Function is a dry vegetative notion of dry humdrum activity. Repetitive as a machine, reliable as a tool. Liminality in function is a factor worthy of study. At which point does function break? And is there such a point at all?

For our suspicion was that each celebration of function is a grim acknowledgement of dysfunction, of break down. Every narrative of function is a narrative of a specific percentage of function. Beyond that percentage there are no guarantees. But even for ordinary contractual commitments this percentage is not talked about. This discrepancy gets hidden in the general prevalence of error, guilt of the knowledge of making mistakes and callousness. Each function is a range and engaging in discussions outside those ranges does not yield anything. You cannot approach a machine and demand everything from it. Because you will only get so much, the rest will be the burden of your angst. The angst of unrequited desires. The mark of a driven person. The angst will make sure that you never sleep with an empty head ever again, you will always wake up with the potential energy of a piston with a push, an engine retrained at fifth gear, ready to go off at a moment's notice. At some level this angst keeps whetting your appetite and leads you on towards your next disaster.

Function then is an analogue entity not a digital one. There is no flip flop possible and talking of it in isolation and singularity can be quite meaningless. There is no construct of language which renders function as an adjective. It is only an abstract noun that further needs to be qualified relentlessly and impatiently.

The functions which the many cleavages of our desire wish to be performed are an amorphous mess. Vague, mysterious and and bewilderingly consuming in nature. In the moments we spend groping around in the dark to figure out what the contours of our desire actually are, we actually live our entire life. The periodic clarity that you feel is as much a distortion as it is a clue. Someone was once telling me that she has stopped listening to her moments of clarity because those moments took her towards more enormous disasters. Now every time she feels she is very clear, all figured out, she laughs and looks and looks in the other direction. And then does nothing at all. There are two ways of unraveling the fabric of your desire. One is to think like a gun. A gun has no process time; you press the trigger and boom. There is no choice, there are no logic gates. The path of the bullet doesn't have to be mapped onto any curve. Just boom and then locate the corpse. The second way is to act always in a way that you are alone in the whole universe. No other sentient being even exists. We know, we know desires, alive and dead, vestigial and functional.

Laboratories are spaces for iterative development of solutions for pre-defined problems. They also reserve the right to forget about the problem at hand totally and become spaces for play and exploration. Laboratories are essential spaces for academic tendencies to breakout of their non-stick, hands-free character and become viruses which can effect lives at large and not impose philosophical biases about the trajectories they lead to. Laboratories are wedded forever to a certain idea of industry and enterprise. If business was to be biologically grown and not fuelled by entrepreneurial lust and social warfare then maybe laboratory spaces would be of a different nature, maybe they would even be farms with ample sun and fertile soil.

Laboratories of course can also be oblivious to all of this and design a process with chaos and disarray at the foreground. It can be seen as a clown's errand, a halfway house between a space for therapy and full-scale nihilism. Doing so takes a lot of strength, so much strength that no one has been able to do it yet in the whole world. There was a time in the past when this strength did exist and such laboratory spaces did exist and that time is the sole reason for nostalgia still being meaningful. In that time there were no shared set of goals, no common objectives, humanity was a lost cause and any guess was good enough. The troops rallied in any direction that was clearly pointed out. The group dynamics was wonderfully cheerful. As no one had the answer and everyone was equally lost there was no diabolical layer to society. Politics was not about image manipulation in a terrain where no one was a star, but rather it was a game of chance where it did not really matter because nobody really cared and nobody really had any secretive schemes for taking over and displacing anybody else. Important decisions were taken over casual discussions over a marked table at the local bar. These decisions were then conveyed to the person who happened to be in charge and like a diligent clerk, the person went about implementing those decisions.

But the laboratories that we present here do not have too much to do with these histories. Maybe a little bit but not much. These individual specific laboratories do not even have distinct human minds looking after them. These are rooms in this building where diseases of different kinds can breakout, these are algorithms for predicting the pathways of outbreaks that may happen. When experiments go wrong here and things explode, things still have the potential energy to fly off in the right direction. Things still have a fair chance to conveyer belt that is connected to the main switchboard. These explosive fragments are charged with the laboratory's infectious ambience. In a way the laboratory travels in the particles of the dust, smoke and powder of things falling apart.

Laboratories do not necessarily invoke any cultural traditions at the first instance. Science, technology, industry, secrecy might be part of the history, might be embedded in the backstory but these do not enslave the idea of the laboratory, only co-inhabit it. Such co-habitations are many many and we would only be able to trace out a few here. These traces will emerge and get drawn out of things we do here and also the things we don't of course but also the things we merely sketch in words, merely write about. Because things being the way they are we figure that if you have to die you can die as much from holding a well-sculpted shred of thought in your head as you can from a bullet-wound.

Journals record the content that consciousness produces. These records are not plain and attempts at representation but rather they attempt to mount a web of discourse into view. A view available for examination and a view that is ready raw-material for history to weave its stories out of. These webs of discourse are like theatre, with figureheads who each seem to stand for a position and nuance of their own. From the world of simulation and modelling, journals are actually model simulations of a world with contrary opinions, hard-line politics and reputations built on them. Each journal tries to inherently be the friction and the noise that emanates when ideas with degrees of variation in their world-view have to acknowledge that they cannot be completed without the other. After movements orchestrated to differentiate and distinguish themselves they have to now make peace with other perspectives and agree to forge a landscape together.

Rather than become mastheads themselves journalists are lighthouse keepers who agree to abide by the inflammable friction that the journals contain. They agree to standby even with the risk of being engulfed by the fire that the friction could cause. And this is a real danger. As is the danger that the friction will subside and become just a rumble echoing from history. After a point, journals still have to remain what they claim to be. They cannot start short-tempered chases after social media brownie-points or financial market ambitions. They cannot suddenly desire to be stars in their own right, they have to commit themselves to being channels, like window-panes let the glass pass through. They cannot hope to become redundant specks of dust on the glass. Various rules apply to journalists. Besides the rules that relate to transparency and fidelity there are a bunch of rules that deal with fraudulent use of language. Journalists should be like lab-rats in the observatory of life. They should only relate authentic observations through media. Fabricated material ensures the death of the channel. On repeated violations of fraud they become nothing but stenographers. They become dependent on a voice that dictates something to them. They lose the capacity to write a single world on their own. They become like zombie-journalists, losing any individuality which they might have had.

Journals are maps of arguments, each journal is piece of fabric that holds the strands of a discussion together. But they are also stagings of fake dramaturgy. Stagings of the empty shells of superfluous construction of drama around empty ideas, not worthy even of consideration by the bored and idle otherwise. These are necessary too, of course, to populate the space of dullness, the off-white space that refuses attention and whispers, "go on searching, this is not where you stop." The moment when they whisper this, energies in the synthetic universe get balanced again and sighs of relief are heard all over, at least there is honesty in this space infested with namesake heroism.

Our journals are without much fanfare not interested in multiple voices, in the outside chance of discovering under published voices and becoming a platform for more bullshit than we know what to do with. We are not just self-obsessed, we genuinely find a satisfying kind of content in the mist of togetherness. Between Alishan and me, issues of journals only need to be transcribed from the radio of our misty heads. We do it one at a time and spread across months rather than days because we empathise with you and we want you to have adequate time for reflecting on each issue. We find calls for entries, invitations for content sent out into the vacuum of hope and unknown genius tiring and wasteful. If we already have an idea of what we want, why don't we do ourselves a favour and just deliver it to ourselves. Our journals are webs of postures that Alishan and me strike when we play amateur theatrics. And being such ardent fans of excellence in theatre we pour ourselves fully into our postures. We literally bend our psyches out of all their elasticity.

Rid of the imposed responsibility of having to discover other voices and promote the voices once discovered, we feel free and light. So light that we can dance around the few pages of our journal with a free-footed ease that betrays the betrays flavour in our heads. We know how to shape the many-sided polygons of the complex nature of concepts that humans consume and into spherical pellets that can be swallowed whole. These pellets are nutritious, low-fat and high in fibrous-content. They are fully digested and there is nothing left for you to shit out.

What is fulfilment? How do we know we are fulfilled and when do we know it? This is a mystery. But it is one that can be solved. It will not shake our entire being up. It will just cause a minor hiccup in our mind. And hiccups always have silly superstitions to explain them. If they don’t, they don’t qualify to be called hiccups. What kind of superstitions? If you are hiccuping somebody is remembering you. And lovingly at that. What does loving remembrance even mean in this day and age wherein nobody even has the time to remember anyone but the carpenter.

Why the carpenter? All hearts are made of wood. And for some or the other reason, they are always broken. So carpenters. Trying to fix our broken hearts…

We are also automatically fulfilled sometimes, if we actually do nothing about it. In a magical and illogical way the question of fulfilment works like a scarecrow sometimes. The things that offer us nothing back stay away and we end up feeling fulfilled without doing anything about it. At least in our minds we have thought about the question of fulfilment and reached for some kind of clarity. At least we know what action is likely to bring peace to our minds and what not. This clarity indicates that we have the capacity to know what is in our self-interest sometimes and what is not. This means that we can play the role of a healer to ourselves sometimes. At other times we come across as a complete stranger to our own interests.

This lack of symmetry in our behaviour is a rather strange phenomenon. It shocks us at least at times that we think of ourselves. Why do we have such a lack of tuning with our own selves? Can we do something about it?

We sometimes think that behaviour asynchronous to our own interests will stand out and seek attention. But it does not happen that way. It can also remain hidden deep within us for a long time. Because such behaviours are like seeds of colonial-instincts. Our personality is vulnerable. It can be taken over at times. And there is no defence acting in its favour. It is just a matter of choosing between two phenomenon. Special attributes cannot be associated between these them. This is a huge vulnerability.

We have many intrinsic ways of dealing with vulnerabilities. We overcompensate to make sure our vulnerabilities do not exploit our personalities. We overcompensate by letting minor indicators be major sirens. We then overcompensate by letting these major sirens be major alarms whether or not they deserve to be such.

But this play is not enough. When we get alarmed we are very observant about every subtle change in our personality. A temporary sinking feeling and we anoint it with a disaster of mega proportions — something which is difficult to overturn without massive effort. This is obviously opposite to the current of fulfilment being prominent in us. Thus we live our lives — incomplete and unfulfilled.å

Spirit emanates from the spark that gets triggered from good ideas. Ideas that have both the resolute nature of defining the individual they get triggered from and the simplicity of being conveyed through text and pictures. And we ought to value this spirit. It doesn’t come easy. It withers away as fast as it emanates. Why? Good ideas are often dismissed because they will upset the status quo. If there is a specific mode of life that is reserved for the exchange of ideas, for the trying out of ideas that are considered good and for taking lightly the outcomes of ideas that don’t prove to be good after all. It is the character of good ideas to seem to be good before they are applied and seem to be not so good after they are applied.

But when we are talking of good ideas here, what do we mean? Good ideas in which domain? By good ideas we are talking about paper inventions here. Ideas about new games, movies, theatre and other non-literary forms of art. Ideas that implore upon you to imagine something, imagine another art form from the way words describe them, put simply ideas of another world which is not this. For once leaving the question of proof of concept or prototype alone, and just let ideas be ideas. Letting practical and so-called worldly concerns of sustainability and profitability behind and just focusing on the merit of the idea. This doesn’t mean we focus on tentatively worked out ideas — it just means we focus on thoroughly worked out ideas (some even with prototypes) without the muscle of industry and capital to test them.

Imagination/creativity and industry/capital do not often co-occupy the same head. So what is to be done? We have to give ideas the opportunity to enjoy the what is only enjoyed by the application of capital. It is an ordinary assumption that the quantum of ideas far outnumber the quantum of prototypes. Taking ideas a step further is only going to test their robustness. But taking them two steps forward only demonstrates the availability and applicability of capital. In the world of ideas, the urgency of capital to multiply doesn’t mean anything. Any act to produce a particular idea so that it has multiple copies available is going to need capital. And capital is scarce at more times if not all times. And if capital is invested, it wants to either multiply or at least break even. A reportage of ideas produced at a certain time would be very useful. Time can be chronicled by ideas efficiently.

A compendium of what kind of ideas were produced in which time allows us to understand the it in more detail. It allows us to know the resonance of the idea more clearly. And this knowledge is very valuable. Instead of letting ideas be judged by the marketplace — we create a space for ideas to be engaged with as ideas itself — on their own terms.