Now, Think Of A Question That Is At Stake For You
5th of March 2023
__CONSTANT__
__PUBLISH__

Programme
14:00-16:00

10min   -  Coffee and tea
20min   -  Introduction to rosa, tour of the diagram
10min   -  Introducing the oracle exercise
15min   -  Setting up ssh
15min   -  Think of a message individually
5min    -  Ask a question individually
5min    -  Ask a question in a group of 2
5min    -  Ask a question as a whole group
15min   -  Writing an intro of what the space is/you would like it to be
10min   -  Going through the texts
10min   -  Discussion


# rosa as an oracle

To log into rosa
    What is ssh
  >  https://project.xpub.nl/img/xpub_logo_2020.svg
    SSH is a command that gives you access to another computer from the terminal.

Open your terminal and run:
$ ssh fotd@192.168.0.114
Ask the key holders at the table for the password.

For this section, we take inspiration from Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who says:

• • Alexis Pauline Gumbs introduces her book, Dub: Finding Ceremony, as an Oracle
  • [in a lecture called Future of Praxis _ Meridians - feminism, race, transnationalism, found on youtube]
  • "Sylvia Winter says what we need is a socio-poetics, poetics for the society, we need poetics of a possible relation. The situation we have, she explains, is one of separation. The dominant story and the languages in which we reproduce it say that we are not related. Our relationships with people and environment are mediated by capital and violence. Sylvia Wynter says we need a poetic practice that finds a way to center our relationships, to displace the unnatural violence that the whole definition of what it is to be human and racist, hetero, patriarchal, colonial, capitalist, and says this is the only way; to be dominated or dominant with resources or without hope.
  • She says, Can we describe it?
  • That attempt should be our work, the point of all our art, the great creative act.
  • There has not been a day since where I have not mentioned Sylvia Wynter, and now I have this book where on every page, I cite a moment of Sylvia Wynter making a version of this argument in different contexts and in different ways. She is still making that argument right now, insisting that in this moment, when we can actually communicate as a species, all of us in real time, we are better poised than ever, to reject the false universalism that was used to justify colonialism and slavery. That continues to destroy our life chances on this planet.
  • This for me is also the question of meridians connecting points through lines, boundaries, transnationalism, feminism, race. The work of finding and redefining our relation across all of this, the nuanced poetic activity of reclaiming relation as praxis. 
  • Sylvia Wynter says the ceremony must be found to create what she calls a we that needs no other. And so I'm offering an Oracle.
  • It requires our relationship and your participation."
  • Oracle Score
  • [these actions are borrowed from a lecture by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, they are edited from a transcript]
  • This Oracle requires your relation.
  • Think of, and activate, a resonant relationship in your own life, maybe part of the reason that you're here, but not a person who's actually here in the room, because that's what's poetic about it. The borders of this university, the limits of capitalist access, even the boundary between life and death cannot eradicate your relations. So we're going to dedicate this space to and for and with our relations. 
  • Did you find them? Okay. 
  • Write down the name and a little bit about why and who you dedicated to.
  • Take about four minutes to do that right now. 
  • Now, think of a question that is at stake for you. In this time in your life. 
  • It may have to do with why you prioritise being at this school. It may be related to the person that you dedicated to, or something else that is urgently on your heart.
  • Push away the fear of asking questions we don't already know the answer to. This is not that not to say that that doesn't do anything, just this is not that.
  • Draw on your relation for the power to be poetic in this moment.
  • When you have your question, think of a number between 1 and 49.
  • It could be just the number that comes to you. It could be a number related to your question.
  • Find your number in the book.
  • Photograph the words.
  • Write a reflection on how this relates to your person, your question, and how you can engage with writing.
  • The way this socio-poetic Oracle works is that there are 49 different passages in Dub, that specifically refer to moments of emphasis in Sylvia Wynter's essays, they are ethno or socio-poetics that I referred to, and those are the 49.

When logging in, you will see a randomly selected Message Of The Day (MOTD). At the moment, these are excerpts from the book by Gumbs.
We invite you to look in the physical space of Constant, the book shop, or your own references to add to the oracle.
To add more texts to this add text files in /home/fotd/oracle:
    ($ touch /home/fotd/oracle/text-name.txt)
    $ nano /home/fotd/oracle/insect.txt
    To save the file:
        CTRL/COMMAND+X, press Y, press Enter


Questions in groups of 2

How to foster simultaneously stability and agility?

• There's something important that the moment of stopping to listen has in common with the labyrinthine quality of attention-holding architecture: in their own ways, each enacts some kind of interruption, a removal from the sphere of familiarity. 
• Every time I see or hear an unusual bird, time stops, and later I wonder where I was, just as wandering some unexpected secret passageway can feel like dropping out of linear time. Even if brief or momentary, these places and moments are retreats, and like longer retreats, they affect the way we see everyday life when we do come back to it.
• From How to do nothing, Jenny Odell:
• Dropping out of linear time

How can/do you use infrastructure that is not/might not always available?

• blame the boats. the small boats tilted by wind. the large boats steep-
• ing in sickness. blame the land. blame the land for rising up so far.
• for cooling for climbing like thorns. blame the volcano for erupting
• in the first place right here. right here. right here. how could you.
• witness coral, microbes, and eels. how could you, you trade wind
• gods. how could you let them come and steal and take and forsake
• and bring and bind and shackle and blind and hold and hide. how
• could you.

Where should from cosmos to ground live temporarily?

• But why do we get bored or frustrated? In our cult to the gods
• of relentless busyness, continuous digital activity feels holy.
• Corporate life pressures us to act quickly. We have become
• accustomed to high-speed internet connectivity and vast com-
• putation processing, all of it occurring with near-simultaneity
• as our fingers release a tap. We scroll, and scroll, and scroll—our
• feeds feel endless and our clicks take us seamlessly from one
• task to the next.
• “ What about the peculiar?
• What about the ad hoc, the
• irregular, the one-off? ”
• You have new mail.

How do we adapt and accept the constraint of disconnect of rosa?

• et l'affaire des insectes dans la nature et dans le fait de leur disparition programmée, de l'intuition de la rapide désintégration de la bio-diversité.
• You have new mail.

What is a feminist server?

• nosunday mostly rain
• You have new mail.

accessible niche?

• this is difficult to answer
• You have new mail.

# From guest to host
Hosting is, among other things, a practice of creating conditions for collectivity. The shell of rosa is a space of encountering each other for example through wall messages, mails, seeing each other's files, traces left in the gestures of naming processes. In the Trans*Feminist Server Wishlist[^tfs], a trans★feminist server "radically question[s] the conditions for serving and service" and "experiment[s] with changing client-server, user-device and guest-host-ghost relations where they can." Starting from the space that is created around and through rosa, what kind of message could be shared with someone logging in for the first time?

[^tfs]: https://etherpad.mur.at/p/tfs

Take some time to write this message.
Write it as a mail to the people who will join rosa in the future.

• $ mail -t
• fotd
• (ctrl-d on an empty line to finish the email)