Introduction
Awareness & Culture is an honours specialisation track that emerged in 2020 through efforts of TU Delft’s professor Eduardo Mendes and his team. His drive to design an honours curriculum that catered towards a more holistic education for engineers sprung from his concern that engineers are often lacking a strong core of principles, as well as a good understanding of their norms and values. In the rapidly increasing complexity of society, engineers must be equipped with tools that enable them to create solutions that take the multitude of facets into account, as well as stand the test of time. With this vision, the curriculum of Awarness & Culture was designed to help students set foot onto this path of becoming a socially- and self-aware engineers.
On this page, my final works of three of the five subjects are showcased, provided with a short description of the subject.
Art, Empathy, and Ethics
This subject focused on the students’ discovery of their emotional response to new technologies to lead them to a better “empathic” understanding of how new technologies impact society. In order to achieve this, a framework of Art-Embedded Learning was integrated with weekly ethical debates on topics of how technology affects individuals and communities in contemporary society. The participants’ ideas and concepts gained depth through being challenged by two artists (Thijs Biersteker and Frank Auperlé) that helped us eventually develop an artistic project. My final product was an artwork, titled Ash. Hereafter comes the description for the work.
Ash
From an early age Maxim Velli was surrounded by death. When he was nine, his grandmother passed away. Later that same year, his hundred year old great grandmother passed. Some years later – his aunt, then grandfather, then the other grandparents. In the hindsight, Maxim realises that he was accustomed to death and its presence in his life to such an extent that he did not fear nor was moved by it. This continued until the summer of 2020, when he was told by his father that his grandmother had recorded memoirs of her mother in 2001, the year when Maxim Velli was born. Her mother, Maxim’s great grandmother, born in 1910, lived through the First World War, the October Revolution, the pogroms and the Second World War along with everything that had happened in the Soviet Union in the 20th century.
As Maxim listened carefully to the stories of his jewish great grandmother, he realised the relativity of his own life. He realised how his life was a continuation of his ancestors’ lives and their experiences. Suddenly, a strong feeling of closeness with his roots and family members emerged; their life experiences gained value. He finally became aware of what premature death really meant. It meant that the person’s experiences were no longer there. And that, at the time, he was too young to perceive those experiences or form any memories himself.
In this series of 3 Maxim says farewell to his deceased relatives – grandmother, great-grandmother and grandfather as well as expresses grief about the fact that his memories of them only live in words of others, video and audio recordings and photographs.
Laboratory of Sci-Fi
Through interactive lectures, debate and study of literature on technology, art, philosophy, and ethics, students learn to critically reflect upon the moral, social and cultural issues that arise from the impact of innovative technologies on the world. They develop and express their personal thoughts and feelings about those issues and particularly the meaning and value of (human) life, by creating their own piece of art throughout the course, which this year will be the writing of a science fiction narrative.
My piece of writing explored the concept of a person’s consciousness losing physicality by having the possibility of being uploaded into a digital space. It explores the place of religious philosophies in the future, as well as the paradigm shift that humanity must undergo after achieving “immortality.”
Link to PDF – Vox Dei Short Story
To accompany the short story, I also produced a image using Blender. I quickly noticed how noisy and harsh the rendering mode looked, which inspired me to think about the initialisation (or generation) of the world, where an old person is placed in the universe of my narrative. So my aim was to portray the mechanical aspect of the genesis of a realm, rooting from the person’s brain. The composition is kept very sterile, with the contact points of the brain with the control grid in white and the daunting outer layer in dark grey. This thick brutal layer adds some tension to the picture, reminding the viewer of the ethical complications of the realised technology.
Matter of Art
Through the development of a new technology or materials together with art students from the Royal Academy of Arts (KABK), engineering students are confronted with the unforeseen requirements for such materials or technologies, as requested by artists. This approach, which the program calls ‘divergent thinking’, goes beyond examining the simple usefulness for which a material or technology was initially designed for. The project guides the engineering students to reconsider the meaning of their work and approach, serving to broaden their creative palette on the go.
My team’s project centred around the topic of connectivity in its broadest form. As a team with a multitude of backgrounds, we explored how the vastly different aspects of our interests and professional pursuits can be intertwined. Therewith, we conceptualised a material as a network of concepts, which was demonstrated through a website.
Check the produced website:
cnxn.cargo.site
em: uni.maxim.velli@gmail.com
pw: c4zegEjnNRVgu-8y8mPk4brG
