Author: 
When discovering that our group was allocated to do a site performance in the University Of Lincoln Library, I gained many mixed emotions about actually using this as our site. The first thought that came into my head was that this is the location that has brought me many endless nights filled with boredom that involved essay writing that felt somewhat endless. This lead to the thought process of me contemplating should I even be at University and also meant I consumed my body weight with Spar sandwiches and enough energy drink that would put a hold on a bear’s hibernation. At the same time, I felt extremely overjoyed as I was given the same site in my previous year but due to illness I had to leave rather unexpectedly so I felt that I was gaining a second chance. Also, gaining the knowledge that the Library has such an amazing past warmed me up to the idea that we were performing there as I had no idea that the location was previously an industrial railway warehouse which was called the Great Central Warehouse until Daniel mentioned it. This vast past made me question ‘How can I link the past with the modern?’ as the Library shows remnants of the past but also has this new life with extensions on the library building itself. So I now have something to research on in preserving the past but allowing development at the same time.
[1]
I also felt that I was somewhat already aware that the Library can be viewed as a location that is boring but also mistreated. After leaving the lesson I felt that I would take a trip to the library and see if my attitude to the library might change and I would gain a new insight for this place of ‘infinite’ knowledge. Sadly I was not mistaken, the library is still seen as more of a communal meet up rather than exploring the knowledge that this Library provides. The most infamous sign that the library is now more of a social gathering is that of the Facebook group ‘Spotted: Lincoln Uni Library’, a group providing daily information that occurs in the library, that many of us fellow students are aware of or have been unfortunate enough to make their presence on. [2]
I would like to leave this first blog with a very brief interview with a fellow Lincoln University student on his thoughts on what the Library is. When watching try and see if you can agree with the comments made throughout the video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0HMErSO5N4w&feature=youtu.be [3]
This could be seen as question you would receive at primary school but, like Pierce mentions, ‘we think only in signs’ [4]. When someone asks us this question we instantly gain the pre set belief that a book is ‘a written or printed work consisting of pages glued or sewn together along one side and bound in covers.’ [5] This idea of changing people’s concept on what a item or location intrigues me very much and I would love to adapt it towards what a library is. As we saw in my previous blog post, most students have an idea of the library as a place to learn with a social aspect, with no knowledge of the past behind it. A performance that helped me in my thought process on how to possibly portray something that we wouldn’t normally relate to said item/location was the University Of West Essex’s work, ‘Reading Around’ [6], where we saw art students creating different aspects of what a book is to them.
After viewing this performance I instantly remembered a piece of work that helped me form an idea on what a book is and how sometimes language creates these preset beliefs. Ferdinand de Saussure perceived that a item/location’s identity is composed by two separate terms:
- A Signified (signife) – The concept it represents
- A Signifier (signifiant) – The form which the sign takes
So with the task to create our own book I felt that the concept (signified) was to tell a story, like a book is well known for and what most people relate to when thinking about a book. But the form of the book (signifier) was to be my body as I feel it contains many stories including my scars, showing operations and how I prevailed over them, and my tattoos containing memories. My ‘All You Need Is Love’ on my chest reminds me of an event of me and my granddad listening to the Beatles, and my wrist tattoo reminds me of my friend who sadly committed suicide in 2011. With these two concepts composed together it creates what I believe to be the overall sign of what a book is and the concept behind it, which is to always carry on and provide information just like my tattoos and scars. They allow my granddads legacy and my friends legacy to carry on as when people ask about them I provide them with information which will hopefully will stay with them.
[7] [8] [9] [10]
It was also extremely interesting seeing the vast creations that my fellow students created and how they perceived what a book should be. I especially thought that Natalie Shorten had one of the best ideas on what a book was to her with another physical aspect involving a glove that had paper applied to it to represent an old couple she had observed and how them holding hands created and maintained their stories and the paper was able to represent these past events.
[11]
Overall I think this task was useful in setting the theme of what I want my performance to represent as people have became somewhat arrogant to the past of the library even though it is right in front of them with the old iron bar construction and brick work.
I think the whole sign concept has also inspired me as I hopefully want people to view the library as something different, as Pierce declares ‘Signs take the form of words, images, sounds, odours, flavours, acts or objects, but such things have no intrinsic meaning and become signs only when we invest them with meaning. Nothing is a sign unless it is interpreted as a sign’ [12]. So, who is to say I can’t change the overall concept of what the library is? I am sure most people, when they hear the word library, just imagine a place with books but there will be a select few that, when you say the University of Lincoln Library, will imagine the old railway factory.
Another task which was given, which I felt was AMAZING! It could be seen as rather simplistic as it only involved observing the library and creating a drawing on what I felt the library was but sometimes simplicity is the key to success. This task helped me to further my thoughts and also the theme I want this site performance to contain, that being ‘Expansion’, which this exercise helped me develop more due to that key word.
I felt that the best place to highlight the growth of the library was to take a visit to the ground floor due to the fact that on this floor the history of the building is in plain sight but also throughout time it has became more technical with the introduction of the computers, vending machines and book scanners. It is also a commercial place for businesses to exploit students’ desire for food and energy supplements, as made aware throughout the library with posters and cut outs to advertise this need.
Something that I found extremely interesting was that through this gradual development the library itself is also expanding on the way information is fed to us as users, none more technical than the use of QR codes which was placed upon a poster and is basically a trademark for a certain type of matrix barcode (or two dimensional barcode) which was designed for the use of a automotive industry in Japan. You might be wondering, how can something designed for a car business be of any use for a site performance in the library? Well, the simple response to that question is to imagine a QR as basically a different form of a book but with the same concept behind it, that is to allow the user to obtain information. This could work extremely well in showing the development process of the library and how information is distributed compared to past techniques.
After this exercise we were told to form groups within our site performance class and converse our ideas and see if we could possibly develop ideas obtained from each individual. I was allocated to a group of three including Scott Bishop, Chloe Gudge and Francesca Betts. The first thing that amazed me was that they instantly said that they wanted their main goal to show the development of the library with a technical aspect to it. This has been my main goal from the off set after discovering the vast past of the library as a warehouse and with that past, to challenge peoples view on what the library is now and what it originally was intended for.
To gain more knowledge about the Library and hopefully inspire us with our performance and do the location justice we decided to take a trip to the Lincolnshire Archives. Before the visit Daniel told us to get into our groups and consider these three questions:
- What is an archive to us?
- What are we using this visit for?
- How can artefacts be useful to our work?
Sadly for Fran and myself we were the only ones present to discuss this but, like a double edged sword, we were able to discuss it with another group which consisted of Natalie Shorten and Frankie Booth. This was extremely useful as I want my performance to be outside of the norm and challenge people’s original views, so to hear what people think about what they think an archive could possibly be and maybe make them think differently would be a good test on how people react to us responding to a place having a different concept instead of its normal view ‘A collection of historical documents or records providing information about a place, institution, or group of people’
We all came to the conclusion that the Archive is basically a different form of a library where knowledge is stored and maintained. An archive contains historical artefacts but, at the end of the day, both buildings allow the users to gain knowledge of past events.
For Fran and myself the main point for us two to go to the archive was to obviously gain past knowledge we had not obtained yet but also to gain a physical feel for the work as we wanted our performance to be interactive whilst still having a futuristic response to the past and for me, the greatest find in the Archives was a picture of the local people around 1904, the story about an outbreak of a disease and finding out that Lincoln around this time was a city built on the railway industry. As mentioned throughout my blog posts, I have wanted to develop the idea of merging the new with the old as with the library and the discovery of …… last week where the performance is a person using a phone to discover past events that we don’t take for granted we could show in different rooms in the library that now have been converted into a place of study as a place of work and the trials the people had to go through back then.
Sadly after a presentation, the group received some criticism on our original idea of what we wanted to portray for our site performance. After discussing it with two of our tutors, they made remarks about how the idea of using technology as a way to allow people to obtain knowledge in a different way really intrigued them. We thought that we would develop the idea of using QR codes to still give knowledge but this time, instead of just giving the audience a list of instructions, these QR codes will be contained in a hundred books and will each contain a story. This will stick with our original concept for our performance which was to allow an audience to gain a different point of view on what something is whilst also maintaining the idea of merging past events, which the library allows us to view on a daily basis.
A performance that I was very aware of from my final year off sixth form and that I felt would incorporate with my site and the use of technology as a art/performance form was ‘Can you see me now?’ [1] by Blast Theory. It is ‘renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists’ groups using interactive media, creating groundbreaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting.’ [2] In this performance, we see that the physical city is overlaid with a virtual city to explore ideas of absence and presence. By sharing the same ‘space’, the players online and runners on the street enter into a relationship that is adversarial, playful and, ultimately, filled with pathos. This idea of the site having a hidden identity being unmasked through technology, allowing us to explore its hidden information, felt like it would fit extremely well with the idea of the library having this hidden/extended information in the books that only technology can allow participants to obtain. This would work amazing with our original inspiration that being the Janet Cardiff and George Bures video walk through performance at Alter Bahnof station as we have mentioned previously that throughout that performance we gain hidden information about the station itself but also we gain a glimpse of something that we are unable to see normally that being in the trolley where a book is locked away but in the video we get to see the book being out of its container and see the pages being flicked and we receive new information on what the book is and how it came across.
Another performance that links perfectly with ‘can you see me now’ and Janet Cardiffs piece of work is that off another blast theory production Prof Tanda’s Guess-A-Ware [3] where once again the main item within the performance is the use of a phone/tablet. There are a series of quizzes and activities and throughout the performance you learn what a carbon footprint is and ways to reduce it. This is done with a questioning techniques that I want to be implemented in our performance that he uses to builds up a profile for each player and over the course of sessions this profile is established through questioning for example Do you drive? Do you have children? Do you like facial hair? which in our performance people could create their own profile by viewing which topics they would like to view and in some topics like for mine depression will have multiple QR codes that will link to other QR codes depending on your response to my questioning like do you feel depressed? have you ever felt useless? have thoughts of suicide came across your mind? would people miss me? then if you feel like you relate to any of these questions you will be able to bview another book and just like the Prof Tanda production the next piece of information will be ways on overcoming said illness and how techniques to help.
The goal is to take advantage of the mobile phone to catch people in specific contexts and equip them with the knowledge to allow them to make informed choices about how they live. Developed in the pre-smartphone era, the game is an early example of a personalized mobile experience.
After we did our presentation, and as mentioned above, we received a negative response about changing people’s view on what a book is by using the three floors to show development of a book. Our initial idea was to have the first floor being self art on my body to show that the first book/story was stored in our memory, the second floor showing Fran covered in a paper dress to represent books as what we normally acknowledge as book to be and then finally with Scott using technology to show how most books seem to be stored on a computer device like an Iphone, Kindle or tablet whilst also showing past events in the library performed out and then they will write a word on each individual book represented on what the library is to them now allowing them to create new thoughts on what a library is but also creating a different format on how people receive information.
Since then, I have been asked the constant question ‘how are you going to use QR codes to represent something about the library and the expansion of said location?’ My initial response used to be that it is a new form to show how the library is always expanding and that these QR codes allow me to show this by putting them in a book but its so much more than that now we are allowing people to go on this search for what they might be interested in if you suffer with depression which i do and have also created a QR code for SPOILER then you can look up on our list to see if you can view a book about said topic and that is something that relates so well with the library yes they have books and yes we’re merging the new and old together but none of that matters if we as users dont try and explore the knowledge that the library wants us to observe and that is why our performance links so well with this site we want people to explore and expand on information they might have known or not at all.
Another question I have received is whether we are limited on what our performance can actually do. This is the one that shocks me more than anything as these QR codes are basically an item containing information, exactly like a book. I want to represent the growth of technology in the library and, with the codes being in the book, it merges the old and the new in the library. They also allow a reader to pick up the books and consume information in ways a traditional text based book couldn’t provide. This includes an embedded interactive content for everything from pop up links displaying production images to definitions for foreign words, right down to a strategically placed intermission guide with bathroom locations and places where patrons can buy a drink.
The biggest revelation that I have discovered is that this performance is ‘Everlasting’, just like the past of the library. There are signs of its history, from when it was a railway warehouse with the iron bars to the books that create its status as the library we all know it as today and so after this performance is all over and done with these qr codes are still going to be in these books and ready to have its information interpreted.
I also realised that we should be grateful for tech runs, especially when our performance is all based on technology, due to the fact that when people were participating in our site performance and attempting to scan a QR code, they ran into two problems. The first simply being that they have to connect to the university internet so I will need to get in contact with the IT maintenance and ask for the password for the UoL – Guest network and put the information on the print outs with the book numbers on. The second problem we ran into was that the QR codes were actually not being read apart from on my phone and that was quite embarrassing when I had to give my phone between 10 people. However, after researching why this might have been a problem it seemed to be that I was creating them with a static address instead of the the dynamic choice which basically allows you to modify the address and will load up information.
For anyone interested in doing this type of performance I recommend that you view the video I created and follow the steps I took and you won’t have any problem when people decide to read the QR codes.