Switch off/ log out/ never use browser-based e-mail – the tabs are lurking to catch you
Switch off notifications, disable e-mail polling etc on all mobile devices – phones and tablets. Set e-mail clients only to gather e-mail when you want (you are weak but will at least be in control)
Set your main e-mail client (in my case on a Mac PowerBook gathering 11 mailboxes worth) to only collect e-mail once per hour – each hour use GTD techniques to respond to e-mail – if you can do it in less than 2 minutes then deal with it, if not schedule a time to deal with it. Get back to writing as soon as you can.
Always have your phone on silent – when a call comes in – have a quick look – be ruthless and push it to voicemail. If it’s a client, friend or otherwise important – take the call; deal with it quickly. You will return to writing with more energy. Distinguish between the important and the urgent.
For writing – use Scrivener – you can chunk up the work to allow for essential interruptions
Go on long train journeys – buy cheap first class tickets in a quiet coach (often cheaper than standard if bought in advance) and write, write, write. They will bring you tea etc. This is good.
Identity, uncertainty and loss are explored in Scan through a combination of participation and projection.
Scan combines live performance, physical exploration of an unfamiliar space (lots of climbing up and down unlit stairs), and culminates in a dystopian “reveal” of surveillance footage, laser scanned images and movies. The culmination is delivered in a performance environment where the boundaries between performers, audience, technologists and observers are not so much blurred as destroyed.
Spot the scanner
Before we got to the big technological reveal, we were ‘rats in the maze’ of the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama’s building – on the roof terrace, in staircases, store-rooms, subterranean pipe-filled rooms where the lights were put out for reasons that became clear on IR camera feed later! The performers escorting added to the feeling of being unsettled; they moved smoothly from personae as guides and reassuring presences – to quite scary officials – providing contradictory information about whether we were being “scanned” or not; arguing with one another about what needed to happen next.
The performers’ use of voice was impressive and, to my mind added greatly to the tension as we moved toward the final scenes. And one of them, from being a smooth-talking charming guide suddenly became a half-naked experimental subject in a theatre filled with audio announcements from bored officials concerning missing persons.
Some of the laser scanned images are of the participants/audience/experimental subjects shown in what I think of as “near realtime” – by that I mean content made so freshly that the paint has not yet dried; and the people in the room gasp as their laser-scanned simulacra are shown on a massive screen in front of them. Unsettling. And very impressive; to incorporate movies generated from laser scanned content less than 45 minutes from the start of the performance. The approach raises the level of risk – spotting Will Trossell at the keyboard manipulating the images and calmly driving the other 3D scanned imagery was, of course, how this risk was handled.
The really impressive elements of this performance centre on the manipulation of time. We were constantly being challenged with trying to understand whether what was happening was in realtime or not; did we really know what was going on, were we on camera, were we being ‘scanned’ – should we be worried? If we were being scanned – what did it mean?
So Bob Shiel and Jessica Bowles and their collaborators achieved a happening, an exploration of physical and virtual space, a performance and an experience of loss.
The Scan was performed as part of the Collisions Festival 2013 at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama. There was one performance only. The work is the latest iteration of creative collaboration between the RCSSD and The Protoarchitecture Lab at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. In this instance, 3D scanning is introduced as a intermediary process that alters the observation of performance in time and space.
The Protoarchitecture Lab at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL is led by Bob Sheil and Emmanuel Vercruysse. Scan was created and devised in collaboration with Jessica Bowles of RCSSD, six recent graduates of RCSSD, ScanLAB projects and the artist collective SHUNT.
The use of metaphor in strategy and business and in the media is widespread and often annoying. Narrative is used to illustrate choices and “It’s been a long journey” is regularly heard from both reality TV participants and news media people who ought to know better. But there are many more forms of narrative than the journey story – and richer archetypes we could think about.
But maybe we could recast or re-interpret some of these metaphors to help see problems in a ‘new light’. There, you see; I’m doing it now. What if we could ‘think our way off the Pendulum’ of boom and bust? How about ‘painting ourselves Out of the Box’? And how about making the ‘Playing Field’ more mountainous for players with too much market power? What if we could harness our knowledge of systems dynamics so that things spiral into control.
And then we come to the Patchwork Quilt analogy I came up with as one of the scenarios for Digital Britain. The industry seems to want to interpret the Patchwork Quilt as a ‘bad thing’. Actually it’s a good thing because it’s a manifestation of the coming wave of localism. Design your own patch of Digital Britain to respond to local conditions and make sure, though, at the edges it joins up with the other patches.
So, the next time you hear a metaphor being used to describe strategy or choices; generate the anti-metaphor in your mind and see where it takes you.
