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Studio Visit / Intro Meeting

In yesterday’s peer feedback meeting, we discussed our initial ideas for our thesis topics. I talked about my first conversation with Sarah, and some ideas I’ve been thinking about after talking more about my photography practice. Nun and I discussed a lot about analog photography, and what drew me to it. I said that I enjoyed the entire of process of it—taking the time to load a film roll into the camera, taking shots sparingly, developing the film, printing the photo in a darkroom, etc. The process makes me feel closer to my own work.

I had some initial ideas about “reimagining” the photography exhibit by making it more interactive. But after the discussion with Nun, I also like the idea of building a type of camera that focuses on the process, over the image itself.

With all these new thoughts and ideas, I met with Sarah again for another 1-1 and described to her my thoughts about photography. We had a thorough conversation about how to move forward with my research. My next steps is to look at each step of the photography process (ie. making a photo, sharing it, and consuming it) and brainstorm alternative ways of doing those things. I’ll also be experimenting with actually making something for each of those topics, to figure out if any of those experiments is something to move further with.

Really enjoyed hearing everyone’s topics evolve and the opportunity to give ideas and feedback on the projects.

After my last Rothberg meeting, the idea came up of focusing on my body of work, looking for themes. Do I have my own manifesto or can I articulate what my existing work is about? Why am I interested in this work?

Phenomenon: Moment of creation, relationship with the work (willfulness, surrender, creation) – a very hallucinogenic- or spiritual-like phenomenon of relational emergence.

In the past I’ve used the term “generative containers”, emergent spaces, or womb-like space where art / life is created.

I’m fascinated with getting closer to the present moment, the now, the moment where life is emerging, being created, to bring myself and others out of their heads and into this emergent moment.

Interactive work → a type of art that affords this type of live, in the moment, emergent relationship with the viewer.

Could some of my work be making a song in real-time in front of others, them watching the creative process? I’m doing this daily for 50 days, but like usual, only posting the result, not the process or moment of creation.

Most of my research in the past week has been into generative poetry/computational poetry, and Jason brought up the point of how they’re never generating fully from nothing, there are building blocks that were inserted by the creator of the piece. That brought to mind the question of what my building blocks would be; what I could put together to help create something in a generative setting. What are the building blocks that make up my art? That’s the question I want to tackle this week.

In the first peer meeting with Sarah, we first reviewed what we talked about our thought during the first lesson. Thanks to Sarah’s note I was able to recall my thought a week ago. I shared a bit about my 1 on 1 meeting with the professor, which was great and inspiring.

Then we had an exercise about using a sentence to describe the question I wanted to answer in my thesis. And this is the question I had in mind at that time:

• What will the world be like in the future (daily life, social structure, etc), if certain technologies have been developed. (AI, brain technology, supercomputer, etc.)

The next step was to add detailed explanations about this question. And here are some of the details I thought about my question:

• In 50 years (2073)
• People communicate through brainwave
• People get together in metaverse

This exercise was very helpful for me since I had a very broad topic in mind. And this thought process helped me to narrow down my broad idea to a more specific and manageable question.

The first peer meeting was great. I was glad to share my 1-1 meeting reflection with others.

More, Sarah Hakani gave me a different angle to see the open source project: Who benefits from the open source project, what is the worst possible thing from that benefit?

I’d never think about the bad things related to open source!

And Wentao also shared a video as an inspiration!

After the first group meeting with my classmates, I saw many interesting ideas from them. Ada, Jun and Yueqing’s thoughts are related to elder group in society. Elizabeth wants to visualize radio waves. They also shared some artists who inspired them and brainstorm process. I illustrated my idea to them and they give me some feedbacks. First, how to visualize the concept of six unwholesome factors to visitors intelligibly. Second, do the concepts I wanted to convey to audience need pre-knowledge? Last, Elizabeth said it is interesting that different regions have similar concept of human’s unwholesome emotion (like Christian seven sins).

Talked with Sarah 1-1 today for the first time. I showed some of my past installation works(very conceptual), live visual clips (purely aesthetic), and projects I did in LOWRES. We talked about how I want to bridge conceptual and aesthetic, getting back to installations/sculptures, bringing strong concepts/research/narrative into audiovisual performances. 

I have envisioned my thesis taking these possible forms:

-immersive cinematic audiovisual 

-explorable world (videogame)

-sculpture/interactive installation

(Having forms in mind might constrain research and possibilities. I will keep an open mind while doing research and be open to change forms.)

Sarah pointed out some common threads in the works I’ve been doing in this program: body parts, cybernetics, mortality, graveyards, mysticism, esoteric & technology. For my thesis I’d like to keep exploring these topics. 

Assignments:

-Use a project I recently did (Unity game Adam Diggler’s Grave) and translate it into 2 of the possible forms I envisioned. As an interactive installation and as an audiovisual performance.

-Read reviews written about other artists’ projects and performances and write a dream review for my project.

References: 

Matt Romein | Home page (matt-romein.com)

HOLLY HERNDON

David Altmejd

Zerospace

Inside Mixed-Reality Rave “Diskokina” at ZeroSpace – PAPER (papermag.com)

More brainstorming/research on a miro board: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPoVWrDc=/?share_link_id=986867347699