The passage of information from one medium to another always involves an act of translation - something is lost and something is gained. Mindful of this, the purpose of representing student's writings here in this website is two-fold:

1, To give an insight to prospective students and other interested parties into the kind of critical material generated by undergraduates on the Fine Art course at Plymouth

but also:

2, To begin to explore how representing (or re-representing) work digitally allows for new strategies of presentation and reading. A possible outcome is that students may start to write within the medium. At the very least it is hoped the audience for the site will become sensitive to the potential.

Even at this 'work in progress' stage a few points are beginning to emerge. It is clear that by representing work here it is essentially 'reopened' from the closure it obtained in print form. This means that the writings can be reworked, by the original author (or others) to extend the arguments proposed. Also: linking is, in itself, an authorial (or editorial) strategy and can take several forms, including linking within the site between the various writings, linking to external, academic sites (as a means of seeing commentaries and illustrations in context), linking to other departments within the University of Plymouth and linking to other non-academic sites (such as artist's sites, students own site's, gallery and bookseller sites etc.) and so on.

Another key aspect I am interested in is how each piece of writing may be represented (metaphorically) by various levels:


Above: one example of thinking through the layering of information afforded by hypertext; the relationship between the layers can be determined by the author.

My own work in this field draws heavily upon the influence of J. D. Bolter and his seminal book 'Writing Space'. I am also very interested in issues raised by one of Bolter's touchstones: Walter J. Ong, particularly those in relation to notions of orality and literacy.

This site will continue to explore the above (and further) ideas in due course.