Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 08:03:00PM +, Johannes Birringer wrote: dear soft_skinned listeners: thx for responses that came, will reply soon when time arrives it just occurred to me, reading the thread-title on practice as a means towards academic self-criticism and Magnus's reply to Magda, that I probably have underestimated how Magda may have intended institutional critique and yet the directing and directedness are of significance, no? what is meant by SELF-criticism? did i miss this in earlier postings, did some of you claim that practice-led research (whether it emulates science methods, or humanities methods or no methods or invents its own methodology strategy) is a means to critique one's own practice-led research, perhaps render it ad absurdum? interesting thought, that. Yes, ad absurdum...I am not sure what to do with that at present, but a position which I think lends weight to such an approach, comes from a program of the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts which has, “...made artistic research in a university context itself the object of study[where]... artistic research can be defined as a methodological investigation of artistic practice or as praxis-generated research situated within contemporary culture. Artistic research operates in a methodical manner, is problem-oriented and eclectic. It has its own grammar that is derived from its own interferences and spaces for negotiation, which are constantly being re-constituted through praxis...as a space for negotiation, a space in which action-reaction are fundamental modes of working and where openness and indeterminacy are not seen as flaws of the system, but as advantages. ” [1]. Also demonstrating the notion of research as object, Sher Dorruf comes to the idea of Res/Arch where: “Artistic research practice proposes to frame what is given in experience as a port of entry. It fields an opening as a creative affordance, composing a fragment of chaos to a scratch-like stuttering rhythm that in turn overflows its boundaries as a mattering, as a matter of concern” [2] [1]Thun-Hohenstein, F. “Art Knowledge” at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, 2009 http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/hohenstein.html [2]Dorruf, S. Artistic Res/Arch: The propositional experience of mattering Acoustic Space #9 MPlab : Riga Eds. Smite, R. Mey, K. and Smits, R. Best wishes, Magnus [Magda schreibt] Thus in my research around curating and commoning (understood after De Angelis as 'the social process that creates and reproduces the commons') I take into account the new context which is defined by the changing character of production which becomes biopolitical production invested in production of subjectivity. what does this mean? i mean how do you use for yourself the term biopolitics? In that context the question of recording is hugely important indeed because it is about what I record and if I record at all (in which case it is a tough luck when it comes to my PhD, though hopefully I will come up with some solution) . On the other hand there are already recordings of the session which are available on the wiki where the common practice is stored, in the edited versions of skype text chat conversations, as well as original chat discussions, wiki history which follows changes, etc. It seems to me that the only way to interact with those, outside of the actual session as it is happening, is through mythologizing, narrating, interpreting, etc. I am not sure what is meant by the concept 'directed commoning'. More explanation would be. Common practice is not about curating collectively either. The following seems to point to the heart of your thesis and philosophy, yes? The research is about investigating the conditions (social, technological, institutional, political) in which curating takes place versus a desire (yes, utopian most likely) to on one hand not to be subjugated to those conditions and at the same time not to subjugate others to them. Linking curating with the concept of the commons is probably not a tactic in this case, but a strategy, or methodology if we want to stick to the research language, to investigate biopolitics of 'curatorial'. If this would be extrapolated, i think the political question at large, as I heard it raised here in debate, is: whether artistic practices (and there are different ones of course and not all are intended with a political or politicized agenda) within the humanities/universities can become or are practices investigating the conditions or frameworks in which the practices can take place and be understood as research and legitimated (via Viva and degree and the writing up)? If self-critical, then the practice would include writing itself as a questionable research action? perhaps based on weak data or weak theories or even lacking empirical evidence or too much empirical evidence and
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
Dear all, thank you for your thought-provoking contributions and responses. Will follow up. I'll start with Magda: Interesting point below. Thanks for bringing up this question again. This is a hard one, and I am a bit stuck on its language indeed, so I will reiterate it again: how do we preserve, what is difficult to preserve (represent) in a widely accepted form in academia which is written text, but what might also be lost when going through that process? I don't want to be romantic about it, but what I would want to preserve for my own practice is the recognition that there is knowledge that is hard to categorise and then that it might become something else (another knowledge) after the process of translation into what we can understand through language. I think that as important for the future too. This is something that concerns me, as well, especially given that the medium I work with is theatre/performance, which seems to resist preservation by its very nature (or so theatre/performance theorists have sometimes argued). I wonder if what is needed in relation to the problem of preservation as it's been posed in the empyre exchanges this week is the possibility of other epistemologies, different from the dominant way of knowing in the academy, characterized by performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood as: that of empirical observation and critical analysis from a distanced perspective: 'knowing that,' and 'knowing about.' This is a view from above the object of inquiry: knowledge that is anchored in paradigm and secured in print.* Perhaps embodied epistemologies? But what shapes would they take? And how would we legitimize them in the academia? (do we need to?) I'd be curious to learn more about what you (Magda)are thinking about what you called another knowledge in your post (highlighted in the passage I cited above). And how the rest of you feel/think about the kinds of knowledges you are (de)constructing in your academic work pursued in-between theory and practice.. * Conquergood, Dwight. “Performance Studies: Interventions and Radical Research.” The Drama Review, 46.2 (Summer 2002): p.146. all best, Ioana From: Magda Tyzlik-Carver ma...@thecommonpractice.org To: 'soft_skinned_space' empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au Sent: Wednesday, February 22, 2012 11:56 AM Subject: Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise I wonder if this implies that what is specific to academic work is just a particular way of accounting for anything - coming down, precisely (purely?), to an issue of language and form. Could it be? (Menotti) I wonder that too. I don't know much about scientific research at all, but I would guess that's very much the case in sciences. I came across a statement that 'engineers don't discover, but they invent' which in itself is an interesting use of language. Another thing would be that many (most?) of science phd's are practice based, often attached to a specific project with defined aims and objectives. So what's the difference between science and art practice-based research and how it is articulated in academia? I would say that is where 'discipline' comes in as an institutionalising factor and language is one of the tools for that. And going back to a question from previous weeks: how do we preserve what could not be written down in the first place, and will inevitably get lost in the bureaucratic translation? Is part of the work of the researcher to make more graspable the less visible structures s/he tackles and employs? Should one provide to his/her examiners the means for his/her own assessment? What about the posterity? Thanks for bringing up this question again. This is a hard one, and I am a bit stuck on its language indeed, so I will reiterate it again: how do we preserve, what is difficult to preserve (represent) in a widely accepted form in academia which is written text, but what might also be lost when going through that process? I don't want to be romantic about it, but what I would want to preserve for my own practice is the recognition that there is knowledge that is hard to categorise and then that it might become something else (another knowledge) after the process of translation into what we can understand through language. I think that as important for the future too. Magda ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
dear soft_skinned listeners: thx for responses that came, will reply soon when time arrives it just occurred to me, reading the thread-title on practice as a means towards academic self-criticism and Magnus's reply to Magda, that I probably have underestimated how Magda may have intended institutional critique and yet the directing and directedness are of significance, no? what is meant by SELF-criticism? did i miss this in earlier postings, did some of you claim that practice-led research (whether it emulates science methods, or humanities methods or no methods or invents its own methodology strategy) is a means to critique one's own practice-led research, perhaps render it ad absurdum? interesting thought, that. [Magda schreibt] Thus in my research around curating and commoning (understood after De Angelis as 'the social process that creates and reproduces the commons') I take into account the new context which is defined by the changing character of production which becomes biopolitical production invested in production of subjectivity. what does this mean? i mean how do you use for yourself the term biopolitics? In that context the question of recording is hugely important indeed because it is about what I record and if I record at all (in which case it is a tough luck when it comes to my PhD, though hopefully I will come up with some solution) . On the other hand there are already recordings of the session which are available on the wiki where the common practice is stored, in the edited versions of skype text chat conversations, as well as original chat discussions, wiki history which follows changes, etc. It seems to me that the only way to interact with those, outside of the actual session as it is happening, is through mythologizing, narrating, interpreting, etc. I am not sure what is meant by the concept 'directed commoning'. More explanation would be. Common practice is not about curating collectively either. The following seems to point to the heart of your thesis and philosophy, yes? The research is about investigating the conditions (social, technological, institutional, political) in which curating takes place versus a desire (yes, utopian most likely) to on one hand not to be subjugated to those conditions and at the same time not to subjugate others to them. Linking curating with the concept of the commons is probably not a tactic in this case, but a strategy, or methodology if we want to stick to the research language, to investigate biopolitics of 'curatorial'. If this would be extrapolated, i think the political question at large, as I heard it raised here in debate, is: whether artistic practices (and there are different ones of course and not all are intended with a political or politicized agenda) within the humanities/universities can become or are practices investigating the conditions or frameworks in which the practices can take place and be understood as research and legitimated (via Viva and degree and the writing up)? If self-critical, then the practice would include writing itself as a questionable research action? perhaps based on weak data or weak theories or even lacking empirical evidence or too much empirical evidence and undecided experiential values or affects or a dubious form of theoretical self aggrandization or justification? and so on. I would like to see such a self-critical phd thesis surely i also like to get the know the folks at the Faculty of Invisibility, and the Boredom Research Institute, and at those german Research-Clusters für Forschungsorganisation und wissenschaftliche. Durchbrüche [which translates as research cluster for research-organization and scientific break-throughs]. nothing beats good organization PS. We Don’t Record Flowers, Said the Geographer regards Johannes Birringer dap-lab - - - - - - - - - Magnus schreibt Hmmm, I am also thinking about your mentioning the production of subjectivity (self-constitution?) through this practice. In another thread, I think there was some reference to invisibility and I see that the Department of Reading has its own Faculty of Invisibility. Does Common Practice pertain to this in any way? Since I've been quiet now for a couple of days, that may a good question to close on :) ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
institutional critique is no longer associated with artistic practices only and is developing towards what has been termed as a 'transversal practice' [MAGDA TYZLIK-CARVER] And do you see institutional critique playing a central role not only in your curatorial practice, but also in your academic research? In practice, what tactics do you employ to manage the paradoxical relation between this political agenda and the “inevitable” outcome of an (institutional) validation? Another seemingly paradoxical relation I’d like to hear more about is that between commoning and curating. In your work, do you actively make an “emancipatory” effort to move away from “directed commoning” and towards “collective curating”? Or you try to pay close attention to how both vectors interact in the course of instituting? How much self-awareness is involved in this process? I don't want to be romantic about it, but what I would want to preserve for my own practice is the recognition that there is knowledge that is hard to categorise and then that it might become something else (another knowledge) after the process of translation into what we can understand through language. [MT] Just to clarify: would that be self-recognition (as the outcome of a learning process) or some sort of institutional recognition (e.g. the inclusion of such knowledge in the common academic tradition, a PhD title, etc)? I would be curious to see how do you relate these hardships of categorisation to the skype logs of the common practice project, which seem to be an interesting way of writing/ preserving that fully embraces the metamorphosis that result from translation (or a transport in time). Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
Hi Johannes, Ioana, Gabriel, and all, Thank you for your comments and great questions. Not easy to answer, I have to admit, but I will give it a go. Johannes thank you for your response. Unfortunately I would agree, there is very little joy about/in academia at the moment and as we know there are many individual and collective struggles all around us and I am sure some on the list might be involved in them in different ways. But before I move on I want to make a little correction as in your writing mine and Ioana's posts were merged into one coming from the same person which perhaps suggests a proximity of our concerns, but as they were articulated by two different people I wanted to make that distinction. Ioana's questions are so well articulated and focused: 'How can I embody and live what I theorize, without letting it close down my possibilities of experiencing? How can I make of my performance-making practice a learning experience (that materializes in some kind of knowledge acquisition or understanding) rather than an application of the theoretical outcomes of my research? (How) am I to justify my art practice in relation to my theoretical research and demonstrate its relevance to the latter? (this question matters because mine is a theory-focused PhD; its outcome will be a dissertation)'. And I would be curious to hear more on this. Johannes, your post touched on so many important issues. What I enjoyed a lot was your description of what you called 'tough luck', actually it made me lough aloud, because I imagine this is exactly the kind of luck that most of those doing practice based PhD's have and again each of us deals with it in a different way. It seems to be an accompanying issue to work with on top of all the original questions that I started my PhD with. I am sure it is a widely shared experience. Magda, i would think your performance practices and the curating experiments are interface enactments and they are lived of course, and yet you might agree, they can be recorded, they can be edited, narrated, mythologized, and written up or down meshed with images... (Johannes) Another seemingly paradoxical relation I'd like to hear more about is that between commoning and curating. In your work, do you actively make an emancipatory effort to move away from directed commoning and towards collective curating? Or you try to pay close attention to how both vectors interact in the course of instituting? How much self-awareness is involved in this process? (Menotti) I would be curious to see how do you relate these hardships of categorisation to the skype logs of the common practice project, which seem to be an interesting way of writing/ preserving that fully embraces the metamorphosis that result from translation (or a transport in time). (Menotti) I situate common practice and my research around curating within what I consider to be a new context for curatorial strategies with reference to social technologies that claim to redistribute power relations. Common practice critically operates in a network environment and pragmatically points to the specific problems characteristic to network society which are labour organisation and its condition (free and immaterial labour) in the environment in which creative co-production of knowledge takes place non-stop and contributes to creating what often has been defined as digital and immaterial commons as well as new forms of enclosures which also accompany this process. Thus in my research around curating and commoning (understood after De Angelis as 'the social process that creates and reproduces the commons') I take into account the new context which is defined by the changing character of production which becomes biopolitical production invested in production of subjectivity. In that context the question of recording is hugely important indeed because it is about what I record and if I record at all (in which case it is a tough luck when it comes to my PhD, though hopefully I will come up with some solution) . On the other hand there are already recordings of the session which are available on the wiki where the common practice is stored, in theedited versions of skype text chat conversations, as well as original chat discussions, wiki history which follows changes, etc. It seems to me that the only way to interact with those, outside of the actual session as it is happening, is through mythologizing, narrating, interpreting, etc. I am not sure what is meant by the concept 'directed commoning'. More explanation would be. Common practice is not about curating collectively either. The research is about investigating the conditions (social, technological, institutional, political) in which curating takes place versus a desire (yes, utopian most likely) to on one hand not to be subjugated to those conditions and at the same time not to subjugate others to them. Linking curating with the concept of the commons is probably not a tactic
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
dear soft_skinned listeners: these last days of reading all of your posts brought many inspiring moments, and I wish to thank all the writers here, there is much to grapple with as we moved forward a bit from noise/free improvisation/Noise and Capitalism to the very precise thoughts laid out now by Marie, Magda, Ioana, Lasse, Menotti and others. In fact, i wish to congratulate Magda for being so excellent at writing what she is grappling with, and it caused some depression, here on my end of course, and I wonder whether other readers get incensed as well when they think of situations they may know - where questions of how artistic practice is condoned/accepted/judged as Phd research are politicized or processed in some form of normal bureaucratic choreography.. Some of you here may work in universities, as I do at times, and some here may also be advisers of Phd practice-based projects, or be directly involved in some. Others in the empyre community may have less time to worry about those things, or find them mildly corrosive. I find some of issues debated here (how you write up your artistic practice as research for the low academy) corrosively upsetting. One might see the humor also in the old high academy positions (Lasse, did you not say that Karlsruhe has no room for practice based Phds and prefers you to write a theoretical/analytical one?), and thus Magda is probably suggesting free improvisations with institutional critique, and those of you who commented that exams and degrees are already gamification of education (Rob) are probably spot on. That is a sickening growing awareness amongst us too, well, at least as far as i am concerned. Wait: Isn't the economization of academia through impact points and evaluations exactly what gamification is about? But fortunately, News of the World is a nice example of circular causality because it bends the very rules that produced it (the demand for peer reviewed publishing). If gamification is to save academia, I think it should be through playing against it (think of speedruns and meta-gaming). [Lasse] Well, how do you play in Karlsruhe, Lasse, or how would you play? and incidentally, is not the practice-as-research Phd a particularized, and located problem or challenge/opportunity ? (in the UK, in Australia, in The Netherlands, in some places in the US, i am not sure where it came from, how it spread, and how the phenomenon is managed or surveilled by national research councils and boards etc; i heard from a music colleague recently that practice-based Phd's in the UK may have a limited time before they might be abolished again. But that may have been a rumor? But exams and degrees are already gamification of education. And badge-based accreditation of achievement outside the academy is a way of reproducing this. So I think copying the aesthetic of gamification inside the academy would be less of a shift than people might think.[Rob] I get a feeling that many of the recent messages revolved around a question or proposition, not only whether art (in the humanities) and science research methodology paradigms are comparable or compatible,. but whether your artistic (and critical) practice can cross over into a humanities paradigm or generate its own independent form and acceptance. Some challenges I am facing in my attempt to move across different disciplines (theatre and performance studies; philosophy; media studies), and between theory and practice in my academic and artistic work are: How can I embody and live what I theorize, without letting it close down my possibilities of experiencing? How can I make of my performance-making practice a learning experience (that materializes in some kind of knowledge acquisition or understanding) rather than an application of the theoretical outcomes of my research? (How) am I to justify my art practice in relation to my theoretical research and demonstrate its relevance to the latter? (this question matters because mine is a theory-focused PhD; its outcome will be a dissertation) [Magda] What is sickening (or interesting perhaps to you, Magda, from the point of view of your curatorial performances of commoning) is that often I hear the school/the discipline/the examiner or examination boards suggest to researchers that they need to pay more attention in their writing up to some fundamentals, such a spelling out clearly in the beginning your research question and your objectives and then your methodology and your case studies (your own work?) and the theory informing your reflections and contextualizations and inferences and findings and summaries with the bibliographical apparatues and the appendices with your finely honed DVD and CD offering the films and the slides not of what you enacted or experienced (Magda) but what you edited to show about the research (not the art work) process and why that is an original contribution to
[-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
regardless if the question of artistic practice and research method and their in/compatibilities take place within an institutional or more personal and subjective context, it is, nevertheless, an administrative issue which involves bureaucratic processes and forms of communication/communicating those processes [MAGDA TYZLIK-CARVER] I tend to agree with this administrative perspective, or at least I feel that it is perfectly able to overarch / make the case for the other two (of “ontological separation” and “methodological confluence”?). I wonder if this implies that what is specific to academic work is just a particular way of accounting for anything – coming down, precisely (purely?), to an issue of language and form. Could it be? And going back to a question from previous weeks: how do we preserve what could not be written down in the first place, and will inevitably get lost in the bureaucratic translation? Is part of the work of the researcher to make more graspable the less visible structures s/he tackles and employs? Should one provide to his/her examiners the means for his/her own assessment? What about the posterity? More generally, how much of a reflexive endeavour within academia (or a meta-research) must a practice-based PhD be? the managerial, administrative and communicative aspects are some of the defining elements of what is considered to be a domain of so called ‘curatorial’ (along many others, of course) [MT] Considering the role these aspects play in a research project (from proposal to the publicization of results), is there any particular way you relate academia and the curatorial? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
Re: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise
Hi Menotti, Magnus et all, Thank you for your comments and questions. I wouldn't wish anyone the torment of academic self-criticism through their practice. I hope I am not guilty of that, but I can almost picture it represented in some medieval style and hanging above my desk as a warning. Considering the role these aspects play in a research project (from proposal to the publicization of results), is there any particular way you relate academia and the curatorial? (Menotti) The obvious relation is the 'institutional', understood in this context as institutionalisation of practice. A useful reference for me is of course the tradition of 'institutional critique' which developed in 60s and 70s as a form of artistic practice which investigated forms and conditions of art field and art institutions in order to break out of and subvert them. Since then and as proposed in a publication Raunig, Gerald and Ray, Gene (eds.) Art and Contemporary Critical Practice. Reinventing Institutional Critique, London: MayFlyBooks (2009) http://mayflybooks.org, institutional critique is no longer associated with artistic practices only and is developing towards what has been termed as a 'transversal practice' and as such suggesting a political dimension to institutional critique. For me as a curator this is important because my research is concerned with the practice of curating that uses various online tools and social technologies, as well as participatory and collaborative forms of engagement that in the result generate artefacts, conversations, poetry, knowledge, data, and of course affects and relations. Here the curatorial role focuses on facilitating the creation of socio-technological networks where participation of the public in generating those resources and relations is recognised as form of commons or more specifically as a form of commoning. It is this relation between curating and commoning that I am investigating in my research. By extending the concept of the commons to curatorial practices I want to examine forms and results of those practices as resources and relations that are produced in common and not as activities that need to be managed by a curatorial control. So by situating curating and commoning within the context of 'institutional critique' I am hoping to explore these two activities in relation to the forms of instituting. The idea is not necessarily to see how my curatorial project such as common practice (http://automatist.net/deptofreading/wiki/pmwiki.php/CommonPractice) might be or is a part of the institution of art, but it is more concerned with the tactics and strategies used in common practice, which undermine the processes of institutionalisation. I suppose it is this trajectory of investigation that also makes me think of what a healthy relation between practice and research might be? Best, Magda -Original Message- From: empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au [mailto:empyre-boun...@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au] On Behalf Of Gabriel Menotti Sent: 21 February 2012 22:06 To: soft_skinned_space Subject: [-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise regardless if the question of artistic practice and research method and their in/compatibilities take place within an institutional or more personal and subjective context, it is, nevertheless, an administrative issue which involves bureaucratic processes and forms of communication/communicating those processes [MAGDA TYZLIK-CARVER] I tend to agree with this administrative perspective, or at least I feel that it is perfectly able to overarch / make the case for the other two (of ontological separation and methodological confluence?). I wonder if this implies that what is specific to academic work is just a particular way of accounting for anything - coming down, precisely (purely?), to an issue of language and form. Could it be? And going back to a question from previous weeks: how do we preserve what could not be written down in the first place, and will inevitably get lost in the bureaucratic translation? Is part of the work of the researcher to make more graspable the less visible structures s/he tackles and employs? Should one provide to his/her examiners the means for his/her own assessment? What about the posterity? More generally, how much of a reflexive endeavour within academia (or a meta-research) must a practice-based PhD be? the managerial, administrative and communicative aspects are some of the defining elements of what is considered to be a domain of so called 'curatorial' (along many others, of course) [MT] Considering the role these aspects play in a research project (from proposal to the publicization of results), is there any particular way you relate academia and the curatorial? Best! Menotti ___ empyre forum empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au http://www.subtle.net/empyre
