Equipment for Living

August 25, 2025 Spring 2025

The title of this class —Equipment for Living—presents a deceptively simple concept. What could be more familiar than the things that fill our lives with meaning and significance, things we share with one another and which make living possible? Yet familiar things often conceal their own inner workings and the bonds that tether us to them. To get to the heart of this idea, we asked applicants a question of equally deceptive simplicity before enrolling: Tell us about something you treasure—an object, artwork, book, film, idea, or anything else that holds special significance to you. The responses revealed not just a list of favorite things, but a promising group of students attuned to the emotional and philosophical charge carried by so many artworks, poems, technologies, and everyday objects. What students shared were not merely curiosities, but rather talismans of personal experience, sharing a glimpse into the ways that various forms of creative expression can function as what the critic Kenneth Burke originally called equipment for living: not just objects of beauty, but a treasury of creative gifts to nurture the constants of the human spirit amid uncertainty, disorientation, and struggle—all the more so in our present moment.

A selection of these treasured objects offer some basic attunement to the equipment for living that served as the foundational for this course.

• Poetry: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha’s Dictee, which one student described as a gasp felt between the language, a vocal stutter that imitates the feeling of learning a language.
• Concept: The Arabic word mushāhada, which on the surface means witnessing, but deeper still, speaks to a kind of seeing that unveils illusions—a perception so true that it dissolves what is false.
• Sculpture: Alberto Giacometti's Femme de Venise IV, in which the artist embraces femininity to occupy an expansive gray zone of body politics and gender performance.
• Film: The works of David Lynch, reflecting a collective affinity among class members that effervesced into a rich conversation in the wake of the filmmaker’s death in January 2025.
• Novel: Umberto Eco’s The Name of The Rose, for evoking the power of words as symbols, and Água Viva by Clarice Lispector, which creates a space preceding language, a place of pure image and sensation, a total poetic state displaced from a ‘self.’
• Meme: A bunny typing on a computer with the text: “Research is like a ceremony for building a closer relationship with an idea.”

From the beginning, we wanted this course to center on forms of personal meaning that we could both dissect theoretically and mobilize in creative practice.

Burke’s idea of equipment for living centers on the capacity for poetic acts of creation to share hard-earned wisdom as a gift to others. Yet the concept of “equipment for living” proved hard to explain in casual conversation. Several students confessed that they struggled to describe the class to friends or family. What exactly were we studying—theory? media? dreams? The title sounded practical, even utilitarian, but the work we were doing often felt poetic, abstract, or experimental. In this way, the course itself became a kind of paradox: those who approached our collective work with analytical caution often came to find it intuitive and grounding, while those who initially found our work straightforward would later grapple with its elusive philosophical dimensions and sprawling conceptual terrain.

To help organize this vast endeavor, we anchored the class in a series of themes, dividing our inquiry into equipment for communication and persuasion, memory and reflection, ritual and identity, collaboration and community, and finally, dreaming and imagination. Along the way, we treated 3D scanning techniques and 3D game engines as technologies for exploring our themes, interrogating their contours, and constructing new “equipment for living.” Working with a 3D game engine like Unity is like having your own film studio—set designers, cinematographers, gaffers, actors, and every other member of a film crew bundled into a free software application for imagining new worlds. Yet we always framed this technical work within the core ethos of “equipment for living.” Our classroom was not simply a site for learning new tools, but also a space for creatively sharing things that help us in our own lives so that these things may also help others. Although the banner of “equipment for living” includes many treasured things, what truly resonated were narratives, ideas, and structures of feeling that had helped us support ourselves, our loved ones, and our communities through pain, precarity, displacement, and loss in the past.

In this spirit, our class discussion often turned to the wisdom of Audre Lorde, who once described poems as a kind of creative generosity aimed at the spiritual foundations of human survival: “We made strong poems for each other,” Lorde wrote,  “exchanging formulas for our own particular magic.” Her insistence that poetry is not a luxury, but “a vital necessity of our existence,” resonated deeply. For many in the course, media-making became not just a matter of creative expression, but rather a ritual of survival and shared imagination—a way to shape what Lorde called the “quality of the light” within which we hope and dream.

During the two weeks of class that directly centered on dreams and imagination, we invited the Swedish artist Rut Karin Zettergren to give a guest lecture and lead a workshop on collective dreaming. Rut’s lecture began with a broad overview of her work, beginning with the cyberfeminist collective 0s+1s, before narrowing the focus to her ongoing studies of dreams as both a source of creative inspiration and a recurrent theme in her projects. One of Rut’s projects that specifically engaged with dreams in a 3D environment is called “Nightboon” (Nattskatt). Students were asked to keep a dream journal for about a month preceding this class, and the resulting conversation yielded a sense of common dreams where matters of personal, creative, and political significance are deeply entangled.

As our class moved into the later weeks, students began to bring together their 3D scans, textures, and dream sketches into more fully realized worlds using Unity. One exercise used the More & More card deck by Marina Zurkow and Sarah Rothberg—a set of creative prompts that sparked surreal and unexpectedly personal visions. Through these and other design constraints, students found ways to articulate their own philosophies of navigation, memory, resistance, and care through their choice of medium, ranging from the full production environment of Unity to poems and essays that engaged with dreams, imagination, and speculative futures. Our guiding ethos was to take hold of some inner experience, memory, knowledge of personal significance and share it with one another through creative practice. Final projects for this class—which ranged from fantastic cityscapes to intimate memory spaces and symbolic dream rituals—reflected a cumulative layering of weekly themes and personal fascinations into a wide-ranging chronicle of our time spent working and learning together.

The archive for this year’s projects was itself grounded in the final project of two student collaborators, Kevin Chapelle and Lisa Yang. Their project, titled “Jungle,” served as a virtual space of geographic links tethering together a collection of photos taken by Kevin in New York and Lisa in Hong Kong. That virtual space then served as the foundation for gathering and sharing the work of the entire class, which included two sections of roughly twenty students each.

Many of the final projects made in Unity centered on altars, ritual spaces, labyrinths, and other locations of sacred and often mystical significance. Maria José Castillo created a 3D temple on a mountaintop where the user progresses through a series of poetic archways toward a rotating altar at the center. Claudia Miranda created a labyrinth of dreams, memory, and the enduring remnants of past selfhood, animating 3D scans of clay figurines along the user’s path toward an altar at the center. Ruby Quail made “Shrine,” a space of randomized perspective points centered on a 3D scan of a firepit, where the dynamism of the flames created evocative glitches. Hyunje Brian Park created “Mediums, between nostalgia and memories,” a tiny plant (resembling Le Petit Prince) where the user’s movement would activate a series of pedestals displaying objects of memory and nostalgia. These are just a few of the projects made in Unity for this class and available in the class archive.

Other students produced written work in the form of essays and poems. Rebecca Kao dissected each word in the phrase “equipment for living” through critical analysis and personal reflection, concluding with a remarkably incisive flourish: “Let us not retrofit this concept to pre-existing notions of what we make and why we make it, but rather, use it to grow our capacity for more imaginative possibilities.” Likewise, Natasha Khanyola produced a poem to supplement a virtual space produced in Unity, each part displaying a poignant reflection on her own physical displacement over the course of this ten-week class:

“What do you pack when you have to fit your life into 2 suitcases?

What do you take, what do you leave behind?

What endures, what changes?

Life is about lessons,

Lessons are like memory, coming and going, there and then forgotten, remembered again only when needed.

…

I'm a stranger in a new land and I know nothing.

I learn.

I learn to speak. Open my mouth and ask.

People are kind, people are understanding, people are gracious.

I learn to listen.”

Natasha’s poem (which supplements her Unity project “Inside My Orange Suitcase”) not only shares the personal significance of this class and its entanglement with events in her life, it also captures a salient feature of our classroom as a community: I was always struck by the kindness, generosity, vulnerability, and trust we shared. People arrived each day with warm greetings and welcoming smiles. As we discussed difficult readings, people voiced confusion and shared realizations. In discussing our lives, identities, and experiences, people listened and felt heard. This class began with a concept and ended with something of a bond. I feel deeply grateful for the opportunity to teach and learn with a group who so embraced the power of creative work to improve the human condition.