In this six-part column, curator and cultural critic james taylor-foster explores spatial and design imaginaries through the lens of the body. Rather than looking at the systems we have constructed to understand the world, these texts explore our own visceral construction to reveal something of how we orient and experience life. This column pauses to consider the unusual relationships between the shapes of ourselves and the designed world.
Charles Darwin described weeping as “the secretion of tears from a blow outside the eye.”1 It’s perhaps the least emotional description of a fundamentally emotive act imaginable. Still, tears are funny, fickle things. What are they for? Moisturising — probably. Signalling — likely. Moral indignation — certainly. The body can compose three very different types of tear: basal, reflexive, and psychic. The former are intended to keep the cornea smooth, lubricating the eye. The second type respond to irritants, again in the interest of comfort and functionality. Only the latter, which emanates from a cloud-shaped gland known as the lacrimal system, emerge emotionally. Psychic tears tell us something about ourselves. They can be faked, but they are phenomenally real.
Psychic tears tell us something about ourselves. They can be faked, but they are phenomenally real.
From the fluid-filled pockets of the interstitium to our 1.5 gallons of blood, our bodies are mostly fluid. It’s said, for instance, that we produce 500mg of cerebrospinal fluid, the solution that surrounds the brain, during a day. Given the quantity of liquid in and of us, a single tear might feel unremarkable. A psychic tear, however, is a full-body experience: it changes our breathing, our muscles convulse, and the limbic system — the slice of our neurology that manages emotion and behaviour — is animated. It is a spacious, intimate, delicate, symbolic message: a liquid expression of the shifting sands of our internal landscapes that transcends words and touch. Tears rolling down a cheek beg to be interpreted, even if the psychic-secreter is themselves unsure of what they want to communicate.
Referential drawing by james taylor-foster (2024).
From cuteness and limerence to fascia and the plastic mind, Gutted has tried to point towards nascent design imaginaries that lie beneath our nose. The body is that thing that we are all in relationship to and yet, at least in my case, know so little about. This series of soft studies reveals that wet, slippery ideas buttress the worlds that we build and the illusions that persist. Just as a single teardrop contains a potent potion of chemicals, such stories serve as a reminder that there is an intricate mix of open-ended realities that coexist fluidly, elastically, and beyond the contours of our collective understanding. I find this idea comforting, and pine for the day when a shared awareness of this soaks into the ways in which we bend our material and immaterial environments to our collective will. We are, after all, soft beings in an increasingly spiky world.
Just as a single teardrop contains a potent potion of chemicals, such stories serve as a reminder that there is an intricate mix of open-ended realities that coexist fluidly, elastically.
Every now and then, I rewatch the final episode of Pendleton Ward and Duncan Trussel’s The Midnight Gospel. Set in a pastel-coloured dimension called the Chromatic Ribbon, a simulation farmer — Clancy Gilroy — travels through psychedelic worlds on the edge of disaster by way of an illegal multiverse simulator. The episode Mouse of Silver is an interview with Trussel’s mother, Deneen Fendig, and was recorded in 2012.2 Both characters — mother and son — experience the complete cycle of life, while chewing over what it means to live and lose. Fendig had been battling stage four metastatic breast cancer for four years, and had been told repeatedly that she had not long left to live.
We are a part of the whole and everything in the whole transforms all the time. It changes form; transfigures
One scene of the episode returns to me time and again. “It's easier to go with the flow of that particular river than it is to try to fight it,” Fendig suggests. “If you look at the world, you see things appearing and disappearing. And humans are a part of the whole of that — humans appear and they disappear...” Lighting a candle, she continues: “...Off the face of the earth. That just happens. Our egos personalise it and we consider ourselves special cases. But we’re really not. We are a part of the whole and everything in the whole transforms all the time. It changes form; transfigures.”
Trussel responds to his mother: “You’re a special case. And I know there's no way to stop the heartbreak. What do you do about that?”
“You cry,” Fendig replies. “You cry.”3
Bio
james taylor-foster is a writer, cultural critic, and curator of design and digital culture trained in architecture. They are the curator of contemporary architecture and design at ArkDes, and have developed a number of curatorial projects in Stockholm including Cruising Pavilion: Architecture, Gay Sex and Cruising Culture and Space Popular: Value in the Virtual, alongside public installations with Studio Ossidiana, Swedish Girls, and others. They curated WEIRD SENSATION FEELS GOOD – the first museum exhibition to explore the culture and creative field of ASMR, currently touring. Most recently, they worked with Joar Nango and collaborators to present Girjegumpi: The Sámi Architecture Library in the Nordic Pavilion at the 18th International Architecture Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia. Their first collaborative collection of essays, softspot, was published in 2021 (InOtherWords).
Credits:
Cover image: Martin Simonic (2023)
