Some More Islands
Editorial
Some Islands has got off to a blazing start. We thought we would continue. Other folk have now joined this art-science collective. They are ready to strut their stuff.
You know when you open up an art journal or other intellectually focused magazine and see an oddly cursory theme like ‘Thought’, ‘Embrace’, or ‘The Sublime’? Some Islands 2 – Representation takes a similar approach. Why representation? Because it is so amorphous and abstract, leaving much to the imagination and creative and scientific repertoire in terms of which direction such thinking can go. We all have research objects we seek to depict, typify, and embody with words, photographs, music, and film.
How do different people across different locations, languages, upbringings, and ages, irrespective of whether their jam is mainly art or science, do, denote, and manifest their thing and become an expression of their thing? Those involved with Some Islands Collective (no italics; the community of artists, scientists, and scholars) contribute and present their thinking in Some Islands (italics; the journal generally) and Some Islands 2(italics, this specific issue of the journal). The product is the course, both arrival and departure.
Who are the players, what is their relationship to Some Islands and Some Islands, and how have they all come together to comprise Some Islands 2? They are architects, artists, musicians, scientists, and writers who wish to get their thinking out in short, manifesto-like statements and polemics about their creative work. Because of the scope and diversity of approaches, the combined result is a multiplicity and pluricity of outcomes. 4FE’s design work is intended to be simple and clean yet provocative and illuminating, combining and contrasting these different voices into some kind of coherency. We’re fine with it if it doesn’t always work. It’s part of the experiment. There is always future and further food for thought in insurmountable contradictions and mistakes.
Pulling together this corpus of minds and ideas involves travel in and out, national and abroad, digital and analogue. The most notable passage and fulcrum here is friendship, that personal and emotional alliance which brings about interaction, managed intimacies, and closeness, either geographical or emotive. The expression, ‘people don’t remember what you said, but they remember how you made them feel,’ is apposite. No one in Some Islands 2 doesn’t want to be. Some wanted to be, but never submitted. Never fear; this is far from the final Some Islands product.
My editorship has involved pulling together as many strands as possible of people’s craft into a digestible mix of declaration-like snippets of writing, image, and some bits of sound. These pieces are the instigation of stories and storylines, places where creatives can tell their and other people’s exposés first hand. The result is that Some Islands (2) has achieved the standard of a peer-reviewed publication, perhaps even higher and more relevant than many other technical and discipline-specific periodicals. Moreover, these pieces are personal, honest, and contemporary, something so often lacking in dry scientific writing.
In this sense, and while Some Islands is the flagship publication for the amalgamation and melding of linguistics, island studies, and art, it is not stringent or closed in terms of the possibility and allowances of topics it can or might contain. Again, Some Islands is the method, the theory, the practice, and the outcome all at once. Some Islands Some Islands’es itself to become and bring into being Some Islands so that it can become more Some Islands-y. And here we are. Where a recipe is not the meal, Some Islands, the journal, is also a part of Some Islands, the collective, concept, and lifestyle themselves. And vice versa. Bon appetite!
The articles are presented alphabetically based on the letter of the author’s first name. Aside from this formality, there is little explicit curation as regards topics, themes, and threads. The intention is that individual thinker’s polemics, that is, the laying down of controversial debate and dispute, through putting forward position statements about said individual’s creative approach(es), comprise Some Islands 2. These more-than-stand-alone morsels intend to set a precedent without the need to spoon-feed readers beyond essential context and content. Any interested seeker can do their own subsequent research to find out more specifically what these exact instances may be and who these scholars are. The intention of Some Islands 2 is to plant seeds of intellectual curiosity and even artistic gaping and amazement in digital format, while encouraging analogue engagement with non-Chat GPT-style production and representation. We hope that you will click on these pieces many times, share them with others, and return to them again and again.
We at Some Islands and in Some Islands believe that it is in this continual commitment through rendezvousing where the magic lies. Interaction and togetherness in artistic and scientific endeavours are the only ways to keep intent, content, and output on their toes. So, dear reader, whether you like it or not or know it or not, you are a part of this project as much as those who are present in these articles are. We chart the uncharted on the page, and work our way through gates to futures we envision to build.
The two hypotheses tested in Some Islands 2 are: 1. Some Islands 2, the actual journal publication, is itself the art and science; 2. Some Islands, the combined methodological processes of The Collective which bring about Some Islands 2, leads to the art and science itself. The results of this hypothesis testing are considered in the final article, ‘Some Some’.
At the start and in the end, Some Islands, the journal, Some Islands 2, this journal issue, and Some Islands, the collective and concept, are about, nay, merely are life(style) and living. And we all know the ur-basis of life is the moral, aesthetic, and emotional domain. These are the provinces at the Centre. They converge and diverge at start-finish by, with, at, on, toward, and in Love.
Joshua Nash
West Cronx, South Australia
November 2023