This article addresses how breath is intra-active with reading and writing. The two meditation methods I used for concentrating on and writing the breath-experience were ‘attention on the breath’as taught within a Korean Seon (Zen) tradition, and writing this experience as ‘meditative enquiry’ [Stephens, T. 2021. ‘A Meditative Enquiry into Presence: Unmaking the Autoethnographic Self.’ Journal of Writing in Creative Practice 14 (2): 161–178]. Two ‘texts’ gradually converge into an intertwined experience of reading both academic and literary writing, blurring distinctions (...) between them. Various theories are drawn from that un-do dualistic frameworks of epistemology assumed in reading academic texts. This raises questions for the embodied cognitive humanities, post-qualitative methodologies, and in autoethnographic and phenomenological writing as well as for creative writers. The article draws from cultural, philosophical, and literary studies, recent breath studies, and from the field of embodiment, to contextualise the ‘creative academic writing’ excerpts; leading to an unavoidable conclusion: this type of ‘new writing’ is not new but, rather, contiguous with practices of embodiment. Yet, how can a written fabrication of breathing be read, and does stylistic innovation present insurmountable problems for the academic validation of creative academic writing? (shrink)

This thesis is a comparative study of research undertaken by practitioners in art and design as part of a research degree (PhD, Doctor of Philosophy) in the UK, and was driven by the lack of clarity in regard to how artists make contributions to knowledge. The Coldstream Report (1960) is taken as a starting point because it put the art school on a path to the university and created a gap between art practice and its history and theory; a gap (...) that serves as the context and inheritance of research in the arts. Where the discourse of research in the arts can be understood as addressing the problem of knowledge through theory, artists instead engage in a working through of this problem via practice, and therefore completed PhD theses exist as a critically under-used resource. However, it was crucial that this thesis aim at redressing artists lack of ownership in research in the arts on fair terms, rather than develop a model that resolves the problem of knowledge, because any top-down demarcation would only serve to delimit the potential of artistic practice. The sample employed by this thesis consists of all thirty-two PhD theses produced by artists at Chelsea College of Art and Design from 1998-2013/14 and was supplemented by six ‘narrative research’ interviews. A basis for comparison was developed through engagement with the sample and used to structure a three-stage ‘discursive method,’ which was ultimately facilitated by consideration of ‘values.’ Due to ‘values’ providing a lens by which the problem of knowledge in the art and design PhD can be understood, an expanded discussion of the sample is proffered in terms of artistic identity, investigative activity and the character of evidence, and what is apparent epistemologically and ontologically. Consequently, a series of concurrent findings are put forward as a contribution to knowledge: the status of knowledge in research in the arts, evidence of deliberations of value by artists, and the identification of a play of forces in research. The findings of this thesis draw attention to how values are negotiated by artists as part of the art and design PhD, and crucially, claims that is a moving towards rather than a reaction to, the problem of knowledge, that grants artists ownership of research in the arts. (shrink)

People learn from practice research in design but how and what is the nature of knowledge they acquire? In this track we look at knowledge claims generated through practice research in the context of and in relation to social design. In other words, the focus is on knowing and how knowledge is produced and acquired through practice research in social design. The basic assumption, as well as the proposition being tested, is: because the knowing in question is acquired in a (...) certain way, it makes certain things known; or maybe even going further, it makes certain - some but not all - things happen. Accordingly, all of the papers submitted to the track speak to – refine and elaborate – the process through which knowledge is produced and, perhaps more speculatively, suggest what outcomes follow from this: what becomes known through practice research in social design and what difference it makes. They don’t arrive at a uniform conclusion but present a range of considerations, together with the vocabulary, to take this line of research forward. (shrink)

This paper gives a stipulative definition of social design. It argues that there is a distinctive field of design practice, and design practice research that can be labelled ‘social design’ but that this distinctiveness cannot be spelled out directly in terms of the relation between design and the social, which has been the dominant view up till now. Rather, social design is defined in terms of the kind of knowledge production that it is – as a form of situational normative (...) inquiry. This means that it is conducted empirically by responding to problems identified in specific situations and according to the ends-in-view that can be collectively warranted, and thus responding to the norms of justification and standards of criticism of those affected. This stipulative definition not only has the advantage of delineating and orienting the fields of practices of social design, it also opens some interesting considerations with respect to knowledge claims made by social design research. (shrink)

This essay examines Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI), an open source computational photographic process that is transforming methodologies in archaeology and heritage conservation for its ability to interactively re-light artefacts within a virtual hemisphere of illumination and extrude a digital topography that is hyper-legible in space-time, from its contemporary application in facial recognition via Bertrand Tavernier's 1980 science fiction film La Mort en Direct and a return of the death mask through digital extrusion, ultimately locating a progenitor of the heightened objectivity (...) promised by RTI paradoxically in Surrealist photography and the fugitive facialities of Salvador Dali's Paranoiac-Critical Method. As emerging imaging technologies such as RTI are seen to open novel ways of extracting latent data from historical artefacts, reassembling objects of study in a new (virtual) light, collateral opportunities provided by these technologies to re-enter archival still and moving image recordings inadvertently recalibrate their spatio-temporal ground and destabilise their indexical reading through an excessive production of new traces and signs. If methodologies can be seen to play a significant role in constructing their objects of study, then emerging computational imaging operations such as RTI have their own subjectivities to disclose: In performing a media archaeology of this digital process, the essay proposes that we not only narrate the subjects of our study but the very tools of investigation themselves. (shrink)

FTW! A mood. A declaration. A form of double speak. A distributed sign. A signature as distributed meaning. We want to think about commitment. Commitment to what? In what form? Would you like to talk about it?