a year of not knowing
This blog post is about not knowing.
It’s about a year of quite intensely unexpected not knowing, along with everyone at the pandemic scale, and also on the macro personal scale, where that state of being became particularly uncomfortable. It’s also a story of realising and releasing a fundamental particle of my creative practice that’s been part of me and my work the whole time. It just needed first of all to be given a name, and a bit of space to wriggle around a bit. I’m excited to be able to describe it, and I am ready for the next chapter of my practice of not knowing, almost.
Here’s how the not knowing goes…..
A lot has happened and not happened since my last blog post a whole year ago. I had a part time position for a year at the History of Science Museum in Oxford, where I was looking forward to learning more about engaging with objects and scientific instruments, and I was in the excited first month of a Developing Creative Practice grant from Arts Council England. So although the pandemic was very present, I was in the privileged position of being ready to distract myself with the delicious not knowing of new spaces, people and ideas.
Then back in April, a few quirks of my biology took me in entirely another direction of not knowing. I almost didn’t mention at the start of my blogs last year, that I have a queer body in all the ways, and somehow it was prescient that I did. What had been a manageable long term baseline of not knowing, with mild ME and fibromyalgia, became a black hole of not knowing after an adverse response to my first Covid vaccine, and a whole bunch of new unknowns in my body to adjust to and navigate.
( I still don’t know how long it will take to return to my baseline, or if I ever will, but I should note here that not hiding the fallout between a vital vaccine and a poorly researched chronic illness is not the same as being anti-vax. I would love to be fully vaccinated. And in fact if medical science had historically been better at the practice of active ‘not knowing’ alongside the chronically ill community, rather than dismissing unknown illnesses, we wouldn’t still be in the dark when it comes to things like Long Covid.)
Meantime, the point is, I had an unexpected plunge into a murky pool of not knowing. I couldn’t work at all for a bit, let alone get out of bed. Gradually, as I navigated a fairly choppy ride of sometimes being able to sit up at a desk, and often not, I found my imaginative horizons almost impossible to activate. They were out of reach, quite literally obscured in a brain fog. Luckily the initial phase of my development process was about personal reflection rather than original ideas, so I went along more gently, allowing deeper reading around the threads from my previous work and the focussed set of questions I was interested in thinking about.
After a phase of trying to be too academic about those questions, reading papers, books, academic essays - about museology, metaphor, perception, alternative economics, philosophies of reality - I got myself stuck trying to find an intellectual articulation of where I was going with my creative practice development. I then had a breakthrough conversation with a friend, about the creative validity of running with whatever conceptual connections these texts triggered for me. I realised we don’t think twice about surrounding ourselves with books of visual references to draw inspiration from, and that it’s just as OK to do that with lines of non-fiction text as much as it is to jump between, and rearrange snippets from imagery and fiction. I decided I should give myself permission for non-fiction text to be equally in the mix.
So for example, while I’m probably a few miles from the rigorous depths of Bruno Latour’s actor network theory, or Karen Barad’s agential realism, I’ve taken something valuable, an excited gut feeling more than anything, about what it could be for creative practitioners, cultural spaces, objects and observer/participants, to be entangled agents in an experience rather than separated out in unhelpful hierarchies.
All this enforced slower thinking took me on to researching a list of practitioners that I wanted to have conversations with and being bolder about the thought leaders that inspired me with their work in hybrid art/science/museums/innovative people centred design. I felt daunted to make a cold approach to people I was so interested to speak with, and I said as much in my emails to them, but I slowly started to send out my invitations for online conversations and receive replies.
I am not used to my brain not being able to keep up in a conversation and having to make notes to hold onto threads I want to run with, so I was tentative about kicking conversations off, but by late summer I was adjusting to this enough to start a few with people online. I had really wanted to travel to meet UK based people in person, to be part of their spaces, walk and talk, but between my health and the pandemic, my fantasy of unfettered creative freedom remained, as it did for so many of us, stuck in a set of very familiar on screen boxes.
Despite that, it felt good to start talking to people. I had naively imagined that each conversation might be a thought experiment in itself - a moment to break out of the exhausted pandemic mode we all found ourselves in. I had wanted to create a conversational space to dream in a little rather than just discuss survival, but it was immediately clear that was really hard to do with someone you’re meeting for the first time on a screen, who’s already been generous enough to reply to an email out of the blue and start a conversation. So I settled for simply exploring the research questions that I’d identified, to see which ones naturally came up in my discussions. Other people’s perspectives immediately expanded my thinking out again and I tried not to hold on to my original questions too tightly, to see what came up.
And then just as I felt I was getting going, I hit another health wall in the autumn, with a whole new set of bodily not knowing to navigate. So I had to pause again. I was miserable and furious and a bit scared. And somehow, while I was flat out on the sofa, in an extended personal state of not knowing, with more time for the few conversations I’d had to percolate a bit, I started to realise that everything was coming back each time to the same thing….
I started out in physics, with a particular interest in the poetic world of particle physics, and so I often find myself searching for the energetic engine at the heart of something, and the fundamental particles that a thing or an idea is made out of. Of the four questions that I’d set myself to think about for my creative practice, one of them was identifying itself as the fundamental particle that the others could all break down into when you poke them.
Where is the invitation to not know?
I’d come up with this question originally because I felt like some something was missing in our cultural spaces. Somewhere in between the didactic explanations of phenomena in science centres, the often sparse or knowing interpretation in art galleries, and the dry catalogue numbered labels in museums, I was looking for a more human invitation to engage with the ideas and processes behind each experience. I’m generalising of course, and I love all these types of spaces as a visitor and as a practitioner, but what if we could bring in more playfulness, curiosity, and a permission to not know. The most thrilling and memorable experiences are often the most unexpected ones. Serendipitous discoveries, turning the corner on the street and finding a musician playing, the rare moment in the empty gallery when a friendly curator opens up a closed drawer for you to see inside.
Exhibits can be too tightly designed for specific learning outcomes without considering what it FEELS like to encounter them. Ideas can be too securely nailed down to allow you to wonder. What if science could be presented as beautifully as art, but without the clean white cube, tiny labelled reverence? What if more museums designed people rather than object centred experiences? What if there were spaces which present what is Not Known rather than what is Known.
For our collective joy and collective survival in a world of wicked problems, we need to teach the art and science and the creative potential of not knowing, as much as we need to teach and test the collected body of things we already know. Where is that happening in the public realm? (An adjacent link here is a joyful reminder or introduction to the brilliant Sir Ken Robinson on the imposed conformity of schools killing creativity.)
Once I started thinking about what this invitation to not know would mean, or need, I found it sat at the heart of all my other questions:
NOT KNOWING AND CURIOSITY - there has to be an element of not knowing for a state of curiosity to arise. If you provide audiences with all the answers, there’s no space left for anyone to feel like active agents with valued questions. But curiosity and not knowing needs to be held safely and carefully designed for. If you’re not given enough context or scaffold to hold on to, you’ll just feel uncomfortably adrift. In an unknown space, the scaffold will be minimal for some people and for others, it will need to be a clearly defined, easily navigated structure. This scaffolding of the invitation to not know is a key challenge for my hybrid creative practice.
NOT KNOWING - A MORE POROUS SHARING OF POWER AND KNOWLEDGE - the shared experience of not knowing is also where I believe the boundaries of power and knowledge can be dissolved. An imbalance of power and knowledge is baked in to the colonial history, architecture, grammar and tone of many of our cultural institutions. But if the museum meets the visitor in what is not known, together, rather than what is known, then hierarchies can melt away. We started to test this out by centring a whole new exhibition around people’s questions at We the Curious. So that the visitor can walk in and see something phrased in the way they would say it or think it, and seeing that a person like them asked that question, feel immediately part of the space rather than peripheral to the way it operates. By inviting people to not know, we are exploring together and in the best case, perhaps even generating new knowledge together. ( I love Alexander Dorner’s vision of the art museum as a ‘kraftwerk’, a generator of new energy.)
NOT KNOWING = IDEAS IN MOTION - not knowing is the space where the questions are more alive than any answers are yet. It’s an exciting and sometimes frustrating space to be in, but artists and scientists have expertise in charting a path through not knowing. This is what the invitation to not know offers audiences, to become valued participants in an active process of thinking and testing out the edges of things. And the more diverse the people included in this way of being, the more generative and creative that process is likely to be.
NOT KNOWING IS GENEROUS - finally, I think not knowing also lies beneath the question of whether a museum can be as generous as a forest. This question came from biologist Janine Benyus’ idea about urban planning, with a city in generous equilibrium with its environment. Thinking about new cultural space, it makes me wonder where parklets might intersect with distributed museums. I also want to expand the notion of generosity too. After generations of institutions holding tightly to power and knowledge and collections, and gatekeeping whose work is presented or commissioned, the most generous thing a cultural space can do right now is to loosen that grip, by inviting people in to a process of not knowing rather than a highly controlled sharing of knowing.
All of the above needs something that society has lost, at least at the moment in the UK - and that is trust. A invitation to not know needs trust. People are overwhelmed with fake news, deep fakes, corruption in the media, in government. And it’s all largely mediated digitally. It’s hard to trust what we can’t touch, or test out with all our available senses. Curators are in the top 5 most trusted professions in the UK to ‘tell the truth.’ I wonder what it would take to be able to also trust curators, artists, scientists, each other, in not knowing, and where the spaces are for us to do that together.
In many ways, my last year has been about learning to trust myself, in all the states of not knowing.
My next post is shorter as it doesn’t have a whole year to catch up on. It’s about an imaginary not knowing space, to play with how that might feel as a container to locate cultural experiences...
Meantime some connected inspiration - to check out the work of Civic Square, whose co-founder and Director Immy Kaur shared her vision of a more generous local environment with me in conversation and made me want to step into it immediately. And the work of MICRO, who share mini museums in urban spaces, as a network of habitat fragments - co- founder Charles Philipp talked to me about his approach to designing for curiosity in unexpected locations.
And a thank you to all the people that have helped me through all the personal not knowing - in particular, Clare Reddington, for love, and incredible food, and listening and making me laugh even in the worst bits.
Also Silke Ackermann, a rare museum director who was kind and trusted me with flexible working when I needed it. And Jessica Bradford, the best co-pilot job share partner in this year of not knowing, or in any year. And to Arts Council England for extending my DYCP deadline twice, and giving me this chance to think and develop and have an imaginary horizon to reach for.
And all my friends who are still wonderfully there even though I mostly haven’t been.