Instruments
A direction often emerges from a constellation.
A question changes when you give it a form. Placed on a map, it acquires neighbours. Written as an instruction, it asks something of a gesture.
The instruments gathered here grew from this possibility. Each offers a way to approach an orientation while it is still uncertain: a compass with 9 bearings, signs whose meanings shift, maps that move with you, scores that open different responses, theatres where a question occupies space.
Begin anywhere: a situation in mind, a form that sparks your curiosity… Its use may change through what you bring to it.
Elanographic Compass
QUESTIONS BEFORE COORDINATES.
The Elanographic Compass is an orientation instrument that gives questions a place before their answers are ready.
Its nine bearings gather different forces and moments of a path within the same field: what sets movement in motion, what it carries from memory, what remains uncertain, what appears through intuition or perspective, and what calls from the unknown or the horizon.
Moving between these axes—élan, memory, uncertainty, perspective, intuition, unknown, horizon, iterations, and discovery—gives elaboration a visible route. Points shift, lines cross, and earlier traces remain. The Compass keeps the memory of a movement rather than measuring an outcome.
You can navigate the Elanographic Compass in sequence or through jumps, returns, and detours.
Click here to navigate through the Elanographic Compass.
Logography
CHANGE ALPHABET. CHANGE ATTENTION.
Logography is a repertoire of forms for approaching what familiar language may name too quickly or feel already known.
It offers a visual vocabulary of 41 signs for an exploratory alphabet with no fixed translation, and moves between speech, image and gesture: a sign appears before its explanation.
A sign can be moved, combined, voiced or carried into another situation. Its function changes through position, colour, proximity and use.
Changing alphabet becomes a way of seeing otherwise.
Click here to play with the Logography and form other constellations.
Deictic Cartographies
A WORD BECOMES A PLACE THROUGH USE.
A Deictic Cartography maps a situation from a situated point of view. It works with words whose meaning depends on a position: here, there, inside, outside, near, far, elsewhere, beyond…
On the page, these words remain suspended. They acquire meaning from the person who speaks, the position they occupy and the movement that follows.
The drawing forms a provisional territory: one that can be displaced and read again from another position. Points, crosses, words and intervals then make visible the position from which a geography is drawn. Move the here, and the relations change with it.
Click here to explore an animated Deictic Cartography and draw your own path.
Orientation Scores
CAN AN INSTRUCTION MAKE ROOM FOR HESITATION?
An Orientation Score proposes an action through lines, positions, gaps, tensions and shifts… without deciding its outcome.
It may ask a line to follow two incompatible arrows, give refusal a place, move a here, or let a detour become the route. You can follow its instruction closely, alter it, interrupt it, or leave it open.
The purpose of Orientation Scores is to create enough movement for another direction to become perceptible.
Traced by hand, carried by a voice or followed by a body, orientation acquires duration, rhythm and physical form.
TRY THIS. Choose a score below. Scroll horizontally to find others. Follow it and see where it brings you.
Partitions à ouvrir
Theatres of Thought
CAN A QUESTION BECOME A PLACE?
A Theatre of Thought brings objects, signs, words, lines, bodies and rules into a temporary arrangement where their positions make tensions and possible movements perceptible.
This is where the instruments can meet. A score enters space; a notation becomes an instruction; a line crosses a body; a point moves, and the scene finds another balance.
Thought takes form through distance, proximity, interruption, movement, and return.
HOW TO PLAY. Move the words, positions, and passage objects. Suspend the automatic motion or recompose the scene.
Theatre of Thought in motion
Move the words, positions and passage objects. Suspend the automatic motion or recompose the scene to let another provisional passage appear.
These instruments are made to travel and change through use. A score may need rewriting; a sign may find a role that its first arrangement did not suggest.
What happens during an activation becomes part of the research: where did movement become possible? Where did the form leave too little room?