About This Site

RATS is a structured publishing system I invented as a place to fix studies, methods, and positions as durable reference objects. These are ways I have been creating notes internally, but the goal of this project is to publish them as a practice of public thinking. It is inspired by, but in many ways contradictory to, standards like SKOS by W3, or those published by ISO, which I so love. This project, unlike those, is speculative infrastructure. The aforementioned standards provide much needed guardrails and boundaries which allow for interoperability between organizations, languages, projects and peoples. My goal with RATS is to introduce a similar kind of interoperable and boundaries thinking to my own practice, without the weight of cohesion and intelligibility which is required of institutional standards.

This system directly results from my desire to escape the logical traps of publishing fixed 'works'; to allow revision, contradiction, and supersession in a work. It is an attempt to avoid collapsing all of my published works into the language of walltext, singular narrative, submission PDFs and artist statements. Unlike most of my projects, RATS is meant to be complex, evolving and intangible while still providing an interface between my perspective and a viewer.