The College Hill Independent Vol. 34 Issue 2

THE

COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY

FEB 10 2017

34

02

THE

COVER

INDY

A BROWN / RISD WEEKLY VOLUME 34 / ISSUE 02 FEB 10 2017

Taxonomy of Love Gabriel Matesanz

NEWS 02

Week in Superlikes Sam Samore and Will Weatherly

03

German Inefficiency Hannah Maier-Katkin

METRO 09

Documenting Progress Katrina Northrup

ARTS 08

Peephole Brian Oakes

13

All of The Lights Kion You

FEATURES 05

On Greenwashing Josh Kurtz

11

suolubaF Noah Fields

TECH 14

Data Tomata' Malcolm Drenttel

INTERVIEWS 05

Catching Up with Ariana Reines Patrick McMenamin

METABOLICS 17

Let's Talk About Sex The Agony Aunts

LITERARY 11

Of Marble Gabriela Naigeborin

EPHEMERA 13

The Table Anna Bonesteel

X 18

MANAGING EDITORS Will Tavlin Kelton Ellis Dolma Ombadykow

ARTS Ryan Rosenberg Will Weatherly Saanya Jain

NEWS Piper French Hannah Maier-Katkin Roksana Borzouei

FEATURES Julia Tompkins Erin West Andrew Deck

WEEK IN REVIEW Sam Samore

METABOLICS Dominique Pariso Elias Bresnick

METRO Shane Potts Jane Argodale Camila Ruiz Segovia Jack Brook

SCIENCE Fatima Husain Liz Cory

TECH Jonah Max Malcolm Drenttel

X Liby Hays Nicole Cochary

OCCULT Lance Gloss Robbie Manley

LIST Alec Mapes-Francis

INTERVIEWS Patrick McMenamin LITERARY Stefania Gomez Isabelle Doyle EPHEMERA Anna Bonesteel

Letters to the editor are always welcome. The Independent, a family-run publication, is published weekly during the fall and spring semesters and is printed by TCI Press in Seekonk, MA.

STAFF WRITERS Eve Zelickson Marianna McMurdock Signe Swanson Josh Kurtz Zack Kligler Brionne Frazier Chris Packs Kion You

The Conformist Nicole Cochary

ILLUSTRATIONS EDITOR Gabriel Matesanz

DESIGN EDITOR Chelsea Alexander

STAFF ILLUSTRATORS Frans van Hoek Teri Minogue Ivan Rios-Fetchko Maria Cano-Flavia Pia Mileaf-Patel Kela Johnson Julie Benbassat Dorothy Windham Anzia Anderson Isabelle Rea Cliare Schlaikjer

DESIGN & LAYOUT Celeste Matsui Meryl Charleston Andrew Linder Ruby Stenhouse Mark Benz

COPY EDITOR Miles Taylor

WEB MANAGERS Charlie Windolf Alberta Devor BUSINESS MANAGER Lance Gloss

SOCIAL MEDIA Jane Argodale Signe Swanson SENIOR EDITORS Alec Mapes-Frances Sophie Kasakove Lisa Borst Jamie Packs MVP Ruby Stenhouse THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT — 69 BROWN ST PO BOX 1930 PROVIDENCE, RI 02912

THEINDY.ORG / @THEINDY_TWEETS

WEEK IN SUPERLIKES Sam Samore and Will Weatherly ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

FIRST DATE IN A DUNKIN’ DONUTS

PLAYING THE FIELD

America loves an underdog. The New England Patriots are not an underdog.

But Providence, RI is. It’s easy to see why the Patriots might favor a city like Boston for the victory parade, romantically speaking. Boston is richer, prettier, bigger. It doesn’t mess up as often as Providence does. So when Rhode Island’s governor, Gina Raimondo, invited the Super Bowl LI champions to a public rally in the Providence Dunkin’ Donuts center, where she would declare it New England Patriots day in Rhode Island, it felt like an opportunity.

An opportunity for Providence to show its love.

Tuesday, February 8, was a rainy day. As they say, “Paris is most beautiful in the rain.” I showed up to Providence’s date with the Patriots full of nervous energy. We Providencians arrived at the Dunkin’ Donuts Center first, so we waited, anticipating. “Where Are Ü Now” by Skrillex and Diplo with Justin Bieber blared over the speakers. Some of us drank a twenty four oz can of Budweiser, to take the edge off. Some of us drank two. “Young, Wild, and Free” by Snoop Dogg and Wiz Kalifa feat. Bruno Mars played next.

Finally, a warm-up crew arrived. This is not necessarily a typical date move, and its effectiveness remains unclear. Mayor Jorge Elorza and Governor Raimondo both took the stage to sing Providence’s praises, to sweet talk us.

They told us about how Boston had a yucky outdoor parade, but how noble Providence protected their team from the elements with the Dunkin’ Dome.

They told us that Rhode Island had more Super Bowl watchers per capita than any other New England state. We were not impressed. We booed them both. We only wanted one thing: our team, our date, our love. The New England Patriots.

Finally, the team arrived, bearing their trophies. Well, about six of them.

Not including Tom Brady. Gronkowski was there. Suddenly, I realized. This was a pity date. Where was Tom Brady? Why were we left for late in the day?

The Boston parade had been the main event; they were just throwing us a bone.

I left, jaded, before the date was even finished. Later, I would tell people that the only reason I wanted to go was to punch Tom Brady in the face à la Richard Spencer. Was it true? I think I was in love once. Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot.

Super Bowl Sunday is either the most confusing holiday or the most straightforward. The whole ritual is a mix of being hungry, watching advertising, getting hit on, or all three at once. Mixed messaging is the name of the game. It’s why Budweiser can sell commercials that simultaneously sell a beer branded as “America” while inspiring think pieces about Trump resistance. The Super Bowl can be anything you want it to be, especially when what you want is something somebody can sell you.

Tinder capitalized on this chaotic mélange of desires and nationalism during the weekend before the Big Game, when the app hosted a nation-wide vote on a range of pressing topics. There were several exciting items on the ballot; users could swipe to decide what team they predicted would win, as well as what liquid would be poured on the victorious coach. In a particularly superficial and shaming turn, characteristic of the service, they asked whether Lady Gaga would have a wardrobe malfunction à la Janet Jackson.

Tinder has a vested stake in attracting users mindlessly swiping during multimillion dollar ad breaks (or do people do that during the actual sport?

This reporter could not tell you). On November 27, 2016, a day when both the Falcons and the Patriots were playing high-profile games, Tinder saw a 10 percent increase in swipes compared to other Sundays. Thus, the birth of an impossibly lucrative Venn diagram between people who are bored because they want a romantic partner and people who are bored because they like sports.

Really, that Venn diagram is a circle, but a circle with pointier ends and made out of sweat-bathed leather. Tinder is just as much a seven-layer dip of commerce, branding, sex, and envy as the biggest game in football. But when Tinder turned a dating app into a ballot box, it yoked its signature recipe for pointless romance with a mindless parody of democratic participation. The app might have been simulating more than awkward matchmaking, or an electoral process reduced to a farce. The Super Bowl is ultimately about selling and drinking alcohol branded with nationalism, but at this point, Tinder capitalizing on a queasy mix of impulses may have just as much a claim to the national character as America’s most popular game.

-WW

-SS

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

NEWS

02

CROSSING Germany's open door

BY Hannah

Maire-Katkin

ILLUSTRATION BY

“Wir schaffen das,” insisted Chancellor Angela Merkel in late August of 2015 when she announced Germany’s open door policy to welcome and house refugees seeking asylum in Western Europe. This deceptively simple assertion that “we can do it”—a catchphrase reminiscent of President Obama’s iconic “yes we can”—rings increasingly hollow in light of Germany’s growing inability to account and care for the refugees that have crossed its borders in record-shattering numbers since that summer.

Nearly two years after committing to provide sanctuary to refugees risking their lives to enter Europe, and despite Chancellor Merkel’s unwavering commitment to her open door policy, the German government is beginning to reassess its promises. Days after Merkel’s Christian Democratic Party (CDU) suffered huge losses in Berlin’s regional elections last September, the Chancellor spoke publicly about concerns that she had lost control of the refugee situation. In an atypically personal address, the Chancellor disclosed, “If I could, I would turn back time by many, many years to better prepare myself and the whole German government for the situation that reached us unprepared in late summer 2015.”

Merkel’s administration has begun to make concessions to a growing constituency of resentful German voters—likely in hopes of winning a fourth term in the 2017 federal election. CNN reported Merkel’s popularity ratings at 45 percent, a five-year low of her eleven years in office that is expected to decline further. The Wall Street Journal reports that half of all Germans are opposed to granting Merkel a fourth term because of her refugee policies. Consequently, the German government has begun taking steps to curb the influx of refugees.

While speaking at an event days before Merkel issued her her own placating remarks, Vice Chancellor Sigmar Gabriel offered support for an “upper limit” on refugees entering the country.

Al Jazeera reported last week that Germany will begin sending many refugees back to Greece beginning in March. The criterion for this resolution, publicized this past January, are set by the European Union’s Dublin regulations, which assert that refugees can only file for asylum in one EU member-state, the first upon which they set foot. This policy will place greater strain on Italy and Greece, who the Pew Research Poll reports have both received over 160,000 asylum seekers, many of whom are from Libya—and these figures don’t include refugees who travel to Greece through Turkey.

The Dublin regulations were established at the Dublin Convention in 1990 to reduce the amount of

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NEWS

Kela Johnson

made plans to work with the government of Libya to inhibit migrants seeking passage to Europe through the Mediterranean Sea. The central points of this agreement with Libya include: increasing coastguard training, uncovering and obstructing smuggling routes, and increasing European involvement in the region to improve the economic conditions. A World Bank report explains that Libya, embroiled in political and civil conflicts, is on the brink of economic collapse. The new plan is an effort to prevent refugees from reaching European soil, to displace an ongoing crisis beyond Europe’s sightline. Outspoken critics of the agreement include Médecins Sans Frontières, who have denounced the endeavor to return people to, and block people from leaving, a country that “makes a mockery of the EU’s so-called fundamental values of human dignity and rule of law.” +++

asylum seekers who are endlessly transferred from one EU member state to another. But this regulation has been difficult to enforce. The ability to track refugees traveling through Europe requires fingerprinting new arrivals. Italian officials often don’t take fingerprints of refugees that land on their shores because Italy hasn’t allocated the resources to support them if they are sent back. Similarly to Italy, Greece is not well-equipped to handle the greater amounts of refugees that they receive because of geographical happenstance. Even before Germany begins the process of sending refugees back, Greece is already struggling to manage its own influx of refugees—and has come under fire, according to Al Jazeera, for “not acting quickly enough to ensure that all refugees are adequately housed.” It is currently unclear how refugees with no recorded point of entry will be treated in Germany.

The German government also announced last week that they will begin offering asylum seekers, who are expected to have slim chances of success in Germany, up to 1,200 euros to leave the country on a voluntary basis.

The government has budgeted more than 40,000,000 euros for the expense of what they have termed the StartHilfe Plus Program, which went into effect this past Wednesday. The plan has been marketed as a method of avoiding the violence of deportation, but it benefits the German government far more than any refugees.

The operating costs for the StartHilfe Plus Program are substantially lower than the cost of tracking down and deporting asylum seekers. While it remains to be seen how effectively the plan will be implemented, the program seems an unattractive option for people who have already invested large amounts of time and money and risked their lives to get to Germany in the first place.

Hoping to stem the flow of refugees from Northern Africa, leaders from the European Union have also

In its most ideal version, an open door policy allows all those seeking refuge a comprehensive network of support, but the German government may not have anticipated the sheer number of people who would cross their borders. Germany received over 1.1 million people seeking asylum in 2015, according to the German news outlet Deutsche Welle, a number which the United Kingdom’s Independent estimates dropped to 280,000 in 2016 with 430,000 backlogged cases. Der Taggesspiegel, a German daily, stated that Germany received more applications from asylum seekers than the rest of the European Union countries combined. And while many are ultimately turned away, priority is given to those fleeing war zones such as Syrians, 95 percent of whom are granted asylum according to Deutsche Welle. Because conceptualizing figures on this scale can be difficult, The Atlantic’s Heather Horn describes the influx of migrants in other terms: “Imagine between two and three times as many undocumented immigrants as enter the United States each year all heading to California, asking for asylum.”

While countries like Hungary, according to Der Spiegel, greet refugees with “water cannons and tear gas,” the German government has sought to create spaces for refugees despite governors from each of Germany’s sixteen states reporting shortages of beds, doctors, teachers, and other necessities for housing migrants set for indefinite, if not permanent, stays. The refugee crisis, nativist fears that the country will be overrun with foreigners, and the subsequent strain on German resources has damaged support for Chancellor Merkel and fostered a new radical right.

Right-wing nationalist populism is gaining traction throughout the country. Fears of economic collapse fused with xenophobia have mobilized violent, Islamophobic rhetoric. Alternative for Germany (AfD)—a 3-year-old right-wing nationalist political party that has received mounting support in recent elections—declared in their 2016 manifesto that “Islam is not for Germany.”

While the refugees traveling to Germany are predomi-

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

THE BORDER

Begins to close

nantly Muslim, the Pew Research Center reports there were 4.8 million people who identified as Muslim in Germany as of 2010—that’s 5.8 percent of the population while the current influx of refugees totals roughly 1 percent of Germany’s 80.6 million residents.

Germany has made greater, more progressive, strides to welcome asylum seekers than its European counterparts. The process of traveling to Germany and of obtaining asylum or a path to citizenship is often drawn-out and harrowing. Moreover, the Guardian reported in 2015, when public support for welcoming refugees was at its highest, “arson attacks on refugee shelters continue on a daily basis,” and that “reports of refugees being greeted at the doors of their new homes by neo-Nazis humming Third Reich songs or being pelted with banana skins [were] not uncommon.” To quantify this experience, Deutsche Welle published the results of a report from Germany’s Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) citing 970 attacks on centers for asylum accommodations and 2,396 crimes against refugees in public throughout 2016. It would be naive to assume that refugees ever tread on German soil with ease. +++ Chancellor Merkel continued to defend her open door policy despite a series of four unrelated attacks committed by Muslim extremists in Germany last summer, after which her approach was denounced by citizens and fellow government officials. These attacks, paired with bombings in France and Belgium, have led to growing resentment of Muslims in Western Europe.

While Merkel still backs her open door policy as “absolutely right,” public support has waned. The initial response to the open door policy was positive, with a Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen poll reporting a 66 percent approval rating for the government’s decision to widely accept asylum seekers arriving in Germany.

But current public opinion of Germany’s commitment to refugees coming predominantly from the Middle East and Northern Africa is in sharp decline.

On December 19th, 2016, Germany was rattled again by an attack on a Christmas market in Berlin. A Tunisian man who had been denied asylum crashed his van into a crowd, killing twelve people and wounding fifty. AfD termed the victims of Germany’s deadliest terrorist attack in decades “Merkel’s dead.” The challenges of welcoming over a million refugees from Northern Africa and Western Asia so quickly into a country that the CIA World Factbook lists as 91.5 percent ethnically white—and overwhelmingly Christian—have led to increasing support for the far-right and vehemently anti-Muslim AfD. Deutsche Welle describes the platform of AfD as one built upon Nazi-like rhetoric, climate change denial, xenophobia, and Euroscepticism. This breed of right-wing nationalism has gained notable support throughout Germany, ranging from the progressive city of Berlin to more rural parts of the country—especially in the former German Democratic Republic, East

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

Germany, where unemployment is decidedly higher and where residents earn less on average than their western counterparts. +++ The door, which was never fully open, is closing. Merkel and the CDU are buckling under the pressure of growing resentment toward their policies. The CDU and other popular parties will likely continue to backtrack and shift their platforms further to the right.

Perhaps those who oppose Merkel’s open door conceive of national borders as preordained truths, not social constructions. Lines are drawn in sand, lodged in mountains, designated by rivers, fought over in blood, and eventually settled on paper. Immigration policies determine who can pass over these lines effortlessly and who—at the whims of others—are forced to abandon their homes and risk their lives. The countries comprising Europe and North America are largely to blame for instability and violence throughout the region of North Africa and Western Asia. Legacies of economic exploitation, wars, occupation—often justified through abstract claims to moral virtuosity—have left ruptures in formerly colonized countries.

Michael Müller, the mayor of Berlin, warned his city this past September that if Alternative for Germany scored in the double digits in the capital city’s elections, it “would be seen around the world as a sign of the return of the right-wing and the Nazis in Germany.”

AfD won 14.2 percent of the vote. Chancellor Merkel’s hopeful “wir schaffen das,” seems less and less likely.

HANNAH MAIER-KATKIN B’18 doesn't believe in an upper limit.

NEWS

04

PLANTING Settler Colonialism and

“It was nothing: sand and sand. We are going to bring to the Negev life,” two Israeli men affirm in an advertisement for the Jewish National Fund (JNF). Only sixty seconds long, the video is directed specifically at American Jews, who are told that they can “make their voices heard” by donating to the JNF, an organization dedicated to preserving and developing Israeli lands and best known for its extensive afforestation (establishing a forest on land not previously forested) projects. The commercial depicts the JNF as the ‘savior’ of Israel, redeeming the holy land at the same time as it liberates the Jewish people. By framing donations both as charitable deeds and as expressions of Jewish identity, the JNF positions itself as a bridge between Israeli and diasporic Jewish communities (Jews who live outside of the holy land).

Responding to Nicholas Kristof’s 2015 New York Times op-ed "The Two Israels," which examined the JNF’s responsibility for the destruction of Bedouin communities in the Negev Desert, the president of the JNF assured, “JNF is not a political actor in Israel, but rather a 501(c)3 charity and a United Nations approved non-governmental organization (NGO).” This is a familiar narrative, especially for Jews who grew up in communities—synagogues, schools, local businesses—in which the JNF’s iconic blue donation boxes were proudly displayed. Reflecting the success of the JNF’s extensive marketing campaigns, most Jewish education institutions frame the JNF as an apolitical, humanitarian actor in Israel, thus failing to recognize the organization’s role in colonizing Palestine. +++ The Jewish National Fund was originally envisioned by Hermann Schapira, a Russian mathematician, at the first Zionist Congress in 1897. Schapira proposed the creation of a territorial fund that would collect donations from diasporic Jews in order to purchase land in what was then Ottoman Palestine. Referencing the Biblical commandment, “And the land shall not be sold in perpetuity,” the JNF imagined its territory to be collectively held by the Jewish people. The land could not be sold, but leased for periods of forty-nine years, harkening to the Biblical decree that defined every forty-ninth year a “Jubilee Year,” during which all land was returned to its rightful owner. At the Sixth Zionist Congress in 1903, regulations regarding the JNF’s land policies were clarified and expanded. Most significantly, the congress ruled that the JNF’s territories could be leased only to Jews, a policy that continues to have serious implications for non-Jews living on Israel-occupied land.

When the state of Israel was founded in 1947, the JNF increased its land acquisitions significantly through state-sponsored policies of seizing and selling land that was thought to have been ‘abandoned’ by the Palestinians who fled the violence that followed the partition.

Within a few years, the JNF tripled its land holdings in Israel. After 1948 the organization steadily shifted its focus from land acquisition to land development, particularly

05

FEATURES

infrastructure and afforestation. In recent decades, the JNF has transitioned from acting as a territorial trust, committed to purchasing Palestinian land in preparation for the return of the Jewish people, to a progressive environmental organization dedicated to redeeming a land that had been devastated due to erosion, poor grazing and agricultural practices, and decades of war. Framing itself to the world as a model of environmental innovation, the JNF proudly asserts, “KKL [The Hebrew translation], born in 1901, is Israel’s largest green organization and the oldest green organization in the world.” +++ When the conservative Likud party came to power in 1978, the Israeli government introduced a series of programs and policies designed to normalize and legalize the construction of settlements in the Palestinian territories. The state launched an extensive land registration program in order to locate lands that could not be proven to be privately owned or in active use by Palestinians.

Any territory that fell into either of these categories was deemed “state land” and seized by the government, often for the construction of new settlements. Eyal Weizman, an Israeli architect and scholar of spatial politics, noted in his book Hollow Land: Israel’s Architecture of Occupation, “In total, by the early 1990s, more than 28 percent of the land area of the West Bank…were registered under Israeli ownership.”

Prior to 1979, the policy of the Israeli government was to support and develop the Palestinian agrarian economy by offering loans to farmers and training them in modern agricultural techniques. This policy was short-lived, for as Weizman noted, “By 1979, when the government realized that the expansion of the

Palestinian agrarian economy was counterproductive to its aim of annexing uncultivated lands, it stopped the policy that actively encouraged cultivation altogether.”

The Israeli state, however, did not merely phase out agricultural development programs in the Palestinian territories, it also reduced water quotas for Palestinian farmers, forcing them to find jobs as day laborers in Israel. By creating conditions that hindered Palestinian agriculture, Israel multiplied the number of uncultivated lands in the West Bank, facilitating further land re-possession and settlement construction. In 1961, the JNF signed a treaty with the Israeli government that effectively designated the JNF as the official agency for afforestation and land development.

Soon after the state expanded its settlement constructions, the JNF began planting pine forests in areas around greater Jerusalem deemed ‘state land.’ Weizman argued that “these planting programmes were undertaken to prevent Palestinian planting, and to maintain land reserves for new settlements or for the future expansion of existing ones.” Pine trees were chosen because deposits of acidic pine needles kill small plants beneath the trees, making the land unusable for Palestinian shepherds. Prior to planting these pine forests, the JNF often uprooted olive trees, which have both religious and economic significance for Palestinians.

In 2002, the East Jerusalem YMCA and the YWCA of Palestine launched the Olive Tree Campaign, which was organized to assist Palestinian farmers plant olive trees. Similar to the JNF’s fundraising structure, the campaign raises money internationally from individuals who, by donating to the fund, can ‘sponsor’ a particular tree. Baha Hilo, the coordinator of the campaign, commented in an interview with Al Jazeera, “Our campaign is to help Palestinian farmers maintain ownership of their property—and once olive trees are planted, it is evidence that the land is being cultivated.” According to a law that

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

A NATION the Jewish National Fund

BY Joshua

Kurtz

dates back to the Ottoman Empire, uncultivated land in the West Bank is subject to state seizure; planting olive trees, therefore, is both a symbolic and material act of resistance, reasserting the significance of olive trees in Palestinian culture and protecting Palestinian lands from demolition. The initiative has planted over 70,000 olive trees since 2002, and the campaign has fostered extensive international support since its founding. Hilo told Al Jazeera, “When a field is taken by Israel, it’s no longer just the farmer who it is being taken from, but from all the international sponsors all over the world.”

In her scholarship on state forests in Southeast Asia, Nancy Peluso defines the “political forest” as a space that is deemed a forest by the nation-state. She comments, “We need to understand the category ‘forest’ as produced through normalizing discourses rather than simply as a universal or biological categories.” The forest, in other words, is a political category, implicated in structures of power and violence. The common assumption that forests are 'natural' spaces—spaces that have existed forever—effectively render them useful instruments of state power. Referring to the JNF’s forests around Jerusalem, Weizman asserts, “The lines separating pines and olives are among the many boundaries produced by the colonization of the West Bank.” The JNF’s forests physically and symbolically articulate the border between Israeli and Palestinian space and culture by inhibiting Palestinian farming and herding. The pine tree is an instrument of border control, demarcating “their” land from “ours.” Moreover, by claiming that these forests are ‘natural’ spaces, the JNF perpetuates the recurrent conceptualization of Palestinian territory as vacant and abandoned, thus erasing the history of people working and living on the land. Peluso proposes, “We need to ‘de-forest’ our minds to recognize the contours of what political forests…have caused history to forget.” De-foresting our minds involves recognizing the JNF’s forests as intersectional spaces; never merely biological, these forests serve as national and cultural borders, perpetuating the ongoing colonization of Palestine. +++ In an essay on the JNF, Joanna C. Long, a geographer at the University of London, argued that landscapes cannot be understood merely as natural or scenic objects, but rather as spaces that shape the ways in which citizens identify with the nation. Forests introduce new modes of thinking about one’s relationship to a particular space—new ways of ‘seeing’ nature as it functions in the construction and preservation of the state. Long suggested, “Within JNF landscapes, the nationalized subject is...the citizen-planter.

Physically fit, adventurous and

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

rooted in nature, the citizen-planter is a fearless pioneer and seeker of freedom who is emotionally attached to the very soil of Palestine.” The JNF’s forests produce citizens whose national identity is contingent upon a deep, historic, and spiritual relationship to the land. These people view themselves as the rightful inheritors of the land, assigned the responsibility of preserving the land’s ‘recently-restored’ value.

The transformation from diasporic Jew to citizen-planter is celebrated and performed each year during Tu B’Shvat, a holiday that is not referenced in Jewish scripture or liturgy, yet has become incredibly popular in Jewish communities globally. Tu B’Shvat was popularized in the 1920’s by the Teacher’s Movement of the JNF, which had also been responsible for distributing Blue Boxes to schools throughout the diaspora. Long contends that given the holiday’s relative obscurity, the Teacher’s Movement could easily re-appropriate the festival through a Zionist lens. Technically the “birthday of the trees,” the festival became “a ritual through which to cultivate modern Hebrew identity in Israel-Palestine.”

First designated a holiday by the British Mandatory Government, the holiday has gradually developed into an educational festival whereby Jewish children are initiated as citizen-planters. Israel’s first Knesset (parliament) opened on Tu B’Shvat in 1949, with Prime Minister David Ben Gurion planting trees alongside Israeli schoolchildren. This correlation was clearly intentional and symbolic; to this day, members of the Knesset plant trees with children every year during Tu B’Shvat, celebrating the birthday both of the trees and of the nation.

nounced the construction of over 5,000 new settlements in the occupied West Bank and East Jerusalem. ‘De-Foresting’ our minds requires that Jews and non-Jews alike recognize that the JNF is a colonial agency, contributing to the ongoing erasure of Palestinian history, culture, and community. Resisting the Israeli occupation has taken many forms, including widespread demonstrations against the destruction of Palestinian farmland. In the past several years, hundreds of international volunteers have travelled to Palestine to assist Palestinian activists plant olive groves in order to reassert the right to live and work on their land. Commenting on the Olive Tree Campaign’s resistance tactics, Baha Hilo told Al Jazeera, “We’re not a militia, our weapons are our pickaxes and shovels, our hands and our olive trees.”

JOSHUA KURTZ B’17 would rather plant trees in his backyard.

+++ This past fall, dozens of forest fires broke out throughout Israel, most extensively in Haifa, a port city in northern Israel. Israeli officials attributed the fires to strong winds and dry atmospheric conditions, but also to terror-inspired arson. Danny Atar, the world chairman of the JNF, asserted, “Whoever wanted to scar our country’s lands and to turn flowering green lands into heaps of ashes—failed. I promise that for every tree that was burned, we’ll plant two new ones…we will restore our forests as quickly as possible and color Israel green once again.” In his statement, Atar again frames the JNF as a humanitarian organization, responding quickly and forcefully to a crisis situation instigated by a perceived threat. However, his comment candidly summarizes the broader mission of the JNF: to “color Israel green once again.” Atar guarantees that the JNF will redeem the land as it has always done, washing away the history of the Palestinians in the process. He threatens those who attempt to thwart such efforts, promising to plant two new trees—which, in practice, may involve the extension of a border or the further destruction of Palestinian agrarian land—for every Israeli tree that was destroyed.

Over the past weeks, Prime Minister Netanyahu an-

NEWS FEATURES

04 06

GROWING UP Vertical Farming from top to bottom Malcolm Drenttel ILLUSTRATION BY Mithra Krishnan BY

The farms of tomorrow will be food-factories built in skyscrapers. Plants will be grown, layer upon layer, with assembly-line efficiency. Sensors will gather data on the productivity, nutritional value, and resource efficiency of each and every plant. The only human will live behind banks of screens and servers; data will be parsed as better growing practices are determined. Cybernetic farmers will offer locally sourced, highly nutritional, and efficiently produced food to the cities of the world, effectively freeing urban eaters from the tyranny of traditional agriculture. After millennia spent digging in the dirt, man will finally be liberated from climatic uncertainty, price hikes, and nutritional poverty.

The story above is offered by today’s Vertical Farm (VF) propagandists. The website of AeroFarms, one of the most-talked-about VF startups, opens with the similarly mythologizing slogan: “Data Science Meets Horticulture.” Off the bat, this claim presupposes that agriculture was ever distinct from its data. Since long before the invention of the algorithm, farmers have observed and recorded the outcomes of their practices in order to develop newer and better ones. The mass of data analytics that supports our current industrial agricultural system—GPS enabled combine harvesters, global distribution networks, GMO development—are but an update of an age-old tradition. More importantly, in joining these two practices, AeroFarms makes a major claim about what they’re selling. Embedded in the slogan lies the suggestion that a tomato is juicier, more desirable, because an algorithm helped grow it; that the merging of data science and horticulture promises a better product. What truth is there in this claim? +++ The most successful VF systems today rely on aeroponics, or growing plants in air without a substrate for the roots to ground themselves. Seeds are embedded in reusable fabrics, often woven from recycled plastics, and grown under magenta LED lights. When the plants mature, the roots simply fall below the fabric. Grown in the open air, the roots need only regular mistings of nutrient-rich water. Trays of seeds arrayed as such are then stacked sky high. While the scale of indoor production remains miniscule compared to the tens of thousands of acres of farmland in Iowa and California, VF nonetheless offers an exponential increase in the amount of growing space available in cities. Once limited to vacant lots and roof-top greenhouses, this technology means that entire homes, office buildings, mills, and factories could eventually become farms.

This idea, however, has its skeptics. Writing for Salon, Stan Cox estimates that current VF systems require about 1,200 kilowatt-hours of electricity to produce each kilogram of edible plant tissue. Vertical farms often tack on solar-panels to meet their electrical needs in a green fashion—perhaps unaware of the irony that plants themselves are solar-panels. Photosynthesis, the basis of the solar-powered biological economy, means that growing plants under coal-powered, synthetic light, even if “energy efficient LED,” demonstrates the wasteful logic of profit-driven industrialization. It’s also not yet clear whether vertical farms are profitable, as the costs of building a vertical farm, compared to a traditional agricultural one, are astronomical. AeroFarms, for example, received $9 million in grants and tax credits from Newark and New Jersey, for a factory which likely cost more than $39 million. In contrast, the cost of an acre of US cropland averaged $4,130 in 2015.

Nonetheless, proponents of VF justify their project with the fact that ecological and climatic chaos threaten our current food system. Vertical farms use 95–99 percent less water, fertilizer, and pesticides than traditional agriculture. They have also demonstrated shocking improvements in both productivity and nutritional value. Michael Barren, AeroFarms’ head of research and development, was recently placed on Forbes’ list of 30 under 30 in Science for having “improved average crop yield performance by 44 percent to 91 percent depending on variety.” Data, they claim, is key to these improvements. AeroFarms monitors 30,000 data points for every harvest.

Registering the light, heat, humidity, water, and nutrients present in the plants’ environment, a mad array of sensors relay their data sets to algorithms which note how minute changes affect the rate of growth and the nutritional value of the final product. Everything is controlled, from the amount and intensity of light to the cocktail of nutrients in the mistings.

At AeroFarms, even the air is enriched with CO2, increasing it from the global average of 400 ppm to over 1000 ppm. In a scenario where changes in climate or a crop’s disease load are increasingly unpredictable and may

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TECH

disrupt crops in the field, vertical farms claim to offer the absolute control needed to render biological processes a mechanical function. +++ Our current agricultural system has long hoped of achieving factory-like efficiency. The logic of the industrial factory is one that enables the production of commodities such that products can be judged by a single metric of standard quality. The same is, theoretically, true whether the factory makes widgets or cucumbers. With this model in mind, Vertical Farming simply intends to bring agriculture into the 21st century. The issue, however, has always been that biology resists standardization, and that standardized biological systems tend to be weaker, less healthy, than complex ones. This is why our monocultural croplands demand more pesticides and fertilizer each year. Chemical inputs maintain frail ecosystems against the pressure of fertility collapse, nutritional poverty, pestilence, and disease. Vertical Farming improves on these errors by reducing chemical dependency, but nonetheless maintains the factory-minded view that plants must be reduced to their most standardized, predictable, and repeatable forms. The VF industry boasts that with enough data, it is possible to reduce the plant to a widget.

The true value of Big Data has its limits. Agriculture likely began as accident—hunter-gatherers noticing that the big seeds left in their trash piles grew into large plants—and has often developed along similar lines of contingency. The dream of absolute control, on the other hand, is one of containing and regulating contingency. Kate Crawford, writing for the New Inquiry on the failings of data mining, notes that “we reach a breakdown of meaning, a profusion and granularization of information to the point of being incomprehensible, of being in an ocean of potential interpretations and predictions.” The analyst must often constrain the possible readings of the data in order to render the manic flow intelligible. This will have serious consequences in the agricultural context. When does the swarm of data on tomato growth foreclose the possibility of a given tomato seed—and its radically unique DNA—exceeding expectations?

Plants resist widgetization. Most vertical farms have rigorous sanitation policies because their plants, grown in absolute isolation from other organisms, have little defense against disease. Developing in their computer-optimized environments, plants are radically unprepared for the many threats the world has to throw at them. In contrast, plants that grow in ‘natural’ systems develop very differently, and often healthier.

The microbiome—the animal, fungal, bacterial, and archaeal life—around a plant’s roots offers protection against disease and pests; it also influences the uptake of nutrients and water. Agroforestry and permaculture are two alternative agricultural systems that take this lesson to heart, seeing the forest as the ideal model for food production. The proponents of these systems are motivated by industrial agriculture’s flawed efforts to regulate and constrain plant potentials, rather than embrace complexity and dynamism as generative forces. If plants grown alongside many other species are more healthy, why grow thousands of acres of only soy? The problem has always been that complexity is, well, complex, and that forest-like farms are hard to develop and harder to manage. How can one observe and improve a network built of diverse species of plants, bacteria, and fungi that interact in subtle and often imperceptible ways?

Perhaps data science might be of assistance.

Returning to the original question: why do we want our food grown by data scientists? The potential of sensor-based data collection and analysis ought not be limited by the dream of absolute control. If the sensorial potential of VF was to be used in food forest settings like those imagined by agroforestry and permaculture, farmers might be better empowered to observe and comprehend, rather than control, their crops. Data in this capacity would not constrain the potential of plant-organisms to their bare mechanics. Sensors would instead render perceptible the interactions between organisms such that farmers could design ever more complex ecosystems. Vertical Farming offers a utopian model for the future of food, but in maintaining the idea of food as commodity, it fails to engage with the full potential of the plant as an organism. The data-driven food forest is the model for a healthier and more resilient future.

MALCOLM DRENTTEL B’18.5 could use a nutrient misting.

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

SAID AND SAYING A conversation with poet Ariana Reines Patrick McMenamin ILLUSTRATION BY Gabriel Matesanz BY

When I reach Ariana Reines on the phone, the first thing she asks me is where I’m calling from. It’s a simple gesture but one that feels more and more appropriate as our conversation progresses. As a poet, practicing astrologer, and performance artist, Reines challenges us to make our presence more than witnessing, to recognize the intensities and responsibilities that come with being where we are, that come with saying that presence. Across three books of poetry—The Cow (2006), Coeur de Lion (2007), and Mercury (2011)—a play (Thursday, 2012), and numerous chapbooks and translations, Reines has established herself as one of a powerful writer of lyric presence in contemporary poetry. Through her work, we come to understand that arriving at this kind of presence is rare and difficult but ultimately a risk we can’t afford not to take. Here we talk about tradition, poetic presence and the responsibilities and possibilities that these pass on to us. +++ The College Hill Independent: Both in your poetry and in your practice as an astrologer, I see you linking yourself to a lot of traditions—to witchcraft, to voodoo, to other mystical practices. I was wondering what kind of obligations or responsibilities you see yourself as taking on in channeling those traditions?

Ariana Reines: That’s a beautiful question. These are things that are thrust upon one. There are good and bad things about the vogue that they’re enjoying right now. I was born in Salem, Massachusetts, my mother is paranoid schizophrenic, my entire family was slaughtered in the Holocaust. So, not to hammer the point too hard, but when it comes to the bad consequences of being what one is or of being perceived as other than what one might be, that’s just really, really overdetermined in my life. Assuming those burdens took me some time. It did really begin with a car accident in Haiti in 2010 that I started to accept a lot of this inheritance. And learning astrology was something that came out of this time in Haiti and things that I was being taught there—without having presumed to ask to be taught any of this.

These were all things I had wanted to run away from; I didn’t want to be associated with anything that could make someone call me a crazy woman and lock me up.

So the astrology practice and the devotional act of studying the various traditions of astrology that syncretized into what I’m practicing now—a lot of that is about honoring my mother and honoring all of the thinkers and the seekers who went before us. And also a whole corpus and tradition of suppressed and repressed ways of knowing.

The astrology practice also came out of a time in my life as a poet when I was burning out on traveling around all the time. I began feeling that the whole beauty of poetry is that it’s an art form not about spectatorship, at least not in the way that I love it. And I started to feel like a traveling vaudeville clown, like a dog and pony show or like two rungs below a stand-up comic or something. I was just so road-weary that I really, really longed to have a different kind of connection with people and to have a chance to bear witness to them, to listen to them and also to satisfy my lust to know about the human animal and the human soul. So I started using astrology—in a very practical, very present-tense way—to break down the bullshit artist-spectator divide that even in poetry was reifying my position and their position and the waves I felt were keeping us apart. I started using it on the road as a way to talk to people and listen to people in a different space than the space that would be possible in the space of performance, or in the space of let’s call it art.

The Indy: When you talk about bearing witness and the problems of spectatorship, I’m reminded a lot of the poem you published on your Tumblr after Sandra Bland’s murder. I’ve returned to it often—I find it a very moving poem for a number of reasons. But I think there’s something—and I think The Cow does a similar thing for me—about witnessing and writing, about witnessing in a way that goes beyond just spectating. How do you think of that poem—what kind of witnessing do you see yourself doing there?

tion and I compose live. I published that poem directly and there’s a side of it that was almost macho, like, I’m putting this poem out immediately, whereas sometimes we work on our poems for years. That’s what I mean by verticality—that I was not only in a state of relation to this horrible, horrible, tragic murder—that of course is one of so many murders, but Sandra Bland’s murder I know is one that got to me and a lot of other women in a different way than all the murders of men. It’s not to say that we’re not scandalized and contorted and tortured by those murders also but there’s something about her activism, her voice, her power…

One of my long-time fascinations and obsessions is the problem of time on the Internet, in particular female time—the rhythms of my body, the rhythms of lived life—in relation to the kind of timelessness (and I mean that with a negative weight on ‘timelessness’) that the Internet produces. Another of my big obsessions is the verticality of it, the overwhelming descent that the Internet is structured around: you scroll down almost all the time. I think in the last five years in design a lot of people have tried to counteract that a little but it is still overwhelmingly a plunge into the abyss. So [her murder] ripped me open and it’s one of the rarer instances where I’m composing directly into that abyss. Writing [“Sandra”], for me, was about claiming some sense of presence and agency in a digital realm that often makes me feel estranged from the present.

The Indy: I often see writing about your work that describes it as personal and powerful for the unveiling that it accomplishes. For me, your work has been about the writing of presence, what it means to be saying and saying at the time that you are saying, and how that saying comes out—if that makes any sense. Does that resonate with you as a description of your work or is something you’re thinking about when publishing?

AR: I really appreciate that reading actually because that, to me, is the fundamental gift of the lyric poem. The magic of the lyric poem, especially one in the traditions that obsess me, is that it bursts open in the present. It’s a gift of presence and in many ways a record of presence on the part of the poet. That’s what the dictum about poetry being the news means to me. I get bored and annoyed by people appreciating the vulnerability in my work, which is a word that has come to really irritate me. I think what they mean is the presence of it, that [my work] is trying to be present to itself, present to a body, present to space and time, and trying to convey that intensity. Lyric poetry is supposed to be intense and it’s supposed to do shit to you. It’s supposed to be full of surprises. They are literally limitless possibilities for how that can be done and that’s something I love about the space of the lyric poem, is it’s truly the space of liberty that I know. That anyone has access to. I think that having an experience of some kind of upheaval and some stripping away of artifice is exciting and life-giving and I want that presence so badly. I think a way that a lot of people go after that is through social media. There are all kinds of ways people are performing their presence to themselves, their presence to others nowadays. Of course we’re living out the bad wages of that in a lot of ways. But this is a strategy for art also: it just takes different kinds of discipline inside the space of an artwork.

Is that an answer?

The Indy: That is an answer. It also helps to clarify my own thought—that describing your work as ‘vulnerable’ ignores the positive aspects or the possibilities of being with people that presence contains. And hearing you talk about your astrological practice as a way to be more present at your readings, I wonder what you see as the future—or the opening gesture—of being-with that you’re finding in lyric?

AR: Well, I see that possibility as really eternal and endless. I also really believe— and this is something I take from one of [filmmaker and writer Alejandro] Jodorowsky’s books—that everyone should write poetry. I think it’s a really healthy thing.

And even though there can be plenty of bad poetry—there always will be—I don’t have a problem with it. I think that everyone should give themselves the gift of that presence and that witnessing. The powers of a poem to reach across space and time are proven and we know what Sappho can still do to us. All of these things are ratified and they’re proven double-blind, placebo-tested. I think poetry is something that everybody should read and that everyone should write. Really. I really believe that. I think it’s a school for the soul. And that doesn’t mean I don’t think there’s shitty poetry or that I don’t sometimes throw a book across the room or whatever.

But I don’t care, I think everyone should write poetry.

AR: What that poem represents is an infrequent instance of what in my mind I call verticality. This is when I am fully present to the moment, that is to the event in the world, as it is happening in my body at the same time that I’m in a state of composi-

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

INTERVIEWS

08

AIMING HIGHER

Undocumented students' access to higher education in Rhode Island

BY Katrina

Northrop ILLUSTRATION BY Iris Lei Javier Juarez, a student at the Community College of Rhode Island (CCRI), was walking to class when he came upon two large groups of people holding handmade signs and shouting. On one side were young students, on the other were a group of older white protestors. Both groups exchanged hisses and boos across the divide.

A man on the edge of the crowd turned to Juarez, pointing to the young people, “Can you believe this?” the man asked. “They are taking taxpayer money.” Juarez played along, pretending to agree with the stranger.

“There was a lot of hate on that day,” Juarez told me.

The protest was in opposition to a proposed policy allowing undocumented immigrants to be eligible for in-state tuition at Rhode Island’s public higher education institutions. Juarez didn’t know about the policy before the rally, and was shocked by the vitriol.

Juarez is undocumented. He immigrated from Peru and attended high school in Cranston, Rhode Island.

After earning his associate’s degree at CCRI, Juarez was hired by Fresenius Medical Care as a social worker and scheduler for dialysis patients. Working full time for four years, Juarez was offered comprehensive benefits and high wages.

“I could see that [at Fresenius] you needed a degree to make more money,” says Juarez. So when Fresenius Medical Care relocated to Atlanta this past year, Juarez accepted his severance, and enrolled at Rhode Island College (RIC) to earn his bachelor’s degree. This wasn’t an easy decision—his tuition for the first semester was more than half of his severance pay. But he is confident that it was the right one.

Juarez remains eligible for in-state tuition at RIC under a policy adopted in 2011 by the R.I. Board of Governors for Higher Education. Any student who has attended Rhode Island high schools for at least three years, regardless of their citizenship status, is eligible to receive in-state tuition at public institutions, according to the policy. The in-state tuition policy was not voted on by the state legislature, but enacted by the board, which has since been replaced by the R.I. Council on Postsecondary Education. Rhode Island is one of eighteen states with this in-state tuition policy, but one of only two states that passed the policy through a separate board decision.

At all three of the state’s public higher education institutions—RIC, CCRI, and the University of Rhode Island (URI)—in-state tuition is less than half of the cost of out-of-state tuition. At RIC, for example, the cost of in-state tuition is $8,206, while out of state tuition is $19,868. Although in-state tuition is significantly cheaper, the cost is still out of reach for many undocumented students who are excluded from employment opportunities and face disproportionate economic hardship.

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METRO

+++ Representative Grace Diaz (D) has served Providence’s District 11 since 2004. The first Dominican-American woman elected to state office in US history, Diaz has proposed legislation advocating for immigrants rights and child welfare throughout her six terms in office, including bills to eliminate housing discrimination and increase access to childcare for low-income families.

Since 2005, Rep. Diaz and District 2 Rep. Juan Pichardo (D) have attempted each year to pass a bill codifying the in-state tuition policy into state law, but they have never had enough support in the state legislator.

“The problem is that the majority of undocumented students are the lowest income people," Diaz explains in her State House office. "And on top of that, they don’t have any documents, so their families have no opportunities to work regular jobs,” Like Diaz, the Coalition of Advocates for Student Opportunities (CASO), an activist group that has pushed to make higher education more accessible for undocumented students by, has provided resources to students while petitioning the state legislature. The Coalition also funds the Tam Tran Scholarship, which

provides additional financial support to undocumented students attending college.

“It’s not an economic factor, it’s an educational and a human factor,” Marta Martinez, one of the founding members of CASO, says to me at her office in Providence’s West End. Martinez remains committed to getting the policy codified into state law. Most importantly, she is concerned that “as quickly as we enacted the policy, another Governor could decide it is over.” Rep. Diaz sends the bill to the fifteen member Education Committee every year, but each time, the bill gets redirected to the Finance Committee where it is denied. “We can’t get it out of committee,” Martinez says, “even though we work day in and day out.”

But this frustrating cycle has the potential to significantly change as a result of Governor Raimondo’s proposed fiscal 2018 budget, which includes a program providing two years of free tuition to students who attend Rhode Island’s public colleges. This benefit would be available to all students who have attended three years of high school in Rhode Island, regardless of their citizenship status. According to the Governor’s estimates, free tuition would cost the state an estimated $30 million a year. The bill has not yet been approved by the General Assembly.

Juarez remains optimistic regarding the new program. “It’s about time that Rhode Island took the lead on something and not just followed,” he says. Since he’s graduating RIC this semester, Juarez will not directly benefit from Governor Raimondo’s proposed legislation.

But he knows many undocumented students who could. +++ According to the 2016 data from the Rhode Island Office of Postsecondary Education, an average of 31 undocumented students per semester rely on in-state tuition across CCRI, RIC, and URI. In the five years since the creation of the in-state tuition policy, a total of 366 undocumented students have received in-state tuition, with the majority of those students at CCRI. Given that 30,000-35,000 undocumented immigrants are estimated by Pew Research Center to live in Rhode Island, the in-state tuition policy has impacted relatively few undocumented Rhode Islanders. Both the efficacy of the in-state tuition policy’s implementation, and the remaining barriers that undocumented students face in order to reach higher education play a role here.

“A big part of it is that folks don’t know about this,” says Daniel McGowan, a reporter for WPRI. Citing political opposition to the policy, McGowan blames the government for the lack of public information available about the policy.

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

Simon Moore, the founder of College Visions, a Providence organization providing advising and financial support for low-income and first-generation college students, offers a different explanation. He cites a lack of institutional support and educational resources as primary reasons for the policy’s disappointing results thus far.

“It is one thing to say undocumented students can get in-state tuition, it is another thing for our public higher education institutions to say we are embracing the idea that undocumented students are coming to campus,” says Moore. He believes that more work has to be done in order to dispel “legitimate concerns about what extent they [undocumented students] are going to be welcomed and embraced on campus.”

Moore emphasizes that mental health services and peer support groups are also necessary to make sure undocumented students feel safe in their educational environment and successfully graduate at the same rate as their documented peers. “We need to understand this as a holistic youth development issue,” Moore adds. “One of the challenges for undocumented students is a real sense of powerlessness and unknown for the future.”

Juarez explains that financial burdens are likely the primary reason why so few students have taken advantage of the policy. “I play soccer with a lot of young people,” he says, “and they always say they want to go back to school, and they know they have in-state tuition, but they don’t have the bare minimum funds… just to register for classes.”

The Rhode Island Board of Education is slated to vote on a potential tuition hike at all of the public higher education institutions, which, according to the Rhode Island Council on Postsecondary Education, would increase the price of RIC by $600. Juarez worries that the hike will put an even greater strain on undocumented students. The Tam Tran scholarship, run by CASO, provides only $500 to the undocumented students they support, which is the equivalent cost of one class at CCRI. According to Martinez, CASO is actively trying to raise money in order to increase the size of the award. +++ Some lawmakers and lobbyists like Terry Gorman, President of Rhode Island for Immigration Law Enforcement (RIILE), are concerned that the in-state tuition policy is not constitutional. RIILE has consistently opposed the policy, and is working to repeal it by petitioning the state legislature. According to Gorman, the existing policy is in direct violation of three laws which make it illegal to give benefits to undocumented immigrants.

One of these laws, 8USC1324, states that if the government gives in-state tuition to undocumented immigrants, the government must provide in-state tuition to all

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

students regardless of state residence. Because of this, Gorman believes that any out-of-state student could sue Rhode Island.

The CASO website counters this argument, stating that the in-state tuition policy is based on high school attendance, not residency, thus eliminating the potential illegality of the policy. Additionally, CASO emphasizes access to education as a human right and a necessity for undocumented students who have lived the majority of their lives in the United States. In order for Rhode Island to compete in the globalized economy, CASO asserts, the government must work to support an educated workforce, which includes talented undocumented students who strive to achieve upward mobility through higher education. +++ On November 8th, Juarez stayed up late into the night to watch the Presidential election results. When it became clear that Donald Trump would be the next President of the United States, Juarez set his alarm for 7AM. First thing the next morning, Juarez went to the Department of Motor Vehicles to renew his driver's license. He had not renewed his DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) status, a 2012 immigration policy enacted by President Obama that provides work permits and relief from deportation to undocumented immigrants who arrived in the U.S. as minors. Denied a new license, he returned home immediately to overnight his DACA application. His DACA status has since been renewed, and extends to 2019.

“That is something I wouldn’t have done if Clinton was elected,” Juarez says. Because Trump has promised to repeal DACA if elected, Juarez is trying to protect himself from deportation for at least two more years, which is the duration of a DACA renewal. Martinez told me that Juarez’s anxieties are common among undocumented students. “On election night, my phone went off like crazy. I got texts from every student I work with,” she says. There is little concrete advice that she can offer, as Trump’s future policies are so unknown. “I turn to the individuals themselves to offer support and calming words,” she says. “That’s all I can do.”

Trump’s presidency also reduces the likelihood that the policy allowing undocumented immigrants to receive in-state tuition will be codified into state law. Gorman says, “Hopefully the deterrent created by Donald Trump being President will be a deterrent to pass a law to give in-state tuition to illegal students.”

According to Rep. Diaz, “If Trump got rid of DACA, there is less chance that anyone here will vote for undocumented students. The Speaker [Rep. Nicholas Mattielo (D)] has a tough race, and his district is

pro-Trump. Because his district is against immigration, he will not help us to pass it.”

“But the chances of gaining support outside the House is bigger," adds Rep. Diaz. "Because more and more people want to fight back.” +++ Juarez is studying for the LSAT, and hopes to attend law school when he graduates from RIC. However, he worries about the cost of law school, “I am currently planning on how to pay for law school. It’s not going to be $8,500 like at RIC, it’s going to be $120,000," he says. "That’s the predicament I am in.”

Juarez first realized he wanted to attend law school when he encouraged an undocumented friend to attend CCRI. He told him about in-state tuition eligibility, showed him scholarship programs, and set him up with the CCRI soccer coach. “That was rewarding to me,” Juarez says. “I just want to help people,” he adds, and becoming a lawyer seems to be the most expedient way to do that.

“Some people assume their destination is predetermined, but they can totally change that, they just need to do the work,” Juarez says. He wants to support his fellow students, undocumented and otherwise, as they take their future into their own hands. “I know how hard it is, and I know I’m not the only one.”

KATRINA NORTHROP B’19 believes in the right to the highest attainable standard of education.

METRO

10

FABULOUS IN ESREV/ER How to appear at the club —or on the page BY

Noah Fields

ILLUSTRATION BY Catherine

Cawley

“Work! You look fabulous,” one queen exclaims to another. Getting dressed up to go out for the night is more than a preparation ritual—it is an event in and of itself. After all, you have to make an appearance when you arrive. Make. Them. Drop. Dead.

While looking fabulous may seem superficial, it can have a political bent. Madison Moore, a DJ and queer scholar on the side, points out in Fierce, “fabulousness is a mode of creative expression, an aesthetic need that is typically employed by bodies responding to oppressive or otherwise restrictive cultural conditions… ‘Appearing’ is to physically demand space, attention, and to announce oneself through the creative labor of self-expression.” In a heteronormative culture where queer narratives—and especially narratives of queer people of color—are often hidden or erased, fabulousness can create visibility. It is a radical act of self-assertion, a tool of resistance and empowerment, saying loud and clear: I am here.

But even more, fabulousness fabulates: physical appearance tells a story. You enter a space and rewrite its dynamics by commanding everyone’s attention.

Of course, to do so, you must become larger than life and make a statement. Through fashion, you can playfully reimagine the visual possibilities of the body and make yourself into a tall tale, almost too grand to be believed. You are the spectacle. You are, as we queens might say, “serving a look,” “legendary,” “slaying,” “giving life,” “flawless,” “everything.” Hyperbole in appearance becomes a way you can escape the constrictions of gendered norms. +++ In walks a sonnet in drag: falsies, lamé, glitter and all… Hold up, say what? Why are we talking about poetry? I thought we were talking about being fabulous! Well, my queen, etymologically speaking, fashion and poetry are cousins. Both mean ‘making,’ and, may I remind you, both work on text(ile) as their material. Fashion creates poetry on the body; poetry fashions language into a body. And we measure both by the currency of style.

Appearance can be as liberating for a poet as for a fashion icon. Experimental writing on the page can playfully escape normative formal constraints to perform fabulousness. For example, Sophie Mayer’s “A Volta for the Sonnet as a Drag Queen” loosens the sonnet’s conventional constraints and personifies the sonnet’s volta as a drag queen. The volta is the “turning point,” the moment of surprise in the sonnet when everything changes, and Mayer’s poem title queerly likens this rhetorical device to a drag performer. This becomes a jumping off point to reimagine the limits and possibilities of the sonnet.

Dressed in drag, the sonnet’s original form is almost unrecognizable. Loosely, Mayer’s poem outlines the shape of two sonnets, with the first one riffing increasingly against traditional sonnet form and the second even more wild and free. It is as if Mayer invites us to watch the sonnet change in the dressing room, and then come out to perform in full drag.

Instead of complying to the sonnet’s customary iambic pentameter pulse, Mayer’s meter shifts constantly: To be real. The sonnet’s a pose. Vogue. Let your body be told what (not) to do. To the letter, in its frame. Again, again. Limbs aglow / akimbo if enjambed: the stance, the torch, the blow…

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FEATURES

Her rhythm is free and flowing, allowing colorful sound play—like internal rhyme, puns, repetition, syncopation, and alliteration—to shine. This is more like how time feels in a club, when you’re dancing with friends late at night. There are no clocks, there is no choreography; you move freestyle as you feel moved. Club time resists the time signature of the workday and revels in a looser, queer temporality inspired by the beats on the dance floor. Mayer gives us hints of this soundtrack by riffing on lyrics from Madonna’s gay anthem “Vogue” (a song, it is worth noting, which appropriated voguing from black queer ballroom culture for the mainstream). Like a dancing body on the club floor, this sonnet is loose and energetic, and probably pretty tipsy. No rigid formal wear here. If only for the night, the sonnet is free from society’s regulating eye to experiment with its identity. +++ Gay clubs are often framed as utopian spaces for liberation and pleasure. However, they also frequently reproduce hierarchies of power based on race, gender, ability, and body size. Thin, white, cis gay men might be able to experience a gay club as a safe space removed from homophobia; but other clubbers, especially queer and trans people of color, may be ignored, exotified, or harassed in the same space. Fabulousness, then, is all the more important for queer and trans people of color to assert their presence, whether in a white-dominated club or in their own haven.

Marvin K. White, a Black gay voguer, captures this urgency in his poem, “the dancer.” A fabulous dancer in a club commands the attention of everyone around him as he loses himself to the music. These other folks look on with jealousy because they “never seem to be able / to catch the holy ghost or make music / do the things it does for him.” Through their gaze, his fetishized body is described as if it encom-

passed the entire club—his “smiling / teeth bouncing light like disco ball” and “his body is dance / is wet with music.” But White’s dancer seems oblivious to their presence, let alone their attention. He dances for his own pleasure, enjoying his fabulous reflection in the mirror as his dance partner: he in the mirror smiling dancing being making sure that he still here.

As closing time approaches, the other people in the club try to cruise him, as if they are entitled to his attention. When this fails, they try to “throw off his rhythm / hurting what they cant have.” White uses violent metaphors to frame their dehumanizing gazes—“the looks shot into his back / he is a moving target.” But despite their attempts to derail him, he keeps smiling and dancing. He refuses to play into the toxic, meat-market logic of these clubbers who treat him as a “target” rather than as a person. In counterpoint to their efforts, the poem’s recurring line, “he in the mirror,” creates a persistent reflexivity, emphasizing the dancer’s presence: he is really here.

In circling back to this image in the mirror, White’s poem reinscribes the dancer’s humanity and makes clear that his pleasure is a strategy of survival in an unwelcoming gay club environment. He engages with the space on his own terms to experience pleasure for himself.

This is a revision of fabulousness, not as a performance for others, but first and foremost for the self.

NOAH FIELDS B’17 “It’s my birthday, queens!”

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

The

Table

T HE BEAR AB LE LI G H The interworking of sunlight and interior space

BY Kion

You

ILLUSTRATION BY

Lillian Xie

I constantly feel a tug away from my home in San Diego toward the translucent confines of my local Carmel Mountain Library. I began to question this pull, asking myself why I would gravitate toward the library, even when I had absolutely no work to do. I’ve since realized a consuming passion for exposure to natural light from within, a comfort in interior spaces intimately connected with their exteriors. For me, meteor-like rays of sunlight provide inspiration. The library, which was physically removed from the rancor and conflict of my day-to-day family infighting, became my haven. After unearthing the effects of floor to ceiling windows, wide stretching cantilevers, and surrounding greenery on my psyche, the Carmel Mountain Library became the starting point for my exploration into the effects of sunlight.

“Light” in common discourse takes two distinct forms: in the physical, photon particle sense, and in the sense of providing enlightenment or knowledge. By providing Vitamin D, and upping serotonin and tryptamine production, sunlight is critical to our physical and emotional well being. It allows us to understand ideas more clearly. The proliferation of floor-to-ceiling windows and massive glass facades into the global architectural canon, made possible by the invention of float glass in the 1950s, is a welcome one. Technological advancements have given way to seamlessly connected interior-exterior architectural designs; inside spaces are directly enriched by the outside greenery, animals, and most importantly, light. A sunlit environment can tremendously increase a building’s functionality under various contexts; in spaces like the residential House NA, the commercial Prada Aoyama, the political Arab World Institute and the religious Chartres Cathedral, the role of sunlight fills a niche. It can enrich a building’s ulterior purpose. +++ Tokyo’s House NA, designed by Sou Fujimoto in 2012, is a slender, 914-square-foot residence that rebukes all the conventions of a standard home: the building’s interior is completely visible to the outside world. A visitor’s experience of House NA is akin to living in a tree. Twenty-one terraced floor plates render the house a spider web, lacking walls but replete with branches that spasmodically connect, weave, and elevate. Fujimoto traces the benefits of the interconnected House NA to “its unique relativity.

[In hearing] one's voice from across and above, hopping over to another branch, a discussion taking place across branches by members from separate branches.” Just as a tree absorbs light to live, House NA absorbs the sun’s rays to facilitate a densely interwoven interior, a vibrant, yet cluttered space. It creates a perfect union between the outside city, the architecture, and the human body; it extends the bridge between the natural and the artificial world. Ideas traditionally related to the concept of ‘home,’ such as privacy and reprieve, become beautifully twisted and confused within House NA. As a visitor, I’m simul-

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taneously drawn to House NA’s immaculate beauty and slightly uncomfortable because of the radical propositions it offers.

In House NA, privacy is forgone (except for the rare curtain) as the house is open and spacious in both its interior and exterior. Sunlight becomes communal, dappled across the entire house, unfettered by walls. The ‘home’ here is no longer confined to the ‘house’; House NA instead overthrows the traditional, insular concept of home. It blows wide open the notion of private family by exteriorizing bloodlines into the streets. Overall, House NA materializes the contemporary zeitgeist marvelously. +++ Nine miles south of House NA, in Tokyo’s Aoyama district, a six story Prada building, designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron in 2003, serves as an all-purpose flagship store containing retail spaces, event rooms, and lounges. The glass facade, whose peak takes on a similar shape to the Louvre Pyramid, wraps seamlessly around the diagonally gridded cage reinforcing the glass walls; it opens a fluid interior-exterior tension that facilitates an ethereal space for the commerce inside. Horizontal tubes jut through each floor. Vertical columns pierce upwards like volcano plumes, engendering a labyrinthine cage exposed to the outside metropolis. As a result of this almost invisible cage, rays of light comprehensively dapple the interior of the building; the reflected light speckles vividly on exquisitely-dressed mannequins.

The Prada Spring 2017 Ready-to-Wear collection similarly exudes lightness and ethereality through its choice of textiles and colors. As mannequins stand in the Prada Aoyama adorned in bright plaid blazers, beautifully patterned kilts, and extravagant sandals garnished with ostrich fur, the emerging spring sunlight elevates the already regal grandeur of the dresses. Prada’s head designer, Miuccia Prada, described her rationale behind this collection: “Instead of exploring the history of women, which I have for a while, I decided to take care of now, the present, and trying to find elegance.” The uncluttered, airy Spring 2017 collection highlights Prada’s decision to present a fashion line unencumbered by a dire political climate, choosing to respond to darkness with lighthearted fluff. Fashion in this sense becomes a distraction, a turn against reality often needed to find comfort. Certainly, the injection of lightness in Prada’s line transports us to halcyon days, but if Prada is actually trying to speak for the present state of women, lighthearted elegance seems to skirt around the issue. Prada, who created a spring collection she described as “personal, real, intimate, and sensitive,” seems to be simply soothing her haute couture audience with looks reminiscent of Gatsby’s gloriously flamboyant parties, retaining an aura of indifference. And for someone who has a PhD in political science, belonged the Italian Communist Party, and rallied for feminist social issues in decades prior, Prada’s subsequent jump into

high fashion demonstrates a degree of hypocrisy. Prada and her audience, at least in the realm of fashion, appear unfazed by the emergence of political figures like Silvio Berlusconi and Donald Trump, possibly because they, as the rich, white elite, have nothing to fear while luxuriously insulated. +++ The Arab World Institute in Paris bridges the unlikely chasm between luminescence and politics. Designed by Jean Nouvel and built in 1987, the Institute incorporates traditional Middle Eastern designs with modern technological innovations. Specifically, Nouvel inserted ornamental mashrabiya designs (latticed geometric patterns) into his glass facade—designs common during the Islamic artistic period dominated by calligraphic designs. Light siphons through 30,000 geometric holes, creating a kaleidoscopic illumination of the interior. Two hundred and forty photosensitive, motor controlled shutters control the flow of light within the building, an architectural staple in Islamic architecture used for climate control.

Other features of the building include a spiral library that spans seven floors, reminiscent of a ziggurat, an ancient Mesopotamian temple that reached to the heavens through its step pyramid design. This symbolic setting for thousands of texts within the Arab World Institute reveals the unification of reason and religion. As for the physical setting, the building sits on the banks of the river Seine, a historical breeding ground of knowledge and culture.

The architecture of the Arab World Institute is culturally welcoming and historically familiar. Through hosting countless conferences on Arab history, awarding prizes for the literature of Arab peoples, and launching business meetings with a diverse coterie of Arab leaders, the Arab World Institute endeavors to provides a space for constructive, critical discussions. The French government has recently taken a reactionary stance against its large minority of Arab Muslims—most notably banning the niqab and burqa— and implying that French Muslims must take a stance as either French citizens or Muslims.

The Arab World Institute is a critically needed space that attempts to mend the hurt within a society forcing the separation of religious and national identity, an implication that a citizen, if religious, must be privately religious and publicly secular. Nevertheless, the net positive contributions of the Arab World Institute are both vital and uplifting—the institute is currently hosting an art exhibition titled, “Treasure of Islam in Africa. From Timbuktu to Zanzibar.” The show emphasizes that cultural displays are both celebratory of distinguished histories and crucial in their capacity to induce familiarity with different cultures.

Encapsulating all these flaws, conflicts, and general bustle within the institute, the sunlight remains a constant fixture, enlightening all interior occurrences. +++

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

H T NES S OF BE I N G

The significance of light is paramount in the medieval Catholic tradition. It’s no coincidence that the first phrase God spoke to the unformed cosmos in Genesis was “let there be light.” The Chartres Cathedral, located about 80 kilometers south of Paris, is an architectural colossus. It is unfathomable to comprehend how this 117,060 square foot giant adorned with 176 stained glass windows and spires reaching almost 400 feet was built. Unlike sleek, modern glass structures, the Chartres Cathedral embodies the interplay between sunlight and interior space for a specific ascetic purpose. Whether its visitor be a 13th century pilgrim or a 21st century churchgoer, the Chartres Cathedral timelessly actualizes the Gothic and Romanesque mission of raising churches to the heavens.

The main source of light in the Chartres Cathedral is through the myriad stained-glass windows, dwarfing the comparatively miniscule hanging lamps scattered throughout the interior. The stained glass itself is significant: light

THE COLLEGE HILL INDEPENDENT

enters the building through a royal Mary seated with a (fully grown) infant Jesus, framed in the Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière window. Other scenes—like David and Goliath, and Moses and Pharaoh—are lit through the northern rose window. Sunlight illuminates the building through biblical spirituality and power; the Catholic devotee in its nave becomes bathed in religious empowerment—they might follow in Jesus’s footsteps as the “light of the world.” They might absorb and internalize the light that inundates them. +++

at all hours, feasting on their escape from their mother's arms. Most importantly, it is an ode to the light itself, for making all of this bustle possible. A unified chaos ensues between the library’s interior and exterior, and to me, the lines between the two become less and less clear. I look around and begin to understand just how exactly the light is affecting the mother flipping through her Bible on the couch, the teenager outside taking photos for their Snapchat, and the college student writing in a cubby.

KION YOU B’20 is refracting.

I’m sitting down at the Carmel Mountain Library, essentially writing an ode to my haven, an ode to the hackneyed, to the wire-framed brunette librarian, an ode to the Ikea-white, steel cut geometry of five rectangular tables, an ode to the angelic, devilish kids scurrying about

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SEX AND ITS DISCONTENTS The Indy weighs in...

Dominatrix Pariso and Jane Argodildo ILLUSTRATION BY Bryn Brunnstromm BY

What’s your advice for when you feel too disgusted by your own body to have sex with someone even though you really want to?

When I was eight years old, a doctor told me I needed to lose weight. So as you can probably imagine, any hope for a healthy body image went right out the window.

I now think of that girl and all the years I wasted feeling worthless, and all the other kids like me and I think: enough. Enough of that.

I want to say that I can write to you now perfectly content, and that you too can get here easily, but that would be a bold simplification. The fact is, it’s hard, and nobody is going to give you permission, so you have to take it. There are too many people who stand to profit, in both money and power, off our self-hatred, but change happens on the level of the smallest action. It’s you and me taking all our clothes off in front of our lovers and saying here I am, even when it makes us feel like we want to crawl under the sheets and die first. Especially when it makes us feel like that. Because doing so will bring us a little closer to the people we want to be.

You have to find a way to get what you desire, especially in the bedroom, while being present in your own body. There’s no getting around it. We’re stuck in our skins until they go.

Obviously, you should not do anything you’re uncomfortable with. But what I keep circling back to in your sentence is the ‘really want to.’ And if you really, truly, deeply, want this level of intimacy, you are going to have to build it.

While we’re on the subject of intimacy: think about what would happen if you were honest with your partner about how you’re feeling. Be vulnerable.

And, to be honest, the conversation that follows may be a good indicator of whether you should let that person stick their hands down your pants in the first place.

In the end, I must defer to Charles Eisenstein: “The revolution is love,” dear heart. That’s gotta start somewhere. Might as well be with you.

The only thing I enjoy about sex is the process of getting people to want to have sex with me. Once it actually starts happening, I’m just bored and waiting for it to be over. Any tips for getting more psychological pleasure out of sex itself, as physical pleasure seems impossible for me to experience?

You say that physical pleasure seems impossible for you to experience, and that could mean a couple of things. If sex is difficult, totally unpleasurable, and especially if it’s painful, it may be a good idea to see a doctor if that’s available to you, because certain medical conditions could be causing some of your symptoms.

If a medical condition is not causing your issue, your very separation of physical and psychological pleasure may be the culprit here. For you, the psychological pleasure comes from the process of attraction and flirtation before it wanes, making the act of sex entirely physical. But to experience the physical pleasure of sex, one must be fully present, and continue to take psychological pleasure in what is happening.

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Totally abandoning oneself in pleasure is something that’s easier said than done, especially when you’re at your most vulnerable. But it can be practiced over time. Remember, there’s a thrill to getting someone in bed with you, but there’s also a thrill to being in bed with someone. The next time you find yourself feeling bored or distracted, remind yourself how fantastic, special, and fleeting it is to share this kind of physical intimacy with another person. Focus on every touch and sensation, and honestly, just look into your partner’s eyes every now and then. It’s not awkward, it’s hot.

How socially acceptable is it to ask for feedback on sex given [in any shape/form]? I like constructive criticism. Constructive criticism in the sexual realm would be nice, too.

While we here at the Independent are very supportive of healthy conversations about sex with current or potential partners, the term ‘constructive criticism’ sounds a little like you’re a student at office hours asking your professor what you need to do to get an A on the next paper. But sex isn’t a test, and you’re certainly not getting graded on it.

Rather than asking for feedback, start an open conversation with your partner or partners. Ask them about their desires and tell them yours. During sex, you should regularly check in with your partner and ask if they’re enjoying themselves, and if there’s anything they’d like for you to do. That’s a good way to keep your sex life healthy and exciting, with a little less criticism involved.

Sexperts! Simple question: where is the goldilocks zone for condom storage? Under my pillow makes me feel promiscuous. Too far away is a total hassle if and when I ever get lucky... maybe I should string some into my fairy lights?

Simple question, simple answer: it is widely known that there are many Providence-based, community-oriented, sex-positive Rattus norvegicus running around; all you have to do is befriend one, and then every time you are about to take a little roll in the hay, merely snap your fingers and one will appear with a condom, probably ribbed, definitely flavored. Like we said, simple.

Hey Indy sex team! My partner is into kink and light BDSM, and wants me to be/enjoys most when I dom. While I have also enjoyed this in the past, it is starting to make me uncomfortable now. Because I was socialized into masculinity, and they were socialized as a woman (though they do not identify as such), I can’t help but feel we are just playing out the implications of the unequal power that we bring to the bedroom. Even though we communicate well and are consenting adults, how do I navigate a space where those desires we consent to are shaped by broader social forces? Do I just need to cool it on the social justice stuff and enjoy a ‘problematic fave?’

have taken a crack at it. Of course, you should never engage in any kind of sexual act that makes you feel uncomfortable. However, you’re saying all the words we sexperts love to hear, words like ‘communicate,’ and ‘consenting adults.’ You, Social Justice Dom, are making our panties a little wet. You also used the word ‘desire.’ So let’s talk desire for a moment, shall we?

The question you are grappling with is a fair one: how do I get the pleasure I desire when that pleasure is tied up with the perverse? On some fundamental level, BDSM is so exciting precisely because it is tied up in larger social dynamics. But, your conflict is born out of the anxiety of domination/submission undoing your partner’s queerness. A tough spot to be in, for sure.

I do believe there is a way for you to have your cake and eat it too, sweetness. There are plenty of sweet, sexy, perverted, queer couples like you getting down, and yes, even getting dirty. I recommend the following resources: Bound to Struggle: Where Kink and Radical Politics Meet, Salacious Mag, or even Queer + Kinky, an all-gender, queer community that organizes events throughout New England.

However, if you’re feeling any level of discomfort, you should put your kink on a temporary freeze. At least until you’ve really thought it through and talked it over with your partner. Hopefully, if you are honest and upfront you both can find a way to make your particular sexual desires (kinks and all) work for the both of you. Then go get yourself some!

Does anyone actually give a fuck about how much pubic hair their partner has?

It was just last summer when one of the Indy’s esteemed sexperts had a fantastic Tinder hookup with a man in a distant town. She decided to hit him up a second time, and he texted her back with a particular request.

“Can you shave?” he bumbled.

Now, because this sexpert has better things to do than shave while on vacation, she had not packed a razor at all. But she was also put in the position of having to explain that she has never shaved her pubic hair (and never plans to) to a person she’d had sex with once and would likely never see again. They still had sex a second time, though she didn’t budge on the shaving thing.

Yes, some people do give a fuck how much pubic hair their partner has. But there’s pretty much no way of asking someone to change their pubic hair in a way that doesn’t come across as inappropriate—especially someone you’re not emotionally intimate with. Even if you are emotionally intimate though, you’re still asking someone to change something about their body entirely for your sake. In the long run, should you really give that much of a fuck?

The Agony Aunts remind you to practice enthusiastic and affirmative consent.

Whole treatises have been written on the subject of BDSM. Everyone from E.L. James (ew) to Rihanna (!)

FEBRUARY 10, 2017

TO PLAY, TO PROJECT, TO EXTEND On and of avatar empathies BY

Brian Oakes

Avatar empathy is what makes the internet, interactive media and other forms of reality so visceral and enticing. By avatar empathy, I’m referring to the bond a user feels through the subconscious projection toward a playable character or digital entity. These empathetic projections tap into the emotional capacity already embedded in a user through real-time reaction, interface, the user’s investment, addressing of the user, and a successful use of a viewport.

Viewers express control and make decisions that do not affect their physical bodies but directly affect the imaginary, virtual version of themselves. A user can control the way an avatar moves, the things it interacts with, the way it grows, and what contextualizes the avatar as a whole.

Avatar empathy can be focused around three main elements: camera, interface and the avatar itself. The camera functions as a window into space and an extension of eyes to be displayed on a screen. In some cases, the line between user and camera bleed into one another as the user becomes not just a viewer but an actual witness to that which is viewing.

The interface is the point of juncture between the bodies of the user and the avatar. An interface requires the user’s input, the processing of the input by the system, and the system’s feedback following that processing. Ultimately, an interface should describe, hide, and condition the relation between avatar and user.

The avatar is the final element in creating a space for projection. An avatar is not necessarily an animated sprite with eyes, arms and legs, or an image of a person, but a name that refers to any sort of presence the user may control. Avatars take many forms such as playable video game characters, profiles on social media, accounts on file sharing sites, or student ID numbers. An avatar is a vessel for the projection of a user and the extension of the user’s identity.

The moment a user makes a connection with an avatar is called cruising: the act of living through the avatar. To cruise is to extend past the constraints of the body and attach to an invented identity. With this in mind, I created Desktop Chambers as an embodiment of avatar empathy. They are spaces for projection, connection, intimacy, and cruising. Desktop Chambers pull away from standard methods of wall projection or wall-mounted monitors. Instead of simply displaying imagery or presenting a pre-existing system or computer, the series presents structural enclosures where a viewer can extend and merge with the visual interface. The custom sites linked to each work do not just talk, nor do they simply display text, but rather they address you, the viewer, specifically. They are extensions of the viewers eyes.

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YELLOW FLOWER Gabriela Naigeborin ILLUSTRATION BY Frans Van Hoek BY

i. the myth of resentment There in Mount Sinai I was trusted with the tablets of stone, but didn’t understand that their contents were a gift to be shared with the rest of humanity. I took all Ten Commandments to myself, onto myself, and thus became the juror of others and the defendant before me. It’s because men are mere children that I took all those laws to myself. Now my back bends with the weight of two broken slabs that, severed into two identical parts, resemble tombstones. One I lay at my childhood resting place—I didn’t have the luxury of keeping her alive for longer. The other I clout into the boy’s grave, burying it deep so that he won’t escape, but the boy is not there: mine is a symbolic gesture that distresses more than it comforts me. They say that joy for a mother is to see her child play, but I’m not anyone’s mother, and he’s not anyone’s child. No, those years are gone and I’m left with a yellow flower with which I mourn the girl every Friday night. The ritual is always the same: at dusk, I plant the flower over her grave and make sure it is well grounded, only to unearth it at dawn, that unwitnessed time of the day when the dead whimper and the living soil their hands. ii. historical error (mythical time) Someone wrote that it’s a pity Sophocles entered tradition as a marmoreal figure of the classical era. He should have entered it as the guy who falls in love with those statues and blows them up once the love is no more, to scatter the sediments of what he deposited in them. iii. personal mythology: the hole on the palm of my hand In “The Hand that Caresses the Night,” the fourth episode of the second season of anime series Mushishi, Ginko meets a young man who has a mark shaped like an eye on his palm. Tatsu is tainted: the wound is the mark of an animal that whispers decay.

That’s why he smells like sweet wine mixed with rotten flesh. This is the only way Tatsu hunts: he purges the life off animals with a gentle stroke of his hand. This is the only way Tatsu dreams: by plunging others into dreamless sleep. He learned these skills with his father, from whom he inherited the eye-shaped mark.

--Tatsu and his kid brother were afraid of their father, but Tatsu promised to protect the kid brother, who instead of a wound on his palm had a wound in his guts that made him spit blood. Tatsu knows his brother is sick. He does not know he is sick as well.

He needs his mark to hunt, but above all, he needs it to feel like himself.

--Towards the end, Tatsu’s father killed animals mercilessly, for the sake of the hunt. One day Tatsu’s father became translucent, later that day he lost his shadow, and by the next morning he had disappeared—all that remained were his clothes, disposed as if his body was still there, dreaming of being king of the mountain. He didn’t die, he just lost his body and soul. He is still in the mountains, says Ginko. You’re also just a part of these mountains, says Ginko. You’re right, says Tatsu, but his hand keeps caressing the night.

--Yesterday I looked at myself in the mirror: I was weak and paler than usual. I sunk in my bed. It’s as if I didn’t sleep. It’s not that my sleep was interrupted—I was. I should have fallen asleep with my right hand hanging from the side of the bed so that I could hold on to the bedframe in case I sunk and sunk and disappeared into the mattress. Instead, I felt awake with my right hand clinging to my body, imitating Tatsu, who would lose his arm to the animals he hunted before he let himself become prey.

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FEBRUARY 10, 2017

2/10

2/15

YÜ//F x Dog Hospice x Invisible Robot Hands x Ky Why — Machines with Magnets, Pawtucket — 9 PM — $5

Teach In: Mashapaug Nahaganset // Past and Present Resistance — The FANG (Fighting Against Natural Gas) Collective, 545 Pawtucket Ave, Pawtucket — 6 PM

Local noise and rock. I saw YÜ//F one time and I think they were playing amplified rusty metal or something.

2/11 The Stunt Queen Tour w/ Mykki Blanco and Cakes Da Killa — Aurora Providence — 9 PM — $16

Teach-in led by Sachem Neesu Wushuwunoag, covering the past and present of the Mashapaug Nahaganset Tribe. Most recently, the Tribe has been active in opposing new fossil fuel operations in the greater Providence area, including a proposed National Grid LNG (liquid natural gas) facility (Providence) and a proposed Invenergy fuel plant (Burrillville).

Good good, goodie goodie.

2/13 Loose Leash Walking Seminar — Camp Bow Wow West Warwick, RI — Free

“Do you feel as if your dog is taking YOU for

a walk? Let us help!” Don’t bring your dog tho; this is a dog-free event.

2/15 Seminar Series: What You Need to Know About Maritime Law — County Cork Irish Pub, Warwick, RI — 6:30 PM — $10 Lawyer/author/speaker John Fulweiler shares his vast knowledge of “the interesting maritime law cases.” Fulweiler is an “admirality lawyer,” which sounds pretty fucking cool.

2/13

2/15

State of the Uterus Address: The Future of Roe v.

Wade — Wilson Hall 101, Brown U — Free

Kesha live in Mashantucket, CT — Foxwoods Resort Casino — 7:30 PM — Free

Venerable speakers — Dr. Sarah Fox (OBGYN and Brown U professor), Craig O’Connor (Planned Parenthood Director of Government Relations), Gopika Krishna (Alpert Medical School student and local reproductive rights activist) — discuss the current state of reproductive rights in Rhode Island and America, in honor of the 44th anniversary of Roe v. Wade.

2/14 An Evening With Roxane Gay — Salomon Center, De Ciccio Family Auditorium, 79 Waterman St., Providence — 7 PM — Free, registration required (via Eventbrite) Roxane Gay is the author of the novel An Untamed State, the essay collection Bad Feminist, the short fiction collection Difficult Women. Her book on food, body, and body-image, Hunger, is set to be released in June.

An Evening with her sounds lovely.

2/16 Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol — Watson Institute, Joukowsky Forum, 111 Thayer St., 7 PM — Free Glauber Rocha’s 1964 film Deus e o Diabo na terra do sol (Black God, White Devil) is a “mystically stylized” parable of oppression and landmark of ‘60s revolutionary Brazilian cinema (Cinema Novo). The Brazil Initiative at Brown U is screening this and other Brazilian films from February through April at Watson.

2/16 Xenia Rubinos with special guest Mal Devisa — Columbus Theatre, Providence — 8 PM — $10 – $12 Mal Devisa is an incredible performer from Northampton, MA. She plays the bass and sings.

Xenia Rubinos’ music is “#Avant indie,” according to her Soundcloud.

2/10 – 2/16