Interview by Teigan Evans with Jason Maling & Torie Nimmervoll about the Triangulation / Prismatic Audit Project

Abbotsford Convent, Tuesday 23rd February 2010

TE:  I've never actually done this before. I record audio quite a lot, but I've never conducted a formal interview with anyone using the phone like this. It's gonna be a bit weird; we're gonna have to hand it back and forward.

I'm here with Jason Maling now; thanks very much for agreeing to do this interview.

JM:  Oh, you wanna actually pass the phone...

TE:  Yeah, I'll actually pass the phone to you. I'm reminded of a-- do you know the TV show "Press Gang"? There was a beautiful episode where.. it's about a bunch of kids who run a youth newspaper, and they're in peril for some reason, and the local community radio station sends down this guy Tony Nolan who's, like, "The Phone Ranger" and he phones interviews back to the radio station. He's constantly running around sticking a phone in people's faces, interviewing them by phone. I feel a bit like that.

It's hard to know where to start. As I said in my interview I'm completely new to the whole process of colour auditing, and it's a bit overwhelming for a novice like myself. I suppose can you tell me first - I realise it's covered in your poster that you've got here - but for people listening, can you explain to me briefly what the prismatic audit that you're doing here at the Abbotsford Convent consists of?

JM:  So the audit goes for twelve days, and each day Torie and myself circulate around the convent every hour, and each participant in the audit -- firstly, the whole community was invited, and the community has I think about 110 people in it or something. Or 110 rooms. They answered a letter and put a little bag on their door, saying that they wanted to participate. And then we put a little kit consisting of eleven little silk flags - red, white, blue, brown, green, orange, purple, pink and grey - I think I got them all - in a little box with a set of instructions, and a rubber sucker thing, and little flagpole that they attach to the front of their door. And all they're asked to do is over twelve days change their coloured flag as often as they like, in response to whatever motivates them to do it.

So we go round every hour and record the colour changes, and then estimate those changes by simple addition to determine the predominant colour for each hour. And then that colour gets displayed, along with the individual data, on a big wall in a central office. And at one o'clock in the afternoon, the community gathers here for a briefing to see the trend for the day, or what's happened, and they come back again at five and then we have a winner for the day, based on the predominant colour of each hour, and there's a little ceremony of discussion and a flag, a little-- well, a big silk flag goes out on a rope line that is suspended in the Convent courtyard. So over twelve days, one flag goes out a day. And in the end there will be twelve.

TE:  Was this audit commissioned by the convent, or.. how is it that you came to be here, doing this?

JM:  I was invited to take part in a project called Inhabit, where I think eight artists across a whole lot of disciplines were asked to spend a year developing and researching a project of their choosing, basically. So they funded it; the development of it, and this is the outcome. So, with the mind that the work would be ongoing, so.. and particularly in this case, the project will happen in other places. So this is the first audit.

So the Inhabit process took place here at the Convent, and because I already had an office in the Convent, the whole basis of a lot of the initial response was Torie and I working together in the past, and having a mutual interest in lighthouses and ship coding. And my response to being here was the fact that nobody communicates visually out their windows, even though they can see everyone on the other side. So we.. they were kind of our starting points. So we're sort of imagining a... providing a community with a framework to code its own meaning, and to respond to each other.

Instead of giving people a set of fixed flags, like you would on a ship - have a fixed code for messages of a certain kind - we're sort of giving people the platform to code their own meaning into something. And that's why it kind of drifted towards this neutral position that we take - and obviously, the loaded meaning of colour. But again, the choice is really determined by a clunky mathematics and the decisions within a community.

TE:  I can see, looking around, that it seems like a fairly rigorous process that you're engaged in. [PHONE RINGS] Jason's iPhone is ringing now, so we're gonna have to take a break..

JM:  [SILENCES PHONE] It's alright.

TE:  Okay, cheers. Yeah, it seems like a fairly rigorous process that you're engaged in. The office that you've set up here on the second floor of the west wing is covered with graphs and charts and lots of data. To what extent do you think that prismatic auditing is a science, and to what extent would you say that it's an art? Coz it seems very subjective to me, in terms of gauging what it actually means, all of this data.

JM:  Jump in whenever you want to, Torie. They're a flip side of the same coin. So the science gives the framework for.. a certain type of objectivity provides the space for subjectivity. And by walking a fine line between somebody being able to see that you are actually providing a real, tangible, reasoned, logical process for something that is entirely abstract, you draw the two together. And that allows people to go in either direction. You can read complete meaning into it if you want to, or you can go in the other direction and treat it as a complete abstraction. I mean, what in the end does an "orange day" mean, or a "green day"? The process that took us to deciding that it was green and orange was logical, but the outcome is illogical. So there's exactly the two, meeting each other. And, I dunno.. Torie and I have an interest in that space, where the two meet.

And the process has to be real, as well, for us. So if you have a situation where you're an imposter, or you're pretending, or you're faking, or you're acting, then your subjectivity is all you have. But your objectivity -- if you're engaged in a process where we actually have to be present and counting and it is real, and it is absolutely genuine, what is going on, then there's no faking it. It is a genuine, absolute, reasoned-out process - but its outcome is subjective. So it allows us to be completely present in it, without feeling like we're pretending - although we do play with the whole look and the feel of things - but it's about sitting in that space where the two things meet and allowing people to move either way. But we try to stay pretty much in the middle.

Do you want to add anything to that, Torie?

TN:  Sometimes the audience struggles to understand that, perhaps. We've had a lot of people come up here and ask us why we're doing it, and also what we're trying to achieve, and what are we going to do with the data, which is sort of..

JM:  Sitting on the side.

TN:  Sitting on the side and just trying to understand, basically.

JM:  Yeah, you wouldn't ask that question of a painting.

TE:  But then it's fair to say a painting doesn't present itself in the same way that you're presenting yourself here. I mean..

JM:  So you could go either way. You're absolutely right; the thing is presented as a clear process. But the outcome is indistinct; it's not clear why. So the process leads you to the kind of abstraction, if you like - and that's where your meaning has to let go. Or open itself up a little bit more. Or.. you take the responsibility for that, not us.

TE:  And that leads me quite nicely to the next question, although I sort of feel like you've already answered it to some degree. You mentioned earlier that you've got 48 people participating in the audit - about half the tenant population of the Convent. And I remember coming to the briefing last week; there were about five or six people from.. who are residents around here, all came up to watch the [briefing]. How do you feel about the response that you've gotten from the tenants?

JM:  The participation response has been much better than we'd thought. We initially thought we'd have about ten people, and figured that it'd be a slow builder. But we had a solid crew of forty to begin with, and it's just gradually kind of been added to over the last six days or so. The briefings have been a little disappointing; we expected more people to come to them, and I have a feeling that's slightly a geographic kind of issue. One floor here has absolutely no interaction with - or even one corridor - have absolutely no reason to go down to the other corridor, and generally don't. So the flow-through of people, even though you're on a landing; you'd expect there to be a lot, but there's very little people moving around. So, yeah, we have our regulars now - about five or six people who come to most of the briefings, but in terms of - I think we really expected the briefings to be much more kind of collaborative and a lot more supported by the community. So that is a little disappointing, but that's okay. That's the way things pan out; you never quite know what the project's gonna do, and because this is the first time round, we take it as it comes.

TE:  Okay, well there's two questions that could branch off that. You mentioned earlier - and it says on the website - that a report's going to be published. Based on the volume of data that you seem to be accumulating I'd imagine that's going to be a fairly hefty document..

JM:  [LAUGHS]

TE:  .. what sort of scale is that gonna be on?

JM:  We've been talking about that a lot, actually. And probably the easiest way would be to photograph it and put it online. We just like the language of, you know, audits, reports and things like that. So it was a glib statement that's probably gonna become some hideous monster of publication that's gonna turn into something.. I dunno. We'll think that through when we're finished. And the participants are going to be given a set of questions, and we really want to gauge what they want from it; whether it's enough for them to have done it, or whether they want their little [data] strip, or whether they want some sort of conclusion... I dunno. So we'll ask them, really, and then generate it based on that. A little bit, anyway. But yeah, it's all gonna be documented and hopefully gathered into some form.

TE:  I could go off on a tangent there about, y'know, the importance of documenting work and talk about The Vorticist, but that might be a bit... yeah. You stated on the website as well that further audits may be necessary in the future. Are you planning to audit the convent again, or are you talking about auditing other places? I mean, after I got home I was sort of fancifully thinking about commissioning an audit of my house..

JM:  [LAUGHS]

TE:  ... y'know, give a kit to my cat and to my housemate, and see what that turned up.

JM:  We have thought about auditing other places, and the obvious kind of thing that this would intersect with is the corporate industry for generating some kind of reasoned nonsense out of leadership courses and behavioural patterns within management, etcetera. This could sit really interestingly in that sort of space, so if anybody has a contact at the ANZ or NAB or whatever. But we've also.. there's a possibility it could be things like shopping centres in some form, or even housing apartment blocks. What else have we talked about?

TN:  Prisons..

JM:  [LAUGHS] Prisons, yeah. Hospitals.. anywhere where there's potentially a really massive range of people having a range of experiences which could be tracked in some way. But the geography of a space is really important, so for instance if you have an open plan office, and everybody has their flags on top of their computers, and they can see each other's really clearly, and people are placed in a hierarchical kind of basis to their management structure, what would that indicate, or what would happen in that environment - as opposed to, say, a hospital, where people can barely get out of bed? Or something like that. Yeah, it'd be great to do it in a whole lot of places.

TE:  Yeah, coz I have to say that the data that you're gathering here is really interesting in terms of.. you were saying earlier, just before we started, that you've had a really remarkable trend since I was last here of two overwhelmingly orange days, and then an overwhelmingly yellow day with a bit of orange in there, and then another orange day - and then today, orange has completely taken a nosedive; there's just a tiny sliver of orange in there. And it's, yeah, hard to draw firm conclusions about what it means, but it must mean something.

I suppose that leads me to the question: what sort of tangible benefits do you think will come out of the audit for the community of the Convent?

JM:  [LAUGHS] The obvious one would be the fact that the work is not so much about the data, so much as the data forms a.. by taking the language of an audit, you are appropriating a social formality of interaction, if you like. It's utilizing an understood relationship where somebody comes into an environment, they're given license to access certain information or data, and it's a giving over. And we've sort of appropriated that interaction to form a framework for both the community and us to negotiate a kind of.. a space where we kind of meet on some sort of abstract level, with this idea of colour. So what they would kind of expect from it, or what we expect to see I'm not really sure. The work is done for us in terms of the success of actually getting these people to do it, and to see that it works. So it's more of a.. for me anyway, it's definitely a system kind of thing. It's an interplay between a whole lot of elements, which function or they don't. And in this case, they clearly function.

TN:  I think we're surprised how well it worked. Like, people were very much involved, and continued to be so, rather than just fading out or losing interest. I think that's been probably the biggest surprise for me, anyway.

JM:  Yeah. I've forgotten what you asked originally, Teigan.

TE:  That's okay, I think you've answered it adequately. Okay, last two questions. At the 5pm briefing I attended last week you ritualistically played the New Order song "Blue Monday", because Thursday had been a predominantly blue day. Given that there's a list of well-known popular songs as long as your arm with the word "blue" in the title, what was it that led you to choose that particular song? Was there some kind of systematic process, or was it.. y'know.

JM:  [LAUGHS] We were just in the studio one day and we thought it'd be funny. And then we sort of started going.. we wanted to cover all bases, so every colour has more or less a different genre of music. So, like, if it goes green today it's Beyonce's "Green Light" and if it's blue it's a sort of indie-house icon. If it was yellow, it's Elvis's "Yellow Rose Of Texas", if it's brown it's Boney M's "Brown Girl In The Ring".. so it's just silly songs that we kind of thought of.

TE:  Are you saying that different colours are genre-themed? Like.. all of the blue songs are..

JM:  No, there's only one blue song. The only one we've got two for is white. And that's because we both thought that "Play That Funky Music White Boy" would be funny, and then "White Wedding" would obviously be the obvious one. But then it doesn't look like we're going to get to play that.

TE:  I was gonna say, yeah, you haven't had a white day yet.

JM:  No! So we're thinking that on the final day of Friday, we're gonna have like a Triangulation classics evening, where we get to play the entire selection, and drink coloured vodka cruisers. Yeah. But I dunno.. no, there's no logic; it was a piece of silliness.

TE:  As with your other project The Vorticist, I can see this potentially taking off and becoming a phenomenon, so...

JM:  [LAUGHS]

TE:  .. a Triangulation compilation album [could be] on the cards potentially. Okay, last question. When I ran into Jason on the way to the briefing last week, he mentioned to me that earlier in the day - or possibly it was the day before - he'd seen, I think, a blue-tongue lizard on the grounds. And he said that - and I quote - "at that exact moment the entire convent turned blue. And at the time I was a bit too sort of taken aback by that statement to ask the question I really wanted to ask, which was: what did you mean by that? Was that a reference to subsequently assimilated audit data, or was it a poetic flight of fancy...

JM:  [LAUGHS]

TE:  ...or did the Convent literally turn blue, and if so did anyone else witness that?

JM:  The Covent did turn blue, but we didn't know that until about fifteen minutes later.

TE:  You meant it in terms of the flags.

JM:  Yeah, but we counterpoint the rationality with completely silly observation of signals and signs, which are poetic fancies. For instance, Torie noticed a collection of yellow flowers in a rubbish bin. There was a dead grey pigeon on the path as we came in after the gray morning. There was an orange wooden cart.. what else has there been? There's been various kind of things. The blue-tongue lizard.. I did genuinely see the blue-tongue lizard. And so we're kind of being sensitive to anything that crosses our path. From the absolute other end of the spectrum to the mathematics of what we're doing. And in our briefings, we counterpoint the intensity of the data with the silliness, or the poetic flights of fancy of those observations.

TE:  So covering all the bases, basically. This is good.

JM:  [LAUGHS]

TE:  I think that's about it. Jason, Torie - thanks very much.

JM:  Thanks, Teigan.