Our task is the construction of a research archive that could be shared by multiple researchers from different backgrounds.
Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2007) is a mobile interactive performance work for cyclists. Participants explore a city on cycles and engage in a game of hide and seek in which they record and hide personal stories at chosen locations and then find and listen to others’ stories in turn. Rider Spoke has so far been performed three times – at the Barbican in London in 2007 and subsequently in Athens and Brighton in 2008. More than 700 participants have taken part in these performances and all of their audio files and associated interactions have been captured. There is also a set of video recordings of participants taking part and an initial project documentary video.
As the most likely users of an archive of a Blast Theory work are festival organisers and museum curators, I researched the kind of data required by archivists at ZKM, Ars Electronica, and V2. This led me to the following list of metadata for a possible REPLAY archive design to support research for Rider Spoke.
TITLE
PRACTITIONER
bio
PARTNER
Bio
VENUE
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
ADDITIONAL DATES
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
DESCRIPTION
TYPE (e.g., interactive, hybrid)
ARTIST VIDEO
RELEVANT PROGRAMMES (hardware, software, applications, operating system)
EXAMPLES OF USER INTERACTION (self-documentations generated by users and documentations generated by ethnographers, performance studies academics and professional photographers/filmmakers/videomakers)
EXAMPLES OF LOGS
EXAMPLES OF MAPS
VIDEO RECORDINGS
AUDIO RECORDINGS
(Physiological Data)
DIAGRAMS
TRANSCRIPTS
(googlemaps)
GPS data
R&D PROCESS
IMPLEMENTATION FINDINGS
EVALUATION
PRINCIPAL REVIEWS
RELEVANT ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
INTERVIEWS
DOCUMENTS
Storyboards
Materials given to players
Materials given to operators
BLAST THEORY IMAGES
USER GENERATED REVIEWS/BLOGS/IMAGES/VIDEOS
FUNDERER
SPONSORS
KEYWORDS
USER GENERATED KEYWORDS
COPYRIGHT
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESTAGING
Search facilities
Tags linking all the above
I showed these data to the Creator team, Peter Tolmie (MRL ethnographer) and Peter Hulton (Exeter Digital Archives) and had the following feedback.
Peter Tolmie felt that although the list seemed quite exhaustive, it is only by researching the work that we will know what should ultimately go into such as archive.
Peter Hulton felt the piece was a very good model to research new archiving techniques as it is in many ways un-archivable. His specific feedback was as follows:
Archives should not pretend neutrality but declare themselves. They should state:
Point of view, i.e., they should incorporate the theory or conceptual framework that has generated them
As they can never match an original event, they should be structured as satellites to it. Each satellite should determine its own approach and declare it.
Satellites should be distinct from one another
Archives should disclose tools, methodologies and intent of documentation. For example a still photo is its own phenomenon and can never equal the original event.
Archives should be living archives and incorporate the past into the present into the future.
Viewers of archives are echoes of the original event and should be able to roam freely within the documentation and create their own trajectories of interpretation.
At the top of this post is a model of the satellite archival system we discussed.
More specifically Peter Hulton suggested that we looked at 6 billion others (http://www.6billionothers.org/index_en.php) as a model to document participants’ statements about their experience after the event by means of a simple 10 minute interview, framing head only, talking straight to camera. These could then be juxtaposed against ethnographies, documentations and other records.
These could be setup in a more immersive environment generating an installation. Navigating through the display may allow viewers to see an enlarged moving image of a given participant on a second wall. Participants could then listen to that participant’s answers while watching their journey replayed in the installation. New questions could be devised for the archive user asking them, for instance, whether they believed the participant’s answers were truthful; how they felt about it or why they thought a participant may have chosen a particular site to make a confession. Participants may also be asked to rate the effectiveness of the replayed journey and to predict the behaviour of participants by stating what they think someone might for instance answer to the question on a party that went a bit mad. Finally participants might be asked to make their own confessions in the aftermath of listening to the ‘original’ ones.
In terms of the overall archive structure, given the data available and the museum/festival requirements for metadata, a possible initial design for a Rider Spoke research archive may be as follows (images are just indicative):
When I showed the list of metadata to Matt Adams (Blast Theory) he noted:
It’s important that archives declare their own rationale also in terms of costs and technologies, i.e. archives should indicate their own constraints
It would be interesting to include a series of drawings of various interface possibilities; whiteboard photos; documents pertaining to the structure of the work; drafts of questions that show refinement (particularly showing how poetic sentences ere refined in terms of usability)
This would suggest a reconfiguration of the metadata as indicated beneath:
Development
R&D PROCESS
RELEVANT PROGRAMMES (hardware, software, applications, operating system)
DOCUMENTS
Drawings
Whiteboard photos
Storyboards
Questions drafts
DIAGRAMS
IMPLEMENTATION
GPS data
FINDINGS
Interface/HCI
EXAMPLES OF USER INTERACTION
VIDEO RECORDINGS
AUDIO RECORDINGS
(Physiological Data)
EXAMPLES OF LOGS
TRANSCRIPTS
EXAMPLES OF MAPS
Venue
VENUE
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
ADDITIONAL DATES
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
Users/blogs
USER GENERATED REVIEWS/BLOGS/IMAGES/
VIDEOS
USER GENERATED KEYWORDS
(googlemaps)
Rider Spoke details
TITLE
PRACTITIONER (bio)
PARTNER (Bio)
DESCRIPTION
TYPE (e.g., interactive, hybrid)
FUNDERER
SPONSORS
KEYWORDS
COPYRIGHT
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESTAGING
META-ARCHIVE DECLARATIONS
Orchestration
Materials given to players
Materials given to operators
PHOTOS
Replay and user generated archives
CREATIVE ARCHIVES
For example SL/CAVE archive etc
TRACKING of USE
Ethnography/Documentation
EVALUATION
PRINCIPAL REVIEWS
RELEVANT ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
INTERVIEWS
Artist video
BLAST THEORY VIDEO and IMAGES
Search facilities and tags linking all the above could be included. Windows could be opened simultaneously allowing users to engage with more than one field simultaneously. For example a user might be able to look at the Blast Theory video while also reading an IPerG report. Or, they might be able to scroll down maps while reading a review and listening to some audio recordings.
It is my recommendation that within the satellite structure proposed by Peter Hulton the archive designers identify a series of paths or individual journeys. Subsequent users may identify other paths.
As a set of initial paths that might be interesting to explore could include:
Relationship between question design and participant behaviour
Licence to confess/to cycle – sense of being in a ‘film’, ‘hyperaware’ (see questionnaires) or, in Matt Adam’s words, in a ‘mini pilgrimage’ (frame analysis development)
Rating system
Confessions are like mementos (see Mauss), a ‘gift’ (poison) so listening to logs is ‘contaminating’ = we become witnesses/bearers to the confession that was made (this could be explored through replay)
Palimpsest quality of piece print/tattoo mark/choice of location site; investigation of the semiotics of both actual and digital locations. The only evidence of the presence of others here is in space: identities come to coincide with spaces, and spaces with their WIFI fingerprints. Matt Adams commented on the interesting possibilities emerging from overlaying Cartesian and WIFI landscapes, the former being ‘fixed’, the latter being ‘unstable’. See also piece dynamics orientation/vs/disorientation
Matt Adams suggested an analysis of how participants behaved in the hour – how they fluctuated in and out of answering vs listening – how they relied on clues left by others
Matt Adams suggested a taxonomy of promises – an analysis of the structural order of the sentences in which a promise was made
Relationship between documentation & ethnography and event of art
Evidence of social expansion (including being ‘hyperaware’)
Jonathan Foster also noted that we should be assigning an index term to each audio file (derived from a simple controlled vocabulary based on the question set).
Blast Theory’s Rider Spoke (2007) is a mobile interactive performance work for cyclists. Participants explore a city on cycles and engage in a game of hide and seek in which they record and hide personal stories at chosen locations and then find and listen to others’ stories in turn. Rider Spoke has so far been performed three times – at the Barbican in London in 2007 and subsequently in Athens and Brighton in 2008. More than 700 participants have taken part in these performances and all of their audio files and associated interactions have been captured. There is also a set of video recordings of participants taking part and an initial project documentary video.
As the most likely users of an archive of a Blast Theory work are festival organisers and museum curators, I researched the kind of data required by archivists at ZKM, Ars Electronica, and V2. This led me to the following list of metadata for a possible REPLAY archive design to support research for Rider Spoke.
TITLE
PRACTITIONER
bio
PARTNER
Bio
VENUE
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
ADDITIONAL DATES
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
DESCRIPTION
TYPE (e.g., interactive, hybrid)
ARTIST VIDEO
RELEVANT PROGRAMMES (hardware, software, applications, operating system)
EXAMPLES OF USER INTERACTION (self-documentations generated by users and documentations generated by ethnographers, performance studies academics and professional photographers/filmmakers/videomakers)
EXAMPLES OF LOGS
EXAMPLES OF MAPS
VIDEO RECORDINGS
AUDIO RECORDINGS
(Physiological Data)
DIAGRAMS
TRANSCRIPTS
(googlemaps)
GPS data
R&D PROCESS
IMPLEMENTATION FINDINGS
EVALUATION
PRINCIPAL REVIEWS
RELEVANT ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
INTERVIEWS
DOCUMENTS
Storyboards
Materials given to players
Materials given to operators
BLAST THEORY IMAGES
USER GENERATED REVIEWS/BLOGS/IMAGES/VIDEOS
FUNDERER
SPONSORS
KEYWORDS
USER GENERATED KEYWORDS
COPYRIGHT
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESTAGING
Search facilities
Tags linking all the above
I showed these data to the Creator team, Peter Tolmie (MRL ethnographer) and Peter Hulton (Exeter Digital Archives) and had the following feedback.
Peter Tolmie felt that although the list seemed quite exhaustive, it is only by researching the work that we will know what should ultimately go into such as archive.
Peter Hulton felt the piece was a very good model to research new archiving techniques as it is in many ways un-archivable. His specific feedback was as follows:
Archives should not pretend neutrality but declare themselves. They should state:
Point of view, i.e., they should incorporate the theory or conceptual framework that has generated them
As they can never match an original event, they should be structured as satellites to it. Each satellite should determine its own approach and declare it.
Satellites should be distinct from one another
Archives should disclose tools, methodologies and intent of documentation. For example a still photo is its own phenomenon and can never equal the original event.
Archives should be living archives and incorporate the past into the present into the future.
Viewers of archives are echoes of the original event and should be able to roam freely within the documentation and create their own trajectories of interpretation.
At the top of this post is a model of the satellite archival system we discussed.
More specifically Peter Hulton suggested that we looked at 6 billion others (http://www.6billionothers.org/index_en.php) as a model to document participants’ statements about their experience after the event by means of a simple 10 minute interview, framing head only, talking straight to camera. These could then be juxtaposed against ethnographies, documentations and other records.
These could be setup in a more immersive environment generating an installation. Navigating through the display may allow viewers to see an enlarged moving image of a given participant on a second wall. Participants could then listen to that participant’s answers while watching their journey replayed in the installation. New questions could be devised for the archive user asking them, for instance, whether they believed the participant’s answers were truthful; how they felt about it or why they thought a participant may have chosen a particular site to make a confession. Participants may also be asked to rate the effectiveness of the replayed journey and to predict the behaviour of participants by stating what they think someone might for instance answer to the question on a party that went a bit mad. Finally participants might be asked to make their own confessions in the aftermath of listening to the ‘original’ ones.
In terms of the overall archive structure, given the data available and the museum/festival requirements for metadata, a possible initial design for a Rider Spoke research archive may be as follows (images are just indicative):
When I showed the list of metadata to Matt Adams (Blast Theory) he noted:
It’s important that archives declare their own rationale also in terms of costs and technologies, i.e. archives should indicate their own constraints
It would be interesting to include a series of drawings of various interface possibilities; whiteboard photos; documents pertaining to the structure of the work; drafts of questions that show refinement (particularly showing how poetic sentences ere refined in terms of usability)
This would suggest a reconfiguration of the metadata as indicated beneath:
Development
R&D PROCESS
RELEVANT PROGRAMMES (hardware, software, applications, operating system)
DOCUMENTS
Drawings
Whiteboard photos
Storyboards
Questions drafts
DIAGRAMS
IMPLEMENTATION
GPS data
FINDINGS
Interface/HCI
EXAMPLES OF USER INTERACTION
VIDEO RECORDINGS
AUDIO RECORDINGS
(Physiological Data)
EXAMPLES OF LOGS
TRANSCRIPTS
EXAMPLES OF MAPS
Venue
VENUE
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
ADDITIONAL DATES
INSTALLATION
START DATE-END DATE
OPERATORS
ORCHESTRATORS
Users/blogs
USER GENERATED REVIEWS/BLOGS/IMAGES/
VIDEOS
USER GENERATED KEYWORDS
(googlemaps)
Rider Spoke details
TITLE
PRACTITIONER (bio)
PARTNER (Bio)
DESCRIPTION
TYPE (e.g., interactive, hybrid)
FUNDERER
SPONSORS
KEYWORDS
COPYRIGHT
INSTRUCTIONS FOR RESTAGING
META-ARCHIVE DECLARATIONS
Orchestration
Materials given to players
Materials given to operators
PHOTOS
Replay and user generated archives
CREATIVE ARCHIVES
For example SL/CAVE archive etc
TRACKING of USE
Ethnography/Documentation
EVALUATION
PRINCIPAL REVIEWS
RELEVANT ACADEMIC PUBLICATIONS
INTERVIEWS
Artist video
BLAST THEORY VIDEO and IMAGES
Search facilities and tags linking all the above could be included. Windows could be opened simultaneously allowing users to engage with more than one field simultaneously. For example a user might be able to look at the Blast Theory video while also reading an IPerG report. Or, they might be able to scroll down maps while reading a review and listening to some audio recordings.
It is my recommendation that within the satellite structure proposed by Peter Hulton the archive designers identify a series of paths or individual journeys. Subsequent users may identify other paths.
As a set of initial paths that might be interesting to explore could include:
Relationship between question design and participant behaviour
Licence to confess/to cycle – sense of being in a ‘film’, ‘hyperaware’ (see questionnaires) or, in Matt Adam’s words, in a ‘mini pilgrimage’ (frame analysis development)
Rating system
Confessions are like mementos (see Mauss), a ‘gift’ (poison) so listening to logs is ‘contaminating’ = we become witnesses/bearers to the confession that was made (this could be explored through replay)
Palimpsest quality of piece print/tattoo mark/choice of location site; investigation of the semiotics of both actual and digital locations. The only evidence of the presence of others here is in space: identities come to coincide with spaces, and spaces with their WIFI fingerprints. Matt Adams commented on the interesting possibilities emerging from overlaying Cartesian and WIFI landscapes, the former being ‘fixed’, the latter being ‘unstable’. See also piece dynamics orientation/vs/disorientation
Matt Adams suggested an analysis of how participants behaved in the hour – how they fluctuated in and out of answering vs listening – how they relied on clues left by others
Matt Adams suggested a taxonomy of promises – an analysis of the structural order of the sentences in which a promise was made
Relationship between documentation & ethnography and event of art
Evidence of social expansion (including being ‘hyperaware’)
Jonathan Foster also noted that we should be assigning an index term to each audio file (derived from a simple controlled vocabulary based on the question set).
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