[-empyre-] practice as a means towards academic self-criticism / research as a curatorial enterprise

[magnus lawrie]

Hello Magda & all,

On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 01:57:43PM +0000, Magda Tyzlik-Carver wrote:
> 
> I situate common practice and my research around curating within what I
> consider to be a new context for curatorial strategies with reference to
> social technologies that claim to redistribute power relations. Common
> practice critically operates in a network environment and pragmatically
> points to the specific problems characteristic to network society which are
> labour organisation and its condition (free and immaterial labour) in the
> environment in which creative co-production of knowledge takes place
> non-stop and contributes to creating what often has been defined as digital
> and immaterial commons as well as new forms of enclosures which also
> accompany this process. Thus in my research around curating and commoning
> (understood after De Angelis as  'the social process that creates and
> reproduces the commons') I take into account the new context which is
> defined by the changing character of production which becomes biopolitical
> production invested in production of subjectivity.  In that context the
> question of recording is hugely important indeed because it is about what I
> record and if I record at all (in which case it is a tough luck when it
> comes to my PhD, though hopefully I will come up with some solution) . On
> the other hand there are already recordings of the session which are
> available on the wiki where the common practice is stored, in theedited
> versions of skype text chat conversations, as well as original chat
> discussions, wiki history which follows changes, etc. It seems to me that
> the only way to interact with those, outside of the actual session as it is
> happening, is through mythologizing, narrating, interpreting, etc.  
> I am not sure what is meant by the concept 'directed commoning'. More
> explanation would be. Common practice is not about curating collectively
> either. The research  is about investigating the conditions (social,
> technological, institutional, political) in which curating takes place
> versus a desire (yes, utopian most likely) to on one hand not to be
> subjugated to those conditions and at the same time not to subjugate others
> to them.  Linking curating with the concept of the commons is probably not a
> tactic in this case, but a strategy, or methodology  if we want to stick to
> the research language, to investigate biopolitics of 'curatorial'.
>
You talk about "...practice in flux, nomadic practice that exists in
the common." If I may infer some degree of useful disorganization
results from the distributedness in your curatorial practice, I would
then ask if there are any incompatibilities emerging from 'nomadic'
(where I read 'disparate') and 'common' (where I read 'shared' and
'collective'). I mean, in your Common Practice is there any difficulty
in curating togetherness, in organizing collectivity? What is the
effect of the technology in this case? How do you respond to the
different aspects of a practice in flux?

Hmmm, I am also thinking about your mentioning the production of
subjectivity (self-constitution?) through this practice. In another
thread, I think there was some reference to invisibility and I see
that the Department of Reading has its own Faculty of Invisibility.
Does Common Practice pertain to this in any way? Since I've been quiet
now for a couple of days, that may a good question to close on :)

Best wishes,

Magnus