| strat@mit.edu + CV |
| bag is the design research practice of stratton coffman. bag gathers a variety of techniques and media to explore how capital, institutions, and design discourses conspire to produce subjects. get in touch for collaborations, commissions, and bag theories. |
| TITLE Crowd1Scores YEAR 2020- MEDIA scores for performance |
As part of a larger project that explores compression as a historiographical device and an experiential one, Crowd Scores turns to the aimless or unruly crowd as a place of unstable embodiment, and specifically to computational models of crowd behavior. | In 2004, the Brazilian Petroleum Company initiated the development of PetroSim, a computational model for simulating the evacuation of crowds in the areas around the company's industrial facilities. Itself built on longstanding liberal theories of the crowd as an existential threat in need of disciplining, PetroSim has spawned multiple applications through apparatuses of control ranging from urban planning, to public safety authorities, to military agencies. | Crowd Scores misappropriates the schematics and language of PetroSim to compose scores for performing—through the body—altered models. The scores generate a bad data set, undermining the enthronement of the crowd leader, redirecting the inclination toward safety, and otherwise offering some movements for momentarily suspending the behavioral norms incorporated in the self-directed liberal subject. |
| TITLE Three Degrees of Squeeze YEAR 2017 MEDIA essay in Log 41 Special section: Working Queer |
A rambling essay on unsettling cases of risky closeness with architecture. It traces compression as an historiographic field of affect, from industrial agricutlural techniques for herding cattle to the unregulated density of mid 19th-century tenement housing. It finds that, "Whether consensual or the outcome of structural conditions, these architectures of closeness stage a kind of living defined by its illegibility, along with the serious existential risks and pleasures therein." |
| Bound House, with Aaron Powers, Jung In Seo |
| bound house in an inflatable installation that initiates encounters with others that are awkward or uncomfortable. folds, slits, and orifices supply means of meeting at the threshold of intimacy and discomfort, either through their momentary occurrence or in the queasiness of their slight possibility. our room registers multiple, displaced bodies and transmits those movements across its depth, overlaying degrees of connection, from the physical touching of an anonymous backside, to the bumping into another’s face, to the jostling of some other presence at a distance. laughs of discomfort or embarrassment are heard from within the concealing facade, observations of movement and shaking register the occupants use within. |
| Paper Space, workshop co-taught with sarah wagner |
| paper space is a creative writing workshop that investigated, through a series of open-ended prompts, how writing may be used as a medium of exploration in architectural production, both to resituate writing as a possible means of design and to reconsider design as the crafting of fictional, poetic, and real worlds. it consisted of three (3) workshop sessions with invited creative writers working in poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. within the condensed scope of these sessions, workshop participants, drop-ins, and the wider MIT community were invited to produce written work in response to the prompts, provocations, and pedagogies of the visiting writer. in between these workshops we held three or four writing sessions for workshop participants to develop longer-term projects individually and collaboratively. |
