END DETOUR road sign

Value Propositions for Taking a Left Turn

After a recent search for some wisdom on finding the right professional destination when your career path is full of left turns, I came up a little short of anything recent, so I decided to put my own thoughts down and do my share towards filling the vacuum. 

I am at the start of my second (or third?) career, depending on what you count. I never fit with the traditional model of working your way up from entry level to management. In my twenties, I had so many different work experiences, moved so many times, and thought I’d never acheive anything of import because I still believed in that traditional model, even if I couldn’t wear the shoes. Later, I started following the philosophy that it is pointless to limit your potential to one role or one industry, or one career trajectory, just because it’s what you’ve been doing so you feel you must continue. In fact, life is too short for those kind of metrics. So I always took the job that seemed like the challenge with the biggest payoff, even if it was a sharp left turn from what I had been doing up to that point. I did so with the rationale that as long as I was always building on my skills and experience, increasing my responsibility, professionalism, and credibility, I couldn’t go too far wrong. 

This is how I ended up working as a Senior Project Manager and Business Analyst, with a BA in Japanese Art History. And this is also how, after 6 years of managing the design and implementation of digital workflows, I was drawn to seek an MFA in New Media and interactive art. 

Now, at 44, with a newly minted Master’s, I have followed my challenges from Maine to Spain, and I’m seeking work in a new country and culture for the first time. This has been a disorienting transition to say the least. One of the biggest questions I have needed to answer is, What is my Job? Am I a Generalist? A Consultant? A Strategist? An Artist? A Researcher?

The job market today has completely transformed since I first joined the workforce. Every. Thing. Is. Digital. Everyone is a social media influencer. And kids on Instagram have a natively intuitive grasp on navigating these waters, unlike us over-the-hill GenX-ers who nonetheless invented these platforms. I used to be confident that the breadth and depth of professional experience usually won out over the blank slate of a twenty-something recent graduate, but this is not necessarily the case anymore. Companies are hiring SMEs with extremely narrow focus, who can state their value propositions in a single page resume, and the millennial crunch means that it’s truly an employer’s market, especially if they are willing to overlook older, more experienced (more expensive) candidates. What’s more, many of these narrow silos of expertise did not even exist as standalone distinctions from Project Managers, Designers and Programmers, little more than 5-10 years ago. Customer Success Managers, SEO gurus, Community Managers, AB Testers and Conversion Analysts, welcome to the stage. 

This is why I’ve come to the recognition that those of us in the middle age of our professional lives, especially those of us who have pursued multiple career directions, and whose CVs reflect multiple left turns, have to focus more than anything else on defining our own value propositions. We have to be able to articulate with confidence and authority that our wildly diverse experiences actually knit together into a compelling narrative that tells a story about who we are, and why This is my Job. 

At 44, I have to be crystal clear that I am steeped in the digital domain as much as your next YouTube content marketer. That while I remember when we used to fly cross-country to visit our clients in person, instead of zooming or slack chatting, I also know the benefits of both relationship models and how they affect communication across different domains. I need to be able to articulate that despite the plain-jane job titles on my CV, I was doing UX research as a vital part of project management, before there was a dedicated role for it, or Data Evangelists or Centers of Excellence to support it.

This is also my reflection on getting an advanced degree late in one’s career. I may have gone back to school because I was burnt out from a toxic work environment and needed a change, or because I wanted to ‘follow my bliss,’ or any number of reasons, but starting over again after taking a 3+ year break to earn a Master’s in your 40s means that everything that came before has still got to prove out as the foundation for this new direction. There is a reason why I ended up working as a PM in process analysis and solution design to begin with, and it’s the same reason why I pursued systems-based interactive art and Human Computer Interaction as a creative researcher. The reason is that my brain is wired to figure out how things work, and how to optimize them. I am better than most people at grasping the big picture AND how all its tiny parts affect the whole. And I am driven to connect with people by telling these stories in meaningful ways. 

So while formatting my value proposition to fit on a single page CV may still be a work in progress (How long is this essay?), these fundamentals are shaping up as my landmarks while I’m scanning the horizon of this job search. I may not know exactly what my next job title will be, but I know it will be a challenge with the biggest payoff yet. 

An image of the promotional poster for the 2018 performance, "I Am Sitting... IV" in Bergen, Norway, depicting Champlin with a 3D printed EEG device on her head.

I Am Sitting… IV

Past performances: 

  • May 17, 2018; Without Borders Festival at Lord Hall Gallery; Orono, ME, USA (view on youtube)
  • June 10-12, 2018; Thresholds of the Algorithmic at Lydgalleriet; Bergen, Norway

Link to video of “I Am Sitting… IV” at Without Borders Festival in May, 2018.

I Am Sitting. . . is an immersive performance and sound installation in which a live performer is seated, in meditation and wearing an EEG instrument, in the center of an array of 8 inward-facing speakers. Eight channels of live-streamed EEG data are transformed into a sonic landscape that is both intimate and expansive. The sounds are spatialized in accordance with the geography of the eight electrode sensors of the instrument in order to create the sense of listening to the brain from the point of view of its owner, the performer.

The performance space is defined by the perimeter of speakers, and invites the audience to enter into the space, move about within it, and become part of an immersive bio-feedback experience. The resultant sound responds to the environment, especially the presence of the audience, by articulating external influences on the brain activity of the performer.

This work speaks to the thresholds at work within our perceptions – of self, of environment, and the distinctions between the two.

It also illustrates a dialectic between author and subject. Do our perceptions and actions generate our world, or are we experiencing a determined universe, an algorithm that is simply playing itself out? This quandary extends from the performer in meditation through the audience experiencing the piece, both questioning their role at the threshold of influence.

Finally, I Am Sitting. . . hovers in the space between the intimate and the interpersonal. How much of me is you? Can we fine-tune our perceptions to be more, or less, sensitive to our social conditioning? Which signals qualify as communication? The piece puts the audience (and performer) in an active state of testing these thresholds, teasing our intuitive and intellectual senses to dialogue with one another and form dynamic hypotheses about the nature of perception and interaction.

This piece is dedicated to the inimitable Alvin Lucier.

Duet for Bow Chime & Live EEG 1

Duet for Bow Chime & Live EEG

Duet for Bow Chime & Live EEG was a live improvisational performance recorded in the IMRC’s AP/PE on March 27, 2018.

This work uses a modified technique, which includes live EEG (brainwave) data in combination with bowing. EEG data processed through custom MaxMSP programming is converted to a sound signal and output through a pair of transducers attached to the resonator of the bow chime. 

The effect is such that the bow chime’s range of frequencies becomes focused where it is resonant with the EEG signal, and the two work together to produce complex layers of sound. Further, the normal haptic feedback loop between the bow chime and player, which allows the player to choose sympathetic bowing actions, is layered with the added element of biofeedback from the EEG sounds generated by the player in action.

An upcoming performance using this technique is scheduled for July 9, 2018, at the Apohadion Theatre in Portland Maine.

 

Champlin uses a modified bow chime developed by Matt Samolis. She has been studying ‘cymbal bath’ techniques with Samolis since 2017. The instrument is modeled on the original bow chime invented by Robert Rutman in 1967.

 

Transfer

Transfer

Transfer is an experimental photographic study using tableware and direct sunlight. This study was undertaken as an exploration of signal transference, mediation, and pattern recognition. The components used recall the elements of a traditional still-life construction, but the results bear no resemblance. The images produced and presented have not been manipulated for effect, but are simply a record of the informational transactions between the sun, the object, and the camera — or in terms of communication, the transmitter, the filter, and the receiver.

These images, as with all still-life images, exist in the continuum between formalism and semiotics. The history and tradition of still-life is nearly as long as that of human image making, but are these images a study of pure light and form or are they a study of symbolic objects and their situational rhetorical vocabularies? At what point in our communications stream do we grant the attribute of meaning to what is otherwise simply data?

Transfer is on exhibit at the IMRC Center of University of Maine from November 27 to December 1. More info….

I Am Sitting... II 8

I Am Sitting… II

“I Am Sitting…” is an experimental performance installation which explores the potential of the mind to manifest itself in direct terms without mediation by physical gestures. Champlin has been developing it since early 2016 and has presented multiple iterations of the project, and has recently completed a residency at Hangar Interactive Labs in Barcelona to develop new instrumentation.

In this piece, EEG and ECG sensors capture passive bioactivity. A chain of simple translators in the form of custom hardware and software introduces the bio signals into primitive audio and video feedback loops, amplifying them to allow subtle changes in Champlin’s physical experience to percolate up as broad variances in the perceivable environment. Nothing seen or heard is prerecorded.

In partial homage to work by Alvin Lucier in the late 1960s, “I Am Sitting…” draws inspiration from two key points of interest. Firstly, and literally, work attempts to comment on the notion of bypassing the choreography of artmaking – moving outside the traditional notion of composition – such that the art is in the composition of the process itself. Secondly, the project’s roots came from an attraction to research by others such as Ernst Chladni and Hans Jenny regarding the transference of signals from one medium to another through the reductive mechanism of their underlying frequencies.

Within these contexts, this work attempts to demonstrate one method of removing the external gestures of performance and using internal control structures, such as information-coded biofeedback, in their place to effect an external change in the viewer’s perceptive field.

As the project has developed, Champlin has focused increasingly on the nature of networked communications systems and the implications they have for neutrality and mediation in language. The feedback loop’s responsiveness to minute fluctuations in EEG signals demonstrates the clear inability of the artist (as a component in a system) to be truly neutral.

Motive

Motive

The durational performance, Motive, went through two public iterations. It began as a response to themes in Yves Klein’s Large Blue Anthropometries, specifically those of distancing the hand of authorship, and making marks that were recognizable as both iconic (figurative traces) and indexical (literal traces). I wanted Klein’s ideas, but without all the misogynistic performance and feminist protest that his pieces are infamous for generating.

My attempted solution was a primitive mechanical system that seemed to be the simplest way to get paint onto canvas, using my body as a ‘neutral’ point of mediation. This took the form of a rudimentary tripod with a pulley and rope to hoist a bucket of paint (International Klein Blue, of course, or the closest I could afford) above the canvas, with me in a white coverall crouched below. The expectation was that the paint would splatter off and create a negative of my form on the canvas.

In the first iteration, the forensic-style display of the paint-splattered suit got much more attention than the action painting produced on the canvas – one person called it a body condom, pointing out how the work was still squarely in the realm of sexually exploitative vocabulary. I felt the conceptual aims of the performance were lost in the same feminist debate in which Klein’s work seems to be buried.

The second iteration was a bit more of a deliberately produced event. With better promotion, better staging, and a streamlined wall text, it left fewer arbitrary details to chance. The durational aspect of the performance lasted nearly 40 minutes. I did not show the resulting suit (it had to be cut off me); this time, only the performance along with a narrative of the conceptual themes of authorship and semiology, and a designated time for discussion afterward. The semiotic power of the body as a symbol to dominate a tableau, and its often immediate reference to objectification, became the salient theme I took away from this work, as I continued to apply the methodologies of reductionism and simple self-regulating systems to produce generative work.

Capstone Thesis – Shikoku Henro

A map of the island’s temples, from the guidebook, ‘Shikoku Japan 88 Route Guide’ by Buyodo Co. Ltd

Over the summer of 2015, I wrote my Capstone (undergraduate thesis) for a BA in Art History, on the basis of 8 weeks of on-site research I did in 2006, on the Shikoku pilgrimage of Japan. The Shikoku Henro (or pilgrimage) is a 1200km long trail based on the movements of the patron saint of Shingon Buddhism in Japan. Henro (pilgrims) walk an ancient loop that chains 88 temples together, over 4 prefectures and all kinds of terrain: from cities, highways, and farmland to beaches, flood plains, and remote mountain passes. This Capstone paper presents the pilgrimage in a hybrid format: part personal narrative, part methodological exploration.

Abstract:
Presented as an Art History Capstone project, this paper hopes to explore a number of modal factors at work in the application of methodological questions to a subject of material culture. While using a more strictly academic approach may generate some insights and demonstrate a general facility with the primary tools of the field, I will argue that in employing a more personal, even narrative, voice, not only can I meet the challenge of contributing something that expresses a sufficiently critical approach, but also show that useful and necessary perspectives can be lost when we limit ourselves to the formal language and expository prose favored by modern scholarship and accepted discursive modalities.