towards the end of last month, i decided to knuckle down a bit and really focus on sending in applications for things. it’s the currency of the art world – funding applications, competition entries, open calls – it all operates on this ‘bid’ system where every artist who’s seen a particular ig post makes a cute little document which presents the best side of themself that day and shows the judging panel what-for.

as an experiment, i’m crossposting this over on substack. i’m never going to make you go over there - i’ll always post things here too, and it might never get used again, honestly - but this is part of me working out how to spread my writing a little bit further, and be a bit more serious about it. there’s also an audio recording of this piece over there too, which is nice to not have to self-host, tbh.

for the last week of may, i was travelling across spain (catalonia) and france, having met up with gem in barcelona as they finished touring with cannonball statman. as part of this, as is natural when you have an ongoing practice, i was taking photos in the places we visited for OUT/WITH. i noticed something interesting about the process of taking photos in different places - some cities or towns are harder than others.

some of the tensions swirling around in my head the most at the moment are to do with reach and visibility. my moral position remains that i think that scale + communication generally only really does bad things for how we think, how we regard each other, and our empathy and compassion when communicating - but i’m facing a conflicting motivation which is the impending reality check that the only thing that keeps a roof over our heads is earning enough money through what i do.

hot off the press! following norwich transformed last weekend, and combined with upcoming essay deadlines that were making me think really hard about my relationship to institutions, i put together a minizine about recuperation. when i talk about recuperation here, i mean it in the political sense see Recuperation (politics) on Wikipedia. it’s an 8-side minizine made from one piece of A4, that you can print at home if you want.

yesterday was the first ever norwich transformed, a splinter event of the world transformed which is a radical political education conference that follows around the labour conference. today was such an energising experience. to spend what was definitely the nicest, sunniest day of the year so far, cooped up in a methodist church with a couple of hundred other comrades, was honestly all i could have asked for. jon hegerty led a workshop on organising for power, from the work of jane mcalevey, which i found engaging.

hello! just a quick one today, very factual i am doing an office hours chat tomorrow evening with rhizome.org! i am absolutely thrilled about it. we're gonna talk about some of the big stuff - artmaking, placemaking, community BUT ALSO alienation under capitalism and being kind to each other and this whole performance we all engage in seemingly all of the time i really love rhizome. back when i was doing my undergraduate degree rhizome was like, the only place i knew where to go to get any information at all about art on the internet, and my dissertation was literally about art (specifically text in art) and the internet so i used rhizome a lot.

this month has been full of change. there's a new boygenius album. i have a new job, and i have a lot more time. i finally delivered the outcome of the residency i did in february, and i did a talk the same evening on zoom. i kind of feel like i just got spat out of a whale. i've cleared a big space in my room, and i want to keep it clear, so i can use it to do yoga.

thinking about the task of putting together a research proposal when the topic is so nebulous as to be your own artistic practice. it faces me with - what even is my practice anyway? what in here is something i could measure, or evaluate, or apply some kind of (here are those words again) methodology or framework to? where do i even start looking? through the course of the last module, i started to realise that all of my work is actually about listening.

this morning i came across this blog post by maggie appleton, titled 'the expanding dark forest and generative AI'. it's a wonderful dissection of the state of the social internet right now (with a beautiful diagram detailing 'digital gardens' as substrate on the dark forest floor, above a network of 'cozy web' tunnels). it handles the expansion of Large Language Models (LLMs) which, let's face it, really feels like it is Happening Right Now.