taxi-to-praxi: experimental workshop about practice-led PhDs

This one day workshop "from taxi to praxi and back again" uncovers and examines some of the challenges and opportunities faced when creative artistic practice is undertaking research.

There is an increasing amount of students undertaking practice-based PhDs across disciplines and practices in the arts as well as technology. This one day experimental workshop affords the opportunity to uncover and examine some of the challenges and opportunities faced when creative artistic practice is undertaking research and doing so by using modern technologies. In the past 10 to 15 years whole artistic genres and fields of work have been reshaped by the emergence of new ways of working facilitated by the internet and free and open source technologies. While many of those technologies have been created by academic research institutes in the first place -- the WWW for instance was invented at CERN to allow researchers a better way of sharing documents -- it seems that in the meantime other sectors of society have embraced the collaborative and participative characteristics of these technologies more strongly than the academic sector. Independent artists and creative free software developers have made more rapid advances than the more traditionally minded arts and humanities departments in academia.

The challenge is now to find ways of re-embedding useful aspects of open source methodologies in practice based arts and technology PhDs. Specifically we are asking, is there such a thing as an open source methodology? How can those new ways of working be generalised and made productive within "practices"? How do we incorporate and negotiate research in those areas of work which are strongly inter- and transdisciplinary? The aim of the workshop is to address and discuss some of the generic, rather than discipline-specific, challenges of undertaking practice-based research.

The workshop will draw on open and collaborative (FLOSS) methodologies proposing and discussing a diverse range of taxonomies and practices thus "from taxi to praxi and back again".

The event is part of the Disclosures project and the Spring Season 2008 of Node.London.

time and date: 21st of April 2008, from 11 am to 4 pm
place: Location: Ben Pimlott Building, Seminar Room, Digital Studios, Goldsmiths University of London