What remains opaque in my area of work is the idea of spatiality. I got interested in immersive audio, often also called spatial audio several years ago. Then I realised that these technologies, such as binaural, produce immersion and spatiality and these are not the same thing. I’m not the first person to notice that immersion is a slippery idea, but spatiality is less well explored. The relationship between audio technology and spatiality is clear but also inconsistent. There’s some interplay between the sounds themselves, their placement around the microphone, acoustics, technology and probably the way a story is put together, so that perhaps listeners are primed to experience a sense of spatiality. Audio producers are sometimes surprised by the spatial qualities of their own work and may believe in the genius of the microphone at capturing space. But I’d like to think more about the genius of the edit…
What remains opaque in how you study the world?
Says the shadow: the person under the duvet under their tangle of yarn; her name lives in the folds made by her incessant circling on the surface imprinting her wanders like the coastal stones that make you forget how to walk, in slanted / in buckled/ in dancing forms your name
drops and because I move in flux with you I also drop your name, luckily the covers remember and fumble uuhndruhhuhhh back in dreams disguising it differently every time: an orca, the Yaxche, a stone tiger, crushed stones, slanted landscapes, a small bird.
I witness her thoughts wound round and around the room—endlessly, tirelessly, picking, cutting, reknotting, and squinting so intensely she traps herself inside her eyes.
A pulse emerges
And the letters on the pages and the words from all the voices she thought she knew turned into this heavy choir of uhhh’s. This closed-eyed sensing had her whole body flushed in swirls.
A pulsing releases
through breath and hums interweaving with the squacks of the seagulls and the chirps of robins reciting alongside the drumming rain and her put-put heart.
The movement of the yarn always unravelling nearby. Running directionlessly around her until she’s sealed in a cocoon materialized by her own mind.
It’s midsummer that revealed uuuhhhndreuhhs under-duvet thoughts. These marching swirls, having taught her whole body, now unfurled, hung, opened, closed, tensed, braided, knotted, wrapped in an incoherent web. I am born from this, she weaves within it. A language felt and thought by tugs and pulls: a resistance an instinct.
But this is inside my room, a cave of sorts, it’s outside where the beginning ingredients are untangled to pure fluff. Where the supposedly fine detail is made a general assumption, and outside her room’s web is smoothed out into something legible. This tangled sentipensamiento resists pure “visual intake”, as it’s only just a corner of an infinite.
This knotting is a split second of other split second knottings; a blink, a looping-on-duvet-fold, or the own instant movements of my shadow and the shadow-maker’s. It speaks flux and imagination, an endless feeling which just so happens
to be opaque.
Read the rest of the article at https://www.mirandaandrea.com/aguasombras
What remains opaque in how I study the world is where ‘thinking-feeling’ begins and ends.
I am drawn to forms of intelligence that emerge without intention, authorship, or central control. A trail of ants forming across a pavement, pollinators moving through a landscape, a spider’s web trembling with vibration, or a slime mold collective tracing its way through a forest floor. These emergent phenomena challenge assumptions about knowledge as something gathered, possessed and mastered by an individual. They suggest that understanding may arise through relations, movements and encounters between bodies and environments.
My practice research often begins with observation, but observation quickly encounters its limits. Much remains beyond perception. Communication occurs through signals I cannot sense. Decisions emerge from interactions too numerous to follow. What I call intelligence may simply be the shape of my own curiosity meeting something irreducibly ‘other’.
Slime mold leaves behind trails that function as a form of externalised memory, guiding future movement through spaces already explored. It may even anticipate environmental change. A spider’s web is more than a structure; it is a sensory and cognitive extension of the spider itself. Memory, perception, and action are distributed across strands of silk and vibrations in motion. In both cases, cognition/ consciousness appears to exceed the organism, unfolding through material relations within a living-fabric world.
The opacity is not only in these more-than-human lives but in the act of research itself. Every method brings to the forefront certain relations, while obscuring others. Every attempt to make the world legible produces new blind spots.
Rather than seeking complete understanding, I find value in remaining with these uncertainties. Study becomes a practice of sustained – even sacred – attention to what exceeds explanation. A way of learning from forms of intelligence that cannot be fully translated into human terms.
What remains opaque in how I study the world is my own position within it. In BITS Research Project – https://bitsresearch.github.io/about, I do not study student transition only as an external topic, I also stand inside it. I am a researcher exploring how students adapt to university, but also a student learning how to adapt again. Having worked and studied in Hong Kong, Canada, the UK, the Czech Republic, and the Netherlands, my understanding of transition is shaped by different cultural layers, encounters, and uncertainties.
As Jenkins (2006) reminds us, “I can’t claim to be a neutral observer in any of this”. To study transition, then becomes an act of adaptation. My researcher positionality is not fully outside the field, and the student is not only an object of study. This opacity is not a weakness, but a condition of becoming.
Transition rarely moves in a clean line. It may pause, retreat, circle back, or break apart. This is important to my practice when thinking about students with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) because traditional, normative models of transition often fail marginalised students by framing variations from the linear path as “deviant” or “deficient” (Colley, 2007). Our experiences cannot be understood through a simple structure of cause, effect, and outcome.
We know more about wars than any generation before us.
We see them live. We analyse maps, statistics, territories and political decisions. Yet much remains opaque.
Wars do not only destroy cities and landscapes. They poison environments, alter ecosystems and leave traces in humans, animals and plants alike.
Their deepest consequences often remain unseen. They are carried in bodies, memories, gestures, silences and inherited fears.
Wars officially end, but their movements continue. They travel through generations, shaping lives long after the last shot has been fired.
In my work MANDELA – Pilot of the Winds, I ask what happens to those who survive. Can wounded souls ever fly again?
Performance by Crystalle Bobbe
All images © Wolfgang Wigands.
Comparing the concepts of nothingness in the universe with the nothingness in the world of culture, one comes to the conclusion that nothingness in the artistic sphere is only a momentary apparent visual illusion that manipulates the senses of the participant or the audience. This manipulative aesthetic imagination (referring to the nothingness) does not correspond and is not able to establish complete constellation with the concept that has the authority to form and represent a concrete thing, same as the ether and the vacuum in nature. Due to the conclusion that the concept creates and makes something concrete in the form of artistic data, the formulation abstains from the nothing. The ideological essence or the concept in aesthetics contributes to isolate the nothingness. The artistic product today shifts the criteria and because nothingness and there may come a period when concept will be completely rejected from the work of art.
“Opaque is the fact that it refuses to reveal itself, for reasons that determine the structure and dramaturgy of existence. We are one story among the millions of stories that life narrates to an audience that may one day be revealed to us. Whether the Earth is a farm producing images or not is itself another possible narrative devised by a dramatist who lives through the ingenuity of his storytelling.
As a civilization, we are on a completely wrong and shameful path of inquiry—not because we could not do otherwise, but perhaps because we ourselves are also nourishment for our desires. A people with the ‘stomach’ of the Earth are condemned to eternal crushing.”
I notice small changes since moving to Cornwall: the roof window above my desk is sometimes covered in marks left by gulls. It happens overnight, without me seeing it. In the morning my view can be interrupted.
At first I found it irritating but now I sit with it longer. I wait for rain or wind to take it away again. Nothing I do affects the process.
It has started to change how I think about what I see and when I can see it. Some things arrive on their own schedule and some things erase themselves without help. I am not in control of when the view opens or closes
There is something interesting in that delay: in the gap between noticing and not being able to see. It makes me aware of how much depends on conditions I do not set.
Ghosts of a Counterpublics Past
‘So many confusions and blurred recollections in people’s memories, my own amongst them… we should, perhaps, be more sceptical of any reconstruction of distant histories’ (Stoneman, 2008).
To study the afterlife of Channel 4’s Independent Film and Video Department (1982-1995) is to confront this exact instability, searching in the shadows of an architecture where autonomy was only ever a phantom of liberty.
There is performative choice in what gets recorded and what fades, a tension suspended between the act of remembrance and systemic erasure from collective memory.
This dynamic ultimately decides who gets to speak, who is heard, and whose muted voices are lost over time. Tracking these fragments requires following the subterranean migration of magnetic tape, yet the ghosts in the counterpublic spheres remain opaque. The history is elusive because the ephemeral social friction of the moment resists easy capture – perhaps haunting our media future.
If life is a simple classification problem, what does artificial intelligence mean for metabolic, reproductive, and cognitive boundaries already buckling under the weight of lipid bubbles, plasmids, viroids, prions, transposons, organelles, and lichen?
If life is something more, if there is an irreducible quality of experience that evades all representation and transduction, what is there to study?
Dialogue around foraged ochre (rocks, clays and soils) as painting medium and more-than-human representative (Ward, 2023) raises tensions between respect for, collaboration with and extraction of such ‘entities’, between anthropocentric assumptions of ‘rights’ (Latour, 2017), of ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007), about ‘proof’ of agency, language, listening and voice, between science and belief, appropriation and common-sense. Some offer that particular ochres will ‘ask’ to participate in specific situations (Ross, 2024), while others that permission must be gained, whether culturally or legally, without conclusive ‘evidence’ for either. An inability to ever really know provides a ‘resonance’ (Rosa, 2020) of creative intrigue, a dichotomy of discourse and an expansive pervasiveness into many other areas of study, from art and design to energy and ecology. No matter how embodied human contact with more-than-human others, there is no guarantee of ethical communication; empathy not arising intrinsically or through logical comprehension but as predetermined belief. Discuss…
What remains opaque is how study learns to imitate itself. Under neoliberal conditions, the radical vocabulary of creative inquiry — risk, experimentation, openness — is absorbed into metrics of institutional value.
Critique becomes something measurable, rewardable, optimised, and available for return. Like the hot dog, registered here through staff accrual points, it offers a recognisable form assembled from processed remnants: shaped, coloured, stabilised, and made saleable. It resembles the thing it claims to be, while replacing substance with simulacrum.
Brown’s account of neoliberalism as the economisation of social and political life is useful here because it shows how education is recoded through the logic of human capital. Study is no longer approached primarily as a space of public, critical, or intellectual formation, but as an investment in future value. In this context, the language of criticality, experimentation, and radical practice can remain fully visible while being emptied of political force.
THEORY/PRACTICE DASHBOARD v12.1
Reference: Brown, W. (2015) ‘Educating Human Capital’, in Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. New York: Zone Books, pp. 175–200.
The performance of research explores the interconnectedness of knowledge and ideas. The practice strives to find the space or conversations in which your emerging and glimmering spark may gain energy and vibrancy.
The spark is an ineffability that needs to gently be held and nurtured before words are found to bring about its form and draw it into relationship with other research. But how do you discover connections without words?
Search engines demand keywords or questions, library classification systems require subject identification, human conversations seek a shared language. Knowledge systems are wrought with problems. Discovery tools are riddled with innate human biases, yet we are so easily beguiled by the illusion of algorithmic certainty.
Intentionality is both necessary and limiting. So much is visible and so little is seen. Whilst steeped in the powerful and fragile liminality of poiesis, embrace serendipity before diving into the opacity of the ‘known’.
I’ve just finished reading a book called The Lamb by Lucy Rose, a folk-horror story from the perspective of a young girl growing up in a tiny toxic home. The ending really struck a chord with me, prompting me to think about all things horror and other-worldly. So spoilers from here on out – you’ve been warned!
It isn’t a traditionally satisfying ending. As the reader, you don’t get what you really want, there’s little justice, and you have to live with this uncertainty. The main character does not survive, and we explore the world through her lens in another dimension. We see the unraveling of the family’s secrets, the breakdown of the house, the death of other characters, the mourning and loss of others who were part of the story. It got me thinking about how comfortably we sit, in our western world, with that feeling of uncertainty. How things like the supernatural, life after death, the not-knowing, leaves us feeling distant, alienated, skin tingling, minds whirring searching for answers.
The Lamb reminded me of another story we tell so often in our Caribbean households, and that is one of duppies. Duppies are ghosts and we’ve told stories about them for centuries. They are intrinsic to our culture, and make me think how important that sense of opacity is to our heritage. We don’t try to explain away duppies, we thread them into our stories, life lessons, oral traditions, so much so that they become one with reality, part of our every-day. They teach us something and these duppies and their lessons become tangible. We sit with their right to be unexplained, and we build that opacity into our histories.
So I turned to a familiar book, my Story Telling Rundown I picked up from a supermarket when visiting my island home one summer. It’s a book written by Nasaria Suckoo-Chollette, recounting Caribbean short-stories. One of these, tells the story of young Limbert and the Duppies, riddled with humour and warnings for young children thinking of sneaking out in the night.
I read the story again, and redrew the story’s illustration with charcoal from a campfire we built recently – a traditional place to share stories and meet duppies.
Where is god? Unanswerable. First breath of the universe; ancient sacred texts containing both breath and primordial waters; Turner’s ‘the sun is god’; a weeping eye in a waterfall; a butterfly under the surface of a river; a circle of standing stones; the tide pulling in and out, sucking stones; a memory palace; a grandmother’s voice patterning through raindrops on wild garlic; the ley line meeting place at Castle Beach, at ancient Glasney. Where is god? The old god – omnipotent, omnibenevolent, omniscient – is dead. How might we build a new dwelling place for the gods now? In land, in bellies and hearts, in process, in attention. How can we hold a sense of the sacred when all is profaned, bureaucratic, polluted? I walk in the woods every day and ask the gods to walk with me. Sometimes they do, I think.
I’ve made over a thousand beats. Started in 2011. And I still can’t fully explain what happens in the moment a track stops being just a track.
It’s not technique. I know technique. It’s something that arrives or it doesn’t. You feel it before you can name it. The arrangement settles in a way that feels less like a decision and more like a recognition.
I built a whole framework trying to hold it. Trilingual. Theological. Cinematic. It works but only around the edges. The centre of the thing still won’t sit still long enough to be explained.
The gap between craft and that other thing, that’s what I keep circling. Discipline gets me to the room. But something else determines what happens inside it.
Thirteen years in. I still can’t teach that part. So I just keep creating the conditions and showing up.
The question of what games are and how they should be understood has been a recurring central tension in Games Studies. That tension was most prevalent in the early 2000s, often framed as a ‘war’ between narratologists (who understand games as a narrative form) and ludologists (who view games as a series of interactions that drive choices). This debate (to the extent it ever actually existed) has ebbs and flows in academic literature, but remains at the core of much informal discourse around games: Is a game better with less story? This provocation aims to stir the pot again by making a statement: interactivity is overrated. A fetishism towards a more and more mechanical view of gameplay has drastically reduced what games (as a form) are both currently doing and actively capable of. Game designers should think about ways to make their games less interactive instead of more.
My work is based on a desire to reunite what has been separated; specimen, land, name, memory. To think about what questions might arise from bringing these fragments together. (Anna Atkins Fragments of Stories)
How do machines learn what age is supposed to look like?
This provocation explores how AI systems both estimate and generate age through two connected experiments. The first examines how an age estimation model predicts age under controlled changes in hairstyle, eyewear, and clothing. The second investigates how image generation models visualise “22-year-old,” “35-year-old,” and “50-year-old” East Asian women wearing glasses.
Across both experiments, age emerges not as a fixed biological category, but as a relational visual construction. In the estimation experiment, predicted age shifts according to facial framing, contour visibility, and the interaction between hairstyle and eyewear. In the generative experiment, age is distributed across interiors, clothing, accessories, and atmosphere, with older women associated with increasingly ordered and middle-class environments.
Rather than simply recognising age, AI systems participate in constructing visual expectations of what age should look like.
The Archive is a place where study becomes quieter and slower. Working with collections has its own ritual: careful handling, a deliberate pace, and the narrowing and deepening of attention. It resets your rhythm, reminding you that study does not need to be fast to be meaningful. It is a space where the mind can breathe, where ideas unfurl, and where unexpected connections surface in the pauses between turning pages and opening folders.
Study here is experiential, physical, and unfiltered, ink on paper, images, traces of past decisions, and voices from other times, all carrying potential for future interpretation. It invites you to notice the smallest details, to value the journey rather than the destination, without a singular interpretation or predetermined outcome.
Initially unfamiliar and opaque, clarity comes in moments of alignment or insight. Archives reveal themselves not by speeding up the study of the world, but by slowing it down enough for you to truly see.
You call it decomposition because you are frightened of intimacy.
From below, things look different.
Nothing disappears here.
Nothing is wasted.
The dead do not end —
they soften.
We receive them slowly:
apple cores,
wet cardboard,
unanswered emails,
collapsed empires,
the names nobody says anymore.
Everything enters the same mouth eventually.
You speak often of productivity,
yet the forest floor is built entirely from unfinished things.
Study this carefully.
The richest soil forms where certainty fails to preserve itself.
A body loosens.
A structure collapses.
Edges become permeable.
Something leaks.
Something feeds.
This is not destruction.
It is a different form of thinking.
Down here, knowledge is exchanged through contact.
Through moisture.
Through pressure.
Through the long digestion of what others were too hurried to metabolize.
We do not archive.
We compost.
Even your theories arrive already decaying.
Especially your theories.
The good ones sweat.
They attract fungi.
They survive being chewed through.
The bad ones remain intact for centuries.
Sometimes I hear you above us,
debating originality.
This is very funny underground.
Nothing originates.
Everything passes through countless bodies first.
The leaf becomes soil.
The soil becomes root.
The root becomes fruit.
The fruit becomes animal.
The animal becomes weather.
And eventually:
weather becomes thought.
You ask what practices of study might sustain a damaged world.
I suggest becoming digestible.
I suggest learning how to rot well.
There are people who still believe study happens in rooms.
This is no longer convincing.
Study occurs in the condensation gathering on supermarket freezer doors.
In buffering icons.
In the silence after someone says “Does that make sense?”
In dogs waiting outside universities.
Entire disciplines are currently being held together by exhausted adjacencies:
tabs left open too long,
half-annotated PDFs,
mutual disappointments,
charged glances across institutional corridors.
Nobody admits this.
Instead we continue to describe study using architectural metaphors:
fields,
foundations,
frameworks.
As though knowledge were a stable structure rather than a fungal bloom spreading beneath damaged terrain.
But observe carefully.
The most intense sites of study rarely resemble expertise.
More often they resemble contamination.
One person develops an obsession.
Another catches it accidentally.
Language starts misbehaving.
Sleep schedules collapse.
Someone begins speaking exclusively through quotations.
A group chat mutates into cosmology.
This is usually where the important thinking begins.
Not in conclusions,
but in atmospheric distortions.
Perhaps study is simply what occurs when thought loses confidence in its own boundaries.
Or perhaps study is what remains after usefulness has departed.
A residue.
A humming.
A sociality organized around shared exposure to things nobody can fully metabolize.
Under these conditions, citation becomes less an academic practice than a form of possession.
We do not read texts.
Texts read each other through us.
I can’t live despite my body.
I inhale and hold – searching for stillness, but the static spreads from chest down to my fingertips.
I hold still, as my lips utter and sputter. I am productive, producing. Surfacing, without exhaling.
I exhale, despite myself, and feel the weight of my eyelids, shoulders, head sinking.
There is more in me – I swim through the static towards the transparency of my goals. There is a surface, right?
I inhale and hold – and my body floats on.