Launched in October 2023, Knottings is a series of syllabi developed in collaboration with Pioneer Works, an arts organization based in Red Hook, Brooklyn. Published once quarterly, Knottings features syllabi from alumni of the Pioneer Works Residency program. Since 2012, Pioneer Works has provided emerging artists, musicians, and technologists with a space to work, tools to create, and a platform to exchange ideas through its Visual Arts, Music, and Technology Residency.
For the debut edition of Knottings, artist and Pioneer Works Visual Arts resident alum Finnegan Shannon shared Bingo for Something You Dread. Finnegan’s work disrupts and intervenes in ableist structures, and in Bingo For Doing Something You Dread, they impart lessons in life-hacking—a survival practice in an ableist world.
The second edition of Knottings, Carrie Sijia Wang, a Pioneer Works Arts Alum and recipient of the Rockefeller Foundation Artist Initiative Impact Fellowship, shared In Pursuit of Connection and Understanding: Three Experiments with Flawed Technologies. It explores the advantages and hazards of leaning on technology for human communication.
To represent this partnership, we have chosen a knot. Syllabi that are part of the Knottings series are demarcated with a . Keep an eye out for these knots as you navigate our site. Winsome and practical, knots loop, twist, and braid, creating new composites from multiple strands. They suggest the joining of our two collaborating entities, and the intertwining ideas, hypotheses, schemes, and provocations these syllabi will generate. We hope you enjoy this recurring feature, and the knots we become tangled up in along the way.