User:Daanprincen/T2 Assessment
How did I end up here?
When walking into the house of XPUB, I knew it was a warm place. With a sweet but awkward introduction weeks. After quite long and slow summer break I didn't know what to expect at all. The jargon [1] that was circling around my head was noticed and thought over, while meanings didn't enter my consciousness. When I brought an old Sonos speaker to the studio that I wanted to take apart because the software didn't work the first people I bumped into were Tommi and Fred Wordie, the first one saying "AAH Fucking proprietary bullshit that is!" the latter suggesting me to find an alternative API on Github because "some dude probably made you an updated version". I didn't know what anything of that was and told myself I had a long way to go.
Coming from fine art, I was so bored with everyone selling their ego's while all practices started to look more and more the same, I started looking for alternatives. Places that would actually spark my creative and critical receptors. XPUB quickly became the best option. Alternative ways of making. A place to experiment with a wide variety of technologies. Perfect!
Special Issue 28
Quickly into SI28, due to all the topics that Steve brought up on his Mondays and the texts Marloes gave us to read, I had gotten much inspired to work with writing machines. To make writing machines, to explore what are the writing machines we have present in this room. And what can they do? How do they function? Ema showed us a video in class of a musician/composer who wrote and performed a piece where a typewriter was used as the conductor and a percussive instrument in an orchestra. Robin and I gathered around him and a whole set of possible ideas opened up in front of our eyes. Enthusiastic as we were, we directly proposed each other to work on a collective performance that somehow needed to include a typewriter and a printer.
... and so the start of Writing Machine Ensemble...
The prototyping session where Manetta and Thijs showed us how to interact with the DotMatrix was another eye-opener, and a secret audition for Dottie as a beautiful noisemaker to become part of this performance. To be honest, I directly forgot how we were to interact with Dottie. But while Robin and Ema were figuring out technicalities of the printer, we had lots of beautiful conversations on how this printer needs a lot of care and attention in order to present in our performance. Being introduced to the term 'cognitive assemblage' and 'cognitive agents', we came to understand that these terms were directly applicable to our project. We couldn't just extract from the object, the object needed maintenance and a need for us to speak it's language.
Robin and Ema wrote scores which they then printed out to see if it would get a rhythm going. And repeating this process until the week before the performance. I was focusing a lot on idealizing the stage set-up, how to place microphones, using the mixer and the physical aspect of the performance. Also I did a lot of planning, note-taking and organizing practice and rehearsing to see if we were all on the same page. After all the projects was a great ride and we all really enjoyed performing it at WORM!
Weasyprint and HTML/CSS basics
Exploring and beginning to understand webpages more and more. Trying out my first bits and pieces of HTML and CSS, got introduced to it in class when we discussed during Prototyping with Manetta what form our publication could take on. Then Robin self-hosted a workshop on HTML/CSS in the Aquarium, in which I learned most of the basic of setting up files for a webpage. Later on in SI28 I committed to the collective publication with two webpages for radio shows Week 2 and Week 6, doing web-to-print with Weasyprint. This helped me a lot in thinking how to design outside of licensed software like the Creative Cloud.
Special Issue 29
The subjects of SI29 were very intriguing, so playful and calling for collaboration. Both gossiping and file sharing need to have some form of collective to take their form and this made me excited to conjure up some concepts to work in. While the Monday's with Doriane were very packed, they inspired me a lot to implement the knowledge in coming projects. I'm a bit sad I didn't get to experiment with it more outside of the classes on Monday, maybe I should've tried harder on making that happen.
Echt Nep?! A workshop on identifying AI generated images
Hosting a workshop was an amazing thing to do. Even the most straightforward topics or workshop where there isn't necessarily a tangible skill being taught can be very helpful and powerful. So instead of hard skills, maybe we were teaching soft skills. The interest in wanting to identify AI images came from the anecdote of Lea her dad sending her happy new year wishes within a weird AI generated video which showed incoherent contexts all together. It made Lea feel alienated, not quite a feeling you'd like to get with happy new year wishes. I had felt the same thing many times before, so I kinda jumped in and proposed to do a workshop on the topic. We saw there were so many anxious moments where you and I are unsure if it's generated or not, so the urgency became bigger and bigger.
Valentin and I were both mesmerized at the same time by our MIDI-consoles (Roland SP404 MKII and Korg Monologue). So we saw this as a perfect file format to start our file sharing in. What would be cool ways to share MIDI-files? We asked ourselves.. I believe Valentin said as a short comment: "We can leave them in DJ-sets!" and since I directly flashbacked to when I always used to forget my USB after a dj-gig, I directly fell in love with the idea of sharing it like that. It could such a mysterious, fun and also subversive project. So we went for it! And I could directly put it to fruition because had to play at WORM that weekend.
Later on we started prototyping all kinds of MIDI based
A collection of webpage sketches...
Doriane as a tutor really showed me to stay true to yourself. To organize yourself and she kept saying not to romanticize complexity. Which gave me a lot of strength to position myself in the through and to validate the things that I was working on. For example in the workshop that I hosted with Lea and Ema we mostly focused on the contents of AI generated images and getting a little community together to discuss on this topic. There wasn't coding involved, or heavy programming. Just a lot of planning and having to be in good communication with venues. Also during the workshop we were mostly analyzing images by annotating them and by holding in depth discussion on the images we had gotten to constructive answers.
XTRAXPUBERRIAL
Always making sounds, good, bad, ethereal, experimental, detuned, vocal, repetitive, stretched, disruptive, hard, noisey.
XPUB opened up chances to experiment live at WORM's 25Hour Radio Relay. Me and my brother Mees, who was finishing a creative writing course during this time, started working on a project tapping into the historical and contemporary lore of our birthplace Oss. It revolves around the crimes committed and absurd situations taking place in the small industrial city. He wrote several short pieces of fiction injected with true stories which occurred in the last few years. I responded to this with a dive into footage that speaks on the inherited crimelives of inhabitants of Oss. Samples of sociologists, historians, documentary filmmakers and everyday people of Oss sharing their experiences and findings on the matter.
Excerpt from live performance at 25HR Radio Relay - at about 06:18 in the morning.
Excerpt from live performance at 25HR Radio Relay - at about 06:32 in the morning.
Inspirational pages & References for this assessment
https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Anita!/Special_Issue_24_notes/knitting_sound for embedding audio fragments into Wiki pages https://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:Tommi/T2_Assessment in looking for a thread to weave the story of your first assessment