Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - ‘Ways of Writing in Art and Design II’ Part 1, Oct 2023

‘A slice of fluid ground’ aims to write-with water; a methodology that is resistant to its instrumentalization under anthropocentric thinking and the Capitalocene. ‘A slice’ recognizes writing as providing a set of relations; a map for interacting with the world. It opens with a ‘Key’, which acts as a navigational tool for traversing the topography of the text. ‘A slice’ attempts to construct a set of sited waters in a way that does not reduce the substance to a line (cartography) or a consistent quantity (hydrological cycle). ‘A slice’ begins with the section ‘Earthrise: The ascent’ and then descends into watery accounts and locations; a counter-operation to the notion that humans can transcend the landscape. ‘A slice’ dives into the nuances and depths of water, situating humans as a species amongst multiple planetary actors. Writing-with water traverses personal and fictional narratives, hydrological theories, and fluid topographies.

This contribution deploys experimental writing as part of a visual art practice to take up themes of embodied practices of writing, writing as a practice of care and writing/reading as affective, immersive flow. It weaves a personal account of the loss of my Ph.D. supervisor and friend, the curator, writer and scholar Bridget Crone into liquid experiences from my past, and quotes from Bridget’s text ‘Deep sea squid: A phase problem’ (2013) to consider writing as reparative in the face of grief. My writing method both refers to liquidity and is liquid in form, water and ink flowing across boundaries of different bodies, places and times. ‘Ink Sack’ also reproduces the tentacular reach of Bridget’s influence: her ‘Deep sea squid’ text was the inspiration for the artist Anna Barham in her 2013 work Double Screen (Not Quite Tonight Jellylike), which Bridget then responded to in her essay on Barham’s work Talking Squid (2013).

0ctoGANN is an experimental fiction, operating through multi-sensory imagination, that draws on my experiences of freediving in the Great African Kelp Forest off the coast of Capetown – home to the common octopus – together with an ongoing commitment to refiguring AI. The writing emerges from imagining into the lifeworld of the octopus, made possible by my immersion in the ocean flows and surges. It is a call to (western) human-centric perspectives to embrace knowledge-gathering through embodied intelligence, and to consider how AI might be trained on the decentralized distributed somatic tendencies of the octopus rather than on current corporate marketing/surveillance agendas. It is also a paean to this protean, incoherent (to humans) and experimental creature, living in a constant state of change and fluidity. 0ctoGANN is certainly an expression of hope for the contemporary world, though not necessarily human.

‘In praise of disquiet’ situates feminist-memoir writing as an embodied artistic process and argues that this form of writerly practice provides a method to work through affective individual and cultural experiences of ‘snapping’; of breaking out and down; of refusing to carry on. I reflect on my own writing practice as a method of writing myself back together again in the aftermath of a feminist snap moment. I argue that the literary form of feminist-memoir is an empowering and critical tool that can be used to challenge the pervasive myth of living and working to achieve the impossibility of the good life. Feminist-memoir writing as literary method can be used to empower the writing–speaking subject and simultaneously critique and challenge the capitalist social codes, values, systems and institutions that have commingled to create the compounded stresses that so often lead to a snap.

This text engages a performative method of writing in the form of speculative transcripting. Operating mutually between practice/research, writing is proposed as ingestion and metabolic processing: one that negotiates a perceived paradoxical condition of transmission.

Interlocutors (fictionalized, human and non-human) transmit to ‘you’, a user, across contemporary dimensions and materialities of transmission (physical, virtual, online). This aims to offer productive openings that take us beyond the binaries of writing/making, practice/theory, image/text and their constituent material–immaterial conditions. Conducted through a speculative grief tense, it is both witness and enactment of the realtime materiality of online searches, image captures, data transmissions and word processing comments facility. The following embodied writing techniques are reformulated here to encompass a somatic estrangement: J. L. Austin’s theory of performative utterances, ficto-criticism utilized by authors Kraus, Nelson and Barthes, along with Sedgwick’s development of reparative reading. This emergent process identifies online forms of transmission (broadcasting, publishing, data) as a new paradigm in the reception, production and distribution of art/ expanded (self)publishing.

‘Art writing as absorption into the world’ is a collection of auto-theoretical writing that experiments with ways to make present the experience of a self that is producing and consuming a world made up of art, phenomenology and contemporary wellness trends. Distinctions between matter and knowledge are blurred within accounts of physical substances and bodily processes. The writing is taken from my 2017 practice-led Ph.D. ‘Link Zone’: an exploration of the sensation of knowledge through a practice of art and writing. It is framed by an introduction that reflects on its operation as writing-as-practice in an academic context, in which this is still uncommon, and on its publishing by performance as Oh-Link Zone (2018).