from Majesty
posted 01/14
I looked at the boy; he was looking at me as if we had already agreed on something. Just by standing beside him for a minute too long, I had somehow propositioned him. I couldn’t leave him without some kind of negotiation.
You could wash my car.
For how much?
Ten dollars.
For ten dollars I won’t do anything.
Okay.
I opened my purse and gave him ten dollars and he walked down Effie Street toward certain death and I walked home. In the reoccurring dream, everything has already falled down, and I’m underneath. I’m crawling, sometimes for days, under the rubble. And as I crawl, I realize that this one was the Big One. It was the earthquake that shook the whole world, and every single thing was destroyed. But this isn’t the scary part. That part always comes right before I wake up. I am crawling, and then suddenly, I remember: the earthquake happened years ago. This pain, this dying, this is just normal. This is just how life is. In fact, I realize, there never was an earthquake. Life is just this way, broken, and I am crazy to hope for anything else.
- No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July
from It Was Romance
posted 01/13
I walked down the hall and saw that Theresa was sitting on the floor next to a chair. This is always a bad sign. It’s a slippery slope, and it’s best to just sit in chairs, to eat when hungry, to sleep and rise and work. But we have all been there. Chairs are for people, and you’re not sure if you are one. I knelt beside her. I rubbed her back, and then I stopped because I thought it might be too familiar, but that felt cold, so I patted her shoulder, which meant I was only touching her one third of the time. The other two thirds, my hand was either traveling toward her or away from her. The longer I patted, the harder it became; I was too aware of the intervals between the pats and couldn’t find a natural rhythm. I felt like I was hitting a congo drum, and then as soon as I thought of this, I had to beat out a little cha-cha-cha, and then Theresa began to cry. I stopped with the patting and hugged her, and she hugged me back. I had made everything just horrible enough to bring Theresa’s sadness down to the next level, and I joined her there. It was a place of overflowing collaborative misery, and we cried together.
- No one belongs here more than you. Stories by Miranda July
some thoughts for now
posted 01/05
Currently my interest revolves around finding ways we can destabilize our constructions of our self-identity. Which qualities and ideas about ourselves do we rely on as the basis for our daily actions and decisions and future planning? How does the definition of our self concept help us and how does it limit us/cause anxiety or other problems? What happens when elements of our self construct are changed, manipulated, eliminated?
What is the relationship between how we think about our own identities, how others think about us, and the systems of interactions and expectations we have created and operate within? Can we exploit, stretch, subtly rearrange these systems as a way of revealing places where needless rigidity in our own self concepts prevents greater freedom and well-being? Essentially I’m interested in finding processes of bootstrapping or subverting our lives and self-identities to discover a much more expansive and free experience as ourselves.
At this moment in time, there is an opportunity to use technology to create some interesting manipulations that were not previously possible. Our pervasive and instantaneous access to each other, to information, and to representations of our own data sets up something of an infinitely reflecting set of distorted mirrors. The accuracy and accessibility of feedback technologies allows for new forms of experimentation and rapid iteration. New forums for connection and communication both reinforce and exaggerate existing expectations while offering potential for developing new systems of relating to each other.
I see this work existing in a space between art, design, technology, and self/life experimentation. Rather than going in with a specific positioning or point of view to express (as in the case of ‘critical design’ for example), projects would be more like experiments. The hypothesis being that technologically introducing manipulations into our daily life could potentially unlock previously unexperienced perspectives of our selves. While many of these may fail, they could point to directions for further investigation.
As my questions involve people, I am interested in situations where I can work with others – whether as collaborators, students, teachers, co-performers, fellow test subjects. By experimenting on our selves, we give up the comfortable boundary between work/theorizing and life/experiencing and maybe create possibilities for more unexpected discoveries.