User:Eleanorg/gradProposal
Graduation Proposal (final version)
for 3 Oct
DO: Write list of keywords. Summarize key interests/processes used and link from previous to current/proposed work.
Keywords:
- consent -- democracy -- negotiation
- facilitation -- curation
- multiplicity -- distribution
- porous boundaries
- publishing -- distribution models
Connections from previous work:
my approach/unsolved problems
Taking the role of facilitator has long been a theme in my work. Often I design situations which invite people to encounter one another and exchange ideas (for example Play!Fight!, 2010). The question of how to curate the resulting content was always a dilemma in this approach, with me having the 'final say' seeming to contradict the ethics/aesthetics of my dialogue-based practice.
previous work
With Open Sauce I began experimenting with handing over curation to the projects' participants. In fact, observing the way in which they edited each other's work was my primary source of interest in this collaborative writing project. A developing interest here was in the power of the editor/curator either to promote or to erase the words of others. I was fascinated by observing how this power is exercised.
My interest in the conflicting desires to echo and to erase others' views was continued in The Dissolute Image, which confronted participants more directly with the question of whether they would enable the distribution of other people's (possibly objectionable) content. Here, the vulnerability of the artefact in question is highlighted (an image divided into individual pixels), and it presents itself as a request for adoption - as opposed to the artefact of Open Sauce, a wiki text, which by its nature invites erasure/re-writing.
future work
The vulnerability of other people's ideas will be further explored in my research this year, focussing on the theme of "consent". This theme links up two key strands in my practice: sexual politics and democratic process. The ability to identify with/repeat/distribute others' ideas will be considered both as a vital skill for working democratically (getting beyond 'me'/'not me'), and also as a site of ambivalence where we ask ourselves where the limits of solidarity lie. (In this respect it also connects to my previous theoretical interest in abandoning solo authorship.)
This year I will focus more narrowly on the ways in which the work of others is handled in various situations which call for reproducing or otherwise transmitting it, specifically in relation to publishing (both print and digital). This research aims to return eventually to the Radical X platform and to facilitating dialogue-based projects on sexual politics - but this time, with more appropriate models for dialogue-based editing and production. In a nutshell, the intention is to figure out how to "write about consent consensually".