I hovered in the doorway as the palliative care nurse who I was shadowing that day indicated I should. She entered the darkened side room to check on a male patient. I could barely make out his shape on the bed; it looked like he was slightly propped up and in a pale green hospital gown. Besides him in the …
Tag Archives: Space and Place
The metropolis and mental life in the age of COVID-19: Delaying descent into the blasé attitude
This article is part of the series: Dispatches from the pandemic
The COVID city: Class, physical isolation, and virtual connection
At the time of writing this we are all experiencing what the classical sociologist Émile Durkheim would call a “social fact” — something that cuts across all individuals and exerts social control on each of us. Today this solidarity-in-separation encompasses almost the whole world (Davies 2019). We are also enduring a …
Dust
The building pictured below sat near Mack Avenue on Detroit’s far east side and, according to the municipal government, was an environmental hazard. Following years of complaints from area residents that the structure smelled of rotting garbage and attracted criminal activity, the building is slated for demolition. In mid-2017, a fifty-five-ton excavator piloted by a human operator knocked down the …
The Boundary That Holds Its Own Narrative
This article is part of the series: Translating Vitalities
We built a sculpture to physically and visually discuss boundary and immunity. As a conscious act of investigation for two days we instigated a physical boundary. The sculpture was built on a stairway, it is a complex place, it is our main route through the building.
We covered the stair in a fine white talcum powder. At first it was …
The Great Wall as Space-craft
This article is part of the series: Translating Vitalities
The Great Wall of China is not the barrier to barbarians it is sometimes thought to be. These days, it does not seem to bound anything [1], in and of itself. Did it ever? The wall is not an iron curtain of the impenetrable sort, heavily policed (though its flows have been managed, at times and in places). …
Spacecraft(ing)
This article is part of the series: Translating Vitalities
…“Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What were we doing when we unchained this earth from its sun?” cries Nietzsche’s madman in a famous parable of The Gay Science. “Are we not continually falling? Aren’t we straying as though through an infinite nothing [5, 7]? Isn’t empty space breathing at us