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richard clarkson

e x p l o r a t i o n

A study of abstraction, sensory adaptation, experience and reinterpretation of the moments and experiences in between the ones we consider important

everyday

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Contents

06............

10............

16............

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26............

30............

Introduction

Abstraction

Sensory Exploration

Experience

Reinterpretation

Conclusions

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Introduction

I listen but do not hear, I eat but do not taste. I touch but do not feel, I sniff but do not smell. I look but do not see.

In life the moments, things and experiences we consider to be impor-tant that are the ones we remember. These moments are both the good and the bad, personal and shared, routine and random and can often be categorized as “Heroic” moments. But what about the other moments, the ones that fill the gaps between these important moments? Where do they go? What do they do? These and other questions are explored in the following work, along with my thoughts, processes, critiques, evalua-tions and ideas. Perhaps this work can help to answer a most interesting question; what happens when we activate the unimportant moments and force them to come alive? What happens when we make the unimportant important?

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Chopping Kumera

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Pronated Walking

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Pulling Headphones

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Abstraction of the Everyday

“to understand something is not to be able to define it or describe it. instead, taking something that we think we already know and making it unknown thrills us with its reality and deepens our understanding of it.” (Hara. 2007. p. 19)

The first step in my exploration of the everyday was to record, ab-stract and illustrate. For five separate hours I recorded every detail of my experiences and interactions with objects and people. From this data-base I chose three interesting moments. The activities themselves where mundane and ordinary, things such as chopping vegetables, walking and listening to music, but what made them interesting was my interactions with the objects during them. I had never realize the way my skin reacts and compresses with the handle of the knife or the way my posture is dic-tated by my shoes or even the way my head is tilted when my earphones are pulled. After I started looking for these details my eyes were opened and all at once wave after wave of both complex and simple information come pouring in, perhaps this is why we ignore so much of the everyday, the sheer amount of information is overwhelming.

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I took these interesting interactions and abstracted them. The point of the abstraction is simple and is best illustrated by Kenya Hara’s quote above. In order to understand the everyday we must make it unknown and by taking it out of its original context we can see the deeper relationships that exist without being hindered by preconceptions or expectations.

I chose to visualize this information in a lightpainting as it enabled me to express the abstract relationships on a visual layer over the top of the original context. I wanted the relationships to become themselves inde-pendent information but still hint at what context they are derived from.

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Set of 12 Sensory Experiences

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Chilli Powder Loud Beep Vinegar Needle

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Crushed Walnut Jam Jar Lid Wet Paper Plaster of Paris

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BeadsWater and EarthDC MotorWater Droplet

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Sensory Experience

The next step was to transform the abstract information into a sen-sory experience. I took a word from each of my abstract images that ex-plained the relationships that existed in each of the separate images; Pre-cision, Density and Continuity. As this particular exploration was not about sight I immersed myself in every other sense and developed a set of 12 sensory experiences one each of smell, taste, touch and sound for the words. Some easier to recognize and create than others, for instance the touch of precision came to me instantly in the form of a needle point. Others required more reasoning and explanation such as the taste of con-tinuity, for this I argued that the only true taste that is continuous is the taste of one’s own mouth and to create this taste I used an eye-dropper of an unknown liquid (water) as water has no taste the user would be trying to taste so hard that they would stumble upon their own taste.

My presentation format for this set was a particularly important aspect of the design; I wanted the user to experiment with how to engage with the objects. To do this I isolated the experiences into separate, covered can-

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isters, some with small openings in the top and others completely sealed. The user must explore the object and in doing so form a relationship with it; for example a user must press one of the objects against their ear for the experience to be activated, in others the user must invert and shake and in some the user must reach into unknown blackness.

For me this particular exploration was very inspiring, during this section I would often ‘smell’ my way through the contents of the pantry and fridge. It was a rather exciting experience as the items very rarely smelt as I expected them to, I had never before truly take the time to smell them. This is a perfect example of the rich source of experience and in-formation that the everyday holds, this information is not locked away or lost as I had previously thought but is just sitting there waiting to be explored by those who question.

The Electrotherapy Shock Collar

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19

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Experience Design

From my set of sensory experiments I chose the most interesting; the needle, I chose this experience for a number of reasons. Firstly it had a mental reaction in that it affected all the other sensory experiences. I told some of the users that one of the cylinders contained a sharp needle and this changed their level of caution across the whole set. They were think-ing more about each interaction than they would if they were casually touching or interacting with the objects. As the exploration was about increasing awareness and thinking of the senses this was a very desirable and interesting effect The second reason I chose this particular sensory experience was its playful nature. During the presentation I was observing people as they interacted with the objects, the needle was something people kept com-ing back to. It was effectively a game for people to try to balance on the fine line between resistance and pain, the presence of the element of pain made the object exciting. This is similar to Volker Morawe and Tilman Reiff’s Painstation, an installation video game that inflicted pain on los-ing players. (McGrath. 2002. p. 1)

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Sketches of Concepts for my artifact

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I looked at aesthetic experiences and researched ways of com-bining this idea of pain and play into an artifact that would be worn by one of my classmates for a week. Initially I looked at using needles but this did not give the instantaneous effect I was looking for. I explored various types of small electric shocks, from peizo electrically generated shocks to 9 volt batteries with capacitors. I found the most effective to be the shock delivered from an ‘Electric Gag Pen.’ The pen’s internal device delivered a sufficient shock that was powerful to cause muscle contraction but not powerful enough to cause lasting damage to the user. I created the element of a challenge though manipulating this device and adding two horizontal mercury switches in opposite directions. The de-vice is then worn of the back of the neck and the mercury switches act as level sensors so that anytime the users posture is off balance the device will shock the user. As the mercury switches are connected separately I used this to my advantage to pinpoint where the electric shock would hit, I could also decide which side it would happen on, the obvious method would be to shock the user on the same as that they were leaning to so they would back away from the shock back into the safe zone. However to make things more interesting and to add an element of humor to my object I put the shock on the opposite side, this means the user must

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lean towards the shock, a completely unnatural reaction to an electric shock. To make things even more interesting I tweaked the wiring of the switches making them ever so slightly random, for example the user may be leaning out of the ‘safe zone’ and not receive a shock leaving the user waiting and anticipating. Also the collar may occasionally shock the user for no reason at all, this keeps the user on their toes for the entire dura-tion of the scheduled session.

The second part in the design of this artifact was the schedule it was to be used to. The user must adhere to three sessions a day for time periods that began with 5 minutes on Monday and ended with 3 hours on Sun-day. At the end of the time period the user entered a word describing the experience into the schedule, the user was not allowed to use the same word twice.

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Reinterpretation of the Aesthetic Experience

In this section I must thank Andrew Miller, a fellow classmate of mine that, for one week, wore my artifact: The Electrotherapy Shock Collar. I gave Andrew the collar, along with the schedule and Video Diary task, on the 21st September 2010 and could see the worry in his eyes. He completed the schedule and Video Diary very well, even when the col-lar became difficult and painful to wear. The collar was designed to be a playful challenge and indeed Andrew found it fun for the first day but in the following days the playful aspect wore off and the collar became a constant mental possibility of being shocked. This was an unexpected outcome and was the key aspect I wanted to document in my Video. For Andrew the experience was similar to that of the Panopticon. The Panopticon was a prison designed by Jeremy Bentham in 1785 and used principals of human nature in order to help guard the inmates. (Foucault. 1977. p. 63) It worked by having a central guard tower that could see into the inmate cells, the tower itself could be seen by the inmates but the guards inside the tower could not be seen. The fact that someone could be watching that kept the inmates in line and in this way the in-

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My Artifact worn by Andew Miller

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mates effectively are watching themselves. These theories were picked up in Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison who said this Panoptic effect could be applied across other areas such as schools and work places. He also expresses clearly that, “Visibility is a trap...” (Foucault. 1977. p. 64) I agree entirely with this statement but expand this to “knowledge itself is a trap.” The knowledge of com-ing possible shocks created a mental trap for Andrew and it was this is the principal that was causing Andrew so much distress. The somewhat random nature of the mercury switches only helped to make the Panoptic effect stronger.

In order to express this in Video format I needed to mentally shock the audience and I needed the audience to know something was going to happen but not know what or when. To do this I use text at the beginning that states,

“In the next 40 seconds you will undergo Electrotherapy......it will hurt.”

This results in the audience becoming immediately aware some-thing is coming. To make the effect more dramatic the next 40 seconds

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are filled with visual darkness accompanied by an audio track of Andrew talking about how horrible the electric shock is. This track pans from left to right the end of each sentence, the speed of which increases progres-sively for more tension and dramatic effect. Then 4 seconds of silence and... BZZZZZ! Bright electric lightning erupts from the center of the screen in a flash with the sound of a powerful electric shock. After showing this to people and watching their reactions it was evident that my desired effect was achieved. Each member of the au-dience knew something was going to happen, but had no idea when, what or how. The fright they received was similar to that which Andrew underwent, the fact they knew it was coming made it that much more exciting. An interesting observation here is that the audience enjoyed the shock in much the same way as Andrew did with the collar for the first day. I believe that were I to make a feature length film of shocks at random times near the audience would feel the same way as Andrew did on the last day of the schedule; nervous, jumpy, sore and frustrated.

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Conclusions and Questions

This paper has been an exploration not only my everyday but of myself. I have had my eyes opened to details and masses of information. My ‘sec-ondary’ sensors awakened. I have had the chance to give someone an aes-thetic experience and then reinterpret that experience for others to have. Effectively I have come full circle in this explorative process; I began with a visualization and have ended with a visualization of another kind. It is only with the concluding thoughts that I began to wonder how the two would compare. On the last page of this work I have taken the light painting image that inspired the sensory experience and put it side by side with frame number 1444 of the final Video. To me this comparison is the most interesting find of all, to me it shows that the information was there all along, that the everyday can be abstracted again and again but will always maintain its essence that can be derived back into a similar form of itself. In the introduction of this work I asked “ what happens when we activate the unimportant moments and force them to come alive?” To that I ask, “what If we already have? What if we just havent’t realized it yet?”

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Bibliography

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish : the birth of the prison. (A. Sheridan, Trans.) New York: Pantheon Books.Hara, K. (2007). Designing design. (M. K. Hohle, & Y. Naito, Trans.) Baden, Switzerland: Lars Muller Publishers.McGrath, D. (2002, July 03). No Pain, No Game. Retrieved October 19, 2010, from Wired: http://www.wired.com/gaming/gamingre views/news/2002/03/50875?currentPage=1

Lightpainting Frame # 144432