What’s this all about? Are we trying this again? Yep, lil dogies, we ride at dawn.*

Like most overcommitted creatives I go through waves where I decide that I am going to solve all my problems! by building new infrastructure, or by adopting a variation on the themes I already have. Enter: substack, the second season.

Nahhhhhh…I’m not worried about the reboot. Not only is it fine, I see this as an essential part of the creative (and just, human) process of learning and becoming: hypothesizing praxis. This way? hmm, that way? (Tweaks it, works for a while, changes, lets the field fallow, tries again, ad infinitum). When things don’t stick, there’s any number of reasons (and a lot of them are capitalism, and the body, and allowing life to life on life’s terms).

It’s January 2024. A lot is shifting and solidifying for me, and I’m shifting and solidifying many things on different scales. During this process, I want to call myself in-to a longer form text-based log practice — building in large part on what I’ve always done virtually in one way or another, from my early days of blogging at/as The Trouble With Bartleby (active 2003-16, still live), to the Field Logs, videos, and other public thought / text / video work I’ve made using the constraints of Instagram’s 2200 character limit, playing at this edge with text-based decks.

But where does it go? Does it become text again? Does it become print/documentation, an explicit digital archive? I’m still not certain of all of those down the time/line, but given that the role of the archive and documentation as a human and creative tool is a major focus of my research, design, and public practice, I’m embarking on a re/new/ed periodical form publication here that will simultaneously: 1) give current thoughts and research more room to breathe, 2) share the projects and initiatives I’m working on with those who are actively interested, and 3) as always, shine light on others’ brilliance, organizing, materials and resources, and calls for collective action.

The way I see it, this documentary initiative is at once an archive, a missive, a sounding board / WIP feedback loop wading pool, it’s accountability (for me), announcements (for you), it’s ephemeral yet evergreen.

Will I monetize the thing? With others’ encouragement (see: chiding) maybe… but there will always be a free version! Will I build out a Substack website more fully? Maybe, maybe (probably?) not. Or maybe the studio website, the artist archive website, the platform / organization-as-hypothesis website, the YouTube channel, the soundcloud, the IG (3 of those technically), the tiktok, and whatever other remnants of myself I’ve left strewn around are enough already?

What to expect:

A range of post types, including some longer form writing, and extended versions of the FIELD LOG entries that I’ve been doing for years across platforms. (PAR EXAMPLE)

Announcements and updates, event announcements, reflections and reports, tools, materials, shares, ephemera. Links, opportunities for engagement, invitations.

*Imaginal Disco is a play on one of my very favorite things / metaphors / active learning devices, the Imaginal Disc. I’ve definitely written, given talks and workshops, led meditations, and made posts and videos about this for quite a few years now. Here’s a video where I break it down a bit.

*The header image here is from Research Gate. It’s stained analytical imaging of the Imaginal Disc process in Drisophilia. Bonus for the unexpected joys of “Wild Type.” I could rabbit hole in the science forever. Have we met?