protocol-virtues-study/text_coding/AFP.csv

1	AFP//You have a past, but you remember it with more detail than you should. And these details cannot be stopped by time. They have become a tradition.
2	AFP//You have no past. Either you have forgotten it or it was erased from you. You are piecing together the rest of the story from the information of others and you have placed yourself inside. This is your protocol.
3	AFP//Identifying and working against these protocols necessitates civil disobedience against the limitations of institutionalized knowledge and biopolitical power that seek to govern and interpellate our bodies, our health, gender, sexuality, and (re)production.
4	AFP//Investigating protocols as such allows us to contribute to the creation of new protocols that are inclusive and equitable.
5	AFP//We were interested in how this process may contribute to long-term political organizing, which requires ongoing cycles of action, reflection, and adjustments to the dynamics and protocols of shared struggle.
6	AFP//Ultra-red has no single organized political affiliation. The collective’s members are engaged with anti-racist movements in Britain, migrant struggles in Germany, community-based education in London, New York City, and Los Angeles, and struggles for housing and just community development in East Los Angeles.
7	AFP//At the passing of four and a half minutes, the workshop organizer announced, “Time.” Then we asked, “What did you hear?” We noticed that this practice increased concerns with and discussion of the contexts within which people gathered to address the crisis.
8	AFP//Who speaks? Whose voice is amplified? What do we speak of and to whom? Who listens, and to what end do they listen? Who has a place at the table? Who determines who has a place at the table? And on whose behalf do those seated at the table speak?
9	AFP//The failure to address this hegemony perpetuates divides between those who circulate within the art world and those who do not. The only acknowledgment of this divide comes in the form of “audience development” initiatives based on liberal notions of inclusion.
10	AFP//When effective, constitutive protocols place experience in dialogue with principles and regulations. This is what I consider the most powerful use of protocols, which is when disciplinary and constitutive protocols form a contradiction or dialectic.
11	AFP//This led us to borrow the concept of “desire lines”—trails or paths carved out over time, usually emerging as shortcuts between destinations. In built landscapes, they break protocol with prescribed routes. In natural environments, they often reveal animal migrations, paths used across generations. Desire lines are always a record of behavior—lines of movement suggested by previous path-takers and followed by future path-takers. Apparently, we cannot all be trailblazers. We love to follow in each others’ footsteps.
12	AFP//Breaking protocol with accepted modes of behavior in public space can feel dangerous—especially given current and historical restrictions on sexual desire and, in particular, same-sex desire.
13	AFP//Freedom and desire mean different things to different people at different times. So one of the central tenets is the liberating notion that we don’t all have to agree. Of course, with a proposal
14	AFP//If I had been outside of my homeland, I then would have acknowledged whosoever’s territory I was visiting, as a political affirmation of their sovereignty and self-determination and a practice of respect.
15	AFP//Maria’s smile, though, was not protocol. There is no rule that Anishinaabe begin meetings, visits, or events with a big smile; if anything, our elders tend to show less emotion in facial expressions in comparison to Euro-Canadian or American culture. I experienced her smile as entirely Anishinaabe because it was contradictory to the colonial form of our encounter and the formality of artist talks and academic conversations.
16	AFP//we are not the first Indigenous women or artists to sit down and have a conversation about protocols. These conversations happen all the time around kitchen tables, on sidewalks, in galleries and studios, and in the bush.
17	AFP//I didn’t set out to break protocol; my intention was to expand our ideas around protocol or to place protocols back within the larger network of Anishinaabe ethics. If the intent of protocols is to show respect and create spaces where we could be our best selves, what happens when there is such rigidity that the protocol erodes our foundational values of consent, diversity, self-determination, and non-interference? What happens when protocol backfires and causes harm?
18	AFP//How can we break the cage of protocol and embody a deeper understanding of Anishinaabe ethics and values?
19	AFP//Anishinaabe life, to a great degree, is care work. Our foundational teachings, the Seven Ancestor teachings, in my area called the Kookum Dibajimowin, are not a set of laws or commandments, or protocols that we have to follow. Rather, they are a complex set of practices that, when embodied, both individually and in relation to other living things, create a world in which consent, accountability, problem solving, and kindness are embedded.
20	AFP//remember very early on in my career being out on the land with an Elder hunting geese. We shot one, and he had forgotten his tobacco. I remember wondering what was going to happen, because it is our practice to show gratitude through reciprocity, and normally this is done through an offering of tobacco. The Elder who I was with left a tiny bit of his baloney sandwich. When I asked him if this was going to be OK with the geese, he said “Of course,” because the gesture was thoughtful and would be seen by the geese as an expression of deep respect.
21	AFP//Avoid using protocol to demonstrate how much of your culture you’ve recovered and instead use our practices as a point of connection and to create belonging and nurture relationships.
22	AFP//It needs to go back to family and community, figuring out who you are, where you come from, what your family gifts, what your gifts are that you have to contribute, ‘cause they are not the same, and they are not always what we want them to be either.
23	AFP//An essential element of my practice is what I call spiritual fieldwork, or the process of developing relationships with the human and nonhuman entities of a particular place or field in tandem with gathering information.
24	AFP//I think time is an Indigenous currency, one that we especially lack in our capitalist society. Listening also requires that you be present, allowing what you hear to shape the process at every step.
25	AFP//When trust has been built, it is important to be aware of one’s limitations, not to overstep, and not to overcommit. Trust is maintained by keeping promises, contracts, and boundaries.
26	AFP//reciprocity takes shape in responding to calls for mutual aid at any level, and by doing so it supports collectivities through personal and professional interactions.
27	AFP//In all Indigenous cultures, there is a natural law, a model of the world in which energies fluctuate between different levels. Associated with this vision of perpetual energy movement is the protocol of pagamento, or payback, which is the need to act based on the principle of reciprocity, to always give something in exchange for what is obtained, be it something material or service of any kind.
28	AFP//The protocols I have shared here are not set in stone—they shift as I learn and grow, as society grows, and as the circumstances of our planet change rapidly.
29	AFP//Let us collectively recommit to center and sustain life through our diverse practices. Let us remember that we are all related and that our futures are intertwined.
30	AFP//Stay low to the ground. Stay nimble and mobile (shifting between places, scales, times, elements). Keep it trans-local. Attend to the lower parts of the body. Think with and of pregnancy, with and of forms of degraded trans*ition, transformation, metamorphosis. Use your nose.36 Follow the shit. Follow the power. Follow the money.37
31	AFP//I argue that this is the kind of approach we need as we think through the nexus of ecology, climate, and racism. This grounding approach does not take refuge in ideal theory (climate ethics) or abstract calculations of emissions (some climate justice) but rather gets down in the muck, in the matter of life and death, to think and be in ways that (to borrow from Wynter) are “down to earth.”
32	AFP//The behaviors that we think liberate us are based on the disappointments of the past and keep us constrained within the confines of colonial imaginations dispossessing us of our purpose and, ultimately, our freedom.
33	AFP//To choose the self without fixing, changing, guilting, or blaming, we also have to choose rather than deny, escape, or wish away the histories that made us. We have to embark on a new protocol.
34	AFP//Escapism is one of the various epigenetic expressions I carry as a descendant of enslaved Indigenous peoples. I have the ability to not be here now as a way of enduring the present and making my way toward the future. Afrofuturist narratives like the folktales of High John and Brerer Rabbit were an already-always part of me when I needed hope—a cartography towards freedom letting me know that other ways of being are possible and that I am not stuck here.
35	AFP//It does not honor our ancestors to create a binary construction of embodiment as celebration and disembodiment as problematic. We will not dismiss and flatten the narratives of escape.
36	AFP//Whether slow or fast, micro or macro, invisible or detectable, this unseen world is responsible for a deep interconnectedness across species, substances, and timescales.
37	AFP//if we think through our vast entanglements under the molecular semiosphere, there are no such categories. We are already alien.
38	AFP//These exercises produce what AiG calls “cultivating an art of combinations,” or an art of symbiosis that “recomposes the commons in an odd world.”10 Working with AiG was the moment I began to see the potential of biohacking and collective world-making and the possibility of neutralizing a deeply ingrained fear conditioned in us from birth. More importantly, I learned that only from this point of emancipatory
39	AFP//There is no hard separation, clear boundary, or final destination in the form of an apocalypse, and perhaps we should all stop hoping for one. There are only relations—entanglements that transform us every day.
40	AFP//We ask that, in entering this essay, you do not merely distill the offerings emerging from it for your needs and desires.8
41	AFP//Access as accommodation cannot truly value disability culture, joy, and knowledge of ways to live otherwise, as it is fundamentally a project of normalization that neutralizes the political world-building potential of access as it is and has been practiced between humans unmediated by vast organizational bodies. The ableist world is just fine as it is and surely everybody wants in, right?
42	AFP//Access-centered practices include protocols because certain needs are best met with consistent solutions (like ASL interpretation), but access overall can’t be reduced to protocols.43 When access practices are responsive to the nuance and mutability of needs, responsibility for access becomes collectivized into culture rather than held by experts or individuals with static roles in policy, protocol, and procedure.
43	AFP//Dependency and interdependency are where we materially and affectively meet: our needs are what connect us to one another, they bring us into the vulnerabilities of both love and harm.
44	AFP//These artworks hold the persistence and necessary creativity of access-centered life, embodying how disability justice organizer Mia Mingus’s concept of access intimacy comes out of (conscious or unconscious) praxis. Mingus emphasizes the possibility for access intimacy to occur instantaneously between people without shared experience or political identity. This intimacy need not be communicated linguistically, offering an intuitive, non-identity based, affective lens onto modes of relation beyond policy.48 Access intimacy centers the affective aspects of access essential to access-centered practice.
45	AFP//Within, we learn each other’s protocols (How do I inject you? When do you have to go to hospital despite the risks associated with being undocumented?). We cultivate practices of care that exceed what protocols encompass (What types of touch does my body welcome? Do you enjoy metaphors when I describe images to you? Who has space to host others?). Amongst, we fuck with policy—negotiate, circumvent, and refuse it. Work it, flip it, and reverse it.
46	AFP//The infrastructure and its limitations have predetermined the communication trajectory and centered the West as a hub through which all information moves, making the internet’s architecture political.
47	AFP//To Wood, Web3 is about building systems that don’t rely on trusting people, corporations, or governments to make moral choices, but that instead render evil choices impossible.”
48	AFP//By care-based internet protocols, I mean a set of rules and guidelines that prioritize the well-being of users, their privacy, and their security over other considerations such as convenience or profit. These protocols move us away from technical jargon and encourage access through consentful participation.10
49	AFP//Redesigning the collective timeline cannot be accomplished by a single, solitary voice or action, nor by a small group of individuals. It requires shared responsibility and agreement from multiple communities and their branching timelines. It calls for the collaboration of multiple forces from different times, spaces, and narratives.
50	AFP//participants were invited to create their own representations of space-time disentangled from racial capitalist patriarchy. They were encouraged to imagine and visualize a space-time that transcends oppressive systems and structures through a series of reflective questions exploring the aesthetics and sensory experiences of their alternative space-time, such as: What does it look, sound, smell, and taste like? Who is present within this space-time? How do individuals choose to act or refrain from certain actions? And most importantly, how do they feel within this space-time free from the constraints of racial capitalist patriarchy?
51	AFP//Protocols, resolutions, and practices are meant to be replicable and will be revisited at some collectively agreed-upon time and space.
52	AFP//That part of the thinking of Blackness in terms of Black studies is something other than the individual biography, individual greatness, or the individual artist being an individual genius. I think we’re all invited into something other than individuation in this symposium with the mode of artistic practices. Part of what I hear from Nadir’s cloud science is also a science of collectivity. That collectivity is a protocol for conducting science.
53	AFP//Each individual cloud, as you can see, it’s kind of chaotic. They all have their small differences, but it turns out that they actually have a lot in common. The best way to describe it is by thinking of them as one collective entity and describing their behavior collectively.
54	AFP//happening in the atmosphere is instantaneous from the point of view of the deep ocean; three to five years is nothing. When we’re thinking in terms of this deep climate time or this deep time, again, relative to a concrete change that’s happening here, the adjustment time here is invisible. It’s instant.
55	AFP//what if rather than remixing and repurposing existing protocols, we orchestrated new ones—protocols that, instead of summoning us into productive labor, compliant tool use, or compulsive consumption, cultivate a soundtrack for camaraderie or care or caprice? Can we imagine an alarm clock whose aubade, or morning song, awakens us into an otherwise world of possibility?
56	AFP//Each day, especially after I have taken photographs of the desk, I write in the notebook. How I have managed to do that all month takes me by surprise. I have never undertaken such an activity, habitually skirting through several notebooks as though incapable of regimen. I imagine this sudden focus has to do with five years of attempting to write a novel—novels, in fact, at one point, coming to forty thousand words—and failing to see the point, the throughline to connect story with imperative.
57	AFP//I was an active participant in the perpetuation of the protocols of that very culture, which I grew accustomed to over many years. These unspoken criteria applied not just to job interviews but to all kinds of curatorial closed-door meetings where we would discuss research, invite scholars to speak on certain topics, or discuss issues connected with exhibitions.
58	AFP//the particular role of the art museum as a tastemaker, gatekeeper, and arbiter of high-end culture has created the demands of a particular economic and cultural model and its intrinsic protocols that, as I will try to argue, are highly fragile and, because of their fragility, highly conservative in their financial and intellectual ambitions.
59	AFP//Once we step outside the metaphorical classroom, we put protocols in motion in order to welcome everyone into these encounters: we work across platforms; we adjust language, design, content, technology; and we insert periods of reflection and time to accommodate different time spans and evolutions in thinking.
60	AFP//Taking the topic of protocols at its most radical form of collective intervention, we had hoped to push the standards of peer review even further with this volume.
61	AFP//For this book, we decided to produce two separate versions and make them available. One is a designed PDF fixed layout—a version that mirrors the printed book and foregrounds the design as a protocol-related feature—and the other is an EPUB file that does not have many of the design features, but it includes all the text of the book while still being extremely accessible to assisted reading devices.
62	AFP//What we’ve learned from this volume is that a protocol—a form embedded in the origins of publishing itself as a medium—can be unbound from any particular monovocal convention.