METHOD

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“Mind Words”

Visual Artist Arantxa Gonlag has recently completed a Bachelor in Photography at the Willem de Kooning Acadamy. Her graduation project explored the infrastructure that is used by our digital data. This resulted in the photographed documentation book ‘Data Diary’. Currently she’s in her Master’s first year Media Design and Communication at the Piet Zwart Institute, where she has just completed one of her new projects ‘The Places in Between’. This project explores the depth of layers that is involved in viewing our digital data. By actually peeling of layers within a book, you discover all the digital information regarding one day in her life. Exploring the digital world first from the surface, she has developed an interest in the underlying depth of that world, how we relate and interact with digital objects and the invisible world underneath. One of her new concept projects is focused on our interaction with the screens of technologies around us, how they affect us as people when we interact with these technologies but also, when surrounded by them, with other people. [EXAMPLE IMAGE DATA DIARY]

During the documentation process of ‘Data Diary’ I had a feeling that I kept myself too much on the surface. The more I discovered about the data world, the more interested I became in the depth of it. This is why I chose to study further in an education where this knowledge is available. Now, I have just completed a new project that is almost completely generated by codes from inside the terminal of my laptop. Though that sounds really complicated, the result is mainly image based, just like my older work has always been. [EXAMPLE IMAGE PLACES IN BETWEEN]

The book ‘The Places in Between’ is an encrypted documentation of one day in my life. The content of the book is hidden behind stripes of paper. These are metaphors for the privacy and accessibility levels you go through to get to my information. I used key loggers and codes to automatically get data from the devices I use daily in access to the digital world. For instance: I coded my webcam in order to let it take short clips of the view on every hour. All the digital information was stored on my computer daily. I decided to put all this information together in a book, as the opposite metaphor to the digital interface.

I approach code as a user, not as a coder. I use it to obtain images or footage to tell a story. Superficially the outcome is not that different from the things I made previously, I’m still working within the same medium. Only with a different process and a different aesthetic.

But working with this process makes a difference in multiple areas. Especially with ‘The Places in Between’ this becomes obvious. One area is the generation of the material: I’ve tried to capture with my professional camera the digital information I’m generating now: it was impossible to keep up with the speed of the digital data this way. The amount of the data that lightly goes on and on versus the heavy recorded files of high quality images and footage. The other area is the relationship it creates with the audience: the recognizable aspect of the way the data is presented. I wanted the project to be as common as possible and use devices that everyone has access to.[EXAMPLE IMAGE PLACES IN BETWEEN]

It seems logical that I had to get deeper inside the code based world to retrieve this data faster and more efficiently. Data about myself. Data about my daily life. My projects are about me as an example or as a particular character. The pieces are not really about the content as such, but about the fact that the content is there. Maybe a quote taken from Sherry Turkle’s book ‘The Second Self’ can make my position clearer: “My method shares the advantage of using ‘ideal types’ – examples that present reality in a form larger than life. Ideal types are usually constructed fictions. My examples are real. Yet they isolate and highlight particular aspects of the computers influence because I have chosen to write about people in computer cultures that amplify different aspects of the machines personality.” (Turkle 9)

Understanding why I became interested in, or better: obsessed by, my own data is the most essential question I need to answer in order to see what’s the next step for me. Understanding why I make things is a project on its own. There is a way to understand why you make certain things; you have to be able to nit-pick your own brain. After completing ‘Data Diary’ I delved into a world which was far outside my own comfort zone.

Learning new technologies and applying them to my projects inspired me in different ways. I would like to immerse myself completely in one project at a time, perhaps spend several months on it. But in reality I have never been able to work in that way. Particularly now, with so many new techniques going alongside my own practice. For me, staying with the essence of a project has always been a hard thing to do. Now I have to think twice as hard, and thrice as fast. When you look at ‘Data Diary’, yes it’s a documentary narrative resulting in a book of photography, but now I combine the same medium and method with [a lot of code based - simply describe them] techniques that are still not as easy for me to use and understand. For example with ‘The Places in Between’ I generate these images via code. I set parameters for my computer and it saves images and text, stores them, I then select them and use them in different ways for particular projects. With a new project based on the relationship between humans and technologies I go further into this by combining code with video and images, resulting (posssibly) in an installation. [EXAMPLE IMAGE SCREENS]

In order to stay focused on the projects' motivation I wrote my keywords on loose pieces of paper. I wrote why I’m interested in those things. Then I applied these motivations to my old and new projects.[EXAMPLE IMAGE MIND MAP] Basically, I created a mind-map of the motivation for my projects and my key interests. Based on this I can create new projects by linking these interests. I could draw different connections. An adjustable mind-map helps to clear your mind so you can look from the outside and see new connections. This is a good method, but the revelations don’t happen from one day to the next, it can come gradually but also suddenly. It could happen that someone else notices something, because most of the time you are too involved. It’s your own mind after all.

Added to my mind-map are sentences from books that I read to better understand my fields of interest. What happens when someone reads my mind map happens also the other way around. For me, reading different opinions and methods of describing the same topics of interest, creates a better understanding. Focusing on the relationship of people with their personal computers, Sherry Turkle has been the first and a prominent writer I enjoy reading, by adding for example: “The Patternist, Mind of my mind” by Octavia Butler, and “The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age” by Allucquere Rosanne Stone, creates a larger overview instead of only one. Next to that I think it’s important to keep reading more general texts about the participatory digital world: “The Work of Being Watched”new – Mark Andrejevic and “Bastard Culture!” - Mirko Tobias Schafer. [LITTLE SYNOPSIS OF THE TEXTS HERE - AFTER READING THEM] This is important to keep an open mind for possible inspiration into other strands, as I continue new projects. I have my mind-map in the middle of my living room wall. The mind-map is always there and it keeps changing: becoming smaller and sometimes bigger, pieces are deleted, crossed out, rewritten and/or added. Why, why, why. Is this perhaps the reason I cannot define myself as a particular artist? I’m not a photographer, I’m not a designer, I’m not only about fine arts. I have many interests, but what do they mean together? As my projects get a more structured outline over time, due to focused theory according to current projects I am making, nit-picking my mind and method will become less hard, but never easy.

Looking at previous projects it seems that the digital world as a whole seems to be an interweaving thread. Where the projects used to be focused on the surface of that world, and of how we are surveyed by that world, they now become more intimate not only in their outcome but in their topics and concepts. Where I was interested in a superficial documentation of the digital world before, now I’m circulating the notion of how we see ourselves in relation to our digital components. The projects become more psychologically invested, and in that way demand more depth of knowledge in the research up to the end result. “…computers closely resemble people in their ‘thinking’ and differ only in their lack of ‘feeling’ supports a dichotomized view of human psychology.” (The Other Self, Sherry Turkle) This I believe will be the way I’ll be leading towards my graduation year at the Piet Zwart Institute.

“Whatever I’m doing, it has nothing to do with me – it has to do with what they’re thinking I am, and, that is what they are” (Reality TV, The Work of Being Watched, Mark Andrejevic)

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(Will add the images in the print version)