Process Mapping

Written by Ben Zucker

PROCESS MAPPING (or, making what we make by)

Late last year, I had the pleasure of giving a workshop to the Nomadic Soundsters cohort about the frameworks of meaning we use to shape our creativity, and how we might think about (re)shaping them. It’s easy for our creativity to feel abstract, fuzzy, impossible to articulate and even a little insulting to try to do so. Yet intuition and planning don’t need to be mutually exclusive, and in fact they never have been from the start. We come to work with certain approaches ‘under the hood’, and to take the car metaphor a step further, ideas can be opened up and tinkered with in a similar way.

I’ve personally called this approach ‘process mapping’ because for me it’s taken a particular approach combining visual thinking with a movement-based metaphor of ‘exploring’ the ‘space’ of an artwork. I’ve also always liked the saying that the map is not the territory—a provocation of fundamental incompleteness, which make us turn to other uses for our tools (i.e. art) when faced with the impossible.

I think much of this comes from being a composer, where we are faced with the, quite frankly, conceptually bizarre and impossible task of being forced to convert sound and gesture, these vibrant things in spacetime, into symbols on paper and screens. We have been trained to be very good abstracters, yet these potentially limitless directions have been typically pigeonholed to the extreme by practical and ideological considerations unique to each artist and discipline…

The point being, just what exactly this process or this map may look like is highly individualized. Consider the ‘diagram hacking’ exercises of artist and educator Judith Leeman: you may identify how you work more with air traffic patterns, or a hydraulic pump. But it’s trying to make this metaphorical jump in the first place that is the important part, and how we can take steps towards it.

In this workshop, we did so with a series of free writing exercises, starting by thinking about the language you use to:

         -describe the work you make to others

         -describe the work you make to yourself

         -describe HOW you make/your process to others

         -describe HOW you make/your process to yourself

What has the most ‘immediate’ impact on your thinking, energizing your associative, creative juices?

When doing these exercises, I’m especially interested in the types of words that come up. Do people put down nouns, verbs, or adjectives? Or to broaden it, is someone’s language mainly action-oriented, object-oriented, or quality-oriented?

And what would it mean for any of those types to change? What would it mean for an object of your practice to become an action, or a quality? It might be a stretch to imagine, but like physical exercise, stretching makes it better.

Thinking about these transformations enables others to take place with further practice and exercises. In a subsequent exercise, a list of object descriptions became rearranged, respelled, resized, broken and reformed—the space and act of the writing opens up new sources for meaning, similar to ‘concrete poetry’ or the spacious poem by Stephane Mallarme “A Throw Of The Dice Will Never Abolish Chance” (Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira le hasard):

All of this moving around is technically abstract—it doesn’t reflect how the words’ meanings/representations could change in real life. Yet nevertheless, it produces an impact on how we perceive them.

Not only do new meanings arise from the individual words, but their spatial relationships affect the meaning as well. To complete the toolkit, we connected some of the words together with lines and arrows, to make other new, maybe unlikely, connections.

These exercises, when combined, helped set the stage for putting one’s practice into practice. The final exercise called for a similar word-making and word-scrambling, themed around a recent artwork or project. When doing this, it’s important to consider all the actions and actors that go into the product, human and non-human alike. I use these shapes to help define some categories of these, as well as how one thing leads to another with the lines:

(an example of mine, with identifying marks removed)

My hope is that such tactile modules offer ways of visualizing change: Inserting things, reversing arrows, exchanging sections, adding or removing influence, reprioritizing by changing size, and the list goes on as far as your imagination wants to take it. In a way, such maps, and messing with them, could be visual versions of Brian Eno’s oblique strategies.

But besides their possibility for new kinds of artistic thinking and productivity, process mapping helped me stay creative (and thus sane) during the lockdowns and crises of the pandemic by reminding me that I could still create, and that any artistic product was only one part of a larger ‘object’ of process. This process, too, was a product of my work, and by thinking about it as an object, I was able to return to the parts of it I liked most, that wouldn’t induce boredom or dread when the rest of the world was doing so. 

Of course, I’m not the only person who found a way to do so, and I’m hardly the only person to be thinking about creativity like this. A rich literature exists on how we can re-vision our thinking process—influential books for me included Lawrence and Anna Halpern’s RSVP Cycles, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By, and the Choreo-Graphic Figures research lab. Of course, thinking is nothing without action to make it real. In addition to my musical activities, my thoughts here are particularly indebted to collaborations with Adelheid Mers and her “Performative Diagrammatics’, and Stanzi Vaubel’s ‘Indeterminacy Method’.

But these are just my territories. Go forth and map yours!