CURRENT RESEARCH

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Hovering between scholarship and performance, the Department conducts experiments that excavate the sands between the academic and the absurd. Its work operates in that chaotic space where theory becomes image and where analysis performs itself into being. Through the instrument of the Pataphysical Collider, shards of culture - poems, broadcasts, headlines and other charged signifying debris - are accelerated toward one another until they collide releasing ephemeral entities known as Quirks. Each Quirk represents a temporary configuration of meaning: a measurable yet unstable compound of thought, irony and visual residue. The Departments researchers observe these brief events through a range of interdisciplinary methods, including linguistic diffraction mapping, image/text chromatography and affective calibration. These operations are not designed to resolve contradiction but to chart its behaviour. Current projects trace how poetic silence interferes with broadcast media, how the aesthetics of documentation generate their own mythologies and how coherence degrades when subjected to repeated observation. The Colliders outcomes - field notes, visual traces, reports and decayed textual artefacts - form a growing archive that questions the authority of authorship. In this sense, research within the Department is a continual rehearsal of uncertainty. 

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