User:Zigbe/Evaluations2

1 . 1 - Seems to be very lost in the ebb and flow of huge ethical issues that surround the multiple uses of information and images on the Web. 1 . 2 -Seem blocked in finding the form and means of expressing your work.

I am indeed lost. I feel that concepts and ideas that were formed in my bachelor time now are finding a need to grow mature. Subjects which were left behind by the influences of the environment and trends need to be revisited and ideas that became rigid should be broken in pieces and reformed. And that's also what brings me to this master, to straighten my interests with politic and uses of technology plus extend my knowledge on other interests in lens based.

2 . 1 - Could you describe possible content for the Radical Software conference (who might be speakers for instance?) What small-scale forms could you engage?

The Radical Software conference is still something that is not yet digested enough in mind to have the outcome I want. Yet since I have the space open, I'm proposing two different Seminars: The first is with two researchers from Jan Van Eyke Academy working on the politics of artistic labor, Rachel O’Reilly and Jelena Vesić. In addiction to their seminars and without their knowledge I invited an artist who makes sensory interventions, Jan-Philipp Hopf, to design the space for the conference. Here I'm interested in how his design of the space might influence the perception of the lectures. And how the institution will perceive their positioning in the researchers subject. As a chain of influences and manipulations with space, content and public.

The second conference I'm proposing is a juxtaposition of a curator and an intellectual who share the same interests: feminism and racial (Black) issues. The first one is a German Caucasian woman and the latter a Black African woman. Besides the political interests, (funny enough) they also share the looks as twins sisters born in different countries. Here I'm interested in how they could collaborate in putting a program together in the gallery space. I'm interested in the clash of their different racial backgrounds and shared interests and what can explode from it.

Both those ideas will be proposed on April 24th.

3 . 1 - How could you use your experiences with graphic design and zine publication?

In late conversations I have been mentioning my background as web designer and my interest in the field. It was amazing to see that in between 1996 and 2002 most of the designers were in between 17 and 22, and almost no one had education neither in technology or design. The web designer was not the designer who works with internet. The web designer was a teenager creatively irresponsible, yet professional, with no historical constrains. There was no Bauhaus, we barely knew what Helvetica meant. And anyone with proper education would reject the field. Web designers understood the fast paced needs of technological development without prejudices. There was no framework or history of how things should be done instead there was a great playground for experimentation, and even the market itself didn't know how to deal with it. Working freely in a medium which its aesthetics was still in development, the web designer by the end of the 90s didn't know what design meant, and therefore gained hers/his autonomy to experiment. Web design is not design. And that's what I want to bring to my practice, besides being aware of Western and South American Art Story, it is by refusing to work within the historical frameworks that I might free myself of its constraints and responsibilities. I'm a web designer working behind the screen and in dimensional spaces.

3 . 2 - How might epub play a role more concretely?

My interests in epub is very new, before I new the format existed, but in Prototyping classes I started to develop some interest for it. I still didn't find much free time to invest more on it. I'm interested in its digital limitations, as a zine finds its limitation in its format (A4 or variation) vs affordability vs message. So far I'm not interested in producing an epub, but in collecting and maybe publishing epubs made by web designers. Is just field I've been looking quite shy, but with lots of interests.

4 . 1 - You need to present manifestations of the research process you are going through, this allows the blueprint of future projects to become visible. You seem to be formulating possibilities for works inside your head, without actually bringing them outside, into workable prototypes. I would like to see products of your research, even if small and incomplete, unfortunately I only saw the containers to host your projects, but no content to fill them with... The only missing element is the work.

Besides that I believe that there are no recipes to make the perfect process of a work I do agree that there are tricks to help making it more efficient. His words here reflect precisely on how to get out of the downward spiral of the creative process. Nevertheless, I want to say in my behalf that I put myself in a position that I had nothing to express but spoken words to inspire an exchange of knowledge, and those 6 months of school have been prolific and inspiring in giving me new information to digest. And I understand that showing this rumination of ideas can be confused when they are still not yet digested. Now facing this evaluation together with a deadline for a major exhibition also works very well to know that this period should have an end and not become a downward spiral. As much as it is important to prototype, I believe it is also of great importance to accept a period to be silent and absorb, open space for new ideas and review old ideologies, and to define deadlines to formalize transitions.

5 . 1 - These topics are very fashionable, but what is his point of view?

I am not an activist even less an anarchist.

Despite that I'm positioning myself politically, more than seeking an outcome as an action this political content works as inspiration to start a project. To be an activist requires one to take actions. There are some ideas of anarchism that interests me such as horizontal structures, or rhizomatic and decentralized structures, which are ideas that have been embedded in network systems and media theory since its begin. I am definitely not interested in Anarchism as a language to speak with. Noam Chomsky has mentioned that the main problem with anarchists is that they only speak one language, their own, which is easily recognizable, labeled and ignored. The only way to communicate something subversive or not is by using its own language, in that case would be capitalism. Capitalism in the other hand is a language which embedded criticism and subversion as part of itself and feed it back to its own profit. That analogy I use for political positioning and language can be used for different subjects. An academic needs to show completely knowledge on academic language in order to criticize it. Capitalism absorbs resistance by transforming it in is own antithesis, than it becomes a role. Such as the punk movement.

hacker.ism

We are so overly surrounded by systems, not only computers, but indeed technological and social systems. That we are all incited to subvert those systems, its natural reaction to it. You can see teenagers listening loud music out of their phones inside the metro, or a iPhone with a broken screen, which is a pretty strong statement against Apple design. And those are non radical examples of how subversion is already part of our systems, even when we are unaware of it. So my point here is that, despite the political changes of the term Hacker thought out the decades - which starts in the 60's at MIT with the people who developed the technology, in the 70-80's the ones that pushed this technology further to personal use (Bill gates, Steve Jobs) to now with ones who want to reform our economy and global politics (The Pirate Bay, WikiLeaks) – I think we hit a point where it never made so munch sense to be hacker as it does now.

How does it apply to my work?

I'm still pretty interested in my work not being focused on the object. The poetics of it are in the interest in the ephemeral transitions between the artifact and the viewer, in this momentum of experience between an encounter based on presence and time. I'm pretty much interested in presence. The main materials I have been working with are Radio Waves, Electricity, Light, Sound. Somatophobia is a concept which has taken different form of understanding on my practice though out those years I have been being educated in Art. - In brief research of the term one can find Somatophobia being mentioned in readers as a reflex of religion and philosophy in Western culture, which splits the body and the mind (or soul) - The idea of the art work existing as a non body, ephemeral thing, splinting the energy from the body, as a negation to Walter Benjamin's aura, a work that exist on its own physical or intellectual experience of the work itself. The work should contrast its visual presence with its metaphysical presence.