We Are Not Scientific At All

Nel Janssens

‘No, we’re not scientific at all.’ So claimed Mira and Cédric during a conversation we had about their work on 6 June 2023. And yet the research-based dimension of TMML really stands out. In particular, the precise and systematic nature of their actions, which are carried out with great attention to methodology. What may differ from what is adequately understood as scientific is that the researcher-anarchist appropriates methods with a scientifically improper purpose, i.e. no evidence is sought, systematic observation is not aimed at establishing data that then generate predictability. TMML carries out research with the aim of creating, of experiencing wonder. This requires a particular technique, one in which the straitjacket of a (scientific/disciplinary) methodology is deployed without losing open-mindedness. Research methods usually aim to heighten the neutrality of observation and to discipline the researcher’s gaze/observation and to limit the freedom of (subjective) interpretation. TMML doesn’t seem to follow this kind of disciplinary thinking. A different gaze is used here. One that analyses less than it associates. The value placed on open-mindedness here is also evident in the playfulness put forward in the work. Play is a proven method of generating wonder and open-mindedness towards the world (both the experiencing and the creating of it). But playfulness is indeed not something usually linked to scientificity and discipline (hence, ‘No, we’re not scientific at all’).

In the imaginative, associative gaze that TMML cultivates, however, there is a clearly inquisitive attitude. This emerges, among other things, in the rigour with which things are literally and figuratively developed. This doesn’t involve value-free observation but appreciatory observation. What comes to the surface is assigned a special value through the attention paid to it and the meaning attached to it (for instance, through association). That process is not aimed at explaining what occurs but rather, and with similar precision, at producing meaning. Meaning that is mainly generated in and through the actions of the participants.

One technique (method) that makes this possible is the introduction of a ‘range of playing rules’ (as described in The Phenomenal Park). The term instruction is avoided here. Instructions are often perceived as overly directive and restrictive, but this isn’t always the case. In essence, they merely provide a structure (from the Latin ‘in-‘ and ‘struere’) in which interactions can take place, and this indeed brings constraints. A structure (or in-struct) places material and immaterial limits on interaction between people and between people and things. In this way, it tries to channel actions and the accompanying experiences. A city is a distinctly complex in-struct. An urban fabric is a designed and materialized in-struct that channels a variety of interactions between people and between people and the surroundings. The complex fabric of built and open space combined with a set of (sociocultural) arrangements and rules aims to structure the hyper-concentrated multiplicity of interactions in a city in such a way that residents are spared unwanted experiences. While that is a noble goal, in doing so, urbanism and city planning risk placing too much focus on the strict definition of both space and its use (and thus risk limiting the diversification of experiences). All these limitations sometimes turn a city into a stifling in-struct for its inhabitants.

TMML offers a different form of urban in-struct. Whereas urban designers usually look at the big (infra)structures, using a high level of spatial abstraction, in TMML the gaze is turned to a completely different grain, the grain of (small) things (whose value is constantly at issue under all that is legislating and categorizing). TMML instructions encourage interactions between people and their environment that create meaning and value rather than ones that control the outcome. In the urban context TMML operates in, that distinct gaze – which perceives but doesn’t assume a predefined location (and which thus questions the standard) – has the additional ability to open up the highly regulated/disciplined urban environment through the deployment of imagination. The playing rules within the various project frameworks set up by TMML suggest an instruction designed on the basis of imagineering rather than engineering. The practice of imagineering developed by TMML is a practice of active, creative observation that differs from the more passive, neutrally establishing observation of what is sufficiently understood under scientific research. Nevertheless, it remains a research-based practice that generates knowledge about the city. Not the type of knowledge engineering builds on to make the city work/function more optimally, more efficiently. But a more poetically inspired knowledge that makes room for reinterpretation and starts from a fundamentally different attention to urban reality. This kind of poetic knowledge – a knowledge closely related to making as a creative act – arises from the unique relationship established between the real (factual) and the imaginary (fictional) [Imaginer le réel, c’est le voir – Georges Amar]. In this respect, TMML projects are instructions to imagine the city where seemingly incompatible things such as fact and fiction are brought into one poetic (productive, creative) movement of association and interpretation, to enable us to go beyond the calibrated (i.e. disciplined and predefined) patterns of thinking. The researcher-anarchists playing in TMML are looking for a different formal and conceptual vocabulary to think the city but, above all, to signify and experience the city.