Second meeting with Sarah. I had lost my group meeting notification for tonight somehow (glad I saw it in today’s email) which is probably why I had made my second meeting with her this late in this month’s window.

Discussed what I’ve been researching (early EEG artists, dub aesthetic), and dug more into what my questions could be. It moved around, trying to find what would be something new (since I’ve been doing EEG work for a few years).

I feel pushed in a positive way, in a way I don’t typically get because most of the time people say “oh that’s cool!” and don’t push harder.

Had a meeting with Marina, who is only in the office hours system for a few more weeks. We started our conversation talking about cyborgs (Rebis) then pivoted to Rafale, Lozano-Hemmer’s Pulse Topology piece. I mentioned my EEG / PPG soundbath this Thursday as well as the Synchrony experiment from Connections Lab. I talked about my climate activism and policy work, and an idea that came up in Berlin of doing an installation where people’s movement in a room causes it to go from pleasant to hellish, and they are incentivized to move more slowly, together.

How do we use art and performance to create impact? People are primed for different experiences, like they are open to different things whether they walk into an exhibit, a protest, a show, a policy meeting. Marina suggested Ways of Being which I added as an audio book on my phone (the only way I have time to read things).

We also discussed moments of epiphany vs sustained daily change, and what has more impact. She mentioned the tool she made with Sarah, the 2×2 grid, and charting projects on that grid, using epiphany and practice, and high and low impact (or some other metric).

Also had a sidebar about naps, nap ministry, the nap room at Moma, Shi Lea Chaeng, and political resistance via napping (I’m a pro napper and big fan of this idea). I attended a nap event in Berlin in 2018 or so.

Meeting notes:

https://jasonjsnell.notion.site/Marina-Zurkow-d12e350c69e54127bfcc5d10a4882af2

I recently met with Sarah H. to discuss Thesis topics and potential. I have chatted with Sarah before about other projects and appreciate her thoughts a lot, so I thought it would be nice to run through some of the things I’ve talked with Sarah R and Nun about with her.

I shared some project ideas with her, with the caveat that these might not be actual project ideas, but more just random “things” I could do that had to do with the topics I was thinking through. I don’t have an idea how to execute them or what they mean, they are just ideas that popped up in my head in the last few weeks.

• Technical gear paper dolls
• Barbie dream stuff // american girl doll?
• Poetry or haikus about how networks work
• Luxury hockey stuff
• Government issued survivor gear (super shitty and propaganda-y)
• Am I going to be okay?? Machine (magic 8 ball)
• a choreographed dance of org structure, business dealings, handshaking
• a manifesto
• fake sensor to find/uncover your true interests and passions on the internet?
• powerpoints that prove a point
• org chart chess (ceramics?)
• nerdy jocks *technical documents for sports…luxury?
• Get ready with me for the apocalypse
  • how i made this toothbrush
  • I made this network from old raspberry pis for my bf and I
  • Scavenging haul

We discussed some common themes of the ideas:

are you ready??? (overarching question)

• tactical
• decision making
• vigilance
• control
• protection
• choreography
• control

Sarah also suggested that I write out a do’s and don’ts list for my thesis because I had very strong opinions about how and in what conditions I wanted to use technology and what kind of tone I wanted to set with whatever the thesis was.

https://first-latency-df1.notion.site/1-1-Meeting-2-21-23-45af8d34e98b4aaead831b7fec588935

Finished up with our peer group meeting with Sarah, Jason, Noah, Wentao, Yuqian, and Renton. Pretty inspired by other folks’ ideas and super helpful to get feedback.

I Changed my topic a bit when starting the starter bibliography and didn’t wanna dive deep into the ChatGPT, so I decided to create a physical interactive installation about how to explain the relationship between the human body and emotions. 

Sarah is amazing and gave me lots of advice: many little prototypes that push to answer a question or get closer to a question can be the final thesis project 

• Look at Beth’s Thesis Project from last year.
  Look at YG’s Thesis Project (ITP 2021)
• Nonhuman object idea:
  All projects made by us are manmade projects – what would a nonhuman project look like? 

4 hours into my flight to SF for the week and thought it’d be good to spend the flight working on my proposal draft. WIP but sharing here to work in public:

Proposal Draft

Proposal Questions

Below is an outline of what you should address in your thesis proposal. In its most straightforward form, you can simply answer these questions. However, if you want to include supplemental material (images, other media) that’s great, as long as the below questions are covered. Anything additional that you believe will clarify your intention and vision is helpful!

Working Title (Optional)

You don’t really need a title at this stage, but it can be fun and even helpful!

On the Sublime and Divine: Explorations into AI & Technological Spirituality

Three Keywords that Describe your Proposed Work

These can be topics, themes, technologies, moods…

Sublime, Artificial Intelligence, Physical Computing

What is your central question?

(approx 2-3 sentences)

Your thesis should have more potential for expansion than a one-off assignment or project. In order to ensure that, it can be helpful to frame the idea you are exploring as a research question. What is a central question, problem statement, or area of inquiry that you will try to investigate and address through your research and creative practice? Here are some guiding principles we have found helpful in working through your question:

1. Is it something that you are genuinely interested and curious about?
2. Is it broad enough that it doesn’t allow for simple factual answers (yes/no responses)?
3. Is it narrow enough that it can be answered/addressed given the available time and resources?

If you are looking for inspiration, the 2015 ITP thesis archive was organized by central questions.

If spirituality can help us process systems greater than ourselves, how might we use its teachings and aesthetics to better understand rapidly advancing technology? Specifically, how might we use music as an intermediate space between Technology and The Divine, in order to help us better understand our relationship with both?

Guiding Questions:

1. What are the basic principles of spiritual and religious aesthetics?
2. What are the fundamental principles that invoke a feeling of wonder and awe?
3. How will our relationship to technology and machines change as they scale in “intelligence”?
4. How might religion and spiritual teachings on higher consciousness help us process and understand this shift?

What is one way you envision realizing this as a project?

(250-350 words)

At this stage – you probably know SOMETHING about your thesis – even if you think you don’t! There are (at least) two ways of thinking through this question:

Describe a process including “known unknowns”

For example: I plan to do x type of research, for x amount of time, with a focus on x. This could culminate in x, which I could achieve in x, y, or z method. I don’t know which method, but I plan to let my research guide me based on x.

In this version, it’s helpful to express whatever you know AND articulate your “known unknowns”. Some of you may be starting with a clear idea of a form and less of the context. Some of you may have an idea for a research trajectory, but aren’t sure what kind of form it might take. Some may have totally different “knowns” and “unknowns”. Talk it out, how do you plan to figure it out?

Take a leap of faith: describe something concrete (even if you’re unsure).

In this version, you should try to paint as clear a picture as you can, in your reader’s mind, of what the end result of your work could possibly be (even if you’re totally unsure and making it up). Then, try your best to explain how you think you would execute that work, including a basic timeline.

In either case, answering these questions will help:

• What are the key steps necessary to make this a reality?
• Are there key milestones you will need to meet?
• What techniques, tools, materials are you planning to use and why?
• Is there a community, space, or audience you want to access?
• What further research and/or skill-building will you need to do?
• What form (or forms) might your work take?
• How does what you plan to do address your Thesis Question?
• Which element is the focus of your work? (For instance: a specific research methodology, an innovative technique, framing the work, gaining expertise in a specific topic, producing a final product, honing a technique there are many possibilities here!)

By the end of the term, this project will manifest itself through the following artifacts:

1. Knowledge product(s) on music, machine learning, and AI (blog post, poster, graphic series, public notes, zine)
2. Knowledge product(s) on wonder, the sublime, and religious architecture (annotated are.na channel, documentation blog, guide, zine)
3. Prototype for a Musical Interface powered by Machine Learning, expressed through the aesthetics researched in #2

It will be important to spend the next 10 weeks focused equally on Research and Making. Each week should end with a new step in research (new book, article) and art that attempts to explore the research (p5.js sketch, paper sketch, zine, sculpture)

Jumping ahead, I imagine this will look like a physical sculpture/interface that allows a user to explore musical latent space through movement, and have this movement dictate musical output and accompanying visuals.

Why is this important to you?

(approx 2-5 sentences)

• Why do you want to do this? Be as honest as possible!
• Why you, why here, why now?
• What impact do you hope your thesis has?

This concept is interesting to me for a few reasons:

1. I want to learn how to develop engaging artwork, and in the future pull from this research on wonder and divinity to build powerful interactive installations
2. I have a strong curiosity about the fundamentals of music and want to learn more about how music works both physically and emotionally
3. I work in AI, and want to learn more about the engineering behind machine learning systems
4. I want to build physical objects, and a musical interface is a great way to further develop my skills in physical computing

Why me, why here, why now?

1. AI systems and generative modeling are extremely relevant right now, and will continue to be important for the foreseeable future
2. The world is becoming increasingly harder and harder to understand as the systems we engage with become more and more opaque
3. As a technologist fluent in art, technology, music, and ai, I have a unique perspective on the intersection between ideas and a want to communicate these ideas to a broader audience

What impact do you hope your thesis has?

1. I hope this work can inspire awe and wonder in participants, and create moments of reflection on the systems that we exist in that are larger than ourselves.
2. I also hope this work can raise critical questions on AGI, and explore how a spiritual framing of AI may be beneficial/detrimental to humanity

What are your influences and inspirations? What is the “ecosystem” of your work?

(10 links, each with approx 1-2 sentence description – this is your initial bibliography!)

• Share 10 links to references that directly relate to your project. These can be books, films, other artworks or related projects. For each, write a sentence or two as to how they relate to your work.
• Please include: at least 1 article from an academic journal, 1 prior art reference (ie, similar work), and one theoretical text (could be a book or article – something which points to a social or critical context). Consider reaching out to Margaret Smith (ITP/IMA Librarian) for guidance!
• You may also include links to any projects you have already done yourself that you intend to leverage and/or build upon.

Music Theory: A collection of resources discussing the physical and conceptual fundamentals of music theory

1. Ableton: Learning Synths – An introduction to electronic music and the sound waves that make modern music
2. Sonic Writing: Technologies of Material, Symbolic, and Signal Inscriptions – (From Luisa Pereira’s NIME) Explores how contemporary music technologies trace their ancestry to previous forms of instruments and media
3. Theremin in the Press: Instrument remediation and code-instrument transduction – Shows how the theremin as a new musical medium enacted a double logic throughout its century-old techno-cultural life

Musical Interface Design: Materials on musical interface design

1. Push, Turn, Move – Teaches how electronic musical instruments are designed for the special needs of the most expressive, lyrical, and demanding things in the music world: human beings.
2. A NIME Reader: Fifteen Years of New Interfaces for Musical Expression – What is a musical instrument? What are the musical instruments of the future? This anthology presents thirty papers selected from the fifteen year long history of the International Conference on New Interfaces for Musical Expression (NIME).
3. Music as a mirror of mind

AI & Machine Learning: Introduction to the math and computer science behind Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

1. NN → Zero to Hero – A course by Andrej Karpathy on building neural networks, from scratch, in code.
2. https://github.com/aaronsherwood/artintel – Machine Learning for Artists (NYUAD Spring 2018)

Philosophy of Wonder, Spirituality, and the Divine: Non-denominational background texts on spirituality, religion, and sublime aesthetics

1. Constructing the Ineffable – Contemporary Sacred Architecture
2. Sacred Spaces: Contemporary Religious Architecture
3. Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)
4. Reclaiming Wonder: After the Sublime (Incitements)
5. Wonder: A Grammar
6. Wonder : from emotion to spirituality
7. The Age of Spiritual Machines

Further Inspiration

1. Google Magenta
2. Brian Oakes
3. James Turrell
4. NIME
5. Thor Magnusson

Optional Questions

(no more than 1 sentence each)

• What are your areas of strength that you think you can leverage in this process?
• What areas do you hope to work on through this process?
• What specific technologies, methodologies, or processes do you hope to explore in more depth?

My areas of strength:

1. Technical expertise
2. Knowledge of the field
3. Curiosity for aesthetic exploration and art direction

What areas do you hope to work on:

1. Research and research presentation
2. Experiential design
3. Visual Design
4. Fabrication and Industrial Design

Technologies to explore:

1. Machine Learning and AI (Tensorflow/Pytorch)
2. Visual Design, Layout, Typography (Figma/Illustrator)

This is kind of the path of the thoughts I was taking, and it generated a few ideas/topics to dig into/directions to go.

I want to continue to research:

• animal craftsmen, and the craft and function of bird nests
• what you can “read” in a nest — what story is it telling
• how is story told in fashion, especially in the craft of haute couture

What stories do I care about? I DON’T KNOW

Prototypes to make:

• nest jacket — mesh jacket stuffed with leaves and straw and the stuff of birds nests
  • how insulating is it?
  • how warm would it be in winter?
  • how would it decay?
  • would it decay in pace with the seasons?
• traveling clothes
  • what were Edwardian traveling clothes for and how were they considered?
  • what is a modern version of traveling clothes?
  • make a set of traveling clothes for myself, and wear them to Shanghai
• what do bird nests do outside of hold eggs? make a garment that could do similar things for a human
  • does it look nesty?
  • does it do the things but look different?

I really enjoyed the first group session with Nun, Nicole, Zoe, Yiyang, and Dora. I think what I liked most about this session was engaging with my classmates’ work and seeing their approaches to what they were thinking about. For example I really latched onto this idea that Nicole is looking at memory and history and holding on to things, and Zoe is looking at forgetting as a magic trick ticket to freedom. Super reductive of both of them so that was NOT meant to be a thorough representation of what they’re doing or thinking about. But those elements are what jumped into my mind and stayed there. I also got excited about Dora’s idea of building a pinhole camera. The stuff of artmaking — processes, tools, materials — these are things that really resonate with me. Also it was very humanizing to hear that everyone felt a bit lost, and to also see so clearly some really rich directions they could go. Gives me hope that there’s something in my own jumbled thoughts that might yield a little fruit.

I then spent quite a bit of time over the next few days mulling and reading and watching and listening to things — a giant inhale. I still have a lot more to do, but here are some thoughts so far:

For 50 Days, I am doing 50 days of seams, which feels relevant to this class because I think I want to do something wearable/garment-adjacent for my thesis. I got a book about haute couture techniques and was reading about how different haute couture garments come together, all the many hours of work and everything hand done, etc, and I started wondering why I even care about haute couture. And honestly, IF I even care about it. I am in complete awe of the craft of it, but I don’t know why. I am certainly not “fashionable” and don’t aspire to be. I find the fashion industry deeply problematic in their treatment of women and bodies. It’s only in the last two or three years that I started wearing dresses with any regularity, yet I am so allured by them.

I decided to dig into the stories that show up in fashion. What is behind the incomprehensible garments on a runway. What the hell is happening there. I love Anouk Wipprecht’s work, the spider dress MAKES SENSE to me. I can see what is going on and I love it and gravitate to that. What the hell is Alexander McQueen doing? I don’t know and I’m not sure how much I care. I did some reading into Guo Pei, and then watched a documentary about her work called Yellow is Forbidden. I found it super interesting to see the process and how much history and story goes into the work. About how so much of the story of the cultural revolution in China influenced the dresses she created and the world that she built.

I then researched more about fashion and communication and storytelling. I read about the rise and fall of the fur coat, and about how the dressing is an applied art, much like architecture, in that it is both functional and delightful. This intersection of functionality and delight is something I responded to.

I started thinking about the functions of clothing — protection, identity, creating self image, some really functional clothing like athletic gear, performance gear, a whole host of shoes. This led me to thinking a bit about architecture, and then thinking about nature, and I somehow ended up on bird nests. I started reading about bird nests and what their functions are. Clearly they hold the eggs and allow for roosting, but do they also provide protection? From predators? From the environment? From temperature? I read about social weaver birds, who build huge intricate colonies and how these colonies do all of that.

I’m loving all this reading and absorbing, and I have a lot more on my list, but I need to turn the corner into making. There I get a little stuck. More to come.

I have been hesitated to point out something buried in my mind for long, but now it is time to actually give a stance:

For the bibliography, I have listed many artists that do similar work/performance. However, I would like to point out that to dig into artists with similar work is usually not my inspiration route. Even if I could gave analysis or learnt from their ways of doing this similar art direction, but still, because of the obscurity of my work, it just not seem very helpful other than echoing the artists’ statement across eras of our time.

Books and mythological figures are more likely to give me idea for a concept. I don’t want to sound this arrogant, but if do pardon me for I just want to be honest and continue my research in a way best suit for myself. Therefore, I would focus on the pedagogy that is most inspiring and makes the most sense for the project I need to do.