DRA3901H|DRM488H1F Solo Performance

Dear class,

On behalf of myself, Tina, and Stephanie, I would like to thank you again for your honesty and generosity during our performance today--it was quite an incredible experience.

Be assured, even the clipboards from our performance have now been destroyed, all evidence is gone. However, if at any point during our piece you felt offended, hurt, betrayed, upset or anything negative whatsoever, PLEASE contact me to let us know. You may email me at [email protected] to share with us your feelings, we would like to hear them.

Again, big thanks. Congratulations everyone on terrific work!

Regards,

N. Schotzko

DRM488H1

18 Nov 2014

Art as Accident

This past Thursday, Robbie presented on Bruce Nauman’s work and during the discussion that followed the presentation, we talked about art and the ownership that the artist claims over a product created by accident. Taking some time to reflect on this, I have come to the conclusion that ‘accidental art’ is still a product of the artist regardless of his/her intentions. Art is often said to imitate life but unlike life, art is typically viewed only as a product and we as spectators are at times unaware of the process or the accidents that made the piece. Perhaps it is because of the separation between process and product in our daily lives, we have become less conscious of process. I wonder if we are willingly ignoring the process or if we are intentionally putting process into a dark corner of sorts. Of course in the context of this course, process is the entirety of performance art as the art is in the process and the experience (or maybe my understanding is completely off). And so, in respect to Nauman’s works which are primarily installations/sculptures, is it possible to see the performance/process beyond the product of the installation or does the element of performance die when the artist is no longer in process with the work? I realize that these questions are probing at (audio-video-based?) pieces that feature a ‘performance’ (and that we have discussed this shift), but I am still curious about how/why a piece changes when a new medium is introduced to it. For example, we watched Hans Namuth’s documentary on Pollock and discussed how the addition of the camera changed our perceptions of Pollock’s finished product of No. 29, 1950, October 1950. Going back a point made by Cam: how do these different layers affect us as spectators and does the separation between the lens make us even more voyeuristic because we know that the subject on screen is completely unaware of our viewing of him/her? Another interesting idea that arises from this question is whether or not the subject in Nauman’s Mapping the Studio I (Fat Chance John Cage) (being the mice primarily) know that they are being filmed and watched. The Hawthorne Effect (or observer effect) describes the shift of behaviour in a subject when it becomes aware of its being watched. Obviously, we do not know if the mice knew that they were being filmed by Nauman and so we cannot say if the ‘performance’ of the mice is genuine or if the piece had experienced the Hawthorne Effect. Regardless of the mice being aware of Nauman’s camera, the piece he created was accidental because the footage was beyond his control. I struggle to conclude whether or not the piece (or any of his other audiovisual installation pieces) can be considered performance art because they are not live/in process. The last thought that I have in contrast (and in response to the elephants collective’s piece) is how live streaming completely shifts the context of performance art even more so than a piece that is filmed and edited.

  Sound and voice is a very interesting field of study, the studies on soundscape is not a field well-known when compared to field of semiotics. In my case I have always been a visual person and music has never been a field I challenged myself with – this makes me more open to manipulation in sound field since I have never developed enough filters to analyze soundscapes. In last two weeks the soundscape of our technological world is discussed in relation to many artist’s works. I knew Janet Cardiff’s works from a class I took in Bogazici University called “Reading, Translating and Walking in the City” and I was happy to discover more of her work. Walking in the city with someone else’s narrative is a dislocating experience, it not only turns the whole urban environment into a stage but also turns the person -who starts as an audience member or a spectator- into a performer. I think this kind of sound work can be categorized under actions like reading where the personal/private acts relate to public by making or destroying imaginary communities.

 Bruce Naumann’s work significantly differs from Cardiff’s since there is no narrative the listener settles in. The sounds, words and sentences work to help create a “sound sculpture” according to the review. It is worthy of examining each sound and word making the sculpture but more importantly what makes it a “sound sculpture” is listener’s engagement with the work. People tend to walk around three-dimensional art objects and engage with creation from different angles, what proves that Bruce Naumann’s work is “sound sculpture” is actually the same kind of engagement people build with the work. The sounds and phrases, when dismembered, tend to have different meanings than they have in daily life and according to the articles the work managed to create a holistic meaning by its own.

  noon  Queen for a Day  Cameron Crookston, Charles Pond, and Paul Weadick

The Vulnerable Body  Rion Chow, Robbie Grant, and Paige Lansky      one15 pm   To Whom Do You Give?  Jeff Martins, Jane Smythe, and Brittany Stewart 

When the Silence Speaks  Julija Pesic and Deniz Basar     two30 pm  Untitled  Steven Conway, Aviva Philipp-Muller, and Sebastian Samur 

artists

Spalding Gray Anna Deavere Smith Deb Margolin Mike Daisey

readings

Spalding Gray and Richard Schechner, “My Art in Life: Interviewing Spalding Gray” TDR ro

Anna Deavere Smith and Carol Martin, “The Word Becomes You. An Interview,” TDR ro

Deb Margolin, “‘To Speak is to Suffer’ and Vice Versa,” TDR ro

Deb Margolin, “O Yes I Will (I will remember the spirit and texture of this conversation,” TDR ro

This American Life, “454: Mike Daisey and the Apple Factory,” WBEZfile://localhost/(http/::www.thisamericanlife.org:radio-archives:episode:454:mr-daisey-and-the-apple-factory

World-Making and World-Devastation in Adrian Piper's Self-Portrait 2000

Continually fascinated by Sydney Tyber’s call for an affective dialogue for the purposes of discussing  digital performance, my reading of Sarah Gorman’s “Wandering and Wondering: Following Janet Cardiff’s Missing Voice” was inherently influenced by Tyber. I consider the ways Gorman’s relationship to the voices on the walkman might coincide with the human controlling the digital avatar via a game such as Second Life. In both situations, there is an external force directing someone/thing through a space,  both the external force and its avatar co-dependent on one another in order to fulfill the mission at hand. Now, it has already been difficult for me to find the appropriate language to discuss what I mean here, mainly because in Tyber’s example, it is a human as external force controlling a digital avatar, whereas in Gorman’s article, a digital force (albeit once human but now digital through the means of a CD walkman) controlling what I will call here a human avatar. The method is the same, but ultimately the result must be different. This is because there are different challenges that the external force faces in order to ensure their avatar do as they expect.

It would seem that with a human external force it is surprisingly easier to have affect pass from body to body (Tyber, 85) as she argues that it would seem humans find a way to pass their physiological response to what is happening to them as they play their game onto their avatar. She uses the example of the avatars often diverting their eyes as they approach Matte’s Imponderabilia. A natural physiological response for a human, it interests Tyber that in this case the human would have to keep their eyes on the screen in order to successfully divert their avatar’s eyes from the situation. She argues that this suggests an inherent link between the human and avatar (84). Therefore, I find it especially interesting that in Gorman’s experience, she found herself ignoring the directions of the voices on the walkman - despite being a human avatar, her ability to consciously make her own decisions, unlike a digital avatar can, provides her a very humane experience of being ‘controlled’. Despite being provided directions for where to go and what to look for, Gorman’s heightened sense of self as being a woman walking alone on unfamiliar pavement (Gorman, 83) kept her from putting her full trust in the external force guiding her. She notes that the multiple narratives and very few specific pointers to the meaning of following this piece instead invited Gorman’s own thought process to flood the experience (85-86). I consider the ways in which this similar but very different inverted experience of the human - cyborg relationship complicates Tyber’s reading of the connection between human and avatar - the human’s ability to pass on their affect to the cyborg is a much safer experience than a digital force doing the same to a living, breathing, autonomous human being. Is there any possibility for a digital agency here? I can’t say that I am so sure.

Works Cited

Gorman, Sarah. Wandering and Wondering: Following Janet Cardiff’s Missing Voice. Performance Research: A Journal of the Performing Arts. 8.1 (2003): 83-92. Print.

Tyber, Sydney. How Can We Talk about Affect in Digital Performance? Canadian Theatre Review, 159. (2014): 82-85. Print.

Brittany,

There's an interesting podcast from Snap Judgment about the game The Sims -- in which, in the third version, apparently, you can afford your avatar (which does not necessarily have to signify 'you' but so often does -- another layer to the issues you bring up here) "free will." http://snapjudgment.org/sim-stephanie 

Sound and voice is a very interesting field of study, the studies on soundscape is not a field well-known when compared to field of semiotics. In my case I have always been a visual person and music has never been a field I challenged myself with – this makes me more open to manipulation in sound field since I have never developed enough filters to analyze soundscapes. In last two weeks the soundscape of our technological world is discussed in relation to many artist’s works. I knew Janet Cardiff’s works from a class I took in Bogazici University called “Reading, Translating and Walking in the City” and I was happy to discover more of her work. Walking in the city with someone else’s narrative is a dislocating experience, it not only turns the whole urban environment into a stage but also turns the person -who starts as an audience member or a spectator- into a performer. I think this kind of sound work can be categorized under actions like reading where the personal/private acts relate to public by making or destroying imaginary communities.

Bruce Naumann’s work significantly differs from Cardiff’s since there is no narrative the listener settles in. The sounds, words and sentences work to help create a “sound sculpture” according to the review. It is worthy of examining each sound and word making the sculpture but more importantly what makes it a “sound sculpture” is listener’s engagement with the work. People tend to walk around three-dimensional art objects and engage with creation from different angles, what proves that Bruce Naumann’s work is “sound sculpture” is actually the same kind of engagement people build with the work. The sounds and phrases, when dismembered, tend to have different meanings than they have in daily life and according to the articles the work managed to create a holistic meaning by its own.

But among all the sound pieces I significantly liked d’bi young anitafrika. She is not only an inspiring and lively figure but I especially liked what she makes with language. It is not only a new vocabulary but also a self-made performative world. The action, sound and word interacts with each other in her work to create the universe she desires. After reading the pieces and watching the presentation in class continued researching her work. It is one of the most living performances we saw through the term and it specially interested me in its own way of rising ethical questions and generating public sphere.   

Deniz Basar 

Deniz,

I agree entirely with you in regard to d'bi young anitafrika's work and its broader political and social implications. There is something here to consider about how sound travels, in different ways than visual objects, or visually realized art and performance, can, and the way we engage it is already more embodied in many ways. 

(Sorry for lateness, I’ve been on the edge of sickness this weekend so my brain is a bit slow to kickstart.

 - Paul)

There are a few terms that have come up over the past two weeks that are circling in my head and that I hope to connect in a hackneyed (and brief) way: hybrid space, diegesis, and distance/distantiation.

One of the critiques of social media and other online forms of communication is that there is a mediated distance between individuals which amplifies antagonism and short-circuits positivity.  Cyber bullying, twitter and flame wars abound in a way that, it is assumed, they would not occur in real life, and the positive or communal aspects of online worlds are most vehemently trumpeted by those who are marketing the products (hence the term social networking).  The critiques may derive from a Levinasian view of face-to-face ethics; we can be more cruel to one another when only confronted with the avatar and not a face in-the-flesh.  It may also connect to Massumi’s description of dated worries about cyberspace as “somnambulist Matrix of the illusion of life” (1).  The fear about virtual reality appears to lie in its distance from life-ness, a half-living or zombie-like space that can be destructive but not generative, because it never escapes “illusion.”

Contrastingly, Tyber describe the virtual and as united: “human and avatar are fused to create a cyborg, experiencing and displaying an affective response to what is seen onscreen, together" (84, original emphasis).  Critically, Tyber argues that “affect passes from the virtual into the concrete world," and, I would add, in the opposite direction [is this the theme of the movie Her which I have not seen?] (85).  How digital mediation reconfigures those affective traces remains an object of inquiry.  Similar, in their union of virtual and the ‘real,’ Benford and Giannachi suggest that “hybrid space is both a space where real events occur and a space of performance” (45, original emphasis).  

These concepts actually took shape for me not in the performances from the “virtual body” week, but in Janet Cardiff’s various sound art projects.  (Perhaps I am inclined to translate the virtual/hybrid into the merely fictional or artificial).  In particular, they solidified around the concept of diegesis, which we touched on at the beginning of class on Thursday.  In The Muriel Lake Incident, Cardiff and George Bures Miller layer three “reals” on top of one another (the auditory-filmic world, the sculptural-auditory theatre space (watching the film, but not within its narrative), and the gallery space (outside of the miniature theatre and the headphones)).  Similarly, Gorman describes the layering of fiction and reality in Cardiff’s “The Missing Voice (Case Study B)” walking tour, a layering which seemed remarkably similar to the hybrid space of Uncle Roy All Around You from Benford and Giannachi.  Both projects seem to reshaping the spectator/participant’s interaction with a specific, public, real sphere.

The hybrid space in these pieces may lend itself to a reconfiguration of the boundary of the diegetic/non-diegetic.  The diegesis may be dual, or hybrid, itself, if these projects all make the participant suspicious about the line between the real events and the space of performance (Benford and Giannachi).  If the hybrid “constitute[s] new means, lenses or paths to explore the context of everyday life itself,” then it may also bring the non-diegetic into the “real” world (Benford and Giannachi, 46).

Ah, but isn't the 'non-diagetic' already a part of the 'real' world (that is, the world of the audience) that intrudes upon the diagetic (the world of the film)? I love this mucking up of diagetic/non-diagetic//fictional/real//real/virtual. (I'm starting to think in terms of Nauman sculptures, I fear. The words just keep going round and round each other in my head.) I think you are quite right in Cardiff and Miller's layering of "three 'reals'" -- and I imagine we may think of other 'reals' or 'almost-reals' through our engagement with the piece. Sound also offers a more immediate and tricky way of playing with the idea of the 'real' than the visual -- we are more quickly able to differentiate between a virtual and actual reality in visual terms than in aural, and this allows for the latter to insinuate itself into our entire sensory experience in a way that the former may not be able to. 

Technology is something that I am very wary of in performance. I suppose I am sort of old fashioned when it comes to performance, and I am a more avid believer in sole performance by human performers. From an “affected” standpoint, . There is not really anything about technology that makes me wonder about my feelings towards an inanimate object that does nothing but perform tasks for me. This was a discussion in class that concerned me in terms of people’s different relationships with their smartphones or other forms of technology with which we interact with on a daily basis. I felt a little out of the loop because I feel nothing towards an my iPhone- other than the fact that it is of functional value in my life. I do not have a personal connection with Siri, nor do I use that type of service on my iPhone.

  Some things that I would like to address in this response would be that of the result of human interaction with technology and how it affects a performance. From my personal understanding the word “affect” means to influence, I understand the functional use of technology but not the emotional need for it’s functionality other than becoming accustomed to it’s function in it’s everyday life.

  Peggy Phelan’s the ontology of performance is something that I am constantly referring back to in my responses. I find that her opinion could also be related into the work of technology within a performance piece. Is it truly a performance if there is not a real, living body within the space but a virtual one instead? I realize that her argument deals with documentation, but a lot of it deals with interaction with the technology with which I would like to expand the argument further by the particular effect of having a virtual body in the performance space as discussed in Stelarc’s article and conversation with a prosthetic head that is coded to meet certain requirements in conversation. That being said, I would further like to relay these thoughts into the article written by Stelarc and compare some of these ideas with the ontological argument that Phelan surfaces in her book. In Stelarcs article, “We need to question the well-held belief that consciousness is a stable, unified and coherent state.” This questioning of consciousness leads me to believe that there is a NEED for liveliness in performance because using technology that has specific guidelines that define it’s reaction and is applied through a specific coding. Yes, it is possible that you can have a connection with the technology in performance- but there is something that is lacking in it’s response and it is the truth of interaction and reaction that one would have between a human and technology. This reminded me of watching I, Sayonara at the Berkley Street Theatre during the Spotlight Japan Festival. The basis of the play was the interaction between an android and a human being on stage. I found that the interaction between the actor and the robot quite censored because the actor was quite aware of the limitations that the android had and that the reaction between the two bodies on stage could only go so far. There needs to be some suspension of belief in which someone believes that a there are no limitations to the technology as there is with a human reaction.

On a personal note, I feel that the use of technology in a performance is showing a way in which performance can once again be dramaturgically removed from reality. Being able to separate these worlds between reality and performance, and then once again a live performance into a virtual one (including a virtual body) is another layer of the dramaturgical experience.

I think that having such technology in a space would hinder a performance, for me I find that I have a more visceral response to a human being in a performance space than I would

technology, I can walk away from where as an  actual living human being I would not be able to. I have this inherent need to communicate and to interact with living objects and not with technology because I know that it would never give me the response back that I need from being inherently human and wanting to have a live reaction and interaction with a performance.

 I think it's very useful to think through Phelan's configuration of 'liveness' with regard to more contemporary intermedial performance -- particularly that in which the human-computer interaction is divided sharply between the lines of audience and performer, respectively. Phelan, as I've mentioned in class, does address the technological, or, more aptly, intermedial, elements, for instance, of Festa's untitled, considering them in line with or as part of (not distinct from) the 'liveness' of the performance-installation as a whole. (I find myself distracted by wondering just how 'live' something like The Artist is Present becomes in contrast to Festa's piece, despite the former's mostly body-driven structure. But that may be a different conversation.) This then suggests that the core of 'liveness' may not lie in the site of "a-liveness" than within the potentiality for interaction. 

Columbia University Fined Student Activists for the Carry That Weight Day of Action