Response 7 - Ordinal Thoughts - version 1
Marie writes: This is version 1 of the response to Task 7. See here for reflections on the response.
16/10/18 – 20:21
I am not sure exactly where to start summarising this. I first want to begin by deciding not to spend time on correcting grammar or backtracking or changing my mind about where the stream of consciousness is going. So I apologise in advance to you, my reader, for the following prose which may well be inaccurate but also not terribly well written. The first thing that comes to mind is a conversation on our holiday in Fur where we took a long walk along the seaside to have a conversation about exactly how we would set up this project. We discussed the title and subtitle for it and what should be the centre of the project. We also discussed at great length what was the most valuable thing about it. I remember being very excited about it and slightly apprehensive too. Would this work out as a creative collaboration? Would we be able to agree on methods and content? What impact would it have on our private relationship and our family? My mind is now completely empty. I cannot recall anything else we talked about as the time pressure is on and I wanted to devote exactly 45 minutes to this task tonight and not waste any time. But now I cannot remember a thing. We have had a number of vehement discussions about the purpose of the parameters. Here is our differences:
You think that the parameters in themselves are what makes the project and by setting very clear boundaries for how a task should be carried out, one will achieve the most novel and surprising outcome. You want to remove yourself and your own ability to make decisions and see what happens when parameters are taken literal and discover new things about the content you are investigating.
I am more interested in parameters as a way of activating myself and seeing new ways of navigating my already existing creativity. I find that if I am very product and goal orientated I stop being curious about the place I'm investigating. All I see is an end product and this tends to take me into grooves where I approach a subject in a specific way and therefore nothing novel comes from it.
I also want to address our disagreement about the degree of which the body and a physical activity should be part of a task. We initially agreed that the task must include a physical or practical activity. This has not been the case in many of the tasks. Task 3 asked me to make a film trailer out of existing footage from the Fieldwork in the Body project which had me do edits in front of the computer all week. Useful, but not physically very engaging. I do get worked up by how the body –my body– and my expertise is often pushed aside to make room for a medium which is widely more accepted and mostly it is more respected in the world of academia. And here I am again. Stuck in front of a computer trying to make myself understood and expressing myself through words, through writing. Words are so closed and definitive. I post them on the internet and I cannot take them back. I can correct them endlessly and perfect them until I reach the result I want. Something that is supposed to represent me although I feel inadequate when I express myself in writing. I suppose my longing for process rather than product is a longing for not trying to get it right. Something that this exercise is testing me in because I will not go back and correct this. I will leave it and then revise but not judge the content or the format for this version.