if sanctuary needs a thesis

perhaps if i open my mouth the words will start spilling from my lips—become a fountain of dandelions and dahlias jumpstarting their own rhizomatic systems within the foreign soil they land upon. perhaps homegirl 3000 is simply the act of rejecting silence as existence amongst a sea of data and digital pollutants.^[1]

i've become sick and tired of working in isolation and have had some time to think about the utility of websites as both artistic object and subject; as dynamic organism; as living, breathing beings that change at a moment's touch. i draw incredible inspiration from kameelah janan rasheed & laurel schwutlz on this note, struggling to deal with presenting a clean and tidy presentation of myself (when you know damn well that you have too many manifestations to ever make that happen!). somewhere along the way i realized all this noise wasn't a bug—it was a feature pushing me to devise new and improvisatory ways of (re)presenting myself. yes, i'm a poet, producer, rapper, intuitive designer, but/and/or i'm also fluid and leaking through the cracks and becoming porous enough to have haptic love flow through me as easily as it spills out.

i'm learning to embrace that by being too much there is so little of me to spare. i'm swimming in bad debt and the no-holds-barred got-me-got-you movement that these stormy times inevitably bring.^[2]

i'm interested in having this site emerge as a means of building community with the folks who have been watching me closely as chosen kin... what happens when the public becomes witness to a seed just beginning to germinate? digital space as shoreline from murky waters once translucent enough to deem revolutionary--that's where we find ourselves. in my wildest dreams this is something akin to bell hooks' homeplace amongst algorithm-heavy social media platforms that kills just as much of me to commodify as you to engage in. instead, let us sit & meditate with the echoes left behind in this putrid sea we, the geographically challenged, call home. let us see what washes up on the shoreline.

robert atwan once wrote that the prize conceit of an essay is that it shows "a mind at work". as someone who is increasingly deathly afraid of my own mind slipping away, that quote is so haunting that it's made me question why i shouldn't water plants that shows life in my own little digital space? i've figured i could just vomit everything out, watch it externalize, dance and laugh and press lips and perhaps entwine with my own innards. feel its digits graze against mine as it's forced to move on in the void, once of but now beyond me.

with that all being said, i guess if i had to give something for the taxonomists & grant funders & homoerotically-charged voyeurs (you sick freaks <3), i'd say the form of homegirl 3000's shoreline is:

• a living, multi-modal experiment
• in creative non-fiction
• spread out like a digital tapestry (much like beat-making manifests as weaving rhythms together in my best faith ringold impression)
• designed as an autoethnographic self-archive, including
  • text
  • audio
  • & live performance (see a demonstration)
• belted out like a hail mary flailing for transnational & postcolonial grace
  • see on grace
    • if everything else is the waters that surround me, then consider this the north star
  • see also:
    • The Indigenous Queer Vision for a Decolonial West Africa
    • We must enter an era of radical remembering
• & arranged so that it may also function as a metacognitive playbox
  • see on metacogntion
  • see also:
    • sade j. abiodun's AMPERS&ND
    • ismatu gwendolyn's A letter on Metacognition ft. a social experiment

of course, this doesn't happen in this order, nor all at once. i'm hoping that because of the dynamic nature of hypertext, anyone can access this site at any point and watch the planks of this floating airship get swapped out in real-time. factors based in materiality, i.e. wi-fi connectivity, site downtime and maintenance, etc., bellow out as mistranslations between new and old versions of myself. perhaps i can also experiment with having two conflicting versions rub up against each other so that their friction is instrumental to how someone subjectively interprets my ramblings.

When juggled together, all these factors' differing likelihoods construct a temporal field where any one interaction can possibly occur--a superposition of potential that describes how a site's branches and stems become activated as individually shapeshifting nodes. Imagine each page as lights scattered across an interminable wall, every activation causing a languid pale-gold light to scour out, briefly illuminating the vantablack that engulfs the briny deep. one eye sees a bold color, the other one views it cool.

the only question left is if you're ready to come with us.