Research Knowledge Practice Lab, Birmingham

The Research, Knowledge, Practice Lab was BIAD's first event of this format, for postgraduates and research staff, for a day of 'interaction, to initiate dialogue, foster connections and reflexive critique around our key themes of research - knowledge - practice.'

The format gave plenty of time to dialogue with other participants - somehow more effective than the usual refreshment breaks and networking opportunities. Perhaps it was the hi-tech drinks machine that took several minutes and a conversation-a-cup to brew gourmet selections from the little nozzled sachets in draws that could have come from a Sunday sweet shop...
... or the speed-dating exchanges of 3 minutes to talk about eachothers research before moving on to the next person - BIAD hosts inside the circle, visitor moving anticlockwise outside. Interesting what comes out when talking about the same thing half a dozen times over to different people.  The day before I had proudly conveyed my research to the Bateson Salon in as few as 6 key words - that miraculously generated interest with no puzzled expressions and even had people coming back later in the day saying 'that sounded interesting... tell me more...'

"I'm an artist researcher and working with people, landscape, media and technology"

So today that worked as springboard, but quickly got adapted to pre-empt the response of 'what's the research?' ... a pervasive media for eudemonia (and all that entails)

Dr Mick Wilson's keynote was a brilliant reminder of the broader context of 'artistic research' (as is the term of preference amongst EU English-as-second-language-speakers, Mick says).
It's rare to hear someone speak who has this mix of educational policy, EU research partnerships, the contemporary art-world, PhD supervision and their own experimental collaborative arts projects.
Mick reminded us that artists have, for centuries, been producing texts to explain what they do - manifestos, artists statements and the like. And that we should remember that the avant garde etc. have historically happened elsewhere than in the academy, and recognise that academics such as himself (and all of us in the room, I would add) 'perform criticality but risk losing critique.'
Mick spoke about his projects at the graduate school in Dublin:

• EARN the European Art Research Network
• CAM graduate school (Creative Arts and Media)
• Publications and implications in the EU networks of quality assurance
• PhD candidates and their work - with examples of Mat, Clodagh Emoe's 17x7' quilt that becomes stage, installation, artwork, platform for encounters, and her collaboration with philosopher Simon Critchley. For example Mystical Anarchism, 2009, an event and lecture at a mediaeval monastic site, heresy at the heart of the lecture, filmed and screened a couple of years later with food as a gathering on the mat. Emoe , through her practice, endeavours to configure relationships between the artworld, academy, and something (social) other than both... A challenge to her doctoral thesis is now to return to her artwork from the immersion in philosophy.
• Food and the uncanny has become an ongoing 'thing' as a method to host and engage visiting speakers, with recipes created for such events that are held in domestic spaces. 'Recipe salons' themes of foodmaking, become the vehicle to address questions of contemporary art whilst widening access for more people to engage with the dialogue. In critique, however, foodmaking and sharing moves into traditionally unpaid territories, seeps into domestic time, challenging traditional academic practices as it challenges us to (painfully) 'attend to the conditions of our own labour'
• Another PhD project Mick spoke about is Conor McGarrigle's NAMA-land locative app using layar and animations of monopoly characters to show which of Dublin's buildings have been bought up (post-bankrupcy) by the National Assets Management Agency - and are as such 'owned' by the Dublin public. McGarrigle's success has seen him offered a professorship in America - yet the PhD awaits completion as a step to a future already materialised.

I particularly liked Mick's proposition that research be itself a proposition in relationship with the world - desiring to know something more, or beyond who or where I am in the world. There are inherent problems, but primarily this is an impossible position to take in relation to the uncritical reproduction of university and the uncritical reproduction of the arts world economy. Research can have a very strong ethical relationship with each without forgoing agency. An inherent quality of philology, starting with a tiny fragment of knowledge and using it to elaborate and to read beyond what you already know, leads to not just access to information, but embodied knowledge as part of human dwelling. As contemporary art (likewise sociology and philosophy) has taken upon itself that it can thematise and explore (anything) through its own discipline, Mick concluded with the provocation that a major problem (for the PhD researcher) in the field is to not need to write in another's voice, rather to have confidence in one's own utterances, and to clearly articulate:

• what are you trying to find out?
• how are you trying to find it out?
• why is it worth finding out?
• how will you know when you've found out?

A thought and knowledge-provoking start to the day.

How will you know is a question frequently used in Clean Language in relation to a desired outcome, and probably the most useful at this stage of defining where the PhD ends and what happens next begins.

In a room full of artistic researchers, it's fascinating how quickly divisions of subdivisions become voiced - differences allotted to design rather than fine art, differences of those engaging with the traditional gallery-curated world of contemporary fine art practice, community practice, fashion.

The dialogue sessions gave an opportunity to explore these differences alongside the common experience of artistic research practice. 

I had hoped to attend all the dialogues, but the programme placed each side by side. Although smaller groups made for a more intimate conversation, I wasn't alone in feeling that we would have got a lot more out of the contrasts of the different dialogues, with one open response panel at the end. 

I was in dialogue with Lisa Metherell from BIAD. We'd had a chat by skype and phone in advance of the lab - as, it turned out, had the other dialogue duos. And, unlike the other duos, we'd identified some themes that occurred in the way we talked about our work, so we used these (as opposed to research - knowledge - practice ) to structure our dialogue:
space and extension in space
positionality
emergence and iteration
encounters
presence

The q&a, feedback and plenary panel (with 6 dialoguers and the guest speakers) raised suggestions that it might be more fruitful to have 'cold' dialogues with no preparation. Mick challenged us to be more challenging - not to accept others views and to be ready to ask 'how can you possibly take that position?' But the general feeling of the day was one of conviviality and the reassurance provided by being with some 30 other practice researchers, most in the second half or towards the end of he PhD. Constructive criticism followed in the breaks and no doubt at the pub afterwards...
It was great to meet up with people from BIAD's Wellbeing conference last year, and with another researcher, Jacqueline Taylor from BIAD who I had met at Text Making and Unmaking in London 2011 and at Wolverhampton's ArtSpace 2009.

I look forward to the dialogues continuing....

_______

For reference:

• The call from BIAD
• Lisa Metherell's proposal to be in dialogue
• My proposal to be in dialogue

_________

 

___________

Research - Knowledge - Practice Lab, May 2012.

Proposal:                                                                         Jackie Calderwood,

3^rd year research-by-practice PhD candidate,

Institute of Creative Technologies,

De Montfort University

Leicester

Jackie.calderwood@btopenworld.com

www.jackiecalderwood.com

Pervasive media can be considered to be ‘digital media experiences woven into the fabric of every day life, created as a consequence of their situational context at the moment of delivery’ (Stenton). Situation, technology, media content, interaction become key components of the design and experience of such artifacts or events.

My practice based research questions how pervasive media might contribute to eudemonic states of human flourishing and well-being, specifically with creative participation and community collaboration.  Drawing on theory from arts practice, education, philosophy, geography and anthropology, the research itself is transdisciplinary - inherently challenging to position within disciplinary constraints to knowledge.

At the end of the first year of research, following a successful though challenging public project with schools, I initiated an experimental walks practice. This was intended to counter the constraints I perceived, were I to follow a trajectory of research within my public practice or of theoretical critique. Experimental practice allowed me to establish rich tacit knowledge that could inform these other trajectories.

During this period I was introduced to the work of counseling psychologist David Grove: Clean Language, Clean Space, Emergent Knowledge. ‘Clean’ utilises metaphor as a way to invite exploration and self-modelling of an individual’s information system, or metaphor landscape. This is an isomorphic process enabling knowledge to transfer across metaphoric, conceptual and sensory domains of experience. ‘Metaphor, that’s how the whole fabric of mental interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of being alive.’ (Bateson) When the metaphor landscape ‘goes live’ (becomes psychoactive - Tompkins & Lawley), multi-sensory relational information is experienced by the ‘client’ - much like the ‘magic moments’ (Dovey & Fleuriot) of pervasive media at its best. Perceiving an alignment with my arts practice, I am interrogating ‘Clean’ as auto-ethnographic method, arts methodology and toolset for transdisciplinary research interviews.