‘The Kiss and the Slap’; UML Review
Yesterday we wrapped up Urban Media Lab, a mandatory two-week program we have to take before starting the faculty of architecture at U of M. We had a mixer last night presenting our work, which consisted of photography, drawings, models, and stellar portraits of every single one of us. Afterwards, I went off with close friends to further celebrate all that we managed to accomplish in such little time. We looked back on the stress, laughs, arguments, and memories we made among ourselves and others students we hardly knew two weeks ago.
Fascist undertones aside (of course), while prepping, I kept thinking of Marinetti’s futurist manifesto, in which he expresses,
“We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.”
We discussed this quote in a visual communications course I took earlier this year, and we contrasted the slap against ‘the kiss.’ Despite their opposition, both are quick, chill-inducing acts of passion that press against the side of our face. Urban Media Lab gave us a taste of architecture; a double-edged sword. A kiss and a slap. The studio, our new home, is a bubbling hub for making things but also a vacuum for sleep. It’s such an incredible feeling to be constantly surrounded by people who are just as passionate as you about what you love, but with that, dissonance is inevitable.
I posted some of the drawing exercises we worked on (rightfully titled as ‘exercises of futility’). But along with that, we also made countless models and iterations – our new favourite word – and remixes of said models; both individually and as groups. My first group project was a gong show; all five of us had our own ideas of what our glue-and-tape free cardboard model should look like, and very foolishly, we started creating anyway without an actual plan (you can imagine the rest). By the end of the second week, the eight-foot-tall iterations we had built as groups of twenty were disassembled, and on the morning of our exhibition, we used their pieces to rebuild a singular, harmonious wall out of differently vernacularized groups of pieces.
What came of this was a large, intimidating wall of curves, columns, and exposed joinery made of wood and cardboard. I am certain that to others, our wall might have looked like jumbled scraps. But for me, I saw the confusion, excitement, and tension of working as a group under pressure. The euphoria of having your idea become real (concepts becoming things!) and watching an idea you love be discarded and mogged by a much cooler one are both integral parts of making. The kiss and the slap. Looking at our wall, I saw pieces of cardboard that we accidentally decorated with dents from our knees because we had to kneel onto the cardboard to cut and score it precisely. I saw some moments of scoring that slightly veered off, unintentionally causing our columns to have interesting gestural moves of line. I saw some of the errors and miscalculations that my friends and I made and kept secret from the rest of the group. The exhibition that I so excitedly anticipated over the last two weeks was a giant pointer to the labour we endured, not just the result of it. I was expecting a shiny, polished object to present to our friends and family, but what I ended up being most eager to talk to them about was the polishing, refinement, and collective iteration it took to get there.
