[-empyre-] Research in Practice, week two, January 14-20

[t.memmott at underacademy.org]

Hello -

I’ve never really thought there to be much of a divide between theory, research, and practice.  They seem to overlap, walk hand 
in hand, be brethren of a sort. The all involve a degree of rigor tempered with playfulness. Though methods may vary. The 
primary difference may be their final output, what is developed from each. 

I started from the position of a visual artist working primarily in assemblage, installation, and video. As a young art student I 
can recall a number of meetings with advisors where the topic of discussion was not the artifacts themselves but my process, 
my concepts and methods. One professor told me that I was the only student he had that came in with a concept, proposed 
research, and began to make “the thing” when the concept was fully formed. To a certain degree, even then, I thought of the 
artifacts as relics of, or remainder from the research practice.  So, like Maria, the connection between research and practice 
seemed natural to me and I started to call myself a “research artist.” (I still do)

My advanced degrees are an MFA in Literary Arts from Brown University, where I was the first electronic writing graduate fellow, 
and a PhD in Interaction Design from Malmö University.  Now, looking at these two degrees it may seem like both could be 
practice-based, and to a certain degree they are. But, where an MFA in literary arts is about creative writing and the expectation 
is that you produce a novel length manuscript – in my case a combinatoric literary application, the PhD in Interaction Design, I 
would argue is more practice-led (at least in my case); in that, my interest and practice in electronic writing practices is what led 
to my writing the dissertation, which is titled _Digital Rhetoric and Poetics: Signifying Strategies in Electronic Literature_. Though 
the dissertation does include a web supplement of research-based practical experiments, the writing itself was the main output 
for the PhD. And, I should add that my supervisor, grading committee, and dissertation opponent largely ignored the practical 
experiments. 

Pursuing the PhD was primarily about academic advancement for me. I had already been teaching for 10 years, and had left a 
tenure track position in California to come to Sweden to teach in a program called Literature Culture and Digital Media, since 
renamed and reconfigured as Digital Culture and Communication. Though before taking the appointment I was told otherwise, 
what I discovered in Sweden was that the MFA was not considered a terminal degree and was no better than a one-year Swedish 
MA. This meant that at the time I was hired I was already as far up the Swedish academic food chain as I could be.  The 
opportunity arose to complete the PhD at Malmö University and I took it.  I am happy that I did, as it has allowed me to advance; 
but, it has little effect upon my practice.  

One thing that I still find interesting is the term “interdisciplinary” has been bantered around since the 1980s and for 
institutions has become something of a catchphrase. It sounds very good in a brochure but I really, still, wonder how often 
interdisciplinary work really happens and how successful the work is. How are students trained in this regard? In researching 
various programs that use this term what I have discovered, and venn diagrams could easily be generated to show this, is that 
most programs that promise interdisciplinary studies offer a lot of one thing, with a smidgen of courses from other areas. 

Though collaboration is sort of the default setting for cultural practice in the digital age, interdisciplinary examples are isolated 
and tend to not rest very well within the academy. What sort of institutional changes are necessary for true interdisciplinarity to 
be embraced programmatically?

Onward!
Talan