Subjectivist

Escher image taken from link:

Methodologies for a PhD Research Proposal.

I'm still working on my Methodology and (thanks to Kolb no doubt who says you have to reflect on anything to understand it p.58 Visualising Research C.Gray & J. Malins) I am having to blog on it.

Constructivist Paradigm, Subjectivist Epistomology - Inquirer and inquired are fused into a single entity.  Findings are literally the creation of the process of interaction between the two.

I'm going to need to look up Hermeneutic Dialectic - and hope that I don't have to try to say 'hermeneutic' out loud.

Methodologies

Argh!  What's my Methodology?

In C.Gray and J.Malin's Visualizing Research: A Guide to the Research Process in Art and Design  Page 19, Methodologies are described to be the 'consequence of ontology and epistemology'.  ' Methodology is evolved in awareness of what the research considers 'knowable', and in an awareness of the nature of knowledge and the relationship between the researcher and the 'knowable'.

The way I understand this is that the classical scientific method for understanding the universe would have been positivist.  That is - reality exists 'out there' (p.20),  the scientist would be distant and the work experimental and objective.

However this positivist epistomology (the nature of the relationship between the inquirer and the 'knowable') must have must have been severely shaken with the discovery of Quantum Mechanics and that the observer of an experiment can affect what is being observed.  I've taken the illustrations below from a wonderful Blog entitled 'Quantum Art and Poetry'.  Friday, 27 March 2009 which explains how the observer effects interference and the theory of Quantum Entanglement.

I'm going to have to ask a Physicist for help understanding this one, because I'll get it wrong.  

Back to my methodology.  My belief about my ontology (The nature of reality, the 'knowable') is that my paradigm of inquiry is somewhere between Critical Realist (believing that reality exists, but can never be fully apprehended - it is driven by natural laws that can only be incompletely understood) and  Relativist which suggests that realities exist in the form of multiple mental constructions, socially and experimentally based, local and specific, dependent for their form and content on the persons who hold them.

My Methodologies for those two paradigms would be either dialogic (and involve eliminating false consciousness and energise and facilitate transformation) or hermeneutic, dialectic (individual constructions are elicited and refined hermeneutically, and compared and contrasted dialectically, with the aim of generating one (or a few) constructions on which there is a substantial consensus).

What does that mean?  I say that I'm wanting to represent life more authentically by using time in three dimensions within holography and lenticular imaging.  What does that mean in terms of an artistic methodology? How do I determine what 'authentic' means?  Would I have to design some sort of questionnaire to evaluate whether I'm being more or less authentic - and ask lots of people?  Yikes.  I know I do not want to use any sort methodology which isn't familiar, or relevant, so I definately have to refine my research question.  Sigh.  A very smart Phd Physics student told me he spent much of his time during his PhD feeling stupid...

"In Time" or "Through Time"

I'm researching how to authentically represent our experience of time in three dimensions.

According to Joseph O'Connor and John Seymour in "Introducing NLP: Psychological Skills for Understanding and Influencing People" people in the Western world order their memories - and their visions of the future - from left-to-right, with the biggest and brightest internal images closest to them.  As the memories and visions are throught of as being further away in time from us - either in the past, or in the future - the images become smaller and dimmer to us.

Organising our memories and visions in time

The images are organised that way because of the way we access memory - which is associated with eye movement - our language is ordered that way too. I was excited to read this - artists using holography have represented the passing of time from left-to-right - and I've linked that movement to the way that we read. I've wanted to produce a hologram or lenticular image which read in English from left-to-right with the arabic translation from right-to-left.  I haven't found a way to crack that technically yet. I've been inspired by Ibtisam Barakat - a friend and Palestinian Poet who had to teach me the history of Britain and Palenstine.  I wanted to link our different cultures with writing.

"I didn't know my own History" - written by Ibtisam Barakat

We in the West and East experience time differently.  Westerners are more likely to experience 'Through Time', while Easterners are more likely to experience time as 'In Time."

Through Time – Anglo European understanding of time – the business world relies on this ‘Time is Money’.   Time line goes from side-to-side.  The past is on one side and the future the other.  Both are visible in front of the person.   Through time people have a good understanding of linear time.  These people store their past as dissociated images.

Past                 Future

In Time – Arabic, or Eastern Time – living in the moment.  Appointment times more flexible.  The timeline stretches from front to back so that the future is in front of you and the past is behind you – you’d have to turn your head to see the past. 

   Future  

Past

I would like to work on merging these two ways of experiencing time, visually using holography and lenticular imaging.

Research blog

It works!

I've been trying out transferring lenticular imaging onto acetate today.

I'm doing a PhD in the Holography Group at DeMontfort University, working with Digital Holography and Lenticular imaging, to explore layering film images in space.

I made my first lenticular image on Monday (16 November), exploring movement and text.  Just a sketch of me writing, I need to look at editing in a close-up, however I have less than 20 frames to work with.