Iterate, deviate, elaborate

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Cover Photo: Padmapani L. Perez

By Padmapani L. Perez

A letter for the new year

As we emerge from the holidaze and resume the practice of counting our work hours while applying ourselves to grand schemes, I thought I’d pass on these words I recently picked up from Donna Haraway: “Iterate, deviate, elaborate.”

These words are the operating principles of a project—or rather, a process, called the Crochet Coral Reef, which was started by two sisters, each of whom is a physicist, mathematician, and artist, poet, and science writer. They set out to crochet a coral reef as a response to coral bleaching. Several years since it began, the project gained about 8,000 collaborators in 27 countries and several exhibits across the globe. Each crafter contributed a piece of coral made out of yarn, plastic, discarded tape, and crocheted them using string theory and a simple hyperbolic code set by the twins Margaret and Christine Wertheim.

For more, visit margaretwertheim.com/crochet-coral-reef

What, you might ask, did that accomplish for coral bleaching? In the same way, I constantly ask myself, what does our work do to help avert the climate crisis? It’s not always self-evident and the answers will keep on changing because this is a question we will keep on asking. It’s a question that will keep us on track.

Haraway offers some glimmering hints. She suggests that what the Wertheim twins have put together in their Institute for Figuring is not a think tank or a work tank, but a play tank.

Is the Agam Agenda a play tank, too? Perhaps. We could be that. We could be so many things. Haraway asserts that a process like that of the crochet coral reef—and I would argue, a process like that of the Agam books and the Midnight. Climate. Survival. video poem—creates “intimacy without proximity.” “Material play builds caring publics,” she writes. Playing with the arts, sciences, and math creates “active attachments” that will matter in the creation of kinder futures for all beings.

So then, let’s play and bring into sharp relief just how much we rely on each other—human or otherwise.

So then, let’s play and bring into sharp relief just how much we rely on each other—human or otherwise. Our materials are words, images, data, relationships, collaboration, wild ideas, and so many other things that we can draw into our spheres of action. Paints, clay, pencils, compost, ink, concrete, garbage, threads, movement, music, seeds.

Let’s play, dream big, make things, acknowledge ancient forms of co-existence, forge new nurturing attachments, and adopt these three words as the Agam Agenda mantra—at least for the first months of 2021. This year, we will launch Harvest Moon, gather more people round and into the renga, and pursue new ideas. As time unfolds for some and unravels for others (for time is relative), we may find that in a few moons we will need stronger, sharper words to guide us towards bigger ambitions. But for now, I propose we begin (again) with iterate, deviate, elaborate.

Notes

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