Research Catalogue

Excerpt from my forthcoming research project How to be a medium? including the script of How (not) to be a puppet and its first act as audio play.

We live in an age of Symbolic Misery (Stiegler, 2014). In this era, we listen to the same music, scroll through the same Instagram feeds, and we immerse ourselves in daily lives that are the same as others, gradually losing the 'singularity (Stiegler, 2014)' of individual difference. This homogenized structure of perception continuously reshapes our subjectivity (Simondon, 1958; Hui, 2016), making individual desires no longer emerge from unique experiences or internal generative processes, but are increasingly induced and regulated by external technological and symbolic systems (Stiegler, 2015). In this context, the question is no longer 'What do we produce?' but rather, 'Do our desires still belong to ourselves?'. As Stiegler (2014) pointed out, in order to enter the market more effectively, marketing technologies have developed an industrial aesthetic system centered on audiovisual media. This industrial aesthetic re-functionalizes individual sensory experiences following industrial interests, aiming to produce a replicable and controllable unified taste through the standardized pleasure. This huge 'desire project (libidinal management)' manipulates human drives for externalization through a diversity of apparatus (Agamben, 2009; Foucault, 1977), generating a sense of 'participation' via formalized interaction, restricting the level of perception and expression (Stiegler, 2015). Through daily repetition, this process gradually weakens the individual’s ability for subjectivation, trapping them within a passive structure of desire (Stiegler, 2014). This exposition is based on an artistic research project titled 'I Don’t Know Who I Am', an installation game. It invites players to watch a five-minute monologue, the story of a cow (inspired by, for example, Lacan et al., 2001), to explore the secrets hidden within this cow’s desire. After watching the video, the player will face a plate of real grass with soya sauce, and be invited to make a choice: whether or not to eat the grass. This installation game encourages players to reflect on a critical question: At a time when industrial aesthetics and subjective experience standardize individual desire, is increasingly hollowed out, where do our desires truly come from? Do they still emerge from internal generative processes, or have they long been preconditioned and disciplined by technological objects and symbolic systems?

Arts-based-philosophy is an emerging research concept at the cutting edge of the arts, philosophy and the Sciences in which cross-disciplinary research collectives align their research practices to finally stage their investigations in field-performances, shared with the public. Our research explores the significance of the HEART in artistic research and performance philosophy from a cross-cultural perspective, partially based on the concepts of the HEART in the works of two artist-philosophers, in which philosophy already became arts-based-philosophy: Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Aurobindo’s poetic opus magnum Savitri. We generally assume that the works of artist-philosophers are not only engaged in “creating concepts” (Deleuze), but their concepts are also meant to be staged artistically to let them bodily matter in fact. The role of the HEART in respect to this process of “bodily mattering” is the core objective under investigation: Firstly, because we hold that atmospheres trigger the HEART of a lived-body to taste the flavor of things it is environmentally engaged with basically in an aesthetic manner (Nietzsche). In this respect the analysis of the classical notion for the aesthete in Indian philosophy and aesthetics, sahṛdaya––which literally means, “somebody, with a HEART”––becomes crucial. Secondly, because the HEART is said to be not just reducible to one’s manifest Nature, but has access to one’s virtual Nature as well. The creation hymn in the oldest of all Vedas (Rgveda) for instance informs us that a HEART is capable of crossing being (sat) & non-being (asat), which makes it fluctuate among these two realms and even allows its aspirations to let virtual possibilities matter. Such concepts show striking similarities with contemporary concepts in philosophy-physics, e.g. the concepts of “virtual particles” and “quantum vacuum fluctuations” (Barad).

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Interior Architecture (INSIDE) Today, one percent of humanity is displaced and there are twice as many forcibly displaced people than in 2011 when the total was just under 40 million.  Many possible solutions are being given to the extent of providing shelters for migrants in precariousness. Many of these solutions seem to attempt to normalise precarity. But so little attention has been given to the perception the migrants have of that precariousness.   Then how can my response to such phenomena go beyond merely providing shelter to understanding the relationship between displacement and belonging? This research explores new processes towards knowing and claiming territory; it speculates on the domestic environment that may emerge through processes of listening, tracing and drawing together with those living on the front line of precariousness inside refugee camps.   To this extent this research will draw a new way of looking at hospitality as a tool for refugees to gain empowerment in the camps. How would that be for a refugee, to be a host in a hosting country?   

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society This thesis is an exploration of escapism, of clashes between the everyday and the sublime, of the concept of stargazing, human connection with stars, escapism and fiction. It is a thinking process behind creating a body of visual photographic work while also an individual set of reflections and arguments around the themes of stargazing, astronomy, photographic representations, darkness, and personal experiences. Through the photographic encounters and meetings with creators of hand-crafted planetariums, planetarium guides, star gazing passionates, amateur and professional astronomers and astrophotographers I follow the theme of stargazing, and through that fascination – the concept of positive escapism. With the use of photographic processes I document, I stage, I manipulate the images. This thesis results from my desire to challenge prominent binary narratives and welcome an act of speculation, of poetry, of reimagining andreclaiming realities.

Thesis of the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague, 2022 Master Photography & Society Welcome to the TROPICAL TRAUMA MISERY TOUR. I invite you to take this tour through aroofless theater called media, the stage representing the farce and media opportunism ofthe Brazilian president and far-right populist, Jair Messias Bolsonaro—The Myth.In 2018, Bolsonaro was stabbed during a presidential rally campaign. Against a backdrop ofpolarization, micro-narratives, and misinformation,The Mythstarred in an online politicalcampaign where he had complete control over his narrative and self-presentation. This tourinvestigates how the ambiguity of the stabbing event exposes the network propaganda in theBrazilian political game.Through a speculative documentary photography practice, this piece overcomes the politicalillusions and dissemination of nonprogressive values of digital populists. The fictionalizationof the real is a form of resistance towards such ideological shams and manipulations. Itdevolves into a meta-play, a farce within a farce.