midterm

Starting this practice was very exciting. After last year's social practice I was eager to dive in. The topic of bodies excites me, as there are many subtopics, especially in relation to the idea of Powerplay.

Luckily finding someone to work with went well. Me and Lianne found each other in the pad and realized we had the same interests so that part was solved quickly. Turned out we had already met each other once before and we started chatting and video calling to discuss our ideas about the topic.
Talking openly about our own experience we had quite some personal talks so far. (maybe easier as we weren't strangers!)

The self-guided study, video talks and research has worked out pretty well so far. Lianne and me researched alone and also video called inbetween, narrowing down our subject + sending out an open call.
Our collaboration has worked out pretty great and I love working with people from other majors to hear about their ways of working, ideas and learn more about them and from them, which has been super nice with Lianne.

So far I think it’s been pretty successful, but the biggest challenge was finding ways to collaborate online. This is definitely different than any practice I attended before. The lack of physical interaction and classroom setting is something that will take quite some time to adapt to, as things might go much faster if we could work together at the academy.

Despite the heavy subject we still have fun and I'm eager to see how we will put our final map together.
This is something we are still figuring out. We got a bit lost in research but with reading through the survey answers from the open call I can see similarities and things that line up with our readings in class/research.
I think once we know how to visualize and divide the tasks we'll get the final map and legend done.

During the self-study weeks, I got very excited when I saw that Powerplay was about bodies. Human bodies fascinate me in every way: how our bodies work, our nerve system, the brain, fragility, decay and you name it. This lead to me being fascinated with the transience of the body, as well as trauma. Trauma fascinated me the most of the list on the garden collective and I was curious if other people would be interested in this theme as well.

When we had our first class, I was kind of nervous to find a partner. My topic and/or pictures were quite dark and when I looked at the pictures of other students, those pictures were less inclined with decay and transience of bodies.

Luckily Sanya and I found each other! During a small and funny chat in the open space, we got in touch and surprisingly we had already met each other at a small party. I was (and still am) happy that we got together for the project and felt relieved. We immediately started chatting and video calling about the project and started talking about how we could fill in this project. After doing research alone, we got together multiple times via chat/video call to talk about our research and would hop off to go search and sketch further.

Until now, our collaboration has been going really well. Being a Transformation Design major myself, I love to get to know more about Sanya's major (Animation), about Sanya herself and her view regarding the topic. We had some very personal conversations, but that is almost inevitable with such a personal topic. In my perspective, everything is going great, except for the difficulties of working online simultaneously on the internet. If we could have sit together and could have talked about it while immediately seeing what would be adjusted, it would be for me one of the best collaborations I've had.

Besides those difficulties, I find it rather hard to work on the map. Where I do not want to randomly change something or am afraid to touch Sanya's work, I make it harder for myself to let loose and get creative. Right now, I am still stuck in an artistic research phase, which I want to step out of by making more sketches, get inspired more by things outside of bodies and trauma's and get some occasional coffee.

Legend WIP: Map Introduction

For our map we want to address the phenomenon of alienation and rewiring of the brain after trauma. We will use our own experiences and overlay them with other people's stories (from an open call/survey) as well as back it up with research and readings from class.

The map will show a timeline, people in trauma, afterwards or maybe inbetween those stages. We already found similarities between our experiences and want to highlight those in the map.

Trauma can be hard on people, but what happens afterwards can be just as hard. We want to open up a conversation, and talk about a topic that feels (to us) rather taboo.

We want to explore the physical, but mostly mental effect trauma causes the body. Also the idea that we can never escape our bodies comes up a lot and how people's brain can rewire to deal with the experiences.