User:Pleun/grad/ProposalTWO

Dear Steve, Simon and Leslie,

I am writing this proposal to you in letterform, as an exercise, a personal mode of address and as a kickoff to a new era in my life departing academic aspirations after more than twenty years of schooling. This proposal will consist of a brief recap of last year, a thesis intention and a project-proposal with a timeline and some references.
  This summer I've been thinking, reading and talking about the continuation of my graduating process. Last spring I couldn't structure and oversee my project anymore, due to a multitude of reasons with one of them being the amount of topics and tools or methods I wanted to involve. With all of these developing at the same time I couldn't exploit the full depth of these subjects and tools. Therefore this time around in my attempt of learning from my past mistakes I want to focus on one main theme. I will have to remind my ego that I can focus on linked themes and theory in next projects and I would kindly like to ask you to every now and again check in with me as well to see if I'm not exploring twenty new additional subjects.
  If I wanted to continue on this path of research–and if yes which topic I wanted to continue with–was my next conquest. I decided it would be a shame to throw away my research by starting completely fresh, so a continuation would be the more logical option.

  Let's scroll back in time together a little bit for a brief recap. I've focused on escapist tendencies in different parts of society during two trimesters, namely in culture; the internet-born image and music subculture of Vaporwave, politics; rising of alt-right ideas and in an extreme form of commodified leisure; the Sensory Deprivation Tank. At the same time I was developing 3D-animation skills in Blender and experimenting with performance, elements of theater and the idea of the audience as a participant, rather than a passive observer.
  After debating for a long time, I decided to stick with my first point of interest which got me into the topic of hypernormalisation, which is the name I lend for these escapist tendencies after I saw the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary with the same name. That topic is the Sensory Deprivation Tank. Before diving into the why and what, I want to briefly discuss the other two subtopics I will no longer include in my graduation project.
  The mocking phrase-turned-meme “Vaporwave is dead” actually was a self-fulfilling prophecy. After the output of the alt-right appropriators of the subculture gained popularity last December and January the main actors in the scene refocussed and moved on creating a thousand other micro-genres. One group building on the ashes of Vaporwave in our own little Rotterdam is Bound Centre, which is a collective of DJ's and image-makers I'm following and in contact with. In the future, I would still like to map out these micro-subcultures, but for now the scene feels too unstable to map out.
  As for the growth of alt-right, I'm still very much interested in mainly the development in the Netherlands. With Forum voor Democratie gaining two chairs in the Tweede Kamer extreme right-wing ideas gained a governmental platform. I believe there is a lack of writing about this specific national phenomenon in context with a larger global movement. I would like to continue this research, but I think I would need a longer timeframe and probably some form of funding. I am planning on visiting meetings of the JFVD–the youth-branch of Forum voor Democratie–to get more familiar with their ideas and mindset offline to get in touch with the other side of this movement than the online meme-wars I encounter daily.

  Back to my current practice, I will now write more about why this strange closed-off bathtub fascinates me so much. I will do so by sometimes quoting myself from the past and adding to it. “The sensory deprivation tank was developed by the neuropsychiatrist John C. Lilly in the fifties and later used with LSD research in the sixties, before becoming available for commercial use.” When I was writing an essay about contemporary Technologies of the Self I was on the lookout for examples. This one really spoke to me because of its wide variety of connotations. The tank and the action or rather non-action involved are quite poetic to me. “The act of going into a Sensory Deprivation Tank is for me one of the most extreme expressions of [escaping society], where we literally hide from all stimulation by voluntarily laying inside a small and closed off space for a while. [The tank] represents [to me] both the beginning of life with its womb-like connotations as well as the coffin-shaped end of it. Its white, shiny and rounded exterior reminds me of how architects and designers of the nineties would describe the furniture of the future.”
  Next to the physical pod or tank itself, I'm interested in the intention with which a visitor enters the pod and which mental state they reach. “The pod is reflected in a range of films like The Matrix and Alien, and appears to always be used to reach a certain non-state. A coma-state where the mind and body are separated to create a lapse in time, promote a healing process or transition, keep the body from harm and/or to use the body as a source of energy.” Apart from actually sleeping, floating in the tank might be the closest a person can safely come to complete passiveness, where time and space become completely irrelevant, while still being conscious. In a tank, you may reach a hypnagogic state, which is the same state that the mind enters in the period of time between wakefulness and sleep.
  And lastly in addition to the physicality and the action I want to research the function of the center in socio-economical context. (+)

  For the three perspectives I just wrote you about: the tank itself, the visitor and the larger context of the center, I want to create three characters all involved with a Sensory Deprivation Tank center. These three characters will form the main thread in my thesis. Each character will have their own chapter in, which I will write from their point of view. Within each chapter, I will alternate paragraphs of fiction with theory. The balance between fiction and theory will next to a number of other things depend on the quality of fiction I produce. Let me introduce these three characters to you. Firstly the idealistic CEO, the guru, the dreamer oblivious to their own privilege, who would never actually call themselves a CEO, secondly a janitor, the skeptic, the precarious worker, and lastly a visitor who will be our deprived eyes and ears within the tank itself. All of them are in their own way in search of an escape, a void, “experiencing the stillness” as the CEO would say.
  References that come to mind are Un Homme qui dort by George Perec, 1967, in which a man finds himself in pursuit of indifference, trying to live in repetition to become non-existent and the Dreamachine by Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville in 1959, which produces a stroboscopic effect that produces visual stimuli that may induce a hypnagogic state.
  As all of the characters are in search for a certain non-state, a hypnagogic state, I like the contradiction of breathing life into these characters by writing about them.

  On to the project as this is, in fact, a project proposal. I mentioned before that the main reason I was looking into Sensory Deprivation Tanks was its ability to function as a modern-day Technology of the Self, one of four "technologies" as described by Michael Foucault: “[...] which permit individuals to effect by their own bodies and souls, thoughts, conduct, and way of being, so as to transform I themselves in order to attain a certain state of happiness, purity, wisdom, perfection, or immortality.” A piece of theory I was especially interested in as this master continues to function as an exploration of who I am and could be as an artist, designer. As a project I wish to attempt to create a contemporary Technology of the Self, which would function as a tool to explore the Self and transform the Self as Foucault wrote.
  It is here that I begin to feel the discomfort of the unknown, as I can't yet describe to you what exactly this tool will be. It is also here that I feel I need to restart my tutorials and my research to figure out what would work as such technology and which criteria I want to work with. (+)

Attached timeline:
  Thesis:
September
   wk4: detailed outline with references,
October
   wk1: character descriptions
  wk1,2,3: read extra materials
   wk2: start writing
November
   wk4: finish writing

  Project:
October
   wk2,3,4: experiments
November
  
December'