SUSAN FRANCIS: WE ARE MULTI-STOREY CREATURES, A SCREENING

MONDAY 20 JULY, 15:00 - 15:25

Lecture Room 1

My PhD inquiry does not, in essence, include direct engagement with participatory groups, or the use of social data in any way. Despite this, I have found it a deeply relational process. From the initial stages to my later activity, progress has evolved through serendipitous meetings, critical conversations, and shared experiences, with family, friends, strangers, artists, and with academic staff.

Relationality does not stop there though, and social modalities are certainly not restricted to human interaction. At the heart of the art making process relationality expands through conversation with material, with objects, with other artworks and with theory. Meanwhile art’s intrinsic ethnographic language has revealed a dialogue with my own past I had not anticipated.

Perhaps the most surprising interaction has proved to be with my digital counterpart, Alice. In order to interrogate fluid boundaries between the analogue and the digital I entered the SIMS world as part of the research process. My assumptions that Alice would behave as a digital extension of myself proved somewhat naïve, and the subsequent collaboration between us, became fertile ground for reflection. This relationship is explored in the subsequent film, We Are Multi-Storey Creatures’