what's up with all the pipes?

To get to my office in Snyder-Phillips, I take one of two staircases. Each staircase contains arrangements of plumbing infrastructure: pipes, guages, valves, signage. These arrangements, which vary by floor, are aesthetic compositions, characterized by a distinctive sculptural quality. Pipes are positioned according to strict horizontal or perpendicular lines, but this rectilinearity is broken by curves of multi-jointed flexible conduit. The clinical white of the plumbing is accented by bright red valve handles and shiny metallic juncture boxes. The red lettering of signs is supplemented by notes handwritten with a black Sharpie, forming micro palimpsests.

 

Each day as I pass these found sculptures, I have the urge to photograph them or translate them to some other medium. In thinking about this website, it struck me that these images constitute fitting metaphors for my interests. They are the partially exposed hubs of larger networks that run throughout the building, invisible to us in the walls and ceilings. In this way, they echo the information networks and learning networks that I study.

 

At the same time, they perform a decisive materiality, asserting their built quality through tightly fastened hex nuts and elbow fittings carefully soldered onto straights. The most vulnerable connections are encased in a protective plastic shell, secured with a padlock of hardened steel. The attentiveness to the way the components are chosen and assembled, the built quality of the composition, hints at my interest in material rhetoric and the processes of fabrication that I am studying in makerspaces.

 

 

 

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