![]() However, we never actually manage to sync and instead, just glitch our way into the (some would say cancelled) future. And this body is not a regular body, it is more like a glitching attempt to connect and sync with the world we inhabit. Thinking is not only the capacity for cognition, it is also a body. So the things that we are thinking with are not simply material objects they are networks and meshes and other various fluid processes. If you are not yet frowning and impatiently wondering what this whole deal about thinking and thingness is, buckle up because things are about to get messier. However, if we were able to completely sync everything, reality would probably collapse back into a tiny speck of infinite energy floating in the omnipresent pool of contingency. For example, we can try as much as we want to sync the rhythms of rustling leaves, humming crypto mines and the beating of our Xanax-slowed hearts but something remains dissonant as if we were continuously short-circuiting with the thingness of our condition. Simultaneously, these things remain alien to us, the Other. The condition, like things, is very material because we grant things almost unlimited access to our bodies, as we drape ourselves with their thingness. ![]() In a haphazard attempt to bring more clarity into this argument, we might say that the condition is things. As we try to grasp this condition (for which we do not have a name yet), it is clear that the tricksterish paradox lies at the core of both: the condition and the effort to get it. No doubt this is a sweeping statement and nobody expects you to suddenly get it. But the body gradually grew out of its material shell and became a slimy, networked abode of thinking itself. Thinking, embraced by theoreticians’ and artists’ endless attempts to dethrone cogito and accelerated by the rise of machine learning and neural networks, firmly established itself as a whole-body exercise. Exacerbated by the pandemic, this condition required or, maybe it is better to say, demanded us to rethink thinking itself. ![]() Not only did it refer to a timeless quote by Donna Harraway but it also touched upon the condition that was slowly encroaching huge swaths of the world. At the end of 2020, Things that we were thinking with seemed a timely but uncanny name for the final event of Rupert’s Alternative Education Programme’s 8th edition.
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