methodology

Methodology V2
The second version of the Methodology of Constallations, written in August 2021, starts with a quote from Alfred North Whitehead out of Adventures of Ideas (Whitehead, 1967):
“...every method is a happy simplification.”

The Constallations*ss Methodology is used to address constellationsi, whatever their nature, by installing a collective procedure. It is a method of setting in motion that borrows from the stars its blurred lines.
Constallations is an ongoing conversation that takes the form of several sessions of brainwish/storm/wash echoing each other.
What must be put into play to make Constallations appear?

Conditions
A minimum of three people who want to work with each other. They know at least one of the others personally.
Each participant wishes to bring into play a personal interest, not to produce a piece of work or to further their own project, but rather to make it move by the view of the others or simply to discover and to probe new approaches.

Necessary attitude
Constallation(s*s*s) needs to be a place where honesty and emotions can be expressed and recognised, where we can jump out of our comfort-zone blindly. Whenever we open a session, we enter it with these words in mind: loyal, attentive, caring, devoid of judgement, trusting and with a willingness to play by the “rules” of Constallations(…).

Tools
• A challenge, a surprise.
• Computers connected to the Internet.
• A dedicated website to communicate the preparations and traces.
• Time to organise, to prepare, to do and to archive.

Protocol
• Start with an online meeting: the participants together define a calendar and determine dates for at least one session per person. They create a dedicated website page and share its access codes.
• Each participant bears responsibility for one session, which means they have to prepare it and to take care of its traces. She/he must choose a theme that matters to them and determine a protocol for the session that is posted online the day before the meeting.
• There is no prior consultation.
• On the day of the meeting (an appointment hour has been fixed before) the person in charge of the session explains the field of the research and the protocol meant to experiment, explore and appropriate the issue together.
• At the end of the day there is time for a debrief.

Why write a methodology, a “how-to”?
The methodology is the result of an attempt to extract the essence of our experiment to capture its energy and potential. It shall not freeze nor dissipate, but must have the possibility to be shared and reinvested. Transmission is also a challenge and can lead to mutations, deformations and repossessions that will fertilise the recipe.
The methodology is also a decortication; it is a way to ‘cut-apart’ what we’re doing, and allows us to conceptualise and see the complexities within the processes and mechanisms we use and experience.

Constallations is devoid of a goal and has no predetermined path.
Constallations is what we are when we give up our personal objectives, and when, based on our own history and skills, we tackle a challenge prepared by one of us.
Constallations is made of travels through things that one doesn’t control, of jumps in the void.
Constallations is an exploration full of unexpected discoveries.
Constallations is a learning tool and/or practice radically open to everything.
Constallations is a concrete utopia — on a small scale, and temporary, it must be said — but therefore it carries a hope for a different society.
It’s a perspective.
Constallations is a path, an adventure, a chemistry, a soup that upsets habits and creates links.
Each session is always also a gesture of love. Intuition, intellect and machines (the apparatus) blend together and create affects. The path fantasised by the one who organises, the one who desires, becomes a labyrinth of encounters, bifurcations, digressions — a pure sensory juice of entanglement. The research is done with a benevolence that is inseparable from it: without kindness, nothing would emerge.