Unstable Connections: using organic forms to express connection and disconnection in a digital world

Aims and objectives

Aim

Throughout this investigation, I want to ask these questions:

What is missing within these technologies that makes them feel less human?

Can we use our realisations from this to get closer to what it means to be human?

Are we replacing our intuition with digital products?

Can I use organic materials and forms to express the digital world?

Is digital filling gaps that nature could not, or is it making us blind to nature’s benefits?

How does code and coding intertwine both the natural and digital worlds?

How can I explore ‘doomscrolling’ and  picking up your phone as ‘Ritualistic’ behaviour?

Create a body of work that explores the interplay of the digital and the organic

1. Create ‘Mechanical gut’ on intuition and LLMS
2. Explore more traditional sculpting methods
3. Develop a series of digital illustrations around humanness drawing off my experience of having an ostomy bag and the unique view seeing how ‘human’ you really are every day
4. Use quick watercolours for exploration of technologies
5. Explore ‘digital bubbles’ such as the imminent AI bubble burst, researching the dot-com bubble
6. Take photos of the canal system in Llanymynech and the canal systems in Birmingham

Improve my knowledge of ritualistic behaviours such as ‘Doomscrolling’ through art

1. Write a research paper on ritual within neoliberal contexts and its relation to art practices
2. Experiment with pieces around the ‘thumb’ and doomscrolling movements in different contexts
3. Explore the ‘pull of the phone’ through video
4. Create a video that expresses both sides of the self, nature walks and sitting in a dark room doom scrolling
5. Research and write about the phone as an extension of the self
6. Experiment with the vertical as framing, cutting off of the world

Context (Including Historical, Contemporary and Theoretical Contexts):

WIP

David Locke- Resistant forms

Can’t Help Myself (Sun Yuan and Peng Yu)

Byung Chul Han

Artwork commenting on the photography or TV

Investigating the AI bubble, how these bubbles form (EG. DOT COM BUBBLE) and what they mean for the general public

Research paper on ritual and connection, how art can bring about connection in a digital world and help to protect us from ritualised doomscrolling

Coding into knitting grannies spies

Dr Paulina Yurman

Methodology:

I wish to experiment with sculpture, performance, Digital illustration and watercolour to explore different aspects of human-ness in relation to the digital world. Creating conceptual schematics and then finding tactile objects to show the realities of the human condition when it interacts with digital spaces. I have previously worked commercially within digital agencies, where the final product was displayed on phones, computers, digital screens in tube stations, or projections on the sides of airports. On the other hand, I have also worked for experiential agencies where my work was physical, tactile, and involved creating spaces and interiors.

Bringing this knowledge into my personal practice, the more I express the digital or technological, the more I want to lean into physical expression and visa versa. I wish to express humanness through the digital and digital through tactile installation or sculpture.

I will handwrite every day, ensuring that I myself, keep out of the digital realm as I cannot look at it objectively unless I am outside of it to some extent. I will sometimes post these writings up on my blog. I will research philosophy related to technology within neoliberalism (Byung Chul Han), and expand my knowledge on the ways we are shaped by ‘non-place’ within social media contexts (Marc Augé)

When tackling issues of organic forms in relation to feeling human, I want to draw on my own experiences in hospitals and post-surgical procedures, where I had direct access and visuals of my own insides outside of the body. The stark and unique view that we are only human compared to the clean, smooth, perfect experience of the digital sphere.

Personal Connections

This work is personally relevant to me when it comes what it means to be human. At 18 years old I was diagnosed with severe Crohns Disease and spent much of my 20s in and out of hospital, 164 hospital stays and a collective time of two years in a hospital bed. These stays included intensive care, multiple obscure tests, months of isolation, having cannulas in both my arms and both my ankles at the same time, getting feeding tubes put into my stomach whilst conscious, threading NG tubes into my nose, three major surgeries, one resulting in having an ostomy bag for three years where my small intestine stuck out of my stomach so my intestinal contents could come out into a bag that I would have to change myself nearly everyday.

I lost half of my average healthy body weight and would spike temperatures of 43 degrees every night from which I have subsequent neurological damage . I was covered from head to toe in large deep bruises from all the failed attempts to get my blood due to such low blood pressure. I was too sick to be operated on and needed emergency surgery.

For around 3 months, I was constantly on the cusp of death.

I experienced what it was to be human, not just emotionally, but also in a very very visceral sense. I saw my guts, my insides, I could touch them, see them, acknowledge how fragile we all are. I remember standing in front of a mirror one day whilst in hospital, just about able to stand and look myself directly in the eyes. All I had left of ‘me’ was the knowing look of my own soul staring directly back.

Death was all around me, I would make friends with elderly women, on better days doing half hearted pole dances on IV drips to make them laugh. Two weeks later they would leave this earth with curtains drawn around them.

Post trauma, and during subsequent smaller flare ups, I would escape the memories and fear through social media, spending hours in dark rooms scrolling. At the time, this was therapeutic and got me through days where I couldn’t leave the house. Technology gave me a connection to the outside world and a space where I could pretend to be less sick than I actually was. I could dive into others worlds without facing my own. Three years ago the pain clinic I attend stepped me down from morphine patches to nefopam, a similar drug that numbs through increased norepinephrine and serotonin. It makes you so happy you don’t notice.

There were many downsides to this relationship with tech, and I want to explore the fact that for myself personally, going through this trauma whilst technology was turning into an integral part of everyone lives, both helped and hindered my experience. On the one hand my vulnerability lent itself to the ritualistic and repetitive draw, but it also numbed like a drug in a time when I was in severe pain, only for it to spill out in other ways.

Technology drew my attention away from what it was to be human, because at the time it was too painful to look at.

Outcomes:

I wish to have a body of work that explores the visceral and uncontrollable nature of being human and how technologies such as LLMs and AI in general reflect, extract and highlight what it truly is to be human. Also, I wish to look at the interplay between the two, how our human need for ritual is creating digital repetition such as doomscrolling and ‘the pull of the phone’, which I’d like to go on to study at PHD level.

I want to use my personal experiences to emphasise the difference between the technological and the human, exploring the visceral and the organic.

Work Plan:

Week 34

Illustration for Editions Print Show DONE

Start videoing for three minute video

Week 35

More work on ‘Mechanical Gut’

Start taking videos

Research Paper

Week 36

More Work on ‘Mechanical Gut’

Editions Hand in on the 6th

Video for three minute video

Week 37

Finish Research paper

Create 3 minute video

Week 38

Hand in Research Paper

Finish 3 minute Video

Week 39

Hand in of Unit 2 Assessment blog

3 Minute Video

Week 40

Editions Print Sale week

December break– Start developing idea for swipe sculpture. Doomscroll sculpture

Week 41

Week 42

Week 43

Week 44

Week 45

Week 46

Week 47

Week 48

Week 49

Week 50

Week 51

Week 52

Week 53

Week 54

Week 55

Week 56

Week 57

Week 58

Week 59

Week 60

WIP

7. Bibliography:

The disappearance of ritual- Byung Chul Hang

Non- things- Byung Chul Hang

Non-Places: A introduction to supermodernity Marc Augé

FILMS

Self portrait as a coffee pot

BOOKS

RESEARCH PAPERS


JOURNALS

WEBSITES


MAGAZINES

SPECIAL COLLECTIONS

PRIMARY RESEARCH