Will Dance to Write

Or, navigating the bizarro world of finding support for your weird ideas

Referred to in this Post:

* The Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute
* ‘Living in the Valley of Undetermination,’ Aaslak Aamot Helm
* Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and Its Reformation Opponents (fuck yeah), on the life of William Tyndale
* The Vicarious Brain, Creator of Worlds, by Alain Berthoz

… along with KUNCI Study Forum and Collective, Solaris, and money.


Longevity has been on my mind. How to go on? (Uh oh. Surely, I shouldn’t start a Substack like this. And I’ll report back on that one.) How to keep inching towards that gauzy, receding horizon where one is left alone to write what one wants to and be paid for that alone?

Fool! No one gets to just do what they want to do!

I know I want to use this Substack as a place to work out half-formed ideas about media and algorithms and AI, sure, in public, and I will do that, by the devil. But half the work, and most of my days, are spent figuring out how to live. How to pay rent, how to pay the dentist, how to install new pipes, how to pay to then get the gift of a little bit of time, to do the work of working out ideas. As much as I appreciate lessons on craft, insight, or spinning gorgeous prose, or whatever people who read the LRB think about, I have more of a grinding appreciation for the work of making an impossible life possible.

I finally understand it as a kind of creative (shudder) practice (there she is), putting stones in the ground, one after another, towards your destination. Building the plane as you fly it. I think it’s why people love reading Octavia Butler’s journal entries and why they are so viral. The ways she encouraged herself every single day are pretty astonishing and emboldening. I think of her immense isolation. Pulling that kind of self-belief out of your gut every day. Christ!

In grad- school I had writing professors who differentiated between ‘pure’ writers and working writers. They’d always use Wallace Stevens or William Carlos Williams as an example of ‘how to live,’ which was unbelievably fucking annoying. The poet can also be an highly-paid executive at an insurance firm. The poet was a highly skilled doctor! Just go be a physician or a lawyer or a consultant, and write on the side. I never took the advice seriously, to go train in another profession altogether.

I thought, and I still probably do, think being a woman and a writer means you either drown, are subsumed by a creative partner’s hobbyist attempts to do what you do, die by some horrible and self-inflicted method, or end up mad, destitute, and unknown. That last one seems to be the most common end. I feel that is a much more likely outcome for any woman insisting on such a narcissistic and self-destructive path. I have also started learning poker and I now know the value of learning when to fold. I wish I learned it earlier!

I was never really sure what my professors, visiting our school for a season, did to live consistently, except for very interesting and glamorous-seeming jobs. They were writing scripts for HBO, or they were detectives in Los Angeles chasing cheating husbands, experiences which they then spun into hit shows for HBO. My writing mentor, a truly amazing novelist, was famous for telling her students, pleading her how to go on: “You’ve either got it, or you don’t.” Incredibly helpful teaching moments like this burnt the story of genius rewards genius and that’s all, folks, into my mind.

Other people seemed to just have it. Connections, sure. Family money, sure. They found agents at 21, and never seemed to have to work again. They bought houses at 23 and from what most of us could tell, money just arrived. They married very rich men and women. They never talked about money. They never talked about working. They seemed surprised and a bit disappointed when you brought up a job, because they expected to be more like them. One writer told me she thought it was depressing ‘and a little sad’ that I had a job. Oh, you’ll get there!

Their lives just seemed highly improbable to me and not really something I could or should dare aspire to. I just knew I had to work. I only saw my parents work from the second they got here; they worked through school, through grad- school, and they worked and worked and they still, in their late 60s, are working. I don’t think they’ll ever get to stop. I don’t know why I thought I’d ever get to stop.

Over 15 years into whatever this life is, I now have a real grudging appreciation for being a working writer. I observe a lot of amazing writers around me, and I most appreciate the workers. They teach, they edit, they speak. Maybe they curate. They do whatever they can to reasonably wrap their words around a few moments. A show, a film, a happening. You iterate. You maybe get better, day by day. And you invoice and then you follow up on that invoice until you are dead.

But even as I respect the grind, I was and am still jealous of the time all that admin- work steals. Imagine the sentences that could have been generated instead of writing a young faceless woman in Italy 5 times over 8 months for your goddamn wire for a piece that’s been the most read on their site? Ha! More than that, the cost of an unsustainable path is high: you miss out on your own family; you miss out on huge milestones you thought you’d have. All this is known. Know when to fold.

I watch my friends work day and night to find support, funding, grants, fellowships, to support their ideas and work. I marvel at them. How do they find the temerity, for one? And two, how do we continue to find the resources to support our strangest ideas as published writing averages to 0, or, into one, sure, flat, and serviceable language? How do you maintain the space for your most difficult ideas without perfect aim to land or certain resolution?

I mostly mourn the losses. I see brilliant thinkers give up their work or stop writing, all the time. Others disappear. Some get lost in teaching. Maybe you also have the sickness that makes you keep doing theory and art and writing, and you are still compulsively bound.

I found a few strategies have helped me persist. The first is constant reorientation. I get restless (not bored) quickly. (Only boring people are bored, a writer I loved to hate once told me.) Every couple of months, I’ll apply to something because it forces me to reorient myself. I’ve learned to enjoy these gruesome little mean-hearted exercises in applying for funding, because I do see this effort as part of the work of thinking. You have to make an argument for what the hell you are doing in a way someone understands. You articulate it to them, and then maybe it is clear, again, for a moment, for yourself.

The second is building a model. Most of my time is spent thinking about modeling, simulation, and vicariance. This book, The Vicarious Brain, Creator of Worlds, is one of my core texts to refer to and teach. Another is Burning to Read, on the life of William Tyndale, a man as obsessed with the TEXT as a man can be, willing to burn at the stake in service of the Text. We should all be so lucky!

Both of these books are about projective models. In the case of Tyndale, the man simulated a future in which people could read the word of God and understand it, and that word then would recast and reshape the possibilities they could imagine for their lives. He cared so horribly about how the Text would open door after door for this speculative future audience, how it would stay in their minds and cast a glow on their everyday, material realities that he stayed on the run for twenty years to write the translation of the Bible down from Greek and Latin. Insane. I love him.

Berthoz’ book is about projecting ourselves - or the ways we project versions of ourselves, little simulations - forward into the future as a cognitive method we have trained in, by necessity. We have to be able to think of ourselves in the future to go on, now. I know I will iterate to a future self; I have to hold the idea of a more peaceful and resource-full self and future environment in my mind to get out of my present. And I do; I project into that future all the live long day, and now, it’s dark.

I wrote this reorientation and projection-happy text for a funder loosely rooted in Silicon Valley metascience research last week. They are looking for proposals about retrieving lost and uncited research. I wanted to describe what I am drawn most to, and whose thinking I am drawn to, and their relationship to doubt, indeterminacy, and the unknown. It was a first step. I will keep developing this. It is the first time I have been really excited by an application to anything in a long time, because I really could just say what I want to do.

I get a lot of advice about creating funding narratives and applying for grants, so I’ll start sharing what I submit here, and what has been successful, if it is interesting to people. This bitty noodling also introduces where I am at now.

I’ll keep going. Please let me know how you keep going, too.

RESEARCH DIRECTIONS

Over the next two years, I want to root my research, and develop a thread I’ve touched on in many projects: how we learn to experiment; how we develop models around experimentation, and how artistic research helps us develop models around ‘territories’ of doubt and uncertainty that later become applicable in simulation science, modeling, and development of theories of technology. I would like to develop this thread of inquiry by looking at globally distributed, largely overlooked or unappreciated hubs for this kind of thinking and research that foregrounds the indeterminate and metaphysical, and the ways this discursive research then bleeds in uncited but marked ways across fields.

A couple of years ago, a good friend of mine and a longtime interlocutor, Aaslak Aamot Helm, was telling me about a presentation he made to Novo Nordisk. He worked with the Natural History Museum in Copenhagen to build a bridge between that museum and the natural history museum in Berlin to (as I understand it) support artistic research that engages with ‘the indeterminate’ in new fields of scientific discovery. (The official description I could find is ‘a postdoctoral research project funded by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, tracing the aesthetics of rising levels of unknowability in the biological sciences in collaboration with institutional partners in biomedical research and natural history’).

Anyhow, he wrote this wonderful piece, ‘Living in the Valley of Undetermination,’ which reflects a lot of our conversations about doubt. It got me thinking about how we learn to move past ‘institutional isomorphism’. How do we learn to think in heterodox or heterogeneous ways when we have been trained in singular paths? How do we craft, as artists and researchers, methods of inquiry that support and sustain an unknown, or unproven thesis, when such inquiry is hard to find support for both materially, on the ground, and intellectually?

I reflect on the ways, in my own practice, I have only been able to find interlocutors around such unknowns, or knots of doubt, through relentlessly pursuing them first alone and at huge cost (a cost I’d accept every time). When I’ve been asked to sum up my drive to write, I’ve often only been able to say that I like to write about things I have no words for, where my language fails me. Wrap some words around an unknown thing; keep trying to wrap words around weird phenomena, where theoretical frameworks at hand fail or fall short. Over time, people see threads that connect to lines in their own research, writing, and making. They reach out, and maybe you find nodes to intersect on. I am thinking here, further, about how to formalize this kind of inquiry, which is often supported in, say, fiction writing or experimental writing, but less in publishing as we have it now.

Perhaps another way to describe this, is that I find, in arts writing and artistic research, a different, wildly open-ended approach towards the ‘science of knowing,’ and the bigger question of ‘how we know what we know’. I find artistic research and practice, and the field of theory-making around certain practices, are often in dialogue with emerging discoveries in science, technology, and on. I think there are some exciting directions to move here. I’d like to research the archives of collectives over the past 50-60 years who have helped generate attitudinal changes in technology, and further, understand these changes as specifically influenced by modes of artistic research. I would want to focus on research initiatives that centered on emergent complexity, wonder, and doubt, and then these collectives’ subsequent publishing of that artistic research that has gone on to influence the sciences.

I’d love to focus on overlooked perspectives in weird rangy interdisciplinary projects that have done this work at crucial moments:

The first is the Detroit Geographic Expedition and Institute, which Francis Tseng has written about quite a bit, which was organized in the pursuit of ‘radical cartography,’ a method of narrative mapping towards a narrative atlas that ‘undid’ or aimed to undo the construction of a neutral gaze or objective mapping (taking off here from Borges’ concept of the map as the territory; we redo maps: we redo the world.)

I think here of Solaris, of course one of the most important films to so many, and to me: an effort to bring affect and emotional complexity to the study of science, imbued with Tarkovsky’s critiques of the Western frame of space exploration and scientific methods. Solaris, then, embeds an argument for centering the essential metaphysical dimension to scientific discovery, and further, a radical comfort and ease with doubt, and testing and discarding hypotheses. There was an incredible piece at the 14th Shanghai Bienniale, Revisiting Solaris, that highlighted the importance of this film as it suggested a way of inquiry and knowing, that protects what is not yet understood.

Another research case study here are the archives of the Los Angeles Free Press Archives. I recently made contact with the archivists there at CSUDH. The LA Free Press published Intermedia, Gene Youngblood’s historic columns, which eventually became Expanded Cinema. While Expanded Cinema formalized these columns into an important book, I’m more curious to look at the columns in the context of the LA Free Press itself; what made it possible for this column to come about? How were Youngblood’s reflections on indeterminacy and doubt in artistic process, his reflections on the global intermedia network, the ‘Paleocybernetic Age’ and so on, made possible by the context of the Free Press? How was this rangy publishing ground - which became the seeds for so much media theory to come - conceived?

From here, I’m curious and excited to trace feminist inquiry into technology’s foundations. My plan is to find analogs to Intermedia in the Los Angeles Free Press globally, as in the publishing and activities of KUNCI Study Forum and Collective in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, which is an important group investigating ‘informal study’ in research, which has gone on to influence many artists, researchers, and thinkers. Indeed, their work on ‘epistemic humility’ as a research method has been incredibly intriguing for me; how do we formalize these informal methods? Do we? In that interview, they mention Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, whose Undercommons and theories of study have of course been incredibly influential for so many artists.

Intriguing, to me, is how their undeniable influence, and the influence of their conception of ‘study’, is still quite hard to locate and ‘pin down’ as research and inquiry. KUNCI also mention The Silent University, Raqs Media Collective. I further think here of Naropa, and Ariana Reines’ Invisible College and the research and study she has cultivated over the years. These are all spaces that have been hugely influential for me in their approach to knowledge building, inquiry, and critique.

Another case study would be the Living Midnight Narrative Outfit, a women-owned narrative-based design and research think tank co-located in Ahmedabad and Delhi. This incredible transdisciplinary collective constantly evolves and changes as it grows, focused on speculative narratives to drive design and research pedagogy.

In all these outfits, I find that there are key threads, throughlines that run through each and overlap. They value indeterminacy, epistemic humility and ‘underdetermination’—which are also inherent to the dialectical nature of technology and science discovery. These values are further systematized. They sustain unique logics of knowledge production, focused on tending towards the unknown, unanswered, and unresolved.

Aslak, in the piece mentioned above, describes the ways mathematician Bonnie Shulman’s work in the history and philosophy of mathematics has been hugely overlooked. He notes the archives of her work with poets in the 60s and 70s, how her transcriptions of these dialogues trace her own resistance and critique of the system of mathematics she worked within.

I can imagine developing an archive of these kinds of lost or sidelined critiques from past and living collectives.

My proposal is aimed at the creation of experimental forms and thinking that go on to influence research, and outfits like KUNCI, LMNO, LA Free Press, DGEI, and on, which fused artistic and scientific research to suggest alternatives paradigms for the design of technical systems.

This work is hard to find, hard to name, and hard to locate. I imagine it could manifest in writing a series of essays, and a show or exhibition of archival material and works arranged around the making of alternative theories of technology.

In studying these ‘minor research groups’ and schools and collectives, I would like to develop some theory about their genesis of experimental models, alternate models and paradigms for systems building, as these models can be replicated in different contexts and into the future.