Rage, Renewal, Refusal (Reminder for June 8 session and update on postcard project)

Hi friends,

Happy June! As a reminder, we will gather next week on Wednesday, June 8, at 1pm EDT to discuss How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy by Jenny Odell. I’ve been listening to it on audio, often while walking in Prospect Park or Green-Wood Cemetery, and have found it provides some really interesting ways of thinking about what I notice with my actual senses—what I see, hear, smell as I move through the world.

We will also consider two artworks:

• The Bureau of Suspended Objects, also by Jenny Odell
• The Library of Missing Datasets by Mimi Ọnụọha

Some key topics to discuss:

• How these pieces all build on the matters of attunement, tempo, refusal, and noticing that we have discussed in other sessions
• Ways to create space for uncertainty and inefficiency (and why we might want to)
• Different valences of “nothing” (How to do nothing, suspended objects, missing datasets… but also the hidden curriculum of higher ed, blank space in a printed poem, loss. When is nothing truly nothing, and when is it a way to make space for something else?)

Overall I hope this session will help us think together about the rich possibilities of indeterminacy, quietness, and the ways of being that interrupt progress and profit.

Hope you can join us; register here.

Oh, and remember the Postcards of Rage and Renewal project? It is still happening! For those of you who signed up, you’ll get your postcards soon.

The project, a collaboration with VFC, is a collective response to the two-year anniversary of the COVID lockdown. Our goal: to collectively channel and process our outrage towards the inadequacy of the pandemic response and to build our hope for the future. Feels like something we could all use right now.

Warmly,

Katina