Adele-project proposal

project proposal
Adèle Grégoire
1004849

Working title

rare earths,
a story about dirt, garbage, dust and the sweat of their makers.

What do you want to make ?

I have several pieces in mind that would add themselves to each other and create a little symbioses.

- The first one would be drawings, little messages I want to throw in the sea of wasted and tired images with the hope of triggering its cybernetic power.

- The second one is an island made of earth. I want to collaborate with a family of Tiger Worms (also called red worms, eisenia fetida) to transform the organic matter I want to get rid of into a safe piece of land. A welcoming, and rich ground made of digested leftover material.

- The third one is an oma-bike-power-generator. This generator activates or deactivates voices, sound, and light.

All of the pieces are linked together through sound. The room is filled with the ventilation of fans used to cool down a cryptocurrency mine complex. The sound of thousands of fans is making ears vibrate, silencing thoughts. Once the Oma-bike is activated, the fans fade and stop.

The viewer can’t access the full piece alone. The viewer or myself has to give of their own energy in order to activate it for others.

How do you plan to make it ?

- a study of digital landscapes
A series of drawings made from observation. Looking at my surroundings, landscapes trigger me. The online overwhelmingly mixes itself with the offline and becomes what I think I see or even what I want to see.
I might put these drawings on the internet, using Instagram, Twitter and Thefoundation.org to see if they trigger people back. There are plenty of solastalgic social media users. Are there eco anxious cryptocurrency users?
What happens if as an NFT, my biodegradable drawing made of trash gains an economical value? Who would want it and why ? But I have to see if I really want to do that, would I be able to live with myself ?
This raises the question of what I want to contribute to, just to prove a point ? I haven’t made up my mind yet, for ethical reasons. Maybe my NFT fantasies should stay in the fiction realm.

- Eating is as much of a labour as searching for food.
I’m building a compost, a place made of walks and wandering around the city, collecting the adequat objects and materials to build it. Once it is finished, it will welcome a family of Tiger Worms, coming from Rob’s compost, that will eat my leftover food previously harvested from the leftovers of Rotterdam’s open markets. A home where their daily living activities and occupation (mostly eating and rejecting organic matter) is the labour that produces the most precious Earth.

- “how to make free electricity ?” or “How to reclaim power?”
Inspired by Oma-bikes from Rotterdam. I would need one with a pretty big gear, that should not be too difficult to find in Rotterdam.
Youtube communities build themselves on challenges. What a better challenge than trying to emancipate oneself from one’s electricity bill ?
Here are a few examples:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wo9d3Ug_Cw8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp_VI6ujKHE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TX71O449AQ0
I need to build a dynamo system using an alternator motor linked to a capacitor and a battery to store the electricity. I also need an arduino and a sensor, to program the turning on and off of sounds and light once someone activates the Oma-bike.

- The sound of work and working for silence.
Listening requires more energy than we think. The sound would come from the stories I manage to gather with my “drawing messages”, as well as from the fans of a crypto currency mine.
This piece will be made entirely of waste material. Reclaimed mediums, reused identities, recycled histories, reworked fictions. And will find its way back to the trash eventually, or into the compost as worm food !

why do you want to make it ? in Relation to larger context

I was raised by pixelated images. I feel instinctively more connected to a screen than to living beings. By the time I started to hear about the physical, economical, and political implications of the digital world, it was already too late… Now I’m starting the learning process of deconstruction and emancipation from this magically efficient land of confusion.
Last year I read three very important books for my learning process. They affected deeply the way I observe, make sense of and try to connect with my surroundings. Anna L. Tsing is making me pay more attention to the importance of intimate collaborations, and contaminations as a result of migration from one ecosystem to another with the book “The Mushroom at the End of the World” she put together. She also calmed my fears about the word “disturbance”.
Octavia Buttler reminded me of the infinite possible meanings of the words “knowledge” and “technology” with her book "Lilith Brood". With "The secret life of trees" written by Peter Wohlleben, trees are not images anymore. I became curious, angry and sad about European forests.
With these books, I started looking at trees, leaves, mushrooms, insects and dirt, instead strictly inside myself when I walk in a forest. They gave me the confidence of observing the complexity of a landscape I often take for granted, in fear of being overwhelmed by it perhaps. And they change the way I observe my concrete surroundings as a result.

I also saw one image taken by a very powerful graphics card that made me realize very clearly in a moment of deep consciousness, that I wasn’t just one. That I was also an ecosystem. If this ecosystem can feel, what are the feelings of bigger ecosystems ?
From all the applied science classes from western culture I have had, nothing has brought me closer to that realization than this image.

If we believe the certified scientists of the 2021 intergovernmental panel on climate change: humans are doomed...

- Hey, don’t worry! We are in a transition! Green energy and artificial intelligence are going to make the earth a better place!

- Hahahaha. -_-’’

humans are doomed... and they are taking everything they can with them. plz make them stop.

Since the beginning of 2021, the GPU market has exploded. Microchips and GPU are out of stock. The industry is reaching a limit, they struggle to generate one of the major money making workforce. But GPUs are also sensitive beings, they contribute to generating our wildest dreams, they take us outside of our miserable lives and stare at the view. They are not only money makers, they are the translating workforce that decipher the data of the images constructing our everyday view. I would like to put in relation a physical environment with fantasized utopias, in order to try and understand some of the implications of a digital fantasy on the contemporary landscape. All of that is a lot to take in and can be confusing. This is why I want to take my time, slowly working on earth with worms, on energy with a bike, and on translating images from led to graphite with intricate meditative drawings.

Relation to previous practice

My practice starts around the seemingly simple and intuitive act of drawing from observation. Not as a way to capture or fixate something or someone on a surface, not even to convey a symbolic message of some sort. More to try and truly exist inside of a shared moment with my surroundings. A vector, or an excuse to establish a connection. How does it affect me? How does it affect my sense of time? Drawing is a kind occupation to pass the time. What do I want to pay attention to? How does it affect bodies? How does it affect egos? Will we have the patience? How do I perform? This is a challenge. I’d like to give back to you the time and effort you are giving me right now. I want you to know I’m cherishing it. How can I be satisfied? Please don’t be disappointed. Does it even make sense to do this? What kind of object am I creating? How does this act affect the subjects I’m observing? Will they pay attention back to me? Troubled by what kind of representation is expected of me while I draw, those interrogations lead me of course to question what subject am I in fact representing and why ? Because, in the end, the moment is composed of perceptible things. What does a drawing mean for the beings receiving, buying, experiencing it and projecting on it? I’ve drawn people, places, and spaces. I’ve made fictional drawings made by fictional characters and hung them inside of invented appartements. With the project Fake "Fake people showing fake love to me"- Drake, I’ve questioned the act of drawing in regards to representation, its value, and the attention that would be paid to the intimate gesture of observing and transcribing slowly a picture with a few likes on Instagram. As it enters the realm of fast existing and fascinating images, a drawing can procure many emotions. One can be happy, glad, flattered, to be represented as one can be creeped out and even angry or scared. These drawings were very performative, I sometimes didn’t feel at ease with the behaviors of the character I embodied. I also got to meet the people I had drawn, and ask how they felt about it. As a result of this experience, I created a fictional room. The room reflected the feeling I had of the obsessed stalker I had been, all the objects were the clues or the witnesses of our fleeting connections.

Then, inspired by documentaries from Agnes Varda to Chantal Akerman, Yann Lemaçon, Jean Rouche or Yohan van der Keuken, I wanted to try and change the medium of my attempts of establishing contact from drawing to digital images. As an innocent cinefile, I tried to make my way into this other fascinating world called cinema. I underwent technical training in the making of images for the cinema industry. It was an interesting adventure of a totally different scale. Learning to work with others as a team, communicating, listening, and helping each other. But then I understood the most precious connections I succeeded to establish were never crossing the camera screen. They were always behind the camera. And knowing what it takes for an image to be made, emotionally as well as the energy costs, human and fossil, I started to doubt. I felt angry at not being able to feel a deep sharing experience apart from just stress and anxiety with what was in front of the lense. I finished this training with the first lockdown saved abruptly from a total burnout by the fast spreading virus Covid-19. Stuck in my apartement, I wrote a technical paper on my self-learning process of the 3D modeling software Blender. My interest in 3D came gradually throughout three years as I was rejecting the physical and oppressive space that often is a film set. I’ve learned so much about emotional intelligence from my peers in that period. During the lockdown, I started replacing virtually the places I couldn’t inhabit and making textures from intimate materials, opening my curiosity to infinite possibilities. What drove and structured me thought this exploration was the online twitch channel we set up with our close group of friends. The cultural sector had completely shut down, but we had concerts, performances, and poetry every day there, we built our own little ecosystem. It made me realize the importance of touch as well as the privilege of having a safe sharing space, a context in which to share stories together and take care of our mental health. This one was only possible through a nice internet connection and a generous GPU. Thanks GPU.

After being locked inside for three months, together with Angel Adhera, we decided to fix our bikes and leave. We biked for 6 weeks in the landscapes of Belgium, Germany, Austria and back. We made one collaborative drawing each day for the 41 days we were on the road. Biking after researching open source render engines, I had this strange feeling, as if I was rendering the landscapes unfolding in front of me. Not solving math equations and translating lines of code of course. More like : food+water+coffee+sleep=the unfolding of unknown lands and sweat. Ongoing project with Sylvie van Wijk.

What is your time table ?

From the beginning of September onwards:
- observational drawings of digital landscapes. Ask a precise selection of people in what digital landscape they feel safe, comfortable, at peace, inspired ? Ask cryptocurrency speculators what kind of land they would buy with their cryptocurrency? - collecting small and bigger trash that resonates with the drawings.

By mid-November:
- having built the compost structure, having a rotting starter bedding and greeting the worms.

By April:
- Having build the oma-bike-generator - Having sound recordings of the cryptocurrency mines. Who can help you and how ? - The tutors could help me structure my rabbit hole thoughts into a nice fiction. - Guillem Arquer could help me to build the compost, “gentle-earth-generator”. - Doe het zelf werkplaats, Martin Ozowsky, and the interaction station to build the “Oma-bike-electricity-generator”. - I’m looking on marktplaats for cryptocurrency mines for sale in the hope to find some mining complexes in the Netherlands. - Rafael Romero, the holy driver with the holy car.