A Hut of Sticks

A place of refuge for listeners, tinkers, and anyone whose work demands sustained attention in head, heart, and hand. Open to practitioners from any discipline, any background. Time apart on the Pacific Rim and the chance to participate in a long-term experiment in collective witness.

We are building a circle of patrons to launch our Workshop of Advanced Practice. Curious? Get in touch.

Why

Day by day, our thinking grows more regimented, more instrumental, less exploratory. Our lives have become saturated by a managerial ethos, an ethos of control. We are losing our sense of life as an exercise in the cultivation of moral imagination. We are losing our openness to the unbidden, not to say our capacity to abide in uncertainty. But it is exactly these things that are essential if we are to find our way through the dual crisis that confronts us: of climate and purpose.

Phase 1 · Workshop of Advanced Practice

Our first step is to establish a retreat for accomplished practitioners of the analytic and expressive crafts. We have in mind a continuing workshop of eight to twelve participants, individual participants to join for six to nine months, with briefer stays by returning participants.

Finishing a book? Experimenting with new ways of looking at data — or of posing questions? Looking for new inspiration as a performer, artisan, or maker of land? Our goal is to create a place where the only urgent thing is the work itself — that, and the weather.

In return, we ask that you participate in the residents’ workshop: that you present your own work and support others in theirs. One thing that distinguishes our workshop is its low-key character. We encourage extemporaneous presentation and the sharing of work in a raw state. This is an exercise not in impression management but in collective witness.

The other thing that distinguishes the residents’ workshop is its remote setting. We would all benefit from periods of retreat that encourage you to be present not just for your work but for the world that does not care about us, the world before, after, and beyond the anthropogenic world we spend our lives in. There are still places where humans are insignificant. These places do not need us — but we need them.

Phase 2 · School of Advanced Practice

Once the residents’ workshop has found its rhythm, we wish to establish a school of advanced practice in the interpretation of collective life.

What would a curriculum in human behavior look like if you threw out the university and began anew? Collective life begins with the making of place, and so does A Hut of Sticks: our curriculum combines a sixteen-month practicum in buildings arts (Term 1: Gardens and Fortifications; Term 2: Domestic Spaces; Term 3: Watercraft) with a reading seminar in evolutionary anthropology, cognitive archaeology, and the history and philosophy of medicine, technology, and practical knowledge. Alongside these, students will attend a three-term lab in formal methods: Bayesian inference, unsupervised learning, agent-based modeling.

At every stage, the emphasis is on the cultivation of a critical ear. Methods are never presented simply as things to be internalized — rather, we encourage an abiding concern for the paths by which certain methods become canonical while others do not.

Our goal is to admit three to five students a year with progression to PhD or equivalent in six years modulo language study and fieldwork. During an initial two years’ residency, students will contribute to the residents’ workshop in a support capacity and benefit from the chance to spend time with residents.

Who

A Hut of Sticks grows out of a recurring theme of conversation: Why is everyone whose work revolves around the interpretation of human behavior so miserable, and does it have to be this way? Our backgrounds range from brain imaging to organizational sociology to the history and philosophy of science. All of us, in different ways, have drawn courage from doing things with our hands. We’ve come to feel the time is ripe to try something new: a new way of practicing the craft of interpretation, a new way of bringing different ways of looking at the world (science, craft, ritual) into rapprochement — not through superficial collaboration but through a congruence of setting and mood.

Convenors: Josh Berson · FIXMEAdvisors: Geof Bowker · Mikko Järvenpää · FIXME

Our Name

We allude to a “dual crisis”, of climate and purpose. But the crisis mindset is a mindset of foreshortened horizons. The real question is, what comes after crisis? Is there a role for us in the community of earthly beings? Consider the words of the late-Heian monk Saigyō Hōshi (1118–90):

If I can find
no place fit to live,
let me live “no place” —
in this hut of sticks
flimsy as the world itself
(via Burton Watson)

The phrase Watson glosses as flimsy you could equally gloss as transient or ephemeral. A Hut of Sticks is an experiment in learning to abide in the knowledge that all our huts, all the projects by which we seek to fortify ourselves against time, are ultimately no more lasting than a tongue of foam left by the receding tide. This is a liberating thought — if we can but learn to hear it as such.

Credits

Sakurajima viewed en route to Yakushima, Digitalis Akujin (2019), CC BY–SA 4.0

Corcovado viewed from Quellón, Chiloé, Bryan Freeman (2005) CC BY-SA 3.0

A Still Night at Hoopers Inlet, Otago Peninsula, Ian Griffin (2017).