Becuase my art is about people, and visual sociology has many cross overs with art. Though no doubt the purist in both camps will hate me for such a statemet... I have some research questions and I use art practice to go abut answering them, but I am always asking myself the questions, "what makes me qualified to be the one to make assumptions on behalf of other people? Who am I to say that what I am saying is right?" Perhaps there is no way of really knowing definitive answers like that, but if I look to precedents in related discplines this may help me think through my own answers.

Its about methodology for me. How can I use what I am creating in a way that is effective in eliciting answers to my research questions? I've not studied sociology so I need to know the lay of the land before I go out there like a bull in a china shop. So far what we have been doing has been reaffirming my own approaches, rather than teaching me anything new, but this is good. I need the reality check that what I am doing is sane and there are precedents out there.  It's interesting being here with a whole bunch of sociologists and a few anthropologists, and finding that neither is able to articulate succintly what the difference between the two actually is. This is another question that may never be answered, because everyone seems to have their own interpretation on it.

I don't know why, but I really (clearly naively) thought that there might be at least a couple of artists here but no, to my knowledege not a soul. Yet artists are often looking at the same things that  visual sociologists are looing at, just from a different point of view, so it would make sense to combine forces. Some of the debates that are going on with visual sociologists are ones that art had long ago, and this is interesting. Why isn't there more interdiscplinary communication? Are we really so protective of our own fields we don't want to help the others out? In discussions and group work, I find myself having to remind the people that I am with that what we are doing is visual, not just theoretical, and that we can use images for more than just evidence that something is happening.... and I am learning from the sociologists alot more about people,  how they behave, their representations and the ways in which others who do not have an art background interpret images, which is invaluable. The relationship is symbiotic.

So much of the "participatory" methods that have been discussed and theorised as novel ways of research are what community artists have been doing for decades. The difference I can see though is that whilst the artists facilitate ways of empowerment though art for communities, I've not observed so much of the products of community art then being used as artefacts which can articulate research outcomes. I guess this is because community artists are not going in with an agenda of elicitiing information, instead they are facilitating creativity and self expression. But, what a great team a visual sociologist and a community artist could make.... incidentally I am neither and do not have any desire to fill this niche  myself, but I can still recognise the potentials that are there.

I had my first Thesis Monitoring meeting yesterday and it was very enlightening. Thesis Monitoring is where a couple of academics who aren't your supervisors sit down with you and go through your progress to date. The term "thesis" in this context can be a littel misleading becuase at my stage I've not started my thesis, and since my phd is art practce based, further downt he track it will be about the progress of what I am making as well.  It's supposed ot occur every 6 months during your phd. In my case somehow administratively I had fallen between the cracks, so I had to do a bit of jumping up and down to get mine done....

It was pointed out to me in thesis monitoring that my current title is really dense and there is alot in it. I don't mind people pullng my work apart critically. It needs to be done, and I have been craving ANY kind of critical feedback on my work, so this was great. Every word in my current title is loaded with its own set of concepts and yes, looking at it, it could be very difficult to work out the main focus.  I think possibly that semiotics is a theme underpinning what I do, but not neccessarily the main driver. Signs and symbols are definately important to what I am doing, not only how they are evidenced in images, but actually what a person's behviour or their environment may signify.

Its funny, the thesis and wirting up is still a long way off, but if one has a title then there is something to hang things off when talking to others.... even thoough the title will probably change a million times before the final hand-in. I guess, its a bit like a focal point, something solid in that shifting snowdome of ideas.

I was thinking the title s more along the lines of: Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of photography but then again if I think about it properly, photography is just one area, even though it is one of my main areas. My work is about people too.. it's about how people act and respond to images and the spaces in which they view them. People are very important in what I do. I want to somehow make life a bit lighter, happier, interesting through my art. We're all too jaded these days. Perhaps a better title is something like:

Visual Dialogues: Convergent technologies and the remediation of image practices.
 

When doing a phd, it is easy to forget that what is all consuming to you, can be inaccessible and difficult to understand for other people. It can be  hard  to unravel the ball of string to sum up in a sentence what it is that you are trying to do before your audience's eyes glaze over in confusion. Today I got an email from the university just asking me if my phd title had changed over the past few months and if, so they needed to update it.

This made me realise  that nowhere on my blog have I actually been that clear and stated my title.  To put my digital whitterings into context, currently my phd title is:

Visual Dialogues: The Semiotics of mobile interaction and convergence in the context of print based art
 

Imagine a snow dome that someone has shaken up. Each snowflake is a thought or idea relating to your work. They whirl around and sometimes settle in groups or create intricate patterns caused by storms of thought. Some melt away into nothing while others form crystalline shapes and structures that later  you work into sculptural forms. You show these to other people and this opens up a forum for discussion and debate… The snow dome has been turned again.

This is what it is like to be doing an art phd, one which is based on research through making things and being a practicing artist, rather than one based  on historical  or theoretical research. I’m not a sculptor, but this is the only way I can describe the process… and there are days, like today when the snowdome is such a flurry of inspiration and ideas I don’t know where to start when writing about them. Instead I have to go and make, for words are too slow and can't yet articulate what is going on in my head – I have to go and shape my snowflakes into forms that enable me to communicate with others.

The tagging workshop below has really been a source of ideas, and then yesterday we had “Who’s Afraid of Artistic Research” which was a student led symposium done through the Visual Research Centre located in Dundee Contemporary Arts and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art & Design. I had a very minor role in helping get it organised, but most of the credit really goes to Lindsay Brown and Cornelia Solfrank. The discourse that came out of it was really thought provoking and when the snowflakes have settled in the snowdome I shall write a little more about it.  

The Signals in the City symposium went well, and it was a very interesting day over all. I was really inspired by the first talk of the day by Jen Southern of Running Stitch. Running Stitch is a group of  collaborators: Jen Southern, Jen Hamilton and Chris St Amand  working with GPS to create artworks which map out the paths that people take through a city. Participants are given a  GPS enabled device (in this case a Nokia phone) which has their software loaded onto it. The path the participants take as they walk around a city is mapped via the GPS and then projected onto a large canvas in the gallery space where volunteers stitch the path taken by the person walking. By the end of the exhibition an intricate and abstract tapestry of people’s journeys has evolved.  

For me the intrigue in this work is not in the final piece, but actually in the processes taken to get to the “finished artwork”. I like the idea of working with people who are part of a place, and the stories that emerge from people’s journeys. Jen’s discussion of how Running Stitch’s projects have evolved over the years also was really interesting, and helps me put my own development and work into realistic perspective. These things take a long time – they took 3 years to develop the software needed to create the works…..

The other really interesting talk at the symposium was that of Chaos Computer Club, which is basically a whole bunch of devoted hackers who though hacking into systems create some great stuff. The talk was mostly focused on Blinken Lights  which started off as a project in an old building in Berlin. The windows of the building emulate pixels and are lit up to create different images. The idea is not unique, but the way in which is was done is exceptionally clever. I think the thing that resonated with me the most was that just by coincidence the day it started was 9/11 and Chaos Computer Club, in a desire to comfort people and make them feel safer displayed a beating heart for a few days… so the cynics of the world may think this tacky, but at a time like that I think that it was the best thing they could have done. As the project progressed, Chaos Computer Club invited the public to create animations for the windows, created by turning on and off a light – which in my opinion really screams Emperor’s New Clothes at Martin Creed’s Turner prize winning ridiculous light.

A couple of weeks ago I attend a course on Free Choice Profilng which is a research method enabling qualitative data to be quantified more “scientifically"  <! --cynical thought:  because scientific enquiry always seems to have more credibility than any other…>

Free Choice profiling was devised to determine perceived  flavours in cheeses and ports, where tasters created lists of descriptive words which they then later ranked for each cheese/ port. Rather than being a yes/ no questionnaire or having terms defined by the researcher, the participants determined the terms to be used (hence the term “free choice profiling). This then has the potential to have a wider range of definitions and terms which may not occur to the researcher. The results are then calculated using GenStat (statistics package) with some customised software to establish areas of consensus amongst participants.

This method can be seen as wholistic rather than reductionist because the results process looks at areas of consensus as opposed to areas of difference. If you think of the classic placebo effect tests, they are usually searching for differences in the participants results to ascertain whether there is anything of significance going on.
But of course you can’t apply such methods to things like tasting wine and cheese, where it make more sense to work on  areas of consensuses where a critical mass of participants are holding similar views.

Dr Francoise Wemelsfelder has been a pioneer in using this methodology, particularly in areas of animal welfare, with the use of videos of livestock animals. Whilst I still have my reservations about the use of the technique in this way being anthropomorphic (attributing human emotions to animals), the actual process and Wemelsfelder’s use of visual material is for me an excellent  means finding answers to some questions my research has been asking.

Although I am an artist, I am the type of person who wants to be able to have repeatable results to illustrate my points. Free Choice Profiling is perhaps one way I can do this, given that the nature of my work is so subjective and based on people’s interpretations and emotional responses to images.

I’m doing a presentation on the 1st of May about my work for the Signals in the City exhibition and its forced me to think about qr-codes on a deeper level than most people seem to engage with. I've come to the conclusion that  looking at qr-codes just by themselves or just in terms of their technical aspects is a rather superfical approach.

The thing about qr-codes that really interests me is that they are physical world hyperlinks: how does this affect people? what impact does this have on social activities mediated by computers/ handheld devices?  It is this linking between physical and virtual spaces that I find intriguing, not the advertising, or the idea that I could call a taxi just by taking a photo of it (with its qr-code emblazoned on its side), not the idea of buying a bottle of coke just by taking a photo of the vending machine that it is in. Although these are amazing ideas this is where most people stop because these ideas in themselves are money making and sometimes I think that this can limit people’s ability to push an idea to its limits.

We need to think about how a user interacts with a mobile phone, their expectations when they take a photograph, what it means to be “in the world” physically while interacting in virtual space. People multitask when they use mobile phones, their attention spans are short and usually data rates are an issue. How do these affect all affect the experience of the user?

Going back to the physical word hyperlinking, if we stop for a moment and question the semiotics of such an act there is so much in this it could be a book in itself. In the 3^rd year of my undergrad degree I did performance studies, and the most informative aspect of the whole year was a research project I did on the Semiotics of the Theatre Experience. I never thought such a project would be useful now, but it is – semiotics of space, breaking down of actor vs audience space could be related to breaking down of virtual vs physical space where the audience belongs to the physical world and the actors to the virtual….

I've been doing more reading for the Thinkng Through Craft book review and Chapter 2 on Material, unlike chapter 1 has been pretty hard going:This chapter is about the relationship that a craftsperson has with the materials in which they work, and how this can define the work itself. The points that the author raises are thought provoking, but there always seems to be an inferiority complex on behalf on craft by the author and he spends much time justifying craft in the context of contemporary/ modern art.

Considering the calibre of artists/craftspeople he is discussing this is rather irrelevant. We know he is  not discussing little old ladies on Sundays crocheting macramé pot holders, who would have no interest in entering into conceptual debates of the materiality of craft as they sup their tea and biscuits. Hasn’t the “establishment” matured enough to realise that the craft-art debate is rather moot these days?

The notion of Process Art is explored and contrasted with notions of “opticality” and this makes for a very interesting discourse on the intentions of the maker. I am using the term “maker” now because I am not sure whether the author is defining the people he discusses as “artists” or “craftspeople”. I get the feeling that they are not sure themselves. He makes an interesting point that although the intentions of Process Art (where the art is defined my the process undergone to create it) and Opticality (where the focus is on the way the physical object appears to us), the resultant works had many similarities.

An inproportional amount of discussion was devoted to the material of clay manifest through a number of artists,  but less was said about the nature of materials such as glass, textiles, metalwork or wood. Adamson’s discussion of Voulko’s relationship to ceramics/ pottery excellently illustrates the maker’s debates about the material they may use, but it gets bogged down by extraneous biographical details which make this a  rather unfocused digression.

 

His discussion about Yagi Kazuo (pictured left) was much more enlightening and more focused where Kazuo’s work with chieokore no kodomo (translated as young people who are slow to develop understanding) highlights the joy of clay as material. Their experiences highlight the way in which the intrinsic qualities of the material are for many the catalyst for making in the first place. This discussion reminds us that this book has been written by an art historian, rather than a practicioner. Such a viewpoint may be why one gets the feeling of someone on the outside looking in, rather than expression from someone who is  so embedded in the making of work, attempting to articulate their  tacit understandings.

The chapter ends with a rather truncated discussion on glass artists Dale Chihuly (at top of entry)  and Emma Woffenden. which one feels could have been expanded much further and related back to the discussion on clay.  Adamson discusses Chihuly’s mass appeal in a way that makes the reader wonder whether craft can only be elevated to the status of art worthwhile when it is uncomfortable, difficult and incomprehensible by those without an art degree. While Emma Woffenden’s work is treated with more sympathy, and this is a discourse that would have been much more fulfilling had it been longer (and the discussion on clay shorter). The chapter on Material is so different in style, structure and focus from the first chapter that one wonders if this were written at an earlier/ later stage and was added quite late on in the editing process.