Image: View of the twilight sky and Martian horizon taken by NASA’s Curiosity Mars rover.
Innovative Skills Training for Practice Research in the Arts
This programme of innovative skills training is geared toward those involved in practice research, generally, and arts research, specifically. The nature of the training is inherently interdisciplinary, devised and developed by researchers across Fine Art, Performance and Poetry. The training will be suitable and beneficial to researchers at any stage of their project’s development and, while specifically relevant to artist researchers, will be open to researchers in any field.
The proposal entails four skills workshops, each dedicated to a key element of practice research. The workshops are scheduled on the following two days:
Workshops 1 & 2: Wednesday, 14 November 2018 @ 11.00 – 18.00
Workshops 3 & 4: Wednesday, 27 February 2019 @ 11.00 – 18.00
All of the workshops will be held at Goldsmiths College.
Participants may sign up for individual workshops, or may choose to attend the entire series.
Details of the workshops are given below.
Question
Led by Kristen Kreider
What is the shape of a question? To whom is it addressed? Are questions always verbal or are there other ways of posing them? How do questions guide research and how do they allow us to get lost? Can we understand practice as a mode of responding to questions, and how does this raise the question of ethics?
Date: Wednesday, 14 November 2018
Time: 11.00-14.00
Location: RHB 2107, Goldsmiths, University of London (map)
Preparation
Please bring the following 3 items with you to the seminar itself:
- one object relating to your research project;
- one image relating to your research project;
- one paragraph selected from an essay, article or book related to your research.
Suggested Reading
These suggested readings are optional, to be read at your leisure. We will not be discussing them specifically during the workshop.
- Arendt, Hannah. ‘Where Are We When awe Think?’ The Life of the Mind. London: Harcourt, Inc., 1971. pp. 195-216.
- Lomax, Yve. ‘To Begin Again’. Passionate Being. London: I. B. Tauris, 2010. pp. ix-xii.
- Rancière, Jacques. ‘The Ignorant One’s Lesson’. The Ignorant Schoolmaster. Trans. Kristin Ross. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991. pp 19-45.
All readings are available at the following Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/1kxojo8n6zmbm4p/AADMSAxM-0A18pz4rIBa3410a?dl=0
Workshop Leader
Professor Kristen Kreider is a writer and artist. Her research stems from an interest in the poetics of thought, its materialization as form, and a concern with how artworks relate to the world. She has published poetry, essays, journal articles and a single-authored monograph entitled Poetics & Place: The Architecture of Sign, Subject and Site (IB Tauris). In collaboration with the architect James O’Leary, Kristen’s artistic practice engages with sites of architectural and cultural interest. Combining aspects of performance, installation, documentary, poetry, fiction and image-making, the work of Kreider + O’Leary exposes and interweaves the complexities of place into a fabrication of the real. Their book Falling was published by Copy Press, Field Poetics is forthcoming from MA Biblioteque, and they are currently working on a large-scale project, Un-Governable Spaces, engaging with five sites of community and resistance globally. Kristen is Professor of Fine Art and Director of the Art Research Programme at Goldsmiths College, London. (http://www.kreider-oleary.net)
Our Tyrannical Methods
Led by Nina Wakeford
How problematic is our affective attunement (or not) with discourses about methods and methodology? Do we desire to have disciplinary specific methods for art research (either individually, or collectively as contemporary fine artists)? How do we forge relationships with other disciplines and their ‘rigour’ about epistemology, methodology and method? I have written about needing to be ‘inventive’ in our methods – what does this mean? I’ll begin by a fairly routine description of terms about knowledge/research, and we will continue the session by exploring the possibility of ‘inventiveness’ in research, and shifting the terms of ‘validity’.
Date: Wednesday, 14 November 2018
Time: 15.00-18.00
Location: RHB 2107, Goldsmiths, University of London (map)
You will benefit most from this session if you study in advance the key reading below, and have begun to think about how and why you might seek to use the language of ‘methods’ in your research project, or seek to avoid it. Please bring a copy of your PhD proposal/current abstract.
Key reading in advance
- Introduction and Chapter 1 (Anecdote) in Lury & Wakeford (2012) “Inventive Methods” – available as ebook through Goldsmiths Library.
Supplementary reading to be discussed at session
- Guba, E. G., & Lincoln, Y. S. (1994). Competing paradigms in qualitative research. In N. K. Denzin & Y. S. Lincoln (Eds.), Handbook of qualitative research (pp. 105-117). London: Sage.
- Lather, P (1993) Fertile Obsession: Validity after Poststructuralism, The Sociological Quarterly, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 673-693.
Readings are available at the following Dropbox link: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/x7mj14fikms4s17/AAC1Wlz6XLwGF2HorMUxCJYGa?dl=0
Workshop Leader
Dr. Nina Wakeford is an artist and sociologist, and is currently Reader in Sociology at Goldsmiths and a Visiting Tutor on the MFA at Piet Zwart Institute. Her work begins with the unfinished business of past social movements, and the challenges of revisiting the energies that these movements created. She is interested in the way in which identification and disidentification are forged, modes of empathy and inhabitation, and the risks of staying loyal/respectful to the kinds of materials that initiate the work. Recently, drawing on a personal collection of feminist materials from the 1970s and 1980s, Nina has made a series of film and performance works that involve singing as a way of attaching herself to objects or images. Nina is the co-editor of Inventive Methods: The Happening of the Social (Routledge, 2012) a collection that explores, amongst other things, how research might better work with openness and ambiguity.
Documentation
Led by Johanna Linsley
Documentation is, arguably, one of the most important practice research skills. It is through documentation that one is able to communicate the ‘rigour’ of a research project, doing so in and through the often complex aesthetics of practice. In this session we will explore aspects of documentation including the role of image, moving image, sound, score, diagram, writing; the importance of sequence, narrative, detail, speculation. We will consider what to edit in and what to edit out of documentation and explore ideas and techniques relating to fact, fiction, description and point of view. Ultimately, our aim will be to develop an art of documentation specific to practice research.
Date: Wednesday, 27 February 2019
Time: 11.00-14.00
Location: RHB 150, Goldsmiths, University of London (map)
Workshop Leader
Dr. Johanna Linsley is an artist and researcher in the Drama, Theatre and Performance Department at the University of Roehampton. She is a research associate on the Leverhulme Trust-funded project Acts of Assembly, which examines the face-to-face meeting as a social genre. Her research also looks at performance and documentation: she has co-edited a forthcoming collection, Artists in the Archive (Routledge, 2018), which arises from an AHRC-funded project Performing Documents, and she co-convenes, with Georgina Guy, the Documenting Performance working group for the Theatre and Performance Research Association. Her ongoing practice-based research project, Stolen Voices, (conducted with Rebecca Collins) combines this interest in the evidentiary with a focus on the sonic, taking the form of an acoustic investigation of the UK coast.
Dissemination
Led by Oreet Ashery
Please note this workshop is now fully booked. Any further registrations will be added to a waiting list.
The dissemination of practice research outcomes can take many forms. What is important is for the dissemination of the research output to adequately communicate research findings to other researchers in a specific field or discipline (here, Fine Art, Performance, Poetry) and more widely. In this session we will look at the importance of communicating research to different audiences, both specific and more general, and examine how different modes of dissemination can be contoured toward this. We will look at ‘the exhibition’, ‘the performance’, ‘the book’, ‘the video’, ‘the website’ as different modes and media of dissemination. We will think about the differences between documentation and dissemination – and here, again, we will think about what is included and what is not. We will also think about dissemination in relation to what kinds of public a research output can reach and affect, ultimately endeavouring to think about the impact of practice research in terms of an ecology of mind.
Date: Wednesday, 27 February 2019
Time: 15.00-18.00
Location: RHB 150, Goldsmiths, University of London (map)
Workshop Leader
Oreet Ashery is a transdisciplinary visual artist, working in local and international contexts and engaged with bio/political fiction, gender materiality and potential communities. Ashery’s practice manifests through distinct multiplatform projects and spans live situations and performances, still & moving image, fibers, writing and assemblages. The work turns to areas such as costume & banners, music, sound, education, distribution, research and activism. Ashery’s recent large scale commissions included Passing Through Metal, a sonic performance with 80 mic’d up knitting needles and a death metal band, commissioned by LPS Malmo, 2017, and the web-series Revisiting Genesis, winner of the Jarman Film Award 2017, looking at digital death, memory as identity and feminist art reincarnations, http://revisitinggenesis.net, commissioned by The Stanley Picker Gallery, 2016.
In 2014 Ashery presented The World is Flooding at Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall, including an hour-long performance, a collection of banners, costumes and headgear made from cleaning materials and a zine. Working with asylum seekers, The World is Flooding was a re-enactment of Mayakovsky’s play Mystery-Bouffe, set in a world inhabited by The Clean and The Unclean. In 2013 Ashery produced Party for Freedom, an Artangel commission, including live performances, AV album and live concerts. The project focused on freedom rhetoric used by the far right and the left.
Funding for this event is provided by the Consortium for Humanities and the Arts South-East England (CHASE).
For any queries, please contact Professor Kristen Kreider (k.kreider@gold.ac.uk).
Terms and conditions
By registering below you are requesting a place on this training programme or selected sessions that form part of the programme. A member of the CHASE team or the workshop leader will contact you in due course to confirm that a place has been allocated to you. If you no longer require a place, please email enquiries@chase.ac.uk as soon as possible so your name can be removed from the registration list.
If you are allocated a place but can no longer attend, please email enquiries@chase.ac.uk so that your place can be reallocated. CHASE training is free to attend and events are often oversubscribed with a waiting list. Failure to notify us of non-attendance in good time (ideally 5 days prior to the workshop/programme) means your place cannot be reallocated and may result in your access to future CHASE training being restricted.