Wednesday Canberra weather: regardless of any thing Neil Finn may have said, you don’t really have your own personal weather bubble. You can easily test this by travelling from the Woden Valley to the northside on foggy morning. Or getting on a plane in December and flying to Helsinki.
So those of you who are in Canberra today will probably experience much the same weather as each other. Warm to hot and slighty sticky. The weather equivalent of spilling cocoa on your new trousers.
Chemical interventions such as deodorant, sunscreen, mosquito repellent and anti-histamines are strongly indicated. Consider long before you commit to opaque tights, however hairy your legs are. Once the sun is over the yard arm, applications of gin and tonic may be beneficial.
This writing workshop is grounded in the premise that collaboratorsbegin from a point of mutual entanglement, in the quantum physical sense of matter (read: the writer) attaining ontological definition at and not before the moment of union with other matter (Barad 2007). The quantum understanding of time and space in fact renders theft impossible – or, rather, it designates theft an existential condition. My boundaries as an entity come into being through my subsuming of other substances into my own definition: taking anything is taking shape.
The workshop’s structure and process borrows (steals) two figures – one from literature, the other from science – as devices for thinking and making with. Renga, the traditional Japanese mode of collaborative poetry, provides a formal structure: participants will be asked to write poetry with each other, responding to each other’s poems, three lines followed by two lines, on and on, spontaneously and anonymously. Yet renga’s linear nature will be foregone in favour of an experiment in hyperbolic space, most easily recognised in the curvaceous, crenelated, coral-like surface that crochet brings into being (see Wertheim 2003; Crochet Coral Reef 2016). Participants will write their two- or three-line segments of poetry on either a pentagonal or a hexagonal card, which will allow ensuing three- or two-line responses to be connected to any one of that card’s 5 or 6 edges. As it goes on, the multi-authored poem elaborates itself into an inter-connective fabric with no fixed beginning or ending – an object suggestive of the light-fingered workings of entanglement.
Barad, Karen (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning.
Crochet Coral Reef. Institute for Figuring. http://crochetcoralreef.org/about/index.php
Wertheim, Margaret (2007). A field guide to hyperbolic space: An exploration of the intersection of higher geometry and feminine handicraft. Los Angeles: Institute for Figuring
