Oona Tikkaoja
Reality Tinkering
100451
Everyday anomalies are fleeting curious events that take place in the
middle of the familiar flow of everyday life. They are often experienced
at a moment when routinized perceptive or cognitive patterns are
disturbed by something different from the usual. An anomaly causes the
experiencer to pause for a moment when things do not proceed as she
expected. Anomalies can be spontaneously born in the environment or as
perceptions of the person experiencing them, or organized by a prankster
or artist. In this dissertation, I ask: How could everyday anomalies be
used for recognizing the abundance in the familiar? I scrutinize the
research question from two viewpoints – experience (anomalous
occurrences) and production (anomalous acts) – in an attempt to
determine what kind of occurrences make people experience moments of
confusion in order to find suitable ways to produce new anomalies.
This work continues the tradition of avant-garde art, finding
inspiration especially in the urge of Situationists and Fluxus to affect
the world at large.
Reality tinkering is the application of bricolage developed during this
research process. When producing lifelike art in environments that are
not demarcated for art, one inevitably affects the shared reality.
Reality tinkering is available to everybody because no special skills or
resources are needed. It operates along two different strategies, one
of which aims to cause disruptions into the flow of everyday life, and
the other of which aims to help sharpen one's perception of everyday
details by concentrating on them. Reality tinkering is an ethical method
that aims to cause an appreciative and participatory attitude towards
the world. It is essentially about the both-and mindset, instead of the
either-or mindset.
Read Reality Tinkering here