Introduction

Act 1.

Scene 1.

Internal. A reader holds a book in their hands. The first page of the book is opened, the reader holds it to their face and smells the paper, touches it. The book touches them back.

the book: (whispering in the reader’s ear) Being vulnerable means being transparent, open and brave, trusting others to handle stories with care. By publicly sharing and processing our narratives, we take ownership of our experiences while contributing to a collective voice. Even when we incorporate stories from others, our names remain attached to this collective creation: Ada, Aglaia, Irmak, Stephen. We have created interfaces highlighting the balance between communal sharing, individual responsibility and awareness.

the reader: Interfaces?

the book: Interfaces are boundaries that
connect and separate. They’re the spaces that fill the void between us. An interface can be an act, a story, a keyboard, a cake; It allows us to be vulnerable together, to share our stories with and through each other. I am a collection of these interfaces.

the reader: (confused) What do you mean a collection, like a catalogue?

<?water bodies>

A narrative exploration of divergent digital intimacies

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are
mediums
that hide and show what’s
hidden.
(Rumi, 1995 translation)

꙳for you

All intimacy is about bodies. Is this true? Does it matter? I doubt it. Do you know? Let’s find out, maybe.

Once, I thought that everything in the world was either one or zero and that there was a harsh straight line between them. Then I found out you could step or hop across the line, back and forth, if others showed you how. Today, I am no less binary, no less interested in dichotomies, but I am willing to dance through them if you are too. Can we dance these dichotomies together, embracing the contradictions of the virtual and physical, the comfortable and uncomfortable, intimate and non-intimate? I can’t do it alone, the subject is too heavy and the binary is too 1011000. I won’t ask you to resolve these contradictions, I have no desire to. Instead, I hope we can cultivate the tension and tenderness inherent in holding together incompatible truths because both prove necessary.

To dance through these dichotomies I will start in a specific position, growing from Donna Haraway’s in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto”. In her essay, Haraway explores the concept of a cyborg as a rejection of boundaries between humans, animals, and machines. A symbol for a feminist posthuman theory that embraces the plasticity of identity. Before she does all this dancing, however, she takes a strong stance of blasphemy. She engages seriously with traditional notions of feminism and identity but with irony, not apostasy, which is to say without full rejection—without unbelief. My position as I jump will be the same as hers, ironic faith. My mocking is grave but caring and my primary aim is for us only to spin fast enough not to see the line anymore, while still being able to see the binaries. It won’t be an easy dance for us but I will do my best to keep softening for you, I promise.

I will show you a digital body, make it comfortable and then uncomfortable, lightly intimate, and richly intimate. I have my own story, my own digital body, of course. This is where I take my second stance, however. This time, the position is Lauren Berlant’s, from ‘The Female Complaint’. The book places individual stories as inescapable autobiographies of a collective experience and uses the personal to explain an intimate general experience. In our story, the difference between my body and the collective digital body is unimportant, I hope you see that. I will tell you my story if you know how to look, but I will tell you through the stories of many others who shared them with me. I have no other choice, every time I have tried to tell this story a chorus of voices has come out.

Some of the stories I will tell you will carry memories of pain; physical and emotional. I will keep holding you while you hear this, but your limbs may still feel too heavy to dance. In that case, I give you my full permission to skip, jump, or lay down completely. This is not choreographed and I care deeply for you.

I love you and hope you see what I saw in these stories.

Safe dreams now, I will talk to you soon.

0. DIGITAL BODIES

“I think the worst must be finished.
Whether I am right, don’t tell me.
Don’t tell me.
No ringlet of bruise,
no animal face, the waters salt me
and I leave it barefoot. I leave you, season
of still tongues, of roses on nightstands
beside crushed beer cans. I leave you
white sand and scraped knees. I leave
this myth in which I am pig, whose
death is empty allegory. I leave, I leave—
At the end of this story,
I walk into the sea
and it chooses
not to drown me.”
(Yun, 2020)

a. what is a digital body?

A digital body is a body on the Internet. A body outside the internet is simply a body. On the internet, discussions about corporeality transcend the limitations of physicality, shaping and reshaping narratives surrounding the self. This text explores the intricate dynamics within these conversations, dancing at the interplay between tangible bodies and their digital counterparts. The construction of a digital body is intricately intertwined with these online dialogues, necessitating engaged reconstructions of the narratives surrounding physical existence. Yet, the resulting digital body is a complex and contradictory entity, embodying the nuances of both its virtual and tangible origins.

There is a specific metaphor that would allow us to better carry these contradictions as we further explore digital bodies. Do you remember that dream you had about deep ocean pie? Allow me to remind you.

You were walking on the shore, slowly, during a summer that happened a long time ago. Your skin was warm and you could feel the wet cool sand sticking to your feet. The gentle lapping of the waves washed the sand away as you walked towards the ocean. You stepped, stepped. Then dove. Underwater, the sea unfolded deeper than you remembered. It was a vibrant display of life: bright schools of small fish, and tall colorful, waving corals. It looked like that aquarium you saw once as a kid. Your arms moved confusingly through the water as if you were wading through a soup or were terribly tired. On the sandy ocean floor, you saw a dining table. It had a floating white tablecloth, one plate, a fork, and a pie in the center of it, on a serving dish. You sat on a chair but could not feel it underneath you. You ate a heaping slice of pie. It had a buttery-cooked carrots filling. You woke up. In the world, the sun was still timid and your bedroom thick with sleep. What a weird dream. You rubbed your face, sat up on your bed, and drank the glass of water next to you. You felt full, as if you just ate a plateful of carrot pie.

There were two bodies in this story. An awake one and a dream one, an ocean one. In dreams, bodies have their own set of rules, often blurring the boundaries between waking and sleeping, wanting and fearing. Digital bodies are very similar to dream bodies. They exhibit a similar fluidity and abstraction, a defiance of traditional notions of physicality. They share the blurring and inherent potential nature of dream bodies. They are slower, stronger, and different. They switch and change and melt into each other, they lose and regrow limbs, they run sluggishly and fly smoothly. If we scream in our dreams, we sometimes wake up still screaming. Our waking bodies react to our dream bodies, they have the same tears, the same orgasms, the same drives.

This is a story of two bodies, same but different, influenced but not driven. A tangible body, full of fluids and organs, emotions and feelings. Cartilage, bacteria, bones, and nerve endings. A digital body, cable-veined and loud-vented, shiny and loading.

The digital body is ethereal and abstracted, embarrassing, graphic, and real but not physical.

This is the beginning.

b. body vs. computer

Framing the discourse around bodies on the internet as a clear-cut dichotomy feels clunky in today’s internet landscape. The web is today available by body, cyborg dimensions of the internet of bodies, or virtual and augmented realities, creating a complex interplay between having a body and existing online.

As intricate as this dance is now, it certainly did not begin that way. It started with what felt like a very serious and tangible line drawn by very serious tangible people; this is real life and this is virtual life. Even people like Howard Rheingold, pioneers who approached early virtual life with enthusiasm and care, couldn’t escape characterizing it as a “bloodless technological ritual” (1993). Rheingold was an early member of The Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link (Well), a seminal virtual community built in the 1980s that was renowned for its impact on digital culture and played a pivotal role in shaping what would become the landscape of the Internet. Rheingold’s reflections on his experience on this primordial soup of the Internet offer insight into the initial conceptualizations of online life by those joyfully participating.

In “The Virtual Community”, Rheingold offers a heartfelt tribute to intimacy and affection through web- based interactions which, at the time, were unheard of. He struggles in his efforts to highlight the legitimacy of his connections, finding no way to do so except by emphasizing their tangible bodily experiences. The community’s claim to authenticity thus had to lie in the physical experiences of its members— the visible bodies and hearable voices, the weddings, births, and funerals (1993).^{You’re dreaming again, good. Would you feel closer to me if you could hear my voice? Is my voice a sound? Could it be a feeling?}

Even then, and even by people with no interest in undermining the value of the virtual, the distinction between physical and virtual was confusing. Rheingold himself reinforces the boundary of body relations and computer relations by referring to his family as a “flesh-and-blood family’ and his close online friends as “unfamiliar faces” (1993). Constantly interplaying digital connections with the physical characteristics of the kind of connections people valued before the internet.^{I will be honest with you, I have little patience for this recurring line of thought that seeks to distinguish people’s noses from their hearts, as if there was a physical love that is the valuable one and a virtual imaginary one that is feeble and unworthy.}

In any case, his primary interest seemed to be to emphasize computer relations as valid forms of connection between bodies, not to talk of any distinction quite yet. It’s the eighties, the internet is still fresh and new and the possibility to form close relations with strangers online seems fragile and concerning yet exciting. This is the clearest the distinction between in-real-life and online has ever been and it’s still fuzzy and unclear.

At the same time and in the same digital space as Rheingold, there was another man, a digital body being formed. This is our second story, the ocean body we dreamt of earlier is now in a digital primordial soup, questioning itself and stuck between staying and leaving. In this story, its name is Tom Mandel and when he died, he did so on the Well.

Mandel was a controversial and popular figure in this pioneering virtual community. According to many other members, Tom Mandel embodied the essence of the Well—its history, its voice, its attitude. Mandel’s snarky and verbose provocations started heated discussions, earning him warnings such as “Don’t Feed The Mandel!” (Leonard, 1995). His sharp comments often stirred emotions that reminded people of family arguments, fuelling an intimacy that was characteristic of the Well: both public and solitary (Hafner, 1997).

Until 1995, Mandel had done a quite rigorous job of keeping his body separate from The Well and had never attended any of the physical in-person meetings from the community. His only references to being a body had been on the “health” online conference, where he often talked about his illnesses. One day, after nearly a decade of daily interaction, he posted he had got the flu and that he felt quite ill. When people wished for him to get well soon, he replied he had gone to get tested and was waiting for a diagnosis. This way, when cancer was found in his lungs, the community was first to know. In the following six months, as his illness progressed, the community followed closely (Hafner, 1997). They were first to know when Nana, a community member with whom he had had a publicly turbulent relationship, flew to California to marry him. The community was a witness and is now an archive of his declining wit as cancer spread to his brain and his famously articulate and scathing comments got shorter, fearful, and more tender.^{Initially, when a member he often argued with offered to pray for him Mandel had replied: “You can shovel your self-aggrandizing sentiments up you wide ass sideways for the duration as far as I’m concerned.” Later, as the cancer progressed: “I ain’t nearly as brave as you all think. I am scared silly of the pain of dying this way. I am not very good at playing saint. Pray for me, please.}

Before he posted his final goodbye, he chose to do one last thing. Together with another member, they programmed a bot that posted randomly characteristic comments from Mandel on The Well—the Mandelbot. In the topic he had opened to say goodbye, he posted this message about the bot:

“I had another motive in opening this topic to tell the truth, one that winds its way through almost everything I’ve done online in the five months since my cancer was diagnosed. I figured that, like everyone else, my physical self wasn’t going to survive forever and I guess I was going to have less time than actuarials allocateus [actually allocated]. But if I could reach out and touch everyone I knew on-line… I could toss out bits and pieces of my virtual self and the memes that make up Tom Mandel, and then when my body died, I wouldn’t really have to leave… Large chunks of me would also be here, part of this new space.” (Hafner, 1997)

With the Mandelbot, Mandel found a way to deal with what he later called his grieving for the community, with which he could not play anymore once his own body died. By doing so, he was starting to blend the boundaries of intimacy through computers and bodies, driven by his love and grief.^{It’s out of care and not lack of relevance that I am not showing you Mandel’s goodbye message. It’s enough to know he was deep in the grief of having to leave a community he loved and cared for and that pain was felt in every word.}

When he talked about the bot in previous messages, it sounded almost like a joke. A caring haunting of the platform, to keep his persona alive for the community in a way that could be quite horrific for those grieving. In his admission though it becomes clear that this was closer to an attempt to deal with his grief around losing the community, his unreadiness to let go of a place he loved so dearly. A place just as real in emotion, that was built in part by Mandel’s digital body and its persona.

In a tribute posted after his death, fellow Well member and journalist Andrew Leonard tried to convey his own sense of blended physicality and emotion.

“Sneer all you want at the fleshlessness of online community, but on this night, as tears stream down my face for the third straight evening, it feels all too real.” (Andrew Leonard, 1995)

c. bot-feelings

An internet body has bot-feelings if allowed to. Let me explain.

A bot functions as a different entity from a cyborg, as it does not attempt to emulate a human body but rather human action and readiness. Its role is to mirror human behavior online, simulating how a physical body might act, what it would click on, and what would it say. On social media, bots engage in a kind of interpretative dance of human interaction, performing based on instructions provided by humans.^{The first bot communities on the internet are now born, half- mistakenly. They are always spiritual communities posting religious images created by artificial intelligence, all the comments echoing choirs of bots praising. Amen, amen, amen. I am not naive, I know they are built by humans but it is this performance of religiosity that I am interested in, and how little humanity is shown in it. It is something else.}

Unlike an internet body, which represents the virtual embodiment of a person, a bot doesn’t seek to be a person. It comments under posts alongside many other bots, all under a fake name and photo but nothing else to give the illusion of humanity. When an internet body has bot-feelings, it is a disruptive performance. They are feelings that do not attempt to be human body feelings, they exist as their own genuine virtual expression.

In “Virtual Intimacies”, McGlotten also incidentally argued that a virtual body has bot-feelings (2013). He described the virtual as potential, as a transcendent process of actualization, making it into, generally, a description of bots. Internet bodies, as virtual, would be by this understanding also charged with the constant immanent power to act and to feel like a human body. It is a constant state of becoming, of not- quite-pretending but never fully being anything either.

Most of the time we can tell disembodied bots online from tangible people and as such they have the potential to be bodies, without ever trying to be.

Of course, when McGlotten described the virtual as such he placed it in a dichotomy, once again, against the “Intimacies” which are the other side of his book. The emphasis here lies in intimacy being an embodied feeling and sense and a carnal one at that. Virtual intimacies are, by this definition, an inherent failed contradiction. However, McGlotten plays with the real and non-real in new ways, using the text to highlight how virtual intimacy is similar to physical intimacy and then, even more, blurring as he shows the already virtual in physical intimacies. Applying this to a body, rather than an affective experience, works just the same.

McGlotten uses a conceptualization of the virtual based on the philosopher Deleuze’s,^{A step in a step in a step, sorry.} which can be used to refer to a virtual body as well. The virtual is in this case a cluster of waiting, dreaming, and remembering, embodying potential. Something that is constantly becoming, an object and also the subject attributed to it (2001). An internet body with its bot-feelings is a body in the process of being one, acting as one, an ideal of one beyond what is physical but including its possibility.

Going a step further in McGlotten’s interpretation of Deleuze, this also plays into how virtual intimacies mirror queer intimacies as they approach normative ideals but “can never arrive at them”. Both queer and virtual relations are imagined by a greater narrative as fantastical, simulated, immaterial, and artificial—poor imitations and perversions of a heterosexual, monogamous, and procreative marital partnership (2013). A virtual body is similarly immanent, with both potential and corruption at the same time. It carries all the neoliberal normative power of freedom that a queer body can carry today but also reflects the unseemly fleshly reality of having one.

This is where the story continues. The body from the dream ocean leaves the primordial soup of the internet to stage a disruptive performance. It moves from potential creation to a wild spring river. A fluid being, that exists simultaneously inside and outside normative constructions. It channels deviant feelings and transcendental opinions about the collective’s physical form genuinely as people use it to navigate their physicality. Both virtual and queer intimacies highlight the constructed nature of identity and desire. They disrupt the notion of a fixed, essential self, instead embracing the multiplicity and complexity inherent in human experience. This destabilization of identity opens up possibilities for self-expression and connection, creating spaces where individuals can redefine themselves beyond the constraints of societal expectations while still technically under its watchful eye. In essence, the parallels between virtual and queer intimacies underscore the radical potential of both to disrupt and reimagine the norms that govern our understanding of relationships, bodies, and identity. They invite us to question the rigid binaries and hierarchies that structure our society and to embrace the fluidity and possibility inherent in the human experience.

1.DIGITAL COMFORT

The only laws: Be radiant. Be heavy. Be green.

Tonight, the dead light up your mind like an image of your mind on a scientist’s screen. ‘The scientists don’t know – and too much.’

“In the town square, in the heart of night (a delicacy like the heart of an artichoke), a man dances cheek-to-cheek with the infinite blue.”
(Schwartz, 2022)

a. comfort care

Let’s care for this digital body. I’ll feed it virtual vegetables while you wipe away the wear of battery fatigue. And why not encourage it to take strolls through the network, it might be good for it.

But what if it falls ill? What if its sickness is inherent, designed to echo like the distorted reflection of rippling water a corrupted, isolated, and repulsive physical form? Then we must comfort care for it.

Comfort care is a key concept in healthcare, described as an art. It is the simple but not easy art of performing comforting actions by a nurse for a patient (Kolcaba, 1995). The nurse is in this story an artist full of intention, using the medium of comforting actions to produce the artwork of comfort for the uncomfortable. Subtle, subjective, and thorough. However, achieving comfort for another is far from straightforward. It demands addressing not only the physical but also the psychospiritual, environmental, and socio-cultural dimensions of distress, each requiring its blend of relief, ease, and transcendence (Kolcaba, 1995).

In moments of need, digital comfort may become the only care certain digressive bodies receive. When the distress a body is in becomes too culturally uncomfortable, no nurse will come to check on it.

If care is offered, it’s often only with a desire to assimilate the divergent body back into expected standards of normalcy and ability. This leaves those with non-conforming bodies isolated, ashamed, and yearning for connection and acceptance.^{I am talking here about the distress caused by mental health issues that have direct connections to physicality—self- injuring in any direct form; food, drugs, pain. The culturally uncomfortable diseases, the it’s- personal- responsibility, and just-stop disorders. This is a hidden topic of this text because I cared more about the pain surrounding them and the reasons to hide rather than the grim physicality of them all.}

In the depths of isolation and confusion, marginalized bodies often look for belonging and understanding online. Gravitating towards one another with a hunger born of desperation, forming intimate bonds through shared pain. Through a shared sense of unwillingness, a lack of desire, and a desperate need for physical assimilation with the norm.

The healthy body, the normal body, the loved body.

On the internet, these digital bodies claw onto each other, holding each other close and comfort-caring for one another. The spaces where this happens are rooms, or corners of the internet that I’ll call back places. Back places were initially defined by the sociologist Goffman as symbolic spaces where stigmatized people did not need to hide their stigma(1963). In our story, backplaces are small rooms online, tender soft spaces reserved by those in terrible psychological pain themselves, where they can find relief, ease, and transcendence.

Of course, when we speak of digital bodies, their physicality is not relevant. To comfort care for a digital body one would thus need to provide relief, ease, and transcendence for the mental, emotional, and spiritual; through the digital environment of the body and the interpersonal cultural relations of the individual. As with any place of healing, however, it is a transient place. It is an achy place, for the last step of the journey will see them leave the community and compassion that saw and sustained them.

There is no other way for divergent people.

b. uncomfortable comfort

In the past and the present, social scientists have studied the people in the corners of the internet, characterizing these spaces between people as deviant. Like children lifting stones to look at the bugs underneath— simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by the coherence discovered where once was separation. A partition that was then reinforced by the scientists themselves as they began documenting the bugs’ behavior. They eavesdropped on conversations, captured intimate moments, and asked again and again what made them so different. The more they probed, the more they made sure to separate their behavior from the norm to place the deviants against (Adler and Adler, 2005, 2008; Smith, Wickes & Underwood, 2013).

The concept of deviance, particularly concerning what people do with their bodies and how their bodies behave, I find inherently flawed. Observing from an artificial external standpoint only serves to further alienate those already marginalized. I like to approach my research into the intimacy and comfort care expressed in marginalized digital communities without the alienation of social science. There are many approaches one can take if one wishes to avoid this, and the one I am choosing to borrow is a mathematical approach to anthropology. I would like to borrow from mathematician Jörn Dunkel’s work in pattern formation. It’s a conscious choice to approach divergences in bodily behavior through their similarities, not differences. This includes specificities in atypicality, of course, but also the distinctions between me as the writer and them as the writer. You as the reader and you as the community. Me and you, as a whole. Both exist, both separate but in what is not of such importance.

“Though many of these systems are different, fundamentally, we can see similarities in the structure of their data. It’s very easy to find differences. What’s more interesting is to find out what’s similar.”
(Chu & Dunkel, 2021)

Individuals who forge and inhabit these communities, fostering tender, intimate connections amongst themselves, are not deviant but rather divergent. Deviance involves bifurcation, a split estuary from the river of appropriate cultural behavior.^{Of course, the river itself is not a river; it’s many confused streams that believe themselves both the same and separate. I don’t know where I’m going with this, I just don’t love the river of normativity and I’d rather go swim in the ocean of dreams with you.}

Divergence can be so much more than that. In mathematics, a divergent series extends infinitely without converging to a finite limit. A repetition of partial sums with no clear ending, never reaching zero. Mathematician Niels Abel once said that “divergent series are in general something fatal and it is a shame to base any proof on them. [..] The most essential part of mathematics has no foundation”(1826). Drawing a parallel to social relations would then imply that there is no end to divergence, too many paradoxes in the foundation of normativeness to base anything on it.

Harmonic series are, on the other hand, also divergent series. They are infinite series formed by the summation of all positive unit fractions, named after music harmonics. The wavelengths of a vibrating string are a harmonic series. These series also find application in architecture, establishing harmonious relationships. Despite their integral role in human aesthetics, all harmonic series diverge, perpetually expanding without ever concluding. They embody a richness that transcends conventional boundaries, blending into one another infinitely.

By likening digital bodies to divergent series, we embrace the complexity and infinite possibilities arising from their interconnectedness and deviation from the norm. However, it’s crucial to note that the divergence I’m discussing here carries a halo of pain, accompanied by the requirement of bodily discomfort. There are other forms of divergence, ways to have different bodies that necessitate creating spaciousness around normativity to allow them grace to grow.

The divergent digital bodies we are dancing with and caring for, however, are of a particular type. If we were to go back to our water stories, we’d see that the digital bodies we are following are painful ones. Cold, deep streams, hard to follow, hard to swim in. Their divergence from the norm makes them so.

They have intricate relationships with themselves, existing in unstainable forms devoid of comfort, nourishment, or thriving. What does comfort mean for a body whose whole existence is uncomfortable? Moreover, what if the comfort care performed for these divergent bodies makes them too comfortable being in their pained state of self? Could they be?^{I heard the idea of living questions for the first time in “Letters to A Young Poet” by Rainer Maria Rilke and then again on the podcast On Being with Krista Tippet. It may be a bit transparent but this entire text is informed by the concept of keeping the unsolved in your heart and learning to love it. Not searching for the answers for we cannot live them yet. The point is to live it all. It could be that at some point we will live our way to an answer but it is feeling the questions alive within us that is important. Do you?}

Caring for a digital body involves providing it with space to live, giving its experimental bot-feelings tender attention, and revealing your own vulnerable digital body in response. It’s about giving it an audience, hands to hold, eyes that meet theirs in understanding. A rehearsal room, a pillow, a mirror. These rooms, backplaces scattered across the internet, are hidden enough to allow the divergent to comfort- care for one another, sometimes to the point where it is only the same type of divergent digital bodies reflecting back at each other.

So far I have talked fondly of divergence and the harmony of divergent series, and the need to have no finite ending. I’d like to tell you a different story now. Divergent digital bodies are, by this point in our text, built and alive as they can be. They are many, they are together and seeing each other, producing harmonic waves. They are in backplaces on the internet, but they are less safe than they seem. They are themselves resonant echo chambers, with an ongoing risk of catastrophic acoustic resonance.

Acoustic resonance is what happens when an acoustic system amplifies sound waves whose frequency matches one of its natural frequencies of vibration. The instrument of amplification is important for the harmonic series, for the music must not match exactly. An exact match will break it for the object seeks out its resonance. Resonating at the precise resonant frequency of a glass will shatter it. Digital bodies meet in these rooms, amplifying their own waves seeking resonance but the risk of an exact match is that it may shatter them. These spaces full of divergent digital bodies quickly grow unstable, tethering echo chambers. Rooms full of reflections, transforming what was once individual pain into a mirrored loop of anguish. Caring for your own and others’ bodies becomes increasingly difficult, making permanent residence in the mirror room unbearable. You all know you must leave before you meet your exact resonance.

c. unbearable intimacy

This is the end of the story. Our digital bodies have a shape, a sense of life and death, and someone to care for us and to care for. We are alive and have found intimacy with each other.

We live in the backplaces, hiding and being hidden online as we have been for years. We used to be on invitation-only forums, password-protected bulletin boards, or encrypted hashtags. Now we are alive in the glitches between pixels, in a shared language of numbers and acronyms and misdirection. Avoiding a content moderation algorithm, always hunting the dashboards of social media websites for visible pain it can cure by erasure. We cannot tell you where to find you or it might too. We try to stay alive, to hold each other, hiding behind code words, fake names, and photos. We care for each other as best we can, the blind leading the blind, the sick caring for the sick. We have brought our unseemliness, our gory gross bodies to each other and found tender intimacy and understanding.

On good days, dashboards are full of goodbyes and my heart swells with hope, for those of us who make it and for the small bright light telling us that we may be one of them. At the same time, some of us leave only to come back ghosts of ourselves, hunting threads with the empty hope of missionaries.

Don’t give up, it’s worth it!

Most of us scoff at this. The idea of leaving only to come back and tell people you left is uncomfortable, the failed progress that washes away hope. A healed patient who regularly comes back to the hospital to encourage the sick, who wish to be anywhere but there. The genuine love and care within these communities transpire better under goodbye posts. When people do heal and shed their accounts’ skin, they often leave it surrounded by all those who once cared for the digital body within it.

I’m so proud of you! Never come back, we love you so much.

Recover, don’t come back. Recover, don’t come back. Recover, never come back.

I had a conversation with a friend who once lived in these spaces between letters but has since moved outside them. When asked, he mentioned he could only find recovery by leaving that community. His body has changed since now it is the spitting image of a standard, healthy body. I didn’t ask, but he knew I’d wonder. He told me he didn’t like his new body and preferred the divergent one he once built himself. Why leave then? Why did you stop?

Because that was no life.

Now life sparkles, everything feels brighter and more exciting. I got my will to live back. Before, there was nothing but my body. I was willing to die for it.

He pulls up the sleeve of his shirt to show me his shoulder, where he has tattooed a symbol for a community friend who died.

I hope I never go back. I miss them every day.

This is the last dichotomy. For the divergent digital body can’t stay in a Backplace for very long, the intimacy of it is unbearable. It is an intimacy that floods, and overruns. In their definition of intimacy in the context of a public surrounding a cultural phenomenon, the author Lauren Berlant denotes that intimacy itself always requires hopeful imagination. It requires belief in the existence of an ideal other who is emotionally attuned to one’s own experiences and fantasies, conditioned by the same longings and with willing reciprocity (2008).^{If we were to be honest, the entire exercise of writing this for you requires this very faith.}

In the context of the intimacy of a Backplace, where divergent digital bodies have formed a community around existing outside the healthy and standard, longing and hopeful intimacy becomes a heavy- hearted and cardinal concept. Being in these rooms and finding care and love for others like you can be so uncomfortable when the longings, experiences, and fantasies you are sharing are centered around pain. The shared cultural experience of existing as a collective divergent digital body promises a fantasy of belonging, a collective hope, and commitment that is extremely fragile.

There is a duality then, if not a dichotomy. As a divergent body, there is nothing you crave more than to be seen and to be loved in a space where you are safe, where the faces looking at you are not repulsed but warm with familiarity. Yet, it is this very warmth that becomes unbearable and an inherently traumatic intimacy. Being loved at your worst, at your most embarrassing, cultural borderline self is an agonizing duality to deal with. McGlotten, who was referenced earlier concerning the potential of bot-feelings of a digital body, now comes back to remind us of their impossibility. In his book, he talks of a digital intimacy that inundates us and is both a source of connection and disconnection (McGlotten, 2013). We are looking at a smaller scale than he does, but intimacy in the context of shared vulnerability can be a need just as intolerable.

Certain kinds of witnessing can become curses, shivers of resonance so close to an explosion of glass if only you strike the cord that will keep me going. Certain kinds of divergence can only end with leaving or death, truth be told. People in these bodies know this, even if the digital bodies behave as if there is hope in a future where the divergence brings joy to one’s life consistently. The shared vulnerability itself then, is unbearable. I need you to see me, I need you, who are just like me at my worst, to love me. When you do, I can’t stand it. It ruins both of us to be seen this way and we need it so desperately. It has to exist and yet it can’t for long.

I leave even though I love all of your digital bodies. I leave because I love you, little digital body and you are me.

2. A LIFE TO BE HAD

^{Was this the end of this story? In the epilogue, you sit your body down and enter your computer. The air coming in from the window smells wet and earthy, new. The sun shines low on the horizon. You log in to the internet and realize you are being told a story. You start to listen, carefully and, full of love, touch the story to let it know you are there. Delicate-fingered, curious like a child holding a fallen bird. I hold you and the story tentatively.}

I don’t know if I am touching you, to tell you the truth. Digital bodies are stories, like physical bodies are, like dreams are, and like water is.

Stories that are hard to tell and hard to hear and even more, maybe, hard to understand. I have loved these stories and I have loved telling them to you. I hope you understand that my goal was for you to live these questions, to feel these stories in their confusion. My digital body, my bot-feelings, my divergent communities. I have given them to you, so they may live longer, like an obsolete but beloved cyborg shown in a museum.

Look: I was here, Look: I was loved, Look: I was saved.

The digital bodies that kept me alive, kept me from becoming fully a machine are no longer around in these online rooms. They are in different places, being touched by tentative hands, being loved for more than their divergence. I am too.

The rooms, the backplaces, however, are still full of others, divergent digital bodies who did not leave, who keep caring for each other at the bottom of the whirlpool. There is no happy ending because there is no ending. They keep typing and hoping, writing their collective pain down on keyboards that transmit love letters to each other. I am not embarrassed by my care for you, but you may be so if it helps. I know how overwhelming intimacy can be.

Telling you these stories was important for me, so much so that I will tell you so many more in a different place if you wish to listen to me longer. With this story, I dreamt of a digital body for you. It came from an ocean of dreams, into a primordial soup that gave it enough shape to become wild rivers, deep streams, sound waves. It flooded and now, it leaves. A digital body that grew its own feelings, looked for others like it, and realized its divergence and the need to leave. A dream body, a primordial body, a disruptive body, a divergent body, and now, a leaving body. This last story, however, of the leaving and loving body, is yet to be told.

The sun is now almost up, and the birds are alive and awake, telling each other stories just outside the room. We don’t have so much time left. I have made you something, to tell your digital body the stories of the leaving and loving body. It is a webpage, the address is https://vulnerable-interfaces.xpub.nl/backplaces/.

You open the page, and you are asked to write the characters you see in a captcha. E5qr7. eSq9p. 8oc8y. Fuck. You try not to panic, but you know you have been detected.

You pack up your things: the pie I made you, a love letter, two hands made out of felt, a star, a door, a stuffed animal; and you leave again.

references

Adler, P.A. and Adler, P. (2008) ‘The Cyber Worlds of self-injurers: Deviant communities, relationships, and selves’, Symbolic Interaction, 31(1), pp. 33–56. doi:10.1525/si.2008.31.1.33.

Berlant, L.G. (2008) The female complaint the unfinished business of sentimentality in American culture. Durham: Duke University Press.

Chu, J. (2021) Looking for similarities across Complex Systems, MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Available at: https://news.mit.edu/2021/jorn-dunkel-complex- systems-0627 (Accessed: 08 March 2024).

Deleuze, G., Boyman, A. and Rajchman, J. (2001) Pure immanence: Essays on a life. New York: Zone Books.

Goffman, E. (2022) Stigma: Notes on the management of spoiled identity. London: Penguin Classics. Hafner, K. (1997) The epic saga of the well, Wired. Available at: https://www.wired.com/1997/05/ff-well/ (Accessed: 01 February 2024).

Haraway, D.J. (2000) ‘A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century’, Posthumanism, pp. 69–84. doi:10.1007/978- 1-137-05194-3_10.

Hyacint (2017) Harmonic series to 32, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Harmonic_series_to_32.svg.

Kolcaba, K.Y. and Kolcaba, R.J. (1991) ‘An analysis of the concept of comfort’, Journal of Advanced Nursing, 16(11), pp. 1301–1310. doi:10.1111/j.1365- 2648.1991.tb01558.x.

Leonard, A. (no date) All Too Real, https://people.well.com/. Available at: https://people.well.com/user/cynsa/tom/tom14.html (Accessed: 01 April 2024).

McGlotten, S. (2013) Virtual intimacies: Media, affect, and queer sociality [Preprint]. doi:10.1353 book27643.

Rumi, J. al-Din and Barks, C. (1995) ‘Story Water’, in The Essential Rumi. New

Schwartz, C. (2022) Lecture on Loneliness, Granta. Available at: https://granta.com/lecture-on-loneliness/ (Accessed: 08 March 2024).

Smith, N., Wickes, R. and Underwood, M. (2013) ‘Managing a marginalised identity in pro-anorexia and fat acceptance cybercommunities’, Journal of Sociology, 51(4), pp. 950–967. doi:10.1177/1440783313486220.

Yun, J. (2020) ‘The Leaving Season’, in Some Are Always Hungry. University of Nebraska Press.

<?/water bodies>

Backplaces

vulnerable-interfaces.xpub.nl/backplaces

Hi.
I made this play for you. It is a question, for us to hold together.

Is all intimacy about bodies? What is it about our bodies that makes intimacy? What happens when our bodies distance intimacy from us? This small anthology of poems and short stories lives with these questions—about having a body without intimacy and intimacy without a body. This project is also a homage to everyone who has come before and alongside me, sharing their vulnerability and emotions on the Internet. I called the places where these things happen backplaces. They are small, tender online rooms where people experiencing societally uncomfortable pain can find relief, ease, and transcendence.

I made three backplaces for you to see, click, and feel: Solar Sibling, Hermit Fantasy, and Cake Intimacies. Each of these is the result of its own unique performance or project. Some of the stories I will share carry memories of pain—both physical and emotional. As you sit in the audience, know I am with you, holding your hand through each scene. If the performance feels overwhelming at any point, you have my full permission to step out, take a break, or leave. This is not choreographed, and I care deeply for you.

Solar Sibling is an online performance of shared loss about leaving and siblings. This project used comments people left on TikTok poetry. I extracted the emotions from these comments, mixed them with my own, and crafted them into poems. It is an ongoing performance, ending only when your feelings are secretly whispered to me. When you do, by typing into the comment box, your feelings are sent to me and the first act closes as the sun rises.

Hermit Fantasy is a short story about a bot who wants to be a hermit. Inspired by an email response from a survey I conducted about receiving emotional support on the Internet, this story explores the contradiction of being online while wanting to disconnect. As an act it’s a series of letters, click by click.

Cake Intimacies is a performance that took a year to bring together. It is a small selection of stories people told me and I held to memory and rewrote here. The stories come from two performances I hosted. First, I asked participants to eat cake, sitting facing or away from each other and sharing their stories about cake and the Internet. The second performance was hosted at the Art Meets Radical Openness Festival, as part of the Turning of the Internet workshop. For this performance, I predicted participants’ future lives on the Internet using felted archetypes and received stories from their Internet past in return. Now the stories are here, each of them a cake with a filling that tells a story, merging the bodily with the digital and making a mess of it all.

The play ends as all plays do. The curtains close, the website stays but the stories will never sound the same. For the final act, I give you the stories. It’s one last game, one last joke to ask my question again. Digital intimacies about the digital, our bodies and the cakes we eat. For the last act, I ask you to eat digital stories. To eat a comment, to eat a digital intimacy. Sharing an act of physical intimacy with yourself and with me, by eating sweets together. Sweets about digital intimacies that never had a body. There is no moral, no bow to wrap the story in. A great big mess of transcendence into the digital, of intimacy and of bodies. The way it always is. Thankfully.

Performing the Bureaucratic Border(line)s

introduction

This thesis is an assemblage^{I live somewhere in the margins of scattered references, footnotes, citations, examinations embracing the inconvenience of talking back to myself, to the reader and to all those people whose ideas gave soul to the text. I shelter in the borderlands of the pages my fragmented thoughts, flying words, introspections, voices. Enlightenment and inspiration given by the text “Dear Science” written by Katherine McKittrick.} of thoughts, experiences, interpretations, intuitive explorations of what borders are, attempting to unleash a conversation concerning the entangled relation between material injurious borders and bureaucracy. I unravel empirically the thread of how borders as entities are manifested and (de)established. How does the lived experience of crossing multiple borders change and under what conditions?

The eastern Mediterranean borderland^{I use the word borderland to refer to Greece as a (mostly) transit zone in the migrants’ and refugees’ route towards Europe.}, I happened to come from, proves to be one of Europe’s deadly borders towards specific ethnic groups. The embodied experience of borders and practices of (im)mobility change radically depending on the various identities of the people crossing them. As I moved to the Netherlands I started more actively perceiving bureaucracy as another multi-layered border. I was wondering how this situation is shifted and transformed moving towards the European North. What is the role of bureaucracy and how it could be perceived as a mechanism of repulsion for some bodies - a camouflaged border?

But what is my starting point and where does my precarious body fit within the borders that I am touching? The language of the administrative document is rigid and hurtful but myself lies between the margins of these lines.

This thesis does not consist of an excessive inquiry about the profoundly complex concepts of borders and bureaucracy. On the contrary, it is initiated by personal concerns, awareness and my positioning. I choose to structure my argument and talk through a personal process that is being unfolded in parallel with the writing period. Accordingly, these words are dynamically being reshaped due to the material constraints of the bureaucratic timeline. A more distant approach became personal and tangible with auto-ethnographical^{I perceive auto-ethnography as a way to place myself, my lived experiences, my identities, reflections in the (artistic) research and talk through them about structures and within the structures of social, cultural, political frameworks.} elements as I was trying to squish myself and my urgencies under these thresholds and fit the A4 document lines.

I would like at this point to acknowledge and state explicitly my privilege recognizing the different levels of otherness produced by the several bordering mechanisms. My European machine-readable passport as a designed artifact dictates and facilitates the easiness of my mobility. In other (many) cases the lack of it creates profoundly a severe barrier^{“Passports still function as a technology to control movement. Technologies like RFID chips and face recognition are part of a control system for digital state surveillance. Designing a passport is relative to design a surveillance tool. The analysis of passport designs rarely looks at the social consequences of identification, control, and restriction of movement, which can have violent consequences.” (Ruben Pater, 2021)}. I do not intend in any respect to compare my case to the lived experiences and struggles of migrants and refugees. I utilize the paperwork interface of my smaller-scale story in order to unravel and foreground the aforementioned questions.

This thesis is very much indebted to some text-vehicles that mobilized my reflections and nourished the writing process. “Illegal Traveller, an autoethnography of borders” and “Waiting, a Project in conversation” both written by Shahram Khosravi as well as “The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy” by the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber. Graeber initiated his research utilizing the horrendous prolonged bureaucratic processes he had to follow in order to place his sick mother in a nursing home. In parallel, Khosravi’s work is itself the outgrowth of his own ‘embodied experience of borders’, of ethnographic fieldwork among undocumented migrants. I found valuable and inspiring in both texts the personal filter through which they articulate their positioning and develop critique.

I follow a zoom-in approach in mapping my thoughts beginning from the large-scale rigid border as entity and ending up at the document as the smallest designed artifact of the bureaucratic labyrinth.

In the first chapter, I touch the concept of borders in relation to migration. I begin with a personal inspection and comprehension of material borders as entities. Alongside, I interweave in the text the concept of hospitality as a cultural attitude towards ‘strangers’ from the state’s perspective. Conditional and unconditional. How the document I hold in my hands reflects positions on the government’s conditional hospitality and what constraints it dictates.

In the second chapter, I unpack bureaucracy and focus on its bordering function. From migration ghost bureaucracies to the educational bureaucracies of my surroundings to even smaller components of this apparatus. I end up analyzing the document as a unit within this complex network. Through the “interrogation” of the form as an artifact are emerging issues related to language, graphic design and transparency, universality, and underlying violence.

In the third and last chapter, I bridge the written text with the ongoing project that runs simultaneously as part of my graduation work in Experimental Publishing, where I mainly speak through my prototypes. Talking documents(5) are performative bureaucratic text inspections, vocal and non-vocal, that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings. The intention is to underline how the vocalization of bureaucracies as a tool can potentially reveal their territorial exclusive function and provide space for the invisible vulnerability.

“on the other side is the river
and I cannot cross it
on the other side is the sea
I cannot bridge it”
(Anzaldua, 1987)

borders

How a border is defined? How, as an entity, does it define? How is it performed? I used to think of borders in a material concrete way, coming from a country of the European South that constitutes a rigid, violent border that repulses and kills thousands of migrants and refugees. In the following chapter, I will attempt to explore the terrain of material borders in relation to bureaucracy as another multi-layered filter.

What constitutes a border? Is it a wall, a line, a fence, a machine, a door, an armed body or a wound on the land? When somebody crosses a border are they consciously aware of the act of crossing? I am crossing the pedestrian street and walking on the white stripes to reach the pedestrian route right across. Are the white stripes a border or a territory to be crossed to reach another situation? Does the way I perform my walking when I step onto the white stripes change? Is there any embodied knowledge about what could be classified as border? Under which circumstances does this knowledge become canonical? I hop over a fence that separates one garden from another. What if instead of assuming that the fence is a device or a furniture or a material of enclosure, it is just part of the same land? The process or act of jumping a fence can be itself a moment of segregation and a moment of re-establishing or demonstrating the bordering function of it.

Borders could be considered as devices of both exclusion and inclusion that filter people and define forms of circulation and movement in ways no less violent than those applied in repulsive measures. Closure and exclusion are only one function of the nation-state borders. Of course, borders are not always that visible or treated and perceived as borders, as Rumford argues they are “designed not to look like borders, located in one place but projected in another entirely” (Rumford, cited by Keshavarz, 2016, p.298)

As institutions, they seem to be much more complex, flexible, or even penetrable in comparison with the traditional image of a wall as a bordering device that demonstrates in a way itself. Crossing and borders are inherently defined in relation to each other. “Where there is a border, there is also a border crossing, legal as well as illegal” (Khosravi, 2010).

conditional hospitality

I started thinking about hospitality as a cultural behavior and as an inseparable term in the context of borders due to a recent personal bureaucratic experience. Hospitality can be instrumentalized to describe an individual’s as well as a nation’s response towards strangers within their enclosed territory - a property, a home, a land, a country. What does hospitality mean and how hospitality under specific circumstances can be a tool in the hands of a state?

I will share a personal story related to hospitality and bureaucracy. I was recently evicted from my previous house [31/01/2024] due to a trapping contract situation. My former roommates and I were forced to terminate our previous contract and sign a new one that further limited our rights. The bureaucratic free market language of the contract, the foreign law language barrier, the threats of the agent and the precarity of being homeless in a foreign country forced us to sign the new rental agreement which was the main reason for our eviction. Currently, I am hosted temporarily by friends until I find a more permanent accommodation. Meanwhile, the government requires me to declare the new address which I do not have within five days of my moving. Consequently, I have to follow another bureaucratic path. This involves requesting permission for a short-term postal address while declaring the addresses of my current hosts [4/02/2024]. I gathered the required documents, I processed a 9-page-text and another one with the personal data of my hosts and myself and answered questions about:

why don’t I have a house,
who are the people who host me,
what is my relationship with them,
where do I sleep,
where do I store my belongings,
how many people are hosting me and accordingly their personal data,
for how long,
why I cannot register there,
what days of the week do I stay in the one house and
what days do I stay in the other house,
whether and how am I searching for a permanent place and
what is the tangible proof of my search?

All these questions provoked thinking around the concept of conditional hospitality as a behavior of the state towards strangers. I can see that on a smaller scale it is being applied to the hospitality I receive from my friends in the middle of an emergency. I am wondering, though, whether is it that important for the government to know on whose couch I sleep or where I store my belongings. The omnipresent gaze of a state who has the right to know every small detail about myself while at the same time questioning people’s hospitality in case of emergency. It seems that forms of knowledge are inseparably related to forms of power. It will take 8 weeks for my request to be processed and for the government to approve or reject if I deserve my friends’ hospitality.

“Today as yesterday, her land and her time are stolen, only because she is told that she has arrived too late. Much too late”
(Khosravi, 2021)

waiting

Waiting can be considered as a dramaturgical means embedded in bureaucratic procedures that camouflage power relations through the manipulation of people’s time. When people are in the middle of a bureaucratic process and waiting for the government’s decision on their case or just waiting for their turn. “The neoliberal technologies of citizenship enacted through keeping people waiting for jobs, education, housing, health care, social welfare or pensions turn citizens into patients of the state” (Khosravi, 2021). I waited two weeks for a response from the municipality only to discover that my request was rejected [16/02/2024].

Contemporary border practices mirror past colonial practices, as they exploit migrants’ time by keeping them in prolonged waiting, “like the way colonial capitalism transformed lands to wastelands to plunder the wealth underneath” (Khosravi, 2021). The current border regime, known by extended waiting periods and constant delays, is part of a larger project aimed at taking away wealth, labor, and time through colonial accumulation and immediate expulsion.

When someone opens their house to a guest, a stranger, someone in need, means that they open their property to someone. Hospitality is interweaved with a sense of ownership over something. Expanding the concept of hospitality to a nation-scale, we could say that the nation-building process involves people asserting artificial ownership over a territory even if they do not own any property within this land.

Conditional hospitality is tied to a sense of offering back to the home-land-nation-state-country as a way to win or trade your permission to enter and enjoy the hospitality of a place. Coming from specific places in comparison to others, having to offer some special skills or your labor - if it is asked for - can be possible conditions that may allow somebody to receive hospitality. I would say that an efficient check of these conditions is regularly facilitated through bureaucratic channels. The concept of unconditional-conditional hospitality is closely related to exchange. When you do not have something to offer according to the needs or expectations of a “household”, you may not receive the gift of hospitality.

The notion of hospitality is excessively instrumentalized within the Greek context portrayed as an “ideal” intertwined with the nation-building narrative and as a foundational quality - product by the Greek tourist industry. However, the Greek sea has been an endless refugee graveyard and the eastern Aegean islands a “warehouse of souls”^{For further reading: https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/} for the last many years. In this case, conditional hospitality applies primarily to those who invest in and consume.

Hospitality can function as a filtration mechanism that permits access – lets in – the ones who deserve it, those who have “passports, valid visas, adequate bank statements, or invitations” (Khosravi, 2010). By doing this, unproductive hospitality is being avoided due to sovereign state’s border regulations and checks. Conditional hospitality, is about worthiness, is directed towards migrants deemed good and productive – skilled and capable for assimilation- or a tiny minority of vulnerable and marginalized asylum seekers who lack representation. Only in a world where the nation-state’s boundaries have been dismantled and where the undocumented, stateless, non-citizens are unconditionally accepted, only at this moment, we are able to imagine the “political and ethical survival of humankind” (Agamben, 2000). Hospitality does not seem a matter of choice but a profound urgency, if humanity desires to foster a future together.

“the right to have rights”^{(Arendt, as cited by Khosravi, 2010, p.121)}

What about the crossers who managed to travel and reach the desirable “there”, the ones who transcended the borders and the control checks of the ministries of defense(7), the ones who enter but do not own papers, the paperless? What does it mean to be documented and what is inefficiently documented within a territory? They are threatened if they get caught by authorities and also according to the official narrative, they threaten. Since the physical mechanisms of bordering did not succeed in repulsing them, the bureaucratic border appears as an additional layer of filtration. The undocumented are non-citizens, they might be crossers or burners(8), both, or even none. “Undocumented migrants and unauthorized border crossers are polluted and polluting because of their very unclassifiability” (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). The loss of citizenship, denaturalisation, makes somebody denaturalised, they are rendered unnatural. “Citizenship has become the nature of being human” (Koshravi, 2010).

According to Hannah Arendt, the right to have rights and claim somebody else’s rights is the only human right (Arendt, as cited by Khosravi, 2010, p. 121). The foundational issue with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is its dependence on the nation-state system. Since human rights are grounded on civil rights, which are essentially citizens’ rights, human rights are tied to the nation-state system. Consequently, human rights can be materialized only in a political community. “Loss of citizenship also means loss of human rights” (Khosravi, 2010)

“…^{This is a transcribed recording of my phone during a protest on migration at Dam Square in Amsterdam. I insert part of the speech of a Palestinian woman addressing the matter of undocumentedness. Date and time of the recording 18th of June 2023, 15:05.} I am here for the rights of the children which haven’t be in the taking part in the education since they have undocumented mothers and they are more than ^“” means undecipherable years. I am here to represent mothers who are looking for a place to have a sense of belonging or how long are you trying to continue humiliating them and the female gender. I am here to express my frustration with IND^{Immigratie- en Naturalisatiedienst - Dutch Immigration and Naturalisation Service}. So frustrated. And I will not stop talking about democracy. Democracy is the rule of law where everybody feels included. Democracy is a rule of law where everybody feels * We, undocumented people, we don’t feel a sense of belonging from the system."

bureaucracy as immaterial border

Apart from the rigid visible borders, bureaucracy related to migrants, refugees and asylum seekers can also constitute an in-between less visible borderland. I used to perceive bureaucracy as an immaterial and intangible entity. However, now I can claim that this assumption is not true. Bureaucracy is material and spatial and can be seen as an apparatus, a machine, a circuitry, an institution, a territory, a borderland, a body, a zone – a “dead zone of imagination” as Graeber claims. It can be inscribed on piles of papers, folders, drawers, booklets, passports, IDs, documents, screens, tapes, bodies, hospital corridors, offices, permissions to enter, stay, work, travel, exist, come and go, leave, visit family, bury a friend.

Bureaucratic documents especially those related to migration, can become territories or should be interpreted “as sites where social interactions happen, where power relations unfold and are contested” (Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021). When these bureaucratic objects are used and manipulated, they can constitute sites of “confrontation, reproduction, negotiation and performance” (Cretton, Geoffrion, 2021) shaping social relations and producing meaning.

Bureaucracy related to asylum seekers reveals the profound bordering nature of these practices, as a continuous process of producing otherness. Accordingly, I see bureaucracy as a practice that raises material and symbolic walls for specific groups of people who are rendered unwanted and unwelcome because they dared to cross the borders of the Global North. It is as if they could never manage to eventually arrive and shelter their lives within the desirable “there”^{I am referring to the desirable potential destinations of migrants and refugees corresponding mainly to Global North countries.}. “In these bordering processes, we can detect the “coloniality of asylum”^{In this text they insert the concept of the “coloniality of asylum” introduced by Picozza, which talks about how asylum systems are intertwined with colonial legacies and power dynamics. These systems are often colonial structures reinforcing hierarchies between nations and reproducing patterns of domination and oppression. In this framework, asylum is not just about offering protection but also about regulating and managing populations in a way that reflects colonial relationships.} (Borelli, Poy, Rué, 2023). Bureaucracies in practice act as filters, determining who, from an institutional standpoint, deserves to receive protection and who does not. They operate as systems that classify non-citizens and place them in a social hierarchy of disproportionate unequal obligations, lack of rights and access to institutional support.

higher education’s expanding bureaucracy

While I had this inherent concern about borders and bureaucratic structures in relation to migration, I decided to start zooming in and explore my own bureaucratic surroundings through my personal lens. As a student, I was eager to understand and dig into the educational institutions’ bureaucratic mechanisms being driven by smaller-scale bureaucratic struggles and peers’ narratives, stories and experiences. How can higher education in a European country reflect policies around migration and border control less profoundly. How can education filter and distinguish, how it can reproduce efficiently itself?

I gradually started perceiving the bureaucratic apparatus as an omnipresent immaterial border - a ghost infrastructure - that one always encounters but does not really see, a borderland that lies in the gray zone between visibility and invisibility. Bureaucracy renders us “stupid” and vulnerable in front of it. It is rarely questioned but it should be performed efficiently for people to exist properly.

The contradiction embedded in many cultural and educational institutions lies in the level of unawareness regarding surveillance via multiple bureaucratic rituals that (re)produce docile behaviors. How these mechanisms are masked and standing in the margins of the visible nonvisible sphere.

“This is what makes it possible, for example, for graduate students to be able to spend days in the stacks of university libraries poring over Foucault-inspired theoretical tracts about the declining importance of coercion as a factor in modern life without ever reflecting on that fact that, had they insisted their right to enter the stacks without showing a properly stamped and validated ID, armed men would have been summoned to physically remove them, using whatever force might be required.”
(Graeber, 2015)

The genuine essence of education is not bureaucratic at all, neither does it have to fit and ground its foundations under a bureaucratic roof. “The pedagogical process runs counter to the hierarchical, impersonal qualities of bureaucracy” (Cunningham, 2017). However, people working in educational institutions acknowledge the fact that entrenched bureaucratic systems impose their material constraints on teaching structures and on how these actors in this process interact with each other.“Students and staff are treated as human capital” (Cunningham, 2017). This determination can dehumanize people involved, like when “faculty-as-labor” and “students-as-consumers” are marginalized and treated as just variables.

“there is no document of civilisation which is not at the same time a document of barbarism”
Walter Benjamin

the document

From fences and armed police to nation-state mechanism of less-material bordering to bureaucracy to the elements of bureaucracy to the document itself as the minimum unit of an apparatus. Understanding and unhiding the violence of a form -violence materialized and at the same time camouflaged by the language structure, the vocabulary, the graphic design, their ability to render subjectivities that fit and don’t fit within the controlled territory of the lines of the form. A language that fragments, classifies, places and un-places. Thus bureaucratic apparatus is something more than a metaphor it is also a symbol. It is hard to see that there are many more layers beneath the purpose it propagates. A metaphor that is so perfectly materialized as well as naturalized that you cannot even see it.

bureaucracy as textual institution

The bureaucratic apparatus can be considered as something more than an infrastructure that organizes institutions, markets, states, etc. It can constitute itself an institution, a textual institution. As the factory generates commodities and sets them within a circuit of motion, bureaucracy generates documents and sets them throughout a communicative circuitry (Cunningham, 2017). An institution that organizes and (infra)structures other institutions and similarly reproduces itself through text. The materiality of a text document reflects the ideology of the interconnected institutions and their underlying bureaucratic systems. Language occupies a dual contradictory role as the foundational element of bureaucracy. Language can become a shroud to conceal the violence and reinforce hierarchical structures and simultaneously can be transformed into the rigid rational cell itself. They shape their own narratives, they reflect the institutional narratives.

the myth of universality

One of the great powers of bureaucracies is their ability to render themselves transparent. It seems that bureaucracy does not have to say anything more beyond itself, is self-referential and self-contained. It is boring or most likely is supposed to be boring. “One can describe the ritual surrounding it. One can observe how people talk about or react to it” (Graeber, 2015). The supposed universality of the form which is carefully constructed can be partly attributed to the individuality and impersonality of many bureaucratic processes. “Bureaucracies operate through an assemblage of hierarchy, impersonality, and procedure in order to complete organizational tasks with maximum efficiency” (Weber, as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p. 307).

I had to open a discussion with students from non-EEA (non European Economic Area) countries in order to understand that they have to conduct tuberculosis x-rays^{“To keep the Residence Permit, some non-European students need to visit the Dutch Public Health Authority (GGD) after they arrived in the Netherlands. They will undergo a medical test for tuberculosis (TB). This is a requirement from the IND (Dutch Immigration Office)”. (Introduction days, 2021)} when they arrive in the Netherlands. It seems that for the Dutch state, their bodies might be more threatening than bodies coming from a European country. The relativization in the quality and the quantity of paperwork requested from different “groups” of applicants in a specific context deconstructs the myth of the universality of the bureaucratic form.

Undoubtedly the success of bureaucracy is drawn from its efficiency in relation to schematization as an efficient material quality. “Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules, statistics, or questionnaires, it is always a matter of simplification (Cunningham, 2017)”. Bureaucracies ignore the social existence of a person and fragment, classify and define them under specific perspectives. Why do they ask for this information instead of others? “Why place of birth and not, say, place where you went to grade school? What’s so important about the signature?” (Graeber, 2015)

materiality-underlying violence

There is a great materiality in bureaucracies. Bureaucratic procedures are often compared to a labyrinth which appears as a similarly complex structure constituted by simple geometrical shapes (Weber, as cited by Cunningham, 2017, p.310). Bureaucratic documents can be complicated and multiple due to this infinite accumulation of really simple but at the same time contradictory elements. A constant juxtaposition of letters, symbols, stamps, signatures, paper, ink, barcodes, QR codes within a circuit of workers, interweaved and interconnected offices, repetitive performative tasks and rituals.

Underneath every bureaucratic document, there is a good amount of graphic design labor. What kind of visual strategy is embedded in administrative objects that the design aspect of these artifacts appears to be invisible? The material decisions applied as well as the material constraints attributed to the document can transform or produce different textual meanings and consequently understandings.

“This does not mean that constraints limit meaning, but on the contrary, constitute it; meaning cannot appear where freedom is absolute or nonexistent: the stem of meaning is that of a supervised freedom”
(Roland Barthes, 1983)

When I encountered the green logo of the municipality of Rotterdam I did not cultivate any feelings of enthusiasm or even boredom. A big calligraphic “R” with the flawless green ribbons that penetrate it on the left corner of a 229x162 mm standardized dimension folder with a transparent rectangle that reveals my inscribed name and surname from the inside part. I did not put any aesthetic critique over this but I rather felt this rush of stress for the expected response to my objection letter or a fine or a tax to be paid within a specific timeline cause another fine would come if I did not comply with this.

One month ago (from the writing present), my friend Chae made for my birthday this amazing Dutch-government-like biscuit forms, recreating the entire layout of the document using the interface of a crunchy biscuit. She used the same color blue scheme and she placed the biscuit form inside the same standardized dimension folder 229x162 mm with the same transparent layer that reveals my name and surname. According to literary critic and theorist Katherine Hayles:

“to alter the physical form of the artifacts is to change the act of reading and understanding but mostly you transform the metaphoric and symbolic network that structures the relation of world to world. To change the material artifacts is to transform the context and circumstances for interacting with the words, which inevitably change the meaning of the word itself. This transformation of meaning is especially possible when the words interact with the inscription technologies that produce them”
(Hayles, 2002)

In the latter case, the inscription technology used is the sugar blue paste and the handwriting of Chae. The text in the white-blue government document forces a different reading from the white-blue biscuit document, even if they carry the same bits of information. If I do not read carefully the text in the folder and if I do not act according to the suggested actions there is a threat. The level of threat varies in relation to the case, the identities of the holder, the state, the context, etc. There is no room for negotiation in bureaucracy and this is the omnipresent underlying violence. The threat of violence shrouded within its structures and foundations does not permit any questioning but on the contrary creates “willful blindness” towards them^{I am referring to those people subjecting others to bureaucratic circles shaped by structurally violent situations as well as people in positions of privilege who deliberately ignore these facts.}. Bureaucracies are not stupid inherently rather they manage and coerce processes that reproduce docile and stupid behaviors.

vocal archives-talking documents

This chapter is mainly a constellation of some prototypes I created while writing and coping with personal bureaucratic challenges. I provided some further space for my anxiety by unpacking and exploring the material conditions that nourished it within this timeline.

An administrative decision on a case may not seem necessarily hurtful in linguistic terms. However, it can be injurious and severely threatening. By performing the bureaucratic archival material of my interactions with the government, I aim to draw a parallel narrative highlighting the bordering role of bureaucracy and the concealed underlying violence it perpetuates.

A bureaucratic text does not just describe a reality, a decision, a case or an action, but on the contrary, it is capable of changing the reality or the order of things that is described via these words. Bureaucratic official documents are inherently performative. These texts regulate and bring situations into being.

My intention in transforming bureaucratic texts into “playable” scenarios is to explore how embodying these texts in public through collective speech^{I imagine the theatrical play as a “human microphone”, a low-tech amplification device. A group of people performs the bureaucratic scenario in chorus, out loud, in the corridor of the school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right across, outside of the municipality building. The term is borrowed from the protests of the Occupy Wall Street Movement in 2011. People were gathered around the speaker repeating what the speaker was saying in order to ensure that everyone could hear the announcements during large assemblies. Human bodies became a hack in order to replace the forbidden technology. In New York it is required to ask for permission from authorities to use “amplified sound” in public space.} can provoke different forms of interpretations and open tiny conceptual holes. “The meaning of a performative act is to be found in this apparent coincidence of signifying and enacting” (Butler, 1997). The performative bureaucratic utterances - the vocal documents - attempt to bring into existence -by overidentifying, exaggerating, acting- the discomfort, the threat, the violence which is mainly condemned into private individual spheres.

How performing a collection of small bureaucratic stories can function as an instant micro intervention and potentially produce a public discourse. Where do we perform this speech, where and when does the “theater” take place? Who is the audience? I am particularly interested in the site-specificity of these “acts”. How can these re-enactments be situated in an educational context and examine its structures? Is it possible for this small-scale publics to provoke the emergence of temporal spaces of marginal vulnerable voicings? According to the agonistic approach of the political theorist Chantal Mouffe, critical art is art that provokes dissensus, that makes visible what the dominant narrative tends to undermine and displace. “It is constituted by a multiplicity of artistic practices aiming at giving a voice to all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” (Mouffe, 2008).

I started working and engaging more with different bureaucratic material that my peers and I encountered regularly or appeared in our (e)mail (in)boxes and are partly related to our identities as foreign students coming from different places. I chose to start touching and looking for various bureaucracies that surround me as a personal filter towards it. From identification documents and application forms to rental contracts, funding applications, visa applications, quality assurance questionnaires related to the university, assessment criteria, supermarket point gathering cards, receipts. A sequence of locked doors to be unlocked more or less easily via multiple bureaucratic keys. The methods and tools used to scrutinize the administrative artifacts are not rigid or distinct. It is mainly a “collection” of small bureaucratic experiments - closely related to language as well as the performative “nature” of these texts themselves. I was intrigued by how transforming the material conditions of a piece of text could influence the potential understandings and perceptions of its meaning.

prototypes

1.

Title: “Quality Assurance Questionnaire Censoring”
When: October 2023
Where: XPUB studio wall
Who: myself

Description: Some months ago my classmates and I received an email with a questionnaire aimed at preparing us for the upcoming quality assurance meeting within the school. Ada and I had a meeting, in an empty white room with closed doors, with an external collaborator of the university. The main request was to rate and answer the pre-formulated questions covering issues about performance, different and multiple topics related to the course, the teaching staff, the facilities, the tools provided. The micro linguistic experiment of highlighting, censoring and annotating this document aimed for an understanding of what a quality assurance meeting is within an educational institution.

Reflections-Thoughts: This experiment was my first attempt to start interrogating and observing the language and the structure of a bureaucratic document. How these “desired” standards propagated through text. What is the role of the student-client in these processes as an esoteric gaze of control over the course and their teachers? My focus was to locate and accumulate all the wording related to measurements, rate, quantity, assessments, statistics. Highlighting the disproportionate amount of metrics-related vocabulary was enough to craft the narrative around this process.

These ‘rituals’ are components of a larger “culture of evidence”, serving as a tool that blurs the distinction between discourse and reality (Cunningham, 2017). This culture of evidence influences how people perceive and understand information. The primary purposes of these metrics are twofold: they play a role in the marketing sphere, attracting potential students to the university as well as they are utilized in interactions and negotiations with the government, which increasingly cuts budgets allocated to universities.

2.

Title: “Department of Bureaucracy and Administration Customs Enforcement”
When: November 2023
Where: Leeszaal^{Community Library in Rotterdam West}
Who: XPUB peers, tutors, friends, alumni

Description: During the first public moment at Leeszaal, I decided to embody and enact the traditional role of a bureaucrat in a graphic and possibly absurd way performing a small “theatrical play”. I prepared a 3-page and a 1-page document incorporating bureaucratic-form aesthetics and requesting applicants’ fake data and their answers for questions related to educational bureaucracy. People receiving an applicant number at the entrance of Leeszaal, queuing to collect their documents from the administration “office”, filling forms, waiting, receiving stamps, giving fingerprints and signing, waiting again were the main components of this act.

Reflections-Thoughts: Beyond the information gathered through my bureaucratic-like questionnaires, the most crucial element of this experiment was the understanding and highlighting of the hidden performative elements that entrench these “rituals”. It was amazing seeing the audience becoming instantly actors of the play enacting willingly a administrative ritualistic scene. The provided context of this “play” was a social library hosting a masters course public event on graduation projects. I am wondering whether this asymphony between the repetitive bureaucratic acts within the space of Leeszaal, where such acts are not expected to be performed, evoked contradictory feelings or thoughts. Over-identifying with a role was being instrumentalized as an “interrogation” of one’s own involvement in the reproduction of social discourses, power, authority, hegemony.

3.

Title: “Passport Reading Session”
When: January 2024
Where: XML – XPUB studio
Who: Ada, Aglaia, Stephen, Joseph

Description: This prototype is a collective passport reading session. I asked my classmates to bring their passports or IDs and sitting in a circular set up we attempted to “scan” our documents. Every contributor took some time to browse, annotate verbally, interpret, understand, analyze, vocalize their thoughts on these artifacts, approaching them from various perspectives. The three passports and one ID card were all coming from European countries.

Reflections-Thoughts: For the first time I observed this object so closely. The documentation medium was a recording device, Ada’s mobile phone. The recording was transcribed by vosk^{Vosk is an offline open-source speech recognition toolkit.} and myself and a small booklet of our passport readings was created.

“So the object here is like not by random it comes from the history of nation-states and how nation-states and nationalities created like a form of identity. So nation-state is actually a recent invention that came into existence over the last two hundred fifty years in the form as we know it nowadays, in the form of democratic capitalism, before like monarchies and so on and each citizen of such a nation-state got also kind of a particular identity”,
Joseph says about his ID card.

We read the embedded signs, symbols, categories, texts, magical numbers in our passports that construct our profiles. Seeing someone’s passport, ID cards, visas, travel documents might mean that you are able to understand how easy or not is for them to move, what are their travel paths, how departure or arrival is smooth or cruel. Are there emotions along the way? For some people these are documents “that embody power — minimal or no waiting, peaceful departure, warm and confident arrival” (Khosravi, 2021).

[Part of the A6 booklet of the transcription of the passport readings session]

4.

Title: “Postal Address Application Scenario”
When: February 2024
Where: Room in Wijnhaven Building, 4th floor
Who: XPUB 1,2,3, tutors, Leslie

Description: This scenario is the first part of a series of small episodes that construct a bureaucratic story unfolding the processes of my communication with the government. The body of the text of the “theatrical” script is sourced from the original documents as well as recordings of the conversation I had with the municipality throughout this process. I preserved the sequence of the given sentences and by discarding the graphic design of the initial form, I structured and repurposed the text into a scenario. The main actors were two bureaucrats vocalizing the questions addressed in the form, in turns and sometimes speaking simultaneously like a choir, three applicants answering the questions similarly while a narrator mainly provided the audience with the context and the storyline constructing the scenery of the different scenes.

The first and the last moment of the performance was during a semi-public tryout moment where XPUB peers performed the distributed scenario in a white room on the 4th floor of the Winjhaven building. They were seated having as a border a black long-table. A border furniture between the bureaucrats and the applicants. The narrator was standing still behind them while they were surrounded by the audience. The main documentation media of the act were a camera on a tripod, a recorder in the middle of the table and myself reconstructing the memory of the re-enactement at that present - 6 days later.

Reflections-Thoughts: Vocalizing and embodying the bureaucratic questions was quite useful in acknowledging the government’s voice and presence as something tangible rather than a floating, arbitrary entity. It was interesting observing the bureaucrats performing their role with confidence and entitlement, contrasting with the applicants who appeared to be more stressed to respond convincingly and promptly. There is a notable distinction between performativity and performance. Performing consciously and theatrically amplifying real bureaucratic texts by occupying roles and overidentifying with them can constitute a diffractive moment, a tool itself. From bureaucratic text to performative text scenarios to speech. The embedded (but rather unconscious) performativity of “real” bureaucratic rituals establishes and empowers (bureaucratic) institutions through repetitive acts. These theatrical moments attempt to highlight the shrouded performative elements of these processes.

conclusion

next chapters of the case with reference number A.B.2024.4.03188

I expanded the “play” by incorporating additional “scenes” sourced again from the documents accompanying the ongoing “conversation with the government”. Two weeks after submitting my application for a short-term postal address [16/02/2024], I received a letter from the municipality stating their rejection of my request and warning me of potential fines if I fail to declare a valid address and provide a rental contract. After extensive communication with the municipality, I decided to respond to this decision by writing and sending an objection letter [19/02/2024]. The objections committee received my letter [21/02/2024], and after some days, they issued a confirmation letter outlining the following steps of the objection process which involves hearings with municipality lawyers and further investigation of my case. The textual components collaged for the next “episodes” are sourced from the transcribed recordings of my actual conversations with the municipality clerks, my objection letter, the confirmation documents including the steps I am required to take.

My case has finished by this time. I withdrew my objection [7/03/2024] and I de-registered [11/03/2024] after a good amount of stress and precarity. My bureaucratic literature is meant to be read and voiced collectively. People’s bureaucratic literatures should be read and voiced collectively.

My intention is to facilitate a series of collective performative readings of bureaucratic scenarios or other portable paperwork stories as a way of publishing and inspecting bureaucratic bordering infrastructures. The marginal voices of potential applicants are embodying and performing a role. “The speech does not only describe but brings things into existence” (Austin, 1975). I would like to stretch the limits of dramaturgical speech through vocalizing a document in public with others and turn an individual administrative case into a public one. How do the inscribed words in the documents are not descriptive but on the contrary “are instrumentalized in getting things done” (Butler, 1997). Words as active agents. I am inviting past and future applicants, traumatized students, injured bearers, bureaucratic border crossers, stressed expired document holders or just curious people to share, vocalize, talk through, read out loud, amplify, (un)name, unplace, dismantle the injurious words of these artifacts.

“we didn’t cross the border, the border crossed us”(20)

As I sit in the waiting area at the gate B7 in the airport preparing to come back to the Netherlands, I am writing the last lines of this text. I am thinking of all these borders and gates that my body was able to pass through smoothly, carrying my magical object through which I embody power- at least within this context. However, I yearn for a reality where we stop looking at those bodies that cross the multifaceted borders and get crossed and entrenched by them, but on the contrary we start interrogating and shouting at the contexts and the frameworks that construct them and render them invisible, natural and powerful.

references

Agamben, G. (2000) Means without end: Notes on politics. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Anzaldua, G. (1987) Borderlands - la Frontera: The new mestiza. 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Aunt Lute Books.

Austin, J. L. (1975) “lECTURE VII”, in How to do things with words. Oxford University Press, pp.83-93.

Barthes, R. (1983) Fashion system. Translated by M. Ward and R. Howard. Hill & Wang.

Border controls (2017) Defensie.nl. Available at: https://english.defensie.nl/topics/border-controls

Borelli, C., Poy, A., and Rué, A. (2023). “Governing Asylum without ‘Being There’: Ghost Bureaucracy, Outsourcing, and the Unreachability of the State.” Social Sciences, 12(3), 169. [DOI: https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci12030169]

Butler, J. (1997) Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London, England: Routledge.

Cretton, V., Geoffrion, K. (2021). “Bureaucratic Routes to Migration: Migrants’ Lived Experience of Paperwork, Clerks and Other Immigration Intermediaries”, University of Victoria

Cunningham, J. (2017), “Rhetorical Tension in Bureaucratic University”, University of Cincinnati, Ohio, USA

Graeber, D. (2015) The utopia of rules: On technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy. Brooklyn, NY: Melville House Publishing

Hayles, N. K. (2002) Writing Machines. London, England: MIT Press.

Introduction days (2021) Rotterdam University of Applied Sciences. Available at: https://www.rotterdamuas.com/study-information/practical-information/international-introduction-days/Tuberculosis-test/ (Accessed: April 8, 2024).

Keshavarz, M. (2016) Design-Politics: An Inquiry into Passports, Camps and Borders. Malmö University, Faculty of Culture and Society.

Khosravi, S. (2010) “illegal” traveller: An auto-ethnography of borders. 2010th ed. Basingstoke, England: Palgrave Macmillan.

Khosravi, S. (ed.) (2021) Waiting - A Project in Conversation. transcript Verlag.

M’charek, A. (2020) “Harraga: Burning borders, navigating colonialism,” The sociological review, 68(2), pp. 418–434. doi: 10.1177/0038026120905491.

Malichudis, S. (2020) How the Aegean islands became a warehouse of souls, Solomon. Available at: https://wearesolomon.com/mag/focus-area/migration/how-the-aegean-islands-became-a-warehouse-of-souls/ (Accessed: April 7, 2024).

McKittrick, K. (2021) Dear science and other stories. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Mouffe, C. (2008) ‘Art and Democracy: Art as an Agonistic Internvention’. Open:14 Art as a Public Issue, No.14 (2008), p.4

Pater, R. (2021) Caps lock: How capitalism took hold of graphic design, and how to escape from it. Amsterdam, Netherlands: Valiz.

Picozza, F. (2021). The coloniality of asylum : mobility, autonomy and solidarity in the wake of Europe’s refugee crisis. London: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.

Talking Documents

This project appeared as a need to explore potential bureaucratic dramaturgies within the educational institution I was part as a student. I was curious about educational bureaucratic mechanisms being driven by smaller-scale paperwork struggles and peers’ narratives, stories and experiences. However, unexpected emergencies - due to my eviction on the 31st of January 2024 - placed centrally my personal struggles unfolded in parallel with the making period. I ended up conducting accidentally auto-ethnography as the project was dynamically being reshaped due to the material constraints of the bureaucratic timeline.

Talking Documents are performative bureaucratic text inspections that intend to create temporal public interventions through performative readings. I utilized the paperwork interface of my smaller-scale story in order to unravel and foreground questions related to the role of bureaucracy as less material border and as a regulatory mechanism reflecting narratives, ideologies, policies.

Central element of this project is a seven-act scenario that construct my personal paperwork story, unraveling the actual struggles of my communication with the government. The body of the text of the “theatrical” script is sourced from the original documents, email threads as well as recordings of the conversations with the municipality of Rotterdam I documented and archived throughout this period. I preserved the sequence of the given sentences and by discarding the graphic design of the initial forms, I structured and repurposed the text into a playable scenario.

I perceive the document as a unit and as the fundamental symbolic interface of the bureaucratic network. The transformation of the materiality of a document into a scenario to be enacted collectively in public aims to examine these artifacts and highlight the shrouded performative elements of these processes.

I see the collective readings of these scenarios as a way of instant publishing and as a communal tool of inspecting bureaucratic bordering infrastructures. How can these re-enactments be situated in different institutional contexts and examine their structures? I organized a series of performative readings of my own bureaucratic literature in different spaces and contexts, pubic and semi-public WDKA, Art Meets Radical Openness Festival in Linz, the City Hall of Rotterdam where I invited people to perform the play together, like a tiny theater.

The marginal voices of potential applicants are embodying and enacting a role. “The speech does not only describe but brings things into existence”(Austin, 1975). My intention was to stretch the limits of dramaturgical speech through vocalizing a document and turn individual administrative cases into public ones. How do the inscribed words in the documents are not descriptive but on the contrary “are instrumentalized in getting things done”(Butler,1997). Words as active agents. Bodies as low-tech “human microphones”. A group of people performs the bureaucratic scenario in chorus, out loud, in the corridor of the school’s building, in the main hall, at the square right across, outside of the municipality building.

I documented and recorded these public acts and I re-created the collectively voiced scenario. This audio piece is a constellation of different recordings and soundscapes of these public moments, a vocal archive, published in the graduation exhibition of XPUB in 2024.

Fair Leads

Fair leads or Fair winds is a saying sailors and knotters use to greet each other. It comes from the working end of a string that will soon be forming a knot.

Through this bight of the thesis, I feel the necessity to clarify my intention of using knots as a “thinking and writing object” throughout my research journey. Although knots are physical objects and technically crucial in many fields of labor and life, they are also objects of thought and are open for wide minds’ appreciation. Throughout history, knots have been used to connect, stop, secure, bind, protect, decorate, record data, punish, contain, fly and many other purposes. So if the invention of flying -which required a wing that was supported using certain types of knotswas initiated with the knowledge of how to use strings to make things, why wouldn’t a research paper make use of this wonderful art as an inspiration for writing and interactive reading?

KNOTS AS OBJECTS TO THINK WITH

Seeing how these words, interpretations of a physical object were so different to each other was transcendental. In this thesis, I am excited to share my understanding of knots with you. My three words for knots are resistance, imagination and infinity. Keeping these in mind, I experimented with certain reading modes as you will see later on.

Knots are known to be used 15 to 17 thousand years ago for multiple purposes. These purposes were often opposing each other. For example, it could be used to let something loose or to restrain it; for pleasure or pain; for going high above or down below… I believe this diversity of uses can also be seen in how people approach knots as an idea or a metaphor. One can think it represents chaos where someone else might see it as a helpful mark. Essentially, this diversity is what got me interested in knots years ago and since then, I have found ways to implement this “loop of thought” in my daily life and research methods.

There are two main reasons to why I chose to write this essay in a “knotted” format. One is that I would like to share my process and progress of research on this project and this involves “thinking with an object”, in this case types of knots. In Evocative Objects, Sherry Turkle, who is a sociologist and the founder of MIT initiative of technology and self, refers to the object in the exercise of thinking as emotional and intellectual companions that anchor memory, sustain relationships and provoke new ideas. I completely agree with this statement through personal experience. The second reason is that I see this as an opportunity to experiment if I can use knots as an interactive (which is not in knots’ nature since they are mainly practiced in solo) and playful element in writing. This is also why I would like to take a moment to mention what happens to the interplay of processes in which we call thought when we think with knots in specific.

For Turkle and Seymour Papert, who is a mathematician, computer scientist and educator that did remarkable research on constructivism, being able to make a reading experience tangible, or even physically representable makes the process of thought more concrete. Concrete thinking in this sense is a way of thinking that I adapted to in the past years, where you think with the object and imagine it vividly during the process and address meanings to it as you read or write along. This way it’s easier to compartmentalize or attribute certain parts of a text to an imagined or real physical item which makes the mind at ease with complex chains of thought.

Imagine you are reading a story… What if you think of the string itself as the journey and the slip knot (which is a type of stopper knot) as a representation of an antagonist because of its specific use in hunting, would this change your approach to reading this story? I believe so…

What if instead of a slip knot a Bowline was on the string, would that represent something else in the story because of its usage in practice. A Bowline is commonly used to form a fixed loop at the end of a string; it’s strong but easy to tie, untie. Due to these qualities, we can imagine the bowline to represent the conclusion in a story. What if we have a Square Knot, how would that change the course of a narrative? Square knot is used to bundle objects and make the two ends of the same string connect. From just this, we can use it to represent the connection between the beginning and end of a story. My point is, there are limitless implementations on how to use knots in literature because of their versatile purposes and the narrative vocabulary they create. Topologists are still trying to identify seemingly infinite numbers of combinations which we simply call “knots” and I see this as an inspiration to keep writing.

One example of the wondrous versatility and potential of knots is how they are used to archive and encrypt information. Incan people from the Andes region recorded information on Quipus, dating back to 700 CE. Quipus are textile devices consisting of several rows of cotton and/or camelid string that would be knotted in a specific way to record, store and transmit information ranging from accounting and census data to communicate complex mathematical and narrative information (Medrano, Urton, 2018). Another example is the Yakima Time Ball, which was used by North-American Yakama people to show life events and family aff airs.

This is why I humbly decided to document my research process with a Quipu of my own. I am trying to symbolize the twists, decisions and practices throughout this year with knots of my choosing. I was inspired by Nayeli Vega’s question, “What can a knot become and what can become a knot?”

WEAVING INTO THE TEXT

This thesis expects participation from its reader. You have the option to have a mode of reading, where you will be guided by strings to start reading from a certain section according to the type of reader you are and read the loops one by one until the end, weaving through the text. To determine the string or mode of reading, there are some simple questions to answer.

The three modes of reading are combine, slide, build. After you discover the starting point with the yes or no map in the upcoming pages, you will continue the reading journey through the strings of diff erent colors that will get you through the text. This way, the linear text will become in a way, non-linear by your personal experience.

Bear in mind that you can choose to read this thesis from beginning to end as a single string too if you wish so.

Combine mode of reading is for readers who are more interested in the journey and the connections between process and result. Slide mode of reading is for more laid back readers who aren’t looking to connect ideas but are more focused on the motivation and purpose of the project. Build readers are detail oriented and academic readers who would prefer a “traditional” lead to reading.

Alongside the different strings to follow the text, there will be little drawings in the margins as seen above, which will have diff erent representations like in a Quipu. Certain knots represent the experiences that raise interesting opportunities for research and distinct events I went through while making the project and underneath the drawing you can find the relation to the knot itself explained. For example if I couldn’t manage to do something I planned to do, this will be represented with a broken knot. Bend knots which are used to connect two strings, will be representing the relation between theories and my ownexperiences/motivations. Hitches which are knots that are formed around a solid object, such as a spar, post, or ring will be representing the evidence or data I have collected on the subject. We move on now with the working end and make some loops!

HOW TO CHOOSE YOUR STRING

Working End

Loop 1

Why am I doing this?

My desire to write a children’s book about grief and memory ignited when I was studying in college and doing an internship in a publishing house in Ankara. I was struggling to process a loss I experienced at the time and to find something to cling to on a daily basis. Then one day I started hearing a buzzing sound in my bedroom at my family’s house. I searched everywhere but couldn’t find the source for this noise. I asked my father and he started searching too. A couple of days passed and the buzzing was still there.

One day I found a bee on the floor in my bedroom and realized that the bees nested on the roof and were coming inside my room through a gap in the lamp. I was terrified because I have an allergy to bees and thought they might sting me in my sleep. This moment was when I realized I was so determined to find this buzzing sound for some time that I forgot about dealing with the loss I was experiencing. This made me feel very guilty and I remember thinking I betrayed the person I lost.

As funny as it may appear, I felt like I was sabotaged by these bees that I thought were here to hurt me but in the end they made me understand that its ok to let things go and every being does what it has to do to find its way of survival. The little habitat that they chose to create in my room seemed like a calling or a sign that I can aff ect another living being significantly without being aware of it. This goes for everything, no matter if some people leave us in this world, they have living matter in us that keeps pulsing. So then I started researching bees and their ecosystems. I read Alan Watts, Alan Lightman, Emily Dickinson, Maurice Sendak, Meghan O’Rourke, Oliver Sacks, Joanna Macy, Rilke, Montaigne and theories on order in chaos, correlative vision, harmony of contained conflicts and the mortality paradox. I wrote a lot and erased a lot and fairly figured out the wisdom of not knowing things.^{I wrote and deleted and rewrote the story 3 times already.}

Years passed and I wrote and deleted and rewrote the story that I am working on to make interactive today so many times and was waiting on it because it always felt incomplete. In a way it will always be incomplete because of the natural ambiguity the topic carries. Years later, grief was back in my life with the loss of my grandfather. So therefore, the story I wrote and abandoned changed again as I attempted to rewrite it as a diff erent version of myself with a diff erent understanding of death. And this went on… The story remained hidden and I forgot why it ever existed in the first place.

Last year when two earthquakes hit Syria and Turkey, I was drowned like everyone I know, by a collective trauma and grief. Then this horrible feeling flared up by neglect and desperation. It was and still is impossible to mourn so many strangers at the same time. I lost two dear friends, I was furious, away from home, mostly alone and remembered vividly my failed attempt to understand or place grief in one of the piles in my mind.

Previous months, I was working on this story (yes, again) but didn’t know how to tackle the text because it was so diff erent to what I was experiencing now, when compared to the last time I rewrote it. A tutor asked me why I wrote this story in the first place and I couldn’t remember. I kept tracing back to 2016 and step by step, remembered why, as told above. The consciousness that this story is actually a personal history of how I went through grief in diff erent stages of my life, made me realise that it doesn’t have to be or even can be a perfect story.

In the end with the experience I had with loss, I believe the story turned out to be an ode to remembering or might I say an ode to not being able to forget or an ode to the fear of forgetting

### Loop 2

9

11

8

The effect of storytelling knowledge on kids’ development and creativity. What can we learn from open ended and multiple ending stories?

ability to form basic stories or to express their emotions through fictional characters or events. Children are not born with a wide vocabulary of emotions and expressions. They learn how to read, mimic and express their feelings over time. The more children read, write and are exposed to social environments, the more they widen their sense and ability of expressing themselves. The language gained as kids comes in many forms and storytelling plays a crucial role in this development. The exposure to stories prepares the kids to the era of reading and writing. Children come to understand and value feelings through conversation (Dettore, 2002). When children are off ered to read or share stories, they also learn to understand people around them better and gain emotional literacy.

Storytelling has been a means of communicating with others for many centuries. It is not only a way to discuss important events, but also a way to entertain one another (Lawrence & Paige, 2013). Stories have been told orally, in writing or with drawings for thousands of years and some of these stories are still alive. This is because language is a living thing that travels through time and still remains brand new. When necessary, it just adapts form, evolves and blends in with the changing world. Children comprehend the idea that they have a story to tell by hearing other stories and this ignites the imagination. We tend to forget many things but almost everyone remembers one small story they heard or read when they were a kid, this moment we remember is the moment a certain story sparked for us.

Nowadays storytelling takes many forms. For example, some readers’ story might even begin from here although it isn’t the beginning. Interactivity is one of the storytelling forms that can signifi- cantly improve children’s creativity. This is mainly because children as readers or listeners get to contribute and aff ect the story. This of course requires and improves creative and active thinking. Getting the chance to choose a path for a fictional character gives the child the freedom and confi dence of constructing a world, a character or an adventure. Although this is essentially “writing” as we know it, children think of this as a game, yet to discover they are actually becoming writers. What kind of reward can we expect from active participation in a story? Narrative pleasure can be generally described in terms of immersions (spatial, temporal, emotional, epistemic) in a fictional world (Ryan, 2009). When we are set to create or co-create a world, the narrative has eff ects on us such as curiosity, suspense and surprise. At this point, we start creatively producing ideas to keep these three emotions.

Interactive storytelling reminds everyone but especially children that there are limitless endings to a story that is solely up to the maker’s creation. Learning to think this way instead of knowing or assuming an end to a story, I think influences the children’s decision making abilities and sense of responsibility towards their creations. It is basically the same in theatre where if an actor chooses to create an imaginary suitcase on stage, they can’t simply leave this object they created on stage and exit the scene because the audience will wonder why the actor didn’t take the imaginary suitcase as they left. In this case, when kids decide to choose a path or item or any attribute for a character in a story, they feel responsible and curious to see it through to the end or decide what to do with it. This interactivity therefore creates a unique bond between the reader/writer and the text.

There are many theories on how to approach interactive literature for children. Multi-literacy theory and digital literacies are some of the theories which I find relevant to my aim with Wink. Multiliteracy theory in a nutshell is an education oriented framework that aims to expand traditional reading and writing skills. This theory was developed by the New London Group. They were a collective of scholars and educators who addressed the changing nature of literacy in an increasingly globalized, digital world. The theory explores multiple modes of communication consisting The sense of storytelling settles for kids, starting from age three. By this time, children have the of multimodal communication, cultural and social contexts, critical inquiry, socio-cultural learning theory and pedagogical implications. Multimodal communication focuses on the variety of communication techniques. This was groundbreaking in the 90s because of its acknowledgment of a diverse range of literacies and its departure from traditional approaches to literary texts. This theory includes new media and communication studies such as visual, digital, special and gestural literacies.

I kept this theory in mind as I chose the interactivity elements to use in the picture book. I think the usage of multiple media such as sound, image and games is a good way to start and diff erentiate from a regular interactive e-book. The fact that this theory has an educational perspective and is taking the rapidly changing qualities of literature seriously, made me consider it as a guide in designing the prototype.

Looking through the perspective of multiliteracies, questions come up for me that lead to the rest of this thesis: What is an interactive picture book? Is it a book? Is it a game? Is it an exercise?

What is it defined as? How can we design an interactive reading environment without confusing children?

Loop 3

Diff erences and similarities between interactive e-books and storytelling games

Storytelling games and interactive e-books have many things in common. To begin with, they both centralize the narrative to engage the audience. While both of these formats are storytelling tools, e-books tend to stay more in a linear narrative and format when compared to storytelling games where the audience is commonly the main character. Reading experiences are also a way to be in the shoes of the narrator or the character but in a storytelling game, you embody the mission and the experience overrules the story most of the time. In the specific example of a child, storytelling games are complicated and puzzle driven where the player has missions to complete. Whereas in an interactive e-book, the missions are solely based on the interactive elements implemented in the text and images.

Another diff erence is that the visual world in an interactive e-book is less cinematic and has limited movement. The imagery plays a massive role in a storytelling game where the world created is off ered to the player. In an interactive e-book, the text itself is designed to be playful and ready for readers to discover.

The main diff erence in my opinion that separates these two methods of storytelling is the reward. In a game, we expect to be rewarded by a victory, passing a level or unlocking something throughout the experience. In an interactive e-book, we work with the story and in return we expect a good experience and there is no reward other than that. But, the whole design of interactivity involves aspects of a game where the reader –not the player- is captured by surprise eff ects or elements that come up on the pages. This ignites curiosity but not ambition, which is a good start to foster the love for reading.

Loop 4

Ways of using interactivity in digital platforms

CASA theory, also known as the Cognitive-Aff ective-Social Theory of Learning and Development, is a framework used in educational psychology to understand how learning occurs within the context of cognitive, aff ective, and social factors. Research on cognitive learning with keeping in mind the limited attention span and memory factors. For children in specific, I think these are very important factors to keep in mind when trying to design an interactive experience. This is because children get bored very easily and can be disengaged because of failure of solving/understanding something in a story. This is something I kept in mind as I wrote for children and chose the interactive elements in the story.

Finding the balance between making the interactive element surprising and making it easy to interact with is the key to designing for kids in this scenario. We don’t want to make them struggle and use the limited attention span in a non-engaging way but we want to keep the reading interesting enough so they want to continue.

Digging deeper into how to do this, I found Children Computer Interaction (CCI) study very useful. This study examines how children of diff erent ages and developmental stages interact with digital devices and how these interactions can support their growth. This made me think about digital gestures; how they change through generations and how to use these to design a platform where children can navigate easily and freely. CCI suggests that when introducing a new media to children its better to start easy and clear when they try it. Through this I think the best easy interaction is the tap or click for children. It is easy to do, instinctive and common. So I decided to base the interactive elements on click animations.

There are multiple ways to use digital gestures in storytelling to make the experience more intriguing. These are usually elements such as sound, animations, voice-overs that are ignited with a click or tap by the reader. For children younger than 5, its usually just tapping over the page and experiencing an action-reaction. For older kids between the ages 6-8, I made some workshops to figure out which types of interactive elements are most useful in engaging them in the reading process.

It is true that sound and animations are very inclusive and it is engaging for kids to find out which part of a page is interactive by clicking on images. Another thing I found out is that kids enjoy being a part of the story. For the prototype of Bee Within (the story I am using to test interactivity also can be read in the appendix) I will focus on color, sound and click based animations according to the results of my research.

Loop 5

What is the target age group for the designated prototype and why?

It is tricky when it comes to choosing the right age spectrum for children’s interactive literature. Children between the ages 3-5, referred to as preschoolers have more developed social skills and day by day increasing interest in play. They can take on roles in imaginative play scenarios. They can also share and take turns more, listen and think about rules of a game. They can form friendships and connections easily.

School age children are between the ages 6-12, which is Wink’s chosen age group is a little diff erent. These kids can form more rooted friendships and engage in more complex narratives. They learn to negotiate and compromise around this time as well. This age group is desired for Wink because kids this age are open to creative problem solving, connecting events and comprehending slightly more complex narratives. Moreover, this age group would benefit the most from the interactive stories and the reading process because of the developmental phase they are in.

The average amount of time children between these ages use on a daily basis is depending on their parents and circumstances. But to be fair, it is often not less than 2 hours. If a child isn’t very interested in spending these hours reading a book, why not ask them: “Would you like to be a part of a story?”

Today, kids from age 3 can use digital gestures successfully and experience these as simple as flipping the page of a book. This is why it is fairly easy to create an interactive picture book which kids can navigate themselves and be able to browse through with or without their parents. But for Wink, I chose to design for older kids because I want to experiment on multi-leveled narratives and I want to avoid the risk of confusing children.

Loop 6

Limits of interactivity in narratives for children and why do we have less modes of reading and writing for children?

Although there are many upsides of creating digital environments for children due to their advanced skills in technology from early ages, there are also risks involved in this where the kid can be overwhelmed and confused due to the autonomy they receive. Reading a story is supposed to be eff ortless and a good free time activity but with interactive picture books, it is slightly more than that and more complicated as an experience.

First of all, with the story at hand, called Bee Within, there are two other stories in one. Although the main story is about a little girl’s journey, kids get the chance to hear the Queen Bee’s story and the tree’s story as well. This is not a must but if they interact with certain pictures on the page, they will be led to the bee’s perspective or the trees. This is where the storyline can get a little bit complicated for younger kids. The child reader at this point should be able to follow the main storyline after visiting the side quests or stories presented in the interactive book. To create this balance I tried to limit the interactive elements I used in the main story. I tried to keep the picture animations limited and focused more on the storylines.

Another aspect I am concerned about after the workshop I did with the kids, is the risk of confusion due to an undefined and multimodal design for a “book”. Kids tend to be confused when they can’t define things or are asked to improvise without knowing the purpose.They know what a book is and that it is similar to what they encounter on the screen. But the method of reading and interacting with Bee Within is diff erent than what they are used to. This concerns me because they might prefer to just read a book or play a game instead of discovering a new thing, which they are exposed to daily because they are always in a process of active learning. So one more thing to learn might come as exhausting. Therefore, in designing, I want to make interactions as clear as possible for them.

Loop 7

Interactive reading and writing examples and surveys done with kids As an improvisation theater enthusiast myself, I tried to engage the kids with the story through some exercises and games during the workshops. My aim was to see how involved they want to be in storytelling. Improvisation has a certain way of storytelling and interaction where there are either too many options or none. You need to have good empathy and harmony with the person you are acting with and you are designated to be creative in your own way. I tried to use several improv games and warmups to involve the kids in the story more and see how they see certain characters from the picture book.

My first attempt was to make a survey at the end of workshops with kids to whether they liked it or not, but when I researched further, surveying with kids has very diff erent methods and complications.

Most kids either really like or really dislike things. Finding the in between emotions with a survey, ends up being vague. Most surveys done with kids use emoticons as representation of a good or bad or average time. Instead, I chose to observe the environment and understand how much empathy kids can off er in an interactive reading or playing environment.

Loop 8

What does the joy of destruction and the awe eff ect have to do with interactivity? Indeed, why did we ever start playing games? The most important aspect of a game for me is that it surprises you and leaves you in awe towards something you weren’t expecting happened. I feel like every reaction I give when I’m surprised, is a mirror of what I felt when I was playing freeze and had to stop moving at any given time or when I found the last friend hiding somewhere in hide and seek. This feeling of appreciation and unexpectedness is why most people remember certain games, movies from their childhoods very vividly. Its an introduction to a feeling we experience maybe for the first time because we don’t necessarily learn from books how and when to feel surprised, that is why it’s a surprise; we live it, experience it and it leaves and impression with us.

In my opinion, what drives everyone as a common denominator is amazement; because it takes us to our childhoods or distant memories where we first felt that feeling of awe. This is the main purpose behind any kind of interactive design and I think books can be an amazing medium to experiment this with. Specifically because this ancient device can take us to numerous worlds. For me as a millennial, books give me enough amazement as it is. But as I worked in publishing through the years and observed, I think kids today need something more to ignite their interest. There are so many factors in a picture book such as the image, the text and sound which can be played with to create an experience that is more surprising. This is the main purpose behind my research and protoype. Today’s world being visually stimulating and serving very short attention spans with social media, it is a tough task to insert a story or reading experience that requires full attention and patience. There are examples of Tiktok stories, Instagram reels, audio books and games that try to tell stories worth listening with attention. Wink is also an attempt to do this and I believe the key is to make an already engaging story enriched with interactive elements that appear to you through a click if you choose to. I think this is also the key to nourishing a new way of storytelling.

Loop 9

Interactivity in reading and writing in history. What changed?

Interactivity has always been an experimental area in literature from inscriptions to narrative games then to playable stories and artificial intelligence. I will expand some of these examples from the rich history of interactive fiction. When I dig a little bit into the media archaeology there are three still relevant aspects that strike me and change/improve my approach to Wink. The first is the need to connect that remains untouched through centuries of human communication, the second is how there were multiple projects concerning interactive media especially for kids that later turned into narrative games or remained as prototypes and lastly how the integration of media and literature has been such a grand topic even before information and technology era. Some examples to this is music, masks, puppets, props used in storytelling.

Ancient texts with annotations such as The Odyssey, The Mahabharata are maybe the earliest written interactive experiences in a historical context. They are published with notes and explanations, clarifications which make the text inhabit diff erent opinions and approaches in an engaging way where the reader can choose to hop on and off from the annotation and margin texts. From the 70s to the present there have been many examples but I will be focusing on a few here. One of them is, Choose your own adventure books which allowed the reader to participate in the plot. These still exist as picture books where you are directed to certain pages according to the choices you make throughout the story. Along with this were also board games and cards that required interactive inputs. Some examples to this is exploding kittens or cards against humanity where the player has the autonomy to be creative and fill in the blanks to win the game. Simultaneously, text-based adventure games such as Zork and Adventure were popular. Early days of computing off ered a wide space for exploring virtual worlds. In the early 80s, hypertext fiction contributed to electronic literature. Hyperlinks were used as a tool to navigate a text and choose paths of reading. This inspired me to write this thesis with diff erent modes of reading as well. After the 80’s, Interactive fiction gained popularity as a genre of interacting with text based input. Dynabook by Alan Kay was prototyped during this time as a promising reading and writing device designed for children.

The 21st century off ers a combination of text and illustrations in augmented reality books that have animations, sound and external interactions. These are followed by digital storytelling platforms like Wattpad and Storybird and interactive e-book apps such as Pibocco, Bookr and Tiny Minies. Most of these apps are dedicated to education however and not solely to creativity. Their aim is to use creative elements to foster education for kids.

With Wink, I want to use a mainly educational tool (a book) to foster creativity and expression. So I believe it is the opposite purpose as to these examples in certain ways. I am trying to combine the delicacy of a narrative where you can only be a reader and the excitement of autonomous writing and experiencing.

This is because I think the understanding and usage of media changed in the last years. Some tools that created the awe eff ect for users faded and left their place to more compact designs. Although audio books were very welcome at some point, younger users nowadays prefer book summary apps or podcasts to them. Of course they are still used and not outdated but there is certainly a visible change to where media is heading.

Loop 10

Experimentation of creative exercises to be used in WINK. Exercises of storytelling with words, images, drawing, sound and gestures.

Before I completed the prototype of Wink, I reached out to an international school in Rotterdam to make a 20 minute workshop with kids between ages 6-8. The aim here was to grasp the interactive elements in the picture book to implement in the digital framework. I wanted to see which parts of the story the children found exiting and which ones are not so thrilling for them. It also helped me draw the pictures for the book accordingly and edit the text with their reactions in mind. Due to a privacy agreement, I couldn’t record or use any data from the workshop but I made some helpful observations from my time there.

The first workshop I planned consisted of two main parts that made up 20 minutes. The first 10 minutes we read Bee Within (attached in the appendix) together in a circle and the last 10 minutes we played little improvisation games, focused on the three main characters in the story (the bee, the kid and the tree). I made three groups and gave these groups the three characters. I asked them to embody a character throughout the workshop and be loyal to it. Each group of three had 1 minute on the stage to silently improvise their characters. They were to use one sentence if they wanted to speak.

During the first part, I couldn’t observe as I was busy reading but their teacher kindly took notes during this time, regarding the children’ reactions to parts of the story. I inserted the bees and trees narrative to the reading by tossing the paper I had in my hand and picking up a new one as I kept reading the bees and trees story. This was crucial because I wanted to see if this multiple stories in one concept would be confusing for kids. The teacher told me that they were excited about my gesture of juggling papers as I seemingly read one story. They were intrigued and confused at first but they did keep up with the storyline and understood all. Her notes basically said they were very focused and less interested in the kids journey. They really liked the bee and were a bit confused with the tree.

There were 12 international kids and 3 of them didn’t want to join the workshop, they wanted to observe. I told them that they could paint and draw what they see. The drawings they made were of their classmates acting as trees or bees. They drew their classmate with a stinger and the other was of a classmate as a tree with his hands wide open as he was performing.

What struck me most on the second part of the workshop was how these kids used the room so freely and in relation to their characters. Because we read the story before the improvisation games, some of their characters were influenced by how it is in the story we read. Next workshop, I am planning to not tell the story but to talk about it before and give context. This is because I want to see how their understanding changes without a limitation of a story.

Bees in the classroom that day were all very active and they used chairs, tables and windows to position themselves in a higher perspective. Children who played the kid were usually standing closer to the trees and looked very calm. Trees were all very diff erent. One of the kids used postits as leaves. Some of them didn’t have leaves because it is winter. Trees didn’t move at all and the bees were buzzing all around. “The kid” usually sat near the tree, on the tree (as in the other performers’ lap or hugged them).

Overall only 2 groups used the option to say a sentence which were, > “I want to go on an adventure”
> “I don’t wanna leave Gray(the tree)”

This was a good feedback for me because I realized they are very perceptive of actions and facial expressions rather than words. The workshop we did in the studio with XPUB 2 students was harder than the session with the kids because everyone felt so restricted to obligations and were not comfortable to let go of bodily control. No one actually attempted in using objects from the room which is a huge diff erence with the kids because they drew on their faces, used plastic bags as wings for the bee and made sounds with their mouths as trees.

The next workshop was to discover how improv would work without reading the story first. This workshop was fruitful because it helped me realize how much information or guidance I have to off er for children in order for them to be comfortable to participate and interact without confusion. We made a circle and I summarized the story to the kids, acting in the middle of the circle. This broke the ice completely because I was a part of the workshop and they thought I was funny. For the next part, I divided the group in three and assigned a character to them. After this, I asked them to decide on an attitude, pop in the middle and tell or act out their character. I went first and they followed easily. They were not under the influence of the story so the performances were diff erent but they still got influenced by each other, which in my opinion is inevitable. Some of the kids were buzzing/running around, the “kids” were walking around, acting like they are playing which I found very interesting. Some trees were small some were mighty and old. It was helpful to see the diff erent attributions they gave to the characters.

After the circle session, they separated in three groups: the kids, the bees and the trees. I asked each group to come up, walk around randomly, embodying the character they chose. Then as I rang the bell, I asked them to change the character. I asked them to be a busy, tired, injured, happy and scared bee one by one. They kept walking randomly and acted these feelings out. For the “kids”, I asked them to be angry, sad, scared, and curious. For the trees I asked them to be wise, mad, funny and happy. The results were amazing. They adapted very quickly to the changing of emotions which showed me that this age gap was good to work with. The trees stopped walking as I changed the emotions and this was an affirmation to not animate the tree with movement but more with changing of color and tiny animations. They mostly used arms and face expressions to show the emotions, some of them ducked or made sounds. As I said mad, one of the kids ran and put her red jacket on. This made me think about using color to show emotions for the tree. It was good to see that they weren’t scared or discouraged by negative emotions as well. We ended the workshop by drawing our characters. It was nice to see them own their imaginary characters enough to draw them with joy.

The last workshop was dedicated to discovering the sound aspect. The tree in the story speaks in verses so I chose one verse and read/performed it in a circle to begin with. Then I gave them some instruments: a drum, a bell, aluminum folio, a balloon and a bubble wrap. I asked for a few volunteers and they made sound eff ects as I read the verse very slowly. This went good and I saw that they like to dramatize the sounds and make them funny or unexpected. They used the bubble wrap to make sounds for snowing or aluminum folio for the volcano. They had great fun but I think I made a mistake by making a few kids do foley at the same time because they didn’t know how to take turns and were hesitant at first. Then quite impressively, they made their own system where they took turns to make eff ects for each sentence.

Then I made four groups of three. 3 kids as actors and 3 kids as foley actors. They buddied up and made short scenes where one group made sounds eff ects to the others acting on stage. This was the best part of this workshop because they could lead the actors with the sounds they made or vice versa. This I think is very important because it shows that they like to be a part of or be eff ective to the story itself. They were very creative in using the objects in the room and turning them into a tool for sound. They enjoyed to foley the bee and the other characters not so much. Which showed me that I should focus on the sound of the bee in the prototype.

Overall, the workshops were very helpful for me to understand where to focus on as I develop. I realized that some of the sound, color and movement animations I planned were too complicated and I decided to make them more simplistic. I decided to animate the tree with only color because I was eff ected by this one participant who took the red jacket to represent the tree was mad. For the bee I decided to focus on sound more. For the kid I decided to use more visual animations to make it more interesting.

One other thing the workshops helped me with is the multiple stories I am planning to tell in one narrative. The book I have has two side quest/stories so it nice to see that kids weren’t confused with these narratives. I decided to make the story of the tree as a click game where the lines appear by clicking and the bee’s story through a text based game. I wanted to use click game with the tree because it seemed like they needed more stimulation to be interested in that story and I though a ‘reveal the story’ click game could keep them interested. For the bee, knowing they like the character, I wanted to make it more like a game to give the kids a chance and autonomy to be a part of the story itself.

Loop 11

The diff erences of these exercises in WINK than the already existing interactive e-book platforms The interactive e-book apps existing today, made especially for children, are quite similar in both format and purpose. If we take a look at Bookr, Piboco, and Kotobee, we can see they seek a new way to tell a story but have one mode of reading. The stories are linear and can be read once, without side quests. This is the main diff erence with what I am trying to design. Wink acts as a tool to play with and choose paths. The story isn’t linear in the traditional way where you interact with the pictures and finish the book but there are side stories to the main story that they can discover or choose not to. I think this is a solid diff erence. This makes it a playable narrative, diff erent from a book.

This prototype is a good start to see how far I can get with the interactive elements and side stories without confusing or discouraging the children. There are many other aspects that can be implemented to this design such as writing elements and drawing but for the meantime, also in correspondence with the workshops, I choose to test the sound and image along with one main and two small narratives.

For future prototypes, I envision space to draw and write as a contribution to the story and maybe turning Wink into a hybrid format with more autonomous features. For me, at this point, it’s valuable and essential to see if my technique of combining narratives is working or not.

Loop 12

Standing End

After many loops of thought, we are here at the standing end of the thesis. There is room for more loops and knots in the future to secure this string of thought but for now, we have come to the dock and rest ashore.

Reading this thesis with a string, using concrete thinking as a technique to go through a research and text was a helpful exercise for me and helped me mark my thoughts and ideas. The overarching theme of knots and experimental approach to modes of reading was valuable for me to share and try as an enthusiastic young writer. I like that I asked the reader to interact with the thesis and follow paths accordingly.

It was enlightening to see the results of working with kids and be able to see from their point of view and alter everything according to these encounters. Using CCI and Multiliteracy theory as a guide to approach the design and prototype was helpful in understanding how to approach and tackle the desire of making something for children.

Now from where I stand, I feel more rooted and have a clearer idea of what works and doesn’t work. Some features that I think would work very well like the choice of writing didn’t go as planned because multiple narratives is already too much. I realized I underestimated the eff ect of introducing a new media to children. This is why I decided to take it step by step with the interactivity.

Taking a step to make Wink and using the story I wrote and feel is important in my personal history as a prototype was a breakthrough. I feel like my interest and desire to discover new ways of writing, reading and experiencing literature is ongoing and it was a beautiful journey so far. I am looking forward to making more knots on this long and mysterious string at hand.