Week 04: Metaphors

This week, I remembered that I don’t care about the gallery space.

I had been imagining my diorama guide in the context of a white box, quiet, and awkward gallery space. [Reading this back, feeling like rescinding some of this fervor, but I’ll let it stand to remember this strong feeling in that moment.]

I am now motivated to push my idea towards the notion of an intervention, and prompt myself to imagine how it might work in a more public, uncontrolled setting.

On the other hand, I committed to the resin diorama form. I wonder if I can create a barrier and float it in some body of water in NYC.

I am thinking about the CBP One smartphone app that Biden has been promoting as the best tool for legal immigration into the United States. I keep reading that people with more up-to-date smartphones and higher speed data are more likely to get granted asylum through this app-based lottery for appointments with immigration officials system, which is open for five minutes every morning. Just as better tech increases migrants’ chances at security and quality of life and LIFE, the physical ability of the body is needed to cross the floating buoy border, and the border in general, when traveling on foot. These inequities in the system according to different types of ability could be metaphorically invoked in whatever I create. Since the project is a guide and guides provide some sort of understanding, I can build barriers to information, for example visibility discrepancies from buoy to buoy of the inside of the buoy (because I am making them clear).

After looking back at some of the class examples of guides, the idea struck me to make linkable floating resin buoys not as a sculptural object intended for the gallery space, but rather as a marketable toy for kids to play with in the bathtub. The guidance of play and the toys with which kids play is effective, subliminal, and located in the everyday rather than in the walled off art space.

I attended a resin machine workshop at the Tandon makerspace across the street from 370 Jay St., as well as a tour of the entire makerspace. I learned that the Objet30 machine can create airtight resin objects. The Form machines, however can print with amber biomedical resin. Now that I feel confident about approaching the printing part of production, my next step is to 3D model the buoy(s). I’ll follow Youtube tutorials for this for either Blender or Fusion 360.

[Continued, a couple days later]

I’ve chosen the form of floating bath toys made of resin, or, you could say, sculpture or, simply, toys. I chose this form primarily for two reasons: 1. I want to learn how to make things with resin (I tried not to go form first but it was hard to resist). 2. I was drawn to the object-ness of the floating barriers I’ve been researching, so I wanted to spend my time understanding the physicality of the border and how intangibly political concepts and feelings manifest as physical objects and impact physical life.

The features of my chosen form are:

-hard, but softer than some plastic toys

-translucent

-impermeable (even waterproof, as I learned from the Tandon makerspace TAs

-finely detailed (layers are far thinner than 3D printed layers), creating a more organic surface texture

– non-hydroscopic: it does not absorb moisture from the air and is resistant to water damage

-stain-resistant

-lightweight

-resists cracks, warping, breakage

-“Synthetic resin is organic compound made by combining carbon atom, hydrogen atom, and a small quantity of oxygen atom, sulphur atom through certain chemical bond.” (This makes me long to use organic resin from plants.)

I am fascinated by amber resin, which apparently hardens over a process that takes two to ten million years. But this project is due much sooner than that!

-if you pour it yourself, you can embed things in it (much potential here, annika recommended embedding (potential metaphor with html here) the concertina barbed wire I told her about)

-viscous

-flammable

-entrapping (plants deploy it against pests to them)

-“Organic resin is often produced by conifer trees such as pine, spruce, and cedar, as a way to protect slow-healing injuries from insects or disease.” https://www.artandobject.com/news/resin-art-fun-trend-or-environmental-threat

-so it is protection of a healing process, that feels significant to my project

-biodegradable (but very slowly so)

Resin, if transparent enough, asks people to look through, and even the cloudier resins filter light. Resin also acts like a freezing agent, holding whatever is within in place in seemingly permanently. The user is babies and children, but not in a literal sense. The user, then, is more parents who make decisions about what toys to give their children, and anyone who learns about or encounters the work. But I’ll stick to children and babies when naming the user, because I am striving to invent, albeit as a statement of sorts.

Resin lends itself to the metaphor of protection, as it seals things into a hard casing. I suppose toys could lend themselves to the metaphor of weapons.

If my project took on another form, it would change significantly, yes. It might be less of a shape-focused, 3D, physical encounter with the object of the floating buoy barrier if it were, for example, a VR simulation or an illustrated manual.

 

 

 

https://anatomywarehouse.com/axis-scientific-two-part-neuron-model-with-dendrite-and-axon-a-111020?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIi5u476vYgQMV86paBR1bSwcqEAQYCCABEgLTr_D_BwE

 

“The pieces are made using algal biomass produced from Algal Turf Scrubbers®, which are designed to remove nutrients from the water and enhance water quality. ”

 

I found some resin artists in Italy: http://www.santissimi.com/index.htm

I also found this piece by an artist named David Teeple. I was drawn to this image and I like this statement on the webpage:

“The framing of the water in the water, glass and light series embodies an embracing of opposites. The frame is essential. The glass construction, the framing device that holds the water, is the only way to see the water up close and in section. The contained water is isolated from a larger body of water; the river that it rests on for instance. By extracting a portion of the shapeless water and pouring it into the rigid glass structure, the frame, we are able to observe certain qualities of the water itself such as its translucency and refractive characteristics.”

I am in the process of scheduling an interview with Mr. Teeple, however he has been under the weather and asked if we could wait for his voice to come back before speaking. I am hopeful that he can tell me about his careful considerations over the years about water.

I have also scheduled two other interviews. Tomorrow I will talk to an old friend Steven, who was born on a boat during his family’s journey as refugees from Laos to the US. This is late because Steven left me on read for a couple days until I bugged our other mutual friend to ask him in person to respond to me.

[Update]****

I just had the call with Steven. It was really nice to catch up with him. Here are my notes from the interview:

I had it wrong that he was born on a boat. He was born in the United States. His mom was pregnant on the boat. He was born a couple months after she arrived.

Everything I learned from Steven feels important to me, but for the purposes of this project, a few key moments stick out. Most prominently, his response to my question about his feelings towards or idealizations of the US immigration system: he said it should be more of a circle than a triangle or a square. He proceeded to talk about the way penguins move counterclockwise and clockwise in circles in the dark six months of winter. Younger more able-bodied penguins on the outer ring, elders and less healthy or strong penguins to the center. The ones in the very center can sleep for a couple hours. And they rotate positions so penguins get their turns in different parts of the formation at the appropriate moments. Flocking birds who continually change directions in the sky are “in a debate” that takes the group in various directions, fleeting agreements upturned by new ideas and disagreements. If these birds communicated “in a phone call” their formation would look like a line. But it’s a debate. Steven thinks that the United States has this opinionated, debating, flocking pattern, when we should rather turn towards the penguin system: seeing which people need what at what times and accommodating those needs, prioritizing the places of need. He said that the US is a place full of immigrants with more coming, and we need to accept that and accommodate them rather than stressing about how to stop it. I like the way patterns patterns of movement has made its way into my research, as it felt like something I was reluctantly choosing to ignore when I dove into researching human migration. But they can be connected.

I also appreciated learning about the Reagan era policy of lifting the Iron Curtain and letting immigrants into the US, partly because of the need to re-stuff the workforce after many American men died in the world wars and the Vietnam War. From what I understand, the US created a refugee crisis in Southeast Asia through the Vietnam War, then opened its doors to those refugees coming to America. Some twisted history. And there is probably much more twisted **** about which I have yet to learn.

Most of the conversation revolved around Steven’s sentiment towards Laos, the US, his family, his heritage, and his identity. This was a really wonderful conversation.

****

The third interview is with a man named Antony, who is Central or South American. Antony has been re-roofing the autobody shop nextdoor since the heavy rains last weekend. I have been watching him from my kitchen window for a couple days, considering whether or not I should ask him for a conversation. I finally worked up the courage to approach him (plus my Spanish is a little rusty which made me even more hesitant). We haven’t spoken much yet, but I gave him my WhatsApp contact and he said he is down to do an interview about migration with me. I was assuming he immigrated to the US or that he knows others who did, but I am ready to listen to whatever his actual story is, if he is willing to share that with me. I can feel my other assumption that his documentation status might be a sensitive subject. I am trying to be aware of these assumptions within me and careful to express my intentions and not express my assumptions to Antony, and to be as vulnerable about myself with him as I might be asking him to afford vulnerability to a stranger. I feel this interview might be the most important to my understanding of my topic and the subject of contemporary immigration to the US, since my family stories are all from at least two generations ago.

Reactions to Metaphors We Live By – auth. Lakoff & Johnson

“The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”

“…[H]uman thought processes are largely metaphorical.”

I read this text in my high school philosophy class, and, though I’d forgotten most of what it said, I’ve been referencing it and the “time is money” example ever since. I remember sharing this observation with my cousin, an Israeli who grew up in a settlement outside Jerusalem, and he told me that in Hebrew he and his friends spoke in the metaphor of war is good/cool. For example “dude, you’re exploding” might be a rough translation of what someone in the US might interpret as “slay” or “you ate” or basically “you’re so cool” (which makes me wonder about the socially good is cold metaphor in our language and culture). 

The parts of this text that help me think about art-making as a fruitful endeavor towards the objective of shifting our culture and how we experience reality are:

• “Rational is up, emotional is down.”
  • the disproving of this through reconceptualizing the physical/cultural basis:

    • “In our culture people view themselves as being in control over animals, plants, and their physical environment, and it is their unique ability to reason that places human beings above other animals and gives them this control.”

• “Spatialization metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experience; they are not randomly assigned. A metaphor can serve as a vehicle for understanding a concept only by virtue of its experiential basis.”

  • we can work this in reverse by communicating in the metaphors we hope to experience, let these new conceptualizations eventually become our culture

• “One way of emphasizing the inseparability of metaphors from their experiential bases would be to build the experiential basis into the representations themselves.”

  • We can make representative art that reflects not the reality as it is already understood and conceptualized but the reality that is overlooked and under appreciated.

I’m glad I was prompted to read these ideas again, but I’m surprised at how I was not totally convinced by the authors’ arguments at a couple points in the text. I wasn’t convinced that the way context alters meaning disproves the conduit metaphor’s claim to “reality”, but now, as I am thinking about the context-independent current of electricity, always calling on the same ohms and voltage in its objective-ish way, I am reconsidering his point’s resonance with me. For the future-events-are-up metaphor, I find it strange that we don’t equally take into account the way an object or person also grows downwards as they move closer, which we represent through rendering images in one-point perspective in which closer objects are not only higher but also lower than further objects. But, I suppose our perception of the ground as fixed, which is how kids often draw a scene, facilitates this conceptual thinking.