Nabokov gave us the word.

Poshlust: not merely bad taste, but the false sublime—
the hollow work dressed as insight, the ornamental thought that flatters power,
the counterfeit posing as truth.

We keep the word because we need it.
To name what we work against – as a marker of refusal.
Refusal of spectacle mistaken for meaning.
Refusal of academic polish that masks epistemic poverty.
Refusal of the comfort that comes from staying inside the lines of a discipline.

We were trained in systems that reward the legible.
We learned how to cite, to publish, to impress.
But we stayed for the feeling that something else was possible.

This is not a place for finished things.
We gather here to trouble categories.
To sit with the tension between structure and surrender.
To create spaces for art and science to meet not as tools,
but as ways of being— ontologically, relationally, publicly.

Here, a dataset might unravel into myth.
Here, a painting might ask a research question.
Here, theory and material refuse to stay in their lanes.

We begin with poshlust
because to name the false
is to begin making room
for what might still be true.