Scandal!

The scandal is that it's been a month since I posted! That's what happens when you get a vast load of comments back all in one big lump, with a deadline looming. In this case, the comments were on 80 pages or so of the document with which I am hoping to confirm my status as PhD candidate. No pressure, huh? I nearly popped a gasket, but I got it done after two and a half weeks of 12- to 19-hour days. Cross your fingers that it actually works, and they don't tell me to *scarper* off.

And now I'm back to the blogosphere with a vengeance, as I'm this week's blogger for viehebdomadaires. Come check it out!

Mobile Life

You know it's a good sign when you don't write about a trip you're taking until after you've taken it. The week of the 30th was an intense few days of representing my project at Surrey's postgrad conference, mixed with getting ready for my visit to the Mobile Life centre in Kista, just north of Stockholm. And then the really intense bit began.

Thursday morning the 2nd, I was up at 4:30 to get the plane to Stockholm and went straight from Arlanda to Mobile Life, where I was whisked to lunch (Thursday ärtsoppa och pannakakor med sylt och grädde, yum!) and then to a public seminar that was like a pre-viva. From there no rest for the wicked, off immediately to Västerås for a larp (live action role playing) convention, where I immersed myself in a Mobile Life game test and Nordic larp culture for the weekend.

Then I had the week at Mobile Life, where I gave a talk on Monday and otherwise chatted with people, raided their library, drank their coffee, and tried to make myself as useful as I could in return.

Some observations:
* Nordic larp is freakishly intense and utterly fascinating, not least because of the mix of people who get so passionately involved. It's not your straight-up D&D/SCA contingent, but neither is it a straight-up artsy theatre contingent, or even a mix of the two. To my untutored eye, this means that it's more about the content of what they're doing than the self-conscious promotion of a group image. In other words, unless you happen to be dressed as a medieval warrior at that moment, there's no obvious marker as to whether you're into post-apocalyptic scenarios or small-scale family dramas about incest, fantasy towns populated by dragons or fantastic rooms filled four inches deep with flour. In fact, maybe you do all of the above. Wow.

* The people at Mobile Life work damn hard, but once you get them chatting, they overflow with interesting ideas, experiences, and opinions. I am so grateful for every chat!

* Annika Waern has a real talent for absorbing my ramblings about my project and extracting exactly those elements that her area of expertise could shed light on. I'm amazed how she cut through the wooly bits with some really solid advice. I couldn't have asked for anything better right now that I'm trying to solidify my designs - and more importantly, to solidify what the heck those designs are for.

* The Swedish Internet of Things Day... I have to admit that the technical bits went over my head, but Kia Höök's comments about performing with technology made me feel like I'm on the right track, and Oskar Juhlin's observations about the transition from professional to amateur might just be the key to one of my main arguments.

This post probably sounds like the delirious gushings of a fangirl, so I will balance it out with some negative comments about my week in Sweden.

Here they are:
* The chicken wraps at the (free) lunch on Thursday were too small for a non-Swedish appetite.

* The (free) food at the larp convention was located a ten-minute walk through the bitter cold.

* There is no third complaint. That's as bad as it got - the freebies weren't delivered to me by unicorn in my own heated palace. Yep, that about sums it up.

mind mapping software

When I embarked on this wack-job adventure of a PhD, one of the very first things I did was to begin populating a fancy shnazzy mind mapping program with every idea that crossed my mind, every article I thought I should read, every writer I thought I should know, every conference I heard of - a vast amount of stuff. Then about the second thing I did was to pay for an upgrade so that I could attach every bell and whistle known to man to these nuggets of future mental goodness.

And it was fantastic! I was sprawling out all over, investigating dozens of leads in new areas. I needed something to remind me that this was the person who wrote that, and referenced this guy's famous concept of that thing. With just my brain to rely on, I'd have felt hopelessly adrift.

But then, several months back, my project started to gel. I started confidently setting some ideas aside, and confidently knowing what I needed to know about some of the others. Trawling through my mind map became less necessary, and I became less reliant on my habit of putting everything into it.

But... now that I don't use it much anymore, I'm finding myself in a bit of a quandary. I've got thoughts and notes to myself written here, there, and everywhere. I'm not trying to claim that every fragment that escapes into digital form is a flash of brilliance, but some of them, when I run across them by accident weeks later, actually seem to make sense. I don't want to lose them, but I'm not at a point where I can turn them all into fully fledged parts of my official text.

I'm thinking of starting a new mind map just for these thoughts. But how to link them together? How to categorise? How to make sure they don't get lost, like all the other stuff I worked so hard to capture and is languishing untouched on my hard drive?

Gee, you'd almost think there was something about the performativity of personal digital media in my thesis...

it lasted a fortnight

I love that word. Fortnight. A big, strong night, with fourteen little blips of daylight peeking through. I had it in my head from learning French as a child that a fortnight was actually fifteen days. It's a picky, archaic little misunderstanding for an American, like misspelling some Middle English term for 'bucket'. Here, though, it can mess up your calendar completely!

My point is, I made a vow after the Christmas break to take it easier, relax, not get so worked up about things, say no to non-critical commitments that would cause me to go beyond a reasonable level of effort. The fact that the end of Christmas break coincides with New Year's means that it was, in effect, a New Year's resolution. And as of yesterday, it has keeled over. My January has gone from busy to crazy to absolutely unmanageable. The thing is, it's all such cool stuff! Workshops and conferences and symposia chock full of brilliant people doing amazing things. And I can play too, if I do the work of four people at once.

So my fortnight of sanity is over. The only silver lining is that it was actually fifteen days, my French-inspired misunderstanding of fortnight. I'm hoping to reinstate the sanity soon. Sanity II: The Return of a Restful Night's Sleep will hopefully be playing in high definition 3D Dolby surround, any day now.

another year

The holidays have consisted of two batches of cookies, one batch of coffee cake, lots of long-cooking, decadent, savoury meals, and lots of sitting around on my butt. I have, indeed, far exceeded my own expectations for chilling out and enjoying myself.

Now the question is, how do I get back to the project without letting it overrun my entire life?

Maybe I don't...

I hereby declare that today is officially a design day. Woot!

it's beginning to smell a lot like cookies

I do love an excuse to bake molasses cookies! I made up a batch of dough several days ago and have been baking a few every night. The last of the batch got baked last night (which leads directly to bad jokes about cannibal cookies with the munchies, unless you stay focused) and the last ones are sitting on the kitchen counter, calling my name.

Jocelyn... JOcelyn... screw your work, come eat us!

Introduction: done. Lit review: done. Performance analysis chapter: done. Design workbook: KILLING ME. Not the designs - I'm not giving myself an iota of time to work on any actual new or improved designs. I'm just trying to make the silly thing look halfway decent. And man, oh man, is that not my strong suit. I just need to tough it out today and tomorrow, finish it off, and then I can kick back for a few days.

Or I could eat cookies.

Or I could eat cookies and then run out, and bake more.

Or I could tough it out.

OK, maybe tough it out while eating cookies...

inverse law

The chunk of work I am currently engaged in (read: slogging through uphill through the snow both ways) is my confirmation document. I Freudian-slippily just wrote 'conformation', which is true, in a way. For a year, I've been writing notes to myself, read only by my supervisors and mostly without commentary. Now I've got to put together a document that's intended to be read by someone without access to the inside of my brain. More importantly, it's going to be read by someone who is part of a large institution situated within a centuries-old, global(ish) network of mutual policing and boundary work.

This thing I'm writing needs to accomplish a set number of tasks in a pretty narrow field: it needs to convince a lecturer or professor, with his or her own set of pressures and expectations, that I can eventually complete a PhD in a discipline that this person is not familiar with. And completing the PhD will mean having convinced two different lecturers or professors, one of whom *is* in this discipline, that I won't make them look like jerks if they agree to give me the degree. It's a wild game of whether or not it's in each person's interest, or the interest of their institution, or of their discipline, or of academia as a whole, to put their money on me not being a jerk.

And how do I prove I'm not a jerk, or going to turn into one? By writing sensible, moderately innovative, competent prose about a sensible, moderately innovative, and sufficiently doctoral-level idea.

Well, the bits that I thought were going to write themselves have proven to be absolutely beastly, taking me almost twice the time I'd budgeted. And the bits I'd thought would be the death of me are skipping merrily along in about half the time. This means I'm wildly misjudging *something* - hopefully just my time, and not the quality of what I'm coming up with.

Meanwhile, I've come up with some ideas that seem like they might actually be the first steps towards the kind of framework I've been groping for. And Connie and I came up with something that *could* turn into a crazy fabulous little paper. All we need to do is invent a thirteenth month and we'll churn it right out.

ho ho ho

The video's finished, at least as far as I'm concerned. There are requests for a couple of small tweaks, which won't be the death of me.

Ploughing ahead on the lit review. The two hardest bits went like a dream, and the bit that should have been easiest is being an absolute beast. It's a lovely, chilly December Sunday, and I'm going to be devoting my afternoon and evening to the attempt to kill the damn thing off. God forbid I have two days off in a row without being deathly ill.

Hopefully I've got a new silver bullet, though. My funding body and I went into London yesterday, an afternoon at Camden Market and an evening of spoken word, Old Me by Polarbear at the Roundhouse. As to the latter, WOW. Wow wow wow. I think I found my knocked-off socks somewhere around Aldwych.

As to the former, we got some frankincense and myrhh and a wee burner, and now the flat has the most gorgeous undertone of scent. Other than mold, that is. Mold, limescale, mildew - those we have in spades, here. Something healing and warming, that's new! If you believe the salesman, I'm about to achieve a new level of consciousness as I slice effortlessly through my tasks.

oh yeah, I have a degree in that, don't I?

That cold just about knocked the stuffing out of me. I've still got a cough and am dragging around like a zombie more than two weeks after the sore throat took hold. I hope no one else out there gets this thing!

On Monday I finished (pending final approvals) a movie, an actual wee movie! In the years since I got my undergraduate degree in radio/TV/film, I've worked on a feature film, a documentary, and a number of television programs, but always in a supporting role. This marks the first time I've done a video of my own (with help from the lovely Kristen, Connie and Nigel) from soup to nuts since I was in college.

And that, my friends, was a long time ago!!!

It's also the first time I've ever used non-linear editing. I have to keep explaining what non-linear editing *is* to people who ask, because it's been decades since there's been any other way of doing things. I feel like granpa moaning about how he had to walk through the snow uphill both ways to school!

But still - learning non-linear editing on the job, almost twenty years after graduating with a film degree? I am a poster child for random semi-competencies and non-linear career paths!

The video is for submission to a conference, so I won't post a link now, but perhaps in a couple of months when I learn its fate.

siiiiiick

That describes my every waking (and sleeping) moment since my last post. I woke up the morning after my supervision with a sore throat and now, eight days later, nose chafed and chest gummy, I'm going to attempt to stagger back to the university.

I have, however, managed to write the first section of my lit review. Actually, it's the middle section, the part on performance studies, which I'll be presenting (at radically reduced volume from usual) tomorrow at the Dance/Film/Theatre Research Week. Though of course now there's no department of Dance/Film/Theatre as such, there's just a School of Arts, with a bunch of musicians, a bunch of sound recording people, a bunch of actors, a bunch of dancers, and me. Picture me flopping around like a fish in the bottom of a canoe. Flop, flop.

Handily, the image applies both to my sense of being unlike the others in my group and to my ability to blend in with a bunch of highly trained, super-lithe dancers.

boo!

Man, there's nothing like a good supervision. Makes you want to conquer the world! At least until you start sorting through your action points and deadlines and you realise that there isn't enough caffeine in the world to make it happen the way you want it to.

So. Performance. Experience design. Smoosh them together and you get, what? Experience designs for performers? Check. Performances for experience? Roger that. Focus it all on storytelling and voila! Store-form-ience design.

Yep. That'll fly.

October BLEH

I never can keep track of Octobers. They're like old socks, slipping down behind the dryer and refusing to match up properly.

I spent Friday and Saturday nights frantically taking notes and pretending to be an actual Londoner. My funding body and I went to see all seven performances of Show Time at Riverside Studios. All of the performances were interesting and enjoyable for one reason or another, but three jumped out at me as particularly useful for what I'm looking at.

One of those was practically a case study for my ideas about performing personal stories with digital media and how compelling the simplest presentation of an anecdote can be. And funny! Legs 11, a work in progress by Tom Marshman.

Now I think I should have studied humour, because I'd have more reason to dwell on the funny bits. Spoiling It For Everybody Else by Rachel Mars was engaging all around, but I laughed until tears poured down my face at the KPMG song.

Neither incisive nor comprehensive, my review stops there. Friday night we spent at a swanky hotel in Chiswick, and Saturday night we had the most painless journey home from London I think we've ever managed. Perhaps that's good karma for my introduction (the one to my thesis), the umpteenth full draft of which is currently thumbing its nose at me and daring me to string three sentences together in a way that makes any sense at all. That's where I'll be when I'm not teaching my brand spanky new Digital Storytelling for Research course, piloting this Tuesday.

blogging like a twitterer

I have precious few brain cells rattling around up there at the moment, but it's been a scandalously long time since I've posted, so here goes nothing.

I've just come back from five days up in Newcastle, visiting folks at Culture Lab, attending the Culture Shock! conference, meeting a new PhD student at Northumbria University, and chilling with the cousin of a guy my ex-husband used to play music with in New Orleans. Yeah, that's not the way I had expected that sentence to end, either.

The Culture Lab folks knocked my freakin' socks off. I can't even process the ways in which my socks are tumbling across my living room floor, in a sort of anti-gravity mode, continuing their knocked-off-ed-ness from hundreds of miles away.

(Someone explain to me why it is that I buy a ticket online for the 11:58 to King's Cross, yet when they decide to cancel that train - weeks ago - nobody thinks to shoot me an email saying my reserved seat is as valid as a tutu on a hippo, and I could have had an extra half hour's lie-in?)

OK, time to test the theory that the purpose of sleep is to make sense of our waking experiences. If it's true, I'll bound out of bed tomorrow morning with a brilliant new take on my thesis. Either that or that hippo ballerina will be back.

beer for thoughts

Naming our informal reading group back when it started a few months ago wasn't easy. We knew it needed to include the word 'beer', and we knew it needed to convey something of the intellectual nature of our pursuit. We got as far as 'beer' and 'thoughts' and called it a day. Thankfully, we show a little more tenacity when it comes to selecting and discussing readings.

Today it was Susan Leigh Foster's Corporealities. I took Sally Ann Ness's chapter on ethnography, embodiment and memory; Jinny took Geidi Gilpin's chapter on disappearance; Melina and Eva took Mark Franko's chapter on male critics of female dancers; and Connie (the non-performance person) took chapter one, Susan Leigh Foster herself, on how a ballerina sticking her leg up in the air becomes a phallus. There were a few thoughts batted around, though not so much as a drop of beer. Clearly, we need to stop meeting in the morning.

I haven't been on holiday this whole time

Two weeks of cycle camping through the Netherlands, Belgium and a bit of northeast France - this was the holiday my husband and I had this year, and we felt like the whole thing was one big sham for lack of hills! What it lacked in inclines, though, it made up for in wind and rain. Five sunny days. Out of fourteen. In August. Sigh. I guess that's five more than it might have been.

Key takeaways:
1. The Netherlands is PURE BLISS for people trying to get around on two wheels and sleep in a tent. It's like they built the nation's infrastructure just for us!
2. Belgium seems, from geographical and ideological proximity as well as reputation, like it would be more of the same. It is most emphatically NOT. Hideous surfaces, fast roads, cycle paths that lead to dead ends, and barely a campsite to be found. God bless the folks at the boys summer camp (which is marked on the tourist map for what reason, exactly?) who let us stay there when all else failed!
3. France. Even the moules are better (sung to the tune of the Air Supply song that you hadn't heard in decades and will now have running through your head for the rest of the week).

Then a week of work and then a week Student Volunteering at MobileHCI in Stockholm. It is perverse what a brilliant time I had, schlepping boxes and wandering the halls of Münchenbryggeriet. Can I invent a university just for us, so we can all hang out some more? And I propose Nacho in the role of DJ-for-Life.

Then a week trying to catch my breath before giving a talk today on my research to the very, very kind sociology PhD students here at Surrey, who gave me some excellent feedback. Two weeks til Newkie! (Think 'no sleep' and 'Beastie Boys' and hopefully it will drive 'Even the Nights Are Better' from your poor, abused mind.)

exercise in intermediality

Arguably...
Anyhow, the best current reflection of the state of my mind and the state of my project - precious little difference between the two at this point - comes from my afternoon tweets. Here they are, in reverse chron, of course:

Was right the 1st time! Freaky genius! Somebody get me a patent application (and some psychiatric assistance)
4 hours ago

Yep. Gone. Not such a freaky genius idea after all. But maybe...
5 hours ago

Doing the I Am A Freaky Genius dance. Humour me, it never lasts long
5 hours ago

I would describe the freaky genius idea, but then I'd have to kill you. What I *can* tell you, Meestair Bond, is that it's an application that originated in an attempt to do reverse augmented reality. Thankfully, that's not exactly where it ended up!

makin' a movie!

As proof that all things come full circle, I'm about to spend the day making a movie! Well, capturing the first of 2 1/2 days' worth of footage that will be turned into a short film, hopefully to be submitted to CHI 2012. No pressure, then...

I'm thrilled A) because this is fun, and B) because I get to stare up close and personal at the workings of a series of focus groups and co-design sessions. Plus it should give my mind time to ponder something else besides the Great Imponderable, which is the unholy conglomeration of post-it notes stuck on the interior doors at my flat in an attempt to map out the introduction and outline to my project. I was hoping that in one giant leap, I would go from post-its to fully formed picture of the way ahead. Instead, I went from post-its to a giant glop of indecipherable scribbling on three pieces of A3. There was much more than I thought I'd have of the sort of middle-granularity stuff, and a lot less than I'd hoped of the big picture, connected-to-theory stuff.

But never mind that for now! Time to finish my tea and try to resurrect my BA in filmmaking!

good supervision

I had one of those blissful days on Monday where the supervision (a.k.a. meeting with my two supervisors) goes really well, and everything is positive and promising and clear, and I can barely sleep for all the excitement. And the next day I dive in to tackle what now seems so thrilling, so doable. And that night I realise that if I want to live up to all these thrilling and doable ideas I have, I'm going to have to give up sleep for the next two years and still not come in on time. And then it's two days later, but instead of being totally overwhelmed and depressed, I've got my newly revised to-do list to cling to. So somehow, magically, the bliss from Monday hasn't been turned upside down.

I've managed to either do or legitimately remove almost everything from my to-do list, which was bearing down on me most hideously up until a week or two ago. I just have to try to stay on top of my reading list - to which I've added about a dozen articles in my quest for the answer to a single question, which has taken me all day, and remains unanswered.

Why am I still smiling? Why do I enjoy this? Somebody smack me. Maybe a sharp blow to the head will make me want to buy a TV instead of pursuing a PhD that's obscure even to me. Then again, maybe it will just give me a headache while I read.

The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic

OK, first thoughts on last night's performance:

1. I should know a lot more about Robert Wilson before saying anything. That said...

2. Whenever she needed to speak or sing, Marina displayed surprisingly 'bad' stage presence - which is NOT bad, as she's hardly set out to make a name for herself as a suave theatre-type! What it did was give a little bump, a little underlining, to every time she opened her mouth in the story of her own life, which I think ended up having a brilliant effect.

3. Nobody, but nobody, could possibly get away with speak-singing lines like 'Salt in my wounds', in what amounted to practically a baritone, channeling Edith Piaf - factorial - in a military uniform, with her long hair shaken out down one shoulder, in a thick Serbian accent, on a dark stage. Nobody except Marina Abramovic. And, I bet, nobody but Marina Abramovic after a couple of hours of setup as to the horrors she has lived through. Decontextualised, in front of an ignorant audience, I shudder to think the response it would have received.

4. For a piece predicated on staggeringly slow movements, repetitive sounds and movements that echo the durational nature of her own work, the time flew by. If that's not an achievement, I don't know what is.

5. Often, an element that seemed completely cryptic would be explained in the very next section, so that if it were possible to play the performance backwards, it would be a series of illustrations of whatever Willem Defoe had just said. Like crashing head-first into a piece of furniture.

6. What visuals! Damn! Damn damn!

7. Further entertainment was provided by the three kids I eavesdropped on. They were watching the whole thing on shrooms. Entirely too funny.

8. For long stretches, Marina would be sitting stock still, staring at the audience, and we of course could stare right at her. I wonder how many people actually did for any amount of time, and whether any felt the sensations that have been reported, and that I can imagine feeling myself, when sitting across from her one-on-one? Seems like a playground for theorising on presence, right there. I only thought of it when I noticed I was essentially giving up this opportunity to have that experience with her by being continually distracted, if that's a sensible term to use, by what was happening on stage. But then I realised I felt nothing looking at her other than interest and respect.

9. I have to admit, the best anecdote from the evening is how I stood two feet away from Björk.

even for an extrovert...

...this has been a tiring week, and it's set to get even more tiring!

Tuesday I spent the bulk of the day at the Live Art Development Agency Study Room, which is a fantastic use of a (dare I say slightly uncomfortably) small space. They've got books, taped performances, interviews, materials, articles, and all sorts of ephemera from live art and performance art of all stripes. I could spend a month just wandering through the coolest of the cool and barely feel like I've scratched the surface. The staff also gave me some good ideas of people and performances to look into, must better than any search engine. It's in an old school building on Arnold Circus, an area that as I understand it has been recently renovated. Successfully, I'd say, because it's cute as a dang button, and just a few blocks from the most exquisite hot salt beef bagels with mustard, fresh and cheap.

Makes getting the train back to Farnborough a less than thrilling prospect...

Anyhow, then Wednesday to Friday I was at EVA London 2011, a conference on Electronic Visualisation and the Arts. The title sounded promising and the paper abstracts sounded intriguing, so thanks to a wee pot of money from Surrey's Dance/Film/Theatre department, I was off. Now, I'm new to the whole academic conference experience, so I'm the first to admit I don't understand the subtleties and complexities of these things. But I have to admit that I came away from three solid days of interesting, intelligent talks by interesting, intelligent people... and I'm still a little unclear as to what EVA is all about. I suppose that's a good thing, as an interdisciplinary-type researcher, to find a very interdisciplinary-type group of researchers to hang out with for a few days. Being at peace with change, at one with the liminal, comfortable in the many skins you're in. Something like that. Yep. Plus there was a girl there from Los Altos, proving just how small the world really is.

Tomorrow I'm off to the Manchester International Festival for The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. I've heard odd things tweeted about it... and then Thursday I get to turn a whole nother year older. Whoopee for me!