REPORT: St Ives September Festival

What Phil and I were trying to achieve with this (a rhizomatic encounter with memory, looking at the intertextuality of memory in the form of oral history, and the materiality of place, and the spaces in which these encounters occur to create a continuous narrative of place. More or less.) proved to be tricky to communicate in the St Ives September Festival programme. We didn’t want to scare anyone off by describing it too loftily as piece of sonic art, which it wasn’t really, as it was a test project to see how people responded. But neither is it an historical audio tour. I wrote this for the programme, with Phil’s help:

Soundwalk

Put on some headphones. Take a walk around town. Encounter memories of St. Ives as you wander the streets. Fragments of memory, swept up from cobbles and beaches, tidied away into the archive, are pieced back together to again litter spaces around town. Archive voices entwined with original material create a rich soundscape to find stories of creative community.

Devised by composer Philip Reeder and St. Ives Archive Research Fellow Jeanie Sinclair, UCF

Wednesday 14^th - Sunday 25th September, Mariners’ Church Crypt, Daily from 10 am until 4 pm. Free.

 

We were hoping that would get the balance about right.

It didn’t. The first day was somewhat disparaging, and I began to wonder why I’d thought this would be a good idea at all. The first people to do the walk, an older couple on holiday, came back after an hour or so. That seemed positive to me. I asked them how they’d got on. They were somewhat hesitant, so I encouraged them to be honest as it was a research project and I wanted their opinion so I could make improvements. “It was quite nice, but we wanted to know more about the history of The Digey.”

So, lesson number one, explain things better.

It went on a bit like that for the rest of the morning, and I probably wasn’t doing a great job of selling as I ended up being a bit apologetic; I didn’t want to disappoint anyone else. I should probably mention that the demographic at the festival does tend to be older people and those with very young families. I realised that explaining that the HP ipaq PDAs that we were using work like satnav made more sense to people unfamiliar with smartphones.

One person actually said he wasn’t interested once I’d explained it, and left. Feeling very downhearted, I started to wonder if it was impossible to create something that would be accessible to everyone at all. The one person that I knew from the archive that came to have a go was foxed by the technology as a previous user had somehow managed to turn on the standby after three minutes button.

I realised that Phil’s sound track wasn’t going to work for anyone with tinnitus, as two sufferers reported back negatively.

I learned to stop talking about the project in terms of the negative, of what it isn’t, after one very nice local man came in and interrupted my weary apologia by saying yes, he understood what it it was thanks, and was very interested, and could he come back with a friend on Sunday? I felt then like a prize chump for patronising the only person to come to the Crypt Gallery that day who understood what we were trying to do.

So, be more explicit. It’s easy to get caught up in the detail and fail to summarise what is essentially a simple idea.

On day two, one of the ipaqs stopped working, so I only had two that worked.

I started being a bit more upbeat, and a few more people came. I’m glad, actually, that I didn’t have any more people come, as there wouldn’t have been enough equipment.

I got more positive feedback. Some people would, they said, rather be told where to go, and be given more direction. Others liked the idea of just wandering. There were some really lovely comments about Phil’s music, and in particular the way in which it enhanced a sense of presentness in time and place, making people look at things in new ways. I think in some ways that it worked better for those who were locals, or knew their way around the town better; existing knowledge and memories of place woven together with the sound walk created the kind of thoughtful intertextual experience I’d hoped for. At least it did while the technology was working.

The GPS drift seemed to be a bit of a problem. Areas I’d tested thoroughly didn’t deliver any content for some users. It’s very hard to get things in the right place using a pixellated map image when you need things to stay in a street that’s only a metre and a half wide. Using live maps in Appfurnace should solve this.

So, things to do for the next iterations: concentrate on specific places more, or specific themes to create micro-narratives of place, and join them together. Use more programming to improve functionality. Keeping it simple made sense, as it’s not about the technology, but the topography of place necessitates more careful thinking. Consider using narrative; the rhizomatic wandering can be retained, but perhaps reassure and guide without actually making a linear walk. Make some more recordings. Extend the stories, or at least identify them – possibly QR codes, possibly using good old paper, or possibly just a tumblr or similar. I still don’t want to interrupt the experience with material other than sound and place, as this disrupts the intertextual of the feeling of being both outside of the everyday and present in place.

SUBTLEMOB: Our Broken Voice, London 13th November

Premieres at Inbetween Time 2010 on the 2nd December. Preview/test in London 13th November, 2pm.

Is likely to be quite different to As if it were the last time, described as more J.G. Ballard. It would perhaps be interesting to participate in both the test and the finished event, to see how much changes and how different it is.

http://subtlemob.com/?page_id=130

NOTES: Mobile Participatory Theatre?

Mobile Participatory Theatre?

Mixed Reality Performance?

Multimodal Partipatory Performance?

Performance Interventions?

Pervasive theatre?

So, what exactly is this medium of performance? How do I describe it? Is it possible to come up with a term that describes its specificity, yet at the same time conveys the multiplicity of modes and levels of performance? To fall back on the term of ‘happening’ is vague and rather describes a historical moment in performance, and although this kind of participatory performance owes something to what has gone before, it is far removed from the somewhat chaotic and haphazard nature that the word suggests. ‘Participatory Theatre’ encompasses something of what is expected of the audience, placing an emphasis on the active mode of the ‘participant’ rather than passive role of the ‘spectator’.

I don’t think the title of mobile participatory theatre is really adequate. I think it is something more specific. ‘Subtlemob’ is a great term, but refers specifically to the mode in which Duncan Speakman/subtlemob works, a term belongs really only to them.

Interestingly, when you type ‘mobile participatory theatre’ into Google, subtlemob.com is the second link, after a somewhat dry article about the ethics of participatory theatre in higher education. Participatory theatre is just too blunt and simplistic a term, and is often used to describe performances in which the audience have little real involvement or impact, and is instead describing theatre events or performances simply where the mode of spectating is unusual rather than actually requiring the audience to actually interact.

I dislike the use of mobile, as I feel it is misleading, and the definition has to be qualified: is it mobile as in movement, or mobile as in device? Both are relevant, and it could mean either or both of those. As such, I think this is a problematic term, at least as far as specificity is concerned, and for the adequate communication of a set of ideas associated with that term. Perhaps that is part of the issue. Is it the format, the medium itself which is difficult to define? Perhaps it would be useful to establish a list of positive or negative attributes by which we might then attempt to better describe (in order to communicate, explain and share, rather than to define, exclude, confine) what this artform/medium is and isn’t.

There are members of the public.

There are performers.

Most or all of the performance is in real-time.

There is usually some kind of technology. These can be wireless headphones receiving a live feed, a mobile device, an mp3, sound recordings, projections.

There is some kind of choreography or orchestration, game plan or controlling element that co-ordinates the movements of the participants.

There is a narrative.

Participatory defines the ‘player’s’ role as active, not passive, and suggests that they have agency and can influence outcomes.

Mixed reality suggests that there are virtual as well as real worlds.

Augmented reality is seeing the world through a virtual lens.

Mobile suggests both a device and a mode of performance.

Player is a better term than audience, participant etc. as it underlines their active role, and emphasises the ludic nature of the experience.

Participatory theatre/sound performance using headphones is a new language of performance that people are unfamiliar with, requiring more than a brief explanation to really get across how it works and what it feels like. This is also problematic when advertising a performance, to let people know what they’re letting themselves in for, without at the same time giving too much away.

Duncan Speakman describes subtlemobs on his website thus:

We’re not sure if we know yet, but this is what we think it might be . . .

Imagine walking through a film, but it’s happening on the streets you live in

Subtlemobs usually happen in public spaces

This is music composed for those spaces

This is about trying to make films without cameras

It’s about integrating with a social or physical space, not taking it over

The audience listen on headphones, a mix of music, story and instructions

Sometimes they just watch, sometimes they perform scenes for each other

A subtlemob is not a flashmob

try to remain invisible . . .

I think the idea of the cinematic that suggested here is interesting. Watching and participating at the same time. It’s an immersive experience, and by being on headphones, separates the participant from their immediate surroundings. And yet, it also creates a hyper-awareness of present reality. It’s phenomenological, a stepping outside of reality whilst at the same time creating a more profound experience of that reality. Perhaps cineastic is a term that also describes the partipatory nature of making a performative experience.

The creation of narrative around the reality of immediate experience sets up a duality of time and space. The Player is immersed in two different realities, the ‘game’ or ‘narrative’ space, and real space, as well as the different time ‘zones’ of it being both now and ‘in the moment’.  Guy Debord suggests that technology distances and separates, and people wearing headphones and replacing the dull drone of banality with a soundtrack is something that can be seen everyday on streets and trains and buses, people walking to the soundtracks of their own lives. but if as Debord suggests, ‘the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images’, then Speakman’s subtlemobs create a social relation between people mediated by sound and narrative

To continue to examine this kind of performance in relation to Situationism,the  Australia-based pvi collective describe themselves as a:

tactical media arts group who produce interdisciplinary artworks that are intent on the creative disruption of everyday life. every artwork aims to affect audiences on a personal and political level and is geared towards instigating tiny revolutions.

This is more of a detournement, an intervention in the everyday with an explicitly political intention. Their work is still scripted and choreographed, and necessarily organised, however, but as the particpants haven’t necessarily actively chosen to be involved it requires flexibility to react to the way in which people respond to the work.

Multimodal Mixed Reality performance?

Immersive Mixed Reality Experience

Related Articles

• Click for curtain-up: technology and theatre (guardian.co.uk)
• How can smaller companies do a Punchdrunk with their experimental theatre? (guardian.co.uk)
• Networked and participatory education (smlxtralarge.com)
• Learning, Teaching, and Scholarship in a Digital Age – EDUCATIONAL RESEARCHER (edr.sagepub.com)

PRACTICE: Small Projects #1

Talking Points

The aim of this project is to create a reactive sound installation, using sensors to detect the presence of an audience.

I want to start a ‘conversation’ between the archive and passers by, located in a specific place.

Located outside, a motion sensor will trigger a device to play a series of mp3s of oral history clips from the Memory Bay archive. These clips will be randomised. I hope to edit the clips in order that they relate to each other to create the illusion of conversation.

I hope that these ‘conversations’ will trigger conversations in passers by, creating a talking point.

It would be interesting to have a simultaneous recording device running to capture people’s reactions, however this may present ethical issues. A QR code/web address on a nearby wall could lead people to give feedback online.

Requirements:
I may need some technical advice
Equipment (small costs involved)
Location: need to be able to safely install equipment so it’s weather and vandal proof.
Edited sound clips.

I would like to build on this further in the future if it is successful, creating more Talking Points around town, possibly with the facility for people to record their own reactions.

Further still, I would like to create multiple randomised conversations at each point. This would include recording other ‘ordinary’ people’s voices talking about place, who are then ‘involved’ in the conversation.
I would also like to project images of people talking on to layers of mosquito net, giving the illusion of depth, and people floating in space. Perhaps this could be done using a shop window.

PM STUDIO TALK: AntiVJ Showcase 29th October 2010

These guys are my heros. They create audio-visual narratives projected on to 3D objects, using mapping.

The talk they gave on their work was really interesting. They showcased a piece created for a chateau in Nantes, as well as their up and coming indoor work that will be shown as part of One Dot Zero at the South Bank in London on the 13th November.