Raw.Space argues that knowledge is a thing with hands on it. These are the hands on this site: the ones that can be named, the shape of the ones that cannot, and the debts that stay open either way. A name on this page is only where the finding-back begins, so each one points to its source and to the piece that draws on it.
Named in the pages
Davi Kopenawa's words came to me as La chute du ciel, spoken over years in Yanomami to Bruce Albert, who set them down in French, and translated into English as The Falling Sky by Nicholas Elliott and Alison Dundy. His people speak for themselves through Hutukara Associação Yanomami. In A shelf is a kind of crossing.
The proverb about the lions and the hunter reached me through Chinua Achebe, who tells it in his 1994 Paris Review interview. Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o's line is from Decolonising the Mind, written on the way out of English. Both in Memory as collective space.
Robin Wall Kimmerer, of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, wrote the grammar of animacy in Braiding Sweetgrass, from lineage and botany at once. In The web we are already in.
Jo Freeman's "The Tyranny of Structurelessness" was published in The Second Wave in 1972, written from inside the movements it describes. In Learning to weave without losing the thread.
Walter Lippmann named the manufacture of consent in Public Opinion in 1922; Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky mapped its machinery in Manufacturing Consent in 1988. In The theatre of opposition.
"The War of the Ghosts" is a Kathlamet story, told by Charles Cultee and published by Franz Boas in Kathlamet Texts in 1901, before Frederic Bartlett gave it to Cambridge students to remember. Toni Morrison's sentence on oppressive language is from her Nobel Lecture of 1993. Maurice Halbwachs wrote of the social frames of memory in 1925. The Aymara model of time was documented by Rafael Núñez and Eve Sweetser, the Guugu Yimithirr compass by John Haviland and Stephen Levinson, and the bee's dance was read by Karl von Frisch. In Unlearning to recall.
Behind the essays
The consciousness essays think inside a living conversation they do not cite line by line: Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, whose account of life as self-making began in Santiago; Antonio Damasio on feeling as the body's keeping of itself; Peter Godfrey-Smith's octopus, in Other Minds; Anil Seth's work on interoceptive inference; Thomas Nagel's question of what it is like to be a bat. Buddhist analyses of non-self and impermanence reach these pages secondhand, through carriers like Varela. In The loop that knows itself and Where feeling begins.
The moth that retains an aversion it learned as a caterpillar was shown by Douglas Blackiston, Elena Silva Casey and Martha Weiss, in PLOS ONE in 2008. In The practice of becoming.
The savings circles are older than commercial microfinance, and each has its own history: tontine, susu, chit fund, tanda, ayuuto. What microfinance did to women borrowers in Bangladesh I learned from Lamia Karim's Microfinance and Its Discontents. Rosario's gardens are real: the growers, the Programa de Agricultura Urbana that met them, and the collapse of 2001 that neither chose. In Where the future grows.
For the methods
Emergent dialogue is a synthesis with many streams in it: Paulo Freire's dialogic pedagogy, David Bohm's work on dialogue, and circle and council practices. Relational analysis stands on feminist and decolonial epistemology, on Patricia Hill Collins and bell hooks writing on what the margin sees that the centre cannot; the "view from nowhere" is Thomas Nagel's phrase, turned here the way those traditions turned it. The Carrying method is shaped by the ethics of translation, by citation held as a form of respect, and by traditions that treat some knowledge as kept rather than public. In the methods.
By mouth
Some of what this site owes arrived by mouth, not by hand. Yé krik, yé krak is the Antillean storyteller's call and the room's answer; the answer was in my mouth before I knew it was an inheritance. Migan belongs to kitchens before it belongs to poems, and one of those kitchens fed me, in a Martinique I left more than half a life ago. The island is in these pages the way salt is in bread, worked in past pointing at, changing the taste of the whole. Other places have fed me since, and longer, and are worked in the same way; Martinique is named because Krik and Migan, both in French, are made of it. Even so, no page can hold the room, and having been of the room is not a licence to hold it.
Known by their edges
The council and circle traditions that shaped how I sit in rooms are practices I was allowed near. Taking part in a practice has not made it mine to teach.
Hands in the making
Synchrony
Built on ge1doot's verlet physics and skeletal animation, shared on CodePen under its MIT licence. Changed here: the colour taken out, so four dark figures dance on white where six coloured ones danced on black, and each can be caught by the whole body. It runs on a 2D canvas.
Murmuration
Built on the GPGPU birds example from three.js, the work of its many contributors, released under the MIT licence. Its flocking follows the three rules Craig Reynolds showed at SIGGRAPH '87: separation, alignment, cohesion. Changed here: the shading reworked for contrast, and the birds set inside a frame, as a cage.
Gaze
Built on Ksenia Kondrashova's eye pattern and shader logic, shared on CodePen under its MIT licence. Changed here: a plastic film laid over the eyes to deepen their deformity, and the image, veins included, turned monochrome, so nothing pulls attention away from the gaze.
The homepage
Built on Andy Barefoot's Layout is overrated, shared on CodePen, and on Matter.js, by Liam Brummitt, released under the MIT licence. Changed here: the blocks that rise, now the site's own territories and pieces. A visitor who asks for reduced motion is taken to the text index instead of the moving pile.
Type
IBM Plex Mono, designed by Mike Abbink with Bold Monday, for labels and the frame; Georgia, designed by Matthew Carter, for reading. The profiles drawn across the homepage come from Entestats and Capsbats, by Joan M. Mas.
raw.space is written, built and kept by one person, Frederic Marc, on a server in London.
Left open
Conversations whose participants I have lost track of; the many writers read over the years, whose traces I can no longer tell from my own; three languages, none of them the first, and the empires that made them mine; the readers of early pages; the more-than-human world this site thinks with and cannot cite. Missing credits, errors and concerns about an adaptation can reach me at hello@raw.space.