Action 6- 7
I was in isolation this week, in quarantine after travelling from the US back into Canada. I was stuck in my tiny one bedroom apartment for two weeks not making any sense. The distinction between the real and virtual became blurry as the zoom interface pushed through the boundary of the screen into my living room and my living room into the my computer screen. This unsettling feeling guided this search for strange clumpy companions, not only to embrace the blurring of real and virtual, natural and synthetic, inside and outside, but to reacquaint myself with my little apartment and its quiet nooks and crannies. I wasn’t alone.
*Also, This is obviously a Morgan Martino-type project*, which helped me understand the power of naming- naming as a method of mediating information- and how naming forms/exposes certain narratives over others. And the power of classification- classification as a “technical apparatus” that shapes the reality of things. And and and what happens when naming conventions and classification systems implode? Whats do we make of the blurry and clumpy pile of mess left behind? Maybe we turn them back into creatures of play and fabulation.
In Search for Clumps
In search for clumps creatures, I found myself keenly getting closer to every corner of my apartment. My body moved and interacted with my apartment in an entirely new way. I scraped window panes, rummaged under my bed, upended storage boxes. I found 25 distinct clumps made of a combination of materials, for the most part unidentifiable to the naked eye.
I observed these clumps and made a chart to outline their external and internal morphology and their behaviour as I perceived it. Based on my own relationship to their morphologies, I gave them each a name. These named embodied their characters. These were intuitive names that I gave them. The names were a part of me as much as the little clump creatures. And so they were brought to life; I got to play God for a moment. But maybe they were already living? I dont know. I was stuck in my apartment for 2 weeks for god’s sake!
They were already living. They had a history, they began somewhere made of something- for example, starting with one hair that coiled into itself and wandered to catch dust and dead skin, brought into its its orb, eventually made bigger with more dust and hair to make an amorphous clump and finally a hot pile of garbage.
I really thought about each of these clumps and its material formulation and came up with the following tree of life sort of chart. It’s inverted though in a way, the simple clumps evolve into more complex clumps until they all eventually merge into one. The relationship between the clumps and their evolution is tangled and harder to delineate; Clumps are inherently tangled creatures.
**Sidenote- What would a clump chart of my family tree look like? The hot pile of garbage that ends up at the dinner table on family gatherings comes from a whole tangled mess of a history. Could I create a family chart not with biological connections but through our external (presentation) and internal (cognitive/ emotional) make-up. Wonder where I would sit in that tree? A tangled mess of my mom’s neurosis and resilience, my grandma’s spirituality and stubbornness and my dad’s (who I dont know much about) lanky feet?**
Anyways, I went on to create a different method of classification that emphasized their internal morphology and the method by which these creatures came into a clump form. The method of clumping was integral to understanding their behaviour and formation- who they are, fundamentally. I created a different naming convention that accounted for the range of material and clumping methods that made each of the clumps. This was the scientific naming convention. The Petrifying Spidey Web is actually an Organic Sticky Agglomeration and Micro-Tendril Clasps of. Dead. Organic. Synthetic Things. Yes, very scientific.
In these two systems of classifications I started moving into rhizomatic ways of classification, appreciating overlapping categories and bringing them into the naming convention. Here the inquiry was into rhizomes and rhizomatic relationship, but the method of inquiry- that of classification and structured typologies- is still of delineation and of bordered categorization. The clumpy creatures must fall within the lines. Its seemed contradictory.
A Cabinet of Curiosities- Blurring Classifications
I chose to embark on this intentional blurring of clump categories by first enlarging each clump to expose its intricacies as a contrast to the simplification/reduction of clump characteristics and properties that I had done in the previous classification and typology systems. I chose to draw each clump carefully. These drawings are part tracings, part free hand drawings of each clumps. As drawings, these clumps have turned into abstract representations of themselves.
What are their stories? Can I gain insight into their stories through the stroke of their tendrils or the curvy or dotted parts that make a whole?
Not sure what to make of these, other than valuing them as beautifully whimsical creature drawings.
I then moved onto to abstract these creatures even further. I used the method of emanation as a form mediation to forefront and abstract these clumps. I made bathroom monsters.
I would like to further inquire what that happy medium is between hyper categorization and complete abstraction of a thing, an idea, a phenomena etc. Not sure where I’m quite going with this…
Bathroom Clump Monsters
What is the purpose of all this, you ask?
I don’t really know. Making sense of this action makes my brain feel like clumpy monster creature. I have floating thoughts. I can’t quite grasp them. I’ll let them float, wander, coil, tangle, grow a little while longer.
Further Exploration: ” Visceral is the space where molecules and meaning , or matter and discourse collide” (Abbot, 2016)
*Credit to Morgan Martino for all the inspiration. After going through this whole clump classification process, funny enough, Morgan shared this with me: https://www.verysmallobjects.com/classification-charts.html
**Part 2 of clump monster project to come…maybe…