00: Enquiry and thoughts from previous iterations:
Starting from the question “What’s the significance of ‘unwrapping?’ and ‘What implications does defamiliarisation offer?”, I tried to find the meaning of the gesture of ‘unwrapping’ while I was looking through references. Unwrapping is not a gesture of opening and looking inside the object, but more of an act of peeling and unfolding the surface. And that’s why this gesture is the same as focusing on the ‘surface.’ This line of thought leads to the position that the significance of unwrapping is understanding our surroundings by ‘finding the surface.’ However, what does it mean to be focusing on the surface? Can we find meaning in it?
Reference 1: Colomina, B. and Wigley, M. Are We Human? : Notes on an Archaeology of Design.
In Are We Human(Colomina and Wigley, 2016), the author refers to the contemporary surface with modernism. The advent of modernism after the war hid everything inside, leaving only a few necessary functions on the surface. It
is mentioned that these smoothed surfaces anesthetize our senses by removing the friction, and act as a shock absorber for ‘sanitation’ of body and mind.
This approach brought me in the direction of what should be the purpose of ‘finding surface’? Based on this idea,
this project examines ‘What meaning does the surface of objects and spaces around us imply in our daily life?’
During my second iteration through Position Through Iterating, I did frottage and because of the diverse scale of objects,
I had to find the specific parts of the objects which can represent those objects. And this means that It was involving a very personal perspective. Based on this experience, I also did self-questioning ‘Is it okay to involve(have) subjectivity when I represent the surface of something?’. And the answer was ‘Yes.’ Then the next question was “What targets require critical thinking that subjectivity should be included in?”,
And if I’m going to involve subjectivity, how can I present the surface in a distorted way with subjectivity?”, and “Which object and place do I need to choose to represent the surface?”
Reference 2: Do Ho Suh, 2016, Rubbing/Loving, [Extended Play].
In the interview for Robbing/Loving(2016), Do-Ho Suh mentioned that “the energy has been accumulated” while he was rubbing the surface. He also added “Just imagine how many times that I actually flip that light switch when I was living here for eighteen years. I’m trying to show the layers of time.” Referencing the idea that surfaces have accumulated energy of people and it’s containing people’s experience of the object, I started to consider ‘finding the surface’ of a common area. I chose benches in the common area and tried to represent their surfaces.
He carefully cut the paper into a circle after a detailed process of work to reveal
the materiality of the thin, delicate, and strong paper. He spread the paper on the wooden frame, sprayed water with a spray, and drew a circle with a wet brush to contour it. Before the outline dried up, he first pressed the spatula into the groove and carefully chiseled it. The circle in this work is barely attached to paper fiber, so it appears as an object itself, not a painting or sculpture. “This work is an act of pushing to the limit to say something to such a ‘circle’ thing. I want to stop any act of expression and listen to what things say.”
Experiment 02:
Then with transparent film, I did rubbing the benches in common places.
I thought the surface of benches where various people always sit and take time also have accumulated energy and experiences.
I chose four different benches and did robbing eight times for each.
Surface as content?
(Scanned image)
Scanning the films
When I scanned the transparent film by hand and put it on the monitor to see them look more clear, I found it as if I were facing all the surfaces I met during the whole process. A monitor screen is a surface itself that has materiality, but at the same time, its content when it’s turned on.
Reference 3: Bruno, G. (2016). Surface: matters of aesthetics, materiality, and media.
According to Giuliana Bruno, the screen is a very contemporary surface(Bruno, 2016). Even though her idea is focusing
on the screen for projection, this could be considered
with the monitor screen as well.
Following her approach, we recognize the screen as an object when it is turned off, but we find it as the content itself when we watch it.
In other words, the screen we face every day has both characteristics: a surface with materiality and the content itself.