Category Archives: Technology

New Notions of Performance and Communitas

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From Wikipedia, a pretty good working definition (in Performance Studies at least) of communitas:

Communitas is an acute point of community. It takes community to the next level and allows the whole of the community to share a common experience, usually through a rite of passage. Link

This post is, in some ways, an excuse to post a video of Ze Frank here because I simply adore his work and want to share it with people in every venue I can. However, while watching his recent TED talk from this past July, I found myself thinking about some of the issues raised in my Materials & Methods class. Specifically, issues of performance, media, the body, and communitas. It seems to me that Frank’s work is about building new ways of creating communitas through a kind of distributed performance that occurs in a new kind of space, but one that is as real in its own way as a physical theatre.

Seems like there might be a paper in this notion. Then again, professional hazard of Performance Studies: nearly everything around us, especially in the U.S. can be seen as fodder for the mind. Take the 18 minutes, please, and watch this video. If you haven’t encountered Frank’s work in the past, you will be, I think, amazed at his whimsical ways to bring people together and if you are familiar with his work, you’ll be reminded just how fabulous and inventive he is, as well as being genuinely concerned with the human expressivity possible through contemporary technology and media.

The iPad and Graduate School

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I love my iPad. Not simply as a fun and geeky toy, although there is that. Honestly though, it’s not something I would have bought it I weren’t returning to school. What makes the iPad a nearly indispensable tool for me in only the past two weeks, is not the lightness, even when combined with Apple’s bluetooth keyboard, and it’s not the apps like Attendance that I’m using for the classes I teach, or even the awesomeness that is Netflix Watch Instantly which I’ll occasionally curl up in bed with for an episode or two of television after I’ve spent the bulk of the day reading for my classes.

It’s how I do that reading that’s the main thing, and I am doing a whole heckuva lot of it on the iPad. Unless I’m reading an actual book, all the various articles and sections of books that are either already available as PDFs from my Professors or those that I make copies of from books put on reserve at the library are being read on my iPad. Everything goes into folders on my Dropbox account and then I access them through iAnnotate. Reading PDFs suddenly feels almost as natural as reading a book or copied pages and with iAnnotate I can mark up my texts exactly how I might with a pencil. Sure, writing marginalia and notes to myself is not quite as natural, and takes a bit more time since I have to type notes in, but aside from that, I really don’t notice much of a difference. And the benefits of carrying only the iPad instead of hundreds of pages of articles to and from school is absolutely fantastic. Even when I have to make copies at the library (because they aren’t advanced enough for me to simply scan directly to my school email), I can then scan them in at home and recycle the paper nearly immediately.

Additionally, I have already bought one of my books for class, Ben Jonson’s play The Alchemist directly through the Kindle store. While markup on Kindle books is not quite as wide-ranging as what I can do with iAnnotate, there are highlighting and notes and bookmarking abilities so that you can get some of the work done. I’m not sure I’d go to a Kindle version of a complex, theoretical text over an actual book, because of the limitations of the software, but as I get more and more used to using the iPad, I might be tempted to at least try and readjust my reading marginalia and markups to accommodate for the shift over to digital books.

If the iPad did nothing beyond simply being the best PDF reader and markup tool that exists, it would be worth it. But there is so much more to the device that I haven’t even begun to really tap into at this point. Plus, did I mention Netflix Watch Instantly? :)

I choose the lowest model, 16 GB and wifi only for several reasons. The first is that I’m not going to be loading it up with music, my iPhone is still going to be how I listen to music while commuting on a daily basis and my iPod what I will be taking on longer trips (considering I have nearly 140 GB of music compared to the average persons 4-8 GB, it’s just not possible for me to shift my full music library to flash based players). The second is that I know I would be storing my work on Dropbox so that it was available from my Macbook Pro, my phone, the iPad, and any computer with an internet connection if I got really stuck and needed access to a file. So I really didn’t need a ton of storage space. Considering that my life is going to be mostly shuttling between home and a fully wifi-ed University campus, I also felt no compulsion to go for the 3g model. As I look forward, there may be a few instances here and there when I might wish I had the capacity to connect without a wifi signal, but I don’t see it being a major deal.

(Speaking of Dropbox, I’m going to write more about that in the future, but if you haven’t already gotten at least a free account, I highly recommend it. And if you use this link we’ll both get a bit of extra memory on that free account, so we both win.)

No, the iPad couldn’t substitute for having a computer and, depending on your work, it might not even substitute for a laptop. If I were working on sound design for a show, I’d absolutely want to have my MbP with me instead of the iPad. However, for work in grad school, as a student, teacher, and researcher, I am completely and utterly sold on the use-value of the iPad as a tool and not a toy.

Short Term Complexity for Long Term Simplicity

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I will admit that I sometimes play around with systems of doing things instead of doing things. I’ve spent a bunch of time this afternoon working on setting up a system to use Textmate for posting blog entries instead of, you know, actually writing anything. Of course, I generally have a reason to fool around with my systems (be they filing, or writing, or research). Certainly, I will often use this as a procrastination tool. However, as I look to start a PhD program in just a few months from now, there are certain processes that I know I want to experiment with now in order to find the smoothest and time-savingest ways of doing things. There are several broad areas that I feel I need to streamline before school starts, or at least have a system in place by then, even if I have to change it. These are:

  • Project/Time management
  • Research/Information Management
  • Writing
  • Blogging
  • Podcasting
  • Health

In this entry I’m going to outline what areas I already have solutions for and what areas I want to develop further over the next several months. I will follow that with separate and more in depth entries for each area over the next couple of months.

Project Management

For now, I’m fairly happy with my system of project management with uses a combination of the task management program Things in conjunction with BusyCal. Additionally, I have a timer program, Minco that I am not using much now, but may start in the future to help track the time I spend on discreet activities. Granted, under grad school conditions I may find I need to augment or adjust my current ways practices. Until then, however, I think I’ve got time management under control.

Research/Information Management

Before returning to school, I want to establish a system for conducting and keeping track of my research. Certainly having a robust citation manager will be useful, but citations are only part of the equation and I also want to think about portability and how I might use such a system with my iPhone when I am away from my computer. Currently I don’t have anything in place for this, though I have started using Notational Velocity for maintaining short notes and do have Yojimbo for storing other kinds of information. Neither of those, however, will suffice when it comes to archiving and managing the kinds and complexities of research I will need to handle in working toward my dissertation.

Writing

Scrivener has me covered for all my first draft needs, even though the program was designed for fiction writing and not academic writing. One of the aspects of this program that some people have trouble getting used to is the fact that Scrivener is not about creating a document, but rather about writing a story/essay/novel. By separating the creation from the presentation, Scrivener can be more tailored to the process of writing than regular word processors. I plan to combine Scrivener with MultiMarkdown and LaTeX in the future to help me create works than can then be easily translated into different document forms (html, pdf, txt, rtf, etc.). More on that and the process of learning MultiMarkdown and LaTeX soon. In addition, I plan on developing a schedule and/or word count goal to be met daily for creative writing, blogging, and scholarship.

Blogging

In the past, I have primarily used a program called Ecto for doing my off-line blogging entries. However, there are only a few things that Ecto can offer as a program that I can’t do in Textmate and Textmate will save each entry as an individual text file, meaning that I can save those files to my Simpletext folder and have access to drafts on my iPhone through Writeroom.

Thus, I can move easily between composing entries on my computer to working on my phone (as I have just done). Since I hope to maintain this blog regularly, having the ability to switch platforms will be a big help and will let me proof-read or edit entries while on the bus or anywhere else I might be and have a few minutes of time. This is made easier by my adoption of Markdown in the drafting of posts and using the Markdown Plugin for WordPress.

(switching back to the computer …)

Podcasting

I will definitely continue to do the audio production for PodCastle while I am at school, and hope to continue hosting and producing Perishable Theatre Presents as well, though I may split those duties with someone else. Overall, I have a decent system in place for both of these podcasts, and use a combination of Amadeus Pro (for individual file edits) and Logic Express 8 (for assembling the shows, fixing sound issues, and mixing everything down). However, I need to look into a few more ways that I can automate some of this process so I take less time dealing with files and some sound issues.

Health

Honestly, this is the area I need to develop a system of behaviors and actions the most simply because, other than trying to walk to work at my last temp job and attempting, with no rubric of success or failure, to not eat too much or too poorly, I have no plan or process or way to measure progress. This must become a priority. Not simply because I am getting older and heavier and have a history of heart attacks in my family, but because getting a PhD is hard and I need to make sure that my mind is not fighting against a sluggish body while attempting to learn and attempting to think critically about theatre, performance, pedagogy, and how cognitive sciences can help us understand performance in new and exciting ways. Poor diet and a sedentary lifestyle, so easily assumed in grad school, will not help me achieve the level of scholarship I want.

All of these new systems and practices will require an initial commitment to complexity of action that may very well, in the initial stages, slow me down in my processes or require that I learn new skills or form new habits of being and working. What I hope to accomplish eventually, however, is a simplicity of action that aids me in my academic, creative, and personal goals.