I was inspired by Michel de Certeau's notions of tactics, ruses, and more generally, methods of creative play that are at work subversively in a rigorously structured, stratified, and disciplined social sphere.

In his book The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau explains,

"Unrecognized producers, poets of their own affairs, trailblazers in the jungles of functionalist rationality, consumers produce something resembling the 'lignes d'erre' described by Deligny. They trace 'indeterminate trajectories' that are apparently meaningless, since they do not cohere with the constructed, written, and prefabricated space through which they move. They are sentences that remain unpredictable within the space ordered by the organizing techniques of systems.
Although they use as their material the vocabularies of established languages (...), although they remain within the framework of prescribed syntaxes (...), these 'traverses' remain heterogeneous to the systems they infiltrate and in which they sketch out the guileful ruses of different interests and desires" (pages 34 - 35).

The techniques de Certeau refers to, which are materially constituted by the very "vocabularies" of dominant "languages", established systems of taxonomy, are in fact located on the outside of language (as opposed to simply outside of language). They form in the interstices of language, make visible Visions and Auditions of Life, as outlined by Gilles Deleuze in his essay "Literature and Life", and offer poignant vantage points from which to re-experience and ultimately 'recolonize' social spaces through creative play.

In the words of de Certeau, these practices make up a "surreptitious and guileful movement, that is, the very activity of 'making do'". Making do involves, "select fragments taken from the vast ensembles of production in order to compose new stories with them" (35).

This is the very essence of my experiments: to operate in prefabricated space, within the texture of hegemony, using the very tools of dominance such as the "established vocabularies and syntax" but to a subversive, or at least creative, end.

For Michel de Certeau links, please click here.
For more information on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, please click here.