Seth Keen

Documentary photography seems to be growing. Jim sent this across, great source of links available within the website.

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International documentary photography is in the process of important and sometimes radical changes. An increasing number of documentary photographers is exploring new ways of making and presenting their work, based on the unique qualities of the  still image. But how can they cope with the requirements of newspapers and magazines that are searching for effective and attractive ways to communicate online or on mobile media? How can photographers enlarge their toolbox to convince the spectator of the significance of what they have to tell? Does still photography remains the basic format for documentary photography? What possibilities are there for new ways of storytelling?

Got to the last hour of a discussion on the transition from practice to research. I need to follow up on the journal material thinking. The speaker Nancy de Freitas (AUT) mentioned another creative journal to check out. The other speaker Daniel Mafe (QUT) referred to the transition from practitioner to research-practitioner. Daniel has a website. His publications:

Mafe, Daniel (2009) Theoretical critique of the work of art : co-producers in research. In Woodrow, Ross (Ed.) ACUADS 2009 Conference Interventions in the Public Domain, ACUADS, Queensland College of Art, Griffith University.

Mafe, Daniel J. & Brown, Andrew R. (2006) Emergent Matters: Reflections on Collaborative Practice-led Research. In Speculation and Innovation, April 2005, QUT Brisbane, Australia.

Haseman, Bradley & Mafe, Daniel (2009) Acquiring know-how : research training for practice-led researchers. In: Smith, Hazel & Dean, Roger (Eds.) Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice in the Creative Arts. Research Methods for the Arts and Humanities. Edinburgh University Press, United Kingdom, Edinburgh, pp. 211-228.

Longer term think about setting up a practice research group as a key learning and research unit in Melbourne.

Think about case studies as an angle on publication writing. Integrated into that could be the use of documentary techniques like interviewing. The other thing to think about, is writing about the methodology being used on projects as an approach towards a publication outcome.

Explore the ‘visual anthropology’ field as a targeted area to focus on. For example, the international journal Visual Anthropology Journal.

Think about an ethnographic focus in relation to documentary-making.

In addition to practice-based research look into writing about teaching material and methodologies.

Post-PhD continue to explore ways to bring together ongoing current reflection into publications.

I was reading Donald Schön’s book, Educating the reflective practitioner and an idea struck me in regards to writing up the projects in my research. One way to avoid the descriptive approach is to reflect on each project using Schön’s ‘Reflection-in-Action’ concept. This would also suit an iterative approach towards the project development. The difference retrospectively is that this is ‘reflection on Reflection-in-Action’. Schön argues (p.31) that this type of reflection brings up ideas for ‘future action’ and iterative project development.

In the Quist example (p.65) he is providing feedback to the student on some architectural drawings. This reflection is based around a key problem that is being explored and reframing that problem. This process of feedback from a teacher to student is ‘Reflection-in-Action’. A key aspect of this reflection comes from what is already known (tacit knowledge and previous experience) This becomes an important part of that reflection and analysis.

The other part that is discussed is ‘on-the-spot experiment’ (p.68) This process is about adjusting ‘the situation to the frame’ (p.68). Schön presents a number of perspectives on the notion of experimenting.

(Within this domain the idea of ‘probes’ appear – testing out a situation with varying moves to see what occurs… A connection here could be made tentatively with ‘design probes’)

A point being made in this section, is the concept of a ‘hypothesis testing experiment’, a meeting of these two processes above. This is where a specific situation that has arisen may be shifted slightly to make something work. The exploratory experimentation helps work out a malleable hypothesis that can be applied to the situation being solved.

Thinking about this from a reflection on Reflection-in-Action’ perspective, the writing up of projects would be examining the varying situations (issues, resistance) that each project brought up as it was developed. In the context of the overall research/practice problem being explored and researched. Following the responses to these situations provides a trajectory for the research argument.

The main issue here it that this could be seen as being relatively chronological in terms of how the projects are discussed. Could this approach be used first to discuss each project followed by a more thematically focused analysis ? Looking at ‘situations’ that occurred in projects may not necessarily need to be chronological ? (they could be based on the themes that are supporting the overall argument research problem instead which is then extended in the thematic section at the end ?)

Schön, DA 1987, Educating the reflective practitioner, Jossey-Bass higher education series, Jossey-Bass, San Francisco (p 26-31) (p. 64-79)

The Stony Rises Project exhibition opened on 22nd July and I finally finished off the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’, I made specifically for this travelling exhibition. The exhibition was reviewed in ‘The Age’ – Rock art, but not as we know it. Robert Nelson the reviewer referred to the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’.

Pondering the aesthetic history of the region, Seth Keen revisits the location of a painting by Eugene von Guerard. His video yields an unsettling tranquillity, where the peace can never be knitted with the glazed lights and hollows of the European tradition.

The supporting Stony Rises project website has been finalised as part of documenting the exhibition and broader research project, where you can read more about the video work ‘Purrumbete Verandah’ and the Locative Painting research project. Also, I there is an artists statement published in the accompanying book ‘Designing Place’ published in parallel with the opening exhibition.

I have been thinking lately about how I could bring writing closer to my documentary practice. Some notes I made in a forum recently on project-based research for my GRC presentation. This is in regards to writing the exegesis.

This week I attended a forum discussion on writing up project-based, research in which Peter Downton described (the exegesis) as potentially being a project. This has got me thinking about how the writing could be developed in terms of it having connections with the practice. One idea is that the themes could become categories and the paragraphs tags were the exegesis is formed in the same way I would construct a multilinear documentary. The writing is seen as being a documentary – a story of my practice and the research inquiry being made through my practice.

So this got me thinking about a few things including what tool I could use to write in a multilinear way. I have been working towards getting to know (tinderbox) lately (and I am only scratching the surface). If I see paragraphs as being like (video shots) each one could be tagged and categorised with the idea to bring the writing together later on under specific conceptual themes. In tinderbox you would use agents to cluster these paragraphs. In tinderbox I need to figure out how to bring the chunks together into a linear document. Of course the writing could be developed in tinderbox then published in a blog.

BM showed me Scrivener which really suits the film and TV writer in terms of thinking about things in shots and sequences. This is useful because the chunks can be assembled at the end into a linear document. It is also works with endnote.

The other idea I had was to go back to wordpress and produce a blog as the exegesis itself. This is interesting because the research blog could be tied into this including the previous reflective writing. Working live online means the work can be really intertextual, with loads of external links to references and other notes etc. The drawback here is assembling the chunks which is covered in Scrivener. This would have to be done manually. The blog could be used to draft the exegesis which is then edited from that draft. Another advantage is that video works could be linked to directly which bears all those tedious pdf images in mac word. Maybe the final exegesis could be a blog instead of a hardcopy pdf? Or it could be both? I need to do some tests. The other consideration is referencing – zotero works nicely online.

I have been looking into databases lately as part of a chapter in my exegesis on the videodefunct system. In a post by Sean Cubitt titled ‘Further notes on the history of invisibility‘, I noted a reference to databases in relation to the effect they are having on time and space. Quoted from the post:

By contrast, the fundamental cultural formation of the network era is the database, and its principle is no longer geometrical but arithmetic. The database is dimensionless: it has taken the logic of converting time into space (the graph, the calendar) and eradicated space as well. The database is decreasingly visible, hidden behind the screen displaying the results of a specific search. Thus the invisibility of database-driven sites to search engines.

More here in Cubitt’s post ‘Workplace Media’. Connections can be made here to with the mapping project ‘Locative Painting’.

Also, connected with this is ‘Data Management as a signifying practice’, David Gugerli, ETH Zurich
November 13, 2009, Amsterdam

Just caught up on few more tips on endnote:

edit – paste special changes a pasted font into the font of the reference a new reference

Amalgamating documents with separate bibliographies:

1. Have one endnote library for all
2. make a back up copy of the documents
3. open all the ones to be brought together
4. unformat from the toolbar all the documents (make sure the cursor in is on a neutral space so that all the references are unformatted)
5. cut n paste the chapters chronologically into a master document
5a. Format bibliography on master doc in toolbar
6. Checks for double references in library (these can be removed in the body of text using reference ‘record no’ added to the library interface) preferences > display field > record no (you trace each individually if needed…

pdf with more detail

Submitting

A bibliography/style can be edited (customised) i.e. edit > output styles > bibliography > author lists
(a customised version is changed to a copy of the original and needs to be selected as the new style)

note: check evernote on iphone

This book Writing Under Pressure: The Quick Writing Process by Sanford Kaye is very useful. The author knows his stuff and has been teaching writing at a high level for many years. Here is some quick overview notes on the process which I plan to expand as I learn more. The approach is like documentary editing where you produce more in the raw draft and then cut back.

quoted from p. 12

How much does the reader know?
How much has the writer learned?
How much does the writer want to learn?
How much does the writer want to tell?

BEGINNING – introduction with overview of proceeding points to be discussed
MIDDLE - key points of the thesis being explored progressing to the strongest point, the opposing point is placed at the beginning of this section.
END – the conclusion of the thesis being examined (i.e summary, critique, other options, broader context and implications)

Raw draft – the idea again is to have more material than is needed as editing is the key here. The process of picking out the best marterial that conveys the argument and loosing material that gets in the way. Notes could be made using something like comments in Word covering all the changes to be made.

This post ‘Why Academia Is No Longer A Smart Choice’ by Melissa Greg on a positive note led to a useful comment by Alex Burns 24/11/09. In this comment he provides some useful information as one approach towards the issues that Gregg raises:

First, you need to develop a ‘programmatic’ approach to your research: a longer-term view with multiple projects, streams or collaborations. Two key questions to ask are: Where do you want to be in 3-5 years time? In your discipline, what do you want to be internationally known as a recognised expert for? Also look at a time management system like David Allen’s GTD, and to writing models like Barbara Minto’s Pyramid Principle, WriteOrDie software, or Sanford Kaye’s Quick Writing Process. Get those sources into Endnote or similar bibliographic management software.

Following up on some of these sources has been really useful. Pyramid writing notes and more to come…