Wednesday, July 20, 2016

Berlin 2016 reading diaries

Documentation-forms of reflection, with Meret Rostad

Journal of Research Practice, The role of Documentation in Practice-Led Research, Nithikul Nimkultrat, Helsinski, FINLAND

Abstract: to document the interplay between researcher-practitioner and her artistic work in process. Two principal aspects:
1.    Phases of documentation
2.    The role of documentation within research process.

Introduction: Practice-Led or Practice-Based Research

She will explain how to apply documentation methods to record her artistic process and how she relates the Documentation with the overall research process.

Practice-led research (or Practice-based research):  two decades debating those terms with no clear conclusion.

(The goes on by giving definitions the the terms practice-led and or research.)

Practice-led: conscious exploration with the knowledge involved in the making of artifacts. Role of practitioner/researcher : the two roles: practitioner and researcher are more equally important because the research becomes intertwined part of practice.
Practice-based: can be carried out freely for its own sake in order to produce artifacts (fairly similar to general conception of ART/DESIGN practice). Role of practitioner/researcher: the practitioner’s role is more dominant than the researcher role. The emphasis is on practice.

To capture visuals and texts become data that can be used as research material.

Documentation as research material.

Research in art involves multiple methods.

Makela (2003) “retroactive gaze” the process of looking back at one’s own practice in order to answer one’s research questions.

She uses research logs, diaries and journals to do documentation. She advises to write while making art: self-awareness of the evolving thoughts, intentions, and decisions, leading to appreciation for the whole process. Self-awareness difficult to disseminate only through text (due to the limitations of language): that explain why we keep out practice to complete communication.

Documentation: recording the journey. Documentation is vital for the Journey of a practice led research.
.

Documenting the Artistic Process. Interactions between different actors: materials, practitioner, and artifact. Written diary, sketchbook, voice recordings, photographs. Both successes and failures are to be recorded.

Role of documentation in the overall research Process. It connects practice with the world of research. As a practitioner she has come to realized that documentation has raised her understanding of how practice-led research could be carried ot: by being able to be critical of her own process, analyzing her own artistic process.


Visualizing research: a guide to the research process in art and design by Carole Gray and Julian Malins., Ashgate Publishing, 2004

I wish this book before, like just when I started, excellent. I would like to develop with you a custom Mind Mapping and a Reflective Journal.

She starts the book with a quotation from Alice, she compares the exitment of being a research student and the risk of getting lost on the rabbit hole due to te broad and interdisciplinary approaches we have on front of us.
She believes that persuing a research degree requires three things: passion, self-confidence and method.
The book enphazises pedagogy, experimental learning, theory of  constructive learning. Encourages stdets to engage in active exploration in relation to practice and context.
Metaphor
Visual thinking
Journey
1.    Planning & preparation for research
2.    Surveying the research context
3.    Locating your research questions to the context
4.    Generating and gathering data through the use of research methods
5.    Evaluating, analyzing and interpreting research outcomes
6.    Communicating research findings

The content of this guide book is derived from creative relationship between research, practice and teaching in Art and design.

1.    Planning the journey: Introduction to research in Art and Design

1.1  Travelers’ tales
How do practitioners come to do research:
Socratic dialogue, the author goes on with different disciplines true stories of people who tell why they came to do a practice-based research.
1.2  The research process
What?: the question of the research; Why?: context, locate position, explore strategies; How?: appropriate methodology, evaluating, analyzing and interpreting evidence; So What?: the research contribution to knowledge. Communication and dissemination.
Key stages of the process: genuine desire to find something out.
1.3  A route map: the importance of methodology
the process is more important than the product. Knowing about knowledge. Method: a way of doing something; orderliness of thought, action; the techniques or arrangements of work for a particular field or subject. Methodology: the study of the system of methods used in a particular discipline; the aim of methodology is to help us understand the process itself.
Reflection and Action question:
·      What could research in Art be?
·      What might artists do research?
·      How might artists do research?
1.4  The ‘reflective practitioner’
the extended professional is a reflective practitioner-researcher.
Consider what characterizes professional context. How do the best ‘professionals’ operate in the context? In what ways are you already, or could be in future, a reflective practitioner?; what problems do you think you might encounter being reflective practitioner-researcher?
1.5  Completed research for higher degrees: methodological approaches
She goes on examining examples of PhDs Pioneers and Settlers.

2- Mapping the terrain: methods of contextualizing research

2.1  The purpose and structure of contextual review
It’s a major part, long as the project itself: critical, analytical activity. The contextual review helps to identify precisely the nature of the research questions.
Defines:
·      The scope of the inquiry
·      The state of the relevant knowledge
It’s a bridge between the problem (What?), and researching the problem through methodology (how).
The contextual review prompts a number of questions:
·      Rationale: why is the research needed and what evidence is there to support this?
·      Competitors, contributors, cooperators: Who else in the fields has addressed significant aspects of the research questions?
·      Currency, cultural, context: When and where was the research carried out?
·      How has the research carried out, what are the implications of this for your methodology and specific methods?
·      Gaps, new ground: What aspects remain unexplored or required further work

2.2  Critical thinking and response: key generic skills
 Meta-thinking: thinking about your thinking, and self evaluation. Critical thinking is creative thinking, it encourages questioning, connecting, interpreting, applying.
Argument is a process of reasoning in which: influence. 4 components: Claim, Evidence, Warrant,  Backing.
Intellectual standards: Clarity, Accuracy, Precision, Relevance, Depth, Breadth, logic/reason.
Critical thinking in visual practices: artists are visual, lateral thinkers.
Applying critical skills: outline strengths and weakness of different positions in order to explain/justify/defend preferred position. Develop a conceptual framework, concept map: purposes of, types of, kinds of, methodological assumptions, related literature, scale and scope of., and so on…
Critical writing: in relation to contextual review: different writing styles should be used:

2.3  Locating and using reference materials for art research
Pragmatic topic. No more than 6 key words when searching.
Identifying a gap of knowledge.
Using bibliographic software: ProCite, EndNote, FileMaker Pro.
FIELDS: Summary, Critical Evaluation, Key notes, other media.

2.4  Undertaking a contextual review: mapping the terrain.
Mapping techniques:
·      Mind Map: key words in its importance. www.inspiration.com
·      Matrix: columns and rows:
·      Networks same concepts as Matrix less structured. It’s a collection of nudes (points) connected by links (lines), visualize as tree. Describing an unfolding narrative.

2.5  A Reflective Practice
Reflective Journalling will:
·      Developing various models of practice
·      Developing interdisciplinary and collaboration through better communication
·      Extending professionalism through self-evaluation
·      Having better conversations with ourselves

3- Locating your position: orienting and situating research

3.1 Raising a Research question: from mapping to location-overview to your view
·      Why is the research needed and what evidence is there to support this
·      Who else in the field has addressed significant aspects of the research are?
·      When and where was other research carried out?
·      What aspects remain unexplored or required further research?
Raise a research question:
·      Immersion in the context where the possible questions lie
·      Adopting a proactive, creative approach to identifying possible questions
Ethics.

3.2 Methodology revisited: possible research positions and approaches
·      Naturalistic Inquiry: an approach for real situations
·      The bricoleur: collage and construction
·      Action research: designed to make a difference
·      Soft systems: understanding the complex whole
·      Inquiry by design: design and research, parallel process?
·      Reflection and action: suggestions

3.3 structuring and writing a research proposal

3.4 Managing research Project Information, a rigorous process.

4-Crossing the terrain: establishing appropriate research methodologies.

4.1 A case for Visual Inquiry.
Leonardo Davinci statements about the visual issues and Einstein statement about Chos are discuss in this section. …Visual research methodology…

4.2 Data, Evidence, Claim: The bases for argument
·      A claim: an argument,
·      Evidence: data used ti support the claim
·      Warrant: an expectation that provides the link between the evidence and the claim
·      Backing: context and assumptions used to suppert the validity of the warrant and evidence
Primary and secondary DATA:
·      Secondary data: archive texts, available txts, classify periods or movements. Convincing arguments by other, some times no easy to take a fresh view.
·      Discovered as a result of the application of research methods. Raw, partial view, possibly incomplete. More risky because they are new.
Good quality data are bedrock of an argument, for both primary and secondary must be critical of their authenticity and dependability. Source and context.

4.3 Crossing the terrain: vehicles for exploration
·      Vehicles for research: she goes on explaining In detail many research methods validated in Art & Design…(pg 121 triangulation)

4.4 Considering preliminary evaluation and analysis
·      To evaluate: is to ascertain the value of something and to judge or assess its worth.
·      To analyze: is to examine something in detail in order to discover its meaning, to break something down into components or essential features.

5-Interpreting the map: methods of evaluation and analysis

5.1 Evaluation, analysis and interpretation
·      Evaluating methodology and methods
·      Validity & reliability: establish research quality. For a naturalistic inquiry validity and reliability concepts are replaced with “TRUSTWORTHINESS” just being honest in everysingle thing.

5.2 Examples of analysis from completed formal research in Art & Design
·      Analysis using triangulation:
·      Visual analysis
·      Multiple perspective analysis
Reflection and action: suggestions

5.3 Playing with data: ttols for analysis
·      Matrices
·      Mind maps
·      Networks
·      Activity records
·      Flow charts
·      Dimensional analysis
·      Chronological analysis
·      Analysis of physical and social environments
·      Analysis on Reflective Journal/development log
·      Metaphor and analogy a analytical and interpretative tools


6-Recounting the jounrney: recognizing new knowledge and communicating research findings

6.1  Recognition of the new knowledge
“original and independent contribution to knowledge”
·      Theoretical knowledge
·      Apply knowledge
·      BOTH
Portfolio of evidence
·      Learning outcomes
o   Visualize concepts
·      Evidence of achievement
o   Map mind
o   Network display
o   Set of photographs
·      Reflective statements

6.2  Recounting the Journey: communicating research findings
·      Thesis as argument
·      The written part
o   Introducing and contextualizing the research topic
o   Describing and evaluating the research methodology
o   Analyzing and discussing the research outcomes

·      Exhibition and exposition expect to see articulated in a exposition:
o   The research questions which were posed
o   The project objectives
o   The methodology including how practice has been involved
o   Some positioning of the project in relation to other key research field, research context
·      Criteria for evaluating involving practice
o   Rigour, depth, critical approach, use of method
o   Revelation, new contribution, dissemination, public output
o   Relevance, contribution to the discipline, society, industry, education, and so on
o   Return, feedback-economic physical, psychological
·      Abstract
o   State research issue/question
o   Describe briefly the context and rationale
o   Describe briefly procedures/methods
o   End with a statement of the main point/outcome/contributions to knowledge
·      Keywords:
o   Social Sculpture, SOCIALLY ENGAGED ART, PERFORMANCE, PHILOSOPHY, VIDEO, PHOTOGRAPHY
·      GLOSSARY
o   The original derivation of a term
o   Definition of the term
o   References to key sources
o   How do you adapt a term to your research

6.3  destination achieved: defending your territory, disseminating the research and future expeditions



Artistic research methodology : narrative, power and the public by Mika Hannula, Juha Suoranta, Tere Vadén, New York : Peter Lang, 2014


1-    Artistic Research Inside-in
o   The research is done inside the practice, by doing acts that are part of the practice.
o   Context: Its made no found, its in a process not static, its situated not stale.
o   Antti Eskola: ” it is not rational to exclude any form of critique or methodological principals of inquiry at the start”….but at the end at the final analysis one should clearly state which ones better than others: “one has to dare to declare the winner, for the debate does not stop here, but continiues with such questions as who were the judges, and what were their principals of justification”
o   CONTEXTUALIZE FIRST
§  What constitutes a tradition is a conflict of interpretation
§  Questioning and doubting by necessity take place within the context of a tradition
“to be born is to be born of the world and to be born into the world. The world is already constituted, but also never completely constituted” Maurice Merleau-Ponty
§  TO COME TOGETHER AND TO STAY TOGHETER
Ø  To recognize what are the inherent chances and challenges of one’s oeuvre and genre, its contested internal logics and the strategies of its survival
Ø  To enjoy those contextual freedoms and responsibilities that come down both as openings and as restrictions and impossibilities but as focus dilemmas to be addressed and articulated
Ø  “Is not to say that art and science are the same, but their separation in the name of creativity and discoveries is false” Nisbet
Ø  The cloven viscount by Italo Calvino
Ø  THERE IS NO IMAGINATION WITHOUT A SENSE OF CONTEXT
§  DILTHEY, a knowledge must be lead by the following:
Ø  Organization
Ø  Stability
Ø  Coherence
Ø  Economy of expression
Ø  Logical consistency

2-    Basic formula of Artistic Research
·      “Being engaged in the artistic process means moving back and forth between periods of intensive (insider) engagement and more reflective (outsider) distance taking” pg. 16
·      Conceptual Work
o   Contextualization: situating the research in its tradition.
o   The text = conceptual work
The narration of one’s research findings is dependent on how one situates, interprets and conceptualizes its parts…writing is about thinking and discovering things.
The starting point, the inside from which everything starts and to which everything returns, is the contextualized practice.

3-    Back to the future: Democracy Experiences, Methodological Abundance and Verbalization.
Naukkarinen (2012) List of what has to be written:
·      What is topic and the question
·      What kind of materials (books, artefacts, interviews, etc.) are used addressing the question?
·      How are the materials used? How are they read, interpreted?
·      On what viewpoints, theories and concepts is the approached based? (feminist, psychoanalytic, hermeneutic, etc.)
·      How can the results, the method, the material and the viewpoints be criticized?

PART II: Narrative, Power and the Public

4-    Face-to-face, one-to-one: Production of Knowledge in and Narrative Interviews
·      Background: qualitative research: Dilthey develops the differences between quantitative (natural sciences, explains the issue) and qualitative (human or social sciences, understands the issue) research (1910): they do not exclude each other they respect each other. DEMOCRACY OR EXPERINCES: both must be used in different aims, must have clarity when to used one or another.
·      Reasons for narrative interviews:
o   Why?
o   What kind of a narrative of a narrative is in question?
o   Open-ended or closed?
o   Linear or fragmented?
o   Collective, one time or a continuous encounter?
o   Transcribed and by whom?
o   Done with voice recorder or with video?
o   Shared and interpreted by the researcher only or by other?
o   Focus in how is said or what is said?
o   Etcetcetc
The narrative interview method is to move toward, seeking a contact, a connection and a contradiction.
Hermeneutics principals
o   To allow and encourage the other to articulate and to present his or her views and visions on his or her vocabulary, manner and vernacular. In short: the first task is to listen and to try to open up toward a different perspective.
o   To relate and reflect what this different view says to you about the same or similar and issue. In short: there should be a critical interpretation of what is said, how the context is constructed and orchestrated, and how it relates to one’s own views and visions.
·      A practical case

5-Methodology of power: commitment as a Method
what is unique in artistic research
There must be a unique argument for artistic research, based on the unique things it can do.
6-Different roles of an artistic researcher, the public and the uses of sociological imagination.

Typology>







Live Writing with Geoff Cox

Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, New York: Columbia University Press 2011

I enjoy this book greatly!! It opened plenty of doors in my thinking, I will definitely add in my research bibliography, I already had selected parts to potentially quote from it.

The world is full of texts, more or less interesting I do not wish to add anymore…
New condition on writing today:
o   We must learn to negotiate with amount of txt already exists
o   How to manage to parse, organize, distribute
Perloff’s notion of unoriginal genius.
Raymond Queneau’s 1964 Hundred thousand Billion poems:
Working of technology and Web as ways of constructing Literature:
·      Word processing
·      Data basing
·      Recycling
·      Appropriation
·      Intentional plagiarism
·      Identity ciphering
·      Intensive programming
Jonathan Lethem publish a pro plagiarism essay The ecstasy of influence: A Plagiarism. (very interesting to me: examples where he assumed to had own original thoughts and then later he realized by Googling them that he unconsciously absorbs someone else’s ideas.
Lethem essay it self is an example of patchwritting a way of weaving together other’s people’s words into a tonally cohesive whole.
Context the new content.
SELECT ALL/ COPY/ PASTE: Literary Revolution.

1-    Revenge of the text
Web for writing = photography for painting
“Mallarme asks us to consider the act of reading-whether silent or aloud-as an act of decoding by actualizing and materializing the symbols (in this case letters) on a page.” Pg. 12
James Joyce’s Finnegan’s wake the act of reading itself is an act of decoding, deciphering and decryption.
Nail Mills Seven number poems, 1971 “I believed that the meaning which emerged I the reading of poetry lay primarily in intonation and rhythm, and only secondarily in semantic content i.e. that what was important was how something was read, rather that what was said-the human voice functioning as a musical instrument” pg. 13
Quantity is the Quality: writing needs to redefine in order to adapt to the new environment of textual abundance.
Joyce inspired language/data ecosystem…writers as custodians of that ecology

2-Language as material
“…language works on several levels, endlessly flipping back and forth between the meaningful and the material: we can choose to weigh it and we can choose to read it…” pg.20
·      The situationists out in the streets
·      Concrete Poetry and the future of the Screen
·      Verbovocovisual: Ezra Pound, Chinese ideograms…music element: Klangfarbenmelodie

3-Anticipating instability
·      Blurred: Parsing thinking and Seeing

5-   Toward a Poetics of Hyperrealism
·      Uncreative writing is a postidentity literature.




Subjectivity and the Mirror with Ruth Novacek


Hilton Als: Photos, writing and portraits:  www.hiltonals.com

I didn’t see phots, portraits, I read some of his articles… I check the blogs round; I wish we got more specific about what to seeing this blog. I did see the pics, looked like polaroid, illustrating his movies articles, and I read them as well. No much to say.

Joe Brainard I Remember, 2001, Granary Books  pdf
Beautiful postcards of memories, I could see and feel what he sees and feels. Excellent!

Chris Kraus I Love Dick [excerpt] 1997, Semiotext(e), 2015, Serpents Tail  pdf

Very interesting and enjoyable reading, I like how Kraus plays with 1st, 2nd and 3th person, I like how he construct the story, the train of thought the description of the characters. I really enjoyed this reading.

Film: Jim McBride, David Holzman’s Diary 1967   –   Available on Vimeo https://vimeo.com/117733608

Amazing video, I will make my version from a single mother, artist, 2016, Miami beach….

Eileen Myles, Inferno (A Poet’s Novel) 2010. see extract here http://www.eileenmyles.com/infernoexc.php

Enjoy it, one more reading full of postcards, images, memories…

Eileen Myles, My Childhood   pdf

Beautiful poem bur I think is more of the same…self portrait. Memories, porstcards…

Cindy Sherman, Untitled Film Stills 1977

Very familiar with Sherman’s portraits. Very interesting the way she embodies other women stereotypes, no very fan of her work though. The article ststes “…She stopped, she has explained, when she ran out of clichés.” I personally believe that clichés born everyday.


Polyplot with Lynn Book 

Excerpts, Rosi Braidotti, Nomadic Subjects, preface + chapter 1, 60 pages pdf

·      Implications of the loss of unity of the subject.
·      What exactly are the political and the ethical conditions that structure nomadic subjectivity, and wat are their implications for critical Theory?
·      Nomadic Subject ever be taken as Metaphor for the Human condition.
·      Nomadic thought amounts to a politically invested cartography of the present condition of mobility in a globalized world.
·      Space (geopolitical, social, and ecophilosophical dimesion)
·      Time (the historical and genealogical dimension)
o   Analize locations in terms of powers in two terms
·      Potestas restrictive
·      Potentia empowering and affirmative
Momadic subjectivity= ethically accountable and empowering

o   GAP between

·      How we live and how we represent ourselves this lived existence in theorethical terms and discourses.
Postmodernity: inhabiting different time zones an schizophrenic characteristic.

Global Hybridity

Subjectivity as a process to became nomad.
Figuration of the nomad=
renders image subject=
nonunitary, multilayered, dynamic and changing entity.

Socioeconomic= Perverse hybridization= Capitalism=Interim, part-time, substandard, underpaid work= Pseudo Nomadism

Bradotti’s nomadic subject genealogically plunges its roots in feminist theory and antiracist politics. Addresses the need to destabilize and activate the center.



Excerpts, David Apelbaum, Voice, preface + Cough, Verge, Chant, Poem, 60 pages  pdf

Iris Rogoff, We Collectivities, essay, 6 pages pdf

Anne Carson, Glass, Irony and God, “The Gender of Sound”, 18 pages pdf

Done and very interesting….good amount of history in a subject I have never thought of. Im a woman with a low tone voice, I like to be like this.

Michael Parsons, The Scratch Orchestra, essay, 7 pages pdf

Very interesting in fact I will use it for my research.
An essay about interdisciplinarity, i.e.visual music….
Cornelius Cardew, “towards the Ethic of Improvisation”> Scratch Orchestra:
“Ideally such music should be played by a collection of musical innocents (people who had no misucal training)”

Influences to the Scratch Orchestra:

·      John Cage> 4”33” “silent”
·      Early Fluxus>George Brecht’s “Water Yam” his pieces operate in an intermediate zone between object and event & LaMonte Young

These and other Fluxus-related works were accessible to musically untrained performers, offering a different kind of challenge; they called for alternative skills of inventiveness, in- genuity, practicality and self-discipline, and total commitment to the task at hand in the face of any eventuality (in- cluding adverse audience reaction, inter- ruption and even interference).
Parsons, The Scratch Orchestra and Visual Arts pg 6
the Scratch Orchestra’s more collective ap- proach to performance reflected its loose and informal sociability, which was based on mutual respect and tolerance rather than on adherence to any pre- conceived structure or set of rules.
Parsons, The Scratch Orchestra and Visual Arts pg 7
Tim Mitchell, Michel Chant, Brecht, Lucier, Young, Ichiyanagi.
All inclusive social music and performance.