“Why not suppose that thinking is not in alignment with the world and not upright in character, that it can be contrary toward things outside of itself and can be playful and ill-mannered as well as upright? Under this set of contestable assumptions, thinking becomes a conglomeration of intentions, leaps, intensities, trace elements, and accidents, out of which emerge the surprises that temporarily jar humans out of the stupor of their duly sequential representing and recognizing.”
Bennett, Jane. ‘The Enchantment of Modern Life: Attachments, Crossings, and Ethics’. New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2001. p52-53
Created in 2016, The Promise of a Scattered Methodology began as an “exploded essay,” sparking a series of artworks that converged into a digital installation.
This project grew out of my experience as a researcher feeling overwhelmed by the explosion of digital information—a reaction to the reality that there is no whole, only a shifting and infinite field. In an effort to find a way through that noise, I turned to Jean-François Lyotard’s concept of petits récits. It captures a world where rapid digital shifts have acted as a disruptor, shattering ‘Grand Narratives’ into a plurality of localised, fragmented experiences.
By leaning into the rhizomatic thinking of Gilles Deleuze and Pierre-Félix Guattari, this methodology treats the explosive nature of digital communication—and the resulting shift in how we construct reality—not as a problem to be solved, but as the very structure that allows for a de-centred, multi-vocal perspective.
As digital communication continues to evolve, The Promise of a Scattered Methodology acts as both a celebration and a shattering of the tenuous relationships between things. It is a constellation of matter(s) that echo and loop back on themselves in a mode of constant reflection. Here, pop-up messages serve not as dead ends, but as loose ends, inviting you to engage with the world as a shifting field of relations rather than a fixed reality.