Oxford and Nottingham

Category: poetry

Track: Oxford and Nottingham

My recent poems around Track: Nottingham theme come from an original multimedia project from 2010 reborn….only this time poetry led…..

I am working on two books of poems drawing on local history in two locations…

The above Thames based one was called Backwater but probably be Track Part One now.

The second local to Nottingham and started with the three poems about Chaplin, Picasso and Lawrence.

Read James Walker on the project here:
https://thedigitalpilgrimage.wordpress.com/2018/07/23/track-nottingham-paper-boats-on-private-road/

The projects take individual ‘derives’ as the starting point for poems that literally ‘track’ individuals movement through urban and rural space and their inter-actions with the current technology to analyse how art and technology interact.

I hope in future to illustrate myself or use illustrators in a wider ‘Track: Nottingham’ book proposal.

So far I have written three poems about Picasso, Chaplin and D.H.Lawrence which rather neatly bookend three con-current aspects of modernity in Painting – Film – Literature.

I am interested in the relation between technology and how these individuals were enabled to move and in turn have their works ‘distributed’ by the new channels of literary and film distribution  and their link to networks of travel especially the railway.

From my earliest poetry I have ought to ‘map’ these webs of inter-dependence and am grateful to Patrick Keiller and David Matless for some of the theoretical cultural geographical basis of this approach. This began with a an abandoned M.A. in multimedia in 2010.

No person is an island and no artist is independent of the tentacles of mass distribution and technological change.

My poetry is an attempt to map these hinterlands of change.

They are also stories about people and love and pain played out against 19th, 20th and 21st century backdrops.

 

and the original Multimedia project from 2010

The Physical Impossibility of a Creative Practice PhD in the Mind of UK Academia

 

This post is born out of total frustration.

In the past three years since I was awarded an M.A. Fine Art (Distinction and all) I have struggled to make any headway in aligning the content of this blog ( a psycho-geographical investigation of the Middle Thames between 1840-1910 ) and the academic notion of a ‘Practice-Led’ PhD.

Even when I have offered to shower the august institutions in cash I have found myself constantly pushed into traditional historical straight-jackets.

In all probability I could have been offered a Cultural Geography PhD down this route and have been offered two places.

1.Loughborough offered me a place for a dodgy proposal thrown together for a MRL place which frankly absurd.

2. Central Saint Martins have accepted me on to a PhD on Victorian Scrapbooks and Printmaking as long as it avoids the very practice I tried to have accepted (down to 20% practice /80% textual exegesis split) which means that though deferred until 2018 it pretty much a busted flush for me already….

So three years later..£10 K lighter and after a storm of personal problems which would sink a battleship I teetering on the edge of giving up entirely.

My pitch now is simple as I have given up on any kind of practice-led fine art PhD degree on the basis that I actually wrote a paper on the fact that it doesn’t exist..read it here…

Grey Ravens Paper

My only hope is a Creative Writing PhD based on Backwater ( fictitious cover above) a new volume of poems drawing together ten years research into the Middle Thames art and writing in the Victorian Era and possibly beyond. If this could be linked to comic art/graphic novel all the better

That’s it folks!

If there is an academic out there who wants to supervise me writing a first proper volume of poems as practice-led PhD and I get the degree too I will shed out the £12K necessary for academic standards to be met…

(UPDATE June 2018 This option dead – I no longer have the finances)

I HAVE NO CHANCE OF FUNDING AT MY AGE.. the AHRC mantra is ‘Creating the next generation of academics’ so young and pretty go ahead ..if you old and not so pretty get back as Big Bill Broonzy sang…

If not I will write it anyway..spend £2K publishing it myself and probably be a lot happier..

(UPDATE June 2018 This option also dead – I no longer have the finances)

For now the possibilities are rapidly diminishing..

 

All depends of course on whether they accept a creative practice element as a substantial part of submission.

 

Its looking increasingly like the PhD is my Dunkirk…a glorious defeat…

TRACKING TIME: Book or PhD? Or both?

amanesia

Things have moved on considerably in the last few weeks.

I was interviewed for a Horizon CHI (Computer Human Interaction) PhD at Nottingham University two weeks ago. I did well to be shortlisted against stiff and much younger competition (average age 25). From the get go though it obvious that my interests were not aligned with CHI and secondly that I would not be able to work with their new corporate partners. I pitched my application to their older local community arts led model. No point crying over spilt milk….marked the end of my involvement in any kind of contemporary web/internet/computer relatedresearch.

De Capo.

NEW ROUTES:

What it did do was focus me on to what I do have an interest in and this Book proposal and possible PhD more firmly located within the Arts and Humanities area.

Here is a very rough outline of what the book may cover.

 

All dates and ideas provisional in the extreme :

cropped-tracking1.jpg

An original provisional title from 2010

TRACKING TIME; ART, TECHNOLOGY AND UTOPIA IN ENGLAND 1850-1950?

Proposed chapters .
Intro: Chalk Detonators to Concorde – The coming of the railway to the end of the line?
1. Dickens and Seymour. Railways and Illustration

2. Mr Fox Talbot and Mrs Dann: Reading’s First Female Professional Photographer and the Inventor of the calotype process.

3. Alexander Mann and the sequential image.

4. Fairground Kinemas and William Frith – Mapping Oxford a psychogeographical derive

5. Industrial film the art of industry in the Thames Valley – Rural Unions and the Co-Operative movement to Cowley Motors .

6. Rural Idyll: The Oxfordshire Railway Villages and Art Movements Blewbury, Long Wittenham and the Cotswolds.

7. Rural Presses and reactions to Modernism and Technology: Kelmscott, Cockerel Press and Communism.

8. Shooting Europe: The Spitfire Reconnaissance mapping of Germany from Beconsfield Aerodrome.

9. Atoms and Stars: The disintegrating world seen from Harwell and the DNA shuffle.11. Building the 60s Oxford and Abingdon – The Mini and The MG. The patriarchical machine.

Coda . Satellite of Love: Space -race to Boom-bust and the end of empire. Trickle down and the rise of the web..Bletchley Park to Cheltenham. News from Nowhere to News from Everywhere.

 

I also have a facebook page which may come in useful for future crowdfunding if I need to go down that road..or track:-)

https://www.facebook.com/SDBTrackingTime/

 

 

 

 

 

Twin Peaks? New Research Track and merging themes?

 

welcome

 

This just to clarify my research has previously had two sides to the story…and no bodies wrapped in plastic ..yet…

 

DRAWING: Comics and Graphic Novels Research

Firstly an M.A. in Fine Art exclusively concerned with drawing and presenting analysis of art research methodology in sequential drawings.

This and associated papers/ outcomes contained herein: https://shaunbelcher.com/research/

This developed out of a scurious cartoon art dog called Moogee’s adventures in the Fine Art World: https://shaunbelcher.com/moogee

UPDATE June 2016: This work is now coming to fruition as Freelance Design and comic illustration under

FLYIN SHOES ARTS U.K.
https://flyinshoesarts.wordpress.com

MOOGEE THE DOODLE DOG
https://shaunbelcher.com/moogee/

 

HISTORY OF ART AND TECHNOLOGY

Following an aborted M.A. in Multimedia which changed into a Fine Art M.A. in drawing I became interested in the notion of the rise of Victorian Technology and Illustration as a early distribution network or web. Specifically I began looking at early photography and film and its influences and cross-currents with fine art especially illustration.

This led to the work here and papers linked below (one purely visual until I finally write up).

This led to a Leverhulme PhD Funding Submission through BIAD in 2014 which was a group submission and unsuccessful around idea of Railway as a instigator of artistic practice.

I recently investigated these possible ideas again. It may be possible to link two areas together via a graphic narrative format.

https://www.scribd.com/collections/4262615/Art-Research-Illustration-and-Media

I have also recently used a poetry narrative to describe a Photographer’s Equipment and its technological changes for RIBA

EDWIN SMITH at RIBA

I have just discovered David Trotter’s work ‘Literature in the First Media Age’ which seems perfect match for what I trying to do.

http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674073159

(UPDATE June 2016: This route may come to fruition in an Art History/Literature/Music PhD as that the area I now consider myself to be operating in and which best match for interests)

 

New PhD development: Art History and Technology

2720ALT

Stanhope Forbes 'The Quarry Team' Print. 1894

Interesting times as the Chinese philosopher said. I have officially returned to NTU School of Art and Design to teach on Animation and Graphic Design courses ….I applied for a reduction in hours to support a more intense period of PhD application but have been told not possible so have to maintain my 0.5 contract for now. If I get any PhD support from other institutions I may try again in a year’s time for reduced hours.

I am moving back towards trying to obtain a fully funded PhD. I cannot afford full funding and supporting myself but maybe can get part funded and keep teaching?

The PhD ‘path’ I considering will bring together the basic premise of the ‘ANAMNESIA’ project but maybe with more focus on the impact of Railway on arts. For now the ‘Popular Culture’ angle one I looking at most intently.

Here are some preliminary proposals:

 

I am particularly interested in the concept of  embedded literature  and using illustrations and a narrative/travelogue approach in my research in the manner of W.G. Sebald and Patrick Keiller’s work with art and technology and region.

The PhD ‘paths’ I now considering below have developed out of the original Leverhulme Proposal and draws on material researched in my aborted M.A. Multimedia ‘ANAMNESIA’ project but with more focus on the impact of Railway on arts. For now the ‘Popular Culture’ angle one I looking at most intently.

The Leverhulme Proposal available online here:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/249245353/PhD-Levenhulme-Proposal

 

Possible lines of research investigation in this art history and technology area being considered are:

RSS

  1. Rain, Steam, Speed:

Art, Modernism and Technology 1840-1940.

The Railway, Radio and Telegraph in the development of Rural Artistic Communities (Networks) and Small Presses. Focusing on how ‘new technology’ created new artistic forms and communities from Dickens’s Pickwick Papers to The Cockerel Press.

team

2.‘Shifting Modes of Narrative’: Investigating illustration and sequential drawing as a response to the ‘new media’ of photography and cinema. 1836 – 1914.

Starting with Dickens illustrators and moving up to ‘Birth of Cinema’. Less regionally focussed.

talbotreading

  1. Drifting Focus 1830 – 1890:
    Kinema, photography, fine art and illustration. An investigation of new media networks in the first possibly’ Transmediale’ railway age.

Focusing on the narrative arts post ‘Railway’ and relating to contemporary definitions of networks and Transmediale new technologies.

Further details available online at my Transmedia Research Blog:

 

Shaun Belcher 10.07.2015

 

 

 

Extended Fictions – Going with the FLOW or not?

haunted house

Read more about this App here : Microsoft Apps

It has been a career-defining week so until the dust truly settles I not making any comments about my withdrawal from the Creative Writing M.A. other than these reflections on what I think is happening to fiction these days in general.

It was only after withdrawal that I started to consider what it was that I had wanted from the course rather than what the course offered me. There was no problem with what delivered it simply wasn’t what I wanted..they sold bananas I actually wanted peaches.

The problem is that the field of ‘Extended Fiction’ which I am primarily interested in is at present almost homeless within academia in general. The NTU course is not the only one focusing on the principles of traditional fiction writing, screen-writing and poetry in categories that have been fixed since the notion of Creative Writing was accepted into the academy. Indeed one could even go back further to the battles to get English Literature accepted into the academy.

This constant seeking for ‘validation’ alongside the sciences means that, like fine art, a lot of conservatism has crept in alongside the wish to be taken seriously. This conservatism is especially prevalent now with REF status measurement . Creative courses move towards ‘acceptability’ through research worthiness but in my opinion it is stifling creative content and not just in writing.

The area of apps and fiction (see above) which mixing illustration and stories, online and offline graphic novels, voice-only novels ( a recent development..basically a recording of writer reading but no text sold) photo-embedded literature, visual-poetry, comics etc etc has hardly rippled the surface of ‘creative writing’ that country-wide has been modeled on a Stateside Iowa Workshop model first introduced in the 1960’s. A model that now 50 years old. We wouldn’t drive a car built in 1960 now so why drive a model of education that similarly dated?

There are various reasons for this. A lot of the embedded wisdom in that model is very good. Good writing is good writing and basic principles have not changed. What has changed is everything around that model. The stand-alone paper novel may not be as Will Self so clearly put it ‘as dead as the Dodo’ but it is it certainly one platform amongst many now. Self is one author trying to breathe life into its  form in an arena where what we call literature or ‘the book’ may be fragmenting into a variety of platforms. The internet has changed the delivery, consumption and influence of the literature we read as comprehensively as the first paperbacks sold at W.H.Smiths (which trains then distributed around the country like a steel internet) changed our notions of literacy, communication and most importantly fueled universal suffrage and democracy.

To paraphrase Yeats

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold……

But the centre here is the reader. The reader is now the centre of endless opportunities be it social media, hypertext, embedded photos. Everything has become an endless ‘narrative’ which we making from our own lives via social media. To disrupt this ‘FLOW’ of trans-mediale imagery and text we have to purposefully disengage via Kindle or paper (the original kindle is a electronic metaphor for paper anyway) and place ourselves outside the ‘FLOW’.

If one turns one’s attention away from standard literature field to what I tentatively calling ‘Extended Fictions’ a whole new landscape emerges. This is a landscape that the millennial born digital natives are swimming in effortlessly. It is both image and text like graphic novels but maybe even more fluid and permeable once online. The graphic novel has its ‘paper’ retro adherents who regard online as a threat to its unique paper object-ness.  They see its object-hood as the defining characteristic of  paper-bound writing and in many ways this ‘thing-ness’ corresponds with contemporary crisis in the fine arts over authenticity and object value.

I spent much of last year investigating Charles Dickens and his illustrators as a key moment in the development of the ‘serialised’ novel. Indeed one could say he invented the modern magazine serialisation and therefore modern cinema and TV.
It is no coincidence that the first efforts to create working free-flowing multi-directional Apps from literature have used him as a model. The image above is a illustrated short story by Dickens from Microsoft. The image below is from the ‘Dark London’ app developed by the Museum of London and again drawing on both location tracking and multiple entry points to the narrative..all is FLOW..not uni-directional narration.

Unless modern creative-writing courses take on board THE FLOW we will have a version of writing presented as all writing just as a version of fine art currently dominates fine art. This is my opinion. It is not an opinion many in my institution would agree with that is for sure.

For me to not go with THE FLOW is to cease to go forward it as simple as that.

The future is here now and it looks very much like the past to me …we do not want to miss the train do we? Would Dickens be working on paper or the web?

london

Dickens Dark London App

Tom Pow’s Dying Villages project

http://www.dyingvillages.com/index2.php

 

By 2030 it is estimated that Europe will have lost one third of its population. It is already an ageing population with a low birthrate. The effect of this demographic change – the greatest since the Black Death – will be felt most acutely in rural areas. In 2007,  I received a Creative Scotland Award from the Scottish Arts Council for a project aimed at responding in poetry and prose to the social, ecological and cultural effects of demographic changes on villages in Europe.

In 2007 and 2008,  I made trips to affected areas in Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Bulgaria, Russia and Greece. The Dying Village website reflects these trips in sound, image, interviews and artworks.

Dying Villages is an ongoing project. Related works of poetry and prose will appear elsewhere.

Tom Pow

© 2024 TRACK

Theme by Anders NorenUp ↑