Leiden and Valencia

I’ve not posted here for a long time now: I’ve found it really difficult to meet my own aspiration to write a little and often. There is such a back-log of things I had hoped to write about that it won’t be possible to do so now; having realised this, it’s become easier again to write something rather than nothing.

I went to Valencia yesterday, courtesy of Hector Perez Lopez’s invite to speak at the international research seminar series that he organises at the Universidad Politecnica. This was the first time that I’ve worked with an interpreter to give a paper, but Lobke Sprenkeling (a research student and recorder-player) did an excellent job moving between her second and third languages (she’s Dutch) and, along with Hector, allowed me to roam freely within my topic. The material I presented was an extension of a paper I gave in Leiden at the last MIDAS meeting in December, which was hosted by Frans de Ruiter. Both of these invites have been welcome and timely: I’ve used them as a lever to get myself to clarify my ongoing thinking and to learn how to build a multimedia document in Keynote to illustrate my points.

The material I surveyed and critiqued in these papers included:

Valentine, L. 2004. The activity of rhetoric within the process of a designer’s thinking. PhD thesis with CD-ROM, University of Dundee.

Meyn, N. 2006. Excavating the future: acting and the art of classical song. DVD. London: GSMD.

Dixon, S. 1999. Chameleons 2: theatre in a movie screen. CD-ROM. Privately published. Accompanying article: ‘Digits, discource and documenation: performance research and hypermedia.’ In The Drama Review, 43.1 (T161), spring 1999, 152-75.

Murnau, F. 1926. Faust: a German folk tale. DVD. Masters of the cinema series. London: Eureka, 2006.

I am eagerly awaiting the delivery of two new multimedia research reports, one of which may well be in the post by now (the other is still being worked on in post-production, it seems):

Bilson, M. 2005. Knowing the score. DVD. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. [micro-site here]

Emmerson, S. Forthcoming. Around a rondo. DVD and DVD-ROM. Queensland, Australia: Griffith University Press.

As a small example of our practice-as-research zeitgeist, without knowing of Stephen Emmerson’s ‘Around a Rondo’ project, Hector has himself been working with technologist colleagues in Valencia to code an intuitive-to-use, platform-agnostic multimedia writer. Here’s a link to the abstract of their recent conference paper in Cambridge. One of the features they are tweaking will allow readers to listen to an audio clip or watch a video clip while the relevant score scrolls by synchronously, ticker-tape style. This facility is something that I know Stephen’s document will be providing, having seen a preview of it in Leiden. It’s an impressive achievement and, like most really good ideas, looks like something which I can imagine taking for granted within five minutes of first engaging with it. When containers are that good, they disappear.