Sweet dreams are made of…
Session 11–30.11.2020 — Own It — 5.K01
What is my biggest fear?
My biggest fear is that the people I work with will get my intentions wrong. I’m very afraid of just beeing voyeuristic and not helping anyone. Another fear is that my work won’t be seen by my target group.
The biggest disappointment for me would be if the project stays in the ZHdK bubble. The work itself does not necessarily have to go beyond the ZHdK, but my future works that builds on my bachelor thesis. In general I want to deal with topics that I want to explore after the zhdk.
Sonjoi Nielsen, 02.12.2020
Session 10–23.11.2020 — How Far? — 5.K01
What is my dream?
In class we had to tell our dreams. I found it funny, because I thought this assignment was rather rhetorical.
Since I had been dealing with the mining business a week before, because of the current corporate responsibility initiative, I told what I thought and where I saw problems. Since I am very rooted in Peru, I see that many problems are rooted in each other. There is a picture of a sad girl with the town of Cerro de Pasco in the background. This mine is currently operated by the Peruvian company Volcan, which was bought by Glencore a few years ago. Before Volcan, however, this mine had been operated for several hundred years to mine silver. So the problem of pollution has been there for several hundred years. With the purchase of the Volcan company, Glencore has to adapt standards. I completely agree that companies like Glencore, as described in the initiative, must comply with Swiss standards, but at the same time difficult, because mines like the one in Cerro de Pasco were already heavily polluted before the purchase of the mines. It is also interesting to note that closing down such mines or selling them to other companies does not necessarily solve the problem of pollution. The mining per se should not be the problem. It should be important that the mining is clean and does not cause environmental damage. On a political level something would have to happen in these countries to get the problem under control. If a Swiss company in Peru would be liable for pollution and leave (through the initiative), another company would take over the mine, which has lower standards. The problem would still be there.
I think the class has understood that I have chosen mining in Peru as my bachelor theme.
I am still interested in social issues. At Cerro de Pasco or other mines that are illegal I find it interesting that people are against it but still support it. They need to survive and they choose the mining industry because it’s lucrative enough. In la Rinconada, the highest city in the world, thousands of people go there to find gold. They expose themselves to violence, power and arbitrariness to find their happiness. I also see parallels in corruption. People complain that all the corrupt politicians and at the same time they support corruption by bribing people to speed up certain processes.
Session 09–16.11.2020 — Joyful Research
Conversation with a Peruvian,
The Difference of living in Switzerland and Peru
I visited Peru around 20 times in my life. There is no other country which is more inspiring for me than Peru because I know this country so well and I see that some things are totally different to Switzerland and that makes it so interesting. The whole country seems sometime like a big chaos, but it still works in way. It’s an order in a chaotic system, which is always very interesting to experience. Some areas of Peru (e.g. La Rinconda) have a lot in common with Hong Kongs, Kowloon Walled City.
I was talking with my mum about living in Peru and living in Switzerland. She’s living in Switzerland for over 30 years now. She grew up in Lima, Peru. She sees the difference of living in these countries much more clearly than me.
Although one experiences daily violence and political insecurity there, one can see that people like to live. Life in Peru is more intense than in Switzerland. You have to fight for your life, but at the same time you feel very alive. This is what all South Americans shock, when they arrive to Switzerland. In Switzerland you have all you need, you don’t have to study for years to survive. It’s all a matter of personal fulfillment. People in Peru are much more emotional, in a good and in a bad way. On the one hand you see the love they live their lives out, on the other hand the violence that is embedded in society is clearly visible.
It’s very interesting for me to see that I get used to this way of living in Peru when I’m there and when I come back I see the differences clearly. (I’m aware that living and being for holidays in Peru is like night and day) The mentality of living is totally different. While in Peru the whole family live together, it is normal in Switzerland to live separately. There are two philosophies of life that are clearly different and also have a financial aspect (in Peru especially).
My mum grew up very poor and is still very aware about poverty in Peru and tries to help wherever she has the chance. The financial aspect is much more relevant there than in Switzerland. My mother always says, if you have no money you are worth nothing there. It sounds very dark, but it has some truth in it. In our family and other relatives, the fight for land and properties is always omnipresent. When someone dies and inherits land, even people appear who you didn’t know existed and want a part of it. This fight can go on for generations and in the end nobody benefits from it. Unlike in Asia, where people live out a collective thinking, in Peru there is more the urge to be individual. There’s even a funny sentence what Peruvians say about Money and being individual: „A Peruvian’s worst enemy is another Peruvian.“ There are plenty of memes around this topic.
My mum is aware that this is not happening everywhere in Peru, but surprisingly often.
„So we vote for PPK, who is Nordamerican.“
Pedro Pablo Kuczynski (PPK) was a president of Peru (28 July 2016–23 March 2018), who was kicked after 2 Years of presidency, because he was involved in a corruption case. It is very funny that this was not a good decision either.
This conversation has led me to these topics, about which I would like to learn more:
Individual vs. Collective thinking
What makes something/someone authentic?
Cultural phenomena of behaviour in society
Sonjoi Nielsen, 20.11.2020
Session 08–09.11.2020 — Making Sense
My Interests
My interests lie in the people. I am interested in phenomena that occur in society. Be it the interaction of people with their environment, changing social classes or human behavior that tilt in an unexpected direction. Existential questions like sex, life, death, violence and love are very important. I find the diversity of people and the coexistence of different cultures when they meet each other very exciting. It can lead to a very interesting symbiosis or coexistence. It also has its dark sides, which can manifest itself as racism, for example. People are looking for their identity, looking for people who think the same way, which can lead to a collection of interesting ideas but also to a bubble thinking. I don’t know yet exactly what kind of project my bachelor thesis will go into, but it should definitely deal with the human existence. How far the work in philosophy should go is not clear yet. My work should raise questions about the behavior of people in the 21st century. I don’t necessarily want to answer the questions, but to show them in a fragmented way.
Literature Review:
Introduction à une poétique du divers (1995, Edouard Glissant). Introduction to a Poetics of Diversity, trans. Celia Britton (Liverpool University Press, 2020).
With his “Introduction à une poétique du divers”, Glissant was able to sketch out the fragmentary theory of worldwide relations, which provides us with the philosophical tool to understand globalization as a cultural phenomenon. A poetics that leaves the boundaries of the aesthetic behind and is fed by ethnological, psychological and sociological insights.
Interesting Topics:
-Multicultural coexistence
-Cultural Identity
-Globalization as a cultural phenomenon
Black Skin, White Masks (1952, Frantz Fanon), (1967 translation by Charles Lam Markmann: New York: Grove Press)
Black Skin, White Masks has had a major impact on civil rights, anti-colonial and black consciousness movements around the world and is the unsurpassed study of the black psyche in a white world. Celebrated for its scholarly analysis and poetic grace at its first publication in 1952, the book remains a vital force in the work of one of the most important theorists of the revolutionary struggle, colonialism and racial difference in history.
Interesting Topics:
-Colonization
-Civil rights
-Racial discrimination
Humankind : A Hopeful History (2019, Rutger Bregman), Rowohlt Buchverlag; 7. edition
In the ground humans are good: this is the conclusion reached by historian Rutger Bregman in his new book subtitled “A New History of Mankind„ (Im Grunde gut). With it he contradicts philosophers such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau — and takes humans thereby purely scientifically under the magnifying glass.
(maybe needed to read Hobbes and Rousseau)
Interesting Topics:
-„Humans are in the ground good“
-Behavior of humans in different circumstances
The Parasitic Mind: How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense (2020, Gad Saad)
There is a war against the truth and if we do not win it, intellectual freedom will be a victim. The West’s commitment to freedom, reason and true liberalism has never been so seriously threatened as it is today by the oppressive forces of political correctness.
Interesting Topics:
-Fake News
-Common sense
-Intellectual Freedom
The Culture of Narcissism:
American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (1979, Christopher Lasch)
Lasch’s identification of narcissism not only as an individual suffering but also as a burgeoning social epidemic was groundbreaking. His diagnosis of American culture is even more relevant today as he predicts the limitless extension of the fearful and clinging narcissistic self into every part of American life.
Interesting Topics:
-Narcissism as a cultural phenomena
The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989, Slavoj Žižek), Verso Books
The question of human action in a postmodern world is addressed in this book. From the sinking of the Titanic to Hitchcock’s rear window, from Wagner’s operas to science fiction, from alien to Jewish joke, Zizek’s meticulous analyses explore the ideological fantasies of wholeness and exclusion that make up human society.
Interesting Topics:
-Ideologies
-Totalitarianism
-Racism
Meaning and Authenticity: Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor on the Drama of Authentic Human Existence (2008, Brian J. Braman), University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division; 1st edition (March 1, 2008)
Meaning and Authenticity is a dialogue between Bernard Lonergan and Charles Taylor, who both claim that there is a normative conception of authentic human life that overcomes moral relativism, narcissism, privatism and the breakdown of the public self.
(Critics by Christopher Lasch and Theodor Adorno: Lasch says it can tip in the direction of narcissism, while Adorno says it can be a glorification of privatism.
Interesting Topics:
-The question of what is authentic
-Relativism, Narcissism, Privatism
Individualism And Collectivism (1995, Harry C Triandis), Routledge 1st Edition
This book examines the constructs of collectivism and individualism and the far-reaching effects of individualism and collectivism on political, social, religious, and economic life, drawing on examples from Japan, Sweden, China, Greece, Russia, the United States, and other countries.
Interesting Topics:
-Collectivism vs. Individualism
Projects:
“No Ghost Just a Shell” (1999),
Pierre Huyghe and Philipe Parreno
Annlee is a cheap model which can be bought in the internet. She has no particular qualities. “True heroes are rare and extremely expensive …” (Parreno) Buying ‘Annlee’ rescued her from an industry that had condemned her to death.
The project addresses film und music industries issues as well overlaps with questions about how identity and difference can be formulated today, given the current demand for the mastery of multiple individual subject realizations.
An ‘Annlee’ shell that is always the same, ‘authors’ who are always subjective? Is it possible to imagine a figure without character, how does ‘identity’ come into being, in reality, in the cinema, in art?
The question of what makes something a character and not just a figure is interesting. You can also transfer this to, what makes something a human being? (How an embodied object gets a character/soul?)
The eyes of Gutete Emerita (1996), Alfredo Jaar
The artist visited Rwanda in August shortly after the genocide in 1994, where he met a woman named Gutete Emerita, who had to witness the slaughter of her husband and sons murdered in front of her eyes. Somehow she was able to escape with her daughter.
Jaar made the very conscious decision not to use any images of the carnage, the bodies that still lay rotting at the site; instead he describes it in text choosing the medium of the lightbox with alternating transparencies. At the end he shows the eyes of the woman, whose expression he cannot forget. This is essential for Jaar’s artistic approach, not to confront the viewer directly with the atrocities of the genocide, but to face her/ him with the gaze of a survivor, who has been a direct witness to something it is impossible to bear witness to.
The idea of showing very dark and brutal themes in a subtle but strong way is, what I find very interesting.
Boris Mikhailov, Photography
Boris Mikhailov is interested in people’s self-presentation. What’s interesting about his photographs is that the people he photographs try hard to look good and make the right pose, but what simply fails. It’s exactly this failure that interests him so much. That’s where the true authentic feeling that people have comes into play.
For me his photography are very interesting because he tries to capture the poeple in an authentic way through these imperfections, although the photographed are sometimes not aware of it.
Maurizio Cattelan, Artworks (Sculptures)
I’m very interested in the way how Maurizio Cattelan deals with serious topics in a humorous way.
Speculative Future, Filip Dujardin, Josef Schulz (Photography)
The photographers Filip Dujardin & Josef Schulz experiment with logic and reality, pushing the limits of what is possible to build in the real world but in a way that leaves doubts.
The important question I see here is what is real. With all the flood of information it is sometimes very difficult to distinguish what is real and what is fake.
Dream Journals (2016–2019), Jon Rafman
In the dream journals the artists visualizes his dreams in a fragmental way. The whole storytelling is split into fragments.
Also the aesthetic of the animation are interesting for me, because the way how it’s animated is simple and sometimes irritating, what makes it more authentic. In general I’m not interested into polish something until it has no imprint, because then it might lose the authenticity.
Wall Of Lies, (2020) Radio Free Brooklyn
A month before the presidential election, community radio station Radio Free Brooklyn showed a huge mural entitled “Wall of Lies,” which includes over 20,000 Mistruths told by Donald Trump since he took office.
Kowloon Walled City
Walled City became an ungoverned enclave after the New Territories were leased to the UK by China in 1898, which brought a lot of people to this place.
It was the densest place on earth with 50,000 people on just two hectares of land the size of two rugby fields.
What’s very intersting is the way how this city emerged. A society was formed by “chaos”, without any rules from outside.
Sonjoi Nielsen, 15.11.2020
Session 04-07, 08/09.10.2020 — Free Flow Retreat
Pick 3 books
For the free flow retreat we had to bring three books from the library, which attracted us for some reason.
I was very surprised that most of the books I picked in the library were related to violence or death. I find the topic of violence very interesting, because it has been around since the beginning of mankind and is still omnipresent.
The final decision of my books were about ethics, freedom and sex, life, death and violance.
I’m very intersted in the human beeing. What traces does the humans leave behind? How does humans interact with the changing environment? What does the Environment with them? The irrational part of the human beeing interests me a lot.
Speed Dating
The first big exercise was a brainstorming where always two people had to talk about a topic they’re interested in. I mostly tried to talk about the topic of my partner, because I’m interested for a lot of topics and want to be inspired. For me it’s always interesting listening to different ideas which can led to new ideas.
After many conversations I was not sure what to take with me. My problem is still that many of the topics are very design oriented. Even my topics are in the setting of interaction design very hard to achieve. My main focus is not design a solution or a method. I want to raise question and questioning social issues. I’m extremely sure that awareness is not present everywhere.
It’s not about questioning general issues, but rather about illuminating the core or the different aspects of it. In my opinion it is perfectly legitimate to point out problems without having to solve them.
This is the reason why I’m not sure how to approach this, because it seems to me as if you have to solve problems or develop methods.
Sonjoi Nielsen, 06.11.2020
Session 03, 05.10.2020 — Positioning in writing
Manifesto: Manifesto del Futurismo
I took the Manifesto of Futurism because it was the first answer I got from Google. According to Google, this manifesto is relevant.
I don’t want to be a designer, I want to be an artist.
My goal is not to change the world. I want to reflect the world and show what is happening in our world. I don’t see myself as a designer and I don’t want to be one. I’m interested in human phenomena that arise in connection with the interaction of the environment. I want to explore them and express them through artworks. My primary goal was never to become a designer. I started to study interaction design because I saw a lot of potential in learning and seeing different methods and views.
I always wanted to be able to express myself freely in a certain way. Design has a primary goal, it helps the people to teach or understand something. Based on something that has already been worked out, the designer’s task is to bring the product closer to the customer or to make it experienceable. Why I see myself more as an artist is because I want to decide freely what I want to showcase and because I don’t want to solve any problems, I just want to show them and raise awareness. I think as a designer you are always connected to a certain product (can be a method and many other things too), where you have to solve problems. The artist in the other hand does it very indirect which is for me a lot more interesting.
“Pick a topic of interest and what do you think you can say about this that no one ever heard before?”
The goal as a designer to learn how to create an experience is in my opinion a matter of time and skill. Instead of creating an experience to get a rational behavior it is a lot more interesting for me to focus on the irrational part, in the unconscious mind of the human beeing.
The idea of picking a new topic brings me to Boris Groys Book “Über das Neue”, which deals about the question in cultural aspect in what is new. The word new depends strongly in the context.
Finding a topic which no one ever heard about it, is impossible. It’s like searching for an answer to a problem you don’t know yet. First you have to find where your interests are, then you find a topic where you want to do deeper research and then you might will find something which no one ever heard before.
Sonjoi Nielsen, 07.10.2020
Session 02, 28.09.2020 — In Formation
For this session we had to print out a poster campaign, that bring awareness and wake individuals towards action.
In May 1970, students from the University of Berkeley met to design a poster workshop, under the direction of Malaquias Montoya, a main figure of the Chicano Art Movement. The posters are demonstrations against the wave of militant conservatism in the early 1970’s.
Sonjoi Nielsen, 28.09.2020
Session 01, 21.09.2020 — What is the Action?
In this course we try to reflect on ourselves to get to know what we could do as our bachelor thesis. Where are our interests and where can we make a contribution?
What made an impact on me the last two years?
My time at the Swiss Army:
Even though I am against the military, I wanted to gain experience of what it is like to be a part of such an organization. I was able to gain a lot of interpersonal experience, which helped me a lot in life. In the military I came into contact with different people I could never have met in civilian life. Some of them did not fit me at all, because they had completely different world views. But I still tried to understand why they think that way and why they have this world view. Through my learned interpersonal skills I can better hold conversations with different people. My goal is generally to avoid being in a bubble.
Urs Fischer’s “Play”:
Shortly before my studies I had the chance to be part of an art project of Urs Fischer. He started a project with my father, which was about office chairs that drive autonomously and react to external influences. As a mechnical designer I had the chance to design a charging station for this artwork. But the interesting aspect for me was that I could see how an artist like Urs Fischer works. It was very inspiring to see how many people were involved in this project. Interaction designers were also part of this project, which brought me to the ZHdK to study interaction design.
Two weeks ago was the Zurich Art Week and I got to know one of his best colleagues. Both studied together at the ZHdK many years ago. His friend studied Visual Communication and Urs Fischer studied photography. Today his friend is a curator and produces art for Urs Fischer, among other Artists. It is very inspiring for me to see how once students who studied together once become famous and successful.
What impact did I do on others?
I find it quite difficult to say this because I think people might have different opinions about where I have had an impact. But I think in general I like to motivate people and get them to do things that they might not have done before. Since I have a wide range of interests, I can certainly inspire certain people with it.
Sonjoi Nielsen, 21.09.2020
