Bits of the RD2 I liked

I read the RD2 there were lots of typos and it seemed rushed - it was rushed at the end though and was written for purpose - most of the bits I liked were bastard remnants of earlier version.  It is not a document I'm very proud of - the distance does not make it any better - it holds the sadness of capitulation.

here are a few bits - maybe I will not have to read the whole thing again for a while.

The Abstract wasn't to bad I thought it had moved away from where I was but actually it still covers everything - I think I have come on a long way since I wrote it and all sorts of ways but I can't actually write down what they are.

Abstract

This study investigates the potential of the artist’s residency as a research practice in relationships to place and community. Acknowledging the broad context, history and contested definitions of what it can mean to be “in residence”, it will analyse specifically how the material dimension of visual art can operate as a method of understanding community.  The study will focus on self build and loose parts play activities at an adventure playground. Drawing on new-materialist thinking within educational research the study will contribute to this field through exploring the situated role of the artist residency within a site of informal learning (Ellsworth, 2005).

An initial literature review will locate the historical definitions of the artist’s residency in the context of knowledge production and artists’ relationship to place (Casey, 1997, Bishop,2012). The study seeks to work through my visual arts practice, which explores ideas of materials, making and community at the intersection or agential cut (Barad, 2007) between artistic ways of knowing and social research. This will take place in two sites of artistic practice. These are; working alongside Dr Abigail Hackett in a playgroup in Eastwood, Rotherham in partnership with Rotherham Museums (www.rotherham.gov.uk/museums) and as artist in residence at Pitsmoor Adventure Playground (pitsmooradventure.org)

My intention is to contribute to the field of educational research drawing on new materialist theory (Bennett, 2010 Barad, 2007) and creative practice while working as artist/researcher. I will use an ethnographic approach working with Visual, sensory approaches  (Pink 2013, 2015). I will explore how the diffractive ethnographic lens can enable an understanding of a complex entangled assemblage (Gullion, 2018).  These research methods will allow me to adopt a new materialist orientation to each site. This study will contribute to the increasing body of research that uses and explores artistic ways of knowing within educational research (Springay, 2011 Atkinson, 2018, Manning, 2016).

The relationship between theory and practice within artistic approaches to teaching and learning provides the rationale for conducting this study within the domain of educational research I will explore how art making relates to materiality, through the concept of the assemblages and how this impacts on artistic approaches to research.  I will be working, as artist in residence at both sites and my work will involve building and making with young people.  A new materialist approach affords an opportunity to explore how art and research are entangled. I will be operating in both realms at the same time within a single project between material outcomes.  New materialist thinking brings into question the specialist artist working to author individual works of art. It provides a way to see everything in the world as more equal and independent, yet active and connected. However, the idea of authorship remains part of arts practice; it can offer a place of resistance affording alternative ways of encountering, knowing and doing. This study will challenge how I understand my practice in arts education and research, it will work with ideas that emerge from the residencies and shape its outcomes to fit with what makes sense within the context in which they emerge. It will focus on participants, the materials, practices and practical applications; it proposes a hopeful trajectory for research.

This study starts with an entanglement with place, practice and research; it is unapologetically messy with threads that flow in many directions in both space and time.  The work at Pitsmoor Adventure Playground presents the potential to work with Karen Barad’s proposition of the agential cut (Barad 2010).  The artist’s residency is a self-contained set of actions that involve the space of the playground in all its relations. It is an event that is constituted from the traditions of the adventure play movement, community arts, socially engaged practice, the artistic residency, outdoor play, children’s geographies, the physical material of the site and the histories and plasticity of the materials that will come into view.  The research of this study presents an assemblage that will necessarily entangle itself with specific aspects of the residency yet create a series of agential cuts both within the fields of practice and at a distance. Holding these two aspects of the project in flow will require an ability to create a single field of enquiry and a jumping of scale. 

Erin Manning (Manning 2016) suggests that it does not require new methods rather it needs a ‘re-accounting of what writing can do in the process of thinking and doing’.  Research no longer sits apart from its relationship to knowledge, writing and making as lived experience are unsettled. Research Creation affords useful discussions of how the arts are positioned as legitimising spaces of difference, transgression and resistance to established ways of knowing and doing. 

This bit might be useful to remember;

Working within a frame of residency as method requires a location of the individual artist that takes into account philosophical approaches that present flat ontologies and problematize the human as privileged actor within the social space. This orientation towards the material world of event and affect is taken up in field of ethnographic research by Jessica Gullion in her book Diffractive Ethnography (Gullion 2017). Here she draws on the work of new materialist thinkers including Jane Bennett and Karen Barad to help us to re-engage with ethnographic approaches that question dominant modes of scientific human-oriented ways of understanding the world.  I will develop my methods of research in the field within an ethnographic tradition of trying to describe in detail what I see as happening. I will do this in appropriate ways that include taking detailed field notes and employing visual and sensory approaches. (Pink 2008). Because I will be exploring how young people interact with and build with materials, I will take an age-appropriate collaborative ethnographic approach that will draw on my experience as an artist researcher and will include audio recording and community film making.  All these methods will be imagined as part of an assemblage research machine that will fully integrate with all the work at the site of study. 

I need to start writing

It is Monday and it is raining outside.  It is raining in a way that reminds me of summer holidays camping in Cornwall with the children where playing cards can only last ten minutes and needs to be looked forward too in advance. With  the kids bouncing off the sides of the tent shedding scabs from impetigo  covered faces, sand in the sleeping bags and scrotal sacks, with wet towels not drying on the car seats, steaming everything up even with the engine running.

I can't go and do any work at the playground and this is a good thing as it gives me an opportunity start writing a literature review.   Everyone including me thinks this is a good idea so I don't drowned under the task of doing some proper PhD writing when the end gets in sight. But its 12.18 and no writing has taken place.   The good intention was there when I woke up and looked out at the wind and rain yet as I once said the only difference between a fake and a copy is an intention and there is little point in faking anything. As I write this my RD2 document sits on my desktop behind this window, I have not read it since it was approved and it felt like a good place to start this morning at 8.30, I will read it next- I promise myself.

I have been thinking about realising being bean a real artist again this morning perhaps this is a signal of an inner insecurity - a need to perform something, a worry that there is an essential performative aspect to where I am at the moment, where I often find myself.

The rational way of thinking about what I'm doing at the moment is to consider the effort it took to read 1000 Plateaus and then to authentically assert that although new materialism owes Deleuze  a debt it is not good to read him with this in mind - you are drawn into a perspective that slices rather than immerses and immersion is the best way to read him. Like jumping in an ice pool after a sauna  the body and the mind consumed or perhaps the Body without organs as a none duelist shock to the system. I've read that book now I've tired myself out digging and building like Professor Challenger from the day the earth screamed I have pricked my world and heard it scream.  Both endeavors have been life affirming and reminded me of my mortality yet neither produced any writing that could be considered a PhD.

My supervision on Friday reminded me of this and somewhere in my mind the bit of my brain that occasional resolves not to drink so much and in a strange way believes itself decided I would give over two days a week to writing my PhD even if i didn't get anywhere I would stick at it. The horse would be flogged to within inches of its death; whether dead or alive or both, like a cat shut in a box of ambiguous potentials.

Why do I forget what new materialism even is? When I quickly remind myself the shorthand for it, origins and definitions it doesn't seem that difficult but then I forget what it is and what it does.  I wonder here if its because with a commitment to materials and process and a very personal aesthetic sensibility if I have felt a new materialist most of my life, an embodied state of relation to the world that can remain unspoken.  If I have been enacting or perhaps enunciating a materialism through making and thinking that aligns with new materialism as it comes or becomes into the world then it is my natural habitus there is little to set it against.  Perhaps it does not change the fundamental relationship to knowing as much of what I have valued or feel inclined to work with what emerges from a close relationship to the properties of materials that extends from the stuff and lines of flight into a world of relations.  Materialism in its mechanical origin is not to say that everything is material it is more the imagining the material accepting the impossibility that there is anything that could transcend this material world.  Materialism perhaps denies the possibility of the transcendental and the meta-physical world - new materialism in its denial of any duality opens up a different set of possibilities.  You can find this difference in Deleuze but when you come back to earth and lay it into a pre-structured and lived ontology then it becomes a flash of difference an alternative rather than the thing in itself.   To hold onto the thing itself I needed to take a break from the world and be in making and be in the book to let both things shape a life. perhaps this is a true return to practice.  Not so much a diffraction but a living that will never actually make it to a literature review.  Perhaps I have conflated distraction with diffraction.

I am not sure what to do now as I am not keen on becoming a performance again just yet.  To demonstrate that I have read something and taken something from it that others can understand as a thing.  However sensible it is to distribute the thinking I have lived within into a form of writing that will work towards a PhD the difficulty of capture of the current assemblage of this moment makes me want to push it to the back burner however reckless an act I know this to be.

I will do my two days this week and next week and the week after and something will come to show from it and it will become something else - 

An Oak Tree

It is a bit difficult to know what wt write now as I feel a little in limbo.  I had my annual review last week and a spot check of the ethical process both shone a light on the world in the middle of a pandemic.  I keep talking to sad people about the apparent smallness of the things we have had to give up on given the scale of everything else that is happening and that at times we just need to accept that some things are difficult to deal with even if they don't kill you.

My annual review went well but it took a bit out of me thinking what was actually happening and not just muddling through although even muddling through seems an achievement given the chaos of the last 4 months. 

My ethical review went quite well to I hope.  I was honest and open and I was reminded about how serious the process was and how seriously I took it at the time and take it now.  I also think it got me thinking about the problems of getting informed consent at the playground and presenting the platform as a territory where we can explore loose parts play together has evolved as a very clear idea that will help define an space for research and also allow for some focused research activity with young people when covid lock-down has lifted. 

I feel like I need a bit of a break - perhaps a long weekend to switch off - I have just been writing about building the platform as a way to get some thoughts down - here is a paragraph to act as a marker for when I'm looking back here.  The last 3 entries on this blog were deliberately erratic as they were written in a slightly erratic period - I think things will settle down soon.

Friday 17^th

The playground opened to a limited number of children this afternoon.  I worked out I hadn’t left enough room for the tree to move and it was making a terrible noise in wind – metal against bark.  For a moment the metaphor and the reality glowed with an abstract intensity heightened by the obscurity of its origin.  I had made something that was rigid and fixed in concrete foundations marry with something that was flexible, full of fibre and sap.  I have watched tree bows move in the wind and instructed by Ruskin in the elements of drawing, attempted to capture in pencil the spaces between the bows rather than the things themselves.  I know enough of trees to have not made this error of measurement.  The noise amplified by the diaphragm of the tin roof created an ugly screeching condensed into my ears.   The obvious cause of the discord took a while to recognize – I wonder if this is axiomatic – the clear and open cause of something that remained unsure but present. I had given the static branch a good 40 mm of clearance to allow for growth but not movement.   In the moment of realizing my mistake, when I un-ironically twigged what was going on I noticed a moment’s lag in the real thing happening and its potential for entering into the space of writing.  For an instance the actual thing was a thing with meaning that was what I can only describe as pre-metaphor; a gasp, a scream, a groan.  Two materials and thoughts animated by the wind causing a discord, meaning held in a moment before entering a system of signs, all that it needs is the refrain and the breeze on the face that preempts it enunciation.  A non-human scream of two things forced to work together where the closeness is painful and destructive to both things.

Capture the Axiomatic and new windows

I had to look up axiomatic before writing this - the definition is - an obvious or unquestionable truth.  I think I knew this but when I was reading a Thousand Plateaus this morning I couldn't really make sense of how they were using the word.  They say it is not a metaphor or being used metaphorically,  I wonder if its not a word that works well in translation, perhaps its not quite right for what they are trying to say. It certainly does not seem to point to an self evident truth that is emerging from the text, or if it does I'm missing something.  A combination of having our windows done and exhausting myself digging and cutting and volunteering at the playground has meant that I have lost a bit of momentum in my morning reading and thinking hours.

I started off with the Nomad and the war machine and I think I took a lot from this that I felt I could work with although its all gone a bit fudgey now in my brain mess.  In the capture chapter the true nature of how capitalism is a mechanism of capture is- worried about, talking through territory we move away from the refrain and the assemblage and place capitalism as something else - perhaps not in a metaphysical sense but at the heart of its essential subjectifications the knots of self that are constituted only by capital, that cannot exist before it.   I think that this chapter more than others requires a carrying of what has gone before that brings us to this point.  Perhaps this is why we are introduced to the axiomatic - by this point a certain set of thoughts and feelings should be self evident. I am not sure I have got far enough, although I have got somewhere and to a certain extent I think I am becoming a Deleuzian;  perhaps as none of the texts or writing that comes after really seems to give you what you need they leave a gaping void in a construction of a worldview.  I said in my RD2 proposal that social science uses the concepts to retrofit modes of thinking that are unable to work with the new technologies of thought, pointless acts of tilting at windmills. When asked what I did in lock-down I can say I read a thousand plateaus from cover to cover and we had new windows put in the house.

Alongside paying attention to my Onto -epistemology I have been volunteering at the adventure playground.  As I am unable to conduct face to face research this work is not part of my PhD.  It's very interesting as the notion of territory is in some ways very straightforward. What is and isn't research is what is agreed within my ethical procedure and at this period my ethics and instruction from my research institute creates a clear line of territory, at least in relation to what can be considered research, which includes collecting data and evidence. I have also finished my arts council project which was concerned with the idea of assemblage and sculpture.  This presented another territory that was externally legitimized. For now I am officially working as volunteer though the process is very similar on the inside the external structures or mechanisms that help to build and hold the assemblage that enunciates a territory that can be traversed is structured differently - the inside subjective has to rise to the surface as there is no longer an external scaffold to structure parameters.

Physical work then and violence against male bodies, the violence and the self flagellation of work. I had thought and written about this as a search for redemption from  my collective unknown sin,  I looked for redemption in work - Work makes you free - the sign from the gates of Auschwitz.  I think now in this limbo land where the external lines of flight that take me out of the playground and position the work within an expanded field of an unfolding assemblage that I am aspiring to reach a state of grace. This lofty notion seems a little extreme as I am really just building a bit of decking with a shed on it however I realise that the closest I ever come to grace is in the sweaty awkward and violent moments of building something on uneven ground.  This is the Axiomatic of diffracting a reading of a thousand plateaus through the body to try and find some kind of freedom.