Lecture 14th May - 'Research funding is a schizophrenic animal'

Prof. Tom Abba
First half given by Tom Abba in leiu of the Dean, Paul Gough, but with Gough's notes.

About Assignment 5:

Ambitions, 10 year plan, funding proposal, almost anything. I think I want to investigate the measure the communities' secretary Hazel Blears is hoping to put through in June: making funding available to use 'slack space'- empty shops etc- as art galleries, community centres and the like. My area of town, St. George, or more specifically, Redfield, has no art and is quite rundown is places. My intention is to treat this assignment as a practise for applying for this funding. I will discuss this with my tutors this coming Thursday in a tutorial. See Guardian article. Other ideas suggested to my by colleagues is putting on shows at the bookable spaces The Cube and the Hen & Chicken. Walked past the exhibition 'Weapon of Choice' the other day- must try to see this.

1. Idea/questions/where is the work going? New questions, new challenges
2. Unpick question - why - what - where - whom - how? Doability? Plain language --> unambiguous
3. How - methods & methodology. Ways to assess success and maybe change. How will you work? describe work in art language
4. What else is going on? Setting th critical context. How well do you understand the rest of the field, ie, is someone else doing it? Situate within peers
5. Who else is doing this?
6. How well informed are you? Regional/national discussion. Links, networks. Bibliography of work written. How well can you command on the subject?
7. What will be the result? Outcomes and outputs?
8. Assessment- is it worth doing?

Arts & Humanities Research Council website

Bibliographies can include film content, web journals. Referenced throughout text.

Dr. Holly McLaren
Cultural geographer, site-specific artwork. Invited artists to respond to the locality of the town of Oswestry on the England/Wales border; exhibition entitled 'Bordering'.

Production process as action research - network of associations - Vivian van Saaze - Ethnography of Installation Art. Connective threads between geography and art. Rearticulate geography in an explicitly artistic manner. Role of geographer/curator allowed flexibility of roles. Kept a research diary, conducted interviews, methodology.

Points- physical border landscape, emotional cartographies, transitory places, liminal spaces, ambiguous places, landscapes of identity.

Two grants- smaller first to investigate if worth it and then larger delivery grant.

Ruth Jones - Ianuae - horses' significance in Oswestry - performance piece with black & white horse.
Simon Whitehead & Stefhan Caddick - Walking Wall - created a mobile border/barrier. Initially in gallery then walked around
TEA - TEA in Oswestry - two videos, installation & postcards and bags. How to engage in place when only there briefly, marketed tourism.

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Tom's talk was very helpful and I think will prove invaluable. McLaren's lecture, whilst interesting to begin with, became less interesting I think more because of her delivery than anything else. That is a lesson learnt: don't read off pre-written notes and try to vary your tone of voice. Also I thought the artworks in her exhibition seemed somewhat weak and obvious (Whitehead & Caddick and TEA) or pretentiously obscure (Ruth Jones). Although I liked the initial idea I found my mind wandered towards the end.

2nd April Guest Speakers

Duncan Speakman duncanspeakman.net

'Sound artist'. Started off as a sound engineer, went into documentary-making and then sound making (interactive design). Site specific work ('no gallery' policy). Using public/online spaces, MP3 players and locative technology.

A particular influence at an early age was a film called 'Iron Eagle'.

He was inspired by the character's idea to strap a music source to his leg when he was flying, to create a soundtrack to his flight- soundtracking the moment. Speakman took to taping his Dad's Walkman to his leg whilst skateboarding, playing something like Beethoven's 9th Symphony.

"An object cannot compete with an experience" - Hamish Fulton

Ephemerality - temporal moment. Making invisible permanent pieces that require no planning permission.

"Walking in particular drifting, or strolling, is already- with in the speed culture of our time- a kind of resistance" - Francis Alys

Acoustic ecology - movement - not much of an awareness of sound and its influences over us. Schizophrenic sound - removed from original source. Ghosting effect & heightening --> articifical-sounding. Sculpting the world- lazy filmmaker.

"...as a manager of sensorial channels, it questions the relationship between the dweller and his environment and enables new modes of experiencing the city" - Jean Paul Thibaud

Ultrared - recognise sound as a residue of social space. Nostaligic & melancholia.

Piece- flowerpots containing microphones which fed out the recorded conversations onto printed sheets in the Watershed cafe. People reading the printed out sheets would create a recorded cycle. Another piece where an internet chatroom fed to live performers filmed, shown on the net - 'Live Chat'.

Video of a soundwalk. Memory/sight/place. Site specific.

'Sounds From Above The Ground' - Rucksacks with laptop & headphones- two characters are arguing - records current sounds and adds them later and charges order or direction.

Piece - Speakman would walk ahead recording sounds around him which would be relayed to audience following behind. They would hear a noise of eg a door opening before they got to the door.

'Always Something Somewhere Else' - in conjunction with Hewlett Packard. Generative soundwalk. Had to find a specific item - tree or bench etc - which would trigger a story on a handheld GPS device.

'My World Is Empty Without You' (Wings of Desire) - Sent to walk round a city listening to an MP3 player. A performer approaches and speaks part of what the audience is listening to, triggered by the performer via Wifi. To get people to feel more engaged with and connected to the people around them instead of being a passive observer listening to their own, disconnected soundtrack.

Next project- May 14/15/16 - Mayfest
'My World Is Empty Without You'

From mayfestbristol.co.uk: What happens when everyone in the city is listening to the same song? Wearing headphones, the audience travels across the city, an immersive soundtrack filling their ears, turning the world around into a poignant and personal cinema.

As strangers drift past you and events unfold it becomes harder to separate the staged and the real.

Exploring ideas of social disconnection in the age of the iPod; part love song, part theatre … My World is Empty Without You will leave marks in your heart.

My World is Empty Without You is a development of Duncan Speakman’s piece of the same name shown at Mayfest 2008.Commissioned by Mayfest, supported by Arnolfini and developed at the Pervasive Media Studio.

"If contemporary audiences are only interested in experience, can we disguise content as experience?" - ?

Paul Thirkel

Etching, woodblock, print. Creates narrative by layering, simplifying. Increasing size of small items. Photogravure. Research old printing- collotype --> Darwin's Expressions of Emotion in Man & Animals used this technique.










Photos of fruit making patterns. Printed one image in 22 different mediums for use as reference material. Digital arts portfolio. Digitally generated collotype. Collage, photocollage. Max Ernst. Printing process can abstract an image. Duchamp- The Green Box. Henry Moore & Richard Hamilton also translated notes from La Boite Verte.

CNC Milling: creates a mold using a photo, use the mold to create a positive impression and impress that into a ceramic tile. Then flood the tile with glaze and it creates the photograph on ceramic. Research into 3D colour printing.



Peter Walters

Fine Print Research. Originally engineering draftsman for 2 years, then studied Industrial Design BA, MA, PhD in Sheffield. For MA designed a pair of Toucan secateurs for ease of use an to being some business to Sheffield. Unfortunately now the product is made in China and Walters makes little money out of it.

Currently works to use rapid prototyping (3D printing) technology in arts & crafts. Mechanisms are becoming more widely available. Supporting & collaborating with artists and robotics.

Z-Corporation Power Binder 3D printing (see YouTube video) Also photopolymer resins. Z-Scanner can take handmade maquette, scan it, alter it and print it out or print out molds in another material. Using ceramic powder with 3D printer and firing it can create durable ceramic pieces.

Heart Robot project with David McGoran.

Made 3D sound print of the printer itself printing.

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Thoughts
Really taken with Speakman's work, always been fascinated by the idea of soundtracking a moment since am a musical and visual person I feel the connection and relationship between the two. I am very aware of how different music will change an image or situation. I love the idea of recordings mixing with realtime noises and sounds and making people really notice what is going on around them. I know I hear and listen to things that other people don't- I earwig conversations a lot, listen to ambient noise out of curiosity. The use of technology in his work interests me too because I love gadgets- the idea of finding a bench and it triggering a story seems brilliant to me, I love the fact that the same narative can be adhered to any bench in any city- it tells a story and a history. Speakman's documentary filmmaking background has provided a great basis for his storytelling and I think he does it very well. I look forward to hopefully participating in his Mayfest contribution next month.

With Thirkel's work I found the CNC Milling technique very interesting. However I am not particularly interested in print making although the collotype printer drew my attention.

Walter's explanation of how the 3D printer works and its applications really inspired me- I never knew this was possible but it's amazing. The possibilities of what this technology can do are enormous and it makes it easy to create something that human hands would find impossible.

Identifying criteria session

This session featured an hours' worth of lectures from Aranxta Echarte ('Research Methods') and Rachael Miles. Rachael's was a kind of walk-through example of a way of doing our next assignment.

Aran's lecture

'Research methods' - Introduction to methods-related terminology

Three types of research methods-

• Qualitative research
• Quantitative research
• Mixed research (qualitative & quantitative study)
  

Qualitative research traditions:

• Heuristic research (put yourself in the situation)
• Phenomenological research (describe objectively)
• Hermeneutical research (looking at the context around the situation)

Quantitative research methods:

• Random sampling
• Selected sampling

Qualitative research methods:

• Participant observer - collection & analysis of field data
• Direct observation - physically or using camera/other media
• Interviewing - structured or unstructured (set questions)
• Case studies

• Data research
• Experience research- research as exploratory or investigative process - repetition/test/variation (change external factors)/exploratory research (set specific rules)

Analysis:

• Analysis of examples - explain why these examples
• Descriptive diagnosis
• Diagnostic research
• Collection
• Replication - naturalistic is copying and learning a technique
• Hypothesis testing
• Variable-based research - how a variable effects what is being done

Also- meta-analysis - analysis of the analysis.

Rachael's lecture

Look at the media in terms of what you can glean from them and how you can apply these things to your own work.

Often research is secondary- re-presentation- DVD, photo etc. It is difficult to work out your criteria from second-hand information so she suggests going to see the work live.

Set of criteria (descriptions until set) could be aspirational- how you could want to look at your or others' work.

Looking/re-looking through representation/writing/redefine.

Roni Horn
You Are The Weather | Dead Owl | Ant Farm | This Is Me, This Is You | Asphere

• Tautological (needless repetition)
• Viewing mechanisms
• Empirical (derived from experiment and observation rather than theory)
• Parallax (the apparent displacement of an object as seen from two different points that are not on a line with the object)

Seeing & looking

• Seeing - appearance & understanding; habitual
• Looking - searching to understand/investigate; the gaze; mechanical aspect of thinking

Group session

We were divided up into 4 groups and given a word. We were asked to name as many artists as we could that full under that description. We had 20 minutes to do this, then we had to think of the antithesis of that word and had another 20 minutes to name artists that fell under that category. The words were:

• Political | Apolitical/politically inert (my group)
• Narrative
• Traditional
• Figurative

I thought this was a brilliant assignment and it provoked a lot of debate within our group. We found a lot of artists who would fall into 'political'- I remember suggesting my perennial favourite, Jan Svankmajer, for making work that loudly criticised the political regimes he lived under, and Christian Dior for creating flamboyant fashion during the rashioning of WW2. I think all of us got to discover artists we'd never heard of from other people. However when it came to political's antithesis, it took us a good 10 minutes to even decide on the word. Even when we had done that, after lengthly discussion, we came to the conclusion that there was no 'apolitical' artists- that even if the artist themselves never intended the work to be political, the era, social atmosphere or audience always politicises work. It was a fascinating discussion and certainly lively and I really enjoyed it.

First lecture - Lecture on Methods

From notes written at the time:

IAN BRIGGS
Three methods
1. Comparative analysis (compare & contrast)
from Harvard Writing Center

• Frame of reference --> your context --> external
• Grounds for comparison --> why these pieces?
• Thesis --> claim/argument
• The 'whereas' --> both sides of the argument
• Organisational scheme
• Linking A + B etc.

2. Observer participation
Professional discourse - talking about work within your area. Observer participation is stepping outside of your own dicipline and explaining your work to someone not part of your professional practise. Comes from anthropology, from ethnography, used by artists such as Susan Hiller. Necessary to observe own work dispassionately, exercise self-reflexivity and try to remove presuppositions. Academic diciplines and new diciplines start up between existing ones, questioning current conventions.

3. Bricolage
Combining different influences, concepts or media to create something new (see Wikipedia's entry). Example is the punk movement or the cargo cult the 'Prince Philip Movement' (Wikipedia article).

BRET WILSON
Characteristics of research

• Rigorous & systematic
• Critical & analytical --> open to question and not dogmatic
• Reproducible & independent --> same answers on repeats
• Communicable & novel
• Testable predictions

Synthesis <--> analysis

To be testable, a prediction or theory must be capable of being proved wrong or else it is a belief.

Perspective is an example of a paradigm: a way of seeing that makes previous theories redundant.

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Thoughts on this lecture

Briggs' section on comparative analysis was familiar ground for me- it was only 2005/6 that I wrote my BA dissertation comparing Rachel Whiteread's monumental pieces House & Embankment using this method and it is still relatively fresh in my mind.

I was initally dubious of the necessity to state the validity of observer participation; however after a while I remembered that at the previous session, gathered in our smaller groups, I had had difficulty in explaining my work when faced with cross-diciplinary students and that this concept was relevant to me. It is easy to forget how to explain your work to someone from another media that is related yet distant to an extent. I realised I have developed a language to explain my work to friends and family who know very little of the visual arts language at all but I cannot use the same style to other arts students. It is patronising at least and perhaps not very informative to students who could easily understand what I want to explain if I find the right language. It was a strange deja vous to hear the MA Printmaking, Fine Art & By Project students using the language I used for three years on my Fine Art BA but have all but forgotten how to use. I find animation a more practical and less wordy dicipline than fine art, and in some ways the better for it: I can explain myself in a much more 'everyman' language whereas fine art requires its own definitions for regular-use words. After being away from it for a few years, fine art language sounds pretentious and hollow.

Bricolage as a concept is also familiar to me from my bachelor's course, from studying outsider art and certain sculptors. Was interested to hear about the cargo cult obsessed by Prince Phillip.

I found Bret Wilson an engaging speaker but I remain somewhat unconvinced the characteristics he listed can be so dirctly applied to reseach within the arts. His giving perspective as an example of a paradigm that changed people's theories helped although I think I need examples on how, for example, to rigorously test an artistic idea.

I felt that Briggs' lecture 'cannot see the wood for the trees'- it concerned itself so energetically with the methods of research that I found myself wondering where the art comes in. I am not sure this focus on research in art is really that helpful. I am reminded of Prof. Jon Dovey's session during our Tuesday evening contextual lectures entitled 'ScreenWork - Media Practise as Research Journal'. I actually became angry during this lecture because I thought Dovey's ScreenWork DVD journal was pointless- the idea that an artist would make a film purely for research purposes only with the intention to further the collective knowledge of the artistic community appears to me to be self-indulgent and irrelevent. Art should be made for its own sake or surely it loses that momentum or energy that inspired its creator in the first place? I cannot imagine putting all that effort into designing a film to try out a new technique and then submitting that for peer review, instead of moving the embryonic concept/technique forward to a finished work of art. Dovey's support of ScreenWork was not aided by the rough, unfinished-looking and ultimately uninspiring pieces he showed us from this project. Or maybe I just don't get it yet.