structure

The general brief for your project is as follows:

Let's unpack this sentence:

requires a shift in how we currently imagine a phenomenon. In its most basic definition, imagination is the ability to create mental images of ideas, concepts or objects that are not perceived by the senses. Imagination is quite an ungraspable phenomenon: neuroscientists cannot precisely locate it in our brains, even though we use it all the time to think, move, talk, make decisions, plan, and so on. Imagination is also vital when creating visions or, more tangibly, imageries, tools, processes and vocabularies of alternative futures. These can trigger social transformations, but many scholars, artists and activists point to the 'poverty of the imagination' in our society, that makes imagining (and enacting) other ways of being and doing increasingly difficult. See for example:

Because of this, we focus on re-imagining. The prefix "re-" means 'back' or 'again', and requires a returning to the foundations of a particular phenomenon or object (in the widest sense of the meaning) and repeating it. Repetition is an interestingly paradoxical thing: following deconstruction philosopher Jacques Derrida, repetition is necessarily based on sameness, while repetition of the same is never identical. So when is something re-imagined? Diego Galafassi's work on the transformative imagination is closely related to the action of re-imagining, and he argues it is necessary in supporting 'fundamentally new ways of seeing, feeling, encountering and envisioning the world'.

indicates the not-yet, Jeroen Boomgaard's 'postponed inevitability', the very near future. In the minor, we're interested in exploring how we can create and enact change in the present, which requires speculative thinking as well as making changes in a very short time span. Engaging in speculative practices enables the opening up of thinking about, experiencing and working with space-time in different ways. To get inspired, take a look at the Black Quantum Futurism initiative.

this topic has come up in some of our discussions already in the form of questions such as: what are the frameworks of our disciplines? And perhaps more urgently: how are they represented in the minor and in your work, and how do they interact? For your own project, pay attention to different modalities of knowing and diverse discourses and traditions of making research. What kind of knowledge, skills and methods do you need that your own discipline or knowledge domain can and cannot offer, and how might you gain access to them? In working across disciplines, new ways of collaborating and merging domains will emerge – what are they for this particular project?

Any project is always situated in a particular time and place and is done according to specific ways of working, with particular tools, in certain material conditions and in relation to existing practices, ideas and other happenings. Work shared with anyone else has an audience, and is shaped by that audience – even before it is made public. Working in a situated way, which includes an awareness of your own positionality and the ways in which you are engaged with your surroundings, means working in and from a particular context. Nothing happens in a vacuum. We therefore ask you to, from day 1, make explicit the particular context outside of the RASL Minor space and audience that you are working in, and show how this affects your choices, content and ways of working. We tend to work in context and with audiences that we are comfortable with. We encourage you to venture outside of this comfort zone to allow for the possibility of other ways of thinking and making to meet your own.