Category: Research

End of Semester Reflection

Research, Writing

One of the things I’m finding difficult about grad school (during covid, even though that isn’t relevant here. why do i want to qualify this? i will never know how things would have been otherwise and i feel like i just have to accept that im going through everything with a fog over my face, which is actually a pretty normal feeling for me.)
more than half the days.
is wrestling with different writing styles. this is my first time off school since christmas. i have a month, so the time is very similar.

in the first semester, everything felt wildly intense. overwhelmingly intense. up until november was absolutely constant wondering about whether or not trump would be elected and what would happen as a reaction. i once fully believed my cat had mouth cancer and was going to die. i had to go through the covid tunnel to get to the hospital to get my second-in-my-life mri (for the same reason? i don’t remember but when i was 18 i was thinking WAY MORE about livers than ovaries. i have to go look up whether or not it was for my liver or my ovaries, and that’s a memory from my own life!). We were in the midst of the second wave and thing were still escalating. I got my first flu shot and felt sick and was told by public health I couldn’t go home. I was already packed. Left to my own devices, I would not have been able to function. My partner had to talk me down and tell me how to “self regulate.”

Not his term, obviously, but that’s how I feel I’m writing when using academic terminology. Other than criticisms about living under neuroliberalism re: “self regulation”, I feel like I’m using short hand to reference specific memories from my own life. Using academic language to tap into a common vocabulary, but also to put up boundaries around my own life. It is healthy and reasonable to have boundaries, but my instinct is to be rebellious about this (something I’m wrestling with re: medicalizing).

Indigenous storytelling is a methods of abstracting and making accessible. Similar to how a rock holds the past present and future, storytelling holds multiple meanings. Wreslting with academic and pathologizing language can be in a piece without being explicitly present.

I’m interested in storytelling because I’m interested in auto-ethnography because I’m interested in creative non-fiction. (Hunt and Holmes.)

Visual vocabular, written vocabulary…

Moussa / Cuthand / Material References

ID, Reading, Research

Dian Million, Theraputic Nations, 2013.

Erevelles (2011), Gorman (2005; 2010; 2013), Haritaworn (2012), Cacho (2012), Ahmed
(2004; 2013), Dossa (2009), Chen (2012), Mollow (2006), Lorde (1997) and Million
(2013).

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha & Leroy Moore & Carolyn Lazard & Kay Ulanday Barrett & Essex Hemphill & Lydia Brown & Park McArthur & Alice Sheppard & Fannie Lou Hamer & Marlon Riggs & Constantina Zavitsanos & Kate Bornstein & Les Feinberg & Audre Lorde & June Jordan & Lorraine Hansberry & Fred Moten & Imani Perry & Eli Clare & Sins Invalid & Neve Be & Octavia Butler & Mattilda Bernstein-Sycamore & Harriet Tubman.

South Atlantic Quarterly Crip Temporalities

Materials

Wild Pigment Project https://wildpigmentproject.org/

  • includes booklist, guidelines, artist/scholar/research directory,

Alma Heikkilä (Artist)

Research, Visual

Describe the feeling: Energy (food / organic matter) going through my body, my colon. Soil (food / organic matter) going through the worm’s body. A neat pile of poop after us. Soft and flexible tunnels that are our bodies. Slowly, twisting around each other, humidity, and us reaching towards the rhizomes or them reaching to us.

Alma Heikkilä is fascinated by the collective activities of soil creatures; from nematodes to fungi, spores to mycelium. Heikkilä’s artistic work evokes a deep sensorial knowledge of ecosystems and the interdependencies of myriad organisms in mutual co-existence. Finding form in sculpture and large-scale painting, she strives to create a space for humans to imagine an up-close encounter or experience with the invisible processes that occur in the soil, often at a microscopic level.

For her solo exhibition at Grazer Kunstverein Heikkilä presents a newly produced body of work, radiating around a macroscale double-sided painting, titled found living in total darkness. This painting is a luminous meditation on the processes that take place in slow continuum within soil organisms nestled under the surface of the earth. In paint and plaster Heikkilä portrays webs and filaments, microbes and insect life, depicting rhizomatic structures of interdependency and symbiosis. She is interested in non-human agencies of change, for example the role of soil in the climate crisis. Through her painting and sculptural work she illuminates these largely imperceptible biotic communities in order to focus our attention towards their dark and complex ecologies, not only beneath the forest floor, but also inside our bodies.

Research-Creation Research

Research, Visual

Academics

Scrolling through https://hexagram.ca/index.php/eng/who-are-we/student-members

The Moldy Strategy

https://www.antoniahernandez.com/artwork/the-moldy-strategy/

This research-creation project has two principal outcomes. One is a theoretical framework that presents online sex in material terms. The other, a series of art experiments that have been exhibited recently and are documented in a website. The relation between these two different expressions is by no means tautological. Rather, it should be understood as an ongoing conversation, perhaps a digression, certainly a permanent back and forth.

The Moldy Strategy, Antonia Hernandez

Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or, How to Speak with the Dead

Huber, Sandra. “Villains, Ghosts, and Roses, or, How to Speak with the Dead”. Open Cultural Studies 3.1 (2019): 15-25. https://doi.org/10.1515/culture-2019-0002 Web.

Disability as a Method of Creative Practice

Dokumaci, Arseli (2018). Supplementary Video Resources for “Disability as Method: Interventions in the Habitus of Ableism through Media-Creation.” Disability Studies Quarterly, 38(3), https://doi.org/10.18061/dsq.v38i3.6491

In this article, I share and reflect on a research-creation video that introduces what I call ‘disability as method’ to critical disability and media studies. The video draws on a year-long visual ethnography, during which I collaborated with a blind and a physically disabled participant to explore the specificities of their mobility experiences in the city of Montreal. In making this video, I use the affordances of filming and editing in creative ways both to explore what access could mean to differently disabled people in the space of the city and to reimagine new possibilities of media-making informed by blindness gain. To this end, I introduce a new audio description (AD) technique by using stop-time as crip-time, and deploying AD not only as an accessibility feature but also as a blind intervention in the creative process of filmmaking itself.

video: http://performingdisability.com/manifest (26:08)

Dokumaci, A. (2019) “A Theory of Micro-activist Affordances: Disability, Improvisation and Disorienting Affordances,” The South Atlantic Quarterly 118 (3): 491-519.

This article proposes a new theory of affordances that is developed through a critical disability and performance lens. Through parallels to be drawn between the creative space of aesthetic performance and the performance of everyday life lived with disability, this new theory situates affordances in the improvisatory space of performance, and introduces the notion of “micro-activist affordances” as a way to understand mundane acts of world-building that could emerge from encounters with a world of “disorienting affordances.” Experiencing disability is inherently disorienting. The environment, as years of disability activism have shown us, is built with a very limited conception of the human being in mind. But the environment can also be disorienting when experiencing bodily pain and chronic disease. I argue that disability, in all of its various manifestations, is experienced as the shrinking of the environment, and its readily available affordances. But, as I shall also argue, precisely at such moments of shrinking, something else happens. When the environment is narrowed down in its offerings, I propose that it is the creative space of performance (on or offstage) that opens up to make it afford otherwise. This very potential to invent affordances is precisely how I conceptualize everyday lives lived with disability as being analogous to the reimagined space of aesthetic performance and its reorientations.

Dokumaci, A. (In press) “People as affordances”: Building disability worlds through care intimacy,” Cultural Anthropology.

Dokumaci, A. (2018) “Disability as Method: Interventions in the Habitus of Ableism through Media-Creation,” Disability Studies Quarterly, 38:3.

Dokumaci, A. (2017) “Performing Pain and Inflammation: Rendering the Invisible Visible”, AMA Journal of Ethics, Special section: Images of Healing and Learning, 19(8): 834-838.

Dokumaci, A. (2017) “Performing Pain and Inflammation: Rendering the Invisible Visible”, AMA Journal of Ethics, Special section: Images of Healing and Learning, 19(8): 834-838.

LETS GET YOU PREGNANT

Heidi Barkun

The first “test-tube baby” came into the world over 40 years ago. Since then, over seven million children have been born through in vitro fertilization. Popular culture leads us to believe that every attempt of this biotechnology is successful. In Quebec, stars such as Céline Dion and Julie Snyder have become models of its triumph. However the global success rate is just 27%. LET’S GET YOU PREGNANT! reveals the experience of failure of in vitro fertilization within the same social, political and medical systems that place motherhood at the forefront of women’s lives. An audio and museum installation creates a virtual conversation between 28 participants, including the artist, who have undergone failed in vitro fertilization cycles and have not become mothers.

(walltext)

link, includes walkthrough of exhibition w/ audio+subtitles: https://www.heidibarkun.com/projects/let-s-get-you-pregnant-

‘Tis but a flesh wound II / 2008 / Oil paint and thread on Terraskin paper, mounted on canvas
white with red square / 2003 / Beeswax, oil paint, cement on plywood; poplar frame

Additional

https://www.allisonmoore.net/

https://www.colleenleonardphotography.com/

colleen leonard

http://www.cecilemartin.ca/conchashumanas.html (architecture of the invisible)

cecile martin

https://www.emiliest.com/

emilie st-hilaire

https://www.dariangoldinstahl.com/ (multi-sensory printmaking practices)

darian goldin stahl

Disability Studies

Cartwright, Lisa. “Affect.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 30–32. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.11. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.

Lewis, Victoria Ann. “Crip.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 46–48. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.17. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.

Davidson, Michael. “Aesthetics.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 26–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.10. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.

Wilkerson, Abby. “Embodiment.” Keywords for Disability Studies, edited by Rachel Adams et al., NYU Press, 2015, pp. 67–70. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt15nmhws.24. Accessed 5 Oct. 2020.

Tech

https://www.are.na/explore (ex https://www.are.na/antonia-hernandez)

There is no right or wrong way to use Are.na. It’s an open-ended space where you can organize your thoughts, projects, or research with anyone else. Some people organize their open browser tabs, some make mood boards, some start creative projects with collaborators, and others simply collect their thoughts. Try playing around for a while. Adding content, connecting channels, and following other members are the best ways to get a feel for Are.na.

Encaustic General Search

Reading, Research, Visual

Readings

(saved to IAMD\Reading\Encaustics)

Whitman, Natalie Shifrin. “The Specter for the Golem: The Quest for Safer Encaustic Painting Practice in the Age of OSHA.” Leonardo, vol 33, no 4, MIT Press. pp-299-304.
The author’s use of the millennia-old, multi-dimensional encaustic painting technique, which uses hot colored wax as a painting medium, led her to the literary and artistic concept of the golem, which she sees as a metaphor for the appropriate use of technology. This, in turn, prompted the author to learn more about encaustic from an industrial-hygiene perspective. Owing to the commendable handling characteristics of encaustic, many painters after using it never go back to using oil or acrylic paints; however, the act of heating wax creates airborne substances that can cause longterm health effects to artists who do not take common-sense precautions. This article offers information to help artists set up safer encaustic/conventional painting studios. The author also introduces encaustic’s long history, describes various encaustic techniques and lists permanent pigments that are generally safer than other professionally accepted materials.

Yao, L. and Wang, T. (2012), Textural and Physical Properties of Biorenewable “Waxes” Containing Partial Acylglycerides. J Am Oil Chem Soc, 89: 155-166. doi:10.1007/s11746-011-1896-7
“The colony collapse disorder of honeybee [2], which if it continues will markedly increase the cost and decrease the availability of beeswax.” … “the difference in melting and crystallization profiles of the 50% AM wax from beeswax and in the crystalline microstructure indicates that further improvement may be needed. “

Heather Hennick (2016) Captured in Layers: Encaustic as a Tool to Reduce Stress (Des couches révélatrices : l′encaustique comme outil pour diminuer le stress), Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal, 29:2, 77-84, DOI: 10.1080/08322473.2016.1250057

Blythe, Sarah Ganz. “R.H. Quaytman: Archive to Ark, the Subjects of Painting.” Afterall: A Journal of Art, Context and Enquiry, no. 38, 2015, pp. 74–87. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/681288. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Elizabeth Garber (2019) Objects and New Materialisms: A Journey Across Making and Living With Objects, Studies in Art Education, 60:1, 7-21, DOI: 10.1080/00393541.2018.1557454
Materials, making, and objects are important parts of an ecology of meaningful learning and teaching in art that must accompany the development of concept and social impact. New materialist theory suggests that matter matters to how life is lived, while emphasizing that animacy is inherent not only to what we think of as animate beings but to all types of matter. The author explores what new materialism is and its relationship with making, materials, and objects in her own practices and in visual art education. Through deepened understandings of their material articulations of the world, makers and learners construct new knowledge and thickened experiences, and they develop firsthand sensitivities to making that help them find the “causal structures” (Barad, 2007) underlying what they do. This “knowing in being” (Hickey-Moody & Page, 2016, p. 12) can be transformative with regard to how a maker/student/person interacts with and lives in the world.

Anderson, Virginia M. G. A Map and a Painting: The Re-Working of Jasper Johns’s Map (Based on Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Airocean World) American Art 2018 32:1, 52-73

Filippone, Christine. “Cosmology and Transformation in the Work of Michelle Stuart.” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 32, no. 1, 2011, pp. 3–12. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41331098. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Paula Eubanks (2012) Interdisciplinary Study: Research as Part of Artmaking, Art Education, 65:2, 48-53, DOI: 10.1080/00043125.2012.11519168

Brown, Maurice. “Review: Garner Tullis and the Art of Collaboration By David Carrier” Journal of Aesthetic Education, vol. 33, no. 3, 1999, pp. 109–112. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3333707. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Thorson, Victoria. “Review: Work of Lynda Benglis Process by Susand Richmond” Woman’s Art Journal, vol. 34, no. 2, 2013, pp. 63–64. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24395321. Accessed 29 Sept. 2020.

Crozier, W. Ray. “Gerald C. Cupchik (2016). The Aesthetics of Emotion: Up the Down Staircase of the Mind-Body.” Empirical Studies of the Arts, vol. 36, no. 1, Jan. 2018, pp. 114–121, doi:10.1177/0276237417723263.

Pelzer-Montada, Ruth. “The Attraction of Print: Notes on the Surface of the (Art) Print.” Art Journal, vol. 67, no. 2, 2008, pp. 75-91. ProQuest, http://ocadu.idm.oclc.org/login?url=https://www-proquest-com.ocadu.idm.oclc.org/docview/223297289?accountid=12991.

Audirac, F. L (2008), ‘Origins of the Future: an artist’s encaustic perspective’, Technoetic Arts: A Journal of Speculative Research 6:2, pp. 199-205, doi:10.1386/tear.6.2.199/1

IMAGES

(saved to IAMD\Reading\Encaustics)


“Jasper Johns.” Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 22 Apr. 2016. academic-eb-com.ocadu.idm.oclc.org/levels/collegiate/article/Jasper-Johns/43846. Accessed 29 Sep. 2020.

Howser, Greg. “Between Friends: A Supporting Paper for a Graduate Exhibition” (MFA Thesis) East Tennessee State University, ProQuest Dissertations Publishing, 2011. 1496103.

Rogish, Tanya. “Time Preserved.” (MFA Thesis) Virginia Commonwealth University, VCU Scholars Compass. 2010.

Schnabel, Julian. “Past,” julianschnael.com, 2018.

Stewart, J. W. “Gibbous Moon.” CCCA Concorida, 2010.
Materials: Color copy transfers, enamel, lacquer, encaustic and other media on hand-made Japanese paper with wood, galvanized steel and copper Measurements: 54 x 40.5 x 3.5 cm ; 21 x 16 x 1.5 in.

Schouten, Tim. “Untitled 111 (In the Absence of Horses).” CCCA Concorida, 2008.
Materials: oil, pigment, beeswax, microcrystalline wax, dammar resin on canvas

Schouten, Tim. “Untitled 20 (In the Absence of Horses).” CCCA Concorida, 2008.
Materials: oil, pigment, beeswax, microcrystalline wax, dammar resin on canvas

Schouten, Tim. “The Treaty 2 Suite (Where IS Treaty Land?)” CCCA Concorida, 2004.
Materials: Materials: oil, microcrystalline wax on canvas

Schouten, Tim. “Highway (Treaty 1)” CCCA Concorida, 2004.

Parsons, Bruce. “Horses & Helicopter.” CCCA Concorida. 1982.
Materials: encaustic construction

Martyn, Carol. “Women’s Commitee.” CCCA Concorida. 1987.

Martyn, Carol. “Coma Cluster.” CCCA Concorida. 1980.

Martyn, Carol. “Uranus.” CCCA Concorida. 1980.

Martyn, Carol. “Jazz Squite.” CCCA Concorida. 1980.

Low-Beer, Susan. “Echoes: Reflection on Structure #4” CCCA Concorida. 2009.

Low-Beer, Susan. “#10 Tools for Daily Living” CCCA Concorida. 2009.

Logan, Janet. “Memories/Dreams” CCCA Concorida. 1995.

London, Naomi. “Beyond Sweeties.” CCCA Concorida. 1996.

Jacobs, Kartja. “Words #2.” CCCA Concorida. 2006.

Jacobs, Kartja. “Healing Blanket #5.” CCCA Concorida. 2006.

Grund, Dieter. “The Beam Rejected.” CCCA Concorida. 1991.

Dukes, Caroline. “Midnight.” CCCA Concorida. 1991.

Donoghue, Lynn. “Anda/Vesalius”. CCCA Concorida. 1992.

Donoghue, Lynn. “Silence”. CCCA Concorida. 1992.

Coupey Pierre. “Notations 19: What If” CCCA Concorida. 1995.

Collins, Nicole. “Cluster Collide” CCCA Concorida. 1997.

Collins, Nicole. “Someday You’ll Find Everything” CCCA Concorida. 2003.

Collins, Nicole. “common currency” CCCA Concorida. 2001.

Barnett, David. “Earth Song #3” CCCA Concorida. 2000.

Barnett, David. “The Death of Icarus” CCCA Concorida. 1991.

Astman, Barbara. “Untitled (The Rock Series, 10 of 12)” CCCA Concorida. 1991.

Pepperell Brain Feedback

Reading, Research

Pepperell, Robert. “How a trippy 1980s video effect might help to explain consciousness,” Interalia Magazine, October 2019.
https://www.interaliamag.org/articles/robert-pepperell-how-a-trippy-1980s-video-effect-might-help-to-explain-consciousness/

READING NOTES

  • “Brains process energy, not information.”
  • “Kinetic energy is a difference due to change or motion, and potential energy is a difference due to position or tension.”
  • “actualised differences[…] do actual work and cause real effects in the world, as distinct from abstract differences (like that between 1 and 0)”
  • “What is special about the conscious brain, I propose, is that some of those pathways and energy flows are turned upon themselves, much like the signal from the camera in the case of video feedback. This causes a self-referential cascade of actualised differences to blossom with astronomical complexity, and it is this that we experience as consciousness. Video feedback, then, may be the nearest we have to visualising what conscious processing in the brain is like.”
  • “recent theories suggest that compounds including propofol[anaesthetic] interfere with the brain’s ability to sustain complex feedback loops in certain brain areas.”
  • ” “reentrant” signals[…] are recursive feedback loops of neural activity that bind distant brain regions into a coherent functioning whole.” (gerald edelman)”
  • “The primary function of the brain is to manage the complex flows of energy that we rely on to thrive and survive”

Related


robert pepperell – expand on flow (mary mcintyre)

Pepperell, R., Burleigh, A. & Ruta, N. (in press). Art and the Geometry of Visual Space, in Space-time Geometries in the Brain and Movement in the Arts, in the series “Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis” eds. T. Flash, A. Berthoz & A. Sarti, Berlin: Springer.
Pepperell, R. (2018). ‘Art, energy and the brain’. In Christensen, J. & Gomila, A. (eds.) The Arts and the Brain: Psychology and Physiology beyond Pleasure, Progress in Brain Research. Volume 237. London: Elsevier.
Pepperell, R. (2016). Neuroscience and Posthuman Memory, in Memory in the Twenty-first Century: New Critical Perspectives from the Arts, Humanitiesand Sciences, Sebastian Groes (ed.). London: Palgrave Macmillan. pp. 330-33.
Pepperell, R. (2015). Egocentric perspective: Depicting the body from its own point of view, Leonardo 48(5), pp. 424-429.

Photo/Printing Processes

Reading, Research, Uncategorized

Phytograms: https://phytogram.blog/recipe/

Pollenol: bee pollen photo developer.

Related: photogram collage –http://filmslie.com/stan-brakhage-mothlight/

Chemigram: – https://www.alternativephotography.com/the-chemigram/

“uses resists on photographic paper much the same way as wax is used as a resist in batik.”

Cyanotypes: https://www.alternativephotography.com/cyanotype-classic-process/

“Unlike photographs set in silver, like in black and white photography, cyanotypes are using a solution of iron compounds.“

(Karly McCloskey/Mary McIntyre)

Collographs

Disability Studies Re: Models of Disability

Reading, Research, Uncategorized

via DAC discord

Michelle R. Nario-Redmond, Jeffrey G. Noel & Emily Fern (2012): Redefining
Disability, Re-imagining the Self: Disability Identification Predicts Self-esteem and Strategic
Responses to Stigma, Self and Identity, DOI:10.1080/15298868.2012.681118

https://www.hiram.edu/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/FINAL-DISABILITY-IDENTITY-PRINT-2012.pdf

The Social Identity Approach to Disability: Bridging Disability Studies and
Psychological Science
Thomas P. Dirth and Nyla R. Branscombe

https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/features/bul-bul0000156.pdf

Siebers, Tobin. Disability Theory. University of Michigan Press, 2008. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.309723. Accessed 30 Aug. 2020.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.309723

Black Madness: : Mad Blackness By: Therí Alyce Pickens DOI: https://doi.org/10.1215/9781478005506ISBN (electronic): 978-1-4780-0550-6 Publisher: Duke University Press Published: 2019

https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/2594/Black-Madness-Mad-Blackness

A (Head) Case for a Mad Humanities: Sula‘s Shadrack and Black MadnessHayley C. Stefan

https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/6378