A field does not begin the day someone proposes a name for it; it begins earlier and more quietly, at the point where the relations among a set of practitioners, questions and methods start outliving any single output that any one of them produces. Individual papers, artworks or projects come and go, but if the network of citation, argument and mutual reference among them keeps recurring across those individual outputs, something more durable than any single contribution is accumulating underneath. RecurrenceMass names the moment this accumulation acquires enough weight — enough repeated, mutually reinforcing recurrence — to start behaving like a gravitational centre that pulls new work toward it, rather than remaining a loose scatter of unrelated projects that merely resemble each other. Naming a field, in this account, is less an act of creation than a belated act of recognition, arriving after the relations that actually constitute the field have already been doing the work.
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