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Topic 1 Development

Interview documentation and reflection

Last week’s in-class discussion with the cohort really helped me to narrow down the research topic into more specifics.

My assigned keywords “kinship” and “grafting” first went to a broader scope of “human evolution and actions of plants & animal domestication”. At this point in time, my research focuses on the ethics and animal welfare of breeding and husbandry.

In order to include different stakeholders’ perspectives, in the interview, I ask a researcher in correlated industries (my father) and a friend of mine (an experienced pet owner) to be my interviewees. Considering different standpoints of their own, I designed 2 question rundowns according to what I understand about their context.

My father holds the title of a senior veterinarian. He has rich knowledge in both animal nutrition and pharmaceutical practice. My primary goal for interviewing him is to gain some insiders view on animals being used in research experiments. Throughout the interview, he educated me with some basic context of current husbandry and pet industry of China, which really has set every regulation based on human needs (health, cheaper protein, higher profits, etc. ) I asked whether we have specific laws and regulation enacted for animals being used in research. He said no. The reason for asking is that within my own research, I have noticed the passage of the bill”(Laboratory) Animal Welfare Act” in 1966 within the states, the bill was intended to protect cats, dogs, and pet animals from using in research facilities and inhumane treatment.

My second interviewee has three Garfield. One of the Garfield has only 3 legs when born. From my research I learned into order to get a purer breed of a certain kind, breeder or industrialized breeding facilities will force inbreeding. The consequences are, many babies congenitally defect.  Also, female animals will continuously give birth to new babies until they are not able to deliver anymore, which is also another strong factor of defective pets. Though my friend has 3 Garfield, she said that all three are adopted, and was pure coincidence that three of them are all Garfield. She also mentioned that she probably will never purchase a pet for any reason. She wishes adoption in lieu of purchase. 

 

 

 

Form Analysis/Brainstorming

My first thought was to tell a story focused on polymorphic colonial organisms, which are organisms that are made up of individuals units, or zooids that have different specialities. For example, zooids may be responsible for feeding, defense, navigation or reproduction. In order for the larger organism to survive, the individuals need to all exists, and work together. Another classification of colonial organisms are chimera colonies, which are many sub-colonies of closely-related, but not genetically identical. There are theories that the diversity in the chimera colonies has advantages in being more resilient to environmental threats.

I haven’t been sure about what metaphor to use, because a lot of my ideas have been pretty literal. I was thinking of presenting an organism with different jobs. And in this way, I was hoping that the form I chose to have some movement. My first thought was to create a guide that takes inspiration from Parable of the Polygons by Vi Hart and Nicky Case, and to create a website that allows the user to move components around the screen. But then I realized that I spent so much time in front a computer, and maybe it would be a useful exercise to create something more tangible, and less technical. During the summer session, I noticed that I sometimes struggled to be creative at my computer. Since I write code for work, it’s sometimes challenging to turn my analytical, work-focused brain off, and be creative when writing code.

When brainstorming about analog ways to tell a story of movement, I came to the idea of creating a pop up book. This seemed like a good way to show movement in a paper form. After doing a bit of preliminary research, I realized that this is also a very technical skill, that will require my analytical mind. But, it’s away from a screen, and doesn’t require my fingers to be on a keyboard, so I think that it may be a good choice for my own creativity.

Now I am thinking a bit more critically about the metaphor I want to use, and how a pop up book may enhance that narrative. To sum up the metaphor that I keep coming back to, in the style that Lakoff and Johnson use in Metaphors to Live By, it would be “diversity is good”. I also keep realizing that though my form and the specific narrative will be different, the over all theme and metaphor is very similar to Parable of the Polygons. I like the idea of using Hart and Case’s general premise, but doing it in a different form. I think that the pop up form will be a bit limiting, mostly because it is new to me, and I will likely not be able to tell such a full story due to time limitations and lack of skill. But, I think if I focus on reimagining this first interaction of Parable of the Polygons, I can still create an effective guide.

 

It would be interesting to show different elements (zooids?) that when they get closer together, they become “happy”, and when they’re further apart they are sad. Maybe something like this:

 

 

I wonder if this is too similar to Parable of the Polygons, and if there is something different I can do to bring the narrative a bit more closely tied to colonial organism, and biology, and kinship. Potentially, I could borrow the ideas I learned from Margaret about slime mold, and their potential self-sacrificing behavior.

I also wanted to add a couple images of my first pop up experiments. These were created by following the Duncan Birmingham’s first two tutorials in The Popup Channel on youtube.

Interview with Margaret Smith

Once I learned that Margaret has a degree in Evolutionary Biology, I knew that she would be a great person to talk about colonial organisms with! A couple of big picture ideas that came out of our conversation were:

  • Maybe nailing down exactly what a colonial organism is, or isn’t, doesn’t really matter. I was feeling the need to put this concept in a box, but maybe it’s okay if the idea of a colonial organism is a bit more fluid than that. After all, the term “colonial organism” and its classification is all based on decisions made by humans. The organisms themselves don’t necessarily care how they’re classified! Lots of organisms live in colonies, and are dependent on one another. And maybe that is the more important thread to pull at, over determining if a bee is a colonial organism or not.
  • On the other side of that coin though, it is very interesting to zoom out and consider if all earth itself, all living things are colonial in some way. For much of human existence, the species weren’t able to survive without other living things, or continue the species without each other. I’m now reflecting on how to some extent that is changing, with modern science we are able to generate food in a lab, have a child without a partner, etc. The colony of living things on this planet is certainly changing.
    • A couple other terms we touched on, that I’d love to do some additional research on are:
      • biome
      • superorganism
  • When Margaret worked in a lab, her focus was on dictyostelium discoideum, an amoeba known as slime mold. We specifically talked about several life cycles these amoeba, and spent some time looking at their social cycle. This is a cycle that the amoebas go through when they need food. They start out being individuals and aggregate, changing into several different shapes to eventually form a sort of fruit. When the fruit erupts, so to speak, it’s spores are transported to a place where there is hopefully food.

    Once piece that is particularly fascinating about this is that only the amoeba in the fruit survive this cycle. The rest die, and sort of sacrifice themselves so that the ones that are in the fruit can survive. In the lab, Margaret and her colleagues found that the fruit was not an equal split of the different genetic material in the aggregation. Are the amoebas that die sacrificing themselves for those that are more genetically similar? Is it cooperation or a competition?
  • Based on the above, it’s clear that the systems involved in how dictyostelium discoideum live, are complex. I also learned just how difficult it is to compare the life cycles of organisms to each other. At first, I thought that perhaps humans have more cycles than dictyostelium discoideum, since we are larger, more complex creatures. But Margaret questioned maybe humans have less cycles that  dictyostelium discoideum – we cannot reproduce asexually! It makes sense, but was still an interesting revelation to see how human-centric my thinking is.

Borders Cohort Reading

I have to admit that I’m “reluctant” to read the chapters from “Borderlands / La Frontera”. For the mixed form of English and Spanish. And the topic is also weird for me at first glance. Strangely, however, I feel like I entered the environment described by the poem in the first chapter. After that, the author talked about the history of the U.S.-Mexican border and Chicana. Considering the title Borderlands, I think the language mixture also shows “borderlands” in the text, which is a novel form for me to read.

 

Following is the second chapter about rebellion. Although I do not fully understand it, I read some flavors of metaphor. I suppose that the author compares the cultural conflict to border clashes. The representation of the conflict is the author. She is a Chicana, the “borderland” between Indian and Anglo. Also, a queer, the “borderland” between male and female. The rebellion against homophobia also expresses rebellion against patriarchy. (Or white supremacy, or whatever I’m unfamiliar with in history, politics, etc.)

 

There’s also a borderland in the art area. The freeport, as the article “Duty-Free Art” said. The artworks there do not belong to any country.

 

And thinking beyond national borders is especially important in the cloud era. While I get bored with these cliches. Such as privacy protection, data sovereignty, etc. It sounds like none of these guys are on the ground (country). The Pirate Bay’s usage of airborne drones explains my opinion: you must use some material to build the network. So you cannot get rid of the real world. The network, the clouds now are the reflection of our real world. Data monopoly is no more different from other monopoly issues for the country and world. The borders that exist offline also exist online in other forms. It may only change after Musk lands on Mars.

 

These articles generally extend my understanding of borders. Beyond the view of just a line, it can be a space, a concept conflict, or the gap between ambiguous areas.

Group Reading Borders

Captives of the Cloud, Part III: All Tomorrow’s Clouds

I feel like my key takeaways from this one is that adding borders to a seemingly borderless space may actually make it safer for the average person on the internet. I never really thought about the internet as a borderless space, but with concepts like the “cloud” and even something as simple as WiFi, it does make sense to frame it that way. I found it interesting that this borderlessness is also precisely what makes the internet so vulnerable to exploitation. The idea that subdividing and localizing the physical servers that comprise the internet to protect individuals that reside in distinct jurisdictions is super interesting. I feel like the use cases cited of China and Russia show the potential downsides of government control and restricted internet access while the potential for governments to regulate how corporations gather and analyze data on the internet is more hopeful. It seems like an interesting double edged sword. I wonder if it will lead to digital demilitarized zones where countries need to allow for a grey area between local servers!

Borderlands/La Frontera

This piece was far more emotional for me, and I loved the way it touches on the invisible nature of borders themselves. While some border may appear physical like lines on a map or a fence, they are often hazy, blurred, and outright invisible. The changing nature of borders highlighted in the first chapter with the expansion of the US border and the diminishing of the Mexican border, shows how arbitrary many borders are. People might wake up one day to find that the place they call home is now something else entirely, and they are now labelled as the “other” when they had been living there for generations. It’s honestly heartbreaking. For the second chapter, the highlighting of the way we separate “others” using social and cultural borders was fascinating. Even the simple act of labeling someone or something as “other” creates a kind of border around that person/place/thing that not only bind the “others” to each other by giving them a sense of community and commonality but also ostracizes them from communities that seek to reject them. It’s a really interesting dynamic that shows the ways in which the concept of a “border” extends beyond the division between two physical places.

Space: Satellites

I learned a lot from the concept map and also discovered some new aspects such as space law and the ethics of satellites. Although the smart use of space can enhance life on earth. Satellites are reducing emissions in the aviation industry by optimising flight paths and help container ships boost efficiency and profitability. Elsewhere, space technology helps us measure global carbon emissions more accurately, allows farmers to boost yields and feed the world’s growing population more sustainably. Satellites will be essential if we are to connect people who have yet to use the internet. Whole industries, from mining to retail, simply would not be able to operate without satellite communications. When I explored deeper than last week, I found that 1. the rise in the number of satellites being launched into space is unsustainable. 2. Satellites mega-constellations pose a risk to climate and the environment. 3. Tighter global regulation is needed to ensure space sustainability.

Colonial Organisms: Systems Maps

I was finding it difficult to create a concept map of colonial organisms, because I think that my understanding of the definition of a colonial organism is still quite tenuous. I decided to start out with a boundary map to see if I could solidify my understanding a bit more.

As I continued working, I realized that though coming up with a definition of a colonial organism seems like it should be straight forward, but it wasn’t. Perhaps the complexity I was running into is because human understanding of all organisms exist within the implied context biology taxonomy. I have learned that colonial organisms are animals, but I kept wondering “what is an animal?”. The individual zooids that make up colonial organisms seems like pretty simplistic animals, so how are they different from moss, or bacteria?

I started to build out a biology taxonomy digram, but quickly learned that once you get to the phylum classifications, the tree expands a lot. I’m not sure that documenting all of the known phylum classifications will help me understand colonial organisms any better, so I stopped at the kingdom level, and discovered that animals are in fact separate from bacteria. This was a helpful discovery because one thing I wondered in my early research was why humans weren’t classified as colonial organisms, since we have bacteria in our body, could they be zooids? Apparently the answer is no, bacteria in our bodies are not classified as zooids, and therefore we are not colonial organisms.

 

Links to miro boards:

  • boundary map: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPVNaV40=/
  • biology taxonomy: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPVSZHYs=/
  • concept map: https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVPWOgdo0=/

Reading response – space

The three pieces of reading inspired me of thinking space differently. In Yoko Akama’s article, I like the part when she discussed the idea of kokoro, and talked about how Japanese traditions, spiritual and religious thinking are incorporated in the design. It reminds me of the yoga topic, in which the notion of space is more about spiritual, non-material power. We often think about the physical space in the outside world, but when we go deeper into our heart, into our kokoro, as mentioned in the article, there are endless space for us to explore. The physical space might be limited by material, but the space in our mind, in our heart, in our imagination is not restrained by anything. And I think that’s the larger space for us to explore compared to the physical world.

That leads to the article of The Poetics of Space. In this article, the author mainly talked about the space of a room. By adding significance and meanings to the limited space in a room, the non-material space of the room is widely expanded. Connecting back to my own topic, plantation, for now I’m merely focusing on all the physical aspects that relate to space. For example, the land used to establish plantation; how plantations occupy of other living things spaces, in other words, their habitat; or from the world market view of how plantations influence the connections within the world. I haven’t think much about how people’s perspectives would connect the idea of plantation and space. I might be able to find more lead in this aspect.

Kinship Cohort Reading

For the cohort group reading I am interested in Lynn Margulis and Dorian Sagan’s article “Introduction from Slanted Truths”. I resonate with the concept of “Gaia theory”. For my point of view, it is a materialistic explanation of our planet’s mechanism. Every planets are generated after the big explosion of universe. The area where has the high energy aggregated dust and different materials together in the universe, then the earliest planets were formed. Based on Gaia theory, our earth is just the sum of energy and it is “a single, self-regulating entity”. Each creature grows up by absorbing the sun’s energy and the energy transfers between different spacies. Besides, from the article, Gaia is Symbiosis. From my understanding, all creatures in our earth have either close or far connection. This idea is related to Buddhist book I have read. For example, every time when we take breath, we gain the energy from the space. After we die, our body will transfer to energy that other creatures will absorb, or the energy will be part of new life. In this case, we become different life form. If we trace back to the root of life, all we might be from the same ancestor. Therefore, we can even say that you are me and I am you. 

For Donna Haraway’s “The Companion Species Manifesto Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness”. I am confused about the differentiation and similarity between cyborgs and dog. Also I quite don’t understand why she said “I consider dog writing to be a branch of feminist theory”. For my understanding of the article, Donna Haraway treated dog as a trustworthy companion. The kinship between human and dog is strong and has long history.  

Brachen, Rewilding, and Mappamundi

I did research in several different veins this week, further exploring gardens and borders. There are a couple of directions that look promising that I want to dig deeper into.

I read a little bit about the gender roles in maintaining cottage gardens, finding that it has gone back and forth between a feminine and a masculine duty over the centuries. I also learned that in the early 1800’s in England, there was an effort to give gardens to people in the working class. It was thought that “the male labourer possessing and possessed by his garden was to be made moral through useful bodily toil” (Sayer 45). Simplistic and paternalistic.

I then turned my attention to the Brachen in Berlin and several rewilding efforts. It is here that I want to spend the bulk of my research time moving forward, as I feel I have just scratched the surface and I am captivated. The Brachen in Berlin were abandoned spaces, caught between the eastern and the western sides of Germany during the Cold War. These spaces, at one time industralized, were allowed to fall into disrepair, and plants reclaimed the space. Then, once the wall fell, developers started re-taking these spaces. I ready about how these Brachen, for so many, represented hope and possibility when they were industrial voids — far more than anything they became.

I want to learn more about the power of plants to take over man-made things. I want to find examples of other places where this has been documented, and I want to research what happened in the first couple months of the pandemic when the US/Europe/Asia was at its most shut-down. I would like to capture the duality of the fragility and resilience of the plant species that inhabit our past and present.

Tactically, I am still interested in the mappamundi, and I think I want to make one from the perspective of the plants (likely local to Chicago) and try to use that as a media to record them/tell their story, or something along those lines. I found the mappamundi intriguing in that they “by exaggerating the spread of time depicted within their borders, the mappamundi also demonstrate that maps in general need not be seen as reflecting only spatial realities… they may also consist of historical aggregations or cumulative inventories of events that occur in space.” (Woodward 519). The mappamundi captured geography, yes, but also history, religious stories, and itineraries. They cant necessarily be used to locate latitude and longitude of towns, but they could probably tell you the order that you would come across those towns as you moved up a given river. There were also precise legends inscribed in them, and they captured illustrations of different animals and humans.

I think this is something I’d like to explore from the perspective of plants in Chicago. Maybe there is a good way to capture some of the history of the landscape and plant species as they have changed over time. Maybe there are ways to also capture the plants that are still here – weeds, cultivated, I’m not sure. I’d like to talk to someone at the Morton Arboretum or someplace similar for my interview to try to get some of that information. Also, just as the people who were trying to protect the Brachen in Berlin did not put them on a map for fear of calling attention to them, I like that a mappamundi would not give you terribly accurate locales of any of the plants included. Not that I’m all that worried, but it ties in with our reading about refusal, as well.