The email exchange was pleasant and topical in the way that people interact after not speaking for the last decade. I've lived over 1/2 my life since the last time this person and I spoke, and this is a bizarre place in my life for our paths to intersect again. I found myself trying to explain things like my limited possessions in a way that a stranger might be able to digest, which is difficult to do because although owning 100 things is a manifestation which is easily identifiable, its genesis is not. And I found myself wondering, why do I live with 100 things?
Why do I live with 100 things:
Well as a basic concept it made sense. I was moving a lot this past year and found myself frequently interacting with those forgotten artifacts that live in the back of closets maybe 2-3 times every six months (where normally a person would interact with these things once every couple years.) Forced to confront an increasing pile of "things I keep but never use" I decided to reassess. When I moved in the beginning of the summer I got rid of 50% of everything I owned. I did this every time I moved that summer and by fall I owned about 100 things. I wrote about this experience extensively in the beginning of this blog. Perhaps driven by OCD, I developed a list of 100 things I thought I needed at the time and decided to live by a numbered list.
There are holes in this I realize. And I've been struggling for the past 2 semesters to help clear up some personal issues I've had. Reading Possessions and the Extended Self by Russell Belk has put me into a bit of a stupor trying to sort through some of these things. I am even further confounded when I try to mentally resolve KR_100.
KR_100 is the documentation of my journey. I have 98 things, a list of these things and the container they all go in. The 98 things are changing fairly regularly and are the subject of a pseudo-artistic, pseudo-phycological interest of a friend of mine who has taken under documenting these changes. This started with a thorough photography session that took individual portraitures of each of the objects (and for kicks, 1 large photo of all the objects together.) This was right as I was leaving for Doha and was a brief snapshot of time. As soon as I got to Doha things were already back in rotation, swapping out sleeveless shirts for black shawls as my needs changed between countries. This presented an issue. To participate in KR_100, my friend needed images of my new things, and a list of things as I was getting rid of them. Even more complicated, there were things that I purchased there and cycled out there, so how do we capture these? This is the most confounding part of my lifestyle: I kept the things I got rid of. I stopped using them, crossed them off my list and made a place in my closet for them. That means when I packed to come home, there were things in my suitcase which I hadn't touched for months, and only kept for the purposes of documentation. And now I'm back to square 1, I have a pile of "things I keep but don't use." This is like Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle but for art. My habits have been observed and are now changed. What do I think about that?
This habit-rabbit-hole goes deeper still. The final outcome of the project might be a tangible artifact. Right now it lives as digital images, but there might be a time when there is an object of my objects. If, according to Belkin, possessions are extensions of the self, ownership of this generated object is like ownership of me in some way. This actually happens to some degree in the act of gift giving but perhaps that's a post for another time.