Rhythmanalysis of Outdoor Arts: the uses of time-lapse videography in mapping non-captive audiences in public space.

The paper presents an innovative methodology for the study of non-captive audiences in public space, useful both for the collection of illusive quantitative data around audience numbers and stay-lengths, and for the generation of qualitative data relating to affect and psycho-geography.

Outdoor Arts have become a significant mass public phenomenon in contemporary culture. Their democratic nature and geographical flexibility have made them a favoured instrument of policy makers in the delivery of cultural products to segments of society otherwise minimally engaged with the arts. Knowledge about how these audiences engage with the artworks is important to artists, promoters and funders and current data sets based on questionnaires and snapshot headcounts only show part of the picture.

The doctoral research I have been conducting for the last three years uses timelapse photography to capture the flows and accretions of audiences in various spaces during Outdoor Arts events in order to analyse the way that ephemeral social spaces are constructed. The ‘temporal articulation’ (Abel, 2005: 211) offered by timelapse has a practical advantage in making it practical to view spaces over long periods and has been shown to illuminate patterns and rhythms of behaviour invisible in real time (Persohn, 2015; Lyon, 2016). The Rhythmanalytic methodology (Lefebvre 2013 [1992]) is adapted from cultural geography and repurposed to consider specific performance phenomena in public space. This is in line with precedent from Simpson’s analysis of a street performance in Bath (2012) and takes inspiration from Harrison-Pepper’s ‘aerial fieldwork’ (1990).

The paper consists of a selection of edited time-lapse films supported with commentary and contextualised with a cross disciplinary conceptual framework.