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Some-One Else’s Monster: Visualising research

Some-One Else’s Monster: Visualising research. Julie Henderson 2010 . Some-one Else’s Monster. 1. an investigation of the roles of the visual 2. ways in which the visual may inform your research 3. a discussion on the imagination, affect of the visual

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Some-One Else’s Monster: Visualising research

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  1. Some-One Else’s Monster:Visualising research Julie Henderson 2010

  2. Some-one Else’s Monster 1. an investigation of the roles of the visual 2. ways in which the visual may inform your research 3. a discussion on the imagination, affect of the visual 4. reflecting on visual research in contemporary context. Except where indicated otherwise the images for this lecture are sourced from Barbican Art Gallery. Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009. Exhibition Catalogue. Koenig Books, 2009.

  3. Visual art researchhas often been questioned in terms of its validity as a research practice.Other kinds researchers may view art research as monstrous and solipsistic since it can be conditioned by intuition and also serially self-defining methods rather be predetermined …and it is excessive to rational linear paradigms. All of this however can be reconciled in a research project in a systematic way. Without deadening the spontaneity of chance or intuitive leaps. Chiharu Shiota After the Dream 2009 wool and dressesWalking in my Mind Exhibition Hayward Gallery London 2

  4. Visual Analysis Gillian Rose’s book Visual Methodologies (2001) looks at terms of visual analysis in detail such as: • visuality and scopic regime,- refer to the ways in which vision is constructed by cultures. • Occularcentrism is a term Martin Jay (1993) has used to describe the centrality of vision. • Simulacra- images become detached from their real referent according to Jean Baudrillard (1988) and dominate the scopic regime. Any interpretation of the visual may assist in opening up possible readings yet of course there is no one true interpretation of an image or an object.

  5. Images as a distinct language? • Yet images themselves do seem to “do something”such that they may articulate a ‘kind of visual resistance, particularity, strangeness, or pleasure but be difficult to articulate’. • Roland Barthes (1982) idea of thepunctum of a photograph for example is an unintentional effect that disturbs a particular viewer out of their usual habits of viewing. The studium is the culturally informed reading of the codes in the photograph. • Semiology or the reading of signs is a method used to interpret visual images. Icon, index and symbol are other examples of semiotic terms. Gillian Rose, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. New Delhi; London: Sage Publications, 2001, 10.

  6. Philippe Petit French High Wire Artist Suspended between the Twin Towers New York 1974 AP/PA Photos

  7. Connotive Signs • Opposite of denotive signs that simply describe something, connotive signs can carry higher level meanings. • 2 types of connotive signsuseful in thinking about art research are: • Metonymic-connotational signs represent something else by association. Eg babies as metonymic of future. • Synedoche is a partial sign standing in for the whole thing eg the Eiffel tower represents the city of Paris even though it is only one part of it. • (*also metaphor based on a comparison of difference) Eg50 keels ploughed* the deep Synedoche Metaphor Metonymy

  8. Relationships to research • Thinking about what images do and the combination of words and images in research is meaningfully referred to by Deleuze in his writings on Foucault: • Reading handout to discuss. • Usefully, W J T Mitchell inverts things by asking: What do [these] pictures (or objects) want? • In this way he refers to the questions framed by visual material according to the cultural, temporal and spatial, the artistic, authorial and viewer investments in them. • This is the substance of your research project in art practice.

  9. Anya GallaccioAs long as there were any roads to amnesia and amnesia still to be explored 2002 Seven felled oak trees

  10. Agnes Denes Tree Mountain- A Living Time Capsule-11,000 Trees, 11,000 People, 400 yearsLand reclamation project Finland

  11. Agnes Denes Wheatfield-A Confrontation 1982 2 acres of wheat planted and harvested on landfill down town Manhattan

  12. Methodologies and Methods in the Research Process • Methodology is the study of the system of methods and principles used in a particular discipline such as visual art or design. The aim of selecting a particular methodology is to help understand the process of inquiry itself. • Methods are specific techniques, ways of proceeding and tools for exploring, gathering, synthesizing and analysing information such as: observation, drawing, concept mapping, photography, video, audio, case study, visual diary, models, interviews, graphs, surveys. So there is a “journey of exploration” and the communication of the journey and making explicit to others what happened along the way to this destination/outcomes.

  13. Visual research and other kinds of research 1. Bruno Latour’s neologism, “factish” reclaims the shared etymological origins of the two terms “fetish” and “fact” in order to reconsider the freedom of passage between the real and the constructed. 2. Futher to the conceptions of artefact as fetish onto which beliefs and desires are projected and the “facts” of scientific reality, factish recovers this link through the ‘actions of the makers of both’. 3. Thereby “construction” and “autonomous reality” are identified as synonymous. 4. Latour posits that the opposition of the terms epistemology (knowledge) and ontology (being) were formed ‘in removing human agency from and attachment to the fabrication of facts and of fetishes’ 5. In reclaiming this association as ‘a practical ontology’, Latour suggests ways of uninhibited movement between territories such as science and art. Bruno Latour. Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. (Cambridge Massachusetts; London, England: Harvard Uni Press, 1999): 274-5. ibid, 284-285. Ibid ibid, 287.

  14. Tomas Saraceno On Air Flying Garden-Air-Port 2004-5Pneumatic structure, entrance exit and social behaviour of the visitors Art research offers a chance to seeknowledge categories differently and to Imagine possibilities- a kind of active philosophy in immersive practice.

  15. Tomas Saraceno How to Live Together 2006 mixed media installation

  16. Mark Dion Mobile Wilderness Unit-Wolf 2006 Mixed media

  17. Diller Scofidio and Renfro (interdisciplinary studio)The Blur Building 2002 Pavilion commissioned for Expo 02Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland Visual Imagination Italo Calvino writes that in aiming for novelty, originality and invention in artistic practice: ‘... the question of the priority of the visual image or the verbal expression(...like the problem of the chicken and the egg) tends definitely to lean toward the side of the visualimagination’.So he asks: ‘What will be the future of the individual imagination in what is usually called the “civilization of the image”? Will the power of evoking images of things that are not there continue to develop ... in the flood of prefabricated images?’ Calvino, Italo. ‘Visibility’ in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage Books, 1993, 86 Ibid 91

  18. Diller Scofidio and Renfro (interdisciplinary studio)The Blur Building 2002 Pavilion commissioned for Expo 02Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland Gilles Deleuze preferred the image of the crystalas a circuit of exchanges in reference to the imagination-as the seeding and environment of possibility and the interchange of actual and virtual, opaque and transparent. (*see Negotiations in bibliography)

  19. Mierle Laderman UkelesGarbage Truck Dance 1985Futurist Ballet for 10 street cleaning vehicles

  20. Simon StarlingTabernas Desert Run 2004Fuel-cell powered bicycle, vitrine and watercolour on paper

  21. Simon StarlingTabernas Desert Run 2004Fuel-cell powered bicycle, vitrine and watercolour on paper

  22. Art research and its particularities ‘.... the discursive [is not] the...prime modality of “thinking through the visual”. Alongside runs its “pathic” and “phatic” force, its penumbra of the non-verbal, its somatic scope, its smoky atmospherics, its performative range’. But it is useful to remember that all knowledge is tentative • Phatic-speech act meant to merely perform a social task not convey information eg what’s up? as greeting • Pathic- feeling, empathic Sarat Maharaj ‘know-how and No-How: stopgap notes on “method” in visual art as knowledge production’ Art&Research 2:2 (Spring, 2009), 4 Accessed 4/09/09 http://www.artandresearch.org.uk/v2n2/maharaj.html

  23. Agnes Denes Isometric Systems in Isotropic Space- Map Projections: the Egg 1974-1976Ink and charcoal on graph paper 28 x 22cm

  24. Action research-one cycle of.. ...And making the process explicit Group process egg design research State the problem/ aim of the research Methodology Systematic Methods Do: Activate the plan Reflect: Critically evaluate outcomes Suggest action for next cycle Interpret outcomes Communicate: Make the research (PROCESS) explicit. Disseminate research outcomes In which ways could this PROCESS happen visually?How does this translate to your research practice?

  25. BibliographyBolt, Barbara. ‘The magic is in the handling’ in Practice as Research:Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. Estelle Barrett and Barbara Bolt. Eds. London: I B Tauris, 2007 Barbican Art Gallery. Radical Nature: Art and Architecture for a Changing Planet 1969-2009. Exhibition Catalogue. Koenig Books, 2009. Blanchot, Maurice. & Foucault, Michel. Foucault/ Blanchot: Maurice Blanchot: The thought from outside by Michel Foucault; Michel Foucault as I imagine him by Maurice Blanchot. New York: Zone Books, 1987. Calvino, Italo. ‘Visibility’ in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage Books, 1993.Deleuze, Gilles. Negotiations 1972-1990. Trans Martin Joughin. New York: Columbia University Press, 1990. Evans, Jessica and Hall, Stuart. Visual Culture: A Reader. London: Sage & Open University, 1999.Geczy, Adam. ‘art is not research’. Contemporary Art + Culture Broadsheet 38:3. Sept-Nov 2009. 206-208.Gray, Carole and Malins, Julian. Visualising Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design. Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing, 2004. Hannula, Mika Suoranta, Juha & Vadén, Tere. Artistic Research: theories, methods and practices. Academy of Fine Arts Helsinki, Finland; University of Gothenburg /ArtMonitor, Gothenburg, Sweden, 2005.

  26. Bibliography continued Kearney, Richard. The Wake of the Imagination: Toward a Postmodern Culture. Fp 1988. London. Routledge,1994.Miles, Malcolm. Ed.New Practices, New Pedagogies: A Reader. New York; London: Routledge, 2005/6 Mitchell, W. J. T. What do Pictures Want? Chicago; London: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Pallasmaa, Juhani. The Thinking Hand: Existential and Embodied Wisdom in Architecture. John Wiley and Sons. London, 2009.Papastergiadis, Nikos. ‘aesthetics and politics in the age of ambient spectacles’ in Contemporary Art and Culture Broadsheet: Criticism /Theory/ Art. Vol. 39 2010. Rose, Gillian, Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to the Interpretation of Visual Materials. New Delhi; London: Sage Publications, 2001. Sullivan, Graeme. Art Practice as Research: Inquiry in the Visual Arts, London: Sage Publications, 2005

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