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I had my first one on one with Sarah on Friday and it was really helpful in getting the ball rolling. We talked about the kinds of things that I’m interested in, like wearables and garments, and the kind of things that I find inspiring. I showed her the work I have done on nature and pants, and we talked about the books that I have on my list of things to read.

I think one of the most helpful parts was just talking about all of this stuff out loud, and processing it with someone else. I’m inspired by nature, but what I really like about someone like Anouk Wipprecht’s Spider Dress is that it also fiercely defines space. It is that second layer, beneath “inspired by nature” or biomimicry, that I want to get to in my own work.

Sarah and I talked about different approaches to thesis work — it could either be one culminating project, or a body of smaller lower-fidelity projects. I’m not sure which I will do, but I like the latter idea. I am going to start with a couple of small projects to get the ball rolling.

Sarah also had some really helpful suggestions of people/work to look at, which I will list below in raw note form. She also pointed me towards different bodies of academic research that I might find useful. For homework I will begin familiarizing myself with the work, artists, and research that Sarah recommended. I will also write my dream review, revisit emergent strategies, and hopefully this week do my first prototype.

Raw notes:

gender inspired by nature biomimicry

Had another great 1-1 with Sarah on Feb 10th.

A starter bibliography is due Feb 14th on this site. 

A thesis draft proposal is due Feb 21st on this site. 

Sarah proposed a few more assignments to engage with before reading the thesis proposal document to try to have some fresh experimentation without trying to fulfill the assignment too much. We also discussed my previous “Assignments from Sarah I” post quite a bit.

A few common themes we talked about were things like, series-based, bite-sized “things” that were easy to share and spread (social media?) and offered a kind of punchy or shocking realization or revelation. A lot of those things were based on juxtaposition elements that were somehow reconciled together to form a thought, or were somehow “clever.” (We also briefly talked about the pros and cons of being “clever”). I ended up looking up the definition of “clever” and I still liked it: skillful or adroit, nimble, mentally quick and resourceful, marked by wit or ingenuity. Some other words in the definition I liked included resourceful (able to meet situations, capable of devising ways and means*), wit (the ability to relate seemingly disparate things so as to illuminate or amuse, imaginatively perceptive and articulate), and ingenuity (skill or cleverness in devising or combining).

We also talked about the “extra layer of meaning” which goes beyond the thing or the making of the thing itself, and into the wider, larger conversation. For instance, Yehwan asks questions about usability and the internet, and purposely makes experiences that are frustrating to demonstrate this (very simplified); Nicole asks questions about waste and sustainability by making useless clothing items from discarded materials from luxury technical brands. For both Yehwan and Nicole, the “material” that they are using/manipulating is the thing they are asking about themselves, but done in a way that adds an extra layer of meaning.

We discussed that Yehwan and Nicole’s work was closely related to what I would like to do.

A few assignments/questions from Sarah, the bolded ones are the ones I will focus on the most:

1. Crit X approach: pick any topic that has any richness for you, and do something/practice something to get a repeatable practice/lens.
2. Are topics things like: science, engineering, space travel?
3. What are we preparing for? Tactical gear for climate change? Tactical gear for space travel?
4. What is something kind of weird you could make tactical gear for?
5. What about “anti” tactical gear? Useless things?
6. Maybe find a randomizer and just practice “(anti)tactical gear for _____” and insert a random topic
7. Is there a specific topic you land on or like?
8. What level of meta category will you live in?
9. Probably will do a “big, series oriented” project, rather than one big thing.
10. Look into speculative design/design fiction/critical design/critical making and write down some thoughts
11. What is the context for exploring?
12. Look into history of fashion and the rise of “technical” gear, camping stuff, etc. 

These things should help scaffold a proposal for a project.

*it doesn’t matter but “ways and means” is a lyrics that stands out for me in a couple songs, interested in breaking down this phrase more as well; also a government committee (methods and resources for accomplishing something and especially for defraying expenses, a legislative committee concerned with this function).

After talking with Sarah, I actually received a book from a coworker about decision making tactics, and I started feeling a connection between that and what I’m thinking about for class. Some things I wrote down from there were tactics/strategy, decision making/options, intuition/paranoia, tangible/non tangible, feeling/knowing, internet, experience/experiences.

Experience/experiences: The book (so far) hinges on good decision making in high risk/high pressure environments as something that comes with experience, which allows experts to make decisions based on metaphor (something they’ve seen before in a different context), intuition (expectations fulfilled/not fulfilled and judgment in a feeling), mental simulation (playing out possible scenarios in an instant in your mind), and storytelling (consolidation of experiences). The idea that we need experience in order to make good decisions made we think about how most of digital/experiential design today focuses on streamlined, easy, fast, immersive, etc. and how it kind of inherently takes away the moments of experiencing a need to make a decision, even in a very small way. Just a thought.

Maybe another blog post for the actual assignments.

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

• The Nothing to Something exercise in class last week ended up being really helpful, and gave me a good start to the brainstorming process. Here’s the miro board from that session: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPsVXxDE=/?share_link_id=120841426188
• Another brainstorming miro board: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPpgc1yc=/?share_link_id=864778946199

In the meeting with Sarah, I started introducing my background, and previous projects I created during Pratt and Low Res. To be honest, I’m not really ready for the thesis, and not prepared so well. I just talked about my initial thinking of using ChatGPT to create the virtual character that can be presented on screen and maybe also create the physical installation.

We talked about AI-Art-Gallery which I made during the fall semester and Sarah gave me a link that related to my project: https://www.stableattribution.com/ 

Sarah also asked me about my favorite artist, and we talked about Beeple who I think combines current news and critical thinking so well(maybe a lil bit shallow tho). Sarah gave more examples related to my interests like

https://bradtroemel.com/

https://lav.io/ 

ryder ripps https://www.artnews.com/list/art-news/news/bored-ape-yacht-club-lawsuit-ryder-ripps-1234638475/

https://constantdullaart.com/%F0%9F%92%A3%E2%9C%8A%F0%9F%8F%BE%E2%9C%8A%E2%98%94%E2%98%81%E2%98%81%E2%98%81%E2%98%A0%E2%9B%94%E2%98%81%E2%98%81%E2%98%81%E2%8F%B3%E2%98%94%E2%9A%A0%E2%98%81%E2%98%81%E2%9B%94%E2%8F%B3%E2%98%A0/  

Homework:

1. Ask ChatGPT once an hour.
2. Find five artists and three projects to write critical reviews(what do I like or dislike about them?)

Had a great time meeting with our group and big thanks to Sarah, she gave us a lot of feedback and some inspiration.
She asked us a few questions and let me start thinking of companies

1. How can AI talk to users like normal people? (Will people need companies anymore when AI can talk to you just like friends and know you so well)
2. What if no more companies existed, and everything was mediated by personal relationships, run by a trained algorithm (AI)?

Also interesting to hear other peers’ thesis ideas.

I had my first 1:1 with Sarah on this Thursday. It was a very nice talk. Firstly, I introduced my background and my initial thoughts about the theme of my thesis – Time. Sarah helped sort out my thinkings and went through with me the objectives, structure and expectations of Thesis. Also, a lot of inspirations and references were provided by Sarah.  Really appreciate it!

Actions:

1. Write two paragraphs from two different philosophical perspective under the theme
2. Search for 3-5 artwork related to my theme – what do I like or dislike about them?

Reference links:

https://www.versobooks.com/books/1570-24-7

https://thenapministry.wordpress.com/

https://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/tate-research-centre-asia/event-report-tehching-hsieh

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/apr/14/carlo-rovelli-exploding-commonsense-notions-order-of-time-interview

Time flys! We talked about some of my past work and also what I planned for the thesis. I made a link for the meeting notes (with a lot of typos in it). I got a lot of things to do after this meeting with a more clear direction to go forward. Imaging my thesis in a public area like a park is an interesting practice and brings out more possible interactions.  Also, since we are still at the start stage, I will try to think broader with different forms and different target audiences.

After meeting:

• A dream review
• Character study & user cases: Developing the interview questions first would help more than random talk (I am nervous about this)
• Imagine my project in three different forms and see how it does or does not communicate and why
• Define “the elderly” in a more detailed form: age range, background, and living situation. etc
• have a user portrait for my target audience
• Review some games that do something similar. Is it successful? why it is successful? which part? Which part doesn’t? Is that the success I want?

useful links:

• https://storycorps.org/
• https://www.tfiny.org/films/detail/truth_booth
• https://www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me

Hello friends,

This week we talked about what our ideas were for thesis, and it was really interesting seeing what my classmates were doing. It was helpful having some sort of accountability, since the other commitments (1:1s and entire class meetings) are not weekly so it’s easy to put thesis aside for days at a time. I think while it was good to have a free-flowing session, I would find it more valuable to have some structure so we can have a productive space to give and receive feedback.

Positive Review:
We’ve all seem to have become resigned that technology is somethings that consumes our attention and time. But Snell’s work has shown us that technology can be used to bring us back to ourselves, something that captures the most fascinating parts of of being human and shows it back to us. His EEG art is intuitive, layered with meaning, and holds itself as an art in itself beyond the novelty of using a new technology.

Critical review:
A pony trick first revealed to the world by Alvin Lucier in 1965, Snell does his best to woo modern audiences with his misleading slogan, “making music from thought.” Only because most audiences aren’t aware of the small field of EEG work, he’s able to sell his snake oil experiences as “innovative.”