Granularity

As the title of my blog suggests, I will from time to time write about object manipulation, an umbrella term used by the juggling cognoscenti to encompass things like toss juggling, contact juggling, poi, diabolo, etc... I'm starting to give lessons at a local community center in hula hooping and poi and I've been thinking about some differences in how various communities push their object manipulation forward.

To draw some very broad strokes I think that you can classify various types of object manipulation into two camps, fine grained manipulation or coarse grained manipulation. The distinction between the two is that with fine grained manipulation you can at a much lower level precisely control the object and that in addition your precise level of control creates a discernible difference while coarse grained manipulation requires far more effort to control and correspondingly has diminishing returns in noticeable effect. To illustrate this, consider hula hooping. Movement in Hula Hooping can be somewhat incompletely partitioned into three major parts. On the body hooping consists of movement of the hoop around a part of your body by a force other than your hands. The obvious example is what everyone thinks of with respect to hula hooping, hooping around your waist, or your neck, or your chest, or your knees and ankles and so on. This is a really excellent example of coarse grained object manipulation. You have a somewhat limited number of places to hoop from, basically: ankles, knees, waist, chest, neck, shoulders, head, arms. Now you can with enough practice and refinement be able to control where exactly the hoop goes, say for example you want to place it 2 inches above your belly button, or two inches below, you could probably do this with enough practice but it require a lot of work to create that precision and consequently wouldn't really create much of a visual difference. Correspondingly let's look at a contact juggling, particularly what I think of as the isolationist movement in contact juggling. As you can see in the video this form of contact juggling relies on lots of precise isolations to make striking visual patterns. Here the level of skill required to precisely move the object is lower, a consequence of the fact that the object is much lighter and can be directly manipulated by your hands, a hoop is manipulated in the previous context by precisely controlling your abdominal and hip muscles.

Another sort of corollary we can draw I think from this idea of fine grained and coarse grained manipulation is that their learning curves are very different. Because coarse grained movement doesn't easily allow one to differentiate between precise control and relatively imprecise control coarse grained movement can have a learning curve that's fairly flat followed by an exponential rise in difficulty, whereas fine grained manipulation has a learning curve that seems more like a logarithm, very steep at first followed by somewhat of a plateau. I think hooping is again an excellent example of this where to learn some basic body hooping techniques is really not that difficult but to gain exact and precise control over the movement seems a herculean effort.

So the question most people are asking right now is what the hell is this guy talking about, i don't know anything about juggling or object manipulation or whatever. I'm going to ignore those people and think about another question maybe a few people are asking right about now, so what, who cares? Well I care, because I think this says something interesting about how the different arts develop and how their communities develop. Hooping's community (from a distance) seems largely dominated by people who are interested in pushing forward the integration of hooping with body movement and dancing and costuming (not to say there aren't several really amazing people pushing the abilities of tech hooping) whereas say the toss juggling community is obsessed with creating the next cool sideswap pattern or the next impressive body throw trick.

I think this also has repercussions in how various groups view each other. Coarse grained manipulation seems to focus on the interplay of body movement with their object while fine grained manipulation tends to focus on exploring the space of visual patterns able to be created by their object. This can have the coarse grained manipulators see the fine grained manipulators as "tech nerds" while the fine grained manipulators view the coarse grained manipulators as "too dancey".