Moving-with contact: research dissertation

Click to access moving-with-contact-helms-0921-1.pdf

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Stromverteilen: a drawing/contact practice as research portfolio

In the process of designating material for assessment, this portfolio for the Research module needs to go here (again). I will have posted it (likely, possibly) earlier when I used it to explore the links between BoW and Research; I also find an earlier padlet to take an earlier role, a body of work: a core, https://oca.padlet.org/gesa492645/rthyyn7qr5iz1zak), and the later Ariadne thread to point onwards into SYP (https://oca.padlet.org/gesa492645/p8217c8jsc8rx4h8).

This padlet served as digital meadow, forest/village edge to situate, explore and reach out to and beyond the various works that were emerging around the site of Stromverteilen. I also then organised towards the resolution of the For Cover BoW while this padlet held onto the numerous enquiries and abandoned (or lost) sites that preceded the village/forest edge.

I am adding pointers forward as well as any missing works that I understand Research objects into this form and link here (and on menu sideline) as key post for understanding the reach/resonance of my practice as research.

counting/not (the dissertation)

A pretence (and some rules)

I wrote about a year ago a set of instructions to my Research dissertation, about the pretence of linearity. I sensed the 12-weeks of lockdown ahead, hoping for only 4 (until Easter was the Germans’ unusually optimistic timeline).

I reread this now, while seeking the space of two register shifts that I didn’t see coming, and realise that I anticipate them quite alright in my instructions:

Nonetheless, I would like to introduce a few rules for this dissertation:

1. it manages excess. Part of the enquiries into drawing/contact are abundant and inherently generative. They are small and inconsequential when taken on their own (at least sometimes) yet in toto accumulate to a distributed field that far exceeds 5000 words. There are appendixes, follow-up on questions and there are satellite objects. 

2. it presents in conventional linearity something that is far less linear in practice. Yet, for a textual document the practice of ‘reading on’ still presents a key approach to temporality, not unlike other time-based work. I can add loops, side notes and references for- and backwards, and still: you will scroll down or turn over. My theoretical contributions are for this presented as findings; my case studies are story-lets that open outwards (to other media, to existing or imaginary appendices).

3. it budges up against its edges, seeks to subvert and step into the sidelines (knowing fine well the sidelines are as much part of the construct as the core itself). In this, it is dissatisfied with the institutional requirements. It tries to laugh at them but also takes them rather serious in its attempt to find gaps and little fissures to disappear into, to retrieve something from elsewhere or test where the citation convention can be made to serve other purposes.

(11 March 2021, Facebook timeline, Friends, no Acquaintances, also Appendix A: The fantasy of linearity in a distributed field)

Research 5: Tutor report and commentary

This report concludes the Research module. It continues my/our exploration of the tutor report forma as a conversation within institutional frameworks. (I had experimented with this in previous Research reports, e.g. one, 3, being an entire conversation transcript, and turning it into a Research object).

This report is a little different as it contains Rachel’s feedback on the final draft of the dissertation. Thus it becomes a more dialogical exchange in written form. It is then furthermore followed with Rachel’s participation in the BoW 5 video tutorial.

The content of the tutorial again concerns audience/engagement, distance, guidance, care and reveal/or not.

I excerpt this section and attach the pdf:

…

How you want to guide/care for the reader through the dissertation – there are some sections that carefully guide the reader though what you are doing and what is occurring, for example: 2.3 distance and closeness. This is excellent work

Thank you, Rachel for taking the time for this written feedback and the joint video tutorial with Doug for BoW5, I really appreciate this! As I said in the tutorial, I had taken some notes upon reading the comments and the feedback and wanted to see if a responsive, interactive modality could work for this written feedback along the ones that I started writing for the video ones. Here it comes in right-aligned Century Gothic 10.5.

There are also still some moments where you drop works or large theories into the text with very little framing which can cause a feeling of being lost in the text (this might be intentional? but equally you can consider how much you want to then frame that expectation for the reader?)

Some more footnoting or a more traditional glossary would help with this, as we discussed in the last tutorial

However, I also recognise this is an ongoing consideration for you in terms of the writing as practice and the idea of contact, distance and how sometimes you are holding your reader at arms length. Again the more you can make decisions about transparency and opacity in the style of the writing and make this deliberate with signposting the better.

You outline the idea of voices clearly in your introduction and the typography of the text in some sections which is really helpful, and so you might want to do the same with the idea of clarity or what is revealed and what obscured?
Perhaps this connects to our discussion last time about managing excess, and the difficulties of cramming all the rich research you have done in the word count?- You do acknowledge this in the dissertation, but you might want to acknowledge the moments when this will impact the reader?

I seem to have been wholly resistant to that traditional glossary. Maybe it’s the fixing that happens through it, the solidity, that puts me off. Let me try for some key terms and add to the dissertation appendix. I mean: it’s not that difficult to excerpt from the blog post two sentences as to nomadism, right. As I said in my first email response to this feedback: I really like how you returned my investigation of care and maintenance to my readership. I think it’s my social scientist who is a little impatient with slow or ignorant readers and I need to have a conversation with her as to how serious she is in carrying this forward to her artistic writing practice. I think our conversation in the BoW5 tutorial that it is not a matter of handholding but perhaps merely naming the opacity, the distance (in a footnote, or in a glossary, now this is turning interesting for me), could be sufficient. And: importantly: that that investigation of clarity of approach will only benefit me for how to proceed beyond this.

On the idea of the management of excess – we talked last time about your research folder and how you might evidence the excess that you speak of in terms of the research. I see you have links included which are not yet active but show your intention to add which is great- how much extra are you planning to add into the research folder on the blog and how will this be formatted/navigated?

Some of these are live (but I hadn’t added them to the dissertation yet. The nomadism one, e.g., is here: https://close-open.net/2021/04/28/nomadic-thought-and-transversalism-research- folder/

There are 3-4 shows/ artworks that I saw, investigated which are key for my development, possibly more of BoW but possibly for Research, with my notes in Glasgow, so I will add those, and then the ones I have included in the dissertation. I also wanted to go through the earlier parts of the blog to re-classify what has been labelled ‘sketchbook’ or ‘critical reflections’ and see how these sit within the ‘research folder’ – this will concern more a restructuring of the overall blog, which e.g. doesn’t systematically use tags right now, but which will also help contextualise this new ‘research folder’.

Oh, but I really wanted to mention the excess again and how we raised its relationship to abundance in the BoW 5 tutorial: how once I had sited the sewing machine with the Walnut tree prints on the meadow, the abundance resurfaced and helped order and contain what could easily overwhelm BoW, Research or the artist.

…

gesa-helms-creative-arts-l3-research-tutorial-a5Download

the haptic and the erotic (Marks 2002)

A (remembered, layered) reading of Laura Marks’ (2002: xiv) discussion of haptics and erotics.
A research object of Stromverteilen.

Research 5: final piece: submission

This post contains the Research Dissertation to my tutor to conclude the Research module.

I have also posted

• an overall module review and reflection: https://close-open.net/2021/05/15/research-5-reflection-and-analysis-of-entire-module/
• and a reflection on the initial Research proposal from Research 1: https://close-open.net/2021/05/15/reflections-and-alterations-on-the-initial-research-proposal-part-of-research-5/

This concludes Research just very tightly within the 2.5 years that I had for it (including a 6 months extension). I will post another bit of reflection on this Assignment 5, along with a series of changes and additions to the Research part of this blog to align it more closely for assessment (in November 2021) and to make space for a Research folder that will link to the currently blank links in the dissertation.

Here the dissertation. Any thoughts and comments: I’d love to hear them, send them along.

I look forward to wrapping up BoW over the next ten days also and then to turn towards engagement for all of this.

research-draft-may-2021Download

Research 5: reflection and analysis of entire module

I am compiling a series of assignment and tutorial reviews, shorten them and add a final paragraph at this point of concluding Research.

1 review

I reviewed a fair bit of work: live performances in different registers; I watched a series of films too and explored their cinematography, script and framing devices; I have read key pieces of fiction writing that I identified as key for my interests and a fair amount of academic work too. Attending the SAR conference mid-March was really important: both to test out my own work (though any feedback was largely self-derived and little came forward from audience) but also to see where my work relates to and can be situated within. I wrote a couple of these up on the blog, but there are a few other artists still key to what has influenced my thinking about performance, intimacy, site and drawing. I have also had my proposition to move the line from online video work to photo essay and to consider its methodology as walking methodology accepted for a conference in Northern Greece (Walking Arts Network).

What I have arrived at with the articulation of the research proposal is a clear sense of what BoW consists of as a work programme (a series of performances in different registers, audience/participant compositions); I have also settled on a focus for the Research: the concept that I currently call near space, that I seek to investigate in contemporary performance/ drawing practice; which investigates some key themes for BoW: relationality, presence/absence and site. This feels important and useful and allows a focus that fits and can be refined further.

2 review

With the glossary I arrive at the first satellite object and begin the exploration of an appendix, additional objects that are part of Research and thus the notion of this project as Practice as Research starts to take more explicitly shape.
In doing so it also at once, exhibits some of the key methodology of the whole work itself: of how to pull things close and also let them go or push them away.
We talked about Laure Prouvost’s Legsicon, Katrina Palmer’s Endmatter and how there are a variety of ways of how my different materials can become a glossary, including the photos, links to texts and other things.

The objects of research at this point are significantly different to what eventually become research objects (we discuss relational tables within GIS and diagrams).

3 review

The tutorial for this assignment took place soon after submission and just as pandemic lockdown was taking hold. My social life had quietened in its analogue form and the distance modality was pushing hard on the laptop camera and microphone. The tutorial, its discussions and insights sat as excess in a world that had begun to get stilled (with some anxious twitches).

We discuss the proposed site of the staircase, its objects and arrive at the padlets that designate at that point three case studies, and that these may be research objects rather than BoW. Questions arise as to how these fold back into the research, how they relate, as well as how the Herz/Stein series acts as warp right across. The glossary elucidates the different aspects here.

4 review

After a thirteen months break we pick up and start with the concepts of the previous BoW 4 tutorial, immersiveness and audience engagement and how these relate to the Research draft. Concerning the draft then the structure of it, its different voices and positions and how it organises excess are key at this point: the role of the academic voice, of research materials, of a research folder on the blog; and then to ensure excess is managed and that the research questions are addressed. We pick up fairly effortlessly after that 13 months break between 3 and 4; we cover initially some of the discussions around immersiveness and audience engagement that arose in BoW 4 and then cover the following:

5 review

Tracing the first proposal through to this moment of conclusion shows at once what has remained constant, what has become more defined and clarified and what was abandoned during that time. The consistency of enquiry, concern over engagement, voice and excess strike me, along with the fruitful exchange and support in the tutorial arrangement, the persistence of focus even as my material and site altered drastically not just once but twice. Relational enquiries with other people, 1:1 or in group settings did not take place, I tried a series of small exchanges at a distance, but the main focus moved to drawing/contact with materials, sites, atmospheres. The BoW shifted further while the methodological focus of Research was merely adjusted to also allow for the eventual BoW series, albeit it taking in Laura Marks’s Touch provided a key conceptual development for both, BoW and Research. I became confident in articulating PaR as methodology and integrating existing research experience with my growing skills as a creative arts practitioner. This feels a considerable achievement and I look forward to engaging this during SYP.

Reflections and alterations on the initial research proposal (part of Research 5)

The initial research proposal, my tutor’s annotations to it and the tutor report report for Research 1 are here:

gesa-helms-a1-near-space-with-annotated-comments-1Download

gesa-helms_research-tutorial-report-2Download

Revisiting these after more than two years point to a series of continuities:

a. the question of voice (and the balance between a reflective, narrative one vis-a-vis an authoritative academic one) was already raised: how of tighten and how to make more authorial my argument. I valued these discussion as much as they clarified to me why I left an academic appointment to seek a creative arts setting, this being an academic degree qualification of course didn’t make the engagement obsolete but it helped sharpen and hone the kinds of voice and registers that I was seeking with my research and practice enquiries and engagements.

b. the suggestion of a glossary arised early on (partly in response to a) and enabled the long and rather fruitful path of how to create objects for Research, of how to conduct PaR and what kind of artistic ‘objects’ I am interested in.

c. from the start I took the critical reflection between BoW and Research serious and frequently returned to these. I feel this is a part where I successfully drew on my existing research experience as well as a rather well-defined artistic practice to be able to move between process and objects and to help develop these as strands with both Research and BoW holding objects and processes accordingly.

The research questions necessarily narrowed: there were no workshops, there were less and less 1:1 enquiries (even though I had found a way of how these could be made fruitful for drawing/contact). This was to a good part due to the pandemic and contact restrictions. And while I experimented with a series of participatory processes (a DIY zine for the staircase site; a series of viewing device instructions posted out), these towards the end call themselves ‘Instructions to touch’ yet are surreal, time-based portraits and narratives rather than engagement. However, with the question of engagement being at the heart of not just SYP but also how I conceive of this work, I look forward to moving this towards processes that involve others, closer and at a distance. The review of other artists’ practice was also less of a feature than initially planned and the work became very strongly one of a process-enquiry of my own practice, of the objects emerging and developing within this and this practice-as-research would yield insight and learning to fold onwards.

With the decision to actively conduct research in this enquiry, the creative writing as theory fiction as auto fiction, retreated somewhat in order to make space for methodology and findings. The case studies became research material, sited outside the text and along with other objects became part of the satellite objects, the appendices that surround a 5000 words academic text in the field of creative arts.

The initial proposal, a few months into the project, draws on earlier work and the development of this, it also features a series of academic practices (conference talks, academic papers, powerpoint presentations as well as diagrams). I wondered at that stage not only what would be considered new work but also the extent to which this academic practice should be part of BoW. Eventually, none of this become part of the portfolio, neither of BoW nor Research. For the latter, I over the course of the module developed a research practice which is firmly located within the creative arts and articulates as PaR, that this is building on an social science research career is not hidden but it is also a distinct development on from this. It is possibly this which I consider the most important learning from Research.

Nomadic thought and transversalism (research folder)

Research folder, expanding on this paragraph in Research dissertation:

Interested in contact implies a curiosity about the fabric that contributes to our articulations of corporeal selfhood (as author, subject and audience). At once immediate, sensorial and tactile it also asks wider questions concerning relationship and presence. These concerns around agency, voice and autonomy are informed by older materialisms (notably: a critical materialism of social praxis) and are curious about new materialisms and its rearticulations of the non/human subject (Marks 2002, Braidotti 2011, Springgay & Truman 2019, Hilevaara & Orley eds 2018).

(Helms, 2021, dissertation draft, 28 April 2021, Introduction)

(a) new materialism, non/human subjects: nomadism and transversalism.

In the draft I carry a different line around new materialisms and the human body with me for a while, Rosi Braidotti’s nomadism is dropped in but not explicated. It is the link to what before was the interest in hybridity (originating from that interdisciplinary conception of drawing), cyborgs and non/human agency.

For the dissertation text I am drawing the theory closer around Laura Marks and Stephanie Springgay and Sarah Truman, all else will largely go to research notes on here.

—

Nomadic subjects in Rosi Braidotti (2011) as a theory of subjectification for our times: feminist, materialist; furthermore, while informed by post-structuralism, she (and others) break with Lacan’s lack as key psycho-analytical feature but draw on Spinoza (via Deleuze/Guattari) to centre desire and the generative features arising thereof for such subjectification.

Figuration is key for Braidotti, there are also references to earlier publications by Laura Marks.

Here are a number of key points relevant for the dissertation (all Braidotti 2011, Nomadic Theory)

Key articulations of what nomadic thought/theory is concerned with:

“Conceptually, nomadic thought stresses the idea of embodiment and the embodied and embedded material structure of what we commonly call thinking. It is a materialism of the flesh that unifies mind and body in a new approach that blurs all boundaries. The embodiment of the mind and the embrainment of the body (Marks 1998) are a more apt formulation for nomadic thought than Cartesian or other forms of dualism. ” (Braidotti, 14)

“Nomadic thought rejects the psychoanalytic idea of repression and the negative definition of desire as lack inherited from Hegelian dialectics. It borrows instead from Spinoza a positive notion of desire as an ontological force of becoming. This achieves an important goal: it makes all thinking into an affirmative activity that aims at the production of concepts, precepts, and affects in the relational motion of approaching multiple others. Thinking is about tracing lines of flight and zigzagging patterns that undo dominant representations. Dynamic and outward bound, nomadic thought undoes the static authority of the past and redefines memory as the faculty that decodes residual traces of half-effaced presences; it retrieves archives of leftover sensations and accesses afterthoughts, flashbacks, and mnemonic traces.” (Braidotti, 15)

“Nomadic philosophy is the discursive practice with the highest degree of affinity to the mobility of intelligence: it is both physical, material, and yet speculative and ethereal. The dialogue itself is a movement of exchange between two consenting antagonists, such as friends, opponents, or traveling companions. ” (Braidotti, 16)

“It is particularly important not to confuse the process of nomadic subjectivity with individualism or particularity. Whereas identity is a bounded, ego-indexed habit of fixing and capitalizing on one’s selfhood, subjectivity is a socially mediated process of relations and negotiations with multiple others and with multilayered social structures.” (Braidotti, 17)

Nomadism in contrast to the flaneur’s gaze:

“Back in the metropolis, the ponderous yet lazy gaze of the nineteenth-century flaneurs theorized the art of walking as a leisurely literary stroll round town. This endowed the continental urban landscape with the mystery and seduction often reserved for faraway places—a domestic variation on the exotic. ” (Braidotti, 28)

Figuration is key for Braidotti, there are also references to earlier publications by Laura Marks.

“Figurations are ways of expressing different situated subject positions. A figuration renders the nonunitary image of a multilayered subject. Feminist theories since postmodernism demonstrated that the definition of identities takes place between the polarized duality of: nature/technology; male/ female; black/white—in the spaces that flow and connect in between. We live in permanent processes of transition, hybridization, and nomadization (…). And these in-between states and stages defy established modes of theoretical representation. The figuration of nomadic subjects, however, should never be taken as a new universal metaphor for the human or posthuman condition. As I argued in the companion volume, Nomadic Subjects (Braidotti, 2011), we need to provide, instead, accurate cartographies of the different politics of location for subjects-in-becoming.
A figuration is a living map, a transformative account of the self—it’s no metaphor. It fulfills the purpose of finding suitable situated locations to make the difference between different locations.” (Braidotti, 34f)

—

Tracing transversalism, which has been in my vocabulary for quite some time is a bit more difficult. The work from early 2000s+ by Gerald Raunig et al. sits closer towards institutional analysis, translation studies; and while informed by Deleuze/Guattari, it turns towards institutional critique rather than the subject, affect and non/human agency.

I have no access to my notes on Erin Manning’s Minor Gestures; nor Stefano Harney & Fred Moten’s Undercommons where much of this was explored and fed into my research/thinking around the Drawing 2 module.

Springgay & Truman’s Chapter 2 in Walking Methodology (2019) however assembles and outlines key lines and arguments: around trans theories and Braidotti’s (2006) transpositions that are ‘playing the positivity of difference’ (52), emphasising the non-linear and nomadic and that explore ‘regulated dissassociation’ of bond which are usually assumed cohesive.

<< these are the arguments that link to the BoW discussion around immersiveness vis-a-vis a notion of fragment, distance and detachment and a moving in and out of closeness and distance, i.e. how I draw on Marks’ erotic for the work).

So, for Springgay & Truman in this review of trans theories intensities and movements are key rather than fixed beings or things. They reference Abraham Weil (2017) on ‘entangled linkages, or transversality’ (53).

Furthermore, they mobilise Harney & Moten (2013) on ‘hapticality to think about how walking constitutes a politics-in-movement’ (12).

Chapter 2 in Springgay & Truman on Sensory inquiry & affective intensities in walking research thus provides not only the arguments around the use of nomadism and transversalism but also in doing so spells out the relevance of the sensorial and how this can be explored beyond notions of immersiveness.

(links to explore: Immersiveness, hapticality and the erotic, new materialism and register shifts (why I am not focusing all that much on matter after all))

Orientating Research blog towards assessment

The Research module consists of several elements. This post is a first attempt to orientate these towards resolution and assessment.

a. Research outline from A1

b. The dissertation, consisting of:

• main body of text
• different voices articulating alongside the main body of text, notably: research practice and notes sitting aside
• Appendices to the main body: key points to the research practice and clarifications over key works and positions

c. Research padlets

d. Other padlets transecting across BoW and Research

e. Art works originating within the research process

f. Research folder on blog

It is this latter, the research folder on the blog that I need to organise and orientate. I have the blog so far mainly used to provide a number of things

1. assignments, reflections and tutorial notes
2. critical reflections across BoW and Research
3. practice pieces and enquiries, many of these are part of BoW, some are part of Research; these often have a performative nature, are often not contextualised nor annotated but instead use the blog as performance/presentation platform
4. some reflections on works and processes that do not directly relate to the intersection between BoW and Research, some of these are for Research

I have not so far used the blog to provide contextual studies or reviews or reflections (like artists, works, exhibitions, etc.), I did this in the past but for these modules much less so, and little that is writing for such purpose for Research.

Research tutorial 4 made clear that the current organisation of excess, appendix or satellite objects does not provide enough space to explore key debates, artists, works nor indeed conceptual considerations for my own practice within the 5k word limit of the dissertation.

Here, the Research folder on the blog will take this role, and it will hold a series of reflective and contextual pieces along with more theoretical and conceptual discussions.

Currently there are four key posts to write:

1. Theoretical significance of nomadism and transversalism (and possibly some new materialism also) which underpins the dissertation but is not covered in depth. (The dissertation will discuss in turn Marks and Springgay/Truman in more detail)
2. Key writers and artists: Spahr, Kapil and Krauss are alluded too, so are Calle, Goudal and Matta Clark; these need more discussion (and possibly just a list of relevant context as appendix in the dissertation); there are also: Bethan Huw’s Lake Piece, Gillian Wearing’s Dancing in Peckham and Georgina Starr’s Eddy & Whistle whose works keep returning to my mind. (Jonas and Palmer will in turn feature in more detail in the dissertation).
3. Different voices in the dissertation
4. Managing excess in Research

I will then also reorganise the categories and tags to account for this new section.

Tutor report for Research 4

I have the tutorial for Res 4 soon after submission and today post my notes to Rachel. We pick up fairly effortlessly after that 13 months break between 3 and 4; we cover initially some of the discussions around immersiveness and audience engagement that arose in BoW 4 and then cover the following:

• Audience relationship and notions of immersion
• Voices in the document
• Unpacking and strengthening academic voice
• Priorities and what to unpack: the role of the blog
• Using the conclusion to go back to aims
• Managing excess

The two key items to take are around the various voices within the document and how to organise these successfully.

The other one concerns one of the rules that I declared (initially in the introduction, for word count then as appendix: that the document, the Research project, manages excess). Rachel poses this as question and I include this section:

Managing excess

The Appendix with Rules: Can this come earlier, these rules are significant. As foreword or prelude? I also suggest to have it as opening quote to start with. Rachel asks: so does this essay manage excess (does it succeed?)? I describe how it manages excess through the various satellite objects and a designation of different voices. I then wonder if excess is already being managed by me naming it, by planting that idea in a relational context, in a dialogue and that the other then wonders if there is more, if there is more beyond the parameter of the project. So that it effectively introduces in dialogue a fantasy object that leads the other to seek around and beyond, and to go away with a fantasy (57mins: transcribe in toto).

Will Self: Digital essay on Kafka’s Wound, a hyperlinked essay.

Arno Schmidt’s Bottom’s Dream

[While listening again, I hear that Rachel also asks whether the project is successful, I didn’t hear that in the first conversation. I will come back to this: of what is success in this, what failure? Perhaps questions of control are always both: tight boundaries provide safety but exclude and simplify massively; and vice versa. Does it depend on the actual relational contact in which this is approached and negotiated every single time to give a sense of whether it works?]

A series of key points for what is next arise from the discussion, I will unpack these further in a next post but they will principally concern

• clarification of voices across the document
• strengthening and tightening of academic voice
• use of Research folder on blog to take all excess and allow me to unpack key issues without worry about the word count

These are relatively modest in scope, I hope the first two won’t take more than a week, the second one requires some reorganisation of the blog which I so far have not really used as a Research notebook, the notebook only every functioned explicitly for the practical work; how extensive this work is going to be is after an initial set of 3-5 posts pretty much up to me though.

The full report is attached here:

Research 4 tutorial report GHDownload

Research 4: submission of a working draft

I submit a word document with embedded audio and ten appendices to my Research tutor.

There are a few notes to accompany this submission:

• Case studies, a/v materials and word count. The dissertation word limit is 5000 words. The Research handbook suggests a study with primary research, which I took serious and present the work primarily as Practice as Research (PaR), it features also forms of narration that fall between theory/fiction and creative writing. The word count even for a simple primary research study is severely limited. My desire to trace divergence with different formats runs up against that limitation even more.
• My solution to this are several strategies:
  • A series of appendices was early on discussed, as satellite objects, I take Kate Zambreno’s (2018) Appendix Project as inspiration.
  • I move some of my theory discussion into a video narration
  • I present three case studies (verge/weed, Dreaming the staircase and Stromverteilen), they each relate to large work series with BoW, the latter, Stromverteilen, effectively becoming an overall container. Each of these series have an attendant padlet space which operates as object for the Research. I currently present the written narrations for each case in the dissertation but also include an audio file narrating these. I would like to consider these quotes rather than part of the word count.
  • To a lesser degree this also applies to a few sections from my research folder where I quote my own notes.

• The above gives some space to explore the research findings relating to the questions, this still feels cursory (I offer a series of routes through enquiries along with two longer discussions of reach/resonance and near space as key findings). I include a list of resources and materials in which I provide more insight into the research processes and the BoW.

Of course the above restrictions budge up against my existing writing practice across these registers: research articles of around 8000 words or in fact a PhD thesis where a 5000 words dissertation will always feel superficial and limited. And yet, I feel this working draft does work, it provides a frame and focus onto the questions that animate the PaR and it offers a series of original insights. What forms and publics these may seek beyond the assessors is a different question, which in part can also be attended to in SYP.

The early discussions around the glossary as well as satellite objects and excess has found a form and expression that seems fitting to me. It allows for different registers and media to circle in different orbits around the text.

There is a lot more in the reference (both artistic works and academic writing) that is not expressed in fullness, Friedrich Kittler’s work remains salient and solely features in a footnote. Relating Laura Marks sensuous theory to Kittler seems promising and is not articulated in writing (though perhaps in practice).

That this is completed almost 12 months late feels like a considerable achievement. I pressed pause at the start of the pandemic, then a combination of winter wave and family illness pushed me further away from the academic work while generating far more practical work (while all the same the loss of distance to and detachment from seemed to ever increase).

I am excited that it is at this stage, I look forward to the discussion of some of the findings and ways to hone and sharpen the written contribution for the Research module.

There are two things remaining ahead of the tutorial:

1. I want to provide too an update on my BoW padlet (https://oca.padlet.org/gesa492645/rthyyn7qr5iz1zak) to account for the works that have developed alongside the writing of the text.
2. Stromverteilen as padlet has developed from a single (and naive, first encountered) site to effectively function as portfolio for the whole BoW (https://oca.padlet.org/gesa492645/8vgddo2olqqwjib1).

I am not currently attaching the draft to this post, if you are interested in reading: send me a message and I am more than happy to send along.

Case study narrations for Research

My Research dissertation revolves around three case studies.

These exist at online sites along with a piece of writing. I narrate the writing in these sound files:

verge/weed

Dreaming the staircase

Stromverteilen

glossary (for Res 4)

I start the work on Research 4 (draft) by turning to the existing (almost full) draft that I submitted for Res 3 about a year ago and investigate both the research questions and the extent to which these need to change as well as the glossary. The glossary currently exists and a .png file, an object but not a glossary as text.

In the previous Research tutorial we discussed:

• how the glossary maps out the terrain of the dissertation and research and presents a research object in its own right; and
• that I should investigate the relationship between the research padlets (verge/weed, stair:case) and the glossary object as a matter of research itself to feed back into the dissertation.

I am starting this process now before writing through the draft sections. Over the months I had updated and revised the dissertations sections as the project was shifting, and am in terms of structure fairly clear what needs to be cut, what reordered and what added.

A similar clarity exists as to the glossary terms: I revise, after having done a rather long list of potential new ones; I cut the ones that for the whole project no longer bear all that much relevance; and alter some terminology. I am clear about the four sections (new conceptual contribution; obstacles; series solutions; methodology; and that these will be the footnote added to the object). Some terms may combine or diverge (bridge/edge are contained in new Sorge/care; smallness of things becomes lin; a/drift covers some of the earlier barriers.

It may be necessary to abandon the title concept drawing/contact: it seems too vague now (and I have a similar sense over how I used performance in earlier submissions). Tentatively, I propose reach/resonance to cover the relational of drawing/contact, it seems to contain the movement better too as well as the role of site. I may delete site/practice and practice/site too: perhaps it’s also too generic and unnecessary.

I am considering including keywords as appendix as short, more traditional paragraphs for each term of the glossary.

Here my revised one, the original one below:

Glossary object as of February 2021

Glossary object as of February 2020

Research 3: Gathering Data: Tutor report

The tutorial for this assignment took place soon after submission and just as pandemic lockdown was taking hold. My social life had quietened in its analogue form and the distance modality was pushing hard on the laptop camera and microphone.

It was quite a special experience to have this tutorial and discuss this subject, which is entirely not concerned with epidemiology nor actually science, in the context of what is unfolding around us.

The tutorial, its discussions and insights sat as excess in a world that had begun to get stilled (with some anxious twitches).

I spent some time transcribing much of the tutorial recording and it’s the longest report I compiled: it talks through the exhibition objects and the research findings along with with the padlets and case studies that I had submitted. It also spends considerably time unpicking the research objects that this module is generating too.

I am including one segment of the discussion, towards the end of the tutorial which tries to conceptualises what the case studies are attempted and how these can feed back into the dissertation process:

Are the three padlets related? Do you see a line, a link across the three?

There is something, and that goes back to the glossary form. I changed the glossary in the sense that each quadrant of the glossary addresses a part of the dissertation and there is a narrative in how each quadrant unfolds.

There a question of geography and scale across the three padlets:

• (a)  The staircase is a traditional, definite site in how it is delineated. I use the site then to step into a fantasy, into a dream space. So while it’s the most physical site it is also the one that moves most clearly into fantasy.
• (b)  The verge/weed has a geography to it, slightly more dispersed and yet it works along a line. Each of the processes hover along a path and the side to that path.
• (c)  The four events, drawing/contact are most abstract, almost purely event- based, almost just the relational aspect between myself and somebody else.

— There is probably more in it but this is first off: they operate on different scales. There is a fourth strand, the Herz/Stein which sits across the entire Research; there are in total four quadrants in the Glossary and four series (three of the latter currently have a padlet).When I talk about the quadrants. The one on the right is methodology; the middle ones are empirical, the top one is theory, the bottom one are the objects; the one on the left are the concepts that I enact and explore.

With the case studies plus Herz/Stein as four series, they don’t quite that easily map across the four quadrants.AP: to write a usage instruction for the glossary as note underneath it (37:00)

The glossary can function as a descriptive way into the work, and a potentially great way of using a glossary. It is important to go back and frame that glossary.

I did this for a PK ‒ I have done quite a few PKs over the year to explore the work ‒ and this PK has an illustration for this on a series of slides.

AP: to explore the relationship of each series to the glossary: what are they and where are the gaps? The spaces inbetween the screen tabs and how you visualise or articulate those connections across.

— I didn’t expect to be able to discuss the forms of writing that are new to me, strike me as innovative, and it’s fantastic to be able to do that in these tutorials. To be able to discuss the writing as if they were art, is immensely useful. I address the glossary items in the dissertation but not as glossary. This, above, will be a way to do so. I will take the glossary and the padlets as art objects and explore them as objects, their relationship and what they fall short of for Research. Rachel returns to a discussion from last time about tracing paper and things being seen through tracing paper and to explore the layering between and across them. There is something in the idea of layering things on to each other, those three padlets and the glossary quadrants and how they function as layers on top of each other and how to move about. I know how to enact these processes with art objects, with drawings, I will explore this process for the glossary and padlets. Doing the review in January, February was really positive as it showed me how the review creates new objects. To push that process a bit further still on the basis of the padlets and glossary, to feed these into the process and see what they generate. I will have my planetary system like this, effortlessly, or an appendix.

— It will also clarify the extent to which my implicit complexity needs other forms of clarity or forms of entry to be accessible in the way that I would like these to function as objects and to be quite deliberate about these.

Rachel suggests that this is important, going back to the opening of the tutorial and ongoing events: that there is material and insights that this work is able to offer and that it should offer. It is important to explore those entry points so that different types of people can access what you are doing.

I am attaching the full tutor report: Gesa Helms 492645 A3

 

Research 3 submission: Gathering data

I submitted my fieldwork submission to my Research tutor a few days ago. It is entirely contained in a word document, which effectively is my working draft for the overall dissertation.

Over the past two and a half months I reviewed my materials and processes by taking a new set of notes in my sketchbooks, proceeding iteratively; alongside, some of the material is actual practice and meant some of the works for BoW also developed further. I annotated further within evernote and last week decided to buy a license for Scrivener to use it for my writing process. It is aimed an novel writers, has a fuss-free interface and crucially allows for fragmentation into separate documents which then can be re-arranged; you can also keep all sorts of notes alongside. It was a good decision. While I have much experience of writing within word and enjoy it; this work is too sprawling and fragmented for the interface to work easily for me (i.e. not to worry that I will lose significant parts).

I made a shortened document for this post and upload the Introduction, Methodology and ‘case studies’ for the work, partly to help prepare for a meeting tomorrow. I.e. the document (copied into this post) isn’t complete but it gives a sense of the structuring of the essay as well as crucially presents the research practice that took place alongside the BoW and how I am currently thinking of presenting it for the Research module.

Three case studies:

• verge/weed
• the dream of the staircase; and
• drawing/events

are written through as narratives and each link out to a padlet that displays still and moving image material of that strand.

There is a fourth set of work, Herz/Stein which will be woven through the whole dissertation.

.

The near space in an expanded field of drawing: interdisciplinarity, hybridity and contact

Gesa Helms DRAFT (for Research 3) 12 March 2020

I have started to assemble the whole document but really only to structure it. I have greyed the sections which aren’t that important and in black are the ones that I have now written: spelling out the purpose of the dissertation, its methodology and then, as key, presenting three case studies (with the BoW material presented in padlets for each) plus the structure for the overall dissertation. There is a second more traditional findings sections which I haven’t written through yet.

I would like to discuss the case studies, if the format and form works and what it raises. I would then move to complete a full draft as Res 4 before producing the work for BoW4 after.

(I currently don’t see the padlets being part of the BoW in their form; they exist for the purpose of the Research dissertation. In some sense, like the appendix they are an exemplar of the satellite objects).

1       Introduction

My Level 3 work on the Creative Arts pathway comprises a series of processes and enquiries relating to drawing/contact. It is interested in modality, site and practice of an expanded field of drawing that sets out with the body as initial drawing tool. In so doing, it situates itself in a relational practice that begins with a situated, embodied self and as such follows feminist concerns, taking both contemporary writers and earlier performance artists as inspiration.

Interested in contact implies a curiosity about the fabric that contributes to our articulations of corporeal selfhood (as author, subject and audience). At once immediate, sensorial, tactile it also asks wider questions concerning relationship and presence. These concerns around agency, voice, autonomy are at once informed by older materialisms (notably: a critical materialism of social praxis) and are curious about new materialisms and the constitution of the human body (also in its potential hybridity, one cyborg form or another).

1.1       Aim and objectives

Practically, I set out to pursue this programme in a series of investigations:

• drawing/performance enquiries which are mainly focused on the self;

and

• drawing/performance enquiries which are small scale, intimate and perhaps simply 1:1, either scripted and more formal or more spontaneous in nature.

By focusing on different self/audience parameters I seek to investigate the forms of contact, presence/absence in the kinds of near spaces that are productive and produced in drawing/performance, and, as a second step, explore them in a series of adjacent media and forms, folding forward and onward (Bedford, Schneider, Lepecki, all 2012).

1.2       The fantasy of linearity in a distributed field

This dissertation serves the purpose of a degree qualification component (40 credits at HE6), in this it has to address a series of objectives and its content is evaluated against a set of criteria to award it a mark. To allow me, the student and author, to progress to that mark, the coursebook offers, similar to other OCA courses a series of parts (five), each marked by a point of tutor contact, to arrive at a 5000 word essay in the appropriate structure and conventions.

At the same time it also is a document that marks the completion of more than ten years of (not very linear) engagement with the field of creative practice in a British Higher Education setting. This setting has changed much during those years, much to the better; and then it got a lot more expensive (as an English, fee-paying degree while I am as EU citizen a resident in Scotland where this degree would not cost me). But, to get back to the other purposes of the document (and you can sense, like I do, the pull to talk about the institutional framework governing this document’s existence): it completes my desire, intent and insistence of acquiring an understanding of first painting, then fine arts, then visual arts, then something that sits more contemporary, more interdisciplinary and concern-oriented. Since my last HE5 module I have come to understand my practice as creative arts in an expanded field of drawing. It allows for much.

Additionally, at the start of this module I was concluding a fixed-term part-time teaching role in the discipline, Human Geography, in which I undertook a PhD at the start of the millennium. As part of this I supervised eight undergraduate Honours dissertations, some of them employing approaches and questions not dissimilar to my own final year work.

This dissertation seeks to explore its substantive concerns in a form that is as much part of my creative practice as it has been part of my academic and professional skills for twenty years. In this it seeks to understand a written, textual form to perform, to present, to engage and participate in such practice of distributed drawing. It runs up against conventions and rules (like anything that is based in an institutional setting, or in fact is part of societal structures).

Nonetheless, I would like to introduce a few rules for this dissertation:

1. it manages excess. Part of the enquiries into drawing/contact are abundant and inherently generative. They are small and inconsequential when taken on their own (at least sometimes) yet in toto accumulate to a distributed field that far exceeds 5000 words. There are appendixes, follow-up on questions and there are satellite objects.
2. it presents in conventional linearity something that is far less linear in practice. Yet, for a textual document the practice of ‘reading on’ still presents a key approach to temporality, not unlike other time-based work. I can add loops, side notes and references for- and backwards, and still: you will scroll down or turn over. My theoretical contributions are for this presented as findings; my case studies are story-lets that open outwards (to other media, to existing or imaginary appendices).
3. it budges up against its edges, seeks to subvert and step into the sidelines (knowing fine well the sidelines are as much part of the construct as the core itself). In this, it is dissatisfied with the institutional requirements. It tries to laugh at them but also takes them rather serious in its attempt to find gaps and little fissures to disappear into, to retrieve something from elsewhere or test where the citation convention can be made to serve other purposes.

.

. [omitting Literature review]

.

3.1 Methods of moving-with

The dissertation itself presents as artistic practice. It does so by moving-with a series of routes through the body of work and its enquiries. It is interested in the pursuit of movements in which contact arises in fleeting encounters. It is also interested in the materials engaged within these encounters and the kinds of spaces they are productive of.

As outlined in the introduction, the interest of the methodology is to practically — through a body of work — explore an expanded field of drawing (the shorthand I employ for an interdisciplinary practice) around the substantive concerns of moving-with, near space and drawing/contact.

The practical textual means of this dissertation draw on auto-ethnographic forms of enquiry in the social sciences and place them in relation to performative practices (mainly of self-directed enquiry, less so other human participants, though a few will feature). For this purpose, the body of the research material is presented in the form of three case studies which draw three lines (along with some further away animations) through the research field.

The three case studies are organised as loose assemblages: one, verge/weed presents a large substantive enquiry over a period of months; a second, drawing/contact events presents the initial enquiries and the concerns these raised for the articulation of research question, method and materials generated; the third one presents the final field site, an institutional staircase and explore this as the animating principle, the hinge around which most of the material can organise. This site also hovers between an actual, physical, site and a dream construction.

The core, or if I want to call it that: the heart, of the overall research is a series entitled Herz/Stein, heart/stone. Rather than presenting it as a separate case study, its work is woven right throughout the material of the dissertation to explore its relevance not merely as findings of the research but also as impulse, impetus, failure and excess.

In terms of exegesis of research practice and findings, the case study narratives present and link each to an online presentation space (as padlets) at this moment. A more traditional exegesis or analysis of findings is presented in the section ensuing the case studies. The approach taken for this consists of a review and analysis of sketchbooks and other materials and records (loose sheets, FB posts, evernote notes) in which I recorded, reviewed and more intuitively explored the emerging materials, their salience, potential and omissions. These currently consist of eight sketchbooks, three of which covering the production phases over autumn and winter, one of which consisting of review notes. The period of review took six weeks, during which some of the materials (notably Herz/Stein and drawing/events) were developed further still and in some case found resolutions. Alongside this review I also begun to explore the in-situ interventions in the staircase as potential exhibition site and developed a list of works to be produced as part of BoW4.

4        Drawing/contact in case studies

4.1       verge/weed

When does a series start? What marks its beginning?
Is it when I take the Bronica to the lochshore? When I load the film? When I say: next time I will bring the Bronica? The tenth time I stop and position the phone to take an exposure? The first time? When the grasses begin to grow? When the bindweed starts winding? verge/weed starts. It becomes a thing. I take the rolls and have them processed, one of them printed. I spend, much later, a day scanning. I make slideshows and posts (here, there, and the draft folder).

I dream of instructions. Of people watching. He does, watch. Sometimes there is a joke: step further, Gesa, just a little bit further still (into the verge, across, and eventually to tumble into the loch).

Other views filter in, prints veer off, find photocopy paper, a larger printer. The greenhouse. The bridge. Are they part of it? What is it? Is it staying on the path, exceeding it, recording the growing season (and this year’s lack of maintenance so that by August the cycle path has half disappeared.)

I depart. Live for a week on the other side of a bridge. Include the 700 mtrs walk across it. I travel again and find ourselves passing underneath a bridge, another and yet another.

I record more abundance. In close up, Shield Bugs nestle inside wild carrot flowers. They also nestles with each other. I watch, even stare.

I return, record some more and do one of the journeys again. By now, the season has changed, both here and there. The nettles are dying off the bindweed is exalted. The garden offers apples and walnuts, and my dad as eager participant. We finally perform, I record our veering, verging.

This record is merely remembered. It is written quickly. I may have omitted much. Will I retrofit, trace the medium changes across, the turns taken and the positions revisited.

https://oca.padlet.org/gesa492645/wuvuilk2ntri

4.2       Dreaming the staircase

I told him quickly of this dream. It doesn’t have an ending. I wake up before the ending, the destination. For weeks, months, I try and daydream a series of onwards developments. It is a desire dream. I don’t reach my destination within it and yet: it is totally within reach.

One day isn’t good. I depart, speechless, and exit, unplanned for, abruptly. I vaguely notice the interior construction that I am departing through. They walk overhead, I hear their voices. Outside I retrace my movement, my turns that have me exiting. I realise the movement is entirely congruous with the staircase movement in the dream itself. The dream starts with me doing the dishes, it follows with a suggestion, an invite, I fail to reach the invitation, or am I the one who gives up on it.

I look at the actual staircase closely. I walked it for years. I noticed its grandeur but generally wouldn’t pay much attention. The turrets, on the other hand; the corridor, on my left hand; the occasional darkness. Once I begin to move-with the staircase, my body crosses effortlessly the edge between dreaming and waking. It is this movement that I trail, stalk until I can step effortlessly between one and the other, in the middle of that institution, while holding a conversation.

For months I return and observe, stand, watch; often talk or listen. I notice its participants, those who walk-with the staircase. I learn gossip. I find extra doors, hidden corners, the objects that make the staircase staircase.

Unexpectedly, just a couple of weeks in, my dream concludes. In practice. I find the two rooms that reside next to each other, the two fragments that suddenly relate to each other; and a movement ensues on the staircase that concludes both dream and desire.

The staircase, right at its top, has a Luke, or is it: die Luke, the hatch (I remain uncertain about its article, is its correlation to the living merely incidental?). I find it early and fantasise about its escape first. Intent to feed it back and to organise around it. In the end, I don’t quite remember: do we? organise around it? or does it remain a fantasy.

A wooden door invites me to push. I never did until recently. Inside it smells chalky, I am waiting for the cicadas on the other side to reward my response to Ancient Greek’s simple past.

In spite of its solidity, the staircase is movement. The principle animated. (not him, the Head, mind).

I try to squeeze it into a single post and a thirty minute conversation. Of course I fail, and yet I get another invitation which I follow suit.

The dream acquires a third act: a fantasy of its objects, me, the ones who view, walk and participate. It is, like the original, fun. We have fun.

Black heat / white heat. I stand and turn. Someone joins me: how can you bear that heat. Later, I take it to the picket and offer it as position, place to the one who complains about the cold. He smiles.

The filter for the staircase is dramatic cool. It mellows the gold decorations and pushes the contrast, I would say a little, it claims dramatically. Another site, further along the corridor owns vivid warm, doing so, it provides a step towards that forest that would eventually lead to the city of illusions. More commonsensically it leads to a filing cabinet.

We can, and once do depart, by flying down the far turret. At its base there is a plaster opening, beautifully peeled. Let me show you. We can quite possibly touch it, too.

https://oca.padlet.org/gesa492645/2y2n9hxzf9on

4.3       Four events (and then some)

I start with these early on. First one, after my visit there are four. I don’t understand what they may be; they seem precious, special, extraordinary. In this, they are fleeting and insubstantial, of small things. I spend time letting them fold onwards in different means.

I try to talk about them and I falter. Not just once, repeatedly, over months. I set up meetings to falter over these and what I am doing.

The afternoon in Daserí marks a shift. I still falter but with what has happened the preceding day I become daring about the inconsequential things, or perhaps it is her company. We eat and we talk, we watch and we drive. Then we are silent for a bit.

For the first time I sense it is something. A tiny thing, merely. It hardly matters and nonetheless.

When I show him he says: you didn’t erase it, you just hid it, obfuscated it. It still remains.

In the meantime I produce a definite thing, a three layer video movement. It is all that I have done before: it is daring, scratchy, violent and confident. It has a heart too. Appropriately with a question mark, or should that be a semicolon.

Elsewhere, someone does die (while we saved a life before Daserí). The day of his death marks the day that I pick up something lost on a pavement on a cold night a few years before.
The conversation about it will conclude a few months later still, in an introduction, a meeting withheld, a space between us closed.

But, I shouldn’t mix methods, muddle enquiries, so let me change adjustment again.

(yet, seriously, I was observed drowning at the top of the staircase)

From then on I become curious over the insignificance and find it abundantly. I almost don’t need to pay attention and the encounters come to me. My recording changes in the process too, and it changes a third time when I start to review what I have done.

https://oca.padlet.org/gesa492645/i0z6z24ldr6m

5       Discussing the findings

My research for this submission consists, besides the Introduction, Literature review and Methodology of two related substantive sections: firstly, the empirical ‘case studies’, which draw together three routes through the material under investigation, doing so creatively and linking to online resources. Secondly, this findings section in which I revisit the three conceptual tenets that inform the dissertation research around drawing/contact, moving-with and near space. It is followed by a Conclusion.

The findings present the methodological lens and process of investigating drawing/ contact over a period of almost eighteen months, in this the draw out some of the process of undertaking this project as well as drawing together findings as they emerged through the research and making process and investigate these vis-a-vis the initial questions and where relevant wider literature or other artistic processes.

5.1       Drawing/contact

5.2       moving-with

My proposal for the form of the dissertation to a large extent rests on my current writing practice and interests.

The concept of moving-with presents a development from Springgay & Trueman’s 2018 WalkingLab and their concept of walking-with within the wider field of walking arts. The material that forms drawing/contact is at once situated or perhaps rather: constitutive of an expanded field of drawing. In this however, it moves and it is not just the author or artist who moves, nor the participants but matter does too, across and between different terrains and spaces. It transverses too different modalities and registers. The movement is at once performative (like a drift, or like the practice of the flaneur are), yet, by shifting traditional terrains and moving towards concerns of networked presence and identities, it leaves ‘walking’ in its traditional sense behind. The material presented is keen to understand this moving across boundaries (of public, private; of analogue and digital) and does so as research practice.

5.3       Near-space

6 Conclusion

 

Research 2: tutor report

Here the notes about the second Research tutorial (the submission material and reflection are in these posts).

The tutorial started with and addressed some of the concerns I had about the research module, usefully at a point when I practically had also moved to resolve the frustrations by making work.

I include the key substantive points of the discussion here, there full report is attached.

The glossary: satellite objects
From this we quickly turned towards the glossary as vehicle and the field it opens out and up. So, the glossary in its terms but also in how it potentially relates to the visual material offers an important and exciting route into exploring nearness, distance and contact. At the same time, the glossary is (at least initially) additional to the academic text of the dissertation, is an appendix.
Rachel begun talking about it as satellite objects to the dissertation text and to then use the requirements of the dissertation to facilitate a (written) ‘body of work’ that consists of a series of other objects. This would at once fulfil the rules, address the institutional requirements but also allow to break them.
In doing so it also at once, exhibits some of the key methodology of the whole work itself: of how to pull things close and also let them go or push them away.
We talked about Laure Prouvost’s Legsicon, Katrina Palmer’s Endmatter and how there are a variety of ways of how my different materials can become a glossary, including the photos, links to texts and other things.
Rachel then mentioned Janet Cardiff’s audio walks (on entirely different subject matter) for the work to be encountered within and outside the gallery.

Relational tables within GIS and the links between analogue/digital
The second main substantive part of the tutorial concerned a meeting I had the day before with a Geography colleague of mine who works with GIS as artistic practice. I had asked to meet with him to consider some of the issues around site, on/offline and connectedness/ fragmentation within the various emerging strands of my BoW. He suggested to explore two things: the relational tables in which GIS stores hierarchical information and thus reorders/ categorises space; and secondly, to explore the ways in which one can draw within an Excel spreadsheet.
I have added the reference and link at the end
I mentioned the usual, fairly straightforward applications of siting and fixing narrative and event within GPS coordinates and that I raised my interest in indexicality (within lens-based practices, but more so around e.g. the work of Anna Barribal) as possibly a better way to explore the connections across (possibly also to consider fleetingness, and the concerns about drawing/contact, in ways the fixing/siting doesn’t generally allow for).

Diagramming my work and its relevant literature
The one thing Rachel would have liked to have seen in my submission are some diagrams about literature and themes. And I realised that, while I have the diagrams about the BoW, the substantive themes, I haven’t expanded these to include the contextual/research work. AP: to do this as part of Research 3
Here, and at other points, the tutorial was inspiring as at times it seemed it provided itself a methodology of how to move within this particular enquiry and the relevant media forms. Rachel mentioned the significance of exploring hybridity and how important it is as contemporary feminist practice of enquiry, and how in turn it then brings with it the difficulty of articulating within a contemporary arts context that still remains media-specific.

Gesa Helms 492645 Research A2

Assignment submission Research 2: a theoretical framework

This post presents my assignment submission for Research 2: a theoretical framework.

It consists of this PDF: Research Assignment 2 (with various links to earlier posts), outlining current status of creative work, a justification for theory and methodology as well as format, a literature review.

I wrote some reflections on this submission in an earlier post.

I am including the middle part: theory and methodology, and format in this post (and will likely fold forward the summary of creative process into another post).

Justification of theory, methodology, and format

My Level 3 work on the Creative Arts pathway comprises a series of processes and enquiries relating to drawing/contact. It is interested in modality, site and practice of an expanded field of drawing that sets out with the body as initial drawing tool. In so doing, it situates itself in a relational practice that begins with a situated, embodied self and as such follows feminist concerns, taking both contemporary writers and earlier performance artists as inspiration.

Interested in contact implies a curiosity about the fabric that contributes to our articulations of corporeal selfhood (as author, subject and audience). At once immediate, sensorial, tactile it also asks wider questions concerning relationship and presence. These concerns around agency, voice, autonomy are at once informed by older materialisms (notably: a critical materialism of social praxis) and are curious about new materialisms and the constitution of the human body (also in its potential hybridity, one cyborg form or another).

This section outlines reason and argument for theory and methodology as well as the form for the dissertation that follows the former.

Theory and methodology

Exploring contact and relationality in small, intimate, near, spaces positions this project foremost within contemporary and near-contemporary feminist concerns: over a body politic, the personal, care and relationality. The means in which these have been investigated in performance and video work of the 1960s onwards also investigate the materialities of such lived experiences and thus more recently lead towards concerns of a new materialism, post-humanism. In this, I am intent to keep the focus on bodily practices and gestures as starting point, and thus to maintain an interest in the signals and processes that constitute phenomenology (references: many, one that usefully articulates past and contemporary practices around relational aesthetics is Reckitt 2013).

At the same time, the subject matter is concerned with moving and shifting: of the unfolding of an event, a gesture, a relationship: what chain of actions take place to co-create drawing, contact and thus space in these small-scale encounters? It is possibly here that some of the contemporary theoretical articulations, originating with Deleuze/Guattari and being further articulated by Rosi Braidotti’s (2011) nomadism and others that concern the transversal, the translation. While not within the scope of this undergraduate dissertation, I nonetheless hope that this focus can point towards a form of practice which speaks to some of Friedrich Kittler’s (1999) media historical arguments concerning the shifts of possibilities and closure with each new media technology precipitated our understanding of not only ‘writing’ or ‘drawing’ or the ‘the visual’ but also constituted ourselves as subjects, bodily and haptically. Practically, this enquiry thus follows a series of movements and shifts across forms, sites and encounters (analogue and digitally) and seeks to examine closely the material processes at play in these movements.

An important aspect, already discernible in this and the earlier document for the module, concerns a question over there being a practical way (and a methodological/theoretical interest) in dealing with questions over divergence, excess and a porous and open practice (I have currently the sense that this relates also to the issues of smallness, fleetingness and absence, above). The form of a glossary (see below) explores a way of investigating this for the Research module (BoW has other forms and processes to pursue this concern, such as inventories in different forms, redundancy and iteration).

The methodology is primarily articulated and explored through the BoW: the concepts of near space and moving-with in a series of artistic propositions around drawing/contact. Here, A2 and A3 of BoW have so far been a considerable research laboratory to explore what these concepts can be within an expanded field of drawing. There is data collection as to the experiments and processes to test and explore to understand my concepts and what they do. – I intend to submit BoW 3 during November before investigating the material more fully for Research 3.

Format of dissertation

I seek to represent (and present) the above in a dissertation that sits between three of the identified forms: creative writing, auto-ethnographic and traditional.

This choice follows from both subject matter and theory/methodology to find a form that allows to mirror concerns over fragmentation, relationality, transversalism/nomadism; of the body/ the sensorial as significant means for sense-making; and thus to employ theory/auto-fiction as element.

The format of the essay will be a narrative framework which takes the text as an artistic proposition itself (as one means of enquiry), and in doing so possesses characteristics of a creative writing proposition. It does so within a context of auto-/self-writing (which is somewhat covered in the coursebook as reflective practice) as much as theory fiction (i.e., also touching on elements of what the coursebook calls traditional/research essay).

walnut gravity support (drawing/contact performance)

Reflection on Research (2: Theoretical framework)

This post accompanies my submission for Research 2: Theoretical framework.

It’s been about five, almost six months since my previous and first assignment submission for Research. This current one contains an articulation of theory, methodology and form of essay, along with notes on the status of the practical work as well as a literature and resources review.

During those past months I was at times close of walking away from this degree and that is largely due to the nature of the Research module: I find it entirely repetitive, generating lots of material and yet not offering anything in a way of editing the material. Furthermore, it proposes processes of dissertation research which are almost entirely suited for a social science project and only barely make reference to artistic research. I see how it genuinely tries to be helpful in supporting students at this stage, yet the ways it does this: lots of activities, lots of angles, only poorly cohering (what is the relationship between the various bits of writing at ‘exercises’ and the final submission for each of the assignments??) — in this it appears prescriptive and thus entirely limiting: there is throughout a sense that planning takes the place of a creative practice, that constant articulation is the way to evidence one’s academic readiness and thus to pre-empt investigative and creative processes (I understand that part of this is again the limits of a distance-learning degree, another part is due to the wide range of practices coming together in Creative Arts, but the third part: to assume a step-by-step planning process ensures progression is counter-productive for at least half of the students, and a somewhat lazy administrative process currently so in favour in UK HE0.

The advice by my BoW tutor to disregard the coursebook(s) was given early (and in some way how I worked with earlier, similarly limiting coursebooks, notably: Drawing 1 and TAOP). Yet, at this stage this seems not helpful and in the absence of what else, it drops me into a void. — There are afaik five students on this pathway plus myself, three further along, two in earlier parts. Also, by doing two modules concurrently, the contact with each tutor seems distant and hardly present (both tutor and peer interactions were entirely different in Level 2, and these were both, along with two very good coursebooks, the reasons for me to continue).

— This means it takes considerable effort to articulate a way ahead with the dissertation module. I would like to make each stage useful to me and it took me several attempts to do that with the current submission.

At this stage, almost half-way through the current two modules I can see that BoW and the practice investigations drive and animate my work. That my work is theoretically informed and methodologically curious does not distract from the former. In the BoW tutorial in late July we discuss to use BoW 3 as experimentation and research stage: to investigate my key concepts and processes. I did this and this current Research submission is my first point of assembling and stopping to reflect on the content and process of the Creative Work and reflect it back to the initial Research Proposal. For this, the process to get this current submission ready involved the following:

[x]assemble the materials you have so far: create an inventory

[x]write-up of BoW and research within it

        (then check what you had written before)

        (this will form the overview for the ‘findings’ material for later on.)

[x]glossary as focus (Williams, Prouvost, Vourloumis, also: Wu Tsang)

[ ]key literature: expand and focus in from Res 1

So, effectively, much time was spent on assembling a review of the materials of BoW and to reflect back on what I had said a few months ago about the direction and content of this. I enjoyed this process, it was good to do and to reflect on what is possible to experiment with and notably, what remains difficult and fleeting. I also drew out three current investigations to explore the idea of near-space in performance/drawing and feel quite content with having found processes and materials to employ in this process.

My resistance to the Research course material arrives from the fact that I am well used to writing academic materials at an advanced level (for peer-reviewed journals, academic theses etc) — and for a 5k text I need about six weeks not the duration of the course. — I knew this before I started, and having just recently supervised 10k long social science dissertations has brought the difference of instruction to mind. In all this, I want the module and the dissertation to be useful to myself: there is stuff I want to learn in this field, in my writing and in my artistic practice. So, how can I realistically do that in the confines of the course?

The proposed format (creative writing + reflective + traditional, in the words of the coursebook; in my own words: auto-ethnography meets theory fiction meets methodology) is one way to hone and develop my articulation in this field; the investigation of an artistic research process around the themes identified another.

I have mainly resisted at this point to provide a literature review besides the one already included: I am currently working with notes and diagrams and images and reading and feel this is productive; I can write these through for the Draft of Research 4, but don’t want to get embroiled in a discussion over individual sentences in my materials.

Preparing this submission I discover the extent to which I am actually conducting research: the material I generate is of that nature and I am excited by this: it is at once a known process but also new as it concerns a different field, different form of enquiry and I am looking forward to the next stage of Research, the data collection.

I have included a number of links to the BoW material and remembered how useful I found the tutorial of Research 1 on the line, the resulting reading and the understanding of my research process and artistic practice.

The above is a comment on the course direction, it is not one on the tutorial process at all. I know that I can be quite literal with instructions and get frustrated by poor ones before stepping to the side and making them useful for myself. I hope that my submission will facilitate such process and I look forward to the tutorial.

My suggestion is to conduct both BoW 3 (almost ready) and 4 before submitting Research 3 (data) and Research 4 (draft) after that.

Shop front cover and reflection, Karlkrona, September 2019

critical reflection: modality of BoW

Detail of updated concept map for BoW (July 2019): modality/methodology

As material for the dissertation:

The process of shifting back and forth as the process of the Body of Work and how produces itself and links to the dissertation.

• the gap pointed to it: what is opened up
• the photocopier manual, (m)use me, and the parallel project present its practice
• the line as practice to deal with the social subject matter (and so does: office at night; the corridor work and other green: contact, secrets, gossip)

Katrina Palmer’s Loss Adjuster is good for process and shift

Juliana Spahr’s Army of Lovers, Everyone connected, The transformation as container and focus on new materialism and relationality within

• sketchbook: thisconnection as bridge
• sketchbook: Juliana Spahr’s thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs

Bhanu Kapil as for fragmentation and moving between different materials.

Joan Jonas and Rosemarie Trockel for holding these togethers (perhaps some like Doris Salcedo too?)

Friedrich Kittler opened the door to this and should be at the heart as conceptual/ methodological question

The smallness and the unimportance as guiding question to judge vis-a-vis artistic canon.

How to trace this through the BoW:

Reworking the concept map from February made some of these processes clearer: what is the how and the what: I had discussed as key outcome/ process a series of performance formats (solo; 1:1; and group) but wonder if that is the process really and if the process is not a tracing, following, pursuing of material shifts and registers; and that performance (through the inclusion of others, and a focus on the body) is merely a format that facilitates that.

In June I collated a few thoughts as to material contact:

clay experiments (following the Bleakeley performance)

darkroom and contact printing

screenprinting again

then: in the sketchbook:

• the transferral of marks to the next page,
• the pick up of graphite on previous pages
• see through/ fold
• (it is again processes that have intrigued me for a long time; possibly it is the link to indexicality again here that also concerns the interest in the ‘contact’ concern for the wider project)
• most actual drawings in the sketchbook are 10-15mins pieces while on the bus: layering fleeting views on top of each other, repeating and reworking. I did 12-15 of these over four journeys. They are not about indexicality. Yet, in some sense I feel they are relevant in terms of the drawing marks and in terms of what is connected through the moving through?

I also think the drawing on top of templates/copies is part of this too, and so is much around photocopying; and indeed the work with the typewriter in late March.

As in D2 I find a hesitancy towards material processes, as if they sidetrack me too much. I don’t think that I don’t experiment enough (which was one of the discussions over the material processes in D2), but I think I struggle to explicate or name what I am experimenting with.

As plan for Part 3 I want to focus on the processes themselves and pursue a range of them to explore what kind of register shifts are occurring (and, so my thought: are constitutive of the near space, the contact).

near space as concept (tracings)

near space as concept:

the gap as source – copying – remaking the gap – mapping/reinstalling (not) – talking about it – writing endings – performing it. letting it be.

the corridor – walking it – recording it – sitting next to – intervening in it – re-orientating it – working in it. leaving it.

other space – the gap as opening – utopian space in the office – world-making – tracing the corridor. dreaming the spot that opens up and out.

the island.

the line to the car park.

update/catch-up

— I have been busy. I also have been recording things that I have done and will move more of them here to the sketchbook and write up as relevant parts to coursework.

A couple of days ago was the already postponed submission date for the BoW 2/ Gather and manifest. I let it pass: I had thought of pulling things together but also felt that the more dialogical/public/relational aspects of it still needed further pushing about.

What I have been busy with was a series of writing/publishing projects. And in that process, I also considered Research further and how to proceed with it. I will rejig it and step further away from the coursework. I wrote (as I know I do) about 5k on the line for the conference publication within a few weeks. The piecemeal leading towards the dissertation doesn’t work for me, I find I am picking arguments with it (and that is only productive in a certain extent). So, I think I will set a series of writing tasks/ projects as equivalent to the module stages and take it from there.

I am also thinking about the idea of defining down and focusing in as discussed in the last tutorial (the report of which will go up after this post, I had it for several weeks — it is here). I think I am really not interested in defining things down — it goes back to the interesting discussion Rachel and I had about ambiguity. So much of what my writing and focus has been over the past few years is an opening out, a holding in tension, and linking to — and I don’t mean with that a ‘more, more’ or just any old stuff, but a rather careful and measured approach towards what elsewhere is considered emergence, or even some of the nomadic theory of Braidotti will hold a hand towards this approach. So, the idea of a glossary for the dissertation is a really good one, but what if it works more like Raymond Williams’s Keywords: a link, emergence, a holding in tension, not an undue tightening down?

I think I will explore this further and am reminded of the pieces of writing that I recently got sent (let me post and link these two.).

Research A1: tutor report.

This is a few weeks old, we had our meeting in early May, and the report got finalised soon after.

The notes are written by myself, a short addition at the end okays them and adds relevant references.

It is good to reread this now: I took serious and onwards the discussion around the line as old/new work and how that articulates towards BoW but also R. I have some further thoughts re the glossary and how it can function in the current update here.

Here are the notes on the existing/new work discussion:

Reviewing work and when does the work become a new piece?

I had uploaded a short post on the line (final work for DI&C, which I am currently working with in order to turn into two different formats), and wanted to discuss: – what in this concerns actually a new work? Are e.g., the different conceptions of the work in relationship to its audience constitutive of a new object? What is in this in relation to academic working practices (institutional critique, specific forms of artistic practice) that are relevant and can be insightful for BoW (and Research). Rachel encourages me to reflect on

(a) what has already been done and achieved in DI&C
(b) what am I looking to do now, new?

And, that part of this process, I am unpicking the methodology of the line to help it inform how I proceed: in terms of space, nearness, performance and relationality. I also raise that the previous form had very little interest in its audience, which now moves to the fore. Rachel advised to be clear about the above and to make a well-informed argument so that I am confident I am not self-plagiarising.

AP: a blog post that reflects on the above and articulate it forward.

This discussion also involves my interest and experiences in academic practices while being eager to avoid the work falling into earlier approaches (i.e., to ensure I am not writing a Human Geography dissertation or PhD but one that approaches the material from within a Creative Arts practice); the question of making the conference presentation and text part of the modules or not was informed by this also, and I have a good sense of how the work (and the new work that builds on the line can contribute to this while being qualitatively new to the DI&C material and also presenting an artistic practice that informs BoW/Research)

We discuss the line and The gap in detail and I realise they share a number of aspects: as concepts that allow me to explore agency, movement, transgression, reveal/conceal. There is in both (more so in the line) an element of excess, overwhelm and I recognise this (positively: abundance, potentiality) as an element where I am seeking a particular sensation in the encounter and to transmit that sensation. It will be good to get a better handle on this (to gain a bit more fluidity in navigating it. [this characteristic is also in my writing, in how I bound/delimit a topic (or not) and what I raise implicitly, allude to].

 

The whole report is in this document. It is accompanied by an annotated copy of my initial research proposal (which I am not uploading). Gesa Helms 492645 A1

Critical Reflection after Res A1

— the tab critical reflection acts as the hinge between the two courses (I have one here, as well as a private one as an evernote folder).

The research proposal is written, thought a fair bit longer than asked for (and it still only reviews key work/resources in 250 words).

I must admit the uncertainty over the relationship of requested tasks (what and how to review, write out, clarify, clarify further) and my own plans seems confusing still: I end up with a far too wide field when I pursue the instructions. It is generative of a lot of text and then wants a very brief text only. (I have no problem with the questions and tasks it asks: the reviews are useful; I think there is struggle is that the text is rather prescriptive in pursuit but offers no tools to tighten and focus: the proposal wants five themes addressed in 1000 words).

I have seen and reviewed a fair bit of work: live performances in different registers; I watched a series of films too and explored their cinematography, script and framing devices; I have read key pieces of fiction writing that I identified as key for my interests and a fair amount of academic work too. Attending the SAR conference mid-March was really important: both to test out my own work (though any feedback was largely self-derived and little came forward from audience) but also to see where my work relates to and can be situated within. I wrote a couple of these up on the blog, but there are a few other artists still key to what has influenced my thinking about performance, intimacy, site and drawing. I have also had my proposition to move the line from online video work to photo essay and to consider its methodology as walking methodology accepted for a conference in Northern Greece (Walking Arts Network).

While during A1 of BoW I was still exploring the extent to which I move anything that sits closer to academic involvements as actively a part of BoW (conference presentations, the concept maps etc), I have stepped somewhat away from this: I feel it would crowd out any visual/performative enquiries and enforce too much of an academic modality on these. I think this move will free BoW, possibly can be altered for SYP. It will however also mean that some of my current commitments in Spring and early Summer will sit additionally to the course work, likely slowing the coursework down.

What I have arrived at with the articulation of the research proposal is a clear sense of what BoW consists of as a work programme (a series of performances in different registers, audience/participant compositions); I have also settled on a focus for the Research: the concept that I currently call near space, that I seek to investigate in contemporary performance/ drawing practice; which investigates some key themes for BoW: relationality, presence/absence and site. This feels important and useful and allows a focus that fits and can be refined further.

What follows below is a series of answers to some preliminary questions in Part 1 of Research, I will keep them here for future reference.

Reviewing your creative work

You’ve got two subject specialisms and two Level 3 courses (for now at least) and somehow you need to find a way to bring them all together as a coherent body of work. Think about the creative work you’re doing for Body of Work first.

1. Look back over the work you’ve just submitted to your tutor, consider their feedback and implement any changes that would improve the work. Now look at the work you’ve created so far for Body of Work and consider how it can relate to the work you’ll create in this course and vice versa. Identify a variety of ways in which the creative and written projects can interlink. Record your thoughts and explore a range of options. Will your creative work drive your written work or will it be the other way round? It doesn’t matter which it is, provided you are working to your strengths from each subject area.

• I thinks the weighting is going to fairly equal: one informs the others and vice versa, I don’t want R to drive BoW, realistically, BoW will always be strongly informed by R; so 50:50 is a good aim
• I don’t want BoW too be too intellectual, solely focused on academic means of interdisciplinarity: I had started to think about some of the hybrid forms between PPTs, diagrams and performative lectures but I don’t find this satisfying enough: it seems more of an institutional critique (and too trying, derivative a form for me to focus on solely). I will thus also not fold the talks at SAR or in Prespes into BoW but set them up as testing grounds for forms of R (and test the materials and how they can fold into other media formats).
• Yet, what I had started to discuss as hybridity is important, and I think the works of HJ Giles and M Bleakley point towards something that then in Jones/ Heathfield eds 2012 is further explored: the performative as viral, activated in different forms and in different instantiations (their focus is strongly on history/memory but bears much significance to the questions that animate me).
• I would like to use BoW as a lab/ experimentation ground for R and to use R to formulate questions/enquiries and then study/contextualise/push further the questions that BoW present as findings.

2. Now think about resources. Can any of the resources you’ve identified in Exercise 3 help you with your creative work? Make a plan of action for accessing these resources. Will you need to visit a specific location, collection, exhibition, practitioner, design group, artist collaboration, performance, installation, recital, reading or conference? Can you access a record of these resources online?

• I am not so worried about particular resources and access just yet: most of what I identify is writing/ artworks for artists that are reasonably well documents/ accessible. This may change though and I started to attend to conferences, exhibitions and performances coming up. My plan is to see a reasonable amount of live performances (both live art/theatre but also more artistic) over the duration of the final modules to get a good sense of what is going on (and am well placed for this in Glasgow/Edinburgh)
• I would like to set up/ test out my own materials/ processes fairly soon though: I am thinking of either a reading group, 1:1 private performances/meetings with artist colleagues, later some workshop/ more public settings >> I am not sure if this will create material for BoW or inform the R (perhaps it will do both)

Now identify what you’d like to achieve from your creative work in Body of Work and think how you could use your research project to help you achieve some of these goals

    Write down answers to the following questions:

• I want to consolidate skills in …
  • performance and interdisciplinary work
  • drawing as in relation to the above and an expanded field
  • conceptual art making that attends to the phenomenological and the sensorial
• I want to produce …
  • a body of work that speaks to my concern
  • a body of work that offers multiple entry and exit points as well as routes through
  • a body of work that uses a range of approaches that originate within photography and drawing and move beyond these in an interdisciplinary field
  • a body of work that is effective with time/space (duration, pace, rhythm, site, place and space and ourselves within it)
• I want to promote my work to …
  • be recognised locally both for my academic/ facilitation work as well as contemporary art practice
  • be able to navigate art contexts further afield (UK, but also NL, DE) primarily through this BoW and an effective link to my Geog/facilitation self
• I want to refine …
  • my understanding of an expanded field and contemporary performance approaches
  • an entry and presence around geographical debates within arts and a potential contribution
  • the analogue/digital
• I want to explore …
  • intimate performance modalities (1:1)
  • the potential for solo performance
  • the role of audiences (present/absent, near/far)
  • moving registers across media forms (Jones/Heathfield)
• I want to prove that …
  • production of space happens in intimacy/body-oriented performances; and discover more about the kind of space being produced in this
  • these spaces contain the potential to be utopian
  • and that they provide easy and accessible links to our understanding of drawing
• I want to involve …
  • my self, my fear, my apprehension
  • my joy and laughter too
  • colleagues and strangers
  • earlier performances
  • writers and authors
• I want to integrate …
  • most of the above works towards such aim.

 

Research A1: dissertation proposal

this post concludes assignment 1 of Research with the dissertation proposal. The work leading up to this is a set of questions and exchange with my tutor prior to this draft.

The near space in an expanded field of drawing: interdisciplinarity, hybridity and contact

Research proposal for Creative Arts, Research
Gesa Helms | #492645
27 April 2019

This dissertation proposal seeks to support my Body of Work drawing/contact with an investigation into the kinds of relational spaces that are created in an expanded field of drawing. Here it begins with drawing as a performative practice and in turn seeks to understand performance as a drawing practice. If performance is centred on the body of the performer within a specific unfolding time frame – a presence, can we then be curious about the kinds of spaces this is productive of: relationally, sensorially and materially?

That such spaces exist in the present time also indicates that they may be past or anticipated, have a memory, an excess as well as an absence (performance art in art history presents precisely this dilemma). Jones & Heathfield’s (2012) edited collection centres on these kinds of presences and absences created, asking also how these by implication draw in a whole range of other media – such as photography, writing, drawing, re-performance, video – to access the live performance positing an important concern regarding interdisciplinarity and shifts in form, register and media.

Centring on the body of the performer and the experiential foregrounds both the material (older and newer materialism) as well as the sensorial (likely accessed through phenomenological means).

The Research dissertation will attend to:

(a) existing practices that engage with this

(b) a set of enquiries/ research questions that are driven through these and animate the dissertation as well as BoW.

• how do these writers inform my enquiry?
• how does contemporary performance practice do so?
• what is there about what constitutes the work: the shifting of medium, register, encounter: how do we make contact within this?
• who is the audience? subject/object? author?

See the PDF for the full proposal, its links to BoW and relevant key texts and resources: Research Proposal A1 Near Space

 

Research A1: responses (and more thoughts) on the first preliminary questions

the coursework asks for a set of initial questions to be answered and sent to the tutor before proceeding to the Research proposal proper.

I received the responses a while ago, then completed A1 for BoW (which covered a fairly similar ground) and am now returning to the research proposal.

Rachel responded to the post here in a generous and helpful manner (I am leaving out a few procedural discussions from our exchange):

I think I can understand some of your frustration with linearity and literalness, and hope that you can hold onto your anxiety of being a good student as the linearity of research, practice, and study rarely happen as they are presented. For myself, this is part of my own practice research interest in the Deleuze and Guatarri’s rhizomatic interconnectedness, and also the entangled cut together-apart of new materialism. 

Trust that there will be moments of overlap as well as moments of separateness between the body of work and the research, and that though they will often develop as a hybrid, they will also be separated for clarity of explanation and academic format. 

The photographs of the mind maps and concept maps are great to demonstrate your thinking visually, though they are a little hard to read in places, (I imagine they are too large to scan?) 

I also wonder if the concept maps perhaps seem to relate more to your practice than the research concerns? I imagine if this is the case it is because, as you have identified, at this early stage things seem so closely interwoven? Mapping the theorists and writers as well as their concerns in amongst your own concepts as you start to plan the areas of interest for your written work will help you to keep tightening your approach and focus.

In your post, course instructions/literalness you write: 

‘the Research/ dissertation then underpins some of this a research form that can explore conceptual forms, moves and potentiality; I hope that it will concern ideas of production of space/ site; utopian forms of hybridity and how this relates to institutional critique’.

I think it will help you to write more about what you understand by these terms, and how you are intending on using some them to clarify your intentions for the research. Also try to use the writers/theorists you have included to help situate your research in more detail. It will also help to start to identify the specific texts you are interested in from the writers you identify in your list of resources. 

As you move into the next section before assignment 1 you will be able to spend some time honing your research question and what it will entail. This will help you to think about the focused direction of the research and how it will sit in relation to your body of work.

My response was as follows:

Hi Rachel — many thanks for sending this and for providing such thoughtful response. This is really helpful, also in how to differentiate out Research and BoW at this stage. Yes: you are right, the concept maps are largely about the BoW focus (and I assume the Research will then peel off and focus in on one area where theoretical/conceptual support for the BoW is required). Yes, I completely agree re the poor readability of the maps themselves: they are done in graphite on grey paper, are fairly large (60x100cm or so), and I will see if I want to transfer them for a different format.Thank you for picking out that one sentence — and I will spend some time unpacking this (part of it comes down to my geography shorthand; another part also possibly that I am finding a good way to deal with my previous academic work, without it letting drown out the artistic practice). 
I will spend the time between now and submission of A1 with clarifying/ focussing on some of the writing aspects and what line through the theory/argument I consider as fruitful (while attending to what I may want to keep as options); I am quite good at keeping on to my anxiety and will make a point to get round to Deleuze/Guatarri — my own work was a critical materialism (the left-section of the Frankfurt School, Alfred Schmidt, Horkheimer; then Foucault and Lefebvre), which never valued non-linearity all that much but had a good grasp of overall messiness and how internal relations of dialectics can help us engage with that societal mess. 

To take at this point:

• the productiveness of anxiety: holding on to it to stay engage; not so much that it blocks you but it propels you on and forward
• I value that she is doing a PhD and while I haven’t looked at Deleuze/Guattari, they have always been on my list and it will be good to become more involved.
• the circularity and iteration of the process will be productive (I know how to do that and have employed that as strategy for some time)
• there is a real sense of being able to bring in my previous academic work and feed it through the artistic processes without overwhelming them. this is really exciting and something I had hoped to achieve over the past few years (when I re-established an honorary affiliation with my old department in order to pursue precisely this).

R1: first responses for tutor

I have now written up and compiled a series of posts relating to the first questions of Research to be send to my tutor for a first feedback before proceeding to write the project proposal. This has taken longer than planned, part of the reasons for this lie I have written about in this post, here about literalness.

In this post, I compile links to the various posts (not in chronological but logical order as per coursebook) that contain responses to the questions about

1. Initial ideas (identification, review, strengths/weaknesses, concept mapping, further identification of interest)

• Initial Ideas: orientation https://close-open.net/2019/02/07/r1-1-initial-ideas-part-2/
• Initial Ideas: concept maps https://close-open.net/2019/01/01/research-concept-maps-initial-ideas-part-1/

2. Getting started (getting organised, time plan, habits, process): https://close-open.net/2019/02/06/r1-2-getting-started/

3. Identifying resources (reading list, skim read, gatekeepers): https://close-open.net/2019/02/06/r1-3-identifying-resources/

Alongside these posts I have a number of further handwritten notes, some of these scanned in here (they include a number of SWOT charts for individual projects, which aren’t written up further yet but I want to do that, as it was a comment during the progression discussion).

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

There are also a number of sketchbook entries that process these documents and notes further:

• https://close-open.net/2019/01/01/spatial-praxis-play-1/
• https://close-open.net/2019/01/03/spatial-praxis-play-3-onto-the-concept-map/
• https://close-open.net/2019/01/12/territory-1/
• https://close-open.net/2019/02/03/sketchbook-wax-stain/
• https://close-open.net/2019/02/07/performance-score-the-gap-observed/

R1.1 Initial ideas (part 2)

I had started to post some of the concept maps which are part of this extensive part of first questions around ideas, review, mapping of existing work, theme, potential, weaknesses in an earlier post here, and now want to conclude this question with a reworked outline of my initial ideas. For this I referred to the statement of intent that formed the basis for the transition discussion in autumn (keeping its review and context and writing through ideas as they have emerged since then):

Initial Ideas and orientation

I would like to continue at the point where my recent module, Drawing 2 concluded (and am for this statement drawing on my earlier self-assessment with some reworking and expanding for what may lie ahead). The final projects (m(e)use|use me; the Hornet Tree, the Critical Review on an expanded field of drawing) as well as the realisation to the Parallel Project, Parallel Praxis, all begun to articulate a notion and practice of drawing in an expanded, interdisciplinary field. Here, drawing emerges as a set of enquiries, methods and processes in which performance, photography, writing, installation and more traditional drawing processes interact and mutually inform each other.

The parallel project indeed relates and looks back to the previous module itself, it reorganises the materials and lets them become something else still. The video is not merely a narration, an instruction; I begun to include the key clips – visual, and also found sound recordings – in the work to author it and let it unfold. In this sense, it draws on a number of senses and sensations, and indeed revolves around an exploration of a body (mine) as drawing tool, investigating the reaches of what constitutes an extended field of drawing. It speaks out of the screen to ask the viewer to engage directly with some other materials. With this, it resonates with both Joan Jonas’s and Katrina Palmers’s work: they engage, performatively, and in doing so make visible and audible that engagement between artist and audience, viewer, reader, interlocutor. Will it work? Does it fail? What happens instead? In this parallel project, there is a literal voice – mine – and in its clarity it also helps to articulate all those other voices that are involved in my art-making, an art-making  that is visual, textual, increasingly dares to be performative; it takes in things I learned before: critical social theory; dialectics; a body/dreamwork coaching and counselling training; a dissatisfaction with academic publishing; a keenness on finding those other spaces and places that are never entirely utopian but offer a hunch, a first step from here to there.

Besides the actual projects that constitute the body of work of Drawing 2, there is something also in the tools that I used and which for the assessment submission refigured as a portfolio without large sheets of paper but instead a series of folders and pouches that relate and point towards some of the digital parts (FB albums, e.g.). This process of working with materials that are common, and in some ways mimic office work processes was important and I feel it may also structure some of my future enquiries. It also deepened my engagement with a movement between digital and analogue (continuing from DI&C). It also continues with questions over what constitutes site, audience, work > explored in different ways and always with an exploration of this movement digital/analogue (initially: gap, agency, control (generative systems, drawing machines); then: what constitutes drawing; the kind of tools: office tools).

In this, and as a first step into Body of Work I have begun to explore the notion of hybridity (is that interdisciplinarity?) within an expanded drawing practice. For this purpose, I have started a series of investigations that take the questions and processes of these initial steps in Assignment 1 and explore their scope for an artistic practice: created and transposing concept maps; guide books etc. Also: having submitted and accepted a conference talk at that Society of Artistic Research conference in late March in Zurich around the work of the Gap and its wider relevance, I have begun to (a) explore further routes around this work (a void, a gap between two filing cabinets as a starting point towards investigating relationship, distance, agency and control as well as notions of a gap between analogue and digital processes within an institutional setting) and (b) the notion of a conference talk as performance, instruction, screening and thus to enquire into this particular format and modality, which I hope will be instructive for the further development of both BoW and Research.

The issues with regards to voice/ themes and practice that clarified during this final Level 2 module were:

• humour and how I instigate processes that allow me to arrive at resolved pieces
• the relationship to conceptual and intellectual concerns (institutional critique, production of space)
• working across a range of media/approaches and finding ways to integrate them with each other and use that integration in innovative ways (photography, writing, performance, drawing)

It is then on the basis of these emerging working practices, conceptual concerns and emerging clarity and articulation of voice that I would like to approach Level 3. I find these first respective assignment pointers for Research and BoW useful in relation to review and investigate existing work to date (and have kept a good part of such review as context for articulating my first moves within Research). I also find some of the overlap but fairly little actual integration confusing, and it took me a while to make sense of the individual exercises and questions and how they do/ not relate between the two modules. As both first assignments are strongly focussed on planning ahead and specifying approaches, means, literatures I find myself hesitating: while I have a clear sense of direction I am at this moment wary of specifying this too far in advance as I generally review and refine on the basis of some work already done and articulate e.g. theory/concept post-practice (to feed into a new cycle). With this in mind, I have spend considerable time with some of the questions, have also reviewed some of the Level 2 pieces in some detail; but crucially, started to do a series of new investigations and enquiries to allow me to test some thoughts, refine these build in these. 

The theme and interest is refined to some extent as for the Research to be an investigation into 

The site of Interdisciplinarity in Drawing Practice, 

and for the Body of Work a Theme of Significance being

Drawing/ Contact (Modality, Practice, Site)

With these two related themes, I would like to pursue and clarify the approach towards an embodied, sensorial and expanded field of drawing as artistic practice. There are a number of technical skills and approaches I am interested in: moving image/ video (possibly even 16mm film); darkroom techniques; screenprinting; performance; but none of these are fixed and I trust that the suitability of any of these will emerge in relation to the actual projects. Similarly, I am very interested in pursuing further my investigations into sites (interior/exterior) as well as movement between these. It may make sense to prepare and arrange for an actual site to serve as a field site for the Body of Work (and thus move it out of ongoing work arrangements).

Following the Concept Mapping (Q1.3), the most promising and salient themes that animate my interest are geographical and environmental following my investigations into the institutional corridor and an artistic practice that engages it: they concern site, direction, orientation, movement, exit; gaps, possibilities for other spaces that sit aside, elsewhere; and as such follow on from the Gap, Green and Parallel Praxis. Related to the production of space, these touch on questions of performance, the sensorial, institutional critique and the sensorial.

There is a continuous theme running throughout which concerns questions over copy, reproduction, repetition and difference, and, as it becomes clear in the later part of the module, this concerns both the surface, the background of the actual artwork as well as that it stretches beyond and outwards from it: what kind of space do we perceive, live, practice?

R1.2: getting started

The second of the initial questions concerns how to get organised, timelines, writing/ creating habits etc. I focus on my workflow and present an initial timeline for both Research and BoW, with the view to complete both by the end of 2019.

Workflow and process

I generally work with a mix of Papers as referencing database and more recently Books for epub. Besides this, a number of books exist on my bookshelves or in the University of Glasgow library to which I have access.
For the past six months I have started to use Evernote as research and planning tool and will continue to do so:

• A large notebook is simply titled [untitled album] L3 work, which contains clipping and thoughts
• A more general album [day thoughts] contains wider, course unspecific information
• I set up more specific notebooks and move across when it becomes relevant
• I tend to draft my blog posts in Evernote, move relevant photos from Photos in here too, which also means photograph handwritten notes and add to digital ones
• I test much of my writing and thinking in limited Facebook publics, that has worked over the past 2 years well and is a good way to gauge how particular concepts, thoughts and writing notes function.
• Once these are relevant, concluded I write a blog post
• I also started to treat a section of the blog as a sketchbook — this comes out of the circumstance that much of my sketching happens digital and I want to recorded (I would like see if I can have these in a side column, separate strand within the blog)

My general manuscript writing interface has been Word, for all the academic texts I have written as well as the Geography PhD. I have now started to explore Scrivener as a tool to help me write longer text and use InDesign for layout work. With Scrivener I am interested in the flexibility that it offers and want to try to use it for a couple of texts that I am working on and I think the dissertation if it becomes a written document may function within that (with Papers, Books, Evernote as research surfaces as well as handwritten notes; InDesign for typesetting). My thought re format however is that I may end up producing a hybrid moving image work which will contain different format, such as a lecture style recording, some slide show with commentary plus perhaps original moving image works and stills. — I will revisit this thought in Assignment 2.

Proposed time line for Research and Body of Work

Spend considerable time in Spring and Summer to work on BoW, in that time refine the focus for Research, write the bulk of Research towards the end of the Summer (if it is a standard written work) – i.e. A4

Can the actual research be in the form of a series of performances/ experiments — largely auto-ethnographic but also testing forms of dialogue, relational encounters that arise from and relate back to the BoW i.e., there is actual empirical research here that sits at a hybrid form and links directly to the questions in the BoW? 

[the summary diagram on p. 8 of the course handbook seems to assume that there is original research taking place, which in part can be secondary literature but that seems only one of several angles and approaches]
If this is so, I envisage to conduct this also over the summer (depending on site, audience/ participation, this may need to be timed more carefully)

Timeline for Research:

• A1: end of March
• A2: end of June
• A3: mid-August
• A4: end of October
• A5: end of November

How does this relate to BoW in terms of schedule?

• A1: end of February
• A2: end of April
• A3: end of July
• A4: early October
• A5: end of December