6-7 June 2008

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I want to begin by reminding myself and others of the core objectives of this Network, which were to:

• Draw on established research practices in individual disciplines in order to develop cross-disciplinary methodological approaches to understanding landscape and environment via performativities of place and space;

• Develop cross-disciplinary investigations of landscape and environment as they pertain to ‘emptiness’, specifically those materially rich locations that are seen to be abandoned, degraded, disappeared, transitory, unmarked;

• Investigate how location-based research into emptiness and non-space may inform material understandings of landscape and environment that avoid constructed binaries between urban and rural;

• Produce new perspectives on ‘place and space’ vis-a-vis landscape and environment that can inform academic research practices and foster knowledge transfer within the creative and cultural industries and public sectors;

• Foster collaborative research practices across institutions and sectors in southwest England and in Wales, drawing on a core team of University of Bristol participants in the Performativity | Place | Space research theme.

In other words, our key concerns have been with questions of method. But, what do we mean by that?

In social sciences terms method might be thought of as a strong enquiry logic that is substantiated by coherence and connection among its constituent parts. As Jennifer Greene argues, the separate parts need to fit together and work together to enable defensible data gathering, analysis and interpretation. In an article published earlier this year she assesses mixed methods in social science research. While her work is specifically grounded in the need to relate qualitative and quantitative data generation, analysis and use, her conclusions have interesting, broader implications.

According to Greene, mixed methods actively invite us to participate in a dialogue about multiple ways of seeing and hearing, multiple ways of making sense of the social world, and multiple standpoints on what is important to be valued and cherished. In specific research terms we might consider, for example, a project that wishes to understand the link between safe drinking water and neo-natal survival rates in sub-Saharan Africa. You could do quantitative research that would produce a graph to show that there is a strong correlation between survival rates and the proximity of taps within a 1km radius of the home. Or, you could run an ethnographic study to examine mothers’ attitudes to and uses of clean water through pregnancy and the first year of a baby’s life. A mixed method approach assumes that there are multiple legitimate approaches to social inquiry, that any given approach to social enquiry is inevitably partial and that we can better understand the multifaceted and complex characters of social phenomena via multiple approaches. The assumption is that in combining the 2 methods we could illuminate individual cultural differences to inflect and highlight important exceptions to the rule of the relationship between the spatial distribution of taps and survival at the same time that we could see that new mothers’ evolving narratives of water and fertility are shaped by their access to taps.

This would relate to our Network through a suggestion that, for example, TC Thomson’s 1959 play about Epynt, The Sound of Stillness produces an evocative, textual history of place that may be complemented by an archaeological survey of the ruins of capell babell – the site at which much of the action of the play takes place. At the same time, such an archaeological survey could be usefully enriched by fictionalised accounts of the uses of this place.

However, is that conventional framing of method what we need or wish to do?

There seem to be some clear questions that the Network poses at the end of its life:

1) Might interdisciplinarity constitute an Arts-based version of mixed method research in the social sciences that simply preserves disciplinary boundaries?

2) Might interdisciplinarity generate, instead, a new method for arts-based research that synthesises the best practices from individual disciplines?

3) Is there a transformation that occurs at the point at which disciplines touch when working together at site that points more towards research modes rather than methods to suggest new forms of transdisciplinarity?

4) Might the new ways of knowing produced by such a Network suggest the benefit of contact, rather than collision – the little static shocks that we pass along to one another rather than the single lightning strike, the forever-extensible rather than the bounded?

In asking those questions we might also investigate where our activities are located; whose interests our work serves; what broad purpose is being fulfilled by our work; n what ways are our practices engaged with the inevitable politics of the contexts in which they are situated. And so we might ask is method here about effective methods for facilitating collaboration? For facilitating new research? For facilitating inter-, cross- or transdisciplinarity? For facilitating cross-sector work? Is there a method, or set of methods that can achieve all of these at the same time? Further, are we even talking about method in a conventional sense? How do we arrive at ways of knowing? And who gets to say? Is our aim summation – a misguided attempt to build up knowledge as progressive act? Surely, Babel Chapel is itself a warning to those who think they can approach a singular truth stone by stone.

If I look at what we actually did in our Network we might consider how at a basic level we were all engaged in sensory, ongoing enactments of space and we rendered these embodied experiences via different media: the body, the text and the archive. But what did these ‘ongoing enactments of space’ actually consist of? I want to consider only 4 loose, overlapping methods :

• Observation and random or adhoc sampling

• Rules-based activities

• Introducing new material into site conversation

slide Observation involved practices of attention through the senses, largely guided by our implicit disciplinary interests. Slide That is, we attended to things that called out to us, that affected us in some way in a practice not so dissimilar to the early empiricism of Francis Bacon or St Thomas Browne. Due to the twin directives of observing through performativity and emptiness, we simply looked for and listen to traces and signals that signal this for us. But that’s not so simple. To observe requires us to perceive, and perception requires memory in order that we may recognise what we perceive. Slide Following Bergson, perception also tends towards materialisation. The act of observation drives us to the material.

The way in which we sampled these places varied, although photography has dominated. On one level, the photographic image is an indexical link to place and it provides evidence of our having been there and of the temporally and spatially specific relationships between us and place: I was there, then. What’s so interesting is that in our group we are all very well aware of the trouble with documents – from the impossibility of its status as objective record to the politics and ethics of representation. Slide Perhaps alongside the affective aspects of material and our entanglements with the ready to hand, our culture of collecting goes hand in hand with acts of perception. We just can’t help ourselves.

Slide People taking photographs are located. They stop. Their resulting images index what’s behind the lens, too. So,where the photographer might be standing. And if the photographer is using a Bluetooth device, then there’s geopositional information encoded onto the image as metadata. There’s a self-conscious quality to people in groups with cameras. Slide And they all photograph the same things. Like a group of tourists – sorry Jim - once one takes a picture of something, they all do it in turn. We used mobile phones, still film and still digital cameras and video as modes of observational method.

Slide Running through our workshops was the pleasure/horror of the forensic. The traces at ground level of human and non-human activity demanded to be photographed and rephotographed. Slide That these materials tend to be part of the surface scatter necessitates bodily practices of bending, stooping, crouching, kneeling, squatting. Movement along a vertical axis, often in a circular arc around objects. We pace like lionesses around our prey.

John Wylie noted at our second symposium that we ignored eye level and the spaces of air. We all kept our eyes firmly planted on the ground. I’d like to suggest that in entering a new space, particularly when place has been framed by archival/historical discourse, we seek points of orientation. We quite literally enact the Bergsonian cone of us in the present as the materialisation of the past, moving through limitless space and we attempt to map the continuity of becoming through materialising moments of perception – where memory instantaneously passes into the lived present. We create the semblance of an orderly chain of perception, which appears opposed to the disorderliness of memory. We continuously seek to impose form onto the flow of duration through the sections of the whole that we make through these materialising practices. Hence, the prevalence of taxonomies and tasks.

Our images served very different functions, however. Observations seemed always a means to a series of ends. Where people were using video, it was not so much for its documentary qualities but in order to produce images and sounds from which creative could be made. Others used cameras as recording devices, to produce images that would be carefully inspected at a later date, because you cannot fit a patch of concrete and the traces of at least 3 different benches into a finds bag. The photographic image here stands in for its 3D index. The photograph may or may not be artfully composed, but it must give a sense of scale, detail and context. Slide Cameras may also be used to transform text into image, for surely the wit relies on the materiality of signage rather than the words per se.

The absence of photography also became a photographic process in that we all either expressed guilt over photographic excess or refused photography or even, in the case of one of our participants, hid a camera which takes pictures that will never be developed.

Slide Cognate modes of observational method include sound recording, drawing and writing. I do not draw and yet I tried at Epynt. Not because I want to be an artist like Iain, but because drawing artifacts was an archaeological skill I could simply never master. And yet, the attention to detail that this affords produces a completely different quality of observation. Drawing entails precise decisions about borders and boundaries, the there/not there of the meniscus between object and surface. The act of drawing transforms the observed into a constellation of dots, dashes and shadings. Like writing, it lends itself to considered abstractions and fictional illuminations and brings more sharply into focus the performative relationship between matter and memory. Slide Repeated pencil lines and cursive loops of ballpoint pen slowly emerge into being – yet, like the impossibility of attention, the closer you look the more difficult it becomes to see any real edges between things.

So, when you arrive somewhere, consider when the urge to photograph occurs and make a note of that. For every photograph practice another mediated transformation: write a note, draw a picture, look at the same view in a mirror; listen to what you’ve just photographed.

Rules-based activities – games and exercises

Slide Games and exercises provide constraints around observation. Commonly used in the creative and performing arts, the workshop exercise becomes a tool through which to negotiate relationships within the group. It acknowledges the arbitrariness of any framing and in its production of boundaries points towards their infinite extensibility. Games result in the collective pursuit of play, although they can be hard work. Slide

At Temple Meads I had to confront the fact that while some of the group did want to simply get on with what interested them, others felt that the site was overwhelming and worked against the possibility of chance collaborations. So we turned to our tunnel, in a strikingly Freudian return to the mother’s womb. It was safe there and where I had expected that our group might work itself out through an amorphous, flat structure in which everyone took responsibility for action, it was clear that – perhaps because of the prevalence of textual instruction at site, people wanted to be given a clear, time-based directive. And so we all had 5 minutes to identify and collect traces of human activity, as junior archaeologists. I then asked participants to spend 5 minutes preparing a response to the site from their own areas of expertise. Anna Farthing ran the length of the tunnel several times and took refuge on the rounded buttress. Slide Douglass and Mike rearranged rocks.

At Epynt, as you heard yesterday, the many suggested exercises involving recollection and deep mapping did not, in the end, play out over the weekend, although we retained the Polaroid snapshots at each location. Instead, at Epynt we were led by a tour guide through the landscape, in and out of a minibus, across these vast landscapes. Whereas at Temple Meads there was no space for loitering, here at Epytn there was no time. While the workshop had been very careflully planned, part of that care manifested itself in our not requiring it. Those of us working with video cameras found it quite tricky to set them up and film as the pace of games-based work precludes composition.

Such exercises, however, shake groups from established ways of working. Slide The transect idea at Avonmouth was new for enough people and yet a simple concept for them all to follow. The twist of looking to the right of whatever was first perceived was canny, but where do you stop, because even that isn’t the overlooked, because we’re seeing it. Slide Our group attempted instead to have no goal. We tried not to look for anything. This changed my own video practice in that we were always on the move. Although the piece I showed yesterday was static, I mainly attempted to work with the notion of peripheral vision and video. Slide Working in this group profoundly changed my practice in that I moved on from my love of litter to working with the bits of audio and video that any sensible person would edit out.

So, set yourself a single task when you arrive. Go for a walk and try not to look for things and resist attention.

Slide Bringing things in to site: Objects, readings, ourselves.

It’s not possible to avoid bringing infection. Like the colonials before us, our simple bodies harbour change.

How do we account for what we bring to site (intellectually, creatively, personally, materially) it terms of how we always both determine and add to place?

How do we account for what place brings to us and how it shapes what we do?

Slide John Wylie and J D Dewsbury brought books in their rucksacks in a reflexive and witty exhange. Carol, Moira and I brought unwieldy boxes and tripods and microphones and headphones and tapes covered with that filmy plastic so that our arms, shoulders and backs ached at the end of each day. I also had to bring paperwork and plans, and timetables, tickets and minibus keys and the need to remember detail and anxiety about that need. Yet, I also brought the fact that I am the chair of my local neighbourhood partnership and so often see another side to these relations. And I can say confidently that actually, all communities want people like us to work in and on them. Iain and Mike brought small objects to place in the landscape and photograph, or not. Mike brought a small red house to Epynt. Slide Iain brought his silhouettes, reminiscent of shooting galleries. Jo brought her books and writing tools and, latterly, the other life inhabiting her body. Jim brought his archaeological toolkit and sought to use it in different ways, struggling (and succeeding) to find another way to produce archaeology. Richard brought his black box recorder. Nearly all of us brought maps of one description or another.

Because it is impossible to arrive anywhere without a gift or two, particular care must be given when considering what those gifts might be.

Slide Conversation

There is a range of activities under the broad title of conversation. There is its literal meaning – of the to and fro of speech among participants. I like this definition for the way in which it connects to technologies of walking as one of its primary modes. If we consider one foot in front of the other and then back again, and, if we follow someone like David Wills, the continual twists and turns to the back as we move forward, conversation as method encompasses a wide range of practices. All of our mobile practices consitutte conversation - Strolling/walking/nomadism/flanerie/spatial praxis/sauntering? The fact of our bodies in these places is conversational rather than observational. We speak to place through movement and listen out for and to it. The speed of our walking is regulated by the ground, the weather, the width of the path, the fit of our boots and so on. Such listening does not impose meaning or understanding, it is a productive silence.

Our conversations with each other took many forms, from arguments, to whispers in corridors – from formal seminar-based discussions, to informal gossip in the pub. One of our biggest challenges was how to keep conversations going when we weren’t together. Our wiki is an important conversational structure. The telephone is perhaps under-used while I’ve tried to keep emails to the minimum. Following Epynt, our group discussed how we might stay in touch ---postcards.

Conversation of course makes us account for our relationships with others. I don’t want to say too much about conversation now as I’d like this to emerge in our conversation at the end. My one lingering anxiety about conversation as method, particularly in relation to the workings of the network is a fear that – since dong my cert in management, all of this can be reduced to forming, storming, norming and mourning. But perhaps even that’s useful to keep us humble.

Where I wish to end this is to repeat JD’s call for us to remove preferences, to remove goals and to move away from signification. Shaping the experience of this network as a whole is the sense in which the bravest, most productive ways of working together are not those that seek to materialize, to represent, almost in the moment of being there. Rather, there is method in a kind of madness that insists on maintaining provisionality and in the madness that says upfront that we don’t know exactly what it is that we’re doing. The Network framework provided us with an opportunity to investigate new forms of sociality, where there was no common goal. What was unique in this Network was/is the fact that so many disciplines and practices and attitudes were brought together - like an unruly family at Christmas. But that’s actually the ethics of being in the world that we are always-already a part of. We chose to work at obviously difficult sites that brought to the fore our own assumptions about which kind of work we might value. And because we worked at site we had to engage with both the ongoing politics of inhabitation and the weight of history. Again, this should be what we do in all our work, but it’s too easy to forget.

I also wish to remind myself and all of you that it is also perhaps too easy to think about the Network in terms solely of the site-based weekends and that the symposia were simply dissemination activities. We felt very strongly that the symposia had to be part of the work. Not only did they displace the weekend activities into an academic setting, which insisted on yet another orientations of politics and practice, they served to extend the boundaries of the weekend, to reconfigure these places within an ever-expanding field. And they were structured as conversations very deliberately so as to confound delegate expectations that they might come to the events and find out about a place. The symposia and this conference do the work of insisting that the Network’s activities were not about coming up with the truth or something new to say about the histories of these places. Rather, they project forward. Nor is the Network solely about producing a set of different orientations for the researcher, artist, artist-scholar that empties our bodies of institutional practices – although this is a hugely important and energizing aspect of the series. Our work at site and beyond adds to the stories of these places. While power and politics are always right there with us, it was never a simple configuration of us ‘making sense’ of a place for others as we were guests and so were very aware of the need not to use the wrong hand towel.

In a sense, this Network became a rather enormous participatory practice in which it’s never been quite clear in which directions the power runs. And I think that has been its strength and is our contribution to arts and humanities research. I think of the film Howl’s Moving Castle and our network as this great trundling contraption, with bits continually falling off and being tacked on and from which, whenever you open the door you find yourself somewhere entirely new and unexpected. It’s like one of John Law’s and Vicky Singleton’s mutable mobiles – this is, in fact, what we always knew to be the case but perhaps had forgotten. There is no ‘thing’ to document or from which to produce a taxonomy. We cannot grasp any of this or find the data to support an answer. If there is a methodological contribution it is to do with the mistake of even thinking of ourselves ‘in the field’ as there is no outside of it.

What does that mean for others from across the arts and humanities? It might mean that the distinction between people who do fieldwork and people who work in libraries, or between research and art, are perhaps the wrong dividing lines. It doesn’t mean that we’re all…whatever now. We’ve successfully resisted the drive to elevate one discipline above all others as the best in show. What the network demonstrates is the positive arbitrariness of the task: it is both necessary and impossible.