Spent the morning reading a little on the internet (mainly this). I also looked at an article on types of game that set up caring or permission-based relationships rather than dominating competitive ones. I spent probably more time than I should trying to figure out how this works, but there’s only so long I can continue playing a game with no instructions, in which none of the actions I try effect change, before I duck out. (This is my experience of most games, even ones with instructions. I get frustrated, they make me feel stupid and angry. I’m not very good at games.)
I spent a bit of time setting up a Slack team group thing for the Method conference in case it’s needed. Slack looks a bit more complex than we need, but now it’s there we’ll see if it becomes useful.
I spent the afternoon taking some photos of myself handling a mouse. I had an idea in my head that it might be a useful way of trying to make the interface feel unfamiliar, to sort of hold it incorrectly. I’m aiming to try and draw attention to those things in the margins of attention, the feel of the mouse against the hand, the scrape it makes against the table. I don’t think it was very successful – it seems to say more about the body than what the body is doing, and images are attended to very differently to these interaction experiences. (see above and below)
The Gravity lecture today was by Ben Judd, and was a frustrating one. He claimed to be interested in distance and proximity, but the work itself seemed not to address this as clearly as he thought. The work did do lots of other viable and positive things, creating beautiful and engaging seance-like events and performances. I wonder if performance – more specifically, the Boal-like deployment of stealth actors disguised as audience members – is here used as a means to talk about disconnection rather than participation. The idea of participation is supposed to be convivial and engaging, immersive even (yuck), but it also divides an audience into attendees and non-attendees, and into spectators and spectactors. By the nature of it, performance is a spectacle, it’s a separate act to the subjectivity of the viewer – and I wonder whether the immediacy that it has is also a means of isolation through other elements of its form. (not being able to interrupt, or physically move, etc.)
One interesting point that might have some use for me is the idea of an obscure boundary between the performance and life beyond the performance. It’s not like this is new, since plenty of performance artists have done this before, and I remember reviews of Ryan Gander’s locked room scenario piece talking about precisely this a few years ago. But for me, the uncertainty about what is and isn’t a performance might permit a different heightened mode of attention being brought to bear on a work. Everything in the margin is suddenly more potentially active, and has greater potential to be transformed to a theme. Or maybe, the margin is reduced as large parts of it are subsumed into the thematic context, while the theme itself is more mutable than usual. Is there a crossover here with attention experiment? (Is reducing the margin what I want to do? Maybe.)