I’m not sure I hit the nail squarely, but I’m interested in what flourished out of a rough notion I had-
System Preferences – humanizing a technical term that is so familiar it feels absent, like your own name. But, when a stranger says it, or someone steps into your space, the distance between you and them expands, and evaporates, all at once.
System Preferences- personalizing our settings. Cultivating our spacial proclivities. Harvesting. Like when you have to get a new phone, or splurge on a new tablet, it takes pruning until the thing feels right in the hand. Until everything is set up, there is an awkward tension.
Things unshown below (because sometimes the idea and the work do not match, they circle, and it’s important to tease out all the good bits I don’t want to miss out on before they scatter). I bought this dining set (for 4) on the day OSU announced our new normal, even though I live alone and live very modestly. I couldn’t look at the table I’d built and chairs I dumpstered anymore, let alone be locked in with them. They were each, those chairs and that table, in my life during a system preference that no longer exists. It was time for an update.
These paper modules choose their entity based on color, and though they have skittered and gathered, forming rings around the chair legs, only one paper module has made contact. This isn’t doing it justice, but I was thinking about the levels of intimacy two entities (ants, objects, humans, armies, galaxies) can have without touching. Like that moment before a sneeze; so much tension.
