The Art of Making Mistakes

July 8, 2024 Spring 2024

In the first iteration of Making Mistakes, taught by Tiri Kananuruk, we were invited to develop a creative practice in response to concepts of “mistakes,” reimagine storytelling and improvisational techniques in the context of *chaos,* and, in the end, become less perfect than before.

What is a mistake?

Is it where you were born? Something you were born with? A system you didn’t mean to align with? A class you shouldn’t have taken? A job you stayed at too long? Someone you shouldn’t have slept with? A leader that misleads? An inability to understand another point of view?

Making Mistakes is an innovative series of approaches that Tiri created to help reveal truths obscured from view. From this journey, many of us walked away changed or affected—perhaps to do better, to not accept social structures, to slow down, to destabilize, to apologize, to get to know our (chosen) families more, to accept our medical fuzziness, to turn indecision into a tool, and so much more.

My name is Adelle Lin Yingxi. I was the assistant teacher for Making Mistakes. I humbly document these transformations to bear witness to the struggles that each participant chose to overcome, and to showcase the beautiful work that came from our shared vulnerability, whilst pondering my own processes and imperfections with eagerness to learn and support the cohort.

Process:

Creating a map of our process was how we began. What is our stable state and how do we rethink, reimagine, disrupt it? With feedback, the process changed and the classes evolved.

Reflections from the Salon

Week 10 was the final salon, and through each presentation, weeks past were deeply reflected, as the cohort's processes evolved as well. Please peruse the Instagram post to see short videos of these works.

What of the trickster?

Andri started off the evening, with an invitation to the OCD trickster in her life to help her slow down. By taking on different “modes of Interaction” with the trickster through three mini games, she showed us the hopelessness, absurdity, exhaustion, addiction and hope that can come from this neurodivergence.

Des, our last presenter, also invited the trickster into their work through the invitation of the tricksters in her life who are their father and brother to bring chaos energy into their work.

Are you in the right place at the wrong time? Or vice versa?

Mistakes happen often because time and place do not sync up, and seeing those as seeds for a new step can be quite empowering.

Bailey decided to break up with perfection by looking at personal websites as something other than shiny packages of ourselves, and instead a collection of absurdities that make us unique. Each site sits along “this continuity between the definition of what is a mistake and not a mistake,” including her medical fuzziness of dealing with neural tube defect.

Caleb continued his process of destabilizing the image, allowing for offcuts of his image making process to become the image itself. This can be experienced in his website of digital cave paintings, subverting the viewer's view of the work by only showing us a window that was always changing.

I, you, we interrupt together

Xixi created a performance that invited her machine and the audience to respond in tandem to her apology soliloquy, creating a sort of cybernetic event score that had its own rhythm that brought humor to the grief.

Can we put back together what we cut-up?

Tyler led us through a poetry performance website, where he reconstructed a cut up poem and puzzle that revealed archival imagery of his ancestral home in China. The combination of words in an eight by eight grid created a constrained writing experience for the visitor of the website, while he brought us deeper into his story layer by layer.

SCRambLE as a guide

Tomomi shared with us the mistakes she felt in Japan, where the rigidness and structure ingrained gender inequalities runs so deep that she had to seek respite. In her ethnographic research project of understanding life in New York, she felt that the demonstrations here were a kind of societal SCRambLE technique, and she brought this technique into her video work.

Are we post-creativity?

In our final weeks, we observed how artificial intelligence, namely large language models, have entered the creative space.

In contemplating these models, Jean felt a need to encourage us to “work with really more raw materials, and put in the mental gruntwork” in our creative endeavors. She created a framework that we can use to cut-up our usual process by introducing Dungeons & Dragons dice to select the characters, medium, time, setting and energies.

“Who gets to make a mistake?”

Tomomi left us with this great question in her presentation, to which Tiri wisely responded with “those that have a support network.” So, perhaps, as we redefine mistakes so that they no longer have a hold over us and become new lenses of creativity to apply to our practice and lives, we should also learn to recognize those who are making an effort to do so, and be that support network. Ask them about their process, listen to their journey, and show up for their performances, so that they may see the gems in their mistakes—as only those with light, may give light.