hauntology

Wednesday was the launch night of Second Salon in which the hauntology project is currently being exhibited. This is the third time it has been displayed, following the two Screengrab09 shows in Brick Lane and Bournemouth. Each exhibition teaches me something new about this project, and the launch night taught me more about audience participation.

In the previous shows I created a small poster which explained that the exhibit invites you to interact with it: variously worded instructions along the lines of 'pick up the picture, explore the drawers, find the casket, leave a haunting'. Something about this troubled me though - not least the fact that by labelling the interactions, I was in some sense removing the possibility of surprise: if you are invited to pick up the picture, then you ought to expect something to happen when you do so. I wondered if this might anaesthetise some aspects of what should be a spooky ghost story. So I thought I'd use the 3 hours of the show just to test out some ideas about how to deal with the balance between instruction and exploration.

I initially set up the plinth and chest with no instructions at all, to see what people did with it. The plinth concealed the computer controlling the exhibit; the chest stood next to the plinth; some leads trailed from the underside of the chest and disappeared into the plinth; finally, a set of headphones rested on the plinth.

There is clearly a grammar about exhibitions: plinths as a rule are not a part of the artwork itself (though Banksy's Bristol show and even the various uses of the fourth plinth in Trafalgar Square play with that idea). And of course, headphones are not generally understood to be for looking at alone. So people had no hesitation to stand by the plinth, and try on the headset.

Another part of the lexicon of the gallery, however, is a kind of permission culture: you must be given permission to touch things, because the norm is to not touch (or in some galleries, speak, laugh, smile, look at each other, or enjoy anything at all). Some exhibits clearly embody an invitation - Olu Taiwo's camera installation in Avatars of Being (also in the Second Salon show) clearly invite the audience to enter the space of the work and see themselves move and twist in the infinite corridor of mirror space produced by the filming of the projection of the filming. But such embodied interaction does not require that the participant touch anything. I quickly found that unless they knew to do so because they had seen the work before, no-one was willing to pick up the picture, open the drawers, find the casket, leave their voice. Without permission to pick up the picture, people merely perplexedly listened to the ambient sounds of hauntology, but never triggered the narrative elements, since these do not start until the picture frame is physically removed from the top of the chest.

I had however prepared a small poster with some notes which, rather than provide instructions, instead gave some ambiguous hints that the exhibit should be interacted with: 'Don the headpiece, touch, move, explore, haunt'. This was an effort to provide permission to touch and interact with the exhibit, while still keeping enough ambiguity that the consequences of specific affordances (such as the start of the narrative in response to picking up the picture frame) might still be surprising. The poster also had a picture of the chest with the top drawer open, showing the casket inside, demonstrating that there were things to find.

I was a little surprised, though, to find that the words were still being interpreted in an unexpected way - though I know I should not be surprised by unexpected interpretations of ambiguity... The hints seemed to provoke people to open the drawers, and touch the chest and picture frame, and even the fairly obvious infra-red sensor fixed to the side of the chest. All of this is excellent: the permission problem seemed to be solved. However, the words 'touch, move' were interpreted fairly literally. Sometimes, people would understand the instruction 'move' to refer to themselves - they tried walking around the chest and plinth. Sometimes I think the combination of 'touch, move' was understood to mean 'touch and move the picture frame' - so that some people tried to slide the picture frame around the top of the chest - an action which I had not anticipated and so is not detected.

So two things seem to stand out from these observations: the first is not so much a problem as an inspiration provided directly by the audience which I would not have had myself; the second is the problem of ordering the interactions to ensure they are part of the story.

The first issue is actually a nice idea which arose on the night in conversation with Lena and Lizzie. The user's action of sliding the picture frame around the top of the chest is actually reminiscent of the way a ouija board is used - the glass is pushed around the board until the group finds the place it should sit. Perhaps rather than endlessly search for the correct but ambiguous wording to encourage interaction, I can just tweak the settings so that, as well as the lifting of the picture frame, simply moving it across the chest, ouija fashion, seance-like, will suffice. There are some technical difficulties here, which I'll perhaps go into another time; I also quite like the more fully engaged and embodied action of holding a picture frame in your hands, and turning it between your fingers, rather than simply sliding it across the chest. But it's something to investigate, anyway.

The second outstanding issue from observing the interaction - the ordering of interaction and participation - is a problem because although hauntology is designed to change in response to audience interaction, I think there need to be boundaries to the nature of those changes. There is a core narrative, albeit made ambiguous by both an element of randomness in order, and by the inherent openness of possible interpretation: who is Michael? who is speaking? who is the picture of? who is 'she'? etc. The casket records the input from the headset's microphone when it is opened, and those recordings are then randomly overlaid onto the core narrative in subsequent replayings, and so any imaginative response to the work is then incorporated into it. However, it is possible (and common in the circumstances I've described above, in which the core narrative is not triggered by the lifting of the picture frame) for the audience to record themselves without ever hearing the core narrative: hence they never get to enter the diegesis the piece invites them to contribute to.

While such recordings are certainly legitimate 'hauntings' - permanent and retrievable records of the unique times and places in which the chest, picture and casket have found themselves - they are not and cannot be legitimate responses to the ghost story. But there is a conundrum here which I can't really answer adequately: a recording of the kind in which the user leaves their odd questions - 'er, what, I'm being recorded..? arrgh' which are fairly frequent - may be left both by people who have not triggered the narrative, but also by people who have heard the ghost story too. I am making a conceptual distinction between the value of the two (the former are welcome, the latter are problematic) which is independent of the type, style, nature and quality of the recordings themselves. This is, strangely, quite like the Gettier problem.

Of course I can close the loophole - only record when the narrative has been triggered, prompting those who find the casket to continue looking for a way to make the light turn on - but that doesn't answer the philosophical question about what is a legitimate contribution to the diegesis of a participatory narrative. Of course, as the maker of the work, I am free to impose my vision on the logic of the piece. But as someone interested in the consequences of opening the process of authorship, I also need to find a good way of dealing with this dilemma: my selfish authorial pride in the sanctity of the diegesis, in conflict with the open-armed embrace of anarchic, carnivalesque participation.