Notes Page 16 tutorial

A tutorial.

I return to the beginnings to try and explain everything. The shopping lists get pulled out from all of the other dross. It's the simplest - yet strongest - has the most potential and can funnel the other theories and ideas. Some of the notes:

• .. ..creating  practices based within everyday experience, especially relating to walking and shopping.
• There are important questions of spatial and temporal organisation that are implied by the different kinds of depiction. 
• You are working in a conceptualist way which I think is developing some stimulating experiments. You can translate these working methods into more ‘realised’ images – this will be an interesting way of testing the boundaries of your practice. 
• using words alongside your mark-making projects. 
• There is something useful about the way that shopping lists overlap with the poetic memory experiments. 
• presenting the work? it might be that you need to create conundrums about the location of the work. 
• These questions about presentation are integral to your practice.

Kim miraculously helps me refocus and revives a mode of provocation.  I begin to get that the point is to utilise the one piece/experiment as a lens to view through.  I can expand/explore freely through it but by returning/reviewing, as you would with a viewfinder when drawing, it will hopefully keep some clarity.   I begin to sketch the significant themes through this frame; the everyday (and pedestrianism), memory (specifically archiving/capturing memory), drawing ( - line, repetition, ambiguity, interzone and more.....) and above all really questioning/provoking presentation/communication of process and conceptual art and I start to feel solid ground for the first time in ages.  

I look back on my latest abstract.  I can see how much of a sudden shift this new perspective has caused. Unable to articulate what it is exactly but knowing it has something to do with locating myself in the actual material practice rather than the theory/idea of it. Inside out rather than outside in? Research through practice not practice through research? I realise how far off I was and how myopic things can get by trying to wedge ideas into theories/fields definitively. There is a way of contextualising that locates but doesn't make it absolute and that skill evades me.......

Notes Page 15

The pedestrian blog for November ends today.
I'm collating the entries and extracting the significant ideas to marry up with theories I've been looking at.

As part of a symposium of work in progress I submitted the abstract below.
I'm hacking this up now and highlighting what needs defining, elaborating, ditching.... It's been a helpful process for refining the question(s).  I'm also helping to organise the symposium and this already has been an eyeopener.  It's so vital that an abstract lands the presentation in the right field/area, is explicit about the intention and is clear.  I'm not sure I had fully appreciated this before.

The difficulty of committing to a set of ideas holds me back.  So I"m publishing here to force some kind of decision......

Abstract: 

Lining up: What is lost (or gained) when drawing research is (not) pursued through lateral or non-linear approaches? Need to establish/define ‘drawing research’, ‘lateral’ and ‘non-linear as terms.  Attest why this is a purposefully ambiguous title. order/chaos?

Under the working title of Pedestrian I have adopted an experimental methodology of researching through walking. The notion of line is a recurring theme in my practice; as a formal system of drawing, as a wider philosophical subject and as allegory for investigating Research through Practice as a subject. So my research sits mostly in the field of Drawing Theory and Philosophy but has always wandered over tentatively into areas of psychogeography, autoethnography and phenomenology. Do I mention what I will be making or doing? Do I need to at this point? Explore/define psychogeography, autoethnography and phenomenology.

(also elaborate on disruption of line, wayfaring/wandering)

My proposal for this MA began with a concern for my working process.  I had begun to realise - in being of a very non-linear disposition, with a disorganised thinking style - to maintain a productive and logical practice within established models of practice and research I had adapted my behaviour.  I had modified. I had lined-up. And in doing so I had eradicated self reference, spontaneity, chance, even any expressive or emotional traces. I had objectified, controlled and constrained. Line as: retaining and recalling memory, repetitive nature of the action of walking (and trying to remember it) - documentation in ref to memory (eg camera synchronic to drawing/notation etc)

As this is literally knowledge gleamed from practice I rely heavily on current thinking around Research through Practice to contextualise this overall problem and convert it into data for the next phase. I have begun to form conclusions, for example; there are advantages to constraint and the paradoxical freedom it enables; my thinking style is of use in an autoethnographic methodology but I wouldn’t have been able to critique this without the previous experience. 

Bearing this in mind for the presentation I would like to explain how the background connects with the next phase and have identified for discussion three key aspects currently being explored:

• Considering walking as a form of drawing. 
• Pedestrianism as a metaphor for lateral thinking. 
• Drawing examined as rational production or phenomenological process against visual and cultural value systems.

Notes Page 14

Binary

Interzone (provide definition)
Ambiguity (refer to Tracey)
Liminality (provide defiinition)
duality
ambivelance

Parallax - maintaining an ambivelant position whilst shifting the view slightly each way...a perspective from multiple postitions....

“Interzone” captures perfectly the spirit of the region which is being described here: spatially, economically, socially, psychologically, spiritually, and mentallyInterzone, here, seems a term located at the very nexus of intersecting lines of global interests, passions, energies and violent eruption. e “Interzone” as a spatial metaphor designed to foreground mechanisms of exchange, fusion, and categorial shifting


William Burrows credited with the original phrase.


Analogy of Intersection (Traffic) : New/Old Architecture, Pedestrian/Motor, visible/invisible (drawing)

Lines are ambiguous - divisive and connective, a border is an interzone


white paper is an absence / ambiguous ... tracey guy on ambiguity adriana ionascu
autoethnography is also an ambiguous process/methodology