Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art

Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art by Lucas Ihlein, BA (Hons) Visual Arts Submitted in part fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University June, 2009 DEAKIN UNIVERSITY CANDIDATE DECLARATION I certify that the thesis entitled Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging as Art submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy is the result of my own work and that where reference is made to the work of others, due acknowledgment is given. I also certify that any material in the thesis which has been accepted for a degree or diploma by any university or institution is identified in the text. Full Name.................................................……………………………… (Please Print) Signed ..................................................................................…………… Date......................................................................................…………… Abstract In his 1934 book Art as Experience, John Dewey called for the reintegration of art with the processes of everyday life. According to Dewey, since the industrialisation of western society, art has become a compartmentalised sphere set apart from ordinary culture. This thesis asks, 'what might the reintegration of art and life look like, in the early twenty-first century in Australia?' Utilising a practice-based research approach, I have developed and refined a new method of art practice – bilateral blogging – which works within the rhythms and spaces of everyday life. Inspired by the 'blurring of art and life' carried out by artists such as Allan Kaprow, the projects developed in this thesis – Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham – extend twentieth century avant-garde art practice into the existing spaces of Australian neighbourhoods. This thesis shows how artworks like these, comprised of localised social relations, might also begin to document the specific interactive experiences which go into their own making. I demonstrate that as a form of art practice, blogging can deepen engagement with everyday experience. It can produce a more dialogical relationship between artist and audience, and, importantly, it is able to generate rich documentation of situated experiences. Blogging is thus a research tool with the potential to bring to light aspects of everyday life which normally go unnoticed. Through close reflection on the processes and outcomes of my own blog artworks, I have also developed a new way of identifying some of the aesthetic qualities of the experiences from which my relational art projects are made. Building on the work of William James, John Dewey and Allan Kaprow, I propose that attention plays a crucial role in transforming social interactions into aesthetic experience. The method of bilateral blogging developed in this thesis uses attention as a framing device, catalysing seemingly incoherent events into an intelligible, expansive structure. This thesis thus makes three substantial contributions: a new method for making relational artworks; the production of an experiential document of the particular environments in which these artworks are situated; and a new approach to understanding the functioning of aesthetic experience. Taken together, these contributions bring a fresh perspective to discussions around the blurring of art and life, and the use of art as a mode of enquiry. i Acknowledgements First of all, many thanks to Estelle Barrett, my supervisor, who took such care in guiding me throughout my candidature. Thanks to all those who were involved in the two art projects which form the art practice component of this research: For Bilateral Kellerberrin, particular thanks to Chris Cruickshank, Pauline Scott, James Scott, Roger Scott, Felena Alach, Marco Marcon and IASKA, Kirsten Bradley, Jo Debney, Jo Law, Redmond Bridgeman, the committee from The Pipeline and everyone who took part in the blog. For Bilateral Petersham, many thanks to Bec Dean, Lisa Kelly, Tully Rosen, Vanessa Berry, Luciana Buonanno, Tim Wright, Heather Stevens, Natalie Woodlock, Margaret Mayhew, Barbara Campbell, Sunanda Creagh, Ricardo Peach, Anna Bazzi Backhouse and the Marrickville Council, The Chowdhury/Coe Family and Wolfie, Liz Pulie, Jay Balbi, Reuben Keehan, Keg de Souza, Lucas Abela, Jasmin Stephens, Lester Bostock, Alex Bruin, Phuong Le, Sue Pedley, Roderick Hietbrink, Rohan Stanley, Greg Turner, the Petersham Bowling Club and everyone who took part in the blog. I also want to acknowledge the influence of those I have collaborated with during this period on related art projects: Diego Bonetto, Keg de Souza, Mickie Quick, Emma Jay, Danae Natsis, SquatSpace, Jim Singline, Louise Curham, Nick Keys, Astrid L'Orange, David Harris, Kernow Craig, Jessie Lymn, Alyssa Evans, BIG FAG PRESS, The Rizzeria, and the Network of UnCollectable Artists. Thanks also to colleagues with whom I have maintained a lively dialogue informing this project: Randall Szott, Jason Maling, Sal Randolph, Andrew Gryf Paterson, Bianca Hester, Scott Mitchell, Stuart Harrison, Spiros Panigirakis, Tom Nicholson, ii Chris Fleming, Sussi Porsborg, Marg Roberts, Mick Douglas, Sarah Rainbird, Zanny Begg, Ruark Lewis, Jane Simon, Anne Kay, Sandra Bridie, Margie Borschke, Barb Bolt, Jon Tarry, Anneke Jaspers, Anthony McCall, Guy Sherwin, Astra Howard, Raquel Ormella, Svealena Kutchke, Christopher Hewitt, David Medalla, Eve Vincent, Jo Holder, Danni Zuvela, Mike Leggett, Lisa Kelly, Kirsten Lowe, Mel Curtiss, Margaret Mayhew, Terri Hoskin, George Khut, Bridget Currie, Jasmin Stephens, Glenn Barkley, Bec Dean. Thanks to my family, who have embraced this art practice and research so enthusiastically: Owen Ihlein, Michele Purcell, Rebecca Newman, Joshua Ihlein, Claire Ihlein, Jonathan Ihlein, Michael Ihlein, Gosia Dobrowolska. Many thanks to Kelly Hender and Anne Walton for invaluable assistance with editing and proof-reading this exegesis. Above all, my thanks to Lizzie Muller, who believed in this project and my ability to complete it, and who read through its many drafts with a critical, supportive and loving eye. This thesis is dedicated to the memory of Arthur Russell, who taught me the value of paying full attention. iii Table of Contents Abstract.......................................................................................................................... i Acknowledgements.......................................................................................................ii Foreword.....................................................................................................................vii Introduction...................................................................................................................1 Blogging, Art, and Everyday Life............................................................................ 1 Developing "Bilateral Blogging" as a Method of Artmaking.................................. 2 Research Questions and Contributions.................................................................... 4 Theory and Practice Informing the Research........................................................... 7 Research Methodology: Reflective Art Practice...................................................... 8 An Outline of the Chapters.....................................................................................10 Relationship of the Practice to the Exegesis.......................................................... 13 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art....................................................................... 15 Dialogue as an Aesthetic Practice: Peg#24............................................................16 Means and Ends in the Work of Robert Morris..................................................... 19 The Legacy of Allan Kaprow................................................................................. 24 Experiential Frameworks: Kaprow's Happenings.................................................. 29 Stories as Experiential Documents.........................................................................32 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging...................................... 36 Dewey's Call for Reintegration.............................................................................. 36 Relational Aesthetics and Micro-Utopias.............................................................. 38 Relational Aesthetics and the Illusion of Togetherness......................................... 40 Bilateral Blogging in Kellerberrin..........................................................................46 Bridging Public and Private Spheres with Blogs................................................... 52 A Bilateral Framework for Aesthetic Experience.................................................. 56 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention................... 62 Comparing Kellerberrin and Petersham................................................................. 66 An Economics of Attention....................................................................................69 Attention and Experience....................................................................................... 70 Attention and Aesthetic Experience ...................................................................... 74 Bilateral Blogging: Attention in Action................................................................. 77 iv Three Attention Frames for Generating Aesthetic Experience.............................. 79 The Territorial Frame ....................................................................................... 80 The Temporal Frame......................................................................................... 81 The Material/Technological Frame................................................................... 84 How the Attention Frames Work Together............................................................85 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham.................... 88 Exploring Bilateral Petersham's Unruly Archive.................................................. 89 A Structural Anatomy of Bilateral Petersham.......................................................94 Connecting with the Local in Bilateral Petersham.............................................. 100 Spatial Stories as Experiential Maps....................................................................101 Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham.....................................109 Blurred Borders: A Short Trip to Marrickville.................................................... 114 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging..............................................................120 Offline Blogging ..................................................................................................120 Offline and Online Experience ............................................................................127 The Location of the Work of Art?........................................................................130 An Inherently Variable Media: Blogging as Art, Art as Research....................... 132 Conclusion................................................................................................................ 135 Challenges and Opportunities of the Research Experience..................................136 How the Research Questions were Addressed..................................................... 138 Contributions of the Thesis.................................................................................. 142 1. The Method of Bilateral Blogging...............................................................143 2. The Production of an Experiential Map of Kellerberrin and Petersham .... 144 3. An Attention Framework for Understanding How Bilateral Blogging ....... Produces Aesthetic Experiences.................................................................. 144 Possibilities for Future Work............................................................................... 145 The Rise of Blogging as a Form of Art........................................................... 146 Beyond the Territorial Frame: Bon Scott Blog................................................147 Documenting Ephemeral Art Practices........................................................... 149 Bibliography..............................................................................................................151 v List of Figures Figure 1: Lucas Ihlein and Mick Hender, Peg#24, 1995. 18 Figure 2: Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of its own Making, 1961. 21 Figure 3: Robert Morris, Card File, 1962. 23 Figure 4: Robert Morris, Card File, 1962 (detail). 24 Figure 5: Lucas Ihlein, Map of Petersham Indicating Suburb Borders, 2007. 81 Figure 6: Lucas Ihlein, Chart of "key" and underlying events in Bilateral Petersham, 2009, photo by Greg Turner. 96 Figure 7: Lucas Ihlein, Chart of "key" and underlying events in Bilateral Petersham, 2009 (detail). 97 Figure 8: Bilateral Kellerberrin paste-up, IASKA Gallery, May 2005 122 Figure 9: Volunteers assemble The Pipeline community newsletter, April 2005, Kellerberrin. 124 Figure 10: Gallery visitor assembles a copy of Bilateral Kellerberrin book, May 2005, IASKA Gallery. 125 Figure 11: Bilateral Petersham's sculptural bench/shelf, May 2007, Artspace Gallery, Sydney, photo by Greg Turner. 126 Figure 12: Technorati graph showing growth in worldwide number of blogs, 2003-2007 (Sifry 2007). 133 vi Foreword The motivation for this research grew from my experience as an artist devising and producing large scale collaborative projects in the public sphere. These were primarily deadline-oriented events, meaning that a great amount of creative energy was directed towards a future moment, when "all would be revealed" to the public. One major consequence of this way of working was that my day-to-day experience of making art became very stressful. Producing art for a deadline pitted process against product. In fact, process seemed to disappear from view altogether, just as critical reflection on my approach to making art was sacrificed for the need to deliver a spectacular outcome. It occurred to me that there must be a better way of making art: a way which allowed for the slow evolution of an idea, rather than a race towards a finished product; a way which enabled the period of time spent making art to be more than just the means to an end. Process, I imagined, needed to be reframed as a mindful and reflective end in itself. How, I wondered, could I begin to model a less stressful practice, integrating the production of art with the rhythms of my own life? It was with this impulse that I set to work on the art projects which are the foundation of this doctoral research. Underlying this work is the desire for a more intelligent, energy-efficient balance between process and product. The method of blogging as a form of art – which I discuss in depth throughout this exegesis – is one strategy I have developed to engage with this problem. No doubt there are many other ways to deepen the integration of art with life. As I describe in this exegesis, the desire for such an integration has deep roots in avant-garde art history. By publically modelling such possibilities, I believe that art has the power to inspire and stimulate a more sustainable relationship between means and ends in all areas of social life. vii April-May 2005 A resident of Sydney lives in a country town in Western Australia for two months. During this time he keeps a daily record of the people he meets. The written accounts of these conversations are posted on the internet each day, generating an emerging document of the developing relationships between "locals" and "outsider". - Lucas Ihlein, Bilateral Kellerberrin, <http://kellerberrin.com> April-May 2006 A resident of the Sydney suburb of Petersham vows to remain within the council-defined borders of his own suburb for two months. During this time he posts a daily record of his everyday life on the internet. These written accounts become a tool for deepening his engagement with ordinary events and social interactions within the neighbourhood. - Lucas Ihlein, Bilateral Petersham <http://thesham.info> viii Introduction Blogging, Art, and Everyday Life This practice-based thesis consists of two art projects, Bilateral Kellerberrin, and Bilateral Petersham, which utilise blogging and face-to-face social interaction as their key aesthetic media. With these projects, I have attempted to forge a closer relationship between the processes of art, and the experience of everyday life. Blogging is a form of interactive self-publishing on the internet. It is a relatively recent cultural phenomenon with very few direct precedents of use as a form of art.1 However, as will be shown, the two blogging projects discussed here build upon, and extend, a well-respected history of twentieth century experimental and conceptual art practice. Blogging as a method of artmaking can also contribute new insights into contemporary debates. In particular, I argue that the projects developed as part of this thesis enrich discussions around "relational aesthetics" – a strand of contemporary practice where social interactions are used as a medium for artmaking. Blogs are primarily communicative tools, mediating relationships between human beings. My blog-as-art projects filter and focus local and global issues currently in circulation, through an art practice based squarely in my own everyday lived 1 To date, the literature discussing the uses of blogs has focussed primarily on the writing of online diaries, citizen journalism, fiction writing, public knowledge-building, educational research, and for bringing together geographically distant subcultural communities (see Blood 2002; Brady 2005; Bruns & Jacobs 2006; Cohen 2006; Coleman 2005; Rettberg 2008; Serfaty 2004). 1 Introduction experience. Participating directly in the sites and subjects of contemporary society, this practice-based research demonstrates that it is not always necessary for art to be confined within art galleries and museums. As a form of art, blogging sometimes blurs, often intensifies, and at its best, fruitfully enriches the relationship between art and life. Developing "Bilateral Blogging" as a Method of Artmaking Since 2003, I have used a blog, entitled Bilateral, to collect and publish my ideas about art and social exchange, and to write short experiential accounts of ephemeral artworks I have participated in (Ihlein 2003). In early 2005, when I visited Kellerberrin, a small town in Western Australia, as an invited artist in residence, I created a new blog as a tool for taking notes on my daily life there. However, after a few weeks of blogging about my encounters with local residents, I realised that what I was doing was not just gathering data which might later be transformed into an art object. Blogging was an emergent art practice in itself. In Kellerberrin I had discovered a new way of making art, and a new form of art object: "blogging-as-art". The resulting blog, Bilateral Kellerberrin (April-May 2005), became a document of, and a catalyst for, my developing relationships with local people in Kellerberrin. I quickly became aware of the twin nature of my artistic process – being out in public, meeting and participating in the life of the town, and being online, writing about and reflecting upon my encounters each day. The project thus became a tool for living, reflecting on, and publically discussing everyday life – for both myself and the 2 Introduction townsfolk. Because of the dual nature of the interactions which produced Bilateral Kellerberrin, and its reliance on a series of encounters moving the work of art beyond a model of solo-authorship, I came to call my particular method of artmaking "bilateral blogging". Towards the end of my residency in Kellerberrin, the socially transformative effects of the artwork raised a further question for myself as an artist and city-dweller. I was keen to find out whether this method could work in variable circumstances. If bilateral blogging had enabled me to rapidly get under the skin of a place thousands of miles from my home, what could a similar process achieve in my own backyard? In this way, my subsequent project, Bilateral Petersham, drew on what I had learned from Kellerberrin. However, like my own everyday life, the suburb of Petersham seemed to have no clearly defined edges. For this reason, as well as blogging each day as I had done in Kellerberrin, I devised a new rule. For two months I would not be allowed to leave the council-defined boundaries of Petersham. This rule forced me, and my blog readers, to devote an abundance of attention to the places, people and events of Petersham. The resulting blog – a poetic, finely described, at times very funny and compelling chronicle of my time as an artist-in-residence in my own neighbourhood – was not only personally transformative (in that it deepened my own connection with Petersham), but it also produced new insights into the kind of social environment Petersham is. 3 Introduction Research Questions and Contributions Over the past two hundred years, as western art has become detached from its service to church and state, it seems to have become a realm of relative freedom. However, art has evolved into an increasingly specialised and professionalised field of cultural production set apart from the social processes of everyday life. To counter this move towards cultural compartmentalisation, many artists in the twentieth century attempted to reimport everyday life into the frame of art. Marcel Duchamp's readymades, and Allan Kaprow's Happenings are emblematic of this endeavour to close the gulf between art and life, restoring continuity between these two spheres. Duchamp, Kaprow, and countless others alongside them, strove to make artworks as "real things in the real world" – not merely representations of reality locked safely away in museums. The questions with which I begin my own research also fall within this vein of enquiry. Thus I ask: How can my own art practice and everyday life be brought into rich relationship with one another? What new forms of art practice are required for this purpose? As a practicing artist, I ask myself these questions not in pursuit of a hypothetical answer but in order to transform my own practices of living and making art. If we are to take seriously the claim that art needs to become more participatory and coextensive with our own lives, this process must, logically, begin in our own 4 Introduction neighbourhoods. Thus, one goal of my research has been the attempt to find ways to reconnect with myself and my neighbours by developing an art practice which facilitates flows of communication in the actuality of daily life. To this end, the new method of artmaking I have developed utilises the dual practices of blogging and face-to-face interaction within specific local situations. My research here takes up some of the methods developed by artists like Allan Kaprow, but extends them, far beyond the narrow social groups and architectural structures which constitute the artworld, into Australian towns and suburbs. The development of such a method of artmaking leads me to a further research question underpinning this thesis: If art and life can be successfully integrated, what new knowledge might emerge in the process? One of the key factors in addressing this question is: knowledge for whom? An important consideration for an art practice which seeks to integrate with real communities is the need to feed outcomes back into those communities, rather than extracting data from them for the benefit of a specialised audience located elsewhere. Bilateral blogging, I have discovered, provides a good tool for feeding back its knowledge outcomes. Why? Precisely because with this method, those outcomes emerge within the public domain itself. Thus, knowledge production is framed as a 5 Introduction situated social process – a set of communicative encounters which produces an everexpanding online document. The research presented here demonstrates how knowledge operates as an experiential process, rather than a disembodied product. The opportunity which this thesis provides to reflect on the processes and outcomes of my own art projects leads to a third and final research question: How does the method of bilateral blogging work to produce aesthetic experience, and new insights, within the flow of everyday life? In critically reflecting on Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham, I have discovered that one of the key components of the way that bilateral blogging functions to frame everyday experience is attention. Bilateral blogging structures, refines and sharpens attention in a way which brings greater focus and intensity to the often invisible or unnoticed processes of living. Thus, in the material embodiment of the projects themselves, and through the reflections in this exegesis, I make three significant contributions to the practice and theory of art and everyday life. First, via two substantial art projects, I develop and demonstrate a new method of art practice: bilateral blogging. Second, I show how my projects contribute situated knowledge outcomes within the very places and social contexts they occupy. Third, by inquiring into the mechanics of bilateral blogging, I 6 Introduction reveal the important transformative role played by attention in deepening the relationship between art and the aesthetics of everyday life. Theory and Practice Informing the Research Enriching and challenging my own practice of bilateral blogging has been a parallel process of reflection, through the examination of the work of other artists and theorists. Particularly important to this thesis has been Art as Experience, the 1934 book by pragmatist philosopher John Dewey (Dewey 1980). Dewey's book shows how we might conceive of art beyond the limits of physical objects and the compartmentalised sphere of galleries and museums, limits which have tended to set it apart from the immediate processes of living. Equally influential has been Michel de Certeau's The Practice of Everyday Life, a book which gives voice to a hitherto unnoticed realm of everyday uses of the city (de Certeau 1988). de Certeau offers an experiential cartography, upon which we might build a new understanding of the world from the bottom up. More recently, Nicolas Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics (2002) takes for granted the notion that art can consist of embodied experiences, rather than static objects. Bourriaud has made a substantial contribution to the establishment of a field of art in which social interactions are both form and content. Finally, the art and writing of Allan Kaprow has been a crucial guiding force for my own research. If Dewey theorised art as experience, it was Kaprow who, from the mid-1950s until his death in 2006, transformed this notion into a practiced reality.2 2 In fact, Art historians Sophie Delpeaux and Gilles Tiberghien argue that for Kaprow, Dewey's Art as Experience functioned as 'a veritable "manual"' (Delpeaux and Tiberghien 2007). Jeff Kelley, in his monograph on Kaprow, also notes that Kaprow owned a well-thumbed and annotated copy of the book (Kelley in Kaprow 2003, xi). 7 Introduction Throughout his career – from his beginnings as a pioneer of Happenings and Environments, to his later, less spectacular participatory artworks, and in all his provocative writings – Kaprow shows how important it is for art to be embedded in the processes of everyday living. Research Methodology: Reflective Art Practice This is a practice-based research Ph.D. The research processes described above relate specifically to the reflective practice of an artist. In this mode, actions carried out in the pursuit of a solution to a problem generate situated knowledge outcomes, which, upon reflection, produce further problems – more stimulus for action. This oscillation between action and reflection is not, however, a closed loop. Theoretical reading, and a consideration of the work of other practitioners, inform both action and reflection. Revelations are given form in the world through new artworks, and critical writings such as this exegesis. The research approach I have developed has something in common with Donald Schön's theory of reflective practice, developed in his book The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action (Schön 1991). Schön's theory involves a spiralling process of action and reflection. The steps of this process include the identification of a problem situation emerging from one's own practice, a conceptual reframing of the problem, and an attempt to live through the consequences of that reframing. The cycle continues with a reflection on the outcomes of this process, and the subsequent identification of a new set of problems emerging from this evolving spiral. As Schön writes: 8 Introduction In this reflective conversation, the practitioner's effort to solve the reframed problem yields new discoveries which call for new reflection-in-action. The process spirals through stages of appreciation, action, and reappreciation. The unique and uncertain situation comes to be understood through the attempt to change it and changed through the attempt to understand it. (Schön 1991, p. 131) Key to this process, as Schön makes explicit, is the desire for change. This is a research approach which seeks to intervene, not simply to objectively observe from a safe distance. The projects which constitute this Ph.D. are inherently interested in the situations and circumstances they occupy – the circumstances of my own daily life – and they take a course of action to transform it. In this, they connect strongly with the pragmatist tradition in philosophy, which draws meaning and knowledge from lived experience, rather than the disinterested purity of abstract thought. It is thus no surprise that the seminal work of pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and William James, as well as the writing of contemporary pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman, strongly influence the thinking underlying this thesis. In the context of the visual arts, several recent publications have dwelt on the problem of how art practice can be a form of research which is able to generate and disseminate new knowledge outcomes. As Estelle Barrett points out, 'the replication mechanisms that have traditionally valorised and validated creative arts practices have focussed on product rather than process' (Barrett 2007, p. 160). The advantage of the practice-based research exegesis model, by contrast, is that the processes and 9 Introduction discoveries at the heart of creative practices can be brought to the surface. In other words, it is not only the finished artwork, but also the artist's experience of making, as well as the audience's encounter with the work of art, which constitute 'an alternative mode of understanding the world and revealing new knowledge' (Barrett 2007, p. 160). In my understanding, art and aesthetics are a way of doing things: a way of doing, crucially, which is inseparable from the done thing. For this reason, the artmaking method developed in this thesis – bilateral blogging – is particularly apposite, because the processes and experiences which constitute the work of art are documented and made explicitly visible within the artwork itself. An Outline of the Chapters In Chapter One, 'Towards the Blog as Art', I outline in detail the problematics of the relationship between art and life, drawing comparisons between my own blogging projects, and the work of two key exponents of the twentieth century American avant-garde, Robert Morris and Allan Kaprow. In doing so, I show how the the seeds for the fundamental properties of bilateral blogging – experiential social interactions, and the ability to document these interactions within the artwork itself – were already present in the work of these artistic predecessors. My method of bilateral blogging belongs to this aesthetic tradition, extending and expanding it by pushing the combination of interactivity and self-documentation into real social situations. I argue that, by the early twenty-first century, the field of art established by these artistforebears has become an aesthetic vocabulary – a set of tools which can be adapted and applied for creating interventions in our own neighbourhoods. 10 Introduction In Chapter Two, 'Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging', I discuss my first case study artwork, Bilateral Kellerberrin, in light of Nicolas Bourriaud's notion of Relational Aesthetics. Relational Aesthetics – a term coined by Bourriaud in his book of the same name – proposes that social interactions can be the form and content of a new kind of art (Bourriaud 2002). My own method of bilateral blogging evidently shares some of the characteristics of this field. However, some of the artists described in Bourriaud's Relational Aesthetics have been criticised for relying too heavily on the institutionalised spaces of art galleries and museums, thus producing aestheticised versions of everyday social relations. I propose that bilateral blogging – an ongoing cycle of virtual and physical interaction – presents a way out of this dilemma. Using Bilateral Kellerberrin as a case study, I show how my method of bilateral blogging moves beyond the social insulation of the art gallery, and falls into rhythm with the spaces and times of daily life. Bilateral Kellerberrin thus creates its own frame for an intensified experience of social interactions, in the process also producing an everexpanding, multi-voiced portrait of the town of Kellerberrin. In Chapter Three, 'Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention', I move deeper into the notion of art as a frame for experience. Drawing on the work of pragmatist philosophers John Dewey and William James, I show how attention forms a frame around everyday experiences, making noticeable what we might otherwise be blind to. Some contemporary writers have described this process as the workings of a new kind of value-production system – an "attention economy". I explain how 11 Introduction attention invested in any subject matter – even something as banal as my own everyday life in the suburb of Petersham – can result in an abundance of increased value in that subject. My method of bilateral blogging, I suggest, offers a structure and form for actively paying attention, and, crucially, a way to produce a dynamic document of the attention paid. Using Bilateral Petersham, my second case study, I show how the method of bilateral blogging creates an integrated "attention framework", focussing and intensifying experience. Emerging from this process is a large experiential archive of blog posts and dialogical interactions, an archive which affords a closer examination of the functioning of everyday life. In Chapter Four, 'Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham', I examine some of the specific experiences generated by my second case study. Bilateral Petersham was an attempt to bring mindful awareness to the social and geographical processes occurring within my own everyday life. More challenging in scope than Bilateral Kellerberrin, my Petersham project required the invention of a new set of behavioural rules and spatial boundaries – new "attention frames" – to strengthen my noticing of the small processes of everyday life in my own neighbourhood. In Bilateral Petersham, I appropriated the geographical borders of the suburb as a territorial frame, and I vowed not to leave this frame for a period of two months. This chapter reflects on how this tactic of territorial framing worked to create a deep sense of spatial immersion and social belonging within the local environment. This, I argue, is a key to understanding how bilateral blogging works to integrate art and life. 12 Introduction Chapter Five, 'Online and Offline Blogging', is an explication of the transformation of both my blogs into various offline formats. The two projects discussed in this exegesis originally took place in April-May 2005 (Bilateral Kellerberrin), and AprilMay 2006 (Bilateral Petersham). Each of these two month durations involved a live period of social engagement. However, once this performative timeframe came to a close, the projects took on a different quality. From that point on, they could only be experienced in retrospect. Fortunately, a core element of the method of bilateral blogging is that the experiential interactions which form the basis of the projects leave behind an intelligible and lively trace of their own making. For this reason, I was able to transform each of the blogs into printed books. Akin to serialised novels, these books provide a more comfortable retrospective experience of the works than reading a large volume of text from a screen. In this chapter, I also describe two further ways the blogs have since been materialised – as window displays and sculptural installations – and I consider the advantages and limitations of each of these forms. Relationship of the Practice to the Exegesis As mentioned above, the art practice which constitutes a key component of this thesis exists in multiple forms: the online blogs; printed books derived from the blogs; and interactive sculptural installation works. The Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham books will be available at the exhibition at the George Paton Gallery which accompanies this exegesis. Although some key quotations from the blogs are brought into the body of the exegetical text, it is recommended that the blog-books be 13 Introduction read alongside this exegesis, in order to obtain a deeper feel for the voices and rhythms of the projects. Readers are also encouraged to explore the blogs online, for the following reasons: the technology of keyboard, mouse, screen, hyperlink and web browser are all essential components of the artwork as it was originally manifest; there are many aspects of the projects such as colour photographs and large annotated maps that have been impractical to reproduce in the book versions; and although their live periods of intense engagement are now concluded, both blogs still welcome contributions in the form of comments and discussion from readers.3 The exhibition, which in part embodies the art practice, offers a physical analogy for my experience of the Bilateral Petersham project: a long bench built in the shape of Petersham's geographical border which snakes throughout the gallery. A book version of the blog can be assembled by gallery visitors, and this assembly is carried out by travelling along the bench ("walking the borders of Petersham") and collecting, one-by-one, the pages which make up the book. Just as it took two months to produce, the blog-book cannot be instantaneously consumed. The large body of text within the resulting book may thus be read in one's own space and time – which in turn, allows a reintegration of the project into the everyday spaces of the reader's life. Finally, a small set of documents and images relating to Bilateral Petersham and Bilateral Kellerberrin is also included in the exhibition, as is a series of handmade maps. These constitute support material to enrich the reading of the blogs and this exegesis. 3 Bilateral Kellerberrin is available at <http://kellerberrin.com>. Bilateral Petersham is available at <http://thesham.info>. Copies of the blog-book are also available in PDF form on these sites. 14 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art In this chapter, I trace a historical lineage between my own art practice and the work of Robert Morris and Allan Kaprow. I do this to show how blogging, which is not ordinarily considered an art practice, can be understood to have grown from the work of these two key exponents of twentieth century avant-garde art. In the early 1960s, Robert Morris produced a series of minimalist objects which revealed the art product as the result of the completion of a simple task or set of procedures, rather than emerging from a mythical font of genius or talent possessed by the artist – an important step in chipping away at the intimidating barrier separating art from life. Bilateral blogging, I propose, borrows from Morris the idea of incorporating the process of making into the artwork itself, as a method of demystifying the creative act. Even more than Morris, Allan Kaprow strove to radically alter the relationship between artist and audience, reintegrating art with everyday social interactions. In this, he was a pioneer of the recent surge of activity in the areas of 'dialogical art', 'relational aesthetics' and 'new genre public art' (Kester 2004; Bourriaud 2002; Lacy 1995). With his Happenings, Kaprow developed a model for framing unpredictable events in the real world – not just tangible objects presented in galleries – as aesthetic experiences. While my own method of artmaking reaches back to these antecedents, I extend the models of aesthetic engagement provided by Morris and Kaprow, using them as a toolbox for intervening in the real processes of my own everyday life. In Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham, the artwork becomes an active participant in discourse – a mechanism for framing experience, and simultaneously an embodied repository of social knowledge. In this way, experimental art practice is 15 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art taken beyond the confines of the artworld, developing a research model which occupies the spaces and rhythms of existing neighbourhoods. Dialogue as an Aesthetic Practice: Peg#24 Before exploring the connections between bilateral blogging and the work of Robert Morris and Allan Kaprow, I first want to spend a moment with one of my own artworks completed prior to commencing this thesis. As early as 1995, I was trying to work out how to bring art and life into more intimate contact. Although at that time blogging was not an available technology, my art practice from that period exhibits the same two key strands which I now identify as the foundations of bilateral blogging. Those strands are the incorporation of the process of making into the finished art product, and the desire for the artwork to facilitate a dialogue with its own audience. My hunch, even then, was that an artwork which could draw together these two elements would enable the practices of art to be more integrated with the flows of everyday life. Why? Precisely because the resulting artwork would itself be composed of the social interactions which take place between myself and my audience. In 1995, I was far from finding a perfect way to make this happen. However, the practice of bilateral blogging, as developed in this thesis, indicates one possible way forward. In 1995, Mick Hender and I were invited to contribute a sculpture to an outdoor 16 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art exhibition at Perth's Gomboc Gallery4. A large paddock was divided up into individual sites, and participating artists were allocated space according to numbered wooden pegs hammered into the ground. The exhibition organisers intended that each artist should use a cross-referenced site map to find his or her allocated position, remove the numbered peg, and "plop" a pre-fabricated sculpture in its place. The numbered pegs, presumably, were thrown away or stored until they were needed again. However, Hender and I could not bring ourselves to discard our peg. First, we were fascinated with its sculptural qualities. Hand cut and carefully painted in turquoise and red, we recognised the inherent beauty of the peg as an unintentional readymade. Furthermore, paying close attention to the peg revealed its inherent political and aesthetic potential. Hammering a numbered peg into the earth is an ancient method for creating territory by declaring land ownership. The numbering system used on the pegs utilised a convenient social convention for mapping and controlling space for human use. As artists, we did not feel that we needed to do more than simply draw attention to this object and its rich layers of in-built meaning. Even though the peg had been made by someone else, and although its (unknown) maker had not intended it as an artwork, our intervention produced this transformation. We constructed a simple glass box, which we carefully placed over the peg. The glass box invoked a museological convention, in which a transparent frame transforms a hitherto ordinary object into art. 4 Hender and I have collaborated on many artworks since 1994. We currently work together as members of the artist group Squatspace in Sydney. See <http://squatspace.com>. 17 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art Figure 1: Lucas Ihlein and Mick Hender, Peg#24, 1995, Gomboc Gallery, Perth. What differentiated Peg #24 from all the other nearly identical pegs in the sculpture park was our decision to focus our exclusive attention on it. We had framed it, enshrined it, treated it with great reverence. It was our intention to allow it to exist in its own right, honouring its inherent physical form and sculptural qualities rather than using and discarding it as a mere instrument of spatial location. However, in bringing this kind of attention to the peg, we came up against a paradox. The peg's very instrumentality, its use as a tool for marking possession, and its embeddedness in the social structures of land use, were among the qualities that we had hoped to foreground in our artwork. By framing it aesthetically in glass (and, moreover, within the context of an art exhibition) we had removed from our particular peg its preexisting social function. It was no longer a numbered wooden peg, it was, in inverted commas, "a numbered wooden peg" – a museum piece. How could we fully explore 18 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art the potency of the peg when it was, like a wild animal in a zoo, divorced from its original context, tamed and framed for human contemplation? Hender and I spent a great deal of time standing in the paddock, discussing this paradox – far longer, in fact, than it had taken us to construct the simple glass box and place it over the peg. Zooming backwards from the absurdly minimalist object on display, we became aware that the dialogue prompted and focussed by our interaction with the peg was in fact one of its key aesthetic products. Dialogue, we realised, could be considered as a constitutive process and product of this artwork. And yet, for those who came to visit the exhibition, our dialogues were unavailable. Visitors to the exhibition simply saw a peg in a glass box. Perhaps they had their own discussions provoked by our enframement of the peg. Perhaps not. We simply do not know. The audience did not have access to the dialogue of the artists, and the artists missed out on hearing how the audience's experience played out in their encounters with the work. This seemed to me to be a lost opportunity for a vital social, dialogical and critical exchange. At this moment, a dialogical seed was planted in my own art practice, as I searched for a way to incorporate the exchange between artist and audience as an integral component of the artwork itself. With the availability of more recent web technologies, Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham represent a significant step towards finding a resolution to this problem. Means and Ends in the Work of Robert Morris I now want to jump back to the early 1960s, when Robert Morris was producing a series of neo-dada objects which incorporated a record of the process of their own 19 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art making into the resulting artwork. Morris' works approached an integration of means and ends which I suggest can offer a useful model for the creation of "dialogical" artworks – aesthetic structures which sustain and facilitate dialogue. As its title suggests, Morris' Box with the Sound of its Own Making, 1961, is a wooden box with an embedded tape loop which replays the measuring, sawing, and hammering of its own fabrication. In his Box, Morris sandwiches the physical history of the object's construction together with the resulting art object in a crisp conceptual demonstration. If it could be said to represent anything, it is simply a representation of the making of a box: more specifically, this box.5 I first became aware of Box with the Sound of Its Own Making in 1995, shortly after Hender and I had made Peg#24. The work made a strong impression on me. With Box, Morris had valorised the process of making, showing how it was inseparable from the made thing. The object – via work's title – framed the act of construction as a new kind of readymade. Standing in front of Box (or at least, imagining myself standing in front of it, as I have never seen it in the flesh), listening to the sounds emanating from within it, I am reminded of the time and labour that goes into making objects. I become aware that objects are always connected to material histories, and that the artist's carpentry is only the most recent layer of work performed on this piece of wood. This awareness challenges the alienation 5 The tape loop for Box with the Sound of its Own Making runs for three and a half hours. Legend has it that when John Cage first encountered the piece, he sat down and listened to it for the entire duration (Morris 1997, p. 74, n.14). In Chapter Three, I discuss in more detail the importance of John Cage's work as a template for my own dialogical art practice. 20 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art performed upon objects when they become commodities divorced from a social history of manufacture. Not only do I become conscious of the past, but the effect of Box is also to sharpen my consciousness of present space and time. The live sounds of my own interaction with the box as a visitor to the gallery – footsteps, shuffling, breathing, and talking to the person next to me – are all thrown into relief as components of my unique aesthetic experience of this piece of art. However, although these sounds may well register in my own ears, like Peg#24, the artwork itself has no capacity to register and respond to we who encounter it. In other words, the process of making Box with the Sound of its own Making came to a halt well before I arrived. Figure 2:Robert Morris, Box with the Sound of its own Making, 1961. Another work by Morris from the same period, Card File, 1962, sets up a similar relation. Card File is filled with carefully annotated and typed index cards, detailing all the processes and actions which went into the production of the card file itself. 21 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art These include the location in which the artwork was conceived, the purchasing of the file, interruptions, cards lost, typographical errors in the index cards, and so on. In its bureaucratic, obsessive self-referentiality, Card File seems to be stuck in an infinite regress (Krauss 1994, p. 4). However, unlike Box With the Sound of its Own Making, Card File is left intentionally unfinished. Each card has space for further typewritten entries, and there remain several empty slots in the file, underneath those completed by Morris. It is as if the future life of the file, once it has left Morris' hands, could be continually logged by its subsequent owners and handlers. Card File, then, has the potential to expand continuously as it travels through the world. Although this potential was never realised, the perpetually incomplete Card File does at least acknowledge the interconnected nature of artworks and the world in which they are produced and circulate. Card File, then, provides a model for an artwork with porous borders – an artwork which might begin to produce a document of the ongoing interactions it makes as it travels through time and space. In this respect, Card File might be seen to point towards blogging. The word blog is a contraction of web-log – and blogs thus log the small iterative moments of creative communication that go into their own making. From this point of view, blogs resemble electronic card files, the function of the paper cards being now performed by a database of blog entries or posts which cross-reference each other. Importantly, blogs also link to related posts by other bloggers, scattered across the internet (which itself could perhaps be considered an enormous, constantly expanding and crossreferencing card file). Blogs self-consciously point to their own influences and 22 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art reference points, acknowledging that each blog entry is held in place by a 'dense network of echoes and correspondences' which connect their experiences to wider social formations (Serfaty 2004, p. 52). For this reason blogging offers a powerful tool for making art which sets itself up, not in isolation from the world, but in ongoing dialogue with it. Figure 3: Robert Morris, Card File, 1962. 23 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art Figure 4:detail: Robert Morris, Card File, 1962. The Legacy of Allan Kaprow Robert Morris's Card File and Box With the Sound of its Own Making each succeed in raising our awareness of the actions (or sounds) that go into the making of an artwork. In these works, however, Morris retains the primacy of the discrete art object as the ultimate site of art. Kaprow, while also interested in making artworks which drew attention to their own process of production, spent his whole career trying to overcome art's fixation on objects. The history of Kaprow's art and writing maps his progression towards the foregrounding of experiences and social relations as the sites for art. In this, they are key precedents for my method of bilateral blogging – although, as I will discuss throughout this exegesis, my projects extend Kaprow's work by sedimenting the outcomes of their own experiential encounters as a continually available archive of their own making. 24 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art In the late 1950s, Allan Kaprow made an important shift in the way he thought about art. He observed that abstract expressionism had transformed the role of the painterly mark. No longer was mark-making to be considered a representational tool – it could now be understood as a trace of action within the arena of the canvas. Kaprow realised that the performative bodily actions involved in making a painting could thus themselves become the artwork's major subject matter. A similar notion had been suggested in 1952 by the critic Harold Rosenberg: At a certain moment the canvas began to appear to one American painter after another as an arena in which to act – rather than as a space in which to reproduce, redesign, analyse or 'express' an object, actual or imagined. What was to go on the canvas was not a picture but an event. (Rosenberg 1961) Kaprow – at that time an abstract expressionist painter and assemblage artist himself – envisaged taking this event of making beyond the hermetic arena of the canvas, out of the studio, and into the wider world. Kaprow's art events and published writing in this area have been greatly influential for subsequent generations of artists. He paved the way for experiences and social interactions to be considered as aesthetic processes in their own right, rather than merely a means to an end. In considering the question set by this thesis – how can I integrate my art practice with my everyday life? – there are few artists as relevant as Allan Kaprow. 25 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art In his 1958 essay 'The Legacy of Jackson Pollock', Kaprow notes that as the twentieth century progressed, 'strokes, smears, lines, dots became less and less attached to represented objects and existed more and more on their own, selfsufficiently' (Kaprow 2003, p. 3). Until Pollock, however, those marks had either been in the service of representation, or they had been locked into a formalist order in which 'one shape balanced (or modified or stimulated others)...for the most part quite consciously' (Kaprow 2003, p. 3). By contrast, Pollock liberated the mark from its conscious duty to represent. Instead of making a picture of an external reality, the 'dance of dripping, slashing, squeezing, daubing, and whatever else went into a work' was what determined how a work would emerge – the final painting embodying evidence of this process (Kaprow 2003, p. 4). Kaprow thus reads Pollock's act of painting (with the huge canvas laid out on the ground, and Pollock darting about splashing paint on it) as a performative event. Furthermore, for Kaprow, the idea of painting as a performative event was not restricted to the artist's interactions with materials and canvas. Viewers, too, were implicated in this action. Hung on the walls of a gallery, Pollock's paintings were so large that it was difficult to move far enough away from them to view them as a detached observer. Instead, his paintings fill our field of vision: we become 'entangled in the web' and by 'moving in and out of the skein of lines and splashings can experience a kind of spatial extension' (Kaprow 2003, p. 6). The 'spatial extension' to which Kaprow refers is not a penetration through the canvas, into deep pictorial space. Instead, 'the skein of lines and splashings' which make up Pollock's 26 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art paintings extend right out into the room in which we stand, relaying the performative action which is evident in their making into the three dimensional space of the viewer. This, for Kaprow, makes the viewer a "participant" rather than merely an "observer" of action having taken place sometime in the past (Kaprow 2003, p. 6; Kaizen 2003, p. 84). In 1958, this realisation enabled Kaprow to imagine transcending the limitations of the discrete art object, framing action itself as art. The following year, he carried out the first of his many Happenings. Throughout the 1960s, and into the 1970s, Kaprow's art events increasingly took place outdoors, in city and rural spaces, rather than being constrained by the architecture – and social insulation – of an art gallery. As a result, they became more and more situated within existing geographies, using everyday objects and social conventions as the sites of art. Kaprow recognised the rich aesthetic qualities in the 'the space and objects of our everyday life'. He began working in 'church basements, hotel courtyards, underground breweries, department stores, train terminals, and telephone systems of the modern urban environment' (Kelley 2004, p. 41). When action is taken off the canvas, and out of the gallery, it can become continuous with existing (non-art) social structures. What is it, then, that gives these actions visibility? Furthermore, what was the purpose and value of art for Kaprow, that despite his desire to escape the refined and segregated world of art, he would want to keep calling his actions by that name, and not be content to pursue them as "non-art" 27 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art behaviours – dumpster diving, amateur forensics, gravedigging, bushwalking, streetcorner conversation or department store window dressing? In a sense, the difficulty of finding the edges of Kaprow's Happenings suggests a problem opposite to that of Morris' Box with the Sound of its Own Making. The Box (an autonomous object framed and bound by the context of the art gallery) was unmistakably, pure art. Kaprow's Happenings, by his own definition, contained all manner of 'impurities', giving them an ambiguous status verging on formlessness (Kaprow 2003, p. 28). One key to recognising Kaprow's increasingly pluralistic set of everyday practices as art, is by seeing them as an extension of a Duchampian tradition. As Kaprow wrote: 'these bold creators [will] show us, as if for the first time, the world we have always had about us but ignored' (Kaprow 2003, p. 9). In this model of art practice, rather than producing an entirely new object, the artist instead draws attention to existing objects in the everyday world, which, due to the habitualisation of our lives, have become dull and utilitarian. In this way, the everyday experiences of life become a readymade. The artist's act of framing these objects forces us to view them in a new light. The artist's task is to activate the viewer's (or as Kaprow would have it, the "participant's") noticing via a tactics of framing and focusing attention. Framing 'the world we have always had about us but ignored' was also the process employed by Hender and I when we placed a glass case over Peg#24. Kaprow radically extends this strategy of drawing attention, by framing not just objects, but the very processes involved in living our own everyday lives (Kaprow 2003, p. 186-7). Kaprow's ultimate lesson is not that we should do away with art altogether – but rather, that the 28 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art power of art is to reveal insights into the ordinarily unseen aspects of daily life, and that this process can be deployed precisely in the very spaces and rituals of our own everyday existence. This, then, is the legacy of Allan Kaprow. Experiential Frameworks: Kaprow's Happenings Kaprow's strategy, tested and refined throughout the 1960s in his Happenings, dramatically reconfigured what could be defined as an art object. In his essay 'The shape of the art environment, Kaprow discusses the key role played by framing in the transformation of ordinary actions into art (Kaprow 2003, p. 90-94). Even those experiences which occur outside galleries, he wrote, can be recuperated by dropping a 'mental rectangle' around them (Kaprow 2003, p. 93).6 Kaprow's Happenings, for instance, relied on a conceptual framing system which was able to make sense of non-static situations, experiences and events. Nearly always, his Happenings were accompanied by a written text – an event-score which provided a series of instructions for what was to take place, and formed a linguistic circumscription of an unpredictable situation to be experienced. Here, for instance, is Kaprow's textual framing of his Happening Moving, 1967: 6 Kaprow's notion of a 'mental rectangle' as a way of framing experiences as art is a crucial insight and a catalyst for the development of my attention framework for aesthetic experience, outlined in Chapter Three. 29 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art MOVING A HAPPENING BY ALAN KAPROW (FOR MILAN KNIZAK) SOME UNUSED HOUSES IN DIFFERENT PARTS OF THE CITY. ON EACH OF 4 DAYS, OLD FURNITURE IS OBTAINED AND IS PUSHED THROUGH THE STREETS TO THE HOUSES. THE FURNITURE IS INSTALLED. ON THE FIRST DAY, BEDROOMS ARE FURNISHED, AND SLEPT IN THAT NIGHT. ON THE SECOND DAY, DINING ROOMS ARE FURNISHED, AND A MEAL IS EATEN. ON THE THIRD DAY, LIVING ROOMS ARE FURNISHED, AND GUESTS ARE INVITED TO COCKTAILS. ON THE FOURTH DAY, ATTICS ARE FILLED AND THEIR DOORS ARE LOCKED. THOSE INTERESTED IN PARTICIPATING SHOULD MEET AT 8PM NOV 27 1967 AT THE MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, CHICAGO. Although Moving is scripted in advance by the artist, there is no audience, in the traditional sense of the word, since everyone involved agrees to take an active role in creating the work.7 In the process, the paradigm of the static art object is critiqued in two important ways. First, the artist allows chance, via the active participation of other agents, to play a significant role in determining the form of the resulting artwork. This results in a dynamic, variable and somewhat anarchic structure. Second, in Kaprow's Happenings, the work of art, instead of being an object or image to be looked at, becomes a framework which shapes and makes visible a set of actions and experiences. Kaprow's Happenings enframe a series of potential 7 The text for the event-score reproduced here is from a publicity handbill exhibited in Andy Warhol's Time Capsules, National Gallery of Victoria, 2005. Moving is also discussed in Kelley 2004, p. 127; and a document from this Happening is reproduced in Meyer-Hermann et al. 2008, p. 196. 30 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art occurrences. However, because of the indeterminacy built into the textual format of the event-score, the artist cannot determine in advance the precise shape of the actually experienced work of art. Instead, as Jeff Kelley has observed, Kaprow 'asked people to do something without telling them how to do it' (Kelley 2004, p. 149). In Moving, Kaprow left so much openness in the structure of the textual frame that participants were forced to improvise, thus becoming actively involved in the artwork's compositional process. Working collaboratively, participants' improvisation-compositions begin to operate not as art objects, but as chunks of lived experience: a series of behavioural and performative decisions and actions which occur within, and constitute, social space. In this way, Kaprow's Happenings become a zone of ethical encounter – mini laboratories of everyday life augmented by the intensifying frame of art (Kelley 2004, pp. 126, 151). Importantly, these Happenings literally "took place" – they occupied existing places, already redolent with memories and historical associations. Kaprow, wherever he organised a Happening, involved local artists, students and residents. For these participants, the psychogeography of place was paramount – indeed, their feelings, aspirations or fears about neighbourhoods with which they were already familiar strongly contributed to their experiences of the event. These fleeting, disparate and unique experiences constitute Kaprow's work of art. No longer was there a tangible distanciation between artwork and viewer. There was no stable, physical object, autonomously existing in the world, to be looked at. Participants were either involved in the work of art, or else, effectively, it did not exist (Kaprow 2003, p. 64). 31 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art The only spectators were passers-by (and sometimes police) for whom Kaprow's Happenings were as real as any other strange urban event encountered by chance (Kelley 2004, p. 129). Passersby constituted what Canadian artist Kym Pruesse has called an 'accidental audience' (Pruesse 1999). Not recognising the standard boundary separating performer and spectator, members of this accidental audience were just as likely to participate, or intervene, in the Happening. Although Happenings were carried out collectively, each participant's experience was unique, and no single participant – not even Kaprow himself – could possibly have a conclusive, omniscient view of the event. All these factors amount to a radical destabilisation of the nature of the art object – a destabilisation which has opened wide the field of possible activities which can be carried out under the banner of art. It is within this expanded field that I situate my own practice of bilateral blogging. Stories as Experiential Documents The idea of an art practice which enframes the momentary, direct encounters of lived experience has excited subsequent generations of artists who are, like Kaprow, interested in the reintegration of art and life (Cohen-Cruz 2005, p. 44). However, the destabilisation and dematerialisation of art's objectness, so successfully played out by artists during the 1960s and 70s, has often resulted in a crisis of historicisation. How, besides poring over black and white photographs, are we to access the history of these art practices? For creative arts practice-based research in the academy today, this is an unresolved problem that hovers over every artist-researcher's work. For Kaprow, the experience of making the work is the work – a collaborative exchange 32 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art between participants, with little besides memories as residue. Although memories are important experiential traces, as traces they are notoriously difficult to share beyond first-hand encounters with those who were present at the time of the work's manifestation. How, then, might an artist today learn from the legacy of Allan Kaprow? One possible answer lies in developing a documentary system which is as mobile and organic as experience itself: storytelling. Kaprow in the 1980s began using storytelling as the main technique for documenting and conveying the aesthetic experiences engendered by his work. Sometimes his stories ('ways of documenting and extending a work') were published as short written texts (Kelley 2004, p. 209). More often, however, they travelled with Kaprow himself, to be presented as oral histories. Kaprow's stories evolved and morphed in the telling and re-telling. In some cases, stories were incorporated as a key component of the work of art itself. For instance, in Trading Dirt (1983-6) Kaprow exchanged a bucket of soil from his own garden with a similar quantity from various locations he frequented as part of his daily life. The inherently absurd request to trade dirt inevitably generated conversations, both amusing and profound, and successive trades resulted in a growing bank of stories. The exchanged dirt was doubly fertile: it carried not only micro-organisms, nutrients, sand and clay, but also the histories of its respective owners and what Kaprow called the 'vibes' of each location. As Jeff Kelly writes: With Trading Dirt, Kaprow integrated storytelling as an aspect of the work: as part of the negotiating process, he told his trading partner the 33 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art story of how he'd gotten this or that bucketful, where it had come from, what (or who) was in it, who he'd traded with to get it, and the like, using the story to confirm the relative value of his dirt as well as to establish trust with his partner. (Kelley 2004, p. 214). The work of art, then, was the action of the trade – an action consisting precisely of an ever-evolving dialogical process between the traders. Storytelling, for Kaprow, was not only a good way to document an event that had taken place in the past, but also an event in its own right, constantly morphing and adapting to situation and circumstance in order to make sense of it. An embodied narrative (unlike a documentary photograph or video of an event) can report poetically, and simultaneously reflect critically on what has happened, in a dynamic situated interaction with the world. Furthermore, in the absence of any other publically available document, the story itself approaches the condition of artwork. This is particularly the case after the event's completion, when all that is left is the tale. In his use of dialogue and storytelling as a key component of his later works, Allan Kaprow achieved what Hender and I had strived for in Peg#24: an approach to artmaking which, like Morris' Box, resonated with the sound of its own making, but which did not disconnect from an active participation in life's processes. Kaprow's stories, rather, traded on the essentially aesthetic qualities of narrative and dialogue that are latent in all human exchanges. My method of bilateral blogging, as I will go on to show, borrows the mobile, engaging, expandable tool of storytelling as a way of making experiences come to life in the present moment, wherever one may be. As 34 Chapter One: Towards the Blog as Art I will outline in the next chapter, blogging also offers a set of technologies which enable this communicative practice to become visible. As an important extension on the work of Allan Kaprow, my practice of bilateral blogging leaves behind a layered sediment of its own dialogical process which can continually be accessed, and used as a basis for building further insights into everyday life. 35 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging To consider social interaction and communication as artforms – indeed, to regard these as art media alongside painting, sculpture, or photography – requires a radical rethink, not only of the nature of the art object, but also the relationship between artist and audience. In this chapter I consider the potential of blogging as a relational artmaking practice, and a tool for an emergent research process. I present my own project Bilateral Kellerberrin as a case study. I use this work to examine the unique aesthetic and ethical problems raised by art practices made up of dialogue and social exchange. Bilateral Kellerberrin occurred in the everyday spaces of the town of Kellerberrin, rather than being restricted to an art gallery context. I show that blogging, as an art practice, is well placed to integrate with the rhythms of daily life, without requiring audience members to step inside an art-specific context. Dewey's Call for Reintegration In his 1934 book Art as Experience, American pragmatist philosopher John Dewey calls for the reintegration of art and life. Dewey laments that in the western world, aesthetics have become almost exclusively associated with the professionalised spheres of art. Art is thus divorced from common experience, and can only be encountered in specially sanctioned times and places. This cultural compartmentalisation, says Dewey, was not always the norm: We do not have to travel to the ends of the earth nor return many 36 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging millennia to find peoples for whom everything that intensifies the sense of immediate living is an object of intense admiration. Bodily scarification, waving feathers, gaudy robes, shining ornaments of gold and silver, of emerald and jade, formed the contents of esthetic arts [and] in their own time and place, such things were enhancements of the processes of everyday life. (Dewey 1980, p. 6) Dewey's aim in Art as Experience is thus to remind us of the potential for art to participate in life, to 'intensify the sense of immediate living', not to stand apart from it. His book represents an attempt to 'restore continuity' between the sanctity of the framed and refined world in which art is thought to reside, and the 'everyday events, doings, and sufferings that are universally recognised to constitute experience' (Dewey 1980, p. 3). It would be absurd to suggest that to achieve this reintegration requires the return to an imaginary pre-modern lifestyle. According to Dewey, we need only come to an appreciation of the existing proliferation of intense rituals and practices within our own contemporary world to understand just how rich aesthetic experience can be. Although Dewey could never have predicted that his book would have a direct effect on the practices of art itself, it stands to reason that to overcome the compartmentalisation of culture, it is neither sufficient nor practical to simply shut down museums. Reconsidering the objects we see in art galleries and museums, and adjusting our perceptions to appreciate more fully the experiences of everyday living involves an active intervention in art and life. For an artist like myself, taking Dewey's provocation seriously calls for simultaneous action on both fronts – a new 37 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging way of making art, and a shift in the normal experience of life. Art thus has the potential to operate as a form of research, testing Dewey's theoretical assertions and, at the same time, probing more deeply into the operations of everyday life in existing social situations. This chapter takes up some of these ideas as they relate to my 2005 project, Bilateral Kellerberrin. Exploring this project, I ask whether it is possible today to realise an art based on experience, while resisting the temptation to fetishise experience as an aestheticised object. Relational Aesthetics and Micro-Utopias Nicolas Bourriaud, in his book Relational Aesthetics, observes that in recent years, artists have increasingly been utilising social relations as both the form and content of their artwork. The artworks considered by Bourriaud in Relational Aesthetics encompass 'meetings, encounters, events, various types of collaboration between people, games, festivals, and places of conviviality' (Bourriaud 2002, p. 27). Bourriaud argues that this contemporary transformation in the materiality of art sits within a tradition of avant-garde practice reaching back to the 1960s and 1970s. The earlier work, he writes, often embodied a revolutionary search for 'social utopias' (Bourriaud 2002, p. 31). By contrast, the recent use of social interactions as art is part of a humbler quest for 'everyday micro-utopias' (Bourriaud 2002, p. 31). He writes: 'it seems more pressing to invent possible relations with our neighbours in the present than to bet on happier tomorrows' (Bourriaud 2002, p. 44). On one hand, the loss of the revolutionary project could be seen as something to be mourned, since it involves an acceptance of the pervasive reach of global capitalism. However, micro-utopian 38 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging projects demonstrate an empowering desire to make pragmatic models of living in the here-and-now (wherever one may be) rather than constantly deferring to some unattainable future. One key ethical and aesthetic problem for artists working relationally is to identify how to carry out projects so that they don't merely create an illusion of community and togetherness. Commentator Claire Bishop has questioned the political efficacy of the micro-utopias described by Bourriaud, because of their failure to escape the social divisions created by art galleries. In Thai artist Rirkrit Tiravanija's projects, for example, the institutional space has often been given over to a playful, temporary reuse, as a site for social interaction. This may appear to re-invigorate the gallery as a place of live encounter, but for Bishop, the utopian scope of such works is limited to a particular set of audiences and social scenes, rather than being more broadly inclusive and thus socially transformative (Bishop 2004). This idea, that presenting art within a gallery is actually an impedence to the utopian thrust of modern art practices, has antecedents in earlier critiques of the gallery system. As mentioned above, John Dewey's call for reintegration between art and everyday experience is a key text in this area. Dewey, however, did not advocate abolishing cultural institutions. His aim was rather to criticise the prevailing tendency to prioritise physical, visible objects over the kinds of experiences that such objects facilitate in our lives. If we consider human aesthetic experience alongside the formal study of objects, then it becomes clear that art galleries are only one among many 39 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging situations in which art can take place. The notion that aesthetic experience is to be found (and created) outside what we usually regard as art-specific locations clearly resonates in late twentieth century art practice. Claire Doherty's compilation Contemporary Art: From Studio to Situation defines a field of art practice which is embedded within a complex web of relations: 'a situation, a set of circumstances, geographical location, historical narrative, group of people or social agenda' (Doherty 2004, p. 9). Extending upon this, I suggest that artworks which are able to draw attention to, and reflect upon, their own position within this complex web of relations might be well placed to go beyond the limitations of a compartmentalised art sphere. Bilateral Kellerberrin, for instance, utilises daily blogging and face-to-face interactions within the ordinary spaces of a small town. Blogging presents an opportunity for socially oriented art projects to leave behind a trace of their own emergence over a period of time, and can also create space for a different kind of public interaction between individuals than that afforded by an art gallery. Relational Aesthetics and the Illusion of Togetherness For Bourriaud, relational art carries out a valuable social function. The current era is characterised by the 'reification' of social interactions (Bourriaud 2002, p. 9). That is, everyday interactions have become commodified and transformed into products which can be sold back to us. He writes: 40 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging [A]nything that cannot be marketed will inevitably vanish. Before long, it will not be possible to maintain relationships between people outside these trading areas. […] The space of current relations is thus the space most severely affected by general reification. […] The social bond has turned into a standardized artifact. (Bourriaud 2002, p. 9) For Bourriaud, artists producing social relations (rather than commodities for an art market) are resisting this process of commodification. He describes such practices as interstices in a pervasive capitalist system (Bourriaud 2002, p. 16). Thus in Bourriaud's formulation, artists who create opportunities for social interaction which elude the laws of profit are not rejecting the capitalist system outright, in preference for a completely new way of living, but are instead flourishing in the small cracks and fissures afforded by capital. Opportunities for social interactions, exhibited as art in galleries thus might operate as one such interstice in the globalised economy. When used as a site for relational art, the gallery could become a venue allowing time and space for interactions which exceed the profit motive: gift economies, skill exchanges, even simply the availability of space to meet where one is not obliged to buy something. The work of Tiravanija is often cited as a key example of relational art practice. Tiravanija is best known for his "hospitality installations", in which he prepares fresh food for gallery visitors. Sometimes he creates freestanding architectural constructions inside a gallery, which replicate the interior form of his or someone else's house, and he invites visitors to come and use the space for whatever purpose 41 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging they wish. Tiravanija thus transforms the work of art from a set of static objects into an open framework for interaction. In this way, the conditions of engagement within the art gallery shift from contemplation to use (Bishop 2004, p. 57).8 His installations create miniaturised public spaces with their own schedule of events, inside the broader context of a host venue. In Untitled (he promised) 2002, he built a large steel and glass pavilion, and welcomed a myriad of public and private activities, from avant-garde film screenings, massage and pilates, face painting for children, and panel discussions. The kind of use-value created by Tiravanija's artworks might thus seem to be a community-building service, through the temporary availability of free space. As artworks, such situations require activation by gallery visitors, in a way which can physically alter them. Thus Tiravanija asks his audience to go beyond creative interpretation and become collaborators in the making of the work.9 As Claire Bishop has pointed out, 'the phrase "lots of people" regularly appears on [Tiravanija's] lists of materials' (Bishop 2004, p. 56). However, in her article 'Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics', Bishop wonders who these people might actually be. Contrary to one curator's assertion that Tiravanija's 'unique combination of art and life offer[s] an impressive experience of togetherness to everybody' (Kittelmann 1996), Bishop 8 9 This apparent dichotomy between use and contemplation is somewhat problematic. Is contemplation never useful? Is the process of using a thing always pursued without reflective thought? It is rather the combination of action (use) and reflection (contemplation) within an integrated practice, which I argue throughout this thesis is necessary for an artwork to situate itself in the web of relations which it creates and inhabits. Marcel Duchamp's famous lecture The Creative Act made explicit the inherent creativity of the viewer: 'All in all, the creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualification and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.' (Duchamp 1959, p. 78). 42 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging argues that this 'everybody' actually constitutes a very small social network. For Bishop, this is a problem, because although the work sets out to be an inclusive and open space unmediated by the controlling influence of capital, it ends up merely creating a kind of club for members of a pre-defined social grouping: Tiravanija’s microtopia gives up on the idea of transformation in public culture and reduces its scope to the pleasures of a private group who identify with one another as gallery-goers. (Bishop 2004, p. 69) The problem with this lies not in the fact that the artist has created a convivial atmosphere, but that this atmosphere may serve to lull the art-going public into a false sense of togetherness. Visitors to Tiravanija's installations might make new friends and feel good about breaking out of their atomised subjectivity, but the illusion that "all are welcome here" may serve merely to hide the antagonistic exchanges occuring within society more generally. Drawing on Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, Bishop writes: [A] fully functioning democratic society is not one in which all antagonisms have disappeared, but one in which new political frontiers are constantly being drawn and brought into debate – in other words, a democratic society is one in which relations of conflict are sustained, not erased. (Bishop 2004, p. 66) 43 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging Hence, despite offering an opportunity to partake in non-commodified social relations, Tiravanija's installations run the risk of creating only a symbolic model of inclusive participation within the safety of the art gallery. To participate, one must first be willing to enter into the physical and psychic atmosphere created by the host museum. As Bishop writes, 'This may be a microtopia, but – like utopia – it is still predicated on the exclusion of those who hinder or prevent its realization' (Bishop 2004, p. 68). If John Dewey in 1934 feared that the retreat of art into institutional ghettos might result in the withdrawal of aesthetic qualities from everyday life, then Tiravanija's offer of proto-democratic situations within art-specific contexts could have a similar effect of compartmentalising freedom: of micro-modelling an ideal society within a gallery, while just outside the gallery walls, that society is in the process of dismantling itself.10 Clearly, Tiravanija's multifaceted art practice cannot be dismissed with a few anecdotal criticisms. Bishop's simplified account of the intention of his work – a 'means to allow a convivial relationship between audience and artist to develop' – is only one way we might interpret his gallery-based interaction frameworks. Another might be to consider it within the avant-garde tendency to defamiliarise the ordinary, 10 In his essay 'Working on the community: models of participatory practice', Christian Kravagna presents some alternative models to the 'social-communicative relationships between artists and exhibition visitors' which are characteristic of the work of Tiravanija (Kravagna 1988, p. 1). Kravagna suggests that 'the social norms and culturally predominant codes that dominate everyday life' can be the locus for a community-based art practice situated outside the art gallery context – and he offers the work of English artist Stephen Willats as one example (Kravagna 1998, p. 9). Willats describes in detail the processes involved in his own 'socially engaged' art practice (occurring primarily in London public housing estates) in his book Art and Social Function (Willats 2000). 44 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging in which non-art objects are imported into the gallery and seen in a new light.11 In this case, the alienation of non-art audiences is not a failure of the artwork to live up to its proclaimed intention, but merely a consequence of the compartmentalised sphere of art in general. Bourriaud, in fact, contends that the sphere of art is 'neither more nor less alienated than what surrounds it', and far from oblivious to this fact, the artist sometimes 'reproduces or uses the very forms of our alienation' in the exhibition process (Bourriaud 2004, p. 48). The drive to resist the alienating effect of capital is by no means unique to artists working within galleries. Economist Colin C. Williams has shown that contrary to the widespread perception that 'monetary relations have penetrated every nook and cranny of the world' (Williams 2002, p. 532), non-commodified relations still proliferate widely: [E]ven in the heartland of commodification – the advanced economies – there exist large alternative spaces of self-provisioning, nonmonetised exchange and monetised exchange where the profit-motive is absent. (Williams 2002, p. 526) In fact, according to Williams, the rise of these kinds of practices (including such non-art activities as car-boot sales, D.I.Y. home renovations, gift economies, bicycle repair workshops, and voluntary labour) might be seen as a backlash against the 11 Defamiliarisation, a concept discussed by Russian literary theorist Victor Shklovsky in 1917, involves the 'making strange' of habitualised objects and events in order to perceive them with increased clarity and truthfulness (Shklovsky 1988). 45 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging pervasive creep of commodification: [A] largely unintended effect of a highly individualised and marketised economy has been the intensification of social practices which systematically 'evade the edicts of exchange value and the logic of the market'. (Williams 2002, p. 537) Williams suggests that spaces of resistance already flourish throughout society. When artists like Rirkrit Tiravanija create high-profile aestheticised versions of these ordinary spaces of resistance inside art galleries, they risk perpetuating the myth that the right and proper place for non-commodified exchange (and aesthetic experience), is a special cultural precinct or architectural construct, rather than recognising that everyday life itself is riddled with such opportunities. Bilateral Blogging in Kellerberrin My project Bilateral Kellerberrin represents an attempt to create a framework for interaction which integrates with the ordinary spaces and events of a small town, and thus goes beyond the limited social networks which normally access art galleries. In Kellerberrin, I developed a new method for artmaking, which I call bilateral blogging. I want to now give some context for this method and the environment from which it grew. Bilateral Kellerberrin took place during April and May 2005. I was invited to spend 46 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging two months in the town as artist in residence, by IASKA (International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia). IASKA regularly "imports" artists from around the world to spend time living and working in this rural community, which, numbering just 1000 inhabitants, is at a precarious point in its existence. The pressures of the global wheat and sheep market have made small-scale farming unfeasible, resulting in fewer and larger properties, increasing reliance on machinery over "manpower", and thus a dwindling population of workers and their families. This economic reorganisation of "human capital" has the predictable flow-on effect of reducing "social capital" – service and support industries, retail, health and educational facilities. These issues of local concern helped shape the project I carried out in the town. In Kellerberrin, I embarked on a rather simple daily exercise. Each morning during my residency, I sat down and wrote, from memory, about the events of the previous day – who I met in the town, and what we said to each other. Social encounters and meetings took place by chance, in the ordinary places of the town – the grocery store, the speedway, the street, the pub – and occasionally in private homes. These encounters were written up and posted online each day – a slightly delayed feedback mechanism. Through this process, the fragmentary episodes in the evolution of friendships, and the acquisition of information were mostly transparent and traceable. Bilateral Kellerberrin thus showed how the generation of knowledge, and the establishment of social relationships, are ongoing processes in constant transformation. This is one of the ways in which the blogging projects presented in 47 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging this thesis offer an aesthetic tool for research in everyday life.12 To hang around the town, casually meeting locals and getting to know people was, in itself, a key part of my artistic process. Framing these rather ordinary interactions as an aesthetic activity represents an important development from experiments carried out by artists during the 1960s and 1970s. As Bourriaud suggests in Relational Aesthetics, this process is akin to reinventing 'possible relations with our neighbours in the present' rather than striving for a revolutionary overhaul of society (Bourriaud 2002, p. 44). In its own small way, Bilateral Kellerberrin attempted to bridge the gap between the traditional roles of audience and artist, offering shared responsibility to each participant in the conversation. By publishing the proceedings of these interactions each day on the internet, the project allowed the conversation-asinteractive-performance to be visible, developing into an archive of its own making. This online archive is not static, but remains open to addition, alteration and further discussion. Could a hybrid project like Bilateral Kellerberrin become, in the terms of Laclau and Mouffe, an 'antagonistic' framework, able to sustain differing subjectivities? Instead of requiring potential participants to cross the threshold of an art gallery, and thus possess confidence in this social sphere as a prerequisite for participation, Bilateral Kellerberrin utilised two complementary tactics of interaction, in online and offline 12 Similarly, technology researcher Mark Brady has described blogs as 'a public space for distributed knowledge-building' for 'ordinary people conducting [...] everyday research' (Brady 2005, pp. 7, 13). 48 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging space. First, conversation and dialogue took place within the normal sites of the town – the pub, the supermarket, the street, the sports field. These conversations, between myself and whoever I happened to encounter by chance or design, were not set aside from the normal rhythms of life. Instead, they grew from the seemingly natural shapes of mutual curiosity or suspicion, which occur when an outsider from the big city encounters a small-town "local". If we consider Tiravanija's sculptural installations within an art gallery as an open framework for social interaction, then perhaps the presence of my own body in the town of Kellerberrin could be thought of as an equivalent kind of framework – but without the need for an additional, specialised architectural construction. There was no need for people to feel comfortable with the spaces or conventions of art to be participants in the project. In this way, the artwork did not just offer social interactions in an artificially created space, but rather became an aesthetic research tool for inquiring into the effect of my own presence as an outsider visiting the town of Kellerberrin. Second, my memories of the dialogues were written up as narratives, which were then fed back in an online public sphere. Feedback took the form of a publically accessible blog. This cycle of physical encounter and virtual feedback was repeated each and every day during my stay in Kellerberrin. Importantly, this oscillating relational process of action and reflection – my own process of coming to terms with difference – is recorded within the blog. As I suggested in Chapter One, the blog thus 49 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging borrows Robert Morris' approach for incorporating into the work of art the 'sound of its own making', resulting in a virtual snapshot – or core sample – of the cominginto-being of relationships in a small town. However, Bilateral Kellerberrin shows that Morris' example can be useful in wider social spheres, and not simply within artspecific contexts. This synthesis of physical and virtual interaction and feedback described above presents an alternative communicative channel to that mediated by the conventions of art gallery display. Unlike Tiravanija, I did not set up a host environment providing a supposedly neutral venue or a free social space for visitors to utilise. My use of ordinary sites of commerce and transit as generative spaces for conversation as art practice acknowledges that these spaces already harbour rich possibilities for interaction. In a country town like Kellerberrin, conversations occur as and when people bump into each other in the course of carrying out their daily tasks. For instance, it is not unusual to chat for fifteen minutes or more in the vegetable aisle at the supermarket. Drivers will often stop their cars in the middle of the road to share the latest news through wound-down windows. The context for these exchanges of information means that my art practice takes place around the edges of existing daily activities – or is, in fact, mediated by those activities. Furthermore, the combination of physical interaction and virtual feedback is able to sustain different voices without requiring closure. In conversations that occur on the street, as well as in fragmentary blog entries, there is no pressure for any single 50 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging particular exchange to reach a definitive conclusion, achieve consensus, or solve a problem. However, this does not mean that discussion is trivial or mundane. The residents of Kellerberrin often displayed great concern for the social, political and environmental problems that beset a small farming community within a globalised economy. The conversations generated by Bilateral Kellerberrin cover issues ranging from rural depopulation to religion; mulesing and live sheep export; land use and climate change; alcoholism and mental health. Many aspects of rural life and work are extremely complex and generate widely differing opinions. For instance, in the following discussion from Bilateral Kellerberrin, two local farmers discuss the politics of breeding and exporting sheep: Tim felt that not enough was taught in Australian schools about the importance of sheep and shearing in Australia’s history. The country was built on the sheep’s back, right? I felt a bit uncomfortable about this, especially since I’d been reading Jared Diamond’s Collapse, where he says that the sheep is an incredibly destructive animal which fucks up land wherever it goes. David agreed, and said that the few attempts to set up kangaroo meat and leather export have faltered partly because of European resistance to farming an animal they regard as our national icon. This is a serious marketing problem, because 'roos are not as harmful to the land, and their meat and leather is of very high quality. (Ihlein 2005a, p. 34) In such conversations, thoughts emerge unshaped and are moulded in the telling – fragments from past conversations re-emerge to be played out again, and gossip is interwoven with personal philosophy. The blog, in its additive and fragmentary way, 51 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging is an ideal medium for nurturing these emergent ideas. In this, it offers a powerful, process-oriented tool for research in which the blog entries, as they emerge day-byday, are both raw data and an affective medium for communicating and reflecting upon their own findings. The ability to witness the development of knowledge via this form of discourse is just as important as the end product. Stephen Coleman in his essay 'Blogs and the New Politics of Listening' agrees: [B]logs allow people – indeed expect them – to express incomplete thoughts. This terrain of intellectual evolution, vulnerability and search for confirmation or refutation from wider sources is in marked contrast to the crude certainties that dominate so much of political discourse. (Coleman 2005, p. 274) Bridging Public and Private Spheres with Blogs As well as documenting 'incomplete thoughts' via daily writing, Bilateral Kellerberrin is an interactive artwork whose content is shaped through the participation of its readership. The technology of the blog enables comments and responses from readers, making the ideas expressed within the text dynamic, unstable, and subject to correction and addition. According to Adrian Miles, blogs do not stand alone, protecting the solidity of authoritative knowledge: '[A] blog is not thought of as an individual site, but as a discursive event that participates in a collection of relations to other sites, and other people' (Miles 2005, p. 67). In this way, the participation of readers is essential in continuing the discussion, ensuring that it doesn't remain a monologue. During the course of my project in Kellerberrin, 52 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging readers posted comments to correct factual errors I had made, to add details missing from my account, to praise me for acute observations, and to contribute local stories of their own. For example, in response to my observation of the local phenomenon of burning back the remains of the previous year's wheat crop (a practice known as burning the stubble), Kit, a local farmer, responded firmly: You need to know that stubble burning is "BAD" the soil should always be covered to protect it from the elements. The stubble becomes organic carbon in the soil which the soil is very short of. The stubble retention conserves moisture and protects new seedlings from harsh conditions. Farmers burn because their machinery can’t handle stubble, there are many ways to solve that and they burn for weed control, but there are ways to solve that too, so when I see a burnt paddock I feel sad. (Ihlein 2005a, p. 88) These comments remain visible to future readers of a blog. In this way, comments facilitate an open-ended, asynchronous dialogue. The kind of dialogue one has in an online environment is necessarily different to that which takes place in the town hall, the supermarket line, or while watching the football. The public sphere of the blog often, but by no means always, creates a particular etiquette, and encourages a particular discursive tone of voice.13 Coleman argues that blogs enable people to participate in public conversation in new ways. Those who might have been too 13 In Bilateral Kellerberrin, the tone of voice of those who left comments was often similar to my own observational, reflective writing style. The notion of stylistic mimicry of the blog's primary author is echoed in the blogging etiquette guidelines posted by Sarah Gilbert on her cafemama blog, who recommends potential commenters 'take your cue from the blog author, and other "guests"' (Gilbert 2003). 53 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging embarrassed to stand up and state their case in front of others in the context of a physical encounter, may not baulk at expressing themselves online. He believes the subjectivity that online conversation enables presents an alternative for those intimidated by the standard democratic process of public meetings: [Blogging] provides a bridge between the private, subjective sphere of self-expression and the socially fragile civic sphere in which publics can form and act [...] By allowing people to both interact with others and remain as private individuals, blogs provide an important escape route from the "if you don't come to the meeting, you don't have anything to say" mentality. (Coleman 2005, p. 274) By bridging the 'private sphere of self-expression' and the 'socially fragile civic sphere,' as Coleman puts it, Bilateral Kellerberrin placed the everyday lives of the people of Kellerberrin (as well as my own) on the agenda. The medium of the blog was able to achieve this in a unique way. In our current system of representational democracy, Coleman writes, community consultation is rudimentary and tokenistic: Polititians are needed because of the dispersed, disaggregated character of the public, which only expresses itself as a collectivity through representation. [...] To represent [...] is to claim knowledge about what the represented need, want and value. The ways of obtaining such knowledge are crude. Politicians claim legitimacy through elections in which voters are asked to opt for a broad package of often disparate policies. (Coleman 2005, p. 279) 54 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging What Bilateral Kellerberrin achieves then, is the creation of a space where the individual voices of "the represented" can begin to be heard, on their own terms. Our personalised voices do not vent hollowly into the bottom of beer mugs, nor do they gather conspiratorially in a falsely inclusive public sphere inside an art gallery. Instead, local and personal politics are sustained through the public narration of events occurring on particular occasions. In this way, a collaborative knowledge, as Coleman writes, 'emerges in fragmented, subjective, incomplete and contestable ways' (Coleman 2005, p. 279). Importantly, the knowledge generated in this way is transmissable to others, as it slowly builds into an archive documenting its own emergence. This combination of incompleteness and fragmentation with communicability and the facility for self-archiving is what gives bilateral blogging, as a method of aesthetic research, its power to reveal new insights into everyday life. I am not suggesting that the medium of the blog is an all-inclusive solution to the crisis of participation in so-called representational politics. Like any medium, the blog places limitations on who can participate, and what is able to be said. One major pre-requisite of Bilateral Kellerberrin is a basic ability to read and write in English. Computer literacy, and access to technology is another. Kellerberrin's aging population has a significant proportion of residents who do not even know how to click a mouse, let alone access the internet. As an imperfect answer to this restriction, I produced a hard copy printout of the blog, both as a portable pamphlet, and as a paste-up in the windows of the town gallery facing the main street. I also published excerpts of my daily blog entries in the town's fortnightly newsletter, The Pipeline. (I 55 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging discuss these "offline" blogging transformations further in Chapter Five.) Obviously, compared with online participants, readers of these printed versions did not have the same facility to directly correspond with the artwork itself. However, the physical presence of the text in the streets of Kellerberrin meant that readers could respond simply by bumping into me in those ordinary spaces – the same spaces in which the original "material" had been generated. A Bilateral Framework for Aesthetic Experience While the blog might seem to present a new tool for democratic engagement, it is important to remember that (at least in the case of Bilateral Kellerberrin) blogs rely on some very old fashioned aesthetic skills: the art of conversation, and the art of storytelling. Each of these ancient arts needs to be wielded with care in order to craft the ongoing 'discursive event' (Miles 2005, p. 67) of the blog-as-art. My special status as a visiting artist is one of the things which made the unique encounters documented within Bilateral Kellerberrin possible.14 Filtered through my written voice, and tempered by the corrections, alterations, and additions of my readership, a fragmented model of developing relationships within the town began to emerge from the ground up. While it facilitated exchange and encouraged readers to speak up, the process I employed in the blog was, perhaps even more importantly, an attempt to honour my own speaking voice. My particular choice of words, and the rhythms of the narrative I deployed on a daily basis, were deliberately designed to create a 14 In the next chapter, I compare my status as outsider in Kellerberrin with the very different circumstances surrounding my subsequent blogging project, Bilateral Petersham, which took place in my own neighbourhood. 56 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging compelling atmosphere which might encourage an ongoing relationship with my readers. Rather than playing the role of a disinterested and detached anthropologist, Bilateral Kellerberrin involved me in the life of the town in a way which did not fear – in fact, actively sought – the transformation of the researcher. By juxtaposing my quotidian experience (that of a white urban male artist) with that of the people in Kellerberrin (variously farmers, shopkeepers, labourers, schoolchildren etc.), the project also revealed the contingent and situated nature of what we take for granted as the everyday. As theorist Simon During writes: [I]t is important to remember the obvious point that everyday life is not everywhere the same [...] doesn’t it make a difference if one walks in Paris, down-town Detroit, Melbourne, Mexico City, or Hong Kong just for starters? And, in each of these places, does a woman have the same experience as a man, a gay as a straight, a young person as an old one? The everyday, too, is produced and experienced at the intersection of many fields by embodied individuals. (During, cited in Morris 2004, p. 691)15 In Bilateral Kellerberrin (as well as in my subsequent project, Bilateral Petersham) I used the term "bilateral" due to its multiple associations: an agreement in which two parties take responsibility; an international trade or peace accord signed by two nations; or, more generally, the idea that anything can have, literally, two sides. I find the two-ness of bilateral useful in immediately conjuring an atmosphere of 15 In Chapters Three and Four, I will explore in more detail the slippery notion of the everyday, both as something to be experienced, as a subject for research and theoretical study. 57 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging relationship between myself as the initiator of the project, and any individual audience member with whom I come into contact. This one-on-one (rather than oneto-many) relationship is the starting point in an attempt to be more specific about the amorphous pool of individuals usually described in generalised terms – by art criticism as "viewers" or "audience", and in research terms as experimental "subjects". My project in Kellerberrin established a bilateral framework for interaction in the following ways. First – by participating in, and writing about, the events in a small town on a daily basis, I engaged in a kind of double portraiture. The project made visible an extended process of coming-into-being, not only of the town (as a social and geographical terrain), but also of myself (as a literary persona and an embodied, socialising subject). Second – for readers of the blog, there was a constant awareness of the artist-author's cyclic, dual role. I was out and about in the town, engaging in conversation and discovery; and then retreating to reflect textually on these experiences, hunched over a keyboard in the glow of the computer screen. Third, the interactions between my literary persona and those blog readers who contributed comments to the online component of Bilateral Kellerberrin created further opportunities for new engagements and interactions to be pursued by my embodied self in the town. This was possible because blog postings were updated daily, so that the moment of publication (the moment, that is, of engaging with the public) was not deferred to some future moment when the artwork was deemed to be complete. On the contrary, readers' contributions had the potential to significantly alter the 58 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging direction of the project on a day-to-day basis. In Bilateral Kellerberrin, then, the online environment was not merely virtual, but actually played a significant role in affecting events in the "real" world.16 As I am suggesting here, a bilateral framework for aesthetic experience is one in which emergent definitions of both "you" and "I" evolve through a process of communicative engagement. These engagements are seen to have aesthetic properties of their own, such as narrative rhythms and linguistic forms, and can induce affective responses in readers and participants. In this sense, they share many aspects of the experience of art, but have the added dimension of being interwoven with daily life, rather than exhibited in an art space. As such, they demand an increased sense of responsibility – an ethics which acknowledges the effect of art within the specific network of relations which constitute our lives. Even in a town of only 1000 people, there are countless overlapping allegiances, and just as many dissenting models on how one's life might be lived. No single research method of gathering and comparing these models could hope to accommodate them all. The very site-specific nature of Bilateral Kellerberrin raises some key questions. To what extent can my short residency in a small country town be used to generalise about communication in society more broadly? How might the dual process of faceto-face and online interaction function differently in a heavily populated urban, or 16 In making a distinction between "real" and "virtual" throughout this exegesis, I am not implying that interactions in an online environment are somehow "less real" than those in the streets, but rather in order to show the flows of influence which take place between these two spheres. 59 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging suburban environment?17 Another question arising from this discussion relates to the role of galleries and museums in society. I have suggested that some attempts by contemporary artists, such as Rirkrit Tiravanija, to offer a free space for open participation in the gallery environment have faltered because of a set of unstated social constraints on who can enter and feel at home in such spaces. However, this could be countered by considering projects by artists such as Hans Haacke, and the Border Art Workshop, each of whom have been able to sustain a fruitful antagonism whilst simultaneously drawing attention to the museum's geographical, economic, and intellectual contexts. Haacke's works from the early 1970s (such as ManetPROJEKT 74, 1974) probed the economic substructure of the artworld itself, relying heavily on being located within a museum for their critical impact. Similarly, the Border Art Workshop's exhibitions in San Diego during the 1990s deliberately dramatised the socially exclusive sphere of the art gallery, in order to argue their case for a broader acceptance of Mexican immigrants in Southern California. Certain of their exhibitions required gallery visitors to submit their bodies to humiliating contortions – such as climbing through shallow ditches or under barriers (a physical process analogous to the border-crossing ordeals of illegal immigrants) before they could enter the gallery space (Ollman 1997, p. 37). In concluding her critique of gallery-based artworks which utilise social relations as their medium, Claire Bishop argues that art is more compelling when it 17 This is the question I pursued in my subsequent project carried out in the Sydney suburb of Petersham, Bilateral Petersham, April-May 2006. See Chapters Three and Four for a discussion of this project. 60 Chapter Two: Relational Aesthetics and Bilateral Blogging 'acknowledges the limitations of what is possible as art [...] and subjects to scrutiny all easy claims for a transitive relationship between art and society' (Bishop 2004, p. 79). Bilateral Kellerberrin, I argue, utilised a method which allowed these limitations to come to the fore, within the work of art. The project set up a framework for social and aesthetic interaction which enabled documentation and reflection to occur in a co-emergent way. In generating and collecting individual stories from particular times and places, Bilateral Kellerberrin allowed them to sit alongside one another, making no attempt at a unified or summary picture of the place. Blogs – like art galleries – are 'sites' and 'discursive events' (Miles 2005, p. 67) which come with their own (often unstated) entry requirements and protocols. However, the fragmentary, additive – and bilateral – nature of the blog as an aesthetic research tool offers a compelling alternative to gallery-based situations, in accommodating the ongoing rhythms of ordinary lived experience. 61 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention In the previous chapter, I outlined some of the basic elements which constitute my method of blogging as an interactive art form. I showed how Bilateral Kellerberrin developed an interwoven process of conversation and online dialogue. Encounters in the streets of Kellerberrin led to virtual interactions on the blog, which in turn fed back into opportunities for further adventures in the real world. Over time, the texts generated by this cyclical process grew into a simultaneous double portrait: of the town, and of myself. In this chapter, I expand the discussion by considering my subsequent project, Bilateral Petersham. In Bilateral Petersham, I repeated my blogging experiment, transferring the work's site from small country town to city suburb. I did this in an attempt to transform my relationship to everyday life within my own neighbourhood. This shift of geographical situation, and the necessary adaptations to my own working method, brought to light an aspect of bilateral blogging which I had not fully comprehended before. While reflecting on the difficulties I encountered during Bilateral Petersham, I came to realise the vital role played by attention in the generation of an artwork which seeks to produce a more integrated relationship with life. As a field of study, everyday life is slippery and fugitive. It is often theorised as a counfounding double concept: average lived experience (and therefore, no individual's actual experience); and at the same time the countless specific tiny situations and occurrances which make up the existences of everyone on the planet. 62 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention Due to its multiplicity, "the everyday" is therefore difficult to grasp. Michel de Certeau, at the beginning of The Practice of Everyday Life, dedicates the book 'To the ordinary man' – a dedication which embodies this paradoxical condition of the everyday. The ordinary man is at once every man, and no man at all (de Certeau 1988). In his essay 'Everyday Speech', Maurice Blanchot writes that by definition, the everyday is that which always escapes our attention: it is the 'unperceived' which resists being 'introduced into a whole or "reviewed", that is to say, enclosed within a panoramic vision' (Blanchot 1987, p. 14). Cultural theorist Ben Highmore adds that the everyday 'cannot be properly accommodated by rationalist thought [...] the everyday is precisely what becomes remaindered after rationalist thought has tried to exhaust the world of meaning' (Highmore 2008, p. 80). In this way, the everyday is lost 'as it is transformed in the process of description and interpretation' (Highmore 2008. p. 81). Because of this, he suggests, we may in fact require different methods of representing the everyday than are available via standard research processes. This is where bilateral blogging, as an emergent form of everyday research, might make a contribution to cultural theory.18 What kind of methods could begin to represent the everyday? Because the nature of the everyday is to slip under the radar of our noticing, Highmore offers the insight that new 'kinds of attention' might be required (Highmore 2008, p. 83). To 18 Consider, for example, The Baghdad Blog, the online diary of Baghdad resident Salam Pax during the 2003 Gulf War (Pax 2003). The blog format allows extremely local everyday experiences to be juxtaposed with events of global significance, creating a body of evidence beyond the capability of slower or more institutionalised formats of journalism or social research. As Jill Walker Rettberg writes, reading a blog by an ordinary citizen like Pax was 'a far stronger experience than reading even an excellent article by a professional' (Rettberg 2008, p. 95). 63 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention meaningfully engage with the everyday without eradicating 'the particularity of the particular by taking off into abstract generalities' is the challenge presented by the everyday to cultural studies (Highmore 2008, p. 85). For the practicing artist, the challenge is more pragmatic. How can I engage deeply with my own everyday? How can I give value to the singularity of each experience without becoming engulfed by an overwhelming volume of perceptual and cognitive stimulus? This is the challege I faced as I began Bilateral Petersham, whose methods, I suggest, offer a new way of noticing, or paying close attention to – and therefore valuing – the particularity of the everyday. The requirement for a new way of noticing everyday life is what brings me in this chapter to the idea of Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham as attention frameworks. By focussing on attention as a key factor in the way these blogs work to focus and create experiences, I make a connection with the framing processes undertaken by all artworks which draw attention to a selected aspect of experience. At the same time, I argue, the method of bilateral blogging offers some quite distinct opportunities for social relations, due to its explicit incorporation of social interactions within the parameters of the artwork itself, making productive use of the attention devoted by both artist and audience in the creation of an emergent work. I begin by outlining some fundamental characteristics of attention, as discussed in the foundational work of pragmatist psychologist and philosopher William James, as well as some more recent accounts, from cognitive psychologists. Primarily, I am 64 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention interested in the way that attention forms an invisible framing system that focuses the mind on one aspect of the world to the exclusion of all else. Bilateral blogging, I argue, provides a compelling case study of attention in action. John Dewey's theory of experience proposes that the flux of life is transformed into an experience when it is bound together with a sense of unity. For Dewey, the binding of experience into an experience is a fundamentally aesthetic operation. In this way, we can think of the structuring of experience performed by art as a means for revealing new insights into the world we interact with on a daily basis. As I will discuss, the blogs I created as part of this thesis not only proved to be useful tools in focusing my own attention in the flow of everyday life, but produced a similar effect on readers. Bilateral blogging harnesses the attention of artist and audience, bringing an abundance of interest to the blog's subject matter. Since the subject matter of Bilateral Petersham is, precisely, everyday life in my local suburb, bilateral blogging has the potential to generate valuable insights in this very aspect of experience that is so often overlooked, because it is assumed to be banal, ordinary or unremarkable. In this chapter, I reflect on Bilateral Petersham's processes. I propose a three-part system as a way of understanding how attention brings increased value to the everyday. The three "attention frames" I identify are: temporal, territorial, and material/technological. Analogous to the operations of a physical frame around a picture, these three frames help us to understand the ways that attention operates to demarcate and focus our awareness, creating the possibility for an intensified experience of life. 65 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention Comparing Kellerberrin and Petersham I want to now briefly compare my experiences in Kellerberrin with those in Petersham. The two projects were carried out exactly one year apart, with an identical duration of two months. As might be expected, the geographical and social contexts presented by a small country town versus a city suburb make for rather different experiential textures, and this is embodied in the text of the blogs themselves. In Bilateral Petersham, several blog postings detail the differences between the two projects (Ihlein 2009, pp. 22-25). In Petersham I found the process much more of a struggle – and in reflecting on that struggle, I have since come to a deeper understanding of the way that bilateral blogging operates. These reflections have revealed the crucial importance of attention as a tool for engaging with everyday life. The obvious differences between Kellerberrin and Petersham can be quickly summarised. Kellerberrin is one of several towns situated on the Great Eastern Highway, a three-hour drive from the nearest city, Perth. With a population of only 1000, the town relies on wheat and sheep farming, which, due to increasing industrialisation, support fewer and fewer livelihoods. Petersham, by contrast, is an inner-western suburb of Sydney, twenty minutes by train from the centre of the city. With a population of 7000, the suburb is known mainly for its Portuguese delicatessens and restaurants. The edges of Petersham blur almost indiscernibly into its neighbouring suburbs. However, in distinguishing the experiences engendered by my two projects, I have 66 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention come to realise that more important than such raw demographics and geographical data, is a consideration of my own relationship to each of these contexts. My experiences in Kellerberrin, as I mentioned in Chapter Two, were those of an outsider. I could not escape the basic condition framing my presence in the town – that of an invited artist-in-residence. My project in Petersham was framed by a completely different circumstance – I was a self-appointed artist-in-residence, based in my own home. As I reflected in Bilateral Petersham, this project therefore presented a much greater challenge. How, I asked myself, when surrounded by all that is familiar and "normal" (as opposed to exotic and strange), could I begin to experience my local environment with fresh eyes? (Ihlein 2009, p. 22). The tension between the familiar and the strange is addressed by philosopher of aesthetics Arto Haapala. In unfamiliar environments, he writes, 'we are more sensitive to the looks of things. They seem to require our attention much more than in familiar surroundings' (Haapala 2005, p. 46). The local environment is usually 'seen through' rather than 'looked at' – its functionality, or practical use, has become our primary means of interacting with it (Haapala 2005, p. 49). For this reason, he writes, 'we often have to make a special effort to really see the visual features of things surrounding us' (Haapala 2005, p. 48). For Haapala, the purpose of intentionally bringing attention to the visual (or aesthetic) features of the everyday environment is not just to make it appear strange (in the manner of much twentieth century avantgarde art) but also to deepen the 'attachment' which develops as one settles into a familiar place. In other words – to strengthen one's relationship with the local 67 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention environment, and, furthermore, to be more appreciative of this transformation as it takes place. Thus, although the process of paying attention to my local surroundings was more challenging in Petersham than in Kellerberrin, the rewards for engaging with my home suburb were potentially greater. At stake was a deeper connection to my own environment, and even more, the discovery of a method for finding value in precisely that which is most banal, most taken-for-granted – my own everyday life. Thus, in the process of reflecting on the struggle I experienced in Petersham, and comparing it with Bilateral Kellerberrin, I came to realise that what seemed to happen "naturally" when I was a tourist in a small town needed to be actively practiced at home. The restrictions which framed Bilateral Petersham – stopping me from leaving the suburb for two months – were thus a set of enabling constraints which afforded a deeper level of engagement with my home environment.19 These constraints (adapted to a particular location and circumstance) have the potential to catalyse this intimate transformation in other situations as well, a potential which I will discuss in the conclusion to this exegesis. The following examination of the functioning of attention should make clear how such constraints are in fact a key part of what makes possible a deeper connection (or 'attachment', to use Haapala's term) to everyday life within the local environment. 19 The use of constraints can be a method for helping focus attention and increase intensity of engagement in everyday life. This is discussed, in relation to the design of tools, toys, appliances and other products, by computer scientist Don Norman in his book The Design of Everyday Things (Norman 1988). Similarly, artist-researcher Bianca Hester has described the power of 'enabling restraints' in her own experimental sculptural practice (Hester 2008). 68 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention An Economics of Attention In both the physical and the virtual worlds, we face a seemingly exponential rise in the amount of information we need to process, and tasks requiring the application of our attention. Contemporary life is characterised by an ever-increasing requirement for "multitasking", often resulting in a scattered and fragmented engagement with the world. Various theorists have objected to the popular notion that the current era can be described as an 'information economy' (Simon 1996; Lanham 2006; Davenport & Beck 2001; Goldhaber 1997). Economies, they claim, are based on scarcity, and there is certainly no scarcity of information in the world today. On the contrary, the commodity in short supply, and extremely difficult to harness and trade reliably, is the attention we need to process all that information. For this reason, it has been suggested that we are operating today within an attention economy. In an attention economy, the more attention that can be drawn and held, the more value is invested in the object of attention. Many business and management analysts using this term are primarily interested in attention because they believe that understanding the flows of human attention can result in an increased return on capital investments (Davenport & Beck 2001). Others, however, recognise that there is more to attention than accruing financial capital. The unintegrated experience of life resulting from the need to process so much information has the effect of generating a widespread yearning for an increased depth of engagement. This is a commodity that cannot easily be bought and sold. Acknowledging this fact, management theorist Scott Berkun writes: 69 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention Whenever someone is lost in waves of e-mail and information, they’re often oblivious to the deepest tragedy of their time [...] somewhere in the wash of interactions and split attentions is the missed possibility they’re looking for: Meaning. Depth of experience. Connection. (Berkun 2006) What Berkun alludes to is the mindful acceptance of one's own presence in this moment in time, in contrast to the loss of the experience of time that seems to be the product of a restless need to process ever more information.20 This is akin to the zeninfluenced philosophy of John Cage, whose musical compositions encouraged not the making of music to drown out the noise of everyday life, but rather simply 'listening devotedly to the manifold sounds that fill the air at every moment' (Kaprow 2003, p. 160). Later I will discuss Cage's famous silent work, 4'33" (1952) – a paradigmatic case of the use of an attention-focusing structure as art. Attention and Experience An emphasis on limiting the quantity of stimulus to be engaged with in order to improve depth and quality of experience characterises ongoing studies of how attention operates. According to the philosopher and psychologist William James, paying attention is a perceptual and cognitive activity involving a reaction to, and 20 Psychologists Kirk Warren Brown and Richard M. Ryan argue that mindfulness plays a 'significant role' in a variety of aspects of mental health, and suggest that further research into the cultivation of mindful attention 'may open up significant new avenues for well-being enhancement' (Brown & Ryan, 2003, p. 844). 70 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention selection of, various stimuli in the world around us. At its core, attention involves a process of discernment, a focusing of the mind's operations, and an awareness of the body's sensations and sense perceptions, which results in some aspects of the world being included, and some excluded from our consciousness. In his foundational text on the subject from 1890, James writes: [Attention is] the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. (James 1918, p. 403-4) For James, an active, attentive state is a precondition for experience. He dismisses as a 'false notion' the idea that experience is something that simply happens to us when we are in a state of 'pure receptivity' (James 1918, p. 402). Experience is not osmotically absorbed, forming and shaping us like rain falling on 'passive clay' (James 1918, p. 403). For James, to define experience as 'the mere presence to the senses of an outward order' would imply that experience has an objective existence independent from our minds and bodies. Rather, he argues, experience occurs through an interactive process of noticing, choosing, and attending. It is perhaps no accident that the word attending also means being physically present at an event or place. As we are only capable of processing a finite quantity of information at any one time, choosing to attend to one thing, by definition, 'implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others' (James 1918, p. 404). Its result is an intensified encounter with those things selected from the 'gray chaotic 71 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention indiscriminateness' of the world, and from this are born our experiences (James 1918, p. 403). As I will go on to discuss, attention thus offers a lens through which to consider the development of tools for research which are able to make sense of everyday life. Recent empirical studies in cognitive science and the psychology of perception have added many layers of complexity to James' explanation of attention (see for example Brown & Ryan 2003; Driver et al. 2002, p. 63-4; Gibson 1966; Noe 2004; Scholl 2002). Broadly speaking, however, James' basic definition still holds firm. Psychologist Brian J. Scholl identifies three inter-related core characteristics of attention: selectivity, capacity limitation, and effort (Scholl 2002, p. 4). Although James and Scholl do not discuss art specifically in their analysis of attention, I would like to suggest that art provides an excellent example of attention in action. Attention is a fundamental condition for the making of artworks, as well as for the audience's experience of artworks. It is therefore, potentially, a useful tool for understanding the structural grammar of art. If we consider the production of a painting, for example, we see that it involves selectivity (the artist must by definition choose a subject matter to concentrate on, and therefore exclude other potential subjects); capacity limitation (the production of a painting requires that the artist sets time aside for this specific task, which cannot be carried out simultaneously with many other activities); and effort (the act of painting involves a concerted attentiveness to looking, and the active manipulation of specific 72 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention materials). The deployment of attention in this way may not always be rational, conscious or intelligible to the artist at the time, yet it is often discernible in the finished product. In fact, it could be said that making art is a practice which involves entering into an attentive state, without prior knowledge of what might be revealed in the process. Knowledge emerges from the effort of attention paid in the process of producing the artwork, with an open attidude regarding outcomes. In a complementary (but by no means identical) process, the audience or viewer of an artwork also deploys Scholl's three aspects of attention – selectivity, capacity limitation, and effort – in the act of encountering the work of art. If he or she did not, there would be no aesthetic experience – and no emergent insights resulting from the encounter. This is made explicit by John Dewey in Art as Experience, when he writes: The artist selected, simplified, clarified, abridged and condensed according to his interest. The beholder must go through these operations according to his point of view and interest. [...] In both, there is comprehension in its literal signification – that is, a gathering together of details and particulars physically scattered into an experienced whole. (Dewey 1980, p. 54) In the next section, I will elaborate on Dewey's notion that attention must be actively deployed in order to construct 'an experienced whole'. For Dewey, this act of construction is an inherently aesthetic activity. 73 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention Attention and Aesthetic Experience The idea of art as a way of intensifying our experience of the world is a central theme in Art as Experience. Dewey, a follower of James' pragmatist philosophy, differentiates between generalised experience and what he calls an experience. In his chapter 'Having an experience', Dewey writes that generalised experience 'occurs continuously', as an ordinary condition of living, and 'is often inchoate' (Dewey 1980, p. 36). An experience, by contrast, takes place when some aspect of the flux of life is bound together by a sense of unity, 'a single quality that pervades the entire experience in spite of the variation of its constituent parts' (Dewey 1980, p. 38). For Dewey, unity is not inherent in the objects, events and occurrences which make up everyday life. Rather, it is our own application of attention that plays this transformative role, making meaningful connections between disparate elements, thereby binding experience into an experience. It is this active, inquisitive functioning of attention which suggests its value as an emergent model for everyday research. Arguing for the central role of art in producing an experience, Dewey draws his terminology from the world of aesthetics: painting, music, dance and drama. Consider, for instance, the words he uses to describe the coming-into-being of an experience. Disparate events are 'composed into an experience'; and life's experiences involve 'histories', 'plots' and 'rhythmic movements' (Dewey 1980, pp. 36-7) (my emphasis). This idea, that chaos is structured into the unity of an experience through aesthetic means does not, however, signify that without the structuring effect of art, 74 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention life remains mired in muddy incoherence. Rather, as I outlined in Chapter Two, Dewey's definition of art includes all manner of ordinary (and extraordinary) cultural rituals and practices which 'intensify the sense of immediate living' (Dewey 1980, p. 6). Everyday life itself is full of structures and practices which are themselves inherently aesthetic in nature, and it is from this "aesthetics of the ordinary" that my own method of bilateral blogging has emerged. By falling into step with daily life, blogging's framing effect makes some sense of its rhythms and interactions while allowing lived experience to continue in all its variety and singularity. In bilateral blogging, a series of seemingly unrelated occurrences may be brought together by something as simple as telling a story. A story involves a beginning, middle and end; rhythms and repetitions; characters, dramas, plots and sub-plots; tensions and dénouement. The narrative synthesis of the storyteller's tale – an inherently aesthetic process – thus transforms life's events into the unity of an experience. In this way it is not difficult to comprehend Dewey's claim that what he describes as an experience is aesthetic in nature. What ramifications might this relationship between attention and aesthetic experience have for my thesis about bilateral blogging? Since, as Dewey argues, experience is the aesthetic intensification of life's own processes, the intimate connection between attention and experience points to the possibility for considering bilateral blogging as an attention-based framework for the creation of an experience in the flow of everyday living. In other words, thinking through the prism of attention is one way of considering how one might produce a more intimate relationship 75 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention between art and life. Before proceeding to discuss how bilateral blogging works as an attention-framing device, I want to point out one of Dewey's more controversial ideas connected to the aesthetic nature of experience. Dewey, extending his own idea that an experience is inherently aesthetic, suggests that those occurrences which are not mindfully and thoughtfully attended to (such as 'extreme rage, fear, jealousy' and so on) are 'nonaesthetic' (Dewey 1980, p. 49). Contemporary pragmatist philosopher Richard Shusterman disagrees with this contention. For Shusterman, rupture, irrationality, the subconscious, and the incoherent all possess aesthetic qualities of their own. He has described these as having an 'aesthetics of fragmentation' (Shusterman 2004, p. 109).21 The aesthetic realm involves felt sensations and affects of all sorts. Thus, experiences which are not mindfully attended to can still be aesthetically sensed. States of anxiety, fear, blood-boiling anger or ecstasy might well be experienced in a scattered, absent-minded, semi-conscious or irrational way, but these states are still strongly registered on the body and mind. Furthermore, as Dewey himself notes, such inchoate experiences may often be bound together into an experience in retrospect. Retrospective reflection is then used as a basis for a deeper understanding of the ongoing cycle of experience in which 'doing and undergoing' are in relationship with one another (Dewey 1980, pp. 44-45). Rather than strictly adhering to Dewey's contention that fragmented experiences are 'non-aesthetic', it may be more productive to suggest that the specific kind of attending we do bears a close relationship to the 21 Shusterman in his book Pragmatist Aesthetics describes an 'aesthetics of fragmentation' as part of an extended consideration of rap music as a form of art (Shusterman 2000, p. 206). 76 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention aesthetic quality of our emergent experiences. This idea makes room for the notion that an aesthetic research method like bilateral blogging could accomodate those aspects of everyday life which, as Highmore suggests, often elude traditional means of enquiry. Bilateral Blogging: Attention in Action Framing is a process of focusing attention. Art creates a frame in which attention is drawn to a particular subject matter, intensifying and momentarily drawing it to consciousness. The traditional rectangular format, for example, is a device used to draw or direct the viewer's attention to what the artist regards as worth paying attention to. Attention thus gives value to whatever is framed. When viewing a painting, I enter into a tacit contract with the artist, in which I direct my attention away from whatever is not framed, and towards that which the artist has urged me, through framing, to consider. This process functions not only for pictorial objects. Robert Morris' Box with the Sound of its own Making, 1961, which I discussed in Chapter One, for instance, does not visually represent an external reality. Rather, the work, utilising an audio soundtrack embedded in a handmade wooden box, frames – that is, draws our attention to – the physical activity of making the box itself. The method of bilateral blogging, I suggest, works to frame the world in a related way. However, because of the underlying technology of blogging, and the way blogs explicitly incorporate social interaction and dialogue within their own structures, bilateral blogging as a strategy for framing everyday life has unique characteristics 77 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention not found in other types of art objects. The framing performed by blogs is perhaps better understood as an ongoing process, rather than a solid, visible structure. Although blogs' framing action is in this sense invisible, it does not mean that blogs are any less powerful in shaping and focusing attention, and thus creating a more intensified experience of that which is framed. On the contrary, the method of blogging I have developed directs attention to the unspectacular ordinary spaces and rhythms of everyday life. Bilateral blogging does so in a way that helps us to find value in the specific moments of ordinary life, without needing to resolve the fragmentation, banality and contradictions which are essential to the everyday, nor transforming them into a fetishised or "aestheticised" form. In the case of the blog projects which constitute this thesis, what draws and directs attention is not a rectangle made of wood or canvas, but rather a set of parameters forming the boundaries of the project – the edges of its "frame". These parameters help to create a sense of boundedness which allows both artist and audience to prise open a small space each day for an increased depth of attention. Bilateral Petersham's frame is embodied in a kind of event-score – a short piece of text which immediately unifies my activities. This score can be seen as a self-imposed instruction, dictating what the project allows and prohibits: Do not leave your home suburb for two months. Each day, write a blog entry about what happens. 78 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention The aspects of attention described by Scholl: selectivity, capacity limitation, and effort, are all embedded in this event score. Selectivity is indicated by the requirement that I remain within Petersham's borders. The project selects Petersham, my home suburb – by extension rejecting engagement with other geographical locations. I imposed this rule on myself precisely for the purpose of capacity limitation – to reduce the quantity of different phenomena demanding my attention at any one time, in an attempt to deepen my engagement with everyday life in my local environment. Finally, the effort required to write a blog entry each day makes sure I actively and mindfully participate in the transformation of the generalised experiences in Petersham into an experience – or rather, an ongoing series of interlinked experiences. In other words, blogging helps to focus my own attention on the fine details of the flux of experience which makes up my life. This triple process – involving selectivity, capacity limitation, and effort – is also what lends Bilateral Petersham a sense of clarity and simplicity which is effective in drawing and focusing the attention of an emerging community of blog readers. Three Attention Frames for Generating Aesthetic Experience Extending upon Scholl's three basic characteristics of attention, I want to now describe three components of the attention framework which underlies my method of bilateral blogging. These three components are: a territorial frame, a temporal frame and a material/technological frame. Taking Bilateral Petersham as an example, I will now explain briefly how these three frames work. In the next chapter, I draw upon this attention-framing structure in more detail to examine the specific insights that 79 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention the strategy of bilateral blogging brings to the surface in Bilateral Petersham. The Territorial Frame I use the term territorial for two reasons. First, the specific spatial limitation I placed on myself while carrying out the project is the suburb's mapped boundary – the geographical territory of Petersham. The project's geographical territory restricts my physical movements in space, and thus forces me to focus attention more deeply on the experiences which take place within that spatial boundary. Second, Bilateral Petersham's territorial frame indicates the project's subject area, or conceptual territory: the idea of an artwork consisting of localised social relations. This correspondence between the project's geographical and conceptual territories provides a set of boundaries which affords an increased attentiveness to something which had, up to the time of carrying out Bilateral Petersham, proved difficult to see clearly. Liz Grosz, in her book Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth, argues that framing is crucial to the construction of territory (Grosz 2008). Framing, she writes, 'cuts into a milieu or space', enabling 'the provisional ordering of chaos through the laying down of a grid or order that entraps chaotic shards, chaoid states, to arrest or slow them into a space and a time, a structure and a form where they can affect and be affected by bodies' (Grosz 2008, p. 13). It is precisely the construction of a territorial frame for Bilateral Petersham that enabled me to see everyday life in my local environment with fresh eyes – to lift my local suburb out of its indiscernible 80 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention continuity with the rest of the city. Figure 5: Lucas Ihlein, Map of Petersham Indicating Suburb Borders, 2007. The Temporal Frame As the territorial frame restricts my physical movements in space, so the temporal frame brackets a set period of time. In the case of Bilateral Petersham, two months is set as the project's duration. From the first sentence of the first blog entry, Bilateral Petersham draws attention to the passing of time: 'The clock ticked round to midnight and I sat in the kitchen watching it [...] That's how I brought in the third of April' (Ihlein 2009, p. 6). This was the project's inception, the moment when it went 81 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention "live". In the terms set by Bilateral Petersham's event-score, the temporal frame created by the project thus frames whatever happens during this period of time as an integral part of the work. As an emergent research process, bilateral blogging's temporal frame creates a system which draws attention to the minutiae of daily life. A paradigmatic example of an artwork which utilises a temporal frame is John Cage's 4'33" – his so-called silent piece first performed in 1952. In an extended examination of 4'33", art historian Liz Kotz argues that the piece 'presents time as a kind of neutral container, like an empty frame that could contain whatever events or sounds might happen during its course' (Kotz 2007, p. 27). When performed in the formal surroundings of a concert hall, 4'33" has the effect of activating the attention of both musician and audience to the ambient sounds occurring in the present moment. In effect, this welcomes into the structure of the musical frame elements which are usually considered noise – including the audience's own coughing, shuffling and breathing. The effect of the piece is thus to shift the audience's consciousness to the very aspect of the world which is usually screened out when encountering artworks – the embodied act of attending itself. The quality of one's own attention then becomes an object of reflection, inseparable from the piece of music. Cage's utilisation of a durational structure paved the way for chance and indeterminacy to enter into the frame of art. With Cage, composition can be understood as occurring in the moment of encounter between artist and audience, rather than having taken place at some time prior to the work's performance. This 82 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention method of composition forces members of the audience to recognise their own active contribution towards the creation of the work, providing a template for later, overtly participatory art structures, such as Kaprow's Happenings. However, as Cage's work shows, the ability of the artwork to incorporate chance, indeterminacy, and the audience's own contribution crucially depends on the creation of a structure through which we are able to bring our attention to the present moment – and this is precisely what the temporal frame enables. Cage's 4'33" also opens up the possibility for a project like Bilateral Petersham to set up a temporal frame on a scale much greater than four minutes and thirty-three seconds. The period of two months activated by my project aligns more closely with the ongoing process of everyday living. Bilateral Petersham's longer temporal frame facilitates attentiveness to a broader range of experiences than those to be had within the confines of a concert hall. However, with the expansion in scale comes a corresponding shift in the quality of attention able to be devoted to the processes of everyday life. For this reason, in Bilateral Petersham, I introduced a further temporal constraint. The overarching duration of two months was divided into a series of smaller frames mapped directly onto each twenty-four hour period. These daily temporal frames allow the process of paying attention to step in time with the ordinary activities of living, allowing me to focus on the "now" rather than trying to make sense of the distant past or future. In Bilateral Petersham, the combination of an overarching duration with a series of 83 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention daily temporal frames produces a powerful effect on consciousness and perception. The ability of this system to focus my attention in the present moment relieves the pressure to produce a finished product for a deadline at some point in the future. The substitution of a daily "mini-deadline" means that I am able to enjoy the process of making art, precisely because that process is daily living itself. In this way, the temporal frame allows me to take the time necessary to closely observe the constituent parts of my own daily life. The Material/Technological Frame The material/technological frame binds together the territorial and the temporal frames into an attention framework. Without some method of material interaction, the temporal and territorial frames could not exist. Art is a process of skillful material interaction with the world. Tools, technologies and cultural practices are what we create and use to interact with the world. They are an instrinsic part of the world, even if they are ephemeral, or seem to carry no weight or materiality. As I discussed in Chapter Two, the technologies and materials framing my projects include the ancient communicative crafts of storytelling and conversation, but bilateral blogging augments and extends these crafts with a specific set of relational and dialogical tools. Thus, the unique features of the material/technological frame include the following: first, a technology which enables the publishing of text and images online instantly; second, the facility for textual dialogue with the audience, through the use of blog comments after each post; and third, the ability for this dialogical process to have a cyclical impact in the "offline world", as online discussions are picked up, 84 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention acted upon by both the artist and audience, and fed back into the blog. The life cycle of bilateral blogging (publication→dialogue→cyclical action→publication→...) thus offers a powerful tool for the production of a dialogical artwork which is responsive to the small social interactions which constitute everyday life. When combined with the territorial and temporal frames, the material/technological frame offers a way of paying closer attention to the everyday. How the Attention Frames Work Together I now want to briefly sketch a scenario to show how the three attention frames work together to create a deeper engagement in everyday life. In the first stage of the process, bilateral blogging performs a small transformation in my own consciousness as I go throughout my daily life. The knowledge that I am going to write a blog post tomorrow helps to sharpen my experience of today. This knowledge is an invisible frame which I carry with me (like Kaprow's 'mental rectangle') which intensifies my awareness of the small transactions of ordinary activity. This shift in consciousness is generated by the dual functioning of the territorial and temporal frames, the frames which bring an increased attentiveness to the "here" and "now". The subsequent writing of a blog post about the events of "yesterday" is the second stage of this process, in which attention is once again sharpened – this time in a reflective, retrospective manner. The attempt to synthesise the disparate experiences which make up my day, in the coherent form of a blog entry, is an attempt to find 85 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention meaning, connections, value and insight where these may not have previously existed. Thus the writing of a blog entry – the deployment of the material/technological frame – has an effect on the transformation of generalised experience into an experience, in Dewey's terms. This is not to argue that this transformation dispells incoherence and elusiveness, which are fundamental qualities of everyday experience. Nor does bilateral blogging create a fictionalised online image of everyday life where everything seems to lock into place in a seamless way. On the contrary, the value of the method of bilateral blogging is that it creates a framework which allows the qualities of experience – whether they be deeply felt and meaningful, or irritating, or puzzling, or only semi-consciously grasped – to exist on their own terms. The expansive container which blogging provides does not require closure or fixity. Small observations, questions, ruminations, phatic utterances, and even self-criticism can sit side by side with more traditional processes of narrative and storytelling. All these modes of synthesised experience are subject to further illumination and alteration through dialogue with an emerging community of readers. This represents a third stage, in which all three attention frames are brought together – dialogical interaction. Due to the daily cycle of the method of bilateral blogging, dialogue (both online and offline) quickly feeds back into further opportunities for experiences in my local neighbourhood. By this stage in the bilateral blogging cycle I am no longer alone in my endeavour to intensify my attentiveness to everyday life. Readers, too, begin to become aware of a heightening of their own ability to notice the ordinary 86 Chapter Three: Framing Everyday Experience: Blogging and Attention experiences in the world around them. Many of these readers' experiences are fed back into Bilateral Petersham, which, as this cyclic process goes forward, builds into a very flexible, collaboratively produced tool for intensifying and documenting experience. By focusing the attention of artist and audience through the territorial, temporal and material/technological frames, Bilateral Petersham thus builds a communitygenerated time capsule of suburban experience occurring in this place, at this precise moment. Small moments of everyday life are not boiled down, summarised, or quantified through graphs and demographic statistics, but rather are given space to exist in their own singularity. The sedimentation of these proliferating moments of interaction – which are, precisely, moments of intensified attention paid to everyday life – results in a continually expanding, cumulative archive. How might we begin to make sense of this unruly archive? What insights are revealed by re-immersing in the everyday of Bilateral Petersham after its temporal frame has elapsed? The next chapter will delve into these problems. 87 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham If bilateral blogging's attention framework intensifies life's processes, generating an expansive archive of experience, to what use can this archive be put? Beyond the immediate enhancement of experience which is afforded for both myself and an emergent community of blog readers, what residue remains? – and what insights might be gleaned from this residue? Exploring these questions is the purpose of the present chapter. In the first section, I consider the difficulty of finding a suitable method to analyse the blog's "unruly archive". I compare the work involved in mining this archive to the process of producing Bilateral Petersham itself. In order to try and make the blog's content intelligible in retrospect, I sketch a structural anatomy for the project. By constructing a schema which identifies a series of key events (or "episodes") underpinned by a "mulch" of minor occurrences, I suggest that the narrative structure of the blog is, in fact, remarkably similar to the flow of everyday life itself. I propose that the blog, and the suburb of Petersham, each operate as "environments" – permeable ecologies of interconnected events in a constant process of evolution. In the second section, I consider some of the tactics I employed in Bilateral Petersham in order to deepen the connection between these online and offline environments. Examining two such embodied practices – walking around the boundaries, and breaking through the boundaries of Petersham – I show how each 88 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham was instrumental in the production of a stronger sense of knowing, and consequently, belonging to, the local. I conclude by suggesting how these tactics of "taking place" through experiential action might exhibit some of the characteristics of an integrated relationality, analogous to the notion of "becoming indigenous" to one's own place. Exploring Bilateral Petersham's Unruly Archive In Chapter Three, I outlined an attention framework for understanding how the method of bilateral blogging operates to frame and focus attention on the small events of everyday life. What, then, emerges after this process has reached the end of its own temporal frame? How might the form of the emergent artwork shed light on its own purported goal: to achieve an intensified engagement between art and life? And if the project's form does not seem easy to grasp, what might this in itself reveal? To sift through Bilateral Petersham is a difficult task. The passing of time does not seem to have created the distance necessary to begin to see the project as an "object" separate from my own embedded involvement in its process of making. Rather, my ongoing life in Petersham continues to furnish further events obscure the project's edges. For this reason, I now want to look briefly at the structure of Bilateral Petersham. The difficulty in seeing the edges of the Bilateral Petersham blog, is in fact similar to that presented by the project itself. Then, my struggle involved the impossibility of including every event from any particular day within the blog. If I wrote about everything which occurred, in exhaustive detail, the time required to write and read 89 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham these accounts would be so great it would defeat the purpose of writing altogether.22 This problem is akin to that described by Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares, in their short story 'On exactitude in science'. In this story, they tell of an empire whose cartographers create an exhaustively detailed territorial map. As the cartographers work, the map expands until it finally matches the size of the entire empire and thus becomes utterly useless for navigational purposes (Borges and Casares 1975, p. 131). Thus, when creating Bilateral Petersham, I needed to actively employ selectivity to usefully navigate the myriad occurrences that took place within the project's attention framework. The act of selecting was not a realm of unbounded freedom. Rather, it was framed by the constraints of Petersham's territory, the time of the project's duration, and the material/technological characteristics of the method of bilateral blogging. Selecting where to focus my attention did not always come easily. Sometimes (as I reflected in the blog itself) dwelling in too much detail on the events of one day meant that other experiences dropped off the map and were forgotten forever.23 It is in the nature of the everyday to resist total "capture". As Maurice Blanchot writes, the everyday is 'the inexhaustible, irrecusable, always unfinished daily that always escapes forms or structures' (Blanchot 1987, p. 13). In this sense, no single method could create an exact representation of the everyday. In any case, as 22 In one of several blog entries which reflect on the difficulty of the blogging process, I write: '...if I wrote about absolutely everything that happened in the course of twenty-four hours, I would have no time to do anything the next day (and neither would you, if you tried to read it)'. (Ihlein 2009, p. 25) 23 See for example the blog entry entitled 'The Lost Vignettes' (Ihlein 2009, p. 55). 90 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham the story by Borges and Casales makes clear, the difficulty of achieving exactitude is matched only by the futility of succeeding at it. Thus, as much as it (imperfectly) mapped my daily life, Bilateral Petersham also mapped my own situated choices within the parameters I had set for myself. Ultimately, producing a comprehensive map was not my goal – the project was rather a way to engage with, and bring visibility to this very problem of how to make sense of the everyday, and I took my own everyday as a logical starting point. Bilateral blogging was a tool which could draw attention to the difficulty of its own task. Now, after the project's original timeframe has passed, the blog has become a vast archive of experience, an unruly document consisting of stories, dialogues and networked tendrils that reach out far beyond the confines of a simple art object. The project resists distanced, all-at-once vision. In other words, the scale of Bilateral Petersham (it runs to over 80 000 words) makes it once again necessary to employ selectivity when talking about it with others. But how can I intelligibly navigate this archive? This question is related to that sketched out by Ben Highmore in his consideration of a theoretical archives of everyday life. He asks: If the archive is made up of a polyphonic everyday, then how is it to be orchestrated into meaningful themes or readable accounts? How can one construct an intelligible articulation from the archive that doesn't submerge the polyphonic beneath the editorial voice at work? (Highmore 2008, p. 85) 91 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham Highmore suggests that art practice might be able to fashion a kind of 'avant-garde sociology' (Highmore 2008, p. 83). He writes, '[w]hat is called the artistic avantgarde seems to offer a repertoire of formal devices for registering a world that appears chaotic, disrupted and radically new' (Highmore 2008, p. 84). Due to its hybrid and emergent methods of situated engagement, Bilateral Petersham may be able to bring to light aspects of the everyday which elude standard social science research. This is in part because the project offers its own archive, the research data itself, as a material to be experienced directly. This material – the blog postings which embody numerous singular everyday experiences – constitute an inextricable part of the artwork's immanent tangible substance. The blog's stories and dialogues cannot be boiled down or distilled into "findings" separate from the specificity of these practices themselves. Rather, the blog must be experienced anew by each reader – who, in the process of reading, to some degree mentally re-enacts the journey of my artist-in-residence project. The practice of reading Bilateral Petersham, whether online (using a home or office computer) or in its book form, becomes woven into the routines and spaces of the reader's own everyday life. Thus readers experience Bilateral Petersham's attentiveness for themselves – a situated, affective transaction which, as Highmore writes, 'articulates the everyday as a sensory realm' (Highmore 2008, p. 87). In considering my own difficulty in re-engaging with Bilateral Petersham, I have taken into consideration the fact that I, too, am now one of the blog's readers. As Dewey writes, to experience a work of art is not simply to passively receive stimulus, but is in itself a creative act involving 'relations comparable to those which the original producer underwent' (Dewey 1980, p. 54). 92 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham My argument that Bilateral Petersham's archive must be affectively experienced as a body of primary material, rather than being distilled into quantifiable research outcomes, does not mean that it fiercely patrols its own borders, resisting any attempt at re-contextualisation and dialogue. Nor does this imply that the work's essence would crumble in the face of an attempt to summarise, or make meaning from, small parts of its expansive whole. The modernist notion of a bounded, autonomous art object (which, as I argued in Chapter One, was problematised by Robert Morris' Box with the Sound of its Own Making, 1961, and progressively eroded by Allan Kaprow's Happenings and Activities) meets with strong resistance in Bilateral Petersham. Any attempt to formulate a tidy narrative of the experiences framed by Bilateral Petersham will always – like the unbounded nature of everyday life – leave a sense of a remainder, a 'fleeting presence that does not allow recognition' (Blanchot 1987, p. 12). Furthermore, Bilateral Petersham has the inbuilt capacity to accommodate dialogue – with readers, and also with other blogs, websites and publications. In other words, the blog can link to, quote from, and reflect on other accounts of itself, in the process enriching and expanding itself.24 With these points in mind (the impossibility of a totalising analysis, and the notion of an everexpanding art object) I now wish to look more closely at Bilateral Petersham's unruly archive, to sketch a structural anatomy of the project. 24 A good example of this is Sunandah Creagh's article about Bilateral Petersham in the Sydney Morning Herald on 19 April, 2006 (Creagh 2006). Creagh's article was written shortly after interviewing me in Petersham. In turn, my own description of this interaction with Creagh is posted in the blog. The encounter with the media thus becomes an intrinsic part of the work, narrated from two separate points of view, and further discussed by a wider readership. 93 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham A Structural Anatomy of Bilateral Petersham As mentioned above, re-engaging with the text of the blog as a researcher has been difficult. My attempts to analyse it often result in me becoming immersed within the narrative, lost in its dialogues and social encounters. Alternatively, in trying to distance myself and formulate abstract notions about it, I lose all connection to the specificity of the blog's fine grained engagement with everyday life. In other words, as a researcher I experience something like the problem described by Highmore of making sense of the archive of the everyday. Or to use the words of Blanchot, I am at once 'engulfed within and deprived of the everyday' (Blanchot 1987, p. 13). As an artist, it is not part of my usual practice to investigate texts in a detached, analytical or literary manner. However, techniques of visualisation, such as mapping, are a part of my aesthetic toolbox.25 I therefore began charting Bilateral Petersham's constituent parts in order to see what insights might arise. This process generated a new image of the blog. Using a hard-copy book version of Bilateral Petersham as a reference, and treating the specific events and experiences that take place within the blog as small Happenings or "episodes" embedded within a larger narrative arc, I mapped each of the blog's postings and dialogues onto a large sheet of tracing paper.26 These formed a linear timeline, running from 3rd April to 31st May 2006. On 25 See, for instance, the map indicating the spatial distribution of rubbish bins in Bilateral Kellerberrin, <http://kellerberrin.com/?p=49>; and the many maps I generated to help readers (and myself) make sense of the border walks in Bilateral Petersham. Note that due to their large formats, these maps are only available in the online versions of the blogs. 26 In Chapter Five, I discuss the usefulness of the hard-copy book version of Bilateral Petersham when consulted in tandem with the online blog, due to the different reading experiences each of these technological frames afford. 94 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham one side of the timeline I inscribed experiences which occurred in the physical sites of Petersham (interactions in the streets, shops or homes). On the other side, I inscribed interactions which were generated within the online environment, such as significant dialogues generated within the comments section of the blog. This process began to reveal something of the structural anatomy of the project itself. Among the mass of episodes crowding along the timeline, some began to rise to the surface as "key events", which I mapped onto a new sheet of tracing paper laid on top of the first. In aesthetic terms, these events were perhaps akin to dramatic peaks in the blog's narrative trajectory. The key events I noted (which will be memorable to those who have read the blog) include: the four border walks (North, South, East and West); Rollerskating at the Majestic Roller Rink; my Bike Ride with the Mayor; Jelly-Wrestling at the Oxford Tavern; the church service at the Metropolitan Community Church; 'The Great Escape' (in which I leave Petersham, blindfolded, to have lunch with my father), and my Visit to Aboriginal Elder Uncle Lester.27 I noticed that these key events were distributed, fairly evenly, throughout the two months of the project, occurring at a rate of about twice a week. What distinguishes these key events from the rest of the blog is their apparent self-containment, as stories with a clear plot and a deeply focused clarity of engagement with, and reflection on, the experience described. Each key event seems to move towards a provisional resolution – akin to what Dewey calls the movement towards 'consummation' in an aesthetic experience (Dewey 1980, p. 35). Furthermore, each of 27 This is by no means a comprehensive list. Other readers might include different blog entries in this list. As de Certeau writes in his chapter 'Reading as Poaching', readers reassemble texts in an active, creative process which constitutes a new work (de Certeau 1988, p. 169). In Bilateral Petersham, since many readers were also writers (contributing to dialogue via comments) there are as many potential authorial positions as there are readers. 95 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham these episodes can be ascribed a name or a synopsis, and they often incorporate critical reflection through dialogical exchange with blog readers. These elements characterise each of these episodes as an experience in the Deweyan sense.28 Figure 6:Lucas Ihlein, Chart of "key" and underlying events in Bilateral Petersham, 2009, marker pen on two layers of tracing paper, 85x60cm, photo by Greg Turner. 28 Philosopher D.C. Mathur condenses Dewey's theory of the basic rhythm of 'consummation' in an aesthetic experience thus: (1) immediate qualitative experience of 'doing and undergoing' in specific situations, giving rise to (2) reflective experience in which the organism not only 'has' the experience but understands its meaning, or perceives the relation between its 'doing' and 'undergoing,' and, as a result, (3) the final phase of experience, which incorporates the significance and meaning of the reflective phase and is thereby rendered more rich and deepened in its immediacy. (Mathur 1992, p. 368) 96 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham Figure 7: Lucas Ihlein, detail: Chart of "key" and underlying events in Bilateral Petersham, 2009, marker pen on two layers of tracing paper. Looking further, I noticed that all these key experiences are underpinned by a series of smaller daily interactions, observations and dialogues. Each of these moments resists tidy encapsulation as an experience in itself. However, taken together, this heterogenous, fragmented collection of impressionistic vignettes seems to form a kind of fertile soil or mulch which nourishes the more prominent experiences. These blog entries bind together the whole project, setting the key episodes in a specific context and embedding them (but also spacing them out) within a dramatic rhythm which allows the reader's attention to engage, rest and engage again. As Dewey writes, such rhythmic modulation is a crucial part of the aesthetic structuring of experience: 'Each beat, in differentiating a part within the whole, adds to the force of what went before while creating a suspense that is a demand for something more to come' (Dewey 1980, p. 155). Bilateral blogging's structuring of experience, then, can begin to make sense of the apparent formlessness of everyday life. Bilateral 97 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham Petersham resonates with Dewey's argument that in an aesthetic experience 'different acts, episodes, occurrences melt and fuse into unity, and yet do not disappear and lose their own character as they do so' (Dewey 1980, p. 36). The accumulation of small vignettes and fragments, punctuated by regularly occurring key events, brings Bilateral Petersham into being as a living, breathing ecology – an environment – constantly changing over time, surging and subsiding in intensity, in tune with the waxing and waning of my own energy, and the attentive engagement of my readership/audience. The notion of the work of art as a unity of disparate elements in constant mutation is closely aligned with Allan Kaprow's use of the term 'Environment' to describe a strand of his own practice. Kaprow gave this name to a series of proto-installation works of the early 1960s, which were intended to evolve and mutate over time. (Kaprow 2003, pp. 92, 108, 204). Environments were a kind of art 'in which the usually slow mutations wrought by nature are quickened and literally made part of the experience of it; they manifest the very processes of creation-decay-creation almost as one watches' (Kaprow 1966, p. 169). Furthermore, as Jeff Kelley has noted, '[Kaprow's] Environments marked the boundaries at which objects of art, once representations of experience, crossed over into the world of actual experience, and vice versa' (Kelley 1994, p. 80). Like the fictional 1:1 scale map described by Borges and Casares, Environments confound any easy attempt at distanciation – they do not lend themselves to objectification. They are inherently immersive, able to be experienced only by what philosopher Crispin Sartwell (following Dewey) calls a kind of 'fusion'. Sartwell writes: 98 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham Fusion of the person with the environment [...] includes the absorbtion of the artist in her materials, and the absorbtion of the viewer in the work of art. In both cases, one experiences a "loss of self." [...] As one becomes identified with what surrounds one, one encompasses it even as it encompasses one. (Sartwell 1995, p. 129) The idea that the experience of my own situated everyday life might be inextricably woven into, and constitute an intrinsic part of a living and breathing environment, relates to both Highmore's and Blanchot's characterisations of the everyday as a phenomenon which escapes a totalising representation. In my case, both Petersham (the suburb) and Bilateral Petersham (the work of art) can be understood as environments which are brought to life through interaction or fusion. Furthermore, as they begin to interact with each other, events in the physical spaces of Petersham, and the online exchanges in the blog fuse into a hybrid social space which is simultaneously a geographical and virtual terrain. This hybrid environment creates both an arena for what takes place, and a shaping force for how events are experienced and reflected upon. In this way, Bilateral Petersham creates a structured attention framework which allows us to experience that breathing ecology of life on its own terms. However, this framework is not flawless. It does not always smoothly accommodate the events of everyday life. Occasionally, in Bilateral Petersham, events destabilised the project's attention framework, forcing me to re-evaluate my working method. In the next section I will reveal some of the insights which arose as a result of these frame-breaking situations. 99 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham Connecting with the Local in Bilateral Petersham Turning now to the environment of Petersham (the suburb), I want to consider some of the tactics I developed in Bilateral Petersham as I attempted to deepen my connection to the local.29 As I described in Chapter Three, the method of bilateral blogging creates an attention framework by setting up a series of provisional frames within which the multiplicity of occurrences which constitute daily life can become intelligible. These frames operate like a set of boundaries or ground rules delimiting the period of time, geographical limits and the ways that materials and technologies are used in the project. One of these boundaries was, literally, that which formed the outer edge of the suburb of Petersham: the "territorial frame". This boundary, visible only as a meandering line on a map, sets Petersham apart from its neighbouring suburbs. But what force does that boundary line really have? What does it permit, and what does it deny? I will now look at the significance of both respecting and transgressing Petersham's territorial frame. First, I will consider my practice of walking the borders of Petersham as a way of creating an embodied, experiential map of the suburb. I use Michel de Certeau's notion of 'spatial stories' to help me think about this practice. de Certeau makes a connection between the small movements or 'itineraries' which constitute our physical use of city spaces, and the way that stories weave together the spatial with 29 I borrow the term 'tactics' from Michel de Certeau. In The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau describes tactics as ways of operating or 'making do' within official cultural forms and structures in order to create alternative possibilities. He writes: 'These styles of action intervene in a field which regulates them [...] but they introduce into it a way of turning it to their advantage that obeys other rules and constitutes something like a second level interwoven into the first...' (de Certeau 1988, p. 30). 100 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham the narrative (de Certeau, 1988, p. 115). I then examine two instances where I was confronted by situations compelling me to break the rule constraining me within Petersham's borders. I explore what was brought to light by these border transgressions, which were induced by the collision of differing sets of social ground rules. I observe that bilateral blogging's attention framework is able to flex and evolve in order to accommodate the specific circumstances that arise during the project. Surprisingly, the act of walking the borders, and the act of transgressing them, each result in a more intimate connection between myself and my environment. In concluding this chapter, I wonder what we might learn from this practical examination of social and geographical borders. Spatial Stories as Experiential Maps As constantly mutating as any environment might be, it does have characteristic features that seem unchanging, relative to human attention spans. Such unchanging features include the recognisable material qualities of buildings, roads, geographical and natural formations, all of which constitute places as nameable entities. Maps tend to document and codify these relatively static features. For instance, circulation and transport routes, municipal and commercial facilities, and the precise division of space, all are mapped in order to facilitate the commodification of land as a resource or property. However, only rarely are our local environments mapped experientially. The expression "taking place" might offer one useful way to think about a tactic of experiential mapping. Taking place, in its colloquial usage, refers to an occurrence, 101 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham an event – something happening in time. And yet "taking place" also seems to imply the seizing of space – its forceful possession through direct experience rather than purchase. Taking place, then, is a phrase which synthesises the temporal and spatial relationships which bind together situated experiences. Through situated experience, places can be taken – their actual use reclaiming and connecting them inextricably to one's own everyday life. Although a desire for an intensified connectivity between art and life was the impetus for Bilateral Petersham, this transformation could not possibly have taken place in a vacuum. Instead, it had to be situated within a specific period in time, in a particular place. Not only does my artwork emerge from the inherent material and relational qualities of a specific place, but new opportunities for knowing that place are generated by the interface between artwork and suburb. This knowledge is one of the products of the application of bilateral blogging in everyday life. The three components of the attention framework are brought together, and a particular material relationship to the world is realised in place and time. Bilateral Petersham consists of a profusion of interlinking events which took place. Importantly, the project's processes participated in an already existing range of everyday practices: conversation, storytelling, walking and online textual dialogue. To borrow a distinction made by Kaprow, Bilateral Petersham's use of everyday materials and practices make it a piece of 'lifelike' rather than 'artlike art' (Kaprow 2003, p. 201). It is these everyday practices which emerge in the project as placetaking phenomena. My prioritisation of the way places are actually experienced, rather than how these experiences are flattened and generalised by maps, is consistent 102 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham with Michel de Certeau's call, in The Practice of Everyday Life, for a reconsideration of cities from the bottom-up (de Certeau 1988). Official maps codify cities and suburbs as an aggregated collection of products of experience, but they struggle to represent the richness of the constitutive experiences themselves. According to de Certeau, experience exists as a 'diachronic succession of points', rather than a 'flattened' representation of these points 'reduced to a single line' (de Certeau 1988, p. 35). For this reason, an alternative way to represent such a succession of points, which de Certeau calls a 'trajectory', might be storytelling. Like walking, the practice of storytelling digresses, backtracks, stumbles, stops and starts again. The connection between walking and storytelling is reinforced by de Certeau when he argues that 'spatial stories' can be responsible for the transformation of static 'places' into what he calls 'spaces' with multiple possibilities for a proliferation of unofficial uses.30 Stories 'traverse and organize places; they select and link them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them' (de Certeau 1988, p. 115). For de Certeau, 'every story is a travel story – a spatial practice' (de Certeau 1988, p. 115). In other words, stories do not merely 'transpose into the field of language' everyday uses of places. Rather, stories themselves wield productive force, creating 'geographies of actions [...] They make the journey, before or during the time the feet perform it' (de Certeau 1988, p. 116). The processes of Bilateral Petersham strongly resonate with this integration of 30 De Certeau makes a distinction between space and place. 'Place' is 'an instantaneous configuration of positions', and is thus mappable and stable – in a sense, timeless. 'Space', by contrast, is 'practiced place'. Space is a place which is 'actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within it', and is therefore characterised by contingency, possibility and temporality rather than permanence (de Certeau 1988, p. 117). 103 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham narrative and spatial practices. At the beginning of the project, I acquired a large scale, standard suburban map, marked with streets and property divisions. A thin black line indicated where the suburb of Petersham stopped and its neighbouring suburbs began. Yet the experience of living in a densely populated urban environment is not permeated by a sense of a sharp division between "here" and "not here". Suburbs bleed into one another, their borders generally indistinguishable. A sense of local identity is often embodied in a sociable centre (such as a main street) but suburbs are rarely brought to an abrupt halt at a tangible boundary.31 In Bilateral Petersham, since I had set myself the task of remaining within the boundaries of my suburb for two months, I embarked on a series of border walks. These walks were an attempt to physically locate, with my feet, the lines indicated on the official map marking the edges of Petersham. The four walks – one for each cardinal point on the compass – had the effect of allowing me to familiarise myself with the territorial frame distinguishing "Petersham" from "not Petersham" (see Ihlein 2009, pp. 18-20; 48-52; 81-84; 139-142). This was not an easy task – often the mapped borders ran through fenced-off properties or across inaccessible railway lines, demanding compromise and inventiveness as I attempted to walk as close as possible to the invisible borders, without stepping into "foreign" country. As I discovered through this process, Petersham's territorial boundaries are no more significant than 'arbitrary lines on a map' (Ihlein 2009, p. 48). A visit to Vince, the 31 This characterisation of the unboundedness of city suburbs clearly does not account for extreme cases of overt constructed spatial control – such as the walls separating the Palestinian from the Israeli sections of Jerusalem, the steel fence dividing Tijuana from San Diego, or the wall which until 1989 isolated West Berlin from East Germany. 104 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham local council's town planner, confirmed that the idiosyncratic shape of the suburb borders results from incremental changes occurring over many years, as property owners, councils and state governments jostle to have small sections of land allocated to one suburb or another (Ihlein 2009, p. 67). Guided by a topographical map, my absurd border walks pointed out the arbitrariness of these mapped borders, precisely by treating them literally, as boundaries not to be crossed. And yet, despite the absurdity of this ritual, walking the borders had a profound effect on my relationship with the local environment. Walking the borders drew together the fragmentation of spatial arrangements which sprawl over the land: divisions which slice it up for sale or use (in this sense, alienating it) and brought these fragments into a provisional unity. In the process of walking Petersham's arbitrary borders, I drew an experiential line around my suburb, creating it as a meaningful entity distinguishable from other places. As de Certeau might put it, I wrote the edges of Petersham with my feet – an embodied ritual of circumnavigation. The border walks were carried out in the company of friends or neighbours – companions and co-witnesses who could share in the creation of these spatial stories. In the process, we collaboratively transformed not only our relationship to the geographical landscape, but also to each other. Chance encounters and discoveries along the way (as embodied in the border-walk blog entries) show how the particular qualities we perceive as belonging to the environment are inextricably connected to our own experience of them. For instance, an account of the northern border walk, carried out in the company of my friend Sue, 105 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham takes us along a thin median strip down the middle of Parramatta Road, one of Sydney's busiest arteries (Ihlein 2009, pp. 139-142). As I note in the blog, this incredibly noisy, dangerous strip of land does not lend itself to promenading, especially at dusk, during peak-hour traffic. However, bilateral blogging's attention framework generates an open-minded, curious consciousness which is often able to transform chance experiences into valuable insights. Thus, although in this walk Sue and I experience the northern border as a fundamentally inhospitable environment for humans, our attentiveness to the 'constant din' of traffic makes it 'somehow...almost peaceful', and even conducive to a sensitive discussion about Sue's aging mother (Ihlein 2009, p. 140). Shortly afterwards, our border walk takes us past 'Miss Dee's Cake Shop' – a place I had never noticed before. In the blog, I describe the cake shop as a 'refuge' (Ihlein 2009, p. 141). And indeed, our experience of being rattled by the noise of Parramatta Road makes us especially receptive to the hospitality offered by Elaine, the cake-shop lady we find inside. Bringing us pastries, she sits down with us, gently interrogating me about the distinction between art and craft. She also tells us stories about the history of this particular piece of the northern border of Petersham, whose fortunes have long borne a close relationship to automobile traffic. This kind of encounter is typical of Bilateral Petersham's border walks, which weave together the slow navigation of space with the unearthing of stories, a deepening relationship to the neighbourhood's spatial and social fabric. Australian children's author Jackie French, in her novel Walking the Boundaries, tells a related story about Martin, a boy whose grandfather has bequeathed him the family 106 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham farm (French 1993).32 However, to claim the land, Martin must perform a seemingly simple action. His grandfather has stipulated that he must walk around the boundaries of the property.Martin plans to quickly carry out this strange task and then sell off the property for a fortune. However, the actual experience of walking the boundaries transforms Martin's relationship with the land. Furthermore, as he walks, Martin enters a dream-state, encountering an Aboriginal boy on walkabout, Martin's European ancestors, and even prehistoric creatures, all of whom exhibit complex symbiotic relationships to the land. This physical and psychic journey turns around Martin's desire to simply cash in the land's exchange value. As he warms to the idea of becoming the farm's caretaker, Martin begins to see this nurturing role as one way of overcoming his own urban alienation and social disaffection. While my own border walks in Petersham activated a somewhat subtler shift in my relationship to the territory of my own neighbourhood, French's parable does make explicit the connection between spatial boundaries – the way land is divided, plotted, mapped and sold off – and social boundaries. These boundaries prevent the self from entering more deeply into relationship – or what Crispin Sartwell calls 'fusion' – with an environment (Sartwell 1995, p. 129). Bilateral Petersham's border walks carry out a spatial embrace of the territory, suggesting an alternative approach to ownership from that made possible through the acquisition of real-estate. From my walks, what begins to emerge is a mutual sense of belonging (I belong here; this place belongs to me) – a form of embodied, experiential knowing. The nature of bilateral blogging means that, like the fictional transformation described in Walking the Boundaries, 32 French's book was recommended to me by one of Bilateral Petersham's readers – my sister Rebecca – after she encountered my border-walk stories (Ihlein 2009, p. 61). 107 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham this experiential knowledge of a place embodied in 'spatial stories' is shared with a community of readers, many of whom are also neighbours and residents of Petersham.33 In turn, the dialogical exchange made possible by blogging gathers together similar stories, contributed by these readers. The resulting accumulation of related but never identical experiences, originating both inside and outside the boundaries of Petersham, builds up a body of knowledge, a range of shared tactics for taking place which might be adopted and adapted to the specific circumstances of different local environments. In Deweyan terms, each of these spatial stories is an experience. Walking the borders, and telling such stories, thus seizes the geographical terrain indicated by the official map's abstract markings and transforms it into experienced space. Walking helps me to develop an embodied relationship with the land, possessing it through experience – developing the beginnings of a sense of belonging to it – and this is the sense in which the border walks "take place". Furthermore, the blog is not only a framework which focuses attentiveness, allowing these spatial experiences to emerge, but also a place where the sedimented stories are gathered together. What results is the filling-in of mapped space with an abundance of finely annotated experiences. Each piece of land which is experientially mapped by Bilateral Petersham (even its northern border, which might be thought of as waste real-estate) is thus shown to possess a history of human occupation. The blog creates a body of 33 That many of Bilateral Petersham's readers were local is evidenced mainly in the comments contributed to the blog, but also in the online poll which I conducted to ascertain where the blog's readers were situated. As at May 2009, over two-thirds of those who completed the poll nominated themselves as residents of Petersham or the Inner Western suburbs of Sydney. (See <thesham.info/2006/05/25/statistical-analysis/>) 108 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham evidence that reclaims suburban space as having an inherent value. This process works against the idea (embodied, say, in the legal concept of terra nullius) that land is simply a commodity that can be bought and sold without cultural consequence. On the contrary, the blog is a kind of experiential-heritage document which could be used to pinpoint the specific connections to place which exist at a particular moment in time. Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham As I described in Chapter Three, my adherence to the (self-made) rule stipulating that I should remain inside the borders of Petersham created a territorial frame, helping me to develop a deeper attentiveness to the nuances of everyday life. However, there were two occasions in Bilateral Petersham where I found it necessary to break my own rule and step over the border. The first of these took place less than a fortnight after the start of the project, and was prompted by my father's solemn request that I join him for Easter lunch in Sydney's eastern suburbs. The second excursion, occurring towards the end of the project's temporal frame, involved a visit to Uncle Lester, an Aboriginal Elder who works just beyond the borders of Petersham. As I will go on to discuss, each of these border crossings involved negotiating between two incompatible, socially constructed rule-systems, and each produced a new way of thinking about the task I had set for myself. In considering these physical transgressions, I want to investigate how they might shed light on social (not just physical) borders, and the role which transgression plays in Bilateral Petersham in reaffirming a sense of social, geographical and historical connectivity or belonging. 109 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham In the blog entry 'An Easterly Dilemma', I announce the following problem: I have been requested by my father to leave Petersham for a day (Ihlein 2009, p. 34). This situation had arisen due to a very recent breakdown in my father's relationship with his partner. He was emotionally devastated – more upset than I had ever known him to be. A resident of Perth, he had come to Sydney to be cared for by his brother during the Easter-holiday season. The opportunity to have lunch with my dad – to offer him emotional solidarity during this very difficult time – shook the foundations of Bilateral Petersham's ground rules. I felt torn: the coherence of my project was, precisely, determined by the strict regulation that I remain within my suburb boundaries for a set period of time. This rule formed the basis of the project's attention framework, creating the structure which enabled me to engage in everyday life with an increased intensity. To break this rule was, potentially, to dissipate the power of the project's focused engagement with the small, the local, the familiar. Furthermore, it was to break a tacit social contract between myself and my readership, a nascent community of blog readers and comment contributors which had begun to assemble in the fortnight since the project's inception. In Transgressions: the Offences of Art, Anthony Julius writes that the word transgression refers to both the breaching of behavioural norms and the exceeding of spatial boundaries. Spatial metaphors are often used to describe the breaking of behavioural rules and taboos ('pass beyond', 'go over' etc.) (Julius 2002, p. 18). However, transgressions do not just destabilise the social order – they also draw 110 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham attention to, and thus make visible, the often invisible norms which constitute this order. When I shared my dilemma with Bilateral Petersham's community of readers, I had not anticipated that this situation might bring to light a paradox at the heart of Bilateral Petersham: that obeying the project's rules could actually lead me away from its originating objective. The project, as I imagined it, was intended to bring my art practice in closer contact with my own life. And yet, by strictly adhering to the project's rules, I would continue to be held at arm's length from the opportunity presented, through caring for my father, of deepening my relationship with him. As one blog reader commented on the tension created by this impasse: 'Your selfassurance is being tested during this residency [...] There is a current of humanity calling you out of the sham' (Jasmin, in Ihlein 2009, p. 38).34 In forbidding my own exit from the suburb for two months, the ground rules of Bilateral Petersham were in themselves a transgression of my ordinary way of participating in society. Thus the proposal to break my self-made rule was, in a sense, the transgression of a transgression. The collision course between two social systems – art and life (or as one reader put it, 'fam versus sham') – was interrogated through dialogical exchange with the blog's readership (Ihlein 2009, pp. 36-39). Surprisingly, a large proportion of my readers actually supported a temporary breaking of the rules, urging me to leave Petersham and spend the day with my father. As partners in the tacit contract which framed my project, this permission granted by readers was an act of redrawing that contract due to what they felt constitued exceptional circumstances. 34 '...calling you out of the sham'. During the course of Bilateral Petersham, the suburb began to be known affectionately as The Sham – a fact acknowledged in the URL <http://thesham.info>. 111 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham As one reader made explicit, 'family business presents a different set of ground rules' which do not always dovetail neatly with the rules defining art projects (Lisa, in Ihlein 2009, p. 36).35 Although they are often taken as static entities beyond our control, social rules and norms are always being written and re-written by actual behaviour. In the process of leaving Petersham to be with my father, I thus made a compromise, determining to wear a blindfold for the entire time I was away. This blindfold clause constituted a kind of legal loophole – a 'device to soften the blow of breaking the rules' (Lionel, in Ihlein 2009, p. 45). However, as Sunanda Creagh stated in an article about Bilateral Petersham, the fact that I did not 'lay eyes on' anything outside the suburb was not a way of cheating the system. Rather, for Creagh, the blindfold 'protected the project's integrity' (Creagh 2006). According to law scholar Stephen Carter, 'integrity [...] requires three steps: (1) discerning what is right and what is wrong; (2) acting on what you have discerned, even at personal cost; and (3) saying openly that you are acting on your understanding of right and wrong' (Carter 1996, p. 7). Thus, when Creagh characterises the wearing of a blindfold as a factor which upholds the project's integrity, this is indicative not of an unwavering adherence to a strict moral code of conduct, but rather of my situated response to a dilemma, and my willingness to be publically answerable for the outcome. Importantly, the blog itself is the tool which 35 Another reader suggested: 'I would say you have to go, because in the contest between art & rarely seen, not very well parents [...] your dad should win' (Deborah, in Ihlein 2009, p. 36) 112 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham helps make me accountable to my readership. Accountability operated, precisely, through my public articulation of the dilemma I had encountered, and by my subsequent publication of a written account of my day spent outside Petersham. Wearing a blindfold was also a performative tactic, drawing attention to the rules underlying my project, raising them to awareness so that they might be debated and discussed. Wearing the blindfold – itself a transgression of civil behaviour at a family occasion – unanticipatedly produced an intimate set of interactions with my own father which more than justified the breach of my Petersham boundary. By substituting a sensory barrier for the territorial frame of Petersham, I deleted vision from my range of sensory apparatus. This visual constraint had the effect of sharpening my attentiveness to the present situation. Being blindfolded also had the unexpected effect of making me vulnerable, and in need of constant assistance in navigating through space. While I had imagined that breaking the boundary of Petersham would enable me to attend to my father's needs, my temporary blindness inverted this relation. At lunch, my father took care to guide and lead me, and his attentiveness to my needs took the form of gentle physical contact (Ihlein 2009, pp. 42, 44, 47). Furthermore, the blog entry which tells the story of Easter lunch with my father and extended family draws to the surface a range of related stories contributed by readers, where unexpected positive outcomes emerge from, and justify, breaching social boundaries (Lionel, in Ihlein 2009, pp. 45-46; Deborah, in Ihlein 2009, p. 47). 113 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham The online debate leading to this transgression, and the discussions which followed my 'Great Escape' constitute an investigation-in-action of the principles underlying behavioural rules and social boundaries. Bilateral blogging's material/technological frame (specifically, the oscillation between real world experience and online exchange) affords a multi-voiced Socratic dialogue, with ethical positions being posed and counterposed in a live philosophical theatre.36 Importantly, this process did not involve theorising a hypothetical problem – the dilemma was real. I had to act quickly, as only twenty-four hours separated the onset of the dilemma and the proposed lunch, and electing to do nothing would have constituted an action in itself. Ultimately, the decision belonged to me alone. However, since both the project and my relationship with my family depend on tacit contracts with overlapping communities – and since these communities are shaped by norms and expectations which do not align with one another – the process of bilateral blogging operated like a social crucible to bring this dilemma to resolution. Quite unexpectedly, in choosing to break my own rule – in other words, by breaching the framework that gave my project a discernible shape as art – I achieved what I had hoped for: a closer engagement with life itself. Blurred Borders: A Short Trip to Marrickville To conclude this consideration of borders and boundaries in Bilateral Petersham, I now want to spend a moment with Uncle Lester. Towards the end of my project, I 36 Indeed, like theatre, the textual voices of the blog's readership are laid out in the comments section under each entry as a kind of script. 114 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham contacted Lester Bostock, a respected Aboriginal Elder in Sydney's inner-west, to talk with him about Petersham's indigenous histories. Lester had been recommended to me by Chrys, the council historian, as someone who might be able to fill in my gaps in local knowledge. I had been hesitant to contact Lester, who works in the suburb of Marrickville, directly to the south of Petersham. Due to the constraints of my project, I knew I was going to have to ask him to come and visit me – and I was aware of how frivolous this proposition might sound to an Aboriginal Elder who surely had more important business to attend to. Lester, to his credit, did not belittle the underlying objectives of Bilateral Petersham. Rather, he appreciated what I was trying to achieve with the project, but claimed that an Aboriginal way of understanding the land would render the sharply defined boundaries of Petersham illegitimate. '"Don't worry about that mate!" he said. "Those suburb borders were drawn up by the white invaders. Just come and visit me in Marrickville"' (Ihlein 2009 p. 142). Once again, an alternative set of ground rules had confronted Bilateral Petersham. The subsequent blog entry, 'A Short Trip to Marrickville', provides much food for thought. Unlike the collision between the rules of art and the rules of family which came to a head in the 'Easterly Dilemma', my transgression of Petersham's borders to visit Lester in Marrickville revealed a fundamentally different social system. If my border walks generated new experiential maps, consisting of situated stories laid over the top of the official street map, then an indigenous history of Petersham might be imagined as a far more ancient experiential mapping, deeply buried under the 115 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham concrete and bitumen, discernible only through the imaginative visualisation performed by storytelling. As Lester showed me, the map of Australia's traditional indigenous language groups pinned to his wall is laid out as a patchwork of organic shapes sprawling across the continent. However, these shapes do not attempt to carve up the land with cartographic precision. They have blurred borders.37 This way of relating to space stands in stark contrast to the cartography employed by the Europeans who displaced Australia's original occupants.38 According to Lester, Petersham's forests were destroyed shortly after 1788, plundered for their value as a construction material. The terra nullius clause was evoked to justify forceful acquisition of Aboriginal lands. The space thus (illegitimately) claimed was leveled, parcelled up into properties and built over. Furthermore, Sydney's original indigenous population was decimated by smallpox transmitted via contact with the Europeans. For these reasons, Lester said, 'strong indigenous connections to Petersham were severed very early in the piece' (Ihlein 2009, p. 156). Furthermore, Sydney's official history, he said, was 'told from the ship, not from the shore' – meaning that very little documentation remains of Aboriginal everyday life pre- (or post-) 1788 (Lester, in Ihlein 2009, p. 156). So, whereas maps tend to reify stories into graphic abstractions, in Petersham, even the originating stories of local experience seem to have been 37 See the image in Ihlein 2009, p. 157. An online version of this map is available at AIATSIS, 2005. 38 That Aboriginal and European systems of relating to land are incompatible is shown by the difficulty native title land claims have in proceeding through the legal system. As Alexander Reilly writes in his essay 'Cartography and Native Title': 'In the "recognition" of Indigenous land rights, there is a tension between decolonising Indigenous spaces and subjecting them to a deeper process of colonisation by reducing them to a singular, unambiguous discourse known to the law' (Reilly 2003, p. 3). 116 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham erased from collective memory. What insights can be gained by a consideration of this visit to Uncle Lester? First, it seems that bilateral blogging could itself begin to model one method for generating a bottom-up version of history, told from the shore – an indexical history embedding experience in place via spatial stories. Furthermore, despite the historical erasure of specific indigenous stories about Petersham, there is, perhaps, something for nonindigenous Australians like myself to learn from Aboriginal ways of relating to space. Belonging, for the original occupants of Australia, did not involve owning the land, as an alienable property, but existing in relationship with it, as custodians – the land and the people belonging to and caring for each other (Ihlein 2009, p. 157). This deep conception of geographical relationality and responsibility is based on a radically different philosophy of spatial inhabitation to that which forms the basis of the standard western system of property ownership. In fact, as philosopher of law Alexander Reilly points out, this kind of relationship is distinguished, in Australian indigenous culture, by the word 'country' – as opposed to 'land' which can be 'commodified, subdivided and owned' (Reilly 2003, p. 217). Furthermore, as Australian philosopher Linn Miller points out in her essay 'Belonging to country – a philosophical anthropology', the state of being that constitutes belonging in indigenous culture involves an intrinsic connectivity between the self and the environment. For Miller, there are three basic senses in which connections to the world might be established. These include social connections 117 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham (between individuals and communities), historical connections (to traditions and stories from the past), and geographical connections ('to a particular locality or dwelling place') (Miller 2003, p. 217). She writes that 'the self does not exist independently of the life it lives or of the world it lives in', and thus any path towards belonging must acknowledge the inherent relationality of the self, interconnected with these social, historical and geographical worlds (Miller 2003, p. 219). For Miller, politically progressive white Australians, conscious of Aboriginal displacement, have in recent years often despaired of the possibility of attaining, for ourselves, such a sense of integrated belonging, given our fundamental status as trespassers on Aboriginal country (Miller 2003, p. 220). However, she argues that in order to overcome this condition – which she calls 'conscious despair' – we must embrace and acknowledge the 'particular heredity, history or locality' which constitutes our own selves 'wherever and whenever we dwell' (Miller 2003, p. 223). Drawing on the work of philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, Miller describes this as a process of working toward 'correct relation' between self and world. Others have described similar endeavours as 'becoming indigenous', 'becoming native', or developing 'attachment' (Leff 2004; Moreton-Robinson 2003; Mathews 1999; Haapala 2005). Achieving 'correct relation', for Miller, requires active work: 'Such a state of being is not something that just happens; it is something we must create for ourselves' (Miller 2003, p. 223). Bilateral blogging, I suggest, might offer one such method for working towards a relationship of belonging to country. In fact, I believe that the idea of 'correct relation' or 'becoming indigenous' aligns 118 Chapter Four: Transgression and Reintegration in Bilateral Petersham closely with the research question I set myself when beginning Bilateral Petersham: 'How can my own art practice and everyday life be brought into rich relationship with one another? What new forms of art practice are required for this purpose?' Having previously achieved something like a sense of belonging in the remote town of Kellerberrin, I asked myself: 'Why should I have to do that? To go somewhere exotic – to BE someone exotic to the locals, in order to achieve this integration? Could this be done at home?' (Ihlein 2009, p. 6). The fact that I needed to pose these questions at all reveals a pre-existing shallowness in my connection to Petersham. I felt an acute lack of belonging, perhaps akin to Miller's 'conscious despair', and Bilateral Petersham was spurred by the desire to develop a stronger relationship to my own 'country'. By intensely inhabiting my local neighbourhood, and by actively engaging with its people, stories and places (Miller's social, historical and geographical criteria for belonging), I uncovered a method for integrating art and life. I constructed spatial stories and experiential maps, in a way which has something in common with the process of connected belonging described by Miller. During April and May 2006, the murky borders which define the suburb of Petersham were sharpened, then transgressed, and finally blurred once again. In this cycle, a more complex and intimate understanding of place, relationality, and everyday life was mapped out. 119 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging In this chapter, I address the relationship between the various states of my blog projects. Both Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham take multiple forms – on the internet, as hard-copy books, and as gallery installations. These states afford different experiences for blog readers and myself. Using the terms of the attention framework developed in Chapter Three, this chapter investigates the adaptation of the blog to offline versions, and reflects on the significance of these adaptations. I show how these online and offline states do not replace or supersede each other, but rather overlap, expanding the possible modes for experiencing the two projects. In adapting themselves to the requirements of new attention frameworks, blogs, books, and installations used together offer a flexible set of options. First, as the ongoing evolutionary states of an artwork, they enable the projects to continue to integrate with the rhythms of life (both my own, and readers') after the completion of the original two-month temporal frame. And second, these different forms make it possible for the unruly archive generated by the blogs to be navigated using multiple simultaneous research approaches. Offline Blogging I now want to consider the various ways in which Bilateral Petersham and Bilateral Kellerberrin have been adapted to offline environments. As I discussed in Chapter Two, social and material limitations can restrict full participation in blogging. Basic 120 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging computer literacy, and access to technology are two of the fundamental barriers to accessing the internet. The origins of my own engagement with "offline blogging" can be traced to my residency in the town of Kellerberrin, since it was there that I first experimented with different ways of sharing my blog with local residents. Many of the discoveries I made in Kellerberrin I have continued to evolve in Bilateral Petersham and beyond. As mentioned in Chapter Two, at the time of carrying out Bilateral Kellerberrin I was acutely aware of the limitations of blogging as an exclusively online format. Kellerberrin has a large proportion of elderly residents who do not use computers. Furthermore, in 2005 when I was in residence, the town was only just beginning to be connected to the broadband network. This caused me to question the extent to which my own intention to find a way to integrate art and life could be carried out using the particular technology of blogging. For these reasons, while working on Bilateral Kellerberrin, I tried out various methods to fold the blog back into the physical space of the town. The first of these involved pasting up the daily blog entries in the streetfacing windows of the IASKA gallery. This meant that those without computers or internet connections could, potentially, encounter the material of Bilateral Kellerberrin within the physical space of the town. The format of these blog entries was rather simple. They consisted of a series of A4 pages, printed on a domestic inkjet printer, fastened to the inside of the windows. The text and images which constituted each blog entry had the straightforward, pragmatic 121 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging layout of a printed webpage. Each day in the blog was allocated a single column in the window, and the height of each column depended on the length of the text generated on that particular day. The progression of days followed a horizontal line around the inside of the windows. In this way, the layout of the texts in the windows of the gallery created a connection between the progression of time and the extension of the printed pages in space. Residents of Kellerberrin could follow the blog by reading new entries as they were pasted up in the window. This made for an "offline blog" – where locals could stand on the pavement and read about the experiences and interactions which had taken place in the physical vicinity of that location. Figure 8: Bilateral Kellerberrin paste-up, May 2005, IASKA Kellerberrin, photo by Gerson Bettencourt Ferreira. Another method I experimented with in Kellerberrin was the use of the town's 122 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging volunteer-run, local newsletter, The Pipeline.39 Published every fortnight as a community service, The Pipeline accepts content from anyone in the town. On several occasions, I submitted blog entries from Bilateral Kellerberrin for publication and assisted with the printing, binding and distribution of the newsletter. The material of my blog thus travelled through existing channels of the low-tech local media network, reaching an audience which may not otherwise have had access to the online version. In the process, my artwork was woven into the everyday lives of those who live in Kellerberrin without requiring them to turn on a computer or enter an art gallery. Furthermore, assisting with the publishing of The Pipeline was an experience which I was able to fold back into the narrative of Bilateral Kellerberrin. By this, I refer not only to the inclusion in the blog of stories about my experiences of volunteering with the newsletter, but also to the fact that The Pipeline's production method suggested a new performative materialisation for the blog beyond the frame of the internet. Each edition of The Pipeline was assembled by volunteers who worked along an assembly line, collecting one page at a time and then stapling together the finished products. As I reflected in my blog entry about this process, this pragmatic assembly-line ritual was a collaborative, sociable and aesthetically satisfying event in itself, intrinsically connected to the ongoing everyday life of the town (Ihlein 2005a, pp. 23-25). 39 The name of Kellerberrin's community newsletter refers not only to its role as a conduit of information, but also to the prominent, large-diameter steel pipe which runs through the town, pumping water from Perth to the goldmines of Kalgoorlie, several hundred kilometres away. This water pipe (sometimes called The Golden Pipeline) is a marker of identity for the string of farming towns between Perth and Kalgoorlie. 123 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging Figure 9:Volunteers assemble The Pipeline community newsletter, April 2005, Kellerberrin. For this reason, at the conclusion of my residency in Kellerberrin, I decided to borrow The Pipeline's assembly-line production process as a model for an interactive installation at the IASKA gallery. The installation consisted of the entire blog printed out, with each pile of individual pages stacked on a long bench winding through the gallery space. Gallery visitors who wanted to take home a copy of the blog were required to travel along the bench, collecting one page at a time and stapling together the pile at the end of the assembly line to produce a portable book. This particular material realisation of the blog had the effect of making explicit the embodied work involved in the audience's encounter with the work of art. Furthermore, local residents of Kellerberrin who visited the IASKA gallery recognised the installation's format as a reference to, and extension of, The Pipeline's own production process. In this sense, a functional analogy was drawn between the town's existing participatory 124 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging community newsletter, and my own experimental online newsletter, the blog. The installation format for Bilateral Kellerberrin, a long wooden bench snaking throughout the gallery, dramatised the temporal journey of the project as a physically built sculptural form. Just as I, together with my blog readers, had travelled through a series of days in carrying out the project, so too, gallery visitors were drawn to travel along the bench, re-enacting spatially the ongoing daily process of making the blog as they assembled it for themselves. Figure 10: Gallery visitor assembles a copy of Bilateral Kellerberrin book, May 2005, IASKA Gallery, Kellerberrin. Later, I further adapted this presentation strategy for Bilateral Petersham. The long bench/shelf which holds the various pages of the blog was constructed so that it matched the shape of a segment of Petersham's mapped borders. Gallery visitors were thus able to engage in a scaled-down re-enactment of my border walks, as they walked along the bench collating a copy of the blog-book to take home. Furthermore, 125 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging the sculptural bench/shelf created a physical obstruction in the gallery, literally separating one half of the interior space of the room from the other – an embodied analogy to the focus on social and behavioural boundaries discussed throughout Bilateral Petersham. Figure 11: Bilateral Petersham's sculptural bench/shelf, May 2007, Artspace Gallery, Sydney, photo by Greg Turner. 126 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging Offline and Online Experience The adaptation of the blog to a portable book format multiplied its potential access points, which up until then had been limited to computer screens. Books and screens each afford a different reading experience. If we consider the terms of the attention framework outlined in Chapter Three, bilateral blogging's temporal frame creates a structure within which small moments of everyday experience become noticeable and compelling. During the project's live period, artist and readers each attend to the experiences of everyday life via the technology of the blog. Readers "tune in" on a daily basis because they know (or expect) a new blog posting each day. As the project's initiator, I too am driven forward by my awareness that an emergent community of readers has the daily expectation of new material. Thus a tacit contract emerges from the activity of bilateral blogging. However, after the live period comes to an end, this tacit contract also expires. The online blog remains as an archive of experiences which occurred during a particular period of time. It is still possible to add new comments and continue with the process of dialogical interaction, since blogging's online archive is dynamic rather than static. However, in practice, at this point, attention begins to ebb away from the blog, which is no longer live in the same way. Thus the creation of a book form acknowledges the need for the project to migrate towards a state which will afford an ongoing engagement. Importantly, as I will discuss shortly, this new state accords with the terms of the proposal underlying this thesis – namely, that art should find a way to integrate with everyday life. As discussed throughout this exegesis, I discovered that blogging provides an excellent tool for this integration while the project is in progress. However, afterwards, the 127 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging sheer volume of material which has been generated means that the audience's means of interacting with the project undergoes a shift. The portable book thus makes for a rich alternative reading experience – an experience which can be taken into the reader's own everyday spaces of transit and recreation. As cognitive psychologists and usability experts have suggested, despite significant recent advances in screen-reading technology, reading large quantities of text on an electronic screen is currently more difficult than reading printed paper (O'Hara & Sellen 1997; Golovchinsky 2008, pp. 22-23). Many studies have compared the affordances of paper with those of digital information delivery systems. For instance, in one research project aimed towards the development of a new 'digital paper' technology, the interface designers acknowledged that as a technology for reading, printed paper remains unsurpassed: 'Paper is comfortable to read, easy to annotate, light to carry, quick to access, and simple to use. Paper’s multiple strengths highlight the weakness of current digital alternatives' (Liao et al. 2008, p. 2). However, despite the difficulty of reading text on screens indicated by these studies, the example of Bilateral Petersham shows that bilateral blogging's attention framework provides a compelling structure which is able to draw and hold a reader's attention – but only while the blog's temporal frame is in progress. During this period, when readers tuned in each day, the task of on-screen reading was broken into smaller, manageable chunks. Furthermore, for many of those who followed Bilateral Petersham, the practice of reading and commenting was not just a consumption of inert material, but rather an active process of collaborative dialogical composition – helping to maintain 128 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging ongoing attentiveness through a shared sense of creative ownership. Afterwards, however, this compulsion to attend and participate on a daily basis dropped away, and it was at this point that the book version suggested itself as a useful augmentation of the blog's online format. Books – a versatile, portable, ancient format – offer a different kind of attention framework. Because of their ubiquity in society, there is no need for readers to learn a new form of interface literacy in order to experience books. Most importantly, books are suited to a depth of attentiveness which is ideal for the purposes of reading a large body of text. In fact, as I discussed in Chapter Four, it was the book version of Bilateral Petersham that I myself used as a research tool for navigating its unruly archive. When needing to skim, bookmark, annotate, highlight, and flip rapidly back and forth between the various episodes in the blog, I found the traditional tools of pen and paper far easier to negotiate than keyboard and screen, their digital cousins. However, I do not want to argue for a simple either/or relationship between online and offline versions of blogging. Rather, the various methods I have developed for gathering together and delivering the material generated by the blogs cross over with one another in complementary ways. For instance, while a printed version might afford me a deeper, slower engagement with the text of the blog, the search facility of the online version is very useful for rapidly finding a particular episode within the text. Furthermore, many blog entries in Bilateral Petersham consist of an interweaving between text and colour photographs – but for cost and space reasons, it is not possible to reproduce all of these photographs in the book. And while the 129 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging online version of Bilateral Petersham contains dynamic custom-made, experiential maps as a visualisation tool to augment my border walk stories, these maps are too large and unwieldy to be reproduced in the context of a paperback book. Another significant limitation of the book version is that it is not immediately interactive. The printed page does not have the in-built capacity, offered by the blog, to perform as a dialogical interface enabling discussion to be folded back into the artwork itself. Nor does the printed page use hyperlinks, which provide context to each blog entry, operating as a dynamic footnoting system connecting the project to an expansive network of related online sources. For all these reasons, I suggest, the book and the blog can best operate in concert with one another. The book provides a satisfying, immersive reading experience, which might be used as a launchpad for an exploration of the more media-rich platform of the blog. In this way, the projects developed in this thesis evolve into a hybrid form which media theorist and practitioner Russell Davies has described as 'post digital' (Davies 2009). A post digital way of working, Davies suggests, goes beyond 'digital infatuation and analogue nostalgia', instead moving back and forth between online and offline forms with a fluency which acknowledges the particular strengths of each. The Location of the Work of Art? In this discussion about different versions of my blogging projects, where can we say the work of art resides? John Dewey argues that our common understanding of artworks is based on viewing them as bounded, discrete objects. The work of art, he writes is often mistaken for the 'building, book, painting or statue in its existence 130 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging apart from human experience' (Dewey 1980, p. 3). In other words, the essence of an artwork is usually thought to be identical with an object possessing an autonomous existence in the world. Dewey, by contrast, shows how it is the experience of those who encounter artworks (not only artists, but also participants or audiences) which is a key factor in the constitution of the work of art. In this way, the work of art becomes the work that art does in shaping our experience, moving its definition towards a transitive verb rather than a noun. This understanding of art as a relational entity, intrinsically connected to actual lived experience, destabilises the notion of an art object with impermeable, static borders. While Dewey argues that this is the case for all artworks, the method of bilateral blogging provides a dynamic case study of art as experience in action. Bilateral Petersham and Bilateral Kellerberrin are extended, multi-voice conversations – interlinked narratives and stories which leave behind a trace of their own making. As I have argued throughout this exegesis, the method of bilateral blogging explicitly situates itself as a field of collaborative, networked activity – a set of performative encounters – and it is the entirety of this wide range of experiences which constitutes the work of art. Experience, as Dewey argues, is a kind of aesthetic material in itself. The texts generated by the blogs can be seen not only as documentation of experiences which occurred sometime previously, but also as actively constitutive of the experiences generated by the project. Importantly, these texts also have the potential to create new experiences as they evolve to different online and offline formats. 131 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging An Inherently Variable Media: Blogging as Art, Art as Research As an aesthetic material, text can take multiple forms. Text is reproducible and mobile, maintaining its integrity even as it is copied and disseminated. Online text presents an interesting case, since it abolishes the relationship between original and copy. Each reader's web browser which accesses Bilateral Petersham creates "the real thing". There is in fact no such entity as an original version or limited edition, as there would be with other serial artforms like printmaking. Furthermore, each computer, running different software and hardware, located in a different physical environment, will generate a unique reading experience. In this sense, it is in the nature of blogs to be multi-sited and adaptable. Bilateral Kellerberrin and Petersham were created using readily available, nonspecialised, open-source blogging software, and this software is regularly updated – as is the hardware we use to interact with it. The ubiquity of blogging in society also changes the way that blogging as art is received and experienced. For instance, between the time that I carried out the two blog projects presented in this thesis, there was a worldwide quadrupling in the number of blogs on the internet – from approximately 8 million in April 2005, to more than 32 million by April 2006 (Sifry 2007). In practice, I experienced this exponential growth as a broader acceptance and easier uptake of the second of these two projects, and a corresponding increase in the quantity of blog readers who felt confident to participate by contributing comments and dialogue online. In other words, the continual growth in blogging across society 132 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging in general means that at the time of making, my two projects afforded very different experiences, even though they used the same medium. The uncertain future availability of particular hardware, software, and the social contexts in which a project is received thus throws into doubt the locus of the artwork itself. Figure 12: Technorati graph showing growth in worldwide number of blogs, 2003-2007. Dates of commencement of Bilateral Kellerberrin (April 2005) and Bilateral Petersham (April 2006) are indicated. (Sifry 2007) More than ten years ago, media artist and theorist Jon Ippolito argued that one of the characteristics of material published on the internet is that it is inherently variable (Ippolito 1998). He wrote: 133 Chapter Five: Online and Offline Blogging Html is already a variable format, which is why the same Web page can look different on different people's screens. Individual users can set their browsers to various page sizes and background colors, default typefaces and sizes, even whether to display images at all – while still accessing the same ASCII data. (Ippolito 1998) If this is the case, then in the adaptation of Bilateral Kellerberrin and Petersham to exhibition and book formats, it could be argued that these art projects do not degrade or lose their essence. The notion of an inherently variable artwork relates to Dewey's notion that the work of art is 'what the product does in and with experience' rather than being a stable entity (Dewey 1980, p. 3). But how can we know what kind of experiences an artwork affords? As I have argued throughout this exegesis, the method of bilateral blogging presents one answer to this question, by creating an artwork structure which can incorporate a trace of its own ongoing experiences as an intrinsic part of the work, and it is this which enables bilateral blogging to be considered an emergent tool for art-as-research. As software platforms, hardware technologies, social contexts, and qualities of human attention all undergo a process of rapid change, so too will bilateral blogging's methods and outcomes continue to evolve. In the conclusion which follows, I will show how far we have come, and consider some possibilities for the future of blogging as an art and research tool. 134 Conclusion It now remains to revisit the research questions raised at the start of this exegesis, showing how they have been addressed in my research. I will then summarise the three main contributions made by this research, to the fields of art practice and theory, the specific local communities in which the projects were located and research culture more broadly. I conclude by outlining some of the future directions for practice-based research opened up by this project – including the development of other kinds of attention frameworks which might extend beyond geographically based communities, and into communities of interest. In the Foreword to this thesis I described how my frustration with the deadlineoriented nature of my own art projects was one of the impulses which led me to undertake this research project. Over the course of this research, I have turned that raw impulse into a robust and innovative artmaking method, underpinned by new techniques for engaging with social interaction in everyday life. This approach has proved useful, not only in my own quest for a more intelligent approach to the art/life balance, but also in shedding light on the social and spatial environments of Kellerberrin and Petersham. The result has been an in-depth case study of the potential of blogging as a form of art. I hope my development of this method, and the resulting insights, will be useful to other artists and researchers working in the field of contemporary art. 135 Conclusion Challenges and Opportunities of the Research Experience Working intensively on these two blog projects has presented great opportunities, as well as daunting challenges, for me as an artist and researcher. I reflect on many of these issues within the blogs themselves. Being literally inside the work of art – as its chief protagonist, researcher, and primary research subject – was often thrilling, but also sometimes frightening and emotionally draining. In Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham, the work of art became a machine for intensifying my ordinary experiences and interactions with the world around me. This meant that not only were the many ordinary things which often go unnoticed brought poetically to light, but also that these blogs propelled me into public life in Petersham and Kellerberrin, heightening my own visibility within the local community. Navigating between the mindfulness of the present moment and the social pressures of performing in the public eye was one of the productive challenges of the works. However, while the projects were running, the tensions created by bilateral blogging – between order and chaos, and between structure and chance – made me feel very much alive and connected with the world around me. I revelled in the fact that the blogs seemed to successfully bypass the mediation and insulation of the artworld. Instead, they located themselves as works of art directly in the flow of life, connecting my work as an artist with the lives of hundreds of other people. In turn, the contributions of the audiences which gathered around my projects informed me directly, through the structure of the artwork itself, that the questions raised by my living experiments were urgent and compelling in broader society. As I mentioned towards the end of Bilateral Kellerberrin, it was exciting to realise that, practicing art in this way, 'all 136 Conclusion life can potentially become interesting, simply by dint of "paying close attention" in a playful way.' (Ihlein 2005a, p. 93). One of the frustrations presented by the bilateral blogging method I developed is that it generates such a proliferation of finely annotated experiences, narrative threads, intellectual provocations and open-ended conversations, that I have had to accept that any written account, such as this exegesis, can only begin to scratch the surface. As I suggested in Chapter Four, the danger is that in re-telling the stories of Bilateral Petersham and Bilateral Kellerberrin, I risk duplicating the narrative work that those projects perform much better themselves. Another difficulty has been that, although I am supposedly working within the field of visual arts, I have produced two projects which consist of a large volume of text. Text, unlike images, resists an all-at-once glance – it requires a durational engagement on behalf of the reader, and with all the demands on one's attention, it can be daunting for others to pick up the blog-books. I have, however, been heartened by reports from readers who, stumbling across Bilateral Petersham on the internet, have been motivated to download and print out their own copy of the blog, immersing in it, for example, while commuting to and from work. This has especially been the case for new residents of Petersham, some of whom have used the blog as a way to get to know the suburb. Noticing alongside me Petersham's small beauties, quirks, hidden treasures and social divides, these readers were able to take my lead, slowing down and honing their own attentiveness to the aesthetics of everyday life. I am convinced that the method of bilateral blogging could be used almost anywhere – not just in the localities of Kellerberrin and 137 Conclusion Petersham – to produce such a sense of value and local knowledge. How the Research Questions were Addressed To consider the trajectory of this research, let us return to the original research questions: How can my own art practice and everyday life be brought into rich relationship with one another? What new forms of art practice are required for this purpose? By looking closely at the work of Allan Kaprow and Robert Morris in Chapter One, I brought to light a pre-existing desire, within twentieth century avant-garde art, to bridge the gap between art and the processes of everyday life. In reflecting on Kaprow and Morris, as well as on my own artwork made prior to commencing this thesis, I demonstrated the need for a new method of making art, which could incorporate the dialogical processes which constitute the work of art into the final product. I recognised that, with Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham, I had begun to develop such a method. My consideration of Morris' Box With the Sound of its Own Making, 1961, helped me realise that an artwork with an in-built system for communicating between artist and audience might have the potential to bridge process and product, suggesting a path towards a less alienated commodity form for art. Emboldened by the example of Kaprow's art and writing, I began to imagine a 138 Conclusion research practice based squarely in lived experience, conversation and storytelling. Extending on the work of both of these artists, I forged a new method based on a carefully structured form of blogging, carried out in specific geographical locations. In this way, my practice-based research approach forged a new method for reintegrating art and life. Exploring further the notion of art as a dialogical construct, in Chapter Two I considered the foundational work performed by Nicolas Bourriaud in establishing the field of Relational Aesthetics as an arena for experiential, socially engaged art practice. However, I also pointed to the limitations of such a field, should it be constrained to the social networks and compartmentalised spaces of the artworld. Inspired by the work of John Dewey, I reflected that my emerging method of bilateral blogging seemed to have the potential – lacking in some gallery-based relational artworks – for bringing together art and life. By working in the existing spaces of towns and suburbs, I argued, both art and everyday life could be mutually enriched. The method of bilateral blogging demonstrates that everyday life is not simply a realm of non-aesthetic drudgery, but rather that the art of living can be an experientially rich end in itself. For its part, art benefits by adopting some of the characteristics of everyday life: namely, the quality of being always in the process of becoming, rather than being placed reverentially on a pedestal. When the gap is thus bridged through the method of bilateral blogging, art's ability to bring mindful attention to whatever it frames can enhance everyday life without transforming it into a static entity. 139 Conclusion The second research question I asked was based upon the realisation that bilateral blogging, as a method of artmaking, could potentially be of use within the specific communities where it is carried out. Hence I asked: If art and life can be successfully integrated, what new knowledge might emerge in the process? In keeping with my approach to break down the distinction between process and product, in this thesis I also understand knowledge to be an entity beyond a set of abstract propositions. Taking seriously the notion of experiential learning, my research thus frames knowing as knowing how. In this way, an examination of the functioning of bilateral blogging in my two projects embodies a detailed manual for engaging deeply in local places and social situations. In other words, the method itself offers a form of knowledge. In terms of the particular interventions this research method makes in specific places and times, my approach to addressing this question is founded primarily on an ethics of feedback rather than of extraction. An art practice which consists of social interaction within existing geographical spaces and local communities ought to feed knowledge back into those same communities. For this reason, as I describe in Chapters Two, Three and Four, the knowledge which emerges in Bilateral 140 Conclusion Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham is shown to be inextricably connected to an experiential process of public engagement with the communities in each location. The artworks generate an additive archive of situated everyday experience, which becomes an extended dialogical portrait of these places. What emerges is a digital time capsule, or experiential database, which can be used to demonstrate, with concrete examples, the day-to-day functioning of life in a small town or city suburb. Crucially, as I argue in Chapters Three and Four, the honing of attention, narrative and dialogical exchange can bring to light forms of everyday experience which might slip beneath the radar of more formalised qualitative research practices. Attention, as I show in Chapter Three, plays a powerful role in shaping our interactions with the world around us – determining not only what we notice, but also how – and this insight itself emerges from my practice, and reflection on the method, of bilateral blogging. My approach to answering the third of my research questions has involved a reflection on the process and residue of Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham. My third question asked: How does the method of bilateral blogging work to produce aesthetic experience, and new insights, within the flow of everyday life? In Chapter Three, I coupled a comparison between my experiences of Kellerberrin 141 Conclusion and Petersham with an analysis of the work of John Dewey and William James in order to reveal the importance of attention in structuring experience. A close look at Bilateral Petersham's unruly archive enabled me to discover that, although compared with physical art objects, blogs might appear formless, they do in fact operate to frame experience in an analogous way. Bilateral blogging works by focusing attention through three interlinked frames. A territorial frame focuses attention within a particular geographical area, and on a specific subject matter; a temporal frame allows an intensified engagement for a set period of time, which enables chance occurrences to be welcomed into the artwork; and a material/technological frame draws together the strands of experience and interaction through blogging and conversation. I suggest that these three frames create a powerful constraining structure, allowing both artist and audience to temporarily select a limited set of elements from the overwhelming flux of experience. As an extension of this insight into bilateral blogging's framing of attention, in Chapter Five I explored the limitations of the online versions of my projects after their temporal frames had expired. I suggested that various offline manifestations of the blogs (such as books and installations) might offer a complementary interface for a deep engagement with the large volume of text generated by these projects. Contributions of the Thesis By addressing the research questions above, this thesis makes three substantial contributions, which I summarise here. 142 Conclusion 1. The Method of Bilateral Blogging The development of this method of artmaking is a substantial contribution made by this thesis. This method is a direct result of my practice-based research approach to the question of how to integrate my own art and everyday life, and involves an oscillation between online and physical interactions. The specific workings of this method are demonstrated in Bilateral Petersham and Bilateral Kellerberrin, and further elucidated throughout this exegesis. They include: • The inhabitation of a specific geographical area, for a set period of time (these case studies occupied the small town of Kellerberrin and the suburb of Petersham, each for a duration of two months); • A daily process in which blog posts are published online, synthesising the experiences of the previous twenty-four hour period into a narrative structure; • A spiralling cyclical evolution, in which comments and contributions from readers feed back into lived experience, providing further opportunities for interactions, and reflections on experience; • The accumulation of these oscillating dialogical experiences into a large online archive, which forms a fragmented, ever-expanding portrait of a particular time and place. The development and testing of this method of bilateral blogging was a direct, situated response to my own experiences in Kellerberrin and Petersham. Just as the method first trialled in the small country town needed to be adapted for a city suburb, so too would bilateral blogging need to be refined and localised in whatever context 143 Conclusion one planned to use it. This is precisely the point. As I outline in Chapter Four in my discussion of transgressing the boundaries of Petersham, the method is not rigid, but rather must flex to accommodate situation and circumstance, documenting its own process of adaptation within the body of the artwork itself. 2. The Production of an Experiential Map of Kellerberrin and Petersham As I showed in Chapters Two and Four, the system of experiential interaction created by bilateral blogging generated an expansive archive of everyday life in the two specific locations where the projects were based. These two (both rather ordinary) locations are, through the dedication of focused attention, shown to possess rich possibilities for aesthetic experience. The interwoven practices of embodied conversation and online dialogical exchange bring to light a situated body of knowledge about these places which becomes sedimented in the technological form of the blog. In Chapter Four, borrowing a term from Allan Kaprow, I propose that by accumulating a proliferation of fragmented experiences, my blog works begin to operate as Environments in their own right. Analogous to the complexity of experiencing the geographical environments of Petersham and Kellerberrin, immersing oneself in Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham requires a kind of experiential fusion which goes beyond the creation of a mere image or representation of these places. 3. An Attention Framework for Understanding How Bilateral Blogging Produces Aesthetic Experiences My articulation of an attention framework for understanding art's interaction with 144 Conclusion everyday life, in Chapter Three, has its roots in the work of pioneering artists like Allan Kaprow, as well as in my own previous art practice. As I describe in Chapter One, when developing Peg#24 with Mick Hender in 1995 I was instinctually aware that attention played a role in the framing of everyday experience. However, it was not until I undertook the immersive process of practice-based research in Kellerberrin and Petersham, comparing the way that the emergent method of bilateral blogging worked in those two places, that it occurred to me to pay close attention to attention itself. Allan Kaprow's suggestion, in his essay 'The shape of the art environment', that even outside the structure of the art gallery, artists carry around with them a 'mental rectangle', was a catalyst for my investigation into attention as a powerful way of framing the world around us (Kaprow 2003, pp. 90-94). The concept of the attention economy which has recently emerged to describe the circulation, exchange and commodification of information on the internet, suggests that in coming years attention may prove to be a much more significant factor in the way we understand culture and knowledge than had been previously realised. Possibilities for Future Work That Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham were successful in working towards an integration of art and life is argued throughout this exegesis, and evidenced in the works themselves. Where to from here? Beyond the live period of their temporal frames, Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham have each been 145 Conclusion presented in multiple exhibitions.40 On each occasion, an updated version of the blog was presented in book form.These exhibitions, although outside the scope of the original intention of the projects to help me integrate art and life, have been important in raising awareness within the artworld of the potential for blogging to be used as a tool for making art. Prior to commencing Bilateral Kellerberrin, I was not aware of any other artists utilising the technologies and methods of blogging as a medium and site for creating, as I am describing here, a new kind of artwork. However, the boom in the worldwide production of blogs in recent years (as discussed in Chapter Five) demonstrates that blogging has become an increasingly ubiquitous social practice. In the future, I envisage that the increasing acceptance of blogs as a normal part of culture will mean that my own blogging artworks will be scrutinised more for their actual social and aesthetic effects, and less as art novelties. As a means of self-publishing, and as a dialogical tool, blogging will continue to mature, developing possibilities and formats which have been unimaginable at this early point in its history. The Rise of Blogging as a Form of Art During the course of this research, I became aware of several other artists beginning to take up blogging as method for making art. Among the Australian works emerging in the wake of Bilateral Kellerberrin and Petersham are Spiros Panigirakis' Outside 200 Gertrude Street, 2006 where the blog operated as a virtual window into a private 40 Bilateral Kellerberrin was exhibited at International Art Space Kellerberrin Australia (IASKA, Kellerberrin) in 2005; Sir Hermann Black Gallery (Sydney) 2005. Bilateral Petersham has been shown at Delmar Gallery (Sydney) 2006; Chrissie Cotter Gallery (Sydney) 2006; Artspace (Sydney) 2007; Contemporary Art Centre South Australia (CACSA, Adelaide), 2007; and George Paton Gallery (Melbourne) 2009. 146 Conclusion series of 'queer happenings' in an art gallery in Melbourne (Panigirakis 2006); Ross Gibson's Conversations II, 2008, which involved the artist setting up a small room at the Art Gallery of NSW, and booking appointments for free-ranging conversations for the duration of the 2008 Sydney Biennale (Gibson 2008); Jo Law's Seasonal Almanac, 2008, in which the artist publishes small daily observations (textual and photographic) of botanical and meteorological phenomena on the NSW south coast (Law 2008); and Thea Rechner's Studio Berlin, 2008, a venue for focussing the artist's awareness in her process of discovering and experientially mapping the city of Berlin (Rechner 2008). Each of these projects, like my own, utilises the oscillation between the direct experience of everyday life, and the online interactions and reflections afforded by blogging – and each of these projects presents the blog as an artwork in its own right. A valuable development of the work of this exegesis would be a comparison of the variations in approach taken by these artists to blogging as an art and research method. Beyond the Territorial Frame: Bon Scott Blog The potential for my particular method of bilateral blogging to be further applied, beyond the projects described in this exegesis, was first suggested to me by curator Jasmin Stephens. In 2008, Stephens, who had been a keen follower of both Bilateral Kellerberrin and Bilateral Petersham, commissioned me to produce a six month long, socially-engaged public artwork called Bon Scott Blog (Ihlein 2008).41 Although at the time I knew little about Bon Scott, the project brief required me to 41 This project was commissioned through the Fremantle Arts Centre as part of a large scale exhibition programme called The Bon Scott Project (see Stephens 2008). 147 Conclusion apply my knowledge of blogging as a method of art to a research process located in a community of interest – the fans of singer Bon Scott. Scott, until his death from alcohol poisoning in 1980, was the world-famous front man for Australian rock band AC/DC. His legacy has endured, not only as a large body of recorded music, but importantly, in the embodied memories and rituals of an enormous community of fans from all around the world. The international scope of this project meant that it was not relevant to utilise a geographical constraint, as I had done in Bilateral Petersham. Rather, with the Bon Scott Blog, I needed to devise a different way to create a compelling attention framework. I discovered that the key to solving this problem lie, precisely, in my own ignorance about the cultural phenomenon of Bon Scott prior to commencing the project. Thus, I embarked on a six-month journey of public discovery, learning from the fans themselves. By focussing my attention – by listening closely – to the stories of hundreds of Bon Scott devotees, and feeding those stories back into the global community of fans, this new blog project brought to light an aspect of popular culture which had not previously been given credence or value on such a large scale. Several volumes have been published on the history of Bon Scott and AC/DC, but never before has a researcher spent so much energy on the fans. As an artist using blogging as a research tool, I was able to take a unique approach to this enquiry. By placing myself as a central character in the Bon Scott Blog, as I transitioned from ignorance to "fandom", this project re-enacted and dramatised the fans' own processes of creative cultural consumption. As a form of research, the art of bilateral blogging– which I had discovered and honed through the two projects described in this thesis – was able to collect micro-histories and rapidly 148 Conclusion feed them back into a community far beyond the constraints of geographical proximity. Reflecting on this, I would suggest that this kind of comprehensive, participatory, publically accountable research method may thus also have something to offer to sociological or ethnographic studies based in a broad range of communities of interest. This idea is related to Ben Highmore's call, which I discussed in Chapter Three, for new research modes for paying attention, in order to bring to light the nuances of everyday cultural practices. Documenting Ephemeral Art Practices Where can bilateral blogging go from here? I believe that this method has the potential to generate situated knowledge in a wide variety of contexts. For instance, I have already begun using a variation on this method to experientially document the re-enactment of one of Allan Kaprow's early Environments, Push and Pull: A Furniture Comedy for Hans Hoffman, 1963 (Ihlein, Keys and L'Orange 2009). When used as a tool for reviving ephemeral art from the past, bilateral blogging can focus attention on the nuances of aesthetic experience which such works produce, making a dynamic deposit in the art historical archive. Blogging can create a reflexive document of value to the development of ongoing knowledge of the history and methods of art practice. Furthermore, blogging offers an excellent tool for further contextualising such traditional methods of archiving experience as photographic and video documentation. Building up a variety of annotated archival deposits could allow multiple iterations of a single artwork to be compared with each other, taking into account different cultural, temporal, and geographical contexts. This could 149 Conclusion produce an experiential documentary resource, augmenting the 'online oral history of media art' proposed by curator-researcher Lizzie Muller (Muller 2008). In Kellerberrin and Petersham, my bilateral blogging method was developed, first through an instinctual, open-ended enquiry in a small town, and then through the intentional desire to change my relationship to everyday life in my own neighbourhood. What began as an experiment, now stands as a new tool for discovery. 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