Fluidity
Forum.

2027

An intimate, participatory gathering for people interested in how humans make sense of things. Talks, practices, meals, and conversations that keep unfolding.

Should I attend?

An intricate, iridescent arrangement of interlocking organic and mechanical forms.

Fluidity Forum brings together people interested in metamodernity, sense-making, rationalism, metarationality, and thinking-about-thinking.

The program includes formal talks, open discussions, workshops, performances, and whatever cool, useful, playful, or intellectual things attendees decide to contribute.

Present something

Bring a developed argument, an unfinished question, a demonstration, or a panel conversation.

Try a practice

Join embodied, interpersonal, and reflective workshops alongside analytic inquiry.

Live together briefly

Share meals, common rooms, chores, late conversations, and the unscheduled life between sessions.

The complete stance

Six textures.
A whole way of being.

Wonder, Curiosity, Humor, Play, Enjoyment, and Creation are all part of Fluidity Forum. These six textures of David Chapman’s complete stance inform how we meet, think, and participate together.

Explore the complete stance

Wonder illustrated as one of the six textures of the complete stance. — Wonder

Curiosity illustrated as one of the six textures of the complete stance. — Curiosity

Humor illustrated as one of the six textures of the complete stance. — Humor

Play illustrated as one of the six textures of the complete stance. — Play

Enjoyment illustrated as one of the six textures of the complete stance. — Enjoyment

Creation illustrated as one of the six textures of the complete stance. — Creation

This year’s emphasis

Enjoyment

Each year, our theme rotates through the six textures. Following Play in 2026, we turn our attention to Enjoyment in 2027.

Decision-making facts

Planning is underway for 2027. Lodging, meals, and registration prices are to be confirmed.

Dates: Thurs Sept 30 – Sun Oct 3, 2027
Location: Detroit
Registration: Prices TBD
Program: In development

Fluidity Forum is an all-volunteer not-for-profit production of Scaladox Street, LLC. Any surplus goes into next year's budget.

Attendees seated around a living room while two people sing karaoke in front of the room's TV. — Presentations happen in the same rooms where conversations continue afterward. This is our late-night karaoke.

A participant stands on a chair while leading an interactive workshop for people seated in a circle. — Interactive workshops make participants part of the material.

Two participants give a musical presentation at an electric keyboard. — Demonstrations and performances sit comfortably beside talks.

Six wooden dice engraved with symbols representing textures of the complete stance. — Each year, attendees receive a handmade gift. This shows dice with symbols representing the six textures of the Complete Stance, central to Fluidity Forum: Wonder, Curiosity, Humor, Play, Enjoyment, and Creation.

Black and white stones arranged in a Go-Moku game on Fluidity Forum's wooden Go board. — Between sessions, we play Go-Moku on Fluidity Forum’s own Go board.

The Ideology Altar

Each year, participants may bring an ideology as their “plus one”: an object representing a memetic system they want to bring into the gathering as though it were another guest.

Together, the objects form the Ideology Altar. Giving each ideology a body and a name makes our frameworks visible, present in the conversation, but distinct from the people carrying them.

This is one of several specific ways that how we make event-running decisions is informed by our foundational texts, especially David Chapman's essay "Vaster Than Ideology".🌐

The 2025 Ideology Altar, with many participant-contributed objects and handwritten tent signs arranged together on a long table.

An object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Metarationality.

A wide view of ideology objects and their labeled tent signs arranged across the altar.

A target-shaped object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Representational Skepticism.

An object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Skepticism.

A prism-shaped object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Pluralism.

An orange object and its labeled tent sign on the Ideology Altar.

A bagged glitter object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Glitterism.

An object on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Libertarianism.

Pens presented as an ideology object beside a labeled tent sign on the Ideology Altar.

A transparent object and its labeled tent sign on the Ideology Altar.

The Ideology Altar showing all of the objects and labeled tent signs together.

A blue folder on the Ideology Altar with a tent sign labeled Machine Learning.

The 2024 Ideology Altar, with participant-contributed objects arranged across a long table.

From past forums

Selected sessions from 2026

Browse the complete 2026 program

Play vs. Games
How to Find the Gradient
Which Connections Are Worth Pursuing?
Occult Frameworks: Tricks and Spells as Models
Embodied Epistemology: What Your Body Knows Before You Can Explain It
Why Do People Like Sad Stories?

Illustration of imagined Fluidity Forum attendees posing for a group portrait in a residential common room. These do not depict real people.

Fluidity Forum takes place in a large shared house, not a hotel conference center. Q&A of a talk can continue over dinner. Workshops can turn into late-night conversations. An idea can be revisited after everybody slept on it.

A few dozen attendees create a temporary household with unusually high conversational density.

“A multidisciplinary, multithreaded, multiperspectival symposium with a few dozen of the coolest humans ever.”

— @puheenix

“Heart and head both filled to overflowing.”

— @puheenix

“Looking forward to watching the recordings of all the other excellent presenters.”

— Anna Riedl

FluidityForum.