It’s been a while since I have published on this blog, but luckily it’s because i’ve been working. This post will serve as a ‘statement’ of sorts; a textual synthesis of my ideas, statement of intent and description of what i’m working on.

Following posts will show documentation of progress work, as well as recapping of my last presentation and committee meeting.

Inspiration / Context

To contextualize my thesis work, I’ll draw upon many of my previous posts, but most notably writing on Gross National Happiness, Hypercontext and Private Interactivity, among posts on direct references and inspirations.

My thesis work stems from the concept of measuring and representing anxiety. I was inspired by certain countries efforts to impose a quantifiable value to the “happiness” of it’s people. Or even contemporary articles in magazines such as Business Week that aim to measure the worlds “happiest countries”, or the country’s “happiest cities”. It follows that if you can “measure” happiness than you can also “measure unhappiness. Taking this as my point of departure, my work investigates the idea of quantifying the subjective, in the case of the thesis, anxiety or unhappiness. By doing this, I aim to apply what I find poetic and interesting about this idea, to the contemporary American problem: a nation in crisis, and a state of palpable, national anxiety and guilt.

The work I’m proposing is a series of sculptures that exist in domestic environments. They are designed as tools or appliances, for people to use in their homes, offices or other spaces of dwelling. The sculptures function as systems, using as their input, the behavioral, physical habits of anxious people and representing/visualizing those gestures in physical, absurdist, imaginative, open forms.

Inventing and creating the objects is one part of the creative process. The other part is crafting a context around them. In this sense, documentation becomes an integral part of the project; maybe the most important part. And here is where I am still investigating possibilities. At the moment, I have decided to document the projects as sets of instructions so that anybody can rebuild them. One context for doing this will be online “do-it-yourself” communities, such as instructables.com. Making the work available to the DIY, open-source community is a critical gesture that implies the potential for these objects to be deployed in real spaces. At the same time, it begs the question of whether or not anybody would actually rebuild it (or improve on it), and explores the idea of O’Reilly Media / MAKE magazine / DIY culture as a medium for conceptual art practice. It also, in my opinion, make the work feel more current.

Final Proposal

The three objects that I am inventing and working on, each take an anxious behavioral habit and transform it into a physical visualization.  The habits I am investigating are sighing, pacing and rapid foot-tapping. All three occupy a grey area between conscious and unconscious behavior, and are designed in a way that does not hide the apparatus, but address it’s obtrusiveness, and the choice to engage with the object at home (or even build it).

Sigh Collector
A wearable device that monitors breathing with a chest strap. The electronics are housed on an medical, IV like structure that is carried around by the person. The strap around the chest connects to the electronics, which are suspended from the IV. The person can also hang the chest strap from the IV when not in use. When a sigh is detected, it talks wirelessly to a stationary piece of furniture, which inflates a red air-bladder a small amount each time. The ‘bag of sighs’ grows larger and rounder each time, and comes to represent the amount of huffing and puffing in a household. I am playing with the idea of including a reverse valve so that the air can be released and allowed to blow in the direction of the person’s choosing. Or perhaps the machine will just inflate until it pops.

Pacing Track
A 12 foot track with a red, carpeted surface is installed in a home, at a point of interest. This could be in a hallway, or perhaps between the refrigerator and the television. The track is actually built on a subtle see-saw, so that it simultaneously acts as a knocking, meditative sculpture, and also registers, at each end, the amount of distance traversed. This amount is correlated directly with a length of red yard that falls from the ceiling and collects in a pile in the center of the track. The yarn can be left to pile up, becoming a visualization of the distance anxiously paced, or recovered and used to measure how that distance maps to real world space in some way chosen by the person.

Foot Tapper
A machine for registering when the foot is tapping, designed as an accessory for any chair. The foot tapper can be attached to the front leg of the chair (next to the foot of choice), and extends a mechanical sensing device to the foot, in order to register the frequency of foot tapping. The device communicates wirelessly to a stationary sculpture that consists of a block of concrete and a mechanical chisel. The chisel hits the concrete each time a tap is registered. Ultimately, the concrete will be destroyed. I have considered placing the electronics inside, and allowing the destruction of the concrete blog to equal the breaking of the machine. This piece represents anxious tapping and drumming as a violent and destructive behavior.

My committee members include, from UCLA, Rebeca Mendez, Peter Lunenfeld, and Casey Reas (as chair). External members include Golan Levin (Carnegie Mellon U., Pittsburgh) and Noam Toran (Royal College of Art, London). In attendance at this meeting were the UCLA faculty only.

The meeting was short, but productive and i’d even say cathartic. I wanted to record it and transcribe the better portions but that fell through. So instead, I’ll list off a selection of notes that I took (with help from Casey).
Selected Notes:

-Initial discussion of leaving room for the imagination vs. closing off the audience…

-Discussion of Aesthetics. What am I going for? Does the highly polished RCA aesthetic really fit my personality/previous work? Rough objects with nice “packaging”? Avoid describing them as “products” ?

-What if the objects/machines are more like creatures? What if they are highly characterized, or have an impression on the world that surprises the maker? These comments made in reaction to the discussion of over specifying the function.

–Infographics, Graphic Design. Is this too didactic/pedantic? I won’t be able to fully know if things like this are truly necessary until the work really exists, of course. Maybe it works in the case of the Singapore objects… but it might not work for what I will make for the thesis. Could make it too packaged and product-like. Or if I do work with graphic design more, perhaps I should avoid referencing any existing style too closely?

-Loosely discussed the Kubler Ross model for the 5 stages of grief, as a potential example / conceptual starting point. Some faculty had problems with this, and warned me not to be too literal. There are different levels of ‘grief’, from serious to humorous. If objects respond to different elements of grief, and the audience mis-interprets the function, it risks being inappropriate…

-I commented about humor, and how I was nervous about using humor too much. Peter said “the grown-up word for humor, is wit“. Interesting. I suppose there is something “funny” and sad about work like the bed cover remover. I agree that “wit” is a better thing to aim for than “humor”.

-Similarly, after conversing some more, Peter suggested that maybe it’s not grief that i’m intersted in, but general unhappiness in our society.

-Characters vs. Objects. Or maybe characters vs. “props”. Committee liked the older work because of the characterization of the machines. Also, because of the way in which the human being and the machine are interdependent and intertwined, such as in the bed piece. One or two members encouraged me to think of my work as the object, and the human as the prop, and not the other way around.

Suggested References:

Some things that came up in conversation.

• Hal Foster: Design & Crime
• Rebecca Horn’s film work
• John Cassavetes’ films
• Kelly Dodson Dobson
• Krzysztof Wodiczko’s early work
• “Freud as Collector” (Freud’s office, full of “primitive” objects for free-association).

I’ve spent the recent days internalizing the suggestions, and now I definitely feel like it’s time to slip out of MK the researcher and slip into MK the maker. But first there’s some other work to do: Nova and I are showing Moon Theater at two venues in the next few months, which will require some traveling, plus the holidays are approaching. So, i’m looking at a busy schedule… Come winter quarter, i’m hoping to expload into production.

Background:

All of the graduate students were asked to do a semi-formal presentation, to discuss references, show progress work, and project a direction for the thesis “project” or body of projects. Additional meta info included a brief, speculative schedule for the rest of the year.

Thoughts:

I think my presentation was successful in being clear, showing a narrative development of work, and showing a promising trajectory. People responded really well to the material, I think, and though there weren’t many productive comments made after I presented, some professors talked to me after the event ended (I was the last to present) and made some interesting observations. I’m not without criticism of myself, of course. I was really dissatisfied that there wasn’t a discussion about the material, or any questions, really. I think this is a huge problem that relates to something I have bolded in a post below: I didn’t really leave much to the imagination. This could also be because I didn’t present any specific proposals for future work…just a framework.

The first major problem of this thesis idea I’ve been working on has been revealed. I’ve been speaking quite idealistically about the differences / similarities between art and critical design. But for all the emotional, conceptual comparrisons, there remains a problem of methodology to consider. If functionality is defined too strictly, people feel excluded, like they have nothing too offer. Whereas, the strength of some of the earlier work was in the metaphors and the characterization of the objects… I think this is why nobody commented after my presentation.. Anyway, the meeting after was really helpful, once we quickly got past this worry. More on this in Part 2.

For your reference, here is a rough outline of what I went over in my presentation:
Creative / Theoretical Influences
Discussion of Critical Design. Work shown: some of Noam Toran’s Accessories for Lonely Men.

Discussion of Mechanical Sculpture. Work shown: Rebecca Horn’s mechanical sculptures, installed in sites of political significance, violence.

The Art of the Demonstration, as exemplified by the work of Maywa Denki. Playfully compared to an old documentation video of me demonstrating an assignment

Theoretical Influences: Anthony Dunne, Nicolas Bourriaud, Jack Burnham, Rosalyn Krauss, Bruce Sterling, Isaac Asimov, JG Ballard.

Brief discussion of the idea of “Social Science Fiction”

Should have shown, but stupidly forgot: Krzysztof Wodiczko’s early work (Homeless Vehicles, Alien Staff).

Work / Defining a Trajectory
Thoughts on old work: Autonomous, Characters, Metaphors…

Showed: Removal Studies, and Tools for Enhancing the Experience of Being Lost. Talked about these objects as a test of some ideas, and a platform for testing out other ideas.

Thoughts on that process: Issues of demonstration and performance, public vs. private interactivity, the “tool” vs. the “final piece”

Talked about the process of defining functions and inventing objects. Is the “function” (title?) the piece? Or are the objects? Because the objects can be swapped out..but the function stays the same. The Singapore objects represent one functional possibility, that was specific to the context of that workshop. But the thesis is going to be more about human behavior in a distressed world; a world were the idea of crisis a constant backdrop.
Thesis “Statement”
Concept: Working at the intersection of mechanical sculpture, critical design and performance, I aim to invent conceptual “tools” for exploring the psychology of distressed human behavior, and the poetics of eccentricity.

Process: Based on a function or theme, invent a constituent series of objects.
Address these objects as sculptures, props in videos/performances, products…

Part 2 of this post will reflect on the committee meeting that followed this presentation, and the critiques, suggestions, warnings I received.

Something i’ve been discussing with my professors lately, is type of interactivity that i’ve been calling, for lack of a better term, private interactivity. I’m thinking of public interactivity as being concerned with the idea of making an interactive object or installation, and outsourcing creativity to the audience (a totally legitimate art form, but leads too often to wavey hands media art). Private interactivity concerns itself more with the invention of a tool for one person. That one person is the expert performer of this tool and performs it for audiences in the context of a live concert, a film, an audio recording, a photo set….

What I have been doing recently, with the Removal Studies and the Objects for Lostness, is more like private interactivity. That’s really what i’m more interested in, but here’s the downside: Private interactivity might be too controlled… In other words, when if I define a function well in advance and “perform” a mechanism or tool as my art, I’m not leaving much room for the imagination… What’s the solution? Maybe don’t perform them to their full potential? Exhibit one possible use for the object and let the audience imagine others?

I found an interesting article on wikipedia about Social Science Fiction, which was apparently first coined by Isaac Asimov. Social science fiction refers to a branch of science fiction writing that emerged in mid twentieth century to deal “less with technology and space opera and more with sociological speculation about human society. In other words, it ‘absorbs and discusses anthropology’, and speculates about human behavior and interactions.”

I know this term mostly relates to writing and prose, but these terms can just as easily be applied to the designing of critical electronic objects. Often times, speculative design objects draw on some kind of alternate present as a vehicle for critique. For example, what kind of objects might we use in the home if we as a culture were less concerned with X and more concerned with Y? Or if war N never happened?

Maybe I should be reading Asimov?