The Palimpsest Project

View Allen's 2019 Spring Symposium presentation in which he discusses the beginning and the future of the Palimpsest project.

Description of the video:

Hello, I'm Allen Hahn. I'm a faculty member in the department of theater, drama and contemporary dance here at IU, where I teach lighting design. I've been a professional designer for theatre, opera and dance since, oh gosh, for a long time, 25 years or more. And been here at IU since 2014. I come to IU from the professional world, not from elsewhere in academia. That's one of the things that gives me value here about. And I continue to practice professionally as a lighting designer around the country and around the country and internationally as well. One of the things that appealed to me about the prospect of working at IU is I use a status as a research one institution as a theatre artist. I'm accustomed to scrambling for any and all resources available to me, dollars, hours in the day to make mouse as a theatre maker was and remains a genuine thrill to explore. In my time here at IU, I've been able to take advantage of the university's resources to expand my creative practice into other media, most notably film making. In 2017, New Frontier and new frontiers grant a colleague and I received to make a dance film. The film has been out for a little more than a year and going around to festivals in the US and Europe, attracted some notoriety in some positive notices, awards and things. And that Liu, for which I'm grateful, this present project, the fellowship called palimpsest in many ways for me, constitutes the first opportunity I've found to engage in what I think is more genuinely considered research. I look forward to telling you a little about it. Struggled a little bit to come up with a concise definition of palimpsests. The best of, the best I can do right now is a place-based immersive mediated interactive performance. So that's a mouthful, huh? There's some of you may know the term alternate reality game. I think it also fits pretty well into that category, but it's not the first work I've done in this space. In 2008, I develop the project. I developed a project called The Secret City, which you can see some images of here. The Secret city existed in two iterations, one of which was done in the Broderick Carnegie Library, the first library Andrew Carnegie ever funded the construction of. And it was kind of a cool opportunity to explore this Groovy or building a one day only thing done on Governors Island in something like 2010, that sort of traffic similar experience. But the reason for making that work at the time was I think I was beginning to acknowledge that I was not significantly challenged in my work as a lighting designer having to serve in that narrow challenged in my work as a lighting designer, having to serve in that narrowly defined role. So I was looking for another creative outlet. Also tuned in to conversations at the time looking back at recent history and how Web 2 technology had helped to dissolve the boundaries of and through international networks of communication was now facilitating collaborative relationships and business relationships of all kinds across continents and across oceans. So at the time all of that was in the rear view mirror. And what was being talked about then in 2008, Future of mobile technology and smartphones heralded and how that might play a role in the development of culture. I started to wonder if this era of pervasive media and ubiquitous computing on which we were beginning to embark in 2008. Couldn't do for the boundaries of time of time. What's Web 2 had done for the boundaries of place? Could we imaginatively engage mobile technology to blur the lines and limitations of linear time. So in making that early work and now and making the palimpsests project, I'm wanting to find a way to use mobile to glimpse the past in the world around us even now. So the way palimpsest would work Is it wouldn't be a story about a different world, but rather a way of looking at our world if it worked on a different set of principles. So this set of principles that the narrative proposes is that the use of this app that we'll be developing your phone becomes kind of a divining rod that has the ability to detect where around campus historical events have taken place that are available for you to experience it in some way. I have ideas about in the story world of the experience this having been co-opted edutainment app thing that is now starting to malfunction in interesting ways. Along the way, Peter Parker was imbued with special abilities when he had that encounter with the spider and whenever that crazy technology was. So, but the idea of palimpsest is that using the app you can move through or interesting spaces rich in history with a kind of a character and patina to them. To explore content related to the University's history. And the stories presented through palimpsests would not be presented as actual history or having historical solidity in the traditional sense, traditional sense, but instead would be more in the vein of historical fiction. So based on real characters but intended not to describe what happened so much as evoke larger truths about the university community in this earlier era. And in light of the social contract at the time of that individual story element. That significantly these would not be the names of, rather these would not be the stories of people whose names now adorn buildings there, Herman Wells is, and so on. But rather people, like most of us people engaged in the daily struggles of life, seeking to do well for ourselves in the world. While also ascribing to a set of so-called enlightenment values intended to strengthen communities and culture through our individual efforts And what I've come to realize is that the stories I'm wanting to tell, our story that point to the University's own motto, Lux a very tass, right? Light and truth. I think we all try our bass right light and truth. I think we all try our best to live lives in which light and truth are valued, practiced, and modeled. And so the palimpsest experience means to point at those things. And this gets back to the reasons for making the work. Maybe am I continuing to explore those things I mentioned earlier in the 2008 version and the secret city of how mobile technology can unite, how storytelling can capitalize on mobile technology and how to expand theatrical storytelling to involve these technologies. But the question I'm adding to all of that now is in this love that now is in this current era of lies and exaggeration, cam fiction be used to reveal larger truths about our world. So in applying for the Fellowship, I had initially targeted by now making a proof of concept version that would be playable in a, in a, in a beta test kind of way for an invited audience. But what I've found is that for want of a working model for creating something as sprawling as this. As well as the demands I'm under as a faculty member of one and my area of lighting design and my home department. The actual making of something has challenged in the extreme by the the other demands on my time which materialize each month in a paycheck and need to be taken seriously. So that's not to say I haven't made the progress, only that it doesn't look at all the way aspire to, but has been more foundational and in its nature more ruminative. But I've communitive. I feel like it's left me at the doorstep of actually making something. So I'll talk about some of that progress in the time that remains. For One thing, I've I've had an extraordinary number of fruitful conversations here at IU as well as further afield. The project has received the enthusiastic support of who's a driving force behind the development of the Arts and Humanities here on the Bloomington campus. A lot of exciting stuff Ed has got going that I'm sure many of you know about as well. I've had dialogues and encouragement from faculty members elsewhere in the humanities, including Fritz bright helped swear in the humanities, including Fritz bright helped, whose research around narrative and empathy falls along similar lines to what palimpsest is about and is trying to do as well as Marko donor Mura, whose passion for games finds its place in his work in the classroom, as well as an advocate in his work in the classroom, as well as a vocation of his as a reviewer of board games. So it's my hope to continue dialogue with both of these guys, capitalize on their expertise. And I hope build palimpsest as a tool for research that can be put to use. By them and other researchers in the arts and humanities, the Media School, including Nathan Michler and we'll EMI, whose work in alternate reality games goes back quite a few years, and Mike Sellers, who runs the game design program, all of them have expressed enthusiasm for, for this project and I hope to continue my relationships with them in an advisory and advisory capacity largely. So while none of these folks is actively involved in the development of the project, they're Council has led me in a forward direction. And two relationships with others that have been more concrete, including other fellow in school of media and Herbert. Herbert who's, who's too as part of the palimpsest experience. Puzzle designer, adam, structure of code and key escape room here in town. And Andy Web, who's been a great sounding board for me, Andes at the 3D Fab Lab here in the wells library. There are other relationships further afield, that further afield that ours Concrete among them, longtime friend and occasional collaborator, the novelist and playwright Gordon dial quest has agreed to play a role in story development. And then most promising Langley, I have a commitment from a fellow named Ian Garratt company in, in Garratt whose company toaster lab, has developed a robust technological platform on which we'll build palimpsest. So this spares me the arduous work of creating a technology platform from the ground up to do all this stuff. Since Ian's already got something in put together this platform with the rest of the toaster Lab team of three supportive an original project of theirs done at the Edinburgh Festival in 2017. That project was called transmission. And you can see some images from that here that experience woven narrative around half a dozen or so characters sitters seeding locations around Edinburgh with mediated content of various kinds. While that story was altogether different than the one palimpsests wants to tell. It did have an impressive flexibility, allowing the player to navigate that story either by character based on their GPS position or chronological sequence. Within the stories. There's multifaceted means of story engagement makes the toaster lab platform just right for building palimpsest on more recently II and has been awarded $250 thousand grant by the Canada Council for the Arts digital strategy funds for the foundation of a two-year initiative called the mixed reality performance. I tell Yay. At the core of the proposal in his included partnerships with a number of artists to develop work through a process modeled after the so-called boost approach. Embeds technologists of various kinds with artists and teams developing work to include AR and VR capacity in furthering the work. So the Mixed Reality performance that tell a will make resources of this kind and expertise of this kind available to diverse set of artists. Part of Ian's proposal is specifically for the development of palimpsests. So the relationships and the dialogues I've had are robust and have helped me refine my ideas of the project, but they only constitute one mention of the progress I've made. The other dimension in which I've made discernible progress, discernible progress under the fellowship relate more to the development of story ideas and ideas about the story world of palimpsests. By any objective measure, this looks like the equivalent of a desk piled high with papers in no apparent order. So I'm not going to try to horn swagger you into thinking the pieces fit together in a coherent as yet they do not. I'll just run through a few of these things and hope to find some images to go along with these ideas to keep you from falling asleep altogether. So I've had a number of dialogues with Kerry ssh wire at the IU archive given rise to a number of story ideas because the palimpsest experiences about number of story ideas. Because the palimpsest experiences about exploring multiple periods over the course of the University's history, not a single one. But among the more compelling threads I've begun to pull that based on my conversation with Kerry involve the Civil War era and the university community at that time. She turned me on to an interesting artifact they have in the collection at the IU archive called the butter not badge, which you can see right there but are not badge with a signifier of Southern sympathies. Worn a way of stealthily and in a more gentlemanly way, identifying to one another when such things were best left unspoken. So I've extended some of that questioning to other more or less contemporaneous things happening in and around Bloomington and the IU community to do with the Underground Railroad. And I've tried to carry that forward in time to the ERA and begun to look a little bit at a divisive 1968 visit to campus by Governor George Wallace. So I think this is important because to me this gets to a central question.

ALLEN HAHN, FORMER IDAH SUMMER INCUBATOR AWARDEE AND FACULTY FELLOW

Q. What is Palimpsest about?

At Bloomington's farmer’s market and at the University only last semester, voices proclaimed that some members of society are more deserving of citizenship, employment, or rights of another kind while others are less so, if at all. Despite its repugnance, this should come as a welcome reminder that intolerance can’t be dismissed as history, and isn’t geographically distant, or the province of the poorly educated. It’s a call to action.
Palimpsest makes the case that the promise of Indiana University’s motto, Lux et Veritas, resides in the everyday acts of heroism of members of its community, and are not to be relegated to an embroidered pillow in the gift shop. The project will mine the University’s archive for tales of earlier generations of University community members who took a principled stand in times where IU's core values of openness and enlightenment were threatened by a seemingly larger tide of cultural discord and disenfranchisement.
The project will deploy mediated content from simple pre-recorded audio and video, to mixed reality (Augmented and Virtual Reality), to live performance that imaginatively engages the past around IU’s Bloomington campus. This hybrid game/narrative/performance hopes to engage today’s University community in compelling experiences tied to a larger narrative about the University’s future. The project will make it clear that even those of us destined not to have our names adorn buildings one day have an important role to play in assuring the University’s foundation remains strong.
More than a decade ago, I did a prototype project which married a sketch of a historical fiction narrative to a 200-year old library outside of Pittsburgh. The use of crude cell phone technology to route text messages and audio among players as they navigated the space made for safe but transgressive urban exploration in a fictional frame. While short-lived and primitive, those who took part in one of its several iterations agreed the project was compelling for awakening in them a sense of history and the era in which the building was built.
With no resources behind it past its initial investment of time and technology, that project petered out before it could be developed further. When I came to IU in 2014, I had hoped to revisit the work in a different context, though it took a while before conditions were ripe to do that. The results of the 2016 presidential election came as a shock, and made me look hard at the work I do in the world as a storyteller (I am a theatrical lighting designer and Associate Professor by day). I made the realization that now more than ever, the stories I told had to have cultural impact as directly as possible and began to consider ways to do that.

Q. How did IDAH help you with the project?

The IDAH Summer Incubator, and Faculty Fellowship gave me the framework of organizational and financial support I needed to begin to conceive Palimpsest. In my field of Theatrical design, the development of a production follows a well-defined path from conception to completion that is well-known to me after a career spanning decades. But Palimpsest places me in the position of a generative artist for one of the few times in my life, and demands that I develop not only the project, but the means to achieve it.
The Incubator introduced me to best practices for organizing and growing a research project which were altogether unknown to me. The Incubator format of presentations by community experts in a range of topics, combined with demonstrations in and access to a number of different technologies and the people who know how to use them helped me imagine possibilities. This was no cookie-cutter approach either. The IDAH team were extraordinary in the specificity they brought to organizing the Incubator so that it included people and technologies tailored to the roster of projects they had selected for participation.
The multi-tiered levels of support offered thinkers and technologists from a wide range of backgrounds, and the structure of the weeklong workshop allowed for breakout sessions to focus on macro and micro issues alike. The larger arc of the Incubator put participants on track to produce a tangible representation of the ideas being developed by each of its participants. Although the material I generated for that was only a proof of concept, it did foster discovery of how navigating architectural space can be made parallel to the content of a brief narrative passage and be mapped onto a game engine structure along a branching path.
So, the Incubator primed the pump, and subsequent access in the Fellowship to IDAH personnel and other resources have helped me develop additional grant language and objectives in support of the longer-term project. That support has helped me build bridges to other University initiatives and spaces, other artists and research tools. Through this support, I've developed partnerships elsewhere in the US and Canada, as well as both internal and external grants for a scaffolded series of project development goals. Continuing on the path IDAH has helped define has me on target to bring Palimpsest to life in a series of workshops, demonstrations and symposia in the next 12 months.

Q. What has your overall research experience been like?

To be honest, it’s been an extraordinary challenge for me to do the work I’ve done so far, which still feels like only the beginning. My responsibilities to my department to mentor my graduate students in production often require that I am in rehearsal by evening. Any University faculty will tell you the commitment necessary to succeed is major. But the additional time commitment of my position has felt overwhelming at times. Carving out the bandwidth to be creative as this project has required me to has been extremely difficult. But in fits and starts, I have managed to grow the ideas to the point where there are enough other people involved, and a solid development timeline sketched out that now it’s just got to happen. This is important not only to the project, but as a model for my graduate students, who face the same challenges of bandwidth and time management themselves in the development of their own work.

Q. What have you taken away from your research experience and your work with IDAH?

At the risk of sounding grandiose, perhaps what I've taken away so far in developing Palimpsest is that I’m living my own version of the core story. Lofty ideals like those at the core of the University’s mission can feel immense in scale or distant and abstract—it’s easy to lose track of their importance or feel like it’s beyond you to make a difference. Working to create something that is true to those ideals requires personal dedication and focus that’s not always easy to muster in the onslaught of a busy life. However, our work as individuals is more easily undertaken when we can count on the support of a dedicated community like the leadership and staff of IDAH.