the Little
We center play as an alternative to extractive or competitive knowledge production.
Our offerings are not routine.
We move at the cadence of a feral curiosity6 as we build and unbuild our “primitive hypertext”7.
Some months, we will have many offerings and other months we may have none. We encourage everyone to explore their relationship to urgency, routine, and certainty. The school is organized around a desire to recapture leisure time8 and curiosity.
We design and facilitate:
Classes
We believe that each class requires a different spatial context, and we align the course with its environment. We are curious about Loris Malaguzzi Reggio Emilia method and the assertion of the environment is a “third teacher” 9 .
Instead of a brick-and-mortar building, we collaborate with institutions to host in-person gatherings. We also host learning experiences virtually because we consider the browser an interface with hidden and visible pedagogies.
Publications
Scratch Disks Full is a publishing project for those with leaky sensory gating10, sprawling interests, kinetic brains (and spirits), and “too many ideas.”
Under the imprint Scratch Disks Full, we publish the excess, dirty data, spillage, noise, leftovers, and unfulfilled.
We publish:
...
and more yet to be determined
Scratch Disks Full asks, in the spirit of Sankofa11:
A scratch disk is a hard disk used as a workspace to store data temporarily. In applications like Adobe Photoshop, the scratch disk is used to hold the data being edited. When an error reads “... the scratch disks are full.” it means there is not enough space on the drive to perform the upcoming task. The users need to find space elsewhere or end the process; they are left holding the excess energy of an unfulfilled action.
Scratch Disks Full is a publishing project producing readers, workbooks, and lo-fi playthings exploring the excess of an exhibition, piece of writing, lecture, performance, or even other publication.
By excess, we do not mean process work leading up to a final work; we literally mean the embodied experiences you could not give yourself over to due to spiritual unreadiness, the sentences you had to blunt because there was not enough time for further editing; the feral idea that blossomed during a performance and began to shape you as much as you shaped it.
Happenings
Instead of a brick-and-mortar building, we collaborate with institutions to host in-person gatherings. We also host learning experiences virtually because we consider the browser an interface with hidden and visible pedagogies.
We believe that each class requires a different spatial context, and we align the course with its environment. We are curious about Reggio Emilia's assertion of the environment as a “third teacher” and are invested in learning as a contingent process.
1. (roaming) Glissant, Édouard. Poetics of relation. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997); Betsy Wing’s translator notes
2 + 3. ( wandering) + ( locomotive) Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2019)
4 + 5. ( ecosystem)+ (interspecies pedagogy)Kimmerer, Robin Wall. Braiding Sweetgrass. United States: Milkweed Editions, 2013.
6. ( feral curiosity) Kenan, Randall and Octavia Butler. An Interview With Octavia E. Butler. Callaloo (1991)
7. ( “primitive hypertext”)Butler, Octavia, and Samuel Delany. “Octavia Butler Samuel Delany.” Science Fiction-Media in Transition, August 29, 1998.
8. ( leisure time)
Marx, Karl. Capital: Volume I. United Kingdom: Penguin Books Limited, 2004.
9. ( environment as a “third teacher”)
Butler, Octavia, and Samuel Delany. “Octavia Butler Samuel Delany.” Science Fiction-Media in Transition, August 29, 1998.
10. ( leaky sensory gating)
Zabelina, Darya L., Daniel O’Leary, Narun Pornpattananangkul, Robin Nusslock, and Mark Beeman. 2015. "Creativity and Sensory Gating Indexed by the P50: Selective Versus Leaky Sensory Gating in Divergent Thinkers and Creative Achievers." Neuropsychologia 69: 77–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.01.034.
“Sensory gating is the ability to filter intrusive sensory information, which is a specific and elementary form of pre-attentive information processing (Braff & Geyer, 1990). Sensory gating may protect higher cognitive function from flooding by irrelevant sensory information (Venables, 1964).”
Kéri, Szabolcs. 2015. "Dopamine and the Creative Mind: Individual Differences in Creativity Are Predicted by Interactions between Dopamine Genes DAT and COMT." Neuropsychologia 67: 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2015.01.023.
“Overall results suggest that leaky sensory gating may help people integrate ideas that are outside of focus of attention, leading to creativity in the real world; whereas divergent thinking, measured by divergent thinking tests which emphasize numerous responses within a limited time, may require selective sensory processing more than previously thought. [...]
Leaky attention is akin to reduced latent inhibition, or a reduced ability to screen or inhibit from conscious awareness stimuli previously experienced as irrelevant (Lubow, 1973). Reduced latent inhibition may enhance creativity by enlarging the range of unfiltered stimuli available in conscious awareness, thereby increasing the possibility that novel and useful combinations of stimuli will be synthesized (Carson et al., 2003). Therefore leaky attention may underlie both costs and benefits of creative cognition; noise and other environmental stimuli can serve as distractors for creative people, and lead them to make errors on some tasks. At the same time, leaky attention may help people integrate ideas that are outside the focus of attention into their current information processing, leading to creative thinking.
11. ( Sankofa)
Stockton University. n.d. "About Sankofa." Stockton University. Accessed November 28, 2024. https://www.stockton.edu/sankofa/about.html.
“Sankofa (SAHN-koh-fah) – A Twi word from the Akan Tribe of Ghana that loosely translates to, “go back and get it.” Its literal translation comes from the Akan proverb, "Se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenkyiri," meaning, "It is not taboo to go back for what you forgot (or left behind)." Sankofa is a phrase that encourages learning from the past to inform the future, reaching back to move forward, and lifting as we climb.”
12. ( Lineage)
Citation as deep lineage storytelling.