Reading Reflection: Thinking About Performance and Process

I am very much interested in the concept of ‘performance’ and those un-capturable elements of human experience. Reflecting on the readings for this week, the idea of what counts as a performance, and the idea of quasi-experiment as structure is drawing my mind in interesting directions, and I thought I’d write out a bit of my mental meandering.

My base interest in this is coming from two past iSchool projects. One being the book I created for the De/Constructing the book workshop which explored the idea of the book as a physical space for performance of a work of music, and the other being the on-going project of creating a database to try and capture ever-changing, privately controlled virtual worlds of MMORPGs.

To me, both of those involve the idea of performance, albeit one in a more traditional artistic space and the other in the digital realm.

(First, though, did anyone else think back to the bird painting when Arsem talked of moving her performance into peoples’ homes as a venue?)

In Arsem’s piece, she talks about the importance of capturing the creative process.  Indeed, she mentions drawing on the process of historical research as part of her inspiration for Writing Ada (Arsem, 2009, p. 208). This process came to mind when Phillips noted what seemed to get a bit lost when the performance and preparation was re-captured in writing to accommodate the standards of an academic journal: “But I am not sure how to fix that joy and fascination and circulate it within the academy” (2015, p. 68). This desire to capture seems to go both ways; as inspiration for the performance and as an afterword to explain it.

I think at the root of these two works and of my own projects, there’s a desire to capture, in an academically acceptable form, those intangible things which make something meaningful to us. I wonder how much of this need to preserve drives other types of research… Could we make the same claim of a formal experiment? Of an ethnography? Of a survey? How do the goals of capturing as opposed to explaining or understanding differ in a research context?

Most journal articles leave room for discussion of methods. For instance, Hartel's article contains a very detailed methods section explaining much of the process as well as the method (2010). But I'm curious how much a methods section forces research to curtail descriptions of the process of discovery. When space is at a premium,  how much room is there to describe the "ah-ha!" moment of the researcher?

I’m looking forward to seeing how my ideas evolve during tonight’s class.

Sources:

Arsem, M. (2009). Performed research: Audience as investigator. In S.R. Riley & L. Hunter, (Eds.), Mapping landscapes for performance as research: Scholarly acts and creative cartographies (pp. 206-13). London: Palgrave-Macmillan. 

Hartel, J. (2010). Managing documents at home for serious leisure: A case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking. Journal of Documentation, 66(6), 847-874.

Phillips, D.J. (2015). Work and play at the threshold of legibility: Theatre as method and pedagogy in surveillance research. Surveillance & Society, 13.1, 57-77.