The Cycles of Circulation project excitedly announces @cyclesofcirculation, an instagram research account that expands and elaborates the places, disciplines and discourse where the ubiquitous and powerful model of the ‘cycle’ shows up.
It is a catalogue of theoretical and diagrammatic cycles that spans disciplines from ecology to psychology to literature and everything in between. Delivered in a scrollable Instagram format, the project provides an incomplete but telling overview of the pervasiveness of cyclical concepts across time and culture, triggering further curiosity, and involved communities to question what the cycle does or can do. In tracing cycles from different fields and through various discourses, we see how these operate as formal projection, and how they order processes that might be, or might be described, otherwise. The cycle here acts as a worldmaking device that generates physical and graphic forms, results, actions, cosmologies, and intellectual, emotional and spiritual sensibilities. The sheer pervasiveness of the cycle helps us ask after how we wound up living in a world with so many cycles, and how things might be otherwise.
@cyclesofcirculation was compiled and prepared by Karolina Sobecka and Jamie Allen. Research and editorial contributions to this project were made by editor and urban studies graduate student Isabella Baranyk.