⁽²⁾
What Am I?
May 17, 2026
I am writing this with a bitching self-doubt. I haven’t been able to write anything close to coherent, but I am choosing to side with Julia Cameron and Neuroplasticity. (Screams) push against resistance!
It’s crazy to think I have created this space right here, a little website I drew up to execution–vertical menu, falling words, a quiet space. Workroom, too, was also just an idea early last year, and now I have sat down across so many incredible people over the past six months, sharing books, stories, images. You know, sometimes I see an image, and I know for sure that it can only exist through that photographer. It’s almost this magical thing, as if the light and the colors and the temperament of the moment conspired for a single person. That’s how all these experiences feel to me; I am meant to be here.
It’s crazy to think I have created this space right here, a little website I drew up to execution–vertical menu, falling words, a quiet space. Workroom, too, was also just an idea early last year, and now I have sat down across so many incredible people over the past six months, sharing books, stories, images. You know, sometimes I see an image, and I know for sure that it can only exist through that photographer. It’s almost this magical thing, as if the light and the colors and the temperament of the moment conspired for a single person. That’s how all these experiences feel to me; I am meant to be here.
Self-Portraits of a Dreamer. Photo courtesy of Tarzeer
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Self-Portraits of a Dreamer. Photo courtesy of Tarzeer
Self-Portraits of a Dreamer. Photo courtesy of Tarzeer
Self-Portraits of a Dreamer, a work for a group exhibition with Tarzeer, from 2025, is a portrayal of a woman whose stretching to her dreams with the life and parameters she’s given. Grappling with the biological timeline and her own. Surrendering to the reality that she cannot be everything she wants all at the same time.
And so she stretches,
comes back to herself preparing for a wider stretch
and repeats.
The foot, mid-movement, preparing to step. Two hands stretching a band; the print wraps a thin wall; its expanse has weight, just as all decisions do.
And so she stretches,
comes back to herself preparing for a wider stretch
and repeats.
The foot, mid-movement, preparing to step. Two hands stretching a band; the print wraps a thin wall; its expanse has weight, just as all decisions do.
First AO Postcard Design
The first postcard design for AO is exactly what running it means to me–an expansion of ways of seeing and understanding. Building a world that centers curiosity and detaches from the outcome; creating and sharing from a place of joy.
Gabo & I randomly act and throw “Who Am I?” at each other. He has been Elyce (our niece), Jimmy (Jason Segel), and maybe a fish. I have been the color orange, Elyce, and an air mascot. These days, it almost feels like I am meeting imagination again for the first time.
Gabo & I randomly act and throw “Who Am I?” at each other. He has been Elyce (our niece), Jimmy (Jason Segel), and maybe a fish. I have been the color orange, Elyce, and an air mascot. These days, it almost feels like I am meeting imagination again for the first time.
I say nice to meet you,
it replies, we’ve met.
I say no, I know, but it’s been a while.
Not really… I am part of your job and your life…
No, I know that, but it feels like a first time.
Ok..
Ok..
it replies, we’ve met.
I say no, I know, but it’s been a while.
Not really… I am part of your job and your life…
No, I know that, but it feels like a first time.
Ok..
Ok..
What I mean to say is, it carries a different weight. As individuals with access and resources, we can simply decide to act and make. This is privilege. Adrienne Maree Brown, author of Emergent Strategy, urges us to question, "Who is doing the imagining?” because “we are living in the ancestral imagination of others.”
Weight.
Now I know I am not fully equipped to process this in writing yet but in Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act, he says that our ideas are not ours; we are simply vessels. If we do not act on an idea, it will find another vessel who will. I think about this a lot, in gratitude. To choose to create and share in an already overwhelming world could (should) mean hope that we can be a resource for imagining a new one.
so stretch,
Colin
Weight.
Now I know I am not fully equipped to process this in writing yet but in Rick Rubin's book The Creative Act, he says that our ideas are not ours; we are simply vessels. If we do not act on an idea, it will find another vessel who will. I think about this a lot, in gratitude. To choose to create and share in an already overwhelming world could (should) mean hope that we can be a resource for imagining a new one.
so stretch,
Colin
Materials on imagination and imagination-adjacent:
(1) Imagination is an emergent organelle.
What is here?
What is coming?
Imagination is a psychic garden, a ripening cornucopia of tendrils and shoots. In our imagination, we conjure fruits, material and opaque. Imagination is the wild architecture of dreaming.
— OK-RM London & Lila Matsumoto, The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement, InOtherWords
(2) Intra-action, a new term coined by physicist Karen Barad.
Intra-action is a Baradian term used to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably. Intra-action also acknowledges the impossibility of an absolute separation or classically understood objectivity, in which an apparatus (a technology or medium used to measure a property) or a person using an apparatus are not considered to be part of the process that allows for specifically located ‘outcomes’ or measurement.
— Whitney Stark, New Materialism
(3) The coffee enters her like a hot dark phrase. Something in its fierce strength is deeply excellent: it reaches her stomach and she sighs. Behind her the room heaves of possessions, far too many. Really, being very strict, the only thing she both needs and wants–both needs and wants, she repeats to herself–is this, the small brown mug with the tiny cross stamped into it. She puts out a hand and touches its hot surface, its mottled, brown glaze, circles its small diameter with her thumb and finger. Its handle so low down on its body, it has a strange shape, a foreign shape. It could accompany her to another existence: she could wrap it in a jumper, put it in a back pack with a few other bits, and go off to Greece or Persia or Morocco, without Rich, just her alone. Walk straight out of the airport with no luggage and get on a bumpy bus. A dusty knot of hair which will stay atop her head all day. She will be browner and a little thinner, she will move easily through the streets. She will sit and eat a spare but delicious meal of olives, hummus, extremely good bread, in a small courtyard. Not read, just gaze. Understand subtle, fragile things. Be like the courtyard, holding it all in suspension. Pour water from a glass of bottle into a brown mug and sip, a few molecules at a time, seeping into her like a blessing. When she comes back she will be different. Her mind blinded by heat, only able to see angles and colors, sun and shadow.
— A paragraph from Rosalind Brown' Narrow Room
Paris Review, Fall 2023
(1) Imagination is an emergent organelle.
What is here?
What is coming?
Imagination is a psychic garden, a ripening cornucopia of tendrils and shoots. In our imagination, we conjure fruits, material and opaque. Imagination is the wild architecture of dreaming.
— OK-RM London & Lila Matsumoto, The Very Nature of Materiality is an Entanglement, InOtherWords
(2) Intra-action, a new term coined by physicist Karen Barad.
Intra-action is a Baradian term used to replace ‘interaction,’ which necessitates pre-established bodies that then participate in action with each other. Intra-action understands agency as not an inherent property of an individual or human to be exercised, but as a dynamism of forces in which all designated ‘things’ are constantly exchanging and diffracting, influencing and working inseparably. Intra-action also acknowledges the impossibility of an absolute separation or classically understood objectivity, in which an apparatus (a technology or medium used to measure a property) or a person using an apparatus are not considered to be part of the process that allows for specifically located ‘outcomes’ or measurement.
— Whitney Stark, New Materialism
(3) The coffee enters her like a hot dark phrase. Something in its fierce strength is deeply excellent: it reaches her stomach and she sighs. Behind her the room heaves of possessions, far too many. Really, being very strict, the only thing she both needs and wants–both needs and wants, she repeats to herself–is this, the small brown mug with the tiny cross stamped into it. She puts out a hand and touches its hot surface, its mottled, brown glaze, circles its small diameter with her thumb and finger. Its handle so low down on its body, it has a strange shape, a foreign shape. It could accompany her to another existence: she could wrap it in a jumper, put it in a back pack with a few other bits, and go off to Greece or Persia or Morocco, without Rich, just her alone. Walk straight out of the airport with no luggage and get on a bumpy bus. A dusty knot of hair which will stay atop her head all day. She will be browner and a little thinner, she will move easily through the streets. She will sit and eat a spare but delicious meal of olives, hummus, extremely good bread, in a small courtyard. Not read, just gaze. Understand subtle, fragile things. Be like the courtyard, holding it all in suspension. Pour water from a glass of bottle into a brown mug and sip, a few molecules at a time, seeping into her like a blessing. When she comes back she will be different. Her mind blinded by heat, only able to see angles and colors, sun and shadow.
— A paragraph from Rosalind Brown' Narrow Room
Paris Review, Fall 2023
(4) My photographs responding to the prompt “Pigil” or restraint from a workshop with Fifth Wall Fest x Plant Vision. I chose to portray "Pigil" as parameters that guide us, parents or parental bodies in our lives.
(5) What if the economy is operated on care instead of capital by Petra Gana.
(6) I did not realize imagination was a privilege by Lina Jasim.
(5) What if the economy is operated on care instead of capital by Petra Gana.
(6) I did not realize imagination was a privilege by Lina Jasim.