I’m going to have subheadings on this post, because I have things to write for several areas of what I’m doing.
PhD Proposal
I don’t know why I want to base my research on digital art, because it makes more sense if I base it on multidisciplinary art. The reason why I changed it to digital art is because I needed to narrow my topics down. In hindsight, I don’t think this is what the supervisors mean, they meant the scope of my research project rather than the tangible work. I’m thinking of changing it back to multidisciplinary art.
The good thing about being a student again is having institutional access to JSTOR and ScienceDirect to see unlimited amount of journals. I can use this access to help me write my PhD proposal. I can also get a discount on Adobe suite.
Science, ramblings about the past academics and identity
I wrote a few posts ago that chemistry is really difficult at the point of sub shells, orbitals and electrons, but I’m okay with it now. It’s like I just woke up one day and understood energy levels, azimuthal quantum numbers, and the electron configuration of atoms in the subshell orders. I don’t think it’s that bad now.
I was really happy to find out that I’ve given my brother all my previous revision guides from secondary school. He’s kept them, so I can drive to his flat to collect these today, and look through to refresh myself the GCSE triple science knowledge. When I was in secondary school, I was classified as an allrounder who wasn’t particularly good at one subject, but had potential to specialise in any area of my own choosing. This was (and still is) a really unfortunate place to be, in the context of Sartre and Kierkegaard on existential choice. I spent year 9 being poached by different subject teachers to choose a range of different subjects, and in the end settled for triple science, history, geography and art as my optional GCSEs. That would go on to predicting my long term interest for sciences and humanities. The teachers were serious about GCSEs being really important in life actually, not in the sense of grades, but in the sense of building an identity.
Something happened at home during my A levels and I kept it to myself, so I didn’t get very good grades for human biology, history, art and psychology; but I don’t want to write about it in more detail. There was something interesting about my A level choices in how I wanted to learn about the human condition from a biological perspective, an artistic perspective, and from a psychological perspective. When we see the structure of the brain and separate the biological components as white, grey matter, and conclude that consciousness is something to do with neurons; it’s not the same as experiencing that consciousness to create art and literary work as a result. Maybe that’s the binary problem of theory and practice in humanities, as in we can’t connect the two?
I think I’m in long term identity moratorium, because I want to keep my options open still. Society has a tendency towards pushing people to foreclosure and philosophical bad faith, with rules of specialising in something, to find a partner and get married, to have kids etc., I think identity moratorium is the existentialist way of life, and a subtle rejection of this transgenerational life script.
Chemistry lesson and theory
My chemistry lecturer introduced us to the concept of valence bond theory of how the chemicals want to become similar to noble gases with a full outer shell, with the analogy that people want to get a job, get a house, have a partner to become more stable. She was basically describing the life script dictating people to become more stable in life. To explain this further, I think people are attracted to certain people who ‘have valence electrons’ that are compatible to ‘their own amount of valence electrons’ to form a stable partnership, hence the notion of the right amount of opposite and similar traits lead to attraction. People aren’t attracted to everyone they interact with, because ‘their valence electrons’ are a different amount, so they ‘don’t make a full outer shell’ that’s stable, and so it breaks down or decays over time.
I just thought of a funny way to explain it in Lacanian terms. If someone has a lack (of electrons. and electrons is like the personality of the atom that is how an atom appears to behave), they want to gain someone else’s electrons to make their outer shell whole, so they are unconsciously on the look out for someone with a specific amount of electrons on their outer shell in order to fill that structural lack/empty space. So that might explain for example, why a shy person is attracted to a confident person, but because the other person hasn’t got a complimentary amount of traits with this person, the relationship decays over time, where that person eventually perceives the other person as arrogant. It’s not accurate, but I’m just borrowing terminologies and concepts and changing it to another field.