Inhabiting an Other

In­tro­duc­tion

"Em­pathy" comes from the German word, Ein­füh­lung, trans­lated di­rectly as "in-feeling". It was used to de­scribe how we re­late to and ex­pe­ri­ence art or na­ture in its orig­inal use.

In In­hab­iting an Other, I was trying to un­der­stand how we em­pathize with our en­vi­ron­ment and the things use, touch, or oth­er­wise ex­pe­ri­ence on a day-to-day basis. I wanted to know how at­tributing value— based on aes­thetics, spa­tial ex­pe­ri­ence, or ma­te­ri­ality— to these everyday items changes their meaning in a sig­nif­i­cant way.

Table

The table that in­ter­sects with the wardrobe on one side was made ear­lier in my school year. It was an at­tempt to per­sonify an inan­i­mate ob­ject, making it fall over and "stand" back up with elec­trical mo­tors. The move­ment, the human scale and func­tion­ality, were all tools to an­thro­po­mor­phize the table with a per­son­ality.

At­tached to the rest of the wardrobe, the mo­tors would pe­ri­od­i­cally buzz— and the legs would twitch. In­side the wardrobe, the table be­came an altar in a kind of "stage" for reading my sto­ries— mem­o­ries and events in which ob­jects be­came spe­cial, unique, or even took on a spir­i­tual value.

Wardrobe

The "wardrobe" I built be­came the set­ting to read some sto­ries about ob­jects that had tran­scended their phys­ical value to at­tain a kind of spir­i­tual sig­nif­i­cance in my life. The in­stal­la­tion was used as an in­cu­bator for this al­ter­nate lan­guage— an­i­mistic and anti-modern.

In the space, a light— bright pink— fa­tigues your blue and red cones; so you ac­tu­ally leave the wardrobe phys­i­cally changed. The ef­fect forces your sur­rounding to take on a greenish hue. It's an in­ti­mate re­la­tion­ship with the in­stal­la­tion and your body. A person of my size would be per­fectly framed around the head and shoul­ders.

It was con­structed of mostly sal­vaged ma­te­rials. I thought it drew power from these sup­plied his­to­ries. I kept all the in­ternal struc­ture from two sets of drawers; so you al­most feel as though you are sit­ting in­side a cab­inet. It trans­forms the scale of your body.

The in­te­rior was lit­tered with "generic" ob­jects: a BIC lighter, a little play block with let­ters on the sides, a deck of cards, some crayons, an alarm clock, and other stuff. These were "memory icons", placed there in an at­tempt to elicit mem­o­ries re­gard­less of whomever en­tered the space.

At the re­view, many of my critics were re­luc­tant to go in­side. Some didn't. I handed out a set of folded con­struc­tion doc­u­ments to con­trast the emo­tional space with the stark prag­ma­tism of di­men­sions and scale.

Gallery