Spent most of the morning tweaking WordPress templates for the site update, and also trying to organise travel for the oF workshop. Disappointingly, I discovered that the workshop had been cancelled, which made the travel planning easier but means I am still on the lookout for oF training.
I spent the afternoon and evening working on ideas. I spent a lot of time during the afternoon trying not to read, and instead to write. I am trying to come up with as many small-scale pitchable ideas as possible to try and get a team of collaborators on board. Most of the ideas that came up today were quite poorly formed and so getting into the habit of trapping them and developing them rather than instantly rejecting them will take a bit of time.
I did, however, read this article on slowness which linked out to an interesting-looking but probably slightly ‘light’ book on time perception. It also linked to a considerably more weighty book on Social Acceleration as a new theory of modernity, reviewed here on the LSE Book review blog.
I have been mulling over some of the course materials on Kyle Mc Donald and Lauren McCarthy’s Appropriating Interaction Technologies course at ITP. The Social Glitch section seems like a location in which I’d like to be making work, as it’s the place where ‘online subjectivity’ seems to appear most visibly: social interaction is a kind of nexus between on and offline practices. Glitches and slips are ways of making these practices ‘unfamiliar’ and visible again.
It seems a long way from the work I have been doing though, and this is probably what’s making me hesitant and un-fluent in my thinking at the moment. I also feel like I really need to get through some Erving Goffman before I start this line of work. I’ve been stalling on this, and on all the other books I need to get through, because I’m under strict instructions to make rather than read at the moment.
I spent the last part of the evening back on WordPress templates. Nearly there now.