Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance

[Helen Thorington <newradio@turbulence.org>]

Hi all: 

I want to pick up on Chris¹ post and write a bit about active objects and
(if I get that far today) responsive environments. Two projects come
immediately to mind. The first is Andrew Shoben¹s Benches and Bins; the
second, The Table: Childhood by Max Dean and Raffaetto D¹Andrea. (1984-2001)

Benches and Bins, which was launched in June this year, involves six or
seven park benches installed at various locations in a park in Cambridge,
England, and close by, the same number of bins positioned to collect
rubbish.  Their mission according to the arts organization, The Junction, is
³to help passers-by enjoy a moment¹s relaxation.² I think
³engagement² is a better word because these benches and bins connect with
humans.  Each is able to roam freely in the large public piazza in front of
The Junction. They can move independently or flock, and drift across the
space. They sing when the sun comes out and sometimes they laugh and giggle
and make rude noises. The benches love to be sat on and often take up
positions in new spaces to make themselves more attractive to potential
human sitters. Sometimes, when it rains, they move themselves to drier, more
protected areas of the square. At night they move toward the Junction Club
and make themselves available to those waiting to enter. They¹re fun.
They¹re attracted to one another; they¹re pleasantly responsive to humans,
and according to Shoben, they¹re ³generative.² Over time they develop more
and more personality.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/4077680.stm)

The Table in the Dean and Andrea work also interacts with people, but here
interaction takes a different turn, a little more disturbing to some, I¹m
sure, than the benches in Shoben¹s work.  The Table will choose one person ­
one only -- from those who enter the room, and as long as that person
remains in the room, he or she will be the object of the Table¹s attention.

The Table will monitor the visitor¹s physical reactions. If the person is
unresponsive, it tries harder.  It might, for instance, initiate an action
enticing the viewer to copy it, or it might turn on its axis with a
pirouette; it might decide to chase ­ or even to flee. Once some kind of
relationship is established, the Table determines how to handle the
situation, whether lyrically or aggressively.

The Table switches the roles of viewer and object. The artwork and not the
viewer is in the position of choice. This in turn focuses the attention of
other viewers in the room on the person Table has chosen, making that person
the "object" of attention.
(http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/vida/paginas/v4/etable.html)

For me there¹s something inherently humorous in both works. I don¹t know how
I¹d feel if  Table pursued me, but on paper, they all make me laugh, which
means the idea of them engages my attention in a pleasing way, as I¹m sure
the real objects do when you are near them.

Are they alive?  Well let¹s just say that computation, telecommunication and
interface are slowly being incorporated into a variety of objects and spaces
and as they are, the long-standing idea that objects are dead is slowly
being turned on its head.


All for now,
Helen








on 7/9/05 11:33 AM, Helen Thorington at newradio@turbulence.org wrote:

> Hi Chris:
> 
> Thank you for your long wonderful post. A number of us had been thinking
> about taking on the question of performance, but (and I speak here only for
> myself) I was both uncertain where to begin and even more uncertain that
> what I have to say is significant, given the long history of discussion on
> the subject in which I have had no part.  But your post has wakened subjects
> that are of great interest to me -- and I hope others will feel the same way
> and  join in the discussion.
> 
> Questions have been raised already to which your post gives answers. For
> instance Komninos' 7/06/05 post:
> 
> "how does one capture that energy that builds through a performance, in the
> exchanges between performer and audience, that ultimately impact on the
> performer and performance?that energy is something that even a video
> recording doesn't actually capture, that presence in the atmosphere around
> you of a certain something, non-physical but present, that you feel moving
> back and forth from audience to performer."
> 
> to which yours below offers some sort of answer:
> 
> it (performance) involves coordinating and choreographing all sorts of
> messy, uncontrollable things like space, time, human beings (both spectators
> and "players") as well as electronic-mechanical-material-computational
> technologies; things that can't be rendered, represented or reduced to the
> level of inscription (or code). In other words, inscriptive systems like
> digital computers can't necessarily capture or (re)produce all of the
> unpredictable and potentially unstable elements that constitute a
> real time event: gestures, noises, rhythmic fluctuations, shifts in
> ambient phenomena (light, temperature, amplitude), movement and
> dynamism of materials, changes in audience affect, and so on.
> 
> 
> Beyond that it seems to me to offer an explanation for the number of
> discipline-based networked performances (dance, theater, music) we see.
> ie., those that "deploy" technologies, while maintaining their integrity as
> dance, music, theater.
> 
> With full respect for this work, my interests have always run toward those
> works that move us away from the more traditional notions of performance and
> toward something that hasn't happened yet.  Sonic City is an example. Sonic
> City could be classified as "generative music"; it is generative music, but
> its designers have  added parameters to music-making that are not
> conventionally associated with music and that enlarge the ideas of how music
> is generated and where. Sonic City is a system that generates electronic
> music in real time by walking through and interacting with the urban
> environment -- in other words,  public space, mobility and everyday behavior
> are crucial.  The music is personal -- it is your music, no one elses. You
> are the audience.    And it is made possible by a "one-size-fits-all"
> jacket.  (Think of the categories Michelle and I set out.. this one bridges
> three..)   
> 
> Human mobility, the city, and a wearable jacket, where  "(... the assembly
> of devices that through communication protocols can send
> packets of encoded data back and forth between each other)" can be found --
> "wireless remote sensors picking up motions in a defined space,
> shipping those numbers to another machine and having them ultimately
> rendered into some sort of audio/visual output or "response."  In this case
> personal music, an experience for the wearer...
> 
> I appreciate the fact that my example may not be displaying the fully
> "nuanced" character of performance that you are getting at in the final part
> of your post... but it does fit the idea of performance as "an artificially
> constructed event ..." and it fits  "the context and act by and in which
> different kinds of human and non-human material forces are
> co-entangled with each other and, in a sense, "co-produce" each other."
> 
> I think I could give you many examples from the work on the blog  -- but
> maybe this will do for the time.
> 
> Thank you, Chris, for taking on the very difficult business of describing
> performance. I haven't answered any of your questions (yet). I am  thinking
> about them -- and hope we can soon get a discussion going around them.
> 
> -- Helen
> 
> 
> 
> 
> on 7/7/05 8:34 AM, Chris Salter at csalter@gmx.net wrote:
> 
>> Hi Helen, Michelle and all,
>> 
>> Please forgive my long prose here. I'm justjoining the discussion and
>> catching up a bit on the different threads so if I repeat things that
>> have already been said, please bear with me :) In the first posts you
>> raise a huge amount of questions and I would like to try and address
>> one of them. First, I appreciate that the definition of "network"
>> here is more broadly painted than just focusing on the
>> techno-glossalia of network technology. Having said this, however, it
>> might be fruitful to examine a bit what we mean by "performance" in a
>> more critical/philosophical context and how it could be distinguished
>> from other forms of static, object-based (and here I include
>> software) creative practice.
>> 
>> Indeed, unlike other uniquely digital forms such as the "database
>> art" or "code-based art" or software-based art or what have you,
>> performance in its traditional sense as a "situated" event that takes
>> place in real time and in physically situated space before a public
>> (I'll get back to these things in a second), is not solely dependent
>> on "technology" to constitute itself. Rather, it involves
>> coordinating and choreographing all sorts of messy, uncontrollable
>> things like space, time, human beings (both spectators and "players")
>> as well as electronic-mechanical-material-computational technologies;
>> things that can't be rendered, represented or reduced to the level of
>> inscription (or code). In other words, inscriptive systems like
>> digital computers can't necessarily capture or (re)produce all of the
>> unpredictable and potentially unstable elements that constitute a
>> real time event: gestures, noises, rhythmic fluctuations, shifts in
>> ambient phenomena (light, temperature, amplitude), movement and
>> dynamism of materials, changes in audience affect, and so on. The
>> interesting thing is that performance cannot be solely articulated,
>> let alone "embodied" by the kinds of schemas or modes of inscription
>> that tend to characterize other digital forms of artistic practice-in
>> fact, it is resolutely not digital. Of course, this doesn't preclude
>> the deployment of technologies, including digital systems, into an
>> event. This is an age-old question, regardless of whether we are
>> talking about network transfer protocols, sensors, fly rails or the
>> architecture of seeing that is constructed by the proscenium arch. A
>> quick glance at theatrical history, for example, reveals centuries of
>> humans grappling with machines in the context of the stage. The
>> "technology" of the crane that brought the gods into the scene of 5th
>> century Athenian drama was called the "machina" by the Greeks. So
>> already in the West as well as East (to make two big cuts), the
>> machine was implicit in theatrical performance. The question is
>> whether or not the deployment of such technologies actually has an
>> ontological effect on the experience of a performative event. This
>> question we should bookend for the moment.
>> 
>> But perhaps it could be useful for us to first look at how we define
>> and interpret performance across different scales-from the micro
>> level, so to speak, to the macro. First, we usually tend to think
>> about performance from the macro standpoint of the "performing arts,"
>> that is as I said earlier, a temporally and physically situated event
>> that takes place within the presence of a spectator (we'll get to the
>> live issue in a second). Here we might like to recall the etymology
>> of the word theater (not just what we think of today as dramatic
>> performances) which in Greek was theatron-architecturally, the
>> audience space where seeing could take place in the Greek
>> ampitheater. So, already the performing arts in this traditional
>> sense involve a relationship between event and viewer. This is the
>> specific context which performance is used most of the time, as a
>> live event.
>> 
>> Since there is already stuff flying on the list about liveness,
>> please allow me to me add my two cents in as well. There is so much
>> bruhaha about the concept of "liveness" (in the sense of the
>> assertion of presence) as the distinguishing factor of the performing
>> arts. The first is the common argument that if something is live it
>> is presumed to be happening in the here and now, in front of us-this
>> is the cornerstone of the old debates about presence. Thus, the
>> introduction of technical apparatuses into the live event complicates
>> this pure situation-obviously, that which is pre-recorded is not live
>> or within the context of distance-based events facilitated over
>> computer networks, one side is physically present while the other is
>> subjected to latency. We somehow assume that technical apparatuses of
>> reproduction (i.e., cameras, computers, etc.,) tend to somehow rob
>> the live event of presence. This strain of argumentation brings up
>> impossible to answer questions, for example, like how many
>> milliseconds of delay does it take before something is deemed as not
>> live?
>> 
>> But the second assumption inherent in the word liveness is a bit more
>> buried-one that is layered with a strong anthropocentric bias. Now,
>> if we use liveness as the distinguishing factor it most of the time
>> refers to humans (and sometimes, animals) performing (which are live)
>> in real time and real space, here and now, but not to machines (which
>> are not human and thus dead-i.e., their animism is banished). This
>> is, of course, a nod to people like Latour who believe that the
>> animism of non-human systems has been patently ignored by social
>> theories of knowledge. Yet, if we use liveness in its other sense, as
>> something which is "alive" then this also assumes that we have the
>> ability to state what is not "live," which again in the context of
>> most discussions around the "live" performing arts focuses on that
>> which is not human. But, in the case of technical systems, then, how
>> do we describe the presence of a crane, or a mechanical or kinetic
>> device that exhibits motion and that is embedded into a theatrical
>> performance or, more to our context, a "network" (meaning here, an ad
>> hoc assembly of devices that through communication protocols can send
>> packets of encoded data back and forth between each other) of
>> wireless remote sensors picking up motions in a defined space,
>> shipping those numbers to another machine and having them ultimately
>> rendered into some sort of audio/visual output or "response." Are
>> these not live systems? So I it would be good to leave this well
>> trodden territory (performance studies has been grappling with this
>> over the last 30 years) as well as whether performance is now more
>> "mediated" than before or less live and sidestep these origin
>> questions in light of perhaps more provocative things that pull us
>> back towards the co-entanglements that occur between us humans and
>> machinic systems in artistic-aesthetic contexts.
>> 
>> Here I would like to examine a more nuanced notion of performance
>> that might be more useful for the discussion here; one that isn't
>> necessarily related to the performing arts at first site but that
>> might give us some clues on how to understand what role and affect
>> such "machines" (not just mechanical devices) have in the context of
>> performance as an art form. First, I'd like to use machinic in the
>> sense that Felix Guattari used it: not just referring to technical
>> systems (although they obviously play a big role) but all kinds of
>> apparatuses that have a kind of enunciative power-that is, they have
>> ability to force change or make marks in the world. What are examples
>> of such apparatuses? Well, language is one. This takes us to people
>> like J.L. Austin and the notion of speech acts; what he labeled
>> "performatives." Performatives are expressions or "utterances" that
>> don't just describe or represent an action in language, they actually
>> perform or activate something?like when one person in marriage says
>> "I do." This doesn't just indicate something, it acts as a material
>> force to change something. Language thus has a material quality but
>> what about other kinds of machines?
>> 
>> Another way this enuciative ability can be seen involves the idea of
>> agency-that things can "speak" (not just linguistically) and thus
>> catalyze a shift because they literally act as a force in the world.
>> This is what the sociologist of knowledge Andrew Pickering labels as
>> "material agency" - that things in the world exert material influence
>> and force: scientific instruments, for example, or the weather or
>> digital computers or whatever. There is something inherently powerful
>> and concrete about this notion of materiality of agencies and how
>> this materiality is enunciated through physical forces that mark the
>> world. Such "performances" are inherently embodied (yet another
>> distinguishing factor)-that is, they deal with something that is
>> experienced or, to borrow a phrase from Natalie Depraz and Francisco
>> Varela, "unfolds in an operative or immanent mode." Depraz and
>> Varela's notion aims to define what we mean by the word experience.
>> The idea of something that is immanent suggests that it unfolds
>> before us (like experience), in the "specious present" as William
>> James called it. Unfolding implies temporality but in the case of
>> materials exerting forces, such force also implies temporality, due
>> to dynamism and motion. So, perhaps performance might be
>> characterized by the immanent, real time expression of material
>> agency or better still, material utterances. Again, we don't
>> necessarily have to restrict the discussion to physical matter;
>> language, economic systems, etc., are not just composed of physical
>> material. This immanent quality potentially suggests an interesting
>> way of thinking about the ways in which performance grapples with
>> present experience that unfolds in an a posteriori way (but not
>> necessarily "presence" or the live). For our purposes, maybe we can
>> begin to imagine performance not only as an artificially constructed
>> event (all of the performances described in the blanket notion of
>> "networked performance") but also the context and act by and in which
>> different kinds of human and non-human material forces are
>> co-entangled with each other (Pickering calls is a dance of agencies)
>> and, in a sense, "co-produce" each other.
>> 
>> So, out of this context, the question I would like to pose for the
>> purposes of this discussion is what kinds of performances (and, by
>> fiat, experiences) are taking place in the various examples of work
>> that you both bring up as being representative of "network" (or
>> machinic) performance? What kinds of entanglements are occurring
>> between the different human and non-human forces? How do the machines
>> deployed generate affect, both on the side of the creators and the
>> public?  How and why does that affect matter?
>> 
>> best,
>> cs.
>> 
>> --
>> Christopher Salter, Ph.D.
>> e: chris@clsalter.com, csalter@gmx.net
>> w: http://clsalter.com
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