We’re at the stage of the studio where things feel, like (and possibly smell) swampy. In the thick of things where direction and destination are unclear, murky, and confused. Welcome to creativity, making, and research. This is a necessary part of the process. All I can say is that you need to trust that there is a method and way through and out of this. It is not something you can be told – it isn’t explicit knowledge like learning your times table – but is more implicit knowledge, something you can only learn by doing. There are ways of learning how to do it, but you have to do it to learn them, not just read this or think about it. (Which is why those who have been coming will achieve a great deal, and those who have not will, quite literally, end up learning nearly nothing.)

We started with difficult readings around object orientated ontology, speculative realism and ontography. The emphasis here became about recognising our anthropomorphism in our thinking about, well, most everything, and to begin to think differently about what things are. This included broadening what a thing is to include immaterial objects (for example ideas), as well as Bogost’s idea of unit operations where things can be of any scale (size), so a container is a thing as equally as a container ship is a thing. We then used listing as a method to build an ontograph to make more apparent how a thing is made up of lots of other bits and it is the relation between these bits that can be thought of as what matters. For example headphones require a certain relation between sound, electricity and magnets to work, unlike a door bell which could also consist of sound, electricity, and magnets.

These ideas and method have become the basis for a media making that is premised on listing. Different types of lists are being made in response to the conversations, discussions, and provocations offered in the studios. Some of these might work, some might not, what will matter in the immediate short term is how you are able to see if and how they work (or not). From these listed making works it takes several iterations (trial and error steps) to clarify, find direction and so on. This is why I describe it as a sketch practice, for if we were sketching on paper we know that it won’t be right the first time, that sketching is good for a quick thinking-through-doing (it is a making concrete of an idea), and that in sketching you’re allowed to cross things out, start again, and so on.

This is happening through writing in response to prompts to help clarify what the work might be about, what idea or ideas it is exploring. As this becomes a bit clearer the next step is to make these ideas much much stronger. This is not be thinking about it. Well, it is, but thinking in terms of research, making, studio practice, needs to be informed, and so that requires reading and looking at other things. This research is where you will read intelligent things that are about the idea you are investigating. For Ai Vee it might be about queer aesthetics as a way to rethink how she might film her project and the sorts of things that might count as content. This will require theoretical readings in queer theory. As your understanding of what is now becoming your ‘problem’ (the gym and humnan/machine interaction, borders, people as ‘relays’ in communicative chains, cinematic movement, and so on) develops this knowledge shifts from being a way to describe what your work does to something that leads your making. What your work is able to begin to become is something that starts to think with these new ideas, and hopefully you not only learn a lot more about something, but you also begin to think differently (about making, media, video, your problem) about some thing. (Again, from my point of view education is not only learning more about something, the quantitate – the internet sort of manages that for us now, it is helping you find and make qualitative changes in your understanding of the content, yourselves, your understanding of your own practice, the media, and so on.)

As your major media work develops it will require a commentary of some sort. The way to do this is to think of them as like blog posts. So rather than trying to write a long essay write a series of shorter things. This maintains the list idea, while also recognising and acknowledging that there are lots of different ways (facets) to your work, your ideas, your problem, your topic, the world. These smaller pieces of writing are ideas, riffs, lists, reveries, speculations, quotes, asides. They are literally to essay (which means “to attempt”), to think out loud and in an appropriate form rather than turn your writing into something which appears to already have all the answers. (This by the way is one of the great virtues of blogging in university courses.) This does not mean that the quality of your writing does not matter. It does. This writing also needs to come from a position of considered knowing, of knowledge, and not just opinion. This means it needs to be informed by your reading, and as necessary, uses evidence.

As I’ve been looking at the studio and the eight who regularly come I’ve been anxious that we’ve lost our way. We haven’t. Not by a long shot, long way. We are now at the cusp of confusion which is the heart of thinking, research, and creative making. (If you know what something will be before you do it, how on earth can it be in anyway ‘creative’?) This is the darkest bit of the ‘black box’ of your practice as media makers and students. The feelings of insecurity and anxiety (of direction, purpose, you can add to the list yourselves) is normal and exactly what ought to happen in a studio. The way out? Read, look at other material, the listing and writing that we’ve done in class. The effort to identify quotes that have certain qualities for you from the readings. All are simple, repeatable, strategies that think with other things and all help you to start to see how you can use and not just describe ideas.

If we remember week one, there were two important principles of studio learning. We learn by making (doing), and that most of the making explicit what is implicit will happen in the studio. I’m only just realising how accurate this is and not just wannabe teacher talk, for how this studio has run, if you haven’t been here, not only have you not got feedback (which by itself might count for little), but the tasks that are now the beginning of the directed focussing (the narrowing) are really about making ideas into concrete things. We are beginning to shift from that old school here’s a thing what might it mean, to I am thinking through a complex idea by making something that doesn’t report on what I know, but is figuring it out – in media – while I’m making and doing it. It literally shifts you from being busy little reactive thinkers to slow, considered, creative thinker-makers.