Peter's got things pretty much right. Only a couple of things to add.
There are several other books which might be useful. One is called 'How to Get a PhD'. Crass title, brilliant book dealing with the practicalities of what is involved. Practice-led Research, Research-led Practice has a range of essays that address aspects of Andreas's original questions. James Elkins' Artists with PhDs asks all the right questions and critiques the very relationship between creative practice and research and offers a healthy balance to the sometimes evangelistic attitude of those within the academy - although I'm not convinced by his arguments. But worth a read.
Peter is correct about the potential isolation faced by the UK PhD. Some institutions work hard to ensure this is avoided, mainly by having supervisory teams rather than single supervisors (especially useful for interdisciplinary research - and the student has tutorials where they are seriously outnumbered by their supervisors, which is a luxury!) and placing PhD candidates in appropriate environments. This might be a studio, a lab or an office - but the key thing is that there are other PhDs working together. Other things, like having weekly research seminars, student involvement in research committees, embedding students in research groups and centres, highlighting their work in the pedagogical environment, are all factors that indicate good practice and which will enhance the student experience. It's about building a community, not just a cohort - and that community needs to involve more than just the students, it needs to engage a range of researchers at different points in their development. If you get these factors right then the buzz can cascade through the system, enhancing the taught student experience as well as well as the environment for staff.
However, it tends to be the larger elite research-led universities that have the capacity to achieve this, especially now that UK Research Council money no longer goes to the individual student but to the institution to use to build the research cohort. Only a small number of institutions in any subject area have this money. That's why the research universities tend to have these facilities - they have the money, and at £50-100k per student to deliver a PhD it involves quite a lot. This is a pity as in this model important domains are overlooked and small centres of research excellence in non-research focused institutions struggle to gain access to resources, making it a challenge to create such environments. It leads to a self-perpetuating stratification of the system - which is exactly what the current conservative UK government seeks.
On the other hand, it's important to remember that the UK research reforms of the past 20 years, especially the creation of the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the inclusion of the creative arts in the processes of national research evaluation, and the funds that flow from that, have transformed and facilitated creative arts education, research and practice in the UK. Countries like Canada, Holland, Norway and Australia have seen this and instituted their own reforms. The main thing to take from this is to ask yourself not only who you want to do your research with and in what subject specialism but also which institution will provide the most support. Careful research of the options is recommended as an error at this stage could be expensive - personally and financially. Within the UK system it is also difficult to get two bites at the apple so correcting mistakes can be difficult.
The question of the examiners, as Peter observes, is key. We always ask PhD candidates to consider who their ideal external examiner is by the time of their first annual review. We have a box on our tutorial report form for the name of the examiner, to encourage students and supervisors to fill it as soon as possible in the research process. It's important that the examiner is sympathetic to the general drift of the work being undertaken. A hostile examiner is going to create a nightmare scenario. I've had my hands full chairing examinations where candidates and examiners have been at each other's throats. Takes years off everyone. It's also helpful if the candidate knows who they are targeting the PhD at. Know your audience...
best
Simon
On 21 Aug 2012, at 00:58, Peter Ride wrote:
> Hi Andreas, Beryl et al
>
> Its a great subject for conversation and one close to my heart as I'm in
> the last stages of my PhD which is, essentially, examining how curatorial
> practice can generate outcomes that can be seen as pure research as well
> as being creative outputs.
>
> Andreas, I suggest that your friends/associates look at a recently
> published book edited by Ernest Edmonds & Linda Candy 'Interacting: Art,
> Research and the Creative Practitioner' (Libri Publishing 2011). Primarily
> it looks at the place of practice based research but most of the
> contributors are people who have either been engaged in computer science
> related research or PhD projects at the Creativity and Cognition Studios
> at the University of Technology, Sydney. I found this publication was
> notable because it blows away a lot of the unnecessary verbiage around
> practice-based research (I think Linda Candy is brilliant at cutting to
> the essentials) and it is the only one the I have come across that
> focusses on media technology. While there is now a lot written on practice
> based PhDs in the fine arts most of them emphasise fine art studio
> practice and they left me with too many unanswered questions and
> annoyances because the situations that they refer to were not those that I
> experience with technology based projects.
>
> As a sidebar there is also a chapter by Lizzie Muller on conducting her
> PhD research as a media arts curator, which I think should be essential
> reading for anyone involved in CRUMB type activities.
>
> I also want to second what Simon has said. In the UK, in my area, we
> rarely run PhD programmes with a taught component and instead the PhD
> process is almost exclusively dependent upon the student-supervisor
> relationship. This has a good side in that it means PhD students can
> develop highly individual projects but I think it can often mean that they
> work without a sense of being in a cohort which can be dangerously
> isolating. My North American PhD students get quite confused about the
> lack of a 'programme' (but thrilled when they realise a PhD in the UK is
> only a three year process and much cheaper for them!). For that reason I
> think that identifying departments that have a synergy with the PhD
> research being planned - which is what Saul Albert so coherently describes
> he did - is an important way to proceed. In my university, students donıt
> have a formal relationship with a department, only with their supervisors,
> but the department structure allows them to access expertise and call on
> 'advisors' to supplement the supervisory team.
>
> I would advise your friends to decide exactly what experience they want to
> get out of doing a PhD and choose their country and system accordingly to
> get what suits them best. Are they open to working/studying anywhere in
> Europe or internationally?
>
> I's also just add a response to your comment:
>> but i fantasise about a PhD project that is akin to a technical
>> invention, the thesis looking
>> more like a patent application than a philological monograph (the latter
>> format can be impossible for artists who have the technical and
>> conceptual but not the writing skills).
>
>
> I am with you on this, and aside from the issues around patents having a
> different form and purpose I think its a sound point. There is absolutely
> no reason why the practical work of a project shouldn't be a 'technical
> invention'. The written component of a PhD needs to be able to argue why
> this the project has been significant and original work. It doesnıt matter
> if its a media arts project, a design for a bicycle, or study of
> Shakespeare's sonnets. It needs to show that the student has a rigorous
> grasp of the context in which theyıve been working, and therefore how this
> contributes to and extends current practice (professional or academic - or
> both). And why the problem that lies at the heart of the study (the
> research question) has been approached in the best possible way to produce
> the best results (the research methodology). So this doesnıt require
> cultural theory. It doesnıt require an epistomological or philosophical
> investigation. It requires that the case to be argued is presented in a
> way that is appropriate to the discourse that surrounds the sort of work
> that is being made.
>
> I've read way too many inept theoretical justifications of research
> projects (some of these being my own). I think universities have a lot to
> answer for in that, while teaching some great intellectual skills, they
> can also narrow their students' abilities to explore ideas. They can
> constrain the way that students develop the ability to communicate their
> intellectual processes. Its a game in which it is easy to become
> complicit. Like Beryl I'm a huge enthusiast of research projects that try
> to do things differently and encourage other approaches.
>
> There is a caveat though, as far as the PhD is concerned, which is that
> the examiners have to recognise this as well.
>
> Best
>
> Peter
>
>
> ***************************
> Peter Ride
> Course Leader of MA Museums, Galleries and Contemporary Culture
> & Principal Research Fellow
> Department of English, Linguistics and Cultural Studies
> University of Westminster
> 32-38 Wells Street, London W1T 3UW
>
> office: 020 79115000 X 2377
> mobile: 07979 590449
>
>
> InteractingArt, Research and the Creative Practitioner
>
>
>
>
> On 20/08/2012 21:40, "Beryl Graham" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
>> Thanks Saul and other contributors,
>>
>> Yes, an interesting issue - what with Sunderland having done
>> art-practice-led PhDs since 1992, it's amazing the variety within that
>> term - our regulations really only differentiate between those PhDs
>> including creative practice and those that don't by the MAXIMUM word
>> count - up to 40,000 words for those that do, up to 80,000 for those that
>> don't. There is no minimum stipulated - it's all about what you need to
>> do to communicate your research clearly, and that always depends on the
>> research. I've seen all kinds of problems with this communication, from
>> the over-verbose, the diagram-blind, the Deleuzian rapture, to those who
>> struggle with visual literacy or taking images seriously at all, but
>> we've always found solutions.
>>
>> Concerning cross-disciplinary research (and hence cross-disciplinary
>> methods and theses), this does indeed cause anxiety, but we have often
>> have supervisors on the team who are from the School of Computing, as was
>> the case with Dominic Smith, whose research concerned exploring parallels
>> between Open Source and participative art production methods and values
>> (see CRUMB completion bios
>> http://www.crumbweb.org/getBiosContacts.php?id=4 ).
>>
>> The fact that we have both art historians and software engineers on the
>> same team seems to work well is the parties know each other well and feel
>> secure in their own fields - think it is when those with less experience
>> in 'new' areas feel threatened that problems start to arise. For example,
>> I think social scientists and design-practice researchers can sometimes
>> feel as though they have fought hard for their own 'new' research
>> methods, and are firmly sticking there rather than risking weird new art
>> ideas. Yes, some art historians have certainly been less supportive of
>> art-practice PhDs than say engineers who might be more familiar with
>> practical research methods, but art methods are still different from
>> design methods, and so I think we still need both sides, or yes, what we
>> might end up with is just 'research and development' with patents at the
>> end.
>>
>> I think it's all about reading and experiencing lots and lots of
>> different discipline's PhDs as student, supervisor, examiner or what have
>> you - Ken Friedman told me this years ago, which rather irritated me at
>> the time, but dammit, he was right! Once you've tried to extract
>> knowledge from someone else's PhD, you become quite critical of whether
>> other people have managed to communicate how they spent their valuable
>> studentships ...
>>
>> Another interesting differentiation for CRUMB is the difference between
>> art-practice and curatorial-practice research - a fair amount of
>> precedence in the former, and not much in the latter, although CRUMB is
>> plodding along with this! Views welcome on this...
>>
>> Yours,
>>
>> Beryl
>>
>>
>>
>> On 20 Aug 2012, at 18:42, Saul Albert wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Andreas, list,
>>>
>>> On Mon, Aug 20, 2012 at 06:17:11PM +0200, Andreas Broeckmann wrote:
>>>> do people have experiences with such "engineering PhDs for artists"?
>>>> and can you name schools that are open to such research, possibly in
>>>> cooperation with a partner art school?
>>>
>>> Good question!
>>>
>>> Two years ago I came to a similar decision to do a PhD because I wanted
>>> to spend an extended period of time reading and writing, and the project
>>> churn didn't really allow for that space, so I started looking for
>>> practice-based PhD programmes with critical/media art leanings.
>>>
>>> Many of the options available in the UK were situated within traditional
>>> art schools, with a few media-art savvy stalwarts holding the fort.
>>> Given that I actually wanted to get some work done, the idea of joining
>>> an embattled few in an unsympathetic institution didn't really appeal.
>>>
>>> The alternative was to apply to a more design-oriented programme like
>>> Design Interactions at the Royal College
>>> http://www.rca.ac.uk/Default.aspx?ContentID=514648&GroupID=161712 or
>>> Culture Lab in Newcastle (http://www.ncl.ac.uk/culturelab/), or to adopt
>>> a curatorial focus and apply for one of the studentships with Beryl
>>> Graham and Sarah Cook in Newcastle: http://www.crumbweb.org/.
>>>
>>> After an interesting but eventually unsuccessful funding bid to put
>>> together a custom research programme with an attached PhD position at
>>> Goldsmiths with Matt Fuller and Olga Goriunova at the Centre for
>>> Cultural Studies (http://www.gold.ac.uk/cultural-studies/), I found the
>>> Media and Arts Technology programme at Queen Mary Univeristy:
>>> http://www.mat.qmul.ac.uk/ almost by accident.
>>>
>>> The programme was set up in the wake of audio-engineering PhDs such as
>>> Dan Stowell's (http://www.mcld.co.uk/) during which the institution
>>> noticed that artistically inclined/curious engineers could stifle the
>>> yawns of the general public and tempt UK funders who sought to invest in
>>> a mix of 'creative industries' and high-tech, perceived to be the UK's
>>> primary exports aside from corrupt banking.
>>>
>>> After going to meet the course directors, I was pleased to find out that
>>> they didn't seem to have heard about New/Media Art in the German sense.
>>> They had envisaged people coming to create *Technology* for the Media
>>> and Art industries, and were surprised and a little bemused when all
>>> these strange people who self-identified as Media Artists applied with
>>> unwieldy CVs, proposing to create all kinds of media art oddities..
>>>
>>> Thankfully, they were very open-minded (though not uncritical) about of
>>> a sizeable influx of us misfits into what I affectionately think of as a
>>> traditional 'corduroy trousers' type of engineering/computer science
>>> institution, where researchers tend to work on recalcitrant, unglamorous
>>> and genuinely innovative research, rather than the proliferation of ipad
>>> fluff I see in more design-centric programmes.
>>>
>>> The major growing pains of joining a straight CS/EE programme have been
>>> learning new research methods and ways of thinking about and describing
>>> my research that are intelligible to people who self-identify as
>>> Scientists with a capital S. Perhaps because Computer Science has a bit
>>> of a chip on its shoulder about not being a proper science
>>> (http://saulalbert.net/blog/2012/02/neuro-informatics-and-art/), there
>>> is a tendency to adopt a somewhat hard-line Popperian stance about what
>>> counts as a valid research question.
>>>
>>> Having said that, two years on I've found the constraints of having to
>>> start from scratch in developing a context and theoretical grounding for
>>> my work very empowering. Now I'm beginning to feel more comfortable with
>>> the new literature, intellectual authorities and epistemological
>>> battle-grounds I'm negotiating in an engineering/CS context, I find
>>> myself agreeing with Sarah Cook that the methodologies and approaches
>>> most readily available to art history and cultural studies aren't
>>> completely sufficient for analysing networked/media art, and that
>>> engineering/CS techniques have a lot to offer in this context.
>>>
>>> In any case, I'm looking forward to hearing about other people's
>>> experiences.
>>>
>>> X
>>>
>>> Saul.
>>>
>>> --
>>> mob: +44(0)7941255210 / @saul
>>> sip: +44(0)2071007915 / skype:saulalbert
>>
>> ------------------------------------------------------------
>>
>> Beryl Graham, Professor of New Media Art
>> Research Student Manager, Art and Design
>> MA Curating Course Leader
>>
>> Faculty of Arts, Design, and Media, University of Sunderland
>> Ashburne House, Ryhope Road
>> Sunderland SR2 7EE
>> Tel: +44 191 515 2896 Fax: +44 191 515 2132
>>
>> CRUMB web resource for new media art curators http://www.crumbweb.org
>> Recent books:
>> * Rethinking Curating: Art After New Media (2010) from MIT Press
>> http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=12071
>> * A Brief History of Curating New Media Art, and A Brief History of
>> Working with New Media Art (2010) from The Green Box
>> http://www.thegreenbox.net
>> * Euphoria & Dystopia: The Banff New Media Institute Dialogues (2011)
>> from Banff Centre Press and Riverside Architectural
>> Presshttp://www.banffcentre.ca/press/39/euphoria-and-dystopia.mvc
>>
>
> The University of Westminster is a charity and a company limited by guarantee. Registration number: 977818 England. Registered Office: 309 Regent Street, London W1B 2UW.
>
Simon Biggs
[log in to unmask] http://www.littlepig.org.uk/ @SimonBiggsUK skype: simonbiggsuk
[log in to unmask] Edinburgh College of Art, University of Edinburgh
http://www.eca.ac.uk/circle/ http://www.elmcip.net/ http://www.movingtargets.co.uk/
MSc by Research in Interdisciplinary Creative Practices
http://www.ed.ac.uk/studying/postgraduate/degrees?id=656&cw_xml=details.php
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