Episode 2 : Research
Finding deeper meaning through connections
In the Agency Methodology, Research is all about connecting things.
Connecting them to each other. You can connect in many different ways. And just a heads up — I am going to use the word “thing” in this episode a lot and it IS a bad word in writing circles. I apologise. I am using it here to signify anything — units of meaning of any kind.
Be they songs in a playlist, the bibliography of your phd thesis or the Christmas gifting strategy that you choose to hit just the right note of weird with each of your16 cousins you barely know. Heck — these reflections and connecting strategies can even apply to your friend group. The way we choose to approach the hunt for these “things” and how they connect to form Sets define our lives in more ways than its easy to admit.
From the objects that we carry daily in our backpacks to the apps in the home screen of our phones or the jobs we consider taking. Our personal style of choosing what to include in our sets and how these sets relate to each other. (And not forgetting the amount of attention we give to each of its components overtime). All of these four dimensional, compounding accidents, habits and choices are the stuff that make up who we are.
I don’t think we give in to savoring the holographic plethora of relationships that form the system of us often enough. And if you feel that you don’t either, don’t worry — language is linear and direly inappropriate to deal with highly abstract stuff as this, but it doesn’t keep it from having incredible influence over where our lives are going.
Well, there’s no way in hell you will manage to reflect on all of the “things” and how all of them relate over time — rationally — but just by shaping this concept is a good primer to form a point of view with which to approach Research as an exciting, important and endlessly creative endeavour. So let’s allow all these “things” I just talked about to sink in and kind of softle forget about it. Let’s get concrete — or at least a little bit more concrete.
Playing with word strings is a good way to exemplify different strategies through which things — units of meaning — can form connected groups.
You can connect them literally — following a linear logical path, like for example — If I start with the word “dog” next we could go “collar” , “string” “neck” “head” “Ideas” and so on towards infinity.
But let’s say we want to find a way to spice things up and come up with a more jarring connection pattern: You can allow yourself to find some lateral connections. Starting again with “dog”, we can go on a completely different journey: “dog” “snoop dog”, “smoke”, “cloud” “god”. That took us somewhere completely different.
Well if you really want to try to push yourself — try to find “connections” that have no inner logic at all. They don’t use any other concept as a springboard — You connect them randomly — which is harder than it sounds. Here’s my attempt: “dog”, “star”, “kettle”, “lamp post”, “glasses”. Wow, that was hard.
But I don’t even know if “lamp post” is truly that unrelated to “glasses”? I mean I use glasses to see and lamp posts light things up. Dammit. I guess the Brain is just a freaking connection finding machine.
I feel like saying that Randomness is not permanent. Even if the strategy that I used to achieve it was random, after it’s out there, it is open for other patterns to be found in it. I feel like saying that randomness is just ‘not yet understood Complexity’. Meaning that is waiting to jump at us after every chance encounter. And I don’t think that it is a bad thing at all because it frees me up to connect things like a mad person.
When creating things, especially things of the artistic, creative kind — it’s no crime to ride the wave of synchronicity, apparent connections and let the chance encounters seem like that they were planned all along. If we learn how to do this sort of half truth seeking, half half baked bug eyed hyper linking investigation, we just might tap into the most powerful source of energy in the universe and the reason why the people have kept up with the kardashians for 15 seasons: guilty curiosity.
So let’s start researching Agency style.
It all starts by putting observations together. And the question here is — what lies in between your recorded moments of presence? And behind? And under and above and everywhere around — if this moment pushes, me — where is it pushing me to? Ok — so let’s go there then.
And you go there. And you repeat. Methodologically.
Now, when you enter this leaping game — the path is full of dangers and seduction — your choices can lead you to commonplace, to wasted time, to non action, to excessive depth and infinite detail. Your choices can lead you to lack of poetry, or to too much poetry — or a lot of input of some kind and no outcome, insight, organization or understanding. I guess what I am trying to say because one cannot find something if they are looking for nothing.
What is the connection? Therefore Research also needs it’s repository. Repositories and Systems of connections organised in a way that CAN BE NAVIGATED — and not necessarily in a completely rational order. A folder filled with a seemingly random collection of some same thing can be just as fertile as organized libraries. The practice of throwing things connected by some criteria into a ‘bucket’ together with others of its kind can reveal to you a lot more about your deepest contexts than a giant effort to impose order over a chaotic universe.
You can do this with anything: Images, songs, stuffed animals, pillows, objects in the color blue. Found material usually will start manifesting an inter-relational magnetism sorta say — it will conspire to achieve higher levels of order, whether you want it or not.
When confronted with a full bucket, don’t worry If you feel a desire to launch yourself into taxonomies and classifications. They can also be rewarding, given you don’t take it too seriously. Just don’t get caught up so deeply in the naming game that the entire process feels like coloring inside the lines. Agency’s creative premise is that we should follow where our excitement and curiosity leads. Sometimes designing maps can be as creative as driving the ship.
But a mapping system is only valid to the extent that it increases our enjoyment of the territory. Avoid becoming the cartographer with compulsion for detail, once the task becomes pointless, know how to flow from order to chaos again and let energy back into the process.
A quick recap: Research is methodologically connecting observations, of yours and others into constellations, or ‘buckets’ by assigning them criteria — or just being a little random and watching their possible criteria emerge. All of this can be done in earnest or in jest and the guiding force is curiosity.
Ok, I understand if you feel a little bit confused. To counter the inevitable confusion — Let me exemplify how I used this approach to research in an actual artwork. The challenge came in a moment of great change in my life. I was working with another artist and we had a very tight deadline. This mindset helped me organise highly abstract ideas that were important — not only for the success of the work being developed but in the interest of us both figuring out what was important to us for the rest of our lives at the crossroads that we were both in. Buckle up, it’s story time.
I had just sold all my belongings, given back my house and studio in Brazil and reduced everything I owned to two backpacks. No more guitar, no more paints and brushes. Left behind family, friends and lovers and landed in Europe with no guarantees. I did not have a visa and the only plan I had was finding my way to Berlin after applying for a new citizenship in Portugal — A place where I did not plan to live. Before I could face any of these issues though — I had a 2 week residency in Switzerland to tend to. There were about 10 of us artists in a town of 500 people and our goal was to produce works that could touch the social process of this extremely neophobic town, etched into the hills and built around a monastery that had been there for 800 years. The monastery we were all sleeping in. If that wasn’t already a bit too much for my freshly arrived Brazilian mind that had never traveled the world before — I was riding an intense paranoia that if I told to anyone my plans of staying I could get kicked out of the residency or handed over to the authorities — it sounds absurd now, but I was real scared at the time. The first late nights seemed to last forever. I would stay up late chatting to one of the other artists. T. She was an extremely talented video essayist whose work was based on research and observation — she was constantly attached to her camera and recording snippets of the world around her.
T.’s super power was to blend with the background and disappear. She’d fall out of the social game entirely and use her observation power and tools to capture what went unseen by everyone else. Close ups of a nervous hand, a faltering voice at the end of an otherwise confidently delivered argument. She was at once absent and extremely present as only a depressed introvert with a camera and microphone could be. Later at night she’d show me how to organise and connect these found materials, books, theories, ideas, text excerpts, pictures. They formed ‘detective movie style’ wall sized maps in her home studio. She showed me pictures of it. T. Would print out frames of the shots and edit her movies on the wall itself before opening any software — and most importantly — she would ride coincidences and curiosities to flesh out very delicate higher level sensorial perceptions. It took me a few months after we met to actually watch one of her movies. I was already in Berlin. It is a tale of the failed arrogance of youth activism. She captured this by superimposing footage of the occupy movement in Switzerland with footage of two lovers on a humble road trip through some mexican desertified territory.
I cried my eyes out. I laughed until I choked. But I did not know any of this in the time of our late night conversations. All I knew is I was terrified and she was a friend — and that, although we felt grateful for the amazing cheese, bread and beer, the premise of the residency was bullshit. They wanted us to talk about “Permaculture” by creating a generic potato garden — and that gave the residency its name — “Culture of Permanence”. It was just an excuse to use donors’ funds. And the true culture of permanence we wanted to talk about was Switzerland itself, so aptly symbolized by that absurd little town of 500 extremely wealthy people. I was fascinated by what happened when different images were overlaid with words in the work and references that she was showing. She was fascinated by my explanations of Relational Aesthetics and works that come to fruition via the participation of the public — and we slowly but surely came up with the concept of “Culture of Permanence, the Deck” — A tarot looking set of cards that had “Culture cards” and “Permanence cards” 40 of each with a varied selection of powerful images attached to each of the words. As you drew different cards, they acted as conversation prompts — sometimes the same image would appear twice both as culture and permanence, creating a dissonance. We quickly say the potential of the concept and that’s how our collaborative work came together.
Me and T. had a great time finding the images and laughing on the accidental meanings that would come up — not only we were the only pair that actually delivered a concise piece of work in the short time — the influential people of the town came and ACTUALLY used it and found themselves talking vividly in the dimly lit room and confessed that some of these conversations had been waiting years to happen. There were hard conversations but also a lot of laughs — and we kept the wine coming.
And so the last night of the residency where the works got presented went very long and no one cared about the potato patch. And that’s the story of how the Video Essayist and the Relational Aesthete delivered grandly. We divided the deck in half and went into our separate lives once again. 20 cards of each, Culture or Permanence, for her and me. It’s not hard to see how this work was born out of a set of observations collected into a repository and connected by a research practice. In terms of process all we had to do was add the images to the card templates. Print them out and cut to size. Delivery was the set date of the event and the invitee list. All of this was taken into account when designing the piece, as well as the time available — it was the delicate balance of all of this that allowed for the success that we shared. But it was the Research mode that truly brought the whole thing together.
All we did, after understanding the situation, was to follow epistemological trails. And you can do it too. In her case, she came from the video essay tradition — you might wanna look into Chris Marker for example. In my case was the mix of Western Occultism from people like Alesteir Crowley and Rudolph Steiner with my Organisational Design consultancy practice (see Alan Kaplan or Edgar Schein) all wrapped into a relational aesthetics sandwich that I took from people like Nicolas Bourriaud.
Your favorite ideas, artworks, concepts or movements would have not been possible without something that came before it. Someone you admire deeply admired someone deeply. Research is following the need to know who and why. Call it unpacking history through research. In the end, that’s just another collection of connections following a set of rules. Of course, the questions here are a little bit deeper than “buying things that make you horny in a flea market” — but it’s not that different. That’s truly what you need to realise to get researching in a way that generates energy, instead of eating it up. Start from your observations and go beyond. And that brings us to this episode’s exercise.
Start “a collection”. (or a bucket or a constellation, whatever you want to call it) Define this collection with a sentence, as if it was a law given by some outside source — we will call this a “constraint” — It just needs to be a well defined, precise sentence. In the case of the example given was “images that provoke thought when coupled with the idea of permanence or culture”. But it can be anything — I am right now taking up guitar and singing after a 5 years break and have a “bucket” in the form of a paper taped to my amplifier — everytime I come across a song that fits the sentence “This song moves me and seems to be technically possible for me to play and sing” I run for a pen and write down the name on this paper. Later I bring them into Process sessions with the guitar.
Defining the collection bucket with the rule is important because it sharpens your perception and gives purpose to the daily observations. With the added bonus that once you’re getting tired following this imposed rule, you start looking for ways to bend it, and then twist it, and then sprinkle it and all other sorts of distortion — and that’s when the fun begins.
Such a sentence can be used as a springboard. You can go very far and have transformative experiences with this: Let’s say I start a collection with this sentence: “Go to flea markets and second hand stores and buy objects that I find sexually arousing or make me horny in some way.” Understanding how this lens transforms how I look at these abandoned, old objects for sale could be super interesting.
How would my resulting collection be different from yours tells us a lot about you and me — So your exercise is to define a collection for yourself and follow about 10 connections and show it to us all in the Miro board. That’s it — not much more.
And that’s my 20 minutes — See you in the next one.
If you need any help to become a dreamer give us a shout in any of the community channels.
