The impetus for the blog arrives out of of an ongoing desire to document my thought process in regards to my research work and out of a need to engage with those topics informally. (I also wanted a space to archive my reason arts practices and my thoughts around them.) Graduate studies has required I do a lot of reading and analysis and I now regularly find my mind full to the brim of dozens of tangents and messy connections; these are sometimes perhaps academically indefensible (at least without an robust understanding of the relevent fields), but still they haunt me: “give me a home,” the thoughts whisper, “we’ll be useful eventually. we promise.”
In the last few months I took the oppurtunity to work on a workshop paper under the pretense of perhaps getting to go to a conference and expand my network. Because the subject of the workshop, the “Metaverse”, was so singular yet so vague, I could do what ever I wanted. After a discussion with a few colleagues about aome adjacent topics, I got to work. It was low stakes, I could say pretty much whatever I wanted in that paper; I could make any argument; and I did. I will probably re-engage with some of my arguments again here because they sure are “fun”.
The process of writing, without the pressure for it to be perfect for someone else, that I’ve cultivated since childhood, was incredibly freeing. I could make those weird connections between whatever was filling up my head at the time from babiniku, to Azuma-sensei’s work on database theory, to Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of capital, to Homestuck (which while I haven’t been reading saved my sanity from being bedreddin while I was sick with Covid via Homestuck Made this World). The final paper was a mess, maybe not ontologically, but of the state of my mind during the time I was writing it, and I want to be able to mark the rest of my development as a scholar and maybe an artist somewhere in the same way that weird little paper did.
I hope that I can use this space to help orient my research goals and art production and also perhaps a space to talk about my experiences within graduate school: now that I’m too years in I can maybe think clearly about it? I’ve been reading Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology recently, after reading What’s the Use? earlier this year. Both are concerned, in part, with how we are made and make in the world as subjects through “orientation” and “use” respectively.
My plans: to “(dis)orient” this space and “(mis)use” these tools I have in front of me to mold a livable subjectivity for myself and maybe come up with a joke or two along the way.