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notes to self: a glossary for what i do

So it's a season of - among other things - digging through piles of digital detritus in search of old workshop plans. I hate doing this kind of thing. I do almost anything to avoid it. I do this because as long as I don't actually look into my archives, I can delude myself into thinking that they exist.

There is something perversely paradoxical in my seeming inability to organise things properly. It's enough to think 'this is quite good, I should make sure to keep it' and then all hope of actually doing so is gone. I don't know how to ratify my allergy to proper record keeping with a simultaneous and contradictory need to assert my presence on the world.

That's a big tug and pull for me.

I want to leave foot prints, so long as my feet aren't artificially weighed down. I want to wear a groove, but only the kind that allows for divergence.

So yeah. Whatever that's about, my (lack of) record-keeping is a physical manifestation of it. Happily, the disorder is accompanied by amnesia and a good deal of serendipity. I probably don't have what I'm looking for, but I do have other stuff, like this, to share.

This particular this is a glossary of practice I wrote last year,  as a means of deciding whether or not it was worth asking others to do it in a workshop setting. I found it this afternoon, over a year later.


Wink: The desire that the work avoid taking itself too seriously; a reminder to endeavour always to approach Chekhov in the sense of laughing because otherwise we’d just all kill ourselves; a rejection of the kind of high-brow pretension that makes us scared to speak among colleagues; a revelling in absurdity, while still embracing caring as a good.

Run(ning) towards complexity: The work’s resistance to anything too easy, to reductive, too neat. 

Smashed beads: A visual metaphor for montage. Less about stringing discrete units, more about overlay, juxtaposition, mash-up.

Dramaturgy: intelligent, intentional making

The why: Something which must always be answered. The principle of curation. The litmus test. The engine.

Specificity: Actually something - the principle that something genuine/actual is actually more communicative than a bunch of apologetic generals.

It’s for them: A reminder to give it away, a reminder that it’s not for/about me.

Some additions from the last year:

It's all part of the same thing: A reminder that there's an element of choice in the creation of internally divisive walls. I'm not working against myself, if I understand the interconnectedness of all things, even those I dislike. There's value in knowing what I'm not.

Auto- : A prefix of agency, learned from Sonia Gomez. What I have. What I can do with it. What is at my disposal. There's always something.

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