During my time at Mediamatic (March-July 2022) I have worked on many projects.
It has really been a constant exercise in testing my abilities: taking on responsibilities that I had never attempted before and often, to my surprise, making it work.
Mediamatic operates on the basis of cooperativeness, there is a shared understanding of the value of being open and available to help each other. I found this working environment to be very effective, curiosity is encouraged and I was never afraid to ask questions or figure out how things worked.
My official role was Pigeon Tower assistant, which mainly consisted of building towers with mycelium blocks with artist Arne Hendriks, but also involved: figuring out how to make a time-lapse of each tower and then taking daily pictures of each of them, welcoming and raising baby pigeons into one of our towers, and installing a camera in the pigeon loft in order to livestream their activities (and make sure they were doing alright).
However, I was also part of the exhibition team, where I worked on some of the signage for the Pigeon Towers and got to be the event manager for one of the Gentle Disco's.
I was also involved in the maintenance of the aquaponics greenhouse, where I learned how to feed, handle and weigh massive 5kg African catfish, and also some chemistry by doing the water testing for the system water and translating the data to the amount of plant nutrients that needed to be added daily (I am still not 100% confident on this).
I harvested and grew different moulds in the Clean Lab for a possible workshop (that unfortunately did not end up happening).
And finally, I took many pictures. Sometimes of the more out of the ordinary Mediamatic activities I was part of (like the baby pigeon arrival and the fish weighing), but mostly of the rich life of the beings (fungi, caterpillars, beetles..) that live on the towers and around the biotoop.
My next step will be to go back to London to finish my footwear design degree. I aim to keep up the level of productivity I have experienced in the past five months and to continue working towards being attuned with my surroundings, and noticing the small things that are constantly happening all around me.
snail trail on spiderweb macro 5 -
Macro photo of snail trails on a spiderweb on tower n.4
