User:Robin/T2 Assessment

My approach to the T2 Assessment, is to highlight some projects to do an auto-ethnography. An extended version of Marloes' Methods exercise. Mostly, as an exercise to myself. Since I love to think about things, I have struggled to not remain in abstract ideas, but to make things tangible and relatable.

So, I'll be...

Situating My Situatedness !

Because I feel like my most valuable take-away from XPUB so far, is to really focus on situating myself as a maker / researcher / person.

This work shows why ->

M I R A G E installation } Extraterrestrial Publishing Fair

User:Robin#Deconstructing LCD screens

I showed my BA graduation project's installation at the Extraterrestrial Publishing Fair. This was the second iteration of the installation.

The installation is made of de-constructed TV-screens. Exposing the film sheets inside the LCD screens that bend light in weird ways. They either let light pass through or reflect it, depending on your position in relation to it. So passing by the screen, the image is revealed, and hidden from view again.

This work was my first installation and the culmination of my interest in considering the social / political effects of media. Mostly inspired by Walter Benjamin's ideas about reproducible media / commodity fetishism.

I loved the work for what it was, but I was left with a bit of an unsatisfied feeling about it. Visually, it might communicate this idea of a double-reality that is in the nature of reproducible media. But couldn't really communicate how that impact shapes social relations. I felt like it missed the link to a concrete experience in order to do that. It stays very vague, it didn't really invite people to relate to it personally.

This was my main challenge throughout my whole bachelor. Because I couldn't help myself but to work with complex ideas, but it was always difficult for me to make them understandable and relatable.

Critical Theory course at the Erasmus School of Philosophy

Robin's personal reader#topics

Robin's personal reader#Imitation and Gender Insubordination - Judith Butler

Robin's personal reader#Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak - An Aesthetic Education in the Age of Globalization

Robin's personal reader#The Mature Politics of Jaques Ranciere - Oliver Davis

he year after, I thought it would help me learn to structure / articulate my thoughts better. I was considering doing a masters in philosophy. So I bought a course at the Erasmus School of Philosophy to try it out, see if I liked it. ( at erasmus, they offer cursus onderwijs, which means you literally buy a single course from their curriculum and you can attend that course )

The year after, I thought it would help me learn to structure / articulate my thoughts better. I was considering doing a masters in philosophy. So I bought a course at the Erasmus School of Philosophy to try it out, see if I liked it. ( at erasmus, they offer cursus onderwijs, which means you literally buy a single course from their curriculum and you can attend that course )

( So, technically, this was before XPUB, but I've been digesting the aftermath during XPUB, and I think it is very relevant to illustrate how I changed my perspective on things )

This was the course I did. Politics and Critique at the Erasmus School of Philosophy. It's in the Sanders Building, the Law faculty.

It was a course in Political Philosophy, focusing in the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory. That part is critical, because we did not learn much critical thinking... The theories we discussed in classes were ( mostly ) super interesting, the way they were taught did not make sense to me at all. Overall, university life felt like one big social theatre to me. I phase it in this way, to make a point of course, but I was genuinely surprised on multiple occasions by something I experienced.

some of the theories we learned about	vs.	things I experienced in the course / on campus
Rousseau -> Romanticism Hegel -> Dialectics		First class, I walk into the auditorium, I have not felt so watched in a long time... And I keep feeling like my presence is noticed during the entire course.
Marx -> The Communist Manifesto
Hannah Arendt -> Totalitarianism		During lecture student says " If I had to choose between living in a tyranny or anarchy, I'd choose a tyranny, because at least it's some form of structure. " as if it's an uncontestable point.
Foucault -> Post-Structuralism		Before lecture in class, a girl comes up to me and makes small talk. I say I don't know how things work here, it's the first time I'm in uni, she responds "Woooww, you're so mysterious!"
Jurgen Habermas -> Public Sphere Theory		In a group project, I suggest to choose a fictional scenario for an assignment, instead of an existing one, to emphasize a social issue we are supposed to discuss more. The group responds, saying 'woooww, that's super interesting, we should ask the professors for permission though'. I thought they were kidding.. But the 3 main professors of the course reply per e-mail that they came together 'to discuss the matter carefully, and agreed, on the condition that we thoroughly frame the context in which the scenario takes place and argue well for it's relevance for the purpose of this assignment'. I could not rhyme this with the objective of the course to learn 'critical thinking skills'.
Angela Davis -> Intersectionality		In a group project, we role-play, impersonating the ideas discussed in class. Angela Davis' character is portrayed as an angry radical leftist activist who glues herself on a talk-show table, screaming her ideas into the crowd. Butler's character says "I agree with you, but you should calm down because no-one will listen to you when you're being so loud." ( I wonder why I got myself into this.. )
Somewhere in-between is two more thinkers I don't remember. essays on them are by an israeli political theorist		The Professor makes a commend on these essays when he gives the readings for the coming week. He says he wants to acknowledge the fact the essays were written by an Israeli theorist, but he could not find anything online about her stance on the 'Palestinian / Israeli conflict' and he will leave it up to us to decide whether we will read the texts or not. --> 1 of the 8 exam questions is about those texts, making 12,5% of the total grade.
Frantz Fannon -> The Fact of Blackness		I use an empty glass bottle to pour machine coffee in, because there are no cups available. A classmate comes up to me and looks suprised. 'Eeehhh, is that coffee?" I say yes. She responds: "Okay... Weird..."
Judith Butler -> Gender Performativity		I walk through the hallway. A group of frat-guys shows up to class, dressed in blue suit, a tie, hair gelled back, with one hand in pocket, they give each-other a firm hand-shake-as if they're about to have a business meeting-and walk into the classroom. I wonder, how come I'm supposedly the one who is "performing" my identity?
Edward Said -> Orientalism
Jaques Ranciere -> Politics and Aesthetics		There's a rainbow crosswalk between buildings on the Erasmus campus. I read the sign, it says as much as "Everyone should feel included, accepted and valued at this university." And I felt so seen in that moment. I thought, I will never have to feel out-of-place here again. https://openrotterdam.nl/de-erasmus-universiteit-heeft-een-regenboogpad-iedereen-moet-zich-hier-thuis-kunnen-voelen/
Gayatri Spivak -> Critique of Post-Colonial Reason

My conclusion after doing the course: It was a very enriching experience. I will never do it again.

This is where I read Judith Butler closely for the first time. ( I knew their work and ideas before ofc, but now I do a close reading of them and place them in relation to other thinkers ). The essay Imitation and Gender Insubordination specifically, which comes back in my SI29 work and personal reader.

And it was a funny read at this time, because I'm trying to make sense of my experiences in uni, using the texts we read, which we're not applying within the course.. They start the essay with an anecdote about their experience as a lesbian, saying something like: How come I can both be a lesbian and act like one at the same time? Gender performativity problematised in summary. And in general, I relate a lot with that essay, but within this specific context it is amplified x10, in all those experiences that I wrote + the fact that I reflect on them at the same time.

What I learned from the course:

Politics = about aesthetic experience. Knowledge, understanding, is not about what to know (left column) but how to know things (right column).

SI28 } Writing Machines Ensemble

Projects SI 28/Writing Machine Ensemble

Fast-forward to XPUB SI28. The Writing Machines Orchestra is the first work I did where I felt the theory and practice informed each-other in a meaningful way.

Throughout the process, because we were practicing what we preached. We took Katherine Hayles' idea of a Cognitive Assemblage and applied it in every way we could think of.

And in the result, having the typewriters performing together with us, making the point that everone in the performance was a cogniscent agent.

Project description for the Writing Machines Ensemble:

Explorations in Potential Musicality

With the Writing Machines Ensemble, rhythm and repetition are experienced in a radically new form. Explorations in Potential Musicality is a musical journey through the sonic qualities of printers—with a strong emphasis on improvisation, yet promising dramatic intensity.

The Writing Machines Ensemble, co-founded by it's current members, is an international group of experimental musicians from around the XPUB Studio. Independent and idealistic, they focus on blending the role of 'instrument' and 'musician' in an assemblage of artistic creation, striving to find the essential musical quality in tools of writing. Since its debut in September 2025, the ensemble has performed once on WORM Radio, for the 5th edition of XPUB's Special Issue Radio show, where the group's unique live scoring method was born.

Emanuele Arrigoni, Daan Princen, Robin de Haan, Thijs van Loenhout, Monica Olympia, Erika Model, N.E.C. (Dottie) Parson, Taxan X.Y. Plotter

Description of a classical orchestra performing at De Doelen, I copied and adjusted to fit make the description text for the Writing Machines Ensemble

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For myself, I was interested in using irony as an approach, to play around with assigned meanings. Here, inspired by Steve's re-mixing exercises. Like in our project description, instead of trying to describe what we did, I searched for the first orchestra I could find performing in de Doelen, copied their description, and replaced words to describe our project.

photo's of our performance:

Manetta's feedback on our project, really pushed me to consider more what I'm doing when we're using this approach. She pointed out ( if I'm summarizing correctly) the fact that we're using the machine's factory names-which are women's names-to address them, anthropomorphizing them, also carries implications. In this case, because of the historic context, that these machines were given women's names to associate repetitive, administrative work with women's work, and to equate it to machine work, to subordinate it.

That's one that stuck with me. And I tried to think through for myself, how I feel about how we dealt with this in the project. What we tried to achieve with it, was to do exactly that, to re-think the assigned meanings of these 'images'. What's a formal orchestra? When is something considered music? Who decides that? What if our instruments are not just tools, but become musicians themselves? Our intention was to see the machine's names in the extend of that. Yes, the names come from that history, we give a different meaning to them now.

That does not necessarily mean that intention matches the outcome. And I have to be honest, and say I have not found a completely satisfying answer to it for myself, within this project. Even if the intent to me is right, how to communicate it in the right way, is a second thing.

It did grow my sensitivity to this. Playing around with meanings opens new ways to think, it also means you are responsible for getting the tone right. That brought me back to the same Butler essay in XPUB.