Chan Forum Masha — Babko

The forum arrived on a Tuesday morning like bad weather — sudden, electric, full of rumors and the impatient hum of people who had been waiting for something to break. Chan Forum Masha Babko was not a place you discovered by accident; it was the kind of event that folded into the net of certain cities and then unfolded in other ones, a traveling bruise of ideas and arguments and thinly veiled performances. It called itself a forum, but it behaved like a carnival, a salon, and a battlefield all at once.

The forum encouraged a peculiar intimacy between strangers: collaborators for a weekend, adversaries for a lunch. In one corner, two programmers argued about whether algorithms could have ethics; across the room, a curator insisted that ethics were not a property to be coded but a habit to be cultivated. The argument ended not in consensus but in exchange: the programmer left with a list of book titles, the curator with a line of Python she’d promised to try. That, more than the formal conclusions, was the point — small transactions of wonder, barter of knowledge. Chan Forum Masha Babko

The venue was an old printing house near the river: brick, tilted stairways, windows lacquered in papered posters from earlier affairs. At the center, a stage built from pallets and paintbins hosted jars of green tea and a single microphone, wrapped in chestnut twine as though to keep it sentimental. The chairs were mismatched, the lighting suspiciously flattering, and the projector flame-thin, as if it strained to make anything solid. People clustered in groups that oscillated between earnestness and irony. Everyone here wanted to be surprised; most feared what that surprise would think of them. The forum arrived on a Tuesday morning like

It was not all performative intelligence. Real projects were hatched and incubated in corners with bad Wi-Fi. An urbanist left with a prototype for a community fridge; two strangers decided to start a publication that published only letters to neighbors; a coder promised to build a mapping tool that would remember street-level oral histories. The hardware in the ideas was modest, the ambition enormous. People took away mail addresses, usernames, and a dizzy optimism — the kind that can exist for a bubble of time before the practicalities return. The forum encouraged a peculiar intimacy between strangers:

Every evening closed with a ritual Masha insisted upon: the Collective Reading. A circle formed, people brought excerpted texts and found passages they were ashamed or proud to claim. Her instruction was simple: read the paragraph that has been living inside you. Some read political essays with the solemnity of confession; some read recipes or grocery lists and wept anyway. On the third night, someone read aloud a piece of raw code and the room listened as if it were scripture. The code was an algorithm that predicted whether a relationship would survive a move. It was ugly and tender and wrong, and the audience loved it for that.