sharleen asked me to take a step back & look at what i’ve learned across my explorations.
i’ve written; spoken; made; and read.
my first observation is that the thesis is self-centered. i can craft explanations for why it’s not, but nasif & mimi are right: it's art; it's not science; and it's not a tool.
continuing an earlier thought — the thesis just needs to be honest — the question is simple: if you have a year to explore something, what would it be?
from past projects (and more recently processing community day 2026 talk), i have conviction that the work i want to do largely falls under the realm of encoding human-experience into programmatic systems, and to produce artifacts that exhibit emergent behavior.
the thesis simply explores alternatives realms of concretization for such systems that aren’t retina-displays (or lcd-s or led-s).
these are tools for me to show my work; to show the outputs of my systems; to be able to teach with them; and to build a certain relationship with the medium that i will work with for the rest of my life. to be able to feel the emergence in ways that weren’t possible before.
the thesis is not my pathway into a job. it is the setting up for an attempt to steer my life into the direction that i want. whether it happens or not, is not up to me. and, frankly, it’s immaterial — i will forge a path.
with that, certain goals become clearer:
- the displays need to be robust. i should be able to put multiple systems onto it, and it should be able to express them. this is a deliberate choice against yeseul & aram’s point of the form being dictated by the content.
certain directions also become clearer:
- research: why did computer screens evolve into the things they became now? why don’t we have access to alternative display mechanisms that aren’t light?
- making: aram mentioned a good point: can i make the simplest systems that exhibit this kind of behavior, to explain my point better?