Last year, Merel Smit, Ariane Gros, and I developed an online installation whilewaitingwaithere.com. The goal was to build a rhizomatic archive of collected material from her one-year research about the Universal Credit benefit system in the UK. The discussions in which we tried to understand our position in bureaucratic regimes, such as the one we were building the website for, define the core of the installation’s architecture and design: interactions with glitches, inaccessible forms, fictive receptionists, and so on, accessed through clickable subjects/objects contained in the illustration made by Maaike Canne.
This year lead to a new collaboration defining Merel’s next research step on the subject of waiting. It was inspired by the previous website’s option to press a Kafka button (at the bottom of the page) and send an anonymous e-mail which allows the user to report the ‘real’ bureaucratic glitches surrounding the user’s life.
On the 29th of May in 2021, an e-mail was received by an anonymous user explaining their relationship with Universal Credit benefit. They explained how smooth of a process, in the beginning, it was - until a few weeks later, when both they and their ex-partner received a letter informing them that they had been overpaid in tax credits to a sum of £4,500, that had to be paid in half by both of them. This led to £60.00 being deducted from their UC allowance. Each attempt to consult/find out more information about the case led to redirection to another department (“DWP to UC to Tax Credits to Dwp to Tax credits to Uc and various permutations.”). The person ended the letter by describing their current situation in which they’re waiting for a reply by an address where they could dispute the tax credit decision.
This intimate story urged the need to build an online platform where similar experiences can be publicly shared and accessed. Its function would be to trigger optional user participation by anonymously sharing their past/current/subconscious experiences of waiting.
is 1. the action of staying where one is or delaying action until a particular time or event.
Many think that waiting is the essence of life; that our lives are defined by the number of times we have waited until the waiting stopped. For many, life equals the content produced by our waiting, and by content, I mean events and their documentation which depict the production of life aka the experience of living. But what happens when a certain type of waiting experience disrupts the production of life and the proof that it still exists? Don’t things get a bit static? Waiting for documents/depending on an institutional decision is a classic example of such intense waiting experiences. Some citizens of the world suffer more from this intensity than others. Some find happiness in what may seem to be the world’s worst waiting experience.
To avoid applying the classification system and hierarchy of waiting experiences, the question is: What is to be learned from archiving the waiting matrix?
Understanding that we’re building a platform to entail a specific kind of user intimacy made us realise that the project’s end should be aligned to the maturity of our weekly conversations about the user ship we desire to build. To build the trust between the developers and users through the interface which links them, time needs to be given. So, we gladly postponed the personally set initial deadline for the website, up to almost 1,5 months later.
I was very excited to learn how to build a custom database for this project and make it visible on the homepage/the only page. After setting up the website’s back-end environment and front-end architecture, I embraced not taking a m e t a visual direction in order to finalize the design. That’s why the page’s height depends on the amount of data it’s given. When the user enters the website, it auto-scrolls to the bottom of the page where the last input can be found.
Although we didn’t want to make design decisions too similar to those behind building the mutual softwares we depend on make, we thought there to be nothing ethically wrong with recycling the ones that work for our understanding of digital interactions. Merel proposed to integrate bouncing dots which would, when hovered, open the textual waiting experience they’re assigned to. For the sake of personal clarity and preference, we turned the dots into squares.
The biggest struggle was to come up with graphic ways to make this archive visually interesting without pumping it up with pixels and colors that would only kill the readability of its ‘printed matter’/listing nature. I couldn’t think of anything that would not ruin the experience of reading a single voice of a waiting experience.
But then I got an idea of integrating a moving image in the background - which would link the digital experience back to the physical spaces it was inspired by. This was also painful, because it’s not really an innovative move, no matter how true it feels for the project. Many presentation websites (especially of cultural institutions located in buildings to be proud of) integrate visuals of their spaces on their websites.
We didn’t want to take the same literal direction of doing so, nor did we want to select the best footage to work with. So, we wondered how to curate the recorded material of relevant waiting experiences filmed across the town + in personal homes.
We worked with 8-10 videos in total, which we cut into snippets of 15secs long and put in a slideshow. Although the snippets were later numerically ordered (1-28), to understand how they got their placement, I hope the following makes sense:
Videos = 6xSnippets
1st vid = 1.1, 1.2, 1.3, 1.4, 1.5, 1.6
2nd vid = 2.1, 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.5, 2.6
3th vid = 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6
4th vid = 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5, 4.6
5th vid = 5.1, 5.2, 5.3, 5.4, 5.5, 5.6
… vid = …
Order = 1.1, 2.1, 3.1, 4.1, 5.1, … 1.2, 2.2, 3.2, 4.2, 5.2, …1.3, 2.3, 3.3, 4.3, 5.3, …1.4, 2.4, 3.4, 4.4, 5.4, …1.5, 2.5, 3.5, 4.5, 5.5, …1.6, 2.6, 3.6, 4.6, 5.6, … … … … …
But that was not the final order really. Although it was a good ‘curating’ framework, watching the snippets again made us feel like it wasn’t there yet. Then we replaced and took some snippets out until the structure became a bit flakey, and until it made sense, for us.
We understood that having a video play in the background while reading through different voices could result in the head’s blur, so we integrated the pause button which, when pressed, poetically goes back to the idea of putting the world on hold while living through the experience of waiting.
After our first UX meeting with the first users/contributors/friends/feedback-givers who felt like they’d rather share their visual waiting experiences than the written ones, we added a note hiding behind the top-right ? saying that the users can contribute to the background archive of waiting.
All buttons stick to the sides so that the experience almost feels like full-screen. By clicking them, the users can get to know more about the project, Share it by e-mail, Show/Hide all the waiting experiences, contribute, and switch between English and Dutch language.
What’s ethically wrong about this website is what a lot of artistic research projects suffer from: the scientific approach. Simply translating one step of a research matrix into a representation of digital storytelling threatens the traditional representation formats of research (papers, books, podcasts) that are still mainly found in the academic/scientific approach.
Within the conflicting formats between the two dominant approaches of research, a question of eligibility kicks hard. Who’s more eligible to have a say in certain subjects, the scientist/academic or the artist? We don’t need to answer that. When the power differences between these roles are distinguished, the artist suffers from being trusted in their research endeavours. Their progress gets overshadowed by the maintained importance of eligibility.
Another ethically wrong thing about this website is that, on top of having digitally materialized all our living experiences already, some might feel threatened by being asked to contribute with the waiting experience in a form of online data. This is great, as it shows that users are more knowledgeable about the intentions of addictively engaging platforms that perpetually poke our privacies. However, what’s lacking in the current agency of a user is the ability to differentiate between varying advantages of data. This is hard, as they’re personally defined distinctions gained in the personal awareness of what the internet is useful for and how to use it according to self-established values.
The final, and perhaps the most ethically wrong thing about this website is that it’s based on the technological polarity of decision making, inspired by our technological reality in which participation means an obligation to make choices. While we’re far from being able to discard this dominant reality, we’re not completely cut off from the process of changing it as users. It’s up to us which choices we want to make in our technologies. It’s up to us which technologies we attune to. As Douglas Rushkoff wrote in his book called Present Shock: “While there is tremendous value in group thinking, shared platforms, and networked collaboration, there is also value in a single mind contemplating a problem”. That’s what making this website is an attempt of. And even if it’s a failed one, it’s one step forward towards a better web ecosystem in which one is allowed to participate without leaving digital traces.
Anyhow, since I’m a digital optimist, I see this project as a genuine act of sharing to connect, more than collecting data for private artistic purposes. The website doesn’t demand participation aka contribution of a waiting experience, nor does it grow more technologically complex with incoming contributions.