End of term presentation

Rushing for Dissertation

This week, I submitted the last essay of my entire life (if I don't pursue a master's, that is). After writing the acknowledgements, it felt rewarding and strangely cathartic to reread everything from start to end, seeing the entirety of the project come to life in written form.

It was nice seeing how initial thoughts progressed into final concepts. For now, I will leave it up to hope and continue working on my graduation project! It was a painful process, but I am thankful to have done the dissertation, as it was a good point of reflection to understand the rationale and thought process behind everything I've done so far.

Ackowledging the important people during the dissertation journey

To sum things up and end the term, the atelier also gathered to do a round of sharing. We went through the term's progress, what ideas have been refined, and what we plan to do in term 2.

It was nice seeing everyone again after weeks of stressing and being holed up writing. Everyone's progress was quite different compared to when I last saw each other's work; some did minor changes, some did major ones. All in all, a pat on the back to everybody for completing their dissertations and finishing the term!

Sharing

For my end-of-term slides, I shared the changes from semester one to two, and the recent progress made to my platforms and final artefacts. Overall, the feedback was alright, although sadly, everything still seemed to look like loose bits and pieces, and the overall narrative still had much left to be desired. Andreas suggested proper documentation and archival of my work from semester one to serve as an entry point into semester two, as it would be a useful introduction that shows how ideas were progressed and refined along the way.

For now, it is still a challenge to bring everything together: the soundwalk, Intimate Acoustics, and Vibrational Ground, into a cohesive format that makes sense as a design project. What is lacking is an overarching narrative that ties it all together clearly, a problem I’ve had since the beginning of the term.

Besides this, I also had to think about my audience. Since everything is pretty interactive, I need to consider how people will interact with and experience the work, and where it will happen. For open studios, I will need to be careful in the curation of my work; how things are arranged and presented. I am reminded again to give sufficient context when explaining things to my audience, since my stuff are a little more artsy and abstract…

Right now, the context of my project is still a little unclear, so I have to strengthen my project positioning, which in this case is to get people to be more aware of sounds and their surroundings.

To recap, It starts with the soundwalks, guiding people on how to listen. Then, noticing the smaller sounds in life through an interactive thought piece. And finally, the fundamentals of it all: vibration, feeling sound at its most basic form.