We Web As Rehearsal
Every Web Needs a Window
This essay was commissioned by Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo and Printed Matter for the occasion of the we web keepers window exhibition which ran from September 21 - November 19, 2022. The exhibition was punctuated with a newspaper publication in which the following essay appears for the first time.
“The chorus bears all of it for us. The Greek etymology of the word chorus refers to dance within the enclosure. What better articulates the long history of struggle, the ceaseless practice of black radicalism and refusal, the tumult and upheaval of open rebellion than the acts of collaboration and improvisation that unfold within the space of enclosure? The chorus is the vehicle for another kind of story, not of the great man or the tragic hero, but one in which all modalities play a part, where the headless group incites change, where mutual aid provides the resource for collective action, not leader and mass, where the untranslatable songs and seeming nonsense make good the promise of revolution.”
— Saidiya Hartman1
Glitched Rituals of the Web
I call it the river, Saidiya Hartman calls it the chorus, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo calls it the web. This headless, collective anti-body2, with practices as strong as spider silk leaving behind threads you can’t see but can feel. How will we destabilize the colonial conception of “human being” while stabilizing the new stories we’re spinning? The web is load bearing, load balancing, distributing network traffic across multiple servers. Suspending the next world in mid-air, keeping it sticky, waiting for others to get there.
In search of our ceremony we found our code. Webbed memory of how we could care for each other in the most metallic times, as elemental as a server we found each other shimmering in a neural net of our own making. Greeting each other each morning with a self portrait captured at arm's length, looking up, up, up reminding the line of time we’re still here. Mutual aid flyers are passed around like service guides on Sunday morning. Your profile grid becomes a quilt assembled with a patchwork of performance, found fabrics of longing, and scraps of slippery selfies to coax the algorithm into the dance. Consenting not to be a single being3, the stickiness of our collective data troubles the boundaries of a body.
Using the web to organize a network of free fridges4 as anchor points5 on the corner for other threads to connect to. Using server farms to farm service. We web as rehearsal6, opening up portals of performance, pulling whatever platforms the people are on into the dance, remembering every web needs an existing structure. Reclaiming the materials the machine spits out, we web in tender emails, in the solitude of a notes app, in the hallways of the DMs wading through a cotton coded history, navigating the warp and weft of the grid that is the fabric of our lives, refusing to fold.
Tangled Demands of the Web
Anything beyond the tangled scale of intimacy is beyond bearable. What overlapping demands might we make from inside this colored lattice of longing? In Extended Notes on the Riot7 Hartman cites the web and recalls the work of Ella Baker and Angela Davis who affirm, “yes, you have grasped the world at its roots, so you know the struggle is eternal.” Inside the deep time of this eternal struggle demands take the form of everyday intimacies: the loop of library checkout cards, the mesh of hair salon waiting areas, the knots of grimoires hidden under floorboards, the net of community gardens, the web inside the pages of family photo albums archiving the evidence of the graduation cookout everyone showed up for. Because who else do you bear eternity with but each other? Our overlapping demands the surface area of the bulletin board already holding your prayer request, or the expanse of the coffee table we sit across while freedom dreaming in mid-air, where our dialogue creates bridge threads between open mouths. Someone said eternity is only survivable through poetry.
The chorus chimes in again when Hartman recalls, “Sharifa Rhodes-Pitts takes it to the bridge: the shape depends on what it is designed to bear and who bears it”. Care webs8 the shape of what it is designed to bear, and who bears it informs the scope of our interpersonal demands. Braiding appointments are traded for childcare, ancestral seeds are left in mailboxes in exchange for art books, and another anchor thread is spun when someone in the group chat asks, “does anyone need anything while I’m out?”
Wrapping ourselves in the possibility that there is no new world, only the next one in this eternal struggle. We are spinning tangled demands the shape of our present longing, a performance of invention and experimentation only feasible through the intersecting support of our webbing, our needing, our asking. Performing the next world where the poetry of our being is an everyday demand in motion moving across the web made possible by the 90 degree angle of the branch and the tree trunk. The web anchors inside this open enclosure to provide the stage for an untranslatable story not yet named, a plot not yet determined, an ending not yet owned. We outline carpool schedules in encrypted messaging apps, break zines like bread, and make music with the moans of our generative conflict. Decentralized, leaderless, and open — our everyday insistence is a demand. Intimate and eternal, open wide.
Holding Stories of the Web
Responsive web design9 is fluid, flexible, and adaptable, responding to the space of the browser, the opening, the porthole of the portal. Webbing inside the window, the stories we need are the stories we have. Our collective memory, an open source software, initialized in our song, our collaboration, our care web technology where tending to roots, weaving mesh, repairing nets, and tying knots are the primary programming protocols. Coded choreography, practiced across generations, you might begin to notice we always leave an opening for you. We web keepers, opaque where necessary, transparent when necessary — only for your gaze. Come look inside. Through colors that sing, flyers that dance, woven need that exchanges hands Lukaza reminds us the web is a stage and we web keepers reminds us every web needs a window. We’ll be waiting for you, singing/dancing/holding as you climb through.
I call it the river, Saidiya Hartman calls it the chorus, Lukaza Branfman-Verissimo calls it the web. To stumble into the social spaciousness of Black feminist being is to remember the stories we need are the stories we have. Responsive web design doesn’t require unlimited space, it requires parameters to dance inside of. Spider silk creating anchor points in mid-air still needs a window to establish the initial bridge thread. Look for the opening, look for the lattice of longing to attach anchor points to. Build a web within its frame and you might find yourself inside the irresistibility10 of the next world suspended in mid-air, keeping it sticky, waiting for others to get there.
This elaboration on what Saidiya Hartman calls the chorus can be found in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019) on page 347-348 in the essay titled “The Chorus Opens the Way”
Recalling “GLITCH IS ANTI-BODY” on page 67 in Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto (2020) by Legacy Russell
Echoing Fred Moten who is echoing Édouard Glissant who is echoing the poetics of relation and the web of diaspora
Here I am thinking about RVA Community Fridges creating anchor points throughout the city of Richmond, stabilizing a web of mutual aid
Referring to an infographic illustrating the process of constructing an orb web found on the spider web Wikipedia page where bridge, anchor, and frame threads make up the architecture of a spider web
McKittrick, Katherine. “Ruth Wilson Gilmore Just Told Us: Abolition Is Presence, It Is Life in Rehearsal. It Is Not the Recitation of Rules. Freedom Is a Place. Freedom Is a Place. Guys. Get into It!” Twitter, 26 Oct. 2020
“Extended Notes on the Riot” was published by e-flux Journal in Issue #105 and written by Saidiya Hartman in December 2019 on the occasion of “The Loophole of Retreat'' Conference at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum.
Thinking of “Care Webs: Experiments in Creating Collective Access” inside Care Work: Dreaming Disability Justice (2018) by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
Responsive web design (RWD) or responsive design is “an approach to web design that aims to make web pages render well on a variety of devices and window or screen sizes from minimum to maximum display size to ensure usability and satisfaction”.
“As a culture worker who belongs to an oppressed people my job is to make revolution irresistible.” ― Toni Cade Bambara, Conversations with Toni Cade Bambara (2017)