Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka: „a (slip)box with the sound of its own making“- exploring the Zettelkasten methodology for creative arts & research practice
Niklas Luhman is one of the few researchers who theorized and publicly reflected his writing workflow: his “Zettelkasten” (slipbox) method consists from a collection of notes that get coded and sorted, thus creating an expanding network, a kind of „external intelligence“ creating new ideas and facilitating his writing process. (Luhmann 1987, 142)
While Luhmann‘s method has been adopted frequently for scholarly work, its applications in artistic contexts are rare, despite its potential for facilitating creative processes. In my presentation I tackle questions of meaning and organization of writing processes in artistic research: how to capture and organize knowledge that comes from different domains? How to avoid a loss of information crossing over from analog to digital, from action to text? How can I make the process of transcoding perceptible to my audience?
I present a methodology using Luhmann‘s Zettelkasten as a basis for multimodal writing procedures in diverse formats (analog and digital) of input and output. „Writing“ is defined as multimodal composition (Hawkins 2018, McArthur et al 2015), a way of coding, capturing and connecting ideas and thoughts into and across different media and sensory modalities, following an inclusive approach conscious about the knowledges produced by the episteme of different senses and media. This discussion on knowledge production through art practice and their relation to the writing process has been at the core of artistic research debates, yet its impact on the process and act of writing itself have been much less debated. (cf. Schwab 2013, Borgdorff 2012)
In an experimental slipbox-lecture-performance I introduce this methodology and demonstrate its use: Starting from artifacts and ideas, demonstrating the process of sorting, transformation and re-elaboration, my performance both shows the „making-of“ of a multimodal Zettelkasten, as well as it essentially is an example of it being put into action.
Bio
Margarethe Maierhofer-Lischka is a musician, sound artist, performer and researcher. She studied double bass, contemporary music and musicology in Dresden, Rostock and Graz, and in 2020 completed her PhD at KUG Graz with a thesis on auditory perception in contemporary music theatre. Her main interests lie in contemporary (improvised) music, theatre, corssing boundaries to media art and performance art.