In the previous chapters I have set out the aims of my explorations into pop-up culture and positioned my own approach within the emerging body of scholarship on pop-up. I explained that as well as approaching pop-up’s imaginaries as nonlinear,
this thesis also takes up a nonlinear ontological position in understanding the city as a precarious assemblage within which imaginaries serve both transformative and stabilising functions. In this chapter I show how these two mobilizations of nonlinearity are synthesised through my methodology. As introduced, this thesis experiments with interactive documentary as a novel method for exploring and examining pop-up space-time. Across this chapter I explore the capacities of interactive documentary (i-Docs) to, on the one hand, evoke and engineer sensitivity to pop-up’s nonlinear imaginaries and, on the other, engage a nonlinear
geographical imagination through which to critically understand pop-up’s roles in the
urban assemblage. This chapter also discusses the core methodologies that underpinned my research and enabled the production of the i-Doc, interviews, participant observation and visual methods. These methods were crucial both in giving me a thorough understanding of the pop-up scene and in generating the material that appears in, and has been analysed through the production of, the i- Doc.
I began preparing to undertake my empirical research in January 2014 and started my data collection in October 2014. It involved the following stages:
January-July 2014 Case study identification Film training including:
Editing Course (AHRC Collaborative Training Scheme) (7th-11th April 2014) Practical Documentary Film-making (AHRC Collaborative Training Scheme) (30th June- 18th July)
August 2014-September 2015
Contacting participants and securing access (ongoing because of nature of pop-up)
October 2014-December 2015
Site visits including participant observation, interviews and filming
January 2015-December 2016
Editing of video clips and digital collages Analysis of video footage and field notes
February 2015-July 2017 Production of i-Doc interface in collaboration with Michael Skelly (i-Doc developer) Coding (by Skelly)
Testing of i-Doc at various development stages
Meetings to discuss and plan alterations “User” testing
Data was gathered through my core methods of participant observation, interviews and visual methods and, as will be explored, this data was brought together and analysed in the making of the i-Doc. This chapter will discuss my use of interviews and participant observation, the various stages of the i-Doc production, and what it meant to use traditional social science methods along with, and in order to inform and constitute, i-Docs as an innovative multimedia method. My use of visual methods, video and collage, are discussed within my account of the i-Doc’s
production, rather than given separate sections in this chapter, to avoid repetition.
As this chapter will explore, i-Docs are an emerging form of documentary notable for their nonlinear organisation of film sequences and other media content. The interfaces of i-Docs offer users multiple paths through, or modes of engaging with, their material, giving them a malleable, open-ended spatiotemporal format. I argue that the nonlinear spatiotemporal architectures of i-Docs makes them a useful methodological tool for researching pop-up’s nonlinear imaginaries and engaging a nonlinear geographical imagination.
Importantly, the creation of an i-Doc also enables attention to both the nebulous and the operative elements of pop-up’s spatiotemporal imaginaries. Given that pop-up’s
imaginaries operate on affective levels, my methodological approach needed to be able to grasp them as they are sensed, to understand what it feels like to inhabit those imaginaries; their sensitivities to space-time, their positively inflected
experiences of precarity and their compensatory narratives. However, on the other hand, I was also looking to understand, how it is that these imaginaries are produced, what their features are, and what force they have within the city. The i-Doc enabled both these approaches. As a creative medium the i-Doc can evoke the sense of pop- up’s imaginaries. Yet producing it also helped me to work out the material, discursive and aesthetic practices through which pop-up’s imaginaries are produced as well as
their roles in the city because, as will be explored, in order to create an i-Doc that evokes pop-up space-time, careful attention was needed to the constituent elements of its spatiotemporal imaginaries.
This chapter is split into three parts. In part one I contextualise my methodological use of i-Docs within two bodies of literature; work on Geographical creative methods, and specifically on their use to explore space-time, and analytical Geographical work on the way that space-time has been engaged with, across history, through artistic and filmic medium. Part one excavates key propositions about the multiple relationships between creative medium and space-time which inform my own methodology. Specifically, I explore, across three sections, how creative mediums are used to evoke spatiotemporal experience, to enhance and produce ways of seeing space-time and to enact space-time differently. In part two I introduce interactive documentaries. Considering them against the lineage of creative mediums explored in part one, I study how they can be used to explore nonlinearity by surveying a selection of commercially produced i-Docs. Part two also develops a vocabulary for analysing i-Docs, which will be used across the thesis. Part three of the chapter then explains my methodological process. Leaving the actual ‘doing’ of the methods to last may seem counterintuitive. However, this structure allows me to explore what i-Docs are, and why I think they are valuable, before I explain my own practical experiments. This allows the conceptual value of the methodology to come into focus, as I explore its stages, and makes the discussion of i-Doc production easier to follow for the reader by first giving them a grounding in i-Docs and their terminologies. In part three I discuss the rationale for my case study selection and explore the methodological value of different stages of the i-Doc creation, including
filming, editing, collage creation and interface design. I also explore the complementary methods involved in the i-Doc production, interviews and participant observation, and consider how the use of these methods is altered when they become part of the process of i-Doc making. In the empirical chapters the i-Doc will be referred to and discussed to help investigate the imaginaries I identify in pop-up culture, so this chapter also serves as an introductory discussion that will ground those accounts.
Using an i-Doc to both engage with pop-up’s nonlinear imaginaries and to engage a
nonlinear geographical imagination prompts a consideration of the politics of both these nonlinear ways of seeing. In using nonlinear ontology to critically examine pop- up’s nonlinear imaginaries – considering their instrumentalities in the city - it would be naïve to not also think critically about the Geographical nonlinear imagination itself. Geographers tend to ascribe a progressive politics to the ways of seeing that nonlinear ontologies enable; grounding a sense of possibility in the openness of space-time to being continuously re-assembled. However, as my approach to pop- up shows, nonlinear spatiotemporal logics can be mobilized in multiple ways and, in pop-up’s imaginaries, are predominantly used to serve neoliberal agendas.
Pop-up is not the only arena where nonlinear logics bolster undesirable political realities. As Weizman has discussed, the Israel Defence Forces explicitly incorporate Deleuzian ‘principle[s] of nonlinearity’ to advance a battle strategy that assumes an unpredictable order of events and sees the city as ‘a flexible, almost liquid medium’ (Weizman, 2011). As I will argue, one of the values of i-Docs as a
method is that, rather than assuming a particular politics to nonlinearity, they help to carefully examine the development and deployment of nonlinear imaginaries in specific contexts. In engaging this critical perspective on nonlinear ways of seeing, it is important not to stop at pop-up’s imaginaries, but to critically consider
Geography’s nonlinear imaginaries too. Academic conceptions of space-time are not
ahistorical; like popular spatiotemporal imaginaries they are developed and deployed in particular settings (Massey, 2005). Perhaps we could even say that ontologies are
imaginaries of sorts. This is easy to state but less easy to know what to do with. A challenge of my methodology is, then, to use Geography’s nonlinear ontological imagination to critique pop-up’s nonlinear imaginaries, without forgetting that my own way of seeing is also situated and performed.