A contemporary presentation?
You mean Practice is a research method!
The Presenter
The paper:
You mean Practice is a Research Method?
This paper aims to give a brief account of my journey, up to the point of revelation, that practice is a research method. This was only discovered after the upgrade process towards my doctoral registration had created unmanageable papers of exorbitant length and very little practice.
My first upgrade document was of many pages of torpid research writing with the first heading 'Seeking an appropriate methodology for researching digital fiction', followed by lengthy explanations of narrative research methodology. I now look back at this (completed in February 2013) with horror.
Nelson, in his book, ‘Practice as Research’ ([1]), speaks of the research process, or methodology, as the way a practitioner works, however he adds:
But, because arts research is subtly different from the arts practice and makes small, but significant, additional demands, it is necessary in PaR actively to promote critical reflection. (Loc 726 of 5939)
Nelson also talks about following the principles of 'doing-knowing', working with a multi-mode method, this is where the artist/performer is often doing, then reflecting to change and improve the doing. This ‘doing-knowing’ becomes the praxis where praxis, as defined by Nelson is ‘theory imbricated within practice’. He is describing this process when he says:
My use of ‘praxis’ is intended to denote the possibility of thought within both ‘theory’ and ‘practice’ in an iterative process of ‘doing-reflecting-reading-articulation-doing’. (Loc 800 of 5939)
This has totally changed my attitude to the research process and what I am doing as a researcher.
It is at this point that I need to inform the reader that I am working through the Institute of Education where there is a strong taught program to support research students, but ‘practice as research’, was not incuded in this research program. Thus my journey of research has been a story of more ‘miss than hit’, and is littered with my interest with every methodology in the hope that it might help. However, I now find, practice is a research method!
[1] Practice as Research in the Arts. Robin Nelson 2013 Palgrave Macmillan (Kindle)
Creating Digital Narrative Imagery
My work is in a contemporary style of digital narrative imagery delivered through websites and blogs, to allow the reader/player/watcher to navigate their own pathway through the narrative.
You, the viewer, create your own individual story as each person has their own journey.
Sarah Lloyd-Winder
The moving image above is some of my new test work, using a flash animation program with images of glass. I am working with these photographs of glass to create sharp edges of colour cutting into our visual pathway that draws the eye into the image. My research is to look at composition and the way that it influences the work I do to create digital narratives.