This chapter explores the compulsion of presence as a gateway into altered states of perception, creativity, and connection. Through rhythm, repetition, and deep focus, trance emerges as a conduit to expanded awareness, suspending habitual thought patterns and opening new ways of seeing. Drawing from cultural traditions and embodied experience, the text considers how language, movement, and sensory engagement act as catalysts for transformation. Curiosity is framed as both an incantation and a method, dissolving the familiar to reveal latent potential. The invitation is to engage with materiality whether a book, a body, or a moment as an active site of discovery, where the mundane becomes extraordinary through attuned participation.

The chapter is a revisitation of the written component of Susan Sentler's contribution to bulanujung: Against Disimagination, 2020/21. bulanujung was a project initiative and thought experiment for a digital presentation of moving images online created and curated by artist Jeremy Sharma, collaborating with twelve invited artists. It was partly motivated by his previous endeavours into time-based media and his personal research. Sentler's contribution fold.fall.nest. was part of the curatorial theme titled ‘choreography and language’.

Daniela Monasterios-Tan's chapter delves into the transformative potential of the fold, or f/ol\d, at the intersection of fashion pedagogy and practice. Focused on a dance and fashion cross-disciplinary project, she examines challenges in merging movement and fashion design. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze's fold theories, Monasterios-Tan highlights the dynamic nature of folds, moving away from static garment-making. Her participation in Dr. Tsai-Chun Huang's Plica Ex Plica workshop expands her insight into pleats, emphasizing their role in liberating bodily movement, with references to avant-garde designers like Mariano Fortuny and Issey Miyake.

Shifting to a free-form origami approach, Monasterios-Tan encourages students to disrupt traditional garment functions. Exploring folds as an interface, she challenges established norms by examining internal body folds. Case studies of fashion photographer Arielle Bobb-Willis and designer Karoline Vitto illustrate the representation of internal folds in visual art and fashion. Ultimately, the chapter reflects on the fold's multifaceted nature, revealing its malleability when released from structural constraints—a dynamic force in contemporary fashion, disrupting traditional boundaries for a more fluid and expansive design approach.

In this article the authors outline a design and delivery of a participatory performance project, which took place in a Kilmarnock care home for people living with dementia (PLWD). In designing the project, the researchers aimed to improve the quality of lives of PLWD through a focus on the active agency of the participants and the co-creation of performance material. Over a period of five weeks in autumn 2023, the care home residents engaged in weekly performance workshops, which offered them opportunities to become ‘performers’. As we demonstrate, their participation in this innovative project enhanced their agency, confidence and overall well-being. In concluding, the authors present a positive case for participant agency being central to project design and make some recommendations for best practices when working with PLWD in care home settings, therefore enhancing their overall quality of life.

Investigation of the learning practices of popular musicians can glean benefits for the field of music education by helping stakeholders connect music practice with the music classroom. The purpose of this case study is to examine the learning processes of professional-level music producers in the United States. Three music producers identified as such by professionals in the field completed interviews regarding how they began and continued acquiring music production skills and knowledge. Resulting themes included learning through experimentation and matching, seeking out information, learning from others and learning in context. Based on the results of this study, internships and opportunities for collaboration during formal music production training might better prepare music production students for their future careers. Institutional learning can be compatible with ways music producers learn, and the expansion of music production education in college and K-12 settings could open the field of music production to more individuals.

In this interview with art historian Maria Elena Buszek, American photographer Kate Simon (b. 1953) discusses her work as a photojournalist documenting the nascent punk and reggae scenes of the 1970s. Simon shares the ‘punky-reggae’, art and literary connections in her long and storied career, and her perspectives on the gender politics that met the growing numbers of women photojournalists and writers who came out of the 1970s music scene.

“Can I Get A Witness: Thoughts on a Writing Life” by Max S. Gordon is an examination on the importance of bearing witness as a writer, and how, through sharing our authentic experience, we empower others with our work. Using the author James Baldwin as an inspiration, Max S. Gordon discusses the importance of writing as both legacy and resistance, that no matter how the medium of publishing may evolve, the need for us to tell our stories remains intact. Gordon also explores the role of identity in writing and how “testifying” to our experience as writers - particularly as writers of color and queer writers - sustains and inspires others.

A career change late in life helped Kealey Boyd find her voice only to lose her footing while navigating the bewildering world of art criticism. Her incisive and hilarious inquiries about writing, motherhood, regionality and art deconstruct our understanding of creative success and the lives behind the page.

Delany declined to summarize his essay. He is 82 years young.