CS A4: Draft extended essay

The essay below is a draft online version. It does not contain all the images I’ve referenced. In some cases, I have not yet approached the artists for permission and in others, I am still waiting for a response.

There are some formatting things that will need to be resolved as well as the following:

1. I need to address the backward page numbering in the contents and pre intro section – please ignore that peculiarity for now.
2. My bibliography is not up to date – I need to double-check it.
3. I will take a very careful look at the Harvard referencing document before submission. I can’t be sure it’s all as it should be right now.
4. I will add more of my own BOW as it develops
5. I need to think about the images I have used some more and also if other images might be worth including earlier and later
6. I have of course noticed mistakes with names and sentence structure since posting. Including Bernard instead of Barnard – which I was so careful to get right but clearly failed! (fixed now)

Draft PDF (sans some images):

Without (c) images 8 March – CS A4 The photograph and photography in the age of entanglement

OCA reflection 

1. Demonstration of subject knowledge based on understanding

I feel compelled to qualify the whole thing by saying…”I think this is what Barad is telling us, but there is always the chance I have got it spectacularly wrong”. I have taken a big gulp at the beginning of every stage and thought I have bitten off far more than I can chew. A physicist read the plan and draft submission (A3) and confirmed nothing was embarrassingly wrong. I have had to work very hard to understand Barad’s and Deleuze’s ideas and have a long way to go before being fluent in either – I am also constantly adding or adjusting sentences to be more accurate every time I grasp something a little more deeply. Saying all that, I suspect the demonstration of knowledge for this level is of a high standard.

2. Demonstration of research skills

I hope I have demonstrated an ability to explore beyond photography and to connect the work to it. I made use of a wide variety of sources – videos, books, exhibitions, discussions, emails to academics to clarify things (some of whom are generous with their time and answers, some of whom aren’t). I feel like I have kept hold of everything by the skin of my teeth, sometimes accessing old blogs and copying what I wrote into the essay before refining.

You can see much of my research on my blog or on the Sketchbook blog linked to it when topics were slightly less related. I need to go through everything in the essay with a fine-toothed comb and the Harvard guidelines to make sure everything is as it should be before submission, including all references listed. (I know some are missing.)

2. Demonstration of critical and evaluation skills

This is always the hardest part – not made any easier by the opaque language many academics use, which makes it challenging to learn from them. However, I hope I have critiqued the work I’ve included using the terms I introduced adequately.

2. Communication

The topic cannot be addressed in 5000+ words. I know that now. But there is a structural problem too. It’s entangled and rhizome-like but the conventions we use for essay writing are linear and top-down. This is probably a good way of describing the present paradigm – code (if I understood this correctly when doing a Processing course) enables a networked, dynamic reality but is contained within a structure based on Cartesian coordinates. What we seem to have ended up with is overwhelming internal tension compromising the structure within which we frame our reality – I expect that sentence could do with going into the essay but it would require explaining and I already need to shave about 750 words. However, I do plan to leave this alone and revisit in a few weeks after working on BOW A4. I will also put the essay through a more robust AI programme to clean up sentences etc. at that point.