Did you ever encounter this small everyday strangeness?
Something feels off, like a glitch in your world view.
Like a pool right next to the ocean.
What if, instead of finding an easy explanation to get rid of the feeling, you would follow this strangeness?
Form a rule out of it, go out and experience it and whatever you discover, embrace it.
FOLLOW
EXPERIENCE
EMBRACE
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The Principle of Nonsense
For my diploma, I developed an extraordinary approach to creative ideation.
The first step is to sharpen your senses for the weird and unusual around you. Mostly they contradict one or more rules of your personal worldview and therefore appear as an error or glitch. Some are very directly irritating, while others may appear only after a closer inspection and questioning of our everyday social behaviors.
Once detected, you need to resist the urge to brush them aside or finding quick explanations for why they are actually quite normal, instead you can try to observe them and decipher the alternative rules they impose. Following those rules by continuing the train of thought, you might find a way to transform them into actual real life experiences.
In exchange for taking these thoughts out of your head into the real world, you will notice your perspectives tilting and new thoughts and ideas popping up. The inspiration acquired in this process can be further developed and expressed as documentation for an audience through individual ways.
Multiple of these results combined will pose as artifacts of a parallel world view, which can be explored and traced back by an audience or spark very different associations in them.
Execution in four versions
During my diploma project I used this method on four very different cases, starting with mundane everyday life encounters, being personality tests, houseplants, vacuum robots and finally the imposter syndrome.
For each I created a real life experience which resulted in three installations and a show.