Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance 0262195887, 9780262195881

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Foreword Peter Sellars

The book you hold in your hands exemplifies our age—exhausting but not exhaustive, much too much information and much too little—and yet hugely stimulating, expansive, and replete with parallel lives and miraculous confluences. We live surrounded by a chaos of undifferentiated factoids and half-formed allusions, and in the absence of convincing structural links, we rely on, search for, or imagine flashes, intuitions, hovering conceptual affinities, and hyperbolic recurrences that can be explained only by accumulated karma from previous lifetimes or pure unadulterated random chance. This book reflects all of these prolixities and unresolvable energies. (That you are even holding a book indicates your predilection for the antique and demonstrates your own taste for time travel, spirit possession, and an interest in getting inside other people’s bodies.) Chris Salter’s project is to propose an exploded performance history of surprisingly radical inclusivity. In the best twenty-first-century tradition the volume assigns low priority to the making of judgments, ideological sequestration, and the old-fashioned twentieth-century scenario of good guys and bad guys and friends and enemies. Across the teeming pages of this book, everyone is here. Or at least a lot of people and quite a few art forms. Extending the boundaries of this book across disciplines and geography means that surprising artists show up in the context of a much richer cross-pollinated image-flow than in many previous histories of avant-garde practice. Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Australia are still underrepresented, which is too bad because we still have a lot to learn about the use of technology from indigenous cultures. The traditional arts in those places have always been interactive and interdisciplinary, with ceremonial imperatives that reach beyond the decorative distractions of a wealthy society with time on its hands and no ethical urge to reshape, reimagine and sustain the mechanisms of justice in human and divine affairs. Indigenous technological practice is specifically oriented to the growth and continuum of the natural world and humanity’s

place in it, direct contact with ancestors, and the creative and moral shaping of future reality. What is technology? A pencil, a stick of incense, or a feather. Or a neutron bomb or a brain sensor. Technology itself is nearly neutral; it is the motives of how and why technology is employed that determine the fruitfulness or devastation of its consequences. Indigenous ceremony uses interdependent technologies embroidered with accompanying narratives to touch and enter a synesthetic state of transcendence that invites an evolving community into a shared aura of undifferentiated, imperceptible simultaneities in which every action is part of another action, in which thought and emotion move in ways that are not limited or overdetermined by temporal powers. Sharing our lives with the dead and with the unborn, with the articulate and with the inarticulate, points us toward an open-ended renewal that hosts and raises spirits and that becomes a direct empowerment. It is no accident that the triumph of bourgeois realism in nineteenth-century theater (itself an avant-garde achievement) was met with a deep counterreaction from artists who needed to break out of their salons and drawing rooms, with such earthed and cosmic activities as Rite of Spring, Poem of Ecstasy, and so on. These synesthetic projects were inspired by accounts from anthropologists coming back from the Pacific Northwest, Guinea, Morocco, Brazil, or Romania and describing performance practices that were extreme and astonishing. Could Western culture of the machine, the time clock, the bureaucracy, the scientifically determined fact be transformed by an action that liberated multiple sensory perceptions into an experience that broke through the confines of a crushing materialism? The new material realities in an age of mass production and reproduction were certainly shockingly dehumanizing and also strangely human. The early twentieth-century technologies of mass media were ideal promotional tools for fascist states because communication typically flowed in one direction, reifying the position of spectatorship. The absence of reciprocity and the heightened possibilities for control created a capitalist or communist paradise for manipulative groups and individuals. The foundations were laid for corporate brainwashing and the marketing of desire, craving, and domination fantasies that have proliferated into our current cultural miasma of virtual realities. Thanks to the generosity if not the foresight of the military industrial complex, the late twentieth century saw the arrival of the Internet and a host of interactive technologies that, if the election of Barack Obama signals anything, have within them the potential to deepen and extend a genuinely democratic and responsive culture. The high-tech interface has been appealing to artists because it does have the potential to fragment and diversify the master narrative, offering simultaneous multiple perspectives, freshly negotiated interdependent vocabularies, and the direct experience of ambiguity, the ineffable, and a sensory and mental landscape that lies above, below, and beyond ideology. The classic Gesamtkunstwerk that we inherited from the Renaissance in the form

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of masques, pageants, and opera regrettably had its muscular and metaphysical transcendence rooted in the heart of empire—the single-point perspective of the ravishing choreography and scenery made sense only from the royal box. Everyone else had to take it on faith that this worldview was complete. The early twentieth century gave us wide shots, long shots, close-ups, and montage. Film language and the mechanisms of projection changed poetry, architecture, music, painting, and politics. Cutting, pasting, juxtaposition, layering, and simultaneity, the rhythmic organization of contrasting experiences, all became strategies for disrupting and interrogating state power. And more important, these new relationships and interactions of discrete aspects of experience opened into deeper understandings of the nature of consciousness and the workings of the mind. The performance of liberation and sensory awakening that Chris Salter traces across the DNA swabs of the following pages has as its primary thread the reorganization of human interaction and the reimagination of interrelatedness. Contrasting and contradictory emotions and histories are found to be deeply interpenetrating. The complications of texture that characterize our historical moment of global unease, with its potential for both confusion and unprecedented solidarities, are best represented in a world theater that is technically informed and brilliantly wired. The question that haunts us—does this technology blunt our humanity or enlarge it?—continues to be explored and understood differently by new generations as the technology itself evolves along with the human species, and becomes more readily accessible in price and in prevalence. The performative possibilities continue to take us into more and more dizzying levels of inherent contradiction, again tending towards a more democratic play of multiple perspectives and the yin-and-yang dynamic of the universe itself. The fixed point of view is gone. The participant-observer is a given. Space and place are remade and remixed in new political, sociological, and cultural constructs. Chris Salter has invited a vast range of artists and movements to his table. The democratic impulse of inclusivity means that he gives equal treatment to masterpieces and minor works, to turning points and to non-events, to revelations and dead-ends, to artists whose work opened new possibilities that are inexhaustible and still inspiring, and artists whose work was a temporary flash, a cul de sac, a philosophical blip. This exercise makes us aware of a collective momentum, a zeitgeist that lies outside the traditional focus on historical points and persons of originality. Nevertheless, I would encourage the reader to explore the interesting and the obscure references in this dynamic amalgamation in much greater depth. The major artists discussed in this book cannot be described in the two sentences that a survey format has allotted them. In most cases, behind the honorable mention in these pages lies a lifetime of inquiry, courage, and risk. All artists court the disaster zone of self-branding that moves an artistic breakthrough into the realm of a fashion statement, that trades the unease of relentless experimentation for the relative ease of creating a

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commercial product with its own seductive qualities. For this reason, the entwined histories that Chris Salter lays before us are not necessarily all about success in the conventional sense; some of the successes are slightly depressing, and some of the failures remain signal, illuminating, and darkly beautiful. Entangled is a good title for a subject that refuses to lie down, clean up, or invite a last word. Messed Up would also be a good title for a lot of the work considered in this perforated catalogue. The fleeting and the improvisatory are at a premium in the face of the challenges before us. Artists are responding with whatever is at hand to a social, political, and technological reality that is completely out of control. We do not have a grip on our moment in history. The hyper-specialization and complexity of every facet of life precludes our full grasp of even the most basic issues that confront the planet. And of course, in all our technological proliferation, we have still not learned how to read our own hearts. Artists across many fields and cultures are collaborating to create shared areas of nuance, mutual regard, specificity, hybridization, care, attention, and debate. In the new era, the power of the work, and the empowerments of authorship, are increasingly held by communities, not individuals. And the very fact that the illusion of control can no longer be maintained is the first stage of freedom. Los Angeles, May 2009

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Preface: A Reader’s Manual for Entangled

What you have before you is a large work that grapples with how technologies, from the mechanical to the computational, have radically transformed artistic performance practices during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries on and off the stage. In doing so, it seeks to answer two specific questions: (1) how developments in electromechanics, projection, acoustic and sound technologies, new architectural materials, and computational systems have altered our making and perception of artistic performance, and (2) what sociopolitical-cultural-economic contexts have lead performing, visual and media artists, musicians, architects, choreographers, directors, composers, interaction designers, and researchers to deploy such developments. My interest in writing this work stems from several directions. The first is the need to fulfill what I perceive to be a gap in how the histories of the new media arts, in particular—but also theater and other stage-based forms—are being written, specifically from the point of view of technical systems and processes. Many of these histories are caught up in a tension between the technophilic and the technophobic.1 On the one side, there is a strange mysticization and godlike awe of technology. On the other, there are the reactions of performing artists who feel that technology will compete with and potentially usurp their central role as human performers. Elizabeth LeCompte, director of the internationally known avant-garde theater collective The Wooster Group perfectly summed up this tension in an interview about her adolescence in New Jersey: I didn’t think of media as a different thing than the theater. I thought the television was no different than what was for Chekhov opening a door and seeing imitation light outside. The television was there all the time, it was a natural element of our environment . . . at the time (during the 1960s) the television wasn’t used in the theater because people said if you put the television in the theater, if you put a TV image in the theater, everyone will watch the TV. They won’t watch the theater experience . . . which fascinated me.” (1987)

Despite this artificial but continually propagated tension between the technical and the human, I am nevertheless genuinely curious to explore what performance traditions can teach other emerging practices, for example, the heterogeneous field described as the new media. I have long held that training in such computer-based arts demands a hybrid approach, in which students not only study code and electronics but also master other practices that are directly imported from performance traditions, like dramaturgy, lighting, sound, or the creation of scenographic environments that involve multiple elements functioning in space and time. Many new media curricula are now bearing this observation out. First, as event and interactive environment design become commonplace design practices, there is a growing interest in performance techniques among students and professionals. Second, accompanying this interest is a demand for critical studies that discuss the histories of such performative practices involving technical processes in a rigorous and thorough manner. Despite a growing cadre of books on performance and technology, however, many of these works focus on one narrow field of coverage, such as media applied to the stage or the performative elements of installation art.2 But if we are to really understand what is going on in these technocultural trends, we need to grasp how performance practices using technical systems have been widely interpolated across a number of disciplines that are rarely, if ever, gathered in the same volume. The more I have talked with students, teachers, and professional artists during the process of writing this book, the more I have realized that there is a deep desire for a historical and critical reference work that is not aligned with just one specific discipline. Perhaps a more fundamental reason for this book is the necessity I feel for both theorists and practitioners to know what has come before them. This desire is not just an academic exercise, rooted in critically analyzing historical trends, concepts, and movements, but is instead aimed to inform future praxis itself. Indeed, this book stems as much from my own professional work for more than fifteen years with technological means in performance in a variety of disciplines as it does from conceptual and historical interests. The fact that I am a maker of as much as a spectator to these processes, of course, puts me both in a privileged and precarious position: privileged in the sense that the practices explored are not mystical but pragmatic, yet precarious, as I certainly cannot employ observational distance in the way that social scientists or ethnographers of laboratory practices do. Thus, this book has been written to be broad and far reaching in order to capture the resonances between different practices that may have been overlooked in their original historical contexts due to disciplinary and other constraints. This does not mean, however, that it is without a conceptual or theoretical basis. Lest I give a false impression, the introduction that follows is designed to expand our conceptual context of what we mean by “performance.” While other books have described the “performance” context from anthropological or linguistic perspectives, what distinguishes this attempt is the focus it

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lays on more recent theoretical work that is just beginning to find its way into artistic performance discourses, for example, science and technology studies. Although this move may at first seem like an unnecessary detour for a book that is mainly focused on artistic praxis and not performance in its multiple other theoretical guises (e.g., linguistic acts, social and anthropological rituals, or the practices undertaken in scientific laboratories), it is essential if we are to grasp performance’s meaning and stakes within the technoscientific culture we inhabit. These technocultural frameworks, of course, apply to the stage, for example, in discussing the impact on spectator perception when a video monitor suddenly invades a text-based play or when a dancer’s double appears on a screen, but they also pertain to other disciplines that we might never imagine as “performative”: architecture or participatory urban spaces that do not clearly demarcate performer and spectator, for example. In other words, I am interested in how performance, as both method as well as praxis, can be explored across a wide range of artistic fields and how these practices have participated in a set of common histories across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, despite their disciplinary borders. In order to accomplish this none-too-formidable task, I have organized the book in eight chapters entitled, “Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933),” “Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–),” “Performative Architectures,” “The Projected Image,” “Sound,” “Bodies,” “Machines/Mechanicals,” and “Interaction,” with each chapter focused on a specific area: theater scenography; architecture; video/image making; music and sound composition; body-based arts like dance and performance art; machine and robotic art; and, finally, the construction of interactive, participatory environments in research, festival, and urban contexts. The chapters are organized first thematically and then chronologically, with both areas intimately related to each other. With some exceptions, the historical span of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first is bracketed by two technological frames: the machine age at the start of the twentieth century, which spans the period from 1900–1933 and the post–World War II computation age, encompassing the period of 1950–1970 and from 1970 to the current time. This historical continuum between the mechanical and computational is intentional. Although, as you will soon discover, technology as device and world maker has always been immanent in artistic performance, the beginning of the machine age of modernism marks a unique moment in which rapid changes of the entire politico-socio-cultural fabric in Europe, Russia, and North America resulted in artists materializing their fascination with technology through new forms and processes. As the historian Stephen Kern wrote in The Culture of Time and Space: 1880–1918, technologies of mechanization inspired entirely “new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space,” transforming “essential structures of human experience and basic forms of human expression” (1991, 14). In similar fashion, the transition from the mechanical to the computational paradigm, or more precisely, the digital paradigm that began in earnest after World War II and has

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reached full force only more recently, marks a similar rupture that we are currently in the throes of grappling with across all registers of life. The historical continuum between the mechanical and computational presents us with the possibility of deflecting the overemphasis on the digital as if technology could be considered only from the standpoint of the computer. Simultaneously, it also allows us to explore a range of techniques (electromechanical, optical, acoustic, and computational) that have elicited radically different kinds of perceptual practices. In essence, then, each chapter of the book is a self-contained overview of performative practices in one of the particular areas, allowing the whole to function as a reference work and enabling us to quickly pick out specific areas of interest. This survey resembles something of a bricolage constructed from historical accounts gleaned from archival textual, image and sound research, technical diagrams, descriptions and models, the close reading of primary sources and accounts of projects by artists, critics and audiences, personal interviews and discussions with living artists, as well as my own experience as both practitioner and spectator. Of course, what I propose here is ambitious—almost impossibly so. Entire books are written not only about each of the areas I endeavor to describe, but also restrict their time frame to a few years. Still, because this is a broad survey, my aim is to cover as much territory as possible within the constraints that have been laid out. As you will soon discover, although the practices discussed could also be described by disciplinary constructs like theater, architecture, sound art, music theater, and visual and media arts, the notion of discipline is quite limited. Artists, projects, works, technologies, and contexts will jump between the different chapters and defy neat boundaries. Some creators will appear only once, yet others will cross several chapters, revealing different facets of their practices. Technologies will become completely mixed up in projects that purposefully shatter the well-defined theatrical and architecturally determined roles of performer and spectator. Where, for example, do we place the pioneering work of the British architect Cedric Price, who worked with Joan Littlewood, a politically motivated Marxist theater director in order to create a “Fun Palace” that was neither completely architecture nor theater but an interactive, technologically driven public play space for performances in everyday life? How do we classify something like 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering using traditional artistic disciplines like theater, dance, or visual art? Where is one to place the range of performative works from artistic collectives that arose in the 1990s, inventing computer-based interaction techniques that straddled the research lab, the media arts festival, the academic conference circuit, and commercial industry? In order to make the book easier to navigate, as well as to enable the work to reveal its structure, I have created several devices that will help you find information. First, you will find many specialized (especially for the technologically uninitiated) terms, some of which may be familiar and some of which may not. In order to not get bogged down in

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too much jargon (although, admittedly, there will be some), I have included a detailed glossary in the back of the book and have italicized those specific terms in the text. Because this is a book focused on technics, I feel it is essential to work at this level of technical detail, particularly as many books discussing performance and technology describe the technology incorrectly in the first place. Second, in order to avoid a sense of “we’ve seen this before,” I have created a crossreferencing system that includes in brackets previous chapter and section numbers of artists, genres, or practices that have already been referred to in the text (e.g., [Tatlin, chapter 3]). This system functions as a kind of extremely simplified hypertext without the computer, allowing you to discover artists working across multiple genres as opposed to being slotted into the traditional categories of “scenic designer” or “director” or “visual artist.” Finally, although I strongly acknowledge that technology within artistic practices is a cross-cultural phenomenon, a large emphasis of what I explore focuses on European, North American, and Japanese contexts. While I have made every effort to include practitioners and works that do not originate in Western contexts, it is inevitable in such a large project that there will be omissions, both intentionally (due to lack of space) and unintentionally.

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Acknowledgments

Writing a book like this is not only a labor for the author but also for loved ones, partners, friends, colleagues, and associates as well. Despite the solitude that is required to write, in many ways, those who are part of the community around the writer are the ones who have to live with the work the most, whether they choose to or not. I first need to thank Todd Winkler. At a symposium on Video and Performance at Brown University in spring 2004, Todd suggested that my talk on the history of video on the stage be turned into a full book. Many pages later and with so many other histories intertwined with it, Todd’s suggestion has materialized. During the process of writing, I have talked with innumerable artists, designers, researchers, curators, and practitioners. While it is impossible for me to name all of these I especially want to thank Erik Adigard, Sam Auinger, Andreas Broeckmann, Dieter Daniels, Scott deLahunta, Laura Farabough, Kathleen Forde, Karmen Franinovic, H. C. Gilje, Heidi Gilpin, Kurt Hentschläger, Doug Kahn, Paul Kaiser, Chris Kondek, Martin Kusch, Katja Kwastek, Armando Meniccaci, Sally Jane Norman, Bruce Odland, Joel Ryan, Rebecca Schneider, Skip Sweeny, Helen Thorington, Woody and Steina Vasulka, Manfred Waffender, Carl Weber, Arnd Wesemann, Robert Woodruff, and others. Furthermore, this work is quite inseparable from artistic practice. My collaborators in Sponge (Laura Farabough and Sha Xin Wei) as well as Marije Baalman, Yin Mei Critchell, Bill Forsythe, Jayachandran Palazhy, Thomas Spier, Michael Schumacher, Lea Xiao, and student collaborators Brett Bergmann, Daniel Grigsby, Nick Munoz, and Philip Viel, have provided many hours of discussion and practice, wherever around the world I was writing. Special thanks to Karen Nölle and Hans-Ulrich Möhring for the wonderful hospitality at their home in Niederkleveez, Germany, which gave me peace and quiet in the summer of 2007 to write.

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Peter Sellars, who is most likely the busiest artist in the world, still managed the time to write such an amazing foreword, even in the midst of flying to New Zealand, preparing an Obama-era Othello, and giving talks across the world about the necessity of art and culture in times of duress such as these. I want to thank my anonymous reviewers from the MIT Press who provided me with so much helpful advice as well as the numerous artists, designers, researchers, archive directors and assistants who provided me such fantastic images for the book. You are all too numerous to mention by name, but I owe much gratitude to you all for your help. The intellectual and artistic community in Montréal has been a great atmosphere to nurse a work balanced between theory and praxis. In particular, I want to thank Ana Cappelluto, Tom Lamarre, Erin Manning, Brian Massumi, Michael Montanaro, and Alain Thibault, among so many others, as well the group of graduate students at Concordia University who have been collaborating with me, especially my PhD research assistants Christoph Brunner, who spent many long summer days and evenings in 2008 in the libraries and on the phone to Germany, Switzerland, New York, and who-knows-whereelse tracking down references and image rights, and Harry Smoak, who spent many an hour working on the superb glossary at the back of this book. Also, architect and PhD researcher Patrick Harrop was invaluable in giving strong feedback on the architectural angles in the text. I need as well to acknowledge my colleagues in the Department of Design and Computation Arts at Concordia as well as the Faculty of Fine Arts for their support. I would also like to thank Louise Dandurand, VP of Research at Concordia, who provided Seed Funds enabling me to acquire the reproduction rights on the large amounts of photos in the book, and Associate Dean of Research Lynn Hughes for her general support. Of course, there are those at the MIT Press who made this project possible in the first place—in particular, Doug Sery. It has been Doug’s unwavering belief in bringing a performative perspective to new media studies that has seen this book through its long gestation period and ultimate materialization. MIT’s crack team of editors, including Kathy Caruso, Nancy Kotary, and Marcy Ross have been incredibly responsive and patient as I have assembled this behemoth. I wish to thank my parents Alice Salter and my father, the late Lloyd W. Salter, for so many years of encouragement, support, and belief. Finally, this book would have not been possible without the love and support of Anke C. Burger, my wife and companion. Danke Liebste. Ich schulde dir Hunderte Stunden von Quality Time und Abwaschen.

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Introduction

Performance as practice, method, and worldview is becoming one of the major paradigms of the twenty-first century, not only in the arts but also the sciences. As euphoria for the simulated and the virtual that marked the end of the twentieth century subsides, suddenly everyone from new media artists to architects, physicists, ethnographers, archaeologists, and interaction designers are speaking of embodiment, situatedness, presence, and materiality. In short, everything has become performative.1 Theater, dance, music, and—increasingly—the visual arts have long been occupied with the embodied, material characteristics of performance, while emerging forms like digital media have emphasized technology and tools as their holy grail of innovative creative expression. Obsessed in the 1990s by the ocular and the inscribed, the screen and data, now even the new media arts are discovering (or recovering) felt experience, situated context and polysensory affect that cannot simply be reduced to text, code, or photons aimlessly floating on the screen.2 This move seems like a logical step as the new media embrace the dynamic, real-time event that has always differentiated performative practices from the static objecthood of the visual arts. Yet with the spurt of work in areas such as laptop computer music, sensoraugmented dance, responsive architecture, video-saturated mise-en-scène, networkcontrolled robots, and performative urban spaces, it sounds like new technologies have suddenly created a horizon of aesthetic experiences with no previous historical precedent. Even a cursory glance at the technological history of performance on and off the stage, however, reveals a story strangely similar to our present one. From the transfer of electric light into the theater, the introduction of optical apparatuses like the video camera that shattered the purity of the live event or wraparound, transmutating image and sound environments, this story is populated with the same utopian hopes as that of our forebears, namely, that technological invention could be harnessed to create unparalleled aesthetic,

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perceptual, and ontological experiences. What these histories so fundamentally reveal is that the performing arts are really an unstable mixture amalgamating light, space, sound, image, bodies, architecture, materials, machines, code, and a perceiving public into unique spatiotemporal events. “Technology,” writes performance studies scholar Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, “is integral to the history of performance” (2002, 48). Undeniably, we see this integration materialized in the endless metaphors used to describe the stage itself: mechanism, clockwork, construction, system, apparatus, and even computer. Whether through the invention of perspective and its subsequent transfer to the stage, the assimilation of newsreel films into the theatrical mise-en-scène in the Russia of the 1920s or the deployment of sensing systems to turn dance and even architecture into a play between humans and electronics, the history of performance has always been caught up in our machine fascinations. As a microcosm of the world, technology already revealed itself on the fifth century Athenian stage as machinae intimately bound up with the fate of human beings. Like an omniscient god, the cranelike deus ex machina emerged in the final moments of Greek tragedy to solve the moral quandaries created by human mistakes.3 Using the civic platform of the stage to showcase the sociopolitical world of Athenian society, the Hellenic theater already plays out dramas between human and machine—technology’s transcendent embodiment as the gods and, simultaneously, its immanent4 demonstration of the constructed mechanisms of the human world. Likewise, the origin of the word “theater,” the Greek word theatron, which translates as the place of seeing, was both a physical and perceptual space ordered by technology: an architectural zone where the spectator sat to watch the drama unfold, and a perceptual one that mediated the visual and acoustic relationship between the worlds of stage and audience. In other words, technology in the performance arts reveals itself not only in the machines that descend from the heavens by their own will, but also in how—through craft, skill, construction, or making (what the Greeks called techne)—it orders the world (logos). But technology is not rooted in just the Western stage. Although it does not explicitly feature discussions of machinae, the Natyasastra (the science of dramaturgy), the great poetics of Indian music, dance, and drama written somewhere between 200 BCE and 200 ACE, spans thirty-six detailed chapters in laying out the mechanics of Indian performance forms, much like a software manual.5 Making no distinction between the performing and visual arts, the Natyasastra articulates the vast systems that give life to Sanskrit performance traditions, from vocabularies of gesture (mudras) and the construction of stage architecture to the analysis of melodies (raga) and rhythmic cycles (tala) and the composition of the aesthetic theory of rasa: rules for the generation of affect between performer and spectator. Similar to the spatial theatron, the literary Natyasastra is also composed of ordering systems; technologies in the form of plans, schemas, descriptions, and rules for

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the construction of performance events that bring the spiritual universe of the gods to life through the fragile techne of humans. Our focus on the technological in performance does not demonstrate just how we order the world through artifice, however, but how such artifice orders us. As KirschenblattGimblett claims that technology is integral to the history of performance, she also states “performance is integral to the history of technology” (2002, 49). Devices, machines, and tools may perform in terms of their efficiency or benchmarks, but they also perform by expressing things through material transformations that do things to the world.6 It makes sense that we can put the artifice of technology on the stage to show the workings of the world and that humans can act out or present something in front of a spectator surrounded by that technology, but how can machines and substances, materials, and spaces perform, especially when they have no consciousness or intention? Why should we grant the human right of performance to inanimate things, especially ones that we have created? How can we confuse artistic performances with the performances of machines, not only in terms of their function or efficiency, but also through the attribution to them of embodied expression?7 If we are then to rigorously examine how technology transforms performative practices, we might start with the word “performance.” To arrive at a cogent definition, however, is not going to be a trivial task, and it will be slow going. In fact, we are only following in the footsteps of countless others who have already created volumes dedicated to uncovering performance’s fluctuating meaning.8 In his Performative Science and Beyond: Involving the Process in Research, the physicist Hans Diebner states quite correctly that “due to many different approaches and divergent developments, the terms ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ lack conceptual clarity . . . deriving from various artistic fields and from linguistic, sociological and philosophical discourses, which are rooted in the second half of the twentieth century” (2005, 21). Even if it may be conceptually unclear, as Diebner states, I want to argue that there are certain characteristics of performance that distinguish it from other forms of knowledge making, namely: (1) an interest in enaction or doing, (2) real-time, dynamic processes over static objects or representations, (3) engagement with the temporal moment of the present, (4) embodiment and materiality, (5) immanent experience, (6) the effect of both human and nonhuman presence, and (7) transmutation and reconstitution. To make sense of this story, therefore, it is first necessary to broaden our inquiry and examine a number of different theoretical and disciplinary registers in order to provide some lenses for understanding what takes place in the technological transformation of artistic performances. Performance in the Arts and Beyond: Culture, Speech, Material

In its commonly understood artistic context, the label performance was a strategy used to describe actions, happenings, and time-based events emerging out of the visual arts during

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the 1950s through the 1980s. Predominantly but not exclusively in North America, Europe, Japan, and Latin America, artists and movements as varied as Yves Klein, Fluxus, the Japanese Gutai (Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai or Collective for Concrete Art) group, and Laurie Anderson, among others, invaded or bypassed the white-walled gallery with temporal and body-based practices, “dematerializing” the art object.9 As described in critic Rose Lee Goldberg’s 1976 landmark study Performance Art: From Futurism to Present, which located performance’s origin in the early-twentieth-century Western European avant-garde of the Futurists, Constructivists, and Dadaists, performance art practices aimed above all to distance themselves both from the static objects of the visual arts and the dramatic, textbased theater of the stage (Goldberg [1976] 1988). The contamination of the sanctified, self-sufficient art object by way of the flux of temporality, the artist’s body, and the viewer’s unstable perception, was not met with universal enthusiasm, however, particularly from art historical critics like Clement Greenberg and Michael Fried, who already claimed that static minimalist art and the encroaching world of performance represented a creeping “theatricality” that would destroy the essence of the individual arts. In what Fried saw as a movement away from the artwork as an independent unity and toward its eventual dissolution in the hands of viewers—or worse, participants—the survival of the visual arts would depend in part, as he notoriously wrote in his 1967 essay “Art and Objecthood,” on their “ability to defeat theater” (1967, 21). The concept of performance received a more radical reconceptualization in the 1970s. In what is now known as the performative turn in anthropology and sociology, scholars such as the cultural anthropologists Victor Turner and Clifford Geertz, theater director and theorist Richard Schechner, and later, performance studies scholar Dwight Conquergood and the sociologist Erving Goffman, attempted to wrestle performance away from its purely artistic-bound connotations. As early as 1973, Schechner already called for using the theories and methods of the social sciences to understand the nature of performance, and not only the kind occupying the traditional stage environment or the avant-garde of the art world. Schechner wrote: I believe that the convergence of the social sciences and the performing arts and the creation of performance theory is an antecedent to an avant-garde movement just taking shape. This movement will be more iconographic than iconoclastic; more conservative than prodigal; and more based on sheer observation and analysis than intuition and feeling. The movement will be radical not in the political sense of the late sixties but in the manner in which it attempts to go to the roots. (1973, 4; emphasis added)

Turning its focus onto the kinds of events studied by ethnographers, anthropologists, and sociologists, such as rituals, festivals, games, play, sports, interaction rituals, and performances within quotidian life like social work or gang violence, performance theory

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sought to “combine aspects of the scientific method with some of the traditionally intuitive methods of the arts,” analyzing what Dwight Conquergood later described as “the fabricated, invented, imagined and constructed nature of human realities” (1989, 83). Harnessing Victor Turner’s work in social drama (Turner 1974), Johan Huizinga’s (Huizinga 1950) and Roger Caillois’s notions of play (Caillois 1961), Goffman’s studies of framing and co-present interaction (Goffman 1959, 1963), and Ray Birdwhistell’s theories of kinesics and gestural communication (Birdwhistell 1970) among others, the performative turn not only took performance as the subject of research but also, more radically, the method by which research would be conducted. Performance as method thus aimed to challenge traditional understanding that saw the transmission of knowledge strictly through textual form and described with a critical, objective distance “from above,” instead focusing on the tacit, nonverbal, embodied, and immanent act of doing research; particularly, ethnographic research—what Conquergood eloquently described as the difference between “knowing that” or “knowing about” versus “knowing how” (2002, 312). The emphasis on performance as an act or doing also finds its roots in linguistics, and in particular the speech act theories of the British linguist John L. Austin. In his 1955 Harvard lecture entitled “How to Do Things With Words,” Austin defined what he called a performative or performatory as an expression or utterance that does not just describe or represent an action in language but actually performs or activates something. Whereas normal statements in speech or what Austin labeled “constatives” are considered to be either true or false, performative utterances, such as saying “I do” in a marriage ceremony or “I christen thee” when inaugurating the maiden voyage of a ship, are words that “are doing something . . . rather than reporting something” ([1955] 1975, 12–13). “The issuing of the utterance,” Austin wrote, “is the performing of an action” (6). Austin’s “questioning [of] an age-old assumption in philosophy—the assumption that to say something . . . is always and simply to state something,” suggests that language does not just represent statements but is an inherently material practice in the way it can change the course of an event in the world or create a new one (12). After Austin’s student John R. Searle broadened the discussion to include all speech acts as performatives, the label performativity reemerged with a vengeance in cultural studies, most notably in the work of philosopher and cultural theorist Judith Butler. Butler’s 1990 work Gender Trouble interpolates multiple meanings of performativity, coalescing them into a critical exploration of how the gendered female/male subject comes to be. In suggesting that “gender is in no way a stable identity or locus of agency from which various acts proceed; rather, it is an identity tenuously constituted in time,” Butler’s concept is critical of the notion that one has a fixed gendered identity (1988, 519). Gender is performative not through the metaphor of playing an imaginary role as Goffman used the term, but as an act, a temporal constitution of identity or event that is not yet given in the world. Although at times the theatrical and linguistic meanings blur, Butler’s use

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of Austin’s word “performativity” over “performance” advocates the active creation of a reality “that is, in some sense new, a modality of gender that cannot readily be assimilated into the pre-existing categories that regulate gender reality” (527). Through Butler, the notion that the materiality of the human body and its gendering is not ontologically pregiven as a fixed essence in a fixed human subject, but instead performatively produced in and over time, has had strong repercussions for the productive understanding of power relations and human subject formation than goes beyond Austin’s use of the word as a linguistic turn of phrase. Spanning a wide range of seemingly disconnected disciplines, what is at stake in all of these accounts is how performance as a mode of being in the world radically differs from representational forms of knowledge. In general, representation assumes a split between the representation, whether an image on the canvas or in the brain, a description in text or a line of code, and a thing or world to be represented—a referent. Variously translated as “imitation” or “mimicry,” Aristotle’s use of the term mimesis in the Poetics already suggests that the thing or act on the theatrical stage stands in for or represents someone that is not present but that we nevertheless should identify with through an act of empathy (1967, 17–18). Within a stage context, representation is hotly contested. The French actor and theater theorist Antonin Artaud railed against the concept that the stage was a place of stand-ins and imitators. By harnessing the means of spectacle, of light, space, sound, gesture, and forsaking the dominance of text, the theater would no longer copy life but instead, through the vibratory effect of its media, emerge as life itself, in all of its unstable, shifting materiality.10 But there is another more fine-grained notion of representation that goes beyond imitation and yet still manages to address the same problematic. In the context of the cognitive and computational sciences, the word “representation” denotes a correspondence between a mental image or symbol (a representation) in the brain or machine and an object or world that the symbol corresponds to. What this definition assumes first of all is that the object outside the brain is fixed and that the role of cognition is to recover the representation, as it exists a priori, that is, before experience. In other words, what representationalist forms of knowledge suggest is that a stable reality exists independent of the knower’s actions, and that this reality can be captured and described purely through the representation, whether a set of abstract symbols manipulated by the brain, descriptions in text or code, or more generally, culture itself. In contrast, what performance as method/worldview suggests is that there is not a reality pregiven before one’s experience but rather that the world is enacted or actively performed anew. The word “enaction” here has a specific meaning, derived from psychologist Jerome Bruner and later, the work of Franciso Varela, Eleanor Rosch, and Evan Thompson.11 Enaction, in Varela’s sense, describes the performance or action of “bringing forth of a world” based on the fact that we are a sensorimotor-based embodied agent in

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which meaning emerges through a continually historical process of “active living.” We bring about this world through a history of structural coupling between us and the dynamical environment, “not as a representation system, but as constrained imagination (which the name enaction evokes)” (Cohen and Varela 2000). Although Varela’s theory of enaction focuses on the embodied and dynamic interactions between the neural–cognitive system of an organism and its environment, there is nevertheless a curious resonance to the connotations of performance found in cultural theory. If representational accounts privilege a demarcation between subject and object or self and world, performative ones imply a world in which subjects and objects have not yet come into being and, even if materialized, are always in a constant state of flux and transformation that is unstable and difficult to repeat.12 “The move towards performative alternatives to representationalism,” as Karen Barad writes, “shifts the focus from questions of correspondence between descriptions and reality (e.g., do they mirror nature or culture) to matters of practices/doings/actions” (2003, 802). Like Butler’s use of the word, which proposes an active practice, a doing that constructs gender, “performative” implies that the world emerges over time, continually transformed through our history of interactions with it. Performative Science: The Battle of Agencies

Given its important contributions, performance studies has largely been a human-centered affair, remaining, with a few exceptions, conspicuously silent on issues of machines, technologies, objects, and matter, and increasingly proving inadequate for wrestling with the complex human–machine relationships that mark not only contemporary artistic practices but also scientific ones within technoculture.13 In fact, in an ironic twist of fate to Schechner’s original declaration that the arts should integrate more social science methods, the arena of STS (Science and Technology Studies or Science Technology and Society) has taken up his call in an inverse way, appropriating performance for the sciences while leaving the arts behind. The areas researched by STS are certainly not new. For the past twenty-five years, its adherents have been trying to understand the complex entanglements among natural, social, technological, and corporeal forces that help shape the world. A mixture between the naturally given and the culturally constructed, scientific knowledge has become an object of study by those seeking to understand, as sociologist Karin Knorr-Cetina argues, “the strategies and policies of knowing that are not codified in textbooks but do inform expert practice” (1999, 2). Proliferating a language focused on laboratories as the site where science is created and practiced while examining the bizarre imbroglios, as the French anthropologist Bruno Latour anoints them, of “human and nonhuman collectives,” those working in STS have effectively displaced humans as the sole producers of knowledge, the expressers of agency,

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or the only performers worthy of study in scientific dramas.14 Instead, STS explores the ways the nonhuman, things like bacteria, yeasts, scallops, bubble chambers, rarified technological instruments, and cultural artifacts, act and how competing materialities of humans and things or matter itself might be reconciled. What is more revealing in the STS landscape is how often the word “performance” appears, used to describe the actions of such entities like lactic acids, failed utopian transportation systems, or piezoelectric crystals that transcend the neat social/natural binaries that we are wont to divide them up into.15 Part of this new performative turn is an attempt to understand the role that material practice plays in scientific creation: how things are done rather than how they are described, once again marking out the territory between representational versus performative knowledge. For example, in numerous articles, sociologist of science Michel Callon discusses the performative properties of economics, arguing that economics, like any social scientific discipline, partially engages in the constitution of the reality that it attempts to describe; that any discourse acts or performs on the object of its discourse and changes it.16 Performance is even more explicit is the work of Bruno Latour. In his anthropologically oriented ethnographies of laboratory practices, Latour seeks a symmetrical relationship between humans and nonhumans in a move away from the earlier school of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) that emerged in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh.17 Unlike SSK’s human-centered focus on scientific construction, Latour seeks to give an equally important performative role to the nonhuman. In Latour, Woolgar, and Salk’s 1986 milestone study of the Salk Institute Laboratory Life, for example, the authors assert that the practice of science is not to provide facts or representations about nature but rather to perform it. “Interpretations do not inform as much as they perform” (Latour, Woolgar and Salk 1986, 285). Arguing that the animism of nonhuman systems has been patently ignored by social theories of knowledge that conveniently attempt to separate nature and culture, Latour’s notion of performance stems from his development along with fellow sociologists Callon and John Law of what has been termed the sociology of translation but more commonly, and perhaps erroneously, as Actor-Network Theory (ANT). In order to cope with the monsters produced by contemporary technoscientific society, the weird jumbling of disciplines, ideas, instruments, and formations ranging from genetically modified foods to ozone holes, digital expert systems, and RFID-tagged animals that are simultaneously social, technical, cultural, and natural, Latour, Law, and Callon invent what they label actor-networks. In this network model, the agency of actants (rather than just human actors) is spread out among multiple associations (the network), connected to each other in a skein of relations and transforming each other through such relations (Latour 2007). Studying “how a given element becomes strategic through the number of connections it commands and how does it lose its importance when losing its connections,” ANT as

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a method examines the co-constitutive processes by which actants come to perform in relationship with each other within technoscientific practices—“the attribution of human, unhuman, nonhuman, inhuman, characteristics; the distribution of properties among these entities; the connections established between them; the circulation entailed by these attributions, distributions, and connections; the transformation of those attributions, distributions, and connections, of the many elements that circulate and of the few ways through which they are sent” (Latour 2005).18 In another vein, sociologist of science Andrew Pickering also engages with the performative modes of science. For Pickering, performance is a method that breaks with the representational modes of sciences—the concept that knowledge can be encoded only in the minds of scientists or in the documents, theories, papers, texts, or other forms of inscription they produce to disseminate knowledge. Rather, the “performative image” of science is of “a field of powers, capacities and performances, situated in machinic captures of material agency” (Pickering 1995, 7). As demonstrated by the invention and deployment of instruments, devices and machines, the material aspects of scientific practice come to the fore; practices arising from the intertwining of human and nonhuman forces (like the weather) or what Pickering calls the dance of agency. Pickering’s dance of agency, however, is not fixed in time but depends on what he calls “temporal emergence.” Particular performances of agency arise only in the process of “doing science”: the processes of building instruments, watching those instruments resist and fail, readjusting or re-accommodating to the performances of the instrument, running the experiment again, and so on. “Scientists,” writes Pickering, “are human agents in a field of material agency which they struggle to capture with machines . . . reciprocally and emergently intertwined in this struggle” (1995, 21). Despite the fact that their ideas go far beyond performance studies’ human-centered approach, the theorizing by Callon, Law, Latour, and Pickering about nonhuman, material agency has come under fire by others working in the field, most notably in the work of physicist and feminist cultural theorist Karen Barad. Interested in what she labels “a post-human performativity for matter,” Barad asks similar questions as the Actor Network theorists, such as “Why did language become to be more trusted than matter?” and “Why are language and culture granted their own agency and historicity while matter is passive and immutable?” But she is also highly critical of the political emptying out of performativity from theorists like Pickering, in which “questions of meaning, intelligibility, significance, identity formation, and power,” are ignored (Barad 2003, 807).19 Influenced by Butler’s politically charged notion of gender performativity as well as physicist Niels Bohr’s philosophical work on quantum mechanics, Barad proposes a replacement of the atomistic notion of nonhuman “things in themselves” with what she terms agential realism. Things in and of themselves that maintain their own separate identities continually place us back into the territory of representation, precisely because they are imagined to exist as bounded entities that can be described and represented in

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language. In her reading of Bohr, things in the world do not have immutable boundaries, but rather are continuously reconfigured based on cultural, political, and material constraints and relations (Barad 2006). According to Barad, if we are going to ascribe agency to nonhuman things we must not see agency as a property of things as ANT and Pickering’s material dance do but as a performance in and of itself, much like Butler depicts the performance of gender. As an “ongoing reconfiguration of the world,” writes Barad, “agency is a matter of intra-acting: it is an enactment, not something that someone or something has” (1999, 7). The enactments of human, nonhuman, or hybrids such as Donna Haraway’s cyborg and simian entities shape their constantly emerging and transforming agencies rather than treating them as a priori subjects or objects. Whereas the performances described in the science studies landscape emphasize the actions done within human–machine entanglements, the performative science described by Hans Diebner has more in common with one of performance studies’ central, albeit more anthropocentric, tenets: an emphasis on the “emergent, temporal, contingent, provisional, indeterminate, dynamic, destabilizing” (Conquergood 1989, 83). Diebner’s notion of performance is intimately bound up with his research into complex dynamical systems whose behavior becomes unstable over longer time evolutions. Just as performance is a time-based, nonrepeatable (in the sense of the exact same situation) practice, so too is the behavior of fluid flow dynamics or cognitive systems that defy the scientific cornerstone of exact reproducibility due to their continual variance over time. The stability of a fixed research object suggesting an objective observer from a distance, something clearly challenged by both performance studies and STS paradigms, breaks down as the researcher becomes actively involved in the “moment in which the action is taking place”; a moment not altogether controllable or repeatable (Diebner 2005, 21). Furthermore, the scientist working with such complex phenomena is actively manipulating the parameters of the various mathematical and computational models she is using and thus, engaging, as Callon also describes it, in a performance with the very systems being studied. Performative science, for Diebner, is thus articulated as “an uncircumventable and constituent element of concrete practical investigations,” which involves not only the performances of systems under investigation but also a general strategy in creating public interfaces between science and art (2005, 25). The Cut

Despite the different connotations of performance in the technosocio-scientific context, the move toward agencies, collectives, and networks articulates a common thread: that humans, things, and matter are not fixed but always in a process of change and becoming. In contrast to stable systems with variables that can be measured and observed from

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without, culture is dynamic, “transacted through performance,” or what Conquergood aptly labeled the shift from mimesis to kinesis (Conquergood 1989, 83). Variously described as posthumanist, what so many of these nonhuman performances hinge on are hylozoic tendencies, the sense that all matter is animate, that lie beyond our human experience, whether embodied in rocks, trees, microbes, or digital computers.20 This animism of the nonhuman must at first seem altogether strange, but as Latour continually reminds us, the cuts between the inanimate and the animate are the results of modernity’s artificially constructed great divide between nature and culture. In contrast, premodern societies mix everything up: signs and things, the social and the natural and the human and nonhuman. Such concepts arise not only from those investigating sociotechnical phenomena. In his controversial work The Spell of the Sensuous (1997), the ecologist and magician David Abram discusses how shamans and sorcerers in traditional cultures act as intermediaries between humans and the larger community of beings, ensuring that the relationship is “balanced and reciprocal.” “Along with the humans, the multiple nonhuman entities that constitute the local landscape, from the diverse plants and the myriad animals . . . that inhabit or migrate through the region, to the particular winds and weather patterns that inform the local geography, as well as the various landforms— forests, rivers, caves, mountains—that lend their specific character to the surrounding earth” (Abram 1997, 10). In fact, Abram details an entire list of Indonesian, Native American, First Nations, and Aboriginal cultures who make no cut between the animism of the human and the world (Abram 1997, 69). According to anthropologist Richard Nelson, vast spiritual power is imbued upon the natural landscape surrounding the Koyukon of northwestern interior Alaska such that an unspoken code of morality toward nature exists. The forest “watches like a sea of eyes,” and demands respect while the “interpenetration of human and nonhuman utterances” in the Koyukon language act as an embodiment of a distant time when common languages were shared between humans and animals (147). Likewise, in the Alcheringa or Alchera (loosely translated as “Dreaming”) creation story, indigenous Australians describe the seamlessness that connects the inner human world with the landscape; a space in which there is no distinction between human, plant, and animal. More attuned to our own neurotic culture of Western modernism, even Sigmund Freud in The Uncanny (1920) addressed debates around how uncanny, strange or even dread-like feelings are unleashed: “Intellectual uncertainty is aroused as to whether something is animate or inanimate, and when the lifeless bears an excessive likeness to the living” ([1920] 2003, 140–141). Whether these anthropological accounts or Latour’s celebration of premodernism serve to reify the exoticism of non-Western culture to our technocratic West is another question beyond the scope here. What these accounts do convey, however, is the possibility of imagining a world without cuts between living phenomena and matter.

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Artistic Performances with Humans and Nonhumans

With anthropologists exploring the performances of rocks and birds and scientists finding agency in scallops, missile systems, and particle accelerators, I want to return to the central question of this book: how have technical objects or beings historically come to have been entangled with artistic performance practices? How can we understand the construction of artistic processes and events in which the human may no longer be the sole locus of enactment but performs in tandem with other kinds of beings: a tangle of circuits, an array of sensors, shape-changing materials, or a “space thundering with images and crammed with sounds” (Artaud 1958, 87)? Consequently, artistic performances that integrate technical systems into their intended strategies of artifice are as hybrid as Latour’s natural–cultural imbroglios, fusing multiple concepts of performativity simultaneously: as real-time actions played out in front of a spectator alongside the agency of machines trying to equally effect changes in the material conditions of the world. Watching what the twentieth-century playwright and director Bertolt Brecht called the apparatus of the stage from a distance, one in which things mechanically go up and down in the fly space of a theater or rotate on a turntable may be easy enough, but what are we to say about the Gordian territories that jumble together performers and spectators, spectators and scenographic environments, computers and actors, theater and urban space, architecture and machine, the research lab and the temporary festival? Still, Latour’s call for a symmetrical anthropology that gives things their due lands us in a dualistic framework between the human and the not. This may be forgiven when dealing with scientific practices that utilize nonhuman forces, but it is a much trickier territory when dealing with the all-too-human arena of performance, as such a split gives a convenient locus to theorists for where or where not to locate agency.21 Instead, my appropriation of the term entangled from its anthropological connotations suggests that human and technical beings and processes are so intimately bound up in a conglomeration of relations that it makes it difficult, if not impossible to tease out separate essences for each.22 When the cultural anthropologist David Howes writes that objects should be seen as bundles of sensory properties and interconnected experiences that activate the human senses in complex and culturally varied ways, he is also invoking a space that refuses to make a demarcation between inanimate technology and human interpreter (2006, 114–115). Another useful formulation closer to our context is the notion of machinic as articulated by the late French psychotherapist Félix Guattari: “Common usage suggests that we speak of the machine as a subset of technology. We should, however, consider the problematic of technology as dependant on machines and not the inverse” (1995, 33). Critical of both mechanist (the machine is a construction of parts) as well as vitalist/anthropomorphic (the machine is a living being) tendencies, Guttari’s notion of the machine is not simply a

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technical device but a bundle of heterogeneous forces perpetually criss-crossing and transforming each other in a constant state of becoming. A panoply of “materials and energies,” “semiotic or algorithmic” components (like calculations, programs or equations), and “individual or collective representations and information,” Guattari’s machinic entangles “social bodies, industrial complexes, psychological or cultural formations, such as the complex of desires, habits and incentives that create particular forms of collective behavior in groups of individuals, or the aggregation of materials, instruments, human individuals, lines of communication, rules and conventions that together constitute a company or institution” (Broeckmann 1999). Furthermore, as a “heterogeneous assemblage of components” that are co-constitutive with each other, the machine is also productive, specifically by way of its power to enunciate—to make “statements” through forces. “For each type of machine,” wrote Guattari in his last work, Chaosmosis, “we will pose a question, not about its vital autonomy—it’s not an animal—but about its singular power of enunciation” (1995, 34). Guattari’s invention and use of terms like collective assemblages and collective enunciations suggest that the machine is unique precisely because it has such enunciative power, not only in its ability to speak through the medium of language, but through all kinds of materials of signifying expression. “Just as social machines can be grouped under the general title of Collective Equipment, technological machines of information and communication operate at the heart of subjectivity, not only within its memory and intelligence, but within its sensibility, affects and unconscious fantasms” (4). Guattari’s machine is, in fact, the apparatus that has this enunciative power—the ability to engender new forms of subjectivity and experience, making marks in and on the world. If one of the hallmarks of performance is its material embodiment in the world, whether that body is defined by human form, a sound that rattles the chest, or a machine trying to decode the nuance of a choreographed gesture, then why should we make a cut between ourselves and the technologies we design to create sheer artifice and, at the same time, a world that is not represented but lived? What would it mean to examine a history of artistic performance practices using technologies as machinic performances in the spirit that Guattari used the term: as an immanent, collective entanglement of material enunciations that operate on, shape, and transform the world in real time? Entanglements

The theories of performance and performativity all too briefly surveyed here nevertheless provide a fruitful set of conceptual frameworks for comprehending the history of practices that makes up this book. Although the work presented does not advocate for a reading of such practices through a single theoretical frame (e.g., “Actor Network” or agential realism), what the exploration of the performative turn in STS gives is more nuanced ways of understanding machinic performance beyond the tired dichotomies of digital versus

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analog, real versus virtual, or networked versus local. In this way, this book reverses Schechner’s original dictum to bring the tools of social science to analyze the arts and instead employs concepts from philosophy and technocultural studies to understand how technology has been used in experimental artistic practices of performance that take place on the stage as well as in clubs, stadiums, festivals, research laboratories, and urban space. Contrary to the idea that performance has so many significations that the use of the word becomes meaningless, I want to set out specific contexts by which to view machinic entanglements. First, although the work here spans diverse areas such as architecture, electronic music, theater, and urban interventions, the common thread that links such a polyphony of practices together is their physical, real-time situatedness involving collective, co-present spectating, witnessing, and/or participation within the framework of a spatiotemporal event.23 Emerging from learning theory and anthropological studies of human-machine interaction, the term situated denotes actions, whether originating in human beings, machines, or materials, that occur in a concrete real-world context at a particular time and place versus an anytime, anyplace simulation, such as what takes place in online environments. In what anthropologist Lucy Suchman almost twenty years ago termed situated action, situation suggests “simply actions taken in the context of particular, concrete circumstances” (1987, viii). “The coherence of situated action is tied in essential ways not to individual predispositions or conventional rules but to local interactions contingent on the actor’s particular circumstances” (27–28). In contrast to many existing studies of performance and digital technologies, I thus will eschew a focus on such forms as MOOs, MUDs, CD-ROMs, solo-based computer gaming, purely Internet-based performances, online meta-verses and virtual communities such as Second Life, and similar examples of what has been branded with the monikers of digital performance, “cyber performance,” or “cyber theater.”24 Furthermore, despite such a technocultural phenomenon as screen-based computer games, there is already a growing body of existing and forthcoming literature that focuses on the dramatic aspects of this work.25 With regard to gaming, I wish rather to explore situated models emerging in the form of flash mobs or location-based media that strategically aim for an embedding of performances into the urban context, thus transforming the city into a temporarily demarcated event space. If the focus on the physically situated event might thus appear at first to be rather restricted, I hope to compensate by broadening the sites of performances focused upon from the theater and the concert hall, to the academic research laboratory, the club, temporary festivals, the interior of the human body, the exterior skins of buildings, public spaces, urban streets, and even the desert. Second, existing works that deal in particular with technology and stage-based performances principally understand technology as media technology, and mainly, image-based

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projected media.26 This has the effect of quickly bringing us back to well-trodden postmodern oppositions between live versus mediated or presence versus absence.27 Consequently, the discourse invoked becomes the same (mainly) ocular-centered one of image representation, thus ignoring other senses like touch, hearing, taste, or smell. I propose to use the word “technology” in a broader and more critical sense. Although one facet of classical philosophy of technology has come to understand it as a constructed tool, object, or—better yet—process that participates, through human action, in either unmasking (Karl Jaspers) or revealing/framing (Martin Heidegger) the world, I want to use technology in the spirit of what Latour calls mediation.28 Technologies are not simply inert or neutral artifacts that are, as Heidegger termed it, ready to hand: waiting for human presence to activate them and thus extend human action into the world, revealing and framing it in a particular manner. Instead, technologies are similar to Guattari’s machine, constructing and ordering social-cultural-political relations.29 Technology does something in and to the world by modifying existing relations and constructing new ones between humans, tools, processes and the environment in which all are deeply entangled. “Techniques are . . . not means,” declares Latour, “but mediators, means, and ends at the same time; and that is why they bear upon the social fabric” (1999, 197). In this spirit, then, I will not focus on what philosopher of technology Andrew Feenberg has called “the hermeneutic understanding of technology” (2000) or what technology means, but rather explore what it does, how it does it, and what the repercussions are across the artistic practices that utilize it. More to the point, the question I ask is how technology has mediated and scrambled meanings and categories among artists, events, and spectators, and in what specific contexts it has done these things. Third, one could argue that any performance practice that utilizes some kind of constructed instrument or procedure deserves to be discussed in the pages that follow. For the most banal example, consider the fact that most forms of modern theatrical performance involve the use of woodshop tools designed to cut materials for scenery or the employment of computer-controlled lighting and sound equipment in works that are not in the least interested in thematizing or embedding issues of technoculture into their making. Of course, though this is true, it would also require many more volumes than I can write. In order to restrict the focus, therefore, I narrow in on performance practices that consciously and intentionally entangle technologies so that they are inseparable from the form and operation of the work. Fourth, the long history of technological entanglement with performance practice has been ignored or downplayed not only in theater and dance histories—even ones purporting to study such issues as the death of character (Fuchs 1996) or post dramaturgy (Lehmann 2006)—but also in the recent surge of writing about the new media.30 Upon mentioning the fusion of performance and technology, one is immediately directed to Brenda Laurel’s much-lauded work 1991 work Computers as Theatre, which focuses on the dramatization

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of narrative models of computer interaction anchored in Aristotle’s Poetics (1967) but says little about the issues of performance as an embodied practice.31 In fact, interestingly enough, Computers as Theatre uses the mimetic, representational idea of theater as its prime model and Aristotle as its ironic father, leaving the antirepresentationalist stance of many performance artists working with machine systems in the twentieth century behind in the dust.32 Moreover, many analyses of technology with stage practices set machines aside as so much dead matter or, to bring up the tool model again, like a pencil wielded in the genius artist’s hands. If writers do get down to the nitty-gritty details of describing techniques, they are usually mystified or misunderstood, something that is mostly overlooked in aesthetic theory and criticism but would never be accepted in the detailed studies of scientific laboratory practices conducted by ethnographers of science and technology. Besides not giving a voice to Latour’s fabled nonhumans, such technical sloppiness is all the more problematic in the fact that creators working on developing and/or co-opting techniques in the construction of performances do so in sophisticated and nuanced ways and are quite aware of how the underlying technological specificity of tools and processes can be utilized to larger effect. Finally, my approach does not aim to reinforce teleological myths of progress or narratives of influence, for example, the tendency to argue that the fantasies of earlier movements like Futurism or Constructivism have finally reached their apotheosis in our superior hardware and software of the twenty-first century. Each episteme is certainly influenced by past ones in refashioning its techne, but this tendency is perhaps more due to our need to find continuity within what we experience as a history of ruptures and violent breaks with the past that we feel technology imparts on us. I want here to investigate how certain practices that attempted to materialize technological ideas arose due to their specific contexts. Whether such ideas were realized purely in their (imagined) material form is irrelevant. The important point is that such concepts could already be imagined through the social-technical-cultural-economic networks of their time. Structure and Organization

Given the ground rules just outlined, I can now describe the general structure of what lies ahead. Chapters 1 and 2 set out a detailed basis for examining the dynamization of theatrical and architectural space and the transformation of stage environments into new kinds of spatiomechanical, electrotechnical apparatuses. Chapter 1, “Space 1: Scene/ Machine (1876–1933),” surveys the machine-age influence on the practice of defining theatrical-scenographic space, starting with composer Richard Wagner’s Festspielhaus in Bayreuth, Germany, in 1876. As a harbinger for the directions that theatrical scenography would take over the twentieth century, Wagner utilized stage technology to create a degree of unprecedented control over the perceptual experience of his spectators. I then

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pursue this machine transformation of scenography in the classical pre–World War II European performance avant-garde from the early Italian and Russian Futurists and Russian Constructivists to Weimar Germany and the Bauhaus, the Swiss and French schools of Dada, and the work of Antonin Artaud. Chapter 2, “Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–),” covers the period running roughly from 1950 to the present, beginning with the work of Czech scenographer Josef Svoboda in the mid 1950s. The chapter continues with analysis of the increased role that electronic, audiovisual practices played in non-text-based theatrical work in the 1960s through the 1990s, from what theater critic Bonnie Marranca famously labeled the Theater of Images to the new formalist aesthetics of media generation artists from New York, the West Coast of the United States, Europe, Canada, and Japan. Chapter 2 concludes with a discussion of how contemporary architects brought with them to the stage not only new materials and construction technologies in the last decades of the twentieth century, marking a return to the machine aesthetic, but also new impulses originating from architectural discourse. Taking chapters 1 and 2 as its starting point, chapter 3, “Performative Architectures,” focuses on the visionary fantasies of creating ephemeral, transformative, and kinetic architecture. Specifically, I argue that architecture must be seriously taken into account due to its ongoing fascination with movement, event, duration, action, and material transformation. The chapter is divided into three separate conceptual threads (kinetic architecture, event, and screen/scene). The first thread considers the continued desire for machine architectures: dynamic, kinetic structures that would liberate construction from its monumentality and stasis. The second thread discusses architectural experiments using strategies arising in the sociopolitical volatility of the 1960s and 1970s that turned away from construction and toward ephemeral actions. The final thread ponders the twenty-first-century move toward mediatechtures, architectures of “pixels and light” (Tschumi) that transform the entire surface of buildings into huge media displays, and ends with an analysis of the tension between architecture as embodied material (scene) and digital representation (screen) contained in the paradigm of the urban screenscape. Chapter 4, “The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the Performative Screen,” investigates the ways in which televisual and projected media have influenced the perception of the physical site of performance in stage based as well as the visual and media arts. The televisual discussion surveys the impact of television, both as a sociocultural phenomenon as well as a distinct sculptural object, moving between performance practices in the visual arts world to the video monitor’s use in theater, opera, and live spectacle. The second section focuses on the architectonic use of film and large-scale projection technologies in stage performance that challenged the live performer’s position as the center of the stage universe, forging him into one element among many in a much larger mediated space. Chapter 4 ends with the territory of audiovisual performance, shifting the locus of

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performance away from the stage and toward the club, the international exposition, and the media festival and replacing the human performer on stage mostly or entirely by the screen surface. Chapter 5, “Sound,” discusses the impact of technologies in the areas of music and sound, particularly how new instruments and processes changed the experience of musical performers and audiences, shifting the concert hall from a passive arena of listening to an interactive zone of improvisation between sound-making technical apparatuses and their players. Beginning with the appearance of electromechanical instruments like the Teleharmonium and the theremin in the 1920s, it continues with the application of studiobased electronic technologies to live musical performance in the work of European and American composers in the 1960s, exploring indeterminacy, music-theater genres that expanded the concert hall, and finally, real-time computer-based interaction. In particular, I analyze the early impact that microcomputers had on live musical improvisation and collective musical composition, moving into the increasing interest in software environments as musical instruments in the 1980s and then surveying more recent digital genres like laptop- and network-based music. The chapter concludes by examining gesture-based music performance that attempts to augment bodily-based instrumental practices with digital tools. Chapter 6, “Bodies,” appraises the long history of technology’s influence in dance, theater, and body-based performance art practices. With origins in early chronophotography and the machine obsessions of choreographers, dancers, and directors in the 1920s, I propose that mathematical and architectural rules, body-based conditioning techniques (e.g., biomechanics, choreutics, eurythmics, eukinetics), and procedural systems pursued in the 1960s by the proponents of postmodern dance should be equally seen as technologies alongside the more accepted devices of sensors, cameras, and computer imagining techniques. The chapter then segues into the performance practices of a diverse range of artists in the 1960s through the 1990s who sought to alter, resculpt, or transform the body by using both primitive and sophisticated technologies and ends with an in-depth analysis of the impact of digital technologies on dance and performance in the 1990s and after. Chapter 7, “Machines/Mechanicals,” focuses on the genre of mechanical or robotic performances in which such constructions are given the same performance status as humans. Based on curator Jasia Reichardt’s argument that the characteristic of liveness in machines can be attributed less to their appearance and instead to their behavior, the chapter surveys the machine performance, Schrottkunst/industrial art scenes, and machine sound art of 1990s European and American subculture. The second half, on performing machines, focuses on the shift from human-based operation toward machine autonomy involving self-organizing behavior based from environmental input, processing, and control by way of computational models. Taking up art historian Jack Burnham’s notion of system aesthetics, the chapter finishes with the phenomenon of autonomous, cybernetic

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sculptures and robotic performances that have taken place in galleries or theaters without the need of human actors. The book’s final chapter, “Interaction,” considers the impact of computational technologies on artists and researchers creating environments that blur the distinction between performer and spectators. Here, I extend Myron Krueger’s notion of responsive environment to include the creation of hybrid media spaces that, although working with similar techniques, go far beyond the traditional performing arts frames of theater, dance, or visualbased performance art. The immersive and interactive participant-activated environments of the 1960s form the conceptual and historical basis to discuss responsive environments in the 1980s and 1990s that pushed the line between art and research, while challenging purely screen-based interaction that denied the existence of the participant’s body. The chapter then transfers to the urban realm, where I detail works that try to reconceptualize the urban space into a post-Situationist enterprise of play through the advent of new networking and mobile technologies. Taking into consideration works that attempt to turn spaces in the city into new sites of public performances by way of architectural and media strategies, mobile systems, and pervasive games, I conclude the book by examining the ramifications of the performative transformation of the everyday through increasingly sophisticated and hidden pervasive technologies.

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1

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

“What distinguishes modern architecture is surely a new sense of space and the machine aesthetic.” reyner banham, theory and design in the first machine age1

Wagner’s Theater of the Future

Our story begins not in the age of the CPU, but on August 13, 1876, the opening day of German composer Richard Wagner’s fabled Festspielhaus (festival theater) and Bühnenfestspiel (theater festival) to which thousands of Europe’s and America’s royalty, artists, and critics made their pilgrimage to witness a spectacle of historical proportion. Descending on the small, rural town of Bayreuth in northeastern Bavaria, the audience of luminaries included Tchaikovsky, Edvard Greig, and Mark Twain. The Viennese music critic Eduard Hanslick announced “an extraordinary musical theatrical experience and much more! This four-evening-long music drama is a remarkable development in cultural history, not to mention the construction of a special theater solely for its production and the pilgrimage of thousands of persons from half of Europe to this remote, half-forgotten little town whose name is now indelibly recorded in the history of art” (Hartford 1980, 72). The catalyst that brought both elite and bohemian societies together in Bayreuth that summer was none other than the world premiere of Wagner’s colossal fifteen-hour opera Der Ring des Nibelungen (The Ring of the Nibelung)—the music-theater work for which the entire theater building and festival had been conceived and constructed. Beginning its composition around 1851, Wagner knew early on that The Ring would be the epiphany of his compositional genius; a work so vast in musical and theatrical ambition that it could not be staged in any conventional theater but required a new kind of space of illusion to cradle it. Even if Wagner was not an unknown composer for his day (the

commission for The Ring came from King Ludwig II of Bavaria), the development of the opera and endless pursuit to create a theater specifically designed for its presentation was to lead him through a twenty-five-year odyssey of failed attempts, exile, and even bankruptcy, until its completion in 1876. Wagner’s penning of The Ring emerged as a response to what the composer perceived as a deep decadence plaguing nineteenth-century culture. Torn away from its Greek origins in the festivals of Dionysus, where the stage served as the “expression of public conscience,” drama itself had become severed from both its civic and sacred origins and split into discrete artistic components: rhetoric, sculpture, painting, and music. In Swiss exile after participating in an aborted 1849 revolutionary uprising in Dresden, Wagner set out in writing his theoretical counterparts to The Ring: “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft” (“The Artwork of the Future,” 1849) and “Oper und Drama,” (“Opera and Drama,” 1850/1851). In “Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft,” a text that already explored the perceptual experience of the spectator in relationship to the dramatic event, the eye perceived not only the visual setting but also the inner life of the performer, while dramatic action drove the need to bring all of the arts together in a total synthesis of elements: staging, image, music, and text. The synthesis of art forms, what Wagner labeled the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total artwork) was “to include all phases of art and in doing so to consume, to destroy each one, so to speak, in favor of the total purpose of them all” (Wagner 1912, 115). For the composer, reason, intellect, and a rational worldview played no role in the audience’s experience of the Gesamtkunstwerk’s utopian synthesis. Instead, the fusion of artistic forms would communicate directly to the senses and through them, exclusively to the emotions. Based on the Romantic notion of the artist as a conveyer of the sublime, Wagner’s interest in appealing to the deepest emotions by way of a fusion of media elements is also surprisingly contemporary. In a strange way, Wagner already had command over what many contemporary creators are still trying to sort out: the design of media carefully choreographed within a specifically defined architected space to create a complete and total immersion of the spectator’s senses, literally sweeping them into an emotional, hypnotic vertigo; what Wagner scholar and editor Albert Goldman so aptly called a theater of narcosis (Wagner 1964, 29). We need not, however, dwell on Wagner the composer or as the theorist of the Gesamtkunstwerk, although obviously such a concept plays a key role in making sense of our utterly confusing, multisensory, audiovisual media society of the present. I want here to focus on Wagner as an experience architect of a machine that utilized the technologies of the time to create unprecedented control over the perceptual and affective experience of his spectators. The illusion technologies of the stage arts form a history in themselves, ranging from the Greeks’ deus ex machina, the moving wagons of the mystery cycles of medieval times

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and the mechanical birds and fountains of Byzantine court spectacles to Serlio’s theatrical perspective in the mid-sixteenth century and Inigo Jones’s elaborate masques for the Stuart royalty in the seventeenth century. But Wagner’s Festspielhaus included the first full-scale use of modern technologies of lighting, acoustics, and architectural transformation specifically manipulated to create a powerful and cumulative effect on the senses that would “place you in a new relation to the play you are about to witness” (Wagner 1964, 358). The architectural plan for the theater that would place the spectator into an unheard-of relationship with the onstage spectacle was nothing short of radical for its day (figure 1.1). Resorting to a Greek amphitheater-like arrangement for the seating configuration, Wagner first and foremost removed any trace of stage machinery that would shatter the spell of illusion. By sinking the orchestra pit below the stage and partially covering it, Wagner guaranteed that the spectator’s eye would not be distracted by stray light and movement from the “mystical abyss” filled with conductor and musicians between the theatron and the stage. “With a dramatic representation, on the contrary, it is a matter of focusing the eye itself upon a picture; and that can be done only by leading it away from any sight of bodies lying in between, such as the technical apparatus for projecting the picture” (Wagner 1964, 365). To further enhance the seamlessness of the effect, Wagner took an idea from his earlier collaborator on the project, the architect Gottfried Semper, in creating a second, wider proscenium frame that served to distance the stage even further from the spectators. The construction of this double proscenium created a kind of “mystical gulf” between the audience and the stage in which “the stage image was reduced to the form of a ‘picture.’ . . . Between him [the spectator] and the picture to be looked at there is nothing plainly visible, merely a floating atmosphere of distance, resulting from the architectural adjustment of the two proscenia; whereby the scene is removed as it were to the unapproachable world of dreams” (Wagner 1964, 366). To complete the distancing effect, Wagner plunged the entire house into almost total darkness by way of gas lighting during the performances.2 If the framing of the stage image was reduced to the equivalent of a two-dimensional screen, Wagner’s precise acoustic shaping of the auditorium had the opposite effect, enveloping the spectators in a continually transforming sea of sound. Slightly fan-shaped to reduce standing waves and with a reverberation time of just under 1.55 seconds, both auditorium and structural interior of the building were constructed of wood, allowing the space to become an efficient receiver and diffuser of acoustic energy. Additional innovations, such as hollowing out the space beneath the ramped seating area to serve as a lowfrequency resonator and the addition of numerous columns running along the walls to create irregularly shaped surfaces, all enabled Wagner to carefully compose and tune The Ring and his last work, Parsifal, to the exact acoustics of the Festspielhaus in a manner unheard of at the time.3

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933) 3

Figure 1.1 Longitudinal Perspective Drawing, Bayreuth Festival House, George Izenour Collection. Reproduced with the permission of the Special Collections Library, The Pennsylvania State University Libraries.

The overall vision of Wagner’s theater of illusion set an important future precedent for later attempts at synthesizing architecture, drama, music, and technology in utopian spaces dedicated to the performance of singular works, including the Russian composer Aleksandr Skryabin’s proposal for a cathedral in the Himalayas to exclusively house his spiritual, seven-day synesthetic music-theater work Mysterium (1903); Le Corbusier’s, Iannis Xenakis’s, and Edgard Varèse’s Philips Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair; or the custom-constructed theaters for Cirque du Soleil’s Las Vegas spectacles O and Ka in the 1990s. With the shaping of space by artificial means and the construction of architecturally controlled aural and visual perception, the event of Bayreuth marked a first at the dawn of modernism that the ontology of performance was transformed not only because of its dramatic content but also by its technoarchitectural setting.

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Appia, Light, and the Responsiveness of Space

As the monumental event of Wagner’s Bayreuth rippled through the cultural structures of Europe and North America, perhaps no other artist was as influenced at the time by the “master of hypnotic tricks” (Nietzsche 1967, 166) than the Swiss theater designer Adolphe Appia. Born in 1862 in Geneva, Appia ostensibly studied music in Geneva, Paris, Leipzig, and Dresden, but increasingly became absorbed with stagecraft by his early twenties. Attending Wagner’s Parsifal, the composer’s last production at Bayreuth before his death, Appia was left deeply disappointed, convinced that Wagner’s greatness as a composer was severely marred by his clunky design, particularly in the use of pseudonaturalistic, tromp-l’oeil scenery—flat, pictorial representations that contradicted the symbolic and sonorous intensity of Wagner’s unparalleled musical abstraction. “The master,” Appia later wrote in 1925, “set his work into the conventional framework of the period; and if everything in the auditorium at Bayreuth expresses his genius, on the other side of the footlights everything contradicts it” (Bablet 1982, 67). Returning to Switzerland in 1890, Appia commenced an artistic quest to articulate his own scenic interpretations of The Ring cycle. In La mise en scène du drame Wagnérien (The Staging of Wagnerian Drama, 1895) and La musique et la mise en scène (Music and Stage Setting, 1899), he swept away centuries of staid scenographic practice by shifting emphasis from the pseudo illusionism created by two-dimensional, painting-based representation toward spatial arrangements of abstracted, rhythmic forms: simple geometric scenic elements such as raked stairs and platforms (figure 1.2). The key to a true realization of Wagner’s vision, Appia claimed, lay in the musical score; the mise-en-scène was already embodied in its tone color (timbre), rhythm, duration, and other abstracted sonic elements. Second, and more important, the plasticity of both performer and stage objects could emerge only through their interaction with light.4 Appia’s vision for a living, responsive space constructed by the materiality of the human figure and the immateriality of light and shadow was not to remain the stuff of theory but instead given physical life through the artist’s acquaintance with the Swiss composer and music education teacher Emile Jacques-Dalcroze. An accomplished composer by the age of twenty-seven, Dalcroze had developed a unique series of physical whole-body exercises borne out of his frustration in teaching musicians who had little sense of rhythm or expression. A series of postures and études intended at structuring better eye/hand/body coordination, Dalcroze’s rhythmic plastiques, named eurhythmics, caught Appia’s eye in 1906, providing the missing link for his new conception of the stage. Through eurhythmics, the body would become the organizer of a new kind of rhythmic space, one sculpted by its movement through such a space and subsequently, shaped and expanded by the technology of light.

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Figure 1.2 Adolphe Appia, “Escalier en face,” 1909, Charcoal on drawing paper. Inventory IV, Nr. 749. Courtesy of Deutsches Theatermuseum München.

Dalcroze’s enthusiasm for Appia’s ideas of rhythmic spaces staged through eurhythmics led to an invitation for the designer to help conceive a new kind of artistic institute for eurhythmic exploration in the German garden city of Hellerau, outside of Dresden. Financed by the young German industrialist and German Werkbund (Work Federation society) member Wolf Dohrn, Hellerau would become a major center of research into new concepts of the body.5 In arguing for the new school, Dalcroze wrote that rhythm should become the basis of a new society and raised to the status of a social institution; an idea that clearly was being played out through the increasing interest in Körperkultur (body culture), in general, and new performance possibilities with such trained, perfected bodies. Between 1910 and 1912 under Appia’s direction, the theater space at Hellerau was to become as aesthetically and technologically groundbreaking as Wagner’s reformation of opera at Bayreuth. Collaborating with the architect Heinrich Tessenow and the Russian painter and lighting whiz Alexander von Salzmann, Appia designed what he called a hall of syntheses: a massive 50 m s 16 m s 12 m open space in which both

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performers and spectators occupied the same spatial volume, without any barrier between them. In direct collaboration with Salzmann, Appia began implementing his lighting concepts. Working with the principle of space projecting light rather than using it to directly highlight the performers’ bodies, the team installed massive, cedar-oil-covered white linen drops on the ceiling and walls, behind which were hung thousands of instruments whose light was diffused through the almost transparent fabrics. Centrally controlled from a console that functioned like a light organ, light became active and responsive, a transformer of space. “Light is conveyed through the space itself,” wrote Salzmann, “and the linking of visible light sources is done away with” (Beacham 1987, 67). Taking full advantage of the new technical possibilities, Appia and Dalcroze’s staging of Gluck’s Orpheus and Eurydice at Hellerau in 1913 met with similar astonishment as Wagner’s The Ring premiere some thirty-six years earlier. In a continual series of coup de théâtre, the two artists created sweeping scenochoreographic effects, and in one case represented the God Amor only through a sharply focused beam of light, causing a theatrical sensation that Paul Claudel called “a union of music, the plastic sense and light, the like of which I have never seen” (Beacham 1987, 78). In Appia’s hands, light had successfully created an environment that both amplified the human body in sculptural form and became itself “a creation animated by an unencumbered vitality” (78). Abruptly interrupted by the start of World War I in 1914, Appia’s short-lived experiments at Hellerau already anticipated the many mise-en-scène of transformable media and bodies that would repeatedly haunt the twentieth century. Moreover, Appia’s interest in artistic and social reform materialized in the design of a performance environment in which stage and spectator were united, transforming the audience from passive onlooker to active participant. “Sooner or later we will come to what will be called simply the hall (salle), the cathedral of the future, which, in a free, vast, and variable space, will play host to the most diverse activities of our social and artistic life. This will be the ultimate setting for dramatic art to flourish in—with or without spectators” (Bablet 1982, 88; emphasis in original). Stage/Machine: Futurism and Performance

At the same time as Appia’s experiments at Hellerau, the radical cultural and socioeconomic change wholeheartedly embraced by the Futurist movements, first in Italy in 1909 and slightly later in the twilight of Czarist Russia, was fomenting, transforming infatuation with technology into full-scale aesthetic-political programs. Announced with cataclysmic intensity in 1909 on the front page of the French daily Le Figaro by the wealthy, Sorbonne-educated Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the artistic movement and ideology of Futurism would claim a new world where “time and space died” (Marinetti 1973, 22).

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It would not be an exaggeration to claim that the Italian Futurist movement, which ran from 1909 into the early years of World War I, when the group’s desire for war brutally materialized into reality, was the first artistic movement in the twentieth century to exaltedly embrace the coming machine technologies. Since much has been made of the Futurists all-out rapture with automobiles, airplanes, electricity, and other machines, it is important to understand the roots of such ecstatic reaction. In his seminal Theory and Design in the First Machine Age, architectural historian Reyner Banham discussed how the historical context of the early twentieth century, where “the sense of the overriding of an old, tradition-bound technology unchanged since the Renaissance,” met with new inventions “without tradition,” particularly in Italy where people were suddenly confronted “on the doorsteps of their ancestral palaces” with technologies that radically reshaped urban environments (Banham 1960, 100–101). For younger, radical intellectuals like Marinetti and his artistic acquaintances, simultaneity, noise, speed, and rupture catalyzed a new poetics of the day through the recently pervasive technologies of radio, electricity, telegraph, and telephone. These wireless inventions were rapidly assimilated as telephonic technologies that, as the social theorist Paul Virilio described, already succeeded in creating “presence at a distance” (1997, 16). Long celebrated for their work in painting, sculpture, music, and architecture, the Futurists were also one of the first movements in twentieth-century industrial modernism to explicitly acknowledge the total impact of machines in transforming performance environments into dynamic, sensory-technical apparatuses. Early Futurist performance between 1909 and 1914 was largely driven by Marinetti’s concept of the serate, a kind of public, guerilla-like provocation designed to break down the separation between stage and audience space.6 Gradually intoxicated both by the newfangledness of the technomachine age as well as by influences from the music halls, circuses, cabarets, burlesque reviews, and variety shows that he had experienced in visits to Paris, London, and Berlin, Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Variety Theater” (1913) declared his disgust for the contemporary theater and his interest in a variety theater “born . . . from electricity . . . having no tradition, no masters, no dogma and it is fed by swift actuality” (Marinetti 1971b, 179). Attempting to articulate a theater of speed and effects utilizing the tools of the day to create “the futurist marvelous produced by modern mechanics” (179) it was not until teaming up with Bruno Corra and Emilio Senttimelli that technology for Marinetti became an explicit material instrument for shaping the experience of performance. Declaring that “the only way to inspire Italy with the war like spirit today (of Futurism) is through the theater,” Marinetti, Corra, and Senttimelli’s “The Futurist Synthetic Theater” (1915) was a rant against the deadliness of Western dramatic traditions since the Greeks due to theater’s mimetic/representational role (Kirby and Kirby 1971, 41–65). The manifesto, however, also imagined a new kind of performance that would produce astonishing relationships between the event and the spectator through deployment of

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technical apparatuses. Describing a new Futurist performance of “dynamic, fragmentary symphonies of gestures, words, noises, and lights” (Berghaus 1998, 8) as a labyrinth of sensations, the theater would become life itself through scenic events that, in the words of the Futurist theater critic Günter Berghaus, “were unique and unrepeatable aggregates of energy and sensations that closed a circuit between stage and audience” (179). Stage/Machine: Futurism and Performance—Scenodynamics

The largest conceptual shift followed World War I, when the Futurists finally sought to transform scenographic space directly through electrical and material means. Already in 1917, the painter Giacomo Balla undertook an early attempt at realizing what would soon be labeled the scenodynamic stage—a five-minute audiovisual choreography of objects and lights for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes accompanied by Igor Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks) at the Teatro Constanzi in Rome. Having translated concepts of speed and dynamism into painting and eventually sculpture, Balla turned to directing a large-scale synesthetic media-performance event that would embody Stravinsky’s music through strictly abstract geometries of 3D shapes and light. Constructed from wood and lit from inside, Balla’s forms generated a formal landscape of cones, half disks, triangles, pyramids, and prisms. To set this landscape in motion, Balla composed a detailed score of fifty lighting cues, made possible by the recent introduction of electrical lighting systems into theaters. Balla’s experiment proved to test the technical limits of the Teatro Constanzi, particularly when disputes between him and the theater’s technical crew left the creator himself alone to run the lighting console for the last 2.5 minutes of the work.7 Despite the production being neither an artistic or commercial success (after its two Rome performances, Diaghilev subsequently dropped it from the Ballets Russes’ repertoire), it nonetheless materialized the Futurist’s theoretical notions of dynamism. It is also almost certain that the then-twenty-year-old Enrico Prampolini influenced Balla’s ballet of objects and light. Originally trained as a painter but moving to architecture and scenic design, Prampolini had real-world performance experience, having painted sets and built costumes to support himself. Establishing contact with Balla in 1913, he was under the influence of Wagner, the Symbolists, and Wassily Kandinsky’s theories of the total artwork as expressed through a synesthetic relationship between sound, color, form, and movement. An exhibition of the Futurist Boccioni in 1913, however, led Prampolini away from Kandinsky’s interior world of expression and toward a more external plastic and dimensional paradigm. Upon reading the manifestos “The Futurist Stage” and “Futurist Scenography,” we might first get the impression of a mind subsumed by electronic fantasies, but we should remember that Prampolini was partially reacting based on his practical theater experience. Prampolini’s concept of scenodynamic architecture attempted to embody the way artists

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such as Balla painted speed and motion onto the 2D canvas in 3D and 4D space, concentrating on the three-dimensionality of performance space rather than the representational aspects of the picture frame that had troubled theater spaces since the sixteenth century. Directly energized with the modern technologies of electricity and mechanics, Prampolini banned fake, painted scenery and in place of “a colored backdrop” imagined a new kind of “colorless electromechanical architectural structure, powerful vitalized by chromatic emanations from a luminous source” (Prampolini 1971b, 204–205). Such a structure would erase centuries of representational baggage in the form of so-called realism from the stage and, more important, imbue performance with the same dynamism now rendered real by machines.8 Despite numerous attempts, it would be several years before Prampolini had the opportunity to realize his scenic ideas, which finally occurred in 1918–1919 when Prampolini arranged for a demonstration of his theories at the Teatro Odescalchi in Rome.9 The production of Albert-Birot’s Matoum et Tévibar was described by Prampolini as a proof of concept of his “plasto-dynamic scenographic system, of the dynamism of colored lights that create a stage architecture, with the stylization of the plasto-dynamic marionettes” (Berghaus 1998, 283). Although this prototype project could by no means be called a commercial success (it ran for a mere two days), it finally secured Prampolini’s international reputation, helping him to become one of the main forces in the world of avantgarde European scenography at the time. The scenographer’s 1924 “Technical Manifesto for Futurist Scenic Atmosphere” repeated the principal themes articulated in earlier writings, but also delved further into the concept of a polydimensional scenic space—the breaking up of the horizontal plane and the introduction of rhythmic plastic shapes or polydimensional forms. But Prampolini now wished to go much further, calling for the total elimination of the human actor–performer and her replacement with what he called “a personification of space . . . as a dynamic and interacting element between the scenic environment and the public spectator” (1971a, 230). Like so many Futurist writings, this elimination of the human was in the service of a much larger spiritual quest that rapidly approached the level of mysticism. By removing the human form, the audience would no longer be distracted by the banality of the everyday and be liberated to enter into a world of spiritual abstraction—one where the dynamics of space itself ultimately would transcend matter. The other major voice in the Italian Futurists scenographic revolution was Fortunato Depero. Working at the same time and competing with Prampolini, Depero went even further with his concept of a totalized mechanical, synesthetic mise-en-scène. In the 1916 “Notes on the Theater,” Depero already described a stage embodying the characteristics of film as a fluctuating space composed of mobile scenery, oscillating objects and moving architecture: “everything turns-disappears-reappears, multiplies and breaks, pulverizes and overturns, trembles and transforms into a cosmic machine that is life” (Depero 1971,

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208). Although Depero’s as well as Prampolini’s visions went largely unrealized, their work paralleled a common theme that would continually arise in Europe during the early part of the twentieth century: the construction of a stage machinery where the human element was integrated into, made equal with, and ultimately subordinated to a technical apparatus. Stage/Machine: The Origins of Russian Futurism

As an artistic and political movement, Futurism had an even larger impact in Russia with the publication of Marinetti’s Le Figaro manifesto there, creating a buzz among an entire generation of writers, painters, poets, playwrights, and eventually, performance practitioners. Distinct from its Italian counterpart, Russian Futurism further elevated artistic forms such as painting, sculpture, literature, the graphic arts, and poetry over the performing arts as media in which to force new radical links with other modernist movements. Influenced by post-Impressionist experiments like Cubist painting over the Italian Futurist’s dreams of war machines, the crucial players of Russian Futurism sought to distance themselves from the Italian’s overarching fetishism for technology, and sought instead to brand the movement with a distinct Russian stamp. If the Russians claimed conceptual and ideological distance from their Italian counterparts, their first manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of the Public,” jointly written in 1912 by the playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet Velimir Khlebnikov, and the painters David Burlyuk and Benedikt Livshits, sounded in tone and argument suspiciously like Marinetti’s opening salvo just three years before. Similarly, Mayakovksy’s brief manifesto “Theater, Cinema, and Futurism” ([1913] 1980) published in the periodical Kine-zhurnal, posed the question of whether theater made sense in a world increasingly dominated by the cinema. Even though it distanced itself from Italian Futurism, Mayakovsky invoked the same kind of argument as Marinetti’s and Prampolini’s early writings against the enslavement of performance’s dynamism brought about by the actor by the “dead backgrounds of (theatrical) decoration” (Mayakovsky [1913] 1980, 182). Here, cinema’s concentration on movement would eventually force performance space to become dynamic as well. Futurism Performed: Victory Over the Sun

Victory Over the Sun, the first highly organized, multimedia performance event that would test the hypotheses of Mayakovsky and other Futurists, was also their most notorious. Premiered at the Luna Park in St. Petersburg in 1913 and billed as “The First Futurist Spectacle in the World,” this cubo-futurist opera—with a libretto by Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenyk, settings and costumes by the painter Kazimir Malevich, and an atonal score by the composer Mikhail Matyushin—elicited such a strong reaction from the public

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during its sole two performances that according to reports, it was difficult to separate the music from the loud rioting of the audience. Deeply misogynist in tone and employing a dizzying variety of theatrical shock effects, Victory Over the Sun was set in a dystopian future and told the story of a group of Strong Men (i.e., Futurists) who kidnap the sun and imprison it inside a concrete lock box in order to destroy the past. The opera ended with a coup de théâtre: the crash of an airplane into the stage. The opera itself was, at the very least, a significant sonorous experience. Consisting of quarter-tone arias, Matyushin’s score was banged out on an out-of-tune piano and accompanied by an equally out-of-tune student choir, while Kruchenyk’s libretto was written in what he and Khlebinikov dubbed zaum, a nonsensical, transrational glossolalia composed of decomposed, purely phonetic Russian stripped down to its fundamental sonic substructure to reveal the primitive essence of the actual sound of the language itself.10 What is more intriguing is how Malevich’s visual environment consisting of large, abstractly painted backdrops and geometrically constructed costumes already presaged the black-and-white minimalism of his early Suprematist paintings.11 Costs prevented Malevich from realizing his originally intended 3D sculptural scenography, but he innovatively compensated with the use of flat 2D backdrops contrasted with the sculptural volumetry of his wire and cardboard costumes—worn constructions that engendered particular kinds of physical movements from the performers who wore them. The backdrops themselves acted as a kind of introduction to the fragmented chaos of an increasingly technologically transformed but just-begun twentieth century: Cubist shapes, a singular black-and-white square within a square divided in half, a painted iconography of symbols, words, signs depicting images of bombs, pieces of machinery, architectural T-squares and bits of airplanes. If Malevich’s painted backdrops were not real 3D, they were certainly enhanced and transformed by his cutting-edge lighting design that took full advantage of the Luna Park’s existing technological infrastructure. Large mobile spotlights were used like weapons, sweeping the stage space and randomly picking out objects and performers. As described by witness Benedikt Livshits, the lighting distorted the performers’ bodies and painted backdrops beyond recognition, giving the impression of “figures cut up by the blades of lights and deprived alternately of hands, legs, heads, etc. . . . out of the primordial night the tentacles of projectors seized on parts of this object, now of that and saturating them with colors” (Baer 1991, 105). Victory Over the Sun marked a high point in the Russian avant-garde of the time, its early vision of depersonalized, mechanized humanity later reaching an apogee in the influential artistic movement of Constructivism. The opera’s overall emphasis on physicality also introduced a new concept to Russian avant-garde performance: that movement was as essential as voice and scenic atmosphere in the “creation of a three-dimensional, kinetic, interactive totality” (Baer 1991, 41).

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Artists like Malevich, Vladimir Tatlin, and Aleksandr Rodchenko began to look toward performance as a vehicle to explore their ideas of three-dimensional materials that assisted in the formation of dynamic space. Furthermore, Malevich saw the possibility of using the stage as a 3D, real space realization of the principals of cubist painting. “Art is the ability to create a construction that derives not from the interrelation of form and color and not on the basis of aesthetic taste in a construction’s compositional beauty, but on the basis of weight, speed, and direction. Forms must be given life and the right to individual existence” (Bowlt 1976, 122–123). Tatlin’s Transformation of Space

Another major figure that emerged from Futurist circles at first but quickly turned toward the rapidly developing movement of Constructivism was Vladimir Tatlin. Trained in painting, sculpture, and architecture and deeply influenced by Picasso after a journey to Paris in 1914, Tatlin began to develop what he called counterreliefs, which were architectural objects made of real materials such as metal, wood, and iron that hung inside wall corners or were suspended in space, appearing to defy gravity. Like Malevich, Tatlin too wished to explode painting from its flat, 2D surface—to recover the lost connections between painting, sculpture, and architecture through the discovery of a new volumetric art with its objective basis in “materials, volume, and construction” (Zhadova 1984, 239). In technologizing space through the use of real material in his counterreliefs, Tatlin’s work pointed to a major cultural shift away from composition and toward construction. “It is a respect for the faktura (texture) of material itself that makes the difference,” wrote the modernist critic Marjorie Perloff, in that “the material dictates the form” (1989, 69). Given his utter fascination with the material essences of real objects that could transform space, it only makes sense that Tatlin quickly turned to performance contexts in which to realize his ideas. Becoming occupied with stage projects on and off throughout his career in addition to unrealized and monumental architectural commissions [Movement, chapter 3], none of his original designs remain except for a single production. In 1923, long after Constructivism had become the de rigueur movement of the avantgarde, Tatlin staged, designed, and performed in Khlebnikov’s science fiction play Zangezi: A Supersaga in 20 Planes for a single performance at the Museum of Artistic Culture in Petrograd. Described by Khlebnikov as “construction units . . . an architecture composed of narratives,” Zangezi tells the story of the prophet and speechmaker Zangezi, who understands the languages of both humans and birds and who descends to humanity to translate these transrational languages to the masses (Khlebnikov 1990, 191). Staged in memory of Khlebnikov’s premature death a year earlier, Tatlin’s production amplified the primitive acoustic materiality and deeply embedded spirituality of the poet’s transcendental zaum language in architectural form.

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Even though little visual record of the production remains with the exception of two photographs (figure 1.3), a set drawing, and one woodcut, we can still glean a sense of the direction that Tatlin was heading in; one where “different surfaces of different physical materials which have been treated in different ways” would incarnate Khlebnikov’s sonic architecture of zaum (Lodder 1983, 209). “Parallel to his (Khelbnikov) word constructions, I decided to make a material construction. . . . I have had to introduce machinery which by its movement forms a parallel to the action and fuses into it” (Tatlin 1988, 248). For the scenography, Tatlin erected an impressive, tower-like structure composed of over-dimensional shapes poised on an acute axis such that the edifice appeared to be frozen in the moment of toppling over. At the top, representing Khlebnikov, Tatlin himself appeared while a piercing light focused attention on the scene “to guide the attention of the spectator, the eye of the projector leaps from one place to another, creating order and consistency. The projector is also necessary to emphasize the properties of the material” (1988, 248–249). Thus, in Tatlin’s work, construction and texture were set into motion through the dynamic medium of light.

Figure 1.3 Vladimir Tatlin. Stage Model for Zangezi. Petrograd 1923. Whereabouts unknown.

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The October Revolution and Constructivism

Even with the basic tenets of the growing movement of Constructivism already planted before 1917, they received a major push in the October Bolshevik revolution. With the total economic and social chaos that followed the final deposition of Czar Nicholas II’s regime in Russia, the revolution began to instantiate Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks’ dream of a proletarian revolution while sympathetic artists searched for new aesthetic vocabularies, techniques, and forms that would serve to express the revolution’s spirit. What exactly Constructivism was and who was in charge of it is still a major debate among historians, particularly as there were several movements that labeled themselves with the word. It is undeniable, however, that the movement in its various facets marked an unprecedented break with Russia’s political past. From 1913 onward, a group of experimental artists from theater, music, architecture, sculpture, painting, and cinema sought new ways of materially expressing rather than representing life’s meaning and situations through a regenerated culture seeded by industrial production that unified the disparate arenas of science, industry, and art under the banner of socialism. The Constructivists’ initial goal was precisely the implementation of the ideals of the new Bolshevik state through its own creative agendas, incorporating cultural production into daily life. One group of artists led by the artist Aleksandr Rodchenko, his partner, and painter Varvara Stepanova, and artist Alexei Gan argued for a new breed of revolutionary cultural worker whose site of practice would no longer be the studio but the industrial factory. Articulated in the manifesto of the First Working Group of Constructivists in 1921, Rodchenko and company declared war on “art for art’s sake” as well as on work that primarily focused on the sensory or mystical life of the individual, instead proposing a new, objective form of cultural production—a form of anti-art that would mirror the new technoindustrial reality of socialism. With the triad of tektonika (techniques of construction), faktura (material texture), and konstruktsiia (the process of structuring and organizing the materials), Rodchenko’s group sought the transformation of reality through the expression of material elements where such characteristics as line, color, space, volume, plane, and light formalized their use. “Construction,” wrote Rodchenko, “is the system by which an object is realized from the utilization of material together with a predetermined purpose” (Lodder 1983, 27). Developing after 1921, a second group led by Naum Gabo and his brother Antoine Pevsner transcended the narrow confines of art entirely, focusing on much broader areas of societal production. The shift away from purely artistic applications led to a break between the group represented by Tatlin and Rodchenko and by that of Gabo. Partly the result of debates among party functionaries, bureaucrats, critics, and artists on how proletarian cultural production could mirror the parallel transformation of social-economic

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structures, the central question of how radically formal avant-garde movements could express the role and position of the working class became a topic of heated debate throughout the twentieth century. Constructivism’s Technologizing of Performance Space: Meyerhold and Popova

The Constructivists had the ambitious aim of a total transformation of the post-1917 society through design and architectonic fantasies but one of the few arenas that pragmatically connected to such visionary experimentation was the “synthetic” realm of theatrical performance. In her well-known book The Russian Experiment in Art: 1863–1922, historian Camilla Gray noted that “deprived at first of their natural field of exploration in architecture, the Constructivists turned to the theater” (1971, 265). Not unlike the new media’s shifting interest from the screen to physical, media-augmented space, the stage too offered the Constructivist’s machine imagination the possibility to explode the surface of the easel and the painting’s frame. Constructivists who entered the performance arena perceived the stage as a micro laboratory to test out social experiments and disseminate new formal ideas within a totalized, artificially designed technological environment. Following the dictates of Rodchenko’s First Working Group, the Constructivist approach to the stage focused on a functional, utilitarian model of theatrical space, dismantling the trappings of traditional theatrical décor such as curtains or painted scenery and nakedly exposing all technological mechanisms to the audience. Erected in its place were stage environments announcing the birth of a new industrial, mechanized age by way of their material constitution—skeletal frameworks of exposed wood and steel, freely suspended staircases and precipitously perched girders, hanging projection screens and searchlights, ladders, cranes and ramps, jungles of blinking displays, signs, posters, slogans and text, moving walls, wheels and gears, and, in some cases, real cars, motorcycles, and trucks. Theater artists problematized the cultural divide between stage and street, audience and event, with stage action invading the sacredness of audience space, suspending the passive role usually attributed to spectators and placing them in an oscillating position between observer and performer. In its stage context, Constructivism intended no less than a radical architectonic and material reimagining of volumetric space, theatrical event and social life by bringing the political urgency of the street inside and onto the stage.12 Although many theatrical experiments of the period between roughly 1918–1928 featured such architectural tropes, the most notorious work originated in the productions of Russian theater director Vsevolod Meyerhold. Arguably one of the most influential twentieth-century directors, Meyerhold’s work from the period between 1919 and 1927 radically transformed stage performance. The controversial director had already achieved

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fame as early as 1909, directing and acting within a large number of formally conventional productions, but it was not until after 1920 that his work would become infected with Constructivist techniques. A devout socialist who had been further ignited by the October revolution, Meyerhold wanted to construct the ultimate participatory experience, perceiving the stage environment as a necessary site for the creation of new aesthetic methods and a new public to carry the political revolution into the staid annals of cultural contexts. As early as 1913, he began developing a suite of techniques such as the use of lighting and fluid, dynamic staging that would result in what he called a cinefication of the theater. This proclamation foreshadowed a wave of experimentation that was to later take place, particularly at a time when the cinema itself was a primitive art form, being little more than a filmed version of the theater.13 Meyerhold’s earlier work already attempted to experiment with formal techniques that had little historic precedent. The German theoretician Georg Fuchs’s 1905 Die Schaubühne der Zukunft (The Stage of the Future) had a major influence on the young director’s aesthetic, prompting him to explore a theater where the actor would be only one part of a larger scenic picture (Fuchs 1905). For Fuchs, acting was the expression of a much broader choreographic environment; a rhythmic exploration of organizing stage space with the human body as one crucial but not singular element. Such an expressive approach demanded a completely different type of performer, physically agile and equipped with split-second timing; something that motivated Meyerhold’s interests in the gestic qualities found in Asian performance forms and low-brow entertainment genres such as circus, vaudeville, music hall, and mystery/pageant plays. With Meyerhold’s lead, an entire generation of successive directors including Sergei Eisenstein, Aleksandr Tairov, Nikolai Evreinov, Nikolai Foregger, and Yevgeny Vakhtangov would contribute to what was seen as one of the most remarkable developments in the Russian theater after 1917: the expansion of performance to include cinema, cabaret, vaudeville, circus, and public spectacle.14 Despite the fact that Meyerhold’s earlier work contained the seeds of his subsequent formal theatrical experimentation, the 1917 revolution marked a radical break with previous productions. After serving in the Red Army during the Crimean Civil War in 1920, the director turned with a furious zeal toward transforming the theater into an instrument of political propaganda and media communication. Taking over the dilapidated Zon theater in Moscow, he assembled a young company of performers dubbed Theater R.S.F.S.R. No. 1. His first production, a controversial interpretation of the 1920 Belgian symbolist play The Dawn, was more akin to a political meeting with the performance continually interrupted by real-time news reports from the Crimean front brought by messengers. Like earlier projects, The Dawn transformed the audience space into a participatory event, exposing the entire theatrical apparatus in plain sight. Using ramps to connect stage to

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auditorium, designer Vladimir Dmitriev’s set attempted to create a space that was nonrepresentational, referring to nothing other than its own material form. More likely, the Constructivist theatrical revolution reached its apex with Meyerhold’s and stage designer Lyubov Popova’s 1922 production of a little-known boulevard farce, The Magnanimous Cuckold, by the Belgian writer Fernand Crommelynck. As one of the few women involved in the history of technoscenographic practice, Popova is critical to an understanding of the machine transformation of theatrical space. Trained first as a painter, she moved to stage design upon meeting Meyerhold. Hired by him as teaching staff in the State Higher Theatrical Workshop (later renamed GITIS) after seeing her painting work in the legendary 1921 Moscow Constructivist exhibition 5 s 5  25, Popova’s set for the Crommelynck production was a textbook example of Constructivism in situ.15 Aesthetically, Popova’s interest in machinism strongly resonated with Meyerhold’s approach—a joint quest for a functional model of scenographic space that embraced the machine but reduced it to its most essential, skeletal form. In a purely pragmatic sense, such a skeletal, freestanding set could be moved from the confines of the theater into the open air so that the results obtained in the stage laboratory could be transferred into everyday life without relying on the institutionalized theatrical machinery. Popova’s stripped-down installation machine for The Magnanimous Cuckold exemplified the best features of Constructivist architectonics for the time (figure 1.4). Gone were the painted backdrops and fake scenery of the past. In their place, Popova erected a labyrinth of ramps, steps, ladders, painted wheels with the words CR-ML-NCK (for Crommelynck, the author’s last name) and sails that at times appeared as windmill blades and at other times, as abstracted mechanized forms. Dressed in everyday workers’ overalls, Meyerhold’s acrobatic actors executed a set of technically precise movement exercises labeled biomechanics [The Machine Body, chapter 6]. Biomechanics enabled Meyerhold’s actors to use Popova’s installation as a kind of performance instrument—what the Russian Meyerhold expert Konstantin Rudnitsky later called “Popova’s keyboard for the performers” (1981, 290). Popova’s environment (and Crommelynck’s text) were essential catalysts for Meyerhold’s theatrical inventiveness, with the scenography enlarging the choreographic possibilities of the performers and thus fulfilling the desire to create a “workplace for the actors” and not a space of decoration. By opening the door for Constructivism to exert its influence in the realm of performance, the painter and designer were forever banished from the theater, with the engineer and the constructor taking their place. Later, Meyerhold claimed as much when he stated that Popova’s construction effectively attempted to create a situation that would not be different from the technological phenomena of real life. “The play (Cuckold) develops in close interpenetration with that which permeates our contemporaneity: technological achievements” (Baer 1991, 102).16

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Figure 1.4 Vsevolod Meyerhold’s and Lyubov Popova’s production of Crommelynck’s The Magnanimous Cuckold, Moscow. Meyerhold State Theater, Revival, January 1928.

Meyerhold’s numerous subsequent projects also mapped out new performance territory. His 1923 production of the Russian revolutionary writer Sergei Tretyakov’s Earth Rampant or The Earth in Turmoil, continued the dream of bringing an advanced technologized society into the theater. Also designed by Popova, the centerpiece of the production was a massive wooden crane crowned with a hanging projection screen (dubbed by one critic as a “machine-photo poster”) onto which revolutionary slogans and titles announcing scene changes were projected [Cinefication and the Stage, chapter 4]. In a production that stood theatrical conventions on their head, real cars, motorcycles, and trucks were continually driven onto a large-scale gangway built directly through the audience space (Rudnitsky 1981, 314). Furthermore, Meyerhold took full advantage of new lighting technologies, including centralized dimmers, using large spotlights to create cinematic close-ups—the stage equivalent of camera movements. His next production entitled D.E. (1924), an amalgam of several sources, featured projections of signs, slogans, and “comments from the director” onto three hanging projection screens, as well as a remarkable series of lacquered wooden screens with casters which the director choreographed into a ever-shifting sequence of complex scenic changes. Although Meyerhold’s greatest theatrical works were still to come, the period of his

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intensive preoccupation with Constructivist stage principles and their technologies effectively ended after D.E. El Lissitzky’s Electromechanical Peep Show

Together with Meyerhold and Popova, no other figure sums up the radical direction of Constructivism’s reach into performance practice better than that of Lazar (El) Lissitzky. Born to Jewish parents near Smolensk, Russia, he was trained in architecture and engineering in Darmstadt, Germany, between 1909 and 1914 and later in Moscow. After working in several architecture bureaus, Lissitzky met Malevich and became deeply influenced by Suprematism but later—by the mid 1920s—he too shifted to Constructivist ideologies. With his command of the German language, working experience in several different disciplines, and frequent travels, Lissitzky became the main artistic conduit for avant-garde thought between Russia and Western Europe from the mid to late 1920s. Like many other artist–designers of the period, Lissitzky was strongly influenced by the proposed unity of art and technology embraced by socialist ideology and the fusion of science, technology, and the machine. The transformation of society through the utopian, potentially democratic possibilities of a new kind of human molded by socialism helped drive the development of Lissitzky’s practice and potent impact in the more than half a dozen disciplines in which he worked: architecture, graphic and product design, typography, theater, exhibition design, photography, and painting. Like other Constructivists, Lissitzky also viewed the stage as an ideally controlled aesthetic milieu in which to rehearse the birth of a New Man within an artificially constructed technological environment. Even if his contributions to performance were relatively few, Lissitzky’s theoretical treatise on “the electromechanical peep show” as well as an unrealized set design for Meyerhold were important landmarks in the history of technoscenography (Lissitzky [1923] 1967, 351). With solid technical and artistic training, it only made sense that Lissitzky would eventually collaborate with Meyerhold. Asked by the director between 1926 and 1928 to design the scenic environment for a proposed production of Tretyakov’s propagandistic I Want a Child, Lissitzky’s stage design aimed at what Meyerhold had only described in rhetoric: a radical transformation of the inherent relationship between spectator and event. “If Meyerhold needs the stage settings for a new play—then I design the lay-out, transforming the whole interior architecture of the theater with its traditional picture frame stage” (Lissitzky 1967, 330). Interested in creating new democratic possibilities for interaction between people and their spatial environment, Lissitzky’s architectural surround amounted to a complete transformation of theatrical space, progressing beyond the rickety, wooden and mechanical, erector set–like environments of the other Constructivists. Lissitzky fused stage and

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Figure 1.5 El Lissitzky. Set model for Sergei Tretyakov’s I Want a Child, Meyerhold Theater, 1929 (unbuilt).

audience space by constructing a kind of amphitheater in which a ring of concentric circles rising out of the floor in the center would serve to create a new acting area directly inside the audience space (figure 1.5). With the audience surrounding the performance on all sides, the performers would enter and exit the space by coming out of the depths of the floor below the concentric circles. The floor would be constructed out of transparent glass and lit from below, while lighting and props would enter and exit the space by manner of a system of pulleys and ropes. Attempting in architectural and spatial form to embody what the playwright Tretyakov was trying to do in written form, Lissitzky sought to create a performance space akin to a debate, where different members of the audience could intervene during the course of event, ask questions and suggest solutions to the contemporary issues of utopianism posed by the play. Like many of the Constructivist projects, however, the complexity of the design coupled with the fact that the play itself had to be revised numerous times because of censor complaints, prohibited the work from ever being realized.17 Lissitzky’s theoretical ideas on the merging of electromechanical technologies and performance were expressed much earlier in a short 1923 essay entitled “The Plastic Form of the Electro-Mechanical Peep Show: Victory Over the Sun.” Written in German to accompany his lithographs for a children’s puppet show–like version of Victory Over

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the Sun, Lissitzky described the construction of a new kind of event that he termed the electro-mechanical peep show (Lissitzky [1923] 1967). The imagined performance would involve a series of artificial bodies becoming animated within a completely transformable environment—a stage offering “the bodies in play” all possibilities of movement. Lissitzky’s choreography of both these machine-like bodies and the environment itself would be conducted from a central control table in the hands of a master director or “show creator” who through electromechanical means orchestrated not only the direction of movement but also sound, image, and light. The electromechanical peep show would also feature such technological innovations as “beams of light, refracted through prisms and mirrors, following the movement of bodies” as well as acoustic transformations of the show creator’s voice, which would serve as the voice of the mechanical bodies and triggers for lighting (Lissitzky [1923] 1967, 351–352). Certainly Lissitzky’s vision of choreography between mechanical figures and media elements was far beyond the possibility of technical implementation, yet he had already laid down (albeit symbolically) the conceptual groundwork for thinking about the mapping or transduction of input from one media domain (e.g., voice) into another (light). Specifying that the realization of such an environment was a task that should be left to others, his idea of the electromechanical stage had a major impact outside of Russia, particularly in Germany with the later formation of Bauhaus performance practice. Constructivist Performance: Beyond Meyerhold

It is widely accepted that Meyerhold’s The Maganimous Cuckold was the only realized production that singularly embodied Constructivist principles in toto. The deification of the machine aesthetic, however, surfaced in the work of other artists as well. Aleksandr Tairov, who as director of the Kamerny Theater ranks along with Meyerhold as one of the key theater artists of the era, also experimented with Constructivist ideas, albeit in a far more aestheticized and representational manner. In his 1923 production of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, the architect and scenic designer Aleksandr Vesnin constructed a towering scaffolding incorporating platforms, moving conveyer belts, flashing signs, and projections that attempted to outdo Popova herself. An equally influential director was Nikolai Foregger. After a brief apprenticeship with Tairov in 1917, Foregger became acutely interested in the mechanization potential inherent in the human body. Simultaneously influenced by circus, commedia dell’arte and the Soviet revolution, Foregger’s MASTFOR STUDIO, a workshop founded in 1921, pioneered new forms of mechanized performance. Counting among its students the former apprentices of Meyerhold and future filmmakers Sergei Eisenstein and Sergei Yutkevich, one of MASTFOR’s legendary productions was the 1922 theatrical review Be Kind to Horses. With costumes designed by the twenty-two-year-old Eisenstein, the scenography

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concocted by Yutkevich created a “mobile ‘urban’ environment:” a spectacle of new mechanization replete with moving escalator-like steps, suspended trampolines, flashing electric signs, spinning sets, and a treadmill (Baer 1991, 49). Foregger’s 1922 production of the old melodrama entitled The Kidnapping of Children went even further in combining the frenetic pace of circus and music hall with Foregger’s own technological interventions. Here, Foregger introduced his own notions of cinemazation and electrification of performance through the transformation of static space into a filmic space, achieved by placing rapidly spinning disks in front of spotlights to give the impression of running film projectors in the live performance environment.18 This “circusification” of the theater was carried to its extreme by one of Foregger’s foremost apprentices: Sergei Eisenstein. Before going on to define cinema history, the young Eisenstein developed a theory of what he labeled a montage of attractions in an essay of the same title. For Eisenstein, performance did not consist of a linear narrative, a selfcontained illusion of reality, but rather an assemblage of images designed to elicit specific affective responses from the audience. An attraction constituted the molecule of a theatrical event—”any aggressive aspect of the theater; that is, any element of it which subjects the spectator to a sensual or emotional impact” (Carlson 1993, 356). The montage of attractions would liberate the theater from “the weight of the illusory imitativeness and representationality,” because one would no longer experience performance solely as an unfolding of a given narrative but as a “construction that has impact”; a free montage of arbitrarily selected independents . . . effects (attractions) with a view towards establishing a certain final thematic effect” (Eisenstein 1974, 79). In this sense, the attraction was like a shock to the spectator’s system, jolting them into action. In search of methods to construct this fragmented yet narrative assembly of attractions, Eisenstein turned toward circus and film techniques. His 1924 production of Ostrovsky’s Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man, adapted by Tretyakov, materialized the theory of attractions, featuring tightropes, the raising and lowering of performers by means of harnesses, clowning, somersaults on an imaginary horse, and general circus pandemonium. Assembled out of series of twenty-five attractions or scenes, the production also debuted Eisenstein’s first film: the short (four-minute) Glumov’s Diary. The show ended with the final astonishment of an actor crashing through the projection screen holding a reel of the actual film. Here, this culminating attraction encapsulated Eisenstein’s theoretical aim to fracture and distance any sense of illusion that might have been produced in the audience’s mind. Soon to abandon the stage entirely for cinema, Eisenstein’s 1937 essay “Through Theater to Cinema” detailed his film theory of montage claiming that Wise Man’s circuslike framework and composition of “separate numbers” formed “into a single montage according to the image and likeness of a music hall,” where the theater moved down to circus and “was brought to the brink of cinema” (Eisenstein 1949, 8).

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Constructivism’s “The Ideological End”

As Foregger stated in 1926, “A future historian of art will call our years the years of prophecy,” yet the visions of the Russian avant-garde were alas only to be realized in the realm of performance, and for only a brief flash (Foregger [1926] 1975, 77). By 1932, as Josef Stalin consolidated power as the head of the Communist Party, Constructivism and other avant-garde movements accused of “formalism” were outlawed in the wake of the newly defined aesthetic doctrine of socialist realism. The experimentalism that had once prevailed was now banned and art was required to submit to a program of political conformity to help support the Communist Party’s goals of industrialization and collectivization with the task of “ideological transformation and education of the working man in the spirit of Socialism” (Londre 1999, 547). The shift implied suggested that technology no longer was sufficient as an aesthetic instrument but rather should be put to quotidian use, harnessing it to construct the industrial infrastructure of the new Communist society. In the climate of Stalinist Russia in the late 1930s and 1940s, artists who were former aesthetic revolutionaries were either silenced, or in the case of Meyerhold and others, machinated into the Stalinist show trial spectacle to be imprisoned, tortured, and executed for their formalist sins. It is undeniable that Constructivist principles are still at work today in our quest for performances in which stage and spectator disappear in a blur of technological wizardry. Still, a kind of blatant irony existed in the Constructivist endeavor to present sophisticated technology within the comfortable isolation of the theater when the Soviet economy was in shambles. Furthermore, during its heyday there was a sense that the theater had become technologized not for the sake of the greater society but for the fetishism of technology itself. The emphasis on mechanical systems, structures, gadgets, and organization was ultimately seen to be the work of artists removed from the political realities of the world outside of the theater: “so absorbed in the creation of systems that for a long time he gave no thought to those he was creating for—to the people of the future” (Brodsky 1987, 81). Weimar’s Machine Aesthetic

With the political-aesthetic revolution making its way through Russian society after the October revolution, the fledgling German Weimar Republic was also paving the ground for a similar cultural transformation, under very different political circumstances. The bitter aftermath of the German defeat in World War I, the unstable economy and constant political fighting between left and right political factions, the unfulfilled hopes among many for a similar Bolshevik Revolution as in Russia and the devastating human impact left by the war all contributed to a fractured climate of overwhelming uncertainty and, simultaneously, frenzied creative output between 1919 and 1933. The question of

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whether a post–World War I Germany would retain traces of its former monarchial past in the form of a bourgeois, albeit democratic republic or move instead toward socialism or communism on the Russian model provided the backdrop for an almost endless continuum of aesthetic exploration—a laboratory for a future technoculture. After aborted attempts at establishing a socialist government in the revolution of November 1918, the years following the founding of the Republic were singularly characterized by an increasing politicization of aesthetic expression by way of formal exploration across architecture, design, urban planning, visual art, music, and performance. Between 1919 and 1923, the greatest change in the cultural climate was the shift from Expressionism, the dominant artistic force in the periods immediately leading up to and after World War I, toward the machine-age utopianism predicated by Cubism, Futurism, and Constructivism.19 The predilection toward what the founder of the Dutch De Stijl movement Theo von Doesburg called “the mechanical aesthetic” in 1921 was already operating full force in certain cultural millieus. The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation)—a statesupported federation founded in 1907 by architect Hermann Muthesius—coupled artistic and design activity with industry in an effort to ensure a competitive role for Germany in the mass industrial production of the early twentieth century against the encroaching economic dominance of the United States. Embracing socialist ideals, the Werkbund attempted to establish a feeder system for artists to be trained as craftsmen in the context of mass production, exerting a major influence on the establishment of the Bauhaus, an institution that sought the ultimate machine-age fusion of artist and craftsman in the service of industry. The growing mechanization of the visual and performing arts was also deeply affected by Weimar’s art and industry mix.20 Underwritten by the new ideology of art’s fusion with engineering, the transformation of stage into machine accelerated in the 1920s as directors and designers rapidly incorporated hydraulics, revolves, screens, moving parts, and complex lighting and projection apparatuses into their mise-en-scène. As the machine dreams of practitioners quickly outgrew the outmoded theater infrastructures of the nineteenth century, artists and architects began to reimagine the apparatus of the theater building itself, integrating new projection, light, and material technologies to catalyze the mediated spectacles predicted to arise in the future. In what the historian Stephen Mansbach called visions of totality, the utopian imaginings for total theaters—particularly those influenced by Constructivism—were part of a general social-cultural desire for the creation of worlds, where the aesthetic and the social, the extraordinary and the everyday would fuse into a gigantic quotidian Gesamtkunstwerk.21 Finally, as a means of communicating political propaganda, performance based on machine-age aesthetics and cinematic principles would serve documentary and informational functions. The technologizing of the stage would thus animate the so-called masses to political activation and media would rapidly be incorporated into the spectacle,

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something that the National Socialists would turn on its head for even more mass effect after 1933. Reinhardt’s Expressionist Spectacles

In contrast to the call for electrification in the face of industrial age modernization, Expressionism was resolutely opposed to contemporary technology’s encroachment into cultural forms. Driven by an anarchistic individualism, it sought to expose subjective internal emotions and mystical inner experience, rather than focus on constructing an accurate representation of the outside world. Although not driven by technology at a formal or conceptual level, it is still critical to note the work of the expressionist Austrian director Max Reinhardt, one of the leading theatrical creators of the time. The Vienna-born Reinhardt, whose interpretations of classical Western dramatic texts were staged as mass spectacles in unusually proportioned spaces involving hundreds of performers, was also acutely interested in exploiting the most sophisticated advances in contemporary lighting and stage machinery to achieve a total spectacle in which the lines between event and spectator would dissolve. As early as 1905, he began to explore new reflective lighting techniques developed by the Italian lighting inventor Mariano Fortuny [Architectonic, chapter 4] as well as to utilize the mechanically driven revolving stage, a technique derived from Japanese Kabuki theater (mawari butai) in the mid eighteenth century. With scenery built on a turntable, Reinhardt could choreograph a theatrical spectacle in which not only could new scenographic perspectives be achieved, but also, more important, actor and stage environment could be seamlessly united, flowing into and out of each other. Owing much to Wagner’s techniques at Bayreuth, Reinhardt’s theatrical work fluctuated in scope and ambition between mass theatrical illusion and the use of machinery for the express purpose of spectacle construction. This formula is no better exemplified as in the example of the immense Grosses Schauspielhaus built for Reinhardt by the architect Max Poelzig on top of a former circus in Berlin in 1919. Originally named The Theater for 5000, but in actuality seating “only” 3000, the Grosses Schauspielhaus was designed with Reinhardt’s spectacles in mind through its wide, arena-like shape and its deeply set thrust stage that literally jutted out into the audience space. Berlin critics never accepted the space as appropriate for serious drama due to its unusual interior of thousands of hanging plastic stalactites designed for acoustic dampening and the space’s gargantuan proportions (the proscenium itself measured some 24 meters across in width and 22 meters deep), but the theater was outfitted with the most recent lighting equipment as well as a turntable: a technical apparatus constructed for Reinhardt’s great theatrical pageants. Unfortunately, the combined attitude of unease from critics and audiences alike toward the bizarrely decorated and colossal space

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led Reinhardt to leave Berlin and return to his native Austria and the theater was then converted over to popular entertainments. Bruno Taut’s Der Weltbaumeister

Derived from the mind of an architect and not a theater designer, another intriguing example of Expressionist performance was the work of the German architect Bruno Taut. Known for his large-scale social housing projects in Berlin in the 1920s, Taut’s utopian imagination had arguably been shaped by his experience from the real world horrors of World War I. Heavily influenced by the German writer Paul Scheerbart, Taut’s ideas originated in concepts focused on the separation of man and nature and the encroaching technologizing of humanity. In science fiction–like novels, Scheerbart imagined utopian cathedrals of glass and performances that would take place at a scale unbeknownst at the time to most performance practice. One of Scheerbart’s proposed events, the Oratory for Balloon Gondalas (1910), suggested an almost Futurist scenario for an orchestra and chorus in a series of gondolas attached to balloons that would float up into the skies above the Germany city of Dresden.22 Like his mentor Scheerbart, Taut imagined transcendent architectures that would unite normal, everyday people (Volk) with an infinite, mystical, transcendental reality connected by way of spirit (Geist), seeking a new, spiritual role for architecture. But, the stage, Taut wrote, would also provide a place where, if only for a short time, the ideal Glanzwelt (literally, the shining world) of inner imagination and the real world could come together. In describing his ideal of an endless theater in the summer of 1919, Taut already imagined the kind of theatrical space that Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus would soon characterize. Taut’s theater would feature a constant interplay between stage and auditorium utilizing material technology such as glass in combination with colored light. The proscenium arch, which Taut saw as preventing the fusion of the infinite stage with the audience space, would be completely removed. “The auditorium,” wrote Taut in his essay “Zum Neuen Theaterbau,” “through its articulation, extends itself into the stage, so that during the performance one senses no division. The auditorium must already appear limitless, but the stage must be truly limitless, not simply in its spiritual multiplicity but sometimes without an actual end” (Taut 1919, 208). In order to fulfill these ideas, Taut resorted to the development of a theatrical work called Der Weltbaumeister (The World Builder) or what the architect labeled an “architectural drama for symphonic music.” Der Weltbaumeister was composed of a series of thirty blackand-white drawings accompanied by music depicting the gradual emergence and transformation of an architectural form traveling through infinite space—an architectural performance without actors. Beginning in a kind of tinted ganzfeld, a space without edges

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lying beyond the realms of perception, the architectural form appeared and then shattered into atomic pieces, dancing as particles through Taut’s mystical, cosmological universe and then eventually coalesced into a sparkling glass cathedral—the ultimate embodiment of the Glanzwelt. Published by the Folkwang house in 1920, Taut’s drawings depicted his synesthetic, cosmic architecture cum symphony drama; a theatrical experience where “colors and form would sound and carry their tone as pure undisturbed elements of the infinite” (Taut 1920, xii). The disappearance of the human being is by no means an antihumanist gesture but in typical Expressionist style, brought about a synesthetic fusion between the observer and the spectacle itself. Like many utopian projects of the early twentieth century, Der Weltbaumeister generated a metaphysical and spiritual experience for the spectators; an experience radically distinct from the visions of an electromechanical stage yet, at the same time, pointing toward future Bauhaus performances where the human figure was only part of a larger play of media effects. Dada

Dada (the French word for rocking horse)—the slowly growing movement in the latter part of the 1910s—was certainly Expressionism’s direct antithesis. Influenced by Futurism as well as the cabaret culture of pre–World War I Germany and Switzerland, Dada’s official founding date was the opening of the infamous Cabaret Voltaire bar on the Spiegelgasse in Zürich in spring 1916. With the founding of the Cabaret Voltaire and the publishing of the first Dada manifestos, the movement’s participants quickly became opposed to Expressionism’s mystical yearnings for inner experience and its factory of interior illusions in the shadow of a World War I–shattered Europe. Composed of a mix of Futurist shock techniques and genres ranging from cabaret performance, sound poetry, absurdist manifestoes, live readings, spoken word, and in general, events designed to shock the staid Zürich bourgeoisie, Dada took both a nihilistic and ironic view of a world overcome by absurdity and meaninglessness. Having seen the Futurist dreams of mechanization find their quintessential expression in the mechanized horrors of the first World War’s trenches, artists like Tristan Tzara, Hugo Ball, Richard Huelsenbeck, and Raoul Hausmann embraced the mechanized, the artificial, the antiestablishment, and the senseless. There is no argument that the initial Swiss Dada group (as well as subsequent manifestations in Berlin, Paris, and New York) was a critical moment in the avant-garde of the twentieth century. Yet, at the same time, Dada was never particularly interested in the techno-utopias being established in Russian, German, and Dutch Constructivist circles. Performance constituted a major artistic vehicle for the Dadaists, but its form highly resembled the decidedly low-tech, prank-like street interventions and serate of early Italian and Russian Futurism.

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The connection to Futurism (which eventually Dada would also oppose, if not for the simple reason of competition) is made apparent by founder Tristan Tzara’s comments in his 1922 essay “Dadaism and the Theater,” which similarly called for the end of stage illusionism. Here, Tzara opened the way for a new kind of spectacle in which its instruments of effects (e.g., scenography and lighting) would be fully exposed to the spectators and where the performers would be liberated from the “cage of the proscenium” (Carlson 1993, 343). Regardless of the fact that Dada acknowledged the machine aesthetic, particularly in the works of the Berlin Dada group formed around Georg Grosz, the movement contributed little to formal spatiotechnical innovations. Schwitters’s Merzbühne

Kurt Schwitters, another German artist influenced by Dada’s modus operandi, also developed his own utopian imaginary blending architecture and performance. Branding his own Dada-esque, lifelong artistic project in order to maintain independence from Dada’s Zurich and Berlin manifestations, Schwitters’s Gesamtkunstwerk Merz was more a total vision of the world than a specific work. Sprawling across multiple media, from collage composed of newspaper bits and other material to sound and concrete poetry experiments, its most famous component, Merzbau, was a massive, strange, and grotto-like architectonic environment constructed from paper, cardboard, and other materials that occupied the studios and room of Schwitters’s homes, first in Hannover, Germany, in the 1920s and later in Norway and England during his World War II exile. In search of the ideal composite work fusing all branches of art into an artistic unity, Schwitters also turned to the stage. His 1923 text Merzbühne (meaning “Merz stage”) proposed a similar kind of total scenario to serve as a platform for the performance of Merz drama, a nonliterary event that would be a Wagnerian fusion of set, score, and text. The Merzbühne, however, went far beyond Wagner’s rather old-fashioned reliance on dramatic narrative and music, instead imagining a performance of matter itself—a kind of living Merzbau made of three-dimensional objects interacting with other materials. A “fusing of all factors into a composite work,” the Merzbühne’s “actors” would range from liquid, solid, and gaseous substances while the environment would be constructed from materials as diverse as “white wall, man, barbed wire entanglements, blue distance, light cone” with noise-generating materials such as “violin, drum, trombone, sewing machine, grandfather clock, stream of water, etc.” (Schwitters 1989, 62). Naturally, such a staged choreography of substances also involved a stage set that moved, shifted, fell backward and forward into relief, and morphed. “Use is made of compressible surfaces or surfaces capable of dissolving into meshes; surfaces that fold like curtains, expand or shrink. Objects will be allowed to move and revolve, and lines will be allowed to broaden into surfaces” (Schwitters 1989, 62). Here, the Merzbühne betrayed

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not just a passing resemblance to Tatlin’s ideas for his production of Zangezi but also to the other Constructivist’s interests in matter becoming kinetic. On a stage where things like strings, gasses, and space took on movement, matter no longer represented something but was itself by virtue of its material constitution. The Merzbühne hence tried for no less than the creation of a performance context where the inanimate could become animate. Frederick Kiesler’s Endless Stages

No one managed to articulate the utopia of a transformable stage within the technical constraints of the time better than the visionary scenic designer and architect Frederick Kiesler. Born into an Austrian family in Romania, Kiesler studied architecture, painting, and printmaking in Vienna between 1908 and 1913. His entrance into the pantheon of European avant-garde theater performance took place in Berlin in 1923, when—without experience in stage design—the thirty-three-year-old created an unusual electro-opticalmechanical scenography for Karel Cˇ apek’s dystopian science fiction robot drama R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). From what is known of Kiesler’s set from two singular photographs and descriptive texts that remain, it appears to have been a massive, Rube Goldberg contraption whose surface consisted of a dizzying array of painted and real objects: electrical machinery, metallic forms, doors and screens that opened, wheels and gears, and other abstracted techno-emblems. Kiesler’s control wall apparatus featured a large, 3-foot (1 meter)-wide lead constructed mechanical iris that when opened, revealed a flickering film projected onto its surface, a kind of seismograph in the middle that moved back and forth, a system of flashing lightbulbs, and a continually rotating turbine-like wheel. Most impressive was his inclusion of the Tanagra device, a nineteenth-century optical illusion system installed mainly in European Luna (theme) parks, which consisted of a series of concave mirrors that helped to produce an almost television-like effect by reducing the size of the performers behind the set and projecting them at micro sizes onto another mirror inset into one of the mechanical frames in the wall.23 The Tanagra device allowed the audience to see what was going on behind the scenery, albeit in spatially manipulated scale.24 Like many similar artists working in the stage arts at the time, Kiesler’s design sought to rid the theater once and for all of painted backdrops and incorporate cinematic media into the stage environment. “No more stage painting! . . . The stage,” wrote Kiesler, “is not a buttonhole that should be decorated. It is a completely independent organism with its own theatrical laws of its time” (Lesák 1988a, 42). His next venture moved toward an even more extraordinary formulation of machine scenic construction described as the Raumbühne (literally “space stage”) and realized in prototype form at the International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques in Vienna in 1924. As artistic director of the exhibition, Kiesler curated a smorgasbord of the most

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Figure 1.6 Frederick Kiesler. General view of the Raumbühne (Space Stage), 1924. © 2008 Austrian Frederick and Lillian Kiesler Private Foundation, Vienna.

radical mechanized European theatrical experiments of the day, from the Russian Constructivist set designs of Popova, Moholy-Nagy, and the Bauhaus to Schwitters’s Merzbühne and Prampolini’s Futurist scenographic concepts. “The stage is space . . . the new need is to blow up the flat image on stage in order to dissolve it into space . . . this creates the space stage, which is not an a priori space but rather appears as space itself ” (Lesák 1988a, 43). Conceived as an element of a much larger project that Kiesler called the railway theater, at first sight the structure, which was constructed as an open tower in the center of the Vienna Konzerthaus, invoked the competing visions of a tower, a parking garage driving ramp, and a boxing ring construction: a multistory set of platforms joined together by a spiral formed ramp traveling upwards from the floor (figure 1.6). Each platform held a separate space for acting/performing areas, of which the top area was made accessible to the performers only from ladders and steps. Although not realized, Kiesler’s original plans also included the use of an elevator that would travel up and down the center axis of the structure to transport the performers through the structure’s eight various levels.25

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Based partially on the overall success of the exhibition, Kiesler was invited to Paris and then emigrated to the United States in 1926, where he became an American citizen and began exploring multiple avenues for his creative output, including theater and exhibition design, writing, cinema and theater design, as well as visionary architectural projects, only one of which was eventually realized.26 While Kiesler’s later performance projects researched the creation of a series of unique and utopian endless theaters (the unbuilt Universal Theater and the conceptual endless theater), he also continued practical work in the theater as a central avenue for his aesthetic philosophies.27 As head of the Juilliard School Drama Division’s department of scenography from 1934–1956, for example, Kiesler carried forth his radical experimentation in using the new media of the time, such as lighting, film projection, and architectural materials, as well as his first experiments working with biomorphic sculptural forms within a stage context. In the same period, Kiesler also formulated a radical theory named correalism, a word play on the statistical term correlation, meaning an interrelationship between two or more sets of variables or observations. Essentially reinforcing ideas already developed in the 1920s by the Constructivists, Kiesler defined correalism as a theory of design in a 1939 essay entitled “On Correalism and Biotechnique: a Definition and Test of a New Approach to Building and Design.”28 Correalism was seen as the “exploration into the dynamics of continual interaction between man and his natural and technological environments,” specifically, the interaction between different built forms of matter and their interaction with human beings (Kiesler 1939, 61). As founder and director of the short-lived Laboratory for Design-Correlation at Columbia University from 1937–1941 he explored concepts of intuition, perception (specific work on a so-called vision machine), and dreams as well as issues of human–environment interaction. A new scientific theory of design, Kiesler wrote, was needed to understand how aesthetic practice could be harnessed to create the conditions for a new kind of socialized human in constant contact with an environment increasingly embedded with technology. As increased technologization would bring aesthetic practice in line with the realms of quotidian life, designer–artists like Kiesler saw a moral and ethical imperative intertwined with design, particularly in formulating new ways by which aesthetic practice could deal with real-life problems. In bringing his performance background to bear on new situations of interaction design, Kiesler thus sought to develop total and organic environments where the separation and dualities between vision and reality, image and environment could be dissolved, leading to experiences “where there are no borders between art, space, and life” (Phillips 1989, 114). Propaganda Machines I: Erwin Piscator

In contrast to Kiesler’s elevation of technology directed to creating a new kind of human, other theater artists working in Berlin during the Weimar period utilized machine-age

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aesthetics for different ends. Born in Southern Germany at the tail end of the nineteenth century, the German director Erwin Piscator became a staunch advocate of what he dubbed “the proletarian theater”—an agitprop (agitational propaganda) theater fundamentally preoccupied with raising class consciousness for the working class in preparation for the coming socialist revolution. During the political unrest of the Weimar Republic, Piscator rose to become one of its central theatrical creators, making his early reputation with a series of politically uncompromising and outspoken productions, many of which took place outside of the domain of the institutional theater in locations such as meeting halls with amateur actors. At the famous Volksbühne (people’s stage) in Berlin between 1924 and 1927, Piscator made a name for himself with stagings that were as controversial for their novel use of slide and film projections as for their explicitly political and ideological bent. His 1924 production of Fahnen (Flags), a second-rate propaganda play about a Chicago workers’ uprising by the German journalist Alfons Paquet, used the theater’s massive 20-meter revolving stage, a large-scale projection screen placed behind the proscenium, and two projection screens mounted on both sides of the proscenium at the same level as the balcony. Because Piscator’s plans to use film did not materialize in Fahnen, projected slides with the title texts of scenes were substituted to comment on the action of the play; the director referred to these as blackboards. His next production, a mammoth historical pageant entitled Trotz Allem (Despite Everything) was produced for the German Communist Party’s first official convention in Berlin and staged in Poelzig’s Grosses Schauspielhaus. Here, Piscator progressed with his use of media through the direct incorporation of film sequences with live performers. Essentially a documentary pastiche of historical events in Germany between the years 1914–1919, Trotz Allem’s greatest achievement was Piscator’s intersplicing of filmic sequences choreographed with live action, a first in the history of live performance.29 Acting as a formal device used to present what the director called “political and social mechanisms,” the filmic sequences were also reported to have had a surprising and stunning emotional effect on the audience’s experience. “The momentary surprise when we changed from live scenes to film was very effective. But the dramatic tension that live scene and film clip derived from one another was even stronger. They interacted and built up each other’s power and at intervals the action attained a furioso that I have seldom experienced in theater” (Piscator 1978, 97). Piscator’s next Volksbühne production, Paquet’s play Sturmflut (Tidal Wave) advanced further the use of film integrated into stage action. Specifically shot for the production, Piscator diffused filmic sequences from a battery of four film projectors onto the main set piece: a large hanging transparent screen termed a “living wall.” Here, the combination of documentation footage depicting cities, forests, naval battles, strikes, and street fighting once again reinforced Piscator’s use of film as “the theater’s fourth dimension . . . living scenery” (Willett 1978b, 60). Like his Russian counterpart Meyerhold at the same time,

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Piscator appropriated the visual apparatus of cinema not only from a technical standpoint but also a dramaturgical one—a way of reaching an audience whose visual vocabularies were rapidly changing as a result of moving images.30 Piscator’s “phenomenal technical imagination” was to reach its peak, however, only after he left the Volksbühne in 1926, founding his own series of short lived (1927–1931) companies eponymously named the Piscator Bühne. Collapsing into bankruptcy after the first season in 1928, the director’s eight precedent-setting productions would have untold influence on the creative use of technological systems in theatrical performance later in the twentieth century. Working with his set designer Traugott Müller, Piscator’s opening project, a massive production of Ernst Toller’s political drama Hoppla, wir Leben! (Hurray, We Are Alive!) featured an 8-meter high, multilevel, scaffolding-like structure: a cutaway house divided into cubicle sections and integrated with transparent screens for rear projection. The Piscator Bühne’s next production, a documentary adaptation of Count Alexei Tolstoy’s post-revolution Russian melodrama Rasputin upped the ante with a revolving hemispheric dome set constructed out of iron pipe and divided into inhabitable sections with hinged flap doors that opened to reveal distinct acting areas (figure 1.7). With the constantly shifting architecture of designer Müller’s dome, as well as suspended but flyable screens, Piscator essentially obtained a series of overlapping dynamic surfaces upon which he projected a running visual counterpoint of around 6,000 feet of documentary film footage acquired from Russia together with textual commentary during the performance. Piscator enhanced his reputation for technological innovation with his next two productions, a new adaptation of the Czech writer Gustav Hašek’s comic antiwar novel The Adventures of the Good Soldier Schweyk and the Berlin writer Walter Mehring’s inflation-era drama Der Kaufmann von Berlin (The Merchant of Berlin) through the use of mechanically driven treadmills that carried the main performers across the stage (Schweyk) and a multitiered set on a revolve with two treadmills, flying brides, and catwalks raised and lowered by gantry cranes and no less than four simultaneous projections designed by László Moholy-Nagy. The 1929 Der Kaufmann von Berlin was to be a watershed in Piscator’s career, his most complex and final mammoth production in pre–World War II Germany.31 After the second Piscator Bühne became financially insolvent due to insufficient funds, Piscator directed several smaller, more traditional agitprop productions before leaving Berlin entirely for Russia in 1931. Due to the takeover of the Nazis in 1933 and the imposition of Stalin’s socialist realism cultural policy in Russia, Piscator fled to the United States, where he remained until after World War II. Accused of favoring technological apparatuses over dramatic storytelling, Piscator continually maintained that technology was not an end but rather an instrument to promote a revolutionary political agenda through a new kind of dramaturgy. Like Meyerhold’s work, formal aesthetic practice and political activism went hand in hand; the

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Figure 1.7

Erwin Piscator. Stage Model for Rasputin (Scenography Traugott Müller, 1927.)

“technicality” of Piscator’s stage, with its integration of media machinery, would have been “unthinkable” without his total and utter commitment to “revolutionary socialism” (Piscator 1978, 220).32 As Piscator repeatedly made clear in his writings, technology was as an instrument used to enlarge the sense of historical events themselves—to construct a dialectical relationship with an audience in order to catalyze a Marxist political revolution. Deploying the latest machinery, Piscator’s technological–dramaturgical innovations pushed the traditional theater apparatus to its technical and organizational limits. By using technology to invoke a new form of revolutionary agency in the audience, politically motivated artists like Piscator and Meyerhold helped generate the need for a radical mode of cultural production within a formally experimental context. Nowhere is this goal more apparent than in Piscator’s desire for a new kind of production environment, a goal that he pursued with the architect and Bauhaus founder Walter Gropius to build an audacious but ultimately unrealized flexible and populist “total theater” that could be fully adaptable while incorporating the latest innovations.33

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Such an ideal theater suggested a new kind of infrastructure, with all of the instruments and apparatuses of the laboratory, a point made patently clear in a statement by Piscator’s production manager Otto Richter that resonates perhaps even more in our present moment: “Workshops should be attached to the acting and rehearsal areas to enable us to get down to some real work, and they should be equipped with every possible machine: for technical work behind the scenes is so complex and varied that it is impossible to work without the very best machinery . . . Instead of luxurious auditoriums made of iron, concrete, glass, and fine materials, build us workshops and a stage which is equal to modern production techniques and much more money and precious time will be saved” (1978, 193). Propaganda Machines II: Bertolt Brecht

It was through one of his chief collaborators, the dramaturg, playwright, and director Bertolt Brecht, that many of Piscator’s more radical notions were popularized, albeit under Brecht’s own name. One of the most influential stage directors, and playwrights in twentieth-century performance history, Brecht began to formulate his theories of the socalled epic theater during his work with Piscator, incorporating ideas such as the use of film and projection as commentary [Cinefication and the Stage, chapter 4], as well as the creation of theatrical performances more akin to demonstrations. In fact, Brecht’s greatest influence had less to do with the kind of technological wizardry practiced so successfully by Piscator but rather in his writing and directing, where he further articulated technology’s role through the context of a political theater of action. In a 1932 interview, Brecht pointed out the necessity of utilizing technology, even under adverse conditions. “It’s an effort (to use technology), particularly when you come up against such disastrous shortcomings on the technical side as Piscator and I did. The flies collapsed when heavy objects were hung from them, the stage broke when we put weight on it, the motors driving the various essential machinery made too much noise . . . [O]f course we had to make use of complicated machinery if we were to show modern processes on the stage” (B. Brecht 1978, 66). For Brecht, Piscator’s advances in the use of media and the mechanization of the stage were a critical development in the quest to bring theater into resonance with modern life. The device of projected commentaries, for instance, operated as a “primitive attempt at literarizing the theater,” making performance operate on a meta level of critical commentary in which the audience became aware of the apparatus at play and were provoked to take a critical stance about the technopolitical practices of modern capitalism depicted on stage (B. Brecht 1978, 43). Not surprisingly, Brecht’s model of performance was resolutely opposed to the immersive aims of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk, with Wagner’s all-encompassing fusion of artistic elements becoming, in Brecht’s opinion, a nightmare come true that “degrades”

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the individual elements into a muddling soup. Whether visual, sonic, or textual, each media element in Brecht’s model maintained its independence from one another by way of a radical separation (Trennung). Wagner’s theory, however, presented a far greater threat to Brecht’s instructive model of performance, for the very immersion of the spectator in a torrent of sensations would drastically mitigate her ability to take a critical stance to what she saw. “The process of fusion extends to the spectator, who gets thrown into the melting pot too and becomes a passive (i.e., suffering) part of the total work of art. Witchcraft of this sort must be of course fought against. Whatever is intended to produce hypnosis, is likely to induce solid intoxication, or creates fog, has got to be given up” (B. Brecht 1978, 38). The Bauhaus: Preliminaries

Under the title Kunst und Technik—eine neue Einheit (Art and Technology: A New Unity), the German Bauhaus opened its first public exhibition, the Bauhaus Week, in Weimar Germany in 1923. Founded by the architect Walter Gropius as both a teaching institution and ideology, the Bauhaus was a distinctly modern phenomenon and one of the first to emphasize the conceptual and practical fusion of art and design, handicraft, and mass industrial production. Gropius’s motto of “unity as diversity” focused on pragmatic, hands-on learning in which architects, sculptors, and painters would abandon their ivory-tower stance toward craftspeople and go back to the shaping of materials in the workshop.34 As part of this direction, Gropius sought out master artists and craftsmen of the time such as painters Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky and the sculptor Oskar Schlemmer, in addition to others. The central defining characteristic of the Bauhaus approach was a oneyear intensive Vorkurs (preliminary course), a kind of boot camp for all students involving basic questions of material form. Initially under the leadership of the Austrian designer Johannes Itten, the Vorkurs specialized in what we now take to be the fundamentals of basic design education: studies in materials, form, color, and composition. In a continual spirit of transformation throughout its fourteen-year existence from 1919–1933, much of the early Bauhaus work was slanted toward more mystical directions. With its emphasis on individual artistic expression, Itten’s view of art did not ultimately coincide with Gropius’s pragmatic, art-technology-industry direction, and in 1923, the artist, theoretician, and educator László Moholy-Nagy took Itten’s place, retooling the Vorkurs with a broader liberal arts approach emphasizing the intersection of art, technology, and biology. This direction was made even more manifest by the Bauhaus’s move from Weimar to a specially designed building by Gropius in the German city of Dessau in 1926. As the Bauhaus reputation was cemented in Germany and rapidly spread internationally, the emphasis on the unity of art and technology not only demonstrated a shift in the Bauhaus

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pedagogical direction, but also reflected the larger transformations taking place across the European cultural landscape. From Material to Architecture: Moholy-Nagy’s Theater of Totality

Similar to El Lissitzky, the Hungarian artist, theoretician, and educator László MoholyNagy also saw the future of mankind dependent on scientific and technological progress and the necessary role of education as liberating the creative potential of the whole human being. Appointed to the Bauhaus in 1923 by Gropius as part of the heightened interest in Constructivism, Moholy-Nagy took over the metal shop from Paul Klee, seeking a reform of the Vorkurs specifically based on Constructivist principles that combined the exploration of materials with new technologically augmented forms of expression. Although he remained at the Bauhaus for only six years, Moholy-Nagy’s impact as both ambassador and policy creator put an undeniable stamp on the institution. To get a sense of Moholy-Nagy’s pedagogical and artistic directions, one need only look to his major 1923 book Von Material zu Architektur (From Material to Architecture) and later republished in English as The New Vision, a work that functions like an encyclopedia of early–twentieth-century avant-garde creation, from Cubism, Futurism, Dadaism, Constructivism, and Surrealism to the beginnings of the so-called International Style in architecture. The book also revealed Moholy-Nagy’s fascination with the aesthetic impulses provided by the mechanized world, as well as his command of its visual vocabularies. Illustrated with a dazzling narrative of images from his own as well as his students’ work combined with archival photography, Moholy-Nagy moved quickly from the structural, textural, material, and sensorial qualities inherent in materials to an exploration of volumetric forms made manifest through sculpture and concluding with kinetic explorations of light and space. The book culminated in the exploration of space as a dynamic material through built (i.e., architectural) form. It is here that he articulated his central concept of Raumgestaltung (literally, the design or ordering of space)—an idea that encapsulated Moholy-Nagy’s interest in the application of new materials for the exploration of kinetic form. “Space,” he wrote, “is a reality of our sensory experience,” both a medium of expression as well as a shapeable material (Moholy-Nagy 2001, 195). This almost Futurist-tinged, dynamic vision of space perhaps explains why the book’s conclusion is preoccupied with endless images of elevator shafts, conveyer belts, smokestacks, aerial street intersection shots, and other building structures—images not only of the industrial transformations of spatiality but also the modernist visions of overlapping materials and structures in the architectonic shaping of the human environment. The stage also provided Moholy-Nagy with a concrete example for his spatial explorations that would take place during his time with the Bauhaus and afterward as a freelance stage designer in Berlin before his exile to the United States. This transformation of static

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space into dynamic space was an idea that Moholy-Nagy began to explore over several projects, one a model of a kinetic stage environment entitled Kinetisches Konstructives System: Bau mit Bewegungsbahnen für Spiel und Beförderung (Kinetic Construction System: Building with Conveyors for Play and Transportation) (with Alfred Kemeny) and the second, a larger concept for a so-called theater of totality. As a kinetic theater environment, Moholy-Nagy and Kemeny’s Kinetic Construction System was envisioned as a huge, vertical cylinder in which audience and performers alike would be kept constantly in motion by a series of spiral formed conveyer belts and escalators mounted on the structure’s exterior and interior (figure 1.8). With a central elevator, the performers could ascend and descend through the tube or slide from top to bottom via a fire station–like pole. Additionally, through large rings, the entire structure itself would turn in circular motion, thus providing several different simultaneously operating dynamics. While an actual scale model appears to have been built by architecture student Stefan Sebök in 1928, the intriguing aspect about Moholy-Nagy’s theoretical conception was the shifting role of performer and actor enabled by the dynamic behavior of the building itself [Performative Architecture, chapter 3]. This concept of an electromechanical theater was further developed in Moholy-Nagy’s article “Theater, Circus, Variety,” published in 1923 in the first Bauhaus book dealing with stage work, alongside essays by Gropius, Oskar Schlemmer, and the Hungarian architect and teacher Farkas Molnár. “Theater, Circus, Variety,” laid out Moholy-Nagy’s own vision of a machine age Gesamtkunstwerk: the theater of totality (Moholy-Nagy 1961, 49). Dissimilar to Wagner’s models, Moholy-Nagy’s totality deemphasized the role of drama and poetry as well as the human being in favor of the mechanical—what he labeled the mechanized eccentric. With total stage action envisioned as a great dynamic– rhythmic process and constructed from “great clashing masses of media,” Moholy-Nagy’s total theater also yearned for the disintegration of the line between spectator and performer. Moholy-Nagy was not interested only in the physical shaping of space through hard architectural materials. With a “new action of light” involving “the potential of light for sudden or blinding illumination, for flare effects, for phosphorescent effects, for bathing the auditorium in light synchronized with climaxes or with the total extinguishing of lights on the stage,” as well as acoustic phenomena, media could be perceived as that which could define space and create volume (Moholy-Nagy 1961, 67). Equally incorporating the play of both material (mechanics, elevators, optical instruments, airplanes) and immaterial (light, film, and projection) apparatuses, Moholy-Nagy’s vision would not only catalyze the turning of passive spectator into active participant but also create the potential for a creative transformation of the human organism. With the stepping down of Gropius and the takeover by the devout communist Hannes Meyer, Moholy-Nagy resigned from the Bauhaus to make his living as a stage and commercial graphic designer in Berlin until 1933. In the fading twilight of the Weimar

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Figure 1.8 Lázsló Moholy-Nagy with Alfred Kemeny. Kinetic Construction System: Building with Conveyors for Play and Transportation, 1922/1928. Courtesy of the Institut für Theaterwissenschaft, Cologne.

Republic, it was in Berlin that Moholy-Nagy began to realize some of the ideas expressed in “Theater, Circus, Variety” with a series of extravagant and experimental stage designs that had been already articulated in the chapter on “Space/Architecture” in Von Material zu Architektur (Moholy-Nagy 2001, 215–219). His design for a 1928 production of Jacques Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffmann at the Staatsoper Berlin attempted to construct a space through the use of light and shadow through a careful choreography of light against a series of translucent architectural surfaces. The scenography for Piscator’s production of Der Kaufmann von Berlin operated in a far more mechanical manner, deploying moving ramps, bridges, treadmills, elevator stages, and a specially shot film directed by Moholy-Nagy himself. In the hands of Piscator, all of this technical paraphernalia helped demonstrate the play’s chaotic portrait of inflation-era Berlin, causing the critic Bernhard Diebold simply to state: “What an apparatus!” (Willett 1978b, 100). Although Moholy-Nagy would work in a stage context for only a short time, his ideas for the theater of totality were to be strongly influential in his subsequent artistic and commercial design work in Europe and, after his immigration after the start of World War II, the United States. Total Theaters of the Bauhaus

Both Moholy-Nagy and the sculptor and dancer Oskar Schlemmer [The Machine Body, chapter 6] had a major impact not only on the development of new performance forms in the Bauhaus stage workshop, but also machine-based performance environments, no doubt due in part to the stage workshop’s interdisciplinary concentration, with the stage design curriculum being one of the few programs in which students from across the Bauhaus could come together in a collaborative research environment. Picking up on themes from Moholy-Nagy, much of the Bauhaus research into total theaters derived from four specific aims: (1) the removal of the line between spectating and performing by shifting the relationship between stage and viewer, (2) the integration of mechanical and media apparatuses to create a total sensory experience, (3) the exposure of technology as part of the performance itself, and (4) the transformation of static performance space into dynamic space by way of technical means. Farkas Molnár’s concept for a mechanically changeable environment called the U-Theater was a series of staging platforms that could be moved in both lateral as well as vertical directions, depending on the staging requirements of a given work. Around these platforms, a series of U-shaped rings formed the central amphitheater, with adjustable and rotating seating for 1200 audience members dispersed across the orchestra and balcony levels (figure 1.9, top left). In the center of the auditorium, Molnár envisioned a cylindrically shaped elevator-like apparatus upon which a long platform would be connected. As the elevator would ascend and descend during performances, the performers installed on the platforms could be

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Figure 1.9 Four Bauhaus Theaters. (Clockwise from top left.) Farkas Molnár, U-Theater, 1925, © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Heinz Loew, Model for a Mechanical Stage, 1927, © Bauhaus-Archiv Berlin. Walter Gropius, Total-Theater (designed for Erwin Piscator), 1927, © VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn. Andreas Weininger, Spherical Theater, © VG-Bild Kunst, Bonn.

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immediately connected to the upper balconies of the theater space, which were to be positioned over the main U-shaped seating areas. “Mechanical aids for the heightening of various effects . . . machines for dispersing odors of various kinds” were also to be installed in the space, along with a series of moving, hydraulically driven drawbridges, ramps, and catwalks, all designed to link the stage with the amphitheater and thus break down the separation between viewers and event (Gropius 1961, 74). Student Heinz Loew produced a scale model for a completely mechanical stage without the presence of performer or audience. Composed of a structure built on three tracks and with two rotary disks, Loew’s mechanical stage set in motion a combination of threedimensional objects, rectilinear-static forms and translucent surfaces, all mechanically controlled to achieve different compositional effects (figure 1.9, top right). More important, performance in the age of the machine had to acknowledge the presence of the technical operators, putting them on display before the public as performers—yet another nail in Wagner’s coffin.35 Another equally utopian scheme was Andreas (Andor) Weininger’s plan for a massive Kugeltheater (Spherical Theater), a gigantic globe-shaped room whose aim was to create for the spectators a new relationship to space itself (figure 1.9, bottom right). By placing the audience on the inner wall of the sphere (something that seemed certain to guarantee a sense of vertigo) and transferring the normal flat plane of the stage onto a series of corkscrew-like ramps that scaled up the central, vertical axis of the globe, Weininger’s theater proposed to create a radical new set of “psychic, optical, acoustical relationships . . . new rhythms of motion to new modes of observation” (Gropius 1961, 89). The boldest performance environment to emerge was Gropius’s own Total-Theater. Asked by Piscator to conceive of a new kind of completely flexible environment that would accommodate his technical visions, Gropius responded with a “great space machine”: a mechanically transformable space with seating for 2000, capable of accommodating multiple stage setups during the same performance, such as arena (audience concentrically around all sides), picture frame (i.e., proscenium), and thrust (audience on three sides). By way of gradually moving machinery, the total theater could transform the spectator/ stage relationship over the course of a performance by turning the large, revolving stage 180 degrees (figure 1.9, bottom left). In order to accommodate different geometries as well as Piscator’s relentless use of film, Gropius designed a complex projection system capable of rear-projecting onto a series of cycloramas wrapped around the space. Through a series of mobile projectors and twelve fixed rear film projectors fanned across the auditorium, Gropius’s integration of the projection apparatus directly into the space’s architecture would serve not only to “build with light and project slides and movies of abstract or figurative material to create scenic illusions which render real flats or stage props superfluous,” but also make it possible to plunge the spectator’s directly into the center of real and filmic action (Piscator 1978, 183). Unrealized due to financial reasons, Gropius’s plans would nevertheless have a major

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impact on the technological transformation of performance environments into the late twentieth century.36 Despite the advanced technological vision demanded of the project, Gropius made clear that technology was not just a means to “accumulate a collection of fanciful technical apparatus and gimmickry,” but rather a tool for “the most fantastic experimental creations of a stage director of the future” (Piscator 1978, 183). Similarly, Oskar Schlemmer reiterated the same sentiment of cautiousness in his writing, stating that technology should be tempered first and foremost by aesthetic concerns: “Today’s technology already has the necessary apparatus. It is a question of money—and, more important, a question as to how successfully such a technical expenditure can meet the desired effect. How long, that is, can any rotating, vibrating, whirring contrivance, together with an infinite variety of forms, colors and lights, sustain the interest of the spectator?” (Schlemmer 1961, 88). Beyond Construction: Dadaism and Surrealism in France

As the electromechanical vision of the Constructivists overtook the Dutch-, German-, and Russian-speaking worlds in the period between the two world wars, Dadaism gradually migrated from its Zürich roots to Berlin, Barcelona, New York, Geneva, and Paris. Not particularly interested in the architectural-spatial questions that consumed people like Kiesler, Meyerhold, Lissitzky, Moholy-Nagy, or Gropius, the Dadaists still shared somewhat of a penchant for multimedia events. Indeed, the internecine battles between the French Dadaists, led by Tristan Tzara, who had left Zürich for Paris in 1919, and their antithetical successors the Surrealists, led by André Breton, resulted in one work: the “instantaneous ballet” Relâche (translated as No Performance Tonight!), which marked the closest that either movement would get to the total performance imagined by machineage adherents. The pinnacle of the break between Dada and Surrealism came with former Dadaist Francis Picabia’s collaboration on Relâche with the French composer Erik Satie. Along with other denizens of the avant-garde, including Man Ray, the young filmmaker René Claire, Duchamp, the choreographer Jean Börlin, and the director of the renowned Parisian Ballets Suédois Rolf de Maré, Relâche was a theatrical lashing out against the Surrealists. The result of this retaliation was a media spectacle that not only mocked the pretentiousness and inauthenticity of the Surrealist’s sudden love for a classical performance form like ballet, but would also become a landmark event in the history of avant-garde performance. The word “Relâche” was used in theaters to indicate “no performance tonight.” Without a doubt, the audience that arrived for the scheduled opening on November 27, 1924, found the theater closed, with a sign hanging on the door stating none other than “Relâche.” This was not just another Dadaist performance but a reality, in that illness

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forced the canceling of the premiere. The audience that returned on December 3 then encountered a media spectacle incorporating frenetic live action and film. Relâche, a “BALLET INSTANTANÉISME IN TWO ACTS, ONE CINEMATOGRAPHIC INTERMISSION, AND THE TAIL OF FRANCIS PICABIA’S DOG” took place on a stage whose scenic spatiality was reduced by Picabia to an enormous wall of 370 silver disks. Appearing like oversized gramophone records, each disk was inlaid with a powerful lightbulb, which had the effect of directly blinding the audience. As the lights dimmed, the audience was greeted first by a film of Picabia and Satie aiming a cannon at them. The first act, featuring Man Ray and Duchamp, was composed of various simultaneously played-out skits in different quadrants of the stage, including dressing and undressing, all the while accompanied upstage by the Ballets Suédois performing in almost total darkness. Satie’s music ranged from a satirical take on a Chopin funeral march to lyrical dances. Those who expected a quiet intermission were jolted by the projection of the young filmmaker René Claire’s surrealist film Entra’acte, featuring performances by Satie and Picabia as well as a frame-by-frame score composed by Satie.37 The second act opened with huge banners announcing Satie as the greatest musician in the world (an obvious attack on Breton’s camp), more bizarre dances by the Ballets Suédois, and concluded with Satie and Picabia driving onto the stage in a Citroën automobile, smiling and waving to the already riot-prone audience. Even with scandalized press and an extremely disquieted public, the performance of Relâche ran for a year, its success partially attributed to the anarchic humor and madcap antics that Picabia and company had carefully choreographed. As Hans Richter later described it, “The word Instantaneism emphasized yet again the central experience of Dada, as Picabia saw it, and as he wanted it to be: the ‘value of the instant’ ” (Richter 1965, 192). The use of multiple media, the rapid-fire spirit of the performance’s Futurist-like leanings toward instantaneity, and its use of cinematic vocabularies finally marked a crucial point in Dada’s history: its elevation into the age of the machine. Artaud’s Cruel Performance

The interwoven threads of the experiments between the world wars emphasized the tension between the language of theatrical performance as literary text versus a formalized event of color, shape, form, light, image, sound, space, bodies, and machinery. If the Futurists, Constructivists, and the Bauhaus tried to mechanize the stage as the rehearsal room for a new kind of human being inhabiting a technologized environment, the French poet, playwright, actor, and theoretician Antonin Artaud viewed performance from a radically different perspective: a savage exorcism of the darkest latent forces inhabiting human experience. Wracked by lifelong physical illness, addiction, and chronic depression, Artaud’s eventual physical and mental deterioration shaped his existential, pessimistic worldview and

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fueled his own creative energies. First through poetry and ultimately with theatrical performance, Artaud searched for the total metaphysical transformation of the human self. Performance, he wrote in a 1927 essay “Manifeste pour un Théâtre avorté” (“Manifesto for a Theater That Failed”), would be no less than magic in which the “inmost motives of the heart” would be laid bare; a place where human anguish would erupt inside the spectator and produce a form operating beyond spoken language and directly on the nervous system (Artaud 1976, 161). Like others, Artaud dismissed the literary tradition of the theater that he blamed for the public’s loss of interest in the art form. Reduced to psychology and drawing-room narratives, the theater had lost its danger and efficacy, as well as “the sense of profound anarchy which lies at the root of all poetry” (Artaud 1958, 42). The ontology of performance lay instead in its direct and concrete physical manifestation; its confrontation with “the revelatory aspects of matter.” Akin to the plague, the theater would liberate the darkest, repressed desires held inside us, producing radical shifts of consciousness similar to the heightened spiritual states undergone during trance and possession. Artaud began to articulate such a theater as early as 1924, but it was Asian performance, first his encounter with Cambodian dance in Marseille and then his seminal viewing of Balinese dance at the 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, which in his eyes “restore[d] theater to its level of pure and autonomous creation, under the sign of hallucination and fear” (Artaud 1976, 215). Transfixed by the elaborate gestural phrases of Balinese movement, Artaud soon discovered a spectacle that replaced words with embodied states of consciousness as a series of gestures in flux. Unfamiliar to Western performance practices, a metaphysics of gesture transformed the dancer’s bodies into pure signs and moving hieroglyphs. Despite the fact that one can read Artaud’s trembling at the Balinese other as an extreme form of European exoticism not uncommon for its time, there was something deeper within the almost intoxicating effect of the choreographed spectacle that he witnessed. The Balinese embodied a theater beyond representation, a “double of life, just as life is the double of a true theater.” Artaud would pursue this emphasis on the double or the chimera throughout his most famous work, Le Théâtre et Son Double (The Theater and Its Double) (1958). In an almost prophetic statement in “Le Théâtre alchimique” (“Theater and Alchemy”), written in 1932 and included in The Theater and Its Double, Artaud described theater’s relationship to alchemy, the medieval practice of transforming base metals into gold. Whereas alchemy sought to use symbols as stand-ins or doubles for the real process of transformation, the theater also engaged in a similar process of doubleness. The theater was not a representation of real life, but in Artaud’s exact words, instead a la réalité virtuelle (virtual reality), one that evoked the alchemical processes of transforming matter from mind:

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All true alchemists know that the alchemical symbol is a mirage as the theater is a mirage. And this perpetual allusion to the materials and the principle of the theater found in almost all alchemical books should be understood as the expression of an identity (of which alchemists are extremely aware) existing between the world in which the characters, objects, images, and in a general way all that constitutes the virtual reality of the theater develops, and the purely fictitious and illusory world in which the symbols of alchemy are evolved. (Artaud 1958, 49)

Ultimately rejecting alchemical, absolute, and metaphysical in describing his ideal theater beyond language, Artaud settled on the controversial word “cruelty.” Yet, cruelty did not signify external torture or bloodshed inflicted on the body from without, but rather the unleashing of latent forces within or what writer Susan Sontag described as an “emotional and moral surgery on consciousness” (Sontag 1976, xxxvi). Through its media phantasmagoria “of pile-driven sounds, wildly stamped out rhythms, vibrations and resonances,” “flowing and surrounding the organs” of the spectator, the “theater of cruelty” would act as rite of purification of the soul (Artaud 1976, 243–244). Even if Artaud did not prescribe the direct use of technology as did the Constructivists, it is clear from The Theater and Its Double that the theater too should be conceived as a laboratory to investigate psychosensory and spiritual states of consciousness. In arching toward this goal, Artaud, like his predecessor Wagner, pursued the utter immersion of the spectator through the entirely deliberate use of media to create an imagined totalizing space of transformation, and in this sense, his importance in the history of the technologizing of performance space cannot be overestimated. Distinct from Wagner, however, Artaud sought to break down the separation between viewers and spectacle. The stage and auditorium were to be fused into a single site where the spectator was placed directly in the middle of the action in order to forge a “direct communication between spectator and spectacle” (Artaud 1958, 96). Theatrical action would be diffused across an immense environment, with the audience made mobile through movable chairs, enabling them to follow the spectacle. Space would also be transformed by a media fusion of light, objects, music, and sound, all having the express aim of evoking a sensory onslaught. It is not an accident that Artaud’s totalizing vision of cruelty and transformation developed during the abrupt end of machinic experimentation through the darkening atmosphere of fascism spreading across Europe and Russia in the mid 1930s. The legacy of Artaud would pick up steam only later, after the devastation of Europe in World War II and the birth of an apocalyptic future in the shadow of the atomic bomb. With Brecht’s theories of critical distance at one pole and Artaud’s immersion at the other, the conceptual tensions of technologized performance and art in general established the roots for the increasingly electronically mediated second half of the twentieth century.

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2

Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–)

Kinetic Scenes

The early-twentieth-century vision of the stage as machine was most strongly carried forth in the postwar period by the Czech designer and architect Josef Svoboda, who followed the call of Meyerhold, Piscator, and Brecht for a theater incorporating the inventions of the scientific era, and in the process, revolutionized production design in Europe.1 A fusion of artist, scientist, and professional craftsperson, Svoboda began to experiment with stage design while pursuing architectural studies. Svoboda’s work in small Prague theaters was noted for its imaginative use of technology as early as 1942 and grew progressively more elaborate under the fully subsidized structure of the National Theater where he assumed the position of chief scenic designer and technical director until 1992. Except for the period 1950–1956 when the ultraconservative aesthetic doctrine of Socialist Realism was at its heyday, continual experimentation, research, and invention coupled with a mastery of technical materials marked Svoboda’s scenographic practice over the next forty years. Like Piscator, Svoboda not only technically advanced the field of scenography but also reorganized the modes of institutional technical production, transforming the infrastructure of the National Theater in Prague in the late 1950s into what he termed a scenographic laboratory—an interdisciplinary, experimental research environment with professionals from chemistry, engineering, optics, physics, and architecture in order to create new technologies which potentially could be used on stage. This emphasis on a laboratory model also was present in Svoboda’s concept for a new kind of flexible performance environment, what he called the production space. Early on, Svoboda articulated the idea of an adaptable environment equipped with the latest lighting and mechanical systems and capable of simultaneously accommodating multiple scenographic setups. Such a space differed from the visions of Gropius or the Bauhaus

through its emphasis on modularity: such modules “would be mobile and able to join in various combinations so as to form a transformable, psycho-plastic space. Moreover, they would also be self-contained energy sources (electrical) and function as lighting instruments. And they would have the further capacity of carrying other objects on and off with them” (J. Burian 1971, 34). This modular electromechanical apparatus may invoke the visions of Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy, but Svoboda imagined the production space as a hybrid between atelier and film studio, made almost endlessly reconfigurable by modular technical devices. Inspired from his architectural rather than theatrical or visual arts training, Svoboda’s proposal of a psycho-plastic space aspired to restore a missing kinetics to the theatrical event, one that he claimed lay at the roots of all performance. “Dramatic space is psycho-plastic space, which means that it is elastic in its scope and alterable in its quality” (Svoboda [1966] 1971, 2). With the phenomenon of kinetics beginning to help compose dramatic action, Svoboda thus aimed to redefine scenography beyond visual scenic design. Scenography or the creation of what Svoboda labeled scenographs involved the complete fusion of dramatic action and stage time and space itself—a contrapuntal accord of media orchestrated under the collaborative hands of the director and the scenographer working in close tandem with each other. Creating most of his designs for dramatic stage works, Svoboda, too, like the Futurists and Dadaists, availed himself to the possibility of choreographed events of pure media. Thus, “a stage filled with vapor and a beam of light cutting a path through it” could as easily constitute scenography alongside traditional theatrical presentations (J. Burian 1971, 15). Instantiating his claim that “modern technological progress belongs in the theater just as an elevator belongs in a modern building,” Svoboda set about developing an entire range of techniques and instruments for performance applications, spanning from new lighting with low-voltage lamps to pneumatic controlled scenery (Svoboda [1962] 1971, 60). Pneumatic mirrors mounted on flexible surfaces capable of changing from convex to concave based on changes in air pressure, for example, fractured the stage environment into a kaleidoscopic arena while generating the potential for multiple games of kinetic reflection and observation. Svoboda also explored large, suspended mirrors hung at sharp angles above the stage to divert spectator perspective to unusual spatial positions as well as gigantic fresnel lenses that visually amplified stage events. Another favored set of instruments involved projection technologies that created dense, multilayered spaces: enormous cut-out forms constructed from architectural materials such as wire, glass, paper, and woven meshes combined with multiple light, slide, and filmic projections that turned flat scenic environments into interwoven visual spaces in motion (figure 2.1, top). Svoboda’s most famous contribution to the use of filmic projections occurred in his Laterna Magika productions, developed with the director Alfred Radok in 1957, and the Polyekran systems [Czech Cine-Scenography II: Svoboda-Radok, chapter 4].

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Figure 2.1 Josef Svoboda. Scenography for The Firebird. Copenhagen, 1972 (top). Josef Svoboda. Hydraulic stage platform for The Ring, Covent Garden/Royal Opera House, 1974. Courtesy of DILIA, Prague (bottom).

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Other techniques focused on mobile and modular mechanical and kinetic scenery, exploiting the combinatoric possibilities of a reduced set of architectural components whose seemingly infinite possibilities for rearrangement through hydraulics created the impression of a continually evolving environment. A scenography for Wagner’s The Ring cycle at Covent Garden in London in 1974 and 1976 consisted of a single set piece: an 11 m s 10 m hydraulic platform with multiple degrees of freedom that could be raised, lowered, and laterally moved forward and backward and that featured a huge mirror mounted on the underside of the structure to provide views of the performers below the assembly (figure 2.1, bottom).2 Svoboda’s productions also made use of motor driven wagons, turntables, screens and electronically controlled curtains whose movement created dynamic scale changes within a particular scenic environment. Far ahead of their time, such techniques were later incorporated into the mega spectacles of Broadway and West End London-based musicals as well as large-scale theme park attractions in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Debatably, Svoboda’s most enduring scenographic contribution was the custom development of specific lighting devices and unorthodox lighting techniques. Continuing in the tradition of Adolphe Appia [Appia, Light, and the Responsiveness of Space, chapter 1], Svoboda’s invention of low voltage lighting instruments where each unit housed its own transformer, gave him a finer degree of dimming control since each instrument contained a smaller lamp filament. Employing parabolic mirrors rather than standard lenses, Svoboda’s low voltage instruments thus achieved a whiter, more intense spectral differentiation through beams with narrower degrees of spread. The Svoboda ramp, as these units would later be called, generated one of his signature lighting techniques: literal curtains of light that when used in combination with such materials as rows of vertically taught strings or special electro-statically charged aerosol sprays created luminous light architectures.3 In his 1969 Hamburg production of Giuseppe Verdi’s Sicilian Vespers, Svoboda literally divided up the stage space into five distinct planes by his deployment of light curtains generated by the low-voltage instruments. The ability to construct kinetic space was thus not only the territory of mechanics but also a purely intangible means. Speaking of Sicilian Vespers, Svoboda remarked “the effect was that of light as a substance, light materialized, resulting from the special new lighting instruments that we designed. I think that we achieved a new level of lighting technique. And I think that Appia and (Gordon) Craig, especially, would have marveled at the outcome” (J. Burian 1971, 65). Theaters of Movement

Certainly the most well known, Svoboda was by no means the only artist to imagine kinetic performance spaces. The Lithuanian-German scenographer Joan Brehms, who studied at the original Weimar Bauhaus and worked with Max Reinhardt [Reinhardt’s Expressionist Spectacles, chapter 1], designed and built a revolving auditorium for the

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open-air theater of the Cˇesky´ Krumlov castle in Southern Bohemia in 1958. With seating at first for only sixty and then four hundred spectators, the spectator space—a huge, slanted disc installed with chairs—revolved; at first, solely by human horsepower with forty workers operating the mechanics from below the stage. Later versions of the stage increased the spectator capacity to more than five hundred, with electric motors replacing the manual human labor that was needed to drive the apparatus. Brehms also managed to realize a unique swinging theater in the courtyard of the Karlstejn Castle in 1968. Although he patented plans for a polydimensional theater featuring both rotating stage and spectator spaces in 1974, the actual structure went unrealized.4 Similarly, in 1961 the Czech-born U.S. émigré sculptor Bernard Reder proposed a “Theater in a Sphere,” a modern-day hybrid between Weininger’s Spherical Theater and Moholy-Nagy’s Kinetic Construction system [Moholy-Nagy’s Theater of Totality, chapter 1]. A transparent arena stage outfitted with equally transparent scenery mounted in the center of the sphere, Reder’s spherical theater was surrounded by a single row of seats on a moving conveyor belt–like track. Like the many theme park attractions that would soon follow in places like Disneyland and EPCOT Center,5 the spectators in Reder’s theater remained immobile during the course of a performance while the conveyor belt system moved them spirally upwards to the pinnacle of the sphere and back down the opposite side, giving them a continuously changing perspective of the event.6 The most extravagant manifestation of this trend was the kinetic performance spaces of the French theorist, director, and scenographer Jacques Polieri. Polieri, trained in the visual arts, had by 1963, together with Michel Oudin, formulated and patented the concept of an electronic image scenography, in which he imagined colossal projection screens broadcasting live video simulcasts in public spaces (figure 2.2). Interested in bringing influences from painting, architecture, and scientific inquiry into the context of theatrical performance, Polieri proposed diverse schemas for the creation of performance environments that oscillated between reality and imagination, science and fiction, theory and concrete space. For Polieri, the shift in perception due to electronically enabled images from new visual media like television in the postwar period suggested a wholly other form of human experience. His vision entailed the tangible manifestation of space to a spectator, the “whole of the pictorial, plastic, technical, and theoretical elements which allow the creation of an image, a bi- or three-dimensional construction, or the installation of a particularly spectacular action” (Polieri 1971, 24). Most interestingly, Polieri’s inspiration for such kinetic, transformable spaces came less from the arena of architecture, as in Svoboda’s case, but rather through his attempt to translate “the mobility and three-dimensional virtuality of the emission and reception of acoustic and visual data” into architectonicspatial form (23). Polieri’s spatiodynamic translation of audio-visual media was already apparent in his earliest schema to develop hexagonally shaped “geometric-hydraulic” matrices of

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Figure 2.2 Jacques Polieri. Electronic projections onto giant screens. Le Livre de Mallarmé at La salle du Rond-Point des Champs-Élysées, 1967. Courtesy of Jacques Polieri.

platforms that could form potentially infinite spatial possibilities by moving on the vertical axis. This idea was carried further in his “Theater on Ball Bearings” (1960), in which hydraulically actuated, cylindrical podiums capable of both vertical and 360-degree rotational movement would be installed in a large room. In addition, individually rotating seats mounted on select platforms would ensure a full panoramic view of the entire performance space. Polieri’s most ambitious visions were contextualized in his Théâtre mobile (Mobile Theater) (1960) and Théâtre du mouvement total (Theater of Total Movement) (1957). Inspired by photographs and a small model of sculptor Alexander Calder’s mobiles in a Parisian bookshop, Polieri began to formulate his greatest dynamic system: the Théâtre du mouvement total. In the first version, which already predated the Théâtre mobile, Polieri called for a massive spherical theater mounted atop a concave pedestal with room for a thousand spectators. The spectators would be seated on platforms jutting out into the central space of the sphere by means of multiple, hockey stick–shaped armatures mounted on rotating mass columns running vertically through the central axis of the sphere. As Polieri stated in a 1999 interview, his translation of the Calder mobile attempted to create multiple spaces of simultaneous movement.7 The sheer structural engineering complexity and financial outlay of this first vision led Polieri to a second rendition of the plan that could actually be constructed. The

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second Théâtre du mouvement total revised the complexity of mounting suspended platforms on the vertical axis by placing the spectators in rotating chairs on different-sized platforms whose height could be raised or lowered by way of telescope-like armatures, while the armatures themselves would be mounted on a large circular floor that could rotate. This version also never materialized, but a number of different architects worked during the 1960s to translate Polieri’s conceptions into built reality, culminating in the construction of an actual version by the Japanese Mitsui group at Expo ’70 in Osaka.8 The Osaka realization utilized three telescoping but immovable arms and adjoining platforms, mounted on a rotating turntable with a single projection screen attached on each of the stages. At first, films and images projected on the modular screens created the impression of a series of self-contained theaters. Gradually, however, the individual screens gave way to both surround images projected onto the walls as well as motion of the actual platforms themselves, in synchronization with the media spectacle. Whatever the success of such utopian projects was, it is clear that Polieri incorporated in his work the essence of a world gradually becoming enveloped by electronic image machineries; a literal electronic kaleidoscope. The future spatiokinetic media spectacle, Polieri wrote in his 1955 text “Le Théâtre Kaleidoscope,” would be one in which the “spectator of the future is in a frame of Plexiglas . . . Surrounded by sound, by light, by colours, by forms, by shadows . . . the rails of the ‘performance train’ converge, cross, then run parallel for awhile, then separate one from the other in perpetually renewing fireworks and a perpetual festival” (Aronson 1981, 501). Écriture Scénique

In a more explicitly political vein was the directorial and scenographic work of the French theater and film director Roger Planchon and stage designer René Allio at the famous Théâtre National Populaire (TNP) in the working class Lyon suburb of Villeurbanne in the 1950s and 1960s. Movement in Planchon’s and Allio’s work was seen as cinematic and heavily influenced by Brecht as well as Piscator’s prewar use of stage machinery such as turntables, mechanically driven treadmills, and precise choreographed lighting, as well as the desire to address issues of social and political injustice through the display of such machineries of capitalism. Set against the turbulent cultural and political climate of the 1960s—in particular, the 1968 student revolts—Planchon’s productions explicitly incorporated technoscenographic and cinematic devices into traditional dramatic productions to create a popular form of performance appealing to a broad, working-class audience. By means of focused and angled lighting, Planchon was able to simulate the viewpoint of a film camera, dividing space and reducing the broad focus of the proscenium stage to a series of close-ups and long shots.

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His 1961 production of Brecht’s Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (Schweyk in the Second World War) was in many ways both a tribute to and advance on Piscator’s 1929 Berlin production. Like Piscator’s use of a mechanical treadmill to speed up the action of the play, Planchon employed the similar device of a rotating turntable, which served to keep the action of the production in continual movement, speeding up or slowing down certain scenes. But Planchon displayed his affinity to Brecht most notably in the concept that the scenographic should be on equal footing with the dramatic text. In his notion of écriture scénique (scenic writing), the contemporary realization of a theatrical event through director and scenographer as auteur was on par with the theatrical text itself. Performance space became the site of spatial textuality, in which multiple texts, both written and media, came together to birth the theatrical event. “The lesson which we can learn from Brecht the theoretician is that . . . stage language . . . has the responsibility equal to that of the written text and, finally, a movement onstage, the choice of a color, of a set, of a costume, etc., this involves a complete responsibility. The stage language is totally responsible, in the same way as the text itself is responsible” (Daoust 1981, 15). Similar to Brecht, Planchon saw the performing technical apparatus as a necessary means to depict the political-economic-cultural condition of the historical moment, framed through the use of a dramatic work. Technology was not to seduce or immerse but bring the spectators into a critical decision-making process as it generated a curious tension in the spectator’s experience or what René Allio termed avouer le théâtre (an acknowledgement that what is being experienced is theater). Planchon constantly reminded the spectator that they were both in the artificial world of the constructed event and, simultaneously, an “actor” and decision maker immersed in a lived world beyond the performance. Performance in the Realm of the Technical Image

The increasing political-social turbulence of the 1960s and 1970s that stoked the work of Polieri and Planchon also had a profound impact on a new postwar generation radically transformed by the spread of broadcast media across all facets of daily life. With the machine age swiftly being replaced by what media philosopher Villém Flusser has termed the “realm of technical images,” the early-twentieth-century interest in the machine as the potential aesthetic-political shaper of society shifted to an increased interest in the products that such machines could produce: technically constructed, manufactured, and disseminated images.9 Inspired by the proliferation of electronically generated images and political-social experimentation, newly emerging synthetic forms of total art were created by a broad range of artists trained in architecture, music, painting, sculpture, and other disciplines outside of text-based theater. This new kind of “performance,” as art historian Rose Lee

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Goldberg tagged the movement, served as both refuge and context for a young generation of visual and theatrical artists who wanted to “turn the stage into a laboratory for visual and perceptual experiments” (Goldberg 1998, 22). Transformed through pop psychology, non-Western music, Buddhist philosophy, hallucinogenic drugs, and 1960s counterculture, the sheer diversity of forms arising in the anti-institutional atmosphere of the 1970s in such disparate places as downtown New York City, Berlin, London, and Paris sent critics scrambling for labels. A 1965 article in the avant-garde theater journal The Drama Review (TDR) by the late artist, writer, and editor Michael Kirby described a New Theater, one whose origins owed as much to Schwitters’s Merzbühne as it did to the work of artists like composer John Cage, visual artist and “happening” founder Allan Kaprow, and the work of the Fluxus movement. Similarly, in his 1968 book Theater of Mixed Means, writer Richard Kostelanetz also attempted to assess the shifting performance landscape. Classifying performance into the four broad categories of (1) happening, (2) kinetic environments, (3) staged happenings, and (4) staged performances, Kostelanetz announced a general trend that he labeled “mixed means media,” where “the components generally function non-synchronously, or independently of each other and each medium is used for its own possibilities” (Kostelanetz 1968, 4). Kostelanetz’s descriptive matrix proposed a continuum from observation to more direct forms of participation, underlined by the scripting of space and time. Whereas happenings were classified as the most “open” form with little intervention from the creators, kinetic environments were seen to be spaces where the scripting of participants behavior within the space was heavily predetermined. This increasing image-technical mediation also led to a powerful backlash, ironically from the realm of avant-garde theater makers. Under the guise of Artaud’s call for a theater of cruelty and ignoring the potential role of technologies displayed in his writing, one strain of theatrical practitioners sought complete liberation from the mediation of technical images. Instead, there was a call to return to a purely human-centered notion of theatrical performance by way of the ritualistic and shamanistic transformation of the (sometimes literally) naked human body in front of a live audience. In a now legendary 1965 essay, the celebrated Polish avant-garde director Jerzy Grotowski ushered in an age of poor theater, an approach to theatrical performance that renounced the use of technology in favor of theatrical space occupied solely through the bodily presence of the actor. “What is theater? What is unique about it? What can it do that film and television cannot?” (Grotowski 1968, 19). Obtaining almost mythical status, Grotowski’s essay and similarly titled book Towards a Poor Theater attempted to answer these questions by presenting a theater awash with technical poverty but replete with the live, direct communion between the spectator and the performer.10 The consequences of Grotowski’s declaration that “no matter how

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much the theater expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television” were profound for the time (19). In his guru status for an entire generation of theater practitioners, Grotowski had an untold influence on one spectrum of experimental performance, particularly the work of collectives such as the New York–based Performance Group under the direction of Richard Schechner, the Open Theater, Eugenio Barba’s Odin Teatret in Denmark, the French actor Jean-Louis Barrault and the Living Theater, as well as the work of the illustrious English theater director Peter Brook, who all turned away from the so-called rich theater of electronic technologies for the stage and instead, embraced an exoticized primitivism of the body in all its shamanistic glory. Given this influence, it is also no surprise that shortly after the 1960s Schechner shifted the editorship of TDR from Michael Kirby’s earlier interest in technological experimentation and toward the anthropological and sociological frameworks that would form the basis for the discipline of performance studies.11 As theater artists created spectacles of body-centered liberation, the McLuhanesque, post-Gutenberg world of “a generation of artists who grew up with television and movies” clearly demarcated new performance practices from traditional literary theater (Marranca 1977, xi). Privileging écriture scénique over narrative construction, the perceptual elasticity of this new “theater of images,” a term used by the New York critic Bonnie Marranca to describe a particular New York-based manifestation of American artists that included the celebrated theater director and designer Robert Wilson, the idiosyncratic playwright and director Richard Foreman and the experimental collective Mabou Mines, founded by Jo Anne Akalaitis, Lee Breuer, Philip Glass, David Warrilow, and Ruth Maleczech emphasized the sculptural, spatial and temporal qualities of performance over linear narrative. The work of the Texas-born Wilson was paradigmatic for his intertwining of spacetime-image-sound in experimental performance practice. Overcoming a speech impediment that had a strong influence on his practice, Wilson’s earliest spectacles carried out with non-professional dancers and actors in his Soho loft, were operatically scaled, stream of consciousness meditations constructed of slowly moving visual tableaux. Moving his performances into the alternative theater spaces of 1970s New York, such epic projects as The King of Spain (1969), The Life and Times of Sigmund Freud (1969), and Deafman Glance (1971) demonstrated Wilson’s interest in dance, music, design and architecture, his penchant for grand scale surrealism and fervent belief in the hypnotic power of a sustained temporal moment. Extending sometimes over twelve hours with casts of hundreds, these powerful visual-aural works put Wilson onto the international theatrical map. The director’s Wagnerian scaled, human-object scenographies in motion employed a choreography of performers speaking texts written by autistic children in precisely lit landscapes whose iconographic qualities reached almost religious intensity; what Bertolt Brecht’s son Stefan (who worked early on with Wilson) called a “theater of visions.”

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“Theater of vision is the staging, with live performers, movements and development in such a fashion as to appear a world of reality or the representation of one by an individual of images occurring to the individual and seeming personally important and significant to him independently of verbal, intellectual or discursive analysis” (S. Brecht 1978, 9). Increasingly supported by the European theater market, Wilson’s early work culminated with the legendary Philip Glass opera collaboration Einstein on the Beach. Originally premiered at the Avignon Festival and then presented for two sold-out performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City in November 1976, Einstein on the Beach marked a turning point in the development and almost mass appeal of the 1970s avant-garde. Sprawling over four hours, the fusion between Glass’s hypnotic, ostinatodriven minimalism and Wilson’s mystical visual landscapes resulted in a performance more akin to a contemplative series of associational images rather than a historical opera dealing with Einstein (figure 2.3). A series of disconnected visual themes resulting in scenes with titles like Spaceship, Trial, Building, and Train all loosely linked by

Figure 2.3

Robert Wilson. Einstein on the Beach, 1976. Photo © Theodore Shank.

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musical interludes labeled Knee Plays, Glass’s and Wilson’s opera was a mesmerizing spectacle of music-theater, light, motion, color, dance and architecture all driven by the incessant, electronically enhanced and sung score [Live Electronics II: The Second Wave, chapter 5]. Even though Marranca remarked that Wilson’s theater was a “spatially dominated one activated by sense impressions, as opposed to a time-dominated one ruled by linear narrative” (Marranca 1977, xii), Wilson’s precise control of temporality is tantamount to a critical understanding not just of the cultural moment of the 1970s media inspired performance scene, but also the subsequent manipulation of time that electronic and digital technologies would increasingly afford in the coming decades. Einstein achieved a transformation of duration by simultaneously slowing down both the staged event (in movement and speech) and the spectator’s perception of the event.12 The fusion between Glass’s repetitive modal pulse music and Wilson’s slow motion, dreamlike archi-scenography created a performative event no longer dominated by the unfolding of linear “clock” time or chronos, but instead by tempus—the spectator’s perceived sense of “lived time.” Sped up, slowed down, and reversed, the manipulation of duration to generate a trancelike state of motionless motion functioned much like the listener’s experience of Indonesian Gamelan or the macro rhythmic cycles of Tala in Indian classical music. This elasticizing of duration reached its pinnacle in a singular scene in Einstein where, over the course of eighteen minutes, a horizontally suspended neon bar of light gradually rose into vertical position in the air only to vanish into the flies: a luminous Barnett Newman minimalist line set into mechanical motion. Subsidized by the largess of European cultural machineries, the post-Einstein Wilson increasingly turned to staging classic theatrical texts and operas. The sheer magnitude of his Gesamtkunstwerk visions reached a pinnacle with the planned but only partially realized 1986 project the CIVIL wars, a massive-scale, twelve-hour multinational vision that was to simultaneously take place in six countries and act as the centerpiece for the 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival. Incorporating extremely loosely structured ideas around notions of civil wars and originally planned with more than five hundred performers, only four of the six sections were eventually realized, due to logistical and financial constraints.13 With Wilson’s scenographies in motion spinning out elaborately layered and highly detailed multimediated imagescapes, the stage work of the iconoclastic playwrightdirector Richard Foreman operated on a far rougher and denser philosophical plane. Influenced by his studies in continental philosophy, Jewish mysticism, physics, and literature, Foreman’s metaphysically dubbed Ontological Hysteric Theater (founded in 1968) constructed theatrical events that enacted the process of thinking itself and rendered such mental acts into theatrical forms. Twisting the spectator’s perceptual experience inside out, Foreman described his theater as “a kind of gymnasium where your perceptual apparatus is forced to work out.”14

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Foreman’s work announced the artifice of the stage event, severing the empathetic/ emotional relationship normally engendered by theater as a representation of life. Instead, the event was that of an abrupt, sudden awakening of consciousness—a “granular widening, a spreading, a stretching of attention itself so that attention is a globular universe on the verge of popping, fragmenting” (Foreman 1985, 192). In his displaying of “mentalacts” that would take place “on the outside surface and not hidden away inside,” Foreman’s almost stream-of-consciousness texts and aggressive staging materialized the phenomenological act of observing and spectating in its moment of taking place (189). Foreman’s early work sought to achieve such Verfremdungseffekte (a German word coined by Brecht signifying defamiliarization) mainly through actors delivering lines in machinelike monotones, uninflected speech patterns and long silences.15 Yet beginning with his play Hotel China in 1973 and later conditioned by the move to a loft with unusual spatial dimensions (7 meters wide and 25 meters deep), Foreman began to augment his staged theatrical koans with (low-)tech scenography, objects and systems. Chief among these was the attempt to change the physical dimensions of his loft cum theater by employing a series of sliding wall units that could be used to suddenly change the shape of the performance space.16 Foreman also enhanced his Verfremdungseffekte with technological devices such as the recording of and playback of actors’ voices on reel-to-reel tape recorders directly operated by the director from the front audience row as well as blinding, high-intensity lights that were periodically blasted directly into the spectator’s eyes. He also focused on the addition of both static and mechanically controlled objects, such as a miniature house on a pulley system, mechanical contraptions as well as the use of dolls, puppets, and other familiars, lending an almost occult layer of mysticism to an already puzzle-like stage. One of the most intriguing yet simple technologies that Foreman began to deploy (and that is still used in his most recent productions) as an important perspectival framing device were white and red color-banded strings tightly stretched across the stage space (figure 2.4). Serving to carve up the stage environment into Cartesian coordinates, the strings divided up the theatrical space and called attention to specific trajectories between actors and objects, prop, furniture, and the architecture of the environment itself while continually reminding spectators of the limits of geometric space.17 Foreman’s spatial defamiliarization coupled with his physical presence as auteur and controller certainly recalled Bauhaus student Heinz Loew’s [Total Theaters of the Bauhaus, chapter 1] prediction that a future technologically saturated performance form would feature the technical operator at the center of the event. Yet such techniques also suggested the use of machines of inscription (the use of projected text slides contradicting visual action à la Brecht, the scattering of cut-out alphanumeric characters within the miseen-scène) to aid in Foreman’s aesthetic process of estranging the habits of perception. For artists like Foreman, Wilson, and other American (specifically, New York) theater makers in the 1970s, the position of technology in their productions had a markedly

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Figure 2.4

Richard Foreman. Book of Splendors, Part One, 1976. Photo © Theodore Shank.

different context and use from the avant-garde of the 1920s.18 The televisual, hermetic, and spiritual theaters of the image superseded the prewar dynamization of space and the theaters of machines and birthed a new kind of author, where the roles of director, choreographer, designer, architect, and even performer were frequently rolled up into the guise of a singular person. Undeniably, Stefan Brecht’s coining of the expression theater of visions not only related to the content of such visions from Foreman and Wilson but also to the reimagining of the role of director/designer in the transformation of theatrical space. “Theater of visions is a stage designer’s theater, theater of the director functioning as a stage designer,” wrote Stefan Brecht, “it relates to masques and pageants and to any theater dominated by stage design” (S. Brecht 1985, 9). It is fitting that Foreman and Wilson represent one extreme of theater auteur, because their works again articulated the split between Bertolt Brecht and Wagner: bodily immersion versus critical distance. As artificial events that operated like “the inside of a camera” (Foreman) or on the plane of almost spiritual transcendence (Wilson), the theater of images pushed the envelope of performance spaces that functioned less like machines and more like alternate consciousness under the spell of electro-technological mediation.

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“Staged Spaces”

The first wave of the North American–dominated theater of images made its presence known to the European cultural scene with the appearance of Wilson’s work in France in the early 1970s.19 Simultaneously, a younger generation of European stage designers indirectly took up the lessons of the NYC avant-garde. Creating elaborate and imagistic architectonic environments, these spaces were inhabited by performers navigating their way through vast spatial zones swelling with light, objects, grossly proportioned architecture made of real material (as opposed to the faux material of the standard theater), projected images, and machine-like constructions. Incubated by lavishly funded German state theaters, designers such as Wilfried Minks, Karl-Ernst Hermann, Jürgen Rose, Achim Freyer, Axel Manthey, Hans Dieter Schall, and Erich Wonder revived the radical tradition of German stage design that reached its height in the 1920s. Forming collaborative partnerships with a series of adventurous stage directors such as Ruth Berghaus, Peter Stein, Peter Zadek, Klaus Michael Grüber, Claus Peymann, and Heiner Müller and charged by the political and artistic climate of the 1960s and 1970s, this post-1968 generation moved stage design away from its representational status and toward the creation of what was called Bühnenraum (stage spaces). Signifying space and room, the German word Raum became the catchphrase for German scenographers who created their own visual and aural layer of interpretation on top of the classical texts of the Western theater canon. “The Bühnenraum should have the matter of factness of a landscape,” wrote designer Wilfried Minks in 1970 (Riddell 1980, 39). The first to elevate stage design to a new level of attention, Minks had already achieved fame and controversy with his radical, antirealistic stage landscapes. Aggressively incorporating Warhol- and Lichtenstein-esque Pop Art influences, real materials like AstroTurf, dirt, sand, water, plastic, metal, and, most influentially, light as an architectural material, Minks set the tone for up-and-coming designers like Hermann, Wonder, and Freyer who would soon shock the German theater performance scene. Both Achim Freyer, a Meisterschüler or master apprentice of Brecht, and the Austrianborn Erich Wonder (a student of Brecht designer Caspar Neher) created an unprecedented blur between theatrical stage design and art installation. Fusing visual motifs from the barren industrial and urban street environments of Germany with inspiration from artists like Kandinsky, Malevich, Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Wonder’s perfectionist theatrical environments appeared more like fantastic filmic spaces than sets for theatrical plays or eighteenth-century operas (figure 2.5). Emphasizing a return to the real materials so celebrated by Constructivism, Wonder’s phantasmagoric universes advanced the notion that performance environments were erected not just to illustrate elements of dramatic texts but indeed, to become texts in and of themselves.20 In the late 1980s, Wonder also began to direct his own “evenings of noise, light and actions,” staged scenic environments that began with the project Rosebud in Düsseldorf in

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Figure 2.5 Erich Wonder. Scenography for Der Auftrag (The Task) by Heiner Müller. Schauspielhaus Bochum, 1982. © Erich Wonder.

1979 and continued with Malstromsüdpol at the Ars Electronica and Documenta 8 festivals and on the canals of Berlin in 1986–1987. Wonder’s promenade-like, sci-fi event Das Auge des Taifun (The Eye of the Typhoon), staged on the Ringstrasse in Vienna in 1990 and accompanied by the German industrial noise band Einstürzende Neubauten, was remarkable for its Gesamtkunstwerk-like qualities in which a traveling, glass-enclosed tram accompanied by a mass crowd made a nightmarish procession around one of Vienna’s most historic streets, flashing images and texts on moving screens and featuring artificial lightning and snow storms (Wonder 2002). Featuring both Wonder and the designer Karl-Ernst Hermann, an exhibit in 1980 at the Hamburger Kunstverein entitled Inszenierte Räume (Staged Spaces) further exacerbated the fragile line between scenography and installation. Conceived as an event to “give designers an opportunity to work without the demands of a text or a director,” Wonder and Hermann created a series of disturbing “exhibition rooms as stages.” Involving wandering viewers looking into a series of spaces, Wonder’s four meditation rooms combined human performers inside bizarre scenic environments. One such space featured a seated figure looking into a bubbling ocean of water, while another was a cinema-like setting with a lone figure watching an endless fragment of Casablanca with rain pouring into the

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room and a gigantic windshield wiper cleaning the visitor’s peephole of rain (Riddell 1980, 50). Collaborating with the young theater director Peter Stein at the prominent Schaubühne in the 1970s, designer Karl-Ernst Hermann, another cutting-edge scenographer, created mammoth walk-in environments that abandoned the restrictions of the proscenium entirely and integrated spectators directly into the scenic action. Working in former industrial buildings, union halls and abandoned film studios in Berlin, Hermann radically reinvented the entire relationship between spectacle and spectators by creating scenic spaces for Stein’s politicized reinterpretations of classical texts from authors such as Ibsen, Brecht, Goethe, Shakespeare, and Gorky. In Stein’s legendary production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It in 1977, Hermann created scenic experiences for the two different environments of the play: the court and the Forest of Arden. Spectators at first entered a ghostly, narrow, but impossibly tall room where the court scenes of the play took place with the actors moving only on the narrow ledges at the periphery of the room. After the court scenes’ completion, the viewers moved through a narrow, wet passageway covered in moss and trees and filled with the sounds of birds, emerging into a warehouse-sized environment replete with a real lake, a forest of 5-meter-high trees and dirt, hanging bridges, and bleachers for the viewers to sit. Undoubtedly, the total effect of the environment was overwhelming enough to force at least more than one German critic to dub the entire event a “Disneyland version of Robinson Crusoe” (Patterson 1980, 46). Known for its progressive artistic agenda, the Schaubühne advanced further in supporting several other large-scale, outdoor scenic projects. In December 1977, for example, Schaubühne director Klaus Michael Grüber and designer Antonio Recalcati staged a deconstructed realization of the nineteenth-century poet Hölderlin’s Hyperion, dubbed Winterreise (Winter Journey), inside the empty Berlin Olympia stadium. Restricted to an audience of eight hundred (the stadium usually seated seventy-six thousand) and corralled in one corner of the vast space, spectators were treated to an installation-like spectacle in which actors played soccer and ran hurdles, speaking on wireless microphones that broadcasted their voices through the dark, wintry Berlin air while watching text fragments flashed onto large electronic screens at each end of the playing field. Flanked on one side by the installation-like productions of Grüber and the large-scale scenic projects of Stein-Hermann, the Schaubühne’s fancy for transforming theatrical space into new kinds of scenic Raum culminated in 1980 in the lavish reconstruction of a 1920s Erich Mendelsohn–designed cinema—costing dm 81 million ($43 million)—on the glitzy Kurfürstendamm boulevard in West Berlin. Seeking to create the most advanced, multiform and flexible theater space in the Western world, the new Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz consisted of one enormous room that could be divided into a vast array of different environments through hydraulically reconfigured platforms, thus enabling the theater itself to run multiple productions and events simultaneously.21 But while some of

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the younger generation of German scenic designers like Wonder also became interested in moving beyond traditional theatrical spaces and contexts like their American counterparts in the gradually burgeoning alternative performance scenes at the end of the 1970s, most German scenographers remained deeply rooted within the established state theater apparatus. “New Formalisms”: From Mechanized to Mediatized

In the United States under the political shadow of Reagan America, the increased influence of media technologies, the impact of so-called postmodernism in fields as wide ranging as architecture, literature, cultural studies, and visual art and interest in intercultural modes of practice, a new wave of experimental performance practice dubbed New Formalism by theater scholar Ted Shank arose in New York, San Francisco, and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles. Driven by collective practices as well as singular artistic visions and transfixed by the photonic and electronic production of signs that cultural critic Fredric Jameson so articulately depicted in his archetypal study of the late 1980s, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), artists and designers sought the use of digital imaging and acoustic technologies to mediatize performance rather than mechanize it. From North America to Europe and Asia, the number of experimental performance events and even popular Broadway-like entertainments incorporating electronic imaging and acoustic technologies became the rule, rather than the exception. When performance practice involving electronic mediation was not focused on the site-specificity of found spaces, alternative galleries, and club environments, productions incorporating audiovisual media technologies were preoccupied with large budgeted presentation within traditional, proscenium-based environments and within the context of avant-garde supporting venues as the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) Next Wave Festival, the Mickery Theater in Amsterdam, the Theater am Turm in Frankfurt, the Kaaitheater in Brussels, and the annual German-sponsored Theater der Welt festival. Working in stage environments inhabited by modern technologies of inscription and recording such as microphones, screens, and cameras, what new audiovisual media offered New York–based experimental artists like Meredith Monk, Ping Chong, John Jesurun, Squat Theater, and, perhaps most of all, the performance collective the Wooster Group, was not only a new way of formulating narratives for a media generation, but more important, also a set of techniques for further fragmenting the increasingly tenuous lines between mediated and real space, fiction and reality. In works like Lazarus (1972), Undesirable Elements (1992), Deshima (1990), and After Sorrow (1997), for example, the Chinese/American director, designer, and choreographer Ping Chong examined intercultural themes of marginality and otherness. Exploiting large-format slide projections, amplified speech and electronically generated scores, video, puppetry, film, and static installations, performers in Chong’s broad media canvases

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engaged in task-based actions (a favorite of such performance practices at the time), dance, and narrative storytelling. More conceptually and politically daring was the Hungarian performance collective Squat Theater. Accused of obscenity and formalism by the Janos government and exiled from Hungary, Squat immigrated to the United States in 1977 after a period working in Europe and quickly settled into a decrepit loft building on 23rd Street in the Chelsea district of New York City. Departing from the purely formalist concerns of the theater of images, Squat’s controversial events masterfully harnessed the perceptual frames of audiovisual culture to challenge the distinction between reality and fiction. Having converted the bottom-floor storefront of their Manhattan loft/living quarters into a theatrical hall of mirrors, Squat’s original plays, including Pig Child Fire (1977), Andy Warhol’s Last Love (1978), and Mr. Dead and Mrs. Free (1982), involved spectators seated in the back of the storefront gazing out into the front window at the street beyond—a moving backdrop providing live, unscripted action from the street. With sets of unknowing passersby staring into the bizarre actions of the Squat performances and seated spectators inside staring into the gaze of both performers and the unintended audience on the street, Squat succeeded in mediating and estranging the border between the exterior street and the interior performance. Squat’s use of visual mediating technologies such as large mirrors and television screens reflected in the mirrors further supplemented their kaleidoscopic distortions of reality, making the collective not only a secret success in the downtown New York 1980s underground but also a regular fixture on the international festival circuit in Europe and Asia.22 Squat’s instrumentalizing of simple media and material technologies to destroy the illusion of performance space was a common theme that resonated through much international experimental work for the stage during the same period. Within the United States, the East Coast/West Coast hubs of New York and San Francisco, in particular, saw the burgeoning of artists who sought to remain far removed from the traditional mechanisms of theater performance. Due to the Bay Area’s geographic separation from New York, many younger experimenters there began working in an image theater style inspired less directly by firsthand experience of the work of artists like Foreman and Wilson but instead from seeing photographs of such visually arresting work that occupied the pages of such publications as Artforum, High Performance, and TDR. Emerging from the visual, filmic, and sculptural arts, a group of San Francisco Bay Area artists such as Laura Farabough (Snake and Nightfire Theater), Chris Hardman (Snake and Antenna Theater), Alan Finneran (Soon 3), and George Coates (George Coates Performance Works) produced technologically enhanced performance landscapes that were more like extensions of live sculpture and film than illusory theatrical pieces. Sculptor Alan Finneran formed the experimental performance entity Soon 3 in order to add performers to what were essentially kinetic sculptural environments. His dark,

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dystopian vision of human beings trapped within technologically augmented landscapes resulted in works where the scenographic design in essence became the dramatic text and narrative. Black Water Echo (1977), A Wall in Venice/3 Women/Wet Shadows (1978), Outcalls/Riptides (1984), Magi (1986), Poison Hotel (1988), and Veer (1989) all involved elaborately constructed yet austere environments featuring moving architectural pieces (walls in Veer), specially constructed spectator spaces (portholes for spectator’s heads to stick through in Poison Hotel), as well as film and slides projected onto moving scenic elements while being inhabited by puppetlike performers mechanically executing ranges of tasks, from hauling projection equipment around the stage to scaling constructed walls (figure 2.6). Eventually, after having exhausted its specific flavor of visual theater, Soon 3 moved outdoors performing in San Francisco parks while continuing to explore the relationships between surveillance and voyeurism through projects involving live closedcircuit TV setups. Director Chris Hardman also incorporated filmic elements and puppetry in his work with Antenna Theater. Developing the notion of Walkmonology or the use of personal listening devices and headphones for theatrical presentation, Antenna created walk-

Figure 2.6

Soon 3. Outcalls/Riptides, 1984. Photo © Theodore Shank.

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through, fun house–like environments with audio accompaniments that turned the viewer into an audient or active listening participant.23 Antenna’s work was widely presented in the 1980s, taken up not only by the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s trend setting Next Wave Festival but also by the then-emerging MIT Media Lab (a residency on the 1987 project Radio Interference to develop wireless headset technology), but the organization would become most internationally known for Antenna Audio Tours, a spin-off company that invented wireless broadcasting technology for museums and location-based entertainment. The most elaborate transformation of stage space into technological images took place in the work of George Coates. In his cleverly titled performances like Areare (1982), Seehear (1983), Actual Sho (1987), and The Architecture of Catastrophic Change (1990), among others, Coates’s set out to construct mostly plotless performances with live singers, dancers, musicians, and acrobats who were essentially reduced to human objects moving inside vast projected backdrops. In fact, Coates’s interest in both architecture and Disney-like thrills also resulted in the invention of Svoboda-like stage machineries. For Actual Sho (1987), Coates and designer Charles Rose created an 8-meter pivoted, rolling circular platform upon which both projections and performers balanced simultaneously. With the extreme slope of the platform, this stage element in conjunction with Coates’s multiprojection slide setups transformed the flatness of projected imagery into a three-dimensional, kinetic environment. Fueled by Silicon Valley funds, George Coates’s Performance Works set out to unite the underground experimental theater avant-garde with Hollywood production values. Coates’s self-promotion and salesmanship also attracted the attention of IT entrepreneurs like Steve Jobs, who noticed the director’s interest in incorporating vast, computercontrolled projection systems, stereographic film, real-time computer graphics, and later, an almost opportunist use of the burgeoning Internet. After Jobs hired Coates to design the opening event for Jobs’s NeXT computer launch in 1987, Coates increasingly began to explore what he called “new forms of live art through innovative uses of emerging technologies” (Shank 2002, 271). Having formed an organization called SMARTS (Science Meets the Arts) and increasingly subsidized by Silicon Valley stalwarts like Intel, Apple, Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), Silicon Graphics, and NASA’s Ames Research Center, Coates began to explore the potential of live computer-assisted interaction within his visual theatrical mise-en-scène. Invisible Site: A Virtual Sho (1991) was cosponsored by DEC and premiered in the Electronic Theater section of the prestigious ACM SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference in Las Vegas in 1991—certainly a first for work that a decade earlier could be seen only strictly within canonic art-performance venues. Aesthetically puzzling to many of the convention delegates, technologically, Invisible Site acted as an up-to-the-minute advertisement for (then) cutting-edge Silicon Valley computer graphics systems. Featuring stereographic images that required the audience to wear 3D polarized glasses, Coates

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also capitalized on the advanced capabilities of Silicon Graphics’ computer hardware at the time by featuring live, real-time, computer-generated interaction between the on stage performers and the projected graphics. Touring internationally during much of the mid-1990s, Coates continued his forays into Silicon Valley inventions (Telepresence through CU-SeeME broadcasts in The Nowhere Band; live Web-based interaction during Twisted Pairs), but by the late 1990s, he had essentially exhausted both his artistic vision and the sponsorship of the technology industry. Turning to stripped-down, politically motivated theatrical work dealing with censorship and government repression, by 2007, by all accounts, Coates had abandoned stage-based theater completely and was the director of a video weblog (VLOG) entitled “Better Bad News,” which sought to deconstruct political videos in blog format.24 Another haven for scenographic experimentation in the late 1980s and early 1990s was Québec, most eloquently expressed in the work of director Robert Lepage. Raised within the turbulent political context of post–Quiet Revolution French Canada, unlike many other image theater makers Lepage came from a classical theater education. As co-artistic director of the Québec ensemble Théâtre Repère in the 1980s, early works like Circulations (1984), the six-hour epic The Dragon’s Trilogy (1985), Polygraphe (1987), and Tectonic Plates (1988), focused on the continuous political tensions of growing up in multilingual Canada while demonstrating an inventive affinity toward the visual spectacles of Wilson and the multicultural leanings of Peter Brook. Armed with a new company (Ex Machina), Lepage’s work in the early 1990s, however, more deeply explored the potential of image technologies to augment his highly theatrical vision. His sprawling Seven Streams of the River Ota (1994–1996), a paean to the consequences of the catastrophic events of Hiroshima, the Holocaust, and the AIDS epidemic during the twentieth century, was in many ways an exploration of the very construction of the techno-image realities made possible by industrial and informatic production over the twentieth century. In addition to a cast of nine actors and one musician, the other central character in the eight-hour production was a modular set by Carl Fillion, which was continuously reconfigured throughout the course of the piece as an architectonic, three-dimensional space inhabited by the performers as well as a façade of surfaces for the projection of electronic (film, slides, computer graphic displays) and human-generated (shadow) images. Many critics thought that Lepage’s next production, a solo work based on Hamlet and titled Elsinore, went much further in its “high-tech” exploration of the interaction between performer and technologically augmented stage space. Fillion’s scenography featured a set anchored by a motor driven moving floor, surveilled by infrared (IR) security cameras, swept by DMX-controlled scan lights, and flooded by slide and video projection; Elsinore’s technology was no more sophisticated at a technological level than that used in a secondtier rock concert or urban club.25 Fittingly, Lepage himself never favored the word “tech-

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nology,” but much like Roger Planchon focused instead on the notion of “scenographic writing” (écriture scénique). Contemporary media no longer competed with the live theater but according to Lepage, actually resuscitated it from a petrified future.26 In Europe, the influence of Robert Wilson’s increasing appearances in Italian theater and opera houses stimulated the development of an entire school of media theaters with names like La Gaia Scienza, Falso Movimento, Studio Azzurro, Magazzini Criminali, and later, Romeo Castellucci’s Societas Raffaello Sanzio, which became obsessed with the creation of mediated stage pictures. Similarly, in Scandinavia in the mid 1980s, noninstitutionalized, free theater groups such as Billedstofteater (literally “picture-textile theater”), which in 1986 became the experimental organization Hotel Pro Forma, as well as Tone Avenstroup’s Baktruppen, pioneered what Hans-Thies Lehmann referred to as a post dramaturgical or visual dramaturgical form of performance where all theatrical elements, including space, image, site locale, and sound were placed on the same hierarchical plane.27 Kirsten Dehlholm’s scenographic performance company Hotel Pro Forma exploited the nonhierarchized connection between image technologies, meant to be frontally viewed on flat surfaces and complex spatial orientations that spectators needed to engage in to experience the collectives’ performances. Normally realized in site-specific contexts, Hotel Pro Forma’s work demonstrated a critical engagement not only with imaging technologies but with how such technologies transformed habitual ways of experiencing scenographic space. Staged in a five-story room in Aarhus, Denmark, Why Does Night Come, Mother? Poetry, Perspective and the Law of Gravity (1989) had spectators view the performance in a vertical manner from a series of balconies five stories up and down into a long, narrow environment. Experienced as a top-down, bird’s-eye view, the floor of the stage transformed for both viewer and performer as the actors performed their actions lying down while spectators served as both voyeurs and observers engaged in a distant panoptic gaze as in a laboratory (figure 2.7). Spatial dimension was reduced to the flatness of a mediated, two-dimensional image (in geometric terms, R2), yet from an odd and simultaneously volumetric and distant perspective; a two-dimensional image that the brain constantly attempted to correct into a three-dimensional (R3) one. Similarly, the group’s live concert–like oratorio House of the Double Axe/XX: An Imaginative Oratorium (1998), was constructed on a stage composed solely of black-and-white, op art–like, top-down projections that were interwoven into flat yet oddly dimensional labyrinthine image spaces upon which singers interacted above and almost within. An even more unconventional exploration of new dramaturgies of scenographic space emerged in the varied manifestations of the Slovenian theater director Dragan Zivadinov’s Noordung Theater. One of the three central arms of the Slovenian collective NSK (Neue Slowenische Kunst), whose other members included the mock neo-fascist industrial band

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Figure 2.7

Hotel Pro Forma. Why Does Night Come, Mother? Courtesy of Hotel Pro Forma.

Laibach and the conceptual visual arts collective Irwin, Zivadinov’s bizarrely titled Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater (1983–1987), Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theater (1987–1990), and the Cosmokinetical Cabinet Noordung Theater (1990–present) attempted nothing less that what dramaturgs Eda Cˇufer and Emil Hrvatin called a “reterritorialization of the theater landscape, which brings performer, spectator, and space into a particular relationship” (Cˇufer and Hrvatin 1997, 102). Named after the mythic Slovenian engineer and space scientist Herman Potocnik Noordung and allied with NSK’s larger subcultural mission of creating an alternative arts context fusing social and political criticism of reigning East Bloc–influenced, socialistrealist Slovenian ideologies, Zivadinov’s current theater took the political relationships inherent in the site of performance production (the auditorium) and spectating as a broader (civil) societal model embodying the tension between individual and collective autonomy.28 Creating events where “the specific structures of spatial dramaturgy and the dramaturgy of the spectator” converged, Zidavinov and his collaborators’ works disrupted the passive body of the spectator as witness to a (mediated) spectacle by radically fragmenting the architectural power relationships between stage and viewer—what Cˇufer called the separation of the eye and body (optical to topical) due to the Age of Enlightenment (Cˇufer and Hrvatin 1997, 103). In Marija Nablocka Retrogardist Event (1985) and Noordung Praying Machine (1993), the total enclosure of the spectators’ bodies inside Malevich and Tatlin inspired architectural structures with only their heads protruding served to integrate the perceivers’ embodied perceptual faculties directly into the normally distanced performance event. This bizarre scenographic sleight of hand not only rendered theatrical space into “the ‘first’ actor” (Cˇufer and Hrvatin 1997, 104) but also removed the binary between the viewed and the

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viewer, the perceiver and the perceived; direct resistance against the dominance of social realist aesthetic ideology. The reimagining of the spectator’s body to formulate scenographic space was further advanced with the Cosmokinetic Cabinet Noordung’s 1991 production The Kapital Dramatic Observatory. Borrowing motifs from Futurist and Constructivist performance, audience members were also placed into a kind of moving box that was spun around, enabling the eye of the immobilized visitor to be greeted with a new scene at each 90-degree turn of the space—what dramaturg Emil Hrvatin identified as the “topical and optical” guiding of viewing. “In topical viewing the viewer cannot see his viewing, while in optical viewing he watches the impossibility of his own seeing” (Cˇufer and Hrvatin 1997, 108). The most extreme articulation of Zidavinov’s Noordung projects, however, was found in his most recent work entitled Noordung Zero Gravity Biomechanical Theater. Through a series of performances taking place in early 2000 through 2001 in a Russian cosmonaut training aircraft owned and operated by the Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training facility in Star City (the Russian equivalent of a NASA training ground), Zidavinov sought out the ultimate technologizing of performance space through the generation of momentary weightlessness experienced in the zero gravity conditions of a parabolic flight. During a series of between eighteen to thirty parabolic-shaped flights performed in the skies above Moscow, spectators, critics, performers, scenery, and objects alike were set into zero-gravity conditions, freely floating in the air for between twenty-five and thirty seconds, directly in the middle of a fully staged theatrical play. In an obvious allusion to Meyerhold’s biomechanical exercises developed for actors with the dual goal of training and mechanizing the human performer [The Machine Body, chapter 6], Zivadivov’s Zero Gravity Biomechanical Theater not only theorized the kinesthetic and social transformation of the body through both socialist ideology and extreme physiological conditions brought on by the onset of zero gravity, but enacted it in real time. Zivadinov’s sequel, One versus One, inaugurated in April 1995, was a performance planned to last until April 2045, with a new edition occurring every ten years. As each of the performers dies by the effects of real mortality over the course of the work, their bodies will be replaced by mechanical, puppetlike objects, which will take over their role in the production, culminating in a performance in a zero-gravity capsule shot into space, where Zivadinov will also perish. Although slightly more conventional in comparison to Noordung’s far-flung journeys into zero gravity, the technoscenographic manipulation of the societal body received one of its most articulate expressions in the work of the Japanese collective Dumb Type. Formed by a group of disgruntled art students at the Kyoto University of the Arts in 1982, Dumb Type forged an aesthetic negotiating the “static visual arts and performance dependent on dialogue,” while charging the resulting work with a compelling strain of political activism and cultural critique. Although members had studied the Japanese

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avant-garde post-1945 Gutai visual art movement, the group was much more influenced by member and director Tejii Furuhashi’s experiences in the New York East Village performance scene (Durland 1990, 33). Originally a collective of six core members versed in theater, music, architecture, graphic design, lighting, and computer programming, Dumb Type’s first projects were marked by an interest in creating unique performances based specifically on specially designed environments.29 One of the group’s earliest pieces, Order of the Square (1985), took place over the duration of an entire year in a series of small, phone-booth-sized capsules with peepholes for the spectators and arranged in site-specific locales dotting the Kyoto cityscape. After 1987, however, Dumb Type began to work in a style that increasingly led to international exposure in high-profile festivals (particularly in Europe), creating performance events whose scenographic environments invoked a contemporary Japan run amok by technological systems. 036 Pleasure Life (1988) was created in two completely different iterations. The earliest version, which premiered in Kyoto in 1988, was built around an environment that appeared to be more like a game than a theatrical performance. A large game board–like floor, rung with fluorescents and upon which performers and sculptural objects were placed in almost mechanical style, was also used as a projection surface, while a cold and minimal metallic wall embedded with monitors and featuring image ranging from LED clocks and timers to television commercials invoked the dehumanized feeling of a waiting room, a control booth, and an underground laboratory all at once (figure 2.8). The second iteration of the piece, simply entitled Pleasure Life and far more amenable to touring, was occupied by thirty-six metal, tubular constructed columns with fluorescent fixtures that organized the stage environment into constructing grids, essentially trapping the performers by dictating a limited range of movement. Dressed in clinical white, the performers executed mechanical, almost robotic movements and banal tasks inside the dystopian environment, all the while accompanied by a sound score of synthesized, late-1980s ambient techno and sample pastiche and hypnotized by searchlights and the random blinking of the fluorescents. The international success of Pleasure Life and subsequent Dumb Type works lay in the group’s ability to fulfill the spectator’s expectations and imagination of what a dystopian future might actually feel like. As audiovisual saturation with a sterile yet seductive technological sheen, Dumb Type’s projects did not articulate a future image of an urban society where political and social control, order and technology would go hand in hand, but rather created a critical image of current Japanese society obsessed with the new, in general.30 Commanding stage, installation, and print, the group’s next work, pH (1989), advanced the theme of technological dystopia. Inside a six-meter-long space that featured spectators seated on both sides peering down into a courtlike environment, Dumb Type erected something similar to a gigantic photocopier: two computer-controlled metal beams at

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Figure 2.8

Dumb Type. 036 Pleasure Life, 1987. Photo Shiro Takatani. © Dumb Type.

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feet and head height that moved endlessly back and forth on mechanical tracks spanning the length of the space. With video, slide projectors, and fluorescent fixtures anchored inside the two moving armatures, light as well as still and moving images were projected directly down onto the floor of the stage, sometimes obscuring the bodies of the performers. Like 036 Pleasure Life, the performance of pH dealt with how the performers would operate with the constraints of the technologically constructed environment inhabited during the duration of the performance. Playing out mostly mundane, task-based behaviors, from dancing and vogueing to giving lectures, the performers would also continually run down the length of the court, jumping over the lower moving beam and flying against the back wall of the space in an effort to prevent the giant scenographic machine from knocking them down with its relentless sweeping motion. Although pH was an international success, Furuhashi’s internal announcement to the collective in 1994 that he was HIV positive shifted the group’s overall aesthetic and political direction. Undeniably, S/N, Dumb Type’s last project with Furuhashi before he passed away in 1995, showed an overt interest in topics focusing on the taboo of AIDS in Japan and an even deeper political engagement than in previous work. After Furuhashi’s death, Dumb Type’s later projects such OR (1997), Memorandum (2000), and Voyage (2003), moved away from the physical architectonics of their past work and toward purer audiovisual mise-en-scène. Comprised of time code–synchronized fusions of staccatto stroboscopic lighting, largescale projected digital video, and digital sound at the extreme ends of the frequency spectrum, the affective tone of Dumb Type’s later works transformed. With the increased precision and control afforded by digital audiovisual production and playback to induce perceptual vertigo, Dumb Type focused on higher-stakes topics: the border between life and death as explored in the clinical, white-out space of OR, where human bodies appeared to be erased by colossal, sweeping video images or the erosion of memory endemic to technoculture in Memorandum. Architecture Machines

The tension between brick and mortar and audiovisual scenography expressed in Dumb Type’s work pinpointed to a larger trend in experimental theatrical performance work engaged in a technological dialogue. This trend was encapsulated not only by physical and media fusion but also by the increasing interest of noted architects or artists and scenographers trained in architectural techniques in using performance space as a context for framing architectural questions. For example, architect and curator Philip Johnson’s 1988 Museum of Modern Art exhibition Deconstructivist Architecture (Johnson and Wigley 1988) introduced a handful of then relatively obscure architects (Frank Gehry, Rem Koolhaas, the collective Coop

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Himmelb(l)au, Daniel Libeskind, Zaha Hadid, Peter Eisenman, and Bernard Tschumi), four of whom subsequently worked in the context of performance with directors, choreographers, and other artists committed to expanding the scenographic envelope. Even if many of the projects that Hadid, Libeskind, Gehry, and Coop Himmelb(l)au engaged with were most of the time one-off opportunities, what these architects brought to performance was not just the specialized architectural discourse of program, event, strategy, and movement, but an aggressive challenge to modernist discourses of form versus function, advancing the role of technology in the process of construction, and examining the political relationships inherent in the perception of space. Attempting (in some cases) to materialize philosopher Jacques Derrida’s literary techniques within the process of construction, the late-twentieth-century architect as scenographer incorporated strategies of folding and twisting of structure and materials in an effort to achieve what Daniel Libeskind labeled as “space [that] is not just one space, but a plurality and heterogeneity of spaces” (Libeskind 1992, 60–62). The most salient contribution that architects brought to the performance arena and that also resolutely resonated with their earlier twentieth-century counterparts was an intimate understanding of new materials that were for the most part utilized only within the scale of real-world architectural applications. Formed from architecturally standard building materials like glass, steel, and acrylics combined with more exotic technologies such as LED lighting and electrochromic glass, large technophysical architectures emerged as hybrids of sculptures and stage sets, buildings, and live objects. A case in point was that of two opera sets for the American opera director Peter Sellars’s 1995 production of Stravinsky’s oratorio Oedipus Rex, designed by the Viennese architecture collective Coop Himmelb(l)au. Initially produced for the Salzburg music festival in 1994 and restaged at the Netherlands Opera, the collective designed a massive, eighteenmeter wall of twenty-five panes of electrically controlled glass that was sequenced to go from opaque to transparent—a key scenographic device in their goal to embody the metaphor of Oedipus’s blindness and sight in the material form of a transient object.31 Another collaborative project, “Available Light” (1988) with choreographer Lucinda Childs [Rules, Games, and Dance Machines, chapter 6], Frank Gehry, and composer John Adams [Live Electronics II: The Second Wave, chapter 5], featured a environment resembling a stadium entrance constructed from Gehry’s favorite building materials of concrete and chain-link fence in which angular structures and sharpened edges in the architect’s multilevel set created an aggressive, multidimensional space that complemented Child’s formal, precisely executed choreography. Architectural approaches to theatrical space also appeared in the work of a handful of contemporary theater/opera scenic designers, namely George Tsypin, Robert Israel, John Conklin, Marsha Ginsberg, and the German-born Anne Viebrock. Tsypin, a student of architecture in Moscow and scenic design at New York University, designed scenographic archi-sculptures that most certainly typified the radical redefinition of the parameters of

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theatrical scenography by way of new materials. Working with visual art as well as architectural influences, Tsypin’s scenographies stretched the capacities of even the grand opera world budgets, involving the collaboration of international experts versed in cutting-edge material fabrication (Tsypin 2005). His setting for Peter Sellars’s [The Monitor and the Mise-en-scène, chapter 4] 1992 Salzburg staging of Olivier Messiaen’s rarely performed eight-hour opus Saint François d’Assise transformed the massive Felsenreitschule theater space into a Constructivist cathedral. Tsypin’s components included a massive “church,” matchstick-like in appearance, housing the opera’s chorus and brass sections and lodged up against the quarry-like walls of the theater, a set of precipitous wooden ramps almost suspended in air and snaking up the back walls, and most spectacular, a huge, steel scaffolding-like box containing thousands of colored fluorescent lights perched at such an angle that it appeared to topple toward the spectators (figure 2.9). Tsypin’s setting for the American opera director

Figure 2.9 George Tsypin. Scenography for Saint François d’Assise (Olivier Messiaen). Production by Peter Sellars, 1992. Photo © George Tsypin.

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Francesca Zambello’s Bregenz staging of the musical West Side Story on the surface of a floating platform in Lake Constance in Austria invoked memories of the twisted wreckage of the fallen twin towers of the World Trade Center. The most notable example of architects working to reimagine the possibilities of technophysical scenography was the New York–based husband-and-wife team of Diller  Scofidio. Founded by architects Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Diller  Scofidio initially made its reputation in the late 1980s working on a series of relatively low-key, New York–based performance and installation projects. Deprived of the ability to build in the reactionary economic and cultural climate of 1980s New York and captivated by the potential of the stage as a proving ground to research architectural issues, the team devised a series of experiments designed to open up and challenge common precepts of architectural discourse. The team’s early projects, made in collaboration with director Matthew McGuire and the Creation Production Company, were almost textbook examples of architectural responses to dramatic texts, employing devices such as a Chinese cabinet type of box that could unfold (Maguire’s The American Mysteries, 1983) or rotating walls and mirrors poised at 45-degree angles over the stage (the Duchamp inspired The Rotary Notary and his Hotplate, 1987) which delivered a top-down perspective of the stage action for spectators, thus inverting the normal relationship between ground plan and elevation views (figure 2.10).

Figure 2.10 Scofidio.

Diller  Scofidio. Scenography for The American Mysteries, 1983. Photo © Diller 

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The device of the mirror and its associations of transparency and opaqueness, surveillance, and voyeurism subsequently found its way into later Diller  Scofidio projects, most notably with the Belgian choreographer Frédéric Flamand’s company Charleroi Dances/ Plan K [The Body’s Limits in Dance and Theater, chapter 6]. Facilitated by the subsidies of an European theater house, Flamand and Diller  Scofidio’s productions Moving Target (1996) and EJM 1–2: Man Walking at Ordinary Speed and Inertia (1988) fused material and imagining technologies to explore how architecture itself might change the perception of the lived and moving body; techniques that, as Rose Lee Goldberg has pointed out, owe as much to the early-twentieth-century experiments of Foregger, Yutkevich, and Schlemmer as to projection and computer-aided imagining systems.32 Moving Target’s deployment of a massively scaled version of the 45-degree angled mirror used in the funky New York downtown theater setting for The Rotary Notary achieved what Diller  Scofidio called an interscenium—an updating of the proscenium that shifted the politicized conditions of spectating constrained by the proscenium arch. In combination with video projections that bounced off the mirror and created a doppelgänger reflection on the stage floor as well as an optical flow camera-based sensing system developed with the artist/programmer Kirk Woolford [Sensate Dances, chapter 6] with which the performers could be virtually followed by an animated crosshair, Diller  Scofidio’s ocularsaturated stage suggested not only the possibility of reimagining the dancing body through architecture but also of a “dancing architecture” itself (Goldberg 2004, 203). With architecture’s return to the stage at the end of the twentieth century, Diller  Scofidio’s experiments—as well as those of other architects—framed a fertile period of development for the advance of new technoscenographic practices that embraced the technical beings of their time, while exemplifying the tensions between stage and world in material terms. If the fusion of electromechanical materials and technologies managed to turn the spaces of theatrical performance into an experimental microcosm of architectural practice and performance itself into dancing architecture, could the same ideas be retranslated back into architecture outside of the stage? What feedback, if any, existed between architecture that remained in the urban setting and the architectural research laboratories taking place in the controlled safety of the theater space? If architects managed to turn performance into dancing architecture, did they succeed at the utopian hope of turning architecture into performance itself?

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3

Performative Architectures

Our architecture doesn’t have a physical ground plan, but a mental one. Walls no longer exist. Our spaces are pulsating balloons. Our heartbeats become space; our face is the building’s façade. coop himmelb(l)au, “our architecture doesn’t have a physical ground plan” (1968)1

Architecture must burn. In a nondescript courtyard of the Technical University in Graz, Austria, at 8:35 p.m. on December 12, 1980, a huge 15-meter tall, 1.5-ton suspended steel frame was soaked in liquefied gas and set ablaze (figure 3.1). Covering the surrounding walls with protective water curtains, the heat nonetheless was so powerful that twentyone windows shattered on impact. With the roaring sound from the burning suspension amplified, the entire courtyard turned into a Dante-esque symphony of combustion and noise.2 The fiery inferno inflicted by Wolf D. Prix and Helmut Swiczinsky—the duo that founded Coop Himmelb(l)au—on this grey southern Austrian courtyard in the coldness of a December night had all of the markings of a performance: the constitution of an event in the moment of action, the entangling among forces (humans and machines), (brutal) material transmutation, and spatiotemporal enactment followed by disappearance. Art and architecture have always been close if not necessarily comfortable bedfellows. Forever dreaming of realizing works at monumental scale, architecture manifests the sculptor’s yearning for objects materialized at monstrous size. With his first sight of the Manhattan skyline after arriving from totalitarian Europe, Constantin Brancusi’s famous statement “New York is my studio” now meets the monumental archisculptural forms of late-twentieth-century architects like Frank Gehry, Herzog and De Meuron, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Thom Mayne, Daniel Libeskind, Santiago Calatrava, and Toyo Ito.3 But architecture and performance are even stranger partners, for how could a discipline so reliant on stable materiality embody the ephemeral moment and nuanced but unstable

Figure 3.1

Coop Himmelb(l)au. The Blazing Wing, Graz, Austria, 1980. Photo © Gerald Zugmann.

interactions taking place among actants, milieu, and spectators? Certainly, upon closer look, the liberation of architecture in the twentieth century paralleled a similar trajectory to the liberation of stage scenography, not only in the transformation of static materials into things kinetic but also the dynamization of the perception of space itself. Architecture was envisioned as that form in which space, technologized through materials and media, could become expressive—almost performative. The desire for an architecture in a state of becoming, no longer rooted to the earth but revolving, pulsing, swimming, crawling, and flying marks not only the hopes of a forgotten industrial avantgarde modernism, but also our age of calculating machines, micromachining, smart materiality, and intelligent undulation. Architecture and Performativity

What role then should architecture play in a technological history of performance? First, the technical formation and shaping of space is a key concept that cuts across the estabChapter 3 82

lished but permeable disciplinary boundaries of artistic practice. Second, performance itself has increasingly become a buzzword in the architectural world—a scaffolding to understand the dynamic processes occurring in architecture brought on by the onslaught of digital systems. Architects increasingly speak of structures and environments as performances.4 In fact, an entire monograph published in 2005 entitled Performative Architecture: Beyond Instrumentality attempted to lay the groundwork for performance’s seepage into architecture’s inherent fixity (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005). In the hands of architects, however, performance is still a slippery term. Architecture professor David Leatherbarrow suggests that performance is the method by which a building reveals its possibilities for action. Buildings are static, however, constructed from the most stable of materials like concrete, glass, and steel. “Compared to dance and musical expression, the building seems to be resolutely—even embarrassingly—inert and inactive . . . about as animated as a stop sign” (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 10). How then does built space become dynamic not in metaphor but in actual movement— specifically, the way that El Lissitzky envisioned when he wrote at the height of Russian Socialist optimism, “The static architecture of the Egyptian pyramids has been superseded—our architecture revolves, swims, flies. We are approaching the state of floating in air and swinging like a pendulum” (Lissitzky 1967, 330). With the implementation of movable mechanisms such as screens, blinds, walls and other elements, a building can suddenly lurch into life. At times, this action is hidden as in the sense of the building’s response to weather on its climate control systems, while at other times it is made distinctly visible/audible, in the case of a media façade that becomes an animated surface for displaying hidden processes. From this perspective, the potential for temporal action in architecture suggests not only kinetic change but also transformation at the level of appearance. But must architecture physically move and be explicitly mechanical in order to be seen as dynamic and performative? As Leatherbarrow suggests in his concept of “weathering,” buildings contain an innate time constant that is deeply connected to their material durations. “No building stands forever, eventually every one falls under the influence. . . . Weathering does not construct, it destroys” (Mostavahi and Leatherbarrow 1993, 4). As far back as medieval times, the construction of gothic cathedrals acknowledged the polyrhythmic play of changing light and shadow, setting buildings into larger movement with the cosmos and bringing a materialized essence of temporality to the structure of otherwise static buildings. Architectural dynamism was also implicit in the famous house cum museum of the eighteenth-century British architect John Soane.5 Designed as a residence for the architect, Soane’s house increasingly became a kind of treasure trove of knick-knacks, artworks, sculptures, antiquities, mirrors, and countless other artifacts that would appear to move and change shape through shadows generated by the continual shifting of light in the house’s countless rooms.

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While action, interaction, temporality, and adaptation characterize architecture’s potential for performance, architect and University of Calgary professor Branko Kolarevic describes performative architecture as that which can “respond to changing social, cultural, and technological conditions” and in which “culture, technology, and space form a complex active web of connections, a network of interrelated constructs that affect each other simultaneously and continually” (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 205). Architecture as practice explores the potential of space to unfold in “indeterminate ways, in contrast to the fixity of predetermined, programmed actions, events, and effects”—a form in which technical and social behaviors dynamically emerge through how users/inhabitants/participants use space. Here, Kolarevic makes the leap between the stage and the urban setting. “Avant-garde architecture advances the latter architecture as performance art.” Space and structure perform and respond based on the spectator’s actions, however unpredictable, and the urban environment becomes “a stage on which it [architecture] literally and actively performs” (205). Architecture and the Stage

The resonance between theatrical performances and urban architecture is not accidental. Architects have long been fascinated by the site and practice of theatrical performance, as a laboratory for exploration and as a staging ground for the fantastic and the visionary. Book Five of Vitruvius’s The Ten Books of Architecture specifically focused on theaters and their acoustic foundations; Book Ten concentrated on the spectacle-like elements of machines of war.6 As discussed in chapter 1, Tatlin, Vesnin, El Lissitzky, Gropius, and other trained architects brought ideas about architectonic form, shape, structure, and material to bear on the creation on new theatrical staging environments in which imagined future performances would take place. In the latter part of the twentieth century, this cycle was mirrored, albeit with star architects working within architecture, challenging the envelope of their own discipline by collaborating with star stage directors. Architecture seems to have historically needed the theater to assist in pushing conceptual and structural boundaries—to practice scenography on the stage in order to carry it over into the urban wild.7 Architecture and Event

In his provocative 2001 book How Architecture Got Its Hump, critic Roger Connah wrote about the distinction between surface and depth or what he termed the screen and the scene. Describing the tension between the flickering, flattened media image (the screen) and the volumetric depth of space (the scene), Connah searches to find a middle way through the possibility of performance. “Understanding the difference between ‘scene’ and ‘screen’

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could produce differing, improbable, even performative, architectures,” he wrote; architectures that, like the transition spaces and gaps that Tibetan Buddhism labels bardos, could remain impermanent (Connah 2001, 28). Suggested in Connah’s reference to the shifting, transitory experience of the bardos, the in-between and the impermanent also help build on architecture’s performative connections to the stage yet, its relationship to time is as challenging as its relationship to movement and action. If Tarkovsky once argued that the art of cinema is “sculpting in time,” architectural critic Sanford Kwinter states its opposite: “What is it about time’s relentless fluidity, its irreducible materiality that the modern mind finds so impossible— or repellent—to think?” (Kwinter 2001, 4). “There can be no architecture without event, without action, without activities,” writes Bernard Tschumi in his oft-cited “Architecture of the Event” (1992, 25). Written at the height of architectural postmodernism, Tschumi proposed an architecture of ruptures and breaks in which “space, action, and movement” would replace the modernist hierarchy of form follows function. Architecture, in Tschumi’s work, was a “stage set” in which radical choreographic ideas of space from dance and film could substitute for the power structures of plans, sections, and elevations, or what Neil Spiller labels “the notations of spatial repression” (2006, 127). Marshaled on by spatial practices known to the performing arts but alien to architecture, the event would be a place of shock in which “by understanding the nature of our contemporary circumstances and the media processes that go with it, architects are in a position to construct conditions . . . that will create . . . new relationships between spaces and events” (Tschumi 1992, 27).8 It is the tension between the transitory nature of the event brought on by the media age and its fixity due to material conditions that form the basis of what is commonly called visionary architecture—architectures that traverse the earth, swallow cities, or fight to the death in atmospheres of war and crisis in short, imagined architectures that operate at the fringes of material reality.9 Perhaps then in the bardo between fixed materiality and disappearance lies the essential argument for why architecture should be included in a book about performance. In order to understand the invisible forces, movements, agencies, and affects that make the machinic performances possible that Félix Guattari described, architecture as a dynamic and elastic “animate form” (Lynn 1999), must also articulate and enunciate. How then do we understand the performative elements of architecture? What are its actants and how do they express themselves? What happens when stable material gives way to hybrid, mutable stuff as a material of signifying expression? The kinetic and responsive structure, temporal event, and flickering screen all contribute to our understanding of the transitory performances of and within architecture that help us pose complex questions straddling the territories of stillness and movement, façade and depth, stasis and morphogenesis, and permanence and evanescence.

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Movement

Like its ambition to transform theater into a plastic-kinetic complex through technology [Stage/Machine: Futurism and Performance—Scenodynamics, chapter 1], Futurism’s architectonic yearnings also were conjoined to the animated power of the machine. As Marinetti expressed in the Italian Futurist’s 1909 opening manifesto, We will sing of great crowds excited by work, by pleasure, and by riot; we will sing of the multicoloured, polyphonic tides of revolution in the modern capitals; we will sing of the vibrant nightly fervor of arsenals and shipyards blazing with violent electric moons; greedy railway stations that devour smoke-plumed serpents; factories hung on clouds by the crooked lines of their smoke; bridges that stride the rivers like giant gymnasts, flashing in the sun with a glitter of knives; adventurous steamers that sniff the horizon; deep-chested locomotives whose wheels paw the tracks like the hooves of enormous steel horses bridled by tubing; and the sleek flight of planes whose propellers chatter in the wind like banners and seem to cheer like an enthusiastic crowd. (Marinetti 1973, 22)

For Marinetti, who began to imagine and articulate entire urban settings as animistic, architecture would have to follow suit. In 1914, Enrico Prampolini penned an architectural manifesto (The Futurist AtmosphereStructure) in which he laid out architecture’s new kinetic future to be formed by the external energies of a society in technologized transition and shaped by “motion, light, and air” (Prampolini 1973, 182). The greatest proclamations, however, came from the short-lived Antonio Sant’Elia, who called for nothing less than architecture’s reinvention in light of the urban transformation taking place in the culture of speed. The Futurist city would be “agile, mobile, dynamic in every part and the modern building must be similar to a gigantic machine” (Banham 1960, 129). Sant’Elia’s own architectural sketches and plans, of course, looked nothing like the dianissino architecttura of swarming elevators, conveyor belts, and suspended catwalks that he and others so emphatically described. Nevertheless, Futurism’s call for machine architecture would set in motion a tension that would both enthrall and contradict architecture’s machinic obsession over the next hundred years: the machine as metaphor versus the machine in materialized motion. If the Italian Futurists’ dynamism lay latent in paper architectures and phantasmagoric descriptions, Russian Suprematism and Constructivism sought actualized movement. As in theater scenography, the Russian spin on dynamic architecture rested upon that which would interact with its environment: structures that would resonate with the times, bearing the icons and letterforms of media and typographic symbols of the oncoming age of advertising and design, put in the service of the dictatorship of the proletariat. Influenced by the new media of motion pictures and radio coupled with a messianic desire

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to integrate aesthetic and technological-scientific forces, Russian avant-garde architectural movements of the early 1920s proposed projects that sought to make manifest the new machine age in appearance, form and materials. With the machine as an idea playing a central role in architectural conceptualization and planning, there was no agreed-upon consensus among Russian architects and urban planners how to materialize it in built form. Constructivism’s reach into architecture was similar to its position within theater and the visual arts [The October Revolution and Constructivism, chapter 1]: not a singular monolithic movement but instead one snarled in different individuals, factions, ideologies, and projects. Already, within the Moscow-based “Higher Artistic and Technical Studios” or VKHUTEMAS, two different factions had arisen while attempting to define the “New Architecture” based on machine-age aesthetics. The Association of New Architects (ASNOVA) movement, led by the architect and educator Nikolai Ladovsky and joined by Konstantin Melnikov, El Lissitzky, and Vladimir Krinsky, preached a form of architectural rationalism formulated from psychoperceptual concerns with the ways in which human beings perceived and interacted with space.10 In his 1924 manifesto-like treatise Stil’ I Epokha (Style and Epoch), Moisei Ginzburg, the foremost proponent of what would be dubbed Constructivist Architecture, founded a parallel VKHUTEMAS movement called OSA (the Union of Contemporary Architects) in 1925 along with the Vesnin brothers. Calling for a fusion of engineering and architecture to use the principle of the machine to formulate a new social-technical reality, the machine for Ginzburg was nothing less than an ideal organizational model: precise, objective, and functional (Ginzburg 1983). With its images of grain silos and American factories combined with forty-five images of exemplary Russian architectonic experiments, Style and Epoch bore more than just a passing resemblance to another great work that rhapsodized the machine aesthetic of the time published one year earlier: Le Corbusier’s Vers une Architecture (Towards an Architecture) (2007). Le Corbusier had taken a great interest in the Russian Socialist aesthetic project and had deeply influenced both Ginzburg and Leonid Vesnin. Even Le Corbusier’s fabled argument for the machine à habiter, the house as a machine for living, however, was properly eclipsed by Ginzburg’s belief in the powers of the machine, not the human architect, to determine the functional course of building. Yet Ginzburg knew that the image of an industrial architecture was just that: an image. Any true machine architecture would have to be reflected not only in the outwards appearance of a structure but also within the very function of the structure itself. Architecture would thus be the ultimate unification of Aleksei Gan’s principles of konstruktsiia, tektonika, and faktura: a rationally organized, engineering-based set of practices that would ultimately transcend its technological framework to become a “social condenser” and create new forms of social life. If this vision of architecture confirmed El Lissitzky’s famous statement that while being an immortalized unification of technology and ideology, the

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Russian revolution was indeed not a technological revolution but a social one, it also resonates with Kolarevic’s argument described earlier that a performative architecture would be “that which can respond to changing social, cultural, and technological conditions” in a dynamic manner (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 205). As influential as they were, Ginzburg’s ideas represented only one perspective in the vigorous debate around the nature and form of Constructivist building. The architect Iakov Chernikov’s The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms in 1931 appears to embrace a similar understanding of the machine.11 For Chernikov, the machine was an ideal model for construction, as it was composed of a series of pure, almost monumental forms, uniting disparate parts or objects into a functioning whole. Through a bevy of constructive unions such as penetration (solids inserted into each other), embracing (solids wrapped around each other), interlacing, mounting, integration, clamping, and coupling, new and more complex united aggregates could be formed from simple elements such as planes, volumes, and surfaces depending on their combination and transformation. The machine not only enabled “the insertion of one element into another with all the possible individual variations and combinations,” but also generated what Chernikov labeled constructive dynamics (Cooke 1995, 113). Although this mechanical nature demanded “that movement of some sort take place,” the architect readily admitted that buildings were static; their potential for real, kinetic movement stopped in time. Perhaps this is one of the reasons why The Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms is filled with images of other disciplinary manifestations of Constructivist form alongside architecture: theatrical sets, gantries and cranes, machine components, and most important, imaginary, constructive “fantasies.” These are not explicitly stated; one senses in Chernikov’s descriptions of dynamic curves; surfaces and lines; jagged volumes; and vibrating, rhythmic components a deep yearning for an architecture where movement would become actualized in physical form. Chernikov might have stopped short of planning for a true kinetic architecture at building scale but the crème de la crème of the Russian avant-garde like Melnikov, Lissitzky, Krutikov, the Vesnin brothers, Gustav Klutsis, and Tatlin, among others, drew up grandiose plans for cityscapes inhabited by buildings and structures that indeed would perform: rotate, shift, and, in more than one extreme case, float, in all of their kinetic glory. The architect Anton Lavinskii imagined a circular City of the Future suspended on springs above the earth and divided into zoned areas. More fanciful ideas bordering on science fiction came from Georgii Krutikov’s 1928 plan for a Flying City on the Aerial Paths of Communication, in which a cylindrical apartment complex, suspended in the air by way of electricity and accessed by nuclear-powered enclosed vehicles, would continually rotate (figure 3.2). Closer to the ground, the remarkable 1924 design by Leonid, Aleksandr, and Viktor Vesnin for the future headquarters of the Leningradskaia Pravda newspaper included a glass-clad building sitting on a mere 18 m s 6 m s 6 m foundation with

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Figure 3.2

Georgii Krutikov. Flying City on the Aerial Paths of Communication, 1928.

exposed wheels, lights, speakers, and glass elevators that literally swarmed up the side of the buildings as Sant’Elia had imagined. Lissitzky saw the Vesnins’ plan for the Pravda headquarters as representing the prototypical “aesthetic of Constructivism,” one in which architecture would no longer be a hermetic, self-sufficient form sealed off from quotidian life, but where “all accessories— which on a typical city street are usually tacked onto the building—such as signs, advertising, clocks, loudspeakers, and even the elevators inside have been incorporated as integral elements of the design and combined into a unified whole” (Lissitzky 1984, 32). Rotation was not simply restricted to the air but also envisioned taking place on the ground. Melnikov’s unrealized plans for a gigantic Monument to Christopher Columbus in Santo Domingo (1929) included a glass-sheathed building shaped like a twisted corkscrew that rotated 360 degrees. The greatest plan for kinetic architecture of the time, however, belongs to Vladimir Tatlin’s colossal vision for the Monument to the Third International. Commissioned by the Cominterm in 1924 to commemorate the third anniversary of the October Revolution, Tatlin’s proposal was a 400-meter-tall, ziggurat-like structure some three times higher than the Eiffel Tower and constructed from steel and glass. Tatlin

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imagined the monument, to be “built on the basis of entirely new architectural principles,” to be a “place of the most intense movement” (Zhadova 1984, 5; Lodder 1983, 56). Tilted in relationship to the earth’s axis, the tower consisted of a double-helical open structure housing four monumental geometric forms: a cube, cylinder, pyramid, and semisphere (figure 3.3). With forms constructed of glass and rotating at different speeds on their axes in accordance with the passing of minutes, days, hours, and years, had the tower been built it would have certainly constituted a dynamic spectacle more amazing than all of the Constructivist theater performances combined. Certainly Tatlin’s intricate steel construction was one of the most radically planned of the time, yet it was his plans for “promoting agitation and propaganda” through a “modern technical apparatus” in the uppermost cylindrical space that acts as a harbinger of the performative “mediatectures” of the late twentieth century. Situated at the top of structure amongst radio masts and communications stations to keep the international proletariat informed, was a single powerful projector with enough lumens to project slogans onto the clouds, as well as a massive screen to broadcast “the latest news in the cultural and political life of the whole world.” Far from being add-ons, Tatlin declared his media apparatus as essential to the form of the monument. “The radio, screen, and aerial, being elements of the monument, can also be the elements of the form” (Lodder 1983, 56). In combination with Tatlin’s media instruments, the overall kinetic gestalt of the tower gave the overwhelming impression of a living, breathing apparatus. Like their Italian Futurist contemporaries, none of the more extreme kinetic fantasies of the Russian architectural avant-garde were ever built. Ironically, the only truly kinetic object that has survived is artist Naum Gabo’s 1920 Kinetic Construction (Standing Wave), an evocative but fragile sculpture consisting of a single steel rod that was set into vibrating, vertical motion by the mechanism of a doorbell buzzer. Tatlin’s architectural marvel also achieved its only manifestation in a 6-meter-tall wood, paper, and wire model that was exhibited in the Academy of Arts in Petrograd in 1920 and later in Moscow. Despite Tatlin’s assertions that “modern technology fully allows for the possibility of constructing such a building,” the actual construction of the tower (if it had been attempted), would have used up all of the available steel in Russia—not a trivial fact, considering that Russian society was barely at the threshold of industrialization and electrification at the time. A similar fate greeted the plans of architects who, like Lavinskii or Krutikov, wanted to take advantage of the magical technologies of electricity in their architectures—an even more utopian vision in an atmosphere in which, as art critic Robert Hughes reminded us, there “was hardly enough surplus wattage in all of Moscow to run an egg timer” (Hughes 2004). It seems logical given the economic and political instability of prewar European societies that such technosocial experiments in construction could not be realized in mate-

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Figure 3.3 Vladimir Tatlin. Proposal for a Monument to the Third International, circa 1919.

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rial form. What the Constructivist and Futurist movements did do, however, was to envision architectures that would enact rather than represent movement, letting it live and propagate and, if only on paper or the screen, release built space from the shackles of gravity and stasis. Event

Visions of performing buildings and living cityscapes resurfaced with an acute vengeance in the 1960s. No longer convinced of a socialist utopia at mass scale, younger designers and collectives instead questioned the very nature of the architectural profession itself— particularly its failure to respond to the rapidly changing political-social-culturaltechnological fault lines. Adorned with enigmatic names like Archigram (UK), Superstudio (Italy), Archizoom (Italy), Coop Himmelb(l)au (Austria), the Metabolists (Japan), Haus-Rucker-Co (Austria), and others, the next generation sought a complete reimagining of architecture in an age of technological advancement, televisual media, and social upheaval, turning to political rallies, theater, and temporary events in the urbanscape as well as media instruments of pop culture such as leaflets, ’zines, and advertising for inspiration (Rouillard 2004). Simultaneously, the turn toward the ephemeral event challenged the essence of architecture as a form of knowledge making, and more specifically, critiqued the very act of building itself, which many saw as reactionary in the face of the wild and fluid metamorphosis of the 1960s. Arguably the most influential of the 1960s collectives, Archigram (an amalgam of “architecture” and “telegram”) was formed by Peter Cook, Ron Herron, Mike Webb, Warren Chalk, David Greene, and Dennis Crompton. Taking its impulses from ’60s counterculture, advertising, comic books, technology, and mass market consumerism, Archigram was the name given to both the collective and its major architectural output: a series of nine ‘zine-like publications between 1961 and 1974. Reacting to both the sterility of British architecture of the time as well as the lack of trade publications focusing on architectural issues, Archigram proposed speculations in the form of concepts, ideas, sketches, and drawings in order to “make what is essentially an inert object, a building, into something fluid” (Webb 1999, 3). Issued in 1961 as a one-sheet publication on cheap paper, the first Archigram published by Cook and Greene set out the collective’s playful tone and conceptual break with the past. Graphically rendered surreal and almost hippie-tinged proclamations such as “a new generation of architecture must arise with forms and spaces which seems to reject the precepts of Modern yet, in fact retains these precepts,” and “we want to drag into building some of the poetry of countdown, orbital helmets, discord of body transportation methods and leg walking” were nested amidst cartoon-like, pop iconography, lending the entire enterprise a manifesto-like tone. Gradually revealed over the next issues of

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the magazine (now stapled), Archigram’s architectures were more like “situations,” “the happenings within spaces in the city,” and environments than built monuments (Cook 1999, 16).12 Partly inspired by architectural historian Reyner Banham who foresaw the increasing technological transformation of the urban environment, Archigram’s projects like Living City, Plug-in City, Instant City, Walking City, Mobile Village, Living Pod, Drive in Housing, and Blow Out Village firmly established the group’s science fiction–esque, visualarchitectonic lingua franca.13 Living Cities, the group’s 1963 exhibition at the Londonbased Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) created a visually packed environment of seven spatially organized zones or gloops (spatial “loop enclosures”) of contemporary city life (survival, crowd, movement, man, communications, place, situation), adorned with collage-like formations of advertisements, texts, drawings, schematics, and plans. Evoking “the vitality of city life,” rather than the top-down, repressive mechanisms inherent in urban planning (Cook 1999, 20), Living City was prototypical of Archigram’s futuristic schematics that gave the appearance of living, behaving machines. The most explicit example of performing architecture in Archigram’s canon, however, was easily Ron Herron’s Walking Cities series. Directly inspired by Le Corbusier’s call for the machine à habiter, Herron’s paper visions imagined colossal, ambulatory, buglike structures that were robotic in appearance, with telescoping legs that could at a moment’s notice scurry across the landscape, instantly situating themselves and adapting to a new environment (figure 3.4).

Figure 3.4

Archigram/Ron Herron. A Walking City, 1964. Courtesy of Simon Herron.

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Imagined at the size of 400 m s 60 m and standing at a height of over 200 meters, Herron’s Walking Cities on the Ocean, Desert, or in New York were technologically cuttingedge but environmentally efficient visions of a future in which all sustainable resources had been wiped away. Each city was to be constructed as a series of different units or pods that could be self-sufficient or exchange environmental resources with other pods, no longer relying on fossil fuel technologies but instead adapting to the particular environmental features at each new site. Walking Cities was part of a larger Archigram obsession with the throw-away, the inflatable, the movable, and the temporary—self-sufficient, modular, transformable architectures that could be inflated, carried on the back (as was the case with Mike Webb’s Cushicle and Suitaloon), disassembled, reassembled, and reconfigured. Radical for their time, Archigram’s machine-like structures also inspired later generations of architects to further explore the concept of moving architectures poised between the mechanical and the organic. Founded by Prague-born Jan Kaplicky and David Nixon, the London-based architectural partnership Future Systems developed visionary moving structures in the mid 1980s, most specifically with their technomechanical schemes for living spaces like Peanut House (1984): a pod that could be raised into the air by a hydraulic boom and set down in any particular environment to afford the inhabitants a 360-degree view (Spiller 2006, 105–106). The most extreme example of walking, robot-like architectures was the speculative work of the American architect Lebbeus Woods. Trained as an architect, Woods turned exclusively to conceptual sketches and drawings in order to realize his fantasies of crawling, mechanomorphic buildings. Set within a postapocalyptic, war-torn present, Woods’ ravaged works like Berlin Free Zone and Zagreb Free Zone depicted huge, insect- and machine-like structures clinging to the sides of buildings and engaged in macabre battles to the death. Like Herron’s Walking Cities, Woods proposed a speculative, migratable, and visionary architecture depicting a dystopian world shot through with violence and war in which buildings were depicted in colossal conflict with one another. Archigram’s progressive ideas about temporary, “living” architectures also inspired individuals and groups outside of the United Kingdom—predominantly Austria and Italy. The fact that such a large number of experimental architecture formations adorned with names like Haus-Rucker-Co, Coop Himmelb(l)au, and Missing Link were situated in Austria led Peter Cook to dub the movement “the Austrian phenomenon.” Formed by Wolf D. Prix, Helmut Swiczinsky, and Rainer Michael Holzer in 1968, Coop Himmelb(l)au (meaning “sky-blue collective” or “building the sky”), the most famous of these collectives that is still active today, provoked established conventions, in particular the “suffocating” architectural landscape of Vienna. Envisioning an architecture that would “be as buoyant and variable as a cloud,” Coop Himmelb(l)au’s early experiments involved the creation of pneumatic and inflatable living units; an architecture that would perform by reacting to “our movements, feelings, moods,

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emotions, so that we want to live within it” (Coop Himmelb(l)au 2005, 24–27). The Cloud (1968–1972) was “an organism for living”; a mobile space composed of “air and dynamics” that would breathe like a pair of lungs while the prototype urban environment Villa Rosa (1967) consisted of Archigram-inspired pneumatic and spherical modules that could be linked up and undergo physical transformations (80). In their effort to create new urban living environments that “beat like the heart and fly like breath,” Coop Himmelb(l)au also turned to performative actions and installations to explore the relationship between the spectator’s/participant’s body and a responding, breathing architectural surround, at times employing early sensing and interactive technologies (figure 3.5). The group’s 1968 action Hard Space, for example, used the heartbeats

Figure 3.5

Coop Himmelb(l)au. Herzstadt—The White Suit, 1969. Photo © Coop Himmelb(l)au.

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of three people in order to trigger a series of sixty explosions in a field outside of Vienna to “create a space” over the duration of twenty heartbeats. Soft Space, filled a section of the Universitätstrasse in Vienna with 1200 m3 of soap foam per minute. Restless Sphere and City Soccer, another series of interventions during 1970– 1971, created large-scale translucent inflatable spheres that invaded pedestrian zones in Basel and Vienna and were moved by people walking inside them. Coop Himmelb(l)au also explored similar techniques with indoor performative installations, early precursors to what computer scientist and artist Myron Krueger later labeled responsive environments [Responsive Environments: First Generation, chapter 8], creating spaces that used the visitors’ breath or bodily movements to control the behavior of light and sound in order to manifest the assertion that their architecture was not a physical one, but a “mental one.” Coop Himmelb(l)au moved on to more bricks- and mortar-based building projects in the 1980s, but they continued to explore the disrupting role of performance with their stage designs [Architecture Machines, chapter 1], exhibitions, and experimental building techniques. During the same period, another Austrian collective named Haus-Rucker-Co (1967– 1992, founded by Manfred Ortner, Laurids Ortner, Günther Zamp Kelp, and Klaus Pinter) also played with the performative potential of inflatable structures as a framework for ephemeral events and alternate living concepts. Haus-Rucker-Co’s Mind Expander (1967) and Yellow Heart (1968) were pneumatic, capsule-like pulsating environments influenced by 1960s participatory politics and happenings. Developed for Documenta 5 in 1972, the collective’s Oase #7 was another example of what the collective called “pneumatic dwelling units” or pneumecosms: a giant inflatable sphere measuring some 24 feet (8 pneumecosms meters) across and attached to the side of the baroque Friedericianum, the main exhibition hall in Kassel, Germany, within which a catwalk-like scaffolding was built that could be inhabited by people. In a series of experimental texts and works during the late 1960s, the Austrian-born, United States–educated architect Hans Hollein, who belonged to a slightly earlier generation, also argued for fantastic architectures based on machine aesthetics which suggested “plastic, dynamic, expressive, formal, and emotional potentials” (Hollein 1968). Hollein’s projects and writings, such as Mobiles Büro (1969), an inflatable office that could be moved to a new location enabling mobile communication to take place long before the cellular telephone and Alles ist Architektur (Everything Is Architecture), a searing, graphically illustrated manifesto that dared to transform architecture from its tradition of physical construction into something permeable and transitory, embraced strategies from the new media (Marshall McLuhan was a large influence) and technology, cybernetics, the visual arts, and philosophy, among other disciplines. “Architects must not only think in terms of buildings,” Hollein wrote, for a new architecture would be one that possessed “haptic, optic, and acoustic qualities” (Hollein 1968).

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Architectural performances and events that became de rigueur in the 1960s were also manifested in the work of the well-known Australian architecture-trained sculptor and later media artist Jeffrey Shaw [Performative Interfaces and Spaces, chapter 8]. More rooted in the visual arts than an architectural context, Shaw’s work with the Eventstructure Research Group (ERG), cofounded with Theo Botschuijver and Sean WellesleyMiller, nevertheless was strongly influenced by the manifestos and actions of the event architecture movement. Stating that “the event we look for is when a particular structuring of art/architecture/spectacle/technology makes operational an expanded arena of will and action open to everyone” (Shaw 1969, 49), ERG’s early work consisted of expanded cinema projects such as Corpocinema (1967) and Movie-Movie (1967) that entailed the projection of slides and films within inflatable environments, fusing immaterial media with temporary architecture. With their series of outdoor installations called Waterwalks, ERG soon moved to the creation of inflatable architectural environments that could be inhabited by participants. The most extreme of these in scale, WaterWalk Tube (1970), was formed by a 250-meter inflatable plastic (PVC) tube that sat on the surface of the Masch lake in Hannover, Germany, in which visitors could enter and literally walk across the surface of the water (figure 3.6). Like Hollein’s, Shaw’s, and ERG’s focus on creating an “alternative form of

Figure 3.6 Jeffrey Shaw/ERG. WaterWalk Tube (1970), Maschsee Hannover, 250 m s 3 m. Eventstructure Research Group (Theo Botschuijver, Jeffrey Shaw, Sean Wellesley-Miller). Photo © Pieter Boersma.

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environmental situation . . . which is in itself as undetermined as possible, depending for its life and forms on participant action and invention,” functioned to reimagine architecture as both event of a new, almost unstable materiality and event activated by inhabitant participation (Shaw 1969, 48). Regardless of their geographic and sometimes ideological differences, what linked many of these experiments was a common interest in exploring the shifting materiality of architecture brought on by postliterate, televisual culture, and social-cultural transformation. Embracing performance practices that involved fluid relationships between the body and space, architecture became ephemeral—an event that would literally disappear and whose constructive trace would remain only in the bodily memory of its participants/ onlookers and in media documentation. Certainly no one exploited this tension more so than the American architect-turned-artist Gordon Matta-Clark. The son of Chilean surrealist painter Roberto Matta, Matta-Clark studied architecture at Cornell University in the late 1960s before rebelling against the profession and turning to performative architectural interventions inspired by his burgeoning interest in happenings, land art, and environments proliferating in the visual arts. In contrast to the utopian, almost rarified futures of the Archigram-influenced architects, Matta-Clark’s anarchitecture operated in the grungy here and now of the derelict structures and constructed wastelands of urban modernism that dotted the city landscape of New York. Consisting of performances in which the artist would dissemble, saw through, or remove structural parts of buildings that were to eventually be demolished, Matta-Clark’s interventions were potent critiques of architectural practice that changed the formal appearance of his targeted structures along with their actual material construction. His most famous intervention, Splitting (1974), took place in a New Jersey suburb where the artist proceeded over the course of three months to saw a disused two-story suburban house in half, creating a sculptural form that appeared like two freestanding houses separated from each other with an elegant slice of sunlight down the middle. Held up by art historians as a prime example of literal dematerialization of the aesthetic object, Splitting also exploited the architectural tension and trauma between the representation of a structure in the form of a ground plan versus the actual material process of making (and unmaking) a building. Moreover, Matta-Clark’s action almost was a textbook demonstration of the manner in which a building was put together, recalling bit by bit the different potentialities of structural chaos that would ensue with each direct cut into the building’s architectural framework.14 During the mid 1970s, Matta-Clark continued his building deconstruction performances with works in New York, Paris, and Antwerp. His notorious action Days End (1975), which involved the cutting up of floor, wall, and ceiling sections in a disused New York metal warehouse on the edge of Pier 52 on the Hudson River in order to create what the artist described as a “sun and water temple,” caused such a stir that the event was shut down by the NYPD and Matta-Clark was smitten with a lawsuit.

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In Conical Intersect, performed in Paris in 1975, the artist cut conical forms into seventeenth-century townhouses scheduled for demolition at the future site of the Centre Pompidou—an ironic action, considering the exoskeletal façade that Richard Rogers’s and Renzo Piano’s future museum eventually would have. Matta-Clark died of cancer at the age of thirty-five in 1978, and the only record of his work exists in 8- and 16-mm films and photographs that were shot on site during the performances. In these haunted media memories, the notion of disappearance becomes acutely revealed in Matta-Clark’s work; not only did his anarchitectural actions vanish, but the material conditions that he transformed also eventually disappeared. Kinetics: Movement Revisited

If kinesis embodied in architectural scale and structure was the stuff of paper in the 1920s, such concepts became reality with advances in material sciences, engineering, and computation, finally coalescing into direct material attempts: a kinetic architecture that tried to implement and simultaneously go beyond the principles of Le Corbusier’s machine à habiter. Through a history of moving structures like medieval drawbridges or modern additions like elevators and escalators contained within the shell of static buildings, architecture, of course, did not necessarily need the kinetic dreams of the Constructivists to further its quest for total adaptation. “We must evolve an architecture which will adapt to continuous and accelerating change,” wrote the architect William Zuk, “a kinetic architecture” (Zuk and Clark 1970, 9). Kinetic architecture would thus not only be an idea of transformation but an actual set of strategies that would require new conceptual and material notions of building to take precedent over older, fixed concepts of permanence and monumentality. With its D’Arcy Thompson–inspired discussions of formal morphogenesis and descriptions of the multivariable evolution and adaptation inherent in machines, Zuk and Clark’s 1970 book Kinetic Architecture was a pragmatic manual for the Archigram-inspired generation eager to create a new continuously moving, shape-changing reality. In particular, through the connections drawn between the 4D and Dymaxion houses and cars conceived by architect and thinker R. Buckminster Fuller and their later retranslations in the retractable, pneumatic roof skins of the German tensile architect Frei Otto, Zuk’s book set out some of the key frameworks for the coming age of buildings fusing technology, sociology, and biology; a movement that architect and writer Charles Jencks would famously label Organi-Tech.15 The translation by Fuller and Otto of kinetic imaginings into structurally engineered realities foreshadowed the direction that dynamic, performative architecture would eventually take at the end of the twentieth century. Although he had no formal architectural training, as early as the 1940s, Buckminster Fuller had begun to explore the possibilities of machine-like living environments that would adapt to their surroundings like living

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creatures and animate matter. In his 4D House, a curious, pagoda-like, stacked, multilevel structure that bore an uncanny resemblance to Krutikov’s Flying City, he proposed an environment with movable partitions, pneumatic beds, doors, and floor pads, which would bring about an economically and ecologically viable dwelling. A more technologically sophisticated version of the 4D House, the futuristic, autonomous, and prefabricated Dymaxion (for dynamic  maximum  tension) assemblage-like dwelling from 1929, furthered Fuller’s deep interest in adaptive architecture. Easily reconfigurable through the use of lightweight materials such as aluminum and photoelectric cell–augmented pneumatic doors that would change the physical form of the environment, the hexagonal Dymaxion house fulfilled what Fuller described as ephemeralization: the notion that “less is more” in order to gain more “performance per square inch” through the use of new materials.16 Fuller’s interest in dynamics and reconfigurability would more boldly come into material reality with his geodesic domes; in particular, his and Shoji Sadao’s design for the U.S. pavilion at the 1967 Montréal World’s Fair. Adapting a construction principle labeled by Fuller with the word tensegrity (short for “tensional integrity”) that was derived from the work of American sculptor and Fuller student Kenneth Snelson, the geodesic dome was a hemispheric structure conceived to cover a mass area without any internal support, its structural strength derived from the push-pull effect of a continuous tensional grid of interlocking steel tetrahedron shaped elements. Fuller’s 70-meter-tall U.S. pavilion for Expo ’67 went a step further, incorporating a motorized membrane of transparent acrylic panels over the structure. It was never wholly functional; Fuller nevertheless envisioned a self-regulating and responsive surface that could “articulate just as sensitively as a human being’s skin” (Krause and Lichtenstein 1999, 428). Composed of a series of mechanically actuated, triangularly shaped shades that were driven by some six hundred photocell-controlled motors overlaid across the surface of the sphere, the pavilion would become not only a continually breathing surface that transitioned from opaque to clear based on the sun but also a totally regulated and adapting environment. Fuller would also embrace similar concepts with Autonomous Dwelling (1983) a short-lived and ultimately unrealized collaboration with Sir Norman Foster that attempted to construct twin revolving geodesic domes that would mechanically open and close based on the sun’s position over the course of a day. Frei Otto’s tensile structures and pneumatic membranes also bore structural resonances to Fuller’s work. Building tent-like canopies installed with pneumatics, Otto’s innovative electric motor-controlled retractable roofs and his development (with assistant Bodo Rasch) of hydraulic-driven, large-scale convertible umbrellas that were installed, among other places, on a 1978 American Pink Floyd tour and in two courtyards of the Holy Mosque in Medina, set his work into the kinetic lineage of Fuller and others. Attempts at creating kinetic structures rapidly multiplied from the 1980s onwards, as engineering techniques were perfected through newly developed computer-controlled

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sensing, modeling, and fabrication processes. Still, a conceptual and material tension remained unresolved between movement taking place at the surface or skin (like Fuller’s skin for the U.S. pavilion) versus kinetic sculptural forms at building scale that mechanically expanded in volumetric space with performative nonhuman gestures. Within the context of sculptural forms that intended, as former head of the MIT Kinetic Design Group Michael Fox described, “to re-configure themselves to meet changing needs,” were included the projects of a bevy of architects and engineers, ranging from the filigreed, tensile work of Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava, to the eco-engineering of Ove Arup; Kas Oosterhuis’s pneumatic, computer-controlled “hyperbodies”; Wes Jones’s mechanical houses; Mette Ramsgard Thomsen’s “robotic membranes”; Chuck Hoberman’s “transforming structures”; Fox’s kinetic “robotecture”; and others. Resembling the skeletal wings of birds and pterodactyls, Calatrava’s spindly, tilted edifices were some of the few built examples to incorporate kinetic elements at both a poetic as well as functional level. His Puente de La Mujer in the Puerto Madero area of Buenos Aires, for example, was a footbridge that could rotate 90 degrees in order to let ships pass under it. More fantastic was the architect’s kinetic Burke Brise Soleil, a gigantic, 115-ton winged structure perched atop the architect’s Milwaukee Art Museum that opened and closed like a bird in flight, or the proposed Qatar Museum of Photography, in which the walls of the structure could shift depending on the amount of sunlight. The Dutch architect Kas Oosterhuis—one of the leading progenitors of so-called blob architecture, in which non-Cartesian geometries were created through sophisticated, computer-generated 3D modeling techniques—developed an entire research program for the 2000 Venice architecture Biennale dubbed Transports, to explore the impact of programmable, expanding structures that fused the pneumatic ideas of the 1960s with the sensor-actuator-augmented, computer-controlled technologies of the 1990s. Realized for the 2003 Non-Standard Architectures exhibition at the Centre Pompidou, Oosterhuis described his MUSCLE prototype, developed with his Hyperbody research group at the Technical University Delft, as “a 3 month performance”—a “prototype for an environment that is slightly out of control” (Oosterhuis 2003). Continuing as well as critiquing Herron’s Walking Cities by stating that “programmable buildings can reconfigure themselves mentally and physically, probably without considering to completely displace themselves like the Walking City proposed by Archigram in 1964,” MUSCLE consisted of a soft, inflated volume festooned in a series of pneumatic, servo-controlled tensile muscles. Changing its physical shape based on sensor orchestration of individual muscle strands, the structure could leap into action due to the proximity of visitors or be steered from a more traditional screen-based interface. With input from the public as well as from preprogrammed algorithms, MUSCLE pointed to an architecture that not only described but

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embodied the rhetoric of fluidity and transformation proposed by the wide spread use of digitally controlled systems in construction (Oosterhuis 2003). The other stream in kinetic architecture was that of physical movement taking place at the surface of a structure: the opening, closing, and undulation of mechanical parts or elements that would animate the surface of a construction, giving the sense that Fuller described of “skin-like articulation.” One of the earlier and also most celebrated of such articulations occurred in the French architect Jean Nouvel’s 1987 design for the Parisbased L’Institut du Monde Arabe cultural center. Known in the 1960s as one of the rebels against the prevailing trends in post-Corbusier modernism, Nouvel’s exterior and interior exploited geometrical forms and lighting patterns from Arabic architectural traditions in order to create what he called “a hinge between two cultures and two histories” (Nouvel). Nouvel’s own take on one of the central elements of Arabic architecture, the brise soleil of the traditional mashrabiyah screen, consisted of an immense wall with some thirty thousand photoelectric cell–enabled, servocontrolled “diaphragms.” Crossing the mechanism of the camera lens with the intricacies of the mashrabiyah’s lattice-like openings, the light-regulated shuttering of the diaphragms generated a continually shifting series of luminous reflections, refractions, reverberations, and shadows within the interior spaces of the building. Nouvel’s photosensitive façade played off the structural resonances of formalized Arabic patterns; British architect Mark Goulthorpe’s and Austrialian Mark Bury’s 2003 responsive Aegis Hyposurface operated more along the lines of an architecture envisioned by science fiction. Inspired by dance performance—particularly the fragmentary ballets of the German-based, American-born choreographer William Forsythe [The Body’s Limits in Dance and Theater, chapter 6]—Goulthorpe’s architectural surface was originally commissioned as an interactive artwork for the Birmingham Hippodrome. As an exterior architectural response to the interior goings-on within the theater itself, the project was built from hundreds of faceted metal plates attached to an elastic-like surface that dimpled and deformed in real time through a series of 896 computer-actuated pneumatic pistons installed behind the plates (figure 3.7). With its performance based on environmental stimuli like bodily movement, moisture, or acoustic changes picked up by sensing and input to a microcontroller, Goulthorpe’s deformable surface could be modified by such exogenous data through a complex series of parametrically alterable qualities (speed, amplitude, phase, and direction) describing but not determining the temporal and hence the spatial evolution of the surface. Evoking the word smectic, which describes the mesomorphic state in liquid crystal in which molecules line up in parallel layers, Aegis Hyposurface suggested the very possibility of a latent performance embedded within frozen architecture: an event in waiting, jumpstarted by the environment but instantiated in real time through its own rules and reactions.17

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Figure 3.7

Mark Goulthorpe/decoi. Aegis Hyposurface, 2003. Photo © HypoSurface.

Responsiveness: Transforming Materiality

Goulthorpe’s responsive surface can be seen as both a highly technologized throwback to earlier kinetic experiments as well as something pointing toward future directions in widening our understanding of “performance” within the architectural milieu. His appropriation of the psychoanalytic terms autoplastic (the environment affects the subject) and alloplastic (the subject affects changes to the environment) to frame Aegis Hyposurface’s hybrid mixing of mechanical, chemical, electrical, and computational materials fittingly describes the current shift from an industrialized era of kinetics expressed through mechanically driven movement (gears and levers) and toward nonhuman yet materialized gestures or “choreographies.” In short, the performative enunciation of agency that takes place within the actual molecular-chemical-physical substrates of materials themselves. Current and future research into so-called intelligent or smart materials that can undergo shape, color, light, heat, and other mutations suggests a different notion of

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kinetic that nonetheless still remains preoccupied with the dynamics of interaction and responsiveness. Responsiveness at the material level, however, now signifies substances that can alter their thermal, electrical, mechanical, or optical properties through micro or molecular changes in their substrates caused by environmental influences and perturbations. It has been claimed by experts such as Yale professor of architecture Michelle Addington that smart or intelligent materials have remained difficult to classify, because they do not stay in a single physical state for the duration of their lifetime (2005, 10). But such materials can nevertheless be qualitatively distinguished by characteristics such as immediacy (real-time response), transiency (movement between several possible states), self-actuation (internal intelligence rather than external actuation), selectivity (discrete and predictable response), and directness (local response to a particular actuating event or stimuli). The kinds of smart materials that could potentially launch architecture from its mechatronic past to an age of self-actuated, real-time transiency can easily overwhelm with regard to the range and complexity of technologies deployed. Thermo-photo-electro-chromic materials that change color based on heating, lighting or electrical changes, luminescentphosphorescent materials that emit light based on changes in electrical fields or lightabsorption polymer and liquid crystal films that can vary their opacities describe the emissive potential of new substances. Intelligent, shape-changing gels and shape-memory alloys (SMA’s) whose crystalline structure can be deformed and reformed through heat in order to remember their initial shape propose, however, physical deformation in matter itself; an intricate array of substances that suggest new, perhaps still nonexistent architectures whose performativity lies in processes involving fundamental material transformations over time. “When will Gehry’s ‘metallic flower’—the rotunda of his design for the new Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain—bloom in truth?” wrote Mark Dery in an ironic 1999 essay entitled “The Persistence of Industrial Memory,” asking when Gehry’s architecture might become truly “life-like” through the fusion of biology, chemistry, and computation. When would the “solar panel petals opening to greet the sun, its organic metaphor brought to life by microscopic nanomachines that juggle atoms to make the museum grow rooms or sprout a profusion of mushroom-like ventilator chimneys, all at the speed of time-lapse photography?” (Dery 1999b, 63). The current technical complexities and unstable knowledge base for such smart, nano, and mutable materials, however, has kept attempts at constructing truly performative architecture strictly at the tabletop scale or as singular, functional elements installed within larger brick-and-mortar infrastructures. Exploited by multiple architects such as Stanley Saitowitz, Renzo Piano, Richard Rogers, Diller Scofidio  Renfro, and Thom Faulders, electrochromic glass—one of the most common smart materials—was utilized more for

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its energy-saving properties, while other designers such as Kennedy  Violich, Martina Decker, and Jürgen Mayer H. explored the use of thermochromic inks and electroluminescent technologies coating or embedded within furniture or as wallpaper and wall hangings. Yet, what kinds of stagings and enactments do smart materials suggest that could take place at the urban scale and go beyond pure function, crossing over into the domain of aesthetic expression and transforming space into an undulating, dynamic form? The complications generated by a technological revolution in new materialities open up a Pandora’s box of questions. Do smart materials catalyze the physical realization of the visionary structures and environments suggested in the sketchbooks, transitory events, and manifestos that exploded the twentieth-century architectural landscape? Could it be in the technological animation of inert materials, in the wiggling, jerking, oozing, flashing, and shifting, that finally the qualities of stasis that has forever been architecture’s stigma disappear? Could a new kind of impermanence that is ironically wholly dependent on transforming materiality suggest a performance in architectonic forms akin to the nuanced and expressive dance of bodies in motion on the stage? In built form, one of the most compelling recent architectonic experiments that attempted to embrace these thorny questions of responsiveness, transient event, and performance was Diller  Scofidio’s Blur Building, erected for the Swiss Expo 2002. A nod to earlier attempts (the first fog sculpture created by master fog artist Fujiko Nakaya at the Pepsi pavilion during the 1970 Osaka World’s Fair), the building consisted of a massive tensegrity platform measuring some 100 m wide by 120 m deep by 17 m high, installed off the shore of Lake Neuchâtel in southern Switzerland (figure 3.8). Although not specifically constructed of smart materials, the shape and movement of this computer-controlled fog structure nonetheless gave the visitor/participant the impression of a dynamically shifting space where optics, acoustics, and haptics intersected. Rendered by the fine spray generated by 31,500 specially designed computer-regulated fog nozzles sucking water from the lake, Blur’s undulating, volumetric shape appeared as an image or display surface from a distance. Upon walking over a pair of flume-like bridges into its massive cloud of unknowing, however, Blur’s 3D volume receded into an ambient, swirling, white-noise-enhanced milieu; an anti-spectacle, according to the architects, where “visual and acoustic references are erased” (Diller Scofidio  Renfro n.d.). Like an ephemeral stage performance, Blur too disappeared, its form and materiality in a state of transition and impermanence. In its transient, interstitial form between (invisible) object and place, perhaps Blur most closely embodied what the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann termed atmosphere: the “surplus of space between place (Stelle) and objects (Objekte) which is ungraspable” (Löw 2001, 146).

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Figure 3.8

Diller  Scofidio. Blur Building, 2002. Photo © Diller  Scofidio.

Screen/Scene

What Diller  Scofidio’s undulating building exposed was the underlying friction between an architecture of performative space versus an architecture of performance originating at the intelligent surface. “Most current attempts to implement smart materials in architectural design maintain the vocabulary of the two-dimensional surface or continuous entity and simply propose smart materials as replacements or substitutes for more convention materials . . . while the common mantra is that architects design space, the reality is that architects make (draw) surfaces” (Addington 2005, 5). The tension between volume and surface, and between smart material as substrate and as surface cladding is now even more pronounced in an era in which, covered with colossal LCD (liquid-crystal display) and LED (light-emitting diode) matrices, the surfaces of buildings themselves have become displays for the thundering and flickering ephemeral media images of our moment. In 1994, philosopher Mark C. Taylor coined the term electrotecture to describe the oncoming age of blurred boundaries between “building and builder, between programme and programmer, time and space.” Describing Japanese architect Toyo Ito’s 1984

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architectural-video sculpture Egg of Winds for a Japanese residential complex, Taylor wrote that the work was “neither a television or a video screen nor neon nor electric sign,” but a set of layered surfaces, partially material (out of perforated aluminum) and partially simulated (the flickering of LCD projection installed inside the egg). “No longer architecture but not yet electrotecture,” Ito’s media sculpture acted as a “transitional object” for Taylor—a form straddling the material and immaterial (Taylor 1994, 83). As architecture seems predestined toward what Bernard Tschumi once described as buildings made of “pixels and light,” then the current movement to transform global cities into electronic screenscapes is the beginning of that fulfillment. “While the development of a physically changeable (robotic) architecture appears still to be years away,” stated Berlin architect Jan Edler, “there is a promise of significant progress in digital display technologies, which allow patterns, images, text, to be mapped onto a building’s surfaces, thus changing its appearance” (Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, 151). Edler’s statement brings us back to the crux of the thorny question already proposed. Is changing appearance on the surface enough to effectuate a true performative architecture, with the characteristics of transformation and flux at the material level and spatiotemporal enactment or is the predominance of electronic skins and so-called mediatecture just another confusion of scene and the screen—between filmic versus inhabited and co-present reality? Architectures fusing light and media image first imagined in the fantasies of the Constructivists and Le Corbusier, the “cathedrals of light” of Albert Speer and the protocybernetic architecture of the Hungarian sculptor/architect Nicolas Schöffer are now commonplace. Considered one of the early pioneers of “cybernetic art,” Schöffer already proposed in 1963 the construction of a colossal, 327-meter-high Tour Lumière Cybernétique in La Defense, on the outskirts of Paris. Following in Tatlin’s footsteps, Schöffer imagined his tower to be outfitted with over 260 mirrors and 3000 high-powered lighting instruments, its media apparatus designed to react not only to environmental parameters like wind, noise, and atmospheric luminosity, but also to radio and television signals. An early example of such media façades with light also included artist Vladimir Bonacˇic´’s DIN.21, a public computer-controlled lighting project installed on the front of the NAMA department store in Zagreb in 1968.18 Toyo Ito’s Tower of Winds (1986) in Yokohama and the Egg of Winds (1991) in Tokyo, however, are usually cited as some of the earliest built attempts to create electrotectural hybrids: electronic skin-sculptures that would rerender and remap the invisible data flows of the city onto a building-sized structure.19 Architected to mask a 20-meter-tall ventilation/water tank outside of the Yokohama central Nishi-Guichi train station, Ito’s Tower of Winds was a temporary, ovular-shaped, perforated metal structure sheath around the interior concrete ventilation tower. With 1280 mini halogen lamps and a stacked concentric set of twelve neon rings inserted between the structure’s aluminum cladding and the concrete of the tower, Ito’s

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dematerialized architecture of light came nightly into being, the patterns and brightness of its visual choreography controlled by a computer reacting to changes in wind speed and direction as well as to the ever-shifting urban noise floor (figure 3.9). “Although the tower, which winks lights similarly to other advertising neon lights, is less spectacular,” wrote Ito in a text appropriately entitled “Architecture in a Simulated City,” “it is said to give an impression that the air around the tower is filtered and purified. It may be so because what I intended was not to cause a substance to emit light in the air but to make the air itself convert into the light” (Ito 1994, 87). The Tower of Winds not only manifested Ito’s desire for an ephemeral architecture where the urban scene could “lose its clear configuration and fade into morning mist,” but also was one of the earliest in a long line of examples to reconfigure the brute material of the architectural surface into façades of ephemeral, electronic shadows (Ito 1994, 85). Even with the notoriety of Ito’s work, however, the electronic surface-skin was something that only a few architects interested in media explored early in the 1990s. The German architect Christian Möller, already working with computer-augmented installations and performance events, built a reactive light façade onto the front of the Zeilgalerie Shopping Center in Frankfurt, Germany in collaboration with architect Rüdiger Kramm. Like Ito’s earlier projects, Möller and Kramm’s Kinetic Light Sculpture also attempted to translate weather data (temperature, wind speed, and direction) and street noise into lighting representations, delivered through the changing yellow/blue color spectrum from an array of 120 HQI lighting instruments positioned behind perforated aluminum on the building’s front as well as through the animation of an LED display that visualized ambient noise in the area. Following Ito’s and Möller’s perforated surfaces through which light could be revealed, a host of other image façades further advanced the reimagining of building surfaces as pixelated low-resolution screens. Deploying sophisticated, state-of-the-art flat-panel LED lighting display technology, entire building surfaces became charged with animations, advertisements, artworks, and digitally constructed data visualizations driven by internal systems as well as by human users or sensors exploring weather patterns, urban noise, and other continually varying input parameters. For the Rotterdam headquarters of the Dutch telephone company KPN, in 2000 architect Renzo Piano installed a 3,600-square-meter semitransparent tilted curtain wall outfitted with 900 green, flat-panel Planon-brand lamps that could be animated, converting the building into a monochromatic billboard. Later projects utilizing mass deployment of LED technologies included the National Library of Belarus in Minsk (2006) and featuring a massive rhombicuboctahedron form adorned with 4646 RGB LED lights; the LED-covered, 300-meter T-Mobile headquarters in Bonn, Germany, designed by the German design group ag4 Mediatechture; the Dexia tower in Brussels (2006); and dozens of projects in Europe, the Middle East (such as Dubai and Qatar), and Asia, where it was not uncommon to see Blade Runner–esque buildings with displays of more than 5,574

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Figure 3.9 Toyo Ito. Tower of Winds, 1986. Photo © Shinkenchiku-sha.

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Figure 3.10 bix.at.

realities:united. BIX façade, 2003. Photo © 2003 Landesmuseum Joanneum, Graz. www.

square meters (the Grand Indonesia Tower in Jakarta) or even floating displays on boats (Shanghai). One of the most high-profile projects, the BIX skin—designed by the Berlin architecture group realities:united (Jan and Tim Edler) for Peter Cook and Colin Fournier’s Kunsthaus in Graz in 2004—almost functioned as a global prototype for the performing media façade (figure 3.10). Employing extremely low-resolution display technology (dimmable, 40-watt fluorescent circular tubes), 930 independently controlled pixel-like lamps capable of displaying eighteen frames-per-second scan resolution were embedded into the Kunsthaus’s front-facing acrylic façade, providing the possibility of creating lowresolution animations, texts, and films that would literally crawl over the building’s blob-like surface. Unlike similar flat surfaces, the BIX façade shared the same geometric deformation as the building itself. Described by the architects as an “architectural enabler,” the BIX skin

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immediately revealed its underlying form the moment the tubes lit up, the presence of the circular fluorescent fixtures normally used in urban homes in the 1970s providing a recognized if not slightly defamiliarized context for the building’s luminous skin (realities:united n.d.). The Edler brothers applied the same principle in their 2005–2007 Spots light and media installation, set into a more conventional (albeit also curved) building in Berlin’s bustling Potsdamer Platz area and using a higher-resolution setup.20 Like BIX, Spots explored the transformation of a building “into a communicative membrane, used primarily for the display of artistic material” (realities:united n.d.) through a series of curated themes that turned architecture into a “seeing object” (City Gaze), a manifestation of the continual transitions of travelers and transport moving through the city (Transition) and a microcosm of the city itself (Inner City Waltz). If the low-resolution, monochromatic façades of BIX and Spots were reminiscent of the Benday dots of Roy Lichtenstein’s pop canvases, then another high-profile media façade, the multicolored shifting skin of UN Studio’s 2004 redo of the Galleria West department store in Seoul, Korea, suggested the optical hallucinations of Victor Vasarely’s Op Art. Employing over 4,000 sequin-like, dichroic glass disks with color-changing LED fixtures mounted behind each disk and plastered across the façade, UN Studio created a 3,716square-meter screen that could be swept in real time with sixteen million color combinations, thus generating a kind of “living kaleidoscope.”21 In counterpoint to the fluid morphs of such color/image-changing surfaces was the emphasis on a kind of DIY hacker aesthetic of exploring buildings as surfaces for expression and play, specifically as the metamorphosing of urban façades into colossal video games, SMS receivers, and any other number of subversive messages. Enabling both present and remote users to be able to switch pixels on and off through websites, cell phones, and other devices, projects such as the famous Tetris games played on the surfaces of buildings at the TU Delft (Netherlands) in 1995 and Brown University (Providence, R.I.) in 2000, “Clickscape Public Space 1998” (which turned the surface of the E.A. Generali insurance building during the 1998 Ars Electronica in Linz into a “public drawing board”), and the Chaos Computer Club’s famous 2001 “Blinkenlights” project in Berlin, translated the anonymity of private screen-based play into visual and acoustic performances taking place on an urban scale [Urban Interactions, chapter 8]. It is difficult to keep up with the barrage of international projects and initiatives seeking to transform the global city into an electronic play of surface effects. Driven by endogenous and exogenous variables such as sensors, people, traffic, weather, statistics, births and deaths, and the neverending flow of markets, the future electrotecture continually renders the immaterial data of binary numbers into the immateriality of moving light. Yet, if all events and actions could be turned into data, did these new intelligent skins and façades simply rerepresent forces and utterances, ultimately emptying them of their material intensity and resistance? Does architecture lose its muscle, its power of lasting

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duration, when it becomes a flickering, ephemeral surface in order to scaffold itself, as Roger Connah (2001, 2) wrote, with the long history of screenal culture? Finally, in light of the hybrid materialities of smart substances where molecules and atoms undergo alteration and exert new kinds of enunciations into the world, would not digital display surfaces be a step backwards into yet another set of image representations? Whatever the response to these questions, the urban screen, like the history of projected, moving images on the stage to which we now turn in chapter 4, will not be replaced in the near future.

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4

The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the Performative Screen

The metopes of the Greek temple pediments represent, by their centering process, a coherent attempt at setting in depth. There is a direct relationship down from the classical scene to the electronic image, from the first codes of perspective to digital or virtual videos. The image is, even now, a prisoner of that rectangle, of that founding frame. jacques polieri, “rectangle and setting in depth”1

Our obsession with the origins of the projected image in the West leads us back to Athens—not only the subterranean phantasmagoria of Plato’s cave around 350 BC, but also the fabled fifth-century Theater of Dionysus, where the rectangular frame began to dominate the architectural backdrop of the stage. The façade of the skene—the wooden framework that served as storage facility, changing room, and eventually, scenic backdrop—was, at first, a low-lying structure that kept open visual access to the natural surroundings lying behind the hillside of the theater for the seated masses. As the later Hellenic and especially Roman theaters closed off the view through the construction of higher walls, transforming the skene into the scaenae frons (literally, the “front stage house”), such architectural adjustments resulted in a radically new perceptual experience for the spectator: the imposition of a dominant, background frame onto the action. The Hellenic proskenium, a series of columns set above the façade of the skene already anticipated the later sixteenth-century Italian construction of the proscenium arch, which would hence box in and frame the theatrical stage for the next four hundred years.2 In strong contrast to the hard geometric frame of the Western proscenium, the Javanese Wayang Kulit, a variation of the Indonesian wayang or shadow puppet theater that most likely originated around 900 AD, unknowingly anticipates the flickering projection surfaces to appear in the early twentieth century.3 Bundled before the delicate stretched

cotton screen or kelir lit from behind by the dancing flame of coconut-wick lamps, the spectators who gather for the magical performance stare onto a surface that is continually born anew through the intricate manipulation of the stylized cutouts of puppets by the master performer or dalang. Pressed up against the cotton surface or disappearing into large shadows as they are drawn away from the screen, the hundreds of characters manipulated by the dalang at times appear to materialize out of thin air and at other times to disappear into the shadowy darkness behind the fire. The performance setting of the Wayang Kulit is none other than the screen itself as the dalang conjures up the endless procession of shadowed characters arising out of his retelling of the Ramayana and Mahabharata myths. In our times, it is these age-old tensions between the frame of the proscenium and the flickering surfaces of projection, between flatness and depth, that continue to reinforce the screen as a central technic within artistic performances. But the appearance of these ghostly phantasms of light on the surfaces of the stage and in the gallery, loft, or buildings of the city also cannot be dissociated from their cinematic origins. It is well documented that the mechanisms and strategies of the theater were co-opted by cinema’s earliest inventors, from Georges Méliès to Eisenstein, all of whom came from theater backgrounds.4 With the explosion of perception that greeted audiences at the Lumière brothers’ first paid public screening in December 1895, when viewers thought that images would literally burst through the screen and into their laps, or the thrill of watching movies embedded into the context of live vaudeville in early-twentieth-century Americana, it is not difficult to understand why cinema at first was a weird hybrid of projected and performative forms. Yet it is the development of that other electronic imaging system, television, that has had perhaps an even more radical effect on the perception of the projected image to the spectator. Just as it is difficult to break the feedback loop between cinema and theater, we cannot also ignore the presence of the television monitor and its use in video-based performance practices. Building upon the precedents of cinema, theater, and music, video’s appearance was hailed as the ultimate time-based art. The introduction of videotape (1958) and the commercial release of the Sony Portapak portable black-and-white video camera/recorder (1967) soon relieved artists of the production-heavy infrastructures of motion pictures on the one hand, and the theater on the other. No longer restricted to the scale of these apparatuses, the cultural phenomenon of video birthed new performance forms that appeared in the most unlikely and unsophisticated of sites: off-circuit experimental galleries, lofts, basements, church meeting rooms, and even the former kitchen of a downtown New York hotel. Alongside the rapid technical evolution of electronic imaging from television and video to their eventual digitization also came new perceptual paradigms that uprooted longstanding assumptions about the relationships among screen, physical space, the live, and the recorded. Although, as we mentioned in chapters 1 and 2, projected images as

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architectonic structures within scenographic practice had a long history before electronic reproduction, the ability to record, play back, and manipulate captured images put an end to the illusionary supremacy of the live performer, sending the theater into a deep metaphysical crisis, while work with the new imagining systems flourished in other artistic contexts, such as video art. Human performers thus increasingly came to share space and time with their screenal interlopers; new actants that had to be acknowledged and reckoned with. If stages in opera houses, theaters, and concert halls had a somewhat uneasy relationship with the reign of projected electronic images during their naissance, the screen’s predominance as a performative medium in its own right accelerated through the rise of audiovisual experimentation and DJ/VJ club cultures in the 1990s. Owing much to (1) the syncretic experiments between sound and image in the early twentieth century, (2) the expanded cinema movement in the 1960s, (3) the manipulation of images in the early decades of video art, and (4) the development of computational image processing, new practices of live cinema arose that were fully neither cinema nor theater but nonetheless demanded co-present and engaged audiences. Viewers became witnesses to technological hybrids that detoured attention from the live actor in front of the projection surface to the play of pixels on the screen itself, transubstantiated by a new set of “performers”: both human digital alchemists as well as computers, mixers, and other interactive paraphernalia on the sidelines. Visible only through the glowing laptop screen, at times these almost transparent human manipulators faded, leaving only surfaces of flickering light. Despite their disappearance on the stage, however, there was still an air of performative presence emanating from the tangle of screen, space, technics, and perceivers. It is these histories of projection, from the televisual monitor and the projected architectonic to the screen itself as object and site of performance where the human actor is displaced that will now be our focus. Televisual

The now iconic object of the monitor that entered the performance landscape had its origin in two of the most important mass media developments in the post–World War II period: the widespread influence of television in the 1940s and 1950s and the development of video in the late 1950s–1960s. With the first televised broadcasts taking place in the late 1920s, it is estimated that half of U.S. households had television sets by the mid 1950s.5 As broadcast television became a mass medium, the development of video tape by the Ampex corporation in 1951 as an alternative to film in logging television broadcasts and the marketing of the Sony corporation’s Portapak, the first nonbroadcast consumer video camera, in 1965 (as a nonportable, 110V device) and later (commercially and battery-powered) in 1967, acted as key catalysts for a new generation of artists who

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began to use the object, image, and cultural iconography of the television as an politicalaesthetic conduit for channeling social criticism. For artists in the 1960s, televisual-based technologies held a compelling bundle of contradictory fascinations that were deeply linked to both rising countercultural mores and the imperatives of the broadcast television industry. For one, television was a popular medium associated with the bland and uniform vision of postwar suburban life and so its sudden transference to the rarefied world of the art gallery (let alone museum) had an appealing but suspicious quality enveloping it. More important, the interest of artists in using the possibilities of a new mass industrially generated medium served as a platform to critique, as video artist Martha Rosler has famously pointed out, the “silencing or muting of artists as producers of living culture in the face of the vast mass-media industries” (Rosler 1990, 31). The early histories of video art have been well described, but what has remained relatively unexplored is the strong influence of performance practices on these histories.6 This is perhaps not unintentional, given what we saw in our introduction as the visual arts’ tenuous connection with temporal processes, nonobjecthood, and ephemerality. Even though leading artists like Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, Dan Graham, and Bruce Nauman, among others, initially embraced video technologies, they still maintained an ambiguous relationship to performance, particularly due to its associations with the traditional stage. As Acconci stated, “we hated the word ‘performance.’ We couldn’t, wouldn’t call what we did performance . . . because performance had a place and that place by tradition was a theater, a place you went towards like a museum” (Rush 2005, 52). Despite this consternation, the advent of portable video gave artists eager to move away from the static nature of painting or sculpture the possibility of turning the camera onto themselves and recording on single-channel tape their most private and intimate expressions. Once a set of actions by the artist was recorded, they could be endlessly rewound and repeated, regardless of the site, circumstances, or time. Recording thus had the strange effect of capturing the potentially unpredictable behavior of the artist-performer and suddenly rendering it into an object outside of time and space. This effect served the purpose of enabling the visual arts to co-opt performative techniques while still maintaining their distance to “theatricality.”7 In contrast, another strain of practice—namely, an emphasis on materiality of the projected image and the interest in the real-time manipulation of that image before a spectator—owed more to the musical performance backgrounds of some of its key proponents such as Nam June Paik and Steina Vasulka than it did to the visual arts. It is this trajectory that allows us to make connections among a cluster of performative practices with the screen that, for now, may appear to be unrelated to each other: experimental theater, worlds fairs, rock concerts, urban streets, new media festivals, and clubs.

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Paik’s Instruments There are ongoing arguments about the early origins of video art, but inevitably, the discussions all come back to the almost mythic figure of Nam June Paik.8 There have been endless debates about whether Paik was the first artist to use video by way of owning an early model of the Portapak (it is a well-known fact that artists like Andy Warhol, Les Levine, Wolf Vostell, and others were already onto similar territory at the same time), but what is pertinent here is how Paik’s early composition background and interest in music figures into video’s early performance-based roots.9 Korean-born and Western-educated in music, history, and philosophy (in Germany), and an assistant to composer Karlheinz Stockhausen [Serialism, Tape, and Signals, chapter 5] at the WDR electronic music studios in Cologne, Paik was already involved in the happening-like performances of George Maciunas’s Fluxus movement and quickly fell under the influence of composer John Cage, whom he met in Darmstadt in 1958. The German painter and fellow Fluxus artist Wolf Vostell was known to have already been working on the integration of television sets into the gallery context in his notorious TV De-Coll/age already in 1958, but Paik’s transplantation of the decidedly middle-class technology of television into the art world at the Galerie Parnass in Wuppertal-Elberfeld—famously entitled the Exposition of Music-Electronic Television—in 1963 already betrayed his simultaneously perverse and playful sensibilities. If one could take Paik’s infamous statement that “television has attacked us for a lifetime, now we fight back” as a partial indicator of his critical opinion of mass televisual media at the time, then his exhibition at the private home/gallery of the Wuppertal architect Rolf Jährling directly materialized this sentiment (Ross 1998). Sprawling over the private gallery and rooms of Jährling’s residence, Paik filled his exhibit-happening—originally titled Symphony for 20 Rooms—with what now reads like a litany of avant-garde objects of the time: prepared pianos, treated violins, sonorous objects and noisemaking sculptures, a dismembered mannequin lying in a bathtub, the freshly slaughtered head of an ox, and, in one rather unnoticed area, a scattering of thirteen television sets that, as Paik later described, “suffered 13 sorts of technical variation.”10 Tipped on their side like so much technical detritus from a junkshop, Paik’s scattered televisions ran found footage of television programs contorted beyond recognition (figure 4.1). With images overlaid on each other on one set and rolled up into a cylinder in another, Paik’s vision of the monitor resonated closely to his prepared pianos: as musical instruments subjected to the nondeterministic force of electronic signals. Interestingly enough, even if his early role as televisual age iconoclast has long been emphasized, Paik’s manipulation of the TV set and its signals appeared to be not only about the destruction of the image and object of televisual media, but also the treatment of the monitor as musical instrument; not as representational screen, but as a Cageanprepared instrument. As Cage inserted the screws, bolts, wires and picks that transformed the normally resonating strings of the piano into dampened, percussive sonorities, Paik’s

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Figure 4.1 Nam June Paik. “Exposition of Music/Electronic Television” Galerie Parnass, Wuppertal, Germany. March 11 to 20, 1963. Photograph by Rolf Jährling. Courtesy of Gilbert and Lila Silverman Fluxus Collection, Detroit.

distortion of both broadcast image and monitor by way of magnetizers, rectifiers, and oscillators helped defamiliarize and thus transfigure a visual medium into an expressive instrument operating across multiple senses. In the interstices between music and the newly developing technologies of video and armed with the influence of Fluxus and Cage as well as his own Buddhist practice with its emphasis on impermanence, Paik quickly began to explore within the gallery setting not what television signified (i.e., its sign) but the temporally based constitutive processes that one could engage with it before an audience. Shortly after moving to New York, Paik furthered his interest in the television object as a key performative element. His first exhibition, the 1965 Electronic TV  Color TV Experiments at the New School for Social Research, featured a live version of his Wuppertal tinkerings, employing magnetizers, feedback processes, and the dismantling of electronic components to distort the televisual image before a captive audience. In what he later called Participation TV, visitors with cameras trained on them unwittingly became performers together among Paik’s “chamber ensemble” of prepared televisions, waving magnets in the air and speaking into microphones to warp the TV set’s signal, creating a fluid, visual music.

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The use of the televisual object as musical instrument progressed even further with the now-notorious set of ongoing performances that Paik collaborated on with the Juilliard-trained cello master Charlotte Moorman—work that reinforced Paik’s critical and playful stand on his music and media roots. The most noted of their media-musical collaborations, TV Bra for Living Sculpture (1969), a Fluxus performance in Cologne later restaged in the TV As A Creative Medium show at the Howard Wise Gallery in 1969, featured a topless Moorman wearing two miniature (3-inch) TV monitors on her breasts. Although Paik claimed that he was trying to humanize electronics and technology, “by using TV as bra, the most intimate belonging of human being, we will demonstrate the human use of technology, and so stimulate the viewers not for something mean but stimulate their phantasy [sic] to look for the new imaginative and humanistic ways of using technology,” the performance smacks of a kind of bad-boy aesthetics and an admittedly sexist gesture (Paik 1969, 6). With the groundwork already laid in their earlier, controversial project Opera Sextronique (1967), during which both artists were arrested for indecent exposure, Paik and Moorman’s controversial partnership furthered the notion that the television could become what the French sociologist of science Michel Serres has called a quasi-object: a fabricated thing mediating between human subjects and environment. The quasi object functions as a material object that is both symbol (in this case, invoking televisual media’s social and economic context) and process (constructing a system or instrument to be changed in the act of performing with it), thus altering its relationship with a subject who comes in contact with it.11 The quasi object nature of Paik/Moorman’s investigation of the television set in performance continued with their hybrid music-media instrument Violin Cello, played by Moorman in the 1971 Concerto for TV Cello and Video Tape and utilizing the video synthesizer that Paik and the Japanese electronics engineer Shuya Abe developed at the WGBH public television laboratory in Boston. Staged at the Galeria Bonino in New York, Moorman, wearing glasses made of miniature TV screens, sat behind a stack of television sets in the form of a cello, drawing her bow across the screens. Using electronic pickups that caused real-time transformations of the sound and image material, the event included live feeds of Moorman herself, intercepted broadcasts, and other video collages by Paik. Essentially a colorizing unit in which seven video inputs could be altered through nonlinear processing amplifiers, the Paik/Abe synthesizer elicited a directly perceivable interaction between performer and image, already anticipating the live, real-time processing of images that we currently take for granted. “The video synthesizer has to be played in real time, like a piano. From a purely artistic viewpoint that is highly interesting—a truly new thing that has no precedent. You simply play and then see the effect . . . it might end up producing a new fertile genre, called ‘electronic opera’ ” (Paik 1974, 55).

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The Vasulka’s Kitchen and Performing Video Even though Paik turned away from performance in the mid 1970s to concentrate on multimonitor sculptures and installations, his interest in video-based temporal events incorporating the televisual was echoed in the work of other practitioners at the time. The early video pioneers Woody Vasulka and Steinunn Briem Bjarnadottir (Steina) were not only outstanding experimental artists in their own right, but also helped forge links between the avant-garde performing, musical, and visual arts worlds with their establishment of The Kitchen in New York in June 1971. Housed at the Mercer Arts Center, a kind of downtown New York Lincoln Center with theaters, cabarets, and restaurants supporting both mainstream and new performance forms, The Kitchen was named for the old hotel kitchen inside the center where the venue was located. Originally founded by the husband-and-wife team—Czech and Icelandic émigrés, respectively—The Kitchen was created to respond to the demand for a public presentation environment where friends and colleagues could show experimental video work. As a public alternative to their loft (which the Vasulkas had already outgrown), The Kitchen stands as one of the earliest presentation platforms for technological experiments with video in a performance context. For the Vasulkas, video was a performance: an “activity,” and not “art a priori.”12 Gradually becoming one of the premiere presentation venues for the newly developing electronic arts, The Kitchen—or, as it was described in some publications, The Kitchen Videotape Theater—was “a theater utilizing an audio, video, and electronic interface between performers (including actors, musicians, composers, and kinetic visual artists) and audience” (Vasulka and Vasulka 1971–1972, 1). Creating a new genre of performing video that was neither cinema nor theater but somewhere in between, the Vasulkas enabled a presentation environment where spectators gathered in a room to watch video screenings of new work. Referred to as “live video performances [which] involve the generation, synthesis, and processing of images during actual performance time” (Vasulka and Vasulka 1971–1972, 5), the Vasulkas played with forms that were simultaneously outside of the gallery and theater context, experimenting with the fusion of music and synthetically generated or altered video images. Combining Steina’s classical training as a violinist and Woody Vasulka’s background in film and mechanics, performance became to be seen as the generation of gestures with the direct engagement of a machine.13 With her shift from music to video and particular interest in the construction of realtime image processing tools, Steina’s work followed a similar path to Paik’s. Their crossinfluences are not surprising, considering that both artists were part of the same downtown New York experimental arts community and among the earliest in the video field. This fascination with the phenomenology of the electronic image was highly evident in both Vasulkas’ early experiments. In fact, the manipulation of the monitor and camera as instrument in Steina’s Violin Power cycle (1969–1978) already picks up where Paik left off in his work with Moorman.

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Called “a demo tape on how to play the violin,” later versions of the piece featured Steina manipulating the live image of herself using the violin hooked up to a Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, an analog device developed in collaboration with engineers Steve Rutt and Bill Etra that enabled the reshaping of television frames through a programmable deflection system.14 This work would later continue in the software realm through Steina’s follow-up Violin Power performances of the 1990s, when she used a MIDI–enabled15 violin to transform both live camera-fed and prerecorded laser disk images in a virtuosic display of real-time editing and montage. In terms of the working environment, The Kitchen was a far cry from the media performance presentation venues of today. A payphone acted as the only telephone number for the office, while open curatorial practices resulted in a kind of open mike/open video night that took place every Wednesday evening, for which people could bring their own videotapes to show before the public (figure 4.2). Primarily interested in video during their years with The Kitchen (between 1971 and 1973), the Vasulkas also let in the door the “great impurities” of other disciplines like theater and “other forms of alternative culture.” In the first newsletter of the organization, the first of many prospective activities included the pursuit of “Media Theater,” “utilizing pretaped and live video- and audiotapes, live performance, live music, projected slide and moving pictures, and light “shows”

Figure 4.2 Ben Tatti, Electronic Imagery, Video installation shown at The Kitchen (New York, N.Y., United States), May 18, 1972. Courtesy of the Vasulkas.

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offering a visual spectrum of all light frequencies and energies” (Vasulka and Vasulka 1971, 1). Additionally, an early experiment called The Actors Video Workshop (AVW), described in the press releases as an “ongoing process of discovery emphasizing the interaction between theater and modern media forms” was also in residency (Vasulka and Vasulka 1971–1972, 6). The main objective of the AVW was to create experiments and projects that focused on theatrical performances within live video environments. Simultaneously, The Kitchen was also home to the Midnight Opera Company, another group exploring the potential of live stage action and video “within an opera framework.” Desiring the exploration of video as moving scenery through “the presentation of ‘flash backs’ allowing for the exploration of past, present, and future simultaneously,” the Midnight Opera Company sought the added visual dimension of watching what was occurring live through different angles, running the tape simultaneously or with a slight time delay. “The effect is to create a living cubism of movement that takes place with the dance or mime, utilizing all spatial directions” (Vasulka and Vasulka 1971–1972, 9). Although the Vasulkas departed after the literal collapse of the hotel housing the Mercer Street Arts Center in 1973, The Kitchen relocated and quickly grew to become one of the premiere venues for experimental performance work in the United States in the late 1970s. Despite this later success, we must bear in mind that the initial organization of The Kitchen was radical in providing both a presentation home and context for the then fast growing but still very alternative video art/performance scene—a media rich scene that was still far from acceptance within the framework of traditional cultural institutions. Screen Violations

Alongside Paik’s experiments in Germany and New York, his fellow Fluxus compatriot Wolf Vostell also sought out new kinds of settings in which TV-based art performances could transpire. In May 1963, approximately two months after Paik’s defilement of the television monitors in Wuppertal, the Smolin Gallery in New York sponsored two Vostell décollage TV events. The first, a solo show entitled Wolf Vostell & Television Decollage & Decollage Posters & Comestible Decollage, featured the same kind of televisual shenanigans as the Paik show in Germany, this time with six “transformed” monitors exhibited while Vostell encouraged gallery visitors to engage in their own performative DIY décollage by smearing vials of liquid on magazine posters hung on the gallery walls. The second sponsored activity was more in line with the performance-oriented Fluxus and Happening events of the time. Taking place in a New Jersey field as part of the YAM festival, Vostell’s TV Burying deframed the television monitor from its intended context through décollage techniques. In this action, Vostell produced an elaborate ritual in which running television monitors were first hit with custard cream pies, then wrapped in barbed

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wire, and eventually buried in the ground. While Paik and Vostell’s actions commented on the military-industrial context of media images, a similar performative defilement of television sets occurred twelve years later with the California video collective Ant Farm. Given a much more sharpened political agenda, the group’s Media Burn (1972) involved the ramming of a 1959 Cadillac Biarritz through a wall of kerosene-doused television sets at the San Francisco Cow Palace—an undoubtedly forceful critique of the banality of televisual culture. The Videated Self in Performance Despite crossovers like Paik, Vostell, the Vasulkas, and others, the visual art world’s interest in performance and video took another direction away from the formal, compositionally centered real-time abstractions of Paik and Steina. Instead, the technical ensemble of camera and monitor became instruments to record and reveal private actions inside the artist’s studio that were not necessarily designed to be shown to the public. Armed with the ideal apparatus in which to perform, record, and distort the self, the camera and monitor acted as a new electronically enabled mirror, displaying the human face and body as disguised, slowed down, sped up, or moving forward or backward in time. In the late 1960s and 1970s, dozens of artists as varied as Vito Acconci, Bruce Nauman, Dara Birnbaum, Joan Jonas, Peter Campus, John Baldessari, Ana Mendieta, Nil Yalter, Chris Burden, Valie Export, Peter Weibel, Martha Rosler, Marcel Odenbach, Jochen Gerz, Ulrike Rosenbach, and others began to explore the performative potential of the video camera to, as Bill Viola described, develop and understand the self (Viola 1981 [1995], 71).16 What is key in the work of so many diverse artists using essentially the same technologies is that through the camera and monitor, the gallery increasingly became a site of performance. With the spectator proving to be a central component in not only the reception of an artwork, but also the creation of it by being made aware of the processing and manipulation of observation by technical instruments like the camera, including the audience as performer in the action became a possibility. Paik had begun to explore this in the 1965 New School performances, as well as others, but suddenly, with the aid of portable technology, such experimentation made a further conceptual leap by placing the audience into a precarious position among themselves as performers, the artist, and the technology itself. Such techniques are important to describe here, as they would also have a major impact on the use of video within more traditional theatrical performance contexts. Beginning with Organic Honey’s Visual Telepathy (1972) and continuing with Funnel (1974), Volcano Saga (1987), and Sweeney Astray (1994), the work of, for example, visual/ performance artist Joan Jonas is emblematic of the direction of self-revelation that videobased performance practice would take. Having first studied art history and sculpture, Jonas, like many artists at the time, was quickly drawn to performance, as it afforded

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the possibility of working with multiple artistic elements (sound, image, space, gestures, objects) simultaneously. “From the beginning, the mirror provided me with a metaphor for my investigations as well as a device to alter space, fragment it and to reflect the audience, bringing them into the space of the performance. . . . Later, after visiting Japan in 1970 I bought a Portapak and began to make video tapes. This device enabled me to add another reflexion and to relate to the audience through close-up on the live transmission, CCTV system. The monitor is an ongoing mirror” (Jonas 1990, 367). Jonas was one of the mavericks in the integration of video into performance work. Many of her pieces, which not ironically took place at The Kitchen in the mid 1970s, pioneered techniques that would continually crop up in similar alternative performance practice in the following decades: sculpture-based spaces dotted with monitors and projections coupled with live and prerecorded images of the artist interacting with camera and environment. The Spectator on Camera Another early attempt to bring the gallery audience into the space of performance by way of the television monitor was the work of visual artist Bruce Nauman. Trained in sculpture, Nauman began examining the potential of the camera and monitor to record private, almost ritualized actions of himself in his studio in many key works in the late 1960s. It was his series of corridor pieces, beginning with Performance Corridor in 1969, however, that pulled the viewer into a vertiginous relationship with themselves enabled by televisual tricks. Breaking with the static reception of the artwork via the live camera, Nauman set out to embed and implicate the viewers in the experience of the artwork, while constructing a disorienting unease and complicity between them and the space they inhabited. In an early exhibition of the corridor pieces at the Nicholas Wilder gallery in Los Angeles in 1969 (perhaps the first video exhibition in a West Coast gallery), Nauman demarcated the gallery space with a series of six narrow corridors, three of which were navigable by the visitor/performer. Cameras mounted atop both the passable and empty corridor walls continually pumped live feeds of the environment to stacked monitors at the end of the passageways. Thus, the visitor/performer was confronted with a perplexing labyrinth of live and prerecorded images. The feeling of presence and absence, of seeing and proprioceptively experiencing the same space with one’s body, and then just as suddenly seeing the same space as an empty void, caused many visitors and critics to articulate emotional states ranging from suspicion to fear and dread. The most notable of the corridor incarnations, Live/Taped Video Corridor (1970), first installed at the Whitney Museum, had perhaps the most profound effect; one, that in a now often-cited statement was described by critic Margaret Morse as a feeling akin to having experienced that her body “had come unglued from my own image” (Morse 1990, 153). Nauman’s deceptively simple environment consisted of two plywood walls, approxi-

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mately 11 meters long and 8 meters wide apart with two monitors stacked on top of each other and positioned at the end of the corridor. A previously taped image of the empty corridor played on the bottom monitor and as the participant to the installation cautiously inched her way down the narrow passage, the visitor’s live image was revealed on the top one. Yet, like a technological Tantalus, the participant’s image became smaller the closer that he came to the monitor, due to a live security camera positioned at the far end of the corridor and outfitted with a wide-angle lens watching the space. The viewer, while becoming the performer/subject to the work, simultaneously performed with the camera/monitor. Although Nauman’s complex of architecture, media, and performer-spectator perception appeared to function in a purely conceptual manner, it is critical to keep in mind the palpable, felt impact generated by the affect of technology and the visitor/performer operating in tension with each other. Nauman’s corridor installations as well as other video works featuring himself engaging in repetitive and banal but altogether disturbing activities also operated with the same phenomenological effects. The spectator was turned into performer not only unwillingly, through the instrument of the camera, but also into the object of other observers’ performances. As Nauman himself stated, “it’s very easy to describe how the piece looks, but the experience of walking inside it is something else altogether which can’t be described. And the pieces increasingly have to do with physical or physiological responses” (Nauman 2005, 120). Like Nauman, the video artist Dan Graham also harnessed the camera and monitor to generate situations amplifying the performative role of the spectator. An articulate writer and critic in addition to his artistic practice, Graham began to explore video in the early 1970s as part of a larger inquiry into the roles established between public and private space and the influence of architecture in shaping these domains. Examining television’s and video’s functioning as window and mirror in projects such as Picture Window Piece (1970), Present Continuous Past(s) (1974), Time Delay Room (1974), and Three Linked Cubes—Interior Design for Space Showing Video (1986), Graham embarked on a series of video-based performance works researching the role of the observer in relation to the monitor. In many of his pieces, Graham carefully orchestrated the technologies of video, as well as two-way glass and mirrors, time delay, and feedback to interrogate the processes of observation in relation to electronically projected images on the screen. Challenging the assumption that what passes on the monitor is both taking place in real time and space, Graham directly placed the act of observing the monitor itself as the performance. “A video monitor’s projected image of a spectator observing it, depends on that spectator’s relation to the position of the camera, but not on his or her relation to the monitor,” wrote Graham, “A view of the perceiver can be transmitted from the camera instantaneously or time-delayed over a distance to a monitor which may be near or far from the perceiver’s (viewing) position in space and time” (Graham 1990, 179).

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The Monitor and the Stage If the gallery increasingly became the site for technologically mediated performances between visitors and environments, with very few exceptions the proscenium theater was not particularly interested in the fracturing of the live by the technical monstrosities of video. Influenced by the work of 1960s gurus like Grotowski, Joseph Chaikin, Peter Brook, and the Living Theater, the experimental theater world—particularly in the United States—was more obsessed with the sacredness of the performer and a strippeddown, poor-theater aesthetic not reliant on electronics [Performance in the Realm of the Technical Image, chapter 2]. The gradual transitioning of television technologies into theatrical performance thus heightened the interesting tension between the use of such technologies within the theater versus the performance contexts emerging from the experimental visual, musical, and media arts. During his early work in the mid 1960s, Paik also ventured beyond the site of alternative gallery performance and into more traditional stage environments. Most notable was his collaboration on Merce Cunningham’s and John Cage’s sensor-driven interactive dance performance Variations V (1965), where the artist briefly moved beyond the monitor, projecting his distorted magnetized TV images in large scale as part of a frenetic visual backdrop accompanying Stan Vanderbeek’s experimental films, sensor-driven music by Cage, David Tudor, and Gordon Mumma, and Cunningham’s sensor-driven improvisation [Cunningham’s Techne, chapter 6]. Svoboda’s CCTV Experiment

Paik’s move to the more traditional world of the performing arts with Variations V was not the first use of televisual technologies as an integral part of the postwar performance landscape. One of earliest documented yet now-forgotten examples of the use of televisual images in theatrical performance was Josef Svoboda’s [Kinetic Scenes, chapter 2] scenic design for a production of the contemporary Italian composer Luigi Nono’s opera Intolleranza, staged by Sarah Caldwell at the Opera Group of Boston in 1965. Although not featuring a television monitor as part of the visual scenography, Svoboda’s production is one of the earliest to make ingenious use of CCTV (closed-circuit television) and magnetic tape that enabled the live recording and playback of the stage action together with large video projection. A joint collaboration with MIT and the Boston public TV station WGBH (the same station that later facilitated the development of Paik’s and Abe’s video synthesizer in 1969), the use of television technology in Svoboda’s production was far advanced for its time. Described by the composer as less of an opera and more of a “scenic action,” Nono’s Intolleranza was a series of short scenes utilizing Brechtian techniques such as voice-over, projected slogans, texts, and documentary footage in an effort to forge an encyclopedic archive of the cataclysms of the twentieth century.

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Svoboda’s production utilized CCTV technologies, which at the time were the privy of large broadcast institutions and universities such as MIT, in order to transmit both live and prerecorded images onto the stage. “In the Boston theater,” wrote Svoboda, “I was able to put my hands on equipment and facilities that I previously could only dream about. Part of the dream was industrial television with the possibility and capability of reproducing whatever was being shot” (Svoboda 1993, 79).17 In the production, Svoboda projected live images of the performers, who in real time would confront their distorted or negative/inverted video doubles. He also used these CCTV recording and playback technologies to record and delay stage actions as well as broadcast the action of some of the singers, who were located in TV studios 5 kilometers away from the actual performance site. One of the most riveting uses of the technology was the possibility to turn the live TV cameras onto protesting crowds outside of the opera house and project 5 m s 6 m images with the aid of powerful black-and-white Eidophor video projectors. In essence, this use of live documentary footage, what Svoboda termed “TV from the City,” shifted the entire form of the opera from a historically constrained artwork to the feeling of a live TV broadcast. Another use of the television camera for Svoboda was the ability to turn it onto the live, seated audience and thus make them implicitly part of the action. This effect was used at particularly poignant dramatic moments during the production, such as the recitative of a young African American singer singing a civil rights protest song. Accompanied by New York Times archive footage of KKK lynchings in the background, Svoboda projected the staring audience onto the large back screen and, using color inversion technologies, began to populate the soon-incensed audience with color-inversed black doppelgängers. What is also worth noting is that Svoboda managed to employ television within a traditional operatic context in 1965, using its mode of production to fundamentally influence the making and reception of the opera. The opera was produced not only in the traditional site of the rehearsal studio and stage but also in the television studio, where editing and directing choices were dictated by the stream of image possibilities coming from the cameras. Even if Svoboda’s production seems to be an anomaly for its time due to the scenographer’s own expertise in developing modern technologies for a theater setting, it was inevitable that televisual media would soon have a profound impact on the traditional stage. Video Scenography: Video Free America and Chelsea Theater Center

One of the earliest examples of an established theater integrating video technologies into stage production was the avant-garde, Brooklyn-based Chelsea Theater Center. At the time one of the most adventuresome theater companies in the United States, and in residence at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Chelsea began collaboration with the alternative San Francisco video collective Video Free America (established in 1970) and its founders

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Skip Sweeney and Arthur Ginsberg.18 Through a personal connection between Ginsberg and Chelsea producer Michael David, Video Free America became video artists in residence at Chelsea in 1971, creating what Sweeney termed “video sets” for a series of landmark theatrical productions between 1970 and 1974 and being one of the first artist groups to bring the language of the growing alternative video art scene to bear on the traditional theater context. Over the course of three productions at Chelsea, Heathcoat Williams’s AC/DC (1970), poet Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish (1972), and the American premiere of Austrian playwright Peter Handke’s Kaspar (1973), Video Free America developed a suite of techniques for the sculptural incorporation of monitors into the scenographic environment and the use of live video technology. AC/DC—an avant-garde, McLuhan-inspired early 1970s play dealing with the sensory overload generated by mass media—featured nineteen television sets integrated into director Robert Kalfin’s frenetic mise-en-scène while Ginsberg and Sweeney manipulated live video feedback in addition to the use of prerecorded material and instant replays of stage action. The next project, Allen Ginsberg’s dramatization of his own unstagable poem dealing with the Hebrew prayer of lament Kaddish, continued the integration of video into theatrical mise-en-scène but utilized a tryptic of large projection surfaces turned on their sides, in addition to CCTV, live cameras, and filmic images. Moving the action backward and forward in time, Video Free America’s direction also used video technologies to mirror the stage environment, slowing down and speeding up scenes, thus irreparably altering the flow of real theatrical time. What video finally brought Kaddish and the group’s most challenging Chelsea experiment—German director Carl Weber’s staging of Austrian enfant-terrible Peter Handke’s notoriously difficult work Kaspar in February 1973 with actor Christopher Lloyd—was the ability to show multiple perspectives on the stage, to have the camera’s point of view influence a live event. Weber’s production of Kaspar would be a milestone in the subsequent use of video technology’s integration into live theater contexts. Based very loosely on the German legend of Kaspar Hauser, a boy who was raised in a cellar completely in isolation and who could speak only one sentence when he wandered into the world at the age of seventeen, the 1967 play depicted the construction and destruction of a human being through the medium of language. Over the course of the production, the audience became witness to the conditioning of the character Kaspar (who appeared autistic) by way of off stage voices or prompters who bullied, tortured, coaxed, interrogated, and forced Kaspar to become “normalized” through a series of absurd exercises and virtuoso language games. With its themes of social control, Weber, a former assistant to Brecht at the Berliner Ensemble, professor and professional director in Europe and the United States, transplanted the play from a European to an American context that specifically addressed the normalizing power of television.

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Figure 4.3 Video scenography for Kaspar (Peter Handke). Chelsea Theater Center, Brooklyn Academy of Music. Brooklyn, NY. February 1973. Directed by Carl Weber. Video by Video Free America (Skip Sweeney and Arthur Ginsberg). Photo Amnon Ben Nomis.

The production itself continued Video Free America’s experiments by integrating monitors directly into the architecture of the stage scenography: this time, a scaffoldinglike set that featured two vertical rows of rotated televisions on each side of the stage and a strip of seven televisions mounted at the top of the proscenium itself (figure 4.3). The video material ranged from prerecorded television clips that would interrupt the action (Godzilla was a favorite), prerecorded segments with Kaspar and prompters featuring disembodied images of ears and mouths, and, finally, live CCTV feeds of the stage action. The use of the live camera and a matrix router that could send the images to the battery of monitors helped establish multiple perspectives of the event for the viewers (showing, for example, a side view frontally) and, simultaneously, created a visual sign for the media’s power as an instrument of control.

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The sheer complications of working with analog gear within the fluidity of a rehearsal process coupled with the inability to edit the video as one would edit film led to a complex series of technical issues for the production. The continual incorporation of the live and the prerecorded was short–circuited, as the taping took place near the tail end of rehearsals, leaving little stage time for the complex choreography of the image onslaught. Every change to the video, which today is taken for granted due to the facility of NLE (nonlinear editing) software, had to be laboriously rerecorded on stage. Last was the unexpected challenge of finding an actor who could perform with his/her own video image over the course of an entire evening. Weber eventually chose Lloyd (who would go on to achieve international fame playing the absentminded character Doc Brown in the Back to the Future films) due to his split-second comic timing and virtuoso ability to interact with both Handke’s extremely precise and absurd language and the actor’s video doppelgänger—a task that even Lloyd admitted was extremely difficult.19 Although audiences generally received the production well, many critics were at a loss to understand the television monitors that they felt violated the sacred space of the theater. In particular, German critics who saw the production were shocked at the use of technology, judging it to rob the purity of live presence seen so essential to distinguish theater from televisual media. But Kaspar set a precedent not only through the use of video in more traditional theatrical settings, but also through its attempt to integrate technological apparatuses fully within the dramaturgy of a theatrical text. Here, both technology and “content” were integrally related and played off each other in a seamless manner. Furthermore, Video Free America’s connection with Chelsea was a rare example of crosspollination between different scenes: alternative video and the traditional stage.20 There was no doubt that others began deploying video technologies in the traditional bastions of the theater around the same time after the early attempts of Svoboda and Video Free America laid out the language and techniques for the use of video within live performance over the coming decades. Even if the technological sophistication of the machinery radically changed with the development of color video, the camcorder, and digital video in the 1980s, the inventory of techniques for the televisual monitor and live camera in performance from their start in the 1960s to the peak period of use in the 1980s and 1990s remained relatively unchanged. The Monitor and the Mise-en-scène Culled from the visual arts, live art, and theater, the techniques by which video was utilized in performance reads like a laundry list of the early experiments that we have discussed. Video could be used in performance settings to (1) invoke the cultural phenomenon of television or, more broadly, the media (video as a sign), (2) articulate the tension between the live and the recorded, (3) articulate the tension between lived stage and media time and fragment its expected continual passage, (4) challenge the line between the public and the private, (5) invoke the image and experience of surveillance, (6) occupy sculptural

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space (as a light source, for instance), (7) provide multiple perspectives and points of view, (8) demonstrate the tension between presence of the flesh and blood performer and absence of the body, (9) emphasize the utter artifice of the theatrical event, and (10) act as a microscope, closing in on and recording elements unbeknownst to the human eye (a system of repetition). Suddenly, in the 1980s in the United States as well as in Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia, the performance stage was awash in video images. In her work Les Écrans sur la Scène, the French theater historian and theoretician Béatrice Picon-Vallin estimated that, for example, in Montréal, Canada, alone from 1981–1986 the number of performance works utilizing video exploded, with some twenty-five productions in 1986 using video and monitors. By the 1980s, performance practices with video had successfully fused the visual context of the monitor as a sculptural object normally found in the gallery or (increasingly) museum with the conscious, popular invocation of a mass, suburban medium. Nevertheless, what the deployment of the video apparatus accomplished was to exacerbate the tension between the flatness and frame of the electronically generated media image and the lived three- and four-dimensionality of the stage. The approach of San Francisco–based performance and visual artist Laura Farabough, for example, was exemplary in exploring this tension. Farabough, who began using video with her company Snake Theater (cofounded with Chris Hardman) in the mid 1970s, continued such mediated explorations at a larger scale with Nightfire Theater in the 1980s. Seeking a full integration between the live stage event and the televisual image, Farabough used the monitor to invoke the banality of American suburban life brought on by television as well as to frame formal experimentation with the integration of live actors and their video doubles and multiples. Influenced by visual artists such as Bruce Nauman’s work at the Nicholas Wilder gallery with its almost violent appropriation of the media object of the television into a high art temple, Farabough pushed the envelope between video and the live performer in a series of productions such as Obedience School (1983), Liquid Distance/Timed Approach (LA Olympic Arts Festival, 1984), Under Construction (1985), Baseball Zombie (1985 and in collaboration with Video Free America), Investigation through a Window (Tokyo, 1987), and Bodily Concessions (1988–1991). Her 1982 work Obedience School, an examination of postcapitalist American suburban paranoia, created a completely synchronized, external performance running on video; what Farabough referred to as a “time prison.”21 Using the video apparatus in architectural/ sculptural configurations (Under Construction and Baseball Zombie) as well as a device to reveal the artifice of the stage and the internal emotional lives of the performers, Farabough’s manipulation of the video image functioned as a distinct counterpoint to her stage action, generating a completely different performance space, albeit simulated, for the spectator inside the realm of the monitor against that taking place on the actual, physical stage.

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At the same time, in New York City, a similar explosion of interest occurred among theater artists who rapidly embraced video in the effort to alter the perception of the live performer. Originally trained in sculpture and film, New York–based artist John Jesurun’s earliest self-authored plays appropriated the languages of video and film and directorially applying them to stage conventions to destabilize the line between live theater and media realities. Although not yet directly incorporating video technology, his long running serial soap opera/play Chang in a Void Moon, staged at the Lower East Side Pyramid Club from 1982–1983, used techniques harvested from video and cinema such as abrupt scene changes to simulate edits and placing actors in unusual configurations (on their backs, sides, in the air) to simulate the multiple angles of camera point of view, particularly from a bird’s-eye-perspective. Jesurun then moved on to more elaborate forms of televised theater, utilizing combinations of live actors and performers on multimonitor setups in projects such as White Water (1985) and Everything That Rises Must Converge (1990) or the more perverse Slight Return (1994), in which an individual trapped inside a room was recorded by five CCTV cameras that projected the images to a distant audience. Within these productions and others, Jesurun manipulated video to regain both the sense of intimacy lost in theatrical space (actors would be “face to face as it were with the audience”) as well as to reveal and conceal gestures and expressions from individual performers not necessarily visible to the naked eye without the help of the camera’s magnifying characteristics.22 Squat Theater [“New Formalisms,” chapter 2] also deployed the television monitor as part of their attempt to fragment the fragile line between fiction and (media) reality. In the collective’s most notorious production, Andy Warhol’s Last Love (1978), staged in their New York 23rd Street storefront theater/living quarters, a live camera that was trained on the storefront window at the street transmitted images of pedestrians who stopped to stare into the Squat performance space, while a seated audience in the back of the theater were witnesses to both the video image and the real image simultaneously (figure 4.4). Squat’s combination of monitor, mirrors, camera, and the (real) storefront window overlooking the street scene outside of the theater in Andy Warhol’s Last Love was, in many ways, prototypical for the manner in which live audiences were forced to confront the swelling uncertainty of image-mediated experiences in live performance. At the same time but in a more sober vein, the avant-garde theater collective Mabou Mines, extensively examined the possibilities of live interaction with the video image in a single work: Lee Breuer’s and Ruth Maleczech’s 1983 “performance poem” Hajj, an interior monologue by cofounder Maleczech. Facilitated with the help of Sony and performed at the American Film Institute in Los Angeles, Hajj employed cameras and monitors ingeniously inset within a triptych of mirrors as a device to recall and reconstruct lost memories.

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Figure 4.4

Squat Theater. Andy Warhol’s Last Love, 1978. Photo © Theodore Shank.

Sitting within a realistic bedroom set surrounded by the mirrors, Malaczech’s virtuoso performance of an old woman painstakingly recalling the movement of her life was complemented by live and manipulated video doubles so that the actress’s actual mirrored reflection melded with her own electronic simulacra. In fact, Hajj’s play on recalling the past through the medium of camera and image helped manifest yet another aspect of video in performance—its ability to invoke, record, play back, and manipulate memory, suggesting filmmaker Chris Marker’s musing from his 1982 Sans Soleil: “I ask myself how people remember if they do not make movies or photographs or tapes, how mankind used to go about remembering” (Marker 1983). Another contemporary stage artist who became widely known for his integration of video into theatrical mise-en-scène was the American theater and opera director Peter Sellars. Influenced by contemporary artists like Bill Viola and Bruce Nauman, Sellars shifted back and forth between art world–inspired use of video as sculptural element within his elaborate opera and theater mise-en-scène and a more directly political invocation of the monitor as a contemporary instrument of media control.

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While still an undergraduate at Harvard, Sellars was known for his scandalous updating of classical theater and opera texts. Already using television sets playing supermarket ads in his adaptation of Mayakovsky’s socialist satire The Bedbug at Harvard in 1979, Sellars— as artistic director of the now-defunct Boston Shakespeare Company between 1981 and 1983—used video as a key dramatic element in his 1983 production of British composer Peter Maxwell Davies’ rarely seen chamber opera The Lighthouse. Running on three monitors, video segments of storms, sand, water, and blasts of light dramatically punctuated Davies’ story of the discovery of an abandoned lighthouse off the coast of Scotland in 1900 and the mysterious disappearance of the three caretakers who ran it. The invocation of a natural landscape, of an image space outside of the physical border of the theater, reached an apotheosis in Sellars’s 1992 Salzburg festival production of Messaien’s Saint François d’Assise [Architecture Machines, chapter 2]. Told in twelve scenes or tableaux, the opera examined the life of St. Francis of Assisi through a synesthetic mingling of color, light, and complex rhythmic and timbral sound. From the start, Sellars imagined the employment of the screen and television in particular as a contemporary homage to the polyphony he saw as representative of the stained glass windows of medieval art in the production. “Video screens are the stained glass windows of our epoch . . . the screen creates a surface as flat as stained glass where spots of color unite to form an imagemetaphor” (Picon-Vallin 1998, 64; my translation). “The flashes, the movement of the camera, the change of perspective,” emphasized not only an experience of visual polyphony in the production, but also video as an integral part of the opera would be “an expression of a world in perpetual change” (Picon-Vallin 1998, 64). Originally conceived to be displayed on a massive Sony JumboTron display used in stadiums, the technology’s cost prohibition for even the world’s largest music festival forced the design team to rethink the video mise-en-scène to being displayed across thirtyeight video monitors, thirteen of them literally suspended in the air at various heights over designer George Tsypin’s towering set. The slow movement of water, clouds, fire, birds, and abstract light played across the multiple suspended screens and a battery of monitors on the actual stage stacked into sculptural forms of crosses, gates, and walls suggested a kind of electronically mediated transcendentalism. “As God never finished in his creation of the world,” stated Sellars, “we are immersed in a continual creation—that is what I want to evoke” (Picon-Vallin 1998, 65). Though video could express a Heracleitan world in continual flux in St. François, Sellars’s 1996 production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—not surprisingly but appropriately set in Venice, California—during the 1992 Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, used video in a more overtly propagandistic manner. Delivering a blistering critique of twenty–four-hour CNN culture and freely appropriating the camera/monitor techniques of his theatrical peers (in particular, the Wooster Group), Merchant was told on a mostly barren set with the exception of tables, chairs, and a row of nine monitors

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suspended over the stage, placed on the floor, and hung over the audience. With the aid of live cameras, actors who turned away from each other to speak were optically captured, suddenly reunited together and exploded into multiple copies on the television screens while prerecorded news footage (most notoriously, an endless series of helicopter shots from CNN surveying the riots in progress) displayed a twentieth-century media imaginary of Merchant’s severe comments on seventeenth-century race relations. For Sellars, both the sign and affective tenor of video forcefully demonstrated the fracturing and reduction of human experience through the media.23 The Wooster Group’s Televisual Gesamtkunstwerk

No exploration of the interplay of video and theater would be complete without discussion of the New York–based collective The Wooster Group, perhaps still the most internationally well-known theatrical ensemble to work toward the total integration of video techniques into the contemporary mise-en-scène. Inspired by the Group’s use of televisual media, Peter Sellars stated in 1986 that “The Wooster Group is speaking the language the theater will speak fifteen to twenty years from now. I’m talking about the vocabulary of stage language, of what a set looks like, how lighting behaves, how sound works, how video works, how all of those things go into creating a total work of art” (Bartow 1988, 283). Emerging out of director Richard Schechner’s 1960s radical theater collective the Performance Group, The Wooster Group (named for their space on Wooster Street in Soho, New York) was founded in 1974 by Spalding Gray, Elizabeth LeCompte, Willem Dafoe, Peyton Smith, and later Ron Vawter, Jim Clayburgh, and Kate Valk. In order to create a theater of simultaneity “where we can talk on the phone, look out the window, watch TV, and be typing a letter at the same time” (Wooster Group 1981), The Wooster Group’s collective working methods generated a controversial series of formally radical, multilayered productions that explored the contemporary political and social ethos and underbelly of late twentieth century American culture. Using sampling techniques applied to existing, sacred texts of theater authors such as Arthur Miller, Thornton Wilder, Eugene O’Neill, and Anton Chekhov combined with the detritus of popular visual and aural culture, the Group’s entangled productions emerged with a sense of the frenzy and bricolage of contemporary, electronically dislocated life facilitated by way of a intricate choreography of highly skilled performers, video, sound, space, and light under the direction of LeCompte. Many admirers of contemporary experimental performance look to The Wooster Group as the originators of video in a theatrical context but we have seen that this is far from the historical reality; the television set played a critical role in the Group’s work, but was only one of many elements vying for the spectator’s attention. In fact, one of the earliest uses of video within the Performance Group/Wooster Group configuration was a curious 1975–1976 project directed by Schechner (and featuring LeCompte as an actress) entitled

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The Marilyn Project, which used live television cameras and a series of mirrors in order to double and reflect the action taking place on the televisionstudio–like stage and on two monitors hung from the ceiling.24 After Schechner’s departure, it would not be until 1981 that the television would reemerge as one focal point in The Wooster Group’s fragmented stage universe. Although the Group worked with slide and film projection from 1975 onwards, the earliest use of the monitor dates back to Route 1 & 9 (1981), a high-octane shredding and reassembly of classical Americana playwright Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, which featured the performers in blackface and unearthed (if not wholly intentionally) contemporary deep-seated racial stereotypes and the buried political hegemony underneath Wilder’s mythic portrait of America. Route 1 & 9—as well as subsequent productions, including L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points) (1986), a sampling of Timothy Leary’s conversations about his Harvard LSD experiments in the 1960s—collaged with a rapid-fire version of Arthur Miller’s Salem witch trial/Joseph Mc Carthy–inspired The Crucible, Frank Dell’s The Temptation of St. Anthony (1988), a radical deconstruction of Flaubert’s 1874 poem “The Temptation of St. Anthony” fused with Lenny Bruce monologues, Brace UP! (1989), an elegiac take on Chekhov’s The Three Sisters, and the group’s famed reinterpretations of Eugene O’Neill (The Hairy Ape and The Emperor Jones, featuring performer Kate Valk in blackface and kabuki kimono), among others, all prominently extended the full range of theatrical possibilities between the monitor and the live human performer. The TV and microphone acted as central technological motifs in the Group’s work; however, these apparatuses functioned less as technological beings for the sake of technology and more as Brechtian estrangement devices: electronically enhanced distancing systems that both removed the historical-cultural weight of the performed texts while interrogating them with technical systems to make them more present. In The Wooster Group’s world, the television set served multiple functions: as an object moved about the stage, a machine for visual inscription, a technical instrument enabling the amplification and attenuation of stage relationships, and a screen for the live display of performing simulacra and popular culture. Subject to the same ruthless deconstruction and transformation as the group’s dizzying array of textual sampling forays and forever ensconced as one element in designer Jim Clayburgh’s (and later, Ruud van de Akker’s) endlessly changing modular sets constructed of platforms, overturned tables, pulleys, aircraft cables, and chairs, the TV monitor made a ubiquitous appearance in The Wooster Group’s media-theatric world but was also continually subject to defamiliarization itself. For example, in Fish Story—a 1993 epilogue to Brace Up!—one of the televisions was used to hold a samovar, while in Brace Up!, televisions were placed on tracks embedded in the stage floor, shoved and pushed toward and away from the audience like so many used packing boxes or discarded furniture items (figure 4.5). During the production of Brace Up!, video designer Chris Kondek actually

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Figure 4.5 The Wooster Group. Brace Up!, 1991. Pictured (l–r): Scott Renderer, Jeff Webster (on large monitors), Paul Schmidt (on small monitor), Kate Valk. Photo © Mary Gearhart.

employed neutral density filters as gels mounted on the television monitor screens to lessen the harsh technological effect and quality of the monitor.25 Although from the naïve observer’s point of view, The Wooster Group’s productions appeared to be chiefly concerned with technological experimentation, from the start LeCompte’s interest in video was less the gee-whiz factor of innovation for its own sake and more interest in its role as a contemporary cultural icon combined with the ability to record moments and play them back. One crucial characteristic of video in the Group’s work was that it could be used to record and document events and encounters between the performers and the director that took place on stage during rehearsals. Indeed, the very “live” qualities attributed to The Wooster Group’s work—its chaotic world veering between complete disorder and an odd sense of order—derived partially from the performers’ highly skilled ability to both play themselves, shift acting styles at machine-gun speed, and incorporate their own lives and the Group’s working process into the creation and production process. What the introduction of Sony’s Hi8 camera in the mid 1980s and the continued evolution of “prosumer” (high-end consumer electronics) video did was provide The

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Wooster Group with wider access to machines that previously had been restricted to the well-endowed video infrastructures of public television stations and community media centers. Similar to the manner in which the Portapak video camera in the late 1960s shifted the technical-aesthetic possibilities of an entire generation of artists, the ability to purchase a cheap, light Hi8 camcorder that was less sensitive to theatrical lighting color temperatures than its bulkier cousin the Portapak gave the group the ability to record their private working process in rehearsal. This recording of process thus enabled not only the re-review of rehearsals post hoc but more fundamentally, provided raw material for incorporation into the public mise-en-scène. Another crucial development in video technology in the 1980s was the introduction of the affordable Panasonic WJ-MX50 mixer, a device that provided the ability to mix and dissolve two channels of video live and thus allow the group to play more fluidly with the time structures in performance through techniques such as cross-fading, luma, and chroma-keying. Like the artistic opportunities provided by prosumer video cameras, the introduction of video mixers to the consumer market in the late 1980s gave LeCompte and her collaborators the capacity to create seamless transitions between different types of material: from the live performer on-camera in the room to prerecorded images of the live performer or samplings of movies and other cultural desiderata. With these technical possibilities, LeCompte (and others) could work with video without being a technician herself, unlike earlier use, which required the video artist to be technician and artist simultaneously. Treating the monitor as an object critical to the scenographic mise-en-scène, the collective also continued to fine-tune existing as well as pioneer new techniques for the integration and manipulation of video images in their performances. The close-ups of television, the presence of an actors’ face on a monitor that only the audience was privy to, the doubling of live actors, and the recording/playing back of absent performers were some of the multitude of concepts that had been started decades earlier but lay in wait for more sophisticated machinery and the creative context by which to exploit such machines. In addition to video performing its predestined role as electronic magnifying glass, distorter, and transformer of the human performer, it also served as texture—as something that LeCompte and Chris Kondek (responsible for video up until 1990) stated was not necessarily tied at all to the content of the work, but rather as associations derived from particular moments in which the screen could provide iconic counterpoint to live stage action. Video, according to LeCompte, could function as “music”—as a technique to invoke a different set of tempi, rhythms, and densities in relation to other happenings on stage (LeCompte 1994, 196). In Brace Up!, for example, the performance was periodically punctuated with bursts from the onstage television sets playing Japanese samurai and monster films—images that derived from rehearsals where the company watched such

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films, which provided a strong rhythmic and textural counterpoint to the quiet ennui embodied in Chekhov’s text. Another function of video in the Group’s work was spectral: to literally represent and invoke the absence of performers who either were not present at particular presentations or had died in real life. In the 1986 Boston showings of L.S.D., the monitor appeared on the long inquisition like table with a prerecorded image of actor/director Michael Kirby, who could not attend the performance and whose video image hence acted as a stand-in. This technique reached a more mournful and poignant dimension in the revival of productions with videotaped images of actor Ron Vawter after the actor’s actual death from AIDS in 1993.26 As video and sound grew more sophisticated in the late 1990s, the technical dimensions of the Group’s work expanded with their increased use of digitally controlled and produced media. In its more recent productions after 2000, the television in fact, started to make a (slight) retreat from its role chiefly as a presentational device (although this was still apparent) and more to a control system that could issue commands or provide impulses to the performers, unbeknownst to the audience. With the Group’s 2003 production of Poor Theater, a strange take/re-enactment of Jerzy Grotowski’s legendary Akropolis production from the mid 1960s, sets of partially hidden monitors were used chiefly as a prompting system for the actors, providing images of gestures and movements from the recording of the original production in Poland that the performers were required to precisely respond to. The same techniques were at work in the Group’s ongoing experimental take on Shakespeare’s Hamlet (2006) and more radically expanded with There Is Still Time . . . Brother (2008), an interactive, panoramic movie projected on a 360 degree screen developed through Jeffrey Shaw’s Australian based i-cinema research center.27 The Monitor and the Mise-en-scène II Principally through The Wooster Group’s festival tours at predominantly European and Asian performance festivals during the late 1980s and 1990s, either directly or indirectly media stage work coming from the United States had a major impact on the direction of experimental performance internationally. With the advantage of state cultural subsidies, European artists and companies began developing performance works using video technology that sometimes went far beyond their North American counterparts in terms of scale and historical-political context. Some of the most innovative work with video and performance emerging from Europe in the 1980s came from Italy, where an entire movement of media-theater dubbed Nuovo Spettacolo arose. Slightly later but still deeply influenced by the movement was the spectacular work of the Milan-based collective Studio Azzurro, an ensemble of artists founded in 1983 by Paolo Rosa, Fabio Cifirino, and Leonardo Sangiorgi. Working across the

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domains of exhibition design, film, computer-augmented interactive environments, and theater, Studio Azzurro emerged out of a photography collective (Studio Azzurro Fotografia) interested in exploring the development of new image languages through technology. Marked by a rigorous historical dramaturgical approach to image material, the collective began working on video settings for theater and opera projects in the mid 1980s named “video ambients” (video ambiente) that made links between the physical language of the body and the immaterial nature of video.28 In order to “spread beyond temporal and spatial limitations” of theatrical performance while “still constituting a specific form of dramatic art,” Studio Azzurro’s video settings consisted of large-scale, multimonitor sculptural environments as well as projected imagery that used developing video matrixing technology in order to create images that would be sequenced across the banks of monitors.29 Even if video artists such as Dara Birnbaum, the Vasulkas, Gary Hill, and Fabrizio Plessi also used such multimonitor setups, particularly as the technology of switching and routing of signals became more sophisticated, Studio Azzurro was one of the early companies to bring such a strong visual signature from video art onto the performance stage. Prologo a diario segreto contraffatto (Prologue to a Secret Counterfeit Diary), Studio Azzurro’s 1985 dance theater collaboration with Giorgio Barberio Corsetti (the Italian director and founder of the well-known Italian media art theater company La Gaia Scienzia), featured seven actors and fifteen monitors stacked in various vertical configurations and thirteen live cameras that captured the live performers, creating a seamless flow between the live stage action and the video setting. With the cameras grabbing movement and dramatic scenes from actors on and off stage, actions that took place in the real stage setting continually overflowed onto the stack of monitors. The dust that an actor blew out of his hand, for example, could suddenly appear to travel across a vertical tower of screens. Studio Azzurro extended the multimonitor setup in original theatrical projects like Primo Scavo (1998), a dance work featuring a giant wheel of sixteen side-by-side monitors and in their large-scale music/theater work Ultima Forma di Liberta il Silenzio (Silence as the Last Form of Freedom, 1993), staged in an outside quarry and featuring two massive multimonitor cubes that appeared to rise out of the ground. Similar to Studio Azzurro, video was incorporated in Giorgio Barberio Corsetti’s experiments developing a “dramaturgy of stage objects” rather than conventional theatrical narratives. As founder of La Gaia Scienza, one of the stalwart groups in the Nuovo Spettacolo (also including Falso Movimento and Magazzini Criminali), Corsetti’s interest in “presenting atmospheres” led to collaborations with Studio Azzurro as well as his own work in the late 1980s and 1990s. With the monitor appearing as the rule rather than the exception on stage toward the end of the 1980s, international theater and performance directors as diverse in cultural,

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economic, and sociopolitical contexts as Reza Abdoh, Robert Woodruff, Ivo Van Hove, Heiner Müller, Frank Castorf, René Pollesch, Gob Squad, Lucien Pintile, Forkbeard Fantasy, Tim Etchells and Forced Entertainment, JoAnne Akalaitis, Ping Chong, and Travis Preston; composers such as Robert Ashley and Steve Reich (with video artist Beryl Korot); choreographers like Meg Stuart, William Forsythe, London’s DV8, Anna Teresa de Keersmaker; solo performers like Bill Irwin and Laurie Anderson; theater companies like Théâter de Complicité; and the younger “next-generation” Wooster Groups such as the New York–based Big Art Group and the Builders Association set about to incorporate video technologies into their experimental mise-en-scène. Even more traditional theater directors like Peter Brook, who had showed little interest in electronic technology in his groundbreaking stage work for the RSC in London and later, at the Bouffes du Nord (C.I.R.T.) in Paris and abroad in the 1960s and 1970s, also turned to the monitor in his 1993 production/adaptation of Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, entitled L’Homme Qui. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the use of video, particularly in younger directors’ productions on German state theater stages, alone led the influential journal Theater Heute to comment on whether there were any German productions without video cameras and monitors on stage. Lest you think that video’s use was restricted to the small avant-garde performance coterie, the 1990s also brought the move of performance and video into the entertainment mainstream. Whether through collaborations between popular artists and avant-garde artists like Robert Lepage’s staging of Peter Gabriel’s Secret World tour in 1996, Broadway spectacles like director Des McAnuff ’s 1993 adaptation of the Who’s classic rock opera Tommy (a production that featured an entire video monitor matrix framing both sides of the proscenium), or video in the Broadway production of Largely New York by new vaudevillian performer Bill Irwin, electronic images became just another technoscenic element, like computer-controlled lighting and automated digital sound, to be increasingly used by the popular culture entertainment machine. The Monitor and the Architect In the late 1980s, architecture as well became obsessed with the video image’s performative possibilities, particularly through architects’ affinities to the ideas of early video artists’ connections to architectural-performative experimentation. The video monitor featured a prominent position in the much-lauded Glass Video Gallery designed by Bernard Tschumi for the center of the northern Dutch city of Groeningen. A long walkthrough transparent glass box planted in the middle of the city and featuring embedded monitors running various programs from artists, Tschumi’s glass structure unmistakably recalled Dan Graham’s 1970s and 1980s experiments in its emphasis as a site of watching from inside and outside, simultaneously. The electronic confrontation between the performative image, the public, and the video screen was more sharply articulated in Diller  Scofidio’s experiments in public spaces.

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The team’s 1996 video installation Jump Cuts at a San Jose, California, United Artists movie multiplex attempted to replace the movie marquee with a series of twelve LCD monitors installed on the cinema’s outside façade and featuring live surveillance of the inside stairwells, escalators, ticket booths, and concession stands. Diller  Scofidio aimed at an even bigger scale with the installation of their public art project Facsimile on the front façade of the Moscone West convention center (a center that opened in 2004) in San Francisco. Installing a 5 m s 9 m LED screen that in theory, could be latitudinally and longitudinally moved across the building façade by way of a vertical steel armature, the oversized video surface attempted to beam prerecorded images of convention delegates mixed with live images taken from a camera positioned on the top part of the screen and focused into the building out into the urban center of San Francisco’s Yerba Buena district. A similar strategy was also at work in the pair’s 1999 reimagining of the Brasserie restaurant in New York City in collaboration with designer Ben Rubin. Time-delayed images of patrons entering the restaurant from revolving doors captured by a hidden security camera were fed to an array of fifteen flat-panel screens poised in a row above the restaurant’s bar. Notwithstanding that the sites of these installations were embedded into the urban wild, they still intrinsically played with earlier video art tropes, particularly the capturing and projection of everyday life as public spectacle under the gaze of panoptic systems of control.30 Possibly the ultimate statements to complete the video image’s transformation from avant-garde performance device to mass specularity was capped by Irish rock group U2’s use of thirty-six onstage monitors during their 1992 CNN-esque Zoo TV tour, or, even more fittingly, Bill Viola’s work for the industrial band Nine Inch Nails’ Fragile tour in 2003, which featured the artist’s larger-than-life elemental images of fire and water emitted over three high-resolution, 23-meter LED panels suspended over the stage. With its rows of monitors, four massive screens anchored into a scaffolding-like set construction, a suspended East German Trabant automobile doubling as a Vari*lite projector and lead singer Bono waving a video camera into his face, projected over multiple screens, in a post–Berlin Wall riff on the Narcissus myth, U2’s Zoo TV tour quickly reminded one that the experiments with video in a stage setting that dated back to the 1960s had come full circle in the 1990s, some twenty-five years after video’s creation. Prefaced by digital technology, however, another wave of experimentation lay on the horizon. With the introduction of mass-market digital video cameras and computer NLE systems appearing in the mid 1990s and the increased resolution of high-resolution plasma, LED displays and high-definition (HD) video at the start of the 2000s, one could see then-unexploited possibilities, not only for increasing the technical accuracy of the video image in performance (via HD) but also advancing the possibilities for its real-time computational manipulation.

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The Architectonic

In direct contrast to the small scale of the video image and its imprisonment within the box of the monitor, the projected image on a screen yielded a remarkably different perceptual effect, able to take on architectural dimensions and be mapped onto a multitude of surfaces. What was lost in terms of the video image’s repeatability across multiple channels was gained in scale: the ability to match or dwarf the size of the live performer. With the emergence of the projected image and its characteristic architectonic scale, a history that first precedes the televisual one and then later runs parallel to it, the live performer’s mostly unchallenged position as the center of the stage universe was suddenly put into question, forever becoming only one element in a much larger mediated space. It is conceptually as well as politically difficult to separate the development of projected images from the technical apparatuses of lighting and projection that enabled such illusionism and image magic.31 As early as 1907, the Swedish expressionist playwright August Strindberg described the use of projected images as a central element in stage design—a desire that, despite several attempts, remained unfulfilled, due to the immaturity of lighting technology at the time. In 1876, the German lighting engineer Hugo Bähr constructed a unique optical projection system that involved the use of painted scenes on rotating mica disks that when set before powerful arc lamps projected moving images onto the cyclorama. Bähr’s device, which quickly found itself into the scenic inventories of international theaters, proved a first for the use of moving, albeit painted images in a stage environment. Likewise, the Spanish/Italian Renaissance polymath and inventor Mariano Fortuny revolutionized the possibilities of stage lighting and, with it, projection, through his research into indirect lighting techniques. His 1904 patented indirect lighting system, the Fortuny dome, comprised electrically controlled, moveable arc lamp instruments indirectly focused on colored pieces of silk. Ambient, colored reflections from the silk would then be projected onto a half-spherical cyclorama, making it possible to create even spreads of ambient light in multiple colors and shifting the visual scenery from dawn to dusk. Enabling the creation of even levels of light across the cyclorama, Fortuny’s system brought the ability to create indirect, reflected areas of light without shadow, through the sheer power of the arc lamp technology. Cinefication and the Stage

The year 1923 marks a milestone in the use of the moving image in relation to human performers. Experiments with film projection on the theater and opera stage already were taking place between 1910 and 1912 in Germany, with attempts to use projected filmic images in variety revues as well as productions of Wagnerian operas to invoke moving images of nature against painted backdrops.32 Most of these attempts, however, were minor in comparison to the deployment of architectonic projections in the hands of theater

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artists like Piscator in Berlin in the 1920s and, to a lesser but still significant extent, Meyerhold in Russia at about roughly the same time. In chapter 1, I described in detail Constructivism’s fascination with the mechanical technologies of the newly dawning industrial age, but it was the cinema, in particular, that generated palpable excitement from directors like Meyerhold, Foregger, and Eisenstein. Constructivism sought to utilize the cinema not only through staging performances that appropriated filmic techniques but also by directly incorporating the screen into the dramatic content and structure of the mise-en-scène itself. “The Constructivist introduces the cinema screen into his installation system so that the director can use it to enhance the propaganda aspect of the play,” wrote Meyerhold in 1923.33 Meyerhold’s desire for what he termed a cinefication of the theater was undoubtedly linked to the revolutionary hopes that he and the larger Soviet avant-garde had in the moving image’s power and persuasion to connect to the proletarian masses—the same persuasion that would later be so forcefully rendered in Eisenstein’s films like Strike! and Potemkin and Dziga Vertov’s 1929 poetic tribute to the nascent industrial modernism of the twentieth century, The Man With the Movie Camera. Furthermore, the Constructivists’ interest in the materiality of mass industrial production was immediately evident in the way that the screen and moving image were deployed in performance work; particularly, in how film as both image and material were played with and commented upon. Eisenstein’s famous incorporation of an actor walking through the projection screen with film in hand as the coda for Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man was the first in a long series of works that played with the physical medium of film itself and culminated with the work of structural filmmakers like Stan Brakhage and Michael Snow in the late 1960s. Figuring prominently in the only remaining photographic records of Meyerhold’s production work in the early 1920s, the image of the hanging screen suggests that projection had already begun to be exploited for its full potential in connection to the stage. Yet Meyerhold’s imagination of what the cinematic image could do in a revolutionary theater outstripped his practical ability to deploy it. “[We will use] every technical means at its disposal, will work with film, so that scenes played by the actor on stage can alternate with scenes he has played on screen” (Meyerhold 1966, 186). The historical records, however, suggest that for whatever reason (most likely a technical one), projection played a relatively minor role in Meyerhold’s work. For example, out of Meyerhold’s enormous oeuvre, only three productions on the historical record used projection—Earth Rampant (1925), D.E. (1928), and The Mandate (1929)—and these were restricted to still image only (figure 4.6). Despite the technical issues, Meyerhold’s vision of the cinematic image as a kind of image architecture, a living billboard of designed slogans and texts, helped define a crucial characteristic of projection within theatrical mise-en-scène in the 1920s: the projected image tied to the promotion of a revolutionary, socialist agenda.

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Figure 4.6 Vsevolod Meyerhold and Lyubov Popova’s production of Tretyakov’s Earth Rampant, Moscow. Meyerhold State Theater, March 1923.

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Figure 4.7

Erwin Piscator. Fahnen (Flags). Volksbühne, 1923.

This viewpoint was simultaneously explored during the same period with Piscator’s work at the Volksbühne and later at the Piscator Bühne (figure 4.7). Certainly, we have to acknowledge the director and his stage designer Traugott Müller as perhaps the first artists to fully incorporate projected film as an integral element of the theatrical mise-en-scène. Yet it is important to understand the dramaturgical motivation behind the technology. Not realized on financial grounds, Piscator imagined the use of film in the theater as early as 1919. In 1927 in The Political Theater, he more explicitly outlined the dramaturgical-political context for projection—specifically, film. For the director, the projected image functioned in three distinct manners: (1) didactic, (2) dramatic, and (3) editorial/commentary. The didactic use of film presented the viewer with objective facts—historical information about the subject on stage. In this context, the projected text, slide, or moving image was given a documentary function. In contrast, through what Piscator called “the playing of a part in the development of the stage action and a substitute for the live scene,” the dramatic function of the projection suggested its full incorporation into the dramaturgical

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fabric of the stage event (Piscator 1978, 238). The gauze-constructed screen could architecturally divide up and slice through the action, increasing its tempo and “delivering” dramatic impact through the rapid-fire iconic play of cinematic time structures.34 In addition to its documentary and dramatic functions, film also served the similar role of the Greek chorus—as an instructional commentary on the stage event, addressing the spectator directly while accompanying the action. Piscator’s use of text and image to comment upon and/or contradict the stage event was also appropriated and further developed by his dramaturge, the playwright and director Bertolt Brecht, and the stage designer Caspar Neher, who began to deploy a similar technique with projected titles and images in their own theatrical productions during the mid to late 1920s. In a 1931 text entitled “The Literarization of the Theater (Notes to the Threepenny Opera),” Brecht stated that the use of projected titles was “a primitive attempt at literarizing the theater . . . moreover, the use of screens imposes and facilitates a new style of acting . . . as he watches the projections on the screen, the spectator adopts an attitude of smoking and watching” (B. Brecht 1978, 43–44). Alongside projected titles, which functioned as literary commentary to scene changes or the dramatic action and announced a set of opinions that could resonate or contradict what the spectator would be thinking, Neher extended the graphic effect of projection to include still images and drawings that also could provoke a dialectical relationship between stage events and large format screen ones. In a potential foreshadowing of the use of live camera projections of onstage performers, Neher’s projections, as Brecht wrote, would “adopt an attitude towards the events on the stage; as when the real glutton sits in front of the glutton whom Neher has drawn. In the same way the stage unreels the events that are fixed on the screen. These projections of Neher’s are quite as much an independent component of the opera as are (Kurt) Weill’s music and the text. They provide its visual aids” (B. Brecht 1978, 38). The stage’s movement, in a relatively short time, from being awash in expressionist effects and pastoral images created by Bähr’s rotating disks to become a site of media documentary—the (sometimes) visually harsh, stripped-down propaganda of large-scale texts commenting on the action or images of mass revolt—more than suggests the populist aura that surrounded moving images blown up and embedded into stripped down, anti-illusionist stage environments. Projected Propagandas

Through the influence of directors like Meyerhold, Brecht, and Piscator who turned billboard, placard, and agitprop posters into projected images to advance revolutionary socialist agendas, graphic or newsreel stylistics became the reigning aesthetic forms for dramatic propaganda. The majority of these experiments took place in Germany and Russia in the 1920s but their influence would soon carry across the Atlantic. In the 1930s, Piscator’s techniques were absorbed by the short-lived but highly influential Federal Theater Project,

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one of the artistic components of the U.S. government’s Work Projects Administration (WPA), a broad initiative founded in 1935 as part of Roosevelt’s New Deal policy and designed as a strategy to employ workers hit by the Great Depression in 1929. Under the leadership of the powerful former Vassar professor Hallie Flanagan, the Federal Theater Project sought not only to put unemployed theater professionals back to work but also to create living dramas that could critically address significant social issues, ranging from race and class, to labor politics, poverty, and the abuse of power. With generous subsidies from the U.S. government that insulated the initiative from commercial market pressures, Flanagan focused on works demonstrating “the struggle of many different kinds of people to understand the natural, social, and economic forces [for] a better life for more people.”35 Similar to Piscator’s work, one of the initiative’s central projects, the Living Newspaper, created a new kind of documentary performance that deployed technological means such as projection, dramatic lighting effects from a single spotlight, constructivistinspired settings and quotations from theatrical forms as wide ranging as shadow puppet theater and the circus to address specific social concerns, then labeled as the documentary influence. Working within a formulaic structure that involved the framing and invocation of a particular controversial yet socially relevant problem (e.g., housing cooperatives, health, labor, and race relations), a historical narrative of its causes, and finally a presentation of possible solutions, plays such as Triple-A Plowed Under (1936), Injunction Granted! (1936), Spirochete (1937, about the conquering of syphilis), and Power (1937) created a populist form of entertainment within a broader sociopolitical conscience. Moreover, the Living Newspaper’s projected environments of slogans, texts, charts, maps, statistics, cartoons, and newsreel footage strangely resemble our current obsession with the representation of information (numbers, binary digits, graphs, equations, etc.), weighing in as one of the central devices to create connections between the mediaactivated masses and the traditions of stage craft–based storytelling. Although the majority of Living Newspaper productions took place in New York due to financial constraints, the form was also encouraged and occasionally tested in other locales across the United States, with varying degrees of success. Robert Edmond Jones’s Theater of the Future In the Living Newspaper form, Piscator’s application of filmic image projection as documentary and didactic medium reached a mass public, but the use and impact of projected media for more strictly artistic ends was also not lost on the direction that stage design might take in a future America. In a series of writings published as The Dramatic Imagination in 1941, stage designer Robert Edmond Jones, already known for his luminously evocative sculpting of stage environments for playwright Eugene O’Neill’s moody expressionist dramas, predicted a future fusion of projection and dramatic form. “In the simultaneous use of the living actor and the talking picture in the theater there lies a wholly

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new theatrical art, whose possibilities are as infinite as those of speech itself,” wrote Jones in a 1941 text entitled “A New Kind of Drama.” “Motion pictures are our thoughts made visible and audible. They flow in a swift succession of images, precisely as our thoughts do, and their speed, with their flashbacks-like sudden rushes of memory-and their abrupt transitions from one subject to another, approximates very closely the speed of our thinking” (Jones 1941, 17–18). In following his own ideas for a cinefication of the stage, in which “some new playwright will presently set a motion picture screen on stage above and behind his actors and will reveal simultaneously the two worlds of the Conscious and the Unconscious which together make up the world we live in,” Jones’s vision of a mediated theater significantly departed from overt politically didactic visions, instead encompassing a richly expressionist universe where the screen functioned to peel away the deeper layers of human consciousness (Jones 1941, 18). This interest in the potential of filmic technologies to create a new dreamlike stage performance reached its apex in a series of four lectures given at Harvard in May 1952 entitled “Towards a New Theater.” In one of the talks, subsequently entitled “Theater of the Future,” the scene designer already foresaw what we today take for granted: the increasing shift toward stage architecture composed of humans interacting with and being dwarfed by fleeting images on screenal surfaces. “The drama of the future will deal, not with objective experience or subjective experience but with both varieties of experience at the same time, expressing our essential duality in a new theatrical idiom, involving the simultaneous use of the stage and the screen” (Jones 1943). Czech Cine-Scenography I: Burian’s Theatergraph Akin to Jones’s expressionist vision (which came some twenty years later) and in strong contrast to the explicitly propagandistic use of projections in Russia and Germany, a quite different vision of filmic media in performance arose in the Czechoslovak Republic. Even as the rise of National Socialism in Germany effectively ended both formal experimentation and cultural sentiments toward Communism, in the late 1920s the Czech scenographer E. F. Burian had already begun work on a system that would become a harbinger for much subsequent work in projected image architectonics. Critical of the bare, unaesthestic, and didactic use of projected media in Germany and influenced instead by director/designer Gordon Craig’s and Adolphe Appia’s notion of a theatrical synthesis of elements such as text, music, light, and space, Burian synthesized a theatrical experience more in line with the expressionist experiments in Wagnerian operas that had taken place in Germany in the early 1910s. In effect, Burian’s Theatergraph system attempted a complete integration of human performer and projected image while attempting to eliminate the screen’s rectilinear borders. According to Burian, the Theatergraph would be “theater with static and film projection, coherently and dramatically integrated into the directorial-scenographic

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Figure 4.8

E. R. Burian. Schematic for Theatergraph system. Prague, 1936.

conception.” Though the Theatergraph system was based on 1930s film technology, the system also depended on other materials, particularly “the discovery of transparent projection screens covering the front of the stage and allowing for a simultaneous viewing of the actor and the filmed image on the screen” (J. Burian 1975, 30). From the standpoint of today’s multiscreen, computer-automated and computersynchronized projection systems, the Theatergraph apparatus was relatively simple (figure 4.8). The system consisted of precise control of light and image through the use of four projectors (two front film and one slide and one slide from the rear) and had two

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screens: one of a gray, scrim-like gauze that covered the entire opening of the front proscenium and was used for both slide and film projection, and another that was poised at an angle upstage and could frontally be projected on from the stage-right wing. Combined with sophisticated lighting techniques that were used in tandem with the projected images, Burian and Kouril could literally make their actors appear and disappear into the foreground and background surfaces, surrounding and immersing them in an expressive choreography of light and image. Debuting in Prague in a 1936 production of the German playwright Frank Wedekind’s notorious 1896 Frühlings Erwachen (Spring Awakening), the Theatergraph employed projections not for their Piscatorian didacticism or as information to set the scene, but to generate an expressive landscape of textures—an environment that would, at times, make the performers indistinguishable from the projected light and surfaces catching and holding it. Other productions that made use of the Theatergraph (Eugene Onegin in 1937 and Goethe’s The Sufferings of Young Werther in 1938) explored different spatial configurations between performer and image, ranging from placing actors before the front screen to dividing up the screen into a landscape upon which multiple projections were displayed. More important was the way in which Burian and Kouril imagined the relationship of the screen to the performers. “Alongside the theatrical research work of Piscator and Traugott Müller,” wrote the theater design historian Denis Bablet, “the experiments of Burian and Kouril helped pave the way to new theatrical forms in which the projection screen and colors no longer characterized stage design. These came to be replaced by architectural structures, light, and projected images. A new civilization of audiovisual communication was born” (J. Burian 1975, 154). Projection, as Bablet later stated about Burian’s work, would no longer occupy a central point of focus, as a billboard, but would rather expand “like light across the multiple surfaces.” In effect, what Burian attempted to accomplish already foresaw late-twentiethcentury and twenty-first-century holographic-inspired visions of floating images on water vapor or highly compressed air in the need to transcend the rigid frame of the projection screen entirely, moving from Piscator’s use of it as a surface prop positioned besides or behind the performers and instead toward the screen’s dissolution in a total environment of lighting-ensconced media. In contextual terms, projection for Burian was used sparingly in order to highlight key dramatic moments and in this sense, it served a dramaturgical rather than a purely decorative function. Projection was what Czech theater historian Jarka Burian called “a dramatic supplement” (1975, 31), one used to transmit another level of emotional context outside of but inspired by the text being staged. Projection media could act as a memory device for the viewer, recalling previous scenes as well as a technique to reveal the underlying thoughts of a character (much as Robert Edmond Jones had imagined it) or as a direct ersatz to live performers. In other words, the content of Burian’s

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light-enabled images was not separable from their embedment into a total live performance reality. Czech Cine-Scenography II: Svoboda-Radok Even to this day, the most advanced use of projection in the early post–World War II period also emanated from Czechoslovakia, an unsurprising fact, given the enormous influence of E. F. Burian and other scenographers on a subsequent generation of Czech scenic designers. Many of these experiments were indeed not just throwing images on the stage but were instead elaborately conceived visual machineries. The most well-known were the pioneering Laterna Magika projects of Josef Svoboda and the Czech director Alfred Radok in the late 1950s. As previously seen in chapter 2, Svoboda’s interest in new technologies to reinvent scenography carried over from materials and lighting and into televisual and large-scale projected media. Originally developed by Svoboda and Radok (who—not incidentally— had been an assistant to E. F. Burian in the late 1930s) for the Czechoslovak pavilion at the Brussels World’s Fair in 1958, the Laterna Magika was by far the most internationally successful Czech contribution to the increasing interest in technologies of projection in the live performing arts arising in the 1950s and 1960s. Deriving its name from Athanasius Kircher’s early device, Laterna Magika was a technically complex form constituted by numerous mobile projection surfaces in combination with live performers that, according to Svoboda and Radok, attempted to create what the artists described as a polyphonic theater. “We would articulate the relations between actions on a screen and on the stage as neither mechanical nor illusionary, neither illustrational filmed projections (à la Piscator) nor a naturalistic illusion of reality. Film would remain film and the stage the stage; we would simply exploit the manner in which we joined the actions on stage with those on the screen” (Svoboda 1993, 110). A merge between theater, film, dance, and media exhibition, the early success of Laterna Magicka at Brussels in 1958 helped carve the way for hybrid-media events to take their place among the pantheon of prestigious yet less technically sophisticated exhibits at high-profile venues such as world expositions as well as in theaters and opera houses accustomed to more traditional performance forms. Like Burian’s work, that of Svoboda and Radok specifically exploited newly developing technologies available at the time, including motorized, diaphragmatic curtains (to change the size and shape of the projection surfaces); treadmills, for mechanically moving the performers in rhythmic relation to the projected images; anamorphic lenses, for projection onto cinemascope screens for frontal, wide-angle use; multichannel stereo sound; and the mechanical ability to rapidly position a series of screens with highly reflective surfaces in almost any conceivable geometric configuration. The first version in Brussels in 1958 featured a synchronized setup of three film and two slide projectors (projecting 12.7 cm

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slides) along with the ability to tilt one projector off its axis in order to deflect its beam to the moving screens.36 Despite this overly complex sounding apparatus, Svoboda and Radok’s artistic goal was a seamless aggregation between live and filmed action; a “simultaneity, a synthesis and fusion of actors and projection,” in which one depended on the other for its life and meaning (J. Burian 1971, 83). In contrast to E. F. Burian’s application of the Theatergraph as a scenographic instrument for staging traditional theater texts, the technological idiosyncrasies of the Laterna Magika demanded a wholly new kind of dramaturgical and perfomative form. If Laterna Magika thus had to devise scenarios that made dramatic sense in which actors and projections could interact with each other, then any shred of theatrical realism or traditionally constructed narrative was to be eschewed in favor of more formally stylistic devices, such as a detailed exploration of rhythm and degrees of motion between screen and the stage. For example, a 1959 Laterna Magicka program entitled “rhythms” was a detailed examination of different rhythmic theories, utilizing film footage from industry (machines), sports, and dance and featuring a array of live dance performances ranging from ballet to modern and gymnastic exercises. In later years, the system, under Svoboda and Radok as well as others, also tried to explore operatic scenarios (an adaptation of Tales of Hoffmann in 1962) and fairy tales (Prague Carnival from 1973 and The Lost Fairy Tale from 1977). The influence of the still-running Laterna Magika’s “search for an expressive stage embodiment for film” (Svoboda 1993, 115) is not to be underestimated. Its advanced exploration of technologically enhanced form coupled with non-narrative experience acted as a subtle if not pointed political statement in the aesthetically stifling, post-Stalin atmosphere of socialist realism. The project’s wide international popularity and exposure also provided catalysts for other later forms of similarly media saturated, location-based entertainment, such as the Disney and Epcot theme parks. In recognition of its influence, Laterna Magicka eventually moved to its own specially equipped space under the auspices of the Czech National Theater in 1973 and held long-term residencies in locations as diverse as Canada, France, the USSR, Belgium, and the United States during the 1970s and 1980s. Despite the fact that Svoboda most likely viewed the Laterna Magicka as an extended laboratory for researching the relationship between the live and the filmic and the projected and the architectonic, the system’s commercial appeal, technical complexity, and economic demands constrained it to its initial form as an entertainment revue. Like so many similar technically dependent performance forms in the earlier twentieth century, the infrastructure demands of Laterna Magicka prevented it from becoming a flexibly deployable system outside of its own context. As Svoboda reported to his biographer Jarka Burian, however, there was a more fundamental problem with the system’s form, constrained as it was by the technology of the day.

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The integration of actors and filmed images (many times of the actors themselves) was even made more difficult in that the film segments had to be planned and shot months in advance, leaving little room for adjustments in rehearsal. The dependence on a medium that could not easily be changed therefore essentially froze the very spontaneity inherent in the form of live performance. Perhaps for this reason, in the mid 1960s, Svoboda himself began to explore the possibility of Laterna Magika techniques using newly developing televisual technologies in performance, starting with the previously discussed Intolleranza and followed up by a 1968 Munich production of Carl Orff’s opera Prometheus, which employed live video feeds projected onto a monumental angled screen surface that also served as a scenic element. Such televisual technologies also resurfaced in Laterna Magika productions in the 1980s. Although Svoboda and Radok continued to work periodically on the project, Svoboda took its basic form and applied it to other stage contexts, including straight drama, opera, and spin-off installation/exhibition projects such as the equally famous Polykran and Diapolyekran setups for Expo ’67 in Montréal and Expo ’70 in Osaka, which will be discussed shortly. Projection in “The New Theater”: 1960s While the American theater stage fixated upon Broadway spectacles of the 1950s or kitchen-sink realism of writers such as Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams (who ironically had described the use of slides in an earlier version of his play The Glass Menagerie), the plastic arts were being shaken up by evolving counter-cultural artistic movements such as Action Painting, Happenings, Earth, and Environmental Art hand in hand with the politically charged climate of the 1960s. Dancers, experimental musicians, writers, visual artists, and adventuresome theater/performance artists began to rediscover the techniques that Piscator, the Dadaists, and now the Czechs had already brought or were bringing to a level of dramaturgical and technical sophistication decades earlier. In a 1966 Tulane Drama Review article entitled “The Uses of Film in the New Theater,” editor and artist Michael Kirby acknowledged the debt to earlier pioneers like Piscator and the Bauhaus but also described at length the experiments of a new generation of artists who were simultaneously moving away from both film and traditional theater. Kirby’s focus centered mainly on noted visual artists employing projected media in performance such as Allan Kaprow, John Cage, visual artist Milton Cohen, the experimental music collective the ONCE Group, visual artist Red Grooms, Dadaist Al Hansen, Robert Blossom’s Filmstage, sculptor Jim Davis, and in particular, sculptor Robert Whitman (Kirby 1965, 50–53). Sculptor Allan Kaprow’s Happening—which was defined as a “pan-artistic phenomena” in which the borders between art forms “would cross each other’s paths at various and unexpected places”—is centrally acknowledged as a free-form and unrehearsed event. Kaprow’s initial 18 Happenings in 6 Parts, which took place at the Reuben Gallery in 1959 and involved the “participation” of six “performers” and seventy-five audience members,

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however, was a tightly pre-scripted sequence of actions; a “program” featuring slide projections on the gallery walls under the clear authorial control of Kaprow himself (Kaprow 1995, 219). Around the same period, visual/sonic artist Milton Cohen’s intermedia Space Theater, based in Ann Arbor, Michigan, explored filmic constructions in live performance through a specially designed assembly of prisms and mirrors attached to a flywheel that could be rotated in space and receive a barrage of images directed from slide and film projection systems. Cohen wished to “precipitate a seeing through the ears and a hearing through the eyes . . . to exploit contemporary technological means to broaden mystery and subvert the machine” (James 1987, 363). Another central figure working with projection during the 1960s was the American mixed-media and performance artist Carolee Schneemann. Trained as a painter and associated at first with the Fluxus movement, Schneemann’s “kinetic theater” integrated the formal techniques of the happening with her own interest in the performing body. In projects such as Night Crawlers (Montréal Expo ’67), Ilinois Central (1968), and Snows (1970), among many others, Schneemann tirelessly examined the dynamics between spectators and event, not only working with film (both for its formal aspects as well as its ability to change the shape and dimensions of a physical environment) but also with the human body itself as a screen and surface within the performance—a technique that would soon be appropriated by countless other artists. In her Montréal Expo ’67 performance Night Crawlers, for example, Schneemann and an onstage partner engaged in a series of tasks, including the removal of foam rubber stuffed inside a Volkswagen in front of a film depicting horrors from the Vietnam War. Later, during the performance and surrounded by projections and sound, the audience physically moved into the center of the performance area, where they were invited to tear down elements of the scenery, including the projection surfaces, thus enforcing a more direct interaction between the spectator and the screen. During the same period, the performance experiments of sculptor Robert Whitman also expanded and challenged the boundaries between live action and projected media. Originally trained as a sculptor, Whitman’s installation-performance events toyed with the line between real performance and its filmic, projected representation, one of the central avant-garde tropes of the 1960s that would become an essential element of experimental performance’s technological-dramaturgical toolbox. Whitman was part of the group of artists working in the happening scene with Allan Kaprow; his earlier “Cinema Work” pieces such as Shower, Window, and Bathroom (1963–1964) integrated projection technology and live performance elements with static sculpture in the attempt to animate quotidian objects and transform them. Shower (1964), for example, featured a real shower stall with working water, upon which was projected a 16 mm film loop of a nude performer showering. The 1960 piece American Moon placed the spectators into long tunnels that also acted as both exterior and interior projection landscapes.

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Working within gritty, alternative, artist-run galleries and lofts in New York City, Whitman soon devised a series of live theater works that continued his exploration of live and played back procedures. The most well-known of these projects, Prune Flat (1965), which was first shown in the Expanded Cinema festival at experimental filmmaker Jonas Mekas’s Film-Makers Cinematheque and later off Broadway, was designed for a more conventional theatrical proscenium setting, and featured three female performers in white costumes, whose own images were projected onto both performers as well as onto a white screen that hung behind them. Reconstructed for performance in 2004 at the DIA Center in New York City, Prune Flat was an early but advanced example of the kind of interplay between live space and image that would take hold in the coming decades with the advancement of media technology. Although Whitman labeled his performance projects “theater works,” they clearly departed from narrative drama as such, instead attempting to harness multiple media in the service of events that Whitman called “non-verbal theater, using a vocabulary of space, rhythm, scale, and formal plastic elements that communicate the image without words. The work of doing the piece is the work of revealing the image.”37 Along with dozens of other experimental artists and filmmakers, the work of Cohen, Schneemann, and Whitman was also profiled in media theorist Gene Youngblood’s Expanded Cinema (1970), another seminal text of the period, which detailed the fomenting movement between projection and performance. Like Michael Kirby’s descriptions of the new theater of media in the Tulane Drama Review, Youngblood’s notions of intermedia theater and expanded cinema also tried to capture the hybrid nature of integrating film into physical environments involving live performers. Drawing from both cinema and theater, intermedia theater was, in the final analysis, neither genre. “Intermedia Theater is not a ‘play’ or a ‘movie’; and although it contains elements of both, even those elements are not representative of the respective traditional genres” (Youngblood 1970, 365). For Youngblood, new experiments with cinematic media and performance guaranteed that there would no longer be any pure form of these genres, but only hybrids, and that future artistic forms lay in such mixing. The kinds of intermedia performances that Youngblood and Kirby described rapidly evolved in the international alternative performance scenes and suddenly began to find much wider and popular acceptance at the tail end of the 1970s. In the popularization of projected media in live performance, for instance, arguably no one had a more widespread impact than artist/musician Laurie Anderson. Armed with a musical upbringing and a sculpture MFA from Columbia, Anderson gained recognition for her solo works in the 1970s, performing in the burgeoning downtown New York performance art scene. Anderson’s mammoth United States I–IV, which premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM) in 1983, was a watershed event, bringing projected media out of downtown lofts and into high-profile international performance venues. Spanning both the upper echelons of both high (BAM) and popular (Warner Bros. records) culture, United

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Figure 4.9

Laurie Anderson. United States, 1983. Courtesy Laurie Anderson/Canal Street Productions.

States was a sprawling four-section collage, operatic in scope, told over eight hours. With wall-to-wall music by Anderson (seventy-eight songs), United States functioned as an almost paradoxical anthem to the foibles and seductions of technologically augmented society and featured a continual moving backdrop of projected slides, film, and video behind the musicians as well as on objects and the performers themselves (figure 4.9). In an almost ironically retro turn, although many of the images utilized by Anderson appeared to have a 1980s techno sheen to them (clocks, charts, numbers, and texts), perhaps unknowingly, they also invoked the same kind of visual displays from earlier uses of screen-based projection. Hailed at the time by critics who marveled at the work’s visually formal innovations, the play between two-dimensional human performers and flat, one-dimensional projections had already been heavily explored in the previous seventy years. What United States I–IV did do, however, was begin to bring media techniques from performance practice into the wider realms of popular culture, simultaneously solidifying and historicizing the form. Anderson’s subsequent forays into visual media theater, such as Home of the Brave (a live concert film from 1983), the Nerve Bible tour (1995), and the even larger-scale Songs and Stories from Moby Dick (1999) upped the technical ante in terms of projection technologies. Freely borrowing from the visual arts, her 1995 Stories from the Nerve Bible tour

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blended elements of art gallery video installation with rock concert–scale projection environments, featuring Anderson backed by a field of rear screens, a stage of vertically aligned television monitors downstage, and a series of hanging projection surfaces in the form of a cube and a sphere, seemingly inspired by video artist Tony Oursler’s work with the projection of faces onto spherical geometries and the video matrix installations of Gary Hill. Songs and Stories from Moby Dick, a retelling of Melville’s Moby Dick, did not break much aesthetic ground in terms of media deployment but continued the same use of projections as earlier works, albeit with increased technical sophistication and coordination. While Anderson was one of a handful of major forces in the media-savvy New York avant-garde performance world to explore media theater on a large scale, the work of other well-known experimental theater artists like Robert Wilson (with the 3D-inspired Monsters of Grace) and Richard Foreman that had already created an international stir in the 1970s, spurned the use of projected images until the end of the 1990s.38 In 2006, for example, after many years of exploring how to transform performance space by means of low-tech devices, Foreman began a series of experimental “film/performance” projects in which he began to more fundamentally explore the relationship between what he called “a self-contained, full-length film” in relationship to a live orchestrated performance taking place in front of the film. His first experiment, entitled Zomboid!, and the 2007 follow-up Wake Up Mr. Sleepy! Your Unconscious Mind is Dead! attempted to break new ground not only in using film to create a series of tableaux vivant that performers could play “within” but also to generate a theatrical score that acted as a mechanism to drive and shift the live performance.39 Projection as Design The increasingly popularity of projection made it no longer sacrosanct to the avant garde but also open to Broadway and the staid American regional theater scenes in the mid 1980s, becoming so commonplace that the new term projection designer was coined.40 Exploring new notions such as “live movies” (Malone and White 2006) or visual libretti (Jerome Serlin), projection designers mainly based in the United States such as John Boesche, Wendall Harrington, Jerome Sirlin, Kirby Malone, Jan Hartley, Laurie Olinder, and others began to combine slide projection and film with computer-controlled automation to create enormous projected environments. Exploiting cutting-edge projection technology—such as high-lumen PANI projectors and new show control technologies that enabled the high-speed dissolving and fading of slides such that static images would appear to be in motion—projected scenery supplemented and heightened physically-constructed stage scenographies, but in many cases literally came to replace the set because of cost factors (Istel 1995). The aesthetic effect that the acceptance of projection design as a craft and discipline in and of itself had on performance was, in many ways, similar to the earlier and gradual acceptance of other

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“ephemeral media” such as light and sound.41 Like mechanically driven scenography, the dynamic layering of static and moving images on surfaces and exploitation of optical perceptual phenomena like persistence of vision could serve equally well in constructing the visual illusion of a total environment. Similar to Burian and Svoboda’s earlier research and creation, projection design techniques had the effect of removing the four-by-three aspect ratio of the screen as a discrete and separate element upon which media was projected (as the film screen in Meyerhold’s and Piscator’s productions suggested) and instead uniting image and performer into a mediated landscape—what projection designer John Boesche labeled “a really interesting container for the actors to stew in” (Mauro 2003). Using layers of hung scrim and hidden architectural features such as steps and platforms, designer Jerome Serlin’s early work with director George Coates [New Formalisms, chapter 2] gave the appearance that performers were floating in the air or occupying the windows of projected buildings as they moved behind and inside Serlin’s large-scale projected images. Serlin also designed a full projection-only environment for Philip Glass’s and playwright David Henry Hwang’s 1988 chamber opera 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof, the first of many film-driven spectacles that would feature live soundtracks with projected images and a trend that started with Glass’s soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi in 1982. By the 1990s, projection-driven and/or -augmented scenography reached a similar level of ubiquity as the use of video and the television monitor in international experimental performance contexts, resulting in companies in Europe, Canada, the United States, South America, Asia, and Australia basing entire productions around such techniques, eager to reexploit the precedents of earlier history as well as new formal possibilities.42 Quickly glancing at the diverse groups of artists and companies active in the international limelight in the last two decades of the twentieth century, such as the United Kindom–based Station House Opera, Forced Entertainment and the film director Peter Greenaway, Quebec’s Robert Lepage and Carbone 14, Japan’s Dumb Type, France’s Jacques Polieri, Spain’s La Fura Dels Baus, the USA’s Ridge Theater, Nightfire, Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater, Mark Reaney’s iEVR, Impossible Theater, Theater X, Ping Chong, George Coates Performance Works, The Builders Association, Three Legged Dog, Temporary Distortion and Paul Kaiser/Shelly Eshkar, Italy’s Falso Movimento, Societas Raffaello Sanzio and La Gaia Scienzia, and dozens of others whose work heavily relied on projection-based technology immediately gives us a sense of the scale and impact that contemporary image media had on the worldwide performance scene. Slide-based technologies had somewhat of a popular resurgence in the projection design landscape of the 1980s as well, not in the least due to their relatively lower cost and higher resolution than large-scale video projection at the time, but these too were soon to be technologically superseded with video and PC-based digital editing systems that could quickly streamline the entire image-making production process. Although film continued to be used, video’s advantage as a lower-cost alternative, its ability to be synchronized,

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and, most important, its real-time possibilities was quickly taken advantage of, particularly as higher-resolution and higher-contrast LCD, DLP (digital light processing) and DLA (digital light array) projectors emerged. Based on these higher-end projection technologies, new playback media ranging from DV (digital video) to DVD and HD coupled with the possibilities of live recording, editing, and mixing with real-time video poured directly out of the computer’s processor; the screen as a discrete, standalone scenic element made a strong comeback in live performance work created by theater makers, choreographers, composers, visual and media artists, opera directors, and even architects during the last decade of the twentieth century. Yet, was this supposed comeback of the screen premeditated by the possibilities as well as difficulties inherent in the medium of display technologies? In other words, the ability of video projection to deliver higher-resolution images continually encountered the difficulty of projecting an image (as multiple artists attempted to do) that was not based on the aspect ratio of a television or computer screen. Technically, if the nature of slides involved the use of photographed images that could be shot, colored, and layered such that the edges could vanish and the image could envelop space without a distinguishing frame, the sheer rectangularity of video projection acted to reinforce both the flatness of the video image and its deliberate distinction from human performers. Stage as Screen At times, it appears that some artists set out specifically to exploit the inherent tension between the quasi-cinematic-televisual aspect ratio of the frame within a frame—the screen set within the larger frame of the stage proscenium—and its ability to be greater in scale, scope, and resolution than human performers. Perhaps no better example can be given of such screen-driven techne being exercised to its nth potential than the case of video artist Bill Viola’s espace scénique for a 2006 production of Wagner’s epic opera Tristan and Isolde at the Paris Opera de Bastille. Working with high-lumen video projectors supplied by the display corporation Barco and shooting in 35 mm film that was transferred to HD video, Viola succeeded in creating what may have been the largest video projections ever to the grace the stage of an opera house. Projected onto a 6 m s 11 m suspended screen upstage, Viola’s extraordinarily high-resolution projections of human actors set adrift in landscapes of fire, water, forests, oceans, and deserts consciously called up associations and tensions between different eras of image technology: the painterly intricacies of Renaissance art dueling with the 16 : 9 aspect ratios and the extreme pixel saturation of HD video. Viola’s video space functioned not only as a parallel and poetically associative narrative to the minimally staged production, which more often than not receded into the background, but in many ways, as a cinematic replacement for the physically realized production itself, with the singers and orchestra arrayed on stage and in the house to provide expert musical

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accompaniment and tableux vivant stillness for the immense movement and scale of human performers on the glowing HD backdrop.43 Viola’s work for Tristan demonstrated both the potential and problems of utilizing extremely high definition projection, but it certainly was not the only project that aspired to bring up-to-the-minute digital imagining technologies into a live performance context. During the same period of time in which much performance work depended on projected imagery as a key scenic element, artists deployed live and large video to demonstrate associations and divergences between human performers and their filmically reproduced and manipulated images, strategies that, as we have seen, were already at work in earlier video art practices. Artists also took advantage of the extraordinary capability of live digital video to manipulate time on a scale that went beyond the small form factor of the monitor. By controlling the flow of temporality in the image sequence at the precision of milliseconds, or slowing down, speeding up, or time-delaying the live combined with the prerecorded, creators could play with extreme time distortion, on the screen and in the public’s experience, on a massive scale. Likewise, the incorporation of technologies of the cinema into the live theater experience in the 1920s in order to capture audiences whose perception had rapidly been transformed was mimicked by digital technologies, which provided live performance the opportunity to incorporate the techniques of digitally augmented fin de siècle blockbuster cinema such as modeling, rotoscoping, green-screening and compositing, morphing, and other processes. These technical possibilities allowed live action to fuse seamlessly with computationally generated environments on the screen as well as screens alight with CGI (Computer Graphic Image) effects to overflow into physical performance spaces. A sampling of late twentieth century performance work that played with such technologies not only reveals the extent to which hybrids between live video, the computationally manipulated, and the CGI image had been thoroughly integrated into contemporary performance practices, but also demonstrates how we have come to be more than merely reliant on such image technologies to make performance appear to follow the current zeitgeist—and how such technologies have subsumed us. Two New York–based companies, the Big Art Group, run by director Caden Manson and the collective The Builders Association, help exemplify the tendencies and tensions of the screen in performance of the twenty-first century. Formed in 1998, Manson’s Big Art Group created what the director called real-time film, “a conceptual model collapsing performance, television, and movies using live action and video. It examines the use of image in entertainment, the experience of the image versus its manufacture, and the split between surface and interior” (Caden Manson/Big Art Group 2001). Big Art’s phalanx of real-time film pieces, Shelf Life (2001), Flicker (2003), House of No More (2004), Dead Set (2006), and Cinema Fury (2007–2008), all conspicuously used a syncretic, simultaneous mix of live action on stage and live video on screen, while taking on such emblematic

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Figure 4.10

Big Art Group. House of No More, 2005. Photo © Caden Manson.

genres of trash culture such as slasher B-movies, soap operas, crime thrillers, and reality TV. In earlier works like Shelf Life and Flicker, the stage was composed of three large, shoulder-high projection screens that visually masked and cut off the performers’ bodies, while three fixed video cameras manipulated by the actors delivered a stream of live images to the screens, constantly exposing the simulacrum of the event and rendering live action into blasts of image and sound bites. Big Art’s later works, such as House of No More, however, moved into the postproduction territory of Hollywood mechanics by utilizing green-screen technology to composite the performers in real time into filmic settings (figure 4.10). In a green-screen box that acted as a film set, Big Art’s live and cameramediated performers jumped between settings and characters at breakneck speed, while spinning out an elaborate audiovisual narrative of mediated deception. The other group that self-consciously and at times ostentatiously worked with largescale projection technology was the cross-media theater company the Builders Association, formed in 1993 by former Wooster Group dramaturge Marianne Weems, which sought to fuse classic texts with the expressive tendencies of television, film, and architecture in order to “extend the boundaries of theater.” In contrast to Big Art Group’s unabashed, frenetic appropriation of technology meeting popular trash culture, the Builders Associa-

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tion’s work searched through the underlying mechanisms of surveillance and power structures enabled by digitally augmented super-modernity. In a series of productions such as Jump Cut/The Last Hour (1996), Jet Lag (1998), Alladeen (2002), SuperVision (2005), and Continuous Cities (2008), the company used projected images to explore the age-old media questions of fiction and reality, real and simulacra, and live and reproduced. Inspired by a passage from philosopher and architect Paul Virilio concerning electronic media’s collapsing of time and space, the group’s 1998 production Jet Lag, conceived and executed in collaboration with Diller  Scofidio [Architecture Machines, chapter 2], explored two disjointed narratives: the story of British sailor Donald Crowhurst, who, having failed in his mission to sail around the globe, eventually simulated his journey with fake news reports, and that of Sarah Krasner, an American grandmother who flew 167 transatlantic flights in the space of six months to protect her grandson from the child’s father and his psychiatrist and subsequently died of jet lag. With actor Jeff Webster in front of a continually rocking screen upon which were projected horizon-line ocean images in part 1 and animated sequences fusing CGI jet plane interiors and with landscapes of “nonplaces” (Augé 1995) such as the Brussels airport in part 2, Jet Lag’s main visual trope featured live performers on stage, arranged in minimal settings evoking an airport control tower, sitting before projected images of themselves and traipsing a uneasy relation between electronic seduction and blank numbness. SuperVision (2006), done in collaboration with the digital architecture studio dBox, explored the disconnection of electronically mediated life further, this time examining identity fraud in a post-9/11 age of computer-enabled data mining in a by now almost clichéd mise-en-scène of actors positioned behind computers onstage while being simulcast live into a projected field of information architecture systems, flowcharts, Cartesian grids, data graphics, and live feeds. In explicit contrast to Viola’s humanism, in which the screen acted as digital canvas for the representation of extreme passions of human existence, the screens in Big Art Group and the Builders Association consciously severed the human body from its position in real time and space. Whereas Big Art literally hid the performer behind the screen, which functioned both as subterfuge and mirror (another trope from video art history) for human images cut up and enhanced by the computer, the Builders Association gradually reduced the screen to no more than a giant display surface upon which the human visage was only meant as a backdrop for the ambient overlaying of data. The Builders Association’s overall mise-en-scène suggested that perhaps the final destiny of the screen in performances about technology was that of the simulacra of simulacras; a state in which, as Friedrich Kittler once reminded us, “numbers and figures become the key to all creatures” and the reproduced and or/simulated human visage is transformed into a flurry of meaningless, disembodied pixels and numbers (Kittler 1999, 19).

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Having become a standard element of the theatrical technological toolbox, the screen in twenty-first-century performance practice is now marked by digital media’s imprint where the position of the human performer in relation to it is increasingly questioned. Who performs and where should our media saturated and accelerated gaze fall? Does the performer gradually become dematerialized by the electronic fog of the increasingly realistic digital image, having become a corpus delicti for photons and pixels, or have the architectonics of the projected image sufficiently overwhelmed the human body so that the screen itself now becomes the new site and body of performance? The Performative Screen

The stage consists only of four massive (3 m s 4 m) screens, turned on their sides in portrait perspective. With the stage reduced to a flat projection surface, scaling upwards in height but not in depth, the traditional spatial demarcation between spectators and stage becomes dictated only by the proximity of the viewers’ eyes and bodies to the expected audiovisual onslaught, which appears inevitable. Lasting approximately forty-five minutes, the performance is a study in extreme reduction of sensory perspective, human visage, spatial depth, and time. At first sight, the screens are occupied by projections of the jittering face of the Japanese performance artist Akemi Takeya, who appears to be stuck in the visual equivalent of a skipping record. As the performance gets underway, however, the jittering turns to spasmodic motion (figure 4.11). Scratching, fragmenting, granulating, and resampling the images in a breathtaking display of media disintegration, the initial projected representation of the image and sound of the human visage is continually reformulated anew in real time. It is a virtual opera with no scenography and no singer per se; the only music provided is the vocalization of screams on the originally shot footage, now subjected to extreme electronic modulation, distortion, and transformation. Describing an experience that he ascribed to the works of painter Francis Bacon, Gilles Deleuze stated that “as a spectator, I experience the sensation only by entering the painting”; the affect of image and sound merging into one through machine manipulation generates “the action of forces upon the body” (Deleuze 2005, 40). In a double transformation, both in replacing the human form of the actor that occupied the space in front of the screen onto the screen itself and the human performing in front of the camera, the reassembled, projected body that reemerges in the performance reaches its machine-age apotheosis. Its epileptic contractions no longer occur in the physical body but in the projected Körper (body) whose genesis relies on the high-powered light issuing from the four synchronized projectors and tape decks, where phase drifting enables such out-of-sync spasms to take place. At times, the almost stroboscopic motion of the image and the acoustic intensity of the auditory environment envelop the spectator’s body with hurricane-like

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Figure 4.11 Granular Synthesis/Kurt Hentschläger and Ulf Langheinrich. Motion Control Modell 5 (1994– 1996). Photo Bruno Klomfar and Gebhard Sengmüller.

force, transferring the flickering, pulsing, interlaced image into the body as an attack on the nervous system. The event described previously, a live performance from the former Viennese-based partnership Granular Synthesis entitled Motion Control Modell 5, exemplified an entire genre of screen-centric live performance that arose in the 1990s. Going by various names such as live cinema, performance cinema, synthetic cinema and audiovisual (a/v) performance, the genre that emerged owed its genesis to the early and later days of experimental cinema, the underground energy of the club and techno scenes where Mensch-Maschine relationships were long in practice, as well as to a particular twentieth-century obsession: the endless quest for synthesis between the auditory and the ocular. In what composer and film critic Michel Chion labeled synchresis, the “forging between something one sees and something one hears . . . a mental fusion between a sound and a visual when these occur at exactly the same time,” sound and image became unified, the dazzling results thrown onto the screen and distributed through loudspeakers (Chion 1994, xvii–5). Chion refers to techniques between the synchronization of sound and image in film sound design, but his description could equally be applied to the diverse set of practices from artists and designers who generated the kinds of audiovisual performance events that swept onto the screens and walls of clubs, media festivals, alternative gallery spaces, and The Projected Image 165

museums in the 1990s. These performances, like Granular Synthesis’s described earlier, could have been conjured up only from instruments of postindustrial technology: the von Neumann architecture (CPU and Memory), the CRT, the LCD, and computer code, which more often than not resembled numerical babble rather than language. It seems, in fact, that in Denis Bablet’s description of E. F. Burian’s revolutionary Theatergraph (which we encountered exploring the architectonic projected image in the last section) that the replacement of the projected image as a representation “by architectural structures and light” guaranteeing “a new civilization of audiovisual communication” had finally arrived (Bablet 1975, 154). In opposition to Burian’s Theatergraph, which still depended on a relationship between performer and projected surface, the various genres of audiovisual performance replaced the actor as the center of the world. Lost amid the tangle of machines, the human performer’s role was usurped and transformed by the artist-technician for whom performance was a process of trackpad or mouse manipulation—the tweaking of infinite banks of parameters designed to filter, sample, blur, cloud, vibrate, shatter, saturate, and granulate image and sound. Such audiovisual performances scrambled the locus of who or what was performing, tipping the balance of concentration to the screen as the center of attention, while the manipulators of mice and keyboards, mixers and outboard effects boxes effectively stood in the background. As the Bauhaus theater design student Heinz Loew with his mechanical stage environment suggested [Total Theaters of the Bauhaus, chapter 1], the performers of the future would be the technicians who would operate the technical apparatus of performance: “It would seem that a task for the future would be to develop a technical personnel as important as the actors, one whose job it would be to bring this apparatus into view in its peculiar and novel beauty, undisguised and as an end in itself” (Gropius 1961, 84). Expanded Cinema: The Screen as Environment

Analog real-time collage, and assembly and manipulation of images begun in the early days of cinema, along with later developments in video art, were two of the key artistic impulses for the rise of the expanded cinema movement in the 1960s: a movement that produced works not wholly cinema or wholly theater but that nonetheless demanded a live audience. Denoting a host of different activities across different countries, expanded cinema in general attempted to restore the original eventfulness and experimental atmosphere that early cinema had possessed before it became standardized by Hollywooddriven narrative. Partly seeded by the excitement around Allan Kaprow’s Happenings, which included different elements of projection on screens outside of a strict cinema context as well as experimental film, expanded cinema involved artists as diverse as experimental filmmakers

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and performers such as Jonas Mekas, Anthony McCall, Michael Snow, Valie Export, Peter Weibel, Stan Vanderbeek, Paul Sharits, and many others. Drawing its energy not only from the political climate of the 1960s but expanding alternative cultural consciousness as well, expanded cinema, according to the book of the same title by Gene Youngblood, was defined “not as computer films, video phosphors, atomic light, or spherical projections,” but rather as “life’s process of becoming, man’s ongoing historical drive to manifest his consciousness outside of his mind, in front of his eyes” (1970, 41). Pushing film and projected images into new environmental contexts, Youngblood’s work became a state-of-the-art document that detailed the wide range of experimental impulses stemming from artists in the 1960s. Among these was the experimental filmmaker Stan VanDerBeek, who encountered John Cage, Buckminster Fuller, and the former Bauhaus painter Josef Albers while studying at Black Mountain College in the 1930s and is known today principally for his early development of computer-generated films with computer scientist Ken Knowlton at Bell Labs in the 1960s. Together with his numerous animated films and scenery for the early children’s interactive game show Winky Dink and You, VanDerBeek developed a multiprojection environment and consequent research program at his house in Stony Point in upstate New York that he dubbed the Movie Drome. The Buckminster Fuller–influenced, dome-shaped space proposed an environment where a hemispheric screen would replace the standard onedimensional flatness of film, enveloping visitors lying down on the floor with a total flow of images—what the artist called the environment’s “visual velocity” (VanDerBeek [1966] 1970). Removing the borders of the screen from the visitors’ visual field and thus, transforming it into a quasi-architectural surround space was also a common theme in the work of the anonymous collective/commune USCO (The US Company). Founded by the GermanJewish Nazi refugee poet Gerd Stern, engineer Michael Callahan, and painter Steve Derkey (Durkee) along with associates such as Jud Yakult, Stewart Brand, VanDerBeek, and others, USCO eventually set up shop in an abandoned Garnerville, New York, church (dubbed the “Psychedelic Tabernacle”) not far from VanDerBeek’s Movie Drome. USCO gained notoriety in the 1960s through both their kinetic, psychedelic performances across the United States, Europe, and Canada involving live, electronically programmed montages of light projection, strobes, slides, oscilloscopes, film, and audio and the close connection and influence of media theorist Marshall McLuhan and impresario/producer John Brockman. In particular, it was Brockman, an investment banker, producer of the first New York Expanded Cinema Festival in 1965 and later in the 1990s, an agent for many of the so-called “digerati” (the digital elite), who was chiefly responsible for USCO’s involvement in the creation of Murray the K’s “World.” An early high-tech, multilevel disco/multimedia entertainment environment organized by Brockman and staged by USCO, and at first, DJ Murray “the K” Kaufman in a Garden City, Long Island, airplane hanger (the

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take-off site of Charles Lindbergh’s first transatlantic flight), the World became a laboratory for consciousness-changing experiments with cutting-edge technologies.44 “The World” was in fact, so successful as a multimedia event that it was eventually featured on the front page of LIFE magazine on May 27, 1966 (Brockman n.d.). Engineering exploration of the differences between the closed-ended structures of film and theater, in which a performance would have a defined beginning and ending, and the creation of temporally open-ended event environments, which one writer labeled “hyped up rooms intended for psychiatric purposes” (Stern 2000), USCO successfully managed to live an alternative, communal lifestyle while simultaneously performing in establishment cultural and academic institutions such as MIT and the Whitney Museum. The group, which disbanded after the 1960s, also acted as a one of a handful of cross-over collectives between the alternative art world and the growing pop culture and music scenes, where the fractured political climate of the 1960s gave way to utopian revolution through new technologies bringing about new consciousness. Live sound and image manipulation events of the kind advanced by artists like Vanderbeek and USCO, however, were only part of a much more widespread embrace of projection-based performances in an atmosphere pervaded by chemical substances, Eastern mysticism, and media-soaked counterculture. Already, figures such as filmmaker Jordan Belson and composer Henry Jacobs had explored audiovisual performance’s mystical and sensory side through their influential series of multichannel, synthetic image-enhanced “Vortex” concerts at the Morrison Planetarium in San Francisco between 1957 and 1959. Less than a decade later, kinetic and hallucinogenic events like USCO member Jud Yalkut’s sculptural projection performance Dream Reel (1969), Jackie Cassen and Rudi Stern’s kinetic light compositions, Andy Warhol and the Velvet Underground’s Exploding Plastic Inevitable sensorium (1966), Jeffrey Shaw and Theo Botschuijver’s expanded cinema performances such as Movie Movie (1967) that were constructed of inflatable projection surfaces, Aldo Tambelini’s Black Gate Electro-Media Theater, and filmmaker Ronald Nameth’s projection environment for John Cage and Lejaren Hiller’s 1969 intermedia concert/performance HPSCHD would stand as key examples of projects that exploited the ever-increasing interest in the live manipulation of image, sound, and projection before such experimentation occurred in the larger echelons of popular culture. In particular, Cage and Hiller’s HPSCHD could be seen as a prototypal and monumental event in the history of live image/sound performance. Staged in May 1969 over the course of five hours in a massive assembly hall at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, the composition performance featured 7 live harpsichords, the manipulation of 208 computer-generated tapes, 64 slide projectors using more than 6400 slides, 8 film projectors showing 40 movies onto a 340-degree circular screen, several other massive rectangular screens hanging from the ceiling, and an audience

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of several thousand who freely wandered about during the indeterminately long spectacle.45 Synchresis in the 1960s: The Performance of Sound and Image

Simultaneously, Bill Graham’s Fillmore East in New York and Fillmore West in San Francisco as well as the legendary Newport Jazz and Monterey Pop festivals became the equivalent mass culture centers for a similarly themed exploration of expanded consciousness through audiovisual means. Alongside the psychedelic music of artists and bands like Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead, Muddy Waters, Soft Machine, Pink Floyd, Traffic, Jimi Hendrix, the Allman Brothers Band, and numerous others came the legendary spectacles of light and projection that accompanied the music. Created from combinations of 16 mm film, slides, DC motor–controlled color wheels, and liquid dyes and oils floating on top of 3M overhead projectors by artists like Tony Martin, the Brotherhood of Light, John Whitney, Jr., and Peter Wynne-Wilson, Joshua Light Show, Joan Hills, and Mark Boyle, much of this psychedelic visual work was essentially wallpaper for the bands involved. The performances that took place, however, already involved the live manipulation of visual material in concert with the music such that a kind of rhythmic and visual synesthesia might take place, no doubt aided and amplified by hallucinogen-fueled audiences. Similarly, while their father John Whitney, Sr., a pioneering computer animator, was working as an artist in residence at IBM, his sons John Whitney, Jr., and Michael were already developing multiscreen projection environments for the Grateful Dead (1966–1967) and the Monterey Pop festival, exploring the idea of “performance films”: “rather than just one strictly composed film but multi-images whose relationships could be improvised in real time. You would ‘play’ as you felt” (Youngblood 1970, 229). Moving Image Spaces The most spectacular examples of the performative use of moving images within spatial environments between 1950 and 1970 arose in the least “alternative” places: the World’s Fairs of Brussels (1958), New York (1964), Montréal (1967), and Osaka (1970). Taking place in environments that Michael Kirby described as being composed of “slide, overhead, and opaque projectors being combined with film projectors of all kinds and sizes . . . and multiple screens providing the audience with different viewing angles and simultaneous presentation of images or 360-degree projection [which] forces the viewer to make perceptual choices,” many screen-based works at world expositions inherently drew on earlier precedents, like Abel Gance’s three-screen presentation of his epic Napoleon in Paris in 1927 as well as the rapid technical advances in audiovisual culture (Kirby 1966, 58). Framed by the potential of the screen as an environment through which performances could unfold in front of a live audience, the events designed by artists and designers such

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as the Eames brothers, Joseph Svoboda and Emil Radok, Francis Thompson, and IMAX cofounder Roman Kroitor, among others, were highly complex and logistical operations that either pushed state of the art technology to its limit or developed new systems. In one case, for example, the array of new filmic-performance hybrids developed for the 1967 “Man and His World”—themed Montréal international exposition were far ahead of their time in both formal and technical terms. Known for their advanced utilization of projections integrated with live performers as seen in chapter 1 and here, Czech theater designers such as Svoboda also developed new largely non-narrative, screen-only performances without human actors geared toward the mass global audiences that visited the Expo sites of Brussels, Montréal, and Osaka. First created for the Czechoslovak pavilion in Brussels in 1958, Svoboda’s and collaborator Emil Radok’s (brother to Laterna Magika co-inventor Alfred Radok) Polyekran (literally, “multiscreen”) projection system involved the creation of a performance constructed only from screens and images—according to Svoboda, a “pure projection form.” As Svoboda’s answer to the immersive nature of widescreen film in the 1950s, Polyekran’s eight carefully positioned and hung square and trapezoidal surfaces, whose suspension wires were hidden by black velvet masking, were designed to emphasize the screen as screen: an empty surface in an empty space that during the performance (a ten-minute promotional film for the Prague Musical Spring Festival), would come alive through projections appearing from eight slide and seven film projectors, synchronized through means of electronic tape and an elaborate multichannel auditory environment. Svoboda further developed this multiscreen direction in his complex Polyvision exhibits at Expo ’67 in Montréal, which consisted of four short and entirely different audiovisual projection performances that could be spatially navigated by the audience to form a total experience. The first work, Symphony, designed by Svoboda himself, consisted of 35 mm film and slides projected onto a series of fixed screens and rotating cubes and spheres that could be moved in both horizontal and vertical directions, creating the illusion of images suspended and revolving about their axes in space. Other components of the Polyvision environment were projection spaces with overlapping and moving rectangular surfaces (The State of Textiles) and a film, but the most spectacular of the performances was Radok’s Birth of the World, featuring Svoboda’s Diapolyekran system. Working on an improvement to the original Polyekran, Svoboda created a screen in relief: a 16 m s 7 m wall constructed of a mosaic of 112 cubes, each capable of 0.5 to 1 meter of independently addressable forward and backward motion and each installed with two automated 35 mm slide projectors (figure 4.12).46 Through relay control, each of the 224 slide projectors was able to flash through its more than eighty-slide library at almost five times per second and could be individually addressed. Controlled by an instruction-encoded tape and utilizing more than thirty thousand slides in the ten-minute performance for an audience seated on the floor in front of the screen, Svoboda’s and Radok’s show centered not only on the individual, rapid-fire,

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Figure 4.12 Prague.

Josef Svoboda. Diapolyekran. Montréal Expo ’67. Photo Josef Svoboda. Courtesy of DILIA,

high-resolution picture elements (i.e., pixels) that constituted the image mosaic, but also in the mechanical performance of a screen apparatus that attempted to “disintegrate the projection surface and to compose and estrange its relief profile in new ways” (Svoboda 1993, 106). In addition to Svoboda’s work, other innovative cinematic performances at Expo ’67 included Canadian filmmaker Roman Kroitor’s massive multiscreen Labyrinth for the Canadian pavilion, an early IMAX prototype that featured an environment where the spectators could observe two colossal, 15-meter-tall projections from overhead balconies, one vertical and another projected onto the floor. Canadian filmmaker Francis Thompson,

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who had won an Academy Award in the United States for his three-screen cinematic event To Be Alive at the 1964 New York World’s Fair, returned with a six-screen film for the C.P.R. Cominco pavilion entitled We Are Young, depicting teenage life through multiple camera and screen perspectives. The Canadian pavilion also featured yet another large-scale filmic event, Walt Disney Studios’ twenty-two-minute, Circle Vision 360-degree film Canada 67, which wrapped the standing audience of 1500 in a circular configuration of nine screens with images obtained from nine synchronized cameras—an event that was first deployed as a permanent attraction at Disneyland in California in 1955. Expo ’70 in Osaka and subsequent World’s Fairs would also serve as testing grounds for further cinematic performance projects from Svoboda, Radok, Kroitor, and others. Kroitor, for example, who cofounded IMAX with a commission from Fuji Film for a pavilion, and Donald Brittain would go on to make the first IMAX film in Osaka in 1970: the large-screen Tiger Child, which was shown to audience members who were carried through the theater on a rotating turntable to view the film. Even as all of these projects featured fixed media (i.e., film), the construction of large, specialized environments for their display and the fact that audiences would gather to not only watch projections but be immersed in an architectural spectacle/event provided precedents for much new media artwork that merged multiscreen performances within exhibition contexts without human performers in the coming decades. The 1990s: Live Cinema, Performance Cinema, and Real-Time Video What was aesthetically and conceptually radical about Svoboda’s and others’ elaborate projection works throughout the postwar and distinctly analog period was the maturation of screen-based performances that went beyond standard narrative cinema along with the invention of technical instruments that enabled their realization. In the Polyekran, for example, both technological machine and the resulting output of image and sound were codependent upon each other. While these audiovisual apparatuses relied on the infrastructures of theaters, festival halls, and exposition pavilions, a new breed of artist interested in the screen as performance instrument and site but working in a completely different techno-socio-economic context than that of the 1960s started to appear in the period after 1990. Going by a long litany of names such as audiovisual performance, real-time video, live cinema, performance cinema, and VJ culture, these multiple genres of screen-based performance were the result of two particular strains of technocultural development: (1) breakthroughs in digital computation, particularly the development of hardware and software components for the capture, processing, and manipulation of image and sound, and (2) the international rise of techno/club culture, which rapidly exploited such technologies. The most profound technological shift was the introduction and wide distribution of digital-based systems for the creation and processing of images. Whereas less than a decade

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earlier the computational power required to manipulate a matrix of 307,200 pixels (640 s 480) at 8-bit resolution was formidable, if not impossible, and required the capacity of mainframe computers, by the mid 1990s, accelerated development of processors, graphic cards, and software (the creation of standard, commercially available software environments for both offline, nonlinear editing of video and real-time image processing) changed the framework of working with video and graphics. The introduction of relatively low-cost laptop computers by companies such as Apple Computer in the 1990s (the first G3 portable in 1997) and NLE hardware and software such as Avid, Media 100, and, later, Apple’s own Final Cut Pro enabled image manipulation at a previously unimaginable scale and detail. In comparison to the heterogeneously assembled analog systems used for projectionbased performance environments in the 1960s, artists exploring image transformation in the 1990s essentially worked with the same suite of software tools deployed by commercial enterprises such as film and TV, graphic design, and multimedia studios. What access to such systems did was rapidly introduce the possibility of manipulating moving image material at almost microscopic levels of temporal and spatial control, providing the ability to break it down into constituent components and in the course of this process, to rewrite the previous temporal and spatial laws surrounding analog media. If expanded cinema arose from the desires of experimental filmmakers to explode cinematic forms, the aesthetic of performance-based audiovisual work partially emerged from the VJ culture that had arisen in the 1980s. Originally a term popularized in the early days of MTV to describe a “video jockey,” the video equivalent of a DJ (or “disc jockey”), who essentially played the new form of music videos, much of the later VJ culture appeared around the house music scene in an effort to give equal weight to sound and image as central elements in the overall spatio-physical ambience of clubs. Arguably, early club visuals played second fiddle to DJ culture, almost as a throwback to the light painting and lava lamp aesthetics that populated 1960s psychedelic concerts. What the club scene did provide, however, was an alternative social gestus that directly led to new aesthetic expression through audiovisual fusion, catalyzing innovative forms of communication that operated at powerful, nonverbal levels of affect, and at the same time encouraged different collective models of production. Driven by developing computer technologies and designer drugs like MDMA (also known as “ecstasy”), club and rave culture soon traded the cultural protest of the 1960s for an almost hedonistic mindset delving into new forms of perception. As the club scene shifted toward commercialization in the early 1990s, the audiovisual impulses and socioaesthetic frameworks that had originally been seeded by club practices crossed over into other contexts, either by individual VJs creating DIY (do-it-yourself) modes of aesthetic practice or by those working with computers in areas outside of dance culture, such as graphic and multimedia design, digital filmmaking, and architecture, whose leisure time was spent in the alternative, technologically constructed ambience of club experience.

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The ideas and models that a postindustrial generation of creators took with them from club culture into an internationally connected scene of alternative art spaces, galleries, commercial design and multimedia shops, festivals, museums, and cultural institutions were thus a fusion of radical social and communications possibilities combined and filtered through the technology of the digit. An interest in the live, performatively constituted image and sound began to yield work whose basis was framed around artists’ manipulating visual and sonic material solely inside the computer and projecting such material onto a screen in front of live spectators. Furthermore, techniques of sampling, cut and paste, layering, recombining, and granulating inherited from electronic music technology quickly became cultural paradigms, applied with equal aplomb to image material. In contrast to the site specificity of artists like Vanderbeek or USCO, who prepared total media environments for days on end, the audiovisual scenes that sprung up in the areas of digital culture were aided by a global system of circulation and dissemination through media/music festival circuits racing to support and exhibit such work so as not to be left out of the larger technocultural zeitgeist. Festivals such as RESFEST (San Francisco), Ars Electronica (Austria), DEAF and Sonic Acts (Netherlands), Elektra and Mutek (Montréal), Club Transmediale (Berlin), Pixelache (Finland), Netmage (Italy), Dissonanze and Mixed Media (Italy), Cimatics (Belgium), Sonar (Spain), and One_Dot_Zero (UK) depended on the aesthetics of fluidity and nomadism generated by portable technology—the ability of individuals to move globally, carrying laptops and portable mixers from one venue to the other, only to move rapidly to the next presentation in a country thousands of miles away. Made possible by an exquisite embodiment of the machinic, the emerging arena of “retinal aesthetics” brought with it a flood of performance forms, constructs, and subsequent experiences that once again exploited the tripartite tension of the screen, the live spectator, the human performer, and the computer itself. This entanglement of screen, viewer, performer, and machine was perhaps most clearly articulated in the media performances of the Austrian group Granular Synthesis. Formed in Vienna in 1993 by Austrian artist Kurt Hentschläger and German-born Ulf Langheinrich, the Granular Synthesis collective became known in the international media art world for the acoustic and visual intensity of their large, screen-driven performances, which applied both the philosophy and techne of sampling, remixing, looping, and granulation to disintegrate and assemble anew images of the human form extracted from recording sessions with real-life dancers and performing artists. In early performances such as Modell 3 and Modell 4 (1992–1993), the duo worked with video and audio recordings of the moving head and voice of the dancer Michael Krammer, which was subsequently subjected to a similar treatment, as in the digital synthesis technique of granular synthesis from which Hentschläger and Langheinrich took their moniker: a process of breaking sound samples down into microcomponents or “grains” that could be infinitely rearranged to form a new temporal continuum.

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This process was taken to a more intensive degree of articulation and control with the use of an Avid online system for the group’s Motion Control Modell 5 (1995), with which the face of Akemi Takeya, multiplied across four screens, underwent a real-time Francis Bacon—like transformation through the microscratching, granulation, and fragmentation of image and sound into smaller and smaller temporal and spatial cells.47 Whereas media theorist Sean Cubitt described the early mechanism of the cinematograph as a device in which “the human vision of the audience is synchronized with a machine perception in the process of formation” (Cubitt 2004, 30), Granular Synthesis’s computational-age apparatus, which rendered the human image into a twitching and jerking Frankensteinlike animal-machine went a step further, yielding what Hentschläger labeled “inappropriate hybrid personas”—a step toward electronic possession, where image and sound, screen and flesh, matter and pixels were pushed to degree zero.48 The group’s 1998 performance POL as well as subsequent works signaled a marked shift from figural representation of the face and increasingly toward fields of colored abstraction. With the use of customized MIDI-controlled software in which video was accessed in real time directly from hard disk, allowing for direct audiovisual granulation, the barely visible visage of singer Diamanda Galas was beamed over seven screens in oscillation between all-too-brief moments of recognition and abstract figuration, poised on the brink of visual/acoustic perception in what Timothy Druckery described as a “postcorporeal, post-optical interface working at sensorial limits” (Druckery 1997). Granular Synthesis’s detailed research—into the explosion of image scale and sound projection between the spectator’s perception and position in relation to the planal screen surface—in many ways proposed the ultimate conundrum to live performance. If POL’s performative disintegration of recognizable images into pure fields of noise, lines, and color removed the human form from the screen, the event in essence also sought to dissolve the line between the subject of viewing (the spectator) and the object of its gaze (the screen), making performance no longer the theatron (the place or event of seeing), but rather a “state of mind.” That the screen as a holder of projected image would move to the pure abstraction of color and line in Granular Synthesis’s final works like Feld and 360 or in Hentschläger’s and Langheinrich’s later solo projects, vanishing into architectural dimensions surrounded by fog engulfing the spectator (as in Hentschläger’s 2005 Feed and 2008 installation Zee) or video-generated spaces (Langheinrich’s Drift), suggested one future direction of projection as something that one inhabits rather than observes from without. Other artists during the early part of the twenty-first century, however, also produced audiovisual performances that relied on the screen as physical architecture, metaphor, landscape, ocular attractor, and perception machine. The former Montréal-based partnership Skoltz-Kolgen created in the “retinal diyptic” Flüux:/Terminal, which consisted of two side-by-side screens upon which projected media were controlled live by the two artists in the back of the room, audiovisual interferences through bursts of sound and

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Figure 4.13

Skoltz-Kolgen. Flüux:/Terminal, 2003. Photo © Skoltz-Kolgen.

image while spitting out the aesthetics of the digital in rapid-fire succession: wireframe objects, deforming lines, and kinetic splines that seem to behave without human intervention in a designed landscape of noise, static, signs, numbers, texts, and grids (figure 4.13). As an exercise in the production and dissolution of binaries between audio and image, each performer occupied a screen in Skoltz-Kolgen’s virtuoso digital pyrotechnic display, resulting in a fight between image and sound that left the audience almost hypnotized.49 Likewise, the Japanese composer Ryoji Ikeda framed his audiovisual concert works such as Formula (2001), C4I (2005), and Datamatics (2006) as performances, even though little or no manipulation of material took place in real time, the performance brought into being by the press of a button on a DVD player or mini-DV camcorder. Ikeda’s fortyfour-minute performance concert Formula, which won the prestigious 2001 Ars Electronica Golden Nica for Digital Music, was based partly on visuals and lighting inspired from Dumb Type’s OR theater performance in collaboration with Shiro Takatani. Set in an environment where the screen was mirrored in a white linoleum Marley floor under occasionally flashing strobes, Formula as well as later works, like Ikeda’s music, was an exercise in digitally enabled precision coupled with extreme minimalism: a projected landscape reduced to the bareness of signals and data such as moving points, crosshairs,

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lines, and endless rows of binary digits that sought a complete synchronization between acoustic signal and moving photons. What then constituted the “performance” in Skoltz-Kolgen’s or Ikeda’s complex but mostly prepared in advance visual and sonic orchestration of machines? Did it live in waiting, fastidiously prepped in the machine and ready to take its place on the screen with the human operator’s tasks reduced to the push of a laptop’s spacebar or the press of the play button on the DVD player? What signified “live,” now that the stage was reduced to the pixel and the stretched canvas, to lights, speakers, and projectors; devoid of human presence, yet still generating the excitement and pulse of a performance happening in the here and now? Although one genre of audiovisual screen performance leaned toward the extreme precision of playback, another emerging genre sought the real-time creation of an audio/visual event in situ. Taking impulses from VJ culture and inspired by techniques of collective improvisation from the noise and free jazz music scenes, much of the activity involved the direct manipulation of video and audio material through software. Dubbed live cinema in Europe and performance cinema in the United States, such new audiovisual movements were defined by Dutch progenitor Hans Beekman as follows: A form of performance art in which a human performer manipulates sound and image in synergy through movement, for an audience. The technological backdrop of Live Cinema is one of daily technological innovation in the audio/visual field. The process of digitalization is most developed in the realm of electronic pop culture, where equipment is compact, user friendly and affordable. All these factors have led to a new artistic practice, where the usage of hardware, such as samplers and computers, have led to new artistic genres and ways to approach art. (Beekman 2007)

The move toward an aesthetics of real-time processes in the production of live cinema performance was chiefly spurred on through the availability of software environments like Max, an IRCAM-developed and later commercially distributed graphic object–oriented software application that was used by musicians to create control structures that implemented the MIDI protocol [Interactive Systems, chapter 5] as well as early Apple Macintosh–based video processing tools such as Imagine (developed at STEIM) and Videodelic (San Francisco).50 The introduction of so-called third-party Max objects that could access the QuickTime video engine—such as nato.055, by the entity called NN (Netochka Nezvanova) in 1999, Soft VNS (developed by Canadian artist and engineer David Rokeby), GEM (a graphics programming environment written for Pure Data, an open source version of Max), and Jitter (video objects developed by Max’s later distributor Cycling ’74 in San Francisco in 2002)—were essential tools that provided a common programming lingua franca and framework for real-time audiovisual practitioners.

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Almost overnight, artists, collectives, and scenes appeared organized mainly around common Max-based software platforms becoming digital bricoleurs. Collectives interested in improvisation within the live performance context—such as 242.pilots (a collective started by H. C. Gilje, Kurt Ralske, and Lukasz Lysakowski and named for an object in nato.055), the Vienna- and Berlin-based farmersmanual, Brussels-based Telcosystems, as well as dozens of other individual artists from North America (Sue Costible and Joshua Clayton, Scott Arford, Scott Pagano, and Chris Musgrave all in San Francisco, and Johnny DeKam, Kurt Ralske, Benton Bainbridge, Golan Levin, and Zachary Lieberman in New York), Canada (PurForm, Ray-XXXX, Defasten, Louis Dufort), Europe (TeZ, Semiconductor, Coldcut, Visual Kitchen, Rechenzentrum, Otolab, Signal, Byetone, Frank Bretschneider, Scanner, Untitled Sound Objects), Eastern Europe and Russia (Domnitch and Gelfand), Japan (Ryoichi Kurokawa, Responsive Environments), Australia, and elsewhere engaged in manipulating live video feeds and signals or building algorithmically driven “patches” (graphic-based object programs) and performance instruments that would enable combined machine and human improvisation. The aesthetic range of this real-time video movement cannot be summarized in a few sentences for like other audiovisual forms, a plurality of approaches appeared with no one dominant idea or technique. 242.pilots, for example, was inspired by the musical process of jamming; what video artist and cofounder H. C. Gilje called “the making of a live film with a soundtrack at the same time.”51 Another major aesthetic force driving the real-time video scene was the obsession with software code, a movement mirrored in the fact that an entire subsection of real-time video practice was gestated by next-generation artist-geeks schooled in computer science, electronic music, and engineering, which helped generate aesthetic practices around meta explorations of code and data itself. Audiovisual performance based in the aesthetics of code most notably emerged in the works of artist-engineer Golan Levin. Levin, who trained under designer John Maeda at the MIT Media Lab’s Aesthetics and Computation Group, developed software tools that enabled the real-time manipulation of computer graphics and audio and made his audiovisual performance projects such as Scribble (2000), Dialtones: A Telesymphony (2001), and Messe de Voce (2005) mainstays at digital media festivals like Ars Electronica during the 2000s. Creating “painterly interfaces for audio-visual performance,” Levin’s Audio-Visual Environmental Suite (1998–2000) comprised what the artist called “an inexhaustible and dynamic audiovisual substance” (Levin 2000): code that enabled a performer to treat image and sound in a highly abstract, textual manner that gave fluid life to digital floating lines, skeins, blobs, and tendrils, all in real time. Another movement within the audiovisual coding scene amplified its processual characteristics through the revealing and subsequent use of errors and glitches. This aesthetics of data was represented in performance by screens filled with broken ASCII code, visual aliasing, bit placement errors, and similar artifacts of the computational age. Discussion

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of the video image as signal or mathematical array of pixels surpassed earlier discussions on representation and meaning, while visual vocabularies effortlessly veered between heavily signal-processed images of pure abstraction (architectural structures, light streaks, layering of numbers, texts, letters, and 3D texture-mapped shapes) and more figurative images. Simply stated, the impact of computational technology and its next generation of adherents who programmed such software led to an obsession with the lower levels of the machine—a sometimes almost fetishistic fascination with digital processes and their collective aesthetics derived from source code. The conceptual intricacies of code and rigors of mathematics drove collective investigation into software-structured performance. Still other collectives, predominantly in the United Kingdom, took their visual/aural aesthetic cues from high-end visual production work in commercial arenas such as music video, advertising, and multimedia production like the London-based design agency Tomato and other British “media collectives” such as the Light Surgeons, UVA (United Visual Artists), and D-Fuse. By 2006, the culture of live audiovisual work had been so thoroughly integrated into screen-based performances that the D-Fuse collective issued an entire book detailing the history of VJ culture.52 The transition from expanded cinema to VJ/live video/real-time video cultures was one marked by both continuities as well as dramatic techno-cultural-political ruptures. With the basis of artistic production firmly anchored around hardware and particularly around software, the live audiovisual scenes were driven by the social mechanism of DIY practices among their participants; DIY suggesting the creation and sedimentation of conditions for such experimentation to take place, from the authoring of software to collective organizing, curating, publishing, and dissemination by artists themselves, either in situ or over collaborative online networks. The future direction of screen-based performance appeared secure. The screen had become as accepted in the cultural vocabulary of performance, with or without a stage or human performer, as the proscenium had after its permanent introduction in 1618 at the Teatro Farnese in Parma Italy. Yet a central tension remained. Was the screen simply a surface upon which to cast the results of infinitely complex processes that took place on a stage without actors, except for those who sat behind the machines, or was the screen perceived by such artists as something else—simultaneously a new stage and instrument, where physical space and screen space were one in the face of the increasing possibilities of twenty-first-century computation?

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5

Sound

The growth of musical art in any age is determined by the technological progress which parallels it. joseph schillinger, “electricity, a musical liberator,” modern music, 1931

The clarion call for a new machinic century that, as mentioned, inexorably transformed the theatrical, architectural, and cinematic arts, also vividly overtook the sphere of music and sound, resulting in newfangled electromechanical instruments and experimental composition practices that intermingled musicians, machines, procedures, and processes to forever shake up the staid concert hall. Certainly, it is difficult to comprehend the influence of electromechanical technologies in sound making without recognizing the radical shifts that recording-based technology, from the gramophone and magnetic tape to studio wizardry, and later digital computers had on its production, consumption, and distribution.1 By now, it is more or less accepted that these principally studio-based techniques incalculably changed acoustic creation and listening practices, but how did they alter the nature of musical performance, specifically using such technologies in situ? Did new instruments and processes reshape the experience of musical performers and audiences, shifting the concert hall from a passive arena of listening to an interactive zone of improvisation between sound-making technical apparatuses and their players? The origins of such formal and technical transmutations already revealed themselves at the end of the nineteenth century in Europe, if not earlier. Western Common Practice music had long been undergoing a radical tonal shift, culminating in the dodecaphonic or twelve-tone row structures of the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg and, later, Anton Webern and Alban Berg. Fundamentally breaking with the hierarchies of Western harmony by using all twelve chromatic pitch classes equivalently and thus destroying the anchor of a tonal center for the listener, the three Austrian composers set the precedent

for the twentieth-century blurring of music, sound, and noise—one that would reach its articulation only with John Cage’s manifesto “Credo: The Future of Music” some twentyfive years later.2 New Instrumentalities for Performance (1900–1933)

In the earlier part of the twentieth century, public performances of new machine-age instruments were met with disbelieving ears accustomed to the sonorities of nineteenthcentury Romanticism. Not only did the riotous first Parisian performance in 1913 of Igor Stravinsky’s percussive savagery in Le Sacre du Printemps shake up bourgeois ears, but also a similar fate greeted the Italian Futurist composer Luigi Russolo’s premiere of Risveglio di una Città (Awakening of a City) in 1914. Along with their ocular-dominated dianissino architecttura and scenodynamic stages, the Italian Futurists also championed the clatter, bang, and din of industrial noise as part of their utopian machine aesthetic. “Ancient Life was all silence. In the nineteenth century, with the invention of machines, noise was born,” wrote Russolo in the opening salvo to his 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises” (Russolo 2004, 10). Russolo’s desire for music contemporaneous with modern industrial experience manifested itself in the machines of his day: “the throbbing of valves, the bustle of pistons, the shrieks of mechanical saws, the starting of trams on tracks” (Russolo 2004, 12). For Russolo, the advancement of music and culture as a whole was intimately intertwined with the development of the machine itself, provoking the possibility of new sounds and modes of hearing through what he called “futurist ears.” The “evolution of music is comparable to the multiplication of machines, which everywhere collaborate with man . . . today, the machine has created such a variety and contention of noises that pure sound in its slightness and monotony no longer provokes emotion” (Russolo 2004, 11). The multiplication of new sounds thus paralleled the multiplication of the machines that either made or inspired such sounds. Russolo’s Futurist music of noises went beyond a new attentiveness to the “soundscape of modernity,” as Emily Thompson has labeled it in her book of the same name (Thompson 2004). In the urban wild, the ear became accustomed to the rancor and blast of subways, trains, automobiles, and iron works, while inside the concert hall a new battery of noises were emitted from new instruments or intonarumori. The “intoners” or “rumor makers” of Russolo’s new orchestra of the future were constructed noise machines consisting of boxes holding metal strings excited by a rotating wheel. Still driven by human operators, these devices made their first public appearance in Italy between 1913 and 1914 in performance events staged before flabbergasted crowds getting their first taste of the future of machine sonance. Russolo saw his noise orchestra countering what he called the public’s “profound disillusionment” before the modern orchestra’s “paltry results,” but his urge to include sounds

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outside of the orchestral canon was already being exploited by others, namely the American composer George Antheil. Antheil’s early instrumental works, like Second Sonata— Airplane (1923) and Third Sonata—Death of Machines (1920), were inspired by the violent cacophonies and rhythmic chugging of machines and caused violent riots in the European cities in which they were first performed. His most notorious work, the high-decibel, twenty-minute Ballet Mechanique (1923) originally designed as a soundtrack for painter Fernand Léger’s film of the same title, was scored for an ensemble featuring three xylophones, four bass drums, a gong, two pianos, a siren, three airplane propellers, seven electric bells, and sixteen electrically synchronized player pianos—a technical feat that proved impossible to execute, causing the composer to later rewrite the score for four human pianists. Deemed to be inappropriate as the soundtrack for the film, Ballet Méchanique nonetheless had its premiere in Paris in 1923, causing almost as big of a ruckus as the catcalls and screaming that greeted Stravinsky and Russolo. Cahill’s Synthesizer

Russolo’s and Antheil’s machine inspired sound was only part of a whole series of innovative, never-before-heard instruments ushered in at the early part of the century with Dr. Seussian names like Telharmonium (1900), the Chorocelo (1909), the Optophonic Piano (1916), Theremin/Aerophone (1917), the Sphaerophon (1924), the Dynaphone (1927), the Ondes Martenot (1928), the Hellertion (1929), La Croix Sonore (The Sonorous Cross, 1929), the Helliophon (1936), the Hammond Novachord (1939), and the Trautonium (1930). All of these inventions had one thing in common: they all demanded new ways of playing them and forged novel relationships among technology, the performer’s body, and the listener’s ears, and in the process, expanded the overall range of musical sonorities.3 Just as Russolo was introducing the possibility of noise into music, slightly earlier American inventor and attorney Dr. Thaddeus Cahill was constructing one of the first electronic instruments to manifest through sound what the physicists Jean-Baptiste Fourier and Hermann von Helmholtz had theorized two centuries before: the perfect production of sinusoidal waveforms across all frequency ranges from an electrically based machine. Trained in music at Oberlin Conservatory, Cahill’s now legendary Telharmonium or Dynamophone was an apparatus so large that it weighed more than two hundred tons and occupied thirty boxcars when transported to New York in 1906 for its first public performances. An exceedingly elaborate but also flexible instrument for its time, the Telharmonium used Fourier’s principal of additive synthesis, in which more complex, polyphonic tones could be built up from the manipulation of simple frequencies or individual harmonic partials. Seeking to “generate music electrically with tones of good quality and great

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power and with perfect musical expression,” the first version of this device was constructed from a series of thirty-five rheotome alternators—tone wheels with small ridges that, when rotated close to a magnetic coil, produced alternating current that was subsequently converted into sound (Holmes 1985, 34). Varying the size of the ridges to obtain different frequencies, Cahill’s synthesizer—as described in his 1896 patent “Art of and Apparatus for Generating and Distributing Music Electronically”—was controlled and played by a seven-octave, thirty-six-chromaticnote, velocity-sensitive keyboard interface (figure 5.1). After obtaining funding support for a much larger apparatus, Cahill’s later version used in performances in New York City extended the number of alternators to 145 (the inventor originally imagined 408!), the number of keyboards to two, and the square footage needed to house the gargantuan instrument to an entire floor in the Holyoke, Massachusetts, building. Cahill’s inventiveness went beyond just tone generation, as he imagined the transmission of his electrical instrument through paper horn-like speakers connected to telephone receivers and carried over telephone cables in an age without electronic amplification. With his transmission of sounds from one space filled with volumes of equipment to another with the simple presence of a loudspeaker linked to a telephone receiver, Cahill was already conjuring up the sound of disembodied spirits and phantoms that would mark the use of tele-technologies as well as foreshadowing the infamous electronic tape concerts of the 1950s, where audiences sat in concert halls only to be greeted by a stage full of tangled wires, speakers, and equipment without a human performer.4 Ambitious and unstoppable, Cahill imagined a far more lofty future for the Telharmonium than just as a new instrument for the concert hall of the electric age, instead forming an entire company (New York Electric Music Company) to carry out his plan to beam the instrument’s sounds (“Telharmony”) to hotels, restaurants, cafés, libraries, offices, and private homes utilizing the existing telephone network. Cahill’s hulking machine had its premiere in a performance given over the telephone wires from Holyoke to New Haven, Connecticut, in 1906, but it was not until the move to its own Telharmonic Hall in New York that larger audiences got their first taste of electric music’s future. Although no recordings remain, ear-witnesses noted the purity of the tonalities that emerged from the instrument as well as its ability to imitate the sounds of acoustic instruments through its additive techniques.5 The instrument’s sonic output was unrivaled for the time, but Cahill’s plans for wired transmission ultimately ran aground when it was discovered that the music of dead composers whom Cahill played on the device leaked over into real telephone lines during performances, interrupting conversations, and later even naval transmissions. This technical glitch along with the Telharmonium’s high maintenance sunk Cahill, and by 1911, the New York Electric Music Company was all but gone. Despite its failure, Cahill’s instrument was the first in a long series of electrically developed musical devices in the first decades of the century. In addition to the Wurlitzer

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Figure 5.1 Thaddeus Cahill. Telharmonium patent US 000580035, 1897.

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organ and later the Hammond organ, both of which employed similar concepts for sound production, other more exotic performance devices began to appear, including the French musician Maurice Martenot’s Ondes Martenot, a monophonic, keyboard-played device developed in 1928 that used the principle of heterodyning oscillators to produce pitches that could be electrically manipulated.6 A favorite of avant-garde composers like Olivier Messiaen, Darius Milhaud, and Edgard Varèse later in the century, the instrument’s pitch could be altered in real time with a pull-tab ring attached to a variable capacitor that ran the length of the keyboard, thus producing microtonal intervals. Another oddly named instrument of the period, the Trautonium of German engineer Dr. Friedrich Trautwein, was capable of producing even more precise frequencies with harmonically richer sawtooth oscillators, whose pitch was controlled by a performer changing the resistance on a metal wire by pressing down on its surface and thus completing the circuit and triggering the oscillator. Originally designed to mimic the human voice, the Trautonium’s oscillators were routed through a bank of formant or band-pass filters that produced vowel-like sounds due to the sharp filtering of most of the side-band frequencies produced by the oscillator. Like the Ondes Martenot, the Trautonium was also exercised in concert performance, namely by Richard Strauss, the German composer Paul Hindemith who wrote a Concertino for Trautonium and String Orchestra (1931), and most famously, by Trautwein’s student Oskar Sala, who was rumored to have composed the bird-like sounds on the machine for Hitchcock’s film The Birds in 1963.7 New Gestures—Theremin’s Ghosts

The early instruments described so far all provided the possibility of new electronic timbres, yet all of the devices’ keyboard-like interfaces were clearly in line with the existing performance techniques of traditional instruments. It was in the twilight of the October Revolution in Russia, however, that the engineer and inventor Lev Sergeyevich Termen (also known as Léon Theremin) was constructing a machine that proposed a radically new gestural relationship between electric instrument and human performer. As a “musical use for electricity,” the Aetherphone—or theremin, as it would be called— operated on a wholly different principal than the mechanical systems of traditional orchestral instruments. Appearing like a rectangular box on legs with an antenna on one side and a stiff piece of looped metal sticking out of it on the other, the theremin output an almost pure sinusoidal tone in the range of five octaves, with the presence of side-band frequencies giving the sound a richer timbre. Using the principal of heterodyning that Martenot would also later employ, Theremin devised a technique by which a human performer could control the frequency and amplitude of audible frequencies generated by radio oscillator interference between 0–2000 Hz by moving her hands inside an electrical field, thus causing changes to the two parameters.

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Altering the frequency of the tone on the vertical axis and the amplitude on the horizontal with a careful choreography of gestures within the sensed field, the theremin’s performer could achieve an almost extraordinary level of expression, with musical effects like vibrato (the modulation of frequency) produced by strange, wavering hand and finger movements resembling those of a magician summoning sound out of the air. Decidedly, the image of a performer gesturing and producing sound but touching nothing imbued the theremin with a haunted presence, something exploited with its use in the soundtracks of spooky Hollywood movies of the 1940s and 1950s. First exhibited at the Moscow Industrial Trade Fair in 1920, the theremin created a sensation to the point that Vladimir Lenin invited its creator for a private demonstration in the Kremlin. Theremin had applied several times for a patent in Europe for his “Method of and Apparatus for the Generation of Sounds,” but it was not until his journey to the United States in the mid 1920s that he was granted one. In fact, as an early example of the mixing of the burgeoning electronics industry with the interest in new forms of sonic expression, RCA Victor’s Radiola division commercialized a vacuum tube version of the instrument in 1928. Under contract from RCA, General Electric and Westinghouse made thousands of theremins in the late 1920s, attempting to promote them as “easy to play” devices in “mom and pop” music stores, high schools, and even onsite church demos, but the instrument was not a widespread success, due in no small part to the stock market crash of 1929 and the onset of the Great Depression. Together with the theremin’s widespread exposure came a series of virtuosos specifically trained on the instrument, which succeeded in bringing it greater public attention. Called one of the first pioneers of electronic music performance, Theremin’s American protégé, prodigy, and muse, the Lithuanian-born Clara Rockmore (née Clara Reisenberg), developed a playing technique she labeled “aerial fingering,” allowing Rockmore to bypass the clichéd glissandi that marked most theremin performers and enabling her to become the instrument’s leading virtuoso interpreter.8 There was also a handful of known and less-known composers who recognized the potential of the theremin to expand the sonic vocabulary of the time; among them was Australian Percy Grainger, who orchestrated for traditional instruments and theremin in three different scores in the 1930s; the Russian émigré and teacher to George Gershwin, Joseph Schillinger; and the American composer Henry Cowell. Cowell commissioned Theremin himself to create a new instrument called the Rhythmicon or, more appropriately, the Polyrhythmophone, an early keyboard-based, rhythmic sequencer that generated continuous rhythms from single keypresses. The Rhythmicon was only one of a series of technological gadgets that Theremin developed in the United States before KGB agents supposedly kidnapped and brought him back to Moscow. Sent to a Stalin-sanctioned labor camp, Theremin was later employed by the KGB to develop surveillance technologies such as telephone bugs for much of the remainder of his life.9

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Varèse and the Electronic Sculpting of Sound

Another fan of the theremin was the French-born composer Edgard Varèse. Although his extant output consists of a scant sixteen orchestral works, two being completed posthumously by his student Chou Wen-Chung, Varèse’s contribution to the technological transformation of musical performance in the twentieth century cannot be underestimated. Having studied in France, the composer lived the better part of his life in the United States to which he immigrated in 1915. Dissatisfied with the state of European art music at the time, Varèse began calling as early as 1916 for the creation of new instruments to transform what he felt was a deadened musical vocabulary at the start of the twentieth century. Through the laboring of “composer and electrician,” traditions such as counterpoint and harmony would be replaced by the movement of “sound masses of shifting planes,” sonic “transmutations,” and “zones of intensities,” with the lines between music and sound increasingly blurring (Varèse 2004, 18). Critical of Futurists like Russolo for wanting to simply reproduce the sounds of the industrial age, Varèse sought “entirely new mediums of expression: sound producing machines (as opposed to sound-reproduction).” Transformed to organized sound through technical possibilities, music would no longer be straitjacketed by the “paralyzing tempered system” but liberated by its planar and volumetric movement through space. As he wrote in “New Instruments and New Music” (1936), new forms of sound projection technology would enable “the feeling that sound is leaving us with no hope of reflecting back, a feeling akin to that aroused by beams of light being sent forth by a powerful searchlight—for the ear as for the eye.” (Varèse 2004, 18–19). When much of Varèse’s early compositional output was lost to fire in Berlin, he essentially started composing again from scratch upon his arrival in the United States. Early works like Amériques (1918), Hyperprism (1922), Intégrales (1924), and Ionisation (1929; the first piece for an all-percussion ensemble) featured traditional instruments; however, Varèse was already attempting the materialization of “spatial music” through the creation of large-scale blocks of tonalities generated by winds and percussion. Dispensing with the melodic capacities given normally in orchestration by strings, these early works consisted of dense, shifting waves with little development in the traditional sense, instead relying on internal friction and kinesis between the flowing but fragmented lines of the winds and the rhythmic and sometimes jarring accents of drums, crash cymbals, gongs, bells, and even more exotic Asian percussion. Yet, even with Amériques, his first work in America, and later the scarcely six-minutelong Ionisation (1929–1931), Varèse had begun to extend his sonic explorations beyond the traditional orchestra, first incorporating sirens as sound sources in anticipation of the coming age of electronic sonorities. Invoking and celebrating the chaotic noise-scape of New York and perhaps foreshadowing the coming destruction of the Second World War,

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the siren was also cherished by Varèse for its unusual spatial projection properties: its “continuous flowing curve” and ability to disperse sound in hyperbolic and parabolic projection patterns.10 In his quest for unusual sound, Varèse was also on the lookout for new electronic devices that could fulfill his conception of “sound as living matter.” His 1934 work Ecuatorial was originally scored for wind, organ, percussion, and two fingerboard-based theremins (this made them easier to play)—the theremin being an instrument that Varèse saw great potential in because, like the siren, it enabled the production of continuous gradations of sound. Later, as it proved difficult to find the original RCA-built theremins, Varèse rescored the piece for two Ondes Martenots, the instrument used as a siren substitute for a Paris performance of Amériques. Seeing the inherent connection between art and science by which science would be “equipped” to give the composer what he needed to create new sounds, Varèse attempted throughout the 1930s and 1940s to attract industrial and foundation support for research into new forms of electronic sound production and diffusion. Applying to the Guggenheim Foundation and Bell Labs, Varèse passionately argued without success for access to a studio with electronic equipment where he could research new acoustic techniques. It was not until 1954, however, that the composer could realize his two greatest works through technological means that he had earlier only dreamed about. The first performance of Déserts, which integrated electronic tape and orchestral instruments into a postHiroshima tapestry (“Music of the time of the H-Bomb,” as critic Nicole Hirsch called it) was broadcast over Radio France in 1954 and immediately caused a scandal, almost forcing the government withdrawal of subsidies from engineer Pierre Schaeffer’s electronic music studios in Paris, where the tape portions of the work had been realized (Hirsch 1954). Arguably, Varèse’s greatest work was still to come: the 1958 Poème électronique, an eight-minute, purely electronic work for tape created for the Philips electronics corporation Pavilion at the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. Invited by the pavilion’s designers Le Corbusier and Iannis Xenakis to compose a sound environment for its multimedia interior much to the chagrin of Philips who wanted a more famous and “accessible” composer, Varèse set about to materialize what he had only theorized in the early 1920s at a none-too-easy level. Given the immense technical resources of the Philips corporation, Varèse had to deal with a whole host of problems during the composition period of the work, including an unfamiliarity with the state of the art equipment, which made the process exceedingly slow, and the fears of Frits Philips himself that Varèse’s work was too inaccessible to members of the general public who would visit the environment.11 Even with the early consternation of its corporate sponsors, the Philips pavilion work would go down as a historical event, attracting nearly two million visitors on the commercial end during its six-month existence and setting a precedent for the transforma-

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tion of entire spaces into instruments through the sophisticated technical integration of sound, space, architecture, and media that we are still trying to understand to this day (figure 5.2).12 Distributed and projected through approximately 325 loudspeakers inset into the hyperbolic paraboloid and conoid geometries of Le Corbusier’s and Xenakis’s architecture, Varèse’s multitrack composition of environmental noise, acoustic, and electronic structures highlighted by the dynamic spatial trajectories of sound transformed the pavilion’s interior into an overwhelming, first-of-its-kind multisensory environment: a space where one literally inhabited sound.13 Postwar Sounds: Serialism, Tape, and Signals

In the post–World War II period, there was a marked split emerging between what composer Michael Nyman has dubbed as avant-garde versus experimental music, with avant-garde exemplified by the rigid, highly structured realm of European serialism and experimental by the more open, indeterminate processes of American composers lead by John Cage (Nyman 1999, 1–30). Represented by Europeans such as the older French master Olivier Messiaen and his younger pupils Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhauen, composers became obsessed with extending dodecaphonic principles of the Second Vienna School across the entire musical system to parameters such as duration, timbre, dynamics, rhythm, and tone production. Serialism, as it came to be known, worked with the permutational and combinatoric aspects of the twelve fixed chromatic tones applied to “non-pitch elements: durational rhythm, dynamics, phrase rhythm, timbre and register, in such a manner as to preserve the most significant properties associated with these operations in the pitch domain when they are applied in these other domains” (Griffiths 1981, 38). This seemingly unusual approach to composition rapidly took off in Europe with Boulez and Stockhausen leading the pack, as well as through American composers such as Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions, and George Perle as early as the late 1940s. Serialism was chiefly propagated in the old world through the increasingly influential summer music courses taught in the German town of Darmstadt starting in 1946, and reached almost dogmatic heights of influence by the mid 1950s. As serialism was gaining ground, another tradition that was driven extensively by new recording technologies was beginning in Paris: the musique concrète movement lead by the French radio engineer Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer had already experimented with recording onto disks in the early 1930s, but the establishment of a sound production studio by Radio France in 1948 enabled him to begin working with the tools of the recording studio as a full-fledged compositional environment.14 䉳

Figure 5.2

Philips Pavilion. World Exposition, Brussels, 1958. Courtesy of Philips Company Archive.

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Called musique concrète for its “concrete” use of real sounds, Schaeffer alchemized recorded material into new sonic objects (l’objet sonore) by mixing, splicing, reversing, manipulating and deforming existing sounds structures into wholly other acousmatic forms.15 Like Russolo’s pleas for a music of machines, Schaeffer’s 1948 broadcast of his Concert de bruits (Concert of Noises) was a landmark event, sharply splitting public opinion about the new sonic possibilities of electronics and ushering in an era of studio-based composition. Schaeffer’s studio soon not only drew composers such as Pierre Henry, Varèse, Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis, and others to a technical infrastructure in which to realize electronic-based compositions that would have been impossible outside of an institutional setting, but also set off a trend in constructing new studios with such purposes in mind. Following Schaeffer’s lead, German engineer Herbert Eimert established the first electronic music-making facility in Germany in 1951. Ensconced in the state-subsidized WDR (Westdeutscher Rundfunk) radio station in Cologne, Eimert’s studio differed from Schaeffer’s in its emphasis on equipment for the production of sound solely through electronically generated signals: oscillators, filters, noise generators, and modulators. Given the interest in applying serial principals to timbre, it was not surprising that composers like Stockhausen were quickly drawn to extending the articulation and microcontrol of sound through electronic procedures. Unlike Schaeffer’s recording-based works, Eimert’s WDR studio focused on the synthesis and analysis of sound from the bottom up, oscillator by oscillator. Early “sine wave” works from Stockhausen such as Etude (1952) and Studie I and II (1953–1954) explored the technical and artistic possibilities of additive synthesis methods, particularly the generation of complex timbres from unusual frequency ratios. Although these and many other compositions realized in Cologne were novel in their deployment of new soundmaking machineries, in many ways they still strongly maintained the separation between electronic processes realized in the studio and music performed live with traditional instruments.16 On the other side of the Atlantic, things were also not far behind, with the founding of the Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center by composers Vladimir Ussachevsky and Otto Luening one year later in 1952, and eventually on the West Coast, with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, founded by composers Morton Subotnick and Ramon Sender in 1961. Although dyed-in-the-wool serialists like Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions also keenly explored combining acoustic instruments with tape-based composition, the interest of the American school of serialists in electronic synthesis was decidedly less at first in comparison to their European counterparts. Still, despite the fact that the early electronic studios could almost infinitely extend the possibilities of instrumental composition, the fixed manner of studio processes ultimately ruled out working with electronics in a real-time, improvisational manner.

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Cage and Indeterminacy

In contrast to what Nyman described as composers interested in a “defined time-object whose materials, structuring, and relationships are calculated and arranged in advance,” the “American” indeterminacy movement emerged, exemplified by the figure of John Cage, who stated that he was “more excited by the prospect of outlining a situation in which sounds may occur, a process of generating action (sounding or otherwise), a field delineated by certain compositional ‘rules,’ ” than composing in a traditional manner (Nyman 1999, 4). Cage presides over the twentieth-century avant-garde as both exaggerated myth and demure father figure, Romantic-era genius and humble Buddhist, an artist and thinker who is both under- and overestimated for his contribution to the field of real-time, improvisational-based composition.17 Born in Los Angeles, Cage studied with Schoenberg in the 1930s, but soon after began to reject the dominance of traditional musical strictures such as harmony, which he felt constrained the processes of music making, performing, and listening. Seeking to move toward a more radical form of composition, one in which “sounds could be themselves” freed from the control and intentionality of the composer, Cage began his lifelong obsession, utilizing chance procedures that would help “deny the habitual or the hackneyed by developing techniques to restrain or condition the immediate process of choice” (Ryan 1992, 414). As a result of his studies of Zen Buddhism under D. T. Suzuki at Columbia University in the 1940s and familiarity with the work of the prominent Indian art historian Ananda Coomaraswamy, Cage would become the ultimate promoter of a compositional school of nonintentionality and indeterminacy, one less about the construction of an a priori, pregiven outcome in a score and instead about the real-time performance and mediating techniques employed to bring such an event into being.18 Composition for Cage was “purposeless play . . . this play, however, is an affirmation of life—not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation but simply a way of waking up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of its way and lets it act of its own accord” (Cage 1961, 12). Coomaraswamy’s oft-cited statement that art should imitate nature in its manner of operation, rather than its appearance, became—almost ironically, given Cage’s nondogmatic attitude—gospel for the composer. In 1950, at the young age of thirty-eight, Cage first explored chance procedures by developing charts to plot rhythms for a musical work for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. Coming to the realization that “I could compose according to moves on charts instead of according to my own taste” (Tomkins 1965, 105), Cage’s artistic direction radically shifted toward the use and/or construction of processes and systems designed to yield a purposeless music—one with the potential for surprising outcomes not dictated by the composer and that climaxed with the infamous 4’33” in 1952, a piece consisting only of silence.

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In addition to work with chance procedures derived from the I Ching, dice rolls, and other games, Cage’s move toward indeterminacy increasingly drew him to the direct incorporation of live electronics. Like Varèse, whose earlier work he acknowledged, Cage also saw the future of music dependent on the potential of new “electrical instruments” to create extraordinary organizations of sound. Working with the integration of microphone recordings of test tones played back on variable-speed turntables in his Imaginary Landscape #1 (1939), the composer became more attracted to the possibilities of live electronic manipulation than the fixed structure of tape.19 Imaginary Landscape #4 (1952), for example, consisted of a score for twelve radio receivers “played” by twenty-four performers (two per radio) over a four-minute duration. With scored notations determining only the tuning, amplitude, and timbre of the radios, the piece, according to modern music critic Paul Griffiths, was not only “indeterminate of composition” but also “indeterminate of performance” (Griffiths 1981, 68). Cage would continue to experiment with tape-based material and chance procedures in other works of the same period (Imaginary Landscape #5 and Williams Mix), yet it was his 1960 Cartridge Music, a work of indeterminate length involving amplification through phonograph cartridge pickups of various objects manipulated by the performers, that helped usher in a new era of live electronic processes in performance. Before Cartridge Music, Cage had claimed that the invention of magnetic tape suddenly gave composers a new kind of haptic control over the medium of sound, but now, the introduction of electronics manipulated by performers would help bring about an even more radical experimental situation “in which any determination made by a performer would not necessarily be realizable”—a “performance which would now be indeterminate of itself” (Griffiths 1981, 125). Live Electronics I: 1960–1965

At first, Cage’s ideas had little impact on the European serialist avant-garde. His later appearance in Darmstadt, in 1959, however, suddenly aroused strong interest in indeterminate (what Boulez in contradistinction would later call aleatoric) processes, including live electronics that would further blur the borders between composition and performance and move away from both the rigid systems of total serialism as well as the objet fixé of pure, tape-based musique concrète. Cage’s Cartridge Music as well as the lesser-known and indeterminate score WBAI (1960) designed to be played by “an operator of machines,” may in fact be some of the earliest pieces to incorporate live electronics in a stage setting. These works were quickly followed during the early 1960s by other composers on both sides of the Atlantic intent on exploring electrical transformation, including Stockhausen, Cage collaborators David Tudor and Gordon Mumma, Luciano Berio, Henri Pousseur, Maurico Kagel, and a decade later, even Boulez.

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With compositions like Mikrophonie I and II, Mixtur, Prozession, Kurzwellen, Mantra, Solo, Pole, and Expo, all composed in the 1960s and 1970s, Stockhausen rose as one of the first major Europeans to fully embrace electronic manipulation, becoming a master in the live processing of ensemble-based music. Focused on the three processes of sound—production, recording, and transformation—Stockhausen’s Mikrophonie I and II involved the playing of a tam tam or gong with multiple objects and its simultaneous real-time alteration by way of simple electronic filters and amplifiers controlled by a potentiometer. Larger scale works like Mixtur processed complete orchestral ensembles through ring modulators controlled by sine wave generators, thus transforming the “familiar orchestral sound into a new magical sound world” (Stockhausen). In contrast to the indeterminacy “school” emerging in the United States, however, Stockhausen still maintained thorough control over the performance event, giving precise notational instructions for the treatment of the sounds. Cage’s collaborator, the virtuoso pianist David Tudor, who had worked on Cartridge Music in Cage’s second home in upstate New York, can be easily credited with being one of the first seriously trained musicians to envision a wholly new type of music created and processed live through electronic circuits. Trained as a virtuoso pianist and specializing in the highly complex Klavier (piano) music of Boulez and Stockhausen, Tudor’s intensive collaborations with Cage quickly lead Tudor to abandon piano as his main instrument and move into the realm of circuit bending and hacking as necessary compositional tools. With Cage’s Variations II (1962), Tudor employed an intricate series of transformations using contact microphone and phonograph cartridge–amplified piano techniques that were directly derived from Cage’s “score”—a graphic series of simple dots and lines printed on numerous sheets of transparent Perspex with the distance between the lines and points representing a measurement of the five essential musical parameters: duration, timbre, frequency, amplitude, time of occurrence, as well as overall structure of the event (number of events). Tudor’s amplification of the piano’s strings as well as his use of microphones as excitation devices resulted in an extremely complex system of feedback loops and resonances in which tiny changes in the system could potentially lead to large-scale, unstable effects—a process that Tudor would continue to refine in later works such as Bandoneon (1966), Rainforest (1968 and 1973), and Forest Speech (1976).20 In addition to his electronically generated feedback processes, Tudor was also one of the first musicians to fully explore the use of output processing (figure 5.3). Working with everyday sound sources, Tudor’s processes operated on the assumption that any sound source could be transformed into a complex sonic event by outboard processing, which included everything from electronic circuits to the manipulation of the acoustics of a live space through equalization and other types of filtering techniques.21 Fluorescent Sound

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Figure 5.3 David Tudor. Generalized Electronic Circuitry Diagram for Rainforest IV (1973). Research Library, The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, California.

(1964), the first composition signed under his own name, was an early work combining performance and sound installation in which Tudor, through contact microphones, amplified and processed the switching sounds of 250 fluorescent fixtures going on and off for a performance with Robert Rauschenberg at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm while touring with Merce Cunningham’s company. This transformation of everyday objects into rich sonic tapestries would increasingly develop in the late 1960s in his ongoing development of live processed works in collaboration with Cage and Cunningham (which continued until Tudor’s death in 1996) and projects for the E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) organization, founded by Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver [E.A.T.’s Participatory Odyssey, chapter 8] and Robert

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Rauschenberg in 1966 to promote collaborations with artists and engineers. Most important was Tudor’s creation of his own ensemble in 1973: the group Composers Inside Electronics, which was a mix of artists and musicians whose explicit goal was the building and use of circuitry for “alternating signal sources in real time” for live performance.22 Another set of early pioneers engaged in the live electronic transformation of composition was the ONCE Group. Founded in 1961 by composers Gordon Mumma, Robert Ashley, Roger Reynolds, George Cacioppo, and Donald Scavarda, ONCE emerged out of several different creative contexts in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in the 1950s, including Ashley’s and Mumma’s Cooperative Studio for Electronic Music as well as Mumma’s own unique cybersonic instruments for use with Milton Cohen’s projection-dominated Space Theater experiments [Projection in “The New Theater,” chapter 4], and live concert settings. More to the point, ONCE was less a collective than a series of annual festivals from 1961–1965 that brought together the crème de la crème of international, experimental new music and intermedia performance artists, and filmmakers in a partial attempt to “decentralize” experimental music activities away from the urban strongholds of New York, Paris, and even Darmstadt. A huge success with audiences who hungered for new artistic expression, ONCE acted as a platform also for exposing audiences to new technological practices increasingly being deployed in the production of mostly live performed music.23 In particular, Gordon Mumma’s cybersonic electronic devices, which were seen as “inseparable from the compositions themselves,” acted as a model for much future development in live electronic instruments. His use of electronic circuitry in musical performance was not just an afterthought, but followed “systems concepts”: a “total configuration” in which “sound sources, electronic modification circuitry, control or logic circuitry, playback apparatus (power amplifiers, loudspeakers, and the auditorium), and even social conditions beyond the confines of technology” were part of the compositional process (Mumma 1967). Mumma’s 1963 composition Medium Size Mograph, for 4 Piano Hands and Cybersonic modification engaged in Tudor-like explorations of piano sounds transformed through live amplitude modulation, and MESA (1966), performed by Tudor with Mumma on “cybersonic console,” was a commission for Merce Cunningham in which the composer worked with the live capture of sounds from Tudor’s bandoneon, transforming and spatially distributing the instrument’s inharmonic frequencies through a six-channel speaker system in order to create a “duo between the Bandoneonist and the electronic circuitry” (Mumma 1967). Above all, what Mumma’s and Tudor’s work suggested is a gradual but critical shift of emphasis from the previously all-important inscribed form of the musical score toward the real-time manipulation of parameters, both musical as well as those made possible

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through electronic circuits. Their work also brought forth a new model for composition, one not pregiven by the composer as a distinct set of commands enslaved to the Western hierarchy of pitch but instead based on the solo or collective manipulation of sound’s timbral and spatial nature as a distinct phenomena in and of itself. Toward Live Electronic Music-Theater I

Partially energized by the improvisational possibilities of live electronics, musicians and composers began to incorporate dramatic-theatrical elements and mixed-media forms in their compositional practices. Cage’s statement that all music eventually leads to theater because “theater takes place all the time wherever one is” acted as a rallying call for adventuresome composers and sound artists during the 1960s (Cage 1961, 174). Pulled by artistic directions outside of the strict formations of “classical music” practice, these experimentalists threw themselves with abandon into creating works that treated music and sound as the chief dramatic elements of a performance/event and contaminated the concert hall with stage props, improvisation, audience participation, musicians functioning as actors (in addition to musical performers), visual projections, and other techniques. Despite the boldness of experimental approaches, the move toward music- and soundbased theatrics was still a marginalized activity in the larger context of the modern music world, which was split between the more established avant-garde, who extended existing forms like opera, and younger composer-musicians, who brought together disparate media to create new experimental genres that hybridized music and theater, often through technology. One trajectory was pursued by many of the largely Western European–trained composers of Stockhausen’s generation who became interested in the Gesamtkunstwerk of the operatic form. Yet, despite the interest in expanding the musical language of opera through the new compositional languages arising from serialism and postserialism, many of these attempts still retained the dramatic stagecraft and orchestral vocabularies of traditional opera and rarely incorporated electronic processes.24 A second area of exploration during the mid to late 1960s involved what composer and critic Eric Salzman called “experimental forms of interaction between the concert stage and theater”—in short, those kinds of “musico-theatrical performance works that clearly did not belong in the opera house, the Broadway theater or the traditional concert stage” (Salzman 2000, 9). In essence, composers such as Mauricio Kagel, Peter Maxwell Davies, Cage, Berio, Stockhausen, Cornelius Cardew, George Crumb, and Dutch-born Dick Raijmakers, searched for nothing less than a total “theatricalization of the concert hall,” in which musical performers had to negotiate unstable conceptual and technological systems and obstacles. Most of these theatrical works were small-scale, chamber-based events that, while pushing the theatrical envelope, were still situated in a concert setting.

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For instance, Stockhausen’s 1955 Gruppen featured three separate orchestras seated across from each other in which sounds from one group were “flung” across the performance space to the other musicians, imitating the spatial movement of sound normally achieved through electronic means. Although many of the composer’s later works such as Trans (1971), Inori (1973), Herbstmusik (1974), and his gigantic seven-day Licht opera (1977–2003) feature mimes, musicians in costumes, unusual lighting, and specially designed multilevel sets and theatrical props, Stockhausen’s theater work Originale (1961)—a musical happening made up of eighteen scenes that could be performed randomly and featuring David Tudor, Nam June Paik, and painter Mary Bauermeister—was his only truly theatrical work that explored other media at the same hierarchical level as music.25 Another major contribution to the field was the “instrumental theater” of the Argentinian Mauricio Kagel. Frustrated in his attempt to set up an electronic music studio in Argentina, Kagel emigrated to Germany in 1957. In works such as Sur Scene (1960), Antithese (1962; a “play for one actor with electronic and public sounds”), Phonophonie (1964), Tremens (1963–1965), Camera Obscura (1960), and Staatstheater (1970), Kagel turned both musical and theatrical conventions upside down while incorporating electronic instrumentation and processes into his works that specifically served dramaturgical purposes rather than just purely sonic interest. In Tremens (subtitled “A scenic montage of a medical test”), one of his more notorious works, a live ensemble attempted to create a mental scenography of delirium for a test patient by electronically distorting recordings that the patient is subjected to in a small room. Other music theater works, particularly by composers such as British-trained Peter Maxwell Davies, explored the transformation of musicians into actors or props, extended vocal techniques, and the increased integration of slides, film, and projected images as integral to the musical score.26 If these experiments expanded the aesthetic envelope of the concert hall, another group of artists began to move away from its formalities altogether, instead establishing themselves in the ever-growing intermedia scenes emerging from the visual arts. Taking place in New York, Berlin, Paris, and Tokyo and involving musicians, “sound,” and visual artists, international movements such as Fluxus and its Japanese wing Group Ongaku picked up on Cage’s theatrics and dispensed with traditional roles of listening and spectating.27 With happenings that fell between medias or what Fluxus participant Dick Higgins labeled intermedia, Fluxus performances frequently involved human-laden “compositions” incorporating sculpture, poetry, instrument playing, and social games that resembled chance happenings and rule-driven events more than “concerts” per se and sought to bring together the disparate and somewhat fixed worlds of musical and visual performance in order to transform both into participatory, open-ended activities. Another important center of gravity for mixed-media music-theater was Ann Arbor, Michigan. Along with the ONCE festival, composers Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, Mary Ashley, and others also formed the loosely knitted ONCE Group, which ran from

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1964 to 1969 and specialized in the development of new mixed-media theatrical events with a particular emphasis on live electronics as an integral dramaturgical component. Ashley had already started to investigate the coupling of theatrical conventions with electronic processes in his 1964 work The Wolfman, an anarchic piece in which the voice of a “sinister lounge singer” is repeatedly subjected to feedback-based modulation that built up a continuously changing live wall of sound. With ONCE, he subsequently continued to explore what he called “electronic theater” in such works as In Memoriam Kit Carson (1963), Combination Wedding and Funeral (1965), Unmarked Interchange (1965), Night Train (1966), That Morning Thing (1967), and Purposeful Lady Slow Afternoon (1970). Taking their works on tour around the United States, ONCE mixed theatrical and media events as elements within the larger context of musical compositions and assaulted audiences with their bold use of simultaneity, asynchronous use of musical sound and live manipulated speech, reenactments of existing texts and films, and everyday pedestrian performers.28 A majority of these Gesamtkunstwerk took place in North America, Europe, and Japan, but there were also active movements emerging in Latin America, particularly in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, Chile, and Brazil, where younger composers shuttling back and forth between Europe and their own countries were experimenting with mixed musictheater forms within indigenous political and social contexts. Known for composing the earliest electro-acoustic taped works in Brazil, Brazilian-born composer Jorge Antunes also created a series of mixed music-theater works including Ambiente I (1965) and Cancao da Paz (1965), both of which involved electronic tape playback as well as kinetic sculptural forms and dramatic lighting, and Pequena Peca Aleatoria (1966), scored for voice, piano, and theremin. More recognized internationally was the work of Peruvian composer César Bolaños, who was instrumental in setting up the first electronic music studio at the CLAEM (Latin American Higher Studies Musical Centre of Torcuato DiTella Institute) in the 1960s. In addition to tape music, Bolaños’s music-theater works such as Alfa-Omega (1967), I-10AIFG/Rbt-1 (1968), and Flexum (1969) also experimented with mixing dancers, slides, lighting effects, and the amplification and processing of acoustic instruments, placing them in a similar formal context to the work going on to the north.29 Live Electronics II: The Second Wave (1966–1980)

With the considerable influences of pop, rock, and jazz, the gradual eclipse of the dominant postwar European avant-garde in favor of the new North American centers of New York, Ann Arbor, and the San Francisco Bay Area and the ever-increasing position of electronic technologies in the fabrication of sound, the socio-cultural-technical explosion of the late 1960s that generated radical shifts in other artistic practices left no stone unturned in the experimental music world. Suddenly, directly or indirectly, music was

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seen as a means of making politics by reflecting counter cultural mores of collectivity versus the solitary genius hierarchy of lofty composer and lowly musician. In Europe, collectives like Musica Elettronica Viva (MEV),30 AMM (1965),31 The Scratch Orchestra (1969),32 and even Stockhausen’s own ensemble33 incorporated either communelike social principles with instruments such as the newly invented Moog synthesizer, brain wave devices that could read EEG signals and heart rate sensors (MEV), and freely mixed electronics, traditional instruments, jazz, oriental-influenced music into stream-ofconsciousness performances by what MEV cofounder Frederick Rzewski called “a new musician,” whose role is that of an “organizer and re-distributor of energies” (Nyman 1999, 130). Slightly more organized than MEV, composer Cornelius Cardew’s AMM sought to understand the production of sound itself by either creating new sonorities through Cagean-prepared techniques or freely mixing acoustic and electronic noise into stream of consciousness improvisation sessions of indeterminate duration. In the United States, this “electronic collective” mentality was also apparent in groups like the Sonic Arts Union (1966),34 the loose collective of musicians like Pauline Oliveros, Morton Subotnick, Ramon Sender, Larry Austin, and Terry Riley who collaborated on an electronic music series (Sonics) in San Francisco and were later instrumental in founding the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the New York–based Electric Circus (1970),35 La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music, and David Tudor’s Rainforest and Composers Inside Electronics projects. In particular, Sonic Arts Union, which formed out of the ONCE Group in 1966 and Tudor’s Composers Inside Electronics lead the way in establishing improvisation with homemade circuitry as a legitimate form of music making. Experimenting with groupdriven as well as solo compositions from its individual members, Sonic Arts pioneered composition as a dynamic process—one between the acoustic environment interacting with live instruments in closed-loop systems of input and processing. While creating new instruments through their signal processing fusion of acoustics with electronic circuits, the members of Sonic Arts, particularly Alvin Lucier, also were fascinated with treating acoustic space itself as a tunable instrument. Using electronic processes to explore the areas of sound “that would never in ordinary circumstances reach our ears,” Lucier’s performances involved the sonification of unusual phenomena like alpha brain waves generated by an almost motionless sitting performer (Music for Solo Performer, 1965; see figure 5.4), the vibration of surfaces captured by sensors in an acoustically sealed space (Shelter, 1970), ecolocators carried by blindfolded performers (Vespers, 1968), and in his most well-known work, the gradual increase of resonances in a space through the continual overdubbing of a single spoken sentence (I am Sitting In A Room, 1970). Similarly, the work of composer-performer Pauline Oliveros during the same period also stressed the use of natural processes created by the acoustics of real spaces as a supplement to the possibilities of electronically generated transformation of sound.

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Figure 5.4 Alvin Lucier. Music for Solo Performer. From Robert Ashley’s television opera, Music with Roots in the Aether. Video copyright © Robert Ashley. Photo copyright © Philip Makanna. Used by permission.

Additionally, electronics and amplification techniques being pioneered in the exploding pop music scene by the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix; psychedelic bands like Pink Floyd, Soft Machine, Jefferson Airplane, Frank Zappa’s Mothers of Invention; and more experimental ones like the Velvet Underground would also have strong repercussions on those outside of the rock world, blurring pop with the classically trained avant-garde (Minimalism), jazz (Miles Davis’s and Chick Corea’s radical recording experiments and the downright surreal work of Sun Ra (who transformed jazz into electronic music), and other forms.36 As evidenced by musician and artist Brian Eno’s onstage, real-time processing in his early performances with the band Roxy Music in 1973, electronic transformation of sound in performance was not only restricted to the classical avant-garde but had reached popular music as well.37 One group of classically trained composer-musicians that was fast to exploit the burgeoning technical developments in popular music was the loosely dubbed “minimalists” on the U.S. West Coast and in New York. Although not employing the signal processing and improvisational techniques common to many electronic ensembles at the time, composers such as Steve Reich, Philip Glass, La Monte Young, and Terry Riley, and later John Adams, Paul Dresher, Gavin Bryars, Michael Nyman, and Michael Galasso were directly influenced by and quickly incorporated the technical devices of rock

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music such as tape loops and amplification and orchestrating works that combined both traditional acoustic instruments with new electronic ones used in the pop world. Furthermore, these composers distanced themselves from the academic complexity of serial and postserial techniques, instead turning to studies of non-Western musical forms such as Indian ragas (Riley, Young), African drumming structures, and Indonesian Gamelan (Reich) in order to construct compositions that employed extremely simple harmonic principles, techniques of repetition and phasing that, as Philip Glass claimed, “must be listened to as a pure sound event, an act without any dramatic structure” (Mertens 2004, 309). What is perhaps more important, however, is the fundamental shift in the relationship between composer and musician that the minimalist composers pioneered. Trained in traditional music composition schools like Juilliard or UC Berkeley, Glass, Reich, and Young also followed the trend of other collectives by founding their own ensembles as a way of getting their music played and heard by contemporary audiences. As early as 1962, composer La Monte Young’s Theater of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate was the first of the minimalist-formed musical ensembles dedicated to the performance of a single composer’s music—in this case, the gradual and continuously evolving drone-like music of Young.38 More prominent among the minimalist performance groups was that of the Philip Glass Ensemble.39 Founded by Glass in 1967, the ensemble consisted not only of seven musicians playing instruments like flutes, strings, and amplified organs, but more radically, starting in 1970, also a “sound designer,” the producer and engineer Kurt Munkacsi. In another nod to pop music’s influence on the experimental music world, in Glass’s concerts with his ensemble, Munkacsi was given an even more prominent position on stage than the musicians: dead center at a mixing desk (which had become an instrument in and of itself) where the on-stage monitor mix for the musicians as well as the acousticelectric mix for the audience could be continually adjusted as part of the performance. Glass’s music for theater, dance, film, opera, and even television commercials would become highly successful in the 1980s and 1990s, eventually making him one of the most often commissioned avant-garde composers.40 Even though many of the more politically radical 1960s collectives like AMM and Cardew’s Scratch Orchestra had dissolved by the mid 1970s, a growing number of their former members began to be associated with universities, continuing their artistic and research practices while teaching a new generation of musical experimentalists. Between the end of the Vietnam War and the onset of the conservative presidency of Ronald Reagan in the late 1970s, one of most lively scenes arose in the San Francisco Bay Area, where David Behrman and Robert Ashley joined the faculty of the all-girls private school Mills College in Oakland, California, teaching in the college’s graduate Center for Contemporary Music at a time when advanced students were already becoming versed in electronics and early computer programming.41

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Another important scene appeared in Amsterdam in the late 1960s around the Dutch composers Dick Raaijmakers, Peter Schat, Konrad Boehmer, Jan van Vlijmen, Misha Mengelberg, Louis Andriessen, Reinbert de Leeuw, and later, Michel Waisvisz. Frustrated by the sterility and antiphysical nature of tape music, the group founded an informal experimental research laboratory (the Studio for Electro-Instrumental Muziek or STEIM) whose main objective was developing new technologies for use in live, real-time electronic music performance. Under the later directorship of Waisvisz, a radical former informal student of Raaijmakers who joined the collective in 1973 and was interested in early circuit bending, STEIM would become one of the only international centers devoted to the development of electronically augmented instruments specifically designed for the nuance and physical actions inherent to live stage performance (figure 5.5). In particular, Waisvisz’s interest in haptic contact with electronics led him to develop the Cracklebox, the first in a long series of touch instruments developed and sold through STEIM throughout the 1970s and 1980s. Intuitively played by the user making contact with a series of cheap electronic circuits constructed out of unstable oscillators that allowed for the production of sounds, the instrument’s rough and rebellious sonorities reacted against what Waisvisz described as “the clean and high-tech quality of the electronic music from the fifties and early sixties.” The Cracklebox’s “touched electronics” were soon deployed in numerous music-theater

Figure 5.5

Michel Waisvisz, 1971. Courtesy Kristina Andersen/STEIM.

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events in which floors, walls, bicycles, objects, costumes, and plants were linked up with Cracklebox circuits and turned into playful and animate sound making substances (Waisvisz 2004). The (Micro) Computer Arrives

The numerous accounts of the history of computer sound have rarely focused on the impact of computer-generated processes on live performance contexts, partially because the computer’s initial connection with audio arose chiefly from industrial and academic research contexts and not directly from musicians or composers’ experiments.42 The interest in the live manipulation of sonic parameters through circuit bending and electronics “hacking” at places like STEIM and Mills College, however, made it almost inevitable that composers would quickly become attached to the potential of cheap, portable microcomputers as they became available in the mid 1970s. As legend has it, some of the earliest digital computer-generated sounds were produced in 1957 by engineer Max Matthews at Bell Labs as an extension of studies in computer-generated speech processes, quickly spinning off entire research programs in areas as diverse as digital signal processing, music perception and cognition, psychoacoustics, and speech analysis.43 As early as the 1950s, however, composers were already imagining ways in which computers could be used in the compositional process; if not through the generation of sounds, then with algorithmic structures to generate potentially indeterminate and evolutionary musical events. Greek-born, Paris-based composer Iannis Xenakis—critical of the “linear polyphony” of the serialists, which, he argued, destroyed the potential for a more detailed and complex micro-exploration of sound—began applying probability and game theoretic decision models to composition. Educated in engineering and mathematics, and having studied with Messiaen and designed the Philips pavilion with Le Corbusier, Xenakis, like Varèse, was interested in the architectural, spatial dimensions of sound, particularly its larger macrostructural behavior. In early works like Pithoprakta (1956), ST/4 (1956–1962), ST/10 (1956–1962), and ST/48 (1959–1962), Xenakis was already using his understanding of the computer’s potential for high-speed calculation (in this case, an IBM 7090 mainframe) to generate what he labeled stochastic compositions—probabilistically generated behaviors from random numbers, which produced musical pieces of both intense structural complexity as well as dense, dynamically wavering sonorities. At the same time, while working on problems of statistical mechanics with the massive ILLIAC mainframe at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, chemist and composer Lejaren Hiller also saw the potential of algorithmically generated compositional techniques. In collaboration with his graduate student colleague Leonard Isaacson, Hiller used programming techniques derived from the computation of polymer structures, including probability functions, Markov chains, and other mathematical techniques to

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generate the Illiac Suite composition—the first machine-generated score with specific contrapuntal and harmonic relationships determined by the computer.44 Even as a handful of computer-literature composers and engineers interested in music painstakingly worked at Bell Labs in the mid 1960s to create the first computer-generated sound-based compositions,45 the non-real-time, time-shared nature of computer technology at the time coupled with the expensive human and technical infrastructure required suggested that such machines were not exactly amenable to live manipulation on stage.46 Consequently, it took until the mid 1970s for digital technologies to become compact and fast enough in processor speed and memory allocation for artists to engage them in real-time performance practice.47 Not surprisingly, the first known use of cheap, portable computing technology for real-time musical performance took place in the San Francisco Bay Area among the technology-savvy graduate students at Mills College’s Center for Contemporary Music during the academic tenures of David Behrman and Robert Ashley. According to Behrman and Joel Ryan, in contrast to the Bell Labs–like scientific research atmosphere across the bay at Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA), the Mills scene was driven by an anti-authoritarian attitude combined with an experimental atmosphere of tinkering and aesthetic curiosity.48 With the 1976 release of the KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor), an early microcomputer with about 1 kilobyte of RAM that was programmed by machine code and cost around $245, hybrid hacker-composers soon began to combine their interests in live performance and music composition with more arcane things like mastering the KIM-1’s 6502 microprocessor’s machine language by programming the device in hexadecimal code. Like the famous Homebrew Computer club, further south in the dead center of Silicon Valley, that rapidly spawned companies like Apple Computer literally out of garages, the Mills scene also benefited from its geographic and aesthetic proximity to the center of the worldwide technology industry as well as the still-counter-cultural, artistic atmosphere reigning in Berkeley and San Francisco. Considered the first “microcomputer network band,” the first organized group of KIM1 users included musicians such as Behrman, Jim Horton, John Bischoff, and Rich Gold, who dubbed themselves the League of Automatic Composers. With a debut performance in Berkeley in 1978, the League’s performances consisted of each human member’s KIM-1 networked together through flimsy, 8-bit parallel ports through which each device could be used to generate its own sound as well as receive and process data from other machines on the “network.” In the midst of such technical tinkering, the notion of “concert” was, in effect, turned upside down, especially with the informal, biweekly performance events that were later held at the East Bay Center for the Performing Arts (figure 5.6). Featuring casual drop-in sessions in which audiences would be treated to the composers’ soldering, hacking, and connecting of their computers and then listening to the results of the machines communicating with each other, the League’s events were a cross between

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Figure 5.6 The League of Automatic Composers. Photo Eva Shoshany.

a hobbyist electronics fair and a geek show-and-tell that involved the production of sound and circuits in a socially conducive atmosphere.49 As Chris Brown and John Bischoff have written, the introduction of microcomputers marked, “the first time in history that individuals could own and operate computers free from large institutions” (Bischoff and Brown 2002).50 Based on the fundamental technological and economic shift that marked the move toward microcomputers as compositional tools for real-time performance, other composers outside of the Bay Area also became interested. Introduced to the KIM-1 by League musicians—in particular, David Behrman—composer and improviser George Lewis sought to translate his studies of both the improvisational nature of human interaction rituals and his deep musical jazz upbringing into complex machine-language programs for early microcomputers that “didn’t just respond with a predictable transformation” but could be a costructurer of music, interacting in an unpredictable and musically rich manner with the playing of traditional musicians (Roads 1985, 80). Lewis’s interest in microcomputer technology was linked with his deeper fascination in improvised music as both “a carrier for history and cultural identity” where “ ‘sound’ becomes identifiable, not with timbre alone, but with the expression of personality, the assertion of agency, the assumption of responsibility, and an encounter with history, memory, and identity” (Lewis 2000, 37).

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Another early adopter of real-time systems was the composer Joel Chadabe. Based at SUNY Albany, Chadabe was fascinated by the unstable, unpredictable relationships between input, processing, and output that digital and analog systems engendered, beginning to work with real-time processes as early as 1970.51 In the composition Echoes (1970) for solo instrument and electronics, for example, sounds that were played from a score with fixed pitches but open dynamics were fed by way of a microphone into an analog/ digital delay system, transformed, and then played back into the environment through a multichannel speaker system. With the results consisting of not simply the initial input but a transformation due to the components and unpredictable behavior of the system (what he described as “the system gives back something extra”), the performer and the system in Chadabe’s work became mutually codependent on each other (Chadabe 1977, 7). Chadabe continued to exploit such feedback loops in later compositions involving control of analog synthesis through a digital system called Daisy in the studio, including Flowers (1975) and Play 1 (1977), in which a computer program controlled the behavior of an analog synthesizer, and in 1977, in live onstage control of synthesizers (an expensive, early digital Synclavier) with computers (Solo and Rhythms). Interactive Systems: Composition Among Computers, Programs, and Humans

As collective authorship with electronics characterized much musical experimentation with technology in the 1960s and 1970s, the next wave of innovation involved improvisational systems between computers and human performers and between machines themselves. The appearance of portable desktop computing with increased processing power and memory together with the MIDI protocol, which was established in 1983 and enabled different manufacturer’s musical equipment to “talk” with each other, helped composers almost overnight to manipulate synthesis and processing parameters with the aid of computers in live, on-stage performance conditions.52 In creating what Chadabe called a system that “has an output that is virtually immediate in response to its input, making it possible to regulate the system during operation,” real-time interaction fundamentally shifted composition paradigms from notational systems to programming languages, communication protocols, and software environments, claiming that the musical instrument was, in essence, “an organization of software and hardware” (Chadabe 1977, 5). As Joel Ryan, one of the handful of real-time experts who also emerged from the Mills scene, later remarked, the notion of more nuanced expression provided through the possibilities of human-machine interaction was (and is) a strange paradox. Given that one of the fundamental aspects of real-time interaction is to encode musical ideas into a form that has no musical analog (computer code), one still has to transcend

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such levels of purely symbolic description (again, code) toward the possibilities of musical invention through the embodied, temporal act of live performance itself (Ryan 1992, 414–418).53 Made apparent by the growing number of composers who almost by default became technologists and programmers in order to coax machines into becoming musically interesting partners, the advent of interactive, computer-augmented composition had a radical impact on the role of composers, shifting them away from traditional score writing and toward the role of technological inventors and innovators. “More than ever before,” wrote American composer and technologist Tod Machover, “the composer is asked to play many roles simultaneously: researcher, instrument builder, performer, theoretician, as well as creator” (Roads 1985, 90). Even as groups of musicians were freed from dependence on expensive research infrastructures to create real-time performance, the shift toward software-controlled, real-time digital synthesis also quickly became a central topic in the key computer music research centers internationally. In 1977, Stanford’s CCRMA commissioned the construction of the Samson Box, one of the first large-scale, real-time, hardware-based digital synthesizers that could accomplish signal processing and synthesis by compositional parameters specified in a custom-written software language (Bill Schottstaedt’s Pla). Another major locus for real-time computer music research was the Paris-based IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), directed by Boulez from 1977–2000. Founded on the French government’s decision to create a center for research into musical research/creation, IRCAM quickly attracted scientists and artists in all branches of sound-based research, from psychoacoustics and musical perception to digital signal processing, sensing, and input devices. It was also at IRCAM that Miller Puckette, a Harvard mathematics PhD, authored what would eventually become one of the first commercially available software environments for the control of MIDI-based synthesizers: the Max programming language.54 Challenged to write a control system for IRCAM’s large-scale 4X (originally 4C) real-time digital signal processor so that the computer could follow a score in conjunction with a live musician, Puckette first developed a non-GUI-based, command-line-driven language that could directly control parameters on the machine. Eventually writing a graphicsbased editor running on a Macintosh and communicating with the 4X via MIDI, Puckette’s “Patcher” program in many ways set the standard at the time for real-time software control of larger, more powerful computers (Puckette 1998, 2002). In line with the paradigm set by Max, composers who had been working with real-time systems such as Joel Chadabe, George Lewis, and Morton Subotnick also pursued the creation of interactive software environments for exploring performative interaction possibilities between computers, synthesizers, and other sound-producing modules by way of the MIDI standard. Developed at STEIM between 1985 and 1987, Lewis’s “Voyager”

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Figure 5.7

George Lewis. Photo Ian Cummings. Courtesy George Lewis.

environment and composition was described by the composer as “a virtual improvising orchestra” that could generate “both complex responses to the musician’s playing and independent behavior that arises from its own internal processes” by listening to and responding to live musicians (Lewis 2000, 33; see figure 5.7). Also working with real-time control methods in the 1970s through tape-based signals that controlled external electronics, composer Morton Subotnick—in collaboration with his student and software programmer Mark Coniglio [Sensate Dances, chapter 6]— developed the graphic software environment Interactor LPT (1985), which allowed live performers to interact with external MIDI devices like samplers and mixers. Having shied away from electronic produced work for years, even Boulez again jumped onto the interactive bandwagon, using the research infrastructure of IRCAM to develop works such as Repons (1986), which relied as much on live, computer-generated timbres as it did on its acoustic instrumentalists.55 Judging from these shifts toward real time, what becomes more than evident is that composition and performance were increasingly drawn together

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partly as a result of machines, further eclipsing the traditional separation between composer and musician while forging a new relationship between composer-musicians and programmers. Toward Live Electronic Music-Theater II

The artistic possibilities of human-to-machine-to-machine interaction also spawned a generation of composers and performers who, comfortable with such techniques, looked to use them in new hybrid music, media, and theater works, once again turning composers and musicians into theater makers. In contrast to many 1960s experiments in Europe that employed tape-based effects and pushed the contextual envelope of what was considered music, composers at the end of the 1980s created works attesting to the mixing between high and low culture, fusing the concert hall and the alternative, noncommercial performance gallery with genres such as rock, jazz, experimental opera, theater, video, and other electronic media, simultaneously scrambling the traditional roles of composers, directors, actors, singers, dancers, choreographers, and musicians. The financial and production support of American organizations such as New Music America and the American Music Theater Festival, European centers like IRCAM and international festival networks guaranteed a steady diet of new music theater that became a key vehicle for composers to find sympathetic audiences for their boundary-defying works. The example of so-called “cross-over” artists like Laurie Anderson, who brought experimental electronic music and performance art practices to a popular audience with her MIDI-controlled violin in 1981 and signing with Warner Bros. Records in 1982, put forth the idea that the mass public was ready for genre-breaking, music-media fusions. One of the most technologically driven composers working with music-theater and live computer-based interaction was Tod Machover. Trained at Juilliard, Machover became composer in residence and then director of musical research at IRCAM in 1980, producing chamber works such as Light (1979) and Fusion Fugace (1981) that combined traditional instruments with computer sounds generated from IRCAM’s 4C and 4X digital audio processing computers. He later embarked on a series of dramatic projects that expanded operatic genres through computer interaction. Valis (1987), based on the Philip K. Dick novel of the same name and described as “the first computer opera,” was a futuristic commission by the Pompidou Center in conjunction with IRCAM that combined elements of sound poetry, speech, rock-tinged electronics, and opera. Featuring six vocalists whose voices were occasionally transformed by real-time DSP (digital signal processing) from the 4X, a massive video wall, and an orchestra consisting solely of two musicians playing keyboards and percussion, Valis introduced Machover’s notion of hyperinstruments: traditional instruments whose timbral and rhythmic possibilities could be widely extended with virtuoso performers

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through sensing and computer augmentation techniques like score following and performer gesture analysis. Developed within the research context of the MIT Media Lab, where he is a professor, Machover’s next theatrical project, The Brain Opera (1996), which premiered at Lincoln Center and was dedicated to artificial intelligence researcher Marvin Minsky, combined a forty-five-minute stage performance with a gigantic, playable walk through environment (what Machover termed the “Mind Forest”) filled with sensor-based interaction systems. Offering Machover’s hyperinstruments to the general public, the “Mind Forest” featured a series of audience-interaction musical games such as “The Gesture Wall,” which allowed visitors to sculpt with musical fragments of sound through gestures captured by electrical field sensing and the video game–inspired “Harmonic Driving” installation, where visitors sitting in a pod-like device could “drive through” an existing piece of music, altering its behavior through real-time control of its musical parameters.56 Although Machover’s access to the enormous research and infrastructure resources of the MIT Media Lab was an exception, other technically adept or curious composers like Morton Subotnick and Robert Ashley developed theatrical works where electronic visual and musical elements were seamlessly woven together.57 Many of these projects were shown in either alternative gallery environments like The Kitchen in New York, which presented new musical experiments within the framework of the visual and media arts or university performing contexts. Similar directions were also found in the solo performances of vocal artists such as Diamanda Galas, Pamela Z, Shelly Hirsch, and Jerry Hunt. Galas achieved particular notoriety through the electronic transformation of her threeand-a-half-octave voice, which at times verged on glossolalia in multimedia works like Plague Mass (1990) and Vena Cava (1992), both of which examined the mental and physical extremities of AIDS victims’ experience. Even more unusual was the Texas-based occultist composer-musician-performer Jerry Hunt. Fascinated by esoteric systems like the Kabbala, Tarot, and alchemy, Hunt’s obscure yet atavistic performances were combinations of theater and shamanistic ritual, integrating what the composer labeled as “interrelated electronic, mechanic, and social sound-sight interactive transactional systems.”58 Works such as Ground: Haramand Plane (1985), Birome (zone): Plane (fixtures) (1992), and Transform Stream: (Core) (1992) generated by Hunt’s development of hermetic, numerological systems and codes, unfolded during ceremonial-like solo performances that featured the composer shaking rattles and talismans and shouting incantations, all the while producing timbrally and rhythmically complex sounds through a variety of home-brewed sensing systems like infrared detectors and crude black-and-white video camera arrays. Other composers, particularly early minimalists like John Adams, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, conceived electronic and acoustic music theater on the even grander scale of new opera. John Adams’s operatic works such as Nixon in China (1985), The Death of

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Klinghoffer (1990), I Was Looking at the Ceiling and then I Saw the Sky (1995), and Doctor Atomic (2007) all combined the use of samplers and amplified singers with traditional orchestral instruments and spanned several theatrical genres, ranging from large-scale “docu-opera” to Broadway-style music theater. After the monumental Einstein on the Beach (1976), Satyagraha (1980), and Akhtnaten (1983), Glass turned to smaller chamber operas (Hydrogen Jukebox, written by Allen Ginsberg [1988]) as well as projection spectacle (1,000 Airplanes on the Roof [1990]). Steve Reich, who began using samplers in his Different Trains commission for the avant-garde Kronos Quartet, wrote two “high-tech multimedia music theater works” (The Cave [1990] and Three Tales [2002]) with large-scale, multiscreen video landscapes by video artist Beryl Korot. Like Adams, Reich also was interested in the exploration of landmark historical events, particularly in Three Tales, which examined the transformation of society through technology such as the hydrogen bomb testing at Bikini Atoll and the creation of Dolly, the first cloned sheep. Another composer who sought to create new theatrical models using live electronics was the “postminimalist” composer Paul Dresher. A former student of Terry Riley and then Pauline Oliveros and Robert Erickson at UCSD, Dresher was as much drawn to the collaborative model inherent in theater making as he was to the invention of new kinds of live performance technologies. A guitarist and keyboardist by training, Dresher developed an elaborate, hardware-based, four-track, closed-tape loop system for live multitrack recording, processing, and playback in 1979, which he subsequently used for live overdubbing in performance until 1997.59 In 1985, Dresher formed the Paul Dresher Ensemble, a composer-led band dedicated to creating new music theater works. In collaboration with virtuoso tenor Rinde Eckert, Dresher’s American Trilogy—featuring the theater works Slow Fire (1985), Power Failure (1987), and Pioneer (1989)—used the techniques and sonorities of an onstage rock band while dramaturgically exploring the sociopolitical underpinnings of disaffected contemporary American life. The interest in mediated music theater was not just confined to the United States. In Europe, dozens of younger composers working with media-saturated performance explored unusual theatrical contexts for their music and sound work, freely mixing genres and contexts like radio plays, sound installations, or citywide festivals. German-born composer Heiner Goebbels achieved recognition for his compositional work with East German playwright Heiner Müller and for his “staged concerts” like Newton’s Casino (1990), Ou bien le débarquement désastreux (Or the Hapless Landing) (1992), Black on White (1996), Eraritjaritjaka (2004), and Stifters Dinge (2007), all of which combined music, text, scenography, and performers. Known for their sound installation projects that transformed the sonic identity of public spaces, Austrian-born composer Sam Auinger and American Bruce Odland (known collectively as OA) also experimented with city-scale performances in their epic

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performance Stadttraum (1991), a “sonic hologram” that “resonated” the city of Salzburg for Mozart’s 200th anniversary.60 In a follow-up to his works in Brussels in 1958 and in Montréal in 1967, even Iannis Xenakis pushed further in his interest in totalizing media spaces of electronic timbres, architecture, and real-time, computer-controlled light.61 His Polytope de Cluny (1972), installed in the Cluny baths in Paris, consisted of an “automated spectacle with lights, lasers, and electronic flashes,” accompanied by a seven-channel tape and digitally controlled by a computer punch tape. Even more spectacular was the light and sound Le Diatope (1978), a huge, temporary, tent-like structure erected for the opening of the Centre Pompidou in 1978 that housed a similar spectacle of computer-controlled lasers, lights, and the playback of the terrifying seven-channel electronic composition Le Legend d’Eer (After Plato). The PowerBook Era and the Aesthetic of the Digital

Arguably, the introduction of the Apple Macintosh PowerBook G3 laptop computer in 1997 ushered in perhaps the most radical technocultural shift to electronically created music and sound in performance since the availability of the microcomputer some twentyfive years before. The ability of musicians to rebuild hardware instruments that they previously had to lug around on tour entirely in software was certainly unprecedented. Powerful real-time synthesis and sampling software environments that a few years before were operated only in computer music research centers like Miller Puckette/David Zicarelli’s Max (and the signal-processing objects MSP), Barry Vercoe’s Csound, and James McCartney’s SuperCollider could now be run on laptops by musicians who carried such new digital instruments in their backpacks from international gig to gig.62 Historically separate, musicians operating in the myriad of club-culture genres like techno, house, drum and bass, ambient, and jungle were utilizing the same computational processes for their sonic ontologies that a few years before were the strict domain of engineers and DSP researchers, creating an almost otherworldly meeting between club and computer music electronica.63 The aesthetic shifts from what became known as laptop music were far greater than just neoteric technical possibilities. The shift to the laptop as the instrument of electronic sound culture signaled an even more extreme move toward an aesthetics of the digital conditioned by software and hardware. Artists as varied as Oval, farmersmanual, Microstoria, Autechre, Christian Fennesz, Carsten Nicolai, Olaf Bender, Frank Bretschneider, Autopoesis (Ekkehard Ehlers), Thomas Köner, Tim Hecker, Tesuo Inoue, Ryoji Ikeda, Antje Fuchs (AGF), Pan Sonic, Peter Rehberg, Florian Hecker, Kristin Erickson (aka Kevin Blechdom), Joshua Kit Clayton, Stefan Betke/Pole, Mouse on Mars, Stefan Mahieu, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Kim Cascone, Francisco Lopez, Rei Harakami, Akufen,

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Figure 5.8 Robotron—Signal—Raster-Noton (DE). Elektra May 2008—Usine C. Photo Camil Scorteanu, Conception Lévy.

Taylor Dupree, Yasunao Tone, Scanner, Exonemo, and Richard Chartier, among hundreds of others, excelled in creating musical evocations of precise reduction that occasionally bordered on minimalist fetishism, using the computational formalism of software to generate either crystalline or almost microsonic abstractions that invoked the visual image of sparsely populated, clinical white laboratories or pulsing transformations of techno beats into ambient acoustic fields (figure 5.8).64 Here, music and sound design inevitably blurred, as did sound and pixel, reflected as well in the graphic design of such mostly European-based digital music labels such as Raster-Noton, Frankfurt’s Mille Plateaux, Amsterdam’s Staalplaat, Vienna’s Mego, Brussel’s Sub Rosa, and others. Through what Kim Cascone labeled “the aesthetics of failure,” sound and music landscapes emerged from a software universe that elevated the digital to an aesthetic paradigm; one marked by a tension between the errors and glitches inherent in the breakdown of data versus the unadulterated aural experience of pure signals in themselves. “The post digital aesthetic was developed as a result of the immersive experience of working in environments suffused with digital technology . . . but more specifically, it is from the ‘failure’ of digital technology that this new work has emerged: glitches, bugs, application

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errors, system crashes, clipping, aliasing, distortion, quantization noise, and even the noise floor of computer sound cards” (Cascone 2004, 393). Judging from the sound and image of laptop performance, Cascone’s postdigital practices spanned across multiple fields, from the design of objects like CD and LP covers and almost antiseptically clean sound installations that demonstrated basic sonic principles to audioscapes generated by the singularity of sine waves, the skipping of CDs, the buzz of ground noise loops, and bursts of aural disquiet. Digital electronica advanced through younger sound artists who raised fragments of digital noise to a status like that of Carl Andre or Dan Flavin in (ironically) the visual arts world, but another major genre that partly intersected the laptop sound universe was populated by digital sampling, appropriation, recycled culture, and plunderphonia—music that began and ended with what Chris Cutler called “the already played” (Cutler 2004, 141). Explored in the late 1980s by experimental rock musicians like Kate Bush, Peter Gabriel, and the Art of Noise with the first available sampling instruments like the Fairlight CMI,65 sampling under artists like John Oswald, Chris Cutler, Negativeland, the “king of sampling” Carl Stone, the politically provocative Bob Ostertag, and conceptual turntablists like Christian Marclay and Otomo Yoshihide became a political weapon against copyright culture in the 1990s, critiquing concepts of ownership and property through appropriated sounds that were mangled, recut, and spit out from the ubiquitous laptop, sampler, or turntable. Network-based music, another digital genre with roots in groups like the League at Mills College in the 1970s, also exemplified a technical paradigm turned to aesthetic practice: the communication of computers over electronic networks. Already exploited by the League with their networked KIM-1s, the group’s all-network successor (renamed The Hub) was founded by Bischoff, Tim Perkis, Scott Gresham-Lancaster, Mark Trayle, Chris Brown, and Phil Stone in 1986. The “hub” in question was in actuality a KIM-1 microcomputer that served as a data mailbox for various communication signals emitted by each individual’s own microcomputer and that could listen to and change the behaviors of the other computers in the network—”the sound of individual musical intelligences connected by networked information architectures” (Bischoff and Brown 2002). As with interactive software, access to large-scale networks like the Internet had a similar ripple effect with musicians who embraced the data environment of computer networks as a new acoustic space for the aural transmission of sound from remote sites. Indeed, “performances” of network music from artists like The Hub, Sensorband (the group’s multi-user instrument NetOsc [1999]), Guy van Belle, CCRMA researcher Chris Chafe’s SoundWire, and others were strange but intriguing affairs, consisting of musicians sitting behind laptops waiting to improvise with data pings and sounds from locales stretched across the globe, the body of the performer apparently dissolved into the network itself.66

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The Body Returns: New Gestures and Instrumentalities in the Twenty-First Century

One of the greatest issues in the era of digital sound concerned what consequences the digital episteme of numbers and instructions, algorithmic representations, and software abstractions had for the embodied act of musical performance. Like the tape music concerts of the early 1960s in which audiences complained of music without human bodies, the laptop was met with the same criticism. “With the emergence of the laptop as instrument,” wrote Bob Ostertag, “the physical aspect of the performance has been further reduced to sitting on stage and moving a cursor by dragging one’s finger across a track pad in millimeter increments” (2002, 12). In contrast to such “knob twiddlers,” as Carl Stone labeled the genre’s practitioners, the computer was also picked up by performers for whom the human body’s gestures and sensorimotor capabilities were central to the sound-making act itself. Basing their practices on earlier models like the Theremin in which gesture and musical play were symbiotic with each other, performer-musicians such as Michel Waisvisz, Joel Chadabe, Laetitia Sonami, Pamela Z, Atau Tanaka, Sensorband (Tanaka, Edwin van der Heide, and Zbigniew Karkowsky), SSS, Jon Rose, Jerry Hunt, Ben Neill, Tod Machover, and Butch Rovan turned their bodies into alternative “controllers,” translating real-time fleshand-blood movements into synthesis parameters through wearable sensors, carried objects, maladjusted instruments, and augmented outfits.67 Once again, research in gesture-based synthesis, mapping strategies, and physically augmented human-computer interaction in institutes like IRCAM, GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales), STEIM, CNMAT (Center for New Music and Audio Technologies) in Berkeley, CIRMMT (Center for Interdisciplinary Research in Music Media and Technology) at McGill and the InfoMus Lab at the University of Genova in Italy seeped into the messy, rough world of alternative performance spaces, galleries, warehouses, and theaters. Orienting Amsterdam’s STEIM as one of the leading developers of new gesture/touch-based controllers specifically for performers, Michel Waisvisz was also one of the earliest artists to develop a gesture-based controller that combined many different sensors attached to two boards that could be gripped by both hands. Bypassing the track pads, mice, and keyboards of computers in favor of direct musical control through the human hand, Waisvisz’s device, appropriately named “The Hands,” became a virtuoso instrument by which a performer could generate torrents of sampled sound from the computer based on quick finger nimbleness, acceleration, and sudden changes of orientation.68 With finger adroitness being the driving force for “The Hands,” artists using bodybased controllers explored other corporeal characteristics as well. In his solo as well as group performances with the “sonic scientists” Sensorband, and later with SSS (Sensors, Sounds, Sights), American-Japanese composer and sound artist Atau Tanaka employed

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Figure 5.9 Atau Tanaka (top). Live in Concert with Sensors_Sonics_Sights. EMF Festival. Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2004. Photo Marc Battier. Laetitia Sonami. “Lady’s Glove.” Photo F. Balde.

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muscle tension and relaxation for control of synthesis parameters, transmitted to the computer by electromyogram (EMG) sensors worn on his arms (figure 5.9). Exploring the territory where “the micro functions of the body are amplified to macro level media projection,” Tanaka’s futuristic in appearance and sonically assaultive performances played with both performer and audience thresholds: the intensity of muscle contraction and expansion and the comfort and pain of amplitude/frequency limits in the listener’s body.69 The French-born composer Laetitia Sonami developed a different technique with her conception and mastery of the so-called Lady’s Glove, an arm-length black Lycra fitting designed and constructed by Sonami and Dutch engineer and gesture expert Bert Bongers and covered with sensors such as contact switches on the fingers, an ultrasound receiver, accelerometers, and Hall-effect transducers.70 As exquisite exercises in microcontrol using tiny motions of the fingers and broader gesticulation of the hands, and combining text, lighting (controlled by the glove), and disconcerting—almost alien—sonorities, Sonami’s “performance novels” appeared like a strange ceremony for the dead in which phantom gesticulations conjured up sonic ghosts from the ether (figure 5.9, bottom). Appropriately, as new instruments equally dependent on both digital processes and the body, gesture-based controllers bookend the twentieth century, taking us full circle to Cahill’s, Trautwein’s, Martenot’s, and Varèse’s earliest electric dreams of instruments enabling an “entirely new magic of sound” (Varèse) while still anchored in corporeally based musical expression. Moreover, the computation-augmentation of a gesture radically problematized the almost overwhelming restlessness we now experience between the human body and the machine. Is it not then the least bit ironic that the biggest threat to the creative evolution of music and sound making through digital systems might even be the looming disappearance of musical performance itself—the fading of the enactive and live act of sensorimotor perception, replaced by the articulation of machines that analyze gesture and re-render it in mathematical abstraction, far removed from the materialized act of generating sound in the physical world? Hardly, for after all, sound is touch and material rolled into one, needing a force to disturb a medium in order to move it through space and time to sound. Even with its overarching transformation through both the analog and digital, we see that the performances of the acoustic world and the sensations that it generates would be unthinkable without bodily presence—as capturer, resonator, amplifier, filter, and, most important, perceiver and listener.

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6

Bodies

In Techniques of the Observer, Jonathan Crary posed the following question: “How is the body, including the observing body, becoming a component of new machines, economies, apparatuses, whether social, libidinal, or technological?” (Crary 1990, 2) It is by now a cliché to say that our traditional understanding of the body is blurred and extended through technical apparatuses. This transformation does not solely occur with the performing subject’s decentering within a scenographic machine-scape. Through changing philosophical paradigms from Aristotle onwards, rigorous systems of conditioning and training also have envisioned the body as a technology itself—a sophisticated musculoskeletal, mechanical-organic system. Technology, in other words, not only provides us with instruments that question the assumed omnipotence of human flesh as the key element in performance, but, as Michel Foucault articulated, also suggests new ways of bringing it into being as a mutable object and subject (Foucault 1979, 135–141). This tension of the organic in relation to the mechanical is one of the central debates in contemporary performance theory and practice. “The modern problem of life,” write Crary and Sanford Kwinter, “is unthinkable apart from . . . the organism and the machine” (Crary and Kwinter 1992, 14). As photography and motion pictures in the fading moments of the nineteenth century appeared, suddenly revealing the microfluctuations of human movement, the raw body soon became the perfect machine embodiment of the new industrial age of socialism.1 With the reigning machine paradigm for the technologized body forming the start of the twentieth century, the prostheticized, computationally augmented or data-formed body frames the twenty-first. No longer conceived as a machine in the traditional sense of an organized heterogeneous assembly of parts, performance theorists and practitioners now see the contemporary body as something incorporated into larger than human systems—as something to be transcended through implants, prosthetics, sensors, actuators, and even genetic invasion.

What then happens to our perception of the dancing body as it is lost in a flurry of dynamic media changes and encounters the mediated double of itself, as in the work of many choreographers utilizing live and recorded images of the body directly in performance? How are bodies extended and made anew by technologies, for example, in the case of Donna Haraway’s “cyborg body,” Stelarc’s network-controlled implants, Orlan’s surgical performances, or Rebecca Horn’s worn machine hybrids? What occurs to the “unmediated” dancing body when it is defamiliarized by exogenous systems of rules, games, and algorithmic constructs, as in the work of diverse choreographers like Merce Cunningham, William Forsythe, Trisha Brown, and Yvonne Rainer? How can we thus grasp this perceptual and ontological transformation of the body before the scanning eye of the spectator through optical devices, “systems of rigor,” models of efficiency, mathematical systems of strategies, cameras, electronics, surgical instruments, and, last but not least, computers? Flash Traces: Bodies Captured

It is well known that the introduction of photography and moving image–capturing apparatuses radically transformed earlier body perceptions, cutting and slicing up motion in time. In what could be seen as the earliest examples of body-based sensing, the French physiologist Étienne-Jules Marey already attempted to “track down the imperceptible, the fleeting, the tumultuous, and the flashing”: that which escaped and tricked the naked eye (Dagognet 1992, 15). Initially trained in medicine, Marey’s doctoral work focused on human movement at the level of the internal rhythms and fluctuations in the circulation of human blood. During a lifelong search for the parameters of movement, its amplitudes, periods, phases, and fluctuations, Marey rejected observation and sensory information, calling it imprecise and elusive. Bringing the invisible to the surface could be accomplished only through the construction of machine inscriptions disjointed from the deceit of the human senses—the “discovery of how to make recordings without recourse to the human hand or eye,” which followed a long post-Enlightenment trajectory of devices rendering visible the invisible forces of the human body (Dagognet 1992, 30). Inspired by the pistons of James Watt’s steam engines, stenographic implements, and Herman von Helmholtz’s “writing” of acoustic phenomena, Marey’s instruments attempted to record what he dubbed “the language of nature,” inscribing signals emitted from bodies in motion as abstract yet legible traces to be discerned from the distant standpoint of the machine’s eye. Marey’s earliest devices used a combination of mechanical sensors (to collect data) attached to the test subject, transducers (to convert the data to a different form), and finally inscription mechanisms (to notate the invisible movements of blood, breath, and neural-muscular oscillations).

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Figure 6.1 Étienne-Jules Marey. Walk with Stiffened Knees (left) 1884. Walk with Bent Knees, 1884. College de France.

Having extracted and rendered the internal fluctuations, Marey then turned to an interest in recording and writing external movement, initializing another major conceptual shift from a mechanical to an electro-optical universe of sensing/writing devices. Along with photographer Eadweard Muybridge, Marey’s partial invention of chronophotography, or the capturing of continuous movement over a series of discrete time intervals, made bodily locomotion a visible phenomenon, rendering a universe of continuity through discrete time constants.2 Wielding a camera-like device, Marey captured the body’s movements and transferred them into reduced visual form in order to decrease the “noisy” information radiating off the subject (figure 6.1). In fact, what we may recognize as a nod to the neoprene wet suits and suspended white balls of sophisticated camera-based motion capture apparatuses today, he ingeniously obscured the human (or animal) body by clothing (or painting) it in black, leaving only thin strips of white metallic lines or paper dots that acted to outline appendages set into vivid motion against neutral black backgrounds. While Marey’s bodies were producing traces manifested through abstract images of moving lines and ghostly points, for colleague and competitor Eadweard Muybridge, the body would prove no less than the source of a quasi science of movement. Born and dying in the same year, the pair of Marey and Muybridge epitomizes our epoch of the technological capture of bodies in motion. As a figure that Rebecca Solnit reminds us “grasped time itself, made it stand still, and then made it run again, over and over” (Solnit

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Figure 6.2

Eadweard Muybridge. Animal Locomotion. Circa 1884.

2003, 3), Muybridge made history for his 1872 chronophotographic record of a horse in motion captured on the site of then–California governor and railroad tycoon Leland Stanford’s stables—what is now Stanford University.3 Reportedly inspired by a reading of Marey’s mammoth study Animal Mechanism: A Treatise on Terrestrial and Aerial Locomotion, Stanford provided Muybridge with the capital and infrastructure necessary to take the photos that would not long after become the basis for the development of motion pictures. There was, however, another crucial difference in approach between these two annihilators of time and space (Solnit 2003, 4). In contrast to Marey’s juxtaposition of the body against a neutral black background, Muybridge’s horses, and later human bodies, were mapped onto a grid-like coulisse (figure 6.2). Suggested by Muybridge admirer and painter Thomas Eakins, the grid served the purpose of helping the viewer identify changes in movement generated by the human subjects. The grid also brought an undeniably scientific gloss to Muybridge’s less-than-scientific photographic images—a representation of the moving and naked human body that could be “subjected, used, transformed, and improved” (Foucault 1979, 136). With Muybridge’s gridding of the human body by way of a visual technology, the photographer already hinted at the oncoming scientism of time motion studies and machine dances soon to overtake the performing body.

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Electric Bodies and the Motor

What the newly invented electro-optical-chemical technologies did for Marey and Muybridge, the airplane and motor similarly did for modern dance. Historian Hillel Schwartz’s often-cited 1992 article “Torque: The New Kinesthetic” suggests that the origins of modern dance lay in the kinesthetic behavior of a technological machine: the biplane of Wilbur Wright’s first 1904 complete circle flight. Like the Wright Brothers’ return to their point of departure in a cloudy Dayton, Ohio, field on September 20, 1904, turn-of-the-century modern dance pioneers like American-born Isadora Duncan, Ted Shawn, Ruth St. Denis, and Mary Wigman also sought a heavier-than-air relationship through the human body’s confrontation with space. Breaking away from the stuffy formalism and assumed weightlessness of nineteenth-century Romantic ballet, “dancers of the modern dance had come to insist upon the grounded human body moving nonetheless fluidly, rhythmically, naturally and, in the sense that any part of the body could be called upon, freely. Its chief pattern was the spiral; its deepest resource was torsion” or movement emanating from the solar plexus (Schwartz 1992, 77). Among Duncan, Shawn, and St. Denis, Isadora Duncan’s claim that dance should be driven by “the crater of motor power, the unity from which all diversities of movement are born,” most closely paralleled Marey’s notion of the “animated motor” as the distinguishing characteristic between the animal and the machine (Duncan 1995, 75). At first, this seems like a strange statement coming from Duncan, whose grounded, lyrical movement was inspired by the friezes of classical Greek vases. Still perceived today as a chief proponent of late choreographic Romanticism, Duncan’s invocation of the “motor in my soul” does not suggest a mechanism of cogs and wheels, but that of sheer propulsion. The motor as the dominant modern technology at the turn of the century, according to philosopher Manuel De Landa, contrasted with an earlier machine: the clockwork. Whereas the clockwork was the perfect cog and spoke mechanism “animated by God from the outside,” the motor behaved the way natural systems acted—”they run on an external reservoir of resources and exploit the labor performed by circulating flows of matter and energy” (De Landa 1992, 3). “Before I go out on the stage, I must place a motor in my soul. When that begins to work my legs and arms and my whole body will move independently of my will. But if I do not get time to put that motor in my soul, I cannot dance,” answered Duncan (1995, 123). The motor in the soul was the “central spring of all movement;” not an assemblage of parts but a reservoir of energy whose force welled up inside the body. “Artificial mechanical movement,” such as that generated by ballet’s emphasis on the back of the spine, “was not worthy of the soul” (58). Regardless of the image of a motor’s mechanically controlled centripetal might, Duncan’s expressive, almost erotic dance seems to be the furthest thing from Marey’s mechanistic rendering of motion through lines and points. Centered on and flowing outwards from the lower torso, Duncan’s dancing body exhibited curvilinear flows and

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magnifications of internal energy driven by a hidden, internal power deep within. Her motor was a metaphor for a technological object that appeared to run on its own volition, something that Duncan sought as a catalyst for motion in her own body. Another American who made her name in Europe, Illinois-born dancer Loïe (née Mary Louise) Fuller also invested in the aura of modern technology to transform the body. For Fuller, however, technology was not just a metaphor to invoke a new state of motion but rather a process to challenge the very perception of movement. Her common answer to the often-posed question “What is dance?” swiftly brought the replies “motion” and “sensation” (Fuller 1978, 70). Motion not only emanated from the human body but also manifested itself in the environment in which the body danced. Functioning simultaneously as choreographer, dancer, and inventor, Fuller’s stage performances were a stunning amalgam of popular culture forms like vaudeville and burlesque coupled with sophisticated invention and adaptation of recently introduced electrical lighting technologies, like Edison’s incandescent bulb. Her signature discovery was the draping of the body in an over-proportioned skirt of silk before a mirror, which when she moved produced fantastic morphologies of billows and dynamic folds (figure 6.3)—what the artist/architect pair Madeline Gins and Shusaku Arakawa have now labeled an “architectural body,” one defined and constituted by its architectural surround.4 This absorption in material was only the first step in Fuller’s

Figure 6.3

Loïe Fuller, 1902. Photo Frederick Glasier.

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use of technology—she further conceived of dance being conjured out of light and color itself, to be achieved by rotating a series of colored gels in front of powerful incandescent spotlights.5 Even by today’s standards, Loïe Fuller’s command of technology’s power of affect was breathtaking. A quick glance at her patented and unpatented inventions reads like a laundry list of theatrical innovations in stage and lighting techniques: new lamp and reflector technologies, invented chemical processes for the creation of slides and colored gels, and experimentation with phosphorescent salts to create almost day-glo costumes. Her shifting away from traditional lighting techniques, like footlights, to movable and handheld spotlights were experiments that would be essential to the burgeoning new developments taking place in stage lighting design. Inspired by her observations of a Grand Hotel fountain in Paris that used up-light to illuminate a statue from beneath, Fuller’s concept of underlighting turned part of the stage floor that she danced on into a glass surface lit from below by incandescent and arc lights focused upwards onto her swirling, vertiginously moving body.6 Fuller’s most famous patent concerned her “Garment for Dancers” (1894), a skirt-like construction inspired from the silk dresses used in her famous Serpentine dances. This worn architecture consisted of a skirt constructed out of “light and fluffy material” with a metal ring at the top that could be placed on the head. Aluminum or bamboo poles held in the hands helped reinforce the garment so that the wearer could control the degree of movement and extension of the material into space while she danced, thus creating the potential for undulating, wavelike motion to travel through the material. As we will later explore, her idea of physically extending the moving body beyond its own established kinesphere through simple technical contraptions like poles and cloth set the precedent for the experiments of such choreographers and performance artists as Trisha Brown and Rebecca Horn some eighty years later. Fuller’s choreographies not only resonated with the rapid development of electric lighting for the stage but also coincided with another luminous medium at the time: early cinema. Rather than adopt the static frame of the screen as cinematic wallpaper for her performances, Fuller’s enveloped, moving body merged screen and scene, confronting the materiality of fabric with immaterial fields of projected light. With her movement, light, and color experiments, the flatness of the cinema screen transformed into a fourdimensional rotating and morphing form, challenging the spectator’s perception of where the dancing body would end and the screen begin. The Machine Body

“One must go beyond muscular possibilities and aim in the dance for that ideal multiplied body of the motor that we have so long dreamed of” (Marinetti 1971a, 137). Written in 1917, Marinetti’s little-known “Manifesto of Futurist Dance” transmitted the Futurist

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ideology—as we have already seen—to permeate scenography, theater, architecture, and music into the realm of dance. Seeking the ultimate “metallicity” of body and flesh, in which the body would “imitate the movements of machines with gestures,” Marinetti admired Fuller’s use of technologies to transform the human body into the body electric. In contrast, Isadora Duncan’s expressionism, her “desperate nostalgia of spasmodic sensuality and cheerfulness,” paled next to Fuller’s “machine-like movements” in Marinetti’s imaginings of a new dance in which the inspiration of automatic guns, shrapnel, and flight could bring about the fusion of human and machine (137–138). Futurist dances such as the Dance of the Machine Gun or The Dance of the Aviatrix specified choreographies for a female danseuse imitating the firing of weapons, the propellers of airplanes, and the movements of “steering wheels, ordinary wheels, and pistons” (Marinetti 1971a, 137). Among the Futurist legions, the dancer Giannina Censi aimed to put Marinetti’s choreographic visions into practice in her Aerodanze from the 1930s. Consisting of a performance at the Milan gallery Lino Pisaro in October 1931, Censi’s Aerodanze was a bodily interpretation of Marinetti’s aerial poems: “Everything that the plane did had to be expressed by my body. It flew and, moreover, it gave the impression of these wings that trembled, of the apparatus that trembled” (Klöck 1999, 400). Twentieth-century Modernism saw the machine as a liberating force for opening up the possibilities of a dancing body restricted by traditional stage forms like ballet or naturalistic acting techniques, thus confronting Lewis Mumford’s statement that “the machine eliminates human performance, which amounts to paralysis” (Weibel 1999, 208). Of course, Mumford’s statement referred to human performance within the industrialized setting of the factory; such performance would soon come to be somewhat idealized by modernist art’s machine longings. Still, Modernism’s image of this technologized body was caught up in the general tension between structure imposed from without and freedom of movement generated within; the mechanically controlled and the ecstatically abandoned. Duncan’s expressive, “motor-driven” fluidity and Censi’s body as airplane brought the image of the machine to bear on the organic and expressive performing human body. If the machine could be used as an image metaphor of movement, it could also be seen as system to organize, train, and structure the body.7 Between 1900 and 1933, influences from industrial human factors research in the United States and Europe and body movement–based training systems with obscure names like eurythmics, biomechanics, choreutics, eukinetics, and choreology began to make their indelible mark on the European terpsichorean landscape. Some of these systems, like Dalcroze’s eurythmics, [Appia, Light, and the Responsiveness of Space, chapter 1] were devised as pedagogical tools linked to the larger movement of dance- and body-based disciplines seeking to formulate a new kinesthetic image of humans through principals of harmony and mind-body expression.

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The merit of such rhythmic exercises was that they longed for a fusion between the spiritual and the physical—the body and soul. Eurythmics was a movement training system intimately linked to the technological revolution of modernism. “Escalator, projector, conveyor belt, phonograph, these all lay within the realm of Dalcroze eurythmy: bodies could be made (or made to appear) whole and mobile, only if one understood the principles of rhythm” (Schwartz 1992, 89). Dalcroze’s eurythmic techniques became more widely known with his establishment of Hellerau, which, along with Appia’s scenographic experiments as discussed in chapter 1, became a center for new concepts of the body, not only through Dalcroze’s work but also that of Dalcroze’s star student, dancer Mary Wigman. One of the key founders of what would later be termed German Ausdruckstanz (expressionist dance), Wigman would eventually leave Dalcroze and venture to Ascona, Italy, in 1913 and later to Zürich to become a student and protégé of Hungarian-born dancer and theorist Rudolf von Laban. It was Laban who helped construct and codify one of the more systematic, rigorous analyses of human movement at the time, while tirelessly promoting research into the science of dance as a lived phenomenon. Raised in an aristocratic, military family, Laban first came into contact with the moving body through his studies of architecture at the Écoles des Beaux-Arts in Paris. Laban’s growing interest in research into dance led to his creation of a complete science of movement termed choreology: a set of detailed technical theories that generated systems of movement notation (kinetography, later called Labanotation), geometries, architectures and spatial paths of bodily movement (choreutics), as well as explorations of the qualitative intensity of such spatial movement (effort behavior or eukinetics). For Laban, space itself was not an empty container waiting to be occupied by a body, but rather a dynamic form that would come into existence only through a moving human presence; space was a “hidden feature of movement” and movement was a “visible aspect of space” (Laban 1966, 4). Attempting a systematic explanation of how the body created spatial pathways in which fantastic geometries would emerge, choreutics or Raumharmonie (space harmony) described “the relationship between the architecture of the human body and its [harmonious] pathways in space” (25). Beginning with the concept of the kinesphere, the geometric sphere around the body “whose periphery can be reached by easily extended limbs without stepping away from that place which is the point of support when standing on one foot,” Laban quickly established a system in which the human body would be surrounded by an imaginary cube with twenty-six diagonal directions of possible extension for the limbs: forward or backward, up or down, and left or right (Laban 1966, 10). When moving through zones in space (what Laban labeled the dynamosphere in order to denote the space outside of the kinesphere), the body transported the kinesphere dynamically in time, the space of it being constructed by “trace forms”—complex

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formations of spatial pathways and directional projections generated by the moving limbs (figure 6.4). Deploying an array of technical terms such as circuits and rings (i.e., returning to their starting point), lines, chains, coils, knots, and spirals to describe the complex trace forms generated through motion, Laban depicted the body as a dynamic generator of intricate geometries of cubic, isocahedral, and polygonal networks through the dynamosphere; crystallographic “scaffoldings” traced out by the body, which resulted in spatial forms akin to what Laban called a “living architecture.”8 The diagonal and transversal pathways that the body could trace through space were not just restricted to the balletic vocabularies of rond de jambe and port de bras, but also to the minutiae of everyday movements arising in the functioning of the body. Of particular interest were the ways in which human movement patterns could be studied and improved upon to become more efficient. “The tendency of our age to replace human-power by machine-power represents one side only of the problem of the economy of human effort,” Laban wrote in his 1947 study Effort; “the other side is the rational use of human-power so far as it is still employed in industry” (Laban and Lawrence 1947, 1). His study of what is termed effort movements attempted fine-grained analysis of qualitative movement behaviors that the human body exhibited in everyday use; “the effort capacities displayed in the functions of man’s bodily engine and of the rules which govern their economic and efficient application” (2).9 Although Laban did not promote a mechanistic, dehumanized image of human movement, his quantitative schematization of effort expressed through varying taxonomies, effort graphs, and charts would have most likely been unthinkable outside of the context of industrial modernism. The general interest in training the body to exploit its full potential in the service of a more efficient set of procedures percolated through the work of dozens of psychologists, managers, and industrialists, as well as artists. One of the most influential thinkers in the area of efficient movement was American mechanical engineer Frederick W. Taylor, whose 1911 work The Principles of Scientific Management set the stage for a powerful set of theories about human movement within the context of a technologized milieu and which Laban himself paid homage to in Effort.10 Taylor not only sought the optimization of prosperity and happiness through a maximization of human labor output, but he also ambitiously tried to develop a systematic corpus of training tools to increase such efficiency. In the past, management decisions were based on a combination of worker initiative and employer delivered incentive, whereas scientific management was directed at developing a systematic science of managing worker output by amassing the “traditional knowledge which in the past has been possessed by the workmen and then classifying, tabulating and reducing this knowledge to rules, laws and formulae which are immensely helpful to the workmen in doing their daily work” (Taylor 1913, 36). Scientific management would create a science of controlled tasks for each element of a particular worker’s job, then

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Figure 6.4

Rudolf von Laban. “Trace Forms” diagram from Choreutics.

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develop a system that would “select, train, teach and develop the workman” in order to ensure that all of the work would adhere to the set of principles developed. The characteristics of Taylor’s “task management” described in The Principles of Scientific Management proposed in-depth analysis of a given set of tasks around a particular set of jobs within the “mechanic arts” (cutting of metal, pig iron handling, bricklaying) in order to establish a given taxonomy or economy of gestures that management should then teach the worker. Through the tool of a stopwatch, these time motion studies would analyze both the amount of time that a particular set of gestures for a particular set of tasks would take, eliminate the false, useless, and slow movements generated, and subsequently collect the best practices; the most efficient movements could then be taught to workers.11 Taylor’s task-driven choreography of individuals and coordination of group-based gestures had perhaps its most sweeping influence in the acting training system of biomechanics devised by Vsevolod Meyerhold [Constructivism’s Technologizing of Performance Space, chapter 1]. A series of rigorous études, biomechanics—like eurythmics—was first and foremost a set of physical exercises (plastiques) that organized the kinesthetic machinery of the actor’s body in close connection with musical principles such as rhythm, dynamics, and tempo. The exercises also simultaneously developed actors’ agility, coordination, and expression, particularly in relationship to other performers on stage. Études, such as walking and running, “shooting the bow,” “the dagger attack” (a complex pantomime that would simulate an assailant’s attack on another performer), and other static and dynamic poses all combined to build up an awareness of the component parts of a gesture, the relationship to the center of gravity and stage space and a general level of physical stamina to bring the actor up to the position of dancer. More important, as a “method of physical actions,” biomechanics brought the body into the role of expresser; “the body as the producer of external word” (Rudnitsky 1981, 296). The goal of biomechanics, according to Erast Garin, one of Meyerhold’s central actors, was one of a “comprehensive training of the actor” through “techniques opposed to the photographic naturalism of ‘slice of life’ theater on the one hand, and to balletic estheticism on the other” (Braun 1979, 37–38). As a system for “training the actor’s material— his body,” biomechanics and its Taylorist-inspired processes viewed the body as a machine, seeking to train not only performers but a new human of the future—what the Constructivists labeled life-construction.12 Meyerhold’s mise-en-scène such as The Magnanimous Cuckold, D.E., and Earth Rampant were the obvious context for his biomechanical techniques to find their home. At the same time, however, small experimental studios created by Soviet theater and dance artists of the Constructivist period also harbored visions of mechanical choreographies danced and performed by human machines. Inna Chernetskaya, a former Isadora Duncan pupil, founded the experimental Studio of Synthetic Dance at the Choreological Laboratory in Moscow in 1923, which abstracted movement into machine-like poses.

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In her “Machine Dances” (1922–1923), the Russian choreographer Bronislava Nijinska also explored the choreographic construction of machines, with performers simulating their individual parts. In 1919, Nijinska established a choreographic studio in Kiev to train a “new type of ballet artist” in which physical movement and mechanized motions would be effortlessly combined with “dynamic rhythm” and, like an airplane or train, would have the capacity for speed, acceleration, and “unexpected nervous breaking.”13 Another use of Taylor’s work appeared in the oeuvre of choreographer Ippolit Sokolov, who from 1922–1923 produced dances embodying the principles of “industrial gesticulation” (Zalëtova et al. 1989, 22). The greatest realization of human-based machine choreography, however, was undoubtedly Nikolai Foregger’s 1924 Dance of the Machines. In addition to the experimental scenocinematic techniques in his theatrical work [Constructivist Performance: Beyond Meyerhold, chapter 1], Dance of the Machines was, as Russian theater historian Mel Gordon has written, “a revue of various machines [performed by actors] portraying the industrial process, each group enacting the movements of gears, levers, fly wheels, motors, etc.” Foregger combined popular forms like circus and music hall performances within a highly controlled spectacle in which, as one critic described at the time, “bodies became correctly constructed appliances. They no longer moved, they functioned. . . . Dancing is intended to be nothing but a vivid demonstration of the adequate organization of the human machine” (Gordon 1975, 72).14 Paying homage to the industrialized utopias of Taylor’s time-motion training systems, choreographic artists in post-revolution Russia and other parts of Europe (e.g., Fernand Léger’s 1924 film Ballet méchanique, of mechanical objects based on Léger’s Cubist paintings) remained mostly stuck in representing the body as a machine by visually imitating the processes of industrial production with it, rather than enlarging or fashioning it anew. The ultimate epiphany of this form of the machine aesthetic would come not from Russia but Weimar Germany, however, in the work of Oskar Schlemmer at the Bauhaus between 1923 and 1929. In contrast to Foregger and Meyerhold, Schlemmer’s imagination of the human-machine interface was less the conversion of the body into a machine but rather one in which, through a harnessing of the techniques of architecture, costume and space itself could “enlarge it [the body] beyond its dimensional and temporal limitations” (Gropius 1961, 21). Like Laban (with whom he briefly collaborated), Schlemmer also saw the human body as an integral mechanism for the creation of space. But the human body was no mere system of simply geometric trace productions but instead pictured as a dynamic event that could invoke both “psychic expression” and an abstract “mathematics in motion” before the spectator (95). For Schlemmer, who had trained in and continued to teach painting at the Bauhaus in addition to running the stage department, live performance was the vehicle to transfigure the human form. Despite the possibilities of the mechanized stage, “man” still stood

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as the centerpiece of performance with the dancing body and its technical augmentation the ultimate mechanism used to transform space. Within the geometries of Schlemmer’s abstract stage, the human body was situated in an abstract, geometric, mathematical space, yet, as Schlemmer repeatedly stated, “man as dancer . . . obeys the laws of the body as well as space” (Gropius 1961, 25). Schlemmer was and is chiefly known for his pioneering Bauhaus Dances, demonstrations of visualizing space and its geometries that took place at the Bauhaus in the 1920s. By simple augmentation of the body by wooden sticks, wire lines, metal, and paper, studies such as Pole Dance (1921) and Raumtanz (Space Dance, 1924) succeeded where the Russians in their quest for the ideal machine body failed: physically extending the human body through simple technologies into space itself. As an external device, technology could be imagined to extend and thus, transform the human body’s limitations by way of gravity, but Schlemmer went further, working with inventive costumes that would help alter basic bodily characteristics. Whereas Kleist or Craig’s theater imagined the human body to be superseded by the Kunstfigur or marionette, Schlemmer saw the possibility of entanglement between what he termed a “technical organism,” an artificial figure and “naked, natural Man.” Clad in “precision machinery, scientific apparatus of glass and metal, the artificial limbs developed by surgery, the fantastic costumes of deep-sea diver and the modern soldier,” Schlemmer’s dancers still remained uniquely human to the artist (Gropius 1961, 28–29). Schlemmer’s most heralded experiment, however, was the Triadic Ballet. Commencing work on the piece in Stuttgart as early as 1912, Schlemmer described a dance of “abstract types”: a work consisting of three parts exploring color, form, and movement. Hoping that the dance would be free from the stigma of tradition (opera and theater) and instead act as a departure point for innovations, the Triadic Ballet owed much to similar machine experiments happening in the visual arts at the same time, namely Léger’s Ballet méchanique and most certainly Duchamp’s Cubist-inspired revisiting of Marey and Muybridge’s chronophotographic orderings of reality. Schlemmer himself declared more than once that the goal of the Triadic Ballet itself was far from transforming the human being into a lifeless automaton through technology, but rather searching for materials that would amplify the body’s “biomechanical exactness.”15 Like other Bauhaus teachers, Schlemmer held an enthusiastic but simultaneously critical attitude to technology in relationship to its ability to change the perception of the human form. “Amazed at the flood of technological advance, we accept these wonders of utility as being already perfected art form, while actually they are only prerequisites for its creation” (Gropius 1961, 31). Technology was a precise and aesthetically powerful means of augmentation and alteration of the human form, but, as Schlemmer repeatedly emphasized, could achieve its impact only with a purpose that was larger than techne itself.

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The Body in the System

Like changes in other artistic forms, the post–World War II world resulted in a dramatic shift in the relationship of the performing body to its sociopolitical technological surround. With the demise of experimental culture in Europe due to fascism, artistic exploration into the nature of the performing body within a technological context largely swung to the North American sphere. The largely American-centered, post-1945 period would increasingly be preoccupied with the phenomenal nature of dance itself, with the performing body seen less as a vessel of expression and more as a material for the production and generation of movement. Much of what would eventually come to be labeled as postmodern dance in the early 1970s directly involved this demystification and stripping away of the overblown theatricality and false emotions that had come to be identified with the modern dance practices of Isadora Duncan or, later, Martha Graham. Instead, the exploration of objective, taskdriven, and quotidian movement anchored within a rigorously formal temporal and spatial context brought a conception of the body as a highly sophisticated instrument whose ordinary movements like walking, sitting, and running could be utilized as material for performance. The other trend that marked the postwar transition period was the increased importance of the body outside of the traditional dominion of the stage (theater and dance), and instead as the subject and object of performance in the burgeoning, genre-blurring array of movements that shook up the visual arts during the 1950s and 1960s. Happenings, Japanese Gutai, and international Fluxus-styled events, installations, site-specific environments, land art, and other hybrid forms all challenged the traditional fixity of the art object as such and brought into play process over result, activity over work, and spontaneity over planning. Cunningham’s Techne

One of the key artists appearing during this tumultuous period was American-born dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham. As numerous critics have discussed, Cunningham acted as a central transition figure between European and later American dance modernism (as typified by choreographer Martha Graham) and a dance that marked new frontiers in North America.16 Originally trained at the Cornish School of Performing and Visual Arts in Seattle, where he met John Cage, who was a faculty accompanist and composer, Cunningham later danced with Martha Graham from 1939–1945. Cunningham’s break with Graham’s aesthetic was due in part to his growing dissatisfaction with her overt emotional and psychological pretexts, overemphasis on linear narratives built upon classical theme and variation models (e.g., A-B-A), and the tendency to subordinate movement to

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illustrative music. It was Cunningham’s collaboration with Cage and their mutual influences on each other that set the stage not only for Cunningham’s development of technologically enveloped choreographic stagecraft but also both artists’ influence on an entire generation of dance and movement artists. Urged by Cage to leave Graham, the two artists’ first experiment, a recital that took place in the Humphrey-Weidman studio in New York in 1944, already explored techniques that would come to define Cunningham’s aesthetic direction. As Cage performed one of his famous prepared piano works in which the composer altered the sound of a piano with the insertion of objects between the strings or on the hammers or dampers, Cunningham danced in rhythmic phrases that he later described as discrete “time units,” sometimes linked directly to Cage’s music and other times wholly independent of it, as if movement and sound existed on separate tracks of a mixer. Cunningham’s movement itself also reflected his departure from Graham’s psychological aesthetic. Angular, geometric, and fragmented, Cunningham’s choreography amplified the feeling of discretization reflected in the music. Cunningham’s fracturing of a predetermined synthesis between movement and music was the beginning of an aesthetic and political practice in which different art forms could be dissociated from each other such that they maintained their own autonomy. This technique resonated strongly with Brecht’s call in the 1920s for a Trennung (separation) of artistic elements, which would keep the totalizing effect of media from overwhelming the spectator’s own processes of making meaning. Deeply influenced by Cage, Cunningham went further in his attempts to dissociate music from movement and to introduce systems of indeterminacy by way of chance procedures. As early as 1950, Cage was already experimenting with musical compositional structures arrived at from using the ancient Chinese I Ching. Suite by Chance, Cunningham’s 1953 choreography, was a dance in which all spatial and temporal elements were subjected to chance procedures derived from coin tosses.17 Searching to open up the possibilities of new forms of movement, the use of mathematically derived chance techniques helped remove the human being as the sole instigator of movement—what Cunningham described as “not the product of my will but which is an energy and a law which I obey” (Copeland 2004, 111). Given Cunningham’s propensity for the separation of artistic elements and his interest in decentering the spectator’s perception through processes of simultaneity and chance, it is not surprising that he was soon drawn to the possibilities that electronic and, later, computational systems could provide. Although not incorporating electronic technology, Cunningham and Cage’s early multimedia explorations between 1947 and 1953 at ex– Bauhaus member Josef Albers’s experimental Black Mountain College in the hills of North Carolina, were prime examples of process-based performance happenings that served as the foundation for their first real foray into live use of real-time electronic technologies: the 1965 collaboration Variations V (Copeland 2004, 149–152).

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It would not be an exaggeration to say that Variations V and subsequent experiments from Cunningham, Cage, and their tight-knit collaborators set up the foundations for much contemporary work in dance and technology that so many today feel is unprecedented. Described by collaborator Gordon Mumma as “a superbly poly: -chromatic, -genic, -phonic, -meric, -morphic, -pagic, -technic, -valent, multi-ringed circus” (Nyman 1999, 98), Variations V was developed and premiered at the Philharmonic Hall in Lincoln Center, on July 23, 1965, for a festival celebrating French and American relations. Involving a stellar list of collaborators including Cunningham, Stan VanDerBeek (film), Nam June Paik (live distortion of VanDerBeek’s films), Robert Moog, Billy Klüver and Max Matthews (electronics), and the musicians Cage, Malcolm Goldstein, Frederick Lieberman, James Tenney, and David Tudor, the work acts as one of the earliest choreographic events to exploit the possibility of real-time interaction between performers (both dancers and musicians) and a semi-autonomous electronic system (figure 6.5).

Figure 6.5 John Cage, David Tudor, Gordon Mumma (foreground), Carolyn Brown, Merce Cunningham, Barbara Dilley (background), Variations V, 1965. Photo Herve Gloaguen. Courtesy of the John Cage Trust.

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Specifically, the event involved the incorporation of two systems of sensors. Designed by Robert Moog, the first consisted of a series of twelve 5-foot-tall capacitance sensors—poleshaped antennas that responded to the distance between dancers, the number of dancers on stage, and the distance between dancers and the sensors. The second system, designed by a Bell Laboratories team led by Billy Klüver, consisted of photoelectric cells that were mounted at the base of the poles, sharply focused at the stage lights such that when the dancers intersected the path between sensor and light, the light intensity measured by the photocells would suddenly change. A specially created array of electronic switching equipment and a fifty-two-channel mixer designed by Max Matthews that would route all of the audio data to a multichannel speaker setup enabled the musicians to control a battery of reel-to-reel tape recorders, radios, oscillators, and other electronics and trigger the overall sonic landscape.18 Even as the musicians—above all, Cage—reveled in the overall indeterminate interaction among dancers, musicians, and the technical systems, the dancers, and—early on— audiences and critics were less than enthusiastic about the mix between the human and technical, with dancer Barbara Dilley stating that the very nature of the interaction between the performers and the technology lent a “ ‘dissociative’ quality that people had trouble with” (Miller 2001, 557).19 Nevertheless, Variations V served to entangle the body within a myriad of complex, nondeterministic electronic systems and furthered Cunningham’s choreographies in which, as critic and scholar Roger Copeland described, the “fundamental differences between human beings and inanimate objects were ignored” (Copeland 2004, 42). Both directly and indirectly, Cunningham would go on to exploit other technological possibilities, due in part to his continued collaboration with adventuresome musicians and visual artists, such as Robert Rauschenberg, Cage, Tudor, Mumma, David Behrman, Jasper Johns, Robert Morris, Andy Warhol, and Bruce Nauman. Ambulant set and lighting elements, wireless sensing technologies (as early as 1972), and, increasingly, electronically generated sound scores were a few of the featured technologies that were explored for their theatrical effect. Choreographies such as Winterbranch (1964) and Canfield (1970) shocked audiences and critics alike by their use of extreme lighting effects and extremely discordant, noisesaturated electronic sound environments.20 In response to Cunningham’s cacophony of technical systems, critic Marcia Siegel wrote in the New York Times: “More than ever the machine is in control. The chance activities that were produced by human beings doing unpredictable things have been submerged under the more powerful unpredictability of electronic equipment. The human input is simpler and less noticeable—all that’s needed now is one long and two short blasts on a trumpet from the top of the balcony or a voice over test or simply throwing the mike open. The tubes do the rest” (Klosty 1975). The musicians with whom Cunningham worked, both inside the company (like Cage, Tudor, and Mumma) and outside, were one of the main forces for his continual seeking

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out and adoption of radical technological possibilities. In addition to Cage, David Tudor would also go on to create increasingly electronic scores for Cunningham. His Rainforest (1968) score for the similarly named choreography featured a series of hanging objects that were set into resonance through acoustic actuators attached to the sculptures. Gordon Mumma would prefigure current experiments with wireless technologies in dance contexts by two decades with his score Telepos I for Cunningham’s choreography TV Rerun (1972), in which the dancers wore “telemetry” belts containing wireless tilt sensors and radio transmitters that would broadcast the physics of the dancer’s movements to Mumma and his mixer. “The dancers were collaboratively responsible for the nature and continuity of the sound, through the implications of this technological extension of human activity” (Klosty 1975, 68). Even when he was not using technology directly, computers and electronics still figured into Cunningham’s overall conceptual planning. His early choreography Walkaround Time (1968), with set design by Jasper Johns (based on Duchamp’s Large Glass), was named after a joke among University of Illinois computer scientists indicating the time spent waiting for calculations on early large mainframe computers. Described as a “machine game,” Walkaround Time in a strange way mimicked earlier twentieth-century machine choreographies with the body imitating the movement of parts, gears, and motors. The fascination with mathematically determined systems and their unpredictable outcomes might explain why choreographers and dancers like Cunningham as well as his disciples and offshoots harbored an ever-increasing interest in the objective, rigorous techniques that they believed scientific and technological models could offer. Given these broader socioscientific and technological interests, it is unsurprising that Cunningham helped jump-start a move away from the dance modernism that he himself partially represented. Rules, Games, and Dance Machines: Judson and Its Postmodern Successors

In 1962, with the encouragement of Cunningham, Robert Dunn, a composition student of Cage’s and husband of one of Cunningham’s star dancers Judith Dunn, taught a radical dance composition course involving several dancers from Cunningham’s own company as well as other New York–based choreographers. Dunn encouraged his younger students to experiment with dance in sweeping aesthetic breaks with the past, bringing not only Cage’s interest in chance operations to bear on movement ideas but also Erik Satie’s time systems, manipulations of objects as part of a performance, and the integration of nondance-like movement into the choreographic composition process. The concert that Dunn’s students staged on July 6, 1962, at the Judson Memorial Church off Washington Square in New York City marked the beginning of what many critics refer to as the start of the postmodern dance era. During the next several years, the

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list of choreographers in Dunn’s workshop who began creating their own concerts at the Judson Church reads like a who’s who of contemporary dance: Alex and Deborah Hay, Yvonne Rainer, Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, Robert Dunn, Lucinda Childs, David Gordon, Simone Forti, Judith Dunn, Meredith Monk, Elaine Summers, Kenneth King, and others. Between 1962 and 1964, the twenty choreographic concerts at Judson radically split with the past, bringing a new generation of female choreographers to prominence and incorporating techniques for making dances that squarely fell outside of traditional compositional strategies: games, casual and quotidian movements, tasks, the manipulation of objects, the reciting of texts, the showing of films, and extensive exploration of improvisation. It is impossible to identify a singular Judson aesthetic. Nonetheless one of the group’s hallmarks was a mutual interest in exposing the structural foundations of movement and how meaning was attributed to its generation. Dance was that which could be labeled and thus, contextualized as dance and performance, focusing less on the virtuosity of expression and more on the “neutral doing” of simple tasks and behaviors. According to Judson expert and dance theorist Sally Banes, Judson and its later postmodern (“post” in the chronological sense, as that which came after modernism) successors, sought out the cultural-social underpinnings of dance as a lived phenomena. “Whether the prevailing structure is a mathematical system for using space, time, or the body; or arbitrary assemblage; or fragmentation, juxtaposition, the deliberate avoidance of structure by improvisation; or the constant shifting of structures by chance methods, there is always the possibility, in post-modern dance, that the underlying form will be bared” (Banes 1987, 16). Judson dance events were tied to the larger experimental cultural atmosphere of the mid 1960s, integrating visual artists, musicians and experimental composers, poets, and choreographers who all shared in sometimes equal and sometimes different duties. Anything could be the subject and event of dance where the body was treated as object to be performed and explored. Moreover, Judson’s concerts freely integrated elements from the visual and sonic arts as well as Fluxus and happening-like strategies into what its members clearly labeled as dance. In such choreographies as Room Service (1964), for example, choreographer and later filmmaker Yvonne Rainer utilized game structures in which teams followed the leader through a dense sculptural environment built by visual artist Charles Ross or tested out strategies of tasks and repetition in her most famous work, a four-and-a-half-minute phrase entitled Trio A (1966) organized from a series of event modules that were chained together into an endless series of transitions. Dancer Simone Forti’s (Whitman) early dance constructions such as See-Saw, Rollers, Slant Board and Huddle, were gamelike dances in which movement was organized by the play between performers and various equipment: a seesaw, wooden ramps, and sculptural jungle gyms.

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In her early pieces Lightfall (1963) and Rulegame 5 (1964), choreographer Trisha Brown developed choreographies with severe rule-bound constraints in an effort to “find the schemes and structures that organize movement, rather than the invention of movement per se,” while Lucinda Childs played with the line between performer and audience perception through site-specific events (Street Dance in 1964) and the conscious manipulation of objects and movement coupled to those objects (Banes 1987, 86). Dancer Elaine Summers, one of the few original Judson members who sought to integrate more complex media into her work, developed the elaborate 1964 performance Fantastic Gardens, one of a handful of early choreographic works to incorporate projections of 8mm film and, according to filmmaker Jonas Mekas, “the most successful and most ambitious attempt to use the many possible combinations of film and live action to create an aesthetic experience” (Banes 1983, 190). In the eyes of contemporary dance historians, the Judson Dance Theater, as it would come to be known, is not normally seen as interested in exploiting technological developments as part of its modus operandi. This may be partly due to the early Judson dancers’ critique of Gesamtkunstwerk-type choreographic events and, instead, for the most part, their pursuit of a kind of bare-bones aesthetic in which the body would become paramount to the act of performance without the clutter of external theatrical devices. Yet, like Cunningham, these young dancers and choreographers were keenly interested in the manipulation, intervention, and extension of the dancing body through all manner of choreographic systems: simple tasks, rule-based or chance techniques, mathematical procedures, game models, or any other kind of “movement not pre-selected for its characteristics but resulting from certain decisions, goals, plans, schemes, rules, concepts, or problems” (Kirby 1975, 3). Rigorous techniques derived from mathematics or inspired by science could thus yield unexpected possibilities that would not necessarily be under the direct control of a single individual but rather subjected to systemic evolution and control. Offering “an objective rigor that was a welcome antidote to the subjectivity of dramatic dance, and a logical extension of a concern with methodology,” some of the key Judson Church dancers like Childs, Alex Hay, Rainer, and Paxton also became fascinated in how new electronic technologies might also enlarge the choreographic process (Banes 1987, 14). This curiosity in technology came to the forefront with the landmark event: 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering, held at the colossal New York Armory from October 13–23, 1966. Created by Rauschenberg and Bell Labs engineer Billy Klüver, who had been working on the side as an assistant to sculptor Jean Tinguely and additionally collaborated with Cunningham and Cage on Variations V, the event was a yearlong collaboration between ten performing and visual artists and over thirty Bell Laboratories engineers to realize a series of performances that fused cutting-edge performance concepts with the latest technological developments. Apart from Judson members Alex and Deborah Hay, Lucinda

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Childs, Steve Paxton, and Yvonne Rainer, John Cage, Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Whitman, Oyvind Fahlström, and David Tudor participated as well. Played in front of an audience of more than ten thousand, the artists devised performance events that in many cases pushed the engineers and technologies to their limits. Lucinda Childs’s Vehicle, for example, incorporated radio technologies and Doppler radar, merging “dance involving three performers and a groups of objects one of which was air supported. The materials and performers came into contact with light and sound sources intermittently throughout the dance so that the qualities of the materials in motion as well as the motion of the performers could be exposed to different situations” (Childs 1973, 56). Deborah Hay’s Solo also explored the relationship between animate performers and objects; in this case, remote-controlled platforms. Steve Paxton’s Physical Things, described as a “dance with a set” took a different approach, resulting in a series of massive polyethylene inflated, walkthrough environments filled with projected images and sound [E.A.T.’s Participatory Odyssey, chapter 8]. According to Judson member, observer, and event administrator Simone Forti, many of these technically innovative performances transformed into real-time “disasters” through the malfunction of untested, research lab–based technologies shortly before or even during the performances. Nevertheless, 9 Evenings produced a series of joint artistic and technical events that were not only unprecedented for their time but also helped strengthen and complicate the collaboration between human and nonhuman systems in performance. Although the actual Judson movement was short lived (from 1962–1964), star dancers in the movement would successfully continue their formal explorations into the 1970s and 1980s. One wing, which Sally Banes termed analytic postmodern, expanded on the research into procedural systems that had marked earlier experiments. In pieces like Accumulation (1971)21 and Locus (1975), Trisha Brown began to develop almost algorithmic models to what she would later call “dance machines that take care of certain aspects of dance-making” (Goldberg, 1986, 166).22 In the 1980s, Brown would begin incorporating more elaborate environments and musical scores, collaborating with visual artists including Rauschenberg (a hanging architectural set mainly constructed through projections in Set and Reset, 1980), the Japanese fog sculptor Fujiko Nakaya (Opal Loop/Cloud Installation #72503), and minimalist Donald Judd, as well as Laurie Anderson (Set and Reset). Preoccupied with Cartesian-driven geometries that would be used to generate extremely reduced sets of movements, Lucinda Childs also went in a direction similar to that of Brown. In her choreographies Untitled Trio (1973), Calico Mingling (1973), Congeries on Edges for 20 Obliques (1975), Radial Courses (1976), and Interior Drama (1977), Childs’s dancers would traverse grids, diagonals, or parallel lines in extremely complex series of repetitive movements that although simple in appearance, demanded extraordinary concentration and virtuosity. Some of the hallmarks of this analytic dance movement would be summarized in the short-lived Grand Union collective (1970–1976), which involved nine of the original

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Judson members, including Brown, Paxton, and Rainer, among others, and sought to more radically explore processes of improvisation through open systems in which little preplanned structure existed and in which social interaction rituals and political frames became the basis for compositional material. In its exploration of the distinctions between control and autonomy, Judson and its offshoots brought a fundamental questioning of received assumptions of what the performing body was and how it could be technosocially constituted. How could one view the body when movement itself was no longer the result of a sole human creator but the result of mathematically generated procedures? If procedural machines were the generating catalyst, then where did the locus of human creation lie and what was the role of choreographer and dancer in relationship to a dance-making machine? Could a machine choreograph, and what kinds of corelationships would be possible? Body Art/Technomanipulation

The Judson choreographers emerged in the broader 1960s climate of artists working with the body as both subject and object outside of traditional performing arts contexts. Driven by a host of international influences, from the experimental Gutai movement in Japan and a resurgence of interest in the writings of Artaud to the violent, politically motivated performances of the Vienna Actionists, the body, according to Rose Lee Goldberg, became simultaneously a material for ritual, a testing ground for psychophysical limits, and a political weapon of protest (1998, 96–97). If a shift toward what Australian-Greek artist Stelios Arcadiou (also known as Stelarc) would call “electronically connected and coupled bodies” (Stelarc n.d.) would not take place until the late 1980s, the roots of technological transformation of the flesh were firmly anchored in the body-based actions and practices of artists in the 1960s. The work of the Judson dancers already resonated with that of numerous visual artists in Europe and the United States, including Yves Klein, Piero Manzoni, Vito Acconci, Chris Burden, Paul McCarthy, William Wegman, Dennis Oppenheim, Klaus Rinke, Joseph Beuys, Bruce Nauman, Stuart Brisley, Marina Abramovic, Ulay, Linda Montano, Hsein Hsuo-Hsei, Gina Pane, Valie Export, Arnulf Rainer, Günter Brus, Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch, and Peter Weibel, as well as Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose interests lay in the use of the body as a material to be subject to transformative processes in order to be reformulated anew. First and foremost, artists saw the body as an extension of painting; a material to be manipulated, like paint or clay in the fashioning of a canvas or sculpture. Much of this activity arose within the visual arts, where new methods were sought in order to expand traditional notions of pictorial representation that had ossified in the fixed form of the object. French visual artist Yves Klein, for example, already used live actors as living paintbrushes in his Anthropometrien performances between 1958 and 1962, and the work

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of the Japanese Gutai group between 1954 and 1972 sought a fusion between Jackson Pollock–inspired Action Painting techniques and happenings.23 Invasion/Mutilation/Reformulation

In other cases, artists looked to more invasive techniques to resculpt and transform the body. In the performances of Chris Burden, the French/Swiss artist Gina Pane, the German artist Valie Export, the Vienna Actionists, the Serbian artist Marina Abramovic´ , and later the modern primitives body artist Fakir Musafar, early Stelarc, or the French surgical artist Orlan, technology helped break the flesh in actions involving direct pain, injury, amputation, and self-mutilation. Using the crude and the sophisticated, from simple instruments like guns (Burden, who was mock-crucified onto the roof of a Volkswagen in one performance and shot in another) and razors (Pane) to advanced plastic surgery (Orlan), artists saw their own bodies as extended sculptures to be deformed/reformed by direct manipulation at the level of the skin. The most extreme refiguring most certainly came in the performative actions of the Vienna Actionists, a group of Austrian artists composed mainly of Hermann Nitsch, Otto Muehl, Günter Brus, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler, whose transgressive public and private events involved actions of public self-mutilation (Brus’s Selbstverstummelung and Schwarzkogler’s photographic works) and theatrically ritualized ceremonies of animal sacrifice (Nitsch’s Dionysian/Artaudian-inspired Orgien Mysterien Theater). Criticizing a postwar Austria that was seen by many artists as still harboring the complicit, authoritarian attitudes that made possible the fascist ideologies of National Socialism, the actionists brutally shattered staid bourgeois political and social mores. Slightly younger but also part of the Actionist circle was artist and curator Peter Weibel. Having studied mathematics, philosophy, medicine, and logic, Weibel was interested in the political power of language through a post-Wittgensteinian exploration of the materiality of words. In early actions such as Polizei Lügt (1971) and expanded cinema works such as Lichtseil (1971), Weibel focused on the visualization of language and its transformation through visual and cinematic juxtaposition, but in later works such as Raum der Sprache (1973), he increasingly explored the connection between text and the body, using his own as a marking system and literal surface of inscription. The direct reformulation of the body with technologies as a form of social protest against established norms also surfaced in a completely different sociopolitical context: the culturally conservative climate of Reagan-era America. In the performances of Ron Athey and Bob Flanagan, for example, bodily pain was also explored as a means of self-liberation against the oppressive atmosphere of Christian fundamentalism or stifling cultural conservatism. The HIV-positive son of a Pentecostal minister, Athey’s “theater of pain” performances such as Four Scenes in a Harsh Life (1990) sought a transcendence

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of the body through processes of piercing, scarification, and masochism akin to the ecstatic behavior that marked Pentecostal religious services.24 Another example of body transformation came in the work of the cystic fibrosis-stricken performance artist Bob Flanagan. Initially known for his role in the banned Nine Inch Nails video “Happiness in Slavery,” in which a naked Flanagan was strapped into a fictional pleasure/pain machine that eventually ripped him apart, the artist’s sadomasochistic solo works also focused on the transcendence of a diseased body through the infliction of pain. In his epic 1994 performance-installation Visiting Hours, first shown at the Santa Monica Museum and then at the New Museum in New York, Flanagan and partner/ dominatrix Sherrie Rose constructed an identical brick-and-mortar replica of the artists’ hospital room. A comment on the nexus between machineries of medicine and pain, Visiting Hours spectators encountered a hospital room with the bedridden Flanagan himself, medical and torture instruments, an S&M dungeon, and a video scaffold featuring images of a healed Flanagan’s body intensely experiencing the pain/pleasure of self-mutilation.25 Noninvasive Extension: Wearables, Prosthetics, and Images

Performing artists also explored less invasive techniques to technologically extend the body. Concurrent with her choreographic experiments, Trisha Brown’s so-called equipment dances between 1968 and 1972 also researched ways to transform the body’s relationship to weight, effort, and gravity. Working with mountain climbing equipment such as ropes and harnesses, pieces like Planes (1968), Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (1969, 2006), and Walking on the Wall (1971) literally suspended normal relationships with gravity by having dancers perform on surfaces perpendicular to the ground (figure 6.6). Brown posed such questions as “What does it mean to walk on a wall?” and “How can you move parallel to the ground?” in her most well-known equipment exploration, Walking on the Wall, which was performed at the Whitney Museum of Art and in which harnessed dancers perpendicularly hung and could walk, run, or remain still at varying heights on two right-angled walls with the aid of climbing ropes and extended tracks that curved around the room.26 Extensions to the body could also take more fanciful, wearable forms such as the strange prosthetic devices created for the early performance experiments of the German visual artist Rebecca Horn and the participatory propositions of the Brazilian artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticia. Interested in how soft materials could extend the body into space during a one-year period of convalescence and isolation, Horn began to sew strange anthropomorphic, pupus-like forms that could protect and, at the same time, project the body beyond its physical constraints into the world around it.

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Figure 6.6 Trisha Brown. Man Walking Down the Side of a Building. Performance restaged at Tate Modern, May 2006. Photo by John Rowe at Tate Museum.

Similar to Loïe Fuller’s extension of the moving body through poles and flowing textiles, Horn’s idiosyncratic performances transformed the female body by means of strange sculptural extensions built by the artist herself: a long protruding horn (Unicorn, 1970), a leather face mask with pencils sticking out from it to be used for drawing (Pencil Mask, 1972), and long, spindly balsa wood–constructed gloves that would enable Horn to “scratch both walls at once” (Finger Gloves, 1974). Almost meditative in their execution, Horn’s performances and films made the body into a hybrid: a quasi animal, human, object, and machine. Horn further augmented this hybrid body with more elaborate costumes during the mid 1970s. White Body Fan (1974) extended Horn’s arms beyond her bodily kinesphere through a fan-shaped construction while Feathered Prison Fan (1974) did the opposite, almost imprisoning the body in a mechanically controlled, feather-coated cocoon. Dis-

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pensing with her human-based performance work in the mid 1970s, Horn would subsequently turn her interests in performance from the human body to a mechanical one with the construction of strange and autonomically behaving machines [Machines for Themselves, chapter 7]. Bodily extension practices enabled through wearable objects and prostheses also appeared in the work of Brazilian visual artists Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica. Starting with nonrepresentational paintings, Clark’s Nostalgia of the Body work between 1964 and 1968 involved the construction and use by “performing” spectators of what Clark called “living organisms”: hoods, gloves, specially constructed eyeglasses, suits, and other strange objects sought to generate specific sensorial experiences among nontrained performers. For example, Mascara Sensorial (Sensorial Mask, 1967) involved costumes composed of hoods and helmets with mirrored eyepieces that allowed the wearer to shift her focus onto herself while Mascara Abismo (Abyss Mask, 1967) focused on the haptic experiences brought on by blindness through weighted masks applied to the eyes.27 Analogously, Clark’s collaborator Hélio Oiticica focused on spectator-generated, bodybased performances involving wearable elements. Oiticica’s Parangoles (1964), a series of participatory happenings emerging from the Maguiera Samba school in a well-known Brazilian favela (slum), used simple materials such as painted plastic bags and jute fabrics worn and danced in by the public participants in order to explore the fusion between fabric and organic bodies. Dancing with the colorful fabrics of the Parangoles, Oiticica literally catalyzed fabric and colored bodies in motion out of the physical behaviors of his spectator-performers, focusing on the kinesthetic intensity that arose within the dance context of samba and the sensorial experience of navigating the various pieces of worn material.28 Video Documentation: Endurance/Transformation

As extensively detailed in chapter 4, more “immaterial” technologies such as the video camera, monitor, and projection screen also played a major role in remaking the performing body, particularly in the documentation of actions designed to dismantle live presence. Before turning to filmmaking with the epic Cremaster cycle, the early works of American artist Matthew Barney used video to document his athletically rooted, endurance-style performances that took place off-camera. Having initially studied medicine at Yale before turning to a formal art degree, Barney’s seemingly homoerotic and visually baroque works culled techniques from body-based art of the 1960s through a systematic fusion of sculpture, video, installation, and live actions. His infamous 1991 New York debut exhibition, held at the Barbara Gladstone gallery, featured video monitors displaying a naked Barney in rock climbing harness, wielding crampons and scaling the ceiling and stairwell of the gallery space. Positioned next to sculptural objects that included a bench press thickly coated in Vaseline, the previously

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recorded performance broadcast on the four monitors appeared like a psychosexual revision of Trisha Brown’s equipment pieces. Soaked in a hermetically sealed yet texturally rich world of metabolically inspired sculptures, clinical medical instruments, and ubiquitous television monitors, Barney’s work exploited video’s ability to display different bodies in the process of transformation—a three-hour physical trial to the body that metaphorically and symbolically converted the gallery space into what critic Roberta Smith called “a kind of body that the artist moves through, like an enzyme in the digestive tract or an infant being born” (Smith 1991). By far the most controversial connection between the skin-based experiments of the 1960s and real-time tele-technologies was the “carnal art” of the French artist Orlan (née Linda Moreno). Constructing what the artist described as a technological form of selfportraiture spanning between “defiguration and refiguration,” Orlan came to fame in the early 1990s with The Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, a series of nine performances in which, working simultaneously as both director and patient, the artist underwent surgical procedures before a live camera. Rather than focus on the ecstatic potential of the body in pain like other body modification artists, Orlan’s “blasphemous” performances generated a new, mutant body remade by contemporary technologies of plastic surgery and artificial implants in which the artist’s identity was continually morphed at a direct physiological level.29 Ranging from plastic surgery, liposuction, and implantation of new materials, each of Orlan’s surgeries redefined her body, basing its form on computer-generated composites of selected features from prototypical female figures represented in classical Western painting traditions such as the Venus of Botticelli, da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and Diana. Accompanied by the artist’s conscious (during the surgical processes) recitation of philosophical texts while a bastion of real medical performers clad in clothing designed by Issey Miyake and Paco Rabanne scurried about, the documentation of the procedures was normally broadcast live to cultural institutions such as galleries and performance venues. The privacy of the operating room was thus transformed into an electronically transmitted theater of observation and spectating on the body, reminiscent of French psychiatrist Jean-Martin Charcot’s late-nineteenth-century public theatricalization of hysterical women.30 Orlan’s public exposure of the processes of bodily representation, writing, and marking, took place at the intersection between contemporary technologies of inscription (the surgeon’s scalpel) and documenting/recording (the video camera), with the once-private operating room becoming both artist’s studio and television set for the surgical reconstruction of bodies at the direct, corporeal level. If the obsession with inscription and marking the skin explored by many body-based artists in the past served as a frame for her surgical birthing of a new hybrid “body-machine,” Orlan’s carnal art sought to convert her own body into a sign—a form of language itself that reversed the traditional formula of “word

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made flesh” to a new formulation of “flesh made word” where “only the voice remains unchanged” (Orlan n.d.). Electronically Coupled Bodies: Cyborgs and Hybrids

The body hybridization work of performance artists was also overwhelmingly influenced by new electronic and computer-assisted technologies and informed by questions concerning new constructions of subjectivity and identity through the writings of feminist cultural theorists such as Donna Haraway, Judith Butler, Katherine Hayles, Allucquére Rosanne Stone (Sandy Stone), Avital Ronell, and Sadie Plant. Undeniably, UC Santa Cruz professor Haraway’s 1991 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and SocialistFeminism in the Late Twentieth Century” helped set the conceptual stage for a new generation of artistic performative practices involving the construction of “chimeras, new fabricated hybrids between machine and organism” that according to Haraway, would blur the boundaries between the natural and the artificial, biological, and computational, the “imagination and material reality” (Haraway 1991, 150). Adopting the tendency toward what quickly became known as the posthuman body, international performance artists searched for new techniques, ranging from high digital imaging, sensors, muscle-controlling actuators, and machine implants in order to transform their bodies into the alloplastic hybrids envisioned by Haraway and others. Directly situating herself in a Haraway-inspired nexus of body representation through technologically determined constructs of gender, the female Japanese artist Mariko Mori’s otherworldly photographic performance projects cast the artist in the center of the image, both seducing and criticizing the mainly male-driven gaze directed toward female cyber identity constructed by fashion and image industries. Dressed up as a cyber-pop Japanese fashion model, “high-tech geisha,” or a mythical being from the future, Mori was photographed within the completely artificial settings of Japanese culture (airports, indoor oceans) and then digitally altered. A similar production strategy was evident in her large-scale photo-performance event, Beginning of the End (1996), in which the artist—encased within a translucent plastic body capsule—placed herself in international public locations, such as the Giza pyramids, Times Square, Brasilia, and the glitzy, commercial Shinjuku district of Tokyo. Ambiguously straddling the desire and fear of hybrid technocultural bodily transformation, the content of Mori’s work derived precisely from her own hybrid East-West, spiritual-materialist fusions of Asian philosophy and Western-styled pop culture. Curiously, although much theorizing of cyborg identity came from women, with the high-profile exceptions of Mori and Orlan, male performers constituted a large percentage of artists willing to physically alter or transform their bodies with mechanical-electronic or even biochemical systems. The Catalan artist Marcel.lí Antúnez Roca developed

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interactive mechatronic performances whose central element involved spectator-initiated computer control of a metal and plastic body-mounted “exoskeleton” that Roca wore. Beginning with Epizoo in 1994 and continuing with Aphasia (1988), Transpermia (2003), and Protomembrana (2006), Roca’s mechatronic performances resurrected body art in the age of computer control. In the widely toured Epizoo (1994), pneumatic and robotic devices mounted in the worn exoskeleton and attached to the artist’s mouth, chest, buttocks, and face as well as lighting and sound elements could be directly steered by individual audience members from a remotely controlled panel interface. With the click of a mouse, spectator “tele-torture” would activate lighting, sound, and compressor relays connected to the pneumatic-electronic hardware mounted on his body, resulting in real-time transformations of Roca’s muscles and nerves: a repeated twisting of the mouth, a vigorous quivering of the buttocks and pectoral muscles, or a spasmodic shaking of the entire face. Claimed by the artist as “probably the first performance to feature a remote control device enabling the spectator to control onstage elements including the artist’s body,” Epizoo’s interactive ritual of computer-assisted body transformation through both active (the controllers) as well as passive (the observer/voyeurs) means raised critical questions about the direct manipulation of a human subject for pleasure/entertainment and the ethical issue of man-machine hybridization.31 In a comparable yet less spectacular vein was the work of Dutch engineer/performer Arthur Elsenaar. In Elsenaar’s ArtiFacial research, the artist constructed a MIDI-controlled system of small facial actuators that when attached to the face could activate up to sixteen different facial muscle groups, the strength of contractions by the actuators controlled and scaled through the seven-bit MIDI number range (0–128). Involving local and networkbased algorithmic control over Elsenaar’s facial muscles in real time, Elsenaar and collaborator Remko Scha’s performances such as rEmote, a.k.a. Compose Your Emotions (1995), Arthur and the Solenoids (1997), and Morphology  Face Shift (2005) created a new form of algorithmic facial choreography in which the human body and face could be seen as potential new computer-controlled display devices. Another artist who experimented with body-implanted control interfaces was Brazilian-born Eduardo Kac. Known for his controversial transgenic artworks, Kac’s 1997 performance projects Time Capsule and A-Positive also sought to mix up the distinction between biological and mechanical bodies, with A-Positive involving a live blood transfusion between Kac and a robot, while Time Capsule saw the artist implanting a microchip into his arm in order to electronically scan his body into an online database for animals. Roca, Elsenaar, and Kac’s body manipulations depended on mechanical technologies; Swiss dancer and body-based artist Yann Marussich experimented with internal biochemical transformations. Marussich’s 2007 solo work Bleu Remix (a sequel to an earlier work

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Figure 6.7 Yann Marussich. Bleu Remix, 2007. Photo Marc Gremillon.

entitled Bleu Provisoire in 2001) was described by the artist as the “first motionless dance piece.” Sitting almost frozen in a glass box before spectators for the duration of one hour, Marussich’s performance consisted of a “biochemical choreography” in which the artist gradually began to sweat blue secretions from the openings in his body, the result of a methylene blue injection before the event (figure 6.7). The result of several years of research with Swiss doctors, Marussich’s “bloodless flaying of the body” occurred at the interior of the body—a performance in which internal bodily processes like thermal regulation and stillness were amplified and exhibited at the interface of the skin (Hauser 2008, 12–13). Arguably, the most high-profile example of such “cyborg performance” was that of Australian (Cyprus-born) artist Stelarc. Ironically declaring that the body is obsolete, Stelarc’s artistic and theoretical research investigated how to “extrude agency with a body’s awareness being neither ‘all there’ nor ‘all here.’ ” Infusing body manipulation practices with a hefty dose of mechanical and electronic invention and a litany of provocative theoretical salvos (“the body is obsolete,” “the body is no longer an object of desire but an object for designing,” “As an object, the body can be amplified and accelerated, attaining planetary escape velocity”), Stelarc radically reconceptualized and enhanced the body beyond its normal human physical limits. For Stelarc, the body

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was seen as an objective, evolutionary structure that could reach a new evolutionary state only through technological fusions among skin, metal, electronics, and computation (Stelarc). In his body suspension pieces, dating from the late 1970s and 1980s, the artist suspended himself from ceilings and various other structures with hooks impaled through the skin. Influenced by both the invasive techniques of the Vienna Actionists as well as the modern primitive movement in the United States, led by piercing and suspension artist Fakir Musafar, the skin and body were both perceived as objects ripe for technical redesign whereby even the simplest technologies of wire and hooks could aid in erasing the skin “as a boundary between the self and the world.”32 Almost simultaneously to these suspension works, Stelarc embarked on the construction of a mechanically enhanced prosthetic device that would technologically extend the body beyond its organic limits. Pursuing his interest in the function of the body within a landscape of machines, projects such as Third Hand (1976–1984), Virtual Arm (1992), Stomach Sculpture (1993), and Muscle Stimulator System (1994) all developed a series of mechanical exoskeletal structures that functioned less as prosthetic substitutions for organic body parts than as extensions of existing musculoskeletal systems. Third Hand, for example, was a mechanical, handlike manipulator attached to the artist’s right arm that could be controlled from electromyogram signals originating from the legs and stomach. Both imitating as well as counterpointing the behavior of human hands, Third Hand served to heighten peripheral and proprioceptive awareness, much like the phenomenon of a phantom limb in providing increased consciousness of an absent appendage. Stelarc’s most infamous experiment with extension (or in this case, intension), his 1999 Stomach Sculpture, turned an endoscopic-like procedure into a real-time sculptural performance event in which the artist swallowed a capsule-sized camera apparatus that was guided down the esophagus to explore the hollow body as a “host” for “aesthetic adornment” (Stelarc n.d.). Toward the end of the 1990s, Stelarc shifted his focus to distributed control via the fledgling Internet. Seeking remote connections between bodies that were both present and absent, simultaneously local and distant, performances such as Fractal Flesh (1995), Ping Body (1995), and Parasite (1997) involved a multiplicity of bodies through the fragmentation and distribution of control facilitated by computer networks. The artist’s body, whose individual muscles could be actuated by network activity (e.g., in Ping Body) was made both object and subject controlled remotely from exogenous code, as a hub, host, and “nexus for Internet activity.” Electronic space, fractured between the physical and the data world, would act itself as the medium for action and performance, turning information away from disembodied bits to what Brian Massumi described as “electronic forces impinging on the body” and highlighting before a public an unfinished body in becoming.33

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Cyborg Identity and Hybrid Bodies

With artists caught up in a kind of technological ecstasy fomented by the very possibility of birthing new mutant bodies through fleshy excavations, other practitioners were quick to focus on the political repercussions of such cyborg bodies’ envelopment within more predatory systems of biopolitically centered control. Working within frameworks of cultural and political identity and hybridity made more complex by the introduction of cyber identity, ethno-techno culture, and biopolitics, artists such as Guillermo GómezPeña, Roberto Sifuentes, Coco Fusco, the Electronic Disturbance Theater, the Critical Art Ensemble, and Tissue Culture and Art all examined issues of the capitalist transformation of bodies through biopolitical structures. Mexican-American/Chicano interdisciplinary artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña, whose prolific solo and group performances, critical writings, and media activism gained him a strong following in the 1980s, became increasingly interested in the politics of cyborg identity and the digital divide between Caucasians and Latinos in the 1990s. A postmodern collage of radio studio, lecture hall, museum exhibition, and political soapbox, GómezPeña’s solo performances involved the adoption of fake Chicano-American characters (the most famous being the Warrior for Gringostroika and Cyber-Vato) dressed in ethnokitsch, who would hold long, radio play–like monologues on the future of ethnic relations, border politics, and Chicano identity. Later, in his chicano cyberpunk performance performances and ethno-techno art with collaborator Roberto Sifuentes, such as El Naftazteca: CyberAztec TV for 2000 AD (1994), Borderstasis (1997), and Ethno-Techno (2006), Gómez-Peña and collaborating artists of his Pocha Nostra collective worked on the creation of living museums, which took the form of audience walkthrough, museum diorama–like total media environments populated by what he termed ethno-cyborgs: performers composed of “one quarter stereotype; one quarter audience projection; one quarter aesthetic artifact; and one quarter unpredictable personal/ social monster.”34 Originally having studied performance art at CalArts in the 1970s, Gómez-Peña’s stab at postgendered, ethno-techno cyborg, “depoliticized, extreme bodies,” was anchored in the direct experience of his body in both performance situations and activist political actions internationally. Not only ironic but politically incisive commentary on the commercialization of the performing body transformed by technology and “populating the corporate mediascape and cyberspace,” Gómez-Peña, as a self-proclaimed “information superhighway bandido,” admitted that he was simultaneously fascinated by and extremely critical of the hybrid convergence of technocapitalism with ethnicity and gender. Collaborating with Gómez-Peña on a notorious performance event in the 1990s in which the two artists displayed themselves as exotic “Amerindian” specimens in a cage in international public locations, Cuban-born, American-based performance artist Coco Fusco also investigated issues of ethnic identity within the moral and ethical paradoxes

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of advanced capitalistic driven technoculture. In collaboration with Electronic Disturbance Theater founder Ricardo Dominguez, Fusco’s Dolores 10h to 22h (2001) and The Incredible Disappearing Woman (2003) used surveillance technology, real-time Internet input and live performance to examine the fate of minority women’s bodies entwined within corporate constructed techno systems of worker discipline and surveillance in the maquiladora factories dotting the shady border zone of Mexico and the United States. A network-based “docu-drama” performance, Dolores 10h to 22h dealt with the fate of a young Mexican woman imprisoned without food or water inside a corporate holding cell for attempting to form a worker’s union inside a maquiladora and involved Fusco and Dominguez in a live room which was broadcast online via hidden surveillance cameras. Their Incredible Disappearing Woman performance used a similar thematic and technological apparatus to follow the story of a young American artist who traveled to Mexico in the 1970s to engage in necrophilia acts with dead women. Using the forum of a live chat room, live performers on stage enacted rituals of “tele-perversion” actuated by online visitors who could give commands to live performers in a theater setting before audience members. Formed in 1998 by Ricardo Dominguez, Stefan Wray, Brett Stalbaum, and Carmen Karasic, the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT) married Internet-activated performance and hacktivist aesthetic-political practice. Emerging specifically out of the 1998 Zapatista rebellion in Mexico as a forum for the performative execution of mass decentered online protest techniques, EDT used the Internet as both a conceptual and situational medium for publicly organized performed disturbances, which targeted the liquid movement of power relations between multinational governments and corporations represented in online, virtual space. Collaborating with artists such as Fusco as well as Gómez-Peña, Dominguez and EDT catalyzed political agency and organized resistance among a seemingly disembodied mass collective of anonymous network bodies. EDT’s brand of electronic civil disobedience was also hatched in the work of the Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), a similar politically driven collective formed originally in 1986 by Steve Kurtz and Steve Barnes and involving other activist artists, including Dominguez, Beatriz de Costa and Bev Schlee. Producing work ranging from installations, books, performances, and public political actions, CAE’s tactical media methods of resistance employed a sophisticated apparatus of critical theory and philosophy, political discourse, theater tactics, and medical technologies to target predatory corporate power structures, particularly those of the biotechnological industries. Some of CAE’s works took the form of performance events that appeared to be a cross between lecture-demos and product information sessions taking place in pseudoscientific settings. In Flesh Machines and GenTerra, the group created fake biotechnical corporations (BioCom and GenTerra), where audience members became donors in simulated rituals of reproductive, DNA-based screening tests or transgenic culture manipulation, while Free

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Range Grain (2005) involved audience participation in fake information sessions about the hazards of GMOs (genetically modified organisms). CAE’s interest in performances about the socioethical problematics of biotechnology was taken much further in the experiments of the Australian collective Tissue Culture and Art. Founded by artists Oron Catts, Ionat Zurr, and Guy Ben-Ary in 1996, Tissue Culture’s research into “wet biology,” the use of visualization techniques for cell functioning versus the “dry” biological and informatic study of genetic code, sought to create a new kind of natural/cultural hybrid; a “Semi-Living” organism sustained outside of an organic body that could still be classified as an “alive” presence (Catts and Zurr 2002). Investigating the “use of tissue technologies as a mode of artistic expression,” Catt’s and Zurr’s work ranged from collaborations with other artists (Stelarc) interested in biotechnological manipulation to the creation of experimental “subject/object sculptures” (Disembodied Cuisine, 2000–2003; Victimless Leather, 2007) raised in vitro and “grown inside a technoscientific ‘body’ ” (Tissue Culture and Art n.d.). Distributing performance away from humans and toward biological actants, Tissue Culture’s projects brought bodybased art full circle, where the spectators’ passive role of watching the transformation of a performer’s body at a distance was transferred to the biochemical reactions and performances of complex semilive organisms inside the Petri dish.35 The Body’s Limits in Dance and Theater

As a technology that could overcome its own physiological limits or was embedded into an external, technoscenographic surround of sound, image, and architectonic space, the body also became an important subject within the work of dance and theater companies like La Fura Dels Baus, Jan Fabre’s Troubelyn, Wim Vandekybus’s Ultima Vez, Saburo Teshigawara’s Karas, Reza Abdoh’s Dar e Luz, La La La Human Steps, DV8 Physical Theater, the Brazilian-based Cena 11, Dumb Type, Carbone 14, Marie Chouinard, Sankai Juku, Pina Bausch, Johann Kresnik, Frédéric Flamand, Alain Platel and Compagnie C de la B, William Forsythe, Hubert Lepka, and others. Supported by the apparatuses of (mostly) European-subsidized state theaters and festivals during the economically flush 1980s and 1990s, these artists created technically intricate, extreme sonic, visual, and tectonic scenographic environments that placed both performers’ and sometimes spectators’ bodies into precarious states of physical disorientation and risk. A staple of the European avant-garde visual theater of the 1990s, the Belgian choreographer and director Jan Fabre subjected his performers to real physical trials, whether through the execution of unbearably slow and repetitive movements (The Sound of One Hand Clapping [1992]; The Other Side of Time [1994]) or direct conditioning and marking of the body. In the 1996 solo monologue Who Shall Speak My Thought . . . , a Ku Klux Klan–hooded Fabre, standing behind a pulpit of switches like a maleficent Wizard of Oz,

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wired the body of performer Mark van Overmeier with electrodes and subjected it to electrical shocks. Other theater makers and choreographers, like former Fabre dancer Wim Vandekeybus, Iranian-born and United States–based Reza Abdoh, or French-Canadian choreographer Édouard Lock also created performances that tested the limits of performer-audience endurance. Beginning with What the Body Does Not Remember (1987), Vandekeybus’s company Ultima Vez created violent, urban-inspired choreographies in which performers threw themselves in the air and at each other in relentlessly aggressive yet precise examinations of the brutality of male/female relationships. The emotionally and physically demanding works of director Reza Abdoh, who had a meteoric European career before he died of AIDS in 1995, incorporated fragments of video, virtuoso movement sequences, and high-decibel sound of a sheer intensity that more than once resulted in the fainting of both performers and audience members. Perhaps no choreographer extended the limits of the performing body as much as Édouard Lock’s celebrated Montréal-based La La La Human Steps. Internationally recognized for his kinetic dances that fused balletic and modern techniques, Lock’s Human Sex (1985), New Demons (1987), Salt/Exauce (1998), Amelia (2000), and Amjad (2007) pushed already extraordinarily trained dancers to their kinesthetic thresholds through ferocious and vertiginous movements executed at almost superhuman speed. The projects of these artists and others produced an atavistic, almost Artaudian cruelty within the confines of a seated, passive audience, but other companies, such as the Catalan pluridisciplinary, all-male collective La Fura dels Baus brought such cruelty into a much closer relationship with its public. Emerging in the post-Franco atmosphere of late 1970s Spain, La Fura dels Baus (literally, “the rats from the Baus,” in reference to a river near Barcelona) originally performed its physically exhausting, street-influenced theater in found spaces like dilapidated, abandoned buildings; plazas; and the street. Moving into indoor nontheatrical venues with a series of internationally touring performance spectacles, starting with Accions (1983– 1987) and followed by Suz/o/Suz (1985–1991), Tier Mon (1988–1990), Noun (1990–1992), M.T.M. (1994–1996), and Manes (1996–1998), the collective developed what they dubbed lenguaje furero, a multidisciplinary theatrical language probing elemental themes such as war, aggression, and the tension between humans and the natural/technological world. Hung from the ceiling, submerged into water tanks, connected to machines, and blasted by the intense pressure of water from fire hoses, La Fura’s jock strap–clad bodies engaged in initiation rituals of human conflict through searing theatrical actions that abolished the borders between spectator and performer corporeality (figure 6.8). The collective’s strategy of maneuvering directly among, on, and around the moving spectators served to shift focus from the trained performer’s bodies to the bodies of the audience.

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Figure 6.8

La Fura dels Baus. Suz/o/Suz, 1985–1991. Photo © Theodore Shank.

Continuously displaced and put at risk, La Fura’s spectators became both subject and object of a performance whose borders were transgressed.36 After 1990, La Fura achieved worldwide attention with their staging of the opening ceremony for the 1992 Barcelona Olympics and subsequently moved into what they termed digital theater: “a theater language connecting the organic with the inorganic, the material with the virtual, the actor in the flesh with the avatar, the present audience with the internet users, the physical stage with the cyberspace.”37 In contrast to the earlier works, which focused on the immediate relationship between the performer and spectators’ bodies, La Fura’s later, digitally inspired events such as F@ust version 3.0 (1996–), Ombra (1998–2000), and ØBS (2000) as well as theater and opera stagings in more traditional theaters focused more on the mediation of the body through the apparatus of camera and screen. Still another set of techniques placed the performing body into stage-specific, artificially constructed environments that both conditioned and estranged the normal possibilities of dance or physical movement. In the distinctly German Tanztheater of the celebrated choreographer Pina Bausch in the industrial town of Wuppertal, dancers navigated scenic spaces filled with water, tables and chairs, wet leaves, fallen bricks, carnations, AstroTurf, and other unusual materials and objects, while engaging in intense

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movement theater that exploited techniques such as repetition to their almost unbearable extreme. The Japanese choreographer Ushio Amagatsu, founder of the international butoh company Sankai Juku, also created scenographic environments of water, sand, train tracks, and gigantic plastic flowers, among other things, that his bald, rice powder–dusted dancers moved through. As leaders in the international dance scene in their own right, neither Bausch nor Sankai Juku were particularly concerned with technological devices, but their work did suggest that the total scenic environment that conditioned the body’s movement was as essential as the movement that took place within such environments, paving the way for other, more media-centric dance and theater makers to explore the possibilities of the body colliding with and performing within installations and architectural surrounds. An important example in this direction and frequent participant in European festivals during the 1990s was Japanese dancer, choreographer, and visual artist Saburo Teshigawara and his ensemble Karas, who created scenic and aural installations that researched the fleshiness of the body (literally) colliding against the materiality of technologically constructed space. Noiject (1992; titled by merging “noise” and “object”), for example, featured dancers who threw themselves against an environment of amplified iron walls generating both an industrial sonic landscape and a space in which the body was subjected to severe environmental constraints. Scattered onto the floor, anchored into walls and furniture, or directly embedded into the backs of the dancer’s costumes, broken glass also played a prominent scenographic role in other Teshigawara works, including the solo Bones in Pages (1992), White Clouds Under the Heels (1994), and Glass Tooth (2005). Poised between beauty and imminent destruction, Teshigawara’s choreographies created direct physical merges between the organic and inorganic: the human body and technological materials. Another staple in European dance-theater of the 1990s, Belgian choreographer Frédéric Flamand, also explored the body’s encountering of technoarchitectonic stage environments. In particular, Flamand’s interest in bringing dancers face to face (and body to body) with unusual surfaces and technological materials, directly materialized in a series of collaborative productions with star architects such as Diller  Scofidio, (Moving Target and Muybridge: Man Walking at Ordinary Speed, 1996 and 1998), Zaha Hadid (MetapolisProject 972, 2000), Jean Nouvel (Body/Work/Leisure, 2001), and Thom Mayne/Morphosis (Silent Collisions, 2003). Arguably, the most high-profile contemporary dance/theater maker to research the body’s entanglement with techno-social-perceptual systems was American-born, Germanbased choreographer William Forsythe. Dancing in the Stuttgart Ballet under John Cranko in the late 1970s, Forsythe became artistic director of the Frankfurt Ballet in 1984. Assembling concepts from architecture, dance theory, physiology, philosophy, literary criticism, film, linguistics, mathematics, and the natural sciences as generative

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material for his choreographies, Forsythe’s vision of the body was not unlike that of Laban’s: a richly complex physiological system capable of producing sophisticated spatial and temporal trace forms. Departing from the ordinary, pedestrian movement so embraced by modern dance, Forsythe’s extraordinarily complex and rigorous choreographies were celebrations of theatrical and perceptual artifice; visceral stage events that functioned simultaneously as theoretical models and as entertainment (Libeskind 1988). By exploiting the platform of a lavishly subsidized, city-supported institution like the Frankfurt Ballet, Forsythe questioned political and perceptual descriptive models within the apparatus of dance and theater itself; particularly, how dance and performance emerged within politically and culturally inscribed practices. Early works in Frankfurt such as Gänge (1983), Artifact (1984), LDC (1985), Die Befragung des Robert Scott (1986), Isabelle’s Dance (1986), and Impressing the Czar (1988) used the conventions of dance and music-theater to demonstrate how power mechanisms of perception/observation operated directly within the act of performing and perceiving dance. Beginning with The Loss of Small Detail (1987 and 1991–1996) and continuing with Limbs Theorem (1991), Alie/n a(c)tion (1992), As a Garden in This Setting (1993), Eidos: Telos (1995), Endless House (1997), and Kammer/Kammer (2001), however, Forsythe turned to a more systematic inquiry into choreographic production, incorporating formal mathematical, architectural and linguistic systems, computer technologies, and media elements into his mise-en-scène to examine the effect of external systems on the dancing body.38 Specifically, the choreographer sought to develop new generative operations that could be applied to movement sequences in order to birth choreographies co-produced through the outcome of the system and the dancers’ own bodies. Labeled improvisation technologies, this assemblage of techniques not only assisted Forsythe in calling into question Laban’s ideology of centeredness but also served as a kind of choreographic machine, not unlike Trisha Brown’s work a decade earlier. Described as “tools for the playful mind” by longtime Frankfurt dancer Dana Caspersen, Forsythe’s procedures consisted of spatial, temporal, architectural, and corporeal operations applied to shorter movement phrases or longer sequences in order to create unpredictable outcomes at both micro (the dancer’s body) and macro (the larger choreographic organization of scenes, events, or entire dances) levels.39 Such technologies served as a generative basis for Forsythe’s large-scale theatrical works of the 1990s, as well as for the development of a unique CD-ROM-based dance archiving tool co-created with the ZKM (Center for Art and Media Technology) and digital artists Volker Kuchelmeister and Christian Ziegler between 1994 and 1997. Forsythe’s improvisation technologies were only a subset of techniques to spark new forms of spatial and temporal movement organization. Populating the stage with information systems ranging from hidden displays showing videos that acted as

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triggers for movement associations to computer-generated timers, such clandestine information streams out of view of the spectators provided the performers with simultaneous options for improvisation to take place within mostly highly inscribed choreographic structures. In the 1992 choreography Alie/n a(c)tion, a work that partially explored issues of xenophobia, a computer-driven timing system helped initiate individual and group sequences that estranged the dancers from their normal, habitual ways of moving (figure 6.9). Acting as research into choreography as a system of self-organization based on the “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” the third act of the epic theatrical work Eidos: Telos (1995) used computationally based instruction sets devised without the aid of a computer that created a huge “connection machine” among multiple groups of dancers.40 The use of so many simultaneously functioning, partially autonomous systems that might or might not have influence on the overall outcome of a stage event assisted Forsythe in his quest to thwart deeply held beliefs by both dancers and spectators about the perceptual determination of order and chaos. Another area of exploration was how architecture produced by the body and construed through an environment surrounding it could shift our understanding of dance. In Limbs

Figure 6.9 William Forsythe. Alie/n a(c)tion, 1992. Pictured: Jacopo Godani, Thierry Guiderdoni, Jennifer Grisette and Francesca Harper. Photo © Dominik Mentzos (www.mentzos.de).

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Theorem (1991), Forsythe and scenographer Michael Simon took architectural blueprints from Daniel Libeskind in order to build vast, Constructivist-inspired objects that inhabited the stage with a parallel kind of choreographic expression as the human performers. Forsythe also developed new lighting techniques involving reflective illumination, moving lighting instruments, and, in perhaps the boldest move, plunging the stage into total darkness in the midst of full dance sequences to generate what dramaturge Heidi Gilpin called architectures of disappearance. “Such performance environments highlight the nonvisibility of the dancers, forcing the audience to strain to see or imagine the body that is producing the movement whose traces are all that can be discerned. Movement itself does not disappear, but the body that performs it does” (Gilpin 1994, 51). Collaborating with Dutch composer Thom Willems, Forsythe’s approach to sound and music also broke with common ways of working with such materials in dance. Inspired by contemporary architectural forms, Willems’s stirring, sometimes baroque, and sometimes minimal electronic scores paralleled Forsythe’s stage language in their timbral, rhythmic, and spatial transformations. Starting with Eidos: Telos and continuing with Sleepers Guts (1996) and the installation-performance works You Made Me a Monster (2004) and Three Atmospheric Studies (2003), however, Forsythe and Willems also engaged sound experts such as Joel Ryan and composers-programmers Andreas Breitscheid and Manuel Poletti to develop real-time software-based instruments for the live production and manipulation of sound. Extending the possibilities of live acoustic instruments (Eidos: Telos and Sleepers Guts, 1997) or inventing new ones, the use of technologies like DSP functioned as a new compositional strategy as well as directly structured a work’s dramaturgical evolution. Moreover, the embodied interaction or co-production taking place among the human players, acoustic instruments, and computational systems in such choreographies resulted in music and sound environments that were more like dynamic, evolving processes (much like Forsythe’s movement) than the construction of traditional objet-fixé scores used in dance.41 Dance and Technology: Extending the Body in the Twenty-First Century

Forsythe’s technologies were more about the processes made possible by complex systems rather than a strict emphasis on the integration of new devices directly into the performance. In stark contrast, the end of the 1990s saw the emergence of an entire genre of performance dubbed dance and technology (or dance tech), which sought to use recently developed tools to reinvent the perceptual and ontological role of dance in the context of a digital zeitgeist. The growing interest from choreographic artists in worn and stationary sensing devices, 3D modeling software, and software control environments coupled with computer vision and motion data analysis techniques trickling down from scientific

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research helped facilitate the possibility of new dance experiences, distributing control among human choreographers, performers, and machine ensembles. Although we can trace dance tech’s origins back to 1960s experiments, the somewhat vague moniker “dance technology” arose around practices combining dance and, specifically, new computation technologies, “including responsive systems that allow performers to manipulate digital media in real time, interactive digital scenography and motion capture as well as the development of new software and hardware for choreographers and dancers.”42 These hybrid dance tech practices piqued artists’ curiosity and also garnered interest from the scientific community looking for artistic, real-world applications of previously lab-driven engineering and computing research. Many in the areas of computer science, electrical engineering, physiology, computer music, kinesiology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, and neurobiology from institutions such as IRCAM, MIT’s Media Lab, University of Genoa, ATR Labs in Japan, KTH Stockholm, DIEM in Aarhus (Denmark), GMD in Germany, and elsewhere, convened numerous symposia and obtained high-level government funding for such exotic studies as emotional interfaces, multimodal and interactive systems, and the application of signal processing operations to movement data.43 Led by University of Genoa researcher Antonio Camurri, a team of researchers within the context of the European Union–sponsored MEGA project developed EyesWeb, a sophisticated software environment incorporating kansei principles of analysis of expressiveness in movement and gesture augmented with custom-written libraries of computer vision techniques to analyze the emotional-expressive features of danced movement. The results of long-term interdisciplinary research, the EyesWeb system was made public as a tool to incorporate both the analysis of gesture in professional performance and exhibition contexts as well as in the confines of the scientific laboratory. During the same period, other scientific laboratories—namely, MIT’s Media Lab—also used dance practice as a viable research object. Computer scientist Flavia Sparacino, a researcher with MIT’s Spatial Imaging Group, worked with computer vision techniques for the real-time control of media elements within a performance environment in her Dance Space project (1996). Receiving attention in computer science conferences like SIGGRAPH and SIGCHI and numerous artistic publications dealing with dance and new technology, Sparacino’s work was one of the early attempts within human-computer interaction circles to create direct, one-to-one mappings between human movement and triggered music. Likewise, MIT physicist and electrical engineer Joseph Paradiso, who originally designed precision alignment sensors for the GEM (gammas, electrons, muons) superconducting supercollider in CERN (Conseil Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire), also developed numerous sensor-based interfaces for dancers during the 1990s. Unlike the camera-based, computer vision technologies used in projects like EyesWeb and Dance Space, Paradiso’s electrical engineering expertise led to his research and development of

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numerous hardware-based sensing systems for dance technology performance, ranging from sensor-augmented sneakers for dance and wearable wireless accelerometers that could form a local body-based network to a piezoelectric-based carpet that could monitor a performer’s foot position. Another key ingredient for dance technology’s increased establishment as a distinct genre was the creation of networks between the cultural and academic world. Taking advantage of the traditional academic platforms of symposia, conferences, and publications, independent arts researchers like Scott deLahunta, the Paris collective Anomos and its offshoot Mediadanse (Armando Menicacci, Emanuel Quinz), and university-based scholar-artists like Johannes Birringer worked to establish knowledge sharing among artists, university researchers, writers, and critics. Ranging from the Laban Center in London and Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts (ISA) to the Dance Technology program located within the prestigious Ohio State University dance department, institutions increasingly moved toward the education of a next generation of dancers who would be as equally equipped with knowledge of sensing, motion capture, 3D animation, and video as with compositional techniques.44 Transparency/Effect: Tools, Systems, and Processes

One of the overarching issues in the dance technology community was how such new technologies could or should enlarge dance as a historical and cultural practice. Even among its stalwarts, the debate raged on email lists and publications around which way the internal, research-oriented practices taking place in the lab/rehearsal studio with sensing, motion capture, and other exotic digital systems could effectively translate to audiences in the result-driven context that marked live stage performance. What aesthetic impact could such abstract, more or less transparent hardware and software systems have on spectators who were not privy to the intricate mappings, the forging of relationships between data input and output between movement on a stage and the resulting translation of such movement into computer-driven media processes? In his essay “Invisibility and Corporeality,” deLahunta articulated this tension, stating that processes of computation—particularly the mapping of input to output—were largely invisible to those from without (i.e., the spectator). Mostly derived from gesture-driven computer music, mapping in dance technology invoked a similar use in its deploying of performer actions to trigger sonic, visual, or mechanical events “in the space around or in proximity to the performer” (deLahunta 2001). The misnomer linking dance creativity with technology as simply a matter of input/ output was further propagated by both dance critics and theorists, who sometimes had minimal understanding of the technologies being used, but also by some artists, whose lack of technical knowledge prevented bolder conceptual ideas that might have employed digital systems to a more potent aesthetic effect rather than covering up conventional

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dance performance with layers of superficial digital icing. The fact that many artists who were eager to work with newly arising digital tools had little understanding of the inner workings of electronics or computer code led to an even greater furor within the community, one acutely articulated in a post from multimedia artist Andy Clarke on the Dance and Technology Zone mailing list in August 1999 entitled “dance technology: undemanding, unambitious, uninformed, and uninspired” (Clarke 1999). According to Clarke, through their ignorance of the conventions, genres, aesthetics, and technical-critical languages of digital art, the practitioners of dance tech produced work that was uninformed by past precedent and utilized technology in an “emperor’s new clothes” fashion. Yet, if such new technologies functioned as mere window dressing, often producing lackluster, safe, and uninspired aesthetic work, what kind of innovation did result from the fusion between soft and hard digital technologies and choreographic practices with those who did seek to advance the fundamental aesthetic and perceptual frameworks of dance? Software for Dancers

Not surprisingly, Merce Cunningham was one of the earliest dance artists, in the early 1990s, to engage the potential of computational technologies for dance performance, chiefly through his widely reported use of Life Forms, a 3D character-animation software package. Created in 1991 by a team of researchers and artists at Simon Frasier University’s Computer Graphics and Multimedia Laboratory in Vancouver, Life Forms was the brainchild of Zella Wolofsky, a Simon Frasier graduate student in Kinesology, computer scientist and engineer Tom Calvert, and later, dancer and computer media artist Thecla Schiphorst [Responsive Environments: Second Generation, chapter 8]. It emerged from an earlier software environment called COMPOSE, which enabled the composition of screen-based dance scores through the use of 3D animated body models. Described by Calvert as an interface and visualization tool for choreographers, Life Forms’s structure combined the four-window perspective inherent in 3D modeling software with that of a timeline-based system for constructing choreographic sequences. As Life Forms moved through the academic research conference context and generated commercial hype and press, the Italian city of Orvieto commissioned Cunningham to create a project using the software for the city’s seven-hundred-year anniversary. No stranger to the potential of computational technologies in a choreographic process, Cunningham’s use of a visual-based software environment that could simulate space and set it into geometric and temporal movement noticeably differed, however, from his and Cage’s earlier envisioning of computers as elaborate generators of indeterminate structures for composition. Working with animated wireframe figures that—as Roger Copeland pointed out in an 1999 article “Cunningham, Collage, and the Computer”—looked very similar to

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Schlemmer’s out-of-proportion machinic figures from the Triadic Ballet, Life Forms’s incorporation of the spatial perspectives of 3D modeling and the timeline perspective of animation software suggested to Cunningham new approaches to visualizing motion in spatial terms that were made possible only through such a software design paradigm.45 Through its innate ability to characterize and visualize space, the underlying software design of Life Forms influenced the kinds and dynamics of shapes that Cunningham’s dancers would execute. Similarly, Cunningham’s use of space became increasingly fragmented and shifting based on dancer position—another side effect of working in a software environment that provided the choreographer with the visualization of multiple perspectives, rather than imagining such perspectives in the head. Yet another paradigm of approach that was already part of Cunningham’s technique but may have indirectly (or directly) been heightened from the use of software as a choreographic sketch pad was the computer’s inherent cut and paste model, in which logical sequences of events could be cut and pasted and rearranged at will. As with Cunningham’s later expansion of the spatial, temporal, and kinesthetic possibilities of dance practice through software, research was already underway in the 1960s by engineers who imagined computers as mainly useful for creating combinatoric systems that could impact the sequencing of actual choreographic phrasing and timing. The choreography Stationary Dance developed at the University of Pittsburgh in 1967 by the choreographer Jeanne Hays Beaman and software designer Paul Le Vasseur employed such combinatoric techniques, as did experiments that took place at the University of Sydney in the mid 1970s. It was, however, a relatively obscure article in Dance Magazine in 1967 by Bell Labs researcher A. Michael Noll entitled “Choreography and Computers” that suggested that a program could be devised with animated stick figures that might suggest new directions for movement from a spatial rather than a combinatoric perspective, a direction that software like Life Forms eventually took.46 With the increased sophistication of computer graphics techniques in the 1970s, Noll’s proposal was realizable as choreographers began folding computer-generated possibilities into their work. In 1982, choreographer Twyla Tharp incorporated an early animated, computer graphic dancer into her PBS video film The Catherine Wheel. Developed at the New York Institute of Technology (one of the key centers of computer graphics research at the time) in collaboration with graphics expert and artist Rebecca Allen, Tharp’s animated St. Catherine was constructed by videotaping the performer and using a mathematically derived wireframe, tree-like figure, intricately studying key positions in individual movements to painstakingly produce keyframes for each movement in order to create the illusion of continuous motion.47 The question of what role software environments could play for expanding choreographic brainstorming was also vigorously taken up in a 2001 workshop/think tank and theoretical article entitled “Software for Dancers” organized by deLahunta in London and

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involving a multidisciplinary group of choreographers (Wayne McGregor, Siobhan Davies, Shobana Jeyasingh, and Ashley Page), digital media artists (Bruno Martelli, Joseph Hyde, and Guy Hilton), and software programmers who also worked as and/or with artists (Christian Ziegler, Adrian Ward). In what deLahunta referred to as software’s “toolness,” its use, one commonly desired application that arose from the team’s in depth discussions was the design of a kind of multimedia “notebook” that could be used in rehearsal for recording, notating, and playing back information (e.g., video), rather than an interface to trigger media on stage. Based on its binary underpinnings, software could thus give choreographers the ability to record and manipulate visual and audio data for sketching, indexing, commenting, and preserving, presenting to its users the sense of an infinite mutability of such data. Motion Captured

If software could enable animated, cross-media sketching and archiving, it could also be used to record more invisible data derived from the force, pressure, acceleration, velocity, rhythm, and spatial trajectories generated by movement. As the obsession with the invisible traces generated by bodies grew, one of the central technologies immediately adopted was the complex system of motion capture (MoCap). Originally developed for the U.S. military to track targets and the head position of pilots, motion capture was the digital age’s version of Marey’s and Muybridge’s quest to reveal the hidden traces of human and animal locomotion. Increasingly utilized in biomedical, film animation, gaming, and sports movement analysis applications during the 1990s, motion capture involved “measuring an object’s position and orientation in physical space, then recording that information in a computer-usable form. Objects of interest include human and nonhuman bodies, facial expressions, camera or light positions, and other elements in a scene” (Dyer, Martin, and Zulauf 1995). Employing mechanical, electromagnetic, or optical technologies through single and/or multiple camera setups, motion capture demanded the wearing of sensor-augmented suits or the placement of tiny, sphere like reflective markers on the joints and body of the moving subject in highly coordinated sessions where cameras, infrared light, and central computers would record the emissive traces given off by the attached markers. Taking thousands of sample images per second (in the case of optical systems), highly detailed and precise locomotion data could then be stored, analyzed, and reassembled in real-time playback to create a ghostly, 3D-animated body drained of muscles, nerves, and organs, replaced by an outline of phosphor dots that retraced an already vanished live movement. In what researcher Lisa Naugle noted as the ability to explore movement and its depth in three dimensions, motion capture was viewed by the dance technology community as a valuable tool for artists that would go beyond the limited visual detail of video.48 The technical complexity and prohibitive cost of systems by companies like Polhemus

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(magnetic) or Vicon (optical, camera-based), however, kept motion capture systems only within the domain of institutionally funded infrastructures like Arizona State, IRCAM, UC Irvine, or other research centers. Furthermore, although motion capture could deliver extraordinarily high-resolution kinesthetic detail beyond the human eye, the question of what to do with such masses of data within an aesthetic framework posed both a formidable artistic and technological challenge. One of the most pivotal collectives to engage with this question was the OpenEnded Group, consisting of artists Paul Kaiser, Shelly Eshkar, and computer scientist-artist Marc Downie. Working first in experimental filmmaking, Kaiser had already begun using computers to capture creative processes in his work with learning-disabled children and then in CD-ROM documentation projects for Robert Wilson. In 1998, Kaiser and Eshkar began several long-term collaborations with Cunningham utilizing motion capture technology. Hand Drawn Spaces (1998) and Biped (1999) took motion captured movement from Cunningham dancers and used it to drive hand-drawn, digitally animated sketchlike figures in a 3D landscape. Whereas Hand Drawn Spaces was exhibited as a screen-based installation, a kind of virtual choreography, the digitally created figures that inhabited Cunningham’s stage choreography Biped shared the stage with live dancers, being projected onto a huge, transparent scrim that covered the entire width and length of the proscenium. As discontinuous segments lasting from fifteen seconds to four minutes, Kaiser’s and Eshkar’s motion-captured bodies materialized in a multiplicity of visual forms such as dots, sticks, lines, and Duchamp-inspired Cubist forms suggesting early chronophotographic forms. Kaiser and Eshkar applied similar techniques in their work with choreographer Bill T. Jones on the 1999 installation Ghostcatching, in which movement data captured in sessions with Jones was “restaged” in character modeling software, forming an astonishing digital dance of multiple Joneses performing as 3D, hand-drawn forms whose underlying bases were mathematically derived spline curves.49 With the collaboration of Cambridge and MIT computer scientist Downie, the artists extended their techniques, introducing elements of computer-based artificially intelligent agents into the mix. Critiquing the mimetic, keyframe animation model of software such as Life Forms as well as one-to-one mapping models, Downie’s work with Kaiser and Eshkar aimed at adding more “computational support to the choreographer” (Downie 2005, 10). With the model of software agents, code-based control structures equipped with percepts, actions, and motor skills that could operate on graphical material, Downie’s AI-underlying programming substrate could thus structure a richer, more nuanced computational universe than the brittle, mapping-based I/O (input/output) systems of dance technology that could “deflate the awesome potential of the algorithmic before it can appear” (19). Another collaboration with Cunningham, Loops (2001) used motion captured data from Cunningham’s 1971 “solo for hands” to create a digital portrait of the choreographer—a

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real-time animation that materialized a perpetually redrawn and nonrepeating cats’ cradle–like image derived from constructing an artificially intelligent network of visual relationships among the vigorously moving points on the choreographer’s hands. Generated by the forty-two motion-captured positions, the autonomous digital creatures of Downie, Kaiser, and Eshkar continually drew and traced lines between the other creatures in the network and signaled interactions that generated a nonphotorealistic, endlessly shifting gestural world. In the group’s 2005 collaboration with Trisha Brown, how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . . , the three artists worked with real-time motion-captured data from Brown’s dancers to generate a projected stage environment with morphologically behaving diagrams of transforming surfaces, paths of motion, points, lines, and shapes computed through probabilistically augmented agents (figure 6.10). Sharing the stage with the performers as in Biped, the Downie, Kaiser, and Eshkar trace-like shapes both examined and sensed the environment of the physical dancers, “notating the traces of the movement” as they took place and producing a choreography of bodies without human figures—a dance in simulated yet somehow tangible physical worlds that—while faintly suggesting ours—was ultimately only known to the machine. Sensate Dances

The OpenEnded Group’s work demonstrated that compelling dance could be constructed from human dancers’ residual traces: machine-captured, -analyzed, and -choreographed data that would intensify the debate around human-machine autonomy and authorship. But their work also leveled a larger critique at another central dance tech paradigm: that of sensor-based hardware and software systems that mapped dancer-generated movement input to media output. Inspired by the gestural instrument control model (Wanderley and Battier 2000), companies such as Troika Ranch (New York), Palindrome (Nürnberg), and kondition pluriel (Montréal), among others, became leaders in transforming real-time human movement data captured from body- and camera-based sensing to create what kondition pluriel cofounder Martin Kusch called the “interactive manipulation of a mediabased environment through dance/performance” (kondition pluriel n.d.). In addition to their media-saturated choreographies, equally important was each group’s custom development of the technical systems necessary to carry out their desired performance explorations. Founded by musician and programmer Mark Coniglio and choreographer Dawn Stoppiello, Troika Ranch emerged in 1994 as one of the earliest companies to develop their own hardware and software systems specifically for the transmission of real-time movement data derived from dancers to control musical and visual scores. Coniglio’s MIDIDancer, a worn hardware-sensing system consisting of a central encoding and transmission unit and a series of wired bend sensors applied to the joints of a

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Figure 6.10 OpenEnded Group and Trisha Brown, how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . . Photo © Stephanie Berger.

dancer, was used to wirelessly send MIDI-encoded data to directly control the note values of synthesizers, the color parameters of projected images, or the movement of motors. With Coniglio’s custom-written Isadora software employed in works like The Future of Memory (2003), Surfacing (2004), 16 [R]evolutions (2006), and Loop Diver (2009), Troika Ranch shifted away from physical sensors to camera-based motion tracking, imposing a simple 3D virtual skeleton model onto the dancing body caught in video capture to control real-time 3D imagery and audio. Troika Ranch’s work sought to establish jazz music–like connections between the organic body and electronic media, creating an

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improvisatory environment that would give performers playful and precise control over media, making them equal authors alongside the stage director or choreographer. The German intermedia performance group Palindrome founded by dancer Robert Wechsler similarly developed both worn and camera-based sensor systems in order to find a “correlation between science and dance” (Palindrome Inter.Media Performance Group n.d.). Collaborating with engineer and codirector Frieder Weiss, works like Menehune (1999) “seine hohle form” (2001), and Maibaum (2003) utilized computer vision techniques like frame differencing in Weiss’s custom-written EyeCon software to track dancers in real time and render the results in an intermedia mix of computer-generated sounds and projected video images. In other works, such as Elektroden, Touching, and Heartbeats (1997–2002), Palindrome experimented with wireless electrodes to render a dancer’s heart rate (electrocardiography, or ECG), skeletal muscle activity (electromyography, or EMG), and brainwaves (electroencephalography, or EEG) into sonic and visual amplifications; a real-time body symphony generated by the flexing of muscles or acceleration of pulse. Palindrome’s artistic interest and technological strategy in creating perceivable yet surprising interactive relationships between dancers and their stage environment bore a similar relationship to the modus operandi of Troika Ranch, even to the extent of marketing Weiss’s software to the dance technology and digital art making world as Coniglio did with Isadora. Likewise Weiss used the techniques developed with Palindrome in other dance and artistic contexts, as in the case of Glow, a 2006 collaboration with Australian choreographer Gideon Obarzanek’s company Chunky Move that tracked a single solo dancer under a transforming beam of video light. Created by choreographer-dancer Marie-Claude Poulin and media artist Martin Kusch, the Montréal-based partnership kondition pluriel also focused on sensor-augmented choreographic practice, designing, developing, and implementing their own wireless and worn sensor systems. Distinct from the almost exhilarating celebration of technological utopia in Troika Ranch or Palindrome, however, kondition pluriel’s choreographic installations took a far darker reimagining of the body integrated within a sensor-occupied universe, while blurring the line between performer and participant. Projects like scheme I/II (2001), recombinant (2004), and Passage (2008) took place in aesthetically reduced stage environments that stripped image and sound of filigree and were co-inhabited by dancers whose movement was deliberately crippled and constrained by the sensor systems they wore. Navigating landscapes of rotating video projectors that cast strange image blurs between actual and simulated spaces onto moving surfaces, kondition pluriel’s performers mixed with audience members in a conscious attempt to estrange the physical and spatial perspective of performers, spectators, and environment. Moreover, kondition pluriel’s work called into question the static relationships between observer and participant through their direct emplacement of performers and spectators into nonproscenium, electronically augmented spaces.

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These same strategies were also evident in the oeuvre of choreographers whose work with real-time sensing systems was motivated by their interest in blurring the boundaries experienced among dancer, observer, and environment. Catalyzed by her studies in philosophy, and particularly phenomenology, for example, choreographer and writer Susan Kozel’s Mesh Performance Partnerships devised choreographic environments based on the question of how a performer/observer could be embodied within the constraints of a sensor-based system. Contours, a 1997 performance co-created with Kirk Woolford, endeavored to create an “ecosystem within which a journey of physical transformation mediated by software was shared by a small number of audience members.”50 In an elaborate circular architectural arena in which fifty spectators were housed, audience members stared down onto dancers whose movements were tracked with infrared cameras and converted into luminous computer graphics suggesting ripples across water or skin, projected onto the floor and on a 360-degree screen. From harness-suspended dancers in the center of the performance space to an audience forced to view a performance from a bird’s-eye view, Contours’ investigation of embodiment within an aware computational environment became manifest by placing shared bodies (both physical and computational) into situations of direct physical confrontation. Mesh’s Figments took on a far more intimate appearance, creating via motion capture a duet between a lone performer and an animated, abstract representation of human form, both of which were viewed by a small group of onlookers. Employing an ultrasound-based motion capture system that could monitor the position of the single performer in space through attached microphones, movement was converted into curves, lines, particles, and other computer graphic structures and projected onto various visual displays: LCD screens for the spectator and an HMD (head-mounted display) for the performer. Kozel described the research and creation process of Figments as one of “birthing a sentient system in six weeks,” in which not only the physically present performer would be captured and transferred into a virtual body but also the history of previous performers’ traces through the system. The choreographer pushed this triadic relationship of performer/digital trace/spectator even further in her 2004 choreography Immanence, a work in which spectators moved throughout an intimate space of three spatially demarcated zones, each occupied by a different performer. Tethered to harnesses or captured by cameras, the results of human movement were then transferred into color blurs, ghosts, medical images, and flying particles and projected onto the floor or screens surrounding the performance. Engineered through choreography between performer and spectator intimately confronting each other, Immanence, like Contours and Figments, tried to generate a felt permeability between bodies, both as physical material and digital abstraction. With a background in computer science, photography, art, and design, Kozel’s collaborator Kirk Woolford became one of a handful of experts in the development of sensorand motion capture–based performance and installation projects in the 1990s. Besides

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cofounding Mesh with Kozel, Woolford also collaborated with the UK intermedia partnership Igloo, a group composed of choreographer Ruth Gibson (who also collaborated on Mesh’s Figments) and digital artist Bruno Martelli (who worked in the domains of choreographed performance and user intervention–based installation around themes of natural phenomena and its entangling with human perceptions). Igloo’s Viking Shoppers (1997), a duet between a live performer and a projected “scratch dancer” employed Woolford’s custom ASCII CAM software which generated an animated body filled with flickering ASCII code, while WinterSpace (2001–2005), a projection-based installation by day and a dance performance by night, used similar tracking techniques to transform particle-system-driven falling snowflakes into a screen of static, star-like points behind which live performers garbed in pointillist costumes continually appeared and disappeared, based on their own extremes of movement and stillness. Simulated Bodies

Woolford’s computer-generated alchemy transforming the dancing self was part of a much larger trend within the dance technology world toward projected visual environments that featured lifelike movement of geometrically birthed morphs and forms that mimicked the behavior of the physical world. As already seen, the tradition of performances between human dancers-actors and their videated doppelgängers traced its arc back to the larger historical movements in projected scenery and imagery, but the continual improvement in processing speeds, graphics cards, high-resolution projection, procedural animation, and software-based physics simulations enabled choreographic imaginings with bodies that were truly virtual—in a constant state of becoming. After D.A.V.E. (Digital Adaptive Video Engine; 2002) and Vivisector (2003), earlier video-based dance-theater experiments with the choreographer and dancer Chris Haring, Austrian composer and visual artist Klaus Obermaier turned to high-end computer vision tracking techniques and physics-based graphic simulations for his 2004 dance work Apparition. A choreography consisting of two dancers set adrift in a massive projection of moving dots, waves, strings, lines, and particles, Obermaier’s highly tuned image landscape formed “a virtual architecture that can be simultaneously fluid and rigid, that can expand and contract, ripple, bend and distort in response to or an influence upon the movement of the performers.”51 Analogous strategies were also seen in the work of dozens of other choreographers interested in dancing with computer-generated bodies, including London-based choreographers Carol Brown and Wayne McGregor, media artist/programmer Simon Biggs, the Irish collective half/angel, Israeli-born dancer Yacov Sharir in collaboration with designer Diane Gromala, and “liquid architect” Marcos Novak and former Ballett Frankfurt dancers Nik Haffner and Thomas McManus, collaborating with ZKM programmer and artist Bernd Lintermann. Conducted at the ZKM in 2003, the Haffner and McManus project

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Timelapses was particularly interesting as a longer-term research exploration into the perceptual links between a physical body in three-dimensional space and its mediated, computer-generated representation on a flat, two-dimensional screen. Christian Ziegler, another ZKM-based artist, designer, and media artist—and one of the main developers for William Forsythe’s Improvisation Technologies CD—also created several key dance works involving the computer manipulation of live graphic material. Ziegler’s Scanned V (2001), in collaboration with the Indian dancer and choreographer Jayachandran Palazhy, used camera-based tracking to grab images of a moving Palazhy, sample them, and project the slowly evolving scan lines back into the stage environment in real time, temporally reorganizing and reshuffling the dance and gradually assembling an image of the body as a sampled entity. Working with Japanese dancer Kazuo Ikeda and German turntablist Florian Meyer, Turned (2005) and its predecessor DDR! (2003) both relied on real-time camera tracking in order to generate a panoply of computer-generated transformations of the dancing performer. Sampling visual motifs from DJ/VJ and audio motifs from video game culture, Turned as a dance event proceeded from concert to dance to installation and finally to a purely computer-generated world in order to produce an evolving set of moving bodies (spectator, dancer, graphic, sound) that would continually spatially reorganize themselves through an interconnected, interactive network of devices and systems. Ziegler’s appropriation of video gaming culture at the sonic level was taken much further into a full-blown dance/video game image aesthetic with two notorious works from the Dutch choreographer Krisztina de Châtel, Lara (1998) and Lara and Friends (1999). Based on the Lara Croft video games, de Châtel used the primitive movement vocabulary of the animated Tomb Raider star to stage a choreography in which dancers and dance were controlled by a real fourteen-year-old boy playing the video game on stage. Her follow-up entitled Lara and Friends (1999) made use of the high-end, real-time computer graphics capabilities of Houdini (a high-end film industry modeling/animation software) to sculpt a projected video game backdrop augmented and driven by the dancers: a live video game choreographed by physical bodies. At the same time, the projects of several prominent Montréal artists working with notions of computer-effected bodies also gained considerable attention in what Andrée Martin in a 1997 Ballett Tanz article called the Canadian “interactive choreography boom” (Martin 1997). Beginning with Le Partage des Peux (1990) and then Communion (1995), artist Isabelle Choinere developed works that sought to test the boundaries between physical presence and projected simulation, at times equipping her body with worn microphone and bend sensors used to produce animate, pulsing, electric-like fields that would erotically dance alongside human performers. More technologically refined attempts to link physical and projected bodies appeared in the collaborations of Michel Lemieux and Victor Pilon with the Montréal-based PPS Danse (Pierre-Paul Savoie and Jeff Hall). Making use of projection technologies similar

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to those that marked Pilon’s and Lemieux’s 4D Art and Cirque du Soleil’s Delirium spectacles, PPS’s Grand hotel des etrangers (1994) and Pôles—dance  virtuel (1996) made live meetings between different orders of flesh: projected and human bodies that encountered each other across cosmic stage landscapes where animated images emerged, cocooned, entranced, and enraptured the human dancers. Dance at a Distance

If one strain of choreographic practice with digital technologies exemplified by artists like Pilon and Lemieux, Ziegler, and de Châtel resulted in duets between projected light and flesh on stage, another explored telematic partnering over digital networks between dancers physically divorced from each other in time and space. Contrasting attempts to transfer video dance onto the Internet or other Internet dance models incorporating early (and quickly obsolete) technologies like VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language), telematic, or network-based dance had one foot in the physical world, while the other (or a partner’s other) was broken down into packets and transmitted across so many Internet hops only to end up as grainy images on a screen thousands of miles away. To many of the practitioners of networked dance or distributed choreography such as Company in Space, Lisa Naugle, Kelli Dipple, media artist Paul Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming work with Susan Kozel, and the research university members involved in the 2002 ADaPT (Association for Dance and Performance Telematics), networks as conceptual paradigms and distribution means provided a context to critique received ideas about the performance and reception of dance within a singular physical space as well as dance’s fixation on the purity of physical presence. Described by ADaPT researcher Ellen Bromberg as “polymorphous movement in a shared stream,” networked dance shared a similar utopian excitement about the possibility of folding the collaborative mechanisms that appeared to be enabled by networked systems into the actual performance process, staging the techniques of collaboration as an aesthetic event in and of itself (Bromberg and Birringer 2002). Emblematic of the trends in telematic dance, projects like Escape Velocity (2000), named after the Mark Dery book of the same title, and c03 (2001), both from the Melbourne, Australia–based Company in Space (founded by choreographers Helen Sky and John McCormick), were works in which the camera frame and the video editor in collaboration with the network helped construct the viewer’s perspective of the dancing body—a presence where partnering only took place over ISDN lines. Transducing choreographic space into the flatness of a pixel array, the work of Company in Space and others was part of a larger debate around the aesthetic merits and effects of a dance form reduced to camera viewpoints, transmitted over fiber optics and received by one audience group only as projection. The technological seduction among choreographers to capitalize on increasingly ubiquitous digital networks, however, sidestepped more

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critical questions generated by the very practices inherent in distributed dance itself. The first major question concerned what aesthetic innovation could emerge from artists on the telematic bandwagon? The precise organization of spatiotemporal relationships achieved through encounters with bodies in physical proximity to each other (one of the central tenets of choreographic practice) was more than complicated by the very use of computer network technologies. If dance before the Internet age (and the even more high-powered Internet 2) was seen to be, above all, about real bodies interacting in real time and space, then hidden engineering factors mostly unbeknownst or unimportant to artists such as latency, bandwidth, and temporal/image resolution suddenly had to be taken into account on equal par with kinesthetic-aesthetic issues. In other words, the stuttering of the network from bandwidth blockages and the crude resolution of a dance jumping around on servers across the globe became at times more important than the actual dance itself. Although Lisa Naugle, one of the key proponents of distributed choreography, claimed that the temporal hiccups and burps in the network were part of a new artistic medium that “plays with its protocols and technical peculiarities, it exploits the bugs and pushes the potentials of software and hardware” (Naugle 2002, 61) and other practitioners perceived that the “delay created by the network liberates the ‘events’ of motion from the bodies executing them” (Bromberg and Birringer 2002), many of these justifications appeared thin at best, covering up what was more likely to be substandard choreography dressed with technological sheen. Perhaps an even more fundamental issue with networked dance, however, was based on the confusion perpetrated by its practitioners between the network as a model of communication and the network as a means of distribution. In their claim to dispense with “older notions of the book and theatrical dialogue” (person-to-person communication) by focusing on the possibility of broadcasting distributed artists at different geographic locations to both physical as well as online locations, in reality telematic dance practitioners still relied on the theatrical sender-receiver model, albeit with two different senders in remote locations. For media theorists like Vilém Flusser interested in exploring different strategies of communication, the theatrical or amphitheater model involved a single sender sending out to multiple receivers. For network discourse, however, the point of origin of sending and receiving disappeared, replaced by a complex latticework of connections. A network model assumed an open circuit (Flusser) with no single point of origin of a message (be it text, image, sound, etc.) and a heterarchy of potential senders and receivers, the majority of telematic dance work used the traditional dyadic, sender-receiver model in which a live dancer from one location was broadcast to another location. Even as network dance’s practitioners claimed that anyone could enter the network at any point by logging on to the performance online, in fact, the complexity of a network was simply replaced by the communication means of a video camera that carried the signal

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from one remote location to another. Networked dance more often than not resembled the distribution model of television than the multiple, independent, potentially rhizomatic nodes depicted by network culture. “Telematic dance exists as transmitted images for remote seeing, and thus, it resembles online television/cinema” (Bromberg and Birringer 2002). That television was a medium that resembled a more antiquated form of communication due to its unilateral rather than network structure appeared to be lost on the practitioners of telematic dance, who were caught up in the techno-euphoria of movement carried across the ether. Augmentation/Prosthesis/Replacement

We began with Marey’s chronophotographic tracings of locomotive bodies across time and space that occupied optical curiosity at the end of the nineteenth century and end with our own digitally conditioned apparatuses of capture that transfigure the body in the twenty-first. After more than a century of machinic and informatic interventions in which the human body was thoroughly altered in concept, practice, and perception, the question still remains as to what borders still exist between the organic and the mechanical. Where is the body left if we so thoroughly trained and conditioned it, pushing it beyond its limits and reconfiguring it in aesthetic moments of dueling monstrousness and beauty? Have we succeeded in erasing the age-old distinctions between the human and the machine, between the body in here and systems “out there?” Perhaps the clue (if not the answer) to this fiendish conundrum lies in the nondigital age, in the perception of the body that the machine age transformed. Through Marey’s grabbing of the “imperceptible, the fleeting, the tumultuous and the flashing,” the technologizing of the body already reached its epiphany with the technologies of his time, long before the digital imaging, sensor augmentation, networked choreographies, surgical metamorphosis, or algorithmic systems of ours. But this feigned, supposedly modern tension between the humanistic body and the dehumanized machine that has so occupied us may be, in reality, a fiction—a fabulous construction drawing a false line between poles that are always in the process of being blurred. If machines remaining outside of human flesh also exhibit expression, agency, efficiency, and virtuosity, just like human bodies, then what are the repercussions of machines performing? Why and how do they perform, and—last but not least—for whom?

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7

Machines/Mechanicals

The world today belongs to machines. We live among machines, they help us do everything, to work and to enjoy ourselves. But what do we know about their moods, their nature? bruno munari, “manifesto of machinism,” 19521

In 1960, at the height of the Cold War, Swiss sculptor Jean Tinguely devised a performance event in which a machine, fastidiously assembled from bicycle tires, wire, and electric motors from New Jersey junkyards, would commit an act of suicide, selfdestructing in the enclosed garden of the New York Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) before the crème de la crème of New York cultural witnesses. Tinguely’s ironically titled Homage to New York was one of the earliest and concrete materializations of European modernism’s dreams of a machine-only mise-en-scène—a performance enacted solely by the material offspring of industrial society’s dreams and nightmares (figure 7.1). But if machine performances such as Tinguely’s mixed human embodiment with metallic apparatuses, then where are we to be found in the early and late dreams of modernity, in which electromechanically enhanced automata displace us to be orchestrators, operators, and witnesses to their shifting feelings? The incessant preoccupation with a total machinic mise-en-scène, performances by and for machines (if not for human spectators) is rooted in a conglomeration of influences criss-crossing the histories of automata, the imagined machine fantasies of industrial modernism, post–World War II military-industrial schemes, the advent of kinetic art, industrial subculture, and finally, our long-standing interest in robots. The histories of performing machines and robotic art, however, have involved a continual mingling between the mimetic (imitative of human behavior in appearance) and the machinic (electromechanical behavior that, though animate, is not anthropomorphic) rather than a disambiguation. Curator and art historian Jasia Reichardt, organizer of the

Figure 7.1 Basel.

Jean Tinguely. Homage to New York, 1960. Photo. David Gahr. Courtesy Tinguely Museum,

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1968 ICA-London exhibition Cybernetic Serendipity, one of the first machine art–based surveys, wrote that an entity’s behavior rather than its appearance plays a crucial role in whether we ascribe sentience and performativity to something that, for all intents and purposes, is dead to us (Reichardt 1978, 56). Here, automata not only refer to something that appears on the surface to be mechanical (i.e., kinetic) but also to processes: how a machine might internally behave to understand the environment it is situated in and react accordingly, based on a set of instructions. For Hungarian-born polymath John von Neumann, a key figure in the postwar cybernetic wave to focus science away from its physics-based emphasis on energy and power and toward information, communication, and computation, an automaton was “any system that processes information as part of a self-regulating mechanism” (Asprey 1990, 189). Interested in the relationship between natural and artificial systems, von Neumann drew upon the models of the nervous system developed by electrical engineers Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts in which nerves were essentially seen as switching organs— input/output devices for neural stimulus and response.2 For von Neumann, automata were not machines in the sense that we understand the term, but rather mathematical axioms defining logical processes for such self-regulation and self-replication: the deciding factors for whether something natural or artificial could be considered “living.”3 How then can we begin to understand the myriad of ways in which machines perform for each other and for us, conveying a sense of animism that appears to be lifelike? How can machines enunciate before spectators and why have they so often been exhibited in an aesthetically artificial performance context based on their ability to perform as “actors” or, as artist Louis-Philippe Demers stated, “agents of expression” (Demers 2004). With few exceptions, from wind-up motors, remote-controlled radios, or computer terminals spitting out ASCII or MIDI information, machinic performances encompass a delicate dance of control between machines and their human counterparts. “Why do we want our machines to seem alive?” wrote the artist Simon Penny (1995, 216). This is, of course, a salient question when surveying our Eastern and Western premodern fantasies of simulating nature through mechanical automata, from the clypsedra (water clocks) of Sung-dynasty China and the sophisticated pneumatics of Heron of Alexandria to the mechanical birds of Philon of Byzantium and the “simulacra” of Islamic scientist and engineer Al-Jazari, whose twelfth-century treatise The Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices contained more than a hundred sketches and models for perpetual machines, wine dispensers, clocks, and similar animated matter.4 Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, the process of constructing automata accelerated, encompassing everything from French inventor Vaucanson’s fabled mechanical duck, musical performing androids, sounding boxes, and chess-playing machines to the Japanese karakuri dolls—mechanical puppets that also had a strong influence on the development of the Japanese puppet theater Bunraku.

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Moreover, the histories of animate objects such as self-propelling mechanical figures, statues, and robots seem curiously tied up with theatrical performance’s similar history of obsession with puppets and performing objects. Already some 120 years after the development of Bunraku, the German romantic writer Heinrich von Kleist’s famous manifesto “Über das Marionettentheater” (“On the Puppet Theater”) described a theater where a dance of marionettes could easily achieve the grace normally accorded to human dancers, because they were not affected by the “inertia of matter” or the affectation of the soul to weigh them down (Kleist 1982, 214). About one hundred years later, director Gordon Craig’s essay “The Actor and the Über-marionette” reinforced the idea that machines could have the same force as human beings in performative spectacles, a suggestion that, as John Bell writes, could condemn the human performer to a lifeless world of objects—to death itself.5 Not surprisingly, the word and concept of “robot” made its first appearance also in the context of artistic performance. Derived from the Czech word robota, meaning “slave worker” or “drudgery,” “robot” was brought into widespread usage by the Czech writer Karel Cˇapek in his 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots). It is not a bit ironic that the play’s premiere in Berlin had the famous electromechanical machine scenography designed by Frederick Kiesler described in chapter 1, a scenography that presupposed that a mechanical contraption could have equal status with a human performer. Mechanization Takes Command

The machine-obsessed Futurists were not the only cultural players caught up in the moment of nonhuman dynamism that the rapidly unfolding machine age provoked in the human imagination. In his 1948 treatise Mechanization Takes Command, the great Swiss architectural historian Sigfried Giedion described the hailing characteristic of the machine above all else, as the phenomena of movement itself; an extension of the human body and an articulated, performative substitute (Giedion 1969, 46–50) . The human hand, which acted as a grasping instrument, was the central assemblage of the body, but the machine was also a kind of articulate aggregation, extending human action and elasticizing it. In a further animistic move, the kinetic sculptor Bruno Munari’s 1936 “Manifesto of Machine Art” suggested that artists were the only ones capable of grasping the machine’s personality, intimately understanding its complexities and possibilities. “Artists are the only people who can . . . take an interest in machines. . . . They must get to know the anatomy and the language of machines, they must learn to understand machines and distract them by making them function irregularly, thereby creating works of art with those same machines and with the means they offer” (Hultén 1987, 17). Munari’s manifesto demonstrated the general aesthetic interest in the simultaneous uselessness of machines and their aura of superhuman abilities that emerged around the industrial cultures surrounding modernism.

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In his encyclopedic 1968 work Origins and Development of Kinetic Art, art historian Frank Popper provided yet another crucial piece in the machine performance puzzle, portraying the superhuman ability ascribed to the machine as something akin to the force of magic. “The introduction, suggestion and employment of machine movements in art,” wrote Popper, “can be equated with the idea of the identification with the industrial and mechanical universe that is as much within the field of magic as that of aesthetics” (1968, 235). For Popper, machines were only a small subsection of the larger field of kinetic art that began in the early part of the twentieth century—an aesthetic field, like Giedion’s claim, based on the dynamics of kinesthetic behavior. The earliest—and consequently, most well-known—kinetic forms that incorporated what painter Fernand Léger called “machine aesthetics” into a direct translation of movement at the material level such as Naum Gabo’s Kinetic Construction or László MoholyNagy’s Lichtrequisit (Light-Space Modulator) from 1929, were chiefly driven by a formal exploration into the kinetic behavior of materials. The fact that Moholy-Nagy’s Lichtrequisit had initially been imagined by the artist to present a new kind of stage environment points out the growing interest that the Constructivist-influenced avant-garde had in the intricate choreography of animated, nonhuman assemblages. In describing the wide range of kinetic possibilities for artistic practice, Popper created a useful taxonomy of movement that corrected the common assumption that kinetic art was the sole basis for machine art and performance. Among categories such as figurations of movement, representation of movement, and photographic and cinematic procedures, he included the notion of movement expressed by movement itself: simple mechanical as well as electromechanical, electronic, thermal, hydraulic, and magnetic kinesis. “The automata of the 18th century have a direct relationship to . . . simple mechanical movement. But there seems little doubt that the modern manifestation of this technique actually derives a reaction to the machine age, which may take the form of fascination or irony. Picabia and Duchamp, in the first place, followed by such members of the younger generation as Tinguely and Gustav Kramer, have adapted this procedure in order to bring out the simultaneous beauty and monstrosity of the machine in motion” (Popper 1968, 221). It is the fusion of beauty and monstrosity that helps articulate the strange, latetwentieth-century phenomena of machine performance or what the San Francisco–based machine art collective Survival Research Labs (SRL) described as “a unique set of ritualized interactions between machines, robots, and special effects devices with humans present only as operators or audience” (SRL Machines 2008). Taking place in abandoned urban wastelands and reconstituted former industrial halls, the new man-machine Gesamtkunstwerk is that of machines fighting and dying in front of a gathered crowd, their human operators banished behind tables holding the controls that breathe life into these mechanical phantoms. The realization of automata that transcend sculpture, machine performance is a spectacle that is curiously live yet, not living: incessantly counteracting the imagined

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utopias of the earlier machine age with the apocalyptic overtones of the postindustrial epoch. Machine Performance/Mechanical Mise-en-scène

The Futurist vision of machine destruction was most patently actualized in the works of Jean Tinguely. Driven by an interest in the “mechanics of chance” (Hultén 1975, 8), Tinguely’s kinetic forms reflected a postwar world in which the utopian perfection of Futurism was replaced by fragmented and absurd, Duchamp-influenced, ready-made junk. Tinguely’s machines were marked by the same war-scarred characteristics that the artist saw in human agents: ironic fallibility subject to error, disorganization, and breakdown— simultaneously self-driven and self-destructive. As early as 1953, together with Romanian dancer and object artist Daniel Spoerri, he began conceptual planning for an Autotheater, a performance for colored shapes and moving objects without human performers. With the scheme unrealized due to the collapse of his mechanical set, Tinguely soon thereafter began experimenting with what he labeled metamechanical (“beyond machine”) devices, including a series of automatic drawing machines that consisted of mechanical structures that held pens or markers and could draw on positioned pieces of paper. Tinguely’s desire to create a spectacle that would “pass like a falling star” and most crucially “be impossible for museums to reabsorb” finally resulted in a landmark series of self-destructing machine performances in the 1960s and 1970s that laid waste to the restrictive white walls of the gallery (Hultén 1987, 350). As described at the beginning of this chapter, the first and most notorious event, Self-Destroying Construction No.1— Homage to New York, was planned for the MoMA sculpture garden. Constructed from electrically welded bicycle wheels, an old upright piano, Addressograph machines, drum parts, a meteorological balloon, mechanically driven paper rolls, go-kart parts, and a plethora of other detritus from suburban salvage dumps, Tinguely’s machine was designed to create acts of seduction and unease in the spectators (Hultén 1987, 2). Assisted in his scavenging and engineering work by Bell Labs scientist and E.A.T. founder Billy Klüver, Tinguely’s “doomsday machine” undertook its sole thirty-minute performance in the sculpture garden on the cold, wet evening of March 17, 1961; a performance that, for the artist, was nothing less than a playful, almost mischievous act of machine suicide. As the junk apparatus ran, various joints melted and collapsed, while a can of gasoline hidden inside one of the components quickly sped up the mechanical selfimmolation process. “The work had to pass by, make people dream and talk and that would be all,” Tinguely later articulated to curator Karl Pontus Hultén. “It had a certain complex seduction that made it destroy itself—it was a machine that committed suicide. A very beautiful idea!” (Hultén 1987, 350). The Homage to New York performance embodied Tinguely’s profound

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interest in the anarchic effect of aleatoric, uncontrollable processes. For the gathered crowd who had expected a colossal act of machinic annihilation, however, the machine itself betrayed the expected and instead malfunctioned—much to Tinguely’s excitement. Engulfed in a smoky cloud of titanium tetrachloride that Klüver had brought to increase the visual pandemonium quotient, the burning machine reached a premature death not only by its own processes of dissolution but through the New York City fire department attacking it to put out the fire as well. As the first in his series of machine performances, Homage to New York was critical to Tinguely’s grasping the importance of the spectator’s role in the mechanical mise-enscène. Study for an End to the World or monster-sculpture-autodestructive dynamique et aggressive (1961), a second performance given at the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, incorporated dynamite to amplify the violent intensity of the spectacle. Before a gathered audience overlooking the Baltic Sea, a figural machine constructed of scrap metal, plaster, and dynamite performed a long theatrical scenario, eventually exploding in a blaze of fireworks, noise, and smoke. Exploiting his increasing interest in the destructive powers of dynamite, Tinguely’s penultimate machine performance, entitled Study for the End of the World II (1962), was to be staged before a NBC camera crew in the barren desert south of Las Vegas, a site not far from the proving grounds where atomic bombs were originally tested. The ultimate tribute to Tinguely’s work, however, must have been the obscure The Tinguely Mystery Machine or The Love Suicides at Kaluka, a 1965 play written by Tinguely’s friend Kenneth Koch and performed at the Jewish Museum in New York by a cast of human actors and Tinguely’s machines interacting with each other. In the last two decades of his life, Tinguely shifted his emphasis to large mechanical sculptures installed in public spaces and museums; works that, though sculptural, also displayed the same performative attitudes. Dissecting Machine (1965) involved female dress mannequins that functioned by sawing themselves apart in an atavistic act of violence. Tinguely’s epic Mengele Totentanz (1986), a large-scale assembly of machines, made increasing use of natural and organic elements such as burned wood, animal skeletons, charred metal appliances, and traditional mechanical parts, and revealed the artist’s growing apocalyptic world view. For Tinguely, as a poetic instrument of liberation the machine’s essence was its ability to move. “Life is movement . . . everything transforms itself, everything modifies itself ceaselessly” (Tomkins 1962, 150). Subject to their own mechanisms of behavior, Tinguely’s machines evolved in a “total atmosphere of anarchy and freedom” (150), their playful, and simultaneously irrational and destructive behavior, expressing the impermanence and entropic dissolution normally attributed solely to human experience. His belief in life’s ephemerality captured through the process of movement applied as well to the life of his machines, which at times ended up on the junk piles and in the trash cans of cultural institutions.

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This Janus-faced tendency toward playfulness and destruction, and free will and control that was materialized in Tinguely’s machines was later resurrected and amplified in what could be called his shadow successors: the California-based machine art group SRL. Founded in San Francisco in 1978 by artist and machinist Mark Pauline as an organization “dedicated to re-directing the techniques, tools and tenets of industry, science and the military away from their typical manifestations in practicality, product or warfare” (SRL Machines 2008), SRL, as it was known, arose in the postpunk, industrial subculture scene of the late 1970s, quickly acquiring an international cult following. As unstable events combining live theater, politics, technology, and engineering, SRL’s mechanical performances fused the organic and mechanical, gravitating to the fine line between control and anarchy, the born and the made. If, for Tinguely, the machine was the ultimate expression of freedom, for Pauline’s dramaturgies it embodied a Nietzschean will to power through the violent triumph over both humans as well as its own fellow machine species. Described by critic Mark Dery in his ode to cyberculture Escape Velocity as “a combination of killing field and carnival midway” (Dery 1996, 119), SRL’s fiery spectacles created a machine-age theater of cruelty in which “the non-rational and the absurd act as the baseline of all activity” (Pauline 1996, 420). Initially, SRL’s spectacles were staged as word-of-mouth happenings in abandoned parking lots, freeway underpasses, and empty bus terminals, but as their reputation grew, so did the profile of performance venues: stadiums, art museums, and even the Sony corporate park in San Jose, California. The group’s partially scripted performances consisted of custom-constructed, tele-operated creatures running amok in Wagnerian-scale pageants of mayhem before a live audience. Unlike German artist Gustav Metzger’s 1959 call for an auto destructive art, where art made specifically for industrial societies would self-destruct by way of its own formal, natural, and technological mechanisms, SRL’s form of performative annihilation was chiefly planned and orchestrated by its human scenographers.6 Machine Sex, SRL’s first public performance in 1979 was staged at a Chevron gas station and featured the carcasses of dead pigeons sliced to bits by a giant shredding machine.7 Other earlier works, such as Food for Machines, Noise, and Assured Destructive Capability (all 1979) were smaller affairs, conducted by Pauline and a small pick-up crew of associates. With the addition of Matt Heckert and Eric Werner in 1980, SRL progressed to more elaborate contraptions that would destroy each other in choreographed rituals of industrial violence accompanied by ear-splitting, machine-generated soundtracks. With extensive titles such as An Epidemic of Fear: The Relief of Mass Hysteria Through Expressions of Senseless Jungle Hate and Extremely Cruel Practices: A Series of Events Designed to Instruct Those Interested in Policies that Correct or Punish, Pauline and company constructed robotic nightmares welded from the plundered remains of Bay Area surplus military and high-tech salvagers in addition to “reanimated” animal carcasses and junked engines (figure 7.2). Radio remote-controlled, SRL performances involved combinations of

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Figure 7.2 Mark Pauline/Survival Research Labs. Illusions of Shameless Abundance, San Francisco, 1989. Photo Steve Heck.

stationary and mobile machines with names as Spike Roller, Chain Thing, and later, V1 (a replica of a World War II Buzz Bomb jet engine), which were pitted against each other in savage battles, spitting flame and shrapnel and eventually consuming themselves in heaps of wreckage.8 By the mid 1990s, the group’s performances began to incorporate more technically sophisticated tele-robotic systems, including Internet-based remote control systems designed by legions of SRL associates and volunteers whose day jobs involved toiling away in the high-tech research laboratories of the San Francisco Bay Area’s military and commercial complexes. In 1997’s Increasing the Latent Period in a System of Remote Destructibility, a performance/exhibition sponsored by Tokyo’s NTT/ICC digital media arts center, SRL associate and UC Berkeley computer scientist Eric Paulos programmed an online Java Applet that gave remote audiences indirect control over a machine in San Francisco. 1999’s Tokyo follow-up to the 1997 Remote Destructibility show was the first recorded event to remotely control a machine during a live performance. In further efforts toward what Pauline described as “converting machines, improving them really, from things which once did ‘useful’ destruction into things that can now do useless destruction”

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(Kelly 1994, 32), more recent performances after 2000 relied on the implementation of even more state-of-the-art sensing, embedded systems, and wireless technologies. In more than one context, Pauline expressed the desire for his performances to be strictly for the machines rather than the human spectator. “These machines are totally at ease in the world we have built for them . . . they act completely natural” (Kelly 1994, 33). In the face of increasingly sophisticated war machines driven by telematic technologies and distributed intelligence, the question remained, however, whether SRL’s “pyrotechnic insanitarium” (Dery 1999a, 3) of machine war simulacra critiqued or celebrated the performative and cataclysmic potential of such postindustrial systems. The impact of SRL on the international machine performance scene cannot be underestimated. Driven by the liberal political-cultural climate of northern California as well as the widespread impact of SRL itself, satellite artists and collectives who had either worked with, been influenced by, or were in opposition to the group made the San Francisco Bay Area a haven for industrial culture, with SRL alumni artists such as Chip Flynn (the Peoplehater Group), and Christian Ristow and Kal Spelletich/SEEMEN creating their own machines and spin-off groups.9 Much of this off-shoot machine performance scene in San Francisco not only took place in the same down-market sites as SRL’s but also at the legendary Burning Man festival, an annual late-summer gathering of more than 50,000 people who set up a temporary alternative city (Black Rock City) in the Nevada desert. In a weeklong festival fusing free expression with nonconsumer culture, technopaganism, and drug-induced hallucinogenia, Burning Man became the single largest “in the wild” performance space in the United States. As an ongoing postapocalyptic spectacle attracting legions of artists who built temporary testaments to cyber-machine culture, Burning Man featured such exotic phenomena as self-incinerating robots, roving Tesla coils on flatbed trucks, computercontrolled flamethrowers, dinosaur-like kinetic animals, and other sorts of pyromaniacal, industrial-techno-culture inspired madness in a barren desert. Another indirect thread from the SRL legacy was the original San Francisco phenomenon of Robot Wars. Initially dreamed up by a former Lucas Arts animatronics designer named Marc Thorpe who was trying to develop a radio-based, remote-controlled vacuum cleaner and saw the commercial potential of similar devices engaged in battle, Robot Wars arose as a popular competition in which remote-controlled robots built by weekend hobbyists would fight it out in a public spectacle. Reminiscent of Roman gladiatorial matches or naumachias, the large-scale mock sea battles that took place in flooded auditoriums and featured condemned criminals fighting to the death on miniature-sized replicas of naval vessels, Robot Wars was also partially inspired by Pauline’s work and a Denverbased machine spectacle called Critter Crunch.10 Partially based on SRL’s European tours, the machine aesthetic also found appeal among European avant-garde art circles in the late 1980s and 1990s, particularly in former Eastern European countries, which found themselves in upheaval after the collapse of

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Communism. Both directly and indirectly, the sheer impact of these events set the stage for numerous cultural festivals and organizations to thematize the breakdown of totalizing systems and the implosion of postwar Warsaw Bloc industrial culture. “Out of Control,” the theme of the 1991 Ars Electronica Festival in Linz, Austria—the largest international event for electronic arts—for example, explored what French theorist Jean Baudrillard in his catalogue entry called the “seismic order”—the new energy brought about by natural and technological systems on the edge of collapse (Baudrillard 1991). In continuing the edge-of-chaos theme in artistic projects, curators Gottfried Hattinger and Peter Weibel presented a veritable potpourri of machine makers, including English robotics builder Jim Whiting, Dutch machine artist Eric Hobijn, German roboticist Nicolas Baginsky, and Austrian artist Just Merrit. Other European media arts organizations, such as the Rotterdam institute V2, EMAF in Osnabrück, Germany, and C3 in Budapest, as well as the squatted derelict East Berlin cultural center Tacheles were also early adopters and presenters of such extreme machine performances. Groups such as the British-founded Mutoid Waste Company, which built roving sculptures from scrap metal, and the infamous Dead Chickens, a collective founded in 1986 that put on machine performances consisting of huge, grotesque mechanical monsters in abandoned buildings, Berlin, in general, and Tacheles, in particular, became attractors for what the Germans called Schrottkunst (scrap metal art): art made from the junked remains of industrial cultures that were disappearing overnight. The most intriguing European machine performance cum happening, however, took place in the most suitable but unlikely of places: the Voest-Alpine steel factory, one of the world’s largest steel mills and former tank factory for Hermann Göring, outside of Linz, Austria. Organized by machine artist Just Merrit, the project Contained was a kind of “nomadic encampment”/arts colony/workshop located directly on the grounds of the behemoth steel mill, whose square area rivaled that of a small town. As a loose “conglomeration of adventurous ideas, carved out with passionate obsession in the heart of a steel works,” the local and international members of Contained sought a connection to a dying industrial culture that the Voest embodied, one born from an interest in industrial culture, “a compassion for the steel workers and identification with their access to hardware, as well as a fascination for the immediacy and directness of production machinery” (Merit 1996). Operating in stealth mode for two years, Contained’s multifarious program of activities, including working television and radio stations, industrial installations, machine performances, sound sculptures, and a bar, was exposed to the public only during the 1996 Ars Electronica festival in a program called “The Rearview Mirror on Reality,” which featured more than twenty prominent machine performance artists like Merit, Chico MacMurtrie’s Amorphic Robotic Works, Matt Heckert, Chip Flynn, Nicolas Baginsky, John Duncan, Eric Hobijn, and others.

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Machine Orchestras

Taking a cue from the Futurists as well as an interest in the sound production surrounding industrial subculture, a number of artists built machines exclusively for their soundmaking potential. One of the most intelligent manifestations of this phenomenon was the Mechanical Sound Orchestra (MSO) of former SRL collaborator/soundtrack designer and artist Matt Heckert. Intrigued by the complex timbral and rhythmic range of sounds that machines could produce, Heckert left SRL in 1990 to create an ensemble of sound-making machines that could be played and conducted by the artist through software-based servo motor and machine control. Longing to give “sonic voice” to machines, Heckert specifically designed and fabricated a musical ensemble based less on its visual appearance than on its aural abilities. Similar to a conventional orchestra only in terms of the diverse sonic range produced by different groups of instruments, Heckert’s machine-instrument hybrids produced wide ranges of sounds enabled by fine degree changes in motor speeds achieved by computer controlled algorithms that executed a combination of predetermined patterns and random behavior.11 Instruments such as the Disc-Cable machine, a rotating, slapping cable threaded with huge metal washers; Resonators, large metal cylinders skinned at one end with tympanic membranes that resembled a machine-controlled drum tuned at different frequencies; and Oscillating Rings, consisting of four rotating gyroscopic wheels set atop a piezo-amplified metal table created a roaring, pulsing, shaking acoustic environment that brought a more intense experience of immediacy to the spectator (figure 7.3). By removing the stage and spatially placing the audience directly among the machines, Heckert’s MSO shifted the scale of spectator perspective, creating the sensation of being inside a set of industrial procedures or the feeling of “having been shrunk down and fallen inside a watch” (Heckert 2005). Heckert’s Futurist-inspired sonic universe was echoed by the machine-music performances of Canadian-born, Berlin-based composer Gordon Monahan, also part of the European machine art network. Interested in the relationships between natural phenomena like weather systems and manmade phenomena like industrial devices, Monahan’s most elaborate performance, Multiple Machine Matrix (1994–1998), subtitled “Sounds and the Machines that Make Them,” was an installation-like environment filled with computer-controlled and -conducted kinetic devices. Constructed from industrial and electronic surplus parts and other scrap metal, Monahan’s matrix was played by the composer using similar techniques of MIDIcontrolled motors and actuators that, when physically interacting with such material, produced complex percussive and melodic sonorities. Similarly, like Heckert’s work, Monahan’s 2003 performance New and Used Furniture Music shifted spectator attention away from the human performer (Monahan sitting behind the computer) to the movement of industrial materials and kinetic elements like motors and metallic strings.

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Figure 7.3 Matt Heckert, Mechanical Sound Orchestra. Installation at Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival, 1998. Photo Matt Heckert.

The strategy of sounding machines as the performers of a new type of industrially generated music was taken in a different direction by another set of Canadian artists who were not part of the machine art scene, the architect Thomas McIntosh and the composer Emmanuel Madan, collectively known as [The User]. As part of their research of noise by machines, “the by product of our existence” (McIntosh and Madan), the group’s 1998 performance Symphony #1 for Dot Matrix Printers consisted of an onstage array of dot matrix printers controlled and conducted through a computer network whose resulting sounds were wholly determined by ASCII text files that shaped their melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic behavior (figure 7.4). Artificially amplifying and processing each printer’s sonic output to create a complex mix of different voices, [The User] also sought to microscopically reveal the mechanical innards of each machine, capturing the movement of its platens, rollers, printer ink cartridges, and disks with miniature video cameras installed inside the printers and projecting these images above the onstage “performers.” An industrial music of used office machinery was also prevalent in the work of yet another Canadian artist, Hungarian-born Istvan Kantor (also known as Monty Cantsin). Founder of the notorious Neoist antiart movement, known for the splashing of his blood onto famous artwork in international museums, Kantor developed mechanical performances whose featured actants included junked file cabinets, office chairs, desks, and the like. After a series of low-tech machine works including File Cabinet Slammers I–III

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Figure 7.4 [The User], Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers, 2001. Avanto Festival, Kiasma Theater, Helsinki, Finland. Courtesy of [The User], © Thomas McIntosh.

(1993–1996), Universal Folk Cymbal, Schlager Kloppen (1994), and Telepathic Transmission Mobile (1995), Kantor created his signature Executive Machinery: Intercourse: The File Cabinet Project—a performance constructed from the sounds of pneumatically controlled file cabinet drawers, which Kantor called “a socio-sonic noise machine and interactive sub monument” (Kantor 1997). The machines in the performances of Heckert, Monahan, Kantor, or [The User] somewhat approximated human scale, but other European-based artists like Eric Hobijn, Bastiaan Maris, and Nicolas Baginsky created much larger mechanical sound apparatuses that easily dwarfed the human spectator in their size and the intensity of acoustic output. Curating The Absolute Threshold, one of the earliest European machine art festivals in

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Amsterdam in 1993, Dutch artist Hobijn built his colossal Dante Orgel (Dante Organ), a musical instrument assembled from computer-controlled flamethrowers, which paid tribute to another critical element in industrial mythology: the Promethean power of fire. Conceived for an SRL European tour opening in Amsterdam, Hobijn’s organ was a pyrotechnic machine spectacle extraordinaire: a sculpture consisting of from five to twelve computer-actuated and synchronized MIDI-orchestrated flamethrowers whose inner chambers were amplified by microphones and distributed over a multichannel sound environment. Creating tornado-like columns of flame spiraling upwards in excess of 40 meters high and producing the howling frequencies of the various fires together with the internal sounds of the opening and closing movement of pneumatic valves and escaping air, Hobijn’s spectacular fire drama united both industrial fossil fuel and information-age technologies in what he called “an audio visual environment, based on military knowledge, dealing with the sounds and aesthetics of domesticated violence” (Hobijn 1988).12 Machine sound instruments consisting of steel, fire, chemical substances, electricity, and water subject to computer control also surfaced in the work of the German artist Nicolas Anatol Baginsky. In I-Beam Music (1995), a collaborative performance with American industrial artist Barry Schwartz, Baginsky created a colossal computer-actuated string instrument consisting of a 4-meter-long I-beam, strung with stretched piano wire and plucked by solenoid actuators. Traveling the length of the vast, former industrial hall of the Kampnagel theater in Hamburg and “played” by an environment of dry ice “fingers” (chemicals such as liquid nitrogen, water, electric current, and machine parts) as well as by acoustic information gathered and analyzed from the environment and transduced back to the instrument, Baginsky’s I-Beam suggested a giant industrial car wash concert—a performance for an autonomous instrument that both played and was played by the environment.13 Baginsky’s interest in the potential autonomy of the machine, in its ability to “learn” and adapt to its environment was already articulated in his Humunculus (1987) project, a self-performing machine controlled by audio signals, with joint movement based on a double pendulum that could exhibit chaotic, nonlinear behavior. A far more involved set of procedures marked the artist’s long-term The Three Sirens, an ensemble of “self-learning” music-performing robots composed of three machines: Aglaopheme (slide guitar), Peisinoe (bass), und Thelxiepeia (drum). Baginsky’s high-tech band, which used sonic spectral analysis as input for computer-modeled artificial neural networks (ANN), learned what sounds were being made based on the strength of the various input signals and then used such learned data to control actuators on the individual machines to produce new sound— what amounted to a rough and strange blend of rock music without any human presence or control.

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Performing Machines: Mimetic or Machinic

Baginsky’s work pointed to the shift from human-based operation and control toward machine autonomy: self-organizing, unpredictable, and “lifelike” physical behavior based on environmental input. Thus, although machines—and particularly robots—were associated with mechanical behavior, the powerful influence of information, feedback, and control theory strongly suggested that technological advances in sensing, microelectronics, and computationally enabled “intelligent” systems could further problematize the fragile lines between natural and artificial behavior. In the mid 1960s, prominent art historian Jack Burnham was already analyzing the shift from the fixed, material art object to the unobject arising from experimentation into areas such as kinetic environments, intermedia events, and happenings. Although Burnham’s discourse focused chiefly on sculpture and not performance in its traditional connotation, his articulation of the emergence of cybernetically influenced systems aesthetics paved the way for machinic performances in which the human would attempt “to concede a soul or indwelling vitality to inanimate objects” (Burnham 1968a, 16). His pioneering 1968 book Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology on the Sculpture of this Century, now widely acknowledged as one of the key texts in the diffuse history of the “cybernetic arts,” set out to describe the influence of both electromechanical systems in order to make objects seem “alive” as well as the application of biological models of feedback and control to artificial, manmade systems.14 As a particular case in point of Burnham’s paradigm, sculptor and architect Nicolas Schöffer [Screen/Scene, chapter 3] had already begun work on the development of autonomous, cybernetic sculpture-machines and accompanying dramatic spectacles in which such hybrids could publicly perform. Generally acknowledged as providing one of the earliest links between kinetic sculpture, architecture, and the more technologically complex arena of robotics, Schöffer was trained in the abstract formalism of the Bauhaus style but then became deeply influenced by mathematician Norbert Wiener’s theories of cybernetics. Schöffer proposed a new approach to sculptural practice, which he termed spatio-lumino-chronodynamism, in which space, light, and time would be combined to generate an unprecedented machinic-sculptural form. Working with the concepts of spatiodynamism, in which the proportions of a sculptural form would, in effect, shape and modify the space that surrounded it, as well as the luminosity of surfaces (luminodynamism), Schöffer’s early machines of sharp geometric forms and vertical structures somehow conveyed a rhythmic, multidimensional, and almost immaterial quality, one of “energy and not material” upon being set into movement (Schöffer 1996, 398). With technical and financial support from the French branch of the Philips corporation, Schöffer began incorporating ideas from cybernetics such as feedback control and the use of environmental data gathered from sensors in his first kinetic machine, which was named

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CYSP 1 (cybernetic  spatiodynamism): a two-and-a-half-meter-high construction made from aluminum and electronics that had its debut stage performance in Paris at the famous “Nuit de la Poesie” (Sarah Bernhard Theater) in 1956. Ambulatory in all directions at two different speeds, with both axial and eccentric rotation, CYSP 1 was described as constituting “a living counterpoint, a new and harmonious contrast with the articulated movements of the undulating bodies of humans by its evolutions and its transparent, orthogonal and metallic structure” (Schöffer n.d.). Further outfitted with photoelectric sensors and a microphone that enabled it to be set into unpredictable motion by external events, CYSP 1 also performed shortly after its Paris debut on the rooftop terrace of Le Corbusier’s Cité Radieuse apartment complex in Marseille for the great Belgian ballet choreographer Maurice Béjart. Béjart incorporated the sculptor’s “artificial being” (Schöffer n.d.) into a dance performance for the Festival d’Art d’Avant-Garde because the choreographer was intrigued not only by the sculpture’s unique movement but also by its interaction with dancers around it.15 Aspiring to further exploit his idea of luminodynamism, Schöffer also constructed two-dimensional machines that could accept, transform, and reflect light sources.16 His Spectacle Spatiodynamique Expérimental, a “luminodynamic” performance involving music and light projections, took place at Grand Central Station in New York in 1957. Even after 1960, as the sculptor’s interest in urban space quickly led him to conceive of cybernetic machines at architectural scale (Tour Lumière Cybernétique), Schöffer continued to integrate machines into stage-based spectacles. In 1968, in collaboration with the American experimental choreographer Alwin Nikolais in Hamburg, he deployed his cybernetic creatures as a key scenographic element in composer Gian Carlo Menotti’s opera-ballet Les Globolinks. Schöffer and Nikolais—along with the French acousmatic composer Pierre Henry—followed up Les Globolinks with their 1973 production of Kyldex I, a “cybernetic experiment” for the Hamburg Staatsoper in which the main performers were five of Schöffer’s autonomous mechanae interacting with Nikolais’s dancers in a pageant of shifting light and color on the opera stage.17 Schöffer’s interest in the feedback loops of man-machine control was offset by Nam June Paik’s more anthropomorphic experiments with his and engineer Shuya Abe’s robot, K-456 (named after a Mozart piano concerto), which aspired to demonstrate technology’s fallibility and stupidity in its supposedly animate relationship to human observers. K-456, a twenty-radio-channel, remote-controlled machine built in Japan with wire, foam, and other scrap parts, bore quick resemblances to its human counterparts through the execution of simple actions such as moving its arms and legs, making noises, and excreting beans. First appearing in private, the robot had its first public performance in Paik’s own Robot Opera with Paik and Charlotte Moorman at the Judson Church in the New York Avant-Garde Festival organized by Moorman in 1964. After performing indoors, Paik led the robot out into the streets, where it expelled beans and played speeches of John F. Kennedy from speakers built into its mouth.

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Subsequently, in what Paik described as the “first nonhuman performance artist,” K-456 performed in the Robot Opera in Berlin in 1965, where it walked up and down the Strasse des 17. Juni, toward the Berlin Wall–surrounded Brandenburg Gate. With two tiny propellers for eyes and a clattering baking sheet for a hat, the robot became a cult object in Germany, perhaps suggesting in its downtrodden appearance an all-too-human pathos—a machine stranded in the midst of an isolated Berlin stricken by the militarytechnological tension of the Cold War. Described by Paik as a street performer, the robot could meet people on the street and “give them a split-second surprise. Like a sudden shower” (Paik 1965). Performing for the last time during Paik’s 1982 retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York, the robot rambled down Madison Avenue, where it met its not-unplanned end in the path of a moving car.18 Far more electronically sophisticated anthropomorphic-technological entities were created by Polish sculptor/engineer Edward Ihnatowicz. A Polish refugee who fled to England during World War II, Ihnatowicz was an autodidact in matters of science and engineering but quickly became fascinated by the potential of electronics to create unpredictable behavior in kinetic systems. Shown at Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity exhibition in 1968, Ihnatowicz’s first cybernetic influenced work, SAM (Sound Activated Mobile) was an electronically controlled, hydraulic, biomorphic-like sculpture in the shape of overgrown vertebrae with a petal-shaped head containing a miniature microphone array. Based on the direction of sound picked up by the microphones, the sculpture could be set into lateral or sideways motion.19 Between 1968 and 1971, Ihnatowicz developed his most revered creation: a large, claw-like mobile machine with six hinged joints enabling multiple degrees of freedom. Named The Senster, the machine was specifically commissioned for the Philips Electronics hands-on science museum Evolon at their corporate headquarters in the Dutch city of Eindhoven. As one of the first mainframe computer–controlled sculptures, the 5-meterlong Senster incorporated electrohydraulics, sophisticated microphone arrays, and Doppler radar tracking technologies in order to generate spectator-perceivable, physicalmechanical interaction. Through relatively simple, low-level environmental input such as spectator motion and sound location and intensity, the Senster, as Ihnatowicz described, could exhibit a sophisticated set of physical behaviors, moving toward quiet and sustained sound sources or rebounding from sudden bursts of movement, noise or violent gestures.20 Unlike the vertebrae-outfitted appearance of Ihnatowicz’s earlier SAM, the Senster eschewed biomorphic tendencies in its visual manifestation and looked like an industrial metal framework with exposed electronics, motors, and wires. Ihnatowicz’s desire to correlate sensorimotor functions in a machine was a strategy that would be echoed some thirty years later in the performance projects of several machine-robotic artists who also sought through more refined hardware/software systems to create what Reichardt (in describing the Senster) had announced as “reactions that one might expect when someone is trying to communicate with another human being or an

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animal . . . the sort of robot which we could imagine must have feelings because it behaves like creatures that have them” (Reichardt 1978, 56). The performances of machine artist Chico MacMurtrie’s Amorphic Robot Works, for example, relied on machines with more direct anthropomorphic behavior, yet also amorphic geometries. Also a staple on the European machine art scene, MacMurtrie’s spindly, rust-eroded human-, animal-, and plant-like forms were a combination of garage aesthetics and higher-end technology, driven by computer-controlled servo motors and actuators that gave complex kinetic possibilities to the individual parts of the machines. In direct opposition to SRL’s threatening assemblages, Amorphic’s machines such as “Super Dog Monkey,” “Sub Human,” “Tabla,” and “Skele” were constructed from plastic, bronze, aluminum, and steel in order to achieve more realistic and graceful movement that could mimic human or animal behaviors. MacMurtrie’s “amorphic epistemology” cast his machines into dreamlike, almost organic landscapes, where they would perform with one another, spinning out multiple dramatic scenarios as well as interacting with observers via body-based sensing technologies. In Trigram: A Robotic Opera (1992), thirty-five of MacMurtrie’s scrap metal, pneumatic-controlled creatures engaged with human performers in a macabre battle in which movement and sound echoed, as MacMurtrie described, “the anguish we feel in a world where we are deprived of the pure by our dependence upon machines that we once controlled” (MacMurtrie 1992). The Cave of the Subconscious (1997) was a performative environment that sought to fulfill the artist’s ongoing obsessions with “the primacy of movement and sound” and consisted of twenty-four machines embedded into the walls of a subterranean, cave-like structure that exhibited different nuances of movement based on visitor proximity. The epic The Amorphic Landscape (2000) was even more daedal, creating a moving, breathing landscape for the members of the artists’ “society” to interact within, where movement could be exchanged between the machines and the hydraulic-sculptural contours of the kinetic landscape.21 The complex behavior of a society of machines based on autonomous computeraugmented control also surfaced in the performance work of Québec robotic artists Bill Vorn and Louis-Phillipe Demers. In earlier collaborative works such as Espace Vectorial (1993), At the Edge of Chaos (1994), The Frenchman Lake (1995), and La Cour des Miracles (1997), Vorn and Demers developed autonomous and complex machine societies: pneumatic-driven, reactive mechanical systems that diffused sound and light within sensor-augmented installations. One of their most complex works, La Cour des Miracles populated a space with six different computer-controlled mechanical apparatuses that were assigned human-like behavioral qualities of crawling, limping, begging, convulsing, harassing, and acting heretically. “Neither animals nor humans, the aim of the work is to induce empathy of the viewer towards these ‘characters’ which are solely articulated metal structures . . . an attempt to

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express the profound human nature of the machinic realm and the profound machinic nature of humankind” (Vorn and Demers 1998).22 Applying concepts from the computing discipline of Artificial Life (or A-Life) where the execution of simple rules yields unpredictable, systemwide behavior, Vorn’s and Demers’s machine ecologies were simultaneously zoo and theater, placing the spectator into the dual position of interloper and activator of the machines’ behaviors, which ranged from pathetic to manic. For Le Procès—The Trial (1999), a robotic performance staged for Robert Lepage’s techno cabaret Zulu Time, an array of machines with realistic movement were suspended, caged, hung, and anchored around the environment of a motorized catwalk. Accompanied by polyrhythmic, pulsing metallic beats as well as a live soundtrack created by their banging into the metallic scaffolding of the scenery, the machines in Le Procès engaged in a mock tribunal reminiscent of Franz Kafka’s The Trial, accusing, menacing, and judging each other. In what artificial intelligence researcher Herbert Simon famously termed “the sciences of the artificial” (Simon 1996), Vorn’s and Demers’ solo and collectively created machines were driven by locally “implanted” simple and low-level rules that, when combined, yielded unpredictable, global “emergent” behaviors: group reactions “engendered by the sum of all the individual reactions” (Vorn and Demers 1995, 6). Moving from the purely digital, computational models of Artificial Life into directly constructed “robotic organisms,” the artists’ “primitive mechanical animats” sought to embody the four characteristics of Simon’s notion of artificiality: (1) artifacts synthesized by human beings, (2) imitating the appearance (or behavior) of natural things, (3) characterized in terms of functions, goals, and adaptation, and (4) articulated in terms of imperatives and descriptives. These themes of artificiality were taken further in Vorn’s and Demers’s solo work. In Demers’s robotic theater cycle entitled The Mechanized Eccentric Series, an updating of Lissitzky and Moholy-Nagy’s electromechanical peep show, machines were elevated to the role of “actors of expression” who could perform in their own mechanical theater and consequently, subsume the human body into a “mechanical rendering and abstract play of stage action and movement” (Demers 2004). Armaggedon (2004), an operetta with robots done in collaboration with the French rock-pop orchestra Art Zoyd and featuring twentyone musical instrument–playing robots with loudspeaker mouths alongside human musicians, was an enactment of the mythic event of Armageddon, leaving a society populated only by machines. Demers’s L’Assemblée/The Assembly (2001) took this theme to an extreme, in the creation of a fictitious future where human spectators crowded into a vast, scaffolding-erected arena became the last witnesses to a machine takeover. Surrounded on all sides by forty-eight computer-controlled and -choreographed robots hanging from an architectural scaffolding membrane with speakers for mouths and theatrical spotlights for eyes, human spectators in the crowd were surveilled by the robotic lights and individually picked out by mounted

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Figure 7.5

Louis-Philippe Demers. L’Assemblée. Elektra—Usine C, 2001. Photo © Peter Dimakos.

cameras sensing movement (figure 7.5). L’Assemblée invoked a nightmarish machine spectacle: a court and assembly where the nonhuman judged the human.23 Machines for Themselves

The exploration of human-machine co-presence explicitly enabled through sensing and computation was also taken up by a number of artists not working in performance contexts per se but in new media, who nevertheless developed articulate, expressive machine systems. Indeed, the autonomy of machines became one of the central themes in the arena of the new media arts during the 1990s. Dozens of festivals presented hybrid performanceinstallations in which machines would enact self-driven and autonomous behaviors as a result of mechanical and/or computational processes, from artists such as Norman White, Ted Krueger, Simon Penny, Ken Rinaldo, Max Dean, Adrianne Wortzel, Susan Collins, Arthur Ganson, Eduardo Kac, and others.24 The kinetic environments of artist Ken Rinaldo, for example, exploited emergent phenomena and the co-productive possibilities between natural and artificial systems. In Machines/Mechanicals 297

projects such as The Flock (1994) and Autopoiesis (2000), Rinaldo experimented with machines that through a minimum amount of sensing technology could be programmed to exhibit complex movement behavior through their interaction with a spectator moving in proximity to them. The works of Australian artist and educator Simon Penny, such as Petit Mal (1993) and Pride of Our Young Nation (1990), critiqued the zoomorphic and anthropomorphic tendencies of much robotic art, instead focusing on the “kinesthetic intelligences” (Penny n.d.) expressed through physically enacted and artificially constructed electromechanical bodies rather than A-Life-esque computer simulations. Others, like Canadian artists Norman White and Max Dean, built more playful robotic constructions that demonstrated the joint fragility of machines and human beings. White’s The Helpless Robot (1996) featured a quasi robot kinetic sculpture that only responded to the presence of visitors by voice synthesis. Asking its observers to reposition it, the machine grew more demanding in time based on the level of interaction. In a more autokinetic direction, Max Dean’s “Robotic Chair” (1994–2006) was a six- to twelve-minute performance consisting of a mechanically controlled chair that would fall apart and then put itself back together again in order “to elicit empathy, compassion, and hope” (Dean n.d.). Even works that were sited in the decidedly nonperformance context of museums and galleries explored the tensions generated by machine co-presence. One of the more bizarre hybrids was invoked in the Cloaca series of performance-installation machines by Belgian conceptual artist Wim Delvoye—byzantine contraptions dedicated to enacting the human gastrointestinal system. A nonanthropomorphic, biochemical system, Delvoye’s numerous Cloaca variations from 2002–2007 were formed from an assembly line of lab glassware, vials, hoses, housings (later, a trio of washing machines), and computer-monitored elements enhanced with more than four hundred types of human digestive enzymes, acids, and human bacteria. In what Delvoye referred to as Cloaca’s “performance,” attendants fed the system’s garbage-disposal mouth opening with food, which was then gradually broken down over a twenty-seven-hour period, with visible excrement finally produced as the result (Delvoye 2008). In an entirely different context, the mechanomorphic objects of Rebecca Horn [Noninvasive Extension, chapter 6 ] provided a strong contrast to machine art’s predominantly industrial-age male flavor. Horn’s mysterious performing apparatuses simultaneously conjured up feelings of menace, wonderment, and pathos in a spectator who became inscribed into their performances based on simple presence. Self-propelled, precisiondesigned, and elegantly controlled by small motors, for Horn, such automata suggested no less than the cycle of an organism’s birth, life, and death: proxies for bodies that as “melancholic actors performing in solitude” would “shake, tremble, faint, almost fall apart and then come back to life again” (Celant 1994, 18). Fabricating a world of things that, as curator Nancy Spector explained, “mischievously revealed the hidden, amorous impulses of the human psyche” (Spector 1994, 56), Horn’s

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Figure 7.6

Rebecca Horn. Concert for Anarchy, 1990. Courtesy of Rebecca Horn.

strange creations of miniature metal hammers, mechanical unfolding peacock feathers, rotating binoculars, mercury-filled funnels, and self-playing musical instruments danced, kissed, slept, fought, and kept watch over each other in performing installations that elevated ordinary objects to the surreal and the fantastic. In Les Amants (1991), a menacing aluminum paint gun continually sprayed a white wall with dark black ink, totally oblivious to the observer’s presence. 1990’s Concert for Anarchy comprised an enormous upside-down grand piano suspended in the air, which, in spasmodic bursts, would suddenly begin to play itself, expelling its keys in full force until its lid fell open with a loud bang (figure 7.6). Similarly, Ballet of the Woodpeckers (1986) featured a gallery of mirrors upon which tiny hammers beguiled by their reflection

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gently hammered away at the glass, continuously recoiling from their images like a frightened Narcissus. Although not computationally advanced, Horn’s imperfect machines also exhibited similar physically animistic characteristics as their more technologically sophisticated, computer-controlled emergent cousins: repetition, dynamic motion, reaction, and unfolding patterns of both periodic and nonperiodic behavior. Arresting in their visual elegance and puzzling in their behavior, her automata confronted viewers with deep-seated philosophical questions concerning their position in a world of seemingly useless yet animistic systems. If machines were no longer designed to assist and augment human abilities, but instead to act on their own volition based on special internal laws, then what role did they play in a human-centered Weltanschauung? What could eventually be unleashed in performances for and by machines? What role did such performing automata give their human counterparts other than to simply trigger them into action or to act as fleshy voyeurs in an electro-mechanical-computational peep show? Perhaps the most provocative answer to these questions came from artist Woody Vasulka’s epic Theater of Hybrid Automata and Brotherhood series of media constructions that explored mankind’s “never ceasing attempt to reorganize nature itself” (Vasulka 1998b). Co-opting instruments of warfare to redefine perceptions of space, Vasulka’s media instrumentaria were culled from military-industrial salvage from surplus dealers and scrap yards near Los Alamos, New Mexico. Unlike SRL’s direct use of military hardware to produce violent spectacle, however, Vasulka’s discarded war artifacts mainly served as scenographic elements in a “closed world” theater of cryptographic devices, feedback algorithms, mathematical models, and computer-generated simulations. With artists, curators, and theorists originally embracing the utopia of information-driven, militaryinfluenced Cold War cybernetics, Vasulka’s work revealed the nightmarish, dystopian side of C3I (Command, Control, Communication).25 His earliest “space exploring machine,” entitled the Theater of Hybrid Automata, (1990) invoked the blur between real and computer-generated space so prevalent in the “infowar” military simulations used to train fighter pilots for advanced aerial combat. Consisting of a RPT (rotate, pan, and tilt) robotic head armed with a video camera and equipped with infrared sensors, Vasulka’s “automated theater” was surrounded by a series of screens upon which computer-generated images of virtual spaces triggered by the sensors were displayed and in which the moving RPT head could “travel” through, providing an articulate example of computer-augmented “machine vision.” These early machines by and large showed little interest in the spectator’s presence, a topic that Vasulka addressed on a much larger scale with The Brotherhood. Commissioned by the NTT/ICC media arts center in Tokyo in 1998, The Brotherhood comprised six interactive media assemblages whose names immediately triggered military associations (“Translocations,” “Automata,” “Friendly Fire,” “Stealth,” “Scribe,” and the “Maiden”;

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Figure 7.7 Woody Vasulka. The Brotherhood, 1990–1998. Photo Bruce Hamilton. Courtesy of the Vasulkas.

figure 7.7). Described as “a series of tables representing the core with its instrumentation able to produce, compose and display varied acoustic and visual structures, surrounded by an exoskeletal support, carrying media (projectors, speakers, screens, lights and sensors),” The Brotherhood referred to a society of devices that artificially prolonged a male sexual drive displaced onto information age control systems; what Vasulka and David Dunn called “the male idea of the machine’s destructive potential” (Dunn and Vasulka 1998b). Made up of three components including “actors” (software), “authors” (spectators), and “drivers” (hardware), each assemblage provided the possibility of spectator and environmental interaction by which a machine could be influenced not only by human onlookers but by also by its own mechanisms.26 For Vasulka’s theater of automata, actors not only denoted the pneumatic pistons and printed circuit boards of the material hardware but also the “acoustic evocations, logic processes and finally, necessary machine rituals, machine states, resets and calibrations” (Vasulka 1998a, 33) caused by endogenous software processes and exogenous

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perturbations from the human environment. The contraptions of The Brotherhood thus occupied the same precarious space that so many other machine performances previously had: between control and freedom, structure and anarchy, order and disorder. At first glance, the use of machines involving the military paraphernalia of industrial capitalism seemed like a strange approach for artists interested in a form, however much abstracted, of political critique. Yet, as Vasulka eloquently pointed out, the potential of interactive systems and scenarios was not only to enable observers and participants to communicate with the machine through its own intrinsic languages of binary code but also to generate an act of potential resistance, an “interference pattern” in the autonomous behavior of a system such that unscripted behaviors and patterns might emerge between the machine’s life and our own. Such computationally embedded interaction processes would go far beyond the idea of choice among a finite set of alternatives and instead “provide the user/perceiver with a sense of exploring an environment of new [elastic] sensory relationships rather than a mere description of such a world” (Dunn and Vasulka 1998a). The spectator’s power to perturb the animism of the machine through interactive processes could ultimately contribute to a co-productive understanding of what machine autonomy actually signified: the potential of interaction between machines and us to create a new “environment in a state of awareness” (Vasulka 1988a, 15).

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8

Interaction

The technical evolution from mechanization to direct interaction with machines through hidden logic and calculation catalyzed the fervent desire for artistic events that would never be completed but would, as Umberto Eco described in 1962, be “in continuous becoming.” Based on “the linear purity of a mathematical program,” Arte Programmata or “programmed art,” as Eco and Bruno Munari named it, would directly embody the counter-cultural longing for spontaneity, open systems, and the dissolution of borders between artistic experimentation and quotidian life, through its programmed ability to continually reconfigure itself (Eco n.d.). Positioned between artistic forms that would replicate the mathematical order of nature and those that gravitated toward a world of randomness and disorder, Arte Programmata encompassed “fields or events where random processes can happen . . . we would have a singular dialectic between chance and program, between mathematics and accident, between planned conceptions and free acception of what will occur, anyway might occur, given that basically it will occur directly following precise, predisposed formative patterns, which do not negate spontaneity, but rather enlarge its boundaries and possible directions” (Eco n.d.). In a technical as well as a social sense, the concept of interaction functioned beyond a purely technological paradigm, becoming, according to Margaret Morse, a kind of “cultural novum” in the early 1960s.1 To bestow belief onto electronic logic to instigate socio-political-cultural liberation and fracture hierarchical modes of control was ironic, considering that it was mainly United States and European military systems of command and control that drove research into man-machine interaction in order to develop the battlefield of the future. Furthermore, the fact that artistic practice straddled the increasing interest in advanced information technology for military applications and, simultaneously, almost anarchistically inspired aspirations for freedom from the same

apparatus, demonstrates the turbulent status of cultural production in the Cold War climate. Generated by both concept and device, the use of chance procedures in the production of performance events in theater, dance, and music was one of the means harnessed to question existing hierarchical authorial structures, represented through the traditional roles of the author, composer, choreographer, or director. Following these techniques, many artists also took hold of emerging paradigms from research into cybernetics and computing as a way of activating a normally passive public, structuring radically new possibilities of feedback between spectators and the environments they could inhabit. Moreover, if both the theatrical and the plastic arts sought participation and interaction as their modus operandi, the intention and realization of these concepts had sometimes radically divergent paths. Although some notable exceptions like 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering employed state-of-the-art engineering research, participation and interaction in the stage-based arts was to be mainly achieved through the liberation of the politically and socially constrained body. Theatrical events such as the Performance Group’s Dionysus in ‘69 (1969) and, most notoriously, the Living Theater’s Paradise Now (1968) sought an abolition of the authoritative structure dividing spectator and performer by inviting audience members onto the stage to disrobe and collectively engage in protorevolutionary rituals of ecstatic excess. These theatrical events were no longer representations of political revolution carried through the medium of already existing narratives but real-life enactments of defiance and revolution. Those in visual arts contexts operating in the realm of Jack Burnham’s system aesthetics [Performing Machines: Mimetic or Machinic, chapter 7], however, sought the liberation of the passive spectator through the creation of kinetic, sensory objects and spaces augmented by technologies that challenged engrained perceptual habits, enfolding their participants into unstable, variable contexts in which they could react to changing stimuli as only one part of a larger organism. In wrestling with the very possibility of systemwide variable relations partially facilitated by machines, interaction shifted from a technique to a medium in and of itself, thus forming the basis for artistic works that set into oscillation the usually fixed relationships of spectators, performers, objects, and spaces. The growing interest in the dissolution of the spatial and temporal locus of the artistic object or theatrical event into larger participatory environments linked what appears at first to be a disparate set of artistic practices while providing a new performative context in which such fluidity of interaction among space, participant, environment, and system could be designed. In his 1968 essay “6 Axioms for Environmental Theater,” Richard Schechner depicted the theatrical event as a set of related transactions among performers, audience members, and production elements embodying new aesthetic practices of “interaction and transformation.” Performance—no longer conceived as solely taking place on

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a stage—should occupy a continuum between public events or demonstrations, nonmatrixed2 performances like happenings, “environmental” theater and finally, the traditional, rigid frame of “traditional theater” (Schechner 1968, 44–46). Similarly, in Allan Kaprow’s discussions of happenings, the notion of environment was paramount in which the “environment, the activity of the people in that environment are the primary images, not the secondary ones. . . . There is an absolute flow between event and environment” (Schechner and Kaprow 1968, 154). Histories of technologically oriented art practice have unabashedly situated the foundations for interactive and participatory computer mediated work that arose in the 1980s and 1990s in the happenings and participatory artworks of the 1950s and 1960s.3 Media archeologist and historian Erkki Huhtamo wrote: The roots of interactive media art are found in the 1960s [. . .] The expansion of the traditional field of art, the dream about “Total Art,” the annihilation of the barrier between life and art, the “ ‘dematerialization’ ”of the art object” (Lucy Lippard), process art, participation art, concept art, Fluxus, the Happening-movement and Situationism, “Art and Technology,” kinetic art, cybernetic art (Jack Burnham), closed circuit video installations—these phenomena may be heterogenous,[sic] but they are part of one and the same process which had a profound effect on the relationship between art and its audience.4 (Huhtamo [1992] 1997, 5)

Oddly enough, as singular, situated, unrepeatable events temporally unfolding over structured as well as improvised relations among spectators, architecture, techniques and social space, the performative aspects of happenings, Robert Rauschenberg’s “reactive environments,” and cybernetic art have been downplayed in the historical literature in favor of interaction as the medium in and of itself—on the singular communication between human and computer (usually discussed as software) to influence or alter the machine’s output behaviors.5 As Andreas Broeckmann reminds us, “in interactive systems the interacting person is typically not executing a more or less open programme, but is included in the technical system as a secondary factor, or as a trigger, who can then observe passively the programmed results of his or her action.” Though performance in interactive systems may be “realized by physical involvement,” the overall teleology of the interacting individual is constrained by what he calls “narrative structuring of the programme” (Broeckmann 2007, 200). Broeckmann’s statement becomes even more prescient when examining the histories of late-twentieth-century new media works that almost exclusively viewed interactive artistic production and experience as the result of interaction between the user and the screen, enabled through standard computer-industry interface devices such as mice, track pads, and joysticks. Focused on the usually visualized results of action, the spatial co-presence of multiple and oscillating spectator-performers mixed within a larger transitory and transforming machinic environment that was so central to happenings and

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participatory events in the 1960s seems to have disappeared, along with the physical and social space surrounding the participant. As a complement to these histories, this chapter proposes another perspective on interaction that couples with the practices of scenography, architecture, dance, and body-based arts, in other words, the arts de la scène, outlined throughout this book. Rather than emphasizing the unique and unprecedented characteristics of the human-machine or human-computer relationship, I shift the focus to interaction in physical space that involves a multitude of untrained performers, that is, the general public. In this sense, this chapter picks up where chapter 3 left off, examining works that while spatial in design are mostly not discussed or accepted within architectural discourse.6 While working both consciously and unconsciously with the techniques of the stage, however, the ideas and projects that are explored go far beyond it, spanning into the hybrid territories of research labs, world’s fair pavilions, transient media festivals and the urban cityscape. In what has been variously dubbed responsive environments, interactive ambients, “spazio interattivo,” reactive environments or performative spaces, these technologicallyenabled rooms and events toy with the set lines between spectating and performing and involve physically engaged, embodied and improvisational play on the part of the participants (both human and non). This change of emphasis from computer-human to inhabitant-performer-environment not only reflects a move taking place in the rarified research circles of ubiquitous and pervasive computing with their ever increasing interest in sensed and aware spaces for multiple participants. It also seeks to readdress historical practices that arose under the influence of information and computation sciences from artists, designers and architects struggling to interface to the world of computational wonder through space and bodies themselves. Cybernetics and the New Tendencies

Art practices that focused on what Jacques Rancière (2009) has called “the emancipated spectator” formed one thread of the history of interactivity but the other is the post-war history of computing marked by a series of milestones which through Cold War military funding, advanced research into the sophisticated construction of human-machine relationships. Forged from established disciplines such as engineering and mathematics and exotic new ones like cognitive science, concepts and writings like Turing’s computational machine, Warren McCullough’s and Warren Pitts’s work on neuronal activity as a complex network, Claude Shannon’s information theory, mathematician Norbert Wiener’s scripting of Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine and The Human Use of Human Beings, J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Machine Symbiosis” and Ivan Sutherland’s development of Sketchpad, the first working prototype of human-machine interaction at MIT’s Lincoln Labs in 1956 all researched new ways of manipulating the control cycle between human beings and their environment.

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Norbert Wiener’s 1948 publication of Cybernetics still acts as a breakthrough event of the period, both for the scientific community that was interested in the steering and control of complex human and machine systems and for the cultural paradigm that the word brought with it. Even though only a small percentage of artists read Wiener’s work and even fewer most likely grasped his intricate mathematical exegesis’ on negative feedback and control theory, cybernetics became a kind of “cultural mindset” as Edward Shanken has described it; the buzzword for the creatively forward-minded who became interested in the libratory possibilities of constructing interactive situations between humans and a technically constructed environment.7 Regardless of the conceptual importance of this advanced engineering and computerbased research and the exception of a handful of isolated institutionally supported examples (Bell Labs’ artist in residence program and its initial connection to Experiments in Art and Technology in the mid 1960s or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art’s (LACMA) Art and Technology Initiative), the fusion of plastic/media arts and technology-based research remained quite separate until the early 1970s, and then only sporadically supported.8 Instead, the proliferation of concepts from scientific research into cybernetic control and human-machine interaction had to trickle down into artistic scenes in the 1950s–1960s by way of a small handful of philosophers like McLuhan and Eco, curators/historians/impressarios like Burnham, Reichardt, Frank Popper, and John Brockman, artists such as Cage, Paik, Rauschenberg, Kaprow, Nicolas Schöffer, and Roy Ascott and even scientists like Wiener and the English cybernetician Gordon Pask, among others. In other words, despite the growing interest in technoscientific research applied to art, there were few opportunities where artists could get their hands on the actual technologies.9 Even as it concentrated on new kinds of cybernetically modeled performing machines, sculptures, and bizarre artworks that attempted to respond to their environment through feedback mechanisms and thus blurred the lines between art, science, and research, Reichardt’s Cybernetic Serendipity and other similar landmark art and technology exhibitions of the 1960s were still organized primarily around the perceptual structures of the visual arts. Focused on object-dominated, observation-based models of interaction, many of the artworks displayed were based either on visual representations (the computer drawing or painting) or, when they sought input from spectators (now participants) to function, still placed them in a distant relationship to both their own body as well as space. In strong contrast to this mode of practice, works such as 9 Evenings, the Philips Pavilion, and early proposals by James Turrell and Robert Irwin to investigate sensory perceptual environments within the framework of curator Maurice Tuchman’s Art and Technology initiative at LACMA, all acknowledged the temporal and durational aspects of participatory interactivity as well as its spatio-architectural-environmental characteristics.10

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Another early meeting point of cybernetics and participant-activated environments that attempted to move away from objects and focus on larger spatial-perception concerns was the work of several groups associated with the New Tendencies (Nouvelle Tendance– Recherche Continuelle or NTrc) movements situated across Europe. A loosely structured entity of around sixty artist-researchers initially formed out of the Zagreb-based exhibition Nove Tendencije in 1961, NTrc’s principle of continuous research emphasized open, collective working conditions, anonymity, indeterminacy, and activation of the spectator. Even as most of the NTrc artists focused on kinetic and op art–based works, a few collectives like GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), Gruppo N (Padua, 1959), Gruppo MID (Milan, 1959), and Gruppo T (formed in Milan in 1959) moved far ahead of their North American counterparts at the end of the 1950s. Producing what Peter Weibel has described as “the first interactive art works,” these collectives appropriated Eco’s principles of Arte Programmata to construct polysensual environments that completely enmeshed the viewer in optical phenomena, challenging their normal perceptual habits of spectating (Weibel 2007, 23–25). One of the most interesting collectives to apply cybernetic principles of interaction in their work was Gruppo T (Tempo), founded in Milan in 1959 by Giovanni Anceschi, Davide Boriani, Gabriele De Vecchi, Gianni Colombo, and Grazia Varisco. Gruppo T’s founding manifesto, the “Miriorama 1” statement that accompanied the collective’s first exhibition in Milan, argued for opere in divenire (“works in becoming”), which emphasized the use of three-dimensional materials and incorporated “spatiotemporal” phenomena that could be set into constant transformation through reciprocal relations between the work and its participants. “Thus, by considering the work as a reality produced with the same elements that constitute that reality surrounding us, it is necessary that the work itself be in continuous flux” (Gruppo T 1959). Working at first individually and collectively on kinetically influenced objects that involved a series of public prototypes, Gruppo T’s aesthetic design research increasingly shifted toward the creation of ambienti interattivi (interactive ambients): physical rooms that used the possibilities of cybernetic criteria in order to bring the spectator into a coproductive relationship with the artwork. In what are some of the earliest sensor-activated environments on record, Gruppo T’s ambienti interattivi comprised physically closed off spaces augmented by light, sound, mirrors, and other optical distortion devices that the spectators could set into motion by tripping sensors and thus altering the perceptual characteristics of the space. Spazio  linee luce  spettatori (1964), the collective’s first sensor-based interactive environment shown in the New Tendencies exhibit at the Louvre in Paris, was a 4 m s 4 m s 4 m enclosed room containing a square grid of thirty-two tightly focused spotlights. Coupled with eight photoelectric sensors, these switches could be triggered by moving spectators, thus creating continual transformations of pin-pointed light on the floor and walls (figure 8.1). In Anceschi’s and Boriani’s Ambiente per un test di estetica sperimentale

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Figure 8.1

Davide Boriani. Spazio  linee luce  spettatori (1964). Photo Johnny Ricci.

(1965), a mercury switch over the entrance triggered by visitors launched a series of twelve algorithmically programmed cycles of additive color changes caused by rotating plates of color gel, generating changing color fields in different segments of the room. Other works, such as Ambiente multidimensionale a programmazione aperta (1966), Ambiente stroboscopico 3 (1967), and Progetto di installazione luminosa interattiva (1968), all applied similar principles of using photocells to launch programmed cycles of changes to optical phenomena like lighting color and intensity changes within claustrophobic rooms lined with mirrors and op art floor patterns. Likewise, solo projects like Colombo’s Spazio Elastico (1967), a shifting room constructed of UV-lit elastic ropes appearing like a 3D wireframe whose shape would change based on a motor pulling the ropes at specific points, also explored similar perceptual techniques. Although the collective officially broke up in 1968, its individual members continued to work and collaborate throughout the 1970s, increasingly on public art projects, largescale interactive environments (Ambiente cronostatico, 1974), as well as reconstructions of their earlier works being rediscovered by media theorists and curators exploring the origins of media art in the kinetic and op art of the 1960s.11

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The Interactive Fun Palace

In their ambitious but ultimately unrealized Fun Palace project from the 1960s, left-wing British theater director Joan Littlewood and architect Cedric Price also sought to apply cybernetic principles of spectator-environment interaction to create a total performative environment transforming the general public into participants. Famous for her decidedly low-tech, politically charged, working-class Theater Workshop, Littlewood joined forces with Price between 1963 and 1974 in the hopes of creating what she called “a people’s palace”: an ever-changing, interactive “university of the streets” that would be “a laboratory of pleasure, providing room for many kinds of action” (Price and Littlewood 1968, 130). Contrasting the perceptual experiments of the New Tendency groups, the Fun Palace was a far more politically motivated attempt to use technologies of interaction for social engineering accomplished without top down hierarchies. In Price, Littlewood found a kindred spirit who might be able to realize her lifelong dream of a public theater without divisions between spectator and performer and event and visitor in architectural form. Price’s architectural concept for the Fun Palace was the construction of a technological vision of London’s eighteenth-century Vauxhall and Ranelagh Gardens, the famous Thames-sited, open-air promenades. Variously described as a huge “toy,” a “social machine of interchangeable parts,” and an “anti-building,” the dream of a transformable environment adapting to the changing whims of fifty-five thousand visitors at a time would be realized by the construction of a vast architectural organism employing the latest material and electronic innovations to create an improvisational social space of leisure and learning for the masses. In seeking maximum flexibility, Price designed a skeletal frame in which multiple interchangeable module-like environments could be constructed, rearranged by a mass-scale moving gantry crane that ran the length of the structure (figure 8.2). Not satisfied simply with enclosures, Price articulated his vision of the Fun Palace’s transformability through its capacity to vary public movement patterns by adjusting mechanical movement aids, such as escalators, moving walkways, and moving structures (Lobsinger 2000, 24). Price’s almost ephemeral architecture would consist of warm air currents, vapor and light curtains serving as walls, electronically controlled sky blinds, inflatable structures and volumes, variable screens, pneumatically controlled floors and subenclosures, and massive gantry cranes that would turn the mammoth seven-acre Fun Palace into a space of which Price claimed, “ I doubt it will ever look the same twice.”12 Sounding as if they were inspired by (and inspired) Archigram’s paper architectural musings, Price and Littlewood, however, sought to go much further than visual pop culture representations.13 Desiring more direct forms of interaction between the Palace’s ever-shifting physical structure and the social behavior of the participants, the two collaborators enlisted the help of cybernetician Gordon Pask.

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Figure 8.2 Cedric Price. Interior Perspective of Fun Palace (1960–1964). Fonds Cedric Price. Collection Centre Canadien d’Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal.

Pask, who began his cybernetic explorations with a feedback structured, light organ– like performance instrument called the Musicolour Machine for a Cambridge University musical comedy, brought to the project his immense technological knowledge of feedback and control systems, game theory, statistical modeling, and other quantitative techniques that Littlewood and Price believed would be essential in creating both a flexible environment for learning and an environment that could learn. As a member of the “Fun Palace Cybernetics Subcommittee,” Pask’s proposal for a “cybernetic theater” in which the audience’s seats would be wired with detectors that could gauge their emotional response and instantiate a feedback loop between spectators and actors, served as a model for the larger performative direction the project would take. But as Price historian Stanley Matthews describes, Pask and his cybernetic subcommittee also began to move the Fun Palace away from Littlewood’s agitprop, egalitarian aesthetics and toward a model of social control. Electronic systems would be enlisted to

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gather information about the visitors in order to influence not only the physical modification of the spatial environment but also the emotional modification of the visitors themselves.14 Sensor-gathered data on visitor preferences, movement patterns, and behavior would be processed by punch card–based IBM computers and used to allocate various resources to alter the Palace’s physical shape as well as activities. Although taking place in the 1960s, the technical ideas for the Fun Palace read like a page from Wired magazine in the 1990s. Mathematical models would search for emergent behavior and patterns emitted by the public, which then would affect the duration of overall events, ensuring that activities would last only as long as the peak of sustained interest. Furthermore, predictive modeling and other advanced statistical procedures would be employed so that the building could learn patterns generated by the public in the hopes of being able to computationally model future processes and events within the Palace. Ultimately, Price and Littlewood’s grand social architecture was not to be realized due to bureaucratic complications. Yet, Pask’s theatrical understanding of cybernetics as a dynamic conversation between spectators and performers coupled with the project’s desire to turn passive spectators into active shapers of their lived environment guaranteed that the Fun Palace would still play an essential role in the history of interactive environments. E.A.T.’s Participatory Odyssey: 9 Evenings and the Pepsi Pavilion

In many ways, the Fun Palace was a groundbreaking experiment in terms of its vision of a fluid environment that could come alive only by interaction among its technical, social, political, and corporeal components. In contrast to the Italian kinetic art collectives’ home-grown and programmed electronics and sensor circuits that initiated the transformation of spectators into performers, had it been built, Price and Littlewood’s dream would have been dependent on high-end, most likely repurposed military technology to facilitate its complex fantasy of large scale social-spatial interaction. Another initiative to mobilize research lab-based computer and engineering technologies in the service of new possibilities for activating the public was Robert Rauschenberg’s and Billy Klüver’s founding of E.A.T. in New York in 1966, subsequent to 9 Evenings. As discussed in chapter 6, the landmark 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering at the New York Armory in October 1966 ranks as one of the earliest postwar experiments to combine military industrial research culture with the avant-garde performing arts community. Although described as theater, the audiences who attended 9 Evenings were rudely awakened to the possibility that theater and performance itself might no longer be a spectacle apart from the spectators, but was in fact ontologically dependent on them. In the decidedly nontheatrical, site-specific surround of the disused armory, 9 Evenings created a total environment that attempted—through new techniques reappropriated

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from military research—to create a wholly other form of Schechner’s “environmental theater” fusing happening, event, stage, environment, and real life. Out of the ten performance projects shown, however, only three (those of Cage, Paxton, and Rauschenberg) were dependent on new models of audience participation for their evolution and success. John Cage’s Variations VII, which featured the electronic filtering and processing of multiple simultaneous audio feeds in locations distant from the Armory, by default became participatory when friends of the composer descended from the grandstands and entered the stage area, surrounding the two lit tables of artists and encouraging other audience members to do the same. But participation in Variations VII was limited to changing one’s physical position in relation to the performers, while Cage and his collaborators’ live manipulation of sound still remained the focal point. Open Score, Rauschenberg’s happening-like performance, went only slightly further in using infrared technologies to confuse the line between witness and participant. Structured in two acts, part 1 of the piece featured a tennis match played live with contact microphone–equipped racquets that both amplified the reverberations from the balls as well as used them to gradually shut off thirty-six theatrical lights illuminating the match, eventually blacking out the performance space. In the darkness, a crowd of extras numbering between three hundred and five hundred then appeared on stage, executing a series of prescripted actions that Rauschenberg had signaled by way of flashlights from the balcony of the Armory. Illuminated by infrared light and filmed with a Japanese IR camera attached to an American-made industrial one, the mass crowd on stage appeared projected on three suspended screens, mirroring the seated crowd by occupying the same physical space, yet visible only as black-and-white projections.15 The most participatory event by far was Steve Paxton’s 1,858-square-meter, walkthough installation environment Physical Things. In distancing himself from the theatrical framework of the other works and taking a cue from the expanded cinema events of the time, Paxton quickly dissolved the line between audience and stage by placing the spectators into choreographed physical spaces that forced a direct confrontation between their bodies and the surrounding environment. In effect, Paxton created a performance environment that exclusively would come into being through the public’s co-present interaction with it. Mixing prescripted performers into the interior of the environment, the colossal inflatable architecture of Physical Things was divided into four specific arenas through which the spectators moved, transforming what appeared to be at first a fixed sculpture into a temporary habitat. Armed with wireless, wearable radio receivers that would individually pick up a barrage of prerecorded music and noise loops, the public crossed and climbed through narrow tunnels that opened up into larger spaces, confronting both the scripted performers engaged in a series of mundane tasks as well as their fellow unscripted audience members in a continually changing game. To further heighten the disorientating effect, Paxton

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highlighted certain areas of the partly translucent inflated environment with powerful spotlights in order to ensure that the spectators’ shadows cast inside the opaque parts of the environment would be seen even by those audience members who remained seated in the bleachers, and were taking in the whole spectacle from the secure position of the passive onlooker. With its complete environmental context, prerequisite of physical engagement and the continual circulation of roles between observing and participating, Physical Things was the singular work in 9 Evenings that attempted to break the spatial and social divides between the stage and the theatron. This attempt might seem ironic within the context of an event largely focused on creating a new kind of participatory stage through cutting-edge electronic technologies. As researcher Clarisse Bardiot notes in her exhaustive analysis of the performances, however, Paxton’s more distanced approach to technology and his closer relationship to the body helped shift the emphasis of Physical Things away from using devices to create representations of interaction (as many of the other works did) and instead refocused it onto the participants’ own interaction with their bodies.16 Paxton’s understanding of the difference between interaction at a distance versus interaction close up, between watching a performance and becoming it, epitomized one of the central criticisms of 9 Evenings’ attempt to create an interactive stage: namely, that the recognition of human to machine interaction was extremely difficult to perceive due to the perceptual-architectural barrier erected between an active stage and a passive, seated audience. Without the direct, felt experience of tripping a sensor or getting automatic feedback from a system, the complex process of interaction taking place on a stage would remain largely unknown and invisible to the seated spectator.17 This realization perhaps unknowingly acted as an unspoken modus operandi for what would next become E.A.T.’s most ambitious project: a specially designed pavilion initially sponsored by Pepsi-Cola for Expo ’70 in Osaka. Here, the frame of “theater” was shifted in favor of the design of a complete multisensory environment that was both performance site and event itself. Although the Pepsi Pavilion follows in a long history of the international exposition pavilion as an all-encompassing technology-enabled event, E.A.T.’s project was one of the earliest attempts to create a participant-driven interactive environment at such scale. Responding to an invitation from vice president of Pepsi marketing Dave Thomas, Klüver, filmmaker Robert Breer, Robert Whitman, David Tudor, and Forrest Myers proposed to create an unprecedented “open-ended situation, an experiment in the scientific sense of the word” (Klüver, Martin, and Rose 1972, ix). Ensconced within a corporate exposition environment, the Pepsi Pavilion would incorporate all of the hallmarks of participatory art of the time: democratic freedom of choice for the visitor, open responsibility, and the encouragement of individual expression through nondidactic exploration. Ironically, to accomplish such lofty ideals, Klüver and his team turned to an even larger

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array of engineering human resources and technological gadgetry to enable the visitors to sculpt both individual and collective experiences. In keeping with its open-ended agenda, the team proposed that the pavilion would not have a fixed presentation but rather, in what Klüver dubbed live programming, continually change based on the interests and whims of artists who would be invited to create works utilizing the technical infrastructure. In this sense, engineers were enlisted to help build a gargantuan sculptural instrument that artists would then compose for and that would be activated by the presence and behavior of the public. The pavilion would constitute, as art critic Barbara Rose later wrote, “an unprecedented structure with unprecedented capabilities for visual, aural and theatrical experience . . . unlike any other performance arena in that performers were as entirely absorbed into its shimmering mirrored surface as the audience” (Rose 1972, 100). Events where sculptures would transform into interactive performances would take place on both the exterior architecture of the building, which structurally resembled a gigantic, white Fuller geodesic dome, as well as in the sensory overwhelming interior. Materialized through 2520 custom-designed spray nozzles, visitors first encountered Fujiko Nakaya’s massive fog sculpture, which enrobed the entire surface area of the dome, generating a 300-meter-diameter, 2-meter-thick moving surface. Accompanying Nakaya’s undulating mist, Breer had installed seven of his 1 m s 2 m marshmallowlooking sculptural forms called “Floats,” which would creep slowly on their own volition at 0.6 meters a minute on battery power, emitting a strange array of sounds and changing direction whenever they encountered a human or architectural obstacle. The interior of the pavilion further amplified the exterior’s impression of a vast, psychedelic organism sputtering away on its own volition. Equipped with wireless receivers that could pick up sounds being generated by those walking on different surfaces already in the pavilion’s inner sanctum, visitors slowly descended through a tunnel and emerged into the strange “clam room,” where they were treated to a four-color laser performance designed by Lowell Cross. The pièce de résistance, however, lay upstairs in the main space, where a colossal 210-degree, thirty-meter spherical Mylar mirror transfigured the visitors into three-dimensional holographic others—transforming morphs that embodied both poetic distance and a fluctuating virtuality. With their vision defamiliarized though such morphed reflection, visitors were also treated to dense sonic immersion by way of a David Tudor–designed multichannel diffusion system made up of thirty-two speakers hidden behind the mirror’s surface and a complex control device that enabled the point source movement of audio around the space in all possible azimuths and angles. Combined with Tony Martin’s equally intricate lighting system, the Pepsi Pavilion’s combination of light, sound, and spatial transformation added up to a veritable “trip” for visitors who were encouraged to become inseparable from the space’s media saturated mise-en-scène and, simultaneously, become creators of their own perceptual experiences.18

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With its rhetoric of remaking the spectator into an active shaper of new forms of perceptual-social space, the Pepsi Pavilion’s overarching goals bear an uncanny resemblance to Price’s and Littlewood’s socially engineered utopia of the Fun Palace. Even as its highly experimental nature eventually lead to unsolvable frictions with its sponsor, the Pepsi pavilion’s creation of the emancipated spectator eventually fit well with corporate capitalism’s co-opting of participatory aesthetics in its 1990s fashioning of the “consumer as creator.”19 Yet the project also acted as a standard bearer for the ever-increasing emphasis that artists and designers would place on computer technology in their quest to emancipate the human spectator’s perception, all the while coaxing hidden enunciations out of the technologically saturated environment. Responsive Environments: First Generation

The work of American scientist and artist Myron Krueger marked the beginning of a major artistic and epistemological shift in interactive environments. Trained in computer science at the University of Wisconsin, Krueger’s research signaled the first attempts to create human-machine environments with sophisticated computer technology in which interaction was perceived to be a medium in and of itself, rather than a side feature. Moreover, Krueger’s starting point was not necessarily motivated by artistic concerns about activating participation through perceptually altering experiences, but rather with the general research topic of human interfaces for new kinds of artificial realities made possible by new technologies of computation. Earlier work into human-machine interaction from scientists like Ivan Sutherland focused on interface research in which the human body was encumbered by worn instruments like 3D stereoscopic glasses and HMDs that would make possible the simulation of new realities through computer-generated, real-time graphics. Instead, Krueger addressed the issue of the artificial environment that one could construct and inhabit itself as both “interface” and expressive means. How could a space become an interface to a machine whose goal would be the creation of an artificial, computationally constructed world in which the participant would not be tethered to worn devices in order to interact with it? Originating not in an exhibition or exposition context, but instead a hermetic university computing lab, Krueger’s first installation, Glowflow (1969) a collaboration with computer graphics expert Dan Sandin, computer scientist Richard Venezsky and sculptor Jerry Erdman, was a computer-generated environment with light and sound that responded to the physical presence of small groups of visitors (figure 8.3). Named by Krueger as participants, small groups of ten to twenty visitors at a time entered a darkened room whose walls were lined with four translucent tubes filled with phosphor-treated particles floating in water together with a series of constructed vertical columns. As visitors navigated the disorienting space, stepping on pressure-

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Figure 8.3

Myron Krueger. Schematic to Glowflow. Courtesy Myron W. Krueger, Vernon, CT.

sensor-augmented floor mats, voltage changes sent to a central computer switched on and off twenty-four lights distributed in the vertical columns, causing the phosphor particles to glow. Additionally, the sensors triggered precomposed synthesized sounds and moved these sounds across a six-speaker array, adding to the overall hallucinatory atmosphere of the space. Exhibited at the university’s art gallery, Glowflow’s presentation served as an aesthetic experience for the community and, more important, as a public prototype for Krueger’s research into what he labeled responsive environments: “environments in which a computer perceives the actions of those who enter and responds intelligently through complex audio-visual displays” (Krueger 1996, 473). As Glowflow was designed to be responsive to the presence of visitors, Krueger’s analysis of the level and depth of the participant’s interaction with the space provided valuable data on how to evaluate the quality of the installation’s design, technical implementation, and aesthetic impact—something that had been hinted at by groups like GRAV and Gruppo N but not to the same rigorous extent. It is crucial to briefly detail Krueger’s lessons learned because they provided both valuable feedback for his design of subsequent spaces like Metaplay (1970), Psychic Space (1971), and Videoplace (1972), which went much further in technological and conceptual directions

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toward exploring computer-augmented responsiveness and signaled a paradigmatic shift in how human-machine interaction within spatialized media environments would begin to be understood by both artists and scientific researchers. Krueger’s key discovery, that the responsiveness of the environment based on real-time interaction between the participant and machine is a medium in its own right bears some explanation. Medium, in Krueger’s sense of the word, denoted “sensing, display and control systems” or the entire machinic apparatus enabling interaction to come into being. The locus of perception in a responsive environment, however, was diffused among the human participants and computational components, that is, the interfaces that attempted to “understand” human physical phenomena and turn such “real-world” behavior into binary numbers for the machine to process. “The perceptual system will define the limits of meaningful interaction, for the environment cannot respond to what it cannot perceive” (Krueger 1996, 481). The types of machine perception that Krueger suggested as potential media such as object tracking, gesture recognition, elapsed time between input events, voice analysis, or facial expression sensing are still the stuff of computer science research today; perceptions that make possible the construction of meaningful (i.e., recognizable to the machine) relationships between participants’ behavior and the corresponding output display that registers this behavior are still complex technological problems. If the artist or designer’s role is to clarify the “composition of the relationships between action and response,” then aesthetic experience, in Krueger’s terms, is an implicit recognition of the machine’s “perception” of us and hence, of our connection to the environment (Krueger 1996, 481). The manner in which Krueger treated the visual display, the second component of responsiveness was even more telling of his research approach to the aesthetic issues arising in Glowflow. “Responsive displays have a variety of functions in an Environment. The responses establish relationships between participants’ actions and what they perceive as well as forming expectations about the consequences of future actions” (Krueger 1983, 76). Display, in common art historical terms, signified the artwork itself—the sets of audiovisual-plastic-material relationships that formed the object or event of observation and contemplation. Yet, in carrying forth with his agenda of responsiveness as a new aesthetic criteria, Krueger downplayed the visual or aural quality of the display (“the slickness of the displays is not as important in this medium as it would be if the form were conceived as solely visual or auditory”) (Krueger 1983, 44) in favor of that which most logically demonstrated the “laws of cause and effect”: the successful computational articulation of machine perception and response. Finally, the control system or logic of the computer acted as the glue, connecting the percepts of the machine with the eventual display output of the system, thus generating the response. Although an emphasis on the action-response feedback loop at first appears to be merely one of direct response, “allowing the environment to show off its perceptual

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system” (Krueger 1996, 482), Krueger was quick to state that many more complex responses were possible. For the machine to show off its perception, the constructors of the system must be clear in what the response space would be and how they would design such real-time calculated response with minimum lag or latency between the participants’ action and the system’s reaction. That Krueger labeled his technological apparatus an instrument, of course, strangely resonates with the work of Theremin (in the analog circuitry domain) as well as more recent gesture-augmented computer music in which direct, low-latency response must be taken into account to guarantee any believable real-time musical expression between the human and machine. But he also described the responsive environment as an instrument in another sense, that of a generalized software-hardware system composed of a designed set of parameters or later, as software libraries that would enable multiple forms of responsive experiences to take place. Videoplace (1976), Krueger’s most well-known environment, applied knowledge gained from previous installations through refocusing on the interactive dialogue of participant, control system, and display. More of a framework for interaction than a singular work, Videoplace consisted of participants facing a video projection screen that mixed their image with real-time computer graphics. Picked up by the far more sophisticated perceptual system of a video camera, the participants’ movements were captured; analyzed through computer vision techniques such as background subtraction, thresholding, and edge detection; and then used to generate and control visual responses. Treating Videoplace as an instrument to compose for, Krueger developed some fifty compositions using the system’s framework. In “Body Surfing,” for example, the participant’s image painted continuously changing shades of color on the screen, leaving its trails of movement’s memory behind. In contrast, “Critter” involved a strange, playful creature that would follow and interact with the participant’s movement, its behavior determined by artificial intelligence methods. These and other techniques implemented for the various Videoplace compositions were of such complexity that Krueger’s graduate students working on the software for the systems wrote entire master’s degree theses on the technical problems of implementation, thus providing another example of scientific knowledge production intersecting with artistic practice. Even if Krueger still labeled Videoplace an environment by virtue of its controlled, darkened setting, the proprioceptive experience of encountering others traversing the spread-out, ambient spaces of Glowflow or Psychic Space was replaced by the participant standing, interacting, and moving before the display—a conception of navigation not in physical space but on the surface of the screen. Similarly, responsive environments involved a whole array of enactive entanglements among the human, technical, and material, but Krueger’s understanding of performance was nothing less than ambiguous.

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Acknowledging that responsiveness leading to the participants’ “direct performance of the experience” (Krueger 1996, 483) was tantamount to the goal of establishing meaningful relationships of action and response, the crucial social performances that usually arose among participants were downplayed in favor of clearly establishing the loop of action and response between the participant, the computational apparatus, and the screen. At the same time, even as physical engagement appeared in Videoplace to be reduced to gesturing before a mirror, the participant’s body was still critical to Krueger’s overall conception of responsive environments. First, his shift toward the disembodied interface of the video camera lay in the desire to keep the participant’s body unencumbered by devices and, at the same time, to guarantee a richer set of perceptual possibilities for the computer. Second, the participant’s performance in front of the camera acted as the trigger for the hidden layers of responsiveness buried in the software of the system, thus suggesting that the participant would gain a renewed sense of their body by exploring the mapping between bodily gesture and system behavior. “Awareness of your body is a vital part of experiencing the medium. When you find that bending an elbow has one effect and tilting your head has another, you discover a new way of relating to your body” (Krueger 1983, 50). This unresolved tension between human movement as an interface and the simultaneous reduction of proprioceptive experience and social space in order for the “user” to legibly zero in on the system’s immediate response at the simulated visual and auditory level marked a shift in Krueger’s own work from Glowflow’s “kinetic environment” to Videoplace’s interactive, screen-based dialogue. But it also exemplified the tension that the interactive media arts would face a decade and a half later in their equally ambiguous relationship to performativity. In his 1974 dissertation—later published as the books Artificial Reality I and II— Krueger was anxious to point to antecedents in happenings and process art as root sources for his work. He appeared, however, unaware of other ambitious interactive environment attempts that took place in European architectural contexts like the Fun Palace or Coop Himmelb(l)au’s reactive spaces of the late 1960s that more broadly explored the position of the body within a architectonic-media surround, focused not just on screen representations but media’s explosion into ambient space and physical memory. Nonetheless, Krueger’s work was a critical development in bringing scientific research agendas into the production of artistic experiences. In distinction to the applied engineering of E.A.T. in which engineers were put in the service of artists, with Krueger’s aim to “raise interactivity to the level of an art form” (Krueger 1998) art was put into the service of human-computer interaction research. Moving away from direct concentration on embodied, social and co-present interaction with other participants in space, “participation” in Krueger’s work was radically reenvisioned as dialogue with the machine.

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Performative Interfaces and Spaces

The transition from kinetic space that challenged engrained modes of perception to communication between human and machine was indicative of the larger transformation of computer mediated participatory spaces from the early 1960s to the late 1980s. Through the increased interest in simulation, virtual reality, and the development of interfaces to set such simulations into interactive dialogue with their users, the screen and the computer became a new kind of stage, as Brenda Laurel pointed out.20 What further distinguished the second wave of participatory artwork was, of course, the shifting political context. No longer considered political in the way in which the perceptual politics of the 1960s helped activate interest in participatory spaces, artists in the late 1980s and 1990s who were encouraged by the rapid developments in real-time graphics and interface technologies focused increasingly on the mechanics of interaction—how a new kind of unprecedented relationship could be instantiated between human users and machines. “Instead of being a commentator standing outside society,” as Söke Dinkla perceptively described this political shift, “the artist now decides to take part in the socio-technological change and judge from within” (Dinkla 1994). The world of international institutions, festivals, residencies, and research institutes in the 1990s was filled with dozens of interactive works that ultimately struggled to liberate the passive art spectator once and for all through the possibilities of computer technology. These projects featured every imaginable form of interaction—which “users” would step on, click, push, and occasionally dance with—new kinds of interfaces in order to make the connection between human and computer intuitive and transparent. In such interface practices, the body was increasingly seen as an appendage of the machine: an extension of the interface to trigger a dialogue latent in code and thus release Platonic image fields that challenged the real and its appearance. The emphasis on the surrounding, immersive environment that marked earlier participatory work disappeared in favor of the visual and auditory display adorning the walls of galleries, museums, or festivals, where it was subject to the noise and distraction of so many other displays around it like in a shopping mall. In other words, the inherent performative constitution of interactive media, from the emergent, on-the-fly social choreographies of spectating (observers) and performing (interactors), felt spatiality, duration, temporal shape, concentration (as Krueger originally demanded), full bodily engagement, and the staging of an overall mise-en-scène of such experiences took a secondary role in comparison to the emphasis on computer responsiveness. At the same time, a handful of media artists contextualized interaction in larger theatrical contexts, placing emphasis both on the machine-mediated interaction of the environment as well as the explicit performances that could be engendered within such an environment. The work of media artist Jeffrey Shaw, for example, exemplified the tension between interface-driven and body-based performative environments. Originally creating expanded

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cinema projects and inflatable sculptural spaces with the Eventstructure Research Group in the 1970s [Event, chapter 3], Shaw’s later work, beginning with Points of View in 1983, shifted away from the physical, bodily engagement of these earlier architectural events and toward the manipulation of interfaces to control all-encompassing computeraugmented and -rendered projected media spaces. “The term movement does not any longer signify the movement of the performer in space, like in the former Happenings, but the movement of the image caused by the joystick” (Dinkla 1994). A “theater of signs” based on the model of a flight simulator, Points of View consisted of an audience seated in front of a large-scale, computer-generated 3D projection in which one audience member could manipulate the various angles of view with two custom-made joysticks, controlling both the visual perspective as well as the auditory landscape. Using pared-down visual aesthetics derived from an early Apple II computer, Points of View could be described as a virtual stage in which the visual representation of the actors was denoted by simple, Egyptian-inspired hieroglyphs. Although both spectators and performer-joystick controller were seated, Shaw quickly recognized the triangular relationship between performer-director (the spectator at the interface and the response of the system), work (the event), and spectator (who was both the seated audience member and the controller). “It is the particular audio visual journey made by a spectator who operates the joystick which constitutes a ‘performance’ of this work. For the other spectators that performance becomes “theater” (Dinkla 1994). Shaw’s next works, The Narrative Landscape (with Dirk Groeneveld, 1985), Inventer la Terre (1986), and Heaven’s Gate (1987) increasingly focusing on projection-based environments with little physical movement demanded of the spectator. With The Legible City (1989), another collaboration with theater director Groeneveld, however, Shaw returned to the realm of fuller bodily expression and perception. Continuing to engage with highend computer-generated graphics, The Legible City went far beyond “point-and-click” interface technologies. Instead, Shaw began to explore devices that demanded full physical engagement, in this case, a bicycle that the participant pedaled that transported her through cities constructed solely of Silicon Graphics–generated, 3D letter forms, displayed on a liquid crystal monitor and in later versions, projected onto a screen in front of the bicycle. Here, too, the performance of participants became key for both the gathered onlookers in that more exertion moved them forward faster through the artificial landscape of letterforms, while slower pedaling decelerated the experience for both observer and player. Suggesting a strange solo cycling machine in a private gym (The Legible City played in a darkened, enclosed room), like Points of View, the dramaturgical and spatiotemporal miseen-scène of The Legible City again demonstrated that a kind of theater ensued, by way of direct physical engagement with the interface and between the user and the observers. “A new aesthetics comes to the fore. The artwork is more and more embodied in the interface, in the articulation of a space of meeting between the artwork and the viewer, and even

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in the articulation of a space where the artwork as an artifact seems to disappear altogether and only communication between the viewers remains” (Shaw 1995). The fusion of media within a total spatial environment coupled with interactive exploration hybridizing cinema and theater reached its apotheosis in Shaw’s 1993 development of the EVE (Extended Virtual Environment). A massive inflatable sphere measuring 12 meters in diameter, the EVE consisted of a stereoscopic, motorized projector mounted in the center of the environment that could rotate 360 degrees as well as pan and tilt 90 degrees, projecting a moving window across the dome’s interior surface. Akin to the spectator/participant strategy present in many of Shaw’s other environments, observed by onlookers wearing wireless headphones, a single performer in the center of the sphere controlled the movement of the projector by way of a head-mounted accelerometer and thus revealed the varying visual and auditory parts of a specially shot film mapped across the surface. As a space of representation enveloping the viewer, the EVE (later renamed EVE Interactive Cinema) referenced Shaw’s earlier three-dimensional and architectonic exploration of expanded cinema combined with the possibilities afforded by machine-augmented interaction in which the “performer” in the center was a vicarious ersatz for both the eyes and ears of the spectators. Through the worn interface, a complex relationship of control, gazing, and performing again occurred as the performer wearing the head-mounted sensor became the eyes, ears, and body of the spectators surrounding her and followed only a narrative that the performer chose to reveal to them. What was and is captivating about Shaw’s work was the creation of situations in which interface, body, and space were merged to produce unscripted explorations driven by participants through prescripted material conditions. During his tenure as founding director of the Institut für Bildmedien (Institute for Visual Media) at the ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany, between 1991 and 2003, Shaw directly supported the work of many artists (as artists in residence) who were interested in similarly exploiting the unresolved tensions of screen, environment, and the performative interface. In projects such as Handsight (1992) and Memory Theater VR (1997), Hungarian artist Agnes Hegedüs challenged both existing computer interface paradigms of keyboard and mouse as well as reigning models of virtual reality (VR). Handsight utilized an eyelike sphere as a tracking sensor that would enable the viewer to navigate through a 3D simulation projected in front of them, thus extending vision through hapticity. A similar tactic was taken with Hegedüs’s, Shaw’s, and Bernd Lintermann’s ConFIGURING the CAVE, which utilized a standalone, puppetlike interface as a real-time controller for intricate graphics and sound inside a CAVE (Cave Audio-Visual Experience Automatic Virtual Environment): a high-end, stereoscopic immersive computer simulation projection environment developed at the University of Illinois’ supercomputing center that was normally navigated through handheld wireless devices or tracking sensors tethered to the body.21

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The American Perry Hoberman, another artist associated with the ZKM, created interactive works that were playful and socially critical commentaries on digital technology. The performers of Faraday’s Garden (1990–1999) were a room of thrift-store household appliances, electrical apparatuses and other motorized detritus that would be triggered into cacophonous life by participants stepping on hidden floor sensors. In Cathartic User Interface, (1995, with Nick Philips), visitors could “effectively work through their conflicting emotions concerning the benevolent yet pernicious influences of computer technology” by hurling balls at a matrix of keyboards mounted on a wall and receive sound and video responses dealing with technology’s encroachment in everyday life (Hoberman 1995). In the work of Polish-born artist Miroslaw Rogala, space itself, like in Krueger’s projects, became the interface to computationally manipulated video images. In Lovers Leap, his most well-known work, the changing location of a visitor in the environment formed the gateway to temporally navigating 360-degree images of Chicago and Jamaica projected on two screens facing each other on opposite sides of the installation, thus converting full body movement into interface, eye, and editor simultaneously.22 Shaw’s interest in alternative navigation spaces at the ZKM also involved other institutes engaged in several European Union–funded projects researching new forms of interface technologies and the resulting potential of new authoring and control systems arising from such research, specifically oriented toward generating unique forms of art, performance, and entertainment. One of the key projects was the European Union funded eRENA (Electronic Arenas for Culture, Performance, Art, and Entertainment) action, which ran between 1997 and 2000 and partnered seven European cultural and research institutions to develop tools and techniques examining “the changing roles of performers and audiences” brought on by computer technologies. With a particular emphasis on “spatial technologies” and “inhabited information spaces in which all participants can be mobile and socially active,” several eRENA projects explicitly developed body-centric interfaces and environments that could elicit new performance forms based on multiparticipant real-time interaction (eRENA project 1997). Distinct from Shaw’s consciously sculptural interface-apparatuses, the body-based interaction in projects like eRENA and others presupposed an untethered participant who was free to move around inside the media space, and increasingly lead to the creation of technical platforms incorporating multimodal sensing that could be used in a variety of contexts. One of the central eRENA partners, the MARS (Media Art and Research Studies) group led by the researcher-artist Monika Fleischmann and architect Wolfgang Strauss at the former Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD) mathematics and computer science research center in Bonn, created a system called eMUSE (Electronic Multi-User Stage Environment) in which various sensor modalities such as vision (camerabased), haptics (touch-based), acoustics (speech recognition), balance (gravity), and motion

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(proximity) could be used to track the participant’s body in order to influence the behavior of computer-generated media within a quasi-theatrical environment conceived as a stage. In another project, the mixed reality installation Murmuring Fields (1997), Fleischmann and Strauss sought a fusion of “virtual and real space . . . linked to each other as independent reference levels for action and perception using an intuitive interface (body tracking)” (Fleischmann and Strauss 1997). In the spirit of Krueger’s Videoplace—albeit with more detailed real-time image and audio processing—Murmuring Fields turned several spectators at a time into active performers before a computer-generated “data body” of themselves. In addition to the interface technologies developed through EU research initiatives, other European media collectives working in the commercial as well as cultural arena also created innovative media environments involving sensor-based interaction that converted the general public into performer. Founded originally by Fleischmann, Strauss, designer Joachim Sauter, programmer Dirk Lüsebrink, and others in 1988, Berlin-based media company ARTCOM was one of the few to successfully cross over between the avant-garde media arts festival circuit and commercial media design for museums, expositions, corporations, and trade shows, through projects that involved custom research / development of interface technologies and conceptual design and implementation of responsive environments that could be used by the general public. Body Mover, a multiuser audiovisual environment commissioned by then-DaimlerChrysler for the 2000 Hannover World Expo used camera tracking “to make the participating players aware of their bodies as an interface between man and machine” (ART COM 2000; figure 8.4). More unusual in context, ARTCOM’s The Famous Grouse Experience was a responsive media environment for the similarly named Scottish whiskey manufacturer installed in Famous Grouse’s Glenturret Distillery visitor center in Scotland. Done in collaboration with the London-based Land Design agency as a new kind of interactive brand promotion, the environment was a room with floor and wall projections in which, through camera tracking and vibration sensing, up to twenty visitors at a time could trigger perturbations in the images. In addition to setting off ripples and cracks through the animated floor images, the room involved interactive sound and, most interestingly, a ventilation system that sent a whiskey aroma wafting through the space.23 The majority of these projects focused on interaction with images and sound; however, there were also individuals who explored the translation of sensing-based data into other kinds of nondigital materialities. The installations of Supreme Particles, a collective founded by media artist and programmer Michael Saup, utilized numerous sensing techniques to investigate the transmission of human energy into both the digital and organic realms. In Plasma/architexture (1994), physical movement of the participants morphed both real-time-produced images and sounds as well as the pneumatically controlled projection surface that transmitted such images.

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Figure 8.4 ARTCOM in cooperation with Atelier Markgraph, Frankfurt am Main. Body Mover (2000). Expo 2000, Hannover. Courtesy of Joachim Sauter/ARTCOM. Berlin.

Analogously, the numerous iterations of the spatially encompassing interactive environment R111 (1996–2001) transduced human presence into nonhuman materialities. “Energy potentials” were, in Saup’s words, “cannibalized off the Internet and from the local movement of spectators . . . and then transformed into various states of matter—both physical and virtual—and presented by the installation with the help of physical and virtual modules” (figure 8.5). Harnessing data from a wide range of sources, R111 provocatively fused the computation and physical, “choreographing particles of matter as if they were pixels” and translated gathered “sensations” not only into the typical interactive liquid morph of the image, but also into the physical waves of infrasonic sound, the vibration of silicon oil, and the shifting of magnetic particles, all installed on tables in the space (Saup 1999).

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Figure 8.5

Michael Saup. R111, 2001. Photo Canon Art Lab.

In a wholly different vein, but also involving the blurring between material and digital borders, another eRENA project that explored performative participation within a totalizing environment was that of the mixed-reality theater work Desert Rain from the British collective Blast Theory in collaboration with the Mixed Reality research lab at the University of Nottingham. Founded by Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr, Nic Tandavanitj, and Jamie Iddon in 1991, Blast Theory originally created site-specific performances in abandoned buildings, clubs, parking garages, and other nontheatrical spaces, using combinations of video, installation, and live performance as well as the participatory elements of club, pop, and media culture. Already, the group’s 1998 work Kidnap—in which two people were randomly kidnapped and held for forty-eight hours based on a Blast Theory– initiated public lottery—played with the fragile line between media-orchestrated fiction and reality. Desert Rain (2000), the collective’s response to Jean Baudrillard’s provocation that the “Gulf War did not take place,” materialized in a twenty- to thirty-minute performanceinstallation that combined techniques from distributed virtual worlds, interface, and mixed-reality research: the fusion between the digital and the physically situated. Navigating by way of a footpad interface through a series of both computer-generated spaces

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projected onto the unusual surface of a 4-meter-long rain curtain as well as physically architected rooms, the spectators to Desert Rain began as a theater audience and metamorphosed into the players of a precarious and disconcerting game of war staged between the simulated-projected and the physical world. The visceral effect of Desert Rain, however, was generated not only in the development of innovative interfaces to elicit the possibility of performative interaction among the players but also through the conscious perforation of the borders between tangible and synthetic space.24 Desert Rain withstanding, most of the projects within the burgeoning interactive new media art and design world involving sensor-activated interfaces shared a common interest in translating human movement into abstracted digital representations, “data bodies,” and similar forms. Emphasizing the novelty of the participant’s ability to instantaneously become part of the immediate feedback loop between motion and computer response, the majority of interactive works focused on a one to one set of representations (between the player and the screen) in which participants stood before the projected image and through semaphore-like gestures, attempted to elicit response from the mirror.25 An even stronger repercussion of the “interaction is the medium” paradigm inherited from Myron Krueger was the fact that with the overarching emphasis on discrete demonstration of feedback, of getting the system to react on each step or movement, the effect of temporal evolution, and the experienced subtleties of bodily time in relationship to machine time were, in the majority of cases, lost. In relation to such definitions of interaction, the work of Canadian media artist David Rokeby marked a significant departure. Starting already in 1982, Rokeby began developing what he called the Very Nervous System (VNS), a hardware- and software-based tool incorporating infrared, camera-based sensing and computer vision techniques together with a set of corollary interactive installations that deployed the system. Distinct from the later interactive media work we have surveyed that used similar strategies, Rokeby’s early installations, such as Reflexions (1983), Body Language (1984–1986), and Very Nervous System (1986–1990), focused exclusively on interaction with the invisible movement and shape of audio over time. “Time, in interactive art,” wrote Rokeby, “is more a material to be worked and formed than a given framework within which the work is constructed. The collisions and interferences between Newtonian time, psychological time, biological time, reflex, consciousness and reflection are a natural area of exploration for interactive art” (Rokeby 1995). In Rokeby’s VNS works, the action-response cycle did not materialize through the mirrored image of the body, whether real or as an abstracted data representation, but instead through the interwoven spatial and temporal richness of sound. Sudden bursts of movement, shifts of tempo, and fluctuating intensities of bodily change could be registered by the system and converted into musical compositions that behaved differently over time depending on the subtleties and nuances discovered by the participants and the

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system itself. Inherently focused on the volumetry of space as a body-driven, musical performance arena activated and shaped by multiple participants, Rokeby also extended the VNS system into video image–based installations. In Silicon Remembers Carbon (1993), a 4 m s 3 m, top-down projection onto a bed of sand, became a surface for shifting images of elements (water, waves, fire) interfered with by the shadows and reflections of past and present visitors’ movement alongside the frame of the image. In many ways, Silicon Remembers Carbon utilized the indirect information provided only by an environment, its human and nonhuman gestures, noises, rhythmic fluctuations, memories, and shifts in half-noticed phenomena and spectator effects to transform space and time itself into an interactive medium—a lived experience for the visitors of the present, past and future. The experience of the body shaping time within a responsive environment was also a strong element in the narrative fictions of American digital media artist Toni Dove. Dove’s highly detailed, large-scale and cinematic environments such as Mesmer: Secrets of the Human Frame (1990), Archaeology of a Mother Tongue (1993), Artificial Changelings (1998), and Spectropia (2006) were situated at the intersection of interactive cinema and responsive installation and researched how body-based movement and gesture could be used as an interface to travel through different visual-temporal layers and shapes of narrative. Artificial Changelings (1998), a “romantic thriller about shopping,” was a spectatordriven interactive movie focused on the span between nineteenth-century Paris and the future whose temporal flow was altered by both performer and spectator. By way of sensoraugmented floor mats, the public used their bodies to activate four distinct spatial zones and thus revealed hidden layers of the narrative by blurring time, changing image quality, changing the character’s POV (point of view) and influencing what aspects of the narrative were revealed over time. Similarly, in 2006’s Spectropia, a project in gestation for five years, trained performers as well as untrained audience members performed before a camera to drive the experiential flow of a science fiction narrative focused on time travel between 1931 after the stock market crash and a dystopian future. Like Kleistian Übermarionettes or what Dove termed cinematic bunraku, her main characters Spectropia and Arathusa were subjected to spatialtemporal-ontological choreographies of manipulation and transformation, inhabited and orchestrated by the performed gestures and movements of human specters (“the ghosts of agency”) exogenous to the narratives, yet essential for their evolution. Operating on and entangling human, animal, technical, and historical subjectivities, Dove’s machinic performances were emblematic of the hauntings that sociologist Avery Gordon so eloquently defined—”how that which appears not to be there is often a seething presence, acting on and often meddling with taken-for-granted realities” (Gordon 1996, 8).

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Responsive Environments: Second Generation—Crisscrossed Agencies, Phenomenologies, Situations

As Dove’s work revealed, subjectivities within the realm of machinic systems were not fixed in time and space but subjected to the performative enactments of spectators and performers who fabricated them into being. The question of how one could physically inhabit such symbolic-material environments of crisscrossed machinic enunciations that moved beyond digital image and sound representation and mixed together bodies, instruments, devices, algorithms, materials, and temporal-spatial systems in their processes of becoming also framed the interdisciplinary work of several art research collectives whose specific goal was to question accepted notions of interactivity. Founded in 1997 by Laura Farabough, Sha Xin Wei, and the author of this book, the art research group Sponge became known in the international media art circuit for largescale environments fusing investigative art, speculative design, technoscientific research, and critical public discourse. Emerging from an interdisciplinary seminar at Stanford University in 1996, Sponge set its sights on materializing in built-form questions concerning the ways in which different disciplinary fields (mathematics, theater, computer science, music, architecture) interacted and interpenetrated each other, producing new forms of embodied knowledge that could be tangibly experienced through what the group called “public experiments in phenomenology, perception and desire.” At the heart of Sponge’s work was a sustained investigation into the ways in which performance could be interpolated across different temporal-disciplinary registers, from the unintentional and ordinary actions and gestures that constituted “the making of traces, making of symbols, the shaping of objects” (performance at the micro level) to performance as an event involving the demarcation between spectator and performer (Salter and Sha 2005, 94). Although the micro scale of the unintended gesture might ride on the threshold of perception and not be recognized as a performance, an enunciation or enactment, the macro level of theater with its architectural separation between theatron and stage normally guaranteed that any gesture executed in this setup would be construed as having and making meaning. Beginning with m1 (1997) and continuing with m2 (1998) and the series m3 (Sauna and TGarden) between 1999 and 2003, Sponge eschewed the stage entirely, developing mediated situations and events where “unpredicted spatial and social conventions could emerge out of locally situated actions” (Salter and Sha 2005, 95). Focused on the question of how an ordinary gesture might evolve over time to be perceived as performative, in Sponge’s first experiment m1 (1997), a group of trained performers enacted an algorithmically scripted series of ordinary gestures and actions over an eight-week period in a public eating area at Stanford University, gradually varying the intensity, speed, and orders of the gestures in search of an ideal spectator: a spectator that intuited but somehow could not directly articulate that a performance was taking place.

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Occurring in the controlled indoor confines of The Lab, a well-known San Francisco experimental art venue, Sponge’s next project m2 continually cycled small groups of visitors through a series of real spaces mixing emotionally charged video images of isolation and abandonment with sound, light, heat, paper, and the spectator’s bodies in an environment that over time evoked human erotic experience coupled with the deformation and decay of media. The performance-installation TGarden, a collaboration with the Belgian art research group FoAM that was staged at SIGGRAPH, Ars Electronica, and V2-Rotterdam Cultural Capital between 1999 and 2002, amplified Sponge’s investigation of performance and agency by creating an experimental media environment in which small groups of participants from the general public influenced and played with real-time-generated sound and image through improvised movement and gesture. Visitors to the environment—which consisted of a completely enclosed space without an audience—chose and wore sensor-embedded clothing that enabled them to “play” the room as a real-time media instrument based on individual as well as group movement patterns (figure 8.6). The clothing or costumes were designed with unusual properties, including uncommon materials (plastic tubing, springs, wire, crinkled, oversized organza) and exaggerated proportions organized to defamiliarize the visitor’s relationships to their

Figure 8.6

Sponge/FoAM. TGarden, 2001. Photo Sponge/FoAM.

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own bodies, while the room’s media output consisted of projected images on the floor and multichannel, spatialized audio. Through worn sensing and wireless communication, spontaneous gestures and movement of the participants were tracked and analyzed in real time. In marked contrast to standard black box models of computing, by which algorithms were abstracted from the world outside of the machine, TGarden’s computational guts attempted to model a virtual physics in software in the attempt to recover a lost physicality as a result of the abstracted digital processes. Players who expended effort by jumping, bouncing, and dragging themselves in the space encountered musical and visual equivalents of this physicality in the lowest levels of software: phantom masses and springs, virtual kinetics, friction, and energy. Here, in the software physics, “the physicality of the performance interface gives definition to the (musical) modeling process itself,” wrote Joel Ryan, one of the project’s collaborators, suggesting the resonances among the space, interface (i.e., sensors), and software (Salter and Ryan 2004, 88). Sponge conceived the physical performance space occupied by the public “players” as a mediated substance shapeable by way of social play. Yet TGarden’s performative “agencies” extended across multiple media, not just electronic: “We are equally fascinated by the agency of the material, the friction of cloth, the decay of data, the elasticity of MIDIcontrolled sound, and by the agency of disciplines—grammar, algebra, systems of orthography, legal systems, and so forth” (Sponge 2002, 102). Sponge and FoAM’s approach to responsive environments examined how performative play from the participants could shape and influence the conjunction of media and social behavior. Shifting away from the invisible interface, the worn costumes of TGarden provided a real world materiality to the on-the-fly experience shared by the participants involved in shaping immaterial media. Departing from the one-to-one relationship between user and system reaction in which each individual was seen as a discrete subject in relationship to discrete media objects, performance and play in TGarden emerged and was reshaped through the spontaneous social entanglements that took place during the event. As Sponge continued to explore the issues brought up by TGarden and Sauna (a responsive architectural project for public space developed at the same time) in computer science and computer music research contexts from 2002 onwards, the group’s Belgian collaborators collectively known as FoAM further dedicated themselves to the blending of “digital and physical realities in materials, interfaces and environments” (FoAM 2003). Founded by Maja Kuzmanovic, Nik Gaffney, and Lina Kusaite in 2001 and utilizing the moniker “grow your own worlds,” FoAM’s biomimetic, organic worlds were in conscious contrast to the hard-edged, reduced digital aesthetic that constituted many interactive media works. Working with and extending the TGarden software and hardware infrastructure, FoAM developed several large, multisensory, responsive environments, including txOom (2002) and trg (2006).26

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In the responsive environment txOom (an amalgamation of the words “texture” and “bloom”), staged in the massive Hippodrome in the downtrodden British seaside resort of Great Yarmouth, the worn costumes deployed in TGarden were extended into architectural scale, creating a “wearable architecture” of walls and dresses. Serving simultaneously as projection surfaces and sensate devices, as well as trapeze harnesses from which the audience members were suspended, txOom encouraged bodily intertwining with the sensations of real physics and simulated, computational physics in the room’s media. Projecting visual and aural media onto the architecturally shaped textiles in order to “drench the physical space with synthetic nutrients,” txOom examined how the synthesis of media, fabrics, and architecture could create a living environment of fleshy and synthetic agencies (FoAM 2003). FoAM’s next environment, trg (Transient Reality Generators), focused on “interaction with an environment modeled as an ecosystem or a universe that reshapes itself on a human scale” (Kuzmanovic 2005, 11). Working again with mixed-reality environments where “digital media becomes tangible and the physical architecture appears simulated and irreal” (FoAM 2003), trg, however, sought to pull back on the architectural scale of txOom, to a more haptically augmented space constructed at human scale. Structures of interconnected stretched fabric and inflatable surfaces were mixed together with projected, localized images and sound, the tangibility of which was augmented by physics-based software simulations, responding to sensor data produced by visitors climbing around, pushing surfaces, and exploring the multiple modalities of the environment. trg’s visitors first were treated to a liminal preparation session including massages, sensory deprivation, and the like. After the initial preparation, the visitors (now participants) then entered into the fabric-based space of soft and elastic surfaces, spindly textile membranes, and discrete “pools” of image and sound. Activated by the participants’ movements and physical interaction with the elasticity and potential physical deformation of the environment, the space’s perception was diffused and distributed from the computer into both invisible forms (camera-based sensing) as well as tangible ones, such as stretch sensing and acceleration embedded into the surfaces and substrates of the textiles. trg was part of a large European Union cultural project that researched the potential of new cultural practices arising from the fusion of media simulation and architectural materiality in mixed-reality environments. Another partnering organization also occupied with the creation of play-based, sensor-augmented responsive environments involving “the physics of simulation and the simulation of physics” was the Austrian media organization Time’s Up. Founded by Tina Auer, Tim Boykett, and Just Merrit in 1996, this Linz-based “laboratory for the construction of experimental situations” conducted “protoscientific” research examining the interdependence and chain reactions among biomechanics (the study of the mechanical laws of movement in living organisms), control, and machineanimal perception. Creating game-like worlds in which participants would interact with immersive media environments through the use of body-based interfaces, many of Time’s

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Up’s projects demanded intense physical exertion on the part of the participants (Boykett 2006). In Hyperfitness Studio, also known as Hypercompetition for Beginners (1996–1999), participants encountered a science-fiction-themed fitness studio made up of situationsapparati: workout devices such as bicycles that rotated on their own axes the harder one pedaled, a bar mounted on a ramp-like structure that dispensed drinks only if the participant could pedal up the ramp (“you sweat, you drink”), and a video game driven by the physical exertion of eight cycling participants in competition with each other. A hybrid of game, sporting competition and mock psychological experiment, Hypercompetition set out Time’s Up’s agenda to examine the sensorimotor coupling between the human organism and its environment (Boykett 1996). Hyperfitness’s follow-up projects SPIN (Spherical Projection Interface) and Body Spin (1999–), attempted to “close the gap between physical and virtual environments,” integrating the body into a complex and disorienting physical feedback loop. With the motto “a journey to the core of your physicality,” the project’s first iteration, SPIN, consisted of a 3-meter-diameter translucent plastic ball that participants could enter one at a time (Time’s Up 1999). Mounted on a pedestal that allowed rotation in all directions from the participants walking inside, SPIN’s virtual content was beamed against the surface of the ball from a series of four corner-mounted projectors, allowing the participants to oscillate between the physical sensation of walking coupled with the loss of spatial orientation generated by the distorted images on the entire surface of the sphere. The project’s second iteration, Body Spin went further by using participants’ psychophysical data such as pulse rate, breath, and stress levels gathered from worn body sensors to generate game-like situations with a projection-based environment—what the group dubbed IRS (Inverted Reality System). In the game “Brain Maze,” for example, participants’ stress levels regulated the visual complexity of a wireframe projected labyrinth on the sphere’s surface that had to be navigated, while “Breath Surf” transferred the differing rates of the participants’ chest expansion and contraction into a virtual surfing competition on the surface of a Tron-like animated ocean. Sensory Circus (2004–), arguably Time’s Up’s most ambitious project and part of the EU trg cooperation, extended the work from previous projects into a children’s playgroundlike environment divided up into several zones (Reality Shift, Integrative Balance Space, Systemic Bar), all inhabited by multiple interface-apparatuses interconnected with each other over a central network. Interface groups like “Carousel Labyrinth,” “Gravitron,” “Sonic Pong,” “Lightning District,” and “Cavity Resonator,” among others, all involved the public’s interaction with a range of custom-built mechatronic and sensate machines, each challenging the participants’ experience of physical space and phenomena. The “Gravitron” environment featured large-scale floor projections of animated, gravitational fields distorted in real time by way of six balance-driven, force-feedback platforms that participants stepped on and tilted by displacing their weight (figure 8.7). Another

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Figure 8.7 Time’s Up. “Gravitron.” Photo Time’s Up—Robert Zauner.

Sensory Circus game, the “Carousel Labyrinth” was a maze of twelve human-scale rotating cylinders with side-by-side openings that when matched up with other cylinders allowed the participant to cross through the labyrinth. In addition to functioning independently, “Gravitron,” the “Carousel” and other groups of interface machines in Sensory Circus were also networked to a central set of computers, forming a “protocognitive” system. With the ability to take the numerous feeds of sensor data that registered the participants’ manipulation of the system and, through statistical processes, “fuse” such data to help generate reactions and responses in sound, image, and light, interaction with the environment could be articulated at the local level of a particular interface group as well as globally throughout the entire Sensory Circus world. Researching the possibility of a media environment functioning as a neuronal model in which the numerically weighted connections of input/outputs would change the system’s response based on the system’s history and “learning” of patterns, Sensory Circus thus attempted to transfer the human-oriented biomechanic feedback loop between

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sensorimotor coupling and environment directly into a space of protomachine interfaces with their own behaviors and presences.27 Even with aesthetic and philosophical intentions, what the media environments of Sponge, FoAM, and Time’s Up shared was a strong interest in extending machine perception across all aspects of the total environment itself. In questioning the paradigm of interaction as that which occurred solely between a human participant and a projected image, responsiveness in worlds like TGarden, txOom, and Sensory Circus was alternately defined across multiple time scales: from the immediate response generated by participants’ interaction with an interface (whether clothing, architecture, or a machine-like device) to much longer time durations, where individual responsiveness would percolate throughout and change the environment based on the history of interactions with the system. Like the earlier perceptual-phenomenal researches of the New Tendencies, the kinds of responsive environments from new 1990s art research collectives also hybridized visual, aural, sensory, and corporal perceptions across the entire machinic apparatus. This emphasis on the physically felt interfaces of sensor-augmented wearables and sensate textiles at both body and architectural scale enlarged the spectrum of embodied possibilities for performative interaction in responsive environments by enabling the gathering of “personalized” psychophysical data that could be used to shape and transform media at a more “intimate” level. Indeed, the mediation of touch and intimacy through worn, body-based technologies was another topic that numerous artists working with performative interfaces explored. In her widely acknowledged “immersive virtual environments” Osmose (1994–1996) and Ephémère (1996–1998), Canadian computer graphics artist Charlotte (Char) Davies delivered a blistering critique at the purely ocular-centric world of immersive computer graphics and VR simulations, instead shifting toward the “intensified experience of being embodied in the space-time of the living world” (Davies 2003, 322). Eschewing the traditional interface of sensor-augmented gloves and “phallic joysticks,” and influenced by her experience as a scuba diver, Davies’ navigation system for both projects consisted of a worn vest embedded with motion-tracking sensors: breath (measuring the expansion and contraction of the chest) and balance (measuring the participant’s degree of bodily tilt). By donning a head-mounted stereoscopic display, participants worked with breath inhalation and exhalation and their own balance to move upwards, downwards, left, and right through a series of evocative, real-time, and computer-generated—yet almost painterly—3D worlds composed of spatially ambiguous, subterranean landscapes of forests, ponds, skies, and the vessels and organs of the body, which suggested connections between interior life and the earth itself.28 As individual, intimate experiences for one person at a time, both Osmose and Ephémère evoked strong affective responses in the thousands of participants or immersants, as Davies dubbed them, that engaged with the work, with many professing profound bodily

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sensations ranging from floating and feelings of ecstasy to “eerie-ness,” a sense of haunting, and deep loss. Within the realm of public exhibitions, however, Davies introduced a far more performative model. As the real-time sound generated by the immersant’s navigation through Osmose and Ephémère filled the gallery or museum space, audiences outside the system vicariously lived through the immersant’s experience by way of two projections: the participant’s orientation and view from inside the HMD on one wall and the silhouetted shadow of the performing participant directly responding in her own body to the work. Osmose and Ephémère thus perceptually juxtaposed two different types of bodies and worlds simultaneously—a projected experience of simulation and a shadow play of the real body. Both of Davies’s works successfully relied on the inherent tensions between the supposed immateriality of digital technology versus the materiality of bodily experience. This tension was most exemplified in the conflict not only between the private experience of the immersant’s body made public as performing shadow, but also between the bulky, almost alien apparatus of the HMD and vest and the participants’ embodied navigation of Davies’ pulsating, immaterial environments of soft and translucent 3D forms that sometimes bordered on the edge of disappearance. Like Davies’s reembodiment of the immaterial, another Canadian-based artist, as well as choreographer and professor, Thecla Schiphorst [Software for Dancers, chapter 6], aspired to recover what she perceived as a loss of touch and bodily intimacy in the face of much interactive digital media, for example, in the widely exhibited installation Bodymaps: artifacts of touch (1996–1998). An interactive video and sound environment that explored, in Schiphorst’s words, “the sensuality and anarchy in the act of touching and being touched” (Schiphorst n.d.), Bodymaps consisted of a velvet projection surface incorporating electric field sensing to gauge proximity from the surface and FSRs (force-sensitive resistors) that measured varying degrees of pressure from participants’ fingers. As fleeting images of Schiphorst’s own body were projected onto the surface of the material, its projected form could be interfered with, stirred up, gazed at, marked, molested, and revealed by the haptic responses of the participants pressing at its luminous surface. The intimacy of touch also served as a basis for Schiphorst and Susan Kozel’s 2002 project whisper, an acronym for wearable, handheld, intimate, sensory, personal, expressive, responsive system. Arriving at different sensory modalities (touch, breath, pulse, and so on) through a series of exploratory workshops with test participants, whisper developed small sensing and wireless communication devices embedded into special garments that were worn, or attached to the surface of the skin. As these devices gathered physiological data like pulse and breath from the participants, the results were visualized and sonified and then “reprojected” back into the installation space in localized pools on the floor, amplifying intimate moments and contacts that normally would go unnoticed. As whisper was presented in public performances in the UK and Rotterdam in 2002– 2004, exhale (breath between bodies), another project from Schiphorst’s and Kozel’s team,

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then based at Simon Frasier University in Vancouver, continued the investigation of technologically augmented intimacy, this time using breath to drive tiny, actuator-like fans, vibrators, and speakers embedded in the seams of garments. If whisper’s media was environmental, exhale’s focus on intimacy shifted the scale of response away from public media display toward personal, body-based enactments such as tickling, stroking, vibrating, and the like, using physiological data as a form of affective communication. Although not based on wearables, Kozel’s own responsive environment Trajets (2004), co-created with Gretchen Schiller, also carried forth the examination of bodily intimacy within a responsive environment. Projected onto twelve motorized screens turning on their axes, ephemeral images of moving bodies and other kinesthetic phenomena danced across the gauze-like surfaces. Turning in response to the floor patterns of the public moving through the maze of rotating screens as well as the public’s internal parameters of attraction, proximity, and repulsion, Trajets also played with the interaction between bodies as one agency distributed among others. Urban Interactions: Playing in Public Space

The use of worn and distributed interactive systems at the end of the 1990s effectively began to shift the discourse from interaction per se to questions of embodiment, intimacy, touch, social play, and the shaping of what Edward T. Hall originally labeled as “spatial proxemics.”29 This performative play was not restricted to the closed, culturally defined spaces of museums, galleries, and festivals but spilled out into the urban environment itself, transforming everyday spaces into what architect Ed Keller called a new, “freewheeling version of Homo Ludens” (Keller n.d.). Fusing architecture, sensing systems, computer networks, distributed devices, and psychogeographic strategies, artists, designers, and architects transformed cities into responsive zones. In the 1960s, Dutch Situationist artist and urbanist Constant Nieuwenhuys, known as Constant, had already outlined a civic utopia where inhabitants of the city would no longer become spectators but active shapers of the urban space. In “New Babylon,” Constant’s concept of the utopian city of the future, the artist foresaw the bidirectional influence of social, technological, and physical space: “space as a psychic dimension (abstract space) cannot be separated from the space of action . . . for us, social space is truly the concrete space of meetings, of the contacts between beings” (Constant 1996a, 155). Depicted in his utopian musings, space was not metaphoric but an ambient surrounding that could be enlivened by play and social presence in relationship to technology. “The ambiance of an environment possessing certain specific plastic and acoustic characteristics depends on the individuals who find themselves there . . . the quality of the environment and its ambiance no longer depends on material factors alone, but on the manner in which they have been perceived, appreciated and used” (Constant 1996a, 167–168).

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Some thirty years later, the metropolitan interventions of a number of international artists attempted to fulfill Constant’s prediction. For example, with his interactive relational architecture performance events that bordered on the monumental, MexicanCanadian artist Rafael Lozano-Hemmer questioned the boundaries of public and private space. Defined as “the technological actualisation of buildings and public spaces with alien memory,” relational architecture put a technological spin on the way we read and interacted with the embedded cultural narratives of buildings and public spaces, defamiliarizing and transforming them by breaking down both the space’s intended use and its patterns of behavior (Lozano-Hemmer 1999, 53). Internationally recognized for his massive light sculptures including Vectorial Elevation (2000), first shown at the Zocalo, Mexico City’s main square, at the start of the new millennium and then with follow-ups in France, Spain, Japan, Toronto, and other cities between 2000 and 2008, Lozano-Hemmer’s Body Movies (2001) more specifically magnified the intimate play between the passersby and their digital reflection to city scale. With influences from the large-scale, critical public artworks of Polish artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, the Situationists and other visionary social architects of the 1960s, Body Movies transformed the façade of the Pathé Cinema in downtown Rotterdam into an interactive shadow play using a combination of Xenon lighting sources, robotically controlled projectors, and the general public. Playing directly off Dutch artist Samuel van Hoogstraten’s seventeenth-century engraving “The Shadow Dance,” which depicted the grotesquely large shadows produced by actors moving in front of theatrical light sources, Body Movies took urban space itself as the new proscenium and an unsuspecting public as its actors. Although the work used computer-based tracking to sense the position of spectators, Lozano-Hemmer’s most effective technology was an age-old one: the mesmerizing, giant shadow selves in performance with the Pathé’s building façade. Lozano-Hemmer’s interest in transforming urban environments through interactive plays of bodies, light and shadow continued in a series of works such as Pulse Front (2007), Pulse Park (2008), and the memorial work Voz Alta (2008) that employed technologies such as heart rate sensors and modified microphones to transduce the pulses and voices of visitors and convert them into luminous patterns projected into the urban night by large robotic Xenon searchlights. These enactments between people’s internal rhythms, and the shadows produced by external amplifying technologies became the stimulus for defining a new performative territory, one that Johan Huizinga noted in Homo Ludens as “temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart” (Huizinga 1950, 10). The public’s dance with their oversized shadows “casts a spell over us that is enchanting, captivating” and the typical flatness of the screen gave way to the threedimensionality of pedestrians’ heart beats and protest voices rendered across the city. Paralleling his work with trained performers, William Forsythe’s [The Body’s Limits in Dance and Theater, chapter 6] inquiry into our perception of the body as it was

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choreographed by technologically derived systems of rules, games, architectures, and algorithmic constructs was also directly played out on the bodies of the public through a series of installation events labeled “choreographies for public and public spaces.” Originally shown at the Roundhouse in London, the installation-environment Tight Roaring Circle (later called White Bouncy Castle [1999]), set the record for the world’s largest bouncy castle: a massive version of the popular fairground attraction in which children jump up and down within an inflated structure. Researching the ballistics of the human body that could be freed for a split second from the constraints of gravity, Bouncy Castle, along with the “choreographic objects” Scattered Crowd (2003) and City of Abstracts (2002), was just one of a number of Forsythe’s public choreographies that attempted to catalyze movement potential in ordinary spectators within extraordinarily circumscribed spaces. The use of media to choreograph public play was also a device in Forsythe’s choreographic public space installation City of Abstracts (2002), in which urban sites were converted into temporary, technoscenographic heterotopias. In City of Abstracts, Forsythe used the potential of spontaneous interaction between everyday inhabitants of the city and their interactive projected images to enable a self-generated choreography in the public environment (figure 8.8). Constructing a semihidden, self-contained apparatus of live cameras,

Figure 8.8 William Forsythe. City of Abstracts, 2007. Photo Philip Bussmann.

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a projection screen, and real-time image processing installed in public locations throughout the city of Frankfurt in 2002 and subsequently other cities, City of Abstracts transformed everyday spaces into stage and playground simultaneously. Software that had been originally developed in consultation with Steina Vasulka morphed a live video feed of participants standing in front of the camera/screen setup. By selectively removing scan lines from the final image and creating a time delay between every other scan line, pedestrians that moved before the camera were converted into turning, spiral forms: a mirrored reflection of passersby stranded between multiple digital temporalities. Like many interactive-participatory performance works sited in the urban wild, City of Abstracts depended on improvised, unscripted movement from the general public to activate response in the system—a viable stage of chance based on real-time variables that were not predictable at the onset. The technologies of image interaction that City of Abstracts deployed drew out threshold co-presence and interaction rituals and projected/ exhibited them as conscious artifacts in situ—microperformative events before a public that was unsuspectingly pulled into a social dance. In a similar spirit, literally hundreds of other interactive or digital works from individual artists and collectives as well as experimental design and architecture studios like Usman Haque, Greyworld, Cécile Babiole, Paul De Marinis, Paul Kaiser and the OpenEndedGroup, Jason Bruges, MVRDV, Christian Möller, Aram Bartholl, West 8, ARTCOM, Todd Winkler, Sponge, Ben Rubin, Association Creation, Erik Adigard/ Chris Salter, HeHe, Pneuma, Graffiti Research Lab, and Zero-th, also endeavored to reinvent public spaces and the urban environment. With events and interventions ranging from responsive façades and gigantic public projections to sensor-activated and -actuated architectures, sculptures, and active objects, many of these urban technology–based performance projects sought to offer experimental media alternatives to advertising and other forms of visual and aural information pollution plaguing the city. In the playful domain, composer Paul De Marinis’s Rain Dance/Musica Acuatica— originally built for the Swatch Pavilion at Expo 1998 in Lisbon—transformed umbrellawielding spectators into performers/listeners/composers as they stood underneath twenty streams of sonically modulated water sprays. Not driven by sensing technologies, another street-based media environment, Paul Kaiser’s and Shelly Eskar’s Pedestrian (2000), projected a walkover, computer-animated image of miniature pedestrians moving on a sidewalk, thus shifting the scale between that of the real pedestrian in the city and their micro image in the projection. More activist types of urban media interventions were realized by the Brooklyn-based organization Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), founded by James Powderly and Evan Roth in 2005 during a residency at the Eyebeam Atelier Open Source Lab in New York.

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Figure 8.9

Graffiti Research Lab, Rotterdam, 2007. Photo Graffiti Research Lab.

GRL turned the act of tagging into public performance by outfitting urban activists with open source technologies. By integrating laser tag and traditional graffiti concepts with computing, GRL’s international cells in countries such as Austria, Amsterdam, and Holland as well as the New York Headquarters engaged in high-tech graffiti practices working with cheap LED technologies (“LED throwies”) or the practice of “projector bombing”: using portable high-lumen projectors to throw images of real-time-generated digital graffiti created by camera tracking a moving laser pointer aimed at and writing onto a building’s surface (figure 8.9). Metamorphosing an urban display environment saturated by advertising through unusual forms of displays was not confined to street level, however, or to the surfaces of screen façades themselves. Known for his and statistician Mark Hansen’s interactive Listening Post installation, designer and artist Ben Rubin was commissioned by Adobe Systems to create San Jose Semaphore (2006), a temporary, large-scale projection-based public artwork installed in the top floors of Adobe’s headquarters in San Jose, California, and visible from the air and ground.

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Rubin’s work based itself upon the earliest telecommunications network in which pulley-driven wooden panels on top of buildings sent messages to other relay towers five miles away, developed at the end of the eighteenth century by Claude Chappe. A “machine for communication,” the artist’s semaphore entailed four 3-meter-tall and 20-meter-long yellow disks that rotated to one of 256 possible combinations seven times a second. Constructed from twenty-four thousand computer-controlled LEDs, Rubin’s semaphore visualized the movement of information at city scale, transmitting its message to the air in a calculated ballet of visible signals and waiting to be deciphered by passing observers on the street and in their cars on the freeways below.30 In designer and architect Usman Haque’s mass participation airborne installationperformances like Sky Ear (2003) and Burble (2007), thousands of balloons massed together and containing color-changing LEDs, infrared senders/receivers, or cell phones were released into and hovered in the air, their color-changing abilities controlled by large groups of public participants on the ground via electromagnetic fields generated from cell phones and from atmospheric disturbances (Sky Ear) or by sensor-embedded handles that held up the structure in the air (Burble). Percolating the movement of crowds through the entire LED system, Haque’s transient, flickering urban events could compete with the scale of buildings. A similar strategy was evident in Light Dome, a 2006 project from the Dutch architecture studio MVRDV’s Winy Maas, the young Estonian architects ZiZi and Yoyo, and Arup’s Rogier van der Heide and realized in the darkest winter in Tallin, Estonia. MVRDV and the younger Estonian architects constructed a cupola of hundreds of white weather balloons suspended in the winter air above the city’s central square and illuminated with intense blasts from sports stadium flood lighting instruments in the interest of proposing a solution to Seasonal Adjustment Disorder (SAD), the onset of depression due to the lack of light in northern winter climates.31 The artist duo HeHe’s (Helen Evans and Heiko Hansen) Nuage Vert (green cloud) realized an urban airborne performance of a different sort. Part of the couple’s ecosophically minded Pollstream series (2003–2006), a series of environmental interventions focused on making temporarily visible the effects of energy and waste consumption patterns “by speeding up the normal time it takes for our actions in and on the environment to have consequences,” Nuage Vert projected a contour-tracing high-powered green laser onto the surface of smoke and vapor emissions from a power plant in residential Helsinki (HeHe 2008).32 Resembling the famed “toxic event” in White Noise, novelist Don DeLillo’s infamous novel of contemporary suburban American decay, Nuage Vert’s shape, chemical composition, and behavior was tracked by a thermal camera, with its size altered in real time through changes of electricity usage in the surrounding areas. Creating a mass green neon sign-event in the sky, Nuage Vert generated the “ultimate” hybrid of natural and cultural phenomena or, as HeHe labeled it, the visual and material “aesthetization” of industrial pollution.

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Supergames in Public Space

The arena of urban interactive projects became so diverse in the late 1990s and early 2000s that entire websites, archives, and festivals were created around the topic.33 Many of these works involved ambient, unfocused play in which large groups of distributed visitors drifting through or by open spaces, windows, screens, or buildings would set media into motion, the effects of their interaction sometimes apparent and sometimes not. Yet, there were other interactive projects in public space that attempted to involve larger groups in more ludic-based engagement, based on specific rules or constraints of game-structured social interactions. One of the most interesting early experiments in mass public gaming was the use of the CINEMATRIX Audience Participation System by American scientist and Pixar cofounder Loren Carpenter and his partner Rachel. Presented at SIGGRAPH in 1980 and the Ars Electronica Festival in 1994, the Carpenters created a game of Pong for the masses. With games broadcast onto a large public screen and driven by red- and green-colored handheld paddles whose color changes were picked up by a camera, Audience Participation enabled hundreds of participants to steer both the Pong game as well as other computer models (a flight simulator, a moving cube in a 3D landscape) by simply rotating the paddle to either red or green, thus transforming public space into a quasi sporting match and mass video game (Carpenter and Carpenter 1994). The psychogeographic tendencies of new urban performance scenarios were also facilitated by locative, worn, and handheld technologies such as cell phones, GPS receivers, and mobile devices embedded with sensors, as well as social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace. These technologies enabled distributed forms of communication and interaction over city-scale environments and thus the possibility of organizing mass collective action performances/resistance acts both in specific locations as well as across the city itself. In what digital guru author Howard Rheingold first described as smart mobs—the phenomena of people who are able to “cooperate in ways never before possible because they carry devices that possess both communication and computing abilities” (Rheingold 2003, xii)—sudden forms of public protest, actions, and games spontaneously erupted in urban locales, enacting what Michel de Certeau called “pedestrian enunciations” (de Certeau 1984, 116). One example of such pedestrian enunciations was the early-twenty-first-century phenomenon of flash mobs, in which unplanned happening-like events would rapidly defamiliarize urban locales through their ability to generate mass public play without a pyramidal hierarchy of control. Launched in summer 2003 by Bill Wasik, a senior editor of Harper’s magazine, the concept of the flash mob was an attempt to critique “hollow hipster cultures” of conformity in New York City as well as being a riff on viral marketing. Organized via email with instructions on where, when, and what to do at a specific

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location, the first flash mob surreptitiously orchestrated by Wasik took place at the main Manhattan branch of the Macy’s department store and involved a group of several hundred people gathered in the rug department who claimed to be from a New Jersey hippie farm and were looking for a “love rug.”34 Around the same time in 2003, another set of flash mob events arose in a series of actions that took place in San Francisco. In what researcher and game designer Jane McGonigal labeled “supergaming”—massively scaled public collaborations that generated an audience—groups of people who had never met gathered in public locations to stage collective games. In the Go Game, four hundred and fifty people received instructions over mobile phones and proceeded to act out live scavenger hunt-like actions in superherocostumed personas with the help of passersby. Likewise, in a 2004 action dubbed by the press as “flash mob computing,” a mass of more than seven hundred people gathered at a University of San Francisco gymnasium with Wi-Fi-enabled laptops and PDAs to create a “grassroots” supercomputer. Other supergaming actions like the use of public payphones by more than four thousand people in the ARG (Alternate Reality Game) I Love Bees (2004), Intel’s research project Asphalt Game or the Big Urban Game, where teams moved giant board game pieces through the cityscape of Minneapolis and others also involved hundreds of participants in public play and were organized through distributed systems like blogs, public payphones, webenabled cell phones, and the like.35 With the rapid spread of flash mobs, smart mobs, ARGs, or what McGonigal described as “ubiquitous games” (McGonigal 2005) literally thousands of participants from multiple countries and continents began to stage performances. Despite being played out in diverse contexts and organized by very different sets of constituents (corporations, marketers, university research labs, independent artists, and others), many of these events shared structural and organizational similarities: (1) the use of distributed mobile and online technologies to aggregate large collectives, (2) the embedding of the game within the everyday physical geography of the city, (3) the amassing of a group of untrained, nonprofessional participants within a defined and fleeting time duration, (4) the shifting of perceptual thresholds between performers and audiences, and (5) the temporary disruption of social norms and habituated patterns of action. These characteristics could also be found in the so-called urban prankster movement, another smart mob-like urban performance trend. Partially the brainchild of a New York–based improvisation group called Improv Everywhere, urban pranks were characterized by spontaneous events orchestrated through online social network sites. Setting out to upset established conventions of behavior in public spaces, urban prank actions ranged from the innovative to the ridiculous: slow motion dérives through department stores, mass water balloon fights in the middle of city squares, wandering around in cultural venues in single file and having impromptu dinner parties in the furniture showrooms of Ikea. Originally responsible for actions such as Mp3 Experiment 2.0 (2005), Slow Mo

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Figure 8.10

Improv Everywhere. Frozen Grand Central, 2007. Photo Chad Nicholson/Improv Everywhere.

Home Depot (2006), and The Camera Flash Experiment (2007), in which seven hundred people released a wave of camera flashes on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City, Improv Everywhere’s Frozen Grand Central (2007) involved a group of 207 public “agents” who froze in place simultaneously for five minutes inside the Main Concourse at Grand Central Station (figure 8.10). Achieved by the public agents synchronizing their watches, the “freeze-in” at Grand Central, like other smart mobs, led to the spread of even larger freezing actions around the world.36 In addition to the smart mob model, another genre of game-like or explorative events in the urbanscape were catalyzed by locative or mobile-based technologies in projects from Blast Theory, Jonah Brucker-Cohen, Katherine Moriwaki, Mixed Reality Lab in Nottingham, Brooke Singer, Michelle Terran, Terri Rueb, Erik Conrad, Drew Hemment, Eric Paulos, the PLAY studio at the Interactive Institute, Jason Lewis, Active Ingredient, Marc Tuters, Julian Bleeker, and others. Though many of these artist-technologists turned

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to the city as a context to examine the politico-aesthetic impact of location-based technologies and their potential to generate new forms of networked communities, there was also increased interest in university and industrial researchers to use the public performances of urban space as a testing ground for ideas originally hatched in both the research lab environment, as well as occasionally the co-opting structures of corporate marketing divisions. Another key issue that arose within the locative media-pervasive gaming arena was the tension between centralized control and distributed, “on-the-ground” gaming. A case in point was the high-profile pervasive gaming projects of Blast Theory such as Can You See Me Now? (2001), Uncle Roy All Around You (2003), I Like Frank (2004), Day of the Figurines (2007), and Rider Spoke (2008), developed in collaboration with ubiquitous computing researchers from the University of Nottingham’s Mixed Reality Lab. Fusing the “overlay of a real city and a virtual city to explore ideas of absence and presence,” Blast Theory’s best-known project Can You See Me Now? comprised (up to) fifteen online player-participants and a series of four physical actors (“runners”) situated on the ground in a real city. Sharing an online map and equipped with handheld computers and GPS receivers, the physical runners hunted down the online players until they were within 15 (virtual) meters of the runners, capturing them and thus winning points in the game. Through online chat and digitized audio, the runners and players both communicated with each other during the distributed game of catch (Blast Theory n.d.). Similar pervasive games that took place between the brick and mortar world and the simulated, computationally navigated one like PacManhattan (NYU/ITP 2004) and Human Pac Man (2004), developed at the Mixed Reality Lab of the University of Singapore, also played on the tension between control from above and command on the ground as well as the vacillating experience of embodiment between players in the online city and the real one. Yet the lingering question that remained in such pervasive gaming examples was the nature of performance in tandem with the array of digital representations, avatars, and other “virtual” models of city experience. How could such games that treated the city as a mapped-out grid of points and obstacles for “players” provide the dwellers and performers in the urbanscape with the real power of pedestrian enunciation through “ways of operating” that would go beyond an experience of the city as a strategic map generated from the code of GPS or Wi-Fi systems? “The presence and circulation of a representation (taught by preachers, educators, and popularizers as the key to socioeconomic advancement) tells us nothing about what it is for its users” (de Certeau 1984, xiii). In other words, if Can You See Me Now? and other like-minded games could be played in any city landscape across the globe, reducing the experience of the localized and situated urban context for the online as well as on-the-ground user-participants as another interchangeable technological representation, then what would become of practices of

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collective civic experience and participation that involved habitation lasting longer than the millisecond durations of handheld network time?37 Finally, although the ambiguity and complex nature of this question was not easily answered, one thing for certain was that pervasive games, scenes, and situations all shared a new vision of the city in the age of connected communities: the conversion of the urban environment into a vast, distributed stage that blurred the distinctions between players and onlookers, and spatial and human performances. In transferring the possibilities of interaction from the controlled spaces of culture and directly into the urban wild, performance became something that could be catalyzed and articulated through devices, informational triggers, inscribed rules, and other forms of structures that were both pregiven as well as emergent during play. Taking interaction into account as both medium and site of action, public performances made possible by technologically as well as socially augmented concepts of mobility sought to generate urban spaces no longer inhabited by passive onlookers but active shapers—an acute but fitting revival of the early Situationist dream to transform the tedium of quotidian life into a fabulist, performed enterprise.

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Conclusion: The Everyday

I write this conclusion while sitting in the inner courtyard of a fourteenth-century cloister cum hotel in the Italian town of Pisa, a few days after a Dante-esque installation period for a new project at the Eleventh Annual Architecture exhibition of the Venice Biennale. Entitled Air XY, the project, an intensive collaboration with designer Erik Adigard, was an interactive multimedia installation that explored many of the themes brought up in this book: screen versus scene, the materiality of media and real time, dynamic and interactive processes that mix human and technical presences. Installed by Adigard, myself, and a team of dedicated multimedia professionals in steam bath–like conditions within the gargantuan space of the Corderie dell’Arsenale in the dead of the Venetian August, Air XY was part of a group show that addressed the theme “at home in the modern world.” Walking through the massive, vault-like spaces of the Corderie, a 319-meter-long building dating from 1613 where ropes were produced for the Italian navy, one encountered what amounted to a series of large installations conjured up from many of the world’s most illustrious builders and thinkers: UN Studio, Asymptote Architecture, Coop Himmelb(l)au, M Fuksas D, Droog Design, Greg Lynn, MVRVD, and many others. Ranging from a colossal white propellerlike twisted form (UN Studio) and a re-realization of Coop Himmelb(l)au’s 1971 interactive Feedback Circuit Program to a gigantic series of subway train cars coated in green plastic (Fuksas), these “momentary constructions” tried to reflect the exhibition’s larger theme: Out There: Architecture Beyond Building, the brainchild of director/curator Aaron Betsky. “Architecture is not building,” wrote Betsky, “buildings are objects and the act of building leads to such objects but architecture is something else. It is the way we think and talk about buildings . . . architecture is a way of representing, shaping and perhaps even offering critical alternatives to the human-made environment . . . in a concrete sense, architecture is that which allows us to be at home in the world” (Betsky 2008). Although

Air XY dealt with fleeting, digital images, light, space, and the movement of bodies before the screen and within space, some (but not all) of the other works also played with the tension between representation and performance: between static objects and processes that dynamically create and adapt to their environment. I write about this work because architecture has played a large role in this book, not just from the point of view of erecting edifices or buildings, but rather by way of producing new kinds of material, technologized spaces. It is here where architecture shares much in common with the texture and materiality of artistic performance (in all its myriad guises, as we have witnessed), through the creation of equally imaginary spaces that, at the same time, are tangible, felt, and inhabited. Like performance, architecture is situated on the cusp between the built and the imaginary. Yet in contrast to the nonutilitarian fantasy worlds of theater, sound, dance, or the visual arts, architecture still must straddle the quotidian. As we saw in our exploration of architecture’s performativity in chapter 3, even when tinkering with the phenomena of ephemerality, event, movement, and disappearance, architecture is by and large a child of the everyday. We cannot help but encounter its spaces in daily life as they surround, occupy, and influence our momentary experiences. In his 1964 manifesto “The Great Game to Come,” Constant Nieuwenhuys [Urban Interactions, chapter 8] wrote of an upcoming life in the city of tomorrow. Our conception of urbanism is not limited to construction and its functions but rather takes in all of the uses that can be found, or even imagined . . . we can already expand our understanding of the problem through experimentation with certain phenomena linked to the urban environment: activity in a certain street, the psychological effect of different surfaces and constructions, the rapidly changing appearance of a space produced by ephemeral elements, the speed with which ambience changes and the potential variations in the overall ambience of different neighborhoods. (Constant 1996b, 62)

Constant’s utopian city of tomorrow was not the one of architectural science fiction lore depicted in the annals of early filmic visions like Metropolis or The Shape of Things to Come, but rather life without spectating. As a place of drifts and ambiences, the Situationist city of the future would consist only of participation: social and aesthetic games and performances of and in the everyday. In a rapidly changing surround of technology, the ennui of daily life would be eradicated by the perfumelike spell of new inventions embedded into and activating the very environment in which one lived. Thwarting an encroaching “impossibility of realizing a creative life within utilitarian society,” space could become “intensified” by technical means and reordered by performances “playing with the elements that make up the environment” (Constant 1996b, 162–165). The futurologist’s and management pundits’ claim that “the future has already happened” is perhaps true. As seen from the lens of technology, quotidian life in our age has

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become a continual, round-the-clock performance. But these ongoing enunciations enabled through technology are not just the privy of a handful of artists and curators interested in opening up the deadness of urban space through the latent potential of interactive paradigms and locative media. Rather, as further evidence of the prescience of the Eric Hobsbawm quote that opened this book, the sense impressions and belief machineries of the aesthetic now saturate daily life, in all of its facets. Sense impressions, even ideas, were apt to reach the public from all sides—through the combination of headlines and pictures, text, and advertisement on the newspaper page, the sound in the earphone as the eye scanned the page, through the juxtaposition of image, voice, print and sound—all, as like as not, taken in peripherally, unless, for a moment, something concentrated attention. This had long been the way in which city people experienced the street, in which popular fairground and circus entertainment operated, familiar to artists and critics since the days of the Romantics. The novelty was that technology had drenched everyday life in private and public with art. Never had it been harder to avoid aesthetic experience. The work of art was lost in the flow of words, of sounds, of images, in the universal environment of what would once have been called art. (Hobsbawm 1996, 520)

Written in 1996 at the tip of the Internet’s explosion into mass culture, Hobsbawm’s observation of the permeation of the everyday with the extraordinary of the aesthetic might find its most salient manifestations in our age of so-called social media where the instruments of social networking, from blogs and Facebook to MySpace and Twitter, have transformed the minutiae of private life into public event.1 How have our electronic networks and mobile appendages scaled everyday behaviors like taking out the trash or eating dinner into something far beyond de Certeau’s “pedestrian enunciations”? Why are the most banal daily tasks viewed, tracked, monitored, captured, and saved to a global audience’s hard drives or MP3 capsules? Could it be that our greatest fear is not the collapse of economies or the pulverization of the glaciers but the sudden loss of connectedness to the exploding digital repositories that store our endless, everyday routines that in the past were ignored as workaday and necessary for survival? Many would find it hard to perceive the world without these technologies of subject creation and subjectification that transform our everyday lives, bodies, and environments, and simultaneously transfer their own idiosyncrasies onto us. Even if the future has happened already, let us imagine for a moment the further performative “revolution of everyday life” (Vaneigem 2001) beyond the individual behind their screen. Although the natural environment melts, we will certainly be overcome with the desire to create ever-more-appealing artificial ones that explode the surface of screens into lived space. The ubiquity of information appliances will most certainly move toward portable experience devices, allowing us to instantly change the entire sensory spaces in which we

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live with a flick of a switch. The DSP chips in our increasingly smaller cell phones will power up embedded DLP projectors held within the circuitry, enabling home movies and media rich blogs to be projected out into real (not screenal) space. Urban spaces like streets, airports, cinemas, and classrooms will suddenly convert into DIY immersive media spaces that until now were the exclusive territory of expensive art and technology centers. The archival retrieval systems for image and sound media that now proliferate online like mushrooms may be no longer searched and unlocked through keyclicks and mouse movements, but instead by the presence of gesturing bodies. Likewise, wireless cameras, sensors, and actuators embedded into our walls and floors that change ambiences and relations will push us further toward Constant’s dream of the “image of an immense social space which is forever other; a dynamic labyrinth in the widest sense of the term” (Constant 1996a, 168). But if everyday life becomes a media spectacular “scenographic syrup” (Payne 2007, 56) and an ongoing ludic artifice, all made possible through technical beings, a central question remains: namely, what role does artistic performance, particularly that dependent on new technology, still have to play? After all, the estrangement of daily life’s routines that long was the territory of artists is now in the hands of everyday people who, in their attempt to elevate the workaday to the status of the fantastic, upload videos of their daily cooking and cleaning rituals, going to church and taking out the trash on YouTube, like so many home movies, hoping to achieve the millisecond attention of our increasingly saturated eyes. What could possibly counteract such a widespread cultural transformation? This book has tried to comprehend the polyphony of ways that artistic creators across disciplinary divides have historically sought to shape the fabric of the world in a situated and embodied way through the technical/material practices of performance. Like living itself, performance, as medium and method, conjures up something fragile and ephemeral that is forever bound in time and space. Undeniably, it is strange and even confounding to think that in our “anytime, anyplace” media-mobility, storage-driven present, creators would also engage the technical instruments and apparatuses of our time to make something that purposefully exists only in the moment of its constitution and eventually evaporates. The practice of performance reminds us of immortality—our experience of something in the course of its birth, evolution, and passing. Performance as an entanglement among humans, instruments, algorithms, and machines on the stage, in the laboratories, and through the streets of cities thus “unfolds in an operative or immanent mode” (Depraz, Varela, and Vermersch 2003, 1) yielding new knowing about the world through its sudden presence and equally sudden disappearance. It is in this sense that performance as knowing takes us beyond the quotidian. It is also why its stubborn makers still seek to create artificial events that remind us that the everyday is extraordinary only when we can observe and experience it as such.

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Notes

Preface 1. See Diller and Scofidio n.d. 2. See Dixon 2007, Rush 2005, and Carlson 1996, among others. Introduction 1. For example, performance has been used in the following contexts: human–computer interaction as performance, performative science, performative environments, performative architecture, performance in archaeology, performative ethnography, performance as knowledge. See Diebner 2005, Kolarevic and Malkawi 2005, Pearson and Shanks 2001, and Latour, Woolgar, and Salk 1986 for different disciplinary interpretations. 2. Of course, this is a bit of exaggeration as certainly performance has been an important part of media art practices. Rudolf Freiling’s and Dieter Daniels’ 1990s online archive medienkunstnetz. de has a small but important section on performance (http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/themen/ medienkunst_im_ueberblick/performance). However, as a study object in relationship to the now being written histories of media art, it would appear that theater, music, opera and dance do not exist. This was made clear, for example, in the fact that the first conference for Media Art Histories at Banff in 2005 that aimed to discover the roots of the field, had out of 120 international papers, only four focused on performance contexts. Another example is the writings of Lev Manovich, in particular his article “Cultural Interfaces and Data Aesthetics” (http://interface.t0.or.at/ levmabstract.html). 3. Later, as the Greek dramatic tradition developed, the lesser known ekkuklema appeared: a wheeled platform that rolled out of the wooden skene building at the back of the stage to display the slaughtered bodies of characters. See Leacroft and Leacroft 1985 for a further discussion of early Greek stage inventions.

4. I use the term “immanent” throughout the text in its philosophical connotation meaning to be within the limits of possible experience or knowledge. 5. Sandeep Bhagwati, personal conversation, June 2006. 6. See McKenzie 2001 for a further discussion of this notion of performance. 7. For a further discussion, see Latour 1999, 174–215. 8. For a full and detailed discussion of performance from linguistic, anthropological, and cultural (but not science or technology perspectives), see, for example, Carlson 1996, Fischer-Lichte 2004, Turner 1982, and Schechner 1988. 9. Although art critic Lucy Lippard is credited with coining the concept of the “dematerialized” art object, signifying the increasingly ephemeral nature of artworks in the 1960s, artist Eduardo Kac in a footnote in his work Telepresence and Bio Art points to the work of the Brazilian theorist Oscar Masotta, who first referred to the notion of “dematerialization” in a 1967 lecture entitled “Despues del Pop: Nosotros Desmaterializamos.” Lippard was known to have met Masotta on her visit to Brazil in 1968, but never cited his lecture in her own work. I thank Jens Hauser for bringing this to my attention. See Lippard 1973, Masotta 1990, and Kac 2005. 10. See Artaud 1958 for a further discussion, as well as Derrida 1980 for a critique of Artaud’s critique of representation. 11. See Varela et al. 1991. 12. For another take on Varela and performance focusing on his and Humberto Maturana’s notion of autopoiesis, see Fischer-Lichte 2004, 61. 13. In the realm of performance studies, see, for example, McKenzie 2001, Auslander 2002, and Sussman 1999. 14. See Latour 1993. 15. Science “studies” infatuation with performance has recently come under criticism, particularly from feminist critics. See Herzig 2004 and Thompson 2005. 16. Callon 1998; Callon 2006. 17. For a brief introduction to SSK, see Biagioli 1999. 18. As ANT has been the subject of much argument and debate, Latour has attempted to describe it as well as the erroneous readings that have been made. In particular, Latour strongly opposes the idea that ANT is a theory, but instead suggests that it is a method (much like performance theory sees performance as a method). See Latour 2005 for a further analysis of this aspect of ANT. 19. Barad’s use of the word “post-humanist” differs from Pickering’s, owing much to Donna Haraway’s idea of the cyborg or simian. 20. While the word posthumanism seems mainly appropriated to describe a decentering of the human subject through technology, a glance at other societies that do not make cuts between the human and natural worlds suggests that posthumanism might be a strange choice of words.

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21. See, for example, the debate between Auslander and Blau concerning the attribution of nonhuman agency to a machine (Auslander and Blau 2002). 22. Although the word entanglement originally derives from quantum mechanics, I use the anthropological understanding of the term. See Thomas 1991 for a discussion as well as Callon 2006. 23. See McCullough 2004 for a further discussion of “situatedness” in architectural terms. 24. See Dixon 2007 and Laurel 1993. 25. See Harrigan and Wardrip-Fruin 2004 and 2007, Laurel 1993, and Murray 1998 for this perspective. 26. For example, Birringer 1989 and 1998, Rush 2005, and Carlson 1996 all focus on stage-based work with technology from a visual or projection-based “media” perspective. 27. See, for example, the debate between Phelan 2003 and Auslander 2002. 28. See Jaspers 1953 and 1963 and Heidegger 1977. 29. There is much that unites Guattari’s notion of the machinic with Latour’s networks and collectives, although the two supposedly never met. See Stengers 2000 for a discussion of the resonances between each. 30. A case in point is the exemplary New Media Reader from MIT, which although quite comprehensive, has little in it representing the history of the performing arts. Better is Randall Packer’s and Ken Jordan’s Multimedia: From Wagner to Virtual Reality (2001), which does feature many more texts from artists involved in performance practices (e.g., Wagner, Moholy-Nagy, Marinetti, Klüver, Cage, and Paik). 31. See Munster 2006 for a discussion of Laurel’s notion of embodiment within the realm of simulations. 32. In Computers as Theater, Laurel devotes a small part of the text to recognizing the achievements of avant-garde theater artists like the Living Theater, Peter Brook, Jerzy Grotowski, Robert Wilson, and John Cage who experimented with performances that “began to dissolve the boundaries between actors and audience by placing both in the same space.” Laurel’s analysis here, however, focuses on the contributions of these artists to the ongoing dialogue of interaction and not about questions of human-machine embodiment and materiality. See Laurel 1993, 52. 1

Space 1: Scene/Machine (1876–1933)

1. See Banham 1960, 2. 2. The innovations that Wagner introduced in the Festspielhaus were not all entirely original. During a period conducting in Riga, Latvia, between 1837 and 1839, Wagner became fascinated by some of the innovations implemented in a small theater there; in particular, a steeply raked seating arena, an orchestra that was situated slightly below the stage floor line of sight, and perhaps most importantly, a slight dimming of lighting during performances. Although the dimming of house lights was already common in nineteenth-century Italian public theaters and had as well

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been proposed by the great German architect Karl Friedrich Schinkel, in practice few of these techniques had reached the German stage. Wagner had also been impressed by the theatrical magic of Garnier’s Paris Opera in 1840, when during a concert rehearsal, he sat in a separate, screened-off area, not seeing the orchestra, which would have distracted from the power of the dramatic presentation. See Spotts 1994, 30. 3. See Spots 1994 for more detail concerning the exact acoustic attributes that Wagner had installed in Bayreuth. 4. “In itself, lighting is an element that can produce unlimited effects; restored to its freedom, it becomes for us what the palette is for the painter . . . through projections that can be simple or complex, stationary or shifting, through partial obstruction, through varying gradations of transparency, we can obtain an infinite number of modulations” (Bablet 1982, 43). 5. The Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation), a state-supported federation, was founded in 1907 by architect and former director of the Prussian Board of Trade for Schools of Arts and Crafts, Hermann Muthesius. Influenced by the English Arts and Crafts movement in the nineteenth century, which aimed to restore the role of the craftsman in the shadow of the industrial revolution, Muthesius hoped to couple artistic and design activity with industry in an effort to ensure a competitive role for Germany in mass industrial production in the early twentieth century against the encroaching economic dominance of the United States. 6. Although Marinetti’s interest in performance was explicitly announced in his earliest manifestos, the Futurists originally turned to theater, less because of the artistic possibilities it offered but instead for its inherent publicness—its ability to stir an audience in real time and real space and to act as a weapon in the political and artistic fight for a total renewal of public life in Italy. Early manifestos such as “The Pleasure of Being Booed” (1911) mainly critiqued traditional forms of theater and begin to propose the literary equivalent of a new form of Futurist drama. Performance as event is given a tertiary priority, however, with little mention of technology or of methods for realization. 7. See Berghaus 1998, 253–259. 8. To demonstrate Prampolini’s hatred of representational theater forced on by the anachronism of the proscenium, we just have to cite the following: “Do directors think that it is absolutely necessary to represent reality?? Fools! Don’t you realize that your efforts and unnecessary preoccupation with realism only diminish the intensity and decrease the emotional content.” See Berghaus 1998, 264–290, for further discussion. 9. These attempts by Prampolini included trying to get Diaghilev to engage him for the Ballets Russes at the same time as Balla worked on Feu d’Artifice. 10. See Gordon 1992, 210–219, for a further discussion of Khlebnikov’s sound poetry. 11. Derived from Cubism, Malevich’s notion of Suprematism was guided by elementary, basic geometrical forms (e.g., the square). Searching for a kind of “supremacy of pure emotion,” Suprematism emphasized the exploration of a nonobjective, nonrepresentation world that aimed to find analogous equivalents to lived experience in the modern world. See Lodder 1983, 251, for a more detailed description.

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12. The urgency of the streets was also amplified in massive outdoor stagings of key events in the Russian Revolution. For example, the stage director and theorist Annenkov collaborated with Evreninov on one of the largest outdoor theatrical events in recorded history, The Storming of The Winter Palace, which featured a cast of 6,000 actors, 500 musicians, and over 100,000 spectators. See Baer 1991, 72–73. 13. See Braun 1979, 74, for the differences between cinema and theater in Russia during Meyerhold’s time. 14. See Baer 1991, 41. 15. Having been left without a theater after the closure of the R.S.F.S.R. No. 1 due to shifts in economic and cultural policy with the implementation of Lenin’s New Economic Policy in 1921, Meyerhold was searching Constructivist practice for not only aesthetic innovations but also pragmatic ones—for instance, how to create a freestanding, freely moveable scenic structure that could be easily transported and set up in a variety of physical environments. See Baer 1991, 47. 16. The Magnanimous Cuckold had more far-reaching implications, particularly within the harsh economic and social climate of the struggling revolutionary republic: If the young Russian republic was too poor to erect Constructivist towers, skyscrapers, glass palaces, clubs in the shape of screws, etc., the days of new structures had not yet arrived. But in the theater the ideas of the Constructivists were realized with the aid of ordinary boards and common (although in equally short supply) nails. Furthermore, the absence of real cement, concrete, iron, and glass and the very poverty of this Republic, which was racing forwards into the future, stimulated with unusual energy the appearance of Constructivist stage machinery. Stage Constructivism was a sort of realization of the artists’ dream of the future, of a technology that would bring the country from poverty into the mechanized, electrified finely organized kingdom of socialism. (Rudnitsky 1981, 293)

17. See Braun 1979, 240. 18. See Gordon 1975. 19. With the normalization of relations with Russia through the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920, Germany and Berlin, in particular, became Europe’s center for an outpouring of Russian artists and their ideas. Additionally, cultural exchange policies of through the IAH (International Workers’ Aid) organization created for the express purpose of opening up exchange between German and Russian cultural workers, guaranteed a steady stream of the most current Russian films, literature and art into Germany. 20. See Willett 1978a and 1984. 21. See Mansbach 1978. 22. See Lesák 1988b for Taut’s background and his connection between Expressionism and architecture. 23. See Lesák 1988a, 78. In her description of Kiesler’s set, Rose Lee Goldberg ([1976] 1988) states that Kiesler was anticipating television. Of course, there was no television at the time, but whether Kiesler anticipated it remains unclear.

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24. As Kiesler wrote in 1923, “R.U.R. was the first attempt to design an electro-mechanical scenery. The fixed scenery has become alive, an active part in the play. De la nature morte vivante. The means to fill the stage with life are: movement of lines, sharp contrasts of colors, the transformation of surfaces toward reliefs and curved human forms (actors). There is the interplay of moving lights of various colors on the scenery, in rhythm according to speech intonation and the movement of the actors” (Kiesler Foundation n.d.). 25. See Lesák 1988a for detailed information in German and English on the concept of the Raumbühne. 26. The sole realized outdoor architecture work realized by Kiesler was the Shrine of the Book in Jerusalem, a museum housing the Dead Sea Scrolls. 27. Kiesler’s use of the word endless was used to describe his later utopian projects such as the Endless House and the Endless Theater. In particular, the Endless or Universal Theater, conceived in 1924 but never built was envisioned as the ideal performance environment of the future: an eggshaped shell of reinforced concrete, steel and glass where the stage would be in the shape of an endless spiral whose levels would be linked by elevators, platforms and ramps. As the ultimate realization of the raumbühne, the Endless Theater would be without proscenium, projecting itself out into an audience who would essentially no longer be separate from the stage space. For Kiesler, Endless was not simply an architectural invocation but rather, a philosophical construct that preoccupied the architect till the end of his life. “The Endless House is called endless because all ends meet, and meet continuously. It is endless like the human body—there is no beginning and no end to it. The endless is rather sensuous, more like the female body in contrast to sharp-angled male architecture” (Kiesler 2003, 67). 28. See Otwell 1997 for a longer description of Kiesler’s more commercially oriented design practice. 29. Although the Lumière brothers also integrated live action into their first cinematic presentation, Piscator was the first to consciously use projected media for direct political commentary and as a dramaturgical device. See Giesakam 2007, 39–50. 30. It is unknown whether Meyerhold or Piscator knew that the other was also utilizing projection devices in the early 1920s, a point that Piscator later articulated in his only theoretical work, The Political Theater (1931): “Later it was often maintained that I got the idea from the Russians. In fact, I was quite ignorant of what was happening on the Soviet stage at this time-very little news about performances and so on came to us . . . in any case, the question of priority is irrelevant. It would merely prove that this was no superficial game with technical effects, but a new emergent form of theater based on the philosophy of historical materialism which we shared” (Piscator 1978, 93). 31. Upon leaving Germany in 1931, Piscator went first to Russia to make films and eventually emigrated to the United States, where he taught at the New School and at the New York Playwrights workshop. As one of the few German exiles to come back to Germany (along with Bertolt Brecht), Piscator returned to West Germany in 1948 and continued to direct new productions until his death in 1966.

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32. If Piscator’s embracing of a capitalist technological apparatus to convey revolutionary socialist sentiments appears at first to be contradictory, the director too addressed this issue in The Political Theater: It is not by mere chance that in an age whose technological achievements tower above its achievements in every other field that the stage should become highly technical. And it is not by mere chance that this technical innovation should receive an impetus from a sector that is in conflict with the social order. Intellectual and social revolutions have always been closely bound up with technical upheavals. And a change in the function of theater was inconceivable without bringing the stage equipment up to date. (Piscator 1978, 189)

33. See Gropius 1961, 10–14. 34. In the Bauhaus curriculum, Gropius aimed to fuse the fine and applied arts, organizing varying disciplines such as printmaking, painting, metal work, weaving, bookbinding, and sculpture into workshop form under two specific categories: Formlehre (fine art) and Werklehre (applied art), each taught by an artist (Formlehre) and a master craftsman (Werklehre). Thus, students were exposed to both approaches in order to set the conditions for a so-called fusion to take place in their actual practice. 35. Regarding Loew’s mechanical stage: “It would seem that a task for the future would be to develop a technical personnel as important as the actors, one whose job it would be to bring this apparatus into view in its peculiar and novel beauty, undisguised and as an end in itself” (Gropius 1961, 84). 36. In fact, Meyerhold, who was also planning a similar flexible structure with variable performance areas and multiple projection points and angles in Moscow, met with Gropius in 1930 and had been inspired to incorporate features of the Total-Theater into his own design—one that was also never realized. 37. Essentially a string of disconnected narratives, Claire’s virtuoso film, which he referred to as “visual babblings,” made use of a number of cinematic techniques, including slow motion, superimposition, rapid tempo shifts, and stop and start motion effects. A hearse carried by a camel, a game of chess between Duchamp and Man Ray on a roof, and a ballerina (Picabia) revealed to be a bearded man were only some of the narrative treats awaiting the audience during the intermission. 2

Space 2: Media Scenographies (1950–)

1. The literature on Svoboda in English translation is little and what currently exists was mainly done by the late Czech theater historian Jarka Burian. See Burian 1971 and 1983 as well as Svoboda 1993. 2. See Burian 1983, 57–59. 3. Such lighting techniques were put to high effect in a series of German productions in the mid 1960s in which Svoboda generated a series of kinetic stage spaces that oscillated between

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immaterial and solid constructions. In his 1967 production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in Wiesbaden, Germany, which featured a single spiral ramp in the center of the space and a cyclorama constructed from thousands of closely bunched together vertical strings, Svoboda managed to construct a huge column of light in the center of the space through a combination of a circular array of low voltage footlights projecting onto finely sprayed electrostatically charged aerosol particles, which would cling to the airborne dust. See Burian 1971, 65–66. 4. See Brehms n.d. 5. The German cultural critic Bazon Brock was quoted as stating “Whoever wants to see a thoroughly organized, totalitarian ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ today has to travel to the new EPCOT Disneyland or to satellite towns around Paris. Whoever wants to experience a ‘gesamtkunstwerk’ will find what he is looking for in Wagner’s works, in those of the followers of the Big Bang theory or in the nightly TV marathons” (Hattinger 1988). 6. See Aronson 1981, 499–500. 7. “I imagined the branches of the mobiles in movement and saw the end sections of these branches, the colored shapes, transformed into small mobile convex rooms which would move in all three dimensions, surrounded vertically and horizontally at 360 degrees, by a performance which was itself moving in the three dimensions.” Sadin 1999, 31–32. 8. Aronson 1981, 501–502. 9. See Flusser 2002, 70–74. 10. From Towards a Poor Theater: This [relationship] challenges the notion of theater as a synthesis of disparate creative disciplines—literature, sculpture, painting, architecture, lighting, acting (under the direction of a metteur en scène). This “synthetic theater” is the contemporary theater, which we readily call the “Rich Theater”—rich in flaws. The Rich Theater depends on artistic kleptomania, drawing from other disciplines, constructing hybridspectacles, conglomerated without backbone or integrity, yet presented as an organic artwork. By multiplying assimilated elements, the Rich Theater tries to escape the impasse presented by movies and television. Since film and TV excel in the areas of mechanical functions (montage, instantaneous change of place, etc.), the Rich Theater countered with a blatant compensatory call for “total theater.” The integration of borrowed mechanisms (movie screens onstage, for example) means a sophisticated technical plant, permitting great mobility and dynamism. And if the stage and/or auditorium were mobile, constantly changing perspective would be possible. This is all nonsense. No matter how much the theater expands and exploits its mechanical resources, it will remain technologically inferior to film and television. Consequently, I propose poverty in the theater. (Grotowski 1968, 19)

11. See Schechner 1973, 3–4. 12. Born with a speech impediment, Wilson’s development of slow motion in his productions was partially based on his work with a dancer (Ms. Byrd Hoffman) to slow down his movement. See S. Brecht 1978, 13–18, and Rockwell 1980. 13. See Shier 1986. 14. See Foreman n.d.

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15. Brecht’s use of the German word Verfremdungseffekt has usually been translated as “alienation effect.” Its original meaning, however, derives from the Russian formalist writer Viktor Shklovsky’s use of the term ostranie, literally translated as “to make strange” or defamiliarize. See B. Brecht 1978, 136–140. 16. Using perspectival shifts continually alternating between close range and long shot spatial configurations, performers and spectators alike were confronted with each other almost face to face and then just as suddenly, in a 25-meter depth of space described as “the shock effect of a vista disappearing into darkness.” See Foreman 1985. 17. ”The strings have something to do with what happens when you’re sketching and don’t know quite what you want to draw, you don’t know how to draw, and you scratch out energetic lines, you feel a thrust, a direction, and then from this tendency grows a face or a house or whatever it is” (Bernstein 1992, 122). 18. Marranca and Goldberg both have extensive comments about the high “tech-ness” of the theater of images. See Marranca 1977 and Goldberg 2004. 19. Wilson’s impact in Europe was nothing short of remarkable, with Surrealist Louis Aragon writing to André Breton that Wilson’s Deathman Glance was “what others such as ourselves of whom surrealism was born, have dreamed would emerge after us” (S. Brecht 1978, 50). 20. Wonder achieved a suitable degree of notoriety in the German-speaking theater world with his radical designs for the late East German writer and director Heiner Müller. For a 1982 production of Müller’s text The Task (Der Auftrag) in the industrial West German steel town of Bochum, for example, Wonder, treating Müller’s text as a kind of spoken noise, erected an elaborate glass tube-shaped cylinder spanning the back of the theater to the lip of the proscenium and bisecting the audience space in two parts. During the performance, which could be glimpsed from the audience only from a triangular hole cut into the proscenium, a swinging piano hung on aircraft cable and swung across the stage while real rain, snow, and firestorms occurred. Wonder’s coup de théâtre was a live black panther that paced up and down inside the tube, leaving its scent for the audience to experience close-up. See Riddell 1980 and Wonder 2002. 21. The goal of running multiple productions simultaneously ran into a wall when it was discovered that the expensive modular walls used to divide the space up were acoustically not soundproofed. Personal conversation with former Schaubühne sound engineer and composer Hans Peter Kuhn, December 1993. 22. Squat’s questioning of the fixed spectator’s gaze onto a simultaneously live and technically mediated performance already foreshadowed the 1990s era of reality TV shows while also harkening back to the tropes of theater history. “This frontal view—the Italian stage, not without irony— exhausts every aspect of the arrangement, every illusory perspective—because nothing can be more illusory than the real rendered theatrical without the artifice of its own reconstruction on a painted canvas. Life, forced to be looked at from both angles, is captured on the ‘backdrop’ ” (Buchmuller and Koós 1996, 102–103). 23. “It’s as if suddenly there’s movie music and you’re in the movie and you’re standing in the scene; it’s almost that vivid. That’s how strong stereo imaging can be. I realized that if I connected this powerful audio experience to the physical world, a person could be in the movie . . . the tape

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could tell them to sit down and they would sit down . . . and they would realize that they are actually performing . . . it’s an amazing new position for the audience to be in” (Shank 2002, 289). 24. See Coates n.d. 25. A detailed examination of Lepage’s tour technical riders reveals just what kind of technology Lepage has used, which included the standard tools of any large theater houses. 26. The essence of the theater as “the meeting point for all the arts,” involves a response to fields outside of the theater; “to gathering what is happening in every field of art, not only in acting, but also in writing, in music, in architecture, in everything” (Lepage 1997, 218). 27. See Lehmann 2006. 28. See Irwin and Eda Cˇufer 2000. 29. Dumb Type founding members included Teiji Furuhashi, Shiro Takatani, Toru Koyamada, Yukihiro Hozumi, Takayuki Fujimoto, and Hiromasa Tomari. 30. This point is acutely stressed by the production’s set of central questions, posed to the audience at the start of 036 Pleasure Life: Just how do they communicate with each other in this systematized life in the Colony? How do they learn the systems of this society? How do they express their love? What does pleasure mean to them? What about life? Technology has in many ways created a network covering the globe, making the world smaller, and sending information tens of thousands of miles, from point A to point B, in just a few seconds. In reality, however, when we try to communicate, for example, the few words “I love you,” just these words, we are forced to realize the vast distances that lie between us. (Dumb Type n.d.)

31. Personal experience at rehearsals, Salzburg 1994. Coop Himmelb(l)au reworked the design for a remounting of the production at the Netherlands Opera in the fall of 1994. A more recent experiment with architects working within the opera production framework was the scenography of the star Swiss architects Herzog and De Meuron for a 2006 production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde at the Staatsoper in Berlin. The architects designed a rubber membrane that stretched across the back of the stage and could easily through the aid of vacuum pumps change its form over the course of the opera. See http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/arts/music/29gure .html?pagewanted=2&_r=1. 32. See Goldberg 2004, 203–220. 3

Performative Architectures

1. Prix 2005, 25 (my translation). 2. Ibid., 46. See also Papadakis 1990, 65. 3. See Archisculpture 2004. 4. See Hannah and Khan 2008, 4–5. 5. I am indebted in this analysis to architect and professor Patrick Harrop for his observations about duration and rhythm in structures without direct mechanical movement.

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6. Vitruvius 2001. 7. “Performance and architecture find their mutual site in theater auditoria where performance is literally housed. These auditoria bring together theater as art form, fleeting acts of dramatic practice that use ephemeral materials and disposable elements, and theater as built form, a stable environment conceived to persist beyond the events it houses.” See Hannah and Khan 2008, 5. 8. Tschumi’s own early teaching at the Architectural Association in London in the mid 1970s was strongly affected by his connection to the performance scene taking place at the Royal College of Art, run at the time by curator and performance historian Rose Lee Goldberg. See Kaji-O’Grady 2008, 43–51. 9. See Spiller 2006 and Burden 1999. 10. Despite their references to psychology and “the economy of psychic energy” that was an integral part of the “spatial and functional aspects of building,” the ASNOVA architects proposed experimental structures that attempted, as Lissitzky phrased it in his work Russia: An Architecture for World Revolution, to “elaborate new methods for scientific-objective elucidation of the elements of architectural design—such as mass, surface, space, proportion, rhythm, etc.” (Lissitzky 1984, 30). Such imagined and unrealized structures, like Lissitzky’s Wolkenbügel (sky hook) that was composed of two horizontally formed skyscrapers or Ladovsky’s plan for a glass restaurant precariously poised on the edge of a cliff, appeared, however, to resemble the context of other European modernist schools like De Stijl and the Bauhaus, rather than the specific political-social context that was post–October Russia. 11. Chernikov was an outsider, both to the Moscow scene and VKHUTEMAS, in particular, being more influenced by the rigorous formal abstractionism of Suprematist thinking than by the calculated, technological fetishism of Ginzburg and other “proper” Constructivists. “The fundamental notion of constructivism is that we unite objects or bodies with each other in such a way that they constitute a complete, harmonious form which conveys a quite specific and defined impression to our brain” (Cooke 1984, 58). 12. “An Archigram project,” wrote member David Greene, “provides a new agenda where nomadism is the dominant social force; where time, exchange and metamorphosis replace stasis; where consumption, lifestyle and transience become the programme; and where the public realm is an electronic surface enclosing the globe” (Spiller 2006, 72). 13. British architectural historian Banham’s 1965 essay “A Home Is Not a House” was a seminal theoretical document in the mid 1960s for architects like Archigram, particularly in Banham’s observations about the role of the technical environment in architecture that was increasingly being subjected to “a mechanical invasion.” See Banham 1965. 14. I thank Patrick Harrop for his description of Matta-Clark’s architecturally motivated framework for intervention in Splitting. 15. See Jencks 2002. 16. These concepts also arose in Fuller’s transfer of the Dymaxion idea into the even more dynamic, mobile context of 1930s U.S. automobile culture through his lightweight, aerodynamic Dymaxion

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transport units: a fully efficient, aerodynamic, tear drop–shaped vehicle whose form was inspired by the aeronautics of ducks in flight. See Fuller and Marks 1973, 25. 17. See Goulthorpe n.d. for more specifics, including models of the partially built structure, exhibited at the German electronics trade show CEBIT in 2004. 18. See Fritz 2008. 19. In 1989, Bernard Tschumi’s unbuilt competition entry for the ZKM (Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie) in Karlsruhe, Germany also imagined the use of large-scale, building-sized video surfaces. See Papadakis 1990, 32–37. 20. The Spots façade deployed 1774 circular and tube lamps with a refresh rate of twenty times a second to generate higher-resolution images than those displayed in BIX. See realities:united n.d. 21. See UN Studio n.d. 4 The Projected Image: Video, Film, and the Performative Screen 1. See Sadin 1999, 36. 2. See Rehm 2003, 22–23. 3. See Keeler 1987. 4. See Cubitt 2004, 42–69, and Giesekam 2007, 27–32. 5. See http://www.libraryindex.com/pages/1305/American-Consumer-RISE-CONSUMERCULTURE.html. Accessed August 26, 2008. 6. See Hall and Fifer 1990 and Cubitt 1991. 7. Again, this reference to theatricality harkens back to Michael Fried’s criticisms of the blurring of self-sufficient boundaries in the visual arts through movements like minimalism and theater. 8. Rosler, among others has a strong critique of the male dominated mythic “origins” of video art. See Hall and Fifer 1990. 9. For more on the Nam June Paik Portapak myth, see http://marotzki.blogspot.com/2007/01/ video-art-ber-nam-june-paik.html. Accessed September 2, 2009. 10. Across the historical literature, there are contradictory statements about the exact number of monitors that Paik used in the exhibit. See Paik 1991. 11. See Serres 2007. 12. Vasulka archive VAB34-C6. 13. “The music in particular carried a similar kind of schism; on the one hand, it was technological, represented by people working with synthesizers or certain textures of sound, generated by machines. On the other hand, it was an almost theatrical rejection of established musical conventions of performing. It was difficult to separate these tendencies within new music. Our

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personal interest was performing video. Very soon, we understood the generic relationship of video to other electronic arts, and this realization became our guiding policy” (Vasulka and Vasulka 1977). 14. See Etra and Rutt 1992. 15. MIDI stands for “Musical Instrument Digital Interface.” 16. Perhaps Viola’s idea of video revealing the self reached its ultimate infantilization in the Internet era with the early JenniCam, and, later, video-based social networking sites like YouTube and Vimeo, where exhibitionism of quotidian behavior that would reveal the “self” became the norm. 17. See Wilcox 1996 and Svoboda 1993. 18. One of the premiere alternative media centers, Video Free America was occupied with similar artistic concerns like their East Coast counterparts at The Kitchen. Although both Ginsberg and Sweeney had theater backgrounds, they were, like many other artists, drawn to the performative possibilities inherent in video technologies early on; particularly, in the aesthetic potential of live imaging processes like feedback and working with monitors in a sculptural context. Interestingly, Sweeney had long wanted to integrate media into theatrical performance contexts, inspired by the use of the tape recorder in Samuel Beckett’s short solo play Krapps Last Tape. See Napoleon 1991 for more details. 19. Personal conversation with Skip Sweeney, March 2006, and Carl Weber, March 2006. 20. In fact, VFA had already shown their long-running San Francisco–based underground video documentary soap opera, The Continuing Story of Carel and Ferd at The Kitchen in 1972 while working at Chelsea. Moreover, in a recent discussion with Steina Vasulka (December 2007) about the early days of The Kitchen, she recalled Weber’s Kaspar as being important in transferring video techniques into the more established theatrical realms. 21. Working conversation with Farabough, February 1996. 22. See http://www.e-felix.org/issue3/Jesurun.html. Accessed April 23, 2007. 23. Having worked with Sellars as a directing assistant on several occasions and having seen both of the productions described, I have had numerous discussions with him concerning the use of video within a theater stage context. The information concerning St. François—in particular, the original plans for the JumboTron—come directly from conversations with him. 24. See Kirby 1976 for details on Schechner’s Marilyn Project. 25. Personal conversation with Chris Kondek, March 2006. 26. Ibid., March 2006. 27. See http://www.icinema.unsw.edu.au/projects/prj_wooster.html. 28. See Studio Azzurro n.d. 29. Ibid. 30. See Betsky 2004.

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31. Although the use of projected images has not been restricted to the West, its European origin rests in the use of crude projection devices dating back to the Middle Ages and later, to the work of Italian Giovanni Baptista della Porta and, most notably, the German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher’s description of the magic lantern or Laterna Magika, an earlier predecessor to slide projection. Nonetheless it is disputed whether Kircher actually built the device that he described in the treatise Ars Magna Lucis et Umbrae or instead gave an account of an already existing invention. Kircher’s magic lantern depicted a system constructed of either a parabolic or cylindrically shaped mirror with an adjustable lens that could be used to reflect sunlight and thereby create an image on a surface. While these later nineteenth-century image machineries such as the Laterna Magika or Sciopticon, the Phantasmagoria, the Panorama, the Daguerreotype, the Diorama, Dissolving Views (the use of two or more projectors set up to dissolve between alternative versions of the same image), the Tanagra device, and Edison’s Kinetoscope, among many others, have thoroughly been documented by Western-driven archaeological and image science (Bildwissenschaft) histories of media, the technical, conceptual, and perceptual impact of projected images in a live performance context has gone relatively unexplored. See Grau 2003, Huhtamo 2004, Zielinski 2006, and Oetterman 1997. 32. See Mildenberger 1961, Kranich 1929–1933, and Giesekam 2007. 33. See Baer 1991 and Braun 1979. 34. “But where live scenes waste time with explanations, dialogues, action, film can illuminate the situation in the play with a few quick shots; troops’ mutiny-abandoned weapons; the Revolution has broken out—a red flag on a speeding car” (Piscator 1978, 238). 35. See Federal Theater Project Collection n.d. 36. Burian 1971, 85. 37. See Whitman 2005. 38. See Packer n.d. 39. See http://www.ontological.com. 40. The profession of projection design in the United States had already begun in earnest in the mid 1960s when lighting designer Richard Pilbrow devised projected images with designer Tony Walton for the 1964 Broadway musical version of Clifford Odet’s Golden Boy. 41. Projection design was not acknowledged as a legitimate profession by the main stage designers union in the United States (United Scenic Artists) until February 2008. See McElroy 2008. 42. For example, in the first ten years of the BAM’s Next Wave Festival, perhaps the premiere American venue for large-scale, high-profile experimental performance in the 1980s and 1990s, seven major productions from artists such as Squat, Impossible Theater, Steve Reich and Beryl Korot, Laurie Anderson, and others featured large-scale projections. 43. Peter Sellars directed the actors, but the sheer resolution of the image coupled with the scene suggested that his Noh-like staging could have easily been reduced to the singers sitting in a circle—to the equivalent of a staged reading—this was the case in a more successful “partially staged” version called the Tristan Project in Los Angeles in 2004.

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44. According to Stern, the technological lineup for “The World” featured thirty programmed slide projectors and one of the earliest Eidophor black-and-white video projectors, similar to what Svoboda had access to for his 1965 Boston production of Intolleranza. “We had, I think, around the whole hangar about thirty slide screens, and we also had one of the first video projectors. It was black and white, and it was an Idofor [sic], a Swiss machine; it could deliver an image which was, I think, about twenty-five feet across, and we had three cameras that could take–for instance, the jiggling behind of a young girl on the dance floor, blow it up across that whole screen, or back off and take practically the whole dance floor.” See Calisphere n.d. 45. See Cage n.d. 46. See Svoboda 1993. 47. See Roads 2001 for a description of granular synthesis. 48. Personal conversation with the artist, July 2007. 49. See Skoltz-Kolgen n.d. 50. See http://cycling74.com and http://www.image-ine.org. 51. Conversation with the artist, Berlin 2006. 52. See D-Fuse 2006. 5

Sound

1. See Sterne 2002, Kahn 2001, and Thompson 2004. 2. Dodecaphonic, twelve-tone, or serial music refers to a system of procedures by which each of the twelve chromatic tones of the equal-tempered scale are utilized in a strict rule-based fashion as the central building blocks of an extremely systematized composition process. The structure of the tone row or the prime (twelve nonrepeating tones) was then duplicated three times as the retrograde (the backward row), the inversion, and the inversion-retrograde. In essence, the rule-driven process of using the tone row, its inversion, and its backward flow might even stand as an early notion of algorithmic process in composition. 3. Other exotic instruments included the strangely named AOMIEOT, an acronym for “Automatically Operating Musical Instrument of the Electric Oscillation Type” from Edouard Coupleaux and Joseph Givelet (1929); the Superpiano from Emerick Spielmann, which used photoelectric cells that generated changes in pitch; and the Rangertone organ, introduced in 1931. See Holmes 1985, 30–54. 4. See Kittler 1999 for further discussion on the phantasmic qualities of tele-technologies. 5. The purity of tone arising from the Teleharmonium was unsurprising, considering the fact that the device created sinusoidal and square wave–like sounds. 6. Heterodyning is a process in which two different but ultrasonic oscillators produce interference or beat frequencies between the two frequencies at an audible range. 7. See http://120years.net/machines/trautonium/.

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8. Interestingly, in 1938, Johanna Magdalena Beyer, another female composer who was born in Germany, immigrated to New York, and worked with composer Henry Cowell, had written an opera (Status Quo) in which one movement entitled “Music for the Spheres” was scored for “electric instruments,” making it one of the earliest composed electronic works. See Kennedy and Polansky, 1996, 749–750. 9. In addition to the instrument named for him, Theremin also developed other devices, including the Terpsitone, a larger platform-like instrument in which pitch and amplitude could be controlled by a dancer’s body, making it one of the earliest sensor-driven dance interfaces. See Mason 1936, 365. The original Theremin would not only feature prominently in Hollywood soundtracks, but later gain a mass audience after the Beach Boys used it in the song “Good Vibrations” in 1966. For a complete history of Theremin’s KGB background and associated espionage, see Glinsky 2000. 10. See Helmholtz 1954, 12. 11. See Treib 1996, 194, for Frits Philip’s quote that Varèse’s music was not “representative” of Philips and the Western World. 12. See Treib 1996 for a complete description of the pavilion’s interior, particularly of the films that Le Corbusier integrated onto the walls. 13. It is still a point of dispute exactly how many speakers were used in the pavilion. Reports range from 300–400, with 325 being one of more accurate quotes. 14. Schaeffer’s perception of the studio as a compositional environment through its the ability to record and shape sound through its technical apparatuses would be echoed some thirty years later by musician Brian Eno in a famous lecture entitled “Pro Session: The Studio as Compositional Tool.” “You’re working directly with sound, and there’s no transmission loss between you and the sound—you handle it. It puts the composer in the identical position of the painter—he’s working directly with a material, working directly onto a substance, and he always retains the options to chop and change, to paint a bit out, add a piece, etc.” See Eno [1979] 2004. 15. The word acousmatic refers to sound that lacks a visual source as the origin, only referring to its own essence. See Chion 1994 for a discussion. 16. Another famous site, the Italy-based Studio di Fonoglia at the state-supported radio and television studios of RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane—or Italian Public Broadcasting), in Milan, was founded in 1951 and directed by Luciano Berio and Bruno Maderna, two major composers who would increasingly incorporate electronic sound manipulation into their compositional practices. Indeed, Maderna has the distinction of being one of first composers to realize a work for traditional instruments together with electronic tape: Musica su due dimensioni, which premiered at Darmstadt in 1954. Maderna’s work, however, would soon be eclipsed by the dozens of composers, from Varèse to Stockhausen, Berio, and Babbitt, for whom tape and instrumental music would fuse. See Salzman 2002, 152–155. 17. Pioneer computer music composer, improviser and scholar George Lewis has articulately pointed out that many of Cage’s ideas concerning indeterminacy and spontaneity were already richly embedded in African and African American musical traditions such as bebop and jazz, but oddly

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enough have been ignored both by Cage himself (particularly through his decidedly racist comments on “hot jazz”) and the retinue of music scholars and critics that followed his work. See Lewis 1996, 91–121. 18. In his work on the arts after Cage, art historian Branden Joseph perceptively describes Cage’s “aesthetic of immanence”; the attempt “to insert indeterminacy into the relation between composer and performer . . . to eliminate as much as possible from the acoustical experience the creation of any abstract form that could be received as existing on a level above, beyond, or outside of the immanent realm.” See Joseph 2008, 77–82. 19. Composed while Cage was accompanying dance classes at the Cornish College in Seattle, Imaginary Landscape #1 still counts as one of the early works to use live electronic manipulation of existing, previously recorded material. 20. For more information about Tudor’s real time electronic compositions, see Gray n.d. 21. See http://www.emf.org/tudor/Articles/cie_buffalo.html#altering. 22. Composers Inside Electronics included such future luminaries as the installation artist Paul De Marinis and the video artist Bill Viola. See ibid. 23. In addition to better-known artists like Tudor and Berio, ONCE introduced younger experimental composers La Monte Young, David Behrman, then-emerging Fluxus musician Philip Corner, the New York–based Judson Dance Theater, and even jazz whiz Eric Dolphy, in addition to presenting work from its composer-founders. 24. Such operatic attempts included works from composers such as Hans Werner Henze (The Bassiards, El Cimarron, We Come to the River), Luigi Nono (Intolleranza, Promoteo), Bernard Allois Zimmerman (Die Soldaten), Luciano Berio (Passagio, Traces, Laborintus II, Opera), Henri Posseur (Votre Faust), Sylvanio Bussotti (La Passion selon Sade, Lorenzaccio), Harrison Birtwistle (Punch and Judy, The Mask of Orpheus), and later, György Ligeti (Le Grande Macabre). 25. More recent research has revealed that Stockhausen had planned more technically ambitious theatrical projects during the 1960s that were never realized, including a spectacular event entitled Projektion in which a massive orchestra would have played with prerecorded video images of itself. See Toop 1998 for a full discussion. 26. See Griffiths 1981 for further descriptions. 27. Key Fluxus participants included musicians and artists such as George Brecht, George Maciunas, Yoko Ono, La Monte Young, Nam June Paik, Philip Corner, Terry Riley, Takehisa Kosugi, Toshi Ichiyanagi, Dick Higgins, Alison Knowles, Charlotte Moorman, and Richard Maxfield. 28. ONCE’s combining of musical and theatrical performance was repeated by dozens of other similar composers and collectives, including Eric Salzman’s Quog Music Theater, founded in 1969 and dedicated to exploring the “problems of performance” through a fusion of media, music, and social improvisation techniques; the early psychedelic-inspired theatrical works of electronic composer Morton Subotnick, such as Theater Piece After Petrarchs Sonnet Number 47 (1961) and Ritual Electronic Chamber Music (1968); the Polish composer Boguslaw Schäffer; the work of Americans

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Donald Erb, Ronald Pelligrino, and Salvatore Martirano; as well as the colossal urban spectacles of Robert Moran, whose vast projects such as 39 Minutes for 39 Autos (1969) and Hallelujah (1971) involved thousands of participants in large-scale, citywide events. See Salzman 2002 and Cope 2001, 114–124. 29. See Del Farra 2006, 136. 30. Formed in Italy in 1966 by American composers Alvin Curran, Frederick Rzewski, and Richard Teitelbaum. 31. Founded by Cornelius Cardew and jazz musicians Keith Rowe, Lou Gare, Eddie Prévost, Allan Bryant, and John Phetteplace. 32. Founded by Cardew, Michael Parsons, and Howard Skempton. 33. With Rolf Gelhaar, Peter Eötvos, and Johannes Fritsch. 34. Formed by Robert Ashley, Gordon Mumma, David Behrman, and Alvin Lucier. 35. With David Rosenboom, Jon Hassel, Gerald Shapiro, and Terry Riley. 36. Although having used electronics, David Behrman now admits that the avant-garde of Ann Arbor was not strongly influenced by the rock music world of 1960s and 1970s. Personal conversation, New York, November 8, 2007. 37. Prendergast 2001. 38. Among those collaborating in Young’s ensemble were violinist and filmmaker Tony Conrad, Velvet Underground cofounder John Cale, Angus MacLise, and Young’s wife, Marianne Zazeela. See Joseph 2008. 39. Founding members of the ensemble included Glass, pianist Arthur Murphy, violinst Dorothy Pixley-Rothschild, woodwind players Jack Kripl, Richard Landry, Jon Gibson and Richard Peck. As Glass later stated, “I had to play my music myself. The musical establishment of the time thought I was crazy, and foundation support was out of the question. We’d play for free or for a small donation in old buildings where you had to climb six sets of stairs if you wanted to hear what we were doing.” See Glass 1987, 19–24. 40. Equally successful composer Steve Reich, who first performed in an earlier version of Glass’s ensemble in 1968, formed Steve Reich and Musicians in 1971. 41. Mills’s graduate students such as Rich Gold, John Bischof, Joel Ryan, Paul De Marinis, and Maggie Payne were all early adopters of cheap computer technologies to use in performance. Another California scene arose in the early 1970s around the University of California at San Diego, where Pauline Oliveros and Robert Erickson taught. 42. For such histories, see the exemplary works from Roads 1985 and 1996, as well as Kahn 2007. 43. Although Matthews has usually been given the credit for generating the first digital sounds from a computer in 1957, the mainframe CSIR Mk1computer at the University of Melbourne generated digital sounds as early as 1951. See http://www.csse.unimelb.edu.au/dept/about/csirac/ music/music.html.

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44. Other composers exploring algorithmic systems and predigital synthesis included Milton Babbit at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Studios as well as the Dutch composer Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Institute for Sonology, first in Utrecht and then at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague. 45. Those working at Bell Labs in the areas of digital sound production and composition included Max Matthews, Lejaren Hiller’s former student James Tenney, Laurie Spiegel, John Pierce, David Lewin, and Joan Miller. See Kahn 2007 for more detail. 46. “Time-shared” in this context refers to the ways in which distributed users on large mainframe computers shared computing resources. 47. To give a sense of how non-real-time this non-real-time was, Curtis Roads points out that between 1965 and 1968, a two-minute portion of the composition “Lyric Variations for Violin and Computer” took nine hours to compute. See Roads 1996, 103. 48. By tinkering I refer here to historian of science Kristen Haring’s concept suggesting a playful, hobby-based approach to technical systems in which a specific culture arises around a set of practices or tools, such as Haring’s example with early ham radio operators or the Mills example of the KIM-1 microcomputer. See Haring 2006. 49. See Kahn 2007 for further descriptions of the Mills period as well as Bischoff and Brown 2002. 50. Although there were also institutionally based attempts at real time synthesis in the early 1970s, for example, the pioneering work of Barry Vercoe at MIT in the mid 1970s, these were also as impractical for live performance due to cost, logistics and equipment access as earlier non-real time systems. 51. Another early real time system that Chadabe was connected to was the SalMar Construction (1970), a massive computational real time electronic instrument designed by the composer Salvatore Martirano. See http://ems.music.uiuc.edu/~martiran/HTdocs/salmar.html. 52. For a complete description and history of MIDI, see Roads 1996, 969–1016. 53. What is interesting about the shift to real-time computing for Ryan is that the machine no longer remains an abstract machine, but rather becomes embodied through the principals of real-time calculation. Due to his connections to scientific infrastructure, Ryan, who worked at Lawrence Berkeley labs as a physicist at the same time that he was studying electronic music with Behrman and Ashey at Mills, began to utilize software languages such as Forth from one of the few real-time scientific areas: astronomy. Personal interview with Ryan, December 3, 2007. 54. The history of Max’s development is itself an entangled story. See Puckette 2002, 31–43. 55. Joel Chadabe was so convinced about the future potential of real-time processes for music making that in 1983 he founded Intelligent Music, a company dedicated exclusively to the development of real-time software for interactive composition. 56. See Machover n.d.

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57. Examples include composers such as Morton Subotnick (The Double Life of Amphibians [1984] and Jacob’s Room [1993]), Robert Ashley (Atalanta [1983] and Dust [1999]), John Cage (the computer-driven Europeras 1–5 [1987–1992]), John Moran (Book of the Dead-Second Avenue [2000]), Mikel Rouse (The End of Cinematics [2006]) and Randal Packer (Arches [1991]). 58. See Hunt n.d. 59. See Cleveland n.d. Dresher’s system comes in a long series of tape looping systems, the most famous being guitarist Robert Fripp’s Frippertronics. 60. Other composers active in the areas of theater and media included Italian-born Roberto Paci Dalo and German sound designer Hans Peter Kuhn. 61. For the main atrium of the French pavilion at Expo ’67 in Montréal, Xenakis created a responsive light and sound environment that he entitled the Polytope de Montréal (Polytope suggesting “many spaces”), which consisted of steel cables with 1,200 attached lights suspended through the space and forming a hyperbolic geometry like the Philips pavilion. Similar Polytopes were constructed in Persepolis, Iran (1971), Paris/Cluny (1972) and Mycene, Greece (1978). See Harley 1998. 62. For more specifics on each of these environments, see http://www.cycling 74.com (Max/MSP), http://www.audiosynth.com (SuperCollider), and http://csounds.com (Csounds). 63. A very partial list would include the endless representatives of DJ Culture (DJ Spooky, DJ Shadow, Coldcut, William Orbit, Goldie, Kit Clayton, Mixmaster Morris, Photek, Richie Hawtin, and many others). For a full overview, see Shapiro 2000. 64. Obviously, this list is far from exhaustive, particularly as it largely focuses on laptop-based genres or at least on genres of electronica that aimed to elevate the unique aesthetic elements of digital computation to an art form. 65. The Fairlight Computer Music Instrument was the earliest commercially available, digital sampling based synthesizer designed by Australian engineers Peter Vogel and Kim Ryrie in 1978 and subsequently marketed to high-end studios in 1979. 66. See Föllmer 2001. 67. In addition to gestural-driven, body-based interfaces include dozens of sensor-augmented musical input devices from the radio drum (Boie and Matthews), the Lightning (Buchla), the Biomuse (Lusted), breath controllers (Yamaha Corporation), and ultrasonic range finders (Chabot). For a full overview of such interfaces, see Roads 1996, 617–658. 68. In order to link The Hands to the outside world, STEIM was also one of the first institutes to develop a sensor I/O (input/output) box (“The Sensor Lab”), which could take real-world physical behavior and, through A/D converters, translate this into data for the computer to read. See STEIM [Products] Sensorlab n.d. 69. See Tanaka n.d. 70. See Sonami n.d.

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6

Bodies

1. For a full exposition of this history, see McCarren 2002. 2. Inspired by a similar device by the French astronomer Jules Janssen, Marey’s early chronophotographic apparatus was ironically in the shape and form of a gun. Consisting of a lens anchored in the barrel, a timing mechanism to set the machine in motion, and a series of rotating disks, Marey’s improvement on Janssen’s “astronomical gun” allowed the device to take twelve photos a second (1/720th a second each), leaving the traces of lived but past movement on a chemical plate surface. Aimed at a subject in motion, Marey’s vision weapon enabled the rapid-fire capture of images of sequential movement, thus depicting a continuous flow from moments of gulls in flight, horses’ gallops, and humans’ walks and jumps through the freezing of time itself. 3. Stanford, who in addition to his railroad empire was also highly invested in equestrian pursuits, employed the photographer to solve a bet: whether a horse would have all of its hooves in the air at a given point in a race. See Solnit 2003. 4. See Arakawa and Gins 2002, xi. 5. Performing her aptly named “serpentine dance,” the 1890 Parisian performances at the Folies Bergère elicited wild rounds of applause from the crowd, with audience members and critics declaring Fuller a genius and cementing her European reputation. Fuller’s experimentation, talent, and prowess made her a doyenne of the French artistic and scientific elite at the time (including Pierre and Marie Curie, Auguste Rodin, Sarah Bernhardt, and astronomer and publisher Camille Flammarion). After charming one of the editors of Le Figaro, the newspaper published a statement that all of Paris would rush to see Fuller “for no dance has ever been more alluring or more magical” (Current 1997, 50). 6. In addition to stage instruments for lighting, Fuller had more exotic ideas. Through her acquaintances with the Curies, she became interested in the potential use of radium to create glowin-the-dark costumes, an idea that the Curies quickly nixed as too dangerous. See Current 1997. 7. In his “Machine and Organism,” the philosopher Georges Canguilhem notes that the image of the human body as machine can be traced back to Descartes and, even further, to Aristotle. The machine would be defined as a “man made artificial construction, essentially functioning by virtue of mechanical operations.” Machines and the mechanisms that constitute them are efficient, based on the degree of movement that a set of interlinking and interacting parts allows for. “In every machine, then, movement is a function, first of the way the parts interact and, second, of the mechanical operations of the overall unit” (Canguilhem 1991, 46). 8. From Choreutics: Movement is, so to speak, living architecture, living in the sense of changing emplacements as well as changing cohesion. This architecture is created by human movements and is made up of pathways tracing shapes in space. . . . The living architecture composed of the trace forms of human movements has to endure other disequilibrating influences as they come from within the structure itself and not from without. The living building of trace forms which a moving body creates is bound to certain spatial relationships. (Laban 1966, 5)

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9. Identifying four different dimensions of weight, time, space, and flow and two extremes per dimension (weight  heavy/light, time  sudden/sustained, space  direct/indirect, flow  bound/ free), Laban developed a taxonomy of eight movement expressions or “operations” derived from combinations of the four different dimensions: slashing, gliding, pressing, flicking, wringing, dabbing, punching, and floating. These eight effort motions were not just fanciful ideas projected onto the human body but instead part of a much larger project to detail and record ranges of kinesthetic behaviors that fluctuated between exertion and control and could help in organizing and training the body for specific types of human labor activity. Indeed, Laban’s statement that “it is in the working actions of man that efforts become most clearly discernable. It is in industry that the control of effort has become an urgent necessity,” clearly set out the machinic context and accompanying goals that were integral to his ambitious analysis. See Laban and Lawrence 1947. 10. In Effort, Laban wrote that “Taylor, the protagonist of what he called ‘scientific management,’ first used the expression ‘motion study,’ and he foresaw its application particularly in the field of industry. . . . In this epoch of industrial revolution or evolution such research is bound to find its first and greatest application in industry” (Laban and Lawrence 1947, xiii). 11. In scientizing his time motion studies, Taylor stated, “In most trades, the science is developed through a comparatively simple analysis and time study of the movements required by the workmen to do some small part of his work and this study is usually made by a man equipped with merely a stop watch and a properly ruled notebook” (1913, 117). 12. “Based on data from the study of the human organism,” wrote an anonymous critic, “biomechanics strives to create a man who has studied the mechanism of his construction and is capable of mastering it in the ideal and of improving it. Modern man living under conditions of mechanization cannot help but mechanize the motive elements of his organism” (Rudnitsky 1981, 294). 13. See Baer 1986. 14. Like Meyerhold, in order to realize his high-precision-based machinic spectacle, Foregger developed his own body/actor training system ironically called tafiatrenage (literally “taffy pulling”), of which very few details remain except the fact that like biomechanics, it aimed at conditioning the actor to find a physical means of expression through the external expression of a highly disciplined body. 15. Responding to a criticism in the German dance journal Schrifttanz in 1931 that his work was simply the demonstration of abstract, technical, and formal principles, Schlemmer answered, The greatest misunderstandings were created by the terms “mechanical” or “mechanistic.” “Mechanical dancers” was the cheap slogan used to describe the figurines of the Triadic Ballet. However, “mechanical dancers” have quite a different nature from these figurines. . . . When I created the Triadic Ballet all mechanical aspirations were far from my mind, for there was no such thing as a machine cult in 1919. The formal approach I used when making the ballet sprung from basic rules of geometry and stereometry which I translated into new and contemporary, interesting materials. It also sprang from the anatomy of the human body which, apart from being made of flesh and blood and having a mind and feelings, is also a miracle of biomechanical exactness. If we choose to look at this particular side of the human body and use it in performance, we are not denying the existence of the other side. All we are doing is creating

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a balance in a field which is commonly called dance and in which the other side is so immensely represented. (Schlemmer 1931)

16. See Banes 1987 for full coverage of this transition state of modern dance. 17. Suite by Chance also utilized one of the first purely electronic scores, a shrill sinusoidal oscillator-driven work of tape music by Christian Wolff that was so lacking in formal rhythmic structures for the dancers to follow that Cunningham resorted to using a stopwatch to keep the chance-derived movements in temporally aligned sequence with one another. 18. For a description of the audio setup, see Gordon Mumma’s description in Klosty 1975, 67–68. 19. If Cunningham and company appeared to be overenthusiastic about the possibilities offered by technologies that had normally seen industrial and military use, they were also flexible enough to accept the probability of the machines’ failure. In fact, although the complex sensing systems had potentially worked in rehearsals, they failed to function during the first performances, causing Cage and the musicians to resort to improvisation that made it appear as if the sensors were working. Malcolm Goldstein, personal conversation, December 8, 2006. 20. Cunningham’s 1969 choreography Canfield, for example, featured a set by sculptor Robert Morris in which a gigantic vertical object filled with aircraft landing lights aimed upstage would electromechanically move forward and backward across the proscenium at erratic speeds, throwing the dancers in and out of light and darkness, while Pauline Oliveros’s score (realized by Cage, Tudor, and Mumma) reached what was described as excruciating levels of loudness. 21. Brown’s “accumulation” pieces, such as Accumulation (1971), Primary Accumulation (1972), and Group Primary Accumulation (1972), were based on constrained sets of tightly defined gesture or movement sequences that would serially accumulate over time (1, 1:2, 1;2:3, 1:2:3:4, 1:2:3:4:5, and so on). Taking place in site-specific locations like park benches or the plazas of corporate buildings, the accumulation works used a simple mathematical procedure to generate a string of increasingly complex, repetitive, yet flowing movements that would then be conditioned based on the physical architecture of the performance site. 22. Brown’s 1975 work Locus delved even further into formal techniques for generating dance by organizing movement around twenty-seven points situated inside an imaginary cube around the body’s kinesphere (à la Laban) with each point in the cube correlated to the alphabet and a written statement. As each dancer moved through the four sections of Brown’s movement score, they would revolve the position of the cube and spatially (but not gesturally) look for ways to move through, touch, look at, jump over or do something about each point in the series, either one point at a time or clustered (Goldberg 1986, 154). 23. Two Gutai members, Kazuo Shiraga and Akiro Kanayama, for instance, forged a coupling between the body (using the feet) and mechanical objects like remote-controlled cars and ventilators as paintbrushes in actions such as the 1957 realized performances “Remote Control Paintings” and “Footpainting.” See Dreher 2001, 73–84. 24. In the scene entitled “Working Man’s Hell” in Athey’s controversial Four Scenes in a Harsh Life, for example, the artist also directly imagined the body as a Kafka-esque, “hunger artist”

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mechanical writing surface. Serving as a tabula rasa on which to write words of judgment upon, Athey cut African-inspired printing patterns into the back of an African American performer with a knife and used paper as a blotting device in a primitive but effective onstage scarification ritual. See Wessendorf 1995 for details on the performances of Athey as well as Bob Flanagan. 25. For more details on contemporary body-based performances, see Heathfield 2004. 26. See Sommer 1972 for details on Brown’s first Equipment Piece performance. 27. See Brett 1994. 28. See Osthoff n.d. 29. See http://orlan.net and Faber 2002. 30. Claiming herself to be the first artist to “use surgery for artistic ends in order to decry the social pressures placed on the human body, especially women’s bodies,” Orlan’s first surgical Unicom works were performed over four sessions during 1990 and involved liposuction techniques that changed the shape of different parts of her body, including her hips, face, waist, and neck. Broadcast to multiple international cultural venues from the Sandra Gehring Gallery in New York, her 1993 performance Omnipresence took the first steps toward the realization of Orlan’s imagined mutant body through the addition of silicone-based protuberances directly into her forehead as well as large-scale breast implantations. Subsequent surgeries in 1998 embarked on what the artist labeled “self-hybridizations,” exploring the image of beauty through different cultures—for example, Olmec and Mayan images of cross-eyed vision, large noses, and deformed skulls, which she merged with computer-generated images of her own face and body. See Orlan n.d. 31. See Jordà 1998 and http://www.marceliantunez.com. 32. See Stelarc n.d. 33. See Massumi 2002, 89–132. Stelarc’s more recent work, such as Third Ear, has shifted to the direction of biotechnological art. See Stelarc n.d. and Hauser 2008. 34. See Gómez-Peña n.d. 35. See http://www.tca.uwa.edu.au/atGlance/pubMainFrames.html. 36. See De Queriroz 2008. 37. See La Fura dels Baus n.d. 38. Working from Laban’s conception of the kinesphere as a cube around the body with twentyseven points emerging from the body’s center of gravity, Forsythe exploded and decentered this earlier model, suggesting not one but multiple centers out of which movement might emerge and thus, throwing the body out of its normal state of balletic alignment by disrupting verticality and emphasizing gravity. See Gilpin 1994 for further description of Forsythe’s revision of Laban. 39. See Caspersen 2004, 28. 40. All of the notes on Eidos: Telos derive from the author’s collaborative work on the dance’s Frankfurt premiere in January 1995. For more detail on the concept of “sensitive dependence on initial conditions,” see Prigogine and Stengers 1985.

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41. See Salter 2009b for more detail. 42. Described on the Dance-Technology Zone (DTZ) list server founded in 1994. See http://art .net/~dtz. 43. European Union–funded research projects like MEGA (Multisensory Expressive Gesture Applications) and scientific conferences like the first KANSEI (the Japanese concept for the translation of a person’s emotional or psychological experience of a product or event and the subsequent translation of such feelings into the design of such a product or event) conference in Genoa in 1997 resulted in the publication and dissemination of both traditional academic papers and computer software tools and environments aimed at or designed for working artists. See Hashimoto 1997. 44. During his tenure as founder and director of the Ohio State University Dance and Technology department from 1999–2003, academic and artist Birringer sought to legitimize dance practice with new computationally augmented technologies within both the larger dance world as well as within academia. Aiming to create a studio-lab context in which choreographers in training would be exposed to the cutting edge of software, camera-based motion capture, sensors and all other things digital, Birringer’s organization of numerous think tanks, workshops and symposia under the title IPS (Interactive Performance Series) also attempted to generate an platform for knowledge sharing and work among multiple constituencies in the dance technology world, shifting between choreographers like Troika Ranch (Dawn Stoppielo and Mark Coniglio), Robbie Shaw and Bebe Miller, visual artists like Paul Kaiser, arts researchers/writers like Scott deLahunta, composers/ performers like Curtis Bahn, Tomie Hahn, and Todd Winkler, and numerous technologists as well as with students. See http://www.dance.osu.edu/%7Ejbirringer/Dance_and_Technology/ workshops/ips2.html. 45. For example, in the first public displays of the choreographer’s engagement with Life Forms, Polarity (1990), and the subsequent Trackers (1991), Copeland noted that Cunningham’s choreography had become increasingly obsessed with a dislocation of the various limbs from the rest of the body—a kind of autonomy that may have arisen as the result of working with animated bodies and continually playing with different parameters assigned to different limbs. See Copeland 1999. 46. See Noll 1967. 47. See Atari archives, Software & Info n.d. 48. See Naugle 1999. 49. See OpenEndedGroup n.d. 50. See Mesh Performance n.d. 51. See Obermaier n.d. 7

Machines/Mechanicals

1. See Hultén 1987, 29. 2. See McCulloch and Pitts 1943.

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3. For another take on the issue of what constitutes “living” from the point of view of autopoiesis, see Maturana and Varela 1992. 4. See Nadajaran 2007 for further discussion of Al-Jazari’s devices. 5. See Bell 1996 and 1999. 6. See Pauline 1996, 401–404. 7. The spectacle included the pigeon’s dressed in Arabic garb while the Cure’s “Killing an Arab” (a song inspired by Camus’ The Stranger) played at high volume. 8. Later SRL machines included ones such as Flame Whistle/Boeing (a 200-pound modified Boeing turbo jet engine with a fuel afterburner), Little Arm (a 12-foot-long mechanical arm controlled by a gesture-based human arm controller), and Shockwave Cannon (a stationary device that shot propulsive air blasts). See SRL Machines n.d. 9. Flynn’s Peoplehater group, in particular, articulated a post-SRL landscape by declaring that its objective would be the creation of “environments where the distinction between machines, carnivals and monsters breaks down.” See http://www.timesup.org/rearview/flynn.html. 10. Thorpe’s initial concept involved a boxing ring–like arena where cheering fans, sitting behind bulletproof glass, could watch a variety of home-cooked machines battle to the death in a remotecontrolled melee accompanied by rock concert–styled lighting and pounding techno beats. Built by hobby inventors who, similar to some SRL alumni, worked day jobs as designers, engineers, and computer scientists in Bay Area/Hollywood special effects and entertainment companies, Robot Wars’ mechanical players were classed by weight (heavy- to lightweight) and constructed from used parts lethally refashioned with circular saw blades, metal pinchers, and other potentially lethal mechanical elements to achieve maximum damage to their fellow machine foils. Generating endless numbers of both live and television-licensed spin-offs in the United States and abroad (particularly in the United Kingdom) such as Robotica, Battle Bots, and BotBash, Robot Wars was a kind of SRL for the Hollywood-bred, nerdy masses. See Thorpe n.d. 11. Heckert’s machines were actuated by servo motor control through MIDI continuous controller information. See De Stefano 1996. 12. See Hobijn 1988. Machine-generated fire instruments also played a large role in the work of Berlin-based Belgian machine artist and “chemo-acoustician” Bastiaan Maris who developed a similar sound-producing machine as that of Hobijn, but based on propane gas, called the Large Hot Pipe Organ (LHPO) in 1993. Stating that “machines become interesting when they don’t seem to have a function apart from just being, that’s when you can only step back and watch.” Maris’s LHPO consisted of twenty pentatonically tuned, 10-meter-high steel pipes, each with a diameter of 10 inches, that produced intense percussive tones by way of MIDI-controlled explosions of a propane gas mixture inside the pipes (conversation with Maris, 1998). 13. Like [The User’s] Symphony, I-Beam music aimed to exploit not only the sonic potential of an industrial, kinetically driven system but also provided an endoscopic, camera-based “machine vision” perspective from inside the machine through the installation of miniature video cameras in the moving structure. See Baginsky and Schwartz 1995.

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14. Later, Burnham further articulated such cybernetic notions in a September 1968 text published in Artforum entitled System Aesthetics: We are now in transition from an object-oriented to a systems-oriented culture. Here change emanates, not from things, but from the way things are done. . . . The priorities of the present age revolve around the problems of organization. A systems viewpoint is focused on the creation of stable, on-going relationships between organic and non-organic systems, be these neighborhoods, industrial complexes, farms, transportation systems, information centers, recreation centers, or any of the other matrices of human activity. All living situations must be treated in the context of a systems hierarchy of values. Intuitively, many artists have already grasped these relatively recent distinctions and if their “environments” are on the unsophisticated side, this will change with time and experience. (Burnham 1968b)

15. See Schöffer n.d. and Schöffer 1985. 16. Schöffer’s definition of luminodynamism included “the exploitation of a surface or fraction of space involving the development of plastic and dynamic elements—whether colored or not— through real movement or artificial movement.” See Schöffer 1996, 397–400. 17. See Wendland 1973 for a review of the performance. 18. See Kac 1997. 19. Although mainly exhibiting sculptures, Cybernetic Serendipity also featured other robotic and machine artworks such as Paik’s K-456 and Tinguely’s work. 20. Using a mainframe Philips P9201 (a clone of a Honeywell-16 (with 8 kilobits of memory) computer to analyze the input signals and coordinate the independent movement of the different servo-controlled motors in the Senster’s joints, Ihnatowicz’s sculpture could achieve extremely lifelike movement behavior through motor-controlled acceleration and deceleration. See Senster.com n.d. and Zivanovic 2005. 21. MacMurtrie’s Inflatable Bodies projects (2005–2006) mark a move away from his previously well-tested industrial, scrap-metal aesthetic and toward a softer, more malleable one, involving computer-controlled, servo-driven air bladders that enable fabric birdlike structures to breathe and flap. See MacMurtrie n.d. 22. See Demers 2004. 23. As seen in the examples, the implicitly designed tension in the battle of presence between humans and articulated mechanical systems underlies much of machine performance. Yet the locus of presence is not just shifted to machines, but, as articulated in Pickering’s notion of the “dance of agencies,” equally shared among the spectator/interloper and the machines. This entire “bundle” of presences constitutes a total performance environment where the distinctions between watching, interacting, and reacting are continually blurred in real-time action; Demers and Vorn predicted that “the transformation of an inert site into reactive locus will force the viewer not only to consider a society of machines but a habitat made for machines where their sole presence will disrupt the system and engender reactions” (Vorn and Demers 1995, 4). 24. See Kac 1997 for a full description of robotic art’s origins and practitioners.

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25. Derived from The Closed World: Computers and the Politics of Discourse in Cold War America, a 1996 work by scholar Paul N. Edwards, the phrase “closed world” refers to the discourse and practice of surveillance and control through high-technology military power during the period following World War II. See Edwards 1996. 26. In The Brotherhood work Translocations, for example, was a construction built around a U.S. Navy plotting table used in war game bombing simulations and involving a moving XY plotter that would respond in audiovisual terms to visitors’ hand movements over the table. Stealth consisted of a helicopter gun sighting apparatus with attached laser in which the visitor, like in video game arcade, could aim at light-sensitive targets while the Scribe machine acted to read the pages of books and, translating such reading through OCR (optical character recognition) into computer code, could rewrite the book on an opposite table solely utilizing the techniques of machine inscription. See Dunn and Vasulka 1998b for further description. 8

Interaction

1. See Morse 2003 for a further discussion of interactivity in relationship to the cultural milieu of the 1960s. 2. Schechner’s reference to Michael Kirby’s terminology of “nonmatrixed” suggested performances that are closer to events in real life rather than theater on a stage. See Kirby 1965. 3. Among the many existing media art histories that discuss similar backgrounds for interactivity, see Dinkla 1997, Wardrip-Fruin and Montfort 2002, Huhtamo 1998, Shanken 2003, Grau 2007, Popper 2007, and Paul 2003. 4. Allan Kaprow sums these convergences up himself by stating, “The Japanese Gutai, Environments, Happenings, Nouveau Realisme, Fluxus, events, noise music, chance, poetry, life theater, found actions, bodyworks, earthworks, concept art, information art—the list could go on—confronted publics and arts professionals with strange occurrences bearing little resemblance to the known arts.” See Kaprow 1995. 5. See Saltz 1997 for the similarities between traditional stage performance and computeraugmented interactive works. 6. Architecture critic Lucy Bullivant’s 2006 book Responsive Environments is one of the few texts written by an architecture critic that attempts to mix projects that have common goals between architects, designers, and new media artists, claiming that they are all participating in the creation of new kinds of responsive architectures. See Bullivant 2006. 7. See Shanken 2003. 8. Institutional support included such centers as MIT’s Center for Audio Visual Studies founded by Bauhaus student György Kepes, Philips’ Electronics’ support of Varèse, Le Corbusier, and Xenakis’s Brussels pavilion, Schöffer’s work on CYSP 1, and Ihnatowicz’s Senster project. See Broeckmann and Nadarajan 2009. 9. On his edge.org website, impressario John Brockman details one of the few meetings that took place between artists and scientists. “These activities led to an invitation in 1965 from

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the Harvard biophysicist A. K. Soloman to bring a group of New York artists, film-makers, and musicians to spend several days interacting with leading Harvard and MIT scientists in biophysics, sensory communication, computation, and cybernetics, all of whom had been colleagues with Norbert Wiener, who had died the previous year. The science contingent included Walter Rosenblith, Anthony Oettinger, Harold Edgerton, and Solomon. Among the arts group were Kenneth Dewey of Theatre X, Musician Terry Riley, Carolee Schneemann, and the USCO group. See Brockman n.d. 10. Turrell’s and Irwin’s fascinating but ultimately aborted attempt to develop sensory spaces that “could sense back” is detailed in Adcock 1990. 11. A number of exhibitions during the early 2000s have focused on gruppo T’s collective as well as individual members’ work, among them “2 Ambienti e opere del gruppo T” at B&B Italia’s New York showroom (2004) as well as the large-scale exhibitions “LichtKunst aus KunstLicht” at the ZKM (2006) and “Ambiente del Gruppo T—Alle origini dell’interattivivita” at the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderne, Rome (2005). See Boriani n.d. 12. See Matthews 2005. 13. I am indebted to architect Patrick Harrop for his observation that in comparison to Price, Archigram’s work still remained caught at the level of visual representation of action and performance. 14. See Matthews 2005, 80. Among the cybernetics subcommittee members were artists (such as Roy Ascott), psychologist John Clark, sociologist Michael Young, members of parliament, and others. 15. In a telling example of the all-too-close intersections between the military-industrial technologies of Bell Labs and the counter-cultural performance scene, Rauschenberg’s interest in using IR technology for Open Score hit a wall, as all American-manufactured IR technology at the time was classified by the U.S. Department of Defense. Bell Labs ‘engineers came up with a solution by using a Japanese IR camera that was affixed to an American Norelco-manufactured normal-light video camera. See the 9 Evenings archive at http://www.fondation-langlois.org. 16. See Bardiot’s extensive analysis of 9 Evenings at http://www.fondation-langlois.org/e/ 9evenings/. 17. See Salter 2009a for more detailed analysis. 18. See Rose 1972 for more detail. 19. Indeed, technical and organizational problems—in particular, the improvisational and “live programming” aspects pushed by Klüver—eventually lead to Pepsi pulling out of sponsorship of the pavilion, leaving E.A.T. to pick up the financial tab of the project. 20. See Laurel 1991 for the discussion of the screen as a new kind of stage. 21. See Cruz-Neira et al. 1992. 22. Numerous other artists also explored alternative forms of interfaces. For example, the celebrated duo of Austrian artist Christa Sommerer and French artist Laurent Mignonneau, who were known primarily for their work in the simulation of Artificial Life (A-Life) models, also attempted to break

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out of the keyboard-mouse mode by creating interfaces (plant leaves armed with sensors) that, when stroked, would yield computational models of growth equations. 23. Land Design Studio, founded by Peter Higgins, James Dibble, and Shirley Walker, was another key European design firm working on the development of performative and responsive environments for the general public. A clear case in point was the studio’s work on the now-closed Play Zone in the Millennium Dome on the outskirts of London, a large-scale environment of interactive digital artworks designed especially for children. See Land Design Studio n.d. 24. See Benford et al. 1999 as well as Blast Theory n.d. 25. Many works from leading media artists dealt with this tension between screen and data, body and data, among them projects from Knowbotic Research (Anonymous Muttering, 1996), Scott Snibbe (Boundary Functions, 1998), and Camile Utterback’s and Romy Achituv’s Text Rain (2000). 26. Both txOOm and trg utilized variations of the software dynamics engine developed for Sponge’s and FoAM’s TGarden. 27. See Varela et al. 1991 and Thompson 2007 for a further discussion of the connectionist approach to cognition. 28. See Davies n.d. for more extensive details of both the technical system as well as Davies’s numerous writings on the work. 29. See Hall 1966. 30. See Rubin 2006. 31. See Bullivant 2006 and http://www.arup.com/netherlands/newsitem.cfm?pageid=6679. 32. Several attempts at realizing Nuage Vert in the Parisian suburb of Saint Ouen in 2003 failed. See HeHe 2008. 33. Examples include Miriam Struppek’s interactionfield.de archive, available at http://www .interactivearchitecture.org, plus numerous international festivals including Champ Libre (Montréal) and the series of roving Urban Screens conferences in Amsterdam (2005), Manchester (2007), and Melbourne (2008). 34. On the Media n.d. 35. See McGonigal 2005. 36. Improv Everywhere n.d. 37. A case in point was the fact that Can You See Me Now? was adapted to multiple urban sites for performance, ranging from Tokyo to London to Rotterdam. Conclusion: The Everyday 1. Facebook, MySpace and Twitter refer to online, web-based social networking services that enable users to maintain online profiles and to continually update these profiles and send messages to other users. The services were started in the mid-2000s.

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Glossary Compiled by Harry Smoak

Accelerometer An electromechanical device that measures non-gravitational changes in velocity over time. As a sensor it is used to detect vibrations, shock, and orientation. Actuator A device used in engineering to introduce or regulate movement in a system. The electronic equivalent is a device that can transduce an electrical input signal into motion.

General term for a class of related sound synthesis techniques based on the idea that complex tones (timbre) can be emulated by adding together multiple, simpler ones (partials). An example of this technique used in computer music is Fourier synthesis.

Additive synthesis

A process or set of rules to be followed, especially by a computer, in calculations or problem solving. The concept has been abstracted by contemporary dance choreographers—notably William Forsythe and Trisha Brown—for the (non-metaphorical) structuring of choreographic sequences. Algorithm

Alternate reality game (ARG) A genre of interactive narratives distinguished by the use of everyday

life as a platform. A form of Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG), ARGs often involve multiple online and media elements to tell a story that may or may not be affected by participants’ actions. Anamorphic lens A lens that optically distorts a projected image which appears normal again when

observed from a particular viewpoint. Arc lamp

A light source produced by an electrical discharge between two points.

Artificial neural networks (ANN) A mathematical model or computation system based on a biological correlate—such as the human brain and nervous system. Artificial Life (A-Life) Computational systems that simulate characteristics of biological

organisms. ASCII (American standard code for information interchange) A set of discrete character codes used for the interchange of information, especially if the information can be expressed mainly by

the written form of English words. It is a widely used format for transferring text between computers. Azimuth In sound spatialization, the direction of a localized sound source expressed as the angle

between the perceived location of the source and an imaginary line extending from between the ears of the listener. Background subtraction Any number of computer vision methods for detecting the foreground

objects in a video frame sequence as the difference between the current frame and an image of the scene’s static background. More sophisticated approaches incorporating this technique adapt to changes such as those caused by illumination, motion, and background geometry. Benday dots A printing process combining two or more different colored dots to create a third

color. It is named after the American illustrator and printer Benjamin Day. Brise soleil In architecture, this refers to a variety of permanent sun-shading techniques.

A measurable electrical property existing between any two conductive surfaces, in which changes in the distance between the surfaces change the potential to store an electric charge. It can be used to identify changes in the proximity of one object in relation to a second object, the sensor, usually within a limited range.

Capacitance

CCTV (closed-circuit television) The use of video cameras connected together where the signal is distributed to a limited number of monitors on a closed path. It differs from broadcast television in that the signal is not transmitted in the open. It is often used for monitoring or surveillance. Closed-loop system In classical control theory, systems that utilize feedback to control the outputs,

called states, of a dynamical system. By contrast, an open-loop control system does not have or use feedback. Color inversion A televisual or computer graphics technique for changing the position of a given color within its respective color space to its logical opposite. Control theory Also called control systems theory, this is an interdisciplinary branch of engineer-

ing and applied mathematics concerned with the behavior of dynamical systems. The desired value of the variable under control is called a reference. A sensor is used to measure the controlled variable. A controller manipulates actuators or effectors in order to modulate the system input in the direction of the desired effect on the system output. CRT (cathode ray tube) The cathode ray tube (CRT) is an important component in many computer monitors and television sets still in use today. The main component consists of a vacuum tube containing a negatively charged filament (the cathode) at one end and a phosphor coated screen on the other end. A controlled stream of electrons emitted from the heated cathode is accelerated to a high rate toward the opposing screen. When struck, the phosphors fluoresce red, blue, and green light, resulting in the image we see.

An early, inexpensive point-to-point Internet videoconferencing software client. It was first developed for the Apple Macintosh computer in 1992 by Tim Dorcey at Cornell University.

CU-SeeME

Glossary 384

Cybernetics The science of action oriented communications and control in machines, living organisms, and organizations.

A large piece of scenery positioned around the back of the stage set. Normally used as a sky or a scenic backdrop. It may be rigid or flexible, and it is occasionally painted.

Cyclorama

Degrees of freedom The set of independent ways in which a system of moving bodies can

change. Dichroic glass A material composite consisting of metal oxides deposited in thin films onto a glass substrate. By precisely varying the type of metal and the thickness of the layers, the wavelengths of light and color reflected or passing through can be controlled. Artistic applications of dichroic glass are derived from aerospace optical research into thin layer physics. DLA (digital light array) A reflective variant of LCD display technology and an alternative to DLP. Instead of individual mirrors, however, liquid crystals are used. JVC’s commercial implementation is known as D-ILA.

The technology used in video projectors in which the image is created by microscopically small mirrors integrated onto a specialized semiconductor chip known as a Digital Micromirror Device (DMD). Each mirror represents one or more pixels in the projected image. The technology was originally developed in 1987 by Dr. Larry Hornbeck of Texas Instruments, owner of the trademark.

DLP (digital light processing)

DMX or DMX512 (Digital Multiplex) A communications protocol first introduced in 1986 for use with lighting control equipment. Now a standard, it was developed by the Engineering Commission of USITT and is commonly used to control stage and entertainment lighting and effects. Doppler effect The change in frequency and wavelength caused by a moving source of waves, as of sound or light, as it approaches or moves away from an observer. Doppler radar systems make use of this effect to measure the range, altitude, direction, or speed of both moving and fixed objects. Christian Doppler, an Austrian physicist, first described the effect in 1842. DSP (digital signal processing) An engineering domain concerned with signals that have been

represented digitally as a sequence of numbers or symbols and the processing of these signals. In order to use an analog signal on a computer it must first be digitized with an analog to digital converter (ADC). DV (digital video) A digital video format introduced in the mid-1990s by commercial video

camera producers. The DV specification defines the codec and tape format. It uses a digital rather than an analog video signal. Dynamical system In applied mathematics, a means of describing how one independent state

develops into another independent state over the course of time, forming an integrated whole. Also called a state space, a phase space, a manifold, or an ambient space. Edge detection Any of a number of computer vision or digital image processing techniques for

identifying the boundaries of objects in a scene, where a beginning or ending edge is indicated by a change in intensity.

Glossary 385

Eidophor A television projector developed in Switzerland used to create theater-sized images. The name Eidophor is derived from the Greek root signifying “image bearer.” Its basic technology used electrostatic charges to deform an oil surface (called the Eidophor liquid), which allowed for significantly brighter images compared to the CRT projectors of the time. The Eidophor was in use extensively from the early 1950s until the 1980s. Electric field (EF) sensing A non-contact method of proximity sensing that allows electronic

systems to detect, evaluate, and respond to objects in their vicinity. The technology is similar to that used in capacitive proximity sensing. The first well-known use of EF sensing for humanmachine interface is Leon Theremin’s musical instrument. Electrochromic glass A material used in some window systems that can alter its opacity—between a colored, translucent state and a transparent state—in response to changes in applied voltage. Electromyogram (EMG) sensor A sensing device used to measure the electrical signals of muscles

at rest and during contraction. Fly space The area above the stage where scenery, lighting, and other onstage elements can be

shifted by a technical crew by “flying” it vertically by rope-line rigging or a counterweight system. Force sensitive resistor (FSR) A thin polymer measuring device which changes its electrical resistance when there is a change in force, such as pressure, applied to its surface. Formant filters In sound synthesis, a band pass filter shaped like any of several prominent bands of frequency that determines the phonetic quality of a vowel (peak, with a sharp band pass) in human speech. Fortuny dome An early 20th century stage lighting innovation created by Venetian designer

Mariano Fortuny that can be used to create upstage lighting effects (similar to a cyclorama) using indirect, reflected, and diffused light. Early versions were covered in fabric, but later plaster surfaces were used. Fresnel lens A type of lens, originally developed for use in lighthouses, made of a number of concentric rings called Fresnel “zones.” It is noted for its thin, light construction compared with conventional, spherical lenses with a similar aperture and focal length. French physicist Augustin-Jean Fresnel invented it in the early 19th century. Gantry crane A specialized crane that travels on a structure consisting of two or more fixed rails,

raising and lowering objects by means of a hoist. GUI and command-line Any of a variety of human-computer interfaces for inputting commands to a computer operating system or software program. A command-line interface is text-based and relies on typed commands, contrasted with the use of visual icons and a mouse pointer to click on options in a graphical user interface (GUI). Hall-effect transducers A type of short-range sensor that detects a changing magnetic field and converts it to a variable electrical signal.

Heterodyning is a process in which two different ultrasonic oscillators produce interference patterns (also known as beat frequencies) between the two frequencies at an audible range.

Heterodyning oscillator

Glossary 386

Hi8 An analog video format that uses an 8 mm videotape and helical scan read/write mechanism.

It was developed by Sony in the late 1990s as a higher-quality successor to the original Video8 format. High-definition (HD) video Any digital video system with a higher image resolution than a standard-definition (SD) video system. Image resolution refers to the amount of detail, usually expressed as a quantity of pixels, an image contains. HMD (head mounted display) A display device worn directly on the head or as part of a helmet, often part of a wearable computer system. It has a small optical display in front of one or both eyes. Stereoscopic versions can be used to simulate three-dimensional virtual environments. HMI (hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide) A lighting source that uses an arc lamp instead of an incandescent bulb to produce light. The lamp is operated by a ballast that creates an electrical arc between two electrodes within the bulb, exciting a pressurized mercury vapor. Commonly found in film and broadcast industries due to its high output, color rendering index, and color temperature—approximately equal to noon sunlight.

A type of high-intensity discharge (HID), ballasted lighting source. Like HMIs, they are compact, powerful, and efficient light sources.

HQI (hydrargyrum quartz iodide)

Fluid power technology that uses the force of liquids to do work without the need for mechanical gears or levers.

Hydraulics

Information theory A mathematical theory of communication involving the quantification of information founded and developed by American Claude Shannon in the mid-20th century. It has since been extended from its original applications in applied mathematics and electrical engineering to other disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, and game theory. Infrared (IR) camera This uses infrared radiation instead of visible light to form an image. Infrared light has a wavelength longer than visible light.

A method for rendering a video image for raster-scanned displays, where every other line is first scanned to form one sequence, or field, and then the remaining lines are scanned to form a second field. Each field contains half of the information content of the complete video frame. The reduced bandwidth, especially for analog signals, is beneficial for transporting each frame through a video system.

Interlace

Isadora A graphic programming environment developed by composer and media-artist Mark Coniglio that provides interactive control of video, sound, and light in real-time for performance contexts. Java applet A very small computer program written in the Java programming language that can be included in an HTML page. While browsing, the program can be downloaded from the server and run from the user’s computer using a Java Virtual Machine (JVM). JumboTron A large-screen television using a vacuum fluorescent display (VFD) technology developed by Sony, and available from the 1980s until the early 2000s. Latency In engineering, latency is a measure of time delay between the moment a process is initiated and the moment one of its effects becomes perceivable.

Glossary 387

LCD (liquid crystal display) A thin, flat display device consisting of any number of pixels

filled with liquid crystals and arrayed in front of a reflector or other source of light. Liquid crystals are aligned by modulating an electrical field to achieve the desired electo-optical effect, such as an image. An electronic light source discovered in the early 20th century. With the introduction of widely available high brightness blue LEDs in the late 1990s, red, green and blue (RGB) color mixing became possible.

LED (light-emitting diode)

Magnetizer The force of attraction of a magnet can interfere with the cathode rays that normally

fill the screens rectangular surface. Moving a magnet on or near a CRT can alter, or distort, the otherwise normal rectangle form. The process of eliminating magnetization on a CRT is called degaussing. Mapping The process of creating associations between two or more distinct data modalities.

A stochastic process named after the Russian mathematician Andrey Markov in which future states depend only on the present or immediately preceding state. An example is a simple random walk algorithm.

Markov chain

Derived from the Arabic root signifying “the place of drinking,” it is the name given to a type of projecting oriel window enclosed with carved wood latticework located on the second story of a building or higher, often lined with stained glass.

Mashrabiyah

Mawari butai A revolving stage device featured in traditional Japanese Kabuki theater, allowing

for rapid changes of scene without interruption of the action onstage. A graphical software platform and development environment for interactive and real-time performance of music, video, and other computer controlled media. Miller Puckette originally created Max while he was at IRCAM in the 1980s. It is named after Max Matthews, an electrical engineer and early pioneer in computer music. Jitter was introduced in 2003 as a set of extensions for real-time video. Today the software suite is maintained and distributed by San Francisco–based software company Cycling ’74.

Max/MSP-Jitter

A simple computer incorporated onto a single integrated circuit (IC). Like other computers, it has a central processing unit (CPU), memory, and input/outport (I/O) ports, and a clock. Due to its small size and simple architecture, it can be embedded in many kinds of specialized devices.

Microcontroller

Mixed reality Interdisciplinary research area examining the hybrid interaction of physical and virtual elements (e.g., computer generated graphics) together in the same space. In computer science, it often combines image processing, computer vision, human-computer interaction, and digital media research. MoCap (motion capture) A process for recording and analyzing information generated by movement and translating it into a digital computer model, also called motion tracking. Multimodal A style of human-computer interaction characterized by several different sense-based paths of communication between the human and the computer, such as touch and sound.

Glossary 388

Nonlinear editing (NLE) A digital editing system that can arbitrarily access a sequence

of edits selected from source audio and video media stored in a randomly accessible digital format. Nonlinear processing amplifier A device that changes the amplitude of a signal in such a way that

results in a disproportionality between the input and output signals. In computer vision, a technique for describing motion in a sequence of images. Technically, it is the computed vector field (motion vector) that describes how the image is changing over time, from one frame to the next.

Optical flow

A device for generating electrical oscillations, or regular movements of energy, back and forth from one form to another. A simple electronic oscillator circuit consists of a capacitor and an inductor.

Oscillator

Paik/Abe synthesizer An early analog video synthesizer built as a collaboration between Nam June Paik and video engineer Shuya Abe during an artist-in-residence program at WGBH-TV in Boston, between 1969 and 1971. It combined a number of analog video distortion techniques in combination with multiple real-time video camera inputs and nonlinear editing control. PANI A large format scenic projection system with a high intensity lighting source, manufactured by Ludwig Pani of Vienna, Austria. Parabolic mirror A parabola-shaped reflective device used to collect light and focus it to a single point. Because the principles of reflection are reversible, it can be used to distribute the energy from the focus point outwards. Parallel port An interface for an electronic device such as a computer, for connecting external devices that send or receive several bits of data simultaneously across multiple wires. In contrast, a serial port sends or receives only one bit at a time. Particle system In computer graphics, this refers to a technique for modeling dynamic pheno-

mena such as fire, clouds, and water, which are otherwise difficult to simulate using conventional surface-based rendering methods. Photocell or photoelectric sensor A digital switch device used to detect the presence of an object between a light source and target receiver. The switch is activated if the beam of light is interrupted. Planon lamp A trademarked flat-panel fluorescent lighting system produced by OSRAM, a leading lighting manufacturing company. Unlike other fluorescent lamp systems, it uses a mercury-free technology based on a xenon excimer discharge to produce a soft, diffuse light.

Uses the power of an easily compressed gas, usually air, to operate mechanical motion. Can also refer to anything containing air under pressure.

Pneumatic

Point source (audio) In acoustics, this is described as an ideal sound source, constituted by a

free-floating sphere infinitely small in dimension from which sound radiates in all directions. Polhemus (magnetic) A magnetic tracking device that allows the capture of motion data in six degrees of freedom. Together these represent the relative position and orientation of a sensor within a magnetic field created by a radio frequency emitter (the source). The sensors themselves are small

Glossary 389

and can be worn on a human body, along with a wearable body pack containing the emitter and a wireless transmitter to share data with a dedicated computer for capture and analysis. Polymer and liquid crystal films Alternative technologies sometimes used in “smart glass” in which light transmission properties can be changed when voltage is applied. These include polymer dispersed liquid crystal devices (PDLCs) and suspended particle devices (SPDs). Potentiometer

A simple device (usually a knob or slider) that produces a variable resistance when

moved. Introduced to the United States by Sony in 1967, this was the first portable video recording device available to the general public. Initially it recorded in black and white only, having a maximum recording time of twenty minutes. Portapak

Predictive modeling A process by which a framework is created or chosen in order to make predic-

tions about future events based on the analysis of current or historical data. Procedural animation A type of real-time computer animation consisting of automatically generated digital images computed according to a predetermined function, or set of functions. Projector bombing A form of architectural light graffiti, this is a descriptive term for outdoor

digital projection situated in urban environments. Radio-frequency identification (RFID) A small, wireless electronic device consisting simply of a circuit and an antenna that can transmit a unique identifier in response to certain radio waves. Active versions may contain a power supply and may emit a signal. Real-time In computing, systems in which the production and analysis of data is done in the actual time during which a process or event occurs. Also signifies something at the moment of its constitution. Rectifier A one-way electrical device that converts an alternating current (AC) into a direct current (DC). A device that performs the opposite function is known as an inverter. Reflective lighting Lighting technique that applies the property of a propagated wave being thrown back from a surface, such as a mirror. Relay control Relays are switches controlled by an electromagnet that open or close the circuit in response to a control signal. There are two common types of relays: electromechanical relays and solid state relays. Resonator A device that oscillates at specific frequencies, called resonance frequencies, with greater amplitude than others.

A technique that takes two signals (each with some frequency) and produces one signal containing the sum and differences of those frequencies. The analog circuit of diodes that was originally used to implement the technique was in the shape of a ring.

Ring modulator

An early video synthesizer consisting of an analog computer for manipulating the scanning of the raster of a cathode ray tube (CRT). It was co-invented by Steve Rutt and Bill Etra in the 1970s as a tool for image processing and real-time video.

Rutt/Etra scan processor

Sawtooth oscillator A device for generating a type of non-sinusoidal waveform characterized by an upward ramp followed by a sharp drop-off, sometimes called a cliff.

Glossary 390

Scan lights A category of automated stage lighting fixtures utilizing a single, controllable movingmirror to reposition a spotlight. These are typically used in combination with a gobo to project a shape or pattern. Scan resolution The amount of detail obtained by an optical scanning device, converted and stored in a digital image, often measured in pixels per inch. Servomotor (servo) An electromechanical device in which an electrical input to a feedback control mechanism determines the position of the motor armature. Shape-memory alloys Class of stimuli-responsive materials whose physical qualities have been altered to give them dynamic shape “memory.” They have the ability of changing their shape upon application of an external stimulus, such as heat, and can return to their original shape once the stimuli is removed. Show control A type of device connecting separate entertainment control systems for more than

one production element together into a “meta-system.” Solenoid actuator A linear motion electromechanical device with a moving rod that either pulls in or pushes out when provided electric current. A coil of wire inside the housing generates a magnetic field in response to current, causing the iron rod to pull in or push away. Solenoids have only two positions, either on or off. Sonification The use of nonspeech audio to convey information. Relies on an interdisciplinary approach to transform data relations into perceived auditory representations. Spectral analysis Generally, a procedure that decomposes a time series into its component parts—

such as frequency or energy—arranged in a progressive series between two extreme or opposite points. It is sometimes called spectrum analysis or frequency domain analysis. A wave pattern within a medium that appears to remain in a constant position. It can be formed from the interference of two waves that are moving in opposite direction to one another, or when a medium is moving in opposite direction to another wave traveling through it. It is sometimes called a stationary wave.

Standing wave

Svoboda ramp A low voltage lighting ramp invented by Josef Svoboda, allowing a narrow

beam of intense light to be aimed with precision in order to create spectacular atmospheric effects. Thermachromic ink

These inks or dyes temporarily change color due to a change of temperature.

Thrust stage A stage that extends into the audience portion of the theater, usually with seating on three sides. An arena stage, by contrast, is surrounded by audience area on all sides and does not have ready access to a backstage area. Time code (TC) SMPTE (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers) Time Code was

originally developed in the 1960s to facilitate videotape editing. Used in live entertainment environments to synchronize media and to trigger event-based systems, each frame of TC breaks down into hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. There are two types—Linear Time Code (LTC) and Vertical Interval Time Code (VITC).

Glossary 391

Ubiquitous computing Phrase coined by the late computer scientist Mark Weiser during his tenure

as Chief Technologist of the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC) to describe a post-desktop model of computing, where computation is embedded in the fabric of everyday life. It was first described in a landmark article for Scientific American entitled “The Computer for the 21st Century.” Variable capacitor Small electronic devices that can store electric charge. The capacitance value of a variable capacitor, sometimes called a “tuning capacitor,” can be mechanically or electronically changed as needed; a useful feature for radio tuning circuits, for example. VARI*LITE A moving lighting system and the first with automated variable-color control. Early systems included computerized control consoles, color mixing using dichroic filters, and moving mirror systems for repositioning the light. It premiered in 1981 during the opening night of the “Abacab” tour by the British band Genesis, an early investor. Vicon A commercially available digital optical and video camera–based motion capture and analysis system introduced in its first marketed form in the mid-1980s. Virtual reality (VR) A technology that allows one or more users to interact with an immersive,

highly visual, three-dimensional, computer-simulated environment. The environment may be a simulation of a real or imaginary world. The origin of the term has mistakenly been attributed to computer scientist Jaron Lanier. However, the first known usage of the phrase (if not the technological meaning) derives from the French playwright, poet, actor, and director Antonin Artaud. Von Neumann architecture Also known as a “stored-program digital computer,” it uses a

sequential processing unit (digital computer) and a single storage structure (memory) to hold both instructions (a program) and data. It is named after the early computer scientist and mathematician John von Neumann. VRML (Virtual Reality Modeling Language) A standard file format co-developed by Mark Pesce in 1993 to represent three-dimensional (3D) interactive vector graphics in Web browsers.

Glossary 392

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References 423

Name Index

Abdoh, Reza, 141, 255–256 Abe, Shuya, 119, 126, 293 Abram, David, xxxi Abramovic´, Marina, 243–244 Acconci, Vito, 116, 123, 243 Adams, John, 77, 202, 212–213 Adams, Matt, 327 Addington, Michelle, 104 Adigard, Erik, 341, 349 Akalaitis, JoAnne, 58, 132, 141 Akufen, 214 Albers, Josef, 167, 236 Albert-Birot, Pierre, 10 Al-Jazari, 279 Allen, Rebecca, 265 Allio, René, 55–56 Anceschi, Giovanni, 308 Anderson, Laurie, xxiv, 141, 156–158, 211, 242 Andre, Carl, 216 Andriessen, Louis, 204 Antheil, George, 183 Antunes, Jorge, 200 Appia, Adolphe, 5–7, 52, 149, 228–229 Arakawa, Shusaku, 226 Arford, Scott, 178 Aristotle, xxvi, xxxvi, 373n7

Artaud, Antonin, xxvi, xxxvii, 45–47, 57, 243–244, 256, 354n10 Arup, Ove, 101, 343 Ascott, Roy, 307, 381n12 Ashley, Mary, 199 Ashley, Robert, 141, 197, 199–200, 202–203, 206, 212, 372n37 Athey, Ron, 244, 375–376n24 Auer, Tina, 333 Auinger, Sam, 213 Austin, John L., xxv–xxvi Austin, Larry, 201 Avenstroup, Tone, 71 Babbitt, Milton, 191–192 Babiole, Cécile, 341 Bablet, Denis, 151, 166 Bacon, Francis, 164, 175 Baginsky, Nicolas Anatol, 287, 290–292 Bähr, Hugo, 143, 147 Bainbridge, Benton, 178 Baldessari, John, 123 Ball, Hugo, 28 Balla, Giacomo, 9–10, 356n9 Banes, Sally, 240, 242 Banham, Reyner, 1, 8, 93, 363n13 Barad, Karen, xxvii, xxix–xxx, 354n19

Boyle, Mark, 169 Brakhage, Stan, 144 Brand, Stewart, 167 Brecht, Bertolt, xxxii, 36–37, 47, 49, 55–56, 58, 61–63, 65, 126, 128, 136, 147, 236, 358n31, 361n15 Brecht, Stefan, 58, 62 Breer, Robert, 314–315 Brehms, Joan, 52–53 Breitscheid, Andreas, 261 Breton, André, 44–45, 361n19 Bretschneider, Frank, 178 Breuer, Lee, 58, 132 Brisley, Stuart, 243 Brittain, Donald, 172 Brockman, John, 167–168, 307, 380n9 Broeckmann, Andreas, xxxiii, 305 Bromberg, Ellen, 274 Brook, Peter, 58, 70, 126, 141 Brown, Carol, 272 Brown, Chris, 207, 216 Brown, Trisha, 222, 227, 240–243, 245–246, 248, 259, 268–269 Bruce, Lenny, 136 Brucker-Cohen, Jonah, 346 Bruges, Jason, 341 Bruner, Jerome, xxvi Brus, Günter, 243–244 Bryars, Gavin, 202 Burden, Chris, 123, 243–244 Burian, E.F., 149–153, 159, 166 Burian, Jarka, 151, 153, 359n1 Burlyuk, David, 11 Burnham, Jack, xxxviii, 292, 304–305, 307, 379n14 Bury, Mark, 102 Bush, Kate, 216 Butler, Judith, xxv–xxvii, xxix–xxx, 249

Barba, Eugenio, 58 Bardiot, Clarisse, 314 Barnes, Steve, 254 Barney, Matthew, 247–248 Barrault, Jean-Louis, 58 Bartholl, Aram, 341 Baudrillard, Jean, 287, 327 Bauermeister, Mary, 199 Bausch, Pina, 255, 257–258 Beaman, Jeanne Hays, 265 Beekman, Hans, 177 Behrman, David, 203, 206–207, 238, 370n36 Béjart, Maurice, 293 Belson, Jordan, 168 Ben-Ary, Guy, 255 Bender, Olaf, 214 Berg, Alban, 181 Berghaus, Günter, 9 Berghaus, Ruth, 63 Berio, Luciano, 194, 198, 368n16 Betke, Stefan, 214 Betsky, Aaron, 349 Beuys, Joseph, 243 Biggs, Simon, 272 Birdwhistell, Ray, xxv Birnbaum, Dara, 123, 140 Birringer, Johannes, 263, 377n44 Bischoff, John, 206–207, 216 Bleeker, Julian, 346 Blossom, Robert, 154 Boccioni, Umberto, 9 Boehmer, Konrad, 204 Boesche, John, 158–159 Bohr, Niels, xxix–xxx Bolaños, César, 200 Bonacˇic´, Vladimir, 107 Bongers, Bert, 219 Bono, 142 Boriani, Davide, 308–309 Börlin, Jean, 44 Botschuijver, Theo, 97, 168 Boulez, Pierre, 191–192, 194–195, 209–210 Boykett, Tim, 333

Cacioppo, George, 197 Cage, John, 57, 117–118, 126, 154, 167–168, 182, 191, 193–196, 198–199, 201, 235–239, 241, 253, 264, 307, 313, 369n17, 369n18, 369n19, 375n19

Name Index 426

Clayton, Joshua Kit, 178, 214 Coates, George, 67, 69–70, 159 Cohen, Milton, 154–156, 197 Collins, Susan, 297 Colombo, Gianni, 308–309 Coniglio, Mark, 210, 268–270 Conklin, John, 77 Connah, Roger, 84–85, 112 Conquergood, Dwight, xxiv–xxv, xxx–xxxi Conrad, Erik, 346 Cook, Peter, 92, 94, 110 Coomaraswamy, Ananda, 193 Copeland, Roger, 238, 264, 377n45 Corea, Chick, 202 Corra, Bruno, 8 Corsetti, Giorgio Barberio, 140 Costible, Sue, 178 Cowell, Henry, 187 Craig, Gordon, 52, 149, 234, 280 Cranko, John, 258 Crary, Jonathan, 221 Crommelynck, Fernard, 18–19 Crompton, Dennis, 92 Cross, Lowell, 315 Crowhurst, Donald, 163 Crumb, George, 198 Cubitt, Sean, 175 Cˇufer, Eda, 72 Cunningham, Merce, 126, 193, 196–197, 222, 235–239, 241, 264–265, 267, 375n17, 375n19, 375n20, 377n45 Cutler, Chris, 216

Cahill, Thaddeus, 183–185, 219 Caillois, Roger, xxv Calatrava, Santiago, 81, 101 Calder, Alexander, 54 Caldwell, Sarah, 126 Callahan, Michael, 167 Callon, Michel, xxviii, xxix–xxx Calvert, Tom, 264 Campus, Peter, 123 Camurri, Antonio, 262 Cˇapek, Karel, 30, 280 Cardew, Cornelius, 198, 201, 203 Carpenter, Loren, 344 Carpenter, Rachel, 344 Carter, Elliott, 191 Cascone, Kim, 214–216 Caspersen, Dana, 259 Cassen, Jackie, 168 Castellucci, Romeo, 71 Castorf, Frank, 141 Catts, Oron, 255 Censi, Giannina, 228 Chadabe, Joel, 208–209, 217, 371n51, 371n55 Chafe, Chris, 216 Chaikin, Joseph, 126 Chalk, Warren, 92 Chappe, Claude, 343 Charcot, Jean-Martin, 248 Chartier, Richard, 215 Chekhov, Anton, xiii, 135–136, 139 Chernetskaya, Inna, 232 Chernikov, Iakov, 88, 363n11 Childs, Lucinda, 77, 240–242 Chion, Michel, 165 Choinere, Isabelle, 273 Chong, Ping, 66, 141, 159 Chouinard, Marie, 255 Cifirino, Fabio, 139 Claire, René, 44–45, 359n37 Clark, Lygia, 245, 247 Clarke, Andy, 264 Claudel, Paul, 7 Clayburgh, Jim, 135–136

Dafoe, Willem, 135 David, Michael, 128 Davies, Charlotte (Char), 336–337 Davies, Peter Maxwell, 134, 198–199 Davies, Siobhan, 266 Davis, Jim, 154 Davis, Miles, 202 Dean, Max, 297–298 de Certeau, Michel, 344, 351 de Châtel, Krisztina, 273–274 Decker, Martina, 105 Name Index 427

Dunn, Robert, 239–240 Dupree, Taylor, 214–215 Durkey, Steve, 167

de Costa, Beatriz, 254 Dehlholm, Kirsten, 71 DeKam, Johnny, 178 de Keersmaker, Anna Teresa, 141 deLahunta, Scott, 263, 265–266 De Landa, Manuel, 225 de Leeuw, Reinbert, 204 Deleuze, Gilles, 164 DeLillo, Don, 343 Delvoye, Wim, 298 de Maré, Rolf, 44 De Marinis, Paul, 341, 369n22, 370n41 Demers, Louis-Philippe, 279, 295–297, 379n23 Depero, Fortunato, 10–11 Derrida, Jacques, 77, 354n10 Dery, Mark, 104, 274, 284, 286 Descartes, René, 221, 373n7 De Vecchi, Gabriele, 308 Diaghilev, Sergei, 9 Dick, Philip K., 211 Diebner, Hans, xiii, xxx Diebold, Bernhard, 41 Diller, Elizabeth, 79–80, 104, 105–106, 141–142, 163, 258 Dilley, Barbara, 238 Dinkla, Söke, 321 Dipple, Kelli, 274 Dmitriev, Vladimir, 18 Dohrn, Wolf, 6 Dominguez, Ricardo, 254 Domnitch, Evelina, 178 Dove, Toni, 329–330 Downie, Marc, 267–268 Dresher, Paul, 202, 213, 372n59 Druckery, Timothy, 175 Duchamp, Marcel, 44–45, 79, 234, 239, 267, 281–282, 359n37 Dufort, Louis, 178 Duncan, Isadora, 225–226, 228, 232, 235 Duncan, John, 287 Dunn, David, 301 Dunn, Judith, 239–240

Eakins, Thomas, 224 Eames brothers, 170 Eckert, Rinde, 213 Eco, Umberto, 303, 307–308 Edison, Thomas, 226 Edler, Jan and Tim, 107, 110–111 Ehlers, Ekkehard, 214 Eimert, Herbert, 192 Eisenman, Peter, 77 Eisenstein, Sergei, 17, 22–23, 114, 144 Elsenaar, Arthur, 250 Eno, Brian, 202, 368n14 Erdman, Jerry, 316 Erickson, Kristin, 214 Erickson, Robert, 213 Eshkar, Shelly, 159, 267–268, 341 Etchells, Tim, 141 Etra, Bill, 121 Evans, Helen, 343 Evreinov, Nikolai, 17 Export, Valie, 123, 167, 243–244 Fabre, Jan, 255–256 Fahlström, Oyvind, 242 Farabough, Laura, 67, 131, 330 Farr, Ju Row, 327 Faulders, Thom, 104 Feenberg, Andrew, xxxv Fennesz, Christian, 214 Fillion, Carl, 70 Finneran, Alan, 67 Flamand, Frédéric, 80, 255, 258 Flanagan, Bob, 244–245 Flanagan, Hallie, 148 Flaubert, Gustave, 136 Flavin, Dan, 216 Fleischmann, Monika, 324–325 Flusser, Villém, 56, 275 Flynn, Chip, 286–287, 378n9

Name Index 428

Ginsberg, Allen, 128, 213 Ginsberg, Arthur, 128, 365n18 Ginsberg, Marsha, 77 Ginzburg, Mosei, 87–88, 363n11 Glass, Philip, 58–60, 159, 202–203, 212–213, 370n39 Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 7 Goebbels, Heiner, 213 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 65, 151 Goffman, Erving, xxiv–xxv Gold, Rich, 206, 370n41 Goldberg, Rose Lee, xxiv, 56–57, 80, 243, 363n8 Goldman, Albert, 2 Goldstein, Malcolm, 237 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo, 253–254 Gordon, Avery, 329 Gordon, David, 240 Gordon, Mel, 233 Göring, Hermann, 287 Goulthorpe, Mark, 102–103 Graham, Bill, 169 Graham, Dan, 116, 125, 141 Graham, Martha, 235–236 Grainger, Percy, 187 Gray, Camilla, 16 Gray, Spalding, 135 Greenaway, Peter, 159 Greenberg, Clement, xxiv Greene, David, 92, 363n12 Greig, Edvard, 1 Gresham-Lancaster, Scott, 216 Griffiths, Paul, 194 Groeneveld, Dirk, 322 Gromala, Diane, 272 Grooms, Red, 154 Gropius, Walter, 35, 37–39, 42–44, 49, 84, 359n34, 359n36 Grosz, Georg, 29 Grotowski, Jerzy, 57–58, 126, 139, 360n10 Grüber, Klaus Michael, 63, 65 Guattari, Félix, xxxii–xxxiii, xxxv, 85, 355n29

Foregger, Nikolai, 17, 22–24, 80, 233, 374n14 Foreman, Richard, 58, 60–62, 67, 158, 360n16 Forsythe, William, 102, 141, 222, 255, 258– 261, 273, 339–340, 376n38 Forti, Simone, 240, 242 Fortuny, Mariano, 26, 143 Foster, Sir Norman, 100 Foucault, Michel, 221 Fourier, Jean Baptiste, 183 Fournier, Colin, 110 Fox, Michael, 101 Freud, Sigmund, xxxi Freyer, Achim, 63 Fried, Michael, xxiv, 364n7 Fuchs, Antje, 214 Fuchs, Georg, 17 Fuller, Loïe, 226–228, 246, 373n5, 373n6 Fuller, R. Buckminster, 99, 100–102, 167, 135, 315, 363n16 Furuhashi, Teiji, 74, 76 Fusco, Coco, 253–254 Gabo, Naum, 15, 90, 281 Gabriel, Peter, 141, 216 Gaffney, Nik, 332 Galas, Diamanda, 175, 212 Galasso, Michael, 202 Gan, Alexei, 15, 87 Gance, Abel, 169 Ganson, Arthur, 297 Garin, Erast, 232 Geertz, Clifford, xxiv Gehry, Frank, 76–77, 81, 104 Gelfand, Dmitry, 178 Gershwin, George, 187 Gerz, Jochen, 123 Gibson, Ruth, 272 Giedion, Sigfried, 280–281 Gilje, H.C., 178 Gilpin, Heidi, 261 Gins, Madeline, 226

Name Index 429

Hirsch, Nicole, 189 Hirsch, Shelly, 212 Hitchcock, Alfred, 186 Hoberman, Chuck, 101 Hoberman, Perry, 324 Hobijn, Eric, 287, 290–291 Hobsbawm, Eric, v, 351 Hollein, Hans, 96–97 Holzer, Rainer Michael, 94 Horn, Rebecca, 222, 227, 245–247, 298–300 Horton, Jim, 206 Howes, David, xxxii Hrvatin, Emil, 72–73 Hsuo-Hsei, Hsein, 243 Huelsenbeck, Richard, 28 Hughes, Robert, 90 Huhtamo, Erkki, 305 Huizinga, Johan, xxv, 339 Hultén, Karl Pontus, 282 Hunt, Jerry, 212, 217 Hwang, David Henry, 159 Hyde, Joseph, 266

Hadid, Zaha, 77, 81, 258 Haffner, Nik, 272 Hall, Edward T., 338 Hall, Jeff, 273 Handke, Peter, 128–130 Hansen, Al, 154 Hansen, Heiko, 343 Hansen, Mark, 342 Hanslick, Eduard, 1 Haque, Usman, 341, 343 Harakami, Rei, 214 Haraway, Donna, xxx, 222, 249, 354n19 Hardman, Chris, 67–68, 131 Haring, Chris, 272 Haring, Kristen, 371n48 Harrington, Wendall, 158 Hartley, Jan, 158 Hašek, Gustav, 34 Hattinger, Gottfried, 287 Hausmann, Raoul, 28 Hay, Alex, 240–241 Hay, Deborah, 240–242 Hayles, Katherine, 249 Hecker, Florian, 214 Hecker, Tim, 214 Heckert, Matt, 284, 287–290 Hegedüs, Agnes, 323 Heidegger, Martin, xxxv Helmholtz, Hermann von, 183, 222 Hemment, Drew, 346 Hendrix, Jimi, 169, 202 Henry, Pierre, 192, 293 Hentschläger, Kurt, 165, 174–175 Hermann, Karl-Ernst, 63–65 Heron of Alexandria, 279 Herron, Ron, 92–94, 101 Herzog, Jacques, 81, 362n31 Higgins, Dick, 199 Hill, Gary, 140, 158 Hiller, Lejaren, 168, 205 Hills, Joan, 169 Hilton, Guy, 266 Hindemith, Paul, 186

Iddon, Jamie, 327 Ihnatowicz, Edward, 294, 379n20 Ikeda, Kazuo, 273 Ikeda, Ryoji, 176–177, 214 Inoue, Tesuo, 214 Irwin, Bill, 141 Irwin, Robert, 307, 381n10 Isaacson, Leonard, 205 Israel, Robert, 77 Ito, Toyo, 81, 106–109 Itten, Johannes, 37 Jacobs, Henry, 168 Jacques-Dalcroze, Emile, 5–7, 228–229 Jährling, Rolf, 117–118 Jameson, Fredric, 66 Jaspers, Karl, xxxv Jencks, Charles, 100 Jesurun, John, 66, 132 Jeyasingh, Shobana, 266

Name Index 430

Kolarevic, Branko, 84, 88 Kondek, Chris, 136, 138 Köner, Thomas, 214 Koolhaas, Rem, 76, 81 Korot, Beryl, 141, 213 Kostelanetz, Richard, 57 Kouril, Miroslav, 151 Kozel, Susan, 271, 274, 337–338 Kramer, Gustav, 281 Kramm, Rüdiger, 108 Krammer, Michael, 174 Krasner, Sarah, 163 Kresnik, Johann, 255 Krinsky, Vladimir, 87 Kroitor, Roman, 170–172 Kruchenyk, Alexei, 11–12 Krueger, Myron, xxxix, 96, 316–321, 324–325, 328 Krueger, Ted, 297 Krutikov, Georgii, 88–90, 100 Kuchelmeister, Volker, 259 Kurokawa, Ryoichi, 178 Kurtz, Steve, 254 Kusaite, Lina, 332 Kusch, Martin, 270–271 Kuzmanovic, Maja, 332 Kwinter, Sanford, 85, 221

Jobs, Steve, 69 Johns, Jasper, 238–239 Johnson, Philip, 76 Jonas, Joan, 116, 123–124 Jones, Bill T., 267 Jones, Inigo, 3 Jones, Robert Edmond, 148–149, 151 Jones, Wes, 101 Judd, Donald, 242 Kac, Eduardo, 250, 297 Kafka, Franz, 296 Kagel, Mauricio, 194, 198–199 Kaiser, Paul, 159, 267–268, 341 Kalfin, Robert, 128 Kandinsky, Wassily, 9, 37, 63 Kantor, Istvan (Monty Cantsin), 289–290 Kaplicky, Jan, 94 Kaprow, Allan, 57, 154–155, 305, 307, 380n4 Karasic, Carmen, 254 Karkowsky, Zbigniew, 217 Kaufman, Murray the K, 167 Keller, Ed, 338 Kelp, Günter Zamp, 96 Kemeny, Alfred, 39–40 Kennedy, John F., 293 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 11, 13–14 Kiesler, Frederick, 30–32, 44, 280, 357n23, 358n24, 358n26, 358n27 King, Kenneth, 240 Kirby, Michael, 57–58, 139, 154, 156, 169, 380n2 Kirschenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, xii–xiii Kittler, Friedrich, 163 Klee, Paul, 37–38 Klein, Yves, xxiv, 243 Kleist, Heinrich von, 234, 280, 329 Klutsis, Gustav, 88 Klüver, Billy, 196, 237–238, 241, 282–283, 312, 314–315, 381n19 Knorr-Cetina, Karin, xxvii Knowlton, Ken, 167 Koch, Kenneth, 283

Laban, Rudolf von, 229–231, 233, 259, 373n8, 374n9, 374n10 Ladovsky, Nikolai, 87, 363n10 Langheinrich, Ulf, 165, 174–175 Latour, Bruno, xxvii–xxix, xxxi–xxxii, xxxv–xxxvi, 354n18, 355n29 Laurel, Brenda, xxxv, 321, 355n31, 355n32 Lavinskii, Anton, 88, 90 Law, John, xxviii–xxix Leary, Timothy, 136 Leatherbarrow, David, 83 LeCompte, Elizabeth, xiii, 135, 137–138 Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret-Gris), 4, 87, 93, 99, 107, 189, 191, 205, 293, 368n12

Name Index 431

Mahieu, Stefan, 214 Maleczech, Ruth, 58, 132–133 Malevich, Kazimir, 11–13, 20, 63, 72, 356n11 Malone, Kirby, 158 Man Ray, 44–45 Mansbach, Stephen, 25 Manson, Caden, 161–162 Manthey, Axel, 63 Manzoni, Piero, 243 Marclay, Christian, 216 Marey, Étienne-Jules, 222–225, 234, 266, 276, 373n2 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 7–8, 11, 86, 227–228, 356n6 Maris, Bastiaan, 290, 378n12 Marker, Chris, 133 Marranca, Bonnie, xxxvii, 58, 60, 361n18 Martelli, Bruno, 265, 272 Martenot, Maurice, 186, 219 Martin, Andrée, 274 Martin, Tony, 169, 315 Marussich, Yann, 250–251 Massumi, Brian, 252 Matta, Roberto, 98 Matta-Clark, Gordon, 98–99 Matthews, Max, 205, 237–238, 370n43, 371n45, 372n67 Matthews, Stanley, 311 Matyushin, Mikhail, 11–12 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 11, 134 Mayer H., Jürgen, 105 Mayne, Thom, 81, 258 McAnuff, Des, 141 McCall, Anthony, 167 McCarthy, Paul, 243 McCartney, James, 214 McCormick, John, 274 McCullough, Warren, 279, 306 McGonigal, Jane, 345 McGregor, Wayne, 266, 272 McGuire, Matthew, 79 McIntosh, Thomas, 289–290

Léger, Fernand, 183, 233–234, 281 Lehmann, Hans-Thies, 71 Lemieux, Michel, 273–274 Lenin, Vladimir, 15, 187, 357n15 Lepage, Robert, 70–71, 141, 159, 296, 362n25, 362n26 Lepka, Hubert, 255 Le Vasseur, Paul, 265 Levin, Golan, 178 Levine, Les, 117 Lewis, George, 207, 209–210, 368n17 Lewis, Jason, 346 Libeskind, Daniel, 77, 81, 261 Lichtenstein, Roy, 63, 111 Licklider, J. C. R., 306 Lieberman, Frederick, 237 Lieberman, Zachary, 178 Lintermann, Bernd, 272, 323 Lippard, Lucy, 305, 354n9 Lissitzky, Lazar (El), 20–22, 38, 44, 50, 83–84, 87–89, 296, 363n10 Littlewood, Joan, xvi, 310–312, 316 Livshits, Benedikt, 11–12 Lloyd, Christopher, 128–130 Lock, Édouard, 256 Loew, Heinz, 42–43, 61, 166, 359n35 Lopez, Francisco, 214 Lozano–Hemmer, Rafael, 339 Lucier, Alvin, 201–202 Ludwig II, 2 Luening, Otto, 192 Luhmann, Niklas, 105 Lumière brothers, 114, 358n29 Lüsebrink, Dirk, 325 Lynn, Greg, 349 Lysowski, Lukas, 178 Maas, Winy, 343 Machover, Tod, 209, 211–212, 217 Maciunas, George, 117 MacMurtrie, Chico, 287, 295 Madan, Emmanuel, 289–290 Maeda, John, 178

Name Index 432

Mumma, Gordon, 126, 194, 197, 199, 237–239 Munari, Bruno, 277, 280, 303 Munkacsi, Kurt, 203 Musafar, Fakir, 244, 252 Musgrave, Chris, 178 Muthesius, Hermann, 25, 356n5 Muybridge, Eadweard, 223–225, 234, 266 Myers, Forest, 314

McLuhan, Marshall, 58, 96, 128, 167, 307 McManus, Thomas, 272 Mehring, Walter, 34 Mekas, Jonas, 156, 167, 241 Méliès, Georges, 114 Melnikov, Konstantin, 87–89 Mendelsohn, Erich, 65 Mendieta, Ana, 123 Mengelberg, Misha, 204 Menicacci, Armando, 263 Menotti, Gian Carlo, 293 Merrit, Just, 287, 333 Messiaen, Olivier, 78, 134, 186, 191, 205 Metzger, Gustav, 284 Meuron, Pierre de, 81, 362n31 Meyer, Florian, 273 Meyer, Hannes, 39 Meyerhold, Vsevolod Emilevich, 16–22, 24, 33–35, 44, 49, 73, 144–145, 147, 159, 232–233, 357n15, 358n30, 359n36 Milhaud, Darius, 186 Miller, Arthur, 135–136, 154 Miller, Sean Wellesley, 97 Minks, Wilfried, 63 Minsky, Marvin, 212 Miyake, Issey, 248 Moholy-Nagy, László, 31, 34, 37–41, 44, 50, 53, 281, 296 Möller, Christian, 108, 341 Molnár, Farkas, 39, 41–42 Monahan, Gordon, 288, 290 Monk, Meredith, 66, 240 Montano, Linda, 243 Moog, Robert, 237–238 Moorman, Charlotte, 119–120, 293, 369n27 Mori, Mariko, 249 Moriwaki, Katherine, 346 Morris, Robert, 238, 375n20 Morse, Margaret, 124, 303 Muehl, Otto, 243–244 Müller, Heiner, 63–64, 141, 213 Müller, Traugott, 34–35, 146, 151 Mumford, Lewis, 228

Nakaya, Fujiko, 105, 242, 315 Nameth, Ronald, 168 Naugle, Lisa, 266, 274–275 Nauman, Bruce, 116, 123–125, 131, 133, 238, 243 Neher, Caspar, 63, 147 Neill, Ben, 217 Nelson, Richard, xxxi Newman, Barnett, 60, 63 Nezvanova, Netochka, 177 Nicolai, Carsten, 214 Nieuwenhuys, Constant, 338–339, 350, 352 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 5, 284 Nijinska, Bronislava, 233 Nikolais, Alwin, 293 Nitsch, Hermann, 243–244 Nixon, David, 94 Noll, A. Michael, 265 Nono, Luigi, 126, 369n24 Noordung, Herman Potocnik, 72 Nouvel, Jean, 102, 258 Novak, Marcos, 272 Nyman, Michael, 191, 193, 202 Obama, Barack, x Obarzanek, Gideon, 270 Obermaier, Klaus, 272 Odenbach, Marcel, 123 Odland, Bruce, 213 Offenbach, Jacques, 41 Oiticica, Hélio, 245, 247 Olinder, Laurie, 158 Oliveros, Pauline, 201, 213, 370n41, 375n20

Name Index 433

Pinter, Klaus, 96 Pintile, Lucien, 141 Piscator, Erwin, 32–26, 41–44, 49, 55–56, 144, 146–148, 151–152, 154, 159, 358n29, 358n30, 358n31, 359n32, 366n34 Pitts, Water, 279, 306 Planchon, Roger, 55–56, 71 Plant, Sadie, 249 Platel, Alain, 255 Plessi, Fabrizio, 140 Poelzig, Max, 26–27, 33 Poletti, Manuel, 261 Polieri, Jacques, 53–56, 113, 159 Pollesch, René, 141 Pollock, Jackson, 244 Popova, Lyubov, 16, 18–20, 22, 31, 145 Popper, Frank, 281, 307 Poulin, Marie-Claude, 270–271 Pousseur, Henri, 194 Powderly, James, 341 Prampolini, Enrico, 9–11, 31, 86, 356n8, 356n9 Preston, Travis, 141 Price, Cedric, xvi, 310–312, 316 Prix, Wolf D., 81, 94 Puckette, Miller, 209, 214, 371n54

O’Neill, Eugene, 135–136, 148 Oosterhuis, Kas, 101–102 Oppenheim, Dennis, 243 Orff, Carl, 154 Orlan, 222, 244, 248–249, 376n30 Ortner, Laurids, 96 Ortner, Manfred, 96 Ostertag, Bob, 216–217 Ostrovsky, Aleksandr, 23 Oswald, John, 216 Otto, Frei, 99–100 Oudin, Michel, 53 Oursler, Tony, 158 Pagano, Scott, 178 Page, Ashley, 266 Paik, Nam June, 116, 117–120, 122–123, 126, 199, 237, 293–294, 307, 364n9, 364n10, 379n19 Palazhy, Jayachandran, 273 Pane, Gina, 243–244 Paquet, Alfons, 33 Paradiso, Joseph, 262 Pask, Gordon, 307, 310–312 Pauline, Mark, 284–286 Paulos, Eric, 285, 346 Paxton, Steve, 240–243, 313–314 Penny, Simon, 279, 297–298 Perkis, Tim, 216 Perle, George, 191 Perloff, Marjorie, 13 Pevsner, Antoine, 15 Peymann, Claus, 63 Philips, Frits, 189 Philips, Nick, 324 Philon of Byzantium, 279 Piano, Renzo, 99, 104, 108 Picabia, Francis, 44–45, 281 Picasso, Pablo, 281 Pickering, Andrew, xxix–xxx, 354n19, 379n23 Picon-Vallin, Béatrice, 131 Pilon, Victor, 273–274

Quinz, Emanuel, 263 Raaijmakers, Dick, 198, 204 Rabanne, Paco, 248 Radok, Alfred, 50, 152–154, 170 Radok, Emil, 170, 172 Rainer, Arnulf, 243 Rainer, Yvonne, 222, 240–243 Ralske, Kurt, 178 Rancière, Jacques, 306 Rasch, Bodo, 100 Rauschenberg, Robert, 196–197, 238, 241–242, 305, 307, 312–313, 381n15 Reagan, Ronald, 66, 203, 244 Reaney, Mark, 159

Name Index 434

Sacks, Oliver, 141 Sadao, Shoji, 100 Saitowitz, Stanley, 104 Sala, Oskar, 186 Salk, Jonas, xxviii Salter, Chris, 330, 341 Salzman, Eric, 198, 369n28 Sandin, Dan, 316 Sangiorgi, Leonardo, 139 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 86, 89 Satie, Erik, 44–45, 239 Saup, Michael, 325–327 Sauter, Joachim, 325–326 Savoie, Pierre-Paul, 273 Scanner, 178, 215 Scavarda, Donald, 197 Scha, Remko, 250 Schaeffer, Pierre, 189, 191–192, 368n14 Schall, Hans Dieter, 63 Schat, Peter, 204 Schechner, Richard, xxiv–xxvii, xxxiv, 58, 135–136, 304–305, 313 Scheerbart, Paul, 27 Schiller, Gretchen, 338 Schillinger, Joseph, 181, 187 Schiphorst, Thecla, 264, 337 Schlee, Bev, 254 Schlemmer, Oskar, 37, 39, 41, 44, 57, 80, 233–234, 265, 374–375n15 Schneemann, Carolee, 155–156 Schoenberg, Arnold, 181, 193 Schöffer, Nicolas, 107, 292–293, 307, 379n16 Schottstaedt, Bill, 209 Schwartz, Barry, 291 Schwartz, Hillel, 225 Schwarzkogler, Rudolf, 243–244 Schwitters, Kurt, 29, 31, 57 Scofidio, Ricardo, 79–80, 104, 105–106, 141–142, 163, 258 Searle, John R., xxv Sebök, Stefan, 39 Sellars, Peter, 77–78, 133–135, 365n23, 366n43

Recalcati, Antonio, 65 Reder, Bernard, 53 Rehberg, Peter, 214 Reich, Steve, 141, 202–203, 212–213, 370n40 Reichardt, Jasia, xxxviii, 277, 279, 294–295, 307 Reinhardt, Max, 26–27, 52 Reynolds, Roger, 197 Rheingold, Howard, 344 Richter, Hans, 45 Richter, Otto, 36 Riley, Terry, 201–203, 213, 381n9 Rinaldo, Ken, 297–298 Rinke, Klaus, 243 Ristow, Christian, 286 Roca, Marcel.lí Antúnez, 249–250 Rockmore, Clara, 187 Rodchenko, Aleksandr, 13, 15–16 Rogala, Miroslaw, 324 Rogers, Richard, 99, 104 Rokeby, David, 177, 328–329 Ronell, Avital, 249 Rosa, Paolo, 139 Rosch, Eleanor, xxvi Rose, Barbara, 315 Rose, Charles, 69 Rose, Jon, 217 Rose, Jürgen, 63 Rose, Sherrie, 245 Rosenbach, Ulrike, 123 Rosler, Martha, 116, 123, 364n8 Ross, Charles, 240 Roth, Evan, 341 Rothko, Mark, 63 Rovan, Butch, 217 Rubin, Ben, 142, 341–343 Rudnitsky, Konstantin, 18 Rueb, Terri, 346 Russolo, Luigi, 182–183, 188, 192 Rutt, Steve, 121 Ryan, Joel, 206, 208, 261, 332 Rzewski, Frederick, 201, 370n30

Name Index 435

Stelarc (Steladiou Arcadiou), 222, 243–244, 251–252, 255 Stepanova, Varvara, 15 Stern, Gerd, 167, 367n44 Stern, Rudi, 168 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 117, 191–192, 194–195, 198–199, 201, 369n25 Stone, Allucquére Rosanne (Sandy), 249 Stone, Carl, 216 Stone, Phil, 216 Stoppiello, Dawn, 268 Strauss, Richard, 186 Strauss, Wolfgang, 324–325 Stravinsky, Igor, 9, 77, 182–183 Strindberg, August, 143 Stuart, Meg, 141 Subotnick, Morton, 192, 201, 209–210, 212 Suchman, Lucy, xxxiv Summers, Elaine, 240–241 Sun Ra, 202 Sutherland, Ivan, 306, 316 Suzuki, D.T., 193 Svoboda, Josef, xxxvii, 49–53, 69, 126–127, 130, 152–154, 159, 170–172, 359n1, 359–360n3 Sweeney, Skip, 128, 365n18 Swiczinsky, Helmut, 81, 94

Semper, Gottfried, 3 Sender, Ramon, 192, 201 Senttimelli, Emilio, 8 Serlin, Jerome, 158–159 Serlio, Sebastiano, 3 Sermon, Paul, 274 Serres, Michel, 119 Sessions, Roger, 191–192 Sha, Xin Wei, 330 Shakespeare, William, 65, 134, 139 Shank, Ted, 66 Shanken, Edward, 307 Shannon, Claude, 306 Sharir, Yacov, 272 Shaw, Jeffrey, 97–98, 139, 168, 321–324 Shawn, Ted, 225 Siegel, Marcia, 238 Sifuentes, Roberto, 253 Simon, Herbert, 296 Simon, Michael, 261 Singer, Brooke, 346 Skryiabin, Aleksandr, 4 Sky, Helen, 274 Smith, Peyton, 135 Smith, Roberta, 248 Snelson, Kenneth, 100 Snow, Michael, 144, 167 Soane, John, 83 Sokolov, Ippolit, 233 Solnit, Rebecca, 223 Sonami, Laetitia, 217–219 Sontag, Susan, 47 Sparacino, Flavia, 262 Spector, Nancy, 298 Speer, Albert, 107 Spelletich, Kal, 286 Spiller, Neil, 85 Spoerri, Daniel, 282 St. Denis, Ruth, 225 Stalbaum, Brett, 254 Stalin, Josef, 24, 34, 153, 187 Stanford, Leland, 224 Stein, Peter, 63, 65

Tairov, Aleksandr, 17, 22 Takatani, Shiro, 176 Takeya, Akemi, 164, 175 Tambelini, Aldo, 168 Tanaka, Atau, 217–218 Tandavanitj, Nic, 327 Tarkovsky, Andrei, 85 Tatlin, Vladimir, 13–15, 30, 72, 84, 88–91, 107 Taut, Bruno, 27–28 Taylor, Frederick W., 230, 232–233, 374n11 Taylor, Mark C., 106–107 Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich, 1 Tenney, James, 237, 371n45 Terran, Michelle, 346

Name Index 436

Van Hove, Ivo, 141 van Overmeier, Mark, 255 van Vlijmen, Jan, 204 Varela, Francisco, xxvi, 352, 378n3, 382n27 Varèse, Edgard, 4, 186, 188–192, 194, 205, 219, 368n11 Varisco, Grazia, 308 Vasarely, Victor, 111 Vasulka, Steina, 116, 120–121, 123, 341, 365n20 Vasulka, Woody, 120–122, 300–302, 364n13, 380n26. Vaucanson, Jacques de, 279 Vawter, Ron, 135, 139 Venezsky, Richard, 316 Vercoe, Barry, 214 Verdi, Giuseppe, 52 Vertov, Dziga, 144 Vesnin, Aleksandr, 22, 84, 87–89 Vesnin, Leonid, 87–89 Vesnin, Viktor, 87–89 Viebrock, Anne, 77 Viola, Bill, 123, 133, 142, 160–161, 163, 365n16, 369n22 Virilio, Paul, 8, 163 Vitruvius, 84 von Hausswolff, Carl Michael, 214 von Neumann, John, 279 von Salzmann, Alexander, 6–7 Vorn, Bill, 295–296, 379n23 Vostell, Wolf, 117, 122–123

Teshigawara, Saburo, 255, 258 Tessenow, Heinrich, 6 TeZ, 178 Tharp, Twyla, 265 Theremin, Léon, 186–187, 319, 368n9 Thomas, Dave, 314 Thompson, D’Arcy, 99 Thompson, Emily, 182 Thompson, Evan, xxvi Thompson, Francis, 170–171 Thomsen, Mette Ramsgard, 101 Thorpe, Marc, 286, 387n10 Tinguely, Jean, 241, 277, 281–284 Toller, Ernst, 34 Tolstoy, Alexei, 34 Tone, Yasunao, 215 Trautwein, Friedrich, 186, 219 Trayle, Mark, 216 Tretyakov, Sergei, 19–21, 23, 145 Tschumi, Bernard, xxxvii, 77, 85, 107, 141, 363n8, 364n19 Tsypin, George, 77–78, 134 Tuchman, Maurice, 307 Tudor, David, 126, 194–197, 199, 201, 237–239, 242, 314–315 Turner, Victor, xxiv–xxv Turrell, James, 307, 381n10 Tuters, Marc, 346 Twain, Mark, 1 Tzara, Tristan, 28–29, 44 Ulay, 243 Ussachevsky, Vladimir, 192

Wagner, Richard, xxxvi, 1–7, 9, 26, 29, 36–37, 39, 43, 47, 52, 58, 62, 143, 149, 160, 284, 355–356n2, 356n3, 360n5 Waisvisz, Michel, 204–205, 217 Ward, Adrian, 266 Warhol, Andy, 63, 117, 168, 238 Wasik, Bill, 344–345 Waters, Muddy, 169 Watt, James, 222 Webb, Mike, 92, 94 Weber, Carl, 128–130

Vakhtangov, Yevgeny, 17 Valk, Kate, 135–137 Van Belle, Guy, 216 van de Akker, Ruud, 136 Vandekybus, Wim, 255–256 VanDerBeek, Stan, 126, 167–168, 174, 237 van der Heide, Edwin, 217 van der Heide, Rogier, 343 van Hoogstraten, Samuel, 339

Name Index 437

Yoshihide, Otomo, 216 Young, La Monte, 201–203 Youngblood, Gene, 156, 167 Yutkevich, Sergei, 22–23, 80

Webern, Anton, 181 Wechsler, Robert, 270 Wedekind, Frank, 151 Weems, Marianne, 162 Wegman, William, 243 Weibel, Peter, 123, 167, 243–244, 287, 308 Weill, Kurt, 147 Weininger, Andreas, 42–43, 53 Weiss, Frieder, 270 Wen-Chung, Chou, 188 Werner, Eric, 284 White, Norman, 297–298 Whiting, Jim, 187 Whitman, Robert, 154–156, 242, 314 Whitney, John, Jr., 169 Whitney, John, Sr., 169 Whitney, Michael, 169 Wiener, Norbert, 292, 306–307 Wigman, Mary, 225, 229 Wilder, Thornton, 135–136 Willems, Thom, 261 Williams, Heathcoat, 128 Williams, Tennessee, 154 Wilson, Robert, 58–63, 67, 70–71, 158, 267, 360n12, 361n19 Winkler, Todd, 341 Wodiczko, Krzysztof, 339 Wolofsky, Zella, 264 Wonder, Erich, 63–64, 66, 361n20 Woodruff, Robert, 141 Woods, Lebbeus, 94 Woolford, Kirk, 80, 271–272 Woolgar, Steve, xxviii Wortzel, Adrianne, 297 Wray, Stefan, 254 Wright, Wilbur, 225 Wynne-Wilson, Peter, 169

Z, Pamela, 212, 217 Zadek, Peter, 63 Zambello, Francesca, 78 Zappa, Frank, 202 Zicarelli, David, 214 Ziegler, Christian, 259, 266, 273–274 Zivadinov, Dragan, 71–73 Zuk, William, 99 Zurr, Ionat, 255

Xenakis, Iannis, 4, 189, 191–192, 205, 214, 372n61 Yakult, Jud, 167–168 Yalter, Nil, 123

Name Index 438

Subject Index

Absolute Threshold, The, 290 Accumulation (T. Brown), 242, 375n21 Acousmatic, 192, 293, 368n15 Acoustics relation with electronic sound, 195, 201 Wagner’s use of, 3 (see also Point source) Actant, 82, 85 defined, xxviii human performance and, xxix, 115, 289 relationship to actor-networks and, xxviii Active Ingredient, 346 Actor and the Über-marionette (Craig), 280 Actor Network Theory (ANT) Latour’s definition of, xxviii–xxix misunderstanding of, 354n18 Actors Video Workshop, 122. See also The Kitchen Actuator in body-based performance, 249–250 defined, 383 to generate machine movement, 288, 291, 295 use in architecture, 101, 352 use in Tudor’s Rainforest, 139 (see also Motor; Sensing technologies) AdaPT (Association for Dance and Performance Telematics), 274

Aegis Hyposurface (Goulthorpe), 102–103 Aerodanze (Censi), 228 Aesthetic experience, xxi, 241, 351 Krueger’s definition, 317–318 Aesthetics and Computation Group. See MIT Media Lab “Aesthetics of failure” (Cascone), 215–216 Affect in Francis Bacon’s work, 164 production of, through technology, xxi, 125, 173, 227 Ag4 Mediatechture, 108 Agency nonhuman and, xxx, xxxii, 103, 379n23 political framing of, xxv, xxviii, xxix, 251 technological enunciation of, 103, 329, 331–332, 338, 355n21 Agential realism (Barad), xxix–xxx Agitprop, 33–34, 147, 311 Aleatoric, 194, 283. See also Chance procedures; Indeterminacy Algorithm, xxxiii, 101, 330, 352 control of machines through, 288, 300, 309 defined, 383 music composition and, 178, 205, 217 use in dance, 222, 242, 267, 330, 342

technical, 3, 11, 26, 34, 41, 44, 57, 90, 114, 130–131, 136, 166, 172, 181, 197, 221, 228, 254, 319–320, 324, 334, 337, 352, 359n32, 359n35, 368n14 Apparition (Obermaier), 272 Apple Computer, 69, 173, 177, 206, 214, 322 Archigram, 92–95, 98–99, 101, 310, 363n12, 363n13 Architectural body, 226 Architecture event and, 84–85, 92–99 movement and, 86–92, 99–102 relationship to performance and, 82–84 responsiveness and materiality, 103–106 screen versus scene and, 106–112 surface and, 83–84, 106–107 Architectures of Disappearance, 261 Archizoom, 92 Arizona State University’s Institute for Studies in the Arts, 263 Ars Electronica Festival, 64, 111, 174, 176, 178, 287, 331, 344 Art and Technology Program at LACMA, 307 ARTCOM, 325–326, 341 Arte Programatta (Eco), 303, 308 Artificial Neural Network (ANN), 291, 383 Artificial Reality I and II (Krueger), 320 Art of Noise (band), 216 Art of Noises, The (Russolo), 182 Arts de la scène, 306 Art Zoyd, 296 ASCII, 279, 289 defined, 383 as visual aesthetic, 178, 272 ASNOVA (Association of New Architects), 87, 363n10 Association Creation, 341 Asymptote Architecture, 349 Audio-Visual Environmental Suite (Levin), 178 Ausdruckstanz, 229 Autechre, 214 Auteur, stage director as, 56, 61–62

A-Life (Artificial Life), 296, 298, 381, 383 Alles ist Architektur (Hollein), 96 Allman Brothers Band, 202 Alloplastic, 103, 249 Ambienti Interattivi (Gruppo T), 308 American Music Theater Festival, 211 Amériques (Varèse), 188–189 AMM, 201, 203, 370n31 Amorphic Robot Works (MacMurtrie), 295 Ampex Corporation, 115 Analytic postmodern (dance), 242 Anamorphic lens, 152, 383 Anarchitecture, 98 Animatronics, 286 Animism and inanimate, xxiii, xxxi–xxxiii, 30, 238, 242 machines and, 279, 302 matter as, xxxi, 100 the nonhuman and, xxvii, xxxi Ann Arbor, Michigan, as experimental performance center, 155, 197, 199–200, 370n36 Anomos, 263 Antenna Theater, 67–69 Ant Farm, 123 Anthropology animism and, xxxi–xxxii performative turn in, xxiv symmetrical, xxxii Apparatus. See also Machine; Projection Brecht’s notion of, 36 image media and, 107, 123, 221, 223, 252, 257, 276, 340, 373n2, 380n26 mechanical forms of, 277, 282, 295, 298, 318, 336 political machinery of, 304 projection technology as, 25, 34, 39, 43, 143, 153, 175–176 in science, 35, 60, 234 sound making and, 183–184, 187, 290 stage as, xxii, xxxii, xxxvi, 8–9, 17, 30, 41, 50, 53, 56, 150

Subject Index 440

Biotechnology and biochemical choreography, 250–251 in body based performance, 376n33 Critical Art Ensemble’s critique of, 254 Tissue Art and Culture and, 255 Birth of the World (Svoboda/Radok), 170 BIX façade, 110–111 Black Mountain College, 167, 236 Blast Theory, 327, 346–347 Bleu Remix (Marussich), 250–251 Blob architecture, 101, 110, Body conditioning through techniques, 228–229, 258–261 cyborg and, 249 ethnic identity and, 253 extension, prosthesics and, 221, 245, 252, 272 hybridity and, 253–255 implants and, 221–222, 248–249 machine and, 227–234 marking of, 223–224 Muybridge’s gridding of, 224 reaching physical limits through performance, 247, 255–258 self-mutilation of, 243–245 technological manipulation of, 245–252 Body-centric interfaces, 324 Bodymaps: artifacts of touch (Schiphorst), 337 Body suspension pieces, 252 Bolshevik (October) revolution, 15, 24 Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices, The (Al-Jazari), 279 Brain Opera (Machover), 212 Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), 156 Next Wave Festival, 66, 366n42 Brotherhood, The (W. Vasulka), 300–302 Brotherhood of Light, 169 Brussels World’s Fair (1958), 4, 152, 189. See also Philips Corporation Buddhism, 57, 85, 118, 193 Bühnenraum, 63 Builder’s Association, 141, 159, 161–163

Auto destructive art, 284 Automata. See also Robots; Puppets mechanical types of, 277, 281, 298, 300–301 von Neumann’s concept of, 279 Autonomous digital creatures, 268 Autoplastic, 103 Autopoiesis, 354n12, 378n3 Avouer le théâter, 56 Background subtraction, 319, 384. See also Computer vision techniques Bähr disk, 143, 147 Baktruppen, 71 Ballet Méchanique (Antheil/Léger), 183, 233–234 Ballets Russes, 9 Ballets Suédois, 44–45 Bardo, 85 Bauhaus Kunst und Technik—eine neue Einheit, 37 move to Dessau, 37–38 origins of, 37 total theaters of, 41–44 Bauhaus Dances (Schlemmer), 234 Bayreuther Festspielhaus, 1, 3, 355n2 Beatles, 202 Bell Labs, 167, 189, 196, 241, 265, 282. See also E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) involvement in computer sound, 205–206, 371n45 support of artists, 167, 307 Benday dots, 111, 384 Berliner Ensemble, 128 Berlin Free Zone and Zagreb Free Zone (Woods), 94 Beyond Modern Sculpture: The Effects of Science and Technology (Burnham), 292 Big Art Group, 141, 161–163 Biomechanics, 333 as body training system, 18, 228, 374n12 Meyerhold’s notion of, 232 Biomimetic, 332

Subject Index 441

Chunky Move, 270 Cinefication, 143–144, 149 Cinema. See also Cinefication; Cinemazation Constructivism and, 144–145 early origins in relationship to theater and, 114 Piscator’s work and, 146–147 Cinematic bunraku, 329 CINEMATRIX Audience Participation System (Carpenter), 344 Cinemazation, 23 Circle Vision 360, 172 Circuit bending, 195, 204–205 Circus, 8, 26, 148, 237, 351. See also “Theater, Circus, Variety” influence on Constructivist stage, 17, 22–23, 233 CIRMMT (McGill University), 217 Cirque du Soleil, 4, 274 City of Abstracts (Forsythe), 340–341 City of the Future (Lavinskii), 88 CIVIL wars, The (Wilson), 60 CLAEM (Latin American Higher Studies Musical Centre), 200 Cloaca (Delvoye), 298 Closed loop system, 384 CNMAT (Berkeley), 217 CNN, 134–135, 142 Cognitive science, xxvi, 262, 306. See also Representation Cold War, 277 (see also Military) cultural climate of, 304 and military technology, 294, 300, 306, 380n25 Coldcut, 178 Color inversion, 127, 384 Columbia/Princeton Electronic Music Center, 192 Command line, 209, 387 Compagnie C de la B, 255 Company in Space, 274 Composers Inside Electronics, 197, 201, 369n22s

Building skins, xxxiv electronics in architecture and, 107–108, 110–111 Fuller’s U.S. Pavilion in Montréal, 99–102 Bunraku, 279 Burning Man festival, 286 Butoh, 258 Byetone, 178 C3I, 300 Capacitance sensor. See Sensing technologies Carbone, 14, 159, 255 Cartridge Music (Cage), 194–195 Catherine Wheel, The (Tharp), 265 CAVE (Cave Audio-Visual Experience Automatic Virtual Environment), 323 CCRMA (Stanford), 206, 209, 216 CCTV defined, 384 in live performance contexts, 124, 128–129, 132 Svoboda’s use of, 126–127 Cena 11, 255 CGI (Computer Graphic Image), 161, 163 Chance procedures, 306 Cage’s use of, 193–194 Cunningham and, 236 Chang in a Void Moon (Jesurun), 132 Chaos Computer Club, 111 Charleroi Dances/Plan K, 80 Chelsea Theater Center, 127 AC/DC, 128 Kaddish, 128 Kaspar, 128–129 Choreographic objects, 340 Choreography. See also Chance procedures external systems and, 230–235 in relationship to computers, 236–239, 261–273 Choreology, 228–229. See also Choreutics; Effort Choreutics, 228–229, 231 Chronophotography, 223

Subject Index 442

Correalism, 32 Cosmokinetical Cabinet Noordung Theater, 72–73 Coup de théâter, 7, 12, 361n20 Cracklebox, 204–205 Creation Production Company, 79 “Credo: The Future of Music” (Cage), 182 Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), 253–255 Flesh Machines, 254 GenTerra, 254 Cross Media, 162, 266 Cubism, 25, 38, 122, 356n11 Cubo-futurist, 11 Cyberculture, 284 Cybernetic art, 107, 292, 305 Cybernetics, 300 defined, 385 influence on artists, 96, 292, 304, 306–308, 381n9 Cybernetic Serendipity (exhibition), 279, 294, 307, 379n19 Cybernetics or Control and Communication in the Animal and Machine (Wiener), 306 Cybernetics Subcommittee, 311, 381n14. See also Fun Palace Cyber performance, xxxiv Cybersonics, 197 Cyborg, xxx, 222, 249, 251, 253, 354n19 “Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism, The” (Haraway), 249 CYSP 1 (Schöffer), 293

Computation body and, 221, 252, 260–263 control and, xxxviii, 292, 302, 332–333 image manipulation and, 115, 152, 161, 324 materials and, 103–104 mechanical and, xiii, xv performativity and, xxx spatial environments and, 306, 320 technologies of, xvi, 173, 179, 214–215, 219, 279, 296–297, 306, 312, 316, 318 Computer-generated sound. See Real-time Computers as Theater (Laurel), xxxv–xxxvi, 355n32 Computer vision techniques, 261–262, 270, 272, 319, 328. See also Background subtraction; Edge detection Concert de bruits (Schaeffer), 192 Concert for Anarchy (Horn), 299 Concert hall, xxxviii, 115, 181–182, 184 Music-theater and, 198–199, 211 (see also Music-theater) Construction of Architectural and Machine Forms (Chernikov), 88 Constructivism, xxxvi, 12–13, 44–45, 47, 281 architecture and, 86, 88–90, 92, 99, 107, 363n11 biology and, 232 end of, 24 influence on later scenography, 63, 73, 78, 261 origin and approaches of, 15–16 relationship to technology, 144, 357n16 stage and, 16–23, 30–32, 38, 144, 148, 232–233, 357n15 “Contained” (Merrit), 287 Control theory, 307, 384 Coop Himmelb(l)au, 77, 81–82, 92, 94–96, 320, 349, 362n31 Hard Space, 95–96 Herzstadt, 95 Oedipus Rex, 77 Soft Space, 96 Villa Rosa, 95

D.A.V.E. (Digital Adaptive Video Engine), 272 Dada, 28–29 Dadaism, 38, 44–45, 50, 154 “Dadaism and the Theater” (Tzara), 29 Dance of the Machines (Foregger), 233 Dance Space (Sparacino), 262 Dance technology (dance tech), 262–264 networks and, 263 origin of, 261–263 research directions, 262 software and, 264–266

Subject Index 443

DJ culture, 115, 173, 273, 372n63. See also VJ culture DLP (digital light processing), 160, 352, 385 DMX (Digital Multiplex), 70, 385 Docu-drama, 254 Documentary, 126–127 Living Newspaper and, 148 Piscator’s use with film and, 147–148 Docu-opera, 213 Dodecaphonic, 181, 191, 367n2 Dolores 10h to 22h (Fusco), 254 Dramatic Imagination, The (Jones), 148 Dramaturge, 147, 162, 261 Dramaturgy, xiv, xxii, 34, 72, 130, 140 Droog Design, 349 DSP (digital signal processing), 211, 214, 261, 352, 385 Dumb Type, 73–76, 159, 176, 255, 362n29, 362n30 Memorandum, 76 Or, 76 S/N, 76 036 Pleasure Life, 74–75 DV (digital video), 160, 176, 385 DVD (Digital video disk), 160, 176–177 DV8 Physical Theater, 141, 255 Dymaxion House, 99–100 Dynamical System, xxx, 384 defined, 385 use in responsive environments and, 382n26 Dynamics, xxx body and, 232, 265 “constructive”, 88 of interaction, 32, 104 movement and, 281 music and, 191, 208 relation to space, 10, 39, 95 spectator/event and, 155 Dynamosphere, 229–230

Dante Orgel (Hobijn), 291 Darmstadt New Music Course, 117, 191, 194, 197 Data bodies, 325, 328 Dead Chickens, 287 Deafman Glance (Wilson), 58. See also Surrealism Décollage (Vostell), 122 Deconstructivist Architecture (exhibition), 76 Defasten, 178 Degrees of freedom, 52, 385 Dematerialization, 98, 305, 354n9 Der Auftrag (Müller), 64, 354n20 Dérive, 345 Der Weltbaumeister (Taut), 27–28 Desert Rain (Blast Theory), 327–328 De Stijl, 25 Deus ex machina, xxii, 2 Deutscher Werkbund, 25, 356n5 D-Fuse, 179 Dianissino architecttura, 86, 182 Diapolyekran (Svoboda), 154, 170, 171. See also Polyekran Dichroic glass, 111, 385 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC), 69 Diller  Scofidio, 79–80, 104, 105–106, 141–142, 163, 258 Blur Building, 105–106 concept of interscenium and, 80 Facsimile, 142 Jump Cuts, 142 Disneyland, 53, 65, 172, 360n5 Disorder, 137 contrast to order, 302–303 Display (computer graphics), 70. See also DLA; DLP; HMD; LCD; JumboTron auditory, 321 Krueger’s definition of, 318–319 media and technologies of, 16, 83, 105–108, 110, 112, 134, 142, 160, 163, 250, 271, 317, 336, 342 DLA (Digital light array), 160, 385 DIY aesthetic, 111, 122, 173, 179, 352

E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology), 196, 241, 282, 312. See also Bell Labs; Expo ’70; 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering

Subject Index 444

Enaction, xxiii, xxvi–xxvii Endless Theater (Kiesler), 32, 358n27 Enough Simplicity in Every Wise Man (Tretyakov), 23, 144 Entanglement, xxvii, xxx, xxxiii–xxxv, 174, 234, 258, 319, 332 between human bodies and technology, 319, 352 defined, 355n22 Entr’acte (Claire), 45 Enunciation, xxxiii, 103, 112, 316, 330, 351. See also Agency collective, xxxii machinic, 330 pedestrian, 344, 347 Environment and inhabitant. See Interaction EPCOT, 53, 153, 360n5 Ephemeral, 116, 159, 283, 338, 352. See also Dematerialization architecture and, 81, 92, 96, 98, 105–106, 108, 112, 310, 350, 363n7 Ephemeralization, 100 Ephémère (Davies), 336–337 Epizoo (Roca), 250 eRENA (Electronic Arenas for Culture, Performance, Art, and Entertainment), 324, 327 Ethno-cyborg, 253 Ethnography, xiv, xxi, xxiv–xxv, xxxvi Eukinetics, 228–229 Eurythmics, 228–229, 232 EVE (Extended Virtual Environment) (Shaw), 323 Eventstructure Research Group (ERG), 97, 322–323 Ex Machina, 70 Exonemo, 215 Expanded cinema (genre), 97, 115, 166–169, 313, 244 relation to VJ culture, 173, 179 Expanded Cinema (Youngblood), 156 Expanded Cinema Festival (New York), 156, 167

East Bloc, 72 East Village (New York) performance scene, 74, 132 Ecology, 100 Ecosophy, 320 Écrans sur la Scène, Les (Picon-Vallin), 131 Écriture scénique, 55–56, 58, 71 Edge detection, 319, 385. See also Computer vision techniques Effort, 229–230, 240, 374n9, 374n10 Eidophor (video projector), 127, 367n44, 386 18 Happenings in 6 Parts (Kaprow), 154–155 Einstein on the Beach (Wilson/Glass), 59–60, 213 Einstürzende Neubauten, 64 Ekkuklema, 353n3. See also Deus ex machina Electric Circus (collective), 201, 370n35 Electricity, 343 impact on Futurism, 8, 10 integration into Constructivist architecture, 88, 90 in music, 181, 186, 291 Electro-acoustic, 200 Electrocardiography (EKG), 270 Electrochromic glass, 77, 104–105, 386 Electroluminescent technology, 105 Electromechanical instruments for electronic sound and, 181 machine art and, 277, 281, 292, 296, 298 stage environments, 10, 20–22, 28, 39, 44, 50, 80, 280 Electronic Disturbance Theater Incredible Disappearing Woman (Fusco and Dominguez), 254 Electronic TV  Color TV Experiments (Paik exhibition), 118 “Electrotecture” (Taylor), 106–107, 111 Elevation (in architecture), 72, 85 Embodiment, 337–338. See also Materiality human/machine and, 221, 277, 355n32 relation to performance, xxi, xxiii, xxxiii technology and, xxii, 174, 271, 355n31 eMUSE (Electronic Multi-User Stage Environment), 324

Subject Index 445

Flying City on the Aerial Paths of Communication (Krutikov), 88–89 FoAM. See also Sponge TGarden, 331–333 Trg, 333 txOom, 332–333 Forced Entertainment, 141, 159 Forkbeard Fantasy, 141 Formant filter, 186, 386 Formula (Ikeda), 176 Fortuny dome, 143, 386 4D Art Delirium, 274 Grand hotel des etrangers, 274 Pôles—dance  virtuel, 274 4’33 (Cage), 193 4X digital signal processor, 209, 211 Frankfurt Ballet, 258–259 Alie/n a(c)tion, 259–260 Eidos : Telos, 259–261, 376n40 Fresnel lens, 50, 386 FSR. See Sensing technologies Fun Palace, xvi, 310–312, 316, 320 Fusion versus separation (Trennung) of media, 36–37, 236 Future Systems, 94 Futurism (Italian). See also Futurist scenography in architecture, 86 compared to Tinguely’s machines, 282 dance and, 227–228 early performances, 8–9, 356n6 incorporation of technology, 8–11 machine art and, 280, 288 origins of, 7–8 and Russolo’s incorporation of noise, 182 Varèse’s critique of, 188 World War I and, 28 Futurism (Russian) comparison with Italian movement, 11–12 influence on Constructivism, 90 Futurist Atmosphere-Structure, The (Prampolini), 86

Expo ’70 (Osaka), 55, 105, 154, 169–170, 172, 314–315 Expo ’67 (Montréal), 100, 105, 170, 171 Exposition of Music-Electronic Television (Paik exhibition), 117 Expo 2000 (Hannover), 325 Expressionism, 25–26, 28 in early Bauhaus, 37 modern dance and, 228 Extension. See Body EyesWeb (software), 262 Facebook, 344, 351 Faktura (Constructivism), 13, 15, 87 Falso Movimento, 71, 140, 159 farmersmanual, 178, 214 Fascism, 47, 235 Federal Theater Project, 147–148 Feedback, 114, 304. See also Control theory; Interaction computational responsiveness and, 314, 317–318, 328 cybernetic control systems and, 292–293, 300, 307, 311, 334–335 in sound, 195, 200, 208 video processes of, 118, 125, 128 Feminism, 249 Festivals, 64, 74 Greek drama and, 2 media, 174 as subject for performance studies, xxiv, xxxiv Feu d’artifice (Balla/Stravinsky), 9, 356n9 Film-Makers Cinematheque (New York), 156 Film on stage. See Cinefication; Projection First Working Group of Constructivists, 15 Flash mobs, 344–345 Fluorescent lights as display technology, 110–111 use in scenography, 74, 76, 78, 196 Fluorescent Sound (Tudor), 195–196 Flüux:/Terminal (Skoltz–Kolgen), 175–176 Fluxus, xxiv, 57, 117–119, 122, 155, 199, 235, 240, 305, 369n27, 380n4

Subject Index 446

Group Ongaku, 199 Gruppo MID, 308 Gruppo N, 308, 317 Gruppo T, 308, 381n11 Spazio  linee luce  spettatori, 308 Guggenheim Foundation, 189 GUI (Graphic User Interface), 209, 386 Gutai Bijutsu Kyokai (Guttai), xxiv, 74, 235, 243–244, 375n23, 380n4

Futurist scenography, 9–11 Futurist Synthetic Theater, The (Marinetti), 8 Gaming ARGs, 345 Go Game, 345 in public space, 344–348 relation to stage performance and, 345 as Situationist vision, 348 ubiquitous, 345 “Garment for Dancers” (L. Fuller), 227 Gertrude Stein Repertory Theater, 159 Gesamtkunstwerk, 25, 29, 60, 64, 135, 198, 200, 241 Brecht’s critique, 36–37 man/machine and, 281 in relation to Moholy-Nagy’s “theater of totality,” 38 Wagner’s definition of, 2 Gestural-based controller (music), 186, 217, 219, 268, 372n67 Glanzwelt (Taut), 27–28 Glass Video Gallery (Tschumi), 141 Glowflow (Krueger), 316–320 Glumov’s Diary (Eisenstein), 23 GMD (Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung Institute), 262, 324 Gob Squad, 141 Graffiti Research Lab (GRL), 341–342 Grand Union, 242–243 Granular Synthesis, 165–166, 174–175 Motion Control Modell 5, 165, 175 Grateful Dead, 169 GRAV (Groupe de Recherche d’Art Visuel), 308, 317 Great Game to Come (Constant), 350 Greek stage, xxii, 2–3, 8, 147, 353n3 Green-Screen, 161–162 Greyworld, 341 GRM (Le Groupe de Recherches Musicales), 217 Grosses Schauspielhaus, 26–27, 33 Ground plan, 79, 98

Hacker culture, 111, 206 Half/angel, 272 Hall effect sensor. See Sensing technologies Happenings, 235–236, 244, 247, 292 connection to interactive arts, 320, 322 Fluxus and, 199 influence in architecture, 93, 96, 98 Kaprow’s definition of, 154, 166, 305, 380n4 in relation to performance, 57 Haptics, 105, 324 Harvard University, 134, 136, 149, 209, 380n9 Haus-Rucker-Co, 92, 94, 96 HD (high definition), 142, 160–161, 387 HeHe, 341, 343 Hellerau, 6–7, 229 Heterodyning oscillator, 186, 386 Hi8, 137–138, 387 HMD (head mounted display), 271, 316, 337, 386 Homage to New York (Tinguely), 277, 282–283 Homebrew Computer Club, 206 “Home Is Not a House, A” (Banham), 363n13 Homo Ludens (Huzinga), 338–339 Hotel Pro Forma, 71–72 HPSCHD (Cage), 168 Hub, The, 216 Hydraulics, 294 defined, 387 use of in scenographic design, 25, 52 Hyperbolic paraboloid Xenakis’ architecture with, 189–191, 372n61 (see also Philips Corporation)

Subject Index 447

computation-based, 107, 175, 267, 295, 316–317, 319, 324–329, 331, 337, 342 hybrid with performance, 155, 245, 261, 270–273, 297, 313, 340 scenography as, 18, 63–65, 144, 154, 258 sound, 196, 212–213, 216, 288–289 in visual art, 74, 79, 120–121, 125, 158, 235, 247, 298–299, 305 Instantanéisme (Dadaism). See Relâche Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), London, 93, 279 Instrumental theater, 199 Inszenierte Räume (exhibition), 64–65 Interaction and architecture, 82, 84, 104 early histories of, 303 electronic images and, 119, 132, 155 embodied, 261 Goffman’s understanding of, xxiv–xxv human/machine/computer-based, xvi, xxxiv, xxxvi, xxxvii, 69–70, 208, 211, 212, 217, 262, 298, 302, 306–308 interdisciplinarity, x and interrelatedness, xi between machines, 209, 268, 281, 294 as medium, 305 between organism and environment, xxvii, 20, 32, 301 relation between theater and plastic arts, 122, 304–306 situatedness and, xxxiv between stage and public, 310 in stage performance with technology, 70, 198, 237–238, 293 Interactive choreography, 273 Interface devices, technologies and, 305, 324, 325, 336 human/machine, 233, 266, 316, 320–323, 325 performative, 323, 332 between performer and audience, 120 screen-based, 101, 250, 264 sculptural, 324

Hyperinstruments (Machover), 211–212. See also Gestural-based controller IBM Corporation, 169, 205, 312 I Ching, Cage and Cunningham’s use of, 194, 236. See also Chance procedures Ideal spectator, 330 Igloo, 272 ILLIAC (computer), 205 Illiac Suite (Hiller), 206 IMAX, 170 Labyrinth, 171 Tiger Child, 172 Imbroglio, xxvii, xxxii Immanence philosophical definition of, 354n4 relation to performance, xxiii, xxiii, xxv, 352 technology and, xxi Immersant, 336–337 Immersion Artaud’s theory and, 47 versus critical distance, 62 Wagner’s strategy of, 2, 36–37 Immersive environments, 321, 333, 336 Impossible Theater, 159 Improv Everywhere, 345–346 Frozen Grand Central, 346 Improvisation Technologies (Forsythe), 259, 273 Indeterminacy, processes in composition, 191, 194, 205, 238, 264 Inflatable architectures, 94, 96–97, 168, 310, 313, 322–323, 333 Information theory (Shannon), 306, 387 Infrared (IR) camera technology, 70, 266, 271, 313, 328, 381n15, 387 Inscription machines/technologies of, 62, 66, 136, 222, 248, 380n26 and representation, xxix, 244 Installation. See also Reactive environments; Responsive environments architectural, 95–97, 111, 142, 343, 349

Subject Index 448

Kinesphere, 227, 229, 246, 375n22, 376n38 Kinesthetic and movement, 73, 225, 228, 232, 247, 256, 265, 267, 275, 292, 298, 338 Kinetic architecture and, 83, 85–86, 89, 99–103 in Constructivism, 88–89 environments and, 297, 320 form, 38 scenography and, 12, 30, 39, 49–55, 67, 69, 82, 155 sculpture and, 90, 168, 200, 277, 280–282, 292, 298, 308–309 Kinetic Construction (Gabo), 53, 90, 281 Kinetic Light Sculpture (Möller/Kramm), 108 Kinetisches Konstructives System (Moholy-Nagy), 39 Kinetography, 229 Kitchen, The (New York), 120–122, 124, 212 Kondition pluriel, 270–271 Konstruktsiia (Constructivism), 15, 87 Körperkultur, 6 Kugeltheater (Weininger), 42–43. See also Bauhaus, total theaters of

skin as, 251 spatial, 316, 323–324, 334, 336 technological appeal to artists and, x worn, 322 Interlace (video), 165, 387 Intermedia, 199, 292. See also Fluxus Intermedia theater, 156 International Exhibition of New Theater Techniques (Vienna 1924), 30 International Style, 38 Internet, x, xxxiv, 69, 216, 351 performances using, 252, 254, 257, 274–275, 285, 326 Intolleranza (Nono), 126, 154. See also CCTV Intonarumori, 182 I/O (input/output), 267, 279, 335, 372n68, 388 IRCAM (Paris) development of Max software, 177, 209 founding of, 209 research infrastructure, 210–211, 217, 262, 267 IRS (Inverted Reality System). See Time’s Up Irwin, 72 Isadora (software), 269–270, 387 Isocahedral, 230

Lab, The (San Francisco), 331 Laboratory for Design-Correlation (Kiesler), 32 “On Correalism and Biotechnique,” 32 Lady’s Glove (Sonami), 218–219 La Fura dels Baus, 159, 255–257 La Gaia Scienza, 71, 140 Laibach, 72 La La La Human Steps, 255–256 Land Design, 325, 382n23 Laptop music, 115, 174, 177, 214, 216, 372n64 Ostertag’s critique of, 217 Latency, 275 defined, 387 problems with in computer–based interaction, 319 Laterna Magika, 50, 152–154

Jefferson Airplane, 169, 202 Joshua Light Show, 169 Judson Dance Theater, 239–241 Judson Memorial Church, 239 Juilliard School, 32, 119, 203, 211 JumboTron (display system), 134, 365n23, 387 Kaaitheater (Brussels), 66 Kabuki, 26, 136, 388 Kansei, 262, 377n43 Karas, 255, 258 Noiject, 258 Kennedy  Violich, 105 K-456 (Paik), 293–294, 379n19 KIM-1 (Keyboard Input Monitor), 206–207, 216

Subject Index 449

Living Theater, 58, 126, 304 Living units (Coop Himmelb(l)au), 94 L’object sonore, 192 Locative media, 344, 346–347, 351 Locus (T. Brown), 242, 375n22 Low resolution screen, 108 Luminodynamism (Schöffer), 179n16, 292–293

LCD (liquid crystal display), 106–107, 142, 160, 166, 271, 388. See also Display League of Automatic Composers, 206–207, 216 Legible City, The (Shaw), 322 Lenguaje furero. See La Fura dels Baus Leningradskaia Pravda (Vesnin Bros), 88 Lichtrequisit (Moholy-Nagy), 281 Life construction, 232 Life Forms (software), 264–265, 267 LED (light-emitting diode), 74, 77. See also Display in architecture facades, 106, 108 Lighting. See also Bähr disk; DMX; Hellerau; LED Appia’s use of, 6, 356n4 architectural use of, 107–108 Balla’s use of, 9 color temperatures in theater, 138 in Constructivist stage practices, 17, 19, 21–22 early technologies of, 143 Fuller’s use of, 226–227 as integral to scenography, 50, 52, 55, 151–152, 261, 315, 343, 359n3 reflective, 26 strobe light, 76, 167, 176 in Victory over the Sun, 12 xenon, 339 Wagner’s use of, 3, 355n2 Light Surgeons, 179 Linguistics, 258 Performativity and, xxv L’Institut du Monde Arabe, 102 Live camera, 121, 124, 128–130, 132, 135, 140, 147, 248 Live cinema, 115, 165, 172–179 Liveness, Reichardt’s notion of, xxxviii Live programming (Klüver), 315 Live/Taped Video Corridor (Naumann), 124 Living architectures, 94 Laban’s conception of, 230, 373n8 Living Cities (Archigram), 93

Mabou Mines, 58 Hajj, 132–133 Machinae, xxii Machine aesthetics, 96, 281 architecture, xxxvii, 86–87 body, 227–235 dance, 224, 233 music, 288–291 organism and, 249, 373n7 perception, 175, 318, 336 stage, 9–10, 16–22, 24–28, 30–44 Machine à habiter, 87, 93, 99 Machinic, xxxii–xxxiii, 85, 355n29 Magazzini Criminali, 71, 140 Magnanimous Cuckold (Meyerhold/Popova), 18–19 Magnetizer, 118, 388 “Manifesto of Machine Art” (Munari), 280 Man-machine interaction. See Interaction Man-Machine Symbiosis (Licklider), 306 Man Walking Down the Side of a Building (T. Brown), 245–246 Man With the Movie Camera (Vertov), 144 Mapping defined, 388 in gesture-based dance and music, 217, 262–263, 267, 320 Lissitzky’s sense of, 22 Marionettes. See Puppets Masque, xi, 3, 62 Material agency, xxix Material enunciation, xxxiii Materiality, xi, xxiii, xxvi, 81–82, 85, 98, 103–106, 227, 258, 332, 337, 349

Subject Index 450

MIDIDancer (hardware), 268 Midnight Opera Company, 122 Military, 294 and industrial complex, 123, 277, 285, 302–303, 306 surplus for machine performances, 284, 300 use of technology, x, 312–313, 375n19, 381n15 Mille Plateaux (recording label), 215 Mills College Center for Contemporary Music, 203, 205–206, 216 Mimesis, xxvi, xxxi. See also Representation Mini DV, 176 Minimalism Fried’s critique of, 364n7 in music, 59, 202 transfer into audio-visual art, 176 Mise en scène du drame Wagnérie, La (Appia), 5 Missing Link, 94 MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) collaboration with Svoboda, 126–127 Kinetic Design Group, 101 Lincoln Labs, 306 Media Lab, 69, 178, 212, 262, 267 Mixed media, 155, 198–199 Mixed reality, 325, 327, 333, 388 Mixed Reality Research Lab (Nottingham), 346–347 MoCap (motion capture) and dance technology, 262–263, 267–268, 271 defined, 388 links to chronophotography, 223–224 origin of, 266 Modern dance origins, 225, 235, 259 Montage of attractions, 23 Monterey Pop Festival, 169 Monument to the Third International (Tatlin), 89–91 Morphogenesis, 85, 99 Morphosis, 258

Max/MSP/Jitter, 177. See also IRCAM MDMA (ecstasy), 173 Mechanical art. See Machine Mechanical Sound Orchestra, 288 Mechanical Stage. See Bauhaus, total theaters of Mechanization, xv, 22–23, 25, 28, 36, 303, 374n12 Mechanization Takes Command (Giedion), 280 Mechanized Eccentric (Moholy–Nagy), 39 Media Art and Research Studies (MARS), 324 Media Burn (Ant Farm), 123 Mediadanse, 263 Mediatecture, 90, 107 MEGA, 262, 377n43 Mego (record label), 215 Merce Cunningham Dance Company, 193 Suite by Chance, 236, 373n17 TV Rerun, 239 Variations V, 126, 236–237, 238, 241 Walkaround Time, 239 Merchant of Venice, The, 134–135 Merzbau (Schwitters), 29 Merzbühne (Schwitters), 29–31, 57 Mesh Performance Partnerships Contours, 271 Figments, 271–272 Immanence, 271 Mesomorphic, 102 Metabolists, 92 Metamechanicals (Tinguely), 282 MEV (Musica Elettronica Viva), 201, 370n30 M Fuksas D, 349 Mickery Theater (Amsterdam), 66 Microcomputer, early use in computer music, 205–207, 214, 216 Microcontroller, 388 Microstoria, 214 MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface), 121, 175, 177, 279, 371n52 as control protocol, 209–211, 250, 288, 291 origin of, 208

Subject Index 451

Network. See also Actor Network Theory; Artificial Neural Network as connection system, 84, 184, 211, 230, 263, 268, 288, 306 electronic, xxi, 179, 206, 216, 250, 263, 273, 289, 334–335, 338, 343, 351 in live performance, 222, 252, 254, 274–276 social, 344–345, 347, 351 used in music performance, 206, 216 Neue Slowenische Kunst (NSK), 71–72 Neutral-density filter, 137 New Babylon, 338 New Formalism, 66 New media art, xiii, xxi, 172, 297, 328 New Music America, 211 New School for Social Research, 118, 123 Newsreels, 147–148 New York Electric Music Company (Cahill), 184 New York Institute of Technology, 265 Nightfire Theater, 67, 131, 159 9 Evenings: Theater and Engineering. See also Bell Labs E.A.T. and, 312 Open Score (Rauschenberg), 313 participants in, 241–242 Physical Things (Paxton), 313–314 public expectation and reaction to, 314 relationship with theater, 307, 312 technical research and, 242, 304 Variations VII, 313 Nine Inch Nails, 142, 245 1984 Los Angeles Olympic Arts Festival, 60, 131. See also CIVIL wars 1960s counterculture, 57, 92, 168 1960s light shows, 169 1931 Paris Colonial Exposition, influence on Artaud, 46 Nondeterministic, 238. See also Chance procedures; Aleatoric Nonhuman, 101, 103, 280–281, 297, 326, 329 Latour’s understanding of, xxvii–xxxii, xxxvi relation to performance, xxiii, 242, 266, 294

Motor influence on modern dance, 225–226, 227, 233, 239, 269 in kinetic architecture, 100 in machine art, 277, 279, 288, 294–296, 298, 378n11, 378n20 servo-controlled, 101–102, 288, 295, 378n11, 391 as technology, 309, 323–324 used in scenography, 36, 52–53, 70, 152, 169, 338 Mouse on Mars, 214 Movie Drome (VanDerBeek), 167 MP3, 351 MTV (Music Television), 173 Multichannel sound, 152, 168, 170, 208, 238, 291, 315, 332 Multimedia environments, 167–168, 189, 349 in performance, 11, 44, 60, 212–213, 236 postproduction and, 173–174, 264, 266 Multimodal, 262, 324 Multisensory environment, 2, 191, 314, 332 MUSCLE (Oosterhuis), 101–102 Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), 277, 282 Music Hall, 8, 17, 23, 233 Music-theater, 1, 4, 60, 198–200, 204, 211–214 Musique concrète (Schaeffer), 191–192, 194 Musique et la mise en scène, La (Appia), 5 Mutoid Waste Company, 287 MVRDV, 341, 343, 349 MySpace, 344, 351, 382n1 Mysterium (Skryiabin), 4 Napoleon (Gance), 169 NASA Ames Research Center, 69 nato.055, 177–178 Nature/culture divide, xxvii–xxviii, xxxi Natyasastra, xxii Naumachias, 286 Negativeland, 216

Subject Index 452

Paik/Abe synthesizer, 119, 389 Palindrome Inter.Media Performance Group, 268, 270 Panasonic Corporation, 138 PANI projector, 158, 389 Pan Sonic, 214 Parabolic flight, 73 Parangoles (Oiticica), 247 Participation TV (Paik), 118 Participatory environments, 304–307, 313–316, 321, 341 Patcher, The (software), 209 Patterns in architecture/media, 102, 107–108, 339 learning of, 312, 335 in machine systems, 288, 300, 302–303 Paul Dresher Ensemble, 213 Performance. See also Agency; Materiality; Representation architecture and, 81–84 defined, xxiii linguistics and, xxv–xxvi machinic, xxxiii media and, xxxiv–xxxv science and, xxvii–xxx visual arts concept of, xxiii–xxiv Performance cinema. See Live cinema Performance Corridor (Naumann), 134 Performance Group, 58, 135, 304 Dionysus in ’69, 304 Marilyn Project, The, 135–136 Performative turn. See Anthropology Performativity, xxiii, xxvi, xxix, xxxii, 82, 104, 279, 320 Performing video (Vasulka), 120 Perspective (spatial) geometric in theater structures, xxii, 3–4, 26, 50, 79, 164, 270 in interactive environments, 270, 288, 322 politics and, xi, 361n22 software and, 264–265 Phenomenology, 120, 271, 330

Nonlinear editing (NLE), 130, 142, 173, 389 Nonmatrixed performance, 305, 380n2 Noordung Theater, 71–72 Nouvelle Tendance–Recherche Continuelle (NTrc), 308 NTT/ICC (Tokyo), 285, 300 Nuovo Spettacolo, 139–140 Oberlin Conservatory, 183 Objecthood (Fried), xxi, xxiv, 116 Ohio State University (dance department), 263 ONCE Group, 154, 197, 199–201, 369n23 Ondes Martenot, 183, 186, 189 1,000 Airplanes on the Roof (Hwang/Glass), 159, 213 Ontological Hysteric Theater (Foreman), 60 OpenEndedGroup, 267–269, 341 Biped, 267–268 how long does the subject linger on the edge of the volume . . . , 268–269 Loops, 268 Open source, 177, 341–342 Open Theater, 58 Opera and new music, 198–200, 369n24 Opera Group of Boston, 126 Opere in divenire, 308 Optical flow. See Sensing technologies Organi-Tech, 99 Origins and Development of Kinetic Art (Popper), 281 Orpheus and Eurydice (Gluck), Appia’s production of, 7 OSA (the Union of Contemporary Architects), 87 Oscillator, 118, 186, 192, 204, 238, 389. See also Synthesis Osmose (Davies), 336–337 Otolab, 178 Out There: Architecture Beyond Building (Venice Biennale 2008), 349–350 Oval, 214

Subject Index 453

Postmodernism, 66, 85 Potentiometer. See Sensing technologies PPS Dance. See 4D Art Predictive modeling, 312, 390 Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor), 230, 232 Procedural animation, 272, 390 Production space (Svoboda), 49–50 Projection, 114–115, 124. See also Cinefication architecture and, 97, 107 as commentary, 36 design, 158–160 as dramatic supplement, 151 early technologies of, 143, 366n31 use in scenography, 25, 32, 33–34, 39, 43, 45, 50, 54, 68–71, 74, 80, 126, 128, 136, 355n26, 358n30, 359n36 World’s Fairs and, 169 Projector bombing, 342, 390 Proscenium critique of in scenography, 27, 29, 65–66, 356n8, 358n27 as distancing device, 3 origin in Western theater, 113 political force of, 80 removal in contemporary performance, 270 screen and, 33, 113–114, 151, 160, 179, 267 theater architecture and, 26, 43, 55, 126, 129, 141, 156 urban space as, 339 Prosumer video, 137–138 Proxemics (Hall), 338 Prune Flat (Whitman), 156 Psychedelic music performance, 167, 169, 173, 202. See also 1960s counterculture Psychogeography, 338, 344 Public space, interaction in, 338–340. See also Gaming Punch-card/tape, 214, 312 Puppets, 61, 113–114, 279–280. See also Automata PurForm, 178

Philips Corporation Evolon (Philips Museum), 294 Philips Pavilion, 4, 189–190, 205, 307 support of Nicolas Schöffer, 292 Photoelectric cell. See Sensing technologies Pink Floyd, 100, 169, 202 Piscator Bühne, 34, 146 Plastic Form of the Electro–Mechanical Peep Show (Lissitzky), 21–22 Plastic–kinetic complex, 86 Plato’s cave, 113 Play improvisational in responsive environments, 306, 331–333 urban interventions and, 338–340, 344–345, 348 Plunderphonia (Oswald), 216 Pneuma, 341 Pneumatics in architectural environments, 94–96, 99, 100–102, 310 defined, 389 machine art and, 250, 279, 290–291, 295, 301 use in scenography, 50, 100, 325 Pneumecosms. See Haus-Rucker-Co Poème électronique (Varèse), 189 Points of View (Shaw), 322 Point source, 315, 389 Polhemus, 266. See also Sensing technologies Political Theater, The (Piscator), 146, 358n30, 359n32 Polydimensional scenic space (Prampolini), 10 Polyekran (Svoboda), 50, 154, 170, 172. See also Diapolyekran Polytope (Xenakis), 214, 272n61 Polyvision (Svoboda), 170 Poor theater (Grotowski), 57, 126, 360n10 Pop Art, 63 Portapak (Sony), 114–115, 117, 124, 138, 390 Post-humanism, 354n20 Postmodern dance, 239–240

Subject Index 454

Reincarnation of Saint Orlan, The, 248 Relâche (Picabia), 44–45 Relational Architecture (Lozano-Hemmer), 339 Body Movies, 339 Vectorial Elevation, 339 Voz Alta, 339 Representation architectural, 98 avant-garde’s critique of, xxxvi, 46, 247 body and, 248–249, 271 cognitive science and, xxvi computing and, xxxvii, 217, 328, 347 dramatic, 3 illusionary pictorial stage and, 5, 10, 23, 63 image and, xxv, 112, 117, 148, 155, 164, 166, 175, 224, 243, 273, 281, 307, 310, 320, 322–323, 328, 330 and materiality, 18, 314 and mimesis, xxxvi, 8, 22, 61, 179, 347 performance and, xxiii (see also Performance) science and, xxix Representational knowledge (versus performative), xxvi–xxviii, 350 Resampling, 164 Resonator, 3, 390 Responsive environments, 306, 380n6 in architecture, 96 interaction and, 320, 325, 330–336 Krueger’s definition of, 317, 319 Responsive Environments (group), 178 Rhythmicon (Cowell), 187 Rhythmic space (Appia), 5–6 Ridge Theater, 159 Ring, The (Wagner), 1–3, 5, 51 Ritual and performance, xv, xxiv, 254, 256, 284, 301 social interaction, 207, 243, 341 Robotic art, 277, 294–295, 298, 379n24 Robot Opera (Paik). See K-456

Quasi-object (Serres), 119 QuickTime, 177 R.S.F.S.R. No. 1 (Meyerhold), 17 R.U.R. (Cˇapek), 30, 280, 358n24 Railway Theater (Kiesler), 31 Rainforest (Tudor), 195–196, 201, 239 Randomness, 303 Raster-Noton (record label), 215 Raum, 63 Raumbühne (Kiesler), 30–31 Raumgestaltung (Moholy-Nagy), 38 Raumharmonie. See Choreutics Ray-XXXX, 178 RCA Corporation, 187, 189 Reactive environments, 305–306 Ready-made (Duchamp), 282 Reagan-era America, politics and artist’s reactions against, 66, 203, 244 Realities : united, 110–111, 364n20 Real-time computational responsiveness and, 104, 318–319, 323–325 computer/electronic music and, xxxviii, 195, 197, 202, 204, 206–212, 214, 261, 371n53, 371n55 computer graphics and animation, 69–70, 166, 178, 266, 269–271, 273, 316, 336, 341–342 control of media in, 262, 331 defined, 390 electronics in live performance, 236–237, 248, 250, 254 non-real-time, 206, 371n47 temporal understanding of, xxi–xxiii, xxxii, xxxiv, 193, 217 video and, 116–119, 121, 123, 142, 160, 172–173, 175, 177–179 Real-time film, 161 Rear projection. See Projection Rechenzentrum, 178 Rectifier, 118, 390 Red Pilot Cosmokinetic Theater, 72

Subject Index 455

camera-based, 297, 328 capacitance, 384 in early interactive spaces, 95, 318 electric field, 212, 337, 386 electromyogram (EMG), 219, 252 fsr, 386 hall-effect, 219, 386 IR, 387 in live performance, xxii, 238, 263, 268–272 multimodal, 324 optical flow, 80, 389 photoelectric, 389 potentiometer, 390 use in architecture, 101–102, 338 variable capacitor, 186, 392 vibration, 325 Sensorband, 216 Sensors Sounds Sights (SSS), 217 Senster, The, 294, 379n20 Serate, 8, 28 Serialism (music composition), 117, 191, 194, 198 Serpentine Dance (Fuller), 227, 373n5 Shape-memory alloys (SMA), 104, 391 Show control, 158, 391 Side-band frequencies, 186 SIGGRAPH, 69, 262, 331, 344 Signal (collective), 178 Silicon Graphics Incorporated (SGI), 69–70, 322 Silicon Valley, 69–70 early hacker culture in, 206 Simon Frasier University, 264, 338 Simulation, xxxiv, 272–273, 298, 300, 316, 321, 323, 333, 336–337 Siren, use in music, 183, 188–189 Situated action, xxxiv, 330 Situationist, 338–339, 348, 350 “6 Axioms for Environmental Theater” (Schechner), 304 Skene, 113. See also Proscenium Sketchpad (Sutherland), 306

Robots, 30. See also Automata; Puppets in architecture, 93–94, 101, 107 in machine art, 277, 280–281, 284–287, 291–296, 298, 300 Robot Wars (Thorpe), 286, 378n10 Roxy Music, 202 Rutt/Etra Scan Processor, 121 Sacre du Printemps, Le (Stravinsky), 182 Saint François d’Assise (Messiaen), 78, 134 Samson Box (digital synthesizer), 209 San Francisco Bay Area experimental performance scene, 67, 200 military-industrial culture and, 285–286 new music technology and, 203, 206 San Francisco Tape Music Center, 192, 201 Sankai Juku, 255, 258 Scaenae frons, 113 Scan resolution, 110, 391 Scenographs (Svoboda), 50 Scenography. See Apparatus; Installation; Lighting; Machine; Projection Schaubühne am Lehniner Platz (Berlin), 65 Schrifttanz, 374n15 Schrottkunst, 287 Schweyk im zweiten Weltkrieg (Brecht), 56 Science Meets the Arts (SMARTS), 69 Science Technology and Society (STS), xxvii–xxviii, xxx, xxxiii Scipion Nasice Sisters Theater, 72 Scratch Orchestra, 201, 203 Screen. See Projection Seasonal Adjustment Disorder (SAD), 343 Second Viennese School, 181 SEEMEN, 286 Self-Destroying Construction No. 1—Homage to New York (Tinguely), 282 Self-organizing system, 292 Semiconductor, 178 Sensing technologies, 209, 212, 286, 292, 325 accelerometer, 383 body and, 222–223, 238, 261, 295, 332–333, 337

Subject Index 456

Sponge, 330–332, 336, 341 Sauna, 332 TGarden, 331–333, 336 Spots façade, 111 Squat Theater, 66–67, 132–133, 361n22 Staalplaat (record label), 215 Standing Wave, 3, 391 Station House Opera, 159 Stil’ I Epokha (Ginzburg), 87 Storming of The Winter Palace, 357n12 Studio Azzurro, 71, 139–140 Studio for Electro–Instrumental Muziek (STEIM), 177, 204–205, 209, 217, 372n68 Study for an End to the World I and II (Tinguely), 283 Stuttgart Ballet, 258 Sub Rosa (record label), 215 SuperCollider (software), 214, 372n62 Supergaming (McGonigal), 345. See also Gaming Superstudio, 92 Suprematism (Malevich), 20, 86, 356n11 Supreme Particles, 325–327 Plasma/architexture, 325 R111, 326 Surgery, use in body-based performance, 244, 248, 376n30 Surrealism, 38, 44, 361n19 Surveillance, 68, 80, 163, 187, 254 use of video in, 130, 142 Survival Research Labs (SRL), 281, 284–288, 291, 295, 300, 378n8, 378n10 Svoboda ramp, 52, 391 Symbolists, 9 Synchresis (Chion), 165 Synesthesia, 169 Synesthetic, x, 4, 9–10, 28, 134 Synthesis (computer music) additive synthesis, 183, 192, 383 granular synthesis, 174, 367n47 sawtooth oscillator, 186, 391 sinusoidal, 183, 186, 367n5 System aesthetics, 304, 379n14

Skoltz–Kolgen, 175–177 Slide projection, 66, 155, 158, 366n31. See also Projection Smart materials characteristics of, 103–104 relationship to performativity, 103, 105 Smart mobs, 344–345 Snake Theater, 131 Socialism, 221 influence on Constructivism, 15, 20, 24, 357n16 Weimar Republic and, 25, 35 Socialist Realism, 24, 34, 49, 153 Societas Raffaello Sanzio, 71, 159 Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK), xxviiii Soft Machine, 169, 202 Software agents, 267 Software for Dancers, 265–266 Sonic Arts Union, 201, 370n34 Sonification, 201, 391 Sony Corporation, 132, 134, 137, 284, 387–388. See also Portapak Soon 3, 67–68 Sound and image, 115, 119, 155, 164–166, 168–169, 172–179 and noise, 182–183 poetry and, 28–29 relationship to other media, 9, 22, 45, 47, 55, 58, 71, 124, 135, 159 technologies of, 139, 141, 152, 181, 183–184, 186, 188–192, 194–198, 201, 206–208, 208–210, 214 use in performance, 76, 135, 198–200, 204, 211–213 Sound Activated Mobile (SAM), 294 Sound design, 165, 203, 215 Space Theater (Cohen), 155, 197 Spatio-lumino-chronodynamism (Schöffer), 292 Spazio interattivo, 306 Spectator-performer relationships, 247, 305 Splitting (Matta-Clark), 98

Subject Index 457

Theatergraph (E.F. Burian), 149–151, 153, 166 Theater Heute, 141 Theater in a Sphere, 53 Theater of cruelty, 47, 57, 284 Theater of Eternal Music or Dream Syndicate (Young), 203 Theater of Hybrid Automata (Vasulka), 300 Theater of images, xxxvii, 58, 62–63, 67, 361n18 Theater of Mixed Means (Kostelanetz), 57 Theater of visions, 58, 62 Theater Workshop, 310 Theater X, 159 “Théâtre alchimique, Le” (Artaud), 46 Théâtre de Complicité, 141 Théâtre du mouvement total (Polieri), 54–55 Théâtre et Son Double, Le (Artaud), 46–47 “Théâtre Kaleidoscope, Le” (Polieri), 55 Théâtre mobile (Polieri), 54–55 Théâtre National Populaire (TNP), 55 Théâtre Repère, 70 Theatricality, 235 Fried’s critique of, xxiv tension between visual arts, 116 Theatron, xxii, 3, 175, 314, 330. See also Greek stage Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (Banham), 8 Theremin (instrument), xxxviii, 186–189, 200, 217, 368n9 Third Hand (Stelarc), 252 3D animation, 263–267, 269, 309, 322–323, 336–337, 344 in contrast to 2D in performance, 9–10, 12–13 modeling, 101, 261, 264–265, 316 physical space and, 105, technology of stereography and, 158, 322 Three Legged Dog, 159 Threepenny Opera (Brecht/Weill), 147 Thresholding, 319. See also Computer vision techniques

Tafiatrenage (Foregger), 374n14 Tala, xxii, 60 Tanagra device, 30 Tangibility. See Materiality Tanztheater, 257 Tape music, 200, 204, 217 Tape recorder, 61, 238, 365n18 TDR (The Drama Review), 57–58, 67 Techne, xxii–xxiii, xxxvi, 160, 174, 234, 235 Technical image, 56–57 Technical Manifesto for Futurist Scenic Atmosphere (Prampolini), 10 Techniques of the Observer (Crary), 221 Technoculture, xxvii, xxxv, 76, 254 Constructivism as laboratory for, 25 Technoscenographic. See Machine; Projection; Proscenium Technoscientific, xv, xxviii, xxix, 255, 307, 330 Tektonika, 15, 87 Telcosystems, 178 Telematics, 274–276 Tele-torture, 250 Television architectural appropriation of, 107, 141–142 cultural phenomena of, 53, 114 early history of broadcast, 115–116 as instrument, 117–119 versus theater, 57–58, 360n10 use of, in performance, xiii, 67, 126–141, 248–249 visual art critique of, 116–118, 122–125 Telharmonium (Cahill), 183–185 Temporality, xxiv, 60, 161 architecture and, 83–84 Temporary Distortion, 159 Ten Books of Architecture, The, (Virtruvius), 84 Tensegrity, 100, 105 Tensile structure, 100 Terpsitone, 368n9 “Theater, Circus, Variety” (Moholy-Nagy), 39, 41 Theater am Turm, 66 Theater der Welt festival, 66

Subject Index 458

Über das Marionettentheater (Kleist), 280 Ubiquitous computing, 347, 392 Ubiquitous games. See Gaming UC Berkeley, 203, 217, 292 Underlighting (L. Fuller), 227 United States I–IV (Anderson), 156–157 United Visual Artists (UVA), 179 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 168, 205, 239, 323 Unobject (Burnham), 292 UN Studio, 349 Untitled Sound Objects, 178 Urban Screens, 382n33 Urban Space. See Gaming; Public space USCO, 167–168, 174, 381–382n9 User, 84, 108, 111, 272, 347 participant defined as, 320–322, 332 and screen, 305 [The User], 289–290 Symphony #1 for Dot Matrix Printers, 289 Symphony #2 for Dot Matrix Printers, 290 “Uses of Film in the New Theater, The” (Kirby), 154 U–Theater (Molnár), 41–42 U2 (band), 141

Thrust stage, 26 Time code, 76, 391 Time motion studies, 224, 232–233 Time object, in relationship to Cage, 193 Time scales, 336 Time share (computing), 206, 371n46 Time’s Up, 333–336 Body Spin, 334 Hyperfitness Studio, 334 Sensory Circus, 334–335, 336 Tinkering, 206, 371n48 Tissue Culture and Art, 253, 255 “Semi-Living,” 255 Tomato, 179 “Torque: The New Kinesthetic” (Schwartz), 225 Total-Theater (Gropius), 42–43 Tour Lumière Cybernétique (Schöffer), 107, 293 “Towards a New Theater” (Edmond Jones), 149 Towards a Poor Theater (Grotowski), 57 Tower of Winds/Egg of Winds (Ito), 107–109 Traffic (band), 169 Transcendence, x–xi, xxii, 62, 244–245 Transports (Oosterhuis). See MUSCLE Trautonium (Trautwein), 183, 186 Treaty of Rapallo, 357n19 Trennung (Brecht), 36–37, 236 Triadic Ballet (Schlemmer), 234, 265, 374n15 Tristan and Isolde (Wagner), techno– scenography for, 160–161, 360n3, 362n31 Troika Ranch, 268–270 Trompe-l’oeil, 5 Turntablist, 216 TV as a Creative Medium (exhibition), 119 TV Bra for Living Sculpture (Paik/Moorman), 119 TV Burying (Vostell), 122 Twitter, 351 2D Balla’s transformation of, 10 Malevich and Tatlin’s critique of, 12–13 242.pilots, 178

Valis (Machover), 211–212 Variable capacitor. See Sensing technologies Vasulkas, The, 120–123, 140, 300–302, 364–365n13 Velvet Underground, 168, 202 Verfremdumgseffekte (Brecht), 61, 361n15 Vers une Architecture (Le Corbusier), 87 Very Nervous System (VNS), 328–329 Vicon, 267, 392 Victory Over the Sun, 11–12, 21–22 Video. See also Projection origin of, 115 relation between gallery and stage, 126–130 use in architecture, 141–142 use in theater, 130–141 Video ambients, 140 Video Free America, 127–131, 365n18

Subject Index 459

Widescreen film, 170 Wi-Fi, 345, 347 Wired, 312 Wireframe (computer graphics), 176, 264–265, 309, 334 WJ-MX50, 138 Wolf Vostell & Television Decollage, 122 Wooster Group, The, xiii, 66, 134, 135–139, 141, 162 Brace Up!, 136–137, 138 Fish Story, 136 L.S.D., 136, 139 Poor Theater, 139 Route 1 & 9, 136 Work Projects Administration (WPA), 148 World, The (USCO), 168, 367n44 Wright Brothers, 225

Video mixer, 138 Videoplace (Krueger), 317, 319–320, 325. See also Responsive environments Vienna Actionists, 243–244, 252 Vietnam War, 155, 203 Violin Power (Steina), 120 Virtual environment, 323, 334, 336. See also CAVE Virtual physics, 332 Virtual reality (VR) Artaud’s original definition of, 46–47 defined, 392 and simulation, 321, 323 Virtual Reality Modeling Language (VRML), 274, 393 Visionary architecture, 32, 85, 94 Visiting Hours (Flanagan), 245 Visual Kitchen, 178 VJ culture, 115, 172–173, 177, 179, 273 VKHUTEMAS, 87 Volksbühne, 33–34, 146 Von Material zu Architektur (Moholy-Nagy), 38, 41 Von Neumann architecture, 166, 393 Vortex concerts, 168 V2 Institute for Unstable Media, 287, 331 DEAF, 174

Xenon searchlight, 339 YAM Festival, 122 Zangezi, 13–14, 30 Zaum (Khlebnikov), 12–14 Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie (ZKM), 259, 272–273 Institut für Bildmedien, 323–324 Zero gravity, 73 Zero-th, 341 Zines, 92 ZiZi & YoYo, 343 Zoo TV (U2), 142

Walking Cities (Herron), 93–94, 101 Walkmonology (Hardman), 68 Warner Bros. records, 156, 211 Warsaw Bloc, 287 Wayang kulit, 113–114 WDR (West Deutscher Rundfunk), 117, 192 Wearable architecture, 333 Wearables, 217, 245, 247, 263, 313, 336–338 Weathering (Leatherbarrow), 83 Weimar Republic, 24–26 West, 8, 341 Wet/dry biology, 255 WGBH, 119, 126 Whisper (Schiphorst), 337–338 Whitney Museum of Art, 124, 168, 245, 282

Subject Index 460