Designing for the In-Between
Hybrids, 1990s net art, and a giant floating worm
The following is an adapted transcript of a presentation I gave at KIKK 2018.
This talk is about something I’m calling “the in-between.” And to explain what I mean by that, I’m going to do what we often do when we meet strangers: I’m going to talk about the weather.
Earlier this year, I was idly flipping through a newspaper and an article caught my eye. It was about an atmospheric river that was set to dump a ton of rainfall and snow on California that weekend. When I looked up what an atmospheric river is, it was exactly what it sounds like: a concentrated pathway of water that enters at one point in the atmosphere and exits (as rainfall) in another. In this case, the rain was going to be coming from the Philippines. And the reason it caught my eye was that I’m half Filipino––but since I’ve never been to the Philippines, it remains sort of a mystery to me.
I had never thought about where clouds and rain came from, and I became fixated on this idea of water arriving from the Philippines. So I set a jar outside my apartment and waited. (And waited… and waited… it takes a really long time to collect rainwater.) I wasn’t 100 percent sure what I was collecting it for, other than to look at it. I thought maybe I should use it to make a…
