IMPROVISATION**
Workshop for provisional design, performance and communication
Stuckeman School - The Pennsylvania State University
Spring, 2015.
Image/imagen: J.R.B., Functions, Field and Noise, Semantic Map for a Lecture, U.D. Mansilla + Tuñón, E.T.S.A.M., Madrid, 2004.
**Improvisation is the process of devising a solution to a requirement by making-do, despite absence of resources that might be expected to produce a solution. […] Improvisation in engineering is to solve a problem with the tools and materials immediately at hand. […] Improvisation in the context of performing arts is spontaneous performance without specific preparation. […] However, improvisation in any life or art form, can occur more often if it is practiced as a way of encouraging creative behavior. That practice includes learning to use one's intuition, as well as learning a technical understanding of the necessary skills and concerns within the domain in which one is improvising. [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Improvisation]
1st Year Sessions - Wednesday, March 4 & Monday, March 03 / Wednesday, April 1.
2nd Year Sessions - Wednesday, February 4 & Wednesday, March 18.
3rd Year Session - Wednesday, February 18.
4th Year Sessions - Monday, February 23 & Monday, March 23.
OVERVIEW
Improvisation is a collaborative workshop that deals with the ‘performative’ stages of design through the practice of impromptu presentations, interactive display, and communication as techniques for instantaneous decision-making.
Public speaking, jam sessions, extemporaneous exhibitions, or collaborative writing all benefit from practice and catalyze creative behavior. Framed imagination, limited resources, and time constraints trigger a turning in the work, allowing for unforeseen possibilities in the process of design. Provisional problem-solving techniques expand the domain of solutions when decisions must be made on the spot. The performer has become a listener and profits from instantaneous feedback. Thought, action, and communication are almost simultaneous. And the process begins again.
OBJECTIVES
• To develop the performative skill of instantaneous decision-making through the practice of improvisation.
• To surpass prefixed, linear, and rhetoric presentations as a means to facilitate public discussion.
• To benefit from externalization of private production by virtue of dialectical practice.
• To integrate rules with chance as complementary components of public display.
• To promote the creative potential of extemporaneous composition.
• To develop presentation flexibility skills
DIALECTICS VERSUS RHETORICS
In an open forum, the presentation of an argument implies discussion. As opposed to a rhetorical approach where persuasion or motivation has a strong emotional component (pathos), the dialectical method strives to obtain answers through collective reason and logic (logos). Conversely to simple oratory that requires no logic or truth, dialectics strives to diminish the contradictions of an argument by the involvement of a listener. As in the Socratic method, a proposition, a thesis, is instantaneously confronted with a counter-proposition, an antitheses, that is based on the internal contradictions of the original discourse. The apparent contradiction is the starting point for a new on-the-spot synthesis or provisional settling between the opposing assertions. This improvised refutation represents a qualitative improvement of the original proposition, and becomes the new hypothesis. The process continues until significant contradictions are settled. The externalization of the original proposal in leaving the private realm can produce thought, even knowledge, as a result of being challenged outside the individual comfort zone.
THE REPERTOIRE, RECONFIGURED
When we speak, we improvise. Our everyday interactions are unconscious acts of improvisation.
At the word scale, our preparation consists of being versed in the meanings of terms, and mastering the rules by which they relate, knowing their grammar, the tectonics of language. The routine of improvisation is the creative process that establishes instantaneous relations between known elements. The more in depth we have explored the meaning and use of these word elements, the greater the potential for new instant reconfiguration of these building blocks; the more we have practiced their usage or established similar paths or connections between them, the more likely new meaningful and effective relations will be formed with them. Improvisation makes use of the known in order to enhance the possible. Specific, or local conditions may take us places that were not accounted for, but for which we have been preparing a baggage of resources.
At the concept level, our preparation is even greater. Complete ideas or arguments may have been constructed before these are confronted with particular situations or new constraints. When entire paths of thought have been rehearsed and assimilated, and bonds between ideas created, what is left to the moment —to chance— is the interaction between the known and the unexpected. Improvisation is the ability to establish complex connections that are needed at an instant in a new and creative way.
In general, the success of the routine is a function of the stock of items or skills that form the improviser’s repertoire.
THE TIMELINE AND THE MATRIX
In the context of a presentation or a performance, improvisation is needed when the message or the expression of a set of ideas can and will be subject to unexpected circumstances. Save the accident, a speaker can choose the structure of a presentation, thus selecting the degree of improvisation whose spectrum lies between the timeline and the matrix. On one end, a written monologue or a PowerPoint presentation leaves less space for spontaneous creation; on the other, an open matrix of phrases or images without a pre-set order requires a greater application of immediate decision-making. The open-structured discourse of the matrix not only completes the necessary connections between a set of ideas, but also relates these to whatever has been deliberately left open. The timeline can be rehearsed almost fully; the matrix that is sensitive to an audience must reconfigure itself as the pieces fall into place. And, by definition, input is unpredictable.
EXTEMPORANEOUS DECISION-MAKING
When time for consideration is minimized, reduced to the instant of a discussion, a performance, or a public presentation, decisions must be made on the spot. The creative process of relating known elements is stressed when the solution to a problem cannot be postponed, and a composition is due immediately. Even at the risk of forcing stopgap solutions, instantaneous decision-making can produce provisional explanations that enhance flexibility, and boost sudden inventiveness, at times resulting in unforeseen results. This thinking outside the box is the result of approaching the predicament by making-do. Unexpected outcomes may come about when the matter cannot be left unsolved. Hence, improvisation becomes a space of possibility.
RULE & CHANCE
As opposed to unlimited freedom, or autonomy, the territory of possibility is one that is based on the limits of the real. Somewhere in between the pre-recorded intervention and the unconditional act where nothing is prefixed, the routine of improvisation is one that requires a very precise balance between predefined constraints and that which is left open, unsolved, expectant. The act of improvisation requires a set of rules that will frame the scope of chance, a funnel for the creative act. The more specific and precise the rules, the greater freedom for impromptu intervention, the more profound the variation possible within the limiting structure.
STRATEGIES
Student’s impromptu presentations will be exposed to a range of situations:
• Sampling: assimilating the alien element through post-rationalization. Logical imagination for the closing of the loop.
• The matrix of slides. Multiplicity of logical paths for equivalent argumentations: when only the diagram is prefixed.
• What We See Looks Back At Us (Didi-Huberman), or The observer, observed (F.Lasserre). Favoring the Interactive.
• Reductio & Amplificatus. The possibilities of derivative and integral action (and vice versa) in a closed discourse.
• The unconscious rule. Recording, challenge and breaking of one’s own rules, hardest first (Jackie Brookner).
• Accumulative variation: the recurrent slide and the repeated term. Iteration versus self-editing (L.Frantz).
• The found concept: forcing the story elsewhere. Searching for relations between repertoire and accident.
• Aiming to miss, or getting it exactly wrong (C.Price), and deliberate WTF-ness: aiming low (K.Ralske).
• The puzzle of fragments. Compacting the whole through the common denominator (Michael Smith).
• Starting backwards. Linear inversion and its relation to the inductive and deductive discourse.
• One phrase improvisational writing. Time, extension, objective, and format constraints.
• Schedule versus diversion. Variation of the self-imposed routine (Martin Beck).
• Subtraction and synthesis through iteration. Comprehension & compression.
• The mistake, or how the unanticipated is mostly a source of information.
• The short circuit. Risk and potential of the untimely closing of the loop.
• Prohibitio. Definition by absence: working around the forbidden term.
• Avoiding the crutch. Detection and elimination of vacant style habits.
• Expositio interruptus. The invisible slide or the verb on its own.
• Framing. Contextualization as a change in meaning.
• Silence or the verbalism antidote (James Benning).
• From general to specific and back again.
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