For our group the most pressing question during the Comedy of Things event was: Does the application of some sort of form produce valuable content? Or when does creativity become nonsense and vice versa? This was on the one hand the question we were implicitly asked to explore by way of the various experiments set up by our organizers; on the other hand it also became the question which tore our group apart on the second day of the workshop and the question which let several of the workshop participants to feel reluctant to share the workshops’ results with the outside world and even feel ashamed at times. Was what we were doing during the days of the event actually worthwhile, or were we enacting yet another instantiation of a privileged group of people playing parlor games?

Half way into the event we became two groups. Group Amanda consisting of Nina Vohnsen, Martin Holbraad and Lise Røjskjær, constructed ‘Amanda’, a local mythical personality from a folksong brought as a ‘myth from place of origin’ from one of the participants. Amanda was a starting-point and an endpoint for our box assignment. After initial attempts to ‘out-smart’ ourselves and make something ‘clever’ we decided to let Amanda reflect the emotional, messy, intuitive side of knowledge production. ‘This feels right – this feels wrong’ was our only valid arguments for constructing her and Amanda became our safe haven in those tumultuous days. The process of building her and the final installation can be explored under the ‘exhibition’ tag.

Under the ‘Text’ tag you’ll find our experiment with ‘form on content’ extracted from selected myths and anecdotes. The principle of this work was to extract ‘a form’ from a number of myths and jokes and apply them on other myths and jokes functioning as content.

Martin Holbraad

Nina Holm Vohnsen

Nicolas Langlitz

George Marcus

Lise Røjskjær Pedersen