Foreground
Work only on the incidental; no return to the official subject until the time you set is up.
Footnotes on the cover.
Seen in Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 1966
Try it on your work
Take the least regarded physical element of your situation (the support, the packaging, the gap between things) and make it the centre of the next thing you make. Stop when the former background can no longer be ignored.
Describe your project by describing only what surrounds it: who waits on it, what it displaces, what it sits on top of. Ten sentences, without once naming the project itself.
Find the step in your process everyone treats as mere preparation and give it the time and standards of the main event for one cycle. Note what it produced when taken seriously.
How it has been used
Make the background the subject: the pause, the packaging, the waiting room, the caption. Perec called it the infra-ordinary. The move forbids returning to the official subject: for the duration, the incidental is all you're allowed to work on.
Where it leads
Grouped under Help me see it from another angle