Thursday 23 November 2023

Study statementS... How do I unify?

Having reviewed a bunch of the old study statements, I have made a bit of a breakthrough:

  1. The study statement is a study statement, not a research proposal - clearly my PhD is haunting me! In practice this means I was thinking that I needed to propose a clear, novel piece of research with a well-defined scope. NOPE, I just need to state what I want to study
  2. The format is quite broad, it's not locked down, and it's about what I want to achieve
So with this new found freedom, I think there are two things I really want to study:
  1. Fucking Inappropriate: Expressing the Socially Unsay-able with Humour and Compassion - How can I use my experiences with care, disability, and death, together with my background in sales, my tendency to compassion, and my tenancy to humour, to make material that speaks and casts light on the things that society doesn't want to hear. A friend of mine summed it up very well "...tackle and shine light these difficult subjects in a engaging, jarring way without being crass."
  2. Human and Expressive Mark-Making with Open Technology - Everyone wants to install Adobe, but it's expensive and feels limiting... Can I explore and demonstrate the possibilities of wading into the 'guts' of technology to create images (and perhaps other things) that are human, expressive, and free (both as in beer and as in speech)
But what I really want to do is BOTH. So do I be 'good' and pick one while doing the other? Or should I be fucking inappropriate and choose both, but rather than try to merge them, literally make both study statements and somehow merge them so neither is obvious my actual study statement, and neither can be accepted without the other? I feel a bit of Godel, Escher, Bach and paired paradoxical statements coming on!

No comments:

Post a Comment