User:LEa/T2

........................................mushrooms

microorganisms........

bio-materials.................

fermenting.........................................................

foraging.......................................

social practice.......................

..............poetry

.............................................writing

......automatic writing

..............walking

........................narration

bootlegs & piracy.....................

exploring commons...........................

drawing.........................................................................

writing

notes on SI28, SI29, and workshops I attended—all squished to fit

A lot of my time here has been spent writing. Writing and editing text has always been something that I enjoy, but (except for a three-month internship in journalism), it was never in focus, but a side-quest. Since I find myself writing in many different contexts and settings, I would like to do it more intently. I'm interested in writing non-fiction and more recently also narrative texts.

✏️ Wiki Writing — Documenting my process, my thoughts, and big parts of group projects ✏️ SI28 Editorial Group — Promotional texts and the introduction to our A_maze_zine

✏️ Blog — Very fun (but scary)! ✏️ Writing Wednesdays — Biweekly meetup to sit and write together

making

writing machines & protocols

output from poetry generator exhibited at creative coding utrecht

For the first few weeks of XPUB, reading texts, learning about new tools, and documenting everything has been all I did. I was longing to actually make things, and was excited to start tinkering with writing machines. I have long been interested in surrealists methods such as automatic writing and exquisite corpse, and I started noticing writing machines in the wild, and had lots of fun making my own. At the beginning, I struggled to find meaning in the texts produced (beyond “I had fun“). Solution: engage with others through the machines.

🪄 Multinational Poetry Remix 🪄 Nod-Blink-Yawn State Machine 🪄 Typing Survival: Glyphica Text Machine ... 🪄 Psychogeographic Writing Machine

🪄 The Calm Machine: Walking Protocol. 🪄 Mud-cell Poem 🪄 Poetry Generator (@ CCU)

a walking card scanned during our event at UBIK

....................

checking on the activity of the mud bacteria

zines

from writing wednesdays to xtraterrestrial zine fair

collective zine making @ leeszaal west

not a zine, but a flyer: promotion for our SI29 workshop

Making zines has long been part of my practice. What I love about it: It is a very quick mode of publishing (if you want it to be—I tend to overthink the process), and there is a physical object to hold and distribute. During the last two Special Issues, I learned a few new things about zine-making and me: Command line tools are awesome! Pdfbook2 and weasyprint simplify tasks that I used to spend a lot of time on. And—making zines together is the most fun!

✂️ A_maze_zine — Wrap up of SI28 (wiki2print) ✂️ Practice and Scale — Interviews from Methods class (wiki2print)

✂️ A Grower's Guide to Writing — Writings and drawings for the Xtraterrestrial Zine Fair ✂️ Echt Nep?! — Collective Zine from our workshop at Leeszaal West

websites

Before I came to XPUB, I had vibe coded most parts of all the websites I made. I was determined to actually learn HTML and CSS during my time here, but I am rarely finding the time to sit down and write code. These pages are what I made during Special Issue 29—very simple, but made without AI. That does not mean that I wrote everything from scratch, though. I got help from others, or used existing code snippets found on the web.

🔗 Echt Nep?! — Our collective zine to click through 🔗 LEa — Personal gossips from Doriane's class

🔗 A Grower's Guide to Writing — HTML hidden in a P2P-garden 🔗 File tree — Kamo helped with the pop-ups

field recordings

Although I adored the topic of Special Issue 28, I was less excited about hosting radio shows. I had very limited experience working with sound, and I am quite terrible at public speaking. Things that I did enjoy, though, were sharing music and found sounds with others, as well as making field recordings of my surroundings when going for a walk.

🔊 Workers putting up a new street sign 🔊 Construction, items being thrown into a container 🔊 Children talking and yelling, cleaning up trash from the street with their teacher

🔊 Dirk supermarket, at the self checkout counter 🔊 People going in and out of Familie Eethuis, cars and a tram passing by 🔊 Construction work, pedestrians passing by

prototypes

During Special Issue 29, we were encouraged to make a new file sharing prototype every two weeks. I did not keep up entirely, but I very much enjoyed the quick mode of making, and not overthinking ideas before sharing them.

🧪 Our house—our garden: A prototype for intimate P2P file sharing

🧪 Campfire: A prototype for local-first file sharing

🧪 Ferment Sharing: A prototype for starter piracy

more(ganisms)

🦠 Sourdough: Feeding, baking, passing it on 🦠 Kombucha: For drinking—and textiles, circuits, batteries? 🦠 Kimchi: Your favorite veggies and salt (and some shared stories)

🦠 Mycelium: Home-grown objects made from fungi 🦠 Sewing: Possibly with bio-textiles? 🦠 My own microbial fuel cells (MFC): Mud or kombucha cultures?

got to make your own if you want to eat good bread in nl

new kombucha starter received from a kind neigbour

collective kimchi!

mycelium grown object (genus ganoderma)

first time at the fabric station

learning

workshops

👾 Fermenting The Earth, Wiring The Mud with Sunjoo Lee & Anna Pastor, 2025-09-19 to 2025-10-25 @ iMal (& CCU) 👾 Let's Make It Last! with Yuliya Gwilym & Brigid Lefevre, 2025-10-04 @ PrintRoom 👾 Introduction to Local First with Tobias Bernard, 2025-12-04 @ the Aquarium

👾 Biocraft with household organic waste with Catinca Tilea, 2026-01-11 @ Varia 👾 Server Charms with Kaa, 2026-01-11 @ toitoidrome 👾 Draw It With Others with Chae & Kamo, 2026-03-17 @ toitoidrome

sunjoo's electric garden at iMal

organic waste from making kimchi (—could then be fermented into fungi substrate)

server charm made during kaa's workshop

diwo: camera obscura from an outside perspective

analogue screenshots made together

coding

💻 why is it so hard:(

cli

💻 very handy!

reflections & questions

🔺 Writing helps me to structure my thoughts, and I'd like to do it more. Maybe in public spaces? Or collectively?

🔺 Being in social situations―especially as a host or presenter―is really scary for me, since I have always struggled with social anxiety. But(!), I noticed that I am most interested in things when I can do them with or for others (e.g. all the workshops, discussing AI, making the walking protocol, intimate P2P file sharing). I really want to explore social practices and how I can take an active role in them.

🔺 My personal practice has been lagging behind in the first two Special Issues, and I want to change that. Though not entirely sure what to focus on, I am thinking a lot about the meaning of fermenting in social and cultural spaces. Looking at the upcoming Special Issue about Unbordering, I'd also like to turn again to walking as research method and artistic practice.

❓ Since I feel that my interests might be too many―and too scattered―I am curious about an outside perspective: What do you see as most central to my work at XPUB so far? Is there something from within my mentioned interests (or outside) that you would advise me to pursue?

❓ Even though I am interested in technology and digital culture, I realized that the technical aspects of XPUB have been very hard for me (e.g. coding). I don't want to stop learning about it, but I currently feel more inclined to work on projects surrounding community practices and research. Are there any requirements for the second year in terms of topics and related practices?

resources

These are the books and texts I've read in the past few months that have been helpful, influential, or inspiring to me:

📖 Walking and Mapping: Artists as Cartographers (Karen O’Rourke, 2013) 📖 Let’s Become Fungal! Mycelium Teachings and the Arts (Yasmine Ostendorf-Rodríguez, 2023) 📖 The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, 2015) [Read here]

📖 Kombucha electronics: electronic circuits on kombucha mats (A. Adamatzkyet al., 2023) [Read here] 📖 Fermenting alternatives through the more-than-human relations of craft entrepreneuring (Emma Bell, 2025) [Read here] 📖 Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective (Donna Haraway, 1988)