dear group:
I'd like to add a few observations to my first posting on the Hellerau
workshop ("computer/body/interaction"), which I made on July 25.
My report reflects my personal observations as a participant, and it is
offered as a proposal for further investigation and discussion of
current
dance/technology and media arts experimentation with the so-called
"interactivity" paradigm.
As a critical reflection, any report of this kind would have to
investigate,
first of all, the pragmatic and qualitative results or discoveries in
the
workshop process itself, including its model or method of participation,
rehearsal structure, artistic or scientific agenda, objectives, context,
and
outreach (final public presentation, website or video documentation).
As
you can imagine, with a small team of 12 people, much of what I might
discuss would therefore concern the internal process and the experiences
we
had leading up to the final public event. Rather than staying on the
microscopic level, I feel it will be more helpful for our international
network if I address some of the implications, unanswered questions and
set-backs that occur in such interdisciplinary workshops that focus on
technological and not artistic "progress." I have ordered my
observations,
which are of a very sceptical nature, in a sequence of 10 notes.
(If I had enough space, I would like to include a historical dimension
to
reflect on modern and late modern avant-garde positions in theatre,
dance
and media art to provide further context for a critical evaluation of
what
"interactivity" yields, or doesn't, depending on aesthetic/cultural
context
or market niche).
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1. I'll start with the proposition that "interactivity," as we
practice
it, is artistically, aesthetically and compositionally unsatisfactory,
even
regressive.
As the featured "product" of a workshop test series, it fails to
convince
me, but of course such an interpretation depends on one's point of view
and
one's criteria for a responsible rehearsal method and approach to the
integration of movement-choreography or theatrical action,
scenography/spatial design, visual imagery, music, computer-based
interfaces
(sound, video, recorded voice linked to motion sensing software), and -
in
our particular case - brain wave activity translated into sound/image
via
MIDI.
As it is often the case, especially when a workshop has no precise
(preplanned and prepared) project-objective, and when the participants
meet
each other for the first time and no modus operandi for shared
authorship is
found, the workshop at best creates a laboratory, a learning and
testing
environment. Hellerau became a very good learning environment, but a
decision was later made to develop a "theatrical" presentation for the
public, and it changed the dynamics, for at that point, half-way through
the
2-week workshop, there were 9 or 10 small individual tests and
explorations
under way, and most of them ended up being presented to the audience,
without that sufficient internal agreement was ever reached over the
form
and content of these tests, why they would be shown, and how they
related to
one another.
I think we need to determine, in such cases, whether we have a
laboratory or
whether we enter into a production mode (for a performance). Sometimes
we
find excuses and say that the public is invited to "visit the lab and
see us
at work." If that were the case, we shouldn't need a theatrical frame
for
presentations. If you introduce a dance solo, the audience will be
watching
a dance solo.
2. The workshop included daily warm up sessions, a few demonstrations
of
the interactive software (Eyecon) that was available, regular training
sessions with Eyecon, as well as measuring tests (with our brain
researchers) which initiated the remarkable effort on part of
Palindrome's
computer engineer, Frieder Weiss, to write code that would link the
electroencephalograms to the MIDI inputs/outputs of the Eyecon system.
On
the technological (interface) side, Frieder succeeded in creating this
link
in his "Brain Explorer" program. The Eyecon system (several cameras
monitoring the dance floor) worked fairly reliably; like BigEye or VNS,
it
may react a bit too nervously when light conditions change.
Interestingly, we work in the east wing of the dilapidated / slowly
renovated Hellerau Festpielhaus; upstairs are our computer (editing)
workstations, cross-platform/networked Macs and PCs, design atelier,
test
chambers, etc; the downstairs room is a "concrete" room with stone
walls/floor, with a glass roof. After three days we add a sprung dance
floor
with a Marley. This is the "stage" for the cameras and our interactive
scene.
The workshop, although led by Palindrome Dance Company, did not attract
many
dancers or choreographers, I think this should be mentioned. Apart from
Robert Wechsler and Angel Blasco, there are no trained dancers but
artists
from different fields (music, film/video, visual design, visual arts,
media,
computer science, theatre). Quite normal, with regard to a digital arts
laboratory. However, the question of the physical or movement
rehearsals is
unresolved, and thus the entire body improviser - computer improviser
relationship.
Also unresolved are the objectives of Günter/Christine, our researchers
from
the Institute for Communication & Brain Research, in relation to our
interactive rehearsals, i.e. the scientists do not take part in the
rehearsals. Their contribution (and general work in
learning-dysfunction
therapy) is to offer questions about sensory feedback. They share with
us a
measuring/analytical system for brain waves (electro-encephalograms &
spectral analysis, measuring brainwave activities via electrodes, the
computer translating the waves and frequencies thus creating visual
graphic
representations of the activity in the left and right hemispheres.
Measuring
is done behind the ears, nearer the deeper layers of brainwave activity,
the
limbian system
- allowing better access to synapse transmissions of emotional states
inside
the brain/nervous system).
Implication: to allow performer or audience to be measured in response
to,
and live interface with a movement, gestural, artistic action, etc, thus
providing signal processing of reciprocal activities (between performer
and
onlooker, transmuted via MIDI into acoustic of visual signals). We
initially discussed "emotional" reactions to performed action, but it
was
not explored how we understand different emotional reactions, how we
explain
them, how we like to manipulate or explore them or provoke them, why we
like
to do that, and how they might create "Rückkopplungen" (feedback) to a
performance or an event or situation as a whole, and why that would
generate
an artistic interactive context or reciprocity. With a further
implication:
why an audience would want to watch this lab test. (I presume we are at
an
early stage of a lab experiment).
3. The laboratory and the aesthetic conditions are confused. As it has
been
reported by Robert Wechsler, there were moments when individuals in
the
workgroup tried something out, but there was no joint project evolving
from
the trying.
Robert wrote:
>Angel, a beautiful Spanish ballet dancer, alternates flitting petit pas and
high leg >gestures with deep wiggly lunges and sequential undulations
reminiscent of >Forsythe. He has four colored wires attached to his
head,
and is trailed by a long >cable. The electronic flute-like sound he is
dancing to has an unusual relationship to >his movements, not one you
have
ever seen before. The sound is an audible >"translation" of his brain
waves. It is, by the way, not coming from the part of the brain >that
generates the movements, but rather lower down -- the area where
emotions
are >said to reside. He has been at it awhile. He is sweaty.
>So just what _is_ the relationship of the sounds to his movements? Good
>question.
Moreover, not only is it a good question, it is a question that was not
pursued in a clearly articulated context of basic theatrical parameters:
a) physical movement languages and forms,
b) visual forms of composition, objects or plastic elements in space
c) the space itself and spatial forms (Bildraum, Bewegungsraum,
Klangraum,
Farbraum),
and thus the environment for interactive performance or
improvisation
d) other abstract or expressive forms and architectonic relationships in
the
sought-
after synaesthesia or interaction of form, movement, sound, music,
language, light,
costume,etc.
e) development of the content of a movement-scene in relation to the
programmed
environment (computer-improviser interface)
[At this point, I would have to include a discussion of how I understand
the
necessity, for each experimenting group, to become aware of its
instrumentarium and chosen parameters vis à vis already historically
developed complex methods of theatrical/dance/performance art/electronic
art
grammars, i.e. the approach to the organic integration or
disintegration/separation or dadaist or parallel structuring of
polymedia in
a scenographic construction (whether we think of Schlemmer's
Bauhaus-dances
or Meyerhold's biomechanics or Cage/Cunningham/Rauschenberg
collaborations
or Bob Wilson's visual scenographies or newer models of physical
theatre/new
dance, say Jan Fabre's work or Meg Stuart's or Bill T Jones' work, up to
current interactive, telematic and online performances, and works also
of
musicians like Laurie Anderson, Laetitia Sonami or Tomi Hahn with gloves
or
pressure/tension sensors, etc].
I argue that all modernist and later movements in theatre or dance or
visual
performance (and site specific art) had to clarify for themselves how
they
would develop an instrumentarium or craft of technique, how they placed
physical composition and the employment of the figure/performer (or
marionette) in inter-action with or distinction to language, music,
spatial
environment, visual projections, recorded sound, etc., and how and why
they
used, for example, abstract or stylized movement vocabularies. These
artists, if you think of Schlemmer, or Artaud, or Hijikata or Min Tanaka
or
Wilson or Yvonne Rainer, had a distinct conception of the human actor or
the
figure within their compositions, and the same can be said for
performance
artists who shifted the focus onto the flesh-body, the gendererd, sexual
body, the distressed or vilified body. Working with the body, then,
cannot
be thought without the theatrical frames, the bodily images and their
cultural resonances, and the use of certain structural and rhythmic
elements, such as repetition for example, or speed, slow motion,
stillness.
All of these have aesthetic (formal) implications and emotional affects.
4. If one looks for a form comparable to current interactive dance, one
may
want to look at contact improvisation and its evolution of body
improvisation and as a presentational form; there is a difference, say,
between a silent contact duet and Steve Paxton improvising to Bach. One
of
the key issues we might examine is the degree to which the equality or
asymmetry of the media in body/sound improvising is expressed in the
forms,
how sound responds to body movements in real-time or how (pre-existent)
music is subordinate to or dominant over the body's work, shapes,
rhythms....
The question of the conception and meaningfulness of various
possibilities
for merging or cutting or de-controlling or shifting the sound and
bodily
streams seems to lie at the heart of current experiments, since there is
an
explicit interest, it seems, among experimenters to use the interactive
system or nervous system as a field for de-controlling and scrambling
the
synaesthesia.
The question of the value of interactive performance needs to be raised
with
respect to the danceforms or physical movement vocabularies used, on the
one
hand, and with respect to the compositional gain (choreographic
development)
on the other, since we know that some dancers who work with interactive
systems have expressed their satisfaction with the impact their movement
has
on the music that is generated (heard). And here we need to look at how
body improvisers and dancers understand their "technique" within nervous
systems, and how musicians and engineers understand and conceptualize
their
computer-improvisation, for example their use of the MAX/MSP programming
environment, their use of MIDI outputs, samples, etc.
Improvised dance, improvised music, a new form of inter-improvisation?
5. We are only at the very beginning of seeing the potential aesthetic
challenges of such inter-improvisation. At the same time, there are
practical (technical) issues which intervene all the time, and thus
influence the formal constitution of a focussed technique on part of the
body improvisers. In terms of the improvisation with invisible triggers
and
with samples (sound, video), I see problems. We need to evaluate how we
see
the structural & rhythmic elements (repetition, slow motion, stillness,
fluidity, polyrhythms) in relationship to the computer's MIDI signal
processing and the feedback that brings us digital information (small
music
samples, sampled sounds, MIDI notes, quicktime movies, tiny video loops,
snippets). How is this sonic and visual material that is triggered
integrated into the performance, how does it relate, how does it
respond,
and how does it change the performance, and what would it mean?
If the interactive technology is not foregrounded in public performance,
how
would the audience know or care about computer-interactivity if they
watch a
dance? What is the gain for the performer? How do we train our
performers do
develop new languages and techniques that would challenge what we
already
know?
I propose that current vocabularies (from modern dance/improvisation and
disco) used in interactive performance are strangely inadequate, if they
don't wish to question their theatrical frames and grammars in relation
to
computer interaction which operates with a different techno-aesthetic
syntax
(compression, delay, filtering, sample, loop, digitised/artifical sound,
etc), and thus, consequently, with a newer cultural-referential radius
(if
you think of techno and the multiple referencing in a live mix of music
and
film/video, advertising, television, global culture). Modern dance mixed
with interactive systems - a decidedly odd marriage. This proposition is
contingent on context, and I am talking from the perspective of
choreography.
(And I don't mean choreography adapted from LifeForms).
Too often, in our workshops, the technological hard/software parameters,
complex as they might be, override the time/effort given to the
development
of new spatial configurations, new architectonic environments, a new
plastic
consciousness for virtual interaction, and new movement-forms beyond
personal clichés.
6. Near the end of the workshop, Sandra Grawunder had developed a piece
(duet) she performed with mental concentration, her brain waves
activating
sounds and video samples she had previously created with the young
musician
David (flute player) who was not longer present in Hellerau at the time
of
the performance. It was a moving piece, I thought, because we saw her,
sitting still in the dark, to the side, trying to evoke or remember - in
her
mind or memory or subconscious - a dialogue she might have had with
David,
days ago, and at certain points, depending on the neural transmissions,
video-images of David, of a hand, a mouth, an ear, flashed up on the
broken-
up screens hanging on the empty stage.
Holger Herrmann, a musician, was the other performer who used the Brain
Explorer in his live instrumental performance, as an accompanying
streaming
generator of sounds that gently ebbed and flowed with his breath and the
wailing of his didgeridoo.
Angel Blasco rehearsed a fine 11-minute ballet solo, carefully
constructed
in a traditional choreographic way and set to the music of Arvo Päart
(on
CD). There was no perceivable interactive dimension, except a rear-video
projection upstage which showed clips from scenes Daniela and Susan had
filmed of him during the previous week. Angel performed the piece
frontally
to the audience.
The same traditional stage-audience separation was used in a duet
performed
by Robert and Angel (the same phrases performed to silence, classical
music,
and interactively triggered sounds), and a group improv with six
performers
which started off the public presentation as a kind of demo version of
the
Eyecon's invisible trigger
system (touchlines, dynamic fields). The group improv displayed
rudimentary, quite banal movements and gestures in brief and awkward
sequences of pure stimulus -
response patterns (gesture=sound, freezeframe; next gesture=sound,
freeze).
The sound samples were chosen quite randomly from the soundcard's MIDI
palette and a few other files. It followed nicely a certain Pavlovian
on/off
logic.
René Verouden had worked vigorously on design sketches and visual
concepts
for a wordpiece (a dialogue) that could be "found" and triggered in the
interactive space, and his simple motions (a walk that looked like
someone
re-tracing his steps listening to the wind) in a darkened room were
quite
resonant, as they evoked, hesitatingly, haltingly, the fragments of an
unfinished conversation about love, sex, and sadness. He added an odd
distancing effect by using the Mac's synthetic voice recorder.
7. The stuttering dancer
It struck me that the 'demonstration' of the interactive system was done
as
a simple action-freeze-frame sequence, presumably allowing the audience
to
recognize causal relations in space (a quick jerky gesture with an
elbow=>sound; gesture stops, sound fades out), note on/note off, a
cause-and-effect parameter. This primitive reactive (not interactive)
version of the computer interface is now quite familiar to folks who
have
been to museums and stepped into installation environments in which a
certain motion triggers audio or visual output through sensors,
detectors.
Or who have an alarm system in their house. I see very little artistic
use
in this.
A more subtle control of the computer output is achievable by the
improviser
when we use the 'dynamic fields' which allow greater modulation, but one
still notices, in many cases, that the sound that is triggered is a
relatively short sample (or looped), and thus the sound, when repeatedly
triggered, begins to stutter, like a broken record.
(This is what I call the dancer-as-scratch DJ paradigm).
Presumably, rather than "fishing" for sounds in the air, the performer
will
need to find his/her story or movement material and compose it, in
cooperation with the computer-improviser or composer, allowing her to
create
a substantial piece with integrity, and with choices when to include the
interactive elements. Traditionally, dancers rehearse their movements
and
know them (and the music, and all the other cues). In a nervous
environment,
then, the technical and expressive quality of a performance will be
susceptible to a different kind of concentration - in the not-always
predictable or controllable feedback relationship to the flows, delays,
and
transformations of MIDI and complex soundscapes. Would the performer
change
the choreography? What happens when there is a group, and individuals
are
not moving separately but crossing into each other's 'dynamic fields'?
One aesthetic problem, which has been raised before, is that improvisers
in
interactive fields do not wish the control process to be identifiable as
such to the audience. If so, what does the improviser want to
communicate,
and why not use composed/prerecorded music on CD in the first place?
8. The autistic performer
One criticism that was suggested by our brain researcher was the
"autistic"
nature of performers who, he had noted in the past, seem genuinely
disinterested in their audiences and how they communicate what they have
to
say. Günter insisted that his research is about bridging the brain's
left
and right hemispheres, and he sees this also as a metaphor for the
bridging
of the emotional separation of performer and audience (in the
conventional
theatre frame). If artists were more aware of how they affect their
audience's emotions, they could interact better with them.
Unfortunately, I fear that the "intelligent stage" enhances and
exacerbates
the separation, since the interactive field must needs be controlled (by
the
sensor-computer interface and the wiring) in and of itself, and thus
constitutes a protective space, which also needs a very particular and
precise lighting, not to speak of the borders and walls that might be
created by video projection screens and surfaces.
The intelligent stage is an autistic stage, in this respect, since it
operates on the assumption that the unpredictable or de-controlled
interactivity happening within the "scene" needs to be controlled by the
production-engineering. If the "scene" is linked to an online webcast or
telematic/streaming transmission, the protection of the multidirectional
interactions needs to be even greater. We have seen similar controlled
"scenes" in the motion capture studio, and it seems to me that the
"intelligent stage" is, in its modernist logic, a Bauhaus stage with its
own
polymedia architectonic, and some marionettes.
At Hellerau, we constructed a small dance stage and hung the paper
drapings
for the video projections and fiddled with the few lamps we had, it was
actually quite charming. We then asked one audience member, a visitor
from
Holland, to be our vicarious audience "Proband" (test person wearing the
electrodes). Since her brain wave activity had not been previously
measured
and analysed, we had no way of knowing/comparing what her emotional
reactions, transduced into music, meant. She sat alone in her chair,
with a
bewildered expression in her face.
9. The "cues" in interactivity
[reaction potential of the interactive system (our partner)]:
As far as the sensitivity of the Eyecon System is concerned, we can be
sure
that it doesn't know how to distinguish one danceform from another, but
it
is quite reliable (in triggering notes and samples), and René created an
interesting little performance with his face that was very suggestive of
the
precision with which one can delineate very tiny areas of the body.
Leaning
against the wall as if asleep, the camera only a few feet away, René
began
with the most subtle movements of facial muscles - corner of the mouth,
eyebrow, eyelid, lip - and gradually created a wondrous, weird
sound-collage with the triggerd samples, including some broken words,
whispered between the teeth, a stuttered dialog with himself, in this
choreography of facial microcosms. We could choose between watching his
real
face or his video face in closed circuit (enlarged).
Deafman Glance? Dialog?
It's a bit daunting to imagine the 30 years and more that span the
cross-over experiments of the Judson Church or Wilson's 7-hour stage
production in Paris (in which he worked with an autistic actor) and
today's
reductiveness in dance&technology. How can we look the fashionable
"interactivity" in the face without blushing?
Sandra Grawunder raised an important question after the workshop:
>Mich läßt das Phänomen "Dialog", seine möglichen Strukturen etc. in
>Verbindung mit dem Phänomen "Zeit" nicht mehr los.
>Dialoge aus der Erinnerung können teilweise derart im Kopf vergegenwärtigt
>werden und dann sogar in eine Art Zukunft hinüberreichen, dass man keine
>direkte zeitliche Zuweisung mehr vorzunehmen imstande ist. Das hat sicher
>etwas mit der Wahrnehmung von Zeit zu tun.
Is she not asking how we understand "dialog" in relation to temporal
phenomena and dimensions, as she experienced, in her spectral
performance, a
sliding of remembered dialogs from the past into a kind of future,
making it
difficult to distinguish
what was said when, by whom, to whom?
We work with time-based media (video, music, dance), and interactivity
ought
to deal fundamentally with temporal dimensions, not just with linking
real
and virtual spaces.
I propose that interactive performance first of all leave the
"intelligent
stage" and its protected theatrical frames, and address questions that
live
art has addressed for many years, namely the limits of work and site,
the
object of performance, its basic materials and forms and its projected,
decorporealized virtuality, and its reliance on a functional
mechanisation
of MIDI.
If digital files are part of the repertoire of composition, we need to
ask
how we understand and use samples, presets, filters, quicktimes movies,
and
the algorithms and mathematics of the computer, and how we relate, say,
compression (and the miniaturization of video in online
performance/maximization of video projection on our large screens in the
theatre/gallery) to the articulation of a choreography, a visual design,
in
movement and action. The articulation of content implies that we
investigate
the possibility of a performance technique not dominated by
technological
constraints or imperatives but able, like free jazz or rap, to play
intelligently with flows, instabilities and transformations.
A new poetry in multisensory space? new interactive relationships
between
performer and audience?
10. Reaction potential of the dancer
What struck me in Hellerau was the lack of real physical contact among
the
performers during the rehearsals. There was very little touch. There
was no
contact improvisation except with invisible, imaginary lines in space.
This may be one of the effects of digital media. Everyone their own
camera
and sensor. The role of the abstract trigger-body (the MIDI performer)
needs
to be questioned, especially of course in larger, slightly more global
cultural relations to other bodies in non-western-technological
performance
who do not trigger.
Finally, on a very pragmatic level, I think we have a concentration
problem.
Angel Blasco mentioned it when he was rehearsing his solo. If the
dancer
warms up and concentrates on the choreographic role she embodies, and on
the
muscle memory, and the spiritual energies needed to perform, and then
focusses the physical and mental body on the complex sequences she has
rehearsed with a particular musical composition, with others in an
ensemble,
with objects in space, costume changes, and such, and if she needs to
remember precisely the cues and the changes of tempi and rhythmic
accents in
the temporal, musical flow and the characterization of her role (that
which
makes her human and distinctly individual) - then she will have her
hands
full, and it may not be so easy to do this in a very nervous environment
with triggers and sensors that might create random or unpredictable
feedbacks and changes in the acoustic environment to the extent that she
would change her internalized choreography or spontaneously improvise
something new. She would be affected, and I have seen dancers lose
their
concentration, as I have seen interactive improvisers flail when the
triggers don't happen when they are supposed to happen.
Since the dancer would likely perform in a complex multimedia piece that
may
also include spoken text and multiple video projections and diffuse
light
and live musicians and singers and camera people and engineers who
monitor
the live transmission to the internet, the cue structure would be even
more
complex. The dancer, like the computers, would have to do a lot of
parallel
processing, and hopefully, still be very connected to the audience that
may
sit around in a circle, walk about or and watch from above. The dancer
would
process a great deal of internal processes, conscious and unconscious
cues,
and, so we hope, once we have set up the right training studios for
this,
she would enter, trance-like but fully present and conscious, into a
state
where she can savour the inter-action, transforming her self continuosly
in
a loop that has become a long poem in motion.
Johannes Birringer
AlienNation Co.
http://www.aliennationcompany.com
RHYTMUS UND RICHTUNG DES LEBENS, DER BEWEGUNG, KOENNEN NICHT IN DER
VERTIKALEN ANGELEGT SEIN.
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