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+---
+title: "Editor's Letter: Introducing becoming.press/"
+authors: ["nikomas.md", "Polymnia.md"]
+tags: "admin"
+date: "07.02.23"
+
+---
+
+A commentary on our becoming so far and an introduction to some new concepts.
+
+Becoming as a project is without expectations; the project grows as more is added to it, new additions create new demands, new breaks create new visions, and always the project must express itself. More than running the project, we often feel as though we are interpreting it, in a quasi-religious way, we are more like eavesdroppers than girlbosses. If you have been following the initial years of “Becoming”, you will recall this situation in the past: we often appear to declare a new situation, but the situation is always responding to new needs that have arisen of their own accord. In building this machine, it became and continues to become entangled in other machines, and the capabilities of the machinery evolve continuously because of this.
+
+The last time we wrote an Editors’ letter, it was titled The Darkside of Ecstasy, and it was the first item published after printing Issue Zero, after more than 6 months back in the laboratory. The Darkside of Ecstasy attempted to declare the new phase of Becoming — but it was more of a report: in building Issue Zero, printing it, receiving feedback, and going back to the drawing board, the interests of the project developed and became more refined. Issue Zero was the attempt to pull the project into existence, and the next step was to refine the resolution of the intent and the interests. That editors’ letter was just a reading of the winds which changed of their own accord, and it came alongside the presentation of the new instagram and website. We declared, or we divined, at that time, that Becoming would become online-only, and that all publications would be published online, and presented on Instagram in the way that you can see up until this point. Yet, as we had to reupload all the printed articles of Issue Zero, by the time we got around to actually posting the Editors’ Letter “The Darkside of Ecstasy”, the reboot was already 3-weeks old, and it was less of an announcement, and more of a “by the way, you may have noticed some changes”. The project goes by itself, and we are always just running after it.
+
+In that way, we feel less anxiety about explaining what is happening, as we do not feel that we are explaining our own decisions, more we are letting everyone know of our child’s changed pronouns, or name, or identity. We want you to know what’s going on, to feel involved, and we report our updates being fully conscious that things must, necessarily, change again, and again, and again.
+
+We are back again, in a new Editors’ letter to report on the new state of Becoming, as the developments of the last months leading up to Issue One have changed the situation dramatically. Given the interest people have taken, and the responses we have had, we are feeling very comfortable in our subject area and in our perspective; Queer Cynicism and Negativism has brought together a very interesting group of artists and writers and we feel that the ship is ready to set sail. As may seem obvious at this point, we have revised our decision to stop printing, and have already committed to the publication of 3-5 printed materials this year. Having dwelled on it a lot, we will be dropping the word “magazine” from the title of our in-house editorial, as it appears to confine certain expressions or set up certain expectations for commodification and presentation that we wish to avoid. We simply publish an editorial titled “Becoming”, and it is the heart of the Becoming project.
+
+As it became clear with the publication of Ulysse Carrière’s essay “Technically Man Dwells upon this Earth”, the platform was suited to more than just being a digitized version of the magazine, and in place of this we confirmed that instead of Becoming Magazine, we would establish ourselves as a publishing entity that has an editorial. There were already plans to publish a book on Raving from niko mas, but with the arrival of several proposals, it was confirmed that Becoming would engage in publishing projects beyond its own in-house editorial.
+
+The situation we were left with was that we needed a platform that could host all of these variations, and needed a conceptual framework to house and make sense of the archive. The platform would need to be able to arrange all of our articles, essays, interviews, reviews and visual contributions into a chronological feed, but also separate them into locations, and to be tagged intelligently across the board. We had a vision to establish a Press, a stack of papers and publications building up in the run-out tray of a printer. This began by admitting to ourselves that despite having barely used our old website for more than 6 months, we would need to reconceptualise the virtual presence of the project in such a way that would accommodate the new direction.
+
+It got confusing at times, how to explain that some publications were virtual, some were physical, some were both, and that some publications were standalone articles or essays, and some were part of series or groupings. Yet, we realized that we had already solved our problems within several articles that we published prior to this phase. To harmonize everything, we had to abandon the usual way of thinking about publishing and about materials. Within a lot of our recent publications, we had been working with a new framework of Quantum Sociology, and the ideas that were coming out of this were feeding into the ever-changing manifesto of Becoming. We were working with the idea of desiring and producing-machines, and realized that all of the publications we were producing, regardless of what and where, seem to begin as an expressive impulse, long before ever opening Microsoft Word or Adobe Photoshop — where the item ended up, how it looked, were just parts of the specification process from impulse to machine, the printed materials were just reifications of an expression that was without body or form. Sometimes we were so moved by an impulse that we would immediately prepare it for online and print formats, as if the affective power of the impulse was so great that it materialized a body around itself.
+
+What we ended up deciding was that the lowest common denominator between all of our publications was this simple truth, that everything starts as an impulse, and impulses leave traces behind them in trails, like footsteps left by a schizophrenic nomad. What we would present, then, online, would be the traces of everything, not the materials themselves, but the immaterial traces that can be materialized and repurposed and represented in many ways or many places. It is only here, that we can declare or divine, that Becoming is now a publishing-machine that produces traces, and elaborates on those traces by specifying them further and disseminating them wherever possible. For this, we have produced the following abstract, found in the about section of “becoming.press/home”:
+
+A machine is a break in the flow; it is a point, a moment, an event. Yet, at the same time a machine is flow, or rather, it is a producer of flow, or a conditioner of flow. A machine can be understood as the resulting tone of an electric guitar played by some idol, but it can also be understood as the effect pedal and guitar that produced that tone; a machine can even be understood as the signal passing through those machines. The quantum foam that appears like bedrock in our reality is itself a machine, perhaps the oldest machine of all, the closest machine we have ever found to the original source, the original transmission of pure flows of expression. Through the reproduction of the traces of pure desire, the machinery lining the boundary of desire-specified and desire-unspecified, like subquarkic pico-bots, endlessly facilitates the transformation of flows of desire from unspecified virtual immanence to substantiated being and back again. Quantum Foam is not a floor, after all, it is a mycelium. Becoming was made as a break in the flow, a moment in which something negative becomes positive, rising up through the threshold like a whale breaching. It is not in our nature to be positive, but it is undeniable that here, we ask for your attention, your time; we are interrupting you. Yet, as Becoming ruptures flows, it creates new flows in their place; it territorializes. Desire and creative energy floods into existence like an ocean into a river basin, disseminating like a fractal family tree through infinite pathways of specification. Creativity is called creative because it creates, it produces positives, substances, materials; creative energy produces machines, breaks in the flow, energy gets tied up in almost dormant structures for billions of years, energy gets tied up in substance. Rather than the expected assumption, Yang is not the creative force, rather it is Yin, the negative, which produces Yang, the positive; Yin creates. The negative is the creative. We who study the negative, we the scholars and nodes of anti-positivist discourse, we the queers, do not study what has been created, but rather study that which creates, and that which has not yet been created. Becoming is the break that leads to negativism.
+
+« Becoming » actualizes and produces traces; creative and expressive signals packaged for transmission.
+
+Traces could be considered like titles — packaged instances of expression, falling under a title; little photons containing affective energy. We classify these traces based on the location where they manifest. We call the traces that are pressed and printed materials, and we call those that dwell in cyberspace immaterials.
+
+Everything begins as a trace, somewhere, in some field(s), and the becoming-machine acts as a patch of soil for planting seeds; it is as much a hydroponics system as it is a magazine, and it is as much a magazine as it is machine-gun that inserts magazines as rapid-fire ammunition.
+
+The site of these traces, the intersection of all the trails of footprints left by the nomads who use Becoming as a way-station or coffee shop will be our new site: https://becoming.press/, there you will find all of the content Becoming has published, and that will be the site of all the future publications of Becoming. We will be producing immaterial traces from creative impulses, then distributing them virtually or pressing them into pulp and uttering them through microphones.
+
+Welcome to the new Becoming, we hope you feel welcome here.