five days of being a city cyborg: day 4

Cassandra H
Sep 4, 2018 · 3 min read

I decided to do something a bit different for my project today, for a couple of reasons. First of all, it was absurdly hot outside, and I didn’t really relish the idea of wandering around the city for an extended period of time. So I decided to pay a quick visit to the very local EM fields in front of D12, at 6 E 16th Street.

Just yer friendly local invisible electromagnetic fields here.

Instead of going in depth with this image or the others I took, I decided to go micro again, but to take a different tack. I felt like I was beginning to hit a plateau with the work I was doing in Processing, both because I’m limited by my own inexperience with the program and because I was just beginning to get a bit locked in to one way of expressing things. I thought I would try a tangible medium instead.

I started thinking about the texture of what an EM field feels like to me. I mentioned before that it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish it from a light breeze, but there’s also a distinct feel to it beyond that. It isn’t smooth like a breeze — it feels like it has rapid fluctuations. I also did some very basic Wikipedia research on how scientists theoretically conceptualize EM fields, and took some notes based on what I read and the textures that I felt.

I spent some time poking around Blick and looking for textures, tools, and media that I thought might be a good fit to somehow describe the granular yet structured form of the field. I ended up picking up some block printing inks, a foam roller, and some modeling mesh. I went home, scrounged around a little more and found some drop cloth and an old phone cord that I thought was perfect for a texture with a repeated structure.

The tools that I primarily ended up settling on.

Then I just played around for awhile and experimented with different textures layered in different colors.

Using the mesh, the roller, and a comb that I found.
Brayer and some cross-hatching with the phone cord.
More phone cord, different textures.

At some point, I realized that the mesh actually printed better when I lifted the ink off of it and printed it with my fingertips, so I played with that for awhile.

Fingerprinting with and without mesh.

I liked the idea of bringing my hands into the piece somehow, since my hand is the sensor that receives the sensation I was trying to depict.

Mesh, phone cord, hand prints.

Finally I settled on this:

The final piece.
A closer image for texture.

I’m really glad I decided to do something more drastically different today — I feel like I actually made new, interesting progress, and have more ideas to explore. Oh, also I made an absolutely giant mess.

In the name of art
Cassandra H

Written by

queer white human. writing on indigenous digital media and sf. currently @MFADT learning to make all the things.

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