Journal of Writing in Creative Practice - Volume 6, Issue 1, 2013

This article reflects on the idea and role of translation in relation to artistic practice. In its trajectory around the subject it aims to bring out some of the issues at stake for artists and writers within this process of translation such as: loss, boundary, threshold, discipline, fidelity, infidelity, accuracy and error. Its disjunctive structure is intentional, since it is a meditation on the subject, which alludes or touches on aspects of theory as they might be encountered in and through practice – stumbled upon in an unsystematic, sometimes haphazard and equivocal, non-linear or tangential way – rather than provides an exposition of it.

An un-edited series of journal entries reflecting on the processes involved in making a copy. The copy was made in order to generate text. Writing about making is employed as a research method in an enquiry into relationships between body, language and material. Can making knowledge allow us to engage more directly with material in everyday life and what might the translation of embodied and material knowledge into words reveal about thought?

This article is based on the workshop, Making Language, although originally prompted by RCA research students and their grappling with translation. For example, despite a long simplification and westernization of Chinese language signifying moves away from pictorial origins based on nature, there still appears to be a great looseness about translation from Chinese to English. As with the world of images, there would appear to be more open choices. Conversely, translation of UK academic codes can be a daunting task in terms of what lies behind the surface meaning of words – the indirect and the ironic. The workshop saw an imaginative engagement with translating thought into image and then word, with partners guessing meaning and discussing what it felt like to communicate in this more visual manner – an empathetic practice then, too. The article describes a small foray only into what is a much larger area.

This is the first of two articles that aim to explore co-authorship in the light of ecological systems. The assumption behind each of them is that designers could make a creative contribution to the evolutionary sustainability of natural ecosystems, thus helping to reduce the ecocidal impact of human behaviour. Unfortunately, designers are trained as specialists who catalyse economic growth and their methods are therefore part of the old paradigm that needs changing. Part of the paradigm change needs to include the re-designing of design to be more relational and combinatorial, so that its primary focus is more associated with the co-creative relations between things, rather than on individual products or services. What we call ‘metadesign’ is intended to help designers, and others, to re-think the habits, assumptions and discourses that seem ‘normal’, or are invisible, to those in the existing paradigm. Its repertoire therefore includes methods for ‘re-languaging’ the familiar belief system in order to encourage beneficial change. Ultimately, metadesigners would be expected to co-create ‘synergies’ that will work together as a ‘synergies-of-synergies’. Re-languaging certain key terms will be vital to the quest for synergy. For example, in the corporate vocabulary, the term ‘creative innovation’ implies an egocentric ‘disrupting’ of the status quo. Metadesigners might wish to re-describe its purpose as a process that helps organizations to find more synergistic ways to coexist, within their habitat.

This picture essay explores the idea of the traces of meaning hinted at in the painted out graffiti images. The rectangles of paint become statements in themselves, disguising and suggesting speculation about the obliterated words.

This article evaluates some of the ‘Rhythms of Practice’ experiment writings (activities of drawing, speaking and writing) from Ph.D. research, ‘Design leads’, 2012. The research developed from earlier Writing PAD preoccupations with the relation of studio practices to writing practices. The article, informed by my role of participant–observer, proceeds from an evaluation of writing that is absorbed into drawing to a second part that analyses the microelements of writings produced. The latter are experiential, towards the phenomenological or sometimes poetic in nature. The final part brings in the perspective of Iain McGilchrist’s research on the bi-laterality of brain hemispheres.

The writing emerged from attempts to document visually and orally what it feels like to be engaged in the process of hand-stitching. As a result, the text performs both collaboratively as ethnographic material, and independently as a piece of creative writing.

A discursive account and photo-essay covering the author’s participation in Writing Practice: A Celebration of Writing Pad at Arnolfini, Bristol and Translating: Paired Practice in London, 2012, and the author’s own writing on contemporary artists and text-based teaching with Fine Art students.

At Translation: Pairing Practices, London in June 2012, participants were given the following instructions:

A short, experimental text produced in the gallery that draws on the Object-Oriented Ontology of Graham Harman – a ‘flat’ ontology, in which there are no subject–object relations, only objects relating to, and withdrawing from, other objects. It is an attempt to write about an artwork from multiple points of view – the space, the work, the audience and the artist.