COUCH
Name: Rhyus Goldman
Professor: Nicole Richards & William Boyer
Date: May, 1, 2024
Museum Object: Couch
Accompanying Essay: Couch that my Friends (the grid) and I put on Wheels Last Summer
Museum Object Annotated Bibliography
“The spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life”
Guy Debord
During the second semester of my Freshman year, I was in a class called Digital American Studies. Over the course of the class, discussions and readings centered around the emergence of new media technologies in the situation of current day American Imperialism. Its aim was to examine relationships between identity, power, and agency within American Studies, and to add another level of interdisciplinary learning by exploring digital humanities, digital ethnography, electronic archives, and online pedagogy. The class was assigned to make a prospectus half way through the semester, this was mine:
(1) People ages 15-25 (specifically in New York who will have access to the physical copy of the Zine) (2) who are in the pursuit of gaining free knowledge with a supportive, no bias perspective, and with an emphasis on learning through an anti-hegemonist lens (3) can do so by reading a free distributed paper (zine) filled with pieces written by the readers of the zine with the same information being presented on a blog/social media.
(4) The writing will be discussed by the readers who will also have the ability to comment on their peers' work either in a published way in the zine or in a less formal way on the blog/social media. (5) The work of the zine and blog is to encourage the creation and spread of thoughts and ideas of the youth through free education and the conversations that come from it. (6) The mission of the blog/zine Weirdeaf: The unwillingness or inability to hear or pay attention to suggesting something is supernatural and or uncanny, allowing anything that is coming from a place of genuine truth to live, thrive, and be focused on. It aims to eliminate the hate and misinformation that is able to be spread when there is no emphasis on facts. The goal is to create anti-homogenous communities in a space similar to the accessibility of the internet without the negative pedagogy that comes with being on the internet.
Around that same time I was having long phone conversations multiple times a week with my friend Piper Jassem, who attends Oberlin College. As we laughed, discussed the content that we were learning in the courses that semester, and were talking of our hopes for the upcoming summer, Jassem had the idea to make a blog. I had just read a Catherine Knight Steele piece that explored in depth on the benefits and limitations of blogs, Steele’s text definitely helped to inspire the mission of my prospectus. Jassem’s idea made me so excited. Moments later Jassem was on Blogger setting up the blog, and my excitement grew. The first thing that we did, once Kittens Wearing Mittens 77 was up, was to make a list; The List. The List had seventy-seven to-do’s, not including footnotes, that we hoped to accomplish over the summer of twenty-twenty-three and beyond. It was so fun to come up with silly, real, really silly, and silly but real ideas that we could achieve and enact with our friends. We have not accomplished all of the activities, we did, however, achieve the most anticipated and exciting idea that was on The List, number eight, couch.
The footnotes of the number eight read as followed, a. get couch (cheap) (second hand - say no to fast fashion), b. put couch on wheels, c. watch a movie in rhyus' courtyard on projector whilst on couch, d. couch in tompkins park, e. couch in washington square park, f. couch in either central or prospect park (last hurrah of couch).
The purpose of the acquisition of the couch, and an addition of mobility via wheels, was made to make the uncomfortable comfortable. To essentially be posted anywhere and everywhere the couch is, always correlating where the grid was (the grid is how we refer to us, as friends, as a collective, the name of our group chat, and the population of my small data research). Thus, making the two most important things of the couch its mobility and pleasantness to be on. Following our freshman year in college, the grid desired the comfort and togetherness of coming home to New York City over the summer; however, we did not want to put a label on the couch that made it something it was not.
“I am steadfast in the fact that, while objectively the couch has artistic merit, it is a couch. We made it with the intent of it being used as a couch. I also believe that an artist gets final say on their work when they make it, and we were very clear that the couch isn’t art, and so it isn’t.”
Z Fluger, who also attends Oberlin College (part of the grid), summed up the nature of acquiring an object and adding something to it was that it was not art. The purpose of the couch was to make the uncomfortable comfortable, so how could we as builders take that core element away from transforming a former commodity to our own personal use, which simply was not artistic.
Taking a look at the concept of home in Sandhya Shukla’s piece It’s That Spanish Blood dives into Langston Hughes’ Spanish Blood, as she studies Hughs’ exploration of the idea of home through the main character, Valerio, whose mother does not want to be in Spanish Harlem, but rather she wants to move to where more black people live. Valerio, having a black mother and Puerto Rican father, is confined to geographic compartments that he is able to move through, and as a result he likes to explore the space that he is in. Shukla provides analysis for who Valerio is as a person, describing his transcendental ability to roam through Black and Spanish Harlem, “Oppositions, between the streets and home, between movement and dwelling, between the US and the Americas, remain important as a (productive) mode of contrastive thinking, not just as fixed binaries. And the body, a preferred vehicle for intimacy, can also highlight the fictions and lived experience of contested worldliness, constituted by blood and thus registering racial mixing, and the font of languages that have cultural and historical referents.” Valerio’s movement is uncomfortable and comfortable, depending on when and where he is, trying to understand relations across races, where home is and where isn't. Valerio, a figure of composition exploring the liminality of all spaces, including his Spanish identity, Black identity, and the local communities linked with these social constructs. Experience is how Valerio received the information that the world gave him, “seemingly peripheral elements into service for expressing and working through the intimacy that was so central to the story.” Shukla cites that Hughes is so effective in portraying Valerio because he is a representation of genuine emotion and trying to find comfort in the unbelievably uncomfortable unknown.
The grid was able to acquire a couch for free, except for the twenty dollar moving fee that the building charged. Z Fluger, Ben Connolly, Pitzer College, Gus Dotson, Georgetown University, and I brought the couch from 43rd Street and 10th Avenue, down the West Side Highway, to the East Village at 8th Street and Astor Place in a drizzle that turned into pouring rain while avoiding gridlock traffic. While moving it, the couch was supported by a two-wheel dolly with a tarp to protect it from the rain (most of the time), and me sitting on top of it to maintain the balance. The now rolling couch was being propelled by Dotson in the back and Fluger in the middle, working with Connonlly in the front to steer.
While I was being pushed down blocks looking at the Hudson River pass me by, providing equilibrium, and the rain hitting my face on the couch, I couldn't help but feel euphoric joy coming from riding a couch on wheels. It was purely because of the situation I was in. It had just come to me that this was reality, an idea that was onlined in a blog made for and by the grid, which was then highly anticipated, because of the positive interaction and excitement that the idea had on and offline that our community was sharing for months. The post turned into actuality, a collective of friends with a blog nobody knows about, was giving life to a couch. The couch was so anticipated, and during my first ride, a distinguished feeling of majestic awesomeness went through my body. I couldn't wait for my friends to experience it. The way that it transpired physically, led to uncontrollable giggling. The fabrication process, led by Tilda Sutter, Wesleyan University, took a week or two; the wheels, although hard to locate the proper ones (steering in the front and locked in the back), were eventually found. Dotson, being by far the most handy one of us, took the lion’s share in building the essential frame for the moving couch, so it would be further from the ground, easier to attach wheels, and most importantly, so the frame would not break or come apart. We successfully completed the three most important tasks of number eight on the list. We did not yet achieve the other three goals in
regards to the couch: c. - due to projector/lack thereof problems, d and f. - because we did not make the commute. d. was hard to achieve because of the surplus of people that roam the sweaty summer streets in the East Village on the fairly narrow sidewalks, and f. would involve either walking for at least fifty blocks or bringing the couch on public transportation. Even though not all the goals were met, the couch got serious mileage, but arguably more importantly, a genuine love and connection for an inanimate object was formed within the enclave of people that built and occupied the occasionally moving space. The importance of the couch, derived from emotion, correlated within a small community.
In France, 1967, Guy Debord wrote The Society of the Spectacle. Debord wrote, “The spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life.” This critique examines consumer culture and the phenomenon of commodity fetishism, addressing concerns like class alienation, cultural uniformity, and the pervasive influence of mass media. When his text came out in May, 1968, it rejuvenated a revolutionary time among a group called Situationist International, which was made up of students, intellectuals, revolutionaries, political theorists, avant-garde artists, and people ready for social change. The Spectacle is not interested in the complexities of reality, it's only interested in simple imagery. The social unrest was the result of the complexities that a society of spectacle tries to suppress. The time marked France's largest-ever general strike with its inaugural nationwide wildcat general strike and student occupations and general strikes that proliferated across France; they were met with fierce resistance from university administrators and law enforcement, leading to street clashes with police forces. Meanwhile, France was the opposite of society in The Spectacle; real life was not invaded by material contemplation, absorbing the content and aligning its values with it.
In America, Erica R. Edwards published a pivotal book on the brilliance of black women, The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of US Empire, in which Edwards wrote a chapter highlighting June Jordan and her revolutionary thoughts and tactics between 1979 and 1985 on the recognition of the redefined counterinsurgent intelligence towards oppressed demographics as the core element of state violence through government interventions, such as economic changes to enclaves and communities, as well as over policing specific geographic locations. Jordan identified that control and fear presented itself as a pivotal tool for the nation's government authority. Jordan emphasizes for community members to defy through vigilance, international solidarity, and reciprocal care as an alternative tactic for rebelling imperial forces. Edwards defines what Jordan was trying accomplish, “in the US context, the crisis in capital, combined with the threat to national hegemony posed by the antiracist, feminist, antiwar, and student movements, compelled capital to “feed on” local histories and languages, putting difference to work for profit, while the nation-state worked “with and through the very local, vernacular, and subjugated histories and differences that brought the nation-state to crisis in the first place.” Edwards and Jordan both describe how to create an anti oppressive community, using archives that are meaningful from peoples’ safety, to comfortability, not conforming to the affirmation of appearances and an identification, successfully accomplishing existing in the liminality of American Imperialism as the spectacle.
Whereas, John McClaughry, a self-described “Jeffersonian Republican” and a Vermont House Representatives from 1969 to 1972, who worked in Nixon’s administration in 1968 as the chief architect of “black capitalism” had goals for the United States to make extremely localized community choices, a “human-scale” society that was made up of independent farmers, small businesses, and consumer cooperatives. Benjamin Looker's Local Spaces and White House Races: Urban Communities and Presidential Politics furthers examines McClaughry's goals as a politician, stating, “McClaughry pressed and pleaded (for) chunks of federal direct aid to cities would be transformed into personal “neighborhood improvement vouchers,” which individual residents could allocate to whatever local service project they pleased, whether run by churches, city agencies, fraternal groups, or block clubs.” McClaughry views align with Debords' need to write The Society of the Spectacle. Debord writes, “Real life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing and aligning itself with it.” The spectacle in McClaughry’s ideas is that each individual would be mined by the government. “Black capitalism” and “government aid” are both attempts to reform instead of abolish. In both scenarios, the provider is the capitalist government of America determining the centralized and state power. McClaughry’s hopes of self-reliance and independence resemble two of Ronald Reagan's core principals; capitalism for the continuation of slavery and a government that provides aid to destroy nations. Angela Davis is quoted in The Student Life - Claremont Colleges News on her thoughts on reform. Davis states, “At some point we have to realize that reform itself is a myth — that reform actually has been the very glue that has held these institutions together, Reform has been responsible for the development of more repressive strategies within the institutions that are supposed to become more humane as a result of the work of reformers.” Thus, McClaughry could have had the potential to “lay the groundwork for a political revolution in the cities,” but in The Society of the Spectacle that occupies each reality for every individual in the neighborhoods that McClaughry spoke of with absorption and alignment dependant upon where the funding is coming from.
In New York City in the summer of 2023, The Society of the Spectacle can be seen around every corner, apartment building, and subway from the perspective of the couch. Debord also writes, “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has actually been materialized.” The creation of a society that has generated a degree of abundance capable of addressing the initial challenge of survival; however, this abundance has been structured in a manner that perpetuates the same challenge, although at an elevated scale. These conditions create human consumers forcing thoughts that lead to the narrative that we always need more; even having a perfectly fine computer, we desire a better one. Subconsciously, feeling that a new computer will make one appear as superior. Social media is a modern day spectacle, where one is constantly trying to succeed within the confines of the algorithm.
As an opposition to conforming to a worldview shaped by social relations among people and mediated by images, Debord offers the idea of the Dérive: An unplanned journey, drifting throughout a City, in order to not focus on the social environment seen throughout everyday life. This was exemplified through the joy from the couch that was experienced in real life, from real participation and engagement of an ever-changing unknown within the liminality of the mundane in the space between me and my friends in New York City. The couch provided us an opportunity to experience the Dérive every time its wheels were on concrete and asphalt of the city sidewalks and streets. Debord stated, “that the most fruitful numerical arrangement consists of several small groups of two or three people who have reached the same level of awareness, since cross-checking these different groups' impressions makes it possible to arrive at more objective conclusions.” This configuration matches what the couch provided our group so well, usually three or four of us rolling the couch to its next location. Then, as more people would join us, we would figure out the next location, sometimes determined while stationary, sometimes while moving. Recently, I asked the enclave of people, who most interacted with the couch, a few questions; one being, what did the couch meant to them last summer? Cora-Louise Fleming-Benite, Princeton University, said,
“It's kind of like a snapshot of the people we were and what we were as a collective in summer of 2023 so I guess it gives some sort of cultural information about the grid. Also potentially reflective of summer in the city, like I remember one time Ben (Connolly) said how summer in the city is interesting because you get to watch the ways that people react to heat and I feel like the couch is a good representation of that.”
(Fleming-Benite)
Ben Connolly also responded,
“I also associate the couch with the locations we took the couch to. I feel like I much more clearly remember the places I sat with the couch than the places without. Because the couch has a noticeable presence, the memories formed while using the couch become key memories of that period of time.”
(Connolly)
Both of these responses match the Dérive, learning the locations in New York that a couch on wheels best fit-in while also gaining a new found emotional response to that geography, thus leading to the idea of the Situationist. The couch allowed us to see people as they went through the distinct motions that are innate to them as individuals, and paradoxically, the couch could have caused the people (us), inhabiting it, to miss the most interesting person on the street. For anybody in the grid was concerned, there could have been another couch on wheels on east 6th Street rolling by ours. Unlikely, but not impossible. What is impossible though, is to know if our potential fellow kinetically powered cushioned comrades saw us. The couch created a vessel to enjoy fleeting atmospheres of liminal existence. Sights that were not routine, rather, the couch bridged a collage of feelings and memories across the grid. This collage had varied perspectives of the space that was occupied by individuals on the couch, enabling the formulation of everything that encompasses the couch. Those who noticed the couch may have also felt the Dérive. There were many strangers who were excited by the couch, through a quick affirmation, long conversations, taking pictures, and even some laughing while being pushed. There were by far more people who stared at the couch without interacting, passing by and going through the motions of their particular day. The vast majority of the City's inhabitants, who happened to pass the couch on wheels, did not notice the artifact. Miles Horner, Wesleyan University, shares an introspective and emotionally genuine experience of unknowingly enacting Debord's theory towards the Dérive, while at the same time unconditionally living in the Society of the Spectacle.
“I think there’s an element to it that we’re playing in NYC like you can just do anything on the street, and having people come up to us and just take pictures or sit on the couch is a really interesting aspect of it. Like the paparazzi? That was crazy! That never happens. You know, and us being scared to take it to Washington Square Park because it’s too much of a stereotype, almost? I wonder to what level the culture of just doing wack shit in NYC is affected by short form video and social media. Like do people do it more? Because they know that some will follow them on instagram? And us, as the first digital natives, are able to perfect that style of living in a way, almost subverting it? The couch meant a lot to me. I think it was a moment when the grid was very much solidifying as something that meant a lot to all of us, and having this project and activity that we could all come together and do was very helpful. The actual process of creating the couch was pretty simple, though, I guess. It also exemplified a lot of our desires as a group at the time. We wanted to just chill and hang out and smoke and sit down but also wanted people to know that? I think. I have no doubt that we all enjoyed the small bits of attention we got from random people on the street. It was a shared activity, a shared desire, and a lot more. Definitely, solidified, exemplified the lifestyle and desires that we nearly all shared last summer. Community and culture, I'm not sure. Our community? Our culture? I'm sure.”
Horner accurately depicts the world that the grid on and off the couch lives in. The explanation of emotion to be experienced as something to be seen; to be the spectacle. To be noticed, for someone to have interest in you as an object that means nothing to them, could be caused through the imagery of seeing something different. Randomly, I met an artist, Jude Lives, one night at around one thirty in the morning with his work on display on the sidewalk. We had a conversation for a half an hour, sharing Instagrams, and obviously I brought up the couch. He asked about why we did it. I replied, so we could be comfortable anywhere we go. When I messaged him about the couch on wheels roughly ten months later, Lives wrote,
“The verbal expression is a couch, it's not a sofa, it's a cheap reproduction and has only utility. A couch on wheels is still a couch, people want sofas.”
Lives and Horner both perfectly depict why the couch is so intricately important to the grid. Ultimately, a couch on wheels is just a couch on wheels. If seeing the couch caused a stranger to interact with it, then it successfully made someone feel emotional based on appearance alone. If seeing it made one so inclined to take a photo, video, or post about because of its physical demeanor, then the couch on wheels is the spectacle. However, if that same person then wants to know the complexities of why the couch exists, then the space is occupied once again by the Dérive, they are in the college of the ever changing possibilities of infinity. The couch is to be sat on, it is to be pushed, it is what it is, that's why when Lives says, “The verbal expression is a couch is not a sofa, it’s a cheap reproduction and has only utility.” The couch can only exist as the spectacle to Lives, an artist in New York City, who has never seen a picture and only briefly heard the concept of the couch, it has no use or purpose to him. Lives is actively subverting to falling for the spectacle, if its purpose isn't learning the intricacy of the couch then, as Lives writes earlier, “couch on wheels is still a couch, people want sofas.”
One of the first days that the couch was rolled onto the street, it reached a demographic that was unexpected, a random person on the street, and to him it was more than a sofa. Jassem and I were on the couch, and it was awesome. We had just moved it from our favorite spot in between our homes. Now, we were in the cove of a building on the corner of 3rd Street and Broadway when a man in a baseball cap came up to us. I don't remember if he wanted to take a picture, or if he just wanted to give us fist bumps. For what? I can only assume it was sitting on a couch on a nice day. Jassem told him it was on wheels, now he was confused, but excited. I offered him a seat, and the two of us pushed him out of our perfect nestled spot, picking up speed as we went north up the block. He was sitting on the fabric that was stitched onto the left pillow; the “shoes off side” that is more of a “shoes off side if one wants or cares,” and the same uncontrollable giggles bestowed on him that I experienced in the rain on the West Side Highway when I experienced my first memories riding the couch. The man got off as we slowed to a halt, he was in full laughter and fist bumped us again and then walked south. The man learned our incomprehensible couch language. Jassem and I looked at each other, cheered, and pushed the couch back to the spot where the man first got on.
A pamphlet was published by Guy Debord in June 1957, explaining why the creation of such situations are so necessary in order to not be in the confines of a Society of the Spectacle, "the concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life and their transformation into a superior passionate quality." Time, place, and emotions were archived through a cultural landmark of a mobile couch. The memory of pushing that man on the couch is one that I’ll hold dearly, because of the couch's ability to elicit liminal space. There are memories from that summer with the couch, but more without. However, the ones with the couch can be archived. There were always at least two people with the couch, allowing there to be a shared memory outside an algorithm or documentation, through a physical artifact. Jassem responded with a reflection that seemed to eloquently summarize the five other responses, she wrote,
“The couch to me is an artifact of a passed youth. It is a material memory that holds my youth, my friendships and love, and a space and its people at a particular moment in time. I think that the couch will always be tinged by time. The couch was birthed from mine and your specific responses to dislocation from home and familiarity, and an urge to hold onto routines of youth that appeared to be fleeting. The couch, at least for me, was a way to distill coming of age routines that no longer felt tangible into a material object. The couch is as much about the grid as it is about New York. Because ultimately, the grid is New York. We respond to the movement of the city, as does the couch. Without the eyes and asses of the city that have laid themselves upon the couch, what would the couch be? The grid exists beyond the home, but it does not exist in its beautiful, loving, and collective capacity beyond physical space. When you and I became pregnant with the idea of the couch, I think I was yearning for a confrontation of the material existence of the grid and of New York. Photographs and group chats were not enough to fill this void. Today, we exist in separation, but the couch continues to hold this inaccessible, collaborative past identity. The couch is a symbol of innocence. Its materiality holds the confrontation between the movement of time and a yearning for a lost, youthful, irresponsible relationship to the world.”
Jassem provides those who are not in the grid nor sat upon the couch a vivid understanding that the couch is a feeling. The couch's inception began as a what if on a digital landscape in the form of a blog, that is open to the public, but is only known and used by the people that were aware of the couch’s existence. The couch is a symbol of community within an established collective. The symbol was online within that same established collective, which is why the coach's introduction to a physical embodiment of reality was especially special. Jassem is describing the circumstances that create Debord’s “concrete construction of momentary ambiances of life.”
In Nick Seaver’s Algorithms As Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems, he goes through the exploration of viewing algorithms; that we must see algorithms as cultural artifacts, as they are not not cultures, but they interact with cultures that they are not a part of. Seaver writes, “This vision of algorithms as culture differs from the notion of ‘‘algorithmic culture’’ (Striphas, 2015), which posits algorithms as an transformative force, exogenous to culture.” This suggests that algorithms are deeply integrated into and shaped by culture, implying that they are not external to it, but rather an intrinsic part of it, like Kittens Wearing Mittens 77. The website is open and accessible to anyone who could search the internet, it was and still is completely human run. Today, algorithms are able to govern ways of thinking
that controls how people are informed. There is a need to meet issues head on and explore the true cultural impacts that a biased algorithm has on a culture. Jassem pushes forward reflections on the couch last summer that the couch is a memory archive of togetherness. The emotions that each of our friends feel for one another transcends a physical object, yet the couch is an artifact that creates emotions through memory and experience. This is why the couch is so meaningful, it is a human made algorithmic input transformed into a culturally significant artifact. In The Imagined And The Concrete: What is an Artifact? Susan M. Hagan gives her opinion on what constitutes an artifact. Hagen writes, “An artifact is, in part, a product of the collective memory, an object that has been transformed for special purposes within the culture… an artifact is first and foremost the fragile residue of memory crafted into a mental representation by an individual.” The couch is the grid's artifact. Its intent is not to be superior to another couch on wheels, or to be seen as a spectacle, it is a couch on wheels. This is why the couch is so meaningful, it is a human made algorithmic input transpiring to an algorithm as culture for the quest for experience within Kittens Wearing Mittens 77. This suggests that algorithms are deeply integrated into and shaped by our culture, “the lifestyle and desires that we nearly all shared last summer,” implying that the post was not external to the couch, but rather an intrinsic part of the couch, deriving from Kittens Wearing Mittens 77.
The interaction with the blog was so beneficial, because it was a forum we knew that only we could see, and it served a different purpose than a groupchat. Now it has grown into a vast collection of beautiful art and writing that each of us produce. The blog has allowed us to share parts of our lives that could be hard or impossible to convey when not in physical proximity. The content that is being created on the blog allows each of us to share moments of truth and real experience, school assignments, and anything else.
In Jen Jack Gieseking, Size Matters to Lesbians, Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data (2018), there is an emphasis on finding the connection created in small specific communities. Gieseking writes of the narrative of the inherent systems of oppressions that are created under capitalism, and how small specific communities are able to work through them. I think this concept is important in viewing the couch through Kittens Wearing Mittens 77, because it adds another level of humanity and connection to the people you are not with and care for so much. Group chats and phone calls help, but seeing manifestations of loved ones creates causation to our community. Gieseking’s text looks at how communities over time are distinguished, and what traits they are able to translate, adding culture to a community. Gieseking writes, “My own project of deep archival research on the lesbian–queer contemporary historical geography is partially made possible because of its focus on New York City. As a hub of LGBTQ culture, politics, and economies, as well as the LHA (Lesbian Herstory Archives) itself, I could amass enough data from a range of sources about a people invisibilized and victimized and who often sought invisibility as protection; in LGBTQ historical work and geographies, this is rarely the case for smaller towns.” Gieseking is examining oppressed populations, LGBTQ+, with “big data'' to gain a representation of LGBTQ+ people while simultaneously using “small data'' to further her work in giving smaller enclaves of that population, being Lesbian Herstory Archives, a more accurate representation.
Similar concepts come about in Jang Wook Huh, The Harlem Renaissance in Translation: Socialism, Nostalgia, and the Multilingual Spaces of Diaspora. The time period is much different, it was in the 1930s when Korean immigrants in New York City and Chicago were reading and translating the work that was produced over the course of the Harlem Renaissance. There were similar issues at hand then too, information was being translated differently from how it originally read. The expansion to examination encompassing cultural exchanges on a global scale reveals that linguistic variations, adaptation, and translation facilitate the irregular and conversational interaction of material, ideological, and roundabout phenomena. Huh writes about the issue and how adversity was dealt with, “Although Korean writers’ engagements with the African diaspora are unidirectional, their transmission of African American texts illuminates the limited possibilities for creating an interpolitical network among subjugated populations, a space constituted by the interconnection of knowledge production in the United States, Japan, and Korea.” The network was created from big and small data before algorithmic could be viewed as culture. The work that was produced created a shared identity from the shared experience. There was not a desire to create solutions to the problems that were experienced in the writings of the Harlem Renaissance, but to understand, relate, and then come to a solution that accurately represents Koreans while highlighting the true intersections of both groups' issues, so further knowledge could be produced. Looking at Gieseking’s text through this lens, she illustrates , “I suggest that society’s obsession with big data further oppresses the marginalized by creating a false norm to which they are never able to measure up.” This is an argument that big data output will always produce objectification and mythos of facts for groups of people, especially those groups that are marginalized no matter how it is input. Gieseking says that reading big data through a queer feminist lens is just the beginning, to critically engage in data studies and the acknowledgement of unique standpoints, wherever they might come from. This thinking parallels what was being actualized through Korean immigrants examination of the Harlem Renaissance.
Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics of American Empire and Nation Building by Janet M. Davis connects to Debord’s thoughts on mass media coverage. Across the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico cockfighting was extremely prevalent at the turn of the twentieth century. The activity took shape for individuals as a form of leisure while also being political. Davis describes the insurgences of the American Empire towards cockfighting, she writes, “Supporters and opponents alike mapped gendered, raced, and classed ideologies of nation and sovereignty onto the bodies of fighting cocks to stake their divergent political and cultural claims about the rights and responsibilities of citizenship and national belonging. Cockfighting enthusiasts were cultural nationalists indeed, cockfighting nationalists who defended their right to fight as a right to preserve their cultural heritage and a right to citizenship and self-determination. Similarly, anti cockfighting activists implemented their own culturally inflected ideals of proper assimilability and nation building to create an empire of benevolence and animal kindness which, in turn, bolstered exceptionalist ideologies of the United States as a republic.” Two communities formed around the same culture with opposite opinions due to appearance. The anti cockfighting notions were brought because of the perception that it was inhumane to the birds. Perceptions that were pushed by the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that were only able to receive United States bureaucratic support in the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, because of the victory of the Spanish-American War. Anti cockfighting groups pushed a notion of compassion, when the only reason it was being imposed was due to warfare. Pro cockfighters argued that it was culture and the fights were a form of animal nationalism; a symbol of how much the birds meant to the people who fought them. There was not a lack of care for the bird, in fact Davis writes, “intimacy and violence of the cockfight seemingly broke down the human and animal divide, if only to reify it with the animals death. But the shared, fraternal spilling of male bodies across socioeconomic groups made the cockfight a particularly intoxicating and accessible form of human and animal interaction that erupted, when threatened, into a populist form of cultural nationalism worth fighting for.” The cockfights were expressions of cultural nationalism, heritage, and were a right of autonomy. Cockers understood the spectacle of the trait because it was a form of culture that was linked to emotional attachment and could be understood by other cockers; beyond depiction, it was materialized for those who understood why they loved the sport. That did not stop American Imperialism from ensuing punitive measures towards cockers, controlling the human and animal body. Ideologies of the United States were hypocritical and lied about the narrative that individuals should choose a side, even when they are fine as they are, we are forced to have an opinion, subconsciously creating thoughts, making us feel like our side is in charge of the individual as superior thought. The United States intervention forced creation of the ‘spectacle of culture’, leading to greater social division and domination by destroying a piece of culture and losing a shared artifact. Thirty four years prior to the United States territorial claim, the country was in the Civil War, which forced the creation of the ‘spectacle of culture’, preceded by social political divisions and desire for domination.
In Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics of American Empire and Nation Building, The Harlem Renaissance in Translation: Socialism, Nostalgia, and the Multilingual Spaces of Diaspora, and Size Matters to Lesbians, Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data, all the authors are emphasizing a similar message to Angela Davis’ previously stated, “we have to realize that reform itself is a myth — that reform actually has been the very glue that has held these institutions together.” Cockfighters and anticockfighter being pitted against each other, intentional language barriers, and small enclaves of populations are the glue that holds the institutions that Guy Debord suggests of how people transform into passive spectators who observe the objectified spectacle. Whereas, Gieseking is specifically trying to provide an accurate form of representational justice for a marginalized group. Specifically the LHA archives within LGBTQ+ history, the small data is within that demographic being lesbians in New York City during the AIDS epidemic to the peak of the television drama, The L Word. The focus is on, “how did lesbians’ and queers’ experiences of justice and oppression shift over time?” We can see that this process of deducting small data from the enclaves must have distorted representation of marginalized communities, and they deserve representation and reparations.
There are differences and similarities when comparing the other scholars’ work and those who make up Kittens Wearing Mittens 77. The mission of Kittens Wearing Mittens reads:
“Basically, Kittens Wearing Mittens is the documentation of the life and work of the grid, it is the creative endeavors of the grid, it is on the grid, we are the grid, it is a way to document our togetherness, it is a way to teach and learn from each other when we are apart, it is our creative endeavors, but our lives are creative, it is our lives, it is to be loved and respected.”
Kitten Wearing Mittens is a group of friends who are trying to stay connected while they are apart. This makes the eighth blog post so transcendent to Kitten Wearing Mittens, it is an archive of the inception of the couch. The couch being an artifact that has so much meaning to the group that knows the complexities of it. Hagen also writes about artifacts as emotional belonging, stating, “An artifact is, in part, a product of the collective memory (Middleton & Edwards, 1990), or as Alan Radley (1990) conveys, an object that has been transformed for special purposes within the culture. However, I would argue that an artifact is first and foremost the fragile residue of memory crafted into a mental representation by an individual.”
Tilda Sutter writes about the couch,
“I think an artifact is like anything in my mind and bestows artifact status on it, anything can be an artifact, my dress can be an artifact. Once you give something artifact status it becomes representative of something. And then because the couch is an artifact, it becomes representative to a group's motive of thinking in a specific time, for us it was our leisure, fun, imagination.”
The couch is an artifact and human-made algorithm that served as a liminal space for the grid, who as a collective exists developmentally between adolescence and adulthood, in a culture where the spectacle of American imperialism and capitalism actively and intentionally mistreats and geographically displaces groups of people and entire communities for the purpose of power and greed that are also exploited, misrepresented, and miscategorized through media in juxtaposition to humanity's universal and intrinsic desire for connection and belonging. Belonging is in the beholder, Earl Nightingale said, “Everything that’s really worthwhile in life came to us free; our mind, our soul, our body, our hopes, our dreams, our ambitions, our intelligence, our love of family and children and friends. All these priceless possessions are free, but the things that cost us money are actually very cheap and can be replaced at any time.” Those are my free memories. The joy felt on the couch, derived from genuine participation and interaction with the unpredictable essence of everyday life, exemplified by the experience of real engagement within the ordinary space shared among myself and my friends. Hopefully, the carefully crafted base supporting the couch is not actually very cheap, and won’t have to be replaced at any time.
Artifact, The Imagined And The Concrete: What is an Artifact? by Susan M. Hagan, Carnegie Mellon University (2007)
This source connects to the essay because it validates the concept of the couch as an artifact. It supports the couch’s symbolic relevance and provides direct physical interpretation of what emotion feels like in relation to an artifact. Artifacts elicit memories (with and without the presence of an artifact), making emotional relevance of an object to a group of people symbolic, which is an indicator that the couch is an artifact to us (the grid). It also provides relevance to why the couch may not be considered an artifact to someone who has not yet experienced it. This connects to Guy Debord's theory of “The Society of the Spectacle” where the couch's meaning may be turned into a perception that, if not interacted with despite society being a spectacle, it will continue to propagate capitalist agenda.
A Nation Of Neighborhood: Local Spaces And White. Benjamin Looker (2015)
Looker examines the political goals of John McClaughry, a key figure in Nixon's administration, who advocated for "black capitalism" as a means of reforming urban communities. McClaughry's approach, as discussed by Looker, parallels Guy Debord's critique in "The Society of the Spectacle," highlighting how real life becomes absorbed and aligned with the spectacle of government aid programs. This connection underscores the tension between reformist strategies and the need for systemic change. Looker's analysis provides context for understanding the complexities of government intervention and its impact on marginalized communities. More than fifty years later, “The Society of the Spectacle” can be seen throughout New York City, the environment in which the grid is situated and the location where they initiated the movable couch.
Cockfight Nationalism: Blood Sport and the Moral Politics of American Empire and
Nation Building. Source: American Quarterly , September 2013, Vol. 65, No. 3, Special Issue: Species/Race/Sex (September 2013), pp. 549-574 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/43822919 Janet M. Davis (2013)
Davis's exploration of cockfighting in the context of American imperialism provides a compelling parallel to Guy Debord's critique of spectacle culture. By examining the intersection of blood sport and political ideology across the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Davis elucidates how American interventionism transformed cultural practices into spectacles of domination. This resonates with Debord's assertion that the spectacle materializes as a worldview, shaping social relations and perpetuating systems of power. Davis's analysis offers valuable insights into the dynamics of cultural imperialism and its impact on collective identity and resistance. The couch provided a concrete form of connection for the grid within the ‘spectacle of culture’ that continues to exist in America and world today through the media that regularly creates the conditions devoid of firsthand human experiences.
The Other Side of Terror: Black Women and the Culture of the US Empire. June Jordan and the Intelligence of the Empire. Author(s): Erica R. Edwards Published by: NYU Press. (2021) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv2tr531b.9
Edwards explores the role of black women, focusing on June Jordan and her revolutionary ideas from 1979 to 1985. She highlights the intelligence of the US Empire and its tactics towards oppressed demographics, revealing how control and fear are utilized as tools of state violence. Edwards' analysis sheds light on the government's economic policies and over-policing in specific communities, emphasizing the significance of counterinsurgent intelligence in perpetuating systemic oppression. Political systems of oppression and violence of marginalized communities remain prevalent today despite humanity’s innate desire for connection and belonging. The manifested a physical object for the grid to have concrete connection within the context of New York City.
October 79, Guy Debord and the Internationale situationniste A Special Issue Guest editor, Thomas F McDonough. Guy Bedord (1997) the MIT Press
The MIT Press, 1997. This special issue delves into the ideas of Guy Debord and the Situationist International, offering insights into their critical examination of contemporary society. Debord's writings, such as those found in "The Society of the Spectacle," illuminate the pervasive influence of spectacle culture on human experience. McDonough's editorial work contextualizes Debord's contributions within the broader intellectual landscape of the late 20th century, highlighting the relevance of Situationist thought to ongoing discussions about capitalism, media, and social control. Capitalism and media, either directly or by proxy, have changed the human experience, which is an idea that the grid grapples with in their interpretations of what the couch means to them; unanimously they determined the couch was not art (or a sofa) and rather derived from a human-made algorithm into a concrete artifact that had meaning due to the connection and memories it provided.
Algorithms as culture: Some tactics for the ethnography of algorithmic systems. Big Data & Society July–December 2017: The Author(s) 2017 DOI: 10.1177/2053951717738104 journals.sagepub.com/home/bds. Nick Seaver (2017)
This insightful piece is reflective of the symbolic significance of the couch as a communal artifact, drawing on personal experiences and cultural context. The emotional resonance of the couch is described by Jassem in my essay, portraying it as a tangible representation of shared memories and relationships within a community. The transition from an online symbol to a physical object adds a layer of depth to its meaning, underscoring its role in fostering connections and experiences. Jassem's analysis aligns with Nick Seaver's perspective in "Algorithms As Culture: Some Tactics for the Ethnography of Algorithmic Systems," which views algorithms as cultural artifacts embedded within and influenced by societal contexts. By considering the couch as an artifact, Jassem emphasizes its transformative power in shaping collective memory and identity. In his thought-provoking essay, Seaver explores the cultural dimensions of algorithms, arguing that they are not autonomous entities but rather products of and participants in human culture. Seaver's analysis resonates with Jassem's reflection on the couch, suggesting that cultural artifacts like the couch are imbued with meaning and significance through their interactions with society. By contextualizing algorithms within broader cultural frameworks, Seaver offers valuable insights into the ways in which technology shapes and is shaped by human experience.
“It’s That Spanish Blood” American Quarterly , December 2018, Vol. 70, No. 4 (December 2018), pp. 755-775 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
In this insightful analysis, Shukla delves into Langston Hughes' depiction of home through the character of Valerio in "Spanish Blood." Shukla highlights Valerio's complex identity as a biracial individual navigating the tensions between different racial and cultural communities. Drawing on Hughes' portrayal of Valerio's experiences in Spanish Harlem, Shukla explores the themes of movement, belonging, and intimacy within the narrative. Shukla's analysis resonates with the discussion on the symbolic significance of the couch as a communal artifact, as it explores the intersection of personal identity and collective memory in shaping notions of home and belonging. Building on her analysis, Shukla further examines the liminality of Valerio's identity and his navigation of diverse cultural landscapes. By contrasting Valerio's experiences of discomfort and comfort in different spaces, Shukla illuminates the fluidity of identity and the complexities of belonging. This exploration of liminal spaces parallels the discussion of the couch as a symbol of community and memory, highlighting how individuals negotiate their sense of home within the context of social constructs. Through Valerio's experiences of movement and intimacy, Hughes explores themes of race, identity, and the search for home in a complex and often hostile world. Valerio's journey mirrors the exploration of the couch as a liminal space and cultural artifact, as both narratives delve into the ways in which individuals navigate their relationships with space, memory, and community.
Size Matters to Lesbians, Too: Queer Feminist Interventions into the Scale of Big Data, The Professional Geographer, 70:1, 150-156, DOI: 10.1080/00330124.2017.1326084. Jen Jack Gieseking (2018)
In this source, Jen Jack Gleisen explores the enclaves with groups that are already marginalized and systematically oppressed. Gieseking does this through finding archives and how they have been turned to algorithmic input from the start of the AIDS epidemic to the peak of the television show, The L Word, located in New York City. She examines this in order to gain an accurate depiction of small data of how lesbian identity was shaped and brought more into popular culture. She is using methods of research that do not participate in systems of oppression, which has created a need for this type of research. This resource connects back to the couch essay because the small group blog data collection that is reflective of a part of culture is parallel.
The Harlem Renaissance in Translation: Socialism, Nostalgia, and the Multilingual Spaces of Diaspora. American Quarterly, Volume 73, Number 3, September 2021, pp. 597-617 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2021.0037. Jang Wook Huh.
This source relates to the couch as a museum artifact because it describes a shared experience as a nostalgic space. The translation of the couch to other people's understanding of the inner workings of how to understand it are completely different. The only reason that the perspectives of the couch are shared in a similar way within our enclave of people is because the experiences we shared together on the couch and with the couch. Our own perspectives and narratives create a story of the couch that is unique to each of us, but connected by a shared feeling towards a symbolic artifact.
Guy Debord's La Société du Spectacle was originally published in Paris by Éditions Buchet-Chastel (1967) and was reissued by Éditions Champ Libre (1971) and Éditions Gallimard (1992). This annotated translation by Ken Knabb, published in 2014 by the Bureau of Public Secrets, is not copyrighted. Anyone may freely reproduce or adapt any or all of it. ISBN 978-0-939682-06-5 Library of Congress Control Number: 2013951566. Guy Debord (1967).
This is in direct reference to what the couch was for the grid over the summer of 2023. Guy Debord's seminal work, "La Société du Spectacle," published in various editions over the years, challenges the dominant societal paradigm of image-mediated existence. In contrast, he proposes the concept of the Dérive—an aimless urban exploration aimed at breaking away from the monotony of everyday social constructs. This idea finds resonance in the narrative of the mobile couch—a symbol of nostalgia and freedom from the excess, disconnection, and exploitation of society. The couch embodies memories of youth, friendship, and a longing for a simpler and authentic connection with the world. Its significance lies not only in its materiality, but also in its ability to transcend time and evoke emotions associated with a bygone era. Through this lens, the act of pushing the couch becomes a metaphorical journey through liminal spaces, where the boundaries between past and present blur, offering a glimpse into an alternative way of experiencing life through true connection and belonging.
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