navigating in heterogeneityFor instance, in the research group urban sound institute we made a one- year
exhibition including a large sound labyrinth in a swedish regional museum.^4 in one
of the labyrinthine spaces we placed examples of old tales and stories from the sound
archive in the museum. some sound fragments were taken out of the narratives and
spread throughout the space by forty small loudspeakers. a few of these were remodelled
into ‘musical’ sounds. other sounds were added, and thus we could investigate both
the narrative, spatial and musical qualities embedded in the stories. in a way, this space
in the labyrinth was in itself a liminal state of storytelling, floating in a vague terrain
between the explicit meaning of words and sentences, speech sounds, musical sound,
and a musical- sonic space. it emphasized shifting levels of focus, and it underscored
an understanding of sounds and narratives from both constructional and perceptual
approaches.
so, the work of modelling broadly spans representational models, idea diagrams,
operative models, and modelling activities in a more general sense. The researcher
becomes both navigator and co- player who reads the situation and the forces at play,
enters a dialogue game with the set- up, follows the inherent movements between
places, bridges the gaps between them, communicates with actors/actants, initiates
boundaries and resistive forces that shift the assembled picture, extracts certain pa-
rameters and places them in liminal states in order to work with them, and so forth.
The researcher takes a stand selectively on what the model is intended to do rather
than what it shall be; i.e. the focus is set on what the model shall relate to, what
secrets it can possibly reveal, what communicative reach it should have, and what
representational forms would be most effective – but not what results it is intended
to generate. The traditional research questions – what, where, when, for whom, by
whom, why and how (in what way, with what tools) – thus relate not only to the
initial formulation of a research project but also critically and creatively to what the
modelling activity itself may perform.
in this way modelling and performance consciously operates with fiction to produce
knowledge. To be workable, writes de Certeau, science (and any research) must
abandon both totality and reality and incorporate ‘fuzzy logic’ and ‘fuzzy relationships’.
science must accept the heterology – the discursive formations and doubled languages
- that emerge between science and language, like ‘science fiction’ (de Certeau 1986:
210–22). such acceptance will clarify its internal and dominant relationships to power.
in de Certeau’s interpretation, ‘stories of diverse voices’ are accompanied by a spectrum
of different actions. This diversity of voices would also open up interesting possibilities
for communication between scientific and artistic modes of making- thinking, e.g. by
critically recontextualizing scientific data, or creatively expand a logic argument into
artistic, associative experimenting.
in parallel with de Certeau, Thomas R. Fisher discusses how architects in general
have pursued ‘public fiction’, ‘imaginative acts and symbolic gestures that embody the
collective values and ideas of community in a particular place and time’. such fictions,
says Fisher, are ‘as diverse as the communities they speak to and the architects that
work with them’, and they involve
acting ‘as if’ something is true even when we know full well that it is not ....
a hypothesis is an idea that we hope to prove true. a fiction, in contrast, we