✩FINAL ASSESSMENT ADA

overview

	00.	----> to now
research methodologies	Background in scientific social research on media and technology	✷ Close reading and analytical observation. ✷ New way to play with research, using improvisational exploration and experiential research as a valid way to construct projects. ✷ Collective note taking & collective reading. ✷ Collective ways to write on Etherpads and big sheets of paper. ✷ Writing as research, speculative writing and experimental writing. ✷ Methodology to write with clear context and intention.
technical practice	background in three very separate practices of baking, social science and illustration.	✷ Python as a way to write poetry, make cards, make books, scan and print. ✷ Web design: html, css, javascript and php. ✷ Web-to-print: paged.js as a way to make books ✷ Developed a prototyping practice: using different methods and materials that you initially thought and the value of many small prototypes. ✷ Found ways to combine media forms in the same project. ✷ Station skills: laser cutting, printing, ceramic making, tried wood and metal working and created a more playful approach to the materials I use.
organisational skills		✷ Git as a way to collaborate on big coding projects. ✷ Organising events and exhibitions, how to write a tech rider, how to communicate when so many parts are moving.

01. contributions to the special issues

	Special Issue 19: Garden Leeszal	Garden Leeszal was a momentary snapshot of the state of a library seen through the metaphor of gardening—an open conversation; a collective writing tool, a cooperative collage and an archive.
research methodologies	✷ close reading and theories to carry through ✷ collective writing as a research method	cards we collectively wrote for the event and made with python
technical practice	✷ python experimentation: as a way to generate poetry, as a way to make cards and as a way to scan and print ✷ understanding servers through breadcube (our own) ✷ using the terminal!	<---- python script to make "gardening" instructions for a library "A House of Dust" inspired generative poetry -->
organisational skills	✷ Making a coherent public event with different steps, minds and ideas ✷ Using etherpads and collective writing as methods for organisation ✷ wiki documentation ;)	↓ the final book with the content I archived the process of scanning and printing through python --->
	Special Issue 20: Console	Console is an oracle; an emotional first aid kit that helps you help yourself. Console invites you to: open the box and discover ways of healing; Console gives you a new vantage point; a set of rituals and practices that help you cope and care.
research methodologies	✷ Applying media ideology and annotating within context ✷ Improvisational exploration and experiential research.	<---- physical map of the intersection between games and rituals, the theme of this special issue.
technical practice	✷ Found ways to combine media forms in the same project by illustrating the cards and generating the pattern with python again. ✷ Station skills: laser cutting the boxes. ✷ Web-to-print: used paged.js as a way to make the console book.	<--- oracolotto cards and booklet laser cutting of the boxes of console ↓
organisational skills	✷ Collective book making: using paged.js and git to make a collective book.	<-- booklet generating script
	Special Issue 21: TTY	This issue started from a single technical object: a Model 33 Teletype machine, the bridge between typewriters and computer interfaces. Through guest contributions, we explored the intersection of historical and contemporary computing. Along the way, we created gestures, concrete vinyl poetry, phone stories, and much more.
research methodologies	✷ experimenting with merging methods even more. Fundamentals was playful exploration of scientific terminology I am used too as a creative tool, is a website using html and css and finally became friendship bracelets and an algae knitting circle. ✷ research as other people's knowledge, direct learning and trust in experiential knowledge.	note taking on a collective huge piece of paper --> <--- fundamentals website and theory algae friendship bracelets from the algae knitting circle workshop ---->
technical practice	✷ Web design: html, css and javascript practice ✷ Web design: html, css and javascript practice	javascript encoding converter with binary, hexadecimal, Cyrillic and emoji --->
organisational skills	✷ weekly release as a complicated routine of caretaking and publishing, self-organising and other-organising
	Summer camp: Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP)
	✷ during the last month of class, I went to ITP in New York ✷ learnt more javascript ✷ From XPUB research and Telecom museum collaboration made Collect Call. A javascript based "calling switchboard" two-way-only webcam website.	the front page of js generated switchboard. ↓ the calling page and me calling XPUB from NY to Constant, Brussels ------>

04. thesis

All intimacy is about bodies. Is this true? Does it matter? I doubt it. Do you know? Let’s find out, maybe.

In my thesis, I explored digital intimacies, questioning whether physical presence is truly necessary for intimacy. I also looked at how identities can fluidly exist across both human and digital realms. Instead of trying to resolve the tensions between virtual and real-life experiences, I used personal stories and shared experiences to show how online interactions can transcend physical limitations and reshape who we are.

I focused on the idea of a digital body—a representation of ourselves similar to a dream version of our physical form. Through this concept, I discussed how digital bodies can offer relief for people with types of stigmatised pain and how they can foster healing connections for diverse individuals. At the same time, I examined how prolonged use of digital intimacy can have negative effects.

0. DIGITAL BODIES

a. what is a digital body?

b. body vs. computer

c. bot-feelings

1. DIGITAL COMFORT

a. comfort care

b. uncomfortable comfort

c. unbearable intimacy

Stories that are hard to tell and hard to hear and even more, maybe, hard to understand. I have loved these stories and I have loved telling them to you. I hope you understand that my goal was for you to live these questions, to feel these stories in their confusion. My digital body, my bot-feelings, my divergent communities. I have given them to you, so they may live longer, like an obsolete but beloved cyborg shown in a museum. Look: I was here, Look: I was loved, Look: I was saved.

05. Backplaces: graduation project and research

trials, public moments and prototypes	subject matter, questions and research areas	methodological approach
love notes	✷ digital forms on paper ✷ anonymity as an exploration of intimacy.	✷ design as a performance, the internet as physicality. ✷ sending letters as a form of private publishing.
cake intimacy	✷ does being aware of our bodies change the way we talk? ✷ does seeing each other's bodies inform the way we share stories?	✷ cakes as objects that contain stories ✷ performance as a way to inform design
AMRO: internet mediumship	✷ Using mediumship as a way to nurture intimacy, if you tell me about you i'll try to tell you more about you. ✷ talking about the internet in the context of feelings, of memory.	✷ made archetypes from stories that stayed in my project ✷ performance as a way to have intimacy, our bodies and tactile experience (felted objects) as a way to talk about the disembodied internet.

FINAL PROJECT: Backplaces

I made this play for you. It is a question, for us to hold together.

Is all intimacy about bodies? What is it about our bodies that makes intimacy? What happens when our bodies distance intimacy from us? This small anthology of poems and short stories lives with these questions—about having a body without intimacy and intimacy without a body. This project is also a homage to everyone who has come before and alongside me, sharing their vulnerability and emotions on the Internet. I called the places where these things happen backplaces. They are small, tender online rooms where people experiencing societally uncomfortable pain can find relief, ease, and transcendence.

I made three backplaces for you to see, click, and feel: Solar Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Cake Intimacies. Each of these is the result of its own unique performance or project. Some of the stories I will share carry memories of pain—both physical and emotional. As you sit in the audience, know I am with you, holding your hand through each scene. If the performance feels overwhelming at any point, you have my full permission to step out, take a break, or leave. This is not choreographed, and I care deeply for you.

Solar Sibling is an online performance of shared loss about leaving and siblings. This project used comments people left on TikTok poetry. I extracted the emotions from these comments, mixed them with my own, and crafted them into poems. It is an ongoing performance, ending only when your feelings are secretly whispered to me. When you do, by typing into the comment box, your feelings are sent to me and the first act closes as the sun rises.

Hermit Fantasy is a short story about a bot who wants to be a hermit. Inspired by an email response from a survey I conducted about receiving emotional support on the Internet, this story explores the contradiction of being online while wanting to disconnect. As an act it’s a series of letters, click by click.

Cake Intimacies is a performance that took a year to bring together. It is a small selection of stories people told me and I held to memory and rewrote here. The stories come from two performances I hosted. First, I asked participants to eat cake, sitting facing or away from each other and sharing their stories about cake and the Internet. The second performance was hosted at the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival, as part of the Turning of the Internet workshop. For this performance, I predicted participants’ future lives on the Internet using felted archetypes and received stories from their Internet past in return. Now the stories are here, each of them a cake with a filling that tells a story, merging the bodily with the digital and making a mess of it all. ✷

06. plans for final publication and grad show

The play ends as all plays do. The curtains close, the website stays but the stories will never sound the same. It’s one last game, one last joke to ask my question again. For the final act, I ask you to eat digital stories. To eat a comment, to eat a digital intimacy. Sharing an act of physical intimacy with yourself and with me, by eating sweets together. Sweets about digital intimacies that never had a body. There is no moral, no bow to wrap the story in. A great big mess of transcendence into the digital, of intimacy and of bodies. The way it always is. Thankfully.