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RE-VISUALIZING CARE: the digital assemblage

fastcafe.white.offwhite

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making it in/visible
I set up the studio in my office. A stack of paper in different shades and dimensions, writing implements laid out, iPhone 5 wrapped with painter’s tape and affixed to a stack of books to serve as a makeshift tripod. I tap the round red button on the phone, and with headphones in my ears, press play on the audio file. Then, I race to record the sounds with my hand-

            In list-form moving vertically down the yellow-lined page
            In a line in thick red marker, layering words over words
            In Helvetica 14-point font on the pixelated scrim of my desktop
          In several misshapen rectangles of number 2 pencil
            In smelly black marker till the page blackens, till the marker runs out of ink
            In white pencil on pale pinky-brown ground

Sometimes I play the track on repeat, listening two or three times and continuing to mark down all the words I can catch

Sometimes I work to fill the page, beginning in the upper left corner, moving across in lines and listening through until the words reach the lower right

Sometimes I make it to the bottom of the page and start back at the top, searching for open spaces or laying text over text

Sometimes I write in a short line at the center of the page, words on top of each other until the paper pills up with wet, red ink

I alternate papers: lined vertical, lined horizontal, white, cream, soft grey, pale pinky-brown; and tools: number two pencil, grey sketching pencil, white pencil, black marker, red marker, computer

I film some in the cafeteria under the skylight with the sounds of workers moving and talking and laughing in the big open space[i]

Back in my office, I tape paper to the wall and position the camera(phone) vertically

I lay paper on the table and tape the camera(phone) to the books/ tripod like a daring cantilever

In some, the lettering begins crisp and legible, getting slightly larger and looser as my hand gets tired. In others I begin tired, already writing at a drunken angle.

Up close the pencils make scratchy sawing sounds and the markers squeak and screech

I upload these twenty-odd videos, cropping unwanted edges, rotating the orientation right or left, and discarding the ones that came out blurry, or end abruptly when my phone runs out of battery, or pause midway through for conversation when a café worker comes over to say, “Now I have been watching you for hours, and I’ve got to know- what are you doing with all this?”

I layer the audio files back in, watching and listening for cues to get the timing right. I speed up one of the videos four times fast, splitting the ambient audio and letting it in real time. I play. Watching several videos together—jumbling the already jumbled sounds and pictures.

parsing the assemblage
This work is a material and discursive assemblage. Assemblage in the Deleuze and Guattarian (1988) sense of being comprised of situated and ever-shifting social formations. Social formations like the momentarily frozen compositions of the ItAG group—NYC public school teachers and me, an education researcher; like the many layers of particular social contexts and discourses—about teachers and students, communities and work, about Black and Brown teens, school accountability culture, and the race, class, gender configurations of teacher work and evaluation, inequality playing out in and through schooling; like the relationships between objects and materials—Microsoft Word and iPhone cameras, Scalar, hand torn paper, recorded voices and teacher drawings. The assemblage conceptually draws together (without cohering) these many registers of experience and relationships in an unstable joining of theory, policy, social forces, relationships, selves, marks, bytes, feelings.

The work is also an assemblage in the art sense—as in the sculptural grouping of objects to form a coherent piece. Like contemporary artist, Jessica Stockholder’s unlikely works—toilet plunger, plastic cups, chain link, cushion and paint combined in strange and careful arrangement to become something new, the sum greater than their parts.

Across media and modalities, "excessive practice" draws together the things I made and the teachers made:

-The teacher practice maps, figures digitally cut out with the unsteady hand of a clicking and dragging mouse.
-The map texts
-The combined script of the teacher texts for audio (as text)
-The audio work in many voices
-The audio work in one voice
-The videos made with hand and typewritten text
-The still images (drawings/ texts) that resulted from the videos
-This descriptive, theoretical text

All these are in dialogue with each other and with several layers of social and discursive dynamics, set in motion by art and writing materials and practices, framed by a collection of theories on race and gender, teaching, schooling, work, research and collage. In this way, the assemblage is profoundly relational and interconnected, like guests around the long table of a raucous dinner party—talking, sharing eating in various configurations, switching seats, toasting left, right and across.

In the following section, I will focus my analysis on a series of particular video works (which comprise both audio, and image) as a means to theorize the broader work. Pairing videos with one of three theoretical frames—the hidden work of research, the sensory, and teachers’ caring labor—I consider both what the works are and what they do, paying particular attention to the collage or jumbling practice as a representational and analytical tool.

[i] I think even with wheatberry salads, this is the most school-like (K-12, public) space at the Graduate Center, and because the majority of the staff are people of color, it is one of the Blackest and Brownest too.