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Daniel Rourke MPhil/PhD Research Proposal August 2010

email: d.rourke@gold.ac.uk Goldsmiths Department of Art Student ID: 33169445

To read what was never written 1 : Writing Beside the Digital Paradigm

My work revolves around the criticality of writing technologies, positioning 'writing' itself at the centre of

my artistic practice.

Following Walter J. Ong's description of dialectic (oral) and grapholectic (written) cultures (2007) my

practice-based thesis will create a critical language necessary to map the paradigmatic moves between oral,

written/print and digital systems of exchange. It will consider and execute the discursive forms it enquires in

documents, book-objects and digital media formats, and in the studio, lecture, seminar and gallery. It will

develop a theoretical framework for the conception, production and curation of discursive works: one that

supplements methodologies rooted in meta-textual systems.

I will argue that digital media and the internet originate a culture of non-privileged interdependencies. That

is, a culture in which the authority of certain kinds of knowledge, and thus of privileged kinds of exchange,

are undermined by the constantly shifting, and re-emerging, lateralrelationships between entities in the

world. Working with Foucaults notion of Similitude(2008) and Agambens concept of The Paradigm

(2009) my writing is an attempt to write beside the digital. From the works of Walter Benjamin, through

Foucault and Derrida, my thesis will examine the principle of mimesis, which binds and dominates the

resemblances between art/writing and its subject. Using Michel Serres work on The Parasite (2007), Bruno

Latours notion of Hybrids(2002) and Donna Haraways Cyborg Politics(1991), my writing insists on a

critical framework, not of resemblance and representation, but of noise and translation. A turn for writing

that, echoing Friedrich Kittler, puts code into the practice of realities(2008); that explores lost spaces

defined by Svetlana Boym as the side alleys and lateral potentialities of the project of critical modernity

(2010).

Contemporary artists and theorists are working to define dispersive (Price 2002), discursive(Gillick

2009), altermodern(Bourriaud & Tate Britain Gallery 2009) modes of practice and artefact. Lev

Manovichs definitions of transcoding and the interface (2002) position digital media as a defining modality

for contemporary art. These works represent a network of paradigms that have yet to be embodied in the

principles and methods of art (as) theory.

In order to break the privileged status of The Thing Itself (Agamben 1999) my writing will develop a

lateral logic, indicating theoretical relationships that are non-hierarchical in both its structure and its content.

My thesis will disseminate traditional textual mediums and effect a blurring between text/object,

writer/reader, student/teacher boundaries.

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Daniel Rourke, Research Proposal

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8/9/2019 Proposal Summary August 2010

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Daniel Rourke MPhil/PhD Research Proposal August 2010

email: d.rourke@gold.ac.uk Goldsmiths Department of Art Student ID: 33169445

Bibliography

Agamben, G., 1999.Potentialities : collected essays in philosophy, Stanford Calif.: Stanford UniversityPress.

Agamben, G., 2009. The signature of all things : on method, New York ;Cambridge Mass.: Zone Books

;Distributed by the MIT Press.

Benjamin, W., 1999. Theses on the Philosophy of History. InIlluminations. London: Pimlico, pp. 255-266.

Bourriaud, N. & Tate Britain (Gallery), 2009.Altermodern : Tate Triennial, London ;New York: TatePub. ;;Distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams.

Boym, S., Off-Modern Manifesto. Available at: http://www.svetlanaboym.com/offmodern.html [Accessed

August 16, 2010].

Foucault, M., 2008. This is not a pipe 25th ed., Berkeley Calif.: University of California Press.

Gillick, L., 2009. Liam Gillick, Maybe it would be better if we worked in groups of three? Part 1 of 2: TheDiscursive / Journal / e-flux. e-flux. Available at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/view/35 [AccessedJune 24, 2010].

Haraway, D., 1991. Simians, cyborgs and women : The reinvention of nature., London: Free AssociationBooks Ltd.

Kittler, F., 2008. Code (Or, How to Write Something Differently). In M. Fuller, ed. Software studies : alexicon. Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press, pp. 40-47.

Latour, B., 2002. We have never been modern 7th ed., Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press.

Manovich, L., 2002. The language of new media 1st ed., Cambridge Mass.: MIT Press.

Ong, W., 2007. Orality and literacy : the technologizing of the worldReprinted., London: Routledge.

Price, S., 2002.Dispersion, Available at: http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion08.pdf [AccessedJune 24, 2010].

Serres, M., 2007. The parasite 1st ed., Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

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