[-empyre-] Re: Computational Poetics

[Aleksandra Dulic <adulic@sfu.ca>]

Dear empyre list,

I also wish you all happy new year and many thanks for the  
opportunity to discuss our recent research.

You can access the web based documentation of One River installation  
that Kenneth refers to at: http://www.sfu.ca/~adulic/oneRiver.html

I would like to take this opportunity to elaborate this concept of  
braided processes as a dramatic structure for media installation and  
performance.

The genealogy of media performance and installation recedes behind  
the origins of mechanical reproduction. Media performances and  
narratives can be found centuries before the mechanization of time  
images. Tracing the different aspects of the language of media back  
to its roots opens new paths for research and contributes to the  
articulation of an emerging field of media performance. The centuries- 
old history of pre-electric screen-based performances of projected  
light, shadow and sound enriches contemporary computational media  
performance praxis. The transformation of shadow-play performance  
into the automated art of cinema transformed this art form from an  
embodied practice to a mechanical recorded time images.

The histories of cinema and animation are interwoven with that of  
shadow play in a shared legacy of stories animated by moving shadows.  
A significant difference is that shadow play is fundamentally  
performative in a way the industrial cinema and animation art are  
not. The cinematic apparatus mechanizes the art of shadows. With  
computational technologies we have an opportunity to reconnect cinema  
with performance and improvisation. The work with computer based real- 
time animation and media invites us to revisit shadow play and  
reinterpret it from the perspective of performative action.

The dramatic model of braided processes is developed in order to  
enable a form of situated media performance that integrates  
computation as a medium for composition, performance and  
improvisation. This model is drawn from a study of the contemporary  
tradition of shadow play to support research into and design of  
performative media compositions and live cinema performances.  
Computing technologies have a potential to extend film as a linear  
media, with its ability to encode practices and mediate processes  
that organize media, performative and narrative elements

Older multidisciplinary and braided performance tradition such as the  
Balinese shadow theatre, in our research, provide a case study in  
media perfomance. The living tradition of Balinese shadow-play  
performance embodies this braided model, producing possibilities for  
flexible, interactive and responsive multi-media events.

 In Balinese wayang kulit, the structure for a flexible, distributed  
and shared narrative system is comprised of orchestral music,  
puppetry, singing, poetry, narration, and lighting effects   
interwoven over an extended time-frame of three hours under the  
direction of a puppeteer. The performance is arranged as a complex  
and layered temporal and spatial composition constructed in  
relationship to the narrative told. Narrative elements have the  
flexibility to begin and end at any time but must occur in the right  
structural and spatial unit of the overall structure. This suggests  
an interesting alternative to the Artistotelian notion of a narrative  
arc, continuous action with beginning middle and end, in which events  
unfold as causal chains ordered in time. The cinema has already begun  
to explore alternatives to this received concept of narrative in its  
use of flashbacks, foreshadowing, reorderings of narrative time and  
so on.

 The suggestive power of the wayang is that the same story can be  
told in a flexible fashion not only from performance to performance  
but within a single performance in dynamic response to the context of  
the performance itself. During a ritual or a play, even in the most  
traditional genre of Balinese performance, new elements are  
integrated into a play and old ones are eliminated. These  
performances are always adjusted to suit the relationship between  
performers and audiences or between a religious leader and the  
faithful. Long running shows, performances and rituals are not dead  
repetitions but contain continuous eliminations and overlays. The  
general shape of the performance maintains an overall form, but  
various aspects and actions within performance are continuously  
renegotiated.

In Balinese shadow play every detail of presentation is worked out  
but variable: the setting of the play, music, types of play, the  
proper occasion, and etcetera. While these details are worked out to  
a level unheard of in Western theatre, there is much liberty in the  
scheme because the parts are variable. Performances are usually  
created in relation to some family or community religious event,  
which is well defined, but each one is unique to the occasion.  
Performers rarely tell the same story twice. Within the performance,  
too, improvisational elements abound in the way the performers  
interact with one another, the story, the audience, and the  
accompaniment. This system provides a form that has a number of fixed  
elements yet is fundamentally improvisational.

As in Greek theatre, there is a start and finish to each performance,  
but this time without a definite beginning and end.  Richard  
Schechner (1985) describes Asian narrative as a system of braids of  
several strands of activities that bring performers and partakers  
together here and now.  Relations among the strands are ever- 
changing. No strand is necessarily more important than any other. No  
strand necessarily causes another. Greek drama, on the contrary, is  
based on causal chains across idea, climax and resolution.

The braided relationships between time, space, spectator and  
performer is based on participant enjoyment. Some participants can  
savor one aspect of the performance while others another. This aspect  
of braided processes found in Asian drama is one that attracted  
Brecht to the technique of independently variable elements, and  
inspired him to develop his theory and practice of verfremdung  
(estrangement or alienation) (Brecht 1964).

The idea of braided narrative structure, drawn from Asian performance  
traditions (Schechner 1985), which include Hindu theater, Indonesian  
Shadow Theater, Japanese Noh drama, and in particular to our research  
the Balinese shadow play, provides a model for the organization of  
media within a computational environment. A related form of braided  
processes is emerging to form the core ordering structure of  
composition in a computational environment. The threads of this  
complex braid are composed of the audible and visible images,  
together with textual, generative, kinetic and proprioceptive  
elements responsible for driving real time processes within the  
performance. The relationships among the individual elements of braid  
are interconnected—“woven”—in different proportions and relations,  
with all of the elements simultaneously accessible and correlated.

The concept of braided processes supports the improvisation and real- 
time animation driven by the body of the performer and / or by  
audiences participation. This dramatic model supports different  
presentation contexts ranging from live media performances to  
interactive installations. The composition and presentation of audio- 
visual electronic media, using capabilities offered by computation,  
provides an extension of the cinematic media. Braiding encoded  
process, various media and narrative elements, the presentation  
contexts and audience participation in the real time of the  
performance positions interactive media art as a contemporary form  
that can be viewed as a continuos development of a thousand year old  
tradition of shadow play.

Refernces
Brecht, B 1964, Brecht on Theatre, trans, Jon Willett, New York: Hill  
and Wang, ‘Der Rundfunk als Kommunikationsapparat’, Blätter des  
Hessischen Landestheaters, Darmstadt, No. 16, July 1932.
Schechner, R 1985, Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia:  
University of Pennsylvania Press.

Ciao, Aleksandra


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Aleksandra Dulic
Researcher, School for the Contemporary Arts
PhD candidate, School of Interactive Arts and Technology
Simon Fraser University