a/folder: an instructive glossary (update 1)

I set up an Indesign file where I keep adding page spreads (A4) to make new iterations of a/folder PDF to print zines.

I tested a few of the early ones with artist friends and refined and edited. I then circulated 3 so far, 2 within my Crit group, one in the OCAEU exhibition group.

The format of the the a/folders has a single A4 page as inside, as the specific object of the a/folder; it then on out the outside has a title page, a folder instruction (with links to the project padlet and a contact email address), there is a notes page and a short statement specific to each iteration too.

I am currently experimenting with

• audience: single, specific, groups; artists and/or other publics; anonymous/general online posting/reposting
• content: method, site, relationship between object/maker/participant
• aesthetics/design: various forms of photographic images, as such, of sketchbook pages, using font or handwritten text (immersive to detached)
• types of invitation, instruction: direct, subtle, disinterested

The post on feedback concerns a series of responses to the a/folder work presented in a couple of group/crit contexts and individually.

All of these so far are strongly mediated by my own relationship with the recipients, and I am interested in the responses to the digital distance, but also concerning the nature of exchange and sense of obligation involved; there are also all sorts of misunderstandings and different response to direction/control or lack thereof.

I have started to receive a number of responses back from the group processes, concerning #5 Make a Pocket; #3 detach and #6 drawing/ machine. They are vastly variable from each other, and quite distinct. Part of that is of course also who responds, but I start to sense the role opacity of instruction plays in this.

Possibly the most interesting response to date is the one from a durational group process among OCA students (working on an exhibition for June 2022), where collaboration is one of the shared working methods. It’s also the one context where the nature of a/folder was most sceptically received: its abstract, intangible nature as PDF format but also concerning the exchange modality. The a/folder invites a response of setting up a drawing machine on a plant, twig, bush, branch or tree and trace wind and other movements on tracing paper to return to me by post. It is one process I used quite a bit during Research but didn’t include in the BoW portfolio and the first responses were: ‘This is so much fun!’ — I had forgotten my own fun with this and other processes and was quite happy to see that surface so strongly and clearly as so much of my pre-Level 3 work was strongly informed by joy and playfulness and a bit of mischief. These seemed to have gotten a little lost with all the contact restrictions but here they were quite at the heart of my archiving process.

Within the collaborative group process I have also made two a/folders in response to one particular request by a colleague: to help preserving a leaf. She asked for different methods/routes towards trying to do so and I was intrigued how the a/folder process can work reactively but also for how my methods can circulate in such a manner.

I am inviting responses to any of the a/folders to post to this padlet and will write further updates on the process as it unfolds.

Next steps:

• how to post on FB, twitter and Instagram (it needs a couple of containers for each of these)
• to continue making further a/folders and exploring their modality and content
• to post to e.g. mail art groups or wider OCA discussions to invite more of the distanced responses to it
• to consider a mail drop to some of the people on my commuting walk and living adjacent to the site

Inside view of #6 drawing/ machine

Advertisement

What I understand as walking (notes)

Springgay/Truman (2018) Walking Methodologies in chapter on inclusion are good with movement:

what they mean, what is conscious, directed; what is intuitive: absolute and relative>> this relates also to participation (and the problem of inclusion); which in itself is precisely why my stuff isn’t Bourriard.
<< it relates to Manning’s minor gesture; but perhaps Harney/Moten on hapticality are better suited?
<< there is a naivety in new materialism: the vitalism is exactly the problem that the Critical Materialism identifies as vulgar materialism.
So:
— Springgay/Truman propose: land + geos, affect, transmateriality and movement as new developments of focus in walking methodology/research.
Movement then supersedes Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis
Nomadic ethics of Braidotti are clearly strongly informed by Deleuze… I think that frame and background is good and resonates with how I work in processwork so this may be a good way to link that working practice (which in turn informed my artistic work, also in the line) to academic material. (see blog here: https://close-open.net/2021/04/28/nomadic-thought-and-transversalism-research-folder/)

But: then, what I have done is use this to transverse, move across spacetime and site/location: analogue/digital; fiction/non-fiction; gossip/sincere argument.
>> there is something in this that then takes the movement further (and arguably considers nomadic theory or hybridity as the constitution across << I mean, in some ways it challenges the notion of virtual space being virtual, non-haptic, non-moving
There is clearly something in the contemplation, stillness of Green that I try to garner, make use of (and in some way it proposes a counter-move to walking art).

Re violence, there are a number of issues that take argument with the flaneur and what he can do… that is a relatively simple route to follow.
Am I doing something else beyond that though?

<< the secrecy, reveal, moving stories and accounts along.

Much of my work in Drawing 2 explored this (see this link for movement in that module’s blog: https://investigatingdrawinggh.wordpress.com/?s=movement), the talk in Prespes (July 2019) and the subsequent publication articulated this in writing (see MS here: https://close-open.net/2019/10/26/moving-with-a-line-gossip-secrets-a-messenger-app/).

Immersiveness and my work (current status)

There are a couple of themes that continue right throughout my work (certainly from DI&C onwards across Level 2 and 3); immersiveness is one of them: the sensorial, an expanded field of drawing, the stepping into work that I make and the relationship it seeks between work and viewer/reader/participant around closeness and distance.

For the production of the BoW this was significant at a number of turns, e.g. when trying to devise what constituted drawing/contact, what the role of lint and the quotidian was, the sites and the reach/resonance of these and how to resolve the BoW.

In the Research (as practice) it was engaged with methodologically: moving-with explored the bodily registers of immersion (or lack thereof); of making mobile artists, viewer and work; the glossary circled around tools, obstacles and sites to explore the relational entanglements at the centre of the work; the Herz/Stein concept explored tactility, bind and release in material close-up.

For SYP I am trying to explore the exhibition checklist as PaR enquiry to get a better handle on (or perhaps a position to the side of) distance as key tool for how this practice moves onwards.

I am collating here the various posts that trace the engagement with immersiveness as concept up to now (at the point of submission for assessment of BoW and Res, and at Part 2 of SYP).

In chronological order the key posts so far are:

https://close-open.net/2021/05/05/site-ambition-of-immersiveness-and-lint-in-the-bow/

https://close-open.net/2021/04/29/immersiveness-1-faking-it/

https://close-open.net/2021/04/17/tutor-report-for-research-4/

https://close-open.net/2021/05/19/for-cover-a-drawing-contact-event-sunday-15-may/

https://close-open.net/2021/05/19/luminous-cover-trafodecke-1-as-viewing-device/

https://close-open.net/2021/05/21/reflective-commentary-of-submitted-bow/

https://close-open.net/2021/09/10/immersiveness-complications-research-folder/

counting/not (the dissertation)

Not/writing about Not/guiding a reader: clarity, reveal and conceal in the dissertation (>Research Folder)

In as much as this text approaches contact in different voices and positions, it also does so with varying levels of distance: some voices lean close, others intent on an arm’s length distance between one and another. Clarity is thus negotiated in a series of reveals and conceals, sometimes it is upfront and present, sometimes it skirts around the edges or hides in tangled matter (as excess or abundance)

(Introduction, Research dissertation)

I add towards the final edits this short note to the introduction of the dissertation. It concludes a long series of discussions between tutors and myself around clarity, reveal/conceal, excess and that notion of writing auto/fiction.

My research tutor carefully noted where I did not guide the reader and in Res 5 she writes:

R: 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?

G: 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.

(Research 5 report, written by tutor, with my commentary marked in document)

This blog post intends to expand on the relational construction of clarity, opacity in the written aspects of my work and also serve going forward to SYP.

Having begun in seriousness to work with personal family matter at the end of AOP meant to explore how to place into public private matter and how to make such private matter strange, performative while still holding and containing its frequency, resonance, content. I have experimented with different forms since (and DI&C, Drawing 2 and now, much less charged and more at ease, have done so also for L3). In all this, the original charge, impetus, motivation is contained and woven into the material, sometimes tightly, sometimes loosely.

For L3, and even more so once I moved towards the edge of the village, this has become much easier and discovering Laura Marks’ negotiation of the visual and the haptic has provided a tool, a methodology that allows for it to be considered artistic practice of serious subject matter.

The forms in which I seek contact are varied: directness, in your face, elliptical omission, shifting text and work along, inventing names, dates and locations while reporting truthfully on all else. In fact, so much of my observations are in fact literal to a fault: even the taste is the one I remembered, and yet a series of turning, shifting, removing and reordering turns pointed observation into matter than can be held and considered otherwise.

The other means in which I negotiate reveal/conceal is excess — in its positive connotations its richness, suppleness, abundance; yet easily it is also simply: too much. In all this muchness the important stuff can be included, can mingle and move while not sticking out all that much. The L3 work (PaR, written) sought and found forms to relate this back to site, audience and artist, and does so through a variety of surfaces, containers and means (glossaries, appendices, font type alignments, a simple visual surface which presents links and layers should one seek these, etc).

In this, care of the matter, the source, the relationships contained therein are a first priority; care for the readership or audience a second thought and one that I sometimes brush aside, even though the intent to make visible, negotiable, public is sincere and thus an audience, a public required nonetheless. Possibly the biggest learning for all of L3 so far has been how to become adept, confident and careful in modulating these relationships and forms. This is work in progress, this blog post situates the Research dissertation as such form and provides a base towards the engagement of SYP and an artistic practice beyond it.

Practice as Research (PaR) (> research folder)

>> key methodology. 

[these are excerpt notes, not all page numbers are given nor is it clearly indicated what is paraphrased and what a citation; this is resolved in the dissertation, this is for further reference posted here only]

Estelle Barrett & Barbara Bolt eds 2006.Practice as Research: approaches to creative arts enquiry.

Barrett, Introduction

Situated knowledge: the subjective and the personal in creative arts research (p.4f)
Paul Carter (2004): Material thinking; to understand subjective and relational dimensions of artistic process: decontextualisation from a universal in the artistic process in order to bring to bear ‘instances of particular experience’. ‘In staging itself as an artwork, the particularity of experience is then returned to the universal’.
Bolt 2004: develops this further towards ‘materialising practices’ to understand ‘the dynamics of the circulation of artistic products… which implies an ongoing performative engagement and productivity both at moments of production and consumption.

>> a relationship is constituted between process and text (and not between image and text), ‘of which the first iteration is necessarily the researcher’s own self-reflexive mapping of the emergent work as enquiry.’

In this, studio practice and own critical commentary in writing enter a dialogical relationship of creative arts exegesis, this in turn creates further development.
Relationship to practice-based learning: ‘A general feature of practice-based research projects is that personal interest and experience, rather than objective “disinterestedness” motivates the research process’.

>> crucially: new learning, not anticipated; emerging methodologies. (6)
Interdisciplinarity (7): Carter 2004 makes the argument that the relationality of the artistic process constitutes interdisciplinarity.

Chapters 1 (Carter): ethics of invention.— not so keen after all… seems confused.

Chapter 2 (Bolt): studio practice and meta-reflective work of exegesis.

I can request her PhD, bookmarked in Safari, if I need it?

Chapter 3 (Perry): creative writing as research; autobiography and fiction: a shift from the tangible object (novel) to the intangible benefits of studio enquiry.

<< this seems really relevant. 

It is an excellent expose of tracing narrative construction and biographical links; of filling one with the other and the blurring of reality and fictional spaces and what that as practice allows for.Writing as searching and contemplating of difficult (to understand) things.The exploration of the journal as creative work itself (rather than a means to other work)

>> this is highly relevant too.

I marked a few pages.

Chapter 5 (Iggulden): space within illuminated scripts revealing existing codes in medieval writing practices.

There is something in this process of copying, repeating, adding mistakes that is important (and the general focus on text is actually, if not in subject matter than in intent — probably even the transcendental focus) quite close to my own; There is something too in the projects she sets up and how she uses cursive and repetitive writing that is relevant.

There is a bigger strand about silence and obliteration of women’s experiences in there that is fairly generationally specific but nonetheless relevant too in the framing of ‘matters of no consequence’

Chapter 8 (Goddard): excess of reflection and core aspect of studio-based enquiry.

Lorne Story video postcard
He finds quite late a family postcard from the 1930s that functions formally like the video postcard that he has been making for his PhD116: ‘As a writerly practice, the exegesis can be as creative, fictive, and as full of playful conjecture as the other creative practice (or practices) it seeks to elucidate.’

> this is precisely how the parallel project for D2 functioned!

<< use the methodology for Res to help you articulate your methodology across writing/production (this stuff is what all the people in Glasgow are doing, it is not new to you. What is however new is that this is academic part of it, the one that ‘legitimises’ it.)

epistolary format: the Dark Object is one; are parts of mine such too? Are the FB posts epistolary?

<< my FB practice is this kind of stuff. it really is. do I want to pull this further into the process?

There is more on 117 about what is epistolary and how it functions

Overlapping fields: autobiographical writing and subjective video practice.

How to perform the reflective process of exegesis as part of the research itself.video: direct monitor to see what is being recorded (unlike film): one camera records while the other was replaying: key meta-narrative in Lorne Story.

He describes the story and how it nestles one layer into another (over time/memory)

> ‘Ultimately, a correspondence occurs between the practice and the exegesis, as a series of interactive dialogues’. (118)

His exegesis was a supporting document, trying to negate the assumption of explanation (119)

A letter or postcard are accessible to a range of different audiences (they are leaky, blurry in that sense), erasure, defacement and destruction in process of delivery (transmission isn’t guaranteed).

(check for quote when using, this is close to original)

> this applies to most things but it’s a good elucidation of how transmission, exchange works and I think while I worked with this before I, and it is active here too. Use it.‘What makes visual, performative, and media arts-based research so distinctive are the ways in which they conduct their enquiries beyond the sphere of written discourse.’ (120)
I don’t seem to find any actual text of the thesis, nor the video. Here is a text:http://www.doubledialogues.com/article/stop-telling-me-stories-she-said/

Chapter 9 (Stewart) Mapping and other research practices as informing artistic research; bricolage as notion.

Chapter 10 (Barrett) work is not the product but the process of enquiry and evaluation (Foucault and Haraway)

Chapter 12 (Barrett) Exegesis as meme.<< this is well before digital memes. quite interesting.
there is a definition on role of exegesis for Australian Res as practice qualifications… is this useful to consider? what does it add? or perhaps overcomplicate?https://ecu.au.libguides.com/research-methodologies-creative-arts-humanities/exegesis

touch and intimacy at a distance

close/open comes to my mind, the title I gave this site before it was a site and a body of work.

I am spending time with the small tactile objects of this work, both Herz/Stein and Drei Nuesse, turning them left and right, exploring well-tested processes and some other tangents to see what form of a tactility, touch and thus closeness I can achieve with them. First in my own hand (not so difficult), then possibly in yours (far more difficult).

Considering this an exhibition with audience participation always introduces the distance of a gallery site, however unconventional. Contact restrictions and sites closed add to this. These limitations notwithstanding, my work has also always worked with closeness and intimacy at a distance, often through social media posts, through audio messages and through touch screens. The viewing and listening experiences often one of a single person and their device. The sound and the handheld device the means for such proximity.

Yet, I remain uncertain if this will do as sensory means for the kind of objects that both Herz/Stein and Drei Nuesse are: stones, paper, yarn, shells. Their touch and the sensation of their weight, shape and surface in one’s hand does not work through a device. Can I narrate these?

The padlets are attempts to bridge such gap and to provide a visual narration through the objects. It’s an effort of translation, transfer, and yet the outcome holds in a number of ways.

In any case, in advance of a series of discussion around my tactile objects, touch and handling, here two sets of images by way of collating what objects there are:

First, the experiments for the walnut shells (cyanotype exposure of the inside; bleach+tone with walnut ink; wrapping; staining with ink inside the shell; tracing the opening with ink and graphite).

The objects created with the cyanotype, bleach and tone are delicate strip, the paper almost undone through the iterative working. They are delicate objects, perhaps suited to a light box but also not quite for handling.

Is the handling just a fantasy? Is there just a trace of the touch contained in these?

A similar gallery for the Herz/Stein processes is this one (I left them in Glasgow, had the original stones and yarn and elastic almost sent three times, today I take a new ball of red sock wool to the edge of the wood and begin to wrap stone, stick and cone):

Ambition/ Onwards (as part of BoW 3)

I am in the middle of things and things are good. Turning seriously towards BoW and not worrying too much about Research a couple of months ago was a good decision and definitely addressed some of my concerns around Level 3.

For the past fortnight I have begun to draw together the various strands of work that are part of BoW 3 and effectively present a live and ongoing research lab. They are not completed, and this is what is keeping me from closing and submitting the next assignment. I am confident I have plenty of work that works and that supports my aims with this Body of Work. I feel also really strongly the pull to keep folding onwards.

So, the coursework wants a review of my ambition and workplan for the remaining two assignments. I am a bit hesitant to do that in a detailed way but, I want to use this post to articulate that what I already know about the BoW and want I want to aim for until the conclusion of the module.

My plan is to complete Research and Body of Work in early summer, ready for submission for the November assessment; and to complete SYP for the March 2021 assessment event.

I would first and foremost want this work to exist in a variegated, expanded form that holds both in analogue and digital a series of investigations into the constitution of near space in the context of drawing/ contact. With drawing/contact I identify medium (expanded field of drawing) and modality (small-scale, intimate, interested in the relational constitution of such spaces).

There are five themes that unpack from this aim:

• material and register shifts (between and across analogue and digital);
• smallness of things;
• peripheral (vision)*;
• moving-with as the process;
• and near space.

I reviewed the state of BoW before submitting Res 2 in late October, and updated and expanded this for this current submission.

*I add as fifth, and yet: maybe it sits below; it also isn’t entirely about vision: it’s about position and relationship between things, possibly the point at which a heuristic device (this time: perspective in vision) is unravelled as that: a device, a construct, while the actual experience is a different one.

Some of the work has by now a clear sense of form to it (notably: the MF images of verge/weed); others have emerging and shifting formats (two participatory projects involving zine-type exchanges, Kaleidoscope and Die Luke (Hatch)); the Herz/Stein flicker/process books; and the earlier events around drawing/contacts have a series of expressions also. Besides this, a whole number of objects and processes begun to emerge that are ready to become part of something larger.

I have also begun to explore the forms and formats of assemblage, holding form for the overall form (and would like to make this part of the discussion for the tutorial of BoW 3).

I am not submitting a revised concept map for BoW but on revisiting the version from July 2019, I discover that I am right at the centre of exploring the substantive question on the right hand side of the map and have a series of processes and projects that fill in the medium/ format questions of the top left. I hadn’t revisited the map for some time and it was exciting to see just how far the enquiry is live and maturing (and will be the subject of Research 3).

I have begun to investigate more seriously the idea of material and register shifts and want to expand this further to include also:

• MF imagery in b/w
• typewriter
• more considered photocopier drawings from sketchbooks etc.
• Kaleidoscope and Die Luke as participatory/ performative events
• possibly a group performance/event
• a series of drawings at different scales originating from d/c events
• excel spreadsheets and relational tables in GIS (to articulate across geographical spaces and sketchbooks, written formats)
• any on-site/ locational means of linking geographical spaces and digital means?

– The last two of these already concern the wider question of presentational form and the connections/ relationships between different spatial constructs on/offline and what happens in their production.

These then also relate to the attempt to explore the role of dream and/or utopian spaces in this work.

Quite a few of these directly link to Research and most of the investigations that I undertake in BoW are directly relevant to how the empirical part of Research is constituted.

The medium/ form question that possibly sits most across the two modules is the role of writing/ listing/ annotating as medium. There is a whole set of notes and some more developed pieces of short writing that I consider part of BoW but they also can become part of Research (notably, the discussions of satellite objects of the dissertation, the role of the glossary, an appendix or similar are relevant here)

satellite objects make love

Gesa Helms

15 November at 12:25 · 

she liked. (a lot) (and as if liking was important).
her geek got fully piqued when i told her of the relational tables that GIS produces. she: go, go, go (near, and far and explore that distance).
of the glossary she made satellite objects.
i went, predictably to here. (it kind of returns it to drawing/contact, if Brexit wasn’t a thing).

Lou Reed – Satellite of Love

the original song from the album transformer… lou reed satellite of love

tutorial reflections 1: what is (source) material?

— following my 2nd BoW tutorial last week, I want to write up a few posts exploring some of the key themes going forward. This is the first one, the other ones are likely to be:

• what are expectations of self/object/viewer in the work?
• what about the smallness of things?

For the past few months, I had a sense of what events, gestures or questions would become source material for the project (they were significant, they generated questions for myself and they invited to be explored and shifted in register). Following the tutorial, I however think, that my source material is far broader and more extensive than I had previously anticipated.

It was becoming evident when discussing what I had and notably what the role of the lens-based material is. I tend to sketch with the phone, and yet I hadn’t thought of including virtually any of the photographs as work (the moving image clips possibly, but also not really).

It was also then becoming clearer as to discussing why an event/ gesture/ question is part of the project (and which ones I overlook); and whether I had collected and explore enough for assignment. I had far too much, Doug seemed to indicate I was an assignment further on that 2, and also that there was not enough time to even go through material that was already on the blog/instagram, let alone the material that was still sitting aside/offline.

This has been turning in my head and so I wanted to explore it further. With my parents, I went on a day out yesterday and I designated the day as exploration. I used the camera a lot to observe what came to attention and recorded a series of questions.

Here they are: road signs, positions of bridges, then an artificial mountain of a mining extraction and its position within a field of wind turbines, cloud formation, incidental signage and finds.

The questions or interest revolved around connections while moving, and of bridges/crossings.

— I recognise that earlier bigger projects also started to follow a line of adjacent/ juxtaposed propositions and questions (notably: the line) to place a series of themes next to each other or in relation with each other. I will explore existing material with this in mind to see what it is that leads me to include within the project or to consider part of the project (i.e.: to ask what is the connection/contact/moving-with that I am interested in and how does it manifest and when).

sketchbook: thisconnection as bridge

for months i have been circling around her. like an elastic band i stretch the connection and at points then jump right onto some of her pages.
.
i write a cryptic line in my summary and off i go again.
.
this morning i pack all three and search.
.
among other things i find:
.
as i continue swimming i bodythink through the cosmos. through the work the living and the dying are doing for each other at this moment in time and any other. i had realised earlier this summer that my dad is going to teach me something vital. and here in this process with Achim i realise the work that is being done by us around to facilitate the movements between here and there and what each receives in this. i think i rarely felt so tender amongst it all.
.
thisconnectionofeveryonewithlungs (juliana spahr)
..
it is the closing line of a longer thisconnection (men, women, roleplay, victims, essentialism)
.
she will be the bridge across and away from the site. form content that connects while standing apart.
.
in army of lovers, she and David Buuck investigate a plot of grassy wasteland between a few major roads.
.
i have precisely such a plot. a pontoon bridge leads to it. all sorts of insignificant incidents take place. some are fantasy. a good part happens on speed. someone falls into the water and eighty-seven pelicans take off while the sparrows argue over the best spot to pig watch each morning. he who opens the kiosk at will and hides in dark corners within sells me an ice cream for €2.50. i think he made the price up. next time i check and i know he did. but he settled on it, having committed to a sun-worn board with lots of expensive ice cream (all cost €2.50). it sits next to the instant cameras,€20 for 2. how did the film develop?
.
.
.
unrelatedly, i observe the verge. in mid-July on the abundant West Coast it is exuberant. i move along and record it. later i step into it and record some more. elsewhere in the village, the council spent money on controlling growth. it does so abundantly. i record eagerly and just wait for being approached by watchful neighbours (none so far).
.

the specific connections this post makes are to Ag Achilleios as site and the bridge as site

I have an earlier short note also relating to Juliana Spahr here.

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).

sketchbook+: the line folds into Level 3

(as a placeholder in advance of Research tutorial 1).

— the piece of previous work that I have spent most time with over the past four weeks is the final work produced during Digital Image & Culture: the line, which I finalised as a tumblr site, and am currently in the process of re-publishing through facebook as a public album.

The line is also the piece on which my submission to the Walking Arts Network conference in Prespes, Greece, is based. So I am currently also in the process of writing a 3-4k word contribution for a conference publication as well as considering how it will present as a 15-min talk/presentation.

As part of the re-publishing process I am keeping an offline journal which I will move here at some point. There are some thoughts I have here right now in terms of how to proceed (and what can become part of Res or BoW and what is best kept aside).

Here some notes from this morning:

I have the strong sense that the line is crucial for moving forward. I want to test some of that with Rachael in our first tutorial today.

• the line as fragmented space that is very much non-linear
• the line as imaginary and anchor to the pieces articulated
• the pieces articulated are diverse:
• • private chat
  • dreams/thoughts/fantasy
  • more functional notes and records
  • methodology concerns
  • fragments from other authors
• there is no clear order as to how they are encountered: they are clearly not a singular line to be walked but multiplicity

There is much in here that is definitely about near space: about relational concepts and about performance.

The performance is in my voice but also in the conceal/reveal that is taking place

The current re-publishing through FB (as suggested at assessment) is testing some of that but also any relationship between audience and work/.

 

course instructions/ literalness

Returning to my notes that I started to work through a series of initial exercises for Research, I see that I have done a lot of it already: mapping, tracing, evaluating, prospecting existing projects; what animates them and what they could turn into; how they speak to each other, to the disciplines they situate within and transcend; and how they speak about myself and my practice.

I map, I draw, I photograph; I go back to the gap and explore it further in extension, in negation, in translation; I seek and touch other spaces that sit off and aside the functional ones. I also begin to use the developmental course tools as site/ enquiry into artistic form.

I felt always really constrained by observation: I have no experience nor vision to draw and conceive of stuff that I can’t access experientially; I never attempted a graphic novel, e.g.. But over the past year I have found means to experientially move with the stuff that isn’t quite there. That is a huge revelation, it moves some of my facilitation/ coaching experience much closer to my practical artistic practice. It seems conceivable now.

In all this, I get flustered. I check the instructions in two coursebooks; they relate – kind of – to each other and yet they are different. I haven’t figured out their difference yet. I thought I had it when I started to produce new work: work that sits as hybrid between instruction, tool and art object. The maps thus move from instrumental form to potentiality – in a similar way as the Photocopier Manual did; as Parallel Praxis did as m(e)use | use me did. It seems expandable, workable as practice; and I begin to conceive of far more other forms – academic presentations – to become hybrid objects. (I of course know of the format of a performative lecture, yet: until now its experiential modality seemed alien to me; it seemed more of a naming convention than something inbetween).

What I get flustered with is the linearity of instruction which yet does not resolve. I realise at various points, and yet forget always again, that I am too literal. I try to follow the steps outlined and yet they don’t resolve for me. I want to be a good student and submit to the process but the process stands in my way. I am too literal. It is the literalness that I understand as culturally different–the reason why we are assumed to have no sense of humour. I remember the teasing that people who are close to me start to dare at one point or another once they hit upon that literalness, that naivety. I always recognise the emotional marker when I am being teased with it, it rarely registers otherwise: I still follow the instructions.

Yesterday morning I dare to write out which part of the instructions make no sense to me. I feel better. And yet: the Research and BoW themes don’t gel yet, I feel any differentiation between them is artificial and premature.

I go back to an early note about the theme of significance:

Three ideas (are maybe only one):
Body in movement (my body as drawing tool) >> starting theme for D2
Interdisciplinarity in Drawing practice >> the wider theme for the Critical Review (if the Jonas’ essay would have been 3500 words longer than what it was)
Production of space, the idea of reaching, touching a utopian spacetime aside the corridor (or, the latter intruding)

At night, I think about a project about touch, about contact

I think about the touch drawings, the pencils on long sticks that produce a nervous line while registering every stutter and stammer along the transmission from hand to paper surface.

It can include movement, the walking back and forth
It can include distance via digital circulation
It can include one to one performances

It is about private, about public,
Tenderness and violence 
Love and withholding.

— and I am certain it can also accommodate some institutional critique and a wide-open grassy field should I desire either.

From this, I propose:

the Body of Work: drawing / contact (modality, practice, site)

the Research: The site of interdisciplinarity in drawing practice

With these two related themes; BoW can explore all that is in the concept maps around Body as movement, Touch, Contact and Spatial Praxis: it will do so phenomenologically; I have the sense that theme can cover most of the quote above, while 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.

Both will likely become more narrow and yet it is a field, play ground laid out to start within, that picks up and relates all important things from before.

spatial praxis play (3: onto the concept map)

part of the play with the spatial praxis map.

here: firstly, it becomes the surface for some shadows being overlaid. these are purely accidental but of course point towards the surface being both representation and new object again: so the circling and iterating, the building on top and layering can proceed in all sorts of way:

it is a concept map

it is a drawing

it is a methodology

it is a floor plan

it is an instruction, a record, a memory, a construction plan.

>> with these different functionalities, time and space of the map are multiple and not clearly determined

In different sites and different times of day, the map will be different.

When I take the maps down to put them in my luggage, I roll them up (or rather: they revert back to the form that I unfurled them from a few days earlier). I realise that they are new objects and shape them a little, place the camera near or far and include my hand. These are basic, don’t work aesthetically but provide enough of a record to develop from. Well: the first one doesn’t work for the background; the two other ones, more close up work better.

R1.1 concept maps: initial ideas (part 1)

This is the first set of exercises (from Research, but overlapping with Body of Work) to revisit significant projects, identify a theme of significance, and to begin mapping out a research proposal and workplan. I have done a number of these exercises before arriving at these concept maps, I will see which of them I will add to the blog in what form).

These are a mix between concept and mind map. each takes about an hour and i develop these over a few days. i map my previous projects into these. contact and touch overlap in small sections the issue of communication and technology is new to arise and good to see where it fits (Kittler but also of course the spacetimes of Le Guin).
there is an issue of wanting to move between concept and methodology: to create a hybrid form similar to what i started with parallel praxis, but this seems daring, uncharted, difficult as it again sits right to the edge of subject matter, discipline, definition

to add:

• touch poems
• Abramovic (and perhaps other things from my Techniques lecture)
• intimacy
• Juliana Spahr’s this connection of everyone with lungs

 

Drawing as contact zone as overall theme for body of work?

>> do some more maps; including spacetime but also perhaps to get a bit more concrete? i.e.: the three themes from earlier:

Body in movement (my body as drawing tool) >> which was starting theme for D2

• done 29/12: it becomes a model more like and some movement is part of the mapping:
• audience sits separate
• body as tool becomes fool as body
• this is more limited to the ones before but also more generative: it is open enough to make connections and point forward:
  • a moving body of work
  • mainly missing: site >> I added this to concept map: Spatial praxis
  • there are a series of modalities of works beginning to appear:
    • impro
    • instruction
  • when is the tool the drawing?
  • what role does the shadow play?
• to add:
  • writing as contact?
  • flirt as contact // erotic charge

Interdisciplinarity in Drawing practice >> the wider theme for the CR >> map the CR onto a sheet of paper

• what else has been added/ remained/ left in terms of interest?
• does the focus on interdisciplinarity still hold interest to pursue further? the extended field? what touches and is in contact with whom and what else?
• what would be a lack/ absence of contact? a gap?

Production of space, the idea of reaching, touching a utopian spacetime aside the corridor
i am mapping the corridor and all else. strangely, i can locate an exact spot where i fantasise about it simply opening out to one of Le Guin’s worlds. i will need to test it.this is the fourth map (after touch, contact, and body as movement) — i want to do two more, then i think i can write what it will bei also realise in which types of constructions the photographers i care about cluster; the writers (of sci-fi, new narrative and steamy surrealism); and then the performance/installation work. i hadn’t thought of Office at Night having an open and House (Stories) having a closed door, but it is a very fitting image, and so is the line which is in fact two, one more rigid, the other one increasingly porous; the gap and the greens sit on different planes: the former folds up and allows us to crawl into the dark space between the cabinets, the greens are a quick release lever being pulled and we rattle (unharmed) to ground level

Also: what about the confessional/ obsession… do you want to explore it a bit further at this time?

close/open FB 17 December, 14:20

album close/open

Gesa Helms

6 mins · 

we talk about my facebook profile. he sees a fair bit, not the close stuff though. i talk about my circling around, the failing archive. we talk about some of the conclusions for some of the projects. he picks up some of the wraps of m(e)use and says: you know. these are all yours: they resonate across your feed, the overspilling albums. why don’t you just let that be and pull out things as and when it seems good. you may miss some things but that is also probably nothing to worry about. 
.
typing this today after a week or so, it occurs to me that it concerns more the nature of project endings rather than all the source material. it is indeed the interface of making material available, in what form, and what it in that action concludes (and what is left open). — that is the point, the hinge, the question, to consider (and to declare all else as secondary).
.
so: the close/open of the album and of the blog is in one part about publicness, the boundedness of seen/unseen, inside/outside; but moreover it concerns closed/still open — the finality of a concern, the question of whether more can still happen, is allowed to happen, is hoped for, sought after. and thirdly, it concerns distance: how close am i, are you, is an imagined audience to the material: that question of distance, attachment and detachment, closeness remains with it all.
.
i am tempted to call this: simple.
. 
it reminds me of the time when i facilitate A. it is about her book project, the one after her PhD. i seem to seek the position to keep, to remain, to find; she wants to lose it, herself, everything else. she shoots an arrow towards the end. i am told off for pushing my need to remain to her desire to let it be. i don’t think my desire was undue, it was her default position that i let her argue against, to become a skilful archer to aim for nothing in the distance.1 CommentLikeShow More ReactionsCommentShare

Comments

Gesa Helms [my mum is still laughing from the sidelines… i wave back at her]ManageLikeShow More Reactions · Reply · 5m