The morning was spent catching up with admin and correspondence. The early afternoon was spent working on code, successfully fixing the computer usage data reader so that it doesn’t trip up when it meets two mouse presses in a row. There is still something up with the original data capture script, in that it seems to have some kind of weird time recording error when it runs for long periods. I don’t know how to fix this without going under the bonnet in C. I’ll have a look, but I there’s a good chance I’ll end up breaking it.

The Transmission lecture today was from Clunie Reid, and it was a strange mixed bag of interesting ideas and slightly uncertain delivery. The work seems to be trying to say something about “internet”, but doesn’t quite seem directed enough to meet the artist’s claims for it. Representations of the body online is not the same a physicality online, and the sense of embodiment of being permanently online wasn’t noticed or addressed in the work. In many ways, it felt like more research could usefully be done to understand the sorts of conclusions that social media studies might be drawing in sociological domains of study.

Most worryingly, I could sense that the way images are circulated online was being addressed by an artist who is firmly embedded in an art world predicated on authorial originality. She partially described the characteristics of Hito Steyerl’s circulationism without actually naming it as such, and this detracted from the persuasiveness of her argument. Her practice takes images that derive their value from their ability to be shared, and fixes them in forms that can only be shared under conditions that slap artistic surplus value on them. This seems paradoxical in relation to her declared line of enquiry.

I spent the evening making a video of a moving dot that corresponds to mouse pointer movement over a period of time, and I hope to use this as a motion path in After Effects to do something interesting (see image of this above). I don’t yet know what that interesting thing might be.

Spent the day travelling back after a weekend away, but managed to take a fair chunk out of James Heartfield’s Death Of The Subject Explained en route. It’s not an easy text to get to grips with as it refers to a body of theory that’s unfamiliar to me. It looks promising though and I get the sense I’ll be returning to it a lot over the next few years.

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.)

Spent the early part of the day reading on the internet:

Are you overconnected? – BBC Future

The Mindfulness Racket – Evgeny Morozov
Mindfulness as a support for capitalism: happy workers work harder, etc. Social media as gambling machine.

Camp Grounded: Digital Detox and the Age of Techno-Anxiety

(yet another ‘in the age of …’ article. Nice photos of iPhones wrapped in kale leaves.)

Digital Distractions – BBC Future

All of these ignore the sorts of incremental disconnective practices that Ben Light was talking about.

Also downloaded A lexicon of attention: From cognitive science to phenomenology by P. Sven Arvidson , which looks like an abridged version of the Spheres of Attention book (£108 at its cheapest). I spent most of the afternoon reading this very dense article that seeks to provide a translation of disciplinary terms between cognitive science and phenomenological approaches to the study of attention. Neither of these are my field, but I did make some sense of the spheres of attention that Arvidson outlines. Based on earlier work by Gurwitsch, the structure of the field of attention has three distinct areas: theme (the thing that is the main focus of attention); thematic context (the stuff that the theme is materially connected with and the centre of orientation of); margin (irrelevant to the theme, but still part of the field in that it might become the theme at any point). The article also talks about how each of these are organised along different principles (respectively: Gestalt-coherence, unity by relevance, and co-presence, terms that I don’t really understand the significance of yet). I was also interested in how the transition between one and another of these spheres can take place, through a dynamic tension and transformative relationship.

I spent the rest of the evening beginning to populate the website at long last. Once it’s done, I’ll be ready to start presenting myself to potential advisors.

The morning was spent WordPress theme wrangling again, frustratingly, and after an hour or so of that I re-read the chapter in Throughout that discusses attention. I’d been meaning to go back to it since October, because it offers up ways of thinking about attention that are helpful and relevant to my practice. Arvidson’s ideas about spheres of attention is a useful way of avoiding the ‘spotlight’ model of attention that is prevalent in the current work.

The research seminar today was a field trip to the Hepworth in Wakefield to see the Linda Benglis show. Parts of it were interesting, but overall I wasn’t overwhelmed by it. There was a great Toby Ziegler piece there that made up for the Benglis’s lack.

The Transmission lecture today was by Rory Pilgrim, and I enjoyed his measured and well thought through delivery and work. Pilgrim’s work creates a valuable contrast to Andrew Conio’s Occupy-based activism, which sits in and says “everything needs to change”. Instead, Pilgrim uses the power of words to persuade, quietly, rather than shouting. Is this a more effective method of activism, or is it too polite, too deferential to the establishment?

After post-lecture chats at Site Gallery, the evening was spent making a concerted approach to WordPress theme endgame. There are only one or two small changes to now be made before I can populate the site with data and replace the old one with it.

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.

I spent the early part of the day completing a submission to the ACM Creativity and Cognition conference. In the absence of any newly resolved work, I duplicated the unsuccessful proposal I made to ISEA. I’m not holding out much hope, but did want to get something in by the deadline.

Later, a small group of PhD students did a show and tell of new work in progress in the S1 studio. There was a lot to be learned for me from showing a very incomplete and inaccessible piece of work. It uses computer usage data to create an aesthetic visualisation of that usage, but is a bit messy in its thinking: the idea of the ON and OFF signs was to indicate whether someone was on or offline, but this already seems like a pointless effort when digital device usage is so blended. The complexity of the staging, with data not being visible, also confounded the reading of the work.

As a result I restaged it in my studio (see above) and this feels like it has a bit more potential. The inadequacy of the means of representation of online or offline status is foregrounded by bad workmanship (flickering light) but the sense that there is something organic at the heart of it comes across in the representation of mouse movement. In this case it looks like a spotlight or like saccades – a layer of distraction on top of the objects.

I need to move on from this piece now and into the data in more depth – gathering days worth of data and creating more static visualisations of their complexity.

Not a very productive morning, but the afternoon went a bit more smoothly. The morning was spent reading online, mainly a review of the New Museum’s Surround Audience show on e-flux.

I went to Sharon Kivland’s C3RI seminar, which was an inspiring account of some very detailed and densely referenced work she has recently exhibited. The specificity of the historical references was a bit lost on me, as was a lot of the theory in the discussion afterwards, but it was good to get a sense of what the work is about and how it functions as an interrelated system of meaning in the gallery space.

The rest of the day was spent reading ITP course notes and working on the data reading system for the method conference. I have a show ‘n’ tell with the PhD cohort tomorrow, so had hoped to get it running a bit more smoothly. Seems that it needs rebuilding from the ground up.

Still ill, but that didn’t allow me to slow down today. The last book project meeting took place today, confirming the arrangements for editioning and sending through to the book fair.

I then had a supervisory meeting and spent the hour afterwards writing it up before heading to the Transmission lecture. Sam Curtis is an artist I have heard of before, via Sluice, but it was very good to hear him talking about radical fishmongery alongside the project leadership at Seymour Arts and Bethlem. For me, the Bethlem project is the central work that the others revolve around: it articulates most clearly his interest in the possibility of free, creative thought within institutional structures.

The evening was spent trying to make sense of the Facebook API, and more WordPress theme wrangling.