Work What Stayed
Push, release, keep what stayed bent.
Formerly Hysteresis
Draw along the creases.
Seen in Tauba Auerbach, Untitled (Fold), 2013
Try it on your work
Take something from your project that can be bent, stretched, compressed or folded. Push it as far as it will go, ten times. Release it fully. Work only with what did not come back: the creases, the slack, the set. Stop when you have used every trace.
Argue your project's position as hard as you can to someone for two minutes, then argue the exact opposite for two. Write down only the claims that survived both directions. Those are the ones you actually hold.
Change one rule of how you work to its extreme for a day, then set it back. Note what did not return to how it was. Work with that residue for a week before deciding whether it is damage or discovery.
How it has been used
Magnetic materials do not simply retrace their path when an applied field is reversed. Some magnetisation remains: the material carries a memory of the force it experienced. Engineers plot this as a hysteresis loop, using the gap between the outward and return paths to understand memory, loss and switching. The useful question here is not whether the work can be restored, but what the excursion has made newly possible or permanently visible.
Where it leads
Grouped under Let me find out what holds up