1999, Leuven
Based in Brussels
Medusa Offspace
Polyflows
The Bureau
email,
Polyflows understands “knowledge” as a WIP –not as information that awaits to be revealed, but rather a collaborative construct by means of undomesticated curiosity. Grounded in this premise, it orchestrates the “happening” of an (accessible) reading group, while revising some of its conventional formalities.
In this attempt, Polyflows moves away from the left-to-right reading of a text and curates materials of various mediums from diverse cultural outputs; from theoretical texts to niche blogs, from wiki-pages to YouTube content, from images, to pop-culture video-clips, from Wikipedia entries to objects brought in by participants. Each session loosely centers around a single keyword, phrase, concept, or phenomenon, and incorporates these input materials in varying degrees of experimentation.
As such, Polyflows seeks inspiration from the dynamics of the internet, where content is inter-linked across different pages, informational intake is fractured in a non-linear multi-tabbed chaos, and reflective discourse in the comments section unfurls in multiple directions, deviating from initial content to take on a life of its own.
The objective of the reading group is not so much to eventuate collective intelligence, as it is to draw on unconventional stockpiles of information, experiment with conversation topics, play with strategies of dialogue, gamble on intellect, fictionalise truth and weave personal stories through theoretical lenses.