Week 9: Interstice Embodied

The final assignment for this course was titled “Interstice Embodied”, which tasked us with defining the tangible nature of negative space, or the empty space that seems to surround the area around things that occupy real space. Within this subject, we were additionally tasked with exploring how individuals place relationships within this space, or how they’re existing relationship is demonstrated through interaction and what is implied within this negative space.

Thinking of an example of this sort of interaction was difficult, although I did know that I wanted a project that would explore the dependence we have on insecurities as well as the reliance on trust. I tried exploring this idea on paper in this train of thought the nature of sPACE-1bi00zy

My first idea was to create this sort of tunnel vision effect, which is shown here Untitled Extract Pages-1by074s

The basic idea behind was this system of question-and-reveal mechanics that would first obstruct the visage of a person, but slowly reveal them with the removal of tabs for each question answered. However, I felt this didn’t necessarily communicate the idea of negative space, as the view of what’s really going on is restricted within a tunnel, the idea was not very good in terms of execution. It occurred to me that I wasn’t thinking specific enough, as this idea only focused on the general idea of establishing familiarity with someone, what I needed was something more specific. With that in mind I looked inward to my own experiences and found that this idea of establishing trust was displayed within my friendship with someone from high school who also goes to college in New York City.

With this in mind, I began to think of how I could represent this specific kind of friendship, that is, a friendship that was pretty strong in high school, but growing more distant after graduation. I wanted a design that would demonstrate the reliance that we still have on one another despite the distance while still incorporating our past. with these parameters in mind, I came up with the first design initial idea-1k3406k which was originally going to have the people facing the same way with a tightening mechanism. However I felt this design didn’t incorporate the increasing distance between us, so with some revisions I thought of something like this introductary idea-1le54eg

With this concept established I was able to piece together a contraption that could hold two people in that position, I decided to construct a harness of sorts.

Construction process:

 the harness prototype

          

There was some mental banter over how I’d attach the two harnesses

(suggestions from professor)

eventually the design came to this:

more of the construction process:

 

The finished product:

In conclusion:

I decided to call my project “Divide Your Infinites” because of the complexity of human awareness, as in the awareness of our immediate occupation within space as well as the contextualization of another individuals intent that we pick up on. This idea was largely brought to fruition from a statement made by Stephen Kern in “The Culture of Time and Space”, which was, “knowledge is essentially dialectual […] and [ideas] have a basic polemic nature” It was this idea that human knowledge, and therefore awareness of their surroundings, has this binary dialogue of whats negative space and positive space. a process that works like a radar, constantly evaluating the area. This then brought up the idea of the personal bubble, which I believed was the closest proximity in this radius of awareness. How is it that we get uncomfortable when things enter our radius but let people in at the same time? This led me to believe that they don’t really interfere with it, rather they meet at points that are agreeable to each individual’s personality, as I don’t think people are entirely compatible with another person, which is why they must “divide” themselves when relating to another person, as both infinite arrays of complexities could not entirely cooperate with the other.

 

 

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