Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, the theoretical dissertation I completed for my BA (Hons), was a big deal.

It was a big deal for me personally because it was a breakthrough in terms of my skill as a researcher and writer.

But it was a big deal academically too because it was a 30,000 word thesis that received the highest mark of my graduating year and was also bestowed with a research excellence award.

I had put a lot of work into and had planned to achieve a solid first from it, but I had never envisioned attaining the result I ultimately did achieve with it.

The success I achieved with Ways of Being came as a huge surprise and it opened a lot of doors; particularly regarding the undertaking of a master’s degree, which was something I had not previously given serious thought towards.

Ways of Being was a consideration of the epistemological, ontological and metaphysical downfalls of film theory’s understandings of the spectator and the spectacle; with particular emphasis directed towards the neurobiological implications of the spectator’s body.

The research focus of Ways of Being was something that I was passionately interested in and which I had only scratched the surface of within the submitted thesis paper.

There were a great deal of loose ends, both in the main body of the work and also in the appendices, that I really wanted to continue further.

In particular, Appendices A, F and I (which had once been the basis of another chapter in the main body) were two of the key sources of continuation.

Ultimately, Ways of Being and its success ended up becoming the main driving for behind undertaking a master’s degree; with the potential of undertaking a PhD further down the line.

But deciding what master’s degree I wanted to pursue and how I was going to fund it took a very long time for me to figure out.

In the meantime, I decided to keep my research focus active and created the Ways 2 Interface blog where I could record my latest findings and theorizations.

As much as Ways 2 Interface was a continuation of my theoretical dissertation, it was also a continuation of my practical dissertation, EYES.

EYES was a web series concept proposal package that was a reflexive expression of contemporary networking attitudes and their implications on our ways of being.

The proposal package included a produced pilot episode, a series bible and a producer’s planning portfolio document.

The package also included a blog, EYES of a Storyteller, that I used to chronical the development of the project and Ways 2 Interface very continues in the same vein of its loose and transdisciplinary blogging style.

Ultimately, while I didn’t end up continuing my research in a traditional master’s degree, Ways 2 Interface did serve much the same bridging purpose between my BA (Hons) and the creation of my MTA Portfolio.

The curriculum of the traditional master’s degree I had planned on undertaking, Creative Technologies and Enterprise, but ultimately abandoned was also absorbed into the makeup of my MTA Portfolio.

Ways 2 Interface had a huge part to play in to create of my MTA concentration in Multimedia Studies and Creative Technologies and, for a time, very much serves as an adjunct blog to it.

“We watch films with our eyes and ears, but we experience films with our minds and bodies. Films do things to us, but we also do things with them. A film pulls a surprise; we jump. It sets up scenes; we follow them. It plants hints; we remember them. It prompts us to feel emotions”

– David Bordwell, The Viewer’s Share: The Model of Mind in Explaining Film, 2012

The point of Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle was to open up the relationship the spectator has with the spectacle and show that it is much more nuanced than merely the spectator passively taking in the spectacle.

“we need to understand how the spectator views, absorbs, receives, engages, experiences, constructs, desires, negotiates, manipulates, participates, fantasises, debates, infers, identifies, critiques, addresses, senses, recreates and integrates with the cinematic fiction [spectacle].”

– Ways of Being: The Spectator and the Spectacle, 2013:36

This is why in Appendix A of the paper, I started to put together redefinitions of the spectator and the spectacle to better express their complex interactions.

What I came up with was…

• The spectator redefined as the perceiving participator
• The spectacle redefined as the spectacle experiencing situation

But, again, something was missing because the perceiving participator and the spectacle experiencing situation were not providing a fully accurate description because, like the spectator and the spectacle terms, they were treating this combined relationship as being made up of two fundamental separated entities:

“cinematic experience [and all content experience] remain phenomenolgically and philosophically undertheorized, in my view, so long as the events on-screen and the spectator are each considered individually, as isolated entities separate from one another. One needs to enlarge the frame of description and know how to draw – behind the back of the spectator, so to speak – a second screen on which the osmotic exchange between the so-called spectator and the events on the primary screen becomes visible.”

– Christiane Voss,  Film Experience and the Formation of Illusion, 2011:139

The truth of the spectator and the spectacle is not the spectator and the spectacle, the truth of the spectator and the spectacle is:

The-spectator-and-the-spectacle (or the-perceiving-participator-and-the-spectacle-experiencing-situation)

They are always a connected unit, the inputs and direct considerations of that unit are always in flux, but the basic unit always remains – it is a fundamental subjective gravity of our cognition.

The fallacy of Ways of Being, in regards to my dissection of the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle, is in the way that I discuss them as being what are fundamentally separate entities and only becoming combined as a result of an external interface – The device that exhibits the spectacle and allows the spectator access to it.

When we talk of the spectator and the spectacle in this separated fashion, we are getting a step ahead of ourselves.

In order to understand the relationship of the spectator and the spectacle, we need to take a step back and examine the nature of the fundamental internal cognitive process that makes the spectator and the spectacle, as separations, a reality.

This process is the internal interface – The cognitive interface inside every human mind.

The interface is what Christiane Voss is talking about when talks about a second screen behind the back of the spectator: “on which the osmotic exchange between the so-called spectator and the events on the primary screen becomes visible.”

The Interface is the central focus of Ways 2 Interface because it offers the best means to reconceive of the spectator and the spectacle as fundamentally not being separate entities and to explore the internal workings of that combined entity.

I am not the first to talk about the interface in this way, but since the very recent all-pervasive overload of technological interfaces onto the consumer market there seems to be a growing consideration towards the larger conceptual frameworks the interface can offer us:

“our perceptions constitute a species-specific user interface that guides behavior in a niche. Just as the icons of a PC’s interface hide the complexity of the computer, so our perceptions usefully hide the complexity of the world, and guide adaptive behavior. This interface theory of perception offers a framework, motivated by evolution, to guide research in object categorization. This framework informs a new class of evolutionary games, called interface games, in which pithy perceptions often drive true perceptions to extinction”

– Donald D. Hoffman, The Interface Theory of Perception, 2009:1

Of all the interface considerations, Hoffman’s Interface Theory of Perception offers us the best place or perspective from which to begin a re-conception of the spectator and the spectacle; not only because It gives my own thoughts on the subject a leg to stand on, but because the computer simulation data he has already demonstrated that his theory holds some ground.

“Why all this horsepower in the brain just to look? The idea from Cognitive Neuroscience is that perception, vision is really just a reality engine; in real time you’re creating all the depths, colours, motions, shapes, textures and objects that you see, so you are creating the reality that you experience right now. You’re not just taking a snapshot of a world that was already there.”

– Donald D. Hoffman, 2013.

In presentation below Hoffman outlines his Interface Theory of Perception and how is impacts our conception of consciousness. You can read more of his research here. 

“We pay good money for user interfaces because we don’t want to deal with the over-whelming complexity of software and hardware in a PC. A user interface that slavishly reconstructed all the diodes, resistors, voltages and magnetic fields in the computer would probably not be a best seller. The user interface is there to facilitate our interactions with the computer by hiding its causal and structural complexity, and by displaying useful information in a format that is tailored to our species projects, such as painting or writing.”

– Donald D. Hoffman, The Interface Theory of Perception, 2009:11

However, this is not to say that there is not a world external to us, Hoffman’s theory is just saying that we have evolved to see that world according to our species specific interface framework.

The interfacing relationship relationship between the-perceiving-participator-and-the-spectacle-experiencing-situation and the interface framework that would reveal is what the posts on Ways 2 Interface were going to theorize about.

I also planned to use the blog to document related research of other practitioners that I would pull apart and attempt to apply to my own theorizing.

Then, eventually, my plan was to take all the thinking collected on the Ways 2 Interface blog and apply it to a full-fledge research project as part of a fully accredited master’s degree.

My thinking was to build on the non-empirical research of Ways of Being and Ways 2 Interface by conducting first hand empirical research in an attempt to prove my theories on the interface.

I was very keen to take my media-centric research and explore it more broadly through the fields of cognitive psychology and neuroscience.

But I ultimately elected to pursue the equally difficult task of building my own master’s degree from scratch.

However, my thinking and theorizing regarding the ‘the interface’ can be discerned in the first set of blog posts I wrote for the Ways 2 Interface blog which I have now reposted on the ibuiltmyown.education blog…

Welcome #2interface: Something New and Fantastic!

Unfinished Business: The Story of the Interface

Spectatorship redux: why we need to re-understand the spectator and the spectacle

An Ambitious Project: Understanding the Interface of the Spectator and the Spectacle

The Interface: Reconsidering the Terminology and the Perspective of Understanding

The Network-Narrative: The World Wide Interface

The Digital Rebirth: From the Cave of Complacency to the Age of the Upgrade

Consuming while being content: ‘consumer’ + ‘content’ = IDEAL?

Complexity Specific Accuracy from the Outset: The Perceiving Participator and the Spectacle Experiencing Situation

The Interface of Reality: Spontaneous philosophizing about the nature of what is real in the 21st century

I used Google’s Blogger platform to create the Ways 2 Interface blog as I had prior experience with using Blogger to create my Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller blogs.

The original name for the blog and research project was originally Ways of Interfacing to better match with its precursor Ways of Being.

But I very quickly changed it to Ways 2 Interface which was much more punchier and, with the inclusion of ‘2’ in the name, stylistically conveyed that it was the second phase of the research I was undertaking.

I always envisioned Ways 2 Interface, a more widely media focused blog, being a sister blog to Something to do with Film, my much more specific film focused blog that I started in 2011 when I was studying my BA (Hons).

I also saw it as being an extension of my EYES of a Storyteller blog which I had brought to a conclusion in 2013.

To this end, I adopted the same blog layout from my  Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller blogs for use with Ways 2 Interface.

Originally I used a professional looking magazine style blog skin that was created outside of Blogger but I found it to be quite restrictive.

So I instead went back to using the same in-house Blogger blog skins I had used for Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller.

For the Ways 2 Interface layout, I widened the right side panel to better accommodate the content and widgets I placed there.

I also inverted the colour of the background of the blog posts panel to further differentiate it from the two previous blogs.

But comparing it to the design of the Something to do with Film blog and EYES of a Storyteller blogs, there are clear similarities in layout with all blogs plainly being related to one-another.

The background image of the blog is the old power circuit board I removed from my television and replaced with a non-faulty one.

Originally I utilised the full colour image of the circuit board, but later changed it to monochrome so as to make it less distracting and impactful on the content on the pain panels of the blog.

The next clear distinction was the design of the banner image which would serve as the main brand identity for Ways 2 Interface.

With the banner images for Something to do with Film and EYES of a Storyteller, I aimed to keep their designs as visual and immediately discernable as possible.

Granted, there is text present on both of the previous two banners, but I only ever put as much as I felt was necessary for introducing the basic concept of each blog.

But for the Ways 2 Interface blog, I wanted the banner image to be heavy on text and information

I wanted a banner image that would quite literally be a heads up display to play into blog’s reflexive nature and essential concept of ‘the interface’.

The image I started with was a photograph I took at the BFI IMAX in 2013 while myself and the rest of the audience were waiting for The Dark Knight Trilogy all-nighter to begin.

I didn’t originally take this photo because I planned to eventually use it for the branding of a blog.

Rather, I took it because I wanted to visually document the vast size of the BFI IMAX – the biggest cinema screen in the UK – which is almost impossible to do without a very wide-angle lens.

However I went with the photo of the audience in the BFI IMAX mainly because…

1. The IMAX medium and the BFI IMAX were two inspirations for Ways of Being, my dissertation precursor to Ways 2 Interface
2. The image contained a number of different interfaces and points of view, i.e. people using their smartphones, one person taking an picture with their smartphone, various people staring directly into my lens, other people looking elsewhere, some people are wearing glasses which act as an interface between them and the external world, there is the interface of the projection room window.
3. The dominant red glow of the image reminded me of the heads up display from the Terminator movies, which itself is another form of interface and was an aesthetic I wanted to replicate in the blog banner.

The blog banner changed a couple of times mainly from where I would add more text information to it or would adjust the information therein.

The final form it took occurred when I decided to transition Ways 2 Interface away from being a research project in its own right and more of a study log and personal journal.

As I was also experimenting with social media at the time and planned to explore the interfacing natures of social media as part of the research project, I also created a hashtag specifically for the blog.

I did create a Twitter account specifically for Ways 2 Interface on which I routinely used the #2interface hashtag.

But the @ways2interface Twitter account didn’t really go anywhere so I eventually deleted the account and instead focused all my marketing efforts on my personal social media accounts.

I had also planned on creating various additional info images to visually present aspects of the research I was undertaking, but never got beyond the one below.

The Ways 2 Interface blog also originally had its own URL – www.ways2interface.com – which I purchased.

I also purchased the similar www.waystointerface.com URL and set it up as a redirect to ways2interface.com because I worried that if someone was typing in the name (which is very rare these days) they would type ‘to’ opposed to ‘2’.

I discontinued using the paid for URLs when my focus shifted from Ways 2 Interface over to what ended up becoming ibuiltmyown.education.

Then I reverted back to using the free blogger URL www.ways2interface.blogpsot.com which is why a lot of the hyperlinks in the pages and posts of the blog no longer work because they’re still set to the ways2interface.com URL.

The focus of the Ways 2 Interface blog naturally shifted as my time and attention gradually moved more towards the building of my MTA Portfolio.

For me, I had a deep and keen interest in researching how we interface with reality (I still do now) but it all boiled down to being able to perform legitimate research to explore those concepts.

In my mind, legitimate research requires the backing of a fully accredited master’s degree which I didn’t have and wasn’t likely to have anytime soon because I elected to construct my own master’s degree.

Therefore, if I was not going to pursue a fully accredited degree, preparing the research for one was largely a waste of my time, which was already being eaten up with the task of building my own master’s degree from scratch.

For a time, Ways 2 Interface served much the same role as ibuiltmyown.education, it held the identity and progress of my MTA Portfolio (or Postgraduate 2.0 Studies, as it was then known).

The studies page is no longer present on the Ways 2 Interface blog, but I have re-posted it as a blog post on the ibuiltmyown.education blog.

I also used Ways 2 Interface to blog about the MOOCs I was studying (something I have not really done on ibuiltmyown.education as I implemented its blog after I had completed the majority of the study component).

Parallel to this, and partly because many of the MOOCs I was studying delved into this, I was continuing to dabble with post about my interest in mass communications and media studies.

So, in addition to it being my study log, I also increasing viewed Ways 2 Interface as being the wider media focused blog space to cover anything that Something to do with Film could not cover because of its film-centric focus.

But eventually even its more general media focus fizzled out.

In hindsight, I wish I had kept Ways 2 Interface going a bit longer because I could have used the blog to document the further development of my MTA Portfolio and the building of ibuiltmyown.education and then handed over the duties when ibuiltmyown.education.

I’ve properly tied up the blog now that I have written up this component page as part of my Creative Technologies Sandbox.

But will I ever pick up the research I started first in my Ways of Being dissertation and then in my Ways 2 Interface blog?

Possibly.

It all really depends if I ever do get around to studying a fully accredited master’s degree.