Bubble Track
Video plays on screen, a mix of waves, bubbles, bees, bicycle wheel building, and painting.

Audio mixes random sounds from videos on screen.

Video narration plays:

I hate to even write or think about alt-scholarship. I've felt for some
time that you don't write about the digital, you do digital work. I
shirk sometimes the onus to report, to circumscribe, to discipline the
beauty flows to be had through our screens. So, what to say? You might
say I'm playing with bubbles in windows under glass. Yes. And I'm clear 
serious about the image. We need liminal spaces for alt-scholarship to
develop. We need the kind of state-changing ability we see in the
shifting skins of bubbles. I'm tired of the way the academy fetishizes
the citation over the good idea. If the concept floats, then people know
it—no need to bolster it. We're learning to recognize liquid networks. I
love that. Water is a good example of the kinds of states we're after.
Too rigid and you get ice, slippery, hard to work with, cold; too
diffuse and you get steam, tough to pin down, escaping the grasp,
dissipating. In liquid form, though, water flows, erodes, works, slakes
our thirst. I wish I had a better grasp on science. I feel an urge to
use the alt-scholarship mashup mode to layer scientific beliefs over
digital work. We've seen this a lot recently in systems theories,
ecocriticism, and brain-related humanism. I feel so much critique
tends toward abstraction; we say there is a linkage between entities,
that it is a mediator. But what does that mean? How does the mediation
happen? When materials move across or through surfaces, the
exchanges can be mapped. How can we do the same when we say
our identities are mediated by our machines? Maybe we should just do
poetry. We might study airflow over wing surface, looking for physics.
Or we can just say the jet in the distance on its glide path lifts our
spirits. Let's talk about alt-scholarship in terms of what we need. Do
we need any more texts philosophizing on ontology or epistemology? None
for me, thanks. I'm all for nuance, and I don't want to shut anyone
down, but if we haven't yet sorted out the obvious questions of subject
and object, time and space, we may not need to. I'm comfortable
recognizing the splits and trying to ply them in my own peculiar ways.
Do we need texts making sense of our cultural moments? I'd say yes.
Let's shine the intellectual light on greed, and power, and systems.
But let's leverage, if we can, the alt to create some serious shifts here.
We can talk about these concerns in our rigorously disciplined ways so
that even when we do illuminate the problems, we bring them into view in
our small scholarly corners. Better to go viral and miss the subtlety than
to soften the blow with our sophistication. Do we need scholarship that
looks at art and knowledge? Tough question. Yes/and. We need scholarship
that is art and knowledge. This is the basic prosumer position. We sit
on a continuum of consumption and production, and we consume to produce.
But still the making is the thing. If alt-scholarship can do one thing,
it can rock this division with its craft aesthetics and willingness to
let creation be. The key mode of alt-scholarship thus far has been the
associative response. That's nice. "Holocene" is fingering through my
earbuds now, the studio version. There is a cleaner sound to this
production making. What moves me is the layering. The way Justin Vernon
mixes vocal track over vocal track makes what we know to be harmony.
There is a kind of fabricated feel, in the best possible sense, a
natural blending. The organic mechanic has long been my figure for this
beautiful mixing between human and machine. In the live version of the
song, Vernon uses a dual microphone setup. I guess this is to process
the single voice in multiple ways. Filters and technologies recreate the
layering for the performance. (And still I love Light Lifting for the
way it does the same with pure human instruments.) In the live take, we
get two layers of Vernon's voice, but live or in studio, we're drawn to
a new scholarly mode: wrought thinking. This links us to craft and takes
the discussion of layering to new places by adding weaving and
hammering, twisting, bending, rolling. To be wrought means to have
layers that are linked by hand. This is still critique cast otherwise as creation.
Alt-scholarship knows that it, too, is wrought. It is both an
unravelling and a putting together. And it knows that rhythms and the
human body and (we can say) spirit participate in the making. This isn't
really a modal thing. With words we weave and layer and stitch as we do
with song, or image, or gesture, or breath. You will never hear these
words if you simply watch the bubble. If you go through the
film, however, to this space, you'll discover these layered phrasings
and craft onto your reading another track. Horizons bend if you can get
enough distance. Much like the human push toward flight we can lift with
sound and we can layer words that will link us to something larger, some
rising. This is what we study as we create.