Hello, I'm pleased to welcome you all to this IIEA webinar on the end of Germany's China Illusion. European policy towards China stands at a critical juncture. In recent years, China in the European conversation has gone from a place that is primarily framed in economic terms with politics mostly absent to a long-term geopolitical challenge and a pivotal factor influencing the competitiveness of the European economy, security of European citizens, and the EU's ability to fulfill its ambitions in terms of climate change, digitization goals, and many other issues. This shift poses a distinctive challenge for Germany, as its dependencies on the Chinese market are perhaps more pronounced compared to other European Union member states. To address the challenges posed by today's China and to establish a forward-looking vision, Berlin unveiled its first-ever China strategy in July 2023. We are delighted to be joined today by Dr. Yonka Ertl, who is director of the Asia program at the European Council on Foreign Relations, who has been generous enough to take time out of her schedule to speak to us on these themes. Dr. Ertl will speak to us for about 20 minutes or so, and then we'll go to questions and answers with the audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should now see on your screen. Please feel free to send your questions in throughout the session. You don't need to wait till the end, and we will come to them once Dr. Ertl has finished her presentation. A couple of reminders. Today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. Please use the Q&A function for your questions, and please introduce yourself in the Q&A function so that we know who's asking the question. For those people who are still on Twitter, please join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA, and now I will formally introduce Dr. Ertl and then hand it over to her. Dr. Yonka Ertl is director of the Asia program and a Senior Policy Fellow at the European Council on Foreign Relations. Dr. Ertl previously worked as a Senior Fellow in the Asia program at the German Marshall Fund of the United States Berlin Office, where she focused on transatlantic China policy, including on emerging technologies, Chinese foreign policy, and security in East Asia. Dr. Ertl has published very widely and very impressively on topics related to EU-China relations, U.S.-China relations, security in the Asia-Pacific region, 5G emerging technologies, as well as climate cooperation. Her new book, The End of Germany's China Illusion, How We Must Deal with Beijing's Claim to Power, was published in German by Piper Press in 2023. So with that, welcome, and I'll hand it over to you for your remarks. Thank you, Alex, very much for the kind introduction and IIEA for the kind invitation. It's a great pleasure to be here and I think I will just jump right into it and then hope they leave a lot of time for discussion because I think that's what's most needed right now. I don't claim any kind of definitive knowledge on this matter but I would love to engage in a conversation with all of you on where we are at the moment because if one thing is certain is that China is becoming harder and harder to read and it is not easy for us to kind of make sense of what's going on at the moment so I think we all need to stick our heads together and figure out what's happening. I thought I would do three things. I would kind of explain what has led to Germany's change in China policy and then explain what has changed in China and then end with sort of an outlook on where we are at the moment particularly because we are at such a pivotal day today, the day before the EU-China summit that's happening tomorrow and how that integrates with the conversation. So if we start out with what has led to Germany's change in China policy, I think it's really important to recap briefly that the kind of 30 years before 2018 have been really great for Germany but also really good for China. This was a complementary relationship in which the German companies made loads of money where this was really beneficial for the German economy, where this led to growth in China and where it seemed like this whole notion of win-win was just really working out. This has never been the case for all European countries but for the Germans this really did work and it seemed like this was a never-ending story. There would always be growth in China, there would always be more growth in China, there would always be more avenues for the Europeans to make money, for the Germans to make money and even if that cake that kept growing, even if that slice was starting to get a bit smaller for the German companies and the Chinese companies were taking a bigger slice of that cake, because that cake was still growing at such rapid speed, it didn't really matter and I think what is also important to understand is just a background of this, in comparison to the sort of China shock logic that we saw in the United States where a lot of jobs in manufacturing actually went to China and the kind of economic downturn that the country experienced and deindustrialization that happened had a lot to do with the engagement in China, the same just didn't hold true for Germany. It wasn't that there were cars that would no longer build in Germany that were then built in China, which is more cars built. German companies integrated nicely into the Chinese market, became huge players there and 40% of Volkswagen's cars are now sold in China, well those were cars that could never have been sold anywhere else. So this was just a fundamental growth story and it was so good. Some industry representatives have said it was sort of like a drug, you always wanted more and more of the Chinese market because it just felt so good and you knew at a certain point that there was going to be some after effects and that you would wake up with a big hangover at a certain point, but it was just too good to stop. Well that hangover moment, that stopping moment came in towards 2017-18, 2017 with Xi Jinping's big speech at the party congress that was sort of laying out some of the priorities for the Chinese leadership that they were actually striving for industrial leadership in precisely the areas that Germany was good at and trying to grab market shares globally in precisely the areas that Germany saw as their market shares and as their growth areas and therefore becoming less complementary but much more of a competitor. And this was actually dawning on German companies first before it even dawned on politicians. So in 2018 the German Federation of Industries, a place that is not known for revolutionary overthrows but actually more of a kind of conservative institution of German Mittelstand, brought out this really revolutionary paper naming China for the first time a partner competitor and a systemic rival. And that was quite something because the notion of system competition, it seemed so gone. If one country has lived the post-1989 dream, it was Germany, it was this whole idea of all of that stuff of system competition is no longer relevant for us. But that didn't hold true anymore and this was becoming something that became a real problem for German companies on the ground and therefore the German Federation of Industries was sounding the alarm and was saying well actually what we're experiencing here is being that we're pushed out of the market, that we're experiencing unfair competition on global markets and that we're experiencing heavy competition in our home market in Europe and this is becoming a problem for us. The European Commission took this up in March 2019 and actually formulated this new holy trinity around the partner competitor rival in its communication that came out in March 2019 and I think also here just to understand there were lots of Germans involved. This was because of all of the key positions there were Germans that were running this process. So there was already a huge German dimension in this and it was the political dimension then saying well actually we have to do something about that. In parallel though, while the Germans at the Brussels end of things were a bit visionary and thinking ahead and seeing these challenges at the German national end with Merkel still in power with looking back at kind of her 20 years of almost 16 years of experience as a chancellor and very close relations with China and very good relations with China it was really hard for her to change and for me one of the most ironic moments was the 2019 last visit that she paid to China which was ironically to Wuhan of all places where she was talking at a university in Wuhan about technology and innovation cooperation with China which felt at the time already slightly out of dates and slightly out of tune with where reality was actually moving then Covid hit and everything changed and it actually brought home a message much clearer than any crisis could have done supply chain disruptions dependencies were all of a sudden conversations that everyone had on their mind and it just brought something to the German home audience here to people in Berlin and in vast parts of Germany that hang on being dependent on China may not be such a great thing. The next hit was then this was already then you know this was something that that was had a huge influence on how the conversation was progressing and the speed with which it was changing. We saw that in the coalition treaty of 2021 that used language that was never there before where it was a reference to Xinjiang a reference to Taiwan a reference to we need a China strategy we need to talk about what is going on so this was already a massive shift in the narrative and then the next shock hit and that was the Russian invasion of Ukraine and I think that was something that was a bit unexpected came a bit unexpected to the China conversation but it actually had it sucked in all of the political energy and sort of parked the China conversation for a second no one wanted to actually focus on drawing up a China strategy while we were trying to keep houses warm for the first winter and Germany's dependence on Russian oil and gas was becoming a real issue but it also catalyzed the conversation about kind of oh hey what does that mean if you're dependent on an authoritarian country that changes tack on you and then you have to respond and react in sort of a panicked that version with huge a huge price that you pay for this and huge costs that are inflicted upon you because of that so it did have a huge effect on the China conversation and then adding to that there was this initial notion that China must have made a mistake 4th of February 2022 when they signed that joint statement with Russia no they can't be serious after this anymore this was obviously they were obviously tricked by Putin into signing something like this and they will obviously now get to their senses and see what Putin is up to and therefore change their ways this was the first few weeks and months of the Russian invasion of Ukraine and sitting there and looking at this and thinking well I think it was very deliberate what they signed there and I think they actually made some comments about what kind of future security order they would support in Europe and they had some thoughts about NATO expansionism and none of this seemed like a big trick pulled by the Russians on the Chinese but actually the opposite that they actually agreed on this and this was then dawning on people in Europe in general but also in Germany in particular that maybe and maybe after all the Chinese were actually serious about this because they kept supporting the Russian government there was continued support economically there was continued support in terms of diplomacy and on all other fronts amplifying narratives etc so this was some then the next thing that has catalyzed the way the China conversation was changing and into all of this then with all of that background the China strategy was formulated and I think it is something that you know normally strategy documents of governments are pretty boring they never really have a lot of substance in them because you can't write stuff that you actually mean down because you don't want to give away your strategy actually you just have a kind of rough political statement on where you're at this document is is a bit different because it really isn't all of this diplomatic prose it is very clear in the analysis of what kind of China Germany sees now and what needs to be done about it it's more muddled in terms of the concrete steps that need to be taken but I do think that this analysis bit on what kind of China are we actually seeing it's very important for the European conversation it is very much linked to how Commission President von der Leyen has described China in her speech in March of the year but also has a lot of a with this coalition in Germany with the Greens and the Liberal Party and the SPD you have a very big variety of political players and political views included in one government the fact that they could agree on a collective description of reality of this is what we are seeing is already something that is quite indicative of where European conversations are so let me just kind of briefly skip through four things because when Alina Baerbock the German foreign minister was describing was saying China has changed therefore we have to change she was stating something that may not have been so obvious to everyone before but how has this China changed so much that we have to change so much and four of those kind of exemplary illusions that needed to be shed about what China was was about the party so that the party is no longer a guarantor of stability but actually has become a risk factor in and of itself the way it governs and the way it operates from the COVID measures to the tech crackdown to the current economic problems that we're facing to the market conditions that companies are facing on the ground the party is no longer that player that German industrial officials used to like when German industry officials would go to to China they would say everything goes so nice and fast and compare this you could never do business like that in Europe if you need a permit you get a permit you get all of the things are just kind of easily done and stability is being provided that was no longer the case now everything has become arbitrary security and politics are reining and it's not that actually the economic dimension economic growth are at the forefront of this this is something that is changing massively then for Germany the outlook on how companies are operating within China the second big illusion I think is that there was this idea of win-win that the communist leadership would actually be interested in reciprocity what we can see now over at least the last I would say eight to ten years is that the Xi Jinping's leadership relies on dominance and wants dominance and not reciprocity that also has some implications for for its economic policy when you look at overcapacities for example in the EV sector or in the green industries where these overcapacities the decisions inside the Chinese leadership have global repercussions but it also means something for de-risking I think that's you know the new buzzword that we throw around a lot in Europe where we say we have to just de-risk a little bit de-risking is a zero sum logic it just means that once China when China de-risks its own relationships with Europe because that's what it wants to do this Chinese leadership wants to have the world more dependent on China but be less dependent on the world that means our risk goes up and whenever we de-risk then their risk goes up again and therefore there's no interest on the Chinese side to actually for us to actually pursue de-risking and to find an equilibrium of some sort but to actually actively act against any kind of de-risking efforts that are being pushed forward by European leaderships and and I think that's an important notion that this win-win thing needs to be beaten out of the heads of people because it's been repeated so many times by the Chinese leadership that it almost became true but it isn't I think a third illusion that has really kind of started to sink in here in the German debate is China's military does not just seek regional control but actually seeks global power from cyber security and surveillance measures to global military activity it now has more soldiers than anyone else on the planet more ships than the US Navy more aircraft in the air than any Asian player and massive investments of nuclear capacities satellite industry building up so all of the things that you're seeing in terms of the military build up none of this speaks defensive regional moderate all of this is talking in superlatives all of this is speaking for a global power with global interests economically and on the security front this has been the hardest one I think to realize for Germans and this has been one that has become more relevant now particularly with the Russian invasion of Ukraine and then the last illusion I think that we can tackle a bit is the one that I was most curious about when we wrote a report about this a couple of years ago so when you travel through Europe and you ask in capitals so if China is our partner competitor and rival where exactly is it a partner and then you ask that question in roughly 20 so I asked it in 24 capitals I didn't manage 27 but 24 and the answer was always climate change and then you know something is rotten because Europeans never agree on anything that much you know you can't have that amount of agreement on a on an issue like that so either they haven't thought about it or it's becoming a default sort of talking point that it doesn't have anything attached to it and any meaning attached to it and I think what is currently sinking in in light of the cop that we are seeing right now and in light of the development recently is that China is not a partner actually in tackling climate change but that we are in intense competition with China that that doesn't necessarily only vote horribly for the climate but that that does something to the way our green industries will develop and that there is the sense of this notion of heightened competition in the industries for the future that will have a huge impact on the way we can actually operate and we can decarbonize so now that Xi Jinping's face is on the kind of decarbonization agenda and the national logic is around ecological civilization and decarbonization and China's pushing forward with enormous amounts of renewables that still doesn't mean it's a partner and I think this is the kind of the logic in Europe and particularly in Germany has been but we need to sort of hold hands and work on this together because it's such a global challenge and if we don't work together then we can't change anything about this whereas the Chinese logic is well this is actually fundamentally a national policy of decarbonization it has nothing to do with international collaboration it actually has to do something with domestic action and if you want to be ahead in the race for a green future then you know China has made the investments in those critical areas quite early on and it has positioned itself quite well so with tomorrow's kind of EU-China summit coming up what does all of that mean for us the developments in Germany the developments in China all of the things that have fundamentally changed for us well for the first thing it means is that the relationship is in really really really bad state at the moment Europe and China I would say have not hit rock bottom yet but the downward spiral is quite significant and the tonality of the conversation has changed this is the first time that Mozilla von der Leyen and Tchai Michel can sit down together in person with Xi Jinping invading tomorrow and have like an official summit meeting the expectations couldn't be lower the two things that they are traveling with to to to China are kind of the China-Russia relationship and actually kind of tightening the screws on China saying you know actually what you are doing and the way you are supporting Russia is having a crucial impact on Europe's security and on the future of Ukraine and if you don't stop then we will have to sanction Chinese companies that are involved in this and this is now being very openly played and the second item that is on the agenda is the massive amount of overcapacities and the trade imbalances that are just growing Europe and China now have a larger trade trade Europe has a larger trade deficit with China than it ever had in history and this is something that is just the speed with which this is happening is alerting a lot of people in Europe we can see particularly on electric vehicles the surge of production in China we can see the surge in ferries roll on roll off ferries that are able to transport and export these massive amounts of capacities to global markets Europe is a very open market in that regard and all of that falls into an unregulated space when it comes to for example data cyber security questions and the question of you know what are these cars going to do with local car industry but also with the question of kind of privacy and data security of European citizens in all of this the German role will be absolutely crucial and it's a it's a role that is not as clear cut as one would think so while the tougher voices in the German system in the economics ministry in the foreign ministry but also in the interior ministry are very kind of clear and are very loud as well the caution cautious ones particularly in the chancellery are still very audible as well and this doesn't cut nicely across party lines but actually through parties as well and it doesn't actually it doesn't always align the way you would expect it to align what we see is that the group of supporters for the current approach of very cautious and very limited engagement is getting smaller and smaller and I do think that the latest moves particularly with regard to the support for Russia are having an effect on the de-risking strategy but so far I would say not all illusions in Germany are shed when it comes to the potential that China still could potentially have for German industry it's really hard to rejig an approach that has been taken for more than three decades and while doing that while you're actually trying to also rejig your approach to energy security at the same time and while you're handling a situation across the Atlantic where you're not sure what's going to happen next year so Germans find themselves in a bit of a bind and are worried that their economic outlook is going to look more dim the problem with that is one could say that the rest of the Europeans particularly from Greece and other places could have a degree of Schadenfreude and say ha ha finally you guys are hit too the problem with this is though that if the German economy goes down the European economy will not look well as well and therefore this is not just the German problem when it comes to its China dependency but it's a European problem maybe I'll leave it at that I've thrown a lot out and then we can discuss more


Hi, welcome to nursing school explain in this video on acute blood loss anemia. While most anemias actually have chronic causes that will develop symptoms over time, acute blood loss anemia is just that. So there can be certain things that cause this acute blood loss and they could be trauma, surgery and an aortic dissection. So the trauma can be minimal or or small, let's say from a car accident where they seat belt compresses the internal organs and causes some tear of a mesenteric artery or it can be severe where the patient has a accident with a chainsaw and cuts a major blood vessel and has acute blood loss there. So think about the different stages of trauma we could have and and so this acute blood loss leads to hypervolemia and again the degree of injury depends on how much blood loss the patient will have and how symptomatic they'll be. If it is slower, so if it's not a major blood vessel that is injured that causes this acute blood loss, the red blood cells will get lower over time and I'm not meaning over months, I mean more about hours or days, which is why it's so important to keep a very, very close eye on any of patients that come from surgery or trauma victims or had an aortic dissection because these symptoms might develop over time. So keeping an eye on their CBC is going to be key. And so the signs and symptoms that the patient might have depend on the volume that they lost. So it can be anything from a small blood loss that might be positive for orthostatics. If there's more blood loss they might show tachycardia and hypotension and that's again is why we're trending vital signs and many times in the trauma room the patient's vital signs are taken every two minutes every five minutes because we want to keep an eye on their vitals and trend them and make sure that we're not missing anything. If the blood loss is more severe they might even be short of breath because now they've lost that oxygen carrying capacity of the red cells they might also start to get diaphoresic and have altered level of consciousness because now only the important organs are being perfused and the skin is not an important organ in a case of acute blood loss and the patient might also exhibit these altered level of consciousness as their brain gets less perfused. And then eventually the more severe symptoms can lead to shock so hypovolemic shock and then eventually the patient will die because they just don't have enough blood volume in their system and symptoms here are listed from less to more or most severe. And then as in terms for diagnostic tests we certainly want to check a CBC and for this particular anemia of blood loss there RBC and H hemoglobin and hematocrit will be low. We also want to check coagulation studies because we know that with this acute blood loss not only are they losing red cells they're also losing platelets coagulation factors white cells clotting factors all these things we want to make sure we check that and then in anticipation we should be typing and crossing the patient because we know most likely they are going to need a blood transfusion. So the goal is to replace the volume that is lost and while the blood bank may be processing the typing and screening or that all negative blood becomes available we might give the patient some isotonic fluids just to give them some volume to keep the blood pressure up. Colloids might even be required and then packed red blood cells to replenish those packed those red blood cells that the patient has lost but like I mentioned with acute blood loss you don't only use red blood cells you also lose all these other things so we might have to think about replacing those and they can be platelets plasma clotting factors and cryoprecipitate so please watch my video on the different types of blood products to get a better understanding of what that means and what we are trying to accomplish here. And then after the acute phase is done so now the trauma has been contained or the surgical blood loss has been taken care of and eventually over time after this acute phase is done the patient will also need iron supplementation to help the bone marrow produce all these blood cells and produce specifically the red blood cells that can be so detrimental to the patient's health. For nursing care if this is a trauma victim we want to make sure we approach them appropriately and follow the ABCDEFGHI approach and I have a special video that goes over the trauma assessment if this is a post-op patient which is why we're checking vital signs and all those things so frequently on post-op patients because we know they're at high risk for bleeding just in case so we need to check their vital signs again to trend and then check any kinds of tubes drainage tubes they have think about JP drains tubes as well as chest tubes for example and dressing surgical dressings to check if they're saturated or filling up with blood because that also can contribute to blood loss and then also the level of consciousness plays a big role here because we know that eventually the patient will become altered so we also want to check their skin and their level of consciousness to see and maybe detect any kinds of hypovolemia soon enough so that we can intervene and then as talked about over here we need to replace IV fluids and the blood products that we discussed over here to make up for that lost blood and then hypovolemia now I have several videos that pertain to this topic which is mostly the videos in the trauma and emergency care site but there's also critical care videos that go over hypovolemic shock and you might even find the one on fluid volume deficit helpful so I'll make sure to put all the descriptions of the videos and the links in the description below so that you have easy reference thanks for watching see you soon


Okay, so I hope you can see all the screen now and hear me well. Thank you. So, first of all, thank you so much for having me here. It's quite a pleasure. And it's quite exciting to see such an in-depth work about Shirley Tse and her printing. I was not aware of the complexity behind the work. So I will try to add a little bit on to being more of an experimental guy working on how to bend the rules of 3D printing and what comes out of that. So I structured this talk in three different directions, one being thermal deformations while simulating substance. The second one is the sintering process and exploring porosity. These are mostly unwanted elements of 3D printed and 3D printing. And lastly, conglomerate materials and balancing stresses, which I think partly might have even to do with the talk that we just heard. So during most of the fractures might have been stress fractures. So first of all, thermal deformation simulating substances. Now, this goes back to a work from 2006 talking about object printing or multi-object printing, which was back then an extremely rare and still today and not very often used technology. And it does some UV-based polymerization techniques using object printers from what was then called, well, which is now from the company Stratasys. It's a multi-printer hat technology that allows multiple materials to be fused into a single model continuously or even gradients. The work then was worked in a clear resin material. I don't think that material even still exists today. The work was never conceived to move or change and was actually interestingly talking from 2006 to 2020 when it was the last time exhibit is that though no breakages happened in the work, the various temperature differences of exhibition environments and lighting continues to form and basically change the appearance of the object. So it's a very simple relationship between thermal expansion and what is then ABS or VeroBite. VeroBite is one of the more UV-based polymers in DLP, SOA or multi-object print. Now the work itself takes reference from body and there was an idea about substance and how to make something that in itself can grow. It is based on MRI scans and their translation from voxel shapes into, first of all, masses and mesh data would be heard already and taking thus a very malleable data into a concrete data, a dataset that has gradients into one that is finite. The installation itself is extremely complex and features reflecting angles of laser cut acrylic plates intertwined with 3D printed large bodies, about a meter long, various components, all in all, first suspended and then later actually placed into this Belgian black marble plate. This is in 2008. At this point you see that there's quite a lot of heavy weight going on and very thin tendril like connections that at that point we're not yet deforming. But after a second exhibition exposed to a little bit more stronger direct spot light deformation and twisting started to happen. It's quite interesting and not something that I saw and not something that was wanted but something that was embraced later on, because it actually added to the material narrative starting from the organelles of the MRI scan, and the kind of replication of something that is actually shifting and changing and aging into a material narrative where even the parts themselves started to, well you could say twist and twirl and bend and kind of react. In 2020 the work was shown last in the University Museum Art Gallery. Not because it broke too much or so but frankly because the material aging of what was then already a fairly experimental 3D printed material basically would make any further exhibition very very difficult. Of course the data exists and can be reprinted in any other material. These differently to FDM printing the printer direction of the G-code file would actually not matter that much. Of course they are printing direction elements for the stressing for the expansion, but frankly as this work was commissioned at the time or I commissioned a 3D printing company to do that. I wouldn't even have the SDR, the G-code file to reconstruct the printing direction and thus could even reconstruct the idea of the twisting. So that was an unwanted and observed problem and maybe a lucky experiment. Let's go more to one that is an experiment where I looked into the problematic of kind of how 3D printing is articulated rather than mechanics behind it. And one of the 3D printing method that is very very very stable and at the same time quite interesting is SLS, Selective Laser Sintering. It was long time only provided very very limited color gradients only white or sometimes gray. It has now today been expanded a little bit to black and slightly darker rates which makes obviously aging in UV light less problematic. But sintering the work how I started the exploration into sintering is the notion of porosity and particularly an idea extending from the investigation into my own body about how to 3D print bones and if that would even be possible. So the porosity of human bones and a bone can be built up from calcium clust and calcium blast and adjusts its density interior and internally to outer stress factors, hence, chins of tyvoxes are a lot, chimbells are a lot lot denser in the inner workings than actually of normal people like me. So it's a reactive material that is on the one hand side an organic material on the other side an inorganic material between proteins and calcite or calcium structures to date that is still more possible to produce such a complex material. It's actually 3D print hearts or muscle fibres or organ parts and using stem cells alongside structures, polymer structures but a reactive material or a material that has the ability to be an organic and organic at the same time was then not possible and it's not possible now. Now this porosity that we're thinking about the processes behind it and one of the idea was to see what kind of, what kind of surfaces could be activated within 3D printing because most 3D printing are extremely inactive polymerizations after the fact of 3D printing and exposure to UV light or thermal plastics they usually vary in non-reactives. So how could one recreate for instance the idea of a material bound, this is an horizon of myself, again I do start quite often this looking into myself and thinking about like how can this be activated interactively or as in the pure narrative. And some little thinking structures of what I was thinking about going through a bit of scanning in Great Oldman Street in London so we're talking then a fairly old work and I have blessed a nice, that's quite nice. So I started with a lot of testing on the porosity of material using crystals, available crystals that are soluble in temperatures that are achievable in laboratory grades so nothing too fancy and too difficult. And looking into the porosity and the relationship between the exterior shape and the idea of how much fluid material can be actually put onto the various 3D prints, either due to its porosity of the shape itself or due to the 3D printed material. And you can see quite a lot of the materials, this is actually a PLA material, this is an SLA material so resin are very, very, very closed and thus doesn't give the chance for micro porosity or the nucleation of crystals to actually happen. In fact, when looking into SOS, we're looking into a technology that is an extremely porous material so you would have here the 3D printed stratus fine so the layers of 3D printing in the Z axis. And you would see that the granulate of SOS is a polymer powder that gets heated up in the 3D printer and then the last part the sintering with the laser would actually leave a lot of gaps in this material. Hence, a lot of the 3D prints from SOS feel like a very high graphite grain sandpaper. So this relationship made it possible to start thinking about the nucleation of crystals in super saturated fluids when cooling down to be maybe even manipulated to bond into the material. And so I started this series of works called slow selfies that started in the Victorian Albert Museum in 2000 and this would be, I think it's about 12 2012 and then extended to a couple of exhibitions and installations in the Museum of Vancouver and the Museum of Moscow. And this one was the latest one, always talking about reification or actualization of material through stimulation of the outer surface of selective laser sintered surfaces. So the blank was basically one state of MRI scan of the skull and the slow selfies the work of the she refers to the idea of photographic development and the chemistry chemistry behind it now being changed into three dimensional activation. And so the formation would happen via projection mapping and stimulating micro differences in the temperature of the bass of super saturated fluids, cooling down and thus crystallizing onto the material itself. That of course is in a highly entropic state and reproduction of any of these works is completely impossible. And this is a little video we made after the fact shows in a time speed of version, how the projection mapping onto the material would activate the crystals this is though after the fact of the bass because most of the best, most of the super saturated fluid are not clear enough to film the chemical process. Oh, sorry, that should be the video. So this would be the projection mapping with strong black and white shadows so obviously changing temperature differences on to the surface, while being in the bass and crystallization. In this case, the video shows the crystallization happened already of the part. The lower part of this. Now this is some of the first results and this was slow selfie one made of a period of four days in the Victorian elder museum. You can see the blanks that you can still having the various part of the slow circle of the kind of medium before being crystallized. Okay, the third part of this talk talking about conglomerate conglomerate materials or materials that are made from various different parts and different methods. This is also about the notion of the craftsmanship as this car is introduced as well as one of the research topics that I wrote as well my PhD about. And it is about combining traditional knowledge of materials with new materials and new methods of making me sweetly printed. I want to give a big shout out to the coach of the school of glass was a artist in residence in 2017, having previously absolutely no idea about what to do with glass. And six weeks that they had been there and then afterwards in the museum of glass into coma really enriched my practice and thinking and writing about digital craftsmanship and possibilities of combining traditional methods with new materials. So apart from blowing glass and understanding the idea of centric and non centric and centrifugal forces and inflation and temperature control and the idea of annealing and integrating the world basically making glass stable for a longer period of time. Well, approximately half time of glasses a million years. I started to develop massive soft digitizing glass, which is quite difficult to do its reflection reflection. So this is actually gypsum powder and hairspray works on glass bodies before trying to see the stand them. And with that digitization. In the studio I explored a world of trying to build interfaces between glass, it's really printing, and how this kind of glass elements be formed or held, or kind of held and blame or even amalgamated into glass itself. So the first idea of that is really to find exactly the right temperature point between glass and PLA material in district school of glass that is actually to three or four 3d printers of PLA, mostly used for investment cast in glass, because the burner temperature of 400 degrees Celsius in the ovens allows the burning out of the organic PLA from electric acid 3d prints and then therefore allows custom glass. So in the annealing process we try to figure out the exact point of the melting point from the PLA prints to be actually put onto the glass and fuse with the glass.  And obviously it became a total failure, which was great as well because we learned a lot about it as the melting point of PLA is so this position quite close to some of the most fragile times in the annealing process of the glass or any tension on the outer surface of the glass needs the glass to completely rupture. So in that case, that idea of fusing two materials together was impossible to achieve. In hindsight that is not necessarily a problem because what I learned through that and that is a very interesting part is that the anticipation of stresses in the PLA material or in any 3d printed material with enough with enough knowledge or enough control is enough training is enough trial and error is actually something that can be anticipated. And so, in the end, what I walked off with this was this idea of making a set of works, where the print itself is anticipated stress to hold glass bodies in place and even elevate them. So these were the first elements and parts things in the residency and later some of the 3d scan data to be prepared for 3d printing for actually working like 3d modeling around and printing. And then first test about how much as a business as material is stretchable. So how much can you anticipate in the two and a half the surface of your computer screen with a 2d mouse. And so the visual link stresses without simulating them because the simulation of something that is not 3d scanned entirely perfect it's almost impossible again to find the point of gravity but as well to use the the material properties of 3d prints particular SLS being slightly more bendable when coming out of a machine which is a temperature thermal plastic. And then later on than months later. So now this these these works are two years old, some of the oldest 3d prints are two years old. The material is still not brittle and the tension is still hasn't sacked in any formal way. So any of these connections are made by simply stretching the material alive by sheer force and pushing the glass bodies into the 3d printed manchats so to speak. So there's no adhesive in any of these following work so we started from the very simple kind of like corset like stretchable or reputable elements to then these much more complex floating glass entanglements. So these are some of the images of the museum. The museum of art gallery and the exhibition of confrontation metamorphosis or confrontation. And these are obviously much more complex 3d prints in form and shape in pushing the 3d prints to be going through the glass with small openings and then expanding within the glass, or balancing and holding these elements by pushing the glass bodies that were separated to spread the glass 10 light structures. The exhibition was quite interesting because it was placed on Chinese furniture that were up to 300 years old, and the dialogue created between the material of polymers, the formal language that was obviously has its references from the organic, all the qualities from the human body and the studies of my own body and then the kind of like more cocoa ask symmetry and super symmetries really work really well with the furniture that we tested on the museum. Now the last bodies of work because I'm running out of time is the idea of combining not only the visible material properties of 3d printing, but as well the idea of invisible properties and the chemical balances between that chemical and mechanical balances between glass and 3d printing. So one of the work I wanted to talk is in balance, in which mechanical forces are applied to glass and 3d print in vessels that are filled with ferromagnetic fluid, and thus continuously changing the blockchain balancing systems through magnets that are pushed into the three print material itself. This is a rendering. I said the idea is to visualize invisible forces such as magnetism and to create a chaotic or entropic state within works. That's my timeline, so I'll do it quick. So in order where you see that this type of balancing system induction of energy, this is a simple belt that goes in one direction and moves the work in one direction. Now the second one is obviously the point of gravity continuously shifting. That is predictable and would be only one system or one border of the relationship. Again, all these things are, there's no adhesive or so are stretched over in three different parts over the glass body. The clicking sound that you should hopefully hear. It's very faint though is from the magnets rolling within these tendrils with a spherical magnets. Basically creating a shifting magnetic field and that shifting magnetic field is then continuously activating ferromagnetic fluids that are in the glass bodies itself. Thus, from the very simple linear movement to a complete entropic state of movements that are continuously unbalancing itself. This work can only exist with the SLS and with the notion of being able to stretch and being able to predict the idea of how much material can be stretched. And as well because chemically speaking and aging wise, the new black SLS materials are incredibly stable. But yeah, I would say in terms of conservation this might be the blankest nightmare possible to reassemble and unassemble and make actually a conversation about it. The last work and I'll finish with that is at the moment in the Museum of Glass, the Tacoma. It's a work that condenses chemically our breath in these condensers which is really printed and have quite an enlarged volume of the large surface area. Inside it uses chemicals that are commonly used for the humidifying in various layers and charcoal filters. So it literally dries out the air around it and then makes the air condenses the water into a glass vessel. The notion of that is that the presence of those in the museum basically started to condense the water into the, any presence of visitors condensing more water into the vessels. This is the previous version of that where the condensers were not connected and in a slightly different SLS material, slightly grayer and slightly more porous, you see here the surface quality of SLS is quite clear. But even though this surface is more close now in this black poly mass, it still retains a bit of a force. In the final version, these were actually installed using them because the breath air, the filtered air was the chemical catalyst where it's becoming slightly saline. So in the end these are the wrong plants in the museum. There are three mangroves over them creating a cohabitation between chemical filtration and then in the end plant life. The exhibition will be on for about eight months. This concludes my 20 minutes of lucky accidents and material narratives are so sweet and great. Thank you so much.


What's the correct way to sit? We're going to figure it out with Aaron Alexander right now. Apparently this is a shitty chair. This is a shitty chair. That's the technical term for what this is. Why? Because all the same business that we're talking about with the standing position, we're putting ourselves into this punch-over, folded, depressed position. We're putting stress on our spine. We want to stack that and actually find this called indigenous curve of your lumbar spine, right?  If you can't feel your sit bones contacting the ground, you're probably failing at that point, right? So we're really making sure we're on the front edge of the sit bones and then from there, that kind of corrects most things, to be honest.  Most people are going to be, instead of being upright like this, like assertive, I'm ready to go, most people are going to be in this position. This is like I got spanked, I need to go to recess, I'm in detention. It's not a very proud position to be in. So if you're on an airplane, for example, what's the correct way to sit on an airplane? If we assume this is an airplane seat, how should we be sitting in that? If you're on an airplane, you need to bring a bottle that's bigger than this, an algae bottle. I would just recommend like an algae bottle, it's a little bigger than this. And you put that bottle behind your thoracic spine, right? So if this bottle was a little bit bigger, this is too small. So you put it up high? Yeah, you put it up high, right? So now from here, imagine this bottle's about here or so, so it's pushing me away from the thing, right? And now, if you look at where my butt cheeks are, now all of a sudden, do you see how I have a lumbar, lordosis, I have a curve in my spine? Yeah. That's what we're looking for. This is healthy and strong, this is discurneation waiting to happen. So you put a, it's like a water bottle, or can it be like your sweater or something rolled up, which you get as long as it's... I like having something that's more solid, so you have more feedback, but yeah, it could be anything. You just probably would stack it up. And when you, which part of the back that you're putting in? So right on, like, what do you call it, the apex of the curve of the thoracic spine, right? Right, so the highest point. And what that does is that relieves pressure on the lower back? That relieves pressure on the whole back. It also opens up the lungs, opens up the heart. Yeah. So you look at your mechanical respiratory efficiency, the way that you breathe, this is not efficient. Punched over like this is not efficient. Stacking that nice and strong, it becomes efficient. Right? And it's well stressed on the organs. Yes. Alright, so if you're watching this now and you're sitting all day at a work desk, try getting a bottle of some sort and putting it on the upper back and also that we should be sitting on the edge of the seat. If you don't know what your sit bones are, the ischial tuberosities, the bony things coming out your butt cheeks, you need to figure that out immediately. Ask somebody, get a yoga teacher, get a physio, somebody, figure that out. And then from there, start sitting on the front edge of those. That's the big thing. If you're on the front edge of those sit bones, then all of a sudden you're starting to put the rest of your body. Yeah. So I can press weight from my head straight nails into my sit bones. As soon as I crunch here and I press weight on my head, now the weight of my head exponentially increases. And now I have this forward head posture that nobody loves, that's excellent.  Sweet. There you go. How to sit properly with Aaron Alexander. Where do we find out more about you, Aaron? www.alientherapy.com. Check out online podcasts, all the social media, everything is online podcasts. There you go. Go and leave a comment down below. Let us know what you think.