_Everything has the name of something else._ What is a _thing_? What is _stuff_? When do we differentiate between isolated elements—a bicycle, a grape, a thought, a feeling—and when do we blur these perceptual categories and merge elements together—a disarranged mess of parked bicycles, a vineyard or even a bunch of grapes, an ideology, an emotional event?  At first glance, “stuff” and “things” appear like simple and straightforward words. We use them all the time to refer to the objects, events, textures that surround us in daily life: “that kind of stuff,” “that sort of thing.” But upon closer inspection, these concepts are more complex than we tend to give them credit for. Stuff is predominantly used for uncountable stuff. Whether it matters or not. Matter and energy (which are interchangeable, physically speaking) can be paramountly designated as “stuff,” as substance with no clearly defined beginning or end: matter is anything that has mass and takes up space, while energy is the ability to do work; to put matter into observable action. Turning matter into a _thing_ is a matter of physical work and organic labor. In this sense, “things” tend to be the more clear and distinct manifestations of “stuff:” the vantage point that renders a thing a thing is what makes it a thing. The thing is that we don’t know what the thing is. Objects tend to be things, but then again: so do activities or processes. That’s why we can speak of a thing like dance, or a thing like music. Or the thing that can happen to be the case or not. These perhaps somewhat clumsy ideas permeate the fields of philosophy, cognitive science, computer science and beyond. In philosophy these are questions of how universals, _stuff_, relate to particulars, to _things_: how does the concept of dog relate (“dog stuff”) to that specific dog, sitting there? In cognitive science we find questions relating to cognition-perception more specifically: how does an experience begin, where does it end? When do we see an object, and when do we see a texture? In computer science, particularly in computer vision, we design parameters for understanding things like semantic segmentation (object and border detection) to designate, e.g., which pixels are part of a thing and which can be considered background stuff.  The same principle of distinction can be applied when recognizing and qualifying specific sounds as background noise, and others as signal, i.e. information, language, music. How does the manifold of sense—stuff—created by firing neurons during the unconscious state of sleep become information—things—we can identify, remember, relate to our life in the waking state? And why are we prompted to assign them a function, and a meaning (to _thingify_ them)? If we move into the territory of art: when, and how, does a urinal cease to be a generic functional item to turn into a thing—namely an art object—with a title—_Fountain_—and an author —R. Mutt (a pseudonym of Marcel Duchamp, or an idea from [Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven](https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/mar/29/marcel-duchamp-fountain-women-art-history))?  Traversing these questions of cognition-perception, designation or naming, selection and distinction, involves attending to them in a variety of particular ways, becoming aware of their complexity. As our weekly practice, Wreading & Riting will operate as modes and modalities of attention that help us shape and interpret things and stuff and organize and express our experiences. In art, we tend to handle objects and textures, processes and events. A lot of things, a bunch of stuff. In this course, we’ll navigate these concepts together in order to question our established understandings and perhaps reach another level of thingification and/or stuffefaction.