This month we feature Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel on the topic of
networked performance.

Helen says "For the purpose of this presentation to the empyre list, we’ve
defined networked performance as any live event that is network enabled."

Along with Jo-Anne Green, Michelle and Helen have been publishing their
"Network Performance" blog at http://turbulence.org/blog since July 2004.
This blog is explorative of a wide range of networked performance.

We will also be joined by various of the artists discussed on the "Network
Performance" blog.

Network enabled performance continues to become more diverse as technology
and bandwidth increase, develop, merge with things like telephone/cell
technology, become wearable, etc. I look forward to Helen and Michelle's
observations about the sort of range they've noted.

ja

--**************************************
  BIO: HELEN THORINGTON & MICHELLE RIEL
--**************************************

Helen Thorington is the founder and co-director of  Turbulence.org
(1996-ongoing). Turbulence commissions NET ART and exhibits, archives, and
promotes net artists’ work. She also founded and directed the New American
Radio series (1985-1998). NAR commissioned over 300 original works for
public radio, 140 of which are currently available at http://somewhere.org
She is also a writer, sound composer, and media artist (
http://new-radio.org ). In 1997 she initiated the Adrift project
(1997-2002), an evolving multi-location Internet performance collaboration
with Marek Walczak and Jesse Gilbert ( http://turbulence.org/adrift ).
Gilbert and Thorington also initiated a number of distributed musical
performances, which included musicians performing at various locations in
New York City and at Mills College, Oakland, CA.  It was her recollections
of Adrift and thoughts about the directions it might have taken that
prompted her interest in exploring current networked performance practice..
This, in turn, lead to her contacting Michelle Riel and with turbulence’s
co-director, Jo-Anne Green, to the development of the networked_performance
blog.

Michelle Riel is an educator, artist, and designer based in San Francisco..
She is an Assistant Professor in New Media and Chair of the Department of
Teledramatic Arts and Technology, an interdisciplinary program at California
State University Monterey Bay. In addition to collaborating on the networked
performance blog with turbulence's Helen and Jo, her current work is
creating networked environments, objects, and experiences that explore
technocultural issues using mobile technologies, networked sensing
environments, and real-time video. Her interest in performance and
space/time based arts stems from her professional training in scenic and
production design focused on the integration of media in live performance
and virtual reality sets. Her work has been seen nationally including
SIGGRAPH, the Whitney Museum of American Art's Performance on 42nd Series
and has received grants and awards including an Emmy Award for broadcast set
design and net art commissions from turbulence.org. Michelle received her
MFA in Theatre from UCSD.

===========

Greetings Empyre:

First of all thank you for inviting us to be guests at empyre this month.
Jim, especial thanks to you for encouraging our participation.

We are proposing a return to the subject of networked performance, which
this list dealt with in  September 2003,  and a second look, this time from
the perspective of recent new and transitional work.

On July 14, 2004, we (Jo-Anne Green of turbulence.org, Michelle and Helen)
launched the networked_performance blog (http://turbulence.org/blog) to
explore the shifting paradigms in performative cultural practice. Our goal
was to take the pulse of current network-enabled performance practice, to
obtain a wide range of perspectives on current issues and interests—which we
felt were under-examined—and uncover common threads that might help shape a
symposium in 2006.

We didn’t expect what we found.

With close to 1,000 entries in its first year, the networked_performance
blog reveals an explosion of creative experimental pursuits, as artists
investigate the possibilities opened by the migration of computing out of
the desktop PC and into the physical world, and by the continuing advances
in internet technologies, wireless telecommunications, sensor technologies
and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

The ephemeral conceptual art practices that came into existence during the
50s and 60s – with Happenings, Fluxus, the Situationists  -- and that
re-emerged as participatory works on the Internet in the early ‘90s, are
now, with mobile networking technologies, networked sensors and embedded
computing, proliferating as new ways of working and experiencing.

The interest in these emergent practices is keen, as the 150,000 visitors to
the blog attest.

For the purpose of this presentation to the empyre list, we’ve defined
networked performance as any live event that is network enabled. There is
nothing clear-cut about what we are presenting – it’s exploratory and
necessarily messy. But we see a great advantage in beginning to look at this
outburst of new work – in chronicling it, understanding its commonalities
and beginning to think about how it impacts our notions of performance.

We would therefore like to start by setting out four broad categories under
which this new work falls, suggesting works within each that are
particularly meaningful to us, namely works that occupy liminal spaces – the
in-between – and are transformative and generative. We would like to invite
the originating artists to describe their work, and then proceed by posing
questions for the empyre list, such as: “How do we understand performance in
relation to these new activities that are between the existing and the
developing, and what can we learn from stretching our understanding of
performance in light of these perspectives”?

More in the next,

Helen & Michelle

=====================

Hello again. 

Surveying the blog we identify four areas of networked performance practice
which current work explores in various combinations. We have categorized
these as (1) telematic events, (2) locative media, (3) wearables, and (4)
active objects and responsive environments.

Telematics connect people to people or people to objects through a network,
such as telerobotics or haptics; locative media provide location aware
engagement; smart environments enable architecture and objects to respond to
environmental changes of state generated by occupants/inhabitants; and
wearables extend the body's senses through technological prosthesis.

We see lots of overlap and combinations in the works we survey, so these are
not to be considered rigid categories but an effort at broad representation..
We’re keenly interested in the commonalties across emergent art/technology
practice with attention to artist/audience/object/environment,
performativity and the open work.

1. TELEMATIC EVENTS

To date this has been the most prolific, comprehensible/understandable area
of practice, encompassing the exploration of networked performance by the
traditional performing arts where new technologies are integrated into
existing forms (dance, music, theater). Examples of this would include the
musical performance. InteraXis with Jesse Gilbert, Mark Trayle and Wadada
Leo Smith and dance performances such as those created by AdaPT, an
interdisciplinary association of artists, technologists and scholars.
       http://www.turbulence.org/Works/interaxis
       http://www.dvpg.net/adapt.html

Others move us onto new terrain. Jeff Mann and Michelle Teran, for instance,
create performance events that explore new ways for computers to support
social experiences in the physical environment.  Their objective is not
performance for an audience but creating a shared experience in which
everyday social spaces become “electronically activated play environments,
capable of transmitting the physical presence and social gestures that
comprise…human interaction” across time and distance. No longer dependent on
the work-based screen and keyboard, in these environments ordinary goods and
wares – furniture, cutlery etc. – “come to life as both kinetic art and
telecommunications interfaces”.

      http://www.lftk.org/tiki/tiki-index.php
http://www.lftk.org/tiki/tiki-index.php?page=Telepresence+Picnic
http://www.interaccess.org/telekinetics/template.php?show=intro

2. LOCATIVE MEDIA

Locative media practice has exploded since the public availability of GPS
and its consequent inexpensive and ubiquitous availability in mobile
electronic devices. Some of this practice makes urban areas into game boards
and city infrastructures into play spaces. Blast Theory, a London-based
group, is renowned internationally for their contribution to this genre with
works that make a public space ‘playable’ by participants in the street and
online.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000221.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000033.html

Others create “geo-annotation projects.” This involves assigning geo-spatial
coordinates to media content so that it can be accessed at a specific
geographical location with an enabled device. While the “true” location of
the content is a database, by making it possible to access that content from
a particular location, its place (so to speak) migrates into the physical
environment, making urban streets and the landscape “programmable.” Urban
Tapestries and the Aware Platform are examples of this.  Both are
location-based wireless platforms that allow users to access, author and
share location-specific content (text, audio, pictures, and/or movies) – But
there are many more:  Yellow Arrow, Grafedia, MapHub, and, as Anne Galloway
says, “ and oh, about a million others now.”
 http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000151.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000555.html

There are also projects specifically designed to enable communication and
shape transient networked communities. Yuri Gitman’s Magicbike turns common
bicycles into WiFi hotspots that broadcast free WiFi connectivity to their
proximity. And Jonah Brucker-Cohen and Katherine Moriwaki’s UMBRELLA.net
develops ad-hoc networks based around the haphazard and unpredictable
patterns of weather and crowd formation. The system consists of a set of
umbrellas as nodes that can spontaneously form a network when unfurled.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000114.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000051.html

3. WEARABLES

Wearable computing enlarges the use of computers to include wearing them on
ones body—much as eyeglasses or clothing are worn—and facilitates
interaction with the user, and between users, based on specific situations.
Fionnuala Conway and Katherine Moriwaki’s Urban Chameleon, for instance, is
comprised of three skirts: 1) “Touch” changes visual properties upon
contact; 2) “Speak” reacts to urban noise; and 3) “Breathe” visualizes
pollution and urban exhaust as it travels through the garment.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000146.html

Tina Gonsalves’ Medulla Intimata is responsive video jewelry. The overall
function of the piece and its video content is to reflect the full character
and content of the wearer’s emotions and thus present a fuller living
portrait: the wearer as he/she is in unmediated interaction and the wearer
as he /she feels at that moment.

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000137.html

4. ACTIVE OBJECTS AND RESPONSIVE ENVIRONMENTS

Increasingly, through ubiquitous/pervasive/ambient computing paradigms and
wireless sensing, artifacts, objects and physical space itself are being
charged with properties traditionally associated with living bodies.

In their recent Benches and Bins, Greyworld creates furniture that is able
to roam freely through the new public square in Cambridge, England and
respond to its surroundings and ambient movement.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000335.html
http://www.junction.co.uk/HTMLTemplates/our_work/news/digital/Bins___Benches
_to_be_Unleashed.htm
http://www.greyworld.org/contact/index.html

While Chris Salter, in the environment-inhabitant interaction
Suspension/Threshold, focuses on the theme of thresholds or bardo (in
between) states, and creates a body responsive environment where the
aggregate breathing patterns of the collective audience/participants lighten
an otherwise dark environment.
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000053.html

Much of this work is conceived to provoke interaction between people, and
between people and their spaces. More than not it encourages people to be
performers within the work and thus to enable or realize the work. This
calls into question the accepted nature of performance and introduces a
shifting relationship between the artist, artwork and audience.

We locate this practice within an historical continuum (Kaprow’s
“Happenings,” Galloway’s “Electronic Café,” “Experimental Art and Technology
(EAT),” the Situationists, Fluxus, etc.) and suggest that this trajectory is
redefining the performative as a socially networked, collaborative model for
artistic and cultural practice.

The overarching question, then. is:

“How do we understand performance in relation to these new activities that
are between the existing and the developing, and what can we learn by
stretching our understanding of performance in light of these perspectives”?

Other questions we are interested in include:

1. How is performance changing in response to networked computing
technologies (mobile, satellite/GPS, internet)?

2. What is the relationship of 'real-time' computing to liveness and
performativity?

3. What is the relationship of agency and authorship to performativity? Is
performativity synonymous with being an actor, agent, or author? Is
“performer” another label for the user/viewer/visitor/ of an interactive
work?

4. As the use of the network becomes more social, adopting the peer-to-peer
model, what does this imply for performance and net.art as performative?

5. How are network processes (algorithmic, procedural rule-based systems,
generative) influencing or being investigated by performance?

6. How are networked concepts as modes of communication (granularity, open
source, emergent behavior, affordance, latency, ubiquitous computing)
impacting performance?

-- Helen and Michelle

=====================

=> http://www.laberintos.org/newgeographies/42.195%20--%2026.2.pdf

Other questions we are interested in include:

1. How is performance changing in response to networked computing
technologies (mobile, satellite/GPS, internet)?

2. What is the relationship of 'real-time' computing to liveness and
performativity?

3. What is the relationship of agency and authorship to performativity? Is
performativity synonymous with being an actor, agent, or author? Is
³performer² another label for the user/viewer/visitor/ of an interactive
work?

4. As the use of the network becomes more social, adopting the peer-to-peer
model, what does this imply for performance and net.art as performative?

5. How are network processes (algorithmic, procedural rule-based systems,
generative) influencing or being investigated by performance?

6. How are networked concepts as modes of communication (granularity, open
source, emergent behavior, affordance, latency, ubiquitous computing)
impacting performance?

-- Helen and Michelle

=> http://www.laberintos.org/newgeographies/42.195%20--%2026.2.pdf

====================

what about audience?
is the auditor(audient) now more of a participant in the performance than
before?

komninos

komninos zervos

http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
http://users.bigpond.net.au/mangolegs
 http://spokenword.blog-city.com
"Our Workplace Rights are NOT for sale."

=========================

*Response to proposed definitions posed by Helen & Michelle*

It is hard to raise questions about anything adopting the meme "locative media" today, because it seems to have overwhelming memetic momentum behind it. It is in fact a term that I actively use, but I am also suspicious of it. (I hope to make a case for being a bit suspect as a healthy one...) So, that I bring this up in a discussion of networked performance may not be spot on; and I hope Helen and Michelle will forgive me as I struggle to pose this as a question re networked performance.

As I read the short history, "Locative Media" got its traction, indeed maybe its coin, from a speculative essay by Drew Hemment to the nettime list on January 8th 2004. As he defines it, "[l]ocative media uses portable, networked, location aware computing devices for user-led mapping and artistic interventions in which geographical space becomes its canvas." (http://amsterdam.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0401/msg00021.html) In that essay, Hemment deals primarily with cell phones as the technical agent (the thing in the user's hand), and speculates about how artists might insert themselves in/against/with the emerging networks of surveillance that the handsets make possible given the handset's location awareness and the ability to report user location to the networks that enable the devices. But also looking in his definition, "networks" and "mapping" (which we can read as the data transport layer and the presentation layer) also appear. Read Drew's essay and you will discover that he also drills to the formal base and reason for existence of any digital media: data. "The mobile phone is carried on the body, and so connects the individual directly to ever proliferating databases, operating simultaneously as identifier and electronic tagging device: it is a wearable technology that places the Panoptic eye in your pocket and the body within the circuits of dataveillance." So from its coining, the panoptic politics of locative media were clearly foregrounded along with a fairly thorough formal perspective on the medium.

Patrick Licthy (in Building a Culture of Ubiquity, http://www.voyd.com/ubiq/) has proposed a trajectory from Screen->Hand->Body->Space: "The infosphere is now a representational spectre, moving in real time, but the physical world is now the interface, creating tightly linked heterotopic spaces instead of multiple bodies." I think we can stretch this model out even further, add to it, (and oversimplify the IT layers a bit) to Database->Logic*->Transport**->Screen***->Hand->Body->Space****, and note that this is actually a circular flow diagram with Space connecting back to Database; the world and its model. I am tempted to add "Place" to Space, as in "...Space->Place->Database...", but indeed, Place is just one attribute of Space that can be modeled; it exists today in an interesting and imho conceptually generative double mirror between existence in space (the real) and existence in database (the hyperreal). (I have written a few essays on the importance of the Database to Space and Space to Database connection, and how they interoperate with place. I view this connection as critically important and too often ignored. One text is a 2K2 essay speculating how database and GIS might play out in artistic practice in the landscape...)

So backing up a bit to "Locative Media", it has taken flight as an artworld meme with some or all, but not often more than, the following sub-components attached to it: (from Helen and Michelle) "urban areas... game[s]... city infrastructures... play spaces... geo-annotation projects...", as well as (off the top of my head) psychogeography, narrative space, interventions, happenings, network space, space as physical canvas, and mapping. (I like using "hotspot multimedia" as terminology for a lot of "locative media" work...)

So, the reason for my suspicion is that these configurations of mimetic connotations that currently guide practice do not always holistically address the whole formal infrastructure. Very interesting things that happen at the strange and novel interface (or cycle) between database and space, (where the physical reality of space and the physical hyperreality of database intersect and mutually generate each the other, admittedly catalyzed by the speed contemporary network communications technologies), often ends up overlooked. (My colleague Geri Wittig has an interesting essay that expands this concept into fields of complexity theory and biology examined globally: http://www.c5corp.com/research/complexsystem.shtml)

So (at last) this is what I am trying to ask a question about. (Thank you to anyone reading this far for your patience...) Does what happened to "Locative Media" in its brief trajectory as an artworld meme contain a larger warning for the conceptual and critical models through which we approach networked performance? Shouldn't we be suspicious, (especially post net art), that "network" is still a privileged assumption re our critical model of locative media and "networked" performace? Or in any positioning of any of the *individual* "layers" that make up the whole, for that matter? And although my expertise as a theorist is not politics, (past tactical dabbles asside), don't we need to take a holistic view of all of the formal layers impinging upon performance (today) to develop a political analysis of performance (today)? (Applause to Hemment for his recognition of the data layer!)

Ok, getting tired of myself... but...

Let's try an experiment with "networked performance". Would any of the following be complete (in the current situation, moving forward), if left by themselves?

Database Performance?
Business Logic Performance?
Presentation Layer Performance?
Site-specific performance (the historical meme for Place performance... well explored...)
Performance Art (Body... ditto above...)
Hand performance (Puppets? Or what some of you may accuse me of doing in this post;-)
Land art?

Curious as to your thoughts.

Cheers,
Brett

* Logic refers to "Business Logic" in program design.
** Transport of data - network - often missed in discussion of "network" is the fact and common usage of networks in distributed computational systems as, well, a bus. In other words, "network" in one sense merely connects the business or application layer logic (algorithms) on one system to the Presentation Layer (I/O) on another that happens to be somewhere else. There is no discrete computer. The more common way artists use "network" in under the rubric of computer mediated communication. I don't in any way discredit the importance of the latter, of course. But it is visible and well explored.
*** Screen - a proxy here for Presentation Layer, which importantly is not merely an output device, as implied by "Screen". We could replace this with Human Computer Interaction (HCI), or just interaction, such that "Screen->Hand" (or perhaps with sound and haptics "Screen->Hand->Body") are specified as partial representative of aspects of the Presentation Layer.
**** * ** ***
***** Maybe the terms "generative locative media" should be employed to separate locative media from the connotations of hotspot multimedia, mapping, geo-annotation, (in either the author-driven or collective-democratic forms of geo-annotation...), narrative, etc.

=====================

Helen and Michelle
I wish to say your proposions are so many intense questions, that it is barely
"answerable". Thre are many good points here like the idea of categorizing
without locking a frame for the crossing manifestations of performance.
I think that most of your questions can be answered with yes, it does, or will
do. On the other hand it is necessary to think that telematic performance or
networked - in general - is subject to criticism from the people who do
"traditional" performance for they argument one of the main traces of
performance is its liveness. It has to do with presence and would not have to
do with absence that signifies remote presence.
I do not agree with that, on the contrary. But arguments for Telepresence as a
kind of presence must have place. (I am not saying you did not mention that).
I am taking a copy of your post (it made 4 pages of Word btw) to show it to my
students for we are now in a struggle, in Brazil, to develop a more connected
performance action.
Oh, pardon me: only now I noticed I forgot to present myself and the reasons I
am posting here:
My name is Lucio Agra and I am one of the members of the crew of professors to
the Undergraduate course of Performance at the Faculty of Communication and
Body Arts at the Catholic University of Sao Paulo. The course was pioneered by
two colleagues, Carlos Gardin (Theatre) and Christine Greiner (Dance) who,
seven years ago, constructed this project. We delivered the third group of
Bachelors last year and we are going to the fourth. The project for the
performance section of the course was made by Renato Cohen, the most important
brazilian specialist in the field, unfortunately disappeared in 2003.
Expecting to continue his work, we are now dealing with one of his last
interests, which happens to be  telematic performance, exactly.
Best
Lucio Agra
Sao Paulo Brazil

=======================

Hello Komninos:

From what Michelle and I have seen on the blog, the answer is yes.
Increasingly the "audience" is becoming a participant(s) in the work.  Take
the musical work "Glimmer"  by Jason Freeman, for instance.   Freeman
engages the concert audience as musical collaborators in the shaping of the
performance. Each audience member is given a light stick, which he can turn
on and off during the performance as a way of instructing the musicians. The
information is picked up by computer software (which analyses a video of the
audience's use of the light sticks) and the instructions conveyed to the
musicians. 

The New York Times review of this piece includes the following description
of the result: "As people flicked their lights in swirling, jabbing and
jittery patterns, the musicians played riffs, chords, sustained tones,
honks, squiggles and whatnot…The problem was, the light show was infinitely
more interesting than the music. Still, the audience seemed elated by the
experience."   

And this, I believe is the point -- not a predetermined composition
perfectly played for a listening audience, but an experience for those
participating, which in this case, as the reviewer acknowledged, delighted
the participants.

-- Helen

=========================

 Hi Brett:

Thanks for your long post. I did read through to the end and will again.
This is just a quick note to say that in fact the categories you mention --
psychogeography,narrative space, interventions, happenings, network space,
space as physical canvas, and mapping
all exist on the networked_performance blog.

Michelle's and my interest was in finding  categories that would include
most of the work on the blog -- the categories we chose, as I think we said,
are not fixed. And they  need to be considered permeable. Already many works
could be placed in more than one.

More later,

Helen

==========================

*Responding to NY Times quote*

I have read you on one other occassion where you pointed out the importance
of "experience" to some particular works. It was salient, given the nature
of the interactive works you were commenting on at the time. The context is
similar, above, in that the work you refer to is interactive.

And you're getting at something that many seem to miss, concerning
interactive work. You and the reviewer distinguish between a perspective
outside the interaction and a perspective from within the interaction, ie, a
perspective of observation and a perspective of experience. It seems quite a
bit of the 'meaning' is carried through the experience, in the above sort of
work.

Creating works that are dynamically responsive/performative may then be a
bit like the difference between a fixed sculpture and a reactive person. The
sculpture is often more beautiful and, as object of contemplation, reads
quite different from contemplating a person. And, again, we do less
contemplation of people than experience of them (for better or worse).

ja

============================

Dear Helen

I'm trying to place my own drawn out practice into your categories but without success. When (at the end of your last post) you say

which in this case, as the reviewer acknowledged, delighted the participants.

I began to wonder if we should talk a little about what a 'performance' is. Over the last 10 years, my primitive, ragged and messy 'Flight of Ducks' has been a source of delight not only for me but for all sorts of people who appear more than willing to engage or participate with me and its manifold content in ways that suggest a long slow performance. I remember years ago that Kominos used the term 'flesh meeting' to describe that entropy or progression that inevitably led towards face to face contact. It's a phenomenon of networked activity that seems to be often overlooked. When it happens the flesh meeting, as a component of the performance, happens offstage (off-line). The network establishes the conditions for it to happen in some cases - for years.

http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD0357.html

Maybe there is room for another category that can encompass this kind of networked experience? I just can't think of a term right now. But it is very human, propositional and incomplete. For all I know, some of us may be engaging it it here.

Best wishes

Simon

Simon Pockley
Flight of Ducks: http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/
[email] simonpockley@hotmail.com
[voice] 0418 575 525

===========================

thankyou helen

your original post was great, very informative and i realise it is a first 
step into this field and not the final word.
it is difficult for me each month, as it might be for others on the list, 
to familiarise myself quickly with the specialty field that is being 
highlighted.
your opening post quickly framed the whole discussion and provided a 
quick-start primer for my better understanding of the topic.
i did not see it as prescriptive of the field but offering enough 
description for further research. 

lucio's point about the 'liveness' is an interesting one. your example of 
the lightbeam concert that engages the audience by their control over the 
direction of the music being played is a valuable one. i wonder if you 
have an example where the audience, artists, and participants are all 
on-line without that live content?

i remember reading about stelarc's performance hanging from a warehouse 
roof by hooks, his body full of stimulators, making his muscles twitch, 
and the sensors which recorded his neurological responses that got fed 
into a synthesizer and expressed as music, all being controlled by inputs 
from remote computers on the web, or was i just dreaming.....

when i first started making cyberpoems in 1995 my goal was to remove 
myself from the performance, i had been a professional performance poet 
for ten years prior to this and was very aware of the importance of my 
presence in the live situation. i was criticised by the print based poets 
who claimed, it was my personality that made the poems work. true i was 
the first interpreter of my own work and so sort of set the authoritative 
interpretation.  so,  i was keen to make my cyberpoems perform on their 
own as digital animated sonic experiences whilst trying to capture the 
excitement of live performance using new devices of engagement.  but the 
field you are describing seems completely different to what my concerns 
were. would i be right in saying the works you refer to are using the 
medium as the performance, and the performers are just the early 
interpreters of the work?

cheers
komninos

komninos zervos

http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
http://users.bigpond.net.au/mangolegs
http://spokenword.blog-city.com
"Our Workplace Rights are NOT for sale."
_______________________________________________

=========================

Hi Komninos and everyone else:

The question about liveness is something that should be addressed. You may
remember that in our original post we defined networked performance as "any
live event that is network enabled."

There can be no question about the "liveness" of the work I described last
evening. "Glimmer" took place in a traditional concert hall. It was an
interaction between participators (the audience) and the performers, all
live and present.

I'm going to take a deep breath and say that I think the same can be said
about pretty much all the work we are looking at on the blog. Under the
telematic category we listed work by Mann and Teran. My hope is that they
will soon enter the list and talk to you directly about their work. But let
me say this much:

In the past they worked with the Waag Society to produce a work (I think it
was actually done at least three times) called The Telematic Dinner Party.
There were 30 people involved, fifteen (very much alive and present) having
dinner in Amsterdam, fifteen (ditto) in Toronto.  The point of this work was
not performance as I think most of us understand it. There was no Internet
audience. The point was to eat, have fun, tell stories, and to enhance the
social interaction between the distant diners by making use of a number of
tele-kinetic objects that transmitted physical presence and social gestures
across space and time.

For instance: throughout the meal, the guests made toasts and speeches using
telematic wine glasses. In each of the two cities, Toronto and Amsterdam,
there were four sensor glasses and four mechanical clinker glasses on the
dinner table. Guests in either space could pick up a spoon and strike one of
the sensor glasses in the manner of calling guests attention to a short
speech or toast. This signal was picked up and relayed across the ocean via
the Internet, where it was then sent to one of the mechanical clinkers.
These responded by striking a glass with a motorized spoon. In this way, the
Glass Clinkers - like a number of other telematic devices - provided a
strong sense of both kinetic and sonic telepresence between the two spaces.
What clinked on one side of the Atlantic, clinked on the other. Streaming
video and audio were used to bring the two parties closer together.

Mann and Teran are now doing distributed picnics using wireless, which I
hope they'll talk about. But for me the points are:  1) here are a bunch of
very much alive and present people eating and having a great time; and
communicating with each other across distance in as many ways as are
available to them   2) there is no traditional audience  3) there is no
reliance on the screen and keyboard. 4. the point is communication and
social interaction and how to do it so that you feel closer...

Under our second category -- anyone of the works -- take umbrella.net. Open
the umbrella and you have (assuming there are others around with the same
kind of umbrella) an ad hoc (wireless) network. Once again: communication
between people in a given area, and social interaction.

Very much alive and present, I think.

Re the suggestion that we try and define what we mean by performance, I'm
all for it... 

But, enough for now,

- Helen

=========================

Hi - Stelarc's performances - there were early ones - that involved hooks - I think 16? or so were completed - the online work/networking work is different - as far as I know, no hooks -

I'm following this discussion with great interest - wondering if anyone can address the issue of (Levinas') alterity - the issue of face-to-face; it seems to me that one of the characteristics of, say, email, or net sex, or online performance, is that the kill/delete/dev/null keys can be used quite quickly - in other words, one can tailor one's online experience by absolutely elminating the negative - but in everyday life, there is always the possibility of (Sartrean) negation - of having, so to speak, one's existence annihilated, one turned down, without recourse (thinking of what happens when one asks someone out and is refused, or for that matter, an unfortunate encounter with Simon Penny last night, who basically looked through me and saw an imaginary). This is also the realm of the stand-up comic, who is in the situation of a wager, really a wager of existence, with her or his audience.

There is a terror in the real, in other words, a terror of negation, that plays only a secondary role in online performance (performance in the broadest sense).

Any comments greatly appreciated; apologies if irrelevant -

Alan

( URLs/DVDs/CDroms/books/etc. see http://www.asondheim.org/advert.txt )

=======================

A quick reply:

Alan, a lot of the work we're seeing on the networked_performance blog
invites people to take part in activities on the street. And therefore to
confront the real and any dangers it may hold.

-- Helen

======================

Hi everyone,
I just want to briefly tell about one of the issues I've approached in my own work and would like to hear if anyone has any thoughts on this. I think the basic premise in these networked performances is physical interaction, i.e. not directly through the computer (that's what makes them "performances"). But most of them seem to involve voluntary actions from a certain public. I'm more interested in the idea of involuntary interaction. Using common actions without the participants necessarily being aware that they're interacting with a work of art or in a way that they don't have actual control over how they interact (for instance, by turning a work environment into an interactive space).

I haven't really formed any deep concepts around this (besides feeling that this is, in a way, a very "pure" form of interaction), so I would be interested in hearing Helen's and others ideas on this.

best regards,
Pall Thayer

======================

As Helen confirms, Glimmer, like many other works on the blog, is representative of a transformation of the audience / spectator (the seeing / listening observer ) to an active, physically engaged participant in the artistic process. The structure
of the work casts the audience as _performers_ in the work. In such cases the artist is creating a framework, or an 'open work', within which the audience is needed to perform to realize the work. Without the audience as performers there is no work,
only the possibility. 

As we have noted in our initial post, we see the historical antecedents of this current work in the art practice that emerged in the mid 20th century, in particular the 'open work' and the practice of 'art as life' which emerged from Cage and Kaprow
and teh Happenings and Fluxus movements of the 50's and  60's.

This leads us to the relation between the open work and open source as formative practice and its relation to performance/performativity.

=====================

There may be a more palpable experience of the visceral in a face to face experience but audience members are also free to  - and do – intervene in the reception of a work by leaving a performance when the content is not to their agreement for
whatever reason. This is the same level of control to disengage or to negate in an online environment. As you also note in your additional examples as well, there are many experiences in daily social interaction in which such negation or dismissal
occurs outside of networked or technological mediation. It would seem the Sartrean negation to which you refer is independent of technology and specifically online performances. 

What Helen and I have found fascinating in our observations, and which she notes in a prior post with the example of the telematic dinner party http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000479.html, is that there is a range of new work that is both
live and using networks to bring people together in a social context in which the objective is creating a context for audience _experience_  rather than creating the context for audience observation of a performer where the focus is the performer’s
body as a ‘site of truth’.  

This raises fundamental questions about the nature of Performance, performance, and performativity. And as suggested in a prior post, a definition of performance is needed, which I will post separately. 

Helen does also note on her reply to this post that many of the works take place in the physical world, as opposed to solely in an online space, and as such confront the dangers, or terror, of the real. A case in point is the company Blast Theory
whose Can You See Me Know urban game pits live performers in an urban city  environment against online players who attempt to "catch" them. The technology is such that the players in the urban street are running around with GPS tracked handhelds
that convey their physical coordinates to the online game space where they are pursued. In an effort to evade the online player, whom the urban street runners see as a tracking beacon on their handheld, they run through the real streets, dodging
real cars and obstacles to evade capture. One player recounts their concern for a player's safety when they heard the traffic and the runner's reply and feared the runner had been hit by a car. (Streaming audio from the runner's makes the online
player's experience both more connected and more real.)

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000033.html
http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000755.html

===========================

Pall, 
In response to ‘involuntary interaction’ or responsiveness that participants may not be aware of, what you describe brings to mind a responsive, sentient or context aware environment (also referred to as smart architecture but I like ‘environment’,
or ‘space’ as it has a more open connotation). The work of Chris Salter and Usman Haque come to mind. 

In the case of Chris Salter’s ‘Suspension Threshold’ the light levels of the space are raised and lowered in response to the aggregate breathing patterns of the audience, which he describes as ‘an environment that lies barely on the threshold of
human perception’. Chris is also an eloquent writer and sums up a lot of compelling aspects of ubiquitous / pervasive / ambient  computing from a sociotechnical or technocultural perspective.

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000053.html 

In the case of Usman Haque, who is trained as an architect and who sites his work in architectural practice, his proposed work ‘Haunt’ seeks to create the parapsychological effects of the feeling of being haunted. He describes the work as ‘using
humidity, temperatures and electromagnetic and sonic frequencies that parapsychologists have associated with haunted spaces to build an environment that feels "haunted".’ By gauging biofeedback via galvanic skin response meters a dynamic database
modeled on learning algorithms learns what is effective in creating the sensation of feeling haunted. The adaptive system responds in real-time to the physiological state of visitors. 

The project focuses on how the psychology of human perception gives rise to the construction of space. See also his project ‘Scents of a Space’ using scent in three-dimensional space.

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000188.html

Usman Haque is also an interesting to reference in that he is engaged from the perspective of an architect. This is parallel to what Helen and I propose through the blog, which is to look at the body of works on the blog from the perspective of
‘performance’. We ask our selves how and why any particular work is performance and what specifically makes it performance or performative. I’ll take this up in a separate post and elaborate on the earlier question to define what we mean by
performance and will return to your proposition that what makes this body of works performances is their physical interaction. 

I’m also interested for you to elaborate on your example of ‘turning a work environment into an interactive space’.  Also, since a number of your works are featured on the blog – ‘Hlemmur in C’, ‘Autodrawn’ and ‘Fictional Space’  - I’d like to hear
your thoughts on being included on the blog by which we propose your works are performative. Do you see these works as performances or performative? How would you understand or rationalize them as such?  Though, we should be explaining our
justification to you, eh?!  Hopefully, this will emerge as we endeavor to further define networked performance.

=====================

Hi Michelle and thanks for the great response. I am familiar with the work of both Chris Salter and Usman Haque. But I think what I was talking about (or at least what I meant to talk about) is slightly different because they are working with environments that respond to the public within it making that public aware of an interactive element. This will cause people to change the way they behave. They'll start "looking" for that interactive element and try to figure out what triggers what. At this point, I'm more interested in capturing "normal" behaviour. So it's more about a sensitive environment rather than a responsive environment. The work doesn't respond to whoever interacts with it, it simply records or transmits the information to another viewing public. This ties into some ideas I've been working with in regards to abstraction for quite some time.

I'm very happy that my work has been included in the blog. The projects definitely involve performance. They aren't necessarily networked but ideally, they would be. For instance, in the case of "Hlemmur in C" the original idea was to use track the movements of employees inside the busstation and that the "base" point for each would differ. That way we would've been able to set up a server inside the station to stream the data out live. However we couldn't afford the super expensive GPS devices that would have worked indoors (the place has big skylights but we couldn't get regular GPS devices to work reliably enough). So I came up with the idea of tracking taxi's instead and collecting the data for the "simulated" live stream. The interesting thing about the taxi's is that even though they were fully aware of the fact that they were participants in a work of art, they couldn't really do anything about it. They have to go where the passenger wants to go and where that passenger wants to go will affect who the next passenger is and so on and so on. Sort of a cascading chaotic effect.

Fictional Space was basically just a "sketch" of some ideas I was working on. It involved using bluetooth to track the proximity of someone carrying a bluetooth phone. The "performer" in the piece was myself, so I couldn't help but to be "aware" of the fact that I was being tracked (by myself). But the idea was to use this one-dimensional spatial data to create a sort of "pallette" of data to mix into a two or three dimensional representation of space so that the result would represent a space that doesn't really exist. I did a somewhat more refined version later called "A painting of three places" located here: http://pallit.lhi.is/3places  But these are some ideas I'm still working on. It's my current research.

Autodrawn is the only one of these that are actually networked. The idea there is that anyone who happens to be driving on one of those freeways at the time that the traffic cam takes a picture and my program happens to randomly select that location, becomes a "performer" in the work. But it kind of stretches the concept of something being "interactive". In that sense it's a bit similar to a little sketch piece I did a couple of years ago called "Headlines". It was a program that would constantly read and parse the local headlines from the website of Iceland's main newspaper and play them as notes. It was presented as an interactive piece explaining that if you wanted to interact with it, all you had to do was make the domestic headlines in Icelandic news.

And yes, I wouldn't mind hearing your reasons for documenting these works as networked performances.

best r.
Pall

========================

There is an experiment like this, made here, in Brazil, first in Rio, then  in
Sao Paulo by a guy named Michel Melamed (it seems he is now performing in
France). The performer is connected to electric terminals and these are
connected to sensors conducted by microphones. Depending on the noises made by
the audience, the performer receives slight electrical shocks. The problem is
that the texts recited by Melamed (which he writes) are extremely funny. The
audience is helpless on a continuous laughing. It becomes a weird situation.
http://revbravo.com.br/impressa.php?edit=td&numEd=89 has some information about
it, though it is in portuguese.
The play is called "Regurgitofagia" (untraslatable word, something like
anthropophagic and puking out at the same time). It is an allusion to the
famous Anthropophagic Manifesto and Theory of the brazilian Modernist Oswald de
Andrade. And, in the same time to the years of dictatorship and torture.
But it goes far more than the dark humour one could imagine. And the responses
of the audience were somewhat very different from one city to another.
best
Lucio BR

===============

Helen and friends
I think you reached the point with perfection. My intention mentioning
"liveness" was to provoke this kind of discussion. You see, I give classes to
students that come from theatre and dance tradition and the obstacles they
oppose to telematic performance are always related to this problem of "live
presence". You example is fantastic. I remember an experiment much more modest
was made in Bauhaus in Dessau, Germany, 1997, between a female dancer and a
male dancer in Brussels. They divided the screen in the middle of their bodies
and they constructed a hybrid with the two halfes of their bodies. It was far
in 1997. and the connections were not so good. Unfortunately I have no
references of this work, but it was very interesting. I mentioned this
experiment to my friend, the specialist in performance and it seems made him
interested in this kind of connection. So that in 2002 he made a teleconference
of performances with the german researcher Johannes Birringer. It was located
simultanously in Sao Paulo, United States (do not remember the city) and
Brasilia.
Many thanks for your brilliant answer.
best
Lucio BR

====================

At this point, I'm more interested in capturing "normal"
behaviour. So it's more about a sensitive environment rather than a
responsive environment. The work doesn't respond to whoever interacts
with it, it simply records or transmits the information to another
viewing public. This ties into some ideas I've been working with in
regards to abstraction for quite some time.

Pall, can you talk about this more.  I love the idea of a sensitive
environment, although I'm pretty sure a responsive one could be sensitive as
well.

As I read you, I might walk into a room, do something that triggers
something else but never know it. In the meantime another audience is
viewing the results of my unconscious behavior in the room ?..

Autodrawn is a bit like this, isn't it? While human interaction doesn’t play
a part and It’s the computer that’s “performing as the intermediary of a
live moment,”  i.e.,  the computer is playing artist in real time, sketching
images seen on online webcams.  The computer is responding to the
"unconscious" behavior of motorists on the autobahn.  And their behavior is
being monitored and rendered for us, another audience.

Or am I way off track?

- Helen

======================

lucio, helen, michelle, greetings
i would like to ask, in relation to liveness, the role of the audience in
adding to a live performance.
how does one capture that energy that builds through a performance, in the
exchanges between performer and audience, that ultimately impact on the
performer and performance?
that energy is something that even a video recording doesn't actually
capture, that presence in the atmosphere around you of a certain something,
non-physical but present, that you feel moving back and forth from audience
to performer.

komninos

komninos zervos
http://www.gu.edu.au/ppages/k_zervos
http://users.bigpond.net.au/mangolegs
 http://spokenword.blog-city.com
"Our Workplace Rights are NOT for sale."

=====================

it's something lots of proximal performances don't manage to capture either ; ) presence - the holy grail of theatre ... how to create it when you're not even in the same hemisphere as your audience? i know that we've achieved it - sometimes - but i don't profess to know the magic formula.

one thing we've learned is to make it clear that it's live, so the audience knows they are occupying the same time-space as the performers. interaction, response, typos, lag, glitches, technical hitches, mistakes - all of these contribute to the liveness. live work is so much more risky than prerecorded, but if it's indistinguishable from prerecorded, then it can lose that energy.

interaction is something that people expect & hunger for in the online world, unlike theatre audiences who often shrink from "audience participation". we've found that when we create a role for the audience, they grab it & run with it. they don't even define themselves as audience, they perceive themselves as an integral part of the performance. the presence is definitely there in those situations. the work is not complete until the audience enters into it.

(another) helen : )

======================

Helen: There have been some interesting experiments done by musicians and
composers. In “interaXis” (2001, 2002), for instance, Jesse Gilbert with
Mark Trayle and Wadada Leo Smith addressed the challenge of the multiple
times and dislocations introduced with networked technologies.

The problem, as Gilbert said,  was that often the sounds coming from remote
locations were/are indistinguishable from the contributions of on-site
performers, creating an ambiguous space that confuses rather than elucidates
the interaction between the dispersed ensemble.

In each of the two “interaXis” performing spaces, Los Angeles and New York,
the live performers were in static positions while  the remote performers
were presented through a spatializing system,  thus creating a perceptual
distinction between the two halves of the ensemble and an aural analog for
the streaming process, symbolizing the movement of the audio stream between
the sites.

There was more to it than that, of course, and they are not the only ones
experimenting. In fact, there are  so many experiments being done with more
musical works that I often wish there could be one place where information
on them could be exchanged..

interaXis of course is an experiment with sound.

The Mann-Teran approach -- telematic objects -- see my earlier post -- is
another way.  Michelle Teran has promised to post soon and I'm hoping she
will write about this (liveness/presence) and how their work deals with
dispersed interaction.

- Helen 

=========================

Hi Helen, Michelle and all,

Please forgive my long prose here. I'm justjoining the discussion and
catching up a bit on the different threads so if I repeat things that
have already been said, please bear with me :) In the first posts you
raise a huge amount of questions and I would like to try and address
one of them. First, I appreciate that the definition of "network"
here is more broadly painted than just focusing on the
techno-glossalia of network technology. Having said this, however, it
might be fruitful to examine a bit what we mean by "performance" in a
more critical/philosophical context and how it could be distinguished
from other forms of static, object-based (and here I include
software) creative practice.

Indeed, unlike other uniquely digital forms such as the "database
art" or "code-based art" or software-based art or what have you,
performance in its traditional sense as a "situated" event that takes
place in real time and in physically situated space before a public
(I'll get back to these things in a second), is not solely dependent
on "technology" to constitute itself. Rather, it involves
coordinating and choreographing all sorts of messy, uncontrollable
things like space, time, human beings (both spectators and "players")
as well as electronic-mechanical-material-computational technologies;
things that can't be rendered, represented or reduced to the level of
inscription (or code). In other words, inscriptive systems like
digital computers can't necessarily capture or (re)produce all of the
unpredictable and potentially unstable elements that constitute a
real time event: gestures, noises, rhythmic fluctuations, shifts in
ambient phenomena (light, temperature, amplitude), movement and
dynamism of materials, changes in audience affect, and so on. The
interesting thing is that performance cannot be solely articulated,
let alone "embodied" by the kinds of schemas or modes of inscription
that tend to characterize other digital forms of artistic practice-in
fact, it is resolutely not digital. Of course, this doesn't preclude
the deployment of technologies, including digital systems, into an
event. This is an age-old question, regardless of whether we are
talking about network transfer protocols, sensors, fly rails or the
architecture of seeing that is constructed by the proscenium arch. A
quick glance at theatrical history, for example, reveals centuries of
humans grappling with machines in the context of the stage. The
"technology" of the crane that brought the gods into the scene of 5th
century Athenian drama was called the "machina" by the Greeks. So
already in the West as well as East (to make two big cuts), the
machine was implicit in theatrical performance. The question is
whether or not the deployment of such technologies actually has an
ontological effect on the experience of a performative event. This
question we should bookend for the moment.

But perhaps it could be useful for us to first look at how we define
and interpret performance across different scales-from the micro
level, so to speak, to the macro. First, we usually tend to think
about performance from the macro standpoint of the "performing arts,"
that is as I said earlier, a temporally and physically situated event
that takes place within the presence of a spectator (we'll get to the
live issue in a second). Here we might like to recall the etymology
of the word theater (not just what we think of today as dramatic
performances) which in Greek was theatron-architecturally, the
audience space where seeing could take place in the Greek
ampitheater. So, already the performing arts in this traditional
sense involve a relationship between event and viewer. This is the
specific context which performance is used most of the time, as a
live event.

Since there is already stuff flying on the list about liveness,
please allow me to me add my two cents in as well. There is so much
bruhaha about the concept of "liveness" (in the sense of the
assertion of presence) as the distinguishing factor of the performing
arts. The first is the common argument that if something is live it
is presumed to be happening in the here and now, in front of us-this
is the cornerstone of the old debates about presence. Thus, the
introduction of technical apparatuses into the live event complicates
this pure situation-obviously, that which is pre-recorded is not live
or within the context of distance-based events facilitated over
computer networks, one side is physically present while the other is
subjected to latency. We somehow assume that technical apparatuses of
reproduction (i.e., cameras, computers, etc.,) tend to somehow rob
the live event of presence. This strain of argumentation brings up
impossible to answer questions, for example, like how many
milliseconds of delay does it take before something is deemed as not
live?

But the second assumption inherent in the word liveness is a bit more
buried-one that is layered with a strong anthropocentric bias. Now,
if we use liveness as the distinguishing factor it most of the time
refers to humans (and sometimes, animals) performing (which are live)
in real time and real space, here and now, but not to machines (which
are not human and thus dead-i.e., their animism is banished). This
is, of course, a nod to people like Latour who believe that the
animism of non-human systems has been patently ignored by social
theories of knowledge. Yet, if we use liveness in its other sense, as
something which is "alive" then this also assumes that we have the
ability to state what is not "live," which again in the context of
most discussions around the "live" performing arts focuses on that
which is not human. But, in the case of technical systems, then, how
do we describe the presence of a crane, or a mechanical or kinetic
device that exhibits motion and that is embedded into a theatrical
performance or, more to our context, a "network" (meaning here, an ad
hoc assembly of devices that through communication protocols can send
packets of encoded data back and forth between each other) of
wireless remote sensors picking up motions in a defined space,
shipping those numbers to another machine and having them ultimately
rendered into some sort of audio/visual output or "response." Are
these not live systems? So I it would be good to leave this well
trodden territory (performance studies has been grappling with this
over the last 30 years) as well as whether performance is now more
"mediated" than before or less live and sidestep these origin
questions in light of perhaps more provocative things that pull us
back towards the co-entanglements that occur between us humans and
machinic systems in artistic-aesthetic contexts.

Here I would like to examine a more nuanced notion of performance
that might be more useful for the discussion here; one that isn't
necessarily related to the performing arts at first site but that
might give us some clues on how to understand what role and affect
such "machines" (not just mechanical devices) have in the context of
performance as an art form. First, I'd like to use machinic in the
sense that Felix Guattari used it: not just referring to technical
systems (although they obviously play a big role) but all kinds of
apparatuses that have a kind of enunciative power-that is, they have
ability to force change or make marks in the world. What are examples
of such apparatuses? Well, language is one. This takes us to people
like J.L. Austin and the notion of speech acts; what he labeled
"performatives." Performatives are expressions or "utterances" that
don't just describe or represent an action in language, they actually
perform or activate somethingŠlike when one person in marriage says
"I do." This doesn't just indicate something, it acts as a material
force to change something. Language thus has a material quality but
what about other kinds of machines?

Another way this enuciative ability can be seen involves the idea of
agency-that things can "speak" (not just linguistically) and thus
catalyze a shift because they literally act as a force in the world.
This is what the sociologist of knowledge Andrew Pickering labels as
"material agency" - that things in the world exert material influence
and force: scientific instruments, for example, or the weather or
digital computers or whatever. There is something inherently powerful
and concrete about this notion of materiality of agencies and how
this materiality is enunciated through physical forces that mark the
world. Such "performances" are inherently embodied (yet another
distinguishing factor)-that is, they deal with something that is
experienced or, to borrow a phrase from Natalie Depraz and Francisco
Varela, "unfolds in an operative or immanent mode." Depraz and
Varela's notion aims to define what we mean by the word experience.
The idea of something that is immanent suggests that it unfolds
before us (like experience), in the "specious present" as William
James called it. Unfolding implies temporality but in the case of
materials exerting forces, such force also implies temporality, due
to dynamism and motion. So, perhaps performance might be
characterized by the immanent, real time expression of material
agency or better still, material utterances. Again, we don't
necessarily have to restrict the discussion to physical matter;
language, economic systems, etc., are not just composed of physical
material. This immanent quality potentially suggests an interesting
way of thinking about the ways in which performance grapples with
present experience that unfolds in an a posteriori way (but not
necessarily "presence" or the live). For our purposes, maybe we can
begin to imagine performance not only as an artificially constructed
event (all of the performances described in the blanket notion of
"networked performance") but also the context and act by and in which
different kinds of human and non-human material forces are
co-entangled with each other (Pickering calls is a dance of agencies)
and, in a sense, "co-produce" each other.

So, out of this context, the question I would like to pose for the
purposes of this discussion is what kinds of performances (and, by
fiat, experiences) are taking place in the various examples of work
that you both bring up as being representative of "network" (or
machinic) performance? What kinds of entanglements are occurring
between the different human and non-human forces? How do the machines
deployed generate affect, both on the side of the creators and the
public?  How and why does that affect matter?

best,
cs.

--
Christopher Salter, Ph.D.
e: chris@clsalter.com, csalter@gmx.net
w: http://clsalter.com

========================

Before seeing this mornings news I was all set to write a lengthy, happy response to this but now I'm angry and depressed and more convinced than ever that a war on Iraq is not a "war on terrorism".

Your understanding of what I said is point on, Helen. But perhaps I should clearify what I refer to on the one hand as a sensitive environment and a responsive one on the other. Yes, a responsive environment is also a sensitive environment but a sensitive one doesn't have to be responsive to the actual participant. I guess, the sensitive environment is always going to be responsive as well, but it doesn't necessarily have to respond to the person or people interacting with it.

Now I'm going to watch the news. Hopefully I'll be in a better mood later and write more.

Pall

=======================

Hi Chris:

Thank you for your long wonderful post. A number of us had been thinking
about taking on the question of performance, but (and I speak here only for
myself) I was both uncertain where to begin and even more uncertain that
what I have to say is significant, given the long history of discussion on
the subject in which I have had no part.  But your post has wakened subjects
that are of great interest to me -- and I hope others will feel the same way
and  join in the discussion.

Questions have been raised already to which your post gives answers. For
instance Komninos' 7/06/05 post:

"how does one capture that energy that builds through a performance, in the
exchanges between performer and audience, that ultimately impact on the
performer and performance?that energy is something that even a video
recording doesn't actually capture, that presence in the atmosphere around
you of a certain something, non-physical but present, that you feel moving
back and forth from audience to performer."

to which yours below offers some sort of answer:

it (performance) involves coordinating and choreographing all sorts of
messy, uncontrollable things like space, time, human beings (both spectators
and "players") as well as electronic-mechanical-material-computational
technologies; things that can't be rendered, represented or reduced to the
level of inscription (or code). In other words, inscriptive systems like
digital computers can't necessarily capture or (re)produce all of the
unpredictable and potentially unstable elements that constitute a
real time event: gestures, noises, rhythmic fluctuations, shifts in
ambient phenomena (light, temperature, amplitude), movement and
dynamism of materials, changes in audience affect, and so on.

Beyond that it seems to me to offer an explanation for the number of
discipline-based networked performances (dance, theater, music) we see.
ie., those that "deploy" technologies, while maintaining their integrity as
dance, music, theater.

With full respect for this work, my interests have always run toward those
works that move us away from the more traditional notions of performance and
toward something that hasn't happened yet.  Sonic City is an example. Sonic
City could be classified as "generative music"; it is generative music, but
its designers have  added parameters to music-making that are not
conventionally associated with music and that enlarge the ideas of how music
is generated and where. Sonic City is a system that generates electronic
music in real time by walking through and interacting with the urban
environment -- in other words,  public space, mobility and everyday behavior
are crucial.  The music is personal -- it is your music, no one elses. You
are the audience.    And it is made possible by a "one-size-fits-all"
jacket.  (Think of the categories Michelle and I set out.. this one bridges
three..)   

Human mobility, the city, and a wearable jacket, where  "(... the assembly
of devices that through communication protocols can send
packets of encoded data back and forth between each other)" can be found --
"wireless remote sensors picking up motions in a defined space,
shipping those numbers to another machine and having them ultimately
rendered into some sort of audio/visual output or "response."  In this case
personal music, an experience for the wearer...

I appreciate the fact that my example may not be displaying the fully
"nuanced" character of performance that you are getting at in the final part
of your post... but it does fit the idea of performance as "an artificially
constructed event ..." and it fits  "the context and act by and in which
different kinds of human and non-human material forces are
co-entangled with each other and, in a sense, "co-produce" each other."

I think I could give you many examples from the work on the blog  -- but
maybe this will do for the time.

Thank you, Chris, for taking on the very difficult business of describing
performance. I haven't answered any of your questions (yet). I am  thinking
about them -- and hope we can soon get a discussion going around them.

-- Helen

=======================

Hi, Komninos
I don´t know, but it seems Helen and the others would agree with me in the idea
that it IS possilble to capture "that presence in the atmosphere around you of
a certain something" and I give an example that comes from my mind exactly now
and has to do with you precisely. Every time I show to my students, your little
movie about your name (k0mninos-kom-kom-I'm not a komunist etc) it evokes me
your presence. Obviously it happens because I saw you laughing and performing.
To another one who did not see you, though, the power of your work turns to be
the power of evoking some traces of your presence which are quite similar to
those that someone who knows you, may experience.
That was, btw, the thesis defended by lots of network performers, i. e, the idea
that we are entering a new conception of presence (expanded) which gives birth
also to a new concept of (expanded) memory.
best
Lucio BR

===============================

Hi all: 

I want to pick up on Chris’ post and write a bit about active objects and
(if I get that far today) responsive environments. Two projects come
immediately to mind. The first is Andrew Shoben’s Benches and Bins; the
second, The Table: Childhood by Max Dean and Raffaetto D’Andrea. (1984-2001)

Benches and Bins, which was launched in June this year, involves six or
seven park benches installed at various locations in a park in Cambridge,
England, and close by, the same number of bins positioned to collect
rubbish.  Their mission according to the arts organization, The Junction, is
“to help passers-by enjoy a moment’s relaxation.” I think
“engagement” is a better word because these benches and bins connect with
humans.  Each is able to roam freely in the large public piazza in front of
The Junction. They can move independently or flock, and drift across the
space. They sing when the sun comes out and sometimes they laugh and giggle
and make rude noises. The benches love to be sat on and often take up
positions in new spaces to make themselves more attractive to potential
human sitters. Sometimes, when it rains, they move themselves to drier, more
protected areas of the square. At night they move toward the Junction Club
and make themselves available to those waiting to enter. They’re fun.
They’re attracted to one another; they’re pleasantly responsive to humans,
and according to Shoben, they’re “generative.” Over time they develop more
and more personality.
(http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/cambridgeshire/4077680.stm)

The Table in the Dean and Andrea work also interacts with people, but here
interaction takes a different turn, a little more disturbing to some, I’m
sure, than the benches in Shoben’s work.  The Table will choose one person –
one only -- from those who enter the room, and as long as that person
remains in the room, he or she will be the object of the Table’s attention.

The Table will monitor the visitor’s physical reactions. If the person is
unresponsive, it tries harder.  It might, for instance, initiate an action
enticing the viewer to copy it, or it might turn on its axis with a
pirouette; it might decide to chase – or even to flee. Once some kind of
relationship is established, the Table determines how to handle the
situation, whether lyrically or aggressively.

The Table switches the roles of viewer and object. The artwork and not the
viewer is in the position of choice. This in turn focuses the attention of
other viewers in the room on the person Table has chosen, making that person
the "object" of attention.
(http://www.fundacion.telefonica.com/at/vida/paginas/v4/etable.html)

For me there’s something inherently humorous in both works. I don’t know how
I’d feel if  Table pursued me, but on paper, they all make me laugh, which
means the idea of them engages my attention in a pleasing way, as I’m sure
the real objects do when you are near them.

Are they alive?  Well let’s just say that computation, telecommunication and
interface are slowly being incorporated into a variety of objects and spaces
and as they are, the long-standing idea that objects are dead is slowly
being turned on its head.

All for now,
Helen

=====================

Hi Helen, et al...

I want to quickly (and briefly) pick up this question of animism. One
interesting source of inspiration dealing with this is Bruno Latour's
essay in his book Pandora's Hope entitled "A Collective of Humans and
Non-Humans" where he focuses on how contemporary theories of
knowledge have continued the split between the world of subjects (us)
and the world of objects (technologically-mediated things).
Again, we may perceive that now objects have become augmented through
computational processes but much of the work that claims this
(particularly in the realm of so-called pervasive or ubiquitous
computing) still focuses on response that happens at the level of
data representation-at the level of DISPLAY (whether this be audio or
visual representations). There is little work to show for that
attempts to "hybridize" the physical and the computational so that
the resulting object-event (what we could call an object that becomes
"life like") or, what Bernard Cache ironically called an "objectile"
becomes truly something in between the two-where morphology is not
just restricted to the level of pixels or bits but this "life-like"
quality enforces change at the MATERIAL level itself. (this is what
I'm currently working on with the schwelle project, as Michelle
mentioned it in her earlier posts). Architects seem to be the ones
(currently) trying to pursue this direction with interests in "smart"
or responsive materials (many of which still operate at the display
level of luminosity or emissiveness). For instance, the work of the
English born architect Mark Goulthorpe (who is currently teaching at
MIT) in his Aegis Hyperspace project (a responsive surface driven by
thousands of computer controlled pneumatic pistons) or, perhaps
better yet, Diller + Scofidio's quite amazing Blur Building...a
"building" that was composed strictly from fog being sprayed from
computer regulated nozzles that was on display for the 2002 Swiss
Expo...this is quite an interesting example of a performance and
building in one and one that operates at different perceptual
thresholds. From a distance, the building appeared to be a surface
and a volume...yet, once inside, it becomes completely permeable and,
in fact, no longer resembled a structure at all...just a mass of
white, hissing, impenetrable fog. D+S demonstrate (even more so than
Goulthorpe, who still resorts to kinetics at the mechanical level)
the functioning of transformable matter...

I think if we are going to move towards truly augmenting objects,
then we might take a look again at someone like Kurt Schwitters, who
already proposed (of course, without imagining how it would be done)
in 1923 in his text on the Merz stage a performance event where
physical reality itself would become kinetic and performative: "Use
is made of compressible surfaces or surfaces capable of dissolving
into meshes; surfaces that fold like curtains, expand or shrink.
Objects will be allowed to move and revolve, and lines will be
allowed to broaden into surfaces."

cs.

=================================

Dear empyricists, and special hello to Chris

this thread is really stimulating - was weaving the inevitable mekhane into a text a couple of weeks back when it cropped up here like a Deux ex Machina - and now the animism thread.

The archaic world of puppets - manipulated objects - and automats - self-moving objects - and all the hybrid entities that span the continuum between those two categories seems to me to offer useful insights into our notions of live/ness. Gaze as giver of life - le report de la vie, as we say in French.

For me, it is this propensity to read life and live:li:ness into things that connects the most ancient effigies and totems, to those strange creatures our prosthetised eyes are revealing in outer space - Saturn's moons or the capsule that relates them to us - and at "non"human scales on earth, as in the shaping of nanomolecular surfaces. Mixes here of computational display and obdurately physical entities and terrain - as exemplified by our being able to follow Opportunity getting out of a rut on some distant planet.

With thanks for the discussion and lively ideas

best wishes

sjn

=====================

i'm also enjoying this thread, altho swamped with other work so i'm afraid i'm not keeping up very well. i'll drop in some random thoughts from a windswept outpost, on animism & reading life into objects. in my own work with avatars (digital puppets) i find the more visually simple they are, the more scope they offer. the 3d human-like style is less interesting to me. & i'm never alone when i'm on stage with my laptop; she is as much a player in the performance as i am; we have long warm-ups together & debrief over a drink afterwards.

h : )

====================

Very interesting, all.

I have a filing cabinet near my desk, in which  “active objects” (“kinetic
or augmented” would have been a better choice of words) and  the
“in-between” are in separate folders, rather than plunked together as in our
initial post. 

The active objects folder is full – some like those I mentioned in my last
are really fun, some are so-so, some are useful and concerned with
contemporary issues such as the environment. LUVMSG,  the reusable, digital
tree carving, which may actually save the life of a tree or two is an
example of this. (http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000636.html)

In the “in-between” folder are Chris’ work Suspension/Threshold, which
creates a body responsive environment where the aggregate breathing patterns
of the collective audience/participants lighten an otherwise dark
environment.

http://www.turbulence.org/blog/archives/000053.html

and Usman Haque, Haunt, which builds an environment that feels "haunted"
based on the physiological state of its visitors.
(http://www.haque.co.uk/haunt.php)

 Both works were mentioned by Michelle in an earlier post. Both are  still
in progress. 

Blur House, which as Chris said, was created for the 2002 Swiss Expo, should
be in my folder as well. It’s amazing! I don’t know Mark Goulthorpe’s work
but a quick search for Aegis Hyposurface produced the following: ”The piece
marks the transition from autoplastic (determinate) to alloplastic
(interactive, indeterminate) space, a new species of reciprocal
architecture.”

I find it interesting that with the exception of  Suspension/Threshold,
these in-between works are the works of architects…  But then, most of the
developments we’re seeing –mobile connectivity, for instance,  have to do
with movements and actions of people in space – they are spatial.. No wonder
that those concerned with spatial design should be creating spatial
experiences.

But I also wanted to say that in thinking about the in-between and what
Chris has written: 

…something in between the two-where morphology is not
just restricted to the level of pixels or bits but this "life-like"
quality enforces change at the MATERIAL level itself.

I think about Dick Higgens’ and his concern for “the implied horizons of the
works which we encounter” – and the need to understand “these projections,
migrations and fusions” and the new possibilities they embody.

-- Helen

========================

Funny the way your laptop having an after-performance drink conjures up
images of Vaucanson's duck!

Also amused by the slip of the digit that came up with Deux ex Machina
like a pas de Deus?

best

sjn 

========================

Dear empyricists, and special hello to Chris

this thread is really stimulating - was weaving the inevitable mekhane into
a text a couple of weeks back when it cropped up here like a Deux ex
Machina - and now the animism thread.

The archaic world of puppets - manipulated objects - and automats -
self-moving objects - and all the hybrid entities that span the continuum
between those two categories seems to me to offer useful insights into our
notions of live/ness. Gaze as giver of life - le report de la vie, as we say
in French.

For me, it is this propensity to read life and live:li:ness into things that
connects the most ancient effigies and totems, to those strange creatures
our prosthetised eyes are revealing in outer space - Saturn's moons or the
capsule that relates them to us - and at "non"human scales on earth, as in
the shaping of nanomolecular surfaces. Mixes here of computational display
and obdurately physical entities and terrain - as exemplified by our being
able to follow Opportunity getting out of a rut on some distant planet.

With thanks for the discussion and lively ideas

best wishes

sjn

=>  Besides, as early as 1963 Jacques Polieri thought that «since some
actions take place at some very far distances on one hand, some others could
equally be contemplated thanks to technology. No doubt, the inclination,
rotation, orbits and movements of planetary systems make up the actual
geometrical structure of a future scenography».

all the best
fa

========================

In Jon McKenzie’s book Perform or Else he presents a case study approach demonstrating the current cultural use and understanding of “performance”.  He cites the parallel developments emergent from the 50’s and 60’s of Marcuse’s claim that
post-industrial societies are ruled by the “performance principle” (oppressive / repressive sublimation, or conformance to social acceptance), concurrent with the rise of both a theatrical concept of performance from ritual and social interaction
and the development in art that would become performance art. 

Specifically, he looks at three facets of performance: the efficacy of “cultural performance” as in the performance of dancers, singers, musicians and actors in the traditional performing arts and experimental art; the efficiency of “organizational
performance” such as workplace productivity of companies, business management, economic power; and the effectiveness of “technological performance” such as the technological functionality of objects or systems.

While seemingly disparate, and certainly broad, expanding performance to be inclusive of these cultural uses enables us to understand as “performance” buildings made of fog and tables that follow you, tools that are sociable and engage you to become
performative through their use and, the more familiar notion of performance, interactions by artists with technology in an event presented to others who observe.  

But unlike Schwitters’ imagined Merz conception, the blog is chronicling _current practice_ which, like the openness of its premise (any live event that is network enabled), means that there is a really broad range of realized work. From lo-fi to
DIY art to academic and commercial institutionally funded research to commercial tools and experiences. And an equally broad range of practitioners from artists and performers, of course, to engineers, computer scientists, social scientists,
humanities researchers, architects, and undoubtedly others.

One aspect of the blog as a database of works is to note patterns of practice as a means to understand the expanding definition of performance. The breadth of this scope points out that both definitions of terms (performance, liveness, embodiment,
presence, agency, etc.) as well as a typology are needed.  We began with the categories Telematic, Locative, Wearable, and Environments. Perhaps the multivalent concept of performance as cultural, organizational and technological can inform a
typology of current networked practice. 

====================

Dear Helen, Michelle, Chris, Sally, et al;

Apologies to Helen for not writing sooner and sorry, but this is going to
be a long one. Helen asked me to contribute to this discussion by talking
about LiveForm:Telekinetics (LF:TK) a project carried out in collaboration
with Canadian electro-kinetic artist Jeff Mann. LF:TK is an ongoing
artistic proposition for networked realities that are embedded within
everyday spaces. We examine social spaces, transforming physical spaces
into connected environments, where communication between two physical
spaces is mediated through ordinary objects such as furniture, cutlery,
utensils, toys and bric-a-brac. As artists, we are not thinking about
functional items, or objects of convenience, rather a more poetic
reimagination towards the objects that we coexist with, looking at the
surreal aspects of subverting an object's use and the social context in
which it is placed and producing alternate 'psycho-social narratives'
(Anthony Dunne) about our relationships to objects and how we inhabit
space.

Embodied gesture, food, body language, music, social ritual, preparation
and the physical space are important ingredients in the creation of a
shared experience. It is important for us to not only investigate/play
with different physical interfaces, but understand how they actually
function socially by staging live events which are more like social
gatherings, like a picnic, dance or dinner party, than traditional
performances. During these events, there are energy ebbs and flows as
people fall in and out of interest, and alternate between being
'performer' or 'audience' member. (in an Erving Goffman sense)

Our first 'pilot project', which took place in 2001/2002, involved several
connections between Amsterdam and Toronto. Within a four month period Jeff
and I worked collaboratively with 8 artists and technologists to create
The Telematic Dinner, a table installation populated by sensored and
kinetic wine glasses for signaling to each other, motor controlled wine
bottle pourers, embedded screens containing a chat and video-mixing
environment between the two spaces, and a hacked 'Billy Mouth Singing
Bass' animatronic fish for mediating speech. During the final event 15
people in Toronto and 15 in Amsterdam sat down together for 5 hours to
share a meal. Although at first a strange and awkward situation for many
of those involved, it was interesting to see how people adapted to this
playfully absurd environment and started to really use the gadgets on the
table. So it was not 30 people making a performance about a dinner, but 30
people having dinner together, a social situation augmented with these
technological interfaces.

This was a good initial experiment for us, but perhaps too literal, both
in our decision to use a dinner party as our interaction model, and also
the functionality of the objects themselves which were directly linked to
the social codes and gestures of a dinner situation, therefore making them
still too 'rational'. A step for us was to start to look at the
environment itself as a communication interface rather than a single
object, which is how we relate to objects within everyday situations. If
I'm in a cafe, it is not only the coffee cup that I'm using as a single,
autonomous object, but how it is part of a complex network of people,
objects, codes and gestures, that form that social environment. This was
something that we wanted to develop further. Also, although we had used a
familiar environment of a dinner table, the events themselves took place
within a gallery setting. Therefore we also wanted to create an
installation that could be moved around and placed within different
real-world settings. In 2004, through funding provided by The Canada
Council for the Arts and HGIS and within Waag Society's Connected!
programme, we were able to explore this new terrain.

Through the recent phase of the work we have started to think about
everyday hybrid realities as anarchic, nomadic experiences,
transgeographical, public interventions, or Telepresence Picnic Parties,
taking place anywhere a network exists. These connections can take place
within the same city or between cities. We are particularly interested in
the wireless phenomenon and the subsequent structural change within the
city. The proliferation of wireless access points makes any location,
however insignificant (s.a an alleyway), fertile ground for a connection
to take place. My network card and KisMac software has just logged 41 open
and closed networks from where I am sitting in a studio in Toronto.

For the installation that we created a collection of sensor controlled
kinetic objects, each with a characteristic movement, emulating an
embodied gesture, but a variety of non-verbal, body language with no
immediate symbolic meaning, such as the way you move your hands while
talking, or how your body moves when dancing. Each object is made up of
two or more objects (s.a. cheese grater and scissors, colander and wine
opener, bowl and straws) combined in such a way that their original
function is eradicated and the resulting hybrid ‘moves between the poles
of kitsch and surrealism’ (Anthony Dunne). Each object can either be
played live, or movements recorded into it and played back, much like a
jukebox.. The installation is meant to be played to music, so that the
installation becomes a choreography of movement and gesture that people
create together.

During BEAP04, in Perth we attempted a couple of experimental linkups from
public parks throughout the city. In December we held several events
around public and private networks (café and home environments) throughout
Montréal and Amsterdam. We would like to do more Telepresence Picnic
Parties, in as many cities and sites as possible, making new friends and
picnic partners along the way. People that are interested in participating
in an event are also invited to participate in the preparation of it. In a
workshop like setting, people are asked to help build objects, prepare
food, and assemble the picnic that is then taken out into the city.

Finally, documentation from past events, illustrated recipes and blog
entries form part of our growing archive, a community cookbook for
electronic picnics.

I realize this is a bit of a monologue and I haven't really addressed some
of the questions and comments posed so far. However, hopefully this
posting can contribute in some way to the discussion.

best
Michelle Teran
http://www.lftk.org
http://www.ubermatic.org/misha

======================

Michelle R. --

"Perhaps the multivalent concept of performance as cultural, organizational
and technological can inform a typology of current networked practice."

Can you give us an idea of what this means?  A new way of categorizing types
of networked practice...  what would you put in each of the above
categories?  And wouldn't one spend hours arguing what work belongs where?

-- Helen

======================

Hello all:

Reading Michelle Teran’s post, I began to think about value … and how in
much of the work we have seen on the networked_performance blog value is
created during interactions between people.

There's a history here. Remember Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz and
“Hole in Space”? One of the classic art-telecommunication projects of all
time, it took place over a period of three evenings in  November 1980.

On the first evening, unsuspecting pedestrians walking past the Lincoln
Center for the Performing Arts in New York City, came face-to-face with
life-sized television images of unsuspecting pedestrians walking past  "The
Broadway" department store in Century City, Los Angeles. And visa versa.
There were no explanations.   3000 miles apart, they could see one another;
they could hear and they could speak with one another.

The second evening saw growing numbers of people populating the streets as
word-of-mouth and long distance telephone calls spread the word; on the
third –as a result of television coverage the previous evening - there was a
mass migration of families and trans-continental loved ones to the two
locations, where they ” utilized the link – or frame -- provided by Galloway
and Rabinovitz, and gave it its content, and its meaning.” Many of those
present had not seen each other in 20 years.
(http://www.medienkunstnetz.de/works/hole-in-space/)

This shift from artist as creator of content to artist as creator of a space
in which others (the public, friends and acquaintances)  produce content and
meaning, is profound. Something quietly, beautifully revolutionary is going
on -- more visible now than ever before (I don’t know that for sure, but
I’ll say it anyway) and visible certainly in works like those Michelle Teran
and Jeff Mann are creating.

-- Helen   

=====================

Hi Hellen

And if I might add to that. I am also interested in what are the
effects/affects of entering into and participating in a social ritual of a
networked connection and also the preparation ritual of building objects,
making food, etc. At a profound level, it is almost impossible to
communicate one's personal responses when you are in the middle of what is
happening. Imprints and traces from the experience resurface at
unpredictable moments. Stories are passed on to others, themselves a form
of documentation. I remember reading an interview with Allan Kaprow who
talked the inadequacy of film or photography for capturing what actually
goes on during a performance, and put more value on gossip as documention..
Personal storytelling vs the mechanical eye of the camera.

By staging these events in public locations, we hope to provoke a social
reimagination of what is a networked space, both for those people directly
involved, as well as accidental encounters by strangers.

The resonances of making or witnessing an object perform inappropriately,
participating in a strange ritual, or having an insignificant space like a
patch of grass transformed into a data portal to another location, are
still yet to be known.

This is the itch that needs to be scratched and gets me out of bed in the
morning.

best
Michelle Teran

==================

To clarify, I don't  necessarily see them as new or additional categories, but to be mindful that we already have an understanding of performance as operating in these ways  - culturally, organizationally, and technologically.  For example, to think
of technological  performance can be to rate an object's utility by some criteria. When I say "How is my computer performing? It seems a little sluggish, I may have too many images open and the vram is maxed out." We understand this to mean that I
am discussing the utilitarian aspect of the computer's functionality. When I say the "freeway performs" in Pall Thayer's Autodrawn work in which he has created a software framework through which to capture the random activities of cars passing along
the freeway and conceptualizes it in relation to the artists sketch exercise, I am attributing criteria of performance to an object, technology, or system. I transfer affect to an object; I see the computationally embedded and technologized world in
which I live as alive, able to engage and enact. The "what" of the engagement / enactment is that  tenuous realm that we are currently pondering: performance without a body, responsiveness, or performance, of once inanimate objects that now sense
and communicate. 

Since we may not usually consider performance beyond the cultural referent, my intention was to propose thinking more expansively about performance as more than a sited event, perhaps a condition or state, since I often also use performance and
performativity interchangeably (which is probably a sloppy practice and I should be more rigorous). As far as examples, this broader perspective of performance is reflected in many of the examples and artists referenced thus far (Pall Thayer as
mentioned, Chris Salter, Diller + Scofidio, Teran and Mann, Usman Haque) in which objects, environments, and systems perform.

Michelle -

=====================

I'm going to try to jump back in to this (I'm moving between continents in a few days so I haven't been able to participate as much as I would have liked). To tell the truth, I never really saw the computer as the performer in Autodrawn. It may sound far-fetched, but I saw the drivers of the cars as the performers. They are what affects the image, not the computer (along with a few other factors like daylight, camera positions and their functionality). Eventually, the drawings being generated become predictable and it's relatively easy to see by the way cars are drawn that the computer shows total disregard for the subject matter (which in itself tends to produce rather interesting effects). The thing that I really think matters with work like this, in regards to "performance" is the live factor and the only factor involved that is really, conciously thinking about this work in terms of "art" is the viewer. The program can't be conciously trying to make art, the drivers have no idea that they're involved in a work of art and so on. I see it as a way of automating experimentation. I could spend years trying out various different scenes for drawing traffic on a freeway, or I can automate the process of trying "them all". Of course, it's going to take forever, but my server's not in any hurry :-) For instance, Autodrawn has already shown me a way of sketching freeway traffic that I probably wouldn't have thought of; as a big sign that says, "This camera is temporarily offline."

best r.
Pall

=====================

Hi Pall:

I do think of the computer as a performer in your work, in the same way that
an automatic coffee maker performs if you set it to prepare your morning
coffee … and see, it (your computer) is already teaching you ways of
sketching freeway traffic. In writing this, I too “am attributing criteria
of performance to an object, technology, or system. I transfer affect to an
object.” (Riel)  

The issue of consciousness is one I’d love to see someone address… I think
immediately about degrees of “consciousness”… people walk through life
sometimes totally unaware of others   (you should try driving in Boston!);
animals, do we know about their level of consciousness? How about bugs and
worms? amoebas, paramecia? And yet we think of them as alive.

Have a safe trip. And may all the automated processes that carry you perform
well!

-- Helen

=====================

Hello Michelle (T) and all:

Recently I read –in Cluster Magazine, an issue on interaction design -- that
there are  12 computer chips for every person on the planet and many are
connected through the internet.  The issue went on to quote Lev Manovich as
saying that computation, telecommunication and interface would soon “be
incorporated into a variety of objects and space”  AND that “one day every
surface may potentially function as a screen connected to networks.”

One of the wonderful things to me about your Telematic Dinner Party and
Picnics is how the screen and keyboard are used minimally, or not at all.  I
wonder if you could write about this?

-- Helen

==================

Pall, in my prior post, I commented that the "freeway performs" and have previously said of this work that the computer performs and can see it as both. The computer can also be seen as a tool, as you note, doing the computational work and
"automating experimentation". 

However, I attribute a broader context. Although each driver contributes to the work and is a performer, though unknowingly, I extrapolate the drivers into a singular - the performance of the freeway  - as an event, location, context and experience.
For example, at some hypothetical time when there are no cars, the computer will still draw the state of the freeway at that time. When there are no drivers, who are the performers? (As experimental theatre director Richard Foreman proposed - and I
paraphrase - a ball rolls across an empty stage and there is no audience to see it happen yet it is still a performance.) Although it's possible that the camera won't transmit an image if there's no movement it seems that the computer still performs
the act of drawing. And, if as you note, it will draw when there is no camera signal, then the computer, under certain conditions becomes the sole performer in the work which could encompass the computer, the freeway and each of the drivers as
performers. 

The simultaneity or multiplicity this proposes is a defining feature common to much of the work on the blog. The familiar dichotomy between performer/audience is now shifting and expanding to receivers of the work being both audience and performers
(and content creators). Although this doesn’t specifically apply to your work with regard to the receiver participating beyond observing. I’m always interested to hear an artist's intention in their work as often my own reception is related but oft
not an exact comprehension, so it adds an additional layer of meaning to understand the artists intentions along with my interpretation. But what I find interesting here - in that you, me and Helen have somewhat different takes on “the performer” in
Autodrawn - is that the door has been opened to interpretation of performer/performance and it speaks of our negotiations with computation in a performative system and the  interest to (re)define the human relationship and role within such a system. 

For me, this thread points to a systems based consideration of performance. In the context of the machinic phylum (Deleuze and Guattari) we can begin to consider humans in a flat hierarchy with machines as a component in a sequence of elements in a
system comprised of feedback loops that receive and pass data, Chris’ earlier conception of the human-machine entanglement. This indicates a willingness to explore human’s shifting relationship within machinic systems, as opposed to  a defacto human
primacy. I feel it’s really important that we have these conversations so that we can understand the changing relationships we are creating between humans and thinking/acting machines which we increasingly not only imbue but equip with learning,
sentience, consciousness and other performative attributes considered the domain of the human. 

You had previously commented on your interest to capture behavior unawares so that people didn’t change their actions in an attempt to manipulate the interactive aspect, as when you discuss capturing the performance of everyday life. This raises the
question of awareness or as Helen notes, consciousness. What it also brings up that we haven't specifically addressed yet is the idea of framing reception or context, an aspect that has to be considered in the definition of performance. 

These questions are not necessarily addressed to you, but are the tangents that are sparked by your reply. 

cheers -
Michelle

===================

Hi Michelle,

I find the following spot-on; and suggest that it might be expanded in a way that addresses some questions I had earlier in the month that perhaps have not been touched upon yet. Your statement that:

"[T]his thread points to a systems based consideration of performance... In the context of the machinic phylum (Deleuze and Guattari) we can begin to consider humans in a flat hierarchy with machines as a component in a sequence of elements in a system comprised of feedback loops that receive and pass data, Chris’ earlier conception of the human-machine entanglement. This indicates a willingness to explore human’s shifting relationship within machinic systems, as opposed to  a defacto human primacy. I feel it’s really important that we have these conversations so that we can understand the changing relationships we are creating between humans and thinking/acting machines which we increasingly not only imbue but equip with learning, sentience, consciousness and other performative attributes considered the domain of the human."

I see a lot of congruency with these concepts and my call (if I may claim that I was making a such a strong plea) to consider contemporary computing in the arts practice (or more broadly "technological art" if you prefer - assuming that the 12 chips per human implies something important, and that most of the art work we are talking about assumes a digitally mediated environment), in the context of a critical framework that acknowledges an intensely bound, recursive relationship between systems of data (and a fully considered presentation of how it is formally organized in layers), and what actually happens in the real: bodies, places, motion, matter, energy. Not just network, (how data is transported), but how data is modeled, stored, processed and interacted with, as well as how information technology now reflects *and* produces the real simultaneously, (emerged into novel new forms of organization by the intensity of flows - data in information are ancient inventions, its speed is what is new), as well as how the real symbiotically produces data. Co-participatory. Entanglement, not only human-machine, but also biota-machine, geo-machine, etc. Above all we can't ignore the formal foundations of what is entangled here; network and performance are two terms in a describing a subset of a larger ontology that needs to be analyzed as a whole. Culturally, organizationally, and technologically. Biologically, geographically, meteorologically, geologically. (The Geology of Morals chapter in 1000 Plateaus has always been a favorite;-) Certainly D&G are important to theorizing the critical framework - as Chris Salter indicated early in the conversation...

Brett

================

Hi Helen;

Sorry for the delayed response. I have been seduced lately with different
experiments in antenna making out of empty food tins and other detritus.

Basically, if there is a television in a room, then somebody will watch
it. Screens and monitors have the tendency to dominate a space which means
that they have to be used strategically if that is not the intention.
Within a telematic experience the screen/monitor functions as a portal,
connecting one space to another.

This communication scenario is a common metaphor within the history of
telecommunications art and which first appeared in the precedent setting
'Hole in Space', by Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (as has already
been mentioned in a previous post). Now what happens when things start to
spill out of this hole, and inhabit a physical space? A different kind of
space is created, not entirely physical and not entirely virtual, but
something in between. It is this kind of hybrid situation that we are
interested in.

In this situation, the monitor does not go away, but becomes part of a
distributed environment. This is kind of the way things work in 'everyday'
living. Recently I've been spending some time hanging around Chinatown and
Kensington Market, an easy going multicultural market area in downtown
Toronto. Within these neighbourhoods, I have been paying a lot of
attention to what kinds of objects store owners arrange around their
surveillance monitors. Perola, a store specializing in Latin American
foods, has cans of beans, chocolate and piñatas. A Chinese kitchen goods
store has a Hello Kitty clock and plastic shrine. The Portuguese household
goods store has tea towels, frying pans and a calendar...

During the Telematic Dinner, we incorporated two types of projections. One
stream embedded into the table combined live aerial video feeds and live
chat from the  two cities with live chat. Another was projected at the end
of the table and showed the diners from the other space. Because I refused
to darken the room (I find dark rooms kind of sad), what happened was the
afternoon sun completely obliterated the 'hole-in-space' projection, which
forced everybody to focus on the other objects on the table and the other
embedded stream. This, for us, was a much more engaging situation since
the 'screen', was now functioning within an environment instead of
directing everybody's attention away from it.

This is the kind of situation we have continued to develop. An environment
where there is not one focal point, but several things that are
'attention-grabbers' but function together as a composition. Again, this
is how things normally work in our day-to-day and are much more indicative
of social environment.

best
Michelle Teran

======================

You had previously commented on your interest to
capture behavior unawares so that people didn’t
change their actions in an attempt to manipulate the
interactive aspect, as when you discuss capturing
the performance of everyday life. This raises the
question of awareness or as Helen notes,
consciousness. What it also brings up that we
haven't specifically addressed yet is the idea of
framing reception or context, an aspect that has to
be considered in the definition of performance. 

It strikes me that this touches on issues found in
work dicussed early on in this list. Adam Nash's
Memory Plains Returning was web3D multiuser
performance, unlike the general notion of realistic
space and faux humaniod avatars. His space was
completely void and the audience avatars where
transluscent grey balls. The performers were huge
musically charged architectual forms. 

The visual disconnect between digital avatar and human
representation gave the show a unique mechanistic
feeling. As an audience memember, I had no metric to
single out the humanity. The division between computer
and performer seemed erased. 

The other grey audience avatars, projections of
humanity were visually tiny in scope of the show,
their actions unstructured, their role as co
performers gained weight most often through the
dimension of proximity. 

As for myself alone, but not alone, in a digital
performance space finding myself and recognizing
myself in an everday performance - a "Ringo moment" 

(I'm unsure of the academic research on Ringo, but
fans of the Beatles and the film Hard Days Night ought
to be able to offer opinions...)

regards
Steve G

========================

Hello again: 

This will be my last post as I leave shortly for SIGGRAPH where Michelle and
I will be conducting a panel on (guess what?) networked performance, with
Julian Bleecker, Susan Kozel, Martin Rieser and Andrea Zapp. But before
saying goodbye and thanking you all for participating, I want to return to
two quick comments I made and a concern, which I trust is shared with many
of you.

I mentioned the 12 chips per person figure in my last post; and that many of
these chips are connected through the Internet. This was not to just throw
out a fact; nor was it intended to invite questions about access, although
there surely are those.  Rather it was to suggest an important fact about
contemporary environments.  Just multiply twelve chips by the world
population, which crossed the 6.5 billion mark this month.

Our environments are crowded fields of telecommunicative possibilities. And
people are using them  – they are not hidden.

Wade Roush, in his recent article, Social Machines, in Technology Review,
calls what is happening “continuous computing,” as over against “ubiquitous
computing” with its implication of invisibility. There’s really nothing
invisible about what’s going on at all.
In fact today’s social software boom “rests on common devices such as mobile
phones, computers, digital cameras and portable music players ” – all quite
visible.

And like “Hole in Space”, as people have become aware of them, they have
determined their use and their meaning. But remember too the Manovich quote:
“…one day every surface may potentially function as a screen connected to
networks,” and then check out the post Jo recently put up on the
networked_performance blog called “information rain,” where your hands
become the screens onto which advertisements are projected…

The social will be commodified; a broad range of communicative possibilities
that could enrich the telecommunicative experience will be lost; others will
never be developed.

 Somehow the artist must find his/her way in this: initiating new
explorations, and at the same time helping to broaden the scope of what is
possible – moving from the purely functional  to something that will help
enlarge the beauty and pleasure of everyday life…

I had hoped to give you a few more examples of work that is being done with
this in mind… Maybe there will be an opportunity later.

Anyway, thank you, thank empire,

-- Helen 
newradio@turbulence.org

===================

Wade Roush, in his recent article, Social Machines, in Technology Review,
calls what is happening ³continuous computing,² as over against ³ubiquitous
computing² with its implication of invisibility. There¹s really nothing
invisible about what¹s going on at all.
In fact today¹s social software boom ³rests on common devices such as mobile
phones, computers, digital cameras and portable music players ² ­ all quite
visible.

Interesting point to bring up Helen, especially regarding your comment following the one above about the commodification of the social. because of this process of commercialization that you point to, i'm weary of accepting claims that the use of devices like cell phones represents a visible activity in terms of computing. i haven't read Roush, so perhaps he explains this, but based on the rhetoric of ubiquitous computing proponents, like John Seely Brown, the point of such technology is for people to interact with computers without having to do the computing, i.e. it becomes "invisible" to them. i can see your point that the use of this technology is so visible through the devices themselves being present in our social vision, but i think one could equally say that they're "invisible" despite their mass - or because of it. that's kind of the point of ubiquity, no?
Thinking of ubiquitous computing in terms of it penetrating all aspects of life (travel, communication, writing, etc), a magazine is an inundated with computing as a mobile phone, in terms of how it was produced and distributed. the "invisibility" is descriptive of _how_ they're used - most people using IT do so as consumers, not producers or even hackers.
i think i may be arguing oranges to apples, but i think your point about market values determining the viability of social software possibilities is what i'm reacting to. i think you're largely right, which is why i take the promise of "invisibility" offered by ubiquitous computing seriously. i think the realm of the possible is being largely overdetermined by interests that are short sighted and oppressive, and ultimately destructive. and i think this is happening by rendering things invisible through ubiquity. all while somehow, magically almost, managing to maintain the myth of economic and intellectual scarcity.
Thanks for a great month of discussion!
best,
ryan

===================

Many thanks to Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel for their thoughts and the
discussion on networked performance during July. It is a curious subject.
One in which the typical notions of performance/performers/audience are
sometimes re-architected into activity between participants mediated via
tool/object/art/communication device (among other configurations).

Let me leave you with the URL of Helen and Michelle's blog on networked
performance: http://turbulence.org/blog ; and thanks to all who
participated.

ja