Untidy Objects, 2022 – ongoing
Untidy Objects, which introduces emergent growth and multispecies co-mingling, is both a sculptural and political proposition. Since the advent of this multi-year installation, a living sculpture adjacent to the Logan Center developed in conjunction with the Gray Center for Arts and Inquiry and the Neubauer Collegium, the population of constituents has radically increased. What is left out is the capacity for humans to perceive the very real connections across species and the stakes of acknowledging a politics beyond a human body as a measure for rights. When one expands their senses to include what surrounds and co-constitutes them, questions of who has legal and political rights grows complicated. This at a time when mixed reality technologies are highlighting porosity between our material realities and virtual realities. This site — which constantly changes — not only provides significant technological challenges, but our requirement for technological open space positions our work in the middle of a property battle over the Internet. If the Internet has been a story of centralization and disempowerment, the incipient power struggles around emerging AR tools and platforms both raises the stakes and offers an opportunity to do the opposite: distributed, collaborative, and fundamentally unbound interaction in messy, real spaces. This project allows us to see if we can push a new technology in ways that would allow humans to perceive property, rights, and obligations, in proximity to joy, survival, play, dirt and code.
https://neubauercollegium.uchicago.edu/research/untidy-objects
