immaterials.
immaterials.
Immaterials refers to all the traces produced by Becoming. It is an important aspect of our process, that everything begins as a trace, as ephemeral, as an undefined flow that becomes affective through its specification as either virtual or actual. Even that which we materialise, the books, the prints, the events, began as a trace, a fluctuation — we sometimes bring these traces into materiality, but those prints are but ripples or echos of the initial source signal.
Our Immaterials are classed by their attributes: type, their author, their tags, and their locations. View All Immaterials.
materials.
materials.
Sometimes traces materialise as substance. They take such a hold of us that they guide us towards embodying them; we reify traces, but it is the traces that produce the affects that move us so. Traces externalize themselves through us, they will us to validate them — to will to hold in your hands and possess a reification of a trace. That is the task of creator, not to produce from a vacuum or to conjure from nothing, but to guide into materiality the traces that flutter and fluctuate and seduce us; creation is to guide what is already there into new forms of itself, to produce new models, to produce new expressive forms.
View All Materials.
submissions.
submissions.
For general contact, it is preferable that you reach out via Instagram↗, as we are more responsive there.
Other enquiries, such as publishing proposals, should be sent to hello@becoming.press↗
about.
about.
Becoming.press is the virtual field of Becoming, an independent publisher. It comprises many surfaces, of which this website is one.
Becoming is a machine. A machine, to us, is what it was to Deleuze & Guattari, after whom this specific machine get its name.
A machine is a break in the flow; it is a point, a moment, an event. Yet, at the same time a machine is flow, or rather, it is a producer of flow, or a conditioner of flow. A machine can be understood as the resulting tone of an electric guitar played by some idol, but it can also be understood as the effect pedal and guitar that produced that tone; a machine can even be understood as the signal passing through those machines. The quantum foam that appears like bedrock in our reality is itself a machine, perhaps the oldest machine of all, the closest machine we have ever found to the original source, the original transmission of pure flows of expression. Through the reproduction of the traces of pure desire, the machinery lining the boundary of desire-specified and desire-unspecified, like sub-quarkic pico-bots, endlessly facilitates the transformation of flows of desire from unspecificied virtual immanence to substantiated being and back again. Quantum Foam is not a floor, after all, it is a mycellium.
Becoming was made as a break in the flow, a moment in which something negative becomes positive, rising up through the threshold like a whale breaching. It is not in our nature to be positive, but it is undeniable that here, we ask for your attention, your time; we are interrupting you. Yet, as Becoming ruptures flows, it creates new flows in their place; it territorializes. Desire and creative energy floods into existence like an ocean into a river basin, disseminating like a fractal family tree through infinite pathways of specification. Creativity is called creative because it creates, it produces positives, substances, materials; creative energy produces machines, breaks in the flow, energy gets tied up in almost dormant structures for billions of years, energy gets tied up in substance. Rather than the expected assumption, Yang is not the creative force, rather it is Yin, the negative, which produces Yang, the positive; Yin creates. The negative is the creative. We who study the negative, we the scholars and nodes of antipositivistic discourse, we the queers, do not study what has been created, but rather study that which creates, and that which has not yet been created. Becoming is the break that leads to negativism.
Becoming actualises creative or expressive signals as traces — in other words, expressive and creative impulses leave a trace in Becoming as they flow through them. In most cases, these traces are immaterial, and those immaterials can be traced to becoming.press, the site where all these tracings intersect. From that position, you can follow each trail and begin wandering around an emergent ethereal forest. Becoming.press is a field that can be accessed through many portals, through the Cargo-space site, the Instagram, the linktree, and the Sandpoints space. Sometimes, the impulses affect Becoming so much that they are actualised as materials, as printed matter such as books and magazines.
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Marco Polo was known as a storyteller, who wrote one of the first widely distributed portrayal of the Eastern realms of Mongolia, China and the Silk Road and so on. The story goes that Marco Polo was born while his father was away as a merchant traveller, exploring the Silk Road as a means of establishing a mercantile legacy in the family name. When the father returned to Venice, he found Marco Polo as a teenager, and Polo joined his father in his travels, ending up spending decades in the Mongolian Khanate as friends and employees of Kublai Khan. There are many ways of retelling this story, and there are many Marco Polos.
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Robert Barry reminds us that the question of a future music has been consistently on the minds of critics and philosophers for centuries. Some writers, such as Charles Fourier, have even gone so far to envision a kind of music-oriented society, where everything is arranged according to western classical theory, modes and scales of interests and priorities, literally with an opera theatre at the centre of the city. Such wild ideas have been proposed, such as Berlioz’ fantasy society that fundamentally revolves around a yearly operatic production, and such ideas have been experimented with, including the Wagner & Bayreuth festival in Germany where a small bavarian town is overtaken and transformed into some reflection of Berlioz’ ‘euphonia’.
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There can’t be any conversation about futurism that does not include Sun Ra. While it was an energetic movement back in the 60s, to look at Sun Ra is neither an act of retrospection nor introspection, rather a kind of extrospection that looks at the notion of time with as much contempt as the dialectical slave holds for the master. With the term “Futurism” tangled up in webs of highly suspicious patriarchal or capitalistic values, which are both necessarily discriminatory modes of organising, where can we find another way of understanding the future? It is fine to dream of cybernetics and cloud-consciousness, but central to the discussion of this kind of posthumanist future must always remain the fundamental reclamation or reassessment of our collective “we”. Who is the “we” of the future? Who gets the bio-enhancements? Who is ultimately invited into YOUR futurism? In some ways, this is part of the role of Afrofuturism, to ensure that the “we” remains open..
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