This brief was extremely challenging to begin with. Because I spent so long selecting my material (Jacques burkhardt’s illustrations of freshwater fish), I didn’t get to spend time to sit with my set and fully understand it. I was looking at reclassifying fish by their visuals rather than understanding how they were previously classified (and how to subvert that).
After revisiting this exploration, I re-read Foucault’s ‘preface’ in the order of things, where he illustrates that existing categories only exist because someone came up with them and people thought it was the only way to think.
I started to understand that scientific classifications can be arbitrary, so I decided to explore breaking science’s understanding of how fish can be classified.