Jessica Foley is a poet and a lecturer of critical and contextual studies in Art at IADT. With a diverse practice that includes writing, socially-engaged practices, and academic research, Jessica works with through relational acts of that most ancient technology, poetry. Her work activates presence, listening, imagination, communication and critically creative action with others, often through forms of writing and multi-media making.  

In 2016, Jessica earned her PhD at Trinity College Dublin through field-work with CTVR/the Telecommunications Research Centre (2010-2015). Her thesis developed the concept of inreach as a choreographic process of transversality necessary to support reflective/reflexive creative communication within STEM fields. She was an IRC/Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow at Maynooth University, working with Prof. Rob Kitchin and the Building City Dashboards team, to explore how poetic fiction can be used to engage the academic worlds of networked digital technologies, such as Internet of Things and Smart Cities.  

She is founder of Engineering Fictions, and co-founder of the Orthogonal Methods Group (with Prof. Linda Doyle/CONNECT), Difference Engine (with Mark Cullen, Gillian Lawler, Wendy Judge) and The Writing Workshop (with Jessamyn Fiore).

Context | Time Well Spent is both an art-work (2018) and a durational research-creation workshop (2022+) by Jessica Foley. 

Time Well Spent is a research-creation project that aims to amplify within academic communities “the capacity to make change in existing conditions” (Rukeyser, 1949). The existing conditions of academic research, learning and practice are increasingly shaped by values and imperatives of neoliberalism, extending and yet obfuscating the empires of power hidden within the curricula of institutional life (Lynch, 1989; Pack, 2028). As Justin Pack has argued of education in the United States, the university “has become an institution to baptize students into the waters of efficiency, to initiate them into the massive modern machinery of production, to teach them not only how to come out ahead but to love the competition. Sink or swim, publish or perish, triumph and win: there is no longer time to think and to wonder” (Pack, 2018:1). If this can be extrapolated as an increasingly symptomatic description of contemporary academia, where the concept of academic freedom is aggressively contested, then the question of how to “make change in existing conditions” is not an insignificant nor an easy one. It is a question that actually demands thought and wonder in order to be answered effectively. And so, the question becomes, how can we create the necessary conditions for change that go against the imperial drive to dominate, subdue and exploit inherent values of difference and delay, even while living and breathing the logic of such systems?

Time Well Spent, through research-creation, seeks to address this question of how to make change in existing conditions, albeit temporarily, whereby the conventions, technologies and lived experiences (somaesthetics) of knowledge-formation, teaching and research are gently yet firmly brought into question through needlework and hand-craft, poetry, and conversation.

I would be delighted to contextualise and present some initial findings and insights from this evolving, slow research-creation initiative at ISTR this summer.