Hauntology

Serendipity

joe — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:00:23 +0000

Serendipity can't just be the happy accident in which all the players and actions turn out well; it can't just be the chance occurrence that is the most pleasing, distinct from all the other possible outcomes which were thankfully avoided. If you threw the box in the air to see where the contents land, it would be foolish to be disappointed that their chaotic scattering is not as aesthetically pleasing as you'd like, or that the random assemblages, unlucky breakages and strange dispersals are less satisfying than you'd hoped. The unfamiliar new configurations in which you find yourself newly involved are as they are: they bustle a life into the world; they invite you to enter in amongst them; but they will not necessarily wait for you to overcome your hesitance to find the meanings that haunt the things in the world as it is.

As I write these words, I hold the squat pen in my hand. It is disposable, plastic, blue. The paper is in a notebook, bound inside a hard-cover, a remaindered, mass-market line-end. I picked them up this morning when a need to write this came on at the end of a car-boot sale exploration. As I suddenly started hunting for paper and pen, I might well have had in my mind's eye some yellowed pad, a miraculously preserved antique moleskin, or some other imaginary canvas awaiting my discovery; maybe an antique pen, complete with wooden barrel and ink-pot, or a hard-leaded pencil, ready-sharpened and decorated with minuscule scenes of distant lands reflecting the long voyage it had taken to reach my hands. Holding out for such romantic finds might seem admirable; uncompromising; indicative of a self-esteem worthy of such fastidiousness: yet it might also have been fruitless, and these words would have fizzled out as their emanations through my mind ran down and vanished along the grooves of my brain.

I saw a little jewellery carton, small and square, felt-lined; likely it had long ago been home to a once-new necklace. Now it lay open on a paste table and held some cheap worn brooches, a chain interspersed with ancient fake pearls, some little plastic beads no longer connected to their cord, so old they were cracking, and an earring, its oval lobe dulled with age. I paused as I glanced at it and then looked up at the man on the stall. He was old, hair combed madly back, the quiff a flat shelf like a crested penguin, his brylcreem dried up in the hot morning sun; painstakingly giving the prices of the bric-a-brac as two elderly women went through his stock.

I walked on, wondering what I could be looking for. Eventually I came to a collection of old boxes, laid out neatly on a table, the proprietor cross-legged in a camping chair, reading a paper over his carefully trimmed beard, looking for all the world as though he and his stall had been transplanted, copy-perfect, from a dusty antique shop to a sunny field. "Yes, that's nice, isn't it?" he said as I examined a wooden box, the lid decorated with symmetrical patterns in the metal trim. "It has some character. You can have that for six-fifty." I'm not good at haggling. "Ah-" I continued to inspect the box, turning to its underside, then opening it, trying to coax the lock mechanism to move with my thumbnail. "I'll take six for it," he pursued. "I'll give you six-fifty," I replied.

As I continued the slow stroll among the aisles of the market, I kept thinking about the little jewellery box and its nondescript contents. I wondered what sequence of events had led to their being thrown together, those old bits of cheap feminine fetishes and their cardboard container with its soft padded lining. Perhaps, I thought, the old man with his rock-dry, dragged-back hair was clearing out the excess of paraphernalia that eventually clutters up a home, the rag-bag, willy-nilly accumulation of odds and ends, accreting in corners and drawers as their ageing human operators fail to dispose of anything that might have some sort of value or place in memory.

The box looked though it had been lifted straight from its home, exactly as it had long lain. How many years had it taken for those items to find their way to that resting place, rather than the next drawer along, or the second one down? Whose fingers had squeezed the beads from their snapped cord, as it must seem, with the hope that they'd some day be sewn together on a new band, to be worn again once more? This old man alone on his stall, laying out for perusal and sale the no longer needed knickknacks, ornaments and decorative leftovers: how had he come to the conclusion that it was now time to vacate this junk and see if it might bring him a few quid? Was he on his own now, I wondered, briefly reminded of the elderly 80-year-old who'd sold me his car a while ago, saying he didn't need it because he couldn't turn his head to look over his shoulder any more, and anyway, he was a widower now? Were these objects on his stall the flotsam he had finally managed to allow himself to part with, now he'd had time to mourn his wife? The more precious things, of course, he'd kept, so he'd have her most evocative belongings around him; but now - perhaps he was moving? or attempting a new start with a clear-out and a clean-up - he was ready to let go of the bits and bobs that she herself had allowed to sleep in forgotten corners before she herself finally slept for the last time.

But how ludicrous to race away with such fantastic ideas. She might well be at home now, the stall-holder's putative wife; not dead, but cleaning the spare room that for the first time in decades had in recent days been emptied of the gradual accumulations and built-up layers of junk that she and her old man had only now managed to gather up, sort through and dispose of. Perhaps they had grasped the nettle together; dusted off some of the shelves; occasionally sat on the bed or the chair, slowly filing through box and drawer. Perhaps they ask each other from time to time about the items they find, deciding what to keep, what to sell and what to throw away; and as they filter all the old strata of life, they might remember together as they stumble through the evidence and detritus - scenes from the past that are familiar, or scenes dusty with disuse, memories across the spectrum - warm, joyful, awkward, painful. Maybe regrets might leak into consciousness, or equally, satisfaction. Who could know, just from glancing at all these worlds on the paste tables and blankets, what memories they were caught up with, what stories they played in?

And all of these stalls, the rows of picnic tables, doubling as counters for the wares that their vendors had dug out from the recesses and crowded old rooms, attics and garages, the homes of people and of things - weren't they all being freed from their buried past, like disinterred grave goods, or unmoored from their hidden creeks and allowed to wash away into an ocean - flotillas of plastic, paper, wood and metal either bobbing away or sinking to the depths, detached from all that had given them meaning? Even now as they lay on their tablecloths and formica tops, they still bore the traces, the fingerprints, even the dust overloaded with sense and the last living remnants of the dead hands that had held them, lives that had carried them along, hearts that had felt and imbued these charmed objects with significance. This field was a mortuary for the paraphernalia that gave people's live structure, the gifts people exchanged, the tools they built with, utensils they prepared food with, the signs and images with which they decorated their homes, the idols before which they knelt - here was the whole sum of their material world, their heirlooms, their heritage: bequests from lives that were no more, a bazaar of surfaces hiding their own importance, a web of relations disappearing forever.

I realised I needed to buy that little box of irreparable and ageing jewellery and started to make my way back to the brylcreemed man and his stall. What would I say, I wondered, as I anticipated his - what? sadness at the box's departure? confusion at my unexpected and inscrutable interest in an old pile of trinkets? I imagined myself asking for the box, and everything in it, just as it is, and how I'd answer his puzzlement by explaining that it just seemed so pleasing, this box that had somehow come to be where it was, with the earrings and chains and brooches it held - it couldn't have been expected, it couldn't be created, or recreated, or staged, or anything other than what it was - some excess of life that had been washed up on this table, in this sunshine, another chain in the sequence, another step on its journey, another sentence, image, meaning, in its story.

"Hi... this box - how much for the box and all the things in it?"
"Sorry?"
"This box? I'd like to take this box and everything in it." He fingered his way through the broken beads and sad anomalies, checking for anything valuable.
"Fifty pee."
"Here... thanks..."
"Thank you."

Live hauntings #three

joe — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:22:03 +0000

Sounds from the Second Salon showing of hauntology.

doessomething - 100 KB
saysomething - 340 KB
hahaha - 60 KB
moment - 128 KB
ooer - 112 KB
snigger - 68 KB
imonnow - 160 KB
table - 80 KB

Exhibit number 3: Second Salon

joe — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 14:14:04 +0000

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.

Exhibit display #three

joe — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 17:02:02 +0000

Poster display from 3rd hauntology showing at Second Salon, KUBE Gallery, 30 September 2009.

hauntology.03.pdf - 32 KB

Ghosts in the machine

joe — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 18:04:03 +0000

With the launch of Second Salon approaching, I dusted off the chest, the chips and the code; unwrapped and unmothballed the hauntology bric-a-brac ready for exhibition. Putting the intricate wires and controllers and sub-routines back into place ... almost impossible, and once achieved - without effect. Nothing would work.

What gremlins had found their way into the innards of the bits and pieces! Had some entropy creeped in, as if it were an instrument gone gradually out of tune? The flex sensor was inverted, its values sky-rocketed beyond the thresholds in the code. The LED, switched, came on when it should go off, and blinked out when I expected it to remain lit. The wires - were they switched? The code, been tampered with?

What has haunted these objects since the last time they creaked into place, wound into the machine assemblage, and flickered into diegetic existence? I am collaborating not only with ghosts but with random acts of agency by inanimate materials.

Second Salon announced

joe — Wed, 09 Sep 2009 11:15:57 +0000

The Second Salon exhibition at the KUBE Gallery Poole has been announced - this is the show in which I'll be exhibiting hauntology work alongside a number of other artists.

"The second show at the gallery by local informal art collective The Salon, featuring works by 11 artists from across the South of England exploring traditional and new media. Exhibition by: Stephen Bell, Jeannie Driver + Mike Blackman, Joe Flintham, Peter Hardie, Poor Photographer, Mark Shufflebottom, Lizzy Sykes + Cathy Seago, Olu Taiwo & Sarah Thompson. The Second Salon show brings together both finished and works in progress, and open-to-the-public events include physical computing workshops, performances, talks and audience involvement. "

Embedded audio hacking

joe — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 23:05:57 +0000

Today I took receipt of two Adafruit wave shields - kits which let your Arduino read and play audio from an SD card.

These kits will be used in the Second Salon exhibition which starts later this month in which I'm showing the hauntology work. I'm planning to rig them up to sensors which will detect movement in the gallery and play sounds in response.

In particular I'm looking at using several sensors dispersed through the building, which when triggered together will fire a set of sounds through the building's tannoy and into the ears of not only the gallery visitors, but the people getting on with their working lives elsewhere in the building.

More details and code here as the piece is constructed.

Intellectual development #1

joe — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 19:51:16 +0000

Part of a series about trying to make sense of #hauntology

I was trying to think about how to make interactive narrative immersive and engaging. I had recently led a 6-part lecture series on narratives for media students, and so was suffused with diegesis, sjuzet, structure, framing, metonymy; oozing Midas-like drips of narrative thinking on everything I touched.

I also had many discussions with my colleague Jim Pope, whose doctoral work had explored the 'vernacular' response to non-linear narrative and hypertext, and showed that a common response to what academics and critics might acclaim as continuing a modern/postmodern development in literature was actually bemusement and alienation. The 'common reader' found hypertext narrative hard to engage with, uninvolving and dissatisfying. Jim recently wrote about this work at interjunction and I implore you to read his hard-earned thoughts instead of my groundless, buffeted words.

In this context I found myself thinking that one of dominant topics in my teaching area, (what we easily call 'interactive narrative' without worrying too much about what that might really mean), might actually be an oxymoron: that a narrative is something provided by a narrator - a voice of providence, a hidden logic, an overarching guide, to wit, an author; and that interactivity is the effacement of the author, the rejection of a providential God who guides and oversees, and an acknowledgement of the tangible, workable, universally masterable, demotic, participatory, revolutionary, anarchic interception of the narratee.

The listener speaks, the spectator mounts the stage, the viewer is seen, the user creates, the reader writes, the audience become the makers, the recipients participate, the public revolt. These role-changes may have been prefigured as the death of the author in the sense of interpretive freedom, but not in the sense that the author must concede even their original skill: the conception of the story and the control of the plot. The writerly text made manifest is not simply that numinous text which is brought to life in every act of reading: it is much more - it is patricide and regicide, it is author reduced to facilitator, god reduced to resource manager, maker reduced to supplier.

In short, interactive narratives are like palpable obscures and darknesses visible: conceptual possibilities designed to confound us by their actual impossibility. To experience a story is to be a fish caught in the net: to tell a story is to weave the webbing for the catch. They are opposites, and there is no overlap, only repulsion.

Live hauntings #two

joe — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 17:59:44 +0000

Sounds from second showing at Screengrab09, Bournemouth Media School.

nice.mp3 - 104 KB
leaf.mp3 - 176 KB
carl.mp3 - 456 KB
notyou.mp3 - 96 KB
soul.mp3 - 352 KB
oooh.mp3 - 84 KB
creepy.mp3 - 280 KB
jim.mp3 - 776 KB
chris.mp3 - 620 KB
mike.mp3 - 408 KB

Exhibit display #two

joe — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 16:47:29 +0000

Poster display from 2nd hauntology showing at Screengrab09, Bournemouth Media School, 5 June 2009.

hauntology.02.pdf - 147 KB