To Our Patrons,
We wanted to give you an update of our activities under the difficult circumstances of the covid-19 pandemic. Our model, honed over many years, has been to phase synergistically between online interactions and in-person gatherings of experimental format, in order to create cross-currents and build momentum. Some activities have had taken a hybrid form, experimenting with strategies for combining in-person and distributed activities, with positive feedback loops between them. Research-creation residencies and cross-travel between our hubs in North America, Europe, Brazil, and Australia, have helped keep the flow of energies and ideas moving.
With the pandemic, the situation has changed. One of our main staging grounds, the SenseLab studio space at Concordia University, has been shuttered by official order since early March (sadly, we were not even allowed back to save the plants we have been nursing there for 15 years in some cases). The activities at the off-campus space we were able to set up with the added support of our Patreon funding have had to be cut back. This space, nicknamed UnderSpazz, is a collectively managed living/working space with a full basement and terrace for group activities, and at least one bedroom left open at all times to provide free transitional housing for collaborators arriving in Montreal for studies or artistic/research residencies. Certain in-person interactions have continued at UnderSpazz, with (and playing with) social distancing requirements. But of course the pandemic restrictions have had a big impact on how we can operate. Travel between the hubs has ceased, and a number of collaborators who were in residency in Montreal have had to return to their home countries. This has tipped the balance toward online activities. We have been grappling with the Zoom-fatigue and confinement-entropy so many people are dealing with, trying to find creative ways to enliven the online. Here are some of the activities that continue:
— Three philosophical reading groups are regularly operating on Skype and Zoom, two network-wide and one under the primary initiative of the Australian hub, but open to all. The readings currently under way are: microsociologist Gabriel Tarde’s classic The Laws of Imitation; A.N. Whitehead’s Process and Reality; and Brian Massumi’s 99 Theses for the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto.
— The Australian hub has launched an initiative coming out of their reading group to spark a collectively invented distributed event to take place in December around “intensity” and “intensive magnitude,” key concepts for alternative pedagogy and alter-economic thinking.
— A fourth reading group is taking place as an email exchange (an option for the Zoomed-out). It is on schizoanalysis and intensity, related to the move toward a December event. The discussion is beginning with a chapter of Erin Manning’s forthcoming book For a Pragmatics of the Useless entitled “Practicing the Schizz.”
— Publishing: the 3Ecologies Book Series at Punctum Books has a bumper crop of titles coming out this autumn.
— Coding for the 3E Process Seed Bank continues on the 3E github. This is the creation of a collaborative, living archive (an “anarchive”: an ongoing gathering-site of traces of events that might seed further events, as opposed to an inert storage place for documentation). The Process Seed Bank is conceived as a part of a future alter-economic platform. (For more information, see the 3E pages on the senselab.ca site). Portions of the seed bank are up and running in beta for testing and experimentation. An event will be organized in the coming months to bring this project to the network as a whole.
— Propositions for small, in-person (outdoors, socially distanced) events are intermittently launched, most recently one in Montreal related to the December intensive magnitude event.
— The 3E/SenseLab Basecamp, our basic networking tool encompassing the entire network, continues, as well as the smaller Slack channel where collaborators wishing to be in daily interaction share images, concept seeds, and lures.
In short, we’re hanging in there!
We greatly appreciate your continued support. If you’re interested in more information on our activities, don’t hesitate to be in touch at 3ecologiesinstitute@gmail.com. We wish you all good health and fortitude for weathering these troubling times.
