User:Tisa/methods

Session #1 [18-9-2019

- How hard it is to listen. "Listening is the most creative act." But here, we're not talking about music, we're contemplating the content without being able to anyhow intervene -> actually, we disable ourselves in order to hear more. People tell a lot, if they are given space. We can hear a lot, if we know how to listen.

+ Learning how to listen, group critique - the one on display has to remain silent. (They also have a representative, a person who speaks on behalf, if necessary.) Ref: Liz Lerman, Critical response process: https://lizlerman.com/critical-response-process/

Ask yourself: What kinds of writing have we done so far? How do we read and write on a day to day basis?
Tisa: language is one of the main materials for her work - likes definitions/etymologies, likes to keep conversations, makes lists, keeps soundrecordings, (essays, poetry, lyrics, performative outcome, reviews, critiques, ...) thinks about blogging as an output to motivate her

The task was: Todays task: what, how, why. Outcome 150 word text describing a piece of work you made. (X2 = 300 words) "The map is not the territory." what 50 wrds <object> how 50 wrds <method> why 50 wrds <motivation>

Here they are:

1. RIVER

What - River is an object, an artist book. A diary, written by the river itself, interspersed in 9 chapters. Loosely constructed, black duct tape is preventing it from falling apart. Each turn of the page unravels a block of hand-written text on the right, juxtaposed by a drawing, resembling the natural flow of water, peculiarly dried up and static on the left. While thumbing through the pages, the hands of the beholder get stained by the materials used.

How - From imagination into words, the personified river told her story fluently, without thinking twice, writing automatically. I didn’t have to do much, her stories have been present for centuries. Then big drawings, made out of natural materials such as charcoal, coffee grounds, soil, dirt and water were cut into equally small pieces. The wilted material opposing the fluid, ethereal subject matter. Bound together, it was put on display in a former mortuary, a place of memory.

Why - The border river Mura served as my refuge for two weeks, while I was involved in a collective process temp.tc, somewhere in between Slovenia and Austria. Bathing in its waters, observing its ever-changing states and gradually becoming aware of its past, present and future - political denotations, the shifting roles the river plays, the human-made constructs imposed onto her. She was screaming to utter, without possessing language. I became the conductor of her content. Comments: the sentences are long - dividing them in order to flow better? writing in a specific way, almost a bit poetic. you don't use connective words (such as and & but) from 1 to 3 paragraphs it gets more simple aka. more comprehensible. could "cathegorise" more in the first paragraph, third sentence. it's rythmic. the 2nd paragraph "it's really pretty" hihi

2. A SCULPTURE MADE OUT OF FOCUS

What - A sculpture made out of focus is a proposition on how to read my performances, a thought experiment. A protocol that is being generated on the basis of my immaterial performative practice and the nevertheless tangible strength of focus, the attention flow that is generated in between the performer and the public, that I observe cautiously and experience strongly. In real-time improvisation, focus is the prime matter for sculpting. The reflection, the analysis of it is also the basis for its future developments, rearticulations in other media, the postproduction of experience that the performances generate.

How - Following a question on how to make my performances more inclusive and interactive, I responded with a fact that has always been obvious to me - the public is already included, a crucially essential part of any performative act. The public is the one that grants the performer with focus and time, creating the very possibility for the encounter between content and the subjects, subjectivities present.

Why - The world is contaminated. Visual pollution is the hypocritical, hidden and omnipresent germ. On daily basis we are confronted with the overflow of images that tend to be meaningless, or there to serve the consumerist system we are a part of. Trying to avoid the production of imagery that would worsen the visual pollution, I took the decision to divert my practice towards the performative, where consensuality is a precondition. The attention of the public is gifted to the performer, not stolen from them. Distraction is the basic tool of "the capitalist beast". I believe that the gifted, consensual attention holds a possibility to reach further into the subjective mind, suggesting and opening up perspectives, otherwise blocked by gleaming pollutants.

Comments: Proposition, thought experiment. Protocol - how it can be applied? What does it do? What can it do? What are its affordances? How to communicate it? More about protocols -> research. Have to know my code in order to understand. Frustrated, disconnected. Social class dynamic, difference in the possibility of understanding. -> anti-intellectualism? Too fancy. Not understandable enough for a non-artist or non-poet person. -> Who is the reader? People can feel excluded by the usage of the language. Vocabulary. I have a strong, sigature way of writing - how to make it not only mine? How to make people understand my code, make it more reachable? (language as a code) Ornamented, descriptive. Using two close-meaning adjectives together (crucially essential; the very possibility) Academic discourse? Precondition for understanding, cracking the code: curiosity and focus, sensibility, imagination. I need attentive readers! Complexity management (*B- Kosovel) Accessibility....

1. todo ARRANGE LEFTOVERS OF SESSION #1
   

WORDS

- Affordance - bench. + "Affordance is what the environment offers the individual."
- veracious - honest and not telling or containing any lies. e.g: a veracious and trustworthy historian
- Apeiron
- Synergy - Recursion

Writing is a piece of software. Alphabet as a software that produces human language,

REFERENCES

Movie: Demolition: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3UnSXelOJo0
Book: Kenneth Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing: https://cup.columbia.edu/book/uncreative-writing/9780231149907

WHAT I READ?

Orality and Literacy, Walter J. Ong: https://pad.xpub.nl/p/orality&literacy

EXERCISES

- changing pronouns, writing in the third person. - Writing for a "naive subject", aka. the sister. - Scheduling writing into the everyday.

COMING UP

SESSION #2 Notation, annotation.

WRITTEN

- about temp.tc

TO WRITE ABOUT

- technology and empathy

TO RESEARCH

PROTOCOLS SPECULATION

writing in safety

Park memory on a server, to not forget. Making a log of the practice-based research.' That's what I'm trying to do now. I'm still kind of "afraid" of loosing this data. Now, in some years. When will I need it again? It's like loosing a notebook, heart shivers. What's up with backup?

Aymeric explains in detail:

>I have another question as I'm writing down a lot of stuff these days - how >safe are the pads and the pzwiki? >Afraid of loosing data... >Is there a backup if something crashes? >What would be your suggestion on how to keep it safe?

First of all, nothing is safe :)

(really...)

With that said, the git repos, pads and wiki have daily backups and they are closely monitored by gnd our sysadmin. So far we've never lost anything. In the past we had one terrible hardware crash, but in the end we only lost half a day of wiki edits (can be a PITA, but that's very little considering what we've been accumulating for the past decade). That's also why we're also now moving to a virtual machine in a local data centre in Rotterdam, instead of maintaining our own hardware (currently only the wikis are left to migrate, still running on a server located at KDH, where PZI Fine Art is).

What's important to know though is that not all resources have been made equal:

- git repos: this is super resilient, because if you clone a repos, you

 basically have a 1:1 copy. So for instance a personal git repos will

exist at least in 3 different locations (your machine, the server, the backup), and a special issue repos (or shared project) will have even more copies. It's version controlled so as long as you commit a change to your repos you will always be able to recover accidently deleted changes. And if you push to remotes repos, you have redundancy.

- wiki: we're running Mediawiki, it's super solid. After all that's the

 backend of Wikipedia. In the past years I've used/run several

Mediawiki instances, and have never lost a thing (with the exception of the PZI server crash but that really was a disk that died). Does not mean it's 100% safe and that database errors or bugs do not exist and could not lead to data loss, but, well, it's as safe as it can be. That's also why we have backup in case something goes wrong. Also all pages are version controlled so if you delete text by accident, you can revert your changes from the "View History" tab on the link.

- pads: this is more tricky. First of all etherpad does not have as many

 dev resource as Mediawiki or git, so it's not as thoroughly tested and

it's much much more unstable. Some users treat pads as temporary/collaborative texts, bit like transitional documents that can either be eventually discarded, or further processed into a more stable format (like a static website, a PDF, another markup language to move the data elsewhere, etc). Some other users/hosts use etherpad as some experimental publishing platform, making websites in the form of maze of pads. That's pretty cool but I would not trust it on the long run. We already had one episode where we had to start the db from scratch again as it was not possible to migrate the old db to a new format. Every now and then there are also strange bugs (for a while etherpad was plagued with encoding issues, and it was possible to crash a pad by inserting an emoji for instance).

My advice would be to use git for all your protos/sketches and documents that are frequently updated, use the pad for collaborative (or personal) light note taking, or to dump stuff, and use the wiki for more thorough and stable documentation (including extracting the relevant stuff from pads) where you would also benefit from more advanced layout and the possibility to upload extra stuff like PDF, images and create more complex hyperlink navigation. Also making use of your User wiki pages will become handy for assessment as we will look at these as part of the documentation of your work and research (also using the wiki to present said work and research is super handy).

On a side note, a good prototyping exercise would be to try making a simple tool to convert a pad into a wiki page in case it's needed for future ref and will not be updated further.

Finally, if you're worried about data loss, the best acid test is to think about a realistic worst case scenario and check whether or not you're equipped for such scenario :)

You should also check Thomas Walskaar grad project :) https://www.walskaar.com/myhddiedalongwithmyheart.html http://pzwiki.wdka.nl/mediadesign/User:ThomasW/MyHard-DriveDied_final There's a copy of the book somewhere in the studio, but not sure where is the video...

Hope that helps! a.