CRITQUE SUMMARY — Chat with Ali

Have bee messaging and chatting with Ali Chalmers Braithwaite, on Zoe's suggestion and it's been really helpful and expansive in how I think about my research topic and the kind of experiments I could do. There are a lot of suggestions / possibilities / tangents / nuggets here, and I want to write them up to process everything and be able to revisit anything that's particularly helpful later on. 

Chat with Ali — 1/5/2020

Experiment stuff

• Augmented reality, face masks could be a cool direction — could even do this physically.. makeup? mask materials. Could look into drag, avant garde makeup https://www.instagram.com/isshehungry/
  https://www.instagram.com/ines.alpha/?hl=en
• For cultural references — look at people doing work in this space — https://yunyingh.com/, other people from the ArtCenter College of Design
• The illustrative potential to explore and materialise the world is great, keep going with it if you want to

• Pairing narrative elements (character, place, action) together, smashing generativeness together — manually — design the experience e.g. poster, game, etc. OR with tools like Tracery http://tracery.io/editor/ — put in variables. And it’ll spit out a combo 
• Similar  — computer generated language around input https://talktotransformer.com/
• Roleplaying games —> generative/participatory character narratives
  e.g. DnD, The Quiet Year

• World building exercises to think through different possibilities/versions spaces etc. — quadrant mapping, do more research into this

Textual/creative references? 

• Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici — a capitalist history of the body, and rebel-bodies — especially the female body/labour/Witches
• Technopaganism — Joshua Madra http://eldri.tech/. Technology and ritual
• A note on 'Why Witches'… bodies, bodies in communion, in relation to world and non-bodies
• VNS Matrix — South Australian art collective, similar work around tech and cyberfeminism https://vnsmatrix.net/

General tips

• World building exercises, get into it
• Little things and experiments are good for thinking through big concepts, don't write them off
• Make kit stuff now?? Make now to figure out what this is, and cull/edit later on. 
• Foreground things that matter to you! Design/research agenda. Keep it fun and 
• Do the blog stuff. It all counts — visual research, whatever — just write it up
• Writing-as-research — it totally can reflect the wicked anarchic energy of the topic. 
• It's ok to revisit anchors/texts. Sometimes nice to forget about them and come back. 

Their project 

• Fictionalising history — archives, Sappho's poetry
• Queer phenomenology
• Started out looking at queer methodology and design practice --> generative poetry and vr
• VR / digital focus as partly strategic: as significant relatively unexplored technological space, hijacking it for their queer agenda
• Strengths: conceptual working through, narrowing down, pulling references and thinking around what it could be? 
• Didn't really engage in participatory methods. Really clear idea of what she wanted it to be, and as a queer, just went with the vision

Action list

• Look more into these references
• I feel like I will play around with Tracery and Talk to Transformer, get back into a code space and keep switching between digital//physical?
• The world building excercise(s). Do the quadrant, and iterate !!
• I'm scared of approaching the conversation around culture and heritage, but take it slow. Do some research first.