The questions I began with this week was : ‘Why ask questions that we cannot answer?‘
At the end of the previous tutorial, I posed an ‘unanswerable’ question to everyone: ‘Where does knowledge come from?’
And gave each person a diagram to ‘complete’ to help them formulate a response to the question.
The responses I collected led me to think about how diagrams could be used as a framework – a metaphor – to help respond to questions that are too big to satisfyingly provide a thorough, exhaustive answer. I was really intrigued by how people ‘filled in the blanks’ – and how the diagrams provided an opening to help respond to a very difficult question. So for this week’s experiment I wanted to take this act of working out unanswerable questions with ambiguous diagrams as a way to resolve a ‘gap’.
How do you resolve the gaps provided by such large questions using the metaphorical models that diagrams imagine? How do diagrams articulate this ambiguity? In trying to work this out. I created 2 sets of cards. A set that asks questions. And another set of diagrams – to use as a prompt to answer them.
It is a beginning at formulating a game of sorts. One that encourages imagination, thought and consideration. It is an attempt at asking if there may be value on posing such questions, and pondering them. And maybe even using them as an opening to think, discuss, imagine and make.
To bring all of this thinking together. I wrote an essay, journeying my thoughts from the first question I ask – ‘where does knowledge come from?’ – to where it led me to – ‘what is the value in asking questions we cannot answer?’
This publication is an essay that compiles my thinking, my attempt at creating an analogy between diagrams and metaphors. And an attempt at diagramming responses to the ‘big’ questions I have been pondering through my research and practice this term. Below is an excerpt from the publication – it includes the full essay and selected spreads from the publication.
This week, I experimented with publications and print as a form of questioning and compiling. I think the printed format works. I used Risograph as the method of printing. I think it works in supporting the diagram style – the separation of layers and lines. However, it is a duplicator, and rather than making multiple copies of the same diagram cards – I would like to expand the set of diagram card. So perhaps for the cards itself Risograph may not be the best option. Although I can retain some of the aesthetic quality of two-colour separation that the layering has introduced to the diagrams.
For the publication: I think perhaps a deconstructed approach to the layout may work better to communicate the actual idea and inquiry. To allow the diagrams to interact more with the essay. And perhaps give shape to some of the writing. Perhaps the ‘chaptering’ while initially useful for me to make sense of how I got here and what I was attempting. But to reflect the inquiry more I might want to experiment with printed form, layout and compiling it differently. Maybe copies of this goes alongside the card game with an instruction leaflet?