Self-interview: Review and reflect on your goals and priorities right now, at the start of the semester. Try to reflect on work you did this summer, what you learned, and how you are positioned for this year.
More specific questions:
- What are you working on right now?
- What's working well? What needs attention?
- What have you not considered yet?
Right now… I just made gan images of rotting food combined with landscapes, as a test. I went to a tarot reading / meaning making workshop this week. I’ve also gone to the abandoned lot to sit there with it and write.
A few next things I want to explore:
- make a digital embroidery from an abstracted version of an afterlife study
- the photogrammetry I mentioned above (also do it through prisms to see how that changes the models that I get)
- train a machine learning model to generate images based off of afterlife studies combined with portraits of faces… also potentially do this with images from the sites and people… and then maybe put all of those exported images into another model that also spits out images of people… as though these ‘humans’ are the offspring of decomposition and particular sites… could potentially be figures in a tarot deck
- do a rough outline of how I want to lay out videos in max (like a three card tarot spread, with background video as well… the most basic version)
- play with anchoring images and text onto my gradient prototype
- go through my images and videos of the sites I have just to get a sense of what is there, and collect more colors
- do free association to glean my own meaning from objects from each site / colors I have gathered from photographs
- I want to write very short stories (a paragraph or two) about different bits of the sites that are poetic and creepy or something… that I can memorize and tell in different ways when I read the relationship of the sites in (potentially) liver performances
I hadn’t considered being as intentional about looking into the history of the sites as I want to now. Although, it is something I’m always a bit curious about and did find out some details about the cemetery in Florida. I've heard the University of Florida has a bunch of aerial photos of the site. AND get this, before the site was a preserve and a cemetery it was hunting grounds. Where the cemetery and conservation trust offices are located used to be the hunting lodge. Whoever owned it would ship in “exotic” animals for people to hunt. One year a storm resulted in the fence going down in the area, the animals escaped into the town... and locals just shot them from their windows (no protective laws against killing non-native animals). Apparently there are still locals that have the heads of non-native animals mounted in their houses. I think it also used to be grazing land for cows. It's also super close to major battle sites from the Seminole Wars, which is so intense, particularly in relation to conservation often being a device that prevents land being returned to indigenous nations. It's also really close to Saint Augustine, which likes to claim it's the oldest colonialist/imperialist city in the U.S. So much to unpack.
I feel the same way about Providence, especially understanding how huge a role it played in the slave trade. Also the history of Federal Hill itself I know is… plentiful, but I haven’t investigated it (haven’t even listened to that one podcast everyone suggests ?…). Also, how did the parking lot come into existence in the first place?
I need to get a family history, which I think will bring up some emotional stuff for me. A tarot reading I did with my best friend told me to ‘inject levity into my relationship with the roost’ (the roost is my dad’s house, a stand in name for interacting with my entire family)
What’s been a bit hard for me is building in the sort of daily practice I want without feeling trapped or like I can’t be flexible regarding when I have motivation/energy. I would like to write daily, words actually for my piece… but it has been challenging to be consistent.
What’s working well is my excitement, and dedication toward continuing my investigation.
Also some interesting themes:
- decomposition in relationship/opposition to conservation/land ownership
- mediation as a way to decompose something / accelerate entropy in order to access interconnectedness