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- Volume 1, Issue 2, 2008
Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 1, Issue 2, 2008
Volume 1, Issue 2, 2008
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The good collusion defeats the Lone Ranger
More LessWe all collaborate from birth, in learning language for instance, in learning to play, and, of course, as writers. This paper discusses collaborative practice, how creative writers work with each other, including composite authorship as collaboration, as well as collaborative projects with visual and/or sound artists to generate material outside of conventional forms. Various questions are explored; what issues emerge in creative collaboration, especially cross-arts? How might one's voice, or aesthetics, affect creative text? How might this kind of creativity be a social process?
I will utilize examples from my own writing (mostly poetry) with visual/sound artists (e.g. short films) and from established collaborative partnerships. The paper addresses the concept and practicalities of collaboration, the issues and processes, and gives a brief discussion of theoretical ideas around these issues.
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Adaptive Assembly
By Peter SpringAdaptive Assembly is the name I have given to an integrative tool that I designed to harmonize participatory practices, creatively. This is needed because gaps in mutual understandings commonly emerge where collaborative teams include members from different disciplinary backgrounds and/or cognitive styles. Adaptive Assembly is a new approach to closing the gap between dispersed information and a task's participants. Here, co-authorship is also a cooperative act; therefore writing can be understood within the same terms of reference as design practice. For writers, Adaptive Assembly situates information in an ecological context by which to enable inter-relationships, and from which, newly dynamic information can emerge (e.g., subjects and hidden contexts). The benefit of this ecological method draws participants such as co-authors together to enable a focus and maps out paths towards its realization (e.g., chapters and their categories), each to be envisaged and implemented, incrementally.
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In the Café Flaubert
More LessDeveloping my long-held contention that an artist might write art-theory differently from non-artist theorists, this paper offers an instantiation of one possible approach. First and foremost, it proposes that an artist's art-theory might utilize their understanding of aesthetic form and functioning to conceive of writing as another art-form, now taking place in words and referencing the structures associated with that medium.
With a nod to Plato's dialogues, the text adopts the format of a fictional conversation offered as reportage, which takes place between the artist-writer and a philosopher an expert on the subject of truth regimes. The artist consults him in order to progress a project. What ensues puts the artist-writer's preference for a realist approach to writing (representation as reflection) into play with the academic's overview of this and other truth regimes. Introduced to Richard Rorty's pragmatism and hence the idea of truth as use-value, the artist is initially bewildered, only later realizing that it takes her project in a new direction.
Given that the text's departure from the form of conventional art-theory is embodied (not just represented), the issues that it raises are implicit, but include: the (dis)advantages of fictional dialogue as theory. (On the one hand both the reader and the writer imaginatively inhabit different points of view more readily than happens with non-fictional prose. On the other hand, fictional dialogue may indulge unreliable spokespersons for particular theoretical positions.) Another point for debate concerns the recourse to the Renaissance pedagogic concept of teaching through delight. (While aesthetic pleasure-in-the-text is a spur for both the writer and the reader, the sensuous dimensions of dramatic embodiment may offer a distraction from more substantial issues.)
As much as this text is an instance of a writing-as-an-art-form as theory, it also proposes, reciprocally, that theory may be found outside non-fictional, non-aesthetic academic discourse. When this is the oblique logic of the writing's form, it is also explicitly elaborated in the article, as Drer's woodcut The Draughtsman and the Lute is seen to comprise observations about the conditions of representation that re-appear in the picture that is the fictional discussion in the Caf Flaubert.
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The relevance of academic writing in design education: academic writing as a tool for structuring reasons
More LessThis paper focuses on the current function of academic writing for design education within Sweden. It argues that in its present form academic writing is used to explain the final result by accounting for the process, but it would be much more useful to designers if the form were modified to fit the purpose of justifying a design solution. Interpretations of the academic report as chronologically telling about the process have, in Swedish design education, resulted in muddled texts where the final results are absent or hidden in the lengthy description of the process. The academic report fulfils its function because it is a logical construction. Its form includes explication of the research-process because this process determines the reliability and/or validity of the new knowledge arrived at. An excellent design-process does not, however, guarantee excellent design: a design-solution is justified only by solving the problem. Adjusted to this purpose, academic writing could become a useful tool, helping students to grasp which explicit reasons and grounds may support their definition of the problem, outline how their design may be a solution to it, and also show where reasons and grounds may prove to be poor. Writing, in a modified academic form, can become a useful and integrated tool in design education, primarily if the intellectual skill developed through this writing is useful also for the practitioner.
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Unnatural fact: the fictions of Robert Smithson
By Duncan WhiteRobert Smithson is an influential figure in the history of contemporary writing in creative practice. Indebted as his work is to Lewis Carroll, Edgar Allan Poe, Vladimir Nabakov and Antonin Artaud this paper will argue for a distinctly literary examination of Robert Smithson's art. Smithson is best known for his earth-works such as The Spiral Jetty (1972) and Asphalt Rundown (1969) in which he offsets cultural and natural forms of production. Yet Smithson's site-specific practice must be situated in terms of his textual approach. By focusing on aspects of Smithson's writing which call into question mediation, representation, mimesis and documentary, the paper will demonstrate how, throughout Smithson's approach, writing is a means of unsettling the cultural and the textual space of art production. Texts such as A Museum of Language in the Vicinity of Art (1968), The Spiral Jetty (1969) and A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic (1967) are written in correspondence with artworks as a means of relocating the place of production with the reader. The Spiral Jetty essay, for instance, which combines aspects of photography, documentary and film-making stages the Jetty's production by drawing attention to its form as a textual, cultural and factual production. The paper will argue, as indeed Smithson's obsessively essayistic reportage seems to acknowledge, that The Spiral Jetty is a matter of writing. Emblematic of Smithson's work with site-specificity more broadly, the paper will argue that the earthwork exists most fully in the correspondence between writing and fact.
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The Critical in Design (Part One)
By Clive DilnotWhat could be a criticality in design? What could be a form of resistance in design? Is design a catalyst between art and capital and therefore always subjected to its role of functioning? Does design need a kind of external experimental space?
Questions presented to the Ph.D.-Design list-serve in December 2007 under the title Criticality in Design The Blind Spot by Kaja Gretinger, a design researcher at Jan Van Eyck Akadmie, Masstricht
The paper concerns the critical in design which is examined under three headings: structurally, as an internal aspect of the processes of designing; economically, in terms of the internal collusion between (weak) design and the strength, persistence and lure of market forces and private interests; historically, in terms of the emergence of a situationthe artificial becoming the horizon and medium of our existencethat now marks our times as one where design takes on new critical dimensions, above all in relation to securing and creating the conditions that can support a humane sustainable global futures.
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Book Review
More LessDesigning for Micro-utopias; thinking beyond the possible, Wood, J., (2007) (Commissioning Editor, Professor Rachel Cooper), Ashgate, UK, ISBN 0-7546-4608-4, (222 pages)
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Volumes & issues
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Volume 17 (2024)
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Volume 16 (2023)
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Volume 15 (2022)
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Volume 14 (2021)
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Volume 13 (2020)
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Volume 12 (2019)
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Volume 11 (2018)
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Volume 10 (2017 - 2018)
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Volume 9 (2016)
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Volume 8 (2015)
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Volume 7 (2014)
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Volume 6 (2013)
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Volume 5 (2012)
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Volume 4 (2011 - 2012)
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Volume 3 (2010)
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Volume 2 (2009)
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Volume 1 (2007 - 2008)