Research

A Social Construct for Survival

Lindsay — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 10:25:54 +0200

"Beverley Jackson, curator of the Chinese collection at the Santa Barbara Historical Society Museum, however, believes that Chinese foot binding has more to do with a far more scandalous aspect of human behaviour - sex.
According to Jackson, the bound foot was the very symbol of chastity, as women with bound feet were restricted to their homes. The reasoning was that the bound foot, once formed could not be unlocked like a chastity belt.
Thus the bound foot came to be associated with eroticism and obsession verging on perversion. It is said that when a Celestial takes a woman's foot in his hand, the effect is equivalent to that provoked in a European by an ample bosom. Jackson believes that the gait of a bound-footed woman strengthened the muscles of her sexual organ, and that the nerves in her feet would become more concentrated, thus making them a major erogenous zone. She pointed out that many literary works and pornographic images dating from ancient China portrayed men fondling and becoming excited by women's feet.

However, it should be noted that all this erotic Chinese connoisseurship literature (all of it pornography, really) was written no earlier than the 19th Century. Dorothy Ko, whose research was on the shifting meanings of foot binding in 17th Century China, points out that although erotic fiction dating from the 16th to 18th Centuries did mention fondling of the bound foot in foreplay, they displayed an aesthetic sensitivity that was not reflected in the 19th Century works. Such blatantly vulgar and disrespectful accounts of the erotic attraction men found in the bound foot could not have been written in the heyday of the foot-binding tradition, but could only have come about in its twilight when the cultural aura had faded and the social status of its practitioners had declined.

From the Chinese viewpoint, foot binding was not considered mutilation but a form of adornment, an embellishment to the human body. The human body, in Chinese philosophy and medicine was not so much a hunk of meat but instead part of a larger organic process of regeneration. The attire and adornment of both men and women forged a link between the needs of human society and universal order, bringing together the world and the spiritual realm of Heaven.
The bound foot was also a symbol of identity and virtue. A bound foot signified that a woman had achieved womanhood, and served as a mark of her gendered identity. The Neo-Confucian thinker Zhu Xi (1130-1200 AD) promoted foot binding in southern Fujian in an attempt to instill in the natives a sense of propriety and chastity. The very act of concealing the bound foot within a shoe was closely linked to the ideals of civility and culture (wen8), which was the highest value in Chinese culture. Because the Confucian tradition put a great deal of stress in properly covered bodies, correct attire - bound feet included - was the quintessential expression of civility, culture and humanity. Attire not only differentiated the Han Chinese from their inferior neighbours, thus giving them a sense of identity, but also set apart social classes and gender within the Han society. Big, flat naked feet were only fit for animals; women who had class had bound feet."

From http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A1155872

Gold Lotus Slippers

Lindsay — Fri, 03 Oct 2008 23:42:46 +0200

A pair of original Gold Lotus Slippers that are between three to four inches in length. The size of the slippers can be compared to the size of the female curator's hands. This is part of the McManus Museums Collection in Dundee. Follow the link to a description of the Chinese tradition of foot binding.

Buoy, girl, seal

Lindsay — Fri, 08 Aug 2008 19:48:45 +0200

Tales from the Flexitariat: the sadness of the scientific lamp maker

doll_yoko — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 09:03:41 +0200

My current flexi-job in the Land of Cog involves research on an arts project. It's a good gig – my colleagues/managers are old friends, the hourly rate is better than normal here (AUS $27 per hour), and the work interesting. The core of my work is interviewing artists and tradespeople who have been partnered in a professional exchange project.

The interviews are “semi-structured” in that I have some prepared questions, but can take alternative pathways depending on how the conversation plays out. My manager trusts that I will come up with the goods she needs, and so it is fundamentally different from more directed call centre work. It's hardly crushing, and I want the work as my scholarship runs out in a few months, way before the thesis will be ended. And the wings on my feet are beginning to itch, which always is a sign of impending travel and its associated costs.

As the interviews are conducted by phone I can do them at home, wearing a little headset and mike and writing as fast as I can by hand. Since my handwriting is becoming more and more illegible I need to type up the interviews as soon as possible, before those inky scrawls have lost all meaning for me. I make an effort to dress for work, although as it's winter here the never-to-be-seen-in-public ugg boots stay on.

This morning I talked with M, who has recently retired from his trade of scientific lamp making. Thirty years of making precision instruments from pyrex glass, and making the tools to make the objects. He tells me that in his youth he worked as a motor mechanic and sheet metal worker, picking up skills to help him make the tools.

I guess the tools are like custom software. They are hand-coded from scratch to run the glass “programs”. At the same time, these tools have been built upon layers of accreted technical know-how. A nimble imagination is crucial, because the lamp maker must interpret the desires of his clients, desires encoded in the technical drawings of the objects they commission. (But what is it that they really want?)

The fashionable distinction between material and immaterial labour bothers me increasingly, as I bother to think about it. It is true that Moll Flanders and I were initially excited by the concept. Perhaps what engaged us was simply the beauty and poetry of the word 'immaterial'. But to pit the bulls of material and immaterial forms of labour against each other in the ring of binary coupling is making less sense to me, although I can't speak for Moll.

The scientific lamp maker works with his hands. This much is clear. Manual dexterity is absolutely key to this trade. M mentions numerous people have sat down at his bench and tried for an hour to work with the tools, and have given up. Patience and perseverance are required, to get the hands working in synch with the tools. Eventually, if one can pass through this initial stage (six months, he reckons), one is rewarded with not only technical ability but a newly acquired confidence. It's this confidence (an example of affect I think) that enables the apprentice, the learner, to keep moving forward, to make ever more precise material objects.

Communication is surely central to the processes of learning a “manual” trade. The mistress/master crafter not only shows with their hands what is to be done, and how, but must explain. This is not the “mute” labour of the factory (and was labour really ever mute, O Virno?), but an example of audible labour of the workshop, the shed, the studio, the bench. Fingers and lips speaking, singing even, when obstacles are overcome.

M has described scientific lamp making as “a rare trade” and “a dying trade”. I ask how it feels to be the last of a kind of lineage of makers.

“I'm very sad really,” he tells me.

And I can feel his sadness over the copper wires.

“I've always wished to pass on my skills to somebody.”

And I can almost see that invisible child sitting at the work bench next to the scientific lamp maker, listening and watching as he crafts the tiny instruments out of hot glass molasses.

There is material in the immaterial.
And immaterial in the material.
All labour can be spoken, sung, whispered, screamed.

We are not mute, even if we might be barking mad.

Technological Determinism in Media Art

Armin Medosch — Mon, 04 Aug 2008 11:58:26 +0200

Man, Machine, Nature

Lindsay — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 12:58:31 +0200

Some of the research for my post yesterday naturally diversified into the building of the Titanic. As stated in one of my first posts Domestic Sub-Mariner, my first working backgrounds were in engine-based careers; creating with metal also providing a sculptural interest later on when I learned how to weld by arc and mig. The following links then are a spattering of those interests and ones which I wished to share in my research journal.

One fact that interested me was the amount of coal needed to fire the 29 boilers on the Titanic (around 650 tons per day), and the amount of waste that this would incur (100 tone of ash). This was a fact that I'd not really thought about, even though I had lived for years in houses heated only by solid fuel fires that needed cleaned every day; but as I found out, the engine room dealt with this problem in the form of Ash Ejectors.

'The device employed was the Ash Ejector. There were two in each large boiler room, recessed into the coal bunkers at various locations. To dispose of the ash raked from the furnace, a trimmer would fill a barrow and wheel it over to the nearest ash ejector, which consisted of a large grating over a hopper that was slightly above the level of the stokehold floor. The ashes were discharged by shoveling them into the hopper, where they then were drawn down by the rush of air to a water jet which was being discharged through a long inclined pipe, at a pressure of about 150 lb., being maintained by a large duplex feed pump. The water jet carried the ashes up the inclined pipe till, at the upper bend they were deflected and discharged well clear of the ship's side above the water line.' (taken from above link)

Although there is a wealth of photographs and information regarding the Titanic on the internet, I've listed below another few links to diagrams and to the research site that currently investigates the wreck. One of the really interesting links however is the Encyclopedia Titanica. This has comprehensive lists of all passengers and crew on board. This is extremely well researched and has an individual biography for each person, providing a really lovely intimate narrative of the hopes, dreams and lives of the individual, some of whom were locked into the depths of the ship to allow more room for the richer passengers in the lifeboats. Also of interest therefore are the facts and figures of Titanic, which includes a list of all the food taken on the journey and the price of a ticket.

Lost Music

Lindsay — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 22:58:27 +0200

My research today took a poetic wander. In thinking about the electromagnetic environment and how 'on land' we are submerged in modulated mumblings, my thoughts turned to the electromagnetically silent world of the deep, a world where radio and light don't penetrate, a world that can only be felt through other senses; the skin, the emotions, sound. Today I started looking at the Titanic. Armin's work through his and Hivenetworks Hidden Histories project, has already highlighted the community memory of this tragedy and through their early research, pinpointed one aspect that I found mesmerisingly intruiging; the music that was still being played when the ship went down.

‘What happens to music as it is played in water? On a purely physical level, of course, it simply stops since the strings would fail to produce much of a sound (it was a string sextet that played at the end, since the two pianists with the band had no instruments available on the Boat Deck). On a poetic level, however, the music, once generated in water, would continue to reverberate for long periods of time in the more sound-efficient medium of water and the music would descend with the ship to the ocean bed and remain there, repeating over and over until the ship returns to the surface and the sounds re-emerge’ Gavin Bryars

So today I spent with music, and the musings of the endless 'Last Tune' that the water surrounding the Titanic holds. I re-listened once again to 'The Sinking of the Titanic', a 1973 version of the Eno supported composition of Gavin Bryars, where the last tune of 'Autumn' is played over and over, interspersed with references to human life, quietly passing through the threshold of air to water, to continue for ever at the depth of 3,800 metres.

In looking at Bryars however, I had to listen and take into account more modern takes on this composition. One such interpretation is by London-based musician/artist Robin Rimbaud who works under the name Scanner. Whilst (for me) Bryars composition takes into account the directly quiet relationship between the music and the water, Rimbaud's seems more of an account of the entire disaster. The recent composition is certainly more dramatic, yet in some respects more obvious. Although following Bryar's lead with 'Autumn' as its intro, and some rather nice sound effects such as creaky boards, the compostion departed from the original around the central point, where the Bodhrán sounding a valiance of the third class, made sure that the celtic heart would never be forgotten. There thus followed an audio account of one of the passengers, that nicely brought the listener back round to the more mystical elements of fate. The track then started to disappear with slightly staccato but effective 'cut offs' of sound, interspersing music with the sound of a crowd, until eventually silence. The performance, which was recorded live in 2007, has the sound of the (slightly unsure) audience clapping at the end, which brings the acoustics nicely back round to rain...

Scanners performance can be downloaded for free here.

The final hymn played during those last 5 minutes of the ship's life is identified in an account by Harold Bride, the junior wireless operator, in an interview for the New York Times of April 19th 1912

"...from aft came the tunes of the band..... The ship was gradually turning on her nose - just like a duck that goes down for a dive. I had only one thing on my mind - to get away from the suction. The band was still playing. I guess all of the band went down. They were playing "Autumn" then. I swam with all my might. I suppose I was 150 feet away when the Titanic, on her nose, with her afterquarter sticking straight up in the air, began to settle slowly.... The way the band kept playing was a noble thing. I heard it first while we were still working wireless, when there was a ragtime tune for us, and the last I saw of the band, when I was floating out in the sea with my lifebelt on, it was still on deck playing "Autumn". How they ever did it I cannot imagine." Gavin Bryars

Titanic Hull

Lindsay — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:35:06 +0200

This is a picture (2004) taken of the hull of the Titanic 92 years after she sunk. The wreck lies at approximately 3,500 metres below the surface of the water, which is the same distance as the tops of some alpine peaks. This very beautiful and peaceful photograph along with a selected few other relatively hi-res images can be found at the Boat Shed

All photographs by Robert Ballard, the original diver discoverer of the Titanic wreck. The image was retrieved from the above link.

Fate Ticket

Lindsay — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 21:15:03 +0200

'One exhibit at Liverpool's Merseyside Maritime Museum is a yellowed envelope whose black-and-red printing announces that it contains "First Class Passenger Ticket per Steamship..." (Then, written in fading brown ink): Titanic.
Because Reverend Holden's wife was taken ill, their tickets, once contained in this unique envelope, were never used. The reverend framed the envelope with the inscription, "Who Redeemeth Thy Life from Destruction" and retained it for years after the sinking.' (Merseyside Maritime Museum.)

Text and image retrieved from Encyclopedia-titanica

Man, Machine, Nature

Lindsay — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 18:16:43 +0200

Yes, the fascination (for me) with metal and engines never goes away (!) ... however this is one of the most amazing pictures that I have seen of the building of the Titanic, it encapsulates the scale and strength of the 'arc' compared to man, yet in comparing the arc to the ocean it becomes meaningless...