Looking at Word Finding, a Practice-Based Research Project About Participatory and Dialogical Art Processes

The art-based thesis project, Word Finding, is currently being produced through dialogue and conversation. Beginning with a community process and finally being realized in an art context, Word Finding asks larger questions about authorship and public discourse. This work and others described here challenge the reliance on fixed authorship in the way Foucault imagined a future marked by distributed authorship. In Word Finding authorship is continually distributed amongst the work’s participants and audience. This project builds on my earlier art practice where I investigated the way words spoken within a social context produced instability of meaning –how they were interpreted, retold and translated between people. To contextualize this project and my practice in general, I present case studies that provide a variety of models for dialogical art strategies. Linda Duvall and Kutluğ Ataman have produced artworks in which the respatialization of unscripted talking in aesthetic contexts enables a level of audience engagement. Methodologies surrounding dialogical and participatory art forms are discussed here with respect to key texts by Mikhail Bakhtin, Grant Kester, Claire Bishop and others. As an art project, Word Finding investigates the integration of communitybased dialogue and aesthetic use of dialogue within art contexts.