The Desk and the Dreaming Space ...

Pusan, 1999

Today I’m surrounded by skyscrapers. Simultaneously immersed in the Cold War theme park that is North Korea, and in the high art/high tech landscape of South Korea. On my desk are pages of notes on the history of concrete, a polythene-covered Penguin Classic, photos of the port city of Pusan, and my notebook from 1999—in which I wrote about an encounter with Chekhov on a winter evening in one of the city’s waterfront bars.

What am I doing? I’m working on UNREQUITED, a 30-minute Performance Essay for the PowerPoint Age which I’m presenting in Adelaide in September. No idea—yet—how I’m going to combine these various strands into a coherent whole. The piece is still in what I like to call its dreaming space: that exciting, early research stage, when curiosity is paramount, and you find yourself pursuing ideas and lines of thought for no apparent or discernable reason—just to see where they might lead …

So apropos of this meandering, here are my 3 favourite tenets from Bruce Mau’s An Incomplete Manifesto for Growth:

6. Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

8. Drift. Allow yourself to wander aimlessly. Explore adjacencies. Lack judgment.

9. Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.