blogYin

Synesthectacles are eyewear where fluctuations in light are transmitted through speakers into the eyes.  Changes in surrounding light are sensed through sound rather than sight: the brighter the light, the louder the sound.  They’re to be worn like glasses, though in the place of corrective lenses, speakers obstruct the wearer’s vision.  When worn, the eyes hear: light is translated into non-visible sound, which in turn creates the sensation of sound waves hitting the eyes.

Process
The build process began with a trio of heavy-duty plastic glasses frames purchased from a vintage second hand shop. The lenses were removed from the frames to make room for small speakers, which were mounted in place of the lenses so as to block the wearer’s line of sight. Next, analog circuitry was designed and built to translate variations in light levels into a range of electronic frequencies to produce sound through the speakers. The basic hardware recipe consists of a photo diode (sometimes called a light dependent resistor) paired with a timer circuit of some kind. This is an extremely basic approach, basically providing one camera “pixel” for each eye, which is sensitive only to brightness (not color).

In spring, I worked with Hamilton Fish, publisher of The Washington Spectator, on strategy and design for the new site, and highlighting its new features, including a writer’s blog and book reviews. We worked with Point Five to realize the design. The new site is finally coming out, and it’s really exciting to see it grow, and have all its terrific contented showcased by terrific UI and design.
We went from:

To:

Though not a part of the current León Ferrari exhibition at Haunch of Venison, we begin with Cuadro Escrito, a conceptual paper he wrote on an unmade painting that he believed was “better described than painted” (Giunta 52). Ferrari’s humorous narrative detailed why the work was a document of the potential painting rather than a painting: the piece was dependent on God’s will to bring it to light; however, God was occupied in creating the outstanding form of a woman. Consequently, Cuadro Escrito was a concept of the piece rather than its actuality. In choosing to bring a form into the world, the artist does so with the optimism that the outcome is at least equivalent to the imagined experience. Producing the object recognizes the limitation of form, and that limitation is a form of destruction; more specifically, a destruction of the vastness of potential. Form reduces or encapsulates that potential to reality and actuality.

Ferrari is Argentinean and was born in 1920. This biographical information holds much of what informed his work: the country was powerfully Catholic, non-secular, and Ferrari lived through several dictatorships. His work is most widely known as political, conceptual, and dealing with power and religion. What’s on view at Haunch of Venison is more his conceptual work with political overtones, some overt, and others subtle.

In her essay on Ferrari, Andrea Giunta spoke of the tendency for the Catholic Church in Argentina to use words as neutralizers for actions to explicate rules and mores around passionate acts. By entering those acts into codification, they are unloaded of innuendo and distanced from the carnality innate in the definition – overt explanation acts as sterilizer: “The Christian pastoral prescribed as a fundamental duty the task of passing everything having to do with sex through the endless mill of speech” (Foucault 51).

With his Untitled drawing series from the early 1960s, Ferrari reanimated the words as lines, devolving them into the sensual possibility of form. As written or drawn rather than printed, Ferrari as the artist controlled the means of expression and mode of production, removing the outside structure (the printing press, the Church). Though devoid of meaning, the drawings reclaim force via script where curvilinear writing allows pure energy to emanate in dichotomous movements across the page. At once controlled and flowing, Untitled (1964) trifurcates an unknown three-dimensional form, and investigates the essence of entanglement evident in Ferrari’s body of work. Shaped into pubic mass, his drawings and sculptures are filled with the rhythm of combustion, growth, and networks.


Untitled (1964)

Halfway into the show was a documentary video showing protests for and against the exhibition of Ferrari’s work. An artistic community was pitted against more conservative members of the Catholic church. At the time, it seemed incongruous; on first look, none of the works seemed potent enough to elicit that kind of response.
The Impregnating Tree sets some precedent for the tumult in the documentary video only for viewers already familiar with the work’s back story (or those who read Spanish fluently). Familiarity with this piece does not necessarily represent an unreasonable expectation of the viewer, but our failure to “correctly” read this piece changed, and perhaps dulled, our experience of the exhibition and made the documents we read after our visit all the more revelatory.


The Impregnating Tree (1964)

However, beyond The Impregnating Tree, the exhibition seemed thin on the politically-charged works for which Ferrari is best known. For example, La Civilización occidental y Cristiana, a 1965 sculpture depicting the crucifixion of Christ on the wings of an American military jet, perhaps his most recognized and controversial work, could be found only on the covers of the monographs for sale by the door.

It seems reasonable that the curatorial team was cognizant of the political precedence in Ferrari’s body of work. Was a politically muted collection of works their intent? If so, an implicit valuation might be that Ferrari’s more explicitly political works are disposable at this point in his career. Or, perhaps his more interventionist sentiments of the 1960s are now implicit in the many untitled works exhibited at the Haunch of Venison. The vein of the Untitled title unpredictably wove through the show; works with similar aesthetic characteristics often had completely different titles. For example, Letter to a General (from Giunta’s essay) shares a similar visual character to several of the Untitled pieces up at Haunch. Perhaps we can contextualize Ferrari’s more ambiguous works with those more specific and politically charged. In doing so, we recognize both his coming and going in the historical and present sense of a fluid and persistent body of work.

References
Giunta, Andrea. León Ferrari: A Language Rhapsody.

This past fall, Peiyu Liu and I worked on an internship project with the Magnum Foundation. Magnum wanted to contribute and partner with Amnesty International to celebrate Amnesty’s 50th anniversary.

Our official roles were as UX designers, but because we worked so closely with Susan Meiselas at Magnum and Nancy Hechinger (ITP), we contributed to strategy recommendations, brainstormed with Cameron (our project manager) on application ideas, met with Amnesty on multiple occasions, then sat down to do the actual designing.

What we decided on was a photographic timeline to showcase Magnum’s particular brand of photojournalism, and to tie in the visual content to Amnesty’s core topics. That is, come for the photography, stay for the cause.

Here are some initial wireframes:

And, via a presentation we did on the hi-res prototype, some information on the user experience:

The Absalon show at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin is structured bottom-to-top, with his last works displayed upon entry, and his earliest pieces, sketches, and videos on the upper floors. I overheard the attendant’s recommendation to start that way, top-down, only after I’d gone through. As a result, I didn’t have the a-hah! moment of inevitability that you might be tricked into believing with that linear progression of artifacts. Whether through Absalon’s own singularity of purpose or the excellence of the curatorial team in comprehending what-from-where, his consistent aesthetic make it satisfyingly clear to glimpse an interior process. Fragments, smaller pieces, and shapes give way to smooth, overarching structures, culminating in a display of utopian dwellings. Pieces no more, it’s as if Absalon transitioned from craftsmen to architect, prototyping habitability. Functional in nature, these soft structures are form distilled to the essence of their usage. Everything is in its right place and joinery fits perfectly; these abodes and Absalon’s other sculptures symmetrically indicate the potential for a balanced form to provide shelter for social harmony.

One piece in his earlier work struck me as important to understanding these works: loaded shapes are settled in a containing piece, carefully slashed with a geometric peephole to view the clean and gentle innards. The interior configurations evoke a complete landscape, forming buildings and a horizon in an adobe-ed desert.

The result of his artistic choices are astoundingly mature and seemingly complete. Without the knowledge of his death at a young age, I don’t know that you would come to the conclusion from this show that he had an abbreviated career. Instead, the curators have put together an exhibit that marks the passing of an artist whose work formed a distinct visual vocabulary early on, and reached the end of an idea. Should he have lived, the question from a spectator wouldn’t have been ‘What then?’, but ‘What next?.’

When God calls Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his instructions to the destination are clear: go to Moriah to perform the act. The whereabouts of the place he is called are more ambiguous – probably in the large swath of the land of Canaan, possibly in Beersheba, and measured in time distance as three days journey from Moriah. What isn’t mentioned is often equally of note as what is in the often-taciturn Biblical narrative. Imagination fosters within that gap, and launches grounds for interpretation and dispute. Kafka explores this uncertainty with positing another Abraham – one different from the one meant; one filthier, odder, and perhaps more faithful or stupid than the one supposed. He fills in the Biblical blanks with this possibility. As we speculate on the questions this potential other fellow raises, I’d like to look at the fuzziness surrounding the indefinite place where this Abraham stood when God called him.

By imagining another Abraham, I compare him to the first, right, original Abraham. He‘s other than the one God meant to call, so by being the alternate, incorrect receiver of the call, he‘s the wrong Abraham. And this wrong Abraham is somewhere near enough the time and place of the right Abraham to intercept this call. But where Abraham is called is unclear. When the Lord calls him, he answers “Here I am” but his ‘here’ is not a geographical location so much as a function of “moral position in respect to God, who has called to him-Here I am awaiting thy command. Where he is actually…does not interest the narrator” (Auerbach 8). The place is omitted and unnamed. There is a general mystery surrounding the story. God does not make his motivation to test Abraham explicit. It is written “Later, God tested Abraham’s faith“ and we’re left to wonder why. Because some time has passed since God felt close to Abraham and he could use a reminder that he’s not only a but the priority in Abraham‘s life? The nature of God as jealous, demanding, and fickle is a fair interpretation of many of his actions, especially as God rarely discloses his reasoning, or does so tersely to the point of being oblique, leaving it open for further interpretation. If God had offered further clarification the way the Supreme Court justices offer briefs and opinions, the interpretative canon on his nature would be markedly different. Getting back to Abraham, God provides clear instructions (take your son to Moriah and sacrifice him as a burnt offering), but no explanation. Instead, the passage is clear in suggesting internal conflict (Abraham’s), fear (Isaac as he asks about the missing sacrifice as they journey to Moriah; Abraham’s consideration of what he will lose by sacrificing Isaac), and emotional turmoil in general. Auerbach comments on this scarcity of information:

…thoughts and feeling completely expressed; events taking place in leisurely fashion and w/ very little of suspense. On the other hand, the externalization of only so much of the phenomena as is necessary for the purpose of the narrative, all else left in obscurity; the decisive points of the narrative alone are emphasized, what lies between is nonexistent; time and place are undefined and call for interpretation; thoughts and feeling remain unexpressed, are only suggested by the silence and the fragmentary speeches; the whole, permeated with the most unrelieved suspense and directed toward a single goal (and to that extent far more of a unity), remains mysterious and “fraught with background” (11-12)

I’d like to seize upon the bit quoted above about time and place being undefined to discuss a place in terms of the wrong Abraham. As a reminder, I use right and wrong because from within that other, alternate possibility of another Abraham is the intention of the recipient of God’s call (right) and the plausible unintended answerer (wrong). It’s relative to God, however. In relation to God’s purpose, design, and impulse is the Abraham who takes the call. His designation is based on some knowledge of God’s wishes. But his wishes are yet unknown. Whether Abraham is the right one or the wrong one is never called into question – God takes the answerer, and it’s unanswerable if he was the right one, or if it ever mattered. The call-taker seems to verge on being arbitrary, especially if the requirement for God is simply that someone named Abraham answers him. It’s the randomest of cruelties to be chosen for such a terrifying act based on name alone.

So, perhaps in God’s original intention, he wanted to call another Abraham, but whoever came forward was good enough for the job. He is in the right place at the right time for God’s needs, but maybe in the wrong place for his own. What is the right and wrong place in this passage? Focussing on non-geographical place, I primarily consider wrong and right relative to God’s desires: the wrong place is other than the one God wanted Abraham to be in, and perhaps an unreachable location from the call. However, the importance of God’s will is undermined with the priority placed on finding someone to commit the sacrificial act rather than caring who should specifically commit that act. Simply by suggesting a substitute to the subject of God’s call, Kafka has crippled the reasoning in God’s authority and paints a different portrait of God by hinting at a God who is imprecise – a God that doesn’t look at process, details or give much of a whit how a job might be completed – a God focussed on the bottom line.

This God is the position that right and wrong is measured from. In Miwon Kwan’s reflection on site-specificity in art, she discusses the idea of the wrong place in relation to a feeling apart from the familiarity of home, and the felt sense of displacement and surreal examination of where we belong when we’re elsewhere than where we were. On the determination of a right or wrong place, she writes:

I implied earlier that a place that instigates a sense of instability and uncertainty, lacking in comfort, a place unfamiliar and foreign, might be deemed “wrong.” And by extension, a place that feels like “home” might be deemed “right.” But this is wrong. The determination of right and wrong is never derived from an innate quality of the object in question, even if some moral absolutes might seem to preside over the object. Rather, right and wrong are qualities that an object has in relation to something outside itself. In the case of a place, it indicates a subject’s relation to it and does not indicate an autonomous, objective condition of the place itself (Kwon 38).

The subject‘s (Abraham’s) relation to the place is again based outside of himself – it is right or wrong depending on if he is the substitute or the original, and right or wrong depending on if it’s a location in which he can hear God’s call. Whoever the Abraham is that answers, we can assume he is in the right place relative to God’s desired end result – he heard the call, after all. He may be in the wrong place because he is the wrong Abraham, and destined to be wrong in one way or another based on God’s initial intention, but for God’s purposes, he’s in the right.

And place does matter, even if there is scant mention of the specifics. There are hints of geography and placement (e.g., a region with multiple mounts, a thicket) where an interested party could map a proposed radius from whence Abraham and Isaac possibly journeyed to Moriah. The importance of place is in Abraham’s answer to the Lord rather than his exact placement. From Auerbach, Abraham’s answer of “Here I am“ is meant to imply respect and willingness to do God’s bidding, not to indicate location. But, Abraham answers God twice this way, and it doesn’t seem off-base to suggest that God requires some situating and recognition; that when he calls “Abraham!“ it is implicit in the call that he wishes to locate him. Or, perhaps that he requires that Abraham orient himself – it may not matter to God where Abraham physically dwells, but it is of God’s supreme interest to know that Abraham is in a state of preparedness, a mental place, to accede to whatever God puts before him. That “here“ in Abraham’s answer is to mark that he’s in the right place and ready to commit.

Then, Abraham answers a second time on the mount before God calls off the act. He’s now in the physical place specified by God – God has been quite exact in his directions. His response of “Here I am“ answers many questions Abraham may have implied that God, in calling, would like answers to: Abraham affirms to God that he has followed his instructions, is precisely where God has directed, and is about to sacrifice Isaac, just as God requested. Abraham answers as a dutiful child to his inquisitive, controlling parent. His “Here“ here is full of answers.

However, the locative “here“ does manage to place Abraham somehow geographically, though relative to not much physically. If God were looking down or up from some hazy void, Abraham’s answer would help pinpoint him to God spatially in a Where-should-I-be-looking sort of way. From Abraham’s own perspective, his here is in relation to his corporeal situation in addition to his spiritual and mental readiness. With no mention of the physical placement of this old man’s body, I imagine him as placeless in the proper name sense of maps, but placed in relation to himself – that he, right or wrong, notes his own being. He considers himself relative to his (unnamed) surroundings, objects, and most importantly his center of gravity, self, whatever you call it – everything else is elsewhere, and orbits around this sense. In a collection of essays accompanying an exhibition on embodied experience, Foucault defined the source in the body:

My body, in fact, is always elsewhere. It is tied to all the elsewheres of the world. And to tell the truth, it is elsewhere than in the world, because it is around it that things are arranged. It is in relation to it - and in relation to it as if in relation to a sovereign - that there is a below, an above, a right, a left, a forward and a backward, a near and a far. The body is the zero point of the world. There, where paths and spaces come to meet the body is nowhere (233).

It is in relation to an object (vs. subject) that prepositions make sense. There are two things I’d like to highlight here in hopes of bringing a couple of strains together. First, the possibility of placing Abraham in light of something besides what is written, that is, relative to himself. The second is to consider the right or wrong Abraham and whether it mattered relative to God’s intention. Did Abraham ever consider that he was the wrong one? That he was potentially signing on to be the butt of a huge cosmic joke? That he was actually in the wrong place at the wrong time? When Kwon discusses this feeling of dis-ease and nomadism present in culture today, she mentions that the journey to someplace else and other than where we come from or were meant to be “is likely to expose the instability of the ‘right place‘ and by extension, the instability of the self “ (42). In Abraham’s case, it’s worth entertaining if there might be any plausible way he could have been exposed as the wrong individual for the job. Without divine intervention, and upon intercepting the call, he was at the mercy of the swinging jungle vine of circumstances and instructions. Because he answered the call, he undertook the role, its actions, inherant faith, and consequences. In any part of his journey, if he couldn’t sense the right or wrong of it, it is likely that the right place or right Abraham was non-identifiable and couldn’t be located to begin with. That is, neither right nor wrong could be sensed. It’s a postulate for an outsider to question God’s intentions in this passage, but not a verifiable determination for Abraham himself to make.

Abraham’s lack of grounding in space arose from a thinness of detail in the Biblical passage. Similarly, the possibility that another Abraham could exist stems from God’s opaque intentions in the same text. Abraham lacked even an internal compass for his place – in answering the call, his “Here I am“ was more a response to the questions implicit in the call of his name: Abraham, Are you prepared to prove yourself to me? I can only imagine his own orientation as a body within space that is following, hearing, and responding to God’s voice, and question if he could fathom an elsewhere from his situation that upon answering the call, his moves would be decided. His emotions over the requested sacrifice would be tacit and unwritten, while the instructions of the Lord were clear in request, but not in motivation. God obfuscated his intentions but not his aims – if any ol‘ Abraham would do, then the intended recipient of the call didn’t matter so much that God receive proof of fear and love by way of renouncing that which his human loved most. Then, with the knowledge that whichever Abraham is prepared to do this for his God, he flip flops, and declares this obedience enough, not caring who has done the obeying.

References
Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis. Princeton University Press, 1953, 2003.
Bible, New Living Translation. Genesis 22:1-19.
Foucault, Michel. “Utopian Body.“ Sensorium, edited by Caroline A. Jones. MIT Press, 2006. pp. 229-234.
Kafka, Franz. Parables. “Abraham,“ Class handout.
Kwon, Miwon. “The Wrong Place.” Art Journal, Vol. 59, No. 1. (Spring, 2000). pp. 32-43.

Draft blurb
My thesis concerns the formation and recognition of a soul as I see it. Through research, investigation, and intuition, I’d like to discuss what animates us, animals, and the inanimate with empathetic qualities. Considering what constitutes that presence brings to light an insidious hierarchy in perceiving autonomy. After deciding on one or a few forms of the nature of the soul in my project, I’d like to make it material. I propose to do so via representations of it in film or projection, through the tools that reach it, and/or an anthropological book on the matter.

Keyword brain dump
pieces
remnants
soul
nature of soul
personality
anthropomorphism
treatment (souls, lesser-thans)
lesser-thans
lesser, lessen
lesser beings
being
dying
autonomy
layers
animated life, characteristics of animated life
Frankenstein
sentience
feeling machines
absence, shadow, presence
soul-hearing devices
world beyond
occult technology

Materials/format
Panel discussion, colloquium
Implements and artefacts
Exhibit
Anthropological, abstract film
Book of fabricated clippings, relevant photos, illustration, and writing

Influences
The 7 Lights and Sade for Sade’s Sake, both Paul Chan
Beau Travail, Claire Denis
The Inside of Outside and Remagine, both Olafur Eliasson
Ascent of Man, Tommy Hartung
The Long Awaited, Patricia Piccinini
Journeys from Berlin/1971, Yvonne Rainer
Switch, Rachel Whiteread

Reading/watching list
De Anima, Aristotle
Time and the Image, Carolyn Bailey Gill
The Perfect Medium: Photography and the Occult, Clement Cheroux
The Animal That Therefore I Am, Jacques Derrida
Towards a Philosophy of Photography, Vilem Flusser
A Blue Fire, James Hillman
Oriental Thought, Yong Joon Kim
The Skin of the Film, Laura Marks
Giardini (film), Steve McQueen
How We Die, Sherwin B. Nuland
Phaedo, Plato
“Is It Okay to be a Luddite?”, The New York Times Book Review, Thomas Pynchon
Heart Advice for Death and Dying, Lama Zopa Rinpoche
Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke
The Telephone Book, Avital Ronell
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley
Frankenstein (film), James Whale

Dorky smudge test (excerpt):

I re-cut appropriated footage from “The Deep” episode of The Blue Planet, and edited the instrumental intro to “Aphrodite” from Edgar Broughton Band as a soundtrack for mood.

As an assignment, I considered a monitor who has just seen its face by viewing parts of it:

Flicker from yin ho on Vimeo.

For our intervention, Andrea, Chris and I chose to place traditional, folded “Reserved” signs in various seating areas around the High Line. We were investigating the reactions from onlookers – would they engage with the sign by respecting it, removing it, or ignoring it? The signs ask for segregation, creating a space that affirms that someone will sit there, but not you.

In an elevated park among the galleries and high-end shops of the Meatpacking District and Chelsea, the High Line as a public park functions differently from a neighborhood green, Central or Prospect Park. It is a promenade with no fields or courts to encourage game-playing or picnicking. Instead, it functions as a thoroughfare and mezzanine to watch walkers, the buildings surrounding it, the street, or the sun set. Most often, it is a destination for people already in the neighborhood, and for tourists.

What we found was a respect for the sign by onlookers – some observed it as art and took pictures alongside it, quite a few chuckled at it, but the only attempts to remove the sign were from the High Line workers. For them, the signs shouldn’t exist in a public space, or shouldn’t w/o the proper authority behind it.