FUNNY FEELING

I'm borrowing a term from Glenn Reynold's book "An Army of Davids" but using it in a slightly different way that Reynolds might or might not have intended. While the book topic is how technology is empowering individuals, I'm interested in the idea of living smaller.

The idea is nothing new because other countries, such as Europe and Japan, which have less land and high oil-dependence, are forced to consume less because of a lack of natural resources. In the US, the idea of "small" is only beginning to resonate since we've seen gas prices skyrocket in the past year. More hybrid cars are being offered and large SUVs trend is giving way to smaller cars.

Besides being efficient, another advantage of small is flexibility which is a theme I explored in a graduate class taught by Fred Fehlau at Art Center. My project explores transiency in housing which we could easily pick up and move or have modular living spaces. Instead of putting all your savings in one big house, what if you could buy two smaller houses? While the internet has untethered us from having to sit down at a desktop, why can't the same concept be applied to housing?

Online communities amaze me to no end because they really do what the Internet was supposed to do from the very beginning. The first time I got online was back in 1992 in a computer class in college. My roommate, Matt, was a Deadhead and we found this bulletin board which had listed very show that they played since 1964(?)and the playlists. The users in the bulletin board comprised mainly of people who were very serious about their music and recorded their own live shows. The board was just text, no images or sounds. Just the latest band news, tour dates, and a community. Through the board, Matt and I began trading master tapes through a guy in Cupertino, CA who knew the sound guy for the Grateful Dead. We were in heaven.

Anyway, online communities are now very mainstream and you can now find a blog or forum for any topic from LA Tacos to Brooklyn brownstones. You can see where my heart is by the blogs I read.

Funny thing is I rarely ever visit forums. Just the word "forums" mean discussion and that means commitment of my part. I don't have much to say and usually I found what I was looking for. The one time I did visit a forum was when I was looking for a solution to a problem that wasn't covered anywhere else. A few years ago, my wife and I ran into a problem with the Immigration office. The office lost our papers and gave us the runaround about how to file a search in the INS office in Vermont. We didn't knwo what to do. In a moment of desperation, I looked into a discussion group about immigration and posted a question whether anyone else had encountered this problem. A few days later, replies started to come through. One of the replies suggested we write a letter to our state senator. So I drafted and mailed two letters to NY senators, Chuck Schumer and Hillary Clinton. One week later, we received a response from the office of Chuck Schumer telling us they have decided to look into the problem. One month later, the INS office wrote a letter requesting an interview and everything was well on its way. We were elated!

The lesson I learned from this is that forums are great for advice, tips, questions. However, lurk around to see if your question has been already covered before you post it again. Forum readers can be someone who is a professional and willing to share his or her expert knowledge to help answer questions. One of my favorite sites for design is Typophile which has an impressive forum, wiki and even more impressive, boasts users the likes of type designer, Matthew Carter. Another great design forum is Speak Up.

Forums are also great for inside knowledge and opinions from everyday people. Recently, I googled "Sunspots" for my Interactive Objects and Spaces class and some of rich information came from others in the Sunspot World Forums site. While the site is relatively new, the great thing is that the Site Moderators are very responsive and patient to new users.

Unfortunately, forums are also places where people get to flame others anonymously. During the dotcom crash a few years ago, FuckedCompany was a site where laid-off employees get to rant about their work situations. Ironically, office workers learned more about the dire state of their companies from FuckedCompany even before management let them know. Postings quickly turned ugly and personal, sometimes targeting individuals instead of the companies. The thing about FuckedCompany was they didn't moderate their forums and allowed flamings to grow.

As an user, I will most likely fall under the reader category, rather than the poster category. Naturally shy and probably not an expert in anything important, I tend to lurk and glean knowledge from others. However, the thing about forums is that once you've received help from one kind soul, you are more likely to offer help to another.

The Griffin LA is exhibiting James Turrell's work. Turrell explores artificial and natural light and how we sense light in our minds. "Moving toward the light" is a natural instinct in humans. His work plays with our perceptions of light. His pieces often manipulate light so it appears three-dimensional or flat.

The most impressive piece at the Griffin is a large installation that visitors are escorted into by a gallery assistant. The disorientation comes from walking into a white room with no edges or corners. The floor gradually ramps up to a ledge on the other side of the room. The ledge overlooks a three foot drop but the drop isn't apparent because there are no shadows in the room. The space appears to be flattened and what seems to be a glowing pink wall is actually an open space.



The exhibit is shown from May 20-August 26, 2006.

Synposis:In the book "Else/Where Mapping", Andrea Codrington's short essay "Contours and Colonies" addresses the issues of cultural and religious identity through dress. In 1945, Jeanne Terwen-de Loos, out of necessity, weaved a Western dress out of silk maps of colonized parts of Asia. The dress represents her identity through size(small), time period(World War II), location (Indonesia), and perhaps culture (Western European) and class (upper to middle class).

While the dress has been stored away in the Rijksmuseum for many years, Amsterdam-based research group, De Geuzen, brought it back into spotlight. The group then reappropriated the dress into three other dresses along with a web site that further details the mixed colonization of Dutch and Indonesian influences. Codrington compares the site to landing in a foreign country and wandering through the information. The idea of getting lost is the essence of both the site and the dress in order to evoke the "lively, messy history of Mrs. Terwen-de Loos.

http://www.unravelling-histories.org/

The makeup of one's identity comes from family, education, culture, religion and values. Fashion is one way of identifying with a certain aspect of one's identity. But rarely is what we wear a clear informational mapping of one's makeup. To read a human body as a topography for information is certainly a different and more subjective experience than reading it flat.

My response:My cultural identity is a combination of my Chinese upbringing and popular culture in America. To trace what has influenced me in my past is also a mishmash of things that eventually did stick and have made me the person I am now. My own identity can be traced similarly to Terwen-de Loos in size (large), time period (late 20th century), location (Eastern US), culture (Chinese), and class (middle class). Another similarity is the idea of of assimiliation through "tolerance" that de Geuzen brings up. The difference between Terwen-de Loos and myself is that while her story is about colonization, mine is about immigration.