‘The Promise of a Scattered Methodology’, 2017, began in 2016, as a means to mirror the disjuncture’s that were forming within my practice.
The idea began in 2015, when discovering Ingmar Bergman’s, 1966 film ‘Persona’. Though this film was not the first where I had encountered montage being used as a cinematic strategy to juxtapose and intertwine a collision of thoughts and feelings, but it was the first film where I had encountered the materiality of the film medium being used as a method to interrupt the narrative content.
To witness ‘Persona’ is to observe a form of technological reflexivity, during which, it is implied that the film may have a sense of self-awareness, with the capacity to exercise influence over the narrative, the characters, and the viewer, by subjecting these subjects to the mercy of the film, as a medium.
Reflecting back to a research method report that I wrote in 2016, at the time of writing it, I had not realised that I had removed the ‘I’ from this report, writing it with a predominant analytical perspective. Since witnessing Bergman’s method of using the materiality of film as a reflective voice, I began appropriating still and moving scenes from ‘Persona’, to present my practice-based research in the form of an essay film. What culminated was a psychologically tense zone (available to view here), that requires deliberation, when jumping between silence and sound, and material manifestations that collapse between still and moving scenes.
Looking for ways to reintroduce the ‘I’ back into my research, I began to retune my voice. What evolved was a cacophony of voices; academic, personal, and poetic. Exploring strategies to decentre any one viewpoint and present a multitude of voices, when discovering Hunter Vaughan’s text; ‘Where Film meets Philosophy’, published in 2013, in which, he explores cinematic strategies to look beyond frames of reference [1] as a method for challenging habituated thought processes, it was at this point, reading Vaughan’s theories alongside Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizomatic thinking; published in ‘A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia’ in 1987, when I began to consider thought-connections and the formation of knowledge, as a rhizome.
Identifying a connection between a rhizomes entangled roots, which branch off in all different directions, akin to an unbounded, dynamic, digital network, I published ‘The Promise of a Scattered Methodology’ online, as a means to embed hyperlinks within a series of web pages, to disrupt the linear format of reading and to mirror the reflective periods, which can take place during the process of working with material, in particular, when attempting to use it out of context.
‘The Promise of a Scattered Methodology’, 2017, has been formed to be an evolving environment, embed with pop-up messages that serve as loose ends or even dead ends, rather than endings. To navigate it requires pattern formations to be considered and intuitive leaps to be taken, for the potential of this spatial form of language to be heard.
[1] Frame of Reference: a set of ideas or facts that a person accepts and that influences the person’s behaviour, opinions or decisions. Online Source: FRAME OF REFERENCE | meaning in the Cambridge English Dictionary, Cited: 13th March 2017