the crit

Last week, I debuted the piece during the art and design school equivalent of a final exam, called a critique, or a “crit.”

The piece is interactive, so it’s difficult to digitally share the experience. The recordings that my friends and healers graciously shared with me are embedded within the piece and are triggered to play when someone touches one of the rocks. There are two ways to do it: By holding the “grounding” rock in your hand while picking up the rest of the rocks in your other hand. Or, by one person holding the grounding rock in their hand and then more people forming a chain of touch with the person holding the grounding rock. The person at the end of the chain can pick up the rocks to trigger the sound.

Below are a couple of links to videos that I think best capture the experience of interacting with the piece.

• Video of the whole class interacting with the piece: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1xFnK965InWba631BFCYy-Ep1kgTgulZ4
• Video of a classmate who seemed to particularly enjoy the piece: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1XBeZjfX2w0B64cMSeH0kisxe-L-56zhe/view?usp=sharing
• And here’s an entire folder of images and videos if you’d like to see more: https://drive.google.com/open?id=15YjWPuW2-8t0E7pLUg8gMz8cEHV8Uxt0

Here’s a few shots of the final piece on display, though again these images don’t really capture it since it’s all about touch, connection, and interaction.

The mobile looks much better when it’s in motion, so I suggest checking out this video: https://drive.google.com/open?id=1JUuUrV5Qnx-k6kHKIfP1OEBwBswMIcoz

Here’s a shot of what’s hidden out of sight beneath the table so you can see the Makey Makey and Scratch in action.

Finally, here you can find the slide deck I prepared for the crit, though I only ended up showing the photos. Most of my presentation time was simply spent inviting my class to interact with the piece.

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The Crit Experience

Sharing the piece with my classmates during the crit was an incredibly moving experience. Hearing my friends’ voices fill the room made me feel enveloped by my community, and being able to share my experiences with my classmates made me feel profoundly understood. I realized that conveying my experience through art made it possible for people I barely knew to understand my story much more deeply than if I were just to verbally explain my experiences to people. Even though I barely knew most of my classmates, I saw looks of connection and understanding on their faces when I told them about my experiences that I don’t often see when I first tell someone about my pain and healing. It was beautiful. I felt healed, and I think my classmates did as well. In fact, one classmate emailed me afterward to thank me for sharing such personal art and to say that I had helped her feel the courage to do the same in the future.

Ideas for the Future

I am still in the process of dreaming up how to do this, but I’d love to be able to share the in person experience of interacting with this piece with people beyond my class, and especially with the people who contributed “healing is” recordings. I will try to host some sort of showing in DC and also hopefully in Baltimore in the future.

One classmate offered the idea to fill an entire room with the installation, expanding the mobile into something that could hang from the ceiling and envelop the walls of a room. My teacher offered the idea of creating an interactive component to the piece in which anyone could recording their own “healing is” statement to be incorporated into the piece in real time. I love both of these ideas and am very interested in expanding the piece into the future.

What It All Means

Here’s something of a code that deciphers what each component of the piece represents.

The wooden rock display

• The shape of the negative space between the wooden forms: I uploaded into Rhino a photo of an x-ray of my spine taken at the age of 14 right before my scoliosis was straightened through a spinal fusion surgery and modeled the wooden forms directly from this x-ray image.
• The raised areas on the wooden forms: I created a typographic map of my own pain in which the raised areas indicate areas of chronic pain. A friend and classmate suggested that I leave the layers as separate pieces so that, hopefully one day when my pain decreases, I can remove layers to symbolize the release of my pain.
• The brackets that connect the wooden forms: The brackets represent the instrumentation I had placed in my spine during the spinal fusion surgery I had when I was 14. I precisely aligned each bracket with the space between my vertebra on my x-ray guiding image.
• The blue color of the brackets: While the rest of the wooden forms feature natural colors, I wanted the brackets to appear somehow unnatural. The blue evokes the color of hospital gowns.
• The rocks themselves: While preparing for and recovering from a major back surgery to correct the spinal fusion I had as a teenager in the summer of 2016, I went on regular hikes as part of my healing process, often accompanied by my little brother who helped me during the first two months of my recovery. Further into my healing process, I went on hikes with the person who came to be my partner and many people who came to be dear friends. As I walked, I picked up rocks. I tumbled the rocks to make them smooth, and slowly over time I’ve been giving the rocks away to people who are part of my healing process and/or who need some support during their own healing journey.
• The recordings: I invited the people to whom I had given rocks, who had been a significant part of my healing process, or who I wanted to share my healing process with to record themselves saying the sentence, “Healing is [fill in the blank with whatever healing means to them].”
• The functionality of the circuit: By using a circuit that requires touch in order to work, the piece emphasizes the connection to ourself and others that is part of the healing process.

The hanging mobile

• The phrase “there is no before there is no after”: I believe that conceptualizing of my body in terms of “before and after” has been harmful to me. Thinking about my life in terms of “before and after and after,” segmented by the spinal fusion surgery I had at the age of 14 and then the instrumentation removal surgery I had at the age of 26, centers my life around these surgeries and emphasizes loss for me. This kind of “before and after” thinking causes me to dwell on all the mobility, connection, happiness, and sense of self I lost after each surgery. “Before and after” is also an unhealthy concept when a “before and after” medical transition is the only mainstream narrative we have for trans people, and when it’s a dominate and prescriptive narrative our society often expects of fat people. We all exist at each step along the way of our journey, not as static images of “before and after.” I wanted to explode the concept of “before and after,” and I believe that my own life experiences already do this. Thought my “before” is a crooked and “deformed” spine, it was a time when I didn’t have pain. My “after” is a “normal” and straight spine, but it’s full of pain. I defy the usual narrative of “after” being the state to strive for (something one of my classmates and friends remarked on during my crit). My narrative is far more complicated than that.
• The shape of the dangling lines: The S-shaped curve I modeled from x-rays of my spine before it was fused, and the nearly straight vertical line I modeled from the most recent x-ray I have of my spine.
• The number of dangling lines: I chose to do 11 iterations of the “tween curves” because the first xray is from when I was 14, right before my first surgery, and the second xray is from when I was 26, right after my second surgery. The 11 in between curves represent the 11 years between my surgeries spent with a screw sticking into my muscles and tendons and causing me chronic pain.
• The circular pattern of the dangling lines: I used Rhino/Grasshopper to autogenerate a series of shapes that would make my “before” and “after” spine shapes appear to gradually shift into and then back out of one another in a continuous loop, thus emphasizing a lack of a distinct before and after.