


There is beauty to the illegible. To hinting at systems otherwise. Resisting reduction.

a thousand incommensurate worlds



Jonathan Skjøtt is a designer, programmer, and researcher working on an expanding range of projects. They are currently studying Visual Game & Media Design at the Danish Royal Academy.

They are half of [LOOOADING](https://loooading.com), a fledgling small studio for interactive digital projects. LOOOADING recently released a [woven paper heart advent calendar](https://www.xn--fletvrk-qxa.dk/).

![a little pixel artwork with a & sign on it](images/ritewelcome.png)

about



Annotation is condensation / curation / comment / elaboration. Annotation systems are meta-tools which are often not used to generate final products or results: rather they serve as scaffolds augmenting thinking and collaboration processes. This page explores the meaning and design of annotations, the different forms annotations take, and strives to illuminate how meta-tools change how we work with ideas.

## Definitions and keywords

Thesaurus
> note, notation, comment, gloss; footnote; commentary, explanation, interpretation, observation, elucidation, explication, exegesis.

Oxford's
> a note by way of explanation or comment added to a text or diagram.

Webster's
>a note added by way of comment or explanation.

## Relationship between entity and annotation

No annotation exists on its own, it must exist in relation to some entity: whether that be a physical object or a piece of media. Drastically different narratives surround the entity and the annotion (this is part of the reason the entity and annotation cannot exist as one.) For an annotation to be an annotation both the source and the comment have to be present at the same time. / An annotation does exist outside of its relationship with the source

## Quotes

> When Ada wrote her footnotes to Menabrea's text, her work was implicitly supposed to be reinforcing these hierarchical divisions between centers and margins, authors and scribes. Menabrea's memoir was the leading article; Ada's work was merely a compilation of supporting detail, secondary commentary, material intended to back the author up. But her notes made enormous leaps of both quantity and quality beyond a text which turned out merely to be providing the occasion for her work.
<cite> Zeros + Ones by Sadie Plant - [source](https://beforebefore.net/digitalstudio/s18/media/01sadieplant.pdf)</cite>

> Only when digital networks arranged themselves in threads and links did footnotes begin to walk all over what had once been the bodies of organized texts. Hypertext programs and the Net are webs of footnotes without central points, organizing principles, hierarchies. Such networks are unprecedented in terms of their scope, complexity, and the pragmatic possibilities of their use. And yet they are also--and have always been--immanent to all and every piece of written work."
<cite> Zeros + Ones by Sadie Plant - [source](https://beforebefore.net/digitalstudio/s18/media/01sadieplant.pdf)</cite>


## Visual Analysis Comics Class by Nick Sousanis

[source](https://spinweaveandcut.com/visual-analysis-unfurling/)

> Its format is open – students trace, redraw, photocopy, layer over the page they analyze with acetate – anything in which they engage with the work in an intimate and visual way. Drawing directly on the page is key! This active interaction with the composition invites them to start noticing everything the author(s) employs to construct meaning. After students move their hand and eyes over a page for an extended period – I suggest at least half an hour – so much spills out as they discover all sorts of things about the maker’s choices and creative decisions not previously apparent. They find every square inch invested in meaning. Students develop their own coding strategies, diagram, work in multiple layers – the results are frequently this beautiful and insightful explosion of thinking. It’s not that doing analysis solely in writing can’t be extremely insightful (of course it can), but in my experience, this direct engagement of hand and eyes opens students to seeing in ways they couldn’t otherwise. (They can always turn their annotations into essays afterwards if so desired, but the thinking is in that direct spatial engagement.)"
<cite> Nick Sousanis</cite>

![a visual analysis of a comic book page](https://spinweaveandcut.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/08/vis-analysis-12.jpg)


## Annotated Portfolios by Bill Gaver & John Bowers 

[source](https://www.uio.no/studier/emner/matnat/ifi/INF5591/h16/pensumliste/gaver-and-bowers---2012---annotated-portfolios-copy.pdf)

> designs need to be annotated if they are to make clear and accountable contributions to research. Such annotations not only point to salient features of an artifact but also bridge between the artifact and issues of concern to the research community. Insofar as such issues include conceptual ones, annotated artifacts can be seen to serve some of the same roles as theoretical statements, identifying activities and qualities deemed important for research and suggesting ways these might be addressed.
<cite> Bill Gaver & John Bowers  </cite>

> Annotations have an indexical relationship to the artifacts they are relevant to. Annotations depend on traceable connections to design for their significance, just as designs are illuminated through annotation.
<cite> Bill Gaver & John Bowers  </cite>


annotation

a photo of an auto rickshaw with a driver and a passenger



There is a lack of documentaries which do not exoticise rickshaw drivers nor depict them as inferior or poor. Our documentary project aimed to capture the lives of rickshaw driver families in an honest way. 

This project was conducted by three filmmakers (including me) and two Hyderabadi locals. We did not immediately define what the documentary would be about but focused on building good relationships with four rickshaw driver families. I was one of the cameramen capturing the environment whenever we went out to visit one of the families. I also supported our local collaborators when we were conducting interviews. By going through this process, we were able to capture the unique stories of each family: their backstories, duties, and dreams.

![a collage with images from the production process](images/auto_rickshaw_four.png)

During post-production, I was part of the three-person core team responsible for finding the story and editing everything together.


auto rickshaw



Having a base, a refuge, a place to slow down and think. A refuge providing roots, enabling relating through making.

# Stations

### Sewing station
The sewing station is for the media of cloth and fabric. 

-  Phoenix 111, hand drive, sewing machine 1951

### Carpentry station
The carpentry station is for the media of wood.

- A høvlbænk providing a base work-station

### Gardening station
The gardening station is for plants.

base

beverages



Another kind of wings, the vehicle which might enable connection rather than alienation. Mechanics which invite tingering and understanding. Potentially unpretentious, yet political. 

## Bicycle Repair and Maintenance

[Sheldon Brown](http://sheldonbrown.com/)

## Cycling as Media

[Critical Cycling](http://criticalcycling.com/english/)

_<br>
\  -o-__/<br>
/-\  ---  /-\\<br>
\\-/ '''' \\-/`<br>


biking



Over time I have developed up a practice of collecting seemingly useless yet somehow inciting objects.

Most commonly objects are found which, by others, have been labelled as trash.

These objects are then used when some spatial or physical need arises.

Trying to achieve some aim, perhaps making some kind of container or hanging some object at a certain angle, the collection of inciting objects becomes pieces of a puzzle. What combination and arrangement of objects will respond well to the challenge faced?

Sometime back I had to create a vertical monitor stand. One combination of inciting objects which solved the puzzle was a combination of some clothe-hangers, a vacuum head, and a candleholder:

![a stand allowing monitors to stand vertically](images/monitor_holder.jpg)


bricolage



I have been really inspired by people who made their own time-tracking tools for a while. The first system which inspired my was Devine Lu Linvega's [xxiivv](https://wiki.xxiivv.com/#about) project. This monday I stumbled upon Blinry's [habitctl](https://github.com/blinry/habitctl) project.

Blinry's project is written in Rust and seeing how straigtforward it can be I decided to make my own little CLI time-tracker: Chasmic.

I ended up creating a simple system which makes it possible for me to keep a list of the ideas which are currently on top of my head and a log system which makes it possible for me to log thoughts I have about certain ideas.

This system works decently well. I even made an ambient visualisation of the amount of log statements per topic over time (the lines in the bottom of the photo above).

Whereas I like the tool as the product of an exploration, I don't think I will use it to actually keep track of my ideas. Mostly because I don't have a vision for how I want to work with the ideas that I document.

Just when I finished my tool I got into a conversation with [Ryan](https://ryanprior.com) who suggested that I look at org-mode (commonly used as part of Emacs) for inspiration. This turned out to be a wonderful suggestion. 


chasmic

a visualisation showing the average color in feature films



### Modeling Color in Film

I always liked thinking about how color is used to generate various experieces in film. Based on this interest, a friend and I decided to try to model the change of color in feature films. Our model's output was a colour timeline like the one seen below. Each point in a colour timeline represent the average colour of the film at that point. The point approximately covers a 10 second window.

![](images/color_in_film1.png)
(From the movie Insidious, (2010))

The colour seen at each point in the timeline above is composed of a particular, hue, saturation and lightness. If these variables are separated and graphed independently then you get a timeline which looks like the one seen below.

![](images/color_in_film2.png)
(From the movie Insidious (2010))

In this visualisation the hue is shown at the background of the plot, the saturation shown as a black line, and the lightness as a white line. Hue is a cyclical data type which makes it inappropriate in the line plot form that saturation and lightness take. Therefore we plot it as the background.

In our model, hue, saturation and lightness change slightly most of the time, and change greatly quite rarely. The small changes seeks to capture the gradual changes happening within a scene or arc of a movie. The large changes represent either a mood or scene change in the movie. We decided to have the concepts of a slight change and a major change because the scale of change and the frequency of these two are very different. For a scene change the hue might jump thirty values in the 360 values wide space between two frame, a change that might take thousands of steps with small changes. This is similar when looking at saturation or lightness.

#### The model’s state consists of:
- The average colour of the frame, broken down into ​hue ​(angle in degrees), ​saturation
(from 0 to 1), and ​lightness​ (from 0 to 1)
- The ​steps_since_direction_change​ (integer)
- The ​saturation_gradient​ (angle in radians), which the saturation will follow
- The ​independent_lightness ​(from 0 to 1), which is combined with the inverse of
saturation to calculate lightness

We did some validation of the model by comparing with indepedently chosen movies. Example of such comparison is below: the blue dots represent the controls and the red dots the generated movies.

![example color timeline](images/color_in_film3.png)


color in film

a screenshot of the produced interactive data visualisation



## Visualising Community 

[github](https://github.com/jskjott/community-network-project)

I created an [explorable](https://community-network-project.surge.sh/) for people to engage with the network research conducted by a group of students at college. The project grew out of a desire to show different network representations of our student community.

Collecting the data was a multi-year effort by a group of students. Having finished the project after 3 years of hard work the group wanted to make the data they had generated accessible in an interactive and explorable way.

The biggest success they had by then was with a series of photos posted on facebook showing the network change over time: 

![the network visualisation used before this project](old_network_visual.png)

We decided to build on this success by making a site which allows the visitar to filter any combination of any of the variables represented in the data. This gives the visitor a lot of freedom to explore the data and make their own conclusions. Part of the reason for this is that we did not want to bias visitors with out interpretations. At the time of writing we are still figuring out what the right balance between freedom and guidance is when it comes to creating interactive visualisation experiences.


community network project

An image of a candle and a vase with flowers with blinds as a backdrop



Whether we want it or not, rituals are abound in computing. The flapping open of the laptop, the churning sound of a computer’s fan when turned on, the initiation of scripts and tasks on the stroke of a button. These actions in of themselves are rituals, or are enmeshed in other rituals — the morning wakeup routine, starting work. In *ceremony is research*, xxxx points to how everyday tasks and habits are full of rituals.

It is important to see rituals for what they are, structures of acknowledgement and placed-ness. Acknowledging the rituals in one’s life enables a shift in awareness. This, I would argue is particularly important to do when it comes to the rituals involving computers.

## Barriers to the emergence of local computational cultures

Computers are often not seen as cultural objects — unlike many other entities computers exists apart from or independent of place, culture, and community. Instead of bearing associations with the local, the known, or part of heritage, computers are often seen as almost alien, or magical, entities, existing in friction with things which are more culturally embedded. 

The reasons why this is is tied to both the soft and hard side of computers. 

Hardware-wise, today it requires transnational supply-chains and high components volumes to make computers — it is hard to make a computer from local materials, especially if the computer is to be accessible to a wider group of people. the hardware components used to make components are made in the order of millions, the materials used for these components are mined at astronomical scales.  Besides, historically the development of computers was the domain of the military and companies associated with it.

However, focussing only on hardware when trying to understanding why computers are not seen as cultural objects would be missing a large part of the picture.

Once the hardware is built, software is needed for computers to function. The base enabling humans to interface with the computer is provided by operating systems, of which there are surprisingly few. The three widely used operating systems, Windows, Linux, and MacOS, where made by hundreds of  specialised programmers building upon Unix, a technology developed at Bell Labs in the 70s and 80s. The operating system provides an environment within which the user can act. All operating systems in use are written in programming languages based on the English language using the latin script. Though operating systems support graphical user interfaces in many languages, the underlying code and documentation will most likely be english. The amount of work involved in developing the fundamental software infrastructure as well as the dominance of English in the software side of computers means that it is outside most communities’ reach to really influence the texture and affect of computing in their lives.

## Computational cultures exists, in the fringes of the inter web

Computational cultures do exist. If geographical maps are replaced by internet cartographies, a wealth of subcultures are to be found in the plurality of the fediverse, IRC channels, and other social networks grounded in different forms of infrastructural ownership and control.

## Computer Rituals

…

computer rituals




> In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.
<cite>Jorge Luis Borges - *On Exactitude in Science*</cite>

In David Graeber's book Debt there is this section digging into the importance of context in relation to identity. Essentially, a person is defined by their context, the set of social relations formed with the people and environments they know. A stranger is a stranger because they are encountered outside of their social context.

In a similar vein I have been trying to understand whether a computer is a close family member or a perpetual stranger. There are good arguments for both. On the one hand I have spent thousands of hours intimately together with my computer, getting to know it,  existing with it in different ways. On the other hand I am also constantly faced with the sheer lack of understanding of it.

Perhaps this alludes to how a computer is a fuller, more complex presence in our lives. Something which, like people, never reveals itself completely to us. Something which must be understood by what is in the gutter just as much as what is said.


Sometimes I close my eyes in an attempt to comprehend what computers are. I think of how they are made from materials dug up from below in places all over the world before they are brought together, processed, synthesised into something which can carry currents and data at unimaginable scales.

I try and think of the networks of cables suspended above sea floors — linking continents and enabling networking at incomprehensible speeds.

But most of all I think of the computer as a complex compound of culture, power, and history. A radical technology which, like many other technologies before it, remade humans understandings of each other and the world in which they find themselves.

What computes are at their core, like much other technology, is contested. Most agree on the fact that this technology is of immense transformative power. Yet, what is the nature and source of this power and how does it interface with other historical and spiritual structures which mediate power?

This essay is an attempt at considering not just the mechanical essence of what computers are, but the its current and future potential as a cultural and perhaps spiritual entity. It is written in the belief that computing must break free of its military-modernist origin-story to become something which is truly intimate and emancipatory for communities in different places.

## The hybris of leveraging the digital to try grasp all of the analogue world

In the context of the military-modernist origin-story the desire to grasp the whole world, like the hand of god, is a given. Within this context it is common to see the future as something that has already been determined. The narrative goes something like this — we are part of a march towards a world where the digital and the physical collapse onto each other as a result of an ever deeper embrace of computational sensing. The philosopher Yuk Hui likens this teleological view of computation to the desire to become god.

> technological historical time synchronized and converged towards one end point which we have called before technological singularity, or if you prefer you can also call it the apocryps or homologues, the becoming of god. 
<cite> Yuk Hui - *[From the universality of progress to cosmotechnics](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Dni6UJDFUuw&t=2005s/)*</cite>



> Why? Why did you die?  — — — God is here.
<cite> Serial Experiments LAIN</cite>


> We’re not living in an algorithmic culture so much as a computational theocracy.
<cite> Ian Bogost - *[The Cathedral of Computation](https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/the-cathedral-of-computation/384300/)*</cite>

There are many cathedrals in existence.
Meta is the missionary church.


<table>
    <thead>
        <tr>
            <th colspan="2">Ontologies of Computers and Gods</th>
        </tr>
    </thead>
    <tbody>
        <tr>
            <td><b>computers are gods</b></td>
            <td><b>computers are created by god</b></td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td>”Unlike today’s virtual assistants, the gods of KamiOS are not all-knowing or all-powerful. They are limited, fallible, and have different agendas and loyalties.” 
            Keiichi Matsuda - GODS </td>
            <td> ”Since computers are a part of the creation, and God commanded ourancestors to exercise dominion over the creation (Genesis 1:28), then the proper relationship between people and computers is for people to exercise dominion over computers.” Joel Adams - A CHRISTIAN PERSPECTIVE ON COMPUTING</td>
        </tr>
    </tbody>
</table>




## Another kind of computation

> The sailing/computing duo Hundred Rabbits are pilgrim-poets of permacomputing.
<cite> Robin Sloan - *[The slab and the permacomputer](https://www.robinsloan.com/lab/slab/)*</cite>

Seeking new computational ontologies by computing where it is rarely done by moving off land entirely.
travelling cathedral builder


## What is the nature of the universes which rise out of the digital?

It feels obscene to think of computer programmers as creators of new universes. Yet, what is it that programmers are creating?

> I always imagine that each man-made object is surrounded by a ‘Magical Circle’, just like those radiant Circles in Japanese Magical girl anime. Imagine a stool silently unfolds its ‘Magical Circle’, urging people nearby to sit in it.
<cite>Weiyi Li - *Function as Narrative*</cite>

> KamiOS is different. It is based in pagan animism, where there are many thousands of gods, who live in everything
<cite>Keiichi Matsuda - *[GODS](https://arena-attachments.s3.amazonaws.com/13686745/a9e686464f00f1a2990822b30796dfef.pdf?1635021002)*</cite>

computers and gods



A sector exploring the history and techne of different crafts.



craft



Spring. Never has this season felt so calling, so pulsing. As if the spring flowers are emerging from the ground for the very first time. They rise in contrast to the forsaken darkness which came before. 

The spring dazzle allude unto a truth ever bathing in the periphery — for me creating is relating. Creating is the finger feeling the pulse, the rhythm which breathes meaning and montentum into the spaces I inhabit. 

Without company nor fresh air the winter dampened all senses. It ushered many parts of me into hiding so thoroughly as to invite forgetting. The slowdown of movement and stimulus renders once visible landscapes unrecognisable to the practitioner’s gaze.

When I don’t create my relationship with the worlds within which I am enmeshed falter. The manifesting of things forces reckonings — with ideas, communities, parts of one self. 

Creation entails destruction. The co-occurence of destruction and creation crafts a lens for sensing the world. The kind of sensing enabled by creation casts new reliefs, generating profound relationship with the entities present at the site of creation.

Now the juicyness invites starting anew. Transition sweet, spring provides kindly paths

creating is relating



## Joseonjok of Daerim-dong, Seoul

You can find a video of Daerim-dong [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNy6z63fLRQ)

In determining which path to take my listeners on, I first thought about my first impressions of Daerim-dong. Secondly, I engaged in a quite thorough literature review of academic papers and news articles about the Joseonjok, Daerim- and Garibong-dong and the Korean diasporas. Thirdly, I went to Daerim-dong again and did a series of thorough observations of the social life and objects located at different potential paths that I could take my listeners on. Lastly, I found the ideal path in which I could tell an engaging story and connect my story to objects and people in the city all while staying focused on the key issues pertaining to the identity and historic challenges   experienced   by   Joseonjok   and   South   Koreans.

I designed the tour for people who are somewhat knowledgeable of East-Asian history and have a basic English academic language. I assume that they know about the Japanese colonisation of South Korea and the subsequent invasion of Manchuria. I assume that they will understand when I use common academic terms such as industrialisation, narratives and ethnicity. I think English speaking Koreans and foreigners alike will find the tour valuable, engaging and thought-provoking.

![a photo of the steet from Daerim-dong, Seoul](images/postcard7-min.jpg)

As I speak very little Mandarin and Korean I found it challenging to build a whole tour without being able to easily engage orally with any of the Joseonjok Korean Chinese or South Koreans that my tour is about. A classmate of mine, Xiaofan Liang, helped me a bit by going with me, reading what the signs said and chatting casually with some people. Many of my resources are done by Korean or Asian scholars. Still, the greatest ethical shortcoming is the lack of Korean Chinese or South Korean voices narrating and being present in the tour. If I were to change something or improve my tour I would want to try to find a Korean Chinese to co-host the tour with me. I would try to include many more personal stories which I would get access to by knowing   and   interviewing   the   Joseonjok   who   live   in   Daerim-dong.

Despite this clear shortcoming, I think the wealth of resources I did have access allowed me to frame and support my argument very well. The struggles of identity Joseonjok, South and North Koreans are experiencing are grounded in historical events such as the Japanese invasion of Manchuria, the Cold War and the recent success of South Korea as an Asian tiger economy. The mechanisms at work in Korean questions of identity can also be found in Japan, Greece and Germany which historically have had large ethnic populations outside of their own borders.

Based on these insights I decided that It would be very valuable to see the Chinatown of Daerim-dong and its Joseonjok population as a manifestation of, to some degree, universal struggles of identity which are experienced currently in different places throughout the world.[1] The particular story of Daerim-dong allows us to situate our discussion in the local. It allows the uninformed listener to better understand how large-scale processes such as the Cold War or South Korean industrialisation might impact different groups and nurture the creation of spaces and neighbourhoods.[2]
    
The guided, app-based tour format allows me as a producer accurately time and synchronises a spatial and auditory experience. For me, the combination of the spatial and the auditory allow me to explain well the space in which an individual is situated. You can explain how different forces worked to produce the physical and spatial reality the individual is engaging with while experiencing the tour. In my tour, this allowed me to show how abstract concepts like ethnicity, nationality and power manifest and influence the creation of a Korean Chinese enclave close to the heart of Seoul in South Korea. The fact that this tour is [3] digital makes it available to many more people than if I had been giving a tour in person.

Detour studio is not that easy to use and that impacts who might end up using the tool. Like other digital or computational tools, Detour limits it userbase in being difficult to use. Another limitation of this style is the lack of potential for listeners or the local population to build on and expand the existing tour. If the local population would be unhappy with the tour I have created, they   are   not   in   a   great   position   to   contribute   or   make   their   voices   heard.[4]

![a photo of the steet from Daerim-dong, Seoul](images/postcard2-min.jpg)

I think the identity issues the I explore in my narrative could be a textbook case of historicity. It goes like this: A population of a culture is split into two. Each is put on one of two sides in the Cold War. One half is put in a communist country with limited contact with consumer market societies. The other is fully integrated into the capitalist global market. Then, you observe the conflicts that arise as diverse groups try to negotiate the meaning of a culture, nation and ethnicity to which they all relate and feel ownership of.[5] It is not that one is more representative I think. Nothing is constant throughout history, both populations have the same heritage down the line but have developed in different ways in recent times. In our case, you have South Korea on one side with more than 40 million people versus Korean Chinese who amount to less than 4 million   people.   The   Korean   Chinese   are   the   subaltern.

![a photo of the steet from Daerim-dong, Seoul](images/postcard4-min.jpg)
    
They have been silenced as South Korea has grown economically successful and gained prominence   internationally. [6]

Particularly interesting is how some South Koreans claim that Korean Chinese have digressed from the true Korean path. South Koreans claim this while rarely being aware of how much they themselves   have   changed   in   the   last   70   years...

___

[1] I use the concept of hierarchical nationhood to describe how Korean Chinese are respected more than foreigners and much less than citizens in South Korea. Using frameworks such as these helps us understand the intricacies of the power struggle between different agents while we investigate the nature of Korean historical identify.
    
[2] Recent newspaper articles helped me understanding how Daerim-dong is portrayed currently in mainstream Korean media. There were many examples of how discrimination manifests in popular media. Academic and historical papers on the Chinese diaspora, and case studies featuring interviews with korean Chinese in particular, played a vital role in cementing the core arguments that are brought forward in the tour.

[3] The media tools which come with digital history allows historians to better exemplify and explain abstract concepts to a less historically oriented audience. The audio tour format creates a strong link between my historical arguments and the place and people it is about. It allows for the creation of experiences which delicately interleave the past with a current reality. 
      
[4] Though the audio tour tool is very empowering to me as a creator I have little opportunity to involve my listeners. There is not space for communities and individuals to develop and critique the tour I made. This might be a barrier to actively engaging the public with history.

[5] Coming to Daerim-dong you don’t realize the very complex issues facing the Korean Chinese community. I manage to get at the many historical ruptures one can find in Korean identity and start explaining how they impact a neighbourhood and a people trying to return to their original homeland.

[6] I describe the current hegemony of the South Korean state at several points during the tour. My difficulty of findings sources speak to the Joseonjok's lack of visibility and voice internationally. 


daerim dong



En portal til denne sides danske univers, en oase, en befrielse fra det engelske sprogs evindelige dominans. Må sproget vokse og frydes. Mit [[modersmaal]].

## Danske forfattere

Karen Blixen

## Ord og fraser

> Være én, men én iblandt
<cite> Per Krøis Kjærsgaard, Linedanser</cite>

> Og mens duggen render sammen i dråber af vand <br/> Blir til langtrukne streger af liv
<cite> Alan Olsen, Han har tænkt</cite>

dansk



*This section presents explorations and thoughts relating to deep work*.

My interest in deep work has let to the exploration of multiple tools for aiding the practice of deep work - one such tool is this site. Others which have since fallen into disuse are [[chasmic]] and [[org-mode]].

___


> In a lifetime of many, many independent choices, small and large, a career with a vision will get you a distance proportional to n, while no vision will get you only the distance In a sense, the main difference between those who go far and those who do not is some people have a vision and the others do not and therefore can only react to the current events as they happen.
<cite>Hamming - *The Art and Science of Engineering* </cite>

> The idea that media has to become more effective at bringing, quote, "thought outside of the body" so that we can use such external imagination to play with them, to communicate them, to interact with them, instead of being stuck with thought in an already overcrowded brain. And this overcrowded is so often being described to me, this problem of having this overcrowded brain, especially when you program. As banal is here, media for the lab are indeed truly tertiary retentions. And the longer you dream all day long about these tertiary attentions yet to be invented, talk is indeed a sad, painful, ineffective, hurtful form of communication.
<cite>Goetz Bachmann - Terms of Media</cite>

> Deep work changes you so if you do deep work in any of these areas you are a different person at the end than you were at the beginning and you're better at what you do in a substantial way not just an incremental way but a way that is different in character another characteristic though aside from the fact that it changes you is that when you start out you don't know where you're going … demanding them to happen on time makes them not happen … one of the best things I can do for generating new ideas is to clear out the old ones. Force my way through make enough time that I'm just gonna go through that old list and try everything I was uncertain about decide yes or no am I really gonna try all these vague ideas and thoughts that are lined up and just crank through them and always as soon as I'm done cranking through those a new period of creativity starts
<cite>Jonathan Blow - Deep Work</cite>

> How to destroy deep work:
1. Scheduling
2.Childproofing
3. Chasing Success / Team Politics
<cite>Jonathan Blow - Deep Work</cite>


>Yes, a bunch of carrots, observed directly, painted simply in the personal way one sees it, worth more than the Ecole’s everlasting slices of buttered bread, that tabasco-juice paining, slavishly done by the book? The day is coming when a single original carrot will give birth to a revolution.
<cite>Cezanne</cite>

>Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. 
<cite> Graham - The Top Idea in Your Mind </cite>

>I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.
<cite> Graham - The Top Idea in Your Mind </cite>

> The moment the key drops from your fingers, you may be sure that the noise of its fall on the upside-down plate will awaken you, and you may be equally sure that this fugitive moment when you had barely lost consciousness and during which you cannot be assured of having really slept is totally sufficient, inasmuch as not a second more is needed for your physical and psychic being to be revivified by just the necessary amount of repose.
<cite>Dali - *50 Secrets of Magic Craftmanship*</cite>

> Be occupied as little as possible with things of the outer world but much with things of the inner world; then right action will overcome inaction.
<cite>Farīd ud-Dīn ʿAṭṭār - *The Conference of the Birds*</cite>

> If Emacs could become a more intelligent data store, where brainstorming would focus on the ideas involved—rather than the structuring and format of those ideas, or having to stop your current flow of work in order to record them—it would map much more closely to how the mind (well, at least mine) works, and hence would eliminate that very manual-ness which computers from the very beginning have been championed as being able to reduce.
<cite>Various - *Remember Manual*</cite>

___

*In Danish, when you cannot stop listening to a song in your head we call it "to have a song on the brain". I want to explore what tools could generate documentation of the process of having things on your brain.*


deep work



*projects which aim to document lifeworlds*

- [[daerim dong]]
- [[auto rickshaw]]


documenting



## Writing tools

Thesauraus
Webster’s Unabridged 1913



english



-- Find Refuge

I have a target called finding refuge because I want to be able to find peace in our hypercharged world. This year has been quite hectic with a lot of moving and changes in life circumstances. So, I would not say that I have hit this target particularly well. I found refuge in some ways at the Recurse Center. However, I would say that RC more than being a space of refuge is a space of community and intense immersion. I guess refuge is more about finding stability and defining a kind of lifestyle which make me feel like I can exist with myself in the world. So, much progress to make on this in 2020.

-- Immerse myself

I have made incredibly strides in immersing myself in 2019. This past year I started reading again and it has produced such a wonderful sense of empowerment, self-direction, and motivation - all things which make me immerse myself in the things I find interesting. I went to RC, a space intentionally designed to allow for immersion in a communal setting - it fulfilled this for me, allowing me to focus on programming and engaging with a community where immsering oneself is appreciated and loved. Lastly, I was able to spend some months at home doing projects and learning on my own pace. This allowed me to explore many things on my own terms. This last period of self-directed immersion convinced me that I am able to direct myself if I get the time and space to do so.

-- Keeping my living space tidy

This target arose this year as I learnt about the relationship between physical and mental space. With the realization that my most happy and fulfilling periods of my life involved me living in tidy spaces I created this as a target. This past year I lived with a roommate who was tidy in a particularly aesthetic way. He taught me a lot about the beauty and joy that grows from having a clean living space with only the objects adn tools which make you most happy.

-- Keeping my body healthy

I have been swimming close to daily for little more than half of this year. I have generally been confirmed in my belief that swimming is the way for me to stay active. The thrill of feeling thae water touch your body as I swim and the otherworldlyness of the world beneath the surface is both stimulating and relaxing to me. Hopefully I will be able to swim even more in the new decade ^^

-- Net Positive

I am not yet quite happy with my overall impact on the world. One way of looking at this target is through the lens of the climate - I have been flying so much these last years (this past year included!), eating so much meat, and have failed to participate in the popular protests calling for political change. Besides the climate lens I feel like I have been moving around too much resulting in me contributing to trends such as gentrification. When it comes to social realtionships I feel like this year has been good. I have been responsible and have been trying my best to support the people around me.

-- Share thoughts

This year I created my first posts on twitter, made an effort to share more of my ideas online, and tried to create a place online I feel good about. I have almost exclusively have experienced positive responses when I shared my thoughts and ideas. My home on the web has turned into something much more like a home. It has become much more visual and representative of who I am as a person. Going forward I hope to start sharing my thoughts more regularly, and to start sharing in spaces where I have not yet shared such as conferences and meetup groups. I also hope to have more conversations on Twitter rather than simply being a fly on the wall.

-- Build Community

This year a number of my projects were focused on creating community. I worked with friends on making browser extensions focussed on creating community online. I also spent some of my time at the Recurse Center building a webring for the RC community to share their onine homes. Finally, I started working with friends on p{x}p a bi-weekly email-based check-in for people with a creative or research practice. My hope for the coming year is to continue doing digital projects which nurture community while also pushing into the physical realm - taking initiative to bring people together in real life as well as online.

-- Promote Inclusivity / Diversity

I have been trying to make the spaces I am part of more inclusive. I have also been actively trying to support places which champion diversity (such as the Recurse Center). However, I generally feel that I have not been contributing actively to promoting inclusivity and diversity. This past year I did not take initiative to create the spaces I think are needed.


end of year reflection 2019



A collection of pieces about tit and tat. 

- [[computers and gods]]
- [[computer rituals]]
- [[from career to practice]]
- [[creating is relating]]
- [[writing drawings]]

essays



Fermentation is a powerful concept whose meaning expands much beyond mere foods. “We are all pickled up here to preserve ourselves and each other”

> How do we connect our readers with kimchi epistemologies?

![picture of Ferment zine idea sketching](images/ferment.png)


fermentation

a fourteen by fourteen blue and white woven paper heart



A woven paper heart advent calendar in a 90s playstation1-esque digital aesthetic. 

![screenshot of the fletværk.dk website, a christmas three in a 90s ps1 aesthetic](images/julehjertejulekalender2022.png)

fletværk julehjerte julekalender



A repository with resources about foraging

## Picking Mushrooms

Forests worldwide contain, depending on climate and time of year, an impressive number of mushrooms. Journeying through landscapes looking for mushrooms can be both meditative and can provide great flavour and texture to one’s cooking.

- [Danish mushroom sightings database](https://svampe.databasen.org/)




foraging

illustration of different fraktur writing turorials



There is a lack of good learning resources for people who need to learn to read old typefaces. The aim of this project was to use the affordances of the digital medium to more effectively teach the skill of reading different kinds of typefaces.

This project sprouted from my interest in [[historiography]]. I first did a precedent analysis of the ways this skill was being taught digitally at the moment. Based on this analysis defined a list of criteria that my design should fulfil to make better use of the digital medium to provide a better learning experience:

1. The learner must receive instant feedback on how they are performing. 
2. The learner’s degree of mastery must be legible.
3. There must be a learning curve with appropriate difficulty at all times.

![a GUI screenshot](fraktur.png)

When I had a working prototype tested it with several history students who needed to learn difficult-to-read primary sources and iterated upon the design based on my observations.


fraktur

Peonies in a window sill with a backdrop of sommerfuglebuske.



I was oriented to consider Career before everything. Flowing through the education system I was taught that obtaining excellence meant embracing disconnection in my chase of opportunity. Opportunities, the things you must respond to. Combinations of time, place, and ideas — things that will supposedly propel you into the world.

It was not always like this. Before I left my ancestral region to go to high school the local and regional was something to be desired. Not a marker of backwardness as it was increasingly described as I made my way through to higher education. As I reached college the narrative of success changed. I supposedly was now one of the chosen few. Someone who was set free from my heritage. Except that I wasn’t. Having worked, interned, volunteered in some of the global centers of “culture” I found that to to these places I myself had to let go of my own culture. I found myself grasping for an identity I had myself, through my actions, been erasing. It was during my attempt at preventing this loss that I found my [[practice]].

## Opportunity and Career

It is easy to get so absorbed in the face of opportunity as to forget to ask what the effect will be if the opportunity is realised. This might be because opportunity is often assumed to be good and desirable. Yet, before responding to every opportunity which presents itself it is worth asking what opportunity is. 

Opportunity is power, a particular kind that is. The anthropologist Baz Gørmann describes how the Communications Research Design Lab tried to avoid creating a particular kind of opportunity. Being based in the Bay Area, anything branded opportunity would quickly be surrounded by venture capitalists looking to exploit every possible opportunity. The GCD felt that long term change isn’t enabled through the chasing of monetary opportunities. If the goal is deep social change opportunity may not be the right thing to chase. Opportunity is something which everyone needs to engage with and reflect on. 

What about Career? Chasing an established career-trajectory requires giving up a lot of things. Many careers exist within a larger socioeconomic landscape. For example, to further one’s career in certain kinds of fields one must do overwork to gain influence. If one is entering a field fields like design or architecture one might also have to accept that no credit will be given for projects one has worked on for months or years.

## Like waking up from a doze



from career to practice

screenshot from wip 2d puzzle platformer game lush pixel forest with a water droplet as the player.




## Last Harvest, for Ludum Dare 52

[Last Harvest](https://loooading.itch.io/last-harvest) is a tiny tower-defence inspired strategy game developed for the fantasy console Pico8 in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 52 in January 2023.

![screenshot from Pico8 game called Last Harvest, a green field is being taken over by a desert](images/ld52_out_of_memory.png)

## Scale Game

[[scale game]] is a puzzle platformer about a droplet which formed from the flow of water through the earths crust, dripping onto a coal spoil.

![a little pixel artwork with a & sign on it](images/scale_game_1.png)

## Experiments



games



[github](https://github.com/jskjott/git-for-filmmakers)

Many creative professions have no high quality version control systems. Film-making is one profession in which the majority of practitioners use only very limited systems for version control. The lack of version control makes collaboration hard as there are many barriers to share, explore, and merge projects.

This project seeks to provide a simple and powerful interface for filmmakers to visualise how their project files changed of time, do collaborative editing, and better document their projects.


git for filmmakers



### Renewal, Silences and Computational Tools in History

In this project, I looked at how historians write about the history of their discipline. In history, the practice of working with the history of the history of something is referred to as historiography. 

#### Project Outcomes:

- An analysis of the format of the historiographical essay
- A new term: Digital Historiography
- A case study

One of the aims of this project was to build a bridge between historiography and the parts of the humaities which already engages with digital or computational tools. 

![a drawing illustring a bridge being built between the digital humanities and historigraphy](digital_humanities.png)

In the second part of my project, I explore how digital tools might augment the research process. The most appealing reason for me is how historiography can be debiased and renewed by scrutinizing and probing the discipline with digital tools and methodologies.
With digital historiography we can include the long tail of research which never becomes part of the mainstream historiographical conscious.

![a line chart illustraing how normally only the most prominent historical soruces are used in research](prominence.png)

Computational tools allow historians to consider thousands of sources, they could be texts, images, or other kinds of media, when they do their analysis: something which would be near impossible without the use of computers. If historians can devise computational analysis’ which generate valuable insights into sources, they are no longer limited to working only with the most prominent works within a field.

In the third, and last, part of my project I tried to provide a case study showing what a digital historiography project might look like. I decided to do a spatial analysis of the writings of Danish historians. Below is one of the visualisations I produced to describe which places Danish historians have written about during the past 150 years.

![a visualisation of the places often mentioned in the primary sources analysedfor the case study.](history.png)


historiography



Draw these momenta into the sun, reveling in what nurtures. Taking things slow, the second growth of the season. Embracing ilegibility in all of its uncertain, immeasurable wonder. Re-placing oneself, coming to terms with decay. Shifting views on what it means to waste away. Acknowledging abundance, feasting in silence, in smallness. Falling to earth by way of slender fortunes.

Slowing down, listening to what happens upstream. Going for the the gutter, the in-between. The buzzing of peripheries which can only just be sensed, the flimmer in the corner of sight. Seeing peripheries for what they are, and giving space to them. Letting loose seized rhythms of passage and seeing the relations therein. Allowing severed seams of otherly fabrics to exist, beyond the realms if discretionary gazes. Allowing for the rise of refuge.

Who is computing, kindling what spark? Who is shooting and what is the mark?

To correspond with spheres long passed, worlds with waning clearness. Distributed overlapping existences spread out on the forest floor. To play apart, not as in alone but a part. As a node among many.

[[motion]]
[[stillness]]
[[language]]
[[meta]]

index



Intermediate representations are constructs which aid thinking by simulateanously embracing while also limiting uncertainty. They can provide clarity and a foundation for thinking in particular ways while leaving space for exploration in others.

[[pointers]] is a particular form of intermediate representation focussing on enabling media design.


intermediate representations



Jona Skjøtt practices design at [Takram↗](https://www.takram.com/) and maintains a personal research practice at [[resevoir]].

## How would you introduce yourself? 

Hi! I am Jona, and I tend to feel at home somewhere in-between research, art, and design. I like exploring conviviality, transition, time, and community through my practice within visual and computational media, tool-making, and life-living in general.

## Which of your projects would you like to share?

In spring 2020 I prototyped a design medium and environment for paper weaving called [[visiweave]] exploring what it means for computing to be part of a communal, cultural, and spatial fabric. In the fall and winter of 2021, I partook in research exploring what sustainable transition means for different people around the world and created a website sharing [what we found↗](https://sustainability-transitions.com).

## Which places and communities have brought you to where you are today?

Working with peers on research related to sustainable transitions at Takram. Being part of a community of people who love programming at [The Recurse Center↗](https://www.recurse.com). Studying History and Computer Science at Minerva Schools at KGI as part of a close-knit community. Working on projects with friends. Going for long distance walks.



jonathan



### How to Introduce Refugees to Online Learning

It was hard for the refugee students at Kiron to succeed in the online studies which would give them access to European universities. In this project, we aimed to craft an experience which would set students up for success.

#### Project Outcomes

- 4 hour interactive learning experience
- 100+ pages long manuscript for videos and audio
- A dozen handdrawn animated videos
- Interviews with succesful refugee students studying online

<div style="padding:56.25% 0 0 0;position:relative;"><iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/202977336?title=0&byline=0&portrait=0" style="position:absolute;top:0;left:0;width:100%;height:100%;" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe></div><script src="https://player.vimeo.com/api/player.js"></script>

A team of five people, including me, decided to initiate this project. First thing I did together with another coworker was to organise a design sprint with a group of our students. In this design sprint, we identified many of the challenges which students were facing: refugee students often do not have a community who can support them, they were not used to being responsible for their academic learning, and they felt that they lacked essential tools.

![a collage of photos showing the MOOC production process](kiron_photos.png)

We decided to make a massive open online course (MOOC) specifically for our group of students, which would address the challenges the students were facing. Once work started, I was responsible for writing a fourth of the syllabi, and I had to coordinate my other team members as they were writing their parts.

During the production of the MOOC, I was one of two cameramen filming the content, and I was coaching the different people who appeared in the MOOC. To create a sense of community, we included a lot of refugee student voices in the MOOC: if they had advice, we gave them a space to share it with the other students. During the last couple of years, more than a thousand students went through the experience, and the feedback from students has been overwhelmingly positive.


kiron



Forms of expression, the bedrock. What builds worlds, makes place. Intimate to every person, worthwhile.

## tongues

[[dansk]]
[[english]]

## assemblages

[[quotes]]
[[essays]]

language




## Last Harvest, for Ludum Dare 52

[Last Harvest](https://loooading.itch.io/last-harvest) is a tiny tower-defence inspired strategy game developed for the fantasy console Pico8 in 48 hours for Ludum Dare 52 in January 2023.

![screenshot from Pico8 game called Last Harvest, a green field is being taken over by a desert](images/ld52_out_of_memory.png)

last harvest 48h



### Reading Lists

#### 2021
- Art & Fear: Observations on the Perils (and Rewards) of Artmaking - David Bayles and Ted Orland
- Pollution is Colonialism - Max Liboiron
- Mapping abundance for a planetary future - Candace Fujikane
- Work: A history of how we spend our time - James Suzman
- Slowdown - Danny Dorling
- Braiding Sweetgrass - Robin Wall Kimmerer

#### 2020
- Japansoft - Alex Wiltshire
- Takram Design Engineering - Hisato Ogata and Kinya Tagawa
- Discursive Design - Bruce M. Tharp & Stephanie M. Tharp
- Are We Human? Notes on an Archeology of Design - Beatriz Colomina & Mark Wigley
- Middlemarch - George Eliot
- Small is Beautiful - E.F. Schumacher
- Designs For the Pluriverse - Arturo Escobar

#### 2019

- Heart of Darkness - Jospeh Conrad
- The Color of Magic - Terry Pratchett
- Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History - Michel Trouillot
- The Best We Could Do - Thi Bui
- Coders at Work - Peter Seibel
- A Theory of Fun for Game Design - Raph Koster
- Understanding Media - Marshall Mcluhan
- Lifelong Kindergarten - Mitchell Resnick
- How to Do Nothing - Jenny Odell
- The Light Fantastic - Terry Pratchett
- Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman!: Adventures of a Curious Character - Richard P. Feynman
- Palaces for the People - Eric Klinenberg
- The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing - Marie Kondo
- The Dispossed - Ursula Le Guin
- Things That Make Us Smart: Defending Human Attributes in the Age of The Machine
- The Dream Machine: J.C.R. Licklider and the Revolution That Made Computing Personal - Mitchell Waldrop
- The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning How to Learn - Richard Hamming
- Design For the Real World - Victor Papanek
- The Book of Tea - Okakura Kakuzō
- Deschooling Society - Ivan Illich
- Orality and Literacy - Walter J. Ong
- Notes on the Synthesis of Form - Cristopher W. Alexander
- Speculative Everything - Anthony Dunne & Fiana Raby
- Ser du Månen, Daniel - Puk Damsgård
- The Field Study Handbook - Jan Chipchase
- Learning from Las Vegas: The Forgotten Symbolism of Architectural Form - Robert Venturi
- Design Research Through Practice: From the Lab, Field, and Showroom - Ilpo Koskinen
- New Dark Age - James Bridle
- Design as an Attitude - Alice Rawsthorne
- The Uninhabitable Earth - David Wallace-Wells

### Books Which Have Inspired Me

- Seeing Like a State - James C. Scott
- The Visual Presentation of Quantitative Information - Edward Tufte
- Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History - Michel Trouillot
- Understanding Media - Marshall Mcluhan
- Mindstorms - Seymour Papert
- The Field Study Handbook - Jan Chipchase
- Discursive Design - Bruce M. Tharp & Stephanie M. Tharp


library



*This corner of the [[resevoir]] serves as a space for exploring lifestyles.*

## Work
I try to create the conditions for myself to do [[deep work]]. 

## Routine
Routine is good as a foundation for a healthy lifestyle, this [[selfcare checklist]] helps me feel some stability.

lifestyle

a blue sky with think branches in silhouette



The link drop of the now:

https://www.christophlabacher.com/notes/ethnographic-research-on-dynamicland
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2015/01/why-i-am-not-a-maker/384767/
https://www.noemamag.com/the-myth-of-tech-exceptionalism/
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UyqFX3zKHOkBlM0M5ggrmYjqa5WxtkRo/view?fbclid=IwAR1bsLtt7MtRNLgt0hCCyVP9pgTc0dL93h97lY3OkmWX58rZtH-stcVQTvY
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/mar/05/world-is-unpredictable-and-strange-climate-crisis-ukraine
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/717313
https://www.robinsloan.com/notes/home-cooked-app/
https://atthis.link/blog/2020/deepwork.html
https://timjackson.org.uk/ecological-economics/postgrowth-book/
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Spell-Sensuous-Perception-Language-More-Than-Human/dp/0679776397
https://www.artnews.com/art-in-america/interviews/pollution-colonialism-max-liboiron-maru-garcia-1234626654/
https://kk.org/thetechnium/103-bits-of-advice-i-wish-i-had-known/

links




LOOOADING a fledgling small studio for interactive digital projects. LOOOADING recently released a [woven paper heart advent calendar](https://www.xn--fletvrk-qxa.dk/).

[LOOOADING](https://loooading.com), 

loooading

manifestations



The *media* momentum is for expressive works.

[[time-based]] | [[documenting]]


mediums



## information

[[about]]
[[resevoir]]

## data

[rss](/rss.xml)
[index](/resevoir-index)

midi plotter



At være ude af stand til at snakke ens modersmål med nogen er et dybt sagn. Jeg har efterhånden levet mange år med engelsk som det mest dominerende sprog i mit liv. Oplevelsen af gradvist at mestre det engelske sprog har været enestående.

Det var på engelsk jeg opdagede at jeg elsker at skrive. Jeg gjorde opdagelsen efter jeg fik tid, rum, og venner som opfordrede mig til at tage det skrevne ord dybt seriøst. Jeg begyndte da at interessere mig for ordvalg og det poetiske. Disse oplevelser har gjort at min relation til engelsk har ændret sig fra at være en oplevelse af at gå med krøkker, ude af stand til at udtrykke og bevæge mig, til en eksplosion af inspiration.

Sideløbende med mit engelske sprogs udvikling krøb det danske ind i skyggen, og med det kom en følelse af tomhed. En dyb tomhed som kun kan lindres ved at tale modersmålet. When I change my spoken language from English to Danish er det som om de talte ord berører verden og tager form af det ordet beskriver. Et ord som vind maner næsten en vind op, ordet græs frembringer lugten af græs efter en forårsregn, lysegrøn fryd og en opløftelse af selvet. Sammenlignet med det danske sprogs sanseætsning virker engelsk som et håbløst intellektuelt væsen, altid på armslængde af det det beskriver.

<hr/>


modersmål

range of coloured leaves arranged in the shape of a circle on a black background.



A piece giving respect to my mother's love.

https://vimeo.com/295409276

mother



The act, process, or state of changing place. Key drivers of different perspectives, change and movement. The blurring of the landscape as one extends.

## Mobility

[[sailing]]
[[biking]]

## Learning

[[library]]
[[manifestations]]

## Media

[[time-based]]

motion



A place containing a summery of the current locus of Jona‘s practice. Big and small, this is a space for the ideas which keep lurking around in the mind, the things touched by the hand.

## The top ideas of my mind:

Scale
- When to be big, when to be small. Growing up I was often implicitly told that bigger is better, now I believe scale is much more complex than that.

The visual representations of ecologies in digital environments
- In a world of climate crisis it is of vital importance to envision new ways of visually representing the networks of life that surround us.

Computers and culture, gods, rituals
- Computers as an entity deeply embedded in culture and practice. How should this realisation influence how we live with computation?

## Current projects:

A pixel art work with green vines, some 2d platforms, and a green lizard



Recently I have been thinking a lot about how living things are visually represented in digital environments. Going about our lives online we are constantly exposed to pictures, sounds, and other representations of other living beings. I probably encounter more species and ecologies in digital worlds than in real life. I most likely have closer personal relationships with  digital representations of beings which have been extinct for millennia than a lot of the living beings that inhabiting the park down the street. 

So, representations of living things are clearly abundant in digital spaces. But how do different communities visually represent  nature in digital spaces, and why do they represent ecologies in this way? I believe asking these questions are important. 

Our understanding of what nature is is increasingly mediated by our experience of digital worlds and our experience of ecologies are increasingly facilitated by digital environments. Additionally, one only needs to consider the urgency of the climate crises to appreciate that the way we represent living things online will inform the form and shape of climate action. However, asking this question only because of climate change misses the point. 

Asking this question takes as a given that values give rise to visual representations and that visual representations in turn act on and influence values. So, asking how why and nature is represented digitally is really asking what our values about nature are? In the end asking this question is about the cultural relationships we have with non-humans. 

Reductionism versus Relationism
Instrumentalism 
Legibility versus Illegibility
Anthropocentrism versus Pluriverse
non-agency versus Agency
Scale



-


1. The grid-based ecology of xxx created by foreign objects
2. The lidar landscapes of forensic architecture and Liam Young
3. The binary essentialism of game of Life
4. The romantic and elegant representation of Flower by thatgamecompany
5. The knotty entanglements of feral atlas
6. The passive backgrounds of super Mario
7. The chaotic audiovisual landscapes of orca
8. The bot assemblages of Tega Brains xxxx
9. The scale bending aesthetics of Hermippe
10. The colonialist extractivism of mining and farming games
11. The speciesism of Pokémon(perhaps there is a better example?)
12. The static nature of most game environments
13. The temporal orientation of trash garden game


-



The way ecologies are represented digitally are historically continguous and constructed by the assemblages of affordability of digital media and computation more broadly.

Considering the exhibits it becomes clear that there are certain representations which are structurally encouraged. These include but are not limited to:

1. Reductivism. An over-emphasis on individual species and under emphasise on networks, relationships, assemblages.
2. Anthropocentrism. An over-emphasis on the agency of humans and an under-emphasis on the agency of non-humans and the non-living.
3. Extractivism. An over-emphasis on singular or quantifiable benefits.

The tendencies outlined above are dominant, yet they are not unchallenged. A number of digital currents are actively probing the possibility of ecologically aware representations of nature online.

Communities within environmental media studies and environmental Humanities more broadly are actively demonstrating what low-carbon, assemblages oriented representations of ecologies might look like
The programming and artistic movement around permacomputibg are questioning the very basis of computation as as medium.



on the visual representation of ecologies in digital media



Org-mode is a powerful environment for working with ideas, and for organising your projects.

When I heard of it I became incredibly excited and luckily there were many people who were willing to teach me a bit about how to use emacs and org-mode.

After two days of learning and exploration I am starting to organise my life with org-mode. At the moment I mostly use the standard formatting together with the agenda and the capture interface.

![a screenshot of the org-mode tranformation](../org-mode.gif)
A little sneak peak of my .org file


org-mode

paper weaving



A piece seeking to humanise a piece of technology through a ritual-like burning.

https://vimeo.com/269137114

passing away

photos

methods of constructing letterforms - Institutionum Geometricarum



Pointers explored on this site include the [[portable typewriter]] and the [[midi plotter]].

> Pointers are early prototypes that point in the way they work towards a possible property of the medium. They point towards this property not only for others, but also for the research itself. They might see something through the pointer that she has not been able to see before.
<cite>Götz Bachmann - Terms of Media</cite>




pointers



The process of printing something involves manifesting a representation on a piece of paper. Manifesting by printing takes time. What is on the paper at every given moment of the printing process is different. This makes the printing process a time-based media.

In most printers it is hard to experience the time-based media of print because it is hidden away inside a huge machine: we cannot see the many intermediate manifestations which lies between the blank paper and a fully printed page.

However, not all printers hide away the printing process. The pen plotter affords observation of the time-based media and provides options to pause, lengthen, or alter the media.

The [pen plotter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plotter) is a piece of technology which allow us to explore the expressive space of the time-based printing medium. In most pen plotters the pen is easily accesible which makes it possible to see what is going on at any point during the printing process.

Several people have made use of this to do exactly this: Wesley Aptekar-Cassels did a playful and insightful exploration by using the plotter printing area as the interface for a [flappy bird game](https://github.com/WesleyAC/plotty-bird).

![a photo of the pen plotter plotty bird game](plotty_bird.png)

Inspired by Wesley's project I decided to do my own exploration by writing a program, [[midi plotter]] which draws a visualisation of what you play on the piano realtime:

![a gif animation of the midi plotter in action](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jskjott/midi-plotter/master/midi-plotter.gif)


portable printing



I was frustrated with how current publishing processes force you to spend hours alone on the computer making layouts. 

Inspiration by Robert Ochshorn's wonderful [desert journalism](https://lowerquality.com/desertjournalism/) project I wanted to respond to these frustrations by making printing available in spaces where it currently isn’t and by doing that move away from the extensive and bulky infrastructure which is typically needed to create a printed page.

This was a personal project. To fulfil my vision, I decided to make a portable, battery-operated receipt printer typewriter.

I acquired all the necessary components (Arduino, battery, receipt printer, keyboard) and wrote the Arduino code needed for the different parts to interface with each other. I then went out to test the functioning prototype. It quickly became clear that the small portable typewriter and access to immediate printing enables a lot of activities which traditional publishing does.

![printed paper snippets](typewriter_two.png)

Doing this project resulted in deeper appreciation of printing as a medium - in many ways it became a [[pointers]] towards a new media which could spring fourth from further exploring printing and portability.


portable typewriter



## informed, committed action ~

The practice reconnects with, invigorates, and heals my sense of standpoint and place. The practice is [[creating is relating]] to myself and the worlds of others. The practice is ambitious, it insists on acknowledging the hard questions and trying to answer them over and over again. A collection of processes of continous, long-term nature. 

***

### [[language]]
the planes of ideas

### Paper 
the art of thinking with paper.

### Media
extensions of self ~ bidirectional shaping

### Discursive
the integrative meta-practice

### Programming
symbolic manipulation unleashed

### Historiographical
authenticity, power, public, foreign, exotic, glocal, historigraphy, legibility, truth, silences, everything is plural, historicities, dirty linen, private/public transcripts, intersectionality, against the grain, progress

### Research
ideas peripheral

### Writing
scaffold for ideas


practice



> All mathematics exhibits in its conclusions only what is already implicit in its premises… Hence all mathematical derivation can be viewed simply as chase in representation, making evident what was previously true but obscure.
<cite>Herbert Simon - *The Sciences of the Artificial*</cite>

> This view can be extended to all of problem solving-solving a problem simply means repenting it so as to make the solution transparent. If the problem solving could actually be organised in these terms, the issue of representation would indeed become central. But even if it cannot-if this is too exaggerated a view-a deeper understanding of how representations are created and how they contribute to the solution of problems will become an essential component of the future theory of design.
<cite>Herbert Simon - *The Sciences of the Artificial*</cite>

> Manipulating words seemed like the obvious place to start because it was a way to manipulate your ideas.
<cite>Doug Engelbart - quoted in The Dream Machine</cite>

> The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play. That's why we have to destroy the present politico-economic system.
<cite>Arthur C. Clarke</cite>

> Optimizing toward the need for less revenue has yielded better results than optimizing toward the generation of more.
<cite>Devine Lu Linvega</cite>

> The goal is to build a catalog of exciting things to wake up to the next day and to experiment with.
<cite>Devine Lu Linvega</cite>

> When you make your own tools, you tend to mold them to fit your hands. So they may fit others' poorly. Other people who tried "part of speech" told me that the experience felt dehumanizing, that the conversation partner's responses felt irrelevant and jarring. I feel that too.
<cite>Katherine Ye - on Twitter</cite>

> To make something well is to give yourself to it, to seek wholeness, to follow spirit. To learn to make something well can take your whole life. It’s worth it.
<cite>  Ursula Le Guin, Steering the Craft</cite>

>Work on a good piece of writing proceeds on three levels: a musical one, where it is composed; an architectural one, where it is constructed; and finally, a textile one, where it is woven.
<cite>Walter Benjamin, One Way Street And Other Writings</cite>

quotes



The *research* momentum is for projects and activities probing new forms of media.

- [[tools]]
- [[studies]]


research



Resevoir started as a blog-like site meant to to document and present already finished projects.
It has grown into a place which makes me feel at home on the internet while also providing a space for me to travel through the thoughts and ideas I have had over time. 
The site is still very much in flux as a result of me experimenting with what structure makes me feel at home.


resevoir

first steps, learning to sail dinghies on the Thames



All vehicles are ways of seeing. Every vehicle, through the way it exists in relationship to the bodies whose existence it extends, powerfully acts on their user’s worlds. They make some worlds accessible and others inaccessible, and enable the noticing of certain things while hiding others, thereby becoming a texture or aesthetic of experience.

What gaze does a sailboat allow us to cast upon different worlds? This is a question I am only just starting to explore by sailing in dinghies on the river Thames. When in the dinghy, I see buildings through experiencing how they act on the the wind. Being in the presence of other entities on the river - The dinghy folds and twists its sail to maneuvre through the steady stream of fossil pushed crafts.


sailboat as gaze

wrapping the sail of a Laser Pico dinghy after use



A repository with resources useful to sailing practice.

A reflection on the [[sailboat as gaze]]

<hr/>

Key moments in my sailing practice:
<table style="width:100%">
  <tr>
    <th>Date</th>
    <th>Description</th>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>06/09/2020</td>
    <td>RYA level 2 at Thames Sailing Club</td>
  </tr>
  <tr>
    <td>23/08/2020</td>
    <td>RYA level 1 at Thames Sailing Club</td>
  </tr>
</table>


sailing

a pixelated screenshot from a game, a drop is crawling up a green vine surrounded by slowers.



A droplet formed from the flow of water through the earths crust, dripping onto a coal spoil.

scale game



Pandemic days are long and the most important things take place in the everyday. I have come to enjoy them as they help to stabilise me by routine one day at the time.

- <input type="checkbox"> have you brushed you teeth this morning?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you showered today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you put on clean clothes today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you done your makeup today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you read your book today?
- <input type="checkbox"> did you go outside today?
- <input type="checkbox"> did you talk to or message a friend today?
- <input type="checkbox"> did you sit down for dinner today?
- <input type="checkbox"> did you care for the house today?
- <input type="checkbox"> did you care for your skin today?
- <input type="checkbox"> did you light candles today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you tidied up a bit today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you drank enough water today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you had some quiet time today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you created something today?
- <input type="checkbox"> have you had time to slow down recently?
- <input type="checkbox"> did you give love to someone close to you today?


selfcare checklist



## How to Make Citizen Science More Participatory

As one of two research fellows I joined Digital Creativity Labs, a research center focussing on interactive media, games, and play, and Bioversity, a global research-for-development NGO working to increase agricultural biodiversity and food security, to work on improving the experience of the farmers who choose to participate in Bioversity's agricultural research. This project pushed me to take charge of conducting the design process and deepened my understanding of service design.

Below is a visualisation of how I spent my time while doing this project. My work naturally grew to be centered around the field-work which with Kenyan farmers which was to happen 4 weeks into the project.

![a visualisaiton of how we spent our time while working on this project](timeline.jpg)

#### First Project / Construct a Problem Brief 

To gain a deep understanding of the problem space my coworker and I first did a sentiment analysis of interviews which were conducted with farmers who were participating in Bioversity's participatory research programs. Our conclusion was that some of the farmers who decide to participate in Bioversity's programs end up feeling that it was not worthwhile. After further analysis we identified three major sources of frustration: 

1. The quality of the data collected for the research was often substandard.
2. There was a lack of expectation-setting with participants who joined the program.
3. The participating farmers did not receive guidance and feedback based on the outcomes of the research.

To address these sources of frustration we decided to focus on two things: first we wanted to redesign of the participant facing materials to manage expectations as well as improve data quality. Secondly we wanted to revamp the last touch points in service journey of the program to provide proper feedback to participants and to address the data concerns.

The touch points we wanted to improve:

![a visualisation of the service journey of the program we were analysing](service_journey.png)

#### Second Project / Form Redesign

I was responsible for layout and form redesign. Below are some of the different forms whose question flow and graphical layouts I created.

![a sample of one of the redesigned forms](form_testing_4.png)

![a sample of one of the redesigned feedback froms](feedback_form.png)

#### Third Project / Group Exercise Prototyping

For the redesign of the activites for the last workshop I prototyped a range of feedback activities based on the book Gamestorming. I knew that these workshops often ended up with the the participants being lectured at. I wanted to design activites which engaged everyone more and engaged everyone in knowledge sharing and discussions about data and results.

![a visualisation of the group acitivities we prototyped](group_activities.png)


#### Self-directed Project / Graph Literacy Assessment

Some of the interviews suggested that participants could not read the data visualisations which contained the research results. I, as someone who is very interested in how different people understand representations of data, designed an assessment which allowed us to understand how well our participants understood the data visualisations we used to provide feedback. The assessment was oral and consisted of participants being shown different visualisations and responding to pre-defined questions about the nature of the data represented. Below are some of visualisations that I used for the assesment.

![ a photo fo the different visualisations used in the assessment](graph_literacy.jpg)

#### Field Testing

We went to do field testing with farmers in Kenya. There we spent five days working with local staff on the prototypes, and we spent four days testing the prototypes with program participants. There, I split my time evenly between leading the testing activities and documenting with written notes, photos, and videos how participants responded to the different prototypes.

![a collage of participants trying out our prototypes in the field](field_testing.png)

The field work was a huge success: it triggered several changes to our designs and generated a lot of knowledge for Bioveristy to use in the future. 

![a collage of participants trying out our prototypes in the field](form_testing_2.png)

During the last weeks of the project my co-worker and I annotated our prototypes with the observations which were made in the field and we wrote up reports for our parent organisations.


more participatory citizen science

‘second London home in the corner of the Isokon’



Roots are important. Putting them down is an active effort, especially if you are new to a place. 

settlement



Some media like text and images provide the entirety of their state in their static form. The piece of text or a picture we put on our wall is glanceable. This does not mean that we can experience the media fully with a glance - we must actually read the text or look at the picture. However, with a glance we can observe the full state of the medium.

An example of a media where this is not the case is video - as a time-based medium one can only experience the full state by directing our attention continously to the media. For a long time I have been interested in trying to craft a static representation of video. A representation which captures the dimension of time in a tangible way.

![an example slitscan photograph created from a video](images/slitscan_video.png)

One way of statically representing a video is by creating a slitscan of it. In a slitscan every column of pixels is taken from a different frame of the source video. The resulting image is a collage of pixels taken from varying timestamps and varying visual coordinates. However, this representation of the time-based medium is rather coarse:


a static represention of time-based media

slitscan video



*This section is dedicated to exploring ideas that relate to spaces created by and with people.*

### An Ode to the Spaces I Want to Create

*During the summer of 2019 I was inspired to try to state what kinds of spaces I would like to create.*

[This ode is a work in progress]

___

>I wanna create spaces where people grow

>places of kindness

>and trust

>play

___

>where richness comes with inclusivity

>and people can feel at home

>immerse themselves

>learn

___

>with others: decentralised and transparent

>environments not lectures

>give people ownership

>co-create


### Return Statement

*In the summer of 2019 I went to the Recurse Center. At the end of my time there I wrote the following about the space we were part of / co-created.*

[This is the first draft of this writing and will change in the coming days]

My time at the Recurse Center was a period of deep immersion and close-knit community which gave rise to an explosion of passion and productivity. 

Now that the batch is coming to an end I have an urge to try to describe what I learned.

Most of my time at RC was spent engaging in a **learning-based projecting** process. The learning aspect of the process was conserned with mastering programming and the projecting aspect was focussed on exploring media.

The outcome of this process is a range of prototypes most of which are incomplete: 

- A git-based [version control tool for filmmakers](https://github.com/jskjott/git-for-filmmakers)  meant to enable more collaboration by providing access to powerful representations of the time-based medium.
- An [audio sequencer](https://github.com/jskjott/casette) implemented to explore the building of custom music sequencers.
- A [realtime midi sound visualisation tool](https://github.com/jskjott/midi-plotter) exploring printing as a timed-based medium.
- A [browser extension](https://github.com/jskjott/manoeuvre) meant to enable rich-text editing in the browser, the prototype mostly explores multi-caret text manipulation.
- A [command line tool](https://github.com/jskjott/chasmic) meant to help me keep track of my ideas. A simple practice in creating tools-for-thought.

In the process of making these tools I learnt about:

- How to use Vue-CLI with Typescript and Electron
- Some of the inner workings of Git 
- Vue component model
- Midi protocol basics
- The Rust programming language
- Ownership & memory management
- Number types, eg u32, i8, float
- Multi-threading by using asynchronous channels 
- HPGL pen-plotter basics
- How to create a browser extension from scratch
- GSFL data stream apis
- How to use Typescript in a variety of different dev setups
- Emacs org-mode
- graphics basics
- tailwindcss
- Glitch!

These projects have served as great vehicles for learning and exploration!

I also learnt a lot about how to work with others and contribute by doing some different activities:

**Pair Programming**:

This was one of my main insecurities when I joined the Recurse Center: I was simply insecure about my ability to collaborate on writing code with others. However, during my time at RC it became one of my favorite activities.

Pairing is a social activity in which each person is bringing their knowledge and viewpoints. As there are often multiple ways of solving different challenges the discussion naturally becomes about style and how to think.

**Creating a Webring for the Recurse Center Community**: 

One of the most meaningful things I did at RC was contributing to the building of community by creating a [webring](https://github.com/jskjott/webring) to encourage recursers to create homes for themselves online. 

A webring is a collection of websites traditionally linked together by a circular structure. A website which is part of a webring will have an icon on its site linking either to the central webring or another site which is part of the ring.

The process of doing a project for the community makes you more part of the community. In the end, multiple people ended up working on the webring, it became a meeting space for some of us.

**Creating a Home for Myself Online**

I also made countless changes to my [personal site](jskjott.com)

The other aspect of my experinece which is perhaps as immense as my projecting is the social experience of being at the Recurse Center.

Before I came to Recurse Center I was impressed to the point of suspicion about the great things people say about the place. Many speak of the space as changing their outlook not just on programming but also on learning, community, and perhaps life. Being exposed to these ideas and essays, as someone who had not been in the space, I felt intrigued, but I also felt that I did not quite have a sense of what this space was like or why it ended up having such profound impact on many people.

Being at Recurse Center now I feel like I understand a little more about why it is described as it is. It can be hard to express something for which one does not have words to describe. I surely feel like I have gained insights from going to the Recurse Center that I might not be able to describe for quite a while.

However, like many others, I will try to express the ways in which this space made a big impression on me.

One thing which is central to Recurse Center as a space is the social rules:

- No feigning surprise
- No well-actually's
- No back-seat driving
- No subtle -isms

I warmly encourage you to have a look at how they are described in the Recurse Center [Manual](recurse.com)!

What is powerful about the social rules is how concise they are. One of effect this briefness is that they become easier to think about and thus put into practice. I feel like the rules are present in the space in a way that would be impossible if they were described in a long essay. 

Also, their briefness do not necessailry take a lot away from their richness. I was talking about this with another recurser yesterday: **the social rules address subtle things which often go unnoticed in other spaces and the effect of that is the initiation of reflection on many other subtleties in how we act**. So despite being brief they uncover a lot of things which remain unaddressed in many spaces.

Another important aspect is the physical space. Having spent the last couple of months at the space I feel that it is one of the most well-designed physical spaces I have ever encountered. This really hit me during my first week at RC. I come into the space in the morning and find a table which can be raised, being 191cm I usually have to hunch down at tables which are standard size, I realized I forgot my headphones and realized that it is okay because there are headphones available that I can borrow, I am tired in the afternoon and realize that there is a space for me to take a nap, I want to receive a package and RC allow people to send packages to the space, there is a printer available for everyone to use... The list goes on and on. I also feel that the space has been designed to make it possible for a large variety of people to feel at home: for example, a baby attended Recurse Center with both of their parents for the first week of my batch. What allowed for this was accomodations such as a wellness room. **A lot of the bugs which exist in normal spaces have been addressed at Recurse Center, this makes the experience of being in the space seemless, pleasant, and welcoming to a wide variety of people**. It is my impression that the current design of the space has grown out of a years-long process in which the facilitators have been receptive to the feedback of the people who came to use the space.

One effect of this is that recursers start to feel an ownership of the space. Something that made me feel that the center was my space is the how I and all the other participants have 24 / 7 access to all the facilities. It is amazing to observe what happens when communities are given access to spaces and resources. The [folk-high-school](https://www.danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-high-schools/what-is-a-folk-high-school/) inspired [boarding school](https://www.oeu.dk) I went to when I was 15 was similar. The motto of the school was "freedom with responsability". This motto was actionised by having all of the schools facilites remain unlocked at all times. Students were free to use the film cameras in the media workshop or the paints in the studio. The result of that was an explosion of creativity and projects as well as a highly responsible student body. We knew that if the cameras break the school would not have money to replace them. So we took care of the space. There is a similar dynamic at Recurse Center. The policy which gives people access demonstrates how at Recurse Center trust is put before control.

When I was making the ring I was unsure of the extent to which the ring could be associated with the Recurse Center brand. Having just graduated from a school in which you might receive an angry email if you used the school's logo without asking for permission I was surprised to find out that Recursers are encouraged to associate their projects with RC. So, I ended up using the RC logo and registering an RC subdomain for the project. I love this! **The community is the brand is the community**.

So, I was provided with a lot of ways to feel part of the space and the community. It is was done in a way that made me feel a part and welcome from a very early stage. This brings me to the perhaps most central concept which Recurse Center has allowed me to rework: Learning.

RC has 

1. inspired me to take control of my own learning 
2. showed me how great learning with others can be 
3. as a result of 2 made me be open about my learning process in all its messiness and beauty.
4. made me keen on sharing as much I can with others

In most schools we let others tell us what to learn. Over time we get used to being fed knowledge without question why those particular pieces of knowledge where seen to be essential while others we disregarded. When I came to RC I was already on my way to taking back control: for the last year of college I had spend more time doing independent projects than coursework. At Recurse Center each participant needs to decide on what to make of their time. This is hard. All of a sudden you have access to more learning opportunities related to computation than ever before and you have to prioritise what kinds of things you want to learn while also finding projects which will allow you to learn those concepts. However, after two months of doing that I feel empowered and responsible for my own learning. 

Now it is time to leave Recurse Center. I feel the sandcorns of time trickle through my fingers: what seemed like a long time has passed in the blink of an eye. I am left in awe at how many incredible friends I have made in only two months. Friends who, despite perhaps not knowing everything about me, have made me feel seen, appreciated, and at home <3


space



In the South Wales uplands, walking through grasslands filled with vividly green growth springing from a humid and rainful climate, rock-faces shaped by the winds and weather, and cairns from times long past. Making my way in between the mosaic habitats of heathlands filled with assortments of heather and crowberry. Passing through a woodland, then altering the route to avoid a bog filled with peatmoss. Weaving through the lush green fields only to stop dead in my tracks. In front lies a heap of allusions to our past and present relationship with the environment. In front, breaking the organic, rolling hills, stands a reaching, geometrically sharp, cone-shaped mound of coal-black soil. 

![Coal spoil near Neath Port Talbot, Wales. © Alan Hughes , 2015. cc-by-sa/2.0](images/spoils_wales.png)

It feels alien. It’s color announcing its strangeness, its slopes’ bare soil and uncanny straightness in such obvious contrast to the overgrowth around it. I have stumbled upon a coal spoil, one of many to be found in Wales, the UK, and around the world.

The presence of spoils and waste are inextricably linked to the life and landscapes of humankind. Most of us are used to the presence of waste in some form. What unites the diverse plethora of different types, shapes, and media of materials as waste seems to be it’s designation as the lost for want: something undesired by all, refuse destined to be sent somewhere out of sight. Sites which host our waste are full of things intimate to us, but often alien to the site’s locality. Soaking up the symbolisms attached to discarded materials from near and far, past and present, the places are shaped. By human hands.
The tale of the coal spoil is one of technology and industrialisation, of power and empire, centres and peripheries. This spoil was created in the late 19th century and is made of materials excavated as part of the building and running of mines. Though the coal spoils found in South Wales are of varying age, most are from the coal boom of the late 19th to early 20th centuries. Their continued presence reveals century-old externalities of the early fossil economy. Coming into being as a side-effect of coal mining, this soil, dug up from below, was deemed useless and left near excavation points. Today, they are some of the most visible remains of the coal mining activities which transformed relationships on environmental, social, and political scales.

The coal spoil is a characteristic example of a landscape-turned-wasteland. The almost black, characteristic, cone-like heaps of soil removed during coal mining activities dot many parts of the British landscape. Their dark tone, in such visual tension with the green landscape, hint at the potency of human disturbance.
To many, the coal black colour of the coal spoil symbolises the coming of waste at profoundly new levels of scale. The colour of the spoils harkens back to the toxic, victorian, industrial landscapes of the 19th century and has to some become an aesthetic marker of waste.

In a country like Britain, coal black has been a part of the landscape for centuries. Coal mining was tightly knit to the birth of industry and drove the development of empire for centuries. Going around the country today, the implications of this development are visible in abandoned mine shafts, ruins, and other remnants of activity haunting the landscape. Heaps of spoil higher than any anthill mark the landscape as touched — by human hands, by development. The result of this touch can be seen today as an unwilding. The existence of the black coal piles marks the landscape as disturbed, they locate the wasteland.

For many, the coal black soil of the spoils will be the darkest coloured soil they will ever see. It’s darkness and sheen making it feel more like galactic space dust than a local material and likely co-habitant of the green, rolling hills amongst which many spoils are found. A material symbolising the alienation industrialisation brought. A monument to the impossibility of transition. Showing how the very seeds of our current climate crisis are found in centuries old spoil mounds.
We can choose to stick to this narrative. To see the waste mounds as emissaries of doom. Harbingers of an environmental crisis in which humans can only be the antagonist.

Yet, that would be like casting a troupe of actors only based on the stories we have heard about them. There is more to most things than what is passed along the viral channels of media networks. Acting on impulse and pre-conviction is not what will enable us to navigate unfolding, transforming worlds.

Perhaps it is okay to slow down, to try and sit with the spoil upon our encounter. Without giving in to first impressions. To stop treating it as a place from which to get away or hide from view, but as part of a larger ecology. What might happen if one were to sit with the spoil, not just once but time after time?

Perhaps it would enable us to cast other perspectives, to point, not towards destruction, but towards regeneration. Not in an attempt to reject the history of mining, industrialisation, or the fossil paradigm’s contribution to our current plight. Or to cast into doubt the absolute urgency of transition away from the fossil paradigm. Not to close our eyes to what we see now but to perceive something more.

There are entire worlds to be found on and in spoils which go unseen if we see the them as being only wastelands. Sitting with the spoil it becomes clear that spoils are anything but barren. The coal spoils of Wales, rather than supporting the story of landscapes as either wilderness or wasteland, might be the very phenomenon proving that natural abundance and disturbance can co-occur. It carries with it the potential to inspire us in this time of crisis by showing that flourishing worlds can rise out of disturbed landscapes touched by humans and that we, too, carry within us the potential for flourishing as part of, rather than apart from, natural ecologies.

What worlds might be seen when we sit with the coal spoil? Liam Olds, an entomologist who founded the Colliery Spoil Biodiversity Initiative, has been documenting how spoils in South Wales today act as refuge for wildlife. He shows how spoils are highly diverse landscapes home to vast flowering fields, meadows, marshland, young forest.
The spoils are sites of natural abundance not because of the absence of humans, though that does have a noticeable effect, but due to the soil composition as well. The conic shape of the spoils give rise to kaleidoscopes of micro climates. The collage of overgrowth and uncovered soil creating conditions for select communities of insects to prosper.
These kinds of stories bring into question some established narratives about what coal spoils are at their core. They probe reorientation as to what their futures might be. If coal spoils should not just be understood as wastelands, what could they be seen as?

There are plenty of examples of soil of this or a similar colour signifying regeneration. Coal-black soil has historically been created by communities all over the world by mixing charcoal with local soil to create resilient, rich soils. Like coal spoils, these soils are also among the darkest soils, but unlike coal spoils, these soils are known for their unique fertility, high levels of micro organic activity, and regenerative capacity. The charcoal contents of these soils are what breathe regenerative potentials into the soil . Like seeds, the charcoal pieces imbue the land.

One could also consider ash as a material whose colour is often associated with coal black. Burnt landscapes and ash come into existence through intense disruption. Burnt landscapes have in dominant western narratives historically been seen as a symbol of doom. Yet as soon as ash from forest fires settles, new life burst fourth from the ground.
We can choose to try and expand the story of what coal spoils are. Expanding our perspectives on what coal spoils are is not just about nurturing a better understanding of these complicated entities. It is ultimately about acknowledging the presence of things in relationship to ecologies and resisting, however briefly, the temptation to divide and segment. Coal spoils have to exist as a means of acknowledging environmental ruin, but seeing them also as sites of hope and reclamation might just, in the faintest of ways, point towards the light. Towards faint potential for human and non-human co-presence and abundance.
It requires little effort to buy into the predominant view of coilery spoils, the waste piles left behind by coal mining activities, as wastelands, manifestations of the darkest days of the earth, a symbol describing the dark pit of a predicament humanity finds itself in in the face of environmental ruin. But we don’t have to see only wastelands. In fact, our future might even depend on seeing something more.


sprouts from spoils

‘A photo of a round black stone on a table at dusk’



The source, stillness enables rooting, the giving of close attention. The slowing down to feel the grinding, marvellous music.

## still space

[[settlement]]

## still media

<a href="/photos">{photos}</a>


stillness

studies



*This section is dedicated to exploring values and ideals in relation to the future.*

**Internal Targets** goals dealing with personal growth

- Find Refuge
- Immerse myself
- Keeping my living space tidy
- Keeping my body healthy

**External Targets** having an effect on the outside world.

- Net Positive
- Share thoughts
- Build Community
- Promote Inclusivity / Diversity

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Every year I try and reflect on the extent to which my life has become oriented towards my targets. 

- [[eoy 2019]]


targets



> Manipulating words seemed like the obvious place to start because it was a way to manipulate your ideas. <cite> Engelbart </cite>

Text is one of the essential media. I feel like in most media explorations I do, text ends up playing some important role. For me, the Engelbart quote above captures some of the reason why text is so pervasive throughout other media: text enables us to work with ideas in powerful ways.

But, how do we really unlock the power that text has. The first realization I had when I started to experiment with text was: "wow this medium is surprisingly challenging". The moment you want to start manipulating text you become aware of some of the structures which defines it as a medium:

- the ordering of ideas matters
- the ability reorganize matters

### Text Interfaces on the Internet


Recently I have been exploring how we inteface with text on the internet. 95% of the internet content, except for the various input fields, does not afford rich text editing. 

The browser offers very weak interface with text. The majority of textual webcontent is made to appear static. The text we see on the internet does not allow us to place a caret (the vertical cursor we find in input fields or text editors) or to change its appearance with highlights or underlining.

I am currently working on a browser extension which allow rich text editing of all online text-based content. The first feature I am trying to add is multi-caret selection:

![a gif animation showing multiple cursors selecting text](images/multiple_cursors.gif)

Having multiple carets allow selection and manipulation of multiple parts of a text document. Coupled with good pattern matching enables a plethora of actions such as data formating, effective selective text copying, and rapid soritng of ideas and concepts.


text



Part of group exhibition The Energy Show at Het Nieuwe Instituut exploring energy and the rise of the solar aesthetic.

![a photo from the exhibition](images/energy_show_1.jpg)

![a photo from the exhibition](images/energy_show_2.jpg)

![a photo from the exhibition](images/energy_show_3.jpg)

the energy show



The timed-based sector is for temporal experiments.

- [[git for filmmakers]] - Making a powerful version-control system accessible to filmmakers.
- [[slitscan experiments]] - Explorations of alternative temporal spaces inside videos.
- [[midi plotter]] - Plotting midi feeds live as they are received.
- [[color in film]] - Visualisation of how colours spread out temporally in films.
- [[auto rickshaw]] - Exploring the documentation of livelihoods and environments.


time-based media

‘Sun-down at 11pm a summer evening on the beach facing Kattegat.’



At the depth of last winter A and I became aware of an option to gain a seasonal [[base]] in Denmark. On the 27th of June we arrived to a little coastal town some dozen kilometers away from my childhood home. As the sun went down with other paths once open to us, the gentle hands of a landscape well-known led us towards a space which would bring much embrace.

to a beginning



*A collection of speculative creative/expressive tools and media*

### [[visiweave]] - A tool for creating paper weaving patterns.

[github](https://github.com/jskjott/heartweave)

A domain-specific language is used to generate grids and spreadsheet style commands are used to shape the cells in the grid. The core philosophy behind this project is that a good end-user programming experience is achieved through a tight coupling and co-presence of both code and data in the interface - the code is the interface is the code.

![the tool work environment](images/visiweave_interface.png)

### [[git for filmmakers]] - A version control tool for filmmakers. 

[github](https://github.com/jskjott/git-for-filmmakers)

The lack of good quality version control has wrecked many a film-project. This project seeks to provide a simple and powerful interface for filmmakers to visualise how their project files changed of time, do collaborative editing, and better document their projects.

![the git for filmmakers GUI](images/git_for_filmmakers_aug21.png)

### [[midi plotter]] - A realtime midi visualisation tool.

[github](https://github.com/jskjott/midi-plotter)

A drawing tool for visualising midi-feeds during performances. When you perform with the pen plotter it almost becomes a second performer as the rhytmns and sounds the plotter makes as it draws merges with the notes you play on your instrument.

![a gif animation of the plotter drawing a visualisation](https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jskjott/midi-plotter/master/midi-plotter.gif)


tools

the primary visual identity of the project



### Forge A More Communal Internet

The ways that community is experienced online felt inadequate to one of my friends and me. We wanted to extend the experience of physically living in a community to the experience we had on the internet.
We wanted to break the assumption that you are alone online when you are not on social media. Therefore, we decided that we wanted to make a browser extension for communities, aiming to make browsing more fun, exciting, and to create a stronger sense of communal presence online.

![an example of a notification provided by the extension](trails_2.png)

For this project, I wrote roughly 40% of the code for the extension using JavaScript. I also created the visual identity of the project.

> “Sometimes, when I’m filling out a shitty visa form, seeing others have been there is quite comforting, or when I’m reading an article, seeing that someone else read it recently is a great excuse to start a conversation. I think it brings a lot of the aspects of an offline community into your on- line experience, and that’s really nice.”

- Alberto

![an example poster from teh project.](trails_poster.png)


trails



*This section is dedicated to developing a praxis for thinking about and addressing what’s urgent today.*

> if we listen to 97% of the climate scientists, we know that there is an undeniable urgency to change things quickly. It is this urgency I want to talk about today, about the urgency for a different kind of politics — a politics of hope, critical activism and fungal, yes fungal revolts to wrangle with the complex challenges we face. <cite> Anab Jain - Calling for a more-than-human politics </cite>

### Modesty

At the age of 24 I have polluted enough for a lifetime. It is time I live a life of modesty and with more regard for my community and environment. I have decided to stop flying, as a signal to myself and perhaps to others. Next step is to stop eating meat.


urgency

Three lush leaves with blood running down through their core.



Initial piece exploring the concept of veins as the life- or motion-giving force in nature and technology.

https://vimeo.com/269136429

veins I

A a dark space with wires hanging vertically throughout the whole frame. Blood drops are flowing along with the cords.



Second piece exploring the concept of veins as the life- or motion-giving force in nature and technology.

https://vimeo.com/269136502

veins II



This project is a braiding of two lines of research
- an exploration of what it means to experience computing as being embedded in a communal, cultural, and spatial fabric.
- the development of a design medium and environment for paper weaving

### What does it me mean for computing to be embedded in a communal, cultural, and spatial fabric?

[slides](http://jskjott.com/presentations/Spreadsheets_as_Notational_Environment_for_Paper_Weaving_Presentation.pdf)・from a presentation on this project at Convivial Computing Salon

At my home the process of weaving a heart is a social and spatial affair. A process where the paper weaving designs I make interact spatially with the ones woven by my great grandfather.

VisiWeave resulted from a process situated in a cultural, communal, and historical context. It is part of a deep network of culture and history.

In his book Tools for Conviviality (1973) Ivan Illich (1926 - 2002) talked of conviviality as a communal practice existing in space “I choose the term 'conviviality' to designate the ... autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and of persons with their environment.”

I feel that the conviviality of VisiWeave is directly tied to my ability to articulate the space and community the tool is embedded in and grew out of.

The design of VisiWeave grew out of a living cultural practice. Conviviality is embedded in process - it is local and situated - and, for me, represents one path forward where computational tools are created with a consciousness of the historical and cultural environment.

### A design medium and environment for paper weaving

> Weaving is a binary art - Heinz Zemanek

[visiweave.com](http://www.visiweave.com)・a prototype environment
[github](https://github.com/jskjott/visiweave)・repo for the environment

The design of this medium flows from the notion that embracing computational media can enrich the practice of paper weaving.

It is inspired in spirit and practice by work within the fields computational weaving, computational origami, and paper mechatronics.

There are many challenges associcated with paper weaving design. A significant barrier is how one is often forced to work with several representations at the same time. For example, one often has to work with the componenent pieces of a weaving design while thinking about what the final interlacement of the pieces will look like.

VisiWeave adresses this challenge by making it possible to work directly with the final, woven, representation of the design.


visiweave

screenshot of the webring member directory



## A Webring for the Recurse Center

[github](https://github.com/jskjott/webring)

While at Recurse Center I noticed that many of us value presenting ourselves online in a way which feels authentic and that we like sharing and connecting with others through shared interests.

As a response to this realization I made [a webring](https://webring.recurse.com) to encourage recursers to create an online home and to share traffic amongst each other.

A webring is a collection of websites traditionally linked together by a circular structure. I thought that perhaps this structure would offer a fine way for us to link our online homes together.


webring

A photo of purple lilies and brown dead leaves



Welcome to the momentum archive of researcher and designer Jonathan Skjøtt, currently thinking about [[computers and gods]], writing an essay [[on the digital representation of nature in digital media]], and working on a [[scale game]]. 

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![A pixel artwork of a ](images/ritewelcome.png)

welcome



"People should be drawing their drawings instead of writing them." 

I caught my dad mumbling this sentence in the atelier after a full day of him teaching sketching. 

This piqued my interest. Here I was sitting and thinking that I had been drawing all day and now he was telling me that I might have been writing all along. It also sparked some fear - after spending years in college writing essays I felt like spending some time away from my usually writing saturated and symbol cluttered life. Maybe my dad's drawing class wasn't as clean of an escape as I had hoped it would be.

It did introduce me, however, to a way of thinking about drawing which helped explain why I find it so hard to draw with computers.

___

## Symbol Literacy Impacts our Understanding of the Visual World

People who write their drawings are heavily biased by their experience of being part of a literate culture - their style, technique, and way of approaching drawing is visibly influenced by them being literate.

Individuals who are new to drawing are usually not new to the tools used for drawing. Most likely they use pens and pencils on a daily basis. They too have, probably, lived a life engaging with a visual world.

When I first started drawing with pencils I had hundreds of hours of experience with using pencinls for writing, and I largely depended on this experience when I produced my drawings. For example, I would hold the pencil close to its tip and build up my drawing like I would letters, words, and sentences - by making single, discrete, strokes with the pencil. Because I heavily relied on my knowledge of writing to produce drawings one can say that I wrote my drawings.

The problem with this is that drawing isn't writing - the techniques used for writing do not work well for drawing. For example, different drawing techniques are used to allow the practitioner to use visual feedback - for example by gradually approximating the right location or flow of a line by layering several strokes on top of each other.

By appropriating writing techniques for drawing we fail to appreciate how drawing is of a completely different nature than writing. Writing is grounded in symbol manipulation - whereas the symbols we are manipulating do have visual form those forms are scaffolds which allow us to engage with the knowledge attached to the symbols.

Drawing is more purely visual. When we draw we often seek to capture things such as visual volume, depth, flow, or perspective. Though these things could be present in writing they have often been compressed away in the flat symbol oriented literate culture. Drawers use specific methods to capture the different visual dimensions. Two such methods are **constructive** and **line-rhytmical** drawing - two methods one of which excels at capturing volume and the other the flow of a subject.

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##  The Plurality of Drawing Methods

Constructive drawing excels at creating highly accurate and sense of volume - This is achieved through building up a motive with straight lines forming shapes. One can say that motives are constructed from simple shapes such as lines, angles, triangles, and rectangles. This approach to drawing does share many aspects with the writing-drawings. However, the big thing that is different is constructive drawings concern with capturing volume and depth. This is something literary culture does not do - at its core it is more graphical and flat.

Line-rhytmical drawing captures the movement and energy-flow of a motive - by using free curved lines over and over again to gradually create shapes out of dozens of overlapping lines.

When done well line-rhytmical drawings can feel almost hyperactive. For example a line-rhytmical study of a stick I did almost becomes so alive that it ceases to be a stick and starts being something animated. With its playing down of accuracy and focus on the rhytmical and relational this kind of drawing is almost opposite of writing.

I love how I can combine these methods to capture the different dimensions of a subject. The plurality of methods suggests that there is no one way of capturing the different dimensions of visual subjects. When people write drawings they inevitably fail to capture the depth and flow of visual subjects bacause they use a method, based on writing, which inherently compresses visual subjects in a way which squash the dimensions which make drawings come alive - the dimensions which have not mattered in symbol recognition and manipulation traditionally.

### Breaking Free of Literate Biases

Now how does this relate to computers? The thing is, I feel like on the computer I am being coerced into writing my drawings. I have experienced no plurality of drawing methods on the computer. Whereas there are many ways of sketching with the computer I feel like the vast number of them have a strong literate bias baked into them.

Looking ahead I hope to experiment with creating drawing tools for the computer which free themselves from the literate basis on which our computer technologies are built. I hope to find ways of more fully engaging in the feedback-based drawing I know from the physical world.


writing drawings



In 2019 I read more than 10 times more books (33) than I did in 2018 (3).

The core reason behind this spike is my realization that self-directed reading creates a well of knowledge and passion which one can draw inspiration from all the while stimulating a feeling of agency and ownership of one's own learning.

In the end of 2018 a few things happend: First of all, I found out about Goodreads.com and the yearly reading challenge where people pledge to read a self-defined number of books in the coming year. Goodreads really is a site where you can keep up to date with what you and others are reading all the while being continously presented with suggestions for which books to read. Whereas the site is not perfect I have to say that it has supported my immensely as I was creating a reading habit for myself. When I first logged into Goodreads and started following some of the people there whom I also follow on Twitter I realized that a bunch of the people I really look up to read a lot. Around that time I also read the notes from an interview with Alan Kay where I was shocked by Alan Kay's comment that one should read 'hundreds of books' a year to continously gain new inspiration. Reading hundreds of books a year might be a bit too much, however investigating these people's reading habits in more detail it increasingly became clear to me that books are a main source of inspiration for many of the people whose work I love.

Realizing how big a role books played in some other people's lives also reminded me that books used to play this role in my life too - during my adolescence when I read multiple books a week. Reading so many books at the age of 11 had a profound influence on me. The books became a primary source of socialisation for me - they helped me understand an often very confusing world.

Around this time I was also realizing how little control I really had over my own learning. At he end of 2018 I had been studying in high school and college continously for 5.5 years and I felt like formal education was failing in providing a path for me to explore my passions. Now, a year later, I feel that deciding to systematically read books has shown me a way to be in control of my own learning - and that made me more motivated about learning in general!


year in books 2019

<p>Draw these momenta into the sun, reveling in what nurtures. Taking things slow, the second growth of the season. Embracing ilegibility in all of its uncertain, immeasurable wonder. Re-placing oneself, coming to terms with decay. Shifting views on what it means to waste away. Acknowledging abundance, feasting in silence, in smallness. Falling to earth by way of slender fortunes.</p>
<p>Slowing down, listening to what happens upstream. Going for the the gutter, the in-between. The buzzing of peripheries which can only just be sensed, the flimmer in the corner of sight. Seeing peripheries for what they are, and giving space to them. Letting loose seized rhythms of passage and seeing the relations therein. Allowing severed seams of otherly fabrics to exist, beyond the realms if discretionary gazes. Allowing for the rise of refuge.</p>
<p>Who is computing, kindling what spark? Who is shooting and what is the mark?</p>
<p>To correspond with spheres long passed, worlds with waning clearness. Distributed overlapping existences spread out on the forest floor. To play apart, not as in alone but a part. As a node among many.</p>
<p><a href="motion">{motion}</a>
<a href="stillness">{stillness}</a>
<a href="language">{language}</a>
<a href="meta">{meta}</a></p>
