What does it mean to be an Artist and an Educator right now in my life?

Last year, post-thesis show, I felt like a director staring at a blank screen, prepping for the next big feature but unsure of the storyline. But then I found myself employed and beyond excited to be teaching again so soon! The classroom morphed into an interactive film festival, each lesson a unique blend of video art and academia. Bridging communications and fine arts was like combining film genres, creating this mesmerizing, experimental filmography. With every new semester, I find myself curating a fresh batch of digital stories, each student bringing their own video diary to the mix.

My own journey into filmmaking as no longer a formal student has been electric. From personal video diaries, spilling raw emotions, to the unfiltered voices echoing from my voicemail project, every piece I craft feels like a frame of experimental digital media. Animation? That's the latest subplot. It’s like adding a sprinkle of magic to already vivid narratives. How I can expand the scope of my work next is a question i’m comfortable arriving to through trial and error but thus far the results have been fruitful and my intuition coupled with everything I’ve learned has been effective.

Finding my footing in these new surroundings, while navigating the snowy landscapes, felt like dropping into another planet but the usual beats have made my new home have a familiar feeling. Walking and biking everywhere always seems to ground me and make me notice what makes a place…well a place. As I brace for the cold on year two, I’ve found warmth in surprising places – my growing love for self, the camaraderie of my online community, and yes, the comforting backdrop of 'Criminal Minds' episodes as I inevitably get sick. The concept of peace has begun to feel less like an abstract idea and more like a commitment.

Inspiration's been sneaking in wherever it can for me lately. Shows like ‘Midnight Gospel’ and a lineup of eerie films seem to be setting the scene. With a fair amount of finished videos behind me, I sense a gentle fade-out approaching; a period of writing and planning in between my slower schedule for producing work actively. Teaching has been its own special fulfillment, but the heart of my story remains in the fusion of video diaries, art, and digital experimentations. Here’s a nod to past screenings, the ongoing film festival of the present, and the trailers of what's yet to come. Hope this movie of mine is good.

Endless Black: An Essay Series | Entry #1 “Ontology as it Relates to Survival”

By Marcelese Cooper

The purpose of this essay, if we are to label these essential motivations as something as specific as a purpose, is set on exploring the study of being and existence (Ontology) as a relates to the survival of the African American. When contemplating the philosophical question of what is to “be” and what our pasts (both ancestral and self-owned) do to inform our present, there are a multitude of ways to define the black existence and something of dispute is whether or not we as a people abide by the proposed rules of ontology. Perhaps there is truth in the idea that black existence and our futures are not chained down by trauma and further on that point its possible metaphysics may have the capability to explain the relationship between trauma and survival for the African American. What is it that forms the self of black peoples and can we define its material? In approaching these ideas open-minded we can explore the notion that we as a people are not monolithic while still confronting this communal space in front of a flame with dark history; looking back at our shared trauma, we must dissect what this intangible entity is and why on earth it creates a home for itself within our very fibers.

From photo series “DON’T TOUCH ME”

To know black trauma is to know the history of the world one could argue but not necessarily to know the black experience. What is trauma if not learned truths of our own experience? Not “things” that are meant to happen but memories that have cemented for an individual by and intagled in a play of cause and effect. For example, the trauma that many African Americans experience when confronted with hospitals, doctors, and medicine is symptomatic of the many cruel and inhumane experimentations on black peoples. There are entire fields of medicine where work was created on the sacrificing of black bodies (gynecology is one such field that comes to mind almost immediately) and so, for instance, when a black woman says she would feel more comfortable with a black doctor or perhaps even expresses being uncomfortable seeing a doctor at all this is trauma chaining down an ability to respond or diverting our beliefs to alternative pathways.

It is not necessarily a truth that doctors are bad or the hospitals are evil but it is the truth that black people have learned that the systems that exist have mistreated us, used us for experiments, and continue to show bias against us and so our trauma lives inside of us passing from one generation to the next, comfortably wrapped around our hearts and burrowed into our minds. Thinking back to the horrifying legacy of America and how slavery has changed how black people are able to engage with both their lineage as well as their own bodies, it is reasonable that these fears and these experiences get hammered into our being with each child that is raised. Like a forest that has managed to start re-growing after a series of fires, there is life. However, these seeds grow in soil that has seen destruction. This learned truth affects how we approach our health and well-being and how we support one another.

Revisiting the subject of gynecology, we can reflect on the question of how trauma forms, shapes us, and informs the survival of the African American. The black female body has been assaulted by many forms of greed and self-entitled conquest across history, to this day the black woman not only in America but around the world is the most under protected individual. The relationship which a woman has with her body is so important, to have a sense of ownership of one’s self is something many of those who lived while enslaved were denied outright. In her book Recovering the Black Female Body, Carla Peterson says that “when invoking the term body, we tend to think at first of its materiality— it’s composition as flesh and bone, it’s outline and contours, it’s outgrowth of nail and hair. But the body, as we all know, is never simply matter, for it is never divorced from perception and interpretation.” I think to this description of the relationship one has with their body not just because it is an apt summary of how much of our identity is linked to our physical being but also because it is the same match that lights the fuse to the findings of Deirdre Cooper Owens in her text Medical Bondage: Race, gender, and the origins of American gynecology. Owens recounts that the first women’s Hospital in the US was started by Dr. James Marion Sims in the town of Mount Meigs, Alabama. This town was only 15 or so miles from Montgomery which at the time was a bustling slave trading center. Between 1844 and 1849 twelve enslaved women and girls resided on the property and worked for Sims in the slave hospital that he had built for his practice and for any surgical repairs that needed to be done.

These women were believed to have seen so many patients that their knowledge of many of these procedures could rival any doctors of the era and ultimately, they were as far as accounts tell us, effectively nurses to Sims. While slavery gave him nurses who must work without question it also supplied him with an almost endless number of vulnerable patients upon which his title of “father of gynecology” could be built. Much of what we know about the survival of black women at the hands of not only physicians but also the white masters is learned from self-memoirs and the small number of ex-slaves who were able to communicate the stories to the public at large because it is not uncommon that early medical writings muted the voice of these enslaved women. It’s the muting of these voices and the racist ideology of early gynecology (an truthfully medicine as a whole) that allows for myths such as “black women don’t feel as much pain as white women” to still float around amongst the medical community.

So, what then can we do when the systems that the public tells us are here to help us are built on the trauma of our ancestors? If the most vulnerable demographic of human being has every reason to judge the history of medicine based off not just emotion but it’s very actions, then what other cornerstones of human knowledge have tools that were carved from our bodies and souls? When a black woman dies during labor in this day and age that adds to this inherited trauma. When a black child has a learning disability go undiagnosed that adds to and affirms this ancestral trauma. When we speak of our pain and are not believed by medical professionals this adds to and affirms the ancestral trauma. Not only are African-American women not protected but neither are their children, their siblings, or their parents; and we know this not as some statistic from recent years but as a learned truth based off of what we see from history and what common misconceptions have grown based off these dark origins of medicine. If one can deny the existence of ancestral trauma and say that it does not affect our view of society then they wear a contextual blindfold and spit in the face of history.

At the very least we can conclude that trauma certainly manifested from these actions and if one could go so far as to say that ancestral trauma truly has been inherited by the present day black (African-American and otherwise) what are we to do with these chains but question them first and makes sense of why they remain. When considering the points I wish to argue about the survival of black peoples I am drawn to the words of Calvin Warren in his work Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation because much of what he has to say speaks to my argument of the purpose of suffering and the distinction of what it is to be and what it is to be black in the world. In defense of the former I look to the first chapter of Warren‘s work where he proposes three functions of the Negro, or black being, in ontometaphysics. He first proposes that black peoples are simply an “incarnation of nothing that a metaphysical world tries tirelessly to eradicate”. Black being, he essentially argues, was pushed into this world to perform the duty of existing despite the odds, in the face of anti-blackness, as if we ourselves are beings born to survive. This notion certainly speaks to the effects of the trauma which we have experienced as a people, having to learn so many lessons through pain we are not only our trauma but it can be said that our paths in this world have been carved out by the obstacles we’ve been forced to navigate.

It’s a rather existential question but when you look at the way in which black communities approach socializing and culture there is a focus on empowerment and preservation. Think back to the same era in which we saw gynecology take form, in this time of slavery there were slaves who found ways to communicate with one another perhaps to move towards freedom or simply to protect their loved ones from further danger; methods embedded in music, in the braids of their hair, and even in the nature around us. To separate this relationship with trauma and suffering from what it is to be black is perhaps too careless a hypothetical lens to see through, we are not the terror that we experience but it is in our DNA it would seem to be pushed and to have the strength to push back and persist. I think to my own experiences as a teenager living in California, my father had spent 20 years in the Air Force and many years going to school while also working so that when he got out he could afford to move to a nice suburb with a good school. The sacrifices he made were for the betterment of not only his life but mostly for the potential improvement of my future, we moved where the grass was greener so that I might grow and while the education I received was certainly worth it I was no more safer where we lived then I would’ve been 30 minutes away in the city of Los Angeles where I was more likely to see faces like my own. My existence in the community of Santa Clarita, California was by the standards of this town a mistake and there were many instances where this sunny and carefree town (nicknamed Awesome Town ironically) presented me with rather extreme reminders that I was to be eradicated if I dare falter in protection of my being.

I remember getting ditched by a few white companions outside of a bowling alley when I was 16, and while it was dark out I had yet two learn what it was to be wary of the shadows. I had called my father about a half hour ago to come pick me up and while I was on the phone a pickup truck had passed by yelling obscenities and calling me slurs. The truck and it’s for bald headed occupants moved on, as all of my friends have been present at the time, but in the short while since then I had been abandoned and was left only with the sounds of closing stores and crickets who played their songs to break the silence. I saw the truck return and I heard several hoots and hollers, as they drew near I could clearly identify them as skinheads and saw what I believed to be the glimmers of what looked like knives. Daylight showed me many ugly things but this was my first encounter under the moonlight and I was terrified. There was a predatory dance between the lanes of cars in the parking lot that they started, taunting me as if to say I was their entertainment for the evening. But before they could close the distance my father appeared in our tiny, little Honda Civic like a hero in his chariot and I leapt into the car and pleaded that we drive away quickly and get somewhere with more light.

From photo series “CAUCHEMAR À PIED”

I think back to this moment in particular because my father had spent 20 years in a system that urges you to shave away things that make you what you are and instead become part of a whole because you are not black now but an extension of others, you are a soldier, you are no longer nothing but something. What I realized was that it doesn’t matter where you place yourself in the world you are black at all times and so much of the world and its inhabitants seek to destroy you for this. I had several other instances of high conflict like I have described as well as more casual displays of racism in social settings which I was forced to navigate but ultimately when I went off to college I was prepared to deal with much of what I had come to accept as normal. I am alive because of what I have learned not only from the experiences of my parents but their parents and so on and so on. To be black is to be a library of knowledge built upon the love, the pain, and the spirit of resilience that is family and friends. Much of what pushed my father forward was the understanding that whether or not he is perceived as black he knows that he most likely is perceived as a threat by someone and so he should become strong enough, smart enough, and seek any and all opportunities to ascend so far above these dangers that perhaps the likelihood that I may too grow strong and persevere is higher.

Without a grasp of just how temporary safety is and what it means to contemplate survival one would be left vulnerable as a black person in America and certainly most places around the world. So, when I think of the question, “Is one’s current suffering necessary for their future survival?” I answer yes because all historical evidence points it’s finger at a society that has burned this function into our skins like an sociological branding. We have not always existed in this world as black beings, amongst ourselves certainly we were just human if any. I’m sure at some point we were seeds nestled into the ground and perhaps we became the trees. I’m sure we are the grass or maybe we rest among the waves along forgotten shores. But what is very clear is that our existence as we’ve known it for the past 500+ years as black people has depended on the understanding that in this reality where we suffer so greatly, blacks must be able to unpack and understand their suffering if they wish to ever know peace and outrun its sinister hold.

Returning to Warren‘s propositions would be beneficial if we are to discuss the difference of being versus being black. I believe it is in this distinction that we can truly dissect purpose and sense of self as a relates to one’s black identity. We explored one of his propositions previously but his second and third in his book are very particular in their approach, the second one argues “The Negro is invented, or born into modernity, through and ontometaphysical holocaust that destroys the coordinates of African existence. The Negro is not a human, since being is not an issue for it, and instead becomes ‘available equipment,’ as Heidegger would call it, for the purpose of supporting the existential journey of the human being. Black being is the evidence of an ontological murder, or onticide, that is irrevocable and irredeemable. The condition of this permanent severing between black being and being is what I call ‘execration of being’. In the sense, being does not withdraw from the Negro, as it does from the human, for what withdraws can re-emerge. Instead, being curses black being by creating an entity unintelligible within the field of ontology.” (Warren, 27) There is this since that the suffering and existence of black peoples isn’t currently tied to a purpose or function that is not derived from black peoples themselves but their classification within this reality. With their physical being and so being so tired too these struggles which push forward development above the culture and there is this metaphorical index of life which we are a left off of as the context of our being does not match that of the perceived default.

Considering the black body and its history as a tool both dependable and expendable there is a relationship with the self that black peoples must tackle for themselves when I reflect on the value, they generate not from the external but internal. Again we must reflect upon the culture and how black history is passed down from within both through music, dance, art, and various forms of storytelling and documentation; if not for black people‘s on where to document the self that exist beyond function we would truly be with your tools left outside to become worn and rusted while others carry on their existence. This distinction between being and black being is what makes me believe that suffering is necessary for future survival because so many of the tools and library cultural information African Americans have to pull from to support themselves have been generated or come from these experiences of trauma and though the trauma is generated by those who simply are, as people who do not exist but exist as black people we must use the byproduct of such hatred and turn it into empowerment and love as we often have. Desire to “exist in spite of...” as well as the perspective of the ever-evolving black experience wrapped up into one that creates a new path for a sense of self to unfold on that is dissimilar to our non-black counterparts. The world they know it’s something we will never see because it does not exist for us.

The third proposition that Warren argues is also relevant to this question of what it is to be black versus simply being. He states that, “ The Negro question that becomes the obsession of antebellum culture (‘what do we do about our free blacks?’) masks we ontological steaks involved in answering the question, since what the question is really about, as I propose, is what we do about the nothing that terrorizes us, that the stabilizes our metaphysical structure and ground of existence. The terms three and black do not just present political problems of citizenship, rights, and inclusion, but also present serious Ontological problems, since the boundaries of ontology - between human and property and freedom and unfreedom - are thrown into crisis with the presence of the free black. Ultimately, I propose that the Negro question is a proper metaphysical question, since the Negro is black and black(ness) has always been a terror for metaphysics. These propositions unfold through an engagement with different onto metaphysical discourses in the black radical tradition alongside and against hi Joe, since Hila just critique of metaphysics, as a disavowal, forgetting, and contempt of nothing assist us in understanding how metaphysics engages than nothing that it despises but needs (the tension between hatred and necessity). I, however, depart from Heidegger since black being is not human being (or Dasein) but available equipment, equipment in human form, that hydrogen does not consider because of his Eurocentric perspective.” (Warren, 27) There is a great deal to unpack in these assertions but it is certainly beneficial for us to first look more closely at the interpretation of nothingness in this case; we speak of value and history, we speak of trauma to no end but what is the meaning of nothing if that is what black peoples are metaphysically?

As it is understood under the assertions of Warren, The Negro question states black being as aligned with nothingness because the question itself infers that we are outside of what constitutes as the center position of life (something), that of being. If we do not fit within the parameters of being and are thus seen as tools or ontological problems, then we both exist and do not exist and thus send the metaphysics that apply to others in a state of disarray. In a framework where everything that is is something the existence of nothing or the absence of something is rather paradoxical. If one is not black then they will never experience black existence and so the black experience is absent from anywhere inside or outside what is excepted as a proper position within metaphysics and this is where our state of matter as nothing emerges as the only sensible definition to attach. Warren refers to this issue as an inside/outside paradox. He infers answering these questions will ultimately lead to even more questions, or what he believes to be a fundamental question, “how is it going with black being?”

 This question is a mirrored echo of the originally proposed “how is it going with being?” within metaphysics discourse, this question was first introduced into philosophical conversation as the proper metaphysical question because it steps forward after destroying and dismantling the original discourse of metaphysics in a traditional sense. This question asks not about a beginning as the source or reasoning for what is to be but rather asks us to look at the status of being once it has been lived and torn apart, asking us what is left over if anything. Truthfully this is a post-metaphysical movement that wishes to shift the question of “what is” to “how is” as being is something that is happening and has happened and continues to happen with greater complexity than one definition, then the proceeding is could ever allude to. So, within this understanding of a fundamental question one could perhaps begin to see why the idea of nothing is so perplexing and even assigned great anger by that of ontology, thus mostly ignored in terms of the data and information relating to the African Americans; they wished that nothingness could be left alone or wiped away. Black being is not inherently ontological because there are aspects of it that sit outside the realm of the current framework for understanding what it is to be. The Negro question is something that has its foot both in and out of metaphysics like a more nuanced Schrodinger’s Cat and so the space in which this question plays in cannot be fully presented as “something”, nothing cannot be perceived and so others stumble over it.

 We are both this perceived indestructible sense of life that has been thrown into the jaws of damnation and destruction again and again never to be destroyed but also never to be free of such a pressure because our nothingness is never fully understood for what it is. Think of even the most destructive yet necessary forces within our own reality, for instance the sun is something vital for us to live and yet we know of is destructive power and even that one day it will cease and consume us but when we think of Black existence there is this unclear function beyond that of existing in spite of and there is no clear end; we know that black existence is present and all the questions that follow make up the layers of nothing and we sit within a void of relationality of being and what it is to be a human being in this world. We can only wonder what our individual purpose is when the shadow of nothing engulfs our presence on this plane. When I look into the mirror I see me but there is the layer of the nothing which I am at my core, there is the knowledge that I have gained of my past before I ever was and there is the understanding that I am free of certain structures of being because it was determined at some point that I must be consumed and used, and in my blood there is a defiance of my destruction that asks for me to survive despite all of the other poisons that swirl within me and around me. In the same way some faulter at the question of “what is black?” many may waiver at the question of what nothing is, that is because they are the same. So, what chance do we have to truly be separate in a sense of self? When one, quite honestly, has nothing to lose but their chains and perhaps make use of these remainders as a means of escape towards freedom, then the self needs only to persist and use nothingness like a cover under which to escape from the blinding faux-utilitarians and obvious opponents of black peoples. Because no matter the intention there is an understood distinction between the black beings and the beings that sit comfortably within the realm of ontology unburdened with such distinct trauma.

What are we to this world if not puzzle pieces with jagged edges? What are we if not dulled tools in neglectful hands? These questions are misleading because we are nothing, the beauty of such is that we exist beyond a limitations of that which has been and what is and though we are alive and must interpret our existence through a lens fused to our eyes there is purpose in us as black beings. As I queried before of our collective presence before the dark flame of history, we are shadows uncast. We are not simply blackness but we are perception of blackness, an understanding of blackness, a mistrust of blackness, and a love blackness. Much like trauma it’s self we are multi-faceted and distinct to individuals but we share a core that cannot be generated outside of black being. We survive because we must, and we must survive because it is our function. A function is not who we are but inherently a part of how we are, so much of this idea is constantly reflected in the stories we tell one another and how we support ourselves; the words that resonate with so many black people‘s such as “excellence” and “resilience” are a display of this perhaps. Many may see these things and think of pride, but they are the tools that we have crafted for survival because if we are not proud of our nothingness what are we if not vulnerable to our trauma? If we cannot speak to our paradoxical existence, then we risk danger by assuming we may one day be something.

Works Cited

Benia, Cooper Owens Deirdre. Medical Bondage: Race, Gender, and the Origins of American Gynecology. The University of Georgia Press, 2018.

Bennett, Michael, and Vanessa D. Dickerson. Recovering the Black Female Body: Self-Representations by African American Women. Rutgers University Press, 2001.

Warren, Calvin L. Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation. Duke University Press, 2018.

What Does it Mean to Make Work?

Having finished my MFA and closed my thesis show alongside my peers successfully, my mind immediately went to what was next and what the state of my art practice would be in the coming months. It’s been three months since I’ve had time to make new work of any “meaningful size” as I’ve made a physical and mental move towards the next marker along a long road that I have no accurate map to guide me on. I’m beyond excited to continue the work I’ve been doing within academia through another media lens, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t scary to start this work without my usual multitasking and the mad dash to be in three places at once. For the first time in quite a while, I have a moment to pause and take comfort in knowing there will always be time for work and that all the work I do will be “meaningful” if it means something to me. All the work will hold value as it encourages moments of practice, moments of joy, and a reminder that creation can be a wonderful thing that doesn’t have to start with a grand purpose.

I don’t know what it means to make new work right now, and while I get used to new surroundings for both work and home life, I doubt I’ll define that in words. It’ll just be a feeling followed by an action. I was led to my thesis work by a feeling that came from the absence of dreams and figures I took for granted, things that were familiar to me. So, who’s to say what feeling will drag me up from my seat next and push me towards another experiment. It’s all speculation and anxiety fueling these questions but I’ve never been one to sit calmly in thought when it comes to my own future. I can only hope that what it means to make my work will involve more peace within myself going forward.

Don’t You Carry Nothing that Might be a Load

I was always a fan of musicals but I think there was something engineered by Quincy Jones and the mad scientists at Mowtown to be placed in between the frames of The Wiz because it sits in my peripheral like a ghost or a guardian angel and it took me 13 years to realize that it left such an impact on me in both an artistic sense but also as someone who tends to sing and talk to themselves moving from point A to point B. The lyrics to “Ease on Down the Road” seem to be tattooed on the insides of my eyelids, the words feeling like an incantation or a hymn better suited for bus stops than churches.

As I’ve been working on my thesis, this version (the more interesting and less brainwashy) of the story has unintentionally become a muse for me. I had my story and characters already formed well before I thought of The Wiz in any conscious way but clearly my subconscious had its own agenda. The way these characters push forward against the menacing winds in a warped 1970’s New York and the funky fresh flair baked into their antagonists is nothing short of jaw-dropping and inspiring for me at this stage in my creative process. I spoke at length about this approach to telling a story during a studio visit. Below are notes from other visits and calls I was lucky enough to be on regarding how it is we tell our stories and what it means to have a voice and the responsibility we have of taking care of it so it speaks for us..

I’m easing on down the road, at my own pace, and with tired eyes at times but the smile I keep is genuine these days. Being in this place, between beginning and end (both with my thesis and my academic career) where I must confront my materials and my influences has placed a certain degree of anxiety onto me but I know from experience that much of that tension is self-generated. Hearing others talk about their jobs as makers of things and as storytellers, in arenas I’ve yet to enter seems to melt some of that stress away (especially when those creative people look like me). I only wonder what I will think when I look back on those moments years later if they’ll provide a similar comfort

I worry about what it means to be an educator and if my idea of making art is truly something worth sharing but all of these visits and talks have only further encouraged me to be bold and be sure that my voice matters and the way I project it is worth something too. I’m excited by not knowing and seven years worth of higher education is enough formal investigation down the golden paved path of curiosity. I need concrete untouched by the soles of my beat-up boots and this work is my first step on that new path. I’m nervous but hopeful as I juggle projects I care about and take my efforts into new spaces.

Seeds for Ideas and Projections of Self

So here I am, an amalgamation of notes, sketches, feelings, and energy bound by time. I’m sure there’s blood, fast food, and oat milk mixed in but those components feel less relevant.

It’s exciting to be further along on this series than I was several months ago, though as I scan in old notes and more current sketches and finds I’m caught bouncing back between reshooting some of my photographs out of a desire to experiment with digital rather than film and pushing forward shooting video in small chunks at a time.

I’ve had my narrative for NIGHTMARE PROPAGANDA for some time, my characters and their designs for even longer, and when I think of what's next I find myself focused on presentation and delivery. I’ve spent a lot of time drawing, experimenting with animation, making music, and writing poems in the spirit of the characters I’m sharing headspace with and the process has left me tired some days but mostly full of anticipation for what feels like a family reunion of sorts. I was told recently that embodying the figures in this series gives my nightmares power- still digesting that thought. Thinking it’s time to really put my mad scientist hat on and experiment with how the installation will function with photo and video at it’s center.

-Marcelese

The Road to Thesis

Currently in the midst of the video portion of my thesis project Nightmare Propaganda and as I move forward in preparation for constructing the installation that will house this multimedia project I look back on the texts I’ve read to challenge my thinking in this process and I wonder if I subconsciously knew in the beginning (well over a year ago now) just how comforting working with these nightmarish figures would be for me. It’s odd to feel such a fondness for people who only exist as we imagine or how we experience them, like a campfire story, an urban legend, or a regional cryptid. These figures whom I’ve come to call The Denizens are the focus of the series and I hope to redefine what we as a society consider the nature of a nightmare, we must reconcile with our fears and acknowledge that they serve a purpose.

I plan on documenting some of my thoughts and musings during the second leg of creating the work while I start drafting the written thesis itself. If anything, these posts will help me get some of my thoughts uncluttered while also being documentation of a time where I kept myself buried in books.

-Marcelese