Messaying: A Method-Mode in Creative Practice Research
Since 2021 the Deep Futures Research Group, chaired by KABK Lector Alice Twemlow, has provided a framework in which KABK tutors conduct creative practice research toward more equitable climate futures. Now a new book published by KABK Design Lectorate and Metropolis M Books presents this body of research, while helping to forge fresh pathways for the documentation of creative practice as a form of knowledge production.
Titled A Fray of Messays: Unraveling Research Toward the Deep Future, the publication features the work of seven creative practitioners in performance, filmmaking, photography, interactive media, fine art, architecture and the sonic whose work seeks to enrich, and challenge the boundaries of, their respective fields.
Collectively edited by Twemlow with the group members, and designed by KABK Graphic Design tutor Bart de Baets, the book assembles traces of individual research processes, as well as moments of collaborative reflection in the form of ‘messays’.
The term ‘messay’ refers to a format members of the Research Group have explored over the past few years: a blend of making and essaying; a site of physical construction; and a provisional holder for a collective writing practice. Incomplete and iterative, a ‘messay’ reveals its own structures of composition. Its edges remain resolutely frayed—signalling to a reader that there is plenty of room for alternative perspectives and approaches.
