A brief explanation of the DCA and my DCA project
The Doctor of Creative Arts program is a PhD equivalent where the primary researched is practice based and supported by a written exegesis (70%/30%). As with a written PhD the researcher (i.e., me) asks a focused question, then formulates research objectives based on that question, then goes about answering that question and achieving those objectives. Unlike a traditional PhD the questioner does not set about answering the question in a written format, but rather through creative practice. The creative work is expected to be of an equivalent length and depth to a traditional written thesis, though measuring that in creative terms is rather difficult and it seems that researchers, supervisors and markers really have to ‘go by feel’ when judging appropriate project size at the moment. This has certainly been a challenge for me, when conceptualising and defining my DCA creative practice my focus shifted several times, and much of the motivation for this was getting the size of the project feeling right.
My Question
After a lengthy development process my question has become: how can cyberfeminist practice and Web 2.0 applications be used to recode gendered representations of women on the Internet?
To answer this question I will be spending a year doing a live-web based art project. Every week for 1 year I will create something that attempts to recode representations of women on the internet. The ‘somethings’ that I create will vary in nature, for example one week I may make animated journal icons, another week I might create a flickr photo gallery dedicated to relevant subject, and yet another week I may make some old-school browser based electronic art. As well as offering each ‘something’ for public viewing and use I will discuss my inspiration for the particular work and in an open source spirit I will explain how I did each thing so that it can be easily replicated by anyone interested. The project is really about exploration and learning and journeying out of my comfort zone to find out ‘what can an average person like me do with a wonderful thing like the web?’
Hello world!
Hello World! As the name of this blog suggests I am a researcher/artist. I am interested in both traditional academic research and practice based research. I am currently a Doctor of Creative Arts candidate and my current work is focussed on using the live-web as a cyberfeminist tool/space/network.
The ‘Diary of a Research Artist’ blog is my reflective journal. This is the space I use to collect, collate and ruminate on ideas, note and discuss the works of others that are relevant to my research, and catalog my general progress. I have been using an online reflective journal since beginning my DCA (though sparingly at first), and my previous journalings can be found here at my original live journal. However, because I am in a more prolific phase of my DCA I have decided to move over here to wordpress, just because of the different kind of functionality it offers.
An online reflective journal is a very special, liminal, public/private space for me. It is public, and I welcome comments and feedback from readers, but at the same time it is a very personal, vulnerable space for me too, many of the ideas that will be kept here are just seeds of something that may grow into something amazing, or may never sprout at all. Sometimes I feel quite awkward publishing fledgling thoughts, but I feel quite strongly about making my research process as transparent as possible, both for my own records and for others who, like me a lot of the time, wonder what this research art thing is all about.
