The Material of us

a sketch of detailed write-up to come -----------------(draft only. feedback solicited)

Its been a long journey since i first started looking at materials in their various relationships, which is how they exist. Starting with an education in mechanical engineering, I see materials in their physical particle beings, manipulable, gullible, separable....engineering uses terms such as malleable or ductile, to be beaten until expanded or to be beaten until drawn. I learnt processes that ranged from the use of brute to sophisticated force that one unleashes on something that cannot react back. I am temped to conclude that the act of making something is the act of violence. It is a fair degree of departure from acknowledging the details that exist beyond the specific utilitarian tunnel, only articulated through experience.

The first step in objectification is the act of making things, and its in the act of making things that world is first divided into the emotionally relevant and the emotionally irrelevant. Contrary to how we make physical objects (heat, beat and treat) naturally objects are made as a dialectic with each other; object shaping its environment and in return being shaped by it. Maybe then, there is far too much of agency that gets attributed to human creativity because, like a stone it is shaping its environment and is being shaped by it. the fact that a human is far too evolved an entity to only shape its own immediate environment, overturns the naive foundations which the previous argument stands on.

My next experience with a material was to take the spirit of the material, assume all the violence as given and transcend / morph it to an emotional being, to see the material as an emotional content, purged of all physicality and then with this standpoint, start moving towards it, creating a grammar of emotional objectivity, a grammar of taste. As an Industrial designer i was to make material my statement in form, color and composition, uplifting its objective form to a matter of taste, completely reversing its identity by a series of manipulations over an already processed material. (on an irrelevant but interesting note its very similar to how hegemony and the idea of the transcendence function, except that in this case we assume that the material has no agency and that the resistance it offers cannot be assumed to be a kickback.

The movement from being an industrial designer to an experience designer brought me to closer to the exchange that one had with a finished product, of how one used it, touched it, lived with it. In case of the intangible face or the user interface of a software which was a system/product exchange was also how user navigated around it.

This exchange or designed experience was how the material was decoded by the consumer as compared to how it was coded (read designed) by the producer, reducing the material to a dialogue between two entities invisible to each other but visible only to the material, which was now a soul less conduit, transcending into multiple avatars of emotional objectivity where each party was only interested to see the reflections of its own value.

Interested with a brief marxist reflection of objects producing social reality and a space for the drama of everyday lives, i read a bit of Henri Lefebvre and got introduced to Jean Boudrillard's work " A system of objects" very recently. How an aesthetic exercise such as a dining table establish and play out a certain patriarchal agenda became interesting to me and i've become very interested in examining the people-object relationship even more closely. More on that will be coming soon

Subjected to its fulfillment, one invests in a dream?

Subjected to its fulfillment, one invests in a dream.

Dreams have always been the missing links between one contextual catharysis and other.
they are like the missed highlights that never happened (given the social moral and spatial constrains) ot what happened between two historic events, these events could be a collective's idea of a tomorrow or an individual's. These could also be the projection of past on the future.

Interestingly projections of past are not marely around events but also around Identities and modality of how one identity will interact with other. Man has little imagination except to project his past and call it future and mix affordances(objects, scenario centered artifacts) which help him travel that distance.

The related question that we ask here is does one expect dreams to be fulfulled. Or the act of dreaming itself is part fulfillment. There is a physiological vs Ideological angle to this aspect that is worthy of observation. The classical normative-formative battle thrown with a little bit of tussel.

Dreams also help de-site. Very often the gender, which is built on the site of domestic, often feudal household, is decapitated from its link and left to float, bloom in its own potent imagination. Dreams challenge agency, transfer agency in a way when they scale down/up personalities, change timelines or surroundings and recur with different themes.

Dreams are a force of latent blur, a sensuous blend of reality mixed and ccopulating with itself. 

Dissecting falling in love-1

Mathematical and logical mapping of love
while it was clear that love of multiple things was increasingly proving to be much more sweeter than the love for a handful of individuals, loving as they say was back.
the entire time when you are occupied with a minimal set of things and you travel into remarkable details as you go by. Love` as frequently defined by sociologists is a byproduct of three different variables. Proximity, similarity and sexually constructed attraction stereotypes.
a truth table for love would look something like this.
p ^s^q<=>L
p=proximity
s=similarity
q= sexually constructed attraction stereotypes
^= "and" condition
please note that no corrections on gender are made.
while these are not atomic divisions this  statement is more like a logical wrapper.
playing along further, lets start deconstructing the ideas of proximity, similarity and attractiveness.
Proximity(descoping-physical proximity) is the simplest to go ahead with.
People interact with each other at various social spaces made of multiple social units . Smallest unit to begin the enquiry at is families. Here the clearly defined social roles hinder the possibility of creating alternate models of kinship over and above the existing ones. So for the sake of covering the largest percentile in discussion, we loop out the families and possible grounds for falling in love with some one in the next of kin(say with your dad or mother or sister or brother)as far as proximity is concerned. I would most certainly touch on the role that family plays in shaping up the templates that decide the world views/similarity and attractiveness ideas. So then you have proximity at living spaces and working/learning spaces, and then there is the cyberspace which is almost like a mashup between the virtual and physical world , adding notably the possibility of interacting and staying close to people who may not be directly known to you. In terms of a logical statement , this can be stated as
l or W or C<=>P
where C= ( l or W)- (l^W). Aggregately stating the statement
P<=> I or W or (( I or W)-( I^W))

leaving  this here in form that may be atomised further we move to Similarity which is a lot more complex than the previous variable.
we start with what can be ruled out. Can age be ruled out, well maybe partially as it's only after the advent of puberty that one gets biologically driven to seek partners. If age is defined as a variable, then it could be expressed as
A<=> Not PUB
numerically
A<=> Not "13"
Other variables which govern similarity in this context (and some of it is to do with proximity which we have already accounted for ) can roughly be World view , which again can be reduced to Institutional/religious affiliations, Gender role confirmations, the perception towards financial goals at different stages of aging (acquiring property vis a vis travelling, or similar examples of culturally shaped ambitions which need to be funded). another important variable which could possibly be aggregated in this bracket but which will be explained later in the paper is the social role perception(what should one do at a particular age/ class and social situation). Similarity may also be coming from class variables , as in people belonging to same economic stata, however this can be contested or cancelled by individual's social model. for the sake of argument we would want to classify this under the social role .
Empirically stating
O<=> (I or R)^G^F^S
where O is a blanket variable (lets call it other) to wrap I= Institutional affiliation, R= religious affiliation, G=gender roles (here to account for people with mating preferences within the same gender we say G is the adapted gender role), F =financial goles/roadmaps, and S= social role roadmaps.
So similarity can be empirically represented by
Sim<=> A^O, aggregating and expanding it-
Sim<=> (Not13) ^(( I orR)^G^F^S)
The next variable that we want to descope here is the role of what is considered attractive . very interestingly an interesting complication is brought about by people attracted by the same gender. They may find the same gender attractive however they themselves may have internalised the a diffrenet gender in a form of passive attraction . We however would be ruling it out for the sake of looping in the largest sample percentile.
first variable to begin with would be visual aesthetique, which again is governed by certain well defined variables.
Aes<=> Sym^Con^Ton^Prop
Sym= symmetry is defined from the planer axis as (1) overall symmetry of left half of the body with the right half (2) inherent symmetry of individual visual components of the external body (which is visible to the mate) say the placement and form of the eyes, ears etc (3)Asymmetry offered by the a vsual component such as a mole or the drop and fold of hair which needs to sit well with rest of the composition. Though we are stating it here, it is more suitably grouped under contrast that we discuss next. So Symmetry can be empirically defined as
Sym<=> BodySym^CompoSym
Contrast again would have two inherent components, one would be the mate's contrast with the surrounding and other would be the inherent contrast between multiple visual elements within the object. One interesting thought around this area is the fact that contrast would also include the clothing that the mate would wear. Another inherent idea of the shortness/ tallness of the mate is also a variable that can be associated with the concept of environmental contrast however for the sake of clarity in the argument we classify it under the structure subheading. A small input in terms of composing the persona in order to guide the viewer's eye movement would help enhance the contrast and as a result the attention that the mate gathers.
Curating this experience further is the argument of the asymmetry that we were discussing in the previous section. Carefully constructed asymmetry would enhance the contrast further and help navigate the viewer's attention to the specific area where the asymmetry is created .
So empirically stating the contrast can be logically expressed as
Con<=> EnvCon^ ObjCon or Asymm
Where EnvCon= Contrast with the environment
              ObjCon= Contrast within the object
             Asymm = Asymmetry within the object
Ton(tone) is the blanket variable by which we represent the overall texture and color/tone of the skin.
Tone as a variable also works as a cultural construct as it represents the ethnicity of the subject . Often the social conditioning is to find the mate within one's own ethnicity. Also the other way round in cases where people look up to their oppressors  or colonizers with respect and are hence have the idea of sexual conquest against them if they are able to mate with the individuals of same/similar skin tone, texture.
Empirically Tone can thus be defined as
Ton<=> Col^Texture^Social acceptability or Misc
Misc= multiple other variables which have not been reduced in this argument.
Prop (proportion) as a variable can be further atomised to following components- Structure, proportion with respect to the species, proportion of the extended organs such as limbs with respect to the trunk(the main visual volume in the body , also proportion of the limbs and the body with respect to the existing patterns that the viewer has stored and is likely to compare to while observing the subject.
      When we talk of structure we are ideally talking about the deviation of body structure of this subject from the ideal structure (as culturally reinforced- lean, bulky, stocky etc) and deviation in the height of the subject(as culturally reinforced- petite, tall, short etc).
Empirically stating
Prop<=>  Struc(Pattern)^Struc(Vol-limb) or Cul(dev-idealstruc).
assembling the empirical statement

Aes<=>(Bodysym^Composym) ^((Envcon^Objcon) or Assym)^((Col^Texture^Social acceptability) or Misc)^((Struc(Pattern)^Struc(vol-limb))orCul(dev-idealstruc)).
Completely this statement can be expressed as
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We now move ahead with reducing this empirical formula into a mathe