Abstract

‘Midpointness’ is a generative project that is dismantled and reconstructed/imagined by the gradual accretion and of the surrounding connections, associations, influences of the curators, artists, students and other audiences who contribute to it. These are in the form of artworks, public events, texts, artefacts, performances or other interventions.

”An Obstract for Midpointness” is an intervention for the SAR Annual Conference 2017 as an element of this ongoing project which seeks to invite us to consider the ‘work’ of art as art’s labour or task. We seek to explore the dynamics of inner/outer dialogues of the process of artistic work, opening up other potentials that an artist researcher might hope for when he/she explores the generative potential of the work of artistic research.

For “Please Specify” we present a spoken text (by a voice avatar) from a standing speaker in a public thoroughfare in the conference venue. The spoken text is a play on the tradition of the conference ‘abstract.’ The abstract is the site of an outline of intention, yet here we couple it with an ‘obstruction’ as a means of aggravating and diverting the attempt at a conclusion towards which an abstract, and indeed a formal presentation, might be aimed.

‘Obstract’ suggests, by a process of intervention that the ‘centre’ (the work and/or the text) and its surrounding universe are completely indivisible. As such the principle of ‘footnotes’ filter through to the whole spoken text; the footnotes being analogous to the surrounding constellations within which the ‘centre’ of the work sits, swapping footnotes for centre and vice versa. The footnotes refer to points both real and imagined in the past, present and future.

This ‘spoken’ text will be modified throughout the conference proceedings to refer back to the conference itself but also to potential future iterations and outputs.