Yannick Trapman-O'Brien
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October Highlight - "It's Just Enough to do Nothing"
🕑 Added 2021-10-28 00:35:01 +0000 UTC
Gallery Entrance, IF WE WIN. September, 2021. Cannonball Festival. Credit: Lilly Roman
It's still October! Things are in full swing at The Telelibrary, with shows at the Denver Film Festival upcoming, and some fresh love from the Indiecade Jury, but behind the scenes we've been slowly cranking away on processing data from If We Win*. In our last look at this project, we explored different kinds of data that may emerge from running sessions, and a few ways to express it. Now, on the other end of the gallery and in person shows, this month we're going to see one of those methods in action, and see how far it can weave together the many aspects of this piece.
*A big shoutout to Lilly Roman, who provided production support for IF WE WIN and has stayed on to keep exploring the data. The progress you'll find below could not have been possible without her!
~
HOW MUCH IS $25,000?
Lilly
It's just enough to do nothing.
Yannick
"It's just enough to do nothing!"
Mae
Write that down! That's good.
Even before adding 18 new participants worth of data to the piece this summer, IF WE WIN was already an archive of facts, stories, and questions far too large to fit in any 80 minute session (a familiar theme in my work). Because of this, performing IF WE WIN tends to feel like something between DJ-ing a live set, defending a PHD, juggling chainsaws, and carnival barking. Shows can vary pretty wildly in content, themes and tones, based on who comes to the table on any given day. After these performances, I found myself very interested in mapping the resulting transcripts, both for the way each conversation leaves a unique fingerprint and the way it represents a cross section of all the various elements of the piece.
Today I'm sharing one of these transcripts. There's a pdf below for your convenience, but I'd heavily recommend checking it out on the website. In that version, the text is hyperlinked and annotated, serving as a bridge to the facts the piece has gathered along the way, the questions participants have tasked me with answering, and to other conversations that begin to overlap on the same themes and ideas.
You can read it here: use the menu options to navigate to "CBT002-052"
What you'll find is something beginning to feel almost more like an interface than it is an article or a text for reading straight (it is also, even after a few rounds of editing down, quite long). There's a lot of data ahead of me, and still a lot to learn; on the linked transcript page, you'll find 3 different conversations, in 3 different forms and stages of presentation. But I'm excited by the way the conversations of the piece are giving suggestions for the direction to take the growing archive.
Performance from the inside of a Sauna. IF WE WIN, September, 2021, Cannonball Festival. Credit: Lilly Roman
More than anything, I think the biggest finding from this round of work is a sense of scale for the project; while I've managed to lay down a lot of the hours for building the digital infrastructure of this piece, there's a huge amount of labor remaining. Having Patrons like you means I can set aside chunks of time to move it forward and fill in details, but as I think about the future of this piece, I feel more and more that a remount of this version of IF WE WIN (gallery and performances combined) would require a funding and producing partner.
I'm excited to explore what that might look like, but also to continue to ask what other windows into this project I can open: more remote solo-shows with shorter engagements? live interactions exploring components and other money prompts? digital deep-dives on the data and research?
This was my first ever Gallery installation, and the fulfillment of a long-held aspiration to make the archive of a piece a physical place where the performance lives. I learned a great deal that I'll no doubt be working through as I expand (and contract) this and other pieces.
As the research continues, you can expect more reflection and synthesis on the broad trends and learnings from the data in this piece, but this much will hold true: this installation was possible because of Patrons like you.
Thanks again,
Yannick
Comments
Yannick Trapman-O'Brien
I love this discussion! It's a big one when considering Creative Research, and how far the new knowledge generated by creative projects can be held as data. I for one take a pretty big-tent definition of "Data," in part to try to call attention to the archives of information being gathered all the time, even unconsciously. That said, I think it's really useful to explore the tension with this stricter idea of what can and can't be data. Even as far back as college, when I started making work that produced interviews and transcripts, I had anthropology students begin to ask me if they could reference my work in their research. It's absolutely true that I deal in N<1 sample sizes, which means that the information collected functions differently at different scales. I believe individuals can absolutely gather "Data" on themselves, and even only one snapshot at one moment gives an individual a point of reference and reflection for past and future data, informally or formally collected. As aggregate, I think my time with Monument Lab(1) really cemented for me the power of individualized data points to build impressions, almost like dots of color in pointillism. We understand that the resulting image or shape is in our mind, but we also reflect on how it is formed by and expressed by all the small components. (1) https://monumentlab.com/publications/report-to-the-city - very much recommend this work if you haven't explored it. Very thorough and thoughtful wrestling with the limits and possibilities of extrapolating from deeply personal and individual data.
Jacob Ford
I consider “data” to be information that can be rolled up or generalized across all individual entries. Which is interesting, because I view IF WE WIN as decisively not that: it’s very individualized answers (sometimes even drawings) to questions. I’d go as far as to see each of the answers cards as artifacts in a fascinating series, but have a hard time calling the responses data. (Not a critique by any means, just a thought aloud.)
