I can feel the end of the masters slowly approaching with the passing of every week. As I write this, I have completed the final Fabacademy challenge of the course just a few days ago. My team and I have prototyped the interface board for our VJ set and tested it out with TouchDesigner and Ableton communicating over a shared IP address. This has lead to a more tangible vision of our ideas for the final installation, but there is still a long way to go.
Chris, Juaco and I are in the process of wrapping up our final project together, Hybrid Ecologies. It is the biggest exhibition any of us has ever done before. We started just a few weeks ago, yet we are moving faster than ever before. It’s amazing that we have the chance to explore what we want to do so freely. We are immensely grateful for the welcoming embrace from Akasha hub and the opportunities our institutions have provided us.
Less than a year ago was the first time I ever exhibited my work. I was on my own, displaying my bachelor’s thesis in a small gallery on the periphery of Milan. So much time has passed since then, and so much knowledge has been gained. I can’t believe that now, I am collaborating with two immensely talented classmates and an artistic collective to display a 5+ interactive installation exhibition at a decentralised organisation in Barcelona to over 50 people. It feels like a dream, and I am both very excited and nervous.
In addtion to that final event, I am also collaborating with other classmates on smaller projects. For Pippa’s REEFish project, I have been asked to make some beautiful visuals which will be projected at the Bioborg event on June 26th. She asked me for some underwater effects to show beside her 3D clay printed corals. Then, I have also planned to work on a Fractal project with Paula for her part of the Bioborg event too. Lastly, I will also be displaying the Artificial Constellations project at Busi’s exhibition at Futurity.
It seems like we’ve found lots of synergies within the class and managed to collaborate in many different ways, embracing not only our similarities but also our differences. I love being able to find common narratives and ideas amongst us and work on the things we really enjoy.
Although there is still a large amount of work to do, and I can see myself flying around like a hyperactive bouncy ball, I can visualise the day of our final event. I will be nervous and shaky, but most people won’t probably notice. Things will definitely go wrong, and that terrifies me. There will be so much anticipation, yet it will likely be over in the blink of an eye. Just like this entire Master program.
I know that theses are supposed to be written in a certain way, with specific guidelines and formatting conventions. However, at at the Master’s in Design for Emergent futures, we were heavily discouraged to follow those protocols. Instead, we were steered towards designing, creating and living from the first person perspective and re-evaluate the way the world works.
Depending on who you ask, we were eagerly encouraged/forced to document everything, all the time. If not, how could we ever share our ideas and projects with the world? This intimate, real perspective is reflected in the way we write and have chosen to display our work to the world.
In this moment, I am also working on the final video submission for the Masters’. I have a specific vision of aggregating all the notions I’ve learned throughout the courses and how they have been applied in my practice. I question how my mindset has shifted since the beginning of the Master and what are the things I’ve learned and topics I have familiarised myself with.
In retrospect, as I examine and review my work from the past nine months, I believe that there was an invisible string running through all my big projects and failed experiments which posed itself in the form of a big question: How can humans live in harmony with Technology & Nature?
Each project seemed to contain this notion of symbiosis yet hybridity. When I think of the spaces and environments I have created, I think of juxtaposition of the “natural” and the “artificial” world, which encompass mathematics, art, biology, humans, animals and everything in between, which at the end of the day are not as different as one may initially think.
This is why I believe the title Hybrid Ecosystems is not only suitable for my final project, but also for this thesis. Over the course of this Master program, the narrative string which fit over all of my assignments, projects and interventions seems to be that we are living in a multifaceted world, with many interactions that relate us not only to ourselves but also to what we define as “nature” vs “the man made world”.
I have explored this aforementioned question through a wide variety of lenses and themes, starting from the Bio & Agri Zero course with Nuria and Jonathan, all the way to the final Design Ethics paper submission.
Althought the list could be longer, I’ve managed to categorise these themes in a list below:
How can humans live in harmony with Technology & Nature?
Through resilience and radicality
Biomimicry
Environmental Conservation
Open source innovation
Sensorial experiences
Activism
Climate Literacy
Digital fabrication - globally connected, locally produced
New materials - biobased
Multimedia installations
Urban farming
Circular economies
Inter-species collaboration
One of the observations I’ve made is that this Master is more about unlearning and re-learning rather than just learning. We have deconstructed almost every notion we’ve had, from how the economy works, solutions to recycling systems, to what “real” jobs even are, material literacy, to technology’s black boxes, to even what the future(s) truly means.
Now the only thing I can’t wait to do is explain these hyper conceptual academic MDEF bubble buzzwords to people in the outside and have them look and me and say:
WHAT THE FUTURES?!