e-Science and the Arts: performativity, place,

space

Angela Piccini

All Hands Meeting, Nottingham, 2006

Drama: Theatre, Film, Television

Graduate School of Education

overview

• WUN - Recreating Medieval Gardens: Universities of Bristol and York in the UK and Penn State University and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the US

• WUN - The Seedbed Initiative for Transdomain Creativity: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, www.uiuc.edu/initiatives/artsintech.html

• WUN - The ARTGRID: A Distributed Collaboratory for Artists and Scholars

• AHRC, AHDS, Methods Network, AHeSSC, JISC• p2p, locative media, telematics, open source

locating grid technologies: performativity, place, space

The ‘Locating Grid Technologies’ workshops (June-October 2006) explore fragmentations of space-time in networked environments by: using the communications grid as a telematic performance environment and as a dissemination tool for other performance forms; using a range of software interfaces within communications grid events to record, annotate and retrieve ‘meetings’; using Semantic Web to query that audio-visual archive in such a way as to facilitate its creative re-use on the fly in performance, in programmed installation environments and in virtual working environments.

e-science and creative research

emerged from PARIP’s aims: … to identify the range of mixed-mode research practices in UK and selected international higher education institutions and produce a database of these materials….

….to innovate in the field of digital performance documentation….

Workshop 1 - Distribution: an introduction to e-Science

technologies for the creative and performing arts and media

• Participants introduced to grid technologies.

• Following presentations by Rob Bristow, Mike Daw and Jon Wakelin, there was a demonstration of the potential use of e-Science in distributed creative practice, with the Bristol-based Orchestra Cube and dancer Kyra Norman, mapped by Simon Buckingham Shum in Memetic

• Issues: sound and vision latency / quality

Workshop 1: Kyra Norman and Orchestra Cube; Photo: Rob Bristow, June 2006

Workshop 1: Memetic, ILRT, Kyra Norman and Orchestra Cube; Photo: Rob Bristow, June 2006

Workshop 1: Access Grid Support Centre; Photo: Rob Bristow, June 2006

Source:

Michael Daw, University of Manchester

Workshop 2 - Connection: PARIP Explorer, Semantic Web and Data Grids for the creative and

performing arts and media

• Participants introduced to Semantic Web, file sharing and intellectual property issues. Emphasis not on the analysis of video data, but rather on how users might annotate archives for creative reuse.

• Nikki Rogers (ILRT), Tomas Rawlings (Fluffy Logic), Jamie King

• rdf workshop: PARIP Explorer + Memetic• Issues: important but challenging to connect tools and technologies for diverse users.

institute for learning and research technology

• FOAF http://rdfweb.org/foaf/

• semantic web http://www.w3.org/2001/sw/

• RDF/XML http://esw.w3.org/topic/RdfXmlSyntax

• Web Futures / Internet Development

http://parip.ilrt.org

Workshop 3 — Location: the impact of Grid technologies on the performativity of space and place in creative and performing arts and media research practices

• Aimed to investigate place and space through the e-science agenda as it interfaces with other practices.

• Teresa Dillon, polar produce• Afternoon collaborative exercises

issues

• sound• vision• application sharing• extensibility: using communications grid to tap into data grid

• development opportunities, if to replace telematic web performance

• handheld and location aware devices

Workshop 3: Mr Hopkinson’s computer; Photo: Angela Piccini, September 2006

Workshop 3: Photo: Angela Piccini, September 2006

Workshop 3: Jem Kelly and students, Southampton; Photo: Angela Piccini, September 2006

Workshop 3: mmmmm; Photo: Angela Piccini, September 2006

some words of caution

Digital technologies and the documents they produce are constituted as a panacea for our worries about practice as research as they are able to bring our performances from the domain of the ineffable into the more comfortable environments of the repetitively visible without inflicting on them the more obvious shape-shifting strictures of writing.

‘the archive…will never be either memory or anamnesis as spontaneous, alive and internal experience. On the contrary: the archive takes place at the place of originary and structural breakdown of the said memory.’

Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever, p. 11

some useful questions

• what happens to documentation where the 'original' has never been present?

• should documentation evoke its absent object?

• what happens when documentation itself becomes time-based and ephemeral?

• where does a practice end and its documentation begin?

• what happens when documentation produces the work; where is the performance?

The withdrawn Information Awareness Office logo: DARPA – Knowledge Is Power. The IAO's overall project is ‘Total Information Awareness’. It is headed by John Poindexter, the Reagan administration national security adviser convicted in 1990 of five felony counts of lying to Congress, destruction of evidence, and obstruction of justice, all revolving around the Iran-Contra scandal.

source: J J King

‘We must become much more efficient and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert it to knowledge, and create actionable options…. Tools are needed to facilitate these collaborations, and to support these teams that work to ensure our security…. Doug Dyer is starting a new program called Genisys, which addresses our database needs. This project will imagine and develop ultra-large-scale, semantically rich, easily implementable database technologies. One goal is to develop ways of treating the world-wide, distributed, legacy data bases as if they were one centralized data base, and another is to develop privacy protection technologies.’

John Poindexter, 2002 http://www.fas.org/irp/agency/dod/poindexter.html

tracingrendering present mapping

‘On Exactitude in Science . . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast Map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters.’

Suarez Miranda,Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV,Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658 From Jorge Luis Borges, Collected Fictions, Translated by Andrew Hurley Copyright Penguin 1999.

knowledge as artefact

idea as commodity

Derrida’s archive fever, Borges’ fictitious maps and documentation practices all coalesce in a murky marriage of surveilled capital and anti-capital: in order to prove something’s reality, we have to transform it into object — yet the only objects that can do justice to event are those that are so excessive, so data-rich, they lose all meaning for us while still facilitating the bean-counters and ‘intelligence’ communities.

‘It is not down on any map, true places never are.’ Moby Dick

other challenges• what are the really innovative uses of these technologies?– how do we push the boundaries of what is possible?

• access to technologies• funding• liaison with Computer and Engineering Science• content

• what does it mean to share IT infrastructures?– how do I get a “fair share” of the grid?

• procurement• metrics

• what will be the effect of– turning around responses to users faster– sharing data seamlessly across institutions

• will it reveal other holes elsewhere?

finally…• e-Science technologies are emergent• research, development and

implementation required before they will become useful or usable across the arts

• performing arts and media sector is intensive user of computing technologies with significant interest in collaboration and distributed practice, managing large amounts of data (audio-video)

• opportunities for creative and performing arts to feed into technical development.