For a long time, I was satisfied with the idea of agency. New materialist thinking helped loosen the human habit of treating the world as inert, reminding us that action is shared and distributed. But lately, agency has felt incomplete. Animacy names something quieter and more fundamental: the tendency of things to act, persist, and express themselves according to their own nature, whether I’m paying attention or not.

I didn’t expect to spend my afternoon sitting with a light pole, but here we are. A chat about new materialism somehow turned into me, a park bench, and a very patient pole trying to see what “co-presence” feels like. No flickering lights, no mystical 'woo', just a surprising sense that the pole and I had… something. And now I’m wondering if this weird little experiment actually scales.