TITLE:
Knowledge production; an institutionalized practice or a practice in resistance of Art

ABSTRACT

By situating my thesis as an extension of today’s historical, theoretical and technological contexts, I can validate the scholarship of my interdisciplinary Art practice. Art as process, Art as culture making and Art as an essential, critical practice in the production of knowledge. My paper will be a formatted as an electronic hyper linked blog. http://errgomeego.blogspot.com/

art

Why challenge university procedure and produce an alternately formatted thesis?
What relevance is it to my practice of Art and my "production of knowledge" as an interdisciplinary practice? I started today by scrambling through my suggested readings for the Spring, 2007 semester and past two years, eventually deciding that Malcolm Ashmore's "The Reflexive Thesis" was the necessary evidence, offering an historical context and published,(through which press?) which qualifies the book as containing knowledge, the intellectual substance, which is a compulsory requirement in justifying my argument for format changes to the ACE Thesis, as an Master of Fine Arts student.

The Production of Knowledge is historically based on the gaining and producing of information. Information that is ‘situated’ (Latour) in a discipline and its practices, and is concreted, (immortalized) by the formatted written document (paper) and its many uses. The writing of the ‘Paper’ is a document that over time has become a self-validating intellectual practice, perceived as subjective, yet elitist in language and function. (Gibbons). Today the academic paper, seems to work both as a metaphor for the Institutionalization of the University System in the West, where the practice of knowledge production is a type of apprentices document and as a way to canonize and solidify the hierarchical nature of knowledge production, education and information recycling, whilst not reflecting the actual way research is carried out . (samples: science authorship and syllabus).

conditional patterns and issues

The practice of paper writing within the University system, has evolved into an intellectual practice, most disciplines use. (Science, Law, Humanities, Informatics) On one hand, the paper is a way to gauge whether a student or professor has developed critical skills in a specific area, but on the other hand it facilitates the flow of the control of research, organizes and directs the development of technology, manages the making of culture and the systems of the capital market.( Bourdieu 1988) (Biagologi &Galison) (Haraway) So why bother challenging a University System steeped in tradition and bureaucracy when it will not further my personal status as an artist or student intellectual?

guttenburg bible rhythm science

The history of the institutionally produced written document, goes back, past the invention of the printing press and the illuminated manuscript, where it was used to influence entire populations. Little has changed with the use and perceived impact of the written document, but lots has changed in the techniques and applications of knowledge research and creation. The use of the written document (paper) is an interpretative practice, where knowledge and its use in education is a 'situated ' production, a nexus of the intellectual market (Latour) and an extension of the power within the technology of information (Foucault) For example the more papers you write, the more information you produce, the more knowledgeable you become, the more chances you have of being selected to be published and if you are published then more authenticity is attached to your work and knowledge production. (Latour). The more you are published, the more you are invited to conferences, which entails the production of more papers to be published and can lead to the publishing of a book . The more papers, books and conferences, the more prestige and that means an increase in notoriety for both the institution, the person and department producing the knowledge. An increase in pre-eminence, then translates to money, money for research, money from grants and donations, money from corporations and money from more students attending the university. The university is a successfully producing knowledge, the paper appears to quantify and qualify the production of knowledge.

Quantifiable and qualifying knowledge production, or perhaps knowledge is as Malcolm Ashmore reflects, “ history is continually in the process of being written, unwritten, and rewritten by it’s various practitioners, commentators, and critics, all of whom tend to claim for it different origins, precursors, and lines of development as well as differing problematics, achievements, and findings.” P1 The academic paper today, is a mandatory inflexible college course requirement, although not followed exactly in each discipline, it does provide rigid evidence of a subject understanding, as well as being an historical and technical indicator of scholarship. The paper is a space for questions, and answers providing evidence of analytical practice and analysis but often this does not address the contemporary methodologies, the digital (global networking), the networked public (site local astronomer's), the publishers (publishers, professors) and the hybridization of new research practices. (e.g. Boston University guidelines). The format for paper writing is relatively universal across disciplines, from the Humanities to Computation, medicine to physics. The basic structure: a particular Font style, 12 point, double spaced, 1.5 inch margin a minimum of 4,000 words. There must be a title, abstract or statement, methodology and conclusion with annotated footnotes, bibliography and notes and can be presented in an electronic or paper form. Why is the paper format so regulated is ‘knowledge’ only about recycling, reinterpreting and reinvention in one particular way? (see Course requirements)

The fact that the same ‘paper’ format crosses many disciplines is problematic.(Biagioli & Galison) Can that one format take into consideration new types of authorship, new types of information technologies and new ways of question ( site science and technology Foucault chasms) Consider the technology of ‘Open source” which has forged ahead creating a challenging new way authorship. It was conceived as collaborative and inclusive because of its open editing process. People from all over the world build on top of, repair and recycle and invent using others peoples codes (give an example of championed individual) (Site paper Hactivism? - Another form of intellectual practice is the way Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak works claiming in her paper Megacity that she an autodidact, nonspecialist but able to write papers, on work in a cross disciplinary manor ( Megacity– (4)

The way Knowledge is defined in different practices "is a ‘socially constructed’ process of negotiation among the disciplines practitioners, commentators and critics” (5 ) Knowledge production is becoming more dynamic as technology and education merge becoming more global and product orientated while less democratic. For example the way the Military is collaborating in many facilities to improve the amputees prosthesis. (site NPR) This constant flux and tension within the alternate and structured forms of knowledge production need to address a more eclectic, inclusive processes. The processes of building, sorting and recycling of information should embrace the new technology of interdisciplinary formation and different methodological practices and collectives.

I am in an Interdisciplinary Program, my area of expertise Art. (http://www.awillcocks.com) My process of writing is reflexive of my Art making, my Art is my process of knowledge production. (http://www.awillcocks.com/PP.html) My blog attempts to address the importance of the new marginal methods in authorship. As I write I am creating a procedure that is valid in my area of specialty, Arts Computation and Engineering. My blog is about the production, examination and retaining of information, the forming and analysis of different cultural practices, through and by technology and the process of Art, I am no specialist but I am attempting to expand on the institutionalization of the knowledge production.

nations art, aboriginal culture repository for art

Art today, is more often than not, connected to the practice of culture making, take for example the web site Art and Culture (www.artandculture.com) or simply Google the words Art and Culture, visit a library and look in an art history book or visit a museum of Natural Science. Can Art and new media challenge the culturally entrenched, bureaucraic University where the way knowledge production is rapidly challenging the format and construction of the act of paper writing? As art critic Robert Hughes states in his book “If not Critical” (I replace the word ‘Art‘ for ’Writing’) “Nature is dead, culture is all, everything is mediated to the point where nothing can be seen in its true quality, representation determines all meaning, and the only way that “so-called high WRITING” can engage with general perception is to step out of its old “elitist traditions and follow the Yellow Brick Road of the “cutting edge” that leads through Deconstruction Flats (6)) and Forest of Signs (7) Jeff Kong’s porcelain pigs (9) ....or to put in academic terms through Knowledge/Power (10) and the Onco mouse (11). William Kentridge's drawings

jeff Koons porcelain pigs

Bibliography:

1. Carson, David, McLuhan, Marshall The book of probes Gingko Press (June 2007)

Ashmore, Malcolm The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. The University of Chicago Press 1989

Latour, Bruno We have never been Modern Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1993.

Haraway, Donna Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997). New York; Routledge, 1991.

Biagioli & Galiston Scientific Authorship; Credit and Intellectual Property in Science Routeledge 2003
McSherry, Corynne Un common Controversies: Legal Mediations of Gift and Market Modelas of Authorship. Chapter 9 . p225 - 250


Allen, Barry. "Power/Knowledge." Critical Essays on Michel Foucault. Ed. Karlis Racevskis. New York: G.K. Hall & CO, 1999.
Foucault, Michael - Power/Knowledge – "...in a society such as ours...there are manifold relations of power that permeate, characterize and constitute the social body, and these relations of power cannot themselves be established, consolidated nor implemented without the production, accumulation, circulation and functioning of a discourse."
purchase

Course requirements:
(MIT) MIT Bachelor of Science in Comparative Media Studies/Course CMS


(El Camino college) Teacher education program


University of Irvine - Feminist studies UCI
ARTS 270/ENGR 270/IN4MATX 270: INFO, PROPRTY, RES, SEM A (01020)
INFORMATION, PROPERTY, RESISTANCE

Biagioli Mario (Editor), Galison Peter (Author) What is a scientific author?.Scientific Authorship: Credit and Intellectual Property in Science Routledge New York 2003

4. Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Megacity Grey Room, Fall 2000, Vol. -, No. , Pages 8-25
"I like interdisciplinarity. I am an auto diadact" p9

5. Ashmore, Malcolm The Reflexive Thesis: Wrighting Sociology of Scientific Knowledge. The University of Chicago Press 1989 p2

Michael Gibbons, Camille Limoges, Peter Scott, Helga Nowotny, Martin Trow
The New Production of Knowledge The Dynamics of Science and Research in Contemporary Societies., Sage publications 1994

6. Jacques Derrida http://sun3.lib.uci.edu/~scctr/Wellek/jacques.html

7. Forest Of Signs
Art in the Crisis of Representation
Ann Goldstein, Mary Jane Jacob, Anne Rorimer and Howard Singerman
Foreword by Richard Koshalek

A Forest of Signs documents a major exhibition of critical art in the last decade, one that marks a change in the art world, perhaps even in the broader culture. The thread of representation ties together the work of the 30 artists included in the book, encompassing such issues as allegory, appropriation, and commodification, the role of the artist, and the functions of authorship and originality in vesting meaning in art. Much of the work is provocative, challenging the way we look at art, the way we talk about it, where we see it, and how we buy it.

9. Hughes, Robert Nothing If Not Critical: Selected Essays on Art and Artists p15.

10. Foucault a discussion on power: http://www.colostate.edu/Depts/Speech/rccs/theory54.htm



11. Haraway, Donna Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©Meets_OncoMouse™ (1997). New York; Routledge, 1991.

12.

http://www.atoa.ws/Spring2006/April.htm
April 2006 ATOA Calendar
Gallerists, curators, and critics discuss the future of postmodern art. What are visual examples of the most recent trends? What societal and technological

http://www.rhizome.org/ - connecting Art and technology the new museum of contemporary Art