photo credit: Lucas Ihlein, 2015

Field Work

Guest editors: Lucas Ihlein and Brogan Bunt

[Download as PDF.]

“Fields”: arenas for action; social discourses; professional areas of practice; knowledge disciplines.

Field Trips: tours, excursions, forays. Research trips, adventures, residencies. Working in the forest, in old mining towns, in local suburbs, on farms. Artists placed in corporations, government departments, schools.

Ethnographic models, educational models, activist models, scientific models. “The artist as…”

Field as field.

Going for a walk. Site specific work. Community as site. Placemaking. Field Work.

This issue of Unlikely explores creative practice beyond the studio:

• What opportunities for the creation of new knowledge are “out there, in the field”?
• What new methods for artmaking are born when artists venture outside the art world - or indeed, take the artworld itself as field? 
• How do documentation, reportage, and writing help make field work visible and intelligible? 
• How do artworks define their own fields?
• How does creative fieldwork relate to other traditions of research fieldwork?  
• How is fieldwork relevant to conceiving art practice as a form of research?
• How is fieldwork formalised, mediated, communicated, aestheticised?

Contributions are invited which exemplify, represent, analyse and probe creative practice situated in such ways.

Deadline: 31 October 2015

Proposals: 30 June 2015

Contributions may include:

• Scholarly articles;
• Description, documentation and analysis of specific projects as creative practice-based research (ie “non-traditional” research);
• Creative work that positions the journal itself as a context for fieldwork.

Unlikely is an open access peer-reviewed online journal. Non-traditional contributions may involve a range of media formats including images, texts, sound, video etc. Traditional scholarly submissions should be in English, between 3000-6000 words (including abstract and works cited), in MLA format. All submissions should be accompanied by a short biographical note (<100 words).

Process:

Email info(at)unlikely.net.au by 30th June 2015, outlining your contribution (250 words) in terms of both the thematic focus, and its proposed form. The editors will respond, inviting selected contributors to develop their proposal into a full submission to be peer reviewed.

*A note from the guest editors on the notion of “the event”:

One of the founding premises of Unlikely is that an initial public event (comprising performative and creative actions) becomes the generative trigger for journal contributions.

As is appropriate to the Field Work theme of this edition of Unlikely, we are not hosting a single, centrally located public event. We are conceiving the event differently – less as a communal moment when something plainly happens than as a field of distributed action that only provisionally obtains communicable aesthetic shape. We are concerned with the tentative, impure and marginal character of events. We acknowledge that each contribution to the journal will have been generated via one or more such events (or non-events) taking place wherever and whenever necessary.

As well as accommodating diverse events leading to each contribution, we are also conceiving the journal itself as a potential event space.