What we are doing here
In 1940s and 1950s São Paulo, the Foto Cine Clube Bandeirante (FCCB) helped to establish photography as an artistic form in Brazil. This amateur group of photographers who explored abstraction, geometric structures, and contrasts in light and shadow organized competitions, published works, and went on to build an international network. Their work is on currently display at the Leica store and gallery in Frankfurt, Germany (explore it in 3D here).
Just a few doors up the road is the birthplace of the “Shakespeare of Germany” Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The four storey yellow house contains many artifacts from Goethe’s time, including his gloriously ink-stained writing desk. Goethe helped to kick off the Romantic Movement at the beginning of the 19th Century, a movement of experimental art and science, politics, sexual relations, and more in response to the Industrial Revolution. The Goethe House museum covers many of the stars of that period, and how they travelled around Europe building networks for social change.
Schlegel puts poetry at the center of everything. (From the notebook of Friedrich Schlegel).
I pondered both of these examples of movement-making. I had just spent a week in Toronto witnessing the negotiating of rules around AI consumption of human content at the IETF AI Preferences working group, then discussing media provenance at DemocracyXchange. From Toronto I flew to London to speak at the independent College of Political Technology Newspeak House, spending a very late evening fervently discussing with fellow-candidates and the dean how we could organize. The final leg of my trip was re-connecting with my old Fission crew at a wedding in southern Germany, capped off with meeting the author of a long essay on how we got here and what post-institutions might look like.
The world is changing (again) and here we are travelling to far-flung regions forging personal relationships, in an attempt to build a new way of computing that can contend with the latest concentrations of power. It has been done before, and I think we can do it again.
Last night I returned to my home in Canada, brimming with new connections and ideas. I have 1639 photos from 4 countries to process, and about ten blog posts to write of things learned and things discovered, and networks to forge.
Onward,
/ck
🖋 From the Blog
Podcast: Biography of Tor
This episode of Peoples & Things completely nerd sniped me.
🧭 Elsewhere
Half of this month was travelling, so I did not spend much time finding cool tidbits online. In fact, during this lengthy trip to Toronto → London → Germany and home via Iceland, I actually spent a lot of time with a paper journal I bought for the purpose of recording my travel.
On my blog you will find a few shots here and there of:
At the very beginning of the month we were able to enjoy the sakura 🌸 by the sea Photos →
📖 What I’m Reading
The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
(100% Complete)
Having spent a lot of time on planes, I finished 6 books this month. Some were novellas, including The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar which I listened to while walking in the rain in Toronto. The audiobook version is especially gorgeous, winning awards for sound design. The story is one of words and music and magic and faerie, and captures the sorrowful romance of her other book I loved This Is How You Lose the Time War.
2026 is the year I leave GoodReads. Since January I have been using 📘 Hardcover which has been a delight. Connect with me there https://hardcover.app/@chadkoh