Diagrammatic Thinking: A practice-led research zine

DIAGRAMMATIC THINKING A practice-led research zine

Cut – Stick- Think

This zine was co-produced by attendees at the University of Leeds Practice-Led PhD symposium hosted by FAHACS and the School of Design.

This symposium posed the question “are there alternatives to ‘talking’ about research?”

This question invited experimental modes of presentation and creative modes of exchange and dissemination in a bid to move away from more traditional academic formats.

This zine is a product of a durational workshop that ran parallel to the scheduled presentations.

Attendees were invited to drop in and out of the workshop space to offer their responses, reflections and questions as they emerged throughout the day.

The zining process was designed in response to the symposium’s call for more embodied ways of knowing and sharing research practice. The act of zining was posited as a performative research event, a playful improvisation challenge, requiring the maker to respond to and translate intangible ideas into a physical, visual form at a rapid pace.

In practice, the act of making and “doing” physically carved out a dedicated space for reflection and response, as well as offering a physical platform on which new dialogues could emerge and be exchanged.

The zine was produced in real-time, each page in response to the symposium’s scheduled presentations.

The zine production was a live act, the zine itself a living, growing form, which continuously regenerated and re-formed in response to information given and received.

This final zine is an assemblage of the diverse ideas and perspectives that were provoked, a multi-vocal object in response to the symposium itself.

Zine facilitated and compiled by; Jade French & Carley Stubbs

John Rooney

Journeys on the A664 The route taken for this research project is the A664 between Rochdale and Manchester. The observation point is on the number 17 bus, a moving object passing through connected (and disconnected) spaces.

People, places and spaces inside, and outside the bus will offer narratives from the historic past, present and future.

The stories and ideas used in this project are taken from a continuous timeline along the route, presented in typographic form.

Voice, gestures and stories from new journeys will be overlaid on location specific data from the past, creating new connective dialogues across fractured timelines.

The collected findings will form autobiographical “deep maps� of location specific places via memory, autobiographical content, gesture and text. Psychogeography and Fluxus inform data collection and presentation The places can be from the past, and if so, when we revisit the space now, what has changed, is there now a void where there was once a building, a story from the past interacting with the present. I will travel the route in both directions and at different times of the day on multiple occasions. This will give many variations on the voices and images recorded during the journey.

John McDowall Some books …

My studio work’s concern with the bibliographic and my research topic of the reflexivity in artists’ books are inevitably closely integrated, as one encompasses and reflects the other.

A constellation of possibility and association is also that of the library, and in my presentation I notionally take down some books from the shelves, books that relate to or are the result of the last couple of months of my practice.

Filippa Dobson

The Badger Stone is a Neolithic/Bronze Age cup marked stone on Ilkley Moor and it is the locus and location of my PhD investigation. The Badger Stone as a Statutory Monument is represented by a projected photograph from my performance the lying stanes 2013. Muriel Enjalran (2015, p.17) consid ers that text in relation photographs, either written or thought, can represents a map of activity: the language of the Moor is displaced by the institution and the artist is no longer present on the Moor (Enjalran, 2015, p18). As Michel de Certeau (1984, pp.120-121) and Tim Ingold (2000, p.234) insist the map hidden inside the postal tube in front of the Stone is silent and bears no testimony to the journey that created it: the the map has no inhabitants, no one is there, nothing moves and nothing makes a sound (Ingold, 2001, p.24). The voices of the past are eliminated and language is silenced.

My performance for the PhD symposium seeks to reanimate the map by co-constituting walking, mapping and text. I deposit another postal tube containing a photograph (as remnant or relic) of my performance unrolled and laid on the floor as a gift. The photograph is a still image and in no way conveys the agency of the Moor, which changed fragile paper into ‘stone’. The audience is invited to consider a set of questions and tasks that they share with the artist by drawing and writing and ‘posting’ their responses in sealed envelopes. The performance is silent and par ticipants (as performers) walk slowly. The results will be reconfigured as a map of perception to be shared via email.