Primitive Hypertext Lab

info

ethos

offerings

Offerings

TYPE	Course
HOST/COLLABORATOR	The School for Making and Thinking @ Abrons Art Center
DATE	April 8 - 29, 2027
TIMES	Thursdays, 6-9 pm EST
LOCATION	Abrons Art Center 466 Grand St New York, NY 10002
INSTRUCTOR	Kameelah Janan Rasheed
COST	$250
ENROLLMENT	Apply Here!
DESCRIPTION	Baddies Who Infodump is a gathering for those who have been told they talk too much about the things they love. Infodumping—the act of sharing extensive and dense information about a specific topic—is often treated as a punchline for the “annoying” person who speaks “too much” about a special interest. Refusing these designations, this course studies the poetics and politics of infodumping: the social regulation of intensity and verbal expression. We ask: Who is allowed to be expansive, peculiar, or intense? Which systems determine when curiosity is “too much”? What can be borne from excess, overflow, and misalignment? Readings, screenings, and prompts will engage Black Disability Studies, knowledge transmission frameworks, noise research, and ludic studies. Resisting the temptation to worship at the altar of compression and obedience, we consider strategies of being out of sync, non-compliant, and excessive. The course ends in a celebratory and unapologetically maximalist burst: (1) an evening of high-energy infodump presentations and an optional mixer where each attendee will be matched with a presenter to learn more or build a new obsessive relationship following the end of the class, and (2) the Infodumpers Reader, a photocopied communal artifact of obsession—scans, notes, PDFs, etc.—assembled as a perpetually folded set of pages, mirroring processes of recursion, expansion, and decompression. Week 1: Excess, Noise, Intelligibility, and Pathology Week 2: Attention and Orbits Week 3: Primitive Hypertext and Pareidolia Week 4: Play and Pleasure Week 5: Infodump Presentations and Reader Compilation