Yeh-Ting Li
Yeah, yeah
Over the last few decades, queer has become a slippery word. The widespread appropriation by mainstream culture has put queerness in an awkward position. Gender-bending dresses have shown up on commercial runways for years. Hotel chains have assimilated transgressive spatial tactics developed in the ‘90s into new lifestyles, such as the idea of visuality, seeing through, and openness. Queerness often ends as a material output that caters to the consumer society and, concurrently, a marketing tool complicit in gentrification. The proliferation of queerness both empowers its aim and depletes its impact. The question here is “Where do we go?”. If queerness is perpetually adapting, perhaps we should respond to it more as a “how” than a “what”.
“Truss”
To make the truss queerly is to linger, linger on the qualities of which you are supposed to pass over, it is to recover a potential from truss that have been left behind, all the things you can do with truss if you do not follow the instruction.
“Asymptote”
“Queerness is not yet here. Queerness is an ideality. Put another way, we are not yet queer. We may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.”
Syncopation is a technique in music as a displacement of a metrical accent caused typically by stressing the weak beat, introducing a disruption by emphasizing the offbeat. It creates a pleasurable frustration while listening to the music and builds a sensibility that is always not quite there. Syncopation helps us rethink the formula of queerness, which is “to interrogate how normative culture produces desire, to expose the constructedness of that desire; and to expand the possibilities of desire through strategic acts of critique and reformulation” (Jaffer Kolb, Working Queer, Log41). This thesis utilizes the warren truss as an instrument to work through this formula. Working with the inflection of the truss instead of deflection implies a structure without its rigidity, resisting the optimal and proposing something looser, softer, and openly conflicted.
“Oops”
It’s fine.
“Joint”
Silicon joint with a familiar role as a connection yet providing something strange in the new configuration.
This thesis adopts a method that requires a closer examination of what is being lost or suppressed. This is not suggesting that a queer method is a better way of working, possibly even a messier way, but perhaps embracing this muddiness would lead us to a more conscious way of working.
“Model Assembly”
Working with the inflection of the truss through different meters which creates grouping dissonances.
“Riso Printing”
Printing with different scan levels, halftone angles, bitmap frequency, ink density, paper types, and the most exciting thing, printing on the wrong layers.