This next task can be thought of as an ‘opening out’, an collecting of things. It is deliberately broad and is intended to get a big pile of stuff together to help shape what the major work will be. So it is like a writer’s notebooks, an artist doing lots of sketches, plucking chords on a guitar as you invent a song. So after the opening out we do a narrowing, a focussing, which is what the final works will become. It is important to bear in mind we don’t yet know what form, or even specific content, this final form will take.

So, another way to begin this opening out, following on from the idea of listing propositions, could also be in the form of letters. Ren was interested in his four cats. What letter (either written, or video) would you make to send to the cats? One to all four or individually? What do you want to tell them? Ask them? (I heard someone say, just in passing, that the family dog was “the guardian of all my children’s secrets”, which struck me as elegant but also if you teased and worried at it enough, a really interesting way to reconsider the relation of human to animal that we foolishly presume domestication and pets to be). Monique could of course do this with dogs, and for Luke I’d certainly make a list of propositions about rubbish (for example how much is cleaned of beaches each week, each year, of St Kilda beaches, how many traps there are to capture rubbish, listings of the different things in the rubbish, and so on). These lists might happen later, but they can also be a way to help think through what might be filmed.