thought machine plain text

first day

a set of glyphs :::
numbers and letters ::: an alphabet
musty categories ::: creaking catalogs
the order of shelves
a rosary of text
lattice of titles topics authors
publishers editors peers

bound paper
sheaves chapters
index index index
bibliographic lists
lists of nested lists
rhizomatic reference
pointers trees
authors
walking books now buried
texts
shucked of outward bindings
harvested processed rebound
synthetic production
cogitates conjugates
cognition
knots

deep in the stacks

collisions

on the first floor
a currency of living authors
filtered gated blocked
before moving
to the upstairs
archive ranges canon sifted
shelving station platform

workers of shelving
honing pruning weeding
a tsunami of new text

electron runways
cyclone torrent
babel

workers labor

it is written
the word
the word of gods

take this dictionary
words collated in alphabets
why rearrange
why the disturbance
of sentences?
the jumble of books

the first word in babel
the utterance before splitting
from silence an emergence
of vowels & rhythm
sharp consonant blows
the ax-split still morning

the first utterance
rock language
soggy primordial marsh language
the sound of cells splitting
lightning

circumscribe
the lantern
moon
a stream of mossy tomes
across the dust-smudged
dim lit room

a raft a coin
a boatman

signal message telegraph
epistolary arrows
epistemic scrawl

these fragile ink-stained
membranes
sewn together
bound

planetarium of librarians
museum of books

the churn factory of digits

modern scribes

masters of zoom
text entomologists
articulate traversals
gymnasts of links
synthesis wonders ::: stitch weave
granular retrievals
artifact thinkers
able to leap across ontologies
across disciplinary boundaries
in a single step
the library
arrivals departures retrievals
memex ::: archive
information
mountain guides
treacherous, snow-packed
arduous learning paths
mappers counters collators
tidal wave surfers
databases streaming digits
vast unending sea of text
farmers of shelves
seeding weeding
companion planters

pollinate(!)

relational queens
hive makers

...

in the distance
the rumble of artillery fire :::
rolling tanks
voracious coal fueled regiments
blinking green light
server troops
black hole language
machines on march
cannons
flatteners
captains of
dimensional collapse
militias of erasure

a sound both low & hollow

dust storm or flood

a stampede of culture-trampling
mono culture-ramping
text-spewing ad-laced
networked surveillance robot
capitalist end-state army

....
kneel behind these
shelves the trenches
weighty books
a shelter

....

scots ::: corbie, corby, korbi
[′kɔrbɪ̢, ′korbi] ::: the raven

prayerful computation
corbie the conjurer

incantatory pipelines
a list
a recursion
::: map filter fold

a creased recitation
loops
map filter fold draw
radio waves
signal noise drift
frequencies colliding
compiling

distilled poetics
choreographic
blinking cursor
performance text

an enjambment
an alchemy
a conjuring
a spell a hex
patterns
interlocking
intertwined
knotted

artist statement

As a media composer and installation artist, I create chance-infused, open systems. I use hand-coded generative methods to create a multi-channel kaleidoscope of sound, animation and physical artifacts.
a cross-sensory, polyphonic landscape that flows from the digital cloud into the physical world.

My current work explores the porous, intimate boundaries between humans and machines.
the strange ritual of tapping glass.
the carbon cycle.
cybernetic ze.
dada data queer learning machine.
beat poet of electricity.
networked, digital hive mind.
the swarm.

Old-school codework is becoming a folk art as the mainstream technology world is subsumed by proprietary platforms. For me, code is a literature, a score, a choreographic alphabet, a poetics. I harness it to generate patterns.
a living work with levers and gears :::: a language of motion and change.

I work with open systems.
chance & improvisation. Chance is a frayed thread, a stochastic cloud, a pointillist field, a variance, a complexity, an uncertainty, a ragged line. Chance is a prayer.
a slim window of possibility to survive profound climatic change. Evolution requires variability.
fruitful deviation. A system's ability to adapt to change depends on its ability to mutate.
on trial & error & improvisation.

Mathematical models are a score. They are a blueprint to draw the contours of change and movement.
convergences, divergences, emergent patterns and cascading, system-level impacts. Mathematical models provide insight into the complexity and profound tension between independent threads and the bounds of interconnected webs.
the polyphony of life.

Time is a material / generative engine / physical flow. Time is a bendable, turbulent, wild river that drives the mill wheel of creative production.
film, sequence, labor, pages, stitched geologies.
layered artifacts.

Time is a torrent.
a repetition.
over & over obsession.
an infinite flow, a keening.
an encyclopedic production, a mimeographic churn.
a whole library of publication.
a voracious, mechanical loom.

big bog

2024.11.18

presentation for Alexis Elder's PHIL 3242
Values & Technology class

My dog died at 18 after living with me for 17 years. I left for the Minnesota north woods to lick my wounds. When she first came to live with us she would howl beside me as I played certain taut sounds on my cello.

Perhaps she thought that people needed tools.
pine resin horse hair
bow across wire across a wooden voice box to howl. The tool people.

After she died I learned what it meant to howl.
felt a keening.
in my sinew in the flesh that clings to bone through my resonant skeletal chest rising from the heart or gut or empty hands coursing through my bloody circulation.

I became an untethered body in the vast sky the dome of night the blanched and naked day.

The word "mine" - a word so extractive possessive.
drawn from the body's marrow
my other being my shadow companion
my belonging to the wildness of the world.

I am writing this from a boardwalk into the Big Bog in northern MN near Upper Red Lake.
An interpretive sign talks about the arduous process of photosynthesis - life transfer of nutrients - a slow churning circulation hard won cellular building.

One black spruce from here with a 2 inch diameter trunk had tree rings revealing an age of 127 years when it died.
Slow growth.
slow building.

I arrived here fast on a road that cuts through the 500-square mile peat bog.
the largest in the lower 48 states.

Many roads & homesteads fought to make this land "productive" by cutting channels to drain the soaked acidic nutrient-poor soils.

Many failed. There were natural backbone paths that rose from a glacial history which indigenous people more adept at finding pathways used to navigate this bog in a slower traversal.

There are also waterways to travel around and through this region. The land is slow to "produce" but it does support a rich ecological history in its own slow manner.

The slow evolution of site
allowed for a time scale of adaptation
a weaving together of living beings
mineral geologies mossy hydrologies.

Messy muddy scrubby "wasteland."
That is what this type of landscape was called when I was growing up.

Caribou once roamed these parts.
A favorite Math professor of mine had a side passion of trying to restore caribou to their historic homelands.
He was my teacher for a graduate-level Mathematics class called "Real Analysis."

Day after day we would work through proofs together.
climbing over the historic building blocks of modern mathematics.
Arduous scrawls on the chalkboard / cross outs / dusty erasures.

Slow show your work symbol by symbol by therefore & ladders.

narrow pathways perilous chains of reason.

We clambered over assemblages of proven concepts built new platforms on which to stand and build anew. Recipes of sub ingredients sub particles theorem confluence proofs constructed tents rose ideas joined to vibrate into vivid views. Glorious moments of luminous insight and then down again into murky troubled waters new use cases that added complexity.
frayed certainty & infused our newly built harmonic structures with a spectral noise
a cloudy weather static signal drift.

There was a joy in building intuition & elegance of thought.
beautiful connections webs.
a lattice of ideas & tools. The entire body gut to synapse to hand to language.
a symbology of figuring frictions resonance echo.
Scrawled systems landscapes maps.

I studied theoretical ecology.
using mathematical models to explore to draw systems ecologies.
flows & transfers.
contours of change and motion distilled.
variables tested
Is this axis important? Does this parameter matter?
How does the whole system.
the tremulous web shift if I perturb this part?

One of the underlying values of mathematical modeling was transparency of assumptions.
an honest tally of the simplifications made.
the things left out
An ethos of a humble articulation
An openness to being wrong
positing a test model system in an attempt to pull out critical structural elements.
primary actors.
critical junctures.
pivot points that tip a system.
Multivariate topologies dependencies complexities.

Diagrams mathematical models bibliographies hyperlink web spaces relational database structures back-of-the-napkin sketches
journal entries book collections scrapbooks card catalogs file systems musical scores blueprints electrical drawings maps
::: these all help us build a structure for thinking for synthesis. They reveal gaps and connections relations oppositions.

In the search for holy grail of efficiency speed standards cohesion we externalize our hand-wrought personal messy efforts to profit-driven proprietary tools.

Do we really want to cede that much?

Do we want to think without a body without an ecology a landscape?

Do we really want to accept an IV mind drip from a disembodied decoupled metallic on off digital opaque profit-driven carbon spewing resource depleting army of computers churning through plundered texts to deliver a flattened biased mimicry of thought?

What does it mean to think without hands? Or without prosthetics pinned to bone fused to shoulder sockets physical extension intention a body being transformed but still grounded in an "i".
a physical cogitation sparked cognition a rhythmic thinking weaving built on pulse or stride or breath. Messy ragged noisy reception tuned to sensory perception drawn from deep time coded memory swallowed and woven into a thick & arduous now.
an embodied here.

Should humans surrender our messy changeable multithreaded turbulent matrix of thoughts dreams communications relations for a flattening steam roller LLM AI machine?
LLMs collapse when trained on recursively generated data.
This is precisely what they offer us in trade for our surrender.
an impenetrable opaque dimensional collapse.

Should we externalize our tools thoughts desires be pressed into a mold a profile a groomable target.
a vortex of accelerating mindless consumption?

Are we merely sensory appendages raw material creative cogs for an uber techne large-scale profit machine?

Should we relinquish our memory to the proprietary cloud Our money to digits
Our maps our sense of space landscape place
reduced to a single moment-by-moment Siri-fed line ...
our engagement with time with calendar temporal context
surrendered to next-day next-hour mobile alerts
our memory to someone else's digital storage silo?

Should we flatten all our dimensions? Outsource all our senses? Be led about by a constructed single-click marketed digital desire?

Velocity isn't a virtue
if our eyes are closed
& we are lost
pressing down hard on the gas pedal
isn't a wise solution.

There can be a tyranny in acceleration.
Velocity chaos
a too-fast-can't-maintain-a-foothold stormy vortex can be a slippery slope a pathway to nothingness not being.

I drove along the car-screen navigation blue single line along the time ticking speedometer miles & arrived alone at the Big Bog.
surrendered to its late Fall subtle shifting colors.
an aching vibrant slowness.

The interwoven interdependent community here is hard won constrained by a slow nutrient carbon cycle a sluggish choreographic exchange an arduous decomposition mineral release a slow knot nutrient uptake photosynthetic building.

Humans extract accelerate and yet my own body coupled with its years of accumulated plastic exoskeleton forever chemicals surging through my bloodstream embedded in my tissues will decompose at an even more glacial pace.

the death of a tree
a long resinous groan
then heavy mass through air
thud to ground
through tangled branches of neighbor
trees shrubs mossy landing
back to minerals and carbon

my own death will leave an exoskeleton of
plastics a mound of (un)de-composable artifacts of this consuming life
or rather a geologically achingly slow decomposition into toxic pellets colorful sand

this anthropocene this epoch
a slowest of bogs
a bog of all bogs
a synthesis of oil
of bogs an evolutionary challenge.

a strange mineralization.
a scifi molecule
of cyborg plastic morphologies
a disjoint relation
to evolutionary biologic time

a confounding of the organics to decomposers to uptake of minerals to photosynthetic tree of life a mimicry of the circle of life
in chains of plastic necklace
dinosaur bone to oil to plastics to
planetary chokehold

go slow
velocity is not an end
in & of itself
the hare's acceleration into
a void isn't better than the
turtle wielding a loom & hoe

My dog's name was Sky.
I held her carbon cycle mineral body one last time. Her fur & paws.

Sky was a walker a curious researcher
a naturalist sniffer
she broke the tether of my screen time.
She showed me the value of uselessness
wordlessness no pixels.

The singular relation
there is no AI reconstruction
you can't average this
you can't generate this with a machine
you can't exchange this for anything better.

This is not a data point a deviance to be averaged out
to be swept
away.

a circulation a synthesis a relation a physical memory an archive
in my mind
an imprint in my body my hands.

down streets & hallways
walking ghosts stumbling no one sees each other greets each other.

Our communications are mediated
triangulated filtered tracked redirected harnessed through centralized turnstile sorting machines cataloged by the amazon buy-button clearinghouses algorithmic friendships
& warfare

we cross the threshold
from the land of organic analog vinyl film paper ink
to the pixelated ad-laced streaming digital virtual world
across
the river styx
a boatman
a coin a journey

Here in this diverse generous generative bog

the wind in my hair i hear a tree slowly fall
into the embrace of a glacial-etched damp & mossy tomb

A smell of pungent green.

project description by mags david

2024.08.28

The UMD library invited Kathy McTavish to join us as our “artist in residence.” Residence is the key word in this invitation. She was hanging around here all the time anyway, and was keenly interested in being able to stay after the early closing time of our summer hours.

We have quickly embraced our artist as one of us, engaging in a search for common ground, shared understanding, the ability to see each other. Library staff often appear as invisible helpers in the hazy idea of what a library is. It feels good to have someone pay attention to us. And Kathy is really paying attention. And we love to hear what she is thinking; we can follow the thought tendrils that creep in to connect words, paper, shelves, metadata, predictive text.

It’s a joint production. Changing our minds.

All good, right? But what is actually happening over here? The artist has been meeting with individual library staff members to learn about what we do, attending a few staff meetings/gatherings. It’s lots of conversation, then the artist goes away (or sometimes comes back to stalk the quiet, empty library) and writes - words, phrases, poems, code. We end up with images and text strewn on a counter on the second floor, below monitors that loop straight line impressions that vaguely evoke our environment. Come take a look, there’s lots to absorb.

The Residency will leak out onto campus in the shape of class visits, a Visual Culture Series conversation, and a reception - eventually. This whole thing will continue through the end of spring semester, pay attention to your library so you don’t miss anything.

project description by ian moore

2024.08.28

When Mags, Kathy, and I began developing this artist residency, we were intentionally vague about what it was we wanted the final product to look like. We tried not to clarify.

This was, in part, to allow Kathy latitude in her exploration. Mags and I wanted to give her the opportunity to meet with library staff, discuss their work with them, and consider the library’s spaces and functions as they fit within our academic community. It was not — is not — for us to be prescriptive as we support Kathy’s work. Our goal is to facilitate her exploration as best we can, giving her the space to develop and iterate her work as she learns the library, its staff, and its community.

Artificial intelligence was also a spur for our lack of prescriptivism. Here, now, as I write this in 2024, many of us are tired of talking about AI in its many new forms. We are tired of AI, but we are also tired of the discourse around AI, the unending rehashing of the same points over and over. We know that the voice of AI is the voice of confidence. Confidence in the sense that it projects certainty and security, but also confidence in the sense of the con. It is orderly, it looks professional, it knows nothing at all.

So yes, Kathy’s work is messy. It has iterated, morphed, changed in the several months since Kathy started her residency. The mess is intentional. The mess is the point. Take, for example, Kathy’s interest in citations. The citation is, for Kathy, a signifier and the signified, a representation of human interaction and human curiosity. A citation represents order, too, the ability to return to a piece of knowledge in the place where it was found, but overlaid on that order is the idea that knowledge as constructed by humans is not a perfect thing, not a thing that matches neatly with the confident projects created by artificial intelligence.

Sometimes I think the mess is part of the point. Sometimes I think the mess is the point. When Kathy’s exhibit started, there were just a few monitors in her corner of the library’s second floor. The monitors displayed images generated by code that developed, an unending parade of shape and color. Now, a few months later, the monitors are not alone. They have been joined by fabric, by string, by bound books, by images, and by Kathy’s writing. They are of a piece and not of a piece, a messy alternative to AI order.

Kathy would tell you, I think, that her writing is not the strongest part of her work. I want to disagree with her on that. I love the images Kathy has created, but I have connected to them more strongly because of the words she has paired them with as the work has developed. When she spoke with library staff a little while ago, a phrase jumped out at me: personal polyphony. Kathy’s work is her personal polyphony, a multiplicity of voices examining, interpreting, and ruminating on the ideas she has come in contact with as she has explored the library. Her words, from her introduction of herself to her rumination on citations, add poetry to the mix.

Kathy’s work lives on the second floor of the library, in the middle of a space students, faculty, and community members use to collaborate, to work, to be. I love that we are able to house this very human work in the middle of a human space, with Kathy’s work offering a respite from all that AI confidence. Here, now, in this moment, the mess is the point.

dear library

2024.04.01 an introduction for library staff

background ::: who am i?

I was born in Iowa City, IA, grew up in St. Paul, spent my late teens and early 20s in South Mpls. and have now lived in northern Minnesota for almost thirty years. I came to Duluth as an ASL interpreter at UMD and that supported my way through school here.

As a media composer and installation artist, I create chance-infused, open systems. My work explores the porous, intimate boundaries between humans and machines. I use hand-coded generative methods to create a multi-channel kaleidoscope of sound, animation and physical artifacts ::: a cross-sensory landscape that flows from the digital cloud into the physical world.

I have been the recipient of numerous commissions, grants, fellowships and residencies from the Jerome Foundation, the McKnight Foundation, Minnesota State Arts Board, American Composers Foundation, Walker Art Center, Northern Lights.mn, Tweed Museum of Art, Zeitgeist New Music Quartet, Arteles International Artist Residency (Finland), Creative Community Leadership Institute (Bush Foundation / Intermedia Arts), United States Artists / Cheswatyr Foundation, Puffin Foundation, the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council and others.

I have a background in cello performance, mathematics, ecology, music theory and code. The confluence of these disciplines informs my work as a composer and multimedia artist. As both a musician and a mathematician, I explore time-based, multi-threaded systems and chance-infused, emergent patterns. As a queer artist I am interested in the infinite, bendable between::: the erotic dynamics of tapping glass ::: the carbon cycle ::: the fragile, electric cyborg body ::: the networked, digital hive mind ::: the swarm.

Old-school codework is becoming a folk art as the mainstream technology world is subsumed by proprietary platforms. Generative, networked, "ecological" work has a digital materiality that has interested me ::: a living work with its levers and gears :::: its language of motion and change.

For me code is a literature, a score, a choreographic alphabet, a poetics. My work uses projection, networked animation and sound to create media landscapes. I also produce algorithmic prints and stitch renderings made by a computer-driven robotic long-arm quilting machine. I map code to sound, walls, cloth and paper (touch, sound, sight).

Coming from a wordless music composition and a math background, I use abstraction to represent an underlying physics ::: a strangeness ::: a pulse / tonal fray / noise / hex / underground / subtextual / space. Time has been a core driver of my sound work and animations. I work in series ::: film frames, book pages, prints, algorithmic quilt installations. Code is a literature ::: a pattern language ::: a score. It is a choreography ::: a performance. A code renderer is the weaver ::: the mill ::: the alchemist ::: the wizard. Code is a spell ::: an incantation ::: an intent.

I welcome people of all ages to engage with my work. I try to create spaces that can be interacted with digitally and physically. My work is legible beneath the surface. My code is human-readable and I try to make myself available for deeper discussions about how things work. I have a mission to make creative codework and algorithmic abstraction accessible to other makers and audience members in my community. I am an active mentor and collaborator in this region and beyond.

I have worked in code space since the very early days of the internet. Those days were infused with an optimistic vision of building tools towards an accessible, shared, grassroots, inter-connected information space that has since been subsumed by a small set of tech monopolies. I have long advocated for making coding tools accessible ::: to own our means of creative / knowledge production and dissemination. I feel that this is all the more urgent in the face of AI-driven extractive, biased (colonizing), hidden algorithms taking increasing control over our lives.

see examples of my work at ::: https://mctavish.work

goals:

Much of my algorithmic, networked art practice is exhibited in site-specific physical installations with companion online exhibits and often also a collaborative performance / artist talk / discussion. Several years ago I had the luxury of creating an exhibit at the Tweed Museum of Art that lasted over a year. This allowed me to create opportunities for ongoing collaboration, conversations ::: an embeddedness and temporal relationship to community and place that I found deeply rewarding. This project will be similarly long running.

I am grateful to have been granted access to physical and electronic resources at the UMD library from April 2024-May 2025. I am looking forward to working with staff at the library to research and map/model/visualize the physics of information flow and memory ::: the ways we archive and diagram thinking / knowledge. I find this particularly compelling in light of the current move towards an opaque, proprietary, extractive, profit-driven AI information landscape.

I plan to read & write and to create an evolving, distributed, multimedia exhibit, series of poster sessions and discussions (April 2024-May 2025). This cross-sensory, trans/media installation will tease out the sculptural / temporal system of archival navigation / knowledge building and dispersal that exists in the sanctuary of a public library space.

Materials from this project will be archived in a dedicated website / online exhibit that I will host starting May 1, 2024 at ::: https://mctavish.work/library/.

I will host this site & am happy to work with you on any other artifacts you would like to keep there ::: I am thankful for your time and resources and I want to be of service to you as well. My goal is to resonate and surface the nouns & verbs of what happens here. The objects & the chordal relationships between ...

the existential role of libraries

my relationship to libraries
see also ::: naming

I was a young gender-bending dyke for as long as I remember but at the time I had no words for this. At first I just thought I was a boy ...

In high school I found the word "homosexuality" in a book about ancient Greece. I had no particular reason to be haunting that section of the stacks ::: no special interest in ancient Greece. That I was haunting that section of the stacks indicates how hard I was combing the books for a word to hold onto. This is a common experience among folks of my generation and earlier ::: the library search stage of the coming out process. An existential quest for naming.

(An existential call for multidimensional naming ::: the see also. Projections / mappings / translations => shelf placement. Temporal naming / categorization / reference ::: shifting, fluid, changeable, traversable.)

Like many young queer people of my generation, I dropped out of high school and hit an urban scene where I could hope to find community. I was hungry for everything. I had very little money but I created a learning, thriving self by accessing free opportunities around me. This included libraries. I hung about the downtown Minneapolis (Hennepin County) public library where I perused books and took advantage of their listening rooms. I checked out vinyl & spent hours alone in a room with a turntable. After work I hung out in the old Walter library on the campus of the University of MN ::: floors of old books, creaking stairs, dusty windows, quiet corners. I stood before the shelves & thought ::: I will read all of these books. At an old used bookstore I bought the first book with my earnings ::: a thesaurus ::: the magical book of words.

I am educated in the wild so I have gaping holes in my knowledge. This includes my lack of citation skills. I have settled in on MLA for this project. But wow ... so much to learn.

I love this pursuit ::: the citation (!) ... a bracketing of exchange ::: a coin left at the altar ::: a moment taken to acknowledge the gift of that reference. Reading can feel like mountain climbing, navigating through a wide open ocean. When dropped in the middle of a text ::: a strange field ::: a foreign topic ::: references can act as a critical deciphering tool ::: a foothold ::: a rope.

I love open systems ::: the move away from horizontal tables for a fluid, vertical join table with many-to-many possibilities ::: with changeable, temporal relations.

I have so much to learn from you ::: from the history, objects & practice in this space. What will future libraries / archives look like? What will information wayfinding look like? Who will own the means of knowledge production, archive / cultural memory, indexing, dissemination, mapping ... citation?

What will web 3.0 look like? I passionately wish for an accessible, open, legible, semantic web where individuals have agency outside of the locked wards of proprietary frameworks and crypto-currency-governed motivations. I am interested in the thinginess of information nodes but also in the revealed aspect of reference and relation ::: a declarative, bare-bones state of linkage.

Patterns

I am interested in non-linear, multi-dimensional, multi-threaded, changeable, relational, networked, humble, open systems.

I am interested in cultural memory and representation, the politics of nestedness (of categories), the existential value of abstraction (zoom), reflection and theory.

I am interested in intersection, collisions ::: the relational join table ::: those nodes / knots where synthesis & magic & friction happen.

Cross-schema translations ...the aesthetics of transparency ...

citation summary :::

citation as an intersectional site :::
a site of exchange

citation as mineralization ::: (photo)synthesis

citation as an alchemy ::: friction adding noise ::: complicating resonating honoring
marking colliding :::
chemical reactions ::: catalysts
mixing ::: fusion | fray

citation as a summoning conjuring invocation

citation as a resistance ::: a presencing

citation as a dimensional turn :::
creating a space in a flatland (lineland) :::
building a pop-up book space :::
a chordal hymn
nesting | situating | contextualizing

bibliographic space ::: building a world
defining a topology ::: a map
a sense of neighborhood
a near/far metric
holding up the tent
weaving ::: knotting ::: fishing nets

citations as pathway
foothold ladder rung
knot

citations as discrete, articulate, legible, artifacts of learning | thinking | clambering | gestalting ::: a lineage :::
a relational join trapeze

citation as resistance to being subsumed by opaque large language model (LLM) confirmation-bias machines

notes :::

bibliographic agency
playing an active role
in the circulation of information

demystify citation
first principles not fragile formats
citing siting sighting

decouple content from presentation
(the semantic web :::: visible articulate relationship assertion)
a citation is just an encoding of an address
like how USPS address format encodes a place
that could also be referred to by geo coordinates or the hyperlocal descriptor tag ::: "that blue book on the lower shelf"

memory & citation
the strange work of escher-like nested citations

citation is messy & open-ended ::: incomplete ::: a partial story ::: a trace a breadcrumb ::: an effort

patterns & thinginess of noun but also verb ::: the passing of information from hand to hand ::: the thinginess of transmission of media ::: of wires that transmit

shelves are neighborhoods call number metrics
call number topologies

citations create a virtual neighborhood ::: a topological space
they hold up the tent where shared learning can happen
they nest the text ::: they turn a text into a room | a world
an assemblage a collage a shoebox

citation ::: a before | after threshold
a summoning
preferred citation (like preferred pronouns)
how do i want you to refer to me :::
my schema my critical axes
my intersectional join
my embodied synthesis

slow way down
create an intent
lay out the ingredients
information as a physical entity
creating a skeletal frame, a circulation ::: a structure of relation
& then using text to sew these things together
to conjure
to breathe life into ::: to animate
(list poems)
making sentences
collating words
making language

the problem of proprietary big tech (like google) defining our metrics of distance | closeness (near/far) :::
defining adjacency contiguous contingent associational join ::: our graph

assemblage
recursion
circle
pollinate

combinatorial, compositional
couplings
stacked thoughts
circuitry spark
electron runways
tracks
fuse solder knot
energize animate

contaminate distress disrupt

a virus
a circulation of scholarship & ideas
self reinforcing
the ways citation ecosystems impact access flow &
dulls the impact of disruptive new ideas
the ways citational metrics impact opportunities for
advancement in academic settings
& the way information space
evolves ::: the possible structures that get built

access & retrieval
breadcrumbs of thinking
::: a map ::: an architecture of synthesis

tai chi push hands
slow traversal
de construction
composability computability (turing)

re-presents
representations references pointers
reify relations

surrogates ::: citations cards link address

a map ::: a way to find
an address
a locator

quipo & woven noise cloth ::: knots ::: the sisyphean task of getting a semblance of cloth from the tangle of strings strung in 2 dimensions cinching down the memory the synthetic moment the gestalt

the attempt to keep the thread from unwinding ::: a staving off of entropy loss unraveling ::: a relationship to the physics of taut thread stretch of weave ::: archive artifact memory

artifact of intersection
synthesis
encounter
moment

dropped into the middle of a text :::
strange field ::: foreign topic ::: mountain range :::
the reference as foothold ::: a rope ::: a ladder

the citation (!) ... a bracketing of exchange ::: a coin left at the altar ::: a moment taken to acknowledge the gift of that reference

the thinginess of information nodes but also in the revealed aspect of reference and relation ::: a declarative, bare-bones state of linkage

Near-far ... not just most likely next word or pixel
but by means of link, join, human-defined connection.

relational joins
chutes & ladders
footnote as transport

bibliography as breadcrumbs | path
the juncture points the joins the intersections the collisional points
knowledge as a vector space :::
branching trees networked directed graphs
zoom
hypertext
a skeletal frame
the open doors

hypertext architectures
hypermedia sculpture
pop-up book
leaps joins jumps

the fractal, recursive nature of info spaces
punk citation :::
an explosion of footnotes & citations & index & bibliography chains
thinking about intersectional junctions & collisional junctions ::: keeping all the axes present (no flattening)

citation as constructing a new nearness ::: a topology of citational neighborhood ::: graph paths

what is the root?
a personal landscape | forest
who is nesting who?

infinite intersecting webs of data
semantic graph sentences
xPath
linked open data
RDFa
JSON-LD
Web Ontology Language (an owl)
possible formats
possible linguistics of traversal
of relation
of connectance

show your work manifesto (!)
make visible all the uncertainty
awkward struggles
dictionary lookups ::: breadcrumbs
clamoring clambering
surface all of the beginner's mind
frustration
collision
encounter
render the gymnasium of reading
the linkage trapeze
like math ::: cross things out
a personal signature to the use of tools
ink blood pulse breath
skeletal resonation
geologic imprint

infinite labyrinth
linkage reference
connective glue

maps

a macrame
a knotted net
a community fishing expedition

articulate referential thinking
documentation builds a history
resists the erasure of LLM flooding
provides a raft
asserts memory

archival models of memory & dynamic relational memory
making sense out of ...
re enactments

curdling (Legones) :::
intersectional action / thought / existence
ambiguation
boundaries crossed
intersections of discipline culture history
curdling as in
complicating

memory in the cultural car wash / erasure

when to pin down when to release
ephemeral sweep of books indices histories

a hyperspace a locus

a twisting tangled shifting cube

ecological gestalts ::: the whole the meta the super ::: ecological systems formed of granularities nodes vertices flows exchange synthesis production / creation / release

situated knowledge (harroway)
interlocking
enmeshed thinkings

cross over
the ferryman the boatman
a coin
a threshold
a relational constellation popup book of
arteries and nerves

an alchemy of description

referential fabric provides a means of traversal
& zoom

list of citations
an assemblage
a placing two things side by side
to create a 3rd space
to complicate
to resonate
to expand & contradict
to build
a nest a ladder a world

nested knowledges relational knowledges site-specific knowledges
historic knowledges velocity of knowledges
collision of knowledges
citation containers bracketed knowledges

a cluster of citations
creates a constellation
an unresolved space
an open system

or it can cinch things down
nail them down

the underlayments of building
thought

charged intersections
local point & neighborhood
observable frame / bracketing / :::

local behavior as a function
a differentiability a mapping
a connect the dots accountability

entanglement containment jumble assemblage
space time convergence
loose coupling shifting allegiance
situational packets aggregates

a snarl ::: contested joins
2 rivers hurtling towards a
confluence ::: a joint topography
a convergence of velocities ::: a turbulence

citation as :::
polyphony
vibrant ecologies
twisting threads

how do we cite each other
cite the cup of coffee meditations
cite the vivid green of summer
inflected pointers
pointers with a brogue

there is a there there
that thing assemblage knot
a braided thing
that thick dimensional moment
phenomenon ::: cluster
bracketed gestalt
landscape | context
ray of sun

to revel in the sensory synthetic moment of connection
touch

resist the cybernetic supersonic averaging mush
that melting pot :::
(colonization & obliteration)
blinking green server farm lighted caves
devouring erasing replacing
blotting out the sun
coal plume dry planet

----

Derrida's différance
collisions & spark
a together compare contrast
fusion

citation :::
a site
a point
an exchange
a moment of fusion
synthesis
collision
a knot a net
a join

defamiliarize destabilize
make strange & complex
to complicate
(twisted rope)

build ladders pathways
tunnels
for each other to follow
liberate
resonate & connect
echo or fray

each one, pull one (Alice Walker)

Walker, Alice. Horses Make a Landscape Look More Beautiful : Poems. 1st ed., Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984.

citation as grounding
vs. the ai oracle
digital cloud metaphor | poppy field :::
fake transcendence
rewiring greenwashing
false narrative that hides the
destruction of the natural world
toxic body mind duality
false dream of a heaven-like escape
delusion of purity
masking of a resource guzzling cybernetic
future
citation as grounding as choice as handshake
as something simple and articulate
and just enough

not over fitted curve but
just enough
a start a blueprint
a seed

nodal point
explicate in detail the conditions
bracket moment bound
citation ::: acting out (performing)
::: making explicit ones'
assemblage / ingredients / recipe

troubling the intersection
creating a thickness :::
a density
to a linear
document
a mass

"Never express yourself more clearly than you are able to think." (Niels Bohr)
leave it messy
leave the clues
leave books open on the table

leave ragged primordial material :::
the potential for a future emergence

::: mineralization (photo)synthesis
thought (books) as a life form

a diagram a map a blueprint
an architecture

writing ::: bibliography as creating
a nest for the reader
a nest of branches from different trees

these cites (sites) are spaces
beam-me-up spaceships

rhizomatic diffraction
an orbit
to cogitate (photosynthesis a form of?)
packets knapsacks

the dimensions :::
citational degrees of freedom
a pointer
a doi
a complete record of data
the thing itself
just a pronoun
a dimensional collapse

a pointer to a bound thing ... a point in time package
clinging to citational ladders to exist in the torrent of ironing erasure folding ::: ai's torrent flood

when things come together & come apart ::: metaphor photosynthesis knots chords citation microaggression gestalt spark alchemy metamorphosis epistemological packet logic ladder algebraic operation
computation an algebra ::: putting pieces together lacunae gap longing
a frame a stage a bridge a spine thick now a friendship graph node causal relation asynchronous exchange ::: or axis of symmetry
translation mapping threshold aporetic collision binary border
kitchen table polyphonic cut

a threshold

a spectral place
a conjuring
an alchemy
a hologram
point / node ::: an obstacle ::: something to trip over ::: something to fall into (a storm grate)

points in the matrix as a perch ::: for the angel or bird
reading as computation
the constellation of domains / hypertext :::
a game of chutes & ladders
a resistance network ::: a way out of the AI kingdom
a pathway network railway telegraph

learning to swim

cognition
points of exchange
a din

interchange interdiscursive intertwine
a summoning
a conjuring
to animate with ghosts

a collage of different thinkers
ideas namings perceptions
an echo ::: illumination
an illuminated manuscript
ripples ::: waves

a reframing of the original utterance
making it strange again
re positioning in this new site

bibliographic spaces resist
flattening by the steamroller
tanks of large language model
proprietary AI

"in the end there was only one sentence" -corbie
the flattening of the world

memory

mapping personal
communal
knowledge graphs

bibliography ::: lists of lists
citation ::: a list of attributes | coordinates
a hydrated reading list ::: follow the references tree
an activated energized pulsing body of interconnected cells

embody the synthesis
sing the electric rhizomatic body :::
the currents flows root systems
=> emergent green

citizen scholars unite (!)
build our reading guides ...
zines | old-school hypertext
worlds webs
flickering universe
lighthouse
signals
telegraph
exchange

embodied knowledge

acknowledgments

This project was developed during an artist residency and evolving exhibit at the Kathryn A. Martin Library (UMN Duluth) 2024-2025. I am grateful for their support.

Kathy McTavish is a fiscal year 2024 recipient of a Creative Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.

under construction - thought machine