voi Cesknow to be untrue, but, like a tool, it proves useful to us at the moment to
clarify something or to help us see it in a new way.
(Fisher 2000: 52f.)Fiction in abR – or artistic activity more generally – is not primarily a story about
something, but rather a design tool for modelling. Fiction does not have to be literary or
narrative, but can create an imagery that transgresses borders between different media,
and goes in and models space, including the various agents’ propositions, place- specific
narratives, etc. By being aware of the fictions one creates, one can also recognize facts
and conditions more critically. Fiction allows for complexity which, in turn, promotes
surprise as total overview or control is impossible to maintain. modelling is spatial
and material fiction. Thus, modelling and fiction are strategic tools in the staging of
explorative experiments and, as important parts in abR, they are actions of active
investigation, of knowledge production- interaction in the making, operating in the
situation directly, changing the obvious to create or evoke new meanings. part of this
is to create tentative, fictive situations that can present alternative set- ups for the
research framework. To consciously operate through fiction can provide possibilities
of discovering a new context, a relevant system or configuration in which different
components are engaged.
in the researching/modelling process, we can work contrapuntally, composing
a contrasting interplay in which we, for instance, may: actively utilize tensions in
the material that attract or repel different components; alternate materials; create
conscious contrasts, contradictions, reinforcements and transformations; test extreme
conditions; change perspectives; allow subject and object to change place; recast power
relationships; construct new tension relationships, etc. or, we can make small variations
and modifications that, if they continue long enough, can give rise to what is known
in physics as phase transitions, sudden changes of entire systems where new qualities
appear. experiments can allow questions in the material and its hidden possibilities, to
temporarily occupy the context and appear in liminal or transitional states.
Through the simulation/simulation work, using floating or liminal conditions,
finding temporary key locations and heterotopias, using contrapuntal techniques to
search for tensions and contrasts, etc., in the research material, we find ourselves in
a process oscillating between disruptive and converging mechanisms. The disruptive
mechanisms dismantle, break up, provoke conditions, vary the material, shift positions
and priorities and change perspectives in the research situation. in contrast, the
converging mechanisms may use discursive and modifying processes to gradually focus
the situation; they compose and shape it into a coherent construction of argumentation,
in whatever form of representation.
in essence, these two main types of modelling actions compete and interact
throughout the research process. They enable the work to emerge from the initial
investigative activity to the composed ‘product’ of a thesis, a journal article, an
exhibition or whatever form of representation this research activity is aiming at.
Through architectural thinking and experimenting, this gradual compositional work
can be understood as configurations – or choreographies – rather than a narrative
rooted in deductive, verbal thinking. These configurations create meaning as the
theme of research is gradually modelled, remodelled, simulated, constructed and