I spent last week at Elsewhere. This was a skeptical undertaking on my part because I was unsure how the experience would relate to my thesis project and to the deliverables I need to finish in the upcoming weeks. I have also been skeptical of educational endeavors that have vague goals or lack explicit activities that will support the attainment of those educational goals. This doesn’t mean that the trip lacked these things- only that I had to make a big stretch to relate them to me. I felt like I would be closed to new experiences if I had stayed behind. Plus, I despeately want to find some sense of what expert-like process entails in the art & design community. So I went. Generally I make every effort just to observe or interact with others’ processes.

This experience did have a lot to offer, but I think it would had a better effect on me earlier in my educational sequence- i.e. when the notions of ordering and cataloguing things and artifacts had greater significance to my research practice. I also felt closed off from the world, trapped in a closed system of objects and signifiers. That is, to a degree, the point of the residency, but my goal is to explicitly deal with existing social problems and the systems that constrain and define them in the “real” world.

Nonetheless, the opportunity for reflection and heterotopia does offer unseen possibilities for “mental recombination.” In that sense, some casual gleanings from long-forgotten biology and science texts yielded some important pairings of images, text, thought, and presence.

Since I have been working explicitly on how to re-represent evolution, the connections made at this particular juncture were beneficial. They provided an uncommon breakthrough that connects 3D structures with time and conventional two-dimensional representations. Perhaps even a new visual language will ensue…stay tuned…