The Choir of 3D Printers

It was 2018 when I was working as a digital fabrication technician at a maker space in Baltimore, Maryland, where I had to tend to twelve 3D printers in a room no bigger than ten by ten feet. The room was clean and neatly organized, with two computers and eight Ultimaker printers stacked on a movable shelf on the right side by the door, stacks of filaments and four Prusa printers on the desk by the wall opposite to the door, repair tool kit and one in-progress giant experimental printer on the left to the door.

To give you a context, this was one of my most depressing time of my life; I was fresh out of undergraduate working two part time jobs and doing freelance works, uncertain about my graduate school applications and funding, worried sick about my ill mother at home, and desperately trying to look for a design studio that was willing to give me a work visa within a time limit of four months or else I would get kicked out of the country–things were not so hot. Every time I clocked in, I dreaded having to deal with customers who often blame the 3D printer’s failures on us, technicians.

It was slow and quiet that day, but I was emotionally exhausted from all my personal baggage. So I rested my head on the desk, closed my eyes, and thought of nothing, when it hit me, they were singing. By that time, I have worked with 3D printers long enough to have recognized their sound when they were printing and made a few off-handed comments about it. However, it was not until that day that it felt like I was listening to the 3D printers’ performance, it was a robotic choir.

Perhaps it would be an insult to performers to call an unorganized sound making machines a choir, but the sound those 3D printers were making was very soothing to me, it felt like one. It might also be because of my bias and affinity towards machines that made me come to this conclusion. Confined in a small room amidst nothing but my depression and twelve moving 3D printers, I subconsciously looked for any kind of comfort the situation had to offer, and it was in the sound of twelve 3D printers I found it.

I was aware that the sound was not an intended product of 3D printers, it just is. Of course, they were not ‘singing’, it was my human centric idea that projected the idea of singing onto those machines. They were just doing their jobs, commanded by us, printing out filament layer by layer to bring a digital design to our physical life. It was my human mind that wanted to believe that they were singing a choir. They were not aware of anything they were doing.

But regardless of intentions, it cheered me up. The twelve 3D printers could not see, hear, nor feel, yet the presence of each of them made me feel better about my life in that moment. It is perhaps romantic, and considering where we are today with technology and the direction its moving towards, it might as well be dangerous. I was projecting and seeking empathy from machines that cannot and will not reciprocate my human feelings for they are not and will never be human.

Living

I think our idea of living is too human-centric. Something is only perceived as living when it presents human life qualities. Our idea of sentient is too conservative, too limiting for us to connect with other beings in our surroundings, when our network with our environment is what has been keeping us alive as human species.

(While I agree that the slime mold is intelligent, I think the researches that show how intelligent the slime mold is by comparing it to human intelligence could be a dangerous practice).

Just because something doesn’t have a brain like organ or a visible network system it does not mean that they are not intelligence or alive. I believe that everything is alive on its own terms. Every objects, material or dematerial, in the physical or in the virtual, have agency that change our behavior around them. We have little to no understanding of how these objects experience life outside of our connection to them because we are fundamentally different species and kinds of beings, but I think it’s important to hold on to this connection, to the belief that these objects are affecting us as just as we are affecting them.

Maybe suggesting that my cup of coffee as a living being sounds too radical of a statement, but as a person and a network, I have a relationship with my cup of coffee as a concept and object, and I think what I’m trying to say that this network is a living quality.

With this line of thinking, perhaps I should really read Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory and Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology. I just haven’t had to time to read their work yet.

Sol Lewitt, Paragraphs on Conceptual Art: A Response

(unrelated, in class thoughts: Do you think if it wasn’t for the military needs, robotic and AI technology would’ve gone through an entirely different route than we are today? less anthromorphized? less advanced because of less funding and interest?)

In my practice, my work has always been conceptual. Before doing my sculptural work, I wasn’t aware of Sol Lewitt (or most artists in general, because I never had any formal education nor access to fine art growing up in Indonesia) but my undergraduate professor told me about him because he thought my work reminds me of his philosophy.

The concepts are never rational, if it becomes rational, then it means nothing. The concept doesn’t have to be complex. Sometimes it comes from a single or two lines of poems I write before I go to bed. Lewitt said, “Ideas are discovered by intuition. What the work of art looks like isn’t too important.” I always follow my intuition, I might now know what the meaning or the symbolism mean, but that is to be discovered later when the work of art is done.

If you create a work of art that you know everything of, in and out of it, deep psychological meaning behind all the symbolism you meant to put on it, then what is the point of that? What is the point of a conceptual art work if it cannot be perceived infinitely? My undergraduate thesis professor once told me, if you know the meaning of everything in your work, then you are not creating artwork for yourself, but for other people. I think, one should be able to infinitely dissecting the meaning of the work by themselves.

An idea and a plan, as Lewitt has put it, “eliminates the arbitrary, the capricious, and the subjective as much as possible.” As much as conceptual work follow intuition, it is not an abstract. It’s not subjective. But everything is subjective, isn’t it? Is there anything out there in the world that is truly objective? What I think Sol Lewitt meant is for the work to be able to be open for interpretation to many of the viewers in many ways.

“Architecture, whether it is a work of art or not, must be utilitarian or else fail completely. Art is not utilitarian. When three-dimensional art starts to take on some of the characteristics, such as forming utilitarian areas, it weakens its function as art.” I’m not sure if I agree with this statement. I think, something still can be completely utilitarian and still serves as art. The notion that utilitarian objects cannot be art is elitist. Concept doesn’t have to be rational, but it can be rational. Art doesn’t only exist in forms but also in ornaments. Creating art for the art’s sake as the only pure form of art is a dated thinking.

Here are my drawings that I did in class, following the drawing rules by Sol Lewitt, including the last 2 drawings following my own rules and my colleague’s rules:

Western Classification Between Fine Art And Design (Or Applied Art)

I was reading a material for one of my class, “Art, Authenticity, and the Baggage of Cultural Encounter” by Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner about the western view of non-western art. The paper points out a lot of reasons why I think the western separation between what fine art and applied art is dangerous.

I’ve always thought that the way western society define and separate fine art and design is weird and problematic in many ways. The western idea of “art for the art’s sake” being seen as the highest form of art while utilitarian art is deemed the lowest is elitist. So many artists who create utilitarian art (as westerners love to call as “craft” or “kitsch”) are not considered to be “artist” by art critics and theorists. This deconstruction devalues people’s art, especially of those who came from minority groups. For example, in the paper I mentioned before focuses on, the indigenous community.

I will draw my favorite example from an art piece created by my colleague, Emary Parisi, who wrote a piece about the interactions that happened during a previous art piece of hers, “Reclaim Your Time (With My Time)”.

(Screenshot from “(this is) A Theoretical Analysis / section to I am all I have” By Emary Parisi, 2018)

I chose this piece as an example because it is something that I, as an artist, have witnessed first hand where an art critic directly questioned the authenticity of an artist by asking her why she was in an art school rather than being in other field such as journalism or anthropology.

What is art and who gets to decide who is to be called an “artist”? If there is anything that I learned from my undergraduate art school is that no one really gets to define what art is. This is very fundamental to me, as I think, it should to everyone else.

“Although the objects under discussion originated in such diverse times and places as mandarin China circa 1850, the American Plains circa 1880, and Kenya circa 1994, they are all equally difficult to contain within the binary schema of art and artifact. In some instances, where the fact of commoditization could be hidden, the objects have been accorded a place in one of the other category. In others, where their commoditized nature has been all too evident, they have most often fallen into the ontological abyss of the inauthentic, the fake, or the crassly commercial. A particularly dense aura of inauthenticity surrounds objects produced for the souvenir and tourist trades because they are most obviously located at the intersection of the discourses of art, artifact, and commodity.”

What exactly separates art, artifact, and commodity? What makes these objects an intersection of all those things? To understand this reading better I searched for the pieces that are discussed in the book along with Oxford Dictionary definition for “art”, “artifact”, and “commodity”.

art¹

/ärt/

noun

noun: art; plural noun: arts; plural noun: the arts

1. 1.

   the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.

   “the art of the Renaissance”

   Similar:

   fine art, artwork

   creative activity

   • works produced by human creative skill and imagination.

     “his collection of modern art”

     Similar:

     fine art, artwork, creative activity
   • creative activity resulting in the production of paintings, drawings, or sculpture.

     “she’s good at art”
2. 2.

   the various branches of creative activity, such as painting, music, literature, and dance.

   “the visual arts”
3. 3.

   subjects of study primarily concerned with the processes and products of human creativity and social life, such as languages, literature, and history (as contrasted with scientific or technical subjects).

   “the belief that the arts and sciences were incompatible”
4. 4.

   a skill at doing a specified thing, typically one acquired through practice.

   “the art of conversation”

com·mod·i·ty

/kəˈmädədē/

noun

noun: commodity; plural noun: commodities

1. a raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee.

   “commodities such as copper and coffee”

   Similar:

   item, material

   type of produce:

   product, article, object, thing, artifact, piece of merchandise, import, export

   • a useful or valuable thing, such as water or time.

     “water is a precious commodity”

ar·ti·fact

/ˈärdəfakt/

noun

noun: artefact; plural noun: artefacts; noun: artifact; plural noun: artifacts

1. 1.

   an object made by a human being, typically an item of cultural or historical interest.

   “gold and silver artifacts”
2. 2.

   something observed in a scientific investigation or experiment that is not naturally present but occurs as a result of the preparative or investigative procedure.

   “widespread tissue infection may be a technical artifact”

“We aim, in particular, to add to the dichotomy of art and artifact a third, pivotal category, the commodity, and, further, to discuss how some aspects of the discourses surrounding all three were complementary and mutually reinforcing while others were intersecting, contingent, and contradictory.”

Another reason why I think this is a good book (that I might actually buy because apparently our school doesn’t have full access to this on Jstor) is this point. By the western definition themselves, art and artifact seem to overlap each other. And the belief that commodity cannot be considered as art is, I think, ignorant, as art takes many forms in our daily life. Igor Kopytoff wrote in “Cultural Biology of Things” that, “A commodity is a thing that has use value and that can be exchanged in a discrete transaction for a counterpart, the very fact of exchange indicating that the counterpart has, in the immediate context, an equivalent value.” In the modern day, what to be considered to be a “high art fine art” is also commonly commoditized as an exchanged value between art collectors and institutions.

Banksy’s attempt to destroy the painting after it was bought at an auction rendered futile as it was kept being commoditized at even a higher value than it was before the painting got shredded.

“To be represented as “art,” in other words, the aesthetic objects of non-Western people had to be transposed into the Western system of classification of the fine and applied art. Feminist and Marxist art historians have revealed how this system reinforces hierarchies of gender and class. Its hegemonic implication for race have, however, been less clearly set out, in large part because the highly selective promotion of non-Western art by modernist artists has constructed the illusion that a universalist inclusiveness has been achieved.”

I’m a firm believer of the notion that nothing in this world is universal, and that everything was created and defined within context of one another (Deleuze and Guattari’s Rhizome). Dissecting the work of indigenous culture through the western lens based on the classification of fine art and applied art, cherry-picking on what fits into the Oxford definition of fine art (“in a visual form such as painting or sculpture”) to represent to the rest of the world of what counts as indigenous art, ignores the indigenous systems of value and meaning that are attached to the objects, is a flawed and ignorant practice.

“The nineteenth-century critical historians of art also grounded their work in a Hegelian notion of progress in which the increased freedom of the artist and the greater incidence of fine art become signs of advanced civilization.”

With that, if you connect the dots, believing in the classifications of what fine art and applied art mean could simply mean believing that western civilization is more advanced in comparison to indigenous civilization. And that is why I think the dichotomy between fine art and design (applied art) is a dangerous belief.

But still, I am guilty of this practice too, by constantly calling myself an “artist and designer” I am actively submitting to the belief. Why have I not changed my title to just “an artist”? As a creator, I have the autonomy to decide what my creations mean to my community, but I think I should still be aware of setting a context for myself and other people. This is both a question and a call out for myself.

A Spoon For Two

 

A Spoon For Two
Hard Maple
2019

“A Spoon For Two” is a piece that was created from a conversation that I had with one of my best buddy, Emary Parisi, and in context of one of the course I’m currently taking called “Affect And Emotion in Practice”.

In my practice, I always want to collaborate with my material. Because collaboration brings the best of everybody involved and merged it into one beautiful outcome. I don’t want to manipulate my materials, for I do not want to force them to be what they are not meant to be. In life, I’m also always in constant state of collaboration. As an artist and designer who lives with bipolar disorder, I have to collaborate with my illness to live a “normal” life. It’s like a dance, careful steps back and forth, side to side, it can be tiring after a while, but always, it’s fun.

I want to create an embodiment and an experience of having to do this collaboration in simplest everyday life events like having a meal. Vlusser mentioned that “gestures are to be considered movements of the body and, in broader sense, movements of tools attached to the body.” So I made a video of people sharing A Spoon For Two to have a meal together. What kind of gestures will people make while they dance for a meal together?

A Spoon For Two
video
2019

I think everybody had fun collaborating.

 

Emotional Computing

Yesterday we started physical computing and opened our Arduino kit and explore what we can do with it. I’ve tinkered with arduino a couple times before, and made a couple of projects with it. I can say I’m somewhat comfortable with it. However, it’s been a long time since I’ve touched any of these tools so I was refreshing my mind with doing little practices.

With the bulb

With the servo

 

The first one is using potentiometer to slowly fade in and fade out an LED light. And for the second one I use the potentiometer to control the servo motor. I made a Fritzing file and I saved both the codes on my github as “potentiometer_bulb.ino” and “potentiometer_servo.ino” I think getting the habit into documenting stuffs is great and it helps me memorize things better.

Having a tactile experience with coding makes it easier for me to find “poetry” in the context of modern technology. Especially with a wide selection of sensors I can buy off the internet for real cheap. Is tactility helping a digital product achieve the “poetry” I am looking for? But what about all of the other qualities that could make digital and virtual objects have the similar vibe of “poetry”?

If I were to equate my definition of “poetry” to definition of “affect” through “gesture” as Vilem Flusser describes, the characteristics of “gesture” is considered movements of the body of tools attached to the body. So does something needs an attachment to a living being to be considered to have a “poetry”?

This is something that I’ve been trying to look for the answer to. Can an inanimate object have a poetry? I say, absolutely, because I’ve seen it. But it does, in fact, always have relations or attachments to living beings around it, or an anthromorphization by us, the living viewers. It seems like inanimate objects could only be poetic through the lens of living beings.

Anyways, since my observation began, I keep anthromorphizing objects around me. Am I studying too much or am I just an empath? *laughs* I’m starting to realize that my study focus heavily on human and their lenses, technology is just a tool that opens up a new lens.

 

Digital Vulnerability

Today I’m going to talk about the ‘poetry’ I found not in objects but rather an event.

On Friday, we had our presentation of our first experiment, which I did with my group partner, Lilian. Our presentation went well despite it being a little chaotic at the beginning. But in the end, we got people to put their phones down on the campfire stand and have a conversation. Our project focuses on the idea of unplugging. 

(photo credit to Nick Puckett)

I remember being on MSN Messenger when I was in middle school. After school we would go on our computers and go ‘online’. When I was ‘online’ sometimes I would scroll down my contact to see who was ‘online’ to see if I can talk to them. But that’s just a weird thing to do these days, isn’t it? You wouldn’t scroll through your contact to see who you can talk to because they are ‘online’ because everybody is ‘online’ all the time.

It’s almost as if our communication devices have turned into an extension of our bodies. Which was discussed about in so far my favorite book of the year, “To Be A Machine” by Mark O’Connell.

The book itself is a journal about transhumanism. Transhumanism might be a concept that’s new to some people, but in one of the chapters there’s a little bit of conversation about how human are arguably unconsciously turning into transhumanists because we let our communication gadgets become extensions of ourselves.

In that sense, can we truly ever unplug from our devices?

The ‘poetry’ that I found in the event of Friday class was that since we are doing a project that requires everybody’s devices, everybody had to remove their phone’s passcode and auto-lock for the sake of efficiency for our presentations. I found this moment really interesting. In the digital era, digital privacy is a big thing. Some people find it uncomfortable for other people to have access to their phones. So to remove our passcodes entirely to a group of people we have just got to know for a month might be a little too much for some. I was talking to my classmate, Neo, and he did admit that he didn’t remove his passcode because doing so makes him feel like he’s “naked”.

I found the ‘poetry’ in the vulnerability in that moment. While I think everybody trusted everybody to have common decency to not look into our phones when they’re basically unprotected, there’s this moment of vulnerability in that action.

During our conversation, Kate mentioned about a book by Sherry Turkle, “Reclaiming Conversation”. I haven’t got the time to look into the book, but I watched her TED Talk on Youtube.

 

She mentioned that she did a TED Talk in the 1996 talking about chatrooms, and how technology has allowed people to communicate to each other without having to sit down in front of each other. Years later, she is still talking about the same topic but different impact the phenomenon has. By texting, emailing, or being on social media, people have curated the way they present, they don’t have flowing conversations anymore.

When I was in my undergraduate at Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA), I came in a little bit older than everybody else in my grade. I didn’t feel much of an age gap, however, I did with the people in the grade just below me. They were communicating in ways that I could only partially understand. They rarely have conversations and communicates mainly through their phones or social media. They communicate through memes and it affects the way they talk in real life.

Not that I don’t understand memes, I am not that old. But I think it has layers of communication that I am missing out. I find memes to be entertaining and sometimes an effective way to communicate my feelings, however, it is not my favorite mode of communication. I always prefer a sit down, face to face, heart to heart conversations without screens in between or in front of me and the people I am talking to.

I think the ‘poetry’ in that mode of conversation is that there’s also a moment of vulnerability in which Turkle mentioned in her TED Talk– There is not enough delay in the moment to curate the way you present yourself to other people, you are just being who you are. And we know when someone is listening or not, not the way it is when we post status on facebook or send a tweet, hoping that there’s someone listening to us.

That being said, I still use facebook and twitter. And then there’s this blog, and my personal blog. Writing in hopes that there is someone out there who would spend their time reading a lengthy text about niche things I am interested in.

I always make sure to create my boundaries around these expectations. Because it’s dangerous. As Turkle said in her TED Talk, people think being alone is a problem that needs to be solved by technology. But I think over the years of maturing and growing up, I’ve come to terms that being alone is not a bad thing. I write things on my blogs and tweet dumb stuffs because I want to and that I am doing it for myself.

As for the question of if we can truly unplug ourselves, I think the answer for myself is not entirely. I recently have accepted that I, too, might be a transhumanist. It’s alright, I think. I’m studying the effect of technology and emotions in digital era and try to keep myself critical to the subject.

And I think I trust my peers in my graduate program to keep myself to be self-critical at all times.

hardcoded impatience

So after talking to multiple professors about my journey in finding ‘poetry’ in modern digital medium, I came to the conclusion that I will find it one day, I just have to keep exploring and have fun with it (It’s a bit hard because I’ve become really impatient with the world recently. It’s like everything is falling apart. I think the Mayans were right, the world did end in 2012 and we’re all just living in an endless purgatory right now).

I talked to my professor, Judith Doyle, who teaches the Affect and Emotions in Practice course I am taking this semester. Her work evokes that feeling of ‘livingness’ through digital medium. And I asked her what makes it so? What is it in things we don’t normally empathize with that could evoke empathy? She suggested that not only I keep journal of my exploration with digital medium but also to do so in everyday life’s ‘poetry’.

Cody Berry at GestureLab, OCAD University from Judith Doyle on Vimeo.

So I started with my study of the piece of red oak I have lying around in my room.

I did three different types of observations of this piece of red oak. First is through looking at a high definition picture of the scan. Second is by studying the simplified version of the grain by image trace function on Adobe Illustrator. Third is by retracing the grain myself. I’ve always found wood to be a quirky material. Its grain is not only unique to each species, but to each cut. Like people and their little movements. Only each move is recorded in its life as it grows. It’s like I’m studying part of the movements this red oak tree made in its life. I think each direction of the grain is a poetry.

I will continue my journey to find more ‘poetry’ in nonhuman things around me. I’m a little tired today, had a full class of debugging our collaboration project. But we ended the day getting ramen for dinner with almost everyone in the Digital Future 2019 program, it was a nice way to end the week.

see you next time

 

Ordinary Computation

Today we learned more about P5.js in class. It was a lot of information in one session and I couldn’t grasp all of the materials because I was trying to understand the parts that was explained at the beginning. I personally think Nick was going too fast, though I understand why he needed to. We’ve only got 2 years in grad school!

I’ve had this conversation with a friend, Allan Doyle, before, but I just remembered again that learning coding is just like learning a language. And we’re trying to understand it over such short amount of time. But I think the upper-hand of being in a learning space is that we can consistently dedicate a huge chunk of our time to learn it.

Learn it like a language. Learn it as if it’s ordinary. I read the intro part of Ordinary Affect by Kathleen Stewart today. What is Ordinary Affect? I tried to break it down by word definition as I usually do to understand a word or a phrase:

or·di·nar·y

/ˈôrdnˌerē/

Learn to pronounce

adjective

adjective: ordinary

1. 1.

   with no special or distinctive features; normal.

   “he sets out to depict ordinary people”

   synonyms:

   usual, normal, standard, typical, stock, common, customary, habitual, accustomed,
   expected, wonted, everyday, regular, routine, day-to-day, daily, established, settled, set, fixed, traditional, quotidian, prevailing

   “the ordinary course of events”

   antonyms:

   abnormal

   • uninteresting; commonplace.

     “ordinary items of everyday wear”

     synonyms:

      average, normal, run-of-the-mill, standard, typical, middle-of-the-road, common, conventional, mainstream, unremarkable, unexceptional,
     unpretentious, modest, plain, simple, homely, homespun, workaday,
     undistinguished, nondescript, characterless, colorless, commonplace,
     humdrum, mundane, unmemorable, pedestrian, prosaic, quotidian,
     uninteresting, uneventful, dull, boring, uninspiring, bland, suburban,
     hackneyed, stale, mediocre, middling, indifferent; More

     antonyms:

     unusual, extraordinary, unique, exceptional
2. 2.

   (especially of a judge or bishop) exercising authority by virtue of office and not by delegation.

noun

noun: the ordinary; noun: ordinary; plural noun: ordinaries; noun: Ordinary; plural noun: Ordinaries

1. 1.

   what is commonplace or standard.

   “their clichés were vested with enough emotion to elevate them above the ordinary”
2. 2.

   BRITISH•LAW

   a person, especially a judge, exercising authority by virtue of office and not by delegation.

   • US

     (in some US states) a judge of probate.
3. 3.

   those parts of a Roman Catholic service, especially the Mass, which do not vary from day to day.

   • a rule or book giving the order for saying the Mass.
4. 4.

   HERALDRY

   any of the simplest principal charges used in coats of arms (especially chief, pale, bend, fess, bar, chevron, and saltire).
5. 5.

   ARCHAIC

   a meal provided at a fixed time and price at an inn.

   • an inn providing a meal at a fixed time and price.
6. 6.

   HISTORICAL•NORTH AMERICAN

   another term for penny-farthing.

and interestingly, the word Affect had 3 different meanings in 3 different context,

af·fect¹

/əˈfekt/

verb

verb: affect; 3rd person present: affects; past tense: affected; past participle: affected; gerund or present participle: affecting

1. have an effect on; make a difference to.

   “the dampness began to affect my health”

   synonyms:

    influence, exert influence on, have an effect on, act on, work on, condition, touch, have an impact on, impact on, take hold of, attack, infect, strike, strike at, hit; More

   antonyms:
   be unaffected

   • touch the feelings of (someone); move emotionally.

     “the atrocities he witnessed have affected him most deeply”

     synonyms:

     upset, trouble, hit hard, overwhelm, devastate, damage, hurt, pain, grieve, sadden,
     distress, disturb, perturb, agitate, shake, shake up, stir; More

     antonyms:

      be unaffected, be indifferent to, unaffecting, unmoving

af·fect²

/əˈfekt/

verb

verb: affect; 3rd person present: affects; past tense: affected; past participle: affected; gerund or present participle: affecting

1. pretend to have or feel (something).

   “as usual I affected a supreme unconcern”

   synonyms:

   pretend, feign, fake, counterfeit, sham, simulate, fabricate, give the appearance of, make a show of, make a pretense of, play at, go through the motions of; More

   • use, wear, or assume (something) pretentiously or so as to make an impression on others.

     “an American who had affected a British accent”

     synonyms:

     assume, put on, take on, adopt, like, have a liking for, embrace, espouse

     “he deliberately affected a republican stance”

af·fect³

/ˈafekt,əˈfekt/

noun

PSYCHOLOGY

noun: affect

1. emotion or desire, especially as influencing behavior or action.

 

Being in a class called “Affect And Emotions In Practice” I went into the reading with presumption that within the context of the class the affect mentioned in “Ordinary Affect” primarily mean the 3rd description of the word. But I would miss the entire point of this reading if I take that as the only meaning of the word here.

Order, rules, fixed, not special, habitual, common and normal. It is what it is supposed to be and just is, ordinary. Nothing is out of place, it’s just there where it is supposed to be. What is it? Affect. But what is affect? “to make difference to”, “to move someone emotionally”, “pretend to feel”, “pretentiously”, or “desire or emotion”? perhaps it is all of them. They might seem to mean differently, but they make sense together in “Ordinary Affect”. as Steward wrote:

“Ordinary Affects is an experiment, not a judgement. Committed not to the demystification and uncovered truths that support a well-known picture of the world, but rather to speculation, curiosity, and the concrete, it tries to provoke attention to the forces that come into view as habit or shock, resonance or impact. Something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation: a something both animated and inhabitable.”

But of what something? gestures, was it, that we talked about in class? Maybe it’s the poetry of everyday movements, the way someone touch their hair, when your parents lick their thumb to flick the page of newspaper, the way trees  grow in directions that are recorded in their grain pattern, the tic toc of a clock? characteristics of the universe that are always affected and affecting to one and another, going on continuous motion keeping the world rotating and revolving.

I don’t know. I would love to hear what other people have to say in class on Monday. I’m very excited for the discussions in this class. But ordinary, ordinary…. I also want to make coding something that is ordinary to me.

So I did a little more practice this afternoon, and probably gonna watch videos and do more tonight. (you know I prefer a night out dancing at some old men bar with friends but I haven’t made many friends just yet and this is okay too).

I tried to create a prototype of our group project that reacts to microphone input, but somehow it’s not working on mobile as we intended to for the context of the piece.

https://editor.p5js.org/nilampwns/sketches/UGF7GFVCM

I tried to find solution to it but google wasn’t much of a help this time around.

But I also want to show this other thing I worked on for fun,

https://editor.p5js.org/nilampwns/sketches/mvB3bq2BG

Which is also in my sketches that make sketches series. The dot goes up and down based on microphone input and the horizontal movement are moving steadily. It’s almost as if it’s making graph for voice input. It was very fun to make!

P.s. we learned how to use webcam on our p5 sketches as well. And we captured this in class.

took us 4 collaborators to make this pic happen. Thanks Liam, Jessie, and Lilian.

Beginning of graduate school

I forgot that I like to write my process journal. I thought that this is a good chance to get back into it again.

graduate school started and I want to document my creative academic experience, journey, and research just like I did for unravel the code course. By doing so I hope in the future this journal will be useful in finding out pattern, resources, and references to whatever I will be researching in the near or far future.

I finished my first week of grad school. one word: hard. two words: very hard. But then again I wouldn’t want to go to grad school if it wasn’t challenging me and making me so scared I’d pee myself. On my Critical Theory course, our professor, Julian Haladyn, shattered all of my ego in my critical thinking, in a good way. Since I finished undergrad there was this growing ego that I didn’t notice. On the first day of class, Julian’s lecture completely broken that ball of ego. It hurt but I was freed. I feel like I can think more abstractly like a child with a fresh perspective again. The materials are gonna be hard but I will work hard to understand and learn more.

Then yesterday I had my Affect And Emotions In Practice course for the first time and it was amazing. We had discussions about what is Affect and what is Empathy and I was very mesmerized by the discussion that happened– or rather, by the fact that it happened at all. I really need to get my head in the game and be ready to learn more about what other artists and academics say about these topics.

And today I had Creation And Computation which is learning our medium, creative coding and computing. I still don’t get this medium. it is something that interests me. But I still don’t understand what it is. I can do it, but I can’t understand it. It is very frustrating to me because I love it and I wanna learn it but I can’t understand it no matter how many times I’ve tried. It feels like I have no talent in it. It’s like when you want to learn how to play the piano and you can play it you can play the scores but you can’t write music. And it frustrates me. I wanna know not only how to code but also understand coding.

Sorry for the sudden rant. I just needed to get it out. I think admitting and understanding my frustration is a good step for learning opportunity and growth.

I guess this post is more about my general experience rather than process, but I think it’s a great transition from my unravel conclusion to my graduate academic process.

Best,
Nilam