My senior thesis critiques our current understanding of archives as something object, of importance, and complete, exploring how intangible, transient, hidden, and mundane narratives and everyday experiences can be archived and their significance.
It aims to transform archive from a noun, complete and stagnant at any point, to the verb (to) archive, highlighting the significance of the process, and decentralizing it so anyone and everyone can decide what is worth documenting.
The archives here are living - because they are about living people and their everyday lives, but because they will themselves keep growing.
How is it decided what should be archived and made part of our collective understanding and memory?
How can we archive intangible, transient, and subjective experiences?
These questions were prompted by the concept of Data Humanism, developed by Italian designer Giorgia Lupi. She believes that data represents real life. It is a snapshot of the world in the same way that a picture catches a small moment in time. This data humanism approach critiques the impersonality of a merely technical approach to data and begins designing ways to connect data to human narratives and stories, as well as critiques the role design plays in the presentation of data and creation of meaning.
"I see beauty in data. I challenge the impersonality that data communicates, designing engaging visual narratives that reconnect numbers to what they stand for: stories, people, and ideas. We should embrace the fact that data is never objective. So the more we can design visual languages, the more we can speak to the general public about it."
- Giorgia Lupi
The thesis explores different aspects of everyday life and identifies three key pieces that make up our everyday experiences: self (emotions and memories), other people (world of interactions), and things that occupy our shared space (objects, decay and traces of use.
As the thesis continued to develop, another common thread that emerged was the exploration of the concept of time, specifically, everyday time, that is how we understand and record time in our normal routines.
Semblance of Normalcy
An archive of newspaper articles and text messages between March 2020 and December 2021 revolving around the Covid-19 pandemic.
Everyday, Every Day
A collection of receipts of mundane objects and products that are used by individuals capturing the traces of daily use.
Soaked in Tears
A collection of microscopic crystals of dried tears collected from friends metaphorically captured and soaked into the fabric.
An archive of newspaper articles and text messages between March 2020 and December 2021 revolving around the Covid-19 pandemic.
The archives revolve around the themes of political restrictions, international travel, mental health, virtual learning and socialization, in times of isolation and distancing. Each entry is marked by a date and creates a collage of articles, (from specific newspapers such as New York Times), published on that date, and is overlaid with all the personal text messages connected to these themes from that same date.
The newspaper articles featured several prominent newspapers from United States and India, which were my primary source of global information at the time. These included: New York Times, The Washington Post, Times of India, Hindustan Times, CNN, NDTV, The Hindu, and Reuters.
The text messages were collected from personal chats (no group chats) on WhatsApp and Instagram filtered by the following keywords: covid, corona, virus, visa, vaccine, vaccination, online, class, time, pratt, cycle, email, test, flight, home.
A collection of receipts of mundane objects and products that are used by individuals capturing the traces of daily use.
This project was developed by asking 15 people in my friend and family circle, giving them a simple open-ended prompt that asked them to document an object they use every single day that changes shape or form with use for 28 days through photographs. Each photo series along with its metadata was printed in the form of a receipt to highlight human consumption and consumerism.
Inspired by the decay seen in the objects, I designed a font family called Wither, used in this project, that itself embodies the organic shapes and decay in each letterform, but also gradually degrades with its font weight variations.
A collection of microscopic crystals of dried tears collected from friends metaphorically captured and soaked into the fabric.
16 participants were asked to produce a tear on the spot in whichever way they felt most comfortable, the tear was collected onto a small glass slide, allowed to dry, and then viewed under a handheld microscope. The process also involved asking them to write down their chosen method of producing the tear, as well as their last emotional memory of crying.
Collected on:
Tuesday, March 28
19:26
Producing the tear:
I kind of just overwhelmed myself with thoughts that make me feel sad.
Last memory of crying
The last time I cried I was feeling really lonely. I was just kind of observing people around me and this overwhelming feeling started to overcome me. I think at first it was kind of feeling joy for other strangers and how nice it was to see them showing love to one another but then I think it turned into loneliness and wanting to love the ones around me but also one special person in a beautiful romantic way.
The hand sewn habotai silk blanket is 80 in. x 80 in. and comprises of a 4 x 4 grid of the particpants' tears and date and time of collection. The blanket is used as a medium to being these experiences together into a collective shared experience (inspired by the idea of patchwork), adding to it through the labor and process of sewing it together, as well as drawing on the themes of comfort that are associated with a blanket. The blanket has inspired the title of the project "soaked in tears" such that the fabric has absorbed the tears and our experiences as often it does when we cry.
The 2 in. x 2in. book records all the collected information in a deeply personal form that is true to the microscopic size of the tears allowing the audience to engage with the stories deeply and personally. The book is printed on drawing paper and bound by hand.
The iridescent stickers create easily conversational and distributable mediums to share these experiences and emotions rather than shy away from discussing vulnerable feelings that led to crying while allowing for a degree of anonymity - letting the images speak for themselves.
These three different visualizations taking different shapes and forms have been collated in the form of a website (it exists in prototype form as of now), creating an archive or archives. The web experience is focussed on creating a truly interactive and immersive experience such that the audience can also become part of this world. The idea is to capture the traces of the user’s interaction with this archive so they are able to create their versions of this archive.
I hope to keep on documenting more and more visualizations of different aspects of everyday life, and this website provides a flexible medium that easily keeps on growing.
Despite being mundane and seemingly insignificant, archiving these transient experiences reveals important aspects of our everyday lives that we don’t pay attention to or shy away from reflecting upon. Furthermore, the process of sharing these creates stronger ties through shared experiences.
