Difference or Sociality was a student led research project centred around the text ‘Difference or Sociality’ by Scott Lash, written in 1996 for symposium at the Jan Van Eyck Academie called ‘Towards a theory of the image’.

This text was given to a number of students in Fine Art Media by tutor Klaas Hoek in response to seeing our work, and became a clear point of reference and connection between our practices. The text ‘Difference or Sociality’ begins with an analysis of Marshall McLuhan’s ‘the medium is the message’ as a way to rethink the politics of how images are received by the viewer and discusses the potential of the politics of representation moving away from ‘difference’ and towards ‘sociality’.

We organised a week of research at The Slade Research Centre, developing existing and new works that touched on and related to ideas within this text. On the last day of our research week we organised a crit with other students from our department, Klaas Hoek, Joy Sleeman and invited writer and art historian Tom Snow to contribute to the discussion.

Graduate Research 2014 - Difference and Sociality (pdf)