Distributed Discovery: Show + Tell / Project Planning
Location
This week, from 4 to 6pm, our colleague Holly will host us at the Pratt Institute Library (thanks, Holly!), at Willoughby Ave and Hall St in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn. Here’s Pratt’s “Getting to Campus” page. If you arrive early or care to stay afterward, Holly has encouraged you to explore Pratt’s Sculpture Park. Holly will meet us in the lobby area and bring us “through the gates,” so please do your best to arrive on time!
Agenda
To start, Holly and her colleagues will offer a brief introduction to the library and share a selection of items from the Archives. After that, we’ll move into our activity for the day. Our Misfits cohort asked for more opportunities to celebrate and activate the wealth of knowledge each CRC participant brings to the group. So, today, we invite you to share something you’ve discovered in your professional, creative, or personal life. We’ll dedicate any remaining time to discussion of our final project. And if folks would like to get a drink 🍷 afterward, we can find somewhere near campus!*
To Prepare for Today
- To help us learn a bit more about our gathering place, Holly has invited us to review the Pratt Institute Libraries Wikipedia page and Johanna Bauman’s post about the Library’s architecture: “Welcome to Iron and Glass,” Pratt Institute Libraries LibGuides (January 14, 2020).
- Now, take a single 8.5 x 11″ sheet of paper, and use that sheet to respond to the prompt: “Follow me down this rabbit-hole:“
- What subjects or provocations — professional or personal — typically compel you to take a deep dive? What kind of circuitous investigations have you so rapt 🤩 you lose track of time? What esoteric epistemological burrows might you be uniquely well suited to guide us through? Choose a single topic, problem, obsession, etc.
- Guide us through your process! Where do you start digging? What mix of digital and analog resources, what physical and virtual sites, does your exploration traverse? Where in your exploration do you reach pivot points, and what guides your choice of path? What questions are you asking yourself along the way? How do you know when you’re done searching — or does the search never end? 😵💫
- Your response to these queries can take any format — perhaps even one of those we’re considering for our final project: a spell, a map, a walking tour, a parody AI prompt + response. Or perhaps you’d like to try a diagram, a recipe, a storyboard, a poem, a flowchart, a list, a parable, an index? Or, if you’re really ambitious, maybe a volvelle, a lift-able flap, or some other analog interactive? Whatever! Maximize those 93.5 square inches!! Now, make 18 copies and bring them with you to class.
- During class we’ll distribute your copies, and each of us will collate everyone’s contributions into a booklet. Each of us will have three minutes to share our work, we’ll take some time to reflect on our collection, and we’ll then explore the various conceptual and methodological trap doors, dumbwaiters, and corridors inter-linking our warren of individual rabbit-holes 🐰🕳️
Fieldwork Documentation
Planning Notes
This week we’ll meet on Zoom — or in one of your spaces 🙂 Our previous CRC cohort asked for more opportunities to welcome colleagues into, and show them around, their own workplaces. This is one such opportunity! Let me know if you’d like to host the group! / The specific format of this exercise will be shaped by our collective interests as they evolve over the course of the spring: we might host a series of lightning talks, stage a “science fair,” create a set of “recipes,” or rehearse a format we’re exploring for our final collaborative project.