Addressing Studio Creative Practice

A good question to ask___Why are you a creative practitioner?

At this juncture, while you are deliberating upon what your work is all about; a very good (if not indeed downright crucial) question is why you are doing what you are doing. Differently put - what is the burning query that you are seeking an answer to? Such a quest does not only cover one project, it is not even about any of your output in general - instead it is about "you," the person who makes the stuff.

So, ask yourself. And then write down the answer. Again - not in long winded, over-intellectualized terms - not as an abstraction; but as a very real, tangible state of mind or as a quest that can be phrased in simple, clear language. I have a sense that pinpointing this will help you enormously in situating your practice - without which I do not think that you can really write about what you do with sufficient authority.

The question (and the answer) may or may not appear in your paper. In fact, most probably it won't do so. So, this exercise is for yourself, to help you come to grips with why you do what you do - out of which will then come the content of your text, since this will be about one of the things that you have actually created as a result of this global mindset or quest, which is simmering in the background, throughout your psyche.

Taxonomies instead of (bisociative) diagrams

8:33 AM Diagram, Subject, Taxonomy,

We spent the 4th class examining the diagrams that I had asked you to construct in a bisociative manner - in such a way that you brought the unrelated strands of your practice together. What has emerged instead is that most of you have constructed elaborate and massive taxonomies (classifications that are used for scientific purposes) in which you are bringing together material that in most cases is not at all bisociative, but quite the opposite: Since there is so much stuff on these lists, most of it inevitably ends up being highly inter-related - to the point where in many cases these are even alternative descriptions of the exact same thing. So, even if creating classifications is your aim, as taxonomies these lists are not working either, I'm afraid; given that many of your items are repetitions. (And a good definition of what a taxonomy is can be found here by the way.)

Even those of you who did attempt to do a bisociative diagram got lost in generalizations, over-complicated language and abstractions whose meanings can be stretched in an untold number of ways. What is needed however is this folks:

Onions >>> Guacamole <<< Avocado. Onions and avocado did not belong together until someone got creative and put them both in the same bowl and came up with guacamole!

That simple! So, I would now like you to go back and look at the tangible components - such as the elements, materials, inspirations/influences and ideas - that constitute your creative practice. Do not go for abstractions, or generalizations, or long winded, over intellectualized explanations! Single words, if possible! And absolutely no need for hundreds of nodes and lengthy lists. Put your practice in the center, in place of where guacamole is in the above line. And then 2 strands that go into it is probably enough! 3 just maybe, 4 is already stretching it. But most certainly not lists of hundreds since these are bound to start making "bridges" - and at this stage this is something that I am trying to get you to avoid, so that we have clear trajectories for the upcoming literature review - out of which you will then in fact be creating your own original bridges...

Literature Review___Locating your sources: Portals, books etc... (and also a few things about citation styles)

1:58 AM Citation, Lit. Rev., Reference, Search, Style,

While Google Scholar is the main source for articles and proceedings papers, another academic search engine you may want to check out is Scirus. PubMed is also a very well known search portal that (as the name already tells us) specializes in biomedical texts and life sciences. As such, probably not very useful to most of you right now; but who knows, there may well be students that will be taking an interest in work that has relations to these fields at some future point, so I have added it here also, just in case. Mendeley, a site that I already recommended whilst talking about reference management systems, can also be used to search for papers. And another good resource is Academia, a portal to which researchers upload their papers. A popular site where you can find many texts is Scribd, which is not only for academic work - so you can find anything from cooking recipes to magazines to government reports in there; but many scholars upload their writings onto Sribd as well, therefore definitely worth bookmarking.

Mendeley will usually show you the correct citation data, however with Academia this may be missing (and with Scribd this is almost certainly going to be the case), in which case you need to copy paste the name of the paper into Google Scholar and get the reference from there; from the link at the bottom of the entry that says "Cite," as I am showing you in the image below:

Literature Review___Locating your sources: Google Scholar

9:03 AM Lit. Rev., Reference,

For articles and proceedings papers Google Scholar is indeed your one stop shop for a good literature review; you really need to look no further! Sometimes GS even gives you direct download links to pdfs that the author has uploaded or that the publisher has provided, so you really can end up being very quickly done with your search. However alas, providing links on GS is not standard practice, most publishers prohibit this since the idea is to get paid subscriptions in order to view the texts. Notable exceptions are so-called Open Access publications that enable unrestricted online perusal of peer-reviewed academic journal articles. Nevertheless, most journals still adhere to the closed system and consequently most texts that you find on Google Scholar will not have the download links next to them.

The good news is that our university has a truly remarkable database through which we are subscribed to most academic publications. Thus, when you are logged in from the campus, almost all texts on Google Scholar will have download links that say "available from sabanciuniv.edu." Click on those and you will automatically be taken to the pdf itself, and if not, then to the correct page on the uni database, from where the text is only one click away. You can also do this from home by installing a macro on your computer that allows you to do so. I have never been smart enough to do this, but try it by all means.

Literature Review___Finding stuff

9:55 AM Lit. Rev., Search,

This is of course rather self-evident to begin with - you find things mostly online (and only very rarely through the physical library on campus), and you do so by using search terms that you type into a search engine such as Google Scholar.

That said, using search terms efficiently is a bit of an acquired skill that I will try to demonstrate to you through an example:

Literature Review___A hierarchy of sources

7:26 AM Lit. Rev.,

We now come to a very important part of your work - the literature review. Before we go into where you can locate the sources that you need for this, we need to talk about what types of publications can be considered for this task and what their order of importance is. First off, you need to be aware that your survey has to come from peer reviewed sources, seminal texts, acclaimed books and book chapters and respected academic websites. So, the order of desirability of where you get your citations from, goes like this:

Situating your creative practice___Looking "sideways": Arthur Koestler and Bisociation

4:29 AM Creativity, Subject,

Before we go into the all-important subject of the literature review, I am now going to ask you to go out on a limb, and take yet another look at your creative work - but not as a logical construct in which your thought patterns rest upon a predictable sequence, where all your ideas and input dove-tail and stand in easily recognizable neat relationships to one another - but rather by trying to identify the different strands of thought, of perception, of reasoning, of ideologies, of mental states, of processes and materials that you bring together to achieve an original result.

Many a cynical person will tell you that nothing is new, that everything has been done/thought of before, that true originality is dead even - and nowhere more so than in academia. But is this really so?

Theories in Arts and Social Sciences___Broad definitions

9:31 AM Theory,

The book Reflexive Methodology: New Vistas for Qualitative Research by Mats Alvesson and Kaj Skoldberg has given me the idea that it may be a very good thing to give brief definitions of some of the prevalent theoretical frameworks in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences. Alvesson and Skoldberg conduct their analysis of these distinct theoretical approaches through separate chapters in their book, which can be read online here. Their objective in conducting such a study is to set the context for a further/novel framework for qualitative research, namely a "reflexive methodology."

Although some may claim that the concerns of creative practices stand outside these theoretical canons, I would strongly argue against such a notion since we (and by extension our work) are always influenced by the particular Zeitgeist that we live under; and these ideologies will have permeated our ways of thinking almost through osmosis, regardless of whether we are aware of this or not. So, a closer look at some of the major contemporary trends of Arts and Social Sciences theories should not be all too amiss:

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