About four weeks before our final Context: Thesis written submission, we were required to present our work so far in a ten minute presentation. This presentation is assessed, and will count towards 25% of our final Thesis mark. As well as this, we received immediate verbal feedback from out tutor and written feedback the same day.
Thesis area of study and presentation contents
My Thesis is on the topic of Urban Catalysis: the power of intervention and participation to enact change. This presentation was structured as follows:
'Catalyst': the evolution of a word – the historical development of the words catalysis and catalyst in terms of their meaning and usage.
Place-specific urban interventions as catalyst – what place-specific work is, compared to other types of intervention (largely based on my Context: Stasis research into place-specific dance.)
Case-study: Street Dance – considering the impact that this work by Lucinda Childs has had, and speculating how it could be increased to have a greater catalytic effect and legacy.
Next steps – what I intend to do over the next few weeks to finalise the written Thesis.
'Catalyst': the evolution of a word
This section traced the history of the words catalysis and catalyst from their Ancient Greek origins through to the present day.
Through my in-depth etymological study, I have discovered that it is only since 1943 that 'catalyst' has been used in the social/figurative sense that we use it today. Prior to that, it was in use in the field of chemistry from 1836. Before that, the word catalyst didn't exist, but catalysis did, retaining the main sense from the Ancient Greek of 'dissolution'. I feel that the most interesting period is between 1919 and 1943, where chemists used social analogies to explain what chemical catalysts were, and it is from this that the figurative sense was developed and then broke away to be used independently. Below is one example of this:
“We may...compare the catalyst to what is known as “a good mixer” in society. You know the sort of man I mean. He may not be brilliant or especially talkative, but somehow there is always “something doing” at a picnic or house-party when he is along. The tactful hostess, the salon leader, is a social catalyst.” ––– Chemical Warfare Bulletin, Volume 12, 1926
Part of this word research exercise that I have done then looks at how the frequency of the chemistry versus the figurative usage has changed over time. To do this, I have looked at a text corpus, namely the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA). I found that the figurative sense has come to dominate over the course of the last century, as conveyed in the diagram below.
Catalyst word usage diagram
Another thing discovered through my research was that one of the Ancient Greek definitions of the word 'catalysis' conveyed senses of 'overthrowing', 'abolishing' and 'destroying'. I have decided that these should be brought into my new definition of 'urban catalyst', to give it a radical underpinning which acknowledges the need to dismantle negative socio-political forces to achieve positive change. The definition that I am therefore proposing is as follows:
Urban catalyst (noun): “An intervention within the city which encourages positive social change (by confronting and aiming to overthrow the negative forces which are resistant to this positive social change).”
Place-specific urban interventions as catalyst
In this next section, I firstly explained site-specificity in comparison to site-generality, by introducing Stephen Hodge's site-specificity continuum.
Stephen Hodge's site-specificity continuum
I then explained the differences between place and space, and stated that the scope of my research is then focused on place-specific work.
Case-study: Street Dance
Next, I introduced the case-study of Street Dance, and stated that I believe it occupies an interesting hybrid position, in that it is overtly place-specific, whilst simultaneously offering a methodology or formula which could be applied in any number of different locations, to achieve a catalytic effect.
Video of the 2013 Philadelphia restaging of Street Dance
After giving background information on Street Dance, its original performance and its subsequent restagings, I then stated that I feel that Street Dance is a work with great catalytic potential, but that it does not fulfil this potential. I then express that this effect could be increased by expanding its spatial and temporal scope, aided by the diagrams below. I hypothesised that the method of utilising a network of nodes and series of events could lead to spontaneous events and interventions happening, catalysed by the original planned events, once a certain density of the network or events is reached.
Diagrams speculating on how the catalytic effect can be increased by increasing spatial and temporal scope (the diagrams to the right showing 'spontaneous' events and nodes appearing)
Next steps
In the final part of my presentation, I set out what I intend to work on for the final few weeks before the written submission.
The first thing was to extrapolate further on the ideas of increasing catalytic effect introduced in the Street Dance section, but looking beyond that specific dance work.
The second thing that I introduced was some initial ideas in how I could test these concepts in Leeds myself. I had identified that Leeds has an issue with Tetrapak packaging not being able to be recycled in the green bins, so one must instead travel to a specific recycling centre, which aren't within easy walking distance for many people. I then suggested an idea that Tetrapak packaging could be used to create small framing devices which anyone could make and put up around the city. The idea was that it would achieve a similar result to Street Dance in getting people to look up and engage more with their surroundings, whilst also forcing Leeds City Council to take action on the recycling issue.
Leeds recycling centres map, highlighting the large distances between some of them
Tetrapak framing device concept
Presentation feedback and reflection
I felt like my verbal and written feedback were positive and encouraging, and I feel that I am in a good position going into the final few weeks of writing.
One of the positive aspects of my feedback highlighted that my self-authored visual content was of good quality and helped support and explain the concepts that I was dealing with. Another positive cited was that my word analysis exercise provided an interesting underpinning to the rest of the thesis.
In terms of constructive criticism, my tutor felt that whilst the Leeds recycling ideas may be interesting, they weren't as relevant or tied-in to the rest of the work, and therefore I should consider rounding off my thesis in another way. The suggestions were to perhaps look for examples of where event venues and festivals follow site-specific works to surprising new temporary locations in the city, leading to a new kind of networked catalysts.
I will now take this feedback on board to try and finalise the final section of my Thesis. I feel happy with the earlier parts of it which are mostly written up already, and hope that I am able to bring it all together at the end into one cohesive piece of research and writing.
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