Jan 30, 2022
Collective Autonomy in Practice: Year-Book 2022 Cohort Members
Introducing the Creative Practitioners Engaging in this Inaugural Experiment of the OS & LL Ecosystem
Last week I publicly announced a new project, the “Year-Book” Committee, which for the duration of 2022 will collectively enact the newest OS / LL experiment in collective autonomous infrastructure and documentation.
It’s been in the works since mid 2021, and I’m really thrilled that the folks pictured in the group shot above, who I’ll introduce you to a bit more in detail above, have all been so enthusiastic about engaging in this emergent form together. It’s also important for me to note that while I am the architect of this experiment, what I like to call the “systems doula,” I am participating in the cycle as well. The illusion of an “administration” that previous iterations of the OS might have allowed for were deeply not in keeping with its mission, which is built on the notion that we, artists, need to make and sustain infrastructure for ourselves as an integral, regenerative form of world-making and refusal.
You’ll be seeing Field Notes from cohort members pop up throughout the year, and many have already started their entries — follow everyone here on Medium for updates on each artist’s process!
Ashna Ali
Ashna Ali is a queer non-binary diasporic Bangladeshi poet, writer, researcher, editor, and educator raised in Italy and based in Brooklyn, NY. They are the author of the chapbook The Relativity of Living Well (The Operating System 2022). Their poetry and research has been published in several journals, and they have taught across many colleges and universities around New York City. Their work centers questions of queer feminist lives, race, postcolonialism, restorative justice, disability and illness, memoiristic genres, and anticapitalist practices of learning. They live in Brooklyn with their sphynx familiar, Kubo Avatar.
Ashna will be producing a Field Notes series on how poetry and healing intertwine in an intentional journey toward emergence, and facilitating a number of Liminal Lab programs around disability and poetics.
Bryanna Bradley
Bryanna Bradley is a body-based broad, notorious ballet class crybaby, and Queens local circa 1995. She has gone under many cycles of reinvention and is currently going through another. Bryanna has arrived in space as a curator of performance, arts administrator, dancer, actor, devisor, dramaturg, and party animal/show stopper.
Currently Bryanna is in the process of creating systems of sustainability/archive for her artistic ecosystems, which will be documented over the course of the year.
Stanford Cheung
Stanford Cheung is a Neo-Speculative Artist working as a concert pianist, intermedia poet, and sound architect from Toronto who maintains an active international performing career as a recitalist and soloist North America, the UK, Canada, Europe, and Asia. Embodying a plethora of artistic outputs from literary publications, installation art, graphic scores, electronics, improvisations, recordings, to interactive concerts, Stanford collaborates with a broad range of renowned artists including The Honourable Elizabeth. A. Baker, Morgan Fisher, Steven J Fowler, Scott Hunter, Jonathan Kawchuk, Nobuo Kubota, Elæ Moss, Marc di Saverio, and Jordan A.Y Smith among others. Such collaborations have resulted in cross-disciplinary creations that have been exhibited/forthcoming at institutions including the Banff Centre for the Arts, the Orpheus Institute Belgium, the Kitakyushu Centre for Contemporary Arts, The University of Edinburgh, Christchurch University, and Osaka University. Presently, Stanford is a Doctoral music student at McGill University where his research is dedicated to the composer Ryuichi Sakamoto.
Stanford is in the process of producing a series of “Sonicfolio Scores” Field Notes in conjunction with the Yuha Archive project he founded; in addition to the graphic score archive, currently Stanford is working towards the production of sound-art installations and a virtual soundscape MMORPG.
Chiwan Choi
Chiwan Choi is a poet, writer, publisher and lifelong seer of ghosts. He is the author of four full-length books of poetry: The Flood (Tia Chucha Press, 2010) and the Daughter Trilogy, three books that explore his lost daughter as ghost: Abductions (Writ Large Press, 2012), The Yellow House (CCM, 2017) and the forthcoming my name is wolf . He is also the author of multiple poetry chapbooks, including Time Out of Space and lo/fidelity lovesongs. He wrote, presented and destroyed the novel Ghostmaker throughout the course of 2015, as part of his ongoing examination on the meaning of a book, of conjuring and nurturing of ghosts. China has published his poetry, fiction and essays in numerous journals and magazines, including the New York Times Magazine, ONTHEBUS, Poem-A-Day and many other publications. He currently splits his time between Los Angeles and Pittsburgh with his wife. He is a partner at Writ Large Press, the Editor at Cultural Daily, and the host of the paranormal podcast with a literary twist, Are You There, Ghost? It’s Me, Chiwan.
Thomas Choinacky
Thomas Choinacky (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist. They are excited by textures, tastes, and feeling it deep in their muscles. His/Their current practice asks questions about legacy, architecture, and queerness, which has led to experimental performances in stairwells, go-go dances, reenacting ice skating routines in living rooms, and building kinky mummies out of duct tape. Thomas uses vulnerability to expel their demons and tell autobiographical stories that previously felt invaluable or dangerous to share. They offer these parts of themself as opportunities for others to consider their own permissions. They archive and articulate their practice with autotopography — using personal objects, memory, and place as ongoing documentation. Thomas is a company member of Applied Mechanics, an artist collective based in Philadelphia. Recent: Fierce! Queer Festival, Folsom Street Fair, and a residency at Pink Noise Projects. @thomastommy thomasistitanic.com
Sherese Francis
Sherese Francis is an Alkymist of the I-Magination and expresses her(e)self through poetry, interdisciplinary arts, workshop facilitation, editing, and literary curation. Her(e) work takes inspiration from her(e) Afro-Caribbean heritage (Barbados and Dominica), and studies in Afrofuturism and Black Speculative Arts, mythology and etymology. Some of her(e) work has been published in Furious Flower, Obsidian Lit, Rootwork Journal, Spoken Black Girl, The Operating System, Cosmonauts Avenue, No Dear, Apex Magazine, Bone Bouquet, African Voices, Newtown Literary, and Free Verse. Additionally, Sherese has published three chapbooks, Lucy’s Bone Scrolls (Three Legged Elephant), Variations on Sett/ling Seed/ling (Harlequin Creature), and Recycling a Why That Rules Over My Sacred Sight (DoubleCross Press). Besides publications, Sherese has had her(e) work featured in various exhibitions and showcases from The Lit Exhibit, NY Live Arts, Queens Public Library, York College Arts Gallery, King Manor Museum, WorksOnWater, Jamaica Center for Arts & Learning, Jamaica Flux, Baxter St Camera Club, Bliss On Bliss, Maleza Proyectos, and The Rubenstein Art Center. Currently, Sherese is the poetry editor of Newtown Literary and curates the Queens-based literary and mobile library project, J. Expressions.
Elizabeth Hassler
Elizabeth Hassler (she/her) is a poet, organizer and digital multimedia artist who lives as a white settler on Wiyot land in Arcata, CA. Her work plays with color, historical texture, and language’s relationship to body, while holding space to honor and imagine old and new practices of disability, queerness, survival and what it can mean to be femme. Elizabeth’s work has recently appeared or is forthcoming in Wordgathering, Stone of Madness Press, Hierarchies of Disability Human Rights, with Community Building Art Works and as a (home)Body Project finalist. She leads free community-focused generative online workshops weekly at https://tinyurl.com/DIS-CREATE and is a recurring facilitator of The World We Want.
Liz Liguori
Liz Liguori creates photographic, sculptural, and time-based work exploring the intersection of science and light. With previous careers in lighting design and photography, Liguori has been driven by the desire to paint with light. Liguori has had solo shows in New York at the La Mama Galleria, Lazy Susan Gallery, and 222 Bowery Art, as well as several museums and galleries across the country. Liguori published an essay on her Electromagnetogram process in the book The Mountain Lake Symposium and Workshop: Art in Locale. Liguori holds an MFA in Creative Technologies from Virginia Tech and a BA from Drew University.
Liz will engage with an experiment on using the Field Notes documentation infrastructure to capture process as it exists beyond and outside the studio, and in the in-between spaces.
Andrea Mazzariello
Andrea Mazzariello (he/him) is a composer, performer, writer, and teacher. His musical practices include writing songs, making electronic music, and working in notated traditions. His work explores spoken and sung treatments of his own original text, plays with computers and other kinds of electronics, and engages the physiology of performance in novel ways. He writes about listening, musical media, and pedagogy, and teaches and mentors music-makers working in a wide variety of genres and approaches. His music has been performed widely in North America and Europe, and appears on releases by New Amsterdam Records, SEAMUS, Proper Canary, and his own One More Revolution records. The Operating System published his first book, One More Revolution: A Love Song, on Vinyl, in 2018. He teaches composition and music technology at Carleton College, directs the composition program at the Sō Percussion Summer Institute, and mentors and collaborates with young beatmakers, producers, and songwriters at The Key, a youth services organization in downtown Northfield, MN.
On what Field Notes might mean this year, and what he’s working on at current, Andrea writes, “I am really interested in thinking about improvisation. Or, what I really mean by that, is musical thinking in the moment, how that connects to what the body practices, broadly defined, and how to lightly hold the feelings of inadequacy that often come up. I have documented a few of these thinking sessions (in audio form) and have been wondering about building an archive of them over the course of the year, then designing something that would mash/mangle/re-present them.”
Dillon McNamara
Dillon McNamara is a sculptor making installation work based in an oscillating practice of digital and analog form finding. The content of the work draws on allegories from mythology and collective history, framed in the language of archeology.
Dillon draws heavily from the study of morphology, creating biomorphic compositions which evolve as result of the propagation of systems and networks. He is currently working towards a number of publication experiments both digital and analog around documenting his practice, and considering the manifold implications of working in physical media.
Elæ Moss
Elæ Moss is a nonbinary multimodal artist-researcher, producer, and educator. In 2021, they co-curated [MOVE SEMANTICS]: RULES of UNFOLDING at EFA Project Space with Jeff Kasper. Personal and curatorial projects and performances have featured or are forthcoming at STWST/Ars Electronica, Usdan Gallery, Judson Church, the Segal Center’s Performing Knowledge Festival, SOHO20, Dixon Place, La Mama Galleria and the Exponential Festival, among others. Publication credits include Vestiges, Big Echo: Critical SF, Tagvverk, Matters of Feminist Practice, The Transgender Narratives Anthology, Choice Words: Writers on Abortion, and the Urgent Possibilities: Feminist Poetics & Pedagogies annex series. Elæ is an Adjunct Professor at Pratt Institute, and the Founder and Creative Director of The Operating System and Liminal Lab. Their work can be found at http://onlywhatican.net; follow @thetroublewithbartleby on IG for the ongoing Speculative Solidarities series and more.
For me, this year, my practice hinges on a lot of why’s around why and how to use a variety of mediums both digital and analog with the goal of regenerative building and healing. In particular in my life these days I’m asking questions about the pace of climate and system collapse outstripping any possible rate of change within institutions, and what it means to move beyond fugitive practice into full-time dedication to the creation and implementation of new models, tools, and ways of being. I’ll be using the Field Notes as an anchoring infrastructure to document these questions and how they bridge a variety of public and private practices in the studio and beyond.
Joe Nasta
Joe Nasta (ze/zir) is a queer writer and mariner who splits zir time between Seattle, Guadalajara, and the Ocean. Joe is one half of the art and poetry collective Eat Yr Manhood. Zir work has been published in The Rumpus, Entropy, PRISM International, Peach Mag and others. Ze co-curates a zine of unconventional art and writing at stonepacificzine.com
I plan to create multimedia work that ties in with the written word — physical and tangible representations of language as image, sculpture, object, or movement. I want to explore the corporeal processes that generating that work will require and experiment with the results, documented in the field notes series.
Noah Ortega
Noah Ortega (they/them) is a neuroqueer, interdisciplinary performance artist based in Queens, NY. Utilizing their background in performance, speculative philosophy, and political theory, they have come to develop an artist/scholar practice that is deeply personal, constantly chaotic, and furiously DIY. Their precarious, transdisciplinary practice considers questions around mental illness, anti-capitalist activism, and crip futurism. They currently hold an MFA in Interdisciplinary Art from Goddard College and in 2018, they were a Target Margin Theatre Institute Fellow.
Noah will be exploring theory as process, the possibilities of the mad archive, and creating performance throughout their cohort year.
mónica teresa ortiz
mónica teresa ortiz is a poet born and raised in Texas.
About their Field Notes, mónica writes, “An idea that I am thinking about is documenting and thinking about the effects we are experiencing under climate disaster, not simply as artists, but as communities. Some of my recent work revolves around hydropolitics. But as we experience more and more climate disasters, I am focusing more on the relationship between art and violence, and building a different relationship to land and water.”
Yvonne Shortt
Yvonne Shortt is focused on using materials to create transformative experiences for herself. These transformative experiences lead to behavioral shifts in the artist. Ms. Shortt reflects these behaviors outward, creating shifts in the viewers of her work. The viewers in turn reflect these behaviors into their communities; little by little the world is transformed. Ms. Shortt’s work is also about transforming static gallery spaces into places where artists are in process. Thus, the gallery becomes a place not only for the object, but the human being.To do this Ms. Shortt co-founded the Research and Development Committee at A.I.R. Gallery to obliterate the scarcity mindset.
Her Field Notes will focus on addressing racism in A.I.R. Gallery using material studies with rope and branches.
Orchid Tierney
Orchid Tierney is a settler poet and scholar from Aotearoa, now residing on unceded territories of the Miami, Lenape, and Shawnee peoples. Her first book is a year of misreading the wildcats (The Operating System, 2019).
Orchid will be running the “Creating an Unreasonable College” Pedagogy Lab from February-March, Saturdays 3–4:30 EST through Liminal Lab. She is also in the process of developing a book project around speculative plant life; her Field Notes will bring together thinking and practice around and between these initiatives and other related research.
Edwin Torres
Edwin Torres’ books include; Quanundrum: i will be your many angled thing (Roof Books), Xoeteox: the infinite word objected (Wave Books), Ameriscopia (University of Arizona Press), and as editor of The Body In Language: An Anthology (Counterpath Press). He has performed his bodylingo poetics widely and has received support for his work from NYFA, The Foundation for Contemporary Arts and The DIA Foundation, among others. Anthologies include, The Difference Is Spreading: 50 Contemporary Poets on 50 Poems, Emergency Index, Manifold Criticism, Poets in The 21st Century: Poetics of Social Engagement, Kindergarde: Avant Garde Poems For Children, and Aloud: Voices From The Nuyorican Poets Café.
He is seeking to use this infrastructure to experiment with the gathering and formation of field investigations and manuscript content.
