v. Vellum: Visphot

Vellum: Visphot

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While this Vellum entry was always meant to be furniture for the competition, it was created with the principle of Jugaad. The steering wheel was not concerned with the search of its original instrumentality. It afforded sitting, so it was sat on. This method is intended to clear a space for the development of multiple alternative narratives and to examine the way this diversity of narratives informs the structure of this society’s life around the interpreted meanings of the abandoned objects. The estrangement produced by the queering of industrial size, mass-produced car parts to become ergonomic for the scavenger who created it, evokes mimicry—it exists as a manifestation of revolutionary consciousness, dismantling normative methods of being.

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The role of the key in Visphot epitomizes the concept of privileging affordances over original instrumentality as a manner of protest. The key, to those who know how a car works, symbolizes a start to a defined process—start of the engine and the subsequent linear movement of the car. In this queered aesthetic, however, the key locks and unlocks the rotational motion of the surface under a body. It is a literal disruption to the act of sitting, where once the movement is unlocked, the person occupying it loses their balance and fall off. In a way, the act that represents the beginning of a standard process, poses a disruption to the queered action—a disruption which is ambivalent, because a queer aesthetic defies any normative ways of being.

Walking through the heat sand back to the community no-place, Kesuma was patiently waiting for the dirt fungi on their head-cooker to finish being happy. The mirror on their head-cooker was seering brightness on to the food and they could hear the sizzling of the fungi.

Lost in thought, they did not notice the shiny shrapnel that stuck out of the ground, and stepped on it.

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The shrapnel went straight through their foot scarf and they felt the pain of the shiny splinter run up their leg. They tried to balance on one foot, unable to touch the wounded foot on the ground, but the heat sand has unstable ground....

Not seen fossils bodies like these near our no-place before. They do look like something from before the Age of Love? They lost their balance and fell, hitting something rockier

than heat sand should be.

They did not know what they fell on, but their body was resting on a tubular orb, that made their body felt it belonged on it. After de-sphrapnelizing their foot cover, they began to observe the pile of techno-bodies of body comfortable objects they fell on. It was an unusual amalgamation indeed.

The hollow orb could hug bodies when they occupy the deer grass field in the dark. I have other technofossilized bodies that will balance them.

They were curious about the comfort of the techno-fossil pile and pulled the tubular orb body out of the sand and dragged them back to the community no-place, their mind full of possibilities.

Once they were back at the no-place, Kesuma jumped on their pile of fossil bodies they had found on previous encounters with technologies before the Age of Love—to find limbs for the tubular orb stand. They had some gracefully curved bodies that would balance the tubular orb and touch the ground lightly, they just had to find them in their little corner in the no-place.

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This should be a good limb once some fingers are added. The stand of the tubular orb has holes on the side that this could join with.

As the tubular orb began becoming a body hugger, Kesuma kept adding limbs to them to support their own. Kesuma was satisfied with the body hugger. They were going to add this to the community settling space so that their family could use it as well. They had made a lot of apparatus from technology before the Age of Love, but this was their favorite. They could tell that this piece was not used for love back then, but this feeling made them love it more so.

This hugs the body happily. Maybe the others in the no-place would like to settle on it? The raccoon has been looking for a place to sit in to take the

heat from the yellow orb.