Week four and we were reading "Making Do": Uses and Tactics. This week I found it difficult to read, I am not sure why but maybe it was because I felt like the text was jumping around with examples and it was difficult to follow, mainly because there were many words that confused me while reading. But I drew a drawing that represented how I felt while reading.
I was confused but I could remember that they compared tactics and strategies with many different things such as nature, war and advertisements. After being in class I understood it better than when I read the text myself. I feel like it always helps to have a discussion about something to deepen the understanding and see how others understand it.
"I call a strategy the calculation (or manipulation) of power relationships that becomes possible as soon as a subject which will power (a business, an army, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated"
"By contrast with strategy (whose successive shapes introduce a certain play into this formal schema and whose link with a particular historical configuration of rationality should also be clarified), a tactic is a calculated action determined by the absence of a proper locus."
The quotes taken from the text together with the definition of the word also helped me understand the differences between strategy and tactic. In class, we discussed how Strategy could be the strategy of the university and how it works and we students usually have tactics when we work. It was a good resemblance to understand the two better. In the text, they say that "in short, a tactic is an art of the weak" I understand this as you should use the moment to take a possibility when it arrives. It is all a way of working in society and works for everything from TV, commercials, education, inventors, salespeople etc. "The imposed knowledge and symbolisms become objects manipulated by practitioners who have not produced them." For me, that becomes something imposing on other people's lives and that is for us the practitioners to find ways to use the tools given to us. We could even manipulate them and find new ways (tactics) to use them. The text also talks about the heart of being in between which I like, a North African man who moves to Paris and finds himself in between the system and the way of living. He can "find ways of using the constraining order of the place or of the language. Without leaving the place where he has no choice but to live and which lays down its law for him, he establishes within it a degree of plurality and creativity. By an art of being in between, he draws unexpected results from his situation." He uses the art of "making do". Recognizing ways of working in the place between.
Drawing with my eyes closed.
My words of the week are:
Terrain
Circumstances
Attempt
Calculation
Paradoxically
Pulling tricks
Imaginary
The three chosen words and verbs:
Terrain To pave, to base, to follow, to adapt to
Circumstances To adapt to, to adapt
Imaginary To imagine, to visualize
In the picture above you can see the exercise where we draw with our eyes closed, this week I sat on the staircase. I listened to the sound in the space as it was very distinct, you could hear every footstep, door, word, scribble with the pen and so on. But the space is also very rigid and has a very zigzaggy pattern to it which I wanted to capture. It was also very cold so I drew a very light pattern around the whole paper almost like a frame. Very light and cold. I remembered the pinboard as well which I drew in the middle as it stands out quite a lot in the space.
This is the exercise we did together as a group see the video HERE. I like to see the progress in our movements, and how we think about the space differently when we do these exercises.
After the exercise, we put down our three words on the paper as well and got the task to design something within our space with help from the drawing with our eyes closed and verbs.
The pictures above is my design. I was mostly inspired by the words "to pave" and "to adapt" whereas "to imagine" came along the way of creating my design. The zigzaggy pattern also inspired the look of the design. I wanted to create a frame with threads within the frame where you have to pave your way through to get up the stairs where the frames are on every second step. You can see pictures 1,2,5 are 3D drawings of the design and picture 3 is a plan and picture 4 is elevations. It will make you move in a completely different way when you walk up and down the stairs. It will make you stretch and move to see the space in different directions as well as think of how to move next. Oren suggested that you can move the threads around from side to side to create new patterns and to think of how to move in new ways. It was a good idea and a different way to think, but if I know people correctly they would mostly be to the sides so you can walk string up and down without obstacles because we like to do what is easiest for us and more (in the eyes of most people) "convenient" in a less fun way.
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