Martyn Woodward
Transtechnology Research,
Room B312 Portland Square,
University of Plymouth,
Drake Circus,
Plymouth,
PL4 8AA
martyn.woodward@plymouth.ac.uk
(Biography)
Martyn Woodward is a doctoral researcher working within the visual arts, trained within visual communications design, with a parallel in film and media studies. He has been researching the limits/ limitations of understandings of visual communication since 2004. He began his Ph.D in October 2008 at the University of Plymouth with a research focus on developing new strategies for Visual Communication which are analogous with the emerging research into the Embodied human condition. His research is philosophically and historically situated, taking a transdisciplinary approach, focusing upon the perceptual and cognitively discursive experiences of audiovisual media forms in relation to issues of imagination, creativity, perception and agency. He is also the research Assistant on the HERA joint research project, ‘Technology Exchange and Flow’ based within Transtechnology research. Previous to this Martyn studied at the University of Wales in Newport, Obtaining a Bachelor‚ Degree in Graphic Design / Visual Communication in 2005 and his Masters in Design in 2007.
Download Curriculum Vitae (PDF)
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(Research)
A formless account of the multi-dimensional image
This research is situated amongst what can be seen as a period of renewal across many domains of the humanities regarding the underlying models of both materialism and the body within the study of both visual and cultural artifacts. Many approaches across the domains of cultural studies, the philosophy of art, cultural anthropology and historiography are providing a more contemporary challenge to conventional and disciplinary notions of what constitutes the boundary and study of an ‘artefact’, of both visual and material culture, through a revision of three inherent dualisms, a mind/body, a body/world and a human/non-human. Whilst the study of material culture within these New Materialisms is receiving a vital support from these domains, the conventional study of visual artefacts, across media studies and art history, particularly that of the materials of popular culture, remains underpinned by a reductive formalism.
The research offers a momentary suspension of these conventional formal approaches to the study of images, and facing the challenge posed by these New Materialisms head on, provides a revised philosophical and theoretical framework within which to re-situate their study. The thesis ultimately provides an alternative formless account of the image in which the study of visual artefacts can be seen as a multi-dimensional process, cutting across the material and immaterial domains of the body, as well as the material and immaterial domains of matter.
Papers:
Woodward, M. (2010) Where does Lap go When You Stand Up?: Meaning Making, Expression and Communication Beyond a Linguistic Constraint. Transtechnology Reader 2010.
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(Editorial / Podcast) MIT Press Journals Podcasts Series, No 18: Artifacts, Entanglements & Deep History: A Reflection on the Sublime in Art and Science
The emergence of deep history is shaping a contemporary concern with the origins of the human and its artifacts, beyond a reliance upon the written word of the (more shallow) past, which has formed a somewhat materialist history constituted by persons and things. Instead of a reliance upon documentary written evidence, a deep history attempts to re-instate the ‘pre-history’ of the written word – a genealogical and archeological history – through the traces of human consciousness left within human made artifacts, which themselves become containers for meanings and social relations (Shryock and Smail, 2011). Shryock and Smail insist that materials, just as the written word, contain traces of human kinship relations and exchanges. Seen within fossils, tools, pictures, household items, ecological change and genetic variation, these traces thus ‘document’ a deep history of the human mind, that extends into the material world. Such a reading of a deep history of the human through artifacts, may give evidence for an imaginary dimension of human desire (Punt, 2000), and by extension human perception, which opens up a deep history of the human beyond that of an axiomatic materialism.
MIT Press Journals Podcast Series, No 18:
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/podcast_episode18_LEON
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(Seminar) On Deep History and the Sublime: A Brief Introduction
Transtechnology Research Seminar
June 20, 2012:
This seminar will introduce the concept of deep history as the driving concept for the next seminar series. As a consequence the seminar will take the form of an open dialogue in which the concept, instigated by Martyn and Rita, will open the floor for reflection by the research group in terms of their own thinking and projects.
The emergence of deep history is shaping a contemporary concern with the human, and artifacts, beyond a reliance upon the documentary evidence of the written word, which has formed a somewhat materialist history as constituted and driven by persons and things. Conventionally, within History, there is a reliance upon documentary written evidence, which is a syndrome of an epistemological framework in which the human controls, works upon and constructs nature. A deep history attempts to re-instate a history that accounts for a ‘pre-history’ of the written word through the traces of human consciousness left within human made artifacts, which themselves become containers for meanings and social relations (Shryock and Smail, 2011, p. 220). Shryock and Smail insist that artifacts such as fossils, tools, pictures, household items, ecological change and genetic variation, just as the written word, contain traces of human kinship relations and exchanges.
A deep history thus attempts to recognize that the human is a part of, and does not exists upon, nature. However, the making of history through a Deep History perspective can be extended to comprise a symbiotic treatment of the material and immaterial -(im)material- dimensions of human experience, which would necessarily implicate a discussion of the sublime both as a descriptive category for the limits of knowledge and its potentialities as a working concept in the making.”
Cachao, Woodward 2012.
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(Seminar) Being through Painting and Weaving:
A brief commentary on Intuition (An artistic diversion from writing)
Transtechnology Research Seminar
May 23, 2012:
“In a forest, I have felt many times over that it was not I who looked at the forest. Some days I felt that the trees were looking at me, were speaking to me […] I was there, listening […] I think that the painter must be penetrated by the universe and not want to penetrate it […] I expect to be inwardly submerged, buried” (Andre Marchand cited in Merleau-Ponty, 1964, pp. 167-8)
In Eye and Mind, Merleau-Ponty speaks of the ‘inspiration’ of a painter in a literal sense, for him there really is ‘inspiration’ and ‘expiration’ of being, a process of respiration in which it is impossible to distinguish between who paints and what is painted. The mind and perception flows like air between the body and the world. In describing the genesis of human inspiration, psychology posits an ‘intuition’, a ‘feeling from within’; a somatic and affective hypothesis about the world encased within the boundary of the human body[1], such is tantamount to holding one’s breath. Human organisms cannot live without air.
What some may attempt to encase within the body, then, is never exclusively of the body, but extends into the milieu (environment). Within the Arts, painters are intimately aware that the activity of painting is a matter not of representing an external world, but of capturing forces, of rendering visible the invisible (im)material forces of the environment they are entwined within[2]. The weaver, also, encourages form to emerge through their engagement with a material emitting forces, resistances and tensions[3]. The human practitioner always works (moves, breathes and grows) within a field of distributed material and immaterial relations – a relational field of flows, properties, tensions, forces and lines of life[4], what I will discuss as an (im)material semi-autonomous milieu, an extended organism, in which the work is grown.
This presentation will not attempt to define the concept of ‘intuition’, nor will it discuss ‘creativity’ or ‘feeling’ directly. Rather, through reflecting upon the very distributed creative processes of painting and weaving, it will construct a model of human activity and practice which is not confined to the body, but actively grows through processes deep within the (im)materiality of the milieu. From such a framework, a very distributed account of intuition can be drawn, which will be as natural and regular as breathing and growing, both of which are essential to life.
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Image Atlas Project:
http://trans-techresearch.net/tef/tef-image-atlas/
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(Symposium) Screening a Puff: Advertising Film and the Enduring Forms of Modernism
TEF Expert Seminar, “Screening the Sublime”
Saturday 21st January, 09:30 am – 17:00 pm
Jill Craigie Cinema
University of Plymouth
This presentation addresses a seemingly simple observation, that of the constancy of specific formal techniques of audio-visual media form over generations of historical time, focusing particularly upon that of the presence of minimalism within advertising and avant-garde film forms.
The thesis proceeds from the claim that a dominance of formalism within western modernism, as recognized within anthropology and philosophy, maintains a somewhat materialist history of art and media, a history that neglects the immaterial processes that structure a wider distributed model of human experience (Ingold, 2000., Malafouris, 2010,. Johnson, 2009). As such, the presentation departs from the canon of a Greenbergian formalist art historical underpinning which has dominated the contemporary debate (Spigel, 2008., Heganar, 2010., Cowen, 2009), and aims to re-situate the debate within a neglected track of a Warburgian framework, which allows for a more contemporary distributed agency model, taking into account the very immaterial processes that are neglected within formalism. Such a shift promotes a rethinking of the nature of minimalism as a ‘technique’ within a materialist discourse, copied from generation to generation, to that of its contingency and endurance within a wider distributed ‘meshwork ‘of dynamic processes.
http://trans-techresearch.net/tef/tef-image-atlas/
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(Paper) A Monstrous Rhinoceros (As Designed From Life):
The Epistemological Nature of the Enacted Pictorial Image
The epistemological role of the pictorial image is enjoying a current resurgence within fields dealing with the visual arts, specifically in light of contemporary non-representational models of perception and cognition. From attempts to understanding the drawing process as bringing forth of a reality as apposed to representing one (Cain 2010), to rethinking Paleontological images through its ‘processes’ of becoming (Malafouris 2010, Ambrose 2006), the epistemological nature, understanding and reading of the pictorial image is currently under close scrutiny. Whilst these studies make some headway in discussing the nature of the ‘pictorial image’ outside of a representational bias, they all subscribe to a further preoccupation, that of the privileging of the visual. This paper situates itself alongside these debates and reveals how the pre-occupation with the concept of mimesis throughout discussions of the pictorial image throughout the nineteenth and twentieth century, have left the traces of a visual bias within readings and understanding of the pictorial image and the processes of image production during the twenty-first century. In realizing this bias, it makes a speculative contribution to the discussion of the epistemological status of the pictorial image outside of the privileging of the visual and of representation.
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(Paper) The [unseen] Modernist Eye:
Minimalism, Defamiliarization and the Advertising film
The formal exchanges, convergences and crossovers between early commercial advertising and experimental avant-garde practices have been richly discussed (Gibbons, 2005; Spiegel, 2008). Contemporary accounts of this relationship describe it as an embracing of each other’s formal styles, driven primarily by an economic engine, and one which treats the Avant-Garde and advertising forms themselves as separate, translatable formal styles (Cowen 2010). These ‘cross-overs’ and ‘convergences’ here are considered in the light of the desire of advertising agencies to apply’ cutting edge’ cinematic techniques to draw viewer’s attentions during a period of advertising saturation in the 1960’s (Spiegl 2009 pp.214-216, in which avant-garde techniques within advertising forms are considered to be a formal strategy employed primarily to stand out and to draw viewer’s attention. This paper traces this formal view of the relationship between avant-garde and advertising to lie within the modernist ‘autonomy of the arts’ (Greenberg 1960) during the 1960s, which maintained two fundamental conditions regarding the relationship; (1) that Avant-Garde (or arts practice) and Advertising are treated as separate endeavours, with different agendas and (2) in privileging the formal structure, the literature overlooks the perceptual and experiential dimension of human experience, and as such neglects any human agency within the transaction. Current research concerning the relationship between avant-garde techniques and advertising film aims to compound the formalist approach in highlight the mutually beneficial exchanges of print advertising and art into the practices of audio-visual media, in which the relationship is viewed as a complimentary mutual interaction that itself produces a creative synergy.[1] This ‘Exchange and Flow’ between commercial advertising film and avant-garde art practice treads further new ground by factoring in the perceptual dimensions of the viewers themselves, which has been overlooked within the literature. In proceeding from this position, this paper aims to re-think the relationship between the practices of avant-garde and advertising in light of the involvement of the creative nature of human experience, perception and agency by recognising the centrality of human perception to both endeavours.
[1]Endemic to the European funded research project (HERA) ‘Technology Exchange and Flow’ led by Prof. dr. Michael Punt, Transtechnology Research, University of Plymouth.
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(Paper) A Brief History and Theory of Not Looking:
Toward an Field Theory of the Audiovisual.
During the 1960s, the constructivist approach to vision and visuality broke free from the dominant culturally and historically relative models (as championed within Semiotics and Feminist theory) to involve the human agency of the body thus proposing a biological model of vision. The Biological framing of vision attempted to discard a culturally and historically relative model of vision in favour of models which involved the body as a site of meaning, thus bringing the body back into the framing of vision, taken away by the previous linguistic turn. Within this biological framework, it is the whole body that supports and maintains the spectacle of vision. However, within Ecological and Enactive approaches to perception, it is argued that perception is not embedded in or constrained by either the body or the surrounding world, but together in a reciprocal, emergent specification and selection. A biological model of vision then must move beyond the body or the environment to involve an enactive approach to vision, that neither privileges the body or the environment. This paper addresses the authors’ insight into the implications of an enacted cognition (and visions role within such a system) on traditional views of vision from constructivist, biological and phenomenological standpoint and its implications to the visual arts. It traces the conceptions of vision historically from a linguistically defined culturally relative model of the early 1960s, through a constructivist biological model of the late 1960s, which focussed on the body as the site of meaning, to Recent enacted models of perception, that privilege neither the body or the environment as a site of meaning. The Enacted model is unpacked and a model of perception in which the role of vision, and thus its very nature, is questioned and established.
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(Symposium) Selling the Immaterial: Avant-garde Practices and Commercial
Advertising Forms.
Wednesday 13th July, 10 am – 7 pm
Kunsthalle project space karlsplatz, Vienna
(TEF Vienna Expert Seminar “Play and Prosume” – Strategies of persuasion in arts, early film,advertisment movies and games as key moments of agency.)
This presentation discusses the mutual exchanges, convergences and crossovers between early commercial advertising and experimental avant-garde practices with a particular focus upon the persistence of perception within both. The Hamlet cigars campaign from UK in the 1960s is chosen as a core example of how audio-visual advertising works in selling the immaterial (of a happiness through a smoke), in which the formal treatment of minimalism used throughout the work is discussed not merely as an artistic stylisation or a conscious formal strategy, but as a product of a very human creativity which recognizes the active role of the viewer.
Web: http://trans-techresearch.net/tef/news/
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Transtechnology Research Seminar
April 20, 2011:
Between Magic and Logic:
Mimesis, enaction and the art of copying
This presentation will investigate the concept of Mimêsis, or copying, not as a mere distortion of reality but fundamental to the enactive human condition. Proceeding from a reading of Panel 21 of the Mnemosyne atlas, it will unpack and discuss Warburg’s methods, revealing a focus upon the mimetic human imagination, in tracing the symbol, or image, of Perseus from Antiquity to the Renaissance within Eastern and Western traditions. Particularly focusing upon his concept of Aesthetic Sterilization, in which the forms become defamiliarized (or ‘distorted’) through copying and subsequently attributed magic properties through the assimilation into the many forms of social memory. Through a discussion of the methods of recording nature throughout the Hellenistic and Medieval periods, this so-called barbaric ‘will-to-form’ through ‘distortions’ will be discussed as an artistic human activity, endemic to the human condition, in which the very representation of reality through copying will always lie under the spell of the artists existing representations and experiences. These ideas will then be traced to be at the core of an enactive approach to perception, in which the familiar will always remain the starting point for the recording of the unfamiliar through a process of the de-familiar, re-reading the panel through an application of the enactive processes that underlie copying.
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(Exhibition) Boundry Work 1
13th – 27th November 2010
Wandesford Quay Gallery, Cork, Ireland
A representation of work that treads the boundary between art & design and science and an invitation to participate was extended to artists, designers, and researchers in practices particularly relating to science and/or technology.
http://www.transculturetek.com/boundarywork/index.php
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Outputs:
Papers
Woodward, M (2013) ‘A Monstrous Rhinoceros (As From Life): The Epistemological Role of the Enacted Pictorial Image.’ Yung, S.T, and Peibalga, A. Designing the Relationship between Humans and Technology. Cambridge Scholars Publishing [forthcoming]
Woodward, M. (2013). ‘A Staging and Choreography of Theatrical Play: A Brechtian Aesthetic for Popular Culture’, In: Jahrmann, M., Felderer, B. (eds). Play & Prosume. Nuernberg: Verlag fuer Moderne Kunst, pp. 63-65.
Woodward, M. (2012) ‘An Electric Deep Time to the Modern Imagination’, L|R|Q 2.02, pp. xix-xx.
Woodward, M. (2012) ‘Artifacts, Entanglements & Deep History: A Reflection on the Sublime in Art and Science’, L|R|Q 2.01, pp. xi-xii.
Woodward, M. (2011) ‘The [Unseen] Modernist Eye: Minimalism, Defamiliarization and the Advertising Film’, Transtechology Research Reader 2011. Plymouth: Plymouth University.
Woodward, M. (2010) ‘A Brief History and Theory of Not Looking: Toward a Field Theory of the Audiovisual’, Transtechnology Research Reader 2010. Plymouth: Plymouth University, pp. 106–120.
Woodward, M. 2010. Where does Lap go When You Stand Up?: Meaning Making, Expression and Communication Beyond a Linguistic Constraint. Transtechnology Reader 2010.
Papers Read
Woodward, M. (2011) Selling the Immaterial: Avant-garde Practices and Commercial Advertising Forms. TEF expert seminar : Play and Prosume, Kunsthalle project space karlsplatz, Vienna, 13 July 2011.
Woodward, M. (2011) Between Magic and Logic: Mimesis, Enaction and the Art of Copying. Transtechnology Seminar Series, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK, 21 April 2011.
Woodward, M. (2010) Designing the Invisible. Transtechnology Seminar Series, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK, 21 April 2010.
Peer Reviewed Papers
Seminar Presentations
Cachao, R., Woodward, M. (2012) Deep History and the Sublime: A brief Introduction. Transtechnology Seminar Series, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK, 20 June 2012.
Woodward, M. (2012) Being Through Painting and Weaving: A Brief Commentary on Intuition. Transtechnology Seminar Series, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK, 23 May 2012.
Woodward, M. (2012) Screening a Puff: Advertising Film and the Enduring Forms of Modernism. TEF Expert Seminar: Screening the Sublime, Jill Craigie Cinema, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, 21 January 2012.
Woodward, M. (2011) Selling the Immaterial: Avant-garde Practices and Commercial Advertising Forms. TEF Expert Seminar : Play and Prosume, Kunsthalle project space karlsplatz, Vienna, 13 July 2011.
Woodward, M. (2011) Between Magic and Logic: Mimesis, Enaction and the Art of Copying. Transtechnology Seminar Series, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK, 21 April 2011.
Woodward, M., Zics, B., Vines, J. (2010) Designing the Invisible. Transtechnology Seminar Series, University of Plymouth, Plymouth, UK, 21 April 2010.
Poster Presentations and Exhibitions
Woodward M. (2010) A field Theory of the In-De-Visible. Boundary Works I, Wandesford Gallery, Cork, Republic of Ireland.
Woodward M. & Vines, J. (2010) Transtechnology Research. Boundary Works I, Wandesford Gallery, Cork, Republic of Ireland.
Edited Papers
Cacháo, R. (2011) Mnemosyne Atlas and Cosmologies: Connecting the Dots or Drawing the Clouds. (Forthcoming, Transtechnology Research reader 2011)
Doove, E. (2011) Laughter and Artistic Insight (Forthcoming, Transtechnology Research reader 2011)
Vines, J. (2011) Senescence, enaction and technology: On the need for movement and questions in interaction design (Forthcoming, Transtechnology Research reader 2011)
Edited Chapters
Drayson, H. (2011) Gestalt Biometrics and their Applications; Instrumentation, Objectivity and Poetics (PhD Thesis)
Vines, J. (2011) Ageing Futures Towards Cognitively Inclusive Digital Media Products (PhD Thesis)
Edited Books
Transtechnology Research (2011) Re-Instating the Visual: Transtechnology Research Reader 2011 (Forthcoming)
