User:Senka/Sick Host
Sick Host
Initial Idea
This is a kind of visual essay with gamified elements. The main idea is that the reader goes through the content of the essay through choice and interaction, while still stumbling upon disturbances that would lead to custom error messages.
I've drafted the essay based on spaces in which hosting happens (on the phone, in the hallway, at the dinning table, in the sink etc) as points of entry to read about what a practice of chronically ill hosting can be like or mean for a technical practice.
Influences
A lot of inspiration here was gained from Johanna Hedva's Sick Woman Theory, talking with Ren Loren Britton, and talking with friends who have also had the embodied experience of sick hosting whether that be because of mental or physical illness or neuro divergence.
I guess the notion of care rings out through this semester as I consider how much care I provide and receive in my collaborative practice outside of XPUB. The collectives I work with are really intimate, and depending on each other for support and care is something that proves necessary time and time again.
For more information look at the page ☞ Reader & Editorial team
Another inspiration was in terms of reading structures online, specifically the double reading and scrolling from my friend's recent essay ☞ Anxiety and Hope
Webpage Editing
I wanted to implement the accessibility features I had worked on my main user page while offering a slightly different form of navigation.
Initial sketches in CSS
Playing with the layouts of the buttons
Interaction
For now the interaction just takes form as an essay with multiple points of entry, and as a folder poem in the sense that it was written through pre tags. So a scroll within a scroll...
But one can use the buttons on the corners to change contrast, change the font type or size:
Sick host font change feature
Sick host contrast change feature
Sick host font change feature
I would want to further work on this in terms of interactions that it can host.
Essay Text
This is the intro paragraph that situates hosting in relation to me:
I’ve been raised with a traditional idea of social hosting. These ideas, rooted in land ownership (and some in christianity), have weighed down on me far too long.
I’ve never been told this explicitly, but it has always been implied that a host:
… is ultimate, all-encompassing.
… will try to anticipate the guest’s needs.
… knows and prepares everything that the guests like to eat.
… provides for the guest, even if it is beyond their means.
… cleans the whole house top to bottom, no excuses.
… encourages the guests to stay way longer than they (host, guest) would like to.
… nudges the guests to eat and drink, nudges the quest to consume.
… insists that the guests wear slippers after taking off their shoes off.
… talks to the guest, even when they are feeling the heaviness of their eyelids signaling sleepiness.
… would give their bed to the guest if they needed to stay over.
… doesn’t want the guest to help out with setting up the table, cooking, doing the dishes, cleaning.
… will greet the guests with the table already ready. Everything set—nothing from the backstage exposed—no messiness.
… would walk the guest to the bus, train station, airport and equally greet them on either of these locations and walk them to their home.
… welcomes the guest into a home, not a house.
… is the one that is dedicated to ‘running or leading’ a home.
Time and time again, I have found myself not being able to live up to the standards. In search of alternatives that have room for the chronically ill, I’ve written this essay.
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This is the final version of the text:
ON THE PHONE – arranging, calling, sending voice memos – OR THE REQUEST
a sick host depends…
…on the guests for getting the last-minute ingredients or bringing a part of the meal.
A sick host might be slow…
…when handling requests. A sick host makes it known what is being processed in the background and what that might mean for the request.
AT THE DOOR – welcoming, hugs and kisses, greetings – OR THE PORT
A sick host might let you let yourself in…
…you might already have a key from taking care of the host or their surroundings from time to time.
…but is equally picky with their trust. Countless times systems have not been in place, or served the purpose of sheltering those that needed it. So, the sick host might be riddled with protocols that sometimes help, sometimes don’t, but serve as a safety net nonetheless.
…and consult the haunting of past encounters, to recon whether this is a route to be taken.
A sick host and their guests benefit from making their sickness, vulnerabilities, and needs known.
AT THE HALLWAY – taking your shoes, jackets, hats, apprehensions off – RADIO WAVES
A sick host is vulnerable, needs to ask guests…
…to come healthy.
…to take off their shoes off before entering, a ritual to ward of the germs.
…to bring the germs with them, in the hopes that they will help them all build a stronger immunity.
A sick host’s guests…
…are comprised of trusted individuals, who in the case of spreading illness, will react accordingly and inform everyone they have or might have come in contact with it.
…depend on each other.
AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER – cooking, arranging, plating, carrying – THE WIRES
A sick host does not manage…
…to clean the whole house.
…to prepare the full meal.
…to host while standing or even sitting, at times they might host from their bed.
A sick host over-prepares in spurs of intermittent energy…
…cooks in bulk, knowing that this food will serve if not them, then possible future guests.
A sick host cannot invite just anyone, they can only have guests that understand, have patience, might try to assist where the host can't reach.
A sick host makes use of the digital landscape as an equally important site of hosting and home-making as the physical one.
AT THE DINNER TABLE – eating, talking, laughing, anecdote-sharing – ELECTRICITY
A sick host does not always…
...eat or join the dinner table.
… try the food they are making as they cannot eat most of the ingredients the guests find delicious. So, the sick host does not know how the food will turn out.
…nudge the guests to finish their food, the sick host knows that they might, at a later time, when energy is sparse, finish the leftovers.
…or ever… offer simple, flattened out solutions to problems that might be caused by an intersection of struggles. Often the sick host is not solution-oriented at all, they understand that time is needed to build a nest of sick hosts and guests to aid to one another. They understand that quick fixes might not soothe or exist for the chronically different.
A sick host always tries to have a nuanced understanding of waste…
… energy, time, food might all, at times, partially be wasted. The sick host cannot always steer for efficiency.
… a sick host attempt to allocate their own resources, by making use of offerings. What they don’t need might come in handy for a variety of guests.
A sick host (over)shares…
…the embodied secrets about the medical industrial complex.
…their ailments and their cause. Knowing that transparency might lead to a strengthening of bonds. They know that ailments are riddled with ghosts, that an intersection of different political forces exacerbate and frame sickness to be what it is considered today: only and always difficult.
…how much it, all of this, [gestures towards the act of hosting] means to them.
…what the infrastructure of their life looks like. This includes the social and technological infrastructure that assists or disables them. They understand that talk of (tech and social) infrastructure often arises when it is not smooth: when it is full of bugs, problems, errors, glitches, unease, discomfort, tension, friction. The sick host acknowledges that infrastructure is never free of any of these.
…the background, the food-making process, the recipes, the code. The sick host highlights the bugs, the decisions caused by illness.
A sick host makes their home, their дом (dom, Slavic word for home), their domain a place where others can access, adjust, attempt to find things at, change the order of. It is not a ‘my home is yours’, but a ‘at times I have as much control over my body as I do of my house, and you may find meaning here where I cannot’.
The dustiness of onsite and virtual homes is acknowledged as a place where intimate shelter can take place.
AT THE SINK – washing, rinsing, putting away, afterlife of food (leftovers) – BITS & BANDWIDTH
A sick host will take into consideration everyone's sickness (including their own) …
…they do not host if their illness can spread. They inform the immunocompromised and ask the same of their guests.
The sick host informs of vulnerabilities in a technical and colloquial or shared jargon…
…They try to understand the languages their guests speak. They provide the source information as technical or medical code, always supplemented by the real implications on everyday life. They use metaphor, jokes, puns, embodied experience and memes, knowing that languages are infrastructures that can exclude too.
A sick host is not…
…a care-taker or a care-receiver. They live in the space between the two.
A sick host might need you to pick up tasks that they cannot. They will ask thing of you. They will trust you. The moment they open the door to you, they might make this very clear.
A sick host leaves amble space in their storage for emergencies…
…medical aid, pain killers, vitamins, allergy pills…
…guest rooms, matrasses, extra pillows…
…protocols for changing how they accommodate the space, based on their own and their guests needs.
AT THE HALLWAY – courtesy, chatter, don’t forget to text me when you are home – RECEIVING COMPUTERS & SERVERS
A sick host cannot have guests that are just guests…
…the partially also have to be hosts themselves.
…but guest who do not subscribe to the binary opposition and framing of guest-host relationships. Nor do they flirt with traditional ideas of home-owners, rent-keepers, land-owners, домаћини, housewives and the rest.
A sick host respects the boundaries of their guests, hosts, and the ghosts of the ailments that they have. They understand that ghosts have a vital place in each hosting practice and that every guest and host bring an array of ghosts from their own political, social, medical history.
AT THE DOOR – goodbyes, see you soons, get better soon – no I won’t – DATACENTERS
A sick host functions differently…
…and the hosting practice of each host and ailment might be different.
A sick host sees all points of failure as necessary and valuable. Failure as a way of life, as learning with the vulnerability.
A sick host is always part, if not total, parasite. And this is not something that is bad.
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Error pages
My initial idea was to edit the default file of the server to customize the error pages, but I did not do that yet as this is and individual project so far and it would feel like taking up to much space on our server (metaphorically not literally).
500 Internal server error
For ages I've dreamt of: opening up the ribcage (the bones are the hardware of the physical body), looking at where the bugs are. Bodies are often black boxes and what we can do is listen closely, tracing the root cause based on the visible symptoms. |
503 Service Unavailable
And sometimes the body says no, we are not doing that. And the hands don't move, the wires don't spark, and we all have to find an alternative to what we have gotten used to. Boundaries can be fruitful. |
407 Proxy Authentication Required
We are out of flour, sugar, eggs. We are out of patience, support, humour. When a host does not share their address with you, it usually means you were never invited to begin with. Unless you have already have a key. |
403 Forbidden
The host's door is locked, they're away, you do not have access to be a guest. Boundaries are to be respected if you are to be invited again. |
ImageMagick
The images used in the project have all been found on archive.org and are free and open to share distribute and edit under the Creative Commons license. Afterwards the image was dithered with the following code in ImageMagick:
magick convert "input file location.jpg/png" -resize 540 -gravity South -extent 540 -colorspace RGB -ordered-dither o8x8 "output file location.jpg/png" |
Kitchen coutner unedited
Kitchen counter dithered
People Dinning unedited
People Dinning dithered
