Future Reflections Research Group

Future Relections research group (FR), was formed by Marsha Bradield, Catherine

Mafioletti, Aaron McPeake and myself.82 As Fine Art practice-based PhD students

at Chelsea College of Art and Design, we wanted to play with ways of undertaking

an integrated form of relection-through-practice and to make this process visible

and transparent through the various art forms by which our collaborative practice was disseminated to ‘a public’. As a group, we went on to undertake collective and site-speciic research into art research itself. We did this work through some of the ‘structural sites’ of art research, such as conferences and publications, where the genre of art research becomes public. We used performative strategies towards interaction with this ield, as a self-conscious relexive method. This approach enabled us to both explore and play with the protocols of these particular institutional and discursive sites. We did this work through performative conference

presentations and written outputs published in art-research publications.83 _Our

website archives all the different FR outputs and I have included two of our papers in the appendix to this thesis, as these are referred to here.

Our contribution to art research as Future Relection Research Group does not propose a new method or way for (art) research to be conducted, but rather, it sought to expand the possibilities for art research, arguing against falling back onto an established epistemologically science-based discourse. Instead, the groups aim was to expand a repertoire of literacies towards creating, reading and otherwise examining the research process. The outcomes that I will discuss within

81 Chelsea had funding and resources to encourage 1st year students to organise a research related event, exhibition, symposium or similar. Future Relections was a three- part project that took place in the Triangle Gallery, Chelsea College of Art and Design

between the 18th-20th, of April, 2007. It included an exhibition, a publication and a two-day conference focusing on the interplay between research and relection at different stages in the art-making process.

82 Aaron McPeake was only involved in the inaugural project as he had to withdraw shortly after due to other commitments.

this case study are amongst the irst that we produced as Future Relection, after our inaugural event at Chelsea. Those include written and performed works that were made for, and after, the Art of Research Conference in Helsinki, 2007, as a way to discuss the problems of our performative site-speciic approach but also to explore its potential (both for art and possibly other research domains). I have chosen this work as a case study because it was through these projects, associated processes and outcomes, that Future Relections developed a way of working, where relexive relection on past and present work self-consciously envisaged new work. It is also here that processes of working and, in retrospect, collective relexion can be irst identiied as key for the project described in the inal section of this thesis, Site 3: Praxis Site.

For the Helsinki Art of Research project, FR wrote a paper called Future Response:

Is the Question the Answer? as an initial response to a Call for Papers (CFP).84

This paper was structured around four questions: 1) What are the key positions on art Research? 2) What are the languages of the art Thesis? 3) When is art R/ research? and 4) Where is the Knowledge in the art PhD?85 _{These four questions}

became foundational to all our subsequent work and thinking. This paper was accepted for the conference, and distributed (along with all the accepted papers) to the conference delegates in advance. For the conference itself, we went on to rework the conference contribution as a performance, the re-conigured paper

became an audio recording narrated by a (male) actor. The ‘paper’ which existed

as text, sound and image, was performed in front of a Power Point presentation backdrop. Prior to the event in Helsinki, we canvassed all conference delegates and speakers, sending them questionnaires that asked questions like: Is art research? circle ‘true’ or ‘false’. The concept of a response was key. We had, even before going, sought to commence a dialogue and our performative

84 Future Response: Is the Question the Answer? Unpublished paper, see website, http:// www.futurerelections.org.uk, (accessed 10.11.10).

85 The ‘random looking’ capitalisation of words was part of our visual language and method here.

presentation was designed to facilitate and sustain this dialogue. The performative ‘paper’ presentation attempted to further elicit the participation of the audience through poll-taking and a inal survey. These surveys were printed on A4 paper sheets which had the instructions for how to fold a paper air plane printed on the back. Thus the surveys were returned to us by air, by means of becoming paper aeroplanes (as data and thus content towards our ongoing research, see Fig. 2 and Image 6). Our presentation at this conference was the only one to attempt

to be both a performative artwork and an academic paper at the same time.86

However this approach did not conform to the audience’s expectations from a conference context, despite its location in an art school. Perhaps this kind of work is in danger of being neither an artwork nor a paper (in the academic sense), but without pushing at the boundaries of both of these categories the status of the work cannot be explained.

This event in Helsinki was followed-up by a submission of a paper for publication,

called Future Relection: Future Rhetoric accepted for publication in ‘Relections

and Connections: On the relationship between creative production and academic

Research’.87 _{In the quote below we identify some of the failed aspects of this}

endeavour, like not being able to close the gaps between our ambitions for the work and the audience and their expectations.

Instead of dialoguing with other Seminar participants, we inadvertently identiied ourselves as our own audience. We spoke to one another about our shared interests and our discussion became increasingly insulated, esoteric and closed. We aimed to share our emerging language(s) – our experimental form and igurations – with our peers. But we failed to also share literacy for interpreting these systems. Consequently, some of our propositions were lost in translation. The result: Future Response made (non)sense.88

Despite the fact that this paper did not follow the conventions for academic papers, it was accepted (it was the only student paper included in the publication, perhaps this gave us some licence). Our intention was to frame the whole undertaking as site-speciic art research, using relective interpretive loops where the relection

on one project becomes the next work. We termed this paper a self-relective/

relexive undertaking based on the event of the performative paper as situated within the conference as a whole.

86 This strategy is not unique, the artist Mark Leckey includes lectures as part of his practice, a ilmed lecture formed part of his winning Turner Prize 2008 contribution. Fluxus artists like Joseph Beuys and Alan Kaprow both used lectures as a medium for their practice.

87 See appendix A, p.195.

88 ‘Marsha Bradield, Katrine Hjelde, Catherine Mafioletti in Nithikul Nimkulrat and Tim O’Riley, (eds.), ‘Future Relections: Future Rhetoric’ in Relections and Connections: On the

relationship between creative production and academic research, Published by University of

Image 6. Surveys folded and sent back to Future Relections as paper airplanes during our performative performance: Future Response: Is

the Question the Answer? Art of Research Conference, Helsinki 2007.

The composition of this text comprises of a mapping through different temporally dispersed voices as a relexive dialogue. There are three main voices that discourse in this paper – each situated as either representing the character of Future Relections Research Group (the R/research student collaboration), the institution (the certiier of Research) and the academic (the certiied researcher). These different voices embody some of the diverse positions that regulate practice- based Research’s Knowledge production.89

The key ‘voices’ in the published paper (Future Relections: Future Rhetoric) were presented in different fonts to accent the distinct sensibilities at play in the process of collaborative writing. These different voices were part of what was becoming a relexive approach, where the form of the writing, the repetitions, dialogue, and different fonts, use of ‘/ ‘and preix -’re’- responded to each other in a generative way. This approach grew out of our emergent methods of relecting on practice within our own PhD projects. Our own approaches were all different and the aim was not to reach a consensus, but to create a form that could encompass and critically play with the different approaches. The notion of play is important here as working together was at times like a game. The collaboration felt like a license to go along with a process, exploring chance through suspending disbelief, moments of non- knowledge for individuals or even for the whole group. Ways of working familiar to many art practices, as an ongoing strategy, or as a way to move on from a block, a stalemate, or a sense of knowing ‘to well’. In our paper Future Rhetoric a font type/style did not encapsulate an individual and her opinions in this paper since we all contributed to each voice’, but by emphasising the multiple voices, making visible the endless dialogue and discussion, there was a sense of the ‘abyss’, of refracting from one position to the other. This was not orientated towards a resolution, but rather to make visible the way between us we represented different positions, and how these positions chimed with particular institutional contexts for art research, like the conference in Helsinki, or our own institution, CCW.