3. Protocols as Experimental Writing for the Studio

WHEN ONE THINKS of the university professor’s work, one immediately is drawn to the practice of lecturing. Indeed, lecturing and the university seem to be synonymous. Depictions of medieval universities focus on the professor reading a book to a gathering of students who, in turn, attempt to copy the text as closely as possible. University practice has, for centuries, focused on dictation and/or note-taking in relation to the lecture. Critics of this practice have noticed how insufficient lecturing has become for conveying the complexity of contemporary knowledge production and distribution, and have called for its replacement as a way of rehabilitating an ailing university system (Laurillard 2002). We agree in part with this critique but see it largely as misplaced. What critics of lecturing are actually concerned with is not lecturing as such so much as with how lecturing has come to embody the metaphysics of learning as a simple, unilateral transmission and dissemination model of education akin to school-like teaching (Masschelein and Simons 2013, 113). While it is certainly true that lecturing can and does embody such a metaphysical commitment, this does not mean that the pliability of lecturing weds it necessarily to learning. Instead, learning has appropriated lecturing as a convenient form (often misunderstanding its pataphysical movements).

Bearing this in mind, we highlight several underappreciated dimensions of lecturing that are missed by its critics. In particular, we would like to shift focus from the formal qualities of lecturing to the implied movements that lecturing induces. First, during the middle ages, lecturing was not so much about transmitting knowledge so much as reproducing texts in the form of the dictation of books or the transcription of a lecturer’s commentary by students acting as scribes. These acts of copying resulted in “drifting texts and vanishing manuscripts” (Eisenstein 1997, 114). Lecturing thus enabled the drift of texts in two senses, first vertically from generation to generation and second horizontally throughout the lecture hall and beyond. It is this drifting notion of lecturing that connects lecturing up to a certain pataphysical notion of educational life that always butts up against any law of order that dictates who can do what when and where.1

Second, lecturing can be thought of less as a stubborn return to oral culture than as a practice of “intermediality” (Freisen 2011) embodying a negotiation between (perhaps competing) media. For the medieval professor, this meant that lecturing translated visual language into an auditory form. Lecturing was literally reading out loud, enabling the written word to be heard (and thus copied directly by students). Later, romantic intellectuals utilized the educational form of the lecture to verbalize the otherwise inaudible sound/presence of the genius or spirit of the lecturer. And more recently, the lecture (more or less liberated from the verbatim textual recital) makes appear the sound of the lecturer’s inner thoughts for the audience through an enactment of thinking (even if this enactment is an illusion of spontaneous, fresh talk). Today, lecturing has become even more adaptable, proving itself to be a potent educational form for mediating between texts, graphics, and gestures in a postdigital world. Intermediality thus enables us to posit yet another form of drift that characterizes the lecture: a drift across and through various forms of media, both dispersing itself while also acting as an educational nexus capable of holding together words, sounds, images, bodies, and screens. That which is visually read can come to be heard, that which is heard can come to be seen, that which is internal can be made external, and that which is virtual can be made actual.

Third, as Lavinia Marin, Jan Masschelein, and Maarten Simons argue (2018), a lecture is an act of profaning sacred texts by making them public or common. The quintessential gesture of the university is precisely such profanation. As lecturing became less tethered to specific texts and was reconceptualized as an act of thinking out loud, thinking became a performance in front of an active audience of note-takers. Thinking as inner monologue gave way to the commons. Like the lecture itself, notes are a profanation of sorts in that they are never direct transcriptions but also contain within themselves a certain amount of drift. Expanding on this point, we can argue that the drift induced by lecturing is a particularly educational form of profanation of texts and thoughts as they are set in motion and dispersed through mediatic displacements and public performance.

Finally, it is interesting to note that in A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari recount a rather surreal lecture given by Arthur Conan Doyle’s character Professor Challenger, in which the lecturer appears to drift into an altered state. They write, “You still couldn’t put your finger on it, but Challenger seemed to be deterritorializing on the spot” (1987, 64). The act of lecturing sets in motion a certain drift within the lecturer. In Professor Challenger’s case, this meant that lecturing caused a change in his voice, appearance, and tone that were hard to describe but nevertheless were distinctive alterations in his comportment. Thus lecturing ruptures habituated or sedimented forms of the self, opening up the self to drift in new directions. In this sense, to lecture is to fundamentally risk the self and recognition of the self as a self. Lecturing is an experiment on the self by the self in relation to a public.

In this chapter, we do not seek to either save the lecture nor destroy it. Rather we ask two questions: First, how can the essential movement of lecturing as a form of educational drift be intensified and expanded? Second, how would this enable the pataphysical dimensions of lecturing to free themselves for new educational uses beyond the metaphysics of learning? To answer these questions, we might very well have to jettison the historically recognizable form of the lecture as such in order to hold onto and pay tribute to the kind of pataphysical and postdigital drift that it sets in motion. In short, we have to let the drift of lecturing drift away from itself. And with this drift, at the very dissipation of the form of the lecture, we find ourselves at the threshold of the studio as a space-time machine a-part from the university and its lecture halls. Here we can recall how studioing takes up drift and overtly thematizes and induces it through a-disciplinary, a-topic experimentation without the need to be tethered to a text or orator or lecture hall. While this might appear to be the antithesis of lecturing, it is our contention that such experimentation in the space-time opened up and sustained by studioing is actually an intensification and extension of the pataphysics of studious drift found in the intermediality of the lecture, and in this sense, is more true to the profanatory movement of the university than many versions of lecturing found today that appear to embody a metaphysics of learning.

But if this is the case, then what kind of preparatory writing is needed to sustain the space and time of such studious drift? What kind of writing can create the situation of studioing (as a knotting and a looping together)? Traditionally, the lecturer recited a text, or read glosses on texts, or performed thought with the aid of notes. Throughout, practices of reading, writing, and thinking (not always in that order) form the preparatory work of the teacher, lecturer, or professor. In this chapter, we will argue that protocoling is a unique kind of preparatory writing that emerges out of and in constant dialogue with drifting. It is less a text, gloss, or set of notes than it is a minimal procedural outline for generating the possibility of study through a common space-time of the studio. It does not rest on the authority of the text or the presence of the self as a source. Instead, it displaces the text even further while simultaneously compromising the idea of a self as source (of spirit, knowledge, or simply information). And in this sense, the protocol as a new kind of writing wrestles the movement of drift away from the structures and forms of the lecture that lend it to cooptation by learning as its definitive, institutional form.

The word “protocol” is particularly apt for describing this kind of writing, especially in relation to e-study in the sense that computer science also uses the term. But we will chart a rather different genealogy for protocoling that is decisively a-disciplinary, a-topic, impractical, and pataphysical in that it refuses to lend itself to standardized learning conditions, opting instead for the singular situations of studioing. Our protocols will not fulfill computational functions so much as intercept them for new use beyond the economy of learning management. In this sense, our protocols do not represent more effective e-learning instruments than lectures (thus replacing lectures with preferable means for achieving the ends of learning). Instead, they are perhaps less effective if not downright ineffective for enhanced learning, but only in so far as they open up alternative pataphysical dimensions of experience beyond learning. In conclusion, we will offer a set of loose constraints defining the unproductive and unpragmatic (in)operativity of the protocol (as illustrated in the previous chapter).

The Protocol

The following is a brief genealogy of the protocol (as we have theorized and employed it in our practice). It is not a genetic genealogy that implies a filiation of inheritances. Instead, it ought to be read as a meandering, rhizomatic drift that puts singularities derived from science, art, and literature in relation to one another. The resulting cryptogenealogy is underground, feral, and historically irresponsible, yet nevertheless makes the outline of the protocol intelligible as a particular kind of writing practice. The task of the genealogy is to simultaneously intensify and extend the drift of the lecture while also using the profanatory nature of the lecture to make common the more esoteric and occultist dimensions of the protocol’s other, subterranean influences. Moreover, it helps to demonstrate how recklessness is a condition necessary to the generation of the protocol and related experimentation, as well as the guiding ethos of studious drift.

The Secret Recipe

The first inspiration for our concept of the protocol is the literature of secrets in the middle ages. As William Eamon writes (1994), books of secrets were compilations of recipes, formulas, and experiments drawn from various crafts. In the twelfth century, alchemical texts translated into Latin from Arabic sources outlining both practical experimental formulae and esoteric theory concerning the transmutation and ennobling of metals joined with the medieval literature of secrets tradition (Principe 2013). Although largely forgotten today, we can still draw inspiration from this defunct literary form in several respects. First, unlike modern science and its interest in generalizable laws, the books of secrets were more or less concerned with the marvelous, miraculous, and the exceptional (meraviglia). They offered catalogues of the irregular rather than the regular functions of nature. For instance, Giambattista Della Porta’s book Magia Naturalis (1589) was a book of “natural magic” for investigating the extraordinary. On our reading, such books were a kind of pre-pataphysical writing invested in the study of states of exception and singularities. Second, rather than antiscience, these texts existed on a threshold of indistinction between religion and science. They were, in other words, a-disciplinary, crossing boundaries between the occult and the scientific, the ritualistic and the experimental, craft traditions and revelation. For instance, although alchemical recipes overtly concerned the making and counterfeiting of gold, on a deeper level, they covertly concerned the mystical possibility of resurrection. Third, unlike scientific texts of today, which emphasize clarity and transparency in writing, books of secrets often reveled in obscure emblems, allegories, exaggerations, and hidden correspondences. It would be too easy to dismiss this convention hiding ignorance and experimental ineptitude behind a veil of mysticism. Rather, books of secrets partook in the early modern obsession with deciphering riddles and allegories as a serious intellectual practice (Praz 1975). Thus these strange books combined scholastic and experimental elements in often times bizarre constellations that suggest hidden connections or discordia concors (harmonious discord) that have to be deciphered through ritualistic reading, experimenting, rereading, more experimenting, and so forth. Existing before clear divisions and separations partitioned out fields of knowledge, methodological specializations, and discursive specifications, books of secrets pointed toward a possible alternative (pataphysical) path. Finally, books of secrets did not abide by conventional academic standards and were skeptical of academic authorities. Those who compiled the books were just as likely to consult with housewives, farmers, or empirics for recipes. Thus the books promoted the drift of recipes across social strata and opened up a space of contamination between empirical and scholastic, legitimate and illegitimate forms of study.2

While many of the recipes were immanently practical—dealing with everyday problems—the tradition did not merely concern pragmatic applications. For instance, the examples of actual texts that survive show little evidence of wear and tear that would come about in a workshop or kitchen. This trivial detail seems to indicate that the books were both literary compositions and pseudoscientific manuals that could just as easily be contemplated as they could be enacted. Furthermore, many of the experiments proved to be impossible. While historians such as Eamon see this as something of a drag on the development of modern science, we would make another point. The aim was not always to learn a skill (in order to become an accomplished artisan or solve an immanent problem) but also to study the texts as repositories of impossible solutions and hidden signatures existing between singularities. The texts opened themselves up to drift (as they were often arranged idiosyncratically and anachronistically and were full of juxtapositions that promoted labyrinthian allusions) and set drift in motion (as the mind moved through the multiple recipes, riddles, archaic imagery, and their implied resonances). The secrets crossed essential boundaries, invoked provocations, contaminated reason, opened pathways to the absurd, and sought to harmonize the incongruent—all of which provoke unpractical study rather than practical learning.

We want to hold onto these features of the books of secrets while, at the same time, open up the secrets to the drift of commoning and profanation. The problem with the literature of secrets is that it remained bound to a notion of the sacred that had to be protected by the initiates from contamination by the general population. The irony here is clear: these books set in motion the dispersal (drift) of esoteric recipes while at the same time attempting to conceal the covert religious dimensions of such recipes through hidden ciphers and allegories that only the initiates would have access to. For instance, in the Latin West, philosophical and theological contexts might have been lost for many of the alchemical recipes found in books of secrets, yet the recipes collected by figures such as Della Porta became “sacred” property meant for princely eyes only. But how can we take up the idea of the recipe and make it common? One such attempt was the comici ciarlatani in early modern Europe, who took recipes from the books of secrets and performed them in public. Somewhere between folk healers, street entertainers, court jesters, and entrepreneurs, we find in the comici ciarlatani an ambiguous point where esoteric secrets became common without reassurances of legitimization by an academic institution (as is the case with university lecturers). And yet, even here, we discover a serious problem. While the charlatans were able to make esoteric secrets common, their own authority (or desire for power) prevented them from encouraging audiences to experiment in the production of exceptions. We want the protocol to encourage the generation of profane secrets rather than the mere circulation of existing secrets. What does this mean? First, the profane secret would no longer be the private property of an elite class. These would be secrets that give themselves away, thus intensifying and extending the drifting already at work in the books of secrets. Second, they would not be secrets to be worshiped or simply accepted based on supposed authority or sacredness. Instead, they would be secret recipes for use, to be used, and thus experimented with. Third, they would be secrets that resist divisions between science and art, knowledge and taste, scholasticism and empiricism, thus holding firm to a pataphysical, alternative possibility that suspends and renders inoperative the terminology used to define modes of inquiry in the university today.

Impossible Machine Blueprints

The second inspiration comes from Jarry himself. In particular, we are referring to Jarry’s blueprint for a time machine. Jarry’s blueprint can be considered a protocol for fundamentally altering the space-time coordinates of average everyday experience. The proposed machine is difficult to imagine, but perhaps we can read the plan differently as a blueprint for the studio itself as a space-time machine. For instance, the main component of Jarry’s argument is as follows, “If we could lock ourselves inside a Machine that isolates us from Time (except for the small and normal ‘speed of duration’ that will stay with us because of inertia), all future and past instances could be explored successively, just as the stationary spectator of a panorama has the illusion of a swift voyage through a series of landscapes” (2013, 4). The studio provides isolation from the functional time of everyday life. It takes one out of the flow of events, and in this sense is a special kind of suspension of action. Through an isolation from the stream of events, the events can be studied as if a series of voyages through a landscape. Isolation from action makes the traveler “transparent” to phenomena, allowing them to “pass through us without modifying or displacing us” (5). Slowing down is not stopping. It is rather a fundamental alteration of habitual duration carried in bodies. Jarry describes the work of the Machine as akin to “the viscosity of a liquid” (5), a certain kind of slow haste that is ritualistic in its repetitious, and almost imperceptible, movement (that is nevertheless accelerating).

The resulting Machine can be constructed using the following paradoxical rules. First, it must be rigid and elastic at the same time. Second, it ought to have weight enough to remain stationary while at the same time be incapable of falling. Third, it must be composed of the “perfect elastic solid” (6) or luminiferous ether (ethernity) that enables the Machine to penetrate and be penetrated by any physical body without effect and to circulate without rotation. When properly constructed, the Machine enables travel into the future and the past, producing its own (invisible) present (that is not fully on any timeline, yet not completely outside of it either). It is our argument that Jarry’s patamachine is none other than the space-time of the studio itself as a paradoxical location inside and outside the present. The Machine is apart from that which it is a part of. Likewise, its s-pacing makes it untimely. Such paradoxes are compounded when we take into account that the Machine is neither here nor there and neither present nor absent, much like the studio itself as a virtual chamber that remains adjacent.

Blueprints for such a studio are never more than an impossible solution, or a solution that, from within the metaphysics of learning, solves nothing at all (and in this sense is functionless to the economization of learning). Pataphysical blueprints are designs for spaces of experimentation that take up no space, that open a gap in place where things, events, discourses, and practices can be taken up and studied (with a certain indifference to their destinies, functions, or ends).

Artistic Test-Pieces

In describing the studio practice of Eva Hesse, Briony Fer (2004) highlights the importance of test-pieces. Fer interprets these test-pieces as material “notebooks” or commentaries on larger works. But they were more than mere prototypes. Instead, the test-pieces themselves had an autonomous life of their own, often being gathered in glass cases and displayed. These displays, not unlike cabinets of wonder, created strange new connections between bizarre shapes and materials that, when viewed together (as good neighbors), threw into relief Hesse’s esoteric practice—a history of experiments. As such, they were not merely means to another end, but rather a meditation on the means of art-making as such—its risks and uncertainties but also its potentialities. As Fer summarizes, “As test-pieces, in which she tried out techniques, they are remnants of her process of making, which are kept and displayed and recycled. The small pieces with which Hesse experimented were highly provisional, yet they come to look like leftovers, especially, of course, as some of the materials, like the latex, have decayed” (34). At first, mere prototypes, in the end, test-pieces leave behind such ends in order to enable the study of Hesse’s means, making her means intelligible. They are the inevitable debris of the reckless act of experimentation, reclaimed and imbued with alchemical import.

This use of artistic test-pieces as a means (without end) recalls Avital Ronell’s peculiar deployment of the “prototype” in her book The Test Drive (2007). In an attempt to understand—and ultimately deconstruct—the notion of the test, Ronell proposes a series of prototypes constituting different approaches to the practice of testing. These approaches range widely across disciplinary divides, including philosophical, scientific, and literary prototypes. What is unique about each prototype in Ronell’s work is how they do not merely test hypotheses or contribute to a coherent “thesis” concerning the meaning and nature of testing. Rather, each prototype returns us to the very question of what testing consists of, or what contaminations are left out of any given scientific experiment. The net result of piling on these protocols is a constant reminder to return to the very potentiality of testability that is pliable enough to constantly produce new uses beyond any predetermined end.

Prototypes as test-pieces are not merely processes from which the artist or scientist can learn how to better accomplish a task or complete an experiment or improve as a professional or resolve a problem. Indeed, if there is an “outcome” to her own iterative prototype writing, it is, for Ronell, “stupidity” as the “experience of exposure without recourse to more reassuring types of evaluations” (75). Prototypes do not point toward a definitive conclusion, solution, evaluation. Another way of saying this might be that prototypes betray their ends (rather than merely point the way toward their ends), and therefore unleash a certain amount of experimental wandering or drift back toward the potentiality (the test drive, as Ronell calls it) that ends presuppose (yet ultimately exhaust). Such potentiality is not for the sake of completion (as with the prototype in a finite experiment) but rather offers a window into a nonfinite, recursive, drifting modality of testing. Test-pieces, therefore, would not be part of an economy of learning (that results in the transformation of nonknowledge into knowledge), and as such, cannot be considered works or acts of communication (beyond certain paradoxical formulations or states). Instead, they are unpractical, noneconomic, ritualistic processes that are disinterested in ends and point toward an investigation of means.

Rules for Protocol Writing

Protocols as a form of preparatory writing can produce certain anxieties in those who are suddenly adrift from the stability and familiarity of the lecture. It releases the professor or lecturer from the work of writing the lecture and separates “teaching” from the act of communication. But what remains of education when learning—as work and communication for both professor and student—are suspended? What then is made common, what is set in drift? In our first attempt to create a situation of and for studioing—a research happening we titled “Education as Experimentation: Possibilities beyond Outcome-Based Learning” (2017)—we invited participants to write short protocols to suspend the operative logic of learning (meaning, the ways in which the metaphysics of learning become operationalized in practice). To our surprise, participants struggled with this form of writing. Because of the unusual format, there was a sense of personal risk in appearing senseless or unprepared or unprofessional in front of peers. They had difficulty truly embracing the risk necessary for real experimentation and the kind of vulnerability and awkwardness it can induce. In short, they had not yet cultivated the necessary recklessness required for the endeavor—reckless in the sense of indifference to outcomes and ends (rather than mere carelessness). We had to reassure particular participants that such risk-taking was essential to the research happening as a whole. Also, other participants could not separate the protocol from an intended learning outcome. They had a hard time embracing the contingency and indeterminateness of the protocol once studious drift was set in motion. The gravitational pull of the lecture and learning were difficult to drift away from, and would often pull the protocol back into their orbit. Indeed, there seemed to be a sense that the conference would be considered a “failure” if the participants did not learn something they could take home to “improve” their pedagogy. Given these pressures, we produced the cryptogenealogy outlined previously from which we derived certain pataphysical principles and rules (rather than metaphysical laws of functionality):

Principles

Experimentation is ontologically primary. Use comes before function.
Experimentation necessitates the space and time of studioing.
Studioing sets adrift subjects, things, actions, discourses, and practices from within yet against the metaphysics of learning.
The educational logic of studioing is study as defined by rules for unproductive ritual (as a pure means rather than a means to an end as with works of communication).
The situation of studioing is anarchic because it lacks authority or sovereignty to determine its foundations or ends, value, meaning, or measure.

Rules for Protocol writing

Embrace an absurdist, paradoxical, parodic mindset that views awkwardness as generative.
Suspend, neutralize, and deactivate ideas, actions, and learning logics.
Introduce limited constraints or rules based on a minimalist aesthetic (nothing too complicated . . . only include what is necessary and sufficient to suspend, neutralize, and deactivate).
Write protocols that extend and intensify drift in terms of places, people, things, and ideas that can be incorporated into the experiment to produce thinking through mediatic displacements.
Make experimentation common. Be sure the protocol can be implemented with limited funds/resources so that the maximum number of human animals, nonhuman animals, things, and places can participate.
Be genuinely experimental, balancing formal constraints, open procedure, and chance and fortune. The idea here is not to confirm results based on an existing hypothesis but rather to see what happens when a protocol is collectively performed.

Where for Art Thou, University?

For essentially eight hundred years, the university’s pedagogy has revolved around the writing and performing of lectures. Because of this history, it seems difficult to imagine a university that is not in some way wedded to or founded upon the lecture. This means that if the formal structure of the lecture is suspended then it signals either (a) the death of the university itself, or (b) the renewal of the university through more sophisticated pedagogical forms transcending the outdated and outmoded remnant of the lecture. We reject both of these options and instead want to redeem the movement animating the lecture by rendering inoperative the form of the lecture. The pataphysics of drift are not, therefore, the antithesis of the lecture so much as a parallel dimension within the lecture, an alternative educational universe that lies in wait and can be unlocked when the genealogy of the lecture is interrupted by the cryptogenealogy of books of secrets, impossible blueprints, and test-pieces. When this happens, the formal structures of the lecture and the lecture hall give way to the situation of studioing (as a contact between movements, bodies, and ideas). Yet studioing is not the antithesis of lecturing, but rather an intensification and extension of the kind of profanatory drift that the lecture sets in motion. By intensification we mean ultimately creating rules of use that challenge the authority of the text or the professor/lecturer or the institution, and by extension we mean the movement continues to give itself away to audiences and participants that lack institutional recognition and yet are capable of hacking into and tinkering with the technological infrastructure underlying the metaphysics of learning. This means making the secret rules of study common, ensuring that the pliable space-time machine of the studio is part of a commonwealth of practices and ideas.

In this sense, we must reimagine the professor/lecturer as a postdigital scyborg. For la paperson, the scyborg is a “reorganizer of institutional machinery” that “subverts machinery against the master code of its makers” (2017, 55) that makes another kind of university possible beyond the “first world” colonialist university (and, we might add, its educational metaphysics based on learning). The term “scyborg” is a rather monstrous (if not alchemical) contact between system and cyborg, reminding us that cyborgs are always plugged into complex social, institutional, political, and economic systems that they capitulate to and reproduce but also potentially reject and betray. Because of the position within yet against, the university scyborg can cobble together a third university out of infrastructural scraps of the first-world colonialist university.

In our view, part of the university scyborg’s practice is the writing of protocols that (a) render inoperative educational metaphysics of economized learning to produce (b) situations of studioing. In this sense, protocol-writing engages in institutional piracy in order to intensify and expand studioing. Through this type of writing and its enactment in and against institutional structures, the scyborg embodies what Ronell would describe as the “personality of the experimenter” or the educational “daredevil” or “risk-taker” (2007, 217) who is wrapped up in “nonfinite experiments” (217) that cannot end (and who could not desire one). This personality lives within a “perpetual proving ground” (324) opened up by the risk-taking demanded by the prototype. Because of the uncertainty of such reckless risk-taking, the prototype indicates a “shriveling of authority” (205), as there is no expertise to guide the prototype or definitively evaluate its value or worth in terms of works or acts of communication. Without authority, the university scyborg is in perpetual threat of losing his or her professional status or value. Not unlike Professor Challenger, the university scyborg betrays the self (and the consistency of the self) in an act of drift. And yet there is an anarchic freedom that the scyborg is in a particular privileged position to make common and thus share with those who lack such privilege (both inside and outside institutional boundaries). Without authority, yet with access to the infrastructure of the first-world colonialist university, the scyborg as protocol-generating machine can invite others into the studio (or extend the studio out for others) for experimentation beyond learning.

The e-learning platform is currently emerging as a major form of university infrastructure that could come to define the horizon of the university. We cannot simply allow the media to overtake the thinking that the university form makes possible (browsing). Nor can we simply or easily impose the summiting of learning into the virtual sphere (transforming it into a classroom). Instead, we have to creatively use this infrastructure in such a way as to induce the drift of unpractical and ritualistic thinking through protocol-writing. It is our contention that digital technologies meant for e-learning can become a way to intensify and extend studious drift, becoming a means for virtualizing the studio as the space and time of an impossible institution: the pataphysical university composed of reckless scyborgs who are busy tinkering with secret recipes in order to give them away.

Conclusion: (D)rifting