This open-source application takes a functional and also site-specific approach to the dialect or condition of the graduate MFA application by interpreting New Genres as a condition of reuse.
>The New Genres Area curriculum includes moving image, sound, performance, installation, hybrid, and emerging art forms. The program invites students to question preconceived ideas about the roles art plays in society, and to examine how these roles are impacted by specific forms and mediums. To that end, students are encouraged to experiment with artistic process, to track the way that ideas change as they move through various modes of production, and to examine how content is affected by methods of display and dissemination. via UCLA 
This wiki has been prepared as a template with the awareness that most artists work in interdisciplinary contexts and that most review committees are intergenerational; underpaid and attention-zapped. Because wiki is a familiar form to anyone who has ever used the internet, I hope that this particular application of wiki can successfully apply the principles of least astonishment to the work which is most difficult to represent towards an MFA candidacy.
See Structural Assistant.
Gratitude
This (grad school) app and also this (software) app have been made possible through the stewardship of wiki's original inventor, Ward Cunningham , and brought to life by the People Projects and Patterns important to the history of software development. Dubbed Seran for the Star Trek outpost known for its excellent engineers, this motley crew of open-source developers is still actively experimenting with wiki ways of working.
> We follow in the tradition initiated by Charles Babbage, recognized by Ada Lovelace, and developed to its full potential by Alan Turing.
Anyone who is interested in working with this application of wiki may join Seran Zoom calls to further explore the principles behind this build. We meet on Sundays at 12PM EST and Wednesdays 1PM EST over zoom .
Feel free to get in touch also via this site's email template.
About the hares...
From this page you will find information regarding method of approach. For portfolio and submission content, see Selected Work or return to the New Genres application.
Federated wiki pages circulate in a self-hosted system of servers. Each page wraps data to visualization using plugins capable of interpreting values and performing operations on them (like for example this paragraph, which dispatches on the first word of each line and sometimes looks like a fruit salad).
People make plugins based on what is useful to them, and make things for others based on what they will discover by taking on x=x+1 (or problems bigger than themselves).
Because I want to modify Federated Wiki for use by educators -- much the way these tools have been adopted for general purpose use in a peer-to-peer dimension other than this one) -- the "pointers" that lead readers down rabbit holes are tracked.
This text is from this place, and that means it will not always travel well, generalize well, make sense elsewhere (…) That's fine.
Here, pointers dispatch to 'pictures', or what's required for an MFA portfolio submission in still image documentation. Hares conform to articles of text when chased into editorial convention. Or personal computing. The same markdown is used here as on Wikipedia or even on Memory Alpha .
This how to create a New Page in a text field that interprets keystrokes as instructions
I didn't want to confuse the "page" with the artwork represented, nor the "portfolio submission" with the computational execution of a process that mechanically defines an "image". So, it feels important to point out that the number on the grey nav bar below changes based on the number of links available to traverse, not necessarily the amount of content presented in a single application. The review committee is invited to peruse as much or as little content they desire through the voluntary action of clicking.
Exploring usability traps in New Genres
In XP and Agile, we try to maximize the amount of work *not* done. That means instead of monolithic project delivery episodes on no sleep we create conditions for iterative development that are somewhat more relaxed in focus:
> Contrast this with the Waterfall Model, where you gather all the requirements up front, do all necessary design, down to a detailed level, then hand the specs to the coders, who write the code; then you do testing (possibly with a side trip to Integration Hell) and deliver the whole thing in one big end-all release. Everything is big including the risk of failure.
As a contender for candidacy in the area of New Genres, this process interprets emerging art forms using principles of Extreme programming and Agile development, which I've relied upon in the process of applying to grad school.
There are technically two processes employed here: collecting documentation, writing personal essays, seeking recommendations, etc. Then: deconstructing the graduate application as an experimental read/write interface with the intent to collaborate. One is a project of personal development and the other is a critical operation.
Reflections were logged in the time period slotted for the application's review as new things were discovered. This includes insights about the awkwardness of the UCLA graduate app itself. These are located in the Artist Statement section of the New Genres application with the expectation that these thoughts will direct others in their own process of applying to fine arts programs with a conceptual art focus.
Abstraction of Method, a page with so many contexts for reuse that the text it contains has been polished down to near-perfect consistency (like a smooth river pebble) due to the efforts of many readers has informed and inspired this process.
ucla.viki.wiki