EEE Pori Session 08: Intro to Artivistic Fieldwork

EEE: To 17.9
Introduction to Artivistic Fieldwork: storymaking and fieldnotes

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Definitions

'Artivistic' is a is a borrowed term from the Montréal gatherings of 2004, 2005, 2007 & 2009

Suggesting the interplay of art and activist practices and theory
I align with 'creative imagineering' of other possible worlds and social change

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'Fieldwork' is the collection of raw data, in situ
in contrast to that which is collected in the laboratory, or in an controlled-experiment environment.

Debateable: How uncontrolled is the situation for an artist?

The term is mainly used in the natural and social sciences studies, such as in biology, ecology, environmental science, geology, geography, geophysics, paleontology, archaeology, anthropology, ethnomusicology, linguistics, and sociology, although it is also used in other subjects, such as in auditing. In survey research, field work refers to face-to-face or telephone interviewing.

'First-hand' recording and observing in the field, doing research, making work as a researcher,

In the habitat
In the landscape
Under the surface (of the landscape)
Revealing
Going back in time
Putting together the fragments
In the environment
Online?
Between people..
Face-to-face
Remote

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Participant observation

A set of research strategies which aim to gain a close and intimate familiarity with a given group of individuals (such as a religious, occupational, or subcultural group, or a particular community) and their practices through an intensive involvement with people in their natural environment, often though not always over an extended period of time.

Informal interviews
Direct observation
Participation in the life of the group
Collective discussions
Analysis of personal documents produced in the group
Self-analysis
Life-histories

Similar to ethnography but often involves a shorter time in the field.
Mostly Qualitative, though it can also include quantitative research.

Presenting findings with objectivity and neutrality using cross-cultural comparisons
Really?

Used extensively in studies of non-Western societies by anthropologists/ethnographers such as Bronislaw Malinowski, Edward Evans-Pritchard, and Margaret Mead in the first half of the twentieth century. Also by students of Franz Boas in the US, and in the urban research of the Chicago School of sociology.

This same method of study has also been applied to groups within Western society, and is especially successful in the study of sub-cultures or groups sharing a strong sense of identity, where only by taking part might the observer truly get access to the lives of those being studied.

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Observing Participation

A variant of participant observation is observing participation, described by Marek M. Kaminski, who explored prison subculture being a political prisoner in communist Poland in 1985.

"Observing" or "observant" participation has also been used to describe fieldwork in sexual minority subcultures by anthropologists and sociologists who are themselves lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender;

the different phrasing is meant to highlight the way in which their partial or full membership in the community/subculture that they are researching both allows a different sort of access to the community and also shapes their perceptions in ways different from a full outsider.

“I define this particular research role, in contrast to participant observation, with two conditions:

(a) OP enters a community through a similar social process as its other members and is subject to similar rules;
(b) OP undertakes field research as if he or she was a researcher.

An ideal OP lives through his/her social role, impassively registers randomly generated personal experience, and applies available data gathering techniques” (Kaminski, p.8)

Epistemology of Participation versus Observation

“A participant or a participating observer may gather useful data when more formalized methods of data collection are not available or provide unreliable output. A participant perceives his world differently than a participating observer perceives the domain of his study. Differences in beliefs, access to information, and attitudes of these two related roles lead to role-specific epistemological deformations.

Such typical deformations are briefly characterized below. A participant is personally interested in his story. He avoids topics that are inconvenient for him and “forgets” embarrassing facts. A political prisoner emphasizes his own heroism against an unjust regime. A criminal prisoner claims innocence against an unjust court. Both of them believe, after Solzhenitsyn, Bukovsky, and others, that “only a prisoner will understand another prisoner.” In otherwords, a typical inmate hardly considers his prison experience to be intersubjectively communicable. He rarely applies any standardized techniques of data gathering. Instead, he focuses on anecdotes and interprets events through his own experience.

A participant observer lacks the sense of real-life pressure participants experience. He is not as affected emotionally by the events as a participant. He lacks experiences that can stimulate one’s understanding of insiders’ problems. In prison, such experience includes the stress of being arrested, interrogated, or transferred to another prison. He may be unaware that inmates use incredibly ingenious techniques to decipher squealers and that such techniques are applied routinely to newbies. Inmates may check his background, his papers and timing of various events, his contacts in his previous prisons and in the “freedom world,” and where he lived andworked. They monitor his in-cell and out-of-cell activities. Most likely, he will be deciphered in a matter of minutes in a new cell.

There is an interesting correlation here: one can learn most from those inmates who are most likely to decipher him. Despite all of my precautions, I was “deciphered” twice by my cellmates as a “sociologist who takes notes and does research in prison.” In one case, a beating followed. All that occurred despite the fact that I was a true inmate, that my research was only a by-product of my role, and that I knew both the argot and prison norms well.” (Kaminski, p.8-9)

“My data sources can be sorted into a few categories: (i) Living through various inmate roles; (ii) Informal evening tea chats; (iii) Secret code training of grypsmen candidates; (iv) Informal conversations with inmates, typically face-to-face; (v) Prison artifacts such as pictures, songs, letters, and hand-made products; (vi) The memoirs and written relations of political and criminal prisoners and conversations with former political prisoners; (vii) Underground Solidarity research reports on prisons and uncensored Warsaw University working papers and officially released statistical data.” (Kasminski, p.9)

Observing Participant data sources came from:
(i) Living through various roles
(ii) Informal collective social conversations
(iii) Specialist knowledge embedded in role
(iv) Informal face-to-face individual conversations
(v) Artefacts such as images, oral forms such as songs, letters, hand-made objects
(vi) Artefacts from related scenes or contexts at other times/places
(vii) Other research or official documents/statistics related to context

Research-Through-a-Role

“I went through the social roles of rookie (twice), humiliated rookie, potential sucker, aproposman, grypsman,7 self-injury expert, faker, and tough political prisoner. Among the major inmate roles that I did not experience were fag, squealer, corridorman, elder, fuss-master, cat, and jumper.” (Kaminski, p.11)

“to use my own personal experience as a valuable source of unique data rather than a starting point for reflection or existential speculation.” (Kaminski, p.15)

Kaminski, Marek M. (2004), Games Prisoners Play, Princeton University Press, New Haven

Bernard, Russell H. (1995), Research methods in anthropology: qualitative and quantitative approaches. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Participant_observation

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What skills and involvements are connected to Fieldwork?

Fieldwork education requires the professional development of skills and competencies in areas such as:

1) Communication skills;
2) Critical evaluation;
3) Teamwork;
4) Problem-solving and decision-making;
5) Responsiveness; and
6) Occupational competencies.

It entails developing ethical and moral behaviour and an attitude and approach consistent with the discipline area such as:

1) Reflective practice;
2) Evidence-based practice;
3) Leadership;
4) Tolerance, caring;
5) Acknowledgement of diversity.

http://eesj.curtin.edu.au/faq1.cfm?sid=321

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'Ethnographic Mapping'

Artist as Ethnographer (Foster, 1996)
http://roundtable.kein.org/files/roundtable/Foster.pdf
Foster, H. (1996) ‘The Artist as Ethnographer’, in The Return of the Real, MIT Press

Art theorist Hal Foster
Noted that in 1980s that some of these art practices were combined with a 'quasi-ethnographic' way of working.. Subject defined in terms of cultural identity.

Avantgarde (left-sided) artist no longer exclusively working on behalf of the proletariat but in addition the cultural or ethnic other.

Ethnography as a research medium for discussions and debates about what was becoming social or cultural aspects of life

“ethnographer envy”

two seperate critical practices simultaneously expanded and touched: installation art and ethnography.

Both short-lived and characterised by a degree of temporal strategy (immersion)

Artistic practice defined by Foster as “Ethnographic Mapping”

a process of highlighting and focusing on phenomenon with context (social, cultural, political) then representing it through artistic expression (specifically installation art) for others to experience it.

Mapping in recent art at that time, he said, “tended toward the social and anthropological, to the point where an ethnographic mapping of an institution or community is [a] primary form of site-specific art today”

He wrote about the work of many artists

e.g. Stephen Willits: report was written in language appropriate to the language of sociology, involving restricted codes, audience perceptions, predictive language and social environment parameters..

Concerned with social environment of art far more than actual work of art.

Who -as he saw it- were working in an analogous way with ethnographic mapping, in order to highlight a specific situation in a context or a socio-cultural phenomenon.

Reassessment of site-specificity relating them social issues and community, ideas of place and non-place.

Kwon, Miwon (2002). One Place After Another: site-specific art and locational identity. MIT Press, Massachusetts.

Kester, Grant (2004). Conversation Pieces: community and communication in modern art, University of California Press.

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Case Example 2003: Mapmyths in Karosta-Liepaja LV

http://apaterso.info/projects/mapmyths/
http://mampyths.rixc.lv/
http://locative.x-i.net/

People/Actors/Participants

  • Authors/producers: Andrew Paterson, Signe Pucena
  • Institutions involved: K@2 Centre for Culture and Information, K'Maksla? Gallery, RIXC Centre for New Media Culture, Karosta Naval Base
  • Funders: Leverhulme Trust Studentship, EU Culture2000 Funds
  • Informants/participants: Baba Dusja, Raimo, Naval Cadets
  • Audience: local karosta-liepaja/Riga people visiting gallery, reading newspaper article, or watching TV broadcast, art/music event audience attending opening (local Karosta-Liepaja, Riga, International), anecdotes to friends, listeners to presentations at Neuro Networking Gathering (Munich), Medialab (Helsinki), RIXC Centre for New Media Culture (Riga), online website visitors

Audience important as actors

Context of Fieldwork

Locative Media Workshop
International and Latvian New Media Practice
New Media Folkloric Studies

Tools

  • Nokia 3620 Camera-phone
  • DAT Professional Audio Recorder
  • Canon Digital Camera
  • Email
  • HTML
  • 'TamTam' Hosted Wiki in Zagreb, Croatia (now offline)

Artefacts

  • 'Media field-notes': digital photographs, sound recordings, video clips, GPS maps
  • Oral anecdotes, presentations and testimonies from producers at several gatherings and events (Liepaja, Riga, Munich, Helsinki)
  • Production notes and files
  • Textual accounts as essays
  • Online wiki/HTML website with visual and aural media
  • Exhibition with material objects: paper photographs, table/chair installations, video projection, spoken word recordings, posters, flyers
  • Opening concert at gallery for local people

NB/ In above artefacts, the producers/authors had full control/authorship. Some were performance related. Below atefacts, no authorship control was possible.

  • Local newspaper article & TV article in Liepaja.

Object/motives/Out comes

  • Gathering stories of individuals, including our own presence
  • Online and event-based representations
  • Exploring specific cultural values
  • Affinity, familiar personal and community relationships
  • Continued contact with cultural institutions RIXC/K@2

NB/This tri-relation O/m/O is constantly being reformed.

Motivated behaviour is preceding out comes?
Should expand on tacit knowledge.

Social-cultural rules (discourses)

  • Media arts and culture
  • Workshop activity in Independent Cultural Event
  • Autobiographical ethnographic practices
  • Storymaking and telling

Communities involved

  • Of practice: Orthodox church congregation, home-workers, navy base training, artistic and cultural management, entho-folk culture
  • Of interest: cultural activists and organisers, media arts activism/research, local media, local inhabitants,

Structured organised behaviour

Authors/producers

  • Turn-taking collaborative 'listening': following each other's interests and motivations, and leading.
  • Appropriate skill roles applied in comunication/documentation
  • _Unequal_ local/linguistic/experiential applied knowledge and contact with informants

Institutions

  • Informal with cultural organisations as the activity was commisioned/allowed by them
  • Formal relations with Navy Base, Church (activity allowed after asking (to make sound recordings)s

Language of dialogue

  • Between Signe<->Andrew: English
  • Between Signe<->K@2/Latvian informants: Latvian
  • Betweeen Signe/K@2<->Russian Informants (Baba dusja/Vasilij): Russian
  • Between Andrew<->all(except Russian speakers who he couldnt communicate with): English
  • Between Andrew/Signe<->audience: Latvian, English

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Case Example 2004: Aware:Storyboard/Kadreejums in Teesside/Daugavpils UK/LV

People/Actors/Participants

  • Authors/producers: Andrew, technical assistance from John Evans,
  • Institutions involved: UK: Stockton-on-Tees College, Verb Garden / LV: Kultūras Dizaina Aģentūra, Daugavpils Pedagogical University, RIXC Centre for New Media Culture
  • Funders: UK: University of Teesside / LV: K@2 Centre for Culture and Information, Nordic Institute for Contemporary Arts
  • Informants/participants: UK: Stoo, Ginge, Foamy, H3RO, agPuk / LV: VICtorija, SANDRA, kalito, Bis, alnis, rekur, TA3, Mary, i-gun, Gunar
  • Audience: online website visitors, listeners to presentations at Transmediale (Berlin), HIIT (Helsinki), Medialab (Helsinki)

Audience important as actors

Context of Fieldwork

UK/LV: New Media Arts Workshop in Education setting
UK: International Animation Festival
LV: Promotion of Cultural Organisation Network

Tools

  • Nokia 3620 Camera-phone
  • SMS Gateway
  • Participants mobile phone
  • Various digital cameras
  • HTML/PHP Web code and MySQL Database
  • 'Aware' Server in Helsinki, Finland (now offline)

Artefacts

  • 'Media field-notes': digital photographs, sms texts, dynamic webpage (all these items are now partially retrievable)
  • Oral anecdotes, presentations and testimonies from producers at several gatherings and events (Riga, Berlin, Helsinki, Sydney, Brisbane)
  • Production notes and files
  • Textual accounts as essays
  • Online HTML/PHP webpages showing contributed images and sms by participants (offline since 01.2006)

Object/motives/Out comes

  • Support young cultural organisation
  • Gathering and sharing moments of individuals, including our own presence
  • Online weblog representations
  • Exploring combined use of sms and image representation for experience.
  • Affinity, familiar personal and community relationships
  • Continued contact with cultural institutions RIXC/K@2

Social-cultural rules (discourses)

  • Media arts and culture
  • Workshop activity in Pedagogical/Educational Context
  • Fine Art Photography
  • Autobiographical practices
  • Storymaking and telling

Communities involved

  • Of practice: Fine Art Photography students, Artists, Cultural producers/organisers, Friends, Lovers
  • Of interest: Cultural Activists and Organisers, Media arts activism/research, Friends

Structured organised behaviour

Authors/producers

  • Facillitated organisational support from local contacts
  • Remote technical support
  • _Unequal_ local/linguistic/experiential applied knowledge and contact with informants

Participants

  • Invited into workshop, in relation to studies or friendship.
  • Once given mobile credit, ability to SMS to database.
  • Continue living as normal pattern, however, contributing to the shared process of sending SMS to database over 1 week
  • Upload images in own time, when appropriate.
  • Meet up with author/producer several times in the process.

Institutions

  • Informal relations with Cultural organisation in Daugavpils and teacher in Pedagogical University
  • Informal relations with K@2 who sponsored the accomodation

Language of dialogue

UK:

  • Between Andrew<->All participants, institutions, and partners: English
  • Between Workshop participants<->Workshop participants: English
  • Between Workshop participants<->Web platform: English

LV:

  • Between Kultūras Dizaina Aģentūra (TA3)<->Andrew: English
  • Between Kultūras Dizaina Aģentūra (TA3)<->Workshop participants: Latvian, Russian
  • Between Andrew<->Workshop participants: English
  • Between Workshop participants<->Workshop participants: Latvian, Russian
  • Between Workshop participants<->Web platform: Latvian, Russian, English, Ukrainian

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Chris Byrne, in essay 'Mobile Realism: thoughts on portable networked imagining and its antecedents', RAM3 Booklet, wrote:

“Projects like Aware's IAN (Interactive Audio-Visual Narrative) are well organised, calling upon teams of people in specialist roles: contributor, gatherer, depositer, connector, listener and ultimately audience. The process of mapping the urban space is co-ordinated through a co-operative structure. The data/content accumulated occurs according to the specific trajectories and interests of certain categories of participants in the project, and also in self-reflexive response to the content left by others in particular cells of the mobile network.”

Byrne made connection with Mass Observation movement in UK from 1937-late 1950s,

“seeking the extraordinary in the ordinary, attemping to decipher through teams of Observers the meanings in the behaviours of crowds and social groups, reports of the images in dreams, the sampling and analysis of overheard snatches of conversation.” (Byrne)

“This organisation was founded in 1937 by three young men, who aimed to create an 'anthropology of ourselves'. They recruited a team of observers and a panel of volunteer writers to study the everyday lives of ordinary people in Britain.” (MassObs webpage) http://www.massobs.org.uk/a_brief_history.htm

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Case Example 2007: Hengita.hankala hengittää in Helsinki FI

People/Actors/Participants

  • Authors/producers: Andrew,
  • Institutions:
  • Informants/participants:
  • Audience:

Event attendees important as actors

Context of Fieldwork

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Tools

  • Nokia N80 Camera-phone
  • Roland Edirol WAV/MP3 Recorder
  • Email
  • 'Stikipad' Hosted Wiki in Kansas USA (now offline)

Artefacts

  • 'Media field-notes': digital photographs, sound recordings, video clips, emails
  • Oral anecdotes, presentations and testimonies from producer at several gatherings and events (Helsinki, Chicago, Montreal)
  • Textual accounts as essay or report
  • Online wiki/HTML website

NB/ In above artefacts, the producers/authors had full control/authorship. Some were performance related. Below atefacts, no authorship control was possible.

Object/motives/Out comes

NB/This tri-relation O/m/O is constantly being reformed.

Motivated behaviour is preceding out comes?
Should expand on tacit knowledge.

Social-cultural rules (discourses)

  • Activitst arts and culture
  • Oral History gathering activity
  • Autobiographical ethnographic practices
  • Storymaking and telling

Communities involved

Structured organised behaviour

Authors/producers

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Institutions

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Language of dialogue

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Summary of Approaches

=1=

Identify a 'centre-point'/shared-space/person/collective/practice/boundary object

Follow the threads that emerge in different inter-related directions, from the attention _you give/share_

Document like a mind-map or a multi-formed narrative.

Case Example 2003: Mapmyths in Karosta-Liepaja LV
Case Example 2005: Oeresund Conversations in Copenhagen DK
Case Example 2007: Add+PF+? in Chicago US

=2=

Identify a 'centre-point'/shared-space/person/collective/practice/boundary object

Invite _others to give/share_ attention to/with it.

While temporarily in the same space, witness and document the backgrounds and particularities which each brings there.

Case Example 2004: Aware:Storyboard/Kadreejums in Teesside/Daugavpils UK/LV
Case Example 2004: Aware:Rengo in Helsinki FI
Case Example 2004/2006: Locative Media:Rautatieasema in Helsinki FI
Case Example 2007: Happihuone writer-in-residence in Helsinki FI

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