November Archive Highlight; "Forward Facing"

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Telelibrary Spoiler WARNING

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Hello all,

It’s decidedly NOT November any more, but a cascading series of tech issues with the original host of the audio for this piece have pushed me into burning the Yuletide Candle. This Archive Highlight marks a kind of experiment for me; in the past I’ve been very cautious about making any Telelibrary materials available outside of the System. However, as we prepare to hit 2000 performances this month, I’ve been thinking a lot about what giving some peeks behind the curtain may look like. And so I give you this (not so small anymore) experiment in looking at some of the questions of operating such a massive, sprawling, and deeply intimate work.  Let me know what you think, or if you'd like to see more content like this!

Two quick warnings:

1 - if you didn’t see it before, (and it wasn’t clear from above), big Telelbrary spoilers /sausage-making discussions are ahead. I’d Strongly recommend not accessing any of this content until you’ve had your own session, or maybe even 2-3.

2 - we’re going to be discussing and evoking some of the early months of the pandemic and quarantine eras. Please be kind to yourself, take some breaths throughout, and notice if you start getting tense or having feelings come up. It was an intense time for all, and some more than others, and in my experience most of us never really had a lot of time to process what that time was like - nor how it changed and gradually became now.

~

One of the core design principles of the Telelibrary is that the main menu should change at least slightly every time a User returns. Originally, this was meant to spur curiosity and create the impression of seemingly infinite options. But as the number of actual options quickly ballooned, this interface choice came to address the practical issue of helping Users understand their breadth of options without being overwhelmed (or at least, without being completely and constantly overwhelmed).

These ever-growing options have many layers of organization on the user end, but on the backend, I tend to think of content in the Telelibrary existing in 3 broad categories: Reading Selections (numbered book and text excerpts), The User Logbook (The Ledger of User Comments) and Expanded Features (content and functions built with User voices and contributions).*

Almost immediately after the introduction of the first Expanded Features, I came to feel they were becoming the emotional center of gravity of the Telelibrary. To that end, in the 1st year of the System’s operation I did my best to keep the early Expanded Features as up-to-date as possible, so that the voices Users encountered spoke most directly to the changing realities of each changing week of the Quarantine Era.

However, as Expanded Features continued to proliferate (49 and counting, as of 2:58pm EST on November 30th, 2024**) , I quickly found myself with far more available updates than time in which to make them. Increasingly, the question became “how do I decide when a feature gets an update?”

To give an example of what those considerations look like, let’s take a look at one of those early features—the Looking Forward feature—and see how it’s grown and where it stands today.

If you want to follow along, you can use this link to a private album of audio, or just click each link as we go - I wouldn’t necessarily recommend listening to every referenced track at full length every time (it would get a little repetitive), so instead I’ll do my best to flag where changes would be found. You can also read this without the supplemental audio, but it will all feel more theoretical.

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In my memory, the first ever Expanded Feature was The Go Outside Simulator, the idea for which was created by User #25 in Comment #3, User Logbook Volume 1 (April 5th, 2020). However, from looking at the metadata on early audio files while writing this reflection, I’ve learned that in the time it took me to assemble and eventually publish that feature (which first hit the Telelibrary on April 17th), I had already started experimenting with sharing Lullabies in The Lullalibrary. In any case, this means that by the time the first instance of the Looking Forward feature went live in the System on July 5th, there existed both catalogs of individual User voices and some very nascent montages.  A quick listen to Looking Forward 1.0 shows it to be very basic, essentially consisting of a long-form sharing of the few currently available User responses to the Add-A-Credit Prompt; “what is something that you are looking forward to?”.

At that time, I felt like the heat*** or payoff of The Telelibrary was “going outside,” and in the first 3 weeks of it being up I can find at least 4 different updates I produced to the Go Outside Simulator. But as the year pushed on and circumstances changed, I felt the emotional ballast of the piece tilt towards Looking Forward.  I certainly had more content when Looking Forward 1.3 was published on October 24th - you can also hear some of the character of stories changing - but the voices I excerpted were by no means framed as “the best” or “the most representative.” Instead, I tried to curate them like I do selections; reaching for things that grabbed my attention and creating enough range and variety to keep you listening, and feeling you unsure what you might hear next. Over the course of the next few months, my approach took a turn in a more defined direction.

Looking Forward 2.1 reflects my general naming system for drafts: integers indicate a specific decision to make major changes or overhaul, whereas decimal points reflect gradual tweaks (increasing length, replacing 1 audio track with another, etc.), with smaller decimals representing more minute changes. Finished on November 17th of 2020, this is the first audio file that’s really recognizable to me now as Looking Forward, both for the density of voices and the emergence of a certain “style” of cutting audio I’d developed across several Telelibrary features by that time, in which Users begin to appear to almost talk to and respond to each other. The focus is mostly on a shared urge to travel or escape individual bubbles, a desire to reconnect, and “the end of 2020,” which by November felt like it just couldn’t come fast enough.

And then of course, it came and went, and the questions became “what now - another year of this? What change is possible? You can hear some of that in the Looking Forward 2.3 update on January 9th, 2021, especially by skipping to around ~02:41 or so. This version also better established the dramaturgical “arc” that has stayed fairly consistent since then - starting with the shared anticipation of travel, exploring middle content that’s lighter and varied, addressing some of the heavy circumstances of quarantine and COVID, and reaching towards hope for what’s to come. This “emotional narrative” wasn’t something I wrote or set out to craft - it was instead something I was finding reflected in the voices I heard every week, and intensifying by the start of our second calendar year in the Pandemic.

Those voices were present and consistent enough that I pushed out another update by January 27th, 2021 - Looking Forward 2.4 (mostly the same, with some edits throughout). Listening back here, I’m again struck by the increasing density, but in particular I notice how certain narratives, voices, or moments remain from version to version but get abbreviated and essentialized. While writing this, I kept thinking of new batches of soil being added to a container and then packed in over time like geological layers. I liked this effect, but again I wouldn’t ascribe it to a conscious choice to produce an aesthetic. In fact, I sometimes wondered if I was doing a disservice by not sampling totally new audio each time, or making more radical departures. The persistence of this “accumulation approach” instead seems rooted to me in three main considerations. The first is practical: having a layout and structure makes it easier for me to listen for new individual content or new emerging “confluences” that might fit in, and to know where to place them. The second is to do with my approach to editing, which I experience as being fairly rhythmic and even musical, rather than strictly textual. I don’t make transcripts of all the available audio and edit a word document before assembling. Instead, I break session recordings into component parts and store them separately, then when diving into editing a feature, I listen a while to everything available, and begin connecting pieces as I hear them. I think the “melody” of the audio can be as impactful as the text, and it’s certainly the former that helps me establish a kind of ebb and flow to move a montage Expanded Feature along. The third is related to this second: as time passes, and as I listen to these recordings again (and again and again - a quick search of the Call Logs produces at least 240 visits to Looking Forward variations), I find myself with a strong sentimental attachment to these voices. Like hearing your favorite lyrics in a song, certain runs of thought or one-two punches of set up and response in the tracks become very dear to me, and it is always a hard moment when I must make the call that the new emerging version of a feature needs to lose one voice to include another. In so many ways I strive throughout performances of The Telelibrary to dutifully and meaningfully limit myself to what “the System” is capable of - or even what a real algorithm or language model might be able to achieve. However, between sessions and behind the scenes, curation is something I remain resolutely and passionately human about, and I believe the act of choosing and assembling these montages and the range of reading selections both necessitate maintaining a personal touch.

This persistent “sediment layer” aesthetic of the audio comes to interact in an interesting way with the peculiarity of audio as a medium, and with the stickiness of conversations about time in general. Users find the Look Forward feature by choosing the corresponding “Add-A-Credit” prompt, but they also often do so by requesting content about the future, by asking the System to prognosticate on various outcomes, or by going into the Clock Menu and trying to alter the nature of time itself. “Can you tell me what will happen in the Future?” Users ask, and in response, the System plays them what it has heard. “But that’s not the Future - that’s what people in the Past thought would happen,” some answer; “some of those things probably already happened.” They have a point; every recording you hear is inherently past tense, regardless of which way the speaker was directing their words. But perfect wish fulfillment isn’t the secret sauce in The Telelibrary: my design principle isn’t that you always get what you ask for, but rather than sincere asking should always get you something—even if it’s not what you expected (perhaps especially so).

What’s more, “key word searches” aside, I don’t actually think the Looking Forward feature is about the Future: I think it’s much closer to a meditation on the nature of Anticipation. What is it like to hope for something, to look ahead, to be pulled out of our present circumstances by what-has-yet-to-be? And what resonates or comes to the surface when we hear how that act of Anticipating has changed for people over the course of the last 5 years?

An ongoing tension in The Telelibrary is between its function as a mirror and its function as an archive: is this “a Pandemic Piece?” I feel loyalty to both the feelings my Users are living today and to the stories and sentiments that Users have left behind, and I don’t always know where to place my focus. But in the Looking Forward feature, I feel like that arc of Anticipating through time is compelling, and the way it demonstrates accumulating voices is a powerful narrator for the meta-story of a System that has been built through accumulation by human actions, choices and needs in a very particular time to be human on this planet.

As such, those updates in the Winter of 2021 marked the end of the “staying present” era of the Looking Forward feature. Certainly whenever it is accessed, it I still keep my ear open for things that stick out or seem unintentionally “anachronistic,” but the weight of editing had by February of 2021 already shifted to more complicated and expansive features like The Lost and Found, and the shape of Looking Forward felt mature and durable. I’ve played with making some spot-edits for special appearances, such as the weekend in March of 2022 that The Telelibrary existed as an actual Phone Booth at the True/False Film Festival (see the opening 30 seconds of Looking Forward 2.52 True False), and I feel that some voices that feel very grounded in a proximal here or now are an important tool, but if you listen to the currently active update for November of 2024, Looking Forward 2.6, you’ll hear a lot of the same sentiments, packed in and worn smooth by repetition.

Of course, the New Year season is always particularly charged with a certain Forward-Facing mindset, so perhaps a light refresh may be in order…

~~~

*Some Users may be inclined to point out that some Expanded Features live inside the User Logbook, which seems to trouble this layout, but if that is you, I encourage you not to think too hard about this, as I work full-time Thinking Too Hard about this and other similar points of minutiae)

** okay yes, that’s being very particular, but seeing as the latest 2 were added within 24 hours of each other, you really can’t blame me for being hesitant to make statements without a timestamp…

*** I often use this term, and I hear other creators do the same, but who knows if it’s widespread, or if we even share an understanding, so here’s the explanatory footnote - when I say heat, I refer to the experience of being a live performer in a responsive and/or interactive piece and noticing the place/moment/topic around which things seem to be happening. Often, this is recognized in terms of emotional responses, or even verbal responses; I was totally taken aback by the number of Users who cried listening to the Go Outside simulator in the early months. Now, that doesn’t mean it was the content that generated that heat; instead, I think this was a case of the content (many people describing what they see out their windows) resonating with given circumstances (lockdown, quarantine, isolation) and the arc of the work (this was often the first time Users would hear other User voices) to permit a kind of release. Mostly, this is something I think about on an individual participant level - taking the temperature in the room and noticing when it changes. But the quarantines of the early pandemic era brought a remarkable impression of monoculture, particularly among my self-selected audience base.