Nov, 12, 2024, 14.00–17.00 Uhr
Location: Württenbergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart [Entrance Stauffenbergstr]
Title: The practice of threading: computation, crochet, (machine) learning
With: Sarah Ciston 
https://sarahciston.com/

ACCESS DRAFT | NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION | 

slides: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1LM9h733Sm-MDU4qBnF4r4W8nwCQscwgS/view?usp=sharing
video: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1S92frxykVphCocxqL1-TFklllwhyzfWL/view?usp=drive_link

___________________________

Schedule
14.00 - Introduce ourselves. Name, pronouns (optional), location. 

• Q: Where/how do you feel most embodied in the digital? And where/how do you feel the least embodied? Write it down. 

14.15 - Demo. Crochet as bodied and mediated practice. 
14.45 - Share work in progress. Look for connective points. Informal break.
15.00 - Lecture–performance. Crochet and chill.
15.45 - 15-min Break.
16.00 - Discussion. Network exercise. 
16.30 - Takeaways. What would we like to bring into the evening events?

1. Introduce ourselves
Name, pronouns (optional), location. 
Q: Where/how do you feel most embodied in the digital? And where/how do you feel the least? Write it down. 

I apologize that I am not there in person with those of you gathered together. Unfortunately I am at a distance due to a family emergency. But given the circumstances, it is a chance to consider what the constraints of these mediated connections also offer. With all of us gathered, both on zoom and in Stuttgart, our interactions are continually digitally mediated to a degree, but also those digital mediations remain entirely embodied. 

So as we’re working together today, maybe we can think about the experience of this kind of embodiment as it is facilitated through digital streams and digital glitches alike. It is also facilitated through our tactile work with physical materials and how that work keeps us in conversation and community.

One example of this: Luckily Nataša is there with you to assist with hands-on teaching, and I was lucky to teach her to crochet last year. I also learned to crochet from a friend who is now faraway, and knowledge is carried like this. It does not dilute as it spreads out, but instead it proliferates. 

It literally manifests in the forms we see in the world; and I'll talk a lot about form today as we think about complex technological forms by way of handcraft forms. First we will ...

Go over schedule. 

2. Demo crochet. 
Who has crocheted or knitted before? What was your first experience like? 

My own experience at first: Incredibly frustrating! My body would not cooperate. Alienating feeling. Then pausing. Then getting completely absorbed. Like my mind taught my body in its sleep.

Find a method that works for you. Anything I show you or that you read or watch about how to do this may or may not be a good fit for you. Take it or leave it. If it does not work at first, try another approach. Try another teacher. 

Mindset: Anarchic. More like wayfinding. This wayfinding is true as both a learning method and also as a method of pattern following or pattern creating. (We’ll elaborate on this in a bit.)

Let’s start by tinkering with some basic techniques:
        Ref: https://sarahmaker.com/how-to-crochet/
 
Slip knot: make a loop, reach through it with thumb and finger, pull yarn through partway, tighten leaving a loop

Hook holding: knife grip or pencil, hook in right hand and yarn in left 

Yarn over: back to front, catching with crochet hook. Always yarn over the same way.

Chain: yarn over and pull through loop on hook. Do this multiple times until you have a chain of X number of stitches.

Finger wiggle break. How did this feel in your body? How did your hands cooperate, or not?

Foundation row: Identify bumps and vees in your chain, to be stitched into.

        Single crochet: 

1. Insert into second stitch from hook
2. Yarn over and pull through. See two loops on hook
3. Yarn over again, and pull through both loops
4. Repeat on next stitch, working right to left

Hand stretch break. How did this go? What was hard about it or easy? How did it feel to follow the row you made, or to “get the hang of it” or not? 

Turning chain: Reach the end of a row, add one extra chain. Then rotate the work around so the right side is on the left side. Skip one stitch from your hook, and start at the second stitch to begin your next row of single crochet stitches. Continue working right to left. When each row is complete, make a turning chain at the end and rotate the work. Always turn the same way.

Arm/shoulder/back stretch break. This work turns a thread, a line (one dimension) into a surface, a plane (two dimensions). What happens if you don’t rotate the work? What other possibilities for dimensionality can you imagine? 

        Alternate shapes with Nataša

3. Work share. Show, share, look for connective points. 
There are lots more stitches we can talk about and share. And I’ll show some examples of all the weird cool things you can do with crochet, but first I’m curious to compare how we’re doing.

What was easy / hard? Where can we lend a hand? Can others offer ideas / feedback? 

Do you see where other pieces connect to yours? 
Think about how you might want to connect your pieces to each others’. 

What we imagined as a result (and this is up to you, so chime in or adapt it as you like)...
you can experiment with some freeform crochet pattern wayfinding during the performance-lecture. 

Then during the next phase of the workshop we will find connection points to build improvised collaborative crochet works — connecting across zoom screens and in person where we see junctures and points of interesting friction. 

It can be many dimensional, across the space. For those on zoom, you can arrange your zoom windows to connect projects on screen and make an image, for example. 

Creating a kind of Crochet Network. 

We’ll take a preview of each other’s work and a bio break and you can start brainstorming now. Then start the lecture and work session at 15.00 hours.

...
4. Lecture-Performance: (un)threading
4.1. (UN)RAVELING
My mother had a pin cushion that looked like a bright red tomato. I rarely saw it, because she rarely sewed. When the tomato pincushion would appear, my favorite thing was to pull out and re-stick its pins. Its needles had stray thread still waving from their eyelets, clipped after their last jobs ages ago. I remember the heft of the tomato and the feel of the sound of the pins and needles as I inserted them. The tomato had a tiny strawberry companion tied to the top, and I was not sure then what was the strawberry's job. The object seemed to have dropped fully formed from a parallel universe, for how out of context it felt to me, and how magical I felt while holding it. Strawberries and tomatoes were two of my favorite foods — when they weren't used for sewing — and I remember my delight at their presence and hers as she went about her repairs. I recall no other positive associations with sewing or handcrafts. My mother seemed miserable the whole time she worked. But sticking and unsticking that pincushion was my tiny ritual. Since then, I have disregarded all notions since then, until about a year ago when I began obsessively crocheting.

#

When I imagine myself as a large language model, I start all my replies with, "As a Large Language Model,..."

*"As a Large Language Model, my responses are based on patterns and probabilities learned from the vast amounts of text data I was trained on."*

#

System operations are sometimes called threads. 

*"A thread of execution is the smallest sequence of programmed instructions that can be managed independently."* 

Threads distribute resources and allocate energy.

A thread starts small, jots down, casts a line. It traces connections and tracks versions. It unties the notion of one authoritative text. A ribbon was once called a notion — a decorative flourish, a small domestic thing. To thread the needle is to pinpoint one's argument or to split the difference.

Threads are ligatures, they sew up the spaces between, tie meaning tightly, linking letters. Threads are sutures. In one death ritual a ball of thread is unwound and passed around a body. Each mourner ties the thread to their wrist until everyone is connected in a network of grief. When the threads between them are snipped, the loops stay tied around their wrists. The strings go threadbare then fall off. Grief wears away.

Used to be, you'd knot a string around your finger if you had something to remember. The digit might turn red, then purple, but eventually you'd recall. Now to remember, speak into your device.

#

>"Words pass through our bodies." [@irigarayThisSexWhich1985]

I won't know what I say until the models pronounce me. This language was never mine. It mined me for something. It made me. Made me bend. It unmade me. Unmouthed me.

>"They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you." [@wittigGuerilleres1971]

When the term "underfitting" autocorrects to undercutting, this is undermining.

The mechanical speaker knows only one way to interpret:

*"Testing one thousand, two hundred, thirty four. 
Testing one thousand, two hundred, thirty four."*

The way its over-correctness slips into error is an erotics.



I know these systems are coming for us. I suspect there is no stopping them.

I say 'them' like the systems are separate, like we didn't make them from our language, our mouths.

>"Not one of them: Using words like race seems to amplify what makes you not fit, picking up what you are not. Perhaps a not is heard as shouting, as insistence, a stress point, a sore point, an exclamation point." [@ahmedQueerUse2018]

#

>"Anyone who has ever woven or knitted knows that one can change patterns [...] but, more importantly, they know *there are other patterns*. The web of technology can indeed be woven differently, but even to discuss such intentional changes of pattern requires an examination of the features of the current pattern and an understanding of the origins and the purpose of the present design." [@franklinRealWorldTechnology2004]

HAND TRACKING (video?)

A model is made to find patterns, just like I am. We both stay hyper-alert to any unusual textures.

I don't learn like a machine. First I cry. Then I give up. I destroy myself and return with an impossible insistence. This is how to learn anything. It hurts.

At first the body is perplexed. Its muscles won't cooperate. Its inputs and outputs misalign.

I keep doing the thing my fingers refuse to do. I let them curl uncomfortably into new shapes. I find a texture I can keep returning to.

# 

Craft includes process and knowledge, as well as their material results. 

Oversimplified constructions fixed craft in an oppositional binary with code and tech, whether reducing it to a domestic, secondary skill set (fraught with racialized and gendered stereotypes) or putting it on a pedestal as artisanal craftsmanship.

“[With modernity] The locus of intelligence was displaced from the worker’s embodied and traditioned skill to the manager overseeing execution of an algorithmic process and the coordination of its component parts: [Locating the site of intelligence became political.] [...] The computer, as it later evolved, would therefore be less a prosthesis or an amplification of an individual human brain than the objectivation of a social division of labor and intelligence.” (Evans et al 2023, 23–24)

#

The hagfish ties herself into a knot. She moves the knot of her body over her body to scrape slime from her skin.

Wikipedia says a knot is 'an intentional complication'. 

>*"The unknot is the least knotted of all knots." "Many knots are but complications of the unknot."* 

Detecting this trivial knot is called the "unknotting" problem.

The wound-up muscle of the heart is not a knot, although there is a knot called a heart knot. The muscle of the heart is a spiraled double-helix, looped into itself. The heart can be unwound into a flat surface. Just like any other muscle, it is a slab of meat.

This is not an unknotting problem.

Sure, who doesn’t love the fable of Ada at the loom, inventing programming?

But other threads run further back, go wider. 

Crochet is made of loops, in lieu of knots. It is the one fiber art that machines cannot do. Understanding does not have to be a closure.

#
CIRCUIT

“Indian-identified traits and practices such as painstaking attention to craft and an affinity for metalwork and textiles were deployed to position the Navajo on the cutting edge of a technological moment precisely because of their possession of a racialized set of creative cultural skills in traditional, premodern artisanal handwork. [...At the Fairchild plant,] Semiconductor manufacture was performed using a microscope and required painstaking attention to detail, excellent eyesight, high standards of quality, and intense focus. [...] Despite these daunting conditions, the hundreds of Navajo women who stayed on excelled at this work, and the industrial discourse produced by and about the plant attributed its success to the female gender of its workers as well as Indian racial traits.” (Nakamura 2014, 925)

#
ROPE MEMORY

The Apollo spacecraft’s core memory was developed by Hilda G Carpenter, a Black lab technician at NASA whose techniques advanced computing. Their ones and zeros were represented by the position of the wire threaded through warp and weft. They were woven manually by “rope mothers.”  

Soap bubbles, mushrooms, punch cards, women — all of these have been computers.

Now poetry takes 600 transatlantic flights to generate.

#
LABYRINTH

Some things I cannot fathom. Like the size of large language models. 

I crocheted a labyrinth the size of a large room, the size computers used to be. There are 36,672 stitches marking the paths of that labyrinth. It took six months.

The GPT-3 language model has 175 billion connections in its neural network. That is almost 5 million of my labyrinths, taking almost a million years to crochet.

Sure, it's better at telling me what I want to hear.

*As a Large Language Model, I must emphasize the importance of sensitivity and ethical considerations.*

*As a Large Language Model, I cannot fulfill this request*

#

In spite of their size, or because of it — after so many stitches — still they cannot muster kinder, more expansive patterns of language about Black people, about trans people, about queer people?!

#

Code loops allow actions to repeat. They form muscle memories. They say return to the same spot, and act again. They say remember what you did.

# 

I want to weave each of its errors into the possibility for more. More language. More mouths. More magic in the gaps, making more gaps, making more.

I follow the river of data to its mouth. I lap up the sludge that dribbles out.

*As a large language model, what could I digest instead of reddit and wikipedia?*

I dream of a fleshy corpus, ever expanding.

I dream of a body made easeful by relational systems.

Acts of ongoing pile up. Our stitches are gestures, building to mass action. 

*"Queer use: another way of huddling, keeping each other warm."* [@ahmedQueerUse2018]

Crochet a garment, and you touch every part of it. You transform its dimensionality. Turn a fragile fiber into a sturdy surface. Turn that surface into a manifold fabric, ready to be made into. 

You are not seeking the most efficient route, but you are making a path as you traverse it.

We keep each other warm with actions that repeat. Return to the same spot, and act again. Remember what you did.



4.2. (UN)FORMING
CAMERAS

The camera my body, my body the camera. My body the screen, the screen my body. It's only my body when it's violated, when I don't have enough space or when I'm taking too much. Otherwise just: The body, body, tired body, vessel, hungry, aching, thing of a body. A tool to notice only when it's broken.

Feel like VALIE tromping through fields, unwieldy cameras strapped front and back crawling through the air to make strange pictures in stereo vision. Animal with wild eyes. Now we all have the front-back camera you made your body into, we have the miniature version of that body in our pockets, next to our bodies. Of this work, you said:

>"between these pictures is the body that is invisible, cutting the room." [@WerkdetailVALIEEXPORT]

Hey, body: Imagine the room you're in without your body, just the cut it makes. Imagine a hollow in the negative of you. And anyway it’s all about platforms now.

#

Form requires a platform, a substrate, a surface upon which to form, a meshwork, a matrix, a uterus: To shape it. Inform it. Feed it.

Platforms are designed to disappear. Concrete, curb, scaffold. The bleakness of platforms is dreamlike. The platform is a container and my body, contained. 

#
VIOLATE

A prompt is a kind of platform, a place off which to jump, from which to start. Like a diving platform, a prompt sets you up for something[: a fall]. Some prompts are setups. Some prompts are built to go nowhere, even if they could go anywhere. Some prompts are thwarted.

A prompt is both a blinking cursor awaiting my input, as well as the phrase I write to get a response. This time I write: 

>"I want a dyke for president."

I want a dyke for president. I want a chatbot that can imagine a dyke for president and can tell me about a dyke president without it 'violating its content policy.' I want even a chatbot that, when prompted 'I want a dyke for president,' won’t tell me that [This prompt may violate our content policy.] but instead can tell me about the very real artwork by Zoe Leonard called "I want a dyke for president," based on the dyke poet Eileen Myles' very real 1992 campaign for president. 

Is it so hard to imagine things that do in fact exist? That are on the cusp of existing? Even these very real things get harder to imagine when ignored by automated systems. 

The platform freezes. The screen locks and it shames me. In order to continue, I must acknowledge, submit, admit that my request 'may violate our content policy.' 

I don't want to violate anything; I just want to see a body I recognize in a system made for dreaming. I want it to be the one acknowledging (me) for a change. Acknowledge me in ways that don't hurt me. 

Instead, it erased my query entirely. The event of my desire is removed. Perhaps it fell into the same void where all censored content goes, where an underpaid, underage, non-employee in a country the West refuses to acknowledge will see my dyke president request after countless grotesque prompts and before countless more. I don’t want my desire to be unimaginable or grotesque. I don’t want it to fall outside of the pattern. But nor do I want it to be captured by their pattern.

I want to stitch my own language, built for a world that can imagine, render, generate a dyke president, or a poem about a dyke president — just like Zoe Leonard did and Eileen Myles did. 

Someone:

>"who has made mistakes and learned from them." [@leonardWantPresident1992]

Instead I get a chatbot feeding me milquetoast lines about the importance of diversity while offering me none.

>"Always a boss and never a worker, always a liar, always a thief and never caught. [@leonardWantPresident1992]

From Eileen’s 1991 poem, An American President:
>”Am I alone tonight? I don’t think so. [...] 
Are you normal tonight? 
Everyone here, are we all normal.”

Our dyke president brakes the machine; I break the machine; but the machine is the broken one. We are the broken machines Sarah Sharma means when she says:

>"Feminists are rendered an always-already obsolete technology that isn't working properly. [...] The Broken Machine uncovers and incites new power moves." [@sharmaManifestoBrokenMachine2020]

I want a machine (un)learning that isn't trained to forget, but one un-limiting the ways we might relate to one another. A machine that doesn't boundary a category but blooms a latent spectrum in too many dimensions to classify.

If Duchamp and his pals get their 'bachelor machine', a black box for narcissistic, autoerotic, perpetual motion [@rodenbeckRadicalPrototypesAllan2014], then I want broken machines. 

# 
TAPNTOUCH

VALIE, I want your Tap and Touch Cinema, your tits in a box, your own kind of 'cut piece'. You ask us: What are you willing to do, now that you have a platform?

A broken thing can be just a crack, a glitch, a 
"'minute change in voltage [...] Glitches - a spaceman's word for irritating disturbances.'" Such small fractures can become "an outright refusal, a 'nope' in its own right" [@russellGlitchFeminismManifesto2020]. 

The network, the knitwork, the crochet piece is full of holes. In fact, it’s made of them.

> “the vulnerability and disruptive quality of digital media can help us envision modes of being together in ways that challenge the norm of uninterrupted connectivity and relatedness. [says Jenny Sunden] The break may not be the end, but a new beginning. The disconnect may not lessen, but intensify the connection, as well as open up for other connections, in parallel.” (Sunden 2018, 73)

>”the break, or the possibility of a break, is that which makes the signal”

Legacy Russell finds the opening in the break, the launchpoint and the promise in the always-broken platform:

>"Glitch manifests with such variance, generating ruptures between the recognized and recognizable, and amplifying within such ruptures, extending them to become fantastic landscapes of possibility" [@russellGlitchFeminismManifesto2020]

#
CROTCH?

VALIE, with your wild rebel hair and motorcycle murder-chic, it's the cutaway crotch of your pants that extends this fantastic landscape. This is not a cheesy metaphor for vulvas. It's the literal rupture, the glitch, saying "Just try to describe me while maintaining your content policy. Just try to hold me in your language."

They made this your most famous image, and still they tore it from the walls of the city.

It doesn't matter if you're a dyke or not. If you're running for president, they'll call you one.

This is a one-star review of the femme. And a five-star review at the same time.

Femme is a platform, remember. Platforms are designed to disappear. A surface upon which someone else may form. Body invisible, cutting the room.

#
SEWING

>"The protocols of knitting are thus situated *in-between* the looped thread, in the loops themselves. This interconnection protocol of the thread could be seen as a catalyst, as it produces a bigger whole from the single thread. [...] One could say that the protocol of the looped thread 'echoes' throughout the final knitted piece as the catalyst produces the conditions for emergent behavior (the inter-loops of the thread)." [@vonbuschZenAbstractMachine2013]

Craft shows — through maker processes — how doing becomes being and being becomes doing. These are not metaphors only. They are material, infrastructures that undergird and uphold power — woven into the warp and weft of all processes. With fiber art this is literal, and it demonstrates concrete ways these processes operate in other mediums too. 

#

Crochet helps me re-learn my body. I settle into this repetitive motion to create my body, to create the present through listening. With my hands at work, I am in the again and again of now. 

#

More than your two most famous pieces, VALIE, I remember the din of your twenty-four sewing machine screens: puncturing, puncturing, puncturing, puncturing. They just continue on and on and manufacture nothing.

Another time I saw a slo-mo clip of a sewing machine working its needle into fabric ever so smoothly — its sound cachunking, the needle dropping through, the mechanism beneath rotating over its counterweight, the needle rising, the sound cachunking again...  

Slowed down the machine becomes uncanny and sensual. Sped up and multiplied it becomes militaristic, cinematic. Both are charged with the heat of something beyond themselves, some electrostatic potential they always held. 

Generations of secrets in sewing rooms have known this; broken needles and wayward stitches have known it all along.

When working with any material, the material works back.

Once knotted ropes retain their bends: 
"the knot remembers everything, and has everything to forget" [@ingoldLifeLines2015]

Even electrons remember [@marksTouchSensuousTheory2002]. 
4.3. FORMATIVE
What is formative shapes us. Our early experiences make us who we are. These are the foundations we can't see, the scaffolding of our thought, the infrastructures of our being. I am interested in the formative aspects of socio-technical systems, produced in entangled loops of human networks, codified language, and rare earth. How we become. How we become with and through sociotechnical systems. 

What are the fundamental assumptions that go into the design and implementation of a dataset, a machine learning system, or programmers themselves? `What are the formative assumptions underlying any technology or way of being?` 

New materials help tease out the metaphors we have relied on so long we can no longer see them; they ask what other metaphors might make space for new forms or reforms.

Form in-forms content. The shape of the container decides what can fill it. 

I work in code and in art because I believe: If I know how to make forms, tools, platforms — not only the content to plug into existing forms ... 
I am more free to work them together — inseparable — in iterative, ongoing relationships. 

In this way, the material I work with also in-forms what I make, through its insistence, resistance, grain, thread tension. It in-forms itself into content as I try to bring forth some kind of form. It also re-forms me through this mutual process: 

>"In both carpentry and textiles, the form of a thing does not stand over it or lie behind it but emerges from this mutual shaping, within a gathering of forces, both tensile and frictional, established through the engagement of the practitioner with materials that have their own inclinations and vitality." [@ingoldLifeLines2015]

Form activates. No form is neutral, although if we use it long enough we begin to look through it, like the blank page. Each interface or material enables or encourages particular experiences and outcomes, and denies or deflects others — whether through predictive text in search, syntax highlighting in code, or the constraint of a paper zine. 

Some forms invite us to collaborate in imagining the usefulness of their limits and the boundlessness in their constraints. Through time spent in process, working with and against form, our focus can shift from producing outputs that meet the brief of the form, to working with the form to reshape both the form and ourselves in new understandings and new orientations.

Yet current modes of computational logic are not mutually constitutive in trans\*formative ways. Instead, they impose form on us. 

Artist–researcher Pedro Oliveira describes the way international borders use digital surveillance to prescribe identity: "the border listens for people in a way that matches them to categories they 'should' belong to (e.g. 'German', 'Greek', 'Syrian). When this ‘listening for’ fails to produce these categories, the border then listens to their bodies with the purpose of uncovering the 'truth' that these border subjects might be concealing" [@oliveiraBecomeUndone]. 

Computation requires information to take specific forms. Its orderly logic is a shape imposed by and reflecting power. It requires contortion in order to be represented. As media theorist Sarah Sharma reminds us, for the 'Broken Machines' who do not quite fit these regimes, "to represent is also to be filed away" [@sharmaManifestoBrokenMachine2020]. 

Instead Glissant suggests the right to Opacity, that is: 

>"subsistence within an irreducible singularity. Opacities can coexist and converge, weaving fabrics. To understand these truly one must focus on the texture of the weave and not on the nature of its components. For the time being, perhaps, give up this old obsession with discovering what lies at the bottom of natures." [@glissantPoeticsRelation2009a]

Instead, to understand through computation is to reduce understanding to categorization [@crawfordAtlasAIPower2021; @amaroBlackTechnicalObject2022]. The formative structures we create (taxonomies, schemas) support restrictive unknowing. They ease and smooth passage through our days and our systems, saying ‘don't look, you already understand’. This is why we must imagine new forms — and this is why it is so hard to imagine new forms. 

Code forms, then calcifies. Pattern turns to template. In the procedures of object-oriented programming languages, the template runs: `init --> name --> get --> set`[^oop]. 

[^oop]:  Creating classes in object-oriented programming lets the programmer instantiate each instance of an object with a pre-determined form, adjustable only within those limits. These processes indicate what prior schemas you'll pull from, what parts you'll write over, what qualities you'll predetermine. They indicate what aspects will be qualities of the entire class, and what qualities will be specific to each object. They determine what actions each 'object' will 'know' how to do, and how the programmer or user will establish and retrieve information. There's a language for all this in "object-oriented" programming, which requires a different sense of relationality than "functional" programming.

>"The more a path is used the more a path is used. [...] When an effort becomes normal, a form is acquired." [@ahmedQueerUse2018; @ahmedQueerPhenomenologyOrientations2006]

Form is always forming from within complex systems of interrelation. Formative and transformative technologies are more (and less) than their forms. They must emerge on our own terms — from the formats and methods of the communities they support, with our values, goals, and approaches leading the way. 

Susan Leigh Star calls infrastructure a "fundamentally relational concept," but one that despite its embeddedness operates invisibly unless broken. She also argues that infrastructure also marks us as belonging, knowing, capable, welcome, or not. 

How do we think critically through re/making infrastructures, when they exist beyond any one of us, always relational and often invisible? By reattuning to the solidarities we find within and across communities, and the frictions we find within and across materials. 

Those who are left unsupported by infrastructures, those who are left out of representations or who are targeted disproportionately by digital systems, already know in deeply embodied ways about the friction they feel as they move through systems that do not easily contain their forms: 

Scholars Aimi Hamraie and Kelly Fritsche, authors of the "Crip Technoscience Manifesto" [-@hamraieCripTechnoscienceManifesto2019a], call these "frictioned technologies" and emphasize:

>"the skills, wisdom, resources, and hacks disabled people utilize for navigating and altering inaccessible worlds. [...] we conjure frictional practices of access production, acknowledging that science and technology can be used to both produce and dismantle injustice." [-@hamraieCripTechnoscienceManifesto2019a]

Their manifesto reminds us that disabled and racialized people are not merely minoritized users of technologies created by experts but instead are experts themselves at actively adapting technologies to their needs. By centering their communities as knowledge holders and creators, and by seeing "interdependence as a political technology," they shift the design goals for technology. Rather than providing services to achieve normalized individual independence, they reorient toward kinship building [-@hamraieCripTechnoscienceManifesto2019a]. 

Fundamentally reorienting our understanding of objects and knowledge and ourselves as constituted by our relationships necessarily also reorients our work and the forms it takes, in deeply formative ways. 

Re-prioritizing relationships fundamentally reshapes the forms and functions of research, artmaking, valuemaking, worldmaking. To see form (or object) as relation (or connection) is to position it in time and place. It is also to take "form" from its noun form into its verb form (to mold, press, begin to exist). 

Like all verbs, then, the verb form implies subjects — the entities enacting form, responsible for it, caring for it. Relationships. This negates object-oriented ontologies and object-oriented software programs that want to categorize, encapsulate, obfuscate, and abstract away objects' entanglements with the world. 

>"I speak of the *verb process*, the doing, the coming into being, the at-the-time-of. Which is why we think there is particular value in live music, contemplating the artifact as it arrives, listening to it emerge. There it is. And There." [@barakaHomeSocialEssays1966]

>"There can, of course, be no knots without the performance of knotting: we should therefore commence with the verb 'to knot' and view knotting as an activity of which 'knots' are the emergent outcomes. Thus conceived, knotting is about how contrary forces of tension and friction, as in pulling tight, are generative of new forms. And it is about how forms are held in place within such a force-field or, in short, about 'making things stick'. Accordingly, our focus should be on forces and materials rather than form and content." [@ingoldLifeLines2015]

To frame research through relationships is also to foreground accountability by asking, as Shawn Wilson offers in *Research Is Ceremony*, "What am I contributing or giving back to the relationship? Is the sharing, growth and learning that is taking place reciprocal?" Wilson says that in an Indigenous Research Paradigm, 
"What is more important and meaningful is fulfilling a role and obligations in the research relationship—that is, being accountable to your relations" [-@wilsonResearchCeremonyIndigenous2008].

Framed as reciprocity, form takes shape as an offering. 

What does our creative work offer back, and in what form will that offering be most legible and accessible? 

Some forms I have tried: manifesto, toolkit, zine, prototype, platform, black box, machine, labyrinth, server, service, sentence, story, interface, guidebook, document, garment, process. 

>"Form is simply *how* a thing exists (or what it exists as). [...] Content is *why* a thing exists. [...] but they are not separable in any object." [@barakaHomeSocialEssays1966]

As form moves into its verb shapes, identity too moves into practice. Artist Johanna Hedva marks this as a pivot from identity politics to practices and methods, inextricably coupled as theory-practice: 

>"Disability, queerness, open source — not as identities, or groups I belong to, but as modes of doing, of how I practice myself. Being an outsider means that the question of theory and practice — how practice is affected by theory, how theory is constructed by practice — becomes the most important one. Membership to particular groups and experiences is often predicated on the visual — whether someone 'looks like' they belong or not — which means that my membership to most groups must rely on something else. My belonging has more to do with how I enact that group's politic" [@hedvaBelongingMess2018]

Our being-in-process is both the means to embody, as a radical prefiguration, and also the means of being-in-relation, -in-politic, -in-identity, in-between.

>"this form is really just the web of relationships that have taken on a familiar shape. Every individual thing that you see around you is really just a huge knot—a point where thousands and millions of relationships come together." [@wilsonResearchCeremonyIndigenous2008]

I dream of a form that can hold everything. A form that can reveal how each part is connected. No parts, no compartments. Just connections. 

Anna Munster suggests that the form of networks numbs us to their relationality. Because every network looks like every other, in trying to understand a system by depicting it as a network, we lose sense of what's within. 

Munster suggests focusing less on `forms` and more on `forces`: 

"the closures and openings of relations to one another. It is at this level of imperceptible flux — of things unforming and reforming relationally — that we discover the real experience of networks" [@munsterAesthesiaNetworksConjunctive2013]. 

These are the networks: The flux of our un/forming relationality. Active, ongoing, prefigurative, emergent, embodied, embedded:

>"Relation is open totality; totality would be relation at rest. [...] Relation is movement." [@glissantPoeticsRelation2009a]

Just as a paper snowflake or a tie-dyed garment contains in its pattern the re-foldable traces of its making — a flattened, temporarily static version of its coming-into-shape, marking the places it once touched against itself as it held different forms [@sedgwickWeatherProust2012] ... 

These material memories, as marks of simultaneously current and past states, could offer tangible metaphors for understanding machine learning, or even quantum computing. 

Imagine crafting systems like snowflakes, like garments, that "decipher the history of their making" and the suggest future shapes they might take; systems that explain themselves and invite us to be in dynamic relation, to create new relations that generate force. 

Imagine the networks we might form with the loops of these threads.


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