The movement of the aside

Abstract

Using the aside itself as a syncretic research methodology to identify the field of study, this project considers the transposition of the rhetorical figure of the aside as a poetic strategy in art.

Tracking the aside across diverse articulations, the research identifies specific instances in which the movement of the aside is from a type of framing of the work to being the work. With this shift, the convention dissolves and what emerges are autonomous poetic forms.

Rarely indexed in books on stagecraft or marked in written scripts, the aside has not been extensively theorised, only gestured to.

Beginning as convention with a meta-linguistic point, the aside is a technique that an author uses to convey to the listener or reader a meaning, with the goal of persuading them towards considering a topic from a different perspective.

Situating itself in the space of commentary, drawing attention to and incorporating the periphery of what is shown, the aside introduces new material that rebounds on the aside itself.

When the aside usurps its secondary status in relation to a main text, it opens a way into something that wasn’t accessible before. This movement can include any kind of materialisation.

This research draws the wide movement of the aside to poetics. The major shift is from the incidental to the important. Each moment/ movement/ instancing of the aside breaks the poetics down into details.

Identifying instances in which the aside is significant, uncontained, or perhaps unrecognised for how it comes to visibility, the research considers how specific works articulate these movements and how these activating structures create meaning.

Existing structures are elaborated on in the writing and studio work. Contingent methodologies are developed in and through specific works in a dialogical mode. An asiding across texts, the written work is part of the creative work.

The research focuses on language and the meta-linguistic aspect of making in which the consciousness of that language is articulated in the work itself, dropping out the main text and holding in the annotation.