User:Themsen/RWRM3-6

Relation to Previous Practice

Note: You don't need to read all this, but it might be pertinent for a better understanding of my motivation & passion

I've always been interested in facts, and at an early age I wanted to be an astronomer, horticulturist or paleontologist. I didn't much care for their foundation.

Why am I telling you this? Because at an early age I did stuff:

I read about facts, I went out into the fields of my village and collected fossils (there were alot of them). I made experiments of levitating magnets, and disassembled toys while I read about other people's worlds. I drew and made sculptures out of sticky-puddy, often of hands and human figures. My favorite pastime was drawing hands and arrow trees, the trees which littered the countryside. It took me away from a demanding social environment.

I collected stamps, hockey-cards, pokemon cards and pogs, funny jumping rubber cons. I built Kapla -castles. Building was the only social context where I felt safe. I built card pyramids. At an early age I followed my fancy, always being the kid all to himself. People like my girlfriend and my best friend, my step-brother took me out of my solitude. I grew vegetables one summer. I read and made things all to myself.

My mom used to say that when I was a baby she had to keep track of me as I would start to disassemble a clock or a radiator within five minutes.

Once I started school and studies became part of my life I did less. When the social and studies came in I began struggling with finding myself in a social environment. The first 5 years a went from being myself to trying to form myself to survive socially. I was literally an alien come to Earth. I'm still struggling.

In my teens I began to read sci-fi, fantasy (David Eddings, Tolkien), horror (Goosebumps) and building Warhammer models, then painting them just for the sake of making and for the sake of imagining. In a hostile world I projected my own world onto it, perhaps to reconnect to a lost part of myself. My interest in fiction and building took me to immerse myself in MMORP games (Massively Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games) like runescape, World of Warcraft, Rubies of Eventide (now gone) and finally Planeshift. I retook my drawing, struggling with expectations from school-life and the online Planeshift community. I got alot of help in drawing and imaging the great fantastical beasts of Yliakum, which the realm simulated in Planeshift was called. I began texturing and drawing concept sketches for the developer team, meanwhile being in conversation with other artists and developers within the community. I learned how to take constructive criticism and how to filter it when applied to my images.

I began using digital programs such as Photoshop and Blender more out of necessity for texturing and adjusting the levels and contrast/light of my scanned images (I bought a cheap scanner) & a wacom styles talet with my allowance.

I was taken in as a prospect developer into the planeshift developer team with alot of support from people who I'd learned to respect. I developed my own style, most likely shaped from my appropriation of drawing styles of the artists in the community. Somehow, in that community I took back some of myself. I became more focused, orgaized; with a purpose. My will for assembling and disassembling things was slightly back. I became a person people could respect. For this small moment, I lead people.

A will for understanding the things I make, perhaps to see myself again. To retake what I lost.

I'm still not socially adept, at handling the game of the social. The things I used to make was me, the process of making; meanwhile my mother was, and still is concerned aout my position in the social human-world. It's something I'll continue to struggle with, abridging my presence in the real world with the things I make and imagine.

I've been lost in the muddiness of the mental/social games of my species and family, and it's time I get back a part of myself. I've deserved it.

It's time I bring back who I am as a struggling social hermit, a maker by birth; with lost, perhaps hidden needs for projecting what I am and what I think onto the world. A small impact is enough, a small push.

I'm still a scared boy, living in a dream of my own making. perhaps to shield myself me from the vicious reality trying to suck the marrow out of my bones. I want to fight back, make the world become my own making, together with people I love. So far the human-world have done just this, sucked most of the marrow out of my being - but I can still replenish. I can still fight back with the tools I've received along the way.

Trying to be a maker and a social animal at the same time I believe is hampering me, but making my work hermetic leaves nothing for the world to interact with.

I must stop being the dark matter, the neutrino (remote, invisible) - and become the matter, the light (radiating, present). I must be fearless in showing my work.

My former bachelor in Digital Culture and Communication gave me the tools to make, to again play. To relish in the social practice of building. Now more than ever can things be built which are more than what they seem on the outside, Arduinos, simple-looking circuit cards organize and execute actions, in such small spacs, which were inconcievable before the 90s. Computers do the same, but more powerfully through their hardware, and through the internet, a meshwork of automated technics invented by makers. In my bachelor I wanted to tie my social struggle with my making, to iluminate other's struggles through these new digital tools and virtual environments parallell to our material tools and environments. Together with Lefebvres social spaces and Mitra's theory of cybernetic space I tried to fit this social struggle into the increased sociality between human technology and our species where I made a conceivable model of space as a culprit for our understanding of social reality. Debord and the situationists' social injections into space, what they called the spectacle, -through Dérives and psychogeographical maps- inspired me to investigate what our virtual bodies and material bodies where doing in the transition between and within these spaces, and how the transition from basically material/abstract perceptions of space to interconnected material/abstract and digitial/abstract perceptions/usage of space could be problematized with Mitra's description of cybernetic space and Lefebvres definition of space as socially/politically/ideologically constructed. My bachelor thesis is complete, but the model of interconnected (cybernetic) digital and material spaces which I envisioned is yet to be revised, clarified and finalized.

My images need to be more than they are, my understanding of the world must become more than what it seems. While I've been writing this I've been crying. Crying because I want this so much! I've been putting myself out to people, and entrusting myself to students and teachers because I want this so much, to make people understand and to be with them while we make. I've vocalized my fears and concerns. I've vocalized years of worry and anxiety in small tidbits; it's what I've learned from years of social learning, not to overwhelm.

I'm passionate about this field of designing media, specifically to design, and this school of makers as well as my work. Like few. People near me see that I'm talented both intellectually, creatively and foremost making-ly. I am not asily understood, I understand that. I have a special way of thinking, of force through doing and when I can't do I'm pained. I've been pained since I started school, and even until now. I believe this depression stems from losing myself, my passion and ability to intimately interact with the physical things of the world.

I am not the sum of the parts I show. I truly believe that I can do so much more than I have done in my school years - to reach relative bliss through making, and through making connect to people. My closest people, my mother foremost, believes I can do so as well. I have let people lead me in order to connect with them. I have listened too much to lecturers' critiques and students comments. I'm sensitive like that. I give too much of myself socially, because I've conditioned myself so much to be social that I've forgotten the making.

I need to sort out who I am in order to make again, and I need to make in order to know who I am.

Research Strands

fungi
nature metaphores | Insect Media
biomimicry |Conway's Game of Life
evolution
biomechanics | Alien

networks
evolutionary algorithms
cybernetics
sociality: tension of virtual - real | Hito Steyerl - Dazed
social space | The Production of Space, H. Lefebvre
sustainability
~~sociology~~ sociopolitics
deconstructivism
cybernetic art Tinguely

image
2D generative/evolutionary art
material drawing (Pen, Pencil, Acrylics)
digital drawing (Photoshop)
image manipulation (Photoshop, python)
2D digital texture

physical manifestation
junk sculpture

Current Practice

mushroom sketches
What: black and white sketches of mushroom structures
How: pencil and charcoal drawings using different softnesses
Why: to visualize structures of my work through generation of random lines and shapes, making a visual language for depicting monumental mushroom structures

mushroom junk-sculptures
what: mushroom junk-sculptures out of electronic waste
how: dissassemble broken machines, printers, smartphones, monitors, glue them into mushroom sculptures
why: Inspired by Insect Media introduction (book) and mycellic networks as organic representations of technical networks technical networks. Also works as a metaphor for considering the sustainability of electrowaste-management as not analogous to fungi's renewal of the biosphere.

mushroom cultivation
what: cultivation of mushrooms at home, oyster mushroom cultivation workshop at mediamatic on 26th of april
how: grow mushrooms using substrate (wood chips), growth medium solution vial (glass), needle, alcohol swab, growing box (plastic), mushroom culture vial (glass)
why: to know what I study I need to know how they live and are maintained, cultivated and grown. I need to see them in person and know how to intimately interact with them.

Future Practice

auditory image-readings of mushroom sketches
what: digital auditory reading of image code of scanned/photographed mushroom sketches
how: find program which can read JPG, PNG or BMP file, assign audio value to each pixelvalue in image through script, play audio
why:

evolutionary mushroom images
what: use mushroom sketches as initial selection for evolutionary
how: look for applications with shape/monochrome-recognition algorithms, use mushroom sketches (scanned) as initial selection for generating new images of mushroom shapes through evolutionary algorithms, assign fitness value according to most aesthetic images in each generation
why: to continue on the metaphor of fungi as contemporary representations of networks, in this case the networked image, each generation mutates the mushroom sketches until they are something else, where the images I've made become framed in the technical networked environment.

mushroom cultivation
what: growing oyster mushrooms
how: oyster mushroom cultivation workshop on 26th of April, I will be educated in cultivating and growing oyster mushrooms; I will also receive a oyster mushroom colony solution, a substrate bag and all the tools mentioned in my current practice of mushroom cultivation
why: to be taught by a competent and professional team of experts on mycology; Mediamatic in Amsterdam provides the best platform for better understanding and learning the best process for cultivating, maintaining and using the growing/life cycle of mushroom for the sake of future physical and abstract mediadesign projects relating to fungi.