What is a Portfolio?

Some years ago the university at which I then was a student hosted their annual campus poet competition. Students from across all faculties could send in poetry and there would be a night hosted during which all participants would read some of the work they’d send in after which a jury would pick a winner who would go on to become the new campus poet. That year, around the start of 2020, I won and became campus poet. I had read some of the work that the other candidates had written beforehand and from this I distilled a general style which I then critiqued. My poems dealt with a trend of solipsist poetry not interested in looking beyond the feelings of the author. I remember telling Just Quist, a friend of mine and a visual artist about what had happened and that they had made me campus poet. We discussed my work of which the value remained unclear to me. Some of my work was reactionary in a way, dealing with the work of others rather than standing on its own. Just told me that he believed it was a good thing to question a medium before entering it. This idea stuck with me. That’s why I would like for you to read this preliminary essay which deals with the question of what I think a Portfolio is. With this I would like to touch on a couple points. I would like to explicate the little game that is played between you the viewer and me the author, I would like to figure out what it is I believe a Portfolio to be and finally I would like to use this essay, which is of course already part of the Portfolio, as a primer for the viewing of the rest of the Portfolio.

A Portfolio is a catalogue[1], although putting prices next to the work is, for now, out of the question; a portfolio is like “throwing a stone in a lake and watching the circles”[2]; a Portfolio is a game which the viewer and the writer play. When I asked some of the professionally successful people in my life how I should approach creating a Portfolio they’d told me that I should look at the work of other students who had managed to get in, to try and get to know you, the viewer[3]. Then I could alter the presentation of my work, maybe even my works themselves just to show you myself in the light I think you are looking for. My relationship to my own work, the way I choose to show it, even what I choose to make, is thus mediated through my perception of what it is that I think can be distilled from the work of others which you viewed and liked in their portfolio’s. You are then tasked with trying to distill from this mediated work of mine some sort of essence and negate the mediation which it has gone through. When we push this logic a bit further we find that actually, given our current circumstances, the best thing for me to do would be to feed all the portfolio’s of your current students to a machine reinforcement learning model and ask it to write me the optimal Portfolio[4]. You might then also employ a model to try and untangle what I’ve written or you might ask for something that I can’t modulate as easily with the help of a model.

The conclusion I drew from this was as follows: I’m not interested in playing this game according to this strategy of optimization. That’s at least part of why I wrote this essay, to try and shift my tactic within the game which we are playing. Now of course the possibility exists that the real reason I am writing it is to actually further reinforce my position as an optimal student, to add a meta-layer to it. To display my critical thinking skills[5]. To this I have no rebuttal but having addressed it I will simply choose to move on[6]. You will have to take my word for it. I’m uninterested in playing this way because it would be, which is why the example with the machine learning model is so telling, about emulating work which already exists, about creating endless varieties of works in an existing tradition. The work I am most interested in is the work I have not yet come up with, rather, the work I can not yet imagine existing.

So, what do I think a Portfolio is? A Portfolio is the mediated object between you, the viewer and me, the writer. I would like to posit that actually, neither of us are necessarily primarily interested in the Portfolio as a series of artistic and intellectual texts and objects, which are a selection of the work I’ve done, but rather are interested in the work I have not yet made. I am in a way taking a leap and, having, using my own method, tried to get a sense of your institution, betting on the idea that it in part embodies a set of circumstances which will lead to work that I find interesting and worth making. You are trying to get a sense of the same thing, will this student be able to do interesting work when we accept him? This is the game I believe we are playing.  It’s a necessary(?) game because we don’t have unmediated access to each other and I am simply choosing to explicate my conceptualization of the Portfolio to reveal myself in a certain way, not to bypass the game but to point to it and try and accentuate my position within it. This is, I think, the function of the Portfolio. All these works are autobiographical - could it be otherwise? – and thus when you look at them you will find clues and hints which point back to me as an author. I am behind the text and “by never saying enough, I also say too much”, unable to communicate with you directly. This is how I am choosing to reveal myself, with this text as a brief exploration of the Portfolio of which it is already part.

Ebbe Tim Ottens, March 10th, Antwerpen

[1] I’m indebted to my wonderful friend Lukas for this statement

[2] I would like to thank my dear friend Antoni for this analogy

[3] To be more precise I think I would have to address you as a gatekeeper, but I don’t really like this term for its, possibly accurate, implication of stoic bureaucrat which through maintaining a strict code decides who enters and who is sent away. I’d much prefer to regard you as an autonomous thinking and feeling human.

[4] I would like to stress that what I am saying is only a little controversial (still) in this world, similar games are being played elsewhere. I read a piece not so long ago about a programmer who had written a program which automatically applied to jobs on LinkedIn, he’d argued that since so many of the companies who post job applications on the website use AI to decide who to hire that his model would simply level the playing field.

[5] At my Bachelors, which was supposed to be  I was constantly reminded of the value of “critical thinking skills” for the job market whilst there was surprisingly little talk about what that might mean. I am here not to omit that I did have two professors, Michiel Bot and David Jansens, who forced us to read reflections on the meaning of critical thinking although I fear that their efforts might be eclipsed from the otherwise decidedly neoliberal narratives within the institution.

[6] I remember reading Rorty for the first time and being very enamored by his refusal to deal with most classical philosophical problems, arguing that the only way to move forward within philosophy, forward to a better world, was to simply move on from these arguments.