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–

]]> http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/life-lessons-of-an-intern/feed/ 0 http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/intern-001/ http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/2010/07/intern-001/#comments Sun, 25 Jul 2010 07:05:57 +0000 Adrianne Goodrich http://siroccoresearchlabs.com/?p=279 Continue reading →]]>

Intern #001

Name: Forrest Kahlil Perrine

Age: 23

Location: Los Angeles, California

Prior Location: The Vanilla Dome; Bellingham, Washington

Objective: Somewhere between life experience and logical conclusion, perhaps both.

Latest experiment in the research labs: Film shutter speeds and documentation of subject on skateboard.

Creatively most envious of: Charles Burnett

Enjoys terribly: Fauvism, and documenting projects that were built with his hands.

Conclusive Report: Forrest is intern 001 for one month in Los Angeles.  A list of preferred women are Suzanne Sontag, Yayoi Kusama, Samira Makhmalbaf and Hannah Hoch.  A list of preferred men are Carl Sagan, Charles Burnett, Dan Savage, Erik Satie, and John Baldessari. Favorite medium is currently collage. Lastly, given a $100 budget, he would create a film of himself consuming $100 worth of Twinkies or an 18-year-long choose-your-own-adventure film about a father who is a spy in the Appalachian mountains.