Week 1 – Gemma Copeland – Reflecting

August 24, 2019

I’m a digital designer and researcher. At the moment I’m particularly interested in self-organisation, interdependence, digital commoning and cyberfeminism.

While I’m here I’m going to reflect on my own practice, write a couple of short guides about digital self-determination (around topics like alternative digital tools, using the internet mindfully and strategies for community-building) and working on some projects for Evening Class and Common Knowledge.

For the first week I did a lot of reflecting, writing and editing, designed a new website for myself, went for many walks up the mountain, ate some figs and read Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea.

Here are some photos of the mushrooms I’ve found:

Here’s an excerpt from one of my favourite books, The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing:

Fungi are famous for changing shape in relation to their encounters and environments. Many are “potentially immortal”, meaning they die from disease, injury or lack of resources, but not from old age. Even this little fact can alert us to how much our thoughts about knowledge and existence just assume determinate life form and old age. We rarely imagine life without such limits – and when we do we stray into magic. Rayner challenges us to think with mushrooms, otherwise. Some aspects of our lives are more comparable to fungal indeterminancy, he points out. Our daily habits are repetitive, but they are also open-ended, responding to opportunity and encounter. What if our indeterminate life form is not the shape of our bodies but rather the shape of our motions over time? Such indeterminancy expands our concept of human life, showing us how we are transformed by encounter.