Collecting Pauses by Caroline Wiryadinata

COLLECTING PAUSES by Caroline Wiryadinata

A project presented to the Graduate Faculty California College of the Arts

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Fine Arts

COLLECTING PAUSES APPROVED

Brenda Laurel

Maria McVarish

Aura Oslapas

Rachel Strickland

DATE

CAROLINE WIRYADINATA

COLLECTING PAUSES MFA Thesis by Caroline Wiryadinata

The Graduate Program in Design California College of the Arts San Francisco, California May 5, 2010 Submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirement for the degree of Master of Fine Arts, this thesis is approved and is acceptable in quality and form.

THESIS COMMITTEE

Brenda Laurel, PhD Department Chair Maria McVarish Thesis Advisor, Senior Adjunct Professor Aura Oslapas Thesis Advisor, Adjunct Professor Rachel Strickland Thesis Advisor, Adjunct Professor

[a manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s] thoughts, feelings, and lovesâ&#x20AC;Ś

are a whirl

where

Every-

[a[a ] man’s man’s] thoughts, thoughts, feelings, feelings, and and loves… loves…

are a w irlwind

life is ru s h i ng insanely

like a cavalry charge, and it vanishesâ&#x20AC;Ś

cinematographically like trees and silhouettes along a road.

Everything around man

jumps, dances, and gallops in a move ment

out of phase

with its own.

octave mirbeau

It was a bad day. All I wanted was to be in the Zen corner — a corner in our apartment, with a giant plush dish chair, by the window overlooking the downtown skyline and the Bay. Ryan was occupying the Zen corner when I got home. I motioned him to give up the Zen corner with my very stern look. I plopped myself on the red cushion, stared out the bay, and slowly drifted into a vegetative state. Moments went by and I knew I should finish the myriad of works for tomorrow. That did not sound attractive. Night time came around, I still did not make much progress aside from getting away from the Zen corner to the kitchen table. I was watching videos of my adorable niece dancing, singing, and other general acts of cuteness. Finally, I was ready to get back to school work. Alternately, I read Aihwa Ong’s Flexible Citizenship and Lucy Lippard’s The Lure of the Local. I enjoyed both books so far, all nineteen pages of them. But frustration reappeared — I just want to quit. I headed back for the Zen corner. How did I get to this point? It did not take long to realize that I had been working myself to death the last few years not allowing my self to have any real breaks. People always told me that I was the Jetson’s robot — running around and doing things too fast for my own good. I forgot the last time I slowed down or stopped to observe my environment. Even when in Sweden, during fika, their coffee break culture, I found myself rushing through my coffee and canne bulle while others leisurely savored them. I pulled out Milan Kundera’s Slowness, hoping the gesture, the book, or both could act as a decelerator for my life. The day’s worth of emotion made me think about how speed have been elevated to the throne of productivity — quantity — often over quality, and how it has alienated us from the aspects that make us human. It was from this revelation that I decided to abandon my initial thesis to investigate the meaning of citizenship in a civic place, and instead inquire into the concept of the pause. 

I think about Carmen and our relationship.

When the button is pushed, time stands still for a moment.

Finally alone , at last.

collecting pauses This book is a collection of various investigations around the construction of the pause today. The projects are produced in the spirit revolving around the logic and phenomenon of the pause. They are intuitive, generative, and inclusive of the various design media: visual, spatial, and cinematic.

INTRODUCTION Why Pause?

Inspirations

First trials

John Cage Meditation SlowLab

Conceptual Map Pause Kits Interactive Maps Thingamajig

VISUAL Poor Manâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s purblue

Language of Pause Punctuations Intonations

32 SPATIAL collecting pauses exhibition

Hallway vacation

50 CINEMATIC introduction

last words

traces

introduction

maurice merleau-ponty

Reflection does not withdraw from the world toward the unity of consciousness as the world’s basis — it steps back to watch the forms of transcendence fly up like sparks from a fire. It slackens the intentional threads which attach us to the world and thus brings them to our notice — it alone is consciousness of the world because it reveals the world as strange and paradoxical.

Merleau-Ponty, M. The World of Perception. New York: Routledge, 2008. 1

Schmidt, Charles. “Rubin Vase.” Rutgers University. www.rci.rutgers.edu 2

Kern, Stephen. The Culture of Time and Space, 1880 – 1918: With a New Preface. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 3

n my early graphic design education, I was introduced to the Rubin vase — a familiar cognitive optical illusion developed by Danish psychologist Edgar Rubin in 1915.1 The illusion presents the viewer with a mental choice of two interpretations, each of which is valid. Through the Rubin image, I learned about the relationship between the figure and the ground — they defined each other and were inseparable. It’s the idea that what is in-between is not really empty but filled with potentials for meaning. Pauses act in our lives as the background to our experiences. I argue that pauses define our foreground experiences as much as the foreground experiences define the pauses. But in a world where speed is valued and technology the enhancer, a moment of pause is often overlooked or simply ignored. The end of the nineteenth century in Germany saw a sharp rise in the production of pocket watches. The dispersion heightened people’s sense of punctuality and symbolized the beginning of an accelerated modern life. Around the same time in France, the number of automobiles jumped markedly and at least ten journals about “automobilism” appeared. In America, a generating station opened at Niagara Falls. It converted the rush of water into

an even faster rush of electrical current and consequently expedited life’s tempo.2 French novelist Octave Mirbeau commented that speed has turned the mind of a modern man into an “endless race track.”3 Many of us living in the twenty-first century can relate to Mirbeau’s apt description of the mind of modern man — an endless race track; and not infrequently, some minds spin out of control and crash. In a cacophony of experiences, the absence of the pause or our obliviousness to it weakens our capacity to discern the meaning of various encounters. There is a lack of interaction between the experience and what is being experienced. As a result, we become disconnected from ourselves, from one another, and from the space we inhabit. In a world too vast and too fast to comprehend all at once, a pause equips us with an awareness that is fundamental in establishing bearings in our lives.

Mirbeau, Octave. Bonnard: Sketches of a Journey: Travels in an Early Motorcar from Octave Mirbeau’s Journal ‘LA 628-E8.’ New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1989. 4

Twemlow, Alice . “Some Questions about an Inquiry.” Design Observer. www.designobserver.com

In my thesis, I am positioning design as a tool of discourse — to ask the questions, make us think, and start a conversation. As design educators Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby say: design that pushes the limits of inquiry is “just as difficult and just as important as design that solves problems or find answers.”4

I began a quest and scoured the library in search of every thing that had been done around the concept of a pause. I found many experiments but three that stuck out: John Cage, the practice of meditation, and SlowLab.

Leddy, Annette, Eva MeyerHerman, Alex Phillips, and Paul Schimmel. Allan Kaprow — Art as Life. New York: Oxford University Press, USA, 2008. 6

Hermes, Will. “‘4:33’.” NPR: National Public Radio: News & Analysis, World, US, Music & Arts: NPR. www.npr.org 7

Pritchett, James. The Music of John Cage (Music in the Twentieth Century). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996.

john cage

Over the course of his idiosyncratic career, John Cage wrote scores that many would not call music. His compositions experiment with music and time, and his performances were more akin to Allan Kaprow’s happenings — an assemblage of events performed or perceived in more than one time and place 5 — than concerts. His Organ²/ASLSP (As SLow aS Possible), composed in 1987, is the longest musical performance ever undertaken. It began with one-and-a-half years of silence, the first three notes were played in early 2003, and the performance is scheduled to end in the year 2640. In 1951, Cage wrote Imaginary Landscape #4 for 24 performers. Each of them either adjusted the volume or tuning of one of a dozen radios. The dial settings were exactly prescribed, however, the result depended upon the frequencies and formats of local stations. The following year, Cage wrote Four Thirty-Three (4'33"). It was his favorite piece and I strongly believed the phrase “deafening silence” was inspired by this

particular work. During the performance, his collaborator David Tudor never played a note. The audience was left to listen to the silence that filled the auditorium.6 Cage had broken then-traditional boundaries of the concert hall. He shifted the attention of his audience and made them aware of a huge amount of sound that surrounds them. Rustling in seats, ruffling of programs, breathing, the air conditioning, the wind, and the raindrops on the roof that filled Maverick Concert Hall, where 4'33'' was first played.7 Through most of his works, Cage believes that every one has the agency to select and enjoy the elements of our world that give the most meaning. Often, the most meaningful elements are obscured in the mix of frenzy. Just as memories have the potential for becoming nostalgic only after changes have made comparisons possible, Cage makes the changes and clears the foreground to allow the pauses to become more noticeable.

American Yoga Association “History of Yoga.” Welcome to The American Yoga Association. www.americanyoga association.org 9

Stanford University. “Mindfulness Meditation.” Department of Psychology. www.psych.stanford.edu

meditation

In my early quest to understand the pause, I joined a 10-week yoga session near my house. I was happy to finally be able to use my new yoga mat which had resided in the closet corner for two years. Yoga is a form of traditional physical and mental discipline originating in India. The word means to join together — a harmonious convergence of the body and mind — and is associated with meditative exercises practised in eastern religions such as Hinduism, Buddhism and Jainism. It dates back more than 5,000 years rooted in the desire for greater personal freedom, health and long life, and self-understanding. Three main structures in yoga are exercise, breathing, and meditation.8 The first few times in a position of stillness left me feeling uneasy about the seconds and minutes in which I “did” nothing. By the fourth position, I began to notice the benefit: it enabled me to pay attention to my breathing and my body. Not only did the experience unwind my mind, it also heightened an awareness in ways I rarely experience. This is to be present. The awareness allows us to pay attention and process what our body is going through. When we allow ourselves to pause — to yield to this awareness — we are given a temporary rest.

On any given day, we drift back and forth on the gradient of our life — the constant push and pull between external forces and our own internal incessant thoughts. When we are in a deeply meditative state, we are selfemanating and in a state of high receptivity. The Center for Mindfulness at the University of Massachusetts establishes a Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (mbsr) program which integrates the teachings of vipassana meditation and hatha yoga in mainstream medicine and health care. In July 2009, Dr. Philippe Goldin gave a presentation at Google TechTalks of mbsr findings in which he explained the neuroscience of meditation. Dr. Goldin is a science researcher and head of Clinically Applied Affective Neuroscience group with Stanford University. He stresses how the practice of bringing one’s attention to the present helps emotional balance and well-being. His claim was grounded in data from recent functional neuroimaging studies demonstrating meditation related changes in the neural bases of various neuropsychological systems. In recent years, there has been an increase in the numbers of therapists using the method as treatment for patients with depressive tendencies.9

carolyn f. strauss

Slow resists and responds to the fast pace of contemporary culture. Its not just about how everything has to move slowly all the time, its more of a quality issue. When you take time to pause and go deeper, you get closer to the essence of a situation or to your creativity, which ultimately accelerates you forward.

Strauss, Carolyn F. “Dialog ” Slow Design Laboratory. www.slowlab.org 10

Virilio, Paul. The Information Bomb (Radical Thinkers). New York: Verso, 2006. 11

Bierut, Michael. “In Praise of Slow Design.” Design Observer. www.designobserver.com 12

slowlab

In recent years, I have come to notice the vastly expanding landscape of design; it has markedly shifted toward designing immersive, digital architectures. Through these virtual environments, design and technology have not only relocated our perception but also elevated the interactive digital experiences. In The Information Bomb, Paul Virilio talks about how information technology slipped its “philosophical moorings and lost its way.”10 Virilio claims that no one is questioning the effects of it in our lives, but I disagree with him: more and more people have noticed and risen up in response. SlowLab is a New York-based design organization that aims to balance the demands of the fast-paced world with our bodies, our cities, and the cultural fabric. Carolyn F. Strauss founded the organization in 2003 as a reaction to the growing sustainability debate in the design field. Its philosophy is to come up with designs that reveal “deep experience of the world — meaningful and revealing relationships with the people, places and things.”11 SlowLab connects an

international network of designers, design thinkers and exemplary projects to bring the slow design movement to life. Their projects have used design as a means of applying critical and philosophical inquiry to things that impact people in the everyday. Many of these have incorporated technology not simply as digital procedures, but to illustrate the poetics and the ephemera that still remain in our experiences.

Franinovic, Karmen. “Sonic Diversion of the Public Flow.” Space Time Association. www.zero-th.org

One SlowLab collaborator, architect Karmen Franinovic, has developed projects exploring how technologically-enhanced interaction can impact our perception of place and social relationships in cities. Franinovic’s goal is to produce “‘experiences of subtraction’ in the midst of the fast-moving urban flow.”12 Franinovic’s Recycled Soundscape explores the auditory facets of urban encounters. The project engages people through sonic relaxation and play which facilitates reflective activities in the public sphere. One can listen and recompose the sonic orchestra of the place which in turn reconnects a person with that specific place.

Early research work includes observing people and encoded behaviors around structures in which a pause is built-in. These places include but not limited to, elevators, escalators, stop lights, or just coffee lines.

  ELEVATOR



The observation revealed these spaces to be enclaves for brief unguarded humanity. Swiss photographer Kurt Caviezel captured glimpses of the moments when he photographed through his window drivers and passengers stopped at the red traffic light outside his apartment on a busy Zurich intersection. Caviezel’s images are various expressions of a pause, the things we do during one: eating, exasperation, inspecting one’s body, respite. The fascination for the quotidian interstices did not end there — I created a conceptual map for the elevator. The map processed and became a mental model for understanding the diverse impressions of a pause. It shows how a person can yield opportunity for meaning in a particular space and time. This discovery influenced my approach in staging some of my spatial interventions, of which further discussion will take place in later chapter.

  

elevating elevator Elevators mainly transports people and goods through vertical distances. But it does not have to be just that — an elevator can transform into a space that is beyond its given functionality.

history

spain, 1000 Elevation used in military purposes — destroying fortresses. saint petersburg, 1793 Elevation as a palatial luxury — Winter Palace. Moscow, 1816 Elevation in main buildings in and around Moscow. LONDON, 1823 Elevation first displayed as “ascending room.” NEW YORK, 1852 Elevation safety is introduced by Elisha Otis. NEW YORK, 1857 Elevation dissemination — the first passenger elevator.

conceptual map

leisure

social

individual trajectories

pleasure

political

daily lives and desires that would be affected by a design change.

culture

spiritual

exterior

(often mirrored) interior

The (almost always) opaque door provides a temporary blocker between individual and the world.

The space of an elevator allows a moment of reflection literally or not.

indicator button

open/close button

These buttons prepare one of the arrival of the temporary space for solace.

These buttons gives a three-second warning to the life outside about to be dealt again.

destination button

The distance that will determine the length of solace.

emergency button EMERGENCY

A sense of assurance, safety net.

1. The Collecting Pauses kit consists of a journal, seven stamped postcards, and one stamped enveloped for returning the materials. [JOURNAL] Start with an introduction â&#x20AC;&#x201D; what you do, your age, where you work and live. Then, I would like you to assign a number that corresponds with the speed of your life, from 10 mph to 100 mph. Is this what you like it to be? If not what would that value be? Describe a typical day. Where and how do you spend most of your day? What do you usually look forward to in your day? Do you usually notice your pauses? Are they pleasant or unpleasant experiences? What are the triggers? Can you tell me how a pause can affect you? Please tell me several stories of specific pauses that you remember vividly. What happens before and after those moments? [POSTCARD] Highlight a typical week of your life on the postcards. Graph the speed of each day on individual postcards. Please tell me what accelerates you and what pauses, if any, take place that day.

My observations afforded me a vague picture of peopleâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s idea of pause. I wanted to hone in and collect more specific stories. Thus, I created and distributed Collecting Pauses kits. Each kit consists of a journal, seven stamped postcards, and one stamped enveloped for returning the materials. The prompts I gave were to write specific anecdotes or in-depth recordings of their pauses, memorable or not in the journal. For the postcards, I asked people to map their rhythms and pauses in a typical week. For distribution of the kits, I selected people who identified themselves as from the very busy to the least busy. From the fourteen kits I sent out, I received eight back. Amongst the eight participants, two work and live in Tucson, one in Denver and San Francisco, and the remaining in San Francisco. They are between the age of 26 and 39 years old.

Kristin Neidlinger, mid 30s, Thursday

Sarah Newby, 26, Monday

PARTICIPANTS

Sarah, 26, Photographer Tucson, Arizona When I am extremely busy at work, I would try to stop every so often. Stop moving, stop being so tense, stop running list through my head. It has definitely helped me.

Lindsay, 27, Writer San Francisco, California By default, I focus to the extreme on those around me. If I don't remind myself to pause and go inward for a moment, I would never remember to take care of myself.

Rocky, 28, Designer Tucson, Arizona If pause were a sport, it would be yoga (although it is not actually a sport, physical activity letâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s say). If pause were a sound, it would be A Moment of Clarity by Boards of Canada.

Melissa, 30, Design educator San Francisco, California I am alone at last. A real pause when I can actually hear myself. Not just outside beckonings.

Jason, 33, Full-time student San Francisco, California I have a consistent pause when I sit down to eat. I almost never try to work while I eat. For dinner, itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s nice because I usually eat with my girlfriend and sometimes watch a TV show online.

Josh, 34, Game Designer San Francisco, California I feel pulled to go faster to achieve my goals faster, as I sometimes feel behind other people in life having only graduated college when I was 28 years old. But then I get tired.

Kristin, mid 30s, Performer and Healer San Francisco, California I work in Pacific Heights, which is a pause from the rest of my life. It is a mini vacation to be there, teaches me to be patient and slow down to wait for people to heal in their own time.

Shane, 39, International Security Study Denver, Colorado San Francisco, California I spend too much time in airports. A pause between place. Place. Place. Again. Again. In an airport.

I have mixed feeling about sleep. It feels like an obligation. I donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have enough time to do what I need to do. joshua wagner

Rocky, 28, Wednesday

You are water I’m water we’re all water in different containers that’s why it’s so easy to meet someday we’ll evaporate together But even after the water’s gone we’ll probably point out to the containers and say, “that’s me there, that one.” We’re container minders

Water Talk, Yoko Ono, 1967

2. Two identical typographical maps differentiated only by colors, blue and orange. The words are generated by the thesaurus, and the Collecting Pauses journals. [BLUE] If you have a moment, I would like to know about your pauses. Use the string and connect the different words you associate with the pauses that you look forward to. Start your map from one of the pause branches. When you are done, wind the string around the last pin several times before cutting the tail as short as you can. Please make sure that your string path is tight. Thank you for your participation. [ORANGE] If you have a moment, I would like to know about your pauses. Use the string and connect the different words you associate with the pauses that you dread. Start your map from one of the pause branches. When you are done, wind the string around the last pin several times before cutting the tail as short as you can. Please make sure that your string path is tight. Thank you for your participation.

–

alone

refreshing

airports

attention

relax

annoyance

awake

release

blankness

aware

reprieve

boredom

break

respite

break

breath

rest

breakage

change

running

break off

clarity

simple

change

comfort

sleep

dangling

commute

quiet

depressing

cooking

quit

disruption

deep breath

solve

divide

dinner

stop

emptiness

dissipate

switch

hanging

divide

think

inaction

dream

thoughtful

inactiveness

drive

timeout

inertia

ease

travel

journey

figure out

vacation

mixture

foramen

nothing

focus

obstruction

gap

perforate

inactivity

removal

introspective

sedative

hiatus

sleep

hobby

stillness

journey

suspension

leisure

tension

let out

transit

lunch

uncertainty

meditative

useless

memory

void

mindlessness

waste

nostalgia

waver

nothing observance opening

Results from the returned kits informed the next stage. I designed two identical interactive posters differentiated only by colors, blue and orange. The maps are compositions of verbs, nouns, and adjectives from the returned journals and the American Heritage Dictionary. I instructed people to identify and map their pauses — positive and/or negative — by physically connecting the appropriate words with the string provided. The positive pauses were signified in the blue poster with blue strings and the negative pauses in orange. The goal of this particular intervention is to let people be aware of their pause by recognizing the characteristics and identifying them visually. Findings from the investigations revealed pattern in behaviors, desires, and types of pauses. The discovery not only provided the verbal vocabulary around the pause but also contributed to the shaping of a visual language to be developed.

opportunity pause peace perforate pets portal realization reflect

3. Pauses Thingamajig is the visual synthesis of what I had discover up to this point. From the observation, responses, and conversations, I discovered three different overarching themes of pauses. There are action-, person-, and object-related pauses. Each type of pause is usually characterized by one or more of these traits: reflective, comforting, interruptive, and transitional. [ACTION-RELATED PAUSES] involve the body while giving the mind a vacation. [PERSON-RELATED PAUSES] tend to be reflective and are usually triggered by what another person says or does. [OBJECT/PLACE-RELATED PAUSES] include spaces and places and have a 50/50 chance for having a positive/negative effect on people

184

PAUSES THINGAMAJIG

pauses noted by eight participants

PAUSES

average of 3.28 pauses WAITING per person, per day

FOOD the most pleasurable pauses in the everyday

An action-related pause tends to ease the mind. It is the most noted and preferred form of pause. This type of pause does ranges from rigorous activities like running to simple mindless ones like chopping vegetables and breathing exercises. “The world can wait” is the general attitude that is most connected to this pause.

the most disdained pauses in the everyday

95/60

the highest/lowest reported speed of life

90/45 REFLECTIVE

VACATION FROM THE MIND INTERRUPTION

A person-related pause is usually reflective. What another person says or does can trigger the pause. A participant explains why this type of pause is often reflective -— it is because words cannot exist on their own. Their meanings can be defined only through relationship to pre-existing meanings. An object/place-related pause has a 50/50 chance for having a positive/negative effect on people. Participants note that while some objects can result in a powerful contemplative pause, others can be an absolute obstruction. Portraits and childhood places rank high as triggers for contemplation. Stop signs, bus stops, and schedules are some of frequently mentioned objects of hindrance. action-related

184

pauses noted by eight participants 26 pauses average of 3.28 per person, per diem

the highest/lowest reported speed of life

hours

the longest reported pause

seconds

the shortest reported pause object/place-related

people-related

95/60 5

TRANSITION

the highest/lowest desired speed of life

hours

the longest reported pause

tuesday

the day with the most recorded pauses

COMM

the mo pauses

To me a pause is simple. Straightforward. PAUSES THINGAMAJIG Anything I can do that will avert my inner worry and alarm clock from the various obligations. It does not have to coincide with a cease in actual physical activity. Actually most of the time it does not for me. Strenuous physical activity, running or riding a bike. It is a vacation for the mind, and that’s what’s important.

PAUSES

VACATION FROM THE MIND INTERRUPTION

FOOD

WAITING

the most disdained pauses in the everyday

the pau

TRANSITION

the most pleasurable pauses in the everyday

My pauses seem to revolve around animals. Stopping to pet my cats is just as comforting and calming for me as it is for them, I think. Pets are good for that, just because they will always enjoy a quiet moment with you. REFLECTIVE VACATION FROM THE MIND INTERRUPTION TRANSITION

n-related

ses m

REFLECTIVE

people-related

action-related

object/place-related

people-related

95/60 5 184 95/60

object/place-related

tuesday tuesday

Just found out two of my friends are getting a hours divorce. The circumstances are similar to my the highest/lowest the day with the most thedivorce longest so it makeshours me a bit introspective. reported speed of life recorded pauses reported pause pauses noted by the highest/lowest the longest I worry about Mattie in particular.They gotthe day with the most eight participants reported speed of life recorded pauses reported pause married really young. Neither of them had average of 3.28 pauses really discovered themselves. Now they are per person, per diem both changing and growing, and realizing they don’t go together so well. I guess that is the way we learn to have healthy relationships. seconds We make mistakes.

90/45 35 90/45 35 the highest/lowest desired speed of life

the highest/lowest desired speed of life

the shortest seconds

reported pause

the shortest reported pause

sunday sunday the day with the least recorded pauses

the day with the least recorded pauses 27

I want it to be 90 mph, that feels like 30 mph.

JIG

SES

FOOD

WAITING

COMMUTE

the most pleasurable pauses in the everyday

the most disdained pauses in the everyday

the most inevitable pauses in the everyday

REFLECTIVE VACATION FROM THE MIND

INTERRUPTION TRANSITION

josh, 33, San Francisco Game designer

I want it to 90 mph that feels 30 mph.

visual exploration

Poor Man’s Purblue visualizes the hiccups of white noise.

Lamontagne, Valérie. "Pause." Mobilegaze. www.mobilegaze.com 2

Assche, Christine Van, Diedrich Diederichsen, Elie During, Kodwo Eshun, Edward George, Francisco Lupez, Jacques Ranciere, and Simon Reynolds. Sonic Process. Barcelona: Actar, 2003.

In Purblue, Canadian new media artist Yan Breuleux investigates sound disruptions and waves and translates his findings into monochromatic-blue studies. The color blue symbolizes the “blank” screen of our electronic monitors — the in-between space waiting to be filled by technology. The pause is then activated through keyboardcontrolled disruptions constituting a series of pre-programmed, yet randomly accessed, animations and sound loops. The broadcasts of technology’s audio glitches are visualized through blue textures, patterns and forms.1 These textures, patterns and forms are translations of the pauses between technology — viewers become aware of their perception of time and its segmentation. Breuleux’s experiments are intriguing. With every minute sound extrapolated to its essence, Purblue reminds me of John Cage’s composition. I went on to try a similar investigation. Since I did not quite have the technological capacity Breuleux had, I came up with a poor man’s model which consisted of a box I made out of parchment paper.

Suspended within the box, was a square cardboard. The square was rotating regularly with the help of a fishing line and a wind-up toy. Then the box, my camera, and I sat in the darkness of my living room with a single lightsource and the lens of the camera pointing at the square. I listened intensely to the gentle hissing of the white noises that filled up the room — the heater, the refrigerator, and the laptop from the opposite side of the room. Every detected hiccup in the noise spectrum was captured and encapsulated by the position of the square at that specific moment. The exercise required an acute focus and lasted for almost two hours. English musician and author David Toop notes how “music is closely related to human perceptions of time and its segmentation. Time unfolds, seemingly forward, yet also laterally and in cycles, and the perception of time is subjective, as well as quantifiable.”2 The noises I was listening might not be the music Toop has in mind, but his statement resonates with my Poor Man’s Purblue.

The Poor Man’s Purblue Poor Man’s Purblue set up

Glitches in White Noise

Language of Pause is a series of mapping exercises using different tools of languages.

Pausing during reading

3,4,5

Bartram, Alan. Futurist Typography and the Liberated Text. New Haven: Yale University 6

Robinson, Susan Barnes. Giacomo Balla, divisionism and futurism, 1871-1912 (Studies in the fine arts. The Avant-garde). Ann Arbor, Michigan: Umi Research Press, 1981.

In reading and writing, punctuation clarifies meaning. Without it, phrases and sentences run into each other and become unclear. Punctuation also serves as an indicator for respite in text. It is a component in written language aside from the actual letters or numbers and white space. It marks intonation and pauses to be observed especially when reading aloud. However, there have been other attempts in typographic organization designed to speed up or slow down a reader. French symbolist poet Stéphane Mallarmé incorporates typographic layout unusual for his time in his poems. In Un Coup de Dés, 1897, the words floated in a substantial amount of white spaces. Mallarmé called the white spaces silences.3 Filippo Tomasso Marinetti, the Futurist foreperson and Mallarmé’s contemporary, rejected the latter’s precious approach — to silence and its aesthetic. Marinetti did not wish to voice his idea with grace, “… I want to grasp them brutally and hurl them in the reader’s face.”4 His typographic approach in Une Assembée Tumultueuse took apart the syntax of speech to the extreme. Punctuation had no meaning and the right adjectives and subtleties served no purpose. His manifesto articulated

the desire for speed and “maximum vibration.”5 This need for speed is also translated into Futurist paintings such as Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash, 1912, by Giacomo Balla. Balla depicted a succession of movements in the dog’s legs, the leash, and the pair of feet of the walker.6 We inherit the Futurist love of technology and speed to the extent that experience of life consists of a cacophony which dulls our senses. From these instances, to pause is to recognize the visual prompts (or their absence) for a temporary state of rest — Mallarmé’s silences are these cues that direct our eyes and thought into a state of thoughtfulness. In first exploration (left), I notate my experiential rhythm in reading. The book is Water for Elephant by Sara Gruen. I read out loud and recorded a page of reading. I listened to the play back and mapped out my pauses in the book. The next step was interpreting the pauses differently. Using a square grid paper, I blackened the squares where a pause takes place and rectangular spots indicate longer pauses. Following the same model, I created visual punctuation maps (following pages) for all the walking I had in a typical day.

Punctuated walks

Following the punctuation experiments, I decided to translate rhythms and pauses modeled after an existing form of notation. A system I am most familiar is the prosodic elements that are used to indicate intonation in Chinese language.

Throughout time, there have been different approaches to depicting movement visually. In painting, Degasâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; graphic vocabulary in representing movement differs from that of Giacomo Ballaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s. Marcel Duchampâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Nude Descending a Staircase brings awareness to the progressive codification of Cubism. In Cubism, objects are broken up to be analyzed before they are reassembled. Cubist paintings unravels a multitude of viewpoints to represent the subject in a greater context. Another portrayal of movement is dance notation. Dance is one of most recognizable human movement patterns. In dancing, the system of labanotation is used to record and analyze human movement. Rudolf Laban, a dancer, choreographer and dance therorist during the Austro-Hungarian rule, first published labanotation in 1928. His analysis of movement is based on spatial, anatomical, and dynamic principles. Initial need to record dance, and its development, followed

1 4 2 3 5

closely the development of dance in Europe during the twentieth century.7 Labanotation provides a linear visual mapping of movement as orderly progression through time. As a pause exists in tandem with movement and one is only observable because of the other, notating them opens up a point of entry to understanding the dynamic relationship between movement and pause. The intonation marks in Chinese language are used to indicate changes in level of the voice to add meaning to what is being said. I am appropriating this system to notate several of my movements in space. I have allocated the following meanings: the first tone indicates steady regular pace, the second tone indicate acceleration, third tone indicates fluctuation in rhythm, fourth tone indicates deceleration, and the dot to indicate a pause. This exercise enables comparisons for my behavior and inform me of the significance of specific pauses in the various experiences.

Tracking, Tracing, Marking, Pacing (Moving Drawings). New York: Pratt Institute, 1982.

Walking home from school

Grocery shopping in Whole Foods

A Forever 21 experience

A stroll in the Yerba Buena Garden

Walk in the footsteps of the person in front of you. 1. on the ground 2. in mud 3. in snow 4. on ice 5. in water Try not to make sounds.

walking piece, Yoko Ono, 1964

spatial intervention

Collecting Pauses Exhibition is a four-week rotating exhibition inside CCAâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rarely used elevator. It exhibited some early findings on the different shapes of pauses. October 13 through November 13, 2009

andy warhol

Sometimes the little times you don’t think are anything while they’re happening turn out to be what marks a whole period of your life.

« Warhol, Andy.

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol: (From A to B and Back Again). New York: Harvest Books, 1977. 1

Walsh, Martin. Brechtian Aspect of Radical Cinema. Britain: British Film Inst, 1981.

One day, while setting up one of the early installations, the door to the elevator opened. A girl walked in carrying several planks of wood. She was rather surprised to see a person with thumbtacks between her lips (me), polaroids on the floor, and a tripod leaned against the wall. She quickly adjusted and asked what I was working on. After listening to the seven second spiel (which was also the length of the elevator ride), she told me that the exhibition was a pleasant surprise within the simple space of an elevator. I was happy to hear it. During the exhibition, I usually set up the various stages in the wee hours of the night when I hoped everybody would have gone home. I wished to stay anonymous but that was hardly the case in one particular late Monday night. In the two hours that it took me to set up the installation, the elevator was used six times — perhaps the heaviest traffic I had ever experienced. Every time the door opened, each one of my potential spectators was taken aback by my presence. I, too, was feeling uncomfortable — especially in the absence of acknowledgement from both sides. The third time the elevator doors opened, I decided to break the fourth

wall between us. The “fourth wall” is one of theatrical concepts developed by influential German playwright Bertold Brecht. It refers to the imaginary wall separating the audience from the performers — the performers do not acknowledge that they are being watched, and the audience is made to believe that the play is “real.”1 In that elevator, I was the performer. I said my “hello” and asked if I had interrupted their time, told them about what I was working on, or requested that they help me with the installation. In a Brechtian play, an actor would break away from his or her character, engaging the audience, or performing with an awareness of being watched. Brecht believed the elimination of the invisible wall would put his audience in a place for action as an objective observer and participant. I had consciously filled in people’s pauses in that elevator even though the approach was counter intuitive to the theme of the project. Additional layers of engagement in these elevator exchanges could increase the chance for introspection. The outcome I had wished was for them to remember of their interaction with me and be more aware of the pause that the elevator could provide.

Collecting Pauses installation #1

arno strine

Every so often, usually in the fall (perhaps mundanely because my hormone-flows are at their highest then), I discover that I have the power to drop into the Fold. A Fold-drop is a period of time of variable length during which I am alive and ambulatory and thinking and looking, while the rest of the world is stopped, or paused. Over the years, I have had to come up with various techniques to trigger the pauseâ&#x20AC;Ś

ÂŤ

Baker, Nicholson. The Fermata. unknown: Unknown, 1994.

A posepause is a term I came up for the approximately three-second period during which we hold a pose for a photograph (unless of course it’s my mom behind the camera, in which case, you might have to hold it for good three minutes). When the button is pushed, time stands still for a moment. Within the brevity of the posepause, we become Arno Strine, the protagonist in Nicholson Baker’s Fermata, — like him, we stop time with our poses. Within the brief three seconds, we think and decide how our image will be mediated or how our experience will be translated for future reads. Just as the mere three seconds can shape the here-and-now reality of a human situation, a moment of pause in our lives enables a thoughtfulness that speed rarely allows. 

Collecting Pauses installation #4

Documentation for the exhibition

Hallway Vacation is a collaborative one-day installation with Kristin Neidlinger. The intention is to offer new ways for people to relate to the pause by intervening with their consciousness of space and time. March 25, 2010

Once a friend posted “Vacation is the opiate of the masses” on her Facebook status. That weekend, we ran into each other and I decided to ask some follow-up questions regarding her status update. What intrigued me most was if she had meant it the way Marx had with regard to religion — illusory and negative. To which she replied, “Somewhat.” She continued to say that vacation is an escape from the real world, and thus, from reality. I paused. I knew I had made similar claims. But is it reality that we are escaping, or is vacation slivers of reality we often forget? The word vacation comes from its Latin predecessor, vacare, and there are records indicating its use to mean “free, empty,” and “formal suspension of activity” in as early as the fifteenth century. The industrial revolution presented us with the wonder of mechanization. With it came the promise that technology will create more free time. Yet, as more gadgets and machines permeate our lives, we find ourselves left with less free time. It is almost impossible for many of us to suspend any kind of activity in our lives. 

niels bohr

Isn’t it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientist we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, yet it is changed completely.

Through habitual use, the sense of meaning of certain times spent within certain spaces can get dulled. The Hallway in CCA’s San Francisco campus connects the entrance of the building to the studio areas. As important as the Hallway is, the experience of walking through it might also be the most overlooked. The Hallway installation is an attempt to intervene with their consciousness of space and time through the body. The spatial experiment seeks to show how sensorial contact embeds a capacity for meaning; thus enabling people to reflect on the role of their encounters with the shortlived pauses in their lives. During the installation, we divided the Hallway into a few sections. Vacationers began their vacation by going through the passport photo section. From there they were whisked away by our pause engineer to various destinations such as the Wind Tracking District and Lullscape Sound Wall. In the Wind Tracking District, vacationers have a chance to see the landmark air curtains which animate the current and flow of the Hallway. At the Lullscape Sound Wall, vacationers will be able to experience the interactive sonic touch — where they listen to the sound of their sense of

touch. Kristin and I designed the vacation packages from as few as seven minutes, to as long as half an hour. The vacation was held during the busiest period of the semester. We found the timing to be important as this was also the time we found people to be least aware of their pauses. The choices of both sites, the elevator and the hallway, are deliberate with a very specific intention. I did not give up this intention even when others doubted. Henri Lefebvre proclaims that a space can serve as tool for thought and for action. The elevator and the hallway, as transitional spaces between destinations, are environments prime for intervention — to introduce new experiences different from the given ones. The new experiences can be described as heterotopic and heterochronic.These terms have their origins in medicine and biology where they explain developmental anomalies between related organisms. The words “heterotopic” and “heterochronic” were then adopted by social scientists to describe conditions of spatial and temporal otherness in cultural production.2 An effort to create heterotopic and heterochronic realities would subvert the predetermined or habitual meaning within a particular space and time.

Hoelscher, Steven & Yi-Fu Tuan. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print. 2

Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Chicago, Illinois: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 1991.

When I'm extremely busy, it's hard to stop and take a breath because my mind is constantly running through a list of things I should be doing instead. What was nice about the Hallway Vacation is that it provided a deeply immersive experience that made the pause engaging in itself. It wasn't about sitting around and trying, in vain, to empty my mind rather it provided something external and physically compelling to pay attention to. amy martin

The Lullscape Sound Wall

The Bathroom is a room designed for thought. It strategically positions a person in the ideal conditions for reflection. First it is the only room in which just one person is allowed at a time. In this regard, the bathroom can be a retreatâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;an escape from overwhelming circumstances or a chance for a deep breath. Isolation from the noise of the world gives the inner voice not only an opportunity to be heard but also a microphone; the bathroom is often a sterile environment (if not in sanitariness then in decor) with little distraction. But there are other places one can be alone. What sets the bathroom part is the requirement that you be there. Those things that bring you too the bathroom are necessary. Moreover they are activities that are uncomplicated and trivial in terms of effort, but they tether you to the bathroom. For example, a shower requires little effort, but you must stand and wait for its completion. The same can be said for brushing your teeth. The idle time is another opportunity for the mind to mull. corey lee

cinematic experiment

The word technology comes from two Greek words, techne and logos. Techne means craftmanship, art, or the way or means involved when accomplishing an objective. Logos means word, reason, or consideration by which inward thought is expressed. In ancient Greece, technology was intimately linked to the poetic and was a means for discourse and strategy in pursuit of knowledge.1 It is this definition of technology that has propelled my foray of video projects. While it has been an exciting learning experience, the purpose behind my use of the medium is to integrate technology’s instrumental capacities: not to enforce utilitarian principles, such as speed and efficiency, but to capture and articulate the fleeting complexities of a pause and to bring to light the density of those ephemeral moments in our everyday.

Burnham, Douglas. An Introduction to Kant’s Critique of Judgment. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. 2

Language Culture Type: International Type Design in the Age of Unicode. n/a: Graphis Press, 2002. Print. 3

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London, UK: Createspace, 2009.

language, I have attempted to sort out some of the chatterings by inserting the pause within the layers of today’s fast and active media landscape. Walter Benjamin believes that the camera can provide a new way of thinking about and looking at our reality, thus allowing us to critically and intuitively grasp what has become culturally invisible.3

The contents of my cinematic experiments have been generated through collecting, observing, conversing, and editing. The essential process behind this method of working has been to consciously allocate a balanced respect for the potentials of techIn Voices, Languages, and Scripts around nology with the endurance of human senses. the World, Robert Bringhurst talks about My first video was a failure. It was a scary language being “what speaks us as well as one-minute night vision recording. My what we speak.” Spoken or the written words second project was a much more pleasant are not the only kind that matters. There experience with less grappling with the are many reminders that language “is a part equipment. The title of my second endeavor of the fibre of which life itself is spun” such is Life of a Hand. It is a 41-second video as “the gestural language of the deaf or the achieved through layering two animated calls of the leopard frogs.”2 Bringhurst’s maps: the first map is that of a movement in an escalator ride and the second is that of a notion of language resonated with me and movement of a garish orange hand recorded I began to notice the myriad languages on an escalator ride. This animation maniunfold around us — gestural, acoustic, visual, and intangible. They were chattering fests people’s behaviors and gestures that I observed during escalator transits. I noticed all at once. Through video and cinematic

walter benjamin

The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses.

Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in The Age of Mechanical Reproduction. London, UK: Createspace, 2009. 4

Merleau-Ponty, M. The World of Perception. New York: Routledge, 2008. 5, 6

Béla Balázs. Theory of the Film: Character and Growth of a New Art. New York: Dover Publications, 1970.

how people’s hands have lives of their own — having a blast tapping on the handrail or compulsively playing with the handles of their shopping bags. When I approached some people and asked if they remembered what their left or right hand was doing the minute before, they would give a strange look before saying no and walking away. There is a disconnect that people have with their own bodies. French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty posits that it is the experience of the body that helps us translate our experiences, although the contents of our thought are not limited to it. The body is an inescapable medium in which animate forms navigate environments and enact intentions. With Life of a Hand, I sought to reconnect the viewer with two of life’s most negligible acts. The sound in this video is that of the escalator. Repetition of the sound mimics that of heartbeats through a stethoscope. The animation makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar and serves as a meditation on the role of the gestural in acts of embodied perception and cognition.

Following Life of a Hand, I created an acoustic film, a montage of ambient sounds of a place. In my Cinema for Design Research class, professor Rachel Strickland often discussed the relationship between image and sound — it is synchronicity. The impression of a visible movement or change is more vivid when accompanied by an audible effect. The purpose of this film is to create an acoustic close-ups that will allow us to notice individual sounds that are usually lost in a clamor. In Theory of the Film: Sound, Hungarian film critic Béla Balázs talks about the role of sound film in revealing the acoustic landscape in which we live. Balázs reckons that “sound speaks to us with the vast conversational powers of life that directs our thoughts and emotions.”5 My acoustic film isolates different sounds that take place during a transit in a BART station. The emphasis of individual sounds gives them lives, and separates them from the “lifeless chaos of sound.”6 The film posits sounds into relation the way visuals do with life. Singling out the different sounds lets us recognize the role that they play in our lives.

Perhaps the most vivid memory I can think of is the time spent doing nothing with my mother when I was young. It was of us sitting on our front lawn in the sun, running my hands across the grass and eating an orange. Doing nothing else, not even talking. jason kerr

yi-fu tuan

If we think of space as that which allows movement, then place is a pause — each pause in movement that makes it possible for location to be transformed into place.

Hoelscher, Steven & Yi-Fu Tuan. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print. 7

Peter Greenaway: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series). Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

Traces is the final short experimental film for my MFA design thesis. It is a montage of various footages I have taken over the last four months. My cinema class introduces me to three films that have influenced my final piece: Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et La Glaneuse, Peter Greenaway’s H is for House, and Jonas Mekas’ Walden. Agnès Varda’s Les glaneurs et La Glaneuse is about people who “glean” or collect what is left behind after a harvest. In this documentary study, she tracks a series of gleaners as they hunt for food, knicknacks, and personal connection which have been discarded or abandoned. Varda sees herself as a gleaner, roaming the French countryside looking to capture the gleaners with her video camera. In collecting the materials for my final film, I, too have seen myself as a gleaner of the pause — roaming the city to collect countless moments and spaces that are often neglected in our modern time. Peter Greenaway’s earlier short H is for House devises his known technique of list-making narration, in which, he uses a list of words beginning with the letter “H.” The short film, set in an English countryside backdrop, is a

poetic pastiche of words with occasionally more personal tone telling the story of a naturalist and his family. By isolating the letter, Greenaway has turned “H” into a character and created many supporting characters out of it. The juxtaposition of the different personas gives “all sorts of interesting connotations.”7H is for House offers a visual focus while the chanting narration drifts viewer to contemplate its meaning. In the late 1960s, Jonas Mekas invented the film diary through his Diaries, Notes, Sketches or Walden, shot using a bolex 16-mm camera from1964 to 1968. It records his life, with numerous portraits of his friends and colleagues, in the mid-1960s. Parallel to Greenaway’s listing exercise in H is for House, Walden lists single-frame flashes, with occasional interweaving of longer sketches. Mekas also repeatedly breaks in to offer his private reflections and astute observation. Culling different visual and narration techniques used by Varda, Greenaway, and Mekas, Traces seeks to deploy an effect analogous to that of “multistable perceptual phenomena” — a form of spontaneous perceptual switching between two or more likely interpretations of an image (or in

Hoelscher, Steven & Yi-Fu Tuan. Space and Place: The Perspective of Experience. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Print. 9

Cresswell, Tim. Place: A Short Introduction (Short Introductions to Geography). Chicago, Illinois: Blackwell Publishing Limited, 2004.

this case, film). Traces offers as an artistic meditation on audio and visual rhythms and pauses created by objects, animals, and humans in urban life. It is centered on the construction of these moments to represent a journey that hope to inspire the audience to think about its significance in connection to their own lives. In the process of gathering and editing for Traces, I notice my visibility as the author of the film. It has become a narrative map motivated by my desire to describe the depth as well as the width and height of the pause. It has also become inevitable for me to interpolate my journey and my pauses into the film. My most ardent experience took place during a friend’s visit —we decided to stop by the skating rink in Union Square. When we arrived, there was an ambivalent attachment that I felt toward the rink. It took me awhile to understand what it had meant in my life.

In one of his books, Tuan writes about the role of experience of a space and place. He describes space and place as the basic component of the lived world which we take for granted. It is only when we think about them that unexpected meanings and questions would emerge. “What begins as undifferentiated space becomes place as we get to know it better and endow it with value.”8 Tuan continues to elaborate that it is through the stability of a place, we realize the openness of a space, and vice versa. Therefore, space is filled with movement, and place is the pause. A pause needs time and assimilates human experience in order to be defined. A pause in a movement transforms space into place and thus creates meaning.9 That night, the rink was my pause and through my film, I have come to understand the symbolic role it has in my life.

It was not until our film assignment to create a cinematic atlas, that I figured out the connection I had with the rink. During this period, I have also read many essays written by humanistic geographer Yi-Fu Tuan.

Union Square and downtown San Francisco in general are touristheavy spots I try to avoid. They are not as bad during the nights, and they are especially pleasant when the ice skating rink is out. One winter night, my friend and I decided to stop by the skating rink en route to Bowbow, a karaoke bar in Chinatown. We got there as the zamboni machine started to smooth the gashes left on the ice. I stared at those marks. Each one is a trace of its maker. It creates a new form as it crosses each different path. Newby and I stood rinkside and watched the zamboni erase the marks in its travel across the icy surface â&#x20AC;&#x201D; making way for the creation of new ones. Growing up, I moved around a lot. I saw each new place as a chance to start over, a chance to reinvent myself, if only in my own mind. A move to Singapore at the age of fourteen allowed me to be recognized as an Indonesian, albeit an Indonesian Chinese â&#x20AC;&#x201D; an identity that I longed for as a child. We were never considered as Indonesians in Indonesia. I was tired of the division between the Indonesian Chinese and the Indonesian Indonesian (and nauseated by the name callings we used toward each other) In Singapore, that was all behind me. The shift gave me the opportunity to be good again after long and tumultuous teenage years of rebelling against my mother. Or so I thought. I found out soon enough that stage was not quite over. But I was everything that I wanted to be, everything I was not in Indonesia â&#x20AC;&#x201D; a good student with many friends and a sense of independence. I was happy.

The “ice” in Indonesia was too scarred and the move was a zamboni that presented me with a new clean surface on which to start over. Before long, I fell in love with the thought of starting over and I would pack my belongings every so often to look for that chance. Twenty-ten marks year fourteen of the period I have lived outside the country of my childhood. Last December, The Economist published an essay called The Others. It talks about the thrill of being an outsider and how it has become both easier and more difficult. I would be what they describe as a genteel foreigner — the bored and the adventurous who went abroad — and I carry it off well and I enjoy it very much. The Others continues poignantly, There is a dangerous undertow to being a foreigner. Somewhere at the back of it all lurks homesickness, which metastasizes over time into its incurable variant, nostalgia. And nostalgia has much in common with the Freudian idea of melancholia — a continuing, debilitating sense of loss, somewhere within which lies anger at the thing lost.

Indonesia has become an acquaintance from the past with whom I would like to get to know better and more intimately. But is it possible for us to have such a relationship after being so far for so long? Perhaps it is that very impossibility that thrills me, being a stranger in the place where I grew up. 

last words

My thesis addresses the pause in our fast moving society. The interest started when I asked the question: how much value does speed have in my life? “Too much,” was the answer, and it had been at the cost of my own well-being and the many relationships I had neglected. Through the entire thesis process, I have thought about what others would get out of this investigation and how it might uplift the people who experience the body of work. Many of my friends have said they would not even have thought about pausing had I not brought it up. That was nice to hear. I had an early fear of it being dismissed as a mere art school project. One participant of my Collecting Pauses kit recorded that his pauses used to only mean“pausing the DVD player to get a phone call,” or “pausing his Final Fantasy game for a similar reason.” Toward the end of his journal, he wrote that a pause had taken a completely new meaning and importance. Filling in the journal had meant setting aside some time to clear his mind from various have-tos, need-tos, and even want-tos. He continued to say how the activity had helped him regain a hint of humanness that is much needed. Several other participants have confessed that the kit had a similar effect on them. I was surprised by this. I designed the kit as a way to gather data, a propellant for subsequent steps, and was not really

expecting it to have considerable effects on people. Through such response, I was again reminded of the power of design. While to some, design is only about the objects; for me, design is about relationships and the affected behaviors that has come out of it. My work in the last year has helped me go through the grueling thesis process almost unscathed. I learn to recognize when it is time to take a pause and to be more aware of it. As a result, the change in my behaviors has increased the level of empathy, which is a fundemental factor in my design thinking. The road that led me here was also filled with various methodology I did not associate with design prior coming to the program. The outcome of the new approaches has been unexpected engagement with other people and the design itself. The process has made me realize and reframe my role as a designer — it is not simply a maker, but also a writer and a facilitator. Realizing these new roles has been tremendously valuable for me. They open up new dialogues for me to enter within the design practice.

Can you pause without reflecting and vice versa? I suppose a complete reflection requires a pause but a pause does not necessarily require reflecting. sarah newby

thank you Without the help of these people my thesis would not exist. Ryan, my family, and friends, Maria McVarish, Aura Oslapas, Rachel Strickland, Geoff Kaplan, Ignacio Valero, Jeremy Mende, Nikola Otto, Kaz Nakanishi, Jessica Gibson. To all my friends, class of 2010, who have been the greatest group of people, working hard together for two years â&#x20AC;&#x201D; the very talented and supportive â&#x20AC;&#x201D; thank you very very much. At times, when I did not think I can continue, it was the friendship I found the hardest to leave behind and it is what helped me to go forward. I love remembering our first days of knowing all of you in the digital story telling workshop and to think how much we have grown since then. I am happy and proud to graduate with all of you.