and are proud to present song lyrics and poems that inspire them!

Special: Gabby Kippā€™s sculptures inspired by Beatles songs! [Can you guess the one in the middle?!]

ā€œA Whole New Worldā€ from Disneyā€™s Aladdin.

³¢²ā°ł¾±³¦²õ:Ģż

³Õ¾±»å±š“Ē:Ģż

Whatever it takes ā€“ Imagine Dragons

Moon River ā€“ Breakfast at Tiffanys Lyrics:

– Audio:

Fleetwood Mac

Rupi Kaur’s Milk and Honey.

when you are broken
and he has left you
do not question
whether you were
enough
the problem was
you were so enough
he was not able to carry it

Holy War by Alicia Keys

Sana Abuleil.

Shel Silverstein’s poem “Forgotten Language”

Miles Carter

Ģż

The 2013 pilot learning project, then called TXT CONNECT, was intended to be a free SMS (short message service) mobile platform to help young people access resources and information in their surrounding communities. [Note: I use the phrase court-involved youth here to describe young people tethered to institutions like foster care, juvenile justice, and criminal justice systems.] As a collaborative project, I wanted to involve young people as users and stakeholders in the process of designing a technology artifact and service.

This process, in research terminology, is called participatory design.

Engaging students in generating knowledge and awareness through participatory practices has always been integral to my pedagogical philosophy across fifteen years of teaching. Some may call this constructivist learning, or libratory or feminist pedagogy. As a mediamaker with close to two decades of production experience, I know that the best kinds of projects turn out to be the ones where I collaborate with others across a variety of expertise and industries.

Iā€™m even more reliant currently upon the collaborative process because, quite frankly, itā€™s how I learn to be a better teacher and mediamaker.

Working with young people who experience dislocation and instability on a daily basis all in efforts to design a piece of technology through mobile design was one of the most challenging experiences in my life. I often asked myself: What makes designing a technology artifact outside of the classroom more difficult than, say, teaching young people about technology inside the classroom, or producing media content in the studio?

Part of the difficulty stems from the fact that learning through research, especially ethnographic research, is messy ā€“ this includes participatory design methods in the ethnography.

Another challenge concerns the way young people see themselves, rarely entering into a collaborative working space as self-acknowledged researchers and designers, especially if theyā€™ve received ā€œmessagesā€ from family members, media, peers, teachers, and institutions that devalue their ways of knowing. And so, I worked to create a culture wherein young people not only saw themselves as users but as integral makers and developers of technical systems in service of their own community.

Another notable challenge is participation. Young people who experience unstable home lives and dislocation have life, school, work, family, and other obligations that often supercede their engagement. (Related: I conducted an ethnographic study on the idea of for my dissertation that explored these problems).

I had to rethink the idea of participation and collaboration; I also faced challenges with defining my roles as researcher and designer.

Not only was I required to meticulously and systematically document the process of design and research, but I was also obligated to make design decisions while facilitating a space where all participants could contribute equally and thoughtfully in developing and building technical systems. I had to be fully aware of my orientation as an adult in the lives of young people. I often had to delegate responsibilities and adhere to design suggestions while also “being there” for young people.

It is like being a student-teacher, sister-friend, and researcher-designer all at the same time. Youā€™re always occupying more than one role. Youā€™re also always critically reflecting upon the roles of others in the process. Youā€™re never satisfied with how institutions make it even more difficult to engage communities that are often underrepresented and lack resources.

You live in a constant state of uncertainty about whether youā€™re documenting the process effectively enough. You worry that even if the research goes smoothly, the end design wonā€™t be what you hoped because of lack of funding or limited user participation.

Youā€™re always wondering about the what ifs.

But even as I struggled through the convoluted mess of innumerable what ifs, I was, and continue to be, reassured knowing that as I collaborate with young people, my work will inevitably be informed by an ethos of itā€™s always possible.

— Tara L. Conley is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communication and Media at . She is an interdisciplinary Black feminist scholar and mediamaker. She teaches courses on race, feminism, media cultures, and storytelling. In 2013, Dr. Conley founded Hashtag Feminism () to locate and archive feminist discourse by way of tracking Twitter hashtags on the web. In 2015, she produced the documentary about life in New Orleans after hurricane Katrina. Dr. Conleyā€™s research and multimedia production engage scholarship and methods across multiple fields including communication and media studies, digital humanities, art and design, science and technology studies, and archival studies. She is currently working with MSU faculty and students to create a multimedia storytelling platform called The Hashtag Project. You can learn more about Dr. Conleyā€™s work and upcoming projects by visiting .

On occasion my life is less quiet. I first met my friend T at a residency. Residencies are never quiet, but they can be fecund. The artists are given studios or offices from which we are pulled three times a day to share meals during which we must chat, and lo! There we are cross-pollinating over the penne pasta without even knowing it. A drink in the studio? In fact, what is occurring now is a studio visit.

I was starting a new series of work when T and I first started chatting over drinks at one of those residency-studio-visits. He wrote reimaginations of old myths, and I later read his trilogy on the life of Jesus. We kept in touch and a few years later, he acquired a cemetery painting Iā€™d started back at the residency. In the winter of 2017, I fell into a psychological crevasse. Into that void, T stepped in, called, made a proposal. On the phone, he even used that word, collaboration. ā€œIā€™m writing a reimagination of Frankenstein set in Nazi Germany. I keep thinking of your cemetery paintings from the residency.ā€

ā€œI love monsters,ā€ was all I could say.

I read the first two chapters of Tā€™s manuscript, which he was still writing, and reread , coming up on its bicentennial. In all of it, I found large swaths of , of Aristotle and the pre-Socratics; in truth, I was just bringing my own background to the work, locating the threads with which to weave my own creation. The idea of art-making, the creative impulse, what it is to be human and the responsibility of the creatorā€“ā€“ those questions Iā€™d been thinking about for years, even before coming to painting.

Our partnership, happily, was very independent. I did not consider myself to be illustrating Tā€™s book, nor did I feel I couldnā€™t push the boundaries of his or Shelleyā€™s story. I looked at canvas, linen, paper, and in their raw material or golem form, I saw only everything I could shape it into, and the trepidation Iā€™d often experienced staring in the whiteness of the tabula rasa vanished. The first piece I made was an eleven-foot long cemetery painting featuring a statuary that often shows up in my work, a weeping woman with her hand covering her face. In the studio, I still eked out a very quiet life, but the usually-fraught space between my ears was now galvanized with purpose.

To reinterpret themes portrayed countless times from Gothic to pulpy, I decided to go epic and sumptuous. The majority of the work was figurative, and led to several artists and art-world figures sitting for me. I portrayed them psychologically, the action of the story reflected in the visual idiom of fractured forms, brushwork that I sometimes resolved, other times left broken. I kept in mind my thematic conclusion: that every generation creates copies of themselves which are let loose upon the world, and then those, inevitably, become artist-makers themselves, create again, and so on and so forth, thereby making us all a little bit monster, a little bit artist. In the course of a year, I showed the work four times in New York. The press picked it up, including .

It turned out to be a good thing that the collaboration was fairly independent, because halfway through the year, I stopped hearing from my old friend T. From social media, I got the sense heā€™d been taken away by other projects and was having a hard time communicating to me that he would not be following through on ours. I donā€™t know if he ever finished his manuscript.

I finished my paintings and printsā€“ eight paintings, a dozen prints, numerous studies and drawings. After a short period during which I wondered what happened to T (had I lost a friend as well as a collaborator?), I realized my collaboration had been with many people. It had been with T, the artists who had modeled for me, the gallerists who hung my pieces in such ways that they interacted and created more interesting conversations, and the many friends and colleagues I spoke with while I was laboring for a year. It is too much to say that among my collaborators were the disembodied voices of Mary Shelley or ? I do not go that far.

It had been thanks to the quiet life that my work had been born into existence; but the workā€™s inception, its growth and change? That had been due to the quiet lifeā€™s expansion and stretch to include others.

Hyeseung Marriage-Song is an American painter best known for large-scale figurative oil paintings in which visual idioms toggle between resolution and fragmentation. Born in Seoul, South Korea, Marriage-Song grew up in Houston, Texas, with degrees in philosophy from Princeton and Harvard Universities. She completed her arts training at the Water Street Atelier, in New York City, now Grand Central Atelier, after which she was twice awarded the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant.ĢżShe has taught at the Maryland Institute College of Art and was cited in Baltimore Magazineā€™s ā€œ40 Under 40ā€ for her work creating synergies between the science and art communities. She has been awarded fellowships at the Vermont Studio Center, Penland School of Arts and Crafts as well as the Alfred and Trafford Klots International Residency in Brittany, France. She is completing her first book, a philosophical memoir about creativity and family, entitled ā€œHead Study.ā€

More work at and @hyeseungs (IG).

Reading was a private pleasure, and writing eventually functioned similarly. In my late teens, when I began to write and publish my own work, the idea of sharing this process was possible only at the stage of editing. A collaboration in which two people somehow commingled their writing seemed like giving away too much. I produced stories and poetry throughout my twenties, blissfully alone. My father, who had read some of my work with noncommittal approval, had withdrawn into the background when I reached adulthood. We got along all right, but we didnā€™t see each other much.

When I became an academic, my writing took a critical turn. One of my ideas was to look at the psychology of camp aesthetics, and I wanted a psycho-dynamic angle for the essay. Iā€™d recently read and disagreed with her point that camp stemmed from a ā€œgenerousā€ impulse and ā€œa love for human nature.ā€ My argument was that camp, like so much pointed humor, derived its energy from aggressive digs at social values and sentiment. Beyond , not that much had been written in the direction I was heading. Iā€™d taken plenty of psychology courses in college, but I clearly needed to do more research. On the other hand, my father, Harold Galef, was a psychoanalyst, always an avid reader, and one afternoon we started a discussion on the topic of camp. Where I saw literary effects, he saw defense mechanisms; when I talked about the hip inside jokes that camp originated, he traced them to a hostility directed toward the boring, square world.

I found the colloquy stimulating. And though my relationship with him was defined more by absence than presence, I found myself making an offer. ā€œWould you be interested in collaborating on an essay with me?ā€

After a momentā€™s reflection, he said yes.

What followed was a lopsided but not unequal process. While I contributed the artistic angle on camp, in works ranging from to , my father steered me toward the observations of Otto Fenichel and Anna Freud. It helped that we paced out the essay over coffee and sometimes cognac, our outline and notes growing longer the more we met. My father was not what anyone would call effusive, but he grew passionate over this topic. Though he always stated matters clearly and perceptively, he wasnā€™t by temperament a writer. He liked to set down words once and have done with them. So I wrote my half and revised his half, then read it back to him and jotted down his comments. The grudges we held (power imbalance, memories of curt exchanges and angry silences) fell away whenever we were at work together.

What I want to say, perhaps with some truth, is that the collaboration created a new connection, beyond the Oedipal conflict. We each wanted to show our best side and were perhaps surprised at the appearanceā€”our own and that of the Other. This alliance lasted a few months, during which we produced an essay called ā€œWhat Was Camp?ā€ published it as a collaboration between the English Department at the University of Mississippi and the Department of Psychiatry at Albert Einstein College of Medicine. We both regarded it as a success, not just in getting out an essay together but also in filling the void that our relationship had been.

Six months after its publication, the editor of Studies in Popular Culture contacted me to tell us that we had won the Whatley Award for the yearā€™s best essay. In congratulating me, the editor added, ā€œSomeday you must tell me what itā€™s like to work this way with your brother. I could no more collaborate with my brother than fly.ā€

* * * *

A dozen years later, tenured and promoted, I got the idea for an essay that analyzed , ¹ó°ł±š³Ü»åā€™s wife of over fifty years. It seemed to me that, for anyone pondering ¹ó°ł±š³Ü»åā€™s views on women, surely Martha must have given Sigmund some ideas. Once again, I turned to my father, who was nearing the end of his professional career. He was tired, perhaps already ailing from the symptoms that would eventually be diagnosed as Parkinsonā€™s disease. Still, heā€™d been happy to see his name in print and cited for the camp essay. He also agreed that the spouse of the man who famously asked, ā€œWas will das Weib?ā€ (ā€œWhat does woman want?ā€), was a subject worthy of analysis. He suggested a close look at , among other sources.

We adopted the same routine as last time, discussions leading to notes and an outline. The difference was that now he relied a lot more on my authority. I didnā€™t want him to feel threatened and downplayed my role wherever I could. I led him out, suggested avenues he might take, and turned his talk into paragraphs.

The high point of this collaboration came when we visited the together to view ¹ó°ł±š³Ü»åā€™s , the cache of letters that he and Martha exchanged during their four-year courtship. In the end, our study, titled simply ā€œ¹ó°ł±š³Ü»åā€™s Wife,ā€ examined a great deal of textual and biographical evidence and satisfied my father, who in his youth had idolized Freud but now had a more tempered view. We placed it in , where it slowly gained recognition. A few years later, Katja Behlingā€™s Martha Freud came out, and an English translation emerged in 2005. But weā€™d staked our claim. My father talked about our work to friends and other therapists. Iā€™d pleased him, and that made me guardedly happy.

Father-son collaborations are rare. The power dynamic between them is over only when one of them dies, and even then it lives on in the other. Oedipal struggles are never quite resolved. Now that I have a sonā€”who also writesā€”I appreciate this dynamic better. Though my father died in 2012, he lives on in citations. Itā€™s startling to see our names together in footnotes, but thatā€™s another aspect of collaboration: a testament to a relationship.

– — fiction writer, critic, poet, translator and essayist — is Professor of English and Director of The Creative Writing Program at ĢĒŠÄvlog. His third novel, How to Cope With Suburban Stress, was one of Kirkus’ 30 Best Books of 2007. His second short story collection, My Date With Neanderthal Woman, won Dzanc Books’ inaugural short story collection prize. His most recent book is .

This commemorative head is the substitution of a sometimes beloved mistress photographer for the always beloved poet whose head Picasso didnā€™t want to put here, as if he were ā€” which he was, of course ā€” dead. That was because that great artist had a phobia about death, and to have put the poet he so loved (indeed he did, even speaking to Apollinaire on his own death bed) into a memorial stone would have been both traumatic and terrible. Better confuse passersby into thinking the poet must have had a very feminine face, to have looked like that.

Patti Smith was once taken in by it, on her visiting to this square of Laurent Prache, behind the Eglise of St-Germain-des-prĆ©s when she was staying at that hallowed by the epochs CafĆ© de Flore, as described in her recent book Devotion.ā€¦ I love writing about this in my just published , as if, in some impossible way, I could be community-gathering with these writers and artists and photographers.

And why not imagine a many-way meeting with those we love to read about and look along with and with whom we try to remember epochs. I love the history of the head: since Aristide Maillol had placed a patina on his statues by pissing upon them, Apollinaire had pissed upon one head of Dora Maar, turned it green, so this is the second head. And then, a few years ago, this head was stolen, and recovered alongside a Breton road, mysteriously. Everything about this head-spinning tale is mysterious.

Is not that, in fact, the most real of collaborative gatherings? The one we remember and re-dwell within? It is not a memorial but a memory, vivid beyond telling, better in the retelling, so I am considering a re-collaboration, heightened by its momentary nature.

Who didnā€™t love and love loving Picasso more than his mistresses, because we, the true appreciators of his art, donā€™t have to be involved with his infidelity. He is there for us always, permanently, however we look and care and judge his differing stages and carings: the genius perseveres. For me, that is the most true of workings-together, writing about what he painted about, seeing through his brush.

Because I love digressions, perhaps most of all, let me remind myself that Leonardo da Vinci, on whom I have just had the joy of writing for the , painted very often with his fingers instead of a brush, so endearing, like his mirror writing and his left-handedness. And so I come back to Dora Maar, around whom I am spinning this collaborative tale, who painted her rather awkward paintings ā€” except for the landscapes around MĆ©nerbes, which I love ā€” with her left hand.

For me, collaboration is indeed about looking, through and with and aroundā€¦so, ā€œaround Dora Maarā€ I have called this reflection on all this seeing together. I have spent my life collaborating with those I have written about and thought through, so, I hope, thought along with. So, perhaps more than a three-way collaboration, as I initially thought, here, I am celebrating a four-way collaboration, as best I can.

— is Distinguished Professor Emerita and Resident Professor of Comparative Literature, English, and French at the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Her many areas of interest in twentieth-century avant-garde literature and art include Surrealism, poets RenĆ© Char and AndrĆ© Breton, Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury group, and artists Robert Motherwell, Joseph Cornell, and Pablo Picasso.

The Brutal State of Nature

I was a tender 14-year-old volunteering in the skeletal biology laboratory at Shriners Hospital for Children when I learned that scientists donā€™t like to work together. ā€œWhy wonā€™t they answer my emails?ā€ I quizzed my mentor, as the techs in the lab next door, who were similarly working on tendon mimesis with the common goal of advancing orthopedic technology for children in need, were ignoring my requests to see how they were mounting specimens for testing. ā€œEver since that first major grantā€¦they donā€™t want to be perceived as helping me since Iā€™m the competition,ā€ he sighed. I was skeptical. ā€œYou mean that people with good ideas DONā€™T want to share them? Not even with others who are working on the same problems and who care about the same things? Donā€™t they realize that by working together we could be greater than the sum of our individual parts?ā€ I was adorably naive.

Years passed, as I moved through pre-med, research assistantships, graduate and medical school, gradually appreciating how exceptionally bright, well-intentioned people who devote their livesā€”often thanklesslyā€”to making the world a better place, frequently grow averse to freely sharing their ideas or precious data. The ā€˜whyā€™ is simple: sharing, i.e. collaboration, is disincentivized. Dishonest actors, of whom most meet their fair share, may ā€˜stealā€™ our ideas or data, convert them into financial or professional profits, leaving ā€˜usā€™ out of the loop. The mere potential of such abuses motivates todayā€™s intellectual idea factories to hoard, rather than distribute, their ideas, preferring to sacrifice scientific progress for self-protection in a world in which they already struggle to be appropriately rewarded for their ingenuity and hard work.

The pernicious underbelly of ā€œpublish or perishā€ is academiaā€™s starvation economy in which there is not enough for collective surviving, much less thriving. Academic medicine falls prey to the fallacy of Social Darwinism: the fittest researchers compelled to consume the weaker, gobbling up ideas, fostering collaboration only insofar as it suits individualsā€™ immediate best interests (i.e., itā€™s better for oneā€™s visibility or credibility to openly collaborate than to claim sole credit for the product of collaboration), as opposed to collective benefits of research collaboration. Other things being equal, collaboration is perceived as something which inherently dilutes, rather than enriches, the value of oneā€™s contribution to humanity. Ģż

This is really happening

As a junior health science researcher, my Principal Investigator (PI) once instructed me not to collaborate with a statistician in exchange for co-authorship because it would mean seven authors on forthcoming manuscripts. With seven authors, the value of publication would be disproportionately diminished for everyone involved, and some of the most prestigious journals do not accept more than six authors per manuscript. I was already doing 95% of the work myself, for no pay (beyond the prospect of future first-author publication), my modest grant barely covering necessary supplies, and no funding available to pay a statisticianā€™s hourly rate. Meanwhile, of my five co-authors, two (the PI and a co-I) brought necessary expertise, and another was primarily responsible for data collection and entry. The two others were at the proverbial table when we embarked on the project, yielding de rigueur inclusion, although they had only tangential expertise and no time to devote to the project.

Was I, then a full-time surgical resident, supposed to perform statistical analysis myself? This hardly seemed appropriate use of human capital, especially as my best attempt would necessarily limit quality of our analysis compared to collaborating with AN ACTUAL STATISTICIAN. I found the suggestion disrespectful of the critical role statisticians play in such research. This disincentivized collaboration delayed the projectā€™s progress by several months as I gradually pieced together the bare minimum with several small grants of statisticiansā€™ time, though paucity of hours and low priority for pro bono student work required substantial narrowing of the scope of my analysis.

Once I had some pilot data analyzed, I met with one of the professional courtesy co-authors for feedback. She agreed that preliminary results validated our hypothesis about overdoing certain procedures and suggested fewer of such procedures should be done. At that meeting she informed me, unprompted, that she was unfortunately unable to participate meaningfully in the project and thus should not be considered a co-author on any final manuscripts. Frankly, I was surprised: relinquishing co-authorship that was both valuable for her professional advancement and cost her negligible time and effort. I had never heard of anyone pulling out of courtesy authorship specifically because, in their own assessment, they did not meet authorship criteria. Impressed with her integrity, I thanked her for her time and forthrightness. When sharing this update with my PI, she shrugged, ā€œAt least weā€™re down to five authors, all the better for us.ā€

At long last, the statistical work was done. By chance, I caught a typo in one of the statisticiansā€™ reports that would have significantly impacted our results. The double-triple-checked analysis of our complete dataset further substantiated our hypothesis that we were likely doing too many procedures. Meeting with my PI to review the results, I was informed that, while data were promising and she agreed with our findings, we shouldnā€™t suggest this conclusion in our manuscript because these procedures comprise a substantial portion of the departmentā€™s revenue. Instead of reducing total number of procedures performed, we should focus on mitigating harmful sequelae of undergoing the procedure. She was not only concerned about blow-back from her superiors, but also that those reviewing our paper were similarly situated regarding the proceduresā€™ profitability, and that a ā€œless is moreā€ conclusion could disincentivize our manuscriptā€™s acceptance. I wrote on egg-shells,Ģż allowing readers to read the writing on the wall for themselves. I solicited feedback from the co-authors. Most saliently, the remaining de rigueur author wondered why we had not explicitly stated that, ā€œweā€™re doing too many procedures,ā€ the clear implication of our data from her perspectiveā€¦

We submitted the manuscript to a leading journal, and, after peer-review, it was politely rejected. Perhaps it was my imagination, but I saw my PIā€™s concerns borne in the reviewer comments: while one appreciated our challenge of routine practices, the other was spitting nails at even the tacit suggestion that fewer procedures be performed. I revised the manuscript, further erasing any trace of the financially unfavorable conclusion, without compromising the findings themselves, and sent it to the co-authors to sign off before resubmission. I was surprised when the PI made only one addition to this final draft: she added her husband, another professor with tangential expertise, as a sixth co-author and asked me to send it to him for comments. This exemplifies the incentive for collusion, rather than genuine collaboration, in academic medicine. Again feeling there was no alternative that wouldnā€™t hurt me in the long run, I sent it to him, and did my best to address his eleventh-hour comments before resubmitting. The project then entered a 9-months-and-counting period of senescence wherein we have yet to hear any updates, including whether it would be considered for peer-review, despite multiple attempts to gently prod the editorial team along.Ģż

Conclusion

This personal narrative illustrates how academic medicine, although it is deeply dependent on collaboration for maximally increasing knowledge and human health, behaves as a defunct market, disincentivizing collaboration and incentivizing collusion. Against this backdrop, we find ourselves with a painfully protracted pipeline from new ideas to create research to then inspire meaningful changes in clinical care. This failure to optimally align incentives in academic medical research has serious consequences for human lives and should not be tolerated.

In a follow-up piece, I will describe a novel solution for this problem which harnesses blockchain and privacy preserving computation to reframe academic medical press as a radical market which fosters collaboration and minimizes collusion in accordance with the mutual goal of optimizing human health.

— is anĢżOB/GYN andĢżfellow at the where her work focuses on application of technology and elimination of bias as means of promoting evidence-basis, equity and efficiency in womenā€™s healthcare (@GYNOBioethicist).

Ģż

Ģż1. Networked DependencyĢż

ā€œThe art field is a space of wild contradiction and phenomenal exploitation. It is a place of power mongering, speculation, financial engineering, and massive and crooked manipulation. But it is also a site of commonality, movement, energy and desire. – Hito Steyerl (2)

Writing is collaboration. The marks on this page (or screen) spark a biological and neurological occurrence causing an experience. Iā€™m joining with you, the reader, in an exchangeā€“ā€“ a collaboration with four unsuspecting writers and artists. Consider these five fragments to be situated somewhere between verse and prose, shared through our immediate imagination and future memories.

Letā€™s begin ā€“ā€“

It is impossible to step outside of collaboration, given the networked dependencies that constitute our survival. We can move between collaborators, however all art (and life) depends on a constant condition of sharing and kinship.

This condition makes art, technology and knowledge creation possible.

Collaboration is a process not a fixed space. It is not an object. It is an ā€œintra-actionā€ between nature and all the planetary species, engaged in being and becoming.

We are all in the same boat ā€“ā€“ together.

2.The Sixth Sense

Shock, discomfort, or frustrationā€”along with absurdity, eccentricity, doubt or sheer pleasureā€“ā€“ are crucial to a workā€™s aesthetic and political impact. – Claire Bishop (3)

You, the individual reader is silent. Outside of this virtual space, lies physical collaborationā€“ā€“ sound, sight, smell, taste and touch within each body and in an ever growing digital-body politic. Collaboration then is our sixth senseā€“ā€“ somatic, conceptual, passive and active.

We arrive at the crossroads as intersectional participants generating social transitions of disruption and continuity.Ģż While in this alliance we are oblivious to the act of collaborating. The self becomes the thing that is negated. The Ģżprocess comes to life through the development of intuitive activities carried out by entropic bodies.

3. Education and GestureĢż

We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. Itā€™s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsalā€“ā€“ being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factoryā€”there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it ā€œstudyā€ is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present. – Fred Moten (4)

The bodyā€™s gesture is the interface; discourse occurs through interdependent multiple identities establishing collective knowledge, provisionally. As artists, we reconfigure the cultural regime into a series of turbulent events, and hopefully, in the process we can make this world a better place.

The collaborative impulse grows within individuals through the desire for a new social dynamic. It is an act of oneā€™s own survival, driven by common and uncommon tendencies. It is a ā€œstudyā€ that is realized and yet unrealized, eternally sought after through an invisible network.

4. Aesthetics and Politics

Aesthetics and politics overlap in their concern for the distribution and sharing of the sensible world. ā€“ Claire Bishop (5)

Rather than a restriction, collaboration can foster a different realization of liberation, a freedom from the tyranny of the individual, the market and the romantic ideal of the rebel.Ģż We traverse the polis as creative mendicants, digital vagabonds and ā€œbirds of passage.ā€ We collaborate by necessity, we share because we have to, like breathing and eating, etc.

We live and work in the ā€œsensible worldā€ and we make art by cribbing from lifeā€™s unwritten cookbook. Subsequently, collaboration can be a recipe for both disaster and joy.

Since collaborations are not static objects, they rely on impermanence and entanglements.Ģż Therefore conflict and crisis are ultimately resolvable. Politically, we should not simply initiate acts of condemnation; together we must discover new sites of commonality.

However there are no guarantees.

5. Forgotten Media

The underlying promise of Rate/Comment/Subscribe! culture is that viewers can engage in a more direct form of fandom, in which their tributary comments and reblogs are directly acknowledged by artists and eventually become an element in their creative process. Audiences can now believe they are co-creators, collaborating with artists by appreciating them.Ģż – Brad Troemel (6)

We are continuously attracted to transgression, jumping the fence of each otherā€™s ā€œautonomous zone.ā€ As an aesthetic practice, media can mutate into participation and common authorship.Ģż It sometimes passes through solid material like a ghost inducing ephemeral currents of exchange and at times, spectacle.

However we need to be on the lookout as Claire Bishop warnsā€“ā€“ sentimentalizing collaboration can lead to the ā€œreinforcement of artā€™s autonomy.ā€

Social Media can appear as the activities and actions of art, but through endless looping and mundane repetition, itā€™s at risk from becoming overly transactional, a deadening process of hyper-commodified productionā€“ā€“ a performance that undermines collaboration by colonizing it as mere personal branding.

Radical collaboration consists of complex ventures where authorship is co-dependent and communication is horizontal both online and offline. Each collaborative initiative needs to mine its own unsettled territory with an acute critical awareness.

Histories within these territories are precarious temporalities that should beĢż continually activated since media is now written in real-time, spatially distributed, and then quickly forgotten. Aesthetic action can serve as a buffer to this precarityā€“ā€“ rendering Ģżcollaborative practice as creative activismā€“ā€“ a life sustaining bio/geo/political event.

SourcesĢż

1. David Wallace, , The New Yorker, April 30, 2018
   

2. Hito Steyerl,
   

3. Claire Bishop,

4. Fred Moten,
   

5. Claire Bishop,
   

6. Brad Troemel,

— is a media artist, curator, educator, and writer. He is Program Director of the Art and Technology Program and Director of the (CalArts).

Tom received his BFA and MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI). His film, video, online work, interactive installations, and public performances have been exhibited at Navel, Harvestworks, Eyebeam, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, The Echo Park Film Center, The Alabama Center for Contemporary Art, Machine Project, The Mount Wilson Observatory, MassMoca, The Santa Monica Museum of Art, The Fowler Museum, Redcat Theater, The Kitchen, The Millennium, Siggraph, and film and video festivals worldwide, with support from Art Matters, Creative Time, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Projects and Exhibitions include: The Scream Project at Navel, Heard in LA at theĢż Electronic Arts Festival at Harvestworks, DryRun, a public art and sound/poetry project for the City of Santa Clarita, CA, History Refused to Die and The Futures Project at the Alabama Contemporary Center for the Arts and the Los Angeles Filmforum, Alternative Projections, Filmforum at the Gettyā€™s Pacific Standard Time, Artist Resident for a Day at Machine Project, Radical Cosmologies at ISEA2012, Indirect Intentionā€”A Home and Garden Intervention at the Museum of Jurassic Technology and the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Future Imaginary at the Ben Maltz Gallery of the Otis College of Art and Design, The Lament Projectā€”An Evening at the Manual Archives, Underground Cinemamachine at Machine Project and Object Lessons for Gigantic Artspace in New York City.

He is an editor and producer for the web-based journal and curatorial project

will be curating an art and technology group exhibition at the George Segal Gallery at ĢĒŠÄvlog in 2021 titled Tech/Know/Future.

ā€œIn each epoch, memory reconstructs an image of the past that is in accord with the predominant thoughts of the society,ā€ noted in his seminal work On Collective Memory. As a ā€œpracademic,ā€ a scholar that also engages in advocacy and policy work on practices and strategies focusing upon how to best overcome post-authoritarian and post-conflict violence, the question of how to create a shared and sustainable collective memory — as well as how societies and local communities perceive past atrocities and human rights violations — remains, for me, a very tough nut to crack.

Fortunately, when embarking on a journey to complete a project with the aim of tackling some of these challenging questions, I was able to lean on a number of incredibly sharp and thoughtful practitioners, scholars and activists who had alternative and innovative ways of approaching these difficult and complex issues.

While on our journey, myriad experiences helped create a rich and wholesome collection of narratives to share powerful insights not only with interested scholars, but also policymakers, practitioners and human rights advocates alike. These narratives draw from many lived experiences, including victim testimonies in post-conflict zones, interviews with youth activists in post-authoritarian countries and diplomatic nation-building in transition areas, such as Iraq, among others.

This adventure resulted in a provocative and diverse book, co-edited with Christopher K. Lamont.

prepares the ground for broader scholarly and public debates on topics, which, until now, unfortunately did not constitute predominant thoughts in society, as claimed by Halbwachs. Often times, collective memory processes are distorted and politicized, and the stories disseminated among communities paint a skewed picture of a conflict or a repressive regime. Helping unheard, silenced voices to emerge and enter centerstage is therefore crucial to help mitigate trauma in affected communities and societies.

Art, for instance, has not yet received the attention it deserves as a topic of conversation, particularly as it pertains to acting as a vector of social change when seeking remedies for political violence and repression. Notwithstanding, visual arts, performance activism and participatory engagements including artistic forms of expression are invaluable means of dealing with trauma and post-traumatic stress. Communities ranging from the Balkan region to South Africa have used various art forms to help victim communities raise their voices, be recognized and commemorate lost and loved ones. Activists in each of the above cases often have relied upon community-built art installations, such as sculptures, and have encouraged victims and community members to participate in advocacy-driven theatrical performances, fueling commemorative practices and furthering community-ties in formerly war-torn areas, and in the aftermath of autocratic regimes.

Moreover, gender-based violence — particularly violence against males and sexual minorities — still represent taboo topics in many societies that are grappling with the consequences of mass atrocities and conflict. Creating physical, virtual and conceptual spaces for victims and minorities who have suffered from such violence is an essential step in the right direction. describe reaching out to individuals and distressed communities, passionately promoting a better understanding and collaborating to build better support structures and transnational networks for advocacy efforts to improve the lives of those who suffered in silence and who deserve to be heard and treated with dignity and respect.

Contributors to New Critical Spaces in Transitional Justice: Gender, Art & Memory all showed a phenomenal dedication to working toward a better future for victims and communities in need. In addition, they have manifested an incredible passion for their work in writing about lesser known issues. Educating the world we live in and the people we live with is an excellent example of a true vocation.Ģż This book could not have been done without the perseverance and collegiality that were the foundation of this multidisciplinary and international collaboration on collective memory processes. I am grateful to have been able to work with such a great team of colleagues to foster new epistemological theorems that provide innovative, forward-looking explanations of how our world works and how contemporary societies embrace social change.

I encourage colleagues to reach out and embark on a journey similar to the one I took many years ago and which I continue to pursue. As , a scholar of memory studies, noted, collective memory is textured, in other words, memorials to commemorate the past also suppress parts of the past.

It is the responsibility of society to weave a narrative that embraces a holistic image and understanding of the violence and suffering endured by its victims.

Working together, we can create a more resilient and stronger social tissue in affected societies.

Arnaud Kurze is Assistant Professor of Justice Studies at ĢĒŠÄvlog. His scholarly work on transitional justice in the post-Arab Spring world focuses particularly on youth activism, art and collective memory. Dr. Kurze was appointed a in Washington, DC, from 2016-2020, studying youth resilience in North Africa and the Middle East. He has published widely in academic journals, contributed to edited volumes and is author of several reports on foreign affairs for government and international organizations. He is the co-editor of the book, (2019). He has also given interviews on the politics of ,and , among others.

Ģż

ā€œThe formalistic dialectic of post-Kantian systems, however, is not based upon the definition of the thesis as categorical relation, the antithesis as hypothetical relation, and of the synthesis as disjunctive relation. Nevertheless, in addition to the concept of synthesis, that of a certain non-synthesis of two concepts in another is bound to take on great systematic significance, since in addition to synthesis there is the possibility of another kind of relationship between thesis and antithesis.ā€

I.ĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢż It seems that for me, the best collaboration is a tentative balance in which I can lose and not lose myself ā€“ it works so well I never feel lost because I never feel exposed in the first place. Having skype chats under the guise of work meetings (and work does get done: texts and efforts and projects and dreams have grown and grown at an astonishing paceā€“ Iā€™m thrilled to have someone who can match my stride so easily) but chats that are also about life beyond work, and helping us see each other in the mirrors of ā€œnowā€ and not rearview (and, perhaps, even future). I find myself not quite sure how I arrived, but feeling invigorated and not exhausted.

ā€œYou and I are deep in the act of collaboration and have written about it together, so it seemed weird not to let you knowā€¦ā€

II.ĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢż I have another cup-filling, soul-renewing collaboration, but what do we produce? While, the above has produced essays and perhaps even books, this collaboration produces steps on my daily count, an exploration of my neighborhood, and the resonance of human conversation. We have been collaborating through life for over twenty years of friendship now.

ā€œI mentally track the items like an absurd grocery list full of acronyms and abbreviations that make sense to no one else: Bernie; Radium; Giant dead thing song Bicycle; Pressure diamonds. These are the things that Iā€™m saving for the not-quite-scheduled but still-happening-regularly walk and talk. A text wonā€™t do them justice. It would take too much context and explanation in a way that would deflate it all. I need the ā€˜thatā€™s right!ā€™ of recognition, the odd chuckle of absurdist acknowledgement. Thereā€™s no order about what comes when or who goes first. It is a messy park potluck rather than a fine dining experience.ā€

III. ĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢż My most fruitful collaboration, however — the one I can point to and say ā€œLook: That is creation! That is production!ā€ and that fills my CV — comes from my husband. We often get odd looks, even from academic pairs, when we talk about the many articles weā€™ve written together on long layovers or delayed flights, the book proposals and co-teaching, and how we tend to give conference talks together now as one. This collaboration is the closest to synthesis, which produces the best work but the unhappiest me at times.

When we work together and write, our voices blend seamlessly, and I cannot find myself within the text when I re-read it. We have gotten editorsā€™ notes confused about why the author keeps referring to themselves in the plural ā€“ fooling everyone that we are one person, even myself. In academia, this perfect synthesis can be a trap, in which a more senior academic may get more of the credit if two become one. I wonā€™t say this hasnā€™t happened. However, this is also the work of which I am most proud, that I truly could not have done on my own, the work I love most.

ā€œAlmost all of our coauthored works are more clearly the product of thinking with each other rather than a kind of oscillating ā€˜sharingā€™ of research ā€” itā€™s difficult to say that our coauthored articles are the product of two different people rather than a kind of collectivity enabled through writing as a singular (albeit multiple) enunciative subjectā€¦I suppose one of the difficulties here is that, intrinsically, collaboration ends up being a deeply intimate relationship, one in which a kind of encounter ā€” ideally, but not always ā€” will be inherently transformative, which shapes the questions, themes, and directions one pursues in their research (and beyond). While thereā€™s some fairly obvious links between what Iā€™m suggesting here and a range of theories of intersubjectivity or even a kind of hermeneutic circle, the implicit result is transformative and expansiveā€¦reinventing and reframing modes of thinking and awareness in the world.ā€

IV.ĢżĢżĢżĢżĢżĢż My final collaboration to discuss here is in many ways antithesis to these brilliant non-syntheses (and dangerously close to synthesis). It shuts down and shows my inability to branch out and become other beyond myself in a generative way. I found myself liking an Instagram photo that they had also liked, and I felt that even this could be a small collaboration. I so constantly want to connect with this person that I will give any excuse. This collaboration does not end with a back-and-forth quote; there is no echo to my own thoughts, just the text dots of an almost reply, one that never came, but that I will always try to synthesize.

— is a theorist and historian of contemporary art, Assistant Professor and Director of Art History in the Department of Visual and Performing Arts at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. She is also Academic Director of the at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Her first book is forthcoming in December, 2019, from the University of Minnesota Press.

Ģż

ā€œā€¦the erotic is not a question only of what we do; it is a question of how acutely and fully we can feel in the doing.ā€

According to Lorde, weā€™ve been mistaking the erotic for the pornographic, which is a plasticized, trivial, psychotic sensation. By giving in to a fear of feeling fully and passionately (because weā€™ve been taught to shun the erotic), we become ā€œunintentional.ā€ In so doing, we become the ā€œOtherā€ of ā€œManā€ā€“ the ā€œfeminineā€ creatures lacking ontological existence as Simone de Beauvoir philosophized in her 1949 book, The Second Sex, which we can now recognize was about so many positions beyond the gender binary she reiterated. Or, as Lorde tells us, somewhat more clearly: we become those ā€œwho do not wish to guide their own destinies.ā€

Easier perhaps, to let another bear the burden of our being, to not have to make decisions about what to do and how to live. But, in relinquishing such a ā€œburdenā€ of making our own choices, however tough the path may turn out to be, we also give up the ā€œinternal requirement toward excellence which we learn from the erotic.ā€ We give up that sense of satisfaction and completion which only an embrace of the erotic can bring us, an embrace that will bring us closest to a fullness of being and living.

Zeba has been one of my favorite travel companions, through whom I have learnt to enjoy, appreciate and appropriate the funkiest of musical tastes from Spinal Tap to David Byrne, in whose company I allow the wind to mess up my hair, wake up to sunrise kissing my face in a lakeside cottage, drive madcap from Barcelona to Pamplona to indulge my fascination with Hemingway and bulls in Pamplona, walk through purple-covered moors in search of Heathcliff and Cathy, all the while marching up and down the dales of a female friendship punctuated by similarities that have helped us overcome our differences through respectā€“ā€“not by sm/othering or collapsing into a forced sameness.

And so, celebrating many decades of embracing the power of the erotic, as we enter the senior stage of our lives, marking my entry into grandmotherhood and her own remarkable ongoing struggle with a chronic illness pushed back through her passionate joie de vivre– we drove her black turbo-charged Beetle several hundred miles recently, to a charming sun-filled cottage on Lake Champlain just south of Montreal. The hours of our journey flew by. Our personal and political selves entwined as we sang along Ģżand even danced in the car to the music of Cesaria Evora, Gilberto Gil, ĢżJunoon and Noor Jehan, and the ā€œBismillah, I will not let you goā€ of Queen.

At our lakeside retreat, we read and chatted, cooked together, and soaked in the susurrus of the water amidst the silence. We gazed admiringly at the majestic green mountains across from us on the other side of the lakeā€™s lapping waves, went for a hike on the paths around a chasm created 13,000 years ago, enjoyed an ice cream cone at a roadside creamery, and chatted some more about our families, friends, the state of the world we live in and our deep engagement with it.

Through the process of this ā€œbecoming,ā€ this life-long journey into each otherā€™s intimate worlds where the personal and the political become one, I feel I have entered what Jane Lazarre calls ā€œa heightened awareness which always seems to involve the entwining of my own life with something outside of myself.ā€

The Nigerian author Chinua Achebe called this state of feeling ā€œimaginative identification,ā€ an ever-strengthening link between ā€œself-discovery and humane conscience.ā€

To me, this is the gift of feminist friendship: where we celebrate the erotic in the endeavor, the hard work that sustained and meaningful friendship requires of us. This ā€œwork,ā€ that is the hallmark of a life well-lived, is indeed a conscious decision. It unleashes the power of the erotic, understood as commitment, to something bigger than some narrowly-defined self-interest. In Audre Lordeā€™s hallowed words, when we celebrate the erotic in any endeavor, that means we make a conscious decision to commit, because we want to, because we believe in it.

So this long-term friendshipā€“like my other life endeavorsā€“has been a conscious decision, akin, in Lordeā€™s words, again, to ā€œa longed-for bedā€ which one ā€œenters gratefullyā€ and from which one rises up ā€œempowered.ā€

It is empowering indeed, to live and bask in the light of the erotic endeavor: where you become a better you through the good company of imaginative communities, with whose help the ā€œIā€ becomes a ā€œyouā€ becomes an ā€œus.ā€

– Fawzia Afzal-Khan is a 33 year veteran of MSU. A University Distinguished Scholar and Professor of English, she directed the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies Program from 2009-15. Her areas of specialization include Postcolonial Literature and Theory, Cultural and Performance Studies and Transnational Feminist Studies. She is author and editor of five books, and her sixth, Siren Song: Understanding Pakistan Through its Women Singers,Ģżwill be published later this year by Oxford University Press. She currently holds a Fulbright Visiting Specialist Fellowship (2015-2020), is a past winner of an NEH development grant that enabled her to make aĢż documentary film on women singers of Pakistan, and returns to MSU this fall after having been a Visiting Professor of the Arts at NYU in Abu Dhabi for the 2018-19 AY, where she taught courses in Muslim Popular Culture, Transnational Feminisms and Feminist Theory in Globalizing Contexts.

Check out her blog at:Ģż