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January 10, 2006

Restart / Not Myself

I haven't been feeling myself lately, but I quite like how when you go to a new place where practically nobody knows you you can kind of start fresh, be somebody else, fantasize ... for a while at least, until all your old hang-ups kick back in and you start getting comfortable again. On new years eve here I went out ó to the Norton Records party ó as my alter ego, Holden Gunn.

Anyhow, I'm aiming at doing my penultimate review in May, and so my goal from here on in is to reflect on what the hell I've been doing for the last two years and frame it some relatively conclusive kind of way. I'll be doing this through writing, but also through a final project (or two?). and the image above is perhaps a starting point for what I might do while I'm here in New York City...

I thought about making it when I was working on the image below...

This is a poster that I'll be putting up around the Williamsburg area later this week. The image of me is from the 'Inviting The Monster' DVD I made in May 04, and the back ground map is one the ones from late last year with designers removed and musical influences put in instead... click on it to see it bigger.

Thoughout my research I've been becoming more and more interested in ideas around the creation and inhabiting of characters, and of playing out narratives... that became more obvious in the DVD, and specifically in my last seminar where I looked back at that as an artefact of my research. I've talked a bit my anxiety about being required to be so self-reflexive that it begins to feel like pathological narcissism... and I guess actually putting myself into my work has something to do with that.

The eventual realisation that my research has always been 'about' research, but more specifically the research of practice, using myself as the model, has been important in the sense that I've been able to begin to see it's value... in this sense one of the things I wanted to do was to begin to map the trajectory of my research over the last 2 years. To look at questions I was asking then and how I'm asking them differently (or maybe even answering a few?) now. In doing so I'm going to consider Cameron's suggestion that it is researching design through the process of designing that is actually monstrous. Further to that (but in keeping with the exploration of the 'generative' metaphor) I'm thinking about how characters and narratives ó stories, fantasy, horror, etc ócan be used to map (and navigate) practitioner research. It was always the "illumination" of the maps that interested me most anyway...

Posted by Luke Wood at January 10, 2006 09:10 AM