Mapping Time: Collectivity, Work, Bodies

by anja k. and manuela z.

framework
What we propose is to set up (1) conversations/ interviews through a nice process in collaboration with the organizations/people that are involved on site, to get a sense of how time flows in those places/lives we visit and take moments to reflect with the people there about what we find out about ways of relating to time and temporality in that context. The (2) workshops would be the moments where that would be collectively discussed and made sense of. We would like to follow these conversations up with (3) a reflection (in writing/notes, which may eventually become a text for the publication). Aside from the broader encounters and online platforms, our way of sharing our research would be in working with these groups locally.

methodology
We will be working with different layers of mapping relating to temporality and time:
* a layer that functions a bit like a time budget study;
* a layer about speeds and movements in the city/local area;
* a layer about temporalities of conviviality;
* a layer about pathologies of the body and psyche that relate to hyperexcitement, depression, etc.
We may add or take off a layer, given on what we find at each site. So in working through those diagrams with people, getting them to map their own situation on them, we aim to get a sense of how these different layers are interconnected and produce ways of thinking about and experiencing time and temporality. We want to get to the question of how we live our lives and how we can change those things that we see are blocking us, which we hope to locate via the maps.
Like the future archive and vocabulatories, there's a consulting-therapeutic-political dimension to the format we're proposing.

maps, annotations, face to face and online
Our idea for the conversations concretely is to work with those maps. So this is the face to face part of the project.
In terms of the online component: we think pad.ma is a great tool and valuable resource for sharing materials across the project and beyond. But annotate and upload every single video in real time would take a lot of time away from what we scheduled and also be somewhat superfluous given that we're proposing a visual layer to the video (the map-makings) that basically ís annotation, even if embedded in the video itself.
We put things online when we think they are valuable and accessible enough that people might actually watch them. But we suspect this won't be the case with all our tik conversations, not because they won't be interesting of course but because they'll be quite long (1-2hrs) and probably not all of them will be flashing exciting in terms of their tempo, but probably more subtle, intricate and slow processes. Which is why we proposed to either upload all of them without annotation or to upload a selection, for instance one video per place, and annotate it properly. I'd estimate that to lightly annotate 2hours of video will be 3 hours of work.
Although, what would make most sense for pad.ma would be to use our reflections/notes on the conversations and workshops as the stuff to annotate one single video with - the one of the collective workshop.
For us it would be a really nice process to annotate the video of each workshop properly, in a way that isn't necessarily linear in terms of what gets put down on what point on the timeline - so for instance to bring all our notes and impressions of distinct conversations together in the annotation of the workshop video.

www.futurearchive.org
and more specifically this:
http://futurearchive.org/static/p_activismandactivistspeech.html

some of the videos/audios we made in that context, in case you want to play them, are:
http://futurearchive.org/movies/24
http://futurearchive.org/movies/25
http://futurearchive.org/movies/26

we also wrote a text to evaluate that work:
http://www.metamute.org/en/subject/politics/social_movements?page=2

and these are some radio shows we made:
http://futurearchive.org/movies/12
http://futurearchive.org/movies/13

www.vocabulaboratories.net
– that site seems offline right now but i'm working to get it back up soon..

the shangai-project
http://transitlabour.asia/shanghai/

get in touch if you've questions or ideas! manuela.zw —-aaaaatttt—- gmail.com

dear TIKkers!

As some of you may know, we will be hosting a series of conversations/ interviews in Brussels from Monday 15th - Thursday 18th November. This is an email to see if you or someone you know may like to participate.

The idea is to map and chat about about how we relate to time/temporality in our lives and collective practices, and to share our different understandings and tools around that in a workshop.

These will be relatively free flowing conversations around the theme of time in relation to collectivity, labour, the body and sociality. We'll use a creative mapping method to track and guide the conversation. The mapping (hands, pens and voices, no faces) will likely be filmed and annotated on pad.ma. We can keep that anonymous if anyone wishes.

We're looking to do 4-5 of these interviews between 15th-17th Nov. They will culminate in a final workshop where we share findings and produce a collective mapping of sorts. The workshop is to be held over 4 hours on Thursday 18th (daytime) with all those who participate.

Here's who we are looking for -

- people engaged in a collective practice of some sort (arts org, political group, band, tea club, etc)
- and who can can ideally bring another person from that group to the interview and workshop
- and who we can speak to in english or german (one of us also speaks french and spanish, but we're hoping to keep most of it in english or german)

We are looking for participants of a diverse age range, from 15-90, so based on who replies to our mail we will try to find the most diverse match of participants.

If you want to participate:

we'd need you to join us for a 1-2 hour interview on either Monday 15th/ Tuesday 16th or Wednesday 17th November, and then for a final workshop of 4 hours on Thursday 18th.

we'll provide food and tea – and for non-tik people, of course a tik publication with a text we'll eventually write on our findings.

Please email us if you are interested in taking part, and please feel free to circulate this!

thanks and looking forward to meeting some of you soon

Anja + Manuela

greetings from shanghai!
we're about to kick off our mappings here, so thought i'd send you the layout so you can an idea. and if you want to show this during the presentation. i don't think we'll get to scan the filled in ones before we leave from here next week, so i think it's safer for you to have the rough ones - i'll explain them to you a bit in case you want to try fill them in and present them like that.

so the first one is a time-budget study type table, quite easy to understand i think. it should lead into discussions on how one spends ones time versus how one would like to and how one used to, as well as helping identify rhythms, cycles and patterns. this rhythms question is really very interesting to me… the way to go about this graph is to color in the dots where you think you are spending time doing sth… the fuller the dot, the more time/intensity you spend on this. a bit like a moon:)

the second one is of convivial time. here the idea is that you write key people you relate to next to the dots of the top part, and then link them up with the activities at the bottom where they apply. this is to get talking about different modes of relational time.

then a map of the body - you mark in tensions, pain etc you have in parts of your body on any of the people in the picture, and maybe write a bit more specifically what/why these symptoms. that map is to be related to the time-study and help identify how modes of inhabiting time and work affect our bodies and produce pathologies.

then the fourth map is a hexagram on which you mark out how much different aspects weigh in relation to a specific situation or job you are in. you end up drawing something like a more or less star shaped (that is, if you're balanced) figure in its middle, using the lines to measure how much of what aspects you get. this one is from some of the collectives we're working with.

the fifth one is a map of the city, where we ask people to mark different temporal zones in the city, i won't attach that but you can imagine i think.

so this is the combo we're working with here! there may be a freestyle part too, though not sure about this yet. we'll let you know how it goes once we're freer again!

sorry we won't get to do a streaming from here, our access to videocamera fell through so we're working with audio for this one, and our program of interviews and talks is really tight while we're here. this is the project we're working on here in case we didn't send you the link yet http://transitlabour.asia/about/

hope all is well in brussels. take care,

manuela / anja