This shortcut gets your current location and queries iNaturalist for the nearest recent research-grade observation with a photo. Downloads the full-resolution image, overlays the species common name and date observed, then sets it as your wallpaper.

Right now the text overlay is ugly and hard to read, so that could be updated in the future.

I’ve set this to run as an automation based on time of day. It would be great to set it for some other events like connecting to Carplay or changin focus mode.

Link to download: RoutineHub • Set wallpaper to most recent iNaturalist observation in your area

Gathering Points: I’ve been experimenting with writing-in-public as a way of exploring speculative ideas without worrying too much about their polish. Gathering Points are a form of this post where the purpose is to pull together a number of complex ideas into something coherent. They are still meant to be unpolished, speculative, and exploratory, but based around an idea I’m trying to understand and/or apply. I’m using bullet points because to me they suggest the idea that each point is distinct but related.

Complicating the Container

• In Zoe Sofia’s article “Container Technologies” is seeking to “unsettle habitual assumptions” and re-evaluate the importance of container technologies.
• This is a feminist history and retelling. Container technologies are “readily interpreted as metaphorically feminine.” and have been historically associated with women’s traditional labours and devalued and rendered invisible. We are reminded that “the female body provides our first sheltering container and source of supply.”
• Containers are complex. They do more than hold: they keep some things in and others out, they are selectively permeable through filtering, absorbing, leaking; they mediate time through storing abundance.
• Containers can also be active spaces of transformation (the stove, the kettle, the cauldron).
  • Sofia links containers with cybernetic ecology and the idea that organisms think outside-their-skin as organisms-environment ensemble of mutual adaptation and co-adaptation. “The organism cannot be considered apart from the habitat that houses it.” The organism isn’t just housed by the environment. It is part of it.
  • Sofia also (delightfully) links container technologies with Winnicott’s intersubjectivist psychology where the baby exists only as part of the “facilitating environment” without which “There is no such thing as an infant”.
• Later, we learn from Heidegger that the container is fulfilled only by its spilling/gushing out what it has gathered and held.
• (If I am a container for this project my greatest fear is I will fail to gush out).
• There is so much happening in this article but here I am focusing on the points relevant to that libraries-as-containers is a useful idea to think other ideas with.

So what kind of containers are libraries?

• Sofia presents a speculative categorization of container technologies:

• The utensil: the generic container, a basket or bowl, perhaps corresponds to the mother as a container into which we dump our excess stuff, and which we come to consider as an extension of ourselves.

• Apparatus: the specialized container, like an oven or a vat, in which something may be created or transformed. The apparatus, as well as the specialized space that houses it (the kitchen, the lab, the workshop), could be interpreted as equivalents of the potential space where inner and outer worlds are negotiated in the course of discovery/invention.

• Utilities: these can include buildings (from humble cottages to huge environment-controlled spaces like shopping malls or airport terminals) as well as various channels for dynamic flows (like pipes, cables, reservoirs). These technologies reproduce something like the “environment mother” who works unobtrusively to ensure “smooth functioning” and continued supply to the infant whose bodily states and feeling she regulates.” (Page 10)

• So what kind of containers are libraries?
• Utensils: I do not think we are utensils, though we use a lot of them: shelves, digital storage devices, book drops, pen cups. Perhaps some of our specialized containers, like a catalog or a digital repository, could in some ways be considered a utensil, but in other ways they do not. If you don’t know a lot about how libraries function, most of what you see is probably a utensil.
• Utility: This is what I think most people familiar with libraries probably see the most: spaces and channels (digital and physical) that work “unobtrusively” to ensure the “smooth functioning” of our services. There is probably a lot that I don’t know about, but I would include our many process-oriented information containers: catalogues, discovery systems, integrated library systems, e-resource management systems, room booking, etc. as well as things that mix container and process in a workflow (acquisition?). Finally there is all the systems and containers for people and processes that help our users directly through service, instruction, etc. If you work on the utility side of things, it’s actually pretty easy to see everything in the library as a utility. That is probably a dangerous habit to get into.
• Apparatus: The apparatus is the type of container I personally think best fits libraries. The vat, the oven, the witches cauldron. To me the goal of our many utensil- and utility-containers is surely to transform our users.
• But what parts of the library make up the library-as-apparatus-container? Is it our information systems? Our spaces and study rooms? Is it our services like reference or instruction?
• I am not happy with my list. It feels piecemeal and disjointed. Part of the issue is that none of these types of containers are exclusive. Things can be one thing in one context and a different thing in another. While the library is made up of utensil and utility containers, it cannot be reduced to these components. It is something more.

Towards a speculative definition: libraries as irreducible local transformative spaces of discovery/invention (worlding)

• Back to Sofia’s original definition: “The apparatus, as well as the specialized space that houses it (the kitchen, the lab, the workshop), could be interpreted as equivalents of the potential space where inner and outer worlds are negotiated in the course of discovery/invention.”
• This is mirrored in the conclusion: “There is no such thing as a discovery/invention *apart from the potential space: lab, studio, study, etc.”
• Libraries are apparatus-containers in that they are potential spaces where we can negotiate worlds in the course of discovery and invention.
• Sofia brings Heidegger back here to talk about the idea that the “the thing” is actually a gathering: a local and specific manifestation of its context, both near and far.
• “The thing emerges in a “nearness” or rather a process of “nearing” that gathers remote elements into itself; thus a local and specific object is also a manifestation of its macro-context.”
• Doreen Massey applies this thing-as-gathering to places (“places are also processes”) which emerge as specific gatherings of relations. A place’s uniqueness is not defined by its mythology but by its distinct mixtures of relations.
• Libraries are apparatus-containers in that they are irreducibly local and specific potential spaces where we can negotiate worlds in the course of discovery and invention that emerge from unique gathering of people, ideas, materials, histories, and places that they gather together.
• This matters for libraries because it means that a library is not interchangeable with any other library. The TRU Library is a gathering of this place, communities, land, relationships, materials, and specific flows of knowledge and care. A library on Tk’emlúps te Secwépemc territory is a different kind of container than a library anywhere else, and not only because of its collections or its containers, but because of the web of relations that make it up.
• So we could add: There is no such thing as a library (apart from the community, the place, and the web of relations it gathers).
• As apparatus-containers, we could add: There is no such thing as the library use (apart from the transformation of discovery/invention)

It turns out that “relation” and “relational” derive from relatus, the past participle of referre, meaning “carried back” or “reported.” and from relatio, the noun form built from that stem.

This is probably a little bit of a stretch, but: reference is carrying something back in order to place it into relation; relations are what result once something has been carried back. Or: reference is the carrier bag that holds “beautiful, edible, or useful” knowledge; relationality is the web of connections that forms through the act of carrying back.

“The basic bibliographical act is to mention a document and a list of such mentions is a bibliography. The mention may simply an allusion or it could include a detailed description. Refer and reference derive from the Latin verb ferre, which means to carry, and the prefix remeaning “back.” Relate and related derive from the irregular past participle (latum) of the same verb. They indicate an already established referring and so related means that one thing has been referred to another. Referring, mentioning, and alluding do not necessarily convey meaning. However, using a name and the manner of referring tend generate meaning.” - (Buckland 2018)

Buckland, Michael. The Expansion of Bibliography : Dog-Stone, Antelope, and Evidence. May 16, 2018. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0bj042km.

I have a confession: I don’t inherently love the landscape that makes Kamloops so distinctive. I understand that the gentle rolling grasslands, grand vistas, and sepia tones are beautiful. There are times when I can see that beauty, especially in the spring when the sage is most green and the grass is like margerine spread across the hills. But it’s too subtle for my taste, and largely wasted on me.

I want to be overwhelmed by the colour green and the funk of wet earth in my nose. McConnell Lake does that for me, and since that first visit its become the place I’ve walked the most near Kamloops. It takes about an hour to walk around the lake, which is the perfect length of time for a walk in my opinion: long enough to feel like you’re doing something real, not so long that you can’t fit it in almost anytime. In the summer it’s significantly cooler than Kamloops, where daily highs are in the 30s. In the spring its one of the first trails to clear of snow and smell like forest. Its especially beautiful in the winter right after a big snowfall.

McConnell is also a diverse little pocket universe. On the west side its sunny where an area has been cleared for parking and picnic tables and there is a meadow that spreads out in increasingly dense layers of plants. As you walk south you find pussy willows and a small marsh filled with cattails. The long east side opposite the meadow is where you spend most of the walk, and is almost entirely shaded by pine and cedar. Darker, damper, and damaged by pine beetles, this side is home to mushrooms and bright green wolf lichen. Walking here in the fall with my partner, who is compelled to photograph every mushroom, can turn that hour-long walk into an afternoon.

Gathering

At the end of August my partner and I drove out to McConnell to gather plants so I could make cyanotype prints on some of the fabric I am going to use for my sabbatical. Cyanotypes use the sun to create dramatic blue prints. Originally used to make blueprints, I think they’re recognizable to most people when its used to make prints of plants.

I was hesitant at first, thinking too hard about what I was doing, trying to think my way through a feeling situation. I grew up in a rural community and remember gathering plants while on walks with my mom. Yet as an adult, this is all new to me, both as an actual thing-to-do and as an intellectual activity. I had struggled the previous couple months with what it means to do a research-creation project, to make something physical instead of a paper or program proposal. To make something personal.

Slowly I loosened up, following my eye and gathering what jumped out at me. I tried to collect mostly what was already dead: some dry thistles, a broken branch with clusters of grey pinecones, bone dry mushrooms, clumps of wolf lichen fallen onto the forest floor. The thistles pricked through the cloth reusable shopping bags we were using, extracting a blood price. The mushrooms smelled overwhelmingly earthy, a musky scent somewhere between bad and good, delicious and dangerous. The plants pulled from the lake smelled like wet animal, a smell which we had encountered earlier and made us think bear. Berries look like less than they should in a bag, a lesson I learn every time I pick them.

By the end we had two cloth shopping bags of materials and a 1/5 of a gallen bag of rose hips.

Back on campus we sorted what we had collected into what was already dry and what needed to be dried and pressed. We then found paper, boards, and clamps and spent an hour pressing the flowers and other plants between layers of paper and plywood that sat out with their legs in the air. Over the next couple weeks I returned to change the paper and eventually to start identifying, sorting, storing, and using them to make test cyanotype prints.

Time, Attention, and Meaning

I think I was so hesitant when I first started collecting because I expected to recognize and have feelings about more of the plants. After all, I had spent so much time out here, and I am doing a whole project about connections with nature. Instead, I found myself apparently as plant-blind as most people.

After, I was reminded that I did have meanings for many of these plants. I associate cattails with my partner because of the joy she gets splitting their dense seedpods open in the wind. Wolf lichen is so vibrant that it fills the need for “overwhelmingly green” even in the middle of winter. The mushrooms are something we come back to visit many times a year, just to see what they are up to.

And over the next couple months, as I worked with the plants—sorting them, drying them, changing the papers in the presses, re-sorting them, clipping them, giving them new homes, identifying them with iNaturalist, starting to make cyanotypes with them—I realized that it was this process and the time and attention that was helping me give the plants meaning. I don’t have strong feelings about them yet. They are the background to a place I love and have spent a lot of time with the people I love the most. But I know their names now, which ones press well, and which ones draw blood.

This is lightly edited entry from the reflection journals I’m keeping during this project. It’s not meant to be polished, grammatical, logical, or a representation of my final thinking. I’m posting these as a way to help me stay somewhat accountable for staying-with-the-trouble I’ve created for myself as I work through aspects of this project. Please keep that in mind as you read this.

I’m learning that struggling with questions is, for me, maybe the point of a research-creation project.

Right now I’m asking people to let me interview them, but I keep wondering: why should they talk to me? This morning I read an article about Indigenous approaches to working with Artificial Intelligence. I want to interview the authors, but why should they agree? I’m not a peer in their field. I haven’t gone through the rigour of a Masters and PhD program. I’m not one of their students.

The even bigger question: why am I the person doing this project? What am I bringing to this conversation that is unique?

I worry that I am being parasitical on others scholarship and practice. Or worse, that I am playing at scholarship. A kid wearing a big hat.

I also worry that I am wasting my precious and short six-month sabbatical when I could be doing something easier and taking more time for sleeping, reading, and going for walks.

And yet I wake up at 3am knowing I will not be sleeping again tonight because there is work to be done.

“To work interdisciplinarily has always carried with it certain risks, such as the revelation of incompetence possible when the skills of one discipline prove insufficient in another context. While research-creation carries these same risks, it raises the stakes significantly. […] It is to allow oneself to take on the risk of insufficiency without letting oneself off the hook for accountability.” Natalie Loveless - How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation - annotations

This project has many threads: art, design, craft, pedagogy, history and philosophy of science, anthropology, Indigenous ways of knowing, culture studies, science and technology studies, etc.

There is so much room to feel insufficient.

One lesson I learned when I was a health science librarian was to not try to pretend to an expert in whatever health science or practice I was working with at the time. It was far more effective to openly admit that I wasn’t an expert, that I would be relying on their expertise, and then explain what I was interested in in my area of expertise. Acknowledging others’ expertise, and even making a little fun of myself in the process, seemed to loosen up others’ willingness to accept my expertise as valuable.

Anyway, what am I not? (or maybe: what isn’t in my bag?)

• I’m not a disciplinary researcher
• I’m not a designer or artist
• I’m not, really, a maker

What am I then?

• I’m an academic librarian
• I’m someone who has always loved exploring technology while also having a lot of complicated feelings about the politics of technology
• I’m someone who feels reborn after spending time in nature
• I’m someone who runs a technology learning space with very specific pedagogies and values, but most importantly (for me) autonomy, play, and experimentation.

And maybe here, between these, is a good place to find the answer to what I bring to this work that is unique.

Starting with the negative list:

• I’m not a disciplinary researcher:
  • I don’t have a specific disciplinary perspective, approach, lens, etc.
  • I do not need to respect disciplinary boundaries. I can be open to ideas, students, collaborators from anywhere.
  • I do not see my job as adjudicating users’ disciplinary approaches or conclusions.
  • I’m also not particularly interested in spending my career writing papers or doing research.
• I’m not a designer or artist:
  • I’m not a designer or an artist. I really respect what artists and designers do and I know that even when I do things that look like they are trying to be art or design, I’m doing them without the intent, practices, and rigour of professional designers and artists. That is true even though I’m a) influenced by what I learn from them, and b) sometimes proud of what I have made.
• I’m not a maker
  • I’ve always been more interested in the pedagogical aspects of making than making itself. When I do make things, I tend to do them poorly and just to prove that I can.
  • Objects are not really the point to me, what people learn and the stories they create about themselves and the future are what I am mostly interested in.
  • Because I am not object focused, the technologies themselves are not really important to me. I do not get bogged down in the specifics. I am not an enthusiast for any tools or technology specifically.

The positive list:

• I’m an academic librarian
  • My interests are in helping people access and use information to learn and achieve their goals.
  • I believe in access to information and technology for everyone. Without being able to really justify it, I think information and technology use are pretty essential qualities of all humans throughout time and should be generally accessible to everyone with very few restrictions.
  • I’m intellectually promiscuous and pragmatic: I do not care where my tools, stories, rhetorical devices, pedagogies, ideas, etc. come from as long as they work.
• I’m someone who has always loved exploring technology
  • Following Le Guin, I believe that technology is “the active human interface with the material world” and a fundamental part of being human. Technology is not just fancy expensive equipment, technology is cooking and beading and gardening.
  • A critical and applied ability to understand and use technology is important for our ability to be free, especially as technologies of control/domination become omnipresent.
• I’m someone who feels reborn after spending time in nature (with caveats)
  • Though I grew up in nature, I do not come naturally to being in nature. In many ways due to health I felt alienated from nature for most of my adult life.
  • I increasingly feel that the disconnections between my work with technology and the time I spend in nature are artificially disconnected.
  • My general interest and undergraduate education in Science and Technology Studies has always made me question the divides we create between us and nature, as well as the “cleanliness” of the stories we tell about nature and technology.
• I run a technology learning space with very specific pedagogies and values
  • All the usual things apply about learning by doing, etc. etc. etc.
  • One of the things I value the most is autonomy: that what learners do in our space is based on their interests and that they are free to choose what to do and how to learn with as few constraints as possible.
  • I value play, experimentation, and a little silliness. I want care and personality. I want to see lots of thinking and lots of creation.

Synthesis

==Research-creation, understood in this way, is a practice of love. It is an erotic, driven, invested practice.== And, as such, it fails to fit into those models that see interdisciplinarity as a way to streamline and multiply research productivities. It is too disruptive for that. Research-creation follows desire, and builds spaces and contexts that allow the time and space to experiment in unpredictable directions. Natalie Loveless - How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation

Silly to call this a synthesis, but whatever:

• Like a lot of librarians I stand on threshold(s) between different disciplines and interests. Information science, science and technology studies, critical theory, design, art, ecology, philosophy, etc. (I’m also a carrier bag/carried).
• What I do bring is an orientation towards the alignment of these domains / a specific arangement of connections/strings between areas.
• My lack of disciplinary focus and my belief in the value of autonomy in pedagogical spaces means I am not necessarily interested in imposing a stance on anyone. Like the carrier bag itself, the goal is to create space for others to determine what they want to gather and carry as technology-makers, kin-makers, etc.
• The fact that I keep waking up at 3 am to work as well as the excruciating feeling of insufficiency I have is maybe a signal that I’m working in the right space to bring about what Natalie Loveless refers to as the erotic, driven, invested practice of love that underlies the value of research-creation.

“It is with this in mind that I proposed to my students the following — slightly opaque — provocation as central to research-creation in its strong form: the crafting of a research question is the crafting of a story that is also the crafting of an ethics.” - (How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation by Natalie Loveless)

I’ve been avoiding this reflection. It makes me nervous because I find it much easier to frame everything I do as purely intellectual, even neutral, bolstered with citations and outcomes. That is not really possible with this project. To quote Natalie Loveless again, this time on working interdisciplinarily: “It is to allow oneself to take on the risk of insufficiency without letting oneself off the hook for accountability.”

What stories are implied by my research question?

Research question: how can active-learning spaces such as makerspaces become sites of kin-making in the more-than-human world of the Chthulucene?

I notice three things when looking at this question now.

The first is that I believe that what happens in places like makerspaces (and places with similar pedagogies and values) matters to how we relate to the world, including the more than human world. They these things are important and worth attention.

The second thing is that I took the hard path for relationality. I decided to centre “kin-making” and the “more than human world” instead of sustainability-as-in-recycling or some form of critical thinking about the impacts of making and technology. I explicitly made this about non-human kin, places, and technologies. I don’t think I meant to exclude questions about how we impact or relate to our self or human communities, but I did decide to de-centre humans from the question.

The third thing is that I decided to use Haraway’s “Chthulucene” framing right in the question, despite it being obscure and not immediately clear how it is relevant. I’ve even kept it through multiple revisions, even though I couldn’t describe why. I even worried I was including it because I liked how it sounded.

But doing this reflection has made me realize why I included it: the Chthulucene is a story about storytelling. It’s an alternative story/future to the human-centric and inherently pessimistic story of the Anthropocene. It’s also a hopeful story where in “multispecies muddle” we “stay with the trouble” of finding new paths forward, new stories, new futures.

This is all a little strange for me to realize now because storytelling is central to how I think about what matters in makerspaces. I encourage students and faculty to think about what they are making as stories, not objects, so that they can focus on their learning process and the meaning of what they are doing over the end results.

Storytelling provides a pragmatic pathway for kin-making. A problem I’ve had with the idea of kin-making is how to make it concrete. How can I make kin with a spider or a mole or a octopus or a dog? Because those relationships will not be like human to human relationships. How is that anything other than pure hubris? But I can tell stories, I can listen to others stories, and the things I create and put into the world can tell and respond to these stories. Together we can tell better stories.

And of course, telling stories is exactly what Haraway does in “The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness”:

I want to tell stories about relating in significant otherness, through which the partners come to be who we are in flesh and sign. The following shaggy dog stories about evolution, love, training, and kinds or breeds help me think about living well together with the host of species with whom human beings emerge on this planet at every scale of time, body, and space. The accounts I offer are idiosyncratic and indicative rather than systematic, tendentious more than judicious, and rooted in contingent foundations rather than clear and distinct premises. Dogs are my story here, but they are only one player in the large world of companion species. Parts don’t add up to wholes in this mani­festo — or in life in naturecultures. Instead, I am looking for Marilyn Strathern’s “partial connections,” which are about the counter-intuitive geometries and incongruent translations necessary to getting on together, where the god-tricks of self certainty and deathless communion are not an option

So that is another story/ethic implied by my question: makerspaces and making can help people imagine new stories/futures about themselves, technology, and the more-than-human world.

So, what ethics are implied by my research question?

The more-than-human world is important. People, communities, other species, places, maybe even technologies are kin. They deserve our consideration.

Making, in all it’s various forms and levels (makerspace, kitchens, studios, classrooms, garages, digital humanities labs, workshops, etc) provides pathways for telling stories about the world and the future. These stories are important, probably more important than the objects that go with them.

Stories are important and we need new stories/futures for “staying with the trouble” together.

What about methodology?

I have this quote saved from when I first created this note:

Containers teach us about interdependence, how nothing exists on its own without an intricate web of (often invisible) support. Containers carry with them an ethics of care. - What Containers Reveal (And Conceal) About Design and Life

I haven’t talked about my methodology in this reflection, and i am running out of steam so I will have to get to it in more detail later, but I think a carrier bag methodology is partly about increasing the diversity of stories we tell and partly about an ethics of care implied by the form of a carrier bag.

But that will need to wait for another day.

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

A short week so I’m posting a late and short WeekNotes.

It’s already October and my sabbatical is now half over. I decided a couple weeks ago that October would be when I switched from research to practice. Practice, attention, and materials are themes that keep coming up in my research.

Practice as attention. Attention as care.

When I’m sewing I can see how practice, attention, and care are related. How care develops through practice and attention and feeds back into them. Not just sewing, but working with fabric as a material. Making cyanotypes. Taking apart old bags.

The same with plants. Picking them, drying them, using them for cyanotypes is also a process of learning about them and how to see them.

So I need to switch over to practices. To focus my attention. To learn how to care. To learn how to turn that into something that can be put back into my pedagogy and the design of spaces and services.

Each day I’m going to spend some time:

• Making things. Mainly I will be sewing, but there will be some weaving, coding, and 3D printing as well. Making is both the topic and core practice of this research-creation project; it is how I will learn, test ideas, and create examplars.
• Writing: Since I am not a designer or an artist my main outcome is the reflections on the process of research and creation. Writing is the bridge that connects research, making, and my own pedagogical practice.
• Reading: Reading is the easiest and therefore most dangerous practice, because I keep using it as an excuse to avoid the first two. I need to put serious limits in place to prevent myself from continuously expanding the scope of what I am reading.
• Meditation: I’ve meditated for almost a decade now, sometimes seriously (I’ve done a 10 day silent retreat) and sometimes going months without sitting. Another reoccurring theme in this project is embodiment, and while I am not sure what role meditation might play in terms of methodology or process, it is a practice with which I am familiar.
• Walking. I’m not formally using a “walking methodology” (i think) but place is a key theme and like meditation it is an embodied practice that I already do and can therefore leverage.

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

Thinking about / Working on

It seems to be testing and prototyping week:

• Testing making cyanotypes on various types of fabric and with different exposures. Lessons so far:
  • Grow lights aren’t UV lights and don’t work (discovered after wasting 3 peices of test fabrics)
  • Sun works great but is variable and also impacted by wind, people, etc.
  • Best if you can use glass/etc to hold down the materials close to the fabric. This improves resolution for find details.
  • Canvas has a less dense weave so maybe loses resolution compared to muslin, but the thicker weave creates a really nice pixilated effect.
  • Canvas also sucks up huge amounts of the cyanotype liquid, which is probably making it darker.
• Testing using Tyvek to prototype instead of fabric:
  • Sews really nicely!
  • Absolutely lowers my anxiety about getting started and fear of wasting materials.
  • Does not turn easily, i.e. going around sharp corners is almost impossible.

Caption: A cyanotype on cotton canvas

Caption: A cyanotype on cotton muslin

Caption: A prototype made of Tyvek

Next this week/weekend:

• Tyvek prototype of my methodology bag, possibly as a 1/3 size version that might end up also being a prototype for a Nalgeine carrying bag. I like the idea of a cute tiny backpack for a water bottle.
• Finish testing cyanotype fabrics/methods. This is dependent on when my new UV light arrives.

Thinking about:

• Role of walking methodologies in this project.
• What information literacy / etc theories are applicable here? How do I want to apply them within this project?

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

John R. Gallagher: Seeking Human Traces in AI Writing

You might be thinking, after rolling your eyes at my overuse of colons, “Okay, John, what does this have to do with writing? I read your blog for writing, not to read about you playing with pictures.” Fair enough. My point here, as it relates to writing: the images reveal the cracks in AI written arguments. Our brains aren’t able to pick up glaring deficiencies with just written words. With images, we can pick out the mechanical things that don’t look correct.

Christopher Brown from the book “A Natural History of Empty Lots”

Real wilderness is still out there, mostly in places where the climate is too extreme for us to fully occupy. I have hiked examples of it in the hemispheric redoubts of Alaska and Patagonia, and in the harshest reaches of West Texas. But there’s another, hidden wilderness that most of us walk or drive by every day. It hides in plain sight, in the liminal spaces of the city: behind chain-link fences, along the pathways of infrastructure, around abandoned buildings. In the brown lands and in the topographies we can never really occupy, even as we encroach as closely as we can. Urban creeks and floodplains, empty lots, rights-of-way, industrial parks, storm sewers, traffic islands, medians, brownfields, and the rare pockets of land that have somehow escaped development. Places that, maybe for just the current moment in nature’s long now, are mostly undisturbed by human activity even as they are surrounded by it. They are not beautiful in the way of a national park. Many of them feel weirdly apocalyptic, places where nature is in the process of reclaiming spots we trashed, and the romance of the green wild coexists with Anthropocene ruin. You could fairly call them urban wastelands, in both the economic and aesthetic senses of the word. But such places are equally, if not more, wondrous than our greatest wilderness preserves, in part because of the way they show the promise of nature’s resilience, its capacity to adapt to and recover from our damaging impact on the planet.

Natalie Loveless in “How to Make Art at the End of the World A Manifesto for Research-Creation”

Research- creation, understood in this way, is a practice of love. It is an erotic, driven, invested practice. And, as such, it fails to fit into those models that see interdisciplinarity as a way to streamline and multiply research productivities. It is too disruptive for that. Research- creation follows desire, and builds spaces and contexts that allow the time and space to experiment in unpredictable directions.

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

Making / Doing / Thinking This Week

• When working with materials there is an interplay between the time spent, the quality of attention, and how well you know and care about the material. GenAI can’t make you know a material through time, attention, and care anymore than it can make you know or care for another person or non-human animal. There are no shortcuts.
• Thinking about how I can display these bags as an artwork / designed object. I am very hesitant to call them an artwork, but its hard to escape the gallery metaphor. Last night I realized I could make the bag unzip and unfold into a single piece of material that I could hang from the ceiling. This would also mean that the inside surfaces were more visible and therefore I could use them as canvas as well. The pockets could also contain objects.
• Over time the bags become less functional bags and more functional metaphors.
• Integrating influences from fiction, especially speculative fiction. Obviously Le Guin has been important to this project, but also books like Becky Chambers’ “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s “Children of Memory” and “The Expert System’s Brother” series.
• I suspect most arguments about GenAI and alignment are used to side-step opposition to specific implementations, but they might also provide rhetorical opportunities for arguing that we need to align our own values and actions before we worry about if/how/why GenAI will do so.
• Digital Gardens are the form that the digital representation of the bags and their contents should take. Not a stream. Not linear. Not ever finished. A garden of vines to tend.

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

Rebecca Solnit: The War for the Imagination

I’ve been thinking about books lately, partly because I am finding it hard to switch from reading and collecting ideas to making things. I keep trying to write first thing in the morning, but my brain wants me to read instead. Increasingly I realize how important reading is to my sense of self and well-being.

I have also been thinking about books and sources of truth in the age of GenAI, specifically the idea that we are rapdily moving from a world where we sift through impossible riches of ideas in books, articles, websites, etc. to a world where many or most people seek a single source of truth from a GenAI chatbot. I was early to switching from physical to digital media after losing a couple boxes of books during a move in my 20s, but I’m having my doubts. Increasingly I wonder if in the near future physical repositories of books – maybe even dark, secret repositories – might be something that we start valuing, a la “A Canticle for Leibowitz”

I and we are wildlife whose natural habitat is libraries, when it comes to physical space, because they contain books in which minds roam free through time and space, encounter Dogen and Dante and Sappho and Black Elk and others long since gone, meet ideas and possibilities, meet each other in that deep way that AI can never replace, because when you read a work of literature you encounter another human being’s struggles and successes in describing the world or their heart or a particular time and place in words, and that contact, even through the medium of black ink on white paper, even across continents and centuries, is human and humane.

What this place will be, and what this country will be, is the subject of a battle right now, and I believe that books have a crucial place in it. They hold the records, the truths, the facts, in ways that cannot be forgotten, manipulated, or erased in ways that digital information can. Books, I once wrote in one of mine, are solitudes in which we meet, in which the reader in his deepest solitude meet the writer in her deepest solitude; they encourage the empathic imagination that arises from entering into lives other than our own, from expanding beyond the bounds of the self; they encourage the concentration and attention that makes us thoughtful in the most literal sense.

Ben Eastham: Anna L. Tsing on Creating ‘Wonder in the Midst of Dread’

I really feel the following quote sentiment as I work on this sabbatical project and think about what I want to bring back and turn into something real for the actual students who I have the opportunity to work with and maybe be able to help think about the future they are building.

I teach at a university in the United States, which brings constraints. But I’m willing to do that, in part, because it allows me to participate in the imagination of alternative visions that might make cracks in the apparatus of power, which is not quite the same as smashing it. Some of my colleagues think we should just stand up and denounce the system. But anthropology is one of the least powerful disciplines in the academy, and so denouncing is not enough unless you’ve figured out a channel through which your denunciations might carry traction. I fear that no one will listen to our denouncements unless we make them beautiful. It might be part of the work of writers and artists to invest critical work with this kind of traction: to put a hair in the flour.

Garbage Day: Charlie Kirk was killed by a meme

I increasingly realize that I no longer understand the culture / psychology that the internet has created, and I suspect most people my age or older are in the same boat, regardless of how terminally online we were/are.

We have let school shootings in America persist long enough that we have created a culture where kids grow up seeing them as a path towards fame and glory. Another consequence of how thoroughly the internet has flattened pop culture, politics, and real life violence. All of it now is just another meme you can participate in to go viral. Made even more confusing by a new nihilistic accelerationist movement that delights in muddying the waters for older people who still adhere to a traditional political spectrum. Many young extremists now believe in a much simpler binary: Order and chaos. And if you are spending any time at all trying to derive meaning from violent acts like this then you are, by definition, their enemy.

Weeknotes are where I share what I am doing without worrying too much about them being perfect. They are a way of thinking-in-public. They are written quickly and generally without editing.

Making / Doing

• Last week I finally submitted my revised ethics application, so now that is out of the way I can start working on my first bag (a methodology bag) and some side projects.
• Unfortunately I find myself procrastinating. Reading is the things I do when I want to avoid something or pass time. I’m sure there is some grist for my therapist here. At the very least it was adaptive to be able to disappear into a book for days at a time when I was on disability for much of my 20s.
• A related problem is that I have wide-ranging interests, and this project reflects that. It could, in theory, encompass everything from a blade of grass outside to geopolitics. It wants to be big and messy, and I (if I am being honest) want to let it.
• But I have less than 4 months left. And at the end of the day I decided to do a research creation project where my primary outcome is physical bags. I’ve done most of the reading I need to do for this project already, and what I still need to do should be about clarifying ideas, not expanding scope, or following up on new leads.
• It’s time to clear out my reader, my calibre, and my todo lists. I have been reading about and exploring the ideas for years now. For most of these I have notes. I also have hundreds of articles, papers, and books saved. It’s time to push all those into a theoretically-in-the-future pile so they stop giving me the side-eye.
• So this week is about switching from reading to writing/making. It’s time to make a plan that involves spending the best hours of my day on actually making things.

Reading / Consuming / Sharing

A few things worth sharing from the last week.

Rebecca Solnit: : The War for the Imagination

What this place will be, and what this country will be, is the subject of a battle right now, and I believe that books have a crucial place in it. They hold the records, the truths, the facts, in ways that cannot be forgotten, manipulated, or erased in ways that digital information can. Books, I once wrote in one of mine, are solitudes in which we meet, in which the reader in his deepest solitude meet the writer in her deepest solitude; they encourage the empathic imagination that arises from entering into lives other than our own, from expanding beyond the bounds of the self; they encourage the concentration and attention that makes us thoughtful in the most literal sense.

Eryk Salvaggio on Human Literacy

But look: of course you can choose to find a story given to you by an AI system compelling and there is no shame in that. I found one on a door. I will not lie and tell you that I sit and choose every word through careful deliberation at all times. I am also not the most accomplished of writers. My point is that translating your language through AI is a lost opportunity to cultivate the sweetness within you. With your own words, connecting to the words of others, we can use stories for what they are for, which is to link ourselves with the stories of the people around us.

Arturo Escobar: Designs for the Pluriverse

Said otherwise, the notions of the individual, the real, and the economy as having intrinsic existence by themselves, independent of the relations that constitute them, and of us as observers, are instances of “folk essentialism,” as Kriti Sharma (2015, 12) wonderfully puts it. They seem to us completely real, yet they depend on an entire complex set of operations. It is precisely this impression of reality that we need to probe more deeply to arrive at a view of their ineluctable contingency.