The Relation Between Things in a Continuum
The Relation Between Things in a Continuum is an essay, published by Flower Press.
I grew up in blue-collar 1990’s San Francisco, in my great-grandmother’s house in the Outer Avenues. My mother was a florist and my dad was a city gardener. We left the city in 1999, at the height of the first dot-com boom, because they couldn’t afford to stay.
I returned to the Bay Area as an adult, and now live and work as an artist and freelance designer. Some of my income comes from the very technology corporations who forever changed the landscape of my home-place.
This essay is about the contradictions of surviving and thriving in the shadow of technocapitalism. It’s nostalgic, and future-thinking, and angry, and hopeful. It contains my story as well as voices of others struggling to manage the tension between art and technology, community and capitalism, work and life.
This writing was created in response to an invitation from a client of mine, a software company who sponsored the 2019 San Francisco Art Book Fair. Once they read it, they decided not to publish it. Flower Press published it instead, and it debuted a few months later at the 2019 Chicago Art Book Fair.
Continuum is out of print, but stay tuned because it might be back in another form.
The title, and much of the metaphoric thinking, is borrowed from a Diane di Prima poem called Rant.
“The Relation Between Things in a Continuum is a public grappling with a mix of privately-held feelings. It’s a reckoning, a coming-to-terms-with, and an honest show of irresolution. Nicole’s work reads like a conversation in a library—intimate, energized, punctuated with ‘Oh, read this part!’. Continuum catches us in the sticky web woven by the likes of Jenny Odell and Rebecca Solnit, among twitching, fitting things: the internet, the making and losing of homeplaces, the Self and the selves. It’s a memory box overturned and sorted among friends. It’s a real shame ******* wouldn’t publish this, but I’m sure glad I got to.”
—Zoe Minikes, publisher, Flower Press
—Zoe Minikes, publisher, Flower Press
“Nicole Lavelle’s work reads like a human heart pulsing out of San Francisco’s hollow tech center — lending it life and fighting its battles. The beast is the internet search engine, her childhood home left in 1999, the social media company, and her own value system. She wonders at its many heads, and whether or not we will be able to tame them.” —Sarah Bofenkamp, Library Services