Our Process
A steel off-cut from a metal shop outside of Sliven arrived in my mailbox. Cut in a decorative shape, an analysis of its material contents revealed it as a composite of various elements with iron. I wondered about its past lives, the elemental kisses and divorces of material components, and where this matter had traveled from and where it might go. In a sense, the off-cut had always moved and changed; a diasporic entity in the middle of a continuous immigrant journey. It reminded me of my own itinerant childhood moving between continents.
Steel off-cut and analysis.Former textile factory in Sliven, Bulgaria.
Over the course of months I 3D scanned the off-cut in different places and postures, commemorating my custodianship by saving its rusted surfaces to digital memory. The textures retrieved in the scanning process also seemed to be in a middle: images ready to travel to other places, to have encounters, and to act on their own. For Materialities of/from the Edge, I cultivated the machine-made images of the rusted metal into digital wallpapers by aging, obscuring, submerging or warping them. Maybe I was a geologist or an artisan for a simulated material world, extracting and processing matter from the off-cut as a misremembered source. These materials masqueraded as tiles, stone, and wood that adorned the rooms in a downloadable game environment, The Always Middle Showroom. The Always Middle became a generous lens for seeing the life cycle, movement, transmutation and exchanges of material heritage between states of matter.
Mismapping
3D models
In Ecologies of Prehod, I translated digital textures from the game environment into the physical surfaces of wallpapering and a curtain that enclose a niche at Swimming Pool Projects in Sofia. Defying orientation like the digital spaces that preceded it, I recalled quotidian textile patterns and faux materialities influenced by Soviet- and Prehod-era domestic interiors. The off-cut’s misremembered surface continues to circulate in the game, in the gallery, and beyond as made-to-order interior finishes found through www.middles.supply. It seems that heritage is slippery; as much memory as invention.
Domestic Interiors