traditional protest can be seen as the use of masses of bodies in a given space in order be disruptive as a political mass organism. these events leave traces and can have the potential to change the emotional and physical cartography of a space. in this way they are autographic, thus gaining further attention due to the rupture of public understanding around a given issue. how else could i display resistance and how could the act become autographic?
Through artists like lydya halcrow and theories of isabelle stengers and jenifer gabrys I found how ‘slow-ness’ could emerge as a countering concept of protest. the act of existing against the grain of capitalist productive-ness can be seen as resisting in a new time scale. walking can be resistance. I begun exploring the ways I could perform resistance, prototyping designs that would explore and combine these ideas.
plants such as tobacco nicotina, strain Bel W3 autographically displays the air pollution of a given space through visual marks. the visualisation theorist dieter offenhuber has created autographic gardens within communities with poor air quality in order to provide citizens with the ability to sense their local environments. I begun creating wearable objects that could become discrete objects of protest through the dissemination of sensitive plants.
could the act of wearing and walking also be disruptive – changing the sites cartography. I proposed walked route located at the proposed site of colliery architecture.
how could my act of slowness correspond to the awkward and figurative engagement of a petition? could the number of seeds dispersed correspond to the broader network of resistance, the mass of bodies being translated into the garden of disruption. what would happen to these seedlings once they were disseminated? would they be visited by the local community? would new desire paths emerge in the grasses? or would they just get removed?
THINKING RESEARCH 