Post 18. a Ball of Yarn

This post is dedicated to the video of Donna Haraway reading the national geographic on primates.

We saw part of this video during the lecture and immediately it attracted my interest. Using simple examples she describe and analyse complex theoretical frameworks. I fund it extremely helpful especially if we relate it with our artistic practice and our research.

She is explaining how we can start our research on a complex subject like the “the production of the modern culture” with the use of a tangle balls of yarn. She says that we need to find a thread and by pulling it to untangle the ball. Taking this example and using it for my project I would say that I have to take the different threads like the emotions, effective computing, interactivity working with them as a start.

Another way she is proposing is to relate our research with a multi layer cake. The whole cake is the project itself but by cutting it we can see the layer of the themes and subcategories that we needed to work on and built our research on them like we do when we built such a cake.

Lastly she is focusing on different covers of National Georgraphic with main character Koko the gorilla. With this example she is showing that on a research we need to take in account the particular time and for particular population that we examine or that our research effect. Koko taking photo of her self, Koko holding a kitten are a few of the covers and the worth commenting fact here is that we talking about a specific gorilla which represent the common man in the current time of history. This is an simplified example on material semiotics theory which involves all these question briefly regarding the "when, who, why, what and how" of a research process.

Donna Haraway is an iconic person of contemporary philosophy and who influence a lot of people artists or not and I would definitely use her influence to my projects.