Unpredictable tools

Doing some reading on animist approaches to technology and came across this quote from Mike Kuniavsky:

“Smart games and toys work by adding enough complexity to their behavior that their actions are no longer predictable, which users then accept as part of the fun. With AIBO, Furby, Musini, and video game AIs, we — the users — cede our desire to predict the actions of our technologies in exchange for more “entertaining” behavior.”

I know what he’s talking about is a bit different here, but the thing this immediately makes me think of is how annoying this sort of thing would be in real-life situations I find myself in. For example, what if I was using a screw-gun, a hammer, or a knife which was capable of acting in unpredictable ways? The outcome could be hazardous, to say the least.

Of course, he’s not talking about all devices working this way, just some and some only sometimes. He says, later in the article, “…user experience design will have to be more sensitive to respecting, creating, maintaining, and selectively breaking expectations.”

Product recommendations on USB biofeedback?

Would like to experiment with biofeedback applications on my PC laptop which use a finger-tip sensor or similar. Anyone have recommendations? I’ve used one in the past with some success… We made rocks float across a screen by regulating some - to me - unnamed inner faculty.

To return to office after living as a hermit on Mount Dongshan

Been busy as a beaver lately, as they say. I don’t know who says that, but I’m sure somebody does… Let’s see… I have been in training to become a chess coach as a part time job. I’ve started to gain experience with lights and electrics at my theatre. We’re hanging lights (attached to a grid made of metal pipes) for the next show. Electrical work - in general - tends to earn you a higher hourly rate than carpentry work. This applies to both residential and other types of construction, I’m told, as well as theatrical labor situations. Not going to become a millionaire from it or anything, but it’s all about learning new skills and backing them up with practical experience. In fact, I’ve had more hours at my theatre lately than ever before - which has been awesome. I’ve also been doing some light work volunteering at another theatre further downtown which is less than half the size, but twice the age. What I’ve been realizing with things like this: if there’s something you want, especially in a job-type situation, you just have to do it regardless of whether or not you’re getting paid (at least to begin with) and the work will come to you. What I mean is, I’ve been donating my time at one place and getting rewarded with extra hours and new learning opportunities at another place. I don’t know if we need to resort to calling it some kind of karmic thing, so much as that when you know what you want to do, and you develop habits which support that, you set in motion inexorable cause-effect forces, a kind of momentum that eventually carries you the rest of the way toward your goal. What’s that Sufi saying? Something about taking one step towards God and God takes ninety-nine steps toward you?

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Parallel to the practical stuff, I’ve been - as you may know - engaging in heavy historical, cultural and theoretical research relating to the domain of theatre and folk theatrical traditions in particular. I’ve got a never-ending list of books coming my way from the Enoch Pratt Free Library, which I have been assiduously annotating with stickies, then copying down quotations onto note cards for later use, and photocopying longer passages. Over the course of two months, the direction of my research has begun to make itself plain simply on account of the types of information I have gathered this way. The path reveals itself the farther you walk on it.

This past Monday morning, I went on a free historical tour of Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre down on Eutaw Street, lead by the docent there, an older man full of information who was plainly in love with the Hippodrome and the institution of theatre itself. We even managed to get a couple of ghost stories out of him, which is always fun. Theatres tend to be full of ghosts. The Hippodrome tour fits in as part of the next phase of my Monument City project. In that, a friend and I completely documented the historic monuments and memorials around the city: photos, GPS coordinates, mapped locations, location notes and historical write-ups for each location. We’re planning to do the same thing for all the old theatres from back in the heyday of Baltimore Theatre - which, at this point, I’d probably peg somewhere in the 1880’s to 1920’s or so, kind of at the height of Vaudeville, melodramas and the touring circuit. The Hippodrome, newly restored as of five years ago, is kind of the crown jewel of this collection. It’s too bad that “union rules” forbade us from taking photos inside. (It’s funny to me how unions are invoked with this almost superstitious quality in circumstances like these…)

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Meanwhile, I’ve been practicing my back-cross, a juggling move which I’ve been attempting for over a year which I’ve only recently been able to land. In three club juggling (though I guess you can do it with balls), you’re juggling your normal pattern when, suddenly, boom, a hand goes behind your back and you throw a club behind you catching it in your opposite hand without messing up the overall pattern. Devastatingly tricky, but my practice time is beginning to pay off.

In fact, everything I’m doing is starting to pay off, individually, and all the various streams are coming together quite nicely. It’s a peculiar life situation to be in, to be honest. I feel like I’ve spent so much time up till now striving to figure certain things out - which I’m now figuring out - that it becomes time to find a new way to define yourself, the quest, the struggle, the goals. Spent so much time developing my “personal power” or my “inner flame” which is now burning brightly… but what do you do with it? What do you apply it to? And how do you learn what the right application of force is, of pressure? So much craft work is all about developing “the touch.” The skill is in the hands, in using just enough, but not more than enough. Letting the tool do the work, having these things become extensions of not just your body, but of your consciousness, your will. How do you develop that? How do you teach others to develop that? I’ve been reading a book about the journeyman artisans of France, the compagnons, who go on an extended Tour de France - not the bicycle race, but a voyage of discovery and mastery of their chosen skill. One of the emblems which aspirants on this journey will wear is that of the Labyrinth. It symbolizes both the difficulty of the journey inward to find the treasure hidden at the center of the maze, but also the journey one must take back outward from the center in which one becomes able to transmit that wisdom and experience to others who are just taking up the journey afresh.

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{Another great original data-digest by Tim Boucher!}™

I’m experimenting with flat HTML files which contain high-quality original data. I haven’t got the hard evidence to back it up, but I have an inkling that Google will rank flat HTML files significantly higher than pages created automatically out of a database, such as WordPress creates. I love the convenience of WP, but I wonder how much more highly my data would be ranked were the 7,500 pages on this website all flat HTML files.

In any case, I’ve redone both my root drive of this domain, timboucher.com with that in mind, along with beginning a cultivation scheme on the travelingperformer.com domain. With that one, my plan is to create highly-compressed “data-digests” on very micro topics related to my current field of study. For example, this first one is a list of all the types of traveling performers I could think of, along with hazarding a definition of what a performer actually is or does. Intending to put together many highly focused topical “lenses” like this, which hopefully will provide a nice conceptual framework for me to do further research and interest others in these topics.

Also check out circuscharacters.org for similarly-themed information, presented in a more extended essay format.

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Skills Inventory (Oct. 2009)

That time of the year again where I update my skills list! You can view my 2008 entry here and 2007 here. Aiming to simplify this list a lot this time around, as I’ve really been able to focus this past year with regard to my professional goals.

Technical Theatre Skills

I am well-versed in…

  1. Stage & scenic carpentry
  2. Working as a stagehand or stage tech for live events: moving scenery, running props, lightboard operation
  3. Scenic painting, backdrop painting and portrait painting

I am a newbie but gaining experience in…

  1. Lights and electrics: hang and focus, as well as basic residential electricity
  2. Sound & A/V
  3. Working as a production assistant/assistant stage manager

Performance Skills

  1. I have acted bit parts in two shows, one at a regional theatre and one at summer stock.
  2. Learned how to waltz for one of the above roles, and could probably pick up other steps pretty easily.
  3. I can juggle up to four balls or three clubs, and am a beginner at partner juggling/passing.
  4. Got a unicycle over the summer, but I’ve not yet mastered it.
  5. I can play basic folk guitar, mostly rhythm work with some finger-picking.
  6. I’ve gotten pretty good at that sort of old-timey talk-singing (”talking blues”) typical to performers like Woody Guthrie.

Research, Writing & Administrative Skills

  1. Well-versed in writing essays, articles and creative non-fiction for the web using a combination of print/library sources and the web, supplemented by in-depth first-person interview and data collection.
  2. I’ve been running a successful and profitable blog for close to seven years.
  3. With a partner, I researched, wrote and developed the website Monument City, which is a comprehensive digital catalog of historic monuments and memorials in Baltimore City.

Computer Skills

  1. Years ago, I taught PhotoShop, HTML, CSS, basic Javascript, ASP and PHP at a job re-training and placement company in Baltimore. Though I don’t code extensively anymore, I have an active understanding of programming and scripting languages and techniques.
  2. Have worked as a graphic designer (print & web), web developer, coder/programmer and e-commerce associate at a variety of small companies around the US, along with freelance web development projects on the side.

Other Skills

  1. I’ve worked extensively with dogs in a daycare environment, as well as on the retail end of the organic/holistic pet food and supplies industry.
  2. I’ve worked professionally as an organic landscaper & gardener, and have installed several urban backyard gardens for friends.

Plastic Hinged Skeleton, Black-Clad Puppeteer

Took myself down to the Charles Theatre again this afternoon for the second installment of Wagner’s Ring cycle, Die Walkure. Somewhere around these parts lies another article about that, but this was one easier to swallow. The first time around took some getting used to the production company (from Valencia) and their vision of how this all ought to be staged and then translated into film. This time I was able to step into that world more easily on a psychological level, since I knew the rules of how it functioned, what laws operated and how characters and the deus ex machine, literally, worked. So the tech stuff, the sci-fi costume antics and the rest sank down into the background for me during this piece, allowing the depth of the various actor’s talents and the enormity of Wagner’s writing as a dramatist to unfold at their own pace. Never during the four plus hour performance (with two intermissions) did I once get bored. Moreso my problem with such long pieces has been about getting comfortable in a confining movie theatre seat.


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Also attended a YouTube play festival over at the Annex Theatre, an independent arts venue and living space in Baltimore’s Station North Arts District. I liked the basic concept of the festival, that of staging YouTube videos as live-action performances. Some of it was beautiful, some of it was indecipherable, some of it idiotic in a good way, some of it in a bad way, and a few bits in it really had the kind of dramatic power in them that make you remember why you go to live events in the first place and don’t just sit around watching YouTube forever. My favorite was probably the one about the fat Mexican kid falling into the river and cursing his friend out, followed by the Neda getting shot one…

Watched also “Les Diaboliques” this weekend, along with Ingmar Bergman’s excellent (though not maybe as good as “Seventh Seal” or “Wild Strawberries”) “Tinsel & Sawdust.” According to the jacket of that DVD, Bergman kept up parallel and largely separate careers on the stage and with film. This movie tells the story of a traveling circus owner, his mistress and their miserably poor circus coming into a town where the owner’s wife and children now live. Some great stuff comparing and contrasting the worlds of circus life and “legitimate” theatre, as the traveling troupe and an established theatre troupe in the town get mixed up in all kinds of inter-character intrigue. Really worth watching.

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Also caught part of the Penn State game this weekend at the bar. Sports has never been my thing, but I’ve begun viewing it lately from the traveling performer lifestyle/professional entertainment business and culture. There’s a lot to be drawn in historically, since most of the folk theatrical research I’ve been doing has been around festivals, fairgrounds and religious holy day celebrations. Sports and aesthetic competition have always been intertwined with such things - sometimes inseparably so. It will be an interesting fish to fry.

My next heavy research topic though will be opera, now that I’ve got a nice foothold into the domain, some of the terminology and a bit of a frame of reference worked out for it all. In the meantime, I’m doing a historical tour of the Hippodrome Theatre tomorrow as part of Free Fall Baltimore, a city-wide thing that includes many performances and events all through the Autumn (such as the Peabody Opera Potpourri performance I attended last week).

One of the things I really want to start looking at is audience make-up and interactions around operas versus other kinds of “lower class” performance rituals. Haven’t got a hell of a lot of exposure yet but have begun seeing some consistent trends: that opera audiences are usually quite talkative and vocal with one another about their opinions during intermission, etc. Maybe not more that theatre audiences, but definitely moreso than movie audiences. Which makes the adaptation of opera and some of the stage rituals to a cinematic establishment at times a bit odd or jarring.

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On the homefront, I’ve begun work on a Halloween costume which I might be able to find other performative uses for. I finally snagged myself a maybe five foot plastic jointed skeleton from a temporary storefront that used to house a Circuit City but now sells fake blood and any number of cheap “sexy” Halloween costumes from China for $19.99. I was gonna replicate the clown being chased by a skeleton bit from a 1930s circus photo I found, but decided to modify it to fit in the front. My idea was to wear all black (including a facemask) and attach its limbs to mine in various articulations, thereby enabling me to make it dance or move around - like a marionette or other kind of puppet. I’ve been thinking of the “laughing skeleton” archetype you see in the medieval Danse Macabre/the Grateful Dead paraphernalia, or also in that awesome movie, The Last Unicorn - that skeleton which guards the clock that’s a portal to another dimension. You know what I’m talking about, right?

Tonight I modified all the joints, so that each end of each one has a wire run through it which then ties it to the corresponding joint, also wired. This way, if any of the plastic joints fail, the whole act doesn’t fall apart. Next will be putting together some kind of harness to give me the types of articulation I’m after for. I’ll post videos of all this when I’ve got it all done. Would be awesome to find a way to use the skeleton in a juggling routine!

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Public Domain Where Applicable, Copy Left Where Not, Universal Free Realms Everyware Else for 2009 and for forever.the timboucher experience. No rights reserved.