User:Cara

Gǫod morning cruəl, swēet wǫrld

Hello reader. My name is Cara Mayer Yepez (14-06-1999). I'm interested in the intersection of technology, art, cinema, and music. I feel particularly passionate about ambient/experimental music and art house cinema (whatever ‘art house’ means to you, dear reader) :) These are complicated, stupid words, but basically I just believe that every sound is music if you consider it to be. My favorite film is Sans Soleil by Chris Marker. I like using neocities to make websites. The favorite one I've ever made is rhizomatic.neocities.org, which attempted to visualize rhizome theory (finding comfort, beauty, and order in chaos) as applied to music and memory. My favorite softwares are Soulseek and Argeïphontes Lyre. My favorite radio-show is Time is Away on NTS. I like the sound of trains, birds, and water. Before moving to Rotterdam, I was studying Art History, Literature and Media at the university college in Utrecht. I love Björk, projects related to James Stinson/Gerald Donald, and cooking using fresh, local ingredients. I really like making playlists. I like using mubi and criterionchannel. You can get mubi for free if you have a student email. (Just pretend to graduate in ten years.) I like going to bookstores and record-stores and spending money I don't have. My favorite record-stores are Pinkman and Clone. My favorite bookstore is Donlon Books in London. Please send me your favorite playlists/mixes, bookstores, recipes, films, buildings, interesting-people-wikipedia-pages.

I work/volunteer at Operator Radio, Future Intel, Galerie de Jaloezie, and Pinkman. Come say hi :)

I am also working on a radio-show called 'Dear Navigator' with my best friend Sylvie (LB'22) at GoodTimesBadTimes, the community-radio station connected to Pension Almonde. Each episode explores a different location in Rotterdam and explores the associations to history, music, and poetry this location evokes for us. Here's a playlist we made that tries to show the (sonic) world / sensations / emotions we are trying to build / uncover / discover.

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WEEK I

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• i saw you on the floor of my life

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• I am thinking a lot about navigation; about whether it is possible to lead relationships without them being socialized (even within yourself). Alternatively, whether it is possible to lead a life as fully and peacefully within yourself as possible; without considering what other people think about you too much. I find the purity of navigating through something uncertain scary and important and rare and am trying to give myself space to be and act intuitively rather than to think about being. Some things feel so strange and so close to approaching purity it's as if touching hot coal or molten glass.

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I remember finding asymptotes really visually beautiful. I find it quite sensitive that something can be forever approaching infinity without ever touching it! Very fragile, the space between so liminal. But then also incredibly stable. Forever infinity! Somehow this relates to my wish to be without thinking about being too much. Maintaining the distance between 0 and nearly zero, and feeling safe within it, is the trick.

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• In our first prototyping class (21-09-21), we went through an exercise of listing our tools as well as listing the tools we would like to pick up. I really liked what I wrote down and thought it was great to synthesize my wishes in a list that felt like it made a lot of sense to who I was as a person and who I wanted to grow into. I'm leaving this here to remind myself!

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WEEK II

• Consulting the oracle (27-09-21)

I love this prototyping class! I had the idea to make a programme for my friend. I thought it would be interesting to consult the 'randomness' generator of python to answer 'unanswerable' question / define 'undefineable' concepts. Using house of dust, I modified the original text (instead of 'a house of', 'music is') and added different variables that referred more strongly to my friend / changed the language to make it more poetic/interesting. We also learned how to connect to a line printer and print immediately as a command from our jupyter notebooks. So it was almost like consulting an oracle. The computer and the printer knew more than I did - knew the poem before I ever saw it. I find this aleatory aspect of the 'random' import choice hilarious and beautiful; making the inorganic not only deeply organic (i.e. unpredictable and capable of delighting and surprising you) but also prophetic. Here's the link to the html of the notebook I coded. ANYWAYS RIGHT AFTER I WROTE THIS WE STARTED TO CODE A SCRIPT TO LET THE SERVER CHOOSE ITS OWN NAME.

Maybe I should let code do all the horrible life-decision-making I've been trying to figure out the last few weeks????

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• (28-09-21)

This morning we are talking about the Cocteau Twins.

Kimberley suggests: 'It has been demonstrated that the more information does not necessary leads to better decisions. Intuition, for example, transcends available data and follows its own logic.' oof