Synthesis

Unit 2 has been a winding, twisting, and at times confusing journey for me and my critical enquiry. To start the unit I picked my Methods of Iterating project—which focused on Risography, gleaning, and ethics of reappropriating other people’s work—as the jumping off point. This led towards a trilogy of publications in Positions Through Iterating and Contextualising, with each one aiming to explore gleaning and the act of creating a publication in a slightly different way, allowing me to unravel the way both gibberish and gleaned information can be used to inform.

My original critical question was “How can the permanent nature of publications be used to help us understand the ephemerality of online life?” and although I’ve zigzagged around different topics I’ve always tried to keep a consistent thread running through. The key themes of gleaning, publishing, and gibberish/oversaturation of information/online aesthetics have remained throughout each of my Unit 2 projects—except maybe Dialogue—with each one coming slightly in or out of focus depending on what the current work needs.

In the earlier stages of Positions, I tried to experiment around these key themes without consciously considering my positionality. Instead, I wanted to just do whatever I was interested in each week, which would subconsciously reveal my positions and hopefully give a more true representation of them. When I started Unit 2 I thought I’d be working with appropriation and ethics as the main topics, but instead I found the publications aspect more exciting, as well as a new idea of gibberish as a way of understanding.

Positions Through Triangulating in particular helped me understand and contextualise my earlier work, particularly regarding the importance of narrative in the presentation of my work. When we first got the brief for Positions Through Essaying I didn’t fully understand the point but now with hindsight I can see it was important for me to be able to articulate my thoughts, process, and outcomes in a clear and understandable way. This helped lay the groundwork for my more introspective Triangulating work, and hopefully I’ll be able to use what I learned from Essaying in my Symposium presentation as well as my Projecting work.

And now having completed the Studio and Writing elements of Triangulating, I can see that my work has become a little abstruse when compared to the projects I made in the first half of Unit 2. I think that the websites I created in Triangulating have been an important part of my enquiry, and fit in well as part of Unit 2, but don’t stand alone without the full context of my other work; as opposed to the trilogy of publications, which are both a key part of Unit 2 and can be more clearly understood alone.

When projecting my work forwards I’d like to be able to better weave in the narrative threads I’ve been tentatively exploring in Triangulating with the key themes of gleaning, publishing, and gibberish present in my earlier Unit 2 work. In particular I’ve shifted away from publications to publishing, and I’d like to more granularly inspect the differences and similarities between the two, with a return to physical publication making.