I was on a panel discussion called “Hybrid practices: humans, machines, networks, interactivity” last Saturday at the future_feed_forward festival.
Something that became a touchstone for all the speakers was the idea of “the crack”.
I first had a conversation about the crack (the first one where it was called “the crack”) at the BRIDGES II research summit in Banff last year. At a dinner table, several of us discussed this notion of the crack as the place where the most interesting things happen – a place that is between categories, that is ephemeral, ad-hoc, impossible to generate on purpose, and where cross-pollenization of ideas is most likely to occur.
The crack in this sense interests me because rather than having a negative connotation (“He fell between the cracks”) it has a positive one, and reflects the true nature of how new things happen – increasing pressure and movement between two or more components causes ruptures, breaks, cracks. Pieces of one thing break off and join another, or go off on their own. (Part of California breaks off and becomes an island. Imagine Los Angeles Island! …but I digress.)
We talked about the crack as an infinitely delicate and fertile space. I thought the conversation paralelled nicely with the work of one of the panelists, Maria Legault. One of her pieces involves filling cracks in her environment with pink icing. She also does this for others, in their homes. This kind of offering can be read many different ways: she provides utility (the cracks should be filled), whimsy (they should not be filled with pink icing), and ephemerality (they won’t be filled with icing for long, once the bugs get to it.)
And lastly, it draws attention to the cracks in our lives that perhaps should not be seen as flaws, but places of departure from which to examine what is possible.