Either evolution or cookies

Finding the thread

When I talked to Steve about my ideas he was able to immediately point out commonalities between the work that I did and the work I wanted to do coming year. In my work I'm "making the invisible visible" and I do this to "address a social issue". He advised me to do all my projects and built up a practice in this way. In the final show I would be presenting this practice. However these classifications are quite broad and therefore a lot of artists fall into it. I may be interested in a more specialized practice, but I do think Steve made an interesting observation by pointing out the elements that most of my work seem to have in common.

Evolution

You could say the following of my work: "I make visible the conflicts that occur when our behavior, which is rooted in the need to cope and survive a prehistoric environment, is expressed in an environment created by technology."

This way of seeing my work has the huge advantage that I can incorporate every thing that I do in the final presentation. Even my skills in a monkey style martial art, whos movement sequences could be used to express our primitive origin.

A disadvantage is that it's quite a stretch of the evolution theory to include all my work and I'm not a scholar in evolution theory nor do I have the ambitions to become one in a year. There may be many instances where I trust upon my intuitions about the theory to connect my work with the theory. The problem is that such connections are probably not evident for everybody and this means that not everybody will perceive my work as a whole.

A possible way to make it appear as a whole and communicate the connection between my individual works is categorizing each work in domains of society like: knowledge, law, community, economy etc. and/or to take as a starting point the experiences of everyday people. With the last remark I mean that I explicitly start from the problems people are likely to experience with technology and then translate these problems in terms of evolution and showing how my work emphasizes or breaks with human nature.

Cookies

Instead of trying to combine everything that I do into a single practice I could apply my divers skills as a practitioner to a single theme. This would show that my practice is a broad one, but since they all refer to the same theme people will not conclude that the separate pieces are about different things. On the contrary, looking at the same theme through various angles will only intensify the experience that I want to give concerning the theme.

A disadvantage of this project is that I can't formulate an interesting theoretical approach immediately and I also don't know what to investigate. This project feels like purely practical with very little investigative opportunities.

The theme that I would pick is cookies and how this technology is used to change browsing into labor, which earns billions of dollars while the workers involved don't see a penny of this money. What follows is a short description of possible subworks that as a whole will communicate about this issue as well as my practice.

Questions for coming period

• Aymeric pointed out to me that the final work should be perceived as a whole. How important is this? Can't I just know for myself that it is a whole and leave it out for the rest to find these connections?
• I still struggle with how to make my work more multi interpretable. I have such clear ideas about what I want and why I want it in a certain way that I fear it will become boring for an audience since they can't project their own lives upon the work. How to deal with this?