Action 3
Making for making sense, making space and making place. Making as extending, opening up, pushing, carving, facilitating, taking up etc.
Starting from the Screen:
I facilitated a few zoom workshops in the last month that my partner also attended. He noticed and articulated that I seem to have a tendency to make my body small right after I say something. While I wasn’t perturbed by his observation- we all have body expressions that reveal our defense mechanisms or methods and self preservation in different inter-relational scenarios- I began to wonder how I take up space and how other people receive my attempt to make or renounce space. To explore this, my first action was tracing my face and torso that showed on the screen during our zoom call during Studio. I later searched the recorded version of the zoom call and again traced my own location on the screen. The two views were entirely different captured at the same time during the zoom meeting.
This got me thinking about making space and making place as a stretch lexicon for “making”. How do I make space in a virtual setting and how is that space granted to me by the affordances of the digital technology itself and how that space taking is perceived different by my community? Next, how does this external perception of space and place making validate or diminish my original attempt, intent or agency to make space/ place? What is the impact of this validation and diminishment of place making attempts? I hoped to explore some of these questions through making.
Extending the Studio- Studio as locality
I extended my studio to the seawall, Embaracadero in San Francisco close to where my mom lives. I visited and worked in my studio everyday for a week. My mom and I even started referring to our walks on the Embarcadero as “the studio” not just mine but ours. My mom-“should we go visit our studio today? I wonder how our studio is doing?” I sat everyday and drew doodles and maps of different observations that I would otherwise not notice. I was hoping to allow unnoticed phenomena to take up space within my own experience of the Embarcadero. In other words, I was making space for what my environment was trying to tell me through a language that I rarely paid attention to.
Map of the birds feeding recreated 
Reproduction for sense-making
On day 3 I found myself wanting to reproduce some of my observation to amplify the quiet phenomena taking place all around me. I wanted everyone to notice, what I was noticing. “Dont you see the ridiculous strut of the pigeons and their implicit acceptance of the pecking order, literally, that informs how they share spilled cornflakes with the seagull and the crow…hello!”
What is the role of reproduction and amplification? The act of reproduction is perhaps a service to the anthropocentric tendency to make sense. Do we care for phenomena only when we can attempt to understands (make-sense of) it? In other words, does sense-making generate empathy and care for other human and non human entities? I reproduced the pecking/eating pattern of the birds by making a strange “sculpture” using local found material. I went on to reproduce the path of sparrows and butterflies through mark-making and mark-leaving.
The act of reproduction was a way of making sense -again stretching the lexicon of “making”. As I held on to (to create memory) the path of the sparrow as it walked in front of me, the subsequent act of marking/mapping this path formalized this sparrows existence for me, specifically its pattern of existence within a particular span of time. By formalizing it, it began to make sense. I’d argue then that sense-making happens through the merging of observation and action- even if the action is simply leaving a small mark. Sort of what I was getting at in the last action-terroir.
Another question for another day- How can we let nature and natural systems and phenomena exist and persist with value in their own right without us-humans needing to make sense of them?
Mark-Making, Mark-Leaving
Amplifying Tree Shadows: 10:55 am 
I take up space through the act of making space for non-human entities.
I was slouched on the ground in the middle of a pretty busy sidewalk on the Embaracadero. These pics dont illustrate well the foot/bike/scoot traffic on the sidewalk. As I was tracing the shadows of the tree on the ground, I found myself moving around dynamically and freely, guided by the curves of the shadow, unfettered by the people walking by. I found myself pushing them out of the way. They were walking around me, some annoyed, some heeding without concern. I was actively carving space for myself through the act of amplifying tree shadows. In this moment, this tree was my ally.
Embarcadero as studio: Every time I left behind a mark on the Embarcadero, I carved space for myself there. It was not a mark of ownership but a mark of belonging and locality. Through proxy, my mom began to experience a similar sense of belonging and relationship with the Embaracadero which has been her backyard for 2 years now.. We came up with these ideas together and she was my photographer. This space became our studio together.
Reproducing Data
Thought experiment: I imagined mapping footsteps of all entities that have feet as they walk on the Embarcadero. I’d use one colour to depict all the footsteps and the amount of time that each step rests in a particular location would be represented by the darkness of the colour- the represented step colour would get darker the longer the step stood still. This map would likely have dark colours that cover a large area around the commercial locations, around the Ben and Jerry’s, the bike rental place, the hand sanitizing station now etc. There might be smaller dark-very dark but very small splotches of colour dispersed here and there (Actually, I’ll draw it out). The outliers- we’ll call them, like the 85 year old woman that I spoke to in “my studio” who was sitting on a bench (see below) for hours, she said, observing the birds and the flowers. Or my mom who experienced an anxiety attack on her way home from our studio. What about the folks managing waste or those digging through trash to collect recycling? These are stories that dont wield the power of a collective. There colour doesn’t take up a lot of space and easily gets lost if not amplified.
This made me think about positive feedback loops of locative media technologies and geospatial tagging. The locations that are already visible are further amplified through geotagging which leads to more visitors and further amplification. Geo tagging amplifies the same narrative over and over again muffling smaller voices and narratives that hold the stories of knowledge and resilience that we need most right now. My mark making is a form of geotagging bringing attention to alternative and frequently forgotten narratives and phenomena. But do I get to tell these stories? Consider the act of tracing- it’s really just a shallow depiction of a story made by a third party to express the overarching shape of a thing. How does tracing really make space? And what is my role in making that space and place?
Who get’s to tell stories and amplify voices?
After leaving the marks about the 85 years old woman, my mom, the custodian and the binner, I was left feeling really uncomfortable. These stories were not my stories to tell! They were written in my handwriting, my words, my voice. Consent making was a whole other matter; I didnt have their explicit consent to reproduce their stories. To reconcile with this question, I decided to leave one last mark on the Embarcadero for now. Its another silhouette of a body with a piece of chalk left behind, which I hope will facilitate space-making and place-making for those who wish to do so. I created a scenario that allows them to tell their own stories if they choose.