METHOD

________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ DRAFT VERSION 1 / 27-05-15

- PAST/PRESENT CHECK!! - DO I NEED TO REFERENCE THE THREE EXAMPLE PROJECTS IN THE CONCLUSION?? - TIME AND GENERATION ESSENCE OF THE PROJECTS IMPORTANT TO PUT IN THE TEXT? - PARTICIPATORY CULTURE/SURVEILLANCE!!!???

“Mind Words”

Visual Artist Arantxa Gonlag has recently completed a Bachelor in Photography at the Willem de Kooning Acadamy. Her graduation project explored the infrastructure that is used by our digital data. This resulted in the photographed documentation book ‘Data Diary’. Currently she’s in her Master’s first year Media Design and Communication at the Piet Zwart Institute, where she has just completed one of her new projects ‘The Places in Between’. This project explores the depth of layers that is involved in viewing our digital data. By actually peeling of the layers within a book, you discover all the digital information regarding one day in her life. Exploring the digital world first from the surface, she has developed an interest in the underlying depth of that world, how we relate and interact with digital objects and the invisible world underneath. One of her new concept projects is focused on our interaction with the screens of technologies around us, how they affect us as people when we interact with these technologies but also, when surrounded by them, with other people. [EXAMPLE IMAGE DATA DIARY]

Arantxa: During the documentation process of ‘Data Diary’ I had a feeling that I kept myself too much on the surface. The more I discovered about the data world, the more interested I became in the depth of it. What is underneath the data centers? How do these servers work exactly? A simple explanation from my guides was not enough. I wanted to understand it from the inside out. This is why I chose to study further in an education where this knowledge is available. Now, I have just completed a new project that is almost completely generated by codes from inside the terminal of my laptop. Though that sounds really complicated, the result is mainly image based, just like my older work has always been. [EXAMPLE IMAGE PLACES IN BETWEEN]

I’m not really into code per se, I don’t go into the technique of it. I am a user. I use it to obtain images or footage. The outcome is not that different than what I have made previously, I’m still working within the same medium, with a different process and a different aesthetic.

Working with this process makes a difference in multiple areas. Especially with my latest project ‘The Places in Between’ this becomes obvious. One area is the generation of the material: I’ve tried to capture with my professional camera the digital information I’m generating digitally now. It was impossible to keep up with the speed of the digital data this way. The amount of the data that lightly goes on and on versus the heavy recorded files of high quality aesthetical images and footage. The other area is the relationship it creates with the audience: the recognizable aspect of the way the data is presented. My initial thought starting the project was that I wanted it to be as common as possible and use especially devices that everyone has access to. The low-res files create a familiarity within the project to other people.[EXAMPLE IMAGE PLACES IN BETWEEN] It seems logical that I had to get deeper inside the code based world to retrieve this data faster and more efficient. Data about me. Data about my daily life. My projects are generally not about me specifically as a person but they are about me as an example or as a certain character. They’re not really about the content, but about the fact that the content is there, the amount of it and the personal aura of it. I have yet to explore for myself if it is important that people understand that the persona is just a character, or that they can fill in the blanks themselves. Maybe a quote taken from Sherry Turkle’s book ‘The Second Self’ can make this clearer: “My method shares the advantage of using ‘ideal types’ – examples that present reality in a form larger than life. Ideal types are usually constructed fictions. My examples are real. Yet they isolate and highlight particular aspects of the computers influence because I have chosen to write about people in computer cultures that amplify different aspects of the machines personality.” Understanding why I became interested in, or better: obsessed by, my own data is the most essential question I need to answer in order to see what’s the next step for me. “Understanding your reasoning” is a project on its own. There is a way to understand why you make certain things; you have to be able to nit-pick your own brain. After completing ‘Data Diary’ I delved into a world which was far outside my own comfort zone of basic photography.

Learning new technologies and applying them to my projects got me inspired into a lot of different directions. I have a tendency wanting to know and do too much at once. This created some confusion as to what I was working on; at times I couldn’t remember why I was creating the projects in the first place. Preferably I like to immerse myself completely into one project at a time, perhaps spend several months on that particular project. In reality I have never been able to work in that way. Particularly now, with so much new techniques going on next to my own practice, I’m doing multiple things at once the entire time. For me, staying with essence of a project has always been a hard thing, but now I have to think twice as hard, and thrice as fast. This because previously I would be working in my comfort zone, working with namely photography based ideas. When you look at ‘Data Diary’, yes it’s a documentation story resulted as a book, but what you see first is images, photography. Now I combine the same medium and method with new techniques that are still not as easy for me to use and understand, for example with ‘The Places in Between’ I generate these images via code. With a new project based on the relationship between humans and technologies I go further in this by combining code, video and again, images. .[EXAMPLE IMAGE SCREENS]

In order for myself to stay focused on the underlying motivation that inspire projects I wrote down my keywords on loose pieces of paper. I tried to apply these to loose pieces of paper on which I wrote why I’m interested in those things. Then I applied these motivations to my old and new projects.[EXAMPLE IMAGE MIND MAP] Basically, I created a mind-map of my mind. Seeing these keyword papers on their own, I could see certain whys relate to multiple keywords and I could draw different connections. In this way I was able to see the essence of my interests. An adjustable mind-map helps to clear your mind so you can look from the outside and see connections you couldn’t see before. This is a good method, but the revelations don’t happen from one day to the next, it can come gradually but also suddenly. It could happen that someone else notices something, because most of the time you are too involved. It’s your own mind after all.

Added to my mind-map are sentences from books that I read to better understand my fields of interest. What happens when someone reads my mind map happens the other way around also. For me, reading different opinions and methods of describing the same topics of interest, creates a better understanding. Focusing on the relationship of people with their personal computers, Sherry Turkle has been the first and a prominent writer I enjoy reading, by adding for example: Octavia Butler - “The Patternist, Mind of my mind” and “The War of Desire and Technology at the Close of the Mechanical Age” – BLABLA?? creates a larger overview instead of only one. Next to that I think it’s important to keep reading more general texts about the participatory digital world: “The Work of Being Watched” – Mark Andrejevic and “Bastard Culture!” - Mirko Tobias Schafer. This is important to keep an open mind for possible inspiration into other strands, as I continue new projects.

I have my mind-map in the middle of my living room wall. The mind-map is always there and it keeps changing: becoming smaller and sometimes bigger, pieces are deleted, crossed out, rewritten and/or added. Why, why, why. Is this perhaps the reason I cannot define myself as a particular artist? I’m not a photographer, I’m not a designer, I’m not only about fine arts. I am many things but also nothing. There are so many options, but what to choose. Sometimes I’m more this than that and sometimes it’s conversely. I have many interests, but what do they mean together? Do I have to pick one for all my projects, or just one for each project individually? I want them all. As my projects get a more structured outline over time, due to focused theory according to current projects I am making, nit-picking my mind and method will become less hard, but never easy.

To me it’s seems that as I’m moving ahead with my projects about our confrontation?? with the digital world, they become more intimate not only in their outcome but in their topics and concepts. Where I was interested in a surficial documentation of the digital world before, now I’m circulating the notion of how we see ourselves in relation to our digital components. The projects become more psychologically infested, and in that way demand more depth of knowledge in the research up to the end result. “…computers closely resemble people in their ‘thinking’ and differ only in their lack of ‘feeling’ supports a dichotomized view of human psychology.” – Sherry Turkle, The Other Self. This I believe will be the way I’ll be leading towards my graduation year at the Piet Zwart Institute.

“Whatever I’m doing, it has nothing to do with me – it has to do with what they’re thinking I am, and, that is what they are” – The Work of Being Watched – Mark Andrejevic

The more I learn, the more I realize nothing stays. Back when learning photography I always knew what I wanted and how I was going to complete it. Now, today I might be a photographer, a designer tomorrow, but who knows what I will be the day after that? My interests are always in movement. What I want to create now will perhaps bore me in a few years, months, or even days. Media will always be of interest to me, it’s been the one constant interest my whole artist career, and as it evolves, my thoughts and feelings about media will evolve with it. Thinking about the thin red line that is always lurking in the back of my projects will keep me motivated. Looking at my own mind thoughts, mind words, and seeing how they evolve over time helps me to see the overall connection. As soon as I lose my belief in my projects as a whole, they will crumble down.

- WHAT WILL BE THE END SENTENCE??

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