Cardiff School of Art & Design>Staff>Dr Martyn Woodward

Dr Martyn Woodward

Associate Dean Student Experience
e: mwoodward@cardiffmet.ac.uk
w: www.trans-techresearch.net/researchers/martyn-woodward | www.plymouth.academia.edu/MartynWoodward

Specialist Subject Areas

Art & Design Theory, Philosophy, Practice.

My research and teaching is transdisciplinary in nature, traversing the spaces between disciplines and seeking insight that emerges beyond disciplines. My expertise crosses the disciplines of Fine Art, Graphic Design, Product Design, Film and Media, Architecture and Digital art and Technology, as well as Philosophy, Anthropology, Material Culture, Deep Human History and Archaeology. My work aims to foster an innate philosophical skepticism that challenges accepted axioms within art and design theory, philosophy and practice, liberating new questions and approaches.

My research explores the intermingled relationship between human experience, the created/designed world of artefacts and what we might call the ‘non-human’ world of matter and materials. I am particularly interested in how such interrelationships change or reconfigure our current view of reality, as well as the received histories of art and design practices, and how we come to understand what it means to ‘design’.

My research is media-archaeological, from the perspective of art and design, interrogating ‘how’ the artefacts of reality come into existence and how they come, and continue to become, to mean.

Qualifications

PhD
Master of Arts
BA (hons)

Biography

Martyn is a designer, media archaeologist, philosopher and theorist working primarily across the visual arts and design through theory, practice and teaching. His key interests lie in understanding how human experience shapes the material world, and in turn how the material world shapes human experience which re-configures received historical accounts of art and design through often-neglected archaeological, geological, genealogical and phenomenological contexts. His research brings together art and design theory history and philosophy together with the philosophy of mind, cognitive archaeology, and anthropology and geology in order to foster new ways of thinking across the territories of art and design history, theory, practice and pedagogy.

Current research

A Field-Theory of Images: Body, Environment, Artefact

Hegemony of language within the study of material culture, and human society since the late twentieth century has rendered partially mute the very creative tensions and resistances between the lived experience of a human body and the affective domains of human artefacts and the environment. This research brings together philosophy and practice, and looks at how we come to understand the ontogenesis of human artefacts in terms of an embodied subject that is immersed within an affective environment. Where human experience shapes the environment over time, the environment also shapes human experience, a reciprocal process that has no defined beginning or end — human history is a non-linear history that includes non‐human agents. Whether we are designing artefacts or spaces the invisible tensions and resistances between the domains of bodies and the environment that shape our activity are made visible through the creative process itself. Through a media-archaeology of human artefacts these tensions are made visible for reflection through the study of depictions, paintings, baskets, and architectural spaces, allowing a reflection upon the history, theory and practice of design based disciplines, to bring to light new questions and ideas, and to critically reflect upon the present.

Memberships

Design research Society

Contributing Researcher

Transtechnology Research, Plymouth University.
MeAT Research, Cardiff Metropolitan University.
Cognition Institute, Plymouth University.

Recent Publications and/or Exhibitions

Drayson, H and Woodward, M (2015) ‘Thinking About Fittingness’, In Blassnigg, M., Punt, M., Drayson, H and Woodward, M. (eds) Media Archaeology and Cognition: Transtechnology Research Reader 2014/15. Plymouth: Transtechnology Research Open Access Papers.

Woodward, M (2015) ‘From Interaction to Correspondance: A Review of Tim Ingold’s Bodies on the Run’, In Blassnigg, M., Punt, M., Drayson, H and Woodward, M. (eds) Media Archaeology and Cognition: Transtechnology Research Reader 2014/15. Plymouth: Transtechnology Research Open Access Papers.

Knight, J., Woodward, M. (2014) ‘A Media-Archaeology of Art or an Art of Media-Archaeology?’. Art Matters 2014, University of Barcelona, Dec 11-12.

Woodward, M (2014) From Interaction to Correspondance: An Archaeology of Visual Style’, TAG 2014, University of Manchester, Manchester, 17-20 Dec.

Woodward, M (2014) ‘A Monstrous Rhinoceros (As From Life): The Epistemological Role of the Enacted Pictorial Image.’ Yung, S.T, and Peibalga, A. Designing the Relationship between Humans and Technology. Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Egbe, A and Woodward, M. (2013) ‘The (im)material Aspects of Film Duplication: The Optical Printer as Philosophical Apparatus’, Deep History, Contingency and the Sublime, TTOA, Chepstow: Post digital Press

Woodward, M (2013) ‘A Shifting Sense of Human Scale: Tracing ‘Deep Time’ Aspects of Human Depiction’, TAG on-sea 2013, Bournemouth University, Bournemouth, 18-20 Dec.

Woodward, M. (2013) ‘ Archaeologies of Deep Time: Images of Tension and Scale’, Public Dialogues: At the Interlude between Body, Artifact and Discourse. Plymouth Arts Centre, Plymouth, July 12-14.

Woodward M (2013) ‘An Enacted Choreography Between Perceiver and Perceived’. The Lure of the New, Cognition Institute, Plymouth University, UK. March 20-22 2013.

Woodward, M (2013) ‘A Staging and Choreography of Theatrical Play: A Brechtian Aesthetic for Popular Culture.’ Jahrmann, M. and Felderer, B. (eds) Play & Prosume: Technology, Exchange and Flow, Vienna: Verlag für moderne Kunst Nürnberg GmbH, pp. 32-37

Woodward, M. (2013) ‘Being Through Painting and Weaving: A Brief Commentary on Intuition’, Deep History, Contingency and the Sublime, TTOA, Chepstow: Post digital Press

Woodward, M (2012) ‘An Electric Deep Time to the Modern Imagination’, L|R|Q 2.02, pp. xix-xx

Woodward, M (2012) ‘Artifacts, Entanglements & Deep History: A Reflection on the Sublime in Art and Science’, L|R|Q 2.01, pp. xi-xii.

Woodward, M (2011) ‘Selling the Immaterial: Avant-garde Practices and Commercial Advertising Forms’, TEF Expert Seminar: Play and Prosume. Kunsthalle Project Space Karlsplatz, Vienna, 13 July.

Woodward, M (2011) ‘The [Unseen] Modernist Eye: Minimalism, Defamiliarization and the Advertising Film’, Transtechology Research Reader 2011. Plymouth: Plymouth University.

Woodward, M (2010) ‘A Brief History and Theory of Not Looking: Toward a Field Theory of the Audiovisual’, Transtechnology Research Reader 2010. Plymouth: Plymouth University, pp. 106–120.

Woodward M (2010) ‘A field Theory of the In-De-Visible’. Boundary Works I, Wandesford Gallery, Cork, Republic of Ireland.

Public Talks / Engagement

Woodward, M, (2017) 'Vital things': the entangled lives of objects and people. Lufkin Coffee, Cardiff, May 21.

Cazeaux, C., Johnstone, A., Woodward, M, (2017) ‘I speak, therefore, the world’, Art & Philosophy: Salon style Debate, Octavo’s Book and Wine Bar, Cardiff, May 2.

Cazeaux, C., Johnstone, A., Stickler, O., Woodward, M., Wooley, D. (2017) ‘I phone, therefore I am’, Art & Philosophy: Salon style Debate, Octavo’s Book and Wine Bar, Cardiff, May 9.