The Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, doctoral programme hosted a two-day research event under the auspices of EARN and LAHP entitled Against Delivery, which will be held at the Slade Research Centre Woburn Square on 12-13 November 2015.

Go to the Against Delivery blog here: http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/against-delivery/

DEADLINE FOR SUBMISSIONS: 29 JUNE 2015 (CLOSED)

The event aims to break down the presenter-audience relation by encouraging active participation and creative presentation formats. Against Delivery reflects the search for modes of practice-based research, which seek to generate alternative formats of exchange. The first day, Against Delivery: Researching Practice, will consider what practicebased
research means, both for researchers and their audience. The second day, Against Delivery: Imag(in)ing Change, addresses how ethical considerations inform and impact upon practice-based research. Against Delivery aims to provoke discussion around practice-based research, taking the form of art, performance, workshops, music and installation among others, foregrounding questions such as:

• How can inherited notions of ‘research’ and ‘knowledge’ – and habitual modes of ‘delivery’ – be re-thought or recovered through practice-based research?
• Instead of talking about research, how can research be embodied through the material processes of – and moments of encounter with – practice-based research?
• How might considerations of practice-based research complicate and challenge our understanding of the artwork as a finite outcome?
• What are the ethical implications of such practices?

We invite submissions – whose format engages with our aspirations for Against Delivery – to respond to any of the following sessions:

Day One: Against Delivery: Researching Practice

Session 1: The Mark of Culture : The imprint, the gesture

Scene 1: Day break
Enter protagonists and live audience.
A plaster board ceiling is suspended 3 meters above the set.
A stain appears.
Something starts to drip through the plaster ceiling.
A puddle gathers on the floor beneath.
Both stain and puddle spread.
The plaster begins to crumble.
The ceiling collapses. It is now a floor.

The imprint can be a technical, operational, or sequential result of an activity. Sometimes, it is unintentional, or else it
involves the motivation for reaching out, for touching and joining together. This might register as subtle shifts, as
consequences of contact and encounter. We suggest a spatial framework for which we invite proposals that situate, describe, demonstrate or complicate these marks of culture.

Session 2: Against Assumptions: Exploring Modes of Presentation and Production

Presenting works that experiment with the presentation format to explore modes, conditions and forms of production. This session is open for submissions from any field: objects, activities, words and surprises are encouraged. Maximum length of works submitted is 15-minutes.

Session 3: Circulation Part 1: Inner Dialogue and Material Translation

This session will take the form of an exhibition and an hour-long discussion, with the artworks responding to ideas of ‘inner dialogue and material translation’ – which is understood here as a vital element to studio-based practice. Circulation Part 1 will consider the different ways in which, in preparation to make works or in the process of making, artists engage in inner dialogue with their own ways, personally, culturally, linguistically, conceptually and methodologically etc.

We welcome submission of any forms of art works that embody the theme of the exhibition and explore the process of making in artworks as a result or/and a process of research. Everyone is welcome to join the installation day prior to the session (date to be confirmed) to explore each other’s inner dialogue and material translation in a more tangible way.

During the one-hour discussion session, which will take the form of “old-school studio critique”, all participating artists will walk around the exhibition space and share their thoughts about the theme in relation to the art works and artists themselves.

Session 4: Circulation Part 2 : The Artwork in the World

This session – conceived as a counterpart to Circulation Part 1: Inner Dialogue and Material Transformation – will explore considerations of the artwork in the world. When does the artworld finish and the world begin? We would like people to submit proposals for a short workshop/ intervention/ activity/ practical exercise relating to this question.

Session 5: Beyond and Before Words: The Inexpressible and the Limits of Language

Children use words before they have a clear understanding of their meaning. They try them out, make mistakes. They experiment. Paul Feyerabend argues that ambiguity is necessary for language to do something new. He argues that it is necessary to progress knowledge. That new ideas require a ‘future language’ which must invent new terms and deploy them before they are clearly understood or defined, and before they acquire any supporting conceptual apparatus. Practice-based research gives rise to questions regarding the nature of knowledge, and how such practice and research
is situated within it. What is the relationship between process and knowledge? How does such a practice engage with the apparent paradox of a pursuit of knowledge through the unknowable and inexpressible? This is an invitation to participate in a conversation on the theme above with an artwork, a line of reasoning, a declaration, action or other contribution.

Evening event: Totally Against Delivery: Encounters I

Encounters is an invitation to respond to the conference title Against Delivery through readings, performance, moving image, installation or other live forms. The Encounters sessions are envisaged as an open space where the audience is encouraged to move freely between the presentations, artworks or events. As well as programmed participation there
will also be space for impromptu participation in an ‘open mic’ format. Staged at the end of each day, Encounters will offer time for reflection and un-structured discussion, as well as an opportunity to continue to challenge the notion of ‘delivery’ – or ‘against delivery’ – through an engagement with practice-based research as event.

Day Two: Against Delivery: Imag(in)ing Change

Session 7: Landscape Encounters and Transformations

Sensing landscape: materials, traces, images. Finding ways of experiencing a site through sight, touch, smell, taste and other forms of engagement. The session is seeking different methods of encountering the environment by considering diverse material and sensorial modes of connection. We encourage proposals for methods of experimenting with these encounters.

Session 8: Ghost Ethics

This day-long collaborative workshop will examine the distribution of individual voices in a discussion held underneath white flat sheets. This activity is open for submissions of content or topics for discussion.

Session 9: Diagrammatic Thought

The diagram as a form of abstraction, as an inherently flexible scientific and artistic working method, and as a transdisciplinary tool; allows for the process of thoughts to be embodied in practice and in movement – to remain as process. In diagrammatic thought, both writer and reader are engaged in continually interpreting and translating, evading resolution, while engaging in the creative process of thinking. Participation in this session is open to diverse forms of contribution.

Session 10: Indexing the Event

…The relationships between artists, indices and non-human actants. Explorations of ontologies, into the object, process and beyond. This session is open to submissions from researchers with an interest in the posthuman, anthropocene, technologies and interdisciplinary methodologies.

Session 11: Embodied Change: Desire / Transformation

The aim of this session is for each participant to share a part of their practice as it relates to the themes of desire and transformation. Possible expressions might include, but are not limited to, the artist’s own: research methodologies / engagement with politics – both local and global / exploration of histories, narratives and temporality / material processes. This 3-hour session is formatted as a roundtable discussion. Numbers will be limited to groups of 10, with panels running concurrently, to encourage an intimate and focused dialogue around each practice. Each participant is invited to present material as a prompt for group discussion in relation to the session themes in the form of object, text, performance, or otherwise.

Evening event: Totally Against Delivery: Encounters II

Encounters is an invitation to respond to the conference title Against Delivery through readings, performance, moving image, installation or other live forms. The Encounters sessions are envisaged as an open space where the audience is encouraged to move freely between the presentations, artworks or events. As well as programmed participation there will also be space for impromptu participation in an ‘open mic’ format. Staged at the end of each day, Encounters will offer time for reflection and un-structured discussion, as well as an opportunity to continue to challenge the notion of ‘delivery’ – or ‘against delivery’ – through an engagement with practice-based research as event.

SUBMISSIONS

Deadline for submissions to Against Delivery is 29 June 2015. The conference programme will be confirmed at a later date. Submissions – and all enquiries – should be directed to sladeEARNplanning(at)gmail.com

All submissions should be formatted as a PDF (5MB maximum) and include the following:
– Name / institution / programme of study
– Title and brief description of the proposed contribution: outlining its format and relation to the topic of the
chosen session(s) (up to 350 words and 3 images maximum)
– Material/equipment/installation/technical requirements, in particular whether a blacked-out space will be
required, as well as scale, duration and sound specifications
– CV
– Link to websites, Vimeo or other online portfolios (where appropriate)