Hellooooooo! Speaking into the Void :)
an introductory post from me, katy kim, and on my new substack ‘pocket visuality’… who am I? what I am doing here? speaking of which, what are we all doing here?
1. Why am I on Substack, why now?
You may know me from @cakesniffing cooking times, or not at all, but after being in the process of phasing my instagram to reflect my *other* life passions for art + other things, i realized that i want to write with space for nuance and reflection, and in a slower dialogue with others. i think substack will give me a better space to do those things. To get acclimated here are some quick facts about me:
Katy (she/her)
Creative Cooking! I love messing around in the kitchen + also working on my monthly supper club
Art history @ Northwestern —> interviews, exhibition reviews, art!
Misc: traveling, running, reading, buying unnecessary things, being a 20-something person trying to navigate life.
2. Pocket visuality; re: on names
i LOVE coming up with names (pls lmk if you ever need a name for a burner cooking account because I have many), and i came up with the name ‘pocket visuality’ because one, your phone is in your pocket + something ‘pocket-sized’ is accessible + friendly
and two, ‘visuality’ is a loaded noun which medieval art historian Alexa Sand traces beautifully here. From first being coined in the 1830s by Scottish philosopher Thomas Carlyle, visuality today, according to Sand, has now come to mean: “the element of visual experience that is contingent on culture and therefore far more unstable and resistant to description… the term is a tool for getting at that most compelling and difficult of art historical questions: how did people in past or alien cultures perceive the objects we now study, what experiences and ideas grounded their viewing, and what, in the end, did they see?” (Sand 2012).
so ‘visuality’ is a term that destabilizes the idea of a singular visual + cognitive understanding, steeped in ‘rationality,’ and better captures how one’s visual experience is mediated by one’s positionality, culture, background; the term captures how visual experience of so many things (!!) can bleed into the spiritual, the bodily, and the inexplicable.
3. On community + schedule
Substack asked me what kind of community i’m looking to build here, and i’m honestly not sure yet. i’m hoping to interview some interesting people, capture some of the art i see, talk about the food i make… i know it will be a reflective space, and also an incomplete one.
i’ll be aiming for a bi-weekly/weekly (?) sort of newsletter thing, but if I don't have anything to share, i obviously won’t write.
4. Thank you :-)
here’s a picture of me from a citrus-themed picnic in Central Park I organized this summer! i felt so happy sitting with a friend in the park before the picnic actually started, and that was a delicious anticipatory feeling. In that spirit, thank you for subscribing + let’s see what happens here!
Finally, a good place to shoutout some other substacks I like: