The best questions are often the last questions: making sense of experimental creative practice as research

_{Presented at the Rebellious Research (Arts/Practice based Research Seminar Series) hosted by Dr Agata Lulkowska on Wednesday 14th December 2023.}

In 2019 I ran a sandbox project funded by Arts Council England (ACE), the project was an experiment in transmedia and emerged from a desire to better inform my own teaching of the subject on a new module at Solent University, Producing for Transmedia. So, in a way, initially, you could think of this as a case study as a means for developing an experiential basis for my teaching and thus an example of research-informed teaching. However, along the way I also want to unpack some issues around practice/research, the generation of knowledge/value through creative practice and the challenge of formulating a research question that might drive any form of experimental and exploratory forms of creative inquiry.

The best way to learn about anything practice related is to try doing it and so that is what I did, and this led to Cursed City Dark Tide, a six-month project that delivered a transmedia experience inspired by a novel The Snow Witch, by local author Matt Wingett. I took a couple of characters from the novel, the protagonist, and a trickster figure, developed the novel’s back story by reintroducing a character we never meet in the novel since she is dead, and brought her into our story as a ghost. The entire experience was positioned as a sort of epilogue to the novel and culminated in a musical event where the ghost was manifest and released through a cathartic encounter with her grandmother. That is the short version of the story. There is more to say about this project and if you are interested a really detailed account is still available on the project website.

For me, the project was very definitely an act of creative practice research, in that, I intended to discover through the practice, the answers to questions such as what is transmedia and how do you create transmedia. But these are vague ephemeral questions that wouldn’t survive any kind of critical examination. They don’t really constitute a hypothesis or research question in the more academic sense of the term. Even though I had a clear sense of creative direction, and I had some processes in mind that would lead me towards the devising of the project. I couldn’t say that at the start of the project I had a deep sense of what it was I was going to be doing or why. The project was after all supposed to be a sandbox, an experiment and I expected there to be a lot of messing around, playful exploration and quite a bit of trial and error. That was the whole point and though I had made a small study of the practice of transmedia in preparation for teaching a module on the subject. Plus, I have experience of creating linear narrative experiences (films, theatre and so on). My understanding of the practice of transmedia itself was at that time and possibly still is very limited.

Now imagine a conversation with a hypothetical research supervisor, or with anyone who might agree to peer review a creative work. Might they need to know the research question and the lines of inquiry in order to make a judgement on the knowledge/value of the creative work? Generating a driving research question might be very challenging if your process is an experimental one. One in which you employ methods for devising the work that engages with communities and other creatives in an open-ended inquiry. Drawing on messy, uncertain, chaotic processes that are purposefully designed to détourne authorship. In such a case, how are you going to arrive at a research question without having undertaken the research first?

In the case of Cursed City Dark Tide, it has taken a further three years of reading and reflecting to arrive at a research question, though actually, I think I arrived at the findings first and I am only now able to start to articulate a possible research question or series of questions. Being able to do that though, is useful to me, not just in terms of future creative practice, but now, I can write the project up and get a publication out of it. It also satisfies a desire to explore practice and theory side by side. So, let’s take a look at Cursed City Dark Tide as a mini-case study which might serve as a means for unpacking some of this. A creative work that has already been completed (2019), it is also the subject of an academic paper which has so far been presented to a couple of conferences and is 30% towards being finalised as a journal article.

Cursed City Dark Tide Mini-Case Study

One aspect of this complex and sprawling creative project that I wish to focus on was the use of street art to communicate messages to the people taking part in the experience. Remember, the project was a transmedia so there was an expectation that the audience would become participators in the unfolding of the story. Initially, when ideating the narrative for the project I had an idea that we would include some kind of urban shamanism as a touch point for the narrative. I recalled at the time, that back in the mid-1980’s you used to see streams of cassette tape wrapped around lamp posts. There were people at the time who claimed that urban witches recorded incantations on these tapes and left them there as a form of urban magic. I considered how we might take that idea and transpose it to 2019 and it occurred to me that perhaps the modern equivalent might be street art. A little digging around and it became clear that there is a synergy between the territorial sigils of urban magic and that of graffiti artists. I was also taken at the time by a flourishing culture of paste-ups in the city where I live and thought, what if our shapeshifting trickster character was a paste-up artist using their artworks to send cryptic messages to the population of the city. The attempt to employ a street artist to create these paste-ups floundered and I ended up taking on the role myself, both designing the artwork and running around with a fox mask pasting them up around the city. Simultaneously videoing myself doing so and then posting to Instagram.

Hopefully what you can see in this account is the way in which the idea unfolded from a base concept through a series of iterations which responded to creative constraints. Leading me to take on the persona of a street artist, a new field of practice for me, both in the storyworld and in real life. I literally became Lissitch the shapeshifting fox spirit and paste-up artist in the narrative storyworld. As a creative I found myself immersed in a new materiality, exploring new forms of expression and audience engagement. New knowledge/value that has had a transformational impact on my own knowledge and understanding of the practice of transmedia (and street art).

Subsequently, I started to explore the experience through a series of reflections, that emerged from a symposium, The Evolution of Story, which sought to explore this idea of transmedia or experiential narrative in a slightly more academic context. Another round of teaching the module Producing for Transmedia also led to a simplified explanation of what exactly transmedia is. This in response to questions from students who found the concept hard to grasp. Thus, the phrase, City as Escape Room then became not only a shortcut for describing transmedia as a concept, but it also started to drive my own research into the subject at a theoretical level. A book review for an academic journal further propelled this line of inquiry leading me to reflect on the way in which “the meaning of a story is affected by the place in which the story is told, and similarly the meaning of place tends to be told through stories” (Harcox 2021, 1). After some further delving into this idea, I emerged from the rabbit hole with some material on affective atmospheres that appeared to offer a useful framework, not only for understanding how meaning had been created in my role of trickster/past-up artist but also in terms of a potential bare bones structure for a toolkit that might aid future practice. In short, the door had opened not just into the world of urban shamanism but also into that of urban foraging. Both of these practices are resplendent with affective atmospheres that thicken place and render it visible, rather than just background (Duff 2010), and therefore meaningful to those who experience it.

In short, the investigation took me on a deep dive into the Ecologies of Belonging (in particular the concept of affect resonance). This then led to an understanding of the role of the audience in transmedia as one of foraging for signs, while in anthesis, the role of the creator is akin to that of the shaman, simultaneously acting on and from within a storyworld. This relationship between audience and creator mirrors the historically symbiotic relationship in street art between catchers (photographers) and artists (creators) and led to the idea of transmedia as being a kind of sympoiesis or co-creation that emerges through collectively produced entanglements of relations (Harraway 2016, 33), a knotting together of people, spaces, and meaning.

Towards a Poetics of Constraint

What I mean to highlight in this brief account, is the way in which the entanglement between the theory and practice also hints at a sympoiesis or co-creation. The journey of both the practice and the theory is one of encounters with constraints and at each encounter, one might argue, a poetic response has been engendered. There is a distinct chicken and egg situation here; which comes first the question or the practice/research. In both cases, the practice-led inquiry and the theory-led inquiry, the knowledge/value emerges from the exploration, from the experience of doing the practice/research. It might even be argued that it is the problem encounters and the practitioner/researcher’s response to these encounters that shape the emergent knowledge/value. This position that was further cemented after I recently attended a talk with two artists Anna Heinrich & Leon Palmer, concerning their Alien Native installation at Gosport Museum and Gallery UK (November 2022).

During the discussion, they described their creative process. Explaining that even though they would usually initiate a project with a very clear intention or vision for the creative work. The undertaking of the journey, and the doing of the work is for them significant in the way it shapes the final outcome. The process of making the work will undoubtedly throw up obstacles, challenges, and problems in relation to; practicalities physicality, technique, tools, approaches and so on. Their response to these encounters is important in the context of this discussion. They spoke of how they enjoyed these encounters with constraint just as long as their response to the constraint was able to be poetic. This comment by the artist’s set off a light bulb moment for me and I have started to wonder if there is something to be explored in the notion of a poetics of constraint. Perhaps here lies the key to unlocking the value of experimental practice as a research methodology and as a mode of knowledge creation.

Experimental creative practice is undoubtedly a form of research that generates research outputs. In this sense, it can be thought of as practice-led research, in that the insights emerge from the practice (Smith & Dean 2009, 5). It is also the case that the experiential knowing developed by creatives through practice, their training, tacit knowledge, processes and so on are also a means for developing knowledge and understanding that can be formulated as a research insight or output, this then is research-led practice (Smith & Dean 2009, 5). In Schön’s (1995) terms the difference between the two formulations of practice/research can be thought of as one of being in different moments; of reflection in action versus reflection on action (which hopefully then leads on to reflection for action). So, there is a cyclical relationship, an iteration of knowledge acquisition, not so much a progression from one to another but an entanglement of each within the other. What Barrett and Bolt (2010, 29) refer to as ‘praxical knowledge’, suggesting that somehow the physicality of creative practice, the embodied doing, generates insights that can ‘shift thought’. Smith and Dean (Smith & Dean 2009, 7) formulate this entanglement as a cyclic relationship between practice-led research and research-led practice which really, at the end of the day, just positions Schön’s (1995) iterative cycle of reflection within an academic context. Wrapping up the practice with outputs and outcomes that please evaluators, examiners, and supervisors.

Actually, it is difficult to actually tease apart these different ideas, to separate the practice from the reflection. The creative practitioner is always in the moment; reflecting in, on and for creative practice, there isn’t a sense that it ever stops, that it can be chunked out, and packaged as a singular moment of experience. Though of course, when we write about our practice for publication it does feel like we are engaged in a different kind of knowledge/value generation. One in which the creative practice is abstracted out, reified and subjected to intense critical scrutiny. All good and proper and kind of what I am doing here in writing about my own creative practice. Out of this comes something that the academy can recognise as more than noodling about, something that can be allocated hours, a value, an outcome. Therefore, REF-able and resulting in increased revenue streams or reputation building.

That said, practice/research is exploratory in nature and the ephemerality of its performative qualities in particular throws up challenges when we try and understand how practice/research is a site of knowledge production or ‘mode-of-knowing’ (Nelson 2013, 3). In Smith and Dean’s (2009) model of an ‘iterative cyclical web’ of entanglement, the interplay of ‘practice-led research’, ‘research-led practice’ and ‘academic research’ is presented as a series of iterative processes which feels very much akin to Schön’s (1995) framing of reflection as; in, on and for action. What we have here then is perhaps a “double articulation between theory and practice, whereby theory emerges from a reflexive practice at the same time as practice is informed by theory” (Barrett & Bolt 2010, 29).

None of this answers the question proposed in the title of this piece. I would argue that in the case of experimental creative practice it is probably unnecessary to have a research question. Having a vision, a sense of a journey or a trajectory for exploration is clearly important. As is having a toolkit of processes, one of which might include doing it differently. After all, following Nelson, “for the purpose of a research inquiry, consciously disorderly or chance approaches are methods” (2013, 99). What I can see here, is that our language and terminology appear to be inadequate. They seem to serve the needs of instrumental forms of evaluation that are imposed on practice/research from the academy. Rather than serving the needs of practitioner/researchers. It may be that further exploration of the notion of practice/research as a poetics of constraint might help untangle the complexities at play in the practice/research debate.

References

BARRETT, E. and B. BOLT, 2010. Practice As Research: Approaches to Creative Arts Enquiry. London: I. B. Tauris & Company, Limited

DUFF, C., 2010. On the Role of Affect and Practice in the Production of Place. Environment and planning. Society & space, 28(5), 881-895

HANCOX, D., 2021. The Revolution in Transmedia Storytelling through Place: Pervasive, Ambient and Situated. Milton: Taylor and Francis

NELSON, R., 2013. Practice As Research in the Arts: Principles, Protocols, Pedagogies, Resistances. London: Palgrave Macmillan UK

SCHÖN, D.A., 1995. The reflective practitioner: how professionals think in action. Aldershot: Arena

SMITH, H. and R.T. DEAN, 2009. Practice-led research, research-led practice in the creative arts. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Watch the video of the presentation here on the Rebellious Research youtube channel.