Nick Montfort heads up the Trope Tank, a media lab at MIT, where he is also an associate professor specializing in digital media. He has authored several books, including Twisty Little Passages, a study of interactive fiction, and the upcoming Exploratory Programming for the Arts and Humanities. I had the opportunity to correspond with him about his work.

Thanks so much for agreeing to this interview. In your technical report about the Trope Tank, “Creative Material Computing in a Laboratory Context,” you wrote that “in reorganizing the space, [you] considered its primary purpose as a laboratory (rather than as a library or studio).” Your desire to distinguish the Trope Tank from libraries and studios strikes me as an interesting place to start thinking about what a media lab is—by first thinking about what it isn’t. Could you describe how the layout of the Trope Tank sets it apart from those other kinds of spaces?

Libraries are set up to allow people to read and consult collections, typically books but other sorts of media as well. Studios are for artmaking; classically they should have good natural light. Archives are for preserving unique documents, and direct sunlight is undesirable.

By explaining that we’re not an archive, I mean to stress that the materials we have are for use, not to be preserved for decades. The Trope Tank isn’t a library in that the main interactions are not similar to consulting books. And we aren’t mainly trying to produce artworks, either. There are aspects of these, but the main metaphor for us is that of a laboratory where people learn and experiment. So we have systems set up for people to use, not stored in an inaccessible way that will best preserve them. We aren’t worried with managing collections and circulation in the way a library is. It’s okay if the outcome of work in the Trope Tank is a paper rather than a new artwork.

At the same time our model is not a pure innovation — it is based on how labs work.

I’ve had some trouble understanding the concept of media labs. In your report, you effectively sum up my problem: “Humanists are familiar with libraries and their uses, artists know what studios are and some of the ways in which they are used, but a laboratory is not as familiar in the arts and humanities.” Unfortunately, you also state that this lack of familiarity “can, ultimately, only be addressed by doing laboratory-based work that leads to new humanistic insights and significant new artistic developments.” 

I’ve never done lab-based work. Can you help me understand why “laboratory” is an appropriate classification for the Trope Tank? Might “workshop,” with its multiple meanings (it’s a space for working with technology and also a collaborative activity with intellectual, creative, and/or practical components), serve even better? 

Workshops are mainly for making or repairing things; laboratories are for inquiry, but that includes conducting inquiry in a practical way that can involve making.

I’m interested in the dilemma you present: the incommunicable quality of lab work. It reminds me of something Matt Ratto said about how critical making communicates concepts to the body, not just the brain. That material, tactile, experiential aspect strikes me as a fundamental difference between lab work and conventional humanities scholarship. What is your take on that?

There are aspects of traditional humanities scholarship, such as that in the material history of the text, also called book history, which are quite similar to our lab-like approach. With regard to this type of work in the humanities, we’re also learning from a tradition rather than developing an entirely new idea.

What are some of the things, whether tangible or intangible, that the Trope Tank produces?

The Trope Tank is for producing new insights. It isn’t about production in an industrial or consumer sense, or for that matter even mainly in an artistic sense.

In connection with my first question, could you tell me how the insights produced in the Trope Tank differ from those which more traditional humanities scholars might produce in a library and also how the media lab’s creative output compares with what one would expect to come out of a studio?

I think one of the answers is in how our projects sometimes lie outside of standard scholarship or standard artistic production. The Renderings project is a good example of this. We’ve translated and in some cases ported or emulated digital poetry from other languages. Most conventional literary translators have no idea what to make of this literary translation project. It involves study of and reference to earlier projects to translate electronic literature and constrained and avant-garde writing. The result is not well-understood (in the visual art world certainly) as artistic production, though.

In other cases we have studied digital media and art in ways that cut across platforms (the Apple //e) instead of confining themselves to standard categories of videogame, literary work, etc. This makes new connections between quite obviously related digital works that have never been considered alongside each other before.

Could you tell me what a typical day at the Trope Tank looks like? Who uses the space on a daily basis and in what capacity? What is it like for you to work in that space?

I don’t think there are typical days. We host class visits at times, have discussions with visiting artists and researchers at times, engage with software and hardware in quite specific and directed ways at times, and use systems in a more exploratory way at times. We have meetings with larger or smaller numbers of people or work individually. Often the people involved in the Trope Tank work from other places, if they don’t need the material resources of the lab. The Trope Tank isn’t an assembly line or Amazon warehouse in which the same activity happens all the time.

Having very fond memories of playing Infocom games (the Zork and Enchanter trilogies) on my father’s Apple IIe, I was a bit startled to learn that the Trope Tank hosts a community which is still developing the interactive fiction genre. In retrospect, it seems obvious that so much of the genre’s potential was never explored back in the 80’s. Why the enduring interest? What is the relevance of this sort of work in the context of contemporary literary production and game design? 

The question of why interactive fiction is still interesting deserves a book-length answer (Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort, MIT Press, 2003) or a documentary film-length answer (Get Lamp, Jason Scott, 2010). The main way interactive fiction relates to contemporary literary production and game design is that it is contemporary literary production and game design. Beyond that, it’s not simple to say how interactive fiction, still being made in very compelling ways, relates to other forms of literature and game. You would do well to consider specific works of interactive fiction and specific people, and how they relate to other sorts of literature and gaming.

Your book is on my holiday reading list, and I’ll see if I can track down that documentary. Thanks for that.

The book is a bit antiquated by now — no coverage of Twine and today’s popular (and sometimes radical) hypertext interactive fictions, for instance. But, I hope it’s still worthwhile.

Your upcoming book is intended to teach basic coding skills to workers in the arts and humanities. What inspired you to take on this project? Who will benefit from it most? More importantly, how can I, an aspiring fiction writer, benefit?

The book was mainly motivated by particular people in the arts and humanities who are interested in programming but who have not been finding the support to learn about it. I also saw that there was little high-level interest (in writing about the digital humanities, in curriculum committees, etc.) in teaching programming — even though millions of people learned how to program just for fun in the 1980s. Exploratory programming is about learning and discovery, not about instrumental uses. So, I would suggest that you and others in the literary arts can benefit by understanding powerful new ways to think and to amplify your thoughts using computation.

Thank you for taking the time to correspond with me.

The post An Interview with Nick Montfort appeared first on &.

Cedar-Eve Peters is an Anishnaabae visual artist and beader from the Ojibwa nation, currently based in Montreal. Cedar sat down with me to discuss the nature of her workspace and its relationship to her beading practice. We also grappled with a question previously asked on the dhtoph blog: “do we really need a designated space for work that we can just as easily do at home or our favorite coffee house?” 

The transcription has been edited for clarity.

So how would you describe your lab space?

Very messy. Like right now it’s very disorganized.

Could you talk about where it’s located?

Oh yeah. My workspace is also my bedroom, so sometimes that’s annoying because I can’t separate workspace from sleep space. I guess it’s kind of organized. Everything’s in containers at least, but it just seems like things are all over the place right now.

What would you say the workspace itself consists of?

Mm…beads? You mean the materials?

Not so much the materials but the things your going to use. Like this chair, and that desk, the way it folds down, the cutting mat and the loom, your boxes of beads; these are all things that you need to get this work done.

Yeah. I guess I don’t think about that. Containers and shelves. Mostly containers I guess. A bunch of lights.

A surface?

Not so much right now. [laughs]

Surface space must be essential being that you need to be able to see all these tiny beads.

Yeah, if the surface isn’t clean then I feel like I can’t think straight, so that’s annoying. But also, it helps in a way cuz I’m just like, stimulated by everything thats around.

Is that a positive to working in your bedroom?

No. [laughs] I don’t think so.

What are the core practices you’ve established to create your beaded work?

Like my routine?

Yeah.

I guess I’ll wake up, depending. Usually early like 8…I guess that’s not that early for most people but, from a person that used to wake up at 1PM everyday to now 8AM…

I’ll bead for like an hour or two, and then watch tv and have breakfast, and then do whatever I need to do, and then maybe sit down again around like 2 o’clock and start beading until like 5 or 6, or whenever I’m hungry again. So basically hungers the only thing that takes me away from it. But I try to wake up every morning and start something cuz I feel like if I don’t do it then, then I won’t do it at all.

Do you have to do any set up when you start something in the morning?

Well if like it’s messy like right now, I wouldn’t start. I really wanna clean that desk right now, put shit away. But yeah, I guess the only thing would be that I try to clear it off at the beginning of every new item, because if there’s like stray beads laying around, I don’t know, it bothers me. I have these set little piles and I wanna completely deplete each little pile before I move on to something else. Or I just put it in a bag and then thats when like the miscellaneous pieces [are made].

It occurs to me that you don’t have to like pack everything up at the the end of the night and then unpack; because you’re the only one using the space you can leave things out and then come back to them.

Yeah.

I imagine that is a big time-saver.

Yeah and even if I do finish something—like right now, I finished a pair of earrings but I haven’t cleared off the leather mat with the beads on it yet cuz, I dont know, I was just like, I’m tired and I cant be bothered to do this, so.

If you’re not beading in this designated space that you’ve created, where else does your beading take place?

If I’m at my mom’s house I bead in the living room cuz the table in the living room, its right beside a huge window, which is like the width of the wall. Theres a lot of natural sunlight, so I like beading there, and it’s amongst plants and stuff, which is cute. But when I’m doing the workshops and stuff that’s usually in the lounge of the Aboriginal Student Resource Centre at Concordia, so there it’s a bit different because there’s people coming and going.

Something I’m dealing with is that when I’m at home it’s solitary and it’s just my energy alone, you know, and a lot of the time I’ll just sit in silence and bead, like I wont listen to anything. But when i’m at Concordia it’s like all these students are passing through, getting a snack or printing off whatever. They’ll stop and chat but it’s obviously like I cant focus my whole attention on making a pair of earrings in one sitting, where I would do it here [in my bedroom]. I also find it kind of distracting cuz like, I don’t know, it’s not like these people are bad or anything it’s just like all these different energies are passing and I feel it affects my concentration and my ability to complete something when I’m amongst other people. I have to be alone to complete the project I guess.

So do you have different routines for different spaces? Or is it pretty much the same?

I guess pretty much the same. Cuz when I was in the mukluk workshop a lot of the people there were already beaders, so that’s different because everyone’s so focussed on making their own thing. There’s some chatting but for the most part everyone’s silent and, you know, focussed on their own project, but when I’m teaching workshops it’s like everyone’s always talking. Like, theres focus but not as much focus—like trying to learn but full attention isn’t on learning? If that makes sense.

Why do you think that is?

I think for people to pick up beading for the first time is really intimidating and I think people think that they’re capable of making something  really clean, and neat, and tight-looking on the first try when thats not the case. It is a solitary thing so I think when you’re in a workshop doing something you’re already familiar with it’s just easier. You’re more comfortable to just dive right in I guess, whereas if you’re coming as a first time learner, and I’m teaching too, like it’s new to me as well.

So this might sound kind of like a silly obvious question but, just to articulate it once and for all, what is produced in your beading space?

Earrings, chokers, and bracelets mostly. Recently made that little pouch with beadwork on it and I wanna make more of those, but yeah, mostly jewellery. It’s also that time of the year for people wanting gifts and stuff, so its a lot faster for me to turn out jewellery than these little pouches.

And you sell those for income, that’s your primary income?

Yeah.

So your beading space is where you accomplish your living, basically.

Yeah…which bothers me sometimes because I would want a studio space, but when I had the studio space I hardly made the effort to go. Every time I was there I would feel more pressure, because it would take me so long to get there that I would be like, ‘I have to stay for like at least four hours’, and if I didn’t then I would feel like I wasn’t like utilizing it, like I was wasting my money. I’m more productive at home cuz I just roll out of bed and do it, and take naps and stuff in between.

So would you consider your current beading space adequate?

Yes.

You don’t have any functional issues?

Maybe I’d want more shelving or something just cuz I have a lot of knick knacks. But yeah it’s pretty functional, there’s like access to most things so [I] just need to organize it a bit better. But yeah. Shelves, yes.

If you could make any changes, what would they be? Maybe in addition to the shelves?

Probably not have it in my bedroom. Like, if I had enough money I would just pay for the middle room [of this apartment] and have my studio in there, and have this as my bedroom. That’s pretty much it. I still like working from home, so I guess the ideal situation would be to have a studio in my apartment.

Do you think that is achievable, realistically, either now or sometime in the near future?

Yes. Cause I gotta be positive about making that money!

The only thing that would really hold me back is that I wanna travel, so when I think about paying (if i’m lucky) like $200 a month for a studio space—maybe sharing it with someone else or whatever—that’s $200 I could save towards travelling which I feel right now is more important cuz like I’m still being productive when I’m in my room. I think that’s the only thing thats really holding me back.

But then again I’m like, if I did have a studio space, since this is my job, my full-time job, it would just kind of pay for itself anyway, cuz I’d be making so many things and maybe I could have studio visits so people could come and buy things, like once a month or something.

Having a separate space brings new possibilities?

Yeah cuz I don’t really feel comfortable with people coming over to buy things unless I know them as a friend, you know. I’d rather just meet someone at a random cafe, but then that feels weird too, like using another space to like sell things. It’s not like I’m setting up shop so to speak but like…

It’s just a hand off?

Yeah.

The space where you sell things is primarily online, right?

Yeah and at shows, like local markets and stuff. But yeah mostly online, and I think Concordia’s [weekly] farmers market’s been helping because thats more steady.

So your retail space is always shifting?

Yeah.

We should also talk about how you’re self taught, and so in that way your lab space is also where you learn new skills—would you say that? Still?

Yeah…yeah. Yeah, [laughs] I would say that. Because I feel like when I’m inspired to do something I have to do it right then and there, I don’t have time to waste in between. When I had that studio, if I was taking the subway it would take me like half an hour to get there. If I was biking it’d be like, fifteen minutes, or twenty, but it’s all uphill so its still annoying. Whereas here I’m like, “Oh, I feel creative. I’ll just like sit down and do that now.” Cuz it’s like by the time I hit the studio, I don’t feel that urge as much.

Lost momentum?

Mmhm. And the idea is gone.

The post Bedroom as Beadwork Lab?: An interview with Cedar-Eve Peters appeared first on &.

Eastern Bloc is an artist-run centre and media lab in Montreal. Since 2007, it has been exploring and pushing the boundaries of the intersections between art, science, and technology. By facilitating hands-on workshops, the centre sets itself apart from commercial galleries insofar as it not only exhibits digital and new media artworks, but helps to educate and provide resources for their production.

The lab’s mandate states that it “provides a platform for experimentation, education and critical thought in practices informed by hybrid, interactive, networked and process-driven approaches.” This includes a mandate to offer a shared lab space involving tools and resources for electronic and digital/new media art. Operating such a lab includes offering technical support, engaging with the community, and reaching out to people who are interested in the artistic use of technology, but may be without the means of producing it. Ideally, this is all in the service of the democratization of technology in a time when we are increasingly alienated from it, despite its prevalence.

I spoke to the Lab Coordinator, Martin Rodriguez, in order to get a better sense of what happens here.

What, if anything, would you say you produce? Is there something material that comes out of this lab, or is it something more intangible, like “knowledge”?

There’s a lot of music synthesizers that are being produced here. That’s one of the main things. There’s a lot of audio works that are happening in our lab right now. We can do everything from fabricating the PCB board, which is like the electronics aspect of it, like just the circuit so you can do multiples. We can make all the casings for them, so there’s the CNC machine which would allow you to cut the wood. Hopefully we will be able to cut aluminum with that.

We also have various different types of woodshop tools. We have a 3D printer there, which we just got up and running. That will allow artists to design 3D objects that are more complicated, something that you couldn’t do with a regular wood and milling machine.

Our lab is really geared toward the creation of electronics projects. What I mean by that is we don’t really have a lot of computers in here, it’s not really made for people to be programming software. So we have all the materials you would need for soldering, and different types of wires. Stranded wire and solid wire, different components, different resistors and capacitors.

Do you think a large part of what you do is educating people on how to use these materials? Or is it more of a resource for artists who already have the knowledge to have access to equipment?

The way our lab functions is a little bit of both. We have lab members who pay a fee to have access to the lab 24 hours a day. They often bring a lot of their own equipment because this is just standard stuff. We also offer workshops, which is a way of generating income for ourselves. But it’s also a way for us to talk to the community. I think a lot of the workshops here are getting people to feel comfortable, and understanding what media and electronic art is. So a lot of our workshops will be like intro to arduinos, or introductions to MaxMSP, Pure Data, or Python. And we also have other workshops which are more like, how to do VHS glitch art. We’ve had workshops that are more panel-based, discussions around artists and their processes.

How do you choose who does the workshops? Do you have artists come in or is it the staff that hosts them?

Because the lab is attached to Eastern Bloc, which is an artist-run centre, we have a mandate to support emerging artists so we offer workshops that are given or facilitated by emerging artists. Oftentimes we find that is more engaging or interesting. Because Youtube is such a powerful thing right now, people can find videos and find out how to build a lot of stuff there, but what’s interesting is coming here and being with an artist and finding out what their whole process is.

What is the relationship of the gallery to the lab? Are their projects similarly aligned? Do you integrate the workshop element into the exhibitions?

Yeah, that’s one thing I’ve been trying to pull in recently with the lab. When we have an artist who comes and presents something to also present a workshop. In the summer, an artist called MSHR came and presented here, and after their presentation we tied in a DIY synth workshop. We had these biopolitics exhibits that happened during Fall with workshops tied in. We also have an artist residency program, where an artist will have full access to the laboratory for 2-3 months, and at the end of that they’ll present what they’ve built during that period.

What are your feelings on the space itself? What is its story, and how does it shape the lab?

We’re currently in the process of acquiring more space for the lab. It’s quite small as you can see, it’s under 500 sq feet. So we wanted to switch it over to where the offices are. Right now there are only two of us working, but with interns we can get up to about 5-7 people in the office. The lab needs to be bigger, there are more demands and we need more tools.

A bigger space would allow us to have more machines. If you go to some of the FabLabs, like FabLab du PEC, which is in Hochelega, they have a much bigger space and a lot of interesting tools. Two different types of 3D printers, a laser cutter, a vinyl cutter, a CNC machine. It’s just a massive space. But it’s different, they don’t have a lot these electronics things. We are kind of limited by the space that we have, it’s not easy to create large pieces because there is not a lot of elbow room.

What are the open lab nights like?

Yeah, we’ve been doing the open lab nights, they’ve been running. But as of recently we’ve switched the programming because it was so open that no one came. It was just like, “hey it’s an open lab night come and check it out.” People would just not show up. So I was like, this isn’t working, we need to find a different model. So what I started doing was trying to create themes so we could target specific people. Right now the open lab night we’re having is a sound lab night. I’m hoping we can do something like a programming one, or now that the 3D printer is running we can do a 3D printing lab night.

Is the idea for open lab nights that you can bring people in who aren’t familiar?

Yeah, to bring people in who aren’t familiar, but also to grow a community. With the sound lab night there are a lot of people in Montreal that are fabricating sound, or experimenting with instruments. So we’re trying to create a community around that. And an exchange of ideas, of circuits, of concepts.

Why ‘lab’? What about this space makes it a laboratory, or just, what comes to mind when you hear this word?

Outside of this context when I hear ‘laboratory’ I think of beakers. But I think the larger concept behind it is like, experimentation, and developing something to be accurate and fully functioning. I think that is a lot of what happens here. Maybe the word ‘lab’ has been used so much it’s getting played out, and that’s why people have a bad feeling against the word, its overuse—

Oh, not a bad feeling. But it has certain connotations. Experimentation, a collaborative space where people have to work on ideas together. It’s different than a factory or something where you know exactly what is being produced. It’s kind of indeterminate in that way. I think that’s why people feel compelled to call their space a lab.

Yeah definitely, I think so. I think sometimes the startup scene tries to take those types of words, those buzzwords and make it something. I feel like what we have in spaces like these feels more like a lab, like what we know as a science lab, because of the machines and what is produced and experimented with.

The post Electronics & Artistic Production: Interview with the lab coordinator of Eastern Bloc appeared first on &.

In my search for people who work/study/use or interact with physical spaces in the Humanities as part of the “What is a Media Lab?” project, I had the opportunity to speak to Ann Hanlon of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries Digital Humanities Lab. The DH Lab was an intiative launched in the Fall of 2013 as part of a collaboration between the UW-Milwaukee Libraries, the Center for Instructional and Professional Development (CIPD) and the College of Letters and Science as an interdisciplinary collaborative space within the library. Ann Hanlon, Head of the Library’s Digital Collections and Initiatives, was kind enough to answer all of my questions about the project and gave me a discursive tour of their space.

1. What does the Digital Humanities Lab look like?
What spaces, both physical and virtual, are available for members to use? Are there any particular objects or tools associated with these spaces?

The DH Lab is located on the second floor of UW-Milwaukee’s Golda Meir Library, the main (and only) library for the UWM campus. The space was formerly a computer lab, and then quiet study space. It is surrounded on two sides by floor-to-ceiling windows, and on a third side by glass walls that look out on the Music Library and a collection of childrens books. The fourth wall is a temporary wall that is bolted shut. The space is large, and includes seven round tables that seat four to five people each. There is a podium and several other tables and chairs, and one large HD monitor (55″) for presentations. There is no other dedicated computer equipment in the room.

We are developing a virtual sandbox for the Lab. This is based on CUNY’s DH in a Box project. We hope to expand on their code to build a virtual lab, essentially, so that our patrons could access DH tools like Omeka and Mallet for workshops, and eventually, classroom projects, from anywhere. Ideally, patrons would come together in the Lab to learn to use these tools.

2. How are the spaces of the Digital Humanities Lab used?
Is the use of lab space structured? How is knowledge produced in the lab? Does it have any material aspects?

The Lab is loosely structured, and this has been one of its chief benefits. Despite our lack of equipment, faculty, staff and students regularly use the Lab for scheduled meetings and presentations and panels. The Lab has been most useful as a space for informal presentations, meetings, and brown bags. Knowledge is produced through discussion and collaboration, and bringing together people who otherwise might not work together — faculty and staff, and students, from departments across campus.

The space is really primary right now, as opposed to any research projects or class projects that are coming out of the lab right now. We did have one collaborative project with a community partner, called “Stitching History from the Holocaust.” In partnership with the Jewish Museum of Milwaukee, we created a digital exhibit in collaboration with their physical exhibit. The physical exhibit received a lot of press from outside the university, which led to an increase in our own funding for the project.

Right now, we’re focusing on building events for the space: designing workshops and providing infrastructure. We’re still building up the skill-sets: staff, physical infrastructure. These skill-sets include data management and repositories, like Omeka (an open-source exhibit software from the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George-Mason University).

How does the space work differently from other library spaces?

It’s a closed space, which surprisingly makes it more flexible in terms of use. It’s a more formal “open-but-closed” space. It isn’t used for classes, but rather meetings and events around digital humanities.

3. How is the Digital Humanities Lab structured?
Who are the organizers and users of the lab? Where is the Lab situated in relation to the university’s infrastructure? Is the Digital Humanities Lab associated with any university research groups or projects?

The Lab is organized primarily by the Library. It has one Coordinator (me), and recently an Advisory Board was assembled and charged with oversight of programming and long-term planning by the Provost. The Advisory Board is chaired by a faculty person from the History department, and includes faculty from English, the School of the Arts, the School of Architecture and Urban Planning, the School of Information Studies, and the Libraries, as well as a graduate student (History). The Lab is a hybrid, perhaps, in relation to the University’s infrastructure. It is likely best recognized as part of the Library, but has strong relationships with several university research groups on campus, including the Center for 21st Century Studies, the Social Science of Information Research Group, the Community Engaged Scholars Network, and the Digital Arts and Culture certificate program.

Would you be interested in working with other DH Labs?

Yes! We’ve worked with other research groups on campus to “pool cash” to bring in scholars from other universities. Generally in the form of panels, like one we had in February on critical data history.

4. What is your role in the Digital Humanities Lab?
How did you become associated with the project?

I am the Head of the Library’s Department of Digital Collections and Initiatives. I became involved with the Lab through our Strategic Planning process, where I proposed the Library should lead regarding DH. In connection with that part of the plan, I helped convene a group of faculty who we knew were active participants in the campus’s Digital Futures initiative, and asked them what they saw as the Library’s role. The faculty proposed the Library as the logical home for DH, and that space was one of the key components to raising visibility and fostering DH research and project development. Through that meeting, I worked with another staff person from a related department to begin designing the space, but more actively, begin developing programming and workshops for the Lab, and planning for future infrastructure — including technical as well as administrative.

Editor’s note: The UWM Digital Futures initiative was part of the university’s strategic initiatives plans for teaching and research. The initiative was meant as a yearlong conversation on emerging technologies and their impact on the university. In 2010, three focus groups (Teaching and Learning, Research, and University Operations and Services) were asked by Johannes Britz, Interim Provost and Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs to consider the opportunities and challenges of new technologies and digitally enabled processes and recommend action steps for UWM. The key issues the initiative addressed were: the adaptability of the organization in adjusting to technological innovation, ethical issues related to new technologies, best practices in utilizing new technologies in administration, the impact of digitization on how we conduct research, and the rapid pace of change in instructional delivery (including developments in online and blended instruction, the ‘consumerization’ of the learning experience, the development of personalized learning systems, and the increasing use of simulation technologies). While the Digital Futures initiative predated the interviewee’s involvement with the project, I asked her about how the initiative shaped the Lab’s development.

It’s had an impact on how we wrote the library strategic plan in 2012/13 and contextualizing the DH Lab (which was a product of the Digital Futures initiative) through the working group’s recommendations around teaching and research.

We’ve had a lot of support from the faculty for this lab and they’ve been extremely tolerant of the establishment of this lab. We provide the space and the skill-sets and the technical infrastructure, and we’re looking at the rest of the university for skills to share and incorporate for more peer-to-peer formations.

6. What are your impressions of the Digital Humanities Lab’s use of space?
Can you imagine ways the space could be changed or improved? How would that affect your group’s research practices or knowledge production?

I can imagine the space taking on more useful equipment for collaborative work, but not becoming crowded with permanent machines. The space is often empty, and my greatest hope is that we’ll secure funding for permanent staff to operate services out of the Lab. This would also include retraining our Library staff to offer their expertise in related areas via the Lab on a regular basis. The main effect additional hours, staff, and equipment might have on knowledge production might be an increase in integration of DH tools and methods in undergraduate and graduate classes, which would in turn, I believe, lead to more robust faculty research and possibly, grant-funded projects. However, classroom integration is likely the biggest beneficiary of any additional development of the space.

7. Has working with the Digital Humanities Lab changed your own thoughts on how space is used in humanities research?

Yes — it has made it clear to me how important space itself is. That has been the rallying cry for our own DH Lab. It’s a modest space, but it’s very existence has increased visibility for DH on campus and brought together faculty and staff from across departments to identify under the single banner of DH and to imagine projects and initiatives that would otherwise have been bottled up in individual departments. The space has served a sort of “stone soup” purpose, in that we provided the space, and everyone else has brought their skills, networks, projects, and questions to the Lab to help form what it is today, and what we hope it will become.

The post A Look Inside: The University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Libraries Digital Humanities Lab appeared first on &.

When my initial interviewee (someone with a large amount of involvement and a fairly high position in anti-oppression education) had to back out part way through, my immediate reaction was to panic. Then, I remembered that, actually, even if they didn’t have particular titles, there were many people around me who had been engaged in this type of work and who had interacted with the transient ‘space’ of the workshop many times over. Luckily enough, one of these friends was kind enough to sit down with me and talk about it.

Ffionn M: As I’ve mentioned, the general theme of these interview assignments is “the lab” or spaces of knowledge production. When we got the assignment, my interest was immediately pulled in the direction of ‘spaces’ that were a little more fluid, knowledge productions that occupied a physical ‘space’ for only a short period but also transformed it into a very distinct sort of space of its own. That’s why I’ve asked you to come talk to me about — broadly defined, here, as ‘social justice’ — workshop and discussion facilitation.

To start, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about your experiences facilitating workshops (what organizations, what sorts of workshops, where they were held, what led you to become a facilitator, etc.).

Theo K: Well, I first started getting involved with Queer McGill after being elected as one of the communications admins. I ended up getting very involved with Queer Concordia, the Union for Gender Empowerment at McGill, and the Centre for Gender Advocacy at Concordia as part of my communications officer duties. That was when I started getting into facilitating groups and leading discussions in general. Especially after my transition and becoming one of the only trans admins on the QM board, I was trained in Trans 101 workshops with the UGE that I facilitated for QM workshop events as well as admin safe space training programs. I ran the Trans 101 for safe space training for QC executives and volunteers as well. I also facilitated for discussion groups fairly often. Most of these were usually held in the QM office or the SSMU(mcgill student union) building’s bookable meeting spaces, or the QC office- usually spaces on campus run by students. Later on, after I’d stepped off the QM board and became more involved with the CGA, I volunteered to be trained as a facilitator for plans made by Concordia to have mandatory consent workshops in the first year residences; these plans ultimately fell through, and we were deployed to facilitate smaller workshops at Concordia’s Arts and Science frosh. I also became a facilitator for Trans Concordia for a brief period, facilitating discussion groups in the CGA meeting space generously lent to us.

FM: You mention that you were trained to facilitate Trans 101 workshops after you transitioned and became one of the only trans administrators on the Queer McGill Board of Directors. It sounds as though the responsibility fell on you because you were trans. Did it feel like that? Did that affect the way you were able to facilitate Trans 101 workshops in that space?

From your description, it also seems like this was the first type of workshop you were trained to facilitate. How do you think your own experience (personal knowledge) related to you being trained in this sort of facilitation? When you were learning to facilitate and later when you were facilitating these workshops, what sorts of knowledges do you feel you were bringing to the table and engaging with?

TK: Yes and no; Queer McGill, and a lot of queer campus resources that were student-run tend to have a bad rep in terms of being trans-friendly because of the fact that they tend to lean more towards social events, like parties. I took it upon myself when I transitioned to facilitate the workshops, since I felt that I was the only one with the depth of personal knowledge to do it, but in hindsight, I feel as though I was expected to do just that. I suppose that’s just the way it goes; people always expect the one who would benefit most from an endeavor of spreading knowledge to be the one to work hardest at doing so. Also on the flipside, being the only trans admin also gave me a sense of authority when facilitating workshops, of course. There’s a certain sort of understanding that if you’re a cis person coming to a trans 101, you’re not going to know better than the trans guy running it.

Being trans doesn’t mean that you’d know everything there is to know about trans politics, though (believe me, there are many trans folks who are still quite unaware). Of course I would have to have had training, and being involved in the construction of the actual workshop was quite enlightening as well- I was part of revamping the trans 101 that the UGE has, and I learned a lot about gender politics during that. I guess I think that being trans simply helped me make more sense of it, or gave me a perspective that is capable of a deeper understanding of gender politics than those who don’t have to live the complications of it. Improvising during a facilitation to counter questions or disagreements is also a skill that facilitators are trained in, and that deeper understanding helps immensely.

FM: I think that’s an interesting tension — that because you belong to the marginalized group, you are expected to be the bearer of knowledge but, at the same time, in certain ‘spaces,’ it also grants you a level of authority. Were there any times where you felt these two forces come into conflict in a facilitation space (or in life in general, since these ideas tend to continue outside of workshop spaces as well)?

You also mention the importance of being able to improvise during a workshop. I was wondering if you could talk a little bit more about this — how it comes up, how your deeper understanding of particular issues helps, what ideas those participators are bringing to the table and what it all results in.

TK: There’s never really a conflict so much as the two conflating to become taxing situations. Of course there’s the incidents that all trans people (and all marginalized people, for their respective marginalizations, for that matter) are weary of- cis people simply expecting to be educated, though they may even be resistant to this knowledge, and assuming that their journey to enlightenment is our responsibility. I usually come to workshops with the energy and expectation to deal with this, but the worst I guess is when it happens outside of workshops, in my daily life, or in my personal internet presence on social media or some such. I don’t think many people actually understand the mental labour that goes into coaxing someone to understand something new. Of course, sometimes I’m deemed too close to the issue to really be objective about it, and my authority on the matter is undermined that way- it’s a bit of a paradox. Usually employed by people who have no intention of understanding, but rather proving to themselves that they tried and that they were ultimately right.

In terms of improvising, there are always questions that ask for things not covered in the workshop. Usually I try to share a consensus with my fellow facilitators if I have any, about whether we could go over the question, or it would open up a discussion much more advanced than a 101 and that we need to skip for time concerns. Having a deeper understanding of the material helps us decide these things, or improvise ways of answering exactly what the person attending may be confused about in a short amount of time.

FM: I hear that! I have definitely, in my own experience with facilitation, noticed that there is a huge difference in the types of dialogues that are produced when you have folks who want to be better about an issue and folks who think that they’re already in the right. It’s also almost always (in my experience) the latter who expect you to educate them outside of the workshop space, at their whim — I think, maybe, those attitudes go hand-in-hand.

It’s interesting to think about this sort of participator in terms of the ‘space’ concept I mentioned at the beginning, though, as well. Maybe the lack of distinct physical space for workshops gives this type of participator the (incredibly misinformed) idea that any encounter with a marginalized person or an educator of this type is, itself, a site for facilitation? Further, what other effects do you think the temporary quality of physical spaces might have on workshop environments or how workshops and discussions are conducted?

TK: Well, the part where people just seem to expect education from marginalized people comes from a fundamental lack of empathy, in my opinion. I usually attribute it to a kind of ‘mental space’: everyone makes different mental spaces for different encounters. When with a friend, you’d make a mental space of friendliness or familiarity, or when dealing with an acquaintance you’d make a mental space of politeness or distance: I’ve found that a lot of cis or white people have treated me as if I’m some sort of kiosk (laugh). I think that there’s some sort of part where who I am (queer, poc) compromises any mental state that they would make while talking to me.

It’s actually something I’ve found because workshop spaces have such a transient nature to them- it’s usually a club office, or a rented meeting space at a restaurant/cafe. There are no assigned places for workshops the way there are for lectures or meetings, so the actual workshop space is a sort of… collective mental one that you join in on when you enter a workshop. The facilitators set the rules and boundaries for the meeting at the start of the session, and these rules hold until the end; I’m not entirely decided yet on whether or not this has a positive or negative effect on the workshop experience and endeavor in general. On one hand, the construction of the mental space makes for attendees that are more engaged and remember more; on the other, it might take away from the perceived legitimacy of the session, and consequently, the information presented in the session. I’ve found that it helps bring a more casual air to workshops, where people feel comfortable asking questions but also understand the deeply personal nature of some of the politics that are being discussed.

FM: I think a mind ‘space’ is exactly what it is. And this creation of ‘workshop’ environment in terms of the written and unwritten rules of behaviour is exactly what changes the physical space into a workshop or discussion space for a short time. How have these mind spaces met with the physical spaces in the past? Have there been particularly fruitful meetings of environment/space? have there ever been particularly poor spaces? Have the physical spaces or what might have been going on around the workshop ever ‘intruded,’ so to speak, on the workshop? If so, what was the result?

TK: I mean, spaces that can be closed off from the general public are always better. There have always been smaller interruptions, especially when the space is one that’s usually used for something else: club rooms always have someone or another coming by for something, and the SSMU general space in particular always has other students and other clubs making noise. A common interruption is when someone steps into a club room, unaware that it’s a workshop space at the moment, and the facilitators end up having to explain to them what’s going on; they either stay or leave, but the bewilderedness of finding the space reappropriated to something they weren’t expecting is still present. That’s essentially what workshops have been like for me so far- reappropriating a physical space with a mind space. The problem is when using an open space that other people already have a mental space of before the workshop space is constructed.

I remember a safe space training workshop that was held in the SSMU general; I wasn’t facilitating, but I was familiar with the material and the facilitators. We were seated around a table at the far end of the space, when somebody else, a tall white dude sat at the table and interrupted to ask what was happening. The facilitators had to re-draw the rules and boundaries for the newcomer, a bit sloppily because of time constraints, and I could feel a shift in the space to a palpably uncomfortable one that was particularly difficult for the facilitators. He kept asking questions about things that had been covered before he had arrived and taking up more time and space. The mind space of the workshop had been compromised, even though the workshop was open to everyone, this sudden interruption made the facilitators lose grasp over the space somewhat.

I’ve always enjoyed the workshops and discussions I’ve facilitated in the more closed spaces for this reason, I suppose. When I was working with the Concordia groups more extensively later on, the CGA lent us a room to use, that was upstairs in a Concordia building with a door that closed and locked. It was spacious enough to hold a good amount of people, and made for a more intimate, let’s say, environment where a certain safe space and facilitator’s authority was able to be held but people would still feel free to contribute or ask questions.

FM: I guess, in that way, you do need physical spaces that can at least work with the ‘space’ of a workshop, rather than against it. The story you told is an interesting one in terms of those rules of behaviour I mentioned earlier but also in terms of audience. I mean, I think that it is 100% the job of the privileged group to seek out knowledge, rather than the oppressed group constantly trying to provide it, but there is a tendency with workshop environments to have a certain participator in mind and it does make for a lot of familiar faces and fewer new ones, depending on the type of facilitation/discussion you’re running. Part of this could very well be due to the transient nature of the physical spaces, which makes things less accessible, but I also think that there are a lot of people who just aren’t willing to participate in this sort of knowledge production, aren’t interested in entering the mind ‘space’ of the workshop. What do you think about this problem? Do you see it as a problem? What can or should be done, in your opinion? Also, do you think that this sort of issue of audience is the same across the board for the different sorts of anti-oppression workshops you’ve run or do you think there are differences and, if so, why?

TK: Well, I guess it mostly comes down to an issue of mental and emotional labour. Of course there are going to be more belligerent attendees, and the amount of effort that it takes to deal with them aren’t necessarily fair to ask from facilitators who are of marginalized groups, whose knowledge runs a risk of being deemed too ‘subjective’ by these attendees. My personal opinion is that more privileged allies should be involved with workshops- those who can listen and help the marginalized facilitator speak from their depth of understanding, while being the one who doesn’t have to put in as much effort and is not at as much risk as the marginalized facilitator when dealing with a more resistant audience.

The knowledge being produced for an audience in a workshop is a very constructed and thought-out process designed to open up a discourse in every attendee’s life- interruptions are accounted for, and actually often lead to very interesting discussions (once during a trans 101 a discussion on preferred pronouns that hadn’t been part of the workshop was opened up and was very involved and enlightening) but it only works when the space has a clear respect for the facilitator, and subsequently for the process of knowledge production being brought to the session.

It’s a bit of a dilemma, I guess. I’ve been to many a workshop where it was simply me, the facilitator, and a bunch of people already involved with the cause and frankly didn’t need the workshop. I definitely think workshops need to reach a broader audience and those outside of the organizing groups, but that runs the risk of having attendees like the tall guy I mentioned. In an optimal world, facilitators would always be paired with one who is part of the marginalized group being taught about and one very adamant ally to sort of verbally wrassle down some of the more problematic attendees (laugh). Workshops for social justice issues still tend to be very small-scale efforts with little funding- as I mentioned earlier, Concordia had plans to integrate mandatory consent workshops for first years in the residences that fell through- and levels of security, safety, and authority are slippery things to maintain without bigger forces to back us up. And even with official sanction, it tends to become difficult to reach people with a workshop- I remember my first year in undergrad having a mandatory dorm workshop on various issues near the beginning of the year. I heard many complaints from my floormates before and after the workshop, and even found people skipping it because they found it ‘stupid’ and ‘unnecessary’ (which is quite inaccurate given the rate of sexual assault in dorms and, speaking from personal experience, the disregard for my queerness or pronouns). I very much appreciated that the RA for my floor was very strict about attendance, and felt that it did create an environment where I felt safer talking about and pointing out bad experiences than it could have been.

So. There’s no concrete solution I’ve come across yet, but I guess it comes down to that- more vigilant allyship from people and organizations in positions of power and authority.

The post Workshop Facilitation and Transient ‘Space’: An Interview appeared first on &.

When approaching professors and professional members of TAG, I was told I should consider interviewing student members about the Lab and the forms of knowledge they create. Therefore, I sought to interview two student members from different disciplinary backgrounds. Unfortunately, the other student was unavailable for an interview before the 15 of December. If possible, we will conduct our interview at a later date and I shall update this post to demonstrate the plurality of voices found within TAG.

In this interview for Mess and Method [Fall 2015, “What is a Media Lab?” edition], Marie-Christine Lavoie speaks with an anonymous student member from Concordia’s Technoculture, Art and Games (TAG). This interview seeks to understand how different members understand and define TAG, and how the lab produces knowledge. Overall, this interview seeks to obtain an inside look at how TAG functions within Academia. This interview was conducted through email correspondence.

ML: Hello and thank you for agreeing to this interview. If possible, could you briefly explain the benefits, or the reason, for remaining anonymous?

A: Note that this won’t actually be anonymous, even if you don’t include my name, because of the other information you’ve asked for and the small size of the lab. It’ll be easy to guess who I am. Knowing that, I’m self-censoring to some extent because it’s dangerous not to. Professors don’t like to acknowledge this, but they hold a fair bit of power over us as students, since they’re the ones who mark our papers, write us letters of recommendation, sign off on RA contracts, grant us permission to use the lab, and so on and so forth. Those hierarchies make it very difficult for a student (or staff member) to be open and honest about their thoughts or experiences. Marginalized people, and students who are not Canadian citizens and/or don’t have access to scholarships or support from their families, and so are relying on RA contracts for their survival, are particularly vulnerable.

ML: Thank you for taking the time to do this interview considering these circumstances.

ML: Can you introduce yourself? What lead you to this field of research, and what kind of work happens on a daily basis at TAG?

A: I’m a 3rd year PhD student in the Humanities program, but I’ve been with the lab for…6 years now? Something like that. I got involved with the lab through the student-run 5a7s[1]. Eventually I was asked to work on a research assistant contract, which sort of made me a member by default. I got involved in games for two reasons. The first was that a lot of my friends in my undergrad played videogames, and some of them played a LOT, and I wanted to know why. I’d mostly stopped playing games myself, aside from the occasional round of Mario Kart, and we had very few games in my house growing up, so I think I was curious. At the time I was doing a Fine Arts degree, and feeling like the art world was this really insular thing, composed mostly of artists talking to other artists and art critics, but not the general public (sound familiar?). I wanted to work with a medium that more people could relate to and access, and games seemed like a good candidate. I knew almost nothing about games at that point, or game studies, or media studies, so it was a steep learning curve when I started my MA based on a project about digital role-playing games.

ML: Could you explain what TAG is and what it means to you?

A: That’s a tough question. I used to have what in retrospect seems like a very optimistic and naïve view of TAG. Mostly it seemed like a great way to meet people and get involved in interesting projects. It provided a lot of opportunities and a sense of community that I wouldn’t have had if I’d just stuck to my MA program. That’s still the case, but I’m much more aware of the costs and limitations of the space and the institution it’s a part of. I like the way Sarah Ahmed puts it, “we learn about worlds from the difficulties we have transforming them.” Thanks to that, I’m more aware of the different ways that women and men, for example, are treated, and of the hypocrisy that is so prevalent in the humanities, where people tend to see themselves and their work as progressive almost by default, while remaining completely unaware of their own privilege/power or the role they play in perpetuating an abusive and exploitative system. I’ve seen how people get pushed out of the space, and silenced in the name of protecting reputations and avoiding “conflict.” I also feel like TAG is somewhat unwittingly playing along with the neoliberalization and corporatization of the university. We’re benefiting from the fact that games are “big business,” which means that we’re able to attract funding where other research centres or fields cannot, but it increasingly feels like that funding comes with conditions and/or tacit pressure to collaborate with the industry in some way or another, and that really frustrates me. Public-private partnerships always sound good on paper, but in the end all we’re doing in funneling more public money into private hands, a process that is eroding democracy and further impoverishing people who rely on public services and social support networks. That doesn’t mean of course that there aren’t lots of benefits that TAG provides to non-commercial initiatives or organizations, or that there aren’t people within TAG that are critical of these processes, but it’s the big picture that really worries me.

ML: TAG stands for “Technoculture, Arts and Games”, but what do you make of this name? What does it mean in the context of the work you are doing in this lab?

A: It’s a pretty vague title, and I guess that’s positive in the sense that it allows for more flexibility and breadth in the kind of research that fits under the TAG label. But honestly I’ve never been very interested in defining art or games, let alone technoculture, because every time I see someone try to impose a fixed definition on these things it ends out being exclusionary and/or limiting rather than helpful.

ML: So then what do you think of TAG’s label as “an interdisciplinary centre for research”?

A: To me it means that people come from very different backgrounds and disciplinary fields, or that they don’t belong to any one field in particular. I think it’s how things should be to be honest. Disciplinary silos are a result of institutional pressures and the need to distinguish yourself from the “competition,” but I don’t think they’re helpful overall. In fact, they can be incredibly harmful, especially when they help to justify the complete elimination of critical discourse or thinking from a curriculum.

ML: TAG is often referred to as a Game lab, what do you think of this definition? Additionally, is TAG unique compared to other labs on and off campus?

A: Well it makes it clear which letter is being prioritized in the TAG acronym. I don’t think the definition is inappropriate or inaccurate, although it could definitely be acting as a barrier to anyone who’s not primarily interested in games. It’s hard to know how TAG compares to other labs because I haven’t spent nearly as much time in other labs. It definitely feels different to me than other spaces, but I have no idea whether or not it’s unique.

ML: As a spaces involved in the formation of knowledge, how does the surrounding labs affect TAG?

A: Occasionally there are collaborations with other labs or people who move back and forth between them, but for the most part there doesn’t seem to be much interaction. I think in some ways labs are often made to compete with one another for space and resources, and that combined with the fact that we are all subjected to productivity metrics that force us to concentrate on our own work at the expense of forming collaborations or taking on new projects makes it more difficult to form lasting relationships with other labs. The sense I get is that TAG is the “golden child” of Concordia’s upper administration, both because it helps to attract new students and is working in an area that the government sees as a key site of economic development.

ML: Bruno Latour explains in Laboratory Life that Laboratories produce knowledge that can become facts and/or artifacts. What kind of knowledge or facts does TAG output? If you had access to different equipment or facilities, would this knowledge, this output, change?

A: That’s hard to talk about succinctly—it’s all over the place. Certainly people are learning how to make games, and we’re also practicing and experimenting with different ways of talking about games. For me though, I feel like the most important knowledge I’ve gained/produced has been mostly about the internal politics of the university, the politics of games, and how these relate to broader power structures. TAG is a place where I can see how these dynamics play out, and I can analyze them based on knowledge I’ve acquired outside or on the margins of the university, mostly through interactions with other people and the things I’ve read online. But I wouldn’t say that this is the case for everyone, or even most people. It’s certainly not the kind of knowledge that is being officially sanctioned or published—if anything, it’s feels like it’s being repressed.

I actually think it’s a mistake to reduce “knowledge production” to writing. It’s even worse to reduce it to writing that conforms to academic standards and protocols, like the peer-reviewed journal article or the book chapter. Even though TAG does produce those things, I personally see this as the least important form of knowledge work we do. I know this makes me a bad academic, but I hate writing for other academics, according to all the unspoken codes about how you should or should not say things. It’s incredibly restrictive, it makes it almost impossible for me to write about what I really care about, and it makes everything I write inaccessible to all but a few elites. The knowledge work that I do that I really care about are my blog posts, Facebook comments, conversations, resource lists, lectures. It’s the articles and videos that I pass on to friends—because even if we don’t produce those things ourselves, serving as a conduit to alternative narratives and critical analysis is important work. It’s the objects I make (or try to make), like the game I’m working on about gentrification, and the experiences I create by organizing and running events. All of this matters so much more to me than journal articles, and I’m going to resist writing them, because I think the way we value and rank knowledge, the way we decide what “counts” as knowledge, is broken. We’re all being held hostage–because everyone knows that your academic career is dependent on your publication count–but we’re also the ones reinforcing that system by playing along and following the rules.

I wish TAG would play a more active role in advocating for alternative forms of knowledge production. if we’re going to change this broken system, which by the way is incredibly profitable for major publishers that are benefiting from all this unpaid labour, we need an organized, sustained campaign. As students, we also need reassurance from professors that they won’t pressure us to publish or punish us for not following the standard academic protocols, that they will make efforts to change how hiring committees work whenever and wherever they have the power to do so, and that they’ll support us if we decide to take the fight to the upper admin. I realize this is wishful thinking, but I do think that this is what’s necessary if we want to see substantial changes in how the system works, and who benefits from it. I don’t think that new equipment or facilities would have that much of an impact on the kind of knowledge that is being produced. I think a much bigger factor is the kind of cultural shift that has been taking place over the last year or two. But that’s a long, slow process.

ML: Could you talk about the kinds of projects TAG is involved with?

Oof there are tons. Off the top of my head, there’s speedrunning, “serious games” and education, virtual reality, Minecraft, modding, costume games, the Indie Megabooth project… Most of them I’m not qualified to talk about because I don’t know enough about them. TAG also runs a lot of workshops, game jams, public arcades, and so on. These things have an impact, although I sometimes wish that more of what we did was politically engaged and critical and formatted for the public rather than other academics. Gamerella [2]is great but we need more of that, and not just for game-makers. There are so many conversations that we could be having but aren’t. There’s also the fact that TAG, like pretty much all academic institutions, has a tendency to colonize the work of surrounding communities, individuals, and organizations. It can do this because TAG members are often involved in projects outside of TAG, and it’s easy to classify the work they do as TAG projects, even if this isn’t how they are being presented or conceived of by the people actually doing the work. In some ways it’s the price we pay for the institutional support and resources TAG provides. Whoever has the money gets to call the shots, and take the credit.

ML: Could you talk about the TAG community? How has/could the community help you with your goals?

A: Parts of the TAG community are very close, and there is a lot of mutual aid and support, which is wonderful. There’s also lots of conflict and tension, people who are being unintentionally excluded or marginalized, and disagreements about how the space can or should be run. I feel like I’ve personally invested a lot in the community, and while there has been a lot of stress and pain that’s come out of that, and a lot of lost trust, it’s also been rewarding in a lot of ways. TAG is also a very fluid community, because as I mentioned so many of the people involved in TAG have connections outside of that, and so it’s hard to separate it completely from other spaces, like for example [3]MRGS or [4]Pixelles, just because there’s so much overlap in terms of who’s involved.

ML: Could you talk about the process involved in become a TAG member?

A: Well there are the explicit rules, and then there are the implicit rules. In my experience it’s the implicit rules that matter, since the explicit rules can usually be bent. Most of the TAG members are Concordia graduate students, and it’s definitely much easier to become a member if you have student status. It also helps if you’re a white cis man, although we’re making efforts to change that. It helps if you don’t have children, if you can afford to live in the city, if you’re able-bodied and neurotypical, if you like to drink beer and don’t need a job to support yourself, if you can speak and write English fluently, if you’ve played a lot of games since a young age, if you’re familiar with academic jargon, if your politics aren’t too radical, if you don’t mind being hit on, and so on. Technically the people who don’t fall into these categories are allowed to be members, but that doesn’t mean they’re able to participate or have access to the space to the same degree as people who do meet these criteria. Also most of this is never really talked about openly, even though there are a lot more conversations about these things now then there were when I first started coming to TAG, thanks in large part a lot of hidden, unacknowledged labour that’s been going on behind the scenes.

ML: What kind of equipment can you find in the TAG lab? Are they useful to everyone? If not, why is it so important to have these (sewing machines, 3D printer, computers, gaming consoles, etc.)?

A: Not all the equipment is useful to everyone, but that’s not necessarily a problem so long as someone is using it. I actually find the equipment most useful when it comes to running events or workshops. That said, most of what I borrow comes from Hexagram (or what used to be Hexagram), not TAG. If we need laptops, projectors, cables, consoles, keyboards, etc. it can be really helpful to have a large pool that we can draw from. I’m involved in running a small non-profit and we would never be able to afford this equipment otherwise, so in that sense it’s incredibly important. It’s just a shame that access to most of the equipment is limited to students or professors. One of the things I think students can do, aside from fighting these institutional restrictions, is to serve as conduits or relays so that people outside the institution, i.e. the general public, can also make use of this equipment.

ML: TAG recently relocated to a new, more open space. What kind of spaces do you have access to as a member of this lab? Do you feel the new space is better?

A: I like the new location. It’s a nicer room than the last one, it’s bigger, and we have a better view. Having the small side rooms is also useful when you want to have a private conversation and need somewhere to go. Personally I find it hard to get work done in TAG most of the time, because there are so many people there and I’m easily distracted. I don’t use the equipment much because I tend to just work on my laptop, so as long as there’s a free table and a chair I don’t really care about the layout—I’ll work anywhere.

Aside from the TAG rooms, I also have access to the Fine Arts Research Facilities (FARF) labs and work spaces. Having access to these is definitely useful, mostly just as relatively quiet places to meet and work. On a less formal level, I have access to other labs and conferences partly as a result of my affiliation with TAG. If I wanted to it would be fairly easy for me to go to just about any other game lab for a visit.

ML: Do you think these spaces are unique compared to other spaces? Is there anything you would change?

A: I don’t know if they’re unique. Maybe in some respects, but I also think they very much reflect what’s going on in the rest of the world. There are lots of things I would change if I could. I would try and eliminate, as much as possible, the hierarchies that exist, redistribute funding, and increase transparency in order to democratize the space. I would try to forge more connections with activist communities and marginalized populations that really need access to the things we so often take for granted. I would dismantle the university system and rebuild it, eliminating grades, exams, degrees and everything else that’s built on the myth of “meritocracy” but that ultimately ends out reinforcing structural oppression. But in order to do that we’d have to change the entire society.

ML: Could you tell us a bit about the project you have done, are doing, or are thinking of doing as part of TAG? How does someone’s project become a TAG project?

A: I’m looking at indie and alternative game communities/organizations, how they function internally, and what their role is in the broader videogame ecosystem. I’m on the board of the Mount Royal Game Society and got involved in that organization through the people I met at TAG, so in that sense my work there has always been connected to TAG, although as an organization we try to do things independently wherever possible. The problem is that as a small non-profit, we are always somewhat reliant on large institutional bodies or other holders of physical and financial capital in order to do the work that we do, i.e. organizing and running events. There’s also the fact that it’s only by incorporating my volunteer work into my PhD that I’m able to dedicate as much time to it as I do, and I’m worried about the implications of that relationship. We’re lucky that most of the time there are very few visible, explicit strings attached whenever we ask for money or support from TAG, but it’s still a form of dependency that is uncomfortable at best. So for me there are definitely benefits to being associated with TAG, but it’s not as straightforward as that question suggest.

ML: Thank you for taking the time to write this interview. Do you have anything you would like to say to our readers?

A: No problem. I don’t think I have anything to add. I’m not really happy with the projects I’ve done in the past, so I’d prefer not to talk about them, and the things I’m doing now are collective efforts, and not something I feel comfortable classifying as “TAG projects.”

ML: Again, thank you so much for this interview and best of luck during the end of semester.

[1] “TAG students also organize a weekly open house between 5 and 7 PM, where researchers and members of the community get together to play, talk and create game related works. These events are open to the public and we encourage anyone interested in becoming involved with the Centre to stop by and learn more. This is the first entry point to TAG and is the BEST way to meet people and learn about what we do” http://tag.hexagram.ca/about/

[2] “GAMERella offers the opportunity to meet more women, PoC and gender-non conforming people (as well as anyone who support minorities in the industry) interested in game development. TAG wishes not only to encourage underrepresented people and first-time game jammers to join in on the excitement, but also to celebrate the representation of diversity in the videogame community” http://tag.hexagram.ca/gamerella/

[3] The Mount Royal Game Society http://mrgs.ca/category/games/page/4/

[4] “Pixelles is a non-profit organization dedicated to empowering more women to make and change games, founded by Tanya Short and Rebecca Cohen-Palacios. Pixelles organizes free monthly workshops, a mentorship program for aspiring women-in-games, game jams, socials and more” http://pixelles.ca/

The post An anonymous interview with TAG student member appeared first on &.

Joanna Berzowska founded XS Labs in 2002 at Concordia, where they focus on “the development and design of electronic textiles, responsive clothing, wearable technologies, reactive materials, and squishy interfaces.” Previous to XS Labs, Berzowska studied and worked at the MIT Media Lab, and she co-founded International Fashion Machines with Maggie Orth. She holds a BA in Pure Mathematics and a BFA in Design Arts.

The kind of work that Berzowska engages in is profoundly interdisciplinary and crosses distinctions that we might automatically put up between design, industry, art, and theory. Her work has been shown at the Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum in New York, the V&A in London, and at Ars Electronica in Linz, Austria, among others. Her lab at Concordia is located on the 10^th floor of the EV and is part of the textiles cluster.

I met Joanna Berzowska for a coffee in St. Henri on December 10 to discuss wearable technology, her experience working at the MIT Media Lab, the agency of things, and what she believes is important for building an interdisciplinary space.

First of all, why do you call XS Labs a “lab”? Instead of say a “studio”? With International Fashion Machines, for example, I notice they call themselves a “company” — why “lab”?

I think part of the reason I originally called it a lab was just out of habit, because I was at the MIT Lab, and “lab” implies a kind of research culture… I’m thinking about it right now, because I guess I’ve never thought about it in depth… So part two of my answer is that it was a very direct, easy way of referencing research culture. Part three is a very strong emphasis at the time — when I was hired by Concordia fourteen years ago — to re-brand the institution as a research institution as opposed to a teaching institution. So when I was hired, I was basically told, your teaching doesn’t matter, your service doesn’t matter, all that matters is your research and how much money you raise. I think it was a turning point for the university, it was like the institution swung one way, because very strongly it was trying to position itself as a viable research institution at the time. Since then, the pendulum has really swung the other way. Now I think with the new president, Alan Shepard, he’s trying to find a comfortable middle that supports research as well as entrepreneurship, but at the same time recognizes that Concordia will never be a pure research institution and that’s what Alan always says — we can’t compete with McGill, we can’t compete with Ivy League–type schools, Concordia is unique. But when I was hired, the push was really, for a year or two, it’s all about research. So that’s part three of my answer, which is political in a sense. Going back to part two, it was important that “lab” reference research culture in a direct way, especially being in the Fine Arts, where, at that time, all the funding bodies and all of the potential sources of research income did not recognize what we now call “research-creation” as a viable way of working.

What’s interesting is I originally called it “XS Labs,” and even within that there’s an embedded critique. “XS” official stands for “Extra Soft” and it’s about soft circuits, it’s about soft electronics, but of course when you read it, it also sounds like “excess,” so there’s an embedded critique of a kind of contrast between a lot of research in Humanities, which is inherently critical of how we apply technology or how society embraces new changes, and then research in let’s say the sciences or Engineering, which don’t question it as much, but really just pursues innovation. The reason I chose the word “XS” was to have this critique. A lot of what I’m doing is in Engineering, science-type research, and we’re just going to put as much electronics as we can into all of these textiles and wearables, but, being in the Fine Arts, I’m also aware that we have to do so in a very deliberative, interrogative way, and question it at each step of the way. So that’s very much the tradition of XS Labs. And also, since XS Labs started, it’s XS Labs, colon, and what comes after the colon has evolved. So now I do refer to it as a design research studio. I’ve examined every couple of years the kind of work that we do, and these days I call it a design research studio, but the name is still XS Labs, so I guess I just want it all [laughs].

You’ve worked with the MIT Media Lab’s Tangible Media Group. This semester we’ve read a bit of Stewart Brand and have talked about California ideology and its very utopian take on technology. I read in an interview with you [with Jake Moore] where you were talking about researchers such as [Steve] Mann or [Hiroshi] Ishii who work with wearable technology in a way where it’s an exoskeleton or a kind of protective layer. And I was wondering if “Extra Soft” is a response to this kind of ethos that came out of working with the Media Lab and this situation where technology is celebrated as utopic and where wearable technology is something protective.

Yeah. So at the Media Lab there was definitely a strong gender divide actually, between how wearables were tackled by male researchers — and also, maybe coincidentally, the female researchers had more of a background in design or the arts. These are all stereotypes, which unfortunately were instantiated in my experience. So, women who I worked with, like Elise Co, Maggie Orth, who was my business partner for a while, Amanda Parkers, who came later, who’s now very active in the space, and then the dudes that I worked with, who were Brad Rhodes, Thad Starner, who ended up working for Google Glass, and Steve Mann, who’s a prof now at U of T [University of Toronto] — the women had more of a design and art background. I’m not saying it’s necessarily because of gender that they were more in touch with embodied sorts of questions, perhaps it was because of their past training, but maybe the past training was tied to gender. There was in fact one woman who was a really hardcore engineer, she still is, and she worked with Ros Picard [Rosalind W. Picard], who’s also a woman and also a hardcore engineer, so maybe the background training is more relevant in terms of the women that I worked with who were more interested in what we now refer to as embodied interaction, and considering the body as crucial — they were interested in textiles and the surface of the skin and what I now call beyond-the-wrist interaction —

Beyond the wrist…?

Whereas the dudes were really interested in things that you can manipulate with your hands and head-mounted displays, I was more interested in what happens on the rest of the body. And in many ways what happens on the rest of the body can be considered as dirty or sexual or smelly or provocative, so that doesn’t fit as easily into an Engineering research model, where you don’t have a specific problem to solve. And of course there are many problems, like how do you track baby kicks during a pregnancy, or whatever [laughs]. But, I certainly was more interested in the textiles, the rest of the body, how can we embed computation in textiles rather than attach devices to our bodies. And one corollary of that is also an interest in simpler kinds of computation. So, you know, the more cyborg approach to wearable computing basically strives to develop a computer as powerful as possible that is wearable and portable and now we have them [points to phone recording conversation] — these phones are kind of that, right? So, keep in mind this was twenty years ago, and the idea was, how can we take our computer with us all over the place? And now we do it with our phones, it’s funny. But back then, it was basically, you had to put the hard drive in the backpack, you have to take it all in pieces, have a huge antenna for your satellite GPS, etc. That’s wearable computing very literally, where you wear the same kind of computer that you have on your desk, whereas with my electronic textiles and the soft computation, it wasn’t a computer as you know it from your desk, but computation, how can you have wearable computing that is about simple kinds of interactions or simple kinds of functionality that are more interested perhaps in well-being or pleasure or just everyday experience or communication rather than just taking your computer from your office. That’s where the Extra Soft comes from, and there’s so many references, because also there’s hard science versus soft science.

It also sometimes seems like a lot of wearable technology aims to be “corrective” somehow, but you’re not really trying to “correct” the body. You’re trying to do something different.

“Extend” is usually what I say, whatever that means. Or not bring about some huge productivity gain or something but instead allow us to experience the world in a slightly different way.

To go back to the lab for a minute, is XS Labs one lab space or is it a series of lab spaces now in the EV?

Going back to the lab I realized there was something else that I wanted to say, so I’m glad you brought it up again. Another reason why I called it a “lab” is also that I wanted another way of working with my students. Traditionally in the Fine Arts when you work with grad students, they work on their own individual projects and you maybe advise them, you provide critique, whereas in the sciences and Engineering, they’re research assistants and you pay them for their time and they work not on your project but on a group project. I remember when I first came I was always using the plural “we” even though I only had maybe one research assistant, and people were very surprised, they were like, why aren’t you saying “I” or “my work,” and it’s because I was coming from a research lab culture, where every research paper that’s published has multiple authors, and you don’t work alone, ever, so that was another reason why I wanted to call it a “lab” and to train the students that I hired to not think of it as a job but to think of it as a collective inquiry that everybody will be credited for and everybody will benefit from. There were a lot of issues that we came up against of course where there was confusion between what would be their own individual practice and what is the research lab practice, so I tried to have very specific guidelines around how we credit, what people can take credit for, and how everybody had to credit everybody else’s work, and that’s a whole other kind of discussion.

In terms of physical space, we’ve always had one space that’s shifted over the last fifteen years, that’s smaller or larger, that was like our headquarters. Then through Hexagram and other facilities we needed to use or have access to other spaces either through the more technical work we needed to do, like the weaving, or, at one point, I was collaborating with a prof in Materials Science on Nitinol, so we had all of these other spaces where work was done, mostly leveraging specific facilities and expertise. With Materials Science we needed specific furnaces to shape the Nitinol and quench it. We’ve got different kinds of looms or laser cutters. Or, collaborating with École Polytechnique, we’ve had some of our students there developing new fibres. But we’ve always had this little central headquarters. [Nitinol, “also known as muscle wire, is a shape memory alloy (SMA) of nickel and titanium that has the ability to indefinitely remember its geometry”; it is used, for example, in XS Lab’s Skorpions dress.]

When you yourself go into the lab, do you have any daily rituals that you find yourself performing there?

I’ll just say that I was Chair of the department for three years and now I’m on sabbatical and I’m pregnant, so what I do now does not reflect historically. Maybe I’ll just talk about the previous ten years, when there was a strong routine and a strong practice. I always had my days organized — certain days I devoted to teaching and office hours — certain days to service — meaning all the committee work, etc., and all of the research assistants who worked with me, some of them were grad students, some of them were undergrads, some of them were affiliates, there was really a wide range of different ways that I worked with students and research assistants. We had one weekly meeting, where everybody was expected to attend. So that was a sort of ritual where we’d touch base and I would give goals and guidance to everybody for the week. I also had somewhat of a hierarchical structure, where students who had been there longer would be responsible for training some of the younger students, and by younger I don’t mean age, but the newer ones. A lot of the culture in a research lab isn’t about hiring skilled personnel, it’s about training HQP [Highly Qualified Personnel], that’s what we write in the grant proposals [laughs]. So I hire students with potential who don’t necessarily have the skills that I want them to have, and part of what we do is train them. I would pay them to take workshops or classes, but I would also really expect them to teach one another and I would hire very complementary kinds of personalities who could teach each other, and the work is intrinsically interdisciplinary, which is where I think you’re going with this anyway. So that kind of collaboration was really crucial to the success of the work.

I’m very interested in research-creation. Would you say there’s any divide in your work between the research and the creation? Do you have a space more for inspiration and a separate theoretical component, or is that tied together for you?

It’s really tied together because the creation is about questioning technology and doing things with technology that were not possible in the past. So for me, creation is not about what colour is it — let’s talk about garments since we make a lot of those — it was never really about, what does the garment look like — it is, what would it mean to have a garment that moved on your body and moved in an uncomfortable way? What would it mean to have a garment that needs energy but doesn’t have batteries and needs to harness energy from the environment or from somebody else’s body. So for me that’s the creative aspect, and then being able to formulate that into a research question that leads to a successful research grant proposal. And then, working with a team that is very creative, so that the potential answers to these questions that we suggest can be described as beautiful or evocative or playful. And they do get invited to be shown in galleries and museums, which I guess is sort of the institutional stamp of approval for the creation side. I’m not an artist. I’ve never had a solo show as an artist. I really think of myself much more as a researcher. But a big part of my dissemination happens in museums and galleries.

So you wouldn’t consider yourself an artist, but you show in galleries? And your inspiration is not so much connected to the fashion, but connected to questions about technology?

Yes. Like how can we really break down what a garment is. Or what a textile is. And how can we use all of these emerging materials that are being used in aerospace or the automobile industries or whatever, but use them in garments. What kinds of new functionalities would they enable? New forms of expression. New ways of connecting with one another. But also, how would they help us understand the world in a different way? Question the world. The project Caption Electric and Battery Boy is really about questioning our dependence on energy and batteries and portables. The major point there was to create garments that are sort of ridiculous and uncomfortable. And the thematic that runs through it is one of fear and paranoia and fear of natural disasters and protection, so it’s deeply linked. And then in order for me to be able to raise the money that I’ve raised that’s more from the sciences and Engineering, there’s always a very strong scientific or engineering innovation in the project. And I would feel like a fraud if there weren’t.

Do you think with working on very highly funded projects, with industry and with big labels, do you see that as in any way compromising your vision? Or extending it? Do you find that working with big industries provides a positive constraint or something where you have to really compromise your creative work?

It’s a different kind of vision. I don’t see them as contradictory. The obstacle to work in my experience has just been the really kind of overwhelming bureaucratic aspect of administering large research grants at the university, where I ended up just spending so much of my money doing paper work and filing reports and filing expense reports in a thoroughly inefficient way… Industry can’t afford to have the same kind of level of inefficiency that we have in academia… They would go out of business. So that’s super refreshing. Of course then we have a board of directors that we have to answer to. We have to show a business model that would be profitable with an X amount of years. Whether that business model involves being acquired by Google or having sales or whatever, I mean that’s another questions, it’s the VC [Venture Capital] world.

That’s interesting, because usually we see the academy as the place where we can sort of nurture our bigger ideas and industry as a place where we have to compromise. But that’s not your experience?

It’s different ideas. But what’s really exciting is there’s different kinds of industry. And right now with the start-up culture around new technology, it’s all about innovation and wonder and discovery that, sure, you have to have a business model, but that can be viewed as a benefit rather than an impediment… I’ve also worked on projects with creative studios. So industry doesn’t necessarily mean military or medical devices. Industry can also mean Cirque du Soleil. Or working with PixMob, which is a great company, some of my ex students started it. So industry, sure, has to have a business model, and if it’s not profitable, it will go out of business, but it doesn’t mean you don’t innovate or you don’t do exciting work. And sometimes innovation is actually stifled in academia because of all the bureaucracy and paper work. I’m being provocative of course. Because all of the assumptions you’re bringing to that question are true, but there’s also that other side.

You said you don’t see yourself as an artist. What do you think the differences are between art and design?

Everybody is going to give you a different answer. But my answer these days is that art is about one individual and design is about multiple individuals. And of course people will argue with that and I will change my mind eventually, but that’s how I think about it these days. So for me, design fits a lot better into this research model where we have multiple authors for each project. It’s almost like thinking of the research work as a theatre performance, or a play, or an orchestra, where you have a conductor, but then everybody gets credited for their own role. Whereas I find a lot of the art research-creation, it’s still about the one person who takes credit for everything even though they might have a team of people working with them. But also for me design is perhaps a little bit more concerned with the tools, the materials, the processes, rather than like the final moment of showing the piece.

So in design there’s more of a process?

No, it’s not that there is more process, but the process is almost more important than the final piece, for me, okay. Whereas the way that I think of art is that the final artefact is given more importance, culturally. In design research, the process, the materials, the steps you took, are maybe just as important or even more important. And especially when you look at that whole movement of speculative design. Or critical design coming out of the UK, with people like Dunne & Raby. In fact, there isn’t really a final outcome, but it’s all about these trajectories and interrogations and asking “what if?” and showing these speculative processes. Or experimenting with materials. But not necessarily building up to the one artefact that will go into a permanent collection somewhere.

But say with industry you would need to eventually produce an artefact—

—Yeah, you need a product—

—Or else they would be like, “where’s your product”—

Well not necessarily, because also patents are a very viable outcome of industry work. So I’m writing a lot of patents right now with OmSignal. And those aren’t artefacts. That’s IP [intellectual property] that has a high monetary value.

In your work, for example in your Skorpions dress, you describe the dress as parasitic and the wearer as a host, so a lot of agency is given to the actual items that you create. Do you see what you do as somehow aligned with biotech? These garments are almost coming “alive”?

To me, a lot of interaction design I find problematic around the idea that the human is always in control or needs to always be in control versus the idea of giving up control a little bit. And maybe that’s also just a personal philosophy as well. With being a mother. Raising two kids in this very unusual sort of circumstance where I’m not their biological mother but I’m their full-time mother and yet I don’t have the same kind of control… So I think for me, my personal life experience has also influenced the way that I think about interaction design… It’s less about biotech and more about control.

It sounds a little like actor-network theory. We read this also in communication with Stewart Brand. And the fact that objects or technology can dictate the way things go, not necessarily just the human.

One of my favourite quotes from Sherry Turkle is that computers aren’t just a projective medium, but also a constructive medium [See Sherry Turkle, The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit (New York: Simon and Schuster), 1984]. You control or project your desires on them, but they also shape what your desires are.

So it’s a collaboration in a way between the human and the technology? And this is maybe freeing?

Well, the reason I can do these things is that I’m not in an Engineering faculty where each project has to be about solving a specific problem that is then quantifiably successful or unsuccessful. I can produce these projects that exist in this much more qualitative research space, whatever that means. I don’t have to have tables and graphs for each project that I make…. I don’t need to do those kinds of quantitative studies for my research, which allows me to explore these questions that are more — sometimes I say they’re poetic — I don’t have a very rigid theoretical structure for how I talk about these things. But it’s definitely great to have a freedom not to need a quantifiable result at the end of each project.

Is there anything about your lab that you would like to change or that you find problematic? Say, in terms of space?

When we were in that corner space on the 10^th floor, that was too small. At one point if you can imagine I had about twelve people working in there with all kinds of sewing machines and electronic stations, so that was nuts. The thing that makes a space successful is to allow everybody to feel ownership over a portion of the space. You need everybody to feel like some small portion of it is their own. To develop a level of trust where people can leave things without worrying about them being either stolen physically or the ideas stolen, so actually working on a culture of collaboration and trust is really important. Definitely in my particular discipline where we need machines there’s always going to be the need to go to other spaces to use different kinds of specialized machines or facilities. But the space itself — it’s more about the culture you create in the space, about exchange, about giving, and the way that I fostered that from the very beginning is by having a lot of parties and 5à7s. It’s all about building trust.

All images taken from the XS Labs catalogue.

The post “It’s all about building trust”: An interview with Joanna Berzowska of XS Labs appeared first on &.

This week, I had the opportunity to correspond with Dr. Erin Wunker (Contract academic faculty at Dalhousie), who I’ve had the pleasure of working with at Mount Allison University in Sackville, New Brunswick. As one of the co-founders & managing editor of the blog Hook & Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe, and the chair of the national literary organisation CWILA, Erin has been heavily involved in fostering public national conversations about women in the academe. Below, I ask Erin about why she began these conversations, about how to perform feminist and anti-oppressive work, and about whether the blog and its digital space can act as a kind of amorphous “Media Lab” where knowledge is produced, disseminated, and circulated to a specific audience.

***

So, this is kind of a funny anecdote to start the interview with. I had this long email draft sitting in my outbox to you, asking if you had the time for an interview about your work on H&E, and then I started thinking about how this time of year is so busy for everyone, but especially for contract faculty who are often working without a lot of the material luxuries (office space, printers!) of their colleagues, and so I was thinking—maybe Erin doesn’t need this extra labour right now, and I planned out three or four other potential interviews. I remember you telling me about all the reference letters and supportive/informational emails you write, about all this affective and emotional labour you perform for your students/former students regardless of your current job position. But then you saw a Facebook post I made (inspired by the work at CWILA) inviting my cohort and friends in various schools/programs to “count their syllabi” (make a quantitative record of the gender equity of reading lists), and you asked “can I interview you guys for Hook & Eye?!?,” and I thought, yes, good timing!

A rough count of the Mount Allison University English Department, Winter Semester 2015

Okay, so, why did you and co-founders Heather Zwicker and Aimée Morrison start this blog in 2010? You call it an “intervention and an invitation;” did you see or feel a need to begin these kinds of conversations?

As you note in your anecdote, coincidence is a funny thing. I’m actually in the process of co-writing an essay on the origins of Hook & Eye with the writers now! It is for Digital Diversity: Writing/Feminism/Culture edited by Susan Brown and Kathryn Holland.

The idea for the blog was Heather Zwicker’s. Heather and I knew each other from a conference I had attended at the University of Alberta called Not Drowning But Waving: Women, Feminism, and the Liberal Arts. Heather was one of the co-organizers. I had presented a paper that resulted in me getting yelled at by a number of established women professors in the room. They took issue with my methodology (I was using Althusser to talk about ideological state apparatuses before moving on to think about Kristeva’s notion of “Women’s Time”). The problem, I think in hindsight was that these women who were at the vanguard of breaking glass ceilings—or, more often, bumping up against them in the academy and dismantling them one time-consuming battle at a time, were frustrated to hear me—a graduate student—talking about the same kinds of issues they had dealt with. The reality, though, was that a room full of full professors ganged up on a graduate student. Heather, who, as I said, was one of the organizers, wasn’t in the room, but or course heard what happened. As I worked with her in the coming year to write a chapter about my experience at the conference, we kept up a conversation about our need and desire for intergenerational mentorship and open feminist discourse about and in the academy.

Heather invited me to start the blog with her, and she wanted Aimée to join us. Aimée was, at the time, an Assistant Professor. Heather was then an Associate Professor, and I was just one year into a limited term contract at Dalhousie at the Assistant Professor level. It was important to us to try and represent a range of experiences in the academy. We called it an invitation because while there are always tacit knowledges about different stages of the profession part of a feminist praxis is mentorship and community-building. We also called it an intervention because the CERC super-star scholars had just been announced and there was not one woman in the nineteen appointees. Not one. So we wanted a space to publicly address gender inequity, and when we looked for one and didn’t find it in the Canadian context we decided to start our own.

 What kinds of knowledge are produced on the blog? There’s so many different kinds of information being circulated: practical, professional, personal, anti-oppressive, revolutionary, etc… do you think the independent hosting of the site allows for these kinds of (potentially controversial) conversations because it happens (digitally, physically) outside of your workplaces?

I don’t think there is a digital divide in the case of Hook & Eye and the work that we do in our brick-and-mortar institutions. Hook & Eye averages about 1,000 views per post in the first week a post is up, and the Canadian academic context is small. Our readership, which you can see in the stats section in the backend of the site, is international, to be sure, but the majority of our readers are in Canada.

We are trying to foster critical conversations about shared contexts. Those contexts—post-secondary teaching, gender identification, Canada—are broad, and each of us writing for the blog identify with them differently. We each write from our own perspectives, and while I have been working as the Managing Editor in the last year, before that we were fairly independent, meaning we each wrote whatever we were thinking about without discussing it with the others. So if I was pressed to identify what kinds of knowledges were being produced I think the best answer I can offer is that we are working to foster and ever-diversified intersectional feminist approach to talking about, working in, and using the tools of academic rigour.

 In my mind, the blog creates a space for vital conversations about women in the academe, but it’s a digital space. Do you ever think about developing a physical or material iteration of the blog and its cohort, and do you ever meet up with your co-bloggers in person or over skype?

Digital space allows us to bring a group of people together on a weekly basis who are, in our real lives, geographically distant. The current team of weekly writers are in Halifax, Toronto, Waterloo, Edmonton, and New York. Our guest posts come from across Canada, the United States, and Britain. So digital space fosters a community conversation that would be financially impossible otherwise. That said, we—Aimée Morrison, Boyda Johnstone, Jana Smith Elford, Melissa Dalgleish, and I—have presented together at a conference using a combination of skype and actually being in the room. We meet on Google Hangout to discuss large issues. For example, we are currently in the process of migrating our site from Blogger to WordPress and refreshing our aesthetic. We are also planning a meeting in Toronto to discuss editing an anthology of Hook & Eye posts. And, we have recently been syndicated by Vitae, which is part of the Chronicle of Higher Education. We’ve met to talk about how to manage that process of writing as a branded collective for an America site.

 When I spoke about H&E in seminar, our professor Darren Wershler brought up the idea that the blog functions as a kind of trade journal for academia, especially for the precariat. Do you think about the practical and vital information the blog gives, not only about academia as a job choice but also as a kind of “forced lifestyle” that is really hard to navigate in a healthy way?

The content of the blog has evolved with the changing roster of weekly writers. When we started Aimée and Heather were in permanent positions, and I was in a limited term contract. Now, we are one tenured professor, three PhD candidates—one of whom is in an alternative academic job, and a sessional. Given that we write from our own experience the content has shifted to issues of precarity because the majority of our writers are in various precarious positions. While this is great—we have a lot of uptake on posts about precarity—we’d like to have more diverse representation. To that end I have moved into a managing editor position and have been soliciting guest posts from writers in a range of academic positions.

 As a young academic in grad school, the blog’s frank discussion about the job market and the realities of being a woman working in academia has been so valuable and vital to me. I think one of the most valuable lessons its taught me is that I am allowed to perform feminist work and feminist interventions in my academic work, and that there’s a way to do so while still staying “marketable” for my future career (if I am lucky enough to have those opportunities). I find doing explicitly feminist work to be, frankly, terrifying. In terms of intergenerational feminist mentorship, do you think having a digital medium is vital to reaching younger academics scattered around the country?

Yes. The great majority of my feminist academic mentors are people I have developed working relationships form a distance. This isn’t because I didn’t have feminist mentors in my graduate program—I absolutely did!—it is because writing for Hook & Eye has opened lines of connection with people I may never have met.

That said, doing feminist work in public absolutely is risky. That, to my mind, makes it all the more necessary, and yet, the risk is real. We need people in positions of power—hiring committees, supervisory positions, graduate and undergraduate chairs—who value intergenerational feminist mentorship as scholarly work.

 Okay, last one! You mentioned above that the blog is always working to feature a more diverse representation of academics/alt-academics (right now the weekly line up is one tenured professor, three PhD candidates, and a sessional). Do you think it’s important for colleagues and ex-colleagues to have frank conversations about the large discrepancies in privilege between these positions? What would you like to see your tenured colleagues do to acknowledge and support the precariat?

There’s a difference between acknowledging someone in a different position than yours and in supporting them. I think that there has been a real surge in understanding amongst tenured faculty that the rise in precarious labour is a critical issue for all facets fo the academic mission. The reliance on precarious labout affects students, it affects the course curriculum in departments, it affects sustainability at the level of long and short-term department planning. Tenured faculty know this, and, on the whole, are also experiencing the pressures of austerity in the academy. I’ve written about the disproportionate amount of service labour placed on associate professors. This disproportionate labour is also placed on academics of colour, as Jade Ferguson and I have written. We—by which I mean people working in the academy—need to work in our own institutions, as well as at the provincial and national level. ACCUTE has been proactive in supporting contract academic faculty by creating the Best Practice Checklist for departments, but we can do more. We need to gather data at the provincial and national levels on how many people are working in precarious positions. With data we can make clear and irrefutable arguments about the changing face of academic labour—my work with CWILA has taught me how compelling numbers can be.

 You were targeted by Halifax’s “satirical” publication Frank Magazine in October, after a letter you wrote to Rex Murphy gained national attention. The Frank piece publicly mocked your last name, your teaching, your ex students (?!?), and your political views on rape culture and Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, among other things. December 6^th just passed, and you posted your thoughts on what memorials do to remind us of violence against women, and about how you think about these women all the time. What are your thoughts on what it means to speak publicly about these issues as a woman; and has being publicly targeted changed (or reinforced) your thoughts on the vitality of your work?

I got my first rape threat on Twitter last year. Since then I have only had a handful more. That’s what I told my students in Writing in the Digital Age [a course at Dalhousie] this fall, when we did a unit on misogyny and online harassment. As we close read the Frank piece my students talked about how my saying I’ve only had about ten aggressive or rapey threats online was upsetting to them. Then we looked at the #GamerGate threats against Anita Sarkeesian, and we read the comments online about Chief Theresa Spence during her hunger strike, and we listened to former MP Megan Leslie read out rape threats that were made on Twitter to she and other women MPs in all the major parties.

Speaking about misogyny and rape culture in public scares me. My voice shakes, my palms get sweaty. I’m always waiting for the first “boo” or worse. And yet. How can I not talk about feminism? I’m trained as a close reader and a theorist, I’m politicized as an intersectional feminist, I learn from the bravery of feminists like Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, El Jones, Tanya Tagaq, Leanne Simpson, Nicole Brossard, and Megan Leslie, to name but a few. I believe in the possibility of working for change, and I feel the responsibility of my relative privilege to foster spaces to have those conversations.

***  

Thanks Erin, for this interview and for your work as a scholar and public figure!

The post Hook & Eye as Digital Feminist Media Lab: A Conversation with Dr. Erin Wunker appeared first on &.

On December 2nd, I interviewed Rainforest Scully-Blaker, an MA student in Media Studies. Last year, he worked on a project at Concordia’s MLAB that investigated communal play and spectatorship. Half of the experiment was conducted in a couch co-op (two players sitting next to each other sharing a controller) and the other half of the experiment was broadcast over the livestreaming service Twitch. I was interested in how livestreaming opens up the space of the experiment to online communities. We discussed the physical layout of the MLAB, the research methods in this experiment, and how the lab functions as a game lab.

CW: What motivated your research at the MLAB?
RSB: We wanted to investigate methods for studying play. The first part of that was a huge review of the literature to see what had been done. What we found were mostly generic ethnographic interview methods adapted to games. We were interested in the kind of things we could do uniquely with games. We wanted to do player studies that were more game-y.

CW: That led you to a live-play experimental environment?
RSB: Yes. One of us was into Let’s Play studies, [Let’s Plays are casual playthoughs of a game, usually with commentary] and my interest with speedrunning [a speedrun is a playthrough with the intent to finish the game as fast as possible, within a specific category of completion] had attracted me to Twitch and livestreaming so we decided to do both. One group (of ten ten participants) would play in pairs, passing a controller back and forth. The other group (of five) broadcast their play on Twitch for whoever was watching. One of our interests was in the family resemblance between a couch co-op and a livestreaming situation. In both cases, you’re not just playing for yourself. Either with the person sitting on the couch next to you and sharing your save file, or with potentially hundreds of people watching. We would also participate in the experiment, to simulate the chat interaction. Participants would interact with that, either with typing or over the microphone.

CW: How did you formalize the results?
RSB: The way we ended up turning the experiments into a way to produce knowledge was: once all the sessions were done we conducted exit interviews with everyone. We then broke up the results into four different papers. My research specifically was about Twitch and livestreaming.

CW: What game did you choose?
RSB: Ultimately we decided to pick Dragon Age. We had a couple people who were interested in Dragon Age and Bioware games and it was a popular enough game. The game has a lot of dialog trees and moral dilemmas.

Viewership

CW: What was the viewership on Twitch?
RSB: The viewership averaged about 2-3 across the play sessions (the sessions were 1.5 hours long). The most viewers we had at any one point was 12, at which point it was the most-viewed Dragon Age channel on Twitch.

CW: That seems like a low number of viewers. Were you expecting more?
RSB: We wanted a meaningful viewership, so we chose a new game. By the time we got approval, Dragon Age wasn’t as new. The general consensus at the time was that we didn’t anticipate having that many viewers. We decided to do everything in our power to get viewers. If we got a lot of viewers, great, but we would work with what we had.

CW: How would the experiment have changed with, say, fifty viewers?
RSB: Having a smaller audience changed things in a number of ways. One of the claims that we make is that having a small audience is similar to couch co-op, because you’re playing for other people. In our interviews, the participants felt like they were playing along, even if the chat wasn’t active. From that, we drew on a couple concepts about spectatorship and performativity through Twitch as compared to couch co-op.

CW: So the most important part of the livestream was having an interactive chat?
RSB: The more viewers, the more spam you get, but at the same time, a quicker moving chat would have changed the experience. The chat moved at a rate that allowed people to read it and respond to it. If one participant had a session where they were interacting frequently with chat, then in subsequent sessions they would be more open to talking even if there was less chat participation. So the base level of interactivity with a hypothetical audience was still there. With a larger audience they might have gotten less done, and been more inclined to participate with the chat.

CW: How much experience did the participants have with livestreaming?
RSB: Only one of the five had streamed before. So they would have been the only one to know how to verify how many people were watching.

CW: They didn’t have the feedback of the viewer count?
RSB: They had it, but I don’t think they knew how to identify it. For the most part, I suspect they didn’t know how many people were watching.

Speedrunning and Communal Knowledge Production

CW: I’m interested in how Twitch facilitates a kind of mastery of these games that wouldn’t be possible otherwise. I imagine that having an audience to interact with affords speedrunners a kind of motivation that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.
RSB: For sure. The community has evolved from the early days of yore of the internet, the pre-YouTube age. There was speed demos archive, which was based off of an early Quake speedrunning site where you would record a speedrun, get it encoded on a CD and then send it to the archive, and then they would vet it and encode it. It would take forever. It was a slow, almost tedious process: there was just you and your TV and the game. Maybe you had a friend over, but there wasn’t a sense of an audience. Even when Youtube came along, and you didn’t have to worry about the draconian standards of how to get a run approved for an archive, you were still recording it by yourself and putting up your highlights and hoping that people would watch. With Youtube, because of search priority and google analytics, there was always a chance that the video wouldn’t get picked up. So there are definitely people saying “I wouldn’t go back to doing it without an audience”.

CW: So how did Twitch change speedrunning?
RSB: Twitch has made a huge difference in terms of the way that these communities’ knowledge grows. The more people you have watching, the more people are going to ask questions like:
“Why don’t you try this thing?”, “Why do you jump over that thing instead of just running?”, or “If you did this would this glitch happen?”
It facilitates an immediate interaction: “I don’t know, let’s try it out”.
If someone streaming on Twitch finds a glitch, it gets disseminated on Twitter and Youtube so quickly.

CW: Looking at Twitch, Twitter, and Youtube as a nexus for knowledge production about streamed games is fascinating. For the research that you were doing, it seems like there was minimal interaction with these livestreaming communities.
RSB: Yes, we were more interested in play-studies rather than player-studies for this project. For practical reasons, particularly participation, we were much more interested in observing play in a controlled lab setting. Because our end-result was a couple of theoretical concepts for how we talk about play, it would have been backwards to start with the communities on Twitch then move into theoretical concepts and then finally into a discussion of play.
There’s a whole other range of things people do on Twitch. If we wanted to be more involved with Twitch, it would have been a much longer experiment to establish some kind of viewership. For example, studying a Twitch personality become a Twitch personality, could be an interesting project. We weren’t really interested in Twitch other than as a platform for a live audience.

Space and Methodology

CW: What kind of technical knowledge was necessary to conduct this experiment?
RSB: The only real demanding part of the experiment was the livestreaming. For the couch co-op, it was as simple as putting the disc in the Xbox One and starting the game. For the livestreaming setup, I had a rudimentary knowledge of what software worked well, so I got it working and showed others how to set it up. It involved:
– Figuring out how the twitch interface works
– Installing the streaming software
– Getting a webcam and microphone setup (we used a headset)
– Setting up the drivers for the controllers so people who were more comfortable with controllers wouldn’t have to use the keyboard

CW: Can you describe the space of the experiment?
RSB: There’s a nook in the back where there’s a leather couch and a TV where we did the couch co-op.

CW: Who was present at the MLAB during the experiment?
RSB: People could come and go as they please. People were aware of the research so they would work quietly at the table. For the couch co-op, people felt more comfortable having a conversation with the people playing. For the livestreaming it was a much quieter environment. Even if you knew the person, there was the assumption that by talking they would be interrupting.

CW: Were there people in the lab who could observe the play, but who weren’t participating in the experiment?
RSB: There are four computers that are visible from the table, and two that are facing the windows. We had the participants stream on the two hidden computers. So, you couldn’t see the screen of the person playing, but the stream was visible on at least one of the four. I think people felt more comfortable looking over our shoulders than the participants.

CW: How would the research you’ve done change in a different setup?
RSB: The people who responded were interested in doing game studies, they weren’t empty vessels who were there to play a game for us with no prejudice. The incentive was that you were exposed to what the game lab was like, and there was the potential for networking, though we didn’t make it explicit. One of the things we asked was: “Do you feel that you did anything differently because you were streaming? Did the potential of being watched affect how you played?” and the corresponding couch co-op question “Did playing the game collaboratively change the way you played?”. Some participants said that it didn’t, but by and large, the response was that it did affect their play. It would always manifest itself in some way. But, as with every piece of ethnographic research, just our presence potentially impacted the way the participants played. One common response was: “I didn’t want to be boring for the person next to me, or for you guys”, but I don’t think it got the point where people felt “I need to play to be interesting from a scholarly perspective”. I think the MLAB as a space is probably the best case scenario for avoiding that. It’s a pretty casual space.

MLAB as a Game Lab

CW: What defines the MLAB as a game lab, as distinct from other kinds of media labs?
RSB: The MLAB is Mia Consalvo’s lab. She is a media studies/game scholar. When Mia set up her lab, it was cut and dry that it was going to be a game lab. We don’t have a maker-corner like TAG does, however, the game collection is much better. Whenever a game is donated, the game goes to the MLAB. It’s a bonafide repository for games. The only tools we have for doing research are computers and game consoles. I think TAG is a game lab, but not purely a game lab. A lot goes on at TAG that is not game-related: 3D printing and rapid prototyping, some very artistically minded and creative projects. I don’t think anything happens in the MLAB that’s not game-related. A game lab is a space where work is done on games. The facilities are there to conduct research on games: by either playing games or watching people play games.

CW: Thanks for this interview!
RSB: No problem, I hope it was helpful.

The post Game Lab Methodology: Communal Play at the MLAB appeared first on &.

On November 16, 2015, I had the chance to interview Dr. Matthew Anderson, Professor of Theology at Concordia University. Our discussion focused on Dr. Anderson’s work as a producer of documentaries on the subject of pilgrimage. In the process, we examined the concept of space as it relates to his creative projects: space as an imagined realm and a utopia. We also discussed the numerous types of spaces, some abstract, other— material, that cross paths during a pilgrimage. The interview also touched upon the topic of space and its relation to what it takes to make a documentary film. A few words were exchanged on rituals and practices involved in making a film. At one point, Dr. Anderson alluded to the power of non-human objects, such as a cup of tea, to influence the process of making a documentary. In the interview, these objects are referred to as “ingredients.” These “ingredients” remind one of the Actor-Network Theory, wherein the human and the non-human affect each other, defining the meaning, function, role and purpose they hold in a given moment.

CP: Dr. Anderson, thank you for agreeing to be part of this interview. I would like to ask you a few questions about the concept of space and its relation to knowledge making. However, the idea of space can be interpreted as widely as needed. My first question is about your work as an academic: can you please tell us what you do in terms of your academic work?

IMAGINED SPACES AND UTOPIAS IN NEW TESTAMENT STUDIES
MA: Sure…My PhD was actually in New Testament studies, in rhetoric and history, so areas where the idea of space is not necessarily obvious. In rhetoric you are creating a space rhetorically. Well, actually, I could talk about that… It is interesting… I could talk about the fact that my initial impulse for research way back when I got my doctorate and wrote my dissertation was all about how you can create imaginary worlds with words and then you inhabit them. This is an insight that you get from Gadamer, philosopher [Hans-Georg] Gadamer, and also from Paul Ricoeur who picks up from Gadamer’s insights. Gadamer had this thing called “horizons of meanings.” That is when you… say you are a really good political speaker. Martin Luther King Junior…and you say…you give a speech…and in your speech you say “I can imagine…I am imagining a world. Let us live into a time when black and white children go to school together, when they play on the same ground, when they live in the same neighborhood, when they go to the same schools, when they grow up together and become young adults together, raise families together.” What he is doing is…that world does not exist in America [at that time].
CP: It is more like a vision.
MA: It’s a vision. So my original impulse in my doctorate research was [to explore] how in the ancient texts do we see this rhetoric of imaginary worlds, in this case, by the Apostle Paul. [Places] that he wants people to live into.
CP: So it was his projection of the future?
MA: Well, not so much a projection of the future. I don’t think he thought that there was a long future ahead for humanity.
CP: Oh yes, the end of the world…
MA: But it was his projection of what can be right now if you lived into it and he was dealing with these communities that never existed. He was dealing with utopian communities that actually everybody talks about. Lots of people talk about utopian communities, but Paul had to deal with sort of de facto communities that were trying to be utopian. There were these communities of Jews and non-Jews who were stuck together in ways that have never been before.
CP: You said “they were trying” in the sense that they never achieved that.
MA: No, I don’t think human beings can ever achieve utopian ideals.
CP: How were they trying the most to live a utopian life?
MA: I think the fact that they were eliminating many distinctions between Jew and non-Jew; sometimes they were eliminating distinctions between women and men. To our way of thinking, we consider that women were horrible oppressed [during that time]. But they were much less oppressed in the Pauline churches than elsewhere. And they were trying to live this sort of non-violent life, following the ways of Jesus. They were utopian communities. How well did they do? If they have done perfectly well, Paul would not have had to write to them. But he was writing to them because they did not do necessarily all that well.

FILMMAKING AND IMAGINED SPACES
CP: It is interesting that you mention the word “utopian” as in something ideal, a platonic form of life. Does this term come into your awareness in the process of your work now as a filmmaker or as an academic?
MA: Yeah…that is a good question…
CP: That imaginary space that you are trying to create.
MA: For instance, this summer…So like many academics, my research has changed. I no longer deal as much with rhetoric and history anymore. Lately, I have been talking about pilgrimage and about first peoples and the newcomers to Canada, those with a European background, especially settlers. In a pilgrimage you are trying to talk about…well I guess it is still rhetoric and the idea of making space…space for learning about each other. And you can do that orally, by making a great speech, if you happen to do that. But also in pilgrimage you are creating a space and maybe even a rhetorical space for learning about reconciliation, for learning about the other, and for learning about brining the community together in some way.

FEW WORDS ON THE SUBJECT OF PILGRIMAGE
CP: Just for the purpose of our dialogue, can you please define the word pilgrimage, in the context of our discussion?
MA: A pilgrimage is a journey, historically normally to a sacred sight for the purpose of obtaining some benefit, either for oneself or for others and returning home.
CP: It has to be a return home?
MA: Not necessarily…There are two definitions of pilgrimage. One is a trip to a sacred sight and a return home and the other was a voluntary exile from the homeland. So the Irish pilgrims and even Abraham and Sarah from the Hebrew Bible, were voluntarily exiled from the homeland as a way of wondering, seeking a homeland that is on the other side of death. And those are both forms of pilgrimage, but they are quite different from each other. In the modern, or contemporary context, ever since the enlightenment and the romantic period and so on, we can think of pilgrimage maybe a bit more widely, as a transformative journey engaging in some way with the transcendent, transcendent values.
CP: So pilgrimage and seeking are inherently connected?
MA: Yes, they are related. Absolutely.

THE LATEST DOCUMENTARY
CP: And in your films…tell us a bit more about what you do as a filmmaker. What is your latest film about, if I may ask?
MA: Yeah, sure. Right now I am only starting work on the North West Mountain Police Patrol Trail film. I am going to come up with a better title, because it is terrible [as it is now].
CP: What is the idea behind the film?
MA: The idea is that this trail in southern Saskatchewan, by walking it, do we learn more about the cultural genocide of the First Peoples in the construction of Canada as a country.
CP: And the answer you found?
MA: I learned a lot about it.
CP: What did you learn?
MA: Well, I learned firstly that it happened. I grew up in this territory. When I grew up there were no First Nations around. You would find arrowheads, or a hammerhead or something, and we would all go “isn’t that interesting?” And I had a fairly romantic, high view of First Peoples, in the sense that I thought how wonderful that these people lived here and that they hunted and so on. But I never, never asked myself the next obvious question, which you should ask, which is “where are they?”
CP: There was no one?
MA: There was virtually nobody there. And only when I hit fifty that we started looking at it again. All of sudden I realized that in fact the reason there were no First Nation Peoples when I grew up is because the government had intentionally moved them off that land.
CP: When was that?
MA: In 1874-1875 through 1880. About 1885… Over a fairly short period of time, ten years, First Nations there went from being masters of a land to being pushed completely off in starving little groups of people.
CP: Where?
MA: Pushed north. For the most part.
CP: What area? What’s the name of that area?
MA: They were moved north, say from Cyprus Hills, southwest Saskatchewan now and from the border. Essentially they were moved away from the border into the beginning of the Canadian Shield, off the woods, in places like Balfour in Prince Albert.
CP: And so you interviewed people about their awareness of the history of that part of Canada?
MA: I did. I concentrated more on the group that was walking. So there was a group of us walking. There were only two of us who walked the entire distance. There was also one First Nations man who walked with us two of the three weeks, and for him it was a voyage of discovery as well. Just to come back to what you said: we were making space for learning.
CP: Learning in what sense?

THE MANY SPACES OF A PILGRIMAGE
MA: When you travel, when you are pilgrim on a road you are absolutely crossing terrain. You are physically crossing terrain. But when you are walking on a road you are making mental and social space for learning as well. So you have this combination of physical space that you are traversing; mental space that you are creating by getting away from your routing; social space that you are creating by being in a group of people who are walking; imaginary space, probably, where you can start to say how would it be if things were different. If now this land were in some way…if we realize that this land that we were walking actually belong to First Peoples and they were starved off of it, essentially, by our ancestors… So you are making space for learning, for practical learning, but also for reconciliation and change, in some way.
CP: What about space and the creation of the final product, which is the film? Could you apply the same concepts to what’s needed to create something? For example, to make a film, what kind of spaces are needed? We are talking abstract here.

ON WHAT IT TAKES TO MAKE A DOCUMENTARY
MA: Well, for me, what happens, I will see something. And I will go “oh.”
CP: So it is sort of a muse?
MA: It is like a visual cue. I will see something and I would say “I can see that.” Immediately I can see where that sits in a film. For instance I made a film about North American Finns who went back to Finland and I was asking the question where is home? But in terms of space needed to make the film I was looking over a lake after a meal and there were a couple of people on the lake and I was looking out and you had the sea right there and the trees in the distance. And I was looking and I realized that that’s somehow what the film is about.
CP: Was that like an aha, eureka moment?
MA: Yes, it was…
CP: So that was the beginning?
MA: Yes.
CP: So what you are saying is that in the creation of film, the initial space is what we call inspiration.
MA: True…
CP: And what are the next spaces involved?
MA: You need good ingredients.
CP: I like the word ingredient, as you are using it here.
MA: You have an idea. That is like a spark. But it is easy to work on that idea if you have good ingredients. In my case, when I was walking, I had people filming. I hired people to film. I filmed some stuff myself. And I would just film something and go “ok, I think that’s going to be useful somewhere.”
CP: How would you discriminate between good and bad [footage] so to speak?
MA: You know, a lot of it is feel. I don’t even know how to describe it.
CP: You mean intuition?
MA: Some of it’s just intuition. I don’t know how else to describe it.
CP: It is almost like an innate thing, you have it or not.
MA: Maybe you have some innately, but you can certainly make it better or worse by ignoring or practicing it.
CP: So what I hear from you is that in the making of a film, like in the making of any other creative work, there is the realm of the abstract, nontangible, not necessarily easy to point, the inspiration, the intuition, the thoughts, the vision. But there is also the material: the space, devices, the script. Is there any other space that we could put a category to it?
MA: There is the social space. You need a social space in order to have people to interview. Because I interview people a lot. You have to create a social space where they feel welcome to be interviewed and comfortable enough to talk. I mean you created a good space for me with the tea and the chocolate just now. Presumably you did it so that I might feel more free to talk.

ACTOR-NETWORK THEORY AND FILMMAKING
CP: So the social space does not necessarily imply humans. It is also the items and things around that bring people together. Tea is just an element of the social space.
MA: The tea is a marker of “now you are going to sit and you are going to drink this tea [and talk].
CP: It has a symbolic message behind it.
MA: It is a symbol with a full sense of symbol because it is real. It does something. It is not just a mind thing. It is warm in my hands and it creates a place where I feel “oh now I am relaxing; it is not really work.”

DIFFICULTIES ENCOUNTERED IN MAKING A FILM
CP: I am going to ask you now a question that is not as easy to ask: What do you dislike about space and knowledge creation in terms of filmmaking. What are the problems you encounter in the process of making this final and beautiful twenty-minute long product that takes one year to make it?
MA: Well you just answered it. One of the problems is that it takes a year.
CP: So it is time?
MA: It takes a lot of time.
CP: What are other things that are not as obvious to someone who just watches a film?
MA: Well, I mean it is like writing a book. You left a lot of good stuff on the floor, so to speak. Which means there is a lot of good things people said which just don’t fit in because there is no spot or they don’t seem to fit.
CP: So what happens to those elements that are left behind?
MA: They are gone.
CP: Do they have a life afterwards?
MA: No, no life. Well, maybe they exist in someone’s memory. But I will have people say to me, “you only took ten seconds, but I talked to you for an hour.” It’s true. And there were a lot of good things that were said in that hour. I didn’t necessarily take the best ten seconds. I took ten seconds that happened to fit my need to create the overall jigsaw puzzle.
CP: Any other difficulties that are not easily evident for someone who is not in direct contact with the process of making a film?
MA: For documentaries, there is an intimacy that develops with the people you interview. If you are a good or relative good documentary maker, you know that the best questions come out of a relationship with people. So you create some sort of a relationship with people and you are gone. That is a bit of a cost.
CP: Emotional cost.
MA: Emotional cost probably for the person being interviewed and also for the interviewer. I still have people from my first film about Santiago who email me once or twice a year. And I only interviewed them for two days.
CP: It has an impact not only on you but also on them.
MA: Yes.
CP: And sometimes you don’t even know the level of impact. Am I understanding it correctly?
MA: Yes, absolutely.

RITUALS AND PRACTICES IN MAKING A FILM
CP: I am going to bring us back to something less abstract. Can you please tell me about rituals, practices, routines that are happening around the space that you are using to make a film? I mean do you have an office space that you use?
MA: Well a lot of my stuff is shut on the go.
CP: On site…
MA: Yes. But I try to set up so that the background does not distract the interview but adds beauty. But I don’t think that’s what you mean…Ritual practices…what do I do? When I interview somebody, what do I do? … I try to get close.
CP: What do you mean?
MA: The first thing people don’t do, not professionals …When you see nonprofessional photos, the first thing you notice is that they are taken from too faraway.
CP: So this proximity that you are talking about, is it a ritual for you?
MA: Yes, it is. I have to get close.
CP: So it is physical and emotional?
MA: You were anticipating what I was going to say. That’s right. All my good interviews are with people with whom I established some sort of emotional connection. So one night, maybe we were in this rainstorm. Only five degrees and we were freezing. And we were all huddled inside a van. Somebody had their back behind the dashboard and their feet up. But they would normally sit. And they are drinking a cup of coffee, or brandy, or beer. And they are sitting and freezing and are miserable. I look at that and say, you are going to warm up and I am going to ask questions. This is out of the normal and this person is going to answer some questions right now. I don’t really have a studio and I shoot films anywhere. But you do have to create, like you did here, a little moment of emotional closeness where you feel more free to talk.

LAST QUESTION
CP: My last question is more general. If someone were to ask you how did you get yourself into filmmaking and you had fifteen seconds to respond, what would be the answer:
MA: I would say, “by accident.”
CP: By accident?
MA: Indeed. And because I appreciate beauty and I think there is beauty in every person. And I like taking pictures and shooting documentaries is an extension of taking pictures and trying to capture the beauty in people. I know there is ugliness in people too, but I like to shoot the beautiful part.
CP: Well, I thank you for this interview and for the time you took to be part of it. I wish you my very best in your creative endeavors.
MA: Thank you as well.

The post Interview with Dr. Matthew Anderson, Professor of Theology at Concordia University and Filmmaker appeared first on &.