Eo draft one 6 10 16

What are you working on now? Currently, I have been making music with synthesisers, thinking about inputs and outputs. Using these electoral currents as a metaphor for meeting points and narratives. I am working to produce a holistic work that speaks about collectively, performativity and ritual. This week I have been casting fellow students feet intending to make props to be used in a performance surrounding potential everyday spaces for democracy. What are you thinking of making? I am looking to make Socialist artwork that encourages discussion, exchange and togetherness. That could incorporate theatrical devices and explore multiple states of emotion. I want to make something that is happy, sad, funny, stupid, serious, punk. To find a way to crystalise feelings and summon acts of what it feels like to be alive today in a cocofanie of a multitude of levels. I have been thinking about writing work for spaces where we are all body and many of our insecurities and limits are desmantailed or stripped away. For example, a swimming pool, a hospital, a post office, a laundrette, a bar, a club. Making work for such spaces I consider there to be able to contain a democratic dimension. I hope to make work that encapsulates what being alive today feels like to me anyway. I am also interested in art that is socialy engaged and takes place out of the institutions, but isn’t necessarily claiming some moral high ground. I am also looking to make something that is in some way physically located in the Netherlands. I have been researching the “basic-income” experiment that will take place January 2017 in Utrecht. I am also hoping to enrol on additional studies as part of the gender studies in Utrecht University (currently in discussion.) I have loose ideas around other works that might explore a window tax, whereby people would get taxed for sunlight and have there windows bricked over. Dutch communist daily newspaper DE WAARHEID (The Truth) that ran from 1945-1990. In which much was written about art and culture and attention as well to social problems and conflicts, such as strikes and elections for works councils, and to the activities of the Communist party. And ideas surrounding zero contracts. And the idea of “the Cockaigne” a land of plenty and imaginary place of extreme luxury and ease where physical comforts and pleasure are always immediately at hand and where the harshness of medieval peasant life does not exist. I find it interesting in relation to social pyramids that link to artists and friends alike of them being accused of being lazy or unmotivated. And the fact that many of the people in my life are trapped in systems of oppression. There is something nice about the cockaigne that it exists only in the imagination and in fictional and religious spaces. I have been thinking about writing about this myth, but in many languages, so the myth travails in multiple ways. I am also thinking about casting parts of my favourite bar in Rotterdam café Keerweer. A gay bar, and perhaps critique the growing extinction of lesbian bars….TBC….

I have been thinking about achieving a live mixing of the senses. A synthetises approach to performance. I direct participants to think about an expansive version of a work whereby its edges include music, dance, radio, sound, sculpture, text, costume, improvisation, smell, tastes and touch. All of this content is channelled though my body.

Emotions central. Possibly looking to the cerebral. How do you plan to make it? Describe how you will go about conducting your research through reading, writing and practice. In other words, through a combination of these approaches, you will explore questions or interests you have laid out in your general introduction. In this section you can help us understand how your project will come together on a practical level and talk about possible outcome(s). Of course, the outcome(s) may change as your research evolves, but it's important to have some idea of how your project might come together as a whole.

Why do you want to make it? I am looking into how our bodies are conditioned. Who can help you and how?

Relation to previous practice? How does your research connect to previous projects you have done? Here you can use the descriptions you made in the first session or make new descriptions

In the past I have build up a varied material practice based on a process that communicates connects intuitions and subject matter deriving from social experience and form. I have a mishmash approach to making that seeks to blur an experience of how the work can be received. The people surrounding me perform in my artwork. Working with others is crucial to my practice and the performance aspect of the work. It is only through this cross-pollination that the work makes any since. Incorporating and mixing section of the same ground.

I began the year with producing a listening device sculpture and prop, which derived from an independent trip to a Military museum in Den Haag, Museum Waalsdorp. I went there around a time that the UK, my country of birth was voting on dropping bombs in Syria. I went intending to find out more surrounding historical military listening apparatus. Thinking about how we receive information, the bankruptcy of Nation State systems as a whole. Moreover I wanted to expose this chunkiness or inept listening apparatus. I was interested in this link between design, functionality and the obsolete. Moreover through this process I was thinking about a reversal of violence and what it means to bring them to the table. And possible channel it towards a feminist discourse of deep listening, originated in Pauline Oliverious. This further develops my previo0us work surrounding pycho-auchoustics, prior to the piet coming from a series of Sound Bath works that I made connecting me to the Integretron in the Mojave Desert where I lived for 6 months. These “sound bath” performances were based around the principle of overtones and new age spirituality.

This use of props sculptures and costumes were also present in other works that I developed throughout my first year. I made Being liberal is not enough Preciado picnic Communal living, trans identity. How you can feel trapped inside a body or particular aesthetic. How we make up our own families. Alternative living systems and structures. How we are conditioned. Relation to a larger context? I have an engaged non-institutional arts practice. Make work that contains the urgent, meaningful and fragile positions at the same time. Through experiements into perception and collectivity I hope to communicate on a holistic register where by audience members can speak on a holistic register and are encouraged to understand the interconnectedness of things. I often work with the body to flesh out politics and corruptions. Looking at bodily transit and movement as signifier of power through history and how to deal with entanglement. Looking to public and private spaces, daily rituals matter that enters a body. People’s daily performance of ceremonies, and how to make a link to coping mechanisms and or hybridizations. I engage with how science fiction looks to the everyday to analyse social systems. To the notion of community, that fights against the neo-liberalist society that individual rules above all. I look to groups that work to evolve future ecosystems. There is a queer politic within my practice. That explores what gender you are assigned at birth and how that shapes how you are viewed within society. How do we talk about privilege? Entitlement? Our own genealogies? Looking how power operates, dominant forms of oppression. Meaning practices or ideas that go beyond the scope of your personal work. Write briefly about other projects or theoretical material, which share an affinity with your project. For example, if you are researching urban interventions, you might want to research about Situations approaches to psych geography, urban tactical media and activist strategies of reclaiming the streets. Or, if you want to explore the way data is tracked, you might touch upon the politics of data mining by referencing concerns laid out by the Electronic Frontier or highlight theoretical questions raised by Wendy Chun or others. (Keep in mind that we are *not* expecting well formulated conclusions or persuasive arguments in the proposal phase. At this juncture, it's simply about showing an awareness of a broader context, which you will later build upon as your research progresses.)

References.