[20 February 2024]: OTS - I never wanted to start a business...
Orange Tangent Study; ethical businesses; neurodivergence and terraforming; an "otherwise" (Ashon Crawley); "grammar of black feminist futurity" (Tina Campt)
Bismillah. We begin everything with the name of Allah. We say Bismillah to initiate an act to acknowledge the intention and the ethics we carry with all that follows Bismillah.
This is part of the newsletter’s Orange Tangent Study Updates.
Hiya!
I have a confession…
My business, Orange Tangent Study (OTS), has been around for three years, but I never wanted to start a business. It felt like a moment of self-betrayal to charge people for what I had given away so freely for the last decade and a half.
And! I didn’t even want to send this email. I hate “marketing” to people or harassing them to buy things from me. I struggle with the day-to-day of being an artist and figuring out a cadence to even tell people that I have shows (see me in LA at REDCAT and in Boston at Emerson Contemporary!).
There was a moment while working with my coach (yes, all good coaches have a coach and actively seek additional training!) where she remarked that my approach was unsustainable and would eventually lead to me being unable to provide anything for anyone, free or otherwise if I continued working in this way. There was also a moment when I realized that my fear of starting a business had much to do with a fear of not having strong models of ethical businesses.
I realized I can only understand what being an ethical business owner means by being one.
And I realized that I can develop a gentle process for inviting people into the orbit of this practice. I like storytelling, so I will tell you some stories.
What is OTS again?
Welcome to OTS! Orange Tangent Study (OTS) is a boutique consulting firm supporting cultural producers in designing materials, experiences, and systems for expansive learning opportunities.
We uphold our mission through various coaching, resource library, facilitation, and design offerings. We support our clients through long-term coaching, short-term intensives, learning design (curriculum, syllabi), resource libraries, and seasonal workshops.
Why did you start OTS?
Why OTS now? OTS began in my subconscious in 1991. I was not diagnosed with a learning disability until I was thirty-seven years old. For most of my life, I was aware that I was “weird,” meaning I had an astute awareness that those around me were processing the world quite differently than me.
I leaned fully into it, and while there were moments when I thought I could cosplay as a “neurotypical person” or don neurotypical drag, I always returned to some version of myself that was, frankly, unassimilable.
OTS sprouts from those childhood experiences of feeling on the outside but without a desire to abandon oneself. Instead of believing that my way of processing needed to be “fixed,” I decided to craft my own learning experiences within the container of the institutions I was placed in.
I imagined another possibility of learning. I found the edges of my various learning environments and identified trap doors, escape hatches, and secret compartments to test some of my methods.
At a very young age, I implemented what I later came to know as “accommodations”: creating homework calendars, spending my lunch periods in the publishing center making books, finishing my work early so I could get up and walk around, finding a way to get pulled out of classes so I could do experiments in the science lab; and spending a lot of time building little worlds in Hyperstudio, an early hypertext software. By the time I got to college, I opted to create my major, which allowed me to design my course sequence. At almost 40 years old, I quit full-time work with a non-profit and embarked on this journey of designing a life that was faithful to my curiosities, neurological needs, and spiritual priorities.
I am adept at terraforming and creating custom systems within other systems that did not work for me. In this process, I learned that I enjoy experience design or creating intentional moments of interactions across a range of environments. And this is not experience design for experience design's sake. We aren’t about a flashy process to bait you into buying something.
There are tons of consulting businesses. What makes OTS different?
What makes OTS different is that the eight year old below is steering this ship so that OTS can bring wider, lusher, and more liberatory learning experiences. Why should you trust a consulting business ran by the feral spirit of an eight year old? Well, because she is the person I am making my way home to: someone who was constantly rehearsing new worlds and asking questions about possibility.
At OTS, we take on the challenge of exploring how experience design can be a rehearsal for other worlds and possibilities. This is why I teach, lecture, and make art — designing experiences that become rehearsals for other learning configurations and methods to organize knowledge production. OTS is an extension of my art practice, which yearns for what Ashon Crawley calls “otherwise possibility”:
OTS is excited to work with you — you who desire an otherwise. Otherwise as Ashon Crawley notes being an “enunciation and concept of irreducible possibility…to create change, to be something else…” It is like what Tina Campt describes in Listening to Images as the “grammar of black feminist futurity” or “the tense of possibility that grammarians refer to as the future real conditional or that which will have had to happen. The grammar of black feminist futurity is a performance of a future that hasn't yet happened but must.“
Each collaboration we take on blossoms from the deep belief that your offering, your project, is something that must happen. This is why we only take on the projects that are aligned to an ethos of what Campt calls a “politics of prefiguration.” We enjoy collaborating with practitioners who seek as Campt notes, “living the future now.”
Come hang out with us if there is a future you want to live out in the present.
Should you work with OTS?
As we approach Q2 of 2024, we are invested in working with courageous practitioners who want to take risks and design experiences that let us test out other worlds.
You are a writer who seeks to design intentional and generative workshops that invite learners to develop rituals and systems free from the rushed publication cadence or stylistic expectations.
You are a DOE teachers with a wink of time to experiment with a new interdisciplinary lesson that combines visual art, social studies, and ecology.
→ Let’s design an interdisciplinary unit on Harriet Tubman as a naturalist!
You are an organization that is curious about designing immersive arts-based curricula that puts learners in the driver’s seat.
→ Check out the elementary school zine curriculum I developed last year for Booklyn!
You are an artist on the cusp of an interdisciplinary pivot and need support articulating the new ecosystem they are building.
→ Check out my Art21 documentary where I explore the development of my language-based practice
You are someone who is grappling with an idea and need someone to closely listen and organize your sprawling thoughts into a strong and sustainable project.
→ Read my 2021 Believer interview with Alexis Pauline Gumbs where we discuss close listening
We are excited to work with folks who, as Ashon Crawley notes, are invested in "imagining other modes of social organization, other ways for us to be with each other."
Thank you for reading,
Kameelah 👽
Finally, while I do not organize my finances around paid newsletter subscriptions, wouldn’t it be cool if this wee little newsletter could allow me to take quarterly self-imposed writing retreats? Consider getting a one-year membership at $70 USD :)
How to cite this newsletter: Rasheed, K. (Year, Month Day). Newsletter Title. I Will (?) Figure This All Out Later. URL