The Eerie Canal’s ghost, which is also a very present physical twin, Erie Blvd, is a transportation artery for 1-81, more appropriately the contemporary version of the Eerie Canal for Syracuse, where vehicles replace the boats, but direction and motion are still in play. I-81 disconnects two prevalent black neighborhoods in Syracuse, enacted as a response to the potential rise in political power of this black community. We’re interested in exploring the areas that exist between connection and disconnection, exploring the wandering between two oppositions and the implications of that duality on the sensibility of our tiles. Rob Goyanes argues that wandering is a “strategy, a necessary fixture of peace: it teaches humility, the sharing of space, the circulation of concepts and experiences.” In some instances, when opposing grains of vertical deliniations and horizontal sequencing intersect, they cause volatile disruptions to the normative understanding of directionality. In other instances, the disruptions soften, blurring into each other. In all cases, the yellow can only be understood by its connection amongst the other colors, Ponty describes a similar condition, “the red is what it is only by connecting up from its place with other reds about it, with which it forms a constellation, or with other colors it dominates or that dominate it, that it attracts or that attract it, that it repels or that repel it” (Ponty 132). The uncanny yellow begins to disseminate through the tiles, until the sequencing is barren of yellow all together.
1. Goyanes, Rob. A Palace of Unsaids.
2. Ponty, Marleau. “The Intertwining - The Chiasm,” The Visible and the Invisible, 130-155.
Beta-Real
Syracuse SoA Boghosian Fellowship Seminar 2018
Linda Zhang, Pararaum
All work in Collaboration w/ Dante Baldassin
all photographs by Thomas Kim and David Broda