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, or text on method, that I wrote during the last year of the course hasn’t been truly 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. So I am now looking at the results of these experiments and making sense of how to proceed; I am looking at ideas that fizzled out and 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 remember and keep track of exciteability and personal urgency when it comes to certain ideas, materials or investigations. There are a few projects (or artworks) that I am currently involved in, in various stages, where all of these concerns are overlap.

The first one of these is my ongoing project entitled Sazarus. Sazarus embodies several media, several autonomous iterations, under a common theme / investigation – building a computer game that is not interactive in the traditional sense. It either relies on instructed users that engage with it within a closed set of time as a mediated, choreographed performance-gameplay, to be observed by an audience. OR it utilizes and harnesses non-human agency in order to push along the gameplay, somehow visualizing or communicating this agency to a potential audience (Yes this non-human agency would still be counted, or directed by a human (my own) algorithm, but avoiding this is simply unavoidable I think). OR it is a combination of both of these. I made up a term which I use to refer to this kind of interactivity – “para-interactive”.

A second project I have started is a ten-page semi-abstract comic, a combination of a branch off from the Sazarus project, combined with the summer reading assignment. The summer reading assignment was my first experiment with text as an autonomous work. I have previously used it as supplementary to a collection of drawings, or a guide to a game, etc. Therefore it was an experiment and challenge to channel my voice/hand/style into a medium, which is still relatively new to me while preserving elements that see as integral to my practice. The text is a thought experiment that involves themes of personal belief systems, decision-making rituals, and an unresolved quest for true randomness. It is written using the 2nd person. I have decided to combine elements of this text with a fragment of the virtual environment I have been building for Sazarus – specifically, a large crater. The comic will combine the walkthrough vibe of the summer text, with pencil drawings overlaid over digital backdrops, of first-person POV hands engaged in various counting, making and searching activities around the crater and detritus that happens to be lying there. In effect, it will be a comic about measuring and finding meaning in some of the found materials located inside of this large crater, told picture by picture. I see this as a short-term work that will undoubtedly put me on the road to something else after, possibly a video for example.

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 inferior or superior to my other works. It is something that I treat as an almost “diaristic” parallel to 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 of these works to emerge out of late night doodles, sketches that come from longer term works that I feel could be pulled out and “autonomized”. This holds true for both drawing & painting as well as music. Improvising jams 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.

2.What are you thinking of making?

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, 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?

The general plan is to start waking up at 6:30am every day (except Saturday and Sunday) and structuring my days in such a way that would give myself space for experimentation and learning, outside of straight up work on projects towards deadlines related to group critiques, etc. 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?

Generally, I want to make anything because there is no other way. I like to think I would be making it if I was in culinary school, working as security guard or stuck on an island with some materials in the small spare time I would find. Specifically, the Sazarus project comes from several threads of thought that came from a previous project. This was called Proxyah and a “traditionally” interactive game, that I distributed both online as a download and as a sculptural installation taking place in gallery spaces. Interaction and immersion became less interesting for me as a result of this work, not because they were fundamental to Proxyah but because they were elephants in the room that got in the way of the content of work being communicated (particularly interaction, which linked up with my issues around participatory art, specifically that it can be an unintentional manifestation of power dynamics). Because one of my primary interests is the complicated role of technology in society, particularly its more recent associations with surveillance, lack of control and dystopian alienation, it makes so much 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, maybe blends in the rest of the world. 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. The antonyms of immersive are ignoring and dis-involving. These became guide words for thinking about my “para-interactive” Sazarus project.

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

I feel that in some respects the projects I mentioned above are evolutionary outgrowths from previous projects – natural developments with some random mutations (left turns) along the way. Nevertheless, I am always attempting to re-evaluate my chosen artistic language and ask why the things that feel default to me, in fact default. 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? I also find that asking these questions too much leads for me 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 cross on my own time.