Alan writes: I recently had to prepare a description of my research for institutional purposes and wrote the following to introduce the project and where we go next with it. The express purpose of the ‘Parameters & Practice’ project was to lay the groundwork for a hybrid mode of creative research...
Alan writes: I was able to present our project at the recent annual conference of the European Artistic Research Network, which this year took place in Leeds and was organised by Azadeh Fatehrad, Maki Fukuoka and Nick Thurston. Here are the slides and films from my presentation, with the script superimposed in...
Dear Marie, Two weeks ago, you gave birth at home to our second child. Please allow this laconic sentence to pay tribute to your achievement. My task, intended to close, though hardly to complete, our project, was triggered when you went into labour. You asked me to create some sort...
Dear Marie, Here is the response to your task, followed by a commentary. Response (Anger Fifties) Brother, I love you, but can we sit down with someone (a therapist maybe) about how you attacked me last night in your kitchen posturing like a gammon, like a thug? ...
Alan writes: Your task this week, perhaps the last you will undertake on the project because our new baby may arrive any day now, is to respond to the score I created in response to Task 48. Here it is again. You asked that this score should be informed...
Dear Marie, This response has taken much longer than it should have. Partly, this is because I have been away for two weeks, visiting several cities in the United States and teaching at The Ohio State University (OSU). Your time, or more precisely your energy, is not your own when...
Alan writes: You write in Task 44 that what you least enjoy ‘in relation to the project is the focus on producing an outcome. […] my strength and (to a degree) my interest lies in the exploration of a task and the creative activity that it involves rather than the reporting...
Dear Marie, Did I put us on the wrong track with Response 44? You didn’t enjoy the task that grew from it, and I haven’t thrived in responding to the repeated task here. The idea with this current response and the task it will generate is to return to what...
Alan writes: In Task 44 you asked me to begin a series of ‘relay’ tasks by setting you a ‘score’—a set of instructions that frame a physical exploration—that will allow you to play and improvise around ideas to do with circularity, the carnivalesque, and the breath. You ask me to...
Dear Marie, When we were delayed in Stansted Airport in a heatwave waiting for a flight to Ireland a couple of weeks ago, I started reading an essay by Johanna Drucker, an author who I think of as part of ‘critical’ digital humanities, called ‘Humanities Approaches to Graphical Display’ (Digital...