Plywood

Plywood is striated space it's made of layers stuck together, the grain of the wood alternating in different directions.  I've seen a film of them making it from giant trees from the rain forest; they mount the trunks on giant lathes and then peel them like apples - the lungs of the earth rolled out like a giant sheet of toilet paper.  I am reading Harmans book about art and aesthetics,  he thinks the only way we can describe an object ( which can be basically anything that has a form) is through metaphor that draws us towards a partial experience of of its Noumenon the thing in-itself or the bit about it that is real but can never be known according to Kant.  Harmen is quite useful in  how he describes the things and people he disagrees with and also the odd bits of other peoples thinking that he agrees with. In this book he talks through Greenberg and Fried and a bit of Kraus and the emerging history of modernity within art criticism.  He just expects you are with him on all the object oriented ontology guff and to be honest its a lot to swallow.  When he describes the American civil war as an object or a banana or the Hudson bay company you begin to wonder what could not be encountered as an object.

What Harmen does give us though is some ideas within the Western tradition that oppose relativism and shake up dualism and if you take the bait line and sinker can hook you in to the possibility of a different way of thinking if you were inclined to think in a way in the first place.

From an OOO perspective then what can the metaphor of plywood bring you closer too ? This was my question for today for trying to work with theory as I go backwards and forwards to the playground reading dense text and trying to work out how to build a slide from my platform, develop loose parts play and still maintain some identity that resembles  what I carried with me before working on a PhD necessarily deconstructed me.  All my images of plywood are in a process of laminating the weather has crept into its edges and dissolved the glue which was obviously under specification.  We have interior ply, exterior ply, Far-Eastern ply, Birch ply and Marine ply - you should always use marine ply at an adventure playground but we never do as its too expensive.  They all look the same when they are new.  As I look at the stamp that says its from managed forests I wonder if this is true, I suspect its not, I have always felt guilty building stuff from the rain forest.  We have the material plywood and the implication for the planet and for  my lungs as I inhale its dust and we have the flatness of surface but the real strength of plywood as a metaphor is when it laminates and spreads itself across the playground, it becomes beautiful within its decomposition.

Plywood in the images above is an active metaphor that holds the object of entropy, things however strongly adhered together, whatever adhesive we use, at some point will begin to laminate. Striated space lets smooth space in, it begins to flow and structural strength is lost. As the age of usefulness passes there is perhaps a moment where aesthetics take over to be noticed sideways and at the edges of perception. This is not so much captured in a photograph but aspects of it are remembered and pointed towards in an image.  And here Harmen is useful as the metaphor is not a simile or a literal comparison,  it is not like the surface of something else it just draws us closer to the thing in itself that can never be known.  This laminated plywood is a metaphor for the object of my PhD writing, PhD as Plywood makes sense and Plywood as PhD doesn't. Its past its best, laminated and becoming soft.  Its no longer useful to build anything practical but as it decays and goes back to the soil it holds a staggering new potential to become something quite different.  

Soil