{"id":2036,"date":"2019-04-03T12:14:03","date_gmt":"2019-04-03T16:14:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-5\/?p=2036"},"modified":"2024-10-08T21:21:48","modified_gmt":"2024-10-08T21:21:48","slug":"the-shape-of-reality","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/itp.nyu.edu\/adjacent\/issue-5\/the-shape-of-reality\/","title":{"rendered":"The Shape of Reality"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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The Shape of Reality <\/h1>\n\n\n\n

By Kathryn Zazenski<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Illustrated by Chengtao Yi<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Revisiting the definition of reality and the flexibility of its shapes during a time of insecurity. Perception is learned\u2014spatially, culturally, psychologically\u2014 narrative is directed, truth has never existed at just one point in space.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n

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In 2004, science-fiction writer Ursula K. Le Guin wrote a short piece in response to an assertion that she avoided technology and instead wrote \u201csoft science fiction.\u201d(1)<\/em><\/a><\/sup> Le Guin railed against this accusation, defining technology not as \u201cwires and servers,\u201d but rather as how society responds to physical reality. More recently, I was thinking about the flexibility and subjectivity of reality after coming across the work of Hilma af Klint, an early 20th-century painter who has only recently gained attention for her revolutionary works. Her paintings, many of which were realized through spiritual divination, share this sense of the truer definition of technology, this response to lived reality.
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Originating in the early 17th<\/sup> century, the term \u201ctechnology\u201d referred to the systematic treatment of art, craft, and technique related to making or doing(2)<\/em><\/a><\/sup>. The concept of technology has always had strong relationship to the hand, to the human body, to the life process. It wasn\u2019t until the tail end of the 20th<\/sup> century that we began equating technology almost exclusively with the computers and devices that we live with and use. In fact, the term \u201cdigital\u201d has a similar corporeal relationship, being coined even earlier, in the 15th<\/sup> century, and referring to a finger or a toe\u2014a digit(3)<\/em><\/a><\/sup>. In this short span of about thirty years, we\u2019ve almost all but eliminated the history, the diversity, and the physical connection to the body that both of these contemporary definitions all but deny.
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We often lose sight of the flexibility of both form and narrative, especially during times of great insecurity, be it political, economic, climate-related, or other. We tend to seek stability and order, something to give structure and form to an otherwise nebulous-seeming existence. Theoretically, when the threat wanes, form and narrative return to this state of being elastic and encompassing. But what happens when change is experienced at a pace and scale previously unknown, when insecurity isn\u2019t an aberration but rather the norm? What happens when we no longer know how to interpret our fight-or-flight alarms or simply how to be empathetic towards one another? What tends to happen is that the reins never loosen and the boxes become rigid and brittle. Our muscles are flexed and poised so tightly, braced for impact, that they break under their own pressure before they succumb to any type of external force.
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