Beyond Control: Towards an Ecology of Uncertainty.

Wilson, Mark (2012) Beyond Control: Towards an Ecology of Uncertainty. PhD thesis, Lancaster University.

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Abstract

With specific reference to five discrete projects, this supporting text sets out to explain the methodologies, dynamics and rationale behind the installation-based and collaborative art practice of Snaebjornsdottir/Wilson, in relation to contemporary art methodologies and the chronologically parallel and equally emergent academic fields of Artistic Research and Animal Studies. The projects are represented by four monographs and one book chapter, each of which has its basis in a substantial art project involving a sustained period of interdisciplinary research and practice and involving one or multiple exhibitions. A series of research questions pertinent to the cross-disciplinary nature of my practice has been tested in respect of each project within the context of an overarching set of meta-questions pertinent to the practice as a whole. As my practice seeks to challenge assumptions, regarding for instance knowledge systems and representation it is the function of this text to present the projects in relation to knowledge production more widely, its currency, value and the basis upon which its value is estimated. I demonstrate how the dynamic of collaboration is integral to the principles of relationality embedded in the work and how those principles reverberate through our methodology and through the participation of the professionals, amateurs, and academics who contribute variously to the projects. Although working counter to subject-specificity as a matter of strategy, I discuss how certain subject-specific models (for example anthropological interview techniques and surveys, museum display, hunting etc.) are nonetheless appropriated and deployed in order to ground and inform critique. The latter and significant proportion of the text is devoted to providing a conceptually and materially descriptive summary of each project, clarifying project-specific research questions and propositions and detailing the relationship of each publication here included, to the research field(s) and the associated artworks.