In September this year, I attended and presented at the SEAM symposium, convened by Samantha Spurr, Margie Medlin, and Benedict Anderson and held at the very lovely venue of Critical Path. This symposium was beautifully crafted and put together with a great deal of care. It was one of those conferences that you remember in terms of generating a feeling of community and enthusiasm for the act of gathering and sharing ideas. A far cry from some others, where it seems more about attaining notches on the refereed conference paper bedhead than a genuine desire to engage. It was, as such, extremely appropriate that Brian Massumi and Erin Manning were keynotes, given that they have a history of convening experimental workshop events that are utterly held together by that kind of generosity, and have not a sniff of the 'refereed' about it.
I felt very honored to give one of the keynote presentations on Thursday, Sept 17th. Brian Massumi and Andrew Benjamin presented on the first night, and myself with Erin Manning on the second night.
My presentation was called 'The Erotic Return', where I discussed how affective states have more to offer the research we do as designers than we have cared to acknowledge. The erotic is a somewhat exemplary category of affective intensity because it’s hard to really think about eroticism without and being aware of feeling, or bodily movements. Thought and feeling coincide. As George Bataille wrote in his study on the subject: “Eroticism is an experience that cannot be assessed from the outside in the way an object can.”
The tingles and flushes of emerging erotic experience are not usually acknowledged features of a design discourse. Encountering an excruciatingly beautiful drawing might make you tingle, taking you to the verge of an erotic experience, but I shudder to think of the awkward pause that might arise in a social or professional situation should you give voice to your experience of that tingle. What I was trying to convey in the presentation, through some project work examples, was: if we are affected by engaging with a creative work, we enter into an even more complex, dynamic, aesthetically driven process when we produce creative work, and that awareness of affectivity is important for research by creative practice. This argument has strong links to those developed in my PhD 'The Aesthetics of Emergence', but is a development upon it. I hope to work up a paper or three on the connections between emergent research methodology (commonly known as 'post-design rationalisation' – which I thorough believe is both valid and necessary for creative work), and the erotic (or, what I am calling in a Nietzschian play, 'The Erotic Return').
books
In picking up a book to get an idea of what its like, eyes flick through thin leaves of words that offer up a semblance of style and mode of assembly. But in returning to a book after its read, if it was a good read, a similar action will pull you into deep images, full of fluttering dimensions in peripheral places, like corners and under bushes. It’s like the difference between seeing someone unfamiliar walk by, and then seeing them again after having spent years in their company.
Graduate Research Conference: key note lecture
Presented key note lecture at the October 2008 Graduate Research Conference at RMIT, in the School of Architecture and Design.
Poster
ARC Discovery Project
Successful acquisition of Australian Research Council Discovery grant:
Ethics and aesthetics as criteria for innovation: A design research study of biological art and digital architecture Funded ARC Grant 2009-2011
This project aims to understand innovation through design research, namely by engaging and reflecting on the activity of designing. It will develop and study a network of artists and designers in an emerging field of innovative practice, to capitalize on Australian expertise, and capture new knowledge about designerly ways of knowing that underpin innovation. Australia must innovate to tackle issues such as climate change, characterised by uncertainty, instability, uniqueness, and value conflicts. The research develops the central claim of design research, namely that design is a discipline with specific forms of knowledge, and specifically considers the role of this knowledge in the vital area of innovation. ARC grant Chief investigators: Dr Pia Ednie-Brown, Dr Andrew Burrow and Prof. Mark Burry of RMIT University, and Oron Catts, SymbioticA, UWA.
The Aesthetics of Emergence shortlisted
My doctoral thesis, The Aesthetics of Emergence, was shortlisted for the RIBA President's Awards for Research 2008.News release.
