t-art magazine / volume 2

t-art magazine / volume 2

resilience SPRING 2022

t-art magazine exists at the intersection of art and technology to create a dialogue between the two seemingly disparate fields.

By bridging the gap between artists and innovators within the Penn community and beyond, our publication explores the collaborative potential to push the boundaries of art and design.

t-artmagazine.com

Editors’ Letter

Eleanor Shemtov and Adrianna Brusie

Dear Reader, We are thrilled to introduce the second volume of t-art magazine and our very first exhibition Resilience: Art and Design in Times of Uncertainty.

Since the founding of t-art magazine, our goal has been to provide a platform for local emerging artists and innovators in Philadelphia to connect and collaborate outside of their communities, from different academic environments to sometimes distant neighborhoods. We found the artistic community to be so fragmented, and one of our ideas from the beginning was to organize an exhibition that would engage meaningfully beyond our campus with the city’s diverse group of creators and bring them together through this project.

As we were choosing a theme for this volume and exhibition, we wanted one that would feel relevant to the current moment and what we have been living through over the course of the past two years, since the initial launch of our digital publication in April 2020. t-art magazine’s juried exhibition, Resilience: Art and Design in Times of Uncertainty, highlights works by fourteen artists that speak to the individual and familial, socioeconomic and historical, and the political t-art magazine / volume 2

and environmental aspects of resilience. These artists represent various schools including Drexel University, Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the College of Arts & Sciences and Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania.

We would like to thank our talented team of writers, editors, artists, and designers who helped to develop this issue along with editorial direction from Sriya Choppara. The exhibition was curated by Avery Givens Nardone, Caroline Jones, and ourselves, and will be held at the University City Arts League in Philadelphia from May 3 through May 24, 2022. This project would not have been possible without the generous support of the Kelly Writers House Creative Ventures Fund and help and guidance from Zoë Rayn Evans at the University City Arts League.

We hope you enjoy this selection of works and walk away feeling inspired by their stories and with a new understanding of what resilience can mean.

Eleanor Shemtov and Adrianna Brusie, Co-Editors-in-Chief 1

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An Introduction to Resilience: Art & Design in Times of Uncertainty ADRIANNA BRUSIE

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Multimedia Oral History Archive GENERATION PANDEMIC

20 Memory, History and Diaspora in Ukraine:

Manuel Herz on the Babyn Yar Synagogue DARYA BERSHADSKAYA

33 The Past, Present, and Future of Biodesign:

A Discussion with Orkan Telhan EMRE GULER

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42 Fireworks & The Human Call for Wonder WES MATTHEWS 48 Nihilistic Humor: Lea Devon Sorrentino

and Natalie Hijinx at Vox Populi ADRIANNA BRUSIE

52 The Lovers: Emails With Lua Beckman CAROLINE JONES

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An Introduction to Resilience: Art and Design in Times of Uncertainty Words ADRIANNA BRUSIE

We often think of Resilience as toughness: the ability to overcome, to persevere, to recover from difficulties. Our challenges are to be conquered and left behind. It’s the ability to not let our stories and our setbacks define us.

In actuality, this definition is incomplete. Resilience is not simply overcoming; this idea of challenges as something that we simply “get through” in a linear projection neglects the very forces that make us who we are, like memory, change, and the ability to adapt. Our traumas shape our routines, belief systems, and the way we relate to one another.

2020 was a year of pause. The collective shock created by the pandemic rippled through our social fabric and trickled down into our most personal lives. It was a call for transformation with respect to every aspect of the world. Who are we when we are alone? What are our places in society? How can we become part of something bigger than ourselves?

This exhibition is a response to the ongoing sense of uncertainty that we continue to carry in a “post”-pandemic world, bringing together artists from a variety of backgrounds and mediums to share the new resilience they have been building over the past two years. In a world where the desire to relate and connect with one another has been amplified, this exhibition bridges new connections and relationships between young artists from different colleges across Philadelphia.

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STORM “X” BREWER Soulholder, 2020 Ceramic clay 11 x 9 x 6 inches Resilience

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HAINUO SHI Nian Ye Fan (New Year's Eve Dinner), 2022 Sequins and oil on canvas 59 x 59 inches

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Several artists in this exhibition explore resilience through a personal and historical lens. Storm “X” Brewer’s Soul Holder speaks for the collective trauma shared by people of color. At a time when more serious conversations related to systemic racism are coming to surface, this work responds to the lack of body autonomy given to the Black community. An extremely personal piece, Soul Holder brings attention to ongoing violence towards people of color through an interruption. As Storm put, “my ashes and my locs must be placed in this vessel since people of color, for so many years, were not able to decide where their bodies resided let alone where their soul resided.”

In Nian Ye Fan (“New Year’s Eve Dinner”), Hainuo Shi portrays a collective sense of hope and isolation as part of her Shamate series. Shamate began as a marginal group in China but grew in popularity during the 2000s and early 2010s. They primarily consisted of post-90s migrant workers or children of rural migrant workers who formed family clans on the internet and migrated to cities, birthing a countercultural, nonmainstream movement. Shamate was one of the first aesthetic internet subcultures that arose in China. The painting depicts four Shamate sitting at a round yellow table, symbolizing the full moon and a state of waiting and hope for reunion with their family for the holiday, according to Shi. The bold colors and style of the women contrast with a sense of longing and neglect; despite their shared resilience through their belonging in this subculture, they also experience loneliness after separation from their lower-class upbringing.

Alhough their own rejection of their socioeconomic status brought about the aesthetic, it has also left them neglected and continually marginalized.

Another recurring aspect of resilience throughout this exhibition is abstraction as reflection of adaptation. In her series The Content of Memory, Amy Krimm examines resilience through the lens of familial memory. Taking film photographs from her father’s childhood, she cross stitches over the faces of her relatives and fragments of the landscapes to create a pixelated effect. This process of embroidery simultaneously obstructs and brings attention to the image, demonstrating how memories and narratives transform over time. While the cross stitches add a third dimension to these images, they also hide the preexisting details, similar to how the nuances of memories are forgotten over time. Remembrance is not a process of passivity, but an active alchemization of the stories that came before us. As put by Krimm, “Embroidery itself is an act of resilience.”

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AMY KRIMM The Content of Memory, 2020 Film photographs and embroidery floss 3 x 5 inches each (clockwise from top left): Hans A. on Buchanan Pass, Aug. 1 The Sand Dunes, June August 19, 1976 The Garden of the Gods, Mar. 1975 Resilience

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Sudeep Bhargava’s Distortions: Bucks County no.1 explores a similar notion of interaction through manipulation with respect to nature. Using a 35mm color photograph, Bhargava manipulates an image of trees and prints it onto a 40-inch silk panel, transforming the original image into an abstraction.

As put by the artist, this process “resists definition […] blurring the lines between image creation and reproduction.” He also raises the question of whether this abstraction is “decorative” or documentary, highlighting the extractive aspect of human interactions with non-human natures. This process of abstracting the natural world creates distance between our constructed ideas of nature and the reality of the relationships between humans and the environment. In this way, Bhargava brings attention to how our collective environmental destruction intrudes into our own psyches.

Spyglass offers a more optimistic take on our relationships with nature. In this painting transformed through digital editing, Kate Coyne collages images and patterns from natural and man-made environments to create a colorful kaleidoscope that synthesizes elements of urban and natural landscapes. Coyne mentions how moving to Philadelphia from her rural upbringing left her feeling disconnected and out of place in the urban environment. “Spyglass is a representation of a realization—a realization that no matter where I find myself, I can define my experience and shape my environment. I can choose to see nature in the unnatural, and I can begin to create the unnatural from nature. We see what we choose to, but in the end, everything is just earth and sky,” describes the artist.

This selection of works featured in Resilience: Art and Design in Times of Resilience is displayed along with additional works by ten other young artists including Alan Jinich and Max Strickberger, Ash Garner - THECOLORG, Eleanor Shemtov, Hannah Pacitti, Kristina Denzel Bickford, Lara Bros, Neill Jordan Frianeza Catangay, Kate Coyne, Laura Li 李婧宜, and Talia Valentini.

From an oral history archive to experimentation with AI, works in this exhibition highlight the multifaceted nature of resilience and the range of ways in which we respond to hardship. These artists alchemize their stories into new expressions of personal and collective narratives.

They show that what’s important is not what happens to us but what we do with it.

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SUDEEP BHARGAVA Distortions: Bucks County no. 1, 2021 35mm color film on silk 40 x 60 inches Resilience

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KATE COYNE Spyglass, 2022 Acrylic, collage, digital manipulation 24 x 24 inches

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TALIA VALENTI Good Talk, 2022 Film and digital manipulation 24 x 36 inches

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Generation Pandemic is an oral history archive that documents the impact of COVID-19 on young adults in America. It explores how the pandemic has exacerbated tensions intrinsic to young adulthood, highlighting how uncertainty has influenced major life decisions and future plans.

During the spring of 2021, Max Strickberger and Alan Jinich, seniors at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted over 80 interviews with 18-25 year olds, meeting people across 16 states and 7,300 miles. Their stories reveal generational themes of sudden movement and entrapment, delayed independence, introspection, and attempts at self-realization.

MAX STRICKBERGER & ALAN JINICH Generation Pandemic, 2021 – ongoing Multimedia oral history

Photos by Alan Jinich.

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Ashlynn, 18, works the McDonald’s drive through in Greensboro, Alabama. Just one month from graduating high school, she wonders if online college will be worth the cost if she doesn’t get a scholarship.

Toño watches cattle cross the US-Mexico border in Santa Teresa, New Mexico. Due to pandemic closures of meat processing plants and drought, Toño and his 23-year-old coworker Jesus became overburdened by work in the winter.

Couvisa, 26, once made hundreds of dollars a week street performing in Chicago. His income evaporated when the pandemic kept tourists away and local traffic home.

“You couldn’t see nobody outside.”

Sometimes he would play for the whole day only to make $15.

Jamie (left) and her boyfriend, AJ, started dating in college until they were sent home because of the pandemic. They drifted apart. Months later, AJ released a song on YouTube about Jamie and they began talking again. AJ later found a job near Jamie and they’ve shared a home with her family since then in Victor, Idaho. “Sometimes I wonder if covid never happened, would we still be together?” she says.

This 23-year-old Native American man—who wears his late mother’s bell and feather charm—became a father in 2020. But job shortages near his New Mexico Pueblo and a debilitating heroin dependence made parenting difficult. He eventually found part-time jobs but wasn’t making enough money, so he said he started stealing from stores to support his son: “He’s my little man, my everything.”

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Raul, 35, shows us how to plant potatoes in his family farm in El Guique, NM. He's one of the youngest farmers in the region.

During the first summer of the pandemic, Blake, 22, was busy training at Marine Corps Officer Candidate School where he had to do all his workouts in a mask. Back home in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, he worked for Apple Support where he dealt with customers across the country stressed from COVID restrictions. “They didn’t understand that I was going through the same thing they were.”

Kayla Diallo, 23, waves to her students at KIPP Destiny Elementary in Dallas, Texas. It's her first year in Teach For America.

Ms. Diallo's students at KIPP Elementary in Dallas, TX.

Tim, 23, shows us around his hometown of Window Rock, Navajo Nation where he works for the tribal government. After Penn State went virtual, he moved back home where the death rate from COVID was 9x higher than the rest of the country.

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Read the stories and see more of their work at generationpandemicproject.com @generationpandemic_ 19

Memory, History, and Diaspora in Ukraine: Manuel Herz On The Babyn Yar Synagogue Words DARYA BERSHADSKAYA 20

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Disorienting: that’s what it was like to hear early reports of Russian troops stationed on Ukrainian borders in mid-January. I was 13 when Euromaidan started, when my parents first explained Donbas and my teachers began asking me about Crimea— honestly, I didn’t know what to say then. Watching this wave of news happen again today prompted my search for a person whose work felt… Ukrainian. I came to find Manuel Herz’s Babyn Yar Synagogue, a project that captures the overwhelming intensity of death, of fear, of the Holocaust, of Ukraine, of religion and ritual and sacrifice and memory. The story of Babyn Yar is a study of the attitude our society maintains towards crimes against humanity as we watch them happen before us. Babyn Yar’s past was not defined by the people whose lives it now buries; instead, it was narrated by Soviet efforts to erase evidence that the massacre ever happened. But when we close the door on exploring painful histories, we rob people of their right to answer a profoundly human question: “where did my family go?”

When I first began writing this article, I knew my motivation would inevitably draw from my family’s own history—more precisely, from a lack thereof.

Learning about the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and the space that Judaism held in these regions makes me confront the heartbreaking thought that I have lost roots in my family’s story, that this fractured past is both profoundly mine and somehow unknown to me.

My parents and I came to the U.S. from Ukraine with the help of a Jewish refugee resettlement program, and yet I did not grow up having any meaningful understanding of what religion carries with it: this is what it means to come from a history where religious practice, openness, and community is a privilege afforded to few.

For 80 years, nothing stood on the site of the Babyn Yar Memorial. When Ukraine gained independence from the USSR in 1991, officials erected a Menorah monument nearby the grounds. Manuel Herz’s Babyn Yar Synagogue was the first building to be constructed on a land that had been barren of its own beauty and truth for decades. It is extraordinary to think that a synagogue was chosen to break the agonizingly silent legacy Babyn Yar held for so long. It is also what connects me to Herz’s project the most: this idea that life perseveres, that in coming to appreciate the complexities of our pasts, we build resilience.

Courtesy of Iwan Baan.

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The war in Ukraine began a week after I interviewed Manuel. It has made writing this article very painful and confusing for me because I am writing about a land and people that is once again contested, once again fighting to maintain their permanency in our shared human history. It is a privilege to write about Manuel’s architectural work, and when we spoke, he was humored by my confession that I couldn’t even believe he agreed to speak to me, that I was scared to not do justice to the synagogue he built. I wanted to write this article for my family, for our journey, and for a more nuanced understanding of what Judaism can be and signify. And most importantly, I want to write this for the people of Ukraine—my heart aches every time I think about a culture and a people I was raised to love so much and so deeply. Ukraine’s multifaceted existence in Eastern Europe has been challenged, misunderstood, and disparaged since its people’s beginnings.

On September 19th, 1941, German forces occupied the city of Kyiv, the present-day capital of Ukraine, and set off explosives that tore through the region and ravaged civilian homes. To this day, the German encirclement of Kyiv during the Battle of Kyiv is considered the largest encirclement in the history of warfare.

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When a public notice was released on September 26th, 1941, urging all Kyivan Jews to gather at Babyn Yar for deportation, it is understandable why people trusted it. Nazi soldiers expected about 5,000 Jews to meet at Babyn Yar but were met with over 30,000 lives. Families were hopeful for their own resettlement, giving up luggage and valuables nearby an evacuee railway station; the moment seemed to make sense, they were finally running to safety. Instead, in the next 36 hours, SS officers and Soviet allies murdered about 35,000 Jews in the outskirts of Babyn Yar, a place whose name translates to “Grandmother’s Ravine” and was once home to several of the city’s Jewish cemeteries. The first two nights at Babyn Yar witnessed one of the largest single massacres in Holocaust history. In the months that followed, more than 100,000 civilians were murdered on the site, including Jewish people, Roma people, prisoners of war, Ukrainians, and people receiving treatment at the Ivan Pavlov Psychiatric Hospital. Prisoners of the Syrets Concentration Camp were forced to conceal the atrocities at Babyn Yar—this is why most of the massacre’s victims remain nameless. Of the lives lost, robbed, and buried at Babyn Yar, only 28,000 have been identified to this day. t-art magazine / volume 2

The Babyn Yar Holocaust Memorial Center is an international non-profit that seeks to transform Babyn Yar from a symbol of devastation to one of thoughtful remembrance. Its founding members are prominent public figures, philanthropists, and politicians, including Natan Sharansky, a political prisoner of the former Soviet Union and head of The Jewish Agency from 2009-2018, Irina Bokova, the former Director-General of UNESCO, and Joschka Fischer, the Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1998-2005, among many others.

In late October 2020, they commissioned architect Manuel Herz to create the first building to appear on the historical site: a house of prayer.

“We find ourselves on a ground that has seen more killing and more death than almost any other place on this planet in such a short and intense time. How do you operate there? How do you act as an architect there?”

“We find ourselves on a ground that has seen more killing and more death than almost any other place on this planet in such a short and intense time.

How do you operate there? How do you act as an architect there?” Herz’s questions are among the many ethical conundrums his team grappled with as they immortalized Babyn Yar’s undeniably spiritual nature. “It was a huge honor for the Memorial Center’s team to say ‘okay, we’re going completely out of the way of what is usually seen as commemorative architecture.’ Because we know the

genre of commemorative architecture, it’s usually lots of concrete, lots of dark spaces and material and maybe an inscription that tells you, ‘This is how you should feel when you read this inscription.’ This is the genre or repertoire of commemorative architecture and to go completely out of that direction and make a huge paradigm shift took courage from Babyn Yar’s Memorial team, especially in this location that is really one of the epicenters of 20th century European history… If you screw up at Babyn Yar, then you really screw up.”

Courtesy of Iwan Baan.

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While Manuel Herz’s architectural vision for Babyn Yar was profoundly unconventional, he had made it work before. In 2010, Herz constructed the New Synagogue of Mainz in Mainz, Germany, on a street renamed Synagogenplatz. The shape of the building aims to physically evoke the word Kedushah, the Hebrew word for holiness. On the inside of the New Synagogue of Mainz, surfaces are shaped by densely packed Hebrew letters, some of which convey the piyyutim, or religious poetry, of Mainz’s 10th and 11th century rabbis themselves.

Maybe Herz’s design inspired both anger and hope, but by questioning architectural conventions, he established himself as someone willing to pursue powerful, awe-inspiring visions.

For Babyn Yar, Herz took a different approach: “You can’t match the monumentality of a crime with the monumentality of the architecture. I wanted to do something that is much more open and open to interpretation, and so I proposed something that, for one, was transformative in its architecture: the Babyn Yar Synagogue literally opens, it opens like a book. And also I wanted it to steer to a very different kind of monumentality, which is not about heaviness and monolithic quality, but about something else, something more fragile: wood. I wanted to use wood because it’s maybe the most fragile material, you need to treat it every day or it breaks apart. I thought that this was a much more intelligent and beautiful way of confronting this past because we need to take care of it every day, both the synagogue and the history. And this is what remembrance really is.”

The Babyn Yar Synagogue must be manually unfolded with the help of a motor, which encourages the opening process to act as transformational storytelling in its own way. When unfolded, the synagogue is about 1000 square feet in dimension, standing 36 feet high. All the oak wood used in Herz’s design is over 100 years old and was sourced from Ukraine, an intentional artistic choice made to unify time before the massacre with our understanding of it in the present day. In its entirety, the synagogue’s structure is informed by ritual: during religious services, a congregation may come together to read a variety of texts—including the Siddur or the Torah—as a way of connecting in thought, spirit, and practice. Opening a book creates space for communities to see experiences they may share as Jews, parents, children, friends, or just as people. And for Herz, the idea of a “pop-up” book incorporates something more imaginative and magical to the synagogue, something that inspires 24

Courtesy of the Artist, Manuel Herz Architects.

wonder and hope in the people who read or live it.

Books are the underpinnings of Judaism, a religion and culture that historically grew within diaspora; the Babyn Yar Synagogue, too, is like a book for the “People of the Book.”

Inside the synagogue, the elements of traditional Jewish prayer are honored in an utterly tender way.

A wooden platform secures the bimah, a platform from which the Torah is read, and the women’s gallery as they are physically lowered down while the synagogue is opened. The building is completely open to the outside on two sides, and a column standing at the very front stabilizes these edges.

Importantly, the central column was designed with a specific pattern of rounded edges to mimic tzitzit, the ritually-knotted tassels worn by observant Jewish men. When a person walks up to the synagogue, they can immediately see the Aron HaKodesh, an ark typically containing sacred Torah scrolls, illuminated by the ner tamid, a source of eternal light in a synagogue. The Babyn Yar Synagogue surrounds visitors with some familiar and some more surprising prayers adorned on its walls: among the unexpected blessings is one for turning a nightmare into a good dream. For Manuel Herz, these details are evidence of a deep desire to work respectfully and compassionately with Babyn Yar, to create architecture that “barely touches the ground.”

The richness of Herz’s designs reference a long tradition of intricately ornamented wooden t-art magazine / volume 2

synagogues that existed in western Ukraine and southern Poland from the 16th to 18th centuries. The Great Synagogue in Brody, the Wołpa Synagogue, and the Zabłudów Synagogue are all stunningly beautiful examples of the unique visual culture that emerged in the Pale of Settlement, a partitioned region including Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belarus, and Moldova that were permanent homes for Jewish people in the Russian Empire. The historic Gwoździec Synagogue of present-day western Ukraine informed Herz’s decision to also ornament the ceiling of the Babyn Yar Synagogue. When you visit Herz’s synagogue, look up: above, you will see an array of flowers imposed on a vibrant blue sky.

The flowers represent stars, and their organization on the ceiling recreates the precise constellation of stars on the first night of the Babyn Yar massacre.

in just over half a year, an experience he called the “formula 1 race of architecture.” It was first unveiled for Yom HaShoah, the Holocaust Remembrance Day, in April 2021, and fully completed in time for the 80th anniversary of the Babyn Yar massacre in September 2021.

Outside of the Babyn Yar Synagogue, Manuel’s brilliance as an architect is immortalized by many other projects. Last spring, he saw the design for his Tambacounda Hospital finally come to a close.

Tambacounda Hospital is the only major hospital in a region of eastern Senegal—it includes a new maternity and pediatric clinic that services about 20,000 people year round. In 2017, he designed a new social housing and nursery in Lyon, France, named Sur ses Épaules, or “On Their Shoulders.” During

“When you visit Herz’s synagogue, look up: above, you will see an array of flowers imposed on a vibrant blue sky. The flowers represent stars, and their organization on the ceiling recreates the precise constellation of stars on the first night of the Babyn Yar massacre.”

“It’s exactly the star constellation that was in the night sky over Kyiv on the night the massacre started on September 29, 1941, because it’s the last thing one may say the Jewish people saw before they were shot, and it anchors the building very precisely into one geographic location, one day in history,” Herz explained of the decision to pay such exhaustive attention to the ceiling’s design. “There’s this uncanny relationship or coexistence between beauty and death, especially in religion… how out of death, new beauty can emerge. And I thought that to start with a synagogue at Babyn Yar is something very beautiful because we start with life, in a way, instead of starting with death. We’re bringing back Jewish life to a place where it was eradicated 80 years ago.

I wanted to design a building that does not only look back, but also looks forward; it’s not only dealing with topics of destruction and killing and the sorrow of this destruction, but it also acknowledges the beauty of life, that there’s something incredibly beautiful about us being here and what we can do and create on this planet.”

Manuel Herz and his team of architects, builders, and designers constructed the Babyn Yar Synagogue Resilience

the 2020 restoration of the Central Park Theater in Chicago, he collaborated with the Central Park Theater Restoration Committee and Future Firm to create an installation called Traces of Past Futures, a recreation of the domestic spaces that once existed next to the theater. Herz’s book, From Camp to City: Refugee Camps of the Western Sahara, examines the urban implications of refugee housing as “political projects,” drawing evidence from the Sahrawi refugee camps established in Algeria during the Western Sahara War. Based in Basel, Switzerland, Manuel Herz’s deeply enthralling and intentional architecture has been acquired into the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and featured in galleries worldwide.

Today, Manuel Herz and his team are working on projects of various scales, including a housing project in Germany with space for 200 families, a kindergarten, and other living areas. When asked about the inspiration behind his architectural style, Herz admitted the following, “There are so many reasons why we do what we do. I can say that I want to do architecture that doesn’t repeat itself, where I can use the architectural discipline also to learn.

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“What is the point of commemorating history, if the lessons to be learned are forgotten and ignored so easily?”

If I became an expert in something, whether it be synagogues or elementary schools, I think that would be stupid. Yes, I have worked on synagogues before, I have built one before, and yes, I am Jewish, but I’m not a Jewish architect, if that makes sense. I don’t want to have the label as the Jewish architect in the sense that I don’t specialize in sacred architecture or in architecture that is only significant in religious or sacred places. To me, an architect is maybe one of the last generalists who brings different disciplines together and connects them. So for this reason, I am really interested in migration, uprootedness, diaspora, all these themes that cut across any one sphere of interest into somewhere very political and contemporary and urgent. And, of course, I have certain personal preferences and fascinations and I like a certain kind of playfulness… there’s enough seriousness in our world and enough pseudoseriousness, we don’t need to add to it. Making people smile is not the worst thing I can do.”

The Babyn Yar Memorial and Synagogue is located in Kyiv, Ukraine. Since speaking with Manuel, the war in Ukraine has revived profoundly painful memories for those who remember efforts made by the Soviet Union to forget and erase evidence of Babyn Yar. On Tuesday, March 1, 2022, a Russian missile hit a broadcast tower and sports center near the memorial site, killing five people. Manuel does not know the state of the Babyn Yar Synagogue, as it is too dangerous to go on site. In a statement published on Forward.com on March 2, Manuel wrote the following, “What is the point of commemorating history, if the lessons to be learned are forgotten and ignored so easily? It leaves me speechless, numb and powerless. I pray for the people of Kiev, and of Ukraine, that the savagery of the war ends as fast as possible, and I hope that the synagogue can eventually regain its community, so that the lessons of fragility are not drowned out by the cruel noise of the war.”

Courtesy of Iwan Baan.

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ELEANOR SHEMTOV Artificial Landscapes, 2021 Photography, AI-Generated Images

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LAURA LI 李婧宜 Stills from Born|Raw 生, 2022 Film, 5 minutes 52 seconds Resilience

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RIANA GIDEON Aorta, 2020 Photograph and ink on paper

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The past, present, and future of biodesign: A discussion with Orkan Telhan Words EMRE GULER

Orkan Telhan is an artist, designer, and researcher—but most importantly, he is a biodesigner. The ambiguous term may seem to refer to many things at first sight, since many industries and creative projects often add the “bio-” prefix into their field of expertise, vaguely referring to sustainability efforts. So it’s not easy to immediately grasp what would be biological about design or what “designing biology” looks like.

At its core, biodesign is an emerging field that seeks to work with living organisms in design for a variety of applications. Biodesigners fuse knowledge in design practices and domains within life sciences and engineering to not only to find solutions to social, cultural, and environmental concerns, but also question responsibility and accountability when it comes to our ambitions of “human interest”.

Aside from fun, small-scale projects including lab-grown meat, bioplastics, or biosomething made out of something, biodesign has the power to change large-scale production practices when it comes to food, agriculture, medicine, apparel, architecture, energy, and more.

As biodesign is taught and applied at larger scales, the stakes rise higher and definitions become trickier, as questions of ethics and sustainability carry more weight. We interviewed the great magician of biodesign, Penn’s own Orkan Telhan, Associate Professor of Fine Arts - Emerging Design Practices at the Weitzman School of Design and a co-founder of Biorealize, to hear his attempts at defining biodesign and to discuss the present and the future of biodesign as well as his journey of learning, practicing, and teaching biodesign as an world-renowned artist, researcher, entrepreneur, and teacher.

As of now, Telhan is on leave from his position at Weitzman, but a lab-grown birdie told me that he might be back to teaching in 2024.

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Growing microbially sourced dyes. Photo by Orkan Telhan.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity.

EG: It’s probably a good idea to understand the term “biodesign” thoroughly before discussing its past, present and future. How do you define “biodesign”?

OT: For a definition of biodesign, I can give you both an academic answer and a simpler answer that you can use if your parents ask you about it. The academic answer is using living organisms to make new kinds of products that we normally make with petrochemicals or unsustainable materials.

But this academic way of describing biodesign can become very vague as people start asking questions like “Well, what about making wooden furniture? We cut down trees to make furniture, and humans have been doing this for a long time. How is biodesign special?” The easiest answer is that people have indeed been doing biodesign for thousands of years.

So, biodesign is not a brand-new discipline. But what we are working on in the last ten to fifteen years under “biodesign” is working with microorganisms: yeast, algae, bacteria, single and multi-cell organisms to make new kinds of products or applications in the space of biomaterials, food, and all sorts of industry.

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So, if I attempt to define biodesign a third time, it is designing new materials and products using microorganisms—and not every living organism.

So if your mom asks, you can say that you grow biomaterials using mushrooms or make bioplastics using algae or bacteria to replace petrochemicals with a sustainable type of plastic.

EG: With this new definition of biodesign, “sustainability” and making something that’s “sustainable” seems to play an important role to this new approach of biodesign that designers, engineers, and artists like you follow. Can you extend on this?

OT: I’m not a big fan of the word “sustainability”, although I use it in conversations. But there is a new way to rethink raw ingredients and where they come from. If you're a designer, product designer, fashion designer, architect, graphic designer, you usually don't have a one-on-one relationship with raw materials. You design something and somebody else produces it for you. With architecture, for example, someone will pour the concrete but the architect won’t ask where the concrete comes from, or how the wood is sourced. A fashion designer who designs t-art magazine / volume 2

cotton sweaters and other cotton products might not know where that cotton, the other textiles, or the dyes used for coloring the garments come from. And they don't have to know.

biology as there was no biodesign option at that time.

The Design and Computation program allows you to bring any other field into the design space and explore it there.

So, biodesign is the ability for designers to grow their raw ingredients, so that the design can be fully renewable, environmentally friendly, and also ethically sourced–ethically meaning labor-wise or without using animal cruelty.

So during my Ph.D., I came to Penn and I realized that you either need to go to the Biology Department or the Bioengineering Department to work with biology and biodesign. There’s nowhere for designers to work with biology themselves except if they collaborate with a scientist. However, collaborating with a scientist is not necessarily learning how to work with biology.

Following this, if I try to define “biodesign” one more time, it is using microorganisms to grow raw ingredients so that you can have ethical design practices.

EG: So those raw materials, or organisms, would be directly used by the designer and not some middle person, which might be different from a traditionally defined design process. Your examples with concrete and cotton are not used under a unified understanding of designing and producing.

OT: You're touching upon an interesting point because a lot of people don't pay attention to that.

If biodesign gives you the ability to grow your raw ingredients, this means that you're closer to the fabrication process. So biodesign is also the ability to rethink not just the raw ingredients and where they come from but also how you turn the raw ingredients into new material or new applications.

Therefore, what happens normally is that you make a design document, send it somewhere, people with access to cheap labor assemble things through assembly lines, sweatshops, or different places, and the product comes into place. Biodesign replaces those people with microorganisms. It also removes the whole assembly process, meaning that you just make the whole thing at once instead of making it part by part. This gives you a lot of ability to customize, fine-tune and also reduce all the labor needs.

EG: As you've mentioned, the applications of biodesign span from apparel to packaging, food production, biomedicine, agriculture. And these applications are not just just for a cool demo or a prototype. Mass production is the next step of the pipeline. And the company Biorealize, which you cofounded, is all about making biodesign accessible to more people while fixing the “innovation pipeline” that’s broken or ineffective. How does Biorealize want to change that? And what’s next for Biorealize?

OT: Good question. First of all, I did my Ph.D. in MIT’s Department of Architecture under the Design and Computation program with a focus on synthetic Resilience

For example, if you want to send an email, do you need to collaborate with a computer scientist? No! Today we have tools that allow you to compose and send emails professionally, as well as word processors and operating systems—all the technology you need to focus on your application is built for you; there are tools and infrastructures ready for your use.

Biology doesn’t have that yet. Instead, it has tools that are only geared towards experts in fields of biology, bioengineering, or medicine. So if you’re not part of those fields, you don’t have access to all kinds of things people do on the lab bench like working with organisms.

Hence, we started teaching biodesign with my cofounders in Biorealize. My desire to teach biodesign came before Biorealize. When I wanted to teach biodesign, they sent me to the Biology Department and told me to work there, teaching with them. Then I realized that it’s not the same thing. With biodesign, you want to bring the Biology Department into your design studio; you need to have the tools. If you’re a 3D designer, for example, you want to have your 3D printer next to the biology tools.

If you’re an electronics person, you need to grow organisms next to electronics. And so my inability to bring a whole biology lab into the design space gave birth to the idea of designing new tools that would allow non-experts to work with biology in their own creative spaces, without even having to work with scientists. That, consequently, is the pipeline.

Here’s a bit more about that pipeline. In any design process, there is an idea and a prototyping part—we call this the design, build, test, deploy cycle. The process is broken into parts because you might have the ideas but not the tools to prototype, test, or deploy them. Ultimately, you will have no idea of how someone can produce your biological idea on a mass scale. This is different for a designer with a 3D printer. If you have a 3D printer, you can model your idea with computer software, test it out, do the user 35

tests and evaluate it. Ultimately, you can give your plans to somebody else who can make it on a bigger scale, such as a professional engineering firm that can build a sculpture that you designed. You cannot use this design process in biology.

With Biorealize, we make our versions of 3D printers.

They do not look like 3D printers; we call them “incubators” but they are a version of 3D tools in the biodesign space and anyone can prototype their ideas in the simplest way possible without having to have a Ph.D. in biology. The process is very similar to cooking. When you cook, you either take somebody else's recipe or you can organize a meal and feed hundreds of people. But everything starts with your ability to have the recipe for how to make the dish and test it out by yourself before you serve it to others.

EG: That is a good analogy, especially given that biodesign is important for the food industry. You have to tinker—or experiment—in the lab and have your “recipe” before preparing it for others, and as “others” come in, the concept of ethics (or “bioethics”) also becomes an important part of the conversation. As you mentioned with your education, there doesn’t seem to be a clear, obvious path to pursuing an education in the field of biodesign. Do you think the next generation of biodesigners will be prepared to teach about and answer questions about the roles of ethics and responsibility in the field?

OT: That’s a good question because around 10-15 years ago, me and the people in my community were thinking that we had two options going forward: either focusing on turning biodesign into a new field on its own or integrating it into other fields.

Then, what does it mean for architects to learn ways to work with microorganisms so that they can change their practice? We can embed the ideas of biodesign into other fields since they already have their notion of ethics and professionalism. The people in these fields know how to make money and build buildings with great security. All these fields have different concepts that biodesign can adapt to.

15 years later, we realized that both approaches work.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both but this never decreases the importance of teaching about ethics, safety, and responsibilities, which I think is more important than ethics in certain cases as it’s about a designer’s accountability to society.

You can be a designer and spend your entire life working for the military or you can build ventilators for patients in need, right? Therefore, if you’re going to 36

engage with biodesign, it’s critical to know that what you’re working with is a highly potent technology that can be used for both good and bad purposes. This is why we need to make sure that you learn the ethical implications and your responsibilities about biodesign in the Biology or the Architecture Department.

But how can we teach this? There’s also another side to it as people often think about ethics in different ways. I’m going to give you my view and we can go on from there if you want to dive more into the ethics: Killing animals for eating food or using them for dairy on an industrial scale is already an ethical question, right? Some people are vegetarian and vegans, some people are animal eaters or dairy consumers. But when it comes to microorganisms, using microorganisms to make new kinds of products is ethically less challenging.

When you kill a cow, it has a lifespan individuality and a very different subjectivity. On the contrary, when you kill a single microorganism, or ten thousand, or a million, say when you are brushing your teeth, it is not the same as killing a cow. These numbers are irrelevant in terms of their individuality, because every 20 minutes, there’s more. So if you compare, making meat out of cells in the lab versus making meat from an animal are ethically very different.

That’s the first part: instead of killing something, you are growing something else in a modern way on the microorganism scale.

The second part is a bit more complicated. I am very much against the idea of humans feeling that they’re exceptional in this world and think that they have the right to use everything at their disposal. Many religions and societies are organized around that idea. I don’t believe that humans have any exceptional or privileged position in nature. But what does this mean? Even when I say “I should make bioplastics, so that I don't make bad, polluting plastics in the world,” I am instrumentalizing certain microorganisms for human interests. I am conflicted with that too.

It’s very important to understand that when I grow microorganisms for human interests, I always have to double-check: what are the consequences and who's benefiting from this in the end. If what I'm doing is only going to benefit humans in the end, I have issues with that.

I think about things more holistically. I want to make sure that when I teach biodesign, I don't teach students how to make bioplastics but instead teach them how to build relationships with microorganisms, which in return can produce ingredients that can be used for bioplastics. It's a very different perspective. t-art magazine / volume 2

Once you learn how to grow an organism, you build a relationship with it. It's almost like growing a plant, with which you have many different relationships.

Ultimately, you grow an apple tree, and you eat the apples. But nothing happens to the apple tree. In contrast, if you kill a cow, you kill the whole thing. So the analogy breaks down when you talk about the dairy industry while you can use some of the cells that are grown from microorganisms or keep their other cultures.

EG: The accountability part is also conflicting in some way. You've mentioned how the process also includes making use of biology and nature for our advantage as humans, and I guess, design is a good way of finding new ways to do that.

OT: Yeah, biodesign can be used in exploitation, right? Humans love to exploit, humans want to make things cheaper, faster, better. And then, of course, you must have seen that there are now people talking about making octopus farms. Instead of animal farms, they want to grow octopuses. It's so ethically wrong but they argue that instead of killing octopuses in the ocean, why don't we just grow them in bulk and

then kill them? Octopuses are very smart animals.

And, to me, it's a crime, but it’s also biodesign.

EG: So maybe biodesign is about minimizing harm and impact on the environment.

OT: Yeah, mitigating humans’ impact on the environment is a very impossible task. And I'm a very optimistic person. You will never hear me saying anything like, “oh, this is horrible!” There's always a solution. It's never going to be the best solution but it is going to be good enough for today.

For example, the people who invented nylon at Dupont never saw its application as a plastic bag.

Can you imagine that? You invent nylon, thinking that you make this amazing material that could be used in all kinds of things. And then people decided to use it as single-use plastic bags, and this eventually caused tremendous pollution for the planet. That's why designers need to be very careful in inventing something that may have added implications for the environment in the future.

EG: This is an exciting way of looking at ordinary things like apparel, packaging, food production,

Carbon Eaters - biosensor prototype developed for Puma. Photo by Orkan Telhan.

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Ouroboros Steaks, Courtesy of Philadelphia Museum of Art.

and biomedicine. Some questions and controversy also arise, for example with the octopus farm you mentioned. Looking at examples of accountability and responsibility when working with microorganisms, I read about one of your works from 2019, exhibited in the Philadelphia Museum of Art—an artwork named Ouroboros Steak, which I am fascinated by, because I always love art that provokes and inspires conversations about bigger, more important things. This piece included vitaminlike sample discs of meat produced from human cells, presumably to show that you can get a sample from your own body and grow them with serums, lessening your harm on the environment along the way. This rather uncomfortable example of working with human cells had some people drawing comparisons to cannibalism, and I feel like those discussions showed interesting applications of biodesign that can be questionable. Can you tell me about the idea behind this artwork and your thinking process?

OT: Yeah, we can talk about the piece very extensively.

There are a lot of different layers in that project, and some of these layers are continuing. When I 38

discussed that piece with my collaborators, Grace Knight and Andrew Pelling, in 2019, we assumed that it was going to provoke people, but we didn't expect it to become such a sensation. Our position was mainly to critique the lab-grown meat industry.

Like I was describing to you, instead of killing the animal, why aren’t you growing the cells on the petri dish? Growing the animal is much cheaper. And then a lot of people ask who is going to afford the expensive, lab-grown meat version. Is it going to be the privileged environmentalists because making that one little piece of meat may cost $10,000?

And then the other option is killing the animal. The animal will have so little impact in this world in terms of their carbon footprint or because of their social cost, the number of things that they consume is tiny compared to an average American citizen. So are you going to punish these people for eating meat?

I am not trying to tell people that they should not eat meat. I'm just saying that what you eat has consequences. And decisions are tied to a lot of privilege. The most ethical way to deal with this would be to grow yourself—you can take your cells and have t-art magazine / volume 2

“I think one of the only things we can do right now is to be responsible for our actions in this world, by understanding how we consume things, where things come from, and how they are made.” a little blob and grow it in about six to nine months. We usually grow them in at least five months. Ultimately you decide when to kill and then just eat them.

But feeding that blob of cells with your blood might be more sustainable than how some startups are doing this in the lab and calling it “lab-grown meat” because what they do is take the cells from the animals and put them in a petri dish. But of course, they need to feed them with some blood because every cell needs blood. They buy very expensive media, which is called Fetal Bovine Serum (FBS)– three times more expensive than human blood. More importantly, the way you extract this is by killing an unborn cow in its mom's body while the mom is pregnant. So you draw the blood out of that animal, bottle, and sell it. It's ethically a very cruel process.

But why wouldn't you just take your cells and use your blood? It's more sustainable! Even if you used expired blood from hospitals, it would be better than that other option because expired blood can be used for this application. If blood expires, the hospitals with blood banks cannot use blood that’s more than a couple of months old for their patients. So it's waste material, which means that if you want to re-upcycle human blood into protein, that's one way to go.

EG: Finally, I want to ask what’s next for biodesign?

What’s next for the fields associated with its practices and what would you like to see in the people teaching biodesign and industries adapting to it?

OT: I have high expectations from biodesign. It is not realistic to expect everyone to become a biodesigner.

There is also a lot of hype around biodesign, causing a lot of unrealistic expectations. And you know, we need diversity: We need scientists, we need architects, we need fashion designers. Not everyone has to become a biodesigner.

understand how things are made, where things come from. To me, this is very important for future generations. I think one of the only things we can do right now is to be responsible for our actions in this world, by understanding how we consume things, where things come from, and how they are made.

Same thing with questions about pollution and climate change. What is the source of climate change?

Everyone talks about this yet they delegate someone else to find the solution. But even if you look at your generation, how much do you feel like you can have a say in this conversation? How much do you think that you're equipped to do something concerning climate change or environmental pollution? Biodesign, on the other hand, should give you and other people tools, skills, methodologies, events, depending on what level they want to engage with, so that they can become better citizens. That's my hope.

So there are people dealing with different parts of biodesign and some of it is going to be useful, some of it is going to be bad. But it's the same thing with every technology like computers: you can use it for hacking or writing emails. We need to be disciplined in terms of understanding the power of our technology and how we can work with it.

Ultimately, this may be a bold statement but I think that biodesign is one of the most relevant design fields to study as it can change the way we produce and consume things. I'm not saying that everyone has to come and take my biodesign course. But there are lots of bio labs out there that you can communicate with, communities to talk to, and free events to attend. Studying biodesign should not be a privilege.

We are working towards making it accessible beyond well-resourced institutions like Penn.

Biodesign is a field that should be disseminated in a lot of different areas where it can. Maybe in the middle school or high school level, so that people Resilience

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JONAH BURIAN Danish Quarantine, 2022 Digital collage

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RIANA GIDEON Inventory of my Brain, 2021 Digital collage and pen

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Fireworks & The Human Call for Wonder Words WES MATTHEWS

Elyssa Chou, Fireworks Simulation, still from 3D animation, 2022.

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If there’s anything good that comes from the pitch darkness that we find ourselves swimming in for a handful of hours every night, it is that humans will find a way to use the sky as a canvas of infinite possibilities and light as the paint strokes of our thinly-veiled dreams. And if there’s anything good that comes from standing in a crowd of awe-hungry people before the beginning of a July fireworks show, it is the reminder that everyone loves a good fireworks show. In a sea of indecipherable faces, I love to imagine everyone staring upward with the same wide-eyed expression, completely awestruck by projectile streaks of thundering light as they travel high and erupt through the night—suddenly, raptures of bright colors fill the blank space, runnels flying with a graceful and precise choreography.

Last summer, I saw as many fireworks shows as I possibly could. My little sister is quite the fireworks enthusiast, and I enjoy accompanying her to any highflying pyrotechnic spectacle. That is to say, I secretly find something novel and strangely compelling about the fireworks show experience, even at my age. When the first spark reaches the top of a foggy July sky, I can’t help but feel like I am watching something that I don’t understand, and therefore probably don’t deserve. My little sister is still at the very precious age where a sky weaving with bursts of color and movement still seems a natural wonder and not a man-made one, and so she is always enchanted by what she sees. As for me, I sometimes resist the temptation to appear overwhelmed by what I am viewing, though it can feel rather overwhelming. I stand there, with her, but I never allow myself to be as deeply absorbed in the spectacle as she is. I often think about what this means for me—what do I miss by drawing back and walling up my emotions in the face of such a rare beauty?

I am growing increasingly vexed by a certain pattern: it seems like whatever used to excite me as a child, doesn’t anymore. It feels like a regression, but then again, what could I possibly be regressing towards? I love witnessing small interactions between children and their parents in which the child is trying to recount a story about something that they saw or heard or touched and the parents cannot suspend their disbelief long enough to provide a reaction that seems even fairly consummate to the amazing story that the child is eagerly weaving together. Instead, they often come off as dismissive, downplaying the moment, pulling out stock phrases of encouragement that don’t seem genuine on any level—“That’s great, buddy” or “Wow, really?” Perhaps a child may catch Resilience

a glimpse of something that resembles a shooting star traveling the night sky and then race back to their parents to direct their attention to it, eyes twinkling with the wonders they’ve just witnessed but cannot yet articulate. Without even taking a moment to look up, the parents may arrive at the silent consensus that what their child is seeing is a mere illusion, a figment of a hyperactive imagination. Not a shooting star—just a satellite slowly drifting through space. Not a comet— just a plane looking out for its landing spot. Something mundane living out its intended course of action.

This is what I feel myself becoming: the parent that doesn’t look up. I have long outgrown the illusions of the show, and I suspect that my sister will someday, too, as she arrives at the worldlessness of adulthood.

But every time I am able to catch a fireworks show, there is a sense of unbridled wonder that revisits me and wells up in my spirit, one that beckons me closer to the refreshing feeling of being a child and starting with that blank slate.

Americans have an interesting tendency to overromanticize childhood, as if it bears an inherent essence that is separate from adulthood when in reality the differentiation is probably much more a matter of circumstance. In our society, children are typically encouraged to play and explore more than work, remaining dependent on their parents’ money and resources until they reach the threshold of young adulthood, at which point they are expected to assume certain prescribed sets of responsibilities that make up good citizenship; so the core memories that we form during this time become coated in rosy veneers of wist and nostalgia. Every year, entertainment companies pour their fortunes into creating and maintaining simulacra of childhood for nostalgic adults who feel like they have lost their way and must return to a state of innocence and vulnerability (The world-famous fireworks show at Disney’s Magic Kingdom alone costs between $40,000 to $50,000 a night). Of course, I am no exception to the culture: I romanticize childhood.

Days rarely pass by without at least one instance of me thinking about some activity that I used to enjoy and no longer do. I was very easily amazed by things, often watching little events transpire for hours at a time: raindrops racing down the glass of my bedroom window, clouds morphing into friendly faces and back to formlessness, a family of worker ants fortifying their mounds within the sidewalk cracks. What I seem to remember most about my childhood are these everyday moments of enjoyment—how genuinely invested I was in things that now seem simple and 43

mundane to me. Curiosity permeated every corner of my mind, and there was no way to turn it off or on. It was not just a feeling that could be disengaged, but a continued lived experience, placing me in this gray area of wanting to know more about the world and never knowing enough—where, of course, I was free to fill in the blanks with my own imaginings.

I should pause here to admit that the sensation we call wonder and our associations with it are very much rooted in a cultural inheritance, a way of scoping out the world that was engineered long before you and I were around. Wonder was one of the key points of fascination among many so-called natural philosophers during the European Enlightenment.

René Descartes, for example, thought that wonder was a charming but silly emotion that must eventually be terminated for one to harness their full capacity for reason and scientific thinking, thus reaching their intellectual maturity. Adam Smith saw wonder as a means to a more glorious end, a necessary first step in the trek for scientific discovery, a byproduct of the insatiable human appetite for knowledge. I imagine that philosophers like Descartes and Smith probably wouldn’t care much for a fireworks show, a form of entertainment that so heavily relies on the willingness of spectators to suspend their disbelief and retreat into the feeling of wonder. But on a larger scale, their ideas of what it means to be an enlightened, fullyrealized human have been carried into the present.

Today, we often abide by the idea that wonder is a necessary sacrifice that we must make as adults for the sake of our comfort, and for survival. We believe that while having wonder is a pleasant aspect of childhood, carrying it into our later years is a danger or risk. We begin to fear that state of not knowing, so much so that we no longer allow ourselves to linger in it. Responding to the fragility of human life, we find it increasingly necessary to know as much about the world as possible, and the limits of possibility are constantly being pushed and expanded when it comes to knowledge. In this particular model for our lives, to be an adult is to be completely divorced from the gray area of wonder, and to slowly accept a place in a society that stands on the principles of rationality, normativity, and stoicism. German sociologist Max Weber had a word for this process— Entzauberung—which is usually translated in English as disenchantment, but may be more accurately translated as “de-magic-ization.” Weber thought that the main difference between the so-called ancient and modern world was a new form of thinking, of organizing normative societal goals. In the newer 44

forms of thinking, he believed, people would abandon the ideologies of “traditional society,” which explained the natural world in terms of occult mysticism and supernaturality, in favor of a more so-called rational perspective for the sake of modernizing and transforming the human standards of living.

While Weber’s theory on societal disenchantment strikes me as oversimplified and centered on Western society, I think that I can take up Entzauberung when I think about it on the scale of individuals who must make sacrifices to stay alive in a rapidly evolving world. What I mean to say is that there is a rather hefty price to growing older. I have found that, over time, every spectacle becomes less and less spectacular until little things are sapped of their bold and natural beauty. The phenomena that I used to marvel at with youthful vigor become stripped back with the constructs of science and logic. It is hard to be freshly captivated by things that you no longer find mysterious. I often find myself asking: why do we give up on mystery? Why do we seek so urgently to make sense of things, to always rationalize them according to our scientific laws of the universe? As we age, we make it harder for ourselves to find the curious beauty in life, and then to cherish it with the same level of excitement that seems to come so naturally for young children.

So yes, I know that the idea of adulthood is essentially a scam rooted in practicality, chartered by a social contract that we sign ourselves into by virtue of merely being born into this complex and ever-changing world. I understand that, materially-speaking, I am no different from my eight-year-old self (and perhaps aware that there is really no such as an “eightyear-old self,” just a self—which alone is still a very controversial assumption). But still, I feel this deep frustration of having lost something that I will never get back. I mourn my inability to appreciate fireworks shows to the same extent that I used to, and I feel vaguely envious when I see children looking up at the sky with their faces shrouded in a familiar mixture of confusion and astonishment. Even in the shapes, my sister often sees things that I cannot see. She will sometimes point toward a particular pattern of colors and call it a smiley face or a butterfly, whereas I just see a random heap of exploding red, blue, and green lights in a chemical chain reaction. This doesn’t make me feel any better about myself, though. It doesn’t make me feel more mature, or more assured in myself.

In fact, these days, the suspicion often creeps up on me that I am missing something that not only can never be recovered, but can’t really be imitated either. t-art magazine / volume 2

I have found comfort in the fact that this worry is not merely my own. I get it—the land that we grace is full of mystery, and it’s a scary and fairly dangerous deed to turn oneself completely over to what they don’t know. Today, we can suppress this fear with scientific enterprise. But here is the fact of the matter: since the beginning of time, humans have had to encounter the sublime and reflect deeply on what it all means. Beauty existed in the world before we had a scientific language for it and humans had to ask why. That’s a painfully genuine question—why are things so naturally beautiful? Every person has asked themselves this at some point in their lives: you notice the supreme floral symmetry of chrysanthemums and ask why, you see the sky dabbling with tinges of orange and then pink as the sun ritually retreats for the night and ask why, and of course you see artificial lights exploding to form flower-like shapes in the night sky and ask why. I like to think that it is a good thing to ask these questions from time to time and admit to ourselves that we don’t have all the answers.

I truly believe that anybody who claims to have life figured out has missed the point of it. There is so much that we don’t know, so little that we do know— about the universe, about the planet, about ourselves and our history.

“I can’t help but think of the firework mechanism as a beautiful testament to our creativity, speaking back to the void—almost like proclaiming we are here and we will continue to manufacture loud noises and bright lights.”

Interestingly, there is a specific word in English for this awe-inspiring encounter that I have only recently come across: numinosity. The word implies not only the sense of superficial appreciation for something, but also a deeper, more internal reckoning where we grow spiritually aware of our place in the world, our relative smallness in a universe that is simply Resilience

unimaginable in size and scope and intricacy. This is perhaps the feeling that I mean to express when I talk about my intense fascination with anything that glows and lights up the sky, and my longing to once again view these things through the lens of a small child who is just becoming acquainted with the world’s scope. I may never get over the uniquely human tragedy of having to abandon the inner child, that capacity for wonder that lies dormant within us.

What still amazes me, though, is the great length that humans will go to in order to fill each other’s lives with even a brief moment of joy, disarming us of what we claim to know and persuading us to step into the suspenseful state of not knowing. Being the curious creatures that we are, these events are often followed by contemplation, but not always. Sometimes, if we are lucky, we allow ourselves to live in mystery, to freely vault into that moment willing to feel something and know nothing about its content. These are the truly humbling experiences, I suppose, when we readily admit that no amount of knowledge could prepare us for the vastness of some of the miracles that pervade our world. When we open ourselves to them, sometimes our appetite for knowing only grows more intense. Sometimes our minds must map out a seemingly infinite entanglement of inquiries and yearnings and delights. But almost always, we feel like we are encountering some kind of attraction that is greater in magnitude and gravity than anything we could come across in our mundane day-to-day lives— it is a respite, an escape into the sublime mystery.

In this sense, I have always thought of a fireworks show as a kind of miracle. It just seems so unlikely: to artificially set the sky afire, not in pursuit of world domination, not as a prelude to war and destruction, but as a display for our aesthetic appreciation.

For celebrations, for sporting events, for casual entertainment. Every time I look up at them, fireworks remind me of our capacity to create for the sake of refreshing the human experience, to stretch our sense of wonder in unexpected ways and redirect our gaze to new possibilities. I can’t help but think of the firework mechanism as a beautiful testament to our creativity, speaking back to the void—almost like proclaiming we are here and we will continue to manufacture loud noises and bright lights. There is this unsure mortar of combustible chemicals at ignition, and when the fuse is lit they shoot up at a hundred miles per hour with a carefully planned lifespan and direction. The rocket soon makes its course in the sky, achieving a short-lived triumph until its climactic explosion into a greater form, whose 45

beauty all people can admire. I don’t want to ever lose sight of how amazing it is that humans have invented fireworks, and how lucky I am to experience them at any point in my life, regardless of age. When I go to firework shows today, I still find myself drifting toward that question that has existed in the minds of humans for all time: why?

When I was a child, I loved fireworks. And now, as an adult, I still love them when I let myself. Sometimes I get caught up in a whirl of regret and frustration about getting older because I think that it serves as a constant reminder that I will never be capable of admiring feats of beauty and grandeur in the ways that I once did. I’m always stuck in a state of discernment on whether or not it’s “real,” leaping to some final value judgment based on the plausibility of it all. But then I say forget all of that—giving into the strange impulse towards the other side, the side occupied by all the timeless things that I love, that swaddled me in that familiar state of wonder as a child roaming my small pocket of this vast earth.

At that point, I can’t help but think to myself: how fortunate must I be that I always get another chance to bask in this thing that renews itself and never fails to give my life meaning—not youth, but wonder.

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RIANA GIDEON Kimba, 2021 Ink on paper

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Nihilistic Humor

Lea Devon Sorrentino and Natalie Hijinx at Vox Populi Words ADRIANNA BRUSIE

How do we get each other to see what they don’t want to? How can we talk about growing wealth disparities, the climate crisis, and the inevitable fall of humanity in a way that doesn’t paralyze us?

To these artists, the answer is humor. Lea Devon Sorrentino and Natalie Hijinx, both members of Vox Populi in Philadelphia, opened two solo exhibits this April featuring interactive, multimedia installations.

Sorrentino’s exhibit Remote Work and Hijinx’ HITBOX use humor and absurdity to expose the underlying structures that shape our current and future realities.

Remote Work was born from a realization Sorrentino had during an artist residency in Vermont. Lea Devon Sorrentino is a conceptual multimedia artist whose work humors “first world” values and ideas of success. As a digital strategist at a tech company, since even before the pandemic she had worked remotely. During her residency, she kept finding herself looking for work, checking for emails and Slack messages from coworkers. Even while climbing a mountain, she found it hard to separate work and life. “We use our work practices to try to cling onto some type of existence,” said the artist.

“What if nature responded the same way, and allowed us to work everywhere?” In Remote Work, Sorrentino proposes a quite literal response to 48

this question. Inspired by the gallery spaces of a natural history museum, the installation consists of infographics, dioramas, and display cases that parody the architecture of museums and offer an insight into how they might look in the future. Most of the “artifacts” on display are handmade electrical devices appearing to be made of natural materials, including stone airpods, as well as powerplugs and USB ports formed of emerald and amethyst. The exhibition’s introduction text reads, “these naturally formed devices found around the world have increased our capacity to perform labor. The evolution of minerals and the modern workplace became entwined. We call it constant work, and we feel productive.” t-art magazine / volume 2

This installation is both a critique and acceptance of the centrality of technology in our lives. “Is there a way we can use these tools? We’re stuck in the binary of these structural systems… either allowing for tech companies to use us, or we can turn away from them.

What if we held them accountable?” What if instead of challenging or changing the forces of technology, what if we embrace it as “both silly and sad at the same time?”

Remote Work also highlights the class exclusivity that allows for working remotely. For the exhibit’s opening, Sorrentino hired a worker paid hourly to stand in a corner of the gallery. During the gallery’s opening hours, the worker was replaced by a chair with a sign written, “STAFF ON BREAK. FEEL FREE TO SIT.” “The more we think about remote work, the less we think about hourly workers,” explained Sorrentino.

The growing popularity of remote and “thought work” or “knowledge work” creates a perceived work-life balance that also hurts hourly workers and obstructs their visibility.

If Remote Work is a warning shot, HITBOX is “we didn’t listen.” Natalie Hijinx’ “Post-Apocalyptic Convenience Store” is a semi-dystopian, speculative world-building installation featuring shelves of hand-made “products” and a series of video

advertisements and news announcements. The title HITBOX refers to the invisible structures and architecture of video games that corral you into a space. “So much of what controls everything, we can’t see… the money, the politics… it’s so completely unparsable. There’s an illusion of control when there’s not a lot of control,” says the artist.

The installation features “products” on a shelf all handmade by the artist, such as bottles of “72-hour Energy,” Zoloft and Cymbalta chocolate bars, “Milc Synthetic Drinking Liquid,” “Male Enhancement Tequila,” Guy Fieri-branded “Premium Algae,” “Insect

“We use our work practices to try to cling onto some type of existence... What if nature responded the same way, and allowed us to work everywhere?”

Left: Potentia Copia from Remote Work by Lea Devon Sorrentino.

Right: Gallery view of Remote Work by Lea Devon Sorrentino. Photo by Adrianna Brusie.

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Gallery view of HITBOX by Natalie Hijinx. Photo by Adrianna Brusie.

Protein Purée,” and “Boner Pills.” When asked about the purée and algae, Hijinx said, “that’s probably all that’s gonna be left.” The further you look, the more parodies you find; for example, a label for toilet paper mimics a Penguin Books cover and reads “Bathroom Reader.”

On one wall, a TV plays a series of commercials and news announcements, including one headlined “REPTILIANS EVACUATE” followed by “WE JUST NEED SOME SPACE RIGHT NOW.” An advertisement for the medication “Abonaquil” depicts a couple in space suits exploring what appears to be the planet Mars, followed by a list of side effects Hijinx gathered from existing medications. The artist confirmed that all the side effects are indeed real and mentioned in various prescription drugs.

While parody is a characteristic of much of Hijinx’ installation works, HITBOX was created by thinking in particular about scarcity and growing wealth disparity. “When we’re down to sustenance - it’s still going to be just eat and f*ck,” said the artist. “It’s the

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most soapboxing I can do without turning people off.

It has to be funny… I’m interested in making people who don’t clutch pearls clutch their pearls.”

When speaking to Sorrentino about how her work relates to Hijinx’s, she said, “What I'm talking about is about a present future… where [HITBOX] is that we have made no changes and learned no lessons and it has put us into complete chaos.” While the two works differ, they both use humor to communicate to the audiences the truths about what we often deny.

Together, they choose a red pill and make it easier to swallow. These exhibits challenge the traditional norms of gallery spaces, placing the audience in a reflexive position where they are asked to see themselves in these dystopian realities. Hijinx says, “I like it when people ask, ‘is this art?’ because it means I’m pushing the boundaries of what art is.”

For more images of the installations and additional works by Lea Devon Sorrentino and Natalie Hijinx, visit www.leadevon.com and @nataliehijinxart on Instagram.

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HANNAH PACITTI A Still Life at a Time of Loss, 2022 Oil on linen 16 x 16 inches

LARA BROS by a single thread, 2022 Acrylic, thread, push pins, mixed media on canvas 24 x 18 inches Resilience

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The Lovers: Emails with Lua Beckman Words CAROLINE JONES LUA BECKMAN

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Lua Beckman is a multimedia artist and a fourth-year at the University of Pennsylvania. Beckman utilizes video and paint-based media to explore issues of gender, delusion, psychoanalysis, and absurdity. The Lovers (Part 2) probes these themes with a focus on polarity, performance, and pregnancy. The film is the sequel to Beckman’s earlier work “Children: They Play (Part 1),” and it is the winner of the 2022 Penn Student Film Festival. The Lovers (Part 2) can be viewed at the artist’s Vimeo page, https://vimeo.com/luabeckman.

CAROLINE: I’m in a coffee shop, and I just watched The Lovers (Part 2). I’m wondering if any of my fellow coffee shoppers snuck peeks of the work and momentarily stewed in the goo and the gloss with me.

Regrettably, I don’t think they did. I have many thoughts, but would like to hear yours first. Can you share a little bit about yourself, and about The Lovers?

LUA: I am so glad to hear that The Lovers got your goo and glitter going. That is the goal! As you know, my name is Lua Beckman. I’m almost 22 years old and have lived in West Philly for the last 18 of them.

My main creative endeavors lie in painting and strange little videos.

A significant chunk of my work for the past two years has revolved around delusion and identity formation (tell me you’re in a transitional period without telling me you’re in a transitional period, right). In trying to express and understand these concepts, the two themes of motherhood/childbirth (especially to birth, to replicate, oneself) and dismemberment of one’s own body (instead of replicating, the taking away of parts of oneself) repeatedly emerge. When I think about the expectations of gender, especially femininity, this duality of repeat (perform, perform, perform!) and reduce (the constant pressure to be smaller and smaller until poof! You’re gone! Problem solved.) is heavily present. Gender, for me, is the perfect example of a delusional identity.

The Lovers is all about duality, the being in-between bipolar options.

I wrote the monologue “I am the Lovers and I can taste the coming of both...” after having repeatedly drawn the Lovers tarot card, Major Arcana VI, for over a year. There are three generations of (some professional) tarot readers in my family (witchy!) and the cards have been a source of absurd guidance since I was a little kid. To repeatedly draw a card indicates the card’s meaning is important to this stage of your life. The card of the Lovers represents oneness through the marriage of opposites—synthesis and division are twins. Union creates disunion and disintegration creates integration. This card started appearing the year I received a diagnosis for bipolar disorder.

Extreme polarity has always been a lens through which I experience life and what The Lovers attempts to express. Puss/glitter; internal/ external; performance/truth; human/mannequin; mother/child; free will/biological determinants; mania/depression—they both exist in my mouth, swirling around and touching each other but never mixing.

In regard to the production of the film, I had a great deal of fun.

The opening sequence is an oil paint stop motion animation of an ultrasound. I wanted to show the polarity growing inside the pink clown before she was aware of its existence. The costume and makeup were incredibly fun to design. The idea was to go in drag as myself—to take Resilience

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Stills from The Lovers, a film by Lua Beckman.

my daily gender performance to an extreme. The results were rather clownish, which feels fitting. I filmed the whole thing on my desktop camera. I didn’t want a crystal clear image. It was also important to me to have a fixed frame (except for the one shot where the camera tilts and the mannequins take on a life of their own) that the character moved through.

I hope that this initial description was helpful and I am excited to hear more of your thoughts.

CAROLINE: Thank you for this brilliant background on yourself and The Lovers. As a fellow 22-ish yearold, I am also deep in the project of creating a self, and I can relate to the challenges you describe.

Repetition and reduction are, as you write, methods of both identity formation and delusion, while gender is an example of both. I’ll go out on a limb and say that identity formation is, at times, extremely painful. I would also say that experiencing dramatic dualities can be uncomfortable. Within a metaphor of pregnancy, they are only temporarily bearable.

Thinking about The Lovers through a lens of resilience, I’d like to ask you about two themes. The first is wholeness or unity, and the second is fluidity.

Both themes are, to me, connected to the symbol of the Lovers tarot cards which you describe as a representation of “oneness through the marriage of opposites.” The symbol brought to mind a definition that I came across a few months ago: the alchemical definition of “androgyne.” In alchemy, the original human is thought to have been be a bisexual being – that is, possessing two sexes. The separate sexes 54

(male and female) represent the fragmentation of the human’s original bisexuality, and each constitute only half of the original whole. Androgyny in alchemy is not simply the unity of maleness and femaleness, it represents the reconciliation of opposites and freedom from fragmentation.

At its core, the alchemical symbol of androgyny represents wholeness. I’m wondering whether you see a sort of wholeness in the film, or whether the process of creation provides some resolution for the opposites and dualities it represents. What, in other words, makes The Lovers bearable?

The second theme, fluidity, first appears in the image of the sonogram. The lovers swim in the fluid of the clowns womb, “touching but never mixing.” In your monologue, you are yourself fluid. You pass through folds and membranes, “[existing] in both” of the opposites that live inside you. The shapelessness of fluid is the reason for its resilience, but what does fluidity mean for the absurd task of identity formation?

I am curious to hear your thoughts about this.

LUA: I never expected to be in the need of alchemical definitions, but you have brought to my attention that I most certainly am! You’ve mentioned two majorly important themes which I am excited to talk about.

The lens of resiliency feels like the perfect way to read this piece. As you said, identity formation can be an extremely painful and never-ending process. The Lovers depicts a person experiencing that without resolution, because there can be no resolution. No one true self can ever be achieved. t-art magazine / volume 2

“Resiliency—when you start to see different parts of yourself take on lives of their own (and personify without your input)—is the ability to remain a whole, singular identity.”

The two themes of wholeness and fluidity work together. Wholeness, the freedom from fragmentation (as you say), is the goal, I suppose, and fluidity is the method. In The Lovers everything comes out of the clown’s body from under its pink skin: the ultrasound, mannequins, the silky afterbirth, and eventually my own body. Everything that comes out of them has its own significance, but the point is that it all comes from within the clown’s abdomen.

It is all an extension of self. In the final montage the clown watches as snippets of the sequences replay and the mannequins take on a life of their own, spinning around in front of the semi torn down hospital backdrop (revealing the gooey painting from earlier). Resiliency in this case, or survival (or even just living), when you start to see different parts of yourself take on lives of their own (and personify without your input), is the ability to remain a whole, singular identity. This is certainly true with mental health conditions and I believe it is also very true for gender. There have been months in which being “a woman” has been so painful that I wanted to chop off my body and exist as a floating head for the rest of my days. Luckily, I am still literally whole. The Lovers characterizes that fragmentation as the clown is split up into four torsos (the two mannequins, the pink clown, and myself). You will have to let me know if you think the pink clown makes it out whole as well.

Now, in regards to fluidity, you make a good point that it is really seen in the ultrasound and the audio.

Animation here was a great tool to depict the unobservable, the dance of the fragmented self.

While the digital video section of The Lovers shows the harsh process of fragmentation, you’re right that the animation shows a more fluid possibility of symbiosis between these different parts of ourselves within us. Inside of the clown, their dualities evolve and make out (so fun). It is when the clown externalizes and makes these dualities concrete, personified, hard plastic mannequins are they fragments.

Our conversation is making me realize how any rigidity in defining our internal and external dualities Resilience

(man/woman, mania/depression, and many/more) leads to a fragmented self. The only way to stay whole is to let your polarities swirl around and touch each other as much as possible. A whole person is a fluid person. I hope that one day the pink clown is able to flow through both of their mannequin children and my own skin whenever they feel like it, just like the fetus lovers.

Well, as abstract as this conversation has become I hope it still makes some sense. I look forward to hearing your response and any more life changing insights from the far-too underrepresented field of alchemy.

CAROLINE: You bring up so many wonderful insights, and I’m glad to hear that the themes of wholeness and fluidity are as resonant for you as they are for me.

I’d like to be brief so that you may occupy the rest of the room on the page. I’ll address one question you asked me, and share a concluding thought.

“Does the clown make it out whole?” is a great provocation. It relies, I think, on an understanding of who (or what) the clown is. My first impressions were: an absurdity, an exaggeration, a feminine freak. A clown is also, of course, a performer. You resolved my guesses with the explanation that “the idea was to go in drag as [yourself].” You confirmed, if I could put it differently, that the clown is a performance of you. In this case, the clown might be a shadow, a conversation, a body. Hopefully, the clown provides a place to play. I think that ultimately, the question of the clown’s survival relies on whether you and she can be happy together. Maybe…you and she can be The Lovers.

I look forward to hearing your thoughts, which I’m afraid will have to conclude our exchange. Thank you for a great conversation, and for making me despise email less. I am leaving you with the opening line of Ian McEwan’s novel Nutshell, which I think is both appropriate and amusing.

“So here I am, upside down in a woman. Arms patiently crossed, waiting, waiting and wondering who I’m in, what I’m in for.”

LUA: Thank you for your insightful and impactful words. Our conversation has uncovered much about my own work to me. I leave you having ordered Nutshell and looking for love with my somewhat maniacal clown friend.

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KRISTINA DENZEL BICKFORD Trash Latch, 2020-2021 Plastic and nylon mesh 60 x 36 inches

NEILL JORDAN FRIANEZA CATANGAY U.S.S. Possessions, 2022 Found wood vessel, world map, acrylic paint, paper, concrete, paper clips 6 x 18 x 8 inches 56

t-art magazine / volume 2

ASH GARNER — "THECOLORG" View of Time Flies, 2020 Iridescent quilted fabric, cotton battling, custom weights, yarn 168 x 144 x .5 inches Resilience

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Sriya Choppara, Editorial Director

Editors & Directors

Ashley Sniffen, Operations Director

Caroline Jones, Art & Design Editor

Avery Givens Nardone, Creative Director

Deren Alanay, Marketing & Media Director

Alan Jinich, Music Editor

Isabelle Yablon, Music Editor

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Co-Founder & Co-Editor-in-Chief ELEANOR SHEMTOV

Co-Editor-in-Chief ADRIANNA BRUSIE

Creative Director AVERY GIVENS NARDONE

Editorial Director SRIYA CHOPPARA

Art & Design Editor CAROLINE JONES

Marketing & Media Director DEREN ALANAY

Music Editors ALAN JINICH ISABELLE YABLON

Operations Director ASHLEY SNIFFEN

Writers DARYA BERSHADSKAYA EMRE GULER WES MATTHEWS

Contributors ABBY WEINSTEIN HANA STAUSS IPEK OBEK YUWEN WONG VERETA GOUR

Layout & Design ELEANOR SHEMTOV ADRIANNA BRUSIE CAROLINE JONES

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t-art magazine / volume 2

t-art exists at the intersection of art and technology to create a dialogue between the two seemingly disparate fields.

By bridging the gap between artists and innovators within the Penn community and beyond, our publication explores the collaborative potential to push the boundaries of art and design.

This volume coincides with the opening of t-art's juried exhibition, Resilience: Art & Design in Times of Uncertainty, hosted at the University City Arts League from May 3 ­— May 24, 2022.