Haptic lab

A studio course “in which haptic learning takes place in relation to digital technology”. We completed three short, yet diversely themed projects with some connection to the work of Marcel Broodthaers.

1. Pre-cinematic devices

The semester began with a visit to the Princeton University Graphic Arts Collection, which holds a number of pre-cinematic devices (e.g. zoetrope, phenakistiscope, praxinoscope, thaumatropes, and flip-books) that rely on optical tricks to create the illusion of a moving image. The coarseness of the technology requires you to “relax your eyes” to be able to experience the animations, which imbues a kind of hypnotic, and maybe even political flavor to these objects. The technology also limits scale; frames are physically small and assembled in short sequences to fit in a desktop-sized or handheld device. They can therefore only entertain for a matter of seconds, like a predecessor of today’s animated GIF. We were asked to make some work in response to these devices. I brainstormed a few options.

First, a proposal for alternative imagery. Persistence of vision is the term given to how the brain interpolates between discrete pictures to create the illusion of motion. I conflated this idea with the persistence of an invasive weed in my garden called Pinellia ternata, or ‘crow-dipper’. The plant, which I struggled to identify before the invention of AI tools designed for just this purpose, comes up in patches of bare soil in the garden. I have found it impossible to eradicate despite disruptions to its visual presence by intermittent weeding episodes. Its habit is low-to-the-ground clusters of single, tender stems that bear three leaves of a light green color. Pulling it up tends to break the stem, leaving behind nut-like roots in the soil. So the plants just regrow, unbothered and tenacious. It doesn’t flower in the familiar way but instead produces ominous vertical stalks terminating in a narrow spathe and spadix. Hallucinating in my strong dislike for this plant, I imagined a journey dipping down inside the spadix and then becoming hypnotized by its evil underground roots. Small at first, the tubers wink like stars in the chaos, then grow, and eventually sprout new plants from which the tiresome cycle repeats.

Second, I focused on the animation books that accompany the devices. The animations have about 12 frames, each only a few inches square. Assembled in a sequence, they make a long, narrow strip. Pages of different animations were bound together in books and distributed as sets, with the intention that pages could be torn out and placed into the device at will. The extreme aspect ratio of these books made for awkward page turning and an altogether different way of experiencing their seriality. I considered extending the awkwardness by creating longer animations that required an even longer, ribbon-like page, so that you might need to cross the room to turn it.

I then wondered what would happen if there were another axis. I imagined two stories intersecting at a single frame. The resulting object would likely be even more cumbersome to handle, but would unlock a new dimension in whatever strange game this is.

Third, I focused on the devices themselves. The devices transform something continuous and “real”, i.e. animation frames on a single strip of paper, into something more-than-real by disrupting continuity. Whereas the zoetrope and phenakistiscope break continuity by apertures that periodically hide and reveal what is seen, the praxinoscope does this by leveraging surface geometry. A central column of flat mirrors creates a faceted surface that effectively discretizes the reflection into small parts.

I considered the praxinoscope as a thing separate from its use. Looking past wear and tear, the mirror surface looks at once technical and opulent. I also found it a bit forbidding, with its closed circular shape that spins endlessly, optimized for meaningless looping. I wondered how I might invert the logic of this object: rather than you looking at the device, what if you were the device to be looked at? I imagined the praxinoscope as a garment to wear, such that body movements become the motion that causes the breakup of the world around you, followed by its re-animation. In this reversal, who animates whom?

The praxinoscope is a 19th-century toy, yet the garments I was conceiving called out to metallic mail clothing from the 1960s (think Paco Rabanne), reflecting an era equally fascinated by — and in fear of — new technology. What was ‘futuristic’-looking back then still seems somehow relevant and ‘futuristic’ now. I have preemptively titled my praxinoscope garment “Take my eyes”, borrowed from the song “Can’t take my eyes off you” (1967), which came to mind as I considered the body/garment as also implicated in acts of mirroring, segmentation, and interpolation. Also: floating, slowly rotating in a state of dazzlement, hypnotizing, and unsure of its realness.

2. Ash wood “prosthetic”

For the second course project, we were asked to fabricate something that would attach to or cushion the body using thin ash-wood strips.

The prompt brought me back to a project from my undergraduate studies in architecture (~20 years earlier) in which we designed a “body apparatus”, or a prosthetic-like object that could be worn on the body and mimicked some formal change through motion. I ended up making a small device that attached to the hand or foot. The pedagogical approach back then was tightly staged (photo study → drawings → concept → fabrication→ explication). The Haptic Lab prosthetic, in contrast, only required that we work with ash mainly because we (our class, also North America generally) have a lot of it due to the emerald ash borer beetle epidemic.

The prompt may have been aimed at leveraging the remarkable bendiness of ash by elastically bending or steam-bending thin strips. These are techniques typically used in larger, furniture-like scales, which I have encountered in previous facets of my work; I have asked wood to bend and support the body (see Strands, Saddle Chair) and had spent the last several years doing various things with elastic ribbons (see Lace in Space and Strands), for research and otherwise. At that moment, I wanted to disengage with elasticity and the anticipated furniture scale. I refocused my attention from the body to the hand. Going smaller meant cutting the already-cut wood strips into even smaller pieces, returning the wood from its present ‘soft’ and compliant state back into rigid, mini board-like elements.

I began by first making a glove out of chipboard by eyeballing the size and shape of each facet, cutting polygons with scissors, positioning them on my free hand, and taping the edges to join the pieces together. Moving to wood, I constructed a work glove from muslin and glued ash pieces I had cut on a chop saw, also eyeballing rough size and angle. This process required deciding which creases I would articulate so the hand could move and which I would ignore to essentially demobilize. How strictly each piece was glued also mattered: a small dot of glue at the center of each facet allowed more degrees of freedom, though the hand was never completely free. For our final presentation, I wore the glove while demonstrating simple janitorial tasks, such as lifting a bucket and sweeping. The thin ash tiles make a satisfying tinkling sound as they move.

Extension to burial suit: I’m dead

As a continuation of this work on faceted fabrics and mails, I have become interested in jade burial suits. These ceremonial suits were fitted to the bodies of select men from the Han Dynasty after their death. They were believed to grant immortality by completely enclosing the body and all its orifices in jade, so that the soul would not leak out.

I have created a digital avatar of my body onto which I’ve designed a rectangular lattice. I then digitally flatten, cut, and assemble the tiles in paper. So far, I have finished an arm, a leg, and a bodice (pictured below). I’m deciding whether this “suit” should be wearable or exist only as sculpture without a body inside. That choice drives the assembly and lattice design. Traditional suits join tiles tightly at the corners with wire and no backing. Reducing slack at the joins locks the shape, making the garment self-supporting, but also hinders movement. This makes sense, as the wearer was dead and thus stationary.

If I stay closer to tradition, I’ll revise the pose and lattices for the arm, back, and shoulders. The shoulder/armpit regions are especially tedious to define: they demand careful placement of topological defects to land on a satisfying shape, and the solution changes dramatically with each arm position. My initial studies came from a slightly tense and upright A-pose; I’m now designing a more “dead” pose: lying down, arms closer to the torso. The process continually underscores how remarkable it is that everyday clothing can accommodate a wide range of positions and movements, while these faceted tile networks resist them.

3. Sorting eagles

For the final project, we worked as a class to sort a collection of eagles, echoing Marcel Broodthaers’s own Musée d’Art Moderne, Département des Aigles. Here we returned to interpolation, now through classification. Starting with assorted eagles, we defined a few soft rules (pose, orientation, size, material, function, etc.) and used them to build a physical network. The result was spindly, orthogonal maze of eagles, slightly grotesque, and mostly brown.