2023-02-08 Reflection: 1-1 with Sarah

I had my first meeting with Sarah on Wednesday, and was excited and nervous. Though we already had our first class, and I had my peer feedback session the day before, this kind of felt like the official beginning of Thesis, and I was still pretty fuzzy about what I actually wanted to focus on.

Prior to the meeting, I started to create a brainstorming miro board that captured those fuzzy ideas of what I wanted/didn’t want to create. Though I was still pretty unsure about the actual direction for the project.

Some of the big takeaways for me from this meeting were:

• It may be helpful to find an artist that is doing similar work, and look to them as a “north star”.
• There are two organizations that have similar interests as I do in regard to old tech, and radio waves: the Media Archaeology Lab and WaveFarm.
  • I can’t express how exciting it is to have work to look up to that expresses fully formed thoughts, that are similar to the nebulous ideas that have been bouncing around my head for awhile now. And not only are there other people thinking about this stuff, but there are full on organizations thinking about this!
  • Sarah suggested that perhaps aiming my work toward a goal of applying for a residency at one of these (or another) organization may be a helpful way to have some direction in my thesis.
• Sarah asked me if I considered creating a no-code thesis, after I expressed some struggles I’ve had throughout this program of letting my creative brain take over while working in code. Since this is what I do for work, it’s hard to turn off my work brain and be creative/innovative/think outside of the box a bit. I think this may be a really interesting pursuit, and kind of jives a bit with some thoughts I had over the summer, where getting to physically experience scientific and technological concepts helps me learn better.
  •  Working with code is not necessarily something that I need this program to practice, since I get practice with that at work. So maybe I’ll get more from this process if I work on stretching and practicing other creative pursuits.
  • Perhaps I can create something that is on its surface non-technical, but could require a sophisticated technology system in the background to make the project work. In other words, maybe the tech doesn’t need to be the face of the project, but I could utilize my code skills in the background to facilitate the system that I’m looking to create.
• Since electricity and radio waves pretty broad, almost all encompassing ideas, Sarah suggested that I think about exploring an application of radio waves in order to connect to something less abstract.
  • I love this idea, but am not sure what that application/less abstract thing should be just yet.
  • I think this could help keep me grounded while doing my research – in previous attempts to study radio waves, I inevitably find myself on the Atom wikipedia page and having a minor existential crisis. How did humans ever realize that radio waves, electricity, atoms, etc even exist? What’s smaller than an atom? Electrons, protons, neutrons are smaller, because they make up an atom – do we just consider an atom the building block because we can’t see anything small? See, I’m spiraling.
• Process related idea: recreate the critical experience process. 

Assignments:

• Dream review exercise
• Know more about the Media Archaeology Lab and WaveFarm residencies
• What is other work that I appreciate/find some kin artists