Isa Plays @ ITP

https://questionable-years.glitch.me/ For this assignment, I was interested in using/sub-categorising data that would usually get chucked/omitted/cleaned away.

Inspired by the landscape of time that omitted years with question marks  and c(circa) significations, or years that were missing a digit entirely in the animals exercise in class, I used the MAP marc records to make a json file that would look for ? In the year sub-field. So switched out the chk.title for chk.year in this function on the server/node app thing:

So, when I was typing into the search bar in the LOC, I decided to type in ‘care and maintenance’ with the intention of taking a look at manuscripts for the care and maintenance of arbitrary things all the way from household items, cars and other machines etc. to the body and vegetation. I don’t know exactly what my inquiry is but I think attempting to make connections about how these processes have changed over time and what kind of language is used depending on who and when the manual was written…would be of interest to me.

In any case, I tried to not restrict my exploration too much either (for the purpose of the assignment). I was indeed, overwhelmed at the amount of objects there were in response to my search query but the filters helped a lot to direct my search.

Using the filters: —> Sound Recordings —> Machinery Industry I came upon this recording of a man named Willie Reed:

https://www.loc.gov/item/afcwip002810/

He is a foundry worker who was interviewed by Robert McCarl in 1994. This recording is part of a larger body of research/ethnographic field exploration conducted by the American Folklife Center of the library,  on “occupational culture” in Paterson, New Jersey. The collection is called Working in Paterson: Occupational Heritage in an Urban Setting. It is an investigation or rather archiving project of ‘occupational culture’ in Paterson, New Jersey. The collection is very rich and holds all different kinds of objects (from maps, to recordings, photographs etc.).

https://www.loc.gov/item/2004695193/

I looked up what occupational culture is --> I find it very curious that an ethnographic research would concentrate on the specific norms, beliefs and values shared by a community with the same occupation. And, an industrial worker occupation at that... I am baffled because this ties into some research that I was doing on the raw materials of Portland cement not too long ago (one of which is silica which also happens to be the main component of fiber optic cables): most of the ethnographic research concentrated on the activities and people involved/working for Watson Machine International which happens to not only be “the oldest continuously  operated manufacturing firm in Paterson.” but also a major manufacturer of fiber optic cables. I’m going to leave it at that for this moment, but here’s a really cool picture of an “engineer (white shirt) and machinist work on machine used for fiber-optics applications.” link

“Given the degree of brokenness of the broken world (and the expense of fixing it), we need all maintainers to apply their diverse disciplinary methods and practical skills to the collective project of repair. Jackson proposes that repair-thinking be considered a distinct epistemology. Fixers, he says, “know and see different things — indeed, different worlds — than the better-known figures of ‘designer’ or ‘user.’” Breakdown has “world-disclosing properties.” 8 Similarly, Stephen Graham and Nigel Thrift identify breakdown and failure as “the means by which societies learn to reproduce,” because the repair of broken systems always involves elements of “adaptation and improvisation.” 9”So two days (four days) ago, I delved into my first questions regarding maintenance , and I have come across Shannon Mattern’s journal article on care and maintenance [https://placesjournal.org/article/maintenance-and-care] “A working guide to the repair of rust, dust, cracks, and corrupted code in our cities, our homes, and our social relations. “ Moments that have stood out to me have been: A) “Modern urban dwellers are surrounded by the hum of continuous repair and maintenance,” Thrift observes. We hear the chatter of pneumatic drills, the drone of street sweepers, and, in the city’s peripheral zones, the clang and hydraulic hiss of auto repair and waste management. 13 Even the cacophony of a construction site — a new building going up on a vacant lot — can be a sign of repair. Planner Douglas Kelbaugh proposes that we think of infill construction as a mending of the urban fabric. 14 I have been thinking to attempt playing around with sounds for some of my ‘outputs’ … outputs that might put into the foreground things that do indeed, become peripheral—chatter—-drone—hiss…background. I think that somehow this sonic presence, if brought into foreground, might be a medium to relay relevant questions about why these things are in the background in the first place? I hear this pneumatic drill so fuckin’ often that it’s become part of the connundrum- but what is it doing? What is it building? What is it drilling? Is it public, is it private? Is my tax money paying for it? Whose building it? I’m not sure if when I speak of ecology, or when I speak of my interpretation thereof…. I am attempting to speak of it - in a way that relates to Morton’s ‘ambient poetics, Morton’s ecomimesis… In that - the environment - NATURE-  is very much about how we inhabit space — how we occupy it and the consequences/FOLLOW-UPS  that that has from a micro-level (when I am JAY walking, am I aware that I am practicing disobedience? an act of resistance? rational resistance? does that make any sense?), to a systemic macro-level (beautify lawns, beautify legs, say yes to neighbourhood recycling, say no,) I was going to say something else about my understanding but I am just going to move on, because this could get sticky I suppose.  So this sound business- this cacophony business - I this links back to day 4 or something when I was trying to scream out the components of cement drowned out by the sounds of a construction site (10 hours of— on youtube - meta - who knows where that came from?). I am slowly beginning to realise that this a lot to do with transport infrastructure, what with not only the “pneumatic drills, the drone of street sweepers etc.” but of cars, trucks, beeping and moving etc. Of traffic lights - sensors - When I was working on some research on the Manhattan grid last semester, environmental psychologist, Richard Wener told me that the grid scheme in America is very much in response to the advent of cars. B)

Mattern also points out that the lack of civic responsibility by some patrons clearly sustains “the oppressions of marginalised and underserved populations.” This ties in with aspects of civic and democratic responsibilities/aspects of environmental justice — not only do underserved populations suffer from the first waves of the consequences of pollution - but also because of lack of maintenance.  Amongst the article’s resources there is an article called Care and Repair and the Politics of Urban Kindness:

So a lot of today will be inspired from Ingrid Burrington’s field guide on Networks of New York: An Illustrated Field Guide to Urban Internet.

“The writer Quinn Orton has written about the difficulty of telling stories today in a world where falling in love, going to war and filling out tax forms looks the same; it looks like typing.” There is an unexpected intimacy to living with screen, that intimacy does typically extend to the cables and conduits the screens rely upon.” (p.11)

I think this field guide is quintessential to coming closer to understanding the skeleton of a city. I’ve read the chapter in which she lists different cable markings in New York that signify the type of cable, its characteristics and what company it belongs to. I am most interested today in Fibre-Optic cables. This is the spray-painted marking for construction workers of fibre-optic cables in nyc:

Fibre-optic cables in New York city may be private or public and a variety of data types can run through them:

internet, video voice communication

Thinking back to the raw materials of Silica, today I am going to look more into its ‘role in the information technology.’ Why are silica fibers so efficient in comparison to copper ?

RP Photonics Encyclopedia is a bit difficult to understand but here are some links that I have found of interest:

Silica Fibers

Telecom Fibers

Optical Fiber Communications

LIGHT —> INFORMATION PURSUIT OF THE SPEED OF LIGHT —> PURSUIT OF THE SPEED OF INFORMATION

“ The transmission capacity of a fiber depends on the fiber length. The longer a fiber is, the more detrimental certain effects such intermodal or chromatic dispersion are, and the lower is the achievable transmission rate.” from Optical Fiber Communications

“Compared with systems based on electrical cables, the approach of optical fiber communications (lightwave communications) has advantages, the most important of which are: • The capacity of fibers for data transmission is huge: a single silica fiber can carry hundreds of thousands of telephone channels, utilizing only a small part of the theoretical capacity. In the last 30 years, the progress concerning transmission capacities of fiber links has been significantly faster than e.g. the progress in the speed or storage capacity of computers. • The losses for light propagating in fibers are amazingly small: ≈ 0.2 dB/km for modern single-mode silica fibers, so that many tens of kilometers can be bridged without amplifying the signals. • A large number of channels can be reamplified in a single fiber amplifier, if required for very large transmission distances. • Due to the huge transmission rate achievable, the cost per transported bit can be extremely low. • Compared with electrical cables, fiber-optic cables are very lightweight. • Fiber-optic cables are immune to problems that arise with electrical cables, such as ground loops or electromagnetic interference (EMI). Such issues are important, for example, for data links in industrial environments.”

Birth of Fibre Optics

1977 - The first optical telephone communication system was installed about 1.5 miles under downtown Chicago. Each optical fiber carried the equivalent of 672 voice channels.

http://www.thefoa.org/tech/ref/basic/fiber.html

“The manufacturing of optical fiber to sub-micron precision is an interesting process involving making ultra-pure glass and pulling it into strands the size of a human hair. The process begins with the manufacture of a preform, a large diameter glass rod which has the exact same optical cross section as a fiber but is hundreds of times larger. The end of the rod is heated and a thin strand of fiber is pulled from the perform and wound on large reels. After manufacture, the fiber is tested and then made into cable. “

I can’t help but connect the way that information travels through the glass hairs of fibre optic cables to rapid eye movement. Babies can spend up to 50% of their sleep in the REM stage, compared to only about 20% for adults. [...]

Some time ago, Donna Haraway skyped into a room full of people at the opening of Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival (2017) at the Performance Space New York , a documentary portrait of her and an introduction to a book that she has edited with Adele Clark called Making Kin not Population. It is a series of essays by feminist scholars pushing for new and modified practices of forming family and, discussions concerning population growth and the advocacy of ‘making kin.’ During the discussion with Haraway and a subsequent talk by Kim Tallbear who has contributed to the book with essay Making Love and Relations Beyond Settler Sex and Family, notions of care and alternative means of making kin (regardless of blood relation) were spoken about in depth.

Fast forward to a month ago, I attended a workshop lead by Ed Bear, artist, engineer, performer and researcher who introduced us to the concept of kin/intimacy in relation to trash/repair. During the workshop we spoke about the relationship that humans have specifically to e-waste; how technology and its waste flows and streams are coupled & tied to historical systems of violent domination. Additionally, he taught us how to get a power generator that is seemingly broken to function again. In my notes from the workshop: “Breaking through the alienation of electronics might involve things that are scare and things that we are not meant to be doing…[such as fucking with cables and being prone to electric shocks] and this leads to needing to have an awareness and intimacy with the objects we are tinkering with. Also, how can we mourn objects/things/electronics?”  We also questioned and discussed why people/we think something is ‘broken.’ In the workshop, I strengthened my understanding that our relation to objects goes far beyond their materiality. I think the moment that I took away the most was when Ed took out a dirty DMX light that he said he’d found on the street and instructed us that the first step to repairing a piece of trash (such as a dmx light, or a television) was to clean it. And he started cleaning it with a cloth and spray; this act made me think again of the notion of care. Repairing things is often frustrating for me — an object that is not working in the way that it was prescribed to work (such as a phone not connecting to a network) seems to always cause a sense of aggravation and impatience…. what does it mean to treat the object with care….?What does it mean to treat your iphone with care? How does this make your hyper-aware of your relationship towards it. Here are my notes from the workshop.

And then…. fast forward to Rome, where I have been for the break and I am sitting on some church stairs - I notice a man, who later introduced himself to me as Nello, sitting in front of a shoebox that is behaving as a pedestal for a couple of plastic bottles, an empty champagne bottle container, coffee cups and other pieces of ‘trash’.

He had cleaned all these items, and was selling them. When I spoke to him, he described to me the various affordances that each object had:

the champagne bottle container could hold a series of tennis balls, the little plastic bowl is a perfect egg beater for when you want to make yourself breakfast...what used to be a sushi box could be perfect storage for jewels and trinkets. Nello is from New York but grew up in Naples and I found him to be making an extremely important and political act, that wasn’t coated in critical theory jackets or enclosed within the context of a performative arts practice... I suggested that he might create paper captions with his descriptions to aid his sale. 

Could a synonym of care be ‘maintenance’? What does it mean to maintain? I have often thought about city streets, and public spaces as living rooms…a living room managed and maintained by different kinds of bodies; singular, collective, bureaucratic, subordinate. Thus, the last couple of outputs that I made were trying to draw similitude between the maintenance of the body and the maintenance of city infrastructure. What does it mean to care for the streets? What does it mean to care for spaces that we enjoy? What does it mean to care for a public space that is unseen for example? What differences are drawn in the care we give to spaces that we take for granted in its utmost functionality, such as a sidewalk? Who is in charge of maintaining it?

Of most interest to me has been this page on the department of sanitation’s website & Cleaning laws of streets and sidewalks.

Exercise/Output for tomorrow: Go collect the debris and clean a space that is ‘unseen’ in the city. Like one would clean underneath a couch when cleaning their living room.

Other links:

Code ecologies github repo: https://github.com/SFPC/codeecologies/tree/master/program

Tori, a friend who is Native American, has told me this:

The past is cylical. For her, things are happening over and over again- something happens and it has happened already. Her ancestors are somewhere happening over and over again. Being over and over again.She likened the past and the present to a worm hole. The future, she says, is ‘grey.’ So how can we create ruptures within this cycle? How can empty space be the space where all things that exist, are existing over and over again- and we are throwing things into that space so that they continue to exist- and maybe the future is where we have a chance to create this rupture.

In Fabrizio Terranova’s film, Donna Haraway makes the claim that ‘good stories happen at the point of speechlessness’’…Haraway skyped in for Q&A following a really important talk by Kim TallBear on “making love & Beyond Relations Beyond Settler Sexualities” and someone asked the question I would have most definitely posed had they not done it. It was a prompt to expand upon this notion about speechlessness. Now, I don’t know if I happen to be interpreting  things in direct correlation with my chosen area of research, but Haraway responded by speaking about ‘creating an empty space’ in the light of letting go of the control over the information that we know…the world as we know it and its systems and our perceptions of it…she spoke about ‘creating an empty space’ in order to accept not knowing, and as providing us with the margins to ‘be quiet’ for the purpose of listening. All of this in the light of ‘making kin’ and understanding how to ‘make kin’ (disrupting the anthropocene, by re-establishing models for familial nuclei). This has been very important for the understanding of my map in its section of ‘periphery’ and ‘history.’

What are the new pirate utopias? Is the notion of ‘empty space’ the catalyst for them?

Can the notion of empty space, allow me to delve into what has/is disappeared and what is/has been contained, and then allow for radical ideas of rupture, of a re-established idea of revolution?

( Am I asking questions that are too big? )

I’d also like to find connections between extinction of species (human and non-human) and the concept of wormholes. I think I am onto something here somehow, maybe?

I don’t think I have been able to narrow down things very much this week; it has been ridiculously tempting to not fall down rabbit holes ( I fell not too deep inside a few ). I have also been very much inspired by Taryn Simon’s project An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar & have re-visited Gordon Matta-Clark’s Reality Properties: Fake Estates (which actually might be influencing my modes of thought a lot more than I want it to at the moment).

I have created this systems map. It is the first time I use Illustrator for its making & I have to say it helps in comparison to working on paper, because it gave the chance to re-organise things as I went along in my ‘speed’ research:

I also continued with X-Y maps and I would like to continue this exercise...I am not entirely sure what this is doing yet but I know it is important (it takes me a very long time to make one):

I have made this Are.Na channel for my sources and begun somewhat of a nascent expertlist, as well as bots that I should interview & the etymology of words: https://www.are.na/isabella-vento/empty-spaces_research_biblio

I have made another tumblr that I will use to keep track of my research more clearly with tags etc as I go along [I have not added anything to this yet]: https://empty-space-empty-space.tumblr.com/

I have scheduled an appt with Margaret for Monday Oct 29th.

I need to watch this sometime soon: http://longnow.org/seminars/02015/sep/21/infrastructure-and-climate-change/

of interest right NOW:

--> speak to Giovanna about Crossbones Garden/Graveyard project in empty/public lot in London.

--> this website (omg): https://livinglotsnyc.org/#15/40.7322/-73.9798

Climate change has become this huge buzz topic that has seeped itself into most of my thinking and a lot of the projects that I am executing this semester. I went to a talk at Cooper Square the other day where Marina Zurkow and Elaine Gan spoke about their work. A lot of questions were throw

n around the room and much of their work had me thinking about these topics:

* the time-clock of non-animal species * eco-spheric diets and regional ” food landscapes “

I want to explore why people are attracted to packaging, branding and aesthetic of their food; why are people snobbish about their food experience, how little people know about the geolocation/route of their food. Perhaps, I would like to explore the idea of “derivation” and “location” — from the very make-up of food physically speaking (if a meal or a togetherness of ingredients- how did they come to be in this way - what is local and what is imported? and if one food object/thing then what is it’s history and where the heck did it come from?) to its packaging and where that comes from too, to its import/export routes. Being italian, it’s funny for me to think that we have mentioned in class that tomatoes are actually from Central America when Italians boast often about the fact that we have ‘the best tomatoes.’ Marina mentioned that in California, people tend to identify with a Mediterranean diet when the climate is clearly changing the food landscape to a more desertic one…how are people going to respond to not having the same accessibility to the food that they have begun to identify with? This is a narrative that allows for a food elitism to ensue…. How could I possibly shift the idea of elitism from cultural narrative to a geo-locational narrative?

Reading about Marinetti, and updating my recollections of the futurist manifesto in addition to italians’ reactions to his culinary avant-garde efforts …I also wish to respond to the manifesto similarly to the way that Hakim Bey has entitled one of his communiques in the TAX:

“ Intellectual S/M Is the Fascism of the Eighties - The Avant-Garde Eats Shit and Likes It.”

General:

https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-biology/chapter/overview-of-photosynthesis/

http://www.eschooltoday.com/photosynthesis/dark-and-light-reactions.html

Artificial Photosynthesis:

https://news.umich.edu/harvesting-clean-hydrogen-fuel-through-artificial-photosynthesis/

https://photosynthesiseducation.com/artificial-photosynthesis/

https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601641/a-big-leap-for-an-artificial-leaf/

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/artificial-photosynthesis-harnesses-forgotten-half-of-sunlights-energy/3008836.article

http://climatechange.medill.northwestern.edu/2016/11/29/artificial-trees-might-be-needed-to-offset-carbon-dioxide-emissions/

https://cen.acs.org/articles/93/web/2015/12/Better-Carbon-Capture-Through-Chemistry.html

https://www.conserve-energy-future.com/carbon-sequestration.php

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-09/sjcu-spa083118.php

https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/energy/a22977558/semi-artificial-photosynthesis/

https://singularityhub.com/2018/02/25/artificial-photosynthesis-is-solar-energys-forgotten-cousin-and-its-making-a-comeback/

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Artificial-versus-natural-photosynthesis-A-comparison-between-photosynthesis-in-vivo-and_fig7_273186509

https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/17559-bill-gates-improving-photosynthesis-solve-world-hunger

https://www.outerplaces.com/science/item/17946-artificial-photosynthesis-clean-energy

Make like a leaf. By: Azvolinsky, Anna, New Scientist, 02624079, 4/15/2017, Vol. 234, Issue 3121

Source: MIT Technology Review. Mar/Apr2018, Vol. 121 Issue 2, p78-82. 4p. 1 Color Photograph.

Phytoplankton:

https://www.fondriest.com/environmental-measurements/parameters/water-quality/algae-phytoplankton-chlorophyll/#algae8

http://www.mathis-hain.net/resources/Sigman_and_Hain_2012_NatureEdu.pdf

https://visibleearth.nasa.gov/view.php?id=7187

https://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/modis_fluorescence.html

https://geo.libretexts.org/Textmaps/Book%3A_Oceanography_(Hill)/10%3A_An_Ocean_Full_of_Life/Distribution_of_Life_in_the_Ocean

http://www.whoi.edu/page.do?pid=7545&tid=7342&cid=54586

https://www.whoi.edu/main/topic/phytoplankton

http://www-das.uwyo.edu/~geerts/cwx/notes/chap11/phyto.html

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/dead-zone/

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/03/140311141536.htm

https://www.space.com/41483-phytoplankton-nasa-twilight-zone-ocean-video.html

https://www.nps.gov/glba/learn/education/upload/me_activity2_handout1.pdf

Images:

[1]

https://www.life.illinois.edu/govindjee/paper/gov.html

[2]

https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Phytoplankton

https://soutien.profexpress.com/solutions-rechauffement-climatique/emiliania-huxleyi-type-a/

https://polycount.com/discussion/164044/completed-female-fighter

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=white+texture+overlay&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiOytbcn-TdAhWEct8KHb_nC-MQ_AUIDigB&biw=1299&bih=1013#imgrc=55DDHMhnFFz5tM:

https://www.yobi3d.com/q/flying%20human

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/printthread.php?t=64578

https://radiostudent.si/sites/default/files/slike/2016-10-28-prikupen-plankton-63392.jpeg

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-viruses-infect-phytoplankton-clouds.html

https://phys.org/news/2018-08-viruses-infect-phytoplankton-clouds.html

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Phaeocystis-antarctica-Electron-micrographs-of-thick-sections-from-a-tilt-series-of_fig1_23596881

I have to say the biggest challenge of the execution of my “Eco-Erotic Meditations for the Embodiment of Natural & Cyborg Photoautotrophs” has been taking all of the information/sources/books/sensations/thoughts of the initial research process & not becoming overwhelmed by the lack of language that I had to even begin to imagine relaying this scientific information. Creating the systems map helped, in addition to the ‘performance’ I made in our second class on the topic, but I have to say that it did little to inform what I would do for the field guide. Even though it lead me to wanting to create something that felt visceral and somatic such as ‘speaking’ to plants, or having a conversation with them. The turning point and the most helpful resource has been Emily, my ‘expert,’ who is in my Art & Politics class, whose parents are biologists and who majored in Biology herself in undergrad. I didn’t know if she counted as an expert, but in class we had to read the first 70 pages of Matter and Desire: An Erotic Ecology by Andreas Weber and Emily called out a passage that I had actually underlined for inspiration for this field guide. She was fascinated with its poetics, but turned off by the lack of scientific information being conveyed correctly. Initially, I was interested in categorising my field guide as such: - To converse with Algae - To converse with a House Plant - To converse with Bacteria

& so on.... and use each different photosynthetic organism as a channel within which to explore different parts of my systems map. Yet, when I met with Emily she convinced me that this would not have helped the conveyance of this energy properly, in addition to demystifying a series of connections and understandings that I had assimilated about photosynthesis in the two weeks I had been skimming through books and websites and concluded that this would be the ideal taxonomy for my entries.

We walked through the entire process together, I was happy to have done research beforehand so that I had specific questions to ask and she also had a series of sources that were a lot more helpful than anything I could find online typing things into my search bar. She suggested initially to follow the path of carbon... I was trying to veer away from creating a traditional, informative field guide but I think this also distracted me. And it wasn’t until Erin handed me Isabella Rossellini’s Green Porno that I somehow, in my own way, answered Marina’s question of “What is talking to plants, that talking is to humans” I have this question stuck in my head as well posed to use during the ideation of the project in san francisco by someone who is in close dialogue with the renewable energies being developed in California: “How do you make solar panels sound as sexy as a Mustang does to people?”

Erotic stimulation is most certainly a form of energy in itself and I was interested in finding a bridge that would allow people who aren’t normally interested in this kind of information to be intrigued. I don’t know if I have succeeded, but it is certainly the beginning of a speculation that I have taken much farther than any other far-fetched connection I have made in my head.  

The embodiment of a chloroplast is meant teach your solely about the process of photosynthesis, that of the phytoplankton teach you about the carbon cycle, and that of the artificial celluloid teach you about the possibilities of renewable energy based on the teachings from the previous embodiments. I am not entirely sure if I have managed to create this path of pedagogy: - My graphics and my meditations could potentially be distracting somehow?

- Is the reduction of the informative parts of my field guide, potentially misinforming?

- Are my speculations and is my inquiry justified enough?

In terms of process and things I would like to keep in mind for topic2:

** I need to strive to make better maps to navigate my research more skillfully and readily from the beginning, and to maintain a clear path later on in the process. (This also requires negotiating with my creative process, which I am still cultivating and would like to challenge but also refine)

** Less good resources are better than many bad articles and web pages.

** Prototype earlier to see if this conveyance of information ‘works’ & show an expert asap.

Biggest challenge: **My understanding of symbols, indexes and signs was clear in class but I had a hard time finding a way of ‘fitting’ them into my work. In fact the alchemy symbols that I used for my second to last draft were taken out because they were not contributing to any purpose.

https://www.beyondweird.com/Enochian_World/agesnew.html The term photosynthesis means "putting together with light."

[https://www.thoughtco.com/trees-and-the-process-of-photosynthesis-1342630]

I didn’t get to finish my presentation last class so here is an outline of all the dialogues I devised for me and the plant:

EDUCATION: “A phototroph that allows makes its own food that is also your food that breathes in what you breathe out and vice versa.”

ACADEMIA (SCIENCE): “carbon dioxide + water —> glucose + oxygen + water” 6CO2 + 6H2O —> C6H12O6 + 6O2

ACADEMIA: “but are you, a plant? Are you defines as such? Are you worthy of this definition?”

SADISM/FETISH: “you really are the best! i love you, pacha mama”

AGRI-ECONOMY: “And if we put in about eight components of the carboxysome system, the model says that we could get a 60 percent increase in photosynthesis” https://www.science20.com/news_articles/optimize_agriculture_optimizing_photosynthesis-130881

SUSTAINABILITY: “we’re trying desperately to mimic your culinary habits, so that we can ease the tension in our relationship”

BIOTECHNOLOGY: “the second green revolution!!”

SURVIVAL: “you’re definitely not as cool as algae…”

COLOR SYSTEM: “I think the God took the pigment out of a leaf and put it in your eyes”

KITCHEN “Your cousin the nightshade, definitely doesn’t have as much nutrients”

In regard to the information that I collected with my map and the solidification of it through the one-minute impromptu performance I did last class, I know:

I want to tackle systems like the kitchen, sadism/fetish and survival and possibly colors.

I should tackle systems like BioTechnology (sustainability) and Education.

I have conducted a series of small experiments guided by the homework prompts. I feel that my mind is still very scattered and for this reason have not been able to guide my research more specifically. Photosynthesis is a form of harvesting Energy as well as creating Energy (oxygen and carbohydrates) in addition to being a cyclical process, specifically when humans are involved.

This for me has become very important as a process but also as a concept. I have created this loose taxonomy that may not be in the chronological order that I wish to follow but it places systems/notions/categories in order underneath the systems of survival & love/fetish. How does the system of survival of human beings lead them to the necessity of something like artificial photosynthesis, and additionally how does this process in its original form represent a core aspect of our survival in that the air we breathe and the food we eat ultimately is borne of this energy. (SURVIVAL) How do we regard/perceive the aesthetic of vegetation & of bacteria? How are we taught photosynthesis and why in this way? Fluorescence in plants does not create energy but it is still photosynthesis- what does this mean?

(I have to obviously flesh out a little more what I mean underneath this section of LOVE/FETISH, but in the meantime....) I have also gone through a series of research questions that would aid this process & these are the questions/ideas I have come up with:

** HOW DO I CONNECT PHOTOSYNTHESIS TO IMMIGRATION? (this is a little less now..) ** HOW DO I MAKE PHOTOSYNTHESIS appealing/interesting/sexy?

** How to emphasise the mimicry of photosynthesis with the scope of renewable energy, but with genuine sustainability in correlation with longevity (i.e. revolution of thought/being etc); via biology (SURVIVAL) but via consciousness (LOVE/FETISH)

—> Do I want this direct field guide to aid a direct conversation with the a plant, a vegetable, bacteria and algae?

“sit the fuck down with a piece of seaweed that you found at the beach, if you can’t get to the beach, buy a seaweed salad”

**A relationship guide to light? **An instructional manual that will allow you to converse with vegetation ? and maybe repeat incantations?

In terms of symbol/index/icon....I started with my first entry of artificial synthesis and begun to think about solar energy, and thought about the framework of “conversing with plant” manual guide....

This symbol for transformation that I found by googling.... “symbols for transformation” and I mocked up this strange section of a direct dialogue with a reader to get my head around thinking about visuals - so either icons or symbols. This is meant to assess the difference between the efficiency of solar panel energy and the energy that is created by photosynthesis...A conversation starter for the reader of my manual and the plant/bacteria/algae/flower they find in front of them. ( I think below will only make sense if this top image is looked at properly)

This last circular symbol is a rip-off from this diagram, and my attempt at creating a symbol that represents the cyclical feedback system of living things, and how photosynthesis is the encompassing of that. In this way I was inspired by this diagram, which is actually astrological symbolism:

The description of the diagram from the source includes this text:

“ In the relations between the species in Earth's biosphere, the two transformative signs often work together so closely as to almost merge. The waste products of the animal kingdom, poisonous to their producers, are the nutrients of the plant kingdom; the oxygenous waste of plants is the breath of life to the animals. Predators benefit their prey species by killing individual members, preventing expansion of population beyond their food resources. When the predators die, scavenger organisms quickly recycle their bodies into nutrients to feed the plants that feed their prey. Every death and dissolution of an individual form leads to the nourishment and development of other forms. The food chain, superficially hierarchical, is actually a food cycle with everything being eaten in turn to continuously regenerate the biospheric entity, which remains itself throughout the constant transformations of its components.

Less drastic forms of cooperation are also common. Plants commonly provide insects, birds, and animals with specialized foods in exchange for their help in reproduction. Small animals feed on the parasites of larger animals. Species with a sharp eye for predators join with others skilled at finding food, enhancing the safety and well-being of both.

Competition, cooperation, individual and group activity; the four arms of the fixed cross are inextricably interwoven in biological processes. Every one of them, and every combination of them, can be found in all the events that make up the internal functioning of the planetary being. “

[https://www.beyondweird.com/Enochian_World/agesnew.html]

I am not a big gamer. Mostly because I’m terrible at computer/video games. Everybody beat me at SuperMario, I was great at combat games because I was fast at pushing all the same buttons at once, and Sims and picking up prostitutes in GTA were secret indulgences I cared not to share with anyone at the time. In regard to avatars, I never really had the patience to create one and that is what I experienced with Fuse this week.

Apart from the general annoyance that I am sure most people in the class had with the restrictions in the light of gender and hairstyles, I felt that the options were lengthy when it came to minor things like what size that ridge above your mouth is, or the color of your molars. This is what made me lose my patience, because I spent a large amount of time attempting to actually reconstruct my face:

After reading a lot of the articles about the self-enhancements that people re-create with their avatars, I set out to have an objective view of what my face, but particularly body look like. It was difficult to not have a critical angle, as well as not be “hard on myself” about the positioning of butt or the size of my shoulder blades and it became a rather anxiety-inducing process.

The only imaginative liberty I gave myself, was enhancing my favorite part of my body which are my hands...But quite literally enhancing them so that they are disproportionate to the rest of my body.

I gave up on the reality-to-digital reconstruction when I got to the clothing, but of-course my hands are still incredibly long. Hence, my Fuse avatar is a mixture of the loss of this patience and a reflection upon what I would ideally like for my digital simulation to emanate:

I’ve always wanted facial hair, so that is probably the only thing strictly correlated to myself that I see in this avatar. I feel that when it comes to avatars, if the options that aren’t related to actual human characteristics are vast, that is when I can come to actually representing myself. This is an interesting notion I wouldn’t mind exploring in the rest of the class.

The second avatar I created was on http://www.doppelme.com/. I am not familiar with many platforms that allow for avatar creation so I just typed avatar creators on google and picked a random one. Doppelganger means the apparition or double of a living person, and I find that this website most definitely gave me the tools to have control over what this secondary life of my self would be:

People at ITP say I wear too much black and always look tired or angry, so in comparison to my Fuse AVATAR I find that this one is a pretty accurate representation of me. These are meant to be used on forums or online - I most probably would have used a service like this in 2004, but it’s no longer trendy, and I can’t risk tainting my reputation in this way at this current moment in time.

Part 1 Map your Energy Record Thoughts and Sources

On the arid lands there will spring up industrial colonies without smoke and without smokestacks;forests of glass tubes will extend over the plants and glass buildings will rise everywhere inside of these will take place the photochemical processes that hitherto have been the guarded secret of the plants, but that will have been mastered by human industry which will know how to make them bear even more abundant fruit than nature, for nature is not in a hurry and mankind is.

- Giacomo Ciamician

(from p.243 of Molecular Mechanisms of Photosynthesis)

Therefore, photosynthesis powers 99 percent of Earth’s ecosystems. When a top predator, such as a wolf, preys on a deer, the wolf is at the end of an energy path that went from nuclear reactions on the surface of the sun, to light, to photosynthesis, to vegetation, to deer, and finally to wolf.

(https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-biology/chapter/overview-of-photosynthesis/)

I think what I took away the most from our first class has been the notion of looking at things from a different context. I took it a bit to heart…and even though I am having difficulty really understanding what can equate to a system I decided to break my map into sections concerning my different interpretations of a system. I looked into many different things and skimmed through a broad plethora of things, as opposed to becoming too obsessive about one path I found.

My topic is PHOTOSYNTHESIS. Plants, survival, light, color, food etc. And it goes on… Here’ s a photo of the map:

Which is a neater and more compact version of this thing:

In my neater/compact map the top-right regards systems that broadly regard photosynthesis and its energy output underneath the umbrella of agriculture. This begins with food, and the systems directly in correlation to it such as nutrients or carbohydrates… Bio-technology and and bio-energy are up there because I read a lot about the prospect and reality of artificial photosynthesis online and also in Wiley Blackwell’s Molecular Mechanisms of Photosynthesis. This leads to economic systems and renewable energies...

[https://www.zmescience.com/ecology/renewable-energy-ecology/semi-artificial-photosynthesis-8251344/] [https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/02/120217145755.htm]

{https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bhH3_EY6uq8]

The bottom right regards photosynthesis and its role in the realm of academia. I went off on some tangents in my research process; I’ve discovered that there is speculation regarding all of plants’ capability to “do” photosynthesis. Fungi do not do photosynthesis apparently, and in my Culinary Physics class with Stefani Bardin, I found out about nightshade vegetables…or rather solanaceae…. which in some sources are said not to do photosynthesis, even though they do! Language and history are inscribed ... --> Further academic speculation about the very definition of plants, in addition to other findings about geo-biology and the history of photosynthesis.  

[https://www.britannica.com/plant/Solanales] [https://photosynthesiseducation.com/photosynthesis-in-plants/]

[https://www.pinalcentral.com/trivalley_dispatch/news/gibson-photosynthesis-is-essential-to-our-survival/article_2f2747bb-fb6c-5cf3-8cd2-3c25d8183453.html]

[http://scihi.org/melvin-calvin-calvin-cycle/] [https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1469-8137.2008.02705.x]

The bottom left of my map considers all of the systems/kingdoms of plants and animals that are involved directly in this process, in addition to systems that I figured made sense to be included when I did research that was more scientifically driven. What to do about information one doesn’t understand? Or needs another expert for? I suppose communicate with the expert…. ! I’d love to speak to someone more in depth about the light-gathering antenna systems and the perception of pigments of plants as opposed to the perception we have of them.

I feel that drawing analogies from this part of the map would be beneficial to make worthy observations about the the right side of the map.

[https://photosynthesiseducation.com/photosynthesis-in-plants/]

[https://www.khanacademy.org/science/biology/photosynthesis-in-plants/the-light-dependent-reactions-of-photosynthesis/a/light-and-photosynthetic-pigments] [https://www2.estrellamountain.edu/faculty/farabee/BIOBK/BioBookPS.html#Light] [http://photobiology.info/Zhu.html]

The top left is my “abstract zone.”  I feel it is missing some things, and that reading about the process of pollination, which is needed for photosynthesis to happen I couldn’t help thinking about immigration….

https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/1-4020-3324-9_95

And here are some questions/comments that came up from the Easterbrook reading:

*Are systems fixed? Are they subjective or objective in nature?

*Is a system always - inherently - politicized, because it is a system?

*Is the application that Steve applied to the Rothamsted protest, the best way of assessing a WICKED problem?

“If the cause of the machine’s erratic behaviour becomes known, the glitch tips and becomes a simple bug report of a failure, in which it be described under its technological name (which at that point is often a compression artifact). However, if the cause of the glitch remains unknown, the glitch can either be ignored and forgotten, or transformed into an interpretation or reflection on a phenomenon (or the memory thereof) defined by a social or cultural context (conventions, histories, perspectives) and the technology that is malfunctioning.”

The Glitch Moment(um) by Rosa Menkman

I initially wished to combine this final with my Nothing Final... I learnt how to use the Twitter API with python, extract tweets…attempted making new “phony” campaign slogans for environmental activism using the semantic walk function and word vectors… as well as attempting to play with Genesis 8:22 (“As long as the earth remains….”).

Yet I did not encounter any results I was satisfied with and set out to displace data in jpeg images using text following up on one of my assignments.

The source text I have used comes from all the messages I exchanged with a person from 2013 to the present. It took me some time to assess how best to retrieve this data. Initially I attempted using THIS script -  And got a series of versioning errors in the Facebook developer’s API. I realised only afterwards that I could download all of my messages directly from Facebook in the form of json…. and cleaned and parsed out the content like so:

I am interested in the manifestation of digital ‘memory’ within data and its parallelism to ‘organic’ memory. I have attempted to visit this notion by extracting representations of the memory of myself and this other person from the text without being too explicit. I tried a number of things to analyse the text from using word vectors and markov chains, and settled with extracting the noun chunks from the text using SpaCy- it does not only extract nouns but other small snippets of the content of our messages that I found to be rahter poetic.

In the meantime, I had also understood via my previous assignment that in python 3 it is possible to open the bytearray of a jpeg file, in addition to encoding and decoding strings into bytes, hex or ascii. And that it was possible to replace the data of a jpeg file with it - thus corrupting or “glitching” the image.

Through my quest to make a statement about my remembrance of this person, and to somehow interpret the phenomenon of our relationship over the years, I wished to subtract things I had said from things they had said through the manipulation of our data- hence the name or the project being “The Subtraction of Me From You.”

In order to “subtract” myself from B, I extracted the noun chunks, transformed them into strings of characters - translated each one to the corresponding ASCII character. Therefore acquiring two different lists of ASCII characters on which I performed the following mathematical operation:

I then proceed to transform this character list into a bytearray that is written over the original data of the JPEG file.

For the purpose of performing this program, I wish to subtract words from words, and the result of this “subtraction” to be the real-time display of this glitch. I want to “subtract” myself so much from this person that eventually the image, which will be an image intrinsically valuable to the memory of our relationship, will be corrupted entirely and can no longer be opened.

I have proceeded to transfer my notebook to a py file that I can run in my terminal. I used the input function in python so that I can decide the  amount of noun-chunks to devise my poem that then wait for a prompt to use the data to overwrite the jpeg. In order for the image to be seen in real-time, Leòn suggested to input the image into an html file that gets constantly refreshed in the browser as I manipulate it.

I wrapped most of the proceedings of my script into functions in order for this to happen & included a counter that makes sure the data being replaced is at the beginning of the bytearray of the JPEG, where the header of the data belongs.... in this way I can be sure that the image is corrupted at a certain point during the performance...

Had I had further time time to work on this final, I would have ideally liked to make it so that the eventual breakage of the image was caused by another operation I would perform using the text to ascii conversions. I have tried doing this, but it would eventually take a lot of time for the file to eventually break- thus I have negotiated for the sake of the performance.

This is a sketch of the physical realization of the project in addition to the video of the mock-up we re-created which can be found here.

The “window” of the spaceship will be re-created with three plywood (or foam-core) panels that will be hung by fishing wire from the ceiling at an angle facing the floor. We would need a short-throw projector to save space to project the planet scene onto these panels. An additional projector would be mounted on the ceiling out of view, and it will be projecting onto the surfaces of three monitors that will be mounted onto scaff poles with a base. The floor will be covered with linoleum.

Additionally, in terms of environment we are considering curtaining off the area in which the installation will take place. We are flexible in terms of location, but it is likely that it should be all be mounted in front of a wall, or at the angle of two walls and it is very probable that there will be sound-cancelling headphones provided for a full immersion into the experience.

To re-iterate our BOM:

Fabrication:

x3 panels of Plywood or foam-core x3 non-operational monitors x3 1m scaff poles with joint and wooden base

fishing wire 60″ x 30 ″ linoleum flooring

After mocking up our initial plan, Ayal & I have decided to leave behind the idea of projecting on both sides of the space craft’s window. Instead, we wish to implement further panels to project on that simulate the interior of a spacecraft’s cockpit. Indeed, it seems to make more sense for the text in our piece to exist simultaneously and seamlessly with the graphics of our “world.” He will be speaking more in depth about our designs in his blogpost.

This week, I have conducted some experiments with markov chains and recurrent neural networks using 1000 tweets I retrieved with the Twitter API, regarding #climatechange, in addition to the quote from Genesis 8:22 that Republican Senator and climate change denialist Inhofe uses to support many of his claims in the book ’The Greatest Hoax.’ I was going to attempt to use these corpuses of text to create a space-craft log in which the entity that we mentioned from our narrative is continuously/ infinitely contemplating whether climate change exists or not. I found this to be somewhat compelling, but have been prompted to think further about what we can give to our audience after they have walked away from our piece; what have we taught/communicated about this issue?

Therefore, I believe we have agreed that there should be a more concise story arc to the text & piece in its entirety. We have diluted it to two options;

—> create a log that includes generative text but not only, where the author of the log evolves from a climate change denialist to an activist pushing for change. (Our concentration in terms of environmental issues being touched upon will heavily lean towards consumption of the internet, data centres & other e-consumption…) This would mean that the installation would have to be experienced singularly and over a prescribed start and finish time.

—> contract a log that re-creates a cyclical narrative, in which the ultimate fate of the entity is his/her death. The visitor of the installation would be experiencing the remnants/ruins of the spaceship.