Columbia University senior Emma Sulkowicz, 21, says she was raped in her own bed at the beginning of her sophomore year. This week, two years after the alleged assault, Sulkowicz, a visual-arts major, has made a promise to carry her mattress around campus every day as part of her senior thesis. It is, she says, a symbol of the burden sexual-assault survivors carry with them every day.
“The act of carrying the mattress from inside my room out into the light has mirrored the way my life has changed, as I’ve brought my personal story out into the light,” Sulkowicz told TIME. “This project is a way to heal one of the most difficult things that happened to me. As I will build muscle and get stronger, hopefully I will also build emotional strength.”
Sulkowicz started the performance-art project on Tuesday, and she said she is determined to continue carrying the mattress wherever she goes — to class, the library, the gym — as long as her alleged rapist is still on campus. That means her project could last until graduation day in May 2015 — unless her alleged assailant is either expelled or chooses to leave the school. Last year, Sulkowicz and two other women reported the same person to the university. All three cases were dismissed.
Art can be used for education, too, though, in my experience as an educator, entertainment and education are naturally synergistic with each other. You cannot educate without a degree of enfurthurance to the lesson, the force behind scaffolding information as that is a combined process of teacher and student enthusiasm, yet raw entertainment is rather mindless and starts to lose interest in infancy, where noise-intensity signal processing begins to lose weight in attentional algorithms once a mind begins producing ongoing an syntatical placement of a self in relation to its environment, obviously. Ie, the human attentional coordination algorithms are tuned neither to raw information download nor highest immediate priority for situational attunement.
IMO, as a poet, I feel there is a “puzzle solving” aspect to my craft. I set limitations, mine mostly working on simple rhyme schemes in near pixel-perfect line length for a visual effect, and I produce a message to fit those parameters. Here is a lipogram I did, titled Nervana:
Art facilitates an aspect of intrigue to the human psyche, and it is intrigue that drives a factor within intention-setting. The awareness of this, combined with the will to defeat the banal “self” results in a divergent narrative from which one derives identity from. In my personal anecdotal experience of this, my unconscious and thus intuition became informed of general archetypal concepts to reality over the course of my adolescence, with a currently noteworthy example being how I conceptualized a part of my reality around the movie Dreamcatcher, based on a Stephen King novel.
There was my memory warehouse, but there was “other” living within it, meaning I wasn’t fully in control. I would once visit “other” in my astral projection/lucid dreaming experiments in my early twenties on an island constructed by “other” that had symbolic qualities, most importantly one visitation where the rendering of reality tore itself asunder so the entire graphonceptation of what can be considered physical reality asymptoted forwards, inwards you can say, towards the central mind of consciousness.
I saw God. God opened Hid third eye. He saw into me to then see all of me and I caught glimpse, but shit quickly catalyzed to null in which I was blinded by the emptiness. And all was quiet. Then I was itchy, to then realize and wake up to the trepid quasitruth that I was being eaten by vampires. But there was only me. I was destroying myself. And I woke in the dampest, coldest sweat I can recall myself experiencing from a nightmare or other nightly verzore intrusion.
But this just what I teach. I don’t tell people where to go hides neon sign saying Live Nudes but everybody who needs to fibd a gerv ber wonb did a prurn trogdn ometr order of the thirst dong dickery doo I’m coming fur or somvf trades godf refernl lol. Obviously.
Jesus Christ
I am.