256A 1.0
My first code in ChucK: EVERY CORRIDOR IN THIS DREAM
Design Etude:
Reading Response 1:
Sung from OSEANA Sunset
––A response to Ge Wang's Artful Design: Technology in Search of the Sublime, Chapter 1
Professor Ge Wang writes about the sublime as this strange meeting place between awe and fear: standing at the edge of an abyss, looking into something so vast we cannot fully comprehend it. And somehow, in that smallness, finding clarity and wonder.
I feel this so much.
I feel this about the ocean. I feel this about human nature.
There is something about smallness amidst feeling safe, unsafe, and everywhere in between. The relationship with the unknown, but with a cradle, a secure base. Vastness, connectedness, us situated within it, feeling at home within its nest and free to move in aliveness. The ocean carries currents where life is already there: life in all its complexity, life in all the directions to which it can flow.
As a trauma survivor, I have felt to the bone the cost of erasure, the topology of dispossession, and the profound magic of reclaimed life. To make this body feel like a tender, lived-in home again is, for many, nothing short of an odyssey. I feel fiercely protective of this vitality, the this-life-is-mine feeling. I bleed for the parts of us absorbing the architectures that teach our bodies to disappear to survive. Artful design, to me, protects aliveness rather than quietly eroding our agency and capacity to feel.
What happens to the parts of us we exile? They don’t just go away. What happens to these places within our minds and within our world that we turn away out of fear, out of survival? Where do they go when we don’t know where to put them? How do they transmute safely?
So many signals to listen to. So many feelings to give a home to.
This is what OSEANA seeks to explore. Across 20+ songs, multimodal worldbuilding, and emerging interactive experiences, I have been designing a creative universe around sound, story, psychology, technology, and trauma-informed psychophysiology, exploring what happens when attunement and safety return. The nervous system becomes a site of design. Co-regulation becomes something we can hear and enter.
I am interested in the nervous system as an ocean to listen to deeply, meet tenderly, and help come home. OSEANA was born out of survival, but aliveness is where she sings from. I want to create shorelines of life. Architectures that cradle us embodied beings. Spaces and support systems where what has been exiled can safely unravel; where fear can coexist with awe; where all our parts are given a home to play, transmute, repair.
A home-making quest that feels spiritual to me.
And the body glows back.
There is a mythic amalgam of feelings I associate with an OSEANA sunset: crying from the shoreline of awe, all this grief and all that awe together, tenderness moving through it. Something almost embryonic. The organism knows it before language. The nervous system recognizes that state. The body remembering its life force again, dancing from inside this old treasure box washed up on the shoreline.
This music is mine, is mine, is mine.
This is why Wang’s “everyday poetry” stays with me so deeply. He imagines artful design reaching beyond function toward something intimate, humanistic, subtly transformative… something that can leave us “playful, understood, elevated.”
I want that everyday poetry to become an everyday talisman.
Glimmers. Songs. Rooms. Messages from a bottle. Liminal ports we stop at that invite exhales and release as we travel through terrains of life. Little cradles to meet and metabolize rupture. Snippets of everyday poetry through which the body gets to reclaim beauty, soften, slow down, and remember the life force already there.
This is the sublime OSEANA sings from: fear and awe, survival and play, the vastness of the ocean and the tenderness of having somewhere within it to come home to, again and again.
We land on a beach. She wants to hide, hyperventilating.
“Too much light, this isn’t real.” She hasn’t seen daylight in years.
I hold her so tight. Slowly, she unravels out of my embrace.
She looks at the burning horizon. She tells me it speaks to her.
She tells me it’s time to live again. Though she fears she’s forgotten how.
She begins to move her limbs, like she is learning to use them for the first time.
“I know, sweet girl, but you haven’t forgotten. The life was always in you.”
“And now it’s safe to unravel. I’ll be with you always.”
She begins to dance, like tomorrow doesn’t exist.
(From OSEANA's journal)
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