the question you posed at the end of your note were quite interesting,
- Putting your work online is the first move. Then what?
- Website views are surfaces of windows into a deep pool of content. How many do you have and how dense are they? can you open them?
i’m about to be finished w/ the mushroom at the end of the world. It’s been quite moving observing the fungal networks created by the matsutake. It’s site specificity and capacity for sustaining life is a quite apt metaphor with many of the ambitions we have expressed in the past and discuss irl. The role of our production is not necessarily a pursuit of an end product, but also a concern w/ the process's residual, and network it sustains (for now, just the two of us).
ur window/pool metaphor seems to allude to what lurks at in the depths of a website, which is probably the network the site relies on (one that is most likely to be human, although I wonder if there are any non-human entities that exists inside, independent of the labor of the machines that dutifully serve content back to us?).
i’ve recently been paying quite a bit of attention to trust berlin, web of trust, and the reading group associated w/ it. it’s digital presence is quite sincere (?) and i'm currently working up the courage to draft an email to see if there are ways for me to participate remotely.
i think what has attracted me to the groups model is the residual left by their activity, in the same way a mushrooms activity can support a network of plants of different species. web of trusts residual content leaves a space for someone like me to explore and discover.
this avenue of thought somehow leads back to the role of an archivist or librarian which seems to be a new model for designers looking to engage is some sort of practice that provides a more stable foundation for us to continue working on top of (I'm thinking of: Mindy Sue, Folder Studio, Nicole Killian, Nontsikelelo Mutiti, Sara Kaaman, David Reinfurt's research on Muriel Cooper). i think there is a part of me that fears this characterization in its potential passivity (for myself, not for any of the aforementioned designers, their's is a position of extreme generosity, their time is leveraged in the uncovering of fading links to our past)
The question I have for our case and process specifically, is if u are documenting something for the purpose of re-establishing some foundational aspect of a praxis, does it need to exist in the past? Is depth useful if it can not only be traversed as a ruin of an action. Perhaps it is necessary for depth to also exist as an exercise in potential. i think project name has the ability to develop this approach. u are right, it is all about positioning. While we have yet to put any of our own work online I think the 'then what' seems to be the most pressing matter. Our foundation should be one that actively engages w/ its own growth, any history matched with an equally developed production of a 'future'. It's depths transparently placed to be engaged w/ as seamlessly as it's surface.
10/14/2019 (02:25 am)
