Sensitive Systems
How can we teach artificial intelligent systems to recognise and safeguard imperceptible, more-than-human entanglements and interactions?

How can the practice of ‘open-runtime’ (vs. open source) and supervised learning in a human-machine collaboration act as methods for sensitising intelligent systems to resonate closer to a sensuous body in a fluid environment?

Keywords: AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), Sensing Systems, Artificial Awareness, Care, Radical Observation, Open Runtime, Thermodynamics, Morphic Resonance, Life-Worlds(“Umwelt”), Human-
Machine Collaboration.

The alarming pace of developments in artificial
intelligence is revolutionising our world, and it is naive of us to think that the infiltration of intelligent systems into human and natural ecologies will slow down, or that anything we care about will be preserved, unless we are able to teach these systems how to be sensitive
to the world around them.

Sensitive Systems is not a research into making a machine that can ‘love’ something, but rather an exploration into how we can safeguard the core essence of humanexperience and our deeper connection with the animate world around us.

The research plans to explore the byproducts of less quantifiable experiences and meanings, and determine if a myriad of these together could act as signifiers for a sensing machine. This includes exploring what technologies exist or could be designed in order to
create the sensing capabilities / ‘life-worlds’ of these machines that would be able to relate better to the human experience.

In order to be able to understand what aspects are important to record, I’d like to borrow methodology
from Het Nieuwe Instituut’s ‘Zoöp’ Model [5], which uses Radical Observation methodology “that
teaches natural world awareness towards ecosystem stewardship”. [6] Using this framework I’d like to framework I’d like to apply similar techniques to understand what agents are present in a collective experience of human-system/technology-environment. The research hopes to raise a general awareness for the threats of advanced AI, and to emphasise that technology itself is not the issue, but rather the fact that it was built for capitalistic, violent purposes that had no connection or sensitivity to the harmony of the natural world.

Inspiration/Respiration

What is the impact on our bodies/sensitivities/practices when we radical- ly expose ourselves to shifting landscapes, in all its temporalities and scales? How do these shifts form us, inform us and how can the world speak to us more fully?

Keywords: embodied, quick-and-dirty, radical exposure, multi-sensorial, fieldwork, sense of place

American poet Ruth Stone describes the creation of a poem as something she feels and hears emanating from the landscape. A poem is like a thundering train of air coming towards her, shaking the earth beneath her
feet. In that moment, there is only one thing left for her to do, and that is "run like hell." She then runs for home, chased by this poem, with the sole purpose of getting to a piece of paper and a pencil as quickly as possi-
ble, so that when the poem crashes through her, she can capture it on a piece of paper.

We call this a moment of inspiration, when a revelation or new perception comes to us from the world of ideas. Inspiration - to breathe life into something - is intimately tied to respiration, the atmosphere, to the body of air in which we all live, and which lives in us. This life giving force, that carries sound, scent, seeds, birds and other organisms across the planet is
at the center of my work. The atmosphere is pervasive and all connecting, moved by the energy of celestial bodies, like sun and moon, its connections extend even beyond the planet. To work with the atmosphere and in land-scape - beyond the controlled lab, class-room or studio space - challenges us to let go of preconceived ideas. This is crucial to working in a fast changing world, where the familiar is left behind, and we are hurled head-long into unknown territory. Deep Futures are deeply unknown futures.

About 5 years ago I pretty much left the classroom behind, to conduct classes outdoors, where students face a lack of facilities (no power-out-lets, no tables, no storage) and to engage with our entire being in our prac-tice (all senses, all organs, all backgrounds). Fieldwork became a method of profound exposure to the deep complexity of dierent territories, like
the Zandmotor (2015-2016) Damen Shipyard (2018) and Almere Beach (2020 - 2023) The radical pedagogy of eldwork, in which guidance can take many forms, often your guide turns out to not even be human. Connecting to storms, geological processes, wild populations of organisms, and deep environmental patterns, to extend our practice beyond the edges of
our perception, from minute ripples, to intercontinental flows. It has been interesting to tie these eldwork classes to public outcomes.

Sensing the Shipyard (2018) was a fieldwork class in the almost inaccessible space of an operational shipyard, where students learned to conduct research within strict connes of health and safety protocols and between megaton machinery, to produce a high-stakes exhibition for Sonic Acts Festival. It has also been fascinating to present eldwork to local inhabi-
tants at Almere Beach, which sets very dierent high stakes for fieldwork. Connecting not just to a place, but presenting to people ground research is a way that I want to explore further in Deep Futures.

I Mine My Own Business

How do contemporary notions of optimised performance, both human and non-human,
contribute to (planetary) exploitation and vice versa; in what ways can performative (theatrical) strategies help us reveal and rethink the exploitative, wasteful and destructive forces of productivity in a manner that doesn’t leave us exhausted?

Keywords: Exploitative productivity, Anti-Work, Exhaustion, Performance, AgitProp, Serious Satire

Over the last years we see a discourse emerging that problematises work. The anti-work movement, the Great Resignation and the “quite quitting” movement all in their own way argue that perhaps the most pressing task in fighting planetary destruction and exhaustion, is to radically rethink the most normalised of ideologies under neoliberal capitalism, namely: the totalisation of work. Or, our constant drive towards productivity. Within this discourse, arguments
are made for understanding ‘work’ not as a site of value production, but rather as a —or the — site of destruction.

Stumbling upon this discourse recently —or rather; this discourse stumbling upon me— allowed me to carefully start situating the entirety of my practice within a contemporary framework that is finally very much alive. For the first time I realised that my work in fact has always concerned work: Work and its performance. I have written performances that address the (false) promise of labour-saving technologies, the devaluation of women’s work, mining of women’s bodies and
reproduction of the workforce, the absurdity of (self)optimisation in professional climates, refusal
of work, work as waste and on the theatrics of the CV.
I Mine My Own Business aims to build upon this body of work as well as strengthen its theoretical and practical foundation, with the particular aim of further developing what I call the theatrical genre of the “serious satire” into a solid performative method, with which sustainable and pleasurable resistance can be practiced and collectivised.

The research methods with which I will explore this question include, but are not limited to a)
Literary Research, b) performative experiments and c) making public;

a. Literary Research:
Literary research covers two primary discourses, namely that of exploitative productivity and
anti-work on the one hand, and emancipatory radical theater on the other, starting with AgitProp
(agitation propaganda), workers choirs and Bertolt Brechts “Lehrstücke”.

b. Performative experiments:
I’ll conduct fieldwork focussing on performance and language, looking at the production of language highly specific to the optimisation of performance and exploitative productivity. Starting with organising ‘expert meetings’ with the risk-assessment team of the NAM in Groningen, during my residency at Het Resort this summer. I also intend to experiment with the
theatrical-psychological technique called ‘imaginary rescripting’ with locals living the consequences of the NAM’s gas mining, who cannot afford to take risk, innovate, and disrupt.

Later in the year I’ll repeat these experiments in collaboration with my students and explore how
work has taken on the semblance of art. Today's ideal worker is in fact an artist: a flexible, adaptable, job-sculptor with go-getter potential that creatively transforms precarity into product, ideally from a place of love. Secondly, I’ll conduct a series of experiments on performance and movement, drawing from AgitProp and Brechts Lehrstücke, taking my body as a starting point for exploring the qualities of exploitative productivity: the body as a site that can be mined for energy, that can be exhausted, self-optimised, made hyper-flexible, hyper-focussed, mind-ful and burned-out.

Essentially attempting to reclaim ownership over the body as a powerful resource. In order to carry out these experiments I will study gestures of productivity in different professional and educational environments as well as collaborate with a movement-specialist

c. Making Public
The literary research and performative experiments will inform script-writing and the scripting of performative tests with and for the participants of the research group, its audience as well as my students. Secondly, and parallel to all research activity, I will keep a public video-journal publishing, findings, reflections, sketches and experiments and lastly, I intend to write a
conclusive essay.

Ansisters - II

With a non-linear, continuous, and cyclical understanding of time, how could we look at archives as formulations of history that need re-defining, re-articulation, re-design, and
re-imagining?

How could we rearticulate archives as spaces for imagination and embodied knowledge rather than spaces for solidified information, treating its documentation (and materiality) as proof?

Keywords: collaborative research; embodied research methodologies; gossip as method;
embodied knowledge production; contextualization as method; anarchive.

While researching in the archives in the Netherlands, for Ansisters I, I came across the labor disputes of women workers from Turkey in 1978 in an onion peeling company in Veghel and a chicken factory in Almelo. Not only were these gender and class-based labor struggles but also they
reveal non-linear ways of thinking while defying factual and informational containers, such as the institutional archives. Further research led to embodied, multisensory, and collaborative methodologies. Ansisters archival research further revealed the urgency to address the lack of contextualization of the archival materials within institutional archives. The first phase resulted in two timelines and a series of videos with subjects of the Veghel labor dispute. Compiled from online newspaper archives, governmental, and legal documents, and institutional or personal archives, the two timelines contextualize the background of the labor dispute in Veghel (NL), and the social, economic, and political conditions of the labor migration between 1960 and 1980. They started as physical timelines and were later digitalized as materials for further research.

After establishing the linear timelines and contextualization efforts of this historical labor dispute in Veghel initiated by sixty-five women workers in an onion peeling company Gebr. Ploegmakers between 1977 and 1979, I came to realize that my efforts to
document and materialize these histories did not correspond to how their subjects were remembering or reimagining them.

Ansisters II will look into the labor-intensive work of plucking chicken feathers in Almelo and peeling onions in Veghel which was lost in the architecture of the institutional archive. Caring for future archives through
contextualizing the archived is a methodology within the project. What shape does non linear contextualization take? Is community building around and reconnecting with the archives a
form of contextualization?

The project finds its siblings in black feminist thought
and practices, from Uses of the Erotic by A. Lorde to Pleasure Activism by adrienne maree brown. In the Netherlands, Spectral Infrastructures, the long-term research trajectory convened by BAK in Utrecht, and its explorations into the unarchivable and the notions of
the archive with its performed completeness, truthfulness, and eventually hauntedness by
the past it carries (or fails to carry) resonates with the project.

As a pedagog, I aim to include embodied methodologies proposed in this project in my curricula and seamlessly move between theory and practice in the classroom.

(Un)limited energy: embodying energy systems to turn passive climate anxiety into conscious action

The first step for any problem we wish to address is to become aware of it, but what comes next?
How can we turn what we have been made aware of into action, or better yet, habit or ritual? How can we shape our environment to help us turn passive climate anxiety into conscious decision-making in our everyday life?

Keywords: Climate crisis, Habitual change, Hopeful action, Climate anxiety, Responsibility, Embodied
energy, Speculative design

In our ongoing search to find ways to reduce the severity of impending climate catastrophe, it has
been made clear that we drastically need to reduce our rate of consumption (Europe’s Consumption Footprint, 2022). In the Netherlands we have a word for this: Consuminderen. When It comes to the consumption of tangible things it can be easier to see and interact with what we are consuming and to make active choices to reduce this consumption. But when it comes to energy consumption this task becomes a lot more vague. The use of energy in the form of electricity and gas can often be hard to comprehend. In our current system, we receive a bill at the end of every month stating how much energy we have consumed in that month in abstract terms of Kilowatts and Cubic meters of gas. Or in the form of how much it all costs, which fluctuates constantly. But how different appliances in a
household add to this total and how our behavior affects this number can be difficult to comprehend
(Broms, 2011).

As a part of the Deep Futures research group, I want to further my research on energy habits and embodying energy in the local environment. Through conversations, experimentation, speculative
product design, and script making I want to explore our understanding of energy and the relationship we have with it. My research will mainly focus on my own environment, specifically local households and the KABK, where the supply of energy is nearly always abundant and uninterrupted. According to netbeheernederland.nl, Dutch households lose power for about 25 minutes on average per year making it one of the most reliable energy grids in the world. (Netbeheer Nederland, n.d.) Although a grid like this is a blessing, it does not promote the conservative usage of energy. It would almost give
the impression that it provides an inexhaustible source of energy which in fact, it does not.

How can we design our environment to make the concept of energy more tangible and embodied in order to help us make conscious decisions regarding the use of this energy? And can we more consciously make use of the energy that is available in and around our environment and in what ways is it possible to reorganize our day, adjust our behavior and or
deadlines to conform to the limited available energy in our surroundings?

In this research, I want to focus less on the design of “new gadgets”. Rather the focus will be on hacking and modifying existing systems and appliances to experiment with, and to reconfigure existing habits and rituals. An important aspect of this research will be
regarding the question of individual or societal
responsibility. According to a study conducted in 2022, 72% of the Dutch population is worried about climate change, however, 62% of those people find that their own actions make no impact as long as the industry does not reduce their emissions. This number increased by a significant 50% since 2019. (I&O Research 2022) While this work will be focused more on the individual aspects of climate action I believe
that a better understanding of our energy systems overall will also benefit the quality of those larger societal conversations and actions. However, this will be an ongoing discussion in my work and I will take into account the risk of placing excessive emphasis on individual responsibility thereby taking away attention from larger governmental and corporate structures.

Trickster in the Capitalocene

How can a contemporary revival of the mythological Trickster fgure help to tell stories of extinction that reconfgure perceptions of time?

My research asks how storytelling around anthropogenic species extinction can facilitate us to better understand and rethink our human perceptions of time. Te theoretical framework that I will employ to do this is creating a contemporary, feminist revision of the mythological Trickster fgure by casting extinct
animals as Tricksters in their aferlife. Te practice-based methodology that I would use is puppetry, the
visual representation of trickery. Specifcally, the continuation of my current project making puppets of
taxidermy extinct birds from a collection in Naturalis Biodiversity Centre, Leiden. Tese puppets will be
characters in experiments with diferent forms of extinction storytelling ranging across flmmaking, writing or performance. These forms of storytelling will be guided by Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘critical fabulation’. In summary, I would outline my research question to be: How can a contemporary revival of the mythological Trickster fgure help to tell stories of extinction that reconfgure perceptions of time?

For the last six months, I have been supported by a grant from Den Haag Gemeente to learn a new skill:
puppet-making. Specifcally, making puppets of 62 species of extinct, taxidermy birds at Naturalis. Trough
this I have been researching the birds’ extinction stories. I have encountered small penguins beaten to death for fear of being witches, parrots’ nests trampled by the hooves of agricultural cows and enormous
cormorants eaten by sailors. There is even one small bird from Borneo who escapes the clutches of extinction and reappears afer almost 200 years since being last seen. Collectively, they form a microcosm of our global socio-political conditions that have led to the current climate catastrophe. All of the birds have, in some way, been driven to extinction through capitalist, patriarchal or colonial endeavours. Commonly: damaging agricultural practices, the introduction of invasive species, hunting or habitat loss due to capitalist industry. I hope to bring these stories to life through my puppets, guided not only by scientifc and historical records but also informed by Saidiya Hartman’s notion of ‘critical fabulation’. In her essay Venus in Two Acts, she coins the term
to describe a method of flling in the gaps of archives through storytelling.