091026 / REFERENCE MATERIALS
sharing some random references
Welcome to REFERENCE MATERIALS. This series engages hypertext1 as a site of study2 to explore the generative space between material and reference.
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For this entry, I’m letting a random selection of information I’ve encountered during some recent research sessions stay here, so that each reference can “bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way.”3 I came across these things on the way to learning about something else, so their tangential qualities might manifest something I never intended that is nonetheless interesting.
Here are some reference materials I’ve gathered:
1. Blackstar Projects. “We Need to Preserve Our History | BlackStar Film Festival 2025.” Published 10 September 2025. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wI7Z5jVNjwU.
2. TeamService95. “Great Art Begins With Deep Study: Inside Aja Monet’s Los Angeles Home.” Service95. Published 24 August 2026. https://www.service95.com/aja-monet-video-interview.
3. Anushka Halve. “Next Big Thing: How 'All We Imagine as Light' Became Topshe's Quiet Breakthrough.” The Hollywood Reporter India. Published 18 March 2025. https://www.hollywoodreporterindia.com/features/insight/next-big-thing-topshes-quiet-breakthrough.
4. “The Internet Reunites After Conquering Pop.” Popcast. The New York Times. Published 16 July 2026. https://www.nytimes.com/video/podcasts/100000011031337/the-internet-is-back.html.
5. Gabrielle Civil. Ghost Gestures. Gold Line Press. 2021.
STUDY QUESTIONS:
Can you imagine a(n) art/research project that included these exact reference materials?
What pieces of information have you gathered lately that could benefit from bouncing, simmering, or oddly reproducing with one another?
Have you interacted with any of these reference materials before?
If yes, what made that interaction possible?
If no, what could have made that lack of interaction possible?
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Thanks for being an audience,
Paris
“I don't have access to this kind of thing on computer but, oddly enough, what you're talking about sounds very much like the way I start looking for ideas when I'm not working on anything. Or when I'm just letting myself drift, relax. I generally have four or five books open around the house--I live alone; I can do this--and they are not books on the same subject. They don't relate to each other in any particular way, and the ideas they present bounce off one another. And I like this effect…let[ting] those ideas bounce off each other, simmer, reproduce in some odd way, so that I come up with ideas that I might not have come up with if I had simply stuck to one book until I was done with it and then gone and picked up another. So, I guess, in that way, I'm using a kind of primitive hypertext.” – Octavia Butler in discussion with Samuel Delany & Henry Jenkins, for MIT Media in Transition Project (1998) ↩
"We are committed to the idea that study is what you do with other people. It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice…The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present." – The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study ↩
See footnote 1. ↩
