Memorial:
Death Box Quiz Thing
Since the prompt for this week’s assignment was to make a memorial that would exist in a physical location and bring attention to an important topic you feel goes under-noticed in society, I knew I wanted to make something about mortality and impermanence. Death is something I try and embrace, with my goal to be keeping a near-constant awareness of my own mortality and that of everyone around me, in order to appreciate life, keep things in perspective, and ironically, to keep things light and fun. I figured I could do a spin-off of a previous project, the Deathwatch, and make it a physical installation as opposed to a wearable, but still inspired by the same quote from G.I. Gurdjieff:
"The sole means now for the saving of the beings of the planet Earth would be to implant again into their presences a new organ … of such properties that every one of these unfortunates during the process of existence should constantly sense and be cognizant of the inevitability of his own death as well as the death of everyone upon whom his eyes or attention rests. Only such a sensation and such a cognizance can now destroy the egoism completely crystallized in them..."
So I decided to stick with the idea of giving an expiration date to the user, hopefully setting them up to think about what it would really feel like if that was the true day of their death. I wanted to sort of trick people into getting that message by having them blindly interact with a seemingly fun game only to have that twist at the end. I also thought it would be better to make something interactive and light as opposed to a memorial that was very heavy and uninviting. So the box experience was:
Users see the box, buttons and display lit up, with a message “Press One”. The colors of the message (“Press” in white and “one” in green) correspond to the colors of the giant arcade buttons to the top and bottom respectively. Hopefully that’s enough leading to get them to choose and press a button.
Then a random assortment of binary “this or that” questions are presented in the same color structure. There are twenty different pairs that could be displayed (“teeth/toes”, “daddy/zaddy”, “PB&J/pizza”, “3 kid/3 $$$”, etc.) and after they make 6 choices, the display reads “look below”.
The display and a noise leads them to look on the front of the box, where a small receipt is being printed. Once it’s done, they rip off the paper and receive their message, which reads “Congratulations! You have: X years, Y months, and Z days left to live. What will you choose next?”
The choices are totally arbitrary, the arduino doesn’t even record which button was pushed, it only increments a countdown until they’ve made 6 choices. I wanted to get across a funny, absurd flavor for what living is like, you make all these stupid choices, and then it doesn’t really matter either way, because you’re going to die no matter what. The death-date prediction was based off the Deathwatch statistical sketch, but I adjusted the probabilities to make it skew toward sooner deaths. It’s not as interesting when 90% of the people live until they’re 81; I wanted people to really have to think, “What if this is right and I only have 9 more years left to live? What then?” Which I hope is guided by the last message of “What will you choose next?” — I usually don’t like being so overtly self-help, but I felt like the receipt was disconnected from the buttons without that last part. I was excited to be able to use a mini printer for the first time, and hopefully they can keep their forecast like a fortune cookie.
Overall, really happy with how it turned out, and excited to leave it up tomorrow during the day and see what people think of it (and their inevitable demise).
Reading Responses
Doris Salcedo — The Materiality of Mourning
I think there’s a lot to unpack with the idea of using “permanence” to demonstrate “impermanence” — or rather, using the less impermanent to call attention to the impermanent (or I guess in the abstract, the infinite… I digress.).
Wow, would love to see some of her concrete sculptures, they sound incredible. Giving me a lot of ideas… I should try out concrete.
Wow, the grass table coffins. Damn.
The first thing that came to mind for something that I could do in a similar vein would be to make sculptures referencing the cartel violence in Cuidad Juarez that was happening throughout my adolesence and peaked during my highschool years. So many stories coming across the border with my classmates — bodies cut up in coolers and sent to families during Christmas for “tamales”, decapitated men in women’s lingerie hanging from highway signs, and many other horrors — that lend so well to this kind of stark visual representation in a sculpture. But those aren’t my stories to tell, my family was lucky enough to not have felt any of the violence first-hand, so that’s not something I plan on pursuing. Lot to unpack there as well.
I think public art as direct action is something I really want to explore further and could possibly be the most important day-to-day application of art, in my opinion."
“Solitary making but collective art”
“Making by unmaking'“
This is really challenging me to think about how to make my art mean more. I’ve always embraced an absurdity and anti-cerebrality to my work, but perhaps I need to step out of my comfort zone and try to actually say something…respond to something… make a conversation about something…
It’s interesting to hear her constantly refer to these works as acts of mourning, because they are represent entire peoples and countries, whereas I’ve done a lot of work and research on very personal mourning. But it’s the same, I guess.
Brainstorm
something iterative, repetitive, using small pieces but huge
in a park? but how to clean up? what could remove itself but not be litter?
something that reminds them of their mortality
button you press and it just tells you you’re going to die (boring)
making by unmaking — self-destruction box
button — press me — “this box will destroy itself after 1,000 button presses. You are press number 23.”
or “the person who pressed the button last is now dead. You will die the next time this button is pressed. Plan accordingly.
shredder box
Harrison Bergeron box would be fun, performative
Sam Durant Doesn’t Need Defending
This is something I’ve thought about a lot as an affluent, white, male-presenting artist, so I’m eager to hear what’s presented.
“Protest isn’t the same as censorship: The former is done by those who lack the power to change a situation, the latter by those who have it.”
I’ve never heard this phrased like that, makes a lot of sense. I practice a lot of double-think when it comes to censorship, so debates like this always get me agitated haha. On the one hand, I think censorship (by power or protest) is completely antithetical to the entire purpose of art, but at the same time, I think there’s a lot of bad art — art that’s irresponsible, cruel, and/or oppressive — and we should do something to ensure that art doesn’t get much light.
I often think about one art drama back in Los Angeles when it comes to censorship. There was an art student in L.A., I think at UCLA, that had done a piece for their seasonal show that included a swastika; the student was Korean if I remember correctly, and their piece was using imagery from Korea’s long history, trying to do something along the lines of “getting back to their roots”. A Jewish student in the school complained (saying their grandparents were holocaust survivors and were going to attend the show or something) and after some protests and a long email debate, the school ordered the artist to remove the piece. This infuriated me for several reasons. First off, I don’t know what it’s like to experience genocide, and I imagine that if there were a symbol that reminded me of the senseless murder of almost my entire cultural or ethnic family, I wouldn’t want to see it. But I don’t think ordering it removed so no one can see it would be the right move. An accompanying warning or some sort of sign decrying the symbol might be warranted, but I think what makes me the most mad is that I don’t think two wrongs make a right. Basically, in my mind, Hitler and the Nazi’s appropriated the swastika from Asian culture, and turned it into the most widely recognized symbol of cruelty and death, completely overshadowing the symbols original meaning over centuries of use in Asian religions. Now here was a student attempting to address this complex issue both in a world-context but more so in a personal one, as an Asian person clinging to their culture in a euro-dominated society, and you have more white Europeans (though whether Jewish people are considered white is too big a question for me to tackle here) trying to tell this Asian person that they have more power over an Asian symbol and therefore should control where that symbol is used. It seemed like exactly the kind of problem the student was attempting to bring attention to in the first place, and they lost the battle to privilege again. I don’t have a resolving conclusion for this thought, other than it’s still something that keeps me up at night.
I do like the contrast between how this piece was handled vs the Dana Schutz controversy — it’s almost as if Durant was saying, I feel strongly about this message, but ultimately it’s not mine to tell, so I’ll give you my art and it’s up to you what you do with it. That seems to me to be the best compromise between acknowledging the complex issue of a person of privilege wanting to use that privilege to amplify marginalized voices and acknowledging that there are lots of ways to give power to marginalized communities that don’t keep the privileged person center-stage.