Autist...
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Fieldlab 3,
April 14, 2025
by Anna Lina Litz
One poet, one professor, and twelve autistic artists walk into a room to test writing exercises for special education. Some of them for the second time. We’re working with design iterations, seeking out criticism. Main takeaway this time around: If nothing can go wrong, you should say so explicitly.
‘How is it going?’, one exercise asked. Connect something you did earlier today to a sensation in your body, sum it all up with an adjective. The artists had 15 or so minutes to go through the motions.
Then the poet asked for feedback. “What do you think you practiced?”
“I’m wondering the same thing.”, one of the artists responded. “I still don’t know what the goal of this exercise is. I’ve learned that my answers are usually too real, too honest, too detailed. I’m expected to just say “good”. So this exercise feels like it’s trying to teach me the opposite, or maybe help me find a middle ground, which can be good, but then I’d like you to be clear about that.”
Someone else was held captive by the consummate adjective: “I wrote ‘vertwijfeld, dus’, but I’m not sure I actually was vertwijfeld. Maybe I just wrote it because of the way the exercise was phrased.”
Another participant suggested repeating the exercise five times in order to break free from the need to make every sentence true and perfect.
“Words slip through everybody’s fingers.”, the professor chimed in. “Writing can be a kind of test, you write something down to determine whether or not it is really true. But what we want to do with these exercises is to create a playground, a space where it is not possible to make mistakes. Where you can operate without judgement, where these topics are relieved from some of their heaviness.”
“It’s a writing exercise to tinker with words”, the poet maintained. “The exercise is not designed towards linear success, or to provide guidelines for social interaction. We want to invite reflection, crisis and space to play with those sentiments.
When belabouring a question like ‘How are you?’, which can — or feels like it can — make or break a social situation right at the outset, this is not obvious. “It helps a little, not to tinker with words but to come to an answer that’s both short and personal”, someone said. “It’s obvious that words sometimes don’t mean what they say, but it’s not obvious that there is space to play, that you can’t go wrong. So can you make that explicit?”
A similar discussion arose during the exercise for writing silence. When everybody stops talking, make a list of what you can still hear. Then organise your list: loudest to softest, least irritating to most irritating. In the final step, write a letter to your teacher with complaints and suggestions for improving silence in the classroom.
“Would it be possible to change the colour of the interface so that it indicates which parts are writing and which parts are reflection exercises?”, someone suggested.
“Writing down sounds helps to understand where my irritation comes from”, another participant said. And: “How am I supposed to write a letter to my teacher about how much my classmates’ breathing annoys me?”
Again, the poet clarified: “In literature, everything is possible. You’re writing a literary letter, a fictional letter, you can say anything: I want all my classmates to drop dead because I find their breathing so irritating. Where can I order a gun? Thankfully, it’s all just words.”
We took a break complete with luxurious asparagus soup.
Then the group reconvened to ponder the problem of ‘It is what it is’. It is what it is, it goes like it goes, what’s got to be has got to be, we must row with the oars that we have, not the oars we don’t.
What does it all mean? Nothing, except when you place it in context, the exercise states. A few of the participants disagree. Nevertheless, the exercise provides a context:
Janneke comes home. Her whole house seems to have burned down. She hears from the fire brigade that all the paintings she has painted herself have been destroyed. Her expensive new TV is nothing more than a molten black clump. First, she cries. But after a cup of coffee at the neighbours she comes back to her senses and finds words for what has happened. She says: It is what it is.
What does the last sentence mean, now?
It means, I imagined: If I were a time traveller, I’d go back and build a force field around my house so that the UFO couldn’t crash into it, but I’m not a time traveller, and so I’m just grateful to be alive. It also means: I have spent a decade of my life on these paintings but perhaps what really matters is that I observed the trees and the sea and the shape of my mother’s eyebrows more closely than I otherwise would have. It also means: at least those aliens didn’t take me with them. Although actually it means, I wish they would have taken me, then I would see something of the world at last, but they just smiled and waved. It means: what can you do, except to keep on going, row with the oars that you have and not the oars that you don’t.
Then the exercise flips on its head, asks to make up the scenarios around ‘empty’ sentences, and finally exchange them with a peer to compare interpretations. At this point, everybody had more or less let go of the idea of right and wrong answers, or perhaps this exercise was set up less as a social skills exam.
Finally, the poet thanked Artistic Research Studio for the hospitality, the participants for their honest feedback, and thusly we concluded a successful third and final fieldlab.
https://www.michahamel.com/
https://schrijflab.nl/
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One poet, one professor, and twelve autistic artists walk into a room to test writing exercises for special education. Some of them for the second time. We’re working with design iterations, seeking out criticism. Main takeaway this time around: If nothing can go wrong, you should say so explicitly.
‘How is it going?’, one exercise asked. Connect something you did earlier today to a sensation in your body, sum it all up with an adjective. The artists had 15 or so minutes to go through the motions.
Then the poet asked for feedback. “What do you think you practiced?”
“I’m wondering the same thing.”, one of the artists responded. “I still don’t know what the goal of this exercise is. I’ve learned that my answers are usually too real, too honest, too detailed. I’m expected to just say “good”. So this exercise feels like it’s trying to teach me the opposite, or maybe help me find a middle ground, which can be good, but then I’d like you to be clear about that.”
Someone else was held captive by the consummate adjective: “I wrote ‘vertwijfeld, dus’, but I’m not sure I actually was vertwijfeld. Maybe I just wrote it because of the way the exercise was phrased.”
Another participant suggested repeating the exercise five times in order to break free from the need to make every sentence true and perfect.
“Words slip through everybody’s fingers.”, the professor chimed in. “Writing can be a kind of test, you write something down to determine whether or not it is really true. But what we want to do with these exercises is to create a playground, a space where it is not possible to make mistakes. Where you can operate without judgement, where these topics are relieved from some of their heaviness.”
“It’s a writing exercise to tinker with words”, the poet maintained. “The exercise is not designed towards linear success, or to provide guidelines for social interaction. We want to invite reflection, crisis and space to play with those sentiments.
When belabouring a question like ‘How are you?’, which can — or feels like it can — make or break a social situation right at the outset, this is not obvious. “It helps a little, not to tinker with words but to come to an answer that’s both short and personal”, someone said. “It’s obvious that words sometimes don’t mean what they say, but it’s not obvious that there is space to play, that you can’t go wrong. So can you make that explicit?”
A similar discussion arose during the exercise for writing silence. When everybody stops talking, make a list of what you can still hear. Then organise your list: loudest to softest, least irritating to most irritating. In the final step, write a letter to your teacher with complaints and suggestions for improving silence in the classroom.
“Would it be possible to change the colour of the interface so that it indicates which parts are writing and which parts are reflection exercises?”, someone suggested.
“Writing down sounds helps to understand where my irritation comes from”, another participant said. And: “How am I supposed to write a letter to my teacher about how much my classmates’ breathing annoys me?”
Again, the poet clarified: “In literature, everything is possible. You’re writing a literary letter, a fictional letter, you can say anything: I want all my classmates to drop dead because I find their breathing so irritating. Where can I order a gun? Thankfully, it’s all just words.”
We took a break complete with luxurious asparagus soup.
Then the group reconvened to ponder the problem of ‘It is what it is’. It is what it is, it goes like it goes, what’s got to be has got to be, we must row with the oars that we have, not the oars we don’t.
What does it all mean? Nothing, except when you place it in context, the exercise states. A few of the participants disagree. Nevertheless, the exercise provides a context:
Janneke comes home. Her whole house seems to have burned down. She hears from the fire brigade that all the paintings she has painted herself have been destroyed. Her expensive new TV is nothing more than a molten black clump. First, she cries. But after a cup of coffee at the neighbours she comes back to her senses and finds words for what has happened. She says: It is what it is.
What does the last sentence mean, now?
It means, I imagined: If I were a time traveller, I’d go back and build a force field around my house so that the UFO couldn’t crash into it, but I’m not a time traveller, and so I’m just grateful to be alive. It also means: I have spent a decade of my life on these paintings but perhaps what really matters is that I observed the trees and the sea and the shape of my mother’s eyebrows more closely than I otherwise would have. It also means: at least those aliens didn’t take me with them. Although actually it means, I wish they would have taken me, then I would see something of the world at last, but they just smiled and waved. It means: what can you do, except to keep on going, row with the oars that you have and not the oars that you don’t.
Then the exercise flips on its head, asks to make up the scenarios around ‘empty’ sentences, and finally exchange them with a peer to compare interpretations. At this point, everybody had more or less let go of the idea of right and wrong answers, or perhaps this exercise was set up less as a social skills exam.
Finally, the poet thanked Artistic Research Studio for the hospitality, the participants for their honest feedback, and thusly we concluded a successful third and final fieldlab.
https://www.michahamel.com/
https://schrijflab.nl/
