What happens on Wednesday afternoons at the Poly?

This is a question posed to us by David McAleavey, friend and person involved in Lincoln's Social Science Centre.  It is offered as a way to kick us off into a new conversation and I think it's a good question.

I've waited until Wednesday afternoon to answer it and I've been asked by David to answer it before we start to collapse things too much.  At least this is how Kate presented what David had said.  Kate has a brilliant way of paraphrasing things it usually cuts to the real meaning of what is said.  For example, our first publication was based around the phrase.

"We are having trouble describing what we do."

 it was paraphrased to

"We haven't a clue what we are doing."

I like the second best - the first sounds clever but the second is clever and truthful.

So for David I'm going to try hard not to collapse things today - I will be as serious as I can be.

 I sat next to somebody while giving our talk at the university of Leeds Degree Show yesterday,  I noticed somebody jot down the note NO(W)HERE - clever : here and now and nowhere - this is what the Poly does on a Wednesday afternoon.  (Whoops I think I've collapsed everything and been ironic in the first para - sorry David)

Wednesday morning was taken up in doing a few emails- one to Geoff about the residency we have offered him, one to Tim about a potential HLF bid about Ruskin and allotments one to my friend who is a raygun consultant, a couple to Kate about the Poly Summer School.  I then did a couple of blog entries, one on a private site which is a project called Imagine and is exploring the idea of cultures potential to enable people to imagine better futures.  It's a private blog but I wrote a bit about how in some partnerships the artist presented an Intra-domain which gave everyone a place to be a bit sloppy, this is a worry as I'm now presenting myself as "The artist other" on the project and I'm not used to it so I'm worried about pitfalls.

Then I blogged on ways of knowing which is a short blog where I talk about the same thing and really quoted Kate Genevers dad who along with Ruskin is a good person to quote if you want to make a comment about value.

Then I went outside and had to think about a projection onto the window of a launderette in Horncastle which references the local naturalist Joseph Banks who had traveled with Captain Cook.  I have made a converted dryer into a green screen washing machine so we could superimpose footage onto the front of the shop click on the picture to get to a rough draft of the first edit.

So this was my morning and after dropping off a couple of CD's of photographs with people and visiting an exhibition made by the Chillian group in our local community centre I sat down to write this.

So the no(w)here idea is that the poly-technic is a place for the many arts to come together.  It serves many purposes but this afternoon it is the rock of my practice - the centering.  Kate is who I share ideas with - we have a different type of short hand she is the person who reminds me of Ruskin and his observation that as an artist I need to spend most of my time remembering how to feel and that I should not really have the time to think.

After the meeting at Leeds and the talk by us and the free university of Liverpool I was struck by the fact that really the poly-technic is a simple invention but at the heart of it are two people struggling to think in a different way- against the flow.  Everything I have done this morning was creative, a little absurd in many ways fun but the Polytechnic and the space we make of it provides me, I can't speak for Kate with a holding form for practice.

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To quote Witkin (1974: 181):

The effectiveness of a holding form depends upon its complete simplicity. [...] The sensate problem itself consists of the structure of sensate disturbance which I have described in terms of ‘contrasts’, ‘discords’, ‘identities’, etc. [...] The individual produces a form that captures these structural characteristics in their barest essentials.  It is the essential gestalt of the disturbance that is held in the holding form.

I would hope Kate would paraphrase this to say 

Put simply 

everything we do gets so complicated and difficult to navigate that we need to make something which can contain them  and this thing needs to be able to adapt to different things, it needs to be able to change shape but keep form.