The Long Year




January 1st, 2026 marks the start of The Long Year, a process which follows my adoption of a new name at the start of each Gregorian calendar year. This process will observe the English names of the Gregorian calendar’s 12 months, and will encompass both legal and social changes to my moniker.

The Long Year is an experiment aimed at allowing a personal exploration of identity, onomastics, and sociosemiotics. While a name, or proper noun, is typically attached to its subject (somewhat) permanently, The Long Year allows for an onomastic cycle that is marked by repetitive change. In tandem, the names of the months already signal an existing set of subjects, and they come with their own set of pre-existing definitions and connotations. Both ideas are central to The Long Year, which hopes to allow for an identity that is constantly in flux — ever-shifting and without a home.

I am joined in this project by my good friend, and filmmaker, Parker Rouse. Parker will be documenting this process over its 12 year course.

Currently - January
thelongyear20xx@gmail.com
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Last updated 25/12/29



Ülle Pärli 2011 “It is still quite clear that proper name that signifies a unique, autonomous entity, be it the individual or a certain segment of the world around him/her, is not comparable to the general name taken into account in the semantic meaning — in order for a general name to become a proper name, it must forget its semantic meaning.”


Ernst Cassirer 1945 “Language is a ‘symbolic form.’ It consists of symbols, and symbols are no part of our physical world. They belong to an entirely different universe of discourse. Natural things and symbols cannot be brought to the same denominator. Linguistics is a part of semiotics, not of physics.”

C.S. Peirce
1897 “An indexical word, such as a proper noun or demonstrative or selective pronoun, has force to draw the attention of the listener to some hecceity common to the experience of speaker and listener. By a hecceity, I mean, some element of existence which, not merely by the likeness between its different apparitions, but by an inward force of identity, manifesting itself in the continuity of its apparition throughout time and in space, is distinct from everything else, and is thus fit (as it can in no other way be) to receive a proper name or to be indicated as this or that.”


George Herbert Mead
1934 "The 'I' is the response of the organism to the attitudes of the others; the 'me' is the organized set of attitudes of others which one himself assumes... The 'I' of this moment is present in the 'me' of the next moment... The self is essentially a social process going on with these two distinguishable phases. If it did not have these two phases there could not be conscious responsibility, and there would be nothing novel in experience."



Nina Arutyunova
1998 “Linguistic competence with regard to names that relate to the world is different, in principle, from words that pertain to human thinking, their system of concepts. In order to operate with names that lead the addressee to the objects of reality, one must know how to find one’s bearing in the world; in order to operate with semantic predicates (attributive words), one must find one’s bearing among the ways of thinking about the world. In the first case, one must be familiar with reality, in the second case — with the expressed system of linguistic concepts. In the first case one must know the word’s relation to the object, in the second case — understand the word’s meaning. The usage of concrete names is determined by the ontology of the world, but the usage of semantic predicates — gnoseologically.”



Joel Parthemore 2014
“...the apparently static nature of concepts is an illusion; concepts are in a state of constant and – if often only incremental – movement and change. They are in a constant state of... being brought forth as the conceptual agent interacts with her environment.Though their superficial appearance is of stability, their underlying nature is of fluidity... they must be this way because, at the same time that they must be able to apply across unboundedly many contexts, to do so they must adapt to fit each new context – since each new context is, in one way or another, unlike any that came before. So there is a tension and a balance between stability and change. Too much stability, and concepts cease to be relevant, because they cannot adapt; the conceptual frame-works of which they form part cease to function as conceptual frameworks. Too much change, and the regularity that is their outward hallmark gets lost.”



 







Last Updated 24.10.31
Journals
Next Update: 26/09/23



26/09/07To be honest I think I’m really going to miss the name January. I kinda like it. 

26/08/23In March of 2022, the New York State Department of Motor Vehicles launched an updated design for driver’s licenses and state IDs. Advanced Licenses feature an exposed chip, where it had previously been embedded within the card. The New York state seal has been redesigned using multiple laser imaging — two separate images are engraved into the card so that its image will change depending on one’s viewing angle. Embossed text is also featured throughout each card, allowing many of the card’s written elements to be felt by touch. 

IDs from before the 2022 update remain valid until the originial expiration date. 
26/08/07 Some words from the kind Social Security Administration worker who helped me with my name change earlier this year: 

“…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 ________.
26/07/23Today marks the end of a different time-based project that has engaged me for the past year: 365 Days of Wenjüe Lu. 

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.
26/07/07“But so... there is this fundamental question: what language is for? And views on it have changed historically.

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.
26/06/21
On average, how many times per day do you introduce yourself?




26/06/05
A side-function of the project is that it acts as a sort of exposure therapy for waiting in line at government offices. I visit them more often than I’d expected; waiting and waiting and waiting and...


26/05/21Almost 6 months into TLY, the process has highlighted an imbalanced communication of identity between digital vs. ‘real-world’ contexts. 

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. 


26/05/05
A nesting of opened matryoshkas


© BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons

26/04/20 “Inner speech is characterized by the juxtaposition of thinking and speech (Vygotsky 1986: 210) in its functioning, bringing into relief the unique role of verbal language in thinking...


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

26/04/05 Four months in. I feel more disconnected from my birth name than ever before. 


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. 



26/03/20 “...umwelt is not simply the environment, but the phenomenologically understood lifeworld of the organism, and that this lifeworld is founded on a functional circle (Funktionskreis), consisting of a dyad of perception and action, to which we will return. Therefore, the umwelt of each animal is “the world as it appears to the animals themselves, not as it appears to us. This we may call the phenomenal world or the self-world of the animal.” (Uexküll 1992[1957/1934]: 319)...


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

26/03/05


 
Don't worry, I have it set so that I cannot see your response.   

26/02/17 “We now know that meaning arises from an initial interaction between the bodies of living beings and stimuli from the outside world. This process, which leads to the development of semiotic structures, is known as anasemiosis. However, the description of semiosis would be incomplete if we did not take into account a second movement in which the body is involved in a second interaction with the world: that of the action exerted on this world by meaning. This movement can be called ‘catasemiosis’ (if the Greek prefix ‘ana-’ refers to a movement from the bottom up, ‘cata-’ refers to a movement from the top down), and the complete semiosis is made up of the interactive cycle of anasemiosis–catasemiosis” (Édeline & Klinkenberg, 2024).

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.

25/12/30 I’m trying not to go into this with too many set expectations. 

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