more work

I've been working hard on some outlining I have to do on my PhD, trying to produce concise and meaningful structures to the guiding questions I've been able to generate with the help of my advisors. This has been more difficult than it sounds, because I'm simultaneously trying to generate a sequence of research goals, (which may turn out to be the developing structure of my thesis), and engineer the practical methods I'll need to create the data that will inform my writing. Although the structure I've chosen is roughly chronological (from the inception of the idea of an artists' book, through its production to its ongoing post-production identity), clearly, examining the phenomenology and heuristics of artists' book production raises issues that can't be examined fully in one pass. At the moment I'm seeing my thesis design change as I build several passes on the data into its structure. Thus there are three iterations of the notion of a cycle of intention, the building up of the idea of artistic intention in relation to the medium, before the book is constructed, during the construction (how it turns up in the strategies of production employed by artists), and, finally, how it persists in the created object, now lonesome and at the mercy of critics who may have no truck with the artist's intentions at all if they're not evident in the work.

Something like this, which is an important notion in the work I want to do, bleeds off into many other areas, (intention and intentionality: theory of mind: theory of culture: cognitive characteristics of media, etc) and I think a strategy of iteration, so that the many different layers of influence that touch on the notion can be slowly glazed on the support of a simple armature, is the only way for me to proceed.

I'm finding that some of the reading I've done is starting to gel, albeit in a fairly brittle way, but I'm attached to the scope of the idea, and I think that my premise

that the practicalities (the problems and the tools) of artistic production need to be understood alongside the works and their historical placement in terms of technological and social possibility in order to describe what is best described as the practice of artists' books (as opposed to the "medium" or the "movement")

requires and deserves a proper breadth in backgrounding the significance and mechanics of artists' heuristics in motivating their choice of material. For this reason, I think that my examination of writing about media and cognition, of intention, of culture and communication, have been anything but redundant to my aims. However, collaging all of these things together, the task of creating the firm guidance that such a widely-populated arc requires,  has been a difficult task for someonelike myself.