#for a US private institution so it’s not universal knowledge ofc

[i-like-plan-m]

What’s your occupation or career, area of study, and/or any topic(s) about which you have you have a lot of expertise??

Asking for fun and also to start a collection of miscellaneous field experts who can answer the random but highly specific questions a writer has when working on a fic/novel

[contaminatedworlds]

18/03/2020

It’s been a long time since I last updated this page, but throughout this time I have been trying to figure out this project’s conceptual form. I’ve been writing / working a lot in my sketchbooks, and have found this process to be really helpful for me. I’m going to scan and upload (some of) these pages to this blog for documentation, but I also think it might be helpful for me to use this space now to outline where I currently am in this project, what my ambitions are, and how I might realise these ambitions. Some of this information may therefore be repeated, but I feel that this is also helpful for me at this stage, moving as I am from a longer period of idea formation and research into more actively engaged physical creation and experimentation.

Where am I now? :

It’s taken some time for me to really process and think deeply about how to move through this project and its creative process(es), situated as I am and therefore going into this from primarily a conceptually-critical perspective. This anti-capitalist perspective of technologies, tracing and conceiving of them as emergent socio-economic forms -- and trying to then understand (and play with, or interrupt) how we are forming and relating to them -- significantly shapes and informs my interests and intentions within this project (+ in my life).

In this project I am experimenting with possible technologies designed around key principles of knowledge-sharing. I am trying to contribute work which embodies and holds spaces for speculative imaginings of worlds wherein knowledge is ungated, open, made accessible by available material and semiotic – and thus technological – means. Put more clearly: I am interested in, and committed to, imagining and trying to help create collaborative local knowledge-banks / archives.

A lot of my previous and ongoing research, thinking, and creative work has tried to focus on (and ofc is now always situated within particular) realities of climate, ecological, and civilisational collapsings and contaminations1. I am, ultimately, very interested in trying to learn from, form, and grow our collective understandings in these multiple interconnected and overlaying landscapes.

The forms our technologies embody, and the spaces they are moving through, are shaped and mediated by -- and in turn then shape and mediate -- the realities which are enforced/made available. What do -- and could -- multiple and diverse forms of technologies founded upon principles of liberation, love, and solidarity look/sound/feel/smell/taste like? How can we shape communities built upon and around planetary abundance2 and shared-values, consciously entangled in sprawling contaminations / collaborations with all life-forms ?

Also, as a further note of where I’m situated in this: I believe art and politics to be (inherently) fundamentally inseparable – all is political, and there is everything to fight for. I hope to focus on and contribute to technological response-abilities3 and real-isations which might aid us in not only imagining, but also living within and embodying such alternate possible realities. We are living in revolutionary times. I want to help make accessible, to as many as possible, knowledge which has been, and is being, violently held within structures founded upon principles of division and exclusion. These structures are deeply entrenched to intentionally deny access, to deny possibilities and opportunities to those without the financial means to “prove” their supposed value to institutions-as-gatekeepers. Capital is valued by these institutions, and the structures and systems they embody, permit, and perpetuate, before and over life4.

Some (sketched out, in flux) principles guiding this project, are:

WE MUST REALISE THE UNIVERSAL UN-GATINGS OF KNOWLEDGE.

OUR SHARED INFORMATION INFRASTRUCTURES MUST BE ACCESSIBLE, SUSTAINABLE, AND COLLECTIVELY OWNED.

INFORMATION IS NOT PRIVATE PROPERTY OR COMMODITY.

WE MUST ABOLISH PRIVATE PROPERTY AND EQUITABLY REDISTRIBUTE ALL AVAILABLE RESOURCES.

WE MUST, AS EVER, CO-CREATE LIVABLE WORLDS FOUNDED UPON (SYSTEMS OF) CARE, AGAINST THE VIOLENCES OF CAPITALISM AND ALL FASCIST IDEOLOGIES.

THESE MULTIPLE WORLDS MUST PRIORITISE AND CENTRE BIPOC, DISABLED, AND LGBTQIA+ FOLX.

...

(I also am, at time of writing, just about to turn 22 years old, and so my present worldviews and understandings have grown from my coming into being of, and in, some of these landscapes, whilst also being protected and held in ignorance of -- and distance from -- the multiple (perhaps innumerable) exploitations which have supported my movements through Western Empire/civilsation. I am mindful that I am, and have been, situated with(in) relatively vast privileges* which have allowed and are allowing me the space and time to learn, reflect, and grow in accordance with my own autonomy/ies. This, of course, is also present in/throughout this project, and this is something I’m aware of and seek always to question and confront appropriately, to the best of my abilities. I want to be teachable and open.)

*    Privileges of (or afforded by) whiteness, citizenship status, being able-bodied, thinness, having family-support, and significant relative access to resources (shelter, food, water, education, ...)

1    I borrow this notion of “contamination” from Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing in particular, and I will take notes and go into more detail here as I’m learning.

2    Here I am informed by Adrienne Maree Brown, particularly her book ‘Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds’

3    I borrow ‘response-abilities’ and ‘multispecies collaborative living’ from Donna Haraway (I will also go into more detail as I continue my research).

4    I have learned from more sources than I can name here at this point, but on UK Universities’ relation to the marketisation of education I have of course learned much from Mark Fischer’s ‘Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alterative’