Luz balão

2024 in retrospect

Friends,

One consequence of this annual ritual is that as the calendar year comes to an end, I preemptively try to draw together the many threads I've labored on. A friend, noting my anxiety, cut through my telegraphic circuits of speech: "Ah... You're thinking about your letter..." It was true, and yet reading last year's dispatch, I'm consoled by a sense of continuity and am increasingly hopeful that the threads will interweave over time into a fabric with heft. I cry out, like the roosters in João Cabral's "Tecendo a manhã":

E se encorpando em tela, entre todos,
se erguendo tenda, onde entrem todos,
se entretendendo para todos, no toldo
(a manhã) que plana livre de armação.
A manhã, toldo de um tecido tão aéreo
que, tecido, se eleva por si: luz balão.

And entwined into canvas, among them,
erected into dwelling, surrounding them,
interwoven for them, the canopy
(the morning) that drifts frameless.
The morning, a canopy of fabric so airy
that, woven, floats itself: light balloon.

I can't report an phase shift since moving back to São Paulo, though I'm beginning to grasp at the lack that had motivated my deracinated wanderings in the past. Unlike my continual flight from New York City, I've found myself hesitant to leave. The sensation is not totalizing belonging, but a density of images punctuating domestic rhythms:

Trees hovering outside the corner windows of my fifth floor apartment, catching the late afternoon sun, or tapping to a fierce spring storm, transforming my home into a tree house or boat at sea;

Wandering with Martin down Rua Jaguaribe, across Santa Casa's baroque patios and gardens, into the grit of República for a coffee at SESC 24's open-air cafeteria floating alongside the medianeras of the historical downtown;

Waking up early for a full-day of to sanding, painting, and building a pair of PIBESP benches with Rafa and friends, installed near Marechal Deodoro late into the evening with a last minute bolt covered in candle wax;

A slow shuffle with the carnival parade down to Praça Violeta with Isa and Emerson, who shields us from the light drizzle with his umbrella gentling bobbing to the samba playing ahead;

Watching Palmeiras vs Flamengo with Vamsi after dark on the top floor of an open barge heading down the Solimões River to Santarém, cheap beer in hand, silver-dollar-sized black beetles beaming in towards the pair of bright lights that illuminate our Monobloc tables and chairs;

A neverending night of hipster wine bar to decadent karaoke who refuses our request for Chorão to cougar decadence at Rex to techno party under the austere concrete slabs of FAU's modernist building at USP with Yshay;

Walking along Palestra Italia with Rafa during a Palmeiras match, bars overflowing, TVs propped up in car trunks, radios blaring, to eat Cássio's esfihas at Cozinha de Damasco after a climbing session at Casa de Pedra;

Riding shotgun on a moto-taxi down Flamengo on the first day of the new year, visor flipped open, hands tight on the side handles, Pão de Açucar and Christ the Redeemer looming ahead in the crisp light;

These images produce a mosaic'd sense of place. Hosting friends in a country and culture that I myself am fondly rediscovering establishes a subtle dynamic between guest and host, an attempt at a kind of translation of place cautious of the possibility of betrayal ("traduttore, traditore"). I find myself cataloging routes and lines of sight of the city, choreographing a morning walk that induces a faithful historical and sociological picture, while exposing my own particular pleasures and way of seeing. This psychogeographical method, made artifact through image or text, is the throughline that most often draws me to art, be it Georges Perec's infra-ordinary documentation, a Ben Kadow part in a Hockey video, Christo and Jeanne-Claude's theatrical stagings, or Claude Lelouch's C'était un rendez-vous. I was tickled by Wim Wenders who during an interivew about Perfect Days said that, were he not a filmmaker, he'd be a tour guide.

Luca called my attention towards a similarity between a certain "cronista" style in some of my writing and the objects I built and compiled throughout the year, deeming them objetos-crônicas. He helped clarify what I find myself compelled to do, these traces through the world, attempts to pin down, call attention to, and re-transmit ordinary experience in a dense yet light manner (comme l'oiseau). I've begun to think of this as a Sisyphean task of drawing together threads into a fabric that is vital and faithful to the world (exuberant), while also being able to be preserved and transmitted (compressive). Trying to articulate this view, both in form and content, is the core of the dissertation I'm working on at FAU-USP. I'm grounding these concepts in my idiosyncratic misreadings of Illich, Bateson, and Latour, which hopefully are fruitful for the handful of readers who stumble upon the USP archives.

Now, my relationship between place and travel isn't as clean-cut as you might assume from above. I ended last year's letter eager to move to Brazil, while also aware that the place that unified those friends who shared this sensibility with me was the internet. Rather than double-down on São Paulo as anthropological object of study, as I had imagined my masters program would encourage me to do, I found myself re-centering technology in a new context, both as concrete tool for representation in art and architecture, but also for its metaphors (transmission, embedding, modularity, portability, interface). Belief in the critical potential of technology to the point of material engagement seems foreign to those versed in a European tradition of critical thought, in contrast to the blogosphere of media theory and pragmatism that I'm native to. Lots of reading, less writing, and even less experimentation, has made the university experience underwhelming, though a single six-week seminar on Bruno Latour's Science in Action has almost made up for it.

Earlier in the year, I contributed to season two of The Inexact Sciences some ideas on lightness, translation, difference, and anti-structures. These are first attempts (essais) towards generalizing my own reaction to a sense of placelessness into more structural understandings. Our method was peculiar: on a private online forum we began drafting essays, suggesting critiques, and accumulating a variety of shared metaphors. Then, once there was enough pressure, we set out to publish a text a day until we ran out of steam. Our diagnostic is not new — the dematerialization of family, labor, and place — and yet the metaphors of lightness, weaving, translation, and autonomy which are swelling in Discourse forums, Discord servers, and emails I exchange with peers seem like new directions that can triangulate beyond the dialectics of localism (be it nationalist or indigenous) and virtuality (be it identity politics or technological interpassivity).

One direction I took concrete steps towards materializing these concerns was a late summer visit to ISSA (Island School of Social Autonomy) with Luca. I had met Srećko (via Marcell) during an earlier trip to a writing retreat on online archives and Ubuweb. He generously invited Luca and I under the banner of Aventura, our collective with Rafa in which we experiment with some of the ideas above in the form of architecture. ISSA is a practice-oriented school for exploring ideas of autonomy which, given its influence from Italian autonomismo (Bifo, Federici, Guattari), is both philosophical and material (pirate radios, rain collection systems, lindy construction techniques). The central learning from the trip was the emphasis on practice: we must build with others. Rather than theoretical sparring, actually laboring together leads to experiences which force negotiations which are both theoretically productive and spiritually vital. Collecting our thoughts each day at the soviet-style Hotel Biševo, Luca and I kept remarking at how light it all felt.

Valeria's talks on Pirate Care were especially resonant. She emphasized that 18th-century pirates were at the technological forefront of their time (caravelas being top-tier military technology), just as contemporary pirates are the avant-garde (e.g. Spotify is just capital catching up to the possibilities that torrenting made possible). As such, autonomy is as much a social concern as a technological concern. She also astutely diagnosed an issue with the Left who "is great at parties" (e.g. protests, direct action), but "struggles at ritual," calling attention to the Right's prevalence in churches and soccer stadiums, places which people choose to continuously return to, not for an express purpose, but to dwell in and share time with others. Per João Cabral's light balloon, I'm curious what alternative places for ritual are, where a collective sense of autonomy can be developed. This is a political challenge that I feel compelled to work towards.

Unlike many peers at ISSA, I'm less convinced of the idea of collective living on isolated farmland, though I understand that an ecologically-driven strategy of degrowth feels both compelling and actionable on a scale that counters the overwheliming capitalist realism. Though I don't have it well theorized (I don't think I have to!), I'm very sympathetic to urban life (and, in particular, the possibility of partial anonymity). I look at the semi-public spaces in São Paulo, in particular the SESC system, as well as the Argentine tradition of "neighborhood clubs" as possible directions. My experiences with online communities speaks to the power of the virtual, though I also see how vital it was to ground those relationships in in-person reading groups, parties, and general loitering. Working through the intersections of autonomy, urban life, virtual communities, and just hanging out will hopefully accrete into a new kind of space. (At the moment, I consider bootstrapping a little library, sauna, climbing gym in São Paulo's historical downtown...)

One resounding success has been building Reduct. We've explicitly adopted the metaphor of pirate ship as we've become profitable with a small skeleton crew. Shifting from the tech-sector as our primary client to public defense has been financially successful, while also making us resilient to hype-cycles and free from the VC-backed pyramid scheme. We've facetiously adopted the sales term of "whale hunting", filtered through flashes of Moby Dick, to describe our outreach to public defense offices in need of help with video archives. It feels right to be the counter-offensive to omnipresent surveillance which filters into legal proceedings in the form of dumps of thousands of hours of body cam footage, though I'm aware of the double-edgedness of our technology. I'm confident our pirate governance will keep us afloat and on route to Libertalia.

In my personal approach to technology, I've come to understand the give and take of means of representation and action. I am still primarily driven by the brutalist impetus of "exposing the functional core of the system," though I'm developing a more dialectical understanding of technology in which infrastructure can become transparent. Beiser offered the thought: "That which cannot be light should be made into public infrastructure." While a water bottle might afford autonomy, abundant public water fountains are both physically and psychologically lighter on the individual. Rob wrote to me in a different context, but with a similar suggestion of technology making the radical into something banal:

I think of Reduct this way [...] taking various stoner thoughts about collective media production and un-editable films and convincing thousands of working professionals that radical collective film editing with backlinks is an ordinary part of their life.

This Janus-faced approach to technology (Brecht/Lightness) counteracts the utopian/doomer battles that dominate contemporary discourse. An essay I wrote on Reduct's approach to LLMs based around "provenance" exemplifies this kind of thinking, with the subtitle "abstraction without indirection" encapsulating the aim well, while also being an example of metaphors from technology that I think should have more traction in political thought. Though still illegible to others, the position I've carved out for myself between fields (technology, architecture, writing) continues to feel novel and productive.

My hope for the upcoming year is to commit strongly and blindly to projects with people I trust and admire, to be "greedy" in mathematical terms, rather than calculating and overwhelmed with uncertainty. Collaboration is extremely difficult — individual neuroses and insecurity get in the way of communication, finances are often precarious, and the logistics of working together outstrip toiling alone. However, my experiences with Reduct, TIS, ISSA, and Aventura make it clear that collective experimentation is the direction I ought to go. Attending together to shared artifacts and thus negotiating fundamental tensions weaves the strongest and lightest fabric under which to dwell.

Abraço,
Cristóbal