Presentation by Professor Howard Riley (University of Wales: Trinity Saint David, Swansea) at the Research-Teaching Practice in Wales Conference, 10th September 2013, at the University of Wales, Gregynog Hall. Slidecast edited by Professor Simon Haslett.

1. Howard Riley
Paul Jeff

2. The Thought Experiment:
Developing Research as Practice
for Masters Students in Art &
Design

3. • The Thought Experiment is
conducted over an eight-week
workshop session at the beginning
of the first year of the MA, designed
to explore and test the possibility
of visual research methods
becoming visual arts practice.

4. Method
The Experiment begins with
a table full of sealed
envelopes, each containing a
printed phrase culled from
several sources, most
notably Roger Pol Droit’s
101 Experiments in the
Philosophy of Everyday Life.
Short, esoteric, intriguing
experiments such as
Rediscover Your Room after a
Journey; Tell a Stranger
He/She is Beautiful and
Dread the Arrival of the Bus.
Students pick their envelope
at random, and then
research directions and
strategies for each
experiment are discussed in
small seminar groups.

5. Helen Walkington 2011 Presentation to R-T Nexus conference, Gregynog

6. HEALEY, M. 2005 Linking Research and Teaching: Exploring Disciplinary
Spaces and the Role of Inquiry-based Learning. In Barnett, R. (ed.)
Reshaping the University: New Relationships between Research, Scholarship
and Teachung. Maidenhead: McGraw-Hill/Open University Press. 30-42.

7. Christine Shaw
• THE EXPERIMENT – VANISH AT A PAVEMENT CAFÉ
• “Sat alone at a pavement café for 30-40 minutes speaking to
no one except the waiter. Made notes about my reaction to
other people’s conversations, actions and the general
atmosphere. Sitting alone makes you feel invisible to others”.
“Researched the cafes of Swansea and discovered the history
of the Kardomah Café. In the 1930s it was a frequent meeting
place of a group of writers and artists, including Dylan Thomas.
The group became known as the Kardomah Gang”.
• The Kardomah was blitzed in WW2, a metonym for cultural
loss. What else has been lost over the years?

8. Concept to Percept
CONCEPT
Past and present elements of time
mixed up in the melting pot.
Who vanished? When ? How?
Influences? External forces?
FORMULATION
Mixture of sounds that could be
audible when sitting in the café.
Sounds from the past mixed with those
of the present day. The main theme
centred around the bombing and
destruction of the surrounding area with
sounds from the present day breaking
through.

10. Sarah Dunstan
• The Experiment, Follow the
Movements of Ants
prompted Sarah to research
the dialectic social group
needs/individual needs.
“Billions of faces pass each
other, some meaningless,
some meaningful. But as
technology allows us to
inhabit our individual virtual
worlds, we become more
introverted and
anaesthetised to our social
relationships.”

11. • The multiplicity of faces
at large in the social
context is opposed by
the multiplicity of selves
we all harbour.
• Sarah’s practice
explores and visualises
some of her ‘selves’ in
the privacy of her room.

12. Daniel Ladner’s
experiment Materialise
Your Insights led him to
research examples in the
field of contemporary
installation art…
Richard Wentworth 2009
False Ceiling Venice
Biennale
Books as synecdoche for all
knowledge, metaphorically
out of reach unless an
effort is made.

13. Daniel Ladner
The basic, traditional research method of gathering and collating information
is here made the subject of a performance. Daniel’s constant restructuring of
the material is metaphoric of the ways we constantly restructure our realities
from research experiences.

14. howard.riley@sm.uwtsd.ac.uk