Showing papers in "Journal of Writing in Creative Practice in 2020"

New models of the inner self: Identity in the digital age

Abstract: The following article addresses the changing nature of human identity in the digital age, with a focus on the emergence of the ‘inner self’ via digital communication. Three models of ‘self’ are presented in this text, which have emerged as a result of our rising use of digital technology, entitled ‘The Constructed Self’, ‘The Programmed Self’ and ‘The Absent Self’. The first model, ‘The Constructed Self’, focuses on our ability online to manipulate the public portrayal of the ‘inner self’ via carefully constructed social media profiles and virtual identities. This model compares the instances in which the ‘online self’ and the ‘actual self’ develop as extensions of one another, with examples that highlight how they can also act in opposition. ‘The Programmed Self’ is concerned with the amalgamation of humans and technology. As machines become increasingly intelligent and humanized, new possibilities are arising for our relationship with technology to become ever more personal. Finally, ‘The Absent Self’ brings to light what we miss through our immersion in the screen; how do online environments capture our attention so effectively and what does this do to our ability to self-reflect?

The (serious) game of classification: (I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?)

Abstract: The principle that classification may always be provisional and illusory continues to be of relevance and concern to art and curation that seeks to expose the fallacies of systematic order and taxonomy. Taking the museum as a starting point, this article explores the curation of information and objects by writers and artists who offer alternative spaces of representation and interpretation. Language is fundamental to these curatorial undertakings, for example: the keywords chosen as starting points by Daniel Spoerri and Marie-Louise Plessen for their 1981 Musée Sentimental de Prusse; Tate Liverpool’s choice of artwork for their 2014 interpretation of Raymond Williams’ 1988 book Keywords; and Rose English’s choice of words to explore during her 1983 performance Plato’s Chair, included in the Keywords exhibition. Developing into a consideration of social networking as a space of curated representation, the article examines my own use of the hashtag and its relation to classification and keywords in a recent Instagram project @cartography_for_girls. I set up the account to share the thoughts of philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch’s fictional women characters on a platform synonymous with personal articulation and connection seeking. The hashtag offered a taxonomy with which to engage with Iris Murdoch’s advocacy of the acceptance of contingency and to her assertion that ‘the task of classifying […] can perhaps never be more than a (serious) game’.

I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?

Abstract: I am interested in the possibilities of redressing the absence of feminine subjectivity in the discourses surrounding Iris Murdoch’s philosophical and fictional writing. @cartography_for_girls is an Instagram account set up to share some of the expressions of feminine subjectivity sourced from within Murdoch’s 26 novels, originally published between 1954 and 1995. Murdoch’s incorporation of her particular metaphysical thinking into the reflections, deliberations and doubts of her fictional women characters made me wonder how these philosophically loaded impressions might fare on the affect- and information-driven social networking platform Instagram. ‘I think I’m happy, she thought, but am I real?’, for example, is an interior thought that resonates in ways more than metaphysical against the backdrop of Web 2.0, and is one of 100 posts shared daily from 21 October 2017 to 23 January 2018.

The phantom ‘practice-only thesis’

Abstract: As universities become accustomed to the complexities of their art and design faculties, a body of literature has emerged that explores some of the possibilities of a doctorate in the creative arts. In the area of fine art in particular, although not exclusively, there has been a drive towards a purely practice-based thesis. This article argues that the notion of the practice-only thesis is not only an unrealistic illusion that puts pressure on students, but also does not reflect contemporary professional practices. For an art practice to communicate any sort of specific knowledge it must be embedded in a pre-existing and continuously evolving flux of discourse produced through written and spoken language. The American artist Trisha Donnelly’s 2014 Serpentine Gallery exhibition is taken as an example. Critical writing in the art press produces an accepted interpretation, and this is what the artist ‘Trisha Donnelly’ comes to stand for. So artwork that might appear to be producing its meaning autonomously should be seen as a collaborative practice involving the artist together with their professional interpreters. Research students are required to produce a self-contained project which would seem to preclude the incorporation of writing or academic interpretation by others. But it is fundamentally unfair to demand a thesis without any written component since it does not exist in an expanded notion of the contemporary art world.

Reflecting on reflection: Exploring the role of writing as part of practice-led research

Abstract: The phrase ‘writing up’ is often framed as the point where a research project is nearing its end, with only a summarizing thesis between a student and their completion. This text seeks to interrogate this dichotomy between research practice and writing. Instead, the text engenders reflective writing as a constant undercurrent of dialogue that continually shapes research through reflective thought. The text implements concepts from two key texts to meet these ends: Kamler and Thompson’s Helping Doctoral Students Write: Pedagogies for Supervision and Bolt and Barrett’s Practice as Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. The first of the texts problematizes the notion of a formal ‘writing up’ stage often cited by students and supervisors in research study, arguing instead for a shift towards a more dynamic role for writing in research, or indeed writing as research. The second of the contributing texts presents Barbara Bolt’s notion of the ‘exegesis’ as ancillary to this thought – outlining written practice in arts research as an intrinsic, generative process, married to any practical outcome. Using the rhetoric outlined in these two references, this article then summarizes with an application of the notion of the ‘exegesis’ to an assortment of personal written texts, such as reflective journal entries and assessed written works across three years of postgraduate study. Herein lies the key claim of this article – that exegesis permeates every meaningful or developmental step of practice-led research, forming a crucial reciprocal relationship between visual and written work not unlike other hybridized methodologies outlined by authors such as Mieke Bal in her text, Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide.

All the Better for Being Vague? The Authority of text

Abstract: In Middlemarch, George Eliot makes a claim for the superiority of writing over painting: ‘Language is a finer medium’, she has her character claim, because it is ‘[…] all the better for being vague’ (1871: 140). This is a perceived advantage that many artists would find it difficult to agree with as we find the use of text in both academia and in relationship to visual art to be anything but vague. On the contrary, language (and specifically writing) is the means by which hierarchies of power are established and reinforced and it is crucial in defining and conveying the meaning of images. For artists, this poses particular, well-rehearsed problems as we try to find a path between the ‘not-knowing’, the uncertainties of the visual and the authority of the written word. Rather than becoming trapped in the conventions of authoritative text, this article argues for a different way of writing in both academia and in the art world at large: one that reflects the processes of visual practice and thinking. Drawing on current experiments in collaborative writing, it argues for forms of texts that are more akin to speech: texts that forgo the authority of the word in favour of approaches that provide a space where uncertain and imperfectly formed ideas can be expressed and tested.

Pears, pistachios, pencils and punctuation: Performative encounter and the art of conversation

Abstract: Words, utterance, gesture, mark-making, ink, nut shells, a peach or a stray button prompt material-discursive engagement. Nothing is taken for granted in terms of knowledge or experience other than a belief that such engagement is a practice, revealing of itself. This article proposes and exemplifies an ‘apparatus’ of such practice, in which the materially embedded and/or physically embodied production of speech, writing, objects and images are intermingled. This practice has evolved through collaboration, within and across successive performative encounters. Through the intra-acting agencies of performative encounter, the material and the verbal are in conversation, questioning the production of knowledge, critically and metaphorically determined as a ‘digestive tract of knowing’. A material engagement emerges that is continuously enmeshed, unravelled and revealed as an embodied tract that surfaces as diagram, apparatus or a conjunction of vertices. In this context, words, whether written, spoken, uttered or as yet unsaid, are interior to the practice. Together and continuously, their shared and formative meanings are mobile, never settling, always productive. Whether critically informed or invented on the spur of the moment, words (including the writing of this article) act as material-discursive fabric. This research-in-action is evident both in the operative engagement and in the subsequent opening of the practice to others, whether as display, text, performance or dialogic example.

It’s Just a Draft: On the messy, the unfinished and the speculative in writing

Abstract: Language, and by extension writing, are used in conjunction with art to explain, decipher and decode. With the move of art education to be increasingly in line with academic practice, the written work undertaken by art students is measured and governed by expectations of being refined, finished and persuasive. Practice is often an altogether messier endeavour than the writing that accompanies, explains and justifies it would have you believe. Considering the relationship between writing and practice, It’s Just a Draft proposes the relevance of writing that falls short of academic expectations: the messy, the unfinished and the speculative. The article focuses on various aspects of written practice, namely: process, and the notion of embracing all stages of writing in a finished text; drafts, the idea of writing and rewriting/thinking and rethinking text as a continuous and developmental cycle; and style, more specifically what constitutes an academic voice. The article reflects somewhat on its own implication in relation to these ideas, being paradoxically more formulaic than the sort of writing that it discusses.

Layering lines and thoughts: A study of musical time through drawing

Abstract: Through the analysis of the drawing Sans Titre (Apres P. B. Notations) (2017), the following article seeks to explore the role of writing in my own artistic practice, which is concerned with the relation between music and drawing. This article examines the creative process that is carried out in relation to drawing with a musical composition, in this case Pierre Boulez’s Notations (1945), and how the imbrication of text influences and shapes the process and outcome of the artwork. In addition, this article analyses how the text engages with a wider theoretical approach of time, through ‘Chronos’ and ‘Aion’, two categories of time developed by French philosopher Gilles Deleuze primarily in The Logic of Sense ([1969] 2004), and the way they relate to drawing and opening up new ways of understanding it. Thus, the research will look at the role of the spiral line or helix as a visual model that could lend shape to musical time constituting the main frame of the drawing.

Invisible language: Metaphors for networked technology in artists’ writings on media

Abstract: Recently, a number of artists and theorists have been writing about the algorithmic, infrastructural and economic aspects of the contemporary media world. Such writing shifts the conversation about social media away from considerations of novel discourse and instead places emphasis on the power structures, profit motives and political machinations that undergird networked reality. Social media platforms are designed to feel like autonomous arenas of free signification, rather than highly controlled and tightly monitored corporate/governmental spaces. In other words, these platforms make the Internet feel like it is built on discourse, rather than on code, servers, fibre-optic cables and the hyper-exploited labour involved in the mining of rare metals. This article examines writings by Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Jackie Wang and others to argue that artist-writers are using open-ended and flexible metaphors, along with other literary techniques, to articulate the connections between the largely invisible systems of code, surveillance and economics.