Category: Practice

3/03/21 – the terrorist

how to link the single to the multiple. how actions of an individuals protest can be enacted whilst being linked to the mass of bodies…

how could my actions of performative resistance be linked to a common voice?

THE PETITION. the petition has always been used but its users have become more prominent when contention around protest has been arising and the dangers of civil disobedience. how can the petition be physicalised by an individual…

using computing to retranslate a signature into an action?

2/03/21

feeling good.

TEMPORALITIES OF PROTEST

this is not a concept to be embarrassed about.

i would like to create a framework and narrative around the past and present of protest in relation to something as time old as cola extraction and its networked effect on local and global. and then want to aesthetically and physically discuss how this future of protest may look around this time old issue and how i have the capacity to critically evolve this. this evolution will hopefully discuss ideas of individual resistance and relationship to place – the slowness of walking and wearing – and in turn also discuss physical resistance of being disrupting in a site through individual means that nods to the communal protest of body, but doing this in an evolved way… ‘the idea of of the petition’ and the virtual protest as being translatable to an individuals actions. the terrorist…

FRAMING

what i want to communicate through this project is the way in which the history and particularities of a given place may aid an act of resistance through informing the objects used in these acts. the way in which a knowledge of place may cycle back into a productive intervention that draws or speculative cartographies whilst relating a global perspective to the local conditions and ways of being in the site.

TO DO THIS I WANT TO LOOK INTO:

  • the history of protest – look into making an archival film of chronological forms of protest through history… MAKE A FILM
  • what objects have evolved through this history – how has the history of coal pretest evolved and come in and out of fashion (the placard…?)
  • look into the petition and its history… the bureaucracy of the petition and how this could be translated into an autographic visualisation…. basically looking into the scaling of pretest and how I can scale it up in new ways that still allow an individual to be slow and to be looking to becoming with the site as opposed to imposing on it.
  • the high viz vest as an object that is evolving through culture. links to mining history and construction whilst moving into the public imagination linked to cycling and being ecological in the public eye.
  • think about the history of colonialist tobacco trade and its relationship to whitehaven, cumbria
  • look into other coal mines of recent and their impacts in order to infer what may happen here. (eg ozone pollution.. do old cola mines result in nitrogen dioxide pollution)

I would like to investigate ways to make a vest or wearable object that has the potential to disseminate tobacco seeds through walking….

  • to do this i want to do some speculative DRAWINGS of various objects that could achieve this in different ways
  • I want to think about the wearable to the discreet… how an object may fold out to become one with a given environment… using local lichens and mosses??? time to start testing:
    • implanting moss and lichen into agar based bio plastics COLLECT LICHENS (research what lichens are local to cumbria)
    • embedding CRESS SEED in agar and gelatine bio plastics
    • looking into FELT as a way to embed plant life
    • experiment with CABBAGE DIED COTTON that autographically visualises the act of walking through sweat detection…
    • buy some TOBACCO SEEDS to grow and see if they detect ground level ozone.
    • look into by-products of the coal industry and other substance i could make objects out of that relate to the exploitation and extraction of this particular place. what trees formed the coal under cumbria…? tying in the metabolism of the ground in different ways… the coal; lithosphere, the mosses / lichens; biosphere, and the impact on the atmosphere….

THINK ABOUT CONTACTING

  • experts in protest
  • environmental agencies involved in this fight
  • local councils and their opinions and desires |(ask about the tobacco garden idea?)

READING

  • nicos quarry paper
  • muscle beach
  • queer walking to under tanning slowness better
  • breading sweet grass – book recommended by jack
  • mussel beach project… cooking sections
  • strangers (essays on human-non-human) human-non-namuh

1/03/21

hmmm where have I got to.

I have reached a point where I now roughly what I want from this project;

I want to create an object that questions temporalities of resistance. I’m interested in the juxtaposition of acts of residence… sandwiching these different forms into on object. acts of resistance can be as simple as disturbing the usual speed of action and production under capitalism. slow acts of resistance could be as simple as walking. as listening. as simple as finding ways to BE with non humans. this idea interesting has some connection to traditional protest whereby that accumulation of bodies, walking, disrupt spaces…

traditional social protest is often about the multiple bodies working together. its about body to body. walking can also be a individuals acts of protest. about the body to non body. this has a different time scale associated with it. often not appearing to be pretest but acting as resistence in the process…. (how can i bring sound into this…)

I’m interested in how an object could be designed with this purpose in mind.

how could this object then also enact other forms of resistance. how could resistance manifest as a a disruptive forces in a more outward sense. objects that use materials that have the potential to degrade and return to the earth in a practical way, changing the physical cartography of the site and even the way in which a community use that space

  • a history of bio bombs… and bio terroisms
  • other industries that are being developed that fly in the face of the ups climate agreements

Im currently most interested in how I might use both the action of walking and the action of planting as two forms of resistance. the walking may allow for a protester to feel a place in a new sense. the action of gardening (perhaps the tabocco plant) may allow for a community to become involved in the conditions of a place more personally – creating new cartographies as the garden…

  • what know more about cumbrias relationship to its colonial history – as a large port for the importation of tobacco

It seems what I’m mainly interested in is the way in which relating to local ecologies and understanding their autographic qualities has the potential to to create community engagement in the issue at hand. an individual can be involved both in the ‘slow act of resistance’ and in the future acts of ‘resistence” through disrupting a place.

22/02/21 – juxtaposed acts of resistance

could contrast the types of protesting the action or inaction of governmental bodies. choose site to protest an issue of compare types of resistance.

being ‘in habitat’

how can slowness and and sensory experiences of ecology transform that relationship and act as an inactions of resistance as much as actions are.

embodying this through the garden. the habitat. how can wearing become a reconnection and a slowness, an understanding of a place through an embodiment

reading: isabella stengers, hélène Frichot, lisa blackman

how to compare different temporalities of protest

objects that hold potential for both slowness and fastness. incorporating disruptive actionable qualities into objects that infer slowness.

could use lichen as the symbolic basis… the structure gestured to in th design of a wearable resistance body armature. the nature of feeling the being with the habitat of local lichens to a given place… but this structure could also hold the potential to be distractive… find a way to fuck with the cite… the cite maybe being the Cumbria coal mine.

very early sketches of this idea… would like to do a speculative drawing of it and perhaps research better how it might be modular… and how to embed lichens/cultivate them in a biodegradable structure

18/02/21

At this point I’ve come to a bit of halt.

I know I want to research the science behind genetic modification some more.

I know I would like to grasp a better understanding of what outcomes i really want to make so I can’t work towards them more pragmatically. although i stand by my natural process of letting the project lead the outcome, i think it would be beneficial for me as a designer if i found a stronger sense of what i really enjoyed making in terms of craft. why do I like creating speculative jewellery? I think i see body ornamentation and body-object interconnection an obvious output because it marries the possibility of making physical objects that feed my desire for aesthetics (in a reductive, i-like-to-ornement-my-own-body kind of way) and the myriad of oddities that happen when we intimately interact with physical things.

jewellery is symbolic, intimate, sensory, instructory.

it holds potential for instumentaltisiton, comradeship, community cohesiveness, pretest.

How can I find an alliance between one or some of these principles with the trustworhty nature of natural indication.

autogpahic means that something needs no translation. its index is apparent.

is it as simple as finding something that needs amplification and finding autographic means to visualise it? why would it be on the body? perhaps the body is a sensual intimate place for the new connection to information? or perhaps the body is a communal and symbolic places? perhaps the traces constricts the wearer? pass the traces releases the wearer? the gas mask is an body ornament that releases the human body. how could other ecological traces help to release the body?

another alternative to wearable objects is a metaphorical/critical reason. the object is tied and ingrained in a greater narrative. for instance; the object could gather information as its passed from person to person, worn in different ways gathering different microbial data.

the object could be critically designed to be bough and the proceeds generated reinforce the negative system the objects represents. plastics necklace profits fund fossil fuel company. naff.

I think i ulitatly want to make beautiful and word bodily objects that infer the damage of human kind though addressing something localised.

lastly, i realise i must find a more concise subject matter. this will be the largest task. to do this i might browse various websites – medium, eflux, thane with the accent bacterial article, natural geographic, new sientic ETC

15/02/21 – WIP

Decided that the best way to tie in all the bits and bobs would be to envision a future retrospective exhibition whereby these autographic interventions became swept up in the capitalist system yet style broke ground in turning the public attention to the intensity of the natural indications of degrading environmentals. a wrote a short bio for the work I have made so far:

Autographic means self inscribing. I am searching for a practice the looks to ways of visualising climate degradation knowledge in ways that engage and attune to publics through the power of the material world’s natural inscription. I have envisioned a future where a movement begun around this idea of ‘self-inscribing’ material traces; artists, designers and activists join to distribute and disseminate new ways to gather knowledge about our environments, especially those that engage with the climate emergency and its symptoms. As capitalist realism maintains: the lack of an ending to capitalism is apparent in this future but this does not negate a science fiction where the planet’s biodiversity prospers despite this. Below is a retrospective exhibition from one of these futures, remarking on the long and awaited turning point of humanity. Autograffitists is the name given to those that autographically graffitied our environments – this movement happened within the long and damaging years of the plastic age; also known as the Anthropocene epoch. 

Red moss GM rebellions

exploring future utilisations of gentetically modified GM plants that have autographic capacities. Red moss is a speculative material that thrives in conditions of high nitrogen dioxide and particulate matter (as opposed to most types of moss that are sensitive to such conditions and usually descries in these areas).

I have both photoshopped and physically painted moss samples to infer this speculate material.

using mapping software such as QGIS and openstreetmapper to depict a coronation between the release of this material into sewage systems and the overlap between this new natural aesthetic and the pollution of these areas. the supposed future is one where a public react to the natural occurrence of red moss and therefore drive less in these areas now that they have a visual indicator of the intensity of the areas pollution…