Measuring Closeness | Extension in Intimacy: Textbook
Eileen Lu
After moving to a different state for the first time, I found myself faced with an instantaneous sense of displacement between/for my friends and I. With this feeling of displacement came the urgency of preservation. This inherently lent itself to a growing dependency on one another, on us surviving, despite the physical distance.
The term ‘closeness’ describes the lack of distance (emotional or physical) between two or more things. The term ‘extension’ implies an outward continuation of one thing/oneself. To say someone is “an extension of you,” or anything describing connection through closeness, is to say that you exist beyond yourself. It is to say that aspects of you live within a person or thing that defies any spatial or physical mode of measurement. Over the years, I have found a growing difficulty to grasp these things that I find too intangible. My response was to create a formula to challenge this idea of intangibility/immeasurability, an attempt to create a mode of measurement in order to make sense of my own intimate relationships.
The product is a textbook documenting my process and attempts to understand the spatiality of intimacy. This book is made up of three parts: personal essays, research texts with annotations, and images scored through a self-made ‘intimacy algorithm’. The goal of this highly self-reflective process being documented is to arrive at a better understanding of the intimate relationship dynamics that have essentially formed who I am.