How ironic of a statement in a document that is supposed to be concerned precisely with that - researcher and his procedure. Nevertheless, it was exactly this inability that brought me to the Master, a deep conviction that the only way to expand my scope on that matter is to change the paradigm and delve into practice.
Obviously, such a shift opens up a new perspective of inquiry into the object of your study, but it also creates
a troublesome surplus value - awareness of the relative relationship between the elements of the equation constituted by the maker, object, tool and spectator (that matter is explained in greater details in the Filmarcades manual that will follow). It paves the way for uncertainty and doubt, creating the paradoxical state of satisfying dissatisfaction, that in turn, seems to be the condition of possibility of critical thinking.
Taking away the comfort of strategic planning from well established disciplinary trenches, it offers the freedom
of tactical interdisciplinarity. I discussed that issue at length in the aforementioned critical review for Exam II, but it's worth repeating that by no means does it suggest a folly ignorance of methodologies or erratic attempt
of cramming them all together. What distinguishes that kind of interdisciplinarity from multidisciplinarity is the fact that instead of marrying several different methodologies, you create one that responds to the needs of your object. However, it implies a further need of remapping all the elements of your inquiry in relation to that very point of interest.
The panel above introduces the embodied example of such an approach, which is our stereoscopic vision. If you stretch your thumb up and close one of your eyes, you'll see that the change of angle not only gives you different point of view on your finger, but also displaces it in relation to the background. Unfolding some piece of information it enfolds another. Yet, our brain has the faculty of stitching two points of view together seamlessly, that enhances our ability to navigate in space and estimate the distance.
Composition of carefully chosen points of view, might enrich our understanding exponentially, however, stitching all of them together would not only be impossible but futile. Since it's precisely this process of hiding and revealing that creates our knowledge - critical selection and abstraction let's us tell the the story of IT, instead of EVERYTHING (which would be the pure chaos, or if you're religious - intellectual faculty of god).
Finally, that brings us to the last concept in this lengthy detour, which is SITUATEDNESS of knowledge. You can assume any position towards your object, but your study of it will only be credible if you account for that position. Theoretical framework can be one mode of such an orientation, but as I stated before, practice could (and should) serve as the other. In this respect, science with its forms of publication accommodating graphs, microscopic shots, accounts of the procedures etc. has an edge over good ol' humanities. Surprisingly enough, even fields that heavily invested in visual domain as the one that I come from - Film Studies - preferred to rely on ekphrasis (linguistical translation of films) to expanding the reified consensus.
My motivation for starting this research was to test the alternatives. I was trying to investigate the consequences of the experimental/practical shift in Film Studies enabled by the form of video essay. However, I soon realized, what I tried to state above - that shifting the 'video' from a position of an object, to the position of a tool, requires profound changes in the whole assemblage.
It meant that I was no longer looking at the film itself, but investigating cognitive processes and procedures of knowledge production enabled by the change of the medium.
It became clear to me that to achieve that I needed to embrace the position inscribed in the second part of the "video essay" formula - that of the essayist - who according to Max Bense:
Is a combiner, a tireless producer of configurations around a specific object (…) for whom configuration is an epistemological arrangement which cannot be achieved through axiomatic deduction, but only through Ars Combinatoria in which imagination replaces knowledge.
Understanding essayistic as the attitude, openness (or even an imperative) to constant shifting of your position, so you can accommodate the thoughts occasioned by* your object, I delved into the experiment.
