Week 70
Body painting & the journey of an idea, holding on to past relationships, conversation about my work, growth as a facilitator and what I'm currently reading.
A full week – with plenty of ups, downs, introspection, extrospection, non-communication and vulnerability.
I think, for a while now, what I have so ferociously desired is stability – in thoughts, feelings, relationships and everything else that constitute my life. What I have come to realise now is that the sheer desire for stability is naive because the idea, as Paul Kalanithi would put it in When Breath Becomes Air, misses the messiness of real human life.
It occurs to me tonight that the beauty of life might just lie in the everyday – a new challenge that governs the day, filled with values of variables that will never be the same on another on. The joy is simply to experience the variables, completely independent of their positive or negative force. In doing so, you allow the day to take you over like a wave and tomorrow, a new one awaits your name.
I have dealt with pain, joy, hurt and sorrow; much like all of you have. Many days appear like a frightful wave and I tend to become wary of its arrival. I tense myself up, prepared to shield myself against the oncoming force – which is the problem. It’s merely resistance and sheer denial of the wave’s arrival. I think my journey lies in allowing the water to touch my skin, allowing the force to embrace me in its outwardly chaos, letting it engulf my entire being and gently dropping me off for the next one.
I am simply a passenger.
[Experiments & Self-Realisations] Body painting and the journey of an idea
This past week, I began work on a piece of software that can allow people to ‘paint’ with their bodies.
The program is simple – it leverages posenet, developed by Google to estimate body poses, to track different joints on the human body and paste them on a canvas according to a pre-defined frequency. The output is not what is fascinating to me today, it’s the birth of the idea that has told me something about my creative process.
While walking back home from office on a Friday evening is when the idea was born in my head. I walked back frantically, resolving the program in my head before spitting it out on my computer the moment I reached home. After I made it and put it out, I began to wonder how did this idea enter my head and what influenced its creation in the way that it did end up being created.
I believe I store information in two ways – one that is subconscious, but long-term; meaning that I don’t know what is being stored or when it’ll be recalled. The other is short-term, impressionable, from which I am directly influenced in my work.
In this particular idea, it was Golan Levin’s TED talk about art that looks back at you which influenced the direct idea of taking some sort of image from the webcam and pasting it on a canvas with a pre-decided interval.
Now, I could have pasted anything on the canvas. I chose to use the entire human body and, also, show links between different parts of the body. Now this, as far as I understand, is influenced or inspired by Chelsea Cocking’s graduate work at the MIT Media Lab where she began with the question: what would it be like if we could see our movement?
The interesting thing about this ‘inspiration’ or influence is that I had seen her work months ago and briefly skimmed through it because it wasn’t as exciting to me in the moment. Yet, somehow, it had stayed in my head which is strange because I seldom remember what I actually want to remember. That evening when I walked back, the visual was apparent in my head and I don’t know how, but I can recall Chelsea’s work even thought I skimmed through it months ago.
Things are influencing me without my knowledge. I now realise why it’s important to surround yourself with inspirational material or, actually, even choose to not surround yourself with a particular kind of material. Let your life and unique circumstances take over your creative self like a (for lack of a better word) wave.
[Reflections] The strange ways in which we hold on to our relationships with people
On Saturday evening, I found myself deep in search of a specific song. I was about to head into the kitchen to cook my dinner and I needed that song to play as I made what I wanted to have.
The song was Tumko Dekha To Yeh Khayal Aaya by Jagjit Singh. The last time I heard this song was in my grandmother’s kitchen, as she cooked and I passed by in broad daylight as a 12 year old. I haven’t met my paternal grandparents in over 6 years and rarely do I even think about them. Yet, as I stood there in kitchen with water boiling in the saucepan, with my hands on my waist, I closed my eyes and smiled.
I’ve tried to deny their existence for the last 6 years. I’ve also tried to deny my relationship with them, and with so many more people. But they are still there, entering my life in the way of the actions I perform that were once theirs.
I am still connected to them and I still uphold our relationship in the strangest of ways – without speaking a word to them, but carrying out actions that will forever remind me of them.
[Conversations] Things about my work - Fabrica
Just today, I had a virtual call with the Fabrica Creative Residents team for a possible place in their semester-based residency next year. While the call was good, I was pleasantly taken aback by the interest that my work was able to generate and the quality of discussion on the call.
One of the two people was an interaction designer in Italy and she started to point out patterns in my work that just hadn’t been evident to me before. She pointed out that I was always attempting to bridge the gap between the virtual and the physical, often by incorporating movement as a new method to interact with computers. This was true, this is what started my journey in computational arts and, somewhere, I lost these collection of words to describe my work.
Her word choices were also immaculate and her observations were extremely sharp & critical. I remember looking at her as she took her time to elaborate on a point in a language that was not her mother-tongue (she was Italian), and wondering the level of criticality in her dialogue and her ability to express her perspective, almost with an underlying tone of bravery.
It has been a long time since I’ve thought, “wow, that’s something I need to learn now”. After this discussion, it becomes clear to me that I need to be in a more creatively-challenging space, surrounded by people who I have surprisingly a lot to learn from.
[Reflections] My growth as a facilitator
This week, I also conducted an internal brand development workshop for TinkerLabs. The workshop was unexpectedly successful, as I managed to challenge the heads of the organisation to rethink, re-articulate and debate on important points that needed collective coherence.
There was a moment when I was walking around the room, while there were two opposing thoughts being discussed by the participants simply because I had made the decision of pointing out that both were right. Had this been me in 2022, I would have worked with them to help them arrive at one but that’s what an inexperienced facilitator would do.
After this workshop, the role of the facilitator became very clear to me. All this while, I’ve been more of a conductor and not a ‘facilitator’ – the purpose of whom is to facilitate the exploration of someone else’s thoughts (group or person).
Even after realising this, I fail to do it with some people because it is so incredibly tough. Every person or group requires precise attention and hyper-personalised dialogue. I earlier thought that there was a playbook of sorts, patterns which could be identified and treated immediately with a common solution, but that is so not the case.
I don’t think that a good mentor can be a good mentor for everybody. It’s probably one of the most human-like positions out there, no matter your qualifications, there will just be some people who will work well with you and some who won’t.
But your endeavour will always remain to try, for as many people as possible.
[Reading] When Breath Becomes Air – Paul Kalanithi
I’ve recently been reading When Breath Becomes Air by Paul Kalanithi. Reading the book, I think I know that I like simple books. The art of spinning words for complexity and poetic quality has never really appealed to me. I like simple words, arranged smartly to communicate ideas with explorative depth. This is why I liked Illusions by Richard Bach as well, because it exhibits a similar quality.
And probably why I rarely enjoy the classics – The Great Gatsby, Walden, The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy and similar ‘popular’ books were downloaded years ago, but remain unread in my Kindle library. I couldn’t get past a few pages, even if I forced myself to read them.