Week 9 in the big brother House (new)sense

My daily regime is now established.  I get up about 8.30 and spend around 2 hours reading a Thousand Plateaus.  I normally manage about 15 pages, this is my main achievement for the day.  I don't find it difficult to read though I can see how the thinking grows in you and makes difficulties.  In the Plateau about sedimentation they refer to a story that I have read by Arthur Conan  Doyle.  This keeps coming back to me as its about digging so deep that we prick the earth and this is what they are hoping to achieve in their writing- dig so deep they prick the collective mind of thought. In saying mind of thought I flag I am understanding to an extent the assemblage with its back to the Abstract machine that is a body without organs that are all part of the same thing but hold a difference that is temporally located within Bergson's notion of time as subjectivity not something we are within but something we are of  (mind becomes both mined as in dug out mind as in mine and mind as in mind the gap- the minor parts of language) .   Everything is different but the same thing, all the concepts role together as do the days and this is the point I take a breath.  As a problem arises with a strand of a concept they tag on or jump to another concept and then say it's different but the same.  There is an ironic strand that flows through the book, at points they cross the philosophers 4th wall and like Lovejoy in the 90s speak directly to the reader or the camera to fill in some gaps in the plot.  These are always - we are bit sorry for making you read this stuff but it may be worth it for you  to stick with us - they are jolts and little wake ups (are you still there!).  I find them strangely absent in the secondary literature apart from Massumi who has adopted their trick to separate the dog from his vomit.

It is funny to look to Deleuze and Guattari to structure my open time, to mark the passing of the days.  I cannot imagine many things other than a long personal illness and recuperation that would afford an opportunity for paying such attention.  With this move towards a difference of understanding comes a slight smugness, an ability to spot the Deleuze in Glissant the lack of it in Bennet the hook and hold of it.  I think many people read it as one side of the Velcro and forget for it to be sticky you need both parts the hook bit and the eye bit.  But how to speak of this (New)sense to anybody living a normal life gets more and more difficult.  Even though the work is visceral and human and connected to the flow and rhythm of the everyday it is under the skin writing but not a tattoo. As written text  it is removed and reified the book and the sandal are both becoming objects. 

There are no notes but there is  deeper understanding. 1000 plateus is where the plain of consistency is established.  For me as someone who lives on the edge of nomadic madness, walks confidently in its shadow, the plain fits quite naturally into a life.  I think for most the plain offers an alternative - the points it surfaces as critique are useful for academics who have been schooled to think in certain ways.  The book is not a guide or against anything it is pure philosophy in the western tradition - as set out in What is Philosophy this is the production of NEW concepts on the plain of immanence and boy do they do that over and over again.

It is probably the book that has most changed me in the way I think I think and I'm only starting to be able to read it properly.  I am a coward Nomad who knows he is only happy when he is traveling, I am also the sailor who fell from grace with the sea. I am legion and we are many.

Getting a pickle

I did this drawing as a joke while I attended the Glissant reading group seminar.  That was yesterday, it was a joke for Kate Genever as it was referring to a drawing masterclass Anthony Gormley had done which irritated us both.   This week has felt mainly not to bad in terms of getting through it although at the back of my mind I keep getting in a pickle.

In simple terms after doing all the Odd jobs and bits and bots and pretending to be busy  I could be making art.  I have some ideas for my PhD and some thoughts of works I have never got around to doing and some stuff to learn about projection mapping and a feeling of self doubt.  I could also learn how to use Photoshop better and shift from final cut to Premiere as I am now paying for a subscription.  I now have space to get around to the things I thought I would do with space, well the only thing stopping me doing them was not having the space.

This morning I came up with my best excuse so far in that whatever I do apart from drawings with coffee and a Graphite pencil in the back of a notebook will become the 'thing '.  My arts practice is a bit of a mush but one of my few successes is to carry on as an artist but actually avoid the "thing' that art gets hung on.  I used to think of this as the simulacra.  I understood this to be the golden calf, the distraction away from the truth by the false idol or image of the truth.   I read in Jane Bennets Vibrant Matter that the simulacra is actually the essence of the thing that comes off as a skin and therefore communicates its thingness to the senses. In writing this down though I'm not sure it makes any sense or if I dreamed it.

The worry would be that anything that I made about something in my studio would become a representation of that thing rather than part of it.  The other bits and bots of art in the work that work l are always marginal but still part of the projects.  The unicorns horn, Carlos the Binauarial head, the pirate ships wheel, these things are minor gestures holding a position in the middle of things.

The idea of going to my Shed and renaming it studio and making an art object about a research project is not what I'm doing or what I'm interested in.  For me it would be a useful distraction but for the project this working with art at a distance and producing an object for an inevitable reductive decoding would be an abomination.  Like Freddy Kruger from the nightmare on Elemstrrt films - the bastard son of a 1000 maniacs.

This feels a useful way to think about the lack of desire to make anything.  Firstly why would I do something to muddy the already opaque water, secondly it would be confusing and deliberately distracting thirdly it would be bad art and bad research.  The good thing it makes me feel is I'm taking PhD research seriously and for this 6 weeks of locking down this is what I have been doing.  I have recognized that this is important, the writing reading and thinking. The making can wait until its on the inside again and not a thin skin like Teflon to fly off and strike my senses with its form but not let anything stick.   

lock down let down

I thought this picture would do. I've been saying its a group of art students making PPE equipment as a joke but does make me wonder what art can actually do in this crises.  Lighten the mood, could be one thing I suppose. 

I wake up everyday with the intention of trying to make some sort of sculpture out of the bits and bods that are left over from Abi's exhibition.  A constructionists hopscotch assemblage that I project images and films onto.  I've downloaded Naum Garbo's communist era manifesto about sculture, it's beautifully emphatic. The recording is from a free 45 inch single that was attached to an art mag in the 60's I'm sure this means something significant. It made me think how conceptual art and pop art  happened around the same time and wonder if one was a reaction to the other or just a fork in a river that we could then think of as a river as it happened before the end of history when rivers were still useful metaphors.

I got up and tried to read a chapter of 1000 plateaus, then I got distracted as it mentioned Arthur Conan Doyle and professor Challenger and  a book called When the world screamed.  I can vaguely remember the character from 1960's British films like At The Earths Core.  In the book he is formidable larger than life, disliked but respected, in the films I think he was slightly bumbling more idiot savant than force of nature.  The Chapter is called the geology of morals, it is a struggle and I have broken off to listen to a reading of the Doyle story on You Tube.   I wonder if this is what I was supposed to do, I read a bit of Conan Doyle science fiction as a teenager and am drawn to his strange spiritualism.  He also worked as a junior Doctor on Spital hill which is very close to my house.  I think that Deleuze and Guattari in choosing Challenger must be constructing the earth as living thing not as literally as Conan Doyle where volcanoes are spots and earth quakes shivers but also not as loosely as James Lovelock with his Gai theory.

And the pricking of the planet to hear it scream is a very funny approach to checking if it's alive or more to let it know that we, us humans are here on its surface.  All this said I did not fall into this chapter well with its Dali esk lobster illustration to kick it off.  Strata and layers and materials and planes and matter and materials and stuff that is and isn't part of the layers that face the body without organs and don't face it.  I wondered if some of the point was to dislodge the reader from a root of sense.  This is implied in the writing Deleuze and Guattari at a few points, though i suspect this may be Massumi as translator, cross the 4th wall and in a paragraph or two return to hold a hand a while, suggest that perhaps what you are looking for in the text was never there and all you need to take form this reading is this.  There is no single root/route to dig up or to follow.

Alongside this I read Glissant an altogether different text and difficult in its own way.  preparing to talk about it or listen to others talk about it later today.  I was moved by the start where I was put on a slave ship and taken across a sea of violence to a place of violence and I think told that this violence will shape who I and all my ancestors could ever be, not exile or nomad or migrant but something born of a violence that will never be left behind as I have nowhere to leave it but where I am.

I wonder what my excuse is for not making the sculpture even as an experiment and a bit of fun.  I think it may become a simulacra and a dangerous thing.  Stand in for what art can do, was doing on the project, be more than a game at the edges, attempt to redistribute the sensible in a direction that could be dangerous.  I don't think anyone could accept it as a playful distraction without a colosal amount of irreverence which would be counter productive.  I am making excuses but there is also nothing stopping me just having a go and seeing what comes out of it , to write a couple of days off to vanity and exploring materials.  On telly last night Anthony Gormly was making dots on blotting paper, he has OCD and it sometimes makes interesting art and sometimes makes dots on paper.

I like the chaos of this writing I want to be like professor Challenger proved right as the world screams.

Post -Qualtative research as a camping trip

I have been thinking of trying to write something about Post -Qualtative research using the metaphor of a camping trip.  I was doing this in my head to try and work out what the differences are between approaches.  I know this is going to be a very lame attempt but thought if I put it here and share it perhaps it would become a document people could add to and correct and eventually become a teaching tool for post grads.  This is an aspiration and not a prediction.

The camping trip is a metonym.  I have only just learnt what this means and although it sounds clever it is really just calling your vacuum cleaner a Hoover, or national government, Westminster.  I present the camping trip as metonym in the spirit of Lacans points de capiton the notion of the quilting button or tie that holds things close together but allows for separation. This is important as the camping trip as Metonym stands for a set of ideas that are similar but not the same.  These are specifically, new materialism, the ontological turn,  post-Cartesian and mostly anything with a flat ontology where the idea of the human is re-imagined.  To those of us who watch Gavin and Stacy its also a reference to uncle Brin's notorious fishing trip.

a general new materialist camping trip.

You pack the car but then decide to camp in your garden as it doesn't make much difference where you go.  There is no inside or outside of the tent but the tent is as important as anything else.  The people inside the tent and the people outside the tent are the same as is everything else.  This includes camping equipment and a moth that flutters around the gas lamp.  At night when we go to sleep even our dreams are part of the camping trip as thoughts even subconscious ones are things.  Deleuze and Guattari are inside the tent, they are talking about all sorts of crap as they have smoked a splith and they say that drugs are flaky so they are like dandruff.  They like camping because it reminds them nomads. Guattari reminds Deleuze to keep passing the open windows but he is sure to forget.

a new materilist camping trip with Karen Barad. 

You pack the car all your equipment is an apparatus that is completely entangled  with all other aspects  life, the fact you are going camping is entangled in the apparatus everything is apparatus which doesn't have any edges.  The inside of the tent is the same as the outside of the tent.  If you perform an agential cut by dividing the tent inside with an internal bedroom it doesn't really make any difference everything including the moth is complicit in what is going on.   Deleuze and Guattari are invited but decide not to come as the trip is really a science school outing and they do not wear the white coats of a royal science on the inside or the outside.



 a new materilist camping trip with Jane Bennet.

You pack the car and drive in a circle and come back to your garden but you experience it differently.  You notice a worm and see its Jiz which is like its life force and how it helps to turn the soil.  Your tent does not separate the inside from the outside but a life force that we can't say is god but looks a little bit like god flows between both. The moth and the lamp are sort of the same but you have a sneaky feeling that the moth is actually a bit more important than the lamp or for that matter a tent peg. Deleuze and Guattari are in the tent they are pissing in a pan because they have one and carefully pouring it out of the door flap so nobody can see them.  They secretly like been invited on the camping trip but  know that Jane doesn't really like them unless they are talking about worms and Jizz and they are keen not to be seen out with her.

 

 A camping trip with actor network theory. 

This camp is very organised the tent exists and it has an inside and an outside and everybody and everything are all part of the trip and they all support each other .  Without the camping trip nothing would really exist in any way shape or form that would make it worth talking about.  There are some big personalities on the trip its just unusual that one happens to be a moth and the other a match head.

A speculative realist camping trip.

Nobody gets in the car because they can't decide if it exists or not.  The tent can have an inside or an outside and it can exist anywhere.  Deleuze and Guattari are invited and even though they are both dead they turn up in the flesh not as spirits. Harman forgets his rucksack and has to borrow a sleeping bag and a camping kettle.  Loads of people turn up with high expectations but they don't know where to go or pitch their tent as it feels a bit like tomorrow could be cancelled due to lack of interest.

A research creation camping trip.

Everyone decides to sleep under the stars and that a tent is a structuralist imposition of the envelope that  could only be felt as global capitalism. Someone starts to whittle a stick with a penknife but half the group is concerned they are making a spear.  The other half think its the emergence of a nomadic war machine that will eventually change the state.  At 10.30 it gets cold and everyone decides to go home to their centrally heated houses in the suburbs because lighting a fire would make them part of the problem and not the solution.




 
 

Day 43 in the big brother house

When I took this photo of the old markets as they were demolished I thought of the Paul Nash painting. I first encountered  sea ice in York art gallery it is the painting that first drew me to art.  The image fits my memory of a lonely younger childhood and the fact I was always in the gallery on my own reminds me of this isolation.  Both images remind me of the first world war and the melancholic beauty of isolation,  feeling a long way away from the rest of the world and other people.

I'm writing to avoid reading.  I'm grinding through a thousand Plateaus and really enjoying the densely packed text.  I have done a close reading of the Nomadic war machine plateau and I am much the wiser though not in a conventional this is what it says way.  I am struck by the connections to Ruskin; the ideas of the Gothic and the idea of a "life force" seem very close to a Ruskinian way of thinking about the world.  I have found some writing about this but it's marginal, few of the writers actually bother to "get' Ruskin, to feel his orietation.  I suppose scholars are worlds apart in terms of areas of interest and nobody really sees the political critique in Ruskin unless you read him as a friend that needs forgiving.

In the bath this morning I had a thought about the ideas I was working with before Christmas and how this related to residency.   When Kate actually realised that the residency I kept speaking of was within  ESRI she referred to it as Russian dolls, I liked this. However as one doll opens you need to open a another  this unveiling requires a new layer of smoke and mirror.  A layer of the secret plan is exposed and somehow I needed to take the flow underground again. The secret plan only really works in terms of giving a direction of flow when it is submerged; on the surface it is to easy to know.  This is how clever scholars like Massumi use Deleuze they ingest him and then puke and shit him all over the world. As Massumi quotes Becket - Habit chains the dog to his own vomit. 

The interesting thing is that I was chained to my habits of residency at the start of the PhD process and I was trundling along fine in the bubble of my own world.  I thought that residency was a way that artists learnt to be present in new spaces, to understand them from a different perspective but to learn to dwell or bide a while in their own way. This way of working requires a settling in and a location of positions to map yourself into.  Reading about nomadology this week I have decided that this is the true nature of the residency, not the settling but the moving differently through space.  I think that the issue is that this moving often requires a strong subjective and to an extent fixed to a person to provide a sense of what is moving.  In simple terms this could be artistic expertise or institutional validation of a practice.  Because we are moving then we need to know where our edges are so we can move them along with us.  

What thinking the residency through the nomad can do is recognise the state of movement which is not related to fixed points.  Mostly when we think of movement we think about a journey that takes us from one place to another through a space which is mapped or mappable ( Striated).   The Nomad does not offer  a different way of moving it affords a different perception of space. Here space is open we can only travel through and between and there are no fixed locations, the desert and the steppe are unmapable ( smooth).  I think that this can make a new sense of residency and change the focus.  It requires a break with traditions and ideas of mastery expertise and training.  It asks questions of different types of knowing, a knowing that is to do with movement and not dwelling.  The contribution of nomadology is to suggest that the sets of relations or the assemblages are within a different space.  However much we strive for an alternative methods to understand the world the Universities construction of knowledge paradigms are exemplars of Striated rather than smooth space.  The Nomad is a nice way to think of myself and to explain away my lightness and inability to attach myself to territory.  The interesting thought from new materialism is what happens if the boundary of ourselves is less defined, if we think of flows and life forces rather than mastery and intentions.  I was thinking this through Dewey and the idea of art as always in process with no concept of finished object.  Perhaps this is what needs to be explained in a felt way, moved towards through a practice that is not located within a person. These thoughts are hard and useful.  In the Russian doll of my residency at ESRI I don't really find or feel this kind of thinking. When I encounter thought at the university it happens on the surface of things, what is thought to be underneath is not really changed.

I started writing this as a return to thinking about the post -qualitative and  why it was important.  I have tried to explain this to people outside of universities and it seems really pointless.  For most people and for me when I was outside the university the really good thing that it could offer was a structured approach and structured thought.  For example a discourse analysis can point to how a text reinforces patriarchy. An ethnographic study can draw attention to important parts of culture that  are normally obscure.  This system at its edges looks to nomadology to crack some of its striations, to frack the system to let out something useful, the rhizome replaces the Arbor because the tree can only produce a certain type of fruit. The university however remains an orchard cultivating the same apples and pears.  When I started this work I was a vagabond, journeyman,  itinerant,  diddycoy I have been taken in but the shelter I've been offered is not really a good fit.  I enjoy been on the outside of the glass house so I can through stones.

Tuesday morning

Today feels a bit random.  I have this in lock down problem in that I feel like I should make some art but the kind of art I could make would be out of context.  It would be a performance to prove a point but I don't know what the point would be.

The art I have been thinking of making was an assemblage of bits and bods from the project with Abi making a sort of sculpture and projecting onto it referencing russian constructivism. The idea was to try and make something physical, a sculpture  and see what would come out of it - stuff comes from stuff - an experiment in material traces. When it was something that I couldn't find the time to get around to it presented a goal I secretly believed I was frustrated in not been able to realise.  It was some sort of attempt to redistribute the sensible - to make this action part of my research, but it was not a very coherant thing.

The problem is in the current context the idea does not have enougth weight to drive itself forward.  It's a sad truth.  It's also that as an idea it has a massive potential to be miss read - there seems little place for irony in my current world and my minor art that hangs from a sleder thread cannot carry the weight of it.

I think it would be better to do something completely different but that different thing also eludes me.

Today I applied to be part of the Yorkshire sculpture network.  I wrote this blog. I did all the final evaluation for my arts council project. This felt like a wet fart at the moment of pressing send no real bronx cheer.   If the art making is entangled with the research then it cannot sit outside of it to the extent where everyone sees it as separate.  I wonder if this is the reason I can't commit to workshop time, a fear of discovering myself adrift on the outside of everything.

When I walked down the canal yesterday I could hear the foundaries and distant noise of machinery and people at work, muffled radio stations drifting from ventilation pipes.  All the time the birds singing and the water offering a very special still silence to the mix.  I thought about recording it on my reel-to-real tape.  This is the redistribution of the sensible the lock down has brought us but as I try and grasp a bit of it it suddenly becomes stupid.  I feel like a reverse Midas turning the gold of art thoughts to the reality of the world. Some days we lose our way.

Perhaps I need to go for a long walk and then cook tea- activities that do not need irony or blogs to justify them will see us through.

I have worked out my PhD - again

I have actually worked out my PhD this morning.  I was grumpy yesterday as I listened to Zizeck too much and thought I had wasted a day but then I talked to Kate about old projects and felt a bit better. 

I am not sure why I felt better.  I remembered been in a Sheffield station. I was recruiting an academic to our Studio legacy project, all full of hope and the energy. This is required to get you through filling out the extensive case for support and its appendixes.  To try and shine a light on our aspiration  I told a story. I explained how at a conference an artist and an archeologist had delivered a project about Quaker sheep farmers in the North York Moors now and used the dairies of Quakers in the same area at the turn of the century.  They made a sensitive film of the working landscape juxtaposed with the modern day farmers reading about the hardships at the turn of the century - a nice and gentle  piece of work - It did not try or assume to be more than it was.   When the floor opened to questions instead of talking about what the film was doing or paying attention to the academics made suggestions of how to make it better.  Things like 

" I was confused because they were reading about winter but on the film it was a sunny day and someone was mending a tractor?"

The consensus in the room was that the film was confusing. My point was that despite all the clever people in the room there seemed to be an inability to actually be an audience for a piece of art.  The academics were disabled by a knee jerk reaction to turn things into textual or at least semiotic meaning.  I also have a story I made up about Erin Manning and Brian Massumi talking dirty to each other in the bedroom, that would make a similar  messy point but that's another story.

The academic I was chatting to took a different meaning from the intended and asked me why I had an axe to grind.  I had being thinking that I want to do a project that makes this better - finds ways for people from different disciplines to work with art in ways more akin to normal people help them live better with their disability; access to art for the text constipated over thinkers. I wanted this as I perform myself as someone who tries to do a good job - to find a cause and do the best I can.  This was not supposed to be a single story with axes to be ground it was a trace that led to more deep seated barriers to a way of working, a call to work not arms.

From this point things started to go astray in all our projects on connected communities.  Territory entered into all our fields and the age old battles began to rage in our backyard.  It wasn't that we had been unaware of the battle it was more we felt  removed from it within a bubble of friendships.  The art school the art market, the art literature, were present but we were the peasants in the farms that only saw the soldiers passing through and had no allegiance and less interest.  The studio project inadvertently dropped us into a battlefield and I had not ground my axe or remembered where I had put it.

I am sat infront of the Skype screen and you are recording and I am wondering what you want from me and then I sleep on it and I work it out. I work it out properly then lay it onto Deleuze and Guattari - this is the right way around for theory - most academics do it the wrong way around or perhaps their right way is my wrong way. The thing  that I do is act as a nomad in residence - not settled in any one place and not carrying a bag of tricks or identifiable set of skills.  As Holly says

" Dad anybody could do what you do but nobody ever would."

This is what I do -  what everyone could do but what nobody ever would - which leads me to thinking about territory.  After yesterday I thought about my RD2 interview and the idea of not giving away my practice the complete and only sense of keeping it secret. From this comes the notion of arts practice as the secret plan, the plan that is, that has to remain, a secret even to me.   This is the point as as it becomes public it claims territory when it is private it allows me to proceed or perhaps the project to proceed in smooth rather than striated space.  As the art object or thing that is preferal or ignored it sits outside of everything it is neither minor or major or molar or molecular it is nomadic.  If it is unseen it does not become part of the meaning making where it is mounted to a board put in a frame or put on a wall - it is able to become what it can become, it has a potential for emergence.  In putting it forward it is fixed. Its potential which was never great is rung out like a dirty tea cloth.  It was never what the project was about anyway it was merely a node in the nomadic war machine of residency.


A bit more theory - Here goes then.

The line from new -materialism is infact the the flat ontology but rather than going from a Barad or a Bennet perspective I approach the flatness through a Guattari and Deleuze notion of smooth space and therefore presenting art as part of  a nomadic war machine and the artist working as journeyman nomad that does not take their territory with them or settle.  Kate used to say I should be a  train always passing through and not stopping.  The notion of residency is then not associated with dwelling but linked to moving through smooth rather than striated space. This position is counter to a tradition where artist with expertise explores space through established method with the intention of finding and communicating new meaning.  The points in projects such as the unicorn horn or Carlos are territorilisations and deterrotirilsations but as they are minor they do not divide space they merely allow for what Whitehead would call a flight of the speculative imagination.  A dropping down below the clouds to find a position, a 'where you are' at that moment rather than trying to map an area or terrain. 

I take this little nit ( this was a typo but I quite like it) of theory and worldize it play it alongside the residency and then record both together so neither takes control neither is allowed to striate the space. This I think is what I have done with the idea of residency and art since the start of working in place across different fields of knowledge.  Hold the idea of the nomad and nomad thought.  I'm sure there is a lot written about this but if I look at my problems on this little journey into writing then they are all linked to space been closed down and structured.  How ludicrous it seems to be doing any sort of research where the territory is fully marked out with ethical procedures where power enacts itself in very simple ways.  How riddled and structured the academic space and approaches to knowledge.  The desire is not for transgression nit (again another typo - this nit is god sent)  is for nomad thought and many many artists can bring an element of this without having to think too hard about it.

Amazingly in my nomadic mind I have found a section in the nomadic war machine  chapter in 1000 plateaus that talks of the Gothic in a very similar way to Ruskin. I mused in the bath about wether the Gothic tribes were actually our indigenous people. In tune with this northern climate in our austerity and love of the changing elements.   Offcourse I am not the first to notice this and I am biased but I think that both Ruskin and D and G find elements of the same thing in the Gothic architecture and process of building cathedrals.  This would be an interesting connection for a literature review (nit).

I wonder if this idea of the residency as nomadic drawing on the flatness or the desire for flatness  that emerges in new materialism has any legs. The legs seem to drop off things really quickly at the moment.  My dad told me this joke when I was younger it is rude but I think as it has a mirror in it then I could probably say in the current climate of poor schlarship that it references Lacan.

A man buys a magic mirror from a car boot sale and brings it home not knowing it can grant wishes.

His wife looks in the mirror, at her sagging aging breast and says 'Mirror mirror on the wall make my breast look like they did before.'  Ping a flash of light and her breast return to how they had looked when she was 19.

Her husband enters the room and realizes the potential power of the mirror, its gaze, his smallness and his desire (nit Lacan) the inadequacy of his Object petit  a (nit)  "Mirror mirror on the wall make my penis touch the floor" and the punch line as it hits you in the face - HIS LEGS DROP OFF.


When I talk of mending the toilets at the adventure playground as part of the residency the problem with people making sense of this is they cannot see the actions as flat. Mending the toilets or building a sculpture from discarded wood or talking by the fire in relation to a residency are flat activities in that they are in the same category of activity.

 I am not that sure if Barads approach to new materialism really sets out a theory of flatness in the same way.  Agential realism proposes a different relationship in fact it is not really flat its just that human consciousness does not sit above anything could I take some aspects of this thinking and flatten them? 

This way of thinking raises all sorts of issues around research creation and creative methods and PaR if I choose to draw from any of them as they are not nomadic  war machines or assemblages - they originate in actions of territorilisation - it is their ontology the why of them.  Nomadology and residency sound oxymoronic yet the nomad has to move through places just like the settler and the dweller and it is this moving through which is the ontology of residency.

propositions.

Nomadic artist in residence the artist is always moving through.
 
The nomadic residency is always within smooth space.

Art is not a nomadic war machine if it aims form a territory or to settle.

I like this idea waking up and reading everyday and thinking. It feels like I have attached a pull along string to the end of the last RD2 I did that was actually going somewhere. I have pulled the thing through all the shit in between like a unicorn on a string.  The flatness of things is what I take from new materialism the position not as master either crafts-person or puppeteer.   The hypothetical positioning behind, below or in the middle yet the recognition that the human or the nomad performs a  position within the smooth space of a residency and the nomad subjective is not located in a singular bounded human body yet it is something that requires attention.

When it was in my head and just about to come out it felt clearer than this but I had to get it down in some shape or form - so in simple terms this emerges through the work with Abi and is expanded into the work at the playground - it was always going to be a hard PhD to write or to mark.