ActionaryThings to do to your workAll operations

Relocate

Move it untouched and let the new surroundings do all the changing; any change to the thing itself voids it.

Duchamp's urinal on a gallery plinth.

Seen in Michael Asher, untitled installation, Art Institute of Chicago, 1979

Try it on your work

With your hands

Move one activity to a place it doesn't belong (the desk work outdoors, the private task in the public room) and do it there fully, once. List what the new place refused to support; that list is the old place's job description.

In words

Have a conversation that always happens in one setting in a completely different one: walking instead of sitting, standing in a stairwell instead of a room. What became sayable, or stopped being sayable, belonged to the setting all along.

In the process

Move one function of your project across a boundary (in-house to outside, one team to another, digital to physical) for a trial period. The adapters you had to build en route are a measurement of how location-bound the function really was.

How it has been used

Move the thing so its context changes its meaning: Duchamp's urinal in the gallery, the office chair on the beach, the lullaby in the stadium. The move forbids altering the thing itself: everything that changes must be changed by the new surroundings, or you've made a different object.

Where it leads

Grouped under Help me see it from another angle

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