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Public vs. Private (Untapped, fig. 2)

Reclaimed desks, pencil, Arduino Uno, motor, electrical circuits, iPad, surveillance camera, civic obligations, and community considerations

Public vs. Private (Untapped, fig. 2), is a manifestation of a series of questions which seek to deconstruct the binary of private versus public, through the examination of mechanized education within the United States. The project in its origin, Untapped, included a singular desk which included a sensor--activated from an approaching individual—caused the pencil on the desk to tap. This second rendition of the piece includes two desks. Not intended to be seen next to each other—separated through architecture, yet existing within the same gallery—will become inherently linked through an invisible dialogue. Embodied through a “user” game type experience between the two desks, the motion sensor located on the primary desk, when activated by the “user” or gallery audience, will cause an automated pencil to tap on the second, displaced, and unseen desk. The motion of this tapping upon the second desk will be monitored through a camera, and streamed back to an iPad attached to the primary desk. This screen will show the implicated repercussions of the interactions of the primary desk upon the secondary desk. Through such tension, the piece looks to examine invisible systems of control within education, and the access of possibility through spheres of private and public education. This work is heavily influenced by the following texts as well as others; Henry Giroux’s The Violence of Organized Forgetting: Thinking Beyond America’s Disimagination Machine, David Graeber’s The Utopia of Rules, and Derek Bok’s Beyond the Ivory Tower: Social Responsibilities of the Modern University

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