I'm sitting in my car, parked on the side of some road somewhere around Brant country. It's about 36 hours away from deadline, on October 16th. It's 8:18pm. I've just come from a failed attempt at laser cutting little boxes for my childhood memorabilia. I left the room in a hurry, upset at myself for leaving it to the very end, rushing, and then failing - quite expectedly I might add. I started driving, as I often do when I find myself overwhelmed. Here's the thing: at a certain point, it becomes unreasonable to expect a long series of necessary actions to come together flawlessly, which is what I was counting on when starting two weeks ago. Having other people callously want to use the workshop at the same time as me was the first thing I didn't take into account. It all spiraled from there. So here I am, a little less than two weeks later, frustrated, exhausted, typing this in a parked car on my laptop in the light of my instrument panel, hoping to achieve some kind of clarity.
At then end of this, I'm hoping you'll get a sense for what I wanted to achieve, why I wasn't able to achieve it, where I think my thesis site is located, and how it ties in to this cabinet. That sounds like a lot, and so I'll try to keep my rambling to a minimum, though I'm not off to a good start.
Anyways.
Two weeks ago, I had an idea. At the same time (and I have proof of this - see the audio logs*), I had a suspicion that this idea would be too ambitious and complex to pull off in time for the deadline. I was right. This idea came to me whilst driving to Montreal, a last-minute trip to immerse myself in my childhood, something I just couldn't do in Cambridge. The idea was this: I knew going in that I would come back with a ton of stuff, and so immediately I thought of an archive. I didn't want to display my objects, or even curate them. I would store them in a container, a modular set of boxes. Modular, because I didn't want to imply that these objects were the end of the story. There would always be more to the story. I didn't want to curate them, because I didn't know where to even begin. Because I didn't think that I could tell a story in that way. And so the one cabinet was now three. One would hold files, one would hold media, another would hold objects. But an archive isn't an archive without a catalogue or database. And so I thought of a website. The website would work in tandem with the boxes, and each item would be given a call number. You could pick up a vinyl record, look at the call number, search the database and find a page where you could stream the music on that record. Some of my content would only exist physically, other content would only exist digitally, but you could find references to both types on both platforms, and so each is a partial picture that tells the same story in different ways.
So this was the Grand Idea. This is what I thought I could accomplish in two weeks. Never mind that the boxes would need to be meticulously crafted, with brass details and hardware. Never mind that I had previously done about zero hours of web design. This was the idea, and I was going to get it done on time, and it was going to be perfect.
And then it wasn't.
I think I'm starting to be okay with that. Because here's where things went wrong: building shit is hard work, and cataloging several hundred items is harder still. I've been working pretty much non-stop since I got back from Montreal with my 7 ridiculous boxes of crap. How I thought I would get this done on time is beyond me. Self-delusion is my strong-suite it seems. You can ask my closest friends - this wouldn't be the first time I bite off more than I can chew. I have a knack for coming up with great ideas entirely too late, and so my M.O. has generally been something along the lines of "Hey, look at just how much potential there is here!" And that's gotten me by so far. But for some reason I really thought I could pull this one together, which is why I'm frankly a little heartbroken. I'm going to go home when I'm done writing this and look at the bare, unfinished skeleton of a project I knew I would have been proud of, and on Tuesday I'm going to display this sad skeleton for all to see. The boxes are kind of done, but not really. They have no hardware, the interiors are unfinished, and as we speak, the most important part - the filling cabinet - isn't large enough to hold my files. Going to have to figure that one out tomorrow. The website, again, is mostly operational, but is missing the most important feature: the search function. I was supposed to tag each entry with keywords so people could search for them without having to go through everything. This was the main interface between the physical and the virtual. As it is, they are related but entirely separate.
This is an issue, because my thesis site was hinged on that interaction. I wanted to play with the space created by this interaction, space that would exist very subjectively in each user's mind. I put up fliers about 5 days ago linking people to the website. I wanted them to track the progress of my cabinet as I uploaded content. That way, on the day of my actual crit, the physical objects would have a different meaning to the 38 people who actually took the time to visit my catalogue so far. The website was also an opportunity to expose a different side of some of these objects. The space created in my mind when I hold a DVD copy of Mulholland Drive is very different than the space created by a stranger. The website allowed me to upload my favourite scene from the movie, along with important stills. Suddenly, the person picking up THAT copy of THAT movie, who takes the time to look it up in the catalogue, understands the special significance of it a little more - more than if they just saw the physical object. At least that was my intention. A lot of these little links are non-existent at the moment, because I've barely managed to upload all the content, let alone unwrap their meaning. This, I think, is an important aspect of my thesis: the spaces we create in our minds are vast and unique and entirely relational. Architecture is this hard, immutable thing, and I think there's so much beauty in the intangible. I was trying to represent this contradiction with the archive and catalogue, and maybe hint at a way to connect the two.
Well I've been here for almost an hour and a half. This project isn't going to remain unfinished on it's own. I'm going to try to scrape together as much as I can by the deadline, now a little less than 36 hours away. I'm not going to edit this, I'm just going to upload it when I get home, as a sort of statement of intent.
The car has gotten cold. It's dark out and my laptop battery is almost dead.
Uploaded on October 16th at 10:47PM.
* See Audio Log 160929_007_Website @ 1m25s