The Multi-Coloured Vision of SerenA

We seem to be in the middle of a very busy, exciting spell of SerenA events in Dundee. We’re running three events next week as part of Dundee’s Small Society Lab; a lunchtime discussion around the controversial ‘Can we engineer serendipity?’ topic, followed by a hands-on workshop on the Semantic Web and Linked Open Data, and finally, a design-centred workshop on the relevance and importance of a prepared mind and reflection in serendipity.

You can find out more and book places for on these free events here (all taking place at the DCA, Dundee):

The Serendipity Panel
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 from 12:15 PM to 1:45 PM
Chasing Serendipity with Linked Open Data Workshop
Wednesday, June 27, 2012 from 2:00 PM to 5:00 PM
Design for the Prepared Mind Workshop
Thursday, 28 June 2012 from 10:00 AM to 12:30 PM

So that’s some near future plans, but last week we were fortunate enough to be invited along to D-AiR’s festival Performing Worlds. The aim of our session was to explore the ways creative practitioners document and reflect on activities and discover ways to map connections between artists, media and ideas. So, naturally, we devised a serendipitous maypole! Armed with multicoloured ribbons and SerenA document-capture cards, we painstakingly (and with scant regard for our own safety I might add) strung string, ribbon and cards around the fabulous space at Chamber East, part of the Fleet Collective, in Dundee.

Setting up the Serendipitous Maypole

Artists from the Performing Worlds Festival braved the dreich Dundee weather to join us and fill out small stacks of coloured cards (to document the ways in which they record reflections) before we would let them play with the ribbons. The ribbons were themed (themes were generated collectively from values ascribed to the Festival) and participants attached their written cards to appropriately themed ribbons. Analysis of the completed cards and themed ribbons will start after our next workshop, but the box of tangled maypole certainly looks interesting! Being truthful, we would have liked to ask participants to try and identify links between some of the cards, ribbons and themes, but we sadly ran out of time.

However, aside from it being an engaging visual exercise, here are some early thoughts emerging from this reflective workshop;

The timing of reflective activities is crucial. The festival was in its last day, and so, whilst on the one hand, documentation and events should be fresh in participants minds; on on the other hand, everyone had been so involved in festival activities that there hadn’t yet been any space for ‘down time’ or self-reflection. And of course, everyone was pretty exhausted.
Emotion Object Card from SerenA workshop

Documentation does happen, whether or not we are consciously aware of it. In the context of the festival, organisers had set up a daily scroll which was passed round the group as an invitation to document or note down transient images or thoughts (similar to the exquisite corpse method). But the notes we collected hinted at more. The act of being asked to reflect captured not just previously captured thoughts (e.g. in the form of written notes or recorded audio), but memories and emotions too (see image to the right).
On reading a few of the cards, several of the ‘future-casting’ questions (asking ‘what are your future plans for this element of documentation?’), were answered as ‘it exists’ or ‘no future. [They are] just stones’. This reminds me of hearing the DCA’s Clive Gillman speaking recently at a Small Society Lab event, when he stated that, “Most of what we do is useless”.
‘Useless’, he went on to explain, means having no actual functional use, but noted that actually ‘useless’ aims or goals are vitally important to the quality and meaning of life (e.g. listening to music is ‘useless’, meeting up in community groups is ‘useless’ and so on). So is documenting fleeting moments ‘useless’ in the same sense, especially if we have no concrete notions of how this documentation might be used in the future? Does it allow us to reflect on those instances which enrich our lives overall? We would argue, yes, it does.