callforfellows@hetnieuweinstituut.nl

Dear all, 

Please find attached our proposal Oracle(s): becoming undone together in response to "Regeneration: Open Call for New Institutions" if you need any further information or would like to discuss our practice don't hesistate to get in touch. 

With joy,
loren britton, romi ron morrison, helen pritchard, eric snodgrass                                                     
Oracle(s): becoming undone together

https://elegantcollisions.com/black-fact

-- https://research-development.hetnieuweinstituut.nl/en/fellows/jury-report-2019
Submission Requirements and Deadline: Applications may be submitted from 16 June to 24 July 2020.

Send application to: callforfellows@hetnieuweinstituut.nl. Your application should include:

Should some answers stay for multiple questions?

Plan for the video
Introduction
-- voiceover at the beginning -- one or two lines that are speaking to what it is that we do -- 

Eric - Oracle(s) is an emancipatory technology to free ourselves from the computational practices of measurement, categorization, extraction and optimisation. 

Helen - Instead Oracle(s) institutes non-linear, collective unknowing practices centered in Black Feminist thinking. 

Loren - Inspired by the ongoing oracle praxis with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, we work with an anti-enlightenment understanding of learning: by which we mean that the idea of shedding light on things is not a primary way of knowing that we work with. 

Romi - We understand that resonance, non-linearity and association are powerful practices within Oracle(s) that creates a "skeleton architecture" (Lorde) collectively training us for a world that is anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, full of tunings and cusps and towards anti-oppressive otherwises.

-- Slot machine at the beginning (randomising or generating -- see whatever link between the question and the image) -- fix into place once we finish describing what it is -- 

oracle questions
Romi
- what will come in the aftermath of the modern institution? 
- how do you practice letting go? ((we got a nice response from p.72 in Dub when we asked this question earlier))
- How to relate to the past critically yet hopefully in conceiving new modes of living together?
- what black feminism means for each of us, outside of the use of its theory and creativity? 
- What are the ways we each breathe into black feminist practice? 
- How do we practice black feminism outside of study? 
- What does black feminism ask of us when we work with it?

Eric
- What are we asked to let go of? --Dub, 165
- How can we lovingly respond to risk? --M Archive, 126
- Who has the right to institute? --Spill, 107
- What does it mean to institute otherwise? --M Archive, 136
- how can we practice the endurance needed to engage the radical intimacy of becoming together undone together? --Spill, 24
- how do i train everyday in time for unknowing in my own practices and ways of being in the world that meets others at the shoreline? --M Archive, 165
- what would it take for engineers (and other priviliged ways of knowing or seeing, e.g. economists) passionate about taking a back seat? M Archive, 26
- What does it mean to setup an institution that is not not trying to know everything in advance by naming it?

Loren
- What worlds are we making possible? (M Archive 92) 
- why does an impossibility have a name? apolitical, transparency, fairness, equality. why do these things have names when they cannot exist? (dub p.35)
- Is unlearning the lining of unknowing? (dub pg 56)
- What might it mean to mobilise care for not knowing, and relatedly, what is response? (dub 68 + M archive 68)
- How to relate to the past critically yet hopefully in conceiving new modes of living together? (dub p 23)
- Could existing structures be reshaped as non-exploitative spaces for public good? (dub 121)
- How can we set free the already existing potential in the world around us? (dub 124)

-------------------

images
- hkw workshop photos: https://cloud.constantvzw.org/s/aAzxtiE968Yej9F
- barcelona photos: https://cloud.constantvzw.org/s/sZGqrbpwrXda3Wn





October 2020 - March 2021 (6 months long)
A proposed calendar and a working methodology or research approach (maximum 300 words)

Proposed Calendar
6 - Monthly oracle practices/meetings/gatherings (perhaps towards the end of the month)

Working Methodology/Research Approach

Potential Structure
Introduction: critical-technical oracle practice
--poethics, anti-positions, what this can do, practice of unknowing 

Methodology: What our group does in meetings & in 'private' do/ why / how 


More than production, the project needs time to practice.

engage each of Alexis's three books twice in the six workshops. people who come to first workshop with one of the books come to the second one with same book - to create longetivity

working to develop "material assistances" for each workshop, working with the nonhuman element as well

Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Abstract Draft

Oracle(s) is an emancipatory technology to free ourselves from the computational practices of measurement, categorization, extraction and optimisation. Instead Oracle(s) institutes non-linear, collective unknowing practices centered in Black Feminist thinking. Inspired by the ongoing oracle praxis with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, we work with an anti-enlightenment understanding of learning: by which we mean that the idea of shedding light on things is not a primary way of knowing that we work with. We understand that resonance, non-linearity and association are powerful practices within Oracle(s) that creates a "skeleton architecture" (Lorde) collectively training us for a world that is anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, full of tunings and cusps and towards anti-oppressive otherwises.

Through a centering of and engagement with Black Feminist Poethics (da Silva), this practice of Oracle(s) explores modes of imagining that work towards an ethical world not based on the commodity subject, determinancy, 'thing'ness and juridic economic architectures. We propose to work with Poethics to intervene upon instituting and institutions, which we recognise to be the repetition of uneven practices that maintain social heirarchy as a response to risk. Such instituting practices are enacted as preservation, being impervious to change, and predicting future survival within precarity. Through working with oracle technologies we navigate the flux together to generate/practices for unpredictability, not knowing and nonlinear institutions. We practice surviving within the present order, sharing the task and responsibility of how we are going to communicate and understand within unknowability, and engage radical vulnerability to become undone together. 

Oracle(s) manifests as monthly, guided processes of welcoming, writing, choosing, reading and intuiting. This involves crafting and experimenting with collective pedagogical, material and technological methods and tools aimed towards furthering poethical approaches. With these tools and in collective groups we pose questions to our shared Oracle, which is always a book of poetry from a Black Feminist writer as a source to work with, not extract from. Oracle(s) demands that we think the world differently and collectively practices what it might mean for all of us to be free.

(304 words)

Longer version draft KEEP: 

Oracle(s) is an emancipatory technology to free ourselves from the computational practices of; measurements of enclosure, secular time, categorization , extraction and optimisation that instead institutes intentional spaces for non-linear, collective unknowing practices centered in Black Feminist thinking. This set of practices intervenes onto Computer Science yet extends beyond its bounds.Inspired by the ongoing oracle praxis and training with Alexis Pauline Gumbs, we work with an anti-enlightenment understanding of learning: by which we mean that the idea of shedding light on things is not a primary way of knowing that we work with. We understand that resonance, non-linearity and association are powerful practices within ours and other Oracle methods and support quotidian (Campt)and accessible ways of knowing.

Through a centring of and engagement with Black Feminist Poethics (da Silva), this practice ofOracle(s) explores modes of imagining that work towards an ethical world not based on the commodity subject, determinancy, 'thing'ness and juridic economic architectures. We propose to work with Poethics to intervene upon the instituting and institutions which we recognise to be the repetition of uneven practices that maintain social heirarchy as a response to risk. Such practices are enacted aspreservation, being impervious to change, and predicting future survival within precarity.

Through working with oracle technologies we navigate the flux together to generate/practices for notknowing and nonlinear institutions. We train for this by engaging unpredictability and how to be together in the unknown. We practice surviving within the present order, sharing the task and responsibility of how we are going to communicate and understand within unknowability, and engage radical vulnerability to become undone together. Our troubling and engagement with Computer Science by crafting oracle practices collectively trains us for a world that is anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, full of tunings and cusps towards anti-oppressive otherwises.

Oracle(s) manifests as monthly, guided processes of welcoming, writing, choosing, reading and intuiting. This involves crafting and experimenting with collective pedagogical, material and technological methods and tools aimed towards furthering poethical approaches that attend toaccessibility, resonances, non-linearity and tunings. With these tools and in collective groups we pose questions to our shared Oracle, which is always a book of poetry from a Black Feminist writer as a source to work with, not extract from.

Oracle(s) creates a "skeleton architecture" (Lorde) for opening up possibilities and imaginations for accountability that arise within our situated presents. Oracle(s) demands that we think the world differently and collectively practices what it might mean for all of us to be free

Original Draft:

Oracle(s) is an emancipatory technology and set of critical-technical interventions that institutes intentional space for non-linear, collective unknowing practices with Black Feminist thinking and Computer Science. Inspired by the praxis of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, we work with an anti-enlightenment understanding of learning: by which we mean that the idea of shedding light on things is not a primary way of knowing that we work with. We understand that resonance, non-linearity and association are powerful practices within ours and other Oracle methods and support quotidian (Campt) and accessible ways of knowing.

Through a centring of and engagement with Black Feminist Poethics (da Silva), this practice of Oracle(s) explores modes of imagining that work towards an ethical world not based on the commodity subject, determinancy, 'thing'ness and juridic economic architectures. These Poethics are entangled for us within computational environments that popularly rest on drives of categorization, measurement, extraction and optimisation. Our troubling and engagement with Computer Science by crafting oracle practices collectively trains us for a world that is anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, full of tunings and cusps towards anti-oppressive otherwises.

Oracle(s) manifests as monthly, guided processes of welcoming, writing, choosing, reading and intuiting. This involves crafting and experimenting with collective pedagogical, material and technological methods and tools aimed towards furthering poethical approaches that attend to accessibility, resonances, non-linearity and tunings. With these tools and in collective groups we pose questions to our shared Oracle, which is always a book of poetry from a Black Feminist writer, with the Oracle technology itself as a source to work with, not extract from.  

Oracle(s) creates a "skeleton architecture" (Lorde) for opening up possibilities and imaginations for accountability that arise within our situated presents. Oracle(s) demands that we think the world differently and collectively practices what it might mean for all of us to be free.

(304 words)

Training for:





 which we meant to say we are intervening on instutitions recreating colonial drives on who is present and what kind of knowledgeis holding value, recognising them as hardened responses that maintain uneven practices through repetition and social hierarchy. Through working with oracle technologies we also hold open the possibilitity to generate/practices for notknowing and nonlinear institutions 

inviting people into space to engage unpredictability.. how to be together in the unknown


Recognising these as hardened responses that maintain uneven practices through repetition and socialhierarchy. 


impervious to change, predict your future survival in a precarious situation 

how to be together in the unknown 

practice through repetition. 

These Poethics are entangled for us within computational environments that popularly rest on drives of categorization, measurement, extraction and optimisation. 


nonlinear instiuting would not be about preserving the social relations that we all   
oracle as a technology to unlearn the social relations/questions of institutes and instituting.. 
The keeping open of the possibilitity to generate/practices for nonlinear institutions

questioning practices v. the insititution as a respond to questioning from the outside
oracles as a practice to build the social relationships upon which the possibility of nonlinear institutions are held open 




Poetry is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.

Institute for learning -- explain what it is while making it clear what it is and how it relates 

for greater access to our workshop participants
expansion of intentionality 
invitation 

we are creating online rooms that are dynamic -- We common tools technologies and knowledge collective creativity of drawing -- pedagogy - workbooks and creating peadgogical -- 

instituting

In this practice we work with non-extraction, non-optimisation, situated practice and non-blackboxing,

the Oracle from participants that allow for thinking the world otherwise, as a source to work with, not extract from...

to practice 

The answers you come to the Oracle for may not be what you want to hear, but encourage commitments towards anti-oppressive practices of all sorts. Rather than claiming knowledge practices that seek to understand universalisms our work is particular, specific and full of feeling. 

material practices
commoning’ of tools, technologies and knowledge



Following Sylvia Wynter we are working with Oracles as a genre specific practice that proposes a mode of 'learning' that operates as a Fanonion 'gaze from below' (antibourgeois, anticolonial, anti-imperial perspective). 

Practicing non-linear modes of ((disruption)) as well as a willful re-situation we are working towards finding new collective modes of being together. 

Oracle(s) demands that we think the world differently and practice what it might mean for all of us to be free within a livable future. 



Troublemaking in the world of computer science must happen.

Feelings are important. 



As a source to work with, not extract from, we understand that Black Feminist Poetry creates the skeleton architecture (Lorde) of our lives an


further or deeper our knowledge of what it is to be human, Wynter still sees a way that it could disrupt -- trying to disrupt -- "As-If" -- what would 

the ways we dont question, they obfuscate the knowledge - the Oracle practice is not just disrupting but doing so that we can re-situate ourselves - the Oracle can help to re-situate within this genre of knowledge -- find new collective modes of being together.

non-linearity, and its situated within black feminist thought -- generative -- nonextractive -- Willful disruption -- tarot reading -- we want to get our story -- institution of the cards + insitution of our own story 

an anti-enlightenment understanding of learning, the idea of shedding light on things as a primary way of knowing is not way we are working. resonance, non-linearity and association as powerful practices - these are just as powerful as ways of knowing

Notes from Sylvia Wynter reading: Instead, the role of such knowledge-making practices is to elaborate the genre-specific (and/or culture-specific) orders of truth through which we know reality, from the perspective of the no less genre-specific who that we already are.

“gaze from below” antibourgeois, anticolonial, anti-imperial perspective. - p 22

subordinated to a figure that thrives on accumulation. -

genres of being human

institution of slavery -- is this an example of auto-institution?
                           
First, each locates the place of disassemblage at distinct levels: in Foucault’s technol- ogy of self (and theory of domination), the task is to be performed at the level of the singular human being’s self-refashioning; in Wynter’s project, the critical task requires the refashioning at the collective level, one that ne- cessitates an acknowledgment of human beings’ ability to “auto-institute ourselves as human through symbolic, representational processes that have, hitherto, included those mechanisms of occultation by means of which we have been able to make opaque to ourselves the fact that we so do.”26 Second, while Foucault hopes that, along with the theory of sovereignty, the grip of disciplinary power would also be dissolved—and the refashioning of the singular being would be possible—Wynter invests in and recasts scientific knowledge. Following Aimé Césaire, and as Katherine McKittrick also argues in this volume, Wynter enmeshes science, scientia, and logos in order to shatter the mechanisms of occultation. - p99 
 
                                                   
                                  
                        
                

Notes
tuning in to each other and ourselves
we have a commitment towards working with black feminist theory, poetry, poethics
responding to Bowker and Starr call of why black feminist poetry not taken up/cared about in computer science, a practice of caring
how are we in relation to cs though: so much about knowing, naming in cs... 
helps you return to the world of computer science specifically and think through it differently and/or otherwise -
instituting otherwise
...How to relate to the past critically yet hopefully in conceiving new modes of living together?
...How can design, architecture and digital culture contribute to, imagine and put in motion anti-racist, feminist, decolonial modes of institutional practice?

oracle as technology, non-linear, unlcear questioning and answering practice that is moving towards unknowing
Oracle(s) demands that we think the world differently and practice what it might mean for all of us to be free within a livable future. 

Oracle practice is a critical technical practice for opening up possibilities and imaginations for accountability that arise within automation and digitalisation.

in(stI)tu(i -X) tIng -- (intuiting) 
:) 

Video
us reading
something about the material assistants 

Notes
...instituting otherwise (Maria Hlavajova)... 
training theme of call... we are being trained by gumbs, are in training
unknowing and not knowing when so many of the institutions are colonial or derived from extractive/colonial sources. what it means to setup an institution that is not doing so (gatekeeping, extracting, etc.). not trying to no everything in advance by naming it

Tavia Nyong'o FB thread: Kind of answering my own question, but why are so many people fantasizing about starting alternative institutions right about now? Any chance that any of these dreams will come to fruition?
John Alexander Lobur: We’ve been doing it for decades (look at Star Trek).
Free black university: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2020/jun/27/payback-time-academics-plan-to-launch-free-black-university-in-uk?fbclid=IwAR2mjRkF1elbybFE_41VUHsdpv_lY2mpGjYUKI0VmQzJCyGpnZ5P16jb_Xk

What does difference mean in shifting contexts? Institutions and grading, grades go against their own principles. Grades is something that separates the collectives. Institutions that individualise us. Critique the fast pace: too fast. Efficiency and fastness. 

https://www.showingupforracialjustice.org/white-supremacy-culture-characteristics.html  
helpful to name practices. what practices can be put in place that disrupt the culture of who is place tools, resources of support. institution needs to be the one changing... not the student or the audience 

oracles vs. hkw
committing to one body of thought. not surfing between different topics. working collectively. 
have agency over the platsforms we use and don't pick something because its convenient 
hkw and us have been more event focused, we would like to be more of an ongoing ritual 

this method that we're doing requires a commitment of meeting again, we need more care 

Bojana Kunst "On Institutions": https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13528165.2018.1514782?src=recsys&journalCode=rprs20
"institutes sustain us but also wipe us out at the same time" 

how does our group take on institutions? --> institutions don't need to be sites and practices, and modes of practicing together -- that form of Sylvia Wynter, Instituting is much more of a practice 
institutes as processes rather than stable objects. we learn institutional practice, unlearning professionalisation... unknowing... instituting otherwise is to practice friendship, working with the text, giving it a lot of time, not oriented towards practice. the practice of just being present for each other.
gumbs sunday services
p.76: these engrained roles. that need to be broken apart. "on purpose"
p.249: practing letting go as a very different temporarlity
question: how do you practice letting go? p.72. stacking, stomping, burning out... propositions

Romi questions:
I like this question around practicing and letting go. I've been thinking about how this practice sits with each of us, and what an oracle practice might ask from each of us differently. I've been wanting to have a conversation about what black feminism means for each of us, outside of the use of its theory and creativity? What are the ways we each breathe into it? Practice it outside of study? What does it ask of us when we work with it? What are we asked to let go of? These have been a few questions on my mind. Maybe we could come around to these as we prep for the HKW submission. 

on Romi's questions from Eric & Loren                                                   
Something like a community of voices or people who more so than many writers he's engaged with that has a sharpness or commitment, Eric feels like he has to (sharpness, passion, community & love) together -- a really great turn in the middle of the dance and they send you a glance, that has a fierceness to the love, expansive, really and amazing writers, the way of looking, and not looking at the object of theory, he feels he is being looked at, being looked at is community, you, -- not adknowledging the complicatedness -- to work through difference, is ignored -- difficulty and the power of difference is kept alive -- and also Eric needed that -- as an American looking back at his education -- most were male writers, and his engagement of Black Culture was predominately male and to reflect back on this -- often through Male perspective 

what asked to let go of first sticks with me. Lorde: am i moving you to change what you do or just temporary reaction. how fully you can feel in the doing. Alexis calls these heart-shaking questions, questions that make your heart shake. bft requires care and attention to the ways in which the world that we live in is a rough place. the love has to be fully attended to all the time. because the stakes are too high and too important to not show up. a lot of US or Caribbean black feminist experience. a lot of respect for the empowerment that is there. to speak to everything with a commitment of learning from and working with these scholars. asks to not allow for medoiocrity when working with it. has clarified that an intersectional position is the only feminist position. asks for me to slow down and not to always do something because I can
                              
                                                 
"Black women’s geographies—produced in the margins, on auction blocks, in garrets, through literatures, and in “the last place they thought of”—indicate that traditional spatial hierarchies are simultaneously powerful and alterable. This simultaneity suggests that human geographies are unresolved and are being conceptualized beyond their present classificatory order." -- Demonic Grounds - p. 122                                       
                                        
from trying to find Wynter writing on instituting, this excert from What is Species Memory? Or, Humanism, Memory and the Afterlives of ‘1492’ article: ..."Fanon derived the central insight that ‘besides phylogeny and ontogeny, there is sociogeny’.51 Sociogeny, Wynter argues, implies that humans are not merely biological beings, but an ‘auto-instituting [...] self-in- scripting mode of being, which is, in turn, reciprocally enculturated by the conception of itself which it has created’.52 And from this sociogenic, i.e. in a sense foundationally culturalist perspective, she draws another figure: homo nar- rans. She argues that the specificity of humanness, our very ‘species-specific cognitive mechanism’,53 lies not merely in bios (purely biological organicity (‘the mesh’)), but in ‘a hybrid nature-culture, bios/logos form of life bio-evolu- tionarily preprogrammed to institute, inscript itself’.54 Or, to say the same with Fanon: humans are always-already both skin (bios) and mask (mythoi), and Wynter turns this into her proposition that humans live in biological/cultural, auto-poietic collectives that are upheld via retrojected origin stories. They/we are ‘a hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species’55 emerging out of the neuro-chemical evolution of the human brain and/as the symbolic-se- mantic evolution of language. Her conception of a non-biocentric species – to which we link ‘species memory’ here – designates then still a mode of life with/in its bios existence (i.e. she works with evolutionist and neurobiological insights),56 yet as neuro-bios-cum-languaging existence (all at once), or as a biological and/as symbolic life-kind." original source is On Being Human as praxis book, parallel catastrophe for our species interview    

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/199/chapter-abstract/108242/Unparalleled-Catastrophe-for-Our-Species-Or-to?redirectedFrom=fulltext                                                

what do we do
we create/curate intentional space (for un or not knowing) 
tuning in to each other and ourselves
we have a commitment towards working with black feminist theory, poetry, poethics
responding to Bowker and Starr call of why black feminist poetry not taken up/cared about in computer science, a practice of caring
how are we in relation to cs though: so much about knowing, naming in cs... 
helps you return to the world of computer science specifically and think through it differently and/or otherwise -- has it changed your perspective on the computer? maybe with the technological infrastrucuture -- should we put this in the call? 
a troublemaking practice in the world of cs, practicing non-extraction, non-optimisation, extreme situatedness, showing all of the tools, no mystique behind what's happening, no blackboxing
Are Oracles also institutions? --> Greek Oracles? Sacred quality, going to for answers? but the answers you get might be... The Matrix, Neo hears what motivates him, not what he thinks he's going to hear 

bits from the call
...archival investigations
...to reflect on and question institutional practices, the structures of social interaction they entail, and the networks they operate in and with, including its own
...the need for generative, collective and practice-based endeavours to test and rehearse new notions of the institution and ‘instituting'
...a reconsideration of established daily organisational structures, methodologies and dynamics 
...How to relate to the past critically yet hopefully in conceiving new modes of living together?
...How can design, architecture and digital culture contribute to, imagine and put in motion anti-racist, feminist, decolonial modes of institutional practice?
...extending beyond the notion of individual authorship
...to reflect on – and reinterpret – their definition of a collective practice, and explain who counts as a collective
...multispecies and more-than-human collaborations emerging along human alliances?
...to collectively disrupt, rethink, experiment, generate and gather new methodologies and forms of institutional practice in order to foster structures of support and care
 Regeneration finds inspiration in existing initiatives such as:



bios:
Eric Snodgrass is a senior lecturer at the Department of Design + Change at Linnaeus University. He is currently conducting a postdoc project at Linköping University's Technology and Social Change program, looking at interventionist-oriented infrastructures that work to imagine, materialize and sustain forms of change. Recent work includes the co-edited volume Executing Practices (2018).