Undisciplined
undisciplined
Undisciplined practice is too busy with proliferating sensibilities, issues, demands, requests, complaints, entanglements, methods, and questions to bother with the inherent etiquette of disciplinarity. It insists on a
mode of thinking and making that is situated and
ad-hoc. It is anti-solutionist and motivated by the need for rigorous uncalibration and disobedient action research.[2]
Undisciplined practitioners often operate collectively. They do not count on validated forms of expertise before interrogating existing ways of doing, and start experimenting with how to do things otherwise, right away. They smuggle techniques from one domain to another, contaminate ethnographic descriptions with accounts of software, mix poetics with abnormal visual renders and blur theoretical dissertations with case-stories.
Undisciplined practice materializes in the use of made-up terminology and uncommon writing, but also in a hands-on engagement with tools, merging high and low tech, learning on the go: active archives, poetic algorithms, body and software, books with an attitude, cqrrelations,[3] counter cartographies, situated publishing, e-traces, ex-titutional networks, interstitial work, libre graphics, performative protocols, relearning, discursive infrastructures, hackable devices.[4]
- ↑ See for example how design educators Anja Kaiser and Rebecca Stephany avoid defining the term in order to make it useful: ‘Undisciplinarity is not a(nother) binary branding exercise … we work with undisciplinarity as a feminist unpacking of the discipline of graphic design itself.’ Glossary of Undisciplined Design, ed. Anja Kaiser and Rebecca Stephany (Leipzig: Spector Books, 2021), p. 4.
- ↑ Possible Bodies, ‘Polyedric Research Methods’,
in Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence, ed. Jara Rocha and Femke Snelting (Open Humanities Press, in press). - ↑ ‘Cqrrelation is poetry to the statistician. It is science to the dissident. It is detox to the data-addict.’ Cqrrelations, work session (Brussels, Constant, 2015).
- ↑ This list of invented practices may read as a manifesto, but actually describes the daily activities of the Brussels-based association for art and media, Constant. Their publications, workshops, methods, and other interventions are an ongoing attempt to imagine what technological practice could be when oriented by intersectional feminisms, collective authorship and Free, Libre and Open Source software. This work is developed in collaboration with maker-researchers moving in and out of various (un)disciplines: artists, activists, designers, passers-by, theorists, programmers, fans, filmmakers, writers. About Constant, constantvzw.org/site/-About-Constant-7-.html, accessed 27 April 2021.