Interfaces of Performance (Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities) [Har/Ele ed.] 0754675769, 9780754675761

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Interfaces of Performance

Edited by Maria Chatzichristodoulou, Janis Jefferies and Rachel Zerihan

Interfaces of Performance

Digital research in the arts and Humanities Series Editors marilyn Deegan, Lorna Hughes and Harold short Digital technologies are becoming increasingly important to arts and humanities research and are expanding the horizons of our working methods. this important series will cover a wide range of disciplines with each volume focusing on a particular area, identifying the ways in which technology impacts speciic subjects. The aim is to provide an authoritative relection of the ‘state of the art’ in the application of computing and technology. the series will be critical reading for experts in digital humanities and technology issues but will also be of wide interest to all scholars working in humanities and arts research. aHrc Ict methods network editorial Board Sheila Anderson, King’s College London chris Bailey, Leeds metropolitan University Bruce Brown, University of Brighton Mark Greengrass, University of Shefield susan Hockey, University college London sandra Kemp, royal college of art simon Keynes, University of cambridge Julian richards, University of York seamus ross, University of Glasgow Charlotte Roueché, King’s College London Kathryn sutherland, University of oxford andrew Wathey, northumbria University Other titles in the series modern methods for musicology Prospects, Proposals, and realities Edited by Tim Crawford and Lorna Gibson IsBn 978 0 7546 7302 6 What’s in a Word-list? Investigating Word frequency and Keyword extraction Edited by Dawn Archer IsBn 978 0 7546 7240 1

Interfaces of Performance

Edited by marIa cHatzIcHrIstoDoULoU University of Hull JanIs JefferIes Goldsmiths, University of London racHeL zerIHan Queen Mary, University of London

© maria chatzichristodoulou, Janis Jefferies and rachel zerihan 2009 all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. maria chatzichristodoulou, Janis Jefferies and rachel zerihan have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiied as the editors of this work. Published by ashgate Publishing Limited Wey court east Union road farnham Surrey, GU9 7PT england

ashgate Publishing company suite 420 101 cherry street Burlington VT 05401-4405 Usa

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Interfaces of performance. -- (Digital research in the arts and humanities) 1. Performing arts--Technique. 2. Performing arts-technological innovations. I. series II. chatzichristodoulou, maria. III. Jefferies, Janis. IV. zerihan, rachel. 790.2'0285-dc22 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Interfaces of performance / [edited] by maria chatzichristodoulou, Janis Jefferies, and rachel zerihan. p. cm. -- (Digital research in the arts and humanities) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7546-7576-1 1. Technology and the arts. 2. Performing arts--Technological innovations. I. chatzichristodoulou, maria. II. Jefferies, Janis. III. zerihan, rachel. nX180.t4I67 2009 700.1--dc22 2009021343 ISBN 9780754675761 (hbk) ISBN 9780754698432 (ebk.V)

contents

List of Figures Notes on Contributors Series Preface

1

vii xi xv

Introduction Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X) and Rachel Zerihan

1

creative media: Performance, Invention, critique Sarah Kember and Joanna Zylinska

7

Part 1 EnvIronmEnts 2

3

environments, Interactions and Beings: the ecology of Performativity and technics Chris Salter Blurring the Boundaries: Performance, technology and the Artiicial Sublime – An Interview with Ruth Gibson and Bruno martelli, igloo Janis Jefferies

27

43

Part 2 BoDIEs 4

ORLAN-Vertigo/Self-Touching-You Simon Donger

57

5

the Path to silence Allucquére Rosanne Stone

71

Part 3 auDIEnCEs 6

reactivation: Performance, mediatization and the Present moment Philip Auslander

81

Interfaces of Performance

vi

7

8

moving audiences: strategies of exposure in the Work of Gob squad Patrick Primavesi

95

How to Kidnap your audiences: an Interview with matt adams from Blast theory Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X)

107

Part 4 PoLItICs 9

The Tendency to ‘Trans-’: the Political aesthetics of the Biogrammatic zone Sher Doruff

10

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Ethno-Techno Politics Guillermo Gómez Peña and Lorena Rivero de Beer

11

Performative science in an age of specialization: the case of critical art ensemble Nicola Triscott

121 141

153

Part 5 affECt 12

affective connection Bojana Kunst

169

13

Love at first Byte Melinda Rackham

183

conclusion Janis Jefferies

199

Bibliography Index

203 211

List of figures

1.1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 1.8 1.9 1.10 1.11 1.12

Media Spaces 01 Media Spaces 02 Media Spaces 03 Media Spaces 04 Media Spaces 05 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 Media Spaces 06, 2008

7 9 11 12 16 20 20 20 20 20 20 22

2.1 2.2

Schwelle, Part 1, Tesla-Transmediale, Berlin, 2007 Schwelle, Part 2, michael schumacher, Place des arts, montréal, 2007 Schwelle, Part 2, Michael Schumacher, Tesla-Transmediale, Berlin, 2007 Schwelle, Part 3, 3-D rendering

37

2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 3.3 3.4 3.5

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 4.5 4.6 4.7

38 39 40

Viking Shoppers, Gibson/Martelli (igloo) Performance/ computer installation with sound (1999–2001) Winterspace, Gibson/Martelli (igloo) Performance/ computer installation with sound (2001–2005) New Forest, Gibson/Martelli (igloo) Wall prints (2007) SwanQuake: House, Gibson/Martelli (igloo) Computer installation with sound (2007) SwanQuake: House, Gibson/Martelli (igloo) Computer installation with sound (2007)

50

The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN MesuRages MesuRages The Kiss of the Artist Saint-ORLAN The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN Self-Hybridizations American-Indians

57 59 60 60 61 62 62

46 46 48 49

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4.8 4.9 4.10

Self-Hybridizations Africans Self-Hybridizations Pre-Columbians Harlequin’s Coat

7.1

Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater Volksbühne Berlin, 2007: sarah thom, Laura tonke, nina tecklenburg, sean Patten Both sides of the screen in Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater Volksbühne Berlin, 2007 15 Minutes to Comply, Documenta X, Kassel, 1997: Liane sommers, sean Patten, Berit stumpf, thorsten eibeler, stefan Pucher, sarah thom, alex Large The Great Outdoors, Berlin, 2001: simon Will Prater Saga 3: In diesem Kiez ist der Teufel eine Goldmine, Prater Volksbühne Berlin, 2004: Passer-by as ‘Bigman’, elyce semenec, simon Will King Kong Club, Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 2005 Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater Volksbühne Berlin, 2007: simon Will, sean Patten, Berit stumpf Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater Volksbühne Berlin, 2007 Saving the World, Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin, 2008: Berit Stumpf and passers-by

7.2 7.3

7.4 7.5

7.6 7.7 7.8 7.9

63 63 64

96 97

99 100

101 102 103 104 105

Rider Spoke, Blast Theory (2007) Kidnap, Blast Theory (1998): Russell, one of the winners of the kidnapping competition, is taken hostage Can You See Me Now? Blast Theory (2001) Can You See Me Now? Blast Theory (2001): Kids are joining in the chase game Day of the Figurines, Blast Theory (2006): Eve, one of the igurines Uncle Roy All Around You, Blast Theory (2003): The interface on the players’ handheld computers

108

9.1 9.2 9.3 9.4 9.5

Deleuze’s diagramme de Foucault Abstractions from Deleuze’s ‘diagramme de Foucault’ Re-marking relational movements (2008) Speculative re-imagining of the ‘diagramme de Foucault’ (2008) Waiswisz tribute in second Life at the odyssey site

126 128 129 130 139

10.1

What if Stelarc had been born in Tijuana? (from The Mexterminator Series, 1998) Chicano Ethno-Cyborg (from The Museum of Fetishized Identities, 1999) Portrait of Gómez-Peña as El Anthropoloco, 2007

8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5 8.6

10.2 10.3

109 111 112 114 116

141 145 146

List of Figures

10.4 10.5 11.1

11.2

11.3

11.4

11.5 11.6

Gómez-Peña as El Shaman Travesti (from the photo portfolio titled Ethno-Techno, 2005) still from a Pocha nostra performance in arco madrid, 2005 Cult of the New Age, critical art ensemble, Paul Vanouse and faith Wilding, Participatory theatre, museum of contemporary art, toulouse, 2000 Molecular Invasion, critical art ensemble, Beatriz da costa, and Claire Pentecost, Participatory science-theatre project, installation view, the Hemicycle at the corcoran, Washington Dc, 2002 GenTerra, critical art ensemble and Beatriz da costa, Participatory performance, natural History museum, London, 2003 Free Range Grain, critical art ensemble, Beatriz da costa and Shyh-shiun Shyu, Performative art project, Schim Kunsthalle, frankfurt Marching Plague, critical art ensemble, Video and performance, Isle of Lewis, scotland, 2005 Marching Plague, critical art ensemble, Video and performance, Isle of Lewis, scotland, 2005

Ballettikka Internettikka Hydraullikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane zorman, madrid, 2008 12.2 Ballettikka Internettikka Hydraullikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane zorman, madrid, 2008 12.3 Ballettikka Internettikka – Part Two: Ballet Net, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, Moscow, 2002 12.4 Ballettikka Internettikka – Part Two: Ballet Net, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, Moscow, 2002 12.5 Ballettikka Internettikka Stattikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane zorman, Hong Kong/Dresden, 2007 12.6 Ballettikka Internettikka Stattikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane zorman, Hong Kong/Dresden, 2007 12.7 Ballettikka Internettikka Stattikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane zorman, Hong Kong/Dresden, 2007 12.8 b.ALT.ica, Igor Štromajer, Internet, 1998 12.9 b.ALT.ica, Igor Štromajer, Internet, 1998 12.10 Ballettika Internettikka Intermenttikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane zorman, seoul, 2008 12.11 Ballettika Internettikka Intermenttikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane zorman, seoul, 2008

ix

147 148

158

159

160

160 162 163

12.1

13.1 13.2

screen Image: Limerence strikes in second Life screen Image: avatars in love in second Life

170 170 171 172 172 173 173 175 175 178 178 185 189

x

13.3 13.4 13.5

13.6

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Screen Image: Textual intertwining in Melinda Rackham’s internet artwork Carrier (1998) Screen Image: Screen Intimacy in Entropy8Zuper’s internet artwork Skinonskinonskin (1999) Screen Image: Post-convergent three-dimensional audiovisual networked performance in Adam Nash’s Scorched Happiness (2004) screen Image: contemplating the triple complexity of eva and Franco Mattes’s Shoot (2007) performance at Odyssey in second Life

192 193 194

196

notes on contributors

matt adams is Visiting Professor at the central school of speech and Drama, Honorary Fellow at the University of Exeter (UK) and co-founder of the internationally renowned group Blast theory (1991). Led by Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, Blast Theory explore interactivity and the socio-political aspects of technology to create new forms of performance and interactive art. Philip auslander is Professor in the school of Literature, communication, and Culture, Georgia Institute of Technology, and Afiliate Professor in the Department of Theatre and Film Studies, University of Georgia (USA). He is the author of six books, including Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2nd edn, 2008) and Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music (2006). maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka maria X) is a curator, producer and Lecturer in theatre and Performance at the school of arts and new media, University of Hull (Scarborough campus). She is at the inal stage of her PhD on ‘cybertheaters’ (Goldsmiths Digital Studios, UK). Maria was co-director of ‘Fournos’ (Athens, Greece, 1997–2002), co-founder/co-director of the Medi@terra Festival (Athens, Greece, 1998–2002) and initiator/co-director (with Rachel Zerihan) of ‘Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance’ (London, 2008). steve Dixon is Pro-Vice Chancellor at Brunel University, London (UK). He is associate editor of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, and his 800-page book Digital Performance: A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art and Installation (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), has won two international book awards. simon Donger is a Lecturer in scenography and Performance arts at the central School of Speech and Drama (London, UK) where he is also undertaking doctorate research. simon has participated in conferences in the UK, the czech republic, Portugal and switzerland. sher Doruff is an artist, theorist, curator and researcher. she is a Lecturer/mentor in the amsterdam masters of choreography programme and a research fellow (ARTI) at the Amsterdam School for the Arts (NL). She is also Adjunct Faculty in the SMARTlab PhD programme at the University of East London (UK).

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Gabriella Giannachi is associate Professor in Performance and new media and Director of the Centre for Intermedia, University of Exeter (UK). She is the author of three books, including Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (London and New York, 2004) and The Politics of New Media (Routledge, 2007). Guillermo Gómez-Peña was born in 1955 and raised in mexico city. He came to the United states in 1978. In his work, which includes performance art, video, audio, installations, poetry, journalism, critical writings and cultural theory, he explores cross-cultural issues and North/South relations. He uses his art and writing to reveal the labyrinths of identity and the precipices of nationality. igloo are ruth Gibson and Bruno martelli. their practice includes installation, intervention, virtualization, ilm and performance. igloo recreate environments and systems where coding joins hands with choreographies of the body. Their core concept is the intersection between technology and the human spirit. ruth Gibson studied performing arts with the marcel marceau Group and at the school for new Dance Development (Amsterdam). She was nominated for a Paul Hamlyn Award for Visual Art (2000). Bruno martelli studied graphic art and set up a multimedia platform for interactive design. He is recipient of a Wingate scholarship. igloo are UK-based. Janis Jefferies is an artist, writer and curator, Professor of Visual arts at the Department of computing, Goldsmiths University of London and Director of the constance Howard resource and research centre in textiles and artistic Director of Goldsmiths Digital Studios (UK). She is Associate Researcher with Hexagram (Institute of Media, Arts and Technologies, Montréal, Canada). sarah Kember is a reader in new technologies of communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. Her research focuses on feminist science and technology studies. recent publications include: Inventive Life. Towards the New Vitalism (with Mariam Fraser and Celia Lury) (London, 2006), Cyberfeminism and Artiicial Life (London, 2003) and recently she co-edited a new journal, Photographies, with David Bate, martin Lister and Liz Wells. sarah is currently working on a novel entitled The Optical Effects of Lightning. Bojana Kunst is a philosopher, performance theorist and researcher at the faculty of Arts, Department of Sociology, University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). She is on the editorial board of Maska Magazine, Performance Research and Amiteater. she is the author of three books, including Impossible Body (Ljubljana, 1999) and Dangerous Connections: Body, Philosophy and Relation to the Artiicial (Ljubljana, 2004). orLan is a multimedia and performance artist. she teaches at the ecole nationale Superieure d’Arts Paris-Cergy, France. ORLAN has participated in group, solo and

Notes on Contributors

xiii

retrospective exhibitions across the world in institutions such as moca, P.s.1, the Hayward Gallery and centre Georges Pompidou. In 2006, orLan was artist in residence at the Getty research Institute in Los angeles. Patrick Primavesi is Professor at the Institute for theatre studies, University of Leipzig (Germany) and Director of the Dance Archive in Leipzig. He also worked as a dramaturge and, together with Hans-Thies Lehmann, has established an MA in Dramaturgy (Frankfurt/Main). His publications include essays on voice, gesture, rhythm and interrelations between performance, ilm and new media in contemporary theatre. melinda rackham has engaged with emergent practices and innovative technologies for over a decade as a pioneering net artist, writer, curator and producer. Her interdisciplinary practice focuses on the shifting and intertwining of cultural and aesthetic, technological and conceptual issues in emerging practices and networked, distributed, multi-user, portable and game environments. Lorena rivero de Beer recently inished a PhD exploring the links between cultural politics and subjectivity in Guillermo Gómez-Peña’s performances (Department of sociology, University of essex). she has developed her practice as a performance artist and collaborated with La Pocha nostra at different international venues. at present, her interest lies in producing political performance. Chris salter studied economics and philosophy and co-founded the art and research organization ‘Sponge’. He is Assistant Professor for Digital Media and researcher with the Hexagram Institute for research/creation in the media arts and Sciences, Concordia University, Montréal (Canada). Salter is the author of the forthcoming book Entangled: Technology and the Transformation of Performance (Cambridge, MA). allucquére rosanne (sandy) stone is associate Professor and founding Director of the Advanced Communication Technologies Laboratory (ACTLab) at Ut austin; Wolfgang Kohler Professor of media and Performance at the european Graduate school eGs; senior artist at the Banff centre for the arts; and a fellow of the Humanities research Institute, University of california. she has been a ilmmaker, rock ’n’ roll music engineer, neurologist, social scientist, science iction author, cultural theorist, artist and performer. nicola triscott is a cultural producer, working in the performing, interdisciplinary and visual arts. she founded the arts catalyst in 1993. as Director of the arts catalyst, she has built alliances internationally between disciplines and commissioned more than 60 art projects. Nicola writes and speaks regularly at international conferences on the interrelationships between art, science, technology and society. Prior to setting up arts catalyst, she was working and

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researching in southern, central and east africa. nicola is currently the nesta arts & environment fellow on the clore Leadership Programme. rachel Zerihan recently completed a PhD looking at ‘Catharsis and Contemporary Female Performance’ (Roehampton University). Currently, she is particularly interested in One to One performance and enjoys publishing widely on the subject. She teaches at Queen Mary University of London, and in 2007 she co-directed, with maria X, Intimacy: Across Visceral and Digital Performance. Joanna Zylinska is a reader in new media and communications at Goldsmiths, University of London. she is the author of three books including Bioethics in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, MA, 2009), The Ethics of Cultural Studies (London, 2005) and is also the editor of The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, a collection of essays on the work of performance artists Stelarc and ORLAN (London, 2002). Zylinska combines her philosophical writings with photographic art practice.

series Preface

Interfaces of Performance is the ifth volume of Digital Research in the Arts and Humanities. each of the titles in this series comprises a critical examination of the application of advanced Ict methods in the arts and humanities. that is, the application of formal computationally based methods, in discrete but often interlinked areas of arts and humanities research. Usually developed from expert seminars, one of the key activities supported by the methods network, these volumes focus on the impact of new technologies in academic research and address issues of fundamental importance to researchers employing advanced methods. although generally concerned with particular discipline areas, tools or methods, each title in the series is intended to be broadly accessible to the arts and humanities community as a whole. Individual volumes not only stand alone as guides but collectively form a suite of textbooks relecting the ‘state of the art’ in the application of advanced ICT methods within and across arts and humanities disciplines. each is an important statement of current research at the time of publication, an authoritative voice in the ield of digital arts and humanities scholarship. these publications are the legacy of the aHrc Ict methods network and will serve to promote and support the ongoing and increasing recognition of the impact on and vital signiicance to research of advanced arts and humanities computing methods. the volumes will provide clear evidence of the value of such methods, illustrate methodologies of use and highlight current communities of practice. marilyn Deegan, Lorna Hughes, Harold short series editors aHrc Ict methods network centre for computing in the Humanities King’s College London 2009

about the aHrC ICt methods network the aims of the aHrc Ict methods network were to promote, support and develop the use of advanced Ict methods in arts and humanities research and to support the cross-disciplinary network of practitioners from institutions around the UK. It was a multi-disciplinary partnership providing a national forum for the

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exchange and dissemination of expertise in the use of Ict for arts and humanities research. the methods network was funded under the aHrc Ict Programme from 2005 to 2008. the methods network administrative centre was based at the centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), King’s College London. It coordinated and supported all methods network activities and publications, as well as developing outreach to, and collaboration with, other centres of excellence in the UK the Methods Network was co-directed by Harold Short, Director of CCH, and Marilyn Deegan, Director of research Development, at ccH, in partnership with associate Directors: Mark Greengrass, University of Shefield; Sandra Kemp, Royal College of art; andrew Wathey, royal Holloway, University of London; sheila anderson, Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) (2006–2008); and Tony McEnery, University of Lancaster (2005–2006). The project website (http://www.methodsnetwork.ac.uk) provides access to all Methods Network materials and outputs. In the inal year of the project a community site, ‘Digital Arts & Humanities’ (http://www.arts-humanities.net) was initiated as a means to sustain community building and outreach in the ield of digital arts and humanities scholarship beyond the Methods Network’s funding period.

Introduction Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X) and Rachel Zerihan

an interface is the boundary or shared space between two areas or systems. It allows for interaction between two entities that would otherwise be unable to communicate with each other. In that sense, an interface offers another perspective of seeing, experiencing and considering one’s given state, through interaction with an ‘other’. In calling this collection Interfaces of Performance we are gesturing towards the myriad aesthetic, experiential and interdisciplinary opportunities offered by contemporary performances that ‘dare’ interact with an ‘other’ system of disciplines by integrating technologies into their practice. marking a shared space of exchange and dialogue as well as a site of contestation and tension, the interfaces proposed herein are positions inhabited by critical cultural theory and innovative interdisciplinary works. In proiling and examining current manifestations of such works, we demonstrate models and strategies practitioners are developing – or frequently appropriating – as a means to their artistic ends, which disturb boundaries of traditional performance and create new paradigms of emergent practice and discourse. The interfaces in this volume relect social as well as cultural and technological attempts to enhance, question and strengthen the scope of the relationship between one and other in the sphere of performancemaking and as such point towards wider relational matters of embodiment, alterity and mechanisms of connectivity. as technologies become increasingly integrated into theatre and performance practice, this volume aims to investigate emergent paradigms while at the same time consciously avoids offering or imposing taxonomies upon such varied practices. Taxonomies require the classiication of things into groups based on their formal characteristics and often entail hierarchies. Interfaces of Performance has been designed to extend current discourse in a ield that is, on occasions, led by formalist analysis focusing on technology per se. such analysis runs the risk of approaching practices as static outcomes rather than (a)live cultural phenomena that are always in the process of becoming themselves –and of becoming other. The proposed approach intends to unpack conceptual, aesthetic and societal elements of performance practice, investigating the strategic use of a diverse spectrum of technologies as a means to artistic ends. the focus of this analysis is neither on the formal characteristics of these practices, nor on the types of technology employed. Instead, we embark on an investigation of the practitioners’ ideas, objectives and concerns; we ask how these artists employ technologies in order to research new

2

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dramaturgies and methodologies for the creation of more e/affective experiences for, and encounters with, their audiences. In order to align the structure of this analysis into the process of integrating technologies into current performance practice, we began by identifying ive core elements that we consider integral to the make-up of all performance, namely; Bodies, affect, environment, Politics and audiences. exploring diverse types of current digital, networked, virtual or technologized performance, this volume asks what becomes of these core performance elements once information and communication technologies become integrated as a sixth core element of practice. How do technologies expand, extend, (re)present, dislocate, disperse or invade bodies in performance? How do they shift the role of the audience? How do they enhance or limit the affective power of live performance? Which are the habitats of such artistic practices? And inally, how does such work deal with its social plexus and current issues of social insecurity, injustice and unrest? following this rationale, Interfaces of Performance seeks to re-examine key elements of performance practice through showcasing current works that trip the line and trouble the boundary between technological advancement and emergent performance (and performative) processes. this volume brings together an international selection of leading practitioners, academics and cultural professionals who, through their work, are exploring the boundaries, crossovers and common grounds, but also the tensions, contestations and conlicts between theatre, performance, digital technologies and broader cultural happenings to challenge expectations and further discourse across the disciplines. We invited a number of leading igures who have had lengthy engagements with the subject matter, together with a new generation of writers and artists who are groundbreaking in their approach and their articulation of new interfaces for performance. the volume is a collection of essays, interviews and poetic fragments, illustrating our endeavour to foreground practice by inviting artists to speak in their own voices, as well as offering theorists the opportunity of sharing their enthralling analyses of current practice. sarah Kember and Joanna zylinska launch the volume with an inspiring call for a fresh approach to talking about media studies. Taking the form of a ‘live essay’ that by its own admission slides into the realm of ‘a manifesto of sorts’, Kember and zylinska attempt to reconcile their academic writing and creative practice through their proposal of a ‘Creative Media Project’. In breaking down perceived divisions between forms of media to perform knowledge differently, they propose creative media as an emergent paradigm at the interface of performativity and performance. Whilst retaining an independent strategy for making ethicopolitical performance, Kember and Zylinska’s discussion also encourages crossdisciplinary exchanges and dialectic enquiries that are furthered and interrogated throughout the course of the volume. The irst subject matter we tackle is the ‘Environments’ of cutting-edge, technologized performance practices. In examining the sites of these practices we ind that they are shifting from traditional theatre venues to a variety of

Introduction

3

spatial contexts such as ORLAN’s operating theatre, Critical Art Ensemble’s laboratories, Gob Squad’s mediatized, in-between spaces, Blast Theory’s fusion of urban cityscapes and online worlds, and igloo’s uncanny virtual, immersive environments. In his chapter, chris salter interrogates such logistics of location in his discussion of the old division between human and technical worlds. He argues that although more artists are turning towards performance in their effort to understand and manipulate the environments we both ind ourselves in and help create, they do not necessarily turn towards the stage; instead, ‘laboratories, the interior of bodies, the skins of buildings and the air we breathe’ become new contexts for performance that brings together human and technical beings. salter further argues for the performativity of the environment itself. His chapter is followed by Janis Jefferies’s interview with artists Ruth Gibson and Bruno Martelli, known as igloo. igloo create virtual worlds and novel performance experiences for their audiences through the use of three-dimensional environments, game engines and motion capture. their virtual environments/games/choreographies challenge the division between ‘real’ and virtual space and attempt to translate liveness into the virtual world. The section headed ‘Bodies’ is designed to proile innovative practice and critical analysis that foregrounds technologies’ advancements on constituents of corporeality in performance. In mapping the manoeuvres contemporary artists are making to reclaim malleable discourses offered outside of their given bodies, the gestures of critical writing contained within this section trigger questions around the eficacy and impact of technologies in manipulating the body’s form and enhancing/disturbing its received presence. simon Donger introduces his interview with ORLAN with a personal response to the artist’s work he had some ten years ago at which he felt vertigo through her close-up (mediatized) image. Donger uses this sense of confusion, ambiguity and dislocation to embark on an interview concerned with foregrounding what he describes as ORLAN’s affective ‘effacement of carnal and technical delineations of experience and the critical collapse of internal and external modalities of (re)presentation of the body’. Allucquère Rosanne Stone also writes from personal experience to tell a story that relects on technology as a transformative tool in the theatre whilst interweaving her musings on questions of deinition and transformation in the site of her transgendered body. Platforming practice that demonstrates the implications of incorporating a diverse array of technologies into the (performing) body, the contributions in this section stretch notions of discourse around issues including embodiment, corporeality, prostheses, hybridization to question and reconsider the human body’s relation to and use of technologies as examined by proliic performance practitioners. Delving into current heated discussions on participatory media practices and user-generated content, in the third themed section of Interfaces we question how technologies shift the role of the ‘Audiences’ within contemporary performance practice. We ask whether audiences are being placed at the core of the thinking, dramaturgy and structure behind practitioners’ work. We consider whether

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technologized performance succeeds in actively involving and engaging its audiences and whether it also has the ability to distance and isolate them. finally, we ask whether audiences can still be framed as what we traditionally call ‘audiences’ – or whether they have become participants, interactors, collaborators, co-authors of such events. Philip auslander opens this section offering an enthralling account on audience perception in a mediatized environment. focusing on the point of reception of the mediatized event, Auslander suggests that ‘the reproduction discloses the original as an event occurring in the here and now’ and argues for our dialogical interaction with historical texts/performances. Auslander’s chapter is followed by Patrick Primavesi’s experiential analysis of Gob Squad’s performances. Primavesi demonstrates, through Gob Squad’s work, the exchanges and interrelations between diverse media. He discusses the group’s playful explorations of notions of ‘liveness’ (often presented as ‘fake’), ‘intermediality’ (‘a ghostly withdrawal of presence’) and the reversal of roles between performers and audiences. The inal piece in this section is Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X)’s interview with matt adams from Blast theory. Blast theory create gaming performances/ experiences that consistently situate the audience centre-stage, demanding active engagement, courage, trust or commitment. adams discusses the dramaturgies, strategies and social politics behind Blast Theory’s complex but accessible work, which aims to demystify both art and cutting-edge technology and reach out to wide audiences through intense, surprising and playful interactions. The three contributions grouped together under the ‘Politics’ section address how technologies impact on and critique a diverse array of political ideologies. In wanting to investigate how performance works are employing various technologies to deal with very contemporary issues of (in)security, the contributions from Sher Doruff, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Lorena Rivero De Beer and Nicola Triscott have produced texts that grapple with state, national and governmental politics as well as aesthetic and disciplinary manifestations of politics. Interrogating the notion of the biogram – the ‘living complement’ of the diagram, Doruff proffers a critical study of aesthetic politics, infused with practical analysis that examines and foregrounds this curious zone’s manipulations of borders, territories and boundaries. The second contribution is made jointly by Guillermo Gómez-Peña and Lorena Rivero De Beer. Gómez-Peña introduces three of his recently performed performance texts with the highly political question of access to new technologies. rivero De Beer takes this idea forward to theorize Gómez-Peña’s ‘Ethno-Techno Politics’ as emerging from his politicized position as a minority chicano and asserts that his playful analysis of new technologies in the texts critiques Chicanos’ relationship with dominant US culture. nicola triscott of the arts catalyst concludes this examination into the relationship between technologies and politics with a contextualized account of the case of Steve Kurtz of Critical Art Ensemble. Framing Kurtz’s biotechnological artistic practice and the ensuing reactionary claims of bio-terrorism, Triscott reafirms vital questions of surveillance, civil rights and state control that continue to affect practitioners crossing the science/art divide.

Introduction

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The last part of this volume explores the subject matter of ‘Affect’. In 1990, Roy Ascott’s seminal article asked: ‘Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?’1 a pertinent question, we think, for every type of mediatized, distributed, (dis)embodied performance. Brian Massumi has further discussed affect(s) as ‘virtual synaesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actual existing, particular things that embody them’.2 Questioning whether technologies expand, restrict, diversify the embodying subject in itself and, as such, in its perspectives, we ask how technologies merge with sense-led interactions to create techno-phenomenologies of digital/visceral sensorium. This inal part opens with a chapter by Bojana Kunst on the work of Igor Štromajer and Intima Virtual Base. Kunst focuses on the Ballettikka Internettikka series of tactical, low-tech, robotic guerrilla performances to discuss daily technological practices of connectivity, which, she argues, ‘deeply inluence our anticipation, desire and imagination around … the experience of our (connected) intimacy’ and explores how protocols become ‘infected’ with desire. Melinda Rackham skilfully closes the volume with two parallel narratives intertwined in her performative essay ‘Love at First Byte’. rackham exposes private instances of falling passionately in love online while introducing the term limerence, ‘an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person’ and attributing this to ‘chemical process[es], brain patterns and deined behaviours’. Rackham eloquently argues that digital limerence opens up myriad possibilities due to the freedom from everyday human singularity. and as all this is yet to come, we urge you to immerse yourself in the performance interfaces offered herein: ‘Let go. Let yourself drift, without resistance, into realms that exceed all expectation’ (Rackham, ‘Love at First Byte’).

1 See Roy Ascott, ‘Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?’, Art Journal, 49/3 (1990): 241–7. 2 Brian Massumi, ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, in Paul Patton (ed.), Deleuze: A Critical Reader (Oxford and Cambridge, MA, 1996), p. 228 (original emphasis).

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chapter 1

creative media: Performance, Invention, critique sarah Kember and Joanna zylinska

figure 1.1 Media Spaces 01

Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

Performing a new paradigm the discussion that follows is an attempt to enact a different mode of doing critical work in the arts and humanities. It adopts the format of a ‘live essay’, performed in (at least) two voices, via numerous exchanges of electronic traces, graphic marks, face-to-face utterances and corporeal gasps. This format is aimed at facilitating collaborative thinking and dialogic engagement with ideas, concepts and material objects at hand between the chapter’s authors, or rather conversational partners. Our direct entry point into the discussion lies with what we are calling a ‘creative media project’. It will provide a focus for our broader consideration of issues of cross-disciplinary performance in this piece. By giving a name to a set of concerns that have preoccupied us both for a long time, we are performatively inaugurating this creative media project. The project arises out of our shared dissatisfaction with the current state of the discipline of

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‘media studies’, within which, or rather on the margins of which, we are both professionally situated. In its more orthodox incarnation as developed from sociology, politics and communications theory, media studies typically offers analyses of media as objects ‘out there’ – radio, TV, the internet. Mobilizing the serious scientiic apparatus of ‘qualitative and quantitative methodologies’, it studies the social, political and economic impact of these objects on allegedly separable entities such as ‘society’, ‘the individual’ and, more recently, ‘the globalized world’. What is, however, lacking from many such analyses is a secondlevel relection on the complex processes of mediation that are instantiated as soon as the media scholar begins to think about conducting an analysis – and long before she switches on her tV or iPod. What does our creative media project have to do with performance? Through instantiating this project, we are making a claim for the status of theory as theatre (there is an etymological link between the two, as Jackie Orr points out1), or for the performativity of all theory – in media, arts and sciences, in written and spoken forms. We are also highlighting the ongoing possibilities of remediation across all media and all forms of communication. from this perspective, theatre does not take place – and never did – only ‘at the theatre’, just as literature was never conined just to the book, or the pursuit of knowledge to the academy. What is particularly intriguing for us at the moment is the ever-increasing possibility for the arts and sciences to perform each other, more often than not in different media contexts. Witness the theatre that involved the mediation of the Big technoscience project in September 2008: the experiment with the Large Hadron Collider at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). The Hadron Collider is a particle accelerator used by physicists to study the smallest existing particles, and it promises to ‘revolutionise our understanding, from the minuscule world deep within atoms to the vastness of the Universe’ via the recreation of the conditions ‘just after the Big Bang’.2 rarely, since the Greeks, has such an attempt to stage metaphysics been undertaken with an equal amount of pathos and comedy, with satellite tV networks staging the event for the worldwide audiences in real time. Performances of this sort often incorporate their own meta-narratives, or critiques – although these critiques tend to remain latent or unacknowledged. remediating such events via critical and creative intervention, the creative media project we have in mind has the potential to become a new incarnation of the age-old ‘theatrewithin-the theatre’ device, whose actors are also at the same time critics.

1 Jacquie orr, Panic Diaries (Durham, NC, 2006), p. 6. 2 Quoted from the CERN website, http://public.web.cern.ch/public/en/LHC/LHCen.html [accessed 4 october 2008].

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figure 1.2 Media Spaces 02

Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

For Judith Butler, when drawing on Foucault’s work, the critic has a double task, to show how knowledge and power work to constitute a more or less systematic way of ordering the world with its own “conditions of acceptability of a system”, but also “to follow the breaking points which indicate its emergence”. so not only is it necessary to isolate and identify the peculiar nexus of power and knowledge that gives rise to the ield of intelligible things, but also to track the way in which that ield meets its breaking point, the moments of its discontinuities, the sites where it fails to constitute the intelligibility for which it stands.3

taking seriously both the philosophical legacy of what the Kantian and Foucauldian tradition calls ‘critique’, and the transformative and interventionist energy of the creative arts, creative media can therefore perhaps be seen as one of the emergent paradigms at the interfaces of performance and performativity that this volume is trying to map out. What will hopefully emerge through this process of playful yet rigorous cross-disciplinary intervention will be a more dynamic, networked and engaged mode of working on and with ‘the media’, where critique is always already accompanied by the work of participation and invention.4 3 Judith Butler, ‘What is Critique? An Essay on Foucault’s Virtue’, Transversal, online journal published by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics, May (2001): n.p. 4 In ‘What is Critique? Suspension and Recomposition in Textual and Social Machines’, Gerald Raunig argues that critique in the Kantian sense ‘remains an ars iudicandi, a technique of distinguishing. … all of these revisions of the existing original material

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repetition with a difference One of the reasons for our interest in developing such a creative media project is our shared attempt to work through and reconcile, in a manner that would be satisfactory on both intellectual and aesthetic levels, our academic writing and our ‘creative practice’ (photography in Joanna’s case, iction in Sarah’s). This effort has to do with more than just the usual anxieties associated with attempting to breach the ‘theory–practice’ divide and trying to negotiate the associated issues of rigour, skill, technical competence and aesthetic judgement that any joint theory–practice initiative brings up. Working in and with creative media is for us irst and foremost an epistemological question of how we can perform knowledge differently through a set of intellectual-creative practices that also ‘produce things’. The nature of these ‘things’ – academic monographs, novels, photographs, video clips – is perhaps less signiicant (even though each one of these objects does matter in a distinctly singular way) than the overall process of producing ‘knowledge as things’. In other words, creative media is for us a way of enacting knowledge about and of the media by creating conditions for the emergence of such media. of course, there is something rather dificult and hence also frustrating about this self-relexive process – it is supposed to produce the thing of which it speaks (creative media), while drawing on this very thing (creative media) as its source of inspiration – or, to put it in cybernetic terms, feedback. But this circularity is precisely what is most exciting for us about the theory of performativity and the way it has made inroads into the arts and humanities over the last two decades. Drawing on the concept of performativity taken from J.L. Austin’s speech-act theory as outlined in his How to Do Things with Words, thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Judith Butler have extended the use of the term from being limited to only exceptional phrases that create an effect of which they speak (such as ‘I name this ship Queen Elizabeth’ or ‘I take this woman to be my lawful wedded wife’) to encapsulating the whole of language.5 In other words, any bit of language, any code, or any set of meaningful practices has the potential to enact effects in the world, something Butler has illustrated with her discussion are to be understood as a productive process of recomposition. Instead of introducing the distinction as an essentialist excavation of an origin, it is instead a matter of reinstituting a heterogenetic process: not a pure tree schema, at the head of which there is an original text and an auctor, but rather a much more winding practice of continual recombination. … critique is thus to be understood as an interplay between the suspended iudicium and inventio, between the capacity for judgment, which in “making understandable” clearly goes beyond the practice of empirically distinguishing in the sense of separation and exclusion, and the talent for invention that newly concatenates the (signiicant) components’. From Transversal, online journal published by the European Institute for Progressive Cultural Politics, August (2008): n.p. 5 see J.L. austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA, 1962); Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York and London, 1990); Judith Butler, Excitable Speech (New York and London, 1997); and Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc. (Evanston, 1988).

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of the fossilization of gender roles and positions through their repeated and closely monitored performance. Performativity is an empowering concept, politically and artistically, because it not only explains how norms take place but also shows that change and invention are always possible. ‘Performative repetitions with a difference’ enable a gradual shift within ideas, practices and values even when we are functioning within the most constraining and oppressive socio-cultural formations (we can cite the Stonewall riots of 1969, the emergence of the discipline of performing arts, or the birth of the solidarity movement in Poland in 1980 as examples of such performative inventions). With this project, we are thus hoping to stage a new paradigm not only for doing media critique-as-media analysis but also for inventing (new) media.

figure 1.3 Media Spaces 03

Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

Creative media: a manifesto of sorts Put boldly, our contention is that conventional forms of media analysis are ineffective in as far as they are based on what we perceive to be a set of false problems and false divisions. the false problems involve current conceptions of interactivity, convergence, determinism, constructionism, information and identity. false divisions, which continue to structure debates on new media in particular, include those between production and consumption, text and image, and language and materiality. We also maintain that there is no rigid division between new and old media, as ongoing processes of differentiation are constantly taking place across all media. The underlying problem of ‘the media’ is precisely that of mediation; of the processes – economic, cultural, social, technical, textual,

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psychological – through which a variety of media forms continue to develop in ways which are at times progressive and at times conservative. the problem of mediation is for us both contextual and temporal. It centres on the evolution of media in a wider socio-economic context. The role of technology in this process of evolution is neither determining nor determined. Indeed, this role is never ‘merely’ instrumental or anthropological, as Heidegger argues: it is rather vital and relational. If the essence of technology is inseparable from the essence of humanity, then there is no justiication for positing humanism against technicism, or vice versa. There is also no point in ighting ‘against technology’. But there is every point – or, indeed, an ethico-political injunction – to exploring practices of differentiation at work in the current mediascape. our creative media project seeks to promote the invention of different forms of engagement with media. This is not to say that differentiation is always welcome and beneicial, and that all forms of difference are to be equally desired, no matter what material and symbolic effects they generate. our emphasis is on creative/critical practices which are neither simply oppositional nor consensual, and which attempt, in Donna Haraway’s words, to ‘make a difference’ within processes of mediation. To put this another way, we are interested in staging interventions across conventional boundaries of theory and practice, art and commerce, science and the humanities. such interventions may come to constitute events that cannot be determined a priori.

figure 1.4 Media Spaces 04

Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

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the invention of what (and what for)? Of course, not all events are equal, and not everything that ‘emerges’ is good, creative or even necessarily interesting. far from it. mediation, even if it is not owned, dominated or determined economically, is heavily inluenced by economic forces and interests. this state of events has resulted in the degree of standardization and homogenization that we continue to see across the board: witness the regular ‘inventions’ of new mobile phones or new forms of aesthetic surgery. The marketization of creativity ends up with more and more (choice) of the same – even if some of these ‘inventions of the old’ can at times be put to singularly transformative uses. and yet most events and inventions are rather conservative or even predictable; they represent theatre-as-we-know-it. Our own investment lies in recognizing and promoting ‘theatre-as-it-could-be’ (the phrase is adapted from Chris Langton’s founding deinition of artiicial life, a discipline that manages both to draw on the most conventional metaphysical assumptions about science and life, and to open a network of entirely unpredictable possibilities for imagining ‘an otherwise world’6). We are interested in witnessing or even enacting the creative diversiication of events as a form of political intervention against this proliferation of difference-as-sameness. We ind such ‘non-creative’ diversiication everywhere, including in the increasingly market-driven academy. One can easily blame ‘performance audits’ such as the Quality Assurance Agency’s inspection visits and the research assessment exercise in the UK, or the compiling of international university league tables for the standardization and homogenization of the academic output worldwide. But these ‘quality-enhancement’ procedures are just a means to the end of competition and survival within an overcrowded global market, run on an apparently Darwinian basis whereby size (of institution) and volume (of output) really do matter. In this kind of environment, it is sometimes very dificult to make a difference. But we can remind ourselves here of Haraway’s willingness to recognize the real limitations of a politics she referred to as cyborg politics. In that old, seemingly dated ‘battle of the cyborgs’, she was always going to lose, but never going to concede: it’s like leaving ‘in the hands of hostile social formations the tools that we need to reinvent our lives’.7 Haraway’s cyborg politics may have been a feature of the Cold War (the old one, not the emerging one), but what survives of it is the politico-ethical injunction to intervene, to make a difference, not for the sake of difference but for the sake of a better – more just, more interesting – world. We take the ‘making’ in making a difference as seriously as the difference itself. Hence our insistence that theory takes the form of theatre; that it is always already performative, and hence our quest for the ‘invention of forms ever new’, to use Bergson’s term. These forms are hybrid, recombinant – and challenging. They 6 Christopher Langton, ‘Artiicial Life’, in Margaret Boden (ed.), The Philosophy of Artiicial Life (Oxford, 1996), pp. 39–94. 7 Donna Haraway, Simians Cyborgs and Women (London, 1991), p. 8.

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represent the kind of conceptual risk-taking and creativity that rosi Braidotti calls for in her book Metamorphoses, and that emerges from feminist philosophy in general. there comes a point, Braidotti insists, when it is no longer enough to deal with the breakdown of hierarchical conceptual dualisms just in the content, but not in the form, of our address. as soon as we attempt performatively to engage form and content, reason and imagination, we are faced with the controversial question of style which relates to the academic conventions of argument and presentation. Hence we are more than willing to join Braidotti when she says: ‘I do not support an assumption of the critical thinker as judge, moral arbiter or high-priestess’.8 In consequence, an alteration in the traditional pact between the writer and her readers inevitably takes place: the ‘writer/reader binary couple is recombined’, Braidotti says, ‘and a new impersonal mode is required as a way of doing philosophy’.9 that is, a new impersonal mode beyond what Karen Barad might refer to as the ‘ethicoepistem-ontological’ divisions between subject/ivity and object/ivity.10 Sarah has been pursuing such an ‘impersonal mode’ in her attempts to write science and iction in a way which fully recognizes their mutual (re)mediation, as well as their existence as relational, non-self-identical differences in kind. Traditional literary iction can be said to ‘other’ science by either avoiding it or subsuming it under familiar humanist narratives. Science iction, in turn, tends to fetishize (or demonize) what literary iction elides. Insofar as there are processes of othering at work in the attitude of science to iction and, to an extent, of iction to science, then what exactly lies between them? The impersonal mode requires experimentation in form and content, and entails technical dificulties and problem-solving abilities on a surprising scale.11 In terms of writing, the chief among these is precisely how to reconcile the exterior and interior world views normally associated with the sciences and arts respectively. fiction, traditionally, offers a view of the world from the inside out, while scientiic and academic writing would offer a view of the world from the outside in. In her experiments with writing across these two world views, sarah is learning, the hard way, what it means to cross this tradition. The Optical Effects of Lightning is a story, which could be a true story, about an experiment in human cloning and what it means to two narrators and to two brothers who are themselves twins (clones may be thought of as twins, separated in time). One narrator speaks in what Braidotti might call the ‘judgemental, moralizing high-tone’ of someone who is, or considers himself to be, outside the experiment – commenting on it, reporting on it and on the protagonists involved. the other narrator speaks of his involvement in the experiment, and of his experience, in 8 rosi Braidotti, Metamorphoses (Cambridge, 2002), p. 9. 9 Ibid. 10 Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC, 2007). 11 this was brought home to sarah, in a way which felt both companionable and inspiring, when she listened to Katie mitchell discussing her work, Some Trace of Her, and when she watched, or rather attended the performance itself.

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a more conventionally ictional, or interior, voice, which becomes increasingly obsessive and perhaps deluded. His less than likely, incredible, highly subjective narrative is framed by the other more controlled, more rational and objective one, but we are never entirely sure which one is ‘true’. The story complicates this problem of truth when, like two cells in a cloning experiment, the narratives and their narrators are (literally?) fused. This attempt at (literary) science iction plays on an analogy between the electrofusion of cells and the (optical) effects of lightning on the body.12 One of Sarah’s intentions here, or one of her interventions, so to speak, is to assert that scientiic processes such as fusion are more than metaphors for iction, or indeed for theory. Instead, they become materialized and play a performative role within theory. this sort of intervention is therefore also something of an invention. to a certain extent, sarah will be repeating this experiment in Media, Mars and Metamorphosis, a work of iction which will appear to be, and which will (up to a point) be, a work of non-iction. Here, the narrator, Jeremy Hoyle, is an academic/cultural commentator and Fukuyama-like igure13 concerned with three life-changing experiments in biotechnology. These experiments relate to different spatial realms, but are linked, in part, by their focus on the cell. they incorporate outer or cosmic space, the interior space of the computer and bodily space at the boundary between self and other. these different spaces thereby become analogous. The experiments – in bacteriology, immunology and mediology – include a test for the presence of microbial life on mars, another designed to induce tolerance in face transplant surgery and a third, user-based experiment to test for prospects of intelligent media.

12 the effects of lightning on the body are many and varied. they range from things like burns, concussion and heart failure, which you might expect, to things like neurological damage and changes in personality, which you might not expect. one of the ways that lightning can kill you prosaically (and it rarely does) is by means of a ground strike: the negatively charged lower portion of a passing cloud creates a positive charge in the ground underneath it, and this runs up one leg, through your body and down the other leg. the effect on cattle can be particularly devastating on account of the fact that they have more legs. one of the ways in which lightning can alter you, physically, psychologically and rather mysteriously, is by using you, instead of a tree, to form an upward streamer – again the current passes up through you from the ground and connects with the lightning strike descending from above. Sometimes reality is indeed stranger than iction. When Sarah talked about lightning at a recent conference in which she was presenting and performing various aspects of her story, she encountered, for the irst time, one of the non-intentional side effects of pursuing an impersonal mode – a certain confusion of attendance. Was the science made up and the story really true? Ambiguity is one thing – and it seems totally appropriate to a subject such as cloning. Confusion, however, is perhaps a more problematic if productive affect to manage in the newly recombined writer/reader, speaker/audience relationship. 13 Put bluntly, liberal-humanist, judgemental, moralizing and conservative.

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Three different characters, Lou, Hannah and Hal, talk about the life-changing experience of being involved in these experiments. Lou, an elderly and embittered microbiologist, whose previous claims to have discovered evidence of life on Mars have been repeatedly rejected by NASA, declares inally to have evidence of a martian microbe with characteristics similar to that of green sulphur bacteria. Hannah, a neurotic young woman involved in a traumatic act of violence, claims to have had the irst successful face transplant based not on immunosuppressant drugs but on the establishment of immune tolerance and hybridity between the donor and recipient. Finally, Hal, a middle-aged curmudgeonly technophobe with a drink habit, who agreed to take part in a smart home experiment because he needed the money, claims that something ‘weird’ happened when the speechbased, adaptive and so-called ‘intelligent’ objects he was forced to interact with started to sound more and more like him. Jeremy interviews each character and – understandably – doesn’t really believe them. not only do these experiments, and others like them, cross the line of good science and the sanctity of human nature (as distinct from aliens, hybrids and cyborgs), they are more than likely to be hoaxes. However, his conclusion is somewhat complicated by his own subsequent experience. Jeremy starts to feel ill. Jeremy is not himself. He must have a terrible stomach bug or something because he is shitting green stuff and hallucinating – he doesn’t even recognize his own face in the mirror and what’s more, what’s worse, neither does the mirror. And it’s telling him so …

figure 1.5 Media Spaces 05

Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

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The point of these true stories – these ‘factions’ that stay as close as possible to what is happening in the world of technoscience now (not in the future) – is not to validate the humanist category of experience but rather to explore the possibilities of what Keith Ansell Pearson terms ‘experience enlarged and gone beyond’.14 that is, experience gone beyond anything singular, or dual, towards something potentially multiple and inherently non-experiential. The body, poor Jeremy’s body, enacts or performs this enlargement of experience – for us. We (writer and reader) attend his transformation, his metamorphosis in as far as we identify with his rigid and righteous refusal of it. It isn’t a nice trick to pull on him, Sarah’s substitute – the dramatized and somewhat parodied voice of the theorist. But perhaps it’s time we dealt with our alter egos, cancelled each other out as we are supposed to – at least in the Gothic literary tradition, if not in the academic one – and found a different mode of working and playing.

technology and the body Donna Haraway is an important igure for us in our joint work and play, because she was one of the irst thinkers to offer a critical, insubordinate and playful engagement with technological processes within a wider socio-cultural setup. Even though her ‘cyborg’, a Star Wars-era creature which hybridized lesh and metal, carbon and silicon, seems positively old-fashioned in the current era of biotechnological hybrids that can literally get under our skin (or into our digestive systems), the political signiicance of her intervention into what she termed ‘technoscience’ has not lost any of its validity. For any creative media project to be truly inventive, it needs to work through the ontological and epistemological consequences of technologies and media becoming increasingly closer to us. It also needs to consider what the french philosopher Bernard stiegler calls our ‘originary technicity’,15 where technology is comprehended as an originary condition of our being in the world, not just an external object we all learn to manipulate for our advantage and beneit. this is a very different view of technology and mediation from the one that sees the human as ‘natural’ and technology and media as external agents. This view challenges the instrumental understanding of technology proposed by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, a framework which still shapes the majority of our media stories about It, the internet or genetics. Within this instrumental framework, technology is seen as just a tool for the human. It is an external object that either promises us pleasure, if it is a gadget such as a digital camera, or threatens our life and well-being, if it is a bomb or a lethal injection. However, what we are trying to do with our alternative media paradigm is to argue for the possibility of, and need 14 Keith ansell Pearson, Philosophy and the Adventure of the Virtual (London and new York, 2002), p. 8. 15 Bernard stiegler, Technics and Time, 1 (Stanford, 1998).

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for, adopting a different model – one proposed not only by Haraway and Stiegler but also by the australian performance artist stelarc. all these thinkers are very critical of the story of the human as a master of the universe who can become even more powerful via his media gadgets. Instead, they outline a more systemic and networked model of human-nonhuman relations, in which mediated prostheses are seen as intrinsic parts of the human body. In an interview with Joanna for her 2002 book, The Cyborg Experiments: The Extensions of the Body in the Media Age, stelarc explained his understanding of the relationship between technology and the human as follows: [t]he body has always been a prosthetic body. ever since we evolved as hominids and developed bipedal locomotion, two limbs became manipulators. We have become creatures that construct tools, artefacts and machines. We’ve always been augmented by our instruments, our technologies. technology is what constructs our humanity; the trajectory of technology is what has propelled human developments. I’ve never seen the body as purely biological, so to consider technology as a kind of alien other that happens upon us at the end of the millennium is rather simplistic.16

So clearly, we shouldn’t think that there was once a ‘pure’ body and that this has somehow been contaminated just as we entered the technological age. Instead, as Stelarc puts it, ‘We’ve been simultaneously zombies and cyborgs; we’ve never really had a mind of our own and we’ve never been purely biological entities’.17 From this critical-cybernetic perspective, the human is seen as having always been technological, or having always been mediated. to put it differently, technology and media are precisely what makes us human. even if we agree that the body is somewhat weakened or inadequate in a world of ubiquitous information lows, computer-led wars and nanotechnology, it does not mean we have to bemoan the loss of our human potency, or desire to become Terminator-like robots ourselves. We can better understand this position as a pragmatic recognition of our dependency on technical and media objects. The work of techno-artists such as Stelarc or techno-philosophers such as Stiegler and Haraway should not therefore be reduced to a naïve prophecy of a post-lesh world in which man will eventually overcome his technological limitations. Instead, we’re better off seeing it as an exploration of the symbiotic relationship the human has always had with technology and media. In other words, it shows us technology as being an inseparable part of both ‘the human’ and ‘the body’. Why is it important for us to think of ourselves in this way? Well, for starters, this position allows for a better understanding of the relations and connections we have in the world. It also lets us develop a more interesting and more critical 16 Gary Hall and Joanna Zylinska, ‘Probings: An Interview with Stelarc’, in Joanna Zylinska (ed.), The Cyborg Experiments (London and New York, 2002), p. 114. 17 Ibid., p. 115.

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relationship to ‘nature’ and ‘the environment’. If we do accept that we have indeed always been cyborgs, that we have always been mediated, it will be easier for us to let go of paranoid narratives (such as Jeremy’s from Sarah’s novel) which see technology as an external other that threatens the human, and that needs to be stopped at all cost before a new mutant species – of replicants, robots, aliens – emerges to compete with humans and eventually to win the battle. all this is not to say that in the universe of complex relations between human and nonhuman beings ‘anything goes’, and that all connections are equally good. But seeing ourselves as always already connected, as being part of the system – rather than as kings of the universe to which all beings are inferior – is an important step in developing a more critical and a more responsible relationship to the world, to what we call ‘man’, ‘nature’ and ‘technology’. It is also a promise of the emergence of some more productive media relations and media environments. Joanna has attempted to enact such a productive relation between technology and the human in her photographic work, in particular in her 2007 project titled We Have Always Been Digital. this has been a way for her actually to practise media philosophy, and to perform concepts via images. The project started with an attempt to think about the media, both ‘new’ and ‘old’, and the way culture repurposes and remediates its different media forms. It may seem constraining or even reductive to begin describing visual work with the verb ‘to think’. And yet, given her professional background in philosophy and media theory, this is the way of approaching creative media practice and visual culture she is most comfortable with, and one she is not ready to abandon altogether. to be interesting, creative practice, including photography, for her has to mobilize complex thought processes, although without doubt it should do more than just illustrate already worked out ideas and concepts. The very nature of this ‘more’ constitutes part of the invention process activated throughout this project. Visual work can of course help us articulate concepts or states that exceed the linguistic, and achieve things that spoken and written language cannot do. But then written texts themselves always already entail a certain lack of determination: even the tightest philosophical argument is always based on a leap of faith, and remains underpinned by numerous investments of which we can only be partly aware. This is a very roundabout, perhaps defensive, way of saying that inding a satisfactory way of negotiating between visual and textual narratives is never going to be easy for a media theorist, and that she will not be satisied with just suspending the latter for the sake of the former.

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figures 1.6 and 1.7 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

figures 1.8 and 1.9 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

figures 1.10 and 1.11 We Have Always Been Digital, 2007 Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

Joanna’s We Have Always Been Digital project explores digitality as the intrinsic condition of photography, both in its past and present forms. rather than focus on the aesthetic qualities of light, it invites the viewer to consider the formal role of light in the constitution of a pattern, the ‘on/off’ of the information culture. The project assumes that computation also takes place outside what we conventionally

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think of as ‘computers’. Indeed, it is through the differential effect of the presence and absence of any data – of pattern, electricity, light – that computation occurs in the wider world, engendering complexity and bringing about change. the six images presented here show the digital low and exchange of data in different media: house walls, furniture, human bodies. they capture the digital condition: the emergence of a pattern of 0s and 1s. The project has had numerous inspirations, both textual and visual. It started with W.H. Fox Talbot’s ‘photogenic drawings’ of lace and of light falling through the window panels in Lacock Abbey – a set of images Talbot allegedly sent to his friend Charles Babbage, the inventor of the differential engine (the irst computer). this story, hinting at the parallel invention of photography and computing as two ways of capturing the pattern in different media, has been narrated by Geoffery Batchen in his article ‘Electricity Made Visible’. For Batchen, ‘photography is a binary (and therefore numerical) system of representation involving the transmutation of luminous information into on/off tonal patterns made visible by light-sensitive chemistry’.18 It is therefore a ledgling form of informational culture, one that since its inception records the presence and absence of data. the images that constitute We Have Always Been Digital have also been infused with some splinters of the theory of computational universe developed by the likes of edward fredkin, which assumes that all matter is computational, i.e. that it consists in the differentiation between present and absent bits of information.19 However, any straightforward applications of this theory as allegedly telling us ‘what the world is like’ are bound to be deeply problematic. The singular materiality of each photographic medium – be it camera, paper, computer screen or human body, from which the image is emitted and on which it is projected – destabilizes the universalizing seamlessness of Fredkin’s propositions. It is precisely in the tension between the conceptual and technical ‘liquidity’ of the photographic object as such, and the (always temporary) solidity of its medium, that interesting creative possibilities are arguably opened up. the point of such creative experimentation with the photographic medium lies not so much in nostalgically harking back to older, more ‘solid’ media – be it analogue ilm or mechanical large-format cameras – although sometimes these particular choices may present themselves to us as aesthetically better and more itting. What is much more important, however, is not foreclosing the performative invention of photography, or any other medium – an invention which is always potentially ongoing, even if not always enacted – with ready-made decisions about its effects and affects, aesthetic, ethical or political ones.

18 Geoffrey Batchen, ‘Electricity Made Visible’, in Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Thomas Keenan (eds), New Media, Old Media (New York and London, 2006), p. 28. 19 For an interesting reading of Fredkin’s theories in the context of arts and humanities research see n. Katherine Hayles, My Mother Was a Computer (Chicago, 2005).

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figure 1.12 Media Spaces 06, 2008 Source: Photo – Joanna Zylinska.

Ethical openings even though human agency does not withdraw altogether from these processes of creative and critical invention, it is distributed throughout a system of forces, institutions, bodies and nodal points. this acknowledgement of agential distribution – a paradox that requires a temporarily stabilized self which is to undertake this realization – allows for an enactment of a more hospitable and more enmeshed relationship with technology and the media. this brings us to an interesting point made by stelarc, who, when commenting on his performances, mentioned adopting ‘the posture of indifference’ in relation to them. This involves abandoning any desire entirely to control the event and allowing it just to unfold after starting it off. Stelarc’s pronouncement conveys a tension between the modernist notion of artist as lone creator and instigator of ideas on the one hand, and the cybernetics-informed understanding of artist as a node in the network of exchange. naturally, the decision about adopting this posture of indifference, about not having any expectations, is made by him, from a temporarily stabilized point of human agency. still, we should perhaps read it as not just a rational decision, but also as bodily passivity, as letting oneself be-together-with-difference, withtechnology. To cite Judith Butler again, ‘At stake here is the relation between the limits of ontology and epistemology, the link between the limits of what I might become and the limits of what I might risk knowing’.20 It is via points of temporary stabilization between human, corporeal and technical agency that partial decisions are being made, connections between bodies are being established, aesthetic 20

Butler, ‘What is Critique?’.

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and political transformation is being achieved, and power is taking effect over different parts of ‘the network’ in a differential manner. There is therefore no guarantee that temporary outcomes of any such ongoing performative processes will be critical and transformative rather than just repetitive and conformist. But it is this possibility of emergence of such transformations and inventions, of making a difference that matters, that can turn this media project from the theatre of mere form to an ethico-political performance.21

21 this last paragraph develops some sentences and ideas from Joanna zylinska, Bioethics in the Age of New Media (Cambridge, MA, 2009).

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Part 1 environments

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chapter 2

environments, Interactions and Beings: the ecology of Performativity and technics chris salter

one of the fundamental tensions running through the history of Western thought is the cut between the human and technical worlds. as philosopher Bernard stiegler reminds us, post-Homeric philosophy represses technics by already drawing up the battle lines between episteme, which encompassed true knowledge through disciplines such as rhetoric, and techne, connoting art and craft – the practices of making.1 In the Republic of Plato, technical know-how helps construct the delusion machine of the cave: the apparatus of image production that seduces the ignorant prisoners away from the eidos of the forms. While Plato does not deny outright the importance of techne, he demotes it to the realm of practical skills, occupying the lower levels of the knowledge hierarchy along with sensory-based experience in contrast to higher knowledge: that of virtue and the good.2 the sophists instrumentalize the art of rhetoric, the word or the tool of order (logos) to maintain control and exert power. Yet, according to Stiegler, it is Plato’s successor Aristotle that truly condemns technical ‘beings’. In describing the four causes that determine how things exist in nature in the Physics, aristotle claims that with ‘artiicial products … none of them has in itself the source of its own production’ versus a ‘natural’ being that harbours ‘within itself a principle of motion and of stationariness (in respect of place, or of growth and decrease, or by way of alteration)’.3 technical beings are already seen to lack the possibility of autonomy or internal causes of movement, conined to an inanimate form and isolated from both the human that produces them and the world they ind themselves in. Centuries later, Heidegger, arguably Western thought’s deinitive philosopher of being, also casts a suspicious eye onto the technical. In contemporary life, technology becomes separated from techne and is also instrumentalized. torn from its origins in poiesis, the art of revealing or making the world present, technology ends up as a ‘frenzy of ordering … and so radically endangers the

1 Bernard stiegler, Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus, trans. r. Beardworth and G. Collins (Stanford, 1998), pp. 2–3. 2 Plato, The Republic, Book V, trans. G.M.A. Grube (Indianapolis, 1974), pp. 135–40. 3 stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, pp. 1–2.

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relation to the essence of the truth’.4 Modern technology ‘enframes’ the world, rationalizing the natural order and rupturing the potential of existence to come full force to us through its transformation of nature into ‘inventories’ and ‘stocks’ to be used up by humans. In the guise of machines, structures and devices, modern technics overcomes human judgement through calculation and rationalization. Even if Heidegger’s relationship to technical beings is ambiguous, neither celebrating nor outright condemning them, the philosopher’s separation of cultural from technological life ultimately reinforces what Gilbert simondon, the french philosopher of technology described in 1958 as ‘a system of defence designed to safeguard man from technics’.5 Lest we fault only Western philosophy, artistic practice and making, techne itself, ironically, also reveal the tension between the human and the technological. as a case in point we need look no further than the arena of artistic performance practice, whether theatre, dance or music. from the deus ex machina to war machines, the early history of the Western stage itself is characterized by the performances of both human and mechanical systems. But the stage ultimately returns back to humans as the source of knowledge and power, celebrating heroism and admonishing hubris while banishing mechanae to an inert, background role. With a handful of exceptions, the machine age that erupted at the dawn of the twentieth century and has carried forth with its electronic (analogue) and computational (digital) equivalents into the twenty-irst is fundamentally not so different from that initial Hellenic cut between human knowledge and the artiicial object embodying human skill. When historians and theorists of the stage have evoked the more ambiguous word ‘performance’ to describe material processes of conjuring forth an artiicial world that has not yet emerged, they most likely retreat to human facticity and abandon the potentiality of expression or enaction of things and matter itself. It is no surprise that the development of the ield of performance studies arose in the Dämmerung of the late 1960s, as the anthropological attention to ritual in avant-garde performance works was at its height. In his helm as editor of The Drama Review, richard schechner turned towards anthropology and sociology as critical methods, replacing the technological formalism and artiice of avantgarde experimentalism that had been the purvey of the journal’s former editor, michael Kirby.6 adventuresome theatre artists or scenographers such as Josef 4 Martin Heidegger, ‘The Question Concerning Technology’, in David Farrell Krell (ed.), Heidegger: Basic Writings (New York, 1977), p. 314. 5 Gilbert simondon, Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques (Paris, 1989), pp. 9–10. 6 Kirby was editor of TDR (then The Tulane Drama Review) from 1971 to 1985. Schechner, one of the journal’s founding editors, took over the position from Kirby and turned the emphasis of the journal towards ‘non-art performance fronts: the intercultural and the theoretical’. See Brooks Mc Namara, The Drama Review: Thirty Years (New York, 1986), p. 19.

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svoboda and richard foreman dared to venture the radical idea that the ontology of theatrical performance was the simple connection between a temporal-spatial event and a set of spectators. Svoboda claiming that ‘scenography can mean a stage illed with vapor and a beam of light cutting a path through it’ certainly raised the hackles of those who could only imagine the stage as a site reserved for human performances.7 While other contemporary disciplines like HCI (Human–Computer Interaction), new media, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, technocultural studies, science studies and physics, to name a few, juggle daily with the increasing panoply of effects caused by the merging of mechanical, computational, biological and ecological forces, performance discourse is still debating the impact of mediation as exempliied chiely through the electronic-digitally constructed image.8 What we have continually forgotten in these analyses of performance and technology, however, are some fundamental questions of performance at a material level: how material forces bring something that was not previously there into the world at a deined moment in time and space. As speech act theory, in its Austinian roots and later in Judith Butler’s writings on gender performativity reminds us, even language has a material potential concretely to reshape the world. But increasingly artists and designers are searching for and in fact constructing material enunciations, performances in what Felix Guattari termed ‘materials of signifying expression’ that go beyond speech acts and indeed ‘media’ in the sense of the artiicially produced analogue-digital image.9 artistic interventions that reveal hidden patterns in data, birth half-living organisms that are neither natural nor cultural, build machines that exhibit mysterious tendencies or amplify the behaviour of phenomena under our perceptual radar, are exploring the processual structures and material actions of technical presences and their milieus in an effort to make machine dynamics tangible and felt to spectators, audiences and participants. this may be why more artists and designers are turning towards performance but not necessarily the stage in their efforts to understand, analyse and manipulate the biological, ecological, mechanological and perceptual environments that we are partially responsible for. Laboratories, the interior of bodies, the skins of buildings and the air we breathe have all become the new contexts for performances where transmutating material processes are in full operation. Neither anti-human nor post-human, these performances immanently bring together human beings and technical beings. In other words, if we are interested in comprehending performance today in a world in which technical processes not only constitute our environments but, as Guattari foresaw, also produce new forms of hybrid human and machine subjectivities, we might shift our analysis of performance. Moving from an anthropocentric one, anchored almost exclusively in anthropological, sociological, 7 Jarka Burian, The Scenography of Josef Svoboda (Middletown, CT, 1971), p. 15. 8 see Philip auslander, Liveness (New York, 1999), pp. 10–60. 9 felix Guattari, Chaosmosis, trans. P. Bains and J. Pefanis (Indianapolis, 1995), p. 36.

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cultural or linguistic frameworks, we now as well have to learn to wrestle with the equally messy domain of non-human enunciations. That techno-scientiic-cultural processes now iniltrate almost every corner of life, from quotidian activities such as shopping, travelling, studying and working to the higher-stakes events of birth, sickness and death, is not necessarily a new phenomenon. technologies have always been part of and not separate from the human world. Yet, the rise of unmoored, distributed and wireless computational systems like sensors, networked objects and mobile devices have nevertheless yielded a new set of consequences: the ambient spreading of machine perception directly across the environments we inhabit. Indeed, it seems now that we move beyond bounded technical objects as discrete, separate forms and into environments replete with machine processes that are increasingly invisible to naked human perception and yet exert all too tangible effects on our existence. over the past 10 years, my own artistic and design work and research has been preoccupied with such interactive processes taking place within technological environments, in the phenomenological experiments conducted under the auspices of sponge from 1997 to 2003 and in solo works. Hence, my goal in this chapter is to scratch the surface of what is a much larger artistic and conceptual project: the understanding and analysis of what Stiegler calls a ‘generalized performativity’ that links artistic processes of performance with techno-scientiic-philosophical ones.10 First, I want very briely to sketch some ideas towards this generalized performativity that we see taking shape in the environments that house technical beings, and processes which defy neat natural-cultural distinctions; what Bruno Latour called ‘monsters’.11 In other words, rather than continue down the line of post-human inquiry and examine how technology either extends, ampliies, prostheticizes or controls the human, I would like to explore the generalized performativity of different material enunciations, both human and non. I base this analysis on two theories, which focus on the processes by which a technical or living organism both forms as well as interacts with its environment: 1) Gilbert Simondon’s description of the associated milieu, the way in which the environment of a technical being participates in its genesis or becoming; and 2) francisco Varela’s concepts of structural coupling and enaction: the manner by which a living being comes to constitute, bring forth and make itself aware of the world that it is embedded into based on its history of interactions with that world. my other goal is to think through this generalized performativity of technics in material rather than abstract conceptual form by discussing the performance project Schwelle (German for threshold), a three-part work developed between 2004 and 2008 in europe and north america, in which the expressions of the human performer and technical milieu blur, with the environment at times taking 10 stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, p. 80. 11 Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been Modern, trans. C. Porter (Cambridge, MA, 1993), p. 12.

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on the role of performer itself. In using the example of Schwelle, I interpolate between its artistic performance context and a larger framework of performativity in order to pose several critical questions: How is the technical environment constituted? What are its forms of expression? What is its relationship to human participants? What are its affects and why should they matter?

simondon’s technical being and the associated milieu In order to examine a performativity of the technical environment, I irst turn to the work of the french philosopher of technology Gilbert simondon. Working in the 1950s, simondon set out to develop a general phenomenology of technical beings; the ‘mediators’ between humans and nature.12 arguing that contemporary culture must ‘come to terms with technical entities as part of its body of knowledge and values’, Simondon developed a theory of technical individuation: the process by which, in particular, industrial technical beings/objects temporally evolve to become increasingly more concretized in their potential for dynamic expression independent of their human origins and fabricators.13 encouraging the separation between human and technical, culture purposefully ‘banishes’ the ‘virtuality’ (that is, the unperformed potential) of technical objects and processes by engaging in two contradictory treatments. on the one hand, technical objects are seen as ensembles of materials that are only to be thought of in terms of their utility: how they can be used as tools for humans. on the other hand, by casting an anthropomorphic spin on the technical object, for instance as an automaton or robot, we can then turn quickly to accuse technologies of somehow harbouring threatening powers against us and, consequently, nature itself. according to simondon, the belief that the perfection of a machine lies in automation completely overshadows the more important aspect of technical objects: their ability to have ‘a margin of indetermination’ and be open to the exchange of information with the environment they are embedded within.14 It is this openness to and exchange with its surroundings, what simondon labels its ‘recurrent causality’, which makes the individuation of technical beings possible. Whereas abstract technical objects are those in which each component has a speciic and deined function in the designer’s mind, concrete technical objects are not based on a priori models or representations isolated from the actual physical and technical situation within which the objects will eventually operate. the machine itself expresses its own existence based on the direct material conditions of its environment – an environment partially created by the machine’s manner of operation. 12 Developing a phenomenology of technical objects, Simondon was a student of both Merleau-Ponty and the French philosopher of science Georges Canguilhem. 13 simondon, Du Mode d’Existence des Objets Techniques, p. 9. 14 Ibid., p. 11.

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A critical aspect of Simondon’s theory of the genesis of technical objects is his discussion of the recurrent causality between the object/process and the environment that the technical being produces. In order fully to articulate this, his focus shifts from the object as isolated from its surroundings, as something abstracted from its direct conditions of operation and, instead, develops the concept of the associated milieu. ‘The environment conditions the technical being, which in turn conditions it. one may call this environment, which is both technical and natural, an associated milieu’.15 the associated milieu functions as the site for the technical individuation of the object or process in question to take place. Neither completely natural nor artiicial, it acts to mediate the relationship between the human constructed technical being and the ‘natural’ environment. The environment is thus ‘self-conditioned’ with the technical object or part of its becoming. to clarify this concept, simondon provides a detailed example of the Guimbal turbine, a particular type of hydro-driven turbine powered by tidal seawater. the turbine is connected to a generator that is surrounded by oil under pressure. simondon claims that both oil and water are plurifunctional elements. the faster the tidal water rotates the turbine, the more heat the turbine produces. at the same time, however, the fact that the turbine is immersed in the seawater allows it to be cooled: the seawater ‘evacuates’ heat from the generator. similarly, the oil surrounding the generator lubricates it, insulates the gears and also transfers the heat from the generator into the housing, which is subsequently cooled by the seawater. Thus, the turbine is ‘concretized’ speciically because of the relational causality taking place in real time in the associated milieu: the natural milieu of the seawater combined with the technical milieu of the generator surrounded by the oil. ‘If the Guimbal generator were operated at full power in air it would quickly be ruined by heat, whereas there is no appreciable heat detected in its concentric double bath of oil and water, each of which is energetically stirred, the oil by generator rotation, the water by turbine turbulence’.16 the associated milieu ‘is the technical object’s condition for existence’ while, simultaneously, the technical object produces the unique milieu. The consequences of Simondon’s analysis for an understanding of the potential performativity of technical beings are profound. concrete or individuated technical beings do not exist prior to their emerging out of and, simultaneously, bringing forth of an environment through their functioning. In other words, their essence is not pre-given through a set of abstract plans, models or designs in the head of the engineer or scientist. Instead, technical beings enact or perform a world that has not yet arisen: the associated milieu spatio-temporally constituted by the operations and interactions between object and environment. My conscious use of performativity here does not signify what the technical object does or how eficiently it does it but instead the potential directions and trajectories (what Simondon refers to as ‘virtualities, potentials and moving forces’) by which it 15 16

Ibid., p. 57. Ibid., pp. 54–6.

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can express or enunciate itself by way of its self-constitution or, more precisely, its autonomy. Technical individuation therefore signiies that the technical object or process ‘is the condition of itself as a condition for the existence of the mixed environment that is both geographical (its physical site) and technical’.17 the key to individuation is the ability for humans to see and anticipate the performative virtuality that technical beings can have. Unlike stiegler, simondon does not explicitly mention the notion of performativity of technical beings; nevertheless, he reveals an underlying interest in the dynamics of their concretization. ranging from cathode ray tubes, turbines and telephone systems, the kinds of individuated technical individuals or ensembles (more complex groupings of individuals) that simondon discusses are not living as human beings are (that is, anthropomorphic) but rather as concretized dynamical processes that affect material transformations in the environments they are situated in.

autonomy, interaction and making the world Simondon’s theory of recurrent causality and the associated milieu also bears a striking resemblance to the work of the late chilean biologist francisco Varela. Known for his work on the biological roots of cognition and for the theory of autopoietic systems jointly developed with biologist Humberto Maturana in the 1970s, Varela’s later work with philosopher Evan Thompson and psychologist eleanor rosch proposed what they termed an enacted theory of cognition.18 In a similar discussion of the circularity between being and milieu that marks Simondon’s technical individuation, Varela asks how it is that we can relect on ‘a world that is not made but found and yet, it is also our structure that enables us to relect upon this world’.19 Varela, rosch and thompson are critical of reigning cognitivist models of human experience in disciplines such as psychology, linguistics, computer science and philosophy that describe human cognition as wholly mental representation: the rule-based manipulation of symbols in the brain. according to this model, cognition consists of the process by which we come to recover a priori a pre-given world by the brain’s manipulation of symbolic representations of what that world is. In strong opposition to the representational model of cognition is what Varela, rosch and thompson term enacted cognition. rather than take cognitive processes 17 Ibid., p. 55. 18 An autopoietic system is deined as an autonomous system that is self-creating, self-organizing and self-preserving. The term is commonly applied to biological organisms, and also to human organizations. see francisco Varela and Humberto maturana, The Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of Human Understanding, trans. R. Paolucci (Boston, 1987), pp. 47–52. 19 francisco Varela, evan thompson and eleanor rosch, The Embodied Mind (Cambridge, MA, 1991), p. 3.

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as the ‘representation of a pre-given world by a pre-given mind’, enacted cognition suggests ‘the enactment of a world and a mind on the basis of a history of the variety of actions that a being in the world performs’.20 Enaction signiies that we bring forth a world because we have a physical body with given sensorimotor capabilities and that our action in this world is perceptually guided as a direct result of this structure. moreover, perception is constructed through continual and recurrent interactions between our perception and the world – one not ixed but in continuous change based on the perceiver’s action. the crux of this model of recurrent interactions between the structure and the environment is what Varela and maturana label structural coupling: ‘the history of recurrent interactions between two or more systems that leads to a structural congruence between them’.21 The structure (in this case, the neural-muscularcognitive one) articulates the way in which the perceiver acts and, simultaneously, is continually ‘modulated’ by the environment itself. Modulated here signiies that the environment perturbs the system by inluencing or triggering behaviour, but does not determine the nature of the behaviour itself. Instead, the system’s autonomy, its ability to self-regulate, self-modify and maintain its own coherent and meaningful patterns of activity based on its internal organization built up from its history of coupling with the environment, gives us some understanding of how the system will respond to the environment’s perturbations over time. the kind of autonomous system proposed by Varela is operationally closed. This signiies that its internal organization (structure) is self-modifying, helping to determine the potential domain of interactions, or the coupling between it and the environment, rather than its behaviour being directly prescribed by an external input.22 Unlike a digital computer’s input/output information-processing model in which interaction possibilities are preprogrammed between the system and environment (that is, all interactions are predetermined by the designer), the environment cannot be separated from what organisms are and how they perform: ‘living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual speciication or codetermination’ (emphasis original).23 Varela’s positing of an autonomous system goes far beyond that of simple feedback and, instead, suggests a system of multiple, interlocking loops of cascading interactions between both the closed system itself (which ‘speciies processes that, in their very operation, turn back on themselves to form autonomous networks’) and the environment that such networks are situated in and help bring forth.24 20 Ibid., p. 9. 21 maturana and Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, p. 75. 22 ‘Autonomous systems need to be seen as sources of their own activity, specifying their own domains of interaction, not as transducers or functions for converting input instructions into output products. In other words, the autonomous character of these systems needs to be recognized’. See Evan Thompson, Mind in Life (Cambridge, MA, 2007), p. 46. 23 Varela, et al., The Embodied Mind, p. 198. 24 Ibid., p. 139.

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The basis for understanding the performativity inherent in Varela’s autonomous systems lies in how such a system brings forth a world through perceptually guided action. Just as technical beings create a milieu which cannot exist before the machine’s operation, the actions and performances of living systems intend situations ‘that have yet to become actual’.25 the primacy of knowing consists not in representations of how the environment is, but of perceptually guided actions that are intended or directed to something missing. Knowing is action in and of the world and not a priori representations in a mind cut off from its body and environment. Following from our all too brief analysis of Simondon’s technical individuation and Varela’s theory of structural coupling, it is now possible to see the critical role that the environment plays in both systems’ performative ontologies. Performativity in this context involves the real-time, dynamic enactments and exchanges that take place between an entity and its milieu; enactments that are concrete and materially transformative to both system and environment. Indeed, what is essential for our understanding here is the fundamental role that ecological dynamics play between both inorganic (Simondon) and organic (Varela) beings and their quasi-technicalnatural environments. Performances do things to the world, conjuring forth environments that emerge simultaneously with the individuation of the technical or living being. How then is this ecological phenomenon, this performative bringing forth of an in/organic object/being’s environment manifested in Stiegler’s observation that a ‘generalized performativity’ can be seen within ‘the informational dimension of present-day technics, for example, in the apparatuses of live transmission and of data processing in real time’?26 to address this question adequately, I now turn towards concrete examples in my own artistic research that have attempted to address this generalized performativity taking place in environments criss-crossed by technical ensembles and human forms of expression in co-production with each other.

sponges and thresholds In the work developed with the art research organization sponge, the collective I co-founded in San Francisco in 1997 with artist and director Laura Farabough and mathematician sha Xin Wei, we were particularly interested in what was designated as ‘designing situations and events where unpredicted spatial and social conventions emerge out of locally situated actions’.27 As an ‘entity realizing 25 Ibid., p. 205. 26 stiegler, Technics and Time, 1, p. 80. 27 Christopher Salter and Xin Wei Sha, ‘Sponge: A Case Study in Practice-based Collaborative Art Research’, in Creativity and Cognition – Proceedings of the 5th Conference on Creativity and Cognition (London, 2005), p. 92.

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hybrid media spaces and performances utilizing investigative art, speculative design, techno-scientiic research and critical public discourse’ Sponge’s artistic and philosophical modus operandi encompassed the creation of technical-social environments as performative manifestations of philosophical questions. While myself and farabough had come from backgrounds in artistic performance with a strong emphasis on the use of technologies such as video and computer-generated sound, sponge sought to go further than the stage through a series of widely recognized, public-driven, sensor-activated responsive environments (TGarden and Sauna) presented in international media art venues such as ars electronica, SIGGRAPH and V2-Rotterdam; projects exploring the ‘ongoing process where bodies and subjects emerge through play and performing within the material ield of the world itself’.28 for sponge, performance was not to be designated by the division between spectator and performer. After Sponge’s dissolution in 2003, I was interested in carrying forth the concept of performance criss-crossing human and non-human forms of expression through a series of collaborative and solo projects, one of which (Schwelle) partially returned to the conventions of stage-based performance while others maintained interest in the framework of responsive environments in public space with no clear demarcation between performer and spectator. I was also interested in advancing through praxis around one of Sponge’s central research questions: how to design an artiicial, technically saturated environment that would be perceived by its human inhabitants to perform or articulate its ‘agency’ or its ‘autonomy’ equally alongside them. This entailed designing technologies (hardware such as sensors, transceivers and software processes) and their potential interactions at the low level that could then actually percolate upwards to the highest experiential level for the general participants who would visit the environment.29 In other words, could a system be designed that could temporally and spatially constitute an environment of performing media simultaneously with, through and alongside the human actions that would interact with it and be convincing in its performative affect to a spectator or participant? Developed between 2004 and 2007, Schwelle is an evening-length theatrical event exploring the varying threshold states of consciousness that confront human beings in everyday life experience, such as the onset of sleep or the moments before physical death. Premiered in 2007 in Berlin at tesla and transmediale and then with further performances in montréal and Paris in 2008, Schwelle attempts to mix traditional performance forms such as dance and theatre with research into interactive and responsive installation contexts arising from the media arts. 28 Ibid., p. 94. 29 By low and high level, I am referring to computer science terminology for how ‘close’ software is to the actual machine components itself (e.g., memory slots, etc.). Socalled ‘machine code’ is closest to the actual hardware of the machine and dificult for humans to read while ‘source code’ is written in a higher-level language closer to human languages.

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figure 2.1 Schwelle, Part 1, tesla-transmediale, Berlin, 2007

Source: Photo – Thomas Spier.

the performance consists of three parts that take place within three different media environments. Part 1 is a large-scale, multi-screen projected ilm shot in High Deinition video with multiple channels of audio that invokes, through Rothko-like visual abstractions and dense clouds of sound, the moments before the dissolution of the human body and consciousness (see Figure 2.1). Part 2 of the project is a theatrical performance between master improviser and former Ballett Frankfurt dancer Michael Schumacher and a ‘sensate’ room (see Figure 2.2). During the ifty-minute work, the spectators experience the performer undergoing a traumatic bodily transformation in the period between death and rebirth inside a sparse, Samuel Beckett-like environment consisting of a single set piece: a large light table positioned at one end of a long, narrow stage in which the spectators sit on both sides, tennis court style.30 At irst, the spectators witness an almost immobile Schumacher sitting at the table and condemned to execute a series of futile, minute tasks such as tearing small bits of paper or walking in an endless series of straight lines from one side of the stage to the other (see Figure 2.3). Sudden physical spasms and vocal outbursts interrupt these periods of sometimes excruciating stasis, briely possessing the performer’s body as he is continually forced to return almost ad nauseam to his fruitless work. the sensateness of the environment is expressed through changing patterns of light and sound that, at times, seem directly to follow the performer’s gestures and actions, establishing a clear cause and effect relationship, and at other times appear to be totally unrelated to his presence. over the course of the 30 In referring to Beckett, I want to suggest the barren and extremely minimal atmospheres of his last short works, such as What Where, Ohio Impromptu and Quad.

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performance, the room moves through a series of media states conveying feelings of nervousness, restlessness, meditation and anger that are manifested through the lighting and sound dynamics. for example, the space shifts from extreme brightness to complete darkness for no apparent reason or the sonic environment builds up in density only to suddenly disappear again.

figure 2.2 Schwelle, Part 2, michael schumacher, Place des arts, montréal, 2007

Source: Photo – Chris Salter.

these behaviours performed by the environment are initiated through the exerted force of Schumacher’s movement as well as continually shifting environmental data (changes of lighting intensity), both of which are measured by wireless sensors located on the dancer’s arms and chest as well as hidden in lighting armatures on stage. aiming to create the dramatic impression of a living, breathing room for the spectators, the environment that schumacher inhabits, in essence, emerges in real time and is determined continuously over different time scales depending on the current levels of overall sensor input (energy), past input and the already programmed internal dynamics of the software system.31 these internal machine processes are thus made visually and aurally perceptible through luctuating patterns based on the continuously changing sensor data emerging from the environment. 31 See C.L. Salter, M.A.J. Baalman, D. Moody-Grigsby, ‘Between Mapping, Soniication and Composition: Responsive Audio Environments in Live Performance’, in Proceedings of the International Computer Music Conference (ICMC) (2 vols, San Francisco, 2007), vol. 2, pp. 413–20.

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figure 2.3 Schwelle, Part 2, michael schumacher, tesla-transmediale, Berlin, 2007

Source: Photo – Thomas Spier.

While Part 2 of Schwelle deploys state-of-the-art wireless sensing technologies and computational implementations of dynamical systems in order to generate the environment in real time before the spectators, the production’s use of theatrical conventions, including the conscious separation of spectator space and ‘performers’ (human and not), makes it more challenging to directly experience the emergence of a perceptually guided world due to the vicarious medium inherent in a live performer.32 In other words, the spectator immediately identiies with the human performer’s perception and experience, with the role of the environment’s expression receding into the background. To get past this hurdle, the computational parameters of the dynamics engine are tuneable such that, at times, the environment’s performance, which is continually changing in varying degrees of aural and visual intensity, appears to eclipse the body of schumacher himself. In attempting to create a milieu that can become a performative substrate on a par with a virtuoso human performer, one of the more dificult perceptual issues in Part 2 of Schwelle is how such interactional machine dynamics can be perceived and felt by spectators. In the typical understanding of so-called ‘interactive performance’, spectators search for direct, one-to-one feedback between the human performer’s actions and the immediate response of the environment to those actions: for example, a gesture generating the same response in light or 32 ‘A dynamic systems model takes the form of a set of evolution equations that describe how the state of the system changes over time’. See Thompson, Mind in Life, p. 11.

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sound each time it is performed. this longing for direct input/output coupling of human actions and machine-initiated, environmental response is certainly culturally conditioned through forms like video games, the branching models of primitive interactive media like CD-ROMs or dialogic, mimetic theories of human–computer interaction. Yet attempting to design a subtle and hence more supple model of interaction within the boundary of a theatrical vocabulary is no easy task. on a theatrical stage, the invisible processes inherent in contemporary technics such as the minute temporal behaviours of ambient luctuations of environmental data (that is, light or humidity) captured by micro electro mechanical system (MEMS) sensors or the computer’s analysis of the accumulated energy of a human performer’s gestures over a longer time frame still remain, for the most part, abstract and distant from our direct experience. If, as Varela suggested, bringing forth a world involves a process of temporal constitution or awareness brought on by complex perturbations between system and environment, the act of bringing such interactive processes onto the stage somehow would appear to demand a reduction of dynamical complexity (not to mention media density) to render the interlocking loops of interactions simple and legible to a spectator.

figure 2.4 Schwelle, Part 3, 3-D rendering

Based on these issues, Part 3 of Schwelle thus bypasses the conventions of traditional performance practice in order to initiate a far more intriguing set of relations within a responsive environment jointly occupied by humans and technics. Staged in a prototype performance at Podewil in Berlin during 2004, Part 3 is simple

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in its execution and yet, as gathered through a series of irst-person interviews with participants, striking in its perceptual affect. the environment extends the uninished work that James Turrell and Robert Irwin began for LACMA’s Art and Technology program in the mid-1960s, where both artists researched questions of audio-visual perception pertaining to sensory deprivation environments. In the Berlin exhibition, a group of participants entered into a small, closed off, pitch-black dark room housing a series of ive, 3 by 18-foot enclosed tunnels containing a series of taut, fabric muslin screens (see Figure 2.4). The rear screen was solid while the others featured progressively larger rectangular openings. Positioned above the rear of the tunnels were cylindrical relectors, each outitted with high-powered, blue-coloured LEDs. The cylinders were adjusted so that the back screens could be indirectly lit from the LeDs, thus reducing the amount of direct light onto the screens. Within the larger room a pair of co2 sensors measured the luctuations of carbon dioxide from the aggregate breath of the ive participants which then steered minute, almost unperceivable changes in the brightness of the LeDs and the amplitude of audio above and below the threshold of human hearing perception in the environment. the experience for the participants lasted a duration of twenty minutes. Brought into the tunnel-like spaces individually and shown their places on the loor by an attendant, the visitors were told nothing about the technical system in the room – only to keep mindful of their breathing. At irst, after all of the participants had entered, the room remained in total darkness for a period of ive minutes while gradually a clock in the software increased the LeD brightness level from 0 to 20 per cent over the course of eight minutes. simultaneously, the system then polled the rate of change of co2 in the room every minute. small, relative changes of co2 during the one-minute intervals yielded relatively static effects, with the speed of change of lighting and sound intensity relatively minimal and thus dificult to perceive. Large changes of co2, however, generated more pronounced results, including raising and lowering the amplitude of the infrasonic audio continuously just slightly above and below the threshold of hearing and rapidly changing the speed of brightness intensity of the LeDs. such brightness changes generated oscillations or pulsing of the light, thus effectively making the tunnel architecture and screens rapidly appear and disappear for the participants. over the course of the twenty minutes, these barely perceivable lit surfaces appeared slowly to materialize and then as suddenly, depending on the overall environment perturbations, vanish. As gathered in the post-performance interviews, for the participants, the changing intensity of the light’s colour temperature allowed the surfaces to seem simultaneously lat and deep, appearing inert but also in motion. Made apparent through the imperceptible changes of light and sound, the very solidity of the spatial environment ‘out there’ which appeared for many to expand and contract, was placed into doubt. Indeed, despite the fact that there was little direct correspondence between the changing rate of co2 in the room and the resulting effects of the media, participants still projected their perception into the changing

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space before them, imaging the dynamic coupling between the environment’s visual and aural luctuations and their own breathing patterns.

Conclusion With Schwelle 3, the central question that we began with compellingly re-emerges, namely, how is it that an environment co-determined through the nuanced interplay between humans and technical beings can begin to perform and produce new forms of mixed subjectivity: processes of existence, movement, change and actualization in the moment of their constitution? In fact, as Guattari wrote in 1992: [C]learly the contents of subjectivity have become increasingly dependent on a multitude of machinic systems. no area of opinion, thought, images, affects or spectacle has eluded the invasive grip of “computer assisted” operations, such as databases and telematics … [but] people have little reason to turn away from machines; which are nothing other than hyperdeveloped and hyperconcentrated forms of certain aspects of human subjectivity.33

We now return full circle to Varela, Rosch and Thompson’s argument that the world is not something that we ‘recover’ in perceptual representations made possible through affordances or pre-given properties of an environment outside us, but rather that the history of interactions between organic (or inorganic) life and its environment brings forth a world that was not previously in existence.34 Given the role that the environment plays in the self-constitution of technics and humans, it only makes sense that future research into the arena of performance and technology must begin to delve into these thorny domains of mixed subjectivity if we are to understand the effects that machinic ‘life’ will have on our own.

33 Felix Guattari, ‘Regimes, Pathways and Subjects’, trans. B. Massumi, in Jonathan Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations: Zone 6 (Cambridge, MA, 1992), p. 18. 34 The word ‘affordance’ was coined by psychologist J.J. Gibson to describe ‘the opportunities for interaction that things in the environment possess relative to the sensorimotor capabilities of the animal’. According to Gibson, there are invariances in the topology of ambient light in an environment that directly specify the way a perceiver can ‘pick up’ or ‘recover’ the affordances. See James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (Boston, 1987).

chapter 3

Blurring the Boundaries: Performance, technology and the Artiicial Sublime – An Interview with ruth Gibson and Bruno martelli, igloo Janis Jefferies

The following interview took place in igloo’s studio in May and July 2008 and via emails across continents. It offers a unique insight into their collaborative and challenging practice that engages us, as viewers, in playful exuberance. * * * Janis Jefferies: the computer both as tool and medium has a profound impact on our understanding and perception of the world. computing modelling, simulation and performance have opened up new and immense vistas for practitioners. What has been the impact on your work and approach to creating virtual environments? igloo: We began working together using the computer as a tool to model physical sets. Our work is primarily interactive, even the non-linear forms tend to have residual interactivity – either random-play coding in DVD works or for stage work having performers drive graphics or manipulate imagery. nowadays working with 3D, game engines and mocap has meant we’ve been able to allow the audience to walk into our worlds and it’s meant that we are able to create these novel performance experiences.1 of course using the computer has meant that everything 1 mocap – motion capture, motion tracking or mocap are terms used to describe the process of recording movement and translating the movement onto a digital model. It is used in military, entertainment, sports and medical applications. In ilmmaking it refers to recording actions of human actors, and using that information to animate digital character models in 3D animation. Sometimes when it includes face and ingers and captures subtle expressions and gestures, it is referred to as virtual theatre, performance capture or performance animation (the latter is a term preferred by Brad deGraf and Emre Yilmaz, who see motion capture as digital puppetry). traditional animators tend to refer to motion capture as the devil’s rotoscope. The roots of motion capture can be seen in the motion studies of eadweard muybridge and etienne Jules marey.

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takes longer to make and goes through many iterations as, for example, the game engines get updated. another impact of using 3D has been that we have learned so much more about our individual practices. more about physics, ways of choreographing in virtual space, assembling movement material, behaviours. now we are making physical objects from forms taken from our virtual worlds. Doing a lot of modelling has greatly increased our appreciation of sculpture and architecture as we are thinking about modelling real space and physicalizing 3D space. Now we’re experimenting at putting the real and virtual side by side. JJ: As your practice has also engaged in nature and artiice and its potential reproducibility, I wonder whether or not you have developed your practical and intellectual concerns to engage in these questions? i: the changing narratives of nature inspire our thematic choices and though we are not painters, geologists or botanists our practice parallels the pathways opened up by Rousseau, Ruskin, and Morris & Glover. We are working with twenty-irst-century tools to explore new ways of presenting, recording and experiencing our observations of the familiar and remote. Our recent ilm works and navigable worlds have questioned perceptions of time, space and natural phenomena. We’re investigating the role of the ‘real’ in virtual environments but also examining the reproductions of nature in the history of art, particularly paintings that deal with landscape work. We’re exploring this through a variety of artistic methods so we may develop our inquiry into computer graphic visualization and the moving image. Our objective is to gain a greater understanding of our surroundings and question our place within it. We’re exploiting virtual reality to explore the relationship between the natural and the artiicial, observing ways in which people relate to natural landscape in both wilderness and urban environments. for example, in Summerbranch the nPc characters were inspired by the famous 1960s fashion model Veruschka’s (Vera Lehndorff) woodland body painting.2 She is well known for camoulaging herself to blend with a series of varying environments.3 The inal artwork is a still image, a photograph. 2 NPC – The term non-player character is used in console and computer role-playing games to describe entities not under the direct control of players. nearly always the connotation is that an nPc is allied with, or at least neutral toward, the player, rather than being an enemy. In video games, NPC is sometimes expanded as ‘non playable character’ or ‘non player class’. Non-player characters might be allies, bystanders or competitors to the PCs (player characters). NPC behaviour in computer games is usually scripted and automatic, triggered by certain actions or dialogue with the player character(s)/avatar(s). In multi- player games, a player that acts as the gamemaster can possess both player and non-player characters, controlling their actions in order to further the storyline. Non Player characters in role playing games are controlled by the gamemaster, they populate the ictional world of the game and ill any role not occupied by the PC. 3 Vera Lehndorff is best known as Veruschka, one of the most celebrated supermodels of the 1960s, frequent Vogue cover girl and the long-legged body photographed by David

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We captured movement on uneven terrain and amongst the foliage with a wireless mocap system, which allowed for a huge mocap area. We could do takes where the performer could travel a long distance. coupled with this increased range, looking up through the canopy of the forest, dodging branches and so on, meant that the data is authentic – no pretending, fakeness or acting – as the movement quality was directly altered by the surroundings. so within the framework of perfect 3D geometry the presence of the igure dancing is a trace of the real, the human. JJ: Do you think that, following Gaston Bachelard we, as users, need to expand our creative psyche’s ‘function of unreality’ (1958)? Bachelard makes the point that ‘if we cannot imagine we cannot foresee’.4 I am wondering what you think about this idea. i: In our current practice we’re examining the postmodern notion of simulacra. A concept based on the idea that nothing is real, the world is a series of interlocking illusions, swimming in a sea of media-driven images and signs, as a mass of information which is both bewildering and ultimately uninterpretable. our desire is to play in the spaces between the ‘real’ and the ‘imaginary’ to provide a counterpoint to the simulated landscapes via the human form. JJ: Do you think that these observations apply to your practice and the complex worlds it attempts to conjure? ruth Gibson: I have always longed for the ability to metamorphose as a performer and it’s a potent drive. For example, in the early days of our work the idea of losing the self, becoming the landscape and being invisible was key in what we did next. In fact, costume became a major part of the work to examine this. In performance pieces and videos I used wigs, hoods, masks and gloves and at one time a beautifully made Pantomime Horse (puppetsprite). I experimented with expressions of movement and powers of gesture and how these could be augmented by costume. By hiding could something ‘other’ be exposed? Could this reveal new meanings? I was using disguise to conceal identity or to transform it like Veruschka as Susan Sontag describes some of her work ‘the body – which is all that is left of the self – becomes a mask: a screen; a barbaric pattern.’5

Hemmings in Michelangelo Antonioni’s ilm Blow-Up (1966). Discovered in Germany as an art student, Lehndorff stopped modelling at the end of the 1960s to pursue the art career she had interrupted. for the next decade she worked with painter and sculptor Holger Trülzsch to create highly stylized, body-based and staged photographic work. Her concerns centred around a single-minded exploration of visibility and disappearance. 4 Bachelard, Gaston, The Poetics of Space (Boston, 1969), p. viii. 5 Susan Sontag, ‘Fragments of an Aesthetic Melancholy’, in Veruschka – Transigurations (Trulzch, 1986), p. 9.

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figure 3.1 Viking Shoppers, Gibson/martelli (igloo) Performance/computer installation with sound (1999–2001)

Source: © igloo (1999–2001), with permission www.igloo.org.uk.

In later stageworks we used cameras and real-time software. Black and white costumes were made for the dancers to enhance their silhouettes and make the graphics they were driving more streamlined, more or less visible depending on the desired effect (Viking Shoppers) (see Figure 3.1). Sometimes we made costumes with relective markers to create illusory effects disguising or locating a dancer in space (Winterspace) (see Figure 3.2). I have always been interested in the idea of disappearing as a performer. these experiments were early investigations into pattern recognition and camoulage. Joan Simon said of Joan Jonas: ‘Jonas almost magically erases her “self”. the performer sees herself as a medium: information passes through’.6 I think in Viking Shoppers the ‘scratch-dance’ duets had this conduit effect.

figure 3.2 Winterspace, Gibson/martelli (igloo) Performance/computer installation with sound (2001–2005)

Source: © igloo (2001–2005), with permission www.igloo.org.uk.

6 See Joan Jonas, ‘Closing Statement’, in Joan Simon, ‘Scripts and Descriptions’, Art in America (July 1995): 139.

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I’m interested in the inner force of which Woodman writes ‘I show you what you don’t see – the body’s inner force’.7 I look for certain qualities of embodiment in our performers, alignment of the bones, instinct, intent and a certain spirit and an abandonment of the self-conscious. It’s the hesitant, sharp relexes and unpredictability of their movement I enjoy, primal like that of a child, no habits, pure action and response to stimuli, like other performers and environment. another constant was to see if these qualities and a sense of gravity could be injected to 3D animations. Mocap was an obvious next step to look at this with graphics becoming the costumes. as a performer I am physically embodied, ready to receive and act on any given stimulus at any given time, it’s a primal quality close to that of an animal. It’s what I look for in a performer, a ‘readiness’. Using mocap to record movement was liberating as you didn’t have to be skinny or beautiful and you could become genderless. A person’s mocap data and movement proile is unique to them. It is unforgiving in that it emphasizes faults, stumbles and so on; you can identify injuries from the data and see the subject breathing. It is this movement which when captured provides the raw material to be reworked in the computer and eventually manipulated or viewed by a player. These source iles need to harbour expression as the varying steps of the process such as cleaning the data, constructing the skeleton, mapping the model onto the bones tends to smooth out any nuances or interesting glitches. Unfortunately, this process of in-betweening and blending in the production pipeline is often where surprising captures are overlooked because they appear as mistakes. Performers in 3D worlds often look as though they are back in the studio. the virtuosic can appear bland when rendered in the computer, perfection appears synthetic. to have 32 fouettes you only need to record one and then repeat it over and over. Technical ability could just as well be made by synthesizing the motion dynamically with genetic algorithms, neural networks and optima controllers. Companies like Natural Motion do just that and can deal with problems such as crawling, swimming and ighting for next-generation games programming. I’m choreographing cycling animations of movement (pre-recorded loops, to be manipulated and experienced in different combinations in real time). I am trying to achieve the impossible, a sense of live-ness with these constraints, making work which lets the audience in a little and relects the audience, a human touch. Purely virtual movement is something I may try in the future but, for now, no live performance can be the same twice and the audiences are a part of this. I think this is why performance and live-ness are so important.

7 Peter Davison, ‘Girl, Seeming to Disappear (photographer Francesca Woodman)’, Atlantic Monthly, 285/5 (2000): 108. See also, John Tozer ‘Francesca Woodman: Standing in for Herself’, Creative Camera, 359 (1999): 40-041. Tozer discusses Woodman’s work at the Photographers’ Gallery, London, from 6 August 1999. Photographing herself, her images seem to focus on the issues of transmuting and forming an identity. Despite a limited exposure during her short lifetime, her images have inluenced a generation of artists.

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figure 3.3 New Forest, Gibson/martelli (igloo) Wall prints (2007)

Source: © igloo (2001–2005), with permission www.igloo.org.uk.

i: after making Summerbranch and New Forest (see Figure 3.3) we began making new 3D work, which was a little more fantastical. We had been away on two residencies in the outdoors, the forest and the australian outback, and we returned to London and the city was grim, rubbish lying in the streets and so cold and rainy it felt like ‘hell-on-earth’. We immediately set to work on House, the irst instalment of SwanQuake, a series of interactive worlds (see Figure 3.4). House features a tube station, our studio in Bethnal Green and it takes an autographical look at a dancing form, moving through hallucinogenic, freaky, apocalyptic cockney landscapes. the work offers up a riotous evocation of the east end, embracing the uncanny with odd perspectives and unsettling visualizations conjuring illusions to stir the imagination. JJ: Do you think that your approach, developing software and generative forms, gives us, as users, glimpses of a ‘new nature’? How do you think that your approach can challenge the computer games industry or does it? i: A central thread running through our work is placing the igure inside a landscape; whether real performers in an alien, or what may be called a strange, fantastical, creative or ‘realistic’ landscape that we have invented, or 3D characters that live within a constructed virtual world. the imagery and narratives of these works, in our view, continue to create dualities. We think this aims at challenging our perceptions of the real and the illusory. our WarStars ilm installations capture live presence against backdrops of epic scale such as glaciers and deserts; the ilms aim to play with our basic concept of proportion and perspective – physically and spiritually. The landscape appears to have a sci-i feel about it, but importantly our characters act as a link between you and the environment, between this world (the so called ‘real’ one) and the next (or

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our modelling of it). In some ways we cannot distinguish between the ilm work and the virtual environments – the components aren’t connected in a narrative sense, but one scene, one theme; one movement follows another as in a dream. There is a feeling of examining the past, the present and then the past again – or is it the future? We play with this threshold. We don’t think that we are making generative work per se and we also think that the term Artiicial Intelligence (AI) can be misinterpreted. As for the idea of a ‘new nature’ we are not sure either but perhaps this is the different kind of science iction that we were referring to earlier. We have been obsessed by the way trees have been represented in games for years – once as 2D billboards and now there is the CryEngine 2!!8 the computer games industry has to abide by commercial goals and we would never say that people working in the games industry aren’t coming up with brilliant ideas, because they are. However, the overriding trend seems to be for games to be fashioned in quite a realistic way with a narrative structure and a sense of progression. We’d be hypocrites to say that this is bad, as we too, as far as we can, are making virtual worlds to simulate the real. We, on the other hand, do not have to be tied down to any sense of gameplay and of course we don’t have to shift millions of units either.

figure 3.4 SwanQuake: House, Gibson/martelli (igloo) Computer installation with sound (2007)

Source: © igloo (2007), with permission www.igloo.org.uk.

Bruno martelli: I had my epiphanal moment when I was playing Call of Duty some years ago. It’s a World War II shooter and I was around the back of a Norwegian 8 CryEngine2 is a game engine, an extended version of CryEngine, the game behind Far Cry. CryEngine2 is currently used by Crytek’s game Crysis. the engine features many graphical, physical and animation technologies as well as many gameplay enhancements and crytek have developed their own proprietary physics system, called cryphysics.

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U-boat pen. Looking out over the water was amazingly beautiful but I couldn’t enjoy the view as I was getting shot at. I realized that I wanted some other kind of experience with this amazing technology, something that would free me from the goal-oriented stresses associated with ‘regular’ gaming … Funnily enough after working for the past four years on SwanQuake we now realize that we may actually want to make a game!

figure 3.5 SwanQuake: House, Gibson/martelli (igloo) Computer installation with sound (2007)

Source: © igloo (2007), with permission www.igloo.org.uk.

JJ: a number of works are interactive. the writer Lev manovich argues that if interaction is to have any meaning it needs a language. What do you think about this?9 Do you think about developing a language as you devise your pieces? How do you irst conceive of them? i: to express our perspective on the world we work in whichever medium is most appropriate. We’re addressing problems and the connections between interface and design and the best materials to use to express ourselves. our newer works deal with the unknown and unattainable, we’re trying to put the spectator in a position of privilege and discovery. over our collaborative partnership we have been researching the potential for visual languages in interactive environments. We hope this research will help us to develop our language and practice by going beyond the lat-screen format and channel the evolving aesthetics of 3D imaging within our development of game environments and camera technologies.

9 see manovich, Lev, The Language of New Media (Cambridge, MA/London, 2001).

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JJ: In the case of virtual reality works, language elements can be taken from ‘real’ experience. I wonder how far this could apply to what you do and how you want your viewers and users to behave in the worlds you have created? RG: The character in the irst work of SwanQuake: House is a scan of me, we have modelled our studio, and some of the nPc Ruth’s inhabit this space we have created. the movement phrases are my data, an amalgamation of movement from four of our performers. These dancing bodies multiply conjuring new meanings and relationships, theatre but not theatre, evolving not ixed. It’s smarter in our world to slow down. We put constraints in, such as making players walk rather than run for practical reasons – the worlds we create are not ininite or generative. Other than that we hope our audience roam and have encounters; there are no tasks, no goals – the audience is, I guess, rewarded the longer they explore – we don’t expect them to behave in any particular way. People seem to clue in that they are not having a ‘regular’ game-type experience. This is helped because we sometimes project the work big – or present it in an unusual atmospheric setting. JJ: Do you think that you use visual metaphors, actions and emotions from the ‘real’ world to develop virtual functionality? i: Yes, we always draw irst, then collect images and objects, photograph, arrange and assemble things, list words and phrases, dream the sound and movement. Working methods then kick in and databases start. We obey new laws when working in virtual space. We use photography to make texture maps and with these we create the architecture of the virtual space. the texture maps are taken from the real world to be simulated in an identical fashion or used to create totally new objects, models and surfaces. There is always a ‘trace’ of the real in our work, in both image and movement. The Ruth’s on offer in the work are neutral female igures, clearly Ruth but a normalized anonymous form, allowing the organic nature of her motioncaptured movement to express her character and her humanity. the shadow igure deliberately interrogates her setting through mantric movements in space and time. our gaze is drawn to the dance, a dance in world, a dance of enquiry in which she moves in her landscape, both part of the code that builds the gamespace and alien to her machine-generated environment in her expression of human movement, she fascinates in her otherness. the ghost in this machine is the reminder of our organic nature.10 10 emma Westecott on Swan Quake. Emma made these comments during igloo’s synergy residency and conversations during may 2008. emma Westecott is a Games research fellow at synergy, International film school Wales/newport school of art, media and Design, University of Wales, newport.

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JJ: How can an inexperienced user engage in interaction and its languages? How can we, as users, be guided or instructed to participate? i: We think our interfaces are obvious and there’s no language barrier with our work. In one of our exhibitions a three-year-old and a ninety-year-old were playing at the same time, one with a joystick in hand, the other a trackball – they played simultaneously without any guidance. most people interact with say, websites, easily now and everyone knows how to use a remote – it’s about what we want and what we need and how. often in our work there is an element that requires no direct interaction – we’ve always done this for the type of people we call the watchers. there are two categories of users of interactive works: clickers and watchers and they can have a symbiotic relationship. We have spent a lot of time making interactive work for special needs kids and they are a particularly demanding ‘user group’ – we take what we learn from them back into the other work. JJ: In feedback about your work, do you ever have a sense that your users get confused or frustrated by interaction? i: sometimes people get stuck or feel motion sick. on the whole we get great comments, like people wanting to have the work in their homes. once we received an amazing three-page anonymous essay in a comments book where the visitor came back time after time. JJ: What aesthetic qualities do you think you bring to your interaction work? i: Well, we are much more interested in looking at painting than work made with a computer – think about de Chirico and Tanguy – they were creating real-time 3D and they didn’t know it. Or someone like Morandi, whose methods and artworks involved moving objects around continuously to ind new forms and patterns of possibility within his still lives. We are introducing the igure to throw another perspective in there and perhaps put the harmony into jeopardy. We visit art galleries all the time – a lot of the interactive stuff we’re not interested in at all – it all looks so horrible – imagine, 16 million colours to choose from and then pick all the crap ones. We spend a lot of time talking about colour, light, texture and so on – it’s especially important with the 3D work. JJ: How do you think performance can be enhanced or challenged within the virtual and interactive worlds that you create? rG: to choreograph I give the performer a set of rules and systems to follow. In the same way the NPCs [non-player characters] in the computer are programmed with another set of rules to follow when they play the mocap back. With the addition of chance the computer in effect becomes a surrogate performer. the computer may

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even improvise through audience intervention. the dance data can grow, it may never repeat. We are always looking to retain a sense of live-ness in the motion-captured iles, by not over-processing them too much. Then we assemble and remix these qualities in the computer to create something else. What the performers get out of the mocap experience is the ability to see themselves from the outside (from all angles), in the round as it were. this helps them visualize their own movement and affects how they perform in real space. this becomes a positive feedback loop for the mocap takes that get recorded. In one sense we’re looking to translate live-ness into the virtual world, that is individual qualities, authenticity of capture, weight and gravity. We also try to do this in the way we construct the landscapes, buildings with great textures, shadows, light, relection, water, grass which blows in the wind. In virtual worlds there is also the opportunity to create totally new places, new bodies and new performance material, which is impossible in the real world. this inspires our newer work.

response: steve Dixon Janis Jefferies hits the nail right on the head in her irst sentence when she encapsulates igloo’s work as an engagement with exuberance. I ilmed a performance of Viking Shoppers in 2000 and felt a peculiar elation, a palpable thrill. ruth Gibson, clad in white garb and balaclava, danced an idiosyncratic and exquisite duet with her identically sized digital doppelganger projected on a rear screen; two ghosts, one corporeal, one ethereal. then a pair of dancers, bathed in soft, dim light, moved and entwined behind a gauze screen placed at the front of the stage, where their body shapes were transformed into ascII code. the bodies became composed entirely of light – shimmering, abstracted symbols and code – dancing hieroglyphics, wraithlike phantoms composed of particles of cybernetic dust. It was hypnotic, mesmeric, breathtaking, joyous. Looking back at the footage, the original exuberance I’d experienced returned undiminished, and new ideas also occurred to me – how the numeric and abstracted computer symbols evoked the complex pattern of cells and genes underlying the human form, and how the bodily transformation seemed simultaneously startling, eerie, uplifting, mystical and natural. igloo’s exuberant transposition of the material into the immaterial, the body into light, continued in Winterspace (2001), where the dancers’ bodies are transposed into beautiful, star-illed forms. The igures are composed only of tiny, pulsating stars, sometimes dancing their celestial duet against a dense blackness, and at others amidst a star-illed outer space, with only the luid movements of their lickering, stellar bodies distinguishing them from the light-speckled cosmic galaxy that surrounds them, and of which they are a part. In both Viking Shoppers and Winterspace, the shimmering bodily metamorphoses, and what ruth Gibson describes in the interview as her central desire ‘of disappearing as a performer’

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produces an Artaudian ‘magic’ (and in Viking Shoppers a perfect encapsulation of Artaud’s prescriptions for ‘physical hieroglyphs’) and a Deleuzo-Guattarian ‘becoming’ (and a literal ‘becoming stars’ in Winterspace). the relationship between the digital, the natural and the spiritual pervades igloo’s work and is drawn out beautifully in this interview. Gibson discusses bodily metamorphosis in relation to Woodman’s notion of revealing ‘the body’s hidden force’ and later ponders ‘the idea of losing the self, becoming the landscape and being invisible’. This sentiment is realized exquisitely in the immersive camoulaging of bodies within woodland in Summerbranch (2005), which exploits ‘virtual reality to explore the relationship between the natural and the artiicial’. It is notable that many virtual reality artworks have ‘returned to nature’ and the primordial – Char Davies’ seminal Osmose (1994) being a prime example. Despite the apparent irony of employing futuristic technologies to recreate ancient and natural phenomena, igloo have used them as a potent means of return: of (re)discovering the true nature of things, as well as spiritual and embodied relationships with space and the world. igloo offer a sophisticated and celebratory exuberance, fusing high technologies, human bodies and natural spaces and landscapes to conjure sublime images, unique metaphors and mystical perspectives on human being, becoming, and the natural world.

Part 2 Bodies

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chapter 4

ORLAN-Vertigo/Self-Touching-You simon Donger

Over 10 years ago, I irst encountered the work of ORLAN in the conined room of a French gallery. The piece was a wall-sized recorded video projection of ORLAN’s face surgically altered. It was presented with very little distance allowed between the image and the viewer. The close-ups on ORLAN’s face, magniied by the environmental conditions of the video’s presentation seemed to locate the viewer within the surgeon’s viewpoint.

figure 4.1 The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN Source: © ORLAN (1993), with permission.

I found my body and my senses disturbed: sight blurring, going greyish, ears buzzing, I passed out and woke up in the garden of the gallery. as I headed back into the gallery to explore the other rooms and artworks, the temptation to return to ORLAN’s piece raised some anxiety. I was confused. Was my anguish originating from empathy with the viewed body under literal deconstruction, with the augmented off-staged presence of the surgeon, or with their ambiguous intersection? The camera’s presence was posited as another surgical tool, thereby

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propelling a blur between the corporeality of orLan, of her surgeon, and of her audience. the ambiguous contact at work in the video invested the actual room of the gallery and the viewers. and although I then knew what to expect in form and content, I could not be sure that this blur would not trigger another physiological attack of vertigo. I headed back into the room for the second time. my interview with orLan attempts to explore the textures and implications of what I describe as an effacement of carnal and technical delineations of experience and the critical collapse of internal and external modalities of (re)presentation of the body. This ‘dis/connection advanced in the logic of the prosthesis’1 can be seen as ‘the trauma of lost unity’:2 ‘leaving the body behind … anti-human … apocalyptic’.3 Yet in ORLAN’s work, it is celebrated as what Donna Haraway has called ‘fruitful couplings’,4 or ‘“pleasurably tight coupling” … erotically charged violations with potent new fusions [where] the cyborg becomes the stage on which are performed contestations about the body boundaries that have often marked class, ethnic and cultural differences’.5 Indeed, orLan herself has said that her work is concerned with ‘pleasure and sensuality’.6 the following discussion strives to clarify the discursive layers at stake behind this sensuous and heuristic logic of dis/connection in ORLAN’s work. * * * simon Donger: for the purpose of this interview I would like to initiate a shared agreement regarding the deinition of the word ‘technology’. I want to propose that technology relates to every tool that the human body has crafted as extensions/ prostheses to adapt, modify and thus impact upon its environment. I want to add that while the body transforms its surroundings it is itself modiied by the very technologies it uses. orLan: that is quite right. technology can be a machine or not. It is also somehow always exterior. and indeed what one does to another or to the environment is always paralleled with a more discreet doing to oneself. sD: I want to propose as a critical starting point that the entire body of work you have produced suggests the progressive breakdown of possible divisions between the body and its technological extensions, by presenting us with a body-tool: the body as instrument of spatial measurement in MesuRages (1968–79), as kiss 1 2 3 4 5 6 2008).

Hal foster, The Return of the Real (London, 1996), p. 221. Ibid. n. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman (Chicago, 1999), p. 291. Donna Haraway quoted in foster, The Return of the Real, p. 221. Hayles, p. 85. orLan, This Is My Body… This Is My Software, Conference presentation (London,

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vending machine in Kiss Of The Artist (1977), but also the body that tests out other bodies in Saint ORLAN (1980–83), The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN (1990–93), Self-Hybridizations (1998–2005) and Harlequin’s Coat (2008). However, looking at your multiple ways of using your body as canvas, it seems that the embodiment of technology is not a settled matter in your work. this is a challenge to any genesis of the human body, suggesting that there is no original body ‘no irst editions, no fair copies [but] only the lickering signiiers, whose transient patterns evoke and embody the context of no context’.7 I will come back to this issue of context. for now I would like to know your thoughts on the proposition that your work offers a pulsating dialectic between technology as an extension of visceral matter and carnality as a prosthetic ramiication of the technological apparatus. This would imply that the technologies you utilize do not constitute interfaces as such. rather, it is precisely the dificulty of drawing a line between the body and technology (the dynamic tension of their rapprochement) in your work that provides schemata of interfacing with your viewer.

figure 4.2 MesuRages

Source: © ORLAN (1980), with permission.

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Hayles, p. 47.

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figure 4.3 MesuRages

Source: © ORLAN (1980), with permission.

figure 4.4 The Kiss of the Artist

Source: © ORLAN (1977), with permission.

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figure 4.5 Saint-ORLAN

Source: © ORLAN (1983), with permission.

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figure 4.6 The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN Source: © ORLAN (1991), with permission.

figure 4.7 Self-Hybridizations American-Indians Source: ORLAN/Galerie Michel Rein (2005).

ORLAN-Vertigo/Self-Touching-You

figure 4.8 Self-Hybridizations Africans

Source: © ORLAN/Galerie Michel Rein (2000), with permission.

figure 4.9 Self-Hybridizations Pre-Columbians

Source: © ORLAN/Galerie Michel Rein (1998), with permission.

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figure 4.10 Harlequin’s Coat

Source: © ORLAN (2008), with permission.

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O: I agree, I create an ORLAN-body but then it is mediated by an instrument made or chosen by myself to become another instrumentalized ORLAN-body that can replace the irst one. Recently for instance I was invited to perform a MesuRage of Jan Fabre’s new space in Antwerp,8 but could not physically attend it, so I sent an ORLAN-body to Antwerp and Jan Fabre used it to measure his new gallery, and this was photographed. SD: This ORLAN-body has had a distinct evolution in time. Looking at the entirety of your work, it appears that the focus was irst on highlighting and subverting the normative impact of the built environment on the bodies that produced it (MesuRages). But then, since The Kiss of the Artist, your work investigated the body’s technological impacts upon itself (The Reincarnation of Saint-ORLAN, Self-Hybridizations, Harlequin’s Coat). as your magnifying lens gets closer to the body, the presence of built environments has diminished and so it seems as if your work is more and more detached from the world … O: Maybe narrowing down a subject allows for larger relections. If you look at Le Corbusier’s Modulor9 it is very clear that it is an architecture based on a tall male body … in all MesuRages, I respond to architecture through a reversal of the criterion, one could say an act of feminization. In the Self-Hybridization series, the bodies are impregnated by all sorts of stories and images such as a non-Western civilization, the paintings of George Catlin and the history of american art, but also my contact with those, my fascination for the gazes created or recreated by catlin, and thus the acceptance of the other in oneself. of course there is an identity, but suddenly there is another that is ixed and allows for a third identity, enriched by the other two. Thus those images that might appear isolated from the world are in fact profoundly immersed in the world. They present us with a ixed historical moment and a whole historical trail, a story that is not mine, not my body’s story. In this sense, MesuRages have much to do with Self-Hybridizations as it is a body that measures itself against a space, a time, a name. Therefore it might seem that my work, as you’ve just proposed, has detached itself from spatial/environmental conditions and focused upon the body, but the body alone allows for broader dialogues both visceral and environmental. though appearances may differ, the goals remain the same. sD: You have written regarding MesuRages that ‘c’est une lutte – se mesurer à –, c’est du corps à corps [avec] le corps du batiment’10 [it’s a ight – measuring oneself against – a hand-to-hand with the body of the building]. Hand-to-hand translates 8 this event took place at troubleyn/Laboratorium in 2007. 9 Le corbusier proposed his Modulor in 1948. It is a system of measurement for architectural realizations, based on a standing up male igure in the long tradition of Vitruvius and alberti. see Le corbusier, Modulor and Modulor 2 (Basle, 2000). 10 orLan, De L’Art Charnel au Baiser de l’Artiste (Paris, 1997), p. 27.

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in french as corps à corps that is, literally, body-to-body as well as bodies-tobodies: a constellation of bodies entangled in one another. Unsurprisingly then, this hand-to-hand measuring act becomes profoundly oriented towards actual bodies, rather than architectures, in the Kiss of the Artist where bodies constitute the environment/world. this sensual act is developed further into extensive embraces, incorporative acts, in The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN, Self-Hybridizations and Harlequin’s Coat. those bodies are imbued by the various environments from which they originate. thus their hybridization intimates subtle and implicit critical dialogues. Would it then be appropriate to say that this ORLAN-body blurs the borders between visceral and technological conditions in order to posit itself as a playground for body-to-body reconsiderations? o: the playground implies a set of rules and an agency of winners and losers, which is not interesting to me. further, playing can suggest a lack of responsibility in the act which I do not adhere to. on the contrary I believe artists have responsibilities. I have said that I have brought my image into play, but it is not a game, not in the sense of playing. The ORLAN-body is a response to a desire to make something else out of my own body but with careful distance: without getting fascinated by it, avoiding the comfort that comes with discerning the technology I employ. I approach a technology as I approach the body. It is about decoding it, using it differently, reversing it, making it doubt, being beside its aims and predetermined patterns in order to desacralize/demystify it, to set it out of its habits and goals. that being said, to be beside the aims of a technology or a body is still to be in the margin of it. All I do is to attempt to come out of it, to get nearer to its periphery, its offscreen/off-stage. Those attempts to escape allow me to go back into the ORLANbody with a better understanding: to reinscribe myself into it in order to dismantle/ deconstruct it again. What becomes dificult is demonstrating the deconstruction, the pulling apart. one could perceive that I am still constructing, or reconstructing within another frame. my attempts are not destroying any existing frame as such, but they look to destabilize frames, therein allowing a deeper comprehension of the frames and as a consequence marking the beginning of their crumbling. SD: In your decoding practice, one can observe that ‘what binds the decoder to the system is not the stability of being a member of an interpretive community or the intense pleasure of physically possessing […] rather it is the decoder’s construction as a cyborg [as] another lickering signiier’.11 though the body is constrained by multiple normative frames, here it seems that there is an ambiguous position for the body to occupy whereby embodiment recovers a kind of transformative preciousness, especially in terms of its off-stage, or lickering, potential.

11 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 47.

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o: the body is precious indeed, it is the only vehicle we have for a little while. It is a sensing and orgasmic entity. But the body is inlected by pre-established patterns which prevent it from moving sensibly within the events of bodies that take place here and now. memory is also failing us, regardless of the computer technologies we have created. Yet there are animals with sensors which, if engineered in the human body, could make us function and think differently. there are indeed potentials for improving the body … sD: Yet your work is not necessarily concerned with speculating about futuristic potential, rather it is highly invested in past visual forms hybridized with present forms: in particular fusing iconographic patterns of the Baroque, the renaissance or ancient civilizations with mechanical, industrial and digital motifs. such strategy of cross-temporal interfacing falls under what Hal Foster calls ‘nonsynchronous forms’ which intend ‘to make a new medium out of the remnants of old forms, and to hold together the different temporal markers in a single visual structure’.12 the potentials you have explored are attached to various contextual markers that you have researched and reconigured in non-synchronous forms: I am thinking of the sculptural Virgin igure of Saint-ORLAN juxtaposed with its ilmic double and captured altogether on a photographic medium, of the same igure turned into a lifesize poster and located in a carnivalesque environment crowded with surgical and mediatic tools, but also of the Harlequin motif and bio-technological apparatuses. such practice, I am proposing, could be seen as engaged in creating potentialities of embodiment emerging from re-intersecting the past and the present. Traces of different bodies and different technologies are merged, coupled, reconstructed as proofs of other contexts and histories … o: We should be cautious with traces. the traces of performance are nothing less than a classical painting: both are the bits and pieces left after a moment of energy that a body has given, both could be said to be a still-life with fossilized elements of that body. the traces of performance are often considered less important than the performance itself: this would ironically suggest that the moment of making the painting is also more important than the painting itself … I shufle and confuse traces. I rework, reconstruct them so that they become something else, that they support another new story and a new perception. I am interested in how a trace can be more than a trace, by giving it autonomy, pushing it to becoming an object. Since everything we do leaves traces, we are always in the traces of other bodies, other places and eras. that is to say, even in the present we are still in the past. thus we must constantly reconstruct reality to make it more real. sD: I am interested in delineating what your reconstruction of the real has to offer our contemporary bodies. According to Foster, the non-synchronous allows for a 12

Hal foster, Design & Crime (London and New York, 2002), p. 137.

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‘mnemonic dimension of the outmoded that might still be mined today’ in terms of recalling ‘forfeited dreams of liberty, equality and fraternity’.13 this is a kind of historical awareness as a ‘melancholia that is, paradoxically, detached from its lost object … because there are too many lost objects to track, so many that it makes one vertiginous’.14 Furthermore, non-synchronous artworks can ‘enact this vertigo and seek to survive it’.15 Foster calls it the ‘vertigo of coming-after’16 the bodies, places, eras that preceded us: such vertigo is ‘conducive to the long-range survival of humans and of the other life-forms, biological and artiicial, with whom we share the planet and ourselves’.17 The lickering effacements of bodily and technological delineations in your work carry vertiginous contacts insofar as ‘there is no clear line between those who act and those who are acted upon’.18 They afirm that ‘to be in contact is neither to invest the other and annul his alterity, nor to suppress myself in the other’.19 Instead human contact is understood as what Jean-Luc Nancy called ‘self-touching-you’: that is where ‘the “self” is as indispensable as you’;20 a model of vertiginous selfpresence giving way to intersubjective and intercorporeal schemes of experience. It is in this respect that ORLAN-vertigo affords ‘an articulation capable of producing new kinds of subjectivities’,21 a tactic of resistance to and survival of the contriving singularity of a body/subjectivity, or the body/subjectivity. O: Indeed we should not try to deine the body: as soon as we do so we inevitably miss on some areas of the body. I propose to think of bodies. this is precisely why I have always created each artwork (drawing, photography, sculpture, video, performance) as a body that looked for other bodies to exist.

a body that looks for other bodies to exist – orLan’s prosthetic gifts: a response by Joanna Zylinska the logic of prosthesis foregrounds a lack at the core of an extendable entity. this lack should not be seen as a cause for trauma or lament. this is because lack is originary, and hence constitutive, of any self and any body. as prosthetic beings, humans emerge with and via technology – from the lint stones of early Homo erectus to the computers and mobile phones of the twenty-irst-century Homo 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

foster, Design & Crime, p. 139. Ibid., p. 169. Ibid. Ibid. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 291. Ibid., p. 217. emmanuel Levinas, Otherwise Than Being (Pittsburgh, 1981), p. 86. Jacques Derrida, On Touching-Jean-Luc Nancy (Stanford, 2005), p. 291. Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 217.

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informaticus. Understanding this will allow us to go beyond the still dominant Aristotelian model, in which technology is seen as just a tool for the human. This model lures us with the false promise of being able to use technology in order to mould the world according to our desire or whim. However, in recent years some other, more networked and more dynamic models of human-nonhuman relationality have been developed: we can think here of the ideas put forward by philosophers such as Gilbert simondon, Jacques Derrida or Bernard stiegler. But philosophers are not the only ones involved in working through and with the matter of techne. Performance artists such as Stelarc, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Eduardo Kac and orLan have also been actively involved in outlining and enacting some alternative ways of being-with-technology. Simon Donger’s interview with ORLAN explores the workings of the prosthetic logic in ORLAN’s performances – from her early projects, such as MesuRages and Kiss of the Artist, to the more recent ones, including Self-Hybridization and Harlequin’s Coat. The interview traces the mutual co-constitution of technology, the body and the environment in ORLAN’s artistic practice. This co-constitution and co-dependence between different physical elements – which become prostheses of one another – does not mean that transformation just happens, or that the artist does nothing more than just allow for the sequence of processes to emerge and constitute themselves in some kind of vitalist phantasmagoria. on the contrary, ORLAN insists on the need for an afirmative moment of intervention, or what we could call ‘a cut’, into the dynamic network of forces and relations on the part of the artist. This cut – whether a literal one to the artist’s face or a metaphorical one to the Gordian knot of constraining cultural values and norms – also becomes a moment of reframing, of redesigning the symbolic uniform that has become too tight. This performative gesture of ripping through this symbolic uniform’s fabric is more than an enraged act of artistic protest for orLan. It is also an ethical act of responding to, and reaching for, the other(’s) body – a body which, in the artist’s own words, is absolutely indispensable ‘for other bodies to exist’. Such a proximity to the other whose voice and lesh call upon me can be a source of a vertiginous feeling, a sensation of there being too much alterity that Donger himself experienced when faced with a rather explicit video of ORLAN’s surgery. But this excess – of the other’s skin, breath or touch – is also a promise of the self’s opening to an alterity that it does not yet know, beyond ‘its aims and predetermined patterns’. It is in creating such rips and openings that performance art can be both most effective and most affective.

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chapter 5

the Path to silence allucquére rosanne stone Allucquère Rosanne Stone combines ilm, linguistics, gender, cultural studies, and feminist theory. she has pioneered “theoryperformance” on cyberspace and the transhuman through a number of seminal publications. In this new chapter she examines the interface of technology and desire. Here, as in her usual exuberant style, she creates a “text that breaks rules” and employs elements from a wide range of disciplines and genres, including cultural and critical theory and personal memoir. Janis Jefferies

I can only imagine what it must have been like when for the irst time a lighting director trained a gas lame on a lump of limestone. Certainly the idea of limelight as a synonym for the centre of attention has survived for all that long time. the difference between natural lighting and the new phantasmatic space opened by controlled artiicial lighting represented a watershed. In one way it signalled the ascendancy of technology as a transformative tool in theatre. In another, it was merely the next step in developing machinery to create better virtual worlds, dating back at least to the crane in ancient Greece. I suppose one could make an argument for irelight as one of the original technological enhancements, as anyone who has told a story to a group around a campire understands. The campire creates a focus of attention; by virtue of the contrast in levels of illumination it blots out the mundane, and narrows the universe down to those within the range of its glow. With the mind relieved of so much of its customary needs – to observe and parse everything taking place within a wide visual and auditory range – a huge surplus of attention is free to focus exclusively on the storyteller and the story. over time, with new sources of power and deeper understanding of the uses of light and sound, it became easier to create more effective theatrical productions. And later, with the arrival of ilm, video, and cheap computers, we opened still more areas for theatrical work. I situate myself in these discourses as someone who is in many ways a therapeutic practitioner. that is, I think of theatre as partly an armamentarium of techniques for producing moments of rupture, during which the watcher’s sense of identity is taken apart and in which there is opportunity for the individual to put the elements of identity back together in new and possibly helpful conigurations. this is in fact one of the aims of expressive arts therapy, and though in recent years I have been working hard to produce some sort of text which describes

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the quasi-therapeutic undercurrent in ACTLab’s1 pedagogical framework, my encounters with expressive arts therapy2 have occurred fairly recently in my personal timeline, and it is clear that there is considerable overlap in our ideas and purposes. While over time several activities have held my attention long enough, perhaps, to be called careers, in my current personal practice I am primarily a performer; more speciically, I am a storyteller. I want to see people changed by this work, the work of making (that is, of poiesis) in a more or less therapeutic context, and in particular in exploring how this practice resonates with telling stories. additionally, I come from an academic background in which my mentors believed that any signiicant work you do in a discipline should change the way people think about that discipline. so let me tell you a story. once a year on the festival of Beltane3 (1 May), The Circle Which Durst Not speak Its name, which is a group of old friends of which I am a member, likes to make a pilgrimage to Pinnacles national Park, in northern california, for a two-day celebration. Pinnacles is several hours from our various homes in the Bay Area, and the journey is short enough to be achievable in a day’s continuous driving, while long enough to convey a deinite feel of moving into a contiguous but also disjunct universe. Creating liminal moments being the goal of a good deal of ritual activity, starting off by removing ourselves far from the everyday moil seems obvious. Once we inish setting up camp, pitching our tents and establishing basic sanitation, we choose a ire tender: the individual charged with keeping the central ire burning high all night long. This is a practical as well as a ritual task, since nights in the high desert are chilly, and celebrants like to creep out of their tents from time to time and warm themselves at the cheery blaze in the occasional company of friends. Once the ire tender has been chosen, the rest pair off and

1 actLab, the advanced communication technologies Laboratory at the University of texas at austin, is an experimental programme based on the act of making and the role of the whole body in the learning process. 2 Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA) is a discipline dedicated, among other things, to creating a therapeutic aesthetics. the concept of intermodal expressive art developed therein resonates with the ACTLab’s pedagogical framework. Because of my association with colleagues Paolo Knill, ellen Levine, stephen Levine, and Herbert eberhart during our summer work at the european Graduate school eGs, I have been interested in more clearly articulating the points of inlection and divergence between the ACTLab’s intermodal (and arguably therapeutic) framework and that of eXa. there are many sources for information about EXA; I suggest googling ‘expressive arts therapy’. 3 Beltane is the anglicized name for the ancient Gaelic festival of Bealltainn, now usually held on the irst of May. Beltane is a cross-quarter day; that is, midway between the spring equinox and the summer solstice; in some traditions it is a major festival (sabbat) and is associated with fertility. It is one of the festivals celebrated in most branches of north american neopaganism.

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‘bower’, which is to say, repair to their tents for a night of wild lovemaking in honour of the gods of fecundity and the returning spring. In the particular year of which I write, I volunteered to be ire tender. I was either just coming off a truly dreadful relationship or about to come off one – I can’t quite recall the sequence, but at that period of my life, deep in gender transition and crazy from its hormonal effects, it was a common trope – and I certainly wasn’t up to anything as intimate and potentially self-revealing as celebratory lovemaking, and so I was attending the festival as a solitary. after we had concluded family business and taken care of what my friend Rowan calls ‘sacred bullshit’, we partook of the ritual drink and settled in for the night. over time, writers call the drink by various names; the most salient is kukeion, referring to the potion served to participants in the eleusinian mysteries. the word kukeion is tantalizingly vaporous; literally it means nothing more than ‘mixture’. The ingredients were secret, as was the ritual, but there seems to be no question as to its power – witness the fact that none of the thousands who undertook the initiation ever spoke a word about what it really was. Various scholars, some respected and some discredited, speculate that it included stuff such as ergot, and that perhaps its psychedelic or entheogenic boost was central to the climax of the ritual; as one researcher remarks, ‘something important and memorable was going on there for hundreds and hundreds of years’.4 since reinvention is the heart of spirituality and we had the privilege of the Prime Directive, which orders that you make it up as you go along, each year we interpreted the kukeion anew. now, in those days, giants of prodigious organic chemical imagination walked the earth, so this year the sacred mixture happened to be Orange Sunshine, a particularly ine varietal of lysergic acid. We built the ire, partook of the blessing, and the celebrants went off to bower. I waved them farewell into the dark, turned from the bitter cold and intense blackness of the night, checked my wood supply, faced the ire, and settled down for the long watch. At about 3.00am, the irst of the gods began to appear. But let’s pause here, so that I can tell you a bit about my history. as a child I was infatuated with theatre and with the possibilities of prosthetics. I mean this in the sense of things which extend one’s bare capabilities. I studied lighting and sound, and learned through practice to harness the power of sound to extend and intensify the theatrical experience. In my circumstance this was comparatively easy; good quality sound was hard to come by, not only in tiny local venues but in mainstream theatre as well; surround sound was astonishing, and one could shake an audience to its roots with barely more than a decent subwoofer. this was also a time of vast experimentation in many disciplines; keeping in mind that I was at the time a preadolescent new Yorker my world view was necessarily 4 cf. John t. Kirby, discussing whether entheogens were used in the eleusinian mysteries (http://www.coraxioms.blogspot.com/) [accessed 14 april 2009]. the idea was irst formally proposed by R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hoffman, and Carl A.P. Ruck in The Road To Eleusis (New York, 1978).

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limited, the little to which I had access was challenging enough: edgard Varése had recently produced poéme electronique; Thomas Wilfred’s Lumia compositions were on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Walt Disney’s Fantasia was in release, though critics derided it – and a zillion strange and exciting things of every imaginable kind were happening practically on my doorstep down there in lower manhattan; so that my world, while quite circumscribed, was bursting at the seams with invention and risk. It seemed quite natural to build inlatable domes on the roofs of buildings, painfully assemble ragtag assortments of projectors, cobble up stage lighting out of stovepipes and coffee cans, construct huge loops of magnetic tape running on hacked recorders with erase heads removed and electronics permanently locked in ‘record’. Using technological prostheses to enhance experience – of which theatrical experience is a subset – seemed as natural as mother’s milk. In retrospect, I think this connected in some way with my own personal predicament as a pre-teen and teenager: being transgendered. At that time, being a tG was a good way to assure that one would be alone most of the time and fairly terriied of close personal associations, the upside of which is that one has plenty of time to geek out on technology. also, in order to survive as a transie one needs massive faith in the evanescence of identity and the mutability of lesh. When you look in a mirror, if you can’t believe that everything you see can be subject to change on demand, then you probably don’t belong in theatre … I mean, you won’t survive as a transie … well, actually, both. Whatever else the transgender experience may bring, you certainly learn a hell of a lot about the uses and limitations of artiice. Which, actually, is my point. speaking again from personal experience, as a transgendered teen, I went through a complex series of mental, emotional and physical transitions. The end product, if you will, may in fact be just another waystation in the process; but still, one does have the unmistakable desire for a telos – a deinable point at which the process of identity shift, even if only for a short while, comes to rest. nevertheless, while the whole thing is actively in play, the social aspects of that process require continual construction. this takes place on every level – social, physical, especially emotional – and subsets of each of those that involve dress, gait, attitude, voice modulation, gaze, body position, movement and speed of movement – the whole apparatus of evoking desired responses from a hypothetical ‘audience’ whom, in ine, one intensely wishes to ‘de-audience-ify’ and convert the audience/performer relationship into mere everyday life. this approach would, remove the fourth wall entirely and transform the theatre of identity into casual co-existence or friendship. If you’ve done your work properly, kept a clear mind, avoided the traps and pitfalls of artiice as crutch, kept as many friends as possible, and managed to rise above the worst of the drama which inevitably accompanies screwing around with your endocrine balance, as you approach the end of the transition process you may begin to experience the ‘just me’ stage in all its heady glory. That is the stage at which you can begin to shed the entire armamentarium of gender presentation like

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a snake sheds its skin. You don’t need it any more. You don’t have to artiicially shape your body this way or that – your body has attained those socially normative planes and curves on its own. You don’t have to hide your complexion or skin texture under makeup, because your own glands, with some encouragement, have inished doing that work for you. You don’t have to think about whether your voice is too high or too low. Everything has become utterly simple. You’ve achieved your goal of realizing your particular selfness. Like the proverbial snake that provides the easy metaphor for the process, you shed the last of your carefully constructed artiice. You’re ‘just you’. (I pause here to mention that this is the point that every transie I know strives for with utterly single-minded purpose, and that while you’re trying to get there, there is nothing whatsoever on your to-do list except that. Some day, maybe we’ll understand why. But it’s only once you get there that you can afford to look around and consider such distant abstractions as career, living quarters, or sweet balance and moderation, all of which may seem as far away as the stars.) And then, of course, if you’re awake and paying attention, you realize that you’ve merely managed to live along into the currently operant hegemony. You realize that simply learning how to thoroughly internalize the norms of your culture’s power structure doesn’t mean that you’ve arrived anywhere, except perhaps at a better, less annoying and more pleasant kind of enslavement. And yet – and yet – that may be true, but still we all have to live. We have to pay the price of internalizing some variety of cultural norm in order to survive as a culture. And so you edit. You decide that just this little bit of social respectability is suficient, but no more than that. You are willing to look ‘decent’ in public. You cross the street at the light. You keep the more bizarre tats covered up. It’s making sure the wheels are lubricated, it’s social oil. You make the minimum compromise that you need to in order to keep life going. And, if you’re really alive, you keep on reining that point of minimality, to keep it really minimal. Okay, now, let’s go back to that moment in Northern California, in Pinnacles National Park, in the intense darkness and cold, those who weren’t bowering keeping close to the ire, when the irst of the gods began to appear. We all saw them, although of course there was no way for us to compare what each of us saw. On this particular night they weren’t in a terribly interactive mood, these gods. They didn’t gesture wildly or put on a show, such as calling up an earthquake or thunderstorm or something. So after a while the people gathered around the ire began to be bored with merely being in the presence of the bare-naked mysterium tremendum. And so they asked me, as designated ire tender, to liven up the evening by telling a story. It’s not an easy thing, telling a story in the presence of the gods. No matter how good you think you are, they’re better. Even if you and your audience think you’re the best damn storyteller in the whole wide world, you are telling your story in the presence of story Itself, the ultimate tale, the arc that, whether in waking or in dream, propels our lives. tropes seem trivial, narrative pointless. and yet, you have to do it – when the husk is revealed as dead and it’s all stripped away, story

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remains. and then you begin to understand what every storyteller understands: that when all is said and done, it is the story that tells the story, the story is telling itself; the storyteller is merely the medium through which the story can speak. It is something like this that maya Deren expressed in her explication of the Divine Horsemen.5 So in that brief season between the worlds, in the ininite cold and dark with only the ire to warm us, I told some story. I haven’t the faintest idea what it was; after all, what starts in the circle stays in the circle, and sometimes it does so whether you want it to or not. But it did seem that the effort of shedding artiice and seeking the story’s heart, while admittedly driven by a sense of hopelessness and perhaps dread, led to something the power of which had become concentrated and distilled. and although for the most part I myself was lost deep in the story, at some point I came up for air, took a deep breath, and looked around. I found myself surrounded by concentric circles of eyes. for a second or two that was all I could see. there was a huge crowd of them, and they all seemed to be the size of dinner plates. They relected the irelight brightly, and their sclerae were fully visible around the irides – which is to say they were wide open. While I’d been deep in the story, all my fellow celebrants had crept out of their tents and silently joined the group by the ire, and it was their eyes I was seeing. They were transixed: not by any skill I may have possessed, but by narrative with its clothing stripped away, by the essence of story laid bare. and then, before I could react to that knowledge, the kukeion chose that moment to peak, and we were all swept away in its exaltation. For a long time, recalling that evening left me terribly bemused. I’d been gifted with the chance to experience a lesson in what it’s like to be more or less forced into a situation of utter simplicity. Or was it? You know the answer. Of course it wasn’t. Instead, I’d have to argue that it was the best that we could do in the circumstances. Of course there was artiice, of course there were prosthetics involved in that telling. firstly there was gesture, and vocal inlection. And then there was also the ire, that vast, hypnotic presence swirling above us. and, of course, there was the kukeion, the engine of the gods. In a way, we were granted the gift of the illusion of the absence of artiice. In reality, the perfectly un-artifactual telling remained a long way off from our imagined simplicity.

5 Divine Horsemen refers to the Haitian loas of the voudun religion, who interact with the physical plane by entering or ‘riding’ a human who consents to loan their body for this purpose. One of the best studies of voudun from a participant’s perspective was undertaken by the visionary ilmmaker Maya Deren, and published in book form as Divine Horsemen: The Voodoo Gods of Haiti (New York, 1953). A ilm by the same name, originally photographed by Deren and completed 20 years after her death by her third husband Teiji Ito and his wife cherel Winett Ito in 1981, was released in 1985.

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However, ever since that night I’ve been haunted by the idea of simplicity. As someone who, for as far back as I can remember, has been in love with the best artiices that theatre has to offer, from intelligent lighting to wearable processors to subsonic woofers that turn your bowels to water, it’s a little unnerving to be thinking about ditching the whole thing in favour of some abstract minimalistic ideal. But I also realize it’s more than a momentary affectation. It may be time once again to inject some juice into the aspect of theatre that functions as political corrective. speaking from the limited perspective of someone in the Us, the days of Teatro Campesino and the San Francisco Mime Troupe – not to mention Arte Povera, Poor Theatre, and their later kin – are not so far behind us that their absence is not keenly felt. Of course present-day artists are working hard in that vein – particularly notable here in the US are Guillermo Gómez-Peña and La Pocha Nostra – but they are bravely struggling against the tide. In a staggeringly repressive era energized by ignorance and fear, when it is once again dangerous to essay politically important work in public fora, the need for simplicity is urgent. We need cheap, easily transportable theatre, a light, lithe, lexible theatre that can materialize and then disappear in moments. It may be theatre in concept only … not recognizable by contemporary standards. It may be theatre that focuses solely on the moment of the story, on the simplest distillation of the work. But I have to add that it would be disingenuous to claim that my concern is purely political. After that evening by the ire, I’ve been hard put not to consider narrative minimalism as a philosophical positionality, as an ethical and aesthetic choice. Just as when one achieves what one believes is one’s true persona by irst adopting and then shedding constellations of interpersonal artiices, there is a zen quality to reducing to its simplest elements the sort of engagement that theatricality provides. I can’t imagine giving up forever the tremendous lights of imagination you can trigger by means of high technology well-planned and executed in the service of a good story. And I’m sure it hasn’t passed unnoticed that I did it myself in The Neovagina Monologues, which premiered in 2007. We used active lighting, a carefully timed and orchestrated musical score, voice ampliication and tons of makeup. It was, of course, as simple as we thought it could have been and still come off as effective theatre. But it certainly wasn’t my ideal. Even while I was on stage performing, working hard in the moment, trying to balance the lines of the script against the direction the audience wanted to take, trying alternately to hold still and move at the right times, part of me was still off somewhere else – still present in that instant years before, at the towering ire, in the freezing dark, surrounded by wide-eyed celebrants, in the monstrous presence of the gods. and yes, I do know what the ultimate simplicity really is. It is stillness, silence, perfect in its emptiness and unity. But that’s not theatre. Once we’ve experienced it, and returned from that experience, we have an obligation to take others to the edge, to the threshold or limin, to show them what’s hidden. Of course that’s an inherent contradiction. Lawyers say that, in the real world, you frequently have to lie in order to tell the truth. In an imperfect time in which our job as practitioners

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of theatre as a therapeutic discipline is to use change to create change, perhaps the best we can do is to engage noise as the pathognomon to silence. And so I’ll shut up now.

Part 3 audiences

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chapter 6

reactivation: Performance, mediatization and the Present moment Philip auslander

my inquiry into the cultural status of performance and media in Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, originally published in 1999, departed from a major premise borrowed from Walter Benjamin: that ‘human sense perception … is determined not only by nature but by historical circumstances as well’.1 sense perception is not simply a biological given. How we perceive and what we expect from the objects of our perception are culturally and historically inluenced. This inluence is reiied in media, which are simultaneously causes and effects of a given historical moment’s social formations and technological capabilities.2 In revising Liveness for a second edition, I was able to provide statistical evidence that even audiences, such as those for theatre, who may prefer live performance over its mediatized versions, nevertheless consume mediatized performances far more frequently than live ones. The implication is that ‘the mediatized version of [performing] arts deines the normative experience of them’.3 simply put, it is crucial to situate audiences’ perception of, and engagement with, performance of any kind, including performances that make substantial use of media technologies, ‘new’ or ‘old’, in relation to this normative experience. In my explorations of mediatized performance I have sometimes argued, for example, that the playback of a recorded performance should be understood as a performance in itself. In claiming that recordings of popular music are legitimate objects of performance analysis, I argue, ‘Regardless of the ontological status of recorded music, its phenomenological status for listeners is that of a performance unfolding at the time and in the place of listening.’4 In concluding my essay ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, I suggest, 1 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, in Illuminations, trans. H. Zohn (New York, 1969), p. 222. 2 This passage is redacted from Philip Auslander, ‘Is There Life After Liveness?’, in Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (eds), Performance and Technology: Practices of Virtual Embodiment and Interactivity (Houndsmill, 2006), p. 194. 3 Philip auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture, 2nd edn (London, 2008), p. 23. 4 Philip Auslander, ‘Performance Analysis and Popular Music: A Manifesto’, Contemporary Theatre Review, 14/1 (2004): 5.

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Interfaces of Performance the crucial relationship is not the one between the document and the performance but the one between the document and its audience. Perhaps the authenticity of the performance document resides in its relationship to its beholder rather than an ostensibly originary event; perhaps its authority is phenomenological rather than ontological … It may well be that our sense of the presence, power, and authenticity of [documented performances] derives not from treating the document as an indexical access point to a past event but from perceiving the document itself as a performance … for which we are the present audience.5

In an effort to shift the balance of a discussion that I see as traditionally weighted towards the relationship between the event and its mediatized versions, I have chosen in these passages to emphasize the relationship between reproductions and their audiences. But any description of the full picture has to include all three entities – performances, mediatizations and audiences – and their interrelations. I intend in this chapter to provide a broad philosophical framework within which to conceptualize audience perception in a mediatized cultural environment. While I continue to see the phenomenology of the audience’s engagement with the mediatized event to be central, the ontological connection is clearly important, not least because it often provides the reason we engage with the mediatized version in the irst place. I gesture towards a reconciliation of the ontological and phenomenological perspectives, a way of understanding how we experience mediatized performances as unfolding in our perceptual present even as we acknowledge their connections to events that occurred elsewhere and else-when. Before proceeding further, I wish to emphasize the limitations of this chapter. Although I use the term ‘mediatization’ to refer to all situations in which performances are conveyed to audiences through media technologies, I focus here particularly on recordings. It is the work of another day to extend the framework I propose here to other categories of mediatization, such as live broadcasts or webcasts and live performances incorporating such elements as live video projections or internet feeds. I believe it can be extended thus because my emphasis is on the impact of mediatization on our sense of temporal and spatial relationships. this impact plays out differently in the case of, say, live video used in performance than in that of recordings. Whereas the audience for a recorded performance experiences it in the present while being aware that it is a repetition of the past, the audience witnessing live video in a performance may be more concerned with the spatial displacement of the image than with time-shifting. It is my hope that the concepts I employ here may prove heuristically useful for analysing more situations than I can discuss here. I must also note that while on some occasions I have distinguished among different kinds of mediatization in terms of the experiences of performance they afford, I will not attend to those

5 Philip Auslander, ‘The Performativity of Performance Documentation’, Performing Arts Journal, 28/3 (2006): 9.

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distinctions here but treat all forms of documentation, recording and reproduction as equivalent.6 I begin by returning to Benjamin, particularly to a passage in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ that has received somewhat less scrutiny than most of that thoroughly worked-over essay. Benjamin’s concept of reactivation provides a starting point for thinking about the relationship between mediatized performances and their audiences. In the second part of the chapter, I turn to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s Truth and Method to further clarify how we perceive performances accessed through recordings as belonging both to the present and the past.7 In the inal section, I raise the question of whether a model developed in the contexts of modernist thought and ‘old’ media remains relevant for postmodern, digital culture.

Benjamin: reactivation In ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’, Walter Benjamin has this to say about the interaction of audience and work, as mediated by reproduction: [t]echnical reproduction can put the copy of the original into situations which would be out of reach for the original itself. above all, it enables the original to meet the beholder halfway, be it in the form of a photograph or phonograph record. the cathedral leaves its locale to be received in the studio of a lover of art; the choral production, performed in an auditorium or in the open air, resounds in the living room … [I]n permitting the reproduction to meet the beholder or listener in his own particular situation, [the technique of reproduction] reactivates the object reproduced.8

Benjamin’s description seems to me intuitively correct, an accurate account of my own experience as an audience for recorded performances. reproduction of a performance does not allow me to experience the performance in its original circumstances; it does not transport me to the time and place in which it occurred. rather, it brings the performance to me, to be experienced in my temporal and spatial context. When I listen to recordings from Woodstock or watch Brian De Palma’s ilm of the Performance Group’s Dionysus in 69 or look at photos of chris Burden being shot, these events are reactivated, or restaged, so to speak, in 6 see auslander, Liveness, p. 58 and Philip Auslander, ‘Sound and Vision: Record of the Past or Performance in the Present?’ (2005), available from http://www.charm.rhul. ac.uk/content/events/symp_1_papers.html [accessed 14 april 2009]. 7 See Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 2nd rev. edn, trans. and rev. J. Weinsheimer and D.G. Marshall (New York, 1989). 8 Benjamin, ‘The Work of Art’, pp. 220–21.

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my living room or study (Benjamin’s choice of the word resounds, re-sounds, is noteworthy here). even though I know these events occurred at another time and in another place, I experience them as performances in the here and now, with myself as audience. One word that commands my attention in this passage is ‘halfway’. What could Benjamin mean when he says that reproduction ‘enables the original to meet the beholder halfway’? In one sense, it would seem that the original has met the beholder much more than halfway in Benjamin’s scenario: the cathedral or the concert has left its locale to join the beholder in his. And the beholder is, signiicantly, described as ‘a lover of art’, suggesting that this beholder understands the cathedral as an aesthetic, rather than ritual, object, and in terms of exhibition value rather than cult value. In other words, the original that meets the beholder does so as a post-auratic object, apparently deracinated from its original context. In the section I excluded through ellipsis, Benjamin discusses the way reproduction depreciates the presence of the original and, thus, its authority, authenticity and ability to provide ‘historical testimony’; being cut off from history is a symptom of the artwork’s loss of aura.9 But I think the word ‘halfway’, when allowed to resonate, troubles a simplistic understanding of what Benjamin may be saying. It is not the reproduction that is received by the beholder, but the original by means of reproduction, and it is the original that is reactivated through interaction with the beholder. the reproduction, then, is not simply a work or entity in itself, separate from the original, which substitutes for it. charlie Bertsch describes Benjamin’s reproduction as an addendum to the original, a McLuhanesque prosthetic that ‘extends the work’s “reach”’ and inluence beyond its original purview.10 While attractive, this formulation cannot be quite right, for the image of extended reach implies that the original stays in place and reaches out from there into the beholder’s realm. Notre Dame remains in Paris, but a photograph of the cathedral extends its reach prosthetically into my study. Benjamin suggests, by contrast and, one supposes, poetically, that the original does not remain in place and reach out but actually vacates its original position: ‘the cathedral leaves its locale’. The reproduction is neither a prosthesis that extends the original, nor is it merely a replication of or a substitute for the original. In terms of its reactivating function, the reproduction is a conduit, a one-way street by means of which the original may join the beholder in the beholder’s particular situation. (I say ‘oneway’ because Benjamin seems to imply that reactivation obviates the need for the art lover to travel in the other direction, back to the original. Given Benjamin’s image of the cathedral’s peregrination, there would be nothing left at its original location for the art lover to see!)

9 Ibid., p. 221. 10 Charlie Bertsch, ‘The Aura and Its Simulacral Double: Reconsidering Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”’, Critical Sense, 4/2 (Fall 1996): 13.

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the force of the word reactivate suggests that the original is not made manifest to the beholder in an ideal, eternal state via reproduction. The phrase ‘it reactivates the object reproduced’ suggests that while reproduction initially ‘deactivates’ the original by robbing it of its historical speciicity, the original is reactivated when it encounters the beholder in the beholder’s place and time through reproduction. In his provocative book Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism, Joseph Grigely argues that texts, which he construes broadly to encompass works of visual art and performances as well as writings, cannot be reproduced, for ‘to reproduce is to reenact. And this won’t work because we can no more print the same text twice than we can step into the same stream twice’.11 Therefore, ‘We cannot reproduce, reprint, or reenact a text: each act of textual production is an act of sequential (even rhizomic) production.’12 Although Grigely thinks that Benjamin missed this point, I argue that something very like this understanding of texts as events (Grigely’s word) emerges from my reading of Benjamin, a reading that focuses more on the idea of reactivation, the event that occurs when a reproduction is beheld, and the renewed status it confers on the original, than on reproduction and the diminishment of aura. Whereas Grigely focuses on the moment of textual production, I focus on the moment of reception to argue that it is the point at which the reproduction discloses the original as an event occurring in the here and now. elsewhere, I have distinguished technologies of reproduction from technologies of production: technologies of reproduction create ixed records of performances, while technologies of production generate real-time performances, even if programmed (a player piano is an example).13 my analysis here suggests that while this distinction holds with respect to the technological artefact, it does not hold with respect to the beholder’s experience of it. From the audience’s point of view, there are only technologies of production, for all reproductions yield productions of the reactivated original with the beholder as audience. each reactivation discloses the original, but discloses it under different circumstances. Perhaps it is for this reason that the work reproduced can no longer provide historical testimony: each time the reproduction is beheld, the original is reactivated as a production in the present tense, not a replication of an historical past. But I am not suggesting that performances lose all connection to their history through reproduction. clearly, the original context in which a performance took place is part of what makes it signiicant to the audience for its mediatizations. If I am listening to the album At the Five Spot by jazz multi-instrumentalist Eric Dolphy, the playback reactivates the performance. I hear the music unfold in real time, as I listen to it – it is happening for me in the here and now. I am very much aware, however, that it also happened there and then. It is important 11 Joseph Grigely, Textualterity: Art, Theory, and Textual Criticism (Ann Arbor, 1995), p. 109. 12 Ibid., p. 110. 13 See Philip Auslander, ‘Live from Cyberspace, or, I was sitting at my computer this guy appeared he thought I was a bot’, Performing Arts Journal, 24/1 (2002): 21.

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to my understanding of what I’m hearing that these recordings document what Dolphy and his group played on a particular night (16 July 1961) at a speciic club in new York city. the fact that this performance happened, under particular circumstances, there and then, is a signiicant part of what makes it compelling to me here and now. To entertain such a claim in the context of a discussion of Benjamin’s ‘Work of Art’ essay may seem quixotic, since the usual understanding is that he sees reproduction as robbing the original of all historical speciicity. But as Miriam Bratu Hansen has shown recently in a detailed analysis of Benjamin’s conception of aura considered across his work, ‘the relationship between aura and technological reproduction’ does not reduce ‘to an opposition of binary, mutually exclusive terms’.14 for one thing, the two concepts are mutually dependent, as aura ‘becomes visible only on the basis of technological reproduction’.15 for another, some of Benjamin’s earlier formulations of the idea are quite different in emphasis. In his ‘Little History of Photography’ (1931), for instance, Benjamin suggests that the photographic image possesses an aura that prompts the beholder to seek out the features of the image that imply connections between the past, when the photograph was taken, and the subsequent future, known to the beholder.16 Hansen argues that Benjamin’s earlier understandings of aura are still traceable in the ‘Work of Art’ essay – certainly, the idea of reactivation, which she does not discuss, implies a complex relationship between original and reproduction that does not it comfortably with the idea that reproduction simply eradicates the original’s connections to the past.

Gadamer: fusion of horizons In order to arrive at a iner-grained account of the beholder’s encounter with the reproduced performance, I turn to Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. I should stipulate that because I am concerned here primarily with reproductions, not directly with their source performances, I draw from Gadamer’s discussion of ‘the historicity of understanding’ in Truth and Method rather than his aesthetics. since recordings are necessarily records of the past, even when the past was only a moment ago, I treat them as instances of historical texts in Gadamer’s sense. In discussing Gadamer, I will frequently substitute the word ‘performance’ for ‘text’ in order to adapt his framework to the matter at hand. Also, it should be understood that in my discussion, words such as ‘historical’ and ‘past’ refer simply to the idea that the audience for a recorded performance perceives it at a later point than the audience for the live event and not necessarily to any great historical

14 Miriam Bratu Hansen, ‘Benjamin’s Aura’, Critical Inquiry, 34 (Winter 2008): 375. 15 Ibid., p. 343. 16 Ibid., p. 341.

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remove. needless to say, my discussion of Gadamer here touches on the mere tip of a monumental philosophical iceberg. for Gadamer, it is impossible that a recording could provide access to an objective experience of the material recorded, for ‘There can be no such thing as a direct access to the historical object that would objectively reveal its historical value.’17 Neither is it possible for me to project myself back in time to experience the performance as a contemporary spectator, as if I were sitting in the five spot on that summer night when Dolphy played there. to do so, I would have to somehow negate my own historically determined horizon of beliefs and values, turning myself into a sort of blank slate, in order to assume a historical horizon and experience the performance as it had been experienced in the past. Gadamer insists, in fact, that even the desire to do this is bankrupt. the only meaning a recorded performance can have is its meaning to the audience presently perceiving it. ‘The real meaning of a text, as it speaks to the interpreter, does not depend on the contingencies of the author and his original audience. It certainly is not identical with them, for it is always co-determined also by the historical situation of the interpreter …’18 this does not mean that we are unable to experience the reproduced performance as originating in a moment or context other than the one in which we perceive it. Quite the opposite: we must do so in order to understand it at all. But we do so not by ‘reconstructing the way the text came into being’ but by constructing it in relation to our own horizon, as the word ‘co-determined’, reminiscent of Benjamin’s ‘halfway’, suggests.19 ‘That is why understanding is not merely a reproductive but always a productive activity as well’.20 through the recording, we access the performance not as a self-deined, autonomous entity, but as a mediation (Gadamer’s term) between its horizon and our own.21 Gadamer conceives our interaction with historical texts as dialogic, on the model of conversation. Understanding the performance means neither discovering its original meanings, seeing and hearing it as it was originally seen and heard, nor imposing our own meanings on it. ‘Understanding proves to be an event’, the emergent result of the conversation between ourselves and the performance, a conversation to which both sides are understood to contribute.22 ‘In this the interpreter’s own horizon is decisive’, writes Gadamer, and this is necessarily true, as the conversational event takes place in the present, against this horizon.23 Indeed, if the performance seemed to have nothing to say to us, in the present moment, there would be no reason for us to engage with its reproduction. 17 18 19 20 21 22 23

Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 327. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., p. 388. Ibid., p. 296. Ibid., p. 328. Ibid., p. 309. Ibid., p. 388.

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Although Benjamin and Gadamer were contemporaries and shared an interest in traditions of scriptural exegesis, they represented rather different schools of thought. Nevertheless, their ideas are compatible enough to allow Gadamer’s conception of our necessarily historical engagement with texts to shed some light on Benjamin’s concept of reactivation. Earlier, I described Benjamin’s understanding of reproduction as a one-way street that allows the original to meet the beholder, but does not allow the beholder to travel the other way to meet the original in its own circumstances. on its face, this schema seems quite different from Gadamer’s idea of the ‘hermeneutic conversation’, an ongoing process that moves perpetually back and forth between historical texts and their present-day interpreters. as I have indicated, however, Gadamer states explicitly that it is not possible for the beholder to experience the reproduced performance in its original circumstances (or horizon). Inasmuch as our encounter with any text must occur in the present, such an encounter necessarily entails the performance’s coming to meet the beholder: ‘understanding always implies that the tradition reaching us speaks into the present’.24 the street clearly runs only in one direction for Gadamer, as well. Another area of potential disagreement between Benjamin and Gadamer concerns the status of the original. There is an apparent objectivity to Benjamin’s discussion of the historical emplacement of the original: traditionally, it was a unique, auratic object; when that object was displaced and replaced by its surrogates through mechanical reproduction, its status was irreversibly altered. Gadamer, seemingly by contrast, argues that the original possesses no objective characteristics (such as aura or its lack). As Joel C. Weinsheimer notes, Gadamer writes that the object of history ‘does not exist in itself. It does exist in relation and mediation, and only there’.25 But this distinction holds only if one believes that Benjamin considered the aura to be an intrinsic characteristic of the object. some commentators take the view, correctly in my estimation, that aura is not a characteristic of the object but an effect of the beholder’s historically conditioned perception of the object. Kaja Silverman, for example, points out that Benjamin’s initial formulation could be taken to imply that the aura is something inherent in the art object, something which is lost with mechanical reproduction. A few pages later, however, Benjamin associates the aura with the “cult” value enjoyed by the work of art before the advent of photography, suggesting that it would be more correct to characterize the aura in terms of a social “attitude” toward the work of art, than a property inherent in it.26 24 Ibid., p. 328. 25 Joel c. Weinsheimer, Gadamer’s Hermeneutics (New Haven, 1985), p. 173. original emphasis. 26 Kaja Silverman, The Threshold of the Visible World (New York, London, 1996), p. 94.

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On this view, the concept of aura is entirely compatible with Gadamer’s idea that the identity of the original is produced through an encounter with a present audience and its horizon. as that horizon shifts, which it inevitably does, so shifts the perceived status of the original object. More speculatively, I argue that Benjamin’s notion of reactivation is compatible with Gadamer’s concept of the ‘fusion of horizons’ that occurs in the encounter between a historical text and its present-day beholder. By ‘fusion’, Gadamer does not mean a synthesis of the past horizon and the present one. this would be impossible, as we can never comprehend a past horizon purely in its own terms. the fusion Gadamer has in mind is of horizons that are always already imbricated with one another: the current horizon is a product of the past, of history, and our assumptions about past horizons are always projected from the present horizon. By ‘fusion’ Gadamer seems to mean an ongoing, never resolved conversation between horizons. We continually test our assumptions about the past through our encounters with its artefacts. ‘Every encounter with tradition … involves the experience of a tension between the text and the present.’27 the fusion of horizons is not the resolution of that tension but, rather, the recognition of its necessity. Dolphy’s music speaks into the present from 1961 and I hear it in 2008. The performance enjoys continued life due to the reproduction through which it is reactivated each and every time I play the recording. from what circumstances or horizon it speaks, and of what it speaks, are sticky questions. Benjamin’s claim that reproduction strips the original of historical authenticity suggests that, as reproduced and deprived of the ability to provide historical testimony, it speaks not only to the present but also only in and of the present. Gadamer, I think, would agree with this, as far as it goes: for a text to be understandable and of interest to us, it must speak into and of the present. If it speaks only of and to the past, it is of no current value. Thinking about Benjamin’s idea of historical testimony in relation to Gadamer’s hermeneutic conversation, however, gives us a way of admitting that although we experience recorded performances as unfolding in the present, we nevertheless perceive them in relation to their origins, albeit always as understood from our present horizon. In Gadamer’s view, we cannot perceive the recorded performance in the context of its own horizon; neither can the performance fully occupy our horizon. It can speak into the present, from an implied elsewhere, but cannot give us objective information about its own horizon. We can understand that horizon only as a projection from our own, which we must continually test and revise through conversations with the text. (That our relationship to the text is never settled may account for why a recorded performance can remain interesting to us despite repeated exposures that might be supposed eventually to lead to predictability and boredom.28) 27 Gadamer, Truth and Method, p. 306. 28 Lee B. Brown argues that the repetitious experience offered by recordings must lead to boredom on the part of the listener in ‘Phonography, Repetition and Spontaneity’, Philosophy and Literature, 24 (2000): 111–25.

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Gadamer’s notion of ‘fusion’, the irresolvable but productive tension between our current experience of something and our knowing that it comes from a context different than our own, coloured by our also knowing that the text’s alterity is not an objective quality but a relation to our horizon, helps me to understand what Benjamin may have meant by ‘halfway’. With that one word, Benjamin seems to imply that the original does not fully surrender all of the things he claims it does when reproduced, that it is still tethered, however tenuously, to its history, albeit a history it can no longer recount but that the beholder may seek in traces still detectable in the object, like the viewer scrutinizing the photograph for anticipations of the present in the past. When I listen to a recording of Dolphy, I hear a performance happen for me now, a performance that has something to say to me now. I also know that the same performance happened in 1961, for an audience to whom it meant something. the tensions between what this performance is for me, now; the fact that it speaks from a different horizon I cannot occupy; and what I think it may have been for its original audience (though this might not necessarily concern me) are intrinsic to the experience of reactivated performances.

the present moment While researching a project on jazz performance, I explored today’s DIY mega(if not meta-) archive, YouTube.com (http://www.youtube.com), in search of video clips. one that caught my interest is of miles Davis performing So What as part of a television concert ilmed in New York City on 2 April 1959. This clip has been posted to Youtube at least ten different times, and the clips are not identical. one of the central differences is whether or not the announcer and titles from the original television production, The Sound of Miles Davis, are included or excluded. there is also wide variation in the information provided about the clip. one source notes two DVDs on which the clip can be found, but dates the performance to 1958 and provides no information about the television broadcast. another describes it as by the miles Davis Quintet with the Gil evans orchestra, which is correct, though not usually acknowledged. still another contributor dates the clip by saying ‘Supposed to be “1959”’. Most of this information is provided in annotations one has to click to see. But clearly visible without clicking, in bold, is the date each clip was posted to Youtube.com. a number of commentators suggest that one of the hallmarks of postmodern/ digital culture is a distinctive temporality. fredric Jameson argues that whereas time was the cultural dominant of modernism, space is the dominant of postmodernism, leading to ‘the reduction [of time] to the present’.29 W.J. thomas mitchell describes the postmodern present by saying, ‘We live in a time that is best described as a limbo of continually deferred expectations and anxieties. everything is about to 29 713.

Fredric Jameson, ‘The End of Temporality’, Critical Inquiry, 29 (Summer 2003):

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happen, or perhaps has already happened without our noticing it.’30 Sue-Ellen Case observes, the category termed “real time”, in which both duration and presentness occur, is countered by the digital image. for example, compare how images recorded on video – which imply that they happened some where at some speciic time – differ from those on a website, which seem to exist within an electronic space that connotes no “where” or time outside of its frame. although images might be loaded onto the web at a certain time, that time is not necessarily a referent in their composition.31

Finally, Susan Broadhurst claims that ‘digitally processed contents require different than ordinary habits of reading – reading digital contents demands thinking in terms of “indifferent differentiation” … a thinking that makes little distinction between the referent and meaning, or for that matter between “reality” and representation’.32 Presumably, one is safe in adding ‘past and present’ to her list. If this synoptic overview of postmodern temporality is accurate, it raises serious questions about whether the kind of engagement with recorded performances I have been at pains to describe could still be the normative experience. If the only tense is the present tense, there is no need for reactivation as all texts are always already active. Both Benjamin’s description of the original’s meeting the beholder halfway through reproduction and Gadamer’s concept of the fusion of horizons suppose a kind of perception informed by an active sense of the recorded performance’s temporal alterity, the sense that it does not belong fully to the present even as it unfolds before us. If temporal alterity were no longer part of our structure of feeling, to use Raymond Williams’s term, if everything were reduced to the present, it would no longer be possible to form a present horizon from which to project the horizon of the other, particularly if the present is as unknowable as mitchell suggests. my Youtube experience suggests that these critics may be right. In fairness, the contributors to Youtube are enthusiasts, not archivists, and cannot be expected to offer the most pristine versions of the clips they upload and full annotation as to their contents and provenance. Grigely would presumably argue that one should see each clip as a fresh textual production rather than a more or less successful approximation of some idealized Ur-clip. Nevertheless, the design of the YouTube 30 W.J. Thomas Mitchell, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Biocybernetic Reproduction’, Modernism/Modernity, 10/3 (2003): 489. 31 Sue-Ellen Case, ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes: The Naked Body and Theories of Performance’, SubStance, 31/2–3 (2002): 194. 32 Susan Broadhurst, ‘Intelligence, Interaction, Reaction, and Performance’, in Susan Broadhurst and Josephine Machon (eds), Performance and Technology (Houndmills, 2006), pp. 147–8.

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site leaves the inclusion of contextual information to the discretion of the contributor and actually seems to suppress it, foregrounding instead the moment at which the clip entered this particular electronic environment. as case suggests, the temporality governing YouTube is self-referential and emphasizes the present – the point at which the clip you can see now became available – or, at most, a very shallow sense of the past, over ‘real’ historical time. The consequence of this for my engagement with the recorded performance is clear. to take but one example, if I am to be able to project the horizon of the original event as it is reactivated through the recording, it is useful to know that it comes from a historical moment when there actually could be a show called The Sound of Miles Davis on Us network television. (As Gadamer insists, I can understand this cultural horizon only as a projection from my own; from this vantage, US culture in 1959 seems very distant and foreign.) When I played a video clip of Jefferson airplane performing Somebody to Love at the 1967 monterey International Pop festival for a class, one of my students recognized the song as something he knew through a trance remix. He provided me with the track, which turned out to be the Ian Knowles remix of the Boogie Pimps’ enormously popular dance mix of the song, made in 2003. at one level, I hear this track as an enactment of Gadamer’s hermeneutic conversation, in which two historically distinct musical genres feel each other out to see what the past has to say to the present, what sense of that past can be produced in relation to the present horizon. Such remixes also exemplify for me Gadamer’s ‘fusion of horizons’ in that although the conversation occurs in relation to the current horizon, neither genre fully subsumes the other, and no third genre or text emerges as a synthesis of the two. The proliferation of remixes – the Boogie Pimps’ EP Somebody to Love features seven other Ibiza trance mixes and remixes of the song – shows that the hermeneutic conversation continues, with no deinitive rejoinder possible. What interests me here is not just the track, but also my student’s relationship to it. although he is a fan of Ibiza trance, he claimed to have no idea where he had obtained this track or exactly who had produced it. It was simply part of some kind of bulk download he had dumped onto his hard drive. He clearly had listened to it and was aware of its presence in his collection, but it was unclear whether he had any interest in identifying it beyond that and whether seeing Jefferson airplane perform the song in any way inluenced his understanding of the remix. Broadhurst’s concept of ‘indifferent differentiation’ seems an apt description of both what I experienced on YouTube and my student’s relationship to his digital music collection. Differentiation in terms of such traditional variables as source, time and place of origin – horizon, in short – just doesn’t seem very operational any more. In saying this, I do not intend a negative judgement against either Youtubers or my student; I am grateful to both for circulating recorded performances with which I engage with pleasure even as I feel uncertain as to just what the terms under which I am offered the opportunity for engagement are. I agree with Jameson that it is far more important to try to recognize new patterns and how they play out epistemologically and culturally than it is to wag a

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judgemental inger at practices arising from them: ‘It is the system that generates a speciic temporality and that then expresses that temporality through the cultural forms and symptoms in question. moralizing is not a very effective way of dealing with those symptoms, nor indeed with the end of temporality itself’.33 Probably, indifferent differentiation really means differentiation according to a new set of variables not yet fully comprehensible in relation to my horizon, as Jameson suggests when he refers, somewhat opaquely, to postmodern culture as one in which ‘some new nonchronological and nontemporal pattern of immediacies comes into being’.34 It is worth noting, however, that Benjamin anticipated the idea of immediacy deined in spatial terms that Jameson suggests with the concept of reactivation, in which the reproduced original regains temporal immediacy by appearing in the perceiver’s space. The change in our structure of feeling to which Jameson alludes is signiicant, but it is also another chapter in the history of human sense perception, understood as something continually reshaped in relation to new media and the experiences they afford, initiated by Benjamin.

33 34

Ibid., p. 718. Jameson, ‘The End of Temporality’, p. 707.

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chapter 7

moving audiences: strategies of exposure in the Work of Gob squad Patrick Primavesi

at the Volksbühne in Berlin, the spectators are invited to have a look behind a screen wall. there, they can see something like a living room with a sofa, a kitchen and a place for sleeping. When the audience is seated in front of the screen, the show starts in silence except for the roaring noise of a projector, white frames and a ilm being counted down. Two igures appear in the hazy atmosphere of a ilm in bad condition; then the picture becomes clearer. The transition from what might have looked like a ilm projection to video screening is obvious, though the image remains black and white. Here we are, at the beginning of the performance Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good) (2007). Accompanied by a soprano aria from a radio, a young actor, in close-up, proclaims enthusiastically the event that has already started – a restaging of Andy Warhol’s Film Kitchen: it’s just a kitchen and some people kind of doing things really, but it’s 1965 and it’s New York, and let me tell you: the times they are changing! We are at the beginning of everything: sexual liberation, gay rights, feminism, sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll. Superstars are gonna become the gods, the Internet, the age of technology is gonna grip the nations of the world in a great explosion of PoP!1

Perhaps the whole performance is about us, the spectators in front of a screen, which simultaneously hides and exposes the actors doing something live. But what is it that we are looking at? What are we witnessing? It is not just a remake of a Warhol ilm but a re-enactment of the action of everyday life as documented by him in the 1960s. The way Gob Squad use audio-visual technology in this performance creates an atmosphere of experimentation, including failure and loss. the production plays with the desire to go back to a moment in the past and become part of the historic offspring of Pop, as art form and lifestyle. It deconstructs 1 In the Berlin performance I saw in June 2008, this prologue was spoken in German by Bastian trost. He and nina tecklenburg played in the kitchen, while simon Will was doing the Screen Test part on the right screen and Berit stumpf the conversation in Sleep on the left screen. my comments generally refer to the performance from 31 may 2007, Nottingham Playhouse (recorded by Gob Squad), although some different elements of the German version are indicated.

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the attempt to inscribe oneself into the mythical community of the ‘Factory’, represented on stage also by two other Warhol ilms: Sleep and Screen Test No. 1. These ilms are presented in the same way as Kitchen, with lickering lights and countdown numbers. On the left screen we see Sarah Thom (or Berit Stumpf) helping a ‘sleeper’ to re-enact Warhol’s ilm Sleep, in which a young man sleeps for eight hours. on the right, Screen Test No. 1 reveals Sean Patten (or Simon Will) sitting on a sofa, like the people in Warhol’s Screen Test ilms who were exposed (more or less) unknowingly to a camera in order to show their natural behaviour. But the audience of this event is confronted with a double situation, the exposure of an exposure, between the making of (a ilm) and a theatrical performance.

figure 7.1 Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater volksbühne Berlin, 2007: sarah thom, Laura tonke, nina tecklenburg, sean Patten

Source: Gob Squad © 2007, with permission. Photo – David Baltzer.

The setting of Gob Squad’s performance already relects (ex)changes between the media, despite attempts to insist on ontological differences.2 Whereas Warhol’s ilms playfully demonstrate the inluence of television on everyday life, the reenactment of these ilms on a stage today shows strategies of post-dramatic theatre forms, through the integration of performance art elements and the rejection of character and traditional role-play.3 The task of re-enactment was developed 2 Susan Sontag once speciied the difference between theatre and all kinds of media in the assumption that ‘one can make a movie “of” a play but not a play “of” a movie’. Susan Sontag, ‘Film and Theatre’, TDR: Tulane Drama Review, 11/1 (1966), p. 25. 3 Cf. Hans-Thies Lehmann, Postdramatic Theatre, trans. K. Juers-Munby (London and new York, 2006).

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more recently to get hold of the history of performance art and to deconstruct the mythical aura of these events – against the idea of live performance as resistance to any reproducibility.4 Gob Squad’s attempt to apply this quite ambiguous procedure to Warhol’s ilms succeeds in demonstrating their own theatricality and also the manifold interrelations between performance art, ilm and video technologies.

figure 7.2 Both sides of the screen in Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater volksbühne Berlin, 2007

Source: Gob Squad © 2007, with permission. Photo – David Baltzer.

However, there is a problem with the ‘real’ actors that hybridize the re-enactment such that it becomes ob-scene: acting exposes itself, by its failure to re-enact nonacting. In Gob Squad’s piece, the ‘sleeper’ complains on the Sleep-Screen that he/she cannot sleep at all whereas Sean (Simon), dressed in white shirt and tie, is pleased with being ilmed and watched. Screen Test No. 2 is performed by sharon smith, who covers her head with a transparent bag in a kind of suicidal experiment for a voyeuristic gaze.5 In the kitchen space, sarah talks about the death of a woman on TV and the process of dropping out of your friends’ memory. Music and atmosphere shift from melancholic, to psychedelic, to horror. the audience is moved both emotionally and physically by the possibility of taking a step behind the screen, into the ilm. At least some of the spectators become involved in the performance: they join the actors as ghosts in the machine, the phantasmatic 4 see Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London and New York, 1993), pp. 146–8. 5 In Berlin it was nina tecklenburg, who started to enact her Screen Test by putting cigarettes into her nostrils and dressing up with sunglasses and a fancy hat.

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sphere of the in-between – on the threshold between sender and receiver, stage and audience, physical and mediated presence. although it plays with elements of comedy, Gob Squad’s Kitchen turns out to be an allegoric commentary on some basic elements in the current ideology of media and performance: livenesss is demonstrated as fake, participation as a process of isolation in exposure, fun as a mode of hysterical overacting, and intermediality as a ghostly withdrawal of presence.6 Gob Squad’s remarkable success in moving audiences through the use of media technology is related to different strategies of exposure, inside and outside theatre spaces.

Crossing the border between theatre and the outside world Since 1994 Gob Squad has produced more than thirty works: site-speciic and/ or durational performances, video installations, live radio broadcasts, live ilms, interactive party performances and more. Since their irst contributions to the annual Glastonbury Festival, entertainment has been a basic element of Gob Squad’s work. With the production of Safe, an imaginary rock concert by an untrained band (1999), they also began to perform on the stages of conventional theatre buildings. As Berit Stumpf remarked, these theatre stages were treated ‘in a sitespeciic way’, according to their particular conditions.7 Thus many of Gob Squad’s works challenge the way theatre is ‘normally’ produced (with professional actors, trained to play their part in dramatic texts). a Gob squad member acts rather as persona somewhere between the character of a particular show, an everyday-life person, and the image of a personality branded by the process of mediatization.8 subsequently, the spectator is challenged in a new way and is split into different functions, as voyeur, as more or less symbolic participant and as witness, who feels responsible for what he/she is actually watching. Some examples of Gob Squad’s work may demonstrate the process of research, experimentation and development they have been undertaking together with their audiences for more than fourteen years now.9 one of the early works that I personally remember is the site-speciic performance 15 Minutes to Comply at 6 the discourse on liveness and intermediality is mapped in Philip auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (London and New York, 1999); and Freda Chapple and Chiel Kattenbelt (eds), Intermediality in Theatre and Performance (Amsterdam and new York, 2006). 7 Berit Stumpf and Sean Patten, ‘Live is Life. Gespräch mit Kathrin Tiedemann’, in Therese Hörnigk, Bettina Masuch and Frank M. Raddatz (eds), TheaterKulturVision: Arbeitsbuch von Theater der Zeit (Berlin, 1998), pp. 34–8 (in German). 8 For the notion of the ‘persona’ see Philip Auslander, From Acting to Performance: Essays in Modernism and Postmodernism (London and New York, 1997), pp. 39–41; and auslander, Liveness, p. 33. 9 see Gob squad, The Making of a Memory: 10 Years of Gob Squad Remembered in Words and Pictures (Berlin, 2005), pp. 163–73.

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Documenta X in Kassel (1997). Gob Squad (and Stefan Pucher) had 15 minutes to engage with their audience in an underground tram station. members of the group performed different modes of waiting on a platform opposite the spectators. Video projections were screened on advertising boards, showing a dog running or a playstation-ride enhanced by choral music. Until the end, when the actors got on a real tram and left the audience, the performance was a kaleidoscope of moments of daily life. I still remember how dense those 15 minutes were until suddenly the actors disappeared, smiling and waving.

figure 7.3 15 Minutes to Comply, Documenta X, Kassel, 1997: Liane sommers, sean Patten, Berit stumpf, thorsten Eibeler, stefan Pucher, sarah thom, alex Large

Source: Gob Squad © 1997, with permission. Photo – Friedemann Simon.

A whole series of Gob Squad’s works from the 1990s played with the use of performance boxes made of mirrored perspex walls, enabling the spectators to look at the actors inside a glass cage, whereas the actors themselves could only see mirrors from the inside: Show and Tell (Frankfurt/Main, 1996), Close Enough to Kiss (Munich, 1997) and the durational performance What Are You Looking At? (Berlin, 1998). In changing outits, the group played with the exposure of private parties, dinners, secret meetings and so on in a public space, commenting on the artiicial intimacy in spectacles and the TV. Again, the audience was free to walk around the box and reduce the watching distance to a minimum, yet remained separated from the scene. Gob squad continued to work outside as, for example, with Calling Laika – a secret meeting under the stars, a site-speciic performance at a car park (Frankfurt/ Main, 1998). The tension between a performance space and the real world ‘outside’ was further elaborated in some performances where Gob squad used the theatre as

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a starting point or terminus for a trip. The Great Outdoors (Berlin, 2001) started on a stage, with six actors in a tent having breakfast and preparing for their expedition through the city. one after the other they left the theatre but kept sending signals via mobile phones and video projections. These signals gradually got weaker, until the audience was completely abandoned.

figure 7.4 The Great Outdoors, Berlin, 2001: simon Will

Source: Gob Squad © 2001, with permission. Photo – Miles Chalcraft.

Casting spectators: ‘Just be yourself, that’s it!’ Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot, a multi-perspective ilm event (Berlin, 2003), questioned the idea of ‘public’ space as a sphere of common interest as much as the power of performance art to change the world. the show started with the end of a trip as the audience was asked to welcome the actors coming from outside the theatre with cheers, sparklers and streamers. The structure of the ‘outside’ productions was thus transferred back into the spatial arrangement of an interior. In Room Service (Help me make it through the night), a live interactive ilm (Hamburg, 2003), the audience was placed in the conference room of a hotel, able to communicate with four Gob squad actors, who were isolated in their rooms but connected via telephone and video camera.

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figure 7.5 Prater Saga 3: In diesem Kiez ist der Teufel eine Goldmine, Prater volksbühne Berlin, 2004: Passer-by as ‘Bigman’, Elyce semenec, simon Will

Source: Gob Squad © 2004, with permission. Photo – David Baltzer.

The idea of casting passers-by was introduced in Gob Squad’s performance of Prater-Saga 3: In diesem Kiez ist der Teufel eine Goldmine, based on a text by René Pollesch (Berlin, 2004).10 While the show was starting on stage, actors were approaching passers-by at the street in front of the theatre, trying to cast them for three characters. the correlation between the stage and real life outside became intensiied, as the audience watched not only the inal show, but also the whole process of actors casting the passers-by and negotiating the job and the fee, projected on a video screen. For King Kong Club, an interactive ilm event (Berlin, 2005), the spectators were dressed in overalls and weird ape masks. They were asked to participate in making a movie, which was immediately edited and presented in the theatre. In this ilm, all the actions that had happened earlier became meaningful: the spectators watched themselves as actors at a fancy-dress ball. This led to a murder scene and an explosion at the end of the ilm: a house blowing up that replaced the venue of the party itself.

10

see rené Pollesch, Prater Saga (Berlin, 2005), pp. 141–71.

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figure 7.6 King Kong Club, Hebbel am ufer, Berlin, 2005

Source: Gob Squad © 2005, with permission. Photo – David Baltzer.

Conclusions/perspectives Gob Squad create ‘situations full of passion and big emotions’11 as a mixture of precise technology and personal commitment. Between the transformation of a site into a performance space on the one hand and the presentation of actors in a halftransparent cage on the other, there are varying degrees of intimacy versus distance between actors and audience. Gob Squad explore different strategies of (re)connecting the theatre with the outside world through a whole range of installations, as well as the use of technological mediation of presence and absence. the main purpose of these events is to be found in the very process of exposure and the ways in which both actors and spectators engage with it. members of Gob squad throw themselves into their shows challenging acting in the traditional sense. they reveal themselves, but without the pretence and pathos of individual characters.

11 Kathrin Tiedemann in ‘Room Service’, in Gob Squad, The Making of a Memory, p. 116.

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Anyone can take on any part, as in Bertolt Brecht’s learning plays, such as The Oceanlight or The Baden Baden Lesson on Consent (1929), where the part of the heroic individual is questioned as such: the participants are learning to exchange their parts and to say We instead of I. Gob Squad’s performances allow for interchangeable positions. there is no claim of authenticity or truth to a character, rather, notions of doubt, imperfection and failure. this approach helps to establish open, experimental situations together with the audience. even when the mutual contact is reduced to a minimum, the process of exposure turns the theatrical act of representation into a situation of shared presence, constantly relecting on its own preconditions.

figure 7.7 Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater volksbühne Berlin, 2007: simon Will, sean Patten, Berit stumpf

Note: Gob Squad © 2007, with permission. Photo – David Baltzer.

the Kitchen performance may be regarded as a perfect example for Gob Squad’s ability to create unique moments of co-presence with their audience. At the end of a long discussion between simon and sarah as to whether he would be able to replace her on the Sleep screen, he suggests looking for someone in the audience who is already tired. they step out in front of the screen and choose a spectator to do the eight-hour sleeping job. They then go on to have a party in the kitchen, trying to perform a historical moment of the avant-garde. Simon returns to his original prediction, that in the future this ilm will be regarded as the offspring of the whole Western culture of Pop, democracy and imperial capitalism. He references the bombings of Hiroshima, Vietnam and Baghdad and, suddenly, he has a moment of disappointment. While the kitchen party is reaching its climax, simon steps out of the screen and watches it from outside, together with the audience. thus he exposes himself again as being on the borderline between different realities,

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ictions and attitudes. The others call him back: ‘Simon? Simon, don’t stay out there, there is nothing, it’s over out there!’ He turns to the audience and asks for someone to replace him. finally, all the actors sit amongst the spectators while their doubles play their parts following instructions through headphones. When the spectator-actors start talking to each other the black and white picture of the screen switches to colour – as if real life had returned to the kitchen. The ‘feeling of loss and melancholy’ and the moment of emptiness from which the whole experiment started are still present, but they are now transferred onto the spectators through their position on stage and their action in front of the video camera. emptiness has become simulation and thereby another kind of reality: ‘they’re faking it, until it becomes real’, as Andy Warhol said.12

figure 7.8 Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Prater volksbühne Berlin, 2007 Source: Gob Squad © 2007, with permission. Photo – David Baltzer.

In this performance, as in many others, the screen on stage marks not so much an ontological opposition between reality and iction, but rather a threshold between different kinds of mediatization and liveness. thus Gob Squad’s Kitchen could be considered the essence of the group’s work so far. What remains for the future? Saving the World, as the title of their new production maintains.

12 andy Warhol, quoted in the programme for Gob Squad’s Kitchen, Volksbühne Berlin, 2007. Baudrillard’s concept of simulation points in the same direction. See Jean Baudrillard, Simulations, trans. P. Foss et al. (New York, 1983), p. 57.

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figure 7.9 Saving the World, Hebbel am ufer, Berlin, 2008: Berit stumpf and passers-by

Source: Gob Squad © 2008, with permission. Photo – David Baltzer.

Again the audience is placed in front of screens, speciically seven screens in a semi-circle. Seven projections with pre-recorded material add up to a panoramic view of a public square in the city where the show is performed (2008 in Hamburg, Mannheim and Berlin). A whole day is ‘saved’, preserved by the recorded images of everyday life. a magician and four Gob squad actors appear on the screen among the passers-by and explain their task to them: to save a reality that will be lost in the future. Suddenly, the ‘real’ actors in the theatre rise from their seats behind the audience and start arguing with their screen images of a past time. Our position as audience is questioned again – haven’t we changed too, facing an irretrievable loss in watching this show? Saving the World, after Super Night Shot and Kitchen, reinforces Gob Squad’s research on the relationship between ‘live absence’ and ‘mediated presence’. Instead of maintaining the reality of theatrical performance against the technological apparatus, their ‘live ilms’ (and video performances) show the interdependence between them. there is no return to an unmediatized performance, as there is no way out of the circle of representation towards a pure, unmediated presence.13 Gob Squad’s attempts to expose actors and audiences test those boundaries and challenge our roles as voyeurs, witnesses or participants.

13 See Jacques Derrida, ‘The Theater of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation’, in Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass (Chicago, 1978), pp. 232–50.

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chapter 8

How to Kidnap your audiences: an Interview with matt adams from Blast theory Maria Chatzichristodoulou (aka Maria X)

Portslade, august 2007. I am here to interview matt adams, spokesperson for the internationally renowned British group Blast theory. Led by matt adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, Blast Theory create projects that merge different technologies and dramaturgical structures, converging disciplines such as live performance, media arts and games. their work explores the relationship between real, virtual and ictional with a focus on the socio-political aspects of technology and how these affect social dynamics. Whereas Blast Theory’s projects successfully target wide and diverse audiences by operating on a usually simple, accessible and playful irst layer, they often consist of multiple layers one can ‘peel off’ to engage with increasingly deep, more nuanced and subtler aspects of the work. In these performances, audiences are placed ‘centre-stage’: they are being kidnapped and surveyed (Kidnap, 1998); chased around real and virtual cities (Can You See Me Now?, 2001–); put in black cabs, side streets, hotel rooms, empty ofices (Desert Rain, 2000; Uncle Roy All Around You, 2003); asked to locate mysterious protagonists or create their own characters (Uncle Roy All Around You; Day of the Figurines, 2006); even asked to commit to emotionally supporting a stranger for a year (Uncle Roy All Around You). In this kind of work, active involvement with the piece is a prerequisite. * * * Maria X: Do you perceive a shift in your work over the years? It seems to me that your early practice, though rooted in the club scene, was closer to the traditions of live art and/or theatre compared to your current work, which seems very strongly related to media arts and gaming. matt adams: I see strong continuities in the work that we have made. our early work, especially projects like Gunmen Kill Three (1991), Chemical Wedding (1992) and Stampede (1994), is already incredibly divergent from traditional theatre practice. We did not perceive ourselves as working within a live art tradition either – in fact, the term live art barely existed at the time. In terms of how our work has

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progressed, I still see a very strong performative element in our current projects, although that is sometimes less prominent. Day of the Figurines, for example, is very different from live performance. even so, I see it as an improvisational theatrical process where people are invited to create characters, represent those characters and act out with other people interactive improvisational narratives. Other projects are more performative: Rider Spoke (2007) invites people to record things at a particular time, in a particular place, and then gives them the opportunity to cycle around to ind other people’s recordings. We are still incredibly engaged with the idea of performance, the idea of a performer and an audience member having a live exchange or interaction in a particular moment in time and place – this is the animating principle behind much of the work that we want to make.

figure 8.1 Rider Spoke, Blast theory (2007) Source: © Blast theory, with permission.

MX: How did you start using technology in your work? ma: right from the beginning, we were very interested in how we might create a fully immersive performance environment in which several things can compete simultaneously for the audience’s attention. We were interested in how this might enable audiences to construct an experience, how they might deal with a sense of overload in order to develop their understanding of what is happening. all our early works were promenades, so they were putting the audience’s body in a situation where one had to decide where to turn to look, how to position oneself. This is how an audience member is constructing an experience by iltering his/her understanding of what is going on.

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mX: as you said, from the very outset of your practice audiences are encouraged to create their own experiences. after some point though they become a really integral active element of the work. How did this develop? ma: there was always an interest in the relationship between audience and performer, and how we can dismantle that. one of the reasons we were so fascinated by clubs was the sense that this was a completely luid environment in which the centre of attention was constantly shifting and entirely subjective. We were interested in how we can have a complex, subtle, nuanced exchange with our audience: they come, they sit in the dark, they watch and we present … But what else can happen, which other methods might we use? This is partly to do with an interest in communication systems and in how these can potentially be socially and politically transformative. so we are looking at what role technology might play in opening up new terrains in theatre practice. the critical moment in that lineage is perhaps Kidnap, because we wanted to make a piece about giving up control. the questions were: in what ways do audience members give up control to the performers on stage? Why do they do that and how can we expose this? How can we play with this boundary? The idea we came up with was to allow audience members themselves to be at the very centre of the piece, to actually be the protagonists. We suddenly thought that the ultimate destination of that process of enquiry would be to ask our audiences to be kidnapped by us, allow us to take complete control of their existence over a period of two days.

figure 8.2 Kidnap, Blast theory (1998): russell, one of the winners of the kidnapping competition, is taken hostage Source: © Blast theory, with permission.

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mX: In the video documentation of Kidnap1 you mention that your audiences (participants, ‘victims’) are 50 per cent of your artwork. This is also the case in all your works that I have experienced: audiences are always asked to engage with your projects as active participants, whereas the projects are structured in such a way that they cannot materialize without the audience’s involvement. Nevertheless I wonder how much you really are prepared to push the boundaries between artists/ performers and audiences/participants? What I mean is that, though audiences are clearly central in your work, they are also given strict guidelines in terms of how they can engage with it. To an extent, they are asked to ‘perform’ speciic roles in pre-written scenarios, which they have limited agency to affect or change. ma: this varies from work to work … this is a key question though. clearly there have been some experiments, John Cage’s 4.332 perhaps being the most extreme example, where the artist is being completely removed and all that s/he does is set a start and an end time while everything else is to do with the audience’s listening. there are a lot of other such experiments from fluxus onwards.3 mX: Yes. I was wondering whether a lot of this work could possibly be considered more risky in terms of its outcomes compared to yours, which seems to be quite closely observed and controlled. You are extremely careful in how you frame your work. ma: our work is certainly tremendously controlled and we are very careful, I think that is absolutely true. the question is, given the fact that those experiments have already happened and have taken things to extreme limits, where do we now want to situate ourselves? Our projects are not hollow intellectual and aesthetic experiments, they are pieces of work that are looking to engage with, and ask particular questions about, the culture in which we exist. If you take Kidnap as an example, the question we set ourselves was: why do so many of us give up control so readily to others and what is the pleasure in that? Clearly there is something about giving up control that we actually like, that we are drawn to, and this is counter to our Westernized notion of the agency of the individual. What is the appeal in taking drugs, getting drunk or extremely angry and being completely out 1 Accessible through the Live Art Development Agency’s archive, visit http://www. thisisliveart.co.uk/ [accessed 9 september 2008]. 2 John Cage’s piece 4.33 (1952) was a three-act composition, which lasted for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, during which the performer (David Tudor) sat in front of a piano without playing a single note. He only marked the beginning and end of each movement by closing and opening the keyboard lid. In this way, cage shifted the focus from the performer (and the sound he was expected to produce) to the sounds of the environments and the listeners themselves. 3 Other such examples are Yoko Ono’s instruction pieces, which are short, zen-like sets of instructions for actions that the audiences were invited to imagine and/or perform. see Yoko ono, Grapefruit (London, 1970).

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of control? Or in handing control over to politicians, religious leaders or others? Why do we leech so much agency away from ourselves? As artists we are trying to set very particular parameters in place, so that the nature of both the freedom and the rules that you as an audience have been given when interacting with a piece are articulate and invite you to think in certain ways. Can You See Me Now? is a good example of that: it is essentially a playground game and you interact, but how much can you do? It is actually a quite narrow ield of interaction. But the parameters that you are able to play with are precisely evocative within the context of the work. those parameters are the building components on which that work generates meaning and emotional impact.

figure 8.3 Can You See Me Now? Blast theory (2001) Source: © Blast theory, with permission.

mX: thinking again of Kidnap, it is interesting to compare it to a piece like marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0 (1974), where there were various objects on the table the audience could use on her. amongst these, there were a gun and a bullet. at some point, an audience member loaded the gun and pointed it at her. While Abramović abandoned herself completely into the hands of her audiences, in Kidnap you ask for exactly the opposite, that is, for your audiences to abandon themselves completely into the hands of the artists. Why do you think it is that, whereas both practices situate audiences in the centre of the piece, their approach to audience involvement is so radically different? MA: The difference is, I think, that Abramović and the traditions she springs from are primarily interested in the language of performativity itself. I perceive

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those practices as relective about the relationship between artists and audiences. Whereas the people who experienced Kidnap were not invited to relect on the relationship between the artist and the audience in the irst instance. This is a piece about kidnapping, an incredibly powerful political and pop-cultural social force. During the 1970s, some of the most important political discussions in Western urban culture were happening via the medium of kidnapping, if you look at the Baader-Meinhof gang in Germany, for example. We always attempt to put those formal enquiries at a subservience to the terrain of ideas that we are looking to explore and relect upon. That is why Abramović’s work takes place in a gallery and is very heavily documented as a historical moment in performance history, whereas Kidnap took place on the streets of London and was observed in a completely different way. mX: It seems to me that your relationship with your audiences often becomes very intimate. In the video documentation of Kidnap, for example, I watched you feeding the blind-folded ‘victim’, taking him to the toilet, waiting outside, taking him to wash his hands … all this seemed to build an extremely intimate interaction. another example is Can You See Me Now?: although the piece encourages the development of very different types of relationships, certain audience members have discussed how they got emotionally involved and felt really close to the runners while they were playing.4 Is this affective relationship with your audiences intentional?

figure 8.4 Can You See Me Now? Blast theory (2001): Kids are joining in the chase game Source: © Blast theory, with permission. 4 See ‘Can You See Me Now?’ at http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_cysmn.html [accessed 9 september 2008].

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ma: I think it is partly intentional and partly out of our control. It is only in the last couple of years that it has become obvious to us that our interest in locative media and work with mobile devices as in Can You See Me Now? is partly about how we can negotiate our relationship with strangers in the city. How you exist in an urban space, how you ind the strength or the mechanism that enables you to have relationships with other people or with strangers, and what the political ramiications of this might be. And I think that they are very strong. Over time we came to an understanding of how politics is actually within everything, it is infused in our behaviour. How we relate to someone who asks us directions is a political act. This is how we create a body politic, through that type of interrelationship. at an intellectual level that is really important to us whereas at an emotional, almost subconscious, level, I think that Ju, nick and I are looking for ways in which you can have those moments of epiphany with a stranger. It is rare that you have an interesting engagement with strangers, but when it happens it is a thrilling moment! How you deine a political moment is very subjective and I do not object to people who describe our work as apolitical. Nevertheless, our projects are about the social organization of the world being conjured up out of personal relationships and one-on-one interactions. To me, that’s politics. mX: In an interview5 you discuss that one of the reasons you are working with games is that, as a cultural phenomenon, they are more accessible than other types of art, and easier for audiences to understand and participate in. are you actively trying to address wider audiences? MA: For me this is essential. I believe that certain art practices are inward-looking, self-relexive, over-intellectualized and framed with far too much meaning. We want to make work that 15-year-olds ind exciting. Of course it is a naïve emotional impulse to say that we want to make work that always has this possibility. It is a completely limsy structure on which to build, but this is not to say that the opposite is true. We have been criticized for being supericial because we are happy to collaborate with the corporate world and we don’t have a critical – that is oppositional – relationship to capitalism. But my belief is that a lot of new media art work, being self-consciously political, is impenetrable and that to me is the antithesis of political engagement. I do not attempt to be dismissive of a whole section of practice; I am just trying to explain, through emphasizing the differences, where I see us as quite divergent from some other media art practices.

5 See Sabine Breitsameter, ‘The Urban Environment as Computer Game. Matt Adams in Conversation with Sabine Breitsameter’, Audiohyperspace (June 2004). Available at http://www.swr.de/swr2/audiohyperspace/engl_version/interview/adams.html [accessed 9 september 2008].

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mX: on your website you describe how you are trying to incorporate social dynamics into live events, such as Day of the Figurines,6 as a method of scripting these events. In another interview you mention that one of the reasons you work with games is that they are ‘part of social and political dialogues’.7 What exactly do you mean by that?

figure 8.5 Day of the Figurines, Blast theory (2006): Eve, one of the igurines Source: © Blast theory, with permission.

ma: one of the starting points for us, and a real interest in our work, is a belief that popular culture is an enormously signiicant political form, which is less readily acknowledged than we realize. on the other hand, we live in an age when technology is considered a democratizing force which allows people to engage with each other in different ways, access information, email their mPs … and the question that we come back to so often is: who is able to speak and what are they allowed to say? That is very much a refrain in the work that we are currently 6 Day of the Figurines is set in a ictional city, which is dark, littered and in decay. The game unfolds over a total of twenty-four days, each day representing an hour in the life of the city. a series of both mundane and catastrophic events is taking place during this period of time. How the players respond to these events and to each other creates an urban community with its own social dynamics. see http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/bt/work_day_ of_igurines.html [accessed 9 September 2008]. 7 See Aleks Krotoski, ‘Alternative Reality Gaming: Interview with Blast Theory’, The Guardian Games Blog (April 2005). Available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/ gamesblog/2005/apr/19/alternativerea [accessed 11 september 2008].

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making, particularly during the last four or ive years. The question is: if these technologies are enabling us to speak to different people and to strangers, or discover new relationships with new communities, what are the limits of these new spaces that are being created? What are these new relationships? What do we mean when we say community? To what extent do these technologies function as consumerist, solipsistic toys? Do they generate social transformations where it really is possible for people to blog from Iraq and make us more aware of what it is like to be inside the war zone, for example? These issues are being very heavily contested right now. But that is not to say that we make political work, because the thing that we learned from the irst years of making work is that any piece is inherently boring if you know what the artist thinks. this is where activism and art become terribly confused for me: this is not what artistic enterprise is about. It is about accepting the full complexity and confusion of our existence, and trying to represent these enormously ineffable issues. and always hover outside of our understanding, always be un-graspable in some ways, because it is so important to be able to ind forms that enable us to represent this complexity. It is such a dificult process … MX: You say that, through your work, you want to ind new interfaces to connect the digital with the physical, the real with the virtual. from my personal experience, the boundaries between the real and the ictional or virtual are always vague, confused and dificult to trace in your projects. For example, Kidnap participants said, after the event, that they were upset about what was happening at the time as they did not know where the limits were, where this experience would stop or how far it would go. Why is your work always situated within this edge? ma: this is the root of drama: it is about people getting up and pretending to do something with enough conviction that you believe them. mX: Well, in your case you make audiences actually do it themselves. ma: Ha ha! Yes, but this is a natural extension … a man puts a round piece of cardboard on his head and says, this is a crown and I’m a prince. And theatre is you sitting there, being prepared to believe that he is the Prince of Denmark. So the question is, where does this leave us now, within our super-personalized, individualized, super-mediatized age, when we can all create personas all of the time so that we have multiple fractions of ourselves spilling out in different directions? through social networking sites, for example, we all represent different slices of our personality. How can we make sense of the world when we are overwhelmed with different sources of information, when there is such a luid boundary between fact and iction? Slavoj Žižek discusses this in The Desert of the Real.8 it is the 8 See Slavoj Žižek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates (London, 2002).

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matrix, this completely blank tabula rasa into which reality is created. We have always sought to create work that represents that. mX: on the other hand, I think that your work differentiates itself considerably from the Baudrillardian discourse on the simulacrum,9 exactly because it tends to point to the real. In a lot of social networking sites and virtual communities the discussions are concerned with whether the actions and commitments that take place or are being formed there are being carried out into the real world or whether they remain virtual, and what this entails. In your work it seems that the actions and commitments which occur during the game world are carried out in the everyday life, in the realm of the real, whether this is the commitment you make at the end of Uncle Roy to support a stranger for a year, or whether this is being sent text messages every day for a month in Day of the Figurines … I ind this kind of reversal really interesting.

figure 8.6 Uncle Roy All Around You, Blast theory (2003): the interface on the players’ handheld computers Source: © Blast theory, with permission.

9 In his book Simulacra and Simulation, Jean Baudrillard claims that, in modern society, reality has been replaced by cultural and media symbols and signs, which he calls simulacra. He argues that simulacra do not conceal the truth but have become the truth, whereas our experience of reality has become the experience of the simulation of a reality, which no longer exists. see Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, trans. s.f. Glaser (Michigan, 1996).

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ma: Yes, it is a reversal. that is where my very simple, pragmatic approach comes in which says ‘yes, the Gulf War did take place’, it is quite straightforward. And the question is: if we accept that we live in the society of the spectacle, that the simulacrum is everywhere, how can we exist? What do we do when we get up in the morning? How do we relate to things and to each other? I think that is why this sense about the real world re-imposing itself into such conceits is such a current and on-going thread in our work. mX: Gabriella Giannachi describes your work as virtual theatre.10 I was wondering, since you come from a theatrical background, how do you envisage the theatre of the future? ma: Well, you know, we are trying to make it! Ha ha!

response: Gabriella Giannachi Blast Theory’s work has consistently challenged its audiences by redeining the boundaries within which they are implicated. such boundaries include dramaturgy, so that, for instance, audiences are often torn between different modes of spectatorship and participation; liveness, in that audiences, who experience a mixed reality, are actually made to encounter each other, as well as other performers, or even bystanders, and commit an act of trust that outlives the performance itself; collaboration, because audiences can often only navigate or advance in their experience by cooperating with and to some extent controlling each other; and mediation, so that not only are the ictional spaces and times set up in their work the result of complex processes of remediation but they also generate an entirely new perspective, that of a mixed reality, through which to experience both the artwork, and the everyday life context within which this is set. In his interview with maria X, matt adams mentions that Blast theory are interested in setting up performative environments ‘in which several things can compete simultaneously for the audience’s attention’. This creation of an excess of signs, but also of an uncomfortable context within which these, whether physical or digital, have become somewhat blurred into one another, is certainly the case of games such as Uncle Roy All Round You where participants reported mistaking passers-by for Blast Theory members. On the other hand, a more pervasive context is at the heart of Rider Spoke and Day of the Figurines, where participants had to negotiate their role and participation in the game, which in the case of the latter lasted over twenty-four days, from within the context of their everyday life.

10 see Gabriella Giannachi, Virtual Theatres: An Introduction (London and New York, 2004).

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In The Politics of New Media Theatre11 I present Blast Theory’s work as political. this is not only because the company create spaces which are aesthetically and socially transformative, but also because they problematize the very ways by which we use technology as a lens and language to experience everyday life. Here, technology does impact directly on whom we choose to be, in our relationships with others and in our engagement with locality as materiality, and in the ways these inform each other. so, as adams suggests, Kidnap is about ‘giving up control’, but also being controlled. It is about looking and being looked at. It is about trust and endurance. Can You See Me Now is about controlling distant runners whose experience of the cityscape in which the work takes place ends up constituting the only live context for our own experience of it. there is a Joycean, powerful epiphanic mechanism that propels most of this company’s locative media work to do with Verfremdung and the very politics of technology, the language of art.

11 see Gabriella Giannachi, The Politics of New Media Theatre (Oxon and New York, 2007).

Part 4 Politics

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chapter 9

The Tendency to ‘Trans-’: The Political aesthetics of the Biogrammatic zone sher Doruff It has been suggested that extending the concept of the diagram into the biogram might be a vector worth pursuing. formal topologies are not enough. the biogram is a lived topological event. It is onto-topological. It is the event of experience folding back on itself for its own furtherance, its continuing becoming […] the biogram is experience reaccessing its powers of emergence, for more effect. It is the existential equivalent of lifting oneself up by the bootstraps: ontogenetic and autopoietic.1 for politics precedes being. Practice does not come after the emplacement of the terms and their relations, but actively participates in the drawing of the lines […]2

extending the concept of the diagram, as explored by foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, to its living complement – the biogram – is worth pursuing. It provides a means of envisioning and revisioning the centralized Fold or ‘zone of subjectiication’ drawn by Deleuze in his overview of Foucault’s diagrammatic ontology.3 Why might this be of interest in addressing the political aesthetics that situate a performative interface? The diagram and its immanent operative, the biogram, propose a process through which the unstable forces of a social ield affect how art and life are performed and lived. How the power relations between these forces charge and guide the individuating subject amidst the multiple contingencies of acting otherwise. the diagram sketches its own propensity to elide the present via a future-past. Improvisation, as a technique and aesthetic, presents a means to explore the relations between power, resistance, knowledge and praxis through the dynamic interface of a biogramming diagram. In this way, the biogram functions as a translocal, onto-topological ‘site’ for a biopolitics of resistance. But resistance, especially when couched within the diagrammatics of the performative, complexiies. It can be construed as a dynamic variable 1 Brian massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, nc, 2002), p. 206. 2 Gilles Deleuze and felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian massumi (Minneapolis, 1987), p. 203. 3 Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, trans. Seán Hand (Minneapolis, 2000).

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impeding and accessing relational intensities of chaos and control immanent to the social ield it inhabits, creates and experiences, re-markably drawing upon that oscillating relation through techniques of performative action. the focus in this chapter will turn towards reinventing the folding diagrammatic ‘zone of subjectiication’ proffered by Deleuze through Foucault, as a biogrammatic performative interface, a lived transcoding of the unformed/ unthought (ontogenesis) and the formalizing (autopoietic) encounter between content and expression. the map that best articulates this diagram runs through and across a simondonian inspired process of individuation4 accessed by contingent relations and shifting differentials. Resistance,5 as a proposition, will tend towards transductive operations capable of intensifying and/or attenuating the relations between disparate forces. These abstractions will be speciically tunnelled through Liveart6 performance practice: 1) through translocal (networked) performance styles experienced in the vj/dj genre; 2) with a nod towards the hacktive. But irst, a preliminary overview of the diagrammatic is useful.

0º phase: How to diagram a diagram How does a diagram diagram? Massumi has called this process ‘the dynamic interrelation of relations’.7 It’s a deinition that can be applied to performance practice and more generally, lived experience. a contemporary theoretical bootstrap in architectural discourse, the dynamic cartography of the diagram resonates equally well with the variable nuance, the indeterminate affect, of the

4 ‘The individual is to be understood as having a relative reality, occupying only a certain phase of the whole being in question – a phase that therefore carries the implication of a preceding preindividual state, and that, even after individuation, does not exist in isolation, since individuation does not exhaust in the single act of its appearance all the potentials embedded in the preindividual state’. Gilbert Simondon, ‘The Genesis of the Individual’, in Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, trans. m. cohen and S. Kwinter (New York, 1995) p. 300. 5 ‘Where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power’. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume One (New York, 1978), p. 9. 6 ‘LiveArt is an umbrella term, a conceptual framework for live arts practice that dynamically slips between the more stratiied genres of the performing arts such as dance, theatre, music, and now, games. Its tenet, if one could dare to call it that, is its resistance to representation, to the inscription of meaning, through its embrace of process. Its very liveness and insistence on change and transformation is integral to its practice. the concerns of Liveart are not about crossing boundaries per se, but favour the dissolution of boundaries into emergent forms’. Sher Doruff, Connected! LiveArt (Amsterdam, 2005), p. 6. 7 Brian massumi, A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: Deviations from Deleuze and Guattari (Cambridge, 1992), p. 16.

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processual, the performative. Indeed, Deleuze has commented in crafting his turn on Foucault’s vision: this is a different kind of diagram, a different machine, closer to theater than to the factory; it involves a different relation between forces […] this is because the diagram is highly unstable or luid, continually churning up matter and functions in a way likely to create change […] every diagram is intersocial and constantly evolving.8

the constantly churning change, open to intersocial dynamics, aptly describes the compositional forces (not the composed forms) and phase-shifting differentials modulated by chance, common to all performance practice in varying degrees. Every diagram is interfaced through a subjective zone or dimension. From this perspective, the biogram will be introduced as a way of describing that subjective zone as a performative interface with a dual function: as a conduit for channelling a heightened sensitivity to the relational events produced by intersecting, unformed forces on the out-side of the diagram; and the selection, iltering of perceptions to forms of content and expression (things, artefacts, meanings, gestures) emerging from the content/expression encounter on the in-side.

the diagram as abstract machine and its hinge ‘Diagramma’ in the original Greek, refers to the wax tablet philosophers once used to compose ideas before committing them to papyrus with a stylus.9 the blackboard and chalk of the mathematician, the notebook of the artist, the sketch of the architect, the inked napkin from the brainstorm lunch, the vectorial indications of the choreographer – all exhibit diagrammatic tendencies, the matter-movement of the not-yet-formalized. There are co-extensive registers of relation present between diagramming as an abstract machine and as a formalizing realization of that abstraction – those sketches, drawings and mappings making their way to form, to the desired construction of the aggregate, the more or less concrete assemblage. the movement of thought, sensation and intuition between these registers provokes strategies for thinking processually through the politics of the abstract diagram to the aesthetic politics of the making of and the made; the relation of informal to 8 Deleuze, Foucault, pp. 34–5. 9 Kenneth J. Knoespel, ‘Diagrams as Piloting Devices in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’, in Deleuze – chantier (Vincennes, 2001). Knoespel notes that diagramma does ‘not simply mean something that is marked out by lines, a igure, a form or a plan, but also carries a second connotation of marking or crossing out […] the diagram participates in a genealogy of igures that moves from the wax tablet to the computer screen […]’ suggesting that ‘that any igure that is drawn is accompanied by an expectancy that it will be redrawn [...]’ (p. 147).

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formal. The abstract machine, the informal out-side of the diagrammatic ‘makes no distinction between content and expression, as a discursive formation and a non-discursive formation’.10 Its virtual, a-signiications of unformed matter and unformalized functions are on the move: ‘They constitute the dynamic “matter” of expression. When they settle into rearticulations, they become “substances”: formed functional elements of either content […] or expression …’11 this distinction cannot be stressed enough. for it is in the formalizing, looping movement of rearticulation, the becoming-substance of expressive matter, that the concept of the biogram makes sense as an ethico-aesthetic interface, pulsing within a larger diagrammatic scheme. so an informal diagram maps the unformed and unstable forces that affect mutations to the conceptual givens of a project’s design: all those possibilities that are most likely to actualize in a making process through habit, know-how, style. The diagram as abstract machine maps, in a Spinozian turn: ‘the relations between forces unique to a particular formation; it is the distribution of the power to affect and the power to be affected […]’.12 the distribution of affective power presents another viable relation to performance practice and political action. In further describing the forces of the abstract machine, Deleuze has commented that relations between these forces tend ‘to incite, to provoke, to combine [..]’.13 strategic thought and provocation, from a foucauldian perspective, is the power/ resistance relation emerging from the action of force upon force. It can be as affectively pre-formative as it is intensely performative. the abstract machine plays out in a theatre of power/resistance relations between compositional forces. It is through the interface of the fold that the diagram continually re-emerges as a new map through its own biogrammatic eventness. It is not yet of content, not yet of substance. It is a process of becoming through shifting and folding. The biogram-as-interface, ontogenetic and autopoietic, draws off the re-markable14 as it re-marks the drawn; enables praxis of something Massumi has recently called a ‘thinking-feeling of what happens’.15 It maps intensities of echo and relay between individual and milieu as it modulates the transductive encounter between content and expression becoming forms of content and expression. It 10 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 34 11 Brian Massumi, ‘Introduction: Like a Thought’, in Brian Massumi (ed.), A Shock to Thought (London, 2002), p. xx. 12 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 72. 13 Ibid., p. 27 14 ‘Remarkable’ has a triple reference: 1) to Deleuze’s notion of the ‘remarkable’ prehension that distinguishes itself and is ‘drawn into clarity’ to become a conscious perception (Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque, London, 2006, p. 104); 2) to ‘diagramma’ which is a marking and a re-marking tending towards a visual display; and 3) the comment or remark which tends towards the utterance. 15 Brian Massumi, ‘The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation’, Inlexion, 1/1 (2008), http://erinmanning.lunarpages.net/inlexions/htm/ node/massumi.html.

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affords the concretizing and conservation of its process as it stratiies. The biogrammatic then, individuates the speciic features of a diagram, its far-fromequilibrium process of perpetually coming into being.

90º phase: from fold to phase-shift to fold the diagram, through its biogrammatic interface, generates a political aesthetic in which action is felt through the affective modulations and/or tonalities it incites. a doubling occurs in the moving towards realization, the rearticulation, of the becoming-visibility/utterance. This doubling divides in a central differentiation, referencing a voluminous vocabulary of the interstitial – issure, gap, disjunction, rupture, in-between, crack, interface, fold, non-place – descriptors of a rift between content and expression, necessary for realization. Deleuze sums up the crux of this foucauldian argument: things can be realized only through doubling or dissociation, creating divergent forms among which they can be distributed. It is here that we see the great dualities: between different classes, or the governing and the governed, or the public and the private. But more than this, it is here that the two forms of realization diverge or become differentiated: a form of expression and a form of content, a discursive and a non-discursive form, the form of the visible and the form of the articulable. It is precisely because the immanent cause, in both its matter and functions, disregards form, that it is realized on the basis of a central differentiation which, on the one hand will form visible matter, and on the other will formalize articulable functions.16

It can be argued that this central differentiation or interface distinguishes between the movements of two diagrammatic registers: out-side from in-side and the forms of realization. Transductive17 processes between these registers mark portals of entry through which all points of the diagram are in superposition, in passage as intensities of non-localizable relations from one point to another. the diagram distributes affective intensities within the situation it maps, the surroundings it ields.18 Deleuze elasticizes Foucault’s reach by translating his oeuvre within the folding/ unfolding of a knowledge-power-subjectivity continuum, mapping Foucault’s relays between the polarities of content/expression, visibilities/statements as they 16 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 38. 17 ‘Transduction is a process whereby a disparity or a difference is topologically and temporally restructured across some interface. It mediates different organizations of energy’. Adrian Mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (London, 2002), p. 25. 18 arakawa and madeleine Gins, The Architectural Body (Tuscaloosa, 2002), p. 7.

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differentiate and integrate through the folding ‘zone of subjectiication’, the force of the relation to oneself – the biogramming interface explored here. The ‘event’ of rearticulation, of knowledge capture and distribution: the topological dynamic mapped by the diagram, affected through the central differentiation (biogram): […] or the “non-place”, as foucault puts it, where the informal diagram is swallowed up and becomes embodied instead in two different directions that are necessarily divergent and irreducible. the concrete assemblages are therefore opened up by a crack that determines how the abstract machine performs.19

It’s the recursive process of swallowing up the relational intensities of a milieu and spitting back out certain selected somethings to be swallowed again that’s of particular interest to political aesthetics of the performative event. Foucault’s cartography of forces, power relations, affects, attractions and repulsions modulates the diagrammatic, exciting the fold that integrates and differentiates forms of realization in continuous variation. the virtual potential of the abstract machine’s unformed content (intensities) and non-formalized expression (functions) affect the actualizing occasions of knowledge as it distributes its relational dust. Deleuze’s somewhat odd diagramme de Foucault helps clarify this process.

figure 9.1 Deleuze’s diagramme de Foucault

Note: 1. Line of the outside; 2. Strategic Zone; 3. Strata; 4. Fold (zone of subjectiication). Source: © Deleuze (2000, 120), with permission.

19

Deleuze, Foucault, p. 38.

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appearing in the last chapter of his book on foucault, it depicts the diagrammatic.20 The line of the Outside (1), which draws the Fold (4) a relation of the out-side to inside/ a relation to oneself, separates the interplay of forces from the strategies and strata that ilter the affects of power relations becoming ‘the world of knowledge’. The central Fold of subjectiication, the zone of life, of biopolitical potential, is ‘hollowed out’, according to Deleuze, by the forces of the outside as they are realized in the strata. the residual dust of the affective relations produced by force upon force are distributed to the strata, where they both integrate and differentiate as polar forms of realization. The central issure attracts the strategic zigzagging of integration and differentiation between content and expression. Deleuze’s zone of the Fold is the ‘center of the cyclone’, the calm encircled by the maelstrom, where life is lived ‘par excellence’ as a ‘slow Being’.21 this zone, with some modiications, can be construed as a living interface, a living abstract machine, speciic to performativity: the biogram is a perceptual reliving: a folding back of experience on itself […] in such a way as to hold all its potential variations on itself in itself: in its own cumulatively open, self-referential event.22

That cumulatively open, self-referential (autopoietic) event tends towards the potentially overfull as much as to the calm, blue-sky emptiness of a cyclone’s eye portrayed by Deleuze. tends towards the drawing off of prehended, remarkable affective intensities as well as the drawing of relations. Both states, overfull and empty, complement and cancel through rhythmic variations of speed and slowness in a manner similar to the relation between power and resistance. Push/pull, contract/expand, ill/empty, dive in/hop over, cut/paste. The issure-as-biogram is a metastable, transductive conduit, embodied and distributed, transforming the reemergence of lived experience as expressive content. repeatedly.

Drawing o(f)f the zone the gist of the biogrammatic zone then is that the lived experience of our perception of the world is inclusive not only of multi-sensory stimuli but also of linguistic signs and movements of strategic thought: […] for all perceivers the biogram is the mode of being of the intrasensory hinge dimension . Its strange one-sided topology is the general plane of cross-reference not only for sights, sounds, touches, tastes, smells, and proprioceptions, but also 20 Indeed, it appears to draw a version of the three overlapping abstract machines delineated by Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus). 21 Ibid., pp. 122–3. 22 massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 194.

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Arguably, Deleuze’s diagram (Figure 9.1) falls short of mapping the disjunctive fold as biogrammatic. another doubling is needed. one speculative augmentation might look something like this:

figure 9.2 abstractions from Deleuze’s ‘diagramme de Foucault’

Note: Left: abstracted from Deleuze’s ‘diagramme de Foucault.’ This is the line of the Outside as Folding subjectiication. Right: To better express the movement of transductive relations of the biogrammatic, the Fold igure could be drawn as a one-sided topology of the möbius strip in a doubling process of looping and folding

Yet other speculative visualizations emerge when the continuous variation of push/ pull, contract/expand movements of integration and differentiation play out. these periodicities of intensity and relaxation resemble wave functions. It’s a rhythmic image that superimposes Simondon’s concept of individuation as phase-shift over both the folded and folding images of the ‘issure’ sketched in Figure 9.2. the speculative biogrammatic interface sketched in figure 9.4, however, produces more radical variations in the zone, focusing on the differential relations critical to the dynamic of the fold. In this sketch, the shifting phases of the zone produce an always-individuating centre, remaining open at one end to reduce a hierarchical, top-down perspective of out-side to in-side. It empties in the autonomy of a closed phase (180º), a centre of the cyclone eventspace in passage. Coherent and incoherent frequencies and amplitudes, speeds and slowness luctuate. Wave species interrelate as polyrhythmic durations in a dynamic ecology, in a total ield, of individuating subject and milieu.24 23 Ibid., p. 188. 24 technically of course, sound and light waves are different in kind and do not interrelate. Yet the empirical synaesthetic experience of intermodality, of everyday perceptual vision/sound intensities and cancellations begs a view on light/sound transduction in the biogrammatic zone as metaphysically viable.

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figure 9.3 re-marking relational movements (2008)

Note: Re-marking the relational movement between the forms of content and expression, between thought and the unthought, transduced through the fold, provides a more inclusive sketch of diagrammatic registers; 1. Line of the outside; 2. strategic zone; 3. strata; 4. Biogrammatic Zone (ontogenetic, individuating, transductive, hacktive).

This approach to the performative biogram elicits a drawing off and the drawing of – a drawing o(f)f the zone. It approximates the rhythmic expression of integration and differentiation that affects performativity/processuality in an art-making context. this sketch retraces the line of the outside that separates and enfolds the abstract machine from stratiied knowledge in a phase-folding subjectivity expressed as a transductive individuation. the differential relations of the phase shiftings constitute perceptual passageways. the transductive zigzag can be reconsidered, when situated in the diagram of a social network as a hacktive operation.

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figure 9.4 speculative re-imagining of the ‘diagramme de Foucault’ (2008)

Note: The proposed folding issure of Deleuze’s diagram mutates yet retains its folding properties through a Simondonian-inspired individuating phase-shift, producing the differential relations that effect variability/change in a total ield, suggesting the interplay of three different types of abstract machine proposed by Deleuze and Guattari (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 513).

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Phase 180º: re-markable resistance These sketches imagine the activity of the Zone. It’s a diagrammatic set-up for approaching the biopolitics of improvisation and resistance. In effect then, the biogrammatic is synergetic with what might be called diagrammatic praxis and can be considered ontogenetic to performing arts practice as it emphasizes the experience of practice becoming perception through transductive differential relations. artistic production has no monopoly on the creative, but it can and often does tease out the unpredictable through processes of creation pushed to mutational extremes. Francis Bacon’s diagram that sweeps the Sahara and the rhinoceros skin across the face of a painting is a well-worn, well-theorized example.25 Twentiethcentury practitioners from Klee to smithson, from stein to Burroughs, from cage to Lygia clark, from the Hub to Judson church represent a fraction of an extensive interdisciplinary list, coming readily to mind, whose work in some way ampliies the diagrammatic. The Situationists (1952–72), mutating from their Futurist, surrealist and Dadaist predecessors, were pivotal in introducing a variegated, mid-century political aesthetic (diagrammatically situated in ‘late’ capitalism), that traversed performative polemics and play: taking the détournement to the streets as both deiance and dérive. Debord et al. continue to affect contemporary political aesthetics as referents to an era in which resistance tended towards negation. A technique of ‘jamming’ that alludes to a breaking down and/or blocking the status quo; the tendency to assert destructive change on the form to create the new.26 Contemporary resistance (diagrammatically situated in ‘later,’ ‘just-in-time’ capitalism) tends to affect change on the compositional forces, not the form. the original terms are often left intact while the relation is transductively modulated. Example: constructive hacking. Current projects of hacker/FLOSS artists and improvisatory performers concerned with the ethical distribution of know-how through multiplicities of authorship such as the Bricolabs initiative, goto10, [share], dyne, cue Berlin among others,27 intervene and construct through diagrammatic points of entry, through biogrammatic interfacing. But how does resistance incite and provoke in this biopolitical diagram? as intimated, the diagram tends to trans-, moving across and through the biogram in a strategic zigzag. In figure 9.1, for example, Deleuze draws the strategic ‘plane’ (2) under the line of Outside that separates informal forces from the ‘visual dust and sonic echo’ of stratiied knowledge/thought.28 micropolitics 25 Gilles Deleuze, Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation (Minneapolis, 2003) p. 82. 26 otto Von Busch and Karl Palmås, Abstract Hactivism: The Making of a Hacker Culture (published online at http://www.kulturservern.se/wronsov/selfpassage/research/ AbstractHacktivism-book.pdf, 2006) [accessed 14 april 2009]. 27 http://bricolabs.net/; http://goto10.org/; http://share.dj/share/; http://dyne.org; http://cueberlin.blogspot.com/ [all accessed 14 april 2009]. 28 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 121.

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is the molecular movement of perceptions, attitudes, representational systems as transgressive lines of resistance (Foucault), lines of light (Deleuze) that decode the overcoded rigidity (segmentarity) of molar organization.29 micropolitics is apt to produce an ethical aesthetic of the affective kind. It resonates with artistic practice in addressing Foucault’s insight that ‘resistance comes irst’.30 Within the diagrammatic, micropolitics and microperceptions share resonant functions. Unconscious microperceptions at play in the differential relations of the biogrammatic zone are imperceptibly affective. a macroperception come to consciousness through differential iltering.31 Both micropolitics and microperceptions effectuate through the immanent cause to perceive, think, act and distribute through a diagrammatic process. Deleuze proposes a scenario for this process and hints at an embedded register of formalizing diagram as a political means: the collective ield of immanence where the assemblages form at a given moment, and where they trace their lines of light, also has a veritable diagram. We must ind then the complex assemblage capable of effectuating this diagram, by operating the conjunction of lines or of the points of deterritorialisation.32

Points of deterritorialization are cutting edges, the avant-garde as it were, of the distinguishing and convolving of matter and function. the transductive biogrammatic Zone plays a role in ‘operating’ or negotiating conjunctions of lines and points. Interestingly, this suggests that a tactical social network may emerge from this immanent collective ield. Practically, the transductive shares a certain operational synergy with the hacktive when the hacktive is perceived not as destructive ‘cracking’ but rather as constructive creative modulation.

transducing the virtuostic transduction is commonly perceived through everyday transformations of one form of energy into another. microphones, for example, transduce sound waves into electrical impulses that are transduced again from electrical energy to sound waves through speaker cones, even as the hair cells of the ear transduce those sound waves so that the full impact of a politician’s posturing can be appreciated. contextualized within the diagram, transduction operates the ontogenetic individuation of the biogrammatic Zone – a becoming ‘out of a domain of 29 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 223–4. 30 Deleuze, Foucault, p. 89. 31 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibnitz and the Baroque (London, 2006), pp. 97–113. 32 Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desire and Pleasure’, trans. Melissa McMahon (published online, 1997), http://www.artdes.monash.edu.au/globe/delfou.html [accessed 14 april 2009], emphasis added.

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unresolved tensions and potentials’.33 Individuations are phase-shifting ontogenetic processes: partial resolutions, metastabilities that produce an internal resonance.34 Individuations support transductive processes even as transductions individuate and consolidate. Performativity, of necessity, resonates with the power relations generated in the milieu of a social ield. Micropolitics foster these relations. Strategically, power may become dominating but as foucault has it, power is an action on possible actions. resistance to power as action need not be a negation, a reaction, but rather a creative vector, a transforming of a situation through active participation. What foucault called ethical action is akin to what francesco Varela has called ethical know-how, an immanent expertise whose only requirement is ‘full participation in a community’.35 Though the ‘fullness’ of participation may be a misleading yardstick, the transductive potential to alter or augment the power relation is of importance. It leads to an aesthetic politics that stimulates the ‘event-value’ of art production and attenuates its surplus or ‘exchange-value’;36 goes for invention ‘unsubordinated to external inalities’.37 the performing artist produces actions, the dynamic matter of expression. Which is not to say of course that it is work without exchange-value but, unlike an art object, it persists in the affect of its eventness – an artaffect resists commodiication.38 Hannah arendt pointed out the political dimensions of performative virtuosity and the performer–audience relation.39 Paolo Virno distinguishes post-Fordist virtuostic activity without end-product from commodity-producing labour. He references the performing arts by example: ‘One could say that every political action is virtuostic. every political action, in fact, shares with virtuosity a sense of contingency, the absence of a “inished product”, the immediate and unavoidable presence of others’.40 the conditions of Liveart practice generally take at least two forms: the immediacy of the live(d) experience as relational affect between 33 adrian mackenzie, Transductions: Bodies and Machines at Speed (London, 2002), p. 17. 34 Gilbert Simondon, ‘The Genesis of the Individual’, in Jonathon Crary and Sanford Kwinter (eds), Incorporations, trans. M. Cohen and S. Kwinter (New York, 1995), p. 305. 35 francisco J. Varela, Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition (Stanford, 1992), p. 24. 36 Massumi, ‘The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation’, p. 9. 37 Ibid., p. 10. 38 Rifing on the Deleuze–Guattarian notion of the artistic percept/affect, an artaffect deterritorializes the artefact. 39 ‘The performing arts […] have indeed a strong afinity with politics. Performing artists-dancers, play-actors, musicians, and the like – need an audience to show their virtuosity, just as acting men need the presence of others before whom they can appear; both need a publicly organized space for their “work”, and both depend upon others for the performance itself’ (Hannah Arendt, Between Past and Future, London, 1993), p. 154. 40 Paolo Virno, A Grammar of the Multitude (Los Angeles, 2004), p. 53.

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performer and participating audience and its eventual reproduction (rearticulation) as commodity/archive/thing (recording, documentation, repertoire, tour, website, blog). What is at stake in the bigger picture, in the diagram of a virtuostic, biogrammatic politics, is admittedly ambiguous. Just as there is qualitative matter in expression and expression in matter, there is qualitative event-value in an exchange-value paradigm, which in fact bolsters the force of its power relations. the economic engine of our time feeds on event potential becoming commodity. It grows and lourishes on the mass production of affective intensities. reciprocally, there are degrees of exchange-value in eventness. To establish a proposition for discussion of the relation between current Liveart practice and its cultural milieu, one might irst and speciically ask: How is a social ield distinguished from a social network, particularly of the Web 2.0 variety?

Phase 270º: the tendency to ‘trans-’ Tendency is a performed self-referencing to other states, past and potential. As such, it is a way in which an event in some sense, not necessarily consciously – in fact most often and in large part nonconsciously – feels itself, catches itself in the relational act. and in some sense, not yet separable from this feeling, nonsensuously thinks itself, in that very same act.41 certain synergies between Liveart practice, micropolitics and the biogram begin to shapeshift topologically. In this expressive movement, improvisation emerges as a creative relation of resistance and power between compositional forces; becomes a technique of aesthetic politicing. Improvisational practice has virtuostic tendencies. It champions the indeterminate; indulges the chaotic in its compositional ordering. In improvisational practice, as in a biogrammatic encounter, content and expression are indistinguishable, on the move. ‘No matter how formulated or codiied a diagrammatic continuum may appear, it can be written over, marking a moment of change.’42 This re-markable movement, when applied to a diagram of online, performative interchange, can be thought of as translocal lines and points. In the event of the LiveArt translocal jam, the operational conjunction of their passing through, of their cutting-edge deterritorialization doubles the nonplace of relation to oneself: 1) through the network; and 2) the ‘skin’ (line of the outside).

41 Massumi, ‘The Thinking-Feeling of What Happens: A Semblance of a Conversation’, p. 39. 42 Knoespel, Kenneth J., ‘Diagrams as Piloting Devices in the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze’, p. 160.

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translocal jamming collaborative performance making43 of the cross-media synthesis variety in the unruly, unstable, experimental 1990s to early 2000s, challenged thresholds of co-creation techniques.44 In its literal translocal variant (performance venues at a distance linked by internet technologies) it was all event-value. Technical failure was a prominent feature. Plug-and-play connectability was a distant concept. DIY hacking at relatively low levels of code was common and just-in-time. Surplusvalue tendencies bubbled up in the realm of intellectual property rights (IPR) for entrepreneurial software applications but most practitioners couldn’t yet envision a need or desire to commodify a performance product; so suffused with chance, instability and the experimental was the activity. It affected a pioneering generosity. For those interested in networked, bottom-up collaboration through real-time performance practice with the audience present in multiple locations, these were heady times. often, technical distractions overshadowed expressive content. But there were moments: events of felt intensities traversing a social ield qua network through the drawing o(f)f of performer/artist/audience spatio-temporal differential relations. Spatially: events of widely distributed translocal affect in which the nonplace of the network met the non-place of the performative biogrammatic Zone in an enveloping situatedness. temporally: events of felt continuity, of durational (poly)rhythmic interplay and a radical suspension of metric time. Politically: culture jamming as a line of light, a creative vector; hacking into diagrammatic relations to contribute through altering rather than negating.45 Enabling betatechnologies of that era provoked a fervour for participatory events through which an unpredictable and unstable technicity (Simondon’s notion of the transductivity of technical objects) saturated the experience of the content/expression encounter. The relations between forces construed in Foucault’s diagram foregrounds the co-extensive powerplay of action on possible actions between the performing artists and the functional limits of their tools. these relational negotiations are an important, remarkable aspect of translocal jamming. As compositional forces, they transform and re-diagram the oscillating encounter between chaos and order. 43 collaborative, distributed performances in which media data was synchronously co-processed and co-authored speciically refers to: KeyWorx events from 2000 to 2004 (see http://sprsearch.waag.org; also Sher Doruff, ‘The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram’ (online, 2006: http://spresearch.waag.org/images/TheTranslocalEvent.pdf); as well as early ResRocket music events; HotWiredLiveArt events (http://plot.bek.no/ hotwired/info.html); and the many distributed image and sound concerts using max/msp/ Jitter, pure data, nato and supercollider applications among others [all accessed 14 april 2009]. 44 This is an artiicial bracketing of a time period for coherence sake. There are ample examples of telematic performance using varieties of technology that naturally pre- and post-date the 1990s to early 2000s. 45 See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_jamming [accessed 14 April 2009]; see also von Busch and Palmås, Abstract Hactivism, pp. 40–41.

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as cooperative strategies, the collective composition emerges and perishes in a diagrammatic transformation modulated through the biogrammatic zones of the performers.

the transductive form of experience Massumi posits that the biogram is the form experience takes – ‘the “being” of the excess of effect over any determinate spatial coniguration’.46 an amalgam of perception and memory, repetitively repotentializing experience, the biogram registers the topological shapeshift of continuous change. Cross-modal referencing of perception leans towards the hypothesis that all experience is synaesthetically modulated. Visual-proprioceptive cross-referencing, for example, both stabilizes and dislodges a sense of place. It’s an everyday cross-sensory perception pertinent to a localized sense of online presence. a translocal sense of place emerges from the conditions of non-place previously established: the non-place of the internet encounter and the non-place of the biogram. The experience of congruent sensory modalities through the practice of digital media processing has speciic characteristics in real-time networked interplay. The performing is generally situated in the kinaesthetic space between the body and the computer screen/controllers (though this screen-based user scenario is increasingly less true as of this writing). the tendency of the performer to wormhole through the screen collaboratively to situate with co-makers was often experienced as a shared, affective, vibratory intensity rather than a pallid, non-sensational ‘disembodiment’. So the non-place of real-time online performance is the individuating event of modulation, vibration, rhythms and polyrhythms that deine the biogram as interface. During the Interfacing/Radiotopia/KeyWorx performance at DEAF03 (2003), performer pairs in Rotterdam and New York experienced their cooperative vj’ing (to Radiotopia’s dj’ing of audience uploaded audio samples) in liminal, translocal space: the non-place the diagrammatic.47 their attention was focused on dynamic multi-sensory transformations occurring within a synaesthetic dimension and the kinaesthetic arm-reach of a laptop screen and controller-tools. The milieu of the performance space at V2_ was resonant with the imperceptible and the mediated, feeding back into the transductive individuating: between performers, between performers and audience, between ambient spatial and temporal qualities. audience members contributed to the expression of content, sending text messages that triggered associative image results generated from the Google search engine. The performers’ conscious perceptions of the emerging and perishing synaesthetic forms during that four-hour performance could be thought of as event-dimensions 46 massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 186. 47 For more detail, see Doruff, ‘The Translocal Event and the Polyrhythmic Diagram’, pp. 107–39. See also http://framework.v2.nl/archive/archive/node/event/default. xslt/domain-deaf03/nodenr-148172 [accessed 14 April 2009].

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‘combining senses, tenses, and dimensions on a single surface’.48 on three projected surfaces the artist pairs (Teran/Jenneches, Redlinger/Loos, Vatsky/ Keesmaat) ‘diagrammed’ the encounter of visibilities and utterances, eliciting a grand loop in which the practice of improvisatory co-composing becomes its own perception. the heightened sensation of belonging together apparent in any group improvisatory performance (jazz, dance, sports, etc.) does not decrease when co-presence is synchronous, performative and translocal. If anything, it ampliies, as its spatio-temporal realities intensively modulate microperceptions in the non-place of the biogram.49 the biogrammatic zone becomes a rhythmic interval, oscillating between overfull and empty: inclusive of affective modalities, of creative iltering (integration and differentiation) and a permeable ‘being there’ of the skin’s surface. The biogram becomes a diagrammatic model of a Simondonian-style internal resonance in which whatever occurs in a point in a system repercussively, consequently, affects all others points in all directions. In translocal performance practice, embodied intensities and tonalities are distributed – in a sense, networked, in the social ield.

the diagram of controlspace But what of that nagging question concerning the relation between a social ield and an online, social network? Web 2.0 developments have changed the processes of dynamic, collective interfacing. there have been gains and losses. technological advances have brought a plug-and-play stability to the meet and greet, data-sharing encounter that has not necessarily enhanced the integration/differentiation transduction between content and expression. Plug-and-play is often plugged play, indicative of the overcoded abstract machine type – expressiveness constipated by prescriptive interfacing.50 In other words, much of the asynchronous interaction on contemporary social networking sites cannot be described as biogrammatic. the Web 2.0 paradigm however, is a diagram par excellence – one Deleuze would have been quick to cite as an exemplary ‘society of control’ model in which change is continuous, borders are permeable, realities contiguous and power affective.51 for Deleuze, the institutional enclosures of the society of discipline Foucault analysed ‘are molds, 48 massumi, Parables for the Virtual, pp. 186–7. 49 Ontogenetic microperceptions percolate in the differentials of the biogram (Figure 9.4). ‘Differential relations always select minute perceptions that play a role in each case, and bring to light or clarify the conscious perception that comes forth’ (Deleuze, The Fold, p. 102). 50 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 223–4. 51 Deleuze, Gilles, ‘Postscript on the Societies of Control’, (Cambridge, MA, 1992): pp. 3–7.

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distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point’.52 the paradox of the diagrammatic is clear. Which is to say that both synchronous and asynchronous play in the social networking context afforded by the corporately owned and regulated usual suspects (MySpace, facebook, friendster, Youtube, etc.) comes with additional, imperceptible layers of modulatory control that has shifted the power relation between in a translocal encounter from event-value to exchange-value. Remarkably. Affective exchangevalue between participating ‘clients’ is dynamically scaled to monetary exchangevalue digits. Even when the monetary exchange-value is ‘0’ or close to it (piracy sites, free downloads, creative commons, etc.), the activity in a Web 2.0 paradigm plays out in a commodity spectrum that was marginal in the short-lived period of unstable, experimental, processual event-value performativity. The diagram of the social ield pertinent to online performance practice has, true to its immanent nature, re-diagramed, becoming a non-place of imperceptible, corporate control. This has consequences as the forces of play, virtuosity and labour become increasingly indiscernible, losing the intensity of their relation. as the market value of affective modulations rises, the ontology of the creative event shifts; relations pass through every password. The subjective folding phase shift conspires in its own bi-lateral becoming. the diagram as a theoretical political aesthetic oscillates between the liberating and the dominating, the molecular and the molar, modulates between D&G’s abstract machines (overcoding, mutation and stratiication) depicted in Deleuze’s drawing of Foucault’s thought. The dynamics of the biogrammatic interface, the transductive pre-formative/performative Zone, offers some clues, a hacktive approach, to the creation and distribution of ethical know-how, to an emergent aesthetics of artistic practice that prehends the belonging-together of the diagrammatic. to round up and synopsize the divergent tangents presented here, it seems appropriate to conclude with a performer whose practice was of the zone.

Phase 360º: the remarkable transducer Michel Waisvisz (1949–2008) was a virtuoso of the biogrammatic zone.53 He lived as a transducer. the thick callouses on the tops of his hands, facing the out-side, were indicative of his relationship with his art and his audience. He played hard, crafting an improvisatory technique that hacked polarities. analog/digital, outside/ inside, content/expression – all at play in the event of his performing. His body, like few other performers, transduced the immediacy of thought and sensation, 52 Ibid. 53 michel Waiswisz was the Director of stichting steIm in amsterdam from 1981 to 2008. He was a musician, performer and inventor of electronic instruments. http://www. steim.org/; http://www.steim.org/michel/ [accessed 14 april 2009].

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transduced the ininite resolution of everything analogue to its digital capture and expression, transduced the content/expression encounter with style. a möbius loop, a living wire, a thinking circuit. His ingers and hands were conductive, his skin ‘a patchable cable, potentiometer and condensator’.54 Permeable, immediate, sensitive.

figure 9.5 Waiswisz tribute in second Life at the odyssey site (http://slurl.com/secondlife/Provincetown%20seashore/234/171/22/) Note: [accessed 16 august 2008]; His patafone instrument is pictured in the background. Source: screenshot from second Life by author.

the crackleBox,55 a 1970s invention by Waisvisz, is a simple circuit board with a quirky oscillator, sensitized to the interaction of skin conductance. as a concept and an instrument, it was seminal to his long-term investment with his second pair of Hands. through the intense physicality of his tunnelled awareness, from tiny, deliberate inger triggers to expansive arm/shoulder gestures, he modulated the continuous stream of his immediate experience with the transformative potential of the sound sample. His practice was diagrammatic. When Waisvisz performed, the play of forces swirling about the room in an affective continuum, doubled and re-doubled through his living circuit. Arms outstretched in a bifurcating igure, Waisvisz was master of the dynamic between chaos and control. The relational artaffect was palpable. The differential relations that ilter percolating microperceptions becoming empowered perception were uncannily transparent. Ambient qualities produced by the audience were essential to his technique just as the social ield is the immanent cause to the becoming of forms of realization, 54 Waiswisz, Michel, ‘Crackle History’ (2004) http://www.crackle.org/CrackleBox. htm [accessed 14 april 2009]. 55 Ibid.

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of content and expression, matter and function. Waisvisz drew the content of his expression from a vast database of soundings processed through software and wetware and the milieu that surrounded him. This quiet, intense drawing off, iltered through the whole of his body. He was resistor, capacitor, transistor, potentiometer, transducing outside and inside, content and expression. the outstretch of his arms, the porous membrane of his skin, the intermediary callous, the touch of ingertips on the small keypads, were of the biogrammatic, poetically, ardently, tangibly. Waisvisz played the indeterminate as it moved through the zone that is no place and everywhere; having no ixed identity, rather a shifting becoming. He folded and unfolded an ethical know-how in the event of improvisatory music-making. The politics of his insistent, rebellious art-making was an emergent, ephemeral aesthetic that somehow evaded the archival. so strong was it. His was virtuosity without end-product, without need of inality. Pure, provocative event-value.

chapter 10

Guillermo Gómez-Peña: Ethno-Techno Politics Guillermo Gómez Peña and Lorena Rivero de Beer

figure 10.1 What if Stelarc had been born in Tijuana? (from the mexterminator series, 1998)

Source: Photo – Eugenio Castro, with permission of the Pocha Nostra Archives.

The work of Guillermo Gómez-Peña always starts from a political standpoint emerging from his position as a Mexican-Chicano in the US. Since the beginning of his career, when he arrived as a mexican migrant in california in the late 1970s, Gómez-Peña has generated innovative forms of representation to challenge the dominant structures that bring minority groups to powerless positions. the term ‘Chicano’ refers to one of the ways in which the Mexican-American community identify themselves. It came into ‘popular usage during the Chicano Movimiento (movement) of the 1960s and 70s as Mexican-American activists sought to deine

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a cultural and political identity for themselves’.1 Chicanos’ use of this term was a response to their situation as border and marginalized citizens, a result of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) that inscribed half of Mexico’s territory within the United States territory. The reality for most of them was (and still is) a situation of powerlessness ‘resulting from limited political representation [and] police brutality’.2 chicanos have fought to create alternative forms of representing themselves, developing a speciic understanding of their own identity to challenge the binary US–Mexico relationship by highlighting their existence in between cultures. The chicano political movement integrated artists in unprecedented numbers. It worked with activists and intellectuals in order to ‘articulate the goals of a collective cultural project that would meld the social practice and cultural production’.3 one of their most interesting contributions relates to how they ‘create[d] [their] personal visual vocabulary [by] freely blending and juxtaposing symbols and images from African American, Native American, European and mestizo cultural sources’.4 as a result, the new meanings that emerged from such pieces were extremely rich in possible associations and political potential. In this context, Gómez-Peña’s artworks are seen as steadily exploring new models of the relationship between chicanos and the dominant Us society. In the early 1990s, when he founded his trans-disciplinary arts organization, La Pocha Nostra, Gómez-Peña’s work ventured to different social contexts by expanding an understanding of the relationship between dominant societies and minorities to a broader, more global level. Following Chicano artistic premises, Gómez-Peña’s work freely juxtaposes symbols and images to cast doubt on the dominant methods used to represent minorities by foregrounding the discursive contradictions that they generate. His representations explore questions of cultural, national and gender identity by focusing on the crossroads between the socially constructed self, the inner self and wider social power structures. In his poetic texts that follow, which are, as Gómez-Peña says, reincarnated in different aesthetic forms, the luidity of identity is both celebrated and feared. The texts distil the minority’s thrill and exhaustion in struggling to locate what cultural theorist Graham Dawson names ‘a position that is psychically integrated and socially recognized’.5

1 a chicana feminist homepage, http://www.chicanas.com [accessed 2 september 2008]. 2 chavez, ernesto, (My people First!) My Raza Primero!: Nationalism Identity and Insurgency in the Chicano Movement in Los Angeles 1966-1978 (Berkeley, CA, 2002), p. 6. 3 Ybarra-Frausto, Tomas (ed.), Gerardo Mosquera, Beyond the Fantastic: Contemporary Art Criticism from Latin America (Massachusetts, 1996), p. 165. 4 Ibid., p. 180 5 Dawson, Graham, Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and The Imagining of Masculinities (London, 1994), p. 43.

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Gómez-Peña’s performance works attempt to highlight the struggle faced by minorities in articulating one’s voice and representing the multi-layered complexity of difference in the new global reality. His work develops from the observation that a signiicant part of social life in Western society is becoming increasingly mediated by images and concepts that claim objectivity. In turn, this implies that the social experience has been replaced by a mediated representation of a social experience that never existed. In this frame, Gómez-Peña’s work explores alternative representations of minorities that ight the homogenizing discourse, as created by the global media: a discourse that disembodies the representations of minorities from the reality of their social, cultural and political standpoints. Furthering this notion, we can observe that in his texts, technologies (tools of the global media machine) function as a symbol that can be thought of in connection to the notion of the border. In chicano identity, the border symbolizes not only the imposed geographical border but also an internal one, one that separates chicanos from their culture of origin and their new adopted culture. Since they are rejected by both cultures, the border becomes the dividing line in which they are trapped, and also the space to claim their dual culture. This paradox also appears in GómezPeña’s use of technologies as symbols of power that have the potential to reinforce or threaten the intangible global border created by the dominant culture. If, from this standpoint, we adopt an intersubjective perspective in viewing the texts, we can observe how the ‘technological border’ functions as a symbolic object to help us observe and relect on issues confronted by minorities ighting to bridge the gap with the dominant ‘other’ in their attempts to co-join the fragmentation within the self. this is directly addressed in Ish bin ain Mexicanishes monster in Berlin when Gómez-Peña asks, while connecting with the audience through web casting, ‘Where is the border between you and me?’ The text uses the technological border created by the webcam to reify intersubjective issues and highlight questions of distance with the spectator. From this position, Gómez-Peña is able to investigate how love, collectivity and commonality can ind a way to cross physical, mental, symbolic, sexual and social borders of the new global order. adopting an alternative take on the issues raised above, X-treme Identity Crisis Online can be seen to trigger relections on the intricate relationship between the self and its representation. the text responds to a sense of loss of self in the distorted and disembodied world of the internet. In the poem, GómezPeña relects on the internet’s opportunity of one taking on different ephemeral identities. the text encourages us to feel as though the terse relationship between self and its representation on the internet is like shouting into the online world’s vacuum. Paradoxically, it also proposes the web as a political force that brings the possibility of rethinking our identities into a horizontal non-conformist position. this confronts the reader/audience member with questions about the constructed character of identity and points to wider issues concerning the origin of the power relationships that are forming such constructions. that is to say, the representation of the internet in the poems below can be seen as inferring a potential space in which to imagine social utopias. However, when we consider the internet in relation

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to the wider social structures that condition its access – through both economical and cultural borders – the bubble breaks. This paradox is beautifully expressed when Gómez-Peña mentions what could potentially be part of a transgressive alternative network: ‘Blind evangelical ministers from Arkansa team[ing] up with Scandinavian dominatrixes in their desperate search for heaven on earth’. By deining the latter as ‘meaningless chat rooms’ that made him ‘breathe anxiously’, the text expresses how the potential for utopia can be destroyed by the lack of connection between this approach to representing identity and political realities. Put simply, presenting the chat rooms as forms of escapism works against their eficacy as products of politically signiicant alliances. Love Conversation with My Computer represents Gómez-Peña’s bid to connect new technologies with a constant thematic of his work – fear and desire. In this poem, we are shown how new technologies, symbolized by the laptop, are able to function as a symbol for self-contradicting dominant US culture to enter into dialogue with Gómez-Peña, a real-life Chicano. The dialogue achieves great complexity through its liminal use of language. In abbreviating the sound of his acronyms in English (GeePee), taunting racist and sexually objectifying allusions to his body (describing his ingers as brown and greasy, for example), and sublimating Gómez-Peña’s spiritual powers, the computer is alluding to the notion that Gómez-Peña has become a container of defensive processes resulting from fear and the need to control (her) unconscious desires for more direct, real and passionate encounters. At the same time when Gómez-Peña expresses his desire for the laptop cyber body (‘your metallic torso is so cool’) it brings Chicano fascination with Western culture to the surface. The text relects a symbolic struggle to move beyond racism and cultural differences and bridge the gap between dominant Us culture and Chicanos by introducing a potential way to create more lexible and integrated identities. In the poem we are invited to question how we can bridge the gap between US and Chicano culture through the laptop’s suggestion of moving out of the symbolic realm to perform a real physical act on Gómez-Peña (as she pleas, ‘pee on me’) to fulil a narcissistic drive (to ilm it and put it on YouTube). this, however, foregrounds a border that is impossible to cross. such a border can be thought of as symbolically equivalent to the one created by hierarchical relationships, akin therefore, to the one prevalent throughout his politicized practice – between the dominant US and Chicano people.

toying with technology, by Guillermo Gómez Peña since the mid 1990s I have theorized about new technologies and the bittersweet relationship that Latino artists have with them; especially the highly political question of access. I’ve been particularly interested in what I term ‘imaginary or poetic technology,’ that is technology with strictly aesthetic, poetic or ritual purposes. My basic premise has been, when you don’t have access to something, you imagine this access. In the late 1990s my colleagues and I constructed a

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series of Chicano Cyborgs and artiicial savages with spare parts of imaginary technology and low-rider prosthetics. The following performance texts and photos included here express some of these concerns. Like most of my artwork, the texts have had multiple incarnations as live performances, videos and radio pieces; and the photos have been illustrations, posters and postcards. I believe in the border strategy of recycling.

figure 10.2 Chicano Ethno-Cyborg (from the museum of fetishized Identities, 1999)

Source: Photo – Courtesy of Performance Space, Sydney, with permission of the Pocha nostra archives.

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figure 10.3 Portrait of Gómez-Peña as El Anthropoloco, 2007

Source: Photo – Zach Gross, with permission of the Pocha Nostra Archives.

Guillermo Gómez-Peña

figure 10.4 Gómez-Peña as El Shaman Travesti (from the photo portfolio titled Ethno-Techno, 2005)

Source: Photo – Orlando Britto Jinorio, with permission of the Pocha Nostra Archives.

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figure 10.5 still from a Pocha nostra performance in arCo madrid, 2005 Source: Photo – Courtesy of Pocha Nostra Archives, with permission.

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El mad mex Confesses to His audience … Damas y caballeros Soy el Mad Mex, Chero psycho-killer; prototype 187-GQ conceived at mGm with body parts assembled in tJ/taiwan. cause’ all Mexican artists were made in Taiwan; our body parts assembled by German curators to perform X-treme art fuctions at expos, festivals & biennales Primary fuctions: 100 + identity morphing capabilities including el s&m zapatista el galant mariachi rocker X-rated narco brujo transgender dandy servidor que cruza y penetra vuestras inmensas nalgas transnacionales. Translation please? (an audience member translates) Delete. open accessories file: *chipotle squirting robo-jalapeño phallus to blind the migra when crossing over; shift. *software located in my *&^&% … $%&&& …. shift. *my intelligent tongue, mastica computer nacho chips imbedded in my *&^&% … $%&&& …. shift. *my poisonous lips mastican your delicious, delicious white lesh -cries El Chihuahua Chucky my favorite Mexi-cannibal pet right before devouring your hardware (I bark) Guillermo Gómez-Peña

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X-treme Identity Crisis online comPUter VoIce: ‘Hello Gómez-Peña, you’ve got mail’ normaL: What am I hearing? comPUter: ‘You’ve got a male inside of you … or so you think pendeja!’ normaL: shit! the computer is talking to me about gender. I think I’m losing it. You know locos, I’m tired of ex/changing identities on the net. (I speak in broken tongues) In the past 8 hours I have spoken 7 made-up languages at least I have visited 12 countries without leaving my room I have ‘interacted’ with 38 subcultures from around the globe I’ve been a man, a woman and a s/he. I’ve been black, Asian, Mixteco, German, an alien raptor, a multi-hybrid replicant. I’ve been 10 years old, 20, 42, 65 … & if these weren’t enough I’ve visited 30 meaningless chat rooms … w/names like (I breathe anxiously in between lines) ‘Asian Goths who sing mariachi music phonetically’ ‘Midget sex workers from Veracruz commit collective suicide for CNN.’ Weird sites carnales, shit like ‘Blind evangelical ministers from Arkansas team up with scandinavian dominatrixes in their desperate search for heaven on earth.’ (normal voice): That’s the pinche title! Unbelievable! They also have aicionado videos in sextube It’s endless…Our options are endless & I am temporarily lost within my cyber-labyrinth as you can see, I need a break real bad; I just want to be myself for a few minutes. at least for the duration of this performance But … is it possible to be one’s self in front of an audience? Guillermo Gómez-Peña

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Love conversation with my computer You know, I suffer from a bizarre sexual pathology: I have an erotic relationship with my lap-top. I’ll read a transcript from a conversation I had with her last night. she recorded it against my will, but since it is an anthropological curiosity, I decided to share it with you. Quote. GP: I’m gonna turn you on chica … (Sound of computer being turned on and then computer jingles) c: ahhhh … You literally turn me on mad mex, with your thick brown greasy ingers. Now touch my liquid screen with your left hand. GP: Asi? Are you horny? c: Yessss, muchiou; feel my subtle vibration; now access my hard drive … entrale! Go-Go-mex GP: Ahi voy … woooow! Como estas mi ciber-loca? C: Well, to tell you the truth, I haven’t had sex in 2 weeks. Since you went on tour, no one has started me, touched my keys, opened my virtual legs; no one. so go … go for it! Go-Mex! GP: Asi? Asi te gusta? Or rougher? c: no, touch me softly GeePee GP: Your metallic torso is so cool & your keys so perky like dozens of hard nipples C: Ay, just to hear you speak with that thick Mexican accent, makes me … mh. there is no english word for what I feel. GP: Good! You are becoming Mexicanized. Do you feel my ingers crawling all over your hardware? C: Yea, yes, yessss. Write something romantic on my torso; algo meta-físico GP: ‘My body is devoted to your hardware; my soul to your software. I am yours. You are mine. You are my parallel mind and body’. C: Vice versa loco. We’ve merged into one single identity. GP4.

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GP: cierto. You own my will. I am a mere expression of your desire. so tell me, what do you want me to do for you? C: Ay Gee Pee; pee on me, please, please, while I ilm you. We’ll put it on Youtube tonight. GP: No pinche way! It would be techno-hara-kiri for both. (Computer freezes suddenly) GP: oh no, error type 12 chingao … coitus interruptus again! restart the performance cabron! come on! chicano special effect #69: sPX type voice activator imbedded in my cobra tongue Guillermo Gómez-Peña

chapter 11

Performative science in an age of specialization: the case of critical art ensemble nicola triscott

the case of steve Kurtz, a founding member of the Us arts group critical art Ensemble, an artist who became the subject of a four-year FBI investigation into allegations of bioterrorism, highlights an extreme example of the pitfalls of invading specialist research and of exposing the control systems of one of the major transformative technologies of this age: biotechnology. This chapter discusses the work of Critical Art Ensemble (CAE), who engage directly and critically with the processes of science, exposing the performativity of science through tactics that include the presentation of scientiic techniques. In doing so, I will explore some of the artistic, tactical, ethical and legal issues that this work presents, including Kurtz’s ordeal with the FBI and the US Department of Justice. For the past decade, CAE has been developing projects addressing the politics of biotechnology, which have taken the form of participatory performances, books, ilms and installations. CAE’s participatory theatre aims to involve the public in the processes of biotechnology in order to contribute to the development of an informed and critical public discourse on contemporary bioscience. Speciic works in CAE’s practice have illuminated the politics and promotion of the human genome project, reproductive technologies, genetic screening, transgenics and genetically modiied food. What led to this art collective becoming caught up in a bioterror investigation was Kurtz’s habit of keeping art project materials – in this case school biology kits and other biotechnology materials – in his own home. In april 2004, I met steve Kurtz in edinburgh. I had previously worked with cae on their GenTerra project in 2002 and 2003 with my company The Arts catalyst,1 and we met to discuss a new collaboration. Kurtz had been researching the impact of the US government’s biowarfare research programme on public health programmes and he was interested in exploring the UK’s involvement in this area. We agreed to research this jointly with the aim of developing a new

1 the arts catalyst is a UK based arts company, commissioning art that experimentally and critically engages with science, http://www.artscatalyst.org [accessed 14 april 2009].

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participatory performance work in the UK. Kurtz returned to his home in Buffalo, where he was a professor of visual studies at the state University of new York. On 11 May 2004, Kurtz woke to ind that his wife of 24 years, Hope, had died in her sleep (of congenital heart failure). Police who responded to his 911 call noticed his home biology lab, became suspicious and called the fBI. the following day Kurtz was detained by FBI oficers and representatives of the special task force on terrorism. He was detained for 24 hours and interrogated at length. His house was seized by the fBI and sealed as a crime scene. Investigators in sealed white suits searched the house for three days, followed by three days of testing for biohazardous materials (the house was clear). They seized Kurtz’s art materials, computers, research materials and equipment, including his home-lab equipment, and his passport and personal documents. A week later, Kurtz’s CAE collaborators were served with subpoenas ordering them to appear before a grand jury to investigate possible violations of the law regarding biological weapons.2 A federal grand jury met in July 2004. The jury refused to bring any ‘bioterrorism’ charges against Kurtz, as requested by the FBI, but it did indict him on criminal mail and wire fraud charges. the charges stemmed from an exchange of $256 worth of harmless bacteria with Dr robert ferrell, Professor of Human Genetics at the University of Pittsburgh, who was the consultant for a number of CAE projects. Dr Ferrell was charged in the same way. The charges carried a potential jail term of 20 years.3 the case dragged on for four years, as the fBI continued to try to press charges relating to bioterrorism against the artist.

Democracy in the knowledge economy CAE’s work springs from its concern that there has been a disconnect between science’s progress and society’s involvement and understanding, and that people may not understand the implications of biotechnology and its commercial applications. the context for its work can be understood better if we look at recent discourses around science and democracy. In her book Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States, Sheila Jasanoff looks at processes of political decision-making around scientiic issues in different countries. She notes: ‘Knowledge has become the primary wealth of nations, displacing natural resources, and knowledgeable individuals constitute possibly the most important form of capital. state policies, correspondingly, are geared more and more towards nurturing and exploiting knowledge, with scientiic knowledge and technical expertise commanding the highest premiums.’4 In this knowledge economy, Jasanoff argues, some of the 2 United states code, section 175, title 18. 3 cae Defense fund website, http://caedefensefund.org [accessed 14 april 2009]. 4 sheila Jasanoff, Designs on Nature: Science and Democracy in Europe and the United States (Princeton, 2005), p. 4.

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fundamental assumptions of liberal democracy are no longer completely valid. these assumptions include that the government understands what its citizens want, that the elected government understands the critical factors affecting societal change, and that the electorate also understands these factors. In the case of scientiic developments, she claims, these three assumptions start to break down because of the increasing complexity and specialization of science and technology, and its alienation from the wider public. In both the UK and the Us, there has been a growing awareness on the part of the scientiic establishment and government that many people view science with suspicion, and a concern that levels of scientiic literacy are low. Discussions around improving scientiic literacy have been driven primarily by economic arguments, combined with notions of enriching cultural health and intellectual life, and of enhancing democracy. In Britain, this debate was initiated by the royal society report The Public Understanding of Science in 1985.5 It noted that public understanding of science was desirable and offered a simplistic solution: the public did not know enough about science, scientists would therefore learn how to communicate to non-scientists, the public would learn about science and support it. this became known as the ‘deicit model’. But Government-initiated exercises in the deicit model in the 1980s around BSE (mad cow disease) and the Chernobyl fall-out’s contamination of sheep were handled extremely clumsily.6 there arose an argument for a different approach, one recognizing that science is inluenced by values, economics and social forces and exposing its internal contradictions.7 The deicit model regarded the public’s distrust of science as ignorance; this new approach argued that the public distrusts science because it has good reason to. the latest discourse in the UK is for experimenting with ‘upstream public engagement’, getting laypersons involved in the crucial early stages of research. But, as the think-tank Demos reported in 2005, ‘Beneath the thin crust of consensus in these debates there lies a deeper ambivalence. Old assumptions’ (that consensus on key science-society issues will appear when the public is suficiently educated) ‘continually reassert themselves’.8 5 royal society, The Public Understanding of Science (London, 1985). 6 In the case of the outbreak of Bse in the 1980s, which was passed to humans through eating animals infected by the disease, British government ‘experts’ irst assured the public that there was no risk in eating beef which had been reared in a system based on cattle (herbivores) being fed the (infected) remains of other cattle. After the Chernobyl disaster in 1986, a vast nuclear reactor accident in the soviet Union, government scientists tried to protect consumers from sheep contaminated by caesium, but were terribly uninformed about local geography, agricultural economy and other important variables. 7 Brian Wynne, ‘Public Understanding of Science Research: New Horizons or Hall of Mirrors?’, in Royal Society, The Public Understanding of Science (London, 1992). 8 Jack stilgoe, James Wilsdon, Brian Wynne, The Public Value of Science (London, 2005).

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In the US, the discourse has been underpinned by John Dewey’s philosophy of liberal democracy: if citizens know how to think scientiically, then democracy and science will be good for each other. an alternative approach was simply to assert the moral autonomy of science: scientists knew what they were doing, and the government ought to fund science with as little interference as possible. this worked well during the cold War, but has been constantly challenged and tested by America’s participatory democracy movement, which questions policy decisions of science authorities. those, like cae, who advocate for a more democratic science believe that non-specialists can acquire, understand and use technical knowledge as necessary, and that participatory democracy and upstream public engagement are feasible for non-specialists who want a voice in science policy.

Performativity Within academia and the arts various uses of the word ‘performativity’ are employed. In discussing CAE’s work, it is interesting to consider the ‘performativity’ of their work, in their staging or performance of science in the public space and with intent to effect change, alongside broader notions of ‘performativity’ as used in economics and science and technology studies. the concept of performativity in the social sciences sprang from its use by the language philosopher J.L. austin, who, in 1975, argued against the predominant view in philosophy at the time: that the chief business of sentences was to state facts. He believed that factual sentences form only a small part of speech and, in particular, he described a type of sentence, ‘performative utterances’, which perform a certain kind of action (such as ‘I name this ship …’).9 This concept of ‘performativity’ has been picked up, developed and extended by theorists across many disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, economics, and science and technology studies and, insofar as it’s possible to summarize at all, has come to be used to describe theories, models or activities that affect and are affected by their actions, rather than being objective observations or truths. In economic sociology, for example, Michel Callon argues that economics is ‘performative’, that it does things, rather than simply describing an external reality that is not affected by economics.10 In the study of science, until recently, experiment (science’s actual encounter with the world) was viewed as something secondary to theory and technology was barely theorized at all. But a new generation of historians and philosophers has pointed out that science doesn’t just think about the world, it makes the world and then remakes it. andrew Pickering argues that studies of science should go beyond science-as-knowledge to include the material, social and temporal 9 John L. austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge, MA, 1975). 10 Michel Callon, ‘Introduction: the Embeddedness of Economic Markets in Economics’, in M. Callon (ed.), The Laws of the Markets (Oxford, 1998).

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dimensions of science.11 Rather than seeing scientists as ‘disembodied intellects making knowledge in a ield of facts and observations’, he suggests that we should start from the idea that the world is illed not, in the irst instance, with facts and observations, but with agency.12 this is his basis for a performative image of science, which rebalances our understanding of science away from an obsession with pure knowledge and towards recognizing science’s material powers. In Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar’s Laboratory Life, the authors suggest that the aim of science is not to provide facts or representation about nature but rather to ‘perform’ it. Among their cast of actors are the new products of science, such as genetically modiied organisms.13

Critical art practice relating to science In parallel with the notion of the performativity of science itself as a series of actions that affect the world – an idea that underpins CAE’s critique of modern bioscience – is the use of performing science as a device in CAE’s art practice. By staging science in the public arena, they focus attention on the impact that science has on the world. In the last two decades a growing number of artists have started working within scientiic contexts (laboratory or ield science), for example SymbioticA and Brandon Ballengée. other artists have chosen to work outside the structures of science, appropriating science as amateurs or tactically exposing the systems that fund and promote science. I include within this occasional works of the Yes men such as their Dow chemicals pranks,14 Platform’s work on oil15 and cae.16 since the 1970s, spectacularly rapid developments in the biological sciences have become a particular source of concern. many scientists warn of the dangers of commercial pressures to push forward with biotechnology, a technique that contains many unknowns and many defects, leading to real and possible dangers to our health and to the ecosystem. CAE’s work exposes misinformation about biotechnology that comes from such sources as market directives and science iction. As few people have direct experience of working with biotechnology, the subject can seem abstract and too dificult for a non-specialist to understand. One 11 andrew Pickering, The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science (Chicago, 1995), p. 6. 12 Ibid., p. 6. 13 Bruno Latour and steve Woolgar, Laboratory Life (Princeton, 1986). 14 Dow is the parent company for Union carbide, responsible for the Bhopal catastrophe. Dow claims the company inherited no liabilities for the Bhopal disaster. see http://www.theyesmen.org/hijinks/dow/ [accessed 14 April 2009]. 15 Platform’s Unravelling the Carbon Web, http://www.platformlondon.org/ carbonweb/ [accessed 14 april 2009]. 16 as discussed in this chapter.

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of CAE’s key tactics, therefore, is to bring this science out of the lab and stage it in the public domain – giving people direct experience of common scientiic processes and reliable information on a one-to-one basis. Each CAE work functions both as an emblematic act and as a discursive educational process, and aims to enable people to become more engaged as citizens in debates taking place in society.

figure 11.1 Cult of the New Age, Critical art Ensemble, Paul vanouse and faith Wilding, Participatory theatre, museum of Contemporary art, toulouse, 2000

Source: Photo – Critical Art Ensemble, with permission.

CAE has completed several major projects examining various aspects of the biotech revolution in performative forms that invite public participation. their works have raised issues concerning eugenic traces in assisted reproductive technology (Flesh

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Machine), extreme medical intervention in reproduction and attacks on sexuality (Society for Reproductive Anachronisms), the overblown promises purveyed by the genetics industry (Cult of the New Eve) (Figure 11.1), corporate initiatives to control the world’s food supply with GM foods (Molecular Invasion) (Figure 11.2), the pros and cons of transgenics – the recombination of genetic material from different species – and their release into the environment (GenTerra), issues of food purity and global trade (Free Range Grain), and the exaggeration of the threat of bioterrorism to the detriment of public health research into disease (Marching Plague).

figure 11.2 Molecular Invasion, Critical art Ensemble, Beatriz da Costa, and Claire Pentecost, Participatory science-theatre project, installation view, the Hemicycle at the Corcoran, Washington DC, 2002

Source: Photo – Critical Art Ensemble, with permission.

In their participatory performance of GenTerra (2002) (Figure 11.3), for example, audience members could grow and own a sample of transgenic bacteria and, after an intensive learning experience, make their own decision on the ‘release’ of transgenic organisms into the environment. In Free Range Grain (2003) (Figure 11.4), the public was invited to bring their own food – especially that labelled as GM free (free from genetically modiied organisms) or organic – and use a simple test lab to detect the presence of contaminant genetically modiied ingredients.

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figure 11.3 GenTerra, Critical art Ensemble and Beatriz da Costa, Participatory performance, natural History museum, London, 2003

Source: Photo – The Arts Catalyst.

figure 11.4 Free Range Grain, Critical art Ensemble, Beatriz da Costa and shyh-shiun shyu, Performative art project, schim Kunsthalle, frankfurt

Source: Photo – Critical Art Ensemble, with permission.

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artistic issues The oft-used challenge for new art practices ‘Is it art?’ (to challenge its validity) takes on a different spin when the artists themselves only use art as a label when it is tactically beneicial. CAE members, despite calling themselves an art ensemble, say they use labels such as ‘activist’, ‘theorist’, ‘explainer’ or ‘artist’ in a tactical manner, as best sets the expectations of the audience. Kurtz sees problems with the social constructions of the roles of artist and activist: ‘To construct these categories as static is a great drawback because it prevents those who use them from being able to transform themselves to meet particularised needs’.17 A further question (or challenge) is: ‘Is it good/great art?’ The philosopher theodor adorno wrote insistently about the vital role of art in both critiquing society as it was and imagining something better. at the same time, he was highly sceptical of political art as such. for adorno the danger for politically committed art was that the work ended up as bad art without becoming good politics either. Adorno sensed in the work of activist artists – whom he called ‘politically committed’ artists – a strong tendency towards agitprop. He was concerned that artworks that get involved directly in political issues are preaching to the converted. Adorno argued that artworks exercise any practical effect not by ‘haranguing but by the scarcely apprehensible transformation of consciousness’.18 Milton Glaser in his article ‘Art and Propaganda’ quotes Horace, the Roman philosopher and critic: ‘The purpose of art is to inform and delight,’ not ‘to persuade and delight’.19 My own feeling about CAE’s practice is that their participatory performance work has been informative and provocative, re-staging science and prompting audiences to think their own way through issues. In the ilm Marching Plague, however, the culmination of the project that I worked on with CAE during the FBI’s case against Kurtz, I feel the approach strays from openness to a more didactic attitude. The ilm focuses on the recreation of an experiment that the British government commissioned in 1952 to see if germs were viable candidates for weaponization. the arts catalyst took cae to the Isle of Lewis in scotland, site of the original tests, where they recreated the harmless simulant tests (not the actual plague tests) (Figures 11.5 and 11.6). Their results were just as hopeless as those of the originals. The ilm opens with a brief history of biowarfare before following the experiment itself, juxtaposing our efforts on boats and loating pontoons with smoke signals, bacteria sprays and guinea pig targets, with archive footage of the original tests. The ilm ends with Kurtz speaking to the camera, explaining the pointless nature of biowarfare and asking the question: ‘Who would be stupid enough …?’ (to initiate a major research programme into this proven ineffective military technology). He answers this promptly with a montage of George Bush 17 steve Kurtz, nettime interview, 18 December 2000, http://www.nettime.org [accessed 14 april 2009]. 18 theodor adorno, Aesthetic Theory (Minneapolis, 1997), pp. 242–3. 19 Milton Glaser, ‘Art and Propaganda’, The Nation, 26 february 2008, p. 1.

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clips.20 Kurtz felt that the argument required particular clarity in its exposition and, due to his personal involvement, he also felt extremely strongly about its message. During the process of developing the project, we had had to relocate the project to Stornoway, changing the nature and medium of the project from a performance to a ilmed action. It had originally been conceived as a recreation of a ‘germ’ release experiment, with audience, on the London Underground (a plan dropped after the bomb attacks of 7 July 2007). Within such a participatory performance, had this gone ahead, I feel that the facts and issues could have been more carefully unpacked and explored by the audience members than was allowed by the ilm.21

figure 11.5 Marching Plague, Critical art Ensemble, video and performance, Isle of Lewis, scotland, 2005 Source: Photo – Critical Art Ensemble, with permission.

20 Marching Plague, cae, DVD, 22 mins, 2006. 21 There have also been some performances since the ilm release that form part of the Marching Plague project.

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figure 11.6 Marching Plague, Critical art Ensemble, video and performance, Isle of Lewis, scotland, 2005 Source: Photo – Critical Art Ensemble, with permission.

tactics Part of this discussion should consider the tactics that contemporary artists use to address issues. Claire Pentecost provides one analysis of tactics in the ield she refers to as ‘BioArt’ (a term often used for art that uses bioscientiic processes or products as a medium) from the starting point of her stated assumption that this art wants to address a particular problem: ‘that science in the service of capitalism alienates the non-specialist, whose life is actually affected by its commercial application’.22 To counter the mystiication and abstraction of science, the artist may stage or ‘perform’ ordinary scientiic procedures in public places and with public participation (artists such as CAE, Brandon Ballengee and SymbioticA use this tactic in diverse ways). to examine the ambiguous nature of funding (and hence the obscuring of vested interests), the artist may participate across specialized knowledge ields. To interrogate the legalities of intellectual property, patents and contracts in science, the artist can become involved in science as an amateur, inding collaborators within science and/or becoming a ‘thief’ of privatized knowledge.23 I ind Pentecost’s scheme useful but limited in its sole focus on capitalist structures of science. I suggest that other political, cultural and historical factors 22 Claire Pentecost, ‘Outitting the Laboratory of the Symbolic: Towards a Critical Inventory of BioArt’, Presentation at the conference BioArt and the Public Sphere, Irvine california, 17 october 2005. 23 Ibid.

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also intervene in determining the content and process of science and how this has become decoupled from deep societal and cultural dialogue. science is not solely driven by inancial imperatives; and these other factors are also important. the scientist roger malina, starting from a desire for artists to contribute directly ‘to a transition to a sustainable, and more just, society’, arrives at tactics similar to those proposed by Pentecost – that is, breaking down of the distancing between society and science, crossing specializations, and participation/ collaboration in science – but his primary focus is the science institution. Malina argues for a ‘systemised’ approach to placing artists in scientiic contexts and for scientists to work more extensively within social and cultural contexts outside the laboratory.24

Ethical issues: GenTerra The presentation of CAE’s work GenTerra raised a number of the complex ethical and safety issues that abound in the area of performative science as art. In GenTerra, cae investigates the consequences of the creation of transgenic life forms. they do so by simulating a biotechnology corporation balancing proits with social responsibility. Lab-coated assistants (members of CAE) introduce bioproducts to the audience, and demonstrate the practical applications of such research, such as disease treatment and xenotransplantation. Viewers are given material and instructions to grow and store their own transgenic bacteria. the audience can spin a bacteria release machine with only one of its ten chambers holding active transgenic bacteria. they are told that the bacteria they might release into the environment are a benign strain. audience members have to decide whether or not they believe this claim and whether or not to play this game of ‘genetic Russian roulette’.25 Before the arts catalyst brought GenTerra to the UK in 2002, it was shown as part of the exhibition Gene(sis) at Seattle’s Henry Art Gallery. The performance took place after the anthrax attacks in the United states and the gallery had to go through lengthy negotiations with environmental agencies in the interest of public safety. Presenting GenTerra in the UK was not as problematic, but we found it more straightforward to present such work in an arts context than in a scientiic one, where science’s procedures and regulations come into effect. So at Oldham art Gallery there were no restrictions, and participants who had been through the learning and discussion process could take their transgenic bacteria cultures home, choosing how to dispose of them. at the natural History museum, the one restriction imposed by the museum was that the audience should dispose of the

24 roger malina, Lovely Weather: Asking What the Arts Can Do for the Sciences (2007), http://vectors.usc.edu/thoughtmesh/publish/111.php [accessed 14 April 2009]. 25 GenTerra, participatory performance, cae, 2002.

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transgenic bacteria before leaving the exhibition in a bag provided. I found, after the event, that this directive had not been strictly followed by the artists. Prior to Kurtz’s arrest, the molecular biologist turned artist Ruth West questioned CAE’s apparent disregard for health and safety regulations, such as in the disposal of transgenic bacteria in GenTerra.26 she asked whether such an action, in fact, went against their arguments for ethical, safe science, and worked against other artists and non-specialists being able to gain access to such technology in the future.

Legal issues: the case against steve Kurtz the combination of regulations, ethics, safety, legality, and public and authority perceptions of safety can make this area of work very dificult for artists. It could be thought that it was ethical and safety issues that led to Kurtz’s legal problems with the fBI, and this might deter artists from the amateur science approach. Nevertheless, looking at the three projects found by the FBI in Kurtz’s home that triggered and fed their case against him, we may ascribe different motives to the FBI’s case, which indicates that the problem was more about politics and art than public safety. The FBI coniscated, irstly, a biochemical defence kit that CAE had been developing for use by organic and traditional farmers against cross-‘infection’ by Monsanto’s GM Roundup Ready products; secondly, a portable molecular biology kit that cae used in their work Free Range Grain to test GM-free food products for GM contaminants; and inally two strains of completely harmless bacteria that were to be used to simulate the behaviour of plague and anthrax for the Marching Plague project, together with an uninished manuscript that Kurtz was writing on the militarization of civilian health agencies in the Us by the Bush administration for biodefence research. Even if, at irst, the FBI truly suspected they had found some sort of bioterror weapon, this misapprehension could not have lasted for very long. What appears more likely is that the fBI thought that they had a situation out of which they could manufacture a terrorism case, which potentially brought great personal rewards.27 However, the items coniscated suggest that there were other reasons for the FBI and the Department of Justice to remain hostile. one was the ethos and message of CAE’s work, which is counter to the privatization (commercial protection) of knowledge, speciically biotechnology that, as explained earlier, is central in the

26 ruth West, Working with Wetware forum, natural History museum, London, 20 June 2003. 27 Great rewards had been heaped on the agents, prosecutors and institutions that managed to convict the so-called ‘Lackawanna Six Sleeper Cell’ case, six young Yemeni Americans convicted of providing support to al-Qaeda.

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US economy, both in medicine and agriculture. Another was CAE’s criticism of Us biodefence policy. Many people have wondered why the FBI couldn’t see that what they found was art. claire Pentecost points out that the fBI was, of course, well aware that Kurtz’s work was art. The fact that it chose to pursue the case indicates clearly that the case was, in fact, all about art, its power and freedom of expression.28

Case closed In October 2007, Kurtz’s scientiic collaborator Dr Robert Ferrell pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, a plea deal made due to the stress of the case and severe illness (Ferrell had cancer). Despite four years of investigation under fBI suspicion of being a bioterrorist, Kurtz was able to reconstruct his research and produce the project Marching Plague during the investigation. The project was ilmed in Stornoway on the Isle of Lewis in Scotland, in October 2005, and the ilm was irst shown at the AV festival in newcastle in march 2006, and at the Whitney Bienniel, new York. In april 2008, Kurtz had the mail and wire fraud case against him completely dismissed by federal Judge richard J. arcara. since 2006, cae has changed the focus of its work towards a critique of Us defence policy, and has moved away from its interrogation of biotechnology, which may imply that the Us Department of Justice were, to some extent, successful.

28 see claire Pentecost on the cae Defense fund website, http://www. caedefensefund.org/relections.html [accessed 14 April 2009].

Part 5 affect

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chapter 12

affective connection Bojana Kunst

Introduction Ballettikka Internettikka is the umbrella name for a series of art projects that irst began in 2001 as an exploration of internet ballet. It has continued with internet performances, guerrilla tactics and mobile live internet broadcasting strategies.1 In the irst internet ballet (Ljubljana, 2001) the focus was on broadcasting dance movement with still images. Since then, the project has developed into a research of the complex tactical and guerrilla strategies employed by broadcasted performance. Ballettikka Internettikka can be summed up as a series of art projects in which artists Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman enter various public spaces and broadcast their performances (ballets) live on the internet. In recent years the focus of the project has been on the emotional tension between the ictional guerrilla framework, the performance location and the performing skills of the robot. In 2007 the duo’s attention shifted to the destructive manipulation of the main hero (see Figures 12.1 and 12.2).2 most frequently, the intervention into the selected space is illegal: the artists take the role of guerrillas who, equipped with accessible everyday technology, ‘invade’ a public space in order to create a performance which is broadcast live on the internet.3 Ballettikka performances, however, are not designed as spectacular interventions, but as strategic invasions into obscure areas of the chosen buildings, such as ofices, restrooms, kitchens, rooftops and so on.4 1 All the projects can be found at the website http://www.intima.org/bi [accessed 14 april 2009]. 2 Recently, the robot has been burned using digital software (Ballettikka Internettikka: Olymppikka, 2008), crushed by a giant machine (Ballettikka Internettikka: Hydraullikka, Madrid, 2008) and ceremoniously buried (Ballettikka Internettikka: Intermenttikka, seoul, 2008). 3 In recent years Ballettikka was performed in various cultural, business and public venues, such as: the Bolshoi Theatre (Moscow), La Scala (Milan), Volksbühne (Berlin), The National Theatre (Belgrade), Hong Kong City Hall and Lippo Centre, and the Dongdaemun construction site (Seoul). 4 for example, in Ballettikka Internettikka Illegallikka Robottikka (2004) the artists entered the kitchen of La Scala (the famous opera house in Milan) with two remotecontrolled toy robots and two wireless web cameras. robots and cameras were remotely controlled from a mini-van parked at the northeast side of Piazza della Scala.

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figure 12.1 Ballettikka Internettikka Hydraullikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, madrid, 2008 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2008 with permission.

figure 12.2 Ballettikka Internettikka Hydraullikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, madrid, 2008 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2008 with permission.

Ballettikka Internettikka always juxtaposes the symbolic and spectacular context of the site with its performative use. for example, in the Ballettikka Internettikka – Part Two: Ballet.Net (Moscow, 2002) (see Figures 12.3 and 12.4), Štromajer invades the cellar of the Bolshoi theatre and dances in the name of all the ballet

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dancers who ever wanted to dance in this particular institution. the performance coincided with Bolshoi’s celebration of its centenary anniversary. Štromajer and zorman, equipped with laptops, mobile phones and small batteries, entered the Bolshoi through a broken window and performed their piece in a small, dark and dirty room of the empty cellar. In VolksNetBallet (Berlin, 2006) ten smaller robots (representing the ‘people’), one bigger robot (representing the ‘leader’) and a lying cow danced a group choreography in the basement (restroom) of the famous Volksbühne (People’s Theatre) in Berlin, a theatre with a well-known political and leftist tradition.5 As highlighted by the artists ‘the event happened on the very same evening and in the very same city as another huge people’s festivity – the World Cup Final soccer match which took place in Berlin in 2006.’6 In Ballettikka Internettikka: Stattikka (Hong Kong, 2007), which the artists described as an ‘almost static but still transitive net ballet’, the robot stands perfectly still on the roof of the Hong Kong Lippo Centre, on the building which embodies the inancial power and dynamism of contemporary economic processes. only the eyes of the intruding robot lickered in constant rhythm with the city lights on the surrounding skyscrapers. the robot appeared isolated and strange in a still guerrilla adventure, and in direct contradiction with the performativity of speed and the spectacular dynamism of the inancial centre (see Figures 12.5, 12.6 and 12.7).

figure 12.3 Ballettikka Internettikka – Part Two: Ballet Net, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, moscow, 2002 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2002, with permission. 5 from its beginning in 1890 the Volksbühne theatre is committed to presenting ‘art for the people’, trying to develop aesthetics that would appeal to the masses, workers and intellectuals, and resist the bourgeois taste for ‘high culture’. See ‘Die Kunst Dem Volke, Berliner Volksblatt’ (1890), available at http://www.volksbuehne-berlin.de/theorie/ pamphlete_und_programme/die_kunst_dem_volke/ [accessed 14 april 2009]. 6 http://www.intima.org/bi/vnb/index.html [accessed 14 april 2009].

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figure 12.4 Ballettikka Internettikka – Part Two: Ballet Net, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, moscow, 2002 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2002, with permission.

figure 12.5 Ballettikka Internettikka Stattikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, Hong Kong/Dresden, 2007 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2007, with permission.

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figure 12.6 Ballettikka Internettikka Stattikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, Hong Kong/Dresden, 2007 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2007, with permission.

figure 12.7 Ballettikka Internettikka Stattikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, Hong Kong/Dresden, 2007 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2007, with permission.

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Intimate guerrilla the guerrilla format of Ballettikka constantly marks a trajectory between different political, aesthetic and technological contexts and the tactical use of technology (in this case, mostly protocols for connections, broadcasting, mobile phones, computers and so on). as a rule, Ballettikka performances use a low-tech approach. the artists do not invent new protocols or develop tactical software; they do not develop alternatives to existing media. Rather, they re-use, recycle and recombine what is already commercially accessible on the market of everyday connectivity practice: telephone signals, commercial connections, available protocols and transmission programs. This low-tech approach can be seen as a continuation of previous work produced by Igor Štromajer. With his Intima Virtual Base, Štromajer has always used low-tech combinations of various technologies of connectivity (connected machines, such as the internet, mobile phones and GPs) and manipulated these as an existing technological practice. By deploying strategies for low-tech combinations, Štromajer not only makes his projects accessible, but also touches on the way our desires are invested in our use of technology: his projects are always strongly intertwined with our daily technological practice. as we all know through daily experience, regardless of our inancial investment in technology, these daily practices are still typically unstable and fragmented, full of circuit breaks and pauses, illed with trash, redundant information and a hyperinlation of possibilities. at the same time, daily technological practice does not only disclose new possibilities, but also deeply inluences our anticipation, desire and imagination around connections and the experience of our (connected) intimacy. In Štromajer’s work, these affective and intimate characteristics of our daily practice of connectivity are explored, playfully unfolded and restaged: we travel through his internet projects as if we were on a secret, private journey, confronted with intimate questionnaires, failures of communication, fragility of desire.7 at the same time, in Štromajer’s projects intimacy is fused with a special feeling of conidence, a kind of peculiar secrecy, which is always playfully associated with political conidentiality, guerrilla tactics and the relation between public and private, politics and desire. Štromajer’s work researches ways in which our experience of technology is conditioned and how we perceive technology’s proximity to our bodies and daily lives. there is a special intimate conspiracy at work here, springing from the disproportionate relation between the possibility of connectivity and our desire and anticipation of it.

7 A good example of this is Štromajer’s netart project b.ALT.ica (1998). We travel to the land at the end of time, a journey which goes through a lickering landscape of signs, erotic images, countdowns, meeting viruses, questionnaires, quotes, icons, and black and white images which are all associatively connected to questions of intimacy, politics and technology (see Figures 12.8 and 12.9).

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figure 12.8 b.ALT.ica, Igor Štromajer, Internet, 1998 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 1998, with permission.

figure 12.9 b.ALT.ica, Igor Štromajer, Internet, 1998 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 1998, with permission.

the focus in Ballettikka is on the exploration of (connected) intimacy, which is closely related to the affective use of technology and how this recombines technological and political aspects of life. What do I mean by that? The strange conidentiality at work, not only in Štromajer’s previous projects but also in Ballettikka, is directly related to the potentiality/possibility of connectivity, that is, with ways of exploring intimacy through protocols of connection. However, in these projects intimacy is not so much about emotional proximity or empathy. Rather, it is generated through the use of protocols, as a process of suring through the fragments and remains of pages, images, connections. the potentiality of connectivity gives the artists’ exploration of intimacy a special tonality, the sound of isolation, loneliness and abstraction. this, in fact, is a paradox that

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applies to the connected world in general. I would relate this intimate tonality to the ways that our use of technology is conditioned by affect(s) through which the potentialities of our connections become actualities. Affect deeply inluences the ways we both experience and interpret the all-pervasive noise and abstracted protocols of communication, the modulation and emotional tonality of connection. It inluences how we translate redundancy into meaning. Today, the ‘pleasure’ of disembodiment is only one aspect of the potential actualization of connection through the commercial, political and economic use of technology. another aspect is an affect of fear, which is deeply related to the technological and political protocols for safety, immunity and at a more intimate level – isolation. So, the potentiality of connection is also conditioned with this affect of fear – being terriied of getting too close: connection enables acts of invading, intruding or infecting something. through connectivity we experience proximity, which is only enabled by new walls of security and new protocols of immunity; these are intrinsic parts of contemporary connected communities. Protocols for communication and connection are immediately related to the desire for safety and immunity. I would say that the intimate guerrilla tactics are formed from this very affective conditioning, invading protected spaces with desire and surprising imaginations of connectivity.

Protocol and affect I have argued that the intimate guerrilla nature of Ballettikka Internettikka deals with an exploration of the affective use of technology. this highlights not only the fusion of a variety of venues, but also the ways that connected performances intervene with our anticipations and desires through the use of connectivity. the tactical aspect of Ballettikka Internettikka performances is developed through the affective use and exploration of the daily practice of connectivity. alexander Galloway writes that a protocol is nothing else but an ‘elaborate instruction list of how a given technology should work’.8 even if it is rightly described as an empty set of rules, it is nevertheless not immune to desire. ‘Protocol is also synonymous with possibility … it outlines a playing ield for what can happen and where’. 9 Like the notion of possibility, a protocol can enable communication. In this sense, what comes with protocols is the ‘exciting new ability to leverage possibility and action through code’.10 Galloway argues that this possibility is particularly potent in the hactivist approach, which operates on the level of code and software development. But Ballettikka Internettikka does not operate on the level of code, it is not developing protocols or software. It is instead using what is 8 alexander r. Galloway, Protocol, How Control Exists After Decentralisation (Cambridge, MA, 2004), p. 171. 9 Ibid., p. 167. 10 Ibid., p. 172.

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already available on the market, dealing with simple pre-made technological tools. everyday technological connections are appropriated through the imaginative use of existing communication protocols. I suggest that Štromajer and Zorman subjugate protocols to interpretation and content. Of course, this subjugation looks at irst like an impossible task; since protocols, as sets of rules, actually have to resist interpretation if they are to be successful. nevertheless, as sets of rules, they also operate on the level of possibility and desire: they explicitly render communication possible. their effectiveness is therefore strongly connected with what we want and desire. the existence of communication protocols means that we cannot not want to connect. their use has an immediate, intimate, material inluence on our daily lives and bodily rhythms – paradoxically, even on the ways that we experience technology itself. this experience can be described as an affective way of pushing the buttons and using the protocol; a viscerally connected experience, as if there were a small butterly luttering in an electronic stomach, causing anxiety and excitement. It is true to say that protocols are abstract, content-less sets of rules; nevertheless their performance is affective. We need to better understand the role of affect if we want to understand the way power operates in the connected world. this is relevant to what Brian massumi detects in his description of affect, when he writes about the central role of affect in the understanding of postmodern power after ideology.11 affect is becoming a condition of late capitalism, central to the activity of power and resistance. affect can have economic effects: a fact well known to market specialists and inlation experts, who know that irrational and unreasonable expectations can be disastrous for the global inancial market. Furthermore, affect has also become central to understanding the future development of technology, especially the ways in which technological connections are affectively conditioned even though they are only abstract sets of rules.

Low-tech operation, hi-tech imagination Ballettikka Internettikka explores the relationship between connection and affect by fusing the procedures of connectivity and the site-related contexts of each of the performed events. this fusion helps us not only to understand the curious aesthetic structure and emotional tonality of Ballettikka, but also reveals the dramaturgical structure of networked performance. In Ballettikka Internettikka connections become plots, adding a speciic anticipation to the merely technical procedure. each Ballettikka is announced with a short but vivid description of the intended action, followed by a detailed and schematically visualized plan of intervention, which is often connected to a broader political event or global happening. the story is structured through the anticipation of the real (live) event, which is transmitted at a precisely announced time on the net as a short dance video accompanied with 11 Brian massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham and London, 2002).

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music. after the live event, a documentary about the achievement is accessible on the internet and, considering its careful composition and aesthetic structure, it is also intended to igure as work per se, as for example in Ballettika Internettikka Intermenttikka (see Figures 12.10 and 12.11).

figure 12.10 Ballettika Internettikka Intermenttikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, seoul, 2008 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2008, with permission.

figure 12.11 Ballettika Internettikka Intermenttikka, Igor Štromajer and Brane Zorman, seoul, 2008 Source: Intima Virtual Base © 2008, with permission.

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the liveness of the actual guerrilla intervention or of the performed, connected event, depends not only on actually performing something live, but also on how the connected event is performed. In that sense, the combination of low-tech formats with a high-tech imaginative situation can be understood as a particular dramaturgical choice. High-tech appears, paradoxically, in Ballettikka Internettikka on a ictional level, as a kind of technological plot and ideal staging of protocols of connectivity. What we get, nevertheless, is a low-tech event, a performance with lickering (sometimes black-and-white) transmission. Winston Churchill’s famous quote from World War II accompanies the description of the project as an ‘ongoing artistic study of the internet guerrilla performance’.12 ‘We shall ight them on the beaches. We shall ight them on the landing grounds. We shall ight in the ields and in the streets; we shall ight in the hills. We shall never surrender’. But who are ‘they’ in this ight – who is being attacked by the toy robot dancing in the cellar, standing on the roof, transmitting the signal from the concrete foundation of a future commercial building? Ballettikka’s mixed signals reveal a ight that is being fought on the very level of imagination and desire, with which we are conditioned when employing the technology and with which we can condition the technology itself. This is also a source for the peculiar conidentiality of these projects, which constantly shift between intimate and political executions of guerrilla assaults with a full strategic repertoire, while at the same time revealing the non-spectacular side of those tactical, intimate appropriations of sites and places.

Performance of connection What is also intriguing about Ballettikka Internettikka is a particular ‘sensibility’ of every connected performance. This is different from the intensity of so-called ‘metal performance’, which Steve Dixon describes as ‘metal camp’.13 ‘Camp’ is here understood in the sense of an exaggeration and theatricalization of humanoid features. for Dixon, some degree of camp seems to be inherent in almost all performing anthropomorphic or zoomorphic robots. Describing the aesthetic features of recent robot performances Dixon states, ‘Since robots currently fail to mimic human and animal movement accurately, their exaggerated gaits and gestures emphasize the same sense of theatricality and artiiciality that we ind in camp. The artiiciality of robot movement mirrors the artiiciality of camp’.14 The key for such an interpretation lies in the robot’s movement, which can mimic and exaggerate, but ‘never achieves the human, just as camp movement mimics and exaggerates but never achieves womanhood’.15 the strange sensibility springs 12 see http://www.intima.org/bi [accessed 14 april 2009]. 13 steve Dixon, Digital Performance, A History of New Media in Theater, Dance, Performance Art, and Installation (Cambridge, MA, 2007). 14 Ibid., p. 273. 15 Ibid., p. 274.

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exactly from this difference between the coding and the norm, or as susan sontag puts it: ‘thing as meaning something, anything, and the thing as pure artiice’.16 However, with Ballettikka Internettikka things become more complicated. We can still ind some elements of camp in Ballettikka Internettikka – Part Two: Ballet. Net (Moscow, 2002) in which Štromajer danced alone.17 nevertheless, none of these elements are present in the performances in which he is replaced with a robot or other toy machine. In the live internet broadcast the robot toy fulils basic kinetic operations: it moves or stays still, it blinks its red eyes in a regular rhythm and it is repeatedly left to the mercy of external forces. In that sense, the theatricality of the robot does not reside in the robot’s resemblance or non-resemblance to the human, but in the event of the connection, in which the robot acts as a representative, an ambassador, a substitute, a double in the true sense. the theatricality springs from the connected situation in which a synergy of different elements works towards a successful performance outcome. The robot’s performance occurs in the period between connection and disconnection that strongly deines the temporal dramaturgy of the robot’s activity, as well as the expectations and anticipations of the (connected) audience. Ballettikka Internettikka projects are thus both theatrical performances and performances of connectivity: they operate on a double meaning of the word performance. connection is activated, executed and carried out, but at the same time, connection is also staged, performed and presented. We can conclude that its execution becomes a show, a plot, a ictional frame, a story, a dramaturgy of performance. this simultaneous implementation of the technical protocols and theatricality of connection is the reason behind the peculiar sensibility of the project, which discloses the affective relation toward the technical and coded context of the performance.18 Ballettikka Internettikka is thus created as a fusion of technical instructions and a theatrical, sometimes ceremonial, pathos of their context. What is performed here is, then, the connection itself. In that sense, the robot in Ballettikka is sent on a mission with the task to invade a selected space and perform in it. the peculiar sensibility of Ballettikka arises from the task set to the robot, that is, to perform: it is not important whether the robot performs as a human or non-human. What is important is that the robot successfully fulils its task. In that sense, it seems that the Ballettikka robot is much closer to the original 16 susan sontag, Notes on Camp (1964), available at http://interglacial.com/~sburke/ pub/prose/Susan_Sontag_-_Notes_on_Camp.html [accessed 14 April 2009]. 17 The elements of camp can be found in the way Štromajer dances in the cellar of Bolshoi. not only is it obvious that he is an amateur dancer, he also exaggerates, playing with dance conventions concerning masculinity and femininity. His gestures are (intentionally) ‘pathetic’ and he is dressed in a strange combination of black suit, white shirt, black tie and cap made from artiicial pearls. 18 this peculiar sensibility can be attributed to a continuous feeling of secrecy and conidence, a kind of connected closeness between the observer and the project itself. The intimacy of Ballettikka is constantly associated with something secret, on the border of legality; or, to put it differently, with something not immediately visible.

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source of the word robot (robota – work). In reality though, its function could not be more distanced from that original meaning. What the robot is really doing is not physical work; it is being positioned in various sites to perform a task/artwork. The robot is the one delivering the performance – and we are the ones watching it and keeping our ingers crossed …

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chapter 13

Love at first Byte melinda rackham

Stormy thoughts dart around the quadrants of my brain. Electric veins activate that impulse to love. As the pixels part, my perfect partner is redrawn before me. We jump, swooning, seamlessly surmounting the synaptic cleft, lying fearlessly between the realms of hard and soft reality. Once bitten – I’m totally smitten.

falling in love It strikes at odd times, descending like a summer cloudburst … soaking you unexpectedly before you reach cover, before you can defend against it. sometimes we walk in the rain to enjoy its sensory pleasure, its refreshing bite, its soothing warmth, the delightful playfulness on our skin. sometimes we get wet. sometimes we are enthralled by a performance, sometimes we coldly rationalize the improbable nature of a scenario. The pinnacles and precipices of judgement – those elusive processes of making an instantaneous decision between restrained annoyance and exuberant immersion, are both powerful and unpredictable. he was unsure about what attitude to strike, so disappeared endlessly to re-dress for the crowd who had gathered at the Odyssey exhibition opening. his consistently poor fashion choices – the neurotic slippage and indecision around his image management of online physicality touched me … i sensed a kindred spirit, and … it felt oddly like … i was falling in love. Don’t get confused here. I am not talking about lusty love or sex drive; nor am I referring to that deep companionate love associated with comfort, attachment

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and parenting; but that other all powerful, all encompassing emotional and physiological love. Being in Love. Passionate love. obsessive love. Divine madness. Limerence.

Limerence? Limerence is an involuntary cognitive and emotional state in which a person feels an intense romantic desire for another person – a constantly distracting obsessive infatuation which can last for months, years and occasionally a lifetime. the term was introduced by american Professor of Psychology Dorothy tennov in her 1979 book Love and Limerence – the Experience of Being in Love. It can be experienced as a sensation in the heart accompanied by intrusive thinking, intense joy or ecstasy at times of mutuality, and extreme despair when feelings are not reciprocated. those smitten can have extreme physical manifestations such as sustained alertness with a heightened sense of awareness, endless energy, heart palpitations, trembling, pallor, lushing and pupil dilation. Sometimes limerence presents as awkwardness, stammering and shyness, with nervousness, anxiety and worry that any action may bring about rejection.1 also had a peek at your Facebook proile, but I’m not stalking you, no seriously … I really like The Diamond Age too … so much more generous and inspiring than the Baroque Cycles which were a bit … uber-researched and yes to Deadwood and Dexter too! tennov is generally not well known outside pop psychology, however she has been rediscovered in the last decade by commentators on the societal impact of technology such as Alison Lewis: ‘Tennov’s characterisation of the state of limerence seems to me to be an accurate paradigm for what can happen romantically in the virtual world, even though she originally wrote about it well before the age of the Internet’.2 Lewis takes a rather pejorative view of this online behaviour: ‘cyberspace appears to offer the ideal environment for the imagined state of “love” to germinate and blossom, providing cyber-based relationships with all the criteria that limerence needs to occur and to continue. these are: attraction combined with hope and obstruction equals limerence’.3 Unavailability and obstruction, it seems, 1 Dorothy tennov, Love and Limerence: The Experience of Being in Love (Maryland, 1979), pp. 17–57. 2 Angela Lewis, ‘I’m not in love … Just a little bit limerent …’, Living Now: Relationships, 097 (July 2007), available at http://www.livingnow.com.au/storyarchive/ ?p=397 [accessed 10 August 2008]. 3 Ibid.

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make the limerent object even more desirable: ‘For the process to fully develop some form of uncertainly or doubt, or even some threat to reciprocation must be present’.4

on love In On Love, the popular writer of philosophy and television celebrity alain de Botton laments the ‘long gloomy tradition in Western thought [which] argues that love is in its essence an unreciprocated marxist emotion and that desire can only thrive on the impossibility of mutuality’.5 citing many texts including those of proliic nineteenth-century French Romantic realist Stendhal, de Botton struggles to understand how he can be besotted by a woman he hardly knows or has little in common with.6 Stendhal – a well travelled military man and ‘no novice in love’ was equally fascinated by, and motivated to write extensively on, unrequited love.7 although he had an obsession with sexual conquests, he seems to have genuinely preferred the desire for an unattainable woman to the consummation.

figure 13.1 screen Image: Limerence strikes in second Life 4 5 6 Beyle. 7

tennov, Love and Limerence, p. 26. alain de Botton, On Love (New York, 2006), p. 48. Stendhal is a pseudonym used, amongst around one hundred others, by Henri-Marie stendhal, Love, trans. G. Sale and S. Sale (London, 1957), p. 12.

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this is not surprising given that stendhal suffered terribly from his syphilis treatment of iodine of potassium and quicksilver – resulting in swollen armpits, dificulty in swallowing, painfully shrunken testicles, sleeplessness, giddiness, tinnitus, a racing pulse and tremors, making it dificult for him to hold a fork or his pen. Despite this he describes the ‘birth of love’ in De L’Amour (Love) as that in which the limerent object is crystallized in the mind, as being a process similar to throwing a lifeless, wintery bough into the salt mines at salzburg. the bough will be transformed emerging two or three months later unrecognizable – covered with a deposit of sparkling diamond-like crystals. At the peak of crystallization almost every waking thought revolves around the limerent object. This transformative process of being deeply immersed in the state of love is an involuntary physical response – an instinctive movement towards the other.8

travel broadens the mind … scored a super internet deal on a tiny single room at Grand Hôtel des Bains, where Death in Venice was written and ilmed.9 i don’t have wireless and the room isn’t lush – tucked away at the back of the hotel overlooking pines rather than the private beach, but has a massive bed, high ceiling, slightly shabby 19th century furniture, and an obligatory marble bathroom. have had three outit changes in the two hours i’ve been here … arrival outit; swimming ensemble for quick laps in the pool and lounging on the sun bed; and now casual but stylish terrace attire. soon i will shut down, stroll around Lido, delight in the promenade and seafood, then return to the terrace to observe the scenarios being played out before me, and to play with you again online … xxx

8 stendhal, Love, pp. 45–7. 9 Death in Venice tells the story of a middle-aged writer/musician who has an obsessive attraction for a 14-year-old boy while visiting Venice. There is ongoing debate as to whether it is a tale of paedophilic lust or a story of lime rent attraction to inspirational beauty and aesthetic catharsis. Written by German author thomas mann, the book was irst published in 1912 as Der Tod in Venedig, and irst published in English in 1925 as Death in Venice and Other Stories. In 1971 Luchino Visconti directed a ilm version (in Italian Morte a Venezia) starring Dirk Bogarde and Björn Andrésen, with a score from Gustav Mahler’s third and ifth symphonies. Mann’s tale can be read as a warning against becoming a slave to sexual desire, while enjoying the slightly undigniied but still morally respectable position of limerence.

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as it comes about, and thrives on emotional bonding rather than physical contact, limerence is classic drama perfectly suited to the global intimacy of the internet. It seems harmless to anticipate and seek out the frisson of a secret attraction and indulge in the shudder and thrill of romantic play with the perfect fantasy partner (see Figure 13.1). However, the longer the potential lovers are kept apart, the deeper and stronger the attraction grows. It is romeo and Juliet on Ice,10 with the passion escalated exponentially … this, often tragic, tale of unrequited love seems to be part of humanness itself, being consistently repeated throughout different cultures and times. so why then does the concept of unconsummated love appear to be such an anomaly in our twenty-irst-century sexually precocious society? Some insight may be found in anthropologist Helen Fisher’s extensive research on the biology and social processes behind what we commonly think of collectively as ‘love’.11 Love is, according to fisher, actually three distinct and observable ‘systems’ of chemical process, brain patterns and deined behaviours. Research shows that different reward circuitry is activated in speciic brain regions and neural constellations by groups of hormones and neurotransmitters. for example, lust is primarily fuelled by androgens and estrogens, whereas attachment by oxytocin and vasopressin.12 What makes this so interesting is that they all are independently functioning systems generating authentic experiences, which can occur concurrently with multiple ‘objects’. combine these seemingly irrational concurrent behaviours with the online experience of being temporarily liberated from our human singularity – simultaneously occupying the three positions of user, viewer and avatar … Digital limerence opens up myriad possibilities, ‘we are the self, and one, and another – alone, together and networked … We are not just binary, pattern and randomness, the presence or absence of zero and one. We are composites, with the physical ecology of symbiotic species’.13 this triple treat of arousing and immersive experience – partly intensely personal and private; partly playful construction within set parameters; and part exuberant and exotic public performance, is fast becoming standard operating procedure in our mediated romances.

10 See ‘Ice (crystal methamphetamine hydrochloride)’, Reach out, available at http:// www.reachout.com.au/default.asp?ti=2681 [accessed 12 August 2008]. Ice is a street name for crystal methamphetamine hydrochloride, a powerful synthetic stimulant drug which speeds up messages going to and from the brain. the psychological and physical effects can be similar to limerence – euphoria and excitement; increased alertness, conidence and libido, dificulty sleeping, reduced appetite, dilated pupils, dry mouth, nervousness and anxiety. 11 Helen Fisher, ‘Lust, Attraction and Attachment in Mammalian Reproduction’, Human Nature, 9/1 (1998), pp. 23–52. 12 Ibid., p. 36. 13 Melinda Rackham, ‘Safety of Skin’, in Mary Flanagan and Austin Booth (eds), re: skin (Cambridge and London, 2006), p. 77.

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amygdala we meet for a swimming date, lying awkwardly on a grainless deserted beach, soothed by rhythmically coded waves and a perfect orange sunset. i give you a swim bracelet and our avatar bodies plunge into the translucent blueness, our arms lightly brushing underwater … the slightest touch, perhaps a mere pixel overlay – just close enough for the tips of our body hairs (if we had any) to intermingle, stimulating our electrical ields … shivers of delight cascade down my spine, my reward circuitry activates that aphrodisiac cocktail of dopamine, norepinephrine and serotonin. Cold-heartedly, to be ‘in love’ is to be addicted to the anticipation of the chemical release that another person or ‘object’ will trigger, to be immersed in a chemically induced alternate reality. Most humans (and a few animals) actively seek out this induced happiness, this lessening of inhibitions, this feeling of wellness and freedom. Unlike our protestant English, other languages have speciic words for the at-once liberation and bondage of limerence – for example the German verliebtheit and the scandinavian forelskelse roughly translate to the condition of ‘fallen-in-love-ness’. This aching for enjoyable, emotive immersive experience is not newly generated by our computer-enhanced society as the hype of the 1990s, such as futurist Howard Rheingold’s technophilic vision may have suggested, although we might be tempted to exoticize the proliferation of the virtual experience over the last few decades.14 our human desire for immersion in alternative forms of reality can be traced from the immersive rituals of tribal performance and shamanic trance to today’s multi-sensory theatrical and cinematic representations and immersive virtual environments. Today, the popularly accessible grid of Second Life (see Figure 13.2) and many other 2.5- or 3-dimensional worlds are the stages on which these love stories are played out by artists, writers, performers and anyone who cares to join in. We have always looked to art, performance and poetry (and the technologies which make them possible) to create portals into other realities – whether it be for entertainment or to contact the spirit world. a thread can be drawn from Platonic philosophies through to the awe-inspiring architecture of medieval mosques and cathedrals, which created transforming spiritual portals through fragrant exotic scents and imposing sculptural narratives. Within these spaces the populace was moved to experience a higher dimension though immersion in the emotive lickering of relective light produced by mosaic and stained-glass technology, and in the ecstatic, resonant and reverberating soundscape of voice and music technology.

14

see, for example, Howard rheingold, Virtual Reality (London, 1991).

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figure 13.2 screen Image: avatars in love in second Life

manifest feelings you are the most stable person in my daily life, touching me in so many deliciously ethereal ways, much, much more satisfying than local encounters. you are very solid for me too. i think we have met years ago, maybe we did and forgot?:) In 1849 richard Wagner penned The Artwork of the Future outlining how music, dance, poetry, architecture and painting could be integrated to create a total artwork, gesamtkunstwerk. This concept of an all-immersive, all-encompassing art and surround-sound environment makes the physical theatre space the interface with a virtual world, whereby: the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and aural faculties … Forgets the conines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes

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Underpinned by the orchestra, Wagner believed the collective artwork could ‘dissolve the hard immobile ground of the actual scene into a luent, elastic, impressionable aether’.16 the experience induced by watching what happened on the ‘wide expanse of the whole World’ could very well translate to an ecstatic transformative feeling experienced in the virtual environment of the ‘world wide web’. Immersion is a profoundly moving corporeal experience, being visually exaggerated and sonically saturated, electronically enhanced and tonally tweaked to produce emotional intensity. This juncture of our physical, emotional and avatar body in electronically constructed space produces an acute awareness of what we have always known, but usually ignore: our multiplicity of self. our perceptions are ampliied, not only by the electronic experience, but also by our biochemical response to the uncertainty that comes from being unable to gauge basic primitive sensory and instinctual information, such as another’s smell and heart rate, in online communications. this mystery further elevates our dopamine production, and we either lee in fear of the unknown, or further engage in anticipation of a pleasurable encounter. In this way, our brain systems act independently of one another, and indulge in what could be considered highly dangerous thoughts and behaviour by another system. In Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind, Gary marcus persuasively compares the human brain, where our rational functioning is grafted onto our primitive reptilian brain, to a power plant where high-tech computers mask the archaic vacuum tubes that regulate all the plant functions. He theorizes that, as the human brain has evolved for different purposes than we encounter in today’s environment, we make seemingly rational choices based on entirely inappropriate or irrelevant data.17 In the twenty-irst century we take it for granted that we can work, rest and play in immersive online environments. We are mutable creatures – our sensory antenna can modify to receive electronic signals and our physical body can low into the folds of electronically produced space. If we think of ourselves as very complex bio-computers programmed to produce useful and creative outcomes, is it just the serendipitous conjunction of erroneous data which makes our love lives material and meaningful? Is limerent love, a once needed evolutionary adaptation, now just a glitch in the machine?

15 Richard Wagner, ‘“Outlines of the Artwork of the Future”, The Artwork of the Future (1849)’, in Randall Packer and Ken Jordan (eds), Multimedia From Wagner to Virtual Reality, trans. W.A. Ellis (New York, 2001), pp. 5–6. 16 Ibid., p. 8. 17 see Gary marcus, Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind (Boston, 2008).

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Don’t leave me this way Online narratives on the love collective – lust, attraction and attachment – are proliic. My networked artwork Tunnel: Lust in Cyburbia, produced in 1996, was one of the early explorations of the tensions between different states of online sexual experience. In some instances online lovers easily transmute to wellmatched ofline lovers, while others encounter incongruities and incompatibility when the coded self crosses the terminal boundary. this erotic, obsessive, noir love story plays out to a not-so-happy ending, as when the lovers meet physically they experience bafling sexual dysfunction after the physical and emotional pinnacles of their text sex.18 it was sorta sweet, and the snugly beddy bit was just tooooo inviting. sorry! the blood rushed away from my brain, and, as i had to actually think and do things i had to log out … i’m here and will be for a while yet … and yeah it can be tough on the brain … :) xxx sleep well similarly, my 1999 viral love story carrier is a sensual investigation of attraction and attachment between shifting physical, emotional and viral network nodes – the symbiotic relationship between human, software and machine. the website seeks to seduce the viewer through aesthetic and textual means, as a software agent takes them each on a unique, intimate journey through subtly different manifestations of the site, according to the choices they make and their level of compliance with the agents’ requests. Visually and textually, carrier (see Figure 13.3) melds lesh and data, bonding with the user, and exposing the vulnerability of raw code – be that machine software code or human genome code.19

18 Rackham, ‘Safety of Skin’, p. 61. 19 One zone of the carrier site contains texts of ‘real’ people’s intimate experiences of dealing with the many stages of chronic viral infection, from the point of infection to facing death of either themselves or a loved one. this created an emotive immersive environment, which almost 10 years later, still regularly moves its audience to respond to the artwork via email.

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figure 13.3 screen Image: textual intertwining in melinda rackham’s internet artwork Carrier (1998) Just before the turn of the twenty-irst century, Auriea Harvey of Entropy8 and michaël samyn of zuper were constructing their own love story. the day after Harvey, located in New York, met Samyn, located in Gent (Belgium), ‘in the wires’, he sent her a web page with seductive whispers embedded in the source code. smitten, she composed and sent a romantic reply. the dialogue went back and forth between them speaking of love, desire and sexual fantasies, until the luscious skinonskinonskin web site (see Figure 13.4) was created in 1999. They then opened up their private web world to the larger world in a pay-per-view format pioneered by the online pornography industry. Harvey says, in an interview in the spanish new media art magazine a mínima, We are not just the consumers of technology. We strive to make love with it. Living apart we came together and made the (possibly) irst net art pay-per-view project, possibly the last. We make work for people. skinonskinonskin. Love for sale. A project of the 20th century Internet.20

20 Auriea Harvey, ‘skinonskinonskin’, a mínima, available at http://aminima.net/wp/ ?p=700&language=en [accessed 20 August 2008].

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figure 13.4 screen Image: screen Intimacy in Entropy8Zuper’s internet artwork Skinonskinonskin (1999) Note: With permission.

continuing to work together as entropy8zuper!, they met weekly online from 8 July 1999 until 9 January 2003 to produce Wireire, where they ‘made love’ live with an online audience. This was creative love – mixing poetic musings, seductive imagery, audio and visual iles, animations, web-cam streams, and their own and audience chat in sensual real-time landscapes. The audience were enthralled and logged on week after week to witness and share in this erotically charged artwork. This adult fairy-tale is blessed as today Harvey and Samyn live together in Gent, Belgium, creating sensual, three-dimensional immersive games and complex, intriguing artworks. others artists, like australian adam nash, have also explored the terrain of virtual or post-convergent space as a place of audio and visual sensuality. His simultaneously online and physically located 2004 performative work Scorched Happiness (see Figure 13.5) navigates wildly varied emotional geographies such as aloofness, conidence, melancholia and naivety, using the live interplay of geometric motifs, bright colours, ambient sounds and emotion-charged text to ill the virtual space with complex abstract structures created from the interaction of simple patterns. more recently, he has been considering sensuality and eroticism in virtual space: Eroticism to me is a sensual playground in the mind of the being-with-a-body … the melding of audio and vision (along with the other media-elements of network, interactivity, database, etc) in the post-convergent space of realtime

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3D returns the visual sense to the erotic register, moving the body via the mind involuntarily.21

There is no need for physicality in Nash’s work which, with other-worldly visuals and primordial three-dimensional imagery, triggers physical sensation making, ‘a harmonious union/conscious manipulation of mind and body’.22 In his ethereal Seventeen Unsung Songs (2007), Nash addresses this emotional/erotic register. for example, a component of the work, the Moaning Columns of Longing, stalks viewers, emailing them every hour using guilt and pain as a lure, and begging them to return to ‘re-touch’ the three-dimensional column so as to stop it from dying out of loneliness; while a live internet performance of another element, the audio-visual Cloud Chamber (a kind of immersive bubble of animated geometric shards of white and pristine sonic tones based on Nash’s own harmonic scale), erotically entrances audiences. For Nash, ‘Erotic doesn’t equal sexual … To me it implies living rather than survival, and rather than simply a subjection to the senses. It is a celebration of being alive, for there is ostensibly no survival/logical reason to be erotic, it is to swim in an excess over survival’.23

figure 13.5 screen Image: Post-convergent three-dimensional audiovisual networked performance in adam nash’s Scorched Happiness (2004) Note: With permission. 21 Adam Nash, ‘Re: Virtual Space’, email to Melinda Rackham (14 July 2008). 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid. Nash has been much inluenced in his work by theorist Elizabeth Grosz who speaks of music being an ‘excess over survival’ in Chaos, Territory, Art (New York, 2008). Grosz argues that art forms, such as architecture and music, are forms of erotic expression connecting sensory richness with primal desire. therefore the meaning of art comes from intensities and sensations, not intentions and aesthetics.

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Cells that ire together wire together co-incidentally the next time we both appeared online, our previously slender, sculpted and muscular avatars had redrawn with a substantial weight gain … Rubenesque … Gladiatorial … Super-sized …24 both now round and jolly, no longer vulnerable, protected by layers of virtual fat, we feel safely self-contained. oddly, our shared anxiety assured each other that we were not just ordinary residents in this pedestrian virtual terrain – we where drawn together by intelligence, humour and quirkiness rather than the low-brow attraction of symmetrical physicality. we marked ourselves as transgressively intellectual pleasure seekers, searching for that quaintly queer connoisseur experience. The power of emotion to inluence the physical is astounding – every action is under the inluence of our magniicent bespoke pharmacy. If everything we perceive or experience can have a possible relationship with any other experience, the scenarios become initely ininite. Given that the concepts of our love collective are stored in the neural net, associations become stronger as we reinforce them chemically in our long-term memory, or we can chemically interrupt the associations to form completely new patterns. However, before this experience is codiied and quantiied, before it even reaches the experience processing plant, it can be corrupted. as Helen fisher points out we no longer receive accurate data from most of the senses that our brain relies upon to make life decisions. Many of our vital physiological and emotional datacollection receptors for falling in love, being sexually aroused or choosing a life partner are interfered with by SSRI anti-depressants, the most widely used moodaltering chemicals in the Western world.25 In addition, cosmetics, hair dye, perfume, deodorant, cosmetic dentistry, stomach banding, botox, laser surgery and so on all alter the human sensory interactions of smell, vision and touch. What we feel and sense today in every communication and each human interaction is already enhanced, already virtual, and often maps to other-than-intended brain constellations. 24 The term ‘Super-Size’, from Morgan Spurlock’s 2004 Super Size Me documentary on the physical and mental effects of consuming large quantities of fast food from McDonald’s, has been adopted by the burgeoning subculture of ‘feederism’. Here, fat fetishists are sexually aroused by ‘growing’ themselves or their partners and eat their way to morbid obesity with both ‘gainers’ and ‘feeders’ indulging in super-sized sex and pornography. See ‘Super Sized Sex’, Marie Claire (Sydney, June 2008), pp. 94–7. 25 Helen Fisher and J. Anderson Thomson Jr, ‘Lust, Romance, Attraction, Attachment: Do the Side-effects of Serotonin-enhancing Antidepressants Jeopardize Romantic Love, Marriage and Fertility?’, in Steven M. Platek, Julian P. Keenan and Todd K. Shakelford (eds), Evolutionary Cognitive Neuroscience (Cambridge, MA, 2006), pp. 254–8.

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figure 13.6 screen Image: Contemplating the triple complexity of Eva and franco mattes’s Shoot (2007) performance at odyssey in second Life

the recreation, reproduction and remediation which occurs in virtual environments such as Second Life, perfectly exempliied by Eva and Franco Mattes’s Shoot performance (see Figure 13.6) at Odyssey in 2007, indicates that we can be profoundly moved by events and objects many iterations on from their origin.26 It is no surprise then that limerence is not limited to human love objects. Stendhal, who was fond of penning architectural and travel anecdotes, described the limerent experience during a visit to florence in 1817. the reaction aroused by viewing an excess of art and architecture is remarkably similar to that aroused by his passion for unattainable love. He noted in Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio: I was in a sort of ecstasy, from the idea of being in florence, close to the great men whose tombs I had seen. absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty … I reached the point where one encounters celestial sensations … everything spoke so vividly to my soul. ah, if I could only forget. I had palpitations of the 26 ‘Eva and Franco Mattes rearticulate important elements of 20th Century art history with their Synthetic Performances … The remediation of Chris Burden’s Shoot at Odyessy in Second Life was performed and watched in-world, documented in-world and now documentation is displayed in-world as photographs or video still on the Odyssey Gallery walls. the hilarity of this tripling and folding is not lost on an avatar audience, viewing a remediation of a remediation’. For a full discussion see Melinda Rackham and Christian McCrea, ‘The Grand Tour – Art in Second Life’, in Stephen Doesinger (ed.), The Space Between Us (Munich, 2008), pp. 152–5.

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heart, what in Berlin they call “nerves”. Life was drained from me. I walked with the fear of falling.27

causing one rapid heartbeat, dizziness, confusion and even hallucinations, the aptly named stendhal syndrome is considered to be a psychosomatic illness. Instead of an individual, the limerent object is art, particularly beautiful art, or an excess of art in a single location, such as magniicent architecture or a museum. The ilm Stendhal Syndrome also describes a similar reaction to the immense beauty of the natural world or the reactions of audiences to music of the romantic period. In homage to the emotionally amplifying experience of travel, the Italian rail corporation named their overnight train from Paris to Venice the stendhal express.28

resistance is futile so we keep missing darting like golden carp in a pond … i just want to cry once limerence loses its chemical hold it usually fades fairly quickly. this can occur through several different routes, including being slowly and painfully starved by a lack of reciprocity. If, however, obstructions are removed and the relationship is consummated, the limerent ones will either form a reciprocal relationship or ind they don’t particularly like each other. Alternatively, limerence can be transformed and transferred, via the same biological and chemical processes, to a different limerent object or resonant artefact. While our software bodies are very capable of adaptation, comfortable with ephemerality and the sensation of operating as shifting nodes, our physical and emotional bodies may be still catching up. they/we may be stretched and replicated, mutated and woven by others, simultaneously existing in multiple synaptic terrains, as mirroring neurons create an emotional geography, an immersive narrative, an experience intrinsic to the medium. As twenty-irst-century adventurers taking today’s Stendhal Express through layers of virtuality, we exist in a constant state of lux. We are always adapting to new spatialities and modes of data exchange, whether we are negotiating a voice-recognition phone menu system, interacting with avatars in virtual environments, or rambling along crumbling Venetian Vias. Low latency connection between people allows for gesture to be shaped by text, for physical proximity to be shared by users, and mood to be shaped and 27 Stendhal, Naples and Florence: A Journey from Milan to Reggio (Rome, 1817). 28 The Stendhal Syndrome (1996) was the irst Italian ilm to use computer-generated imagery (CGI). Written and directed by Dario Argento, it starred his daughter Asia Argento as the heroine overcome by stendhal syndrome while viewing art in florence.

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resonated by artefacts and architectures. our hot primitive brain systems engage easily with the simplicity and lack of pretension of networked immersion, and thankfully dominate cool reason which tries to tell us that love online (in its many forms of lust, eroticism, limerence, sensuality and attachment) is merely a Pascallian diversion from wretchedness.29 When we fall in love and scratch what Helen Fisher labels ‘an intolerable neural itch’, we are following the directions of a powerful drive, not just acting on a transient jagged peak of emotion.30 It may appear to be not in our best interests to fall for an unobtainable stranger – however philosophers, biologists, writers, anthropologists, artists, neurologists, musicians and psychologists across the centuries agree: we are driven to experience that which we logically shouldn’t. another summer cloudburst descends, that unexpected portal into an other/ underworld, a labyrinth of mystery and expectation. embrace the soft rhythmic hard drive hum; the soothing boundlessness of screen space; the responsive touch and reactive resistance of your keyboard; ill your nostrils with the potent scent of electricity. Relax into the matrix – an all encompassing translucence, celebrating exquisite data errors, the potentialities of pattern mis-recognition. Let go. Let yourself drift, without resistance, into realms that exceed all expectation. i reached out … telling a story i didn’t know how to translate, ethereally embracing my perfect other dissolving singularity I never want this to end … being with you listening to Wagner together at the terminal boundary fare-well love u xxx

29 Seventeenth-century French mathematician, physicist and theologian Blaise Pascal believed the human condition was so miserable we needed to divert ourselves from thinking of it. 30 Wystan H. Auden quoted by Helen Fisher in ‘Helen Fisher: The Science of Love, and the Future of Women’, TED: Technology, Entertainment, Design (2006), available at http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/helen_isher_tells_us_why_we_love_cheat.html [accessed 30 July 2008].

conclusion Janis Jefferies

In 1932 Bertolt Brecht imagined a future in which radio would cease to be merely a one-way ‘apparatus for distribution’ and become ‘the inest possible communication apparatus in public life, a vast network of pipes’.1 In writing this he anticipated what we now know as internet culture and the possibilities of interactive media in ‘theatre’. Almost concurrently, in 1936, Walter Benjamin, wrote ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’. According to auslander in his contribution to Interfaces, ‘Benjamin’s concept of reactivation provides a starting point for thinking about the relationship between meditated performances and their audiences’. Mediated is a useful term here as Auslander has proposed that we live in a world where the concept of ‘liveness’ is losing its meaning. It would seem that ‘liveness’ as used in theatre (by which I mean the genre of non-participatory, Western performance) is in direct opposition to ideas of media and technology in general. media, in this sense, can include the broadcast and projection of ilm, video, images and other content but it need not be digitized. However, Chatzichristodoulou and Zerihan have noted in their introduction, ‘as technologies become increasingly integrated into theatre and performance practice’ emergent and disparate paradigms challenge such oppositions ‘through a strategic use of a diverse spectrum of technologies as a means to artistic ends’. By the early 1990s, in fact, it had become possible to stream video images over the internet at very low cost. Artists were quick to exploit video-streaming technologies to create live multi-site performance events. The use of technology in performance does not merely add a new tool to an old discipline but rather challenges some of our most basic assumptions about performance itself. Indeed, digital, networked and virtual technologies’ performance challenges the very distinction between ‘liveness’ and media. these methodologies reactivate the relationship between performers and audiences who can now share the same physical space, a space of becoming, a space of interaction and integration. As Auslander points out, a human audience is co-present with performers in the same shared breathing space, without restraint from physical barriers or perceived interface. If an interface can be a shared space between two areas then it is also possible, as Kember and Zylinska argue in ‘Creative Media: Performance, 1 Bertolt Brecht, ‘The Radio as an Apparatus of Communication’, in John Willet (ed. and trans.), Brecht on Theater (New York, 1964), p. 52.

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Invention, Critique’, that the status of theory as theatre, or ‘for the performativity of all theory –in media, arts and sciences; in written and spoken forms’, can be pursued in experimental form. They highlight ‘the ongoing possibilities of remediation across all media and all forms of communication’ so that theatre does not only take place ‘at the theatre’. This is an important point as the interventions made by, for example, Intima Virtual Base, Gob squad and Blast theory investigate how their performances are always performed and positioned within a venue’s concrete geographical, artistic and social contexts. this could be a theatre but it could also include more intimate or larger, public-scale, site-speciic locations. For example, Gob Squad’s House was installed in a disused suburban home in 1994, whilst Work was a forty-hour performance of working activities in an ofice building in 1995. If Gob squad turn the status of who is the performer and who is the audience inside out, it is because among their antecedents, it could be argued, are Brecht’s learning plays. for example, in The Oceanlight or The Baden Baden Lesson on Consent audiences learn to exchange their roles. the question of performativity is also taken up by nicola triscott in her chapter, ‘Performative Science in an Age of Specialization: The Case of Critical Art Ensemble’. For her, ‘performativity’ has come to mean that theories and models bring about the very conditions that they attempt to explain. this, I believe, applies to the interrogative practices of many of the chapters included here. triscott cites Latour and Woolgar’s ‘Laboratory Life’, in which the authors suggest that the aim of science is not to provide facts or representation about nature but rather to ‘perform’ it. This is a useful way of thinking through Simon Donger’s interview with ORLAN as she performs her body as a series of ‘scientiic’ experiments, modiied and mediated by the very technologies it uses. Through personal testimony, ORLAN describes how she creates an ORLAN-body mediated by an instrument made or chosen by her. An instrumentalized ORLAN-body, she says, can replace the irst one. so now we have audiences replacing performers, performativity of all theory performed in experimental terms, theatre spaces moved to tram stations, instrumentalized bodies replacing material ones, and in ‘Love at First Byte’, melinda rackham explores ideas around what can potentially happen romantically in the virtual world. she argues that limerence is classic drama perfectly suited to the global intimacy of the internet, as it comes about and thrives on emotional bonding rather than physical contact. It may be as, salter argues in his chapter, ‘Environments, Interactions and Beings: The Ecology of Performativity and Technics’, that ‘new forms of hybrid human and machine subjectivities shift our analysis of performance from an anthropocentric one’ to those of ‘non-human enunciations’. In this respect, Gilbert Simondon’s ideas on recurrent causality are key. His ideas are taken up by Sher Doruff in her chapter, ‘The Tendency to ‘Trans-’: The Political Aesthetics of the Biogrammatic’. The consequences of Simondon’s analysis for an understanding of the potential performativity of technical beings are profound for both authors. Individuation of technical beings becomes possible through an openness to and exchange with its

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surroundings. As Salter states, ‘technical beings enact or perform a world that has not yet arisen’ or to return to Chatzichristodoulou and Zerihan’s introduction, ‘(a) live cultural phenomena are always in the process of becoming themselves – and of becoming other’. Such ‘otherness’ is not to be found in predetermined scripted plays, scientiic models or solid interfaces but rather through diagrams. The emergent value of diagrams as working objects depends upon the openended nature of their representations. today, process is but the principle that was explored well before technology in the early history of the culture of diagram. Doruff reminds us in her chapter that the diagram, quoting Brian massumi, is a process, which ‘encounters the dynamic interrelation of relations’. As such, this becomes a useful deinition that can be applied to performance practice and more generally, lived experience. In Doruff’s practice and writing, the diagram is highly unstable or luid, continually churning up matter and functions in a way likely to create change. How does change come about? On the one hand, Triscott cites Wagner’s 1849 text ‘The Artwork of the Future Proposes a Total Artwork – Gesamtkunstwerk’, as a response: the spectator transplants himself upon the stage, by means of all his visual and aural faculties … forgets the conines of the auditorium, and lives and breathes now only in the artwork which seems to it as Life itself, and on the stage which seems the wide expanse of the whole World.

on the other, Blast theory in their interview with maria chatzichristodoulou, describe how their work explores the relationship between real, virtual and ictional forms. There is a focus on the socio-political aspects of technology and how these affect social dynamics. so their questions comprise: In what ways do audience members give up control to the performers on stage? Why do they do that and how can this be exposed? How can we play with this boundary? Can the audiences themselves be at the very centre of the piece, become the protagonists? Interfaces of Performance has been designed to extend current discourse in theatre, performance and ‘liveness’ practices. It was initiated around the time, october 2008, that the Ica2 announced the closure of their Live and media arts Department. In his statement, the Ica director ekow eshun expressed the judgement that ‘the art form lacks depth and cultural urgency’.3 this statement sparked a series of responses in the media4 and lively debates on several mailing 2 see http://www.ica.org.uk [accessed 23 october 2008]. 3 from statement forwarded to new media curating mailing list by Ica media and Live art curator emma Quinn on 17 october 2008. see http://www.crumbweb.org [accessed 22 october 2008]. 4 See, for example, Lyn Gardner’s article on the Guardian theatre blog and numerous responses to this. Lyn Gardner, ‘Ekow Eshun and the ICA’s death blow to live art’, The Guardian Theatre Blog (23 October 2008), available at http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/ theatreblog/2008/oct/23/ica-live-arts-closure [accessed 25 October 2008].

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lists, such as new media curating,5 Liveart6 and node.London.7 Interfaces of Performance refutes such a negative judgement and ill-conceived comment by revealing the depth and breadth of those practices and the work of several artistic, curatorial, academic, media and research communities that can be found in this volume of extraordinary, vibrant and challenging chapters. Note that quotations are from the authors’ chapters in Interfaces of Performance.

5 http://www.crumbweb.org [accessed 29 october 2008]. 6 See http://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/webadmin?A0=LIVEART [accessed 29 October 2008]. 7 See http://one.server1.org/mailman/listinfo/nodel-discuss [accessed 29 October 2008].

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210

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artists’ websites Blast Theory Entropy8Zuper! Gob Squad igloo igloo, SwanQuake Intima Virtual Base Adam Nash Melinda Rackham

Index references to photographs and illustrations are italicized; numbers such as 44n2 mean note 2 on page 44. 15 Minutes to Comply (1997) 98–99, 99 3D imagery 43, 44, 45, 47, 48, 50, 52 4.33 (Cage, 1952) 110n2 Abramović, M. 111–112 abstract machine 123–125, 126, 129, 138 Adams, M. (Blast Theory) 4, 107, 117, 118 adorno, t. 161 affect 2, 5, 36, 107, 176, 177 amygdala 188 arts catalyst 4, 153, 161, 164 associated milieu 30, 32–33 audience members Blast theory 108, 109–110, 111, 112–113, 201 CAE (Critical Art Ensemble) 159, 162, 164–165 Interfacing/Radiotopia/Keyworx (2003) 136–137 audiences 2, 3–4, 81, 82, 83, 87, 199, 200 Blast theory 4, 107, 108–110, 111–113, 115, 117, 201 Gob squad 4, 95, 97–101, 102–105 aura 84, 85, 86, 88–89 auslander, P. 4, 199 austin, J.L. 10, 29, 156 Ballettikka Internettikka 5, 169–171, 174, 175, 176–179, 180–181 Hydraullikka (2008) 170 Intermenttikka (2008) 178 Part Two: BalletNet (2002) 170–171, 171, 172, 180 Stattikka (2007) 171, 172, 173 VolksNetBallet (2006) 171 b.ALT.ica (Štromajer, 1998) 175 beholder 84–85, 86, 88, 90, 91 Benjamin, W. 83–86, 88–89, 90, 91, 93

Bioart 163 biogram 4, 121–122, 123, 124, 127–129, 131–132, 134, 136–137 biogrammatic zone 127–129, 136–137, 138–140 biotechnology 153, 154, 157–158, 164, 166 Blast theory 3, 4, 107–109, 110–113, 114–118, 200, 201 Can You See Me Now? (2001) 107, 111, 111, 112, 112–113, 118 Day of the Figurines (2006) 107, 108, 114, 114, 116, 117 Kidnap (1998) 107, 109, 109–110, 111, 112, 115, 118 Rider Spoke (2007) 108, 108, 117 Uncle Roy All Around You (2003) 107, 116, 116, 117 bodies 2, 3 igloo 53–54 orLan 3, 65, 66–67, 68, 69 Braidotti, r. 14 Broadhurst, s. 91, 92 Butler, J. 9, 10–11, 22, 29 CAE (Critical Art Ensemble) 153, 154, 156, 157–160, 161–162, 165–166 Cult of the New Age (2000) 158, 159 Free Range Grain (2003) 159, 160 GenTerra (2002) 159, 160, 164–165 Marching Plague (2005) 161–162, 162, 163, 166 Molecular Invasion (2002) 159, 159 camp 179–180 Can You See Me Now? (Blast Theory, 2001) 107, 111, 111, 112, 112–113, 118 carrier (Rackham, 1999) 191, 192 central differentiation 125–126

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Chatzichristodoulou, M. (aka Maria X) 4, 199, 201 Chicano Cyborgs (Gómez-Peña) 145, 145 chicanos 4, 141–142, 143, 144 Cloud Chamber (Nash, 2007) 194 cognition, enacted theory of 33–34 collaborative performances 135–136 computer games 44n2, 49–50, 114n6 computers 20–21, 34, 40, 43–45, 47, 48–49, 52–53 Love Conversation with My Computer 144, 151–152 connectivity 1, 5, 174–176, 177, 179, 180 controlspace 137–138 crackle Box, the 139 creative media 2, 9, 10, 11–12, 19, 22–23, 131, 200 Creative Media Project 2, 7–8, 10, 12, 17 critical art ensemble. see cae critique 8, 9, 10 Cult of the New Age (CAE, 2000) 158, 159 cyber-based relationships 184–185, 187, 188, 191, 192–193, 197–198 cyborg politics 13 cyborgs 17, 19 Day of the Figurines (Blast Theory, 2006) 107, 108, 114, 114, 116, 117 de Botton, a. 185 deicit model 155 Deleuze, G. 121, 122, 123, 124, 125–126, 127, 128, 131–132, 137–138 diagramme de Foucault 126, 128, 130 diagram 4, 121–123, 201 abstract machine 123–125 controlspace 137–138 fold 125–129 resistance 131–132 tendency 134 transduction 132–134, 136–137 translocal jamming 135–136, 137 diagramme de Foucault (Deleuze) 126, 128, 130 differentiation 11, 12, 21, 92–93 central 125–126 indifferent 91, 92, 93 digital limerence 184–185, 187, 188, 191, 192–193, 197–198

digitality 20, 21 Donger, s. 3, 69, 200 Doruff, s. 4, 201 embodiment 47, 59, 67 enaction 30, 33–34 environments 2–3, 27–42, 200 interactive media 30, 39–40, 43, 48, 50, 52, 100, 101, 199 mediatized 82 ORLAN-body 65, 66, 69 performative 108, 109, 117 virtual space 3, 44, 51, 193–194 virtual worlds 43–45, 188, 189–190, 196, 197, 200 ethno-techno politics 4, 141–144 Expressive Arts Therapy (EXA) 72n2 fisher, H. 187, 195, 198 fold 121, 124, 125–130 foster, H. 67–68 foucault, m. 121, 122, 125–126, 132, 133 Free Range Grain (CAE, 2003) 159, 160 Gadamer, H-G. 83, 86–90, 91, 92 Galloway, a. 176 GenTerra (CAE, 2002) 159, 160, 164–165 Gibson, R. (igloo) 3, 43–47, 48–54 Gob squad 3, 4, 95–101, 102–105, 200 15 Minutes to Comply (1997) 98–99, 99 Gob Squad’s Kitchen (2007) 95, 96, 96–98, 103, 103–104, 104 The Great Outdoors (2001) 100, 100 King Kong Club (2005) 101, 102 Prater-Saga 3 (2004) 101, 101 Room Service (2003) 100 Saving the World (2008) 104–105, 105 Screen Test (2007) 96–97 Sleep (2007) 96, 97 Super Night Shot (2003) 100 Gob Squad’s Kitchen (2007) 95, 96, 96–98, 97, 103, 103–104, 104 Gómez-Peña, G. 4, 69, 77, 141, 141, 142–145, 146, 147, 148 Chicano Cyborgs 145, 145 Love Conversation with My Computer 144, 151–152

Index X-treme Identity Crisis Online 143, 150 Grigely, J. 85, 91 Guimbal turbine 32

internet ballet 169–171 Intima Virtual Base 5, 174, 200 invention 11, 12, 13, 15, 19, 21

Hadron collider 8 Haraway, D. 12, 13, 17, 18, 58 Harlequins Coat (ORLAN, 2008) 59, 64, 66 Heidegger, m. 12, 27–28 horizons, fusion of 86–90, 91, 92 Hydraullikka (Ballettikka Internettikka, 2008) 170

Jameson, f. 90, 92–93 Jasanoff, s. 154–155

igloo 3, 43–47, 48–54 New Forest (2007) 48, 48 Summerbranch (2005) 44–45, 54 SwanQuake: House 48, 49, 50, 50, 51 Viking Shoppers (1999–2001) 46, 46, 53–54 WarStars 48–49 Winterspace (2001–2005) 46, 46, 53–54 immersion 190, 198 impersonal mode 14 improvisation 121, 131, 134 indifferent differentiaion 91, 92, 93 individuation technical 31–32, 33, 35, 122, 128, 200–201 transductive 129, 132–133 interactive media 199 Blast theory 107, 109–110, 111, 112, 115, 118 Gob squad 100, 101 igloo 43, 48, 50, 52 Schwelle 30–31, 39–40 interfaces 1–2, 115, 189–190, 199–200, 201 3D imagery 50, 52–53 biogram 121–122, 123, 124, 125–126, 127, 128, 136, 138 bodies 59 Web 2.0 paradigm 137–138 Interfacing/Radiotopia/Keyworx (2003) 136–137 Intermenttikka (Ballettikka Internettikka, 2008) 178 internet artwork 191–194, 192, 193, 194

213

Kember, s. 2, 14, 199–200 Media, Mars and Metamorphosis 15–17 The Optical Effects of Lightning 14–15 Kidnap (Blast Theory, 1998) 107, 109, 109–110, 111, 112, 115, 118 King Kong Club (Gob Squad, 2005) 101, 102 knowledge 2, 9, 10, 27, 28, 154–155 Kunst, B. 5 Kurtz, s. 4, 153–154, 161–162, 165–166 limerence 5, 184–185, 187, 196, 197, 200 live-ness 47, 53 live performance 2, 47, 81, 97, 201–202 Live art 133–134 love 183–184, 185–186, 187 Love Conversation with My Computer (Gómez-Peña) 144, 151–152 Marching Plague (CAE, 2005) 161–162, 162, 163, 166 Martelli, B. (igloo) 3, 43–47, 48–54 massumi, B. 5, 122, 124, 136, 177 material enunciations 29, 30 Media, Mars and Metamorphosis (Kember) 15–17 Media Spaces (Zylinska) 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 22 mediation 8, 11–12, 13, 17, 29, 87, 102, 117 mediatized performances 81–83, 85–86 MesuRages (ORLAN, 1968–79) 58, 59, 60, 65 metamorphosis, bodily 45–46, 53–54 micropolitics 131–132, 133, 134 Moaning Columns of Longing (Nash, 2007) 194 mocap (motion capture) 43n1, 45, 47, 52–53 Molecular Invasion (CAE, 2002) 159, 159

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moving audiences 95–101, 102–105 nash, a. 193–194 New Forest (igloo, 2007) 48, 48 non-place 135, 136, 137, 138 non-synchronous artwork 67–68 NPC (non-player character) 44n2 orLan 3, 57–59, 65–68, 69, 200 Harlequins Coat (2008) 59, 64, 66 The Kiss of the Artist (1977) 59, 60, 66 MesuRages (1968–79) 58, 59, 60, 65 The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN (1990–1993) 57, 59, 62, 66 Saint ORLAN (1980–1983) 59, 61 Self-Hybridizations 59, 62, 63, 65, 66 ORLAN-body 65, 66, 200 Part Two: BalletNet (Ballettikka Internettikka, 2008) 170–171, 171, 172, 180 participants 4, 29 Blast theory 108, 109–110, 111, 112–113, 115, 201 CAE (Critical Art Ensemble) 159, 162, 164, 164–165 Gob squad 103, 104–105, 117 Interfacing/Radiotopia/Keyworx (2003) 136–137 Schwelle 36, 41–42 participatory performance 153, 159, 161, 162 Pentecost, c. 163 performance boxes 99 performance practice 1–5, 28–30, 122–123, 138, 199, 201 performative science 156–159, 161–162, 163–165 performativity 2–3, 10–11, 30–31, 32–33, 35, 129, 133, 156–157, 200 photography 19, 20 Pickering, a. 156–157 political art 4, 13, 113, 118, 133–134, 161 Prater-Saga 3 (Gob Squad, 2004) 101, 101 Primavesi, P. 4 prosthesis 58, 68–69, 84 protocols 5, 174, 175, 176–177, 179, 180

rackham, m. 5, 200 reactivation 83–86, 88, 89 recorded performances 81, 82, 83, 86–87, 89, 91, 92 recurrent causality 31–32, 33, 200 relational movements 129 remediation 8, 14, 117, 196, 200 reproduced performances 4, 83–87, 88, 89, 90 resistance 131–132, 133 Rhythm 0 (Abramović, 1974) 111 Rider Spoke (Blast Theory, 2007) 108, 108, 117 rivero De Beer, L. 4 robot performances 5, 169, 171, 179–181 Room Service (Gob Squad, 2003) 100 Saint ORLAN (ORLAN, 1980–1983) 59, 61 salter, c. 3, 200, 201 Saving the World (Gob Squad, 2008) 104–105, 105 schumacher, m. 37–38, 38, 39 Schwelle (2004–2008) 30–31, 36–39 Part 1 37, 37 Part 2 37–39, 38, 39 Part 3 40, 40–41, 42 science 154–156 performative 156–159, 161–162, 163–165 science iction 14, 15, 49 Scorched Happiness (Nash, 2004) 193, 194 Screen Test (Gob Squad, 2007) 96–97 second Life 185, 188, 189, 196 Self-Hybridizations (ORLAN) 59, 62, 63, 65, 66 sensate room 37–38 sense perception 81, 93 Shoot (Mattes, 2007) 196 simondon, G. 28, 30, 31–33, 35, 128, 135, 200 simulacra 45, 116n9 simulation 104, 116n9 Skinonskinonskin (Entropy8Zuper, 1999) 193 Sleep (Gob Squad, 2007) 96, 97 social ield 121, 133, 135, 138 speech-act theory 10, 29 sponge 30, 35–36

Index Stattikka (Ballettikka Internettikka, 2007) 171, 172, 173 stelarc 18, 22 stendhal 185–186, 196–197 Stendhal Syndrome 197 stiegler, B. 17, 18, 27, 30, 35 stone, a.r. 3 Štromajer, I. (Ballettikka Internettikka) 169, 171, 174, 177 b.ALT.ica (1998) 175 structural coupling 30, 34 stumpf, Berit 96, 97, 98 subjectiication, zone of 121, 122, 123, 126 Summerbranch (igloo, 2005) 44–45, 54 Super Night Shot (Gob Squad, 2003) 100 SwanQuake: House (igloo) 48, 49, 50, 50, 51 tactics 163–164 taxonomies 1 techne 27, 28, 69 technical beings 27, 28, 29, 30, 31–33, 35, 42, 200–201 technical individuation 31–33, 35, 122, 128, 200–201 technology 1–5, 12, 17–19, 22, 27–28, 30, 31–33, 135, 199 Ballettikka Internettikka 174–177, 179 Blast theory 107, 108, 109, 114–115, 118, 201 CAE (Critical Art Ensemble) 153, 154, 157–159 Gob squad 95, 98, 102, 105 Gómez-Peña, Guillermo 143–145 igloo 43–45, 47, 50, 54 orLan 58–59, 66, 68–69, 200 Web 2.0 paradigm 137–138 tendency 134 The Great Outdoors (Gob Squad, 2001) 100, 100 The Kiss of the Artist (ORLAN, 1977) 59, 60, 66 The Optical Effects of Lightning (Kember) 14–15 The Reincarnation of Saint ORLAN (ORLAN, 1990–1993) 57, 59, 62, 66 theatre 3, 8, 13, 28–29, 40, 77–78, 200 Blast theory 107–108, 109

215

Gob squad 96–97, 98 traces, of performance 67 transduction 122, 125, 129, 131, 132–133, 136 transductive individuation 129, 132–133, 136 transgender 3, 74 translocal jamming 135–136 triscott, nicola 4, 200, 201 Tunnel: Lust in Cyburbia (Rackham, 1996) 191 Uncle Roy All Around You (Blast Theory, 2003) 107, 116, 116, 117 Varela, f. 30, 33–35, 40, 42, 133 video presentation 82, 199 Ballettikka Internettikka 177–178 Gob squad 95, 99, 101 orLan 57–58, 69 Schwelle Part 1 37 Youtube 90, 91–92, 138, 144 Viking Shoppers (igloo, 1999–2001) 46, 46, 53–54 virtual space 3, 44, 51, 193–194 virtual worlds 188, 189–190, 196, 197, 200 Blast theory 107, 115, 116, 117 igloo 3, 43–45, 48–50, 51–53, 54 nash, adam 193–194 VolksNetBallet (Ballettikka Internettikka, 2006) 171 Wagner, r. 189–190 Waisvisz, m. 138–140, 139 WarStars (igloo) 48–49 We Have Always Been Digital (2007) 19, 20, 20–21 Web 2.0 paradigm 137–138 Will, simon 96, 97, 103–104 Winterspace (igloo, 2001–2005) 46, 46, 53–54 Wireire 193 X-treme Identity Crisis Online (GómezPeña) 143, 150 Youtube 90, 91–92, 138, 144

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Zorman, B. (Ballettikka Internettikka) 169, 171, 177 zylinska, J. 2, 199–200 Media Spaces 7, 9, 11, 12, 16, 22

orLan 68–69 We Have Always Been Digital (2007) 19, 20, 20–21