Divert to Bergman's Cries and Whispers.
Carnal love
wears quickly thin
a respect and
admiration that
weathers, as
aliveness putresces.
To put words to, is to blaspheme detonation
in the consummation of platonic love deferred its romantic attraction by otherwise extrications.
in forward momentum, when
the world at hand is not
besieged by indefiniteness, you don’t cast a backsliding glance.
And when he was in the same room as you, you
extinguished flame for swallowed
rage and incinerated pride, you withheld
affection or even eye contact.
Xi's plastic fanaticism underlies the journey to surpass the absurdism brimming our new anthropological frontiers. We’ve graduated from the fire to the synthetic flame, the last light you see before you lid your eyes each night.
Hovering or clambering to their digestive deaths in this enclosed system of functional futility, the ambitious choice of absolution is theirs to make. Our Sisyphean flyfeeder, the designer, is at once Daedalus tending to her infinite Icari destined for finite fate and Sisyphus perpetuating the ritual of the absurd.
Vasquez invites Xi to slip off the illusion of blinders. Shift focus to the agency of “tool use,” because fire is a tool to be used. There is no turning back after every iteration of the flame. It is at once a force that brings us together and can blow us apart.
Perhaps all she has succeeded in is cultivating empathy for the installation’s residents living out Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, performing a universal coming-of-age —a hankering quest to understand origin, to distinguish lifesource from illusion-source.
My parents weren’t much older than I am now when they left behind everything they knew and everyone they loved to come here... Filial, obedient Chinese daughter was never in the cards for them. Fate demurred.
My work as a painter-projectionist is driven by sunshine, software, and subversion of longstanding systems of oppression. I design immersive experiences to challenge audiences towards a culture I hope to be more inclusive, curious, and open-minded. In my third site-specific installation, the environment of ‘The Pleasures Gain Intensity When Fewer and Far Between’ is created with multi-channel video, 3D animation, projection-mapping, and carpet—inhabited by 16 fleshly lbs of silicone soft sculpture.
At the crossroads of self-portraiture, social commentary, and soul regurgitation, documenting bodily reactions of fear at the threat of consumer-grade fascism, the piece attempts to reconcile shame, guilt, and privilege in the experience of the American femme. Commodification of gender is juxtaposed with the absurd; a disorienting audiovisual-tactile environment of charged textures and highly palpable objects riled with impalpable attraction immerses viewers and forcibly eliminates the onlooker experience.
Politics-driven narrative aside, technical design both involved the hardware considerations of ceiling-mounted dual projectors, wired electrical and communication networks, and blackout lighting control, as well as explored software processing of 3D animation, motion graphics, video art, digital compositing, and audiovisual analysis.
A production designer and an experience director start an exhibition project together. Both of their backgrounds are in studio art. But in order to eat in 2020, your job title has to be some slant of “designer”.
The artists behind the project would be giddy to create flickers when the table supplants the screen in instances of shared warmth. In huddled solidarity around flames of our own making, be it further illusion, community, or echo chambers. Grab a plate.
Abstract
Neurogenetic disorder Angelman Syndrome (AS) manifests clinically as severe mental disability, epilepsy, microcephaly, absent speech, ataxia, uncontrollable paroxysms of laughter and constant smiling (Bernard, 2008). The single gene responsible, ubiquitin ligase E3A (UBE3A), lies in the q11-q13 locus of chromosome 15.
Exclusive to neurons, UBE3A expression is entirely dependent on the maternally-derived allele, because the paternally inherited copy is inactivated by genomic imprinting. Consequently a maternal deletion or mutation in UBE3A would result in loss-of-function, as would cases of uniparental disomy of two inactive paternal copies and defective imprinting.
UBE3A encodes a ubiquitin ligase, whose crucial function during neurodevelopment tags substrates for degradation. Studies in the transgenic mouse model demonstrates UBE3A’s roles initiating the proteolytic pathway and functioning as a transcriptional co-activator. Its action is required for synaptic maintenance, long-term potentiation, and plasticity. The transgenic mouse model is particularly useful in studying AS’s UBE3A disruption, due to the conserved mammalian genomic imprinting mechanism. In the Drosophila model, removal of ortholog dube3a mimicks AS proteolytic pathway dysfunction and proves useful for detection of downstream targets. Recent neuroimaging developments successfully visualized correspondent aberrant connectivity to clinical features of AS.
Discovery of the imprinting mechanism of antisense RNA responsible for paternal UBE3A inactivation holds potential for an effective gene therapy rescue, if target-specificity, delivery, and developmental window challenges can be addressed. This paper explores the latest research developments demystifying UBE3A pathway interactions, towards viable epigenetic rescue for AS therapy.
Cornelia De Lange Syndrome is a rare developmental disorder characterized by growth delays, mental disability, facial dysmorphisms, and upper limb malformation in a spectrum of severity. While classical, severe CDLS involves defective NIPBL cohesin regulatory gene, a subset of variants exhibit less severe phenotype, attributed to mutation in one of 3 core cohesin components; one of these, RAD21, is the focus of this study in the Drosophila model analyzing an imperfect excision mutation of its encoding gene verthandi (vtd)."
Universal health care, long mislabeled “socialized medicine” still sits as a concept of controversy, with looming uncertainties if the Affordable Care Act on paper will hold up in the long haul. It should be noted, the ACA lacks the elements of the single-payer Canadian Health Reform grounded in public administration, comprehensiveness, universality, portability, and accessibility to be truly considered universal health coverage. Examining the inexorably tied aspects of access, equity, costs, quality, and outcomes reveals the superiority of the single-payer system—objectively, before we consider its viability in the cultural and sociopolitical climate that can only be described as uniquely American."
The way she felt, sloshing time and self-scrutiny around in a glass within his periphery, was like the very dredges of her own slurried longings waking up most mornings. Equally over-macerated.
He flashed her his grim leer, its corners nudging her towards the subtext of what they both were doing out here braced in the night, chilled by the liminal between brickclad city facades.
She offered, nah, I’m not sexually into smokers, fixing her pupils to pavement to avoid his wounded surprise. Gravelly bits seemed to rattle with independent will. Keeping her gaze glued anywhere but to meet his, “I’ve hand-washed too many vacuum cleaner filters.”
Good bye, revered New York. Good bye, nihilo-hedonistic 2010s.
Still love to talk shit.
If you instill in a child the Pavlovian association of pain with care,
of cutting criticism with loving investment, of deeper connection wrought
through violent ends—does she sprout a scythe for a tongue and claws to caress with?
does she die alone or does she perpetuate—a cyclic, sadomasochistic Sisyphus
The universal image of girlhood is
loss of innocence.
While out, I’ve mastered the eye-roll dismissal graciously proclaiming,“I am a self-contained interior life, and I’ve exhausted the humor for this intrusion.” Unlike men, I don’t have to resort to violence or coercion to be rid of what itches.
He drank in her tentative upturned gaze, breath ragged as moth wings beating dusty circles about a flame.
Her grip was tight, asphyxiating. Remote. And then it was over, and she was relieved to be allowed the peace for inner turmoil. Maybe that was why she acquiesced in the beginning, coyly for the evitable collision course to self-evisceration.
the dizzy shower afterward, as i watched
myself pooling between my toe webs, diluted spirals in vibrant
last dance down the drain.
At some point, you run out of close calls. Lying in frigid bed sweat, you rationalize; fidgeting with pillow threads, glazed-over blank gaze directed at the dull wall, with the dawn creeping up it like the hairs on your neck’s nape, you squirm in some-point’s aftermath.
The week before i turned 19, i wrote for the first time about an experience w/ sexual assault. My agency in speaking up for myself, initially with immediacy, over time and repeat experience, eroded.
Cerebral concoction,
for you i crack open my carapace,
inner spoils in overflow
an excitatory abundance,
richness running down your chin
Scramble of curdles, their
fissures pulsating
in invite to probe its profundity.
Effuse unctuous on the tongue,
keys jangling in the self-loathing ignition.
sustainable partnership i want to believe in;
privately, i think—are we all, each of us, just
things for another to get bored with?
—disillusionment, the natural course of the human condition?