Seeing Through Glass | Amira Chowyuk

Seeing Through Glass: On Materiality, Estrangement and the Counterimage

Printed on Alga Carta White, Favini Papers

Smyth sewn signatures bound by hand

Small edition run

Seeing Through Glass: On Materiality, Estrangement and the Counterimage is a hybrid research publication and assemblage of original writing, photography, design experiments, methodologies, and graphic explorations alongside a meticulously curated collection of work by sculptors, poets, artists, writers, makers, theorists, architects, and other critical thinkers around the topic of materiality.

Through the work, glass becomes a multidimensional lens for discovery.

The work explores questions like, "What is material, anyway?" and "What happens if humans lose touch with the sensibilities and language of the material world?"

Chapter One, Are you material, membrane, memory, motif, medium, mediator, method, or milieu?

The body, the physical one, is an unrelenting insistence of our material being. It is the way in which we speak the language of the material world—altering it and being altered back—constantly collapsing into one another in totality and consequence. This vulnerability experienced through the material world is the thread that keeps us connected and attuned to the physical state of things. This intimacy is the checks and balances of the material world; the state of which is always reflected within our material bodies.

Sylvia Wynter’s contextualizing of the storytelling body as genre’d, nuanced in narrative, and longing for Studia—a higher, everted order of human knowledge—foregrounds the biological body draped in cultural ineluctability. Donna Haraway, Mark Hansen, and Don Ihde examine and speculate about the body under technomediated forces while Juhani Pallasmaa depicts architectural backdrops of the sensorial world as rightful extensions of bodies, much like spiders and their silk. Legacy Russell transports us into the glitch where digital skins shed and elude singular and static identities. Samantha Frost, Petr Vaškovic, and Stacy Alaimo ground the physical body in its relational transcorporeality. Caroline A. Jones transposes it in nowhereness.

The many diverse theories, narratives, and realities about material bodies and being of a material nature demonstrate the indeterminacy of the material world. The material world is never fixed or absolutely known, instead, it is subject to constant change, possibility, and consequence.

The work explores questions like, "What is material, anyway?" and "What happens if humans lose touch with the sensibilities and language of the material world?"

Chapter One, Are you material, membrane, memory, motif, medium, mediator, method, or milieu?

The body, the physical one, is an unrelenting insistence of our material being. It is the way in which we speak the language of the material world—altering it and being altered back—constantly collapsing into one another in totality and consequence. This vulnerability experienced through the material world is the thread that keeps us connected and attuned to the physical state of things. This intimacy is the checks and balances of the material world; the state of which is always reflected within our material bodies.

The work explores questions like, "What is material, anyway?" and "What happens if humans lose touch with the sensibilities and language of the material world?"

Chapter One, Are you material, membrane, memory, motif, medium, mediator, method, or milieu?

The body, the physical one, is an unrelenting insistence of our material being. It is the way in which we speak the language of the material world—altering it and being altered back—constantly collapsing into one another in totality and consequence. This vulnerability experienced through the material world is the thread that keeps us connected and attuned to the physical state of things. This intimacy is the checks and balances of the material world; the state of which is always reflected within our material bodies.

Sylvia Wynter’s contextualizing of the storytelling body as genre’d, nuanced in narrative, and longing for Studia — a higher, everted order of human knowledge — foregrounds the biological body draped in cultural ineluctability. Donna Haraway, Mark Hansen, and Don Ihde examine and speculate about the body under technomediated forces while Juhani Pallasmaa depicts architectural backdrops of the sensorial world as rightful extensions of bodies, much like spiders and their silk. Legacy Russell transports us into the glitch where digital skins shed and elude singular and static identities. Samantha Frost, Petr Vaškovic, and Stacy Alaimo ground the physical body in its relational transcorporeality. Caroline A. Jones transposes it in nowhereness.

The many diverse theories, narratives, and realities about material bodies and being of a material nature demonstrate the indeterminacy of the material world. The material world is never fixed or absolutely known, instead, it is subject to constant change, possibility, consequence, and enactment of itself.

Sylvia Wynter’s contextualizing of the storytelling body as genre’d, nuanced in narrative, and longing for Studia—a higher, everted order of human knowledge— foregrounds the biological body draped in cultural ineluctability. Donna Haraway, Mark Hansen, and Don Ihde examine and speculate about the body under technomediated forces while Juhani Pallasmaa depicts architectural backdrops of the sensorial world as rightful extensions of bodies, much like spiders and their silk. Legacy Russell transports us into the glitch where digital skins shed and elude singular and static identities. Samantha Frost, Petr Vaškovic, and Stacy Alaimo ground the physical body in its relational transcorporeality. Caroline A. Jones transposes it in nowhereness.

The many diverse theories, narratives, and realities about material bodies and being of a material nature demonstrate the indeterminacy of the material world. The material world is never fixed or absolutely known, instead, it is subject to constant change, possibility, consequence, and enactment of itself.

The work explores questions like, "What is material, anyway?" and "What happens if humans lose touch with the sensibilities and language of the material world?"

Material estrangement is named and defined as the gradual drift toward disconnection, unfamiliarity, and weakening intimacy from the material world and one's own material nature.

Counterimage, as medium and method, is presented as a response to this estrangement, operating as a site of exploratory exchange, entangling materiality, bodies, ecologies, and media.

Counterimage is concerned with producing novel and generative methods available when design participants are willing to be changed and guided by one another, unlocking possibilities that would not otherwise have emerged or become visible.

Counterimage→, as medium and method, is presented as a response to this estrangement, operating as a site of exploratory exchange, entangling materiality, bodies, ecologies, and media.

Counterimage is an approach to making and a design research methodology that asks us to engage our whole selves and be willing to be changed and guided into possibilities that would not otherwise have emerged or become visible.

Material estrangement→ is named and defined as the gradual drift toward disconnection, unfamiliarity, and weakening intimacy from the material world and one's own material nature.

Counterimage→, as medium and method, is presented as a response to this estrangement, operating as a site of exploratory exchange, entangling materiality, bodies, ecologies, and media.

Counterimage is an approach to making and a design research methodology that asks us to engage our whole selves and be willing to be changed and guided into possibilities that would not otherwise have emerged or become visible.

Material estrangement→ is named and defined as the gradual drift toward disconnection, unfamiliarity, and weakening intimacy from the material world and one's own material nature.

Bioglass→ is a product of the counterimage methodology and serves as both a philosophical exploration and material-based design response.

CHAPTER FOUR

Water, glass’s liquid, transparent twin. That pairing, a glass of water, is actually quite remarkable. A sip—crisp, sharp, lemon brain freeze. The bottom lip, the liminal vermillion zone between chin and nose, wet inner mouth and drier ambient air, rests gently at the glass’s own lip, a kiss. Well it certainly is deserving considering all we’ve been through to get here.

Included work, writing, and references by Ana Mendieta, Andrew Piper, Arielle Bobb Willis, Ashley Montagu, bell hooks, Bruno Latour, Carolina A. Jones, Christopher Tilley, Debora Moore, Don Ihde, Donna Haraway, David Abram, David Owen, Frantz Fanon, Geoffrey West, Glenn Adamson, Hannah Levy, Harriet Rabe von Froreich, Hito Steyerl, Jane Bennett, Joanna Zylinska, Julie Barfod, Juhani Pallasmaa, Karen Barad, Katherine Hayles, Laura Tripaldi, Laura V. Marks, Legacy Russell, Lina Bo Bardi, Liz Corbin, Mark Hansen, Martin Puryear, Michael Young, N.K. Jemisin, Neda Genova, Nehal El-Hadi, Olga Ravn, Petr Vaškovic, Ralph Ellison, Ross Gay, Rosi Braidotti, Samantha Frost, Seetal Solanki, Shusaku Arakawa and Madeline Gins, Stacy Alaimo, Sylvia Wynter, Tim Ingold, Toko-pa Turner, Tom Lee, Yrsa Daley-Ward, and a featured interview, Futurescaping, Dialogue with Orkan Telhan→ .