A Softer World
“the yarn bomb keeps going off, whole buildings are radically softened”
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Life is hard. Let’s just start there, we live in hard times. Metaphorically this can be seen as a never-ending info-pool of doomsday apocalypse scenarios we are either creating for ourselves or unable to stop. While practically speaking, it can be seen in pretty much everything we’ve built that is contributing to those apocalypses. Our technology, from cars to iPods, is a series of sleek artful robots, and all of it is hard.
And then one day you see that someone has knitted a yarn cozy and sewn it around a bike rack. Blammo! Yarn bombing meet modern life! Let’s see if we can’t get a hard world to go soft.
Technological design is art. Apple issues a new laptop somehow both thinner and sharper than its predecessor, and we marvel at how newly small the world is! But just like the robots are an art form, so is the rest of the world, and design for it follows the same logic: we see a garden in one light, and then it is landscaped and it’s a whole new thing.
Now allow me to propose that graffiti is like landscaping for the urban environment. One day there’s a normal building and then one night it gets bombed with a series of tags and suddenly we have questions in our head: about the lack of color in our world, or who owns what, or if unsolicited art is somehow dangerous?
Short answer: it is.
The power of art lies in its ability to transform. We interact with the world and see it one way, and then somebody shows us a piece of art and the way we see the world shifts completely. Sometimes that piece of art is a poem or song or movie, it worms into our skull and tampers with our brain. Sometimes it’s a sculpture or a painting, the medium shifts, but the fundamental change involved remains. Here is one version of the world, and now here it is seen through the prism of art, the same thing completely skewed.
With street art, that power can work on an almost unconscious level. Every day we interact with a world increasingly cold and distant, metallic and cut off. We encase ourselves in machines to maneuver through daily life, connect ourselves to machines to communicate with each other; ultimately we interface more with machines now than we do with people. And that leaves our sense of the world at a remove too.
Yarn bombing provides a way back into the world. Like putting on a sweater as the winter begins to approach, yarn bombing goes out into the world and warms it back up. Apple products pride themselves on sleek futuristic lines and smooth unbroken surfaces, but all that synthesized future deco does is force interactions that are stiff and terrified of any sort of mishandling.
Sure trees get yarn bombed sometimes, but when I think of that bike rack I'm thinking about that sleek metal surface finally being encased in the natural world again. I think of cold steel becoming warm fuzzys. I look at an object I've never felt particularly compelled by before and see not only its beauty in form (finally) but the need to interact with it in a tangible way. To touch it. To work my fingers around the loops and knots, through the stitching.
Look, we still wear clothing for reasons of comfort. We are not daily encasing ourselves in metal unless our brains have been infected by the robots, and quite frankly, fuck those guys. Robots do not have our best interests at heart. Robots do not have hearts. But also, robots have a need to kill humans. It is how we understand each other best, what is human is opposite from what is robot. And what is human is to touch, to feel, to sense things.
What is human is art.
I read a book recently that dealt heavily with the theme of Green sense, having a connection with the spirit of the land, and I think that's something we've lost over time for sure. Yarn bombing is an art that restores that, the Green sense; it is a softer more connective substance.
Looking into the future through our info-swamp we see doomsday after doomsday: overrun worlds filled with hordes of mindless zombies, or drones, all contained in the sterile interlocked miles of hospital corridors. Very rarely do we offer ourselves a future of hope. But yarn bombing does. In the future where the yarn bomb keeps going off, whole buildings are radically softened from the inside out. Imagine walking past streetlamps at night that just bomb on, brilliant loose fuzz halos bursting out of their sockets in light and fragile wonder. The sense that at any moment radical change is possible. That the mailbox could explode into an afghan. That the bus stop shelter could pop into a quilt. That we could live again in a world that seemed to be comfortable, warm, and inviting.
I want that from all my art: the promise of hope. It is the same reason I voted for Obama. It is why I spend so much free time reading articles online about intersectionality, how to be an ally, and deconstructing the cultural identity that I represent every day of my life. It is massive claims that the world can change for the better. I do believe somehow that the world can change for the better. Yarn bombing is not the only part of that. But it is a part. Like turning home-sale leaflet dispensers into poetry display boxes. Like community gardens and green roofing. It's hippy shit for sure, but in a cool, not aggressively-in-your-space-with-too-much-body-odor way.
I for one am tired of feeling like going outside each day is just going to be an exercise in getting busted up. Tired of feeling like I always have to “man up” somehow, fake some sort of carapace onto my exterior. I’m sick of fighting the world, worrying about how hard life is all the time. Shit. I’m ready to get soft, to be embraced by art that is warm, comforting, quiet, and fucking everywhere once you recognize it. My heart has been primed; it is a yarn bomb waiting to blow.
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