Flem

What did you like about the process of creating the Special issue 16? What would you like to keep in the process for the next special issue? What did you not like about the whole journey? What would you like to do differently for Special Issue 17? Feel free to elaborate in more specifics. Share a memorable moment during the last 2.5 months :) What was the most challenging thing while working in the big group; and in the sub-groups? What did you learn during the Prototyping classes (Michael & Manetta)? What will you keep from them? What did you learn during the Special issue classes (Cristina & Steve)? What will you keep from them? How would you describe your overall experience of doing this special issue? How will you use what you have learned this trimester in your personal practice? Anything else you would like to share with the group

it felt so weird, starting from nothing and ending with something so concrete in our hands.

at some point during the last three months, in my notebook, i've written: make sure they know what we're doing. Now, i ask myself: maybe they knew it and didn't tell us? they knew we were working on something, what i am still asking myself is: how could they know that we would end up with something presentable and not a bunch of shit? i would answer that they looked at us, listened to us, waited for us to find our own answers to our countless questions, much more than we realised. and i feel like we learnt so much without having the answers in front of us, even if it made us freak out every single day of the project.

prototyping lessons have been continuous ups and downs: one day i understood something, went home happy, the day after happy to play. another day i felt so useless, i couldn't listen and sometimes i didn't even want to open my jupiter lab because i didn't know what to do with it. it's been so hard to imagine something without knowing what it was about. it was so hard to work on something, spend days and days, meetings over meetings, talking about an unexisting idea. then, at some random point, i don't know how it happened or why, i understood what they meant: work on something, find an idea that can fit with these methods, with these tools. easy to say. i think it took a month and a half until i've been able to think about something more concrete to work on, and nothing would have happened without Manetta and Michael's help. they didn't just explain, show, throw on us a giant amount of unknown content, tools, and ideas, but also encouraged us, listed to us and pushed us to work more, always sure (?) that we would make it.

it was also hard to understand what the readings classes were about, at the beginning. then, when we started to make something, everything started to make more sense, day by day, week by week. tha last three weeks have been full: we had a fucking giant amount of stuff to do. all the things we didn't do in the two months before, all the things we didn't do because we were talking, reading, throwing ideas.

i superenjoyed the group communication exercises: cristina's ones, steve's ones and also the class we had with Nor. i find this topic so interesting and i'd like to read more about it as well as using our group to try out new methods.

we understood how hard democracy is: how hard it is, how much time it takes to listen to every voice, to make sure everyone doesn't feel down or unhappy. sometimes it's necessary to give up, and now that i see it from the future, i'm enthusiastic to say that i'm happy i gave up some things i thought were important, and i fought for some others that in the end were important for the results, even just for myself.