Mid-term Reflection
mid-term presentation.pdf
For this reflection I will detail briefly MDD/Fab Academy’s influence, key turning points within seminars and feedback sessions, as well as the mid term presentation. I’ve also done a write-up for my masters project which goes over the questions and research areas.
The impact of MDD and Fab Academy inform my project primarily through the chance to prototype. The emphasis on making and dealing with the endless arrays of errors in experimentation with messy materials, troubleshooting electronics, machine error, etc. bring to the forefront the borrowing of different methodologies (scientific, pheonomological, engineering, etc) – it’s interesting to see how these fields approach problem solving and what we can borrow in the design process. Interacting with embodied cognition, craftsmanship, and digital literacy first hand also contributes to how I approach the questions I have for my masters project.
I really enjoyed the way we approached experiments in MDD, they were always in relation to time, leaning into the glitches, integrating different insights and crossing between different touch points, combining aesthetics and function, the senses and data. I found a lot of joy in sculpting and playing with my hands. Thomas Duggins had also suggested I consider how we could track the human senses, the movements of our eyes, the sweat that we perspire, in relation to ideas of living archive in human form. The main takeaway from MDD that carries through to my masters project was to treat design as a process, not a means to a solution:
- apply observational knowledge with intuition and actual facts
- the application for your experiments will come later
- don’t worry about the final products, the worlds will meet each other with time.
There was also discussion about transference of process into the final project – for example, in material design, we had to quickly source local waste materials by finding a source and contacting them, creating relationships with people in the process, we were encouraged to apply the same process into the development of our final project. I found that people were really enthusiastic to help out if you are clear with your intention, something that my masters thesis has yet to pinpoint.
I also find that specific technologies such as AI/Machine Learning are not informing my train of thought as much as the first term, however I’ve begun the process of delving into the field of computer vision. This was a byproduct of one of my experiments for the mid-term, by asking ‘Can I map the colours of my walk?’, I had to learn the fundamentals of how to create a pixel array and the components that make up the creation of a pixel, as well as dig around some Python/Processing code. The language of machines, and how machines see is an area that continues to intersect with my research as it helps answer the question of ‘How do our digitised interactions with the archive affect the way we apprehend it?’ However this brings me to the question of what technologies do I want to inspect and leverage for the duration of this masters to assist in answering the questions that I have?
It’s also been a journey of unpacking ideas and the languages used in the project. I’m trying to not conflate the conceptual with the literal when speaking about the ‘museum’, for me it’s about the values that it represents – a material archive of cultural memories, a journey of curated knowledge, and how this can be re-interpreted when we think about it in future contexts. This expands to how we perceive, codify, and curate information and how that affects the way we make sense of the world.
Some important references that drive the project that I didn’t interact with last term were primarily Ernst Wolfgang’s Digital Memory and the Archive, and Narrative Environments, which we recommended to me by Mariana. The seminar with Indy served as a good reminder that nothing we are all dealing with is ever a single point issue, it all cascades and weave together, ‘knots of systems’, and the origin of an issue is most often economic.
After my mid-term my key points of feedback were to find a sublayer of ‘the archive’ (for example, looking at centralised tourism in Barcelona and people constantly flowing through the same three routes, how may we decentralise tourism?), in the form of picking an existing archive. Further examples being information on neighbourhoods, and using the stories of spaces to create guidance in our routes, to an archive of the dying. Whatever ends up being chosen, whether it be a community or archive may be the driving point to create the next layer of depth and intention for the project, and will allow for further inspection into what values I wish to be translated.
Further feedback also included playing with potentials of haptic information, pushing information to extremes, the role of the Cronista, a chronicler who keeps the memories of the city, and the Museum of Tomorrow project. RE: interactions with technology, further inspecting the relationship between content and wrapper – sometimes the wrapper is political and not the content.
Some additional feedback throughout the term:
- Set expectations now until June, establishing goals and resources
- Form analysis, platform for recognition, observatory of everyday life
- Walking as an act of understanding - ways of drifting
- Remapping research questions w Mariana: How do interactions with the archive affect the way you apprehend it? The points of view that you build from it? / If we are exploring how to see differently, what other kinds of senses (information capturing) can inform our view/perception of the journey? / Enframing of technology, how can we make this process more transparent?
The main catalyst for me now that I feel will help push me forward is the beginning of Atlas of Weak Signals, to apply the research into a local context.
Design Dialogues II
For the second term final, we presented exhibition style similarly to the first design dialogues, and had one on one discussions with the panel who circled the room.
Since the mid-term, my project moved from looking at boxes of information to information itself. I discuss memory and visual culture in relation to how our memory impacts the value of the experience, and thus as the more time passes, the the value of memory can be increased. The translation of information between one medium to another became one of the key points of discussion. In general the discussions revolved around gaining a better relationship with the body, to a better relationship with data, to a better relationship with the city. The video I created also regurgitates this narrative, and acts more like a promotional introduction to the narrative that I want to develop, which is still in flux.
For the term two final I showed
- posters of the clusters of research, of which I’ve clustered into – museum, archive, memory, body
- project mapping in relation to weak signals
- key contextual themes I arrived at for my project - hypermediation, displaced information, digital memory, embodied data
- series of objects that represented alternative interactions with city data either for points of conversation or as examples of some experiments. Visualising walking the city purely through the lens of colour, a fabric made out of algae and mica, inheriting a contemporary tooling device as a cultural artefact, textural rendering of an experience by printing a cube of soundscapes




Feedback
Narrative
The general consensus was that the area of intervention was clear however the narrative still needed to find the starting point. The ingredients are all there and just need to make it clearer to someone unfamiliar with the process. To do so, I could start to find the glue – Is it HMI x urban landscapes / ubiquitous information / the different senses / future of interfaces / uncovering unseen layers of the city / cultural materiality as a way of engagement / data authorship? Since it is a bit of a combination, figure out the points of convergence to find cohesion in the narrative. What not to include was a re-occuring point of feedback that I will take forward.
Scope
What is the systematic purpose? What does the project look like in 5 years? The longer scope of the project I envision to be more community/platform based, but for the remainder of MDEF I will focus on creating a proof of concept through an installation or series of speculative artefacts. In the future, I hope to engage more closely with opening up archives, and bringing down walls of information. Need to have awareness of the spectrum of speculative and applied depending on where in the process I am, this is important – whether I decide to make something real or speculative.
Ideas
Translations: Can I systematize the synthesis of information and develop a ‘information transformation device’? Translations between different types of code (e.g. HEX <-> Binary <-> Genetic <-> Symantic). How about the information of a book in a genome? Distinguish phenotype vs genotype. Create representational form to enhance the visual - create a new form of communication.
Data Traces: A means to reclaiming our relationship with data could be to make visible an invisible relationship. Could this be manifested through a physical installation? Decide on type of data (Ring of your voice, physical movement).
Hacking: Hacking myself to see different things, removing data inputs as an experiment to enhance satisfaction. To healthily excite the senses is to enhance memorial perceptions; sense the city with different sensors - more satisfying experience with the city. Understand data as all the stories that you can perceive and understand, removing a sense / adding a sense - tricking data perceptors that give you the feeling of depth, distance and time
Objects: Speculate the first generation with no family objects - objects of the future will be missing - value of objects of lost information. More data and complexities - data in each object could be emotionally richer than all objects – e.g. a phone compared to the rest of your room. Values of ‘objects of data’.
Intervention
Does it take the form of a simulation or a physical intervention in a space? If a community/collective approach - platform based, putting down walls, would then need to seek out collaborators immediately. Then define levels of participation / interaction and what I would want from the experience. Collaboration with curators, archivists, in order to transform local spaces into that of a museum (while simultaneously re-defining the idea of what a future museum could be)? Adding and removing senses is a re-occuring thread in this project and so a conversation with the jury around those who are sense impaired could be a potential audience.
References
- The Genetic Code
- George Church
- Gambling, Gods, and LSD
- Rotterdam Open Archives - art storage accessible to the public
- Jewel with genetic code encapsulated project? - ‘matching’ something created as a jewel - intimate, precious, intimacy on the dna, not the surface
Reflection
Sometimes the process feels like an ouroboros of doom, so finding the ground is needed! To move forward I will be focusing on one input/output, defining key narrative/terms, and also work with collaborators. For the proof of concept I will make an installation that is dedicated to interfacing invisible urban data, I will be spending the first week looking into wifi, emf, rfid, and something that has been a recent new interest, biophotons - the photons in the low visible light spectrum that is emitted from a biological system. Alternatively, a physical and immersive experience to stimulate the use and understanding of existing archival data by the public - to reinvigorate old, historical information. It could be interesting if both were possible – layering the old forgotten history on top of the new technologies.
The approach of which I decide to take hasn’t really defined for a while but I think will come as things get built – a digital intervention? A material approach? A bodily, embodied approach? A platform/collective methodology? A strong narrative, a pure speculation?
I feel like over reading has been a bit detrimental to the process but I’d like to turn it around into something useful, and am in the process of creating a reading list that I can throw into the void of the internet. Maybe a project about museums and archives and books warrants a contribution in the form of an archive itself. It is a website forked from a resource that I’ve personally used for a long time, graphic design readings by Jarrett Fuller. It will be a work in progress on continually create a dedicated, comprehensible online presence to the project to the public. Alongside this online repo, for the exhibition I would also create a physical book or kit on the project, so that it is self sufficient, combining my own deliverables with the weekly deliverables for the third term.
Onwards!
I will be planning my final term on this gantt chart