Why was there this crisi-moment in my process? I believe it was because some reasons coming together.

I am used to start with the content of something and then choose the medium depending on that.

Also I prefer making logical decisions and resulting decisions on content.

In Open Lab I started with the media, comic and podcast/radio without any logical or natural resulted content. I should have known better but this was difficult for me.

Constantly it has been proposed to use open lab as a content and that I finally should make a podcast. This is understandable, still i did not want to do it as the main project or force a podcast for the sake of doing a podcast with boring or nonsense content.

Focussing on Open Lab would have been too much of a service for me and I prefer a free investigation into an independent topic. Could the Topic be Comic or Podcast in itself or a combination? Yes but no. I did not want to do something like Art for Arts sake or a self-analysation of the medium through the medium. The content needs to make some sort of sense to me, a good reason.

Now I chose a topic not too far away, still quite big but defined enough to work with it. Besides that the possibility is still there, that Open Lab can make use of my project.

My content is conversation. Conversation is my Topic.

I dont have a fixed plan jet how to tackle this and where to head to. All I do is active design research and investigating conversation theory.

New step towards the final object.

I got a satellite dish at Teunissen scrapyard. I disassembled it, painted it black and made the speaker waterproof at its heart.

I had a lot of troubles understanding how to amplify my heartbeat through a mk190. In the end Arvid and Leif helped me a lot. It was a matter of wring soldering, twice.

Post exhibition

The first plan I had made for myself in OpenLab : exploring research tools, ways to collect data on a done subject, looking at writing, photography, social experiments and different fields where data collecting (the understanding of this idea is very open) is involved. I dropped this first idea for a hands-on, technical/mechanical exploration with electricity as a subject.

The idea is to work from a collection of drawings that are remaining from a project I did about electricity. The drawings are ideas of ways to switch on and off light. I felt there was some quality in these drawings and I wanted to give them a chance to get out of my drawers and become something.

So far, tried to give it a context via :

* Collaborating with classmates ( (performance/visual installation/ stage design related) ), implementing my electric tricks in their projects to give them a context. > on going work : translating the inanimate drawings into self-explanatory flip-books)

* Translating one of the drawing into an actual lamp (which I have a hard time describing : it is anyway not a product).

These two attempts to give a context to my work so far didn’t help me to understand where I want to go with the project.

A concept/direction/drive is missing.

Writting down some facts and gut feelings about my project might help me to understand where my drive is

- Really wanted to build my own light table. Something about mastering the whole process and building my own tools.

- The research is not ‘’technically’’ driven : the switches alternatives I came up with are rather simple tricks. I didn’t become an electricity expert, actually took an un-knowledgeable approach all the way, important to keep this ‘amateur’ relation with my subject.

- Not so excited about translating the tricks into actual physical mechanisms. It is not about product making.

Is it about the exploration itself then? If so, how to make that relevant for other to see? What to share?

Key words

Hacking, dismantling, exploration, amateur, imagination, empirical understanding of electricity.

Another thing

I could now work in the High voltage lab of the TUe campus. I contacted this place some months ago asking if I could lead a little research on high voltage as a design tool. The idea is to pass electricity to conductive material to see how they are shaped/colored/patterned by a high voltage imput, and see to which extend I can master this process.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the curriculum and the road we’ve been taking; purely to foresee what steps will be taken and what we’re encountering. And I’m starting to have my doubts on some points. I’ll freely brain fart them here and hope to hear what you guys think on my viewpoint.

We spend a lot of time as a group discussing what we want from the class and what to present; the whole problem is that every decision to be taken is taken by the whole group, and it’s so damn inefficient. If we want to go somewhere we might have to trust certain tasks to certain people and let them raise their influence in the same way all the communications is put on Jim and Alvin. We could all play some role and organise things beter. I think we can’t keep on spending all our time on architecting the curriculum week by week all together as it leaves little to no space to execute it and get something out of it. When problems arise we should address them head first, but for the biggest part it’s probably a bad idea to discuss anything with an entire group. Everything that will come out of a 2 hours discussion with all of us will probably be a mediocre compromise eventually taken because we ran out of time. (yes, this is how I feel about the upcoming exhibition, I can’t imagine everyone’s happy with this idea yet it’s the most neutral and also very collectivistic, which I wholeheartedly doubt is a good idea at this stage in the process). after Cindy leaves the whole feedback cycle starts again, basically we will be doing the same compass 4 times in a row. I know Open lab is a startup, but the problem to me is that I don’t see something coming out of open lab except for an improved version of the curriculum co-designed by the whole group, because that’s where all the energy goes for now. We’ll be relaying and improving the structure time after time and having to spend a lot of time introducing our works to new people again and again. Ideally we’d be each others teachers, of course, but I will come back to that issue later.

Now that could be just ok still, but: We also have a lot of exhibitions that we spend a lot of time on, and workshops, and lectures and maybe we should focus this time more on actually having a process. I admit, it sounded amazing to me at first as well, gathering all this information so quickly. Yet after X weeks, I’m not sure anymore of that’s the best way to learn.

Everybody’s working on a project and we’re doing workshops and coaching and exhibitions and this and that. I think we’re actually doing too much. What do we want from open lab?  that’s probably the biggest question we have to face right now. Do we want to learn a bunch of stuff, design open lab itself or work on a project and be guided in that? And do we get a free choice in that?  Extracting from that knowledge It’s no wonder that we need a database to stay updated on each other’s work, because we don’t really see each other working on things except for the exhibitions. I don’t really get the chance to work on my stuff during our classes, I’ve hardly made any progress in the past weeks on the database, all I get to do is talk and reflect, but there is little to reflect on besides the curriculum for now. So then is the idea we work on our projects purely outside of class so we have something to shape during class? (Another things is the database has been the holy brainchild of Open lab, yet I openly question if it should be. I learnt so much more by listening to some people talking to Cindy about their projects than from reading their posts and looking at their inspiration that I’m not sure if it should be anything more than an archive which carries the function of an archive instead of a social media platform, because we’re using Facebook for that anyway, which is a functioning system.) The upcoming exhibition however worries me the most in terms of the curriculum, we will be spending a lot of time on curating and building an exhibition around a very small amount of newly added work due to the circumstances of the last 3 weeks; I’m worried I’ll be spending so much time on the technical setup and I won’t have anything new to show, because with all this added energy into some crazy nice setup I won’t be able to focus on the substance of my project. Whilst we’re presenting work in progress.

Our focus should be on communicating with others and gathering feedback and executing the process and growing in that instead of making a crazy nice exhibition for now, because it masks the vulnerability and core of the projects in the same way the 3D messes with the database. This is exactly where we miss the point of teaching each other, as we only get the chance to really do that during the exhibitions I guess.

We want input on the work and not a visualization of it, we’re talking concept building and not visualizations.

I will go to the metal workshop to ask:

• How can I build a 40 cm diameter flat bowl ?

• How can I afterwards to it with copper ? For How much ?

___

I will go to the plastic workshop to ask:

• What can I build such a bowl from?

• What if I melt a black mat acrylic plate on a convex foam shape?

____

I will go to the ceramic workshop to ask:

• How can I make a 40cm plate

• How can I make ti black

___

Self refliection piece 3; Luca

Over the past few weeks I’ve been busy with all kinds of different stuff, past openlab, giving me some headroom to take a step back and analyze the work I’ve done so far. Overall I’m ok with the direction I’m heading, but I’ve developed serious doubts around the value of a 3rd dimension in the organisation structure after reading the following interview: http://rhizome.org/editorial/2014/oct/22/big-data-little-narration/ The doubts boil down to the simple statement that available data/metadata shouldn’t necessarily need to be the norm for the structure of information. The 3D is a new thing, a compelling new structure. But the more I try to order it, the less organised it seems to get, blog posts and image data are flat items; positioning them in a 3rd dimension doesn’t add any value, for all it seems that it only complicates and hides the value of the information. This explosion into 3 dimensions becomes a mere visualisation of, instead of interface for the data. The second argument is scalability: the 2d interface is more scalable and can be used in a lot of different situations/ grow easily and be organized and reorganized better. When it comes to carrying over the source code to someone else to continue on what I’ve built, and people still being capable of seeing the page as we do right now there might be a necessity to also keep the code simple and accessible, one of the, to me, core values to open lab.

Concerning my general interest and direction for Openlab:

I’m really interested in getting better at coding and getting a better general understanding on how programming languages work.

I think the cloud project could be a nice way to get into it, but I also want to teach myself how to make super dumb and stupid apps, as a practical goal to orient my programming learning on.

I also want to think more about the workings and philosophy of programming languages as a language and how they compare to our cultural languages. I also think the ‚logical language‘ Lojban is super interesting. If you have an unambiguous logical language, how much can you still read ‚between the lines‘? Does poetry even work in such a language? How does it matter to a language to be in lack of metaphorical, cultural and historical origins/associations? When is it better to speak in programming language and cultural language (which one?) or in logical language to each other?