A1 translucent paper, highlighters and black ink pen
As an explorative researcher who makes connections across a large network of disciplines, it was during my undergraduate study that I found myself discombobulated by the endless connections I was making when researching on the internet and the impossibility of a holistic, digital worldview.
In response to the feeling that my research was being bent out of shape as I attempted to force it into a linear format with a conclusive crescendo, during my postgraduate study I developed a prototype titled ‘The Promise of a Scattered Methodology’, which worked with discombobulation as a method and a platform where I self-published my research as a scattered methodology.
Devising an alternative approach to present research, where I could curate configurations with content that mirrored the physical disjuncture’s within my practice, the scattered methodology adopted the interconnections of rhizomes (Deleuze and Guattari), which took me underground, to play with the foundations of knowledge. Hypertexts enabled me to spatially disperse my research in a way that was non-hierarchical and decentred the knowing subject (Lacan). By hosting research within a digital framework, I discovered that implicit knowledge and multiple frames of reference could coexist, creating an environment, in which, episodic forms of knowledge could interact, while remaining inconclusive.
What I witnessed when exploring the constellation of punctuation’s I had curated, was a feeling of discombobulation that left me disorientated within my own research, as I circled-back upon things I had read prior, but as I returned to familiar territories, shifts in my thinking began to happen, as I wandered, wondered, and formed new patterns of thinking through the dispersed body of visual and literary encounters. By producing a platform where the dynamic and limitless space of the digital realm is operated through a participants interactive sense of awareness, this method of publishing research re-presented the predetermined nature of knowledge, to consider if new knowledge could be formed in a different way, remaining inconclusive, always in the making, through a heuristic process of discovery.
