Meaning is slippery... don't slip!
Sentimental approximations rain down from so many wide clouds, it's easy to earn only vague understandings of words. Conversations over the past week(+) keep bringing me back to the importance of being in tune with what you're trying to get at. Algorithm and woke are two high-vis examples of things that get tossed around and passed through different contexts with no boundary between how they are deployed. Words that are used in a bunch of different ways, with no care to distinguish what's meant deep down.
People are rarely hip to the questions that they, themselves, are asking. Questions deserve a blanket, or an outfit. They deserve to be well-dressed in specificity, to disarm and make obvious some of the potential answers.
What will I worry about today? The world is my sad oyster.
A lack of boundary between meanings can be seen as a liquidity of meaning, an extension of the structural and capital liquidity that Zygmunt Bauman used to describe where we're at now. This smooth, fluid, hyperfast swappability breeds anxiety. It's an easier world to live in, but one that many don't want to live in.
Open Studio continues weekly
"A boundary is the distance at which I can love you and me simultaneously" - Prentis Hemphill
I used to think there was an ideal world of no boundaries, where I could safely open my door to anybody and y'all can have it and there is only kindness and openness in return. Not even "in return," though, simply shared. I've had to learn the hard way that this is a bad utopia, a subtopia, something both impossible and undesirable when thought through.
The issue wasn't so much in thinking that boundaries shouldn't exist, but that the only metaphors I had for understanding them were things like doors and gates. A boundary is not a door or a gate, but something that settles and finds equilibrium in the plane of shared space. It doesn't pre-exist, but is produced by the arranging, shaping, and pushing around of objects within the plane, à la Susan Leigh Star's boundary objects.
Your voice can be carried across the frozen lake a million miles away. A metric of distance in the abstract.
We all engage with boundary objects in different capacities and to different degrees. The use-relation, Alive Process, is what produces and updates boundaries.
47 Thames is a boundary object, too. Feel free to come thru and make something happen together.
You don't need permission to be anything
The doordash phenomenon: you have the world at your fingertips, begging some unfortunate shmuck to drag your sustenance around. I wonder about this feeling of hurling through time with little agency. Things just happen, right...?
Leaving everything outside of yourself up to the rest of the world has disarmed us of our abilities to understand--and by understand, I mean grasp--the world. Dematerialization happens in real time as things around you get crushed or poof into vapor for live viewing. Hydroplaning (chrono-planing?) down the slippery road of meaning. Sand runs through your fingers.
The project of Removing Friction that characterized early-21st century design obsessed over "making things easier." This has extended wayyyy outside the zone of apps and websites into the built environment, where things like gated communities and security parks exist to remove all fuss and worry for insiders, creating frictionless utopias that are covert hellscapes for anyone on the periphery.
I think real people are acutely aware that friction and fuss is where fun happens and where action is created, and that this frictionless project is coming to an end.
Ease, simplicity, lack of worry... these things don't correlate to fun, connectedness, or full living. They are sandpapers that grit away our fingerprints and smooth our brains.
Take the Printed Matter Book Fair, where some River folks linked up in LA this past weekend. The space was crowded and alive, it was at times overwhelmingly fussy, but a lot of fun was produced.
We are interested in helping shape a world that is more optimized along the axis of Fun, which is not to be confused for or conflated with ease or lack of worry--again, I want to be very in tune with the specifics of what I'm trying to get at.
It's important to make two things clear:
- We are not making a security park
- You don't need permission to be anything
A broad question / Lesson learned
In the foot-tall window through which familiarity
can be built, we built it but i don't know still
when we're talking about the book in your hands
or what it's like knowing you'll never see it all--
I can't tell if the looks in our eyes know each other.
Heart on a wire, weightless desire
what can i worry about today?
ash floats upwards, lighter than air, lighter
than the little time between your first walk
out the door, coming back for you, and then
it's time to leave.
