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!

audience, audience, audience

It's been a very audience-focused week. Monday I spent the entire day in a training session on giving presentations at conferences. The instructor kindly declined my description of myself as a 'weirdo' for  enjoying opportunities to give a presentation, but did agree that it made me a bit of a rarity in her sessions. And what a day! Loads of fantastic advice and really useful feedback for all kinds of situations involving speaking to people you don't know terribly well.

Then Wednesday we had an internal presentation by our resident graphic and brand designer, Kristina Langhein. I half-knew, half-trusted that she did good work, but I had no idea how good. Wow. She's done some really lovely and thoughtful stuff over the years.

Now, I can give presentations. I can talk for England. I can even do a lot of the conceptual work involved in things like brand design. But if you want to see my weakness, ask me to do graphic design. I tried putting together a one-page invitation to my birthday dinner. Copied-and-pasted photo: check. Event information, centred, each piece of information on its own line, in a readable font? Check. I then sat there staring at the page for a good ten minutes, trying to think of anything at all to make it look more like an invitation and less like a picture perched on top of some text. After ten minutes I gave up and sent it out.

My lack of skills don't bode well for any future posters I might have to create. Then again, I do sit next to a brilliant designer. And she likes dark chocolate. Hm...

hello summer

I'm back on the horse! Not to be confused with having a monkey on my back. More like the horse that threw me from a precarious height onto a rocky, muddy hillside spangled with goat shit and stinging nettles. That's the horse, and it took me a few weeks to clean myself off and find a way to get my foot in that high, high stirrup. But now I've got the rein in my hands, and even if the great beast will insist on going his own sovereign way at his own sovereign speed, at least I get to make something out of the view along the way.

In other words, I had a supervision yesterday in which I didn't make an utter ass of myself.

Now if only I could work a zebra into this post, my equine metaphors would be complete.

It's still windy as hell, I'm in long sleeves and a jacket at 2 pm, and an hour ago it pissed down rain. But for about four minutes out of every five, the sun is shining, and I can feel my fingers. God bless summer in the UK! I think I just might survive my first year (knock wood).

ok fine here I go

I vowed to myself I would blog this whole PhD process, and apparently, step one of that vow was to decide I didn't know enough to start blogging yet. Well, I still don't know a damn thing and realize every damn day that I know even less than I did the day before, but it's been nine months. Nine months! If it was a baby, it would be hatched by now. I'd be up all night worrying about it and running around all day chasing after it... not unlike my life right now. At least I'll be finished with it in three years instead of 18.

So - my project. I'm using performance, along the lines of performance art/live art, to inform new methods of interaction with digital media to support live, co-located, conversational performance of travel narratives. This plan hasn't changed much since I started, but it feels like I've been to the moon and back in terms of my focus, and how I thought it would develop, and what angles I thought I might take on it. Right now I need to clone myself at least twice, with one clone doing nothing but read, day and night. That clone needs to snort No-Doz to choke down one more article before sunrise. Know what? I dig reading. I dig reading theory. I dig reading crazy theory and imagining what I can do with it.

I am a geek.

Let's see how long before I post again!