tim wright: digital writer

The Haunter Field Day: Tuesday 19th June 2012 - Join Us!

A DAY FOR RECORDING, BETA TESTING, WALKING & TALKING

Both Joe and Tim are going to be contributing to the Location-Based Storytelling Symposium at Bournemouth University on Monday 18th June. See http://symposium.bujournalism.info

The next day – Tuesday 19th June – we’ll be going to Dorchester to do some work out in the field. We’d love people to join us.

Our intention is to:

• record as much Hardy material as possible out in the field – and capture ambient sound from the route of the walk, snippets of conversation, natural sounds etc.

• work with Proboscis to create a Haunter booklet (or perhaps more than one!?), and simultaneously contribute to the very exciting ongoing series of collaborative urban explorations, City As Material: http://proboscis.org.uk/projects/ongoing/city-as-material/

• walk and talk with people from various backgrounds and disciplines in order to understand how The Haunter project can be developed to appeal to the broadest range of user groups and local service providers

People can walk with us, try out Joe’s beta version ‘haunted’ box, help us record audio, create booklet material or simply join the conversation about what we’re trying to do with this project.

It may be also useful for Joe and I to give a short talk at some point on the walk, and perhaps others would like to do the same. If you have some thoughts or a story you’d like to share with the group at some point during the day, do let Tim know in advance, so we can plan it into the schedule.

The Plan for the Day

Here's a GoogleMap of where we’re proposing to walk at. You can join us at any point during the day. To track us down follow @moongolfer on Twitter.

View Where The Night Rooks Go in a larger map

10:30

Coffee at the Dorset County Museum

11:00 

Start the walk proper at the Hardy statue at the top of High W Street, following the Yellow Route. Joe & Tim to introduce the project.

12:15 

Arrive at Gray’s Bridge on the London Road. Here, we may split into two groups, one walking on the Red Route, the other on the Blue Route.

13:30 

Arrive at Stinsford Graveyard.

13:45

Late lunch break – you’ll need to bring your own food & drink or we can repair to the  Kingston Maurward Gardens, which has a cafe

14:45 

We’ll take the Black Route on the map via Lower Bockhampton, up to the Heath and on to Hardy’s Birthplace (sadly closed on Tuesdays).

16:15 

Back to Stinsford via the Green Route and on to Max Gate (also closed on Tuesdays) via the Blue Route. A chance for final audio recordings.

17:45 

Finish at the Thomas Hardy Pub: DT1 2AB. Disperse at leisure.

Charting the weather for my Compote Tree

Some of you are probably thinking I’ve already given up on my compote tree (in the same way as I give up on so many of my projects after an initial flurry of interest).

Far from it. 

Like the tree itself, I may look as if I’m standing still, but things are always moving, creeping out into the light.

For example, I have been watching the weather. Thanks to the very marvellous London Grid For Learning Weather Monitoring System, I have been grabbing all the relevant data from the Streatham weather station. Here, for example, is a spreadsheet with all the weather data for my area for the last 30 days or so:  Download Streathamweatheraprmay2012

This weather station is only 5 mins walk from my house so the conditions it is describing are  - I would assume - relevant to my tree.

As an experiment, I have tried various ways of cross referencing this data and re-charting it to see if I can find patterns or ‘meaning’.

In order to protect myself from imposing something on the data that my mind might be deliberately looking for, I have been careful not to put much thought or strategy (or indeed *knowledge*) into making these charts, but have simply let the machine generate something for me. That way some interesting patterns might emerge.

I was right! As with the patterns made by the tree branches (as mentioned in a previous post) it’s clear there are messages here.

Any thoughts you might have about how to interpret these charts – or indeed about how to visualise the weather data in general - please let me know.

My next task in this area will surely be to take the weather station feed and create my own web-based monitoring system. I have much to learn and do.

And then there is the knotty issue of monitoring the tree itself. I have already created a spreadsheet for that too ( Download Compotetreedata), and I intend to start taking measurements with rudimentary instrumention at the beginning of the month. Watch this space!

Sorry I missed your birthday Shakespeare

I really liked the idea of contributing to http://birthday2012.bloggingshakespeare.com/, but failed to get my act together last week. So here’s a belated post.

Shakespeare has been looming quite large for me in recent weeks. I’ve been re-reading 'The Tempest' as homework for an AHRC research project I’ve been contributing to (http://digitalcopsandrobbers.wordpress.com/). I was invited to the energy-fuelled version of Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Lyric Hammersmith. *And* I chanced upon a Globe Theatre production of Othello on Sky Arts with a mesmerising performance by Tim McInnerny as Iago.

This isn’t that unusual actually. Every few weeks or months, something about Shakespeare tends to intrude into my life (and yes, I know how wanky that sounds). In the last few years he’s cropped up in a Twitterplay I helped write, a really good film I saw, a really good book I read, a place I visited...

This is rather the point about Shakespeare. If you’re someone who’s trying to make a living from any kind of writing and/or performing, he looms large. Sometimes he looms in a threatening way – (thinks: I will simply never be as good as him at what I do).  On good days, perhaps, it feels more like a steadyand reliable pulse that beats on in the background of a writer’s life. He’s always there. There’s always another one of his works that is relevant to what’s happening to you right now.

And yet the most striking thing about Shakespeare for me is how bloody surprising he is whenever you do go back to him. He’s just so damn fresh and experimental; he’s so quick to set up really interesting situations and dilemmas for people who have character traits and personalities that you instantly recognise; so good at using language to create a mood, set a scene or match the action.

And then he’s prepared to take scenes and plotlines and whole plays off into crazy places that somehow seem acceptable and *real*, and that offer the potential for all kinds of endings, happy or sad. Quite often I finish reading or watching a play and think: 'I wonder what could have happened to that character?' - even though I *know* what happened to that character because Shakespeare told me.

I guess that’s why I keep returning, and why I keep getting surprised. And in that way he sets the bar so very high. It spurs me on. Happy (Belated) Birthday.

Lovers and madmen have such seething brains,

Such shaping fantasies, that apprehend

More than cool reason ever comprehends.

The lunatic, the lover and the poet

Are of imagination all compact:

One sees more devils than vast hell can hold,

That is, the madman: the lover, all as frantic,

Sees Helen's beauty in a brow of Egypt:

The poet's eye, in fine frenzy rolling,

Doth glance from heaven to earth, from earth to heaven;

And as imagination bodies forth

The forms of things unknown, the poet's pen

Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing

A local habitation and a name.

Such tricks hath strong imagination,

That if it would but apprehend some joy,

It comprehends some bringer of that joy;

Or in the night, imagining some fear,

How easy is a bush supposed a bear!

The underground sound of the Compote Tree

When I told my wife that I was worried about the damson tree, that it may be harbouring thoughts and messages, not all of them kind, she was very understanding.

More than that, she came at the problem of how to communicate with the tree (or at least listen to it) from an angle that my over-complex data-centric sensor-based perspective had prevented me from seeing.

How noisy the subterranean world of the tree must be, she said. And it's true. The world of plants must be *horrendously* noisy. Just think of this sound - of growing rhubarb - and times it by a million:

Think of the compote tree constantly being bombarded with rumbles and vibrations, tumults and quakes. Think of water trickling and gurgling underground. And the beetles and worms, the slugs and the nematodes and the ants all busy scratching and scraping, boring and writhing. And the creaks and the cracklings of other roots, other plants swelling and popping, quite literally ‘rooting’ around for moisture and nutrients.

All this the tree can sense, and all the time it’s sending out its own root signals, its sighs, its secret messages, its cries for help.

Some quick research about the actual ‘sound’ of plants has led me to some very interesting places. For example, this:

"When South African botanist Lyall Watson claimed in his 1973 bestseller Supernature that plants had emotions and that these could register on a lie detector, scientists scoffed and branded it hippie nonsense. But new research has revealed that plants appear to react to sounds and may even make clicking noises to communicate with each other. Scientists in Australia, Britain and Italy have collaborated to show that the roots of young plants emit and react to particular sounds."

http://www.universityworldnews.com/article.php?story=20120406103841958

Amusingly, artist Luke Jerram has even gone as far as to co-ordinate this apparent cacophony of plant noise into a plant orchestra, and someone in Japan has been doing experiments on how to make plants ‘sing’.

Even more wonderfully, there is infobreath:

"In InfoBreath, the participant is presented with a cybernetic flower arcing from a frosted pane of glass. Rigged with a breath sensor and connected to Carnivore, an internet packet sniffer, the flower is cued in to the wireless network flowing in the space immediately surrounding it. Breathing on the plant triggers a flurry of text that makes visible the wireless internet traffic passing through the air around the viewer. The plant absorbs this information, analyzing the bytes of data for those aspects that seem more ‘alive,’ or human-generated, and releases those packets in a form comprehensible to humans."

So now we know that plants do make noise, can be taught to sing (or scream?) by touching them and almost certainly talk to each other. Oh, and from this research into sound, we can also pretty firmly assert that plants also have *feelings* and can even distinguish between plants of their own kind and complete strangers. See http://www.viewzone.com/plants.html

So thank you to my wife for setting me on this path. And thank you to my friend Alison who subsequently told me it was common knowledge that acacias in Africa talk to each other to warn about incoming giraffes and can even change their chemisty as a result of these warnings in order to taste more disgusting!

At least the trees haven’t learned yet to run away. Although, that may become a reality sooner than you might think. Enter the Robotic Action Plant!:

Jurema Action Plant Firenze 2011 from Ivan Henriques on Vimeo.

There is so much to ponder here.

The Compote Tree is following me

So this is odd. I have yet to install any sensors on the compote tree, but already it has started talking to me.

Cold day than Wednesday. Young. 12mm

— Compote Tree (@CompoteBot) April 5, 2012

To be more specific, something or someone has set up @CompoteBot and started tweeting. It is already surprisingly articulate.

My assumption was that, at the start, the tree would simply spew data and it would be up to me (us?) to translate the data spew into meaningful strings of words. Through conversation and interaction, perhaps, the tree could ‘learn’ like a big baby how to speak and then how to converse. I was assuming this task would take a number of months, if not years.

Yes, yes, I understand that this Twitter account is more than likely someone I know goofing around. This in itself is interesting.

I thought this story – if that’s what it is – would be something only for me and the tree to tell. But already someone else, a stranger who chooses to keep his or her identity hidden, has decided to intrude. Part of me feels delighted. Part of me feels disturbed.

My main worry is that it puts pressure on the *real* tree to speak – and to speak interestingly, entertainingly.

Poor tree. Before it has even become sentient there are people out there putting words in its mouth, people with high expectations of what the tree might become. We do have to entertain the possibility that the tree is quite dumb, with very little memory (recoverable memory) and not a lot to say.

The good news is that there are bees on the tree. Pollination has begun!

The Compote Tree is in bloom

I have been in correspondence with Dynamax, AgriSupport and Fruition Sciences, hoping to get hold of a set of phytomonitoring sensors for my tree. Thank you to both Thibaut and Mike McClung for their extremely helpful emails.

The question the experts keep throwing back at me is 'What is it exactly are you trying to measure?'. This is a good question.

It seems that are so many things to look out for. The most obvious are:

• Air temperature, humidity, rainfall, windspeed and direction. Handily there’s a weather station just at the top of my road (it's the Streatham, London, UK one). It tells me we’ve had 15 days without any rain, that there’s an easterly wind speed of 0.9m/s and humidity is at 57%. 
• Soil Moisture and Temperature. At several different depths of course!! 
• Soil conductivity. Some soils will obviously conduct electricity better than others due to the different types of salts that may abound. It might be interesting to know whether my tree is 'plugged in' in some way.   
• Air vapour pressure deficit. This is not something I've thought about very much but seems to be critical - "As a general rule, most plants grow well at VPDs of between 0.8 to 0.95 kPa."

Sometimes I think the tree is trying to graph itself, plotting its own curves, its own rise and fall over time. I see how the branches bend and stretch as the tree blooms, and I like to imagine that maybe I won't need sensors at all. I shall simply 'read' the tree.

On the other hand, there is a fantastic array of kit it would be interesting to install. There are so many things I could be measuring:

• Trunk and stem diameter. It's kind of obvious now that I think about it that the trunk of the tree and the stems of the main branches can contract and expand on a regular basis. It's probably the most obvious way of tracking the basic rhythm and status of the tree.
• Leaf temperature. It turns out you can track not just leaf temperature, but check it against the temperature of the soil, the air, and even the blossom!
• Sap flow rate in plant stems and trunks. This is basically a way of tracking 'transpiration';  i.e I can keep an eye out for when my tree is sweating...
• Blossom colour. I've already purchased the Royal Horticultural Society Colour Charts, since I'm assuming that each year there are going to be differences in blossom colour. I'm wondering, in fact, if a laminated Pantone swatch might not come in handy also.  
• Canopy analysis. As the seasons progress, I'll be able to track how the density of the leaves on the trees might be affecting fruit growth. 
• Photosynthesis.  Apparently I can use a 'quantum sensor' to measure accurately "Photosynthetic Photon Flux Density" (PPFD). PPFD is the number of photons in the 400 to 700 nm waveband incident per unit time on a unit surface. I'm not sure what this means.
• Porometry. "Stomatal aperture is the dominant factor in the diffusion conductance of leaf surfaces, which controls both the water loss from plant leaves and the uptake of CO2 for photosynthesis. Measurements of diffusion conductance are therefore important indicators of plant water status and provide a valuable insight into plant growth and plant adaptation to environmental variables." 
• Optical Absorbance Meters for Epidermal Polyphenolics. With these babies I'll be able to "quickly and quantitatively estimate the concentration of Flavonols and Anthocyans in fruit and vegetables (leaves and skin)"

 Obviously this last one is just one of a whole new set of sensors I'm going to need when the tree starts to fruit, but for now the current list of kit  will have to suffice. (And anyway I'm getting to the edge of my scientific knowledge - can't you tell?)

To help me with the money side of things I'm thinking of starting a Kickstarter so that anyone reading this can help me fund this research and share with me the tree's secrets...

Talking of which, I am already noticing that as the tree blooms it is creating a number of patterns and shapes with its twigs and branches.

Yes, the shapes have been there for a while, I grant you, but somehow the blossom has accentuated things, thrown everything into relief. Just for fun, I traced a few lines onto a couple of photos of the tree. I didn’t stop to think too much; indeed, I tried to make this feel as much like some kind of automatic writing as possible.

You can see that it came out as a rather compelling collection of letters and ‘runes’. The major surprise, though, was how the felt tip I’d used had come through on the other side of the paper. With the image of the tree taken away I really did have some kind of message.

Obviously I’d like to dismiss it as a freak accident, a quirk of the pen. But I can’t help thinking there’s something here, something to decode. Something that I can work on before the sensors arrive. Can you see it?

The Compote Tree is giving me funny looks

Thank you James! You have made me realise I am not crazy. As your video link clearly demonstrates, it is perfectly possible for trees to make music – or more precisely it is perfectly possibly to find music encoded within a tree:

YEARS from Bartholomäus Traubeck on Vimeo.

I have been thinking about my own tree for some time. It has been worrying me. Only the other day I wrote this:

It's spring. The crab apple and the cherry blossom are sherbeting into life. The velveteen magnolia pods are splitting open to reveal a peep of pink. And my fruit tree is looking at me in a funny way.

I paid a stoner called Tristram to prune all my trees back in September and I felt he'd done a good job. He seemed like the kind of hippy who might have a 'feel' for how best to mutilate a tree, even if he was doing it through the mystic fug of sensimilia. He told me he was getting his shit together because his partner was 7-months pregnant and he wanted to take his responsibilities as a dad seriously. I think this meant he wasn't going to forget to invoice me like the last time he'd been round. He didn't even remember having been at my house before.

Anyway, the fruit tree has clearly not enjoyed its haircut by Tristram the father-to-be. I'd guess that pretty much every son of a certain age has a story about being taken to the barbers by dad and it never ends well - babyish curls reduced to a bowl cut, the rebellious teen fringe shawn away, grunge bedhead replaced by short back and sides.

So maybe the tree is sulking, refusing to blossom, raising its rough stumps in protest towards me; ruining the view, despoiling my quiet washing-up time, that calm 15 minutes when I slop the suds over pots and pans, screen out the wharbling radio and pretend to be lost in a world of good intentions, a world of projects I will deliver - oh the words I will write, the great works I will lend my name to.

But now I have the tree looking back at me through the window. Not sulkily really, but definitely pregnant with some kind of emotion, like it has something to say to me, some accusation to make or a secret to share. The tree is trying to tell me something.

So now, James, I'm recalling the IBM reed-beds in Yorktown Heights that were once used as a vegetable memory store. (Did I dream that up? I don't think so. I think I remember writing about it in Which Computer? in about 1992.)

The principle is fairly simply – a plant’s cell structure can change according to how you feed it, how you water it, where you locate it etc. Match a data set to a particular moment in a plant’s life cycle and you have basically encoded a message into a plant by associating it with a particular cell structure. (Are you following me?) It makes sense then that by ‘growing’ the plant back to a particular state in its life – or by growing a replica plant to the same state - one might be able to retrieve any data that had been encoded into said plant.

So maybe trees don’t just have music within them, James. (After all what is music but a way of encoding emotion, memory, time...?) Perhaps the trees have DATA.  Yes, that sexy DATA word. Or maybe the music that is playing in that video was 'planted' there by another human being some time ago as some kind of record about how she or he (or the tree) was feeling at the time. Perhaps the music itself is a message. Music often is.

Sounds a bits nuts, I agree. But get this. It is perfectly possible to work out what's going on inside a tree. I have been in contact with an Israeli company, for example, that can supply me with phytomonitoring equipment - tools for measuring sap flow, branch girth, leaf growth, photosynthesis rates, fruit size etc. And in this way I could start to get the measure of my tree, understand how it is emerging from its cold-stare winter look to something more shrouded and fulsome and giving.

As it sprouts its blossom and allows its bark to breathe, I’ll discover if the data locked inside it makes any kind of sense. The tree and its sensors can start to speak to me. And I'll have my reason for why the tree looks at me in that funny way.

So thanks, James, you have started something. I'll report back when the sensors arrive.

The Story, CERN & spambots: the future of writing

Trying to digest The Story, a visit to CERN and a talk by James Bridle in the space of 10 days has left my brain a bit boggled. It’s also made me think a lot about writing stories (which is kinda my job...)

After last year’s The Story I became slightly anxious about the tools I’ve been using for digital writing – a computer rather than a quill, a phone rather than my own voice etc. This year that anxiety bloomed into a full-blown worry about who gets to write stories at all.

It was noticeable at The Story, for example, that there weren’t that many writers on show at all. Instead there was a parade of artists, politicians, journalists, musicians, magicians, designers and datamongers all with extremely interesting stories to tell and various different ways of telling them.

Perhaps not surprisingly in these times, there was a distinct political edge to the stories that were being told – Tom Watson & Emily Bell ran us through Tom’s experience of doing battle with News International, Jeremy Deller picked away at the Miners Strike, Ellie Harrison explained why she’s tried to stop being a data addict in favour of bringing back British Rail, Danny O’Brien talked of anarchist hackers and billionaires sharing the same boat.

Beyond the obviously political angle, there was also quite a lot of talk of art - or indeed any of the other amazing forms of meaning-making that were on show at The Story - being not *enough* in itself; that every project needs to have a wider social purpose or some kind of utility.

Phil Stuart & Tom Chatfield told of a game that also helped teens come to terms with death and dying; Matthew Herbert likes to make music out of the sounds of life as we live it (or more specifically out of the sounds of a pig’s life as it lives it); Liz Henry’s story about the fake Syrian lesbian blogger seemed to express an anxiety that more important ‘real’ stories were being drowned out.

Ellie Harrison was the speaker who most directly spoke of 'art for art's sake' when she talked of abandoning her personal projects based on measuring herself and collecting & analysing personal data in favour of social activism and projects that required the presence and action of other people. She moved from telling stories about her world to stories about our world – or perhaps more accurately a future world that we could share (one with trains in it).

What has this got to do with CERN and storybots, you may ask? Well, I went to CERN on a trip organised by the Science Museum with a view to seeing how people from different creative backgrounds might try to make sense of some very big (and sometime very small) science. I guess the idea was to find a really good way to explain what CERN does, what the large hadron collider is and why things such as the Higgs boson, muons, neutrinos and the gluon plasma really matter.

Don’t worry – I’m nowhere near being able to talk clearly about this. But the key perception I came away with was that this is a story that may best be told by the physicists themselves and almost certainly will involve the mahoosive and complicated machines that have been built at CERN telling their own stories too – using the impossibly huge amounts of data that these machines generate to tell us what they ‘see’ when particles collide.

In other words, the machines and people that do stuff will also be in charge of the telling. And the telling will somehow involve the instructions and the theories and the equations and the engineering manuals and the code that lie behind the delivery of the project (or ‘experiments’ in the case of CERN). What will be left for an actual writer to do is open to question.

And this is where Bridle’s spambots come in. He gave a talk in Geneva last week at LIFT12 entitled 'We fell in love in a coded space' (and he then went to visit CERN – I swear the guy is following me around). It was basically a version of a blog post he wrote about his excellent Ship Adrift project but it also broadened out a bit to discuss the business of 'writing like a spambot'.

His point (I think) was that all the artificial systems that we’ve allowed into our lives, whether it be the stuff that processes passengers and their luggage in and through airports or autogenerated comments about Russian porn on our blog posts, they all deserve to have a voice, and indeed are trying to tell us something (perhaps telling us how much they love us?!). “They have agency. They're doing something,” says James.

And there we have it again. Having agency and doing something commands a respect that writing or telling a story just doesn’t.

James is imagining a future where we work with bots - the generators of spam, code, data, call it what you will - in order to help them tell their stories. CERN wants to use its machines, its experiments, its data to tell what might just be the greatest story ever told (about a particle). The speakers at The Story communicated a group concern about being 'of use' or being an active citizen.

And writers? Well, they need to find a use for what they do, I guess. Because a story for its own sake written from a single point of view – digital or otherwise - is increasingly looking like it isn't enough.

BlakeWalking and the Makerbot

One of the main things that made me want to join Fiddian Warman’s Makerbot group is the address where the group gathers on Lower Marsh in Lambeth. It’s just a stone’s throw away from where William Blake and his wife started their own peculiar printing revolution in Hercules Road. What better place to think about how to add a 3D printed element to my own work?

Here’s the first disastrous output from my first session with Fiddian and others on Monday. It’s meant to be a letter A:

Here, though, is the second attempt (not really mine, btw, but created by Fiddian based on my 'holding forth'):

This looks much more exciting. Imagine if I could produce a full alphabet of letters. I could end up printing a physical alpahabet that could be used for... printing!

Imagine if I could produce a set of letters and blocks in Blake’s original handwriting. We could create a set of 3D models that would allow anyone to block print their own hokey versions of Blake’s illuminated texts. We could all become makers of our own Blake books!

Now I’ve been somewhat obsessed with Blake for some time now and, in particular, in a time in his life (specifically 1794) when he was living and walking around North Lambeth dreaming up & making The [First] Book of Urizen and also Songs of Experience.

These are both extraordinary things to be making at any time, but what was going on in Blake’s life (and in his mind) to want to produce them right there and then?

I’m *still* researching & developing a geolocated audiowalk that guides people around this area whilst telling an imagined story about Blake and his wife attempting to make a living from ‘illuminated print’ - and also unlocking a new recitation of the Song of Urizen accompanied by (and inspired by?) sounds of both then and now.

Fairly regularly I like to walk the route of my Blakewalk and capture sounds that might be useful for the final production. For example, here’s the sounds of trains going overhead in the tunnel on Carlisle Lane:

Carlisle Lane by moongolfer

I’m imagining mixing these sounds with imagined sounds from 1794 as well as with music from that time such as this:

Marc Minkowski – Symphony drumroll in E flat major, hob. I:103 - Adagio - Allegro con spirito

Or this:

Frances Kelly – Musical Relicks of the Welsh Bards

It feels right too, though, to think that by walking this route, channelling Blake’s work and almost divining a story out of the ground upon which those feet must have walked (in ancient time etc), it might also be possible to make or print a little something. And Fiddian’s Makerbot is in just the right place to do that. Perhaps each person who takes the walk and listens to the audio is also triggering the Makerbot to pop out one extra letter or printing block, so that over time, the more people who walk, the more blocks there are from which to print new Blakean works on paper.

Ok, so I’ve got a long way to go and a lot to learn (downloading autocad 1-2-3D as we speak). But huzzah for Fiddian and his forward thinking idea of sharing a Makerbot and building up a community of Makers. I’m already looking forward to the next session.

P.S. check out the Makers Guild site and, in particular, forthcoming events at the V&A.

Making Stories Out Of Squiggles

At some point during his talk at Field Studies, Tim Ingold drew a squiggle on a whiteboard:

It looked a bit like this: 

He was talking about perception – in particular how we see and hear the world around us – and with this squiggle he was trying to show (I think) how anthropologists, in particular, have had a problem over the years about how to record accurately the experience of living within a community and comprehending its culture. (Someone else who attended this talk will almost certainly be able to report this better than I can.)

Tim repeatedly wanted to make the point that life, as it is lived, keeps going forward in a constant flow, so that any attempt to ‘record’ our experience of life in some ways always takes us out of that flow and forces us to look (and hear) backwards, and then ‘replay’ an experience.

So Tim’s squiggle was an attempt to show how an anthropologist might live in the flow of other people’s lives for a while, but would then loop back over that experience to where the journey had begun and would then replay it to the point where the journey stopped. Tim seemed to be claiming from this that all endings are imposed and somehow a falsification of actual experience. Is this right?

I got slightly obsessed with this squiggle - as you can already tell – and perhaps stopped paying close attention to Tim’s complicated but compelling arguments about how sound has been treated differently to sight over the centuries by intellectuals and cultural historians (most basically by talking about ‘sight & sound’ rather than ‘light & sound’ or ‘sight & hearing’.)

What interested me was how this squiggle might also be used to think about how writers take experiences and make stories out of them - imposing beginnings, middles and ends on chunks of life that are in reality just one continuous (meaningless? storyless?) flow.

I am starting to imagine a story structure that matches the squiggle.

(1) We start at the end, a scene or an event that somehow needs ‘explaining’.  

(2) We move forward in real time for a short while but with a slightly heightened perspective of the storyworld.

(3) Now we start heading back, already reviewing the end point of the story, but with some kind of overview rather than being ‘in the room’.

(4) I start to pick out significant moments from the past, significant in how they might relate to the end, without actually clearly stating or even understanding their significance. We stay ‘above’ the action.

(5)  We hit a key scene in the past where the experience of the story is actually lived again by the writer, a point where the storyteller is part of the story, too involved in the scene to be ‘dispassionate’.

(6) The writer is now working ‘below’ the storyline’, looking for undercurrents, themes, psychologies that can explain what’s been going on, and then reaches a third key point in the story, the point where the story *really* began, the trigger point for everything that came after.

(7) And now we start to replay events from this trigger point, events already described to us but which  start to have a pattern and a meaning we hadn’t perceived before. Til then the story had just been a set of selected points in time we scrolled back through without seeing any pattern. Now we can consider a key point both from above and from within.

(8) Perhaps now an event we’d logged before whilst going back into the past has a new hue, a new meaning now that we approach it from the other direction and with new knowledge of events that preceded it.

(9) And as we zoom down to an ending, the point where in fact the writer started, we come to that point with a new understanding, with a pattern defined, with the sense of an ending. What started as a bare fact, an isolated incident has now been imbued with significance, emotion, symbolism, meaning.

Now I have no idea whether this makes any sense at all. It is though (for me) an interesting (but not the only) way to think about story. (The story it makes me think of most of all btw is The Good Soldier). I’m already wondering what happens if I change the axes so that squiggle works symmetrically (well, almost).

Does that change things? Who knows? But I am indebted anyway to Tim Ingold (and Field Studies) for at least getting me thinking again about something that is pretty fundamental to a storyteller’s art.