Thank you very much, Ruhr Residency!

The Ruhr Residency 2017 allowed me to pursue my creative research on the
theory on smooth and striated spaces in New York City, a space that is both
nomadic as well as sedentary. The journey to New York, the experience of
living in a different, unfamiliar space, that is by its looks other then
territory I am familiar with, was very insightful and relevant to get a
physical feel of spacial differences. It helped me to physically explore
smoothness and striation through changing my habitat.

Just like the sea changes its current form continuously, one characteristic
of New York that struck me a lot, were spacial changes over short periods
of time, disappearances of buildings, areas of uninhabited territory,
construction works, fallow lands, new buildings rising out of the ground in
no time, as well as old ones being torn down. It changed my perception to
look at those alterations through the lens of Guattari and Deleuze’s
theory. And to see a space like New York, a territory dominated by order,
laws, stock-markets, economy, numbers, codes, algorithms and to conclude
that those aspects, that demand striation, equally facilitate smoothness.

While I was initially interested in the visual aspect of striated and
smooth spaces, led by the idea to transform them into graphic animations to
create experiences that allow a physical understanding of different spacial
perception, by learning the basics of creative code and interactive
animations, working with softwares such as p5, processing and mainly the
Kinect, as a motion capture sensor, my attention was caught by artificial
intelligence during my research. A field that I would like to further
explore in the context of the theory on the smooth and striated.

Not only did I physically encounter new spacial structures and went through
the process of learning how to navigate through them, e.g. understanding
the grid structure of New York City, but I was also able to observe a
cultural environment being sedentary as well as nomadic co-exist in one
space.

Apart from that I particularly enjoyed being in close proximity to striated
spaces that are in its nature very different. The city and the sea. They
are nomadic and sedentary at the same time.

This residency has been a great starting point for this particular
research. There will be more to come. Relationships between New York based
artists and creators from Ruhrgebiet have been made and I am looking
forward to where this project will take me in the future.