-:- The abstract, slides and presentation script from my session at the Clean conference are included below. Unfortunately no audio recording available as yet.
Please contact me for further information, and please reference this post if referring to any of the material. Thankyou. -:-
Clean Conference 19-20 May 2012, University of London Union.
Session
Title:
Clean and Colourful Research:
Transdisciplinary Research, Arts Practice and Clean Language
Presenter: Jackie Calderwood
E-mail: jackie.calderwood@btopenworld.com
Website: www.jackiecalderwood.com
Level of Clean experience required: none. Duration: 60 minutes. Sunday 20th
9.30-10.30am.
Session
outline:
- Overview of Jackie’s doctoral research with exploratory use of Clean in artistic and academic contexts: problems and potential.
- Guided walk through creative methods developed: listening as wellbeing, looking for creativity, questioning research structures, notating time, place, call & response.
- Dive into experience with an individual and group activity using scaling, space and colour to notice and notate moments amidst movement.
What will
participants get from the session?
- An introduction to creative and innovative use of Clean with a participatory arts flavour.
- Examples of introducing Clean within arts practice and academic research.
- Practical opportunity to explore your own ways of noticing with space, language and colour.
Presenter’s
biography:
Jackie Calderwood is a media artist and doctoral researcher with the
Institute of Creative Technologies at De Montfort University, specialising in
interactive media, participatory arts and landscape. Her research interests
spring from freelance practice in sculpture, video, community arts, holistic
massage and energy-work. Since encountering Clean Language in August 2010, Jackie
has been learning, applying and interrogating Clean wherever possible.
Presentation
Script: (also included as notes with the slides when viewed on slideshare)
Hello! I’m Jackie Calderwood, I’m delighted
to be here, and to start this second day of exciting presentations. I’m going
to talk to you about some of the things I’ve been doing in my PhD research as
an artist, and in particular in the past 21 months since first beginning to
discover the wonders of ‘Clean’. My research comes from a background in community
arts facilitation, and work with lots of different mediums including sculpture,
video and mobile technologies.
As my focus is on process and experience,
I’d like to start with an activity, and come back to talking about the work
that it’s derived from after that.
So the session will be:
2 min’s set-up, that’s now!
30-35 minutes activity - @ a fairly brisk
pace J
which should give time for
15 minutes on the research, Use of ‘Clean’
and what I’ve found to date;
some time for discussion -
and feedback forms before the next stretch
break.
In the activity we will focus on the senses
and on everyday movement.
So this is an invitation to enjoy, and to notice what you notice,
and how that may or may not change within the various scenarios that I’ll talk
you through. You’ll be working on your own, and you’ll need one of these (grid
sheet), a pen, and some colours - there are baskets around the room. You may
like to sketch or make notes as you go, and part-way through the exercise I’ll
ask you to get some colours if you haven’t already, and to use those with the
grid. If you want to use the grid before that point - that’s up to you!
So please be aware of aware of other
people’s space as they’re working around you, and be a little bit flexible to
the environment that we’re in.
With this activity, you have the
opportunity to choose some ‘thing’ that interests you - so something that you’d
like to develop and get to know more of. If you have that already, you may want
to jot it on your paper, and if you don’t have something yet, don’t worry, you
can use the first space to find something! I’ll ask you more about your ‘thing’
later on during the activity.
------- Activity --------- (email me for further info)
And when you’re ready, please return your
colours and come back to the chairs.
Thankyou. I hope you found that useful.
So we’ve been exploring the senses and
movement by distance, time and intuition. And that’s also what people have been
invited to explore in my public arts project Hunter Gatherer, last summer.
This is a map of the Yorkshire Dales
National Park, showing the 5 locations of the Hunter Gatherer GeoCaches.
Geocacheing, for anyone not familiar with it, is great fun! - it’s a gps-enabled treasure hunt,
with around 5 million ‘seekers’ worldwide. Geocachers register with a central
website to get the gps location and clues of a cache. Most caches consist of a
box with a book in to sign to say you’ve been there, as well as logging your
successful find on the website. Some people leave small toys as a visitor’s
exchange in the box. The caches are often hidden in unusual, attractive or
historically interesting places.
Hunter Gatherer was one of a series of
GeoArtCaches commissioned by Chrysalis Arts, to see how artists might use
geocaching to appeal to visitors to the Yorkshire Dales. My research interests
are in digital media, co-creative participation and mobile technology, so this
project created a model for geocachers to contribute images and words that
would become part of a digital media ‘treasure’. The ‘story’ I devised to
encourage people to take part is that there is a magical creature of the
Yorkshire Dales, who emerged from hibernation here at Ingleton Quarry,
whose voice is the sound of ringing rocks and bubbling brooks, and who moves between the cache sites following solar
and lunar cycles.
Inside each cache is a sound button that
plays a short message from the creature, inviting you to send your response of
what you notice in this place. Each cache site focuses on one of the senses of:
imagination, smell, sight, sound and feeling. People are invited to make a
colour grid, just as you have, expressing what they notice, and then to
complete 3 short questions, inspired by Clean Language :
Things I (sense) [see, hear, smell
or feel] here are… I notice… The
colours in this grid are like…
The responses from the cache logbooks and iphone
app form a call and response with the magical creature who communicates back
via short films on the Hunter Gatherer website.
The Hunter Gatherer iphone app is a tool
for noticing what you notice, in the moment, at a specific location. As you may
have found, it’s not so much about the colours themselves, rather what they
mean to you, the relationships between them, and, with series of colour grids
such as this trail across Canada, the patterns that occur across time and
space, pointing through to something more.
Where are you going when you go there? - I
love that specialized question -
-and used it as the title of an
installation exploring moments of noticing in the context of my residency with
the University of Alberta’s research in culture project, On The
Commons at the Banff Centre, Canada, last year.
Musing on mountain horizons, traced with
thread and pins, connecting to rocks from this landscape where the ocean floor
has risen up through the folds of time, counterpoised with these fleeting
moments and reflections of noticing, noticed.
The grids have evolved through a series of
workshops and experimental walks, tracing interjections and investigating the
affect of scales of strange and varied kinds.
At Sideshow, the British Art Show ‘fringe’,
in Nottingham, participants made colour grids about their experience of this
hidden place in the city centre, and then paired up to have “Clean
conversations” … and is there anything else about… and that’s like what?
So where could this colour grid tool come from? and what happens just before?
To find out, we need to visit Soundlines, a
project with schools and communities in North Somerset.
Through a series of arts workshops over 6
months, young people workshopped responses to the history, myths and their own
perceptions of Sand Point. Some 75 improvised music tracks, and 40 ‘bubbling’
animations were mapped to the hilltop. The audio is triggered by gps, playing
back as the students move over the land: a step here to trigger Viking sounds,
a step there for echoes of a volcano erupting in the Bristol channel millennia
ago, running here to play rhythms, pausing to let the track play out. Each walk
is recorded, creating a movement trace, unique audio composition and animated
sequence resulting from that route, and pace, of walk. Students reflected on
their experience live at the hilltop, a month later revisiting their walk
online, and as hosts at a community event in which the sounds were remapped to
the school grounds.
Amongst other things, Soundlines explored
the balance of notation and improvisation, the unique choices and consequences
of the individual, within a collective experience, and ultimately seeking to
encourage a personalized noticing in the environment that would lead to an
intimately personalized media experience.
Considering what kind of sensory system
might be able to pay attention, ‘read’ and respond to an individual in this
way, prompted me to turn to noticing how we notice, and evolve this colour grid
methodology.
This is not the occasion to go into the
research findings of SL or Hunter Gatherer, but both projects are well
documented online, and you can email me if you’d like more information or
copies of papers.
So to focus a little more on the core of my
research, before going on to the details of using Clean…
A current definition of pervasive media is:
‘digital media experiences woven into the fabric of every day life, created as
a consequence of their situational context at the moment of delivery.' I would
add to this that the media is ‘with’ the user - and becomes particularly
interesting via the potential to iterate across time and to merge roles of
artist/author and audience/user.
Eudemonia is from the Ancient Greek, eu
meaning good and demonia or daimon as the personal spirit guide, house god or
muse. Taking an Aristotlean view of virtue as necessitating context, the
definition I prefer to adopt is that of ‘human flourishing’ - a well-being
‘plus’!
So can pervasive media contribute to human
flourishing - on an individual or collective level? Mobile technologies,
sensors and the web can certainly saturate our lives with media and stimulate
endless communication, but is there room for a quality of attention and a
freedom of aesthetic experience? The research has to make steps in practice -
it’s not just a theoretical exploration, although theory and critical analysis
play a key part, by default, in any PhD! So we have these tensions between
practice and theory, and a need to speak across disciplines in a language each
may understand.
The tensions of research by practice are
foremost those of maintaining a coherent approach and integrity of position -
the research has to articulate and harmonise with the methodology of the
practice, the one being not only symbiotic, but also congruent with the other.
Apart from the practical questions the
research would try to answer, finding an approach that could cohesively deal
with these layers of tensions has been a major challenge. And that is where I
have found Clean - language, space, and symbolic modeling - to be of most value
for myself.
Thanks to Wendy, the Clean Change Company,
and many other wonderful people who I’ve learnt from and practiced with, I’ve
spent the last year and a half testing out how I could use Clean in my research
- as an arts methodology, an interview tool, for self-modelling and personal
development, and above all as a point of reference in this search for the
sounding board of a unifying approach.
So what kind of arts methodology?
Another project conceived soon after
Soundlines was with the Alzheimer’s Society, as a woodland walk in which trees
would become placeholders for the voices of people living with a diagnosis of
dementia. The initial motivation came from a comment by a gentleman during a
video interview I was filming for the Society. When asked if there was anything
else he would like to say, he interrupted his companion’s reply with ‘hang on a minute, it’s not often anyone
asks us if we have something to say!’
My idea was to combine the ‘anything else’ - stories, anecdotes,
words of wisdom, experiences of living with disease - with my research in
pervasive media, given my thesis that the embodied reception and freedom of
movement facilitate a greater sense of awareness and hence perhaps of the
‘wisdom of walking in another’s moccasins’ to borrow the Lakota Sioux
expression. The challenge would be to maintain integrity to the contributor’s
‘voice’ when choosing a tree to map the voice to.
This is where I thought we might trial
Clean. Of course I had chosen the theme of ‘tree’ - the artist might become
invisible but nonetheless has a voice! In introducing the project to
prospective participants, Julia Burton of the Alzheimer’s Society adapted my
suggestion from the tree as metaphor to elicit characteristics of the ‘story’
to ‘if you were a tree what kind of tree would you be?’ And this is where Wendy
kindly joined us for a three-layered interview process: me asking for that
‘anything else’, Wendy developing the tree metaphor, and Julia asking about the
disease.
From the ten interviews we learnt a lot,
people responded very differently, and really this just scratches the surface
of what I envisage as immense potential for a transdisciplinary arts and health
research intervention.
Interviews and dialogue have featured
extensively - from modeling papers and seeking to find a form of written
expression that can carry the experience of an arts project in the similar way
that video can craftily convey experience of an event. -
to a series of research interviews with practitioners from diverse fields,
invited to consider a metaphor for their research practice. I wanted the
interviews to be like inviting the respondent into a rubber dinghy, steering
them round an Escher River (it flows in either direction in a continuous loop) pointing
out the mountains of ‘pervasive media’, ‘holistic user experience’ ‘ landscape’
and so forth as we go. What I then found was that it was the space between the
mountains that were more interesting - space, iteration, community and
presence. So these became the four ‘interjections’ added during the otherwise
Clean (from squeaky to-ish ish J ) interviews. What evolved was a method of asking at the start how
the respondent would like these words introduced - as a feather floating in a
letter being handed to them, a marble rolled into the landscape.. or anything
else?
Again, a wide range of responses to the use
of Clean, and many facets of interest for analysis - but most relevant in what
I was feeling for, rich material on the creative processes of interaction with
others, from practitioners of visual arts, arts management, creative
technologies, education, tai chi, homeopathy, transdisciplinary research and
literature.
I’m still writing up this research, but in
the meantime my technique has evolved to combine an open active interview
format with colour grid elicitation and symbolic modeling. And I’m delighted to
have just completed the first interview for publication - in the International
Journal of Cinema - with a fellow pervasive media practitioner.
I have found Clean Language as a complement
to the colour grids to be extremely effective in a conversational context,
drawing out deep personal insights in a non-threatening and unassuming manner.
Participants frequently comment on their surprise at new realizations and
personal significance in just a short 2 minute conversation.
The questions for the Hunter Gatherer app
were devised and tested during module 3 & 4 training with the Clean Change
Company. And indeed the whole project is interwoven with my training in Clean.
After accepting the commission and making initial site visits, I had several components
I wanted to include, with a finite context (time and resources!) and an
ambitious research agenda.
So, in skype practices, we tried out
modeling how those components might fit together, finding a sequence that
connected them and ultimately informed the locations and interrelationships of
the five cache sites. The magical creature gets to the heart of everything -
it’s the ‘mystery’ of digital media creation, it’s the collective imagination
at work, it’s the connection with the planetary cycles of earth, the senses, an
invitation to listen with perhaps something like the exquisite listening that
is attributed to Clean? It’s a metaphor for many things, maybe even eudemonia?
But it has to be explained as research -
it’s not enough to chase magical creatures to play with, in this situation!
Introducing Clean Language to my
supervisors, a year into the PhD, was the first challenge. It’s been
interesting to notice the shifts in language and attitude since that time. I’ve
conducted Clean research interviews with both of my supervisors. One struggled
to see the practical application of Clean Language. The other
questioned and began to enjoy the extent to
which his metaphor for a successful practice-based PhD, - an amoeba on the ocean floor - could
adapt to the questions asked, and to voice for himself the potential to
communicate across disciplines.
I felt that I learnt more much in that hour
than I had in piecing things together over previous months.
I then invited him to interview me - using
the Clean Language Cards - about the structure of my thesis, which I had
developed from a series of modeling exercises. This was extremely challenging -
for us both! And a fantastic learning device all round.
He is now most supportive of my use of
Clean, understands the synergies with the practice, and is better able to
advise on the interview analysis.
I’ve gone on to do workshops with the
library writing group and the transdisciplinary research group - proposing the
use of metaphor to envisage a flourishing TD environment - promising, but early
days yet!
Other interviewees, in particular those
with a visual arts background, with no prior experience of Clean, have found
the process illuminating, one of whom commented:
‘I
think it’s really useful to talk in metaphors, and to consider your practice in
that way with someone else. I thought there was quite a clear description that
you brought out of the conversation of the developmental process.’
Interviewing the Royal Literary Fellow at
De Montfort University proved extremely interesting. Author Susan Price talks
about her relationship with her own ‘daimon’ or muse, and has given me helpful advice
on editing other interview transcripts (made by instant messaging). She
commented that the quality of writing notably ‘goes up several gears’ once the respondent is using their metaphor,
language becomes focused and rich.
So there is use in practice, use in written
and oral interviews, and also there is the theoretical modeling of a pervasive
media for eudemonia. This is where the kind of exercise you’ve just experienced
comes into play. James and Penny talk about the trialogue of the client,
facilitator, and the client’s metaphor landscape.
There are parallels in landscape studies,
participatory arts and in interactive media. Add to this the notion of the
landscape becoming psychoactive - with pervasive media we talk about the ‘magic moments’ when the media experience
and the outer world fuse -one might for example hear the sound of a steam train
whilst walking down a disused railway track, or birds singing inside and
outside the headphones simultaneously.
And when the ‘client, user, participant,
collaborator’ - whoever we want to call them - creates their own media … well, being in the moment - could
be quite a thing to notice!
We have a few minutes left, I hope, for any
questions, and to open up the discussion…..
- spontaneous 'gallery' of grids.
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