Back from Europe and the edge

The students in Venice made me cry -  I'm not sure why, it was a letting go of something we were never really allowed to have - us British say we are European but I'm not that sure that many of us who have lived lives on our island  genuinely feel it.  Venice was a pause for lots of reasons, it came on the end of writing my RD2,  its the last piece of scheduled Poly-Technic work with Kate and it was for 2 weeks.  Venice is  one of the most amazing cities in the world my spiritual home an old soul in an old city.  Its left me feeling a bit warn out to be honest, like the pause is leaking into my everyday life but then of course there is always other stuff going on.

I'm reading Gullion's Diffractive ethnography today and doing some writing.  I'm actually doing three types of writing.  I'm catching up on field notes'  I'm writing notes on the book I'm reading and I'm writing a blog post.  They are all very similar as they are personal and although this is public few people will read it.  I don't swear on the blog though I do swear in all my other texts (fuck).

The blog is a roughly weekly affair where I attempt to put a marker down on where I am. I do try to be clever probably for posterity and my archive it is very much about how I feel about things.  I also try and skim some of the deeper bits of my thought to have a shorthand that clarifies a few things.  Today I'm recognising a conflict between doing and thinking.   It feels like there isn't enough time in a life to get to wrapped up in one or the other and the trick isn't finding a balance.

At the moment I am in a doing phase or on the brink of a doing phase and its hanging a little heavy with me as it does feel like a balance - the draw of the text, the reading and the writing are a distraction from the doing.  The reading and the writing are an essential- vibrant matter - is not something that fits well with words but without words it would not be shaping my thoughts.  I'm also finding myself drawn to aesthetics and emotion and affect but know that these terms are very much  appropriated,  in different realms they mean different things the songs are not on the same hymn sheet

I'm not finding Diffractive ethnography very helpful at the moment it seems like a methods book about Qualt verses quant and the problems with positivism wrapped up in new materialism - its as if it is giving us as much as ethnography can cope with.  I'm enjoying writing field notes and saying I'm doing ethnography and reading a bit about it. I acknowledge its a construction and I know where I think it fits in terms of my relationship to the world but I'd like to have it as a useful tool to work with so that my doing is not just doing. Ethnography cannot elevate the doing into something else but it does make the doing different.  I'm having different here back from Derrida and using it just to mean different to what I've always done which is mainly is about doing.

When people encounter something new like art or ethnogrphy it has the potency of the newness to them, for them.  I've had many encounters in my life of love, of the imagination of pain and fear, we all have.  Every new encounter sits within this trajectory of previous encounters - it is a skill to be able to encounter something as new, to grasp it tightly and to change through and with it.

That is one of the problems with the mundane and the everyday and methodologies that are completely embedded, methodologies can work with difference they can shape the encounter between actors - sometimes methodologies need an interjection of newness to make them work for us to give us momentum.  Because people spend a lifetime in  research and can get lazy or as Whitehead would say in a groove methods and methodologies need renewal.  The thing that can sometimes be forgotten is what is old and tired for some is completely new for others and as we know since the end to history has already taken place no position is more progressive or advanced than any other.

In the playground and personally I probably need my newness of old school ethnography to give me epistemological distance in a very traditional way - A distance that just doing denies me.  In terms of ESRI for most people things have moved past this.  I'm pretending  my residency is at the playground but perhaps my real work is at ESRI.  I know this as I haven't got ethical consent so the boundaries are not set by systems.  So which will it be heavens or hells, truths or speculation, old school or new materialism - my ontologies are not flat they stick out at and angle. "Is that a flat ontology or are you not pleased to see me?"

Igloos and upcycling

I am back from Venice and today I installed two igloos that are being taken out of artic world at Weston park Museum at the playground.  After two months of working on the exhibition in Rotherham and writing my RD2 its one of the first times I've felt useful in this kind of way for a while.  By useful II mean handy but also doing something physical, making a change in the structure of the world - a change of space.  I didn't make them but along with others I'm instrumental in them getting here.

I keep telling people that Venice was like -walkabout - a songline and a travel away from the everyday of my life. I am pleased to be back and pleased my brain feels a little easier for the break but I'm also missing the intensity of thinking I managed in the middle of my RD2.  Some of that complexity has now become a short hand and I've relaised that the shorthand does not contain enough of the original.  I wonder what the walkabout means for me, if I will actually get somewhere when I come back to earth. At the moment I feel more like I have lost an important thread.  I read a lot of Dewey when I was away and I think this messed my thoughts up a little.   There is clearly something within art and experience that is very useful.  It links to Williams and culture as ordinary in that it prevents us creating categories of art or culture.  The thinking also stops us talking about art as process and art as product and these two aspects of art being set against each other. In Dewey art can only be experience and this is very useful as both process and product only exist as experience so they are not strictly speaking in opposition or in fact different.   Perhaps this is the obvious thread I bring back from my walkabout plus the dense  melancholy aesthetic massage that Venice inevitably gives me.

I set out with the newly found focus on the aesthetic and saw this as a line in all my work and came back feeling raw and exposed to the aesthetic world of feeling and seeing.  This connection is always to much and though I turn from it ironically it is always on the brink of consuming me, indulging me and taking me deeply into myself.  Its strange how I thought this was happening intellectually in the world of ideas and as Whitehead says the grooves we slip into but to be honest it has always been the aesthetic I hold at bay and am dragged relentlessly towards.

I need to focus on fieldwork for a while and be immersed in place and making in all its complexity  academic thought is just a massive distraction no wonder the field is so conflicted. 

I will write some field notes tomorrow about my work at the playground and meeting the architecture students .  They seemed a little lost I told them I hated CNC routers plywood and laser cutters and it was as if I had taken away all their toys.