CASSIE FIELDING: CUT, COLLIDE, BECOME: SURREALIST GAMES AS COLLABORATIVE METHOD

Cohear 1 Kirby Stenger, Spring 2024

WEDNESDAY 22 JULY, 14:00 - 14:55 

Lecture Room 2

What if the most rigorous thing a doctoral researcher could do was to cut up their abstract and let someone else rearrange it?

This session takes surrealism seriously as a research method — not as aesthetic decoration but as a practice for encountering what rational inquiry suppresses: the unexpected connection, the knowledge that lives in the gap between disciplines, the third thing that emerges when two unlike things meet.

Through two surrealist games used in sequence — the cut-up and the conditional — participants will work with fragments of their own research language, exchange them, collide them with someone else's, and discover what the collision produces. The session closes with a collective reading of a composite text that belongs to everyone in the room and could not have been written by any individual alone.

No prior knowledge of surrealism required. Bring a few sentences of your research. The scissors will be provided.