Sirocco Research Labs

Author: Forrest Perrine

• Time for Coupons

  I made a coupon and holder that peo­ple can cash in for adven­tures. You can take these instruc­tions in which ever direc­tion you want, but here’s my step-by-step:

  1. Find a book with nice pictures

  

  2. Cut out a pic­ture for the front of your coupon

  

  3. Write on the back

  

  4. Make a case for your coupon

  

  

  5. Hope for the best
  

  Published October 1st, 2010 by Forrest Perrine

• Life Lessons of an Intern

  Les­son #1: Sweat­ing for geometry

  Fly­ing over Cal­i­for­nia, I noticed how much we humans love geom­e­try. In a world of gra­di­ents, geo­met­ric shapes and pat­tern give us the com­fort­ing feel­ing that some sort of order exists in the universe–they’re kind of a visual equiv­a­lent of reli­gion. When we look at them, they say “out­side of these four right angles is the vast­ness of infin­ity and bil­low­ing chaos, but in here, in here I’m 100% square”.  Out the plane win­dow en route to Sirocco, there was this warm embrace wait­ing for my eyes:

  

  Just look at that and tell me you aren’t in love

  Com­ing into Sirocco, my first task was wait­ing for me: build a bed. When it came to beds, I and most peo­ple I know have been oper­at­ing under the assump­tion that we sleep on what­ever Swedish design­ers tell us to—would you like the RYKENE or the FLORÖ?  In the SRL though, every­thing was built by hand, includ­ing my allot­ted space to sleep, which was a hard­wood floor until I made it oth­er­wise. Luck­ily the Labs are some­where between a lum­ber­yard and a preschool, with end­less stacks of wood from old sets and rack over rack over rack filled with every mark mak­ing tool you could dream of. The tools were there; all I needed to do was build.

  

  For the first time in my life, I was forced to build my space for sleep and pri­vacy which felt like a small scale ver­sion of build­ing my own house. And because a sta­pler has been the most indus­trial tool I’ve used over the past ten years, the saw­ing, mea­sur­ing, drilling, and screw­ing I had in front of me made the road look that much longer.

  I spent my few hours in the labs sketch­ing what it was I would be sleep­ing on for the next month. There was no dead­line or due date, but my cur­rent hard­wood floor-bed brought an urgency to the process. In most art forms, you have the time to draw and erase, paint then paint over, add and remove—a process more of exper­i­men­ta­tion than plan­ning. With no place to sleep, I had to scrib­ble out some ideas as fast as pos­si­ble so I could start mak­ing said scrib­bles into a structure.

  

  My first few ideas were a bed in a box (felt too much like a cof­fin), bed on a box (fine, but just a bed on a box), bed with long legs (get­ting there), bed with legs and a mouth desk (still too open) , and bed with legs, desk, and fort fab­ric (per­fect!). After the rough idea of my bed was sketched out, the build­ing process was a lot sim­pler than I thought it would be. I’m still torn as to what my favorite part was, either the 8-year-old-fort-building feel­ing or going to the gar­ment dis­trict with Mar­tin to get my fabric.

  

  I decided to fol­low my heart, and it took me to polka dots

  

  All together:

  

  Such a direct hand-to-mouth rela­tion­ship was really excit­ing; hav­ing grown up in a world where actions are always ten to twenty degrees removed from their con­se­quences (e.g. how a come­dian can feed them­selves with­out ever hav­ing seen a plant), build­ing my bed felt like farm­ing my own food. And while the actual con­struc­tion was eas­ier than I thought it was going to be, the direct man­ual labor that went into my bed made me feel like I earned a place to sleep for the first time—tonight I won’t be sleep­ing on a mat­tress and frame, I’ll be rest­ing on sweat and determination.

  So as you can see, my first week in the labs was hardly about beds. Bed build­ing was really one task that embod­ied two dif­fer­ent lessons. The first was straight from the heart of Sirocco, a les­son about per­sonal agency and hid­den imag­i­na­tion — learn­ing to close your eyes and use your hands to make what you see under your lids. The sec­ond was about our need for def­i­nite lines and shapes; because in the end, my bed became another exten­sion of this geom­e­try we so love. Before, my bed was a sleep­ing bag dot in a prairie sized room in an infi­nite city.

  

  But, by assem­bling together an assort­ment of hard and opaque objects, I now have my own geom­e­try to crawl into that says “out­side these angles is the vast­ness of 15 mil­lion peo­ple and bil­low­ing smog, but in here, in here we’re 100% dreams”. Until next week, I’ll be here, star­ing out my rec­tan­gle window.

  

  –for­rest–

  Published July 31st, 2010 by Forrest Perrine