RE: [-empyre-] Re: Computational Poetics

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

That's an interesting piece of writing, Aleksandra, on "braided processes".

I take it http://www.sfu.ca/~adulic/oneRiver.html is relevant to the ideas
you discuss below?

Are you developing any digital works involved in the Balinese theatre you
describe, or does the Balinese theatre function solely in a 'theoretical'
context in your work?

ja
http://subtle.net/empyre
http://vispo.com


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