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.
050c
In The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin attempted to account for the economic and political life of XIX century society through a study of the famous Paris shopping arcades: the glass-covered passages where the Parisian middle-class used to stroll and buy luxury goods. The Internet is today’s shopping arcade, and the virtual plaza, one of its deluxe sites.
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050b
The image cannot present itself without a certain force, without a certain amount of violence. The image must always remove, put aside, place another image behind itself, to come to light. The image of the Sun is, in this regard, the cruellest one since it always presents itself only by obliterating all other images, even itself. It is only after a certain time, according to the Platonic allegory of the Republic, that the image of the Sun and its daylight may be in plain view.
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050a
Dreams about the end of the world are not, perhaps, anymore the fruits of despair and fear alone. They are also the frolics of boredom. It is not only when the world is evil or ugly, but when it does not matter anymore whether the world exists or not that feverish dreams of destruction surge from the depths; it is amidst yawns, more often than whimpers and cries, that the world ends. A friend once told me: ‘When I am bored, I would like to watch the world burn.’ The world thus ends, and it is just fantasy. That is because boredom does not really destroy anything, it does not create at all.
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