Play the Street (part of Doing Together 2023)
Play the Street
Workshop with Conor Wilson as part of doing together 2023
Tuesday 4 April 2023
doing together is a yearly two-day making and sharing practice symposium at Locksbrook Campus, hosted by Bath Spa University’s Centre of Cultural and Creative Industries and Art Research Centre. Workshops, delivered by staff and PGR 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.
Play the Street was a cross disciplinary research activity. The group engaged with the space of the Street through a collaborative, practice-based research process, involving making, documentary/reflective writing, visual documentation and evaluation.
Making was proposed as a speculation on reality, as a nodal activity that might allow us to perceive interactions between objects/things (material, tool, body, language, space), as mesh.
‘Good’ or ‘bad’ judgments of individual contributions were irrelevant; engagement was everything. The difficulty of translating and communicating tacit (if not ‘unknown’) knowledge is a critical element of the research process. As is the difficulty of working under close observation. Is making changed by observation? And how might we know this?
The group was split into teams of three, each with three roles: Maker + Writer + Documenter. Each team member performs each role, for one hour.
Data generated (image, moving image, text, sound) was collated and a group evaluation held after the doing together symposium. The making, the writing, the documentation and the evaluation, together, constitute the research. As part of the evaluation, the group will decide how best to share the research.
