Woo! I am back from my vacation hiatus with ideas and obstacles of all kinds. The main obstacle is that I have yet to secure a space, but there are feelers out in all directions, so hopefully that will be resolved soon.
A meeting point of both obstacles and ideas is the performance part of my piece. I know that I want it to be structured like a Wolof lesson, as I felt that my experience was like a constant Wolof lesson -- both inside the classroom and out. I was constantly being quizzed by my Wolof teacher, my Senegalese peers, random people in taxis and on the street. And not just about my language skills, but my general cultural understanding of the Senegalese as well. When I finally learned how to make attaaya, a fairly complicated and involved tea ceremony, it was as if I passed a little test. The next time anyone asked me, "Yaangi attaaya?" (which means "Do you do tea?"), I could confidently reply, "Men naa attaaya sama bopp!" (which means "I can make tea myself!") When I could call out the merchants in the market who yelled lewd things at me, often they responded as if they were proud of me, that I could hold my own in Wolof.
So, I have a lot of conceptual thoughts about the performance, and I even have a basic outline, but I am having trouble filling in the spaces. I decided that since the performance is about learning language, and I am one of the only people I know who speaks all the languages I would be using, I will be creating the piece as a solo performance. This means that I have write myself something that will be engaging and meaningful for at least 20 minutes, and since it is about learning, it seems like it would involve other voices. I am thinking about having pre-recorded conversations, like on language learning software, where I have someone record one side of a dialogue and I will perform the other half. Part of me thinks it will be helpful in composing the piece if I break it down into units, like a class would be, and I came up with this structure: I. Basic Introductions, II. Weather, III. Food, IV. Getting to know people, V. The Market, VI. Proverbs/Idioms.
My Wolof teach in Senegal had a rigid format for our practice exercizes/quizzes, and had us memorize these little dialogues, and I am trying to figure out a way to use those structures, but give the piece some kind of development. One strategy I have thought of is the incorporation of visuals. Since most of the piece will be in Wolof, or sometimes French, it would seem I need to have some kind subtitle or supertitle. For this, I think it might be neat if I have projected translations of what I'm saying, since Wolof translated directly to English is actually really funny most of the time. In my imagination, the translations are accompanied by images and are themselves images: at the outset, the translations look like they are from the weirdo Peace Corps workbook I got at the first place I studied in Dakar; they have funny illustrations and are very neatly laid out with charts and diagrams. When I got to Saint Louis, everything became hand-written; and I recently looked back at my notebook, in which my notes became progressively weirder, messier, more scattered, and littered with bizarre drawings and side comments. As my piece goes along, I want the images to become less and less coherent, and I also want the content of the dialogue and the exercises to become more surprising.
So, I have a lot of work to do on that!
In more optimistic but no less challenging news:
A recent exciting revelation has influenced and advanced the writing portion of the piece. I have a lot of notes here and there, half written things, and nebulous ideas that have yet to reach the page about the collection of stories I want to write, but I have been having a supremely difficult time actually producing something I felt good about. What I discovered is that they needed a clearer frame, and I think the frame is going to manifest itself in a clearer narrator that isn't neccesarily just me. The recounter of these stories is the uninitiate in a land of cult knowledge, and I think what makes these stories interesting is the nearly unflappable earnestness with which I tried to make sense of things, and the comical inevitability that I never succeeded in the way I thought I would. Now, I feel like my ramblings about trips to Dogon country, weddings, odd afternoons spent with strangers, all have more of a direction.
My goals for next week are:
-To have a space, to have finished first drafts of three stories, and to have at least one act of my performance articulated.
-To assemble the lists of music I have made in various places and make sure I have the music I need.
Monday, January 19, 2009
Friday, December 12, 2008
I have been thinking a lot about the installation part of my project lately. Right now, it sounds really cool in theory, but I am having a hard time figuring out how to go about actualizing my idea while maintaining the integrity of what I want.
At first I thought this was going to be a video and music project, then I thought it wasn't, but I have since seen a really cool installation exhibit at the MoMA and have learned about a really cool program that are making me think about incorporating video again. The installation I saw at the MoMA was this piece by a Swiss artist. She transformed the entire atrium on the second floor into this psychedelic womb thing. I will explain further. They put down really comfy carpeting all over the atrium, and in the middle of the room there is even more comfy carpeting in a circle around a banquette of tempurpedic couch-like things. In the middle of the couch circle there is EVEN MORE comfy carpeting. On the three solid walls (the fourth wall is covered in a pink curtain to block it off from the exposed floors) there is a really trippy video playing that has images of a naked woman crawling through a field of tulips and also a pig eating rotting fruit and also the naked woman swimming and walking around in the rain and putting tulips in her nose and sometimes just pink with bubbles forming. It is way weird, but the whole thing, accompanied by a soundtrack that can best be equated to electronic groaning, creates a trance-like atmosphere. People were lying down on every variant of carpet, on the banquettes, on each other. The whole thing seemed to have become a de facto day care center, as the centermost ring, the comfiest of all the carpets, was host to a bunch of kids who were alternately enthralled by the videos and trying to destroy each other. In fact, I was one of the few people there sans kids. I'm not saying that this bears any resemblance to what I want to make, but I do like the way it created an atmosphere. I think that I am engaged in creating an environmental experience, so there are certainly things I can take from this exhibit.
The program I mentioned I learned about is called Max/MSP and it is both a software program and a programming language. It is a way of creating sound and video pieces entirely from scratch; that is to say, the program itself doesn't presuppose anything about your creative process, so it starts you off with a blank canvas and you can build virtual devices to manipulate sound and images in any way you can imagine. Unfortunately, it is still a little too complicated for me to really be creative with -- I am just now struggling to get the basics of it, but I am hoping that if I keep working with it I might be able to figure out how to make my own thing. What it allows you to do that I really like is that you can make sound and video interactive with one another, so as a sound changes, a video will respond. The installation is going to be primarily focused on religion and religious practices, so it might be really cool if the sound is the focal point, an uninterrupted thing of religious music and the sound of people praying, and the visuals change based on the sound. This is all still a little out of my scope of ability, but I am set to practice and see what I can come up with.
At first I thought this was going to be a video and music project, then I thought it wasn't, but I have since seen a really cool installation exhibit at the MoMA and have learned about a really cool program that are making me think about incorporating video again. The installation I saw at the MoMA was this piece by a Swiss artist. She transformed the entire atrium on the second floor into this psychedelic womb thing. I will explain further. They put down really comfy carpeting all over the atrium, and in the middle of the room there is even more comfy carpeting in a circle around a banquette of tempurpedic couch-like things. In the middle of the couch circle there is EVEN MORE comfy carpeting. On the three solid walls (the fourth wall is covered in a pink curtain to block it off from the exposed floors) there is a really trippy video playing that has images of a naked woman crawling through a field of tulips and also a pig eating rotting fruit and also the naked woman swimming and walking around in the rain and putting tulips in her nose and sometimes just pink with bubbles forming. It is way weird, but the whole thing, accompanied by a soundtrack that can best be equated to electronic groaning, creates a trance-like atmosphere. People were lying down on every variant of carpet, on the banquettes, on each other. The whole thing seemed to have become a de facto day care center, as the centermost ring, the comfiest of all the carpets, was host to a bunch of kids who were alternately enthralled by the videos and trying to destroy each other. In fact, I was one of the few people there sans kids. I'm not saying that this bears any resemblance to what I want to make, but I do like the way it created an atmosphere. I think that I am engaged in creating an environmental experience, so there are certainly things I can take from this exhibit.
The program I mentioned I learned about is called Max/MSP and it is both a software program and a programming language. It is a way of creating sound and video pieces entirely from scratch; that is to say, the program itself doesn't presuppose anything about your creative process, so it starts you off with a blank canvas and you can build virtual devices to manipulate sound and images in any way you can imagine. Unfortunately, it is still a little too complicated for me to really be creative with -- I am just now struggling to get the basics of it, but I am hoping that if I keep working with it I might be able to figure out how to make my own thing. What it allows you to do that I really like is that you can make sound and video interactive with one another, so as a sound changes, a video will respond. The installation is going to be primarily focused on religion and religious practices, so it might be really cool if the sound is the focal point, an uninterrupted thing of religious music and the sound of people praying, and the visuals change based on the sound. This is all still a little out of my scope of ability, but I am set to practice and see what I can come up with.
Thursday, December 11, 2008
As I divulged in the previous entry, I am having a hard time figuring out how much of myself and my specific experiences I want to include in this project. It might make it less accessible if there is no personal narrative to which an audience member can relate, considering the already extremely abstract nature of what I am trying to do. However, I really don't want to impose myself too much on the audience, I would like them to be able to have a perspective that isn't automatically triangulated through my lens. Since it is likely that the majority of the audience members will know me personally, I don't want their knowledge of me or their feelings toward me totally color what I am presenting to them.
One way I have thought about dealing with this is by making the written portion of my project fictionalized. The stories will still be based on my experiences, but they won't be told from a first person perspective. Even if I tell the story exactly as I would were I telling it from a first person perspective, the mere fact of having a third person narrator gives me some necessary distance from the story, as well as the audience. I think that will help in differentiating the space and purpose of the writing with the space and purpose of the blogging that I am doing. A little booklet, which is what I hope to make, is very different from a blog, and warrants a different approach to its subject matter. If the anecdotes I relate become stories, that further differentiates their purpose in relation to the blog, because this space is about factual documentation of my process and perhaps my experiences, whereas that space can be more reflective and leaves the door open for both commentary and ambiguity.
One way I have thought about dealing with this is by making the written portion of my project fictionalized. The stories will still be based on my experiences, but they won't be told from a first person perspective. Even if I tell the story exactly as I would were I telling it from a first person perspective, the mere fact of having a third person narrator gives me some necessary distance from the story, as well as the audience. I think that will help in differentiating the space and purpose of the writing with the space and purpose of the blogging that I am doing. A little booklet, which is what I hope to make, is very different from a blog, and warrants a different approach to its subject matter. If the anecdotes I relate become stories, that further differentiates their purpose in relation to the blog, because this space is about factual documentation of my process and perhaps my experiences, whereas that space can be more reflective and leaves the door open for both commentary and ambiguity.
So, I've been encountering a few difficulties in moving forward with my project. My first difficulty has been finding a space. The large majority of Centennial Scholars do their projects at one of a few locations on campus. Because these locations are used for tons of different events and activities, they do not really meet my needs. I want an empty box that I can fill and shape. I know that Prentis, a building used primarily by the Graduate School of the Arts on 125th street has a lot of wonderful empty spaces, but I'm not sure how I would go about securing a room there. I have sent emails to the people I think might be able to help me, so we'll see if that works out. If it doesn't, I really don't know where else on campus I would be able to do my project.
Except! I just had a brilliant idea! If the thing with Prentis doesn't work out, I might be able to create my own space. All of the Villages (what they called the dorm buildings at the university where I was staying in Senegal) had these little enclaves made of sticks that served as prayer venues. The picture at the head of my blog is of a sign that each enclave has outside it to say when the call to prayer is during the day. It might be much more difficult, but may be really interesting if I created my own space outside that mimicked this prayer space. That would cohere with the thematic content I have envisioned for the installation. Logistically, this seems extremely ambitious, just because I would have to construct the thing myself and that seems like a big and mysterious project, but I'll keep it in mind if I can't find another space inside a building.
The second problem I am dealing with is super meta, because it is actually this blog. I know that this virtual space is mostly for myself, and the few other people who might read it (who are probably related to me or involved in my project), so I shouldn't be so self-conscious about it, but I am having difficulty grappling with the self-revealing nature of the blog. I think in attempting to keep this blog I am realizing that this whole project has the potential to become something just about me and my experience, which is not really what I want. Instead of just sharing the things that happened to me with the audience, I want to create an experience for them. I think that my personal experiences give the project a grounding in reality, and will provide something concrete amid the fairly abstract construction that I have conceived, but I don't want people to come to my presentation and think that I am just trying to tell them about what happened to me. I am much more interested in putting people in situations like those that I was in, even if in a weirdly arty, abstracted way, to give them an opportunity to feel the way I felt, or feel something completely different in the face of a similar circumstance.
I guess what I am discovering is that I haven't articulated clearly enough what I want my audience to come away with, but the problem is that I have -- up until now -- purposefully left that ambiguous. I have already discussed that one of my goals is for this to be rough around the edges, for the pieces to clash as much as they mesh, but because of that I can't figure out how to keep my wits about something that is supposed to be confusing. I also wonder if I am too concerned with the audience, and maybe I should just construct the pieces of this puzzle the way I want them, without thinking about their reception, because part of what interests me is that I don't know how this will be received and I want to leave it open to interpretation.
I know I am in the messy middle of a process and it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I think that it is good that I am getting all of the problems I am seeing out in the open so I can strategize ways to solve them, or decide that they don't need solving, as I solidify or fill in the other elements.
Except! I just had a brilliant idea! If the thing with Prentis doesn't work out, I might be able to create my own space. All of the Villages (what they called the dorm buildings at the university where I was staying in Senegal) had these little enclaves made of sticks that served as prayer venues. The picture at the head of my blog is of a sign that each enclave has outside it to say when the call to prayer is during the day. It might be much more difficult, but may be really interesting if I created my own space outside that mimicked this prayer space. That would cohere with the thematic content I have envisioned for the installation. Logistically, this seems extremely ambitious, just because I would have to construct the thing myself and that seems like a big and mysterious project, but I'll keep it in mind if I can't find another space inside a building.
The second problem I am dealing with is super meta, because it is actually this blog. I know that this virtual space is mostly for myself, and the few other people who might read it (who are probably related to me or involved in my project), so I shouldn't be so self-conscious about it, but I am having difficulty grappling with the self-revealing nature of the blog. I think in attempting to keep this blog I am realizing that this whole project has the potential to become something just about me and my experience, which is not really what I want. Instead of just sharing the things that happened to me with the audience, I want to create an experience for them. I think that my personal experiences give the project a grounding in reality, and will provide something concrete amid the fairly abstract construction that I have conceived, but I don't want people to come to my presentation and think that I am just trying to tell them about what happened to me. I am much more interested in putting people in situations like those that I was in, even if in a weirdly arty, abstracted way, to give them an opportunity to feel the way I felt, or feel something completely different in the face of a similar circumstance.
I guess what I am discovering is that I haven't articulated clearly enough what I want my audience to come away with, but the problem is that I have -- up until now -- purposefully left that ambiguous. I have already discussed that one of my goals is for this to be rough around the edges, for the pieces to clash as much as they mesh, but because of that I can't figure out how to keep my wits about something that is supposed to be confusing. I also wonder if I am too concerned with the audience, and maybe I should just construct the pieces of this puzzle the way I want them, without thinking about their reception, because part of what interests me is that I don't know how this will be received and I want to leave it open to interpretation.
I know I am in the messy middle of a process and it is hard to see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I think that it is good that I am getting all of the problems I am seeing out in the open so I can strategize ways to solve them, or decide that they don't need solving, as I solidify or fill in the other elements.
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
Catching up
Here is where I stand right now:
My Centennial Scholar project has five elements. That there are five parts is not arbitrary, but a gesture towards the inspiration for this whole thing, which is the call to prayer. The call to prayer happens five times a day, so my idea is that each element of the project represents a piece of a day, or in a more abstract sense, a piece of a whole. These pieces, like pieces of a puzzle, complement one another and they are related thematically, however they do not all fit together. My objective is for each piece to require a different kind of interaction with time, so each is on its own temporal plane. An art installation has a very different relationship with time than a book, or a live performance. So, as each part of this time-puzzle operates on a different plane, the pieces can never fit together completely. There is no way to fashion a convenient whole, even though each part is working toward that end. By this I mean that within each component I will seek to investigate and/or ruminate on ideas and experiences with a unifying thematic construct, but I don't expect to create a clean package that has a pithy take-home message.
Here's what I have so far in terms of a delineation of each element:
1. Installation
- Site specific (involving transformation of a space, dealing with issues of sacred spaces/spaces that are reserved for certain populations)
- Involving visual, sonic, and spatial manipulations
- Thematically concerned with religion
Why? --> I observed that for Senegalese, in general, religion is a 24/7 thing; it is the most important and constant thing, not just in your life, but about you personally as well
- VISUAL: Maybe I can make a space to look like an exaggerated version of someone's UGB (Université Gaston Berger) dorm room. I would need to include Catholic and Muslim imagery, which would be interesting. I could have in chalk on the wall "Heure de prières" and fiches about meetings and homework like in the Resto. It would be really cool to have the images of marabouts on the walls, and prayers written in arabic. Should the imagery be indicative of the actual religious demographics of Senegal (94% Muslim, 5% Catholic, 1% animist), or the demographics as I encountered them, with a larger input of Catholicism?
It might be important for me to put on the wall one of those blurbs like in a museum exhibit explaining the link among this part and the other parts of the project.
- SONIC: Obviously call to prayer, baye fall songs and whatever that other confrerie that I can't remember the name of right now that sang a lot was, people saying Hail Mary and other Catholic prayers in French, drumming, peolple saying "toubab"/"maay ma 100 francs"/etc., goats/cows/cats making noise
2. Performance
- Thematically concerned with LEARNING, within that umbrella: interpersonal interaction (issues of translation and miscommunication); repetition and the line between something being void of meaning and being imbued with new meaning or transcendent meaning through repetition
- For text, use Baobab Center workbook and Gangui; also wolof/English proverbs; compare the nearly-impossible-to-describe-or-explain Wolof sayings to perceptions of English or American sayings (Time is money...); incorporate Senegalese non-word verbal indications like EH! and pss-pss
- For movement: shaking hands, the question gesture, playing with spatial relationships (maing people stay very physically close -- it would be awesome if I could find a really old station wagon as a sept-place/set piece to give people the idea of what it is like to travel); the action of prayer (Julli, muslim prayer, vs. Catholic prayer: both very different, but unifying elements like prayer beads/rosaries)
- Tie in WAITING, also stopping things to pray/call to prayer\
-- Don't necessarily want it to be a narrative, but how to keep it coherent and engaging? Maybe structure it like a disrupted narrative, like a Wolof class that keeps being interrupted, to tie in idea of learning
REMEMBER: this is a medium where I can't slow things down, but the only medium where I can actively prolong/defer things
Maybe incorporate attaaya (Senegalese tea ceremony)? Have it take place over the course of three cups of tea?
3. Puzzle
- A sudoku that looks like the one from my 365 Days of Sudoku book that became my functional diary while abroad (more information about Sudoku tie in and Sudoku journal is forthcoming); include a place to put the date and a space for notes, just like in my Sudoku book. Have out for people to find and complete while they wait for performance to start/after they check out the installation?
- Maybe the puzzle accompanies an explanation of the relationship between my theme of time and my ideas about puzzles in general; for instance, on the post card that I have to create to publicize my project I will have one side be the Sudoku puzzle image and the other side be an introduction/advertisement for my project. This way the post card is both a tool for advertising and an integral component of the project itself.
4. Written thing
- Thematically concerned with: not just being the perpetual outsider, but investigating the puzzle-solving idea that element 3. introduces; I was an outsider trying to figure out a massive, unsolveable, cross-cultural puzzle, and the stories I include in this part all deal with that element of trying to figure out what is going on without having the necessary tools that a cultural insider or an initiate into the mysterious Senegalese rites would have; again, more elaboration of the puzzle theme is forthcoming
- Stories about:
*Pilgrimage to Poponguine with the Catholics
*Midnight party at Cheikh's house in Dakar
*A hilarious afternoon with Faatu
*A weirdo afternoon with Talla Lo
*Rachel/Youssou's wedding
*The bus to/from Mali, getting to Dogon, the sketchy Bamako hotel
*Unpleasant encounters with the Talibe?
*Passover!
*Singing at the Journée d'Integration des Informaticiens
*A djembe lesson
-It might be cool if everything was handwritten
5. THIS BLOG -- meta!!
- Thematically concerned with documentation/memory and remembering
- Keeping track of the process of putting together this project, including seeking out memories from others who were abroad with me, working through new ideas or refining ideas about other elements of the project, allowing the audience to participate in the documentation and memory of the project itself
SO! Those are all the things I want to accomplish in my project. I still have a lot of figuring out to do, if merely logistically (like, where will I find a space to put on this crazy thing!?). The idea of this blog is that I will rigorously and diligently track the progress of my project from here on. At some point, I might investigate how I can use this space to encourage interaction from/with disparate geographic circles (like, people in Senegal and people in the US!). Since this entry has largely served to catch up on what I have been doing for the last three months, hopefully forthcoming entries will be more immediate.
Ba beneen yoon! (that's Wolof for "until we encounter each other again along the road")
My Centennial Scholar project has five elements. That there are five parts is not arbitrary, but a gesture towards the inspiration for this whole thing, which is the call to prayer. The call to prayer happens five times a day, so my idea is that each element of the project represents a piece of a day, or in a more abstract sense, a piece of a whole. These pieces, like pieces of a puzzle, complement one another and they are related thematically, however they do not all fit together. My objective is for each piece to require a different kind of interaction with time, so each is on its own temporal plane. An art installation has a very different relationship with time than a book, or a live performance. So, as each part of this time-puzzle operates on a different plane, the pieces can never fit together completely. There is no way to fashion a convenient whole, even though each part is working toward that end. By this I mean that within each component I will seek to investigate and/or ruminate on ideas and experiences with a unifying thematic construct, but I don't expect to create a clean package that has a pithy take-home message.
Here's what I have so far in terms of a delineation of each element:
1. Installation
- Site specific (involving transformation of a space, dealing with issues of sacred spaces/spaces that are reserved for certain populations)
- Involving visual, sonic, and spatial manipulations
- Thematically concerned with religion
Why? --> I observed that for Senegalese, in general, religion is a 24/7 thing; it is the most important and constant thing, not just in your life, but about you personally as well
- VISUAL: Maybe I can make a space to look like an exaggerated version of someone's UGB (Université Gaston Berger) dorm room. I would need to include Catholic and Muslim imagery, which would be interesting. I could have in chalk on the wall "Heure de prières" and fiches about meetings and homework like in the Resto. It would be really cool to have the images of marabouts on the walls, and prayers written in arabic. Should the imagery be indicative of the actual religious demographics of Senegal (94% Muslim, 5% Catholic, 1% animist), or the demographics as I encountered them, with a larger input of Catholicism?
It might be important for me to put on the wall one of those blurbs like in a museum exhibit explaining the link among this part and the other parts of the project.
- SONIC: Obviously call to prayer, baye fall songs and whatever that other confrerie that I can't remember the name of right now that sang a lot was, people saying Hail Mary and other Catholic prayers in French, drumming, peolple saying "toubab"/"maay ma 100 francs"/etc., goats/cows/cats making noise
2. Performance
- Thematically concerned with LEARNING, within that umbrella: interpersonal interaction (issues of translation and miscommunication); repetition and the line between something being void of meaning and being imbued with new meaning or transcendent meaning through repetition
- For text, use Baobab Center workbook and Gangui; also wolof/English proverbs; compare the nearly-impossible-to-describe-or-explain Wolof sayings to perceptions of English or American sayings (Time is money...); incorporate Senegalese non-word verbal indications like EH! and pss-pss
- For movement: shaking hands, the question gesture, playing with spatial relationships (maing people stay very physically close -- it would be awesome if I could find a really old station wagon as a sept-place/set piece to give people the idea of what it is like to travel); the action of prayer (Julli, muslim prayer, vs. Catholic prayer: both very different, but unifying elements like prayer beads/rosaries)
- Tie in WAITING, also stopping things to pray/call to prayer\
-- Don't necessarily want it to be a narrative, but how to keep it coherent and engaging? Maybe structure it like a disrupted narrative, like a Wolof class that keeps being interrupted, to tie in idea of learning
REMEMBER: this is a medium where I can't slow things down, but the only medium where I can actively prolong/defer things
Maybe incorporate attaaya (Senegalese tea ceremony)? Have it take place over the course of three cups of tea?
3. Puzzle
- A sudoku that looks like the one from my 365 Days of Sudoku book that became my functional diary while abroad (more information about Sudoku tie in and Sudoku journal is forthcoming); include a place to put the date and a space for notes, just like in my Sudoku book. Have out for people to find and complete while they wait for performance to start/after they check out the installation?
- Maybe the puzzle accompanies an explanation of the relationship between my theme of time and my ideas about puzzles in general; for instance, on the post card that I have to create to publicize my project I will have one side be the Sudoku puzzle image and the other side be an introduction/advertisement for my project. This way the post card is both a tool for advertising and an integral component of the project itself.
4. Written thing
- Thematically concerned with: not just being the perpetual outsider, but investigating the puzzle-solving idea that element 3. introduces; I was an outsider trying to figure out a massive, unsolveable, cross-cultural puzzle, and the stories I include in this part all deal with that element of trying to figure out what is going on without having the necessary tools that a cultural insider or an initiate into the mysterious Senegalese rites would have; again, more elaboration of the puzzle theme is forthcoming
- Stories about:
*Pilgrimage to Poponguine with the Catholics
*Midnight party at Cheikh's house in Dakar
*A hilarious afternoon with Faatu
*A weirdo afternoon with Talla Lo
*Rachel/Youssou's wedding
*The bus to/from Mali, getting to Dogon, the sketchy Bamako hotel
*Unpleasant encounters with the Talibe?
*Passover!
*Singing at the Journée d'Integration des Informaticiens
*A djembe lesson
-It might be cool if everything was handwritten
5. THIS BLOG -- meta!!
- Thematically concerned with documentation/memory and remembering
- Keeping track of the process of putting together this project, including seeking out memories from others who were abroad with me, working through new ideas or refining ideas about other elements of the project, allowing the audience to participate in the documentation and memory of the project itself
SO! Those are all the things I want to accomplish in my project. I still have a lot of figuring out to do, if merely logistically (like, where will I find a space to put on this crazy thing!?). The idea of this blog is that I will rigorously and diligently track the progress of my project from here on. At some point, I might investigate how I can use this space to encourage interaction from/with disparate geographic circles (like, people in Senegal and people in the US!). Since this entry has largely served to catch up on what I have been doing for the last three months, hopefully forthcoming entries will be more immediate.
Ba beneen yoon! (that's Wolof for "until we encounter each other again along the road")
Tuesday, November 25, 2008
Getting started
me: hey ben!
12:45 PM Ben: hey eva
me: how are you?
Ben: i'm well
i just found out that one of my classes is cancelled so i'm just killing time in the lab
you?
12:46 PM me: I found out that my next class is optional, so I decided not to go!
I'm really excited about Thanksgiving
12:47 PM Ben: oh yeah? you heard about the turducken I'm assuming?
me: I did
I'm a little apprehensive about that, but I'm sure it will be fine
12:49 PM I have something I want to talk to you about when when we get up there
12:51 PM about blogs
Ben: ok
12:52 PM any clues now so that I can prepare some info?
me: part of my centennial scholar project is going to be a blog, and I am having trouble getting into it
Ben: ok
12:53 PM me: and I think it's because even though I know blogs are an important medium I don't really understand what makes them so special and specific
Ben: ah
well it's best to separate blogs into categories, as in there are many different types of blogs
12:54 PM me: yeah
I don't know what mine is, I guess
and that's the problem
12:55 PM Ben: well tell me what you want to do
me: it's kind of complicated/involved
12:56 PM my project is in some ways about the different ways we interact with time
Ben: hmm
me: so I am doing this large scale perfromance art thing
that has an installation, a live performance, a published piece of writing, and a sudoku puzzle
12:57 PM and the last part of it is a blog
my idea is that each of these things elicits a different relationship with time
12:58 PM I know this doesn't make that much sense, but I can explain more thoroughly when I see you in the flesh
Ben: ok
so what do you want to put on the blog?
12:59 PM or is the blog an actual performance art piece?
1:00 PM me: sort of
my idea about the blog is that it ties into the process of documenting and collective remembering
Ben: ah
me: and so I want to document the process of putting together my project
Ben: ok that makes some sense
1:01 PM me: and then when people come to see the piece itself I will have a laptop there where people can comment on the blog about what they thought of it or what they took away from it
1:02 PM or they can do it later
but the whole thing is about Senegal
1:03 PM and I want to tie in the importance of the internet and internet communities in places that are far removed from each other
because there is a whole different kind of internet culture in Senegal than there is here
which is really interesting
and I am having trouble reconciling these two things
Ben: far removed as in different locales far removed or as in cyberspace as removed from real space
1:05 PM me: kind of both
they are kind of behind in terms of technological access
which is a kind of removal
but they are also far away
like, geographically
1:06 PM Ben: so what it sounds like is first and foremost the blog is the virtual anchor to your project
1:07 PM it connects the "spaces" together, both real and actual
me: and also, the only access Senegalese people have to other places is what they see/find on the internet
yeah
1:08 PM Ben: so are you using technology to facilitate people in Senegal being able to experience things in the US
me: guh, that's what I don't know
I think that is a little much to ask of myself
Ben: well not really
1:09 PM there's a lot of internet technology already designed to do this
me: yeah I know
Ben: for example setting up a streaming video webcast is not so difficult
me: all my senegalese friends invited me to Hi5
oh I see what you mean
Ben: see I don't even know what that is!
me: it's like facebook but french
1:10 PM Ben: ah
is it pronounced "hee-sank"
me: no, it is pronounced like high five but in a silly french accent
Ben: lol
me: so like, hie fayve
1:11 PM I have to go to a lunch date, but I want to keep talking to you about this
Ben: ok
1:12 PM me: also, I just had the idea that as a start to my blog I would publish this gchat, since it is about the process of putting my project together
also just so I feel like I am accomplishing something
is that ok?
I'll send you the link
there is nothing on it yet
Ben: that's an excellent idea
1:13 PM i was going to reccomend that you document with meticulous precision every aspect of the project
and archive the results]
me: that's what I want to do, I just didn't know how to get started, but now I do!
thanks Ben!
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