MICA'20 Thesis Project
Liminal Beings
speculative design, soft robotics
speculative design, soft robotics
The conceptual background of this project has come a long way. Through readings of animism, object-oriented ontology, new materialism and speculative realism, I gathered an intersectional base for formal inspiration.
The questions I asked myself revolved around the possibility of creating something that could not either be undermined to an inanimate object or overmined to an animate being. Could I make something that swayed in-between, something that had liminality in its essence?
Liminality according to 20th-century anthropologist Victor Turner is a state of betwixt and in-between. Connecting the concept of irreducibility with something that had flexibility and animate-like qualities seemed like a good way to visualize a liminal being to me.
One thing that does not stand on either of two edges, is in the middle of everything. It is liminal. Liminality considers anthropomorphic mythical creatures liminal, just as it considers a graduation ceremony to be a liminal experience. At the middle of a rite of passage, something at a neither/nor state.
If liminality is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, a breathing object would be liminal in the sense that it stands between animate and inanimate.
Something that is either human or non-human, but something that "breaths". Something that is on that rite of passage of ontology, swaying between human and non-human.
