METHODOLOGIES OF SAMPLING

The methodology of sampling is used across disciplines and spans a wide frame from the sampling as a reuse of a musical theme or portion in another record to the sampling in environmental sciences for the exploration of a site, material or context. The design of a sample is based on its purpose and unfolds its character in the specific preparation of the object, which depends on its subsequent use. Converting an ordinary object into a sample requires its recontextualisation, as it has to be taken out somewhere to be rearranged somewhere else, including a whole set of translations and transformations. Samples exhibit validity in more than one system and furthermore link one with the other. The nature scientific object sample is comprised of the critical momentum of fact and artifact, where the borders between natural and artificial, abstention and intervention, are in constant shift. 

Samples are taken within, out of, and back to systems. A system is in a generic way defined as an entirety of elements which form a unity of sense, purpose or function. Systems have to be determined and delimited from the (potentially infitite) amount of occurences that surround us. The act of taking a sample from a system is assigned to produce a practicable part of this entirety of elements in order to discover its compounds, relations and determine interdependencies by examining or measuring.

The concept of samples implies the production of a (representative) extract, which can be used to inductively derive information about an entirety. Whereby one sample is individual and exhibit singularity, several samples can be compared in order to homogenize and heterogenize. Sets of samples can (1) condense presumptions, indications or evidences or (2) exhibit significant differences and open a frame of tension and argumentation.

From the stage of being taken and being measured the practicable sample has to be converted into a measurable sample, within the scope of a certain experimental setting, which for its part is determined by the sample and refers back to a recordable phenomenon. The practicable sample usually stages a system‘s conglomerate of serveral components, which is rearranged and modified in a whole chain of transformation, concentration, deletion and expansion. Information turns into a function of condition and order, being situated within a spatial and temporal context. Reconstructing the single members of these material- and form-dominated references reveals an interrelated sequence without definite ruptures, as each reconfiguration seems to be incomplete (something is maintained through the whole series) and each product can be related to its previous and its subsequent product. From a practical point of view, these transformations are mostly irreversible (once the sample has been burned, for example) and performed in a forward direction from the raw object to the measurable unit to the publishable entity. From an epistemical point of view, the situation is reversed, as its references and relations are created in a backwards direction, unfolding importance in its back- or re-references.