Hi, my name is Churchofdave on Xbox Live but you can call me Dave. You may have noticed I look a lot like my alter-ego in the real world, Dave Owen (or he looks like me). The fact that Dave asked me to host this pre-seminar web-posting for him has everything to do with Herbert Blau’s statement: “the subtext of the virtual is that it really wants to be real.” [italics original] (536) There will be more on Blau’s article later. The fact is, the real life Dave has many internet personas performing for him like: Facebook http://www.facebook.com/TheOneTrueDave, Twitter http://twitter.com/#!/TheOneTrueDave, Linkedin http://www.linkedin.com/profile/edit?id=80813425&trk=hb_tab_pro_top and me on Xbox Live! Which one is the real Dave? Are we all Dave? Is the business-Dave on Linkedin more authentic than me, the “social one” on Facebook or the “meat-bag” in front of the computer screen? [Wave to the people, “Dave”!]
Dave asked me to be sure to address his three articles (Auslander, Blau and Causey) by giving a description of their key interventions and methodology along with brief synopses. In addition, I’ll provide some suggested further readings and viewings to go along with them! No problem, I thought, but wow! Where should I start! First, the three articles are quite different in their style and content but after some serious contemplation I decided they deal with the concept of liveness, mediation and presence. Philip Auslander provides a useful visual aid in his article that I, with Dave’s help, have extended to help illustrate some of the more difficult concepts like “feeling live” when interacting with machines and unbearable presence in the case of the Causey article. Here is my expanded version of Auslander’s table from page 110. Dave assures me he plans to unpack it during the seminar and I’ll also refer to it below.
| Spacial Co-Presence | Spacial Absence | Virtual Co-Presence | ||
| Temporal Simultaneity | Live I – Theatre | II – Live broadcast, Phone Conversation | Group Liveness – Texting, Clan Raids in WOW | |
| Temporal Anteriority | III – Stadium Replay. | IV – Recorded film and video | Online Liveness – Breaking news on websites. Chat. Twitter. Facebook updates and newsfeeds. | |
| Affective experience for the receiver. “Feels” live for the viewer/player. Websites. Video-games. Electronic composing. Interacting with a robot. | ||||
As you may have guessed, I – as a virtual entity – fall under the virtual co-presence category and also blend into the affective experience for the receiver. Where the glowing bunny from Eduardo Kac’s installation fits is somewhere up the proverbial Z axis and a little to the left. I will talk about unbearable presence (mediated and otherwise) shortly.
Please allow me to introduce you to the authors of the articles:
Philip Auslander is a highly influential performance studies scholar extremely active today. Dave witnessed Dr. Auslander give a paper on T-Rex in Calgary in the fall of 2006. He has a large presence, is a strong speaker and Dave hopes to present as well as Dr. Auslander someday. Here’s his Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000340839991&v=wall
And his CV: http://lcc.gatech.edu/~auslander/publications/auslander_cv.pdf
Dr. Auslander’s work is cited often in the intermediary scholarship Dave has found on performance in virtual spaces. In fact, he is quoted by our next scholar, Herbert Blau.
Herbert Blau is one of those scholars who has been everywhere and seen everything. Dave is extremely jealous of the fact Dr. Blau directed several North American premiere’s of Samuel Beckett’s and Harold Pinter’s plays. Dave says Blau’s writing is meandering, philosophical and anecdotal but at the same time, spot on and highly enlightening in the connections it makes. For me, his writing style reminds me of Jean Baudrillard’s in that he seems to be a bricoleur of popular culture, historical, artistic and philosophical references. Here’s his online profile: http://depts.washington.edu/engl/people/profile.php?id=549 and his CV: http://faculty.washington.edu/hblau/VITA.pdf
The third author is new to Dave and I. Matthew Causey represents himself on his blog with two juxtaposing quotes: one by Heidegger and one by The Joker. http://www.blogger.com/profile/12173347321803447481 I think I like him. Dave is now following him on Twitter. http://twitter.com/#!/causeym
Additional Viewing and Reading!
Please check out these links. Dave says he might not have a chance to show the clips during the seminar but would still like to refer to them in the discussion. Here they are:
This first features predominant British actors like Sir Ben Kingsley and John Cleese talking about the challenges of acting for video games and how the talents required must be taught in acting schools. http://g4tv.com/videos/48939/Fable-III-Voice-Cast-Dev-Diary-Video/ This embellishes Auslander’s Willem Dafoe example.
This link deals with the concept of liveness both in reference to being a character in World of Warcraft in what the interview subjects say but also in how the filmmakers mix the WOW characters in real environments. http://vimeo.com/15076003
Here are two links to sites where you can buy your own robot. Note, especially, the Honda site and how the robot addresses you. These links expand on both Auslander’s “feeling live” by interacting with machines and Matthew Causey’s engagement with the post-human. http://asimo.honda.com/
There are two DVDs (Parts one and two) of a CBC documentary called Gamer Revolution at the Sound and Moving Picture Library. Part two has more to do with social networking and online identity.
Lastly, here are links to the complete texts cited within the readings and that Dave will be referring to during the seminar:
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.
http://www.dzignism.com/articles/benjamin.pdf
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays by Martin Heidegger (Translated by William Lovitt).
http://browseinside.harpercollins.ca/index.aspx?isbn13=9780061319693
Simulacra & Simulation by Jean Baudrillard.
http://files.meetup.com/1392983/Baudrillard,%20Jean%20-%20Simulacra%20And%20Simulation.pdf
Article Summaries:
“Live and Technologically Mediated Performance” by Philip Auslander
Philip Auslander’s chapter in The Cambridge Companion to Performance Studies entitled “Live and Technologically Mediated Performance” starts with a quotation from an introductory theatre course exemplifying the essentialist binary difference between theatre and film as being either immediate or mediated. (107) This chapter’s engagement in performance discourse both complicates that simple binary and also places the analysis of mediated performance (in all its forms) within the field of performance studies. There are three sections to Dr. Auslander’s chapter. The first expands on Steve Wurtzler’s work on liveness explaining its four levels distinguished by spatial and temporal separation (see table above) by adding further levels through internet and non-human liveness. The second section consists of a case study featuring GuitarBotana illustrating his idea of non-human liveness. (Dave will have a hands-on demonstration of this idea during the seminar!) The third section takes a page out of Heideggerian philosophy returning to the Greek word techne to dissect mediation into a binary of internal and external mediation. Auslander claims performance, itself, is a technology that semiologically enframes that which is performed as mediated and calls forth the audience into their role by how they are signaled to do so.
The first section is highly influenced by Walter Benjamin’s essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. The Willem Defoe example illustrates Benjamin’s point regarding how the actor’s portrayal of character is fragmented by the means of reproduction. The following example of Wallace Shawn’s quote further expands on Benjamin by speaking to how reproduction and its need for realism and closeness has altered Shawn’s perception of what he expects from live performance. Auslander takes this idea of perception further by explaining “how closely our experience of live performance is bound up with our experience of technologically mediated forms.” (109) This makes me think of playwrights like Morris Panych, Brad Frazer and Daniel MacIvor that are described as being ‘filmic’ in their style of writing. Dave agrees.
As this point, section one leaps ahead conceptually into the analysis of liveness itself starting with the example of Whitney Houston singing “The Star Spangled Banner” at the 1991 Superbowl. Auslander introduces the idea of simulatenously live and non-live (109) and how technology allows the production of a hybrid event. He uses Steve Wurtzler’s table juxtaposing Spatial presence and absence with Temporal simultaneity and anteriority (see above). After explaining Wurtzler’s table he expands its scope further by introducing Nick Couldry’s “online liveness and group liveness” (111). Taking the idea even further, Auslander introduces Margaret Morse’s work on interactions between human and nonhuman agents. Auslander states:
We are now at a point at which liveness can no longer be defined purely in terms of either the presence of living human beings before each other or physical and temporal relationships between them. The emerging definition of liveness may be built primarily around the audience’s affective experience. To the extent that websites and other virtual entities respond to us in real time, they feel live to us, and this may be the kind of liveness we now value. (112)
For Dave’s research in performance in videogames this is a highly provocative idea. A player immersed in a game situation feels present in the environment and the entities there are “in the moment.”
The second section focuses on Mari Kimura’s interaction with Guitarbot and ‘their’ creation of GuitarBotana. Within it, Guitarbot would respond to Kimura’s input (prescripted) and Kimura would both play from a score and improvise overtop. That was six years ago. Dave recently saw a concert by Ryuichi Sakamoto at the Harbourfront. Several of the pieces during this one man concert featured Sakamoto interacting ‘live’ with specially designed software to ‘listen’ to Sakamoto’s playing of the piano. The software would sample, manipulate and respond with previously programmed responses which Sakamoto would then further embellish on. At home, Dave has an expensive keyboard that has automated many aspects of composing (through arpeggiators, layered sequence tracks and sample loops) that greatly expedite the act of composition. In fact, there are several simple applications available for handheld devices that will take minimal amounts of input from the user to embellish musically in predetermined ways. (Please note the itouch that will circulate throughout the seminar.) These examples are all offered as demonstrations of Auslander’s point regarding “feeling” live.
The third section of Auslander’s chapter looks at the concept of mediation itself and breaks it into internal and external categories. This chapter contains several similarities to Martin Heidegger’s book The Question Concerning Technology including drilling into the etymology of the Greek word techne, describing how technology enframes our perception and how people become ordered by the inscribed demands of that perception. It is interesting that Auslander makes no reference to Heidegger’s work. Dave wonders if it may be due to how Heidegger’s work is shunned by some scholars because of the open debate regarding whether Heidegger was complicit with Nazism. Regardless, Auslander mines the same vein with the analysis of techne and claims that “performance is a technology in the first sense [and] performance studies is a technology in the second sense.” (115) This technology in both senses frames (or enframes to use Heidegger’s term) an audience/receiver’s perception. Auslander continues by delineating internal and external mediation by saying “the internal are aspects of the performance situation itself, such as the nature of the performance space, while the external ones are historical and social factors, such as the impact of television and film in our perception.” (115) He uses a lengthy quote by Richard Bauman that supports Auslander’s claim regarding the semiological framing power of the performance and performance studies as conceptual mediations. With a truly Heideggerian rhetorical move, Auslander concludes the third section by saying “we see that there can be no such thing as technologically unmediated performance because performance is itself a technology and the idea of performance is a mediation that shapes audience identity and perception of an event.” Thus, everything is mediated through technology and we are incapable of seeing an event outside the frame of performance studies. …Dave thinks it is ironic that Heidegger gave us an ‘out’ when he concludes his essay saying art contains the saving-power to free us from a world enframed by technology. I think Dave should get out of the house more. [He doesn’t know I typed that!]
Questions: Do you agree with Auslander’s claim that calling an event a performance frames it as such or is it truly inevitable?
Is the song we composed on the itouch live?
“Virtually Yours: Presence, Liveness, Lessness” by Herbert Blau
Blau’s essay is a philosophical meditation on liveness in theatre peppered with a myriad of examples from both philosophy and theatre. Early in the piece Blau introduces the concept of a ‘metaphysics of seeming’ (533) however, in his rigor and exploration of essentially Baudrillarian hyper-reality, Dave and I interpret this essay as dipping into the realm of the ‘Pataphysical. Dave feels this is at least partially justified by the fact Jean Baudrillard was a self-proclaimed ‘Pataphysician and also because of Blau’s references to consensual hallucination, seeming, illusion, distraction, feedback loops, repetition, redundancy, entropy and lessness is very much in line with Alfred Jarry’s science of exceptions and incongruities. Dave thinks so but I’m not convinced.
Blau begins the article with an ‘impossible’ example of ghosting in the lights controlled by a new and massive computer controlled lighting system. In the end, the lights were controlled by hand. A metaphor for how technology can’t replace the human. From there Blau gives examples of the illusive nature of reality through reference to Plato’s Cave, Beckett’s Endgame (Dave’s favorite play by Beckett), the Challenger disaster, Peter Brook and John Cage. Introducing the concept of metaphysics of seeming, Blau states “the minimalist aesthetic of conceptual art, and the installations that followed, evolved in theatricality, which for an unregenerate formalist (specifically, Michael Fried) seemed to be the end of art.” (533-34) He further illustrates this minimalist impulse toward lessness through Cage’s 4’33” (which Dave has on his ipod), Baudelaire’s boredom, and Beckett’s Breath.
At this point in the article, Blau moves into the “televisual” (534) by introducing Philip Auslander’s work on “remediation” and the “meaning of presence in liveness” (535) Drilling further down into mediation via the Internet (past Freud and Artaud) Blau leads us to engage with the work of both Benjamin and Baudrillard.
While the photographic, filmic, or televisual image is still attached to the material site of representation in a legacy of realism (however the image is produced, indexically or analogically), the substance of the virtual, digitally produced as it is through the wobble of one and zero, may appear to be three-dimensional, but in the electroluminescence of the apparency of a stage, there is only an “empty display,” nothing to feel, nothing to touch, only the phosphorescent presence of what – unlike the object of the camera, however abstracted – was never there to begin with. (535)
I asked Dave what Blau means by this. Dave explained through the example of how film is incapable of showing a non-space (several films have tried). Attempts have shown white backdrops or other forms of emptiness, but still something was photographed. The stage is fluid. Shakespeare painted his locations with words. When one sees the mouth in Beckett’s Not I, one contemplates the mouth and the missing body, not the missing backdrop and setting.
I told Dave that didn’t help.
He continued by saying Baudrillard is useful here because of his concept of simulacra. The film must photograph something. The camera needs a referent. So even when trying to film an empty non-space, something appears on film. That something refers to emptiness and becomes its simulacra.
Dave waited for comprehension to cross my pixilated face to no avail.
That is why Nam June Paik’s Fluxus film is a useful example. Paik is confronting the medium of film to not represent.
I told Dave we should continue.
The crux of Blau’s article comes in the statement I referred to above that “the subtext of the virtual is that it really wants to be real.” [italics original] (536) I am represented here for your viewing pleasure as an Xbox-Live avatar to illustrate this point. I also want to draw your attention to endnote 8 where Blau refers to videogames’ reliance on buttons, sticks and keyboards for interaction. Since this was written, the Wii controller, Playstation Move and especially Xbox Kinect are all attempts to have the player interact directly with the game with minimal (or no) controller in hand.
The article continues with a discussion of Brecht and feedback loops (Dave hopes there will be some feedback from the webcam to help illustrate this during the seminar) and how there is “no digital equivalent of the Alienation-effect.” (536) The discussion moves into Blau’s launching from Benjamin and Baudrillard to a possible future of performance and how “the truth is that, psychically and otherwise, no less realistically, we know very little about its cultural substance and prospects, its possibilities for performance, not its eventual effect on what we take to be human.” (538) Blau sees digital culture, without Brecht’s verfremdungseffekt to provide any brakes, as spiraling out of control, homogenizing behavior as a code and making us signs of what we appear to be. (538) The actor on stage will become “the redundancy of a redundancy.” (539) Blau completes this thought with a reference to Beckett’s Play (which Dave directed in 2008) – “Am I as much as…being seen?” Dave wanted to point out that Beckett’s film entitled Film starring Buster Keaton might have been an even stronger example here. In Film Keaton’s character spends the entire film avoiding being seen. When he is seen (by himself/his own spirit) he dies.
I see a turning point in the article with the introduction of Heidegger’s being-seen and the affectivity of presence. (539) Blau has dug a deep and bleak conceptual hole and throughout the rest of the article he sets up the physical body as having the ‘saving-power’ of empty representation. The living body “stinks of mortality” (540) which is something irremediable, according to Blau. He goes further, invoking Blade Runner and the epiphanic redemption of entropy and the noise of John Cage as possible means to circumvent the relentless media. Blau proposes that the most powerful act of mourning for September 11th would have been a cessation of the media for a brief period. He implies that silence is perceived as an error. To be confronted with silence is pure presence.
The next issue is that of human presence (542). Blau invokes Strindberg’s claim of constructing his characters through conglomerates of “scraps of humanity” (543) and Duchamp’s ready-mades. (Please note John Cleese’s statements regarding acting a videogame character in the Fable III videolink.) Blau takes this concept further with reference to current social networking and media practices and how, ultimately, it leads back to the body. “If cyberspace itself is the consensual hallucination that is the consummation of virtual technologies, the hallucinatory consensus extends to notions of performance disassociated from the mundane gravity of the corporeal body.” (543) Blau continues by saying “the dematerialized figures are unthinkable without the bodily presence presumably vanished.” (544) Blau concludes his essay reinforcing the idea that the body, or at least the promise of a real mortal body somewhere, is the thing “you can never get on film” (545)
So, please allow me to appear before you metaphorically/’Pataphysic ally as Dave’s virtual referent – an index (a promise) of his stinkingly mortal corporeal body. The place-holder of his presence in this mediated cyber-culture.
Questions: Blau’s conclusion regarding the need for a bodily representation indexing a real one seems to agree with current trends in game console design. How long do you think it may be before we take our avatar’s to work in our virtual offices?
Do you agree there is no digital equivalent to the Alienation-effect?
“Stealing from God: The Crisis of Creation in Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s Genesi and Eduardo Kac’s Genesis” by Matthew Causey
Dave and I were initially stumped by the inclusion of this article with the other two. Then Dave asked me whether it was possible the work of the two artists in this article are using and indicating technology not in a distancing referential way as indicated in the Auslander and Blau but is instead being used to confront audiences with unbearable proximity and participation. We talked at length and finally we came to the working theory that Castellucci’s work may be successfully using technology to achieve Artaudian goals while Kac by be proving possible what Blau claims is impossible – a digital equivalent to the Alienation-effect.
Causey begins the article by briefly describing Societas Raffaello Sanzio’s production Genesi: From the Museum of Sleep and couches it with the premise that the act of creation is always also an act of annihilation. The second work is by Eduardo Kac who is an installation artist who uses genetic engineering on live subjects. Both these pieces are highly disturbing to me (and especially Dave) but Causey’s engagement with Kate Hayles’ work on post-human subjectivity and invoking Artaud’s ideas of circumventing social codification helped me (and Dave) understand better the artist value of this work. Causey, paraphrasing Hayles, positions “the post-human as a new phase of humanity wherein ‘no essential difference between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals’, exists.” (202) In this light, I am able to better unpack Kac’s Genesis in that his involvement of the audience – through the web – to rewrite both genetic code and the bible can be seen as highly metaphorical and highly insightful into the unquestioning pursuit of science as well as unquestioned faith. I must admit, though, I am much muddier in my appreciation of the glowing bunny. I can’t help but wonder if the glowing bunny is simply a demonstration of Castellucci’s phrase, “the terror of sheer possibility.” (201) According to Causey “in post-human thought, human consciousness is extended, altered and transfigured by technology.” (202) Causey describes how Kac places his spectators within an ethical problem and gives them the agency to continue or not. Dave questions, however, how the piece was framed. Would some spectators push the button simply to see what happens? Perhaps the considerations of the implication of the piece would come after but again, how is it framed? Dave might pause and question it, but I love to push buttons.
Causey’s description of Castellucci’s piece is much more detailed. His use of Artaud, Heidegger and Neitzsche to contextualize the extremely loaded interaction of images and symbols (like an Auschwitz scenario performed by children) is useful though no less disturbing. This piece also presents a highly problematic view of faith and faith in science illustrated by the use of radium (and nuclear energy) as a metaphor throughout – and even in his creative process. (205) The influence of Artaud is clear in the example of the head of a dead animal being slowly crushed on stage. “The grotesque stage-poetry of this moment brings a visceral corporeality to the stage.” (205) I imagine the horrific sound, the slow meditative destruction of the head and the “cruel presence” all contribute to a flurry of associations and meanings outside the realm of socialized experience in the members of the audience is possible during this highly intense and focused piece of stage business. “The effect is a stage presence of profound duality, Castellucci’s stage is a space of not-being (seeming) that regurgitates spasmodically the presence of being (not seeming), foregrounding the lived body in mythological space.” (206)
In addition to the Artaudian visceral presence throughout the piece, Causey states “perhaps the most significant components of Castellucci’s stage are the performing objects that appear through the performance.” (207) The mix of live and mechanized performers resonates back to the two other articles and Auslander’s concept of a hybrid performance. My impression of Castellucci’s work is that he and his company strive to problematize the identification of mechanical performance (always performing) and non-mechanical (temporally finite performance by actors). He is engaged with live and not-living, present non-liveness. Causey summarizes this well by saying “the transference of attributes between machine and human performers insinuates that the dis-human is very close, in theory to the post-human, that models subjectivity in an intimate relation between machine and human.” (207) This use/inclusion/creation with machines differs from a Futurist aesthetic that worships the machine as an ideal model for society (thus, war, for the Futurists was its highest form of expression) but is, instead, a synthesis of the human with the machine. To conclude, “the artist, under the emblem of Lucifer, knows only the not-being which gives rise to art.” (207)
Questions: Who has the right to create new life? (202)
Is the input of the spectator intensified or dissipated through the use of a website?
Thank you everyone. It had a lot of fun working with Dave to bring you this. I hope you enjoy it!
The One True Dave 
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