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The New Performer: Data as Performer and Performance
By Sheila A. Malone
I.
Introduction: In pursuit of the virtual performer
The nature of all performance includes the elements of time-based
experience and space as "stage". I use the term
"stage" as a simple reference point to describe the space in
which a performer performs and not as reference to the theatre. The
nature of performance in the computer age includes these elements of time
and stage as space. A simple definition of performance is : that which
is feigned or pretended. It is action. It is speech. It is anything
performative. The nature of the performer includes any entity who/which
feigns, pretends, acts, and speaks. So, it is natural to include
non-human entities, such as robots, cyborgs, and databases in this
discussion of performance. Baudrillard might describe performing and the
performer as more real than real, so real that they are virtual. "Of
course we have a multitude of objective, real proofs, but what does one
do with historical reality in a system which itself has become virtual?
"(1) New media's complex nature has influenced the nature of
performance to become something many don't consider performance. Anything
involving action, interaction, time, and space is performance. Therefore,
performing is both real and virtual, becoming more real than real through
the very nature of simulation. Performance on and of the net includes
everything from virtual actors (interactors) interacting with real
actors, Moos, Mud's, Mucks, Games, Chat groups, telepresence, Database as
performance. The performer is data. The performer is virtual. The
history of virtual performance begins with interaction between the real
and hyperreal in time-based experience in a space referred to as the
stage.
II.
Humans have romanced with the real since the beginning of our existence.
With cave drawings, petroglyphs and Egyptian hieroglyphs, ancient
civilizations marked stone with symbols and icons representing the world
around them and their beliefs about the world. And so, through the
centuries human bodies have invented new ways, new mediums to describe
the world around and inside them. Each medium used through the ages has
acted as a vehicle for the performer or describer. In the past 75 years
our romance with the real has become even more intense. We have seen the
most explosive and dynamic changes in performance as a direct result of
the invention of the vacuum tube, the transistor, and most recently the
silicon chip. Radio, sound effects and actors' voices performed images on
audiences' ears, exploring the medium to convey the ideas in the scripts.
With the advent of television, visual information created a way to mimic
reality and record reality. The family situation shows of the 1950's were
a hyper reality, reflecting back to the public their own
"perfect" image. With the age of the computer, visual, aural,
and text are combined as mediums for the performer to describe and
rescribe the world around and within. What is real becomes virtual
through the act of performing. What does this mean in terms of the
performer? It means there is a new kind of performer, stage, and
performance.
III.
The Early Years: Technology and body
According to Village Voice writer Cynthia Carr, John Jesurun's play, "Deep
Sleep" (1985), was one of the first performances to illustrate
Baudrillard's concept of the loss of the real or how virtual is more real
than the real. In "Deep Sleep", film projections of actors and live actors
argue over who is real or alive. "The youngest actor, a boy of
perhaps twelve (Michael Tighe) who responds with the most conviction...is
certain he's not a projection."(2) The presence of real actors and
projected actors and the subsequent interaction begins to warp the line
between real and hyperreal. The audience is forced to question their own
perceptions of real. Performance and computers have a somewhat recent
past with the personal computer's short history paving the way. One of
the early crusaders of performance art using computers was Joe Lowery. In
1983, in the piece titled, "Discrete Packages", Lowery uses his newly
acquired Atari 800 microcomputer to generate designs of some of the ideas
and philosophies explored within the text and structure of his
performance. "(He) was interested in the different metaphors
society uses to view itself, and ended up intertwining computers,
performance, and Kabbalah..."(3) Lowery believed that the programming
aspect of computers was a metaphor for performing. Lowery says,
"...the questions are basically who's being programmed and how do
you respond to the programming?"(4) Lowery was exploring issues that
are still at the heart of computer interaction.
IV.
The Recent Years: Virtual performers
More recently, the use of virtual performers can be seen in George
Coates' Performance Works. According to George Coates, "(The George
Coates Performance Works) produced a show called the "Nowhere Band" that
included an inter-actor named Ralph who arrived on-stage via the internet
every night at 8:30 PM PST for a five week performance run - This was the
first distributed live performance ever to occur as part of a regularly
scheduled theater run. Audiences in our theater would see Ralph blow into
his pipes to sound a `C' note in Australia establishing the musical key,
as the Nowhere Band in San Francisco tuned their instruments to his
bagpipe for the first number played in the show. This show premiered at
our civic Center theater in San Francisco in 1994."(5) The idea of
space and real are connected with the idea of a time-based experience.
The relationship of live characters is absolutely dependent on the
interaction with the virtual characters. George Coates takes these ideas
of real and hyperreal and completely mesmerizes audiences with the
production of "20/20 BLAKE: The Visions Of William Blake."
George Coates describes the performance, "at one point we had even
hacked a way to make two SGI graphics engines run simultaneous
stereographic interactive animation programs enabling audiences wearing
polarized glasses to experience stereo 3D illusions of volumetric space
interacting in real time with live actors on a stage. (This enabled, for
example, a flock of birds to appear to hover over the stage and
audiences, swooping down to harass the live actor, chasing the actor
around the stage wherever the actor chose to go - in real time)."(6) Here
Coates and his company of actors, technicians, and virtual images are
merged with the audience into a space created and controlled by the
computer and its operators. The definition of performer has changed. But
the presence of space and time are consistent common denominators in the
performance.
V.
Virtual Verbiage: Textual performance of Moos and Muds
Performance in real time made virtual is exactly the environment found in
Mooing. Moo stands for mud object oriented, which is a hybrid of Mud,
multi-user dimension. Mud is a text based virtual reality world. A moo is
an electronic "place" where people log onto a network or server
and talk simultaneously, electronically through the computer. In order to
Moo, one needs a way to telenet, i.e. a computer system at a university.
Mooing and Mudding are descendents of the computerized game "Dungeons and
Dragons". Participants can Moo by teleneting through the Internet from a
host computer to another host computer, which is the domain of the Moo.
Users can also access Moo's through the Internet, using a client server
program, such as "mutt" which will actually allow the user to
log on to several different Moo's at once.(7) As in "Dungeons and Dragons",
the participants can take on many personas in one session and thus
actually interact with themselves. This is truly virtual performance.
"Craggy Island" is "... a Lambda-based MOO, themed around the Emmy
Award-winning British Channel4 sitcom, "Father Ted". "Craggy Island" itself
sets to capture some of the atmosphere and stunning scenery of Ireland,
as well as the general inanity of its administrative staff. Here you will
find many things, some of which will amaze you, others may just scare.
There's online login and character requests, links to other great "Father
Ted" sites, a guided tour of the Island, archived mailing lists, and best
of all, drink!"(8) The virtual creative performance potential of
Mooing is limited only by a person's imagination and language skills and
of course programming skills and access. The popularity of Mooing is
huge, with classes offered by distinguished English professors, and
departments specializing in Moo and Mud creative writing. The result is a
Mooing and Mudding frenzy across the nation and across the university
circuit. People take on personas, describe themselves how they want to be
perceived, accomplish tasks, and interact with other participants. They
can visit make believe places, interact with 3-dimensional objects all
through Mooing and Mudding.
VI.
Virtual Bodies: Robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence as performers
The new 3-dimensional graphically represented self comes in the form of
robots, cyborgs, and artificial intelligence. After all aren't we the
real intelligence? Or are we the virtual intelligence? The intersection
of real and virtual is similar to the intersection between audience and
performer. It is precisely this intersection in time and space that Suzi
Gablik calls, "the key that moves art beyond the aesthetic
mode."(9) Eduardo Kac, an artist with roots as a performance artist,
is working with this idea of the intersection. His work encompasses
telepresence and interactive robots. Most recently his project "UIRAPURU",
a combination of local network, remote network, virtual space, and real
space, was named one of the top three entries at the ICC
(InterCommunication Center, Tokyo, Japan) Biennale '99 exhibition(10). Kac
uses the mythical and real Amazonian bird as a structure and vehicle for
the work. Kac says, "(his) version of the legend reinvents
Uirapuru's dual status as a real animal and a mythical creature through
an experience that is at once local and remote, virtual and physical. The
flying telerobotic fish is a blimp that can be controlled both through a
local interface and through the Web."(11)
For over 20 years Stelarc, an Australian based performer has been working
with robotics, artificial intelligence and their relationship with the
human body. "(Stelarc's) work explores and extends the concept of
the body and its relationship with technology through human/machine
interfaces incorporating the Internet and Web, sound, music, video and
computers."(12)
From 1968-1970 Stelarc created what he calls "Multimedia
Performances."(13) His romance with the body and technology is evident
in his subsequent work. From 1972 - 1975 Stelarc worked with "
sensory deprivation events"(14) suspending the body with harnesses. By
1976, he was investigating the impact of artificial intelligence on the
body "real." Stelarc has recently been performing interactively
with the Internet. "While the body is under the control of the flux
of information streaming through the Net during these performances, live
images are uploaded and samples have been archived for viewing."(15)
Stelarc's work is most significant to all of the mutations and form
performance has taken in the past twenty years. His innovation and
continued exploration moves new media forward with each new project he
envisions and executes.
VII.
Data Performer: The most true and most real performer on the virtual stage
The most natural performers in cyber environments are databases and the
data itself. In her essay, "Will the Real Body Please Stand
Up?" Allucquere Rosanne Stone describes the nature of the
cyber-experience. " The "data" in some of these virtual
environments are people--3-D representations of individuals in the
cyberspace."(16) Data can also function as the stage or environment
for performance. Data can also bring time notions together, holding a
performance together by its own processing. In the book,
"Technoromanticism: digital narrative, holoism, and the romance of the
real", Richard Coyne discusses the nature and function of data in virtual
reality. "(Performers) use computers to represent space, as in
computer-aided design, virtual reality, and geographical information
systems. Such systems employ databases in which numerical and other
attribute data based on some coordinate system or other are stored, which
can be manipulated according to the rules of mathematics and geometry.
The prospect of immersion in three-dimensional virtual worlds captures
the romantic imagination."(17) The group Knowbotic Research uses data
environments to create simulated and network experience for participants.
Working for over 6 years in the field of computers, research and art
Knowbotic Research has collaborated with other scientists and artists in
VRML experience making. In 1996 Knowbotic Research's "SMDK Simulation
Space Mosaic of mobile Datasounds" brought performance into the definition
of database as performer and data as stage. Knowbotic describes this
project as a complex self-organizing system that is processed on, thus
creating a new system for the visitor. "The chaotic basic structure
of SMDK, the self-organization feature, the real-time composition of
public sound material and its fragmentation, the continuous visualization
of (mathematical) processes and the openness of the entire system to the
outside world through data networks represent a complexity that
challenges the visitor to construct his or her own orientation system,
within an interactive database.(18)
David Rokeby is an artist working with
computerized interactive sound and video work. He uses data as "the
real performing body"(19) and data processed on as a virtual
experience provided through computers. In a recent work, "Universal
Translator", "the interface ... is a microphone with a micro video
camera embedded in its head so that the camera looks directly at the
mouth from very close up. The sound of the voice and video of the moving
lips are captured by computers. These sounds and images provide most of
the content, and are used to control most of the interactivity of the
work. A computer monitor faces the interactor and displays the processed
mouth images."(20)
VIII.
Conclusion: The politics of virtual performance or virtually performing in the future of the hyperreal
"... Today enters into the same domain of indeterminate, undefined
interpretations or into the principle of indeterminacy. And this not only
applies to the past, but also to the future as well as to the
present."(21) Baudrillard's comment on history and the past can only
point to the future. And the future is marked by the ability to become
what it will become, real or not.
According to Peggy Phelan in her book,
"Unmarked: The Politics of Performance", "Performance art usually
occurs in the suspension between the "real" physical matter of
"the performing body" and the psychic experience of what is to
be em-bodied. Like a rackety bridge swaying under too much weight,
performance keeps one anchor on the side of psychic Real. Performance
boldly and precariously declares that Being is performed (and made
temporarily visible) in that suspended in-between."(22) The
"psychic experience" becomes synonymous with the virtual
experience, and the "performing body" is no longer synonymous
with the human body. The body is changing from that of the person to the
body of the computer. And at times the data particles of the information
being acted upon becomes the performing body. Cyberperformance has many
different characteristics from that of traditional performance. But,
ultimately it is still a time-based experience in some sort of space we
can call the stage or cyberspace. We are still in the Lacanian
"Mirror Stage" in which we use our virtual selves to perform
actions, ideas, and language. " A never-resolved assemblage of
virtual and real (making) up the very fabric of human
subjectivity."(23) The politics of cyberperformance are embedded with
data representing and unrepresenting the world around and within us.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Auslander, Philip, From Acting to Performance: Essays in modernism and
postmodernism. (London: Routledge, 1997) 90-1.
Banes, Sally, Subversive Expectations: Performance Art and Paratheater
in New York, 1976-85. "Joe Lowery logs On" Ann Arbor, MI: The
University of Michigan Press, 1998)261-3.
Batchen, Geoffrey, "Spectres of Cyberspace," an essay from the
book, Visual Culture Reader, edited by Nicholas Mirzoeff. (London: Routledge,
1998)273-8.
Baudrillard, Jean, from CTheory interview "Vivisecting the 90s: An
Interview with Jean Baudrillard" by Caroline Bayard and Graham Knight
Blau, Herbert, To All Appearances: Ideology and Performance. (London:
Routledge, 1992) 152-3.
Carr, Cynthia, "Realms of The Unreal" from On The Edge Performance
At The End Of The Twentieth Century, (Hanover, New Hampshire: Wesleyan
University Press, 1993) 219-20.
Coyne, Richard, Technoromanticism:digital narrative, holism, and the romance
of the real (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999)73-4.
Gablik, Suzi, The Reenchantment of Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1991)151-2.
Goldberg, Roselee, Performance:live art since 1960 (New York: Harry N.
Abrams, Publishers. Inc.,1998)190.
Phelan, Peggy, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance (London: Routledge,
1993)167.
Stone, Allucquere Rosanne "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?"
An essay first published in the anthology Cyberspace: First Steps, edited
by
Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118.
URL BIBLIOGRAPHYhttp://www.georgecoates.org/who.html
http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/spring/articles/art90s.html
http://necro.mcc.ac.uk:6666/ Craggy Island
http://www.ekac.org/uirapuru.html
http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
http://www.t0.or.at/~krcf/smdk/smdk1.html
http://www.interlog.com/~drokeby/trans.html
http://www.simulation.dk/articles/a24-vivisecting_90s.html
http://www.t0.or.at/~krcf/
1. Jean Baudrillard, from CTheory interview "Vivisecting the 90s:
An Interview with Jean Baudrillard" by
Caroline Bayard and Graham Knight (http://www.simulation.dk/articles/a24-vivisecting_90s.html)
2. Cynthia Carr, "Realms of The Unreal" from On The Edge Performance
At The End Of The Twentieth
Century, Hanover, New Hampshire, Wesleyan
University Press, 1993. Pp. 219-20.
3. Sally Banes, "Joe Lowery logs On" from the book, Subversive
Expectations: Performance Art and
Paratheater in New York, 1976-85. Ann
Arbor, MI, The University of Michigan Press. 1998. Pp.261-3.
4. Ibid
5. http://www.georgecoates.org/who.html
6. Ibid
7. http://www.cas.usf.edu/english/walker/spring/articles/art90s.html
8. http://necro.mcc.ac.uk:6666/ Craggy Island
9. Suzi Gablik, The Reenchantment of Art. Thames and Hudson, New York,
New York, 1991. Pp. 151-2.
10. http://www.ntticc.or.jp/special/biennale99/preface_e.html
11. http://www.ekac.org/uirapuru.html
12. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/biog/biog.html
13. Ibid
14. Ibid
15. http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/
16. Allucquere Rosanne Stone, "Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?"
An essay first published in the anthology
Cyberspace: First Steps, edited
by.
Michael Benedikt (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1991): 81-118.
17. Richard Coyne, Technoromanticism:digital narrative, holism, and the
romance of the real. The MIT Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1999. Pp.73-4.
18. http://www.t0.or.at/~krcf/smdk/smdk1.html
19. Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Politics of Performance, Routledge, London,
Great Britain, 1993. P.167
20. http://www.interlog.com/~drokeby/trans.html
21. http://www.simulation.dk/articles/a24-vivisecting_90s.html
22. Peggy Phelan, Pp.167-8.
23. Geoffrey Batchen, "Spectres of Cyberspace", an essay from
the book, Visual Culture Reader, edited by
Nicholas Mirzoeff. Routledge,
London, Great Britain, 1998. Pp.273-8
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