Utopia: 13,960 (?), Edinburgh
Day 3. A change to the tiemtable due to ash clouds and so onwards, always onwards, to another aritst: Louise K Wilson. Louise gave a presentation, ‘Listening to spaces, looking at spaces: site-specific audio and video’, where she showcased some of her recent projects. Being an artist opens doors, she argued, and she explained how she had gained access to scientific laboratories, and been fascinated by the theatre of the laboratory. Part of her work was interested in re-staging the laboratory in the gallery and how that might (not) be possible. Louise’s ‘inadvertent collaborations’ (her description, not mine!) resonated with her determination to unnerve herself. This made me think, once again of Isabelle Stenger’s writing on ‘risky research’ and her hope that you allow your work to quite literally work against your ideas, questions and theories. Louise was very open about the sorts of materials she generates – much serves as an aide memoire – and she has experimented with privileging different media. For example, for one short film, she developed the soundtrack prior to shooting the video. More recently, Louise has been attempting to record what cannot be heard. Here, I immediately thought of Chris Salter’s work on Just Noticeable Difference (JND)1. Throughout the presentation there was an overwhelming emphasis on process, and much less on the end-piece. She mentioned that she had started doing some writing to allow her work to be something else (to transform perhaps?) but when I looked online, I found a much earlier piece, written for Angelaki called ‘Stories from the research labs’2!
The rest of the day did not have quite the same structure (or feel) to it as the rest of the week; in fact, it was a little disjointed. The next session was, and there was a choice, either video analysis or build-your-own contact microphones. I chose the former, led by the geographer Eric Laurier. I have to admit I was a little sceptical of the session, perhaps partly due to my distrust of the word ‘analysis’, but found it very stimulating and interesting. Eric told us how he regularly runs ‘data sessions’ where a group of people get together to watch a video over and over (and over) to see what happens in it. He was keen to stress that the aim is to get at what is going on, at what people are doing, and was anti-CSI in the sense that you are not looking for something hidden. So, it is ‘just’ what happens, with no hidden agenda. At the sessions, the person who brings the video will also have produced a transcript, which serves as a document to think with, as well as to annotate. The transcript we were handed seemed rather different to any others I had seen before and included far more information and a greater sense of the temporality of the actions. We were shown a video (not quite 3 minutes long) of two men chatting in a car several times and asked to pay particular attention to sequences and categories, to bring out what we were noticing, in the hope that collectively we might give life to the script.We took it in turns to make a few comments and/or observations; I found it remarkable that although many of the gestures and actions were notated, there was no much of the many instances of leg-rubbing and was curious as to where/when the transcription is finished. Eric explained that the technique had been developed about 40 years ago and served both as an apparatus for making more visible and as a reminder of what happens, what they are doing, and how they do what it is they are doing. The protocol was fairly complicated: ((non-verbal)), +[overlap], °more quietly°, emphatically, >faster<, <more slowly>, were just a few.
In the afternoon there was free time and so I nipped over to the Fruitmarket Gallery, and ended up bumping into another participant from the workshop! So that was nice and relaxed. Later on, we reconvened at the annexe at the Geography Institute for a talk by Nigel Thrift, provisionally titled ‘Experimental methodologies’. I met Nigel and he apologised, explaining that he would be re-presenting a paper that he gave at CRASSH a few months earlier on. ‘LIFEWORLD INC. – And what to do about it’ was just as good the second time, although slightly altered, perhaps for the different audience. The paper was concerned with new forms of power and of interrogating power, traced a shift from epistemology to ontology, and explored movement-space (becoming in to existence, Erin Manning’s resonant-grid) rather than simple displacement (actual; movement already taken). The talk was broadly divided into two main parts, ‘Empirical economy’ and ‘Empirical turn’; the first dealing with socio-technical happenings and the second pointing to areas which might be re-worked. It was perhaps the second part which interested me the most, as Nigel discussed ways of re-figuring parts of social science methodology: re-working what is meant by the case study, faster modes of proceeding which keep up with some of the things going on (cross between social science and journalism), social science fiction (conjuring up of dramatised analyses of social structures and situations, e.g. The Wire). He asked us to think of social science much less as a way of gathering data all the time, but much more of ways of using data that are associative, and pointed towards ways of re-working spaces, moment-by-moment. The first two points were brief (1. Re-working of phenomenology; 2. Biopolitics of space – the use of biological metaphors as ways of proceeding) but the last, 3. Writing, was more substantial. Nigel contended that writing is starting to change its form and hoped that social science might induce and produce new forms of notation, which would mix different registers of experience together. Although I think this is an important point, I was left wondering how we might do this, and was unsure if Nigel’s comment about the chase for a 27th letter was said tongue-in-cheek or meant rather literally. In this case, is more better? He gave the example of maps as a means of re-working the familiar, of “not just re-naming but re-worlding”. Writing the world differently.
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This post is tagged EwG, manning, maps, movement, space, thrift, video analysis