July 07, 2005
July on empyre
Join the Discussion
Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel are guests on the empyre list for July 2005. The following are their first two posts on the subject of networked performance. You are invited to join the discussion: to subscribe and contribute, go here.
1. Greetings empyre:
First of all thank you for inviting us to be guests at empyre this month. Jim, especial thanks to you for encouraging our participation.
We are proposing a return to the subject of networked performance, which this list dealt with in September 2003, and a second look, this time from the perspective of recent new and transitional work.
On July 14, 2004, we (Jo-Anne Green of turbulence.org, Michelle and Helen) launched the networked_performance blog to explore the shifting paradigms in performative cultural practice. Our goal was to take the pulse of current network-enabled performance practice, to obtain a wide range of perspectives on current issues and interests—which we felt were under-examined—and uncover common threads that might help shape a symposium in 2006.
We didn’t expect what we found.
With more than 1,000 entries in its first year, the networked_performance blog reveals an explosion of creative experimental pursuits, as artists investigate the possibilities opened by the migration of computing out of the desktop PC and into the physical world, and by the continuing advances in internet technologies, wireless telecommunications, sensor technologies and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
The ephemeral conceptual art practices that came into existence during the 50s and 60s – with Happenings, Fluxus, the Situationists – and that re-emerged as participatory works on the Internet in the early ‘90s, are now, with mobile networking technologies, networked sensors and embedded computing, proliferating as new ways of working and experiencing.
The interest in these emergent practices is keen, as the 150,000 visitors to the blog attest.
For the purpose of this presentation to the empyre list, we’ve defined networked performance as any live event that is network enabled. There is nothing clear-cut about what we are presenting – it’s exploratory and necessarily messy. But we see a great advantage in beginning to look at this outburst of new work – in chronicling it, understanding its commonalities and beginning to think about how it impacts our notions of performance.
We would therefore like to start by setting out four broad categories under which this new work falls, suggesting works within each that are particularly meaningful to us, namely works that occupy liminal spaces – the in-between – and are transformative and generative. We would like to invite the originating artists to describe their work, and then proceed by posing questions for the empyre list, such as: “How do we understand performance in relation to these new activities that are between the existing and the developing, and what can we learn from stretching our understanding of performance in light of these perspectives?”
2. Surveying the blog we identify four areas of networked performance practice which current work explores in various combinations. We have categorized these as (1) telematic events, (2) locative media, (3) wearables, and (4) active objects and responsive environments.
Telematics connect people to people or people to objects through a network, such as telerobotics or haptics; locative media provide location aware engagement; smart environments enable architecture and objects to respond to environmental changes of state generated by occupants/inhabitants; and wearables extend the body's senses through technological prosthesis.
We see lots of overlap and combinations in the works we survey, so these are not to be considered rigid categories but an effort at broad representation. We’re keenly interested in the commonalties across emergent art/technology practice with attention to artist/audience/object/environment, performativity and the open work.
1. TELEMATIC EVENTS
To date this has been the most prolific, comprehensible/understandable area of practice, encompassing the exploration of networked performance by the traditional performing arts where new technologies are integrated into existing forms (dance, music, theater). Examples of this would include the musical performance. InteraXis with Jesse Gilbert, Mark Trayle and Wadada Leo Smith and dance performances such as those created by AdaPT, an interdisciplinary association of artists, technologists and scholars.
http://www.turbulence.org/Works/interaxis
http://www.dvpg.net/adapt.html
Others move us onto new terrain. Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran, for instance, create performance events that explore new ways for computers to support social experiences in the physical environment. Their objective is not performance for an audience but creating a shared experience in which everyday social spaces become “electronically activated play environments, capable of transmitting the physical presence and social gestures that comprise…human interaction” across time and distance. No longer dependent on the work-based screen and keyboard, in these environments ordinary goods and wares – furniture, cutlery etc. – “come to life as both kinetic art and telecommunications interfaces”.
http://www.lftk.org/tiki/tiki-index.php
http://www.lftk.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Telepresence+Picnic
http://www.interaccess.org/telekinetics/template.php?show=intro
2. LOCATIVE MEDIA
Locative media practice has exploded since the public availability of GPS and its consequent inexpensive and ubiquitous availability in mobile electronic devices. Some of this practice makes urban areas into game boards and city infrastructures into play spaces. Blast Theory, a London-based group, is renowned internationally for their contribution to this genre with works that make a public space ‘playable’ by participants in the street and online.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000221.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000033.html
Others create “geo-annotation projects.” This involves assigning geo-spatial coordinates to media content so that it can be accessed at a specific geographical location with an enabled device. While the “true” location of the content is a database, by making it possible to access that content from a particular location, its place (so to speak) migrates into the physical environment, making urban streets and the landscape “programmable.” Urban Tapestries and the Aware Platform are examples of this. Both are location-based wireless platforms that allow users to access, author and share location-specific content (text, audio, pictures, and/or movies) – But there are many more: Yellow Arrow, Grafedia, MapHub, and, as Anne Galloway says, “ and oh, about a million others now.”
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000151.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000555.html
There are also projects specifically designed to enable communication and shape transient networked communities. Yuri Gitman’s Magicbike turns common bicycles into WiFi hotspots that broadcast free WiFi connectivity to their proximity. And Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki’s UMBRELLA.net develops ad-hoc networks based around the haphazard and unpredictable patterns of weather and crowd formation. The system consists of a set of umbrellas as nodes that can spontaneously form a network when unfurled.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000114.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000051.html
3. WEARABLES
Wearable computing enlarges the use of computers to include wearing them on ones body—much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn—and facilitates interaction with the user, and between users, based on specific situations. Fionnuala Conway and Katherine Moriwaki’s Urban Chameleon, for instance, is comprised of three skirts: 1) “Touch” changes visual properties upon contact; 2) “Speak” reacts to urban noise; and 3) “Breathe” visualizes pollution and urban exhaust as it travels through the garment.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000146.html
Tina Gonsalves’ Medulla Intimata is responsive video jewelry. The overall function of the piece and its video content is to reflect the full character and content of the wearer’s emotions and thus present a fuller living portrait: the wearer as he/she is in unmediated interaction and the wearer as he /she feels at that moment.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000137.html
4. ACTIVE OBJECTS AND RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS
Increasingly, through ubiquitous/pervasive/ambient computing paradigms and wireless sensing, artifacts, objects and physical space itself are being charged with properties traditionally associated with living bodies.
In their recent Benches and Bins, Greyworld creates furniture that is able to roam freely through the new public square in Cambridge, England and respond to its surroundings and ambient movement.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000335.html
http://www.junction.co.uk/HTMLTemplates/our_work/news/digital/Bins___Benches_to_be_Unleashed.htm
http://www.greyworld.org/contact/index.html
While Chris Salter, in the environment-inhabitant interaction Suspension / Threshold, focuses on the theme of thresholds or bardo (in between) states, and creates a body responsive environment where the aggregate breathing patterns of the collective audience/participants lighten an otherwise dark environment.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000053.html
Much of this work is conceived to provoke interaction between people, and between people and their spaces. More than not it encourages people to be performers within the work and thus to enable or realize the work. This calls into question the accepted nature of performance and introduces a shifting relationship between the artist, artwork and audience.
We locate this practice within an historical continuum (Kaprow’s “Happenings,” Galloway’s “Electronic Café,” “Experimental Art and Technology (EAT),” the Situationists, Fluxus, etc.) and suggest that this trajectory is redefining the performative as a socially networked, collaborative model for artistic and cultural practice.
The overarching question, then. is:
“How do we understand performance in relation to these new activities that are between the existing and the developing, and what can we learn by stretching our understanding of performance in light of these perspectives”?
Other questions we are interested in include:
1. How is performance changing in response to networked computing technologies (mobile, satellite/GPS, internet)?
2. What is the relationship of 'real-time' computing to liveness and performativity?
3. What is the relationship of agency and authorship to performativity? Is performativity synonymous with being an actor, agent, or author? Is “performer” another label for the user/viewer/visitor/ of an interactive work?
4. As the use of the network becomes more social, adopting the peer-to-peer model, what does this imply for performance and net.art as performative?
5. How are network processes (algorithmic, procedural rule-based systems, generative) influencing or being investigated by performance?
6. How are networked concepts as modes of communication (granularity, open source, emergent behavior, affordance, latency, ubiquitous computing) impacting performance?
-- Helen and Michelle
Posted by jo at July 7, 2005 07:40 AM
Comments
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 15:48:52 +1000
From: Komninos Zervos
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
what about audience? is the auditor(audient) now more of a participant in the performance than before?
komninos
komninos zervos
http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
http://users.bigpond.net.au/mangolegs
http://spokenword.blog-city.com
"Our Workplace Rights are NOT for sale."
Posted by: Jo at July 4, 2005 10:46 AM
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 01:18:49 -0700
From: Brett Stalbaum
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2 - (Locative Media Thread)
It is hard to raise questions about anything adopting the meme "locative media" today, because it seems to have overwhelming memetic momentum behind it. It is in fact a term that I actively use, but I am also suspicious of it. (I hope to make a case for being a bit suspect as a healthy one...) So, that I bring this up in a discussion of networked performance may not be spot on; and I hope Helen and Michelle will forgive me as I struggle to pose this as a question re networked
performance.
As I read the short history, "Locative Media" got its traction, indeed maybe its coin, from a speculative essay by Drew Hemment to the nettime list on January 8th 2004. As he defines it, "[l]locative media uses portable, networked, location aware computing devices for user-led mapping and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes its canvas." (http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0401/msg00021.html) In that essay, Hemment deals primarily with cell phones as the technical agent (the thing in the user's hand), and speculates about how artists might insert themselves in/against/with the emerging networks of surveillance that the handsets make possible given the handset's location awareness and the ability to report user location to the networks that enable the devices. But also looking in his definition, "networks" and "mapping" (which we can read as the data transport layer and the presentation layer) also appear. Read Drew's essay and you will discover that he also drills to the formal base and reason for existence of any digital media: data. "The mobile phone is carried on the body, and so connects the individual directly to ever proliferating databases, operating simultaneously as identifier and electronic tagging device: it is a wearable technology that places the Panoptic eye in your pocket and the body within the circuits of dataveillance." So from its coining, the panoptic politics of locative media were clearly foregrounded along with a fairly thorough formal perspective on the medium.
Patrick Licthy (in Building a Culture of Ubiquity, http://www.voyd.com/ubiq/) has proposed a trajectory from Screen->Hand->Body->Space: "The infosphere is now a representational spectre, moving in real time, but the physical world is now the interface, creating tightly linked heterotopic spaces instead of multiple bodies." I think we can stretch this model out even further, add to it, (and oversimplify the IT layers a bit) to Database->Logic*->Transport**->Screen***->Hand-Body->Space****, and note that this is actually a circular flow diagram with Space connecting back to Database; the world and its model. I am tempted to add "Place" to Space, as in "...Space->Place->Database...", but indeed, Place is just one attribute of Space that can be modeled; it exists today in an interesting and imho conceptually generative double mirror between existence in space (the real) and existence in database (the hyperreal). (I have written a few essays on the importance of the Database to Space and Space to Database connection, and how they interoperate with place. I view this connection as critically important and too often ignored. One text is a 2K2 essay speculating how database and GIS might play out in artistic practice in the landscape...)
So backing up a bit to "Locative Media", it has taken flight as an artworld meme with some or all, but not often more than, the following sub-components attached to it: (from Helen and Michelle) "urban areas... game[s]... city infrastructures... play spaces... geo-annotation projects...", as well as (off the top of my head) psychogeography, narrative space, interventions, happenings, network space, space as physical canvas, and mapping. (I like using "hotspot multimedia" as terminology for a lot of "locative media" work...)
So, the reason for my suspicion is that these configurations of mimetic connotations that currently guide practice do not always holistically address the whole formal infrastructure. Very interesting things that happen at the strange and novel interface (or cycle) between database and space, (where the physical reality of space and the physical hyperreality of database intersect and mutually generate each the other, admittedly catalyzed by the speed contemporary network communications technologies), often ends up overlooked. (My colleague Geri Wittig has an interesting essay that expands this concept into fields of complexity theory and biology examined globally: http://www.c5corp.com/research/complexsystem.shtml
So (at last) this is what I am trying to ask a question about. (Thank you to anyone reading this far for your patience...) Does what happened to "Locative Media" in its brief trajectory as an artworld meme contain a larger warning for the conceptual and critical models through which we approach networked performance? Shouldn't we be suspicious, (especially post net art), that "network" is still a privileged assumption are our critical model of locative media and "networked" performace? Or in any positioning of any of the *individual* "layers" that make up the whole, for that matter? And although my expertise as a theorist is not politics, (past tactical dabbles asside), don't we need to take a holistic view of all of the formal layers impinging upon performance (today) to develop a political analysis of performance (today)? (Applause to Hemment for his recognition of the data layer!)
Ok, getting tired of myself... but...
Let's try an experiment with "networked performance". Would any of the following be complete (in the current situation, moving forward), if left by themselves?
Database Performance?
Business Logic Performance?
Presentation Layer Performance?
Site-specific performance (the historical meme for Place performance...well explored...)
Performance Art (Body... ditto above...)
Hand performance (Puppets? Or what some of you may accuse me of doing in this post;-)
Land art?
Curious as to your thoughts.
Cheers,
Brett
* Logic refers to "Business Logic" in program design.
** Transport of data - network - often missed in discussion of "network" is the fact and common usage of networks in distributed computational
systems as, well, a bus. In other words, "network" in one sense merely connects the business or application layer logic (algorithms) on one system to the Presentation Layer (I/O) on another that happens to be somewhere else. There is no discrete computer. The more common way artists use "network" in under the rubric of computer mediated communication. I don't in any way discredit the importance of the latter, of course. But it is visible and well explored.
*** Screen - a proxy here for Presentation Layer, which importantly is not merely an output device, as implied by "Screen". We could replace
this with Human Computer Interaction (HCI), or just interaction, such that "Screen->Hand" (or perhaps with sound and haptics "Screen->Hand->Body") are specified as partial representative of aspects of the Presentation Layer.
**** * ** ***
***** Maybe the terms "generative locative media" should be employed to separate locative media from the connotations of hotspot multimedia,
mapping, geo-annotation, (in either the author-driven or collective-democratic forms of geo-annotation...), narrative, etc.
Posted by: Jo at July 4, 2005 11:06 AM
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 17:27:25 -0300
From: Lucio Agra
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
Helen and Michelle
I wish to say your proposions are so many intense questions, that it is barely "answerable". Thre are many good points here like the idea of categorizing without locking a frame for the crossing manifestations of performance. I think that most of your questions can be answered with yes, it does, or will do. On the other hand it is necessary to think that telematic performance or networked - in general - is subject to criticism from the people who do "traditional" performance for they argument one of the main traces of performance is its liveness. It has to do with presence and would not have to do with absence that signifies remote presence. I do not agree with that, on the contrary. But arguments for Telepresence as a kind of presence must have place. (I am not saying you did not mention that). I am taking a copy of your post (it made 4 pages of Word btw) to show it to my students for we are now in a struggle, in Brazil, to develop a more connected performance action.
Oh, pardon me: only now I noticed I forgot to present myself and the reasons I am posting here:
My name is Lucio Agra and I am one of the members of the crew of professors to the Undergraduate course of Performance at the Faculty of Communication and Body Arts at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo. The course was pioneered by two colleagues, Carlos Gardin (Theatre) and Christine Greiner (Dance) who, seven years ago, constructed this project. We delivered the third group of Bachelors last year and we are going to the fourth. The project for the performance section of the course was made by Renato Cohen, the most important brazilian specialist in the field, unfortunately disappeared in 2003. Expecting to continue his work, we are now dealing with one of his last interests, which happens to be telematic performance, exactly.
Best
Lucio Agra
Sao Paulo Brazil
Posted by: Jo at July 4, 2005 11:10 AM
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 19:31:16 -0400
From: Helen Thorington
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
Hello Komninos:
From what Michelle and I have seen on the blog, the answer is yes. Increasingly the "audience" is becoming a participant(s) in the work. Take
the musical work "Glimmer" by Jason Freeman, for instance. Freeman engages the concert audience as musical collaborators in the shaping of the performance. Each audience member is given a light stick, which he can turn on and off during the performance as a way of instructing the musicians. The information is picked up by computer software (which analyses a video of the audience's use of the light sticks) and the instructions conveyed to the musicians.
The New York Times review of this piece includes the following description of the result: "As people flicked their lights in swirling, jabbing and jittery patterns, the musicians played riffs, chords, sustained tones, honks, squiggles and whatnotŠThe problem was, the light show was infinitely more interesting than the music. Still, the audience seemed elated by the experience."
And this, I believe is the point -- not a predetermined composition perfectly played for a listening audience, but an experience for those
participating, which in this case, as the reviewer acknowledged, delighted the participants.
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 4, 2005 11:12 AM
Date: Sat, 02 Jul 2005 20:01:44 -0400
From: Helen Thorington
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2 - (Locative Media Thread)
Hi Brett:
Thanks for your long post. I did read through to the end and will again. This is just a quick note to say that in fact the categories you mention -- psychogeography,narrative space, interventions, happenings, network space, >space as physical canvas, and mapping all exist on the networked_performance blog.
Michelle's and my interest was in finding categories that would include most of the work on the blog -- the categories we chose, as I think we said, are not fixed. And they need to be considered permeable. Already many works could be placed in more than one.
More later,
Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 4, 2005 11:14 AM
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 17:33:55 -0700
From: "Jim Andrews"
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
I have read you on one other occassion where you pointed out the importance of "experience" to some particular works. It was salient, given the nature of the interactive works you were commenting on at the time. The context is similar, above, in that the work you refer to is interactive.
And you're getting at something that many seem to miss, concerning interactive work. You and the reviewer distinguish between a perspective outside the interaction and a perspective from within the interaction, ie, a perspective of observation and a perspective of experience. It seems quite a bit of the 'meaning' is carried through the experience, in the above sort of work.
Creating works that are dynamically responsive/ performative may then be a bit like the difference between a fixed sculpture and a reactive person. The sculpture is often more beautiful and, as object of contemplation, reads quite different from contemplating a person. And, again, we do less contemplation of people than experience of them (for better or worse).
ja
Posted by: Jo at July 4, 2005 11:17 AM
From: "949Simon Pockley" simonpockley@hotmail.com>
Reply-To: soft_skinned_space
Date: Mon, 04 Jul 2005 10:48:05 +1000
To: empyre@lists.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
Dear Helen
I'm trying to place my own drawn out practice into your categories but without success. When (at the end of your last post) you say
>>which in this case, as the reviewer acknowledged, delighted the participants.
I began to wonder if we should talk a little about what a 'performance' is. Over the last 10 years, my primitive, ragged and messy 'Flight of Ducks' has been a source of delight not only for me but for all sorts of people who appear more than willing to engage or participate with me and its manifold content in ways that suggest a long slow performance. I remember years ago that Kominos used the term 'flesh meeting' to describe that entropy or progression that inevitably led towards face to face contact. It's a phenomenon of networked activity that seems to be often overlooked. When it happens the flesh meeting, as a component of the performance, happens offstage (off-line). The network establishes the conditions for it to happen in some cases - for years.
http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD0357.html
Maybe there is room for another category that can encompass this kind of networked experience? I just can't think of a term right now. But it is very human, propositional and incomplete. For all I know, some of us may be engaging it it here.
Best wishes
Simon
Simon Pockley
Flight of Ducks: http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/
[email] simonpockley@hotmail.com
[voice] 0418 575 525
Posted by: Jo at July 4, 2005 11:20 AM
Date: Mon, 4 Jul 2005 10:12:00 +1000
From: Komninos Zervos
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
thankyou helen
your original post was great, very informative and i realise it is a first step into this field and not the final word. it is difficult for me each month, as it might be for others on the list, to familiarise myself quickly with the specialty field that is being highlighted.
your opening post quickly framed the whole discussion and provided a quick-start primer for my better understanding of the topic. i did not see it as prescriptive of the field but offering enough description for further research.
lucio's point about the 'liveness' is an interesting one. your example of the lightbeam concert that engages the audience by their control over the direction of the music being played is a valuable one. i wonder if you have an example where the audience, artists, and participants are all on-line without that live content?
i remember reading about stelarc's performance hanging from a warehouse roof by hooks, his body full of stimulators, making his muscles twitch, and the sensors which recorded his neurological responses that got fed into a synthesizer and expressed as music, all being controlled by inputs from remote computers on the web, or was i just dreaming.....
when i first started making cyberpoems in 1995 my goal was to remove myself from the performance, i had been a professional performance poet for ten years prior to this and was very aware of the importance of my presence in the live situation. i was criticised by the print based poets who claimed, it was my personality that made the poems work. true i was the first interpreter of my own work and so sort of set the authoritative interpretation. so, i was keen to make my cyberpoems perform on their own as digital animated sonic experiences whilst trying to capture the excitement of live performance using new devices of engagement. but the field you are describing seems completely different to what my concerns were. would i be right in saying the works you refer to are using the medium as the performance, and the performers are just the early interpreters of the work?
cheers
komninos
komninos zervos
http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
http://users.bigpond.net.au/mangolegs
http://spokenword.blog-city.com
"Our Workplace Rights are NOT for sale."
Posted by: Jo at July 5, 2005 09:43 AM
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 11:30:24 -0400
From: Helen Thorington
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
Hi Komninos and everyone else:
The question about liveness is something that should be addressed. You may remember that in our original post we defined networked performance as "any live event that is network enabled."
There can be no question about the "liveness" of the work I described last evening. "Glimmer" took place in a traditional concert hall. It was an interaction between participators (the audience) and the performers, all live and present.
I'm going to take a deep breath and say that I think the same can be said about pretty much all the work we are looking at on the blog. Under the telematic category we listed work by Mann and Teran. My hope is that they will soon enter the list and talk to you directly about their work. But let me say this much:
In the past they worked with the Waag Society to produce a work (I think it was actually done at least three times) called The Telematic Dinner Party. There were 30 people involved, fifteen (very much alive and present) having dinner in Amsterdam, fifteen (ditto) in Toronto. The point of this work was not performance as I think most of us understand it. There was no Internet audience. The point was to eat, have fun, tell stories, and to enhance the social interaction between the distant diners by making use of a number of tele-kinetic objects that transmitted physical presence and social gestures across space and time.
For instance: throughout the meal, the guests made toasts and speeches using telematic wine glasses. In each of the two cities, Toronto and Amsterdam, there were four sensor glasses and four mechanical clinker glasses on the dinner table. Guests in either space could pick up a spoon and strike one of the sensor glasses in the manner of calling guests attention to a short speech or toast. This signal was picked up and relayed across the ocean via the Internet, where it was then sent to one of the mechanical clinkers. These responded by striking a glass with a motorized spoon. In this way, the Glass Clinkers - like a number of other telematic devices - provided a strong sense of both kinetic and sonic telepresence between the two spaces. What clinked on one side of the Atlantic, clinked on the other. Streaming video and audio were used to bring the two parties closer together.
Mann and Teran are now doing distributed picnics using wireless, which I hope they'll talk about. But for me the points are: 1) here are a bunch of very much alive and present people eating and having a great time; and communicating with each other across distance in as many ways as are available to them 2) there is no traditional audience 3) there is no reliance on the screen and keyboard. 4) the point is communication and social interaction and how to do it so that you feel closer...
Under our second category -- anyone of the works -- take umbrella.net. Open the umbrella and you have (assuming there are others around with the same kind of umbrella) an ad hoc (wireless) network. Once again: communication between people in a given area, and social interaction.
Very much alive and present, I think.
Re the suggestion that we try and define what we mean by performance, I'm all for it...
But, enough for now,
- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 5, 2005 09:48 AM
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 2005 22:47:33 -0400 (EDT)
From: Alan Sondheim
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
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
(URLs/DVDs/CDroms/books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt)
Posted by: Jo at July 5, 2005 09:50 AM
Date: Sun, 03 Jul 2005 11:56:51 -0400
From: Helen Thorington
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
A quick reply:
Alan, a lot of the work we're seeing on the networked_performance blog invites people to take part in activities on the street. And therefore to confront the real and any dangers it may hold.
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 5, 2005 09:51 AM
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 00:01:52 +0000
From: Pall Thayer
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
Hi everyone,
I just want to briefly tell about one of the issues I've approached in my own work and would like to hear if anyone has any thoughts on this. I think the basic premise in these networked performances is physical interaction, i.e. not directly through the computer (that's what makes them "performances"). But most of them seem to involve voluntary actions from a certain public. I'm more interested in the idea of involuntary interaction. Using common actions without the participants necessarily being aware that they're interacting with a work of art or in a way that they don't have actual control over how they interact (for instance, by turning a work environment into an interactive space).
I haven't really formed any deep concepts around this (besides feeling that this is, in a way, a very "pure" form of interaction), so I would be interested in hearing Helen's and others ideas on this.
best regards,
Pall Thayer
artist/teacher
http://www.this.is/pallit
http://pallit.lhi.is/panse
Lorna
http://www.this.is/lorna
Posted by: Jo at July 5, 2005 09:54 AM
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 08:59:09 -0700
From: "Michelle Riel"
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
As Helen confirms, Glimmer, like many other works on the blog, is representative of a ransformation of the audience / spectator (the seeing / listening observer ) to an active, physically engaged participant in the artistic process. The structure of the work casts the audience as _performers_ in the work. In such cases the artist is creating a framework, or an 'open work', within which the audience is needed to perform to realize the work. Without the audience as performers there is no work, only the possibility.
As we have noted in our initial post, we see the historical antecedents of this current work in the art practice that emerged in the mid 20th century, in particular the 'open work' and the practice of 'art as life' which emerged from Cage and Kaprow and the Happenings and Fluxus movements of the 50's and 60's.
This leads us to the relation between the open work and open source as formative practice and its relation to performance/performativity.
michelle
Posted by: Jo at July 6, 2005 11:14 AM
Message: 2
Date: Tue, 05 Jul 2005 09:23:07 -0700
From: "Michelle Riel"
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
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
michelle
Posted by: Jo at July 6, 2005 11:16 AM
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 03:24:46 -0700
From: "Michelle Riel"
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
Pall,
In response to ‘involuntary interaction’ or responsiveness that participants may not be aware of, what you describe brings to mind a responsive, sentient or context aware environment (also referred to as smart architecture but I like ‘environment’, or ‘space’ as it has a more open connotation). The work of Chris Salter and Usman Haque come to mind.
In the case of Chris Salter’s ‘Suspension Threshold’ the light levels of the space are raised and lowered in response to the aggregate breathing patterns of the audience, which he describes as ‘an environment that lies barely on the threshold of human perception’. Chris is also an eloquent writer and sums up a lot of compelling aspects of ubiquitous / pervasive / ambient computing from a sociotechnical or technocultural perspective.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000053.html
In the case of Usman Haque, who is trained as an architect and who sites his work in architectural practice, his proposed work ‘Haunt’ seeks to create the parapsychological effects of the feeling of being haunted. He describes the work as ‘using humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies that parapsychologists have associated with haunted spaces to build an environment that feels "haunted".’ By gauging biofeedback via galvanic skin response meters a dynamic database modeled on learning algorithms learns what is effective in creating the sensation of feeling haunted. The adaptive system responds in real-time to the physiological state of visitors.
The project focuses on how the psychology of human perception gives rise to the construction of space. See also his project ‘Scents of a Space’ using scent in three-dimensional space.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000188.html
Usman Haque is also an interesting to reference in that he is engaged from the perspective of an architect. This is parallel to what Helen and I propose through the blog, which is to look at the body of works on the blog from the perspective of ‘performance’. We ask our selves how and why any particular work is performance and what specifically makes it performance or performative. I’ll take this up in a separate post and elaborate on the earlier question to define what we mean by performance and will return to your proposition that what makes this body of works performances is their physical interaction.
I’m also interested for you to elaborate on your example of ‘turning a work environment into an interactive space’. Also, since a number of your works are featured on the blog – ‘Hlemmur in C’, ‘Autodrawn’ and ‘Fictional Space’ - I’d like to hear your thoughts on being included on the blog by which we propose your works are performative. Do you see these works as performances or performative? How would you understand or rationalize them as such? Though, we should be explaining our justification to you, eh?! Hopefully, this will emerge as we endeavor to further define networked performance.
michelle
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 09:41 AM
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 15:54:35 +0000
From: Pall Thayer
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
Hi Michelle and thanks for the great response. I am familiar with the work of both Chris Salter and Usman Haque. But I think what I was talking about (or at least what I meant to talk about) is slightly different because they are working with environments that respond to the public within it making that public aware of an interactive element. This will cause people to change the way they behave. They'll start "looking" for that interactive element and try to figure out what triggers what. At this point, I'm more interested in capturing "normal" behaviour. So it's more about a sensitive environment rather than a responsive environment. The work doesn't respond to whoever interacts with it, it simply records or transmits the information to another viewing public. This ties into some ideas I've been working with in regards to abstraction for quite some time.
I'm very happy that my work has been included in the blog. The projects definitely involve performance. They aren't necessarily networked but ideally, they would be. For instance, in the case of "Hlemmur in C" the original idea was to use track the movements of employees inside the busstation and that the "base" point for each would differ. That way we would've been able to set up a server inside the station to stream the data out live. However we couldn't afford the super expensive GPS devices that would have worked indoors (the place has big skylights but we couldn't get regular GPS devices to work reliably enough). So I came up with the idea of tracking taxi's instead and collecting the data for the "simulated" live stream. The interesting thing about the taxi's is that even though they were fully aware of the fact that they were participants in a work of art, they couldn't really do anything about it. They have to go where the passenger wants to go and where that passenger wants to go will affect who the next passenger is and so on and so on. Sort of a cascading chaotic effect.
Fictional Space was basically just a "sketch" of some ideas I was working on. It involved using bluetooth to track the proximity of someone carrying a bluetooth phone. The "performer" in the piece was myself, so I couldn't help but to be "aware" of the fact that I was being tracked (by myself). But the idea was to use this one-dimensional spatial data to create a sort of "pallette" of data to mix into a two or three dimensional representation of space so that the result would represent a space that doesn't really exist. I did a somewhat more refined version later called "A painting of three places" located here: http://pallit.lhi.is/3places But these are some ideas I'm still working on. It's my current research.
Autodrawn is the only one of these that are actually networked. The idea there is that anyone who happens to be driving on one of those freeways at the time that the traffic cam takes a picture and my program happens to randomly select that location, becomes a "performer" in the work. But it kind of stretches the concept of something being "interactive". In that sense it's a bit similar to a little sketch piece I did a couple of years ago called "Headlines". It was a program that would constantly read and parse the local headlines from the website of Iceland's main newspaper and play them as notes. It was presented as an interactive piece explaining that if you wanted to interact with it, all you had to to was make the domestic headlines in Icelandic news.
And yes, I wouldn't mind hearing your reasons for documenting these works as networked performances.
best r.
Pall
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 09:48 AM
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 13:13:04 -0300
From: Lucio Agra
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
There is an experiment like this, made here, in Brazil, first in Rio, then in Sao Paulo by a guy named Michel Melamed (it seems he is now performing in France). The performer is connected to electric terminals and these are connected to sensors conducted by microphones. Depending on the noises made by the audience, the performer receives slight electrical shocks. The problem is that the texts recited by Melamed (which he writes) are extremely funny. The audience is helpless on a continuous laughing. It becomes a weird situation. http://revbravo.com.br/impressa.php?edit=td&numEd=89 has some information about it, though it is in portuguese. The play is called "Regurgitofagia" (untraslatable word, something like anthropophagic and puking out at the same time). It is an allusion to the famous Anthropophagic Manifesto and Theory of the brazilian Modernist Oswald de Andrade. And, in the same time to the years of dictatorship and torture. But it goes far more than the dark humour one could imagine. And the responses of the audience were somewhat very different from one city to another.
best
Lucio BR
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 09:50 AM
Date: Wed, 6 Jul 2005 13:28:13 -0300
From: Lucio Agra
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
Helen and friends
I think you reached the point with perfection. My intention mentioning "liveness" was to provoke this kind of discussion. You see, I give classes to students that come from theatre and dance tradition and the obstacles they oppose to telematic performance are always related to this problem of "live presence". You example is fantastic. I remember an experiment much more modest was made in Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, 1997, between a female dancer and a male dancer in Brussels. They divided the screen in the middle of their bodies and they constructed a hybrid with the two halfes of their bodies. It was far in 1997. and the connections were not so good. Unfortunately I have no references of this work, but it was very interesting. I mentioned this experiment to my friend, the specialist in performance and it seems made him interested in this kind of connection. So that in 2002 he made a teleconference of performances with the german researcher Johannes Birringer. It was located simultanously in Sao Paulo, United States (do not remember the city) and Brasilia.
Many thanks for your brilliant answer.
best
Lucio BR
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 09:52 AM
Date: Wed, 06 Jul 2005 15:36:45 -0400
From: Helen Thorington
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
on 7/6/05 11:54 AM, Pall Thayer at palli@pallit.lhi.is wrote:
> At this point, I'm more interested in capturing "normal" behaviour. So it's more about a sensitive environment rather than a responsive environment. The work doesn't respond to whoever interacts with it, it simply records or transmits the information to another viewing public. This ties into some ideas I've been working with in regards to abstraction for quite some time.
Pall, can you talk about this more. I love the idea of a sensitive environment, although I'm pretty sure a responsive one could be sensitive as well.
As I read you, I might walk into a room, do something that triggers something else but never know it. In the meantime another audience is viewing the results of my unconscious behavior in the room ?
Autodrawn is a bit like this, isn't it? While human interaction doesn¹t play a part and It¹s the computer that¹s ³performing as the intermediary of a live moment,² i.e., the computer is playing artist in real time, sketching images seen on online webcams. The computer is responding to the "unconscious" behavior of motorists on the autobahn. And their behavior is being monitored and rendered for us, another audience.
Or am I way off track?
- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 09:55 AM
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 08:08:51 +1000
From: Komninos Zervos
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
lucio, helen, michelle, greetings
i would like to ask, in relation to liveness, the role of the audience in adding to a live performance. 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.
komninos
komninos zervos
http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
http://users.bigpond.net.au/mangolegs
http://spokenword.blog-city.com
"Our Workplace Rights are NOT for sale."
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 09:56 AM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
From: Helen Varley Jamieson
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 16:18:33 +1200
it's something lots of proximal performances don't manage to capture either ; ) presence - the holy grail of theatre ... how to create it when you're not even in the same hemisphere as your audience? i know that we've achieved it - sometimes - but i don't profess to know the magic formula.
one thing we've learned is to make it clear that it's live, so the audience knows they are occupying the same time-space as the performers. interaction, response, typos, lag, glitches, technical hitches, mistakes - all of these contribute to the liveness. live work is so much more risky than prerecorded, but if it's indistinguishable from prerecorded, then it can lose that energy.
interaction is something that people expect & hunger for in the online world, unlike theatre audiences who often shrink from "audience participation". we've found that when we create a role for the audience, they grab it & run with it. they don't even define themselves as audience, they perceive themselves as an integral part of the performance. the presence is definitely there in those situations. the work is not complete until the audience enters into it.
(another) helen : )
helen varley jamieson: creative catalyst
helen@creative-catalyst.com
http://www.creative-catalyst.com
http://www.avatarbodycollision.org
http://www.writerfind.com/hjamieson.htm
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 05:49 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: Pall Thayer
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 12:02:44 +0000
Before seeing this mornings news I was all set to write a lengthy, happy response to this but now I'm angry and depressed and more convinced than ever that a war on Iraq is not a "war on terrorism".
Your understanding of what I said is point on, Helen. But perhaps I should clearify what I refer to on the one hand as a sensitive environment and a responsive one on the other. Yes, a responsive environment is also a sensitive environment but a sensitive one doesn't have to be responsive to the actual participant. I guess, the sensitive environment is always going to be responsive as well, but it doesn't necessarily have to respond to the person or people interacting with it.
Now I'm going to watch the news. Hopefully I'll be in a better mood later and write more.
Pall
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 05:51 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: Chris Salter
Date: Thu, 7 Jul 2005 14:34:47 +0200
Hi Helen, Michelle and all,
Please forgive my long prose here. I'm just joining 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) roduce 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
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 06:02 PM
To: soft_skinned_space
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Thu, 07 Jul 2005 11:41:45 -0400
Helen: There have been some interesting experiments done by musicians and composers. In ³interaXis² (2001, 2002), for instance, Jesse Gilbert with Mark Trayle and Wadada Leo Smith addressed the challenge of the multiple times and dislocations introduced with networked technologies.
The problem, as Gilbert said, was that often the sounds coming from remote locations were/are indistinguishable from the contributions of on-site performers, creating an ambiguous space that confuses rather than elucidates the interaction between the dispersed ensemble.
In each of the two "interaXis" performing spaces, Los Angeles and New York, the live performers were in static positions while the remote performers were presented through a spatializing system, thus creating a perceptual distinction between the two halves of the ensemble and an aural analog for the streaming process, symbolizing the movement of the audio stream between the sites.
There was more to it than that, of course, and they are not the only ones experimenting. In fact, there are so many experiments being done with more musical works that I often wish there could be one place where information on them could be exchanged.
interaXis of course is an experiment with sound.
The Mann-Teran approach -- telematic objects -- see my earlier post -- is another way. Michelle Teran has promised to post soon and I'm hoping she will write about this (liveness/presence) and how their work deals with dispersed interaction.
- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 7, 2005 06:05 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Sat, 09 Jul 2005 11:33:09 -0400
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
Posted by: Jo at July 9, 2005 01:51 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
From: Lucio Agra
Date: Mon, 11 Jul 2005 13:57:40 -0300
Hi, Komninos
I don´t know, but it seems Helen and the others would agree with me in the idea that it IS possilble to capture "that presence in the atmosphere around you of a certain something" and I give an example that comes from my mind exactly now and has to do with you precisely. Every time I show to my students, your little movie about your name (k0mninos-kom-kom-I'm not a komunist etc) it evokes me your presence. Obviously it happens because I saw you laughing and performing. To another one who did not see you, though, the power of your work turns to be the power of evoking some traces of your presence which are quite similar to those that someone who knows you, may experience. That was, btw, the thesis defended by lots of network performers, i.e., the idea that we are entering a new conception of presence (expanded) which gives birth also to a new concept of (expanded) memory.
best
Lucio BR
Posted by: Jo at July 12, 2005 10:17 AM
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Tue, 12 Jul 2005 16:30:47 -0400
Delivered-to: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
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
Posted by: Jo at July 12, 2005 09:51 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: Chris Salter
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 01:09:32 +0200
Delivered-to: empyre@gamera.cofa.unsw.edu.au
Hi Helen, et al...
I want to quickly (and briefly) pick up this question of animism. One interesting source of inspiration dealing with this is Bruno Latour's essay in his book Pandora's Hope entitled "A Collective of Humans and Non-Humans" where he focuses on how contemporary theories of knowledge have continued the split between the world of subjects (us) and the world of objects (technologically-mediated things). Again, we may perceive that now objects have become augmented through computational processes but much of the work that claims this (particularly in the realm of so-called pervasive or ubiquitous computing) still focuses on response that happens at the level of data representation-at the level of DISPLAY (whether this be audio or visual representations). There is little work to show for that attempts to "hybridize" the physical and the computational so that the resulting object-event (what we could call an object that becomes "life like") or, what Bernard Cache ironically called an "objectile" becomes truly something in between the two-where morphology is not just restricted to the level of pixels or bits but this "life-like" quality enforces change at the MATERIAL level itself. (this is what I'm currently working on with the schwelle project, as Michelle mentioned it in her earlier posts). Architects seem to be the ones (currently) trying to pursue this direction with interests in "smart" or responsive materials (many of which still operate at the display level of luminosity or emissiveness). For instance, the work of the English born architect Mark Goulthorpe (who is currently teaching at MIT) in his Aegis Hyperspace project (a responsive surface driven by thousands of computer controlled pneumatic pistons) or, perhaps better yet, Diller + Scofidio's quite amazing Blur Building... a "building" that was composed strictly from fog being sprayed from computer regulated nozzles that was on display for the 2002 Swiss Expo...this is quite an interesting example of a performance and building in one and one that operates at different perceptual thresholds. From a distance, the building appeared to be a surface and a volume...yet, once inside, it becomes completely permeable and, in fact, no longer resembled a structure at all...just a mass of white, hissing, impenetrable fog. D+S demonstrate (even more so than Goulthorpe, who still resorts to kinetics at the mechanical level) the functioning of transformable matter...
I think if we are going to move towards truly augmenting objects, then we might take a look again at someone like Kurt Schwitters, who already proposed (of course, without imagining how it would be done) in 1923 in his text on the Merz stage a performance event where physical reality itself would become kinetic and performative: "Use is made of compressible surfaces or surfaces capable of dissolving into meshes; surfaces that fold like curtains, expand or shrink. Objects will be allowed to move and revolve, and lines will be allowed to broaden into surfaces."
cs.
Posted by: Jo at July 12, 2005 09:55 PM
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: "Sally Jane Norman"
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 07:43:52 +0100
Dear empyricists, and special hello to Chris
this thread is really stimulating - was weaving the inevitable mekhane into a text a couple of weeks back when it cropped up here like a Deux ex Machina - and now the animism thread.
The archaic world of puppets - manipulated objects - and automats - self-moving objects - and all the hybrid entities that span the continuum between those two categories seems to me to offer useful insights into our notions of live/ness. Gaze as giver of life - le report de la vie, as we say in French.
For me, it is this propensity to read life and live:li:ness into things that connects the most ancient effigies and totems, to those strange creatures our prosthetised eyes are revealing in outer space - Saturn's moons or the capsule that relates them to us - and at "non"human scales on earth, as in the shaping of nanomolecular surfaces. Mixes here of computational display and obdurately physical entities and terrain - as exemplified by our being able to follow Opportunity getting out of a rut on some distant planet.
With thanks for the discussion and lively ideas
best wishes
sjn
Posted by: Jo at July 13, 2005 10:07 AM
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: Helen Varley Jamieson
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 00:04:06 +1200
i'm also enjoying this thread, altho swamped with other work so i'm afraid i'm not keeping up very well. i'll drop in some random thoughts from a windswept outpost, on animism & reading life into objects. in my own work with avatars (digital puppets) i find the more visually simple they are, the more scope they offer. the 3d human-like style is less interesting to me. & i'm never alone when i'm on stage with my laptop; she is as much a player in the performance as i am; we have long warm-ups together & debrief over a drink afterwards.
h : )
Posted by: Jo at July 14, 2005 10:42 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance 2
From: Chris Byrne
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 16:30:27 +0300
Like some others, I'm currently engaged on multiple other tasks, but this thread is thoroughly stimulating. Perhaps also vast in scope!
This may mark me out as a member of the 'old guard', or perhaps I am just slipping into a customary habit. When questions emerge about new forms and how a tradition will move forward given new technologies, I often feel that interesting perspectives are gained from looking at early uses of the technologies which are entering new (and different) phases. As Fluxus, EAT et al were cited, I guess it's okay...
Two important markers for me along the timeline for "telematic events":
The "Slow Scan" telephone/TV experiments between Vancouver and various locations in the world, from 1978 (?) onwards I think. Particularly memorable for me was a performance by Mona Hatoum, "So Much I Want To Say", 1983 was the date if I remember (it was recorded on video and shown widely in this form). The limits of the progressive scanning of the "live" image were used as a very effective performance constraint.
"The Mashed Potato Supper", a live Internet performance between New York and Edinburgh in 1996. It used webcams and CU-SeeMe, the video/audio compression pixellation giving a presence similar to the slow scan events in some ways. Participants included Cary Peppermint, Simon Yuill and Pernille Spence. http://restlessculture.net/peppermint/exposures/mps/
Despite the different technologies, and the post-"Electronic Cafe" status of the latter event, the performances seem similar to me in certain aspects. The use of geographical distance: the foregrounding of this aspect lent a wistfulness to proceedings despite the use of humour by some artists; and the exposing or hiding of visual elements, used to add ambiguity or mystery to the characters/personas/avatars invoked by the performers.
Obviously the interface for both events was televisual in form, which in itself formalises and distances the performative gesture. For me the use of telematics in itself seems to point towards a difference in the possible levels of intimacy for the performer/user/audience, at least when comparing telematic events to forms/spaces in the other categories. There are different implications for telerobotic forms, and the spaces currently possible via haptic interfaces. More intimate and unexpected/informal experiences could be possible (if that is the intention). I wonder though if the layer of technological mediation still necessary in most interfaces is another kind of distance? When does the 'real' give way to the 'hyperreal'? 'Live' to 'programmed to react'?
Chris
Posted by: Jo at July 14, 2005 11:15 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 10:31:35 -0400
Very interesting, all.
I have a filing cabinet near my desk, in which ³active objects² (³kinetic or augmented² would have been a better choice of words) and the ³in-between² are in separate folders, rather than plunked together as in our initial post.
The active objects folder is full some like those I mentioned in my last are really fun, some are so-so, some are useful and concerned with contemporary issues such as the environment. LUVMSG, the reusable, digital tree carving, which may actually save the life of a tree or two is an example of this. http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000636.html)
In the ³in-between² folder are Chris¹ work Suspension/Threshold, which creates a body responsive environment where the aggregate breathing patterns of the collective audience/participants lighten an otherwise dark environment. http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000053.html
and Usman Haque, Haunt, which builds an environment that feels "haunted" based on the physiological state of its visitors. (http://www.haque.co.uk/haunt.php)
Both works were mentioned by Michelle in an earlier post. Both are still in progress.
Blur House, which as Chris said, was created for the 2002 Swiss Expo, should be in my folder as well. It¹s amazing! I don¹t know Mark Goulthorpe¹s work but a quick search for Aegis Hyposurface produced the following: ²The piece marks the transition from autoplastic (determinate) to alloplastic (interactive, indeterminate) space, a new species of reciprocal architecture.²
I find it interesting that with the exception of Suspension/Threshold, these in-between works are the works of architects? But then, most of the developments we¹re seeing mobile connectivity, for instance, have to do with movements and actions of people in space they are spatial. No wonder that those concerned with spatial design should be creating spatial experiences.
But I also wanted to say that in thinking about the in-between and what Chris has written:
"something in between the two-where morphology is not just restricted to the level of pixels or bits but this "life-like" quality enforces change at the MATERIAL level itself.
I think about Dick Higgens¹ and his concern for ³the implied horizons of the works which we encounter² and the need to understand ³these projections, migrations and fusions² and the new possibilities they embody.
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 14, 2005 11:20 AM
Subject: RE: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: "Sally Jane Norman"
Date: Wed, 13 Jul 2005 15:37:00 +0100
Funny the way your laptop having an after-performance drink conjures up images of Vaucanson's duck!
Also amused by the slip of the digit that came up with Deux ex Machina like a pas de Deus?
best
sjn
Posted by: Jo at July 14, 2005 11:21 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] networked_performance
From: "Franck Ancel"
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 11:30:48 +0200
>>>this thread is really stimulating - was weaving the inevitable mekhane into a text a couple of weeks back when it cropped up here like a Deux ex Machina - and now the animism thread.
>>>>The archaic world of puppets - manipulated bjects - and automats -self-moving objects - and all the hybrid entities that span the continuum between those two categories seems to me to offer useful insights into our notions of live/ness. Gaze as giver of life - le report de la vie, as we say in French.
>>>>>For me, it is this propensity to read life and live:li:ness into things that connects the most ancient effigies and totems, to those strange creatures our prosthetised eyes are revealing in outer space - Saturn's moons or the capsule that relates them to us - and at "non"human scales on earth, as in the shaping of nanomolecular surfaces. Mixes here of computational display and obdurately physical entities and terrain - as exemplified by our being able to follow Opportunity getting out of a rut on some distant planet.
Besides, as early as 1963 Jacques Polieri thought that «since some actions take place at some very far distances on one hand, some others could equally be contemplated thanks to technology. No doubt, the inclination, rotation, orbits and movements of planetary systems make up the actual geometrical structure of a future scenography».
all the best
fa
Posted by: Jo at July 14, 2005 11:25 AM
Subject: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: "Michelle Riel"
Date: Thu, 14 Jul 2005 15:28:31 -0700
In Jon McKenzie's book Perform or Else he presents a case study approach demonstrating the current cultural use and understanding of "performance". He cites the parallel developments emergent from the 50's and 60's of Marcuse's claim that post-industrial societies are ruled by the "performance principle" (oppressive / repressive sublimation, or conformance to social acceptance), concurrent with the rise of both a theatrical concept of performance from ritual and social interaction and the development in art that would become performance art.
Specifically, he looks at three facets of performance: the efficacy of "cultural performance" as in the performance of dancers, singers, musicians and actors in the traditional performing arts and experimental art; the efficiency of "organizational performance" such as workplace productivity of companies, business management, economic power; and the effectiveness of "technological performance" such as the technological functionality of objects or systems.
While seemingly disparate, and certainly broad, expanding performance to be inclusive of these cultural uses enables us to understand as "performance" buildings made of fog and tables that follow you, tools that are sociable and engage you to become performative through their use and, the more familiar notion of performance, interactions by artists with technology in an event presented to others who observe.
But unlike Schwitters' imagined Merz conception, the blog is chronicling _current practice_ which, like the openness of its premise (any live event that is network enabled), means that there is a really broad range of realized work. From lo-fi to DIY art to academic and commercial institutionally funded research to commercial tools and experiences. And an equally broad range of practitioners from artists and performers, of course, to engineers, computer scientists, social scientists,humanities researchers, architects, and undoubtedly others.
One aspect of the blog as a database of works is to note patterns of practice as a means to understand the expanding definition of performance. The breadth of this scope points out that both definitions of terms (performance, liveness, embodiment, presence, agency, etc.) as well as a typology are needed. We began with the categories Telematic, Locative, Wearable, and Environments. Perhaps the multivalent concept of performance as cultural, organizational and technological can inform a typology of current networked practice.
..........................
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
Posted by: Jo at July 15, 2005 08:33 AM
Subject: [-empyre-] LF:TK
From: misha@ubermatic.org
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 11:06:46 -0700 (PDT)
Dear Helen, Michelle, Chris, Sally, et al;
Apologies to Helen for not writing sooner and sorry, but this is going to be a long one. Helen asked me to contribute to this discussion by talking about LiveForm:Telekinetics (LF:TK) a project carried out in collaboration with Canadian electro-kinetic artist Jeff Mann. LF:TK is an ongoing artistic proposition for networked realities that are embedded within everyday spaces. We examine social spaces, transforming physical spaces into connected environments, where communication between two physical spaces is mediated through ordinary objects such as furniture, cutlery, utensils, toys and bric-a-brac. As artists, we are not thinking about functional items, or objects of convenience, rather a more poetic reimagination towards the objects that we coexist with, looking at the surreal aspects of subverting an object's use and the social context in which it is placed and producing alternate 'psycho-social narratives' (Anthony Dunne) about our relationships to objects and how we inhabit space.
Embodied gesture, food, body language, music, social ritual, preparation and the physical space are important ingredients in the creation of a shared experience. It is important for us to not only investigate/play with different physical interfaces, but understand how they actually function socially by staging live events which are more like social gatherings, like a picnic, dance or dinner party, than traditional performances. During these events, there are energy ebbs and flows as people fall in and out of interest, and alternate between being 'performer' or 'audience' member. (in an Erving Goffman sense)
Our first 'pilot project', which took place in 2001/2002, involved several connections between Amsterdam and Toronto. Within a four month period Jeff and I worked collaboratively with 8 artists and technologists to create The Telematic Dinner, a table installation populated by sensored and kinetic wine glasses for signaling to each other, motor controlled wine bottle pourers, embedded screens containing a chat and video-mixing environment between the two spaces, and a hacked 'Billy Mouth Singing Bass' animatronic fish for mediating speech. During the final event 15 people in Toronto and 15 in Amsterdam sat down together for 5 hours to share a meal. Although at first a strange and awkward situation for many of those involved, it was interesting to see how people adapted to this playfully absurd environment and started to really use the gadgets on the table. So it was not 30 people making a performance about a dinner, but 30 people having dinner together, a social situation augmented with these technological interfaces.
This was a good initial experiment for us, but perhaps too literal, both in our decision to use a dinner party as our interaction model, and also the functionality of the objects themselves which were directly linked to the social codes and gestures of a dinner situation, therefore making them still too 'rational'. A step for us was to start to look at the environment itself as a communication interface rather than a single object, which is how we relate to objects within everyday situations. If I'm in a cafe, it is not only the coffee cup that I'm using as a single, autonomous object, but how it is part of a complex network of people, objects, codes and gestures, that form that social environment. This was something that we wanted to develop further. Also, although we had used a familiar environment of a dinner table, the events themselves took place within a gallery setting. Therefore we also wanted to create an installation that could be moved around and placed within different real-world settings. In 2004, through funding provided by The Canada Council for the Arts and HGIS and within Waag Society's Connected! programme, we were able to explore this new terrain.
Through the recent phase of the work we have started to think about everyday hybrid realities as anarchic, nomadic experiences, transgeographical, public interventions, or Telepresence Picnic Parties, taking place anywhere a network exists. These connections can take place within the same city or between cities. We are particularly interested in the wireless phenomenon and the subsequent structural change within the city. The proliferation of wireless access points makes any location, however insignificant (s.a an alleyway), fertile ground for a connection to take place. My network card and KisMac software has just logged 41 open and closed networks from where I am sitting in a studio in Toronto.
For the installation that we created a collection of sensor controlled kinetic objects, each with a characteristic movement, emulating an embodied gesture, but a variety of non-verbal, body language with no immediate symbolic meaning, such as the way you move your hands while talking, or how your body moves when dancing. Each object is made up of two or more objects (s.a. cheese grater and scissors, colander and wine opener, bowl and straws) combined in such a way that their original function is eradicated and the resulting hybrid ?moves between the poles of kitsch and surrealism? (Anthony Dunne). Each object can either be played live, or movements recorded into it and played back, much like a jukebox. The installation is meant to be played to music, so that the installation becomes a choreography of movement and gesture that people create together.
During BEAP04, in Perth we attempted a couple of experimental linkups from public parks throughout the city. In December we held several events around public and private networks (café and home environments) throughout Montréal and Amsterdam. We would like to do more Telepresence Picnic Parties, in as many cities and sites as possible, making new friends and picnic partners along the way. People that are interested in participating in an event are also invited to participate in the preparation of it. In a workshop like setting, people are asked to help build objects, prepare food, and assemble the picnic that is then taken out into the city.
Finally, documentation from past events, illustrated recipes and blog entries form part of our growing archive, a community cookbook for electronic picnics.
I realize this is a bit of a monologue and I haven't really addressed some of the questions and comments posed so far. However, hopefully this posting can contribute in some way to the discussion.
best
Michelle Teran
http://www.lftk.org
http://www.ubermatic.org/misha
Posted by: Jo at July 18, 2005 08:52 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Sun, 17 Jul 2005 20:10:52 -0400
Michelle R. --
"Perhaps the multivalent concept of performance as cultural, organizational and technological can inform a typology of current networked practice."
Can you give us an idea of what this means? A new way of categorizing types of networked practice... what would you put in each of the above categories? And wouldn't one spend hours arguing what work belongs where?
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 18, 2005 08:54 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] LF:TK
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Mon, 18 Jul 2005 11:45:47 -0400
Hello all:
Reading Michelle Teran¹s post, I began to think about value? and how in much of the work we have seen on the networked_performance blog value is created during interactions between people.
There's a history here. Remember Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz and ³Hole in Space²? One of the classic art-telecommunication projects of all time, it took place over a period of three evenings in November 1980.
On the first evening, unsuspecting pedestrians walking past the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, came face-to-face with life-sized television images of unsuspecting pedestrians walking past "The Broadway" department store in Century City, Los Angeles. And vice versa. There were no explanations. 3000 miles apart, they could see one another; they could hear and they could speak with one another.
The second evening saw growing numbers of people populating the streets as word-of-mouth and long distance telephone calls spread the word; on the third as a result of television coverage the previous evening - there was a mass migration of families and trans-continental loved ones to the two locations, where they ²utilized the link or frame -- provided by Galloway and Rabinovitz, and gave it its content, and its meaning.² Many of those present had not seen each other in 20 years. http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/hole-in-space/)
This shift from artist as creator of content to artist as creator of a space in which others (the public, friends and acquaintances) produce content and meaning, is profound. Something quietly, beautifully revolutionary is going on -- more visible now than ever before (I don¹t know that for sure, but I¹ll say it anyway) and visible certainly in works like those Michelle Teran and Jeff Mann are creating.
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 18, 2005 05:03 PM
Subject: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 8, Issue 15
From: misha@ubermatic.org
Date: Tue, 19 Jul 2005 14:45:09 -0700 (PDT)
Hi Hellen
And if I might add to that. I am also interested in what are the effects/affects of entering into and participating in a social ritual of a networked connection and also the preparation ritual of building objects, making food, etc. At a profound level, it is almost impossible to communicate one's personal responses when you are in the middle of what is happening. Imprints and traces from the experience resurface at unpredictable moments. Stories are passed on to others, themselves a form of documentation. I remember reading an interview with Allan Kaprow who talked the inadequacy of film or photography for capturing what actually goes on during a performance, and put more value on gossip as documention. Personal storytelling vs the mechanical eye of the camera.
By staging these events in public locations, we hope to provoke a social reimagination of what is a networked space, both for those people directly involved, as well as accidental encounters by strangers.
The resonances of making or witnessing an object perform inappropriately, participating in a strange ritual, or having an insignificant space like a patch of grass transformed into a data portal to another location, are still yet to be known.
This is the itch that needs to be scratched and gets me out of bed in the morning.
best
Michelle Teran
Posted by: Jo at July 22, 2005 01:15 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: "Michelle Riel"
Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 13:28:42 -0700
To clarify, I don't necessarily see them as new or additional categories, but to be mindful that we already have an understanding of performance as operating in these ways - culturally, organizationally, and technologically. For example, to think of technological performance can be to rate an object's utility by some criteria. When I say "How is my computer performing? It seems a little sluggish, I may have too many images open and the vram is maxed out." We understand this to mean that I am discussing the utilitarian aspect of the computer's functionality. When I say the "freeway performs" in Pall Thayer's Autodrawn work in which he has created a software framework through which to capture the random activities of cars passing along the freeway and conceptualizes it in relation to the artists sketch exercise, I am attributing criteria of performance to an object, technology, or system. I transfer affect to an object; I see the computationally embedded and technologized world in which I live as alive, able to engage and enact. The "what" of the engagement / enactment is that tenuous realm that we are currently pondering: performance without a body, responsiveness, or performance, of once inanimate objects that now sense and communicate.
Since we may not usually consider performance beyond the cultural referent, my intention was to propose thinking more expansively about performance as more than a sited event, perhaps a condition or state, since I often also use performance and performativity interchangeably (which is probably a sloppy practice and I should be more rigorous). As far as examples, this broader perspective of performance is reflected in many of the examples and artists referenced thus far (Pall Thayer as mentioned, Chris Salter, Diller + Scofidio, Teran and Mann, Usman Haque) in which objects, environments, and systems perform.
Michelle -
Posted by: Jo at July 22, 2005 01:19 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: Pall Thayer
Date: Thu, 21 Jul 2005 16:51:55 +0000
I'm going to try to jump back in to this (I'm moving between continents in a few days so I haven't been able to participate as much as I would have liked). To tell the truth, I never really saw the computer as the performer in Autodrawn. It may sound far-fetched, but I saw the drivers of the cars as the performers. They are what affects the image, not the computer (along with a few other factors like daylight, camera positions and their functionality). Eventually, the drawings being generated become predictable and it's relatively easy to see by the way cars are drawn that the computer shows total disregard for the subject matter (which in itself tends to produce rather interesting effects). The thing that I really think matters with work like this, in regards to "performance" is the live factor and the only factor involved that is really, conciously thinking about this work in terms of "art" is the viewer. The program can't be conciously trying to make art, the drivers have no idea that they're involved in a work of art and so on. I see it as a way of automating experimentation. I could spend years trying out various different scenes for drawing traffic on a freeway, or I can automate the process of trying "them all". Of course, it's going to take forever, but my server's not in any hurry :-) For instance, Autodrawn has already shown me a way of sketching freeway traffic that I probably wouldn't have thought of; as a big sign that says, "This camera is temporarily offline."
best r.
Pall
Posted by: Jo at July 22, 2005 01:22 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Fri, 22 Jul 2005 13:27:27 -0400
Hi Pall:
I do think of the computer as a performer in your work, in the same way that an automatic coffee maker performs if you set it to prepare your morning coffee? and see, it (your computer) is already teaching you ways of sketching freeway traffic. In writing this, I too ³am attributing criteria of performance to an object, technology, or system. I transfer affect to an object.² (Riel)
The issue of consciousness is one I¹d love to see someone address? I think immediately about degrees of ³consciousness²? people walk through life sometimes totally unaware of others (you should try driving in Boston!); animals, do we know about their level of consciousness? How about bugs and worms? amoebas, paramecia? And yet we think of them as alive.
Have a safe trip. And may all the automated processes that carry you perform well!
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 23, 2005 02:36 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] Re: empyre Digest, Vol 8, Issue 15
From: Helen Thorington
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 15:03:01 -0400
Hello Michelle (T) and all:
Recently I read in Cluster Magazine, an issue on interaction design -- that there are 12 computer chips for every person on the planet and many are connected through the internet. The issue went on to quote Lev Manovich as saying that computation, telecommunication and interface would soon ³be incorporated into a variety of objects and space² AND that ³one day every surface may potentially function as a screen connected to networks.²
One of the wonderful things to me about your Telematic Dinner Party and Picnics is how the screen and keyboard are used minimally, or not at all. I wonder if you could write about this?
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 23, 2005 06:09 PM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: "Michelle Riel"
Date: Sat, 23 Jul 2005 12:12:33 -0700
Pall, in my prior post, I commented that the "freeway performs" and have previously said of this work that the computer performs and can see it as both. The computer can also be seen as a tool, as you note, doing the computational work and "automating experimentation".
However, I attribute a broader context. Although each driver contributes to the work and is a performer, though unknowingly, I extrapolate the drivers into a singular - the performance of the freeway - as an event, location, context and experience. For example, at some hypothetical time when there are no cars, the computer will still draw the state of the freeway at that time. When there are no drivers, who are the performers? (As experimental theatre director Richard Foreman proposed - and I paraphrase - a ball rolls across an empty stage and there is no audience to see it happen yet it is still a performance.) Although it's possible that the camera won't transmit an image if there's no movement it seems that the computer still performs the act of drawing. And, if as you note, it will draw when there is no camera signal, then the computer, under certain conditions becomes the sole performer in the work which could encompass the computer, the freeway and each of the drivers as performers.
The simultaneity or multiplicity this proposes is a defining feature common to much of the work on the blog. The familiar dichotomy between performer/audience is now shifting and expanding to receivers of the work being both audience and performers (and content creators). Although this doesn?t specifically apply to your work with regard to the receiver participating beyond observing. I?m always interested to hear an artist's intention in their work as often my own reception is related but oft not an exact comprehension, so it adds an additional layer of meaning to understand the artists intentions along with my interpretation. But what I find interesting here - in that you, me and Helen have somewhat different takes on ?the performer? in Autodrawn - is that the door has been opened to interpretation of performer/performance and it speaks of our negotiations with computation in a performative system and the interest to (re) define the human relationship and role within such a system.
For me, this thread points to a systems based consideration of performance. In the context of the machinic phylum (Deleuze and Guattari) we can begin to consider humans in a flat hierarchy with machines as a component in a sequence of elements in a system comprised of feedback loops that receive and pass data, Chris? earlier conception of the human-machine entanglement. This indicates a willingness to explore human?s shifting relationship within machinic systems, as opposed to a defacto human primacy. I feel it?s really important that we have these conversations so that we can understand the changing relationships we are creating between humans and thinking/acting machines which we increasingly not only imbue but equip with learning, sentience, consciousness and other performative attributes considered the domain of the human.
You had previously commented on your interest to capture behavior unawares so that people didn?t change their actions in an attempt to manipulate the interactive aspect, as when you discuss capturing the performance of everyday life. This raises the question of awareness or as Helen notes, consciousness. What it also brings up that we haven't specifically addressed yet is the idea of framing reception or context, an aspect that has to be considered in the definition of performance.
These questions are not necessarily addressed to you, but are the tangents that are sparked by your reply.
cheers -
Michelle
Posted by: Jo at July 23, 2005 06:16 PM
Subject: [-empyre-] Screens and monitors
From: misha@ubermatic.org
Date: Tue, 26 Jul 2005 08:57:03 -0700 (PDT)
Hi Helen;
Sorry for the delayed response. I have been seduced lately with different experiments in antenna making out of empty food tins and other detritus.
Basically, if there is a television in a room, then somebody will watch it. Screens and monitors have the tendency to dominate a space which means that they have to be used strategically if that is not the intention. Within a telematic experience the screen/monitor functions as a portal, connecting one space to another.
This communication scenario is a common metaphor within the history of telecommunications art and which first appeared in the precedent setting 'Hole in Space', by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (as has already been mentioned in a previous post). Now what happens when things start to spill out of this hole, and inhabit a physical space? A different kind of space is created, not entirely physical and not entirely virtual, but something in between. It is this kind of hybrid situation that we are interested in.
In this situation, the monitor does not go away, but becomes part of a distributed environment. This is kind of the way things work in 'everyday' living. Recently I've been spending some time hanging around Chinatown and Kensington Market, an easy going multicultural market area in downtown Toronto. Within these neighbourhoods, I have been paying a lot of attention to what kinds of objects store owners arrange around their surveillance monitors. Perola, a store specializing in Latin American foods, has cans of beans, chocolate and piñatas. A Chinese kitchen goods store has a Hello Kitty clock and plastic shrine. The Portuguese household goods store has tea towels, frying pans and a calendar...
During the Telematic Dinner, we incorporated two types of projections. One stream embedded into the table combined live aerial video feeds and live chat from the two cities with live chat. Another was projected at the end of the table and showed the diners from the other space. Because I refused to darken the room (I find dark rooms kind of sad), what happened was the afternoon sun completely obliterated the 'hole-in-space' projection, which forced everybody to focus on the other objects on the table and the other embedded stream. This, for us, was a much more engaging situation since the 'screen', was now functioning within an environment instead of directing everybody's attention away from it.
This is the kind of situation we have continued to develop. An environment where there is not one focal point, but several things that are 'attention-grabbers' but function together as a composition. Again, this is how things normally work in our day-to-day and are much more indicative of social environment.
best
Michelle Teran
Posted by: Jo at July 28, 2005 10:39 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: steve guynup
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 10:46:56 -0700 (PDT)
>>>You had previously commented on your interest to capture behavior unawares so that people didn't change their actions in an attempt to manipulate the interactive aspect, as when you discuss capturing the performance of everyday life. This raises the question of awareness or as Helen notes, consciousness. What it also brings up that we haven't specifically addressed yet is the idea of framing reception or context, an aspect that has to be considered in the definition of performance.
It strikes me that this touches on issues found in work dicussed early on in this list. Adam Nash's Memory Plains Returning was web3D multiuser performance, unlike the general notion of realistic space and faux humaniod avatars. His space was completely void and the audience avatars where transluscent grey balls. The performers were huge musically charged architectual forms.
The visual disconnect between digital avatar and human representation gave the show a unique mechanistic feeling. As an audience memember, I had no metric to single out the humanity. The division between computer and performer seemed erased.
The other grey audience avatars, projections of humanity were visually tiny in scope of the show, their actions unstructured, their role as co performers gained weight most often through the dimension of proximity.
As for myself alone, but not alone, in a digital performance space finding myself and recognizing myself in an everday performance - a "Ringo moment"
(I'm unsure of the academic research on Ringo, but fans of the Beatles and the film Hard Days Night ought to be able to offer opinions...)
regards
Steve G
Posted by: Jo at July 28, 2005 10:45 AM
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
From: Brett Stalbaum
Date: Wed, 27 Jul 2005 22:11:01 -0700
Hi Michelle,
I find the following spot-on; and suggest that it might be expanded in a way that addresses some questions I had earlier in the month that perhaps have not been touched upon yet. Your statement that:
"[T]his thread points to a systems based consideration of performance... In the context of the machinic phylum (Deleuze and Guattari) we can begin to consider humans in a flat hierarchy with machines as a component in a sequence of elements in a system comprised of feedback loops that receive and pass data, Chris’ earlier conception of the human-machine entanglement. This indicates a willingness to explore human’s shifting relationship within machinic systems, as opposed to a defacto human primacy. I feel it’s really important that we have these conversations so that we can understand the changing relationships we are creating between humans and thinking/acting machines which we increasingly not only imbue but equip with learning, sentience, consciousness and other performative attributes considered the domain of the human."
I see a lot of congruency with these concepts and my call (if I may claim that I was making a such a strong plea) to consider contemporary computing in the arts practice (or more broadly "technological art" if you prefer - assuming that the 12 chips per human implies something important, and that most of the art work we are talking about assumes a digitally mediated environment), in the context of a critical framework that acknowledges an intensely bound, recursive relationship between systems of data (and a fully considered presentation of how it is formally organized in layers), and what actually happens in the real: bodies, places, motion, matter, energy. Not just network, (how data is transported), but how data is modeled, stored, processed and interacted with, as well as how information technology now reflects *and* produces the real simultaneously, (emerged into novel new forms of organization by the intensity of flows - data in information are ancient inventions, its speed is what is new), as well as how the real symbiotically produces data. Co-participatory. Entanglement, not only human-machine, but also biota-machine, geo-machine, etc. Above all we can't ignore the formal foundations of what is entangled here; network and performance are two terms in a describing a subset of a larger ontology that needs to be analyzed as a whole. Culturally, organizationally, and technologically. Biologically, geographically, meteorologically, geologically. (The Geology of Morals chapter in 1000 Plateaus has always been a favorite;-) Certainly D&G are important to theorizing the critical framework - as Chris Salter indicated early in the conversation...
Brett
Posted by: Jo at July 28, 2005 10:49 AM
Date: Sat, 30 Jul 2005 13:51:52 -0400
From: Helen Thorington
Subject: Re: [-empyre-] cultural, organizational and technological performance
Hello again:
This will be my last post as I leave shortly for SIGGRAPH where Michelle and I will be conducting a panel on (guess what?) networked performance, with Julian Bleecker, Susan Kozel, Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. But before saying goodbye and thanking you all for participating, I want to return to two quick comments I made and a concern, which I trust is shared with many of you.
I mentioned the 12 chips per person figure in my last post; and that many of these chips are connected through the Internet. This was not to just throw out a fact; nor was it intended to invite questions about access, although there surely are those. Rather it was to suggest an important fact about contemporary environments. Just multiply twelve chips by the world population, which crossed the 6.5 billion mark this month.
Our environments are crowded fields of telecommunicative possibilities. And people are using them they are not hidden.
Wade Roush, in his recent article, "Social Machines," in Technology Review, calls what is happening "continuous computing," as over against "ubiquitous computing" with its implication of invisibility. There¹s really nothing invisible about what¹s going on at all. In fact today's social software boom "rests on common devices such as mobile phones, computers, digital cameras and portable music players" all quite visible.
And like "Hole in Space," as people have become aware of them, they have determined their use and their meaning. But remember too the Manovich quote: "...one day every surface may potentially function as a screen connected to networks," and then check out the post Jo recently put up on the networked_performance blog called "information rain," where your hands become the screens onto which advertisements are projected.
The social will be commodified; a broad range of communicative possibilities that could enrich the telecommunicative experience will be lost; others will never be developed.
Somehow the artist must find his/her way in this: initiating new explorations, and at the same time helping to broaden the scope of what is possible moving from the purely functional to something that will help enlarge the beauty and pleasure of everyday life...
I had hoped to give you a few more examples of work that is being done with this in mind. Maybe there will be an opportunity later.
Anyway, thank you, thank empyre,
-- Helen
Posted by: Jo at July 31, 2005 07:16 PM
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 18:29:20 -0700
From: ryan griffis
Subject: [-empyre-] continuous vs ubiquitous
>> Wade Roush, in his recent article, Social Machines, in Technology Review, calls what is happening "continuous computing," as over against "ubiquitous computing" with its implication of invisibility. There's really nothing invisible about what¹s going on at all. In fact today¹s social software boom "rests on common devices such as mobile phones, computers, digital cameras and portable music players" all quite visible.
Interesting point to bring up Helen, especially regarding your comment following the one above about the commodification of the social. because of this process of commercialization that you point to, i'm weary of accepting claims that the use of devices like cell phones represents a visible activity in terms of computing. i haven't read Roush, so perhaps he explains this, but based on the rhetoric of ubiquitous computing proponents, like John Seely Brown, the point of such technology is for people to interact with computers without having to do the computing, i.e. it becomes "invisible" to them. i can see your point that the use of this technology is so visible through the devices themselves being present in our social vision, but i think one could equally say that they're "invisible" despite their mass - or because of it. that's kind of the point of ubiquity, no?
Thinking of ubiquitous computing in terms of it penetrating all aspects of life (travel, communication, writing, etc), a magazine is an inundated with computing as a mobile phone, in terms of how it was produced and distributed. the "invisibility" is descriptive of _how_they're used - most people using IT do so as consumers, not producers or even hackers. i think i may be arguing oranges to apples, but i think your point about market values determining the viability of social software possibilities is what i'm reacting to. i think you're largely right, which is why i take the promise of "invisibility" offered by ubiquitous computing seriously. i think the realm of the possible is being largely overdetermined by interests that are short sighted and oppressive, and ultimately destructive. and i think this is happening by rendering things invisible through ubiquity. all while somehow, magically almost, managing to maintain the myth of economic and intellectual scarcity.
Thanks for a great month of discussion!
best,
ryan
Posted by: Jo at August 1, 2005 08:03 AM
To: "Soft_Skinned_Space"
Subject: [-empyre-] Thanks to Helen and Michelle
From: "Jim Andrews"
Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2005 23:52:20 -0700
Many thanks to Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel for their thoughts and the discussion on networked performance during July. It is a curious subject. One in which the typical notions of performance/performers/audience are sometimes re-architected into activity between participants mediated via tool/object/art/communication device (among other configurations).
Let me leave you with the URL of Helen and Michelle's blog on networked performance: http://turbulence.org/blog ; and thanks to all who participated.
ja
Posted by: Jo at August 1, 2005 03:42 PM
