A New Home

Thesis (Master's)--University of Washington, 2018Being a product of your environment, limitations of exploring ones' self and discovery of your own essence become very apparent by not exploring your surroundings. One would never know the beauty of a sunrise cresting the horizon if they spent their life sequestered to the windowless dwelling of an urban interior. Conversely, you would never know the beauty of a ray of light cutting through the vertical forest of skyscrapers if they doomed themselves to live in a suburban metropolis. As an active member of a culture built on appropriation, the question begs to be answered; are you limited by your own sphere of life? Life becomes a self-prescribed autobiographical memory of places people identify with. Felt memories, experiences, smells, visuals, visceral experiences that you hold on to, things that over time you compile that equate to you: your person, your character, your voice, your temperament, your opinion, your intellect. The human experience of place becomes the vehicle and access we use to synthesize and absorb our surroundings. This experience may present itself in many tactile natures from the sole participant to communal experience, as well as from active to absent participant. Regardless, by inflicting limitations on the volume of experiences in life, this reduces the richness and diversity within ones' self. Connection through your surroundings can be one form of identity, as well as identity through an address or a structure or region. Memory can equally help to serve as method of identity, a comparative tool to situate yourself in place you find yourself. Identity implies that there is a set standard quality, or circumstance, distinguishing factors, or likeness that acts as the ability make a comparison. How you identify yourself can be equally essential as to how you identify yourself with your surroundings. Possibly a systematic approach to organize how you self-identify may not be the appropriate tool. Experience, especially a felt, bodily experience, building cognitive and affective relationships, is an instance where the translation of each space will not evoke the same response so your place identity might vary, as well as the same place may evoke opposing results. Take a thunderstorm for instance may spark memory of fear, the unknown, or a phenomenon outside of your control where as others might relate that event with a place, not related to a reactional emotion to the phenomena. Home, likely the first, most influential foundational in ones' life, it is the control by which all other experiences, places, and identities are compared to, as the key to learning ones' identity. As home grows farther away, or the tangible "place" of home disappears, or loved ones identified with home are inaccessible, the idea of home becomes increasingly abstract. Home is no longer a domestic dwelling or an association with a street or city but becomes detached from "place;" feelings that through affective memory transport you to this place. This feeling can be resolved through the idea of topophilia and place attachment. Topophilia being this strong sense of place, occasionally mixed with cultural identity. I argue that home is equally as much youthful attachment to place, as it is more importantly assorted felt experiences at differing geographic locations independent of built environments or participants. So, home, however abstract it may be received, is no longer is a carbon copy or reflective memory of childhood but now is now a distilled place one identifies with; a spatial or singular experience of content, euphoric bliss, and an affective, generally positive connection to another place, and time. This concept of home no longer requires others, no memorization of an arrangement of place, of family, of community, or even contributing human factors. Home in being, the here and the now, it is a participation in being enveloped in your surroundings; home is the moment you transition from observer to participant. Home is now a gesture, a material, visual ques that reference familiar, nostalgic responses to heterogeneous scenarios and materials channeled through a felt experience. Home is an emotive, content moment, where connection to your immediate environment registers with past experience and identity to specific places and parameters. Having an attachment with the thread of home, not in the idea of dwelling, but as an emotive affective response to physical surroundings can now define home, anonymously represent place even in a moment in one's life