_null landing_

thinking with null data 

Here I attempt to produce an introduction to my creative and critical work as well as share some of the thinking, planning, and research behind it. It is not my intention to produce an etymological study of the words “null” and “landing” but instead to invite you to think and imagine with me what becomes possible when we bring these words and their many meanings together.

My first full-length collection of poems, null landing, speculates on language and documentation, practicing deep listening and communing with the nonlocal. These poems draw on the repertoire of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and black feminist theory to offer paths toward rethinking the ways we communicate and relate across difference, particularly at intersections of blackness, queerness, and disability.

Taking the Luso-African creole nation of São Tomé e Príncipe and its cartographic/conceptual closeness to “Null Island'' as a paradoxical point of departure and entry, I ask what work, real or virtual, is done when language gets used as a refuge from self-questioning? How do the questions we must ask become different when we are attending and attuning to the precarious psychoaesthetics of "error" and "excess"?

"of little geographic significance" [a null value]

São Tomé e Príncipe is home to an exceptional diversity of plants and animals that are still largely unknown. The isolated islands are part of an ancient volcanic archipelago ecosystem and are host to hundreds of species found nowhere else on the planet, including the world's largest begonia, tiniest ibis, and the largest canary. STP is also home to a unique and still-evolving literary and visual culture. The region's most developed form of expression is poetry, which has garnered the islands a relatively small amount of critical attention. In particular, I am moved by the work of Francisco José Tenreiro, Maria Manuela Margarido, Alda do Espírito Santo, and Conceição Lima. 

An amalgamation—of cultures, processes, practices, traditions, histories, ways of knowing—a place uniquely entangled and occluded in the origin story of modern/western science. What would happen if we engaged the aliveness of São Tomé e Príncipe while also taking note of the function of nullification in thought? In my writing I have tried to raise such questions as how to share a story that is not mine to tell? And how to reimagine the practice of relation to land, history, and mythology that i am only intangibly connected to? What possibilities exist for inter-action at a distance?

As a founding member of PALOP, the group of Portuguese-speaking African countries, São Tomé is an ideal location for investigating myths of racial democracy that dominate national discourses in Lusophone Africa and Brazil. Conceptual tools of colonialism like Gilberto Freyre’s “lusotropicalism” obscure the antiblack violence and white supremacy on which the modern world order is premised (Valentim, et al., 2017). I have conducted research on the literary cultures and history of São Tomé e Príncipe in personal, poetic, and formal academic capacities and I am deeply interested in Luso-African and Brazilian literature and cultural politics. As a queer black poet scholar, I am intimately attuned to such tensions as incommensurability and the interface of language, culture and power.

not/another origin story

In the summer of 2020, I lived in East New York, Brooklyn, and I did not have wifi. I lived in a spacious basement unit that could be considered a "converted" apartment. I had an address that does not exist. 

Humans make a lot of errors. I, personally, make a lot of errors. I think it is particularly important to confront our mistakes, to stand within them. In our algorithmic cultures there are many "errors" made around us, too. I have been thinking about myths and maps, and how the instruments of modern science are in need of a lyrical and imaginative infusion. What would it mean to approach data in the raw? Listening to data for its journey of preconception, birth, life, and limbo. What exactly is it that makes certain data "bad"?

I am also thinking here about the promise of mathematical knowledge. When is a mathematical precision actually desired or even ethically obligated? When do poetics prevent necessary clarity, occlude or nullify life, or hinder action? How do we navigate poetry that mobilizes a violent reductionism, harmful abstraction, or an extractive logic? Could the tools of physics, biology, or geology be rehabilitated and/or readapted to address interpersonal, cultural, structural, or racial violence? Perhaps by outfitting our deterministic and 'objective' tendencies with a more vibrant, caring, even loving treatment, we might find some restorative functionality in mathematical and scientific ideas. 

This idea of the zero-zero point—a specific kind of origin story—is not yet even 40 years old.It's based on the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84), a widely used global reference system for modeling the Earth. It is the standard for the Department of Defense and the Global Positioning System (GPS). It is not the only possible coordinate system or mode of map projection. Many possibilities have yet to be thoroughly considered (Rankin, 2015). Different frameworks exist for adapting the Earth into a sphere, ellipsoid, plane, or some other shape for measurement. I'm no expert in geospatial data, but the possibilities appear to have no discernible limit, other than our own imagination and willingness to break with standard methods of geocoding. 

some end notes : the soul buoy at world's end

thinking the Land(ing) as an event, a horizon, a site of confrontation, an opposition—the indexing and abstracting of black life. It seems to me that our living presence, our (non)arrival is occluded by the violence of the encounter—rendered null. the Landing is an example of an opposition that figures a nullification rather than a contradiction (Ferreira da Silva, 2017). Here I am also thinking with Claude Shannon's mathematical theory of communication (1948) and the structural principle of information (Vakarelov, 2011). 

Put differently, black life gets rendered inanimate.Yet, we crucially retain the capacity to recover something like the original message by performing the inverse operation of that done by the transmitter, signaling an (otherwise/elsewhere) irreducible though fungible existence. This could gesture toward an embodied experience of the Land/ing that operates on a different register, a different time-space, one that frustrates the equation of value and the dominative mode of knowledge in the modern world. 

In this alternative account of the Land/ing, there are infinite possibilities of being/positioning/existing because the status of nullity can also work to free the object of thought from the strictures of proper/contractual/transparent subjecthood. In a null-time and a null-space, what is made possible? What unfolds? What kinds of linkages, interconnections, and relations are pulled into reach? The sound-space of the L/anding, despite being made null, remains raw. I wrote null landing as a way to speak nearby to what escapes attention and avoids notice it can't be captured it is that which exceeds. Strangely, poetry is the making of worlds in this room and the making of room in this world.

Sometimes referred to as "the most visited place on earth that doesn't actually exist," or an "island of misfit data," Null Island was first used by mapping systems analysts to trap data errors and anomalies of local coordinate systems. Null Island is paradoxically material/tangible on multiple registers despite its technical status of non-existence. On one hand, Null Island is a mathematically certain numerical figure (0°N,0°E). The cultural and political functions it performs and its role as a producer of scientific, calculable knowledge seem to indicate that Null Island possesses a global significance and is capable of producing concrete effects. On the other hand, Null Island is undeniably fantastical when framed as invention, second-order, indeterminate and undefinable, building upon and extending the presupposed/pre-established symbolic regime. 

Perhaps the isolated and multiplicitous nature of Null Island could speak to the strictures and expectations of the modern ethical program, generating a way of thinking about the position of blackness within/beyond the present global order. A blending of 'imagined' and 'real' geographies, thinking Null Island as the banished place (Hortense Spillers, 2004:535) allows us to raise several questions like what makes data bad? What would it mean to approach data in the raw? If geocoding is the process of transforming a description of a position and location and converting it into geographic coordinates, what kinds of work/force/energy is required for this information transformation? What could be the implications in regard to ethics, processes of abstraction and extraction, and the Western quest for determinacy?What might be the possibilities for geocoding in other systems of coordinates or alternate forms of map projection?

Western aesthetic culture demands a transparent subject that quantifies, evaluates, categorizes and catalogues its interactions with the world (capable of thinking in data). Blackness frustrates this effort, rupturing normative frameworks of being and gesturing toward an alternative, more opaque horizon of existence (Ferreira da Silva, 2018). Blackness occludes the total violence necessary for the expropriation of a category of racial difference, resulting in an error in mapping. Despite the nuances or complexities of the error, the object in question can now only produce one outcome: (0,0). The result is a representation of black life as inanimate, valueless, 2-dimensional, and ultimately null. The expected/obligatory subject positions are unable to be properly occupied, figuring a nullification in which the productive power of blackness is rendered void, rather than a condition of opposition under which both elements/reactants retain their value, meaning the violent elision would register as something closer to an ethical crisis. 

null landing is an exploration of the interlacing of our physical and psychical landscapes, a mapping of the movement of meaning and configuration of Truth. i am struggling with and against language, trying to mediate the nuances of modern black queer life and speculate on the sonic, visual and affective motif of "nullness,'' that is, of being without properties, having no legal or binding force, and amounting to nothing (tangible).

Perhaps by returning to the mythic origins of language and thought, we might make retrievable and repairable the foundational building blocks of consciousness and communication. My hope is that null landing could be used across practices and places of nontraditional learning and instruction, providing people with a tool in the ongoing struggle against the ceaseless tasks of interpretation, sense-making, and assignation of value. The demand for determinacy and singularity in the classical disciplines and their rigid methodologies makes it difficult for us to see the work and world for what it truly is—an amalgamation of meanings, frames, trajectories, and symbols that contract, expand, and deform together to produce an appearance of uninterrupted progression, a continuous flow—a swelling wave...