Navsuv. The Bi-Weekly Summary

The Bi-Weekly Summary | 20.Oct.-02.Nov.2025

Epistemic Footnotes, Ecological Records, and the Screen That Wouldn't Let Go

What if the archive could mourn, the forest could catalog, and the screen could finally unlearn the page? These last two weeks have revolved around that uneasy triad — grief, ecology, and simulation — tracing the outer limits of description across its many material and epistemic guises: metadata, matter, and medium. Each text I wrote in this period explores a distinct mode of inscription, together composing a small inquiry into how knowledge systems remember, transform, and occasionally resist themselves.

In Epistemic Footnotes, I extended the Metadata as Revolt series by asking what occurs when the record begins to speak back to its own conditions of possibility. Footnotes, disclaimers, and tooltips — the quiet apparatus of bureaucratic self-reference — are reframed here as acts of conscience. Each annotation becomes a micro-gesture of accountability: a confession inscribed within the structure of description itself. Metadata, once conceived as a neutral substrate for information, emerges instead as an ethical surface — one that can grieve, accuse, and instruct. When the archival paratext is allowed to mourn, the catalog ceases to be infrastructure and begins to perform testimony.

From the syntax of metadata, reflection shifted toward the metabolism of the world. In Documentation Beyond Control and its mirrored chronicle Light as Record, I developed the framework of ecosemiotic archivistics: an ecological theory of documentation in which light, decay, and exposure displace the canonical triad of intention, authorship, and control. Within this paradigm, the leaf appears as the planet's first record — a self-descriptive archive written by sunlight and translated into pigment and form. Documentation, thus redefined, precedes the documentalist; inscription becomes a property of matter rather than a prerogative of the human. The archive, if read ecologically, should aspire not to permanence but to photosynthesis: to the continuous conversion of exposure into renewal. The forest teaches that memory endures not by resisting transformation but by metabolizing it.

Finally, Digital Literocentrism returned to the domain of the digital library to expose the persistence of print epistemologies beneath their algorithmic veneer. Screens, servers, and repositories promise dematerialization but replicate the architecture of the codex. The ebook replaces the book without altering its grammar; search interfaces still privilege what can be parsed, cited, or indexed. The infrastructure of access remains tethered to literacy, excluding gesture, sound, silence, and all forms of knowledge that resist textualization. In this sense, digitization becomes a new regime of compression: a translation of epistemic diversity into the narrow syntax of data. Until libraries learn to listen rather than merely display, inclusion will remain a decorative fiction, a slogan carved in pixels.

These writings chart a landscape in which metadata becomes testimony, documentation becomes ecology, and digital access becomes a mirror demanding to be broken. Between annotation and exposure, between footnote and photosynthesis, the work continues: to imagine archives not as mausoleums of order but as living systems — porous, accountable, and vibrantly entangled with the worlds they claim to record.

Navsuv offers a biweekly synthesis of my work: blog posts, critical notes, articles, archival documents, and other materials. It's not just a summary — it's an editorial thread tracing how each piece fits into a shifting landscape of memory, critique, and resistance.

The name comes from the language of the Sivdara, a fictional people from a broader personal project I'm developing: a continent imagined as a space to explore knowledge, memory, and the tension between presence and erasure. In their tongue, navsuv names the rope-and-straw suspension bridges used to cross the naroow valleys, up in the mountains — ephemeral yet enduring paths stretched between worlds. Like this section.