session #3

15-10-20

Homework: which five works/texts/... are key to your research? + annotations

[1000 Plateaus]
[Off The Network]

...

pad As long as the criteria (on the pad) are met, the form of the text is up to us.

What text form would be best appropriate to the content, context of our work?
"The ability to make work and to be able to articulate the reasons for the choices you made; to think seriously about the implications of the work you've made and to respect it as a serious contribution to a discourse."

"Writing articles that compile a thesis, breaking it down into manageable pieces."

"Use the forms you know work for you: If you write articles, poems, scripts, polemics, diary entries, stories, field reports, academic essays, observational essays, description of family video footage, use those skills in making your thesis."

"The fancy term for describing what you do and why you do it is methodology."

"There has to be in your thesis, whatever form it takes, some space to reflect on why you are asking these questions; and an account of the means by which you set about answering them."

"Be clear about these things before you go into writing the thesis think carefully about why you want to write this text and why it needs to take the form that it does."

MY QUESTION: "How to respect the unpredictable ways that the process might take when deciding on a form, even content.

If breaking down to separate pieces, how to assume the development?"

session #2

29-9-20

w/Marloes: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/GRS290920

Homework: Hackpact Prototype

Transcription of the presentation:

I'm thinking about how structure is something that is always present in all kinds of systems, even if they are not human-made.

(showing my prototype)

It is a collection of images. [Beehive, bees have a very clear structure.]

I am interested in these dynamics that happen because of certain structures. Improvisation is kind of on the other side of it as something that is something that is not predefined and pre-structuralized, but can also be (through composition, certain rules, protocols, regulations).

(max helping me hold up the prototype. "this printer is great, i didn't expect this effect".)

[humans inspecting weather. chaos. butterfly effect. trying to understand what is the sublime structure of weather.]

[a grid of streets, one square is misplaced]

[root systems, connection to the rhizome (Deleuze, Guattari), the notion of networks and systems - they are not even horizontal, there is another set of rules that regulates a certain system, way of being, way of construction]

[a bookshop Bukvarna in Maribor. no taxonomization, books all over. Something usually very straight-forward, categorized, not necessarily always. And you find crazy things in there. M:"a surrealist, structuralist experience of a library".]

(turning around for 180)

[How tool effects the body. Foucault: bodies of humans are being regulated. Notion of the power, governance that regulates. Orthodontist. Foot deformation. How the social structure/regulation, expectation (beauty standards). Applies to a lot of things > the common denominator: there is an internalized way of how we perceive something to be done in a correct/right/done in a certain way - the social contract basically. And it effects the bodies. Sitting behind a computer for 8 hours a day will probably lead to back pain in 20 years, if not now already.]

[human inside of a theatrical and acoustic space.]

[robocops and a person reading the constitution. The development after this picture was taken was quite brutal. Repressive organs of the society that govern our behaviour.]

I want to understand structure more, know where it comes from and how it effects the everyday life of people. It's quite abstract and theoretical.

What is the role of improvisation here? Perhaps (performance, sound, text) is a testing field, a space where blueprints for another kind of structure are suggested/tried out. I think that no-structure never exists. The absence of structure is almost impossible. If there is structure that is made in the flow, in the dao, in the undictated sorts of behavior, as an opposition to something that already exist - even this is structure. How to analyse it, how to perceive, which patterns are just copy-pasted into the structure.

M:"Improvisation is your method to analyse the topic of structure, or is it also about improvisation - is it your method AND your topic?"

T:"It's both. I always do this thing where I put structure into topic, and then it all mixes up. It is like the root system. ... And I don't like labels too much, therefore I try to dissolve it."

M:"Sometimes I have to put labels on things, in order to understand, to see if I recognize it correctly."

T:"That's the catch - how not to label something too fast, in what way to make the labels into variables. So it is not fixed and structuralized, just because the world says it has to be. Sometimes one thing goes under a lot of categories."

An anecdote from my performance (ctrl+p): In the moment when I was improvising lyrics/poetry, I was digesting all of the material that I was reading and researching. Improvisation for me is (in a strange way) also some sort of a composition of thought. A tool that materializes all of the conceptuals into reality, into language, into something that is shared with others."

M:"Method and medium."

Yes. Improvisation = topic, method and medium.

///

Graduate proposal guidelines > *making a proposal for yourself, scope and content, methods and formats. Short, precise, practical outline.

Marloes' questions:

*Why do you want to make it?

I consider improvisation as a domain where habitual behavior and social contracts are questioned/challenged, their liminalities explored. The aspect of "hacking the human mind/the human intelligence", finding strategies that overcome habitual behavior /indoctrination, systems that produce us/, enhancing sensibility, exploring subconscious modes of operation as a proposition, opening up options to each one of us, and the way we are intrinsically intertwined.

*What do you want to make?

Does it have to be ONE thing that I make? How does this work? How interdisciplinary am i allowed to be? ... Rather than making one work, i want to make a myriad, mutually informing each other, linked to theory (testing out theoretical claims in practice, with others).

I want to facilitate workshops and other forms of interactive situations (such as sound walks), or this and this, continue performing (alone and with others) in the field of sound improvisation; write and compose (scripts/compositions/exercises for humans in flow), build machines that help me think this one for example, and theoretically research the field of my interest: the friction between structure/form/composition/systems and improvisation/flow/subconscious.

A system for a structuralization/archivation of my research and practice will also be constructed "on the go", its final form will most possibly be a website.

*How do you plan to make it?

Here is a list of my research strategies.

*What is your timetable?

Practice and research simultaneous. Weekly overviews of the work made. Daily arrangement of thoughts. Prototyping continuous.

*Who can help you and how?

Collaborators, partners in communication, theoreticians and practitioners, tutors and classmates and friends and random encounters, meaningful debates.

*Relation to previous practice

Obvious and full. hehe.

*Relation to a larger context

See: why, and see references. &spell out the links.

*References/bibliography

See a list of references here, and my research log here.

comments on the answers to questions

session #1

17-9-20

w/Steve, Marloes, Natasha: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/GRS_session1_20_21