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Studio 08: The things you can tell just by looking (or, Oriented Writing)

Studio brief

Writing tells us who we are and how each of us thinks and interprets the world. Writing as a practice is concerned with individuated approach, with pedagogic interpretation and with modes of register. Writing as a practice is a continuous dialogue with form. Writing as a practice is:


Biographical and Autobiographical
Fictive
Creative
Critical
Centred
Experimental
Theoretical
Descriptive
Contextualising
Interpretive
Mimetic
Wilful
Obfuscatory
Riddling
Promiscuous
Radical
Community-focussed
Poetry, Prose, and Sculpture
Rhizomatic
Friendly
Warm
Graphic

Oriented Writing is the gesture that acts as a pivot to art and design.

The practice of Oriented Writing identifies, explores and analyses current trends in art and design and investigates how its issues emerge –in text, media, exhibition and curatorial agenda.

Indicative bibliography

  • Walter Benjamin, Illuminations
  • Mieke Bal, ‘Spider’: The Architecture of Art-writing
  • Dave Hickey, The Heresy of Zone Defense
  • (Various editors) The Happy Hypocrite
  • (Various editors) Dot Dot Dot
  • (Various editors) F.R. David
  • Brian Dillon, I am Sitting in a Room
  • Stewart Home, 69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess
  • Kathy Acker, Young Lust

Indicative weekly outline

Week 1: Art-oriented writing: Galleries
Week 2: Object-oriented writing: Museums
Week 3: Site-oriented writing: Architecture
Week 4: City-oriented writing: Public Sphere
Week 5: Desk-oriented writing: Research
Week 6: Self-oriented writing
Week 7: Publishing & Presentation

A piece of text that has been corrected

Details

Tutor Ajay Hothi

Dissertation Studios

 
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Drawing

Studio 01: ideas in places

Ektoras Arkomanis

This studio prescribes a direct treatment of place, whether subjective or objective.

Drawing

Studio 02: Narrative and Storytelling

Jon Baldwin

This studio focuses on modes of storytelling and narrative conventions. We will particularly consider how narrative intersects with, and informs, identity.

Store parking area

Studio 03: The Conquest of Joy

Aleks Catina

This studio encourages dialogues around the cultural production at a time when narratives founded on certainty have ceased to make sense.
Farage pointing to his campaign poster

Studio 04: Bullshit, propaganda and post-truth

Jeremy Collins

This studio will look at the emergence of the notion of ‘post truth’ and explore links between other ideas around propaganda and Harry Frankfurt’s argument about ‘bullshit’. We will consider the usefulness of these ideas, and how they can be explored in creative practice.
Portrait of Frau Fiber, a textile worker and activist

Studio 05: Meaningful Work

Paul Harper

This studio will consider the value of making -in itself, independent of the product or outcome, exploring the idea of craft as meaningful work.
Artwork by R Prince

Studio 06: Writing Rough

Andrew Hewish

What are the outer limits of the essay? Write on the edge of the possible in a rich, researched and evidenced discussion which creatively explores the expanded field of the essay.
Bomb damage, Jewry Street

Studio 07: Thinking with Ruins

Danielle Hewitt

This studio pays heed to these cultural forms and persuasions but asks, how might we productively think with ruins in the present?
Text corrections

Studio 08: The things you can tell just by looking (or, Oriented Writing)

Ajay Hothi

Writing tells us who we are and how each of us thinks and interprets the world.
Man under a cascade

Studio 09: Le Marteau Sans Maître

Joseph Kohlmaier

Digging through the deepest layers of archaeological time, André Leroi-Gourhan (La geste et la parole, 1964) concluded that for millions of years, human culture and technology evolved without complex language, rational planning or abstract ‘thinking at a distance’.
Photograph:Harriet McKay

Studio 10: Globalism

Harriet McKay

For good or ill, we live in a global world. Whilst this may appear to be obvious, globalism is only a relatively recent term as is the phenomenon itself. What do we mean by this? How did we arrive in this place?
Installation art by the Korean artists, M. Kyungwon & J. Joonho

Studio 11: Performative Acts: Art, Architecture and Writing

Nico de Oliveira

In the last decade or so we have moved from objects to subjects or audiences. In parallel, the word performative has been adapted from a theoretical term to a key rubric within the discourse of contemporary art, architecture and beyond.
People break off stones from the pavement to use as ammunition. Photo: Robert Nagle, 1997 (CC BY-SA 2.0)

Studio 12: Decay, Repair and Back Again

Gabriele Oropallo

Things break down and decay. In this studio you will experiment repair as strategy to negotiate breakdown, and you will practice mining patina and weathering for information and stories.
Anonymous stencil of a quotation from a letter from Leopold 1 of Belgium to his niece, Queen Victoria

Studio 13: ‘If I stay silent nothing will change’: Identity, Politics, Social Change and Creative Culture(s)

Christina Paine

This cross-disciplinary studio considers how power, culture, politics, identity, representation, activism, social media, and mass culture theory intersect with a range of arts practices, including photography, architecture, design and fine art, film studies, fashion and music, sound, pop art, and theatre.
A body engulfed by a web of string

Studio 14: A Material World

Emma Davenport

As the title suggests, this Studio will be based on the processes that are intrinsic to the design and making of textiles, however it will also be looking at the materiality of these textiles as objects.

Installation of several resin coloured cubes aligned on the floor

Studio 15: Souvenir

Lesley Stevenson

This studio is concerned with those objects that are lent a particular enchantment because of their relationship with the past. It considers the role of memory and how it is embodied in cultural artefacts.
A desire path across a green field

Studio 16: Paths of Desire

Heidi Yeo

"Design needs to be plugged into human behaviour. Design dissolves in behaviour." Naoto Fukasawa

Cass Studios archive by year