User:Flo/Aqua1

AQUARIUM 1.0

A Small Ecosystem for Living Thoughts

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Monday, 11th October 19:30 – 21:30 Leeszaal Rotterdam West Rijnhoutplein 3, 3014 TZ Rotterdam

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with Clara Gradel, Floor van Meeuwen, Martin Foucaut, Camilo Garcia, Federico Poni, Nami Kim, Euna Lee, Kendal Beynon, Jacopo Lega and Louisa Teichmann

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It’s oh-fish-ial! Students of the Experimental Publishing Master invite you to dive into their small ecosystem of living thoughts. Join us for an evening of conversation, discussion and new view points from inside and outside the net. If you look closely, you might even see some early thesis ideas hatching. Let's leave no rock unturned.

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Letters

For Aquarium 1.0 I thought it would be interesting to let the participants of my workshop write a letter. This intimate gesture of sending post could be a way of addressing bigger topics. One of those big topics that is in my interest is climate change with a focus on the use of materials. To narrow this topic a bit I asked participants to write a letter with the question "What materials do you see around you?" in mind.

De Leeszaal

Because our location for this event was De Leeszaal, a free community driven library, I wanted the participants to interact with the place itself. To do this I asked to find a place inside the library to post the written letter that suits the letter best. For example; a letter in the shape of a poem at the section poetry, or a letter about food at the cookbook area of the library. By leaving the letters at the location, part of the workshop was the speculation of visitors of De Leeszaal (after Aquarium 1.0) finding random post inside a book or a shelf.

Expectation VS reality

The result I expected the participants to write about were different from my expectations. When asking about "the materials around us" I expected people to write about things as wood, paper or elements but instead people wrote more about objects such as dust, the carpets, paintings or the piano. When explaining the assignment I didn't want to give any examples because these could influence the content of the letter. Other expectations were that people wouldn't had inspiration to write a letter and they needed more help, this luckily was not the case, so both workshops were 8 minutes of people writing in silence.

Envelopes

When checking the settings of the printers at WDKA, I found out the possibility to print on envelopes (Instead of A4 as paper source there are different envelope sizes!). For the workshop I printed reversed slogans on the envelopes, a square for the stamp and lines to address. The reversed slogans were based on some typical slogans but mixing it up:

"It's about the journey not the destination" >> "It's about the destination not the journey"

"It's about quality not quantity" >> "It's about quantity not quality"

"Less is more" >> "More is less"

When reversing the slogans and the relation to writing letters made me think of the value of the original slogan. For example; for a letter the destination is more important than the journey if you think about the process of writing to a person. You normally don't think about the transport of the letter, or in this case the place where these letters were stored before found by a visitor of De Leeszaal. In design the quote "Less is more" is used in minimal design. For me this classic design slogan is connected to the typical Helvetica designer. When reading these words in a different order, "More is less", I think more about using a lot thus having less. If you use more resources, you have less in the end.