SLANT or, How to start a research project
An Introduction to Slant
by Nicky Coutts & Adam Kaasa
1. To start with a skew
Lines of flight are bolts of pent-up energy that break through the cracks in a system of control and shoot off on the diagonal. By the light of their passage, they reveal the open spaces beyond the limits of what exists.
Tim Rayner (2013) — Philosophy for Change
At the start of any research project lines get drawn. Provisional marks circle the researcher’s feet, positioning them ‘here’ not ‘there’, with ‘this’ territory in mind over ‘that’. And extending from these lassoed feet spiral dashed, dotted, curved, looping, perspectival lines indicating predicted direction(s) of travel, journey times, expected encounters.
Research in the arts often begins, not with a question but with a configuration of lines, a drawing that is at the same time establishing/descriptive data, a sheaf of maps, hunches, annotated diagrams and plans. At this stage, the lines involved are workings-out as a proposition is made.
MRes students from the School of Fine Art and Humanities and from the School of Architecture pathways, combined to produce a series of books based on this provisory moment, the ground zero of an individual research project. Preparatory discussions across the two pathways, centred on how to locate and position yourself as a researcher — to look not only at what claims are being made, but from where they can be articulated.
Philosophers Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari wrote of the diagonal trajectory, referred to by Rayner, as a means to contest normalcy, to vie against established conventions exemplified by the horizontal and vertical axes. To operate on a tilt, incline, pitch, skew is to place yourself in a particular position beyond convention that is intrinsically also a perspective.
This joint cohort chose to refer to this generative set of principals as Slant, each one choosing an individual angle. Slant has become a physical cut applied to the base of each publication, a description of walking as a choreographic act of falling and catching yourself, an intrinsic concern in architecture for keeping any building watertight. It is an emotional state, a climate, a ramp, a rant, a prediction, a joke.
2. To start with compromise
Precarity is the condition of being vulnerable to others. Unpredictable encounters transform us; we are not in control, even of ourselves. Unable to rely on a stable structure of community, we are thrown into shifting assemblages, which remake us as well as our others. (…) Indeterminacy, the unplanned nature of time, is frightening, but thinking through precarity makes it evident that indeterminacy also makes life possible.
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing (2015) — The Mushroom at the End of the World
In Tsing’s view, we must get used to living in an age of uncertainty where slants inevitably abound. Occupying a slanty world takes considerable negotiation, time to adapt and be adapted.
Finding out ways of working together, while respecting individual slants, became a major consideration and activity throughout the slant project. Occupation within the project was extended to all, even as their physical slants might place them at odds. The cohorts got together regularly to investigate notions of consensus, ambition, compromise and community: to lean into each other.
The precarity of negotiating within a group also gave rise to basic considerations of what makes sense and how much sense is needed. The group would migrate into fictional mode. Voices would multiply in the room as ideas were put forward and contested, with sometimes a single voice occupying and testing out many contradictory angles.
3. To start with a book
In fact, while we read a novel, we are insane — bonkers. We believe in the existence of people who aren’t there, we hear their voices, we watch the battle of Borodino with them, we may even become Napoleon. Sanity returns (in most cases) when the book is closed. … In reading a novel, any novel, we have to know perfectly well that the whole thing is nonsense, and then, while reading, believe every word of it.
Ursuka K. Le Guin (1969) — Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness
A book usually comes at the end. Perhaps after months or years of writing, image making, editing, contracts, and printing. Perhaps years after the end of a PhD. But here, the book comes at the beginning. Unlike the reader of fiction who must believe in the reality of nonsense, researchers on the MRes started with the nonsensical reality of beginning at the end.
This temporal bias, twist or distortion disrupts the (fictional?) timeline of when research begins (the beginning of the academic year) and when it (the end of the academic year). The project inverts the slanted line from start to finish. With the book-series of SLANT in hand, do students now work backwards, forwards, or up or down?
We invite you to explore this end of the beginning of a research in process. What axes remain, what lines of flight emerge, what transversals open when the book is closed? Does sanity return, as Le Guin suggests? Or is every turn of a page a brief encounter with nonsense, but one we deeply trust? Do you believe the SLANT?
“The book is provoking by questioning its own and its authors position and polarising by playing with contradictions within its pages.” - Moritz Dittrich
This slant book is a foreword thought about the positions and observations we take according to objects -of research, of bodies, of functions. Taking an oblique angle as a researcher, it establishes a fragmented dialogue with representations of movement and form, and incorporates a sort-of-conversation with the Warburg library.” - Nuria Benítez Gómez
“This slant is just a fragment. A fragment of many possible lives, many possible scenarios, many possible suns over many possible places.Several directions, several lines that have found themselves in a circumstance and generating an angle, a limit. That limit is the beginning, is the primitive border of a shape. The shape of an existence.Slant is existing” — Mariano Cuofano
“Slant is a symbol of the trend. You could find the various perspectives about the future of retail in this book.” - Ching-Hung Lin
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