Play Principles

 

I mended the castle yesterday along with a few other bits and bobs.  Writing my trajectory I did start to wonder about the practice of play work and how it relates to ethos and if I am not going to engage with it as a trajectory   I at least have  to  explain why and provide a rational.   So I read some Wendy Russel and I thought about how play is quite robust and is a concept that can be applied to other things in the form of  playfulness. I  then tracked down the play principles  thought  how British they are.   I copy them here as a reminder that this is also something to think about .   When I did the talk with Patrick at the national play conference I  realised that one reason it didn't go down well was that people were sick of always trying to re-engage  with first principles  .  To be asked again what is play ? is a mistake because the feeling is that this at least we know.  In art we like to ask ourselves what it is all the time because its actually not good to think you know.   The searching for an ontology is actually part of what art is.  I am not sure how much I need to engage with the play principles but it is where play workers meet practice and to an extent theory . 

 

 

The Playwork Principles

 

 

The Playwork Principles, 8 in total, provide an ethical framework for the playwork sector. They were written by a scrutiny group of experienced practitioners, trainers and educators in 2005, with extensive consultation with the playwork sector. They have been highly influential in the sector as they set out not only what the sector understands by the term play but also what are the key qualities of the staff who are responsible for creating conditions in which children can play. The Playwork Principles have underpinned qualification and training courses and feature heavily in key documents. The principles set out the need for play professionals to advocate for play when faced with other adult agendas and to develop skills in reflection to ensure when working with children and young people that staff provide the right permissions and support to enable children the freedom to play. In essence, the principles set out what is unique about and to be cherished when

working to support children’s play.

  

1. All children and young people need to play. The impulse to play is innate. Play is a biological, psychological and social necessity, and is fundamental to the healthy development and well-being of individuals and communities.

 

 2. Play is a process that is freely chosen, personally directed and intrinsically motivated. That is, children and young people determine and control the content and intent of their play, by following their own instincts, ideas and interests, in their own way for their own reasons.  

 

3. The prime focus and essence of playwork is to support and facilitate the play process and this should inform the development of play policy, strategy, training and education. 

 

 4. For playworkers, the play process takes precedence and playworkers act as advocates for play when engaging with adult led agendas.  

 

5. The role of the playworker is to support all children and young people in the creation of a space in which they can play.  

 

6. The playworker's response to children and young people playing is based on a sound up-to-date knowledge of the play process, and reflective practice.

7. Playworkers recognise their own impact on the play space and also the impact of children

and young people’s play on the playworker.

  

8. Playworkers choose an intervention style that enables children and young people to extend their play. All playworker intervention must balance risk with the developmental benefit and well-being of children. 

 

 A video titled The Playwork Principles

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“why we do what we do” can be viewed here

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VGq83lPPn8

6

 

What are you Playing At ? Three Trajectories

 I have just paid £100 to have a book of this blog made.  I did this as I needed something substantial to hold onto as although I have done a lot of work and thinking I consistently feel I haven't got very far.  I know I have moaned a lot on here and when I read through the whole thing it's going to make me pull my socks up and get stuck in and move on.  It does follow a timeline though and it does map out the last 2 and a half years of work that will eventually add up to my doctorate.

In Pat Thomson's book about supervising PhD students which I read early last year she talks  about writing your scholar identity.  She also writes about how you think things through writing rather than think them and then write them down. This process orientated way of working is a bit like artists who have a conversation with materials, the words speak back and the meaning grows on the page. 

This process can't happen if you are not writing. So I made a decision to write even if it feels a little pointless.  The idea is to write three trajectories or personal journeys that interconnect but eventually end up at the start of building and eventually on the platform  at the playground.  As the platform will be the focus of the fieldwork I think these journeys are probably about context. I keep thinking of the subtitle of the Hobbit There and Back Again or in the film An unexpected Journey.  The last 16 months have felt like this yet at least this morning i have woken in a better mood and decided I have done reasonably well in navigating them.  I am writing my trajectories as personal biography and I have decided to produce some words without paying too much attention to the form of a PhD. I am starting as if I am writing something which is not considered to be part of a PhD then I should at least not be overly constrained by the dominant form of academic writing which is blocking my paths.  

Trajectory one 

 The journey of the visual artist.  How ideas from art flow into research and how they clash and mix.  This relates to making in the material and the stuffness of things.  The place of art is in the sideways look, the complexity of aesthetics the construction of the social.  Art follows its own trajectory and I journey in its flow but usually I am away from the main current or even swimming against it.  The river however does not care.  This trajectory touches on theory and philosophy in as much as it recognizes it and sees it as present. Art must to an extent be aware of its ontology for it to exist as anything distinct from anything else even a trajectory.

Trajectory two 

The journey through adventure play from making equipment to helping to sustain and maintain our playground in Pitsmoor.  Here too there is an encounter with theory and and encounter with history ethos and identity.   I have never seen myself as a play worker though i do see myself as a builder or fabricator. Aesthetics are still present but they are not foregrounded there is a desire to make something authentic and in this sense I avoid artifice or art object.  In some ways the role is something i need to accept as this is what I am if we think of it in terms of the self that is constructed.  I am not seen as artist or researcher at the playground i am a person that makes things and fixes things and I am happy with this. 

 

Trajectory three 

The journey through research. This is the line which is the newest but is not really new.  The line is a crooked one and it is central to my PhD but not as central to my life or my identity.  My journey through research proper feels very much within reading and writing and it does not cross the other trajectories as much as I would hope.  It too contains theory and ontology and it is a big part of the last 3 years.  I am not sure where it fits in relation to my identity. 

 

These three trajectories cross and meet in many places but for the purposes of this PhD I hope to write them so they meet on the Platform I have built in the world at the playground and in this writing something interesting may happen which hopefully will get me a PhD even if it doesn't really look or read like one.   

 

Faded A

 This is the space that was an A from my Utopia sign.  It became a box for kids to play in and then a compost bin and now its nearly rotted away and it is in a pile of rubbish waiting to be picked up by the council.  In a strange way even though I've just been writing about the utopia sign in my history of my relationship to the adventure playground it doesn't feel like as much of a material connection as perhaps it should.  Maybe this is because its at the end of things rather in a point of reuse like the other things that seem to follow me around at the playground.

I have been thinking today about PHD writing and I have read a couple of systematic meta reviews of literature on adventure play and risky play.  It is very interesting to touch against formal research and realize again how far away from it I am.  Walking the dog I had a thought that art has little to do with research.  In research knowledge is built up on a platform of what has gone before.  So you say something and then you reference it and tie it back into the fabric of knowledge This presents an ontological orientation towards knowing which contrasts to a practice based approach  where knowledge is more embodied.  I am sure i have written about this before but today as I walked past my faded A  I realised that there is something that connects arts practice to affect theory that I have perhaps missed .  The idea of what is internal and not so much external in terms of what constitutes knowledge is more fundamental and not something that can be worked around very well.  When i work as an artist within research on a project I can manage it because i assimilate the difference into the practice -I can maintain a flow of practice that I can personally make sense of.

However when I do my "own research" I don't have the position of research to accommodate into my practice so it makes less sense or newsense as I like to say. I wondered about interviewing the staff at the playground today about loose parts play.  I think I might wait until I'm at the playground properly doing my 6 weeks as this would make more sense and contain things within the edges of an experiment. 

Everything feels a bit up in the air just at the minute with the house move and the end of Covid and everyday feels a bit messed up.  I know when I read all these blog post back I'm going to feel a bit sad like it was an upset time and I was a bit messy.  I think though by the time I get to October things will of leveled out a bit again and I will be able to look back and perhaps think I did ok considering

loose parts

 This has felt like another Covid week where just muddling through is enough.  The house has gone on the market and we have some offers and that feels a little bit stressful as moving is now a reality.  I wrote some reluctant field notes about Monday as when I got home I decided that the loose parts stuff had slipped off the platform and so the territory of the PhD in terms of the space of the research had extended.  This is an interesting idea and makes me think of the notion of territory.

In my notes I realised that I am actually managing to step away from doing workshops and handing the space over to the kids and the staff in a way I haven't done before.  I think this is about agency and seeing your mark or at least your influence and this is very different to making art although it may be part of what I am describing as residency as method.   The ability to step away and imagine different types of territory feels like a very different space to normal.  The bits and bobs are getting moved around and there is clearly an area where the kids have made something that could be an open plan den.  So to an extent without my direct intervetion in making something is happening.  Part of me wants to go and sit and just observe for a while - I may even try and draw something a bit like John Berger doing portaits,  I just thought of this as i wrote and then I decided it would be something to do.  I should probably wait until June though.

I have had to think about how I start to work in this space without taking over and I think perhaps it will have to start off by introducing materials - I will do a cardboard day.  I also thought it is timely as I can move lots of old stuff from my workshop, finally find a new home for my prosthetic leg that has followed me around for 20 years.  This will be interesting to see the things I have kept for a rainy day become part of the detritus of the playground.  

There will be an issue about how messy things get and if things need to be put away and if we need a churn of materials its quite nice to have some practical concerns as a distraction.  I am going to fit the big slide we have salvaged next week - this will not be part of the platform of my research so I will not have to write field notes at least not in the abstraction of the present. 

Just breath- reciprocal bellows

 I like these bellows as they are beyond restoration. They are reciprocal  I think this means that they give a constant stream of air  or perhaps they pump on the upward and downward stroke. Not now of course, now they are useless.  However they are dignified and beautiful in their decay a last gasp of entropy after helping to fire the forges of the industrial revolution. 

I woke up this morning and there is nothing written in my dairy for the week.  I mended the coffee machine and then read a little bit about continental philosophy, a sort introduction.  I then listened to Steph Springay talk about research creation and rigor in an hour and a half long webinar on post philosophy and educational research.  I only really listened to the edges of the talk I found it hard to follow in my current frame of mind.  The day has sped past - the coffee machine was stripped down and re assembled 4 times but is now working I did a little "get in there" move of the hand  to myself when I finally got it working as I was a bit worried that it was gone for good. 

Two people coming to view the house this evening Lots of footage from the Odd project that Charles has taken to scrub through and think about.  I spoke to Kate about the final book chapter towards the end of last week.  The idea is that you don't replace  theory or methodology or ontology with something else - diffract through or simply develop  and extend we just allow a gap or placeholder to make difference possible. That is it really we haven't got much to go on.  I will blog later in the week if I feel more settled.

Unpacking my old Computer

 Its Thursday so its writing day.  I have decided to do what Kate asked me to do and write about my relationship to the adventure playground.  I will go back to the start and write it as both a story and an auto ethnography.  I can then think of the material things at the playground and the people and perhaps this will eventually form an assemblage.  I don't know whether to call it the three trajectories riffing from Guattari or One and three trajectories riffing off Kosuth.  The title of this post refers to Benjamin's unpacking my library of course as  going through the contents of an old computer and deciding what to carry forward is a similar process to unpacking the books collected over a lifetime.  

Enough hyperlinks to obscure and less obscure reference.  I'm not sure it matters if you are aware of the origin in terms of reading a text - the trajectories collide anyway.  I always like the Kosuth title as it holds the false optimism of conceptualism to actually capture philosophy.   The works reliance on such a good title to actually be good art perhaps contains conceptualisms short life in the linear  history of art.   In advance of a broken arm.

I have moved away from trying to write a PhD in a way that will pass as a PhD and moved towards writing a text that I can then retrofit to perhaps pass a PhD.  This will include some chapters that will be a slog but the first thing to do will be to write some words and develop an alternative structure.  I think this is needed because there is such a small space for art within social science research and there may be some value in beating the boundaries  .  This ritual takes place every 7 years and local landmarks are hit with sticks to create mental maps of an area, perhaps to refer back to Benjamin these moments are punctums. A point of resonance that punches through - Barthe also talks of this idea of a punching through in  the rhetoric of the image.  I miss Barthe and the Frankfurt group I am a bit sick of the flow and the fold.

I did my talk at the childhood and time conference and attended quite a lot of the sessions this week.  It felt a bit like there were two clubs.  There were the post group and the wannabe-post-group but can't quite make it post group because of their scientists white coats.  I was in the artists group which was quite small but present.  I did feel like matter-out of-place and I didn't enjoy doing my presentation.  I had some good pictures and I had a plan but somehow I couldn't get into the flow.  The idea was to start with the page a day artwork so to establish the idea that art can hold space/time open for the unknown or the immanent.  Yet this holding open has to be in some ways opaque and not constructed - like a micilium of interconnections enfolded and not contingent, in opposition to the idea of a scaffold.  The holding open is within the thick-time of the present meeting the future not a process of predicting what is to come.  It may be anticipation yet this still suggests that the future exists to be uncovered rather than to unfold.

"A narrative is constructed - a story unfolds. "

I came up with this quote and am reasonably pleased with it.  I had some nice images for the talk and after explaining a-page-a-day I talked through the Odd project so I suppose it wasn't really about my PhD work but it certainly felt close.  Sat at home skimming the conference I did end up thinking that creative and artistic and visual methods have very little to do with art-making.   They may produce similar looking stuff and objects especially now as art has entered an expanded field yet there are very different intentions.

"The only difference between a fake and a copy is an intention."

That is another of my quotes from an unrealised project I thought of to create a website where you could log a quote and claim it as a reference.  An Andy Wharhole 15 words rather than 15 minutes of fame.  I don't think the academics using creative methods are making fake art they are merely borrowing technics from a different discipline and putting them to work.  Artistic methods within research are more complicated as the entwining of self-hood and practice are what constitutes art as art so to an extent cannot be put to work for a research.  I am sure I have said this many times before in different ways so its probably time to go and set myself to writing a history of my entwinement with the adventure playground.  A agencement of connections and stream of consciousness will hopefully flow out.

Another thought from the week

 I took the image out cos I got worried about ethics- and put this one of me and my brother in doing cultural appropriation.

My talk for a conference about childhood and time is on Monday.  I'm planning to be charismatic - I have a picture of my insides written in my own blood and I'm wearing a T shirt with an image of a Frohse anatomical chart dissection on it with the chart in the background - three representations of inside or to be clever none and three insides.  I have paused to blog as I think there is something in my presentation which could form a chapter or rationale for my PhD writing.  A new point to make, I don't feel like I have had a new point for a while.

I am taken by Ruskin's idea that architecture has failed for a 1000 years, he is specific in saying that the Gothic was the height of architecture as at that point building could still grow, in fact they grew triumphantly. The builders and designers were the masons and journeymen of Europe and they would dwell over generations within their manifestations.  To draw is not to prehend it is to capture a representation of the not-yet that closes down the multiplicity of  potentials, not all drawing but the drawings that plan and shape what is built rather than what grows.

My talk is called "insert place holder" it is a function in film editing software that allows you to put a Tristran Shandy-esque black page in a film where you are not sure what needs to go in but you are sure something needs to go in.  

This place holder for the talk is of course a metaphor - it relates to holding space/time in the present for potentials to emerge.  A place of difference and speculation.  And this holding space like Witkin's holding form is palpable and felt yet, as Glissant so well articulates in the Poetics of Relation, it is opaque.   The notion of a scaffold to hold something back, like doubt, desire, skepticism, the curriculum, hunger or our imminent destruction by fire (parallax).   This is the kernel then from where a proper PhD that actually says something can start.  In my bed last night as I churned my day like rancid butter, I finally fell asleep thinking that knowledge is not an edifice or artifice, it is a flow. 

The picture is from the Odd project.  I was trying to green screen the kids so they could do a film of themselves outside Tesco but somehow I managed to key to them rather than the background and turned them all into Tesco.  To paraphrase Virginia Wolf from Mrs Tupperware.  'There will be days and days like this I thought I was projecting Tesco but in fact I am Tesco'.  Or something like that.

I am not interested in the mundane

I had a supervision yesterday and it got me thinking.  Kate had come up with a strategy to get me writing but this got deflected.  I think it was a good idea to start to construct a context.  I had had an idea that morning about three trajectories.  

1. the visual artists with a de-materialized process orientated  approach

2. The builder of adventure play equipment.

3.the student doing a PhD at Esri.

I like the play on the three ecologies and how these three things work across different planes of relation and subjectives.  They are interlaced positions that come into and out of focus and disperse.  I thought this was a good idea and if I work along these lines and write these three trajectories perhaps something will emerge.  

I then got a a bit perturbed by Mannings new book and Kate talking about the mundane.  On the way back from town I took the pictures above, I suppose from one perspective you could say that the jack and the beanstalk down pipe or the stack of tyers are mundane and everyday.  The photo draws attention to them but from a practice perspective this is just impossible.  There is nothing mundane in the sets of relations they are spectacular.  We may not be able to always notice how spectacular the world is in all its glorious life but the moments I am drawn two are exceptional. Not mundane and not everyday neither failure or useless.  They are Lacans quilting points, the Hai of the Haiku, Blocks darkness of the lived moment or Duchamps infrathin or Benjemens Punctures.  All attempts to point to what is in excess in desire, to escape the fascism iof the everyday and the mundane.

I then thought about poor Wilhiem Riech and his Orgone and Deleuze and his notion of life.  I then wondered why Riech hadn't had a revival with Whithead.  Then i decided it was time for a few days off and thinking about how to fit a big slide at the playground

Today I am sorting out my computer.

 I have spent all day sorting out the files on my computer.  I have been very keen not to lose some of my writing.  I have sometimes copied stuff onto this blog just to keep it in a timeline.   I have found lots of bits of writing I had forgotten I had done.  A nice piece about a post-ontologies camping trip and a dairy piece from a couple of weeks before the first lock down. I sometimes find it difficult to read my notes as they always seem a bit the same and I often sound like I'm moaning when I really only stuck.  Its interesting to read these notes as its clear that the process of doing the RD2 review knocked me sideways and I haven't really recovered my stature.  At the point of writing I was helping Alice realise one of the ideas from her cancelled degree show.  It is a projected image of me drowning in a bucket.  Make of that what you will.  I'm so lazy today I'm just going to stick in some chunks of this text - its from a year ago and I am not sure if I have moved on much, this is fine. 

thoughts on a literature review 24th Feb

I realized that my description of fixing the toilets at the adventure playground in the context of event had not hit home like the well-aimed practice oriented arrow I had hopefully launched.  I also checked the fact that my close reading of Manning and Massumi early in the PhD process would not get me very far given the context that it was not enough to be interested in why other people are interested in something and I had to at least find a glimmer of my own interest.  I honestly said that the idea of the assemblage was the thing that had held my attention.  The reason I like the idea of the assemblage from Delueze and Guattari especially within the nomadic plateau is that it feels like life and it feels like art.  The always more than simply putting things together- the beyond the sum of the parts of this togetherness.  How the idea relates to arts practice and the encounter with the world of the material.  It quite simply has helped me to think differently in a way that does not seem performative.  Although you can stack up the theory – Assemblage is a concept that sits on the plane of philosophy established by D and G which is essentially after Oedipus so different to Lacan in that it does not foreground the essential ‘I’ or individual subjective.  Although in no way is the idea strictly materialist it does hold some of the useful aspects of a new materialist approach that does not put the human subjective and perhaps body ( without organs) at the middle of everything.  In many ways this feeling about the vibrant connectivity and togetherness of things that allows for at least the concept that there may be no territory can open up all sorts of ways to feel the world.  These ways of feeling the world are probably- if I scrape off the layers of irony and doubt what I feel art can do or is about...

 

The idea I’m massaging then and the new issue that has come up within the field work and flown inevitably into other aspects of my work.  The ideas behind loose parts play and sculpture although on the surface similar and I will describe as;

 ‘A free arrangements of different materials with many potentials for their own sake – the sake of the action rather than a specific pre determined outcome.’

This phrase could be applied to both things and could underpin both activities and produce near identical material outcomes yet there seems to be a critical disjuncture at an ideological level.

For me this revolves around the subjective, the flow of practice and the need for unnatural levels of investment in a thing that cannot be pinned down.  The role of artist is often for me the idea of paying attention to the personal the identifiers.  In its simplest form this could be a motif yet as this attention is layered into materials or images  we pay attention to affects that are unmediated by  the systems of language.  We accept there is no lexicon or interpretation; we accept this as the limitation of the gestalt or form we work within – art in this sense is not a language it is affect.

The reason that Deleuze draws on Bergson is the pure connection between subjectivity and time.  Bergson says that the subjective is time rather than existing through it.  This concept is one of those reductions that I wonder if people actually pay attention to.  It is a way marker in a movement towards a different understanding of the self, of identity and of an individuated ontology.  There are the people who understand what this statement points towards and the people who just say well Doh.  When I talk to most people about this, well the few people who are polite enough to pause I can feel the held back Doh – the “ that is just a statement of the obvious” yet at the back of my mind I have a feeling that I have done a lot of work to get to the point of understanding why Deleuze turns to Bergson to wrestle time back for living. 

 It is naïve yet more importantly pointless to think of the PhD as a set of relational assemblages with points of connection, tempting as it is to explore this as a rhizomatic set of relations I do not think that I can leap into this level of connectivity across territory within a single plane.  To do this is not easy though at some point may be necessary yet I feel it would defuse the potency – make the specific general subsume everything within a singularity when the search at the moment is for difference held in the same place – Barad’s Agential Cut .

Alongside this pragmatic application of theory is the notion that Art with a capitol A sits upon a different plane.  It does not nestle into D and G’s plane like one of their philosophical concepts and they really don’t want it to.

In What is Philosophy D and G say that the purpose of Philosophy is to establish concepts upon a plane of immanence.  They suggest that only a very few philosophers have ever established a new plane Kant is one as is Nietche and of course themselves.  They place science and art on different planes of understanding.  Cleverly they say science has limits – the speed of light and absolute zero as two examples  - a science that thinks faster than the speed of light will need a new plane of immanence – it will not emerge within the current plane.  Their plane defies territory and boundaries it allows for everything that can be real and imagined to emerge within it and become a concept – its limits are not charted it is consistently unfolding within chaos – it resist chaos yet not at a division or a cut it is part of it and does not order chaos into anything it merely resists it. 

The limits of art are not specified but like the other planes it also resists chaos.  I think  Art here is probably part of a validated cannon, Brecht, Kafka. Joyce, Fransis Bacon perhaps Godard, Proper Art.  I am not sure that it is an art I recognize. Yet it is interesting as a proposition to place it within a different plane, perhaps the thing that is outside the plane is the point of difference that at least gives some sense of orientation.

In the conversation with Tim I tried to talk through how this idea presents a problem with the thinking about assemblage as residency.  The art of the residency can be moved onto a separate plane of immanence and emerge differently.  I can accept I am not Francis Bacon and the art that I produce does not transcend the assemblage, I am happy to an extent with this.  Arts as everyday -culture as ordinary – give up on expertise or the notion of training yourself to see – artist as Shaman or savant sensitized to the field they choose to operate within, a little bit special.

However if I unpick my journey and my agency through the various research projects I work within and my resistance to the form of a PhD then an acceptance that I desire to sit upon a different plane to what is considered research is clear.  The problems with Practice as Research as a mode of validating art within the academies becomes clear as it locates it upon the plane of research.   Also as I tried to explain to Tim the moments I switch into a making art mode, driven by all the old desires to keep chaos at bay the more uncomfortable I feel. perhaps rather than a line of flight from the assemblage I’m trying to imagine I’m working on a different plane.  Nobody will ever care but me and that is me as a subjective Eye yet the fact I care so much I’m sure that must be the point.

 

 I enjoyed reading this again after a year of Covid I had forgotten I had written it - there are bits in it that stand up well - that have not been broken by Covid lock-down and the drift of the past year. I think this will be a good place to reread them as I go through this blog in a few months time - when it finishes and goes through a Mary Douglas transition from function to meaning