Critical Reflective Summary formulation

I've been thinking about how I can best articulate the overall critical reflective summary for a few weeks now, and while I have started to write the introductory section and create a framework, I'm still conscious of the need to distil the most important parts of my learning experiences over the last year.

It would simply be impossible to include all of the events into a succinct 4,500 to 6,000-word essay, so the key to creating this I think, might be for me to make a timeline of sorts to map out how ideas have developed.  Indeed, during the first term, I created a mind map that has been pretty much the mood board for lots of research, but this has room to be updated too.

Having already indexed the majority of my blog the easiest thing for me to do is to print out a complete copy, although I realise that this amounts to some 120,000 words over approximately 320 pages!

It seems appropriate that this document can become the backbone for my CRS, it's just now a matter of selecting the most poignant elements and explaining my reasoning and justifications for the decisions I have made.

I also recognise that I have taken a number of turns and deviations during the last year which is perfectly acceptable I believe in an artistic and creative mode. This freedom of thinking is vital in my opinion to develop new ways of interpreting not only existing art by other practitioners but also the various volumes of theories, across multiple set of disciplines including philosophy, anthropology, psychology, perception and not forgetting digital media practices.

Conclusions

• Setting a timeline like a kind of decision tree will be vital.
• Distilling the most valuable learning experience is going to be hard as there have been so many.
• I need to be quite ruthless in my selections.

Pushing myself forward now, the Sun's coming up and Drawing at 6:30am!

The view from our cottage window down the Hetton valley is truly beautiful this morning, Dovecote field in front of us is thronging with young pheasant poults, field hares and a few adult pheasants too.

A cock pheasant in all his resplendent colours is guarding his harem. His regal pose, with upright stance, his head and neck stretched way above the other birds commands instant respect. There is a sense of piety in the way he looks, especially because of his striking reverential white dog collar surrounding his neck. Like the village parson, overseeing his flock, perhaps even giving his morning sermon? This is far too anthropocentric I know, but one does wonder!

I find it incredibly hard not to believe that certain species of animals are able to intercommunicate with one another, especially herbivores. There is a sense of sharing in mother nature's glory on the morning like today which is tangible and palpable.

The remnants of wispy mist rise slowly from the distant hills and valley basins. A quick sketch before breakfast sets me into a good mood for the rest of the day and I've started to write some further ideas down to speculatively think about representational images from the Peregrine's perspective and "the Peregrine's story".

Thinking about the clouds and the free movement of the summer swallows, I positioned myself speculatively above them or at least floating in parallel with them. I imagined how it might look from 3000 feet, as according to Baker peregrines often glide and rise on the thermal air currents to that sort of height. The classic towering cumulus clouds nearby would appear lower on the horizontal plane, whereas distant clouds would appear higher on the horizontal plane as one would be above them. This would be the reverse view that we as humans have from ground level.

A suggestion by Rowan and Richard a few weeks ago to renew some of my thoughts and remove images of the Peregrine itself has been playing on my mind. Critically thinking through what a Peregrine may see as an important object in its day-to-day activities, I feel that the inclusion of other peregrines, and particularly when in the United Kingdom, the breeding grounds of peregrines, then it necessarily follows that encounters with either the Falcon's mate, the Tercel (the male); or alternatively for the tercel to see the Falcon (the female) will occur frequently. It is perfectly appropriate therefore to include images of other peregrines and also their chicks.

This is led me to think about some speculative drawings of chicks feeding? I'm also thinking further about views from the Peregrine's scrapes too. My plan is to climb some nearby crags which are perfect Peregrine nesting points to try and find primary source material.

Conclusions:

• The inclusion of Peregrine images in my book is absolutely verified now after thinking about this deeply. So too are parts of Peregrine anatomy of close-ups, both of the viewing Peregrine's anatomy and equally, of their mates, chicks or siblings.
• I need to try and find some primary source images and real live views of steep cliffs and craggy outcrops and spend some time creating rough sketches that can then be digitised back in the studio.  There are plenty of spots nearby to do this so weather permitting, this will be a little expedition and adventure over the next few weeks.
• Breeding season for peregrines is now completely over, most of the birds having fledged and probably returned to their northern hunting grounds through June and July, so the chance of seeing young juveniles this year has gone. 
• Nevertheless, there is substantial video available from online web cams, particularly of city peregrines and their chicks. I need to make some enquiries and research around copyright before I potentially use these images as secondary sources, nevertheless, with a bit of imagination, I should be able to develop sufficient drawings that are completely independent.
• I'm going to increase the level of my blogs a little more over the next few weeks to help with my clarity of thought, as I find that writing is particularly important to my practice.
• As I temporarily reduced and even suspended publication of blogs during the last four weeks or so, during the academic quiet period to allow my tutors to have some breathing space during undergraduate degree marking and also during their marking and review time for ourselves.
• I feel that it is acceptable to restart the weekly frequency of these again. And publish the backlog that I have been saving up too. I hope this meets with their approval and doesn't overload them of course!

Re-cap on the week's work, but feeling pretty down with myself still.

Back home now for a couple of days before heading back up to a new cottage. The last week has been really difficult for me, even though I made it an intention at the beginning of the week not to worry too much, nor to be anxious about production, and just to take some time out!

Doing nothing is very difficult for me, and with being in a depressed mood to start with since the presentation, which I feel I messed up completely last week, all I've managed to do is wallow in some rather dark thoughts, which have translated into the darker side of peregrines outlook on life.


This has manifested itself through drawings of dead prey creatures, dead rats & mice and especially a desire to draw Peregrine favourites like pigeons and pheasants!

I found a dead dove/rock-pigeon on the dirt track next to our cottage, and although I think it was shot as vermin by the local game-keeper, it nevertheless got me thinking and wanting to draw it.

Turning the carcass over, I realised that the entry and exit wounds would individually look quite similar to the strike wounds of a bird of prey, so in a way, the macabre find was actually very useful.

In thinking about this though, and coupling it with some of the recommendations that Dr Bailey and Richard Mulhearn kindly offered, may be the slightly alternative view becomes a self-reflection of the peregrines daily dalliance with life-and-death?

Having also thought considerably about making some sort of installation work, whilst I believe it is achievable to some degree, I am now wondering if it is, in fact, a cohesive output? Having thought about this for the last week, I've decided to postpone any kind of installation work until after my submission date of 1 September. I believe that such an installation would actually detract from the work that I've already been building upon, and the suggestion to focus on my book and build and expand upon this, together with much more drawing makes far more sense to me.

Conclusions:

• Still, lots to do with regards to drawings and writing, but if I keep the focus of these next three or four weeks and make time to draw whenever I can then at least I have a chance of creating a robust and professional artefact is a much bigger book (page number -wise).
• Thinking now about the critical reflective summary, I need to create a framework again for the production of the CRS and create some scaffolding headings to start working with.
• Next week is going to be another busy week with various jobs that need to be completed in the cottage to make it watertight and bug proof.  I am sure my priorities will no doubt be dictated through those, but I need to ensure that each spare moment can be used for reflection and be drawing too.

Presentation day! ...Was a bit of a disaster for me! Friday 28th July.

What a disaster yesterday's presentation was for me! - At 8:30 am in the morning, I thought it would be a good idea to just do a quick tidy up of my front page to the "Prezi" home page of mine.  Then, when the presentation time of 10:35 am came, just a couple of hours later, I could walk into the conference room and simply "sign-on and go!"...

A very good idea I thought...  And, as it was "La Veintiocho de Julio", a national fiesta day in Peru, the country of my birth, I thought nothing could go wrong!

(Hubris perhaps?)

I resolved too quickly to remove all the clutter and backup copies of work in progress, plus all those presentations and backups from the last term. To file them away neatly, and hey presto, a nice clean "menu" for me to impress the lecturers and 'judges' with when I walked into the conference room a couple of hours or so later.

...[Ego-driven motives perhaps, I hate myself for being so shallow in thinking this way!]

So off I went, busily moving past 'Prezis' and backups to different folders from the front screen menu, and deleting the presentations that had been superseded and no longer valid.

Move this file...   Delete this file...  "ARE YOU SURE?" the message said... "Yes" of course I am!... more delay, tut, tut, in my mind.
[I've only got an hour and a half to get to Huddersfield in plenty of time for the presentation].

So my mind was thinking 'I need to be set off from here at 9:15 at the latest, then I've got a good hour and 20 mins. to complete a 45-minute journey and have plenty of contingency for "Sheep on the Road"; a broken down bus causing traffic jams; road works and other delays.

Fine.  Delete the next file... "ARE YOU SURE?" ... Of course, I am! "YES", [tut, tut, more delay].

[move that file to last terms work....]

Delete this file "ARE YOU SURE?" ...YES!...

[Come on, it's nearly 8:55 by my watch...]

Delete / move / delete and so on.

Then...

  "Application is Not Responding"...

Crash!...[PC jumps back to the desktop screen]

Oh no!...

[ Restart my web browser ....as it's all disappeared! ]

Oh...

Where's my presentation for today? ... I said aghast, to myself looking at the screen with last term's version on it...

Oh my god! (I'm not religious, and I apologise to anyone reading, who is of course, but it seems we always turn to Him in our immediate despair).

What's happened! ...What have I done!

It [the cloud based app, but also arguably, me], had only gone and deleted the presentation that I've been working on for the last ten days!

Help!...  I looked in all the online help spaces for the Prezi site, but they all said, once a cloud file is deleted there is no way of recovering it, and "The 'undelete' function is only available in the fully paid up 'Pro-version of Prezzi'"... Arrggh!

Oh M.G... again....#"£$££$%% and a few other expletives about my own stupidity and applications not being fail safe, came out involuntarily again.

It's 9:05 am.
I need to be set off on my journey as soon as possible... I suppose I can stretch it to 9:30 which gives me an hour to get to University, park my car, and walk/run to the conference room with about 10mins for recovery time from breathlessness, so... What can I do?

Now thankfully, for some reason at 00:30 am the night before, having just finished the last touches to my swish Peregrine-centric, peregrine-zooming-binocular, media-spectacular, all out, "I'm quite chuffed with that!" show, I took the last decision to make screen shots of each frame of the sequence. This was done so that after the actual formal display, I could rush home, use the screen shots as the basis of the Adobe "Portable Data/ display Format" (.pdf).  Then, convert them through photoshop into a static version that I could upload to the University's submission portal for my tutors to assess as a hard 'electronic copy'...

The plan was, to get home after the presentation, upload it, then jump back in my car to drive for about 3 1/2 to 4 hours up the A1 to join with my wife in plenty of time to spend the weekend together in our new cottage. (She had been up there for the last few days, and I'd been working on my own).

Thank goodness that I had done this!... Between 9:10 and 9:35-ish, I managed to make a static version of the approx. 30 slides and put them into a coherent format....

Phew!

Then off to Uni!... Got there for 10:20 am, parked the car and ran over to the Contemporary Art Building... 5 minutes to get my breath back....

Thankfully, things seemed to have been going well, some previous presentations had over run a little, and the timetable was running a few minutes late...

I had time to cool down and gather my thoughts... [How had I been so stupid!]

Ah well, there was nothing I could do but to put my best foot forward and "blag" it, confidently presenting in the best way I could.

Best foot forwards, stiff upper-lip and all that.  I hadn't felt so nervous (and foolish), for a long time, my mind was churning, and I knew it would affect my delivery, even though I knew my material back to front almost!

Being too honest perhaps, I decided to mention it very quietly to my tutors, shortly after entering the room, "...Unfortunately, the the swish-animated-Prezi-version was 'trashed' at 9:20 or thereabouts, this morning, so I hope they did not mind if I used a static .pdf version instead?" [or similar words to that effect]...
"No, that is fine" was the reply.
I'm glad to say, they immediately put me at ease, and off I went...
- I was not at all very polished, nor as unflustered as I would have liked, but I did my best to get the messages across in a relaxed, yet confident way. Hopefully convincing the tutor's that my year's work to date was still very valid and progressing well; which of course, with their help, it had been. I think I did sort of OK but felt incredibly despondent with the morning's events and I've been worried ever since.  I recognise that failure can be a good learning tool, but why does it have to happen at critical moments I wonder.  Perhaps my tiredness of driving so much recently has been doing more harm than I thought?

Conclusions;

• Overall, I could definitely have done a much better delivery I think, but the content and messages were generally made in the right way; I believe, albeit, in a very unpolished, amateurish and rather 'clunky' way.  I'm certainly not happy with what I did.
• I was very flustered, and the lesson "not to alter anything in a presentation at the last minute unless absolutely vital" has been cemented.  I should, (and did), have known this already.  Something similar happened to me before when I was unexpectedly asked to give someone else's presentation at a major customer meeting many years ago, and my delivery was appalling then. I replayed those embarrassing memories and emotions and cursed my bungling for many months afterwards.  Perhaps I need to listen to myself and such recollections more!
• As it turned out, it took me the rest of the afternoon to completely re-draw and re write the animated "Prezi" version online.  
• I probably didn't need to do this, but I felt that I had to make a new digital Prezi version for completeness, and for my own sake of perfectionism.  I finished the down load of both the static copy and the electronic version to 'Turnitin' by about 7:15 pm that night, 4 hours later than planned. 
• When I drove up to Northumberland through some horrible weather, the A1 was shut, so had to make a long detour, and by the time I got to the cottage, it was nearly midnight.  I was shattered, and very down in my mood. It's taken most of today to come around and start thinking a little bit more positively about what my tutors said to me.
• I know now that I need to put all that behind me.  
• It was a real mess in my mind on Friday, and I felt utterly demoralised, but I know I need to push forward, I shall take a break for this next week or so, recharge, and perhaps re-evaluate things.  
• I still need to spend some time with my poor suffering wife who has been so amazingly supportive, and I just need to get on with more drawing too!   
• I have the opportunity now, I just need to get down to it!

Just about getting there! - Book submitted on time, but 'Turn-it-in' was down, creating a day of opportunity.

It's been an uphill struggle this week, and in reflection, the best-laid plans of mice and men fell apart a little bit at the weekend as I had to attend a 75th birthday party for a dear friend of many years, and ended up spending much longer there than anticipated.
This put out Sunday for much writing and reading, but I spent Monday concentrating on finishing my Peregrine essay.

There is a bit of uncertainty in my mind as to whether I am hitting the mark with regards to trying to thread all of the various voices of my research into this, now "short book".
While I have tried to incorporate the main players of research into the document, I am conscious that I have had to leave many of them out. This is because (while they are relevant on my influence), I feel that it is inappropriate to simply list the various contexts of power and juxtapose them with the references that I have chosen to include, (such as Prof Tim Ingold, Donna Haraway, John Berger, Thom van Dooren and others).  The inclusion of other sources in any detail will make the work far too big, beyond the 14,000-word limitation set by the module criteria.  I'm therefore taking a bit of a risk, but I need to leave them out!

The intention was to print my book completely at the University on Tuesday, but having lost a couple of days at the weekend, I ended up going right to the wire and finally finished formatting, proofreading and correcting minor errors until midday on Wednesday. I was then able to print out a draft copy on Wednesday afternoon for myself, and a hardcopy was lodged with the ADA office precisely at the deadline time of 4:30 PM!

Phew!

I'm generally quite pleased with the final outcome of the book, although having now submitted a hard copy, I was unable on Wednesday night to upload the digital version to Turnitin (the University's online essay submission repository)! This was because some unforeseen maintenance on their system had overrun from Tuesday the 18th which meant that we were unable to submit work electronically at all. Thank goodness I had been able to leave a hard copy with the secretarial staff!

However, having now had a chance to review and read my draft version, to be expected, I have found some typos and minor errors. Thankfully, I have used the extra time that Dr Bailey has kindly given us (until next Monday 24th July) as a result of the system maintenance outage to make corrections in the electronic version. I have therefore been able to submit the document a little earlier than the new deadline, this morning (21st), a corrected digital version through Turnitin.
Feeling quite pleased and relieved, I thought I'd write this quick blog this morning before taking a couple of breaths.

Conclusions:

• Life has been very hectic over this past couple of weeks with our new cottage, and the travelling time of 3 1/2 hours each way is somewhat exhausting. Nevertheless, I'm also conscious that my wife Julie has seen very little of me for the past nine months or so whilst I've been focused on my master's degree. So I am trying hard to make sure that she is happy, while at the same time driving up and down the A1 from West Yorkshire to Northumberland on a regular basis. 
• To cap it all, this weekend, were off to a wedding in a remote part of Wales for three days, which again is going to eat into my production time for the presentation I need to create for a week on Friday! Nevertheless, I'm reasonably confident that as I had started the presentation a couple of weeks ago, the format is reasonably fixed. The content is very much based on a replay of the development of my book, and so I should be able to finish this off on Monday and Tuesday next week, before driving Julie back up to the cottage late on Tuesday evening so new furniture can be delivered! 
• I can then stay there for Wednesday, keep polishing the "Prezi" before returning back south on Thursday morning. 
• Any small adjustments I need to make to the presentation can be made on Thursday evening before the actual formal assessment that I have on Friday the 28th July.  A lucky day maybe? It's the Peruvian Independence Day (La Veinti-ocho de Julio) and national festive day there, and being a Peruvian born subject, I hope it goes well there, and for me here in the UK! 

Phew, it's gonna be a busy week!

Moving forward with the book, but still rather behind!

Having spent the last week up in Northumberland at our new cottage, the good intentions of trying to use this week as a focussed production time have all but evaporated!  I've got a fair bit done, but the intention of using yesterday to print off a finished copy of the book at the University came and escaped me as I'm still writing and adding to the content, rather than condensing it and cutting it down to more concentrated, distilled outcome.

Nevertheless, the format is pretty much fixed now, using InDesign has been a great help, and together with the great help from Dr MacDonald earlier in the week, following our one to one last Friday, I've taken her advice and notes and tried to conform to her recommendations, especially in the style of voice for writing 'in the voice of the Peregrine'.  I need to put some thought into how I can rearticulate the ideas of kinship of the Peregrine, - I agree with Juliet that 'Brothers & Sisters, Mothers and Fathers' type language is far too anthropomorphic and human centric.  It almost sounds like a Marxist or Unionist angle of the committee of Peregrines! - So these sections can be re-worded much better I think using a kin-ship approach.

I also like the idea of reading the essay "What is it like to be a bat" by Thomas Nagel.  Thankfully, that is an essay that appears in the recent acquisition I made of "Animals: Documents of Contemporary Art", by Whitechapel Gallery and MIT press.  IT also has an extract of John Berger's "Why Look at Animals" there too, together with Donna Haraway's "Companion Species Manifesto"... So this was a great buy and brilliant source of texts.

And finally, the recommendation Juliet made to seek out the essay, by Jakob von Uexküll: A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds, where he explores a concept of Umwelt, (or in-around-world... I remember 'um und um' means 'around and about' or some-such like, because I thinks it's one of those words that has multiple meanings depending on contexts (like, 'for' and 'too'), if I recall the German translation correctly), - anyway, this essay seems very promising.

Conclusions;

• Still lots to do! - I'm a bit behind with the intention of printing the book out on Friday this week, and so this will now likely be done on Tuesday ready for submission on Wednesday 19th July. 
• I'm eating into my contingency a bit here, but arguably that's what it is built in for! - However, the distractions of last week and also having to take care of social engagements this weekend continues to put pressure on me that I could have avoided. 
• Whenever I plan workloads in advance, I often make the mistake of making my plans fit in with actual 'work-load' only, and I don't build in enough contingency for personal and family commitments right into my plan.  I wish I had done this here too, as this last week has been frantic in many ways, and we're out for the rest of this weekend too now, so more work will back up. - Ah well!
• I need to find a copy of Jakob von Uexkooll's essay that Juliet recommended.  It may be a little too late to influence my submission next Wednesday, only three days away effectively, but it will be worthwhile reading it before the presentation on 28th or certainly during the wrapping up in August, so there's still plenty of time to look at it I think. 

References;

Ramos, Filipa. (2016), Animals: Documents of Contemporary Art, by  Whitechapel Gallery & MIT Press, London & Massachusetts.
Jakob von Uexküll: A Stroll Through the Worlds of Animals and Men: A Picture Book of Invisible Worlds.

Format of the book, Thoughts on style and colour

The essay is coming along well.  My production is fitting appropriately with the time I have available, and a little light sketching ha been really useful through the creative process.  I've decided to keep my drawings and sketches sparse through the book as this artefact is really concentrations of the written word.  However, the act and performance of drawing help me to situate the writing as I move through the various stages.

With regards to the format of the dissertation, I felt that rather than create the standard and rather lifeless academic form of an A4 document, I have the artistic licence to make an interesting and engaging bound book.

The whole format of the design needs to be considered carefully to gain maximum appeal...

There is an element of a historical feel in my explanation of the relationship between humans and Falcons/falconry, so rather than adopt the conventional fonts usually associated with academic writings, such as Times Roman, or Times New Roman, or perhaps the non-serif styles of Helvetica or Arial, I thought it would be appropriate to find a similar older font. 
However, for readability, it would be too fanciful to create the document in a Chancery, Gothic or 'fancy' script style of typeface; this could distract the reader too much, and while I am bending the academic rules a little, it is valid to think that I should constrain myself a little and not bend them too much.

So, after this careful deliberation, I  have decided to use the older Caslon type font.  William Caslon was a master engraver of London, who between 1692 -1766 (his lifetime), developed much of the foundation for many of the serif style fonts still in use today. (Wikipedia, 2017).

What also makes a beautiful connection to my story, although I've decided to avoid putting this link into the essay text, is that William Caslon's company had a long history with Chiswell Street in London's St Luke's parish, Islington.  This street is just off Moorgate / Finsbury Pavement and near to Finsbury square.  This was the traditional heartland of the 'new' finance district in the 'City of London', and I spent many years working with the Financial Services Authority (what was), and later, my company head office, between 2010 and 2013 was based at No. 1 South Place, just on the other side of Moorgate from Chiswick Street.  My peers, management, and I regularly dined at the Chiswick Street Dining Rooms, and the area was quite well known to me during my last few years with the company.  So Chiswick Street, and hence Caslon, is another mysterious connection to my journey overall.

With regards to the book cover, this has prooved to be a more difficult assimilation.   The Peregrine must form a striking and yet appealing image to the first view of the book.  It's likely that a cropped version of a drawing that I made some time ago will form the frontispiece. I have yet to decide on which one though...

The background might be rather dull if I left it as plain white.  A bright colour is likely to be more noticeable, but there must be some connection to the book or my story.  This has been a problem to ponder for a while over the last week. - Yellow or Orange are obvious choices initially, but there is little connection still.

Lots of thinking about this have resulted in the conclusion that a bright light blue might be suitable, especially as Huddersfield has an identity with this light cyan colour through it's older football team colours? - Perhaps this is the way froward.  A few experiments are called for no doubt.


Conclusions:

• More connections/coincidences are looming and being overturned. 
• I'm thoroughly enjoying the rollercoaster ride and looking forwards to what happens next!
• I must be careful to keep the focus on the actual story and journey relevant to the narrative.  While I can make references to past events of my career here in my blog, I think it is important not to confuse this with my core narrative of "The Peregrine" and keep the theme of AJ Baker's writings in mind. 

References:

Wikipedia, 2017, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Caslon