Doing what it said on the tin

I'm still trying to write my RD2.  I want to write a front end as a list but I don't think it will go down well so I will do it here.  The process of trying to write has brought me to a set of conclusions most of which if unpicked are positive and lay some groundwork.

1. There is an aesthetic turn within social science research.  This is at a practical and theoretical level.

2. Aesthetic thinking is slippery and often gets conflated with other types of thinking- it nests with phenomenology yet also refutes it.

3. The coin has many sides but the two that really count are the idea that aesthetics exist externally to human experience (within the object sometimes called Kantian aesthetics) or that they are constructed by things outside it ( often human actors thoughts , networks or event).  One road leads to relativism the other awakens all types of gods and her functions. 

4. Artists are involved because they historically have the reputation of living closer to an aesthetic world as Ruskin says they learn to see what is really there. If we flip the coin they help construct all that can possibly be constructed.

5. ESRI is known for cutting edge social research that embraces the turn towards speculation and questions the value of any existing methods.

6.  The only real point in progressing this PhD is to be able to work from within the idea of what artists can bring to research and invest in the relations that construct this network.

7. Theory of this sort can sit next to practise yet when we work it through practise or as I suggest worldize it,  it is not  helpful to split the two. ( hence the pull of totalising ontologies- Dialectics - phenomenology new and old materialism the Event and the move towards flatness)

8. The systems at the university are not set up to enable the kind of artistic approaches to research that people are keen to explore.

9.  There is a lot of cherry picking of thoughts and ideas from different fields and an attempt to work with them out of context.  This can find low hanging fruit but becomes problematic when it turns to fundamentally different ontologies and world views - you can't just sit where you like.

10. I am doing real work and getting somewhere with a complex set of thoughts but it is fragile- the temptation to go through the motions is difficult as going through the motions in the past had a rational that I understood or felt in terms of a wider practice.  Going through the motions now has no point and more importantly would disenchant my world.

today I am mostly thinking theory

My head is hurting this morning.  I'm reading Harman's idiot guide to Object Oriented Ontologies - the book is very like Stephen Hawkins a brief history of time in that someone deeply embedded in a field writes an explanation for normal people.  It is still on the edge of what it is possible for me to understand yet clear enough for me to work out where and why I disagree with lots of the thinking.  It also in its reductive flight through a selected history of western philosophy reminds me of a lot of things and gives good insights into phenomenology and Actor Network Theory.

I don't want to review the book or go into the detail of OOO as I've not finished yet but I do want to say - nice diagrams- and it is good to see Heidegger making another comeback and actually get a reference that doesn't just remind us he was a Nazi sympathiser.

I met with Richard Steadman Jones yesterday and probably went on a bit - we probably both went on a bit in our own specific ways and it was probably good for both of us.  Richard said I seemed to be going a bit theory heavy. This surprised me as I wasn't thinking of the theory in itself.  I  think I am thinking of a way to navigate my RD 2 so I can write a PhD that does not feel banal to me - this is my secret fear.  The trick with theory is to have a take on it that allows you to think through the world in new ways and that is my quest to come up with something obscure and robust enough to ride the storm of necessary critque .

I tried to explain this to Richard by giving a potted history of the Post - qualt turn in social science. I am not sure if it was just a mumbled ramble as it slopped out of my mouth. It felt like among the big stories and new theories of everything there are small trajectories that are been enacted in the world of educational research and among with other things these threads of relations make sense of me being at Esri as a philosopher artists trying to write a PhD.  As Boudoir so clearly points out the glass in the window does not break because the stone hits it it breaks because glass is breakable.  Along with all sorts of other things that look like luck the fabric and thoughts of social science at its edges are flaky and breakable. I am not really a stone though more like a clod of soft mud, well shit I suppose so I may smear the windows of social science with brown streaks and that may be enough as it is cold in houses with no windows.

People in glass houses should not throw stones

For ages people thought that scientific method was a good way to understand the world and that the natural sciences and the study of society needed to adopt scientific method based on an enlightenment notion that the world could be known fully.  This is realist and materialist and positivist approaches but they are fundamentally based on the idea of a fully knowable world even if this is not called the real the true or the quantum world.  Anthropology trundles on in the background in the south pacific it doesn't fully buy into scientific method but cracks on with writing about culture and holding opinions deeply embed in enlightenment thinking. Post 68 but obviously before, the post structuralists break down the possibility of truly knowing anything and social research splits and expand and reconstructs.  Qualitative research builds a stronger profile and this is underpinned by the ideas that we cannot ever really understand and have true knowledge of the world of emotion of the social of the human and more than human. We need methods that give us archeologies of knowledge to reference Foucault.

Post- qualt or what sometimes gets called the new theory emerges from falling deeper into the trap of thinking that nothing is truly knowable it  responsed to and resists  post structuralism and its challenge to the idea of knowledge is only ever enacted as power.  My encounter with post-qualt at ESRI brings into play a plethora of fantastically dense ideas and philosophies.  They are alternative theory, a bit like alternative medicine the homeopathy or Rieka of the social sciences.  They have massive appeal to those of us who struggle with the dominance of scientific rational reductionist ways of encountering the world and the trail of thought carnage this can leave in moving feeling aesthetic bodies.

I tried to explain this to Tim while we were picking mushrooms he thinks actor network theory and OOO are potential wormholes that spiral forever.  I wondered about the term wormhole - in science its a theoretical connection between dimensions - I also thought of Felix down the rabbit hole which is of course a reference to Alice in Wonderland and in that moment of thinking I logged in my head a paragraph that is not banal about the theoretically possible wormhole that has never been seen beyond mathematics and Lewis Carols creation for Alice to enter a speculative dimension.  I thought a paragraph that could explore the two through ideas of speculative realism with a focus on function metaphorical and scientific could hold something interesting but its not really for now.

For now I wanted to try and put a marker down about why I'm not getting heavily into theory and it was Tim that came up with it as I was giving him my basic steps to Object Orientated Ontologies and it was this.  Firstly he asked me if I believed in magic? then he asked if I thought it was about a new enchantment.? I think I had been building to this point but Tim catalysed it in his questions and I saw that my PhD was not about theory in the broad sense of all the guff I had been reading but was about a re-enchantment of the world through aesthetic experience. and perhaps this 'is' what people are looking for and within this lies a kernel of hope.

I started my RD 2 and wrote this  -

‘People are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent— WP- D and G)203-204’

Working within a frame of residency as method requires a location of the individual subjective artists that takes account of philosophies that present flat ontologies in order to problematise the human as privileged actor within the social space.  In order to work within a more-than-human research field the re-enchantment of the world, its objects, subjects, spaces, feelings, thoughts and emotions need to activate and become visible through creative events that bring the potential of newness into the world.

he wrote yes but it needs an edit.

I wrote this:-

edit it !  - I’ve got to write 6000 words and I’ve only done 9 

I wanted to sends it as I’m nicking your idea of re-enchantment - I think that is perhaps what it is - an opening up of possibilities that science closes down and we look to art to hold it but all the artists are saying - that is to much to ask for us - you need to banish us Like Plato did the poets and we can go and be Hermits and be happy.

If ~I go down this avenue then I’m the person or one of them that is required to re- enchant and persuade people they need re- enchanting but art now refers to itself - its like the coalfields it has been mined out and what is left isn’t worth digging out - its just the pit props and the bits they left underground to stop the land subsiding.

I’m just going to write 6000 words and then start to edit - to hard to construct well as you go along - better to get it all down and then work it up -  Basically its jumping through a flaming hoop and not burning yourself.

mushrooms were nice - scoffed em all - the big ones sort of melted into worms over night XX

and now its clear that the process of doing the PhD in all its relations may need me to fall in love or recognise my love of the aesthetic world in all its sensuous affect and it is essential within the objects of artists to love the world and seek to know it. This is a task worth setting a mind to.  In the end all theory of any value leads to the felt beating heart of the living body in the world of relations.  The new theory is important but to return to Heidegger through the thoughts of OOO it only really becomes visible when it stops functioning as a tool. 

What is Philosophy

: people are constantly putting up an umbrella that shelters them and on the underside of which they draw a firmament and write their conventions and opinions. But poets, artists, make a slit in the umbrella, they tear open the firmament itself, to let in a bit of free and windy chaos and to frame in a sudden light a vision that appears through the rent—Wordsworth’s spring or Cézanne’s apple, the silhouettes of Macbeth or Ahab. Then come the crowd of imitators who repair the umbrella with something vaguely resembling the vision, and the crowd of commentators who patch over the rent with opinions: communication. Other artists are always needed to make other slits, to carry out necessary and perhaps ever-greater destructions, thereby restoring to their predecessors the incommunicable novelty that we could no longer see. This is to say that artists struggle less against chaos (that, in a certain manner, all their wishes summon forth) than against the “clichés” of opinion. (WP- D and G)203-204

I was starting to write an invoice and I found this quote in the wrong folder on my computer.  It came at a good point as I was thinking about my encounter with a rat and working out how it would slot itself into the world of research.  The rat is a slit in the umbrella a tear in the firmament.  The loss of this fragment is significant as it must be important and it popping up as I looked for a folder to copy an invoice is testament to my messy note keeping.  This makes me think about slippage and the points that are becoming interesting are these slippages.  Not as art but as moments that transcend the present - become a memory in the act of their becoming. There is a physicality and a reality and although we have some arty stuff in the quote the tear in the umbrella seems to go beyond art.

I have just ordered  What is Philosophy - I hope its not really hard biut it could be useful for my PhD - not a bedrock but a shifting sand to drive in the concrete foundations that will be washed away in the storm - never buy a house in a hole or build on unsure foundations.
Here are my fieldnots about the rat and a reminder and a tear.

I talked myself out of doing a den building competition or having a den building afternoon as a way of getting more kids actively involved as it felt like a workshop and I wasn’t really that interested in workshops.  I felt like I was relaxing into being at the playground without doing an all singing all dancing role and started fiddling with the 360 camera and wondering what it would be able to capture – its playing in the background as I write these field notes and its strange – I don’t know where it will go but I will talk it through with people and work it out – it feels strangely ethnographic and not invasive like police surveillance – perhaps this is because I’m carrying it about everywhere.  It definitely felt like I was hanging out at the playground and this is what I had planned to do but it also felt like I needed to be deprogrammed from trying to be useful.

This became more noticeable as the sinks in the kitchen got blocked.  Both sinks were full of washing up which is unusual as, even if the drain is blocked, water tends to leak out the top of the drain outside rather than sit in the sink.  I genuinely felt a small lift inside, a little flutter as I cleared the cupboards to strip down the waste pipe and find the fat burger.  A strange Lacanian primeval desire to be useful coupled with the unsettling feeling that I was just very deliberately hanging about like what my dad would call a loose part.  The playground has a collapsed drain so I got Sinbad to run the sinks in the kid’s toilets to check there wasn’t a big blockage further down.  I suppose if my brain had been working better I would of realized that it was unlikely that both sinks had got blocked simultaneously but experience teaches you that you come across unpredictable phenomena and double faults in plumbing.  I had once used back-pressure to clear a blockage in my friends Saskia’s shower system – the water ran bright blue for ten minutes afterwards with no practical or scientific explanation. 

Working backwards down the three and a quarter inch tubing I found the T joint where the pipes joined. It was complicated to get to them and I had to pull away protective covers.  Patrick emptied the sinks and I let it run onto the grass. I stuffed my fingers into the pipe to try and find the blockage.  Remembering the blue sludge and life’s unpredictability my fingers grasped what felt like a balloon, tough and rubbery I imagine children pushing them down the sink with a wooden spoon but as I loosened it from the congealed fat and its surface began to pull away I realized it was a rat’s tale. It was attached to a body that was very stuck.  I screamed in a non-gender=specific way and asked Patrick to bring me some gloves.  Not wanting to let go of the rat as like Schrödinger’s cat I was unsure if it was both alive and dead simultaneously.

Patrick seemed a bit irritated at first I thought it was because he didn’t realize what was happening – later he would admit that he didn’t want to get accidentally slapped in the face by a dead rat if it were to fly out all in one go.  Julius came over and Fran legged it saying she needed to get ready for her holiday.  The feeling of usefulness was beginning to fade as I began to gag in that horrible way when you want to be sick but have run out of puke.   I pulled really hard and wiggled and considered moshing the bastard up a bit with a screwdriver.

  

 I asked Patrick and Julius if they remembered the story of the Giant Turnip. I thought it was in Winnie the Poo where they all had to grab hold of each other to pull it out of the ground.  I think it may be a folk tale we all knew it from our various histories - it made me laugh although I was also a bit disgusted.  It was only a baby rat in the end, my Granddad hated rats and along with his good temperament I inherited a probably quite rational dislike for them – he used to say that they “Would be bad buggers if they were as big as donkeys.’   Sinks mended, water flowing, a slight feeling of satisfaction at doing something useful with an overwhelming inner disgust.  I washed my hands like Lady Macbeth and avoided eating food with my fingers. 

Matter Out Of Place

Monday morning and about to start writing my RD2.  I've started my fieldwork at the adventure playground and I'm working with Abi in Rotherham.  I laid in the bath this morning and started to mull things over in my head. I do this about four times a day - not the bath but the mulling over.  When you think about making an artwork this is what you do, turn things over and stir them around until they fall into a place that feels about right.  Before you get properly practiced at this or mature as an artist you can get stuck at this point of falling and not enact anything.  I think this could be related to lines of flight (as a feeling) and flow (as a relationship to time)  perhaps what John Dewey would call 'the rhythms of the world'.

As I'm writing a PhD and not making an artwork, the flow doesn't make the same kind of sense - it keeps flowing out of sight into texts.  The idea of residency as method is about sense making - a slant telling of the truth or more correctly a truth.  The truth that came to me in the bath this morning before embarking on squeezing the round peg of my brain into the square hole of the RD2 writing  process was the absence of critical aesthetic thinking within the art orientated educational research  papers I have read.  Aesthetics are also a little absent in some of the spacial thinking from Soja to Massey and although Sara Pink writes a whole book from an aesthetical perspective in doing sensory ethnography, she doesn't really name it as such.  Culture and socially constructed norms are present yet there is little critical aesthetic theory from a current or historical perspective.  I can't say this with confidence as I haven't read that widely, there may well be a whole massive body of literature just concerned with aesthetic theory within educational post -qualt research. If so, I haven't encountered it yet so it's okay to say that some of the papers I have read lack a position or a perspective on aesthetics whilst explicitly situating a practice within the aesthetic realm.  Perhaps this is due to some of this work positioning aesthetics within the relational/diaolgical/everyday in some ways denying it a ontological category for itself and to an extent historical context. 

I was reminded in bed last night as I closed my eyes to go to sleep of my favorite quote from Brecht "Something is missing".  The quote is so great because the thing that is missing isn't a thing or a thought, it is the space that is opened up by the feeling that something is absent.  Aesthetics are absent in this way from the papers, not the aesthetics we can describe, the historical chain of thought from Plato banishing the poets to to the aesthetics of the everyday, they hover in the background. For me the lack is more aligned to Dewey and his sense of rhythm within art and experience, a lived and felt aesthetics of bodies moving in space in time. I feel a sense of a disjuncture, an absence of understanding, perhaps a fault line where the uncomfortable feeling of things not being quite right locates itself.

In her Blog on the Odd project Becky Shaw describes me as an 'education artist'.  I must admit, like the other prefix people put in front of my title such as local or community, I would much rather just be an artist.  This is important for my generation of artists as it allows the necessary amount of flexibility in role for us to remain unfinished.  It affords me my nomadic status and legitimizes my choices.  At a time when artists are not that bothered about what they get called and become producers or activists or community development workers there is a need to ask questions about what we lose and what we gain from thinking ourselves different.

I took a break, wrote some field notes and then read Geoff Bright's excellent position paper on auto ethnography from his PhD.  It's really interesting as he clearly explains why the method lacks traction within educational research.  It made me a little sad to read it as Geoff's struggle felt a little like mine.  He says that within auto ethnography he could find a real contribution to knowledge production as he could work with his 45 years experience as youth worker and activist in an honest way, a way where this knowledge could be drawn into the field pulled in by the great attractor, the gap, the void, the undefined thing that we all feel is missing at the heart of arty-farty-research.

I also felt quite liberated.  Geoff wanted to make a mark in the world of educational ethnographic research and every time he wanted to do something really interesting something hobbled him.  Like the scene in Misery where Kathy Bates smashes James Caan's ankles so he can't run away, when Geoff finds something that works he has to hold it to one side as nobody will publish anything that smells of auto-ethnography.  It is contamination - it is dust - it is self obsessed and self promoting, it is not knowledge.  I would love to read Geoff's proper auto-ethnography and I think this is why we both find ourselves returning to John Berger's writing, especially 'A Fortunate Man' which is the best ethnography I've come across.   Geoff's writing is a cautionary tale and a reminder that I have and never have had any intention of becoming an ethnographer of education and to an extent this is liberating. 

I hope there is no Kathy Bates character waiting to chain me to a bed and hobble my ankles and if there is that I can work out strategies to navigate them that are not too demoralising.  In adopting the life of a professional nomad in the post-structuralist sense of leaving behind the singularity of my consciousness, the gift or the payback is a freedom from the restraints of intellectual belonging, the rules of being accepted within any school of thought place of worship or field.  This position has its drawbacks but also its advantages. Geoff could not turn to auto-ethnography as he would not be taken seriously by the world of educational research, the world he wanted to step into and at the very least find some level of intellectual validation.  I don't share this desire, my validation lies elsewhere.  As I am just about to set fingers to typing my RD2 I wonder how much of my desire to hold onto my identity as an artist I will make visible, how much of this process needs to be treated as a game and how much of it is a genuine place for growth.

I am Icarus making wings of feathers and wax, I am not sure they will get me off the ground so at the moment have no worries of flying too close to the sun.  I have 6000 words to write and I am reluctant to start as they will pin down my thoughts in a way that chains the aesthetic mind of touch, sense and emotion and breaks with the rhymes and rhythms of my day to day.  This is what I am taking on - this is my new nomadic home. 

A difficult couple days on the road to self knowledge

Until this point I've been slightly reluctant to write about the Rotherham project as it's felt like a space in which to try things out. It's been a journey of personal reflection and I've put some feelers out into doing a different sort of research.  Until now, even though I've been involved in 14 research projects the world of research has always felt like an encounter.  I come out to meet it in the street or go to the pub for a date. I've never, to be honest felt married to it or even that fond of it.

Working on my PhD and a research project in a playgroup and with Rotherham Museum initially felt like a perfect alignment of the planets; a marriage made in heaven.  The time with Abi in the playgroup messing about with tissue paper, a gazebo, a 360 camera, Multi Cheerios and shaving foam has worked out really well, the conversations the playfulness and mostly the thinking.

Since I started back at work after been a dad at home I've always felt like a shape shifter; sometimes an artist, sometimes a researcher, sometimes a play-worker and sometime a technician. I wear all these hats with pride and do the best job I can.

On Friday though things got to me a bit.  I have always had an internal logic that justifies and places my practice in a line that connects Joseph Beuys  to social sculpture to the Fluxus movement to the Artists placement group. It has a more difficult relationship to the 'social turn' and its difficult incorporation of participation and relational aesthetics.  Of course my work also relates to political community arts and cultural democracy.   Was I a man who had only dreamed he was an artist?  The problem with thinking yourself an artist and working with internal logic based on a life of practice is it can situate you in a cloud cuckoo land. Cloud Cuckoo land can be nice while you're in it but difficult to crash out of.

I don't think my feathers were ruffled by a period of deep self reflection or a personal epiphany - it was more that I popped my own self-blown bubble.  My self image of what I was doing no longer fitted with the reality of what I was doing. I invested time and thinking in doing a research project differently, doing my own research made it different. I think one issue is locating the practice in the production of the best art I could, rather than within the best project I could.  I forgot to give up on some of the things I knew I would care about before the inevitability of having to to give them up, I have become practiced at giving up.

I invested time in trying to take images that captured a sense of place, that were evocative of space, time, and feelings they work with the position of the camera and the lens and required me to be present.  I became invested in these images and decided I liked them, that I had accomplished something, obviously not new but of a place and a time, sensory,  and evocative.  I have these images and they are interesting things to talk about and talk through.   Our exhibition at the Museum is co-produced and the parents involved prefer other images I've taken.   This of course it what I knew all along, it was never suggested that I would get to choose what images we used.  I think co-production works when nobody knows best, the images I liked looked out of focus, they showed movement but not really the concentration of young people on what they were doing.  To a general audience they probably looked a bit strange; at best arty, at worst blurry.  The other images were more than in focus; they looked like images that a professional naturalistic photographer might take.  It is another hat I've worn and the style rubs off although you need to keep your hand in and years of film making have got in the way of my natural sensitivity to composing stills, they will pass  they are good photographs.  In a still, you aim to tell a story within a single frame - this child is happy, this child is focused, this child is learning, this child has friends, these parents care.  They are not public relations images but they borrow from the genre.

My problem then is not the fact that the parents didn't like my pictures and it's not the fact I took both kinds of pictures it's that for some reason, perhaps because this was about thinking about myself and my role, I had become over invested in the wrong thing.  That is not to say that I don't normally invest in taking pictures it's just I don't normally see the taking of the pictures as being part of my practice so if people don't like them or in this case don't select them it is easy to move on.  It was harder to move on here as, if I'm honest, I put myself in a place where I believed I knew best, I thought I could educate people to like the blurry touchy-feely pictures better if only they looked at them long enough. Or I made assumptions why people didn't like them based on things I don't know.  It doesn't really matter if I was right or wrong about any of this, the point is because I was researching myself, I approached the project differently to how I would normally.  Because I was trying to see the running of the workshops and the making of the exhibition in the context of an ongoing creative practice, I had located this in the work I produced.  I have very rarely done this on any of the successful research projects I have worked on.  I have written about the dematerialised artist, the notion of the 'not yet' and 'becoming'; the idea that art is not about objects and art's potential life within research does not chain it to specific forms histories and trajectories.

It feels ironic then that when I actually get to look at this and think about residency as a method of enquiry and think about the location of practice I regress into a space of making art from my perspective as an individual. I talk about the lens and being at ease with my camera; I discuss F stops and motion blur and read Walter Benjemen's A short history of photography (again) .  These are the things in the background that prop me up and keep me going, my secret hobbies and concerns but I was never intending to bring them into the foreground.  I slipped up - not in the project but in where I locate my energies, where I locate my feeling of belonging or in keeping with my PhD title, where I reside.

This raises questions of how honest I have been with myself and how fragile the idea that I'm working in a radical tradition of engaged art within the world and not the art world.  Kate says I'm matter out of place and I think I am - neither one nor the other.  Better than expected at lots of things but not that good at most.

I'm now making the the Museum display boards for our show.  In my head I'm doing it partly as a complex set of relationships, partly to prove my value in a practical way.  Previously, I could of framed it as a complex set of practices that drew on multiple traditions including participatory and community art but now I have a chink in my armour I wonder if I'm doing it to help save money.  There is nothing wrong with this as long as I recognise where it sits, what it is and don't over invest or may it into something it isn't.

First year review meeting

When I work in schools I often review by asking the students a set of questions at the end of the session. They are very standard questions but often throw up interesting thoughts.  I think I originally based the approach on something I stole from Peter Senge in his systems thinking book the 5th discipline which sounds a bit quasi religious or sci-fi but is very business.  I feel like I read it in a different life but the bit I stole was to make slightly longer lists than expected of things that you do and don't like and then start to priorities.  If you could choose two things off the list what would they be ?  which is the most important single thing on the list.   To be honest I have a meeting with Abi tomorrow to review how the PhD is going.  My lists are currently all muddled up so I am doing some thinking out-loud - partly as a note to self and partly to prepare for the meeting.

6 things that are going well.

1. I am enjoying the space that having a regular income is giving me.

2. It is really interesting having a 3 year project and been able to think in terms of this.

3.  I am really enjoying working closely with Abi it feels like within the Eastwood project a different way of working is emerging for me.  I would not say its more thoughtful but it does feel more connected to what I think research can be - or perhaps do.

4. I'm enjoying reading more and more systematically. ( see not going so well also)

5. I have really enjoyed my supervisory meetings - each one has felt like what a I thought conversations at universities would be like before I actually went and realised the weren't. I feel respected and I feel valued and think they are a great and supportive team.

6.  I think I am working out how to work with my life experience , my connections , and the things I'm good at in the context of my research.  This has been really hard but probably the area where I have learned the most.

6 things that are not going as well.  

1. I've found it harder than expected to adjust to the intellectual isolation of doing a PhD. I hadn't really anticipated it.

2. I've secretly found my dyslexia a challenge - its made me notice and become aware of my coping strategies. I have become aware they are no longer fit for purpose but struggle to do the work to sort myself out- 52 years is a long time to just about get by.

3.  A couple of months ago I would have said that I felt a bit isolated and thought there would be more structure.  Not in terms of my PhD but things I could get involved in at ESRI. I know there are things like the visual methods group and the labs but it hasn't felt like the best time to get involved - they feel like a distraction.

4.  I don't think I am reading systematically enough - I have bad habits that need breaking.  I think some of the texts and ideas I have been encouraged to explore by my supervisors have been a little to difficult and very eclectic.  The most useful stuff I've read has being historical - Dewey  especially and some specific writing on Play and of course Collin Ward. I've also got a lot from reading some stuff on methods and ethnography Sarah pink and Eric Lasseter especially.    I feel like this reading has worked well to start mapping out a field.  New materialism - speculative realism and some post structural text  and also writing on affect has being interesting but to be honest I can easily get overwhelmed when I try and think through some of this writing in relation to the fieldwork and the idea of residency as method.

5.  The ethics process feels like a mess.  The rest of the logistics has not being easy for me but I have never worked within an institution or had a job so that's probably to be expected.  Navigating ethics has felt over complicated and without any rational that makes sense in the context of the research I'm proposing. On the positive side it has made me think deeply about ethical issues and consider things in a different way but I don't think this has being helped by the mechanism of applying.

6. I thought I would have more clarity and direction by now - I'm not sure if the fact I haven't is good or bad.


You are now supposed to whittle the list down to 4 then 3 then the most important single thing but to shorten the process I think I will just do the best thing and the worst thing


The best thing 

The time and space for thinking- this means not having to rush around all the time looking for work and threading things together and pretending they make sense.  It feels like a massive privilege and it feels like the first proper pause I've had since I stopped been a dad at home in 2002.  I'm not sure I deserve it but I think it is my absolute duty to make the most of it and try and keep happy and engaged through it. It's cheating a bit as this should be one thing but part of this is getting to work with such brilliant people like Abi Geof Kate and Laura but also people at playgroup and people at the adventure playground -

The least best thing.

Fighting the nagging bit of self doubt about not been good enough.  I know we all have this and its different for everyone.  My slow reading speed and my dyslexia ( as Geoff would say - the haunting of it)  are bigger than I expected- so possible in a true and honest systems thinking kind of a way I should flag this up here. 

A precise way to capture a storm

It has been a few weeks since I last blogged.  This is due to waiting to get confirmation of ethical approval and because I am with struggling to read and didn't want to admit it.  I have had the idea that my PhD can be thought of as a snowman.  Kate suggested I think of Four Pillars of Wisdom but I told her that like Ruskin's Lamps there are in fact Seven and perhaps at the moment this is to many.  A snowman like an insect has three body parts.  A head, a body and then a pile of snow at the bottom that helps it stand up and is supposed to look like feet.

A snowman also uses some ready-made objects, sticks are appropriated for arms, coal or stones for eyes and buttons and a carrot for a noes.  We never put hats or scarves on our snowman; it seems stupid to try and keep them warm.  I like the idea of a snowman as it gives me phases to work through and a way to imagine all the work building towards something.  I also think that a snowman is  apologetically autotelic my new word that means for its own sake. This is a move for me to think of the process of writing my PhD may not serve much of a purpose beyond itself is potentially liberating, both a giving up on and a stepping into a space full of potential.

At the moment I'm making two big balls for the head and the body.  I'm rolling the snow up on the grass lawn, around and around in circles, inscribing green marks in the white.  The snow is perfect, nice and sticky and crunches as it pulls itself clean out of the frozen grass.  The head is the theory and the literature review; what I am calling my reading.  I keep finding snow that won't stick it is dry and behaves a bit like dust, either not sticking at all or compressing so much that it's barley visibly adding to the balls diametre.   I keep getting distracted from what the head is supposed to be made of or what it will do.  This is partly me, partly necessary and partly a feeling of been slightly adrift. 

I'm not officially allowed to start on the body yet or what could be called my work in the field.  I've been working out how to start this snowball.  I've enjoyed reading about auto ethnography and I'm looking forward to trying to write something a little different. Again I'm not sure what this will look like but it is an exciting proposition.  I nearly have full ethical approval for both projects and I'm working well with Abi.  I'm testing an approach out in Rotherham - I'm trying to be  sensitive to the space.  This is a tuning into affect or perhaps its something else but I feel like I'm learning how to do a very specific type of practice that suits me.  I am tentatively thinking about writing something more detailed and specific but just never seem to get the time to sit down and do it.  I've not really started properly at the adventure playground as I don't have ethical consent but I am doing some groundwork.  I'm not clear where my snowman starts or finishes here but as soon as I have ethical approval I will plan for what matters and what can melt away.  

I've not decided what the branches of the arms, the carrot for the nose or the coal for the buttons represent. I think as they are things that you need to find and the things that persist after the snowman melts they may be activities that are happening that are not directly part of the PhD.  This could be the project I'm doing now in Sheffield and Venice called Never-land, Or our ODD project.  They cannot be part of the PhD or the snowman of my analogy yet its impossible not to have them  around.  I can't not use these parts of my life as spaces to think about other parts.  They are the finishing touches that can help represent something else and ensure the snowman looks like something real.

I put the picture of the storm in by Leonardo because I was amazed how precise his drawing was of something so chaotic.  It made me think that if I'm successful this is what my PhD or snowman will attempt to do and this is the challenge.  Not to simplify but to find routes to complexity.  I find this thought exciting as it makes it feel more like an art practice with an internal logic that can resist external logic.  This is probably what PaR or Research Creation has to offer, a resistance to what you are supposed to do by something that feels to the individual more important. This is my snowman and I will build it slowly precisely and make sure I continue to have fun. and now I'm off on holiday