For these two group meetings, we shared our progress for each week and also the difficulties we are facing, and the help we need.
Group meeting #3 is about catching up on the proposal and some technical tests we tried.
In group meeting #4, I shared part of my interview results. Danni gave us advice about how to prepare for the show-one-thing event and also she reminded me that for the next interview, I could take some pictures for the documentation.
Did a useful exercise with Ai, Yiyang, and Siri where they workshopped a thesis issue for me. I talked about the challenge Rothberg and Zurkow brought up about the potential of cultural appropriation / extraction with my project.
It seems like the concern was about using meditation, which could be seen as extractive of Eastern religions, and psychedelic experiences, which plant medicines and rituals with repetitive beats are associated with indigenous cultures, like Mayan.
It was interesting to speak to 3 students of Asian background about this. Some of the feedback was they didn’t consider it as extraction, and didn’t even consider that until I brought it up. If I were doing something more directly Asian, like showing a large Yin Yang symbol or was demonstrating Tai Chi or Chi Gong, that would be cringier. They seemed to see some usefulness of bringing up that my dad taught be about Taoism and Buddhism when I was young, and learning about meditation from my rave friends who grew up in the Transcendental Meditation movement. But overall they didn’t see that type of extraction in my presentations and aesthetic to date, so they hadn’t considered any of this.
An interesting distinction came up about my own experiences with hallucinogens: they were largely with LSD, which is not an indigenous drug but rather created by Albert Hofmann a Swiss chemist. So my reference point for the chemical experience is lab-based rather than plant-based (I disliked mushrooms and psilocybin, and haven’t done any other plant medicines).
However, the repetitive beats is something from Mayan culture and is something I easily already cite when I present my repetitive beats research.
One standing question coming out of this discussion is the idea of obviously using a cultural influence (and risk appropriation) versus something I’d call perhaps “extraction” or “distillation.” In my mind is what happened with the transition between jungle music to drum n bass music: jungle music’s rhythm used samples from Black jazz musicians (which itself may have been appropriation /extraction), creating one of the most innovative new genres in the 1990’s. Over time, UK artists dropped the samples and distilled the rhythms into simple, easily repeatable drum machine patterns. Optimized, extracted, systematized, not sure the exact word, but it was renamed drum n bass and became a “new” genre. Is this process of optimization a normal artistic practice of inspiration and evolution or is it self another layer exploitation where all the original forms are stripped out? I consider this because if when people see my presentations and don’t think of the history of meditation or the history of repetitive beats, is that a success of my art, or a practice of stripping out the history of my influences?
https://jasonjsnell.notion.site/Production-Schedule-6d10a236c0c849f88e9b7ecf790bc331
Moodboard & Persona : https://daisylulowres.myportfolio.com/moodboard
Met with Marina and a good continuation from the last talk, even through my thesis focused into a different topic (prior I was thinking of a climate exhibition where the room would become more intolerable as more people moved in it). Particularly James Bridle ‘Ways of Being’ – a book she suggested last meeting – has landed well and became a continuation point.
Discussed my EEG work and she centered in quickly on appropriation of healing modalities using repetitive beats or psychedelic experiences, and asked my background, why am I drawn to this. In a way, “am I a tech bro who did Ayahuasca”? (my words, not hers). The value of my past came out as I explained my Dad teaching me about Taoism (and some Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Judaism) as a child, reading Tao of Pooh and Tao Te Ching in college, meeting fellow ravers in the mid 90’s who grew up in Fairfield, Iowa in the Transcendental Meditation school system (MIU and the high school), learning about Vedic and Hindu traditions from this community, seeing TM applied in David Lynch films and television shows,  learning to meditate from an LSD experience in 1996 (where the chemical experience itself taught me where to go in meditation), then keeping that interest going throughout my adult life, getting sober at 21 and not using chemicals anymore to achieve personal growth or insights, but rather non-chemical tools like meditation, reading Be Here Now in my early twenties and learning more how Richard Alpert went from LSD to meditation. This type of history and possible citation could help contextualize my work to new audiences.
Discussed a number of artists to look at (in notes link below) and discussed if my work could be a connected to the “more than human” world, as discussed in “Ways of Being”
https://jasonjsnell.notion.site/2023-03-28-Intro-to-Thesis-Project-62af517e96f04f83b18f323441dfef1e
1st meeting with Merche, it was very amazing in a sense that I get to hear an artist’s work (even though just a bit) in her (their) own perspective. We touch upon some similar experience of visa, and Merche gave me very valuable information~ And also, the thesis is moving forward to the technical problem solving part, which in steps I will:
progress of my thesis so far:
Create the simple facial emotion recognition system for testing:
https://www.notion.so/Test-Blog-fa71d11e65d34c1792e55a7ea96ca38f?pvs=4