I’ve put this category first because in many ways it contains all those that follow. I see my work as a human (and yours) as never not research, insofar as I feel our work here in these meat-suits is best captured by Arakawa and Gins’ description of us as organisms that person.
When framed within creative discourse, and aided by a variety of materials we use to re/present our inquiry for others, that research has a plasticity disallowed by institutional ontological formation; similarly, I see the language of citizen science as a necessary and radical reclaiming of a practice central to our survival for all of human history. As our modes of collective meaning-making increasingly resist top-down strictures and stories, and technology offers new opportunities for distribution and archiving of public data and shared methodologies, lending words like “citizen science” to what have often been underground, informal practices begins to offer alternative speculative perceptual formations of future.
You can find some of the conceptual frameworks I’ve developed around queer and trans futures and speculative language in my essay, “Languaging a Future for Lovepersons: Speculative Strategies Towards Radical Trans/cendence,” in the Transgender Narratives Anthology (2021).
Under this category, I’ve placed thematic lines of inquiry that have linked many of my projects over the years as well as discrete projects themselves. These show up in long-term theoretical study, published texts, workshop and program facilitation, performances, documentation of personal field experimentation, and then a dedicated practice of building social practice tools / frameworks out of these investigations. Of course, the work itself plays out across my other areas of practice — and is offered as strategy through tools, protocols, social practice and site interventions, in particular, via FIELD STATION, LAB and LIBRARY INSTALLATIONS, and the public Field Practice invitations found there.
ÆVOLUTIONARY THEORY
is a theoretical framework for understanding the human potential for auto-evolution and transformation during a person’s lifetime, with the possibility of reprogramming genetic (or, in homeopathy, miasmic) imprints on our physical / energetic form. Experiments around personal, collective, and systemic transformation continue to derive from my ongoing research into these possibilities from sources in the natural and social sciences, design, technology and artificial intelligence, as well as into spiritual and energetic intelligence lineages. An initial publication around these concepts (and announcement of the early development of a book collecting early forays) was released in 2012.
DE/COMPOSITION AND THE SOUND EVENT: FORENSIC BIOMIMETICS FOR ACOUSTIC LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE
is a multimedia research and performance project begun in 2021, including field study, sound compositions and wire framing for an open access geo-located sound-walk app, in collaboration with Stanford Cheung, which we presented initial sound experimentation and data from as part of New Mimesis: simulation, models, metaphors and data in music, hosted by the Orpheus Institute (Ghent) at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK, in January 2022. It considers the preservation and potential mimetic intervention of the sound event from a forensic model, investigating the harmful impacts of anthropogenic sound on human and other-than-human environments. This project proposes the re-establishment and exposure to retrofitted, collectively sourced archival and current sound data through open access media platforms as a potential site of collective regenerative field practice.
MYCELIUM NETWORK SOCIETY
is an underground network imagination situated in a post-internet mudland and powered by fungus, spores, culture, kitchen, radio, transmission, installations, workshops and performances. visit here. It began formally out of the shared desire of artists from all over the globe to engage with mycelial intelligence, document this work, and share strategies and received wisdom across this network, archived for public use.
FIELD PROTOCOL : MANIFEST
The MANIFEST Field Protocol [download here] is a social practice toolkit for re-orienting attention and #DocumentingPresence on a daily basis. It was developed out of a desire to make concrete a productive form of recording (understood broadly across material possibilities) as a field practice available to anyone and everyone. It centers around thematic, meta-taggable documentation, turning the attention outwards as opposed to “inwards,” where humans can often find themselves reproducing the cycles and language as part of the often-recommended practice of “journaling.” Through the use of discrete, identifiable categories, we are able to observe the shifting landscape of our own consciousness and perception away from the ruts in our psychological/energetic roads. [The MANIFEST draws heavily on ævolutionary theory and is connected to / part of the larger set of disruptor mechanism protocols.]
DISRUPTOR MECHANISM PROTOCOL
the DISRUPTOR MECHANISM PROTOCOL is a set of tools meant to assist humans in preparing for alternative futures. Its three central modes are A Type: the Diachronic Biophilic Recode, B Type, the Speculative Linguistic Model, and C Type, the Neuroplastic Somatic Biohack. It was initially published as the “[Nonlinear Alchemical Disruptor Mechanisms]: Tripartite Spellwork and Documenting Presence / Disruptor Mechanism Field Protocol,” included in the “What got left in the future” folio of Tagvverk in the Spring of 2020. It was drawn from ongoing Field Work practices used in personal experimentation with self / body hacking driven by ævolutionary theory, and was framed as an excerpt of a speculative future transmission recorded in 2019. This transmission attempt #46-06-909 introduces the character of Elæ the systems doula as a trans temporal entity channel from a society known as the Fewkin. It was included in the Distāntia Reading Series in March of 2020. Miniature zines offering Disruptor Protocol guidelines have been produced and distributed as part of the Speculative Resilience Radical Practice Field Library in each of its iterations. I produced and staged the conceptual tradeshow style one-act, “How to Human™: Disruptor Mechanism Protocol Training [Level 1],” based on these strategies, as part of the Performing Knowledge Festival at the Segal Center in December of 2019.
SOMATIC WORK / 50 LOOKS
In a way, this SOMATIC WORK category could be included under In the Shed, because ultimately it represents the space in which I explore the medium of my own human body as the site of experimentation and inquiry, especially around rewiring and hacking trauma patterns. However, through series like the Speculative Solidarities videos, and then explicitly through the 50 Looks videos I made during quarantine, the practice of my somatic work has been at once private and public artist research, field-documented and commented on as a form of auto-archiving but also opening up inquiry and making invitation. When living alone with COVID I found that somatics, dance, and other body-work were essential to my health and psychic well being, I began what I jokingly called “dance camp,” taking everything possible available through Movement Research (in particular, Klein and Alexander techniques, Qi Gong, and Body Mind Centering) as well as working with Olive Bieringa and the Body Cartography project. In response to this, and in memory of the wonderful Merce Cunningham, I tasked myself with learning the choreographer’s 50 Looks sequence using the eight-session online workshop led by Patricia Lent in 2020, during Cunningham’s centennial, and on the 40th anniversary of the piece — choreographed in 1979, when I was born and he was 60. I documented myself learning the sequences as I worked, imperfectly, with notes and set to music––in part as a question of “what is public practice?” so central to our minds as our world shifted online.