people at the graduate school of creative arts and media

 

tim stott: ncad, faculty of visual culture, research scholar

 

 

 

biographical details

 

Tim Stott has a BA (hons) in Drawing and Painting (2003) and an MSc in Contemporary Art Theory, both from Edinburgh College of Art (2004). He is currently a visiting lecturer in contemporary art at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin, where he teaches on the MA Art in the Contemporary World, as well as leading a research methods module at undergraduate level in Dublin Institute of Technology.

 

He has also given guest lectures at the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Hugh Lane Gallery, and National Gallery of Ireland. He regularly writes reviews for Art Review and Circa, and has recently had essays published in Media Mutandis: a NODE.London Reader, Variant, The Future, Printed Project, Karnival, and House Projects (forthcoming).

 

research interests

play-events and players: the complexity of play and the governance of self and others


My research concerns the problematic triangulation of play, governance and processes of subjectification as it is elaborated in participatory art practices, or art practices that foreground and are contingent upon social interaction. Attention is given to those practices that use play or games to facilitate participation and in particular to those ‘play events’ wherein unpredictable or ‘loose’ social encounters and interactions are allowed to happen. Such events are exemplary of the shift from critical to ludic registers in participatory practices and, more broadly, through them the patterns of subjectification of economic and play behaviours converge as objects of managerial and governmental concern.

To address this problematic a complex systems model will be developed, for two reasons: firstly, it will allow for the analysis of possible correlations between complexity theory and discourse concerning participatory art practices, especially insofar as the former’s emphasis upon open, changeable relations and distributed agency might correspond with claims made for the possibility of emergent behaviours and collaborations occurring in the privileged and ‘relaxed’ field of art. For many, the possibility of emergence through collaboration is what makes participatory art practices critical exemplars of possible forms of self-organisation and self-governance. Secondly, and conversely, the study of complexity is currently at the forefront of research into contemporary problems of governance and the development of suitable managerial and organisational models.

Thinking the possibilities and constraints of play events and players through complexity theory is crucial to reassessing play generally in light of its increasing primacy in the production of cultural meaning and value, and specifically in light of the corresponding convergence of economic behaviour and play behaviour in the normalisation of free subjects – in particular, cultural producers – as ‘good players’ within ‘advanced’ liberal governmentality.

 

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