I’m from the Umpqua Valley of the Pacific Northwest. This is an in-progress space for sharing activities and updates. If you want to get in touch, send me an email (1025orchard [at] gmail [dot] com).
What I’ve been working on this last year…
I’m currently writing on the utopian commune of New Odessa (1881–1891) and the Religion of Humanity, with initial research supported by a grant from the Oregon Cultural Trust. I edited artist books on the persistent growth of weeds by gloria galvez and a famous robbery in Ojai, California by Hailey Loman. Cedric Tai and I are slowly formulating a workshop on hearsay and the spread of gossip. Several brief pieces I wrote on rationalism, propaganda, nuclear fusion, images, and time travel were also printed in the September and April 2022 issues of The Paper by Good Press. In the Spring, I discussed utopianism in the work of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Bloch for a panel on hope at Index, where I presented alongside Ana Luisa Figueiredo and Mavis Yue Cao. Adam Feldmeth and I continued to compile a dialogue on the European Graduate School’s PACT 2021 Online Session. By day, I work with the Los Angeles Contemporary Archive as their Description Archivist. On assignment for LACA, I led the processing of the Common Field collection, representing a decade of internal records from the now defunct networking organization.
Some earlier activities…
I wrote a study of ritual architecture and the establishment of modern city centers for PROTOCOLS issue #10: TEMPLE (eds. Lauren Levy & Ben Ratskoff eds). My essay on Emily Ensminger’s utopian project Housepitality (2012–2020) was published in The Feral Fabric Journal volume 05: Labor (eds. Paulina Berczynski & Amanda Walters). Another piece of prose on language and war appeared in Plates issue 04: Craft (ed. Casey Carsel). A short critique of alternative museums, with focus on the New Museum, was published by COPY. I completed a Certificate in Philosophy, Art & Critical Thought at the European Graduate School. My old textwork “Messages to a Former Love” was printed in the Summer21 issue of Soft. A rare fiction piece of mine was published in the third issue of Grits. My contribution to the publication You Are Here was on display with Unbound Press in “Mapping Narratives” at the International Print Center New York. I was featured at Printed Matter’s Virtual Art Book Fair with the Southland Institute, including a prompt I developed for a program on art museums, authoritarianism, and protest. I edited a group video project and wrote an accompanying essay on the minimum wage for the Institute for Conceptual Studies. An infrequently ongoing side project is the Authoritarian History Film Index, a spreadsheet of films on authoritarianism and its opposition, all of which are available to watch online for free. I continue to grow my “Links” document, a directory of helpful websites for those in orbit of the arts.
What I’m studying…
I attended courses in architecture and vexillology respectively led by Sharon Leung and Laura Scofield at Index. Over the last year or so, I've enrolled in other classes with the Southland Institute, Index, and the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. I’m also a co-facilitator of the Community Reading Group, which is currently reading Angela Davis’s An Autobiography. On my own, I recently finished reading David Wengrow’s The Origins of Monsters and watching the 1974 BBC televsion drama series Fall of Eagles. My brother and I have also been discussing ethics and imperialism in Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Books while exploring Minecraft together.
Last updated December 20, 2022.
After paying for a website through Format for years, I finally learned to code one by hand through a class at Index. Many thanks to Megumi Tanaka for getting me started. I am currently paying $15 USD a year for my domain and host the code on GitHub for free. My favicon is a portrait of me drawn by my former first-grade student, Taven.
