Present at the workshop were Adrian, Kate, Gabriella, Julianne, Jonathan, Duncan, Alan, Drew and Chris.
We started with an update from Gabriella, Jonathan and Duncan whose brief was to create an archive of Rider Spoke for research purposes. Gabriella explained that she decided to base her work on an archive for museums and other interactive centres such as ZKM Ars electronica Gabriella consulted with them to find out what would be the optimum requirements for an archive for researchers and users would be and compiled the list below which she circulated to the Rider Spoke research group.(see next post below)
I showed the list to Peter Hulton (Exeter Digital Archives) one of the largest collections of performance archives in the UK he has been documenting performance for 30years through various means primarily video she said she showed him the list, he smiled a lot and said that it was completely unusable for the point of a user because there is too much information what you need are paths to allow the user to get a sense of an original experience, however he said first of all archives should declare themselves in other words they should not pretend to be neutral ‘this was the event’.. no, they should say this was the event as seen by me Gabriella Giannachi scholar in performance studies as opposed to a scholar in management systems or computer science etc. You also need to declare the kind of budget you have to create the archive, it should allow for seeing different things at the same time then he drew a sort of bicycle or atomic structure and he drew two or three of them at the same time where the centre should not be a core about the work but something you can navigate from, and Kate also came up with similar looking structures, in my final consultation with Clare ....? from the Watershed who said I should talk to Angela Piccini who works at Bristol university on archiving performance work they had over the last 10 years used a similar visual model for navigation this was for something webased so that’s were I got to, then we had a meeting in London .
Jonathan So on Monday Gabriella myself and Alan met at the British Library and took on board the initial plan that Gabriella had suggested….. the need to share audio and video files. Gabriella also mentioned that she had had some feedback from Matt he suggested different paths that could be followed.
Our idea of a kind of intelligent documentation is currently at a stage of tagging up, meta tagging, the content of the archive so we are currently looking at tagging the video files, tagging the cyclist journeys.
Gabriella Showing an example website
http://www.veogeo.com/She said when she spoke to Matt about paths, overlaying a series of maps, you could experience it through the overlay and each map would tell you something different about the journey and you navigate these maps and create further meanings. The video shows one of the cyclist’s journey and a graphic of the journey laid over a google earth map with a marker representing the person on the bike. As you move the marker round the journey the video camera shows the driver view of the route.
We decided that we would work with Peter’s ethnography’s in order to refine the amount of material we have to deal with. We decided to work with three ethnography’s with video, which adds to the documentation. So we are working with ethnography’s of 2 men and 1 women with very different behaviours with the game, so by using different layers over each other we can see the similarities and differences by creating a set of filters, or that a certain age group did a certain thing, so the journeys will probably be in different colours that can be read separately or together, you could move backwards and forwards and discover the tags.
Jonathan, A cyclist journey is an hour in Rider Spoke, I was thinking about having a set of tags to segment it every 3mins. There is a basic 3-part structure to the Rider Spoke event the induction, the journey and some kind of close down.
Gabriella we also decided we would come from different disciplines e.g. Jonathan would create tags from his disciplines perspective and I would create tags from mine. Which would probably lead to the tags being less structured than every 3mins.
Jonathan yes a lot will depend on the action.
Duncan what format the tags would take, would it be text appearing as you roll over the map, how many simultaneous bubbles would you have? If you have too many bubbles it could be distracting from the map.
Gabriella Possibly you could have one visualisation where you see all the bubbles, and you could see differences between myself and Jonathan, I might put 15 tags in one minute if it was a fantastic minute that tells me many different things about the performance from my disciplinary point of view.
Jonathan This raises the issue of how structured it is, whether one uses an ontology and a system to segment it or whether the archive declares itself for want of a better phrase with user generated tags, the clustering of tags and granularity of detail.
Gabriella The other thing we discussed was what you would see if you do see the video is not the players experience but is Peter seeing the players experience. We should declare that that what we see here is Peters, the ethnographers, vision of Rider Spoke so from my point of view of performance studies it would be very interesting to have some one to interview Peter and add his tags. So you have the ethnographers report the ethnographers documents the actual rides but then you could take the video out and just listen to the sound and then you would get closer to what somebody experienced in terms of replay. So you have different possibilities of visualising different perspectives of Rider Spoke. We also wondered whether the user generated stuff could go as far as a blog under each tag allowing further comments but then we decided it could create an overload of information. Also with all those different layers you could navigate through the archive.
Adrian How would you do that, what sort of access to the archive?
Jonathan With the tags
Adrian Is there some kind of control to the archive that could allow us access to the data?
Jonathan How do you mean in terms of access points?
Adrian Yeah different access points to be able to put queries into the data base.
Gabriella Because Matt doesn’t want it public, so from our point of view as a prototype it would depend on Duncan giving you access to the data base on the web.
Adrian One of the thing we were discussing was thee idea of being able to access the archive without necessarily knowing what the archive data is in a sense to be able to hard code it into our application.
Gabriella One thing that may be interesting is that you have this map overlayed with a similar journey by Kate in the CAVE so you’re including a replay of a journey that never existed, pure simulation on top of the ethnographers reading of the original player journey. Which would bring up all sorts unexpected meanings and coincidences. Ideally you should be able to mash up this different things.
Julianne What criteria are you using to select the journeys?
Gabriella We are using the ethnographies by Peter they have very idiosyncratic different and typical behaviours it is interesting behaviour
Drew was all focused on the ethnography or could it be more generalised to include having cameras on all the users?
Gabriella yes we are using what we have, we don’t have any players that used there own cameras. Ideally you would insert the documentation within the experience. One thing we talked with Julianne about was in a sense this archive starts after the work where as in a sense the archive should start before the work.We start with the ethnography, as we don’t have many other forms of documentation. If Blast Theory were thinking of doing Rider Spoke again we could look in to generating more.
Julianne It would probably be really useful to do it again based on what you’ve been working on so far…..we are going to do it in Budapest that’s in October and were also doing a mini version at Port Slade in October 08.
Jonathan so we are doing the ethnography tagging the video pulling in a few audio files so lots of interesting representational issues tags how many tags what kind of tags vocabularies user generated material a few other issues were with the sharing and the accesses of the archive and for research purposes what actions are allowed are they allowed to edit annotate etc
Kate Would it be a website?
Gabriella I think that’s what we are working with at the moment but this is just to create the basic archive but then the issue of replay…we were talking earlier about the issue of using ‘Replay Tools’ Duncan….to use the google maps within ‘Replay’ and see if that works and if not …..the ‘Replay Tools are something that MRL has developed. Which allow you to create these complex juxtapositions of visual files sound files very interesting from a performance documentation point of view ….I think Steve hoped we might use it ….
Alan It’s free to down load its quite window heavy …..Its in development it’s probably quicker to go another route
Duncan it might be the case to have it as the underlying mechanism …
Gabriella Yes we talked about not reinventing the wheel.One thing that is important to Blast Theory and to me is that one must never confuse the viewer that they are witnessing anything of the original or that what they see is the artwork one must always declare this is an archive. So that the original work is not exploded into the archive in a way it shouldn’t be
Julianne there is a difference between it being a sort of documentation of the work and somehow trying to replicate the experience So do you think it’s a combination of both or do you think they are quite separate?
Gabriella good documentation wil,l to some extent, attempt to replay or reconstruct an original, but this is true for any documentation, performance work or indeed a lot of art work. A lot of conceptual work is only really graspable through its documentation, for example the art work consists of someone being shot at, you only see it in its documentation. To then talk about replay is one step away from that, but the relationship between the artwork the documentation and now the replay is something that has been written about and practiced a lot at least since the 60s where you no longer have original scripts that allow you to restage plays. In this case your dealing with the experience of every player being completely subjective and unique so you have to declare which player you choose
We came to the conclusion you are never replaying the original quite
It is a reconstruction of the event whatever that might be
But you can skirt around it in that wheel way and the more layers you have may be you see something maybe not
And the pleasure is trying to understand what happened through all these layers, it’s like a detective story
Kate I can see several links in the way you’ve been thinking about the archive and how we’ve been developing our ideas. For me there have been two strands developing, the idea of using Second Life as a site for replay and creating an immersive virtual model. We have also been thinking about the use of tags and how they exist as 3d objects, been playing around with text, and also having problems with the amount of material, how do we choose what to use. I’ve thought about using different focus points from looking at satellite image using google earth maps to using pot holes cracks and bike tread tracks
Jonathan Is there one aspect of the journey that would lend itself to Second Life representation? Is there one time point on the journey that might lend itself to a blow up?
Kate Yes one of the ideas was to have holes you could fall into a pothole or drain and end up in a totally abstract space, which could be the sound of someone talking. It was the idea that many of the recordings have a certain drama, seem a step away from everyday life, talking about something sad, travelling through that. Then in other environments there would be all 300 sound files so depending on your position you could hear a cacophony of voices or get really close to one voice that fills the soundscape. This was thinking about how to contrast the public and the private part of Rider Spoke.
I the try out model the sounds are contained in dark blobs in a very plain space your imagination creates the visual environment. I quite often chose recording with wind, seagulls in the background, breathlessness to help build the sounds cape.
Gabriella A colleague of mine did something similar in Second Life when you approached an object your avatar would be animated and you would start to dance this extraordinary duet I remember feeling really peculiar as you build up an sort of identity with you avatar your control is taken away you become part of something else
When I listened to Rider Spoke not so much when I cycled but when I just listened I felt compelled that I had to sit through this endless extremely emotional confessions it felt like I was trapped inside this other persons emotional structure so much so that everyone I know had to stop listening at some point finding it too much.
Kate So I’m torn between the idea of simulated replay in Second Life using photos and maps from google earth making it highly visual but also really liking the idea of a soundscape where the voices are accesses by proximity and the visuals are in your imagination.Also we keep discussing the sort of hardware we could use for example using a real bike or handle bars. I would like the navigation to be as intuitive and as physical as we could get it.
Gabriella we had discussed navigating through sounds at an earlier meeting my experience of sound had not be that great in CAVE
Adrian the demo we have prepared using the powerwall was working well and the sound gave a real sense of space. It is really important to get the tracking and the positioning set up accurately.
Gabriella the only successful one she had experienced was Corolla where you move and you hear the bees, I heard that it was harder to use words but may be the systems have changed now?
Kate bringing the archive element into the replay through the use of layers, the idea of being able to mine down through the virtual model, so the top surface level might be minimal but you would have the option to dig deeper and accesses much more of the archive material. How do we create a journey or give the participant the choice that they may go a bit further into the model?
Alan using the rankings that had already been done to construct the layers so the clips became more successful the deeper you were prepared to go into the archive model.
Kate Yes the idea that Rider Spoke gave you commands as pointed out by Gabriella, to move, to pause, to listen, to speak, to take those commands as the starting point and use the questions that Blast Theory gave the participants. Some responses let you know the question in their answers but others don’t, you could have those at the start so it creates that friction of interest
Jonathan it does raise the issue about interpretation it all comes up with the representation of the archive whose interpreting the archive
Gabriella well it can’t be neutral so it must be declared Matt was interested in letting the riders grade the responses
Chris said the idea of whose perspective, of sound and of the visual I wonder and I realise this is very difficult to do, but what about the other senses of smell, touch and taste?
Alan I guess there are two ways you can represent the story being told or the environment they are telling it in. Because there are two or three things going on at once here being asked to do something the persons experience and the story that’s created of the whole thing it creates this bizarre space with all this different perspectives
Kate We did think about some other sensory material we discussed whether the participant in the virtual space could leave a fingerprint or write some sort of virtual graffiti on the wall of the model.
Adrian they could also leave an audio message.
Created some 3d text thinking about sounds in the space. Also asked Adrian if the participant could write a message on the walls while in the cave.....
