Below is a link to the video elements from “A Chocolate Autopsy”.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B6abQqwHIGAPT01zVFUzTW50Wk0/edit?usp=sharing
A Chocolate Autopsy – Video Elements
////Final Blog Post
//First Impressions and Exploration.
“I declare that the library is endless.” (Borges, J L. (1998) The Library of Babel .Collected Fictions.
Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin. P112/3)
After being allocated to the library, a place of almost infinite knowledge and Personal interest as well as having a rich History as the Great Central Warehouse, I knew that research would be first on my agenda. In my quest to know everything there is to know about the library my first stop was, predictably, the library. I spent hours wandering between the shelves, becoming immersed in the book titles, until I began to read them out of context, I was looking at the words as if they were floating in space and not part of the library, noticing that many of them were senseless, or even offensive when taken away from their paper counterparts.
I was particularly caught on a book called White over Black to have these words written in the side of a book is acceptable, but imagine them written across a building, or on a bathroom wall and suddenly the meaning changes. Context was one of the first ideas that hit me and I spent a few days playing with the context of signs around the building and created my own map of the Library using the floor plans but naming the rooms myself. Context took precedence in this exercise, fire doors became gates of hell and the staff room was a place for wizards to store their armaments.
Continuing with exercises to gather as much as I could from the library, I next found a spot on each floor one after the other and sat for half an hour. Splitting that time into ten minute sections where I did the following:
Write down everything I think
Write down everything I hear
Draw everything in my field of view
This was a very interesting exercise in collecting short pieces of writing in raw form about a short, personal experience in the library. Putting the sections together and seeing how they intertwine or sit completely apart helped me to form some interesting ideas regarding live art within the Library. At this early stage I was contemplating heavily the idea of placing cameras with live feeds to televisions around the library, forcing anyone who enters the building to take part in this kind of exercise without them knowing. Possibly formulating a final edited video of several people’s entire library experiences, but this soon became an idea for future pieces as the group formed and our joint efforts took us in a different direction.
The Group and Initial Ideas
We first traded all our gathered research and exploration so we could find where our impressions so far overlapped, thus helping us figure out where to move forward. We had all by this point read about several other pieces to influence our progress. We all mentioned The Surveillance Camera Players, who perform short plays in front of CCTV cameras, in a pro-privacy protest to show “CCTV as unable to offer any useful social function but to violate human rights.” (Govan, E. Nicholson, H. Normington, K. (2007) Making A Performance. Routledge) This was a particularly interesting piece because there are many cameras throughout the entire library, most of which I had never even noticed. We discussed the possibility of using the cameras and live camera feeds which I had been exploring the week previous.
Another key stimulus we found Cardiff and Miller’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) I found the idea of merging two realities through everyday handheld technology fascinating, the way the real world and the pre-recording become one and catch you off guard when the camera moves and people seem to disappear. Instantly I knew that mobile phones and video technology had to be included in this piece.
After a visit to the Lincoln Archives, learning about the history of the building and surrounding area, I was certain that I didn’t want to go any further this way. While the past was good grounding for several early ideas, I was more focused on bringing the books and the library into the future. The group agreed that the past of the building wouldn’t be our focus and from this and we set to work learning about the technology involved in running the Library. This brought our attention to the numerical ordering system of the Library Catalogue, which was the base of our piece.
All the world, in a few little codes
With the Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) Still in our minds we put together the two main ideas we had struck, and we planned to have a barcode inside a book in the library which would take you on a tour around the library, taking you to places we would be performing or have installations. Merging the two realities into one. The barcode was the first thing to be cut as they were difficult to make however Ivor lead us to QR codes, easy, free and infinite to make, eventually.
There was a meeting the following week to pitch our ideas to people who could authorise them and also a chance to get feedback. The feedback turned our group upside down, the material we had was vague at best and we realised that we were taking on too much at once so the piece changed and we were now creating a group total of one hundred QR codes, twenty five each, to be placed into books and each leading to a different piece of material, relating to both the book and ourselves. An Interactive Promenade Performance.
QR codes are my worst enemy at this point. Ivor is the only one who understands fully how to use them so we are making the material for him to make the QR codes for. We soon realise that we don’t have the time to continue making them this way so we searched the internet for help and immediately found the website, www.qrstuff.com that will generate a code leading to just about any online material you can create, pictures, videos, pieces of text, websites etc the infinite amount of knowledge held within the libraries books are about to be expanded by a few little codes stuck in their pages, a fantastic opportunity for any artist.
We went our separate ways for a few days as a group to work through the list of books we would use and start to plan what was to hide behind our codes. I started by making simple video and picture link codes and realised I was making them in about 3 minutes, meaning I could focus my time on making the content of the links which was what I was hoping for. We met as a group and looked through the material we had each already made, what we had planned, suggestions for where to find inspiration next and planned when our next meeting would be and what we were hoping to achieve by then.
Reconnecting with the Site
After spending almost a whole week getting to grips with QR codes and attempting to realise their full potential, it was time to get back to the centre point of our piece, the library and its many books. I spent many hours over a week finding and flicking through the twenty five books that will house my codes, all books that have some personal resonance to me; A book about sign language, relating to my father who is deaf and Life Of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht, my favourite play, to name a few examples.
For many of the books it was simple to decide what was to go in them, I followed my instincts for many of them as I wanted my code to be a representation of how I feel about a book when judging by its cover. I read a lot from the books on my list to improve the quality of my work but my base idea was always set before I opened the book. The code within the Sign Language book was a slideshow of me signing out the alphabet, as when I saw the book on the shelf, it was the first thing I thought about. The ideas were influenced by and created within the library but each book became its own site.
…And Beyond
Since the beginning we have been constantly reminding ourselves in the library being infinite. It isn’t, it’s simply too immense for us to comprehend so we label it infinite. There is more information there on each topic than most could learn in a lifetime and I planned to expand infinity. An Idea I was set thinking about from reading Borges The Library Of Babel which opens with “The universe (which others call the Library)” (Borges, J L. (1998) The Library of Babel .Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin. P112/3) Much like the universe any library is an infinite but always expanding collection of knowledge and stories. This was stimulus for many of my QR ideas; I wanted to be part of the expansion, leading me to create my QR for How To Succeed In Business Without A Penis. I wanted this QR to offer an alternative source of information, so I scoured every modern student saving grace, Google, until I came across a list of the 50 most powerful women in business. I linked the code directly to this, making the point; if you want to succeed in business, genitals will not stop you if you truly want to succeed. Along this route of being beyond infinity I made my QR for Legacy link to a story posted online from a survivor of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. So anyone using this book for research into Chernobyl can read the code and be lead onto a new source of information, of course still relating to me as this was a story I had read a while before and found fascinating.
Error 404: Page not found
A performance that hinges upon technology and online material was destined to run into technical difficulties, most came and went without a problem, but “error 404: Page not found” nearly brought the whole piece crashing to the ground. Nine days before the codes were to go into the books every one of my codes had this issue, thankfully I have spent a lot of time troubleshooting and fixing computers due to my Previous I.T training at AS and GCSE, as well as being the family technology buff. I spent hours trying to find the error, even reading through the http script trying to find where it was stuck and nothing. The next day I was about to start remaking all the codes from scratch, a laborious task which, thankfully, I managed to avoid, I tried one of the old codes one last time and, as is the way with technology sometimes, it worked perfectly, as did all the rest. I presumed this to be an issue with the servers that link the codes to the URLs although truthfully the cause was unknown. The important thing was my codes all worked again although there was always the worry after this that we could put 100 fantastic little pieces all over the library that all linked to “error 404: Page not found” and we would be forced to postpone our grand unveiling. I had no further issues with QR codes after this, however, like an artist with an eternally unfinished painting I kept editing and changing material within the codes and the only way to do that is make a fresh code, by the date of performance I had near 100 QRs myself and choosing which ones to use proved harder in the end than making them.
Evaluation
If I see another QR code I’m going to… Scan it. I have discovered something I simply adore through working on this Site Specific piece, QR codes are so simple to make, rarely have technical problems that don’t fix themselves and can be linked to do just about anything. You can even set a code to send a text from the phone it’s scanned with. I am certain I will be including them in future work and will be experimenting in my free time to hopefully achieve their full potential. What we as a group produced in the end was something I found very exciting, we had done what we set out to do, expand the infinite and insert snippets of our own lives into the library.
Personally I was very pleased with every QR I had made and was excited to get feedback from people who had come and found my work. Feedback was almost entirely positive with the only negative feedback being out of my control, codes not working straight away or books not being in their proper places, which is the nature of the Site and part of the performance, the QR codes were not made to be in the books for a day and then gone, they are there forever now. I felt that reserving the books so they would all be there from day one was to cheat the Site, the Library is a working living space and to have denied students those books for my QRs would have been against what I believe Site Specific work to be about. It’s crucial to me that the Site be compromised as little as possible as the first instance of me changing it to fit my needs it becomes a theatre. One of the most interesting things about this piece for me is the way the audience became the performers. As they stood in the library scanning the codes and not knowing what to expect, people would watch them, wondering why they are holding their phones up to the books and suddenly a fresh performance is created, irrelevant of what is in the codes, the act of finding scanning and watching them becomes a performance in itself as “a distinction is drawn between the watchers and the watched.” (M. Pearson. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. p157) This was another reason for me to not want to compromise the site at all by setting it for performance as a key purpose was to create this watcher and the watched with the audience, I wanted them to search for the books and possibly need to ask for help should they not know how the ordering system works, possibly increasing audience members as whoever helps them may wait to see what they are so desperate to find.
Were I to do this again I would have the practice and time to make all the QR codes myself from scratch rather than trust a website to generate them for me, as there is much less chance of running into server problems and I could claim all credit for the technical work.
I had thought about making the QRs more interesting themselves as you can change colours and make patterns from them etc which would be interesting to experiment with but personally I prefer the simplicity of them. The plain mask helps build the anticipation for whatever you are to be lead to.
As a group I feel we worked together well, there were times when we struggled to communicate properly as tensions were high towards the end and several deadlines and performances all at once got the better of us but we always came together and talked through issues in a professional way. I enjoyed spending time with my colleagues as people and was proud to work with them as an artist and together we made something we are all very proud to leave for people to find for years to come.
Borges, J L. (1998) The Library of Babel .Collected Fictions. Trans. Andrew Hurley. New York: Penguin. P112/3
Cardiff. Miller. Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012)
M. Pearson. (2010). Site-Specific Performance. Palgrave Macmillan. New York
Govan, E. Nicholson, H. Normington, K. (2007) Making A Performance. Routledge
Sophia Bishell : My final submission
//My final submission blog
It has been very exciting for us to look at such a familiar place and delve deeper into the library and its past. My immediate reaction to the library was the association with the endless times I enter the building with just the aim to work on endless essays or for dashing to the printers before my 9am lecture. I have always seen the Library as a formal, serious, organised place with the sole purpose to work. This is where our social groups, lecturers walk in and out, pass by every day. Until studying the module for Site Specific Performance I had never looked in such detail researching a location to make sure all our project was backed by archive research. As the library is a place of routine where we go with purpose to study, it becomes easy to look past the entire space which it has to offer.
I worked with Samantha Thomas and Jessica Spencer to create a unique project which involved multiple influencers, primarily artist Andre Stitt. As our Site Specific performance evolved, my group’s process was a continual learning process in an exhibition performance space. The process created a living installation that did not interfere with the library users. The performance focused on three 10am starts Wednesday 7th May 2014 to Friday 9th May 2014, and as a final open exhibition Saturday 10th. The durational quality of our piece extended due to the nature of the tasks we were doing in order to create the visual aspect of our space.
‘Audience need not be categorized, or even consider themselves as ‘audience’ as a collective with common attributes. All three sets of relationships performer/performer, performer/spectator, spectator/spectator, become part of an active matrix of interaction and available for negotiation: momentary and durable, individual and collective.’ (Pearson, p.175) Our performance space was in the University library Freezone; we saw the space to be ideally situated as a live art installation location within our given site.
The project has been exhausting mentally and physically. We were being observed behind glass and also when transporting materials to our space in a library environment. A security camera already in the room, which connected to the screen at the library reception made us extra conscious when there was no audience behind glass. We still felt as though we were being watched. Our performance was experimental due to the nature of the project being a learning by doing performance so we were becoming aware of methods to do tasks in such scale and be aware of our attitude and behaviour in the space. We were performing in a library where people do not expect to witness performance. There was a continuous through line with our project from the developmental processes of seminar tasks and brainstorming after weekly readings.
We pursued the challenge of bringing back the library sites past, the idea of layering the space to show the site development, concepts of materiality based performance, durational performance and shift work.
The process analysed
We called ourselves ‘The Curators’. A ‘Curator is a person who is in charge of looking after precious things e.g. in a museum, library, art gallery.’ (Penguin English Students Dictionary, p.189). We wanted to perform our tasks as curators would. We gave attention to detail to tasks, such as hanging the dripping pages on the lines.
On visiting the Lincolnshire archives we found out about the important role of the current library site in Lincoln. The visit was highly insightful as we gained a clear perception of what the library used to be. The site was once called Holmes common.
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University of Lincoln
Masterplan 01
Design and access statement
August 2012. P.34
The previous railway siteMap & image
As well as the archives as a group we looked at as many different documents featuring local site information. A link can be found here to a detailed documentation of the site history explored for the University Masterplans for architecture.
‘Site specific performance can be especially powerful as a vehicle for remembering and forming a community for at least two reasons. First its location can work as a potent mnemonic trigger, helping to evolve specific past times related to the place and a time of performance and facilitating a negotiation between the meanings of those times. A memory is invested in and stimulated by sites’ (Harvie, 2005, p.44)
In the classes where we listened in the library and explored the site, I began to realise there were many parts of the library which I had not been to. The seminar tasks made us think about the sounds of the library. Where I expected silence there was lots going on when we focused on listening. Our performance appeared silent externally however was not.
Here are a few extracts follow this link…
In another task we were asked to interpret and create a drawing of that space. The idea of doing a project showing the library generating to incorporate the site past and the present was brought forward from this.
The link can be found here for my interpretation.
Book as art was an inspiring stimulus for our performance to think of the visual aspect of our project.
Blood Sweat and Tears & Journeys Fuelled by Ideas covers remaining after the performance
In addition Andre Stitt and Alastair MacLennan presented a live 24-hour collaborative performance work at the Drawing Center, New York. Vanishing Point performed experiences of conflict, the legacies of post-colonial identity, memory, recall, departure and arrival. It focused on the moment of encounter through collaborative activity and the artists filled the gallery space through a combination of performance and installation. This was comparable to what our project evolved to create for when we covered the floor in pages.
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Andre Stitt and Alastair MacLennan, St. Paul St. Gallery, Auckland, New Zealand
Twenty Four Hour Performance from Midday, 4 May to Midday 5 May, 2011
Exhibition, 6 May to 3 June, 2011
Spectral arc vanishing-point
The book as art, and Stitt inspired The Curators Thursday 15th & Friday 16th May 2014
Andre Stitt was an inspiration for working with materials incorporating labour-based tasks. His physicality enabled him to undertake physical performances and do the tasks with purpose.
Andre Stitt -shift work, part 1
The idea of creating a shift-based performance was important for us as we liked how in this project performers collaborate in shifts creating a visual project. Performing space was similar to ours too as performers were exposed.
Andre Stitt project for Trace involved projects by artists creating work in response to the characteristics and qualities of the space and context. The project consisted of planned installations as well as informal detritus for the following month. (Pearson, p.89) Our piece was inspired by this project by its similar structure for durational tasks and the material aspect in developing site performance work.
The conditions and work for the site has evolved from the hard physical labour constructing the site and in the grain workhouse to the mental labour studying in the library now. The previous work in the library has been durational. We wanted this highlighting in our project. Looking into durational performances helped develop our concept. ‘Durational art has another quality that invokes the flux of temporal experience, the quality of time experienced in the doing of an action rather than simply the quantity of chronological time that a task might consume. This idea might be summarized by saying that the completion of a task takes as long as it takes, that it has its own duration.’ (Sheer, p.1)
Our idea developed into filling the space. I suggested to our group we should bring back the green. After speaking with the lecturers we were reminded not to lose our initial idea of using raw materials for our project. We then went on a quest for for turf to cover a 25ft room. After calling up all local suppliers it was a relief to get a deal making the project feasible from the nearby B & Q. The delivering and travelling became a task of part of our performances as our preparation was exposed with three of us girls pulling trolleys through the University campus. In doing this task we were focused thinking strategies to stack the living grass and lift it.
We originally planned for our piece to be performed over three days but these were extended due to the set up and take down of materials, known as pre-performance and post-performance. The main performance took place during days one and three, working from 10am aiming for 6pm but ending up working overtime until the tasks were completed. We were doing tasks that were exposed at all times in a lit room. On the Tuesday afternoon we all met and I produced a draft drawing of how our piece would develop over the main three days. We then went to B & Q, across the road, and collected two full trolleys of turf. Due to this being in the afternoon onlookers could see us travelling to the library with the obstruction. Later that evening we tested our plastic sheeting to make sure it would fit in the space. We went to the local bed shop for free sheeting which covered their display beds. This plastic was thick and great at protecting the floor from the turf and everything else layered on top.
Stans Café presenting Of All The People In All The World used grains of rice to bring formally abstract statistics to startling and powerful life. Over a period of days a team of performers carefully weighed out quantities of rice to represent a host of human statistics of populations. The statistics were arranged in labelled piles creating an ever changing landscape of rice. This piece drew multiple parallels to our performance. Similar in a sense that their piece was a durational performance requiring shift work, equally having concept of displacement and creating installations similar to the piles of rice whereas we used grain and turf.
Stan’s Cafe: Of all the people in the world 2013
Preparation day:
Preparation day Tuesday 6th May 2014
Day One:
We carefully laid our turf, with the precision of curators making sure this was neatly done. We measured the room three times previously and gave our original measurements to the store. Unfortunately due to a few of the rolls being slightly shorter we had to go back to the store and get a couple more. As part of our process Jess stayed preserving the freshly laid grass by tidying edges and watering it, whilst Sam and I got the final delivery. We then broke for lunch as we took into account breaks into shifts as shift work requires time and workspace rest. After lunch we collected a tin bath which had plastic sheeting in it to prevent leaking. We then filled the bath representational of the Brayford Pool site. To the left was situated a grain bag. To the right was a mass pile of books on the desk. Task one for one performer to record the book’s ISBN, and title and log like a curator by sorting the books into ones wanted for the performance and disused showing the sorting that has gone on in the site. Task two; filling the bath- collecting bucket at a time (inspired by the typhoid outbreak water collecting from the site)
Task three; emptying 40kg of grain from the bags by a different method, Sam handful by handful, Jess pinch of grain by pinch of grain, Sophia grain piece by grain piece. By doing the precision of the grain challenge we were doing hard labour in its smallest form. We rotated our tasks after fifteen buckets were filled and poured into the bath. We finished the tasks in the day and ended by putting up lines of string up on the wall and then we stayed over time to layer the grass with pages.
We incorporated the process of choosing two books from our pile which we had to begin setting up the space with. We carefully chose two books with text relevant to our site specific performance. We laid them into the bath of water on day one. The books ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’ and ‘Journeys Fuelled by Ideas’ were symbolic to our piece in a sense that they were representational for our site. The ‘Journeys Fuelled By Ideas’ book related to the idea development and precision involved to our project for detailed measuring, and design to this experimental performance. ‘Blood, Sweat and Tears’ book brought out idea of labour in our site.
The Curators: Day 1 Wednesday 7th May 2014
Day Two:
Preserving:
We watered the grass every two hours with a watering can. We carefully cared for the grass it was not the easiest of challenges as we had all the lines up. This made preserving the space far more difficult a challenge than we had thought. The lines were obstructions in the structure of our performing space. I took careful precise placement with my body to get through the space without destroying the lines. The lines would fall but we made rules for our shift performance such as when the lines fell, we all stopped task and resumed putting them back up. The space was abandoned with the light off in this night and apart from the watering of the grass we added no new material. After the final watering at 6pm we destroyed the books and covered the floor to show the desolation of the site.
Abandoned site-
Day Three:
We debriefed at 10am and logged our tasks. We curated the pages. Over the days the books began to naturally separate, we carefully pulled out the pages from the binding, whilst the books was submerged in the water. We took care in our task to not rip the page itself and then passed the dripping page to another performer to the peg on the line. We took out twenty five pages out at a time and then rotated our work for our shift piece. The third performer had the memo board and a handful of grain that they gently placed directly underneath the drips to the drying pages and recording this by tally. The individual tasks we rotated tested our relationships within the performance. Personally for me my patience was tested when I was paper clipping pages to the line then doing the grain task straight after as I felt I had a long period of time manoeuvring myself round a limited space. When I brought down a line by falling over another and lost my handful of grain my patience was tested and I was feeling the toll of the durational performing. I put the line back up and began climbing the space and pursuing my task until the rotation. This showed the genuine behaviour that happens in doing teamwork. Until we had done three rotations our task was complete. We wanted to leave a lasting image for the day. Taking down the lines together, it was a relief to be able to freely move the space without feeling trapped. We decided to lift the grain piles and separate the grain from the pages on the grass in order to leave the remains on just the common to show the traces of the development process. By the end of the day traces were left, from the evolving site.
The Curators: Day 3 Friday 9th May 2014
Final day:
After completing our tasks we decided that we wanted to open up the space to our audience so that it could be the Freezone common that it once was again. This was successful as we had students and families explore the materials and traces of the room. It was great to be able to interact with our audience to be questioned further on our project and talk through the week’s progress to get to the final stage we were now at. From 5pm until the early hours of the morning we cleared the space until the room was spotless. It didn’t seem right when we stripped the room back again. It was sad to have lost the ‘common’.
We are the curators of place you often go. A place where you study, achieve and think you know well. Watch us work to uncover history and preserve heritage. Our labour involves precision and care. By adding the layers to work we generate something new from a place once destroyed and abandoned. Witness what it is to work. Observe us on our shift…
My performance evaluation
As our performance was an installation and it relied on the users of the library and people walking through campus as our audience who saw our process and progression of the site. As our space was next to the entrance of the building, we found a regular curious audience observing the room and us at work. We did hear the odd negative comment due to people being confused and not understanding about the Library site history and looking further into observing our project, we were taking performance into a non-arts venue our project and performance was un-expected. However people were intrigued by our evolving performance and the common returning to our site, who questioned us in our breaks and after shift.
On the Saturday opening the room up was very interesting to see the reaction of interested audience who were pleased to see the evolved process and grass in their library. The final performance progressed into a site with remaining traces. We were very pleased with the visual turnout of the space.
In performance week the space was successful in making an impact on the passers by of the library questioning the site and space. The mapping of the performance we initially drew up, established a clear deadline for all of us to focus on. I was enthusiastic, self-motivated to get the tasks done, with a strong work ethic in this collaborative performance in building the site.
The location of the room worked particularly well as we found our performance easy to access in taking our materials to and from. We also did not disturb people working and studying in the library. The items we chose, grain, tin bath of water, books and grass, were particulary good materials as all related to our site, and in their mass form were easy to be seen by our audience. The overall project was a success due to the interest into the context of the site, the course and module we were studying and for us understanding what Site Specific Performance really is.
Beyond the routine work of maintaining the space with the girls we were pleased to open up the ‘common’ again on the final day to see people interacting with our space. Every performance and project has its errors and relationships which could be improved upon. Durational performance became a test for each of us. Our patience, focus and commitment was needed in order to sustain team relationships for performance. Before undertaking this project I was running a few times a week to build my general fitness up for this challenge however personally I feel I could have been a little more physically stronger in my arms so it would be easier to undertake the labour challenges. I would also say rather than having enough turf to have extra would have saved us the task of returning for more as performance.. If I were to alter my performance I would take more precision and time with tasks.
If I were to do this task again with a bigger budget in the same space I would incorporate more of the natural elements such as bringing in of a tree and wildlife of the common into the room creating a more real experience. Using microphones inside the room with speakers connected, so audience could hear conversations would be interesting to explore. Finally It would be interesting to have stretched the project out longer to make use of the ‘Common’ by opening the free space to the public.
Having mainly experiencing performance in a traditional venue or on a stage this was very different. The theories we looked at in the process behind taking performance into any location and relating it to site was very interesting. I became committed into justifying everything with research and site context. The practice of Site Specific performance developed my understanding of Site based projects. The project allowed my imagination and ideas to be free and become possible. It is a shame to have to say; goodbye to the green.
“Goodbye to the green”
Site history:
Accessed 28/4/14 from http://environment.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2011/04/613_design-access-statement_LOWRES_120813.pdf
-Morrison (2012) University of Lincoln Master plan 01 Design and access statement August 2012 London, UK: Allies and Morrison Architects.
Abandoned site-
Accessed 10/05/14 https://www.flickr.com/photos/universityoflincolnlibrary/2944779930/in/set-72157608049400154/
Quotations
-Harvie, J. (2005) Staging the UK (Manchester: Manchester University Press)
-Hill, L (1991) Penguin English Students Dictionary (London: Penguin
-Pearson, M. (2010) Site Specific Performance (King’s Lynn, UK: Palgrave Macmillan)
-Scheer, E. (2012) Performance Research: Introduction: The end of spatiality or the meaning of duration
Youtbube links:
Andre Stitt Shift Work
-Accessed April 18th 2014http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAGUco6lGwk&list=PLFA71EDA6EE1BC486
-Accessed April 18th 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8OKGMoqliH4
Stan’s Cafe-Of all the people in the world
-Accessed April 24th 2014 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BZ8Ixvq-OHY#t=109
Websites
-Accessed May 5th 2014 http://www.andrestitt.com/project/spectral-arc-vanishing-point/
The old warehouse image:
-Accessed January 24th 2014: http://stemarchitects.co.uk/Projects/printView?req=Great-Central-Warehouse-Library-GCW-Lincoln
University of lincoln library current image:
-Accessed January 24th 2014: http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/CULIB/CULIB61/CULIB_61.htm
Final Blog
//Framing Statement
Our final site specific piece in the GCW Library is a culmination of ideas from the last few months’ exploration and experimentation in the space. Drawing primary inspiration from Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993) and Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag (1995), as well as more subtle influences from Forced Entertainment’s Nights In This City (1995) and Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk (2012) we created our piece Functions and Fundamentals. Central to our work has been the idea of making people not only look but ‘see’ what surrounds them in, what is for most, a functional study place. Through the concept of materiality the project aims to play on the idea that “Wrapping ‘alienates, but at the same time makes clear what until now was blocked from our perception’”[1].
![Figure 1 - Christo and Jeanne-Claude's Wrapped Reichstag (1995) available at: http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2007/12/13/2118451.htm?site=news [accessed 15th May 2014].](https://sitespecific2014dhu.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2014/05/r211658_813563.jpg)
The project was framed in performance by the audience encountering myself, the librarian, fully wrapped in book pages with only holes for eyes in the downstairs entrance to the library. Here the audience were invited to collect a wrapped book featuring a series of instructions:
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Go to the First floor.
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Find Group Room 2.
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Enter when vacant.
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Explore, no time limits.
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When finished place your book on the trolley and exit.
The spectators were able to enter group room 2, which was half wrapped in book pages, and viewed two videos (Figure 3 – Spaven, Laura (2014) Example of videos played in Group Room 2, Great Central Library Warehouse.) – one product, one process – of our group wrapping large objects within the site with the same book pages had been used to wrap the room. The performative nature of the piece was not restricted purely to the day of presentation. Many spectators have encountered the process of the work, the wrapped interior of the lift, a wrapped computer and so on. Throughout the final 4 hour performance, I remained still until the spectator requested a book at which point I selected one at random off the side table and delivered it. The other group members acted as Library assistants moving the books from the trolley in group room 2 back to their rightful place with The Librarian, controlled the flow of people in and out of the room and maintained order in our ‘new library’ by whispering their words.
Analysis of Process – Exploration and Engagement
Back in January when we discovered that we had been assigned the university library for the module I was relatively underwhelmed. After all, this is a building on the campus of the university that is not unfamiliar to students researching and writing essays. That said, as Mike Pearson states in his book Site-Specific Performance, part of the process is “researching a place, often one that is imbued with history or permeated with atmosphere”[2] in order to produce work. At a brief glance it was apparent that our site began its life in 1907 as an industrial railway goods warehouse before being used as builder’s warehouse up to 1998. Until a 2004 renovation saw it open as the university library it spent some time in disrepair. During initial research into this style of performance, which appeared to focus on a building or particular locale, it was useful to note that “it’s not just about the place, but the people who normally inhabit and use that place”[3]. For me, to use a section of the buildings history, something from its present usage or something for inhabitants to interact with as inspiration would provide a performance that “engages with [the] site as [a] symbol,”[4] an important feature within this field of performance. Yet, it was also useful to think about the site not just as a library but as a space to perform and how redefining the space could be key to performance.
It amazed me during our initial exploration of the site that having been in the Library so often just how many rooms, signs and spaces I had not noticed. By investigating the building’s interior and exterior it helped us to begin to see links to the buildings history, how it has been adapted for use as a university library as well as the contrast of architecture between new and old. When on task recording the sounds of the space it took a while to tune in past the electronic hum and the mumbled conversations. It was quite strange in a place where one rarely stops to listen. After noting the rather loud clicking of mice and tip tap of keyboard’s I honed in on one conversation:
– Out tonight?
– No, my boyfriend’s round
– From home or uni?
– Home
– You been together long?
– Erm about 3 years
– That is soooooo cute!
– (laughter)
– I wanted to go further away than here but I don’t know if it’d have worked. Here is good.
– Yeah
– Where you from again?
– Hertfordshire
– I used to work there!
– Where?
– Heart FM
– Did you meet anyone?
– JLS, Kasabian played, I used to get free posters all the time, I lost my job though cause I called Aston Ashton.
– You lost your job cause of that?
– Wait, Aston’s the little flippy one right?
Potentially one of many random conversations being had in the library, I felt there was something quite performative about it, perhaps a verbatim piece. Although the idea fizzled out, I felt that this was a useful process to go through as it was organically creating performance ideas from the specific site.
Engaging with theory would also prove to be integral to our work. Inspired by Tim Etchells and his work with Forced Entertainment, in particular their piece Ground Plans for Paradise (1995), we used maps of each floor of the library to literally write over the current names and uses (Figure 4). Like Forced Entertainment we replaced existing names with “descriptive names, literal names, names that refer to the use we made of the[m]… and not their official function”[5]. I found this to be particularly useful in redefining the space as it made what is a ‘public’ place ‘personal’ to me and to encounters and feelings I had experienced there. This made us consider the psychogeography (where the humans and their environment interact leaving traces) of the Library. It appeared that there were areas of the library more popular than others, certain places that virtually everyone interacted with and others that may have been forgotten or even unknown, such as the Zibby Garnett Library on the first floor had been to me. Thinking about how people interact with the space ultimately came through in our final piece. Through alienating the accepted norms, redefining space became a crucial part of our process.
Looking into existing site specific performance work really opened my eyes to its potentially interactive nature. Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk cleverly used technology to guide the audience through the piece using their mobile phones. Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells’ library based The Quiet Volume looked at the subversion of use in multiple libraries, in different locations, as well as pointing out the sensory elements we can experience in s library through the use of audio commandments. This interactive and sensory nature appealed to me as potentially interaction with the spectator is more easily achieved with site specific work than the traditional theatre structure as it can be encountered. The use of technology in the works above made me consider the expansion into the digital age of performance and storage. Books are now available digitally as e-books with vast amounts of storage online and on hard drives, Ipod music libraries are also making CD libraries redundant.
Whilst technology would be later utilised in our piece, inspired by the work of Hampton, Etchells and Cardiff, at the time we focussed on the expanse of architecture. This is a visually predominant form expanse with our site as it is clear to see the difference between the old brickwork core and new modular buildings. The Lincolnshire Archives helped us to discover something that we couldn’t find online, something tangible, artefacts and documents to potentially help ground our performance in the site’s history.
Architecturally, we immediately noticed from Figure 5 that the modular buildings home to stairs and group rooms in the buildings current function were once wooden. Consequently it would appear that the buildings modern architecture took influence from how the building once looked. Another observation made was that the words Great Central Library Warehouse, at the Brayford Warf East end of the building, seem to have changed multiple times. Whilst the words Great Central Warehouse have remained constant, what now reads Library has been changed at least four times previously reading “Grain,” “Harcros” and “Pattinson” after the building’s owner or use. Furthermore a map of the Great Northern Railway (Figure 6) displaying features still recognisable today such as the Brayford Mere, train station, and Engine Shed sparked ideas of the site’s previous industry.
Analysis of Process – Wrapping, Materiality and Preservation
“The real power of site-specific work is that it somehow activates, or engages with, the narratives of the site … That might be with its formal architecture, or it might be with the character of the building.”[6]
Inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Reichstag, the initial idea was to internally wrap the floor to ceiling windows UL111, a modular building of the library.Through a range of brick-like materials we wanted to engage with the narrative of the site architecturally, making the building resemble how it once looked, thus bringing its history to life. We wanted to wrap to emphasise the materiality of the building’s architecture. Consequently, we spent a large amount of time looking at blueprints and drawing in space, considering the impact of imposing architecture onto architecture which we felt held a strong material presence. Additionally, we had planned to reconstruct the railway lines based on the Great Northern Railway map, which had ran between the library and the Engine Shed. However, as the project progressed we felt we were spreading ourselves too thinly and being overambitious which may result in a lack of quality in our work. Another problem encountered was because the lack of budget was restrictive of the quality of wrapping materials and therefore we risked our work looking like a cheap gimmick.
We decided to abandon the rail reconstruction and focus on wrapping. At this point we asked ourselves the question, why do we wrap? This led us to the idea of preservation. We wrap presents to preserve the surprise, the Ancient Egyptians wrapped bodies to care for them, old items are often wrapped to protect them from damage. We then looked to define preservation:
Preserve
1. To keep alive or in existence; make lasting: to preserve our liberties as free citizens.
2. To keep safe from harm or injury; protect or spare.
3. To keep up; maintain: to preserve historical monuments.
4. To keep possession of; retain: to preserve one’s composure.
5. To prepare (food or any perishable substance) so as to resist decomposition or fermentation[7]
Whilst this was an interesting idea, especially considering the function of a library is to preserve books, we had not decided an appropriate material in which to wrap objects. After playing around with a few materials including baking paper and tracing paper we found that the material was only any good when wrapping square objects with straight edges. However we then discovered large sheets of white cloth. We found that this material was more workable on a wider range of objects, providing both larger surface coverage and definition. This was especially striking with larger objects due to the impressive visual impact (Figure 7) – something we were striving for.
As well as the idea of preservation, wrapping can be used to highlight. Here the concept of not only looking but ‘seeing’ came to the forefront of the audience experience thus we were wrapping to open peoples’ perceptions. In addition to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, the artist who had a great influence on our work was Rachel Whiteread. Her project House (Figure 8), filled an entire house with concrete, before removing the bricks to leave a cast of the interior. Despite the fact the monument was demolished a mere few months after its birth, House made an impact. This particularly struck us, as we wanted our piece to have an impact even though it would be taken down only a few hours after its construction in order for the library to once more function normally. House was in its short life a monument and “as Robert Musil wrote that ‘the most striking feature of monuments is that you do not notice them. There is nothing in the world as invisible as a monument’”[8]. This quote particularly grabbed my attention when I think back to our original explorations of the library and how little I actually knew of what, to me, was a functional work space.
![Figure 8 – Rachel Whiteread’s House (1993), the cast of the interior of an entire Victorian terrace, the soon-to-be-demolished 193 Grove Road. Photograph: Rex Features/Jon Bradley. Online: http://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/jul/07/rachel-whiteread-whitechapel-art-interview [accessed 23rd March 2014].](https://sitespecific2014dhu.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2014/03/House-Whiteread.jpg)
Analysis of Process – Framing The Library
For our final piece we decided that we wanted to wrap a section of the library’s Group room 2 where people could enter in small numbers to be completely immersed in the material. However on reflection we chose to only wrap half of the room in order to highlight the contrast of architectures and really expose the materiality of the space which features an amalgamation of materials such as metal, brick, concrete and glass. In order to give a more performative element we decided that a projected video tour of the library depicting wrapped objects would be shown on one wall with a second video on the half wrapped TV screen in the room playing the process of wrapping as we wanted our audience to have some insight into the huge journey of process we have been through on the module.
In the final weeks before our performance we had doubts about the material presence of the white cloth we had been working with. With materiality central to our work we wanted to ensure that we had made the correct choice to provide a crisp definition and meaning. Whilst we liked the translucent nature and manipulability of the cloth, we felt it was too decorative and pretty which was not our desired outcome. After an experimental phase of using materials such as paper mache – which seemed too much like amateur craft – and masking tape – which was too expensive for our project – we arrived at the use of book pages. Experimenting with different material developed our wrapping skills, so that by the final performance the art of wrapping was becoming second nature. The ripped out pages of books were relevant to the site’s function, provided a good quality of definition, helped ‘alienate’ the objects they encompassed and looked visually intriguing. As the found text of the books held no meaning as a text alone, we chose them in order to create a presence generated through the “intrinsic characteristics and qualities: its appearance, patina, texture, feel [and] size”[9]. The material presence of the book pages, for me, made us “redirect our gaze to that which was an absence,”[10] such as the function of the objects in the video and the architecture of the room. Through destroying the physical appearance of a book, it potentially drew the audiences’ attention towards the materiality of the site, rather than just the functionality. This led us to the name of the piece Functions and Fundamentals.
Evaluation
Unlike many site specific works with a single director or artist, our collaborative process allowed four times the brain power to develop ideas and potentially more ownership over our work as we had no external help. This meant wrapping the room from 11pm Thursday until 10am Friday was physically and mentally demanding. We had originally planned to wrap me from head to foot prior to the start of the performance, however as the room took longer than anticipated to wrap exactly in half, we had to adapt involving me being wrapped during the performance. As I was situated on the ground floor of the library near the entrance, almost everyone entering the library noticed me. The reactions varied from fear, to bafflement to laughter.
The performance ran from 10am-2pm drawing a satisfying amount of spectators, 16 parties of two’s or three’s in total. The spectators who entered the room (Figure 9) appeared to be relatively impressed by the visual spectacle, with many asking how long it took us to complete the task. I believe framing the piece by the audience collecting a book of instructions from me and finding the room to subsequently explore worked quite well as it created a more interactive, sensory experience for the spectator allowing them to form their own opinions and experiences from their visit as opposed to having a particular view imposed upon them.
![Figure 9 - UoL Library (2014) Group Room 2 Wrapped, online: https://twitter.com/GCWLibrary/status/464716556619239424 [accessed 16th May 2014], Great Central Warehouse.](https://sitespecific2014dhu.blogs.lincoln.ac.uk/files/2014/05/BnMBPoxCMAA56cd.jpg)
By practically and theoretically engaging with site-specific performance I feel I have advanced my knowledge of how to frame performance in a non traditional venue. Unlike a formal theatre venue defined by a stage and seats for the audience, site-specific performance offers the capacity to frame performance in much more creative and potentially coercive ways. The work of Forced Entertainment with guided bus tours, Rachel Whiteread creating installations to be encountered and Christo transforming buildings are a mere few examples of the possibilities of how to successfully frame site specific work.
Works Cited:
[1] Hanssen, Beatrice (1998) Christo’s Wrapped Reichstag: Globalized Art in a National Context, Germanic Review, 73, 4, 358-359.
[2] Pearson, Mike (2007) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 7.
[3] Pearson, Mike (2007) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 8.
[4] Pearson, Mike (2007) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 8.
[5] Etchells, Tim (1999) “Eight Fragments on Theatre and the City”, Certain Fragments, London: Routledge, 78.
[6] Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 35.
[7]http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/Preserve?s=t
[8] Lingwood, James (1995) Introduction. In: James Lingwood (ed.) Rachel Whiteread: House, London: Phaidon Press Limited, 6-11.
[9] Pearson, Mike (2010) Site-Specific Performance, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 118.
[10]Dennison, Lisa (2001) A House Is Not A Home: The Sculpture of Rachel Whiteread. In: Rachel Whitread (ed.) Rachel Whiteread: Transient Spaces. New York: Guggenheim Museum Publications, 33.
Final Blog Submission
//Body of the Text: An Audio Tour
Framing Statement:
This site specific module meant studying GCW Library itself in its entirety; the opportunity to discover the hidden nature of this building really excited and intrigued me. I felt the main challenge of a performance involving such exploration was not missing anything out. An audio tour therefore seemed the best way to really get to know this public space on a personal level. This line between the public and the personal was an aspect of this site that I wanted to look into. The library is almost continually full of people, yet these people are predominantly inwardly focused on their own tasks, minimally aware of the others around them. This led to an interest in Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells’ The Quiet Volume where participants were made hyperaware of themselves within the space (Etchells and Hampton, 2010). It also connected with Janet Cardiff’s audio walks with George Bures Miller which subtly heighten participants’ awareness of the space and those around them Cardiff and Miller, 2006, 2012). The work of these practitioners looks at the influence of a space on the individuals it contains as well as their involvement with each other and the space itself. I wanted our piece to consider each of these concepts with a focus on how a space influences the way we behave in and interact with it. These influences will be discussed in more detail later.
Our final piece came together as a guided tour, of sorts, of each floor which began just past the main entrance to the ground floor of GCW library. Participants were invited to collect headphones and follow a link to our audio. I use the word ‘participants’ as opposed to ‘audience members’ as those coming to experience our piece were actively involved in reassessing the space, rather than being passive observers. The 30 minute audio tour consisted of both my voice and Frankie’s, (the other member of my group) which directed them throughout its duration. It guided them on an alternative route through the library, asking them to look at and listen to certain aspects they were unlikely to consider on any other occasion. Cardiff says herself that “a walk is an act of contemplation” (Cardiff and Miller, 2006) and this is exactly how I wanted our piece to come across. Our participants were asked to listen in on other people’s conversations and seek out places such as the Zibby Garnet library, the Worth Room and the word covered windows on the first floor. The audio also highlighted for them the connections between the original architecture of the Great Central Warehouse and the new additions made by the university. This involved asking them to assess the changes in atmosphere between certain spaces, touch the brickwork and look for original features that have been masked by new ones. Participants were also asked to take part in tasks which were designed to test expected behaviour, consider the contents of this building and reflect on the way others use this space. Tasks such as deliberately pulling books from shelves and letting them fall to the floor, counting the number of shelves on one floor or listening to the ruptures of the third floor’s silence created by the people there.
Analysis of Process:
Early Ideas
My initial encounter with Great Central Warehouse Library (from now on referred to as ‘GCW’) first meant establishing what is meant by ‘site-specific performance,’ before I could even begin to think about such performance in this erudite and enigmatic environment. However, Pearson says, “a practicable, encompassing definition of site-specific performance…remains slippery” (2010, p. 7). It therefore seemed appropriate to decide upon our own definition of site-specific. We began by considering how we differentiate ‘site’ from ‘space’ and ‘place’. We came to the conclusion that a ‘space’ is empty, and therefore has great potential. A ‘place’ however is inherently active, a physical setting for people to inhabit and interact with. A ‘site’ then is a focused framing of space being used in a place, where something has happened / is going to happen. I therefore agree with Pearson who says that Site-specific performance acts as a “response to the characteristics and qualities of the space and its immediate context” (2010, p. 84) – that context being the place and time in which it is situated. This led to further discussion of the purpose of site-based work; realising that site-specific performance is not just about physical space but its conceptual perceptions and identity. This was followed by a consideration of a performance space’s place within its surroundings, not fixed within a theatrical context but based on a hyper awareness of the dialogue created between the two. I therefore felt that our site-specific piece in GCW did not have to include its entire history, but rather needed to be mindful of the impact that history has on it today. I also hoped that it could assess this subverted dialogue in an explicit, yet subtle way. This inspired me to want to create a participatory piece, as opposed to an active performance, that created a situation which could spark new, considerate trains of thought in those taking part. This was a predominant feature in deciding to create an audio tour which could address each of these aspects.
Research
However, I did not want to create a guided tour which simply mapped out the building, rather a means of facilitating a deeper look at GCW. In the early stages of research this meant asking questions such as ‘what is a book?’. We took this concept above and beyond the idea of type-on-paper-bound-by-a-cover, looking at the University of West England’s, Reading Around… (Book Arts, 2008). This project saw artists creating books in a variety of atypical forms. I created the book pictured below entitled “Waiting on a Woman”, inspired by Brad Paisley’s song of the same title, whose lyrics cover the paper hand.
(Images 1 and 2)
Our collection varied from edited books that had been cut, stuck and written over, to single images or conceptual ideas. The issue then of having such variety was how to catagorise our newly created library – a task that we ultimately realised as futile. This raised questions about the catagorisation and ordering system of GCW. How can a place that can be welcoming in so many ways also be a clinical, elitist structure based on an almost ridiculous amount of formal rules and social conventions? Though we debated how to discuss such a question, our final narrative addressed this by interweaving questions about atmosphere, order and human interaction. As McAuley says of site based work, it can establish a “deeper understanding of the spatialised nature of human culture…changing the way people perceive places” (Pearson, 2010, p. 10) which is exactly what I hoped our piece could do for GCW.
After thinking about the conceptual side of GCW we looked for ways of reconnecting with the physical site. We found somewhere in the library and made a close drawing of it, a task designed to look closer than ever before at one specific detail of this vast building. We then shared these drawings with the class, swapped our ‘masterpieces’ and made new copies of each other’s drawings. We then reconnected this copy to GCW in some way. The aim of this was to examine how an image can be removed, distorted and then reconnected to the space – how a performance may take one aspect of a site, dissect, expand and reconfigure it, without losing its relation to the site as a whole. I swapped a drawing of the front of GCW which I then zoomed in on for my copy, focusing on the protruding Worth Room. To reconnect this with the library I swapped mediums; choosing photographs over pencil drawing. I started with a photo of the roadside wall and repeatedly zoomed in on the Worth Room before moving inside the library and zooming out from the Worth Room, through the library and back around to the front.
(Video 1).
This idea of moving through the library whilst challenging our usual focus really interested me and heavily influenced our piece. I also decided we should include the Worth Room in our tour after realising what an odd yet interesting addition it is to the original building.
Again returning to the site to link our concepts to the space, we explored the library, walking each floor, observing people and discovering new places we had yet to visit. We had the interesting task of finding a space to sit and note a stream of consciousness; sights, sounds, smells and our thoughts and feelings created by this experience. As McAuley says, “a site chosen for its formal qualities can begin insistently to tell its own story” (2012, p.33). This observation task seemed to highlight the point where such a subtle change takes place. The third supposedly silent, floor is a good example of this. Though the library rules dictate it should be a silent space, I was amazed how full of sound it was. I found the quiet coughs, rustles, clicks and bangs considerably more distracting than the allowed hub-ub of the lower floors. An acknowledgement of this contradiction was included in our tour by asking participants to sit in the private booths on the third floor and taking a full minute without audio to absorb the sounds around them. This linked with Etchells’ idea that a city or a “meeting point of crowds and of capital” (1999, p.79), in this case realised in GCW, can “[breed] the fantasy of human interchangeability…[creating] strange intimacies [which] play between hereness and thereness ” (Etchell, p. 79). I wanted to bring this collection of ideas to our participants’ attention, whilst allowing them to come to their own conclusions; hence giving them time to consider the sounds of the people around them with no voiceover.
Influences / Inspiration
Looking to other site-specific work for inspiration, we came to The Quiet Volume by Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells. This piece spread across four libraries and whispered audio instructions to its participants through headphones (Etchells and Hampton, 2010). I liked the intimacy created and the level of trust that was established through the softly spoken audio. I also liked the subtlety of their instruction; they left little room negotiation, yet their instructions did not feel like demands. Though this piece heavily influenced the nature of our own, I felt it was important that our tour should not be “site-generic (performance generated for a series of like sites)” but discernibly “site-specific (performance specifically generated from / for one selected site)” (Pearson, 2010, p.8). I felt this was necessary as I wanted the piece to inspire our audience to look at their personal connection with GCW, rather than consider libraries in general. This was a dominant reason for creating a tour with a set route and a specific focus on architecture, as opposed to mirroring Hampton and Etchells’ work.
Janet Cardiff’s Alter Bahnhof Video Walk with George Bures Miller made participants hyper-aware of their situation and the history of the place they stood in. The aim of this was to “reveal the poignant moments of being alive and present” (Cardiff and Miller, 2012). I didn’t like the idea of using video as I wanted the other people present in real time to affect our participants just as much as the space itself did. However, I thoroughly agreed with the significance of revealing the poignancy of the present moment; a moment where our participants would be viewing the site from an alternative perspective than they were used to.
Justine Shih Pearson intertwines explicit directions with invitations to consider one’s surroundings. She says that her piece A Place Called Lost, “posits placelessness as an in-between (not detached from place but between places), creating its own character, its own sense of being-in-the-world.” (Pearson, 2006). This is the sense that I wanted to convey to our participants whilst they were assessing the wider spaces of the library, as when they are sat on the first floor and asked to count the number of shelves they can see. That GCW represents not a destination, but a stop on a bigger journey. That it can be appreciated as its own almost living, breathing entity as opposed to a solely functional place.
Development
After looking at these practitioners and engaging in this research, I felt that we had gained a sense of where we wanted to go with our piece and roughly how we would like the final product to form. However, I felt we needed research into other peoples’ current feelings about their library, before we could attempt to challenge these pre-existing ideas. To gain a sense of peoples’ opinions we asked those moving around GCW to sum up how the library makes them feel in one word. We had an interesting variety of responses, collated in this video
(Video 2).
The inwardly focused nature of all these responses centred around work. This spurred me on to want our piece to highlight for our participants, the everyday users of GCW, to look beyond themselves. Butler says that audio tours create “sophisticated and nuanced experience of places” (2007, p. 360). I wanted to open participants’ eyes to such an experience of GCW which reaches far beyond work and study. Writing a narrative that encompassed all our ideas and was spoken in an appropriate tone was our next challenge. Cardiff’s piece, Her Long Black Hair helped us decide how far to go with text and sound. Her piece, “[interwove] stream-of-consciousness observations with fact and fiction, local history, opera and gospel music, and other atmospheric and cultural elements” (Cardiff, 2004). We decide to stick solely to narration as opposed to including music or singing. I felt this was more appropriate for a site so inherently dedicated to words. This also meant that the voices of Frankie and I were the only things our participants heard, apart from the natural noises of the library. This aimed to place more importance on those external noises by keeping what was heard as internal sound simple.
When penning our narrative we repeatedly edited our script, playing with words, alliteration and metre. Our original recordings sounded like this; Track 1 by Body of the Text
(Booth and Shorten, 2014). However on listening back we felt this was too dictatorial and went for a much slower, softer tone for our final recording. We wanted to find a balance between directing our participants to guide them on our designated course, whilst providing them with things to consider and time to think on their own. This was particularly important in the timing of our audio. Our first ‘draft’ had very few moments for reflection, it was only when listening back and getting advice off others we decided that much longer pauses were needed for contemplation. The extension of these pauses took a number of attempts to get right. We found it difficult coming to the audio with fresh ears, as from an outsider’s perspective. Knowing what was about to be said and asked of us meant we continually pre-empted the narration and therefore did not leave our actual, naïve participants enough time to fully appreciate or engage with what we were asking them. Between the penultimate and final recording of audio we added just over ten minutes of silent pauses. This is our final track; Body Of The Text by Body of the Text
(Booth and Shorten, 2014.)
Performance Evaluation:
Review and Analysis
Though our audio is still available on the internet for anyone to access, for the purpose of analysis our ‘performance’ will be classed as the four days after our audio went live. Audience / participant numbers are difficult to assess. Frankie and I were present at the start of the tour for the majority of the first day and we saw nine people take part, though more may have done so over the following days. These included staff, drama students and their friends. The main issue we had with participation is that though our tour was open to every user of GCW, we did not come up with a way of getting a varied audience to interact with our piece. Were we to do this again we would have to promote the piece much more avidly in an attempt to include more people. We also discovered an issue with orientation; we had created this piece for users of GCW, people that are familiar with the building. When we had an external lecturer take part, he did not know that there is a second staircase so lost his way. We had not accounted for this as we wanted the piece to challenge peoples’ existing thoughts on GCW as opposed to manipulating their first impression.
We wanted to host the track online so that it was freely available to access or download and so it could remain after our ‘performance’ was over. I particularly liked the idea that someone may just stumble upon it and take this tour without having any idea who Frankie and I are. As we hosted our track on Soundcloud, we can see how many times it has been played – a total of 42 – though we cannot be certain that each of these plays occurred on site by an active participant; someone may have come across the track anywhere. This is the main issue with ensuring our piece reaches the appropriate audience, perhaps a future production could set up a QR code in GCW so the participant had to be present.
However, issues of inappropriate participants aside, overall we had a good response to the piece. People followed it through from start to finish, predominantly staying on course and said they enjoyed taking part. Responses varied from incited intrigue to feeling overwhelmed. Our tone and narrative was complemented for being just right in terms of balance between direction and guidance. As expected, people were most shocked by having to drop a book from its shelf, yet everyone we spoke to completed the task. This task also involved rewriting quotes from books and sticking them to the front covers as well as relocating the books to a different section of shelf. Photos of some of these can be seen below.
(Images 3-8)
The main thing that surprised me about our final performance was the participants’ response to the site itself. We had expected that not everyone who came into the library would want to take part. We had thought that it would be best attended on the first day. What I had not expected was peoples’ genuine surprise at what our piece had shown them. I had thought we were showing them things they hadn’t considered, but I was unsure how much they would really care or be interested. Just because I now found GCW intriguing didn’t mean that they would. After all I had been studying it for weeks and getting to know the place on an almost intimately personal level. People showed real interest and surprise in how our audio had made them see GCW and how it had made them feel about a place that had previously incited stress and frustration. Though we spoke only to a small number of people about their experience, I feel that the broad, new found level of appreciation they now had for GCW meant our piece was an overall success. This module opened my eyes to the broad scope of site-specific performance and corrected a lot of preconceptions I had had about the simplicity of site work. Looking at the broad spectrum of site related work has made me realise not only the variety and scope of non-traditional venue performance but the value of it. Exploring the library in this way intrigued and excited me about site work in such a dynamic setting full of structures, contradictions and most significantly, life.
(Word Count 3,294)
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