New Friends
From Masako Miki's exhibition at MassArt Art Museum, “an experiential world populated by semi-abstracted felted wool sculptures set within a galaxy. Referencing nature, Japanese yōkai (supernatural beings), and Shintoism, Miki creates new mythologies that reflect the complexity of multicultural identities and worlds.”
I went to a tiny conference of librarians and technologists, people trying to create new infrastructure with few resources, as old infrastructure is being gleefully destroyed by monsters. What used to have billions in funding is now demolished and without benefactors. No one is sure what comes next.
It was Chatham House Rules so all I'll say is that, because I like to write about the way technology touches culture, I have repeatedly found in my life a small, diligent cluster of humans who take it as their mission to preserve the digital moment for the future. There aren't many. They are not in it for the money. I honor them and hold them in the highest regard.
We often talk about what history will make of us. What history will say—because this is actually what history says today—is, God bless the archivists who put this aside, who thought the fragile was worth saving, because otherwise we could not know what we truly were.
When the conference was done I took the 77 bus to Porter and got the Purple Line. I didn't have a ticket and I wasn't totally sure where I was going. The conductor got to me.
“It starts with a W,” I said.
“A lot of things start with a W,” she said.
She was, I saw, beautiful, and all I could wonder was: How many Boston men she has thrown off moving trains? Nowhere near enough. She helped me figure out I meant Waltham.
Farewell conductress. In Waltham is a synth store. Not just any: Much of what they sell is unsoldered—just bags of parts.
Go to a place. Look at a thing.
I'm not sure life requires much more.
This store was a 15 minute walk from the train, but more like 30 when impeded by enormous drifts of snow. My hobby is obscure and tends to mail order, so stores are often way out of the way, halfway between mail-order warehouses and retail. I nearly bailed but it's very, very important, when you can, to go to a place and look at a thing.
When I walked in a man with a Boston accent as strong as getting a thermos of Dunkin Donuts coffee thrown at your head at Fenway Park said, “I don't know where they ah. I don't know anything about this stuff.”
That's okay. I wandered around in a daze, also taking a work call and bought some 2-OP FM synths so that I can...god knows why I do anything. I do not know what animates me any more. Then Lyft to the museum, the work call finishing in the car, talking about delivering an AI platform while, outside, we were running through countless small towns, past infinite mills-now-lofts, until finally we got back to Boston.
The museum was founded by a good friend's wife. It's mostly operated by the students. There was a piece on the first floor that shocked me a little: It was called Fragile Vessels by Maren Hassinger. It was two very spare, large lithographed outlines of large vases, on silk, and when I walked by it moved, like curtains in a breeze. I would welcome seeing it every day for the rest of my life. I think when someone can create something that is almost nothing but then it connects to almost everything—then they have given you a tool for living the rest of your life. You can organize your thoughts around two spare vessels on organza silk.l
A large group drifted away, and as it was a quiet Friday afternoon on a school day, I had the whole upstairs to myself. There were 20 animated felt creatures in a field of stars. Each one a mix of adorable and terrifying. I wanted to touch the animistic spirits so badly. I wanted to ride the Million Year Old Horse back to New York. Even more form—form so abstract that you can see the root shape of culture. All these creatures in conversation and communion, labored over for thousands of hours. The labor is part of it; without it, it would mean nothing, just more slop. With it, it is as powerful as any major communications technology.
Maybe we should be grateful to AI for showing us why we need humans to make art.
Obviously I am craving something simple, something that is two lines on one piece of paper, or an abstract horse taller than I am. I am craving form with as little content as possible. Something that just shows the form as it is. At the same time I personally am pouring out thousands of words a week across my various portfolios. I don't know why. If this ends in poetry I will be very annoyed.
A stray thought came into my head as I waited for the Green Line: If you're going to talk about how the world is ending, do it at a museum. And then to the Red Line, and then to Amtrak, and then to the yellow Q train, and then dragging the suitcase thought a little more snow, and then home to flop on the floor.