This is my friends Tattoo he gave it to himself when he was 15 with a bottle of Quick ink and a safety pin under a railway arch. He said its blurred around the edges as he couldn't stop himself picking the scab. The New Year has started and I really feel like things have changed. I'm not really doing much work other than the PhD which is very liberating but also a bit discombobulating. I am also thinking through the ODD project which we are keeping very separate from the PhD, however the picking of the scab where it itches is allowing its ink to bleed into the margins and blurring things.
Myself and Kate are working with Maggie Mclure to deliver a paper at the AERA conference in Toronto in April we have had a meeting and done some planning. This part of the Odd project feels impossible to distance from my PhD as it will be my first conference as a student and not an artist - or at least I will be a hybrid - running on two fuels. I say this because starting a PhD changes you. My friend Tim took to me one side about 6 years ago and said that you don't ask people how their PhD's are going. If you are not doing one then this makes no sense, it's just polite, like saying -' How are the kids ? ' but when you are doing one, firstly you get sick of people asking and secondly its not really a thing that can be going well really it just is. Perhaps its like saying 'Is the sea going well ?' it doesn't feel like a thing that goes well or badly it is just a thing. I understand that more now, I always say its going well, and it is, but behind that you are aware that you can never be sure if its going well or not.
For the record the last two weeks have felt very desk bound. I have nearly got an Arts council proposal which will augment my work at the Adventure Playground ready to send in. I have worked up two applications through the Ethos system at MMU that are nearly ready to send in. I've been reading Releasing the Imagination by Maxine Greene and actually taking detailed notes. This is probably the best thing I've done as I feel a better way of working through the literature emerging. Because I have notes I have something that feels like work , as I'm taking them for myself I am working out how this can work for me.
I've met with the Adventure playground and explained how the PhD will work and how it will fit in with their aims and ambitions. I've also talked through why we need to do ethics with them and what I will get out of the process so I feel like I have met my own ethical position. Filling in the ethics forms felt like a chore but it did make me realise that the work on the RD 1 was valuable and my final submission was well crafted and fit for purpose. I also experienced first hand how the ethics application process forces you to think about and articulate important issues within the research, it was much more than the going through the motions that I had expected.
I am still thinking a lot about being useful and trying to work out what will be a useful thing to do with my three years as a student. Some things are clearer the ink of the experience working on research projects is deep under my skin, it is not faded or blurred, it is becoming more important, more vivid. I'm recognizing that as in Kafka's In the penal colony your crimes are tattooed onto your skins through the apparatus of life.
I have being setting things up - clearing the way. I read Kate and Richard Steadman Jones Blog this morning and it mentions me thinking through the idea of the 'throughline' so I looked it up again on Wikipedia - this is what I wrote about it.
Through-line is very specific it comes from Stanislavski's System. It was described to me as the pumping artery of the play -the point where the blood of character , narrative, emotion, moments flow together to form the whole of the play. So even up to the capillaries of our finger tips, the blood is flowing for a reason that links back to the whole - the living organism or the sense of the theater piece - the reason for it to exist. That is how I try and use it although it does get used more loosely - I like to think the pull of the through line on a good project is so strong that it forces a coherence pushes past disciplinary boundaries - helps to make something new.
I also found this diagram which is classic
The through-line is important here as its supposed to be my PhD as a thing, not the sea, as a separate 'new place' but perhaps it is actually a practice or if we think of Kafka an apparatus. The scratching of the edges of the wound lets the ink bleed into the edges and softens the image. The through line is to resist the edges rather than to map them, to make something interesting but also blurred.
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