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The loose narrative follows a cohort of scientists studying otherworldly phenomena and supernatural creatures. Learning more of the story is entirely optional and you can dive deeper into crew logs, scientific reports, audio snippets, and email correspondence at different screens throughout the space. These are well-written and thought-out fictions that support the overall sci-fi fantasy theme, but the rooms aren't overly focussed on the plot. Rather, the main appeal is a combination of surprising surface textures, rooms that trick the eye, and unique spatial configurations with hidden components. With permission to touch anything, you truly lock into your intuition and follow your curiosity, never feeling like there is a right or wrong path to take.

While projection was used for certain atmospheric effects, the most beautiful and awe-inspiring aspects of Otherworld were a careful balance of analog scenography and multimedia elements. One room was cloaked in a crochet textile piece that impressively spanned the entire ceiling space to create a cocoon-like den. Secret passageways with hairy walls welcomed us. Inflatables took on a life of their own under the spell of gramophone static in a Western saloon. Otherworld's lit-up version of the Yayoi Kusama infinity mirror room was more fun than I had ever had in a Kusama gallery installation. Drawers and display cases holding imagined museum artifacts felt like reading clues to an unexplained world. With the help of some cool tech, at one point we crawled out of a grotto and triggered some unexpected sounds, finding a playable scale of stalagmites and stalactites. From another room, we watched live surveillance footage of visitors bouncing around a padded playground. There are no prompts or maps for these interactives, and they can be well-hidden depending on your chosen path, so uncovering them is up to a mix of chance and letting your senses be the guide. Appealing to my nostalgia, one area covered in a cyclone of torn book and magazine pages reminded me of how I decorated my teenage bedroom.

On an emotional level where fun meets quiet contemplation, I could appreciate the wide variation in rooms with some employing minimal color palettes and clean light fixtures for calm ambiance while others had a heavier style of fabrication combined with tech, such as walls built to look like real cave rock with embedded eyes that would blink at different intervals. Many installations had a psychedelic feel, embracing underground punk artist culture as they dripped in neon and glow-in-the-dark.

As Location-Based Entertainment goes, Otherworld checked all the boxes for me. I'd love to see how it compares to a Meo Wolf experience as I have had House of Eternal Return on my bucket list for awhile now. If Columbus was closer, I would definitely go again.

Background:

I had this zine idea a few years ago when I was cleaning out my mom's condo and going through our old family laptops, from back in the day when a household only had one computer. The MS Paint files I found there were likely migrated from an even older desktop computer because I wouldn't have owned a laptop in 2003 when the earliest files were dated. The files were BMPs and PNGs and I made sure to retain all the original file names in the zine.

Process:

This was a headache to layout as the graphic files were geriatric and I wanted a true-to-screen Microsoft color palette printed on paper, which doesn't work when you convert the files to PDF or drop them into Photoshop (at least without a ton of work; photoshop doesn't recognize the colors in these image files and appears to auto approximate the color). I was out of my wheelhouse and I'm still curious to know how a designer would go about handling these files to get an authentic color match in Photoshop. I spent SO long trying to figure this all out and did a ton of print tests because I needed that MS Paint palette to look turn of the 21st century and not have the colors changed to whatever present day Adobe software wanted them to be.

In the end, Microsoft speaks to Microsoft, so I laid it all out in Powerpoint and called it a day. This was kind of a 'give up' moment for me, but in hindsight, after all the tests, it proved to be the most logical and un-fussy way to do it. I also wanted to use a free program. I printed on my Epson home printer and a stack of 50lb. premium matte Red River Paper (cardstock weight) which is almost too much and too heavy , but I loved how there was no bleed-through and how it made the book feel extra tactile. If you have memories of printing out your MS Paint creations on office paper circa 2003, you know how terrible and soggy that was; over-compensating with the 50lb. weight healed a bit of this traumatic memory. All to say, the inkjet print quality is simply astounding, pure matte heaven! I hand-punched the binding holes and hand-assembled each one with the plastic coil.

Takeaways:

The thing is physically huge and has ultra thick paper. There's a weightiness to the whole package. In fact, so heavy that the binding can't handle it and is separating from the block at the back (reading Amazon reviews, many others have had the same issue with their copies). Even with this structural flaw, the proportions of the book feel just right and the images gain extra drama from the scale of the tome.

2. I love the bold approach to text styling—all uppercase, excessive spacing between words, zero leading between lines—the quotes read more like poetry. Meaning that the text becomes visual too. It's as if the stacked typesetting on the page reflects rows of people walking down a crowded sidewalk of the Big Apple. The texts are quotes from notable authors on the pleasures and evils of being a New Yorker.

3. There are two text variations: black text on a white background (pictured above), and white text on a black background (which I think is less effective). There is even a page of white text on black that faces a completely black page. Which I think is kind of crazy, to have a whole black page when you could have had an image there? But I get it because there really is this nice rhythm to the book created by alternating schemes of black, white, and image pages.

4. Now for the pictures. These New Yorkers are deranged, possessed, caught off-guard, upset (perhaps not even at New York but at the invasiveness of the camera). As the quotes lead you to believe, these people have reason to look miserable. Manhattan is "a wicked and wild bitch in her old age." Gilden promises this vantage point through his close camera angles, which trap each subject, distort bodies, foreshorten, and create enlarged heads. No doubt it took a lot of skill to get these framed shots in a constant stream of pedestrian movement. This is the kind of series that I'd love to see the contact sheets for, even if Gilden's take is too pessimistic for my taste.

I. the theme is rest

First, there is softening. An invitation to vulnerability. A cozy portal. Hesitant steps into something furry in the beyond. I set my pen to page to flow write, a way to chart the journey. I always feel better when I have a map. But I think the point of this gathering was to get a little lost. Be destabilized. I felt that too. Jaamil was gently leading us into other possibilities. The portals were multiplying at the end of caves and at the lips of horizons. I was experiencing the way rest can activate the imagination and resound with the deepest self. How rest is catalyst for other ways of being.

II. when rest touches reality

In my meditative state, an awful vision of myself floated to the surface. When I feel stressed and am furiously tidying after myself in the kitchen, washing a stack of dishes, there is this thing I sometimes do: I will consciously waste the water. I let the tap run. I watch it go, knowing I would normally feel very badly about it. I am usually careful to use the water in a specific way, I plan and choreograph the dishes in order to use as little water as possible. But when I am stressed, my not caring overcomes me. I want to waste. I don't know why I thought of this. But as someone who normally cares deeply about my human impact, I regard it as a small violence.

For a moment, I am ugly and uncaring. I believe I am in control of the water. Yet, how pathetic it is to conflate that privilege of access with control over whether water runs from the tap. I am perfectly aware: Water decides for itself. It is running through my body, it is the reason for all life on earth and beyond earth, it is life knowledge, it is bigger than us and it is part of us.

I don't think it is any coincidence that what comes forward in a moment of deep listening and rest is a situation of power and powerlessness. What my memory manifested was a ritual object, one that I reach out for daily to prepare my food and from which I eat. In ancient and medieval times, across many cultures, dishware was often inscribed with poetry, stories, and incantations.

It seems frivolous to judge the washing of dishes, but how can I be in right relationship if I cannot first face myself? What I identify about my reactive state is an embedded supremacy—the need to control—and a micro metaphor for the destruction humans cause when we are in constant production mode. When we fail to take rest. When what we really should be doing is sitting down and taking stock of our inner landscapes. The doing can wait another hour, another day. As Maxine Hong Kingston says in The Woman Warrior, "I let the dirty dishes rot."

How do we learn to sit with rotting? Learn to be comfortable with the smell of mold and decomposition, the multi-colored palette of bacterial life and death? Learn to release our need to improve upon and to control?

For Hong Kingston, rotting is her rebellion against prescriptive gender roles and domestic labor. Rotting is refusal. But rotting also restores balance. The rotting of dishes is necessary, at least for a moment, in order for Hong Kingston to preserve self.

III. on refusal

Jaamil's guidance also ushered us towards the idea of refusal, and together, we discussed refusal in relation to fugitivity, what Kosoko spoke to as "constant running." I am not really familiar with fugitivity as a concept, but I believe it is rooted in Jaamil's thinking around Marronage and the work of Bayo Akomolafe. Bear with me as I wander and ponder with these relatively new concepts here.

One of the lines of our host's inquiry was, In what ways can refusal operate outside of the fugitive framework? I summarize his question here. And I take some liberty to re-interpret it: How might refusal be seen as generative rather than fugitive? My words are not entirely aligned with Jaamil's questioning, but sometimes I need approximations to get me to the next place.

The first thing that came to mind was perhaps that refusal only occurs in systems of control. In a society based on control—the reforming, conforming, and forced obedience of bodies—any behavior outside of these expectations would be considered to be a resistance or refusal by a figure in power.

But let's imagine a world where control does not exist (we are not in that world, much imagination needed here). There is nothing to "be against" or "disobey" or "refuse" or run away from if bodies are not coerced. Perhaps what is regarded in the current system as refusal is just an expression of preference, of self. Or just an action, Jaamil added. I am in uncertain territory here and I want to be careful, because I am aware that naive ponderings can be neglectful of the lived experience of ancestors and historically marginalized folks. But I appreciate that Restshop held space for this kind of hypothetical and directionless musing without landing, a willingness to entertain the what ifs and travel alongside the learner.

From this, I might imagine that in a world very different from Hong Kingston's world, perhaps she simply preferred not to do the washing. She preferred to use her time to rest, to think, to write. Without her doing those things, we wouldn't have the gift of her books. So we may be glad that she let those dishes rot.

IV. "the approach to the problem is the problem"

This is one teaching I am carrying forward with me from the workshop. It is from an audio recording of Akomolafe that Jaamil played for us during the session. For me, it points to the limited nature of our current thought paradigms (science, empiricism, sight-dominant perception, fixing, capitalism etc.) and in the context of the Restshop, suggests that engaging other approaches—moving, resting, walking, dancing, questioning, gathering reading, dreaming, deep listening, praying—might be more attuned to problem solving.

I can directly relate this to wanting to evolve the energies around my own creative practice, to move away from a feeling of forced production and of wanting too much. How might I change my approach and release my need to create within institutionalized forms of language and knowledge?

I am truly grateful to Jaamil for his work because it pushes towards feeling what it is unknown and limitless. I feel invited to play with the possibility of redefining doing on the level of individual existence, which is also the interpersonal, relational, and ecological levels. In the last session today, during a live sound conjuring by the artist Mlondi Dubazane, I wrote:

Walking backwards is returning to a womb-like state. Here, we have less to worry about. When we know less with the mind, we know more with the body. What are my stories? The rest exposes pre-existing knowledge. It liberates us from linear time. Taking care of the self is taking care of the stories. The stories are the pre-existing knowledge of our bodies.