Tractieweg on Google Maps

A few days into the first week of the course – and after the first ‘present yourself ‘ day which I will post about shortly – I realised that my research proposal would have to undergo major reconstruction. Pitching a research proposal is a difficult task as selling your ideas requires the assistance of professionals so I sought help from this page. Which is a good thing, really, and doesn’t bother me, but left me with a situation where I was very uncertain about the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of my research. Then  Klaas Hoek made a remark about how important it is what name we give our workspace. He gave us the example of Andy Warhol calling his workspace ‘the Factory’ and how this put a stamp on all his work from then on.  So, as I could not yet decide about the ‘what’ or ‘why’, I went for a decision about the ‘where’ .

So I made two decisions:

• one: as I do experiments, I will start calling my atelier ‘the lab’
• two: I will appropriate the parking-lot-cum-wasteland around the atelier building for the lab’s outdoor facilities

As you can see, this gives me a lot of room to manouvre in.  I will talk about my first explorations of the outdoors lab in later blogs, but let me tell you right now that these days it is much much greener than it looks on the picture. A lot of grass, seedlings, trees even have grown up since the aereal flight that provided Google with it’s maps!