Inventory of Behaviours (part of doing together 24)

Inventory of Behaviours

IoB with Natasha Kidd and Jenny Dunseath as part of doing together 24

Thursday 4 April and Friday 5 April 2024

Inventory of Behaviours (IOB) is an evolving artwork consisting of instructions written by artists that detail how to reproduce their behaviours in the studio.

Preliminary research through IOB has revealed that artists’ encounters with matter, with concepts, with process (production) are frequently prefaced, punctuated and concluded by apparently unrelated and often habitual activity (peripheral). External factors such as financial imperatives, domestic responsibilities and physical and mental wellbeing are influential in the formation of these. It is common for artists to engage in preparatory, and sometimes diversionary, activities that directly inform the creative processes of art-making. These comprise a broad range of types, which can be found in multiple individuals and, therefore, categorised. However, despite their universality and pervasiveness, such peripheral activities, behaviours and habits within cultural production have been largely ignored in pedagogy and by scholarly research as the subject of systematic investigation.

IOB is predicated on the idea that there are currently overlooked opportunities that can be afforded by looking more carefully at artistic processes and that a wider examination of these could be of value, not just to artists and related disciplines but beyond. A better understanding of the real contemporary activities of artists and the imperatives that shape them has the potential to inform new and current narratives around artistic creativity, how it can be taught, applied, who can do it and what the benefits are to society more broadly, for instance in respect of health and wellbeing, equality and diversity, employment, and education.

For doing together 24, IOB introduced a series of spaces to PAUSE around the building.

IOB invites you to use the materials and autotelic actions to reflect on and share your own periphery behaviours.

doing together 24
doing together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by the Centre for Cultural and Creative Industries in collaboration with Bath School of Art, Film and Media and Bath School of Music and Performing Arts.

Workshops, delivered by staff and postgraduate students from across the University, share practice-based research methods and a broad range of approaches to practice. doing together is proposed as a generous space to make/do/share and discuss practice with colleagues from a range of different Schools.

Throughout the symposium, facilitators – alongside participants – test out ways of doing together in an effort to make their practice-based research explicit, rather than simply describe it.