Let us begin with Enid Guruŋulmiwuy from Miyarrka Media. She sits with her back to you, the colourful polka dots of her skirt echoing the dancing mulmul that foams on the edge of the gapu as it bubbles ashore. The zig zag of her top ricochets off the choppy ocean as the winds of Raymangirr stir the waves into fractious lines criss-crossing toward the horizon. In her hands rests a small camera. Within the camera, a screen creates a small frame of attention. It holds her gaze. She doesn’t notice our looking at her looking as she leans into the colours curving through the waves as they roll the sea-shell wrack lines further up
the red shore.
the red shore.
As your eyes wander around the computer screen, it might take a moment before you notice, just beneath Guruŋulmiwuy, gently lying on the sand, an invitation to ‘scroll’. So, you do.
Through the movement of your finger, you roll into a blur where horizons give way to colour, like when you open your eyes beneath a salty ocean wave. This scrolled reveal is unhurried. Sitting at the level of the gapu and the raŋi, you settle down to tune in. Your sliding finger, your moving mouse, a lulling rhythm: one line at a time, revelations of vision and feeling and argument unfold.
Miyarrka Media has invited you into relationship with a climate-change impacted world coming into formation.
Guruŋulmiwuy and her family have lived with the rhythmic flux and expressive force of shoreline life for countless generations. They know how to sense, and extrapolate from, the ancestral meanings and contemporary relations inscribed by seas and sands. Their image-essay is for those of us who don’t. It begins with the raŋi moulded into shapes by the sea, because these shapes, in turn, sculpt a digital opening of Miyarrka Media's theoretic horizon.
What happens when we let form write form?
‘The articles designed themselves’ has become the complicated catch cry of our editorial team. We explain our process like this to draw attention to the material relations in play within the work itself and to announce that we absolutely take for granted that creativity is collective. As a team of editors, curators, anthropologists, and designers we committed ourselves throughout the making of ‘Epistemic attunements’ to work in collaboration with not only other anthropologists, artists, and researchers, but with Country, ancestors, oceans, soil, honeyeaters, sound, wild bores, frogs, fire, ash, sand, trees, echoes, colour, code, bitrates, cameras, computers, and archives. This list of formative forces stretches even further to include flows of more-than-human relationality, economics, climate, politics, storytelling, histories, futures and more.
As we searched together with our contributors through their materials—written, imagistic and sounded—we put elements side by side, seeking flashes of recognition. This process of combining and recombining often revealed surprising conjunctions. Contributors began to find new dimensions to their research and, often, to relinquish expectations of a solely human authorial voice. Freed from the need to foreclose arguments into a particular form of academic output (see the introduction to this double special issue), we set about nurturing the emergence of knowledge by exploring what it might mean to ‘write’ in collaboration with the entities and forces that compel our authors’ ethnographies.2
Each article has been designed with the heart of an anthropologist.3 Meaning that
we take intermedial relations as inherently social relations. We applied the rigour of participant observation in new co-creative contexts. We immersed ourselves in the research worlds of our contributors, spending hours sifting through images, videos, sound recordings, drawings, diagrams, and maps. We held long Zoom meetings talking through their ethnographies, reading from field diaries, and already published works, sometimes watching presentations and talks. The form of each article announced itself as we took the time to attune to the expressive registers of the social relations under investigation—and the ways that these might add their ‘voices’ to the crafting of an argument.4 The relationships that intermedial composition allowed us to activate were key. Every design decision was conceptually motivated. It was never simply a case of making things look ‘beautiful’. The intermedial analytic force of the design propelled arguments forward, but also sideways, down through layers, into shifts of sensation and abrupt moments of pause.
we take intermedial relations as inherently social relations. We applied the rigour of participant observation in new co-creative contexts. We immersed ourselves in the research worlds of our contributors, spending hours sifting through images, videos, sound recordings, drawings, diagrams, and maps. We held long Zoom meetings talking through their ethnographies, reading from field diaries, and already published works, sometimes watching presentations and talks. The form of each article announced itself as we took the time to attune to the expressive registers of the social relations under investigation—and the ways that these might add their ‘voices’ to the crafting of an argument.4 The relationships that intermedial composition allowed us to activate were key. Every design decision was conceptually motivated. It was never simply a case of making things look ‘beautiful’. The intermedial analytic force of the design propelled arguments forward, but also sideways, down through layers, into shifts of sensation and abrupt moments of pause.
The rigour of the process that this set in motion is anchored in an aesthetics of form that considers every decision to be a matter of ethics, as much as a conceptual commitment to the argument. It’s a matter of care, as Maria Puig de la Bellacasa (2012) would be quick to point out. Care for the argument entails care for the relations set in play within and beyond the screen. Decisions of alignment, repetition, contrast, balance, hierarchy, pace—each have consequences for the argument at the centre of the article and for the ways that these analytic formations travel back out into the world.
As each article taught us how to see, listen, think, and feel anew, we became acutely
aware of the part that design has historically played in privileging certain forms of knowledge—and excluding others. When the academy celebrates only black text on white pages, it synthesises form and content into a particular storying of the world, so enabling the retelling of certain histories, an invocation of certain values, relationships, and intelligences. Our effort here is to use design to give expression to polyvocal registers
of knowledge and authority, ‘writing’ social analysis by working with and across different media, creating a multi-sensuous reading experience for those who will come to our pages. ‘Attuners’, we have taken to calling you.
aware of the part that design has historically played in privileging certain forms of knowledge—and excluding others. When the academy celebrates only black text on white pages, it synthesises form and content into a particular storying of the world, so enabling the retelling of certain histories, an invocation of certain values, relationships, and intelligences. Our effort here is to use design to give expression to polyvocal registers
of knowledge and authority, ‘writing’ social analysis by working with and across different media, creating a multi-sensuous reading experience for those who will come to our pages. ‘Attuners’, we have taken to calling you.
As Anna Tsing writes in her essay, Attunement: Form in motion,
[t]o nurture and protect even small fragments of liveability, we must get to know the lives of others, human and nonhuman. The Anthropocene collates projects of erasure, and we forget that we need companions. What might it take to bring us back into remembrance?
One such practice of remembrance must come from epistemic practices that embrace study and rumination, that make visible the dynamics of beginning, of searching and questioning, and of opening again and again towards new theoretical and methodological horizons in pursuit of better questions to ask of different scenes of culture. Like Tsing,
we seek out practices that honour what it takes to cultivate processes of coming to knowledge, rather than presuming that knowledge comes ready made to record and transmit. In short, we curated this collection in a co-creative effort to recognise and remember differently, together.
we seek out practices that honour what it takes to cultivate processes of coming to knowledge, rather than presuming that knowledge comes ready made to record and transmit. In short, we curated this collection in a co-creative effort to recognise and remember differently, together.
In Tsing’s article we find her crawling through the sand alongside her co-thinker and maker Elaine Gan. But it is a ‘jackpot’ bloom of mycorrhiza they uncover that writes her introduction. It sprawls across the frame settling into your backlit screen having been
dug up out of the dark depths of the soil. Mycorrhiza is the collective and individual name given to the joint organs made by fungi and tree roots. They are forms that emerge only from the relation between organisms; they’re usually bound in brown coal or clay or entangled in soils topped with recent organic material. As Tsing describes, not many mycorrhiza survive the act of being dug up to be studied. But the Paxillus involutus in
your screen that opens Tsing’s article was relatively easy to get a hold of amongst the crumbling soils of Søby, Brunkulslejer, Denmark. The process of bringing this bloom
into the light hasn’t broken its expressive form.
dug up out of the dark depths of the soil. Mycorrhiza is the collective and individual name given to the joint organs made by fungi and tree roots. They are forms that emerge only from the relation between organisms; they’re usually bound in brown coal or clay or entangled in soils topped with recent organic material. As Tsing describes, not many mycorrhiza survive the act of being dug up to be studied. But the Paxillus involutus in
your screen that opens Tsing’s article was relatively easy to get a hold of amongst the crumbling soils of Søby, Brunkulslejer, Denmark. The process of bringing this bloom
into the light hasn’t broken its expressive form.
Here form, Tsing argues, is as much the will of the mycorrhiza, as it is its colour, shape, texture, and smell. Here form is considered its essential essence of being, its insistence
on life, the way it expresses itself. Each one takes a different form according to the life histories of tree and fungus as they reach for each other. Together, plant and fungi coproduce structures to exchange and share resources. As Tsing describes, she and Gan find themselves crawling in the sand tips of Søby trying to bring themselves ‘inside the “will” of this system of stretching and sharing’. Together they learn official names, watch, and look through lenses and magnifying glasses, describe and follow, and attempt to understand how mycorrhiza express themselves and manoeuvre themselves differently between unique combinations of fungi and tree. These practices of attunement attempt
to come into ‘alignment’, as Tsing puts it. This requires expanding our repertoires of attending and responding. It is from such practices that we have taken cues for co-designing this double special issue of TAJA.
on life, the way it expresses itself. Each one takes a different form according to the life histories of tree and fungus as they reach for each other. Together, plant and fungi coproduce structures to exchange and share resources. As Tsing describes, she and Gan find themselves crawling in the sand tips of Søby trying to bring themselves ‘inside the “will” of this system of stretching and sharing’. Together they learn official names, watch, and look through lenses and magnifying glasses, describe and follow, and attempt to understand how mycorrhiza express themselves and manoeuvre themselves differently between unique combinations of fungi and tree. These practices of attunement attempt
to come into ‘alignment’, as Tsing puts it. This requires expanding our repertoires of attending and responding. It is from such practices that we have taken cues for co-designing this double special issue of TAJA.
As Tsing writes, ‘[i]f we want to know the possibilities of the worlds we can make
together, we need to follow them as they express themselves through form.’ To move beyond the limits of human language and the written word, we work in this volume with what we call, ‘frames of attention’. To work with a frame of attention is to honour the emergent knowledge practices of ethnography, those constantly shifting modes of sensing and reflecting in an effort to find focus and critical inspiration with the worlds in which we work. In this design process then, it is to come at material before it is fixed and ordered. Frames of attention are about looking for emergent moments of
analytic possibility.
together, we need to follow them as they express themselves through form.’ To move beyond the limits of human language and the written word, we work in this volume with what we call, ‘frames of attention’. To work with a frame of attention is to honour the emergent knowledge practices of ethnography, those constantly shifting modes of sensing and reflecting in an effort to find focus and critical inspiration with the worlds in which we work. In this design process then, it is to come at material before it is fixed and ordered. Frames of attention are about looking for emergent moments of
analytic possibility.
So as designers we saw the frame of a screen as a site in which to amplify our authors’ frames of attention as they have been honed in the field. We co-designed these frames
of attention with them, inspired by the effort to get closer still to new forms of understanding. We weren’t just working with media materials themselves, for as Tsing shows us, it can be in the attention to the relational dynamics of the in-between that form emerges. Through iterative processes of co-design we have worked to get inside the will of each article’s system of sharing, stretching, and recognising to establish lifeways and histories anew that broaden the collaborative horizons for co-creative critical thinking.
of attention with them, inspired by the effort to get closer still to new forms of understanding. We weren’t just working with media materials themselves, for as Tsing shows us, it can be in the attention to the relational dynamics of the in-between that form emerges. Through iterative processes of co-design we have worked to get inside the will of each article’s system of sharing, stretching, and recognising to establish lifeways and histories anew that broaden the collaborative horizons for co-creative critical thinking.
Where Tsing provided a provocation for our editorial processes, Miyarrka Media’s raŋi showed us how to trouble what coming into alignment means. Their article rolls in and out of focus and voice just like the tide. The frame of attention is shaped by Guruŋulmiwuy’s lines:
When you write with your hand, what happens?
Gapu is always making patterns with the raŋi.
Like your hand.
Exactly the same.
Gapu is always making patterns with the raŋi.
Like your hand.
Exactly the same.
The raŋi shows itself differently each time, teaching us that coming into alignment can be fleeting. But also cumulative. The gapu writes patterns on the sand like our hands and the waves transform light and shapes and argument before they roll back toward horizons again in new directions and in new configurations. Miyarrka Media write in their collective voice, ‘[i]f you tune yourself into the gapu’s frequency, it will show itself through the lines, patterns, everything. The feelings will flow, the knowledge will build up. Like the tides. In and out.’
If we are to really commit to practices of attunement that establish new lifeways
and histories, then our practice of attunement must come closer to the Yolŋu word, malŋ’maram, which means ‘looking in a careful way’ and that holds onto the verb form of attunement: attuning. Such a practice entails acknowledging that coming into alignment is not an end-goal or continuous state of being, but a temporary moment amidst processes of misalignment, and sometimes misrecognition, that can be just as informative and powerful. Our careful looking, our malŋ’maram, seeks out alignment and misalignment, resonance and dissonance, attention and inattention, as two sides of the same generative coin across the entire collection of articles.
and histories, then our practice of attunement must come closer to the Yolŋu word, malŋ’maram, which means ‘looking in a careful way’ and that holds onto the verb form of attunement: attuning. Such a practice entails acknowledging that coming into alignment is not an end-goal or continuous state of being, but a temporary moment amidst processes of misalignment, and sometimes misrecognition, that can be just as informative and powerful. Our careful looking, our malŋ’maram, seeks out alignment and misalignment, resonance and dissonance, attention and inattention, as two sides of the same generative coin across the entire collection of articles.
Attention to flashes of recognition as well as circuits of misrecognition allow us to design frames of attention that also hold what Daniel Fisher calls ‘practices of inattention’. Fisher is particularly interested in the apprehension of something out of place, ill-fitting, and at times invisible within a broader cultural imaginary. In his article, ‘Fire’s habit: Elemental media and the politics of apprehension’ fire is hard to reckon, to know, to capture, to show. The echoes of explosive celebration, the ashen shadows left by campfire gatherings, the practices of erasure at the edges of a climate politics that burn through Australian cities and rupture Indigenous connections to land are some of what motivated the design of Fisher’s article. Together, as editorial team and contributor, we practiced fire as something that spills from the edges of all that tries to contain it and know it. Something that slips across scales of discourse becoming uncontainable as it roars through landscapes and climate politics. This provides the frame of attention for the design of Fisher’s article. Between his written texts come floating ash and flying birds, the sharp spray of firehoses and warm waves of orange flame, firework blooms and cotton stem smudges of navy clouds, all colliding in a photo roman of telling juxtaposition. Unexpected synchronicities and similarities materialise ideas and forge arguments.
The critical friction afforded by shifting scales is put to work again, but differently in Citt Williams and Jaramali Kulka’s article, ‘Filming jilba: Sensing beyond the exclusionary fictions of climate change’. It interrogates the knowing and feeling of climate change by zooming in and out of satellite imagery and the intimate sensations of being in place that Kulka’s country offers in far north Queensland. Anthony Irwin, Ken George, and Kirin Narayan’s article, ‘Cult, cosmos, and craft at a Thai art academy’, seeks the reverent edges of performing sacred knowledge while avoiding a sacrilegious mimicry of ceremony. Recreating ritual gestures within the screen, their article describes the transfer of knowledge through different haptic forms in a Thai art academy. Designed in layers that accrue through hand-drawn pencil lines, the article stages an intimate analysis of ‘far futurity’. CómicsClub’s thinking and drawing is also motivated by practices of future-making, albeit of a very different kind. In their webcomic, ‘The Fences: A webcomic on collective debt and ruination in Paraguay’ they analyse the financial structures and systems amplifying the precarity of a small agricultural co-operative in northern Paraguay. Here the digital affords a ‘choose your own adventure’ structure through which the attuner becomes unnervingly looped into ‘bifurcating worlds of indebtedness and
financial risk’.5
financial risk’.5
A particular poetics plays across every contribution of this special issue. It’s a poetic made possible by eschewing formal hierarchies. Across the collection we have sought ways that enable different forms to amplify one another, working towards an enlivening dynamic that makes knowledge palpable and different styles of argument possible. In Thom van Dooren and Zoë Sadokierski’s collaboration with Myles Oakey, Timo Rissanen, and Ross Crate, ‘side flights’ offered a unique style of argument that layers details into the central text while introducing movement as a core concept. As you scroll through the article, ‘A bird, a flock, a song and a forest: The decline of Regent Honeyeater life’, you are invited to navigate the work as if you were the Regent Honeyeater, whose nomadic lives up and down the eastern half of Australia are entangled with noise and predators and dramatically changing landscapes.
The poetics in this collection don’t fully announce or explain themselves; they operate in chorus with the gaps between forms, with the open space of the screen, and with the fecund emptiness between moments of movement. Such poetics invite your participation as a reader-turned-attuner and are designed to allow you into the impossible yet nonetheless generative effort to get inside the will of each article.
The editorial effort is to care for the work that’s there, to get inside it and to make it more itself so that we might return it to the anthropologist, artist, author or collective, in a way that makes them feel as though the work is more itself than it would have been had it found its shape in words alone. This approach softens the ideas of intervention, invention, and innovation ordinarily associated with design in anthropology. By treating design as a way of thinking, and co-thinking, we want to bring attention to how the ongoing forms of expression for our work shape what it is possible to think and therefore possible to show and know.
Mieke Bal offers wise counsel for those of us attempting to write about form. As she points out,
Shape and form are tenaciously difficult to define. Fortunately, defining is not the only, nor even the best, way of approaching and understanding something. Thinking-through—engaging what one wishes to understand in a reciprocal intimacy—seems more promising, because more open to newness.6
The same holds true, we would argue, for transforming worlds. Throughout the co-creative work of finding form across this collection, we have held onto the belief that the articles that we have crafted collectively perform an opening towards new horizons of critical commitment to, and coming to understanding with, worlds in transformation. It is our hope that in creating this special issue we might inspire other makers and anthropologists and researchers working in other fields, to gently move towards new syntheses of form and content, so that they too might participate in the making of new histories and futures by simply reconsidering how we design knowledge.
What happens when we let form write form?
Yolŋu Country, image by Miyarrka Media
