portfolio : laurentharrington
Catalyst (2016)
How to express something that is felt but not seen? Catalyst, a collaborative project by Lauren Harrington and Charlotte Lewis was created as an attempt to express the ineffability of friendship. The two met as students in a class called “Radical Addition”, a phrase borrowed from chemistry which describes processes involving free radicals whose interactions result in unpredictable and completely new phenomena. Using the analogy of free radicals to selves, and the process of radical addition to the discovery of a unique bond, we collaborated on a final project that articulated this chemo-social metaphor. Charlotte and Lauren generated new email addresses from which they sent each another thoughts and ideas about shared topics of interest throughout the semester, such as cryptography, mirrors and light, metaphysics, and entanglement. We then encrypted our entire email history, which only we had the access key to. We used private-key encryption as a physical metaphor to demonstrate the inability of outsiders to understand the internality of a given relationship. After, we used Adobe inDesign to create a book-formatted risograph printed copy of our encrypted conversations. This piece is entitled Catalyst, another phrase borrowed from chemistry, to describe the explosive event marking the beginning of a meaningful friendship.
