15 September 2008

Notes from Rider Spoke Workshop 11.09.08 University of Reading AM

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)

Gabriella 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.
Kate We still don’t know whether to include a bike reflecting Matts desire to keep away from Jeffery Shaw’s territory so I’ve gone away from that idea but if you were on a bike you would get a very physical sensory experience.

Chris Smell would really be able to transport you to another environment for example the smell of a meadow etc

Adrian
Smells are quite hard to contain and are also expensive to work with its easy to work with one smell but to work with a range of smell brings up a lot of issues

Alan asked would you have multiple participants or just one.

Adrian said well in the CAVE you really only have one because of the corners you get distortions if your not the person wearing the tracking device. This is less of a problem with the powerwall.

Alan something that came out of Rider Spoke was that it was very isolating for the participant

Kate Like a two wheeled confessional

Alan Yes

Adrian yes well ideally the cave is a solo activity really …

Alan said if there were 3or 4 people in with you the feelings would be less in tense your more likely to put barriers up if invited to participate.The other stuff that has recently be release by the lab is Bio sensing stuff so there are videos of the way people saw the world

Gabriella is it in Rider Spoke

Alan Yes

Gabriella Do you think it would be better using those than Peters?

Alan Peters is good because he’s asking questions too

Gabriella ok

Alan You see the riders face

Drew so you also said there’s some bio data?

Gabriella
So it might be interesting to use 2 by Peter and one with bio data

Alan
I have to find out if they give permission to let anyone except the lab see it

Drew A fruitful way to look at this could be what could we do if we did do this again? I guess for this project it is time limited, but its only a pilot project isn’t it I don’t see any reason why there could not be valid outcomes based on it being staged again using biodata getting permissions that would seem to me to be a good starting point etc

Kate So would there be a camera on the wheel of the bike for example

Alan We did have that but it was too dark

It’s interesting it brings allsorts of issues up

Gabriella in another project I decided I would take a photo every time I received an sms message but then I had to make the decision of what to photo, where I’m looking, the prettiest/ ugliest etc So whose gaze are we using when we rerun Rider Spoke?

Drew
asked what is the aim of this? Is it for audiences is it for researchers the answer to the question would determine whose gaze views to use

Gabriella
I don’t think the project has stated what the overall aim is we are all coming at it from different perspectives from my perspective it is to create something which allows me as a scholar to see the work even if I missed it originally so for my students people at ZKM or people in 30 years time and I know this issue is hugely topical at the moment in ZKM in particular are trying to reconstruct for archival purposes works which are only 20 or 30 years old and they can’t because the artist can’t remember how they did it and they are desperate and investing a lot of money into this problem how do you document or archive interactive which is distributed and takes place over a long period of time where the experience is subjective so for me that’s my agenda

Jonathan From my perspective I can tell you what I think or thought I was doing is making it available to two audiences there’s a research audience primarily performance studies but also making it accessible other researchers and the other audience is for previous players to come back and replay the experience Matt has said that some participants commented that they only got to listen to a small selection of audio files when they took part and would like to go back and hear more, and annotate them, and discuss there experiences Every thing we are talking about at the moment fits with those two audiences for me

Kate We are interested in both side there’s the creative layer, the archive but also could we draw people in who never experienced Rider Spoke before not researchers but people fresh to the whole thing?

Drew
so there is a third audience seeing it almost as a new piece?

Gabriella
Not as a new piece for Blast Theory but as a new piece of documentation

Drew Yes

Gabriella
If the archive is not designed by Blast Theory its not Blast Theory’s work

Well there isn’t one yet but they might involved at some point?

Kate I don’t see why they archive and the replay have to be separate

Gabriella Some artists are very possessive about their archives others let others into them and let others do as they wish

Julianne
I think from Blast Theory’s perspective because of our relationship with MRL making the material available for research it has certainly raised issues for us in terms of how we deal with archive and documentation of an event because generally it happens afterwards to a greater degree especially the more complex archiving process. I think a key issue from this project is that we don’t have permission from the audience to use their material which is something I think we will address in future events and make the audience aware their answers and responses could be used for those purposes, but then how would that change what they might say its an interesting One thing that I’m particularly interested in which doesn’t seem to have come up through the study are issues of consent, privacy and I would be interested in talking more about that is that a separate project that could evolve out of this or is it relevant to your research.

Who owns the stuff?

Julianne Yes what is privacy how does it challenge privacy who is the author? As Gabriella has talked about its very much you have to declare the archive, then where or who is the author, does authorship matter in this case? Perhaps there are other questions that we can tease out later

Gabriella
Research archive that declares itself as an archive, there the author does matter obviously people are going to much more interested reading what Matt says in 20years time than what I said about it probably. To simply merge our voices given how many disciplines we have around the table I can imagine somebody would be interested in seeing what does someone in HCI say and what does someone in art versus someone in management say, if you merge all the voices you loose that

Drew You’ve also got the academic authorship you’ve also got the IP the artistic work as an entity in its own right and the extent to which the cyclists as authors Blast Theory become the authors in some sense

Alan
Blast Theory have created the structure the bones but not the voices so although there might be some input the people have read that and put there own input on it so I guess they are the authors of that work where as the event is slightly different Its like me writing a review of a painting

Gabriella where this is where we talked about layer where you could have the Blast Theory Structure Layer which allows you to have their questions then you could have overlayered the input they gave the journey they took the ethnographers input which is the videoing of the journey in the structure Blast Theory created and you can separate them so that from a declaring yourself point of view Now obviously permission is a separate matter you should have permission from those replayers if this was a public archive

Adrian You can’t really separated it like that because when the data has gone from the collected messages Blast Theory would have edited the material you two have gone through the data, each level the data gets filtered so you don’t get the distinct views

Gabriella
so what you have to say for example is that in the archive we use 360 data selected by Kate

Kate
I choose ones where they didn’t say there names

Julianne
and Blast Theory have been very selective about what they have kept because it’s somehow what they want to make Rider Spoke an artwork.

Kate
Yes and the questions and the way they are asked are so particular it has a lot of control of the audience’s responses

Alan don’t forget everything is there, there are thousands of things that aren’t ranked

Adrian so actually everything is in the archive?

Gabriella In performance studies, not in new media which has a different approach, in performance studies you sit down with the artist and ask what they want to see so they might say I want this move with my shoulder that I learnt in Kerala etc So we film it in that way so that is one kind of archive but that in itself is You can use part of that performative knowledge with Blast Theory’s work the induction part is very performative talking to people in a very prepared way not improvising so that is quite a theatrical moment which then goes into a more new media type of work which is subjective where it is the player that creates the content or there are bystanders that just happen to be there particularly with the voyeur question your looking at what the player sees of course you can never get permission from that. So in other words when your talking for instance at ZKM there are different kinds of interactive works and Blast theory’s work is one of the most complex of all to archive because it’s a hybrid its not just an interaction it uses performance, its not just a game

Julianne also because it is so dispersed and how do you capture that

Gabriella the question of why the choice of Blast Theory is not only because they work with MRL but also because if we can solve those questions then we can solve those problems then we can solve lots of problems of the management of information in general.

Kate Going back to what Gabriella said about how you would start a certain kind of archive the thing that’s odd about this research is that Matt has said he’s happy for us to do as we will as long as its not public facing so Blast Theory haven’t let us know what they wish to keep as an archive

Gabriella they want to see what we do

Kate Yes it is a bit like being in one of their games

Gabriella yes but it is a prototype we are in a very privileged position, if you were doing the real thing you might not discover anything new because your so busy trying to do what you have to do in the time and the money. It’s a good platform to explore.

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