I am noticing the transitions between states of form tell us as much, if not more, about the forms themselves than studying them directly. I focus my attention on the moment just before the square emerges. What will we find in the moments when light becomes shadow, then light again? When the curve of the bamboo passed through the inflection of a straight line on its way to another curve?
Siobhan K. Cronin in “Form as Passage” from SLOW READER
“If I move slower, how many forms will I find?”
I thought I would need to seek out forms, but discovered that, through the act of play, forms would find me. Discovery becomes the by-product of a practice of attention where hypotheses are developed experientially as movement. How many forms exist between a sphere and a cube? My hands and eyes seek out the answer. By slowing down my movements I begin to discover the threshold; how the number of forms is limited only by the speed of my hands and my ability to detect change. If I move slower, how many forms will I find?
Siobhan K. Cronin in “Form as Passage” from SLOW READER.
“Collectives are not just out there. They do not exist prior to action. Rather, they evolve dynamically out of diverse actions through which individual voices gather and mutually strengthen one another. They are in becoming.”
Lorenza Mondada in “BEcomING COLLECTIVE”
Most importantly, we are learning that making collective and collectively making is like building a qanat, it is like digging a hole together. With enough effort, that hole can be extended into a tunnel, possibly connecting to other holes, becoming a channel, gradually intersecting with others to form a network, now open to flows of new relations and different ideas, forming an imperfect and ever changing whole. We could then sediment together, forming collective habits, rhythms, and motions. This means preparing together and training together to tunnel under whatever may come. We can always dig a little further, but we cannot fully predetermine, or even less own, the spaces e have dug.
“Learnings from the Underground Waters,” Francesca Masoero for QANAT.
Harney & Moten, on study, “From cooperation to black operation”
And we have a word for the sabotage of information, and that word is study. But this is to say that study, insofar as it comes first, is what the ministry of information has always been trying to regulate—simultaneously to accumulate and destroy. So you try to study, where to study, to be collected and stranded in study, in friendship, not, in the first place, to try to sabotage information; rather we might say study sabotages information precisely because that it is not its aim. Study is not a critique of information. In fact, study is aimless, shiftless. Study is a drifting hobo camp of sharecroppers with untimely dreams of cooperative farms, dreams that never settle, as, for instance, Christopher Taylor reads CLR James’s writings on sharecroppers. The university - the ministry of information – can be sabotaged, but it cannot be transformed. Study is not transformational. It is deformational, subformational, formless formation.
Snowber:
I have often wondered if the gift of the body’s knowledge is the best kept secret. We are bodies, we do not have bodies. They are a place of deep learning, and both bodily knowledge and bodily wisdom are available to us.
Carl Craig on why “Poppa Was a Rolling Stone” is a techno record:
Techno is about attitude. It’s like how rap music is about attitude and lifestyle. Punk was about attitude and lifestyle. Techno is really about an attitude because we don’t lock ourselves into only listening to techno all fucking day long. The attitude of techno is that kind of brashness, but that you’re doing something that can sound like it’s timeless, and also that it’s not from this earth. That’s what “Papa Was a Rolling Stone” is to me; at any point I can hear it, and it’s just the amount of space that’s being used, the grooves. It’s got a groove without playing a lot of notes. It actually probably has more of a Miles aesthetic: it’s not about the notes you play but the notes you don’t play. The amount of space that’s in between bass riffs, or that there’s a little bit of Rhodes, and there’s some horns with an effect on them. The thing that’s carrying it is the hi-hat and the low bass. So, that is really techno to me.
I had not even known that I craved being asked to do something important until I was actually asked.
Julia Putnam on when Jimmy and Grace Lee Boggs came to Renaissance HS recruiting for Detroit Summer.
This ability to turn anyone into a debtor is what fuels the first university toward inclusion.
Your Sunday sermon from la paperson, A Third University is Possible