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.
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