On the vagaries of performance perception

Last night we saw Feist play at the Palais Theatre in Melbourne. It was a seated show and we got tickets quite late, ended up high in the balcony.

Feist is an amazing performer and by all accounts the show was fantastic: great renditions of her songs, a very tight and accomplished band, fun audience interaction, great stage presence, excellent sound quality, wonderful music. I could tell, objectively, that the show was fantastic.

Subjectively it was a different story. K and I came out of the show feeling angry, disappointed, upset. Why? Because of the lighting setup. “Really?” you say, “you were that upset by the lighting at a gig?” This sounds churlish I know, but hear me out.

In any normal circumstance I wouldn’t pay any attention to the lighting at a gig. But for this gig, someone, somewhere, had made a decision: there would be lots and lots of silhouette effect, through the use of a little smoke from a smoke machine and some backlighting on stage. That’s fine — I like a good silhouette as much as the next guy: it can be exciting, dramatic — but this decision came with a pretty serious drawback for people sitting in our particular (numbered seat) position:

The lights, when on, shone directly in our eyes. The entire time. The lights flashed at regular intervals. They changed colour. I don’t know if you’ve spent much time on stage (I have a little), but stage lights are bright. Sun reflecting off snow bright. High-beam headlight bright.

It is a testament to the quality of Feist’s performance that we stayed at all. We managed to cope by sometimes wearing sunglasses, or turning away and closing our eyes at very regular intervals. Our experience of the show (which should have been about the experience of the performance), became the experience of trying to enjoy the show despite the unnerving nature of the lights in our eyes. Just when we were getting in to a great version of a song, we’d get a blast of bright light straight in the face, along with the resulting retinal after-image which affected our vision even when the lights were off. The best parts of the show were the songs where they didn’t use the backlight, but I spent a lot of that time preparing to shut my eyes again quickly or turn away when the next light came on.

It seems ridiculous. I feel like an old curmudgeon, complaining about lighting at a gig. In many ways, the fact that it was ‘only’ the lighting makes it worse: if it was a bad performance at least I could say “well, not every performance is good, maybe she had an off night” . I’ve been to bad shows, ones that I was particularly excited about (including the infamous Cat Power show at the Corner Hotel where she didn’t even finish a song). But this wasn’t a bad show, it was a ruined experience. As I said, by any objective metric the show was wonderful. We should have walked out elated, enriched. But we didn’t.

* * *

This points to a peculiar issue when it comes to recording and archiving live performances: that the experiential memory of a spectator — “the spectator’s more or less distracted perception” ^[1] —  can be at odds with the authoritative, ‘documentary’ nature of the archive.  The Feist show would have made an excellent recording, video or otherwise. But our experience of the show — the ‘authentic’ live memory — was something completely different.

To address this problem, Matthew Reason [great name! - ed.] argues for a “mutable live performance archive”, that “accept[s] the positive valuation off memory’s transformative power.” ^[2] This is my current understanding of where the Living Archive Project is headed: an attempt to create a digital performance archive that somehow captures the complexities of memory involved in archiving an ephemeral, live performance.

1. Pavice, Patrice. 1992. Theatre at the Crossroads of Culture, London: Routledge, p. 67 ↩
2. Reason, Matthew. 2003. “Archive or memory? The Detritus of live performance.” New Theatre Quarterly 19 (73): p.87 ↩

Manufactured nostalgia, authentic structure

We threw a new years eve party this (last?) year. We decided early on that we wanted to have a costume party of some kind, and after tossing a few themes about with various friends we settled on one we thought would work for everyone: we would have a 90s party. Reuben and Kate’s all or nothing 90s party.

Why 90s? Most of our friends are in the 25 to 35 age group, so they were teenagers in the 90s. This is more important than you might think: because we were teenagers, the 90s was the period in our lives when we really started engaging with the world, when we became aware of music, and art, and cinema, and each-other. It was a formative period. And because we lived it, we knew all the fine details. No clichés and stereotypes. We remember exactly what we wore. We were there, man.

So: we wanted our invitation to reflect the party theme, and to act as a nostalgia trigger — something to remind our friends of the 90s, to inspire them when it came to costumes, to get them in to the right mood. We wanted it to be fun.

In the past, Kate and I have made well received video invitations for events (another party, and a wedding). This was our original plan: to collect classic 90s videos (movie trailers, TV shows, advertisements) and produce a video mash-up in the style of Liquid Television. But after some discussion we realised that no, a video wasn’t actually appropriate.

Why? Because in the 90s, amateur video production was expensive and hard. It would have been almost impossible to collect all of those videos in one location and edit them together. You couldn’t send out a video invitation to someone without posting them a videotape, let alone send them one over the dial-up internet.

* * *

In Archive Fever ^[1], Derrida suggests that the process of archivization (consigning an external trace of an object to the archive) is determined by technological constraints such that it directly affects our reading of history. Or: we are limited in what we can capture in the archive by technological constraints. (Full disclosure: I am yet to read Archive Fever, my knowledge here is second-hand via Marlene Manoff ^[2] ).

The archivization argument seems to point to the political implications of the archivists curatorial decision: you can only add the objects that the technology will allow — “the structure of the archive determines what can be archived” ^[3] — thus determining what can be added to (and hence, retrieved from) the historical record.

But this technological limitation is also interesting when considered in the context of a layperson reading the archive, especially if he/she is reading for some kind of nostalgic gratification. The structure of the archive is laden with meaning, and the technical constraints of a period are essential markers of the authenticity of the archival object.

* * *

Ok, so what does any of this have to do with an invitation to a 90s party?

Well, we wanted to create a (loosely defined) archive: a collection of curated works, representative of the era, with the goal of manufacturing nostalgia for the 90s. But for our invitation to be an authentic nostalgic trigger, we required more than just the correct archival objects: we required the correct structure, the correct technical limitations. And this was the 90s — when we, the non-archivist laypeople, began to break the boundaries between the personal collection and the public one.

I’m talking of course about the personal “home page” — the first living archive. So, without further ado, I present to you our own attempt at manufactured nostalgia: Welcome to my home page.

1. Derrida, Jacques. 1996. Archive fever: a Freudian impression. University of Chicago Press. ↩
2. Manoff, Marlene. 2004. “Theories of the Archive from Across the Disciplines.” portal: Libraries and the Academy 4 (1): 9-25. ↩
3. Ibid. p. 12 ↩

Two short questions

I’ve been thinking again. Well, actually, I’m a PhD student, I’m always thinking. More specifically, I’ve been thinking about personal digital archives again. And I have two questions:

What does the archive gain in the transition from physical to digital?

And, (perhaps more importantly):

What does the archive lose?

No coherent answers yet, but I thought I better note the questions down. All part of the messiness of my PhD.

Performing 2012

There is a certain amount of struggle required to get back in to a work rhythm after a break. So I’m writing this post partly just as a way to force me to start writing seriously about my work again, instead of posting drawings of my cameras, or photos of paint, or photos of my photos.

I had this idea that I could write a really great comprehensive post about all the amazing things I did and learned last year. But that was a struggle too. Not because there weren’t things to write about, oh there were. But because I didn’t know where to start. I started a list of All the Great Things that I Did, Thought, Read Etc Etc last year, but that got tiresome, and really didn’t do the year justice. And now I’m thinking — what is this about anyway? I’m keeping pretty good documentation of my PhD work in notebooks, in a Scrivener document, in Lightroom catalogue, in a series of artefacts. I know what I’ve read, I know what I’ve written. Why do I need to write about it, again, here, in public?

I’ve been reading “The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life” by Erving Goffman. I’m not far through it yet, but I’m already fascinated by his take on human interactions and relationships: viewing our interactions through a frame of performance. When we interact with each other, we perform: we project a view of ourselves in an attempt to control the impression that the other (the observer) receives. But the observer also projects an “agreeable view” of said projection to form a working consensus: an agreement about the nature of the situation. In any given interaction, the observer is also performing.

When an individual plays a part, he implicitly requests his observers to take seriously the impression that is fostered before them. ^[1]

This blog is part of my performance as a PhD student, as a professional designer, as an amateur photographer, etc. But who are my observers (and do I even have any)? Who, exactly, am I performing for?

And herein lies a problem: I am my own observer. I am performing on this blog, hoping that I will take seriously the nature of the impression. But I am well aware of my own performance: I know what I am presenting, here, in public. I know what I am keeping hidden backstage. As I read back through my blog posts about my PhD, the impression that I get is one of controlled thought, of meticulous thinking, of structure an neatness. But I know that isn’t true: a PhD is messy. And maybe that’s why I felt that a structured post about All the Great Things that I Did, Thought, Read Etc Etc can’t do my work justice: because it’s just not messy enough.

I don’t really know how to follow through on this idea just yet: it’s just an observation at this stage. But perhaps an interesting one for how I approach my PhD this year.

1. Goffman, Erving. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. 1st ed. London, United Kingdom: Penguin. p28 ↩

“You don’t need a methodology”

This would have to be some of the best and (in some ways) oddest advice about doing PhD study that I’ve yet heard.

It comes from Margot Brereton, and was part of some of the wonderful feedback that I received at this years doctoral consortium at OzCHI 2011. (And this is certainly not to discount the excellent and insightful advice from Gerhard Fischer ^[1], Lian Loke ^[2], and Toni Robertson ^[3].)

Ok, so. You don’t need a methodology. What does this mean?

The way I understood it is this: To do research, you need a question, and way of getting data to respond to that question. You then need a way of analysing that data to answer your question. Your question drives your methods. Your methods for data collection and your methods for data analysis are different.

Once you have some data you can begin to ask yourself: what does your data tell you about your question? This is an iterative process: a PhD is about question reframing in response to you data.

But you don’t start with methodology. What you need is a good question.

1. “if you do not like what you are are doing then it is a bad idea” ↩
2. “treat a PhD like an apprenticeship: find a good supervisor” ↩
3. “The PhD is the side effect of the person you become” ↩

Documentation, not things.

What if the video archive isn’t a ‘video archive’, but an archive of ‘events that are recorded on the videos’? What is the difference? The current Circus Oz video archive is quite literal: a cupboard full of VHS and Mini-DV tapes. But once they are digitised at stored ‘in the cloud’ (as it were), it won’t be the video-object that exists in the archive (to the extent that we can say that digital objects ‘exist’ in any real sense), what will exist in the archive is a subjective record of a performance. Or less academically: you aren’t watching ‘videos’ anymore, you are watching a certain record of someone’s perspective of an event.

Here’s how it works: There is a performance. This is a real event, verifiable, happening in the world. The events of the performance are captured on video (in some format). This video is transcoded into a series of digital copies: one ‘archive quality’ (theoretically lossless), one ‘working copy’ (optimised for web streaming) for general access, others, probably stored in the nebulous cloud. Other data is associated with this copy (archive metadata, descriptions, images). Together these make up a record of a performance: a representation of the event. Documentation, not things.

How does this change the way of thinking about a video archive and archive practice? Is it because we are not concerned with preserving objects but with preserving perspectives?

In “the serendipity of the unexpected, or why a copy is not an edition”, Sarah Werner notes a problem with the digital archiving of manuscripts: that the process of digitising a copy of a text can destroy the history of the artefact. It is common practice, for example, to leave out blank pages when digitising text:

[..] their surrogates start with the frontispiece or title page, then move to the dedication/preface/letter to the reader/start of the text. But you know what’s missing? The blank verso of the title page. Does that matter? I don’t know. It might. It depends on what you’re looking for. But you’ll never know that you might be looking for an answer that depends on that blank presence if you don’t know that it’s not there.

Regarding the video archive, this point is still relevant: the representations of performance were originally on VHS and transcoded via SAMMA, so we should keep evidence of this. Does that matter? I don’t know. It might. It would be great to be able to see who’s handwriting is on the original videotape. It depends on what you’re looking for. But regarding a performance archive, I would argue, it is not so important that physical attributes of the record object are kept, what matters is the performance itself. We also have to deal with the fact that the physical aspects of the record are actually becoming harder to preserve as all steps of the archiving process move to digital: Circus Oz are shooting digital video now, writing show reports and tape descriptions on a computer, not by hand.

This is where the ‘living’ part of the ‘living archive’ comes in: To archive a performance, we need multiple perspectives from primary sources (ie, people who were there) to be able to clearly interpret the contents of the archive. If we are concerned with a record of perspectives, not a record of objects, then allowing people to add content (memories, stories, …) to the archive makes perfect sense.

Rational reframing

Or, adopting the language of your clients as a manifestation of design rationality

As I work on the design of a prototype for the Circus Oz Living Archive I’ve been playing around with some basic experiments in reframing. It is a bit of a language game: by changing the way we talk about [something] we can change the way that we think about [something]. I started with a question: we are building a prototype, but what is a prototype? The answer could be very simple: a prototype is a thing, designed to test an idea.

This is where the language game begins. What else is a prototype? A prototype could be an introduction (perhaps the first time a client has interacted with a product or idea). A prototype is a tool (for data collection). A prototype is a rhetorical device (by leaving things in, or taking them out of a prototype, you are making an argument for/against certain aspects). A prototype is a process. You get the idea…

By asking the question, “if the prototype was x, what form would it take?” I am trying to force myself to leave behind my implicit understanding of what a prototype is for: perhaps a prototype can be for much more than testing and solving a particular design or technical problem. Schön calls this imposition of a ‘new way of setting the problem’ a ‘frame experiment’. This kind of experiment forces a reflection on your practice, or ‘Reflection-in-Action’ [and sorry about the sexist nature of the designer as ‘he’ in this passage]:

When someone reflects-in-action, he becomes a researcher in the practice context. He is not dependent on the categories of established theory and technique, but constructs a new theory of the unique case. His inquiry is not limited to a deliberation about means which depends on a prior agreement about ends. He does not keep means and ends separate, but defines them interactively as he frames a problematic situation. ^[1]

This kind of frame imposition can lead you to strange and interesting places. One of the paths that I’m interested in pursuing in my PhD research is the idea that performance practice and interaction design practice share certain qualities. This gave me a new frame to work with: What if we consider the ‘prototype’ analogous to the ‘rehearsal’?

Work with me here: A prototype shares much in common with a process of iterative development in a performance context. The rehearsal and the prototype are both tools to develop, explore, communicate and evaluate ideas. The prototype, like the rehearsal, encourages improvisation and reflective feedback. The prototype, like a rehearsal, can take place in a context similar to that of its final outcome. The prototype, like a rehearsal, can be understood as a means to an end, a version of an artefact that is subject to change, a collaborative work in progress.

One of the well known problems with the use of prototypes in interaction design is that it can be very hard to communicate to a client what a prototype is, and what a prototype is for. You can make the prototype as ‘low fidelity’ as you like, but this can lead to the client thinking that it is ‘broken’, you can make it ‘high fidelity’ which can lead to the client thinking it is finished (and so only providing superficial feedback) ^[2], you can carefully ‘filter’ your prototype ^[3] to test for a single quality, but this doesn’t let the client experience how the design might be used in a real world context. It can be really hard to get a client engaged in a process like prototyping.

I would say a lot of these issues actually arise from communication/language problems. A designer intuitively understands ‘prototype’: what it means, what it affords. But this is a technical, professional language. What if instead we adopted the language of our client, using a metaphor for prototype that they can understand?

According to Löwgren and Stolterman:

‘a designer has to have a solid understanding of the complexity involved in being rational. When a designer works with a client, she has to be able to appreciate the client’s understanding of rationality, in relation to her own understanding of it. A basic appreciation of that relationship is fundamental to the communication between designer and client. Rationality is therefore not only a matter of how to do things, but a precondition for good communication’ ^[4].

I would suggest that appropriating language of a client is an explicit attempt to understand a different rationality: for a designer, it is ‘obvious’ that a prototype is subject to change, unfinished, wants feedback, etc. For a performer, while ‘rehearsal’ has these ‘obvious’ qualities, ‘prototype’ sounds technical and meaningless.

This example of reframing in the language of practice is particularly interesting in the context of the Circus Oz Living Archive project, considering that one of the points of adoption for the digital archive is actually as part of their rehearsal practice. So: the prototype of the digital video archive is a ‘rehearsal’ for the digital archive, it is also a tool to use within the context of a rehearsal.

‘Rehearsal’ has pretty clear implications: this is an unfinished object; this is something open to change; this is an object with the potential for collaborative development; this is something that, while not final, will be public at some point in the future. Using this language can work the other way too: reframing ‘prototype’ as ‘rehearsal’ serves to remind me of the performing arts community context in which I’m working, and also serves to remind me of the prototype’s transience and malleability (which should help prevent me from becoming too fixated on a particular idea or design solution this early in the project).

1. Schön, Donald A. 1991. The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action. Aldershot: Avebury. p68 ↩
2. McCurdy, Michael, Christopher Connors, Guy Pyrzak, Bob Kanefsky, and Alonso Vera. 2006. Breaking the fidelity barrier. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems  – CHI  ’06, 1233. Montréal, Québec, Canada. ↩
3. Lim, Youn-Kyung, Erik Stolterman, and Josh Tenenberg. 2008. “The anatomy of prototypes.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 15 (2) (July): 1-27.  ↩
4. Löwgren, Jonas, and Erik Stolterman. 2004. Thoughtful Interaction Design: A Design Perspective on Information Technology. The MIT Press, December 1. p50 ↩

Editing is harder than writing

Last week I had my first attempt at writing an ACM conference paper. It’s not really a full academic ‘paper’ — it’s for a doctoral consortium — but it was still an interesting experience: I am submitting my PhD research proposal, and in order to fit it in to their conference format (seen above), I had edit my 5000 word (plus references) proposal down to ~2500 words (including references).

One thing about ACM papers is that they proscribe a structure that you must work to (including section headings). This messed with me quite a bit as my original proposal was written as a ‘slow build’ argument: my research questions and arguments were introduced slowly, arguments for research questions scattered through a literature review, or arguments for a research approach scattered through the explanation of a problem. I have a habit of using narrative and repetition as a rhetorical device: I’ll introduce a concept early on with a sentence, later  repeat that sentence with an expansion, later in the piece explain in more detail using the same words.

This doesn’t work for this kind of paper. I had to restructure my argument to fit to introduction/context —> literature review —> gap/research question —> project methodology, and the low word count meant I couldn’t play around with repetition at all. The positive: I had to re-think my argument such that it is now a little clearer in my head. The negative: I think this structure is boring way to make an argument. No narrative, boring to read.

What I’ve discovered (and I’m sure it’s not an original discovery): editing is harder than writing. I can bang out 500 to 1000 words per day with no problem. Editing those words to a concise structure, that’s a different story.

Communicating design synthesis

When synthesising the reams of data that we collected on the user-experience redesign for Pool, we produced several formal design artefacts that we used in workshops to communicate our thoughts and findings to stakeholders within the ABC. This process—explicitly encouraged by Jeremy Yuille—appears to be a direct response to Jon Kolko ^[1] and his argument that the private nature of design synthesis is one cause of problems in design practice:

When synthesis is conducted as a private exercise, there is no visible connection between the input and the output; often, even the designers themselves are unable to articulate exactly why their design insights are valuable. ^[2]

The artefacts that we produced were expressive objects ^[3], designed help us understand our process, but also designed to help include the client in abductive sensemaking. While these objects couldn’t capture the full gestalt of our insights, they allowed a level of understanding beyond the usual presentation and subsequent discussion of a traditional design outcome.

Kolko spends much of his paper defining an explicit sensemaking action framework, complete with some oddly specific instructions (my emphasis):

The designer will begin to identify insights in the data that has been gathered by combining an observation (I saw this) with knowledge (I know this). They can then write the insights on yellow note cards. ^[4]

While the methods he describes (reframing, concept mapping, insight combination) are not new to contemporary interaction design, the formalisation of a pattern language for synthesis methods is welcome and well justified, if a little over-prescriptive.

Where my experience on Pool fits here is not in relation to this formalisation, although we did use variations of the methods discussed in Kolko’s paper. Instead, it is in response to Kolko’s implicit argument for more effective communication of the sensemaking process to stakeholders. Discussing the lack of formality in design synthesis, Kolko notes:

Clients don’t see the relationship between design research and design ideas, and therefore discount the value of design research and design synthesis entirely. ^[5]

I can confirm this anecdotally from my own experience in various design and development roles in the industry. I imagine that most designers would have experienced this in some form during their careers. This not as an argument for formalisation so much as an argument for more effective communication of process. You might call it a ‘second-level externalisation’ of the existing ‘externalisation of knowledge’ performed by the designer during abductive sensemaking ^[6]. It is an attempt to make the implicit explicit.

What might this process involve? In the case of Pool it involved producing artefacts during sensemaking that acted as formal representations of our process. These artefacts were then used as a tools to communicate the (usually implicit) sensemaking to those not privy to the (usually private) insights of the designer(s). As a response to Kolko, it seems so obvious when stated: “The client does not recognise the value of design research and design synthesis—we really should communicate what we are doing more effectively”.

Kolko’s response to the sensemaking problem is a valuable industry focussed one: to formalise the processes through an applied framework (one that help designers understand their own insights), and to suggest that design practitioners allocate time to this formal process. I suggest an addition: produce formal artefacts during and after synthesis that can be used to communicate your process to stakeholders.

While synthesis is still primarily performed as a reflective and private exercise, production of formal records and artefacts could help a designer consider how and why they’ve reached certain design insights, improving the chances of effective articulation of concepts. These artefacts, when used as part of a client engagement activity, could help stakeholders to participate in—and better understand the value of—the research and sensemaking process.

1. Kolko, J. (2010). Abductive thinking and sensemaking: The drivers of design synthesis. Design Issues, 26(1), 15-27. ↩
2. Ibid. p. 25 ↩
3. Dewey, John. 2005. Art as Experience. Trade pbk. ed. New York: Perigee Books. ↩
4. Kolko, J. (2010), p. 26 ↩
5. Ibid., p. 16 ↩
6. Ibid., p. 18 ↩

Pattern recognition

I’m at that funny starting stage of my PhD where I’m trying to write a well defined research question, but in order to know what it is that I need to define, I need to read as widely as possible. I’m following all sorts of tangents at the moment: new media theory, interaction design, phenomenology, anthropology, media convergence, digital memory, performing arts practice, creative practice – to name a few, and I do mean a few. ^[1]

I am starting to see patterns popping up, particularly as I begin to circle around a bit of a theme: something to do with prototyping process, and how video can be used as a rapid prototyping tool in the performing arts.

But I still feel like I’m flailing a bit, so as a break from reading and note-taking I invented a pattern recognition exercise. ^[2] From the top of my head (no looking back out my notes), I wrote down terms that I though were important, had come up regularly, or needed definition. As far as I can see, these are all terms that I’ll need to use in my research proposal.

Next, I put the words in a random order (so as not to make any direct associations), and for each word,  wrote a sentence or two about what it meant in terms of the literature, any contentious issues around the term, how I thought it related to my research, and how I thought it related to the overall project.

What this helped me do was identify any terms that need more definition, terms that were present in my writing but not in the literature, terms that were related to or defined by other terms in my list.

It also helped me in finding my ‘location’: I could identify as soon as I started writing which terms I considered the most important. The exercise was also an extremely useful idea generation tool – as I was writing each term, I would frequently find myself going back and forth, adding and removing from my other descriptions as ideas coalesced and interacted with each other.

Research at this early stage is particularly hard for me, because I constantly have to fight the urge to follow up everything in depth. Everything that I read sends me off on a new tangent, and everything that I read, see, hear, or experience seems relevant in some way – but it’s important that I define how it is relevant.

1. I guess you want some names? (Academics love names): Liu, McLuhan, Dourish, Boehner, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, Geertz, Lanier, Jenkins, van Dijck, Brockmeier, Kozel, Birringer, Vaughan… ↩
2. At least, I think I might have invented it. I haven’t seen or read about this technique before in any case. ↩

Video as performance prototype

There is quite an established community and commercial practice of using video as a prototyping method, especially in software design. I made video prototypes the central artefact of my App a Week project, and in my prototyping work with Jeremy we used video to test interactions before building working iOS prototypes.

Why does video work so well for exploration in interaction design? Interactions happen in sequence and over time – it is can be hard to properly understand interactions when seen as discrete elements, it is better to experience them as they will behave over time – video simulations allow you to play with sequence and timing easily. Video is cheap and quick to produce – programming a complex interaction can be time consuming and often exceedingly difficult – it’s much easier to knock-up a quick video that simulates the process rather than building it only to find it doesn’t work as expected, or needs to happen in a different order or though a different process.

You know what else happens over time, involves discrete steps to form a coherent sequence, and is time consuming and often exceedingly difficult to produce and test? Physical performance.

Because the act of performance is frequently very physically demanding, experimenting with repertoire is both time consuming and exhausting. Repeating an act in a different order is very hard and sometimes dangerous, cutting a video in to a new order is fast and cheap.

This seems to be the overriding attitude of Mike Finch, Circus Oz’s artistic director. When working through the development of an act he will shoot multiple rough performances, cut them up in to sequences and sets of skills, edit them rapid-fire (with the performers watching), try new sequences, new music – mostly using a Flip camera and iMovie, but sometimes just with whatever he can get his hands on. I’ve been called upon several times to shoot video – any free hands in the room at the time get co-opted in to the process.

To me, this process seems somewhat like creating a sketch or an animatic (I have heard Mike call the process “sketching” in fact) – it is not the performance, but it is a way to test the performance, quickly and cheaply. A prototype of performance, from the perspective of the audience.

There is some difficulty getting performers to understand and engage with this. I watched time and time again as Mike would shoot an act and set about experimenting with sequence using iMovie, while talking the performer though the changes. Meanwhile the performer would attempt to ignore the video and try something on the stage instead, while Mike focussed on the screen. So what exactly is going on here?

David Carlin says this is part of the “don’t look at the screen, look at me” – the narcissism of the performer. I think it is more than that – I’m guessing that circus performers engage with their performance on a physical and performative level (which makes logical sense), so the act of watching themselves on a small screen actively disembodies themselves from their understanding of what they are trying to do.

I think that the video process is too abstract and intellectual for a lot of performers. To the performer, their understanding isn’t in “seeing” their performance – their knowledge is the knowledge of the act itself – physical knowledge, doing knowledge, being knowledge.

Practice

I thought I had a really good idea about where I wanted to go with my PhD research. I’ve been interested in memory and nostalgia for a really long time, especially when it comes to the storage and retrieval of memories, the emotional attachments that we form with physical objects, and the way that we respond to digital objects as opposed to physical ones. “Great” I thought, “I’m getting somewhere with this”. I did some reading, some planning, I’ve read papers and books in fields like memory studies, cognitive psychology, human-computer interaction, media studies, anthropology. And I wrote a draft research proposal, an idea for a research question, on design for nostalgia and serendipity in archive software. “Not too shabby” I thought, “for someone who is new to this whole academic research gig.”

But then something went wrong.

For the last few days I’ve been hanging out in the rehearsal space with the lovely ensemble at Circus Oz as they prepare for their upcoming show in Melbourne, and as we (RMIT that is) ramp-up our research practice where the Living Archive project is concerned. It was a great experience (and one I hope to continue) – I’ve been “playing anthropologist” – hanging out in the corner with my notebook, observing people, conversations, physical and technological practices. Watching how a group like this puts together a coherent and complex circus show is absolutely fascinating.

Problem is, this tiny bit of actual, on-the-ground, in-the-thick-of-it research has changed my mind completely about what it is that I want to do with my PhD. I keep saying that I want to produce “useful, simple software”, and from my observations so far, what would be useful to Circus Oz isn’t some kind of archive that facilitates nostalgic engagement and tries to transfer characteristics and practices from “real world” archives in to “digital” archives blah blah blah… What they want is something they can use, on-the-ground, in-the-thick-of-it, as they work and develop and produce and perform. And there is something in that thought – a research question that addresses a real, useful, practical application: video archives as an augment to an existing physical development practice, or practical applications for video in performing arts repertoire development, or….?

So I’m a little stuck now. I need to turn around and re-write my research proposal form an entirely different perspective (which involves a whole new path of background-reading), and I’m under time pressure: I want to get a new draft to my supervisor this weekend, I’m off to WWDC next week, and I’m supposed to present my research proposal to a panel as soon as I get back.

I’m just guessing here, but I get the feeling that this is just how PhDs go. Everything you read and do sends you off on a new tangent – you follow a path for a while and get sidetracked, or hit a dead-end and have to turn around. I’m chalking this one up to experience – if I’m going to spend all this time watching circus performers practice their backflips, I might as well start practicing mine.

On headphones and headspace

I’ve been a fan of Sennheiser headphones for a long time. My HD25s have followed me around the world, they have wonderful sound isolation and a great flat frequency response that I love, and I’m a big fan of supra-aural headphones (not for everyone, I know). I’ve just bought a pair of smaller, lighter, Sennheiser PXC-250 II for travel and work. They are lightweight, have great sound, and the noise cancelling works quite well – the sound quality isn’t perfect (with noise cancelling headphones it never is), but it’s a lot better than iPhone earbuds and they are more convenient to carry than my HD25s.

I’ve always, almost without exception, listened to music while working. For the majority of this period, “work” consisted of programming – working with other peoples designs, making them interactive, making them move, solving minor technical or technological or design or architectural (in the software sense) problems. Plus the other minutiae that goes along with any freelance or programming job – emails, code maintenance, communication, business management issues. This was “work”.

And my work could always be done while listening to something. In more recent years as my programming skills improved and my programming work became more straightforward (I’d developed patterns to solve the same problems over and over – most websites are pretty much the same after all), I began listening to podcasts – my brain was at a point where my work was done in some subconscious part, separate from words and language. I could listen to people talking and comprehend that information at the same time as “working”. Very occasionally I would run in to a problem where I had to turn off my audio for a minute or two to get through something, but that was it. I liked this about working – in later years as a bored programmer it was something to look forward to: work was my music and information time.

I’m no longer a programmer in the same sense anymore. Although programming will be part of my work for the next few years, my work is not primarily programming – my work is now “research”. And as a PhD candidate, that means reading. Reading reading reading reading. Reading and paying attention. Reading and thinking and writing about and around what I’ve read.

Problem is, I can’t read and comprehend an academic paper, or journal article, or thesis, or book – and listen to music at the same time. I can’t think through a complex conceptual problem and listen to music at the same time. I can sometimes listen to music and write, depending on what I’m writing about, and as long as the music is repetitive or very familiar, or both. I can’t do any of these things and listen to podcasts.

I remember hearing on a Radiolab episode that included an experiment where subject’s language centres were effectively “shut down” by being forced to repeat strings of random words piped to them via headphones, while they tried to complete basic tasks. Without access to language, people were unable to make the most basic conceptual links: unable to connect “direction” and “colour” in ideas such as “left of the blue wall”. This is how it feels when I listen to music and read at the same time. I can read all the words and sentences, but the ideas just don’t connect.

Now, this doesn’t really surprise me – somehow it makes sense that I can separate “programming” and “language” in my brain but not “language” and “music”. Programming always seemed a technical, craft-like, mechanical problem. Music is a steady flow of connected concepts and ideas.

My problem is really related to routine – for me, forever, I listen to music when I work. It’s part of who I am. Was. I mean was: right now, I’ve got some reading to do.

Little windows

As K and I are preparing for a long holiday in Spain, we decided  to watch a slideshow of K’s parents on a road trip around Europe in the late 1970s. It was the real deal: magazines of slides, stored in metal and plastic boxes, labelled in pencil, the whirrr of the fan, the heat from the globe, the k-clunk-click of the slide advance. Not to mention some awesome 70′s fashion.

Watching slides in a projector is a considerably different experience to browsing digital photos. Sometimes I look through my Lightroom catalogue at the thousands of photos that I have taken during overseas travel over the past few years, but looking at a photo on my computer screen never evokes the feeling of a slide projected in a dark room from a tungsten globe.

It’s not that I don’t feel nostalgic looking at my photos – of course I do. Looking at the images can’t help but force me to remember details of the travel experience – but there is something in the physicality of a slide that makes it different.

Each slide is a unique object that can be held up to the light – a miniature window to another time and place. Each little window is “real”. Each little window says: “this is proof”.

Slides degrade over time, and the damage and disintegration is a clue to it’s age – older slides feel old because they are old. Even the technological limitations of photo processing in each era – the colour balance, the roughness of the edges, the sharpness of the image – mark each photo as from that particular time.

The audible click and visual shift from one slide to the next marks a space in time – like the gutter in a comic, this gap between images says: “then this happened”.

Digital photos have none of these qualities – they are clear, sharp, clean, ageless. You can’t hold them up, hand them around, flip them over to look for a note on the back… let alone store them in a box to be found accidentally years later by curious grandchildren.

I think this partly explains the recent popularity of “vintage” photo apps – by digitally adding the trappings of analogue technology – borders, scratches, vignettes, light leaks, scratch marks – you also add a level of (albeit contrived) “reality” to digital photos that isn’t inherent to the medium.

Watching a slideshow is not a simple as just flicking through a series of photos – it is a shared experience, full of stories, questions, sometimes arguments over a shared history. This storytelling is part of what makes the slideshow special. It is not a passive activity of watching and remembering – it is an active experience of re-remembering (or sometimes mis-remembering) and retelling.

This really struck me about the way that we look through old slides: the element of surprise. Even if we travelled to those places, lined up the viewfinder, took those photos – our memory is malleable and unreliable and forgetful enough that it isn’t until we see the slide projected on the wall that we recall the details. This is not inherent to slides of course – it applies equally to photo albums, diaries, journals, even digital archives. But there is something about the discreet nature of a group of slides arranged in a magazine that adds a level of excitement to the experience: you’re never 100% sure what comes next.

Slides are old technology now – like black and white photography before it, the slide’s time has past. There will always be enthusiasts, but photographing on transparency is becoming less and less economically viable (not to say impractical).

This isn’t something I really worry about – technology moves on, and I certainly wouldn’t want give up the convenience of digital photography. But perhaps there are things that we can learn from the emotional experience of the slideshow in the design of image storage and presentation technology.

A physical history

As part of my preparation for my PhD I’ll be spending a fair amount of time over the next few months thinking about and observing how people create, record, interact with, various types of archives and histories.

An almost ubiquitous sight in Australian family homes (and possibly around the world?): The Height Chart. Usually on a door frame, usually in or near the kitchen (which is an interesting space in its own right for the interactions that it encourages).

A record of the family’s physical development – sometimes including guests, friends, even pets – the height chart feels temporary – written in pencil (because pencil sticks to paint? Or because it can be removed easily?) , each entry is temporary – soon to be superseded, out of date as soon as it is made.

It seems as much about the act of creation and comparison as it is about keeping a record: who even looks at the chart when they are not adding a new entry?

What makes the height chart interesting is that it is one of the few places where you can see a singular record of someone’s development (albeit on a very specific metric) – from childhood all the way through to adulthood. I can’t think of another. (Maybe photo album collections come close).

It is a specific and personal kind of history, attached to the frame of the building itself. You don’t take the chart with you when you move, in all likelihood it will be painted over, ready for the next family to record their progress.