Vulnerable Proximity
74
1 28.“When I Grow Up.” Rebecca Mead. The New Yorker. January 19, 2015.
75 About The following three vignettes consider practice and its vulnerable proximities through a socially-focused lens. Like each vignette, practice itself is constituted by often unseen drafts and repetitions, interludes and recurrences. Underlying each narrative is a suspicion of existing structures of power and information, especially of those which profess neutrality but in reality operate within and proliferate normative values. Unified by the tension between visibility and invisibility of process, propoganda, and personification, these seemingly disparate examples of social practice address technology’s effect upon contemporary culture, engaging the question of how to construct and represent intimacy in an age of both immediacy and non-locality. Today, community — simulated or otherwise — is accessible in an instant, but as two citizens of KidZania put it, “ ‘on the phone, you can’t really feel your happiness...What a boring thing, just touching the screen....’ ”1
Marissa Clifford
I. KidZania | Practice as Play In KidZania, a globally franchised edutainment destination where mundane adult work becomes highly-scripted,