This week’s session took me by surprise. We were led into a small room with sweet potatoes standing on plinths and facts about sweet potatoes stuck up around the walls. After reading the facts, we were asked to select one and bring it back upstairs to the classroom and respond to our sweet potatoes.
I decided to “get to know” my sweet potato by having a conversation with it by writing and drawing on the piece of paper provided to us. For some reason, I was reminded of a YouTube cartoon I used to watch called ‘Salad Fingers.’ This is a very surreal and disturbing cartoon with a lot of characters or objects being not quite right or featuring a lot of deformities. The character Salad Fingers has a complex relationship with the ‘things’ he cares for. Sometimes he loves them in a maternal way, other times he suddenly hates them and rejects them in disgust. This came through in my response, possibly because of my sweet potato’s unusual shape reminding me of deformity.
We also considered “Null Island” which is the point where the Prime Meridian and the Equator meet, and is recorded at zero degrees longitude and zero degrees latitude.
This island is only an island digitally, due to errors in geocoding systems. If data was input incorrectly, the location would read as (o,o), which is a point in the Atlantic Ocean marked by a buoy. Some people have created a fantasy history of the island, even making a national flag and a fake map. I wondered if one day, people would go as far as to build a manmade island where Null Island is supposed to be and bring it to life even more than it inexplicably has been.