If you walk straight into the Tate Gallery, right through to the back, you can still feel the thrill of a queue but without having to devote yourself to its principle (the Cezanne centenary is the Real Thing - out the front, round the corner, and practically over the bridge). Georgina Starr’s exhibition (Brit Pack superstarr) is right next to the ringing tills of the Cezanne exhibition - entrance to her room: no charge.

As the money circulates in exchange for static miniatures of old memories in the large white room, moving images of Georgina Starr circulate through video tape on tv screens, caravan windows, and the walls of a dark room. This young artiste is totally absorbed by screen-images from dreams and scenes of films and plays, mixed with mundane moments in the privacy of a kitchen, the isolation of a caravan.

The constantly looping video machines seem mesmerised by their memories; they don’t seem to care if anyone is watching. They don’t register your entrance and exit with cash transactions; they don’t wait till you’re seated, to start. Like the Man in the Caravan (part of the exhibition), they will use themselves as the audience, playing for their own edification. Like the dancers in the disco scene, they seem focused on a spot beyond anyone else’s gaze. But in fact, they care passionately about their audience. In seeming to look away, they invite you into their intimacy. In a dark room full of strangers, a quiet shift can take place in one’s attachment to the world.

Repetition, identification, rearticulation

If you had been in Milton Keynes last December, you could have come to a Software Symposium. Repetition identificaton rearticulation. ‘Ethnography and Software’ could well have been the third meeting in a series begun at CRICT (Do Users Get What They Want? 1992 and Do Users Get What They Want? 1993). Repetition. Where social scientists tried to explain (to each other, to practitioners, and to their colleagues in the Mathematics Faculty) what they are doing in the computer department. Identification. And computer department people wonder at the difference between their orientation and that of the ethnographer. Both seem to be focused on the same stuff, yet produce such different accounts of it. Rearticulation.

This meeting was organised by the SCoS Group (Social Construction of Software), an informal and dynamic research group within the Faculty of Maths at the Open University. They focused their energy on this symposium to persuade socio(-)logists and software specialists to take to the floor once more and see where their turn-taking took them this time.

Georgina Starr’s art is presented to you entirely through pre-existing familiar objects (kitchen tables, coffee cups, cornflake packets) including videotape on a tv screen. Come and sit on the bed and watch the artist perform a scene from Grease (the play) playing all four different women herself, rendering it real through careful cutting of the video tape. She invites your identification by placing you in the same physical location, and engaging you in the problems of the conversation, but leaves you in the dark to make your own articulation to the scene.

To what extent do ethnographers identify with their software subject, and how does this join in with the re-articulation of that subject? Georgina Starr’s art is expressed entirely through the medium of technical artefacts. She even becomes one herself as she appears on her screens in various guises. Her position in the Tate Gallery maintains her status as An Artist even as her work changes what that means.

Paul Benyon-Davies (Glamorgan University) considered each of the different positions an ethnographer can take as they practice in the field of Information Systems. An ethnography OF IS maintains the allegiance to anthropology and a distanced relationship with software. Ethnography FOR IS surrenders one allegiance to the other. And Ethnography WITHIN IS suggests a more productive relationship from both points of view.

Nevertheless, Symposiums IN Computer Science Departments themselves change the balance once more. And presentations THROUGH computerised machinery magnifies this problematic (Helen Sharp, SoCS group, Open University). Ethnographies that turned into computer software (Tom Rodden, CSCW Centre Lancaster University) through a HyperText tool stood in marked contrast to Ethnographies that devoted themselves to the possibilities of the body (Janet Rachel, University of East London). And finally, ETHNO(-)graphies which focused on the social machinery of software engineers took us back to the beauty of writing, and the skill of turning a phrase (Graham Button, Rank Xerox Research Centre).

The symposium as a whole offered a spectacle of different articulations on a theme. Each turn presented an image to reflect on, offering distinctive possibilities to think in. An attempt to bring two of these together simultaneously (Pat Hall, Open University, and Janet Rachel, UEL) reinforced the value of difference and reminded everyone of the necessity to decide. This point was revisited at the close of the day by Anthony Finkelstein (City University) who drew our attention to the circulation of money, and its place in the decisions to repeat, identify, and articulate.

The constantly renewing queue crawling towards the tills at the Tate Gallery reinforces the importance of the turn of the century - one hundred years of Cezanne, a revolutionary painter in his time. The thrill of the new takes off in his shadow, as Georgina Starr registers her difference in the small dark room next door. Repeating the revolution presents new opportunities for identifications, and invites us to join in differently each time.