Next week we’re back at college for the Spring term and straightaway we have a presentation to do for our Lab session.

This follows on from our initial presentation back at the beginning of the course, designed to allow us to introduce ourselves to our colleagues by the selection of six objects through which we could talk about our backgrounds and motives for being on the course.

This time around it’s a review (or “reprise”) of the original presentation, with the effect of progress made over the previous term. Again, the format is to bring a number of objects. We’ll be looking at transformations in our approach to the course and possible lines of development.

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For the original presentation I talked around the following objects (they are followed by some bracketed notes on how I accounted for their inclusion):-

• DVD: Jacques Tati’s Playtime (my sense of humour, modernism, architecture in general)
• Some Monopoly houses (suburbia – my upbringing, architecture)
• my iPod (music, electronica)
• A small maquette for a sculpture (lovely objects, my interest in art)
• 2 of my own artworks (the work I was producing while at College)

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For the forthcoming presentation the main theme (or problematic) I want to talk about are my search for a hook within the course subject-matter on which I could hang my own (potential) work. This has only very recently started to become clear.

Up until the end of last term I think I was somewhat at a loss as to how the course actually intersected with my own interests. The main problem being that I’m not sure what my interests are at this point, which obviously makes any kind of progression difficult. This has always been my problem – deciding on this course was seen by myself as more of a move away from a negative rather than towards a positive.

But the presentation that I did with Ian in the last week of term clarified some things for me. Certainly what I enjoyed most in this presentation was the analysis of the presentation of the Beuys work at the tate, and—perhaps more pertinently—the representation of that analysis through diagrams and performance.

Relating this back to previous work I’ve done (specifically activities I was initiating while I was at Middlesex University doing my first degree)—the writing, and performance of those writings; the concern with space and perceptions of space; the systems of awareness and control of space—I can see a method for the future forming.

Another thing which is in the process of bubbling up is my interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s writings. Right now I’m attempting to write an essay on ‘the refrain,’ specifically where mentioned in A Thousand Plateaus, and am finding it quite ‘interesting’ (and challenging). For me, it’s a new way of thinking, so I’ll be keen to see where it leads me.

I think those are the two major results of this course so far. They are both effects of extreme and ongoing trauma for my patterns of thought, displacing me from what I already know to new pastures, potentially deterritorialising my thought (I have a feeling that that word will become more common in my writing from now on – this being one of the side-effects of reading D&G).

So, as far as the presentation goes, there is a distinct difference between the first and forthcoming one. The first was concentrating on personal, anecdotal evidence, while the next will be focused on the course itself and it’s effect on my thinking. The objects to present remain to be decided – books would be too obvious, so I must come up with something a little more intelligent to show. A difficult proposition.