Wayne and Rebecca Madsen

Even though I lived through three years of Rebecca's graduate experience, I didn't notice anything different between what she was doing and how I approached undergraduate classes. This, I now know, was a lack of perception on my part because there are obvious differences between graduate programs and undergraduate programs, especially with the current program I am in. My first year was a blur, but not because I was appropriately using my time to research my field. It is true that I was learning about theory and practice in my discipline -- which I needed to spend a year to catch up -- but I was missing the essential research ingredient which would inform my practice.

I don't know how to begin research, but I have learned the clear difference between "learning" and "research." Rebecca was lucky to have a professor who she could bounce ideas off of and who would be able to direct her to papers and information which she could then compile into her research database. I only have access to one professor who strongly resides in the available-yet-insanely-busy camp. This means my research has to be initiated by myself and somehow I'm supposed to become an expert in my field of transdisciplinary practice. Which leaves me feeling rather overwhelmed and especially confused because I'm interested in too many things and going in too many directions. Somehow, I am supposed to become passionate about something and focus my life on that something. While this task was "easier" when I was only dealing with pigments and brushes, it left me feeling empty and shallow -- I was only speaking to a small group of people ("art community") and I was creating something from a paradigm which I no longer believed in. So this week I spent a great deal of time doing non-research, but project based, work with Sam Gould of Red76.

Monday evening was a meeting with the SWITCH online journal staff and we planned out the current issue. We will be taking advantage of the FUSE:conversation colloquiums and publish our experiences with some of the major social practice players in the contemporary transdisciplinary artworld. Since we will already be interacting with the best minds of our generation, our dialogue will be translated to the journal as a part of our research. Of course, a meeting like this has a lot of duplicate cross-speak and reminders-given-in-person. I just can't help thinking of a poster from despair.com about our collective intelligence through personal meetings. While some meetings are effective and smart -- for example, meetings I had later in the week -- a good number of meetings could conceptually be directed through a more efficient medium. Sitting around "trying to get things done" without any major prior research done by any team members always results in a non-meeting meeting.

Many of my concerns on research -- or my lack thereof -- came from the diatribe my professor gave our graduate seminar Tuesday night. A well deserved thrashing, I felt partway motivated and partway lost as to how I am supposed to remedy my non-research interests. Unfortunately for me, I haven't even had time this week until now to ponder on what I need to do because I've been swamped with other meetings and in my spare time I have been trying to verify the functionality of our newly built desktop. The one problem with building your own unit from scratch, as opposed to a steady system of updates, is that you never know which part is the part causing your computer to crash. At least not without hours of testing and rearrangement. I do believe that my time has paid off because, as of today, we have run every software that previously caused a computer reset and haven't seen anything. Perhaps we finally did it! After testing the most important software: Rebecca should be able to work from home.

This week marks the beginning of my project with Red76. Sam Gould flew down here for the weekend, both to give a forum at San Jose's city hall and to talk with myself and the team at Ars Virtua about our collaborative project for the Zero1 festival next year. Currently there is a wide expanse of project base we have to work with as well as an 8 month timeframe to work in. Thursday evening, Sam flew out and we chatted at Montalvo until late. Friday afternoon was going to be a taco truck extravaganza, but that fell through due to some meeting complications. Instead, Rebecca and I went to Sam's forum at FUSE:conversations and then went home to sleep off some massive allergy headaches.

Saturday morning, we had a workshop, robotics demo and electronic swap meet with Sam organized by CADRE. One of the more difficult things I have to do which I'd like to get better at is leading a discussion as opposed to directing questions at the artist. Then, while most people were building junkbots, Sam discussed with us the framework for how we are going to get this residency project started. We're all really excited about the possibilities, but because it's so early in the game it is all potential for the kinetics of the project. It was a long Saturday, but a fruitful Saturday. Here's to hoping that I am able to make some research involving the current projects I'm in.