Next Update: 26/09/23
IDs from before the 2022 update remain valid until the originial expiration date.
“…you’ll need to be very careful with the IRS. If they notice how frequently you change your name legally, they will want to see every document from each name change. They will definitely be suspicious. If they ask you why your previous taxes were filed under May while your current name is June, you’re going to have a big problem unless you can provide every single piece of documentation from each year… be very careful with the IRS.”
I will keep their name private, but thank you ________.
Put on by my dear friends at Studio Wenjüe Lu, they have described the challenge as a “durational experiment that challenges the participant to only wear fixed sets of Wenjüe Lu pieces for one full year, or 365 days.”
At the outset of the challenge, Michael, a member of the WJL team, shared some words that have stuck with me through the beginning of The Long Year:
“Pattern itself is merciless at times. Even Ever-Changingness can be rendered, through its lenses, as Unchanging; in forms of ceaseless need for change, without much thought given to the Ends such Means could beget - Burnout from the "meaningless" search of "meaningfulness"
Boundless love to Michael and Lulu. Boundless love to Martin and Laurent. On to the next day.
For centuries, the dominant view was that it is essentially for cognition, the organizing of knowledge and thoughts within the mind. In Plato’s Timaeus, Timaeus says the gods gave us sight and hearing so that we might behold the courses of intelligence in the heavens and apply them to the courses of our own intelligence which are keen to them. Socrates, when he talks about communication, says it is a paltry thing. Communication hardly figures in Saussure’s Cours. Even Chomsky has said that what a pity it is that the wonderful intellectual faculty that is language, this beautiful structure, has to get distorted by its use in mere communication. So, there’s a very long history of this. And then there is Romantic thought, where self-expression becomes the key function. But starting in around the late nineteenth century and continuing up to the present, communication is what most linguists, and non-linguists, will tell you is the main reason why language exists. You know, tracing this history reveals a lot about the human conception of human existence vis-à-vis God, animals, other people, and above all, oneself... You know, one’s selfhood, person-hood, identity, that is up there with the other functions of language at least.”
Excerpt from interview with linguist John Joseph, conducted by linguist E. I. Chávez Barreto.
Whereas ‘real-world’ references to one’s name or identity can be tied to the present moment, digital spaces are accompanied by a sense of timelessness.
So far, in face-to-face social interaction, I am grateful to be able to say that people very rarely refer to me by a previous name. If someone makes a mistake (understandably), it’s always followed by an apology and a correction. Again, I’m thankful for all of your continued participation and co-authorship of this project with me.
In a digital ‘place,’ old emails, social media accounts, or photos can resurface as a near-daily occasion. Any of these notifications, correctly addressed or otherwise, are granted the same weight through the abstraction of the screen. A digital identity from my distant past might spring up via push notification — frozen in time, and, technically, still correctly attributed to my personhood.
I look forward to seeing how confusing this gets as TLY continues. By the end, there’ll be 12 different names all attributed to my same inbox. The amount of corresponding identities, then, gets a little more complicated.
© BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons
According to Vygotsky, signs are first used as external means, and via a complex process of internalization, “[s]tep by step a sign is being interiorized” (Ivanov 2014: 498) to serve specific inner functions (Vygotsky 1978; Veer, Valsiner 1991). Speech represents one of the most complex uses of sign systems, allowing a child “to master his surroundings with the help of speech” (Vygotsky 1978: 25). In this respect, the internalization of speech refers to a developmental point at which verbal language becomes a dominant sign system for mediating inner psychological processes.”
Aleksandr Fadeev 2022
Reminiscing on past chapters. The death of a friend. The feeling of hearing my birth name falls somewhere between the two.
A recent conversation with my friend Myunghyun reminded me of the power that lies in a name. Though I’ve never felt strongly about my given name, I’ve begun to feel a creeping sense of loss.
In embracing myself as January, however, I’ve found a new rock upon which to steady myself. A temporary net of support.
It’s only year one, and we’ll see this cycle repeat itself again and again. A repeating pattern of change — one of many within the project.
Understood in this way, umwelt is “the core sense of Uexküll’s concept – subjective space in identical time” (Kull 2023a: 178). For the sake of clarity, to avoid blurring the concepts, Kull (2023a: 177–178) proposes the term ‘umweb’ for the second type of umwelt, suggesting that Distributed umwelt is the web of meaning-relations over the course of time (diachronically), both intra- and inter-organismically. For this, the term ‘umweb’ is proposed. Umweb is the whole set of sign relations that organisms have through-out their life.Furthermore, Kull describes ‘umwelt’ and ‘umweb’ in terms of opposition: the former is personal and closed, while the latter is interpersonal and open. However – and this is important from the perspective of our discussion, umwelt is the subjective world of the organism (as Uexküll intended) at a given moment, whereas umweb is diachronic, encompassing a longer time perspective, and sometimes also relationships between different umwelten. Umwelt is subject to subjective time, whereas umweb – if we can simplify matters in such a way – is objective, or perhaps ‘shared’ would be a better word here.”
Katarzyna Machtyl, 2024
Don't worry, I have it set so that I cannot see your response.
This active perspective on meaning is central to The Long Year from a wide variety of angles and at various levels of conceptualization. To name a specific factor as it relates to TLY, our current conventions of naming could be considered to be an anasemiotic structure of today’s social culture. The communicative structures of language allow for the categorization, or grouping, of sounds into names, which gives them meaning to be used as names in everyday practice. TLY’s practice of assuming a new name functions as an attempted act at catasemiosis in which the central questions of the project are exerted upon the world through a set of social actions.
The anasemiotic process poses a unique challenge in that it contributes to an inherent loss of information through the practice of grouping objects together. To solely focus on a grouping of similarities leads to an erasure of individual distinctions. The categorization of an animal as a mammal, for example, focuses on the shared traits of possessing warm blood and fur, giving birth to live young, and producing milk to feed their young. If, for example, I am told about the discovery of a new mammal, I know to expect that it possesses the aforementioned mammalian traits. What this label does not communicate, however, is whether I should expect to see the long neck of a giraffe, the hard tail of a beaver, or some entirely new distinctive trait upon viewing this newly discovered creature. If a cheetah is simply described as ‘a mammal,’ all of its distinguishing information — its spots, running speed, diet, coloration, etc. — is lost.
As a whole, contemporary naming conventions are far too complex, culturally dependent, and dynamic to break down and define in this single post. There are, however, a few specific aspects of naming practices that fall under TLY’s consideration. Whereas most given names are carefully, intentionally chosen by the members of one’s family, the individual relationship between a name and its subject can, at times, feel somewhat arbitrary (given that a person rarely has a say in the decision behind their own name). The simultaneous presence of arbitrariness and intention is similarly present in The Long Year. The 12 names that will be assumed over its course have been intentionally selected, though my own personal connection to these names is severed due to their predetermined connotations as part of an anasemiotic cultural system relating to the measurement of time (similar to how given names often relate to meaning systems such as cultural tradition or religious belief).
Catasemiosis then comes into play through the continued assertion of these changing names in my day-to-day life, both in external, social interactions and in internally affirming these changes to myself. The resulting expression of this assertion could be seen as one angle of The Long Year’s mission. What exactly might this entail? To be honest, I don’t know yet. Each new introduction, name correction, and online account creation, however, brings a bit more clarity to the nature of this process.
I’d say that The Long Year is being treated as an experiment. I’m curious to see how these changes will affect my ego, sense of identity and social interactions. This section of the website will be updated with the turn of each 节气, or roughly every two weeks, beginning with the dawn of the new Lunar new year in 2026 (year of the Fire Horse).
Additionally, since July 24th, 2025, I have been participating in a challenge put on by the lovely team at Wenjüe Lu: #365DaysofWenjüeLu. At this point, I’ve spent a little over five months wearing only their clothes. This small change in my life has shown to transform my habits and ways of thinking. I’m curious to see what stands out during the months that these two projects overlap.
I’d like to express a preliminary sense of gratitude to all of you who are joining me in this experiment. If our paths cross in any way over the course of the next twelve years, make no mistake — you are a part of this too.
January, 2026