Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2

["Michelle Riel" <michelle_riel@csumb.edu>]

There may be a more palpable experience of the visceral in a face to face experience but audience members are also free to  - and do ? intervene in the reception of a work by leaving a performance when the content is not to their agreement for
whatever reason. This is the same level of control to disengage or to negate in an online environment. As you also note in your additional examples as well, there are many experiences in daily social interaction in which such negation or dismissal
occurs outside of networked or technological mediation. It would seem the Sartrean negation to which you refer is independent of technology and specifically online performances. 

What Helen and I have found fascinating in our observations, and which she notes in a prior post with the example of the telematic dinner party http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000479.html, is that there is a range of new work that is both
live and using networks to bring people together in a social context in which the objective is creating a context for audience _experience_  rather than creating the context for audience observation of a performer where the focus is the performer?s
body as a ?site of truth?.  

This raises fundamental questions about the nature of Performance, performance, and performativity. And as suggested in a prior post, a definition of performance is needed, which I will post separately. 

Helen does also note on her reply to this post that many of the works take place in the physical world, as opposed to solely in an online space, and as such confront the dangers, or terror, of the real. A case in point is the company Blast Theory
whose Can You See Me Know urban game pits live performers in an urban city  environment against online players who attempt to "catch" them. The technology is such that the players in the urban street are running around with GPS tracked handhelds
that convey their physical coordinates to the online game space where they are pursued. In an effort to evade the online player, whom the urban street runners see as a tracking beacon on their handheld, they run through the real streets, dodging
real cars and obstacles to evade capture. One player recounts their concern for a player's safety when they heard the traffic and the runner's reply and feared the runner had been hit by a car. (Streaming audio from the runner's makes the online
player's experience both more connected and more real.)

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000033.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000755.html


soft_skinned_space <empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au> writes:
>
>Hi - Stelarc's performances - there were early ones - that involved hooks 
>- I think 16? or so were completed - the online work/networking work is 
>different - as far as I know, no hooks -
>
>I'm following this discussion with great interest - wondering if anyone 
>can address the issue of (Levinas') alterity - the issue of face-to-face; 
>it seems to me that one of the characteristics of, say, email, or net sex, 
>or online performance, is that the kill/delete/dev/null keys can be used 
>quite quickly - in other words, one can tailor one's online experience by 
>absolutely elminating the negative - but in everyday life, there is always 
>the possibility of (Sartrean) negation - of having, so to speak, one's 
>existence annihilated, one turned down, without recourse (thinking of what 
>happens when one asks someone out and is refused, or for that matter, an 
>unfortunate encounter with Simon Penny last night, who basically looked 
>through me and saw an imaginary). This is also the realm of the stand-up 
>comic, who is in the situation of a wager, really a wager of existence, 
>with her or his audience.
>
>There is a terror in the real, in other words, a terror of negation, that 
>plays only a secondary role in online performance (performance in the 
>broadest sense).
>
>Any comments greatly appreciated; apologies if irrelevant -
>
>Alan
>
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..........................
michelle riel, mfa
asst. prof. new media & dept. chair
teledramatic arts & technology, bldg. 27
california state university monterey bay
100 campus center
seaside, ca 93955, usa
v: 831.582.4665