Further Reading On Nothingness
Exercise as a response from Chrysa Parkinson’s assignment:
Create a list of practices you are using Create a heading for each practice that has a nice word-sound to it
List what ‘it’ needs
List what ‘it’ doesn’t like
Describe ‘its’ boundaries
GENERAL SPACE (from which the sub-practices emerge)
The situation:
This practice needs a protected place where it can temporarily escape a certain logic. It needs a context where it can perform - since it is a performative act to ‘temporarily suspend a logic which tries to resist a realm of production’ and create a sheltered alternate operational logic.
This practice needs a doer that does and is to be done on.
This practice needs a space that does and that is to be done on.
This practice needs to be a working space in a working context.
Co-working is possible. Parallel practices are possible in this one space, and others’ activities are included as what is happening in the space. Multiple people can be in their experience of this practice together. This practice can also be done alone.
This practice attempts to pose the following questions; what does one do when there is nothing to do and how does one work when one does not work in relation to market value? How does one orient themselves? What feels like work according to oneself?
One needs to be willing to have nothing to do, and to be willing to explore what happens from there.
One needs to be receptive to realising what are their needs that arise during the practice.
This practice needs particular principles:
How? (suggested strategies)
One needs to be flexible with how they consider the principles of the practice, this place being more a place of reflection and realisation rather than a place of achievement. Whatever the practice brings one to realise in whatever way, is interesting. Whatever one needs to do in order to be able to operate, is valid. Some people might need all principles, some might need some.
It needs for one to want to invest and stay interested, though it needs for one not to try to be interesting
It needs for one to place themselves in a state of disposition, where things might happen.
This practice needs to keep moving.
This practice needs a bit of will and desire, maybe also a bit of personal taste, as navigational tools.
This practice likes encountering both comfortability and uncomfortability, and likes the site of recognition of those two.
This practice likes that things can emerge from a point of curiosity, and that curiosity can also be a discipline.
This practice allows for (re)searching, development and continuity but does not really yet accommodate process. That is for another space.
This practice likes to question what feels like working.
This practice does not like on the one hand, when things are too pre-decided (then one leaves the practice and enters a production zone, with plannings, objectives and calendars).
What this practice does not like, is when nothing can emerge. Things are to be found.
This practice doesn’t like judgement, it doesn’t like perfectionism, it doesn’t like trying to do things well. The tolerance bar is really lowered. It is not about doing the task well, it is about trying to see what happens when one enters it.
This practice is resisting selfie-culture - the acquisition of the self, the financialization of daily life, institutionalisation, urgency, quantity over quality, fear and progress amongst other things.
This practice is not leisure
This practice is not a place where work is conceived as a means to an end. This practice does not generate concrete market-valued products.
This practice does not like to relate directly with produced images of the known and reproducing them.
This practice does not like judgement or instrumentality
Boundaries:
This practice has a problem with spectatorship, since it is not a performative practice. What happens in this studio and how time is spent, is not to be viewed, but experienced. Spectating implies a relationality in which the doer might start to compose their experience in relation to a dramaturgy. This interferes with the practice.
The practice can dissolve at any moment. It is not a place that must resist to stay and be protected in that way. If anything is happening, if others ask something of us… one is capable of dissolving it instantly. It is flexible and malleable. This practice is not one of privatisation, hoarding and stubborning.
LIST OF SUB-PRACTICES / situations that emerged from the general practice.
These emerged from my use of the first practice, other practitioners might have others.
(these practices need most of the above to exist)
Object calling:
It needs doer to encounter objects and relate to them in many different ways. Many times the objects do on the doer, in different ways.
It needs imagination and forgetting
It needs searching further than instrumentality, reconceptualisation of the ‘known’.
It needs pretending one can sense and integrate things which are organically separate and maybe imperceptible
It doesn’t like pragmatism
Vision dances
It needs eyes that are conceptualised as cameras, followed by a sensing body.
It needs a maker (primary experiencer, and crafter of that experience) and a receiver.
It needs a particular visual trajectory in space, which the maker will craft, with a set of particular instructions to be able to transmit. What is transmitted is not only the pathway of the eyesight, but also how and in what way it is seen.
Perception is choreographed through vision. Most sensation is visual, though the rest of the body is also involved in the sense-making.
It cannot be done through camera.
Vibrant room
It needs a receptive doer and a receptive room, which communicate
It needs entering a realm of potentiality and therefore time
It needs believing in immaterial shifts and playing with immateriality within one room.
It needs to recognise the active presence of the elements, its state of being and occupying/holding place/time
It doesn’t like judgement and imagination-limiting.
Behavioral design
Re-relating to the room
It needs a certain reading of how the room is triggering behavior, occupation and use
It many times asks for an experimentation of that, and requires re-shuffling of the elements
Things can be introduced or removed
It should be contained within the room
It asks to change the governing forces of the space
It can also answer the questions; ‘’What if I didn’t know how to operate this room?’’
It has physical limits but not immaterial or virtual limits
Re-searching
To try to do again anything
It needs a material/element/practice to re-search on
Through repetitions of researching, themes and variations usually emerge, either expanding or modifying a sense of an original.
It needs a tuning attention
It doesn’t like too much dispersion
Forms of attending
Practicing the following attention scores in order to practice ‘the form of an activity’’, or practicing ways of attending situations, as another way of embodying situations.
It needs deciding which of the scores to follow.
It is useful to practice these within a time limit, so as to be able to fully commit for a short period of time, which ends. Possibly in the future, with practice and attentive stamina, consistency can be prolonged into longer periods of time.
It needs something through which to practice the attention. Sometimes this is moving/dancing, other times it is with objects or it can even be an added layer onto another task.
Sometimes these can be done with multiple people.
Some of these are:
Layered score:
Thinking queues
Performing the different forms of attention as well as other thoughts and realising what are the visual expressions of particular thoughts, how they manifest themselves and if even perceptible.
This requires a spectator for feedback. (this is one of the only more performative ones)
Blind tracing
Tracing a room blindfolded so as to reconceptualize, re-encounter the place where you are. Many times many different worlds and surprises will emerge.
It needs one to be really honest with being really present, and to try not to constantly guess where they are in order to be correct in their guessing.
It needs investing in discovering a known place, as if for the first time.
It needs not taking for granted.
Blind tracing can lead to other things, for example, in one occasion a story was written as a result of the experience.
Studying
Spending time studying in the studio
Many things (if not all) could be considered studying. For this particular naming, I consider the more traditional form of the activity of studying (from a book, a podcast…) the direct acquisition of knowledge from another source.
It needs a decision as to what is to be studied and the action of doing it.
It does not need an objective
Tracing thinking / languaging
Creating a state of disposition through which language can emerge
It needs a state of disposition as medium (can be moving, can be talking, can be free-writing, can be drawing, can be singing…)
It usually needs a tracing technology.
It doesn’t like going back and editing, it constantly moves forward and it doesn’t like judgement.
Observatory
Observing the state of being at certain moments, paying attention to what draws the doer’s attention, what is it from the outside that is calling me in, where do one’s eyes look, what do certain placements and certain positions allow one to do.
It needs withdrawn, meta-analytical attention
It does not need a willingness to change anything
It needs a play between naming and not naming.
Exploring different possibilities / multiplicities (naming, redrawing)
Naming, renaming, redrawing the already known to transform it into something else.
It requires imagination and, like many of these, hates pragmatism
Sleep organising / receiving thought
Being in the state of falling asleep and noticing what your brain is organising right at that moment
It needs one to usually position themselves in a semi-resting (not fully resting) position.
It needs for one not to guide their thoughts anywhere
It requires observation and the realisation that thoughts follow their particular flows and organisational patterns, with priority levels, and realising how they arrange themselves on their own.
Particular thoughts will jump out, and one might need a notebook to write them down.
The objective is not to resist distraction - it is not meditation. It is another way of organising information, and another way of directing what to do, or checking in with what one is thinking about and in what way.
Spending time with others
To allow for spending time with others when needed, usually through interruption or intervention from the other. (It requires another)
It requires treating that time shared as important and valuable
It does not like feeling like time is being wasted
It is based on abundant time, having no rush since there is nothing to achieve and treating the care for others also as work.
Celebration
An answer to what to do when there is nothing to do can be in the form of celebration. Celebration can happen in a working situation. It is interesting to observe, in every different case, what is it that it is celebrated and in what way. Celebration does not have any kind of particular prescribed form.
It needs the decision to do so.
It does not need to ascribe to cultural patterns, although it can.
The Bored Room
To force oneself into boredom and see what emerges from there
To observe all that occurs in waiting
It needs a reduction of activity
It requires time but usually also a timer
Sometimes it requires a limitation of the senses (for example, a pitch-dark room)
It usually makes oneself ask themselves the question of how one occupies themselves
It needs to let things arise out of complete boredom - how one occupies themselves?
The constriction between limitation and freedom is to be regulated by the doer, but it does not like self-amputation.
Continue
Usually, when one feels like planning something else, or detaching from what they are doing, the command of ‘continuing’ can be a helpful strategy to stay with what is happening, even if a lack of belief in it is present.
It usually requires a realising that one wants to detach from their activity, and then insisting on it for some more time until it usually evolves into something else.
It doesn’t like skips and jumps, it likes following and allowing.
Moving with a word/question
Moving constantly thinking about one thing in a loop.
It requires a timer
It requires a chosen word or question
It requires a certain continuity
It doesn’t like when thought and movement start to operate separately
Thinking in pathways
Following a thinking thread in relation to pacing through a room: i.e.moving close to a wall indicates the end of a thought-> Pacing can govern thought and thought can govern pacing.
It requires a thought and a delimited space.
It doesn’t like too complicated thinking nor making too complex pathways in space.
Meta - interruptions: Organising words and thinking about the practice through the practice. It likes documents, traces, post-its, visual placing of language, embodied symbols of experience, memories, a will to organise and open more potentials from there.
It doesn’t like fixing, setting and enclosing.
Invocating:
1. invocating certain people, things, presences, possibilities into the room
2. becoming transparent as to whom is in the room with me (what expectation, what projections…)
Sometimes it can imply having conversations with these imaginary beings, sometimes these conversations can be about asking them how they are and then allowing them to leave the room so you can work, other times these can be your working partners…
It requires imagination based on prior experience, it requires searching for a modus operandi that is helpful and not limiting.
It does not like stubbornness and it does not like that it actually triggers anxiety if it starts to bring in the realm of expectations into the picture.
Create a list of practices you are using Create a heading for each practice that has a nice word-sound to it
List what ‘it’ needs
List what ‘it’ doesn’t like
Describe ‘its’ boundaries
GENERAL SPACE (from which the sub-practices emerge)
The situation:
This practice needs a protected place where it can temporarily escape a certain logic. It needs a context where it can perform - since it is a performative act to ‘temporarily suspend a logic which tries to resist a realm of production’ and create a sheltered alternate operational logic.
This practice needs a doer that does and is to be done on.
This practice needs a space that does and that is to be done on.
This practice needs to be a working space in a working context.
Co-working is possible. Parallel practices are possible in this one space, and others’ activities are included as what is happening in the space. Multiple people can be in their experience of this practice together. This practice can also be done alone.
This practice attempts to pose the following questions; what does one do when there is nothing to do and how does one work when one does not work in relation to market value? How does one orient themselves? What feels like work according to oneself?
One needs to be willing to have nothing to do, and to be willing to explore what happens from there.
One needs to be receptive to realising what are their needs that arise during the practice.
This practice needs particular principles:
- There is nothing to fulfill
- Everything is equally valuable and valueless
- Everything is nothing and nothing is everything
- In this practice, the action is spending time in the studio/workplace
How? (suggested strategies)
- Paying attention to what is already happening
- Following a feeling sense
- Treating the environment one is in as equally valuable, containing potentialities and abundance of information, considering immateriality and virtual space as included material.
- Hanging out with stuff
- There is nothing to prove/no risks
One needs to be flexible with how they consider the principles of the practice, this place being more a place of reflection and realisation rather than a place of achievement. Whatever the practice brings one to realise in whatever way, is interesting. Whatever one needs to do in order to be able to operate, is valid. Some people might need all principles, some might need some.
It needs for one to want to invest and stay interested, though it needs for one not to try to be interesting
It needs for one to place themselves in a state of disposition, where things might happen.
This practice needs to keep moving.
This practice needs a bit of will and desire, maybe also a bit of personal taste, as navigational tools.
This practice likes encountering both comfortability and uncomfortability, and likes the site of recognition of those two.
This practice likes that things can emerge from a point of curiosity, and that curiosity can also be a discipline.
This practice allows for (re)searching, development and continuity but does not really yet accommodate process. That is for another space.
This practice likes to question what feels like working.
This practice does not like on the one hand, when things are too pre-decided (then one leaves the practice and enters a production zone, with plannings, objectives and calendars).
What this practice does not like, is when nothing can emerge. Things are to be found.
This practice doesn’t like judgement, it doesn’t like perfectionism, it doesn’t like trying to do things well. The tolerance bar is really lowered. It is not about doing the task well, it is about trying to see what happens when one enters it.
This practice is resisting selfie-culture - the acquisition of the self, the financialization of daily life, institutionalisation, urgency, quantity over quality, fear and progress amongst other things.
This practice is not leisure
This practice is not a place where work is conceived as a means to an end. This practice does not generate concrete market-valued products.
This practice does not like to relate directly with produced images of the known and reproducing them.
This practice does not like judgement or instrumentality
Boundaries:
This practice has a problem with spectatorship, since it is not a performative practice. What happens in this studio and how time is spent, is not to be viewed, but experienced. Spectating implies a relationality in which the doer might start to compose their experience in relation to a dramaturgy. This interferes with the practice.
The practice can dissolve at any moment. It is not a place that must resist to stay and be protected in that way. If anything is happening, if others ask something of us… one is capable of dissolving it instantly. It is flexible and malleable. This practice is not one of privatisation, hoarding and stubborning.
LIST OF SUB-PRACTICES / situations that emerged from the general practice.
These emerged from my use of the first practice, other practitioners might have others.
(these practices need most of the above to exist)
Object calling:
It needs doer to encounter objects and relate to them in many different ways. Many times the objects do on the doer, in different ways.
It needs imagination and forgetting
It needs searching further than instrumentality, reconceptualisation of the ‘known’.
It needs pretending one can sense and integrate things which are organically separate and maybe imperceptible
It doesn’t like pragmatism
Vision dances
It needs eyes that are conceptualised as cameras, followed by a sensing body.
It needs a maker (primary experiencer, and crafter of that experience) and a receiver.
It needs a particular visual trajectory in space, which the maker will craft, with a set of particular instructions to be able to transmit. What is transmitted is not only the pathway of the eyesight, but also how and in what way it is seen.
Perception is choreographed through vision. Most sensation is visual, though the rest of the body is also involved in the sense-making.
It cannot be done through camera.
Vibrant room
It needs a receptive doer and a receptive room, which communicate
It needs entering a realm of potentiality and therefore time
It needs believing in immaterial shifts and playing with immateriality within one room.
It needs to recognise the active presence of the elements, its state of being and occupying/holding place/time
It doesn’t like judgement and imagination-limiting.
Behavioral design
Re-relating to the room
It needs a certain reading of how the room is triggering behavior, occupation and use
It many times asks for an experimentation of that, and requires re-shuffling of the elements
Things can be introduced or removed
It should be contained within the room
It asks to change the governing forces of the space
It can also answer the questions; ‘’What if I didn’t know how to operate this room?’’
It has physical limits but not immaterial or virtual limits
Re-searching
To try to do again anything
It needs a material/element/practice to re-search on
Through repetitions of researching, themes and variations usually emerge, either expanding or modifying a sense of an original.
It needs a tuning attention
It doesn’t like too much dispersion
Forms of attending
Practicing the following attention scores in order to practice ‘the form of an activity’’, or practicing ways of attending situations, as another way of embodying situations.
It needs deciding which of the scores to follow.
It is useful to practice these within a time limit, so as to be able to fully commit for a short period of time, which ends. Possibly in the future, with practice and attentive stamina, consistency can be prolonged into longer periods of time.
It needs something through which to practice the attention. Sometimes this is moving/dancing, other times it is with objects or it can even be an added layer onto another task.
Sometimes these can be done with multiple people.
Some of these are:
- Enacting out not your first idea (2nd option)
- Presentism (define its route in function of what is happening)
- You to something as you think about something else
- You do, you perceive fully
- You do in order to erase thought
- You trace the room with your body
- The hardest way possible of getting somewhere (continuous strenuous distraction)
- Everything is one thing
- To propose and follow simultaneously
- Asking for help from the space / space is a score
- To think listen see touch at the same time
- Zoning out / drifting off - what happens there?
- Perception that acts itself out
- Tennis ball on the butt
Layered score:
- Presentism
- Being/doing, not naming anything
Thinking queues
Performing the different forms of attention as well as other thoughts and realising what are the visual expressions of particular thoughts, how they manifest themselves and if even perceptible.
This requires a spectator for feedback. (this is one of the only more performative ones)
Blind tracing
Tracing a room blindfolded so as to reconceptualize, re-encounter the place where you are. Many times many different worlds and surprises will emerge.
It needs one to be really honest with being really present, and to try not to constantly guess where they are in order to be correct in their guessing.
It needs investing in discovering a known place, as if for the first time.
It needs not taking for granted.
Blind tracing can lead to other things, for example, in one occasion a story was written as a result of the experience.
Studying
Spending time studying in the studio
Many things (if not all) could be considered studying. For this particular naming, I consider the more traditional form of the activity of studying (from a book, a podcast…) the direct acquisition of knowledge from another source.
It needs a decision as to what is to be studied and the action of doing it.
It does not need an objective
Tracing thinking / languaging
Creating a state of disposition through which language can emerge
It needs a state of disposition as medium (can be moving, can be talking, can be free-writing, can be drawing, can be singing…)
It usually needs a tracing technology.
It doesn’t like going back and editing, it constantly moves forward and it doesn’t like judgement.
Observatory
Observing the state of being at certain moments, paying attention to what draws the doer’s attention, what is it from the outside that is calling me in, where do one’s eyes look, what do certain placements and certain positions allow one to do.
It needs withdrawn, meta-analytical attention
It does not need a willingness to change anything
It needs a play between naming and not naming.
Exploring different possibilities / multiplicities (naming, redrawing)
Naming, renaming, redrawing the already known to transform it into something else.
It requires imagination and, like many of these, hates pragmatism
Sleep organising / receiving thought
Being in the state of falling asleep and noticing what your brain is organising right at that moment
It needs one to usually position themselves in a semi-resting (not fully resting) position.
It needs for one not to guide their thoughts anywhere
It requires observation and the realisation that thoughts follow their particular flows and organisational patterns, with priority levels, and realising how they arrange themselves on their own.
Particular thoughts will jump out, and one might need a notebook to write them down.
The objective is not to resist distraction - it is not meditation. It is another way of organising information, and another way of directing what to do, or checking in with what one is thinking about and in what way.
Spending time with others
To allow for spending time with others when needed, usually through interruption or intervention from the other. (It requires another)
It requires treating that time shared as important and valuable
It does not like feeling like time is being wasted
It is based on abundant time, having no rush since there is nothing to achieve and treating the care for others also as work.
Celebration
An answer to what to do when there is nothing to do can be in the form of celebration. Celebration can happen in a working situation. It is interesting to observe, in every different case, what is it that it is celebrated and in what way. Celebration does not have any kind of particular prescribed form.
It needs the decision to do so.
It does not need to ascribe to cultural patterns, although it can.
The Bored Room
To force oneself into boredom and see what emerges from there
To observe all that occurs in waiting
It needs a reduction of activity
It requires time but usually also a timer
Sometimes it requires a limitation of the senses (for example, a pitch-dark room)
It usually makes oneself ask themselves the question of how one occupies themselves
It needs to let things arise out of complete boredom - how one occupies themselves?
The constriction between limitation and freedom is to be regulated by the doer, but it does not like self-amputation.
Continue
Usually, when one feels like planning something else, or detaching from what they are doing, the command of ‘continuing’ can be a helpful strategy to stay with what is happening, even if a lack of belief in it is present.
It usually requires a realising that one wants to detach from their activity, and then insisting on it for some more time until it usually evolves into something else.
It doesn’t like skips and jumps, it likes following and allowing.
Moving with a word/question
Moving constantly thinking about one thing in a loop.
It requires a timer
It requires a chosen word or question
It requires a certain continuity
It doesn’t like when thought and movement start to operate separately
Thinking in pathways
Following a thinking thread in relation to pacing through a room: i.e.moving close to a wall indicates the end of a thought-> Pacing can govern thought and thought can govern pacing.
It requires a thought and a delimited space.
It doesn’t like too complicated thinking nor making too complex pathways in space.
Meta - interruptions: Organising words and thinking about the practice through the practice. It likes documents, traces, post-its, visual placing of language, embodied symbols of experience, memories, a will to organise and open more potentials from there.
It doesn’t like fixing, setting and enclosing.
Invocating:
1. invocating certain people, things, presences, possibilities into the room
2. becoming transparent as to whom is in the room with me (what expectation, what projections…)
Sometimes it can imply having conversations with these imaginary beings, sometimes these conversations can be about asking them how they are and then allowing them to leave the room so you can work, other times these can be your working partners…
It requires imagination based on prior experience, it requires searching for a modus operandi that is helpful and not limiting.
It does not like stubbornness and it does not like that it actually triggers anxiety if it starts to bring in the realm of expectations into the picture.