British Sociological Association Annual Conference 2009

We gave our research its first public airing in the form of a Poster at the recent Annual Conference of the British Sociological Association on Friday 17th April. The conference took place conveniently in Cardiff at City Hall. Despite the heavy rain the poster was delivered dry and was lovingly attached to the boards. The content and design of the poster compared favorably with others on display. Revealing the poster in public has given us confidence in our research activity and direction.
Ashley and I attended one day of the three day event and were treated to a range of interesting presentations. There were several themes, I focused on Culture, Media and Society. Reflecting on the quality of presentations has given us ideas about how to present our paper at next weeks WIRAD Emerging researchers conference in Newport.
Exciting times for Gridlocked!

WIRAD Paper

Ian and I are making great progress on the paper for the WIRAD Conference, which we need to be, as the deadline is the 13th of March.

I am addressing a number of areas for the WIRAD paper which are as follows: exploring surveillance, visibility and observation, locating panopticonism, increased technology, from the exteriority of cctv's to the interiority of webcams, where power comes from, and a synopsis of the game Gridlocked.

I am trying to order my reading and writing in a linear way, I've looked at texts and theories on surveillance, and now I am exploring texts about games and gaming about which I know very little, and I am finding it really interesting to engage with a whole new area. I am particularly enjoying a book called The Video Game Theory Reader, choc full of diverse research and ideas, from psychoanalysis and Avatars to sexuality in videogames - its fascinating stuff.
Its also giving me ideas about further research I'd like to do about Geeks.

I've just found this which is the most succinct way of defining Panopticons:
'all embracing in a single view' (Ainley, 2001)

Ethics and video capture

UWIC Application for Ethics Approval
I have recently submitted an Ethics Approval Form to the Schools Ethics Committee to obtain permission to approach the public to capture video as well as observe and record users emotional response to the 'wall of video'. We are awaiting the Committees decision.

PHOTOGRAPHIC and/or VIDEO RELEASE FORM for research purposes
I have also written a video release form which asks subjects to sign the following statement... "I hereby grant permission to use any and all photographic imagery and video footage taken and any audio recorded of me on the date entered below, without payment or any other consideration. I understand that such materials may be published electronically or in print, or used in presentations or exhibitions. We will have to create something similar when we observe users experiencing the game."

Video Capture
The game needs 32 video clips to build the grid. They need to be captured in varying lighting conditions and with a range of gender, ages and race. This variety is essential to convince the participant of the game that they have been randomly captured by the game.
I have developed a method of creating short seamlessly looped video clips in order that they appear to be live.

1. Capture
Subject to remain still with minimum movement of body and arms but with a focus on recording breathing and blinking together with small head movements in order to convince the user of live feed video. 30 seconds are recorded whilst the subject watches a digital clock in the center of the screen. I have been using the iSight camera built into an Apple MacBook Pro laptop running iMovie software.

2. Edit
Select 6 or 7 seconds of video and repeat it in the timeline, reversing so that it becomes a seamless loop.

3. Export
Quicktime files are created at 160x120 pixels. No audio is included. Matt Leighfield compresses the file with Visual Hub and inserts them into the grid.

Synopsis of the game

I wanted to state clearly what the Gridlocked game is in around 200 words. 240 words actually. Here is my first draft...

The visual structure of the game simulates a panopticon substituting prison cells for a revolving wall of video showing computer users captured by webcams. The computer user becomes the observer/guard/game player. Each video clip is seamlessly looped, appearing to the player as continuous live video feed. Once the player gives permission for their webcam to become active, their video image, in real time, will also be included in the wall of video. The player will appear to be locked into the grid, gridlocked. The player will discover their entrapment serendipitously. Therefore the player is not only the observer/guard but also appears to be the observed.

Entrapment
Timecode will be included in each video clip (with randomly allocated starting points between 30 and 10 minutes) counting down to zero. Some video clips will be set at zero and will show a distressed static image of a trapped subject. The game will last up to 30 minutes and as the video clips reach zero they will change from moving image to static distressed image.

Escape
The aim of the game is to escape from the grid before the timecode reaches zero. The player will be able to discover oral clues within video clips by rollover. The clues will lead to a small number of simple challenges in order that the participant may stop the timecode from reaching zero, avoiding becoming trapped in the game forever.

Exciting Instalments

Following on from the post yesterday, Ian and I are making great progress. In a meeting yesterday, we've decided that we need to have a methodical stratagem to approach these two conferences.

I have been collating information, and have developed an outline of the paper, I need Ian to write a synopsis of the game so that we have a point of discussion. We have decided that we are still in the preliminary stages of the research, so we may not get round to actually conducting qualitative research before we give our presentations.

The WIRAD paper might just explore where are how Ian and I started working together and propose some areas that we will explore in future. For the BSA conference, we need to produce a beautiful poster outlining our research questions and again, we will propose areas to be explored in future.

Another opportunity has presented itself, there is a call for papers from the online journal Surveillance and Society - http://www.surveillance-and-society.org for an October Issue of the journal called: Performance, New Media, and Surveillance. The deadline is 31st of March, so I am also working towards submitting for that, too. In for a penny, in for a pound, eh?

Ian is doing sterling work with consent forms, and has sent an outline of our research to the School's Ethics Committee. He has also been busy collecting images for the game, so its going to look really cool.

So there we are, all up and running, keep reading for another exciting instalment!

Latest Gridlocked News

I've been having some thoughts about our research, as deadlines for three different, yet related things seem to be appearing very rapidly on the horizon.

Ian and I are presenting our paper at the WIRAD conference, the deadline for the full paper deadline is the 13th of March, which now I think about it, is more time than I thought, but still, no point procrastinating.

I have decided that for this paper, we will write an account of what we wish to do, i.e. the direction in which our research will be going. I have asked Ian to write a short account of what the game 'Gridlocked' actually entails, this will give us more substance to get our teeth into and both give focus to and inform structure of the discussion in the paper.

Research Assistant Update

Starting to look at the Panopticon idea Ian has described elsewhere on the blog, this is the start of the Flash based experiments stemming from this research: