Ground
Works

The Filipino migrant worker’s story takes place across continents, resulting in gaps and silences within their story when viewed from a single perspective. How can techniques in illustration be used to challenge linearity and dominant perspectives? How can it be used to record and retell histories of marginalized/migrant populations? In a collaboration with Damayan Migrant Workers Association and Barnard College History Department, the project utilizes both art-based research and field work methodologies toward an illustrated visual essay of the experience of the Filipino migrant domestic worker in New York City. It looks at how illustration can be used as a tool for documentation and journalism. Illustration can record and inform, but it can also fill silences in the archive, as well as protect subjects who may be undocumented or trafficked, especially in contexts in which photography might have jeopardized their safety. Field work, reportage drawing, and interview aid in recording my experience as a volunteer staff member in Damayan. In late 2023, I illustrated and designed 20 Years of Damayan, a visual historical timeline for the organization, assisted by collaborative archival research with Barnard College History. I then brought my illustration methodology to Little Manila, the Filipino im/migrant enclave in Queens, New York.

Watching and Dreaming is a body of work that enables the viewer to peer inside the “mind” of a machine to observe its perceptions, mind wanderings, and dreams. This is not a metaphorical representation of dreams, nor a technical exercise in AI such as DeepDream [1] but the realization of a computational model of dreaming informed by cognitive neuroscience. This level of description avoids biases towards Jungian and Freudian psychology that assume dreaming is exclusively human. Dreams should not be considered independently of the perceptual capacities of the dreamer, and thus comparing this model to human perceptual abilities is problematic. For the audience, these artworks function as entry-points to consider the constructed nature of perceptions and the continuity of waking, mind wandering, and dreaming. For the artist, the artworks are sites of knowledge-making; it is through the making of artistic works that the model (computational formalization) and theory (argument that situates the model in empirical knowledge) are developed. The research underlying these artworks integrates knowledge in multiple disciplinary dimensions: (a) The computational modeling of dreaming processes (Zhang 2009; Treur 2011), (b) generative and media artworks engaging with the concept of memory and dreaming (Franco 2007; Dörfelt 2011), and (c) the conception of dreaming as imagination (Nir and Tononi 2010). In this text, Watching and Dreaming (2001: A Space Odyssey) (2014) serves as an exemplar of the Watching and Dreaming body of work. The machine attempts to learn and predict Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001: A Space Odyssey through the construction of its own subjective perception that is the basis of dreaming. “Mental” images generated during perception, mind wandering, and dreaming are subjective constructions bound to the peculiarities of the machine’s way of seeing. The body of work constitutes various manifestations of the cognitive model, not attempts to communicate the model’s mechanisms.