Artisitc outcomes from my Masters thesis, inspired by Jane Bennet's book "Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things"

Planned Obsolescence is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so that it becomes obsolete (i.e., unfashionable, or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. The work seeks to bring attention to the practice of planned obsolescence by reclaiming discarded circuits and repurposing them into unplanned forms of newness. The exhibition was an outcome from collective study into materiality of media practices and its socio-ecological implications. The course - Archeology of Media Infrastructures - was taught at Aalto MediaLab by media artist Samir Bhowmik.

generated by voicebox by Botnik. This is a satirical course catalogue, co-written by a predictive keyboard which uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate typing suggestions. The predictions are made from within the corpus of a source text. This keyboard was fed as source text, all the course descriptions from the department of art at Aalto University - and now it is proficient in 'art writing'.‍

The lichen Cladonia Rangiferina, changes its ontology across realities. It exists as myth, in the minds of humans as the beard of a mighty forest spirit. It exists as food, for reindeer. SEM is a type of electron microscope that produces images of a sample by scanning the surface with a focused beam of electrons. The electrons interact with the atoms in the sample, creating signals that describe the topography and create the image down to the resolution of a single nanometer. As part of my artistic research with Reindeer Lichen, I made a series of microscopic scans using the Scanning Electron Microscope.

I spent about seven months researching and artistically engaging with the lichen Cladonia Rangiferina. There was a collaborative research phase - with students from Parsons University, New York - that lasted about three months and was followed by individual production. The research months consisted of discussions, reading, watching and thinking about ecology, the role of artists, ideas about control, and ecological relationships inhabited by humans and non-humans. An increasing fascination with glass jars and through some gardening tutorials, I learned how to make tiny terrariums. Aiming to keep the lichen alive, I made 7 experimental terrariums to test the ideal conditions suited for their survival. Terrariums usually consist of some gravel, a layer of activated carbon and some form of soil/substrate. After much adjusting of different factors like air, water and microbes, an almost ideal solution was to just leave the terrariums out in the snow, which preserved the lichen perfectly.

made with Processing