joana with one n [has a thesis blog]

The show was quite a success, I’d say. I received lovely feedback, and it was a true delight to see my prints up and framed.

General comments:
- The teeth look like chiclets
- Do the M’s in the eye photograph have any significance?
- I can’t tell you how many women (specifically!) asked me if I’d thought about having fabrics printed…
- No really, have you thought about making a dress out of these? (Yes)
- A lot of people chose a favorite (Always Hair, then you are either an Eye person or a Teeth person, apparently). I find this particularly interesting because folks were imaging them as commodities to put in their homes. The hair was the most home-friendly piece, and the least creepy.
- I should sell my pieces individually to a dentist, an optician, and a hair salon.
- A few folks asked what software I used to generate the pieces. Photoshop, people. Photoshop is the only tool you’ll ever need to manipulate yourself into oblivion.

I was very pleased to see lots of people look at the work from a slight distance, then get very close to an individual piece for a closer examination. Perfect!

I’m sorry, I’ve been bad.

I haven’t updated in a long time, which is bad because a lot happened in December.

First of all, let me show you the Viva videos I made using Processing (see below), which I completely omitted in November. I really enjoyed making the videos, and even though I didn’t consider the first one as part of thesis, it spawned the second video, which eventually spawned Monitors.

Viva Laptop:

A time lapse video using photos taken with my laptop every one to two minutes. The program to take the photos was written in Processing.

Viva Faces:

I asked several other DT grad colleagues to run the Viva Laptop code during their daily, and this the time lapse video using only the pictures in which a face is being touched.

Monitors:
I’d like to post the various videos I took of folks, but uploading them to vimeo is going to take several days. Stay tuned for those.

In essence, Monitors is a video installation that explores portraiture, expectation, and control. The audience is faced with a horizontal screens, showing video portraits of people between 23 and 34 years in age. Each person has been asked to check his email, or watch a video of the prior person checking his email, or watch a video of himself previously filmed while checking his email.

It’s a bit confusing, but pretty to look at, and that’s where I ended the semester. There was an interactive component, but I realized that I’m not interested in creating an interactive component for my thesis.

So where am I now?
I want to curate a series of portraits. Why? Being young and inexperienced, the unknown life that lies ahead of me after school makes me nervous. It’s exciting, but I don’t know what kind of person I’ll become. I got a really great response from Ted about this:

A “career” is, among other things, a technique that a deeply oppressive society uses to keep you firmly in line. It’s akin to the kind of double-bind that our society uses by extending lunatic levels of credit to kids and then cudgeling them about the head with their “credit rating”: the obvious ‘rational’ solution would be to incrementally extend sensibly growing amounts of credit to kids to teach them about finances, right? Wrong: the point of this whole exercise is to train huge numbers of young people to feel like complete losers who deserve to be relentlessly reamed out of every penny they’ll ever earn — sort of an information-age version of low self-esteem. Careers, mortgages, investments, none of this shite is freedom, it’s all slavery. And you’ve been trained very well, so instead of doing what you should do — taking the opportunity of your thesis to (in the words of the French poet Rene Char) “cultivate your legitimate strangeness” — you’re DREADING NOT HAVING A FUTURE. That’s the bad news. The good news is that the world has gone absolutely insane, and by the time you get out there won’t BE any careers. So, please, spare yourself the needless hassle of wandering around like a dog in search of a master who, shall we say, came to an untimely end sometime last year. Be your own master. Hint: a career will come out of it — after the fact. It’ll be much more fun if you invent your own ‘career’ than if you do the equivalent of looking through some lifestyle catalog for one that looks like it’ll fit.

Tangents aside, not knowing what my thesis was really about only made me feel less sure of myself. By snapping self-portraits and portraits of others, I found a way to document what people are like when nobody’s looking (more or less). I wanted to sneak up on myself, take a picture, and say “Ha! There you are!” and maybe I’d learn something new and figure out the rest of my life in an instant. Obviously these things don’t quite work that way. My subjects are always a little self-conscious if not completely self-conscious, and there’s only so much you can glean from such stark portraits.

The automatic quality of the Viva series and the very controlled situation of Monitors was a nice way for me to “act out” and get a grip – more or less. With that in mind, I’ve moved on to better things…

I got my midterm evaluations, and they’re fairly interesting. I think Marko is totally on point, but I’m now reevaluating what I want out of this thesis. I thought I was going to build a booth, an interface for others to take photographs of themselves, but now I’m thinking that’s not quite right. Sven suggested I scrap all the tech stuff I’m so hung up on and just do a photo project. I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner, after all, people make films and animations for their thesis, so why not a photo show?
Well, now I’m back at square one. I have a lot of work to do.

Today I started out with something simple. I scanned my head:

Relationship between magic and technology
Playful spaces
Places that can be an agent of change.
*Question if you want to converge aesthetics with utility.
*Can you altar the space of the booth to seem larger? Outdoors? On the moon? Think of Olafar Eliason’s reinvention of the space through lighting in “Take your Time”.
*Gaetane Michaux is showing now in Beacon
*Larger question, why do people need to record moments? Why can’t they just experience? How can the experience be documented automatically?
*Portable issues. Look at Adams from Copenhagen and his techniques for pop-up boats, rooms, and houses. Also the parasite by ______ for the homeless?
Talk to strangers idea?”
*What about a nostalgia booth that remembers the previous user? It could merge your photobooth session with the user before you.

(thanks, Erik!)