Mod. 7 - Blocking & Probing with Your Matter of Concern

Adapting The Probing Process by Probing the Probing Process

Within Iain Kerr and Jason Frasca’s framework, they claim that a Matter of Concern (MOC) exists within two entities in constant concurrent motion (or a dance) with each other. They refer to these entities as “The Agent” and “The Environment. Their work aims to challenge the creative practice of ideating, thinking, brainstorming, etc., vs. feeling, doing and making. The former focuses on The Agent and less (if at all) on The Environment. As if this weren’t complex enough, Iain and Jason also identify the possibility and likelihood of unanticipated byproducts emerging from the dance between The Agent and The Environment.

Their challenge to the reader is to identify a few elements that make up The Environment and begin to probe into those elements by blocking them one at a time and noting the feelings that emerge, defining this experience and process as “sense-making.” The repetition of this process of feeling, responding, making, and stabilizing creates greater consciousness of The Environment’s role in co-making The Agent.

Before going further into the probing process, I identified a gut feeling that something was missing within their framework that I couldn’t place without making the thing I was seeing in my mind. I attempted to create something to represent this gut feeling by building a concept map inspired by Iain and Jason’s drawings that made more sense to me. Ironically, identifying this gut feeling actually revealed what was missing.

Their goal and presupposition is that by initiating a new practice of probing by identifying the elements that make up The Environment, the Agent will better understand and engrain the role The Environment plays in the co-making of the MOC with The Agent. However, after carefully reading where this probing process leads to (i.e. combining aberrant beauty with new tools to create a new media/medium) I realized what my gut feeling was. Iain and Jason presupposed a large degree of self-awareness on the part of The Agent. This presumed self-awareness by The Agent implies they have the capacity to recognize and identify their feelings, their responses to those feelings, how to make something that represents those feelings, and then stabilizing it all within the probing process. Another way of looking at this is to realize the role psychology plays within The Agent. The Agent can’t understand the role it plays within The Environment if it doesn’t know the role they themselves are playing. In the same way that the probing process blocks an element in The Environment in order to create new pathways, we must also probe The Agent by identifying the elements that make them up and block the elements on the other side of the dance.

Moving away from the conceptual into the practical, in the process of trying to identify the elements that make up The Environment, I realized the questions of who, what, where, why and how aided me in identifying the properties of the elements for both The Environment and The Agent. Using Sara Nephew’s MOC as a guide, I input the elements into a concept map and then added properties within them. You’ll see my concept maps outlined below. The image files are small, so I’ve provided them in full scale in the subsequent pages. This is as far as I was able to get within this assignment, however, I can say that it deeply enriched and encouraged me to follow Iain and Jason’s prompt of making something in order to find the new. I just wish they had better drawings…

MATTER OF CONCERN

ENVIRONMENT

AGENT