Viktor draft 1 - October 6th 2016

1. What are you working on now?

I am currently trying to make sense of the last year and how this next year will be shaped. The proposal that I wrote about in my text on method hasn’t been completely fulfilled, or least not yet. I am thinking about how this initial proposal has changed through the course of completing the first year and how I went through the experiments that I set out to do. So I am now looking at the results of these experiments and making sense of how to proceed, working through the following points : I am looking at ideas that fizzled out and deciding whether they are worth revisiting; I am thinking about which directions are worth pursuing given the time frame and pressure of the second year; I am trying to keep track of my authentic excite-ability and personal urgency when it comes to ideas, materials or investigations. There are a few projects that I am currently involved in, in various stages, where all of these points overlap.

The first one of these is my ongoing project entitled Sazarus, started during the first trimester at the Piet Zwart. Sazarus has embodied several media and multiple autonomous iterations united under a common theme. Sazarus is concerned with visualizing ecosystems, however small, broken or intertwined. These ecosystems have materialized primarily as installations involving performance, custom software, video, choreography (a set of instructions), autonomously-moving electronic bugs, and wall-paintings. I am presently working on two new iterations of Sazarus. In the first one, I am working out a way of tracking and recording movements of new, autonomously moving agents, and then using that information as an input into a computer program which could in turn effect the autonomously moving agents - creating a non-interactive game which behaves like a closed ecosystem unfolding in real-time. In the second one, I am thinking about choreography and interfaces – how I can create a mediated interaction between audience and a compute program, by using performers as a proxy. I have been calling this kind of mediated interaction “para-interaction”, as in : the computer program is not non-interactive, it is para-interactive (using the para- prefix meaning peripheral, besides, auxiliary to).

A second project I have started thinking about comes from ideas that were sparked with the summer writing assignment, an exhibition of the most recent Sazarus iteration (II) in Glasgow in July and my first studio visit back in school with Katarina. Going through the Sazarus documentation of the exhibition, Katarina noticed the particular way I chose to document the performance that was part of Sazarus. She suggested a next logical step might be to funnel my interest in choreographing the performance into about the way it might be documented as a video – thereby compressing everything into a single screen and directing an audiences view to the unfolding narrative in a more straightforward way. I decided that the best way to approach this would be to write a new text, similar to the summer writing assignment, and turn it into a scripted performance that is to be filmed using a 360 degree camera (Samsung 360), resulting in a 360 degree video that would have to watched using a virtual reality headset (Samsung GearVR). I believe the headset’s characteristic of creating an immersive viewing situation that deeply enhances empathy and recreates a first-person perspective from which a new time/space situation could be experienced, would be perfect for this work. Like the summer reading assignment, the video would be experienced in first-person, as if you the viewer is witnessing and participating in it by merely being there, functioning as an involuntary participant at the same time as a being a passive viewer. To see it is enact it.

The third and conceptually, least-united “project”, is my drawing, painting and music making practice. Though I have listed this last, it is by no means hierarchically distanced to my other projects. It is something that I treat as a “diaristic” parallel to these other longer term projects – I give it space to be autonomous with the possibility of overlapping and flowing in and out here and there. It is commonplace for some works to emerge out of late night doodles, or sketches that come from longer term works that I feel could be pulled out and “autonomized”. This holds true for both drawing and painting as well as music. Improvising music is something I do a lot at home, and at some point some of these sessions begin to feel like they have a coherent attraction to each other; or something is brewing that can be isolated and possibility refined a bit. The short term and by comparison, impulsive, nature of these works is of utmost importance to me, especially as they run in parallel to projects which could last a year or two. Additionally, I am very interested in the combination of this medium-constrained practice, with my other projects thinking about how (and if?) to unite drawing, painting with electronics, sound without coming off like a multi-media, Renaissance-man, showboat. I have successfully done so in an exhibition in Glasgow over the summer, for which I scanned in my coloured pencil drawings, digitally sculptured three-dimensional forms out of them and then printed them on vinyl which I glued to the walls and floors of the gallery space to articulate and activate the gallery space I was using.

2.What are you thinking of making?

Besides the three projects listed above, I am thinking of the many kinds of material experiments that I want to engage in, and something I didn’t get quite to do last year. This might include everything from 3D printing, to metal, fabric and wood. Without a specific agenda or end result, I would really like to simply make – and see if, how and why these material experiments could be useful to me in my projects and whether they will warrant their own project, or completely force me to rethink me practice / rest of my time at the PZ.

I am also thinking about the overwhelming amount of software I would like to experiment with and get better at using. Which leads me to think whether this is right time to be doing that. However, as I treat software like any other material, I conclude that it is in fact worth engaging in, especially if the matter is urgent, relevant and possible. Some of the software I am thinking about is Max MSP for programming music in both deterministic and non-deterministic ways, Max Jitter for computer vision / real-time video analysis, Cinema 4D and Z-Brush for 3D modeling and basic animation rigging, and linking my Unity game engine projects to Android devices that could run Augmented Reality apps or GearVR programs.

3.How do you plan to make it?

I do not have a special plan on how to produce the projects and experiments listed above, only that I am striving to make room everyday for experimentation, and learning something new outside of larger deadlines related to group critiques and drafts. Additionally, I find that participating in exhibitions (group exhibitions more so) is extremely productive as additional deadlines for experiments and actualizing studio exercises.

4.Why do you want to make it?

Sazarus comes from several threads of thought that came from a previous project called Proxyah. Proxyah was a traditionally interactive game, that I distributed both online as a download and as an immersive sculptural installation taking place in gallery spaces. Generally speaking, Proxyah was purposefully dense, confusing and non-linear. As I exhibited the project in several spaces, I began to consider what my position was on interactive work in general. Having never made anything interactive, it never crossed my mind. I found that I generally had more interesting experience watching other people interact with Proxyah, than getting feedback on its interactive qualities. This got me rethinking topics of interaction and immersion, which were fundamental to Proxyah. I realized that I had a big issue with interaction, and its relationship to participatory art - specifically it’s unintentional manifestation of power dynamics. Additionally, as one of my primary driving interests is the complicated role of technology in society, particularly its more recent associations with surveillance, lack of control and dystopian alienation, it started to make more sense to work with the opposite of immersion – Why should a work about alienation necessarily be immersive? What is immersive? Isn’t everything immersive? By virtue of looking, being, absorbing, consuming, producing one immerses oneself in the fabric of the world intentionally or not. Art that uses “immersion” as a way of speaking to an audience, perhaps in a multi-sensory, trans-media sort of way just silver-spoons the medicine, and in that way, might end up compromising its own artistic integrity for the sake of “immersion”. Either way, I became much more interested in the opposite of immersion – work that doesn’t NEED an audience or even purposefully pushes it away. This led me thinking about autonomously existing ecosystems and feedback loops that exist when no one is looking. The antonyms of immersive are ignoring and dis-involving. These became guide words for thinking about my “para-interactive” Sazarus project.

Another recurring theme that runs through Sazarus as well as other projects is the idea of personal rituals and the value of subjectivity. I began thinking about this when I started working on my first web-based work titled Selekthor. Selekthor was an instruction-less puzzle game that would be both interactive and self-playing. In this way, standard cause-effect relationships were disrupted, which immediately made interacting with Selekthor frustrating and uncertain. I programmed Selekthor using probabilities, timers and random-number generators, which worked together to make a unique experience within a certain set of parameters. This led me to think about randomness, specifically the value of true randomness versus computational randomness. I learned that the most effective and “true” randomness that was used in simulations and supra-human algorithms was still being harnessed from nature – from weather patterns primarily. This set me on path that eventually led to writing the summer writing assignment, in which I write about a character that invents personal “counting rituals” to make decisions. This involves measuring the average “pulse” of breaking waves on a beach, average cloud count per minute, etc – all of which are ripe with human bias and personal error. For me, these systems are both ridiculous but also functional, and work as a response to my standard analysis-paralysis condition when faced with making decisions. Inventing these systems and rules, as random, flawed and subjective as they might be, become the ultimate guiding truth.

5.Who can help you and how?

My biggest help could be finding someone to help with losing control, or collaborating with to get away from a work that is singularly my own vision. This could be in the form of a loose, collaboration that might materialize in a quick and autonomous work, but might also have deeper, longer effects and opened avenues as a result. It could also be simply in the form of more hanging-out and learning about how my peers here at PZ manage similar problems and concerns – simply learning by proximity. Of course I am also very open to critical discussions and arguments from peers and tutors, as a way of refining, questioning further my project and its motivations.

6.Relation to previous practice. Larger context

Every other left turn is followed by a right one, which sometimes brings me back to my default road, but with a re-established confidence. There are definitely times when I ask whether what I am making or wanting to make will find value anywhere else by anyone else, or even perhaps by me at a later date? Am I having fun? SHOULD I be having fun? What is my responsibility as an artist? Is that a dumb question? Is sincerity and urgency valueable in an artwork, or should it be suppressed? Can art make a difference, or should it be held accountable? Is it enough to “express” yourself? How do I make sure I don’t become a confident, buzz-word dropping graduate? I also find that asking these questions too much leads again to analysis paralysis, a state in which my parameters are blown wide open and the world exists without bounds, without ground or gravity. I am realizing I need borders to work within and eventually to them cross on my own time.

I am still not certain how I will approach the Writing Component of the PZ second year. I am considering extending the summer writing exercise into a longer text, by adding drawings, diagrams and additional texts. I would like to further investigate themes of personal ritual, randomness, quantification of everyday activities and “pointless” data-sets.

While there are several artists, writers and thinkers I am influenced by, I hesitate to position myself in relationship to them. However, due to the wide spectrum of them, sitting somewhere between them is maybe already a unique position. I am deeply attracted to the fiction of Tom McCarthy, China Mieville and Neal Stephenson. I frequently read essays by writers such as Keller Easterling, Hito Steyerl, Nick Bostrom and Alexander Galloway.