PARIP
Symposium WORKSHOP GROUP 3 TRANSCRIPT Relating documentation,
research practice and the performing media: how do we re/present practice
AS research? How do we interrogate processes of documentation
vis a vis the production of research in both live and recorded
contexts? If videoptaping, a live performance is felt to be a form of
documentation then where does the documentation of film/video practices
lie? If the performance itself cannot stand on its own without
some other form of critical document, then can a film or video stand on
its own? If film-, video-, and television-making, like performance-making
practices, have complex ecologies, then can their recorded outputs serve
as documents of their own making? Rapporteur: Misri
Deitch Dey, York St John College We came up with five
points. 1) New paradigms for new PhDs should be developed to account for
the problems PhD students face with practice as research, examiners and
assessors. We would like new structures set up by which the work is talked
about. It occurs to us that although other people are dealing with staff
research, the PhD does remain a benchmark of academic research as its
at PhD level that we have to articulate how our practice as research stands
up against the fixed set of paradigms of traditional research. Also, perhaps
being among first wave of practice as research PhDs is like what the more
established academics experienced when they were the first wave of theatre/drama
students at degree level. Maybe there is some value in considering how
drama was first articulated as a valid subject within academy. 2) We also
questioned attitudes to documentation and memorialization: notions that
involve fragmentation. There has been a recurrent undercurrent of feelings
of loss and nostalgia with documentation as the memorialization of work.
Technology and plenitude make us think we can begin to get there, but
we all know that there is no end to what can be said about a single photograph.
Is not the potters wheel the best document of artistic process?
3) We need to develop modes/examples of documentation appropriate to practice
as research. PARIP could establish networks of people who are redefining
the boundaries. 4) We need to negotiate the status and function of the
document, that different kinds of document have different kinds of status
attached. 5) Finally, we wondered what the outcomes of this forum and
work of PARIP will be. No additional comments Transcribed by Angela Piccini, 1 February 2002
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