Today began with a meeting with Jon Kirby at the Design Futures unit about the visual identity for the Method conference. It was cut short because I had to run to the deadline meeting for the book project, and spent a fair proportion of the rest of the day helping people complete their books to the specifications laid down by Sharon. I managed to complete three people’s books before heading to the ADRC seminar shared with the creative writing group.

This was an interesting collaborative effor in which a couple of  PhD students from the art and creative writing areas did short presentations on the work they were doing. While a range of topics were discussed, the key areas of confluence were the use of voice and speech, and how this immediacy is understood in writing and through reflection. Structurally, the creative writing students seem to clearly divide their critical and creative output, giving a seemingly much less negotiable form to their thesis. There seems to be a more circumscribed relationship between the two. Art students seem to have a bit more of a job to justify their creative work as new knowledge – nobody would question that the production of a novel or body of poetry is the generation of new knowledge. Can art theses operate the same way? Should they?

The Transmission lecture – Grace Schwindt – was unfortunately a bit of a disappointment. Only one major body of work discussed, and largely referred to only in terms of the administrative and practical approaches rather than the motivations or intentions. Grace didn’t give much away, and this seemed to weaken the voice in her work rather than strengthen it.

The evening was spent managing more issues with the book project, with other PhD team members. The whole set were checked, errors spotted and info sent on to the authors.