ds1935’s blog

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Day 1: I DID NOT WANT to meditate. I procrastinated, I felt anxious, I finally sat down around 11:10 and set an alarm for 11:30. As is often the case, my brain went in waves between jumpier and quieter. I had a few moments of quiet. After a while I panicked that my alarm wasn’t going to go off and I would be trapped there for HOURS, so I opened my eyes and sat up about two minutes before the alarm was set to go off. After that I didn’t really want to do anything, so I went to bed early and lay in bed for a while and eventually fell asleep.

Goffman: giving versus giving off impressions, observer almost always one-up even when process is iterated, social performance so that people all know that they agree what situation they are in–smooth working of society, role of cautionary tales in upholding conformance to appropriate social performances, feelings of anxiety when people don’t all agree as to the basic situation. I liked this.

Self-reflexive performance: who is the audience? performing for oneself so as to situate oneself in culture. I am skeptical of the idea of using tokens from written profiles to infer a meaningful interpretation of one’s role in culture/subcultures–it offers a veneer, an interpretation of what is already a fairly self-conscious performance (filling out a public profile). It doesn’t tell us how people behave in elevators,* but only how their already socially-aware choice of pop culture tokens fits into a matrix of pop culture tokens. I guess it would tell the user if the impression they wanted to give off when writing the profile is indeed the impression they give off. Just seems kind of trivial.

Is there a computational way of extracting elevator behavior/performance of one’s social role regardless of the specific role/smooth social functioning/avoidance of anxiety/etc. from some database?

*(i spend a lot of time in elevators, and there’s a lot of weird behavior codes when a whole bunch of strangers stand elbow to elbow for 30-90 seconds–i don’t have them all worked out, but i *really know* when someone breaks role!)

Identity and the Internet: Teens use myspace as a way to access/create public and private spaces that are free from adult control–’hang out,’ learn and experiment with social dynamics and experiments.  Interesting interaction between enduring developmental psychology and sociology of teenagers and changes in how teenagers are able/allowed to access different public and private spaces–the way online life is not so much taking kids away from real life, but that often kids aren’t *allowed* to access real life, so they use the internet as a replacement for what they can’t access.

Judith Butler wikipedia entry: I ran into this a lot in undergrad, although I assiduously avoided actually reading Butler.  Basically, like “waitress” or “grad student” or “well-behaved elevator rider,” gender is a role that everybody performs rather than a natural fact. I’m neither convinced nor unconvinced, but I think it ties in a lot with anxiety that comes up not only when people don’t do the role that everyone is presumably agreed they are doing, but when they call into question the genuineness of that role–basically, we’re all supposed to perform correctly, but we can’t let on that we’re performing or that we might have options for other performances that we might or might not pursue.

Go here to watch my daily ritual repeat itself

One of the things that struck me about Tehching Hsieh’s one year performances is that they look so damned unpleasant. Yes, I know I’m trivializing the whole issue. But I do believe that there’s a pervasive mythology around art being intrinsically connected to suffering. I like to make art, but I’m not particularly invested in suffering (my own or others’).

I started doing yoga (mostly) daily around the end of last semester, in part as a tactic for better managing the stress of school. Yoga was my first thought as a daily ritual to record, although I quickly decided that it made more sense (for time and consistency reasons; i do take days off) just to document the relaxation pose at the end (which I can easily do on off days). It’s also interesting to me because I’m not very good at being still, and I’m not very good at being without some activity, so I find relaxing to be difficult but good for me on many levels. I am also tickled by the idea of visually recording a process that involves almost no visual movement, even though my internal experience of it is often very full.

This project will be an exploration of the artist’s anti-suffering. (And, for the viewer, really boring!)

Heh, I knew that I was forgetting something among the various blog entries for the first week. So here are comments on how I encounter the word performance and instances of performance in my daily life.

One short answer is: not as much as I expected.

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No doubt thoroughly incomplete.

First version for single performer:
Performer sits on stage with a pair of scissors in front of him. It is announced that members of the audience may come on stage one at a time to cut a small piece of the performer’s clothing to take with them.
Performer remains motionless throughout the piece. Piece ends at the performer’s option.
(From http://webcast.gatech.edu/papers/arch/Concannon.html)

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Although it wasn’t my initial intention, many of the projects I worked on last year were very performative–primarily the photo booth and the 360 camera project. I also became enamored of the interactions between computing and people’s motion through space, which has a number of obvious connections to performance.

Most of my interests in performance lie in smaller-scale, semi-intentional performances, as well as in the grey area between what actions do and don’t constitute performance. I’m particularly interested in performances that occur in games, actions that are accidentally (or surreptitiously) perceived, movements that are choreographed through activities that influence people’s responses (rather than through people intending to move or act in certain ways), and ‘generative’ performances in which simple actions are viewed or put together in a way that results in an interesting whole.