Reviewing the Process

Well, I did it. Initial feedback seems encouraging and people laughed in the right places and clapped at the end. What more could I hope for?
Now seems a good time to see if I fulfilled my original intentions and work out where to go from here.
My tutor commented "I think it is fair to say that the final piece was an expression of some of the frustrations you found about doing the piece" and I think she's right, it is fair to say that. However I have also come to realize that, although I was deeply frustrated at times and at other times felt that I could not stay true to my aims, to a certain extent I have fulfilled a lot of my initial criteria. There are other instances where I failed but from that failure I have begun to acquire an awareness of how and why things can go wrong and how to move from that point into future work .

I would like to take some of the work I generated in my C.E.P. and move it off-line.
The final script featured lines of text from Finish This and also evolved directly out of studying the content and form of that particular blog. I also wanted, for my personal practice to have this opportunity to experiment with taking a piece of work forward beyond the confines of the college defined project length, to run with it and see where I ended up. I've ended up discovering a little of what it means to write for performance rather than for writings sake, but more of that later.

Through the course of the original project, links were being made between new writing and existing texts from various media. I would like to continue this progression (i) and also take myself out of the relatively isolated context of the Internet (ii) and begin to bring a physicality to text that currently only inhabits a virtual space (iii). I also wish to continue with the existing collaboration and invite others to participate.
I would like to continue holding my documentation at http://startingthis.blogspot.com/ where my actions and progression through the project are held up to public scrutiny and comment. I am hoping that a rehearsal process can be shaped on-line in much the same way as the original writing was.
(i) I never did link my writing to existing writing in quite the way that I would have liked, I toyed with using song lyrics for a while, staying true to the Finish This ideal of moving a line into a new context to give it new meaning, but I feel that avenue required a separate project as, to do it hurriedly, became trite and forced. I also looked at taking first lines of novels and rearranging them but this only led to more non-performative text presenting the same trouble I had using the Finish This texts in a 'straight' way.

It became quickly apparent that I could not just 'cut and paste' the texts into a script and then perform it, they were not performative texts. Rather, I would have to take inspiration from them and then write new material. This also seemed to be in the spirit of my C.E.P., a line, a word, authored by another, expanded upon to create something entirely new. The original word or phrase was often unidentifiable in its new context but their was always a way to trace it back to it's source through hyperlinks. The audience at the performance was provided with the address' of both Finish This (containing its own links to show the origination of the text components) and this documentation blog, where, should they so choose, they could trace back through the process to see how the piece evolved and where the lines started. In this way, a different group of people have a chance to engage with the work of online community that collaborated to create the primary texts.

(ii) This project was always personally intended to be a collaboration and I believe that the majority of moments of indecision or frustration or unclearness in direction came out of the fact that it remained a solo piece and I became even more isolated in my work.

The project is designed as a solo project but I felt that by blogging regularly about my process I would receive the same support/criticism/suggestion that I had previously. This was not to be.

Right at the very beginning of the project my computer went down and I had no access to the internet. This meant that a lot of my entries were posted, en masse, up to a few weeks after the date that they happened. Although this backdating has had its uses, it has meant that my writing has not had the immediacy and the regular updates that keep a blogs readership reading. Had a reader had the chance to accompany me through the process then more comments may have been engendered. Again because of the backdating, even if a comment had been received on a particular post, the project may have already moved on from there rendering the comment less useful.

This also means that it was impossible to pursue the aim of having a rehearsal process shaped by daily suggestion, in much the same way as 'Playing Grounds' ;

"The audience will be able to comment on the work in progress and through the user feedback the choreography will be changed, shaped, and polished. Every other rehearsal will focus on the internet feedback and the public view of the work. The audience becomes the choreographer, making a ... Piece created for the public by the public."

Because of the failure of the documentation to function as efficiently on all the level I had intended, I had to come to view the project in a different light. No longer was I going to be presenting a piece of work, polished by a continuing test audience throughout the process. Instead, I was going to be working alone and the performance was to become the moment of experimentation.

Blogging is generally a long process, a regular readership takes time to build up through word of mouth or self promotion. That readership will quickly dwindle if they keep returning to the site and finding nothing new. This is especially true of blog-art and Finish This. The text that is there is unread and stagnant. In order to breath new life into it the blog must continually present something new that incites the reader to want to know its history. I have previously stated that I was unable to attract or maintain the feedback and comments that I sought. However early on in the process I received valuable input from Geof Huth (the earliest collaborator and initial inspiration for Finish This). His input seems to confirm the theory that had I posted regularly to maintain a readership, their comments would have greatly improved the clarity of direction and purpose that I lacked.

(iii) Returning to the studio and attempting to bring a physicality to the text was a more difficult process than I had anticipated. The aforementioned, unexpected, continuing isolation, bred frustration and ultimately negativity about my own abilities to create and communicate. I had to learn to work through this negativity in order that I did not 'freeze' completely. The negativity was counter productive and led to, fiercely critical, self-editing and an inability to present anything. I think the communication failure came out of trying to pursue to many ideas. There were so many themes and styles that had come out of the original project that I, initially, felt unable to reject, that I never committed to a single idea and thoroughly worked with it, explored it. I should have realized earlier that I couldn't cover everything in a project with such a short duration and should have simplified exactly what it was that I was trying to communicate. At the time I was to precious about trying to include all the levels that I wanted that in the end the performance may only have strongly communicated that I was frustrated and struggling with myself within the project.

All of this provided confirmation that I wish to continue practicing as a writer but that I would like to work on projects that allow me to write concurrently with a rehearsal process, the performers and the writer taking inspiration and feeding back into each others work throughout a rehearsal process. I admire the approach that Timberlake Wertenbaker undertook in writing 'Our Country's Good', writing material for the next days rehearsal based on transcripts and ideas from that days rehearsal. In this way the work was continually evolving out of what had gone before until a final script emerged. I attempted a similar process of evolving the text from the previously written (for example, the list of phrases taken from the original texts evolved over time into a list of awkward feeling when frozen into inaction but still contained key words and moments from the original text) but couldn't adequately work with it in the studio and observe myself working with it at the same time. In my next project for my degree I will be working with a director and two performers and we will attempt to work like Wertenbaker to devise new theatre.

Preparing a script, especially with the prescriptive staging that I became interested in, was also difficult when I didn't try it in the space. What looks good on paper doesn't necessarily translate and therefore there is a world of difference between writing and writing for performance. I feel that unless one has years of experience in writing for performance then one must continually try, assess and evaluate the effectiveness of the writing in the space, preferably with an 'outside eye' or two present. It's a symbiotic process between writer and what happens in the space. I seemed to lose site of this fact and internalized my work until I wasn't sure if I was saying what I thought I was saying. This could also explain where issues of performance clarity came about, themes that were obvious to me, knowing the body of work as I did, may not have even been present.

I could also have been helped if I had stuck to my side of the Contract for Working. On a practical level, I remained in contact with my tutor and informed her of my whereabouts, progress reports were available at Start This, but when I needed help I shied away from asking. This came out of the frustration I was feeling that I should be 'doing better' and the embarrassment I felt when presenting something I didn't feel was 'ready'. This was a counter-productive attitude that meant that I did not receive as much as I could have, and wasn't always amenable to, the support/advice/criticism that we had negotiated. 'Rod' and 'own back' spring to mind.

What did I want?

To put a little of the process of creating the Finish This texts into my product - I considered telling, in a performative way, the story of the interaction that created the original texts but in the end it was more important to focus on what it was about the project that excited me, being the centre of writers/voices and facilitating a conversation that created something new out of the old. I tried to take this into the piece by showing the protagonist responding to an outside voice and fighting to present something new out of the repetition and fear of repetition that they were given. I have realized, after the fact, that this outside voice was me talking also to me. How isolated and introspective could I get? Of course I would struggle to present something new when my source material was past or internal. I believe that in the future I will have to look outside of that which I know, look to the new to find the new.

To express something of the format of blogging - This again is something for the future, should I take on the work I have done for this project, it would be interesting to present the piece, as Geof Huth suggested, looped, in a variety of locations and times, for a variety of audiences, then invite them to comment. This would be an attempt to mimic the way in which a blog interacts with its audience. In the end the piece could continually shift in response to its on and off-line feedback and in that way emulate how blog content and style shifts through time in response to its readership. This would be a good way to free the performance up and help to lessen frustration/stagnation in the devising and performing process. In this way I would be engineering an obsolete voice from the past into influencing present and future work, an aim I didn't explore fully. New life is breathed into the "cobweblog" by what comes out of it.

To have the text read by its original authors - this was not practical due to continental differences in location but as I have previously said, I should have experimented with truly outside voices and then my response may have been fresher and more genuine.

To progress the he/she personas created in Finish This - This never happened, to do this I don't think that I would wish to perform, I would rather take two actors and work with them using the source text to create a more character driven piece, again using the work informing the writing informing the work approach.

To provide very detailed stage directions - This is something I looked at and the presented piece was informed by that research but to truly achieve the precision of Beckett I'd need his experience, genius or to work as previously stated within a system of constant testing of the writing.

To explore notions of repetition, remembering, forgetting, starting, stopping, the inability to these things and the consequences of that - I think I should have taken just one of these to run with, conversely by narrowing my thematics I would've widened my options in writing and performance, given myself time to look at something in depth rather than skirt lightly round all of them.

To present something stripped back and uncluttered - see above! The staging was simple as well as props and lighting (not costume - my frock was a giant fifties ball-gown and I looked like the fat kid at a five year olds tea party!) but the contents of the piece was not specific enough in it's themes and what generally emerged was "an expression of some of the frustrations you found about doing the piece".

To present a accessible, short, contemporary piece to an intimate audience - Check.

A key moment for me, possibly my 'Miracle Moment" was the decision to use this line within the piece:

repeat

I want you, too, to have this experience

so that we are more alike

so that we are closer, bound together, sharing a point of view

This line is directly lifted from Finish This and before that from the weblog My Life by Lyn Heijinian (blogger unknown) and before that from the book 'My Life' by Lyn Heijinian. I felt that all the way through the piece I had, at the most basic, just been trying to share a little text with an audience but I was only addressing them indirectly and sometimes obscurely through the tape. What better way of achieving this fundamental aim than to just say a line from Finish This to them? The line worked on that level and also through it's content, the protagonist meant every word and as a writer it somes up the experience of writing to share.

Out of the frustrations and difficulties I encountered I have begun to create my own system of tools for writing/devising including specifying a form for content, (although I feel this should be placed later in the process than I did and should arise out of experimentation rather than stylistic choices) this form could be specific to an individual performance and by placing restrictions or limitations upon the writer their worked would be influenced by these arbitrary rules and hopefully culminate in an internal logic for the piece and a code for the performers to work with and in. This theory needs further looking at, hopefully I will be able to try it for my end of year performance but be willing to reject the strict limitations if they prove creatively disabling.

There seems to be an awful lot of documentation considering the relative shortness of the project. This is because, having started backdating, I allowed myself to continue so I could really take a look at where thing went right and wrong and how they affected me. Had I tried to do documentation of this length within the month confines of the project, I can't see that I would have had any time to write creatively, although had all gone swimmingly, the daily posts would be more about inviting and responding to comment and evaluating that days rehearsal rather than a retrospective document and subsequently a shorter document.

What I produced during the course of this project is not as important as how I got there. The piece is a work in process and I feel that should the work continue under the suggestions and circumstances I have outlined above, that it would still culminate in a shifting outcome that reflects the forms and conventions of weblogging. And this project, in the end, has been less important in terms of fulfilling designated aims than it has to the understandings I have gained into the direction, strengths, weaknesses and hopes for the future of my practice. It seems that by undergoing such a struggle to create/write I have been forced to question my actions/responses much more deeply than I would if I'd breezed through with few problems. I may not have been totally successful in achieving what I set out to but my priorities shifted and what I've learnt in the end will probably be of greater benefit to my writing as a whole.

Blogging and collaborative writing within the realms of blog-art are relatively new forms (as is blog-art itself), it's hard to find examples of other work in this area as there is very little. Examples of collaboratively written blogs as art or space based work from blogs are few and far between. For my dissertation I will be exploring this further and hoping to generate forum based conversations on the subject.

I'm confident the dearth of information and examples will change over time. Blogging as a medium is continually growing with something like 7000 new blogs started daily and out of this number more and more artists, recently including Forced Entertainment are seeing how useful the form can be not only as documentation but also an aid to process and art piece in its own right. As the community grows conventions will emerge that the blog-artist can use or fight against, either way the discussion and work will be opened out and the new blog-artist will have precedents to support and inform their choices.

Tonight's the Night

The poster/program information:

Continue This…

A work in progress.

Thursday 3rd March
7:45pm - Studio 22

http://startingthis.blogspot.com/
http://finishingthis.blogspot.com/

Wish me luck...

Rehearsing

In the last two days, I have spent time going over how I will present what I've written so far. Some changes have been made in response to written directions not working in a live space, for instance, all the tape changing and "and that"'s were clumsy and slow so in the end I will just turn the tape over as if the protagonist believes they have inserted the tape the wrong way round. Other changes have come from being directly in the space, the studio I have been allotted has only one exit which the audience will be entering through, it feels necessary that the performer should already be in the space when the audience enter. In doing this it has come about that the performer is inexpertly hidden behind the podium for the dictaphone, they can be seen (although they believe that they can't) fumbling for the tapes and becoming increasingly excited by their impending moment of glory. Rather than walking on to the music that begins the tape, they grandly emerge in their very best(!?) impersonation of a balletic swan but do so vertically and are blocked by the podium.

These little alterations allow the audience to see how important this debut performance is to the protagonist and how amateur and at the same time sets the audience to believe that it will be a great spectacle but also that something may go wrong. Hopefully they will not anticipate quite how early the fall comes and will truly expect, as the performer prepares to speak, a profound utterance, allowing the deflation of the protagonist to have a greater humorous impact.

It's going to be a short little piece and I'm not sure if more is expected of me. Rehearsing has been quite difficult as I am not a director and I am an increasingly reluctant performer. As this is a solo effort and my peers are wrapped up in their own work, I'm doing the best I can with the fact that I have neither the skills as a director to bring forth the best performance from the text and the performer nor the skills as a performer to be brought forth. Anyhow enough excuses, bad workman and all that, I'm being marked on my process as a writer and not the end result and I don't see tomorrows performance as a product. I see it as a sharing of where I'm at at the moment, a little outreach to an audience for their criticism and (hopefully) entertainment and as a chance to test out ideas that only exist on paper.

Off to bed now, printing of programs and posters and preparing for performance in the morning.

Better Get Me a Great Big Meringue of a Frock then...

Okay, there's not going to be a 'finished' product, the piece I will present is evolving daily out of what has gone before. At this point I will stop rewriting and work with the script as it stands.


Continue this…
A work in progress

Mega dress
Mega entrance
Music at start of tape
Large indrawn breath
Clears throat
Indrawn breath

Whatever you are about to say has already been said.

Player deflates and looks at Dictaphone

Big pause
Tries to start again

Whatever you are about to say has already been said and what ever you are about to do has already been done.
Your next action will be completely unoriginal

Changes tape
Music again

See, I knew you were going to do that

Turns tape over

And that

New tape

And that
As I said, what ever you are about to do has already been done. There is nothing new here.

Looks at dress

The following may strike you as familiar
As I said, what ever you are about to do has already been done. There is nothing new here.

Looks at dress

The following may strike you as familiar

- Your heart falling into your shoes and this cold dying sensation coming over you.
- Looking foolish in front of friends.
- being tongue-tied
- being ‘frozen to the spot’
- being a little overdressed
- Hopping to remove your shoes
- Speaking someone else’s lines

These things have been done.
These things will be done again.
There is nothing new here.

Do something new
Various sequence of movements interspersed with
-looks panicky, picks up skirt sides and takes step forward
Old
Drops skirt, steps back
Thinking pose
Old
Wild and fantastic dancing
Old
Steps towards Dictaphone finger outstretched in admonition
Old
Stampy tantrum
Old
Summat saucy
Old
bird
Old
Stop

Say something original
Abortive attempts at speech, garbled sounds
Hard isn’t it?

You cannot present anything new. You endlessly repeat that which has gone before
There’ll be no ground breaking because you’re following in the footsteps of others.
You’ll never speak because you know that the words have been put in your mouth.
Not able to start anything because you might know how it ends.

Where do we go from here.

The following may strike you as familiar

- Your heart falling into your shoes and this cold dying sensation coming over you.
- Looking foolish in front of friends.
- being tongue-tied
- being ‘frozen to the spot’
- being a little overdressed
- Hopping to remove your shoes
- Speaking someone else’s lines

The following may strike you as familiar.

- Your heart falling into your shoes and this cold dying sensation coming over you. (begins Hopping to remove shoes)
- Looking foolish in front of friends.
- being tongue-tied
- being ‘frozen to the spot’
- being a little overdressed
- Hopping to remove your shoes
- Speaking someone else’s lines protagonist says...“I am searching for a particular word”
- Looking foolish in front of friends. “It is a way of saying I want you, too, to have this experience”
- being a little overdressed “so that we are more alike” ...removes dress
- Speaking someone else’s lines “so that we are closer, bound together, sharing a point of view”
- little dressed
- in front of friends

These things have been done.
These things will be done again.

“repeat
I want you, too, to have this experience
so that we are more alike
so that we are closer, bound together, sharing a point of view”

You cannot present anything new. You endlessly repeat that which has gone before.
There’ll be (bend ‘no’) ground breaking because you’re following in the footsteps of others.
You’ll (bend 'never') speak because you know that the words have been put in your mouth. “to be spat out in a new order by a new voice”
Not able to start anything because you might know how it ends.
"Able to start anything because I know it doesn't have to end"

Where do we go from here.

"Repeat"

Whatever you are about to say has already been said and what ever you are about to do has already been done. protagonist joins in with this line as if expecting the tape to say that.

Your next action will be completely original

Lights down
See, I knew you were going to do that.

stop

Aaaarrrggghhh!!! II

I've found the process, so far, incredibly difficult. My self-belief has taken a knock and I'm afraid to present anything for fear of criticism. I have never before experienced such fear in sharing my work. I don't want to show any of my workings as they are not just right. It's getting to the point where I cannot write or produce anything because of my fierce self-criticism and over-editing. I worry that I will arrive at the night of the performance with excuses for the absence of the great piece that I intended. Somehow I have strayed from the simple ideal of taking a little of the Finish This text off-line. Their were great little texts that cried out for sharing and now I am writing pieces about struggling to write a piece.

I need a Goat Island miracle...

"If we focus on a problem, we start to see problems everywhere. We become one who is defined by the perception of the proliferation of problems. Because of this approach, the creative mind often seems to shut down when critical discourse starts. If we focus on a miraculous moment instead, we start to see miraculous moments everywhere. We become one who is defined by the perception of the proliferation of miracles."

Assessment Criteria

Assessment Criteria T310
Rachel Baynton

I wish to be assessed on the process I undertake (as a writer) in attempting to realize my original intentions. A process that will culminate in a performance that represents a point-in-time on a continuum, reached through recognizing limitations and exploring multiple avenues generated from the original text and that will provide a 'spring-board' to further work.

To be taken into consideration;

- My evaluation of how successfully I realized some intentions.
- My awareness of those moments when I failed and how I moved on from them.
- My continuing personal explorations of blogging and writing for/from blogs as a generative tool for theatre making.
- My awareness of the usefulness of the project to my emergent practice as a writer.

Find the New

Okay, this time some directions and tape content to take to the studio...

Repeat
A Piece for One Player with Dictaphone.

Set
The audience are arranged in a semi-circle around the performance space which is backed by a curtain or wall. A stool is placed slightly to the stage left of front centre. The furniture is non-descript, neither homely or institutional.

Exits
The player exits and enters from the same place each time. Footsteps should be clearly audible upon the players entrance.

Costume
Non-descript. Shoes should provide a firm sound of a footstep but should not be high heeled.

Voice
The recording on the cassette tape should neither be of professional sound quality or of poor quality, rather the player will have recorded it, somewhere with no extraneous noise, directly on to the Dictaphone to be used in the piece. The voice is both low and slow throughout.


Silence.
Steps are heard as the player approaches the stool (holding the Dictaphone in their right hand) with purpose, though not hurriedly. They stand centrally, directly next to the stool. The tape is started and the Dictaphone placed on the stool. A subtle hiss from the dictaphone may be audible. The player then faces to front as if about to speak...

Whatever you are about to say has already been said.
Player deflates and looks at dictaphone
Whatever you are about to say has already been said and what ever you are about to do has already been done
Hangs head
The following may strike you as familiar

- Your heart falling into your shoes and this cold dying sensation coming over you.
- Looking foolish in front of friends.
- Walking with your eyes half closed taking in only enough to get your body to work.
- Walking on a hill of tan grass; dozens of plump green cedars scattered over it; not a single shadow.
- Crying at Neighbours.
- Running, hard, legs pumping and feet hitting the ground, loud, and pressure building up in your chest, each step causing a glancing bite. Your sweat sweet with victory.
- Pretending to be Marilyn Monroe.
- Seeing rush hour as a steady line of receding red and an opposing line of intermittent white, the image strobing through the railings as you move along the bridge.
- The rice krispies floating on the milk and falling over the edge of the bowl.
- Ignoring a ringing phone.
- Hopping to remove your socks and shoes.
- Smelling a sharp scent of smoke

These things didn't just happen to you
These things have been done.
These things will be done again.
There is nothing new here.

Do something new
Various sequence of movements interspersed with
-
Old
-
Old
-
Old
-
Old
-
Old
-
Old
-
Old
Stop

Say something original
Abortive attempts at speech, garbled sounds
Hard isn't it?

And I bet you've done it again. You've invited people to come and witness an original work when its clear that they'll have heard it all before.
It's all been done before.
You remember what has happened in order to move on to something new.
But you endlessly repeat that which has gone before.

Now you are stuck aren't you
You can't do anything.

Shit.

Perhaps I'm wrong

You'll never get anywhere if you're afraid of repeating yourself. There'll be no ground breaking because you're following in the footsteps of others. You'll never speak because you know that the words have been put in your mouth. You won't be able to start anything because you'll know how it might end. That's no way to live.
You need to forget everything that I just said
I hope you remember this

Removes tape from machine pulls out tape
Unwraps new tape puts in machine

Whatever you are about to say has already been said starts to leave
Whatever you are about to say has already been said and what ever you are about to do has already been done
exit

It's a little negative isn't it? This writing froze me. Once I had convinced myself that there was nothing new and it had all been done before, I couldn't do anything. I listened to myself telling myself not to bother. Where can I go from here?
Humour seemed my only option to save myself from this descent into stagnation. How amusing to see the protagonist, grandly attired, making a grand entrance, preparing to speak, only to have the wind knocked out of their sails by "whatever you are about to say has already been said".
I played with how angered and saddened I was about the news of my unoriginality. It became apparent through this that I was only believable when responding as if this news was new to me.

What does one do when everything is pre-empted? One fights against it, still strives for originality, to catch the knowing out. If this is truly new information and the protagonist is so grandly prepared would they not do their utmost to present something, anything, to create a new meaning through a different placement of that which has already been said?

Double Yikes and a Mysterious Tape

Still ill. Feeling quite worried now with the performance only a week away. Every night that I have to work on the project is valuable and I can't afford to waste them in getting acquainted with my toilet bowl.

Anyway, in the midst of last nights disease-broken slumber (am still terribly sorry for myself), I imagined myself confronted by a tape of my own voice that I had no recollection of making. I am going to write and record that tape for tomorrows studio session. I'd like to include some edited elements of the writings for voice-off that I did and also create a little intrigue as to why it was recorded and why the protagonist has no memory of doing so. I shall also prepare some detailed stage directions for listening and reacting to the tape that I can execute exactly then improvise around. Hopefully by the end of tomorrow I should have established if this is an idea to pursue and, if so, what needs to be altered on the recording and the optimum set of directions for staging it.

Poorly me

V. sick and sorry for self.

Documentation and Backdating

I have chosen to use the blog format for my documentation of a project again. Last time, the comments I received were invaluable, not only in providing constructive criticism and support, but in shaping the direction that the whole project took. I had hoped for the same input this time but due to my computer going down, causing me to have to backdate the posts and the short duration of the project I don't think it will be as possible this time. By having to backdate posts, I'm not using blogging in it's most constructive way. A daily post, with links, open to comment, has become a more standard journal and does not have the immediacy that instant publishing brings, comments happen retrospectively. Although, I do feel that because the project is short, change can happen swiftly and any comments received will still be relevant and taken into account.

There has been some good come out of having to backdate my posts. It's kept everything fresh for me. Ideas that I had at the beginning of the project and may have discarded or just forgotten, if my documentation had been updated daily, are still being jumbled round with new notions. Through backdating I have been forced to meticulously review and rephrase my old notes, with the added benefit of creating a more coherently narrated documentation. In this way I am able to progress through the project whilst remaining true to my original goals.

I received this feedback from my tutor:

hi Rachel. Well, I've had a look through your writing and I think it is really interesting. Well done. I think the ambiguity works well and leads to a nice sense of intrigue. Intrigue means I want to follow you somewhere - I wonder if you know where you are going yet? You've made a break from the original material - I think it's presence is clearly felt but that you are now free to do as you wish. Keep the experience of the process at the heart of the product, as we discussed, and I think yes it will help you make the next few decisions re performer presence etc.

She's got a point, where am I going?

Starting This and Not Being Able to Finish

The following was written to take into the studio today.

Voices Without

A Piece for One Player with Dictaphone.

Lighting

The stage should be as dark as it is possible to allow the player to traverse the stage and find the lamp switch with ease. One large angle poise lamp, plain and of dark metal. Bright but not blinding light (60w?)

Set

The audience are arranged in a semi-circle around the performance space which is backed by a curtain or wall. A central table with chair behind, facing out to audience. Both items of furniture non-descript, neither homely or institutional. The lamp is set on the stage left of the table, at a right angle to the audience. They see it in perfect profile. The light is angled directly down to create a circular pool of light on the table. With careful placement it should be possible that the head of the lamp would replace the head of the seated protagonist when viewed directly from the front. The pool of light should directly illuminate anything placed in the centre of it so that no shadow is cast. The edge of the light circle should extend exactly to the edge of the table nearest to the chair so as to illuminate the fingers of the player placed round that edge. As little else as possible should be 'caught' by the light.

Exits

One. Central at the back of the stage. Footsteps should be clearly audible upon the players entrance.

Costume

Non-descript. Shoes should provide a firm sound of a footstep but should not be high heeled Hands made up to be as visible as possible. No jewelry or other ornamentation apparent. The bag is large, dark and plain, no visible buckles or zips.

Voice

The recording on the cassette tape should neither be of professional sound quality or of poor quality, rather the player will have recorded it, somewhere with no extraneous noise, directly on to the Dictaphone to be used in the piece. The voice is both low and slow throughout except where indicated.

Dark and silence.

Steps are heard as the protagonist approaches the chair with purpose, though not hurriedly. They stand stage left of the chair, directly behind the lamp. They turn on the lamp. From the bag they remove the dictaphone and place it centrally in the pool of light. From the bag the also remove an unmarked audio cassette. Placing the bag on the floor next to them, they sit and remove the cassette from its case. The case is placed on the unlit right of the table. The cassette is inserted into the dictaphone and the play button is depressed. The protagonist places their hands on the edge of the table nearest to them, thumbs tucked under the edge and fingers relaxed.

A subtle hiss from the dictaphone may be audible.

I had intended to set everything up as above and then improvise for a while to establish what the 'voice off' on the tape could say to me and how I would respond. Technical support at college was closed and I couldn't get a lamp, desk or stool. I really wanted to experience being within such tight staging and, as I could not, all creativity deserted me. My tutor showed up and as I had nothing concrete to show her, I tried to explain where I was heading with my writing. She said, "I don't get it".

I'm going to have to have something to show her next time, I can't explain myself properly when put on the spot. I just don't really know where I'm going with this project. At first I had to much text and tried to refine it down, once I had, it's all opened up again from there and I'm frustrated, really bloody frustrated, at my inability to commit to an idea and to communicate effectively.

What is on that tape Rachel?

Form into Content

Working with the fact that I am preoccupied with form, I have written myself a list of forms that interest me for possible inclusion in the end product. By laying it all out I hope to find content within. I'm going to attempt to write something that falls within these guidelines to take into the studio and work with.

Form for Content

Voice Off:

Both low and slow throughout

Obsolete voice from the past trying to communicate with it's present-time listener Engineer resonance between the history recounted and the current situation

Prescribe length of pauses

Prescribe the volume of sound

Stuttering voice

Repeated phrases

Movement:

Prescribe exact stage directions

Prescribe the number of step

Stuttered movement

Repeated movement

Look:

Prescribe the angle of perceptions

Prescribe the timing of camera shots

Clarification:

Who are 'they'? - This outside input

What are they saying?

Why are they saying it?

Who are they influencing?

Why?

What am I saying?

What do I want my audience to leave with?

Why?

Thematics:

inability of someone to remember

repeat a period of time until it is 'completed' before they can commit the events to memory

failure to complete

decision making - its consequences

someone being affected by outside input

outside voice influencing/dictating in the space

attempts at finishing blocked by repetition/procrastination/delay (-ed gratification)

"why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?"

"she's started to finish this."

short scenes/recordings linked by the repetition of themes/phrases

Different audio or video clips looped in the same physical location over a period of days

diligent replication

taking the words from someone else mouth

picking up where someone else left off

he/she, me

memory

forgotten/remembered/mementos

false starts

repetition

I am only done when nothing else can be removed.

Process into Product?

Right then, what did I do in Finish This and why did I start it?

She finishes others writing
To find out what happens next
she's unable to start her own
It would languish without continuation
To bring the writers together in a new voice

In essence,

Someone finishing what someone else has done
To see what could happen
Because they didn't start it
Because no-one else would do it
To bring together the elements needed

Refine,

Continuing/completing
Concluding
Last resort
Collating

Expand,

The only person who would bring these this together and try to progress, continue, to a conclusion

You are the chronicler
The standard bearer
The end is in sight
Do you want to get there
Is it possible to get there

Expand again,

Everything comes from something
This work is Bourne out of all the work that has gone before
There is nothing new
It has all been done before
These words have been said
I'm just rearranging the order
You said this yesterday
It is just as true today
I am trying to find a new meaning
To express something in a new way
Putting things together so that they mean something new


(V.O.)
Hello
Are you listening?
When you're ready, we'll begin.

Ideas...

Ø Tape is by her - not immediately apparent - do you remember making this tape/saying these things?
Ø If you've truly forgotten you'll not remember where you hid/the location of the other tapes
Ø Why is she trying to forget
Ø Empties bag full of tapes
Ø She erases and makes a new tape at the end or gets out new tape at end
Ø Tape is to make her forget?
Ø Spotlight on hands/recorder
Ø Revelations on tape
Ø It must become clear she is trying to forget
Ø Hasn't successfully forgotten =] remembers=]makes new tape?
Ø "If you can hear this, it hasn't worked"

An Early Morning

It's taken him over a year but my son is finally sleeping through the night. The trade-off is that we're now up at six every morning. I've tried explaining to him that I'm a student and look upon midday as an acceptable time to rise, especially seeing as I have to get my college work done after he's gone to bed and usually work to the small hours, he's having none of it. Six it is then. Today that was a blessing. I could have kissed him. I did. We turned on the telly so he could catch up with the Hoobs over his Weetabix and stumbled upon a film of Samuel Beckett's 'Footfalls'. It was so simple. Such a strong image of a woman endlessly pacing, "endlessly revolving it all." She became bowed and the light on her dimmed over time until, in the last scene she wasn't there at all. The whole time she responded to a voice off ("voices: both low and slow throughout") until the voice merged with her own. It was full of pauses, silences, the words were achingly slow and drawn out yet it still held me. The voices drifted to the audience in a timeless, weary monochromatic timbre. These were not elements unique to this production. All of these details would have been laid down specifically by Beckett. From my old school notes:

"Unlike more traditional playwrights who indicate but who do not, except in certain moments, prescribe exact stage directions, Beckett calls for diligent replication of the number of steps, the angle of perceptions, the length of pauses, the timing of camera shots, the volume of sound, and such like, and to deviate from his carefully prescribed directions is to immediately reduce the effectiveness of the production and the impact of the symbols and images embedded in the text. The stage instructions remain sacrosanct, and there can be no gender bending of characters or cutting of lines. We have to be true to the spirit of Beckett who, of course, was the most careful writer in the world. He was also, though, a very imagistic writer. Even if they don't remember the name of the plays, people tend to remember the images - those guys in the sacks, the people buried up to their necks, the characters in the dustbins. He created simple, sparse, strong images that stick in the mind."

Harold Pinter said of Beckett and his work:

"The farther he goes the more good it does me. I don't want philosophies, tracts, dogmas, creeds, ways out, truths, answers, nothing from the bargain basement. He is the most courageous, remorseless writer going and the more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him. He's not fucking me about, he's not leading me up any garden path, he's not slipping me a wink, he's not flogging me a remedy or a path or a revelation or a basinful of breadcrumbs, he's not selling me anything I don't want to buy - he doesn't give a bollock whether I buy or not - he hasn't got his hand over his heart. Well, I'll buy his goods, hook, line and sinker, because he leaves no stone unturned and no maggot lonely. He brings forth a body of beauty. His work is beautiful."

Now there's somebody to emulate, "the most careful writer in the world". I want to hold my audience with something simple and precise.

A Few Words from Mr. Huth

I'm going to try and write some audio scripts that I can record and take into the studio with me. This will give me a chance to see how they sound in a space, to work physically from them and to get some feedback from Lou.

Geof Huth, the writer of One Million Footnotes (the inspiration for Finish This) has kindly answered some of my questions. He raises the point that to emulate blogging I could have "Different audio or video clips looped in the same physical location over a period of days." I have considered that, if I just produce an audio recording, then I could have it looped in a space and produce a durational performance that the audience are free to join and leave as they wish. This would also be a nod to another of Geof's points,

"Movement and change are what is necessary on the web. Any site that is no longer updated becomes a cobwebsite and visits to it decline precipitously. Your blog now lies fallow."

A recording is the capture of a passed moment. Like watching re-runs of the news, the words would not be of the now. The tape would be an obsolete voice from the past trying to communicate with it's present-time listener. Maybe there would be a resonance between the history recounted and the current situation, maybe that resonance could be engineered?

I just worry that I might not be able to hold the interest of the audience through sound alone.

To do

• Move on from new writings - reject, edit, rewrite where necessary
• Book studio space - this is essential, I must get away from the computer and in to the studio, what works on paper may not in a live situation
• I now have my performance date - Thursday, March 3rd, 7.45pm - I need to be ready to show something approaching the final performance, to Lou, by the 25th.
• Yikes.

First Writings

I sent the following to my tutor:

Please find attached some first writings for a 'voice off'.
The first few texts are deliberately ambiguous in their intended target, I want the listener to question whether they are being addressed directly or if they are being told about someone else.
The last text is an attempt to introduce a live performer into the space.
These are preliminary ideas but I think that I shall definitely be looking at short scenes/recordings linked by the repetition of themes/phrases. At the moment I'm still trying to clarify whether or not to have a live body in the space but I trust that this will eventually resolve itself through the continuation of the writing.
I'm looking at the inability of someone to remember, possibly that they have to repeat a period of time until it is 'completed' before they can commit the events to memory (a return to the copy), decision making, failure to complete and its consequences These initial writings may be rejected again but I feel it is a move away, from the 'finish this' texts that were holding me, in the direction of something more performative. I think as a next task that I will write taking this writing as my source so that the writing can evolve out of itself.
I want also to present something very 'stripped back' a kind of zen-gardening approach where I am only done when nothing else can be removed.

(V.O.)
Hello
Are you listening?
When you’re ready, we’ll begin.

(V.O.) Does any of the following strike you as familiar?

- Your heart falling into your shoes and this cold dying sensation coming over you.
- Looking foolish in front of friends.
- The sharp scent of smoke.
- Sweat, sweet with victory.
- Walking with your eyes half closed taking in only enough to get your body to work.
- A hill of tan grass; dozens of plump green cedars scattered over it; not a single shadow.
- Crying at Neighbours.
- Running, hard, legs pumping and feet hitting the ground, loud, and pressure building up in your chest, each step causing a glancing bite.
- Pretending to be Marilyn Monroe.
- Rush hour as a steady line of receding red and an opposing line of intermittent white, the image strobing through the railings as you move along the bridge.
- Ignoring a ringing phone.
- Hopping to remove your socks and shoes.

(V.O.) Do you remember?
Do you remember?
Do you remember anything?
Do you remember anything at all of what happened?
Do you remember anything at all of what happened yesterday?
Do you remember anything at all of what happened yesterday, of what you did?
Do you remember anything at all of what happened yesterday, of what you did, when and why you did it?
What you did, when and why you did it?
Do you remember anything at all?
anything at all?
anything?

(V.O.) Comfortable?
Comfortable isn’t it?
Just sitting there … listening?
You know what you’ve done, you had your reasons.
You may have carefully considered the implications before doing what you did.
You may have not thought at all before jumping in, both feet first.
In the end you made your decision and stuck to it.

(V.O.) Reasons for not doing include:
I was drunk
I fell asleep
I didn’t wake up
I couldn’t be bothered
I didn’t have the time
I didn’t know where to start
I had too much else to do
It was too difficult
It was easier not to

The Voices Without
Or
She’s a good girl who does what she’s told for as long as they want her to with seemingly no end in sight – A story in ten unfinished chapters (with prologue).

(An empty circle, she stands still in the middle.)

(V.O.) Clears throat – 1, Start. She’s a good girl who does what she’s told
Her mobile rings, she takes it out her bag and goes to answer it.
Stop right now, thank you very much
She stops, thinks better of it and puts it back in her bag.
She takes a compact and lipstick from her bag and, using the mirror, begins to apply the lipstick.
Don’t go changing to try to please me
She stops, thinks better of it and puts it back in her bag.
She is never happier than when following an instruction
(SINGS)If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands
With a big smile she claps twice.

People sometimes worry about her. “it’s as if she’s hearing voices” they say. Of course, they cannot hear what you can.

(An empty circle, she stands still in the middle.)

(V.O.) Clears throat – 2. She’s a good girl who does what she’s told and every day she’s told something. They have come together to tell her these somethings and she must follow their thoughts to their illogical inconclusions. She must because she chooses that she must and because they have taken the trouble to tell her to and she’s a good girl who does what she’s told until they stop telling her. She hopes they don't stop.

(V.O.) She’s particularly fond of these words

Stop
Don’t
Won’t
Forbidden
Forgotten
Shouldn’t
Wouldn’t
Couldn’t
Haven’t
Didn’t

She’s not mad or submissive, she just doesn’t like the responsibility of setting a task, completing a task

If someone’s telling her what to do she doesn’t have to think for herself
And if their telling her not to do something she never has to finish anything

She worries that she’s lazy

Voice

Lou mentioned something interesting. When she heard me reading the texts she said that I had a good voice and maybe I should use it. This has got me thinking. I could be my own 'voice off'. I could respond to the outside influence of my own voice (either live or recorded), speaking the words of others. Or, maybe I don't need to be present at all, maybe the audience should feel that they are being addressed directly by a disembodied voice. Maybe some ambiguity, who is being addressed, the audience or the performer?

hmmmm...

Goat Island and Mr. Beckett.

I've been looking at Goat Island, a Chicago based ensemble of collaborative performers. I've loved them since the first moment I saw "It's an Earthquake in my Heart" during my first term at Dartington. Actually, I thought that I hated them when I saw them but when, as my first assignment, I had to review the performance, I discovered the beauty and complexity of their work that I had fought seeing. I was new to this kind of theatre (my theatre background was touring Shakespeare-in-the-park) l had never seen anything like it and resisted it, complaining that it made no sense and was boring. When I couldn't get the images they presented with me out of my head and was forced, through the review writing, to really question what I had seen, I realized that I couldn't dismiss it so easily. Now, four years on, I can't wait to see them when they come back to Devon in a few weeks.

"Goat Island performance work is a series of responses: to the exercises we give ourselves, to our surroundings, to the events of the world, but mostly, to each other. We perform responses for each other back and forth. The conversation goes further than were we just talking. At the end of the conversation we have a piece in front of us and it's ready to show. These conversations take place over a long period of time. As in a chess match, each response is carefully considered. Time, and therefore, dreams and reverie are part of the conversation. These conversations can be two years long. This gives time for a history to grow and for us to interpret it, for distortions to take on their own meaning, their own demands."

I lifted this from their website (please also look at their Letter to a Young Practitioner, it's inspirational) as it describes what they do far better than I can. While I was doing so, I found this:

"As each project is performed creative energy is encouraged to gather strength through the process of creative response. Each presentation of work is met with some kind of artistic response: a work of art that could not have existed without the work it is responding to. These responses are individual contributions to a conversation that stretches. In this way work begets more work and all of the work is inextricably linked. This practice destabilizes the boundaries between critical and creative modes in order to enrich them both."

Which I think how I hope to work in this project and all future endeavors. Also, some useful advice:

"If we focus on a problem, we start to see problems everywhere. We become one who is defined by the perception of the proliferation of problems. Because of this approach, the creative mind often seems to shut down when critical discourse starts.
If we focus on a miraculous moment instead, we start to see miraculous moments everywhere. We become one who is defined by the perception of the proliferation of miracles.
Try the second of these approaches. Think of a creative response as your own work that would not have existed without the work you are responding to. Start with the most obvious miraculous moment that you see in the work. What is obvious to you may not be obvious to anybody else.
You may have an association with that moment. You may want to echo it, multiply it, or work from it in some other way. Work out from that moment. The moment may have been intentional or accidental. Instead of a moment, your starting point might be a structural element, a visual element, a spatial element - anything."

Well that's a way to work, but I've also been thinking about style. When I was writing the first sketches, I started writing incredibly detailed stage directions, about movement, vocal quality and staging. This was to aid my own performance of them, notes to self if you will. This reminded me of Samuel Beckett's plays. I studied them about ten years ago and remembered how Beckett was always very detailed in exactly how his work should be shown.

"Beckett regarded his plays as artifacts, and refused to comment on their 'meaning'. He guarded jealously the shape of these 'artifacts', and became notoriously prescriptive of the way they were to be staged. A few years ago there was a collision between the Beckett estate and Deborah Warner, who, in putting on Footfalls (1975), deviated from the stage directions and diagrams for stage movement Beckett had left. The estate succeeded in stopping that production, and banned Warner from ever directing another Beckett play."

Perhaps I don't need to be quite this controlling but maybe it would be worth looking a little further at his work. Maybe try to emulate his style. A prescriptive form to shape my content. I vaguely remember one play, Footfalls, where a woman is responding to a voice off-stage. I shall look through my old school notes and see what I can find.

Writing Exercises

I wrote a few little sketches, based on the individual texts. Here's a bit of one...

The Voices Without
Or
She’s a good girl who does what she’s told for as long as they want her to with seemingly no end in sight – A story in ten unfinished chapters (with prologue).


(An empty circle, she stands still in the middle.)

(V.O.) Clears throat – Start, prologue. She’s a good girl who does what she’s told and every day she’s told something. They have come together to tell her these somethings and she must follow their thoughts to their illogical inconclusions. She must because she chooses that she must and because they have taken the trouble to tell her to and she’s a good girl who does what she’s told until they stop telling her. They won’t stop.

1, Rush Hour.

Go placidly amidst the noise and haste.

Keep your head when all around you are losing theirs.

Here in your car you can lock all your doors it’s as safe as a house it’s the only way to live.

I went on to describe the performer following beams of light through an empty space.

I wasn't really happy with them as, because they were so text-specific, there was even less connection between them and I wasn't sure what I was trying to say. However, what did emerge was a clearer understanding of what I want to express.
I want to show someone being affected by outside input.
I want to show an outside voice influencing/dictating in the space.
I want to show attempts at finishing blocked by repetition/procrastination/delay (-ed gratification) "why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?" "she's started to finish this."

Also,
Who are 'they'? - This outside input
What are they saying?
Why are they saying it?
Who are they influencing?
Why?

Conclusions Drawn from Studio Session

Reflecting on yesterdays, eventually productive, studio session, the following conclusions have been drawn:

• I have 'permission' to write - rather than being scared by the wealth of material I have, I should see it as a starting point. Taking elements from the texts to produce a performative work. This first journey back into physical work is not the time to take on the texts 'whole'. Instead I need to concentrate on a further exploration of my own work, taking that which I have already generated and moving it on within the boundaries of the (college specific) project. Theoretically, I have a huge resource of written starting points for work that could keep me going for years!
• In light of the above, I do not have to be so 'precious' about the texts - I was worried that by writing on from them that I, and my audience, would lose sight of where they came from. It is possibly enough that I know. The audience can be directed to the sites through a progamme, of sorts, for the performance. Indeed, the elements that I choose, and a little of the process within the performance, may stand as enough of a pointer anyway. I'm very fond of the texts generated in Finish This, some of it personal pride in the collation, some of it the feel of a particular phrase and also the feeling of being in the centre of a group of writers, bringing them together and seeing new meanings emerge from the existing texts.
• I'm very bogged down in form - It's a bit of a control issue but maybe I can turn that to my advantage and allow the form to shape the content. If I know what I want to say to an audience and can rigidly define how this happens then the content will be part of the form.
• I need to set a few exercises to progress my writing.
• I need to question my actions and reasonings.
• I need to identify what I wish to communicate, then, how.

Some questions:

Why am I presenting these texts?

Why the specific texts?

What is my finishing (continuation) of others writing a metaphor for?

Why start something and then not finish?

What am I finishing?

Why was I drawn to blogging in the first place? - specifically what did I enjoy about Finish This?

What do I want the audience to take from the peice?

Why am I giving them that?

Some exercises:

Take something from each of the texts and write something new around it

Take ten first lines from different books, write something from them

Take ten last lines from different books, write something from them

Some themes for possible inclusion:

blogging

finishing something

not finishing something

stuttering - movement/voice/text

false starts

repetition

picking up where someone else left off

taking the words from someone eles mouth

he/she, me

memory - forgotten/remembered/mementos

process into product

Studio

By the time my tutor arrived, it had become very apparent that I was stuck and had very little to show for the hour and half that I had been there already. I was embarrassed by my failure to communicate the texts that I so desperately want to share. Every exercise or attempt at moving the words became awkward and stilted, in the end, the movement ceasing altogether until I returned to just saying the words.

After some discussion, it was pointed out that, although these texts may contain the inspiration for devising contemporary theatre, they are not performance texts and will not translate directly from the page to a space (unless in the most trite and obvious way). Where as I, in my closeness to the texts due to my immersion in their creation, could see unwritten connections between the posts I had selected - a fragmented story - all Lou could perceive were unrelated texts forced together arbitrarily. She could see what I was getting at, knowing the background to the project, but I will be performing to a public audience with no prior knowledge of my work. I have to precisely define what it is that I am trying to communicate and then do so effectively.

It was also remarked that I was still avoiding discussions of content, preferring to examine and set precise forms for my work. I think this is probably due to a lack of self-confidence in my own abilities as a performer, I've fallen out of the habit and don't wish to commit myself to anything that I would not be able to execute satisfactorily. Time to take a few risks methinks. I need to keep reminding myself that this does not have to be a highly polished extravaganza, it is an explorative exercise in producing work for public consumption to aid my emergent practice as an artist.

Lou suggested that as I had been working primarily as a writer for the past few years, it seemed obvious that I should write something. I had purposely not written anything new as I felt that I had so much, too much, material already. But perhaps it is truer to the spirit of Finish This (where a line was taken, added to and placed in a new context to give it new meaning) to take just a word/phrase/action from a text and write from it, then write from that new writing until I have a text for performance. I will need to retain enough elements of Finish This to show that it came from there, else I could have just written something new and forgotten all about the texts.

Aaaarrrggghhh!!!

I've still very little for my studio session tomorrow. At the moment I'm going in with the following:

• Warm-up - will start with a full warm up and try to re-acquaint my body with the notions of moving in a space, to focus my mind and prepare to work and to remind myself that this is what I used to do, was good at and chose to study before I decided to change nappies for a while.
• Texts - I'm taking in several copies of the texts so that I can experiment with them, reordering, cutting, pasting and rewriting. Also a list of actions that are within the texts, I shall try reading and moving the words under the direction of these actions.
• Script - A really rough attempt at putting stage directions around some of the texts. It's not great but it's a start.
• Old notes - on previous studio work and techniques for devising theatre, if I get stuck I might be prompted by them.
• And after reading the above - quite a negative attitude to the whole process and my abilities, perhaps this shouldn't come with me.

Copy

Well, I wrote the requested copy. It just kind of tumbled out of my head, really quickly, and I'm not sure that it follows the direction that I thought I thought the work was taking. It just 'felt' right.

She's taken the words from out of their mouths.
Together it's a new voice.
She’s hoping that it can fill in the gaps in her memory.

A story of a forgotten 24 hours, pieced together from the writing of strangers. Follow her as she tries to finish what they've started.…

I think the memory element comes from the fact that I see the Finish This texts as individual scenes or pages from a torn up book: parts of a greater whole. If ones memory of a time is patchy then flashbacks will occur in a non-sequential order.

I don't know if this is the direction to take but it's a possible starting point, my 'in'.

Contract for Working

The following is the 'contract for working' that has been agreed between my tutor and myself. It is particularly useful as we have not previously worked together nor met prior to the start of this project. It states what we can and should expect from each other.
It also serves as a model of my ideal of a 'good working practice', which I may be assessed against, and as a personal yardstick to measure myself against as I progress through the work.

Contract for Working

You will…

- Establish a working dialogue
- Set limitations and deadlines to guide me forward through the work
- Provide an ‘outside eye' to those rehearsals viewed
- Offer much support/observation/criticism/suggestion
- Feedback on progress reports
- Help with clarification/justification of the work as it progresses
- Offer links to existing practitioners/work

I will…

- Establish a working dialogue
- Meet with you regularly
- Be in regular e-mail contact
- Meet the deadlines set
- Provide regular updates on my progress outside of tutorial contact
- Provide information on times that I am working in college
- Request help as soon as it is necessary
- Make regular presentations of the work as it progresses
- Be open to much support/observation/criticism/suggestion

So far so good, I'm not in breach yet. I'll review the situation further down the line...

Select Text

The following are the Finish This texts that I've decided to start with. They all contain a little information about 'he/she', potentially useful should I use these characters, and also an action of some kind (flee, walk with eyes half closed, hopping etc.) which I hope will be a starting point or impetus for movement.

I can see a vague story of observing and chasing emerging, should I choose to write linking passages and 'flesh out' the story, but as yet I don't know what my 'in' is. How do I begin to move the writing into a physical place? I'm due in the studio on Friday and I have three hours booked in there. I haven't been in a studio for two years. My tutor will be catching up with me at some point during the session to see what I'm up to and I have the awful fear that she'll find me sitting in the middle of the huge empty space with nothing to show.

I'm going to play with the texts, reordering, editing etc and see if I can't set myself a few exercises to get me started.

332. The sharp scent of smoke in the living room didn't come from the fire, but from the rain falling on the embers of the fire. As the weather worsened, we bees were forced to flee the hive.

348. From above, rush hour was a steady line of receding red and an opposing line of intermittent white. The image strobed through the railings as she moved along the bridge. She walked with her eyes half closed, taking in just enough to get her body to work.

357. A hill of tan grass; dozens of plump green cedars scattered over it; not a single shadow. She bursts out from between the trees, hair whipped and panting. He follows her and tries to synchronize the rhythm of his steps to the rhythm of her steps. He ran, hard, legs pumping and feet hitting the ground, loud, and pressure building up in his chest, constricting, each step causing a glancing bite. Her sweat was sweet with victory.

359. At that point during the day when the sun has almost slipped beneath the earth, when the brightest light huddles across the horizon, when the clouds turn a deep blue against the night and a sliver of moon cuts through the sky, he felt the cold of winter for the first time. He made his way to the Orni hoping that it wasn't quite cold enough to freeze, hopping to remove his socks and shoes. Fog drifted above the waters, enveloping the night in the city's holiday glow. He felt his soles sink in the mud with each step he took. He enjoyed the sensation. The soles of his feet were persistently grey.

367. 'The new winter wind surging against the house, the radiators clanking in response, and, alongside his leg, the ragged purring of the cat.' This was all too familiar. Reading the post made her nervous, as if someone had seen into her unspoken life. The phone rings. The ringing echoes out the walls in into the building's stairway. Everyone notices it. She will not pick up. She lost herself between clicks of the mouse. She is lost, staring at the screen, at her reflected self.

374. She saw her shadow as simply a reflection that had fallen away from her. One had merely to turn around in order to see it. And as you have been told before: A person does not look the same in a mirror as she does.

379. He continued to shower until he finished the sliver of soap. He stepped out, dried thoroughly and talced the necessary. The soles of his feet were persistently grey. He had never known why but always pumiced them to within an inch of their lives in the hopes of uncovering the pink. He dressed with care and left the house.
Should he chance to say what he was doing, he would disguise the saying so as to throw one off the track, describing, for example, a passenger on a plane while neglecting to tell us where the plane was headed, or narrating a dream of the night before when asked what he had been doing recently. Tonight was no exception; he was going to dinner, if he happened to meet her along the way and she happened to join him, well how delightful. Like Rapunzel, she lived in the tower apartment above the street corner and nestled in the tall, hundred-year-old oaks. He, like the prince, glanced furtively at the windows every time he passed by. This evening, however, for the first time in years, he finds his (delicately powdered) courage:
He rings.
She asks who is it.
He says his name.
She says come up and buzzes.
He opens the door.

380. Because the snow fell a day late, they walked out that night onto snow that sparkled in the streetlight. They walked down the road, through the woods to the lake, a journey they had taken before, washed new and white. Fog drifted above the waters, enveloping the night in the city's holiday glow. They make a game of acting out their last journey: He follows her and tries to synchronize the rhythm of his steps to the rhythm of her steps. It's a slower, quieter chase, muted by the snow carpet. This time she lets him catch her without a struggle and he holds on tight. Hugging her was coming home. They stay within each others gaze for the rest of the evening, hoping that the morning will be just as glorious. If they don't break the spell, it will. The day will twinkle, sparkle, shoot forth its single bits.

Just noticed some of the alliteration above (sweat/sweet, receding/red etc), it always feels so nice in my mouth. The texts have an immediacy when read aloud, they come alive.

Dissertation

Concurrently to this project, I'm supposed to be working on my dissertation (I'm hoping to take some of the themes and questions that arose from my C.E.P. research and explore them in greater detail).

I can see that it could be beneficial to still be looking at the theoretical aspects of the blogging medium and its relation to arts practices in the light of this more practical work; it will help to contextualise what I am attempting and could offer practical suggestions for the work. However, as this project will be completed by the end of February, I worry that I will not have enough time to do both to a high enough standard.

The dissertation is to go on the back burner until this project is concluded. I shall still be engaged in sourcing texts and information but will leave any serious ink-slinging until March. In this way I feel that I shall be able to fully commit to the work in hand whilst maintaining some engagement with more theoretical concepts.

All style and no substance

Met with Lou Cope, my new tutor. She has suggested that we don't decide on an assessment criteria just yet, at least until I'm more definite about what I wish to submit. She has asked me to produce a contract that lays down what we can expect from each other.

I arrived at the meeting somewhat flustered and felt that I really didn't know where to begin in extracting a performance from the huge body of text in Finish This. By asking me to question myself, Lou helped me to clarify what I had been thinking but felt unable to express;

• A contemporary piece - I'm studying devising contemporary theatre, it seems appropriate
• A medium sized audience - more than ten, less than forty, intimate but not intimidating
• About half an hour long - not rushed but not a drag
• Accessibility - not 'high-art', open and understandable to all at whatever level
• Drawn from Finish This

What was established today is that I have quite definite ideas about the form of a potential performance but no content! This needs to be addressed. The first thing to do seems to be to select the texts and see what they suggest.

As another exercise in clarification, I have been asked to write a few lines of 'copy'. This is the kind of vague description of a piece that is written to accompany funding applications. It has to give enough of an idea about the piece to attract funding even though it is usually written at the very beginning of the devising process in order to get the money to finish that process and produce a piece.

Initial ideas

here's my initial proposal that I've mailed to my new tutor:

I would like to take some of the work I generated in my C.E.P. and move it off-line.

The work involved a collaboration between writers in an (on-line) live forum and was starting to reach a point where links were being made between new writing and existing texts from various media. I would like to continue this progression, taking myself out of the relatively isolated context of the Internet and begin to bring a physicality to text that currently only inhabits a virtual space.
I also wish to continue with the existing collaboration and invite others to participate.
I would like to continue holding my documentation at http://startingthis.blogspot.com/ where my actions and progression through the project are held up to public scrutiny and comment. I am hoping that a rehearsal process can be shaped on-line in much the same way as the original writing was.

I have a meeting with her soon to discuss this. In preparation for that I have begun to toy with a few ideas on possible content for a performance;

• Tell the story - Should I present a performative account of how the Finish This texts were created?
• Different voices - If I use the individual texts/posts unedited, should I credit them to their individual authors by assigning a unique 'voice' to each, do I have recordings or videos of other performers (or the real authors?) reading the lines?
• Progressing the he/she personas - Should the piece be character driven, an expansion on the personas to create a full character from what is already 'known' about them?
• Expressing something of the format - It has been suggested that I use the format of blogging (a daily item linking to others, offered up for comment) within a (durational?) performance, how do I do this?
• My own thru-line - In selecting the Finish This texts, can I forge my own route through them to tell a story that I find?

What Rachel did next...

I'm typing this on the 18th of February. I have been intending to post from the date of this entry but my computer went down. During this time I kept a 'paper blog' and, now that the machine has decided to co-operate, I'm busy uploading the missing entries. Needless to say that this has an effect on my original plans of continuing to allow my work to evolve through comment and suggestion. This new project only lasts about a month and already I've lost nearly three weeks of potential input. Please do comment, on these backdated entries as well as the new daily ones. The contributions, suggestions and constructive criticisms that I previously received were crucial to the nature and success of the last project and I feel that they will be equally important to this one. Thankyou.

Right, a new challenge!
The nature of this project is quite flexible. I present what I want to be assessed having first negotiated exactly what criteria I am to be assessed against. For example, should I produce a 'one woman show' I could choose to be assessed on my script-writing, performance, the process that led up to the performance or a mixture of all three.
As I have previously stated, I want to 'do something' with the Finish This texts. My C.E.P. was an investigation into the remote context of blogging and, although I had the blogging community and the wider [online] world as my potential collaborator/audience, I was, physically, very isolated. Just me, at home, on the computer. I felt and still feel that it would be beneficial to my ongoing arts practice to build on an existing body of my own work, taking elements from it to create new work. Pushing the original work forward in a new direction, instead of abandoning it to explore an entirely new area as usually been the case in my academic career.
I am also interested in returning to studio based work as I have not physically performed for an audience in close to two years. For the last part of my degree I have to be involved in a live public performance so I should take this opportunity to ease myself back in to physical work.
As I am currently not adding to Finish This, it is more than likely that the blog will not be read, people seldom read or return to a blog that is not regularly updated. Therefore the generated texts are just sitting there, idle, google spiders building giant webs for the blogdust to cling to. It seems a waste. I was quite fond of some of those texts.
So, I'm going to select a few posts from Finish This and try to create a performance from them.

Starting up again...

---------------------------------------------------

A New Start?

Well, I've given my presentation, it went better than I could have hoped. My tutors seemed really positive about what we've been doing here and made some excellent suggestions for future work around the texts we've created and the blogging structure within performance.

The highlight of the presentation does have to be the moment when, discussing how I had started to receive anonymous contributions of new writing but wasn't sure what the next evolutionary step for the project was and how I was sure I'd receive a suggestion through the comments, I accidentally clicked onto One Million Afterthoughts. I found that Mis_nomer had added yet another layer to the text borrowing, taking my original one line responses (way back at the beginning) to Geof's Footnotes and putting them with writing from her own other blog, Pencil Shavings. This is linking even more texts together and creating more routes through Finish This and it's growing community. As I say, the timing was immaculate, I had no idea that she was doing this and let out a small squawk, "What's she doing? Those are my lines!", right in the middle of the presentation, much to the amusement of all present. It was a fantastic illustration of the point I was trying to make and Mis_nomer put it a lot better than I could have. Thankyou!

Someone else has had a similar thought, a few days ago, as I have said, I started to receive contributions of new writing. This contributor has started their own blog where, again, they are taking lines from Finish This and creating new text around them, rather than continuing a post by extending it. There's only the one post so far but I hope they continue.

I will continue too, shortly, but for the time being I have to prepare a first birthday party...

Back soon, keep writing,

Rachel.

Reviewing the Proposal

Aims: To explore the notion of blogging (internet web logging), its meaning and significance, through research and immersion in its community:

In this documentation I have briefly looked at the history of blogging, the different kinds of people who blog and why they might decide to put their writing into such a public forum and the power of the blog. I have discussed variations in blog content from the diarist to the artist and the shifting definitions which evade attempts at classification. There has also been a need to look at where I should house my blog and online publishing. The wealth of writing on 'blog theory' is huge and increasing all the time as the bloggers themselves constantly redefine the medium, improving it through their demands for greater technical improvements and using the blog format to record/show/discuss everything from their pregnancies to their poetry to their daily weight. I hope I have given an overview of these subjects, a more in depth look would require a whole other project...

One area that I would have liked to engaged with a little more is a look at who actually has access to the blogging medium, not everyone has access to the internet and the internet is still, largely, centered in the U.S.A. I flashed over it but never really delved into how proportional the blogging community is of the wider world. You really have to be able to read English to fully interact with the medium as so many blogs are written in it. The major contributors to Finish This were in England, U.S.A.(New York), U.S.A.(Virginia), Mexico and Singapore. How proportional are we?

To engage in a dialog, through keeping my own blog and following those of others I encounter, that will define my role within the community - through elicited responses, I wish to allow my writing (blog content) to be influenced by others and, in turn, influence the writing (blog content) of others through my own dispatches.

I've maintained two blogs on a daily basis as part of this project. The content of both has been affected and shaped by those of their readership that wished to comment/contribute. Comments have included advice on promoting my blog, support and encouragement and as a recent development, extensions of the writing within the post. It is an unusual experience for a writer to publish and receive feedback on a piece of writing within the space of as little as an hour. It has meant that the project has been pushed forward (within its relatively short duration of just over a month) from a tentative response line to a footnote, to a collaborative, generative engine for new text. I have gone from a one-line reply in my own words, through a longer response drawn from various sources to a site receiving unsolicited contributions of new writing and links to existing writing.

It could be seen as though I've secured myself a captive audience. If someone was stealing my lines, I'd want to see what they were doing with them but then could read and leave the blog. I've been incredibly fortunate that those contributors that came to look, stayed for a chat and have corresponded with me through e-mail and comment. Its created a dialog around the work and turned it from outright plagiarism (I have e-mailed Lyn Hejinian but so far have received no reply) to a more collaborative piece.

I was initially worried that the blog was too exclusive (in the excluding sense of the word rather than the new/rare/special one) and that no-one would get involved with a seemingly private 'conversation' between myself and Mr. Huth. In previous work I have always shied away from 'art for art people' and wished to create work that was inclusive and accessible to all. Blogging is a way of reaching, potentially, an awful lot of people and allowing them to participate in the work. However, even after I started receiving comments from the other contributors, I felt that this work was only interesting to those involved and that I would have to do something more with the posts to engender a more public response. I am now learning that these things take time and am receiving e-mails and comment/contributions from those who had no knowledge initially of the project, but are (randomly?) finding and engaging with it. Perhaps the fact that the work and it's documentation have run simultaneously has drawn people a little further in? If they find one blog they may link to the other in order to discover the post/explanation of the post's existence.

I think that I've failed to make enough an effort to comment myself on others blogs. I've read the other blogs authored by the main contributors (and urge you to do the same, they can be found through their Blogger profiles) but have just lurked and read, only commenting when a post has relevance to my work. This has been mainly to do with time, I've been so busy with this project that I have had little time for browsing at leisure. In the future I would like to think that I could offer the same advice and encouragement that I have received. Any time I have commented, I have done so under my own blogger name (4thra) and left a note as to how I found them and how to find me. I like to know this information from others as it can be useful and interesting to know who is reading the work and how they arrived there.

The anonymity of '4thra' was quickly unnecessary as Start This reveals who I am and what I'm up to and is easily found in my profile or the links list of Finish This. It is another tenet of what makes a good blog to be honest in your writing. As soon as it became apparent that I would not be creating an assumed persona in which to write the blog and that the multiple shifting personas I had initially envisaged were coming about through the writing in the posts themselves, '4thra' was redundant.

How can I build on the learning and work that I engaged with in the first two years of my degree?

A lot of the work I have been a part of has been geared towards collaboration, a necessity in a large class with one tutor, this is the first project in which we have been allowed to work individually. It seems fitting that I have sought and engaged in a collaboration. Indeed, it seems that through the process of asking for and acting on comments, a collaboration cannot really be avoided.

The major difference between this work and previous ones is the method of documentation. In the past, I have experimented with structured essay formats, portfolio style documents and even storybooks (I think I even once submitted a hatbox for assessment but that's another story). All of these forms have contained a diary element but have never been entirely in the form of a journal. This blog is my documentation. I have been assured that I can just submit the URL and that a hard copy is not needed but I suspect I shall hand in a printout of the site feed just for my peace of mind.

The writing within both blogs, including all comments, has become both the project and it's documentation. They are so linked that one is not really independent of the other. Finish This could probably stand on its own but this blog contains a partial dialog on the work, within the comments, that only makes sense when viewed in conjunction with Start This.

Another departure from my usual form of documentation in the non-inclusion of a standard bibliography. Instead of footnoting all quotes and including a bibliography at the end, I have used my sidebar links list and embedded links to show my sources and other relevant articles/sites. I believe that this is more inkeeping with the blog format and that Start This is reverting to the earlier definition of a blog as links-with-comments. As the blogging phenomenon is fairly new, and online, the majority of texts and discussion on the subject are online and being updated frequently (usually in a blog format) as the medium evolves.

I initially conceived the idea for this C.E.P. as I wanted to generate a lot of writing, very quickly, and get it published. This is an extension of a project that I was involved in at the end of my second year. We produced a gallery exhibition of 'Findings' from our local environment. A large part of my contribution to the exhibition was written: displayed texts, lists, prose, film scripts and publicity documents. I was encouraged to produce a lot of work, very quickly and to not be 'precious' about it. All the writing was subjected to a peer group review, sometimes just finished, sometimes unfinished and then they would select that which was to be discarded/exhibited/further worked upon. Finish This is an extension of that work. As soon as the post is composed it is subjected to a, potentially huge, world-wide, peer group for their rejection/acceptance/alteration. We have always been encouraged to submit documentation of a 'public document' standard. I don't think I've ever submitted such a public document as this.

What can I take from this experience into future written/performance based work?

Historically, the C.E.P. has nearly always been an investigation into a physical context. By being online, I have isolated myself from a physical interaction with the context, In order to break this isolation I have sought out other bloggers to work with. But to leave this remote context and to reintegrate with the world outside the internet, I must look to a physicalising of the work. It would be fascinating to look at the texts in the differing virtual/real contexts, looking at comparisons between the two.

I have already mentioned the reasons for rejecting a bookwork comprised of the Finish This texts and some possible ideas for live interventions into the virtual space of the blog. The team behind Playing grounds are already experimenting with the blog as choreography. In much the same way that I have tried to allow the writing to be shaped by those who encounter it, they allow their dance to be formed by the public to "create a dance for the public". This is still, however, a 'reflection and then action' process. I am interested in a much more immediate interaction with the text. I'm not quite sure how yet(!) but wish to see if the text of the blog could be used in conjunction with a live performance that feeds back into it.

As for the future of Finish This, I would like to see it progress through receiving more new writerly contributions to, possibly, beginning to form links between existing texts, finding a new story within a new route through an established story. This could include online works as well as those on paper, this would allow a route than spanned not only several texts, authors and original writing, but also several mediums. I wish to see it retain its non-linear nature and the individual posts still be able to stand alone as pages of the missing books, each post a little text-for-performance in it's own right.

Finishing Start This

As I have already stated, there just isn't the room within this project to explore its context fully, I would have to cover blogart, blogging, internet publishing, publishing, the internet, audience/performer relationships, virtual art, the internet and performance, writing-for-performance etc. The list is huge and each item on it is huge. Refining exactly what elements of each of these subheadings are necessary to this project has been a mammoth task and I'm sure I've made some glaring omissions. Having said that, there is still very little written on the subject of 'blog art', it is an emergent form and as such there are more reviews and promotions of individual works than there are critiques of the medium and work within it. I suspect that this will change as more artists use the blog for the work as well as for the record of the work.

Finish This was, originally, merely a tool to facilitate a dialog with other bloggers and explore notions of blogging as a whole. Start This has grown out of that exploration, but both blogs have become so inextricably linked that they both stand as documentation as art. Their form and future has been defined by their context. Writing that could never otherwise have been connected has been joined and rejoined in new ways forming new connections both between the text and its authors. New writing has been engendered and new work will hopefully come of the project. I will try to ensure that they continue to grow, attracting those who enjoy reading them and wish to participate through their comments.

The End of The Year Review

I've temporarily stopped work on Finish This. Each post can take upwards of an hour to collate and my presentation is on the 6th so I need all the time I have left to prepare it. There are also a few chronological gaps within Start This which I need time to fill with some of the research and discussion I have undertaken in the course of the project.

I do intend to continue with Finish This to see how it evolves and I would like to take some of the entries forward into a future piece of college work, I'll keep you posted.

I would like to take this moment to wish all those who have been part of this collaboration and those who have offered support and creative input through their comments, a very happy and prosperous new year and thank them for all their contributions. I hope you've enjoyed the journey so far as much as I have.

It now seems like a good moment to refer to my original proposal and see where I'm at...

As ye sow, so shall ye reap.

Received some new incoming links. Firstly, Mis_nomer has kindly included a link to Finish This in her side bar under the heading FOOTNOTES PROJECT. Secondly, HL Bird at Her Little Bird has included links to both of my blogs. If you remember, this was the site I had taken an interest in and had posted a comment there in the hopes of making a new friend. I believe I have!

I did let HL Bird know how I had found her blog when I commented. I'm always keen to know how people have arrived at my blogs so therefore like to explain the routes I have taken. HL Bird has obviously traced me back through One Million Footnotes; my link, through OMF's technorati account, to her. Leaving a trail of breadcrumbs or even a direct link back to ones blog within my a comment left on other blogs means that I am only a click away and that the author has an easy way to investigate exactly who is talking to them and can see their writing. It seems a fair exchange: You show me yours and I'll show you mine.

Picking up where I left off.

I've been wondering what I would do next with Finish This, how I could progress the collaboration, but two souls have got there first. I have received some anonymous poetry; in both cases, a continuation of the writing within a post, in the comments.

The first new collaborator has left writing on two separate posts. One comment seemed very familiar and turns out to be written by Ted Hughes (sadly, he will not be the anonymous visitor), the other is in a different style but I cannot ascertain the source. What I like most about this is that someone has taken the time to select excerpts of appropriate existing writing for each of the posts. This has widened the collaboration to not only include the nameless contributor but a wider realm of established poetry.

The other contributor is JD*96 who appears to have established a blog just in order to comment on this site. I have a sneaking suspicion that this reluctant blogger is actually a friend of mine who I had mentioned the blogs to. If it is, who I think it is, I had assumed that they would merely have a look at what I was doing and maybe leave a few words of encouragement on Start This. But whether I know them or not, how much greater to receive a creative contribution, an extension to the writing in Finish This?

To both new collaborators: welcome and please continue. As for all of you out there, get writing. Jump in, the water's fine.

Tick tock, tick tock...

Time is catching up on me, I think I'm going to have to stop looking for new contributors (maybe after my presentation has been assessed I will continue with Finish This and seek out more footnoters). I need time to concentrate on the Finish This posts and to respond to those who are commenting on the work. The progress and development of the project has been made through the feedback it has elicited and the decisions made arising from it. By chasing other writers, I could lose the additional, outside of post, contributions that its current authors are making.

From darkness into light...

Today I shall begin to make the OMF lines appear before your very eyes. For now, at least, I'm going to bring the whole post into the same font, this, I hope, will unify the text and allow it to scan better. I think I will also begin to fade the text in, possibly maintaining it at a slightly darker tone to emphasize its place as the starting line. Let me know what you think, or if it even matters (am I being too picky...?!).

A little later still...

Just after working out that Lyn Hejinian is not just your average blogger and, indeed, is probably not the one posting to My Life by Lyn Hejinian, I received this from Geof.

I have found a contact e-mail for her at the University of California, Berkeley, where she is a faculty member of the English Department. I feel that it would be rude not to inform Ms. Hejinian of her inclusion in this project but worry that either myself or the anonymous poster on the blog in her name are infringing some kind of copyright law. Surely if her books are widely published then we are not allowed to reproduce any part of them without the author's permission. Part of me wants to not bother her with the project and thereby escape any potential trouble and the other part is compelled by manners and a burning desire to see if she will reply or what she might say.

Mr. Cottin and Ms. Hejinian

Alfr3do has responded to my missive at his Live Journal blog and also sent the following e-mail:

Date: Sat, 25 Dec 2004 20:46:19 -0600
From: "Alfredo Cottin"
Subject: minute:second
To: rachelbaynton@btinternet.com

hello Rachel,
First off, happy holidays!
I just saw your comment on the livejournal blog. I read through your start this blog to see what you're up to. Very cool. I had no idea that Geoff had linked to hour:minute on his OMF. Its a huge honor that both you and him are taking hour:minute into account. I had a busy end of
the year and got sloppy on the frequency there, but I'll get back to it. I'm more motivated now.

Thanks for letting me know about your work, don't worry about the timing.

Take care, best wishes,
Alfredo

Another footnoter resumes the challenge! That's Alfr3do and Mis_nomer both now writing again. More ingredients for my word soup!

The best way of receiving input for my blogs seems to be to leave feedback for others. I have said that I am a little sloppy in commenting on others work and should get out more, so, with this in mind, I have left a comment at a site where I particularly enjoyed the writing style (she writes a lot in handy one-line paragraphs, I wonder if she'd be interested in a little cutting and pasting...)

The hunt for Ms. Hejinian has taken an interesting turn, I typed her name into Google, on the off-chance that she may have another site somewhere with some contact details, and wasn't quite prepared for the 15,100 results that I found. Aren't I naive? No wonder there's no contact details on 'her' blog, its probably a fan uploading her work for all to see.

More of a whimper than a bang...

Blogexplosion is set up so that for every two blogs I visit for thirty seconds each, I will receive 1 credit. The credits I collect can then be exchanged for advertising about my blog or for visitors. In effect, every two blogs I visit means one hit on my stat counter. 65 of my hits so far have been through Blogexplosion but because they are mainly people trying to earn credits, few stay longer than thirty seconds. It takes a long time to earn enough credits to ensure, enough people visit my blogs, that there will be a few who stay longer than the required time and that within that number there will be someone who may leave a comment. At first I though it might be a valuable way of scouting for potential collaborators but there is no way of refining your search and I spent an hour trawling through all kind of blog (predominantly 'Mommy Blogs'). I have a limited period within which to prepare my project and hours of random browsing is unproductive.

Conversations

I have now finally got round to sending a message to Peter Stinson at Notes Along the Elizabeth, I've had to leave it as a comment as there is no e-mail address. Because Hour:Minute is not being updated and there is no e-mail address listed, I decided to track down Alfr3do through his profile and see if there was any other way I could contact him. I found another abandoned blog which then directs you to a blog he is still posting to at Live Journal. I left him a comment and hope that he and Mr. Stinson will reply. There doesn't seem to be any way of contacting Lyn Hejinian. It's a bit late now but I will do my best to find her tomorrow. In the mean time here is the latest from my tutor:

Date: Wed, 22 Dec 2004 20:22:54 +0000 (GMT)
From: "Rachel Baynton"

Subject: God bless Nanna Wes!
To: "Paul Clarke"
Dear Paul,
Hope you are well, and are being a good boy in preparation for Santa's immanent arrival.
If you wouldn't mind looking over both blogs in a convenient and non-turkey moment I would really appreciate it.
Please e-mail me back or, if you feel its appropriate, leave comments on 'start this'. I'm trying to show all processes in the documentation blog. It would be useful to the blogs structure to show tutorial feedback, and my responses to it, as I'm making a lot of decisions about the direction of both blogs based on the readership's comments.
There are some chronological gaps in 'start this' but I'm hoping to fill these with some research I've been doing on precedents for collaborative writing and more theory based work, if you think of any relevant research areas I should look at let me know.
Have a lovely Christmas,
Rachel

Date: Thu, 23 Dec 2004 12:23:48 +0000
Subject: Re: God bless Nanna Wes!
From: "Paul Clarke"

To: "Rachel Baynton"
Merry Yule, And indeed God Bless Nana Wes. I agree with Geoff, that this is an interesting new progression, or sequence of developments. Becoming much more complicated and intriguing - developing an interesting and growing network of links, references and quotations. And the weaving of texts seems to be working well, remains coherent. Hope you get some more comments from those you're borrowing from. Sorry, should have posted this... Good luck with it.

Paul.

Technorati and a Tribute

After following the suggestion from Mis_nomer, I acquired a Technorati account. This enables me to see who has linked to either of my blogs. This means I can now see if anyone is commenting on my work in a blog of their own. Through the account, I discovered that Mis_nomer has briefly discussed my blog in an ongoing essay, The Blogging Phenomenon, but has also written a tribute to the style and content of the Finish This project, for which I thank her heartily. She also seems to have resumed her footnoting site One Million Afterthoughts (I used today's post to apologize for my thievery), long may it continue.

I'm starting to engage in the dialog that I'm aiming for. I'm receiving and acting on comments and suggestions (though maybe not sending out enough of my own) and have had two posts on other blogs written with my work in mind (the aforementioned tribute and Geof Huth's discovery of a shadow). The relative immediacy of the feedback in the blogging medium is allowing the project and its documentation to become more technically adept and continuously evolve in new directions.

I would like to include other writers in the collaboration. I feel that the project will only benefit from an increased participation and inclusion of different writing styles. I'm hopeful that signing up at Blogexplosion, as suggested, will mean I can discover/attract those that might be interested. More blogs will mean more material and a greater possible number of combinations of posts.

Each line is imbued with another layer of meaning when removed from its own context (original blog) and juxtaposed with a line from another. With this in mind, when I use the same line from a blog more than once, instead of linking to its original site, I now direct the reader to the first time it was used in my blog. Linking from this first usage will then return the reader to the lines source. In this way I hope to attach even more meanings to each line and present the reader with a new way through the non-linear story. With continued line repetition, the story (blog) would eventually become cyclical, the reader following a journey through the site, eventually returning to his starting point. That may take a little time though(!), for now it will just mean a network of overlapping pathways through the site and strange and new connections being formed through the linking of apparently unconnected entries.

Research - (VI) Blog art

Start This is part of a tradition of journal use in research, blogging is seen as the modern equivalent of the pen and paper diary. According to Dieu (2004), blogs in education may be used in manifold ways, the most common being: "By individual learners to post work and reflect". Finish This has a different set of precedents.

Artists have used the internet to document and promote their work and also in the creation of online artworks or as part of a live performance but more recently and with increasing frequency, blogs are being used.

There are temporary weblogs such as Globeart, maintained to coincide and work in conjunction with a physical art exhibition;

"An exhibition need not be a pre-determined thing, its great when it evolves in relation to the space, the local environment, the fellow artists involved, the internet(!), and any number of other factors. Weblogs and other social software applications could then be put to use as an instant archive. Performances, like this evening's, could be broadcast live via webcam (I'll need to do a bit more research for that one), images of the work can be uploaded, sound pieces, everything. And new ways of working would evolve specific to that environment. You may need never go to a gallery again! ....but, er, then again, maybe not...."

Blogs are also being used as discussion forums as in the case of networked_performance;

"an open forum to discuss network-enabled performance for an international conference in 2006. The idea is to use this blog to generate discussion about emergent forms, current practice, histories, interests, issues and ideas - to explore performance within, through, and across computer networks and disciplines."

Then there are sites such as Blog.art;

"Blog.art utilizes blogging as the medium for web-based artworks [net.art]. In other words, blog.art is not a blog about art, but rather a blog as art, where the blog is the conceptual foundation of the work."

The Blog.art site was created by Christina Ray, a Brooklyn-based artist and the founder of Glowlab. Ray began the Blog.art site in August, 2003 as a place to collect her own recent experiments in blog-based net.art. She has now opened the site to submissions, and aims to maintain it as a resource for blog.art.

Some works are literally blog as art as in the case of art-blog, conceived in the recognized blog as diary format; images, links with commentary, the artist describes it as;

"Art as diary: day by day, the blueprint of the thoughts, connections and leaps between ideas and images which are the essence of my work as a visual artist and videomaker. A work of art in itself, art-blog is made of texts and photos."

Playing grounds explores the notion of public interactivity with the piece's choreography;

"The audience will be able to comment on the work in progress and through the user feedback the choreography will be changed, shaped, and polished. Every other rehearsal will focus on the internet feedback and the public view of the work. The audience becomes the choreographer, making a dance piece created for the public by the public."

Another is a collaborative photoblog and exploration of avant soap.

However, the two pieces I am most interested in are Sarah and Ahmad which is,

"A collaborative story written in five sentences each post, between two people. The storyline progresses without any discussion, and characters emerge likewise."

and Metabetablog;

"a graphical representation of the TypePad beta testing experience, a compression of data generated in an evolving blogging environment. Each entry contains a dense chunk of sample content from the top ten most recently-updated blogs from the TypePad Devlog, gathered just before posting. The posts can be read as generative poetry or text-snapshots of blogging activity."

Both pieces have similarities with Finish This. Sarah and Ahmad's collaborative story is open-ended and text based. The contributors have no idea, day to day, what will be the content of the line they will be adding to, much as myself with the One Million Footnotes posts. The characters and locations are revealed as the story progresses. The blog follows a standard template and it's art is in the story. Where we differ is that S&A is linear, each post follows on from the last in a coherent narrative. Their characters are also much more rigidly defined, they are named and have descriptions of their status and personality/character traits. The characters within Finish This are shifting, multiple personas, it may not be the same 'he' or 'she' from post to post and the posts have no linear progression. Metabetablog is a much more visual piece, overlaying text over text over image over image but is still formed from lines taken from individual contributors blogs. Each post can be seen as a separate piece or as part of a longer piece of "generative poetry". Taken, as they are, from entirely random blogs the individual lines have less chance of running together neatly as I have tried to make mine or as S&A intends. It's like holding a magnifying glass to Finish This and instead of looking at the posts in light of their new contexts and meanings the viewer/reader is visually asked to make connections between the individual words.

Genre

An unusual and interesting aspect of this style of writing is that I'm not tied to any particular genre. Some elements of the posts contents, e.g. location, event, are dictated by the OMF post of that day but then I usually just look for posts within my blogpool which have a similar key word/theme and try to link them with my own writing. This means that I am then free to shape the paragraph through my own words, resulting in straight answering back to Mr. Huth, reality based fiction or something more fantastical. The piecing together of lines has created a style of writing in which the truths of the real lives of it's authors can be joined, concealed/revealed and stretched by fictional additions or framing.

Still haven't got in touch with any of the collaborators other than Mr. Huth. This is terribly impolite and is also denying me the chance to receive comments on what I'm doing or suggested ideas for further development from those who are most involved so far. Mis_nomer knows about this project (presumably through the OMF link list) and has been most helpful with ideas and encouragement but I have failed to introduce myself properly or even seek permission to use her lines. Must rectify this situation immediately.

Join me.

I have included another collaborator today, Lyn Hejinian's My Life. This seems to be the last of the footnoters from Geof's link list that I can use. Either the sites haven't been posted to regularly enough to provide enough material or they are character specific and will not work with the 'he' and 'she' personas that are developing. As I have had no luck in drafting new recruits I am going to see where the work goes by varying the contributors and their order within each post and acting on those suggestions made to me. If their is another footnoter out there who'd like to join in, step forward and make yourself known.

I made the OMF entry visible today. I wanted to emphasize the truth behind the writing and show "the shape but not the substance" of the missing, "forgotten" line. This also left a great big pointer to those who had not discovered the 'hidden' lines, "The gap indicated that objects or events had been forgotten".

I am currently debating whether to bring the OMF lines into the same format as all the others. It feels a little like I am excluding them from the body of the text. It means that the visible text is viewed as an entry in it's own right but that the impetus for the paragraph may not be included in the reading of it. I don't know if it separates the lines in an elevated way or makes them seem an unequal contribution. I shall think on...

Google Spiders

I have been spidered by Google and Yahoo!, though you have to enter 'finishingthis' (all one word), the words 'finish' and 'this' are just too common and give a huge number of search results. No sign of 'Start This' yet. Hopefully this will see a little more traffic come my way and the number of comments might increase. Any comment I receive may contain a suggestion that would help the work to evolve.

I really had to resist the temptation to alter the odd word here and there within the appropriated lines used in today's post. I knew the paragraph would then scan better but I would like to keep each line as it was written. I feel that interfering would deny the collaboration as each artist contributes in their own words. However, 362. doesn't flow as well as I'd have liked and I think I'm going to need to increase my blogpool and amount of material available to me. Now I have to decide how to widen my search, I've not found any other footnoters on Blogger so do I look for them elsewhere or start borrowing from other kinds of blog?

Someone to watch over me.

It's nice to know that Mr. Huth is keeping an eye on me. I have been warned that, as the majority of students on my course engage with an actual, geographical context for their projects, I'm going to have my work cut out proving that the interactions within the virtual context of the internet are worth an enquiry. Every suggestion I receive, every comment I respond to, enables me to show this context's effect on my writing. I do, however, need to put more comments out, I'm a little wrapped up in what I'm doing and perhaps my writing is not having as much of an effect on the context as it could/should.

Welcome back!

Today's post sees the reintroduction of Hour:Minute. At the beginning of the project I was trying to respond to both One Million Footnotes (327.) and Hour:Minute (00:18). However, the latter wasn't maintained on a daily basis and I would have run out of posts before the end of the project. The decision was made to concentrate on the OMF entries.

Now that I am bringing in lines from other sites, I can go back to using H:M posts. Alfr3do's lines follow the 'he'/'she' protagonist style of the other footnoting sites I am using and also feature a variety of event descriptions that are not too location-specific. This means that they can be easily connected to other lines or can be slotted into the situation/location defined in the OMF starting line.

Postcards from the Blog

I find my self thinking of the Finish This posts as either; the pages of a huge and sprawling book that are falling down to me daily, in a random order, that I must piece together to find the coherent narrative or, as a box of postcards or private letters written by many different people over a long period of time but all about the same extended family, a sort of piecemeal family history. In either scenario the vignettes can be seen as independent or as interconnected. Maybe disconnected is a better way of describing them? Yes, these posts are disconnected, fragmented parts of a greater whole.

I'm not sure what I want to do with them.

The blog is gradually evolving from a two-line entry, private conversation between Mr. Huth and myself into a more open collaboration, other writers are being included and I hope, in time, to attract some more contributors. I want to continue with the independent, unconnected lines forming independent, disconnected posts. But then I would like to take these posts out of such a virtual context as the blogosphere and give them a little more physicality. I'm not sure of the appropriateness of a bookwork now, as I had initially intended, as this would force the posts into an order (probably chronological) that would impose a rigidity in the way the posts were read next to each other.

I'm not explaining myself very well here. Let me try again.

If the posts were laid out in a book with their numbered order you would more than likely read them in that order - while they are on the internet you can instantly link from each line to its source and view that line in an entirely different context. The way the blog is laid out also encourages a non-linear viewing of the posts - the archive and previous posts links can easily be clicked to reveal a whole different set of posts and again, a different set of contexts. You may never get the same story or the same meanings and connections twice.

Another possibility is a public reading of the texts, maybe with some kind of live feed (have a look at 'Live Chat' by Uninvited Guests, for a performance generated live between the virtual space of the internet and a real, geographical social setting) so that the texts are read in a randomly generated order, dictated by a volunteers personal route through the site. However, this also does not allow for every audience member/participant to find their own, personal route through the story.

Both these possibilities would generate new contexts and meanings for the lines/posts but would remove others. I wish to keep adding layer upon layer of meaning and think any subtractions would be detrimental to the work. At the moment, the project sits best within the virtual context it was designed for.

There is a third option, during the next phase of my degree course, I have the opportunity to put on a solo performance piece or 'Statement in Action'. I wonder if I could take some of the posts and present them in a variety of ways through live performance and multi-media, showing my route through the story, as it's collector. I feel this would only be possible after the cessation of the project so as not to bias the journey of others. Anyway that's a whole other documentation blog, I'll keep you posted...

In the meantime, any better suggestions for ways I could use/expand on/physicalise this work are always gratefully accepted. Answers on a postcard please.

Notes Along the Elizabeth

Mr. Huth is multiple posting again, four today! How am I supposed to keep up? I think I may need a little help/more material. Peter Stinson's Notes Along the Elizabeth will now be included in my daily list of blogs to draw lines from. I must remember to leave an e-mail or comment for both my new contributors and any future ones to let them know what I'm doing and seek their blessing to carry on. Theoretically I could just use peoples line without their permission, as posting on a blog makes the work available publicly, but I would much rather this project was a coming together of initially unknowing contributors than an enforced collaboration.

The posts now have a greater variance in length and are beginning to seem much more like the missing pages (or at least a paragraph) from the non-existent book that Mr. Huth has been footnoting so diligently.

Research - (V) Instant publishing

I chose to use Blogger as my content management system/weblog publishing tool based on the opinions held in The Weblog Tool Roundup by Joshua Allen. He says that Blogger (and Diaryland) are ;

"easy to use and free of charge (they ask that you include a small promotional button in exchange for the service). Both are Web-based applications that live on somebody else's server, and this is a key difference from some of the other tools we'll be talking about. What this means is that you don't have to worry about installation or maintenance or anything else, you just create an account, choose a prefab template or build your own, and you're ready to start spilling your guts right from your browser."

Blogger sells itself as "push-button publishing" and its pretty much as simple as that. As I have already explained, I've been looking for an immediacy of feedback that a paper-based method of publication doesn't allow. Blogger also allows me to review and edit work and writing that I have already published to the web, correcting errors in a hard copy would be a difficult maybe impossible task.

For a further discussion of online publishing have a look at Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals by Stevan Harnad, Professor of Cognitive Science, Department of Electronics and Computer Science, University of Southampton. At the end of the paper he makes a suggestion

"as to what the optimal and inevitable outcome of all this will be: The Give-Away literature will be free at last online, in one global, interlinked virtual library (see <http://www.cogsci.soton.ac.uk/~harnad/citation.html>), and its QC/C expenses will be paid for up-front, out of the S/L/P savings. The only question is: When? This piece is written in the hope of wiping the potential smirk off Posterity's face by persuading the academic cavalry, now that they have been led to the waters of self-archiving, that they should just go ahead and drink!"

The Borrowers

Received a comment today, on post 335., from Mis_nomer. After a little investigation I have established that my new friend is from Singapore and has her own footnoting site, One Million Afterthoughts. Seeing as she thought Start This was interesting, I thought that she may be amenable to a little plundering of her lines. In 347., I have used my own writing as a bridge between Mr. Huth's post of the day and Mis_nomer's Dec. 2nd entry. This gives me a slightly longer paragraph and a narrative has a chance to emerge. It is a departure from the question/response nature of my previous posts.

In order to differentiate between the lines authors, and to keep the overall blog coherent, I am maintaining the custom of 'hiding' the OMF entry but I'm putting the OMA line into the same font as my own writing. The eye then travels more smoothly over the text and hopefully this will go a little way to hiding the paragraph's fragmented origins. However, it is still clear that there are two writers as the OMA text is a link back to it's original location and is therefore a different colour. Any future collaborator's posts can be formatted in the same way, so as to ease reading but ascribe authorship. Moving the mouse pointer over the texts highlights the links, individually, making the multiple contributors clearer.

The Big Wide World (Web)

There's so much out there! Searching for people to be my friends/plagiarise is a huge task. How do I narrow my scope? For a start there's the Whole Bloody Web, for a next, if I stick to bloggers, there's a host of content management systems (Movable Type, Livejournal etc.) and then in third place, if I stick to Blogger, how do I choose between blogs?

I have decided that whichever blogs I do take lines from, I should continue to take lines from. That is: I should build up a small base of blogs that are regularly drawn from. It will be easier to monitor the processes and outcomes of this collaboration of, initially unknowing, participants, if the community starts relatively small. In fact, if my soon-to-be blogger friends are also footnoters then each single line will have its own identity and context, yet, by its nature will link fluently into another. I think I'll see if Geof's 'Other Footnoters' can help me, after looking up 'chiaroscuro'!

A little bit sad?

Received a comment from Geof today. I think perhaps he is wrong, not about my woeful wailings in his direction, but that any one will notice. My intention has always been a collaboration and investigation into, and with, a community: not an obsessive stalking and aping of one poor soul. I should get out more. I could find other blogs written by other people and steal shamelessly from them as well!

Research - (IV) A good blog

D. Keith Robinson is a Web designer and developer in Seattle, Washington, he offers, here, a list of what he thinks makes a successful blog. He states;

"I decided to sit down and think about what I felt made a blog (or blogger) successful. It was a bit of a challenge because I'm not sure how to define success in terms of my own blog. I started it out as simply a place to work on my writing and my original definition of what success would have been has changed greatly in the last year or so. I've got readers now! Y'all have made it much more complicated - but I love you for it. I really owe it to the people who visit this site, you've made it much more than I ever planned. More work, more spam, more stress…aha…just kidding."

In the spirit of dialog and exchange with his community he adds ;

"I thought about the blogs that I like to read the most and other blogs that I feel are successful. Here’s what I came up with. Depending on your views of what is successful and what you like in a blog you may disagree. If so, feel free to add a comment telling us what you think makes a successful blog."

Because of the high number of readers to his blog, it has become more complicated but his opinion carries agreat deal of weight. People want to emulate his success. The 48 comments he received on this post are largely from people thanking him for the advice. Had he not such a great readership then his ideas on what makes a good blog would not a) reach anyone or b) be as creditable.
Discussion boards are full of various opinions (and all blogs generally are is an individual expressing their opinion and linking to those for their reinforcement of this opinion) on this subject but D. Keith Robinson's list seems to cover most of the criterion raised in any other search for what makes a good blog. It is subjective, your opinion on the opinions expressed, but in general terms a good blog will eventually be linked to (the bloggers gift of acceptance).

Research - (III)Blog power

James M. Branum's The Blogging Phenomenon - An Overview and Theoretical Consideration states:

"There is no doubt that the phenomenon of blogging has changed the Internet as we knew it three years ago ... Blogs are truly the "pirate radio stations" of the web, (Katz, et.al 1999 quoting Jesse James Garrett), by allowing individuals to create "personal platforms ... to broadcast their perspectives on current events, the media, our culture, and basically anything else that strikes their fancy from the vast sea of raw material available out there on the web. Some are more topic-focused than others, but all are really built around someone's personal interests. Neither a faceless news-gathering organization nor an impersonal clipping service, a quality weblog is distinguished by the voice of its editor, and that editor's connection with his or her audience."

Clare Hart, CEO of media monitoring agency Factiva, points out that;

"the real power of the blog does not lie in the net giving a voice to people whose opinions would never have spread so rapidly before. Their importance is rooted in people trusting one another's views more than those published on official company websites."

Hart explains;

"After a doctor, the person we would most trust is the average person who's 'just like us' - a company CEO is eighth on that list. It's the same for news sources about companies. After specialist business magazines, we trust family and friends and colleagues; journalists are sixth."

By finding a reading blogs written by people "just like" us we learn about things that we believe are of interest to us, the relationship that grows between the a blogs author and its readership can be very powerful and close friendships can be formed through correspondence in and around the blog. Blogs with a regular community of readers and commentators, as they grow, have a greater power of opinion beit political, purchase power, word-of-mouth advertising or an issue that the community backs. The more blogs linking to an individual blog, the more potential traffic a site can receive, the more people trust the opinions therein.

"In fact, blogs have become so powerful that they already have the launch of a company to their credit. Kathy Rittweger, CEO of Blinkx, was on what she thought was just a normal trip to the offices of Business 2.0 magazine to show the editor her new search software. Om Malik, one of the journalists in the meeting, was so impressed that he immediately wrote about it on his blog. 'Within a couple of hours we were being mentioned on thousands of sites and I had venture capitalists calling me left, right and centre. The blog made us so popular that we had to bring forward our launch from autumn to June.'"

The idea that the blog is a world voice and leveling tool (anonymity assures that age, race, religion, gender etc have no bearing on the way the blogs opinion is communicated) ignores the fact that the blogging medium is only available to those who have internet access:

"However, survey research suggests that the demographics of bloggers do not differ in any appreciable way from Internet users as a whole. One online survey suggests that in terms of gender balance and income distribution, the community of bloggers is more representative of the general population
than Internet users."

I have been unable to ascertain exactly which online survey this is. The article the above quote is taken from is a very thorough paper on THE POWER AND POLITICS OF BLOGS by Daniel W. Drezner, Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago and Henry Farrell, Assistant Professor of Political Science at George Washington University, dense but well worth the read. It also discusses Clay Shirky's ideas on how the,

"persistent theme among people writing about the social aspects of weblogging is to note (and usually lament) the rise of an A-list, a small set of webloggers who account for a majority of the traffic in the weblog world ... A new social system starts, and seems delightfully free of the elitism and cliquishness of the existing systems. Then, as the new system grows, problems of scale set in. Not everyone can participate in every conversation. Not everyone gets to be heard. Some core group seems more connected than the rest of us, and so on."

Shirky offers models of blog power sharing and the following explanation;

"Diversity plus freedom of choice creates inequality, and the greater the diversity, the more extreme the inequality. In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution."

As a practitioner documenting her work, blogging offers a medium through which I can, potentially, reach a proportionally representative slice of the people of the world show them my work and ask for their, advice, opinions, criticism, support or even help promoting it.

"The most revolutionary effect of blogging is still a ways off. The first three generations of media are remarkably age-, race- and gender-driven. What had originally been a reserve of white males is now a region of tortuous balancing and hypersensitive massaging of unspoken quotas. The blogosphere has none of that. It is the real marketplace of ideas, where there is no barrier to entry and Ragged Dick doesn't have to sell papers for very long if he's got talent."

Research - (II) Bloggers and their blogs

Classifying blogs

The most inclusive classification system of blogs contents I have found is at Wikipedia under, not surprisingly types of weblog. I'm not quite sure which category my two fit in. There is a classification, "Collaborative (also collective or group)" defined as,

"A weblog which is written by more than one person about a specific topic. It can be either open to everyone or limited to a group of people."

However, this seems to be more relevant for the types of blog that have a membership of writers who all blog daily on a relatively equal footing. As I have taken the role of a collator on Finish This and make the decisions about which of the contributors posts are used each day and in what order, I don't think we constitute a Collaborative weblog by Wikipedia's definition. Start This could be classified as "Personal", "an online diary or journal" as each post charts exactly what happened at any given day on the project, but is more of a chronicle of the work in progress than a personal log (I will shortly be looking for other artists who are using the weblog medium as part of my research, maybe we will have to define a new classification of blog to cover working artists and their accounts of their creative endeavors!)

Documentations of previous works I have submitted have always been ink and paper but have always contained a diary element. The format of the blog means that the document is in the diary and that I am able to let contributors and the (internet connected) public know exactly what is going on as it happens. This is creating a very accurate account of the work's life as I am not reflecting on what has occurred but putting it out for discussion in almost real-time. This document is something closer to a live work than the retrospective accounts I have previously handed in. I'm hoping that my assessors will agree that this medium for documentation best compliments the format and context of the project.

Another classification system has been proposed, this time categorizing the bloggers themselves. With the idea that "classifying blogs is almost an impossibility" and that

"portals have their usefulness in categorizing blogs by topic, but I'm not sure that does blogging or bloggers full justice.", "Electric Venom looked at the metaphysics of blogs and broke away from topic oriented classification... thinking about different ways of looking at blogs and how they interact with others."

This system is not as widely recognized as the Wikipedia one but I believe it helps to identify the huge variation in bloggers and their blogs. In this system's view, I'm most likely a "Thinker",

"These folks look to the "big picture" of the web as a whole, with blogs being just one source of information in the massive glut of resources on the web. "Thinkers" running this type of blog tend to link to other blogs by targeting a specific post. If they bother with a blogroll at all, they keep the list limited to ten or fewer sites that they personally visit on a regular basis."

Because this is an assessed document on a structured piece of work, I am only linking to those sites with relevance to a discussion of the works progress and context or to those directly contributing. If it were a more personal journal I would then be more likely to show links to those sites that keep distracting me from working with all their pictures of lovely boots and music I like and all Geof's other sites that I keep getting lost in...

Why blog?

I'm Blogging This - A Closer Look at Why People Blog features an investigation in which;

"We conducted audiotaped ethnographic interviews with bloggers, text analysis of blog posts, and quantitative analysis of posts and blogs."

In answering the question, "Why Do People Blog?",

"We discovered five major motivations for blogging: documenting the author's life, providing commentary and opinions, expressing deeply felt emotions, working out ideas through writing, and forming and maintaining communities or forums. These motivations are by no means mutually exclusive, and can come into play simultaneously."

I typed "why blog?" into Google and found this essay. An alternative classification system of bloggers themselves is offered under Chapter 2 - Why do they do it?, it's a tad negative but a good read (I'm reluctant to look to hard at the list in case I see myself in there smiling back). The essayist admits that it is all a little tongue in cheek but also states that;

"People who are webloggers themselves write to tell me that my essay made them think about why they weblogged in the first place, and made them re-evaluate the quality of the substance of their weblogs. I've gotten email from people who 'got it', and thanked me for being brave enough to be insultingly honest."

It can only be healthy for the medium to have it's detractors.
For a less vitriolic answer to the question I recommend ReasonToBlog, it offers technical and psychological reasons and some possible motivations e.g. "Sharing information - If you've found some interesting or useful information, why not share it with others?". At the bottom of the page it offers possible reasons for the "why-are-people-blogging-won't-someone-make-them-stop explosion of recent years." The problem with this list is that it seems to have been written by someone who hates weblog haters so offers a biased view of the detractors, one classification reads;

"Dis-Association - Since the stereotype of blogs is that people are only talking about making sandwiches and doing laundry, and because I think of those acts as stupid stuff (like going to the bathroom,) I'm going to dissociate myself from those things by saying that I HATE BLOGS! If I'm not feeling quite so radical, I will merely question their utility and existence."

The weblog medium is changing all the time in response to demand from its users, the boundaries between blogs of different classes are blurred as an online journal may also contain elements of one or several other classes and a person may blog for multiple reasons. In a few years these terms may be obsolete anyway and we'll be looking at a different set of rules.

A little research - (I) Blogging

What is a blog?

The term "weblog" was coined by Jorn Barger in December 1997. Jane Perrone defines weblogs thusly;

"A weblog is, literally, a "log" of the web - a diary-style site, in which the author (a "blogger") links to other web pages he or she finds interesting using entries posted in reverse chronological order."

The shorter version, "blog," was coined by Peter Merholz who in April or May of 1999 broke the word weblog into the phrase "we blog" in the sidebar of his weblog.

Blogging combines the personal web page with tools to make linking to other pages easier, specifically blogrolls and trackbacks, as well as comments. This way, instead of a few people being in control of threads on a forum, or anyone able to start threads on a list, there is a moderating effect that is the personality of the weblog's owner. Dave Winer describes them as tour guides:

"A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide [whom] you get to know. There are many guides to choose from and each develops an audience. There's camaraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs. They point to each other in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.".

By 1999 weblogs were changing:

"While weblogs had always included a mix of links, commentary, and personal notes, in the post-Blogger explosion increasing numbers of weblogs eschewed this focus on the web-at-large in favor of a sort of short-form journal."

Rebecca Blood offers the following possible explanation:

"Blogger itself [and most other content management systems] places no restrictions on the form of content being posted. Its web interface, accessible from any browser, consists of an empty form box into which the blogger can type...anything: a passing thought, an extended essay, or a childhood recollection. With a click, Blogger will post the...whatever...on the writer's website, archive it in the proper place, and present the writer with another empty box, just waiting to be filled."

So now, five years later, the variation in blog content is huge and while bloggers argue the minutiae of "what is a blog", the definition for the time being must be the most all-encompassing. Strangely enough, its one of the earliest definitions, and was proffered by Brigitte Eaton at the eatonweb portal;

"a website that is updated frequently, with new material posted at the top of the page."

Please see Rebecca Blood's Weblogs: A History and Perspective for a comprehensive look at just that.

A little later...

Mr. Huth has kindly left a comment to clear up the matter of the truth within his writing. I would like to write from much the same angle, revealing a little of the truth within my life but not worrying about straying into fiction for the sake of a well phrased post.

'He' and 'She'

I have been trying to maintain a little anonymity in Finish This. I want the writing to stand or fall on its own merit, irrespective of my gender, age, location etc. Blogs are usually full of personal opinion and comment, by stating who I am, I immediately prejudice the visitors interpretation of the writing. If the author of Finish This is at first unknown then their (my) contribution to the post is of equal importance within the collaboration. Hence 4thra (I'm in the 4th year of trying to finish this degree and the first two letters of my name are 'ra', ingenious aren't I?). Anyone remotely interested in these things would not have far to look, my profile would give them the link to Start This where I'm trying to be truthful and to my e-mail address which features my full name.

The lines between the fictionality of the 'he' and 'she' protagonists and the truth of my own and Mr. Huth's real lives are becoming quite blurred. I have always felt that posts on One Million Footnotes are inspired by real events in Geof Huth's life. For a start the comments are seasonal, the current (Nov/Dec) entries feature a lot of 'cold' and 'Christmas' content. Then there was the 'shadow' of post 330., where my line stealing was sprung. Now, with post 337., there is a double layer of character and meaning; there is the 'she' in Geof's life who wants him to speak and there is the me-'she' who also would like him to speak to her through her blog. It could have also been a fictional sentence.

Are you trying to be funny?

I'm trying to follow the style dictated by the One Million Footnotes post of the day, if the sentence is broken by a semi-colon, mine will be too, but by doing this the posts are falling into a trite dee-dum di-dum di-dum, dee-dum di-dum di-dum pattern. This quick answer/response is limiting the potential direction the posts, and blog as a whole, can take. Equally limiting is my nasty habit of treating the OMF entry as something requiring a 'punchline'. Aside from its lack of creative depth, it could be offensive to the author of the original line to the point where he would not wish to be involved in the project anymore. I need to vary the length of my writing and avoid the speedy, flippant response, if I wish to open up the writing and be approachable to other potential collaborators.

Documentation

I shall have to check with my tutor but I'm hoping that I can just submit this blog as my documentation and won't have to hand in a hard copy of selected excerpts. I'm worried as Start This is couched in a much more informal tone than any documentation I have submitted for a previous piece of work. However, I do feel that this mode of documentation more accurately reflects the type of work I'm engaged in than, for example, an essay. The informal style coupled with a lot of links is typical of the journal-blog format but I will also try and include some more formal essay-type writing within the posts in order than I can fully discuss my enquiry into this context. With running the two blogs simultaneously it is easier for the reader/assessor to cross reference each individual post on Finish This with its explanation/analysis. It also means that any links I have made to other relevant blogs can be accessed instantly.

Hello Mr. Huth

After yesterdays excitement, I e-mailed Mr. Huth:

Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 20:46:00 +0000 (GMT)
From: "Rachel baynton" Add to Address Book
Subject: You and your shadow...
To: geofhuth@gmail.com

Dear Mr. Huth,
I am writing to apologize for my shameless theft from your blog, 'one million footnotes'. I can only say in my defense that, for someone at a loss for where to begin, you are an inspiration. I hope that my responses will live up to their source!
I stumbled across your blog by accident and fell for its non-linear story-telling, I thought that I'd try to pick up where you left off.
If you have a minute perhaps you would take a look at the start where I will endeavour to further explain myself.

With fondest regards,
Rachel Baynton

This grovelly but heartfelt message was replied to (two hours before I sent it?!) thusly:

Date: Sat, 27 Nov 2004 18:46:40 -0500
From: "Geof Huth" Add to Address Book
To: "rachel baynton"
Subject: Re: You and your shadow...

Rachel,
No problem at all. I ran across your "Finish This" blog last night--and added a link to in from my "Other Footnoters" list. You'll note that your link is the only link that I decided deserved a footnote!
Also, my footnote from last night was a direct response to my running across your blog.
I come from an artistic tradition that promotes collaboration, so I look at this as a collaboration. In that vein, I have one suggestion: that the links back to my blog go back to the exact footnote, rather than the whole blog. This will throw in a bit of a sense of dislocation for the reader, but will also help those readers find exactly what they're responding to--assuming that they don't realize that the awkward black spaces in your footnotes are actually my own reprinted in black on black.
A nice--in the old--sense idea of yours. Good luck with this and tell me how things turn out in January.
Also, thanks for the link to the "Starting This" blog, which I had not discovered on my own!
Geof

What a lovely man! He looks upon this as a collaboration? Brilliant! So do I! And after this message, it is one, officially! We're agreed then. Very over-excited now, must take break...

I will take his advice and refine my links back to OMF so that it is clear which entry of his I am responding to. Was also pleased to note that the 'hidden' text is easily found by those looking for it and those not. I've also added a links column to my sidebar so that those stumbling across one site have a greater chance of finding the other.

No new entries in Hour:Minute but then, looking over previous entries, posting was sporadic and Alfr3do may not blog daily. I enjoy the variance in content/style/length in his posts and they would be great to respond to or maybe link with OMF posts. For now however, I will have to wait for his return.

Are you talking to me?

Sat down to today's post and found this. I thought, "oooh! That could be about me that could!". Then thought "Nah! How could he possibly know about me?". For a start 'he' may be fictional today or it could be about a completely unrelated event in Geof's day. I therefore have responded in a similarly ambiguous style to the original post. Then I noticed a link on OMF to Finish This. It must be about me! This makes me very excited. Not only have I a reader, but it is the very man who's work I am continuing and he has responded with a post written to me that I could reply to. How's that for a project worthy dialog? (Plus he linked to me, which makes me an official, proper blogger now!)

Today's post also generated my first comment (again very excited), from an 'r' in Egypt (New York, Egypt, international collaborative C.E.P. anyone?). I'm going to need to attract a greater amount of traffic towards both sites in order to build up dialogs and engender suggestions that will move the work forward. Blogexplosion seems like a way of doing this but I can't find any reviews of the service and don't wish to sign away my blogsoul. If there's anyone out there who uses this service or knows of a better one please let me know. All comments gratefully received...

Notification/Permission/Asking for Forgiveness...

I have been at this for a couple of days now and really ought to get in contact with Geof Huth at One Million Footnotes and let him know what I'm up to/ask permission to use his writing/say sorry for stealing from him. It is no small worry that he may not wish to be involved and that I would have to look for another footnoter/one-line author to continue with the project.

I was really attracted to OMF through its non-linear story-telling and how the protagonist, 'he', seems to be real (Geof himself?), fictional and, at times, both. There is the element of voyeurism, inherent in the blogging/on-line journal medium, that can be made limitless through a fictional expansion on the truth.

Responding...

So I have started. I'm adding the next lines to the One Million Footnotes and Hour:Minute (another footnote site I linked to from OMF) entries of the previous day. I have decided to 'hide' the original lines so that my addition can appear to stand on its own as a footnote but the two can be viewed in conjunction if the text is selected. I hope that the hiding place of the text will be obvious by the differing gaps left between the entry number and the apparent start of the post.

A Proposal...

"The promise of the [world wide] web was that everyone could publish, that a thousand voices could flourish, communicate, connect. The truth was that only those people who knew how to code a web page could make their voices heard. Blogger, Pitas, and all the rest [of the content management systems] have given people with little or no knowledge of HTML the ability to publish on the web: to pontificate, remember, dream and argue in public, as easily as they would send an instant message."

Rebecca Blood, Weblogs: A History and Perspective

AIMS

To explore the notion of blogging (internet web logging), its meaning and significance, through research and immersion in its community.

• What is a blog?
• Where did it come from?
• Who blogs?
• Why?
• What are the variations in content?
• Can these variations be classified?
• What makes a 'good' blog?
• Is the blogging community representative of the world as a whole and what effects do they have on each other?
• Where does blogging sit within theories of mass communication?
• What political/cultural power does the blog have?
• Where is it going?
• How can this aid me as a practitioner?

To engage in a dialog, through keeping my own blog and following those of others I encounter, that will define my role within the community - through elicited responses, I wish to allow my writing (blog content) to be influenced by others and, in turn, influence the writing (blog content) of others through my own dispatches.

• What is the difference between content management systems and where do I place my blog?
• How does this 'instant publishing' affect blog content?
• What am I giving/ what is my position within the community?
• How does my blog affect the community?
• How am I classified?
• What are the effects of the relative immediacy of response/feedback/criticism on blog content/my writing?

To further my writing practices as an artist through keeping a daily blog and following others?

• How do I select the blogs I choose to follow?
• Can I continue to build on the exploration of style and content that led me to be so prolific in my creation of textual work/performance writing at the exhibition at the end of the second year?
• How does blogging every day limit/expand my possibilities as a writer?
• What can I take from this experience into further written/performance based work?
• What are the precedents for art within the blogging community and within mass communication/correspondence as a whole?
• What technical skills will I have to acquire in order to elevate my blog above a standard template? (Do I need to ?)
• How do I obtain and then hold onto a readership?
• What happens if their is no feedback from my readers?
• What happens if their are no readers?
• How do I wish to comment on other blogs? Critical/personal opinion?

POTENTIAL STRATEGIES FOR BLOG CONTENT

A) There is a proliferation of political comment/opinion sites within the blogging community (at the moment, largely centered on Bush/Kerry and Iraq) as well as a high number of diarists. As it is my intention to write under an assumed fictional persona, that is created out of the writing and the feedback it receives, it seems prudent to adopt a recognized format such as these. It is not, however, my intention to cause insult through deception but merely to become a voice drawn form the collective voices of the community. This persona becomes a multiple personality, constantly evolving through outside input. Under the guise of a conventional day-to-day journal I would be drawn to different sites that I could collectively comment upon.

B) An unusual form within blogging is 'Footnoting', spearheaded (created by?) Geof Huth. He describes the form thusly;

"Footnotes to a nonexistent book, a series of observations, a novel without the plot, the autobiography of an imagination, linked poetry of the everyday world, an impossible goal."

These single lines of text could become the bloggers meme;

"meme n (mem): A unit of cultural information, such as a cultural practice or idea, that is transmitted verbally or by repeated action from one mind to another. From the Greek minema, something imitated, from mimeisthai, to imitate"

The Memes List

Bloggers use meme lists as impetus for their own daily entry. Could I use a footnote site as my impetus, writing the nonexistent companion page to the note? Perhaps a collaboration with the footnoter themselves could be sought or an amalgamation of sites' notes be used too draw into a single narrative?

POSSIBLE OUTCOMES/MODES OF DOCUMENTATION

• a blog with a following, that is linked to by other blog sites
• a created character or persona that can be taken onto future performance based work
• a bookwork of selected writings and conversations generated from the enquiry
• an annotated blog transcript, charting my course throughout his project including responses and evaluations to situations arisen
• public readings of selected excerpts

(I then went on to include a proposed time division, budget, health and safety risk assessment and an indicative bibliography to date. All assessment criteria, I'll cover them as and when.)

Blogging

My partner, in seeing my frustration at a project thwarted at its outset;
"have you heard of blogging?"
Myself;
"no."
He then tried to explain until the look of incomprehension on my face became too much for his technologically-savvy mind to handle. He sat me down in front of the computer, opened 'Blogger' and told me to work it out for myself because it would be exactly what I needed.

The immediacy of publication was exactly what I needed. Here was a medium in which anything created was instantly available for public viewing and comment and in which I, in turn, could respond to what was happening around me. Anonymity was assured as long as I insisted, thus disassociating a potential character from my own authorship and allowing it to be formed through comments received.

I looked at many other blogs and found such variance in content that I became unsure as of where to start with one of my own. My favorite on this first bimble through the blogs to hand was One Million Footnotes. I enjoyed reading it as a non-linear story, hundreds of snapshots of time, truncated entries that I wished would continue.

As part of the C.E.P. marking criteria, I had to submit a proposal as to the nature of my project. It need not be adhered to but would serve as a record of my initial intentions. Any future deviations from this could then be assessed and evaluated to chart the evolution of the project.

Beginnings

Originally, I had intended to look at publishing. The C.E.P. is intended as a way of building on the foundations of an artistic practice, laid in the first two years of study, and as an initial outreach into the wider artistic community. The C.E.P. handbook suggests that, ideally, the project should be geared towards areas of work that we may be interested in pursuing post-Dartington. I thought, 'I'd love to be a writer, I'll write a book and get it published!' After some consideration this was decided to be a little ambitious. Thinking smaller; attempt to get my name in print as often as possible, in as many varied publications as possible, for as many different reasons as possible. The publications could then be exhibited in gallery/non-gallery spaces showing the initial article, edits that occurred during publication and any correspondence entered into around the work. This was then refined by concentrating on the 'Your Letters' pages of various magazines. I felt sure that by doing this I would at least incur editors comments, if not some kind of public response. I didn't even have to write as myself, I could create a character that arose out of unsubstantiated opinion on magazine content and evolved as a reaction to public response.

This idea seemed feasible, I enjoyed the notion of an anonymous shifting personality, shaped by its readership that may, in time, have become a workable character for a future, more physical work. It soon became clear that in order for this project to suceed and accrue enough information about this imaginary writer, I would need significantly more time than the constraints of the project and family life would allow.

Then someone mentioned blogging...

Start

My name is Rachel Baynton and I am a third year BA Theatre student at Dartington College of Arts, Devon, England. As part of my course I must undertake a Contextual Enquiry Project (C.E.P.) in which I am asked to investigate the effects of my artistic practice on its context and the context on my practice. By January 6th, 2005, I should have completed the project and prepared a presentation for my examiners. Through this blog I hope to chart my journey towards this goal.