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Every single one of us exerts a gravitational force—however weak and small it may seem. We may not be pulling objects into our body on a regular basis, and even on the scale of the vast earth, we seem to be able to defy gravity with ease...pull our leg up and we're already halfway there. Gravity is the weakest of foundational forces, weaker than electromagnetism and the nuclear forces. And yet, gravity holds us and everyone we know securely on Earth. The moon's gravity creates the tides, generating a pulse for the vast oceans. Gravity is the dance between sun and planets, solar systems and galaxies—the balance that allows life to exist.

Likewise, the largest movements operate through many, many smaller gravitational pulls. If we are invested in enacting or inspiring change, we must focus our energy on these relationships and dynamics. There's often a lot of noise from our existing political and corporate spaces on what change should look like, the inspirational individual that galvanizes, or the power of a centralized system. These same spaces are rife with exploitation and inefficiencies. So as we model alternatives, we can't use the same metrics these spaces use to gauge success or trajectory. Our goals are not the same, we are not continuously gathering more centralized power, nor are we in desperate pursuit of larger and more grand influence or scale.

Instead, in some ways, we are just giving a name and some context to the anarchistic ways we already gather. In the same way we come together as friends, these groups are often small and intimate, addressing specific wants and needs (someone to talk about identity with in Chicago that is along my transit line, coworkers that have good taste in music but really dislike our mutual boss), instead of the broad strokes that larger institutions often paint with.

practice room is a space, and it's many spaces. It's the venue and the event. It's the idea that the spaces we have can be the spaces we need. We can transform our apartments, houses, sidewalks, into the galleries, hang out spaces, and theaters we want.

practice room can start as a monthly series of pop-up experiments. Different people are invited to experiment with event and space ideas they have, whether it's a pop-up restaurant, or a gallery, or a workshop, or a lecture. Just as an illustrator has only obtained the skills they have through hundreds of sketches, or a musician performs well only after many practice sessions, creating an event requires practice and experimentation too. But since most events require so much initial investment, we're not given many spaces to practice, and the few opportunities we get to host or curate an event, we skew conservative in order to fulfill the pre-existing obligations, make back venue costs, fulfill ticket requirements, conform to pre-defined layout of a space, etc.

From there, create a template that others can build upon, so they can cater specifically to their audience. If I host a screening series showing Asian cinema—creating a theater in a home—it might inspire an attendee to create their own screening series in their own home with their own community, building upon the structural work they learned from attending my event while also building in a way that best suits them. Maybe they want their film series to be about movies on disability, or they want to have a discussion before the film, or they want to have it every week. By keeping the groups small, it allows these pop-up events to be dynamic to the needs and wants of the immediate community it serves. This is one of the immediate failings of a larger, centralized system, in which, their pursuit of scalability will always exclude the most marginalized in favor of a broader, mass appeal.

The space can also expand into the virtual space. Create a gallery in Minecraft, or use geolocation and map an auditory space on top of an existing physical geographic space (i.e. an auditory mall, put some headphones on and go into a mall, walk into the food court to hear a lecture happening, then walk into a department store and hear a rave.) Our fluidity in how we create spaces that are vital in the development of more spaces in the future. The skills we accumulate from designing a town in Minecraft can translate over to how we design a mixed-use block, they both involve overlapping questions of governance, autonomy, etc.

These experiments, these DIY art spaces, these pop-up events, these various configurations are not just good substitutes for the "real" thing, or the best we can do with our existing resources, but a crucial application of our creative energy on the very structures that house and nourish our creativity. I want to claim that a screening in someone's apartment between friends is more cinema than any movie theater, that hanging up my friend's photos on the wall is a better celebration of photography than any gallery, that the spaces we forge within community will always be the ones that sustain us.