As part of a staff development initiative I took part in a series of meetings aimed at developing a public-facing exhibition that would showcase the work of PhD students at CSM.

A little context:

These students’ work emerged from practice-based research methodology.

The exhibition ran at the Lethaby Gallery from December through January and was called: ‘(In)Visible Processes’. The exhibition was also accompanied by a series of events ranging from panel discussions to workshops. Myself and a colleague ran one of these workshops.

The meetings were between CSM staff (mostly academic) and the PhD students.

Examples of group discussion topics were:

• Rigour and Intersections – here we discussed how rigour is followed or not in an academic realm and how it’s interpreted through practice-based research methodology, i.e. how can we maintain rigour when research is situated at the intersections of practices, spaces and academia?  

• Hybrid Languages and In-between Spaces – what kind of languages does practice-based research mobilise? What kind of spaces? What languages, experiences, feelings, ways of being develop in the interstices between research practices? And can we value them?    

• Agencies, Accesses, Audiences – how can we articulate the inter-relationships between agency and access in research? How can we define agency and access when considering research practices? What is involved in addressing (or involving) a wider, non-specialist audience? 

My experience:

I got introduced to this project by a course leader from our programme. I thought it would be a great idea to get involved and see how I could contribute to helping students put on an exhibition, since, as a Production Manager, I felt I could offer practical ideas on how to translate their projects into a (possibly) multi-media installation or at least into an impactful audience experience.

I also thought it would be a great opportunity to get a sense of how PhD students think since I am planning to pursue one myself.

Finally, it seemed extremely interesting to learn more about the result of practice-based methodology, since I am interested in a practice-based PhD myself (or what I have now learnt would be a practice-based PhD I should say). I wanted to understand how academia and artistic practice could interlink to produce new knowledge presented in a way that to me was very new, i.e. not (solely) in written form.

However, I didn’t realise that the meetings were going to be conceptual discussions; I didn’t realise that we were going to actually discuss how practice-based methodology, academic practice and audience experiences were going to interlink and culminate into an exhibition. I thought this process had already been explored as the curatorial approach and that the meetings were going to be about constructing the exhibition.

At first I found the language of the conversations a little daunting and feared I couldn’t contribute much: as a non-PhD holder and given that my current job is not formally/usually academic, I felt under-equipped.

I soon realised it was actually very positive to be able to contribute from a different perspective. I noticed that for many students technology was a means to an end as opposed to an integral part of their concept. I was able to make some suggestions about how to incorporate technology in the showcasing of their work to enhance the audience experience. For instance, instead of projecting images on a 2D screen, why not create a projection surface out of the materials used in the student’s practice? This would help the audience be more immersed in the work, rather than having to bypass a medium non intrinsic to the language of the practice, such as a TV screen.

The other aspect I realised I could contribute on was my specialism, sound. I realised that the students had not thought about sonic environments at all. They had focused their attention to the visual aspects of presenting their work. This was incredibly interesting as it opened up a series of conversations that helped the students think about a fuller audience experience and a more complete way to showcase their work. It also helped me feel more positive about my contribution to the project.

On the whole, I found that both the PhD students and the other members of staff were very generous in sharing their practice and ideas and this gave me tremendous inspiration and put me at ease in my desire to share too. 

So much so, that I put forward an idea to put on a workshop as part of the events that went alongside the exhibition: I was interested in offering audiences the opportunity to experience what practice-based research is, since this was very new to me too. I also thought this workshop would help to demystify what academic research is and make the idea of taking on a PhD more accessible to those who thought a PhD is solely based on the more word and number-based research approach.

The idea was (to my surprise) very well received and in fact another member of staff offered to join forces and put on the workshop together: great!

Together we decided that in order to make the workshop doable in the limited amount of time (2.5hrs) we should find an approach that would somewhat simplify the research process, whilst still give a flavour of what that would be like.

We chose three of the students’ works as inspiration, but then we borrowed the IDEO method cards to give the participants some prompts and help them through the practical aspects.

The method cards have been invented by a company called IDEO who focuses on a user-centred design approach to develop products, services, experiences, spaces.

The cards are divided into 4 categories (Learn, Look, Ask, Try) each offering several approaches and prompt the designer to help them empathise with the user:

• Learn helps analyse the information gathered to find patterns and insights

• Look encourages to observe people in their daily lives to understand what they actually do vs what they would say they do

• Ask gets people to participate and test out offerings in order to see how they respond to them

• Try has the designer try the offering themselves to see in first person how it works

For the workshop we chose 3 categories and one method from each that somewhat tied in with the PhD students’ research questions and methods without attempting to be too exact and possibly inaccurate.

We chose:

1. ASK

Observe how the environment is influencing a member of the public’s physical portrayal. Ask “Why questions” (IDEO, 2022) to investigate your observational perspective.

This method forces people to examine and express the underlying reasons for their behaviour and attitudes.

2. LOOK

Capture pictures of someone’s character through the eye of the camera. Collect information on each other exploring a narrative of secrecy and desire. 

This method generates visual evidence to uncover patterns of behaviour and perceptions related to a particular context and informs conclusions.

3. TRY

Create a silent group walk focusing on the intuitive responses prompted by the physical environment and the proximity to each other. 

This method helps to quickly generate and test many context and behaviour-based concepts.

We then divided the participants into 3 groups and sent them off for 45mins to complete the tasks.

Once back we asked each group to share how the experience went and what they got out of it, what they had discovered.

We also proceeded to ask a few questions to see how they could connect this practical experience to academic research:

1. How can these methods relate to academic research? 
2. How can these methods help you interrogate your research in relation to others in the field? 
3. How can practice-based methodologies be documented and articulated for an academic context?

The participants were of quite varied backgrounds: some thinking about taking on a PhD, some Master’s students, some BA students, some non-academic.

The two aspects that struck me as most interesting were:

1. How the practice-based research saw the participants focus on the practice itself and on how this brought back not only theoretical findings, but also physical and emotional connections that contributed to those findings.
2. The debate we had about academia vs practice.

From that discussion, many questions came to mind: why should the main channel of academic communication and presentation of findings be the written word? Why can’t the practice speak for itself? Is this the difference between art and academia? Art can speak for itself, but should artistic practice in an academic context be analysed and relayed back in a coherent form? Is this necessary in order to contribute to new knowledge that we all equally and somewhat objectively understand? But is there such a thing as objective understanding? Isn’t artistic practice subjective by definition? Should academic research be scientific and so objective? Is it simply that academia is based on written communication and anything other than that should be called something else?