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.
041
aaaaaaand finally, our interview with Iara Lee is live. Our interview was sort of auspicious, materializing from nowhere really, an accidental meeting perhaps, where two timelines fuse together. Of all the things we might have asked, we thought to focus on something quite honest; a reflection on a 20 year becoming, a reflection on staying motivated.
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025
As the director cites in an interview with Vice, in Indonesia in 1965, there was a right-wing military coup-d'état, where the military rounded up any opposition to the new dictatorship, and executed a million or more people using civilian death squads. The paramilitary and mafia leaders who enacted these atrocities are still in power, and the decision to really pursue this documentary film relates to Oppenheimer’s observation that these people boast their violence as glorious. As if taking a huge bet on their boastfulness, the director gives a selection of ex-death squad members a chance to retell their story through a dramatization, knowing that their pride would lead him to the heart of the conflict, which has been one of the biggest mass executions in human history.
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001
“becoming-” magazine is a temporal magazine project that doesn’t intend to do anything besides grow, slowly, over time, in, not random, but entirely unexpected, or natural ways. It is unclear, as we feel is necessary today, whether there is any permanency to either the name, the magazine, the content, the design, or the attitude. It is a transient magazine that seeks to learn something through “doing”, and to reconsider “being”. We are living within some kind of turning point in our understanding, a phrase which we have been commonly hearing for decades; we are at a turning point. We are no more in a turning point than ever before, what is and has changed however, is our understanding of the present, or of the ‘point’ itself. It is not that we are at a turning point, rather we have begun to understand that all points are turning. There are many transitions we are passing through now, as we always have, but this change in the perception of self and universe defines the moment today. This transformation in how we understand stasis and the present, in turn radically changes how we perceive ourselves as subjects. There is a lineage of critical studies into this evolution of how we understand ourselves, dating back through Fisher, Deleuze, Foucault, Lacan, Marcuse, and Adorno.
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