Found myself in a machine-facilitated fugue this week; head-down, puzzling my way through new (technical and conceptual) terrain, with a few video calls anchoring me to a shared social reality.

Undertakings:

  • Web development: A frankly inadvisible amount of website-wrangling throughout this week, including some late-night rabbit-holes and debugging loops. I’m now most of the way through an LLM-supported rebuild, shifting my site away from Wordpress to a Jekyll static site. With outside machine support, I’ve been getting more comfortable with working in the command line, Visual Studio Code, etc., and have successfully implemented wiki-style linking, tagging, and a backlinking system, and got a rudimentary vis.js knowledge graph up and running.

  • Latent Intimacies: Check-in with Vytas on Tuesday evening, synchronising our thinking about how to develop some of the outcomes of the “Synthetic Minds” collaborative prototyping residency we were part of back in January-February; also helped him think through some text for an (unrelated) publication later in the week.

  • Choreographing attention: IM meeting with M (dialling in from a electric vehicle charging station somewhere in Croatia), postponed after I spread myself a bit too thinly last week; talked through plans for getting stuck into the next Anarchive Reader, committing to a focused two-week editorial sprint from the 27th, as something preferable to a more thinly-spread, piecemeal approach.

  • Enxaneta: Week twoish of a planned six-month Python-for-ethnography collaborative skill exchange with Tim; reflecting on some on my website-wrangling experiences, and the outcomes of a field observation exercise I’d set. We talked a bit about critical technical practice, Britishness abroad, Mariann Vaczi’s monograph Catalonia’s Human Towers, and different approaches to bounding and specifying ethnographic fieldsites, and set some next steps for the coming weeks.

Tim, Habia etc., dithere

Side-missions:

  • Dowsing: Caught an afternoon screening of La Chimera with D over the weekend, which was shaggy and weird, with a dreamy energy that seeped into the rest of the week. Now imagining a dowsing-specific double feature, running it alongside Ben Wheatley’s A Field in England.

  • Thick presents: Social catch-up with Richard, having been in close contact during a flurry of activity putting together an (unsuccessful) funding proposal for a small project on ecological citizenship earlier in the year; we’re both going to be at Anticipation in September, so useful to get a sense of the kinds of things he’s thinking about (※).

  • The jagged frontier: Monthly Friday morning call with Andrew, a little unfocused after staying up into the early hours wrestling with GitHub branches1; a wide-ranging chat, covering Wardley maps of dog-breeding as a service, generative AI’s jagged frontier, the Tao of Pooh, and the ‘protocolisation of small team collaboration’ (whatever that means).

Next week:
  • Shift from technical web development to tweaking the site’s look and feel, and thinking about content strategy.
  • Another skill exchange session with Tim, going deeper on participant observation and fieldnotes.
  • Editing work, sketching some ‘serving suggestions’ for a deconstructed photo book.
  • Call about an archiving/experimental publishing side-mission.

  1. Don’t talk to me about GitHub branches. ⤴︎

Later →