Category: Writing

We take on writing projects, from artist catalogue essays to academic texts: book chapters and journal articles published on high-profile platforms from MIT Press to Journal of Futures Studies. See a few examples of Ralph Borland’s work below. If you’re interested in help with your writing projects, see the top post below for more information about consultation.

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Writing

Consulting

Do you need help with your writing project? Talk to me: my name is Ralph Borland, and I’m a transdisciplinary knowledge worker with over 15 years experience of higher education and research. I’ve worked across a number of institutions including University of Cape Town, New York University, and Trinity College Dublin.

My first teaching post was with the Expository Writing Program at New York University. I have two publications with MIT Press (see one of them below). I work across disciplines: I wrote my PhD thesis as an artist working in an engineering school, and my most recent fellowship was a collaboration with a surgeon which resulted in a publication in biomedical visualisation (see Bone Flute below).

I’ve supervised Honours and Masters theses. I can help you with your PhD work, and other writing projects. These are my current rates, for online or in person:

1st consultation: 30 minutes, free

R600 per hour thereafter, in a package of 5 hours = R3,000

Hours include reading your work and consultation time (one on one).

Get in touch.

Categories
Writing

Bone Flute

From 2021 – 2023 I was a research fellow in the Future Hospitals project at HUMA – The Institute for Humanities in Africa at University of Cape Town. I contributed to this Pan-African research project investigating the use of new technologies in healthcare in Africa, with my project Bone Flute: a collaboration with an orthopaedic surgeon in a public hospital in Cape Town to produce a flute from a 3D-printed replica of my femur, obtained by medical scan.

A short film from the project made in collaboration with Dara Kell

You can read more about the project, which I presented in my exhibition AIAIA – Aesthetic Interventions in Artificial Intelligence in Africa in fulfilment of my research post, on the project website boneflute.org, where I describe the entwinement of my personal experience as a medical patient during the course of my fellowship, with my research and artwork. The result is a story combining these threads, which you can read on the site.

The website text is drawn in part from a book chapter titled ‘Bone Flute: An Art-Science Research Project‘ (click the title to download a copy) exploring this combination of art-science, research and storytelling which I wrote for the series Biomedical Visualisation, in the 6th edition edited by Leonard Shapiro, published by Springer in September 2024.

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Writing

Design and Futures

In early 2019 studio lead Ralph Borland was asked if he would contribute an article on the theme of ‘Design and Futures’ to a special edition of the Journal of Futures Studies.

I wrote the article while in the thick of working on Dubship I – Black Starliner, a @spacecraft.africa project, in bursts late at night and early in the morning after working on the sculpture, thinking ‘why do I do this to myself?!’ but I was very happy with the result. Thanks to the editors Cher Potter and Stuart Candy for inviting me! I couldn’t resist the opportunity to write about my work in the context of futures studies, a really fascinating field, and there was a pleasing resonance in working at the same time on a sculpture which combines future vision with 800 years of technological history.

Ralph Borland’s Instagram post

The article is titled ‘SPACECRAFT: A Southern Interventionist Art Project’ in Volume 23 no.4 June 2019 of the Journal of Futures Studies. It is freely accessible online at jfsdigital.org ⁣⁣

SPACECRAFT XW01 2019
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Writing

Manual

There is pleasure in writing catalogue essays for artists – at the best of times it becomes a collaboration with the artist and their work, revealing aspects of the work that the artist may not have fully articulated even to themselves, as well as assisting them in communicating the concerns of their art to a public. It requires the work of a detective, conducting a deep reading of and engagement with the art works, and the work of an artist, willing to make word pictures and word sculptures for the reader.

Ralph Borland is proud of the results of this process in his catalogue essay for the sculptor Michele Mathison, for his exhibition Manual at What If The World gallery in Cape Town in 2015. View a pdf of the text here, and see a small extract below.

In ‘Dig down’, dozens of bare-metal spades with hard black-rubber handles dig and scrape at the ground, fused together in a multiple-exposure of work – turning now left, now right, forward and back, up and down. They are a condensed expression of a few minutes of labour, made monument – a sculptural expression of a work and motion study. In their hardness and their military tones, worn metal, they hint at the violence of work: this exertion, this digging and scraping, this biting into and relocating of unseen earth.

Manual, Ralph Borland (2015)
Dig down, Michele Mathison 2014
Categories
Writing

The PlayPump

The PlayPump diagram

In January 2015 a chapter I wrote about the PlayPump, the subject of my PhD work, came out in the book The Gameful World on MIT Press. I enjoyed the opportunity to write about the PlayPump from the perspective of game-play and ‘the ludification of society’. You can download a near-to-final proof of the chapter here