Almost Open

La calavera emerges from a trap in the floor 

¡Bocón! is almost open... it's now so close that you can taste it in the coffee we drink all night while we're working, so close that you can smell it in the hazer fluid that's filling the air. In many ways the transition from the initial days of tech and the final dress seem like an impossible transformation. 

It's difficult to see the forest for the trees sometimes, and this experience has been no exception. It seems like there have been countless nights when I've wondered if we'd actually be able to put together the media for this show. My role in this production has been as the assistant to the very talented and driven Dan Fine - a second year MFA student in the Interdisciplinary Digital Media and Performance program at ASU. It's strange to think that we actually started this process back in August when he first asked if I'd be interested in working with him on this project. Our initial meetings, that now seem so long ago, were centered around codifying the ideas and aesthetic that we were hoping to create in designing the media for this show. 

The palace in Miguel's journey 

In thinking back to those initial meetings they provided an invaluable scaffolding for the work that would come as we started to install projectors and create content for the show. Those first meetings helped to unify both our vision and conviction for the show and the ultimate look of what we were looking to create. Central to our conversations was the idea that the visual expression of the show was somewhere between a storybook and abstract art. Dan wanted artwork that supported the story visually, helped to create the world of the play, but didn't distract the audience from the actors in the space. The difficult balance of mediating a production like this is to avoid the impulse to fill the space with so much content that it overpowers the actors on stage. It's been an interesting balancing act to support the action of the space without becoming a distraction to the audience. 

Lost in the forest Miguel is comforted by La Llorona

This process of media design has also left me with more questions than answers about how one might meaningfully examine this work. After several long nights in the theatre and working at home I'm left wondering when my most productive and meaningful work happened: was it productive to be in the theatre until nearly 3:00AM? Was I actually designing quality work after midnight as I fought with After Effects night after night? Did our system of versioning our work facilitate better organization or impede our efforts to implement changes from run to run of the show?

By the sea Miguel talks with a collector of shells

The part of me that obsessively tracked the mileage of a Prius as Lauen Breunig and I drove across the country is left wondering how, and what, I might track in the next show that I design or assist in designing. What would help me be a better practitioner, a better artist, a better scholar? What's the appropriate balance of quantitative and qualitative data to be pulled from my process that might tell a compelling or interesting story? Better yet, what method of data collection is going to be unobtrusive enough to warent implementing - this process is about as resource intensive as it can be already, what kind of investigative instrument is going to yield useful data without providing biased results?

Form the media tech table the view of the show is obscured by confidence monitors 

Looking at the opening of the first ASU show where I've made a significant contribution I can't help but wonder what the next semesters and years hold, what my work will look like, and what I'll do after I leave the desert. 

Auslander and Blau: Two Robots walked into a bar

Photo by Matthew Ragan

In 2002 Philip Auslander and Herbert Blau engaged in a debate about the emergence of chat bots and the subsequent implications of their presence in performance. This debate took place in the pages of PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art in the January edition. What follows is a description of their perspectives and arguments in relation to this issue, their rhetorical tactics, and the shortcomings of their arguments.

A Summary of the Debate

Auslander’s Perspective and Argument

Auslander’s LIVE FROM CYPERSPACE starts with an overview of his position on the influence and change instigated by broadcast media, specifically radio. Here he asserts that it was the rise of radio that obscured the relationship between the audience and the performer, necessitating the use of “live” as a signal word to audiences in order to indicate that a performance was not pre-recorded. The nature of the broadcast machine that is radio “does not allow you to see the sources of the sounds you’re hearing; therefore, you can never be sure if they’re live or recorded. Radio’s characteristic form of sensory deprivation crucially undermined the clear-cut distinction between recorded and live sound” (Auslander 17). Paramount to this discussion is the question of liveness. Early in the article Auslander provides the reader with a clear definition of “live.” For this article he pulls the definition from the Oxfored English Dictionary. The definition of live reads: “Of a performance, event, etc.: heard or watched at the time of its occurrence; esp. (of a radio or television broadcast, etc.) not pre-recorded” (Oxford University Press). 

Of the utmost importance to Auslander is how the “live” exists in a dependent relationship to the recorded. That is, the “live” is defined by what it is not – it is not pre-recorded – rather than what it is. His position here is that prior to the advent of broadcast media there was no need to differentiate between the pre-recorded and the live performance; simply put, there was no cognitive or economic construct that necessitated a distinction between the live and recorded. One always knew if they were listening to a recording (because of their forced interaction with a playback machine) or attending a performance. The argument follows that it is only in a circumstance where the listener cannot personally confirm that a performance has not been pre-recorded that the terminological distinction of “live” is necessary.

Recording technology brought the live into being, but under conditions that permitted a clear distinction between the existing mode of performance and the new one. The development of broadcast technology, however, obscured that distinction, and thus subverted the formerly complementary relationship between live and recorded modes of performance. (Auslander 17)

With this position clearly articulated and codified he transitions to the topic of web-based bots. In the case of web-technologies the term bot is shorthand for robot and is in reference to a class of programs that run autonomously. These programs are designed for specific tasks and operate within the parameters of their programming. Auslander takes some time to describe search engines as a kind of bot. A query to Google, for example, is handled by a bot that searches an index of web-pages and returns results that match the query. Another kind of bot common on the web is the chatbot. Programmed to engage in conversation with a user, the “best-known chatterbot is Eliza, the program that interrogates the user in the manner of a Rogerian psychotherapist, developed at MIT in 1966” (Auslander 18). Auslander goes on to discuss the ever-growing presence of the bot in web-based interactions. In a crescendo of panic he laments that “although you can still choose to converse with a chatterbot, it is now possible to be engaged in conversation with one without knowing it. Chatterbots can and do participate in online chatrooms and e-mail lists without necessarily being identified as bots” (Auslander 19). Using his previously established position on the definition of live as emergent from the development of radio Auslander is ready for the next transition in his argument. In bold strokes he draws parallels between the rise of recorded media and the distribution mechanism of radio, and the development of bots (specifically the chatbot) and the distribution mechanism of the web. Further, he suggests that “the chatterbot forces the discussion of liveness to be reframed as a discussion of the ontology of the performer rather than that of the performance” (Auslander 20). As he works to clarify the significance of these linguistic intruders he uses the writing of Herbert Blau to make his point:

The magnitude of the challenge chatterbots pose to current conceptions of liveness becomes evident when we consider how both the ontology and the value of live performance have been construed in performance theory, which often invokes the performer’s materiality and mortality to describe liveness in existential terms. In Blooded Thought, Herbert Blau declares dramatically that “In a very strict sense, it is the actor’s mortality which is the actual subject [of any performance], for he is right there dying in front of your eyes.” (Auslander 20)

Finally Auslander concludes his argument by specifying that the chatbot “undermines the idea that live performance is a specifically human activity.” Adding that, “it subverts the centrality of the live, organic presence of human beings to the experience of live performance,” ending with a warning and frantic call to arms that “it casts into doubt the existential significance attributed to live performance” (Auslander 21).

Blau’s Perspective and Argument

Immediately following Auslander’s warning about the impending automation of live performance is Blau’s response, THE HUMAN NATURE OF THE BOT: a response to Philip Auslander. Blau begins by clarifying his position on liveness in relation to theatre and film. Interrogating the liveness of theatre he laments that “everything was so unenlivening in its predictability, so insusceptible to the unexpected, so invariable once staged, that it seemed (to use an image from another era) like a carbon copy of itself.” In addition to describing a faded representation of what it once was, Blau continues that “as for the text, when the play was the thing, it might have done better in a reading without any actors at all (22). Blau later describes the behavior of actors as looking “canned” and “thoroughly coded and familiar.” In the jargon of theatre one might call this a description of formulaic productions: performances crafted according to a recipe that combines a predetermined ratio of aesthetic elements and plot twists ultimately producing something that feels flat and uninspired despite being visually beautiful. 

Addressing this issue of flattened experience, Blau takes issue with Auslander’s objection to the use of bots on the web and the declaration that “it can be impossible to know whether you are conversing with a human being or a piece of software” (Auslander 19). Blau counters by reminding Auslander that “it may be chastening to remember—you may be conversing with a human being and feel the same way, as if the person were programmed.” This then “may suggest that liveness is variable in definition, with inflections of value through a spectrum of meaning from being alive to being lively” (Blau, Nature of the Bot 22-23). Blau makes a hard transition to examine the programmed experience of chatbots. Here he states that bots, as programmed virtual entities, exist as a kind of human mimic that could not be possess any sense of liveness “were it not for the omnipresent shadow of the apparently vanished being, who, dead or alive, endows the notion of liveness with meaning or substance to begin with” (23). His coup de grâce comes as he questions Auslander’s frenzied final statement: 

Auslander says that the chatterbot “casts into doubt the existential significance attributed to live performance,” but I’m not quite sure what sort of doubt he has in mind. We’re obviously engaged with a technology of production capable of making of performance something other than “a specifically human activity,” but it is the specifically human activity that—if not reproduced by the bot, which draws its material from data bases—remains the inalienable referent around which the data’s collected, just as the human conversation is the datum from which, by whatever ambiguous means, the chatterbot proceeds (Blau, Nature of the Bot 23). 

Shortcomings

While both authors have their share of compelling moments in their articles, they also face some steep shortcomings in the presentation of their arguments. Auslander falls short by placing too much stake in the OED. In doing so he fails to correctly interrogate the problem of the ambiguity of language. The current edition of the OED online has ten different definitions for the word “live” that comprise over 4200 words of definition, description, history, and example. In fact, he uses only eighteen words of this definition as the definitive authority by which all questions of liveness are measured. While the OED is unquestionably a respected authority about the development and use of language, this point is worth belaboring if only because Auslander himself heavy-handedly references this definition, and this definition alone in terms of how to frame liveness, on four of the six pages of his article. While he does invoke Blau and Phelan in a short discussion about performance theory, he does not adequately address any issues about the ambiguity and complexity of language. This seems to be an especially pressing concern when dealing with a term whose history in relationship to performance has only appeared as of the 1930’s (Auslander 16). Here his argument would be more compelling if it also included some examination of the use and history of the word “performance.” 

An important consideration in examining Auslander’s position on bots is that he incorrectly describes the operation of search engines. He states that, “the bot itself actually searches the web electronically, locates sites containing that key word, and reports back to you” (Auslander 18). While this may be the case for some search engines, it is certainly not common practice for search today. Todays’ search engines still rely on indexes of cached (saved versions) web-pages for their operation. While a database of cached pages is collected by bots for search engines, search does not operate in real-time the way that Auslander suggests. This is a minor error in his description of search, but it also belies a potentially larger misrepresentation of the technology. In order for his argument to meaningfully resonate it must be based on an impeccable understanding of the technologies he describes. For the technologically literate reader this mistake is an indicator that his conclusion may be based only upon a partial understanding of a premise.

Blau in his fervent efforts to counter Auslander’s claims makes the mistake that is highlighted in Auslander’s analysis of the definition of “live.” Specifically, Auslander takes issue with the practice of defining a term in relationship to what it is not. In the case of the OED, a “live” event is not pre-recorded. Blau makes this same mistake; in writing about bots in a performance he states that “they’d hardly have any presence at all, any sense of liveness whatever, were it not for the omnipresent shadow of the apparently vanished being, who, dead or alive, endows the notion of liveness with meaning or substance to begin with” (Blau, Nature of the Bot 23). Reductively one could restate this as: Bots are bots because they’re not human. Further, Blau seems to suggest that the condition of humanity itself is what gives liveness any meaning. This privileging of the human perspective of self-awareness feels narrow. To the point, it reads as belligerently narrow. One could easily speculate about the state of the scientific community today had the succeeding method of discourse been to celebrate anecdote as evidence rather than empirical data. Ultimately, both authors fail to demonstrate the validity of their conclusions with anything other than philosophizing and empty appeals to authority. 

 

Works Cited

Auslander, Philip. "Live from Cyberspace: or, I was sitting at my computer this guy appeared he thought I was a bot." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 24.1 (2002): 16-21.

Blau, Herbert. "The Human Nature of the Bot: a response to Philip Auslander." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 24.1 (2002): 22-24.

Oxford University Press. live, adj.1,n., and adv. 2012. Oxford University Press. 25 11 2012 <http://www.oed.com.ezproxy1.lib.asu.edu/view/Entry/109299?rskey=a0XRhK&result=1#eid>.

A Review of The Language of New Media

Photo by Matthew Ragan

The Language of New Media. By Lev Manovich. Cambridge, MIT Press, 2001; 354 pp. $16.71 kindle.

What, precisely, is the right term for content that lives with its left foot in a world of traditional gestalts, and its right foot in a mire of experimental methods? How does one characterize the trends that have emerged in the making, distribution, and viewing of media? How does one broadly conceptualize and decode the impact of a digital mechanism as the primary method of cultural expression? These questions frame the narrative in The Language of New Media by Lev Manovich. Heavily constructed around the critical conventions of cinema, Manovich’s perspective works to deconstruct the modalities of today’s media with an “aim to describe and understand the logic driving the development of the language of new media” (Manovich 7). 

In his examination of (what Manovich calls) the “new media” this work looks to create “an attempt at both a record and a theory of the present” (7). Manovich helps the reader towards a working definition of new media by stating that “all new media objects, whether created from scratch on computers or converted from analog media sources, are composed of digital code; they are numerical representations” (Manovich 27). In short, his assertion is essentially that any new works created, modified, or distributed by using a computer fall into the category of new media. Further, historical analogue works that have been transferred into a digital representation also bear the title of new media. While his definition seems, at first blush, to be all encompassing, his explanation heavily relies on the concept of numerical representation. “Numerical representation turns media into computer data, thus making it programmable. And this indeed radically changes the nature of media” (Manovich 52). Here Manovich is really stating that that the numerical nature of media stored on a computer is the defining characteristic of new media. The programmable nature of this media is what makes it new. The problem with this newness is that it is not explicitly visible. A painting scanned and stored on a computer carries the same characteristics as the analogue original. How then does one differentiate between the two? Manovich’s distinction about the programmability of the numerically represented copy here becomes the key to understanding his definition. This new copy can be manipulated in a manner that the original could not. As an example: a tool like Photoshop can be used to instruct a computer to replace all of the color values of a specified hue, with a different hue; or, average color values from specified rows or columns could be fed into a synthesizer with the end result being an auditory representation of the painting. The numerically represented version of this painting can now be changed in an infinite number of ways. At the heart of how Manovich characterizes new media is its programmability – its ability to be altered and changed with a computer. In this way Manovich asks the reader to conceptualize the computer as a meta-medium for media. “No longer just an Analytical Engine, suitable only for crunching numbers … it has become a media synthesizer and manipulator” (Manovich 25). It is here, after a lengthy process of defining his terminology, that Manovich starts to push the reader into interesting intellectual territory. He argues that a computer is the mechanism for consuming new media as well as the tool for creating it, transcoding it, and distributing it. “All culture, past and present, came to be filtered through a computer, with its particular human-computer interface” (Manovich 64). It is at this junction that Manovich begins to push the reader to consider that “at the same time, the design of software and the human-computer interface reflects a larger social logic, ideology, and imagery for the contemporary society” (Manovich 118).

While Manovich goes to great lengths to help the reader see that the medium has a bias, this is not a new problem for media. The medium for every work has a bias, so what precisely is it that Manovich is trying to tell the reader? In a linguistic fashion that feels distinctly dystopian, and also strangely inviting, he slowly spells out the real problems of this initially invisible bias. 

Now interactive media asks us to click on a highlighted sentence to go to another sentence. In short, we are asked to follow pre-programed, objectively existing associations. Put differently…we are asked to mistake the structure of somebody else’s mind for our own. (Manovich 61)

The convention of using hyper-links on the web is one of the underlying principles of a flat network. Unlike hierarchical file structures on a computer that require the user to follow a specified path to locate a file, on the web any artifact can be linked to any other artifact. Manovich reminds us that someone, or something, did the work of creating those connections.  Further, those connections are not arbitrary. The author of a blog makes specific decisions about what links to include, and where to include them. Here Manovich pushes the reader to remember that at some point the relationship between those two highlighted sentences had to be constructed by another party. Another party that, presumably, had a specific agenda for how the user is going to experience that moment. The implications here are tremendously powerful for the reader, but Manovich over-reaches his assertion with a one-up-manship that is logically sloppy. 

Two sources connected through a hyperlink have equal weight; neither one dominates the other. Thus the acceptance of hyperlinking in the 1980s can be correlated with contemporary culture’s suspicion of all hierarchies, and preference for the aesthetics of collage in which radically different sources are brought together with a single cultural object. (Manovich 76)

Correlation is not causation, and without appropriate support the reader is left to question what ideological position they are being asked to adopt.

Perhaps what Manovich is really trying to communicate is the deeply integrated, and partially invisible, impact that this shift towards new media implies. 

Because new media is created on computers, distributed via computers, and stored and archived on computers, the logic of a computer can be expected to significantly influence the traditional logic of the media; that is, we may expect that the computer layer will affect the cultural layer. (Manovich 45) 

The result of this composite is a new computer culture – a blend of human and computer meanings, of traditional ways in which human culture modeled the world and the computer’s own means of representing it. (Manovich 46)

Who then is responsible for this new cultural model that is a blend of traditional and experimental modalities? This work seems to be targeted distinctly towards academics and media historians who are invested in having a sense of the broad strokes that created the new media landscape of the early 1990s. Interestingly, it seems as though an appropriate readership for this work should also include media designers, application developers, cyber-culture artists, and students of new media. This is especially true given his critique of the typical citizen’s daily mode of operation, and the role these individuals might take in reversing this trend: 

Today, the subject of the information society is engaged in even more activities during a typical day: inputting and analyzing data, running simulations, searching the Internet, playing computer games, watching streaming video, listing to music online, trading stocks, and so on. Yet in performing all of these different activities, the user in essence is always using the same few tools and commands: a computer screen and a mouse; a Web browser, a search engine; cut, paste, copy, delete, and find commands (Manovich 65).

Manovich is explicit in his belief that a computer is meta-medium media machine, a cultural transcoder that acts as a mechanism for creation, translation, and distribution. This is perhaps best represented when he says “in short, we are no longer interfacing to a computer but to a culture encoded in digital form” (Manovich 69). He is the most inspiring and the most chilling when he examines the computer as our cultural monolith. His only failing is that the critical language he predominantly adopts is squarely grounded in cinema. While this approach is not without its merits, at times it feels stretched too thinly to make an argument that’s truly compelling. One of his grossest assertions about the reach of cinema comes in his insistence that “cinematic ways of seeing the world … have become the basic means by which computer users access and interact with all cultural data” (Manovich 78). This is true insomuch that the computer interface is a montage of individual actions framed by a screen. However, this opinion seems to deny the reality of reading text as one of the primary acts of interfacing with a computer. Further, it dismisses the fact that not all text wants to be cinema. To belabor the point, not all sound or still images strive to be represented through cinema.  Provided that one accepts Manovich’s bias towards cinema as the dominant cultural form, The Language of New Media provides an inspiring examination of the historical trajectories of mediated culture, as well as a suggestion of what is likely to come. 

Works Cited

Manovich, Lev. The Language of New Media. Ed. Roger F. Malina. Kindle Edition. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

Photo by Matthew Ragan

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art

Edited by Bonnie MarrancaPublished by The MIT Press

PAJ: A Journal of Performance Art can be examined from three distinct vantage points: the journal itself – who publishes, edits, and distributes this piece of academic discourse; its aim – the general issues and special topics explored within the journal; and an examination of representative articles – an investigation of the journal in terms of the topics and viewpoints that create a thematic through line. 

The Journal

PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art published by the MIT Press is a fine example of an internationally admired journal that is focused on “cutting-edge explorations… [ and ] new directions in performance, video, drama, dance, installations, media, film, and music, bringing together ideas of theatre and the visual arts” (MIT Press). Issues published tri-annually cover a wide range of topics including “artists’ writings, critical essays, historical documentation, interviews, performance texts and plays, reports on international festivals and events, and book reviews” (MIT Press). The editor, Bonnie Marranca, is currently teaching Theatre at The New School / Eugene Lange College for Liberal Arts in New York. Marranca is an accomplished scholar, writer, and teacher who co-founded PAJ in 1976 (Marranca, Home). Marranca began the publication with the intent that PAJ would “publish important, original works in the arts and the critical commentary about them, as an ongoing dialogue between art, artists, and the public” (The MIT Press). Additionally, it is clear that it has met its intent to reach an “international readership of critics, scholars, and artists crosses the borders between art forms, and the arts and humanities and science/technology” (The MIT Press) as it has currently published “plays and performance texts, by now more than 1000, translated from twenty languages” (Marranca, Being Here). 

PAJ aims to reach a broad sampling of artists and scholars who are invested in creating an ongoing dialogue of both performance and scholarship. Despite editing a publication with widely defined notion of theatre, Marranca seems to have a much narrower ideological stance on the topic of performance. In her article Being Here, which introduces the 100th issue of PAJ, she celebrates the unwavering focus of the journal while also sharing anecdotal evidence that suggests a tangible bias in her worldview. 

PAJ Publications never abandoned the dramatic text, even though a changing theatre culture and the rise of Performance Studies have contributed to the slow erosion of interest in drama in recent decades. It is disconcerting to watch the move away from dramatic literature and its heritage, the more apparent when one is able to see a superb realization of a great play. Not surprisingly, drama’s current decline coincides with the diminishing role of the voice in everyday personal communication. Against the background of more and more text messaging, people seem to have lost interest in the sound of the human voice…In the past friends said to one another, ‘It’s so good to hear your voice.’ I wonder, too, if this move away from drama has also to do with the fact that drama is often based on secrets, and we live in an age when the public is valued over the private life of an individual. (Marranca, Being Here 11)

One should certainly not take issue with Marranca’s dedication to the preservation of a journal whose focus is on dramatic text; it is, however, worth questioning the motives and biases of an editor who seems to be ignoring ever present conversations about the value of personal information and privacy in a Facebook driven world. While it is true that advances in telecommunication services have erased illusions of privacy, they have also kindled numerous conversations about the value and nature of what is truly private. While it is clear that the PAJ is dedicated to a broad sampling of work, one should note the absence of perspectives that broadly embrace the use of varied technologies in performance. Instead, the editor’s strong words leave the reader feeling distinctly as though technology is an evil that must be suffered in order to make art in this age. 

The Aim of the PAJ

The aim of the PAJ is not only present in the types of material published in general issues, but also in its special topics publications. Further, in examining the history of the publication, Marranca reflects that, “PAJ started out as a theatre periodical (originally called Performing Arts Journal), with an added interest in dance, music and performance arts” (Marranca, Being Here 3). A survey of material from artists and scholars across a broad swath of expressive fields can be difficult to categorize, but here Marranca succinctly describes the theoretical through lines that have been central to the journal’s discourse: “Over the years attention turned from originality to appropriation, from group to solo, from play to fragment, from live to meditated, from authenticity to social construction; and from, ritual to genocide, from pleasure to trauma, from borders to globalization” (Marranca, Being Here 6). In a summative look at the trajectory of the PAJ and its contributors, the 100th issue “was published with the special theme ‘Performance New York’, featuring commentary, dialogues, and art work by more than fifty artists representing several generations working in multiple art forms” (MIT Press).

The 100th issue, however, was certainly not the first time that the PAJ narrowed its sights to a specific topic. The years and issues worth examination include: 1997’s The American Imagination, 1985’s The American Theatre Condition, and 1991’s The Interculturalism Issue. This last issue “gathered together important new perspectives on theatre, anthropology, and culture from diverse national traditions and art forms” (Marranca, Being Here 7). In addition to special issues, the PAJ has often worked to pull in contributions from fields outside of its original scope. Here Marranca notes that it has “been an editorial direction to welcome more visual art thinking into the journal and books…in 2008 PAJ also began to publish Performance Drawings portfolios” (Marranca, Being Here 11).

This demonstrated inclusionism aside, there is a demographic that is at a distinct disadvantage when it comes to publication in the pages of the PAJ. In the preface of the 100th issue Marranca unabashedly declares that, “performance by visual artists is problematic because it has never fully evolved a substantial critical vocabulary, unlike the development of theatre writing in a comparable period since the sixties… I think this has to do with their lack of sophistication in performance ideas, in addition to the limitation of art history narratives” (Marranca, Being Here 13). Here Marranca’s perspective seems very clear: visual artists with a penchant for performance need not apply. 

An Examination of Representative Articles

In examining the scholarly scope of the PAJ a representative sample of its content can be found in: Soraya Murray’s Cybernated Aesthetics Lee Bul and the Body Transfigured, an examination of “visual incongruity within a cluster of aesthetic divergences,” (Murray 38); Philip Auslander’s Digital liveness A Historico-Philosophical Perspective, an exploratory discussion on a “phenomonilogical perspective on digital liveness,” (Auslander 3); and Johan Callens’ The Double Recursiveness of Postmodern Dance, a critical account of Erase-E(X) which he saw “showcased at the Royal Flemish Theatre in Brussels,” (Callens 70). Important to all three authors’ is the focus on meaning-making in relation to the art they are the most connected to. 

In Cybernated Aesthetics, Murray looks to describe, “an aesthetics that accounts for the impact of electronics and the digital,” (Murray 39). In examining the work of Lee Bul, Murray pulls apart the recurrent use of machine imagery in order to highlight the underlying message that the “development of new media forms are not completely erratic, but situated within the set of possibilities set forth by its ideologies” (Murray 39). That is to say that nothing, even an aesthetic that seems disconnected from existing artistic forms, exists in a vacuum. Murray takes this idea and expands it to more broadly approach the formal aspects of new media, again encouraging the reader / viewer to remember that “[ new media ] are still forms of cultural production, and as such can be considered within the context of the expressions that have preceded them” (Murray 48). This broader vision approach to the examination of art and artist as active members in a critical dialogue about meaning-making is central to the work of the PAJ as a publication that focuses on the connective tissue in the arts community.

Auslander, too, in Digital Liveness is looking to place an emphasis on what connects artists and audiences. Auslander, however, goes one step further in looking to isolate the value audiences place on the notion of “live” performance. Historically, the idea of a “live” performance is relatively new. Here Auslander reminds us that “prior to the advent of these [ recording ] technologies (e.g., sound recording and motion pictures), there was no need for a category of ‘live’ performance” (Auslander 3). It is Auslander’s contention that audiences understand live performance only as a product of their exposure to recorded media. In further dissecting the nature of the live performance, Auslander finally comes to the conclusion that “liveness is an interaction produced through our engagement with [ an ] object and our willingness to accept its claim [ to be considered live ]” (Auslander 9). Like Murray, Auslander is working to make observations that further develop the richness of a connective linguistic architecture for the state of the arts today.

In comparison to Auslander and Murray, The Double Recursiveness of Postmodern Dance feels distinctly different. Callens approach is centered on observation and critique. While projection and media are used in Erase-E(X), Callens only mentions them briefly. Instead his focus is centered on the physical dialogue of the performer / dancers, choreographers, and other contributors. Detailing the chronology of the dance, and its numerous quotations from other works Callens notes that “the postmodern artists assumes and declines authorial responsibility, is present and absent…the artistic hybridity of postmodern art, its ‘in-betweenness’ or the degree to which it eludes medium-specificity and instant legibility, proves crucial to its performative character” (Callens 72). Callens’ perspective on Erase-E(X) rings as that of a dance historian when he observes that “the recursive sequentially of Erase-E(X)remembers the earlier installments in order to forget them, since the dancer cannot forget what the body keeps remembering” (Callens 80).

It is the variety of the contributions in the PAJ that makes it an interesting specimen for examination. It is clear that the journal aims to reach a broad sampling of artists and scholars, all of whom are invested in creating an ongoing dialogue of both performance and scholarship. To that end, it seems worth noting that while the PAJ is focused on a diverse listing of topics, it also harbors biases for and against a variety of creative works and artists. 

Works Cited

Auslander, Philip. "Digital Liveness A Historico-Philosophical Perspective." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 34.3 (2012).

Callens, Johan. "The Double Recursiveness of Postmodern Dance ." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.3 (2008).

Marranca, Bonnie. "Being Here - PAJ at 100." A Journal of Performance Art 34.1 (2012).

—. Home. 21 10 2012 <http://bonniemarranca.com/>.

MIT Press. MIT Press Journals, A Journal of Performance and Art. Ed. Bonnie Marranca. 2012. The MIT Press. 21 October 2012 <http://www.mitpressjournals.org/loi/pajj>.

Murray, Soraya. "Cybernated Aesthetics Lee Bul and the Body Transfigured." PAJ: A Journal of Performance and Art 30.2 (2008).

The MIT Press. MIT Press Journals. 2012. The MIT Press. 21 October 2012 <http://www.mitpressjournals.org/page/about/paj>.

Bocon Tech

¡Bocón!

After four days of going to bed between 3:00 and 4:00 AM it finally feels like we're making progress. This challenge is something between the most amazing opportunity and the most terrifying challenge. Here I am, not even a semester into Graduate School and I'm working on a project with three panoramic screens and floor projection: nine projectors, five computers, two media play back systems, two operating systems, two frazzled graduate student media designers, and one children's show. 

Below is a moment from the show as the main character runs through a forest in an attempt to escape an oppressive military force. As the lights change, the floor is painted with a vine-like mandala as the three panoramic screens are slowly fade up revealing a forest of vines, and masks. 

A sample of the floor projection for Bocon

The time and the place of the play read as an abstracted South America - something that straddles an aesthetic that's a strange marriage of expressionism and realism. It's one thing to think about that in terms of production meetings, and another to see it finally materialize. In this way it's interesting to finally see a fuller representation of the production. 

One of the three 35 foot panoramic screens that surround the audience for Bocon

Strange to me has been the experience of getting tossed headlong into this whole process. The learning curve on this process has felt like more like a straight line than a curve. As this show has developed it's felt as though there are new techniques, software, and concepts to learn at every turn. For every new method I've started to digest, there are another 10 to add to the list to learn later. More than ever the idea of life-long learning is something that I keep coming back to... it's just a matter of continuing to learn and apply techniques and process. I came to grad school to learn lots of tools and techniques, and already I'm quickly finding that I've actually come to grad school to learn how much more there is to learn.

Tools Used:

Media Control for Panoramic Displays - Watchout

Media Control for Floor Projection - Isadora

Media Generation - After Effects, Photoshop

Interested in Attending the Production, learn more here.

Solo Performance Project

This semester I'm in a course titled "Performance Technology." The course serves as a broad survey of technology used in conjunction with performance as well as a primer on the theoretical constructions that frame the discussion about the use of technology in conjunction with live performance. According the syllabus, "This course will examine the issues surrounding the integration of live performance and digital media. Students will study the work of contemporary practitioners and theorists and experiment with creating their own works of digital performance." 

The texts that accompany this course are "The Language of New Media" by Lev Manovich, and "Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (2nd Edition)" by Philip Auslander. 

This past week I completed our most recent project, titled "Solo Performance Project." The assignment guidelines are below:

• Should be between five and seven minutes in length, unless the piece is nondurational (e.g. the performance is a “space,” an installation, or is triggered by an event) in which case it should be appropriate to experience during a five to seven minute window.

• Should be an original, devised/created work of your own.  The subject matter (if it has any) can be ANYTHING.

• Must utilize digital and/or telecommunication technology of some kind as a tangible part of the performance text. Must demonstrate critical or sophisticated use of technology as a medium, with clear thought about its relationship to the subject.

• No live performers other than yourself, unless you use an audience as participants.

• Must include some live performance, though this performance need not be corporal.

• Can either be a completed work or serve as a sample of a hypothetical, larger work.  It might be a sort of performative “treatment,” sample, or work in progress (e.g. “This is five minutes out of an hour-long performance that would…”)  If choose this option, please turn in a written paragraph describing your projected vision of the completed work.  

Here is a video of the work in it's current form.

Solo Project Performance Technology from Matthew Ragan on Vimeo.

Comments and Thoughts:

In conceptualizing this assignment part of the real difficulty was in trying to determine both the subject for commentary and the best media for addressing that issue. If the message is the media, and the media is the message than making a purposeful choice is as much a part of the challenge as the creation and execution of the project. In hindsight, I think I failed this assignment's call to create a totally original work. I used Auslander's text. While my intention was that it was framed by the introduction and conclusion of this unknown character living in the "dark," I wonder if my use of his text was too heavy handed. In all honesty, part of the challenge here was selecting material that felt appropriately matched to the course content that we had discussed up to this point. While I have my own ideas about the nature of liveness and mediated performance, I liked Auslander's point. The audience determines the liveness of a mediated environment depending on their willingness to define it as "live."

In some respects I'm compromised here - I really should have composed my own text, but I was afraid that I wouldn't articulate my thoughts clearly enough to have the intellectual impact that I was looking for. I also elected to learn a new tool / technique for this project, projection mapping, and didn't adequately anticipate the time that would be needed to learn new methods, composition methods, hardware, and software. 

Tools Used:

Mapping - MadMapper

Audio Recording - Zoom H4n

Projection - Sanyo XGA Projector

Media Generation - Adobe After Effects

Sound Editing - Adobe Audition