great doco

a series of documentaries about the application of systems thinking in society, called 'all watched over by machines of loving grace'

the second in the series, called 'use and abuse of vegetational concepts', touches on much of my thesis territory.

watch it here

transition alignments

in a movie i saw recently, a conversation something like this:

reporter: So, Yoko, what are you working on now?
yoko: I'm thinking about scissors.
reporter: What? Just thinking about them?
yoko: Yes

and so it is with any art that takes conceptualism as a fundamental component of its makeup. thinking is much of the work.

with the new year coming (an arbitrary signal marker of time) and the continuing refinement of the direction of my work, i've been thinking of using this next show at west wing as a transition process. my initial intention was to construct some sort of installation of hybrid organic robots made of plants and electronics. my first sketches were rather literal robots. but with the focus of my work on systems, i feel i can start to be less literal in my material creations.

i feel like i should make the systems (machines/robots/hybrids) more abstract and ambiguous, even less heirarchical (eliminating who is 'boss' in the system) and more mysterious.

how this will manifest itself is not yet certain. but i'm going to embrace this exhibition opportunity as a platform for development. the first step is to move back from a literal hybridisation of plant and electronic, in the form of robots with 'plant brains', and to move into new territories of ambiguous systems. materially, for this installation, that means no plant robots listening to the pipes, or moving about the space like living things. instead, the system of functioning parts will simply be there, and the viewer can decipher their relations if they choose.

a new title

so after much deliberation, and some insightful feedback, the thematic context of my phd project, and its title, have been updated. the change in title is a necessary outcome of the refined theme but i'm a little sad to see chaos calls be replaced. it will no doubt rear its head at a later juncture.

here's an abstract for the newly articulated project, 

system synthesis: 

the ambiguous zone of the nature/culture divide 

An exploration of the nature/culture divide through an analysis of the relationship between these two highly fluid and overlapping categories. With particular focus on the way in which the use of technology filters and mediates this relationship, a set of propositional objects and installations are created from assemblages of materials that straddle the ambiguous zone of this arbitrary divide. It is the problematising of the theoretical nature/culture divide, particularly through the interrelationship of networks and systems that spans both categories, that offers us a field of inspiration from which to harvest ideas and a prism through which to examine the swirling pool of our collective understanding.