Love in the Dialectic of Vanity
An Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Funded, University of California Humanities Research Institute's Horizons in the Humanities Project
Viewpoint Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 2019
Viewpoint Gallery, University of California, Irvine, 2019
Jiayi Young (Design, Univeristy of California, Davis)
Yogita Goyal (English, University of California, Los Angeles)
Coleman Dobson (Mathematics, California State University, Los Angeles; ArtCenter College of Design)
Wenjie Cao (Design, Univeristy of California, Davis)
Engineer: Ye Xiang
Student Intern: Ting-Yu Chang
Project Advisor: Danny Snelson (English, University of California, Los Angeles
Special thanks for David Theo Goldberg and Alison Annunziata at UCHRI
Yogita Goyal (English, University of California, Los Angeles)
Coleman Dobson (Mathematics, California State University, Los Angeles; ArtCenter College of Design)
Wenjie Cao (Design, Univeristy of California, Davis)
Engineer: Ye Xiang
Student Intern: Ting-Yu Chang
Project Advisor: Danny Snelson (English, University of California, Los Angeles
Special thanks for David Theo Goldberg and Alison Annunziata at UCHRI
Love in the Dialectic of Vanity is a temporary public art project where the human and the machine coproduce Tanka poems. Tanka originated in the seventh century Japan and is one of the oldest Japanese poetry forms. It consists of 31 syllables and takes on a five-line 5/7/5/7/7 syllable count form. Because of its economy and immediacy, it is an ideal form for swift, and sometimes intimate and intense, emotional expressions. Lovers in ancient Japan, after a night of courtship, are known to exchange Tanka poems for expressing gifts of gratitude.
In this project, instead of a linguistic and recitative experience of poetry, the public is invited to inhabit poetic form as an embodied experience of connecting in space and time of the intimate and the private to the enlarged, the synthetic, the inflated, and the exposed. In the installation, a set of transparent and supersized inflatable mats, faithful to the same 2:1 length to width ratio as the classic Japanese Tatami mat proportion, are placed next to each other on the floor. One at a time, groups of two to three people are invited to take up sections of the mats along precut curves and toss and turn them 31 times to create changing spaces of transformation and transfiguration. Each group is promised a poem at the end of the work. The composed structures, no matter the exact configuration, visually resemble the mathematical structure of the Calabi-Yau manifold known to dissolve boundaries between two subjects while having the capacity of adding extra spatial dimensions during possible transformations between spaces. These changing physical structures, while in motion, also infer a generative process through an opaque interface giving birth to Tanka poems and praises for the poems that bear apparent signs and flaws of a machine-generated product. To conclude the program, the participants are further rewarded by a round of thunderous applause and cheering. In this work, poetic form is manifested as physical form to invite the discovery, and simultaneously, the witnessing of shape and bodies in proximity moving together through 31 folds in a public space; the interface, from which chosen words appear with undisclosed methods of translation and mapping, defines the space between lines and the space of meaning. Through the act of participation–either as an active composer or as an onlooker–our understandings of the relationship between transparency and opacity are confused and challenged. Juxtaposing the transparent and the opaque, we are interested in asking questions relating to the landscape of love, attachment, and intimate exchanges in the context of an era of hyper-visibility and accelerated reality. Our moment in history defines itself through the grappling with the age-old dichotomy of longing for love and exchange, while at the same time increasingly challenged by the evermore deeply felt experience of the deprivation of meaningful love in everyday life. Collaborating from the perspectives of art, design, computational poetics, and mathematical interpretations of time and space, we seek creative expressions associated with these topics. |
// More on the math ----- Calabi Yau manifolds obey a beautiful property called mirror symmetry, where the two spaces, while very different topologically, are equivalent algebraically. We call the resulting manifolds mirror pairs. We can associate to each Calabi Yau manifold an invariant called a motivic zeta function, which is a formal power series that encodes vital information about the degeneracy of the Calabi Yau manifold in its poles. We use series that encodes vital information about the degeneracy of the Calabi Yau manifold in its poles. We use this special zeta-mirror association and degeneration information to interpret our sensor data and generate an 11-word tanka poem. Invoking the mirror property, we map the (x,y) coordinate of our participants into the complex parameter z = x + iy which we input into the zeta function. We create a correspondence between the y coordinate and the zeroes of the zeta function, so that each y coordinate maps to a zero of the zeta function. We use 11 of the significant figures in the zero and map these to our collected library, which generates the resulting tanka poem. We use the zeta-mirror correspondence to show how we daily compactify the many curves of our imagination in the geometry of our vast memory space to one thought, which will forever be a mirror to the other non-compactified thoughts. // Instructions to Participants --- Three rectangular inflatable pieces are lined up on the floor ready for interaction. Each is of 2:1 length to width ratio true to the classic Japanese Tatami mat dimensions. Interaction is designed for small groups of two or three people with one group interacting at a time. Step 1: Configuring the Mats You are invited to take up sections of the mats along precut curves and toss and turn them 31 times to create changing spaces of transformation and transfiguration. Snap corner magnets to the red-handled metal block to anchor the structure. Step 2: Receiving a Poem See the finished configuration on the laptop screen and press a large red key to receive the Tanka poem you generated and be rewarded for your work. |