1. Let's start with the heavy stuff.
As of last month, I'm no longer an active university student. I've passed all the courses required for my degree, and in about five months, I'll likely be walking across a stage grabbing a piece of paper that sums up how I've spent the last 3.5 years of my life and is supposed to dictate how I'll spend the next 45 or so years — as a Mechatronics Engineer. And yet the one lingering thought in my mind is... is that what I want to be?
I've talked to plenty of fellow students about this — some younger, some older, and some who've long since left university behind — and the best advice I've received is that you don't ever have to be "stuck" in a particular career. There is always the option of pivoting to new companies, new roles, even new degrees if the heart so desires. It's difficult to believe that this is easy to accomplish at any stage though, since the reality is that life often gets in the way. Financial difficulties and other commitments and responsibilities, not to mention an ever-evolving and yet consistently challenging job market, seem likely possibilities that can prevent needed career shifts at any given moment. My biggest fear stepping out of university and into the "real world" in the coming months is this act of "getting stuck." Ironically, it seems, this fear is also holding me back from unsticking myself in the first place.
In other words, I think I'm already stuck.
Whenever I think about what I truly want to do in life, a branch of possibilities seems to grow in my mind, each flowering differently with its own variety of skills, applications and potential opportunities. The problem is, I want to own and grow every part of this branch, even though I know deep down that there are only so many resources I can give to do so. At some point, I will run out, and the branch will wither. I've learned firsthand that my insatiable desire to do everything is, unfortunately, not possible with the limited time and energy available to us humans in a given week. However, I can't remember a time in my life when I didn't want to do everything, and when I was perfectly content focusing on a few specific things. The times in my life I cherish most are when I've tried many new things, or worked to improve on many things, or accomplished many things. I've never been content with achieving just one goal, even if it was larger than many smaller goals combined.
Thus, at the root of my fear of getting stuck, and why I feel I'm already, essentially, stuck, is my desire to do and try everything. I fear being in a place where I am forced to pick just one or two things to do, whether it be a career or sport or hobby, and yet this fear has held me back from picking something to focus on now that university is over. This is painfully obvious in my current job situation: I'm currently working two internship-level positions until March, one full-time and one part-time, and yet have no long-term role planned afterwards. I have vague ideas on what I want to do based on my passions and interests, but nothing concretely decided. Part of this comes from a desire to take a break and slow down in life (an equally important thing I'm learning to do which probably deserves an entire post of its own), but part of this also comes from a fear of pursuing a job I might regret. I haven't done nearly enough research on what I want to do and the companies I might want to work at to identify whether this is a rational thought, so it would probably be best to leave this train of thought here for now.
So I return to another area of my life where my pervasive desire to do everything has gotten me stuck: passion projects. I love coming up with new project ideas, whether for a photoshoot, short film or an application of technology in art, and yet rarely commit to bringing any of them to life. I fear pursuing the "wrong" project — the project that wouldn't bring me any joy or satisfaction, the project that would just waste my time. And yet every project idea seems like the "wrong" project specifically because it hasn't felt like the "right" one. Most likely the perfectionism I thought I left behind in high school is showing here, and if I learned anything from that era of life, the best way to get over it is to start.
2. So what am I rambling on about, exactly?
Hence, I arrive to the purpose of this post, and hopefully posts to come: to just start. I want to get unstuck, to get working on things that excite me, to explore my passions in art and technology and share them as a means of holding myself accountable. I also want to allow myself to explore everything, to fulfill my desire of doing everything that has also been holding me back. Many of the ideas and technologies I explore are too expensive, complicated or irrelevant to be incorporated into projects I have in mind, but I don't want to discourage myself from exploring them in the first place just because they can't be applied in the near future. I think the learning opportunities from these little explorations are still incredibly valuable and encourage me to keep being curious, something that I feel is essential as both an engineer and an artist. I plan on sharing these findings, including the resources I discover, in posts such as this in order to provide a space for them that isn't just in my brain or on long-forgotten grouped tabs left open on my web browser. I also do plan on sharing updates on the projects I undertake, whether big or small, to continue encouraging myself to complete them (another thing I seem to struggle with). I don't want to make this a chore for myself though, so my posts may be brief and somewhat unstructured (this post in particular is pushing the limits of what's considered structured in my mind...), but I hope they will serve to share my ideas and explorations and fuel my passion in the creative technology and art sphere.
3. The other half of the title (technology and art).
I'll start small and just list off the two little art and technology explorations I've done recently! These both deserve their own posts but I'll give a little bit of detail here to start:
DIY capacitive multi-touch sensors, which I would love to create and use in an interactive electronic art installation I've been dreaming of making. There are potentially easier ways to accomplish the interface I would need for the installation's interactive component, but I've always been fascinated by the technology that gave birth to touch screens at its most electrically simple (if you can even call electricity simple... I still can't).
Moiré effect, lenticular printing, and other "kinetic" imagery made with "spliced" images. This exploration is the more recent and less developed of the two and came about after experimenting with splicing up photographs from my latest photoshoot (something I plan to do for the presentation part of the photographs once I'm done with Lightroom editing — a small test of this is included as the cover image for this post). I'm continuously amazed by the way our brains fill in visual information so easily and the moiré effect is a great example of this — it's definitely something I want to explore in the presentation of my photos.
I've also learned through this exploration that parametric and programmatic design using Illustrator is possible and is something I definitely need to try (really shows I'm an engineer and CAD designer at heart...). See here: https://graphicdesign.stackexchange.com/questions/37998/how-to-create-a-vector-curve-programmatically/38010#38010
A post describing the whole art and technology sphere in general and what excites me about it is also warranted, but I'll save this for a later date — one thing at a time. Writing this out has already gotten me so much more excited to explore and share my learnings as I go, so I think this will be the first post of many! I don't expect a lot of people (or anybody, really) to read this, but if you do and you've resonated with any of my experiences or explorations, I'd love to hear from you — feel free to reach out :)
Till next time!
~ Sophia
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