Love Letter is an exploration into the poetics of objects and how they can be leveraged into the language that occupies intimate correspondence. Where words fail, can the semiotics of the machine provide us with the look, feel and resonance of love and passion?
Hi There!
I guess I should introduce myself. I am Calder! I am a big oaf, but a big oaf with a lot of hobbies, passions and prior endeavors. I love to make games, I love to build things and I really love to cook. That last one is less relevant but the two former qualities are what brought me to the program two years ago. That, and some real fatigue from the life I was living back home.
I love home though. I love the people. I love the chaos, I love the familiarity and I love just how exposed everyone and everything is at all times. In a city on the verge of constant collapse, the roads bubbling over match the people, willing and ready to tell you of every good thing and every tragedy that ever happened to them on the first conversation you might ever share.
There is a vulnerability in survival, a communal ritual of familiarity that keeps everyone going despite the heat, the anguish, the tragedy, even the water. New Orleans is a mess, but the way it revels in it is truly something else.
When I moved here I knew I was leaving a lot behind. It was something that rang true every time I returned. Connections new and old resting within the comfortable lanes of home. The cracks in the dirt and pavement full of subconscious sentiment and unyielding love and comfort.
I knew I wanted to make something for the people from there, maybe even just there in general, but I wanted to bake it in the practice that brought me out here in the first place. My language might not be in the verbiage of song or prose, but I can make a thing. I can make a thing from almost anything. I came here to get better at just that. If I’m not going home to bring that knowledge back to them, I can send them letters of what I have picked up along the way.
I adore love letters. Such simple objects and such slight gestures that become larger than the sum of their parts over time. The words on them matter, but less so as time passes. The object itself gains that power. Resonant frequencies of the affection left on paper growing over time, multiplying upon the object and manifesting into something that radiates with not only with the sentimentality of who wrote it, but of the feelings you have for the people who wrote them.
However, this language, this sentiment, this is not my wheelhouse. I am not a writer, a poet, maybe im on the margins of being a fine artist. The real language of my passion exists elsewhere within the machine. A world of cold hard parts, duty driven to complete their cycle and go into sleep. Yet still, to the people who make these devices, there is love. There is passion that guides their hands in creation, so why not leverage that feeling into the a device for a person, rather than a device for everyone.
Barthes argues that there exists a language of semiotics within the things that populate our day to day. That they do not lie invisible to our eyes and do indeed conjur up desired feelings that color our disposition as an end user. Yung would argue that much of this colors our sbconcoius, guiding our mood as we pick up on the emotions we associate with them even if we aren’t guiding our focus toward them. Why not instead make the implicit explicit.
How can I capture the intimacy of a love letter in the poetics of the machine?
The Wilting Veil took the shape of a reflection about grief. seeing as this is a reflection and not the complete documentation, I will make this brief and go over some broad strokes. I made the controller, but I wanted to take the theme of rot and find a congruent part of my life that connects with that. I have always struggled with death, and prior to my arrival at The New School, a lot of my friends passed away in short order. One of them I was extremely close to but fell out of touch after a series of nasty encounters. I remember his funeral as a strange affair of recollection, putting together desperate memories of a man out of order to create him into something greater than he was. Maybe it was who he could have become.