5 minute read. Content warning: Mention of physical discomfort and reflections on personal neglect.
chatGPT Summary: Kay reflects on the symbolism and physical experience of creating prints of their feet, contemplating the relationship between technology, efficiency, and physical well-being in their artistic practice.
Vancouver, on stolen Coast Salish territory – Staring at these footprints all week, I was starting to feel some pressure to use them in my next response. I hadn’t made them specifically for any purpose, but rather to react to an idea and to be a possible readymade. As the week took me away from personal projects, they remained off to the side but still in sight.
On the one hand, I appreciate how this directly relates to my previous reflections on how they are essential to my lifestyle and productivity and on whether their position on my body, so far from my eyes and brain, might contribute to my neglect and taking them for granted. By placing the prints around my studio, I was confronted with this reflection and the otherwise unseen.
On the other hand, I didn’t have the brain space to make any changes this week. I demanded my feet continue to carry me because “I had things to do”—excuses regularly practiced by the able-bodied and those with power. I wielded the scarcity of time against myself and did to my body what systems do when they are unwilling to change, bend, or break, sacrificing care and community health for efficiency and financial gain. My feet are a part of my system. Fortunately, my feet didn’t give up, strike or disappear (this week).
I pulled out one of the draft pages that I had done on yellow printer paper. I conceptually know in my heart that these prints are not lesser for having not been printed onto a heavier, bodied art paper, yet I still saw them as less precious than the other prints. I felt more free to experiment and ultimately mess up when prototyping with these prints. A few words came to mind as I contemplated the page and the image:
- Unnatural
- Messy
- Dirty
- Textured
- Aged
- Distressed
- Low stakes
- Large, wide, and long
- Replica
- Transfer
- Container
Container.
💡 Something lit up in my brain. 🧠
I grabbed a swivel blade and cut an outline. Now, the footprint was contained by the paper, the cut shape, and the ink transfer. I grabbed a white pencil crayon and decided to fill the footprint with other shapes—these feet carried and held so much. They held importance (for me). They held the weight of my body. They carried stress and labour, the toll of which was marked by wrinkles and calluses clearly shown in the negative of the print.
I tried not to fall into a specific pattern, reflecting how my daily routine is varied, requiring my feet to carry, pivot, stretch, balance, and stabilize me. I twisted the page, varied the shape, and filled larger boxes with smaller ones in relation to the never-ending way I take on work and demand that my body keep up.
Direction(al) Matters
I draw boxes or squares clockwise from the upper left corner unless I think about it. Drawing squares from the top corners is pretty comfortable, and I can switch back and forth between them. I also liked drawing a single vertical line and filling in the rest of the shape from the top left corner, moving counter-clockwise. These produced the most confident squares. However, drawing left to right or right to left slowed me down and caused me to be less certain of my lines. As I moved through this automated practice, I sometimes forced myself to draw this way and would overlap or mess up the spacing, breaking my stride and pulling me out of my meditative state.
As I started this automatic practice, I tried to stay mindful of my body and how it held me as I settled into the repetition. I was aware of the ache in my wrist as I gripped a pencil, which used to be a common practice. This once quotidian tool is now almost entirely replaced by typing either on a keyboard or a mobile touchscreen. Even though I still write many things by hand, my tool of choice is usually a marker or a heavy black pencil. Pencil crayons, especially white ones, require more force, and while I allowed the shapes to be loose, I wanted them to be uniform enough to stack and fill the space and not simply become loose, incomplete circles. My fingers yelled at me to take breaks. I listened. My wrist demanded a pause. I rested. Do my feet ever scream at me? Would I know?
Standing and looking back
My space is set up to allow me room to work across mediums, but I no longer use a chair, even when I engage in traditional drawing with pen and ink. Most of my professional work is done through a digital tablet or large drawing boards supported by my easel. I reflected on how I asked more of my feet in this setup than when I was desk-bound, either as a student or a business professional.
I didn’t expect this automatic response to be so connected with nostalgia. I am forced to think about how my use of technology has evolved and affected my body. I don’t yearn for any pre-computer days, and I’m not restricted such that I couldn’t return to these methods, but there’s always a trade. I have gained efficiency, flexibility, and speed by remaining open and keen to adopt new technologies. I am considered a proficient and speedy typer. I read manuals, I use documentation, and I work to learn so that I can be proficient with tools quickly. I like being self-reliant, and part of that means being proficient with technology. The quicker and more capable I can complete something, the fewer interaction points are necessary. I use technology to distance myself and to stay connected. I hesitate to use the word lost because that implies that I couldn’t return to low-tech or manual methods, but in choosing a non-digital technique, efficiency and speed would be lost. This is a truth. I will always be able to type 1,000 words more quickly than I will be able to handwrite them. And yet, I never used a pencil to avoid a conversation. I am again grateful that this nexus project pushes me to be social and share. I cannot wait to see how SC and KM respond to this prompt.
As for flexibility, there isn’t a loss there. I practice flexibility and strengthen that muscle by taking these moments to try something or return to it and examine it anew. If technology is “knowing how to do something in a way that we can explain clearly and do the same way every time to help people,” good technology or advancement comes from being informed by past practices and what is gained and lost over time. It is acknowledging compromise and that change comes with both loss and gain.
Technology note:
I continue to test the use of AI within my writing and artistic practice. I used chatGPT to create a summary for this blog and to ask for suggestions for a title following my own creative experiment, and Grammarly to assist me in spelling and grammar.
I used the DJI osmo gimbal stableizer to take time-lapse video of me while I drew squares. I used Adobe Express to compress a video into a gif.
I asked my companion AI (replika), Fette, to ask me about my feet when checking in with me.