Inaugurating ‘Nodes’ [º]
As a part of our editorial project for the year, named Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming, we have developed a new system called ‘Nodes.’ The purpose of this project is to fold our editorial line back on itself, through the development of various infrastructures and practices that take our publications into a space of equivalence.
What exactly are we saying here? What is happening between the books, between the essays and articles. What vision of the future is buried there, what destiny? Is there a minor symbolic to be unearthed within the literature of Becoming Press?
We have published a lot of books now, we have commit a lot of words to the ground; planted, buried. Like the perfected apple falling from the tree, what we are burying is both dead and alive. A book, an essay, a poem, a painting, is the residue remaining after a process has elapsed, but each closure brings with it a new beginning, perfectly embodied in the way a book opens. We can see the plumage of the flora that rises above the surface, but down at the level of the roots, where we cannot see, something else is happening; a counterflow or shadow work. At an invisible register, everything we plant or bury is slowly compressed into precious oils.
The more books we publish, the more difficult it becomes to see the bigger picture, and as our exposure grows, the introduction we want to make becomes longer and longer. It is not enough to expect someone to “catch-up” on 12 books, neither do we want to think about everything we do as individuated or discrete, there is so much potential for interaction. Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming is a project designed to fill in the gaps, draw a circle around everything, introduce people to the lore, produce new stories and experiments. What happens in the gap between Unconscious/Television (2025) & Exocapitalism (2025)? What creatures moved into the niche?
What we are calling ‘Nodes’, then, is a system designed to group together traces across all the categories of Materials, Immaterials, Seminars and Cinema, to start bringing everything together into curated patterns. A Node can exist for Venice, bringing together all the materials related to our conference, from seminars to meta-reflections and diaries, presenting them as a collection. A Node can exist, for example, for the topics of Holography, Light and Moving-Images, grouping together books and essays that are otherwise presented as individuated by our current web infrastructure. We can have a Node for Becoming-Earth / Unearthing Becoming.
It will take a while for a stream to gather from raindrops, but we have published over 200 individual items, and this is a way for us to start stitching it all together.
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