Jerald: Hey Andreas, thanks for being here. Could you start of by sharing about your practice?

Andreas: Hey, nice to be here. My practice goes back quite a few years, maybe 25. I became interested in media arts through design, communication design or graphic design, where I thought computers could be a great tool to create and to work on different design exercises. This is where I developed my passion for working with code and computers.

My practice continues to develop till today. If you work with technology and computation, there’s a new thing every year or every two years. You have to be constantly on the lookout to not fall behind and to keep yourself updated.

Jerald: How did you get involved with Entangled Agencies?

Andreas: Kian Peng from Supernormal reached out to me and asked if I would be interested in taking on one of the three topics he had prepared. I was interested in Mirroring and Mirrored as a topic. It was helpful to have take reference from Lacan’s mirror stage, which gave me a starting point to think about the lecture, the two workshops, and the new work that I wanted to develop.

Jerald: What were your expectations or hopes for the program and how has it matched up with the experience of running workshops and seeing people interact with it?

Andreas: There was quite a bit of pressure—there wasn’t really a lot of time. In the beginning of January, I invested a big portion of my time developing ideas for the lecture and workshop.

For the workshop, I was clear from the beginning to use machine learning techniques that capture body movement, facial features, or hand gestures. We used ml5 and p5.js, tools made available for artists and designers wanting to dive into creative exploration of technology, computer vision, and machine learning.

Once you start developing materials for your workshop, the biggest question is who your audience will be — beginners or people with more advanced skills. Finding a good middle ground is difficult, but I decided to go for the latter. The examples I prepared were a bit more advanced, and some participants struggled with adopting them, but the outcomes and snippets from participants show they had fun and were able to manipulate the code sketches to their liking or create their own interpretations.

Jerald: As someone sitting in the workshops, I had a lot of fun. Participants I talked to also really enjoyed it. While ml5 and p5.js are meant to be accessible for artists with lesser technical backgrounds, a lot of why the workshop was a success was due to how you adapted to different skill levels. You mentioned in your talk how your time managing the ADM program is somewhat of an extension to your own art practice, could you share a bit more about that? How have you gotten good at working with people newer to media art?

Andreas: From an instructor’s perspective, it’s always a little bit of a struggle. You have expectations, but they’re often not met, often due to skill set. Over time, I have gotten used to it. You always have to adjust and adapt to the participants or students and be patient.

You should not forget to make it fun for them and not be selfish trying to make them do what you expect. Often this comes down to skill. Code looks intimidating and abstract. One mistake, and the whole thing might not work. It’s fragile as a medium. Understanding that makes it easier to adapt and ensure participants don’t lose interest.

Jerald: To make the learning process fun — maybe not all instructors think about that. It reminds me of your response in your talk to the question of what makes something poetic—simply something that brings a smile to your face. Could you share any moments from this module that felt poetic to you — in workshops, exhibition, or making the pieces?

Andreas: When sitting in front of a computer trying to come up with a new work and fine-tuning it, it’s very similar to painting. You’re sitting in front of your canvas with your brush, trying to bring paint onto it based on your personality or artistic vision. You can spend hours getting it right. It’s the same for coding, just looking at the screen and coding. To me, that’s enjoyable.

Interfacing with what I created through code on screen, through visuals or interactive visuals, feels like a playground. I start playing with the visuals and making changes. To me, it’s a very enjoyable process. Coming back to the poetics of code, if it puts a smile on my face, that’s already poetic enough for me, and hopefully for others.

Once you walk around looking at people’s screens, it’s nice to see if the starting point has dramatically changed. That puts a smile on my face because I can see engagement with code, manipulation to their liking, and entering a moment of flow where you forget things around you and focus on the interaction between the system and yourself.

Having conversations where people ask deeper questions about why this can be useful or where it can be applied shows it’s about play but also beneficial beyond the classroom or creative practice, meandering into other areas and disciplines to be inspiring, meaningful, impactful, purposeful. That’s another moment that puts a smile on my face.

For the work itself, it comes in three pieces. The first piece, the slit-scan piece, builds on the idea of the myth of Narcissus, who was captivated by his reflection in the water. Water always has to do with flow. I had worked with slit-scan technique before and thought it would be a good application for interpreting self-reflection looking into water.

I made tweaks to initial slit-scan sketches or code snippets. For this piece, I wanted the pixels to melt from one end, from the starting point to the other side of the screen. Through the process, I started to enjoy the imagery that emerged, which looks like landscape paintings or drawings.

The positioning of the screen is a reference to Narcissus looking into the water and observing himself, or in this case the viewer observing themselves, but at the same time acting as a brush or tool to create this landscape painting on the screen. Spending a little bit of time with yourself through technology, maybe forgetting about yourself and the world around you and just being in the moment, hopefully having a creative and enjoyable moment.