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Plus or Minus 3,919 Grids
A site-specific installation with curated performances that took place on September 21st, 2025 at Confloptus,
Oakland, CA.
The installation was made of five hand crocheted nets and a wall drawing of shadows it created throughout the day.
Badri Valian performed her piece, Force Displacement. In her words, "Forced Displacement began when I questioned the meaning of land acknowledgments that are spoken but rarely acted upon. In a conversation with my mentor, I was challenged to transform that frustration into an act of “radical care.” This became an interactive performance dedicated to people who have been forcibly displaced."
Helen Shewolfe Tseng discussed their computational poetry practice and the handmade web. Helen explains, "I am an enthusiastic participant in the handmade web! All of the projects I will show today are hand-coded pieces. I often imagine hand-coding going the way of hobby crafts like knitting, hand-weaving, or embroidery, which may be rendered “obsolete” by contemporary technologies (and “vibes” ??), but still retain the pleasures and principles that make them worth returning to as an artistic medium and process."
Tasya Abbot made music and invited others to join. Taysa describes her sound practice as "I am primarily a singer. I also compose and arrange music. I perform as CANTATI, a practitioner of choral trance, with forays into object performance. I play an assortment of instruments with varying degrees of skill. Sometimes I construct sound-objects. When performing solo, I use a live looping setup to make sonic landscapes and 'Be My Own Choir.'"
Nate Dube showed diatoms and the art of diatom arrangements through their projector microscope. As they explained to the Craftsman, “I remember going to collect diatoms from fountains, people watching me scoop mud into vials. I’m a very shy person—something like that would’ve freaked me out before. But I just had to get these diatoms, I had a mission. I realized I didn’t need to care what people thought. It wasn’t a single moment; it was gradual. The sort of thing that needs reinforcement. You learn to accept the way you’re seen, and then to be seen the way you want to be seen…..So—I’m not saying diatom arranging makes you non-binary, but it affects how you see yourself. It’s hard for me to disconnect those things from the work I’m doing here.”
Despite its appearances, a more precise number does not make what it purports more accurate or real. 3,919 grids sounds exact and calculated, despite just being a prime number I liked and begs the question: what is one grid? Is it the stitch, the squares they form, a certain number of squares? What is counted and who does the counting?
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