The past few decades have seen conversations around code and language exponentially intensify, with the advent of social media – X/Twitter, TikTok, Instagram and Facebook – and artificial intelligence, ChatGPT and so on. In this article, Ami Clarke makes the case for artists’ publishing as a site of affective experimentation that emerges from very specific human and technological assemblages throughout history. A posthuman reading reveals the unreliable narrator, the unstable text, fluidity and multiplicity and other emergent properties, indicative of a subjectivity that emerges in synthesis with its environment, revealing artists’ publishing as a radical site of change. This article focuses specifically on publishing as process – the idea of processual works that critique through their production and distribution, and that come out of the frameworks inherent to publishing and early networked culture, and hence the dissemination of ideas central to this.
This contribution takes the form of a transcript of a prayer/interview. A prayer is a speech act directed into a void, towards an absence (a hole, so to speak). It ‘lays claim to an immediate connection with the Being whose absence fills the world’ as Anne Carson writes in reference to the mystics Simone Weil and Marguerite Porete (2005: 177). The aspiration of a prayer, not unlike a spell or curse, is to directly affect something or someone in the real and physical world through an act of speech (Carson 2005: 177). The following text is developed in reference to the three existing books of the writings and teachings of the mystic St. Catherine of Siena. Parts of the text are fictionalized, reassembled and borrow direct and attributed quotes of these books. The script features characters called K, an amalgam of the researcher and the persons, figures and subjects I converse with in my research. K blurs the authorial voice by mingling it with others, in an attempt to flatten the authority of the narrating voice towards polyvocality. Combining the forms of prayer, interview, dialogue, written conversation and play serves to explore and apply different registers of writing that correspond with St. Catherine’s chosen forms of communication and to (playfully with a nod to common academic methodologies) investigate the holeyness/brokenness of dialogical speaking voices, the wounded text and a textual approach towards the unsayable/unthinkable.
This article emerges from a series of phone calls with the visual artist Beth Emily Richards in anticipation of her exhibition Poor Copy at The Northern Charter in Newcastle and Jerwood Arts London in 2018. A gossipy piece, it draws lines of connection between telephones, telepathic cats, urban legends and ‘King of Pop’ Michael Jackson’s apparent visitation to Devon in 2003. This visit which, as lore goes, is also contested forms the basis for Richards’ subsequent show and sustained engagement with contemporary mythmaking. Calling up lovers of the telephone Jacques Derrida, Hélène Cixous and Avital Ronell, celebrity impersonators and television illusionists, this article writes in and through the mystics of ‘electric speech’. The outmoded phone call is engaged as both a ‘conduit for thought’ and a poor copy – the line is cut or stalked, or a story is interrupted or interfered with – revealing a forensic fascination with the sinister and the unknown.
My article looks at the problems generated by essay writing for two students that I taught contextual studies to, some ten years ago. Both students, bright and engaged, were poorly served by an assessment mechanism that failed to adapt to their needs – for cultural reasons, in the case of one student and due to educational needs in the other. The article explores the challenges that the students had, not in writing per se, but in the conceptual understanding of what a critical essay is, uncovering some of the limitations of art and design at tertiary level. Using my reflections as an educator, this article seeks to understand how to overcome unhelpful binaries that thwart creativity and to propose other ways of moving forward. This article is a response to Jenny Rintoul’s ‘“I came here to do art, not English”: Antecedent subject subcultures meet current practices of writing in art and design education’ (2022) in WoW Special Issue 1 of Journal of Writing in Creative Practice.
This article treats the temporality of writing as a place or event – which is to say somewhere which must be arrived at on time or otherwise. This arrival is vulnerable to the vicissitudes that all physical bodies/places can undergo: alteration in one’s absence, disappearance or loss. This contribution re-presents a piece of work that I produced about a place and then mislaid before it could be presented in the form that I hoped it would take. The place that it was a response to has also been lost. Both the writer of the place/event and their reader thus experience a form of belatedness. What made the place live in my mind so intensely was a series of texts scrawled on its wall, interspersed with images. I was late arriving for that. I address the reader as a latecomer in turn.
The following contribution aims to convey a sense of O Complex Mass, an artwork I developed for Dilston Gallery, Southwark Park, London in 2022. O Complex Mass represents the first significant outcome resulting from a commitment to a new site-responsive approach to writing within my practice that I now refer to as ‘spatial writing’. This work is preoccupied with the complex relationship between writing and physical space – how the conditions under which we experience language (written or spoken) can have an impact on our understanding of its meaning. Could ‘site of reception’ be considered as a facet of language itself? By naming this approach ‘spatial writing’ I connect it to twentieth century avant-garde approaches within ‘spatial music’ as well as ideas around ‘critical spatial practice’ as defined by Professor Jane Rendell.
This article explores writing as a way to make the invisible labour of art practitioners visible. More specifically, it engages with the performativity of words and the embodied knowledge and skills performed in and through art educational practices. Building on the notion of artwork as invisible labour, I explore writing as a way to articulate the embodied work of professionals in art education. Drawing from the analyses of the words of professionals in embodied work, the article presents a writing exercise for articulating embodied labour.
Service Providers is a prose text and text art piece, and presents a write-up of redundant electronic cables. In my attempts to create readable prose through the writing up of electronic waste – in the difficulty of that task – I materialize the impossibility of visualizing the problem we face regarding waste and the environment. There is something particularly affecting about E-waste in its toxicity, and yet we rely on it to provide services and communication. The piece published here is the start of a longer 100-page publication forthcoming with Hem Press and is a component part of a larger creative project about waste.
In this example of relatively long-form art writing, the writer begins by relaying an anecdote regarding a difficult interaction with an editor. As this rocks the confidence of the writer, they try to rally themselves but seeking out an almost arbitrary receptor for their art writing skills and passions. This turns out to be a concurrent exhibition of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. The piece describes the writer’s feelings, as well as the journey to the gallery, and ultimately creates a form of review or representation of the exhibition. However, the initial impulse for the piece remains and is returned to in a series of analyses of the writer’s method. This includes a candid exploration of the writer’s considerations of the place of judgement in their own and in contemporary art writing. Ultimately, the piece toys with the idea that, in an age of ambivalence, in which judgements all too easily seem all too harsh, it might just be the use of adjectives that are sufficient to betray an art writer’s evaluation of what they are otherwise simply describing. While the initial criticism by an editor involved the concept of transcendence, the art writer takes this accusation on board and tries, again candidly, to judge themselves, and for themselves, with regard to this concept. Ultimately, they find that, far from leaning towards transcendent values in art they are in fact committed to forms of immanence. Along the way other artists, including Cezanne and De Chirico, as well as other thinkers such as Deleuze and Alfred Jarry are utilized to develop the lines of thought. Ultimately, and rather obliquely, the piece becomes a response to the editor’s riposte and appears to succeed, to some extent, in re-founding the writer’s confidence in their own methods and beliefs, to which they have been led by their own approach to art writing, and of course by the art itself.
This article uses in-depth performance descriptions to engage in a form of writing as documentation of live performance. I frame my practice-led research in performance art by scoring and writing through four selected performances: Nape (2013), Scaw (2014), Mean (2016) and Faults (2019). These performance descriptions are presented as performance documentation providing insight to an established practice in performance art that is language-oriented. This writing is both descriptive and autobiographical and explore methods and tasks that use the vocal-body as ‘writing with the voice’ and ‘live writing’ over extended duration. These texts position the creation of language-oriented performance art from within, expanding and reframing my own performances that bring new understandings on how we read, witness and experience experimental writing practice in performance.
This article considers the journeys of three design students who produced graphic memoirs as a component of their postgraduate theses. Following a preliminary consideration of the nature of the graphic memoir as a form of artistic inquiry, the article discusses unique challenges to thesis supervision that the creation of such texts can pose, including the scale and complexity of the undertaking, the emotional cost to the candidate, and wider ethical concerns surrounding the representation of the self and others.
The study examined content structuring of final year project reports and theses in design and formulate a conceptual model of the content structure of the exegesis to accompany creative work. The study involved analysis of the Malaysian Qualifications Agency’s specifications for design as a sub-discipline of creative arts and the theses writing guidelines of two Malaysian universities offering creative arts academic programmes. The results showed recommendations on the conventional social science thesis structure with some space for the design processes. In addition, the analysis of eleven creative arts theses revealed confusion on the content structuring and student weaknesses in amassing research findings to contextualize the creative work. Based on the results, a conceptual model of creative arts exegesis with separate chapters for ‘Proposed final product and human factor issues’ and ‘Intellectual property documentation’ was formulated and validated by creative arts lecturers. The exegesis model which builds in design processes and research processes would resolve issues on unclear expectations in creative arts students’ theses and elevate the significance of the creative work.
The trickster methodology combines elements of practice-led research with trickster qualities (slippery, subversive, disruptive, unstable, creative, destructive, ambiguous) by identifying four qualities that are particularly relevant to creative writers: shapeshifting, play, chance and order. The theoretical frameworks that underpin this methodology include Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of the carnivalesque and Sara Ahmed’s notion of wilfulness. The trickster methodology is distinct from existing research frameworks and models of creativity as it reflects the fluidity of the writing process and the ways in which writers embody that fluidity. In this way, it extends our current understanding of practice-led research as it offers a model of clearly defined traits that remain malleable and flexible enough for individual use while providing a way to describe the creative process that leads to a written product.
Review of: Mixed Forms in Visual Culture, Mary Anne Francis (2021) London: Bloomsbury, 248 pp., ISBN 978-1-35021-139-1, h/bk, £76.50
In this example of relatively long-form art writing, the writer begins by relaying an anecdote regarding a difficult interaction with an editor. As this rocks the confidence of the writer, they try to rally themselves but seeking out an almost arbitrary receptor for their art writing skills and passions. This turns out to be a concurrent exhibition of the paintings of Giorgio Morandi. The piece describes the writer’s feelings, as well as the journey to the gallery, and ultimately creates a form of review or representation of the exhibition. However, the initial impulse for the piece remains and is returned to in a series of analyses of the writer’s method. This includes a candid exploration of the writer’s considerations of the place of judgement in their own and in contemporary art writing. Ultimately, the piece toys with the idea that, in an age of ambivalence, in which judgements all too easily seem all too harsh, it might just be the use of adjectives that are sufficient to betray an art writer’s evaluation of what they are otherwise simply describing. While the initial criticism by an editor involved the concept of transcendence, the art writer takes this accusation on board and tries, again candidly, to judge themselves, and for themselves, with regard to this concept. Ultimately, they find that, far from leaning towards transcendent values in art they are in fact committed to forms of immanence. Along the way other artists, including Cezanne and De Chirico, as well as other thinkers such as Deleuze and Alfred Jarry are utilized to develop the lines of thought. Ultimately, and rather obliquely, the piece becomes a response to the editor’s riposte and appears to succeed, to some extent, in re-founding the writer’s confidence in their own methods and beliefs, to which they have been led by their own approach to art writing, and of course by the art itself.
Service Providers is a prose text and text art piece, and presents a write-up of redundant electronic cables. In my attempts to create readable prose through the writing up of electronic waste – in the difficulty of that task – I materialize the impossibility of visualizing the problem we face regarding waste and the environment. There is something particularly affecting about E-waste in its toxicity, and yet we rely on it to provide services and communication. The piece published here is the start of a longer 100-page publication forthcoming with Hem Press and is a component part of a larger creative project about waste.
During the UK COVID-19 lockdowns (2020–21), new approaches to online teaching and learning were developed in all fields of higher education. As we move, we must hope, out of the most critical phases of the pandemic, the question arises: what should be retained of this work? In some quarters, anxiety has been voiced that important potential lessons are being jettisoned in favour of a return to ‘business as usual’. Taking the first WoW Special Issue’s focus on experiments in teaching and learning in visual culture as my focus, and in particular those detailed in Rebecca Bell’s article ‘Untrammelled ways: Reflecting on the written text, nourishment and care in online teaching’, this article will argue that to fully learn from the pedagogical experiments undertaken during the UK lockdowns and to protect safe and caring spaces for critical thinking, the pandemic needs to be understood as linked to environmental and climate emergency.
This text engages a performative method of writing in the form of speculative transcripting. Operating mutually between practice/research, writing is proposed as ingestion and metabolic processing: one that negotiates a perceived paradoxical condition of transmission. Interlocutors (fictionalized, human and non-human) transmit to ‘you’, a user, across contemporary dimensions and materialities of transmission (physical, virtual, online). This aims to offer productive openings that take us beyond the binaries of writing/making, practice/theory, image/text and their constituent material–immaterial conditions. Conducted through a speculative grief tense, it is both witness and enactment of the realtime materiality of online searches, image captures, data transmissions and word processing comments facility. The following embodied writing techniques are reformulated here to encompass a somatic estrangement: J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, ficto-criticism utilized by authors Kraus, Nelson and Barthes, along with Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading. This emergent process identifies online forms of transmission (broadcasting, publishing, data) as a new paradigm in the reception, production and distribution of art/ expanded (self)publishing.
0ctoGANN is an experimental fiction, operating through multi-sensory imagination, that draws on my experiences of freediving in the Great African Kelp Forest off the coast of Capetown – home to the common octopus – together with an ongoing commitment to refiguring AI. The writing emerges from imagining into the lifeworld of the octopus, made possible by my immersion in the ocean flows and surges. It is a call to (western) human-centric perspectives to embrace knowledge-gathering through embodied intelligence, and to consider how AI might be trained on the decentralized distributed somatic tendencies of the octopus rather than on current corporate marketing/surveillance agendas. It is also a paean to this protean, incoherent (to humans) and experimental creature, living in a constant state of change and fluidity. 0ctoGANN is certainly an expression of hope for the contemporary world, though not necessarily human.
‘In praise of disquiet’ situates feminist-memoir writing as an embodied artistic process and argues that this form of writerly practice provides a method to work through affective individual and cultural experiences of ‘snapping’; of breaking out and down; of refusing to carry on. I reflect on my own writing practice as a method of writing myself back together again in the aftermath of a feminist snap moment. I argue that the literary form of feminist-memoir is an empowering and critical tool that can be used to challenge the pervasive myth of living and working to achieve the impossibility of the good life. Feminist-memoir writing as literary method can be used to empower the writing–speaking subject and simultaneously critique and challenge the capitalist social codes, values, systems and institutions that have commingled to create the compounded stresses that so often lead to a snap.
