re;Verse was initiated in 2020 by two independent art-makers, Ceyda Berk-Söderblom and Reishabh Kailey. It is a digital machine for upcycling rejected/unproduced thinking. We collect rejected grant proposals which can be anonymously donated through our Very Open Call. The Very Open Call will remain open forever and, as soon as a sufficient number of proposals have been collected, a machine learning algorithm will be invited to remix them into community-generated poetry.

Artisitc outcomes from my Masters thesis, inspired by Jane Bennet's book Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things

Planned Obsolescence is a policy of planning or designing a product with an artificially limited useful life, so that it becomes obsolete (i.e., unfashionable, or no longer functional) after a certain period of time. The work seeks to bring attention to the practice of planned obsolescence by reclaiming discarded circuits and repurposing them into unplanned forms of newness.  The exhibition was an outcome from collective study into materiality of media practices and its socio-ecological implications. The course - Archeology of Media Infrastructures - was taught at Aalto MediaLab by media artist Samir Bhowmik.

This thesis examines the agency of non-expert knowledge in experimental making processes. It draws upon sociological discourse to question the growing expert-laypeople divide. Non-expert knowledge is any knowledge lying outside commonly understood notions of expertise, i.e. outside hegemonic knowledge structures. This social divide, understood to have a psychological impact, is seen through current research about phenomena surrounding professional anxiety, such as the Impostor syndrome. Within this context, the research explores the agency in non-expert knowledge by engaging in methods that allow for non-expert agency to materialise in the making process. The research employs an assemblage of methods based on existing literature. It draws from jugaad (a cultural outlook to hacking from India), critical making, tactical reuse, embodied tinkering and reflective practices. Through this combination, the method aims to be critical, reflexive and responsive to situated ecology. The agency of objects and material affordances offered by the situation are signs of ecological vitality that the research addresses. Thus, it asks two questions: 1) How does non-expert knowledge exercise agency in the critical making process?, and 2) How does non-expert agency address situated ecological vitality through the critical making process?

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The research follows a methodology of practice-led research. The methods mentioned above were applied to experimental making processes, which were carried out over the span of one year by the researcher to test the agency of non-expert knowledge. These experiments were recorded using process-oriented autoethnography through self-filming, sketches, texts and images. The results discuss the making processes by introducing the thematic thinking behind them, as a consequence of the non-expert approach. These themes, ‘Rubbery Making’ and ‘What’s going on Cladonia Rangiferina?’ are discussed through case reflections of making processes. Further, the results include a curated YouTube playlist of relevant lectures, included as a part of the making process as well as process films. The discussions address questions about ecological vitality by recording examples of material agency and affordances. It establishes how non-expert agency materialises in the making process through ecological interaction. The research is limited to the processes carried out by the researcher but poses a possibility for expanding the approach to other participants. It explores and applies theory about sociology, critical media theory, and new media materialism.

from Samir Bhowmik's blog post: INFRAGRAPHY Volume 2. is a compilation of critical student artworks and short essays dealing with the materialities of media technologies and their environmental implications. These works and texts are the outcomes from the course ‘Media and the Environment’ in the Fall of 2019 at the Department of Media, Aalto University. The course was a series of scholarly readings about and around the themes of media including media’s relations and impacts on the so-called Anthropocene, thermocultures of media, ecologies of fabrication, media and plastics, Internet of Things, Planned Obsolescence, e-waste, and media’s energetic landscapes. A key approach of the course was also introducing artistic methods and practices that could address emerging media materialities. The final exhibition of the course was a collection of student artworks as a response to the contemporary discourse of political economy of media and related environmental implications.

generated by voicebox by Botnik. This is a satirical course catalogue, co-written by a predictive keyboard which uses a machine-learning algorithm to generate typing suggestions. The predictions are made from within the corpus of a source text. This keyboard was fed as source text, all the course descriptions from the department of art at Aalto University - and now it is proficient in 'art writing'.

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Exhibited at Can You See Work - produced by Aalto ViCCA, curated by Shubhangi Singh and Naya Magaliou

Students from Aalto Medialab were invited to do an exhibition of New Media artwork at assist, Seoul School of Integrated Sciences and Technologies in Seoul, South Korea

The lichen Cladonia Rangiferina, changes its ontology across realities. It exists as myth, in the minds of humans as the beard of a mighty forest spirit. It exists as food, for reindeer. It also exists as a detector of radiation since it doesn’t have any roots and absorbs all its nutrition from air, making it a ‘radioactive sponge’. After the Chernobyl disaster in Ukraine, Cladonia Rangiferina was used to measure the radiation levels in surrounding areas. In fact, Chernobyl’s far-reaching effects all the way in the Nordic countries were understood through testing the lichen. SEM is a type of electron microscope that produces images of a sample by scanning the surface with a focused beam of electrons. The electrons interact with the atoms in the sample, creating signals that describe the topography and create the image down to the resolution of a single nanometer. As part of my artistic research with Reindeer Lichen, I made a series of microscopic scans using the Scanning Electron Microscope.

I spent about seven months researching and artistically engaging with the lichen Cladonia Rangiferina. There was a collaborative research phase - with students from Parsons University, New York - that lasted about three months and was followed by individual production. The research months consisted of discussions, reading, watching and thinking about ecology, the role of artists, ideas about control, and ecological relationships inhabited by humans and non-humans. An increasing fascination with glass jars and through some gardening tutorials, I learned how to make tiny terrariums. Aiming to keep the lichen alive, I made 7 experimental terrariums to test the ideal conditions suited for their survival. Terrariums usually consist of some gravel, a layer of activated carbon and some form of soil/substrate. After much adjusting of different factors like air, water and microbes, an almost ideal solution was to just leave the terrariums out in the snow, which preserved the lichen perfectly.

Sonic twink is an interactive experiential sculpture which began as an experiment with Light Dependent Resistors (LDR) using the Bela Microcontroller. A small patch of code on Pure Data translates the input signal from the light sensors to the audio output after some filtering. Glass jars lined with reflective foil cover the sensors and distort the light, creating an additional filter to the sound.It is currently a wooden board + electronics + jars and stuff + illustration. This is an ongoing experiment, I'm quite unsure where it will end up.

Scenes from the Hindi movie Chalti Ka Naam Gaadi, 1958 - all playing simultaneously to create a composite moving image which is projected on a wooden surface. The moving image holds the entire narrative of the film within each of its frames. Participants were able to paint with different colours on the wooden surface, thus physically interacting with the grayscale images from another time.

made with Processing

There are8 balls flying across the screen, each at a different speed and a different score. Catching the faster balls scored higher points. The game goes on as long you want points.