Arts Lab 7.0: Mohamed Eddaif | Month II

The month progressed at two different speeds, shifting between outreach at schools and the quiet of the rehearsal space. While mornings and afternoons were spent at schools, engaged in running activities and meetings with teachers to develop short workshops, evenings pulled me into the rehearsal space. Right after school, observations translated seamlessly into rehearsal space testing of movement and projection. This cycle of going fast: run, note, rehearse, and refine was the most effective process of synchronizing timing and composition. Concurrently, an online workshop was conducted for art students on our process and delivery of alternative museum ideas, and participation in a roundtable discussion on Open HeART HUB  methodology pushed the project towards better explanation and shorter demos.

As the residencies escalated, cycles overlapped: support in schools, test projection cues in the hub, and back home to refine files and export again. The process of converting cardboard prototypes from workshops to Blender and Unreal scenes became feasible: from a student’s quick paper model to a projected object the next day. November culminated with me presenting at a round-table café on our public engagement work and then taking a Romanian lesson—notable public exchanges that influenced how I would describe activities in school and informed thinking on workshops and language.

A national holiday had become one to remember for reasons that had little to do with the program, a dear person got  bitten by dogs while going out for a morning stroll, and our running around between the emergency rooms of the town and finally, and unexpectedly, the police station. The labor of forms and waiting rooms gave way to something else, namely, it showed just how much care was actually implicit within the routines of the house. Holding each other through that day and learning from one another strengthened the ties with the flat mates and brought a sense of a family among the team members. In the early days of the cold and a couple of illnesses, there were movie nights, singing, and mealtimes that sustained the level of morale.

Production was swift in the first half of December. We did a photoshoot with black backgrounds for the catalogue, ceramics and kiln cycles, as well as the Ruginoasa photoshoot with costumes and masks from historic eras, which would become important imagery later on. Catalogue compilation required extended nights with concerted efforts at sequencing images, writing captions, and aligning pages. An evening in the studio with a collaborator until the early morning hours stands out, as making by hand solved image and spatial problems that computers couldn’t.

At the same time, I dedicated some of my personal VR development time to contribute to the live component by leading light and projection mapping for the three-scene play we put together as a team. This meant putting more emphasis on hub practice and projection software development rather than experimenting with my own ideas but allowed for greater multiplier potential for the creative process because the play allowed for focused collaborative effort, and the projection mapping I developed for it is now providing value for the residencies as well. The low-tech, projection-capable masks were highly successful for school presentations and at the House of Culture, as they easily allowed for direct child participation and provided excellent results for repeatable documentation for the catalogue.

Technically, it was the month where the projection process was put to the test. Rehearsals were where the differences between motion and projection were highlighted, and it was where I began looking for ways to utilize the strengths of modular assets, more accurate export preferences, and an easy means offallback playback in case the program didn’t quite go as planned. I experimented with scenes for the Unreal and Blender applications with this in mind. The debriefs were where I picked up insights on what went right in the exhibition and areas that needed improvement. This means by mid-December the elements were falling into place: the HUB exhibition went ahead with proven visuals, the catalogue had progressed to a stage close to print-ready, the residency cycles were loopable, and the introductory scenes of Unreal were interacting the way I wanted the environments to. This month has been a learning experience regarding the working of delicate plans to make them more robust: short test scopes, saving and versioning the data to safeguard it, and including the people surrounding the project not just to watch the process happen. Ultimately, the experience of the month has left me with better approaches, concrete things to show for my time, the friendships that can only come from shared hardship, and the confidence that stems from embracing the human work involved in residencies.

This monthly report was written by Mohamed Eddaif, our Moroccan volunteer taking part in a six-month Arts Lab 7.0 mobility, co-funded by the European Union under the European Solidarity Corps.