[STUDIO MAIN]

praxis //

[noun: the process by which a theory, lesson, or skill is enacted, embodied, realized, applied, or put into practice]

A message from Elæ: 

I’ve written a lot about my “work” -- which I often will say is no different from my life, or being as a human on the planet -- much like that of mushroom, bird, or water. 

This work takes a lot of forms, and when I write about this work, it’s often for different audiences and contexts. The language and other tools I use in my work can as a result sometimes feel illegible or inaccessible, but this is no different from any other specialized communication -- I can’t speak Japanese, or write any number of programming languages, for instance.

Here, via this studio / lab, my goal is to make this work the most accessible to the most people. These tools are, truly, for everyone -- they’re really derived from studying human systems in relationship to the rest of the ecosystem, and thinking about the ways we become familiar with our bodies and their capacities.

In around 2010, I announced publicly that I’d been working on a project to understand our capacity to auto-evolve, which I called ÆVOLUTION. In 2014, I began asking questions that became workshops and lectures on “HOW TO HUMAN.” This spun out into many projects, resources and tools, including the DISRUPTOR MECHANISM PROTOCOLS and the experimental, open source framework of THE OPERATING SYSTEM and LIMINAL LAB platform.

I’ve come to call the set of Human Technologies I’m interested in helping others think about and come to have an intentional relationship with “AUTONOMOUS MECHANICS” and the process of shifting that way of being “becoming plural,” which is where this studio was born.

Think of me as an eccentric neighbor with a garage full of always-in-process inventions, with an open invitation to all to play and discover. Artist? Sure. Teacher? Sure. Scientist? Hell yes. These are all roles humans have established, claimed, and played as we’ve engaged with curiosity in understanding ourselves and our world.

Not only is the asking of questions (as well as discovering, exploring, documenting and communicating our findings) central to human experience but to our existence and our continued survival. My dream for us is to get back to these basics of purpose on this planet, extracting our possibility and power from the stories and systems that we’re caught up in.