APENDIX

Complete list of research:

Reading / lectures / films /courses /conferences /artists /artistic researchers.

Conversations with the work in the future - essay writing

2022

As a part of an art writing workshop with philosopher Josefine Wikstrom at The Stockholm University of the Arts, I wrote an essay where I attempted to engage informative and speculative wring together to "talk with my" future research work.

See text here

Descending into the Cave - speculative fiction writing

2023

While developing "Pulling the Earth Strings" I wrote this short story as a way to process the dramaturgy for the audience in the work.

Screen-based installation and text work:

“The Oligarch’s Daughter that Wanted to Fly Freely Like a Bird in the Sky”

2020

During the first semester of the PhD, I spent time focusing on the question of “digital experience” to gain a clearer understanding of how this aspect was reflected in my project. Initially, I had set as a prerequisite that there was a correlation between complex hyperspace geometry and the digital and wanted to nuance this position.

I was interested in exploring if I could draw inspiration from the HYPERSPACE SPECULATIONS of modernist artists and use their methods of moving beyond normative perspectival experience as a way to reflect on contemporary digital experience.

I began by re-reading The Cyborg Manifesto by Donna Haraway and What Is the Measure of Nothingness? by Karen Barad, then moved on to We Are Data by John Cheney-Lippold, Psychopolitics by Byung-Chul Han, technology-related essays by Franco “Bifo” Berardi, and essays on social media cultures by Joshua Citarella. These four sources led me into a contemporary technology-pessimistic outlook, where the development of digital technology is primarily viewed through the lens of cognitive capitalism and neoliberal control over online life. This aligned with my initial premise, stated in the PhD proposal, that “our engagement with digital technology seems to be about striving for an ideal of power, free movement, and access that, while being granted, might also flatten our experience as much as expand it.”

To reflect this flattening effect of the digital, I began writing a SPECULATIVE fairy tale, The Oligarch’s Daughter Who Wanted to Fly Freely Like a Bird in the Sky, about a young, economically privileged woman who becomes flattened from a 3-dimensional to a 2-dimensional body, experiencing this as increased freedom. This was a way to create an image of radical screen existence and to reflect on capitalist mechanisms of digital identity and ontology.

At the same time, I took the opportunity to explore this in the choice of medium, as COVID-19 had moved all activities onto digital platforms, and I could not work with people in spatial installations. I chose to present the work on a computer screen, in one of the research school seminars via Zoom, as a digitally manipulated, performative lecture that turned into a storytelling session. Visually, the presentation displayed a morphing, manipulated play on the 2D, 3D, and layered spaces of the computer screen, where my actions repeated over time and became fragmented, using multiple camera angles, layered alpha (green screen) backgrounds, and augmented lenses. I also used a free-moving webcam to create proximity, giving a sense of close-up intimacy and disrupting normative perspectival directionality.

I found that this form was helpful for exploring and reflecting via the proposed methods of INTERDIMENSIONAL SPECULATIVE FABULATION and the use of digital technology as a means to “go where I cannot otherwise go,” moving into expanded dimensionalities. Through speculative text and digital augmentation, I could explore the “promise of access and free movement” that lies in neoliberal technological extensions of power (as well as in modernist utopian visions of abstraction) and how this promise can lead to extended capability and access but also to space-flattening, time-accelerating, physicality-negating effects.

While pursuing the speculative premise of the story of the Oligarch’s daughter to its conclusion, I left her feelings about being flattened onto a 2-dimensional plane open-ended. The conclusion of the story was in the language of a fairy tale ending, morphed with the positive language of an advertising campaign. This was intended to reflect how the limits and strains of the digital are often absorbed uncritically. However, I was not satisfied with the fairy-tale format, as it made my reflections simplistic and ironic, leading to a binary position. I felt that this reflected the technology-pessimistic outlook of the sources I was reading, which I found somewhat too binary in its good/bad division. I wanted to pursue a more nuanced position that could not be so easily categorised.

I realised that I wanted to delve deeper into the problem of how we see ourselves as agents using digital tools (which might be good or bad), but in fact, the digital is not external to us; it is already deeply interwoven into our ontological fabric. I wanted to research from a more complex, nuanced position that explicitly highlighted this biological/digital entanglement, including in terms of artistic media modulations.

Visually, I felt this theme suited the layering of 2D screen images through transparencies, overlays, and alpha channels that video editing software and built-in Zoom effects allowed. However, I felt limited in the INTERDIMENSIONAL MOVEMENTS I could explore when everything was collapsed onto a 2-dimensional screen. Therefore, I decided that moving forward, I would develop my work within installations, where the tactile and spatial physicality of the actual sites would provide a better friction with the digital, allowing me to reflect more nuancedly on our digitally/physically entangled experiences.

Early intermedia tests:

2021

I wanted to explore how digital interactivity, and augmentation could give the installations a performative expression in real-time and how the digitally computational movements could stretch the installations beyond normative / physical limits of temporality, layering, malleability, and spatiality. I therfore set up some string installations combined with projections of digital lens effects, exploring how to move between all the elements together. It might also provide a very direct and tangible way to explore the cybernetic and entangled perspectives that were becoming increasingly fundamental to the project.

Test role play sessions: while developing “The Panel Discussion of Another Dimension” in Room 61, KMD.

2022

With Emma Sjövall, Beate Poikane, Erla Auddunsdottir, Linn Mina Paasche, Marlene Rysstad, Ingeborg Jørgensen Tysse, Yasemin Orhan, Yimin Dong, Sepideh Garakani.