Silvie-project proposal

1 What do you want to make?

starting from the notion of water memory I want to make a digital environment, a navigable collage, that visualises this memory. But in a speculative manner. What has the sea seen and what will it be seeing / covering in the near future? What objects have been lost at sea? The web page will in that sense be rhizomatic, not without an origin but with a variety of different pathways opening up.

Using archive footage of objects as relics.

2 How do you plan to make it?

I am currently teaching myself HTML, CSS and Javascript in order to give myself the tools to in fact build an environment like this. I am not yet sure about how I want to be hosting this website.

3 What is your timetable?

For the next 2 months I would like to focus a bit more on the technical side of things. Learn Scroll magic so that I can explore the possibility of using audio in an interactive way: let scrolling or clicking trigger audio that actually narrates or adds relevant sound effects.

4 Why do you want to make it?

I want to engage with

Additionally, I wanted to exit this school with a very concrete new skill. Coding has been something which I have taught myself a little over the course of last year. I think I wanted to foreground it for the thesis as a way to challenge myself.

5 Who can help you and how?

I think it would perhaps be useful to have some help from a tutor that has some experience with coding - the technical side of things.

I think I could use some help to structure my thoughts, focus them a bit. I think I keep changing my mind because I go off on these rabbit hole researches. There are too many interesting things I would like to incorporate.

6 Relation to previous practice

This project is closely related in terms of content to the radio show I have been working on over the last few months. I am currently working on a Radio show. For each episode this radio show takes a different location in Rotterdam as its locus. The show engages through the lens of Rotterdam with the historical past of The Netherlands, especially as Rotterdam as the port city plays and has played quite a fundamental role in the relationship of The Netherlands with water.

Relationship to infrastructure and socio economic history and cultural memory. The conception of a city, a scape land or sea, as a palimpsest. A result of a constant process of writing and re-writing. Finding This project in a way would function as a speculative recording device.

I have a practice of making collages. This would seem to be a new way of approaching that. In this format I could animate the collages and make them tell stories in a different way. The fact that different elements of the collage can be hyperlinked and hover triggered I find interesting and would like to explore.

7 Relation to a larger context

I read Limbo by Dan Fox, which focusses on the state of limbo and its' cultural references. What stood out to me was this paragraph on memories that have not been confined to the past but instead are trapped in a state of in-betweenness. They have become ghosts that are haunting the present. With regards to the Dutch past I think this quote for me seems quite accurate.

"The refusal of an experience to enter into the past' is a workable definition of a haunting. The mission of the dead souls is to escape whatever dimension they are trapped in and return home (Fox 2019, p. 55)

Susan Owens in the Ghost: A cultural history writes: 'These shape-shifting spirits seem intent on getting a purchase on the physical world in any way they can in order to attract attention before, in most cases though not at all, gaining access to human form so that they are able to communicate their predicament' (Fox 2019, p. 55)

8 References/bibliography

Tabita Rezaire - Deep Down Tidal (2017)
Dan Fox - Limbo