The first four weeks of Studio entailed tackling rapid 3-day briefs that employ 4 dynamic Research Strategies that would later be applied to our individual projects.
The 4 Research Strategies are as follows:
- Scale
- Territories
- Flow
- Knots
The Monday morning online sessions were used to introduce the Research Strategy, lightly tread by the upcoming week’s brief and assign homework that is related to the brief. The Tuesday Studio sessions were usually kickstarted with the introduction of the week’s Research Strategy brief as well as a group task (e.g. brainstorming) and ended with the 3-day brief that we’d have to work on for the upcoming Thursday’s Studio session. Thursdays were divided between CRP sessions with Margherita and the Studio briefs’ presentations with Jack.
The outcomes of these highly interactive sessions can be found below.
Scale
The term Scales usually implies the use of numbers. The Monday morning session introduced the notions of quantitative and qualitative datasets as well as the idea of ordering data. During the Tuesday morning session, different groups were assigned an instrument of measure — the group I was part of was assigned the word Bandwidth. Each group was sent to explore and discuss the possible uses of the assigned term: we found that the Bandwidth scale entails various concepts, variables and thresholds.
Afterwards, on an individual basis, we were asked to alter the parameters and functions of our assigned scale and find an inventive way to create a communication method for the new version of the scale.
Bandwidth can be defined as the ‘energy or mental capacity required to deal with a situation’ — below is my interpretation of this definition in the socio-political context of Lebanon.
Territories
The second week of the course surrounded the notion of Territories. On Monday, we were asked to assign ourselves a term of the following list:
- Your workspace
- Shorelines
- Ports (Airports, Docks)
- The Camberwell Library
The research process begun on Tuesday: we brainstormed ways to ‘explode’ or ‘exhaust’ our territories with the aim to produce a new index/map that represents our territory.
The term I opted for is shorelines, particularly the shoreline of a[n unnamed] city that has strict dress-code rules. The piece, titled Censorship, represents a gridded map of this city; whilst the areas in which ‘immodest’ clothing are permitted are overlaid with a photograph of a person dressed in swimwear, the areas in which ‘immodest’ clothing can lead to prosecution are left bare.
Flow
The third week kickstarted with a pair signup: each pair had to find a myth or legend from their cultures to explore. The week’s task was to find a way to spread the myth — we had to ask ourselves whether or not that would entail implicating individuals, a situation, or an audience. The outcome of the task would be a ‘situated symbol’ that could take the form of a ‘photograph, a flag, a sticker, a forged document, an activity or event situated in a specific context’.
Hannah and I chose is the superstitious act of ‘knocking on wood’ — an Apotropaic tradition that is believed to repel negative or evil energies or influences. Attributed to Celtic or Germanic origins, the myth is said to have originally been an appeal to tree-dwelling spirits to ward off bad luck and an expression of gratitude for good fortune.
Through further research, we found that the myth is found among several cultures around the world. Despite having similar objectives, the myth is iterated differently within those different countries.
With the hopes of extending and consolidating the myth, we came up with a board game titled Knock on Wood.
The game prompts the players to reflect on their lives and can be interpreted as an analogy to life: one is only as lucky as the cards they are dealt.
Knots
The fourth and final week of the Research Methodologies series surrounded the topic of Knots. As a pair, we had to choose one of the following ‘knotty’ notions:
- Artificial Meat
- Click Farm
- Bitcoin Mining
- Nationalism
- Space Tourism
- Deep Fake
In the very beginning of the Tuesday session, we took an hour to produce and present a poster that visualises our chosen notion, Deepfake. Generally understood as media that help impersonate individuals, Deepfakes can take on various forms ranging from the audio to the video. Here’s what we came up with:
This poster displays several Deepfaked iterations of the same initial image and aims to show how easy it is to create a fake version of oneself. The tagline Be yourself, be someone else further pushes the idea that the online world allows for individuals to choose the identities that they display to the world.
For the main task of the brief, we had to represent deepfakes in a way that would implement sequence. As instructed, Camila and I sought to create a deepfake graphic sequence. Through research, we found that deepfakes can and have been involved with several domains including:
- Politics
- Entertainment
- Pornography
- Celebrity culture
- Fraud
We designed and crafted a piece that allows for the viewer to embody known individuals from these various domains. When extended (see below), it reveals a series of hollowed out faces that reveal a reflective surface — the user sees themself in lieu of the face of the celebrity they chose.
Territories: Rupture NO 1: blowtorching the bitten peach — Heather Phillipson (an exposition at the Tate Britain)
Installation analysis in the context of the Territories Studio Methodology
- Colours: cool and warm, contrast
- Soundscape: wind, water
- Materials emulating: technology and natural systems
- Feel: eerie, claustrophobic, being held accountable for the destruction of the planet and its non-human inhabitants
Flow: Synthetic Imaginary Workshop
This collaborative Studio activity involved collaborating with Machine Learning Models. It entailed collecting data (in our case, images) to train a model to generate morphing animations. Each of the tutor groups agreed on a subject for their animations and collected an array of relevant images that would then be used to create the animation.
The tutor group that I’m in (Sadhna’s) was inspired by the idea that motherboards, when inspected from a close distance, can be reminiscent of cityscapes:
Each member of the tutor group collected 100 images that were later formatted by Jack. This is a sample the outcome of our work: