Trimester II Assessment
This is a work in progress, shoo!!
What was your interest
What stood out
How did you collaborate
A frustration, would you like to go back to it?
Special Issue #25
☆ Highlights:
⇔ Bureaucratic Review Committee (SI25)
- coding was hard to follow, especially since it was my first time working on an interactive project like the telephone. Fred would upload the code to our shared wiki page and I would read it in my own time. It did not make sense to work on the code myself as this would slow down the process, so I would occasionally follow Fred’s explanation of the code as he would be working.
- I joined later on…
- I helped in wiki documentation and scenography of the exhibition (explain a bit more about the choices of the scenography)
- Hardware set up, it was the first time I had to solder attachments and work with a raspberry pie.
- Was part of the logistics team
- Preserving peoples comments
⇔ Prototyping
- soundboards: leading to my first ever coding workshop (save as) - introducing this to the Maltese context.
- pianola
- pietzo michrophone making
- graphiz
- intro to server
⇔ Methods
Special Issue #26
☆ Highlights:
⇔ Quilting <p> (SI26)
- wiki page as research
- Class workshop
- Researching ways of translating mediums
- Finding connections between css elements with physical quilting techniques
⇔ Prototyping
i love penplotting (put scans here)
media archaeology approach
⇔ Methods
- The fan fiction exercise was great, Claudio and I wrote an "email" response to Olia Lialinas essay "Vernacular Web". Sometimes I find it hard to remember or summarise texts from class but this exercise was a great opportunity for me to add commentary after reading the text and helping me do so through a fun approach. I come from a very strict academic background, they would critique the way we write, especially if it does not sound formal, which took me a while to feel a bit relaxed in theory classes. In a nutshell, I would like to thank this exercise for helping me feel more comfortable with my writing!
- Pippin Barr workshop: this workshop, including his talk in the evening with Jaret Vadera, made me feel really inspired and motivated. It was really interesting to learn more about his work process, especially the idea of note taking in markdown or in vs code (version control!). The workshop encouraged me to use the Wiki way more often, as one of my frustrations is not documenting enough, which is something I want to work more on. My notes from this workshop can be found here.
Future works
★ Thesis research
I am really interest in exploring ways in which we:
- collect
- gather objects and data
- compile
- archive
- preserve
- record
- store
My interest in material culture also inspires me to learn more about the idea of inheritance, I have been thinking a lot about digital inheritance, is that a thing?
I am also really interested in ways of transmitting information/ sharing of information / data storage and structures. Relating to the transmitting of information, I've wanted to explore how images are transmitted through radio waves, specifically through SSTV imagery.
Printers (the beating heart):
I remember a year ago I watched an episode of Better Call Saul and there was a scene where Saul is being interviewed to be a salesman for a printer company and he says:
"I know-- I know better than anyone...that the copier, it's the beating heart of any business. It goes down, it causes delays, that is lost money...that is frustrated employees, that's a negative work environment. That's a business on life support. But you plug one of your new machines into the system...whoo, that is a healthy, strong heartbeat.
(imitates heart beating)
That is a healthy business.
(imitates heart beating)
That is a successful business."
Of course, I did keep in mind that this was his salesman technique speaking, but I could not help and think about what he said about printers and the frustrations they bring. I also started to think about how could anything exist without the printer, how could I print my documents to send over to an embassy, or to a scholarship application or the validate something at a bank? These are things I often take for granted.
★ Possible residency
Four week residency: Beyond What Drifts Us Apart 2025
I have been invited to be one of the artists representing Malta in the BWDUA residency of 2025. This residency is part of Unfinished Art Space, run by Margerita Pulè and curated by Elyse Tonna.
"Beyond What Drifts Us Apart (BWDUA) is a multi-year interdisciplinary research and residency-based project that uncovers the less dominant narratives associated with the environments surrounding Malta’s historic (300-year-old+) coastal towers. As colonial legacies have dispersed over time, the relevance of these towers beyond their military and cultural significance has faded. However, their continued presence within fragile landscapes reveals the evolving relationships between impacted ecosystems, human intervention and non-human communities."
The project asks:How can a shift in focus towards the non-human reveal environmental challenges and human interventions shaping coastal landscapes?
By embracing the ecotone of these in-between zones - the spaces where land and sea, past and present, human and non-human meet - BWDUA facilitates the development of new relationships between geographical, geological and ecological factors. The project fosters collaborative research, artistic production and public engagement to explore alternative models for conservation and coexistence.
This edition of BWDUA at Għajn Tuffieħa Tower - a 17th-century coastal defence structure at risk of cliff erosion, environmental instability and unsustainable development - will delve into the physical and conceptual transformations of this coastal site. Through a four-week artist residency, workshops, temporary artistic interventions and public engagement, BWDUA will offer alternative ways of thinking about these landscapes, challenging fixed historical narratives, zooming in on the natural environment and advocating for sustainable futures.
Some initial ideas:
Server in The Watchtower:
- Server = storing data related to the watchtower
- I was also thinking of the perspective of watching from the watchtower and vice versa from ground up
- I am currently thinking of a server but I guess it could be anything that stores current information of the tower, and how can this data be stored constantly?
- This residency will take place in the first few weeks of September but I think the research and work that will be produced during this time could benefit the research question/ thesis production.
"The Għajn Tuffieħa Tower, also known as Riviera Tower, is a 17th-century coastal watchtower located along Malta’s north-western coastline. It originally served as a warning system against maritime threats. The tower is now a Grade 1 listed heritage site under the guardianship of Din l-Art Ħelwa and sits within a Natura 2000 protected area, surrounded by cliffs, sand dunes and marine ecosystems. Due to coastal erosion and structural instability, access to the tower has been restricted by authorities, requiring a broader investigation of the surrounding landscape and ecological networks."
★ Past projects / works since starting XPUB
I hosted my first coding workshop!
During February 2025, I had the opportunity to host my first coding workshop! My expertise with workshop hosting usually focuses on clay and jewellery making, but I wanted to explore the idea of using workshop giving as a tool for my artistic research. When pitching my idea, Sustain Delay happily accepted that I would host their first ever workshop! Sustain-Delay is a programme of adventurous music presented by the Malta Society of Arts. It is a series of concerts, workshops or talks spread over four seasons in 2025: Winter (February), Spring (April), Summer (July) and Autumn (November). My workshop, Save as: sonic fieldwork and collective coding session, took place in the town of Ħamrun, Malta. During the workshop, we gathered for a collective sound walk around Ħamrun, capturing the sonic textures of the area. After walking back to the workshop space, we transformed these recordings into digital soundboards, exploring ways to archive and preserve local soundscapes through collective coding.
In preparation for this workshop, I made a soundboard dedicated to the sounds of devices (as mentioned in the thesis research section, I'm very interested in the rhythmic sounds of things turning on/off). You can test out the sound board on cereal box.
I wanted to prepare two soundboard examples for the participants, so instead I opted for an image + sound based example and the other one could change the pitch, pause, and loop the sound. I shared these examples, along with a few notes prior to the workshop, so the participants could get familiar with the work and use it as a guiding structure.
Reflections:
I really enjoyed the overall outcome of this workshop, people were initially a bit intimidated when they heard the word 'code' but I wanted to host this type of workshop to invite creatives that have always wanted to do something like this but never found the space to do so!
In my previous workshops, I would use clay as a medium to record, preserve and narrate. Similarly, the soundboard holds the same characteristics: we could collectively preserve the sounds of the town and collect them onto our online soundboard, share them with the public, etc..
Overall great vibe, I made new friends and I love the communal aspect of these workshops. 100% will do again!
soldering practice with dad!
My dad has a radio license and he loves to build his own radios. During the Christmas holidays, I asked him if he could give me some soldering tips and we also dismantled my old tamagotchis to take a look inside them! He also shared with me some of his own radio building project and I helped him set up his Arduino which I gifted him in Christmas! I guess this isn't necessarily a work update but it made me happy to connect with my father and get him interested in what I was exploring in the course.
★ my own website
Since I graduated from my bachelors in 2021, I've always dreamt of making a website for my works. I've always resorted to cargo collective to make a portfolio website but I did make my own in my bachelors and I remember feeling so accomplished with this page! I want to get that feeling again, so I plan to slowly work on it.
☆Website manifestations☆
- I want my website to be a space to show my work, but also showing my process and research / things i find interesting.
- I want my website to look like a repository. During my time at Heritage Malta, I was very inspired by archival cataloguing systems, where I renumbered and filed numerous amounts of archival imagery - i want my website to feel the same way?
- I want my website to be a container of information.
- I want my website to be my diary/ note taker.
| I started to experiment on how I want the core structure of my website to look like: |
