Soap Box: Voicing Mischief

Course: Mapping: Geographic Representation + Speculation, Harvard Graduate School of Design, 2019.
In collaboration with: Emma Mendel and Bert De Jonghe.

In a world that is entering indeterminant economic, ecological, and social realities, the methods and data we use to map and model are straining to represent this reality’s complexities. The hidden, invisible, and marginal elements in today’s society are marginalized by the existing mapping tools and are crucial in understanding and projecting alternative futures. In the slipstream of this shift towards a new reality, new methods of exploring and understanding indeterminacy are critical—for example, through the ritual of hand-washing. Soap engages in a set of coded dynamics inherent in any individual’s existence in society, especially now during a global pandemic. It is marketed as an eliminator of society’s dis-wants and promises a cleansing of the day’s traces on the surface of our bodies. In the coded dynamics between the surface of our skin and soap, there is also a heuristic in the slipperiness, the slime, the lather that disavows the fallible human in our relationships of place, both beyond and with other bodies. Spatially, soap can also be linked to people’s behavior in the city and be an interface for storytelling or data; in doing so, it focuses on the hidden, chaotic, emotive and reactionary parts of our day, such as mischief. Spatially mapping mischief is to translate the slipperiness and spontaneity of soap, along with the ritual of washing, into a new process of interpreting spaces and shifting our cognitive ways of understanding and engaging with such spaces. Finally, revealing new realities and spatial patterns that question familiarity and explore the precariousness of urban life.

Mischief requires time and exposure to understand what is under the surface. In order to understand and appreciate mischief in Cambridge, we looked at five activities: the exhibitionist (sex), the kleptomaniac (stealing), the addict (medicating), the sloth (sleeping) and the narcissist (grooming). These activities were extracted as points of misbehavior. The project categorizes a parcel of the city into five categories of land use; residential, commercial, institutional, forest/nature and cemetery. This was then pixelated to create a grid, dividing the parcel into zones of misbehavior, abstracted into a black acrylic grid seen in the physical model.

The model elicits two parables;
Over time, through the ritual of washing our hands and eroding away the soap, we expose acts of mischief. In doing so, we expose mischief’s inherent irony in the forbidden and celebrated, the destructive and resilient. As such it is hypocritical. Mischief exists in degrees, time periods of normalcy that transfer into mischievous, suspicious and mysterious spatial time zones. Mischief could also elicit joy, humor and pleasure. It is something we forbid on the one hand, but also celebrate through holidays such as Halloween or April Fools Day. We are both excited by it and afraid of it, which allows mischief to emerge as a confused character. It then begs the question, at what point are we being mischievous? The zones of mischief are compared to the duration of activities and frequency to arrive at degrees of mischief. Each cell is filled in with solid cubes of glycerin, tinted in relation to their appropriateness when coupled with land use. Exhibited through the length of the wire quills, are these durations of time spent evolving the space.