Attention stretched thin across winter’s grey, voices cast into future rooms as old stories assume new weight.

Wall-sized mural depicting William Morris against a leaf-print wallpaper pattern Circle line moquette fabric design featuring interconnected red human figures on a blue background

When my friend David invited me to specify my own role title as an affiliate of his para-fictional institute1, I found myself wrestling with fundamental questions of identity beyond traditional institutional boundaries. If there were no limits, what role or remit would I opt into? After some reflection, I found myself gravitating toward historical examples of institutional ‘keepers’ – those tasked not with ‘delivering projects’ but maintaining and tending to collections, practices, relationships over time.

This sparked strangely with anthropologists Andrew Graan and Carl Rommel’s recent work on project temporalities, which I chewed through this week, particularly their observation that projects aren’t neutral vehicles for human action. My own recent encounters with improvised, pragmatic research practices – from a former Zoological Society researcher’s account of collecting sperm by placing Eppendorf tubes in freeze-dried birds, to prototyping markdown templates for my own field observation needs – highlight both the limits of project frameworks and the need for scaffolds that can support more open-ended forms of attention and care.

Undertakings:
  • Review of materials from four recent funding applications, mapping and taking notes on recurring patterns and tacit themes. Though mostly a stocktaking exercise after an intense run of proposal writing, this helped clarify how my work is developing, particularly around ideas of documentation and collaborative work.
  • Check-in with the complete Anarchive editorial team, after a prolonged hiatus; good to realign and identify immediate priorities, particularly around interview processing and breakthroughs on this web canvas interface.
  • Some early progress developing the spine of a markdown notetaking/documentation system tailored to my own needs, setting up a dedicated Obsidian vault for experiments.
  • Long-overdue catch-up with David, ostensibly seeking his advice on structural armatures for creative/hybrid practice, but quickly sliding into more general life chat. The call jolted us into reactivating a publishing experiment that had stalled when I left for Madrid this time last year, leaving me working out how to triage 2000+ phone screenshots against some still-emerging criteria of ‘relevance.’
Side-missions:
  • Trial day at new local coworking space was less that I’d hoped for; felt unsettled, still stabilising, an environment in transition. The comparatively more business-like atmosphere (and user base) suggest a different model of shared space that my previous experiences – more infrastructure than social container, at least for now. Did use the day to crack on with some postponed/unhelpfully-scaled admin tasks, emails, etc., and grateful for that. Left my laptop charger behind, prompting a jittery early start on Wednesday.
  • Got a bit overexcited by the programme for this Brussels workshop on ‘Prototypes for a pirate colporage’, having gone a bit off the deep end with the Walter Benjamin fixation during my PhD.2 Ticking many of my boxes (speculative methods, experimental publishing, the circulation of knowledge), this prompted a flurry of Instagram/Mastodon follows, despite having just deleted the former’s app from my phone.
  • Friday-Saturday: Down in London for the weekend; watched Glass Onion at D’s sister’s place while on cat-sitting duty, the 2022 tech billionaire satire landing with a muffled thud in the cold January of 2025. Despite the bitter weather, D and I made it up to Walthamstow for an exhibition on William Morris and Islamic art the following day, though combined food market and family day crowds made for a somewhat rushed visit.
  • Sunday: Met up with an old friend and her family, as the five of us gazed, bewildered, at the ‘industrial womb’ currently occupying the Tate Modern Turbine Hall, and made an impromptu dérive through the footprint of the Great Fire of London, from St Paul’s to Pudding Lane, prompted in part by her child’s recounting of diarist Samuel Pepys burying his parmesan.
Next week:
  • Coffee/similar with Asa in York; hoping to draw on his combined experience as a researcher and confirmed game enthusiast to stress-test some of my early ideas for an April academic workshop on ‘plurimodal’ ethnography, play, and worldmaking.
  • Resynchronising with Tim after the winter break3, mapping out collaborative activities and sketch some plans for the year ahead, including identifying next steps for our reflexive software development work.
  • Blocking out some time for Anarchive editing, returning to these autumn interviews now the midwinter funding application sprint is over.
  • Further iteration and testing of my markdown note-taking templates and protocols, alongside some parallel experiments in visual/spatial documentation.4
  • Scheduled call with Laura, gauging our enthusiasm to develop some academic writing based on the Latent Intimacies project.

  1. Probably best not to ask; at least, not yet. ⤴︎

  2. Badge: ‘Ask me about the colportage phenomenon of space.’ ⤴︎

  3. Having sent him a lengthy placeholder via voicenote monologue late last week, as some kind of meeting agenda. ⤴︎

  4. Sticking fiducial markers to things, mostly. ⤴︎

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