My Study On Waiting

Interactive Telecommunications Program
Tisch School of the Arts
New York University
Meng Li
Thesis advisor: Kevin (Super) Slavin

1. Abstract

Waiting is banal, but as I will argue, overlooked. Waiting is hard to describe and difficult to document. I did a series of experiments around waiting, analyzed different types of waiting, video captured waiters' portraits in a long period of time, closely read and analyzed their gestures, especially their micro-expressions, and finally developed an intimate and intense relationship with my subjects in those video portraits due to my own waiting for them. My capture, analysis and vocabulary on waiting gave me a chance to look at this mundane activity through new lenses, and hopefully will open your mind.

2. Keywords

Time, waiting, video portrait, subway, gesture, micro-expression

3. Introduction

3.1 Waiting is powerful

Waiting is powerful in that it requires the subjects to control their desire. So it either drives people "creative" -- filling time strategically to avoid pure waiting -- or crazy, becoming obsessive-compulsive in reaction to waiting. Examples:
Even in the restroom, we can't simply wait. We take newspapers, phones, even computers with us.
Waiting for a UPS delivery, we obsessively refresh the tracking page, knowing it won't make the package come any earlier.

3.2 Nobody likes to wait

Waiting is generally associated with losing control over time. Waiting time is felt and endured consciously.? It seems slow, thick and opaque, unlike the transparent, inconspicuous time in which we accomplish our tasks. While waiting, we become the time's unfolding. Rather than seizing time, time seizes us.

Waiting creates a vacuum. One is inactive, in one place, expecting something happen. Human nature abhors a vacuum. To experience ourselves as fully alive, we have various "arousal requirements" - physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual. And if we feel understimulated, we'll generally complain of being bored, antsy, anxious, irritable, lonely, or even depressed.

In our teleological culture, waiting is not valued since it is usually perceived as slow and passive, which means weakness and irrelevance to the fast-moving culture. In almost all aspects of our life today, we value speed as an adaptation necessary to survive in the current culture.

3.3 So what is waiting?

The dictionary provides several definitions of waiting:
To remain or rest in expectation: waiting for the guests to arrive.

• To tarry until another catches up.
• To remain or be in readiness: lunch waiting on the table.
• To remain temporarily neglected, unattended to, or postponed: The trip will have to wait.

However these do not show how people wait and how different people understand waiting.

How to describe waiting?

It's related to time. But waiting is more than an amount of time. It's a condition of our being. Some waiting creates anxiety, but not all. Some waiting can be associated with boredom, but not all. Some waiting can be seen as a vacuum, but again, not all.

4. Problem

4.1 The Problem

The more I see "waiting," the more I feel "waiting" is a "familiar stranger" to me. Like being, waiting has manifold meanings. It doesn't have a fixed form. We wait for many things in many ways, but I never thought about their differences and similarities. Waiting is easily overlooked.

4.2 Why waiting is overlooked

Waiting is non-action. We tend to focus on action and operation rather than non-action.

Waiting is resistant to description and analysis because of its complexity.

Because of its ordinariness as well as its uselessness, waiting seems to be almost universally denigrated.

So I started a close reading on waiting, as a "waitologist"

5. Experiments

Experiment 1:

Create a personal waiting inventory with parameters of time, duration, emotion, the thing I am waiting for, the nature of the thing I am waiting for, and do self-analysis from Feb 1 to 7.

Experiment 2:

Asking people how they wait.

Experiment 3:

In Twitter, select tweets with "waiting" or "to wait" from March 3rd? to 4th. Analyze other people's waiting based on time scale, from waiting for 30 seconds to waiting for the end of the recession. I also analyze how intense the waiting experience is.

Experiment 4:

Collect video portraits of waiting people in subway stations, restaurants, Grand Central, museums, night clubs, etc in New York City.

 

6. Descriptions and Findings

6.1 The analysis of three types of waiting

Three types of waiting experience:

First type of waiting is waiting for man-made, artificial things, which are machines or man-set social rules. Most of us hate waiting caused by these types of things. It's boring. We would love to get rid of it. So we build machines that reduce the time to produce a product, and computers that increasingly support multi-tasking?

However, there's another type of waiting, for which we'd better not feeling bored. It's waiting for natural events, for instance, waiting for the sunrise or the spring to come. Our experience while waiting for the nature is different because we understand our limitation to intervene and can't speed them up.

The third type is waiting for the development of human mind, intellect, emotion. We wait to see where the thesis goes. We wait to discover something new. We wait for a solution. Essentially, the thing we wait for is indeterminate. And different from the two above, how we wait defines the thing we are waiting for.

Diagram analysis: taxonomy of waiting

Note:

The intersections of the three categories are the most interesting. For example, we use technology to intervene in nature in order to wait less. We produce genetically modified tomatoes to make them grow faster. And as we intervene in this way, our attitude changes -- we morph the tomato's nature to that of machine, something man-made.

This analysis is not the only way to category waiting, but it's a way to help us understand waiting. It makes people more conscious about what we are waiting for and how we wait, especially those types of waiting that we tend to overlook, and less biased about waiting. We experience a lot of waiting for man-made things. But that doesn't mean waiting is all negative, and we need to hate all kinds of waiting regardless of the nature of the thing we are waiting for. Thinking about waiting this way, enables people to hold the right attitude towards waiting and perhaps question phenomena in our speed culture such as speed dating, speed yoga, etc.

6.2 The discovery of micro-gestures and the prolonged micro-gestures in video portraits

Backgrounds:

In the last experiment which is video shooting people who wait, I want to grasp something tangible and visible that embodies waiting.

My obsession with reading people always leads me to the theatric sparkles of their real lives. I see them as performers, consciously or unconsciously.

Scenes of waiting in New York subway stations are among the most interesting real life theaters for me. Because waiting is generally mundane, boring and solitary, its theatric parts are deeply hidden and often ignored. I am interested in extracting the tiny theatric sparkles of people's various unconscious behaviors while they wait. I magnify them, slow them down, and see what may happen.

Tools:

"The camera introduces us to unconscious optics as does psychoanalysis to unconscious impulses."That's what Walter Benjamin thought photographs did in changing our perception of human movement.

More specifically, in terms of shooting, my project needed to shoot people waiting ("waiters") for a long period of time, as clearly as possible, with different shots, close, medium, and long in order to analyze facial and body languages.

I selected location and time, went out and shot people waiting.

I first tried surveillance camera systems, hoping to capture waiters in delis for a long period of time. But I failed, in that I couldn't get high quality independent footage.

Body languages:

I am always interested in how body language reveals emotions and thoughts. For studying waiting, body language is a good point of entry. Each gesture or movement can be a valuable key to an emotion a person may be feeling at the time.

Micro-expressions:

Micro-expressions: a micro-expression usually only lasts a moment. Micro-expressions are also almost entirely involuntary. For this reason, experts believe they hold clues to what we are actually feeling, whereas expressions are mere masks.

here is one collection of mouth movement.

By constantly reading the footage, slowing them down, scaling them or playing frame by frame, I discovered several micro-expressions on those waiters' face. Most of them just happened for less than 1 second. But they revealed the mental states of the waiters and their emotions which were very complex and very authentic.

As I prolonged the micro-expressions happened within 1 second into 3 seconds, so people can perceive them.

6.3 The analysis of the three types of waiters

Three types of waiters:

1,The waiting engagers, with their full attention on waiting and the thing they are waiting for.

2, The self-distracted with their attention on external things, but not waiting itself. The distractions, which can be seen as dead time fillers, are sometimes strategic and purposeful, sometimes conditional reflex and unconscious.

3, The self-absorbed with their attention within their mind, but not thinking about waiting itself. They are the problem solvers, random mind drifters, and the meditated.

The inventory of waiters in these three categories:

The self-absorbed (internally attentive)

The meditated
The problem solvers
The random mind drifters:
The sad, the happy, the inspired

The self-distracted (externally attentive)

The "keeping-my-hand-busy"
The kinetic time-fillers:
Repetitive, mechanical, rhythmic?
The strategic ones, the instinctive ones, the conditional reflected ones
The productive (making up, reading)
The observer
The potential trouble maker

The waiting engagers (attention on waiting)

The anxious
The bored
The impatient
The disappointed
The waiting breaker
The satisfied
The released
The hopeless
The resigned

Diagram analysis:

Notes:

This is not "the" way to classify waiters based on how they wait, but a way to do it, in order to help us understand waiting and see it in another way.

People constantly swim between categories, based on how they switch their attention. The mechanism of how people switch attention, what triggers the switch is not all clear, since many swimming and floating between states are unconscious. But there are some physical signs as waking up calls.

Research possibilities involving consciousness, gesture and micro-expression are involved. After getting more data, we will see some patterns. This project is a start point to analyze waiting through physiological cues.

Database of waiters:

As I cut those faces into pieces, mouth/eyes/chins/hands/etc, they formed a database of gestures in waiting, based on three types of waiters.
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There are certain patterns coming out of the database. For instance, the pattern of finger massage while day-dreaming.

6.4 My own waiting

Since my work is about waiting, I need to wait, in order to get something real and first-person. That is usually how I do my work.? However, the difference this time is? I did not design an experiment as before, setting myself up to be the subject of my piece, as a performance. This time, I naturally became my own piece's subject.

Waiting to discover

The nature of this project is less about designing to solve problems, or increasing the awareness of something in our society, which I see as propaganda. This thesis project is about discovery, which means indeterminate, both adventurous and risky. Not being specific what I'm going to make, an object or a phone application, or what technology I'm going to use at the very beginning, I only know my subject is "waiting".

Understanding the facts that there could be nothing interesting coming out after 3 months, I am being vulnerable, waiting to discover something new.

Waiting for the waiters

The shooting process required me to experience waiting, specifically, anticipation, hope, excitement, danger, disappointment, uncertainty, boredom, energy, expectation, anxiety, worry, surprise, etc. I was waiting for people's unconscious gestures, facial expressions, movements.

Waiting for the waiters also happened while analyzing the video portraits of waiters. The longer I waited, the more mysterious they became, the more I want to see something happen.

It demand my real waiting, my real self-involvement, and it is less a performance, or a experiment in a setting up, more like a project process documentation, especially, in this case, waiting for people who wait, the majority of the time is "nothing happens".

The poem

The excitement of discovering something after having been waited for a long time, the uneasiness of the waiting and the ever increasing intimacy between me and my subjects in my portraits as the suspension getting stronger inspired me to write a poem.

Nothing happens

To the self-absorbed ones

Your gaze loses the focus,
Faraway, faraway.
You are waiting, but not waiting.

Your finger follows your thought, across your chin,
Slowly, slowly...
Suddenly, tipping away,
I know I know,
You got inspired!

Your lips follow your thought,
Tight, tight...
You're biting them,
Suddenly, they separate,
And a long sigh follows,
I know, you tried hard already,
I am sorry.

You stand still,
Still, Still...
Suddenly, the tip of your lips up,
I know, it was sweet.

All happened, all gone,
In the past one second.

7. Conclusions

After the project, I become more conscious about different types of waiting as well as how people wait. I gain the fresh perspectives on waiting. I asked myself the same question I asked when the project just started. So what is waiting?

Waiting is the suspended desire, is the unfilled time gap, is more than an amount of time, is the experienced time, is an empty container with its form and shape, by itself; but without meaning and content, which is to be imbued in. Waiting can be associated with adventure, discovery, positive, active. Waiting can be enjoyable. While waiting, our attention swims among different states, self-absorbed, self-distracted, and engaging in waiting.

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