Author: Brian D. Hamilton

Two years ago, Brian Lindgren got hit by a car. He broke several bones, but the most important was his left pinky. Lindgren is a violist. He needs his left pinky. 

This was the summer of 2020, the height of the pandemic shutdown. Musicians were already struggling. Lindgren was heading into the final year of an M.F.A. at Brooklyn College in New York, and he wasn’t sure what would be waiting for him on the other side. In some desperation, he took a step he never thought he’d take: He applied to Ph.D. programs.

As a master’s student, Lindgren’s main project was to design and build an electronic viola. He’d first had the idea as an undergraduate at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York, but it had lain forgotten for over a decade, as Lindgren made a life for himself writing, performing, and producing music in New York City. He grew up playing the viola; he studied viola at Eastman; he loved the viola. But Eastman also introduced him to the world of electronic music. With electronic music, he says, you get to work with an “infinite sonic palette.” The world of electronic music also seemed more accessible, more open to experimentation, than the sometimes rarefied world of classical strings. But back then, he didn’t yet know how to combine these things he loved. 

At Brooklyn College, he found a way. “I was a hybrid person,” Lindgren says, “which can be very challenging in our assembly-line kind of world. But this program”—an M.F.A. in Sonic Arts—“was really geared towards musical explorers.” He took a class with Doug Geers, famous for his own technologically charged compositions, all about building electronic musical instruments. That first semester, he hacked together the first prototype of his new instrument. It was an a heavily modded acoustic viola, all black, with heavy white cables snaking out from the fingerboard and the new pickups he had constructed. Orange, green, blue, and white wires tangled around the tuning pegs. Lindgren describes it as “Borg-like.” This was EV 1, and it worked.

But he wasn’t satisfied, and he spent several semesters more in independent study with Geers, refining the concept. Another of his teachers challenged him: The music he was creating with his new instrument sounded just like something he could have created without the instrument, he said. What was he really trying to do here? (That teacher was Morton Subotnick, a pioneer in the world of electronic music and a co-inventor of one of the earliest analog synthesizers, so the challenge was one to take seriously.) He re-envisioned the instrument from the ground up. He learned CAD and circuit design. He experimented with ways of combining analog and digital sounds. He joined a long line of composers who invented instruments to achieve a sound no existing instrument could produce. In a mad dash at the end of his degree program, he finished EV 2, a sleek black wedge, like a viola’s fingerboard without a body, built from scratch on a 3D printer. 

Then he put it in a drawer. As he began his Ph.D. in composition and computer technologies at the University of Virginia last fall, he wanted to start with a blank slate. It was time to figure out what was next, and he wanted to open himself up to the opportunities the new environment would offer. But his passion for the instrument has continued to smolder. 

Lindgren’s pinky healed, thankfully, though it now has a permanent bend to it. The Telemetry Music Series, which showcases experimental sounds, provided Lindgren a few opportunities to perform this year—at The Bridge, at Old Cabell Hall, and even outside on the Downtown Mall. He’s slated to play this fall at a conference in North Carolina and a festival in Connecticut. He’s bursting with new ideas for composition.

As we talked, Lindgren sat in one of UVA’s makerspaces and the 3D printer hummed away behind him. EV 2.5 would be ready in three more days.

Think about the clothes you have in your closet. Or in your dresser. Or in the pile next to your bed. Think about a piece that has some special meaning to you. 

My mind goes to a watch that my partner (who, full disclosure, is the editor of this magazine) gave me on our wedding day, and to a loud floral shirt I would never have chosen on my own that she encouraged me to wear. Wearing the watch makes me feel closer to her; to me, it’s a more powerful symbol of our marriage even than my wedding ring, partly because nobody else knows what it means. Wearing the shirt—even just seeing it hang there in the closet—makes me feel more confident, because it reminds me that someone else has confidence in me. 

What are those pieces of clothing for you? What’s meaningful about them?

These are questions that Micah Kessel, executive director of the Playground of Empathy, often poses to groups going through the immersive, empathy-building experiences he and his team have designed. Some people resist, denying that they care that much about what they wear. But the emotions slowly come out. One person has a really comfortable sweater they always pull out at the start of fall. Another has a pair of slippers their grandfather wore.

After everyone has shared, Kessel asks members of the group to reflect on what they’ve appreciated from the stories they’ve heard. Without fail, no one mentions a single piece of clothing. What they remember are the emotions. 

“No one talks about the slippers, ever, ever, ever,” Kessel says. “It’s almost like a little magic trick that we get to watch every time.” 

The magic is empathy. The conversation about clothes provides a way of grasping the subjective validity of another person’s relationship with the world, and thus brings us closer together.

***

Kessel started Playground of Empathy with his friend Kelley Van Dilla in 2017. Van Dilla’s main work is in theater and film (they debuted their autobiographical film/play, Let Go of Me, last year at Live Arts); Kessel’s focus has been experience design (having worked on everything from escape rooms to restaurant design to art installations). Their first big project together was to build a giant shoe.

After 13 years in Europe, Kessel moved to Charlottesville “in the midst of a national tragedy,” he remembers—just a month after August 12. The city was “in a deep state of processing.” He had left his work as a behavioral design strategist in Amsterdam in order to think more deeply about the connection between emotions and education. Now that work seemed even more urgent. There are a thousand things to take away from that day, he says, “but for me personally, it was a reminder that the lack of emotional intelligence developed in our education system had become a harbinger for fascism.” He wanted to lay a foundation for the cultivation of real emotional nuance in this country. 

Kessel and Van Dilla believed that empathy was a skill that could be taught and practiced. But most of what we usually do to teach empathy is profoundly ineffective. That’s because we tend to leave things at the level of facts and concepts and moralisms, while empathy has to grow from experience.

They began collecting stories of marginalization and exclusion. The stories had to do with race, gender, sexuality, disability, body type—any number of ways people mark others off as alien. Then they scripted and produced first-person enactments of those experiences that pulled the viewer into the action. Then, joining forces with sculptor and designer Annie Temmink, they built the shoe.

A vibrant thing of orange, green, and yellow stripes, tied with bright pink laces, the shoe was big enough to walk through. You entered, by yourself, and watched the videos, maybe even donning a piece of clothing that put you in the mindspace of the subject. Alone, in someone else’s shoe(s), it became possible to imagine inhabiting a different body, a different relationship to other bodies, and to recognize how different that experience must be.

The shoe was a hit. They traveled across the country with it, visiting a host of colleges and companies, talking about empathy and inclusion. In 2020, they won an Innovation Fund Award from the Harvard Culture Lab. The project has now evolved into an ambitious effort to reimagine what diversity training should look like—not a seminar, not a presentation, but an experience of other experiences of the world.

***

Empathy is a tricky concept. Kessel tells me that people often nod to the German term Einfühlung—a word that literally means “feeling into” another—as the source of our definition. We usually talk about it as a matter of being able to feel what someone else is feeling. “But I think we’ve got it wrong,” he says. “I think we’ve really got it wrong.”

The problem is that, as we all know intuitively, truly feeling what someone else is feeling is impossible. “The neural network that is making up your state of being right now, that constellation of billions of neurons firing, will never be felt before or again exactly how it’s being felt by you or anyone else on earth—ever.” Every experience is utterly singular. 

Kessel is part of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Lab at Northeastern University, run by the esteemed psychologist of emotion Lisa Feldman Barrett. That experience has given him a scientific understanding of emotion and empathy that deeply informs his way of approaching the issue.

If every experience is singular and it’s impossible to grasp any experience from the outside, what is empathy? It starts with what Kessel calls subjective realism: “a comfort with the realization that our reality is our own, and no one else’s.” I have to accept that my experience is not the measure of yours, nor yours of mine. 

But the distance between our realities does not doom us to separation. I can become curious about your experiences. I can share experiences of my own with you. When we do that, we grow closer to one another—even if neither of us has ever felt, or could ever feel, what the other is feeling. In encountering your experience, your reality, I learn to make space for you within mine. That’s the work of empathy.

In a paradoxical way, empathy is less about entering into another’s feelings than it is entering more deeply into your own. When I deepen my understanding of your experience of the world, I come to see my experiences in a new light. We grow closer to one another as we grow to know ourselves better, and we come to know ourselves better as we become closer to one another.

***

For the last year, Playground of Empathy has been contributing a regular feature to this magazine—“Charlottesville Street Style.” It spotlights local fashion, and crucially, asks the wearers why their clothing matters to them. The answers are illuminating. Some are protesting expectations. Some are declaring freedom. Some are connecting with their roots, or bringing cultures into fresh conversation with one another. Some are looking for ways to make old things new. “These clothes disclose my testimony,” said La’Tasha Strother in the summer 2021 edition.

In keeping with Playground’s mission, the point of these features is not to set an example; it is not to tell you how to dress. Kessel sometimes says that theirs is the only diversity and inclusion training in the country that does not tell you what to think. The point of what they do, rather, is to give you an opportunity to encounter another person’s experience, to open a window into the way that others relate to their clothing, and so maybe to bring you closer to them. The point is to prompt you to reconsider yourself anew.

We do not often think of empathy as having much to do with the way we get dressed in the morning. But for Kessel, our clothing can be “the great equalizer in a world of inequality: we’re all finding meaning in the items that we connect to our embodied self.” This, perhaps, is the style of empathy.

New Hill Development Corporation got its start from a series of conversations about the history and future of Black wealth in Charlottesville. In early 2017, Wes Bellamy and Kathy Galvin, then City Council members, gathered a group of Black entrepreneurs and community leaders to talk about Black representation in city development. But the scope of the discussion quickly grew. 

They wanted to develop sustainable economic power for Black communities, so they set out to understand the history of that power.

They uncovered a story that is only now becoming more widely known, a story about a Charlottesville that was majority-Black after the Civil War, about a Charlottesville whose largest landowners were Black, and about a Charlottesville with a flourishing Black entrepreneurial class, concentrated especially in Vinegar Hill. They also uncovered a story about white legislators who passed laws meant to keep Black people from acquiring new land, about white city officials who neglected the infrastructure in Black neighborhoods, and about white city planners who decided to raze Black property, using the infrastructure they had neglected as justification, in order to make space for new development. In short, they found a story of the suppression and destruction of Black wealth. 

“Just as there was intention around destroying something, there has to be intention around building something back,” says Yolunda Harrell, one of New Hill Development’s founders and now its CEO.

Over the last five years, New Hill has been building. Its first major initiative, the initiative that gave it its name, was a small area development plan that aimed to revitalize Black housing and business in Starr Hill. At the heart of the plan that was developed in 2019—itself a master class in holistic urban development­—is an ingenious reimagination of City Yard, a 10-acre piece of city-owned land, as a mixed-use residential and commercial area. It’s a perfect illustration of entrepreneurial spirit: transforming a municipal storage site into the heart of a revivified Vinegar Hill. 

The coming of the pandemic in 2020 forced Harrell and New Hill to turn their creativity and resourcefulness back on themselves. They completed their Starr Hill Vision Plan—and, as of last November, saw it officially incorporated into Charlottesville’s Comprehensive Plan­­­­—but knew that it would be impossible, with the inevitable redirection of resources and energy, to enact it immediately. What would they do in the meantime? “People should not have to wait for generations for things to change,” Harrell says. New Hill wanted to act. 

The pandemic was devastating for all business owners, but it was especially so for Black entrepreneurs. The U.S. House of Representatives’ Committee on Small Business reported that 41 percent of Black-owned businesses closed their doors between February and April of 2020. As New Hill worked with Black-owned businesses to stay afloat, it saw a need for a more robust network of support for Black entrepreneurs, leading to the creation of BEACON: the Black Entrepreneurial Advancement and Community Opportunity Network.

With a critical mass of Black entrepreneurs in the food industry, that’s where BEACON’s energies would be focused. And true to form, the incubator would not focus on only one area of need. In addition to training—not only general education for entrepreneurs, Harrell says, but specialized training about the food industry—BEACON will provide marketing and bookkeeping help that will enable its members to get loans and leases, access to a commercial kitchen so no one will be burdened with crippling startup costs, and even storefront space for testing new concepts and getting off the ground. The BEACON project has already begun building out training and support, and is looking for funding for kitchen and storefront spaces. “What we wanted to do,” Harrell says, “was to look at a way of helping people embrace their dream without risking their financial future: ‘I can dare to dream this dream if I want to.’”

Vinegar Hill flourished before; it is no pipe dream to think a new hill can flourish, too. If it does, it will be because of the patient, enterprising, and determined work of people like Harrell. “We want to make sure that something is happening,” she says. “We are in a position to help move lives forward in a way that the community wants to move their life forward.”