The Towngas Ma Tau Kok Control Center has been recreated within the Leave Your Body world. Its worth mentioning that this was built with the help of a very talented Minecraft Architect, and consist of the exterior only – but wow is it beautiful.

A site recreated within the aesthetics of Minecraft is similar to how most 3D scanning and digitization projects – the information extracted is for “skins” and “shapes” and how these two types of information interlink with each other. The material of the site cannot be calibrated, and the material of the project becomes the medium in which the information is expressed – light emitted from a glass surface.

I had a really hard time working with the old footage and photographs from Ventspils, it was too emotionally charged (but not in a spectacular powerful way, more like in a gentle-nagging-weighing-down way). and I was sitting in the studio, breaking down a bit and thinking “this is not supposed to be so difficult and boring, this time is supposed to be creative, playful and life-affirming!!!”

so I asked myself WHERE IS MY POWER

(and I found it.)

I’m actually starting to work on some fun stuff right now that also came out of my archives but it’s not at all what I expected coming into this residency.

so yeah, I don’t think I’m ready to work with that particular video footage yet. I had glimpses of what kind of film this footage could become but it’s out of my reach right now because I’m only starting to come back to my individual practice, plus so many hard things happened in the past 3-4 months (from my housemate leaving without a word, to another burnout from work, to fighting off illegal eviction attempts, to going through assessments with DWP that kept being rescheduled) – I really need to listen to what energies/thoughts/feelings are here with me and ready to be expressed. not forcing anything anymore.

♥

This reel is on my Minecraft mood board for sure:

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CPyBLT-lTkb/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=

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Video description: An Instagram reel by @minecraftprimebuilds that shows a Minecraft player jumping over objects/obstacles in a tunnel while in the child’s voice we hear the following words (that also show up in large letters over the video): “Roses are red, violets are gay, I sent this to you cause you are gay”

Minecraft is a sandbox video game that was first made public in 2009 before being released in 2011. It has since become the best-selling video game of all time. A game with over ten years of development and lore is intimidating to step into. Instead of just releasing a video game with the possibility of sequels like a movie, the recent trend in video games is to continually make improvements and add complexity over time, through updates. Added complexity retains the interest of hardcore users, and updates keep up with current trends to absorb new users. Developers consistently introduce new skins, maps, items, stories, missions, etc. As a maintenance format for the medium of video games it works. One can’t help but think what other systems could benefit from similar forms of continual improvement and incentivizing.

I am embarking on the early portion of the adjustment period and wondering how long it will take to where the game feels intuitive. The controls are still uncomfortable and there are too many types of blocks to know what to do. Luckily I can stand on the shoulders of giants and channel the wisdom of millions before me by watching Youtube tutorials. So far I have figured out how to build a tunnel and put some light in it.

The initial plan for my residency was to go through video footage, images and writing pieces that I accumulated since the last time I made a film.

Finding these images I’m sharing today immediately changed the tone of what I needed to say.

I don’t feel like I can do the “welcome to my blog” thing for this; it’s too abstract, too sad, too intimate. So I recorded audio instead of writing the image description, and there is a transcript for it below too.

Transcript:

Hi. So I want to talk about these images that I’m posting. I selected them in… I selected them on Tuesday and then was at a loss, I didn’t know what to write, what image description to write… that is not boring. What kind of context to give to it, or what introduction to give to it.  Because these photos are the photos I took in November 2019 in Ventspils, Latvia, where my grandparents live, and that was the last time that I visited them – I was a complete emotional mess. And none of the words seemed right, so I’m recording this audio now.  So those of you who are just here for matter of fact description, let me do it first. There are three photographs. They are in landscape orientation mode and, and these images show sand. Just sand, what else can I say, but very particular sand, obviously, it’s the Baltic Sea beach. The sand is very light in colour, almost off-white. You… The image shows this interesting pattern on the surface, it shows thin kind of lines created by the wind: very long, thin, wobbly lines quite close to each other. And then it shows footsteps in the sand like sole imprints, that are more rough. Like while the pattern created by the wind is very gentle, as if you know the sand was stroked in this gentle way. The imprints, the sole imprints are obviously like more rough and deeper. There are also like little pebbles of different colours kind of scattered around the images. They’re mostly medium shot. One of them is kind of like a long, longer shot. One is more of a close up, and it maybe makes me think a teeny tiny bit of the surface of the moon. You know that patchy quality of it. But yeah, when I saw this image, the thing that came to my mind was, Oh my God, this is kind of my DNA like the DNA of my perception of the world, the DNA of my perception of beauty, my understanding of what home feels like. It is a very quintessential element of growing up by the sea in that particular place. And also, it’s quite stunning in maybe a quiet, more reserved way. But that’s me talking about the place itself, not necessarily about what these photographs would convey to other people. 

Being sick with COVID kinda ended up being the perfect time to explore the thing I’m doing for Videotage – having a go at creating an intervention for their Leave Your Body realm in Minecraft.

I’ve been struggling with falling asleep for more than a year, and whenever I get sick I secretly hope that falling asleep will become easy at least for a while – it never does. So feeling poorly, unable to sleep and very bored, I tried my first build.

I never played Minecraft before, it took me a couple of tries and a couple of random YouTube tutorials to get the hang of the most basic things.

The game was fun and quite calming, it required the perfect level of engagement and effort for somebody lying sick in bed. I loved doing a bit of math to figure out the scale of what I wanted to do, and then thoroughly enjoyed the repetition of placing a block after block next to each other. it drew me in. Tiny repetitive tasks can be a source of calm to neurodivergent bodies.

I don’t know if Videotage had things like disability and dissociation in mind when they named the project Leave Your Body, but being disabled, we get a lot of reasons to want to leave our bodies so it all really connects for me.

I decided to recreate my bedside table but massive like a tall building. The bedside table was nearby, quite pleasant in shape, basically contained my life in it, and maybe by now, it is an established subject matter in Disability Arts iconography?

As with the current semi-lock down in Hong Kong, just as in most other lock downs, people develop an inexplicable bubbling primal urge for greenery and sunlight. So this last weekend my partner and I took our poodle to do a short hike on Hong Kong’s outlying Lamma Island.

Although I had seen it before, I somehow completely forgot about this sizeable man-made hole in the hillside along the hiking route, that dated back to the Japanese occupation (1941 – 1945). It is said that this cave was used to hide boats ladened with explosives that would have been launched into unsuspecting enemy ships. There is a small stainless steel plaque near the cave describing it as a “kamikaze grotto” along with some information. However, I have found some speculation on if the caves were ever in use or if the boats and their operators were intended to be sacrificial.

In thinking about the city’s relationship with the subterranean this instance is unique in that it supports a larger historical narrative and also takes on the significance of a landmark. What is essentially an empty hole, contains within it so much thick tension through the power of absence. Somehow it manages to be a very “heavy hole”

To assist in thinking about this I found this quote from Underland: A Deep Time Journey by Robert Macfarlane:

“We all carry trace fossils within us – the marks that the dead and the missed leave behind. Handwriting on an envelope; the wear on a wooden step left by footfall; the memory of a familiar gesture by someone gone, repeated so often it has worn its own groove in both air and mind: these are trace fossils too. Sometimes, in fact, all that is left behind by loss is trace – and sometimes empty volume can be easier to hold in the heart than presence itself.”

Is this the greatest hat + book combo ever? they match so perfectly the only answer is YES or I’d need to see some photo evidence from you to prove me wrong

they are my source of warmth for now because…

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(Content Warning: COVID and isolation)

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I tested positive for COVID on Saturday, 1 day after the residency started. Despite the frustration, I am still lucky because I don’t have physical conditions that could put my life in serious danger in this situation, I have access to healthcare, I have some money and a regular job. I have a house to stay in now, and a house that I will move to next month.

I am holding in my heart those who find themselves in a scenario drastically different from this one. I know the terror.

Yet, it was still triggering to realise I am ill and stuck being alone again. Ill and alone. again. ill again. alone again.

I am okay now, I had some support to process my feelings. Since starting No Bad Parts, it has helped me so much to try to befriend and earn the trust of that panicked, catastrophising, upset part of me. To gently ask that part what it is trying to say, why it hurts and what its story is. There’s always a story, and sometimes the stories are too big for us to see and hold at once.

My plan for this residency was simple: to be myself and to find some rest. And I’m starting it off not with my perfect idea of creative connected luxurious downtime, it is starting with lying lethargically in bed, taking pills for my inflamed sinuses, and dodging phone calls. I want to roll my eyes disappointingly and say “classic..” but also it reminds me to put things into perspective.

I’m sure there is a smart point I could make about disability lens somewhere here, but writing is effort, writing is labour, writing is hard on the body and my body is gently yet rightfully directing me towards a nap.

stay and keep each other safe x