Writing/play/research
TLDR; I'm going to be regularly blogging again. For the next few months I'm going to use this space as a development blog for my new short Pressing Play. Join me!
Last semester, whilst working on Forgetting Play - now nearly finished and retitled Finding Play - I decided that I couldn't write academically and make a film at the same time. For me, they felt like two different halves of a whole that is my PhD. In the spirit of research, however, I kept a weekly journal - one hour a week set aside for free-written reflection on the experience of making this film in a way that adopted - and adapted - some of the learnings of the research; essentially, making a film in a plorkful way. From a research perspective, this auto-ethnographic journalling practice was fruitful - it has provided some really interesting insight into my own practice, into the tension and discourse between 'play' states and 'work' concerns during my film-making practice. However, in order to freely, honestly, openly write about my process - in essence, in order to play with the journal as research - I felt like it must remain behind the closed lid of my laptop rather than be posted publicly. This in itself is interesting, as it highlights the tension between opening oneself up creatively and 'publishing' the results of ones play publicly. What if I said something truly personal? Would I want that out in the world?
Reflecting on this, there is perhaps something courageous in journalling so openly. But that tension runs the risk of subconsciously self-editing whilst writing in order to make it more legible, more palatable, and therefore defeating the point of using free-writing as a tool for journalling. I could, of course, have re-written and/or edited my journal entries for public sharing, but to what end? Going back to my beliefs about playfulness, what is the intention behind that? What is its purpose?
The purpose, I suppose, would be to maintain a toe in the water of more critical reflection and academic writing, rather than just free-writing. As it stands, I feel a little distanced from my writing because of essentially leaving it to one side for a while. There is also another purpose here. Free-writing creates a wonderful space in the mind. What it doesn't do, is help actively collect evidence of creative practice (apart from the writing as a creative practice on its own). What I mean by that is, when coming to write up the process in more detail, I find myself having to trawl back through folders matching "date created" data to journal entries in order to compare the visual and written work I was making. It also means that my supervisors have less visibility on how the film-making is going - not a massive issue, but it can slow down supervisor meetings having to trawl over what feels like old ground to me, but new ground to them.
For the next step of my research, I am considering how I can use my practice not only to make creative work, but to research creative work as well - to follow Corita's idea that making and analysing are two different processes, but to analyse through making. In essence, to make a second film that discusses the making of Finding Play and demonstrating, through film-making, how it connects to the rest of my research. This also gives me a space to reflect on the recording and reflection practices I engaged in over the course of the last semester.
My new aim is to continue to spend one hour on a Friday morning free-writing as a journalistic, reflexive, research practice. But instead of then getting straight back to the film-making, what I will attempt to do then is use the *following *hour to write a separate blog post pulling together the week's work including digital images, animations, sketchbook pages and other production ephemera. This should allow for two things:
- a clearer record of the film-making (and subsequent research) process
- to test a journal/blog combination as a method of maintaining a plorkful research and, more importantly, film-making process
In a sense, the writing also becomes part of the research itself: taken at a very basic level, the journal can be seen as a 'playful' activity (self-initiated, personal) whereas the blog can be seen as more 'work-like' (focussed on output, public). But the reverse is also true - the journal is specifically to free up brain space and reflect on the film-making with a view to making the film better; the blog is not meant to be a chore, but a pleasurable way to disseminate and chart how this project is going. Both activities are essentially plorkful outputs.
I don't know whether this way of working will be effective, or whether this process will get in the way of the creative process and muddy the waters, a problem I've had in the past. But the more I think about it, the more I think about the process of working and researching in this way actually being core to the idea of plork - that you find your own processes, and that you are able to playfully work, playfully reflect, and playfully learn. And if this process is another rung on the ladder of that learning, then it can only be a good thing.