User:Ssstephen/grs/20231018

project proposal

What do you want to make?

An assessment of what a ⊞er does, through autoethnographic and academic research. This could be expanded to other people or groups that relate to or interact with ⊞ as a category and label. Secondly, a collection of tools that highlight, stretch, decompartmentalise, undiscipline, annotate, break, cross, laugh at, question, dissolve the boundaries that exist around this apparent object. At the moment these seem like two separate things. They also seem to each consist of lots of little things maybe more as vague constellations rather than fixed objects or even categories. This is intentional.

How do you plan to make it?

Assessment, autoethnography: I have been documenting my practices on this page. I am experimenting with different ways of doing this, so far all based on text annotations. I plan to expand the methodology further to get a wider view of the practices. It could also be possible to document the practices of others, for example through interviews.

Undisciplined tools: Software and hardware tools that interfere with the boundaries as described above. I want to make small prototypes that make a point. I want to review these prototypes and see what they do. For example at the boundaries between ⊞ and other disciplines. At the boundaries between work and play. Taking inputs or sending outputs where they are not traditionally connected.

What is your timetable?

October/November: expand the range of methods and ideas for tools. Reflect on what the research brings.

December/2024: I dont really know. Maybe focus on some specific methods and categories of tools. Maybe keep expanding.

Why do you want to make it?

a desire to decompartmentalise and be more flexible about intra- and inter- personal identity and connection. Yes I have skin but it is full of pores, it is surrounded by and surrounding hairs, it is completely empty.

Who can help you and how?

Marloes, I dont really know how to write a project proposal for example. Joseph and Manetta, with technical aspects of the tools, and technical approaches to documentation maybe. People involved in other practices (disciplines) who could help me explore crossing these boundaries. Writer contacts in Ireland. OSP. Michael. Jian. Frank. Jonathan. xpubs. There are probably more. Maybe I will ask Meghan Clarke I really like her work and it seems relevant.

Relation to previous practice

I have worked and been trained as a ⊞er. I have also worked and been trained as a musician, a theatre maker, a teacher, a web developer. The boundaries have never been clear. I'm not sure will this make them clearer or fuzzier. Hopefully bring the fuzziness into focus, without expecting it to be clear.

Relation to a larger context

I'm struggling with this a little, sometimes it feels too personal. OSP. Ruben Pater. Meghan Clarke. The context of design studios and institutions I was involved with in Ireland. The context of other workers who relate to and struggle under systems and labels like "self-employed", "freelance", "creative". This also makes me a little uncomfortable as most of these workers including me come from an extremely privileged position of literal wealth and other advantages which allow them to operate in these fields. I dont want to suggest their struggles to be worse than or even comparable to those of many others people currently on this planet. I'm worried about the urgency and validity of the work, is this a good way to spend my time?

References/bibliography

see below. Also Jian's work from last year, as well as Supi, Emma, and Kim.

annotated bibliography

By the next session: Make a VERY SHORT bibliography NO MORE THAN THREE KEY TEXTS. Write a very brief (two sentence) outline of the key texts in your bibliography and discuss how they will relate to your thesis). This will be the start of an annotated bibliography.

Caps Lock, Ruben Pater

This book is about ⊞ from several different contexts. It's chapter headings show that it examines the "⊞er as" (salesperson, worker, amateur, activist, etc). It has given me so far lots to think about in terms of the ⊞er's role in society, particularly through a Marxist lens. Further Reading: 'The Politics of Design: A (Not So) Global Design Manual for Visual Communication 2016'.

16 case-stories re-imagining the practice of lay-out, Open Source Publishing

This is relevant to the part where I want to examine the eco-system of tools that surround me, and make tools that play with the boundaries and possibilities. It includes some really interesting experiments in the same spirit. I need to read it again because it gave me loads of fun ideas.

Death of a Son, Jon Silkin

  I have seen stones: I have seen brick
But this house was made up of neither bricks nor stone
    But a house of flesh and blood
      With flesh of stone

  And bricks for blood. A house
Of stones and blood in breathing silence with the other
   Birds singing crazy on its chimneys.
     But this was silence,

The "Moralities" of Poaching. Manufacturing personal artefacts on the factory floor, Anteby, M.

Case study of the weird boundaries or connections between labour and the rest of existence ("leisure"). Situating labour within bigger social structures. It would be interesting to work through a similar lens.

Notes on: De Certeau, M.(1984) The Practice of Everyday Life, Dave Harris

And also the original De Certeau piece. This is about navigating systems, networks and institutions, tactics and counter strategies. It is about disorder and destruction/destructuring.

interrupt the accepted framework and order, which 'leaks... meaning: it is a sieve order' 

A Prehistory of the Cloud, Tung-Hui Hu

This is relevant because I find the cloud based elements of my practices, in particular design software and communication tools, to be very influential on how the practices are carried out. Also the time-sharing aspects of computer and human networks that the book deals with and our modern view of time, where it comes from and how it affects us.

On the Inconvenience of Other People, Lauren Berlant

I dont have a specific reason why its included it's affected everything to be honest. I guess most relevant here is the idea of 'loosening objects' which is the main point of my work, to loosen ⊞.

Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight, Clifford Geertz

Or the Interpretation of Culture, but I haven't read much of that except for the title. I am interested in the method of thick description that Geertz used here, trying to look at events, episodes and practices in a lot of detail to understand why people do things, and how they derive meaning from their actions.