Tracing Invisible Lines

David Prescott-Steed

Description

TRACING INVISIBLE LINES is a critical autoethnographic text built around Gregory Ulmer’s concept of the “Mystory.” Dedicated to the enhancement of imagination and innovation in a digital-media saturated society, Ulmer’s Mystory is a creative research method that draws narratives from three domains of discourse (personal, professional, popular). Analysing these domains means generating fresh insight into the deep-seated emblems that drive the creative disposition, or “invariant principle,” of the practice-led researcher. Here, the mystoriographical approach has mobilized an exploration of the interrelations between self and society, between memory and imagination, as well as between industry-driven design-arts education and experimental sound-art practice (prioritizing the sonic, the perambulatory, careering). As a result, the Mystory fosters critical awareness of the socio-cultural instruments of creative inspiration and perspiration.
Reflexive in intent and experimental in approach, David Prescott-Steed’s hybrid writing style moves freely between art historical, biographical and autobiographical, academic and speculative moods. This book’s emphasis on an electronic, investigative sound-based practice finds it treading new ground between the sonic arts and the field of electracy; through its addition of sound and music to the genre, this book extends the scope of studies into Ulmer’s work beyond English literature and the ocularcentric arts, offering a new handbook for sonic conceptual art practice.

Sujets

• Scholarly
• Academic
• Writting
• Disciplines
• Language Arts
• Sciences de l'éducation

Informations

• Publié par: Parlor Press, LLC
• Date de parution: 28 février 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781643170787
• Langue: English

Extrait

Electracy and Transmedia Studies
Series Editors: Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes
The Electracy and Transmedia Studies Series publishes research that examines the mixed realities that emerge through electracy, play, rhetorical knowledge, game design, community, code, and transmedia artifacts. This book series aims to augment traditional artistic and literate forms with examinations of electrate and literate play in the age of transmedia. Writing about play should, in other words, be grounded in playing with writing. The distinction between play and reflection, as Stuart Moulthrop argues, is a false dichotomy. Cultural transmedia artifacts that are interactive, that move, that are situated in real time, call for inventive/electrate means of creating new scholarly traction in transdisciplinary fields. The series publishes research that produces such traction through innovative processes that move research forward across its own limiting surfaces (surfaces that create static friction). The series exemplifies extreme points of contact where increased electrate traction might occur. The series also aims to broaden how scholarly treatments of electracy and transmedia can include both academic and general audiences in an effort to create points of contact between a wide range of readers. The Electracy and Transmedia Series follows what Gregory Ulmer calls an image logic based upon a wide scope—“an aesthetic embodiment of one’s attunement with the world.”
Books in the Series
KONSULT: Theopraxesis by Gregory L. Ulmer (2019)
Exquisite Corpse: Art-Based Writing Practices in the Academy, edited by Kate Hanzalik and Nathalie Virgintino (2019)
Tracing Invisible Lines: An Experiment in Mystoriography by David Prescott-Steed (2019)
The Internet as a Game by Jill Anne Morris (2018)
Identity and Collaboration in World of Warcraft by Phillip Michael Alexander (2018)
Future Texts: Subversive Performance and Feminist Bodies , edited by Vicki Callahan and Virginia Kuhn (2016)
Play/Write: Digital Rhetoric, Writing, Games , edited by Douglas Eyman and Andréa D. Davis (2016)


Sites
Gregory Ulmer’s Konsult Experiment : http://konsultexperiment.com/




Tracing Invisible Lines
An Experiment in Mystoriography
David Prescott-Steed
Parlor Press
Anderson, South Carolina
www.parlorpress.com


Parlor Press LLC, Anderson, South Carolina, USA
© 2019 by Parlor Press
All rights reserved.
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.
S A N: 2 5 4 - 8 8 7 9
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data on File
978-1-64317-075-6 (paperback)
978-1-64317-076-3 (hardcover)
978-1-64317-077-0 (PDF)
978-1-64317-078-7 (ePub)
1 2 3 4 5
Electracy and Transmedia Studies
Series Editors: Jan Rune Holmevik and Cynthia Haynes
Cover image: © 2019 by David Prescott-Steed. Used by permission.
Copyeditor: Jared Jameson.
Book design: David Blakesley
Parlor Press, LLC is an independent publisher of scholarly and trade titles in print and multimedia formats. This book is available in paper, cloth and eBook formats from Parlor Press on the World Wide Web at http://www.parlorpress.com or through online and brick-and-mortar bookstores. For submission information or to find out about Parlor Press publications, write to Parlor Press, 3015 Brackenberry Drive, Anderson, South Carolina, 29621, or email [e-mail].


Contents
Acknowledgments
1 Mystoriography: Theories and Considerations
2 Mystory: Creative Cultural Practice
1. Other People’s Stories
2. Personal (Autobiography)
3. Popular (Community Stories, Oral History, Popular Culture)
4. Expert (Disciplines of Knowledge) — Part One
5. Expert (Disciplines of Knowledge) — Part Two
6. Formulating an Invariant Principle
3 A Brief Account of the Dominant Themes in my Creative Practice: 1992 — Present
4 Assemblages: Towards a Sonic Psychogeography
5 Afterthought
Works Cited
Index to the Print Edition
About the Author


Acknowledgments
F irst and foremost, I would like to thank Julie and Olive, the two most important people in my life. I am very grateful for your love, understanding, and endless support of my artistic preoccupations. Whatever disposition this project describes, and whatever creative outcomes might serve best to express it, nothing is as important to me as the life we are making together. I love you more than the moon and the stars in the pristine Heathcote sky.
In the creative fields, I would like to acknowledge the wonderfully multifarious organism that is the experimental music community here in Melbourne. It is an honor to be a collaborator with, and not infrequently a student of, the many artists whom I call my friends and peers.
I would also like to express my sincere gratitude to Kevin Wisniewski and Felix Burgos, editors of the imaginative and eclectic journal Textshop Experiments . Their support for my forays into creative and critical thinking has helped fuel the momentum needed for me to undertake this much larger project.


“We speak of the abyss when, having been separated from a basis of support and having lost a point of support, we go looking for one on which to rest our feet.”
— Martin Heidegger


1 Mystoriography: Theories and Considerations
A s a writer, sound artist, and design-arts theory teacher living in Melbourne, Australia, I appreciate how important it is to seek out new material and theoretical tools for developing a creative practice, whether with the aim of enhancing its perceived social function or simply as a means of advancing its esthetic qualities. The image of the artist as a person chipping away at a project by themselves, an isolationist’s approach to conceptualizing what it might mean to make art in a studio space of some form, is a fairly limited depiction of what it means to make art. It may be deemed rather romantic in its implicit appeal to individuality and, thus, in its claim to authenticity. To the extent that it is imagined, it is an artificial image, and one anchored in a specific socio-historical context. As David Inglis explains:
The “magical” power of certain people, such as art critics, gallery owners and patrons of the arts to define what counts as “art” and what does not, is a phenomenon peculiar to modern societies in the last 200 years or so. Before that, no-one had seriously entertained the view that “art” and “everyday life” were totally separate from each other. The terms “art,” “artwork” and “artist” are historical inventions primarily of the nineteenth century. Before then, these terms did not exist. . . . Indeed, the ideas of “art,” “artworks” and “artists” are not just modern inventions but are specifically Western inventions too. Societies outside the West have not historically possessed these categories and the ways of seeing cultural products that they encourage. (91)
If we accept the socio-political and economic argument that we exist in a multi-cultural and globalizing industrial society, it seems strange to remain dedicated, in our thoughts and actions, to Western attitudes around art, specifically, the notion that art and life are discrete modes of existence that come together only in the lives of small groups of special people, people who have somehow been born with an artistic gift that makes them far more suited to a life of “making” than the rest of the general population and which, in turn, might find them less suited to the quotidian tasks of day to day living. How can this distinction be made when life is itself a creative process of trial and error, when it is filled with our efforts to build relationships and to establish meaningful roles in the communities that we value, in which we may perform our identities and learn from other people?
Despite this question, I cannot claim to have the most articulate and insightful answer to it. I can remember when I was a child, however, my parents telling me: “Life is hard. You need to make something of yourself. You need to make something of your life.” They wouldn’t say it simultaneously, as a synchronized voice, like two oscillators of a synthesizer (whereby a master oscillator resets the cycle of the slave), but their individual statements have conjoined in my memory to form a single adult voice declaring possession of universally applicable insight. It is an adult concept that probably seemed harsh to my immature, child-like ears, though I infer it carried with it a work ethic and an emphasis on self-reliance, on personal responsibility, and that this was part of an education deemed necessary by parents who wanted to raise an adult and not a voting child. It took me several years, but eventually I found a way to make sense of these kinds of authoritative self-assertions, something more workable than just stern warnings about the grueling nature of a long and inflexible life that, thus, I imagined stubbornly awaited me, as if the world itself was an authority from which I should learn to protect myself, to become ever more articulate at self-defense. When I finally moved past this species of anxious, paranoid thinking and reached a place of emerging cultural agency, when I started focusing on my creative strengths, less on what pre-existed to challenge me, but rather what I could create as a challenge to myself that was sharable with others, I gradually realized something that has remained with me ever since. I realized that, from quite an early age, I had been trained in line with the world-view that the most important thing in life was making , that life was a m