City Futures Conference, Sheffield Hallam University

Subtitled 'New Perspectives on Placemaking', this one day conference at the other Sheffield university looked like a timely opportunity to open a specifically local conversation about urbanism wide range of practioners, arts and environmental organisations. The two Universities don't often have much to do with one another (I was the only delegate from TUOS), particularly the two architecture departments which are often characterised as being at opposite ends of the spectrum. While SSoA prides itselfs on its independent critical approach and social/political awareness, while Hallam's architecture course sits within the department for the built environment and arguably has a greater focus on the commercial and technical aspects of the profession.

My own interest in the subject of 'city futures' is at least threefold; the RECITE research project is very much interested in how people define 'places' and how this knowledge might aid designers, as an architect and design professional I am interested in the other side - how best practice current and planning policy are being using in urban design, and from a personal political level I have a keen interest in the direction the city is headed after the mini boom and subsequent failures of Sevenstone and Housing Market Renewal.

The conference - essentially made up of 5 keynotes and a series of afternoon workshops - kicked of with Kevin Murray of the Academy of Urbanism, an independent British think-tank for urban regeneration that seek the development of progressive, sustainable, economically viable and attractive cities. Though they promote that they are a-political, there was a clear belief that better cities are achieved in the Scandinavian model; top-down, with progressive government and long-term, creative strategies - in partnership with designers, planners and businesses. A telling moment of this engaging run-through of principles of urbanism was in the discussion of the AoU award for outstanding city. This annual prize was intended to alternate between a British and European example - but they had already run out of British cities. Even the most recent British example - Glasgow - felt a bit thin now that the New Labour millennium money has run dry (and they are building yet another motorway through it). As a result the presentation borrowed heavily from the lessons learnt in Freiburg - which essentially seemed to be that at least 30 years of clear strategic committed policy and investment were required. Unlikely to be happening here any time soon!

Next up the new Head of Planning for SCC, David Caulfield. His talk - about how important 'quality of place' (which roughly seemed to be equated with plenty of tended grass and granite paving) was for the economic competitiveness of the city. To crudely summarise what was a fairly crude argument - if we give lawyers and financiers a nice place to eat their sandwiches and go for after-work drinks they will be more likely to move their HQ here rather than say, an M1 business park or Leeds. This same economic argument was then able to be reused to explain why we need more car parking, why we need to 'regenerate' the markets and various other controversial decisions. However, thanks to the broad range of Sheffield voices in attendance, David had a much more difficult Q&A than he might have expected, especially in relation to the politics of keeping the station bridge public and the increased difficulty of access that have resulted from the much lauded revamp of the train station.

With many of the workshops appearing to follow on from the morning's theme, I opted to take part in the one that sounded most different - based on some of the entries to the Forgotten Spaces exhibition. Unfortunately the structure was not well thought through - and two short presentations (akin to 'provocations') from the speakers left the rest of the group unsure how to participate. However, the essential thrust seemed to be that cities are not all about the commercial and main public spaces, but the other lifeblood of urban areas is the terrain vague and in-between bits; spaces that people might colonise, daydream about, or simply pass by on their way to work. This is a conversation that has been going on at SSoA since Jermey Till's Softspace in 2005 (and probably for many years before that)!

Fortunately a much more resonant tone (though pre-judged as 'alternative' by the chair and Head of department) was struck by Owen Hatherley, who took us on a romp through the failures in planning and design of the 20th century, some the most notable of which were identified in Sheffield (the student flats by Park Square - a slum in waiting). Though Owen seemed unafraid to heavily criticise the politics of regeneration in the UK, it was interesting that his critique of Urban Splash's Parkhill was not nearly so strident as in his Guardian article a few days later.

The day finished with a very brief but fascinating sales pitch from Martyn Ware (formerly of the Human League & Heaven 17) and his new venture in 3d sound interventions. Though he couldn't say exactly why, he was sure that these installations 'somehow change the way you look at the city' (I have paraphrased). After a day severely lacking in the subtle nuances of what 'place' is and the uncertainty and delight of cities - this was good note to end on for my own research interests.

TaPRA Annual Conference, Kingston

The TaPRA (theatre and performance research association) annual conference in Kingston was packed in between arriving home from a month-long stay in France (a working holiday!) and the chaos of moving back into the Arts Tower, launching the new SSoA website, and writing up my first year research.

The conference was a first chance to have the work done over the first year of RECITE properly critiqued by an audience who really knew the subject area. TaPRA is structured around the 'working groups', which form the bulk of the conference programme and provide a platform for smaller-scale, specialised discussion within the conference sessions as well as helping to foster a close-knit network one the conference has finished. Coming from outside the field I was initially unsure in which working group my project would be most appropriate, but given my interest in the effects and legacy after performances (and the lack of specific group for site-located theatre), the 'Documenting Performance' group seemed to offer the best fit.

The documentation working group was making its reappearance at TaPRA after disappearing for a few years, and referring to this absence Toni Sant (co-convenor) suggested that a mentality had set in in performance research whereby ‘if everyone is documenting now so why do we need a specific group?’. However he felt that it was the interdisciplinary nature the group (with presentations covering web media / mapping / information design / archival studies) that made the new direction distinct. Though from a personal perspective it was very useful to be part of a cross-disciplinary dialogue, it will be interesting to see if the working group has a long-term future, given this fragmentary nature of documentation research.

Perhaps a product of this new mentality across the discipline, there was surprisingly little questioning in the working group about the fundamental philosophy of why we to document live performance and the ‘secondary’ nature of documentation. The majority of the presentations assumed that you would document ‘as much as possible’ - with the debate then about how you create access to archive (digital, social media documentation, wiki etc) and how to ‘activate’ archive material (re-embodying, inspiration). Perhaps therefore the debate has moved on - there is an assumption that ‘documentation’ will happen whatever on youtube & flickr (with performance being subsumed into the mass media) so the aim should be to discover methods of doing this in a way that will be useful for future performers & academic study. The panel session, where delegates were more free to move between working groups, saw Heike Roms (Senior Lecturer in performance studies at Aberystwyth) present her long-term research project into Welsh site-specific work from the 1960s and 70s, which employs an admirable array of methodologies and techniques to uncover how these performances became embedded in the cultural memory of a place.

Beyond the working group, we heard interesting keynotes from Ian Brown on Scots playwrights and Louise Jeffreys, director of programmes at the Barbican. However these sessions (and much of the other discussion around the conference) only really served to highlight the marginal of performance research that interests me and that I am able to engage with to any kind of informed degree!

Overall I came away from TaPRA with mixed feelings; one the one hand very pleased that the presentation went down well and the the first year pilot produced results that appear valuable to theatre research community. That said, I couldn't help but come away considering the disadvantages of crossing disciplines - that its easy to miss out on significant attitude changes in performance research and end up covering ground that is well-established (albeit with an architectural spin), or worse - that the audience don't know enough about architecture, urbanism or the research questions to feel able to criticise.

National Youth Theatre - 'Slick' at Park Hill

I very rarely buy local newspapers, but feel very fortunate that last week I picked up a copy of the Sheffield Telegraph, which devoted its centre page spread to the National Youth Theatre (in orange boiler suits) preparing for their takeover of the behemoth that is the Park Hill flats in Sheffield. Before this, I had somehow missed all publicity for the 'outdoor spectacular' that has come north to Sheffield following the success of 'Swarm' in London last year.

And, particularly in the sunset, Park Hill makes a beguiling setting - with its commanding views of the city, complicated and contested history, and current half-finished transformation into trendy Urban Splash apartments. The narrative of 'Slick' reimagines Park Hill as a ship that will transport those gathered for the performance - both audience and 200 or so actors mingling as fellow passengers- to a Utopian island made entirely of recycled plastic where they will volunteer to make the world a better place. There are clues here of what might have inspired the story - the huge geometric form of Park Hill cut into the hillside has a resemblance of an ocean liner, and the original intentions of much of this large-scale deck access housing was to replace the horrors of back-to-back terracing with an idealised form of new social utopia.

Perhaps to most impressive thing about the performance (apart from the sheer scale) was the dramaturgical ambition - the tone for which was set by the initial excitement and anticipation generated by the actors mingling and preparing to board. The audience of 100 or so (also 'playing' fellow volunteers) were then split up into manageable groups (built into the narrative), to enable the plot to unfold with the closer spaces inside the building.

On climbing the amazing new spiral staircase almost to the top of the structure, the concrete decks and unfinished apartment spaces were perfectly suited to the intimate scenes aboard the boat, where the early excitement quickly gave way to scenes of fear and distress as the ship's security forces searched for stowaways and a disturbing group of malnourished 'islanders' warned of the true atrocities that were taking place at this 'utopia'. In some of these chaotic scenes the distinction between actors and audience became blurred - a relationship which dramatically changed once we left the 'ship' for the breathtaking final scenes of mass-coordinated dance and action. The outdoor courtyard spaces of Park Hill lent themselves perfectly to the dramaturgy - this time as an auditorium / stage and the building's facade as a huge backdrop to the action. With the story coming to a head (basically a simplified battle between environmentalism brought down by capitalism in turn brought down by popular revolution), hundreds of orange boiler-suited actors came together amidst sound, smoke and lighting display to create a stunning visual finale.

Park Hill tends to polarise those within Sheffield, and its reputation lies somewhere between iconic and detested. It has been written about and talked about to death - and then unexpected rebirth through its Grade II listing and massive Council investment. And given its current state of flux there is still so much more to come. In this context there is probably already too great an excess of meaning written over it for the ideas of 'Slick' to stick - but given the enormity of the project the NYT handled the scale brilliantly, and created unexpected moments of exhilaration in a city that is often lacking in such bold and brave outdoor theatre.

http://www.nyt.org.uk/news/news-slick-sheffield.html

Intransit festival _ Zero hour bus tour

The marketing for Zero Hour promised "a series of postapocalyptic audiojourneys on night buses across London" in the early hours of the morning on Night Bus route N11. The first difficulty (for both organisers and myself) was caused by the timing, with the date associated with the 12.30am start slot causing all sort of confusion. Secondly, the promised download link never arrived (and the use of mp3 format seemed to be designed to make it deliberately difficult for Ipod/Iphone users). However despite this and the booked (free) ticket being moved back and forth, I made it to Liverpool Street for the Thursday night (or Friday morning?) for Greg McLaren's 'End of the World Show'.

The appeal of this type of audio show is two-fold; it allows us to project the story onto the often post-apocalytic scenes of everyday life that you come across at night in the city (both in and out of the bus), but on another level it the audio lets the audience into the fictional world, permitting us the audience to behave transgressively (we were asked to wear face-masks) and accept the transgressive behaviour of the actors, thus confusing and entertaining the non-participants.

The plot, set in a future scenario of a energy melt-down, involved snippets of a radio broadcast implicating listeners in a late-night escape, which was spliced up along with 'sci-fi' adverts and recordings of everyday memories of the city. Though I found this pseudo-futuristic format I found a little grating, there were several moments when the effect of the audio, the passing scenes outside and the drunken character(?) scrawling messages on the bus windows (ITS NOT REAL!). The final piece of music, listened to now off the bus at eerie public space at the 'End of the World' in Chelsea, worked genuinely well.

Unfortunately by the end of the night I was too exhausted to fully appreciate the return leg, and the lack of coordination by the organisers made the event feel like a missed opportunity.

Interface 2011 review

Despite finishing just 48 hours ago, the Interface conference now feels a long way away as I write this from the first stop of my summer break at La Tranche sur Mer on the beautiful west coast of France! However this review looks back on two and a half engaging days of talks, workshops and conversations around the idea of Digital Humanities. In fact, to me Interface very much felt like Humanities+, with a significant number of delegates (including myself) dealing with subjects that are either on the fringe of the traditional humanities or much closer to the arts. There was a sense that the use of ‘advanced’ digital or technological tools (whether programming, XML, web science, or computational analysis) was the common framework within which a diverse range of disciplines were able to come together and share skills, ideas, and the experience of undertaking a PhD.

Stephen Scrivener’s keynote talk on design innovation in the context of research was a fascinating lecture as a designer that also covered many of the issues raised by inter-disciplinary research. The way he moved between arts and computing (and research and practice) throughout his career was encouraging, and as a PhD student from a School of Architecture, the way the design was described as a research activity (and not just in research by design) was highly resonant. Categorising three processes of research design; ‘problem solving’ (traditional research question), ‘projective’ (perceived as risky in the context of academia) or ‘reflective’ (not often done explicitly by designers) was useful, and the admission that many projects written up as a clean ‘problem solving’ thesis came out of a messy ‘projective’ process made many in the room feel a lot better about the confusion in their own projects!

Melissa Terras (UCL) questioned the relevancy of defining a field for ‘digital humanities’ in the age of everyone using Google or databases. She also suggested that in order to define yourself as ‘digital’ you need to develop expertise across a range of tools and disciplines – and as the conference progressed it became clear that many individuals were trying to become ‘multi-lingual’ in digital tools across the disciplinary spectrum.

The format of the ‘lightning talks’ seem to make people more nervous than one might have expected, as the stress of what to leave out from a detailed research project led to two approaches; focus in more detail on one aspect or try and give a very light overview of everything that is of interest. The fear was heightened by the fact that any slight overrun would be immediately cut off by the two-minute horn. As they flashed it was hard to keep up, though the ones that stuck out for me were the more alternative interpretations of ‘Humanities’, such as Eve Forrest’s (Uni of Sunderland) phenomenology of Flickr users, Tim Murray-Browne’s study of the interactive effect of interactive art, and Jenny Steele’s art projects in China. The type of researchers one might expect at a digital conference meant that there was the obligatory simultaneous conference proceedings and commentary via Twitter – though it was hard to tell how much this added to the relatively tight-knit conference or whether it was simply a distraction.

One benefit of the lightning talk format was the acted as a social ice-breaker, with people suddenly approaching to say “was yours the one with the site-specific theatre…?” This led into the afternoon workshops, but a late withdrawal by the representative from Mandelay (a rival of Zotero) led to Leif Isakson (all-round digital researcher from Uni of Southampton and former host of Interface) leading a really useful session on Geo-Spatial technologies including Simile Exhbit, Google Fusion, GIS, and Geo-databases. We covered a lot of technology I was familiar with but it was good to see some different applications as well as being another chance to get to know some like-minded PhD students.

Next up, Martin Zaltz Austwick of CASA led a hands-on introduction to programmatic visualisation of social and spatial data. Many of the recent CASA examples demonstrated the compelling nature of beautifully presented and analytic communication of complex datasets (but also a continued preoccupation with Twitter). The popular open-source Processing (Java) language was used in conjunction with CSV data, with the basics of parsing and projection explained in an accessible manner. The work of CASA will definitely continue to be an important reference point for my research as I progress.

Claire Warwick’s (UCL DH) session on studying users may have been framed a little too narrowly, with all of the examples related to the digital archives. However the principles of user-orientated design; participation, testing, redesign could all be related to the wider disciplines that all involve some form of user interface. Indeed, a recurring issue that came up in informal conversations with other delegates was the lack of engagement or ‘fear’ of studying users in the arts.

From a personal point of view, the rest of the talks that made up the morning of the third day felt somewhat less relevant (though this may well have been a product of staying up very late to see some experimental theatre on a night bus (see the separate post for a review of ‘Zero Hour’). These sessions concerned academic publishing, funding, and careers, which may feel pressing for ‘pure’ Humanities scholars, but it’s a route that I have yet to be sold on post-PhD.

Though many including myself found the management-speak title of the final ‘un-conference’ a little grating (I was still tired), the principle of opening up a whole session to address topics raised by delegates is a good idea, and one that the Interface members took on with gusto. Having chosen to participate in the crowdsourcing subgroup (an area of genuine interest but one which only impacts on my project indirectly), we had a lively and well-informed discussion covering participant motives, incidental and designed interfaces, when crowdsourcing works best and worst, and the reliability of the data generated.

All in all this was very enjoyable and engaging conference, principally because of the open, intelligent and truly inter-disciplinary group of researchers. The workshops were the most successful element as these were skills-focussed sessions rather than subject-specific. However I do feel that in future Interface could be made stronger by focussing more on the digital (and being inviting to arts & social science) and keeping the larger Digital Humanities conference more strictly for the humanists.

PQ 011_day seven & roundup

With little time left in the city, I managed to spend the last hour buying a couple of souvenirs and a very nice bike seat for the new bike I have been working on as a birthday present! There was just enough time for a couple of last stops on the PQ trail. Firstly the exhibition of Edward Gordon Craig, who challenged the elaborately realistic theatrical design of the early 20th Century and pioneered the use of more abstract and mobile scenographic elements. The final event before heading to the airport was Doina's lecture, where the notion of what 'performance' might mean in an architectural context was challenged, and instead a proposal put forward for a 'social & political performativity', where the architecture is just one actor in the 'performance'. We were walked through examples of aaa projects in Paris, where the architect works together with local citizens as a agent for change, enabling those people to become agents themselves. Mapping was shown as way of representing both space and process. Critically, it was the architecture of the process here that was important, not necessarily the products or outcomes.

Very much like architecture, scenography is currently experiencing a difficult period - as a contested discipline and one in flux- with a dialectical erosion and expansion of the profession. As Arnold Aronson suggested, perhaps its not the profession that has changed but everything around it - the digital age has matured into a new culture of online-all-the-time, social connectivity and a saturation of imagery, which has fundamentally changed expectations of the audience. It was therefore interesting that the PQ adopted a new name and that this caused so much debate, and at the same time the key message of the architecture section was the theorists were challenging the nature of a theatre building while the architects were struggling to see where they fitted in.

There was a almost total absence of traditional dramaturgical examples; taking a text and composing it onto a stage. Instead contemporary practice suggests an increasing blurring between dramaturgy and the visual arts, performance arts, digital media, architecture and urban studies. In this context, by far the most interesting 'exhibits' were the new experiences - either installations or site-specific events, rather exhibition of costume/set design/theatre buildings from 'other' past performances. This shift perhaps reflects the altered digital society - where swithced-on audiences are always hectically chasing the next new experience. This became quite exhausting - possibly just due to the nature of being at a biennial / quadrennial type event, or possibly the nature of the city of Prague, where everywhere you look another type of social 'performance' is going on. Whether tourists or audience, the amount of '3rd-hand documentation' (Richard Gough's term for photo / videos of documentation) was staggering, with everything recorded via Smart phones or expensive-looking digital SLRs. At times it was a real shock how much people pushed to the front of a carefully crafted live scene in order get a clear photo without the back of anyones head in it!

Almost everyone referred in some way to the recent events in Tahrir Square and the Middle East (and social media in general) as 'performative' and therefore having some sort of fundamental impact on performance design, but no-one that I saw managed to articulate this connection in anything like a convincing manner. This was perhaps due to a lack of political assertion amongst the groups chosen to represent at PQ; the slightly underwhelming response to Doina's presentation was further evidence that theatre-designers are not necessarily inspired by the hard graft of social and political reality.

PQ 011_day six

A warm day six began with a trip back to the Veletrzni expositions, as I was particularly intrigued by the Netherlands' walking trip '7Scenes'. This IPhone walking tour / treasure hunt / game was part of the new genre of 'performative user experiences' that are not theatre in the sense that they do not necessarily involve a live actor, but utilise mobile technology (phone, gps, bluetooth, 3G) to network 'live players' either together or to some central system. In this way players create their own experience from the instructions or narrative given by the creator of the performance. The freedom in space and time that these forms open up was demonstrated by 7Scenes, where players were guided on a route through the city using picture clues. The 'performance' was constructed around a set of old photographs, taken in Prague in the 1960s. When you arrived near the scene of one of the photos, a GPS trigger played a audio clip, instructing you to take a photo inspired by the original. As you couldn't see this, the audio offered a series of clues, such as 'take a self-portrait with your eyes closed'. The heightened awareness of being 'part of something' had a tangible impact in terms of framing the city - opening your eyes to things that otherwise might have seemed banal. Having said that, the mobile interface became a bit of a distraction. The nicest touch was that photos were automatically uploaded and printed in the exhibition space (alongside the 1968 ones), providing a fascinating insight into the multiplicity of ways that people looked at the city and interpreted the instructions.

There was just enough time for a coffee on the roof terrace before a hurried tram ride across town in time to get a seat at the packed architecture section where Professor Marvin Carlson was giving the task of answering the central question of the section, 'What is a theatre?'. This was a hugely relevant talk for both myself and the large crowd gathered in St Annes, as he sought to cram the recent history of site-specificity and future developments into a hour-long lecture. Taking Peter Brook's 'empty stage' quote as a point of reference Professor Carlson explored notions of scenographic control, the framing of the everyday (optical unconsciousness), through to the techno-theatre of Smartphones. He suggested that the digital (web 2.0) era had further opened up Peter Brook's ideas about 'I' to 'we' (can take any space, real or virtual, and call it a theatre). Interestingly this statement was qualified using the social science term 'interpolation' whereby the creation of something (theatre) just by giving it a name relies on your 'authority to do this, ie. you still need an 'audience' willing to 'buy into it' or 'go along with it'. Responses from Jane Rendell & Christopher Baugh were also though-provoking, and raised questions about a new definition of 'architecture'.

After 2 hours of exhausting notetaking I needed a break, and got to the Czech Bridge just in time for the start of Christina Bosse's hour-long public 'situation' and to see what was going to happen in the place of 500 people. The bridge had been closed to traffic and it appeared that she had managed to get some chairs - after a slow start people began to congregate around these focal points, and individuals / groups of people subtly but gradually took over the bridge as a public space. Here is a link to an animation I produced as a web-based documentation experiment and as part of my learning process of flash.

The remainder of the evening was spent talking with Doina Petrescu, tuesday's keynote architecture speaker (and my Masters tutor), but I also managed to catch he Scenofest Fourth Act installation, where an interesting back street had been converted into a outdoor living room - but lacked any real invention beyond the use of furniture in an unlikely setting.