Re: [-empyre-] Computational Poetics

[Danny Butt <db@dannybutt.net>]

Aleksandra,

If we start talking about "communities", and in particular if we talk  
about the relationship between communicative forms and social  
processes, we're in the terrain of "culture", and anthropology,  
right? I feel that you opened this question up in you posts  
mentioning Schechner (and then Tuner and Goffman) - however the  
anthropological work from this era has been subject to fairly  
substantive critique within the discipline, and I wonder whether the  
questions about the ethics of interpretation and cross-cultural  
engagement after colonisation  might have some resonance here, seeing  
that these are the stock-in-trade of any anthropologist under 40. I  
know a little about anthropology but much less about performance  
theory, so maybe I'm finding my own questions in this. But I'm  
struggling to see the benefits from "models" for computational  
practice are being developed from the interpretation of a cultural  
form that has "had thousands of years of unbroken development".

What I don't understand, to draw on a few approaches that come from  
some of that contemporary anthropological work, is

a) how any "breaks" in the development of Balinese shadow play would  
be identified and assessed (compared to which broken traditions  
exactly?) .

b) how Schechner's "Asian performance" (to whom does this grouping  
make sense?) that "sees narrative as a system of braids of several  
strands of activities that bring performers and partakers together  
here and now" can be truly differentiated from the large corpus of  
post 1970 Euro-US performance work which does exactly this AFAIK.

Mindful of the issues Sally raised about authorities and not wanting  
to create any, I am wondering what imaginary dialogue could be  
established between this conversation and the work of Guillermo Gomez- 
Peña (to choose one example of someone deeply engaged in the  
triangluation of new technology, anthropology, and performance).  
Because that would seem to take some of the dead white academic  
authorities out of the argument and bring us into a set of  
conversations that are taking place right now, not so far away from  
us. And maybe also prevent repetition of a few romantic methodologies  
of early European modernism w.r.t. "the Other" that haven't aged well.

All the best,

x.d

--
http://www.dannybutt.net




On 11/01/2006, at 9:52 PM, Alan Drury wrote:

> Aleksandra in  her first post has opened up a series of fascinating
> discussions, but the chief one is, obviously, to determine what
> 'computational poetics' offers that no other poetics can; that it  
> is not
> just delivering a variant on existing practice by other means. In  
> trying to
> define an unknown we are limited in our thinking by the knowns we  
> use to say
> what the unkown is not, and the true nature of the beast is often  
> hit upon
> by structured serendipity. The totally defined practice is the dead
> butterfly pinned to the board.
>
> Central to Aleksandra's first post was the idea that braiding is  
> possible
> because the work springs directly out of and responds to a  
> community. Her
> later description of  current approaches to shadow puppetry  
> suggests this is
> a state of prelapsarian bliss, probably suggested by Artaud's  
> solipsistic
> romanticism. Although any live theatrical performance has elements of
> braiding, (apart from 'Les Miserables'), true braiding as being  
> talked about
> here can only result in work springing from a social rather than a  
> purely
> commercial context.
>
> In trying to fit 'computational poetics' into a theoretical  
> overview and
> quoting authorities, we are putting the cart before the horse. If  
> we accept
> 'computational poetics' as defined by the example of shadow  
> puppetry, we
> should be asking what community it is drawn from and responding to.  
> From
> whence can its braiding come? We won't know until it does, and since
> community is one of the most devalued current cant terms, I'm not  
> hopeful.
> There is certainly no real community in cyberspace per se.
>
> Alan Drury.
>
> PS: This is my first post. I'm a playwright, director and amateur  
> conjuror.
> What Svoboda was being quoted as inventing in 1958 was being done in a
> simpler form by vaudeville illusionists in the late 1920s and early  
> 1930s. A
> less sophisticated form of braiding is happening as I write in  
> pantomimes up
> and down the UK, mainly outside of London.
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