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LIN[E]GUISTIC DIAGRAMS: SCRIPTING THE WORKSHOP FROM BEYOND THE VISUAL [WORKSHOP]


Benjamin Jenner, University of Leeds

 

 

Research Objectives
This proposal is concerned with exploring how a researcher and their workshop might ‘make a proposition of themselves’, so that the proposition (its research objectives, its methodologies, its contributions), and the participants it hopes to attract, might collaborate as materials in the scripting of a collectively authored diagram of the experience. It wishes to do so in order to mark a difference between drawing (verb - diagramming) as a process of ‘thought-in-the-act’, and drawing (noun – the diagram) in which that act is necessarily already ‘over there’ and ‘in the past’.

 

The drawing in question will be enacted through the co-authoring of a script via the repurposing of declarative statements. A declaration is a statement of fact that does not require a response, communicating information quickly, clearly, and precisely, but only by excluding the nuance, situatedness, and reciprocity of everyday life. The workshop will disturb the declarative’s hermetic economy by subjecting it to the indeterminacy of the group. To achieve this, a proportion of the workshop will be conducted blindfolded, a perceptual reorientation designed to encourage the generation of embodied neologisms based on imaginative somatic recall and placed-based visualisations. As such, the workshop will open up a space between writing and images in and through which the wor[l]ding of collective experience can emerge.

 

Methodology
1. The workshop will begin with the collective reading of a script that articulates the process of scripting as a place-making strategy. Importantly, the script will be made up of declarative statements consisting of objects and actions, e.g., ‘this script will provide a glimpse…’
2. I will then conduct a blindfolded visualisation in which participants recall a space of learning that is important to them. Holding an image of their space in mind, participants will engage the script with its objects and actions removed, e.g., ‘this ______ will provide a _______’, generating new words to fill the gaps inspired by their space of recall. The visualisation will end with each participant reciting their words to the room, like a form of litany.
3. Blindfolds off, participants will use the language generated through this process to alter the script. There will be as many versions of the script as there are participants and each participant will mark all of the scripts. By adding their words to the script(s), participants will begin to cohabit the site of scripting. The workshop will end with a collective reading of the adapted script(s) as it/they blend(s) with the room.

 

Contribution
By these means the workshop will make a timely intervention into the symbolic relationship between language and things. A relationship propagated by academic scholarship through the continued use of words as containers for events that are always ‘over there’ and ‘in the past’. By contrast, LIN[E]GUISTIC DIAGRAMS… offers a proximal form of critique: enabling the script to function as an imaginative, non-representational diagram of the relationship between language and experience from beyond the visual; scripting an ontograph of divergent participant exchange for use as material in the conference’s final book.

 

Keywords: Workshopping, Dialoguing , Scripting, Visual Deprioritisation, Ontography


Biography
Benjamin Jenner recently completed a fine art, practice-led PhD at the University of Leeds, UK, entitled Blindfolded Navigation as Perceptual Ecology: The Re-Markable Space of Poetic Form. The objective of this research was (1), to explore how, in the absence of vision, embodiment and ulterior sensory phenomena might rewrite the conditions of object intra-actions; and (2), once rewritten, to employ the weak strength of these textual, dialogic knowledge forms as a means of disturbing perceptual and institutional norms. Benjamin is an artist-researcher living and working in London, UK.