For 43 minutes, professional cellist Melody Giron plays Johann Sebastian Bach’s Cello Suite No.1 in G Major. Or rather – she plays parts of its prelude, over and over, searching for her tone. The ending never arrives. The beginning returns again and again, maintaining a state of perpetual preparation. Listen with us to Cally Spooner’s DEAD TIME (Melody’s Warm Up), 2022. Will you unlearn the melody? Can you listen like a beginner?

Spot, the yellow four-legged robot dog manufactured by Boston Dynamics, and its canine lookalikes, have become increasingly ubiquitous in daily life. It patrols and surveils university campuses, parks, and neighborhoods under the auspices of safety and innovation. Many are not fooled by this narrative and, in response to its presence, have taken Spot’s removal into their own hands. The following text is a set of speculative abolitionist scenarios constructed by reappropriating the Boston Dynamics User Guide for Spot and shifting it into a manual of sabotage to be used instead against this carceral technology.