Technologically Mediated Bedtimes

In 2002, the above poster was circulated by Susana Mendes Silva. Visually identical to any number classified advertisements promoting particular services, Artphone essentially made the artist available to discuss contemporary art related subjects with anyone that called her. By dialing the number advertised on the poster above, a user of the service was directly dialing the artist's personal cell phone number. In an effort to entice, she writes “Don’t be afraid to ask everything you always wanted to know about contemporary art”, simultaneously revealing her intention for the project.

Confidently assuming she could answer any question addressed to her, this cell phone mediated performance was repeated three years later but with adjustments and a change of format. Instead simply making herself available by being just a phone call away, Mendes Silva infiltrated an online video chat room. Mendes Silva created Art_room, an online chatting performance where again, anyone could meet the artist online, and once again, by asking everything they wanted to know about contemporary art (provided they had internet access and the correct plug-ins).

These projects are working within pre-existing actual-virtual networks and communities, and simultaneously temporarily shifting and renewing their functionalities for the duration of the performance. Clearly Silva Mendes' agenda is markedly different from say making artful objects, hence the reliance upon audience participation was not only essential in the reception of the performance but in the performance's creation. The audience viewing the performance were also constituting it, by way of engaging in a dialogue with the artist, either using telecommunication or internet networks.

Such artistic methods and concepts provide the ground for Silva Mendes latest, related work, A Bedtime Story, created for INTIMACY: Across Digital & Visceral Performance (2007) , a series of events designed to address an aesthetically and formally diverse set of responses to the notion of ‘being intimate’. Art works included sought to address proximity and hybridity in performance, particularly digital and live art performance practices were set up as agents to further a vibrant discourse and practical exploration of intimate inter-actions. (Click here to be directed to the Intimacy website).

To follow a detailed discussion of how A Bedtime Story operates as a performance piece please click here. Essentially, someone either emails and phones Silva Mendes to book in story time, and then artist and participant meet online at the agreed time. Using skype the artist tells a 30 minute bedtime story, a similar concept to the two aforementioned projects of Mendes Silva.

Mendes Silva describes "the outcome of each performance [as] very interesting. The first minutes were used to chat a little bit and to ensure that each person had the right environment at home. A lot of participants were alone, but some people asked me to listen to the story with someone else, which created a deeper communal sense. One participant didn't have microphone, so we could only interact by chat. This was very strange because i had no immediate feedback, like sounds of movement, breathing or sighing..."

Quote taken from http://a-bedtime-story.blogspot.com/2008/05/about-performances.html

The technologically mediated performance is dependent on the interactions between the artist and the participant, to both set up the booking and during the actual reading of the bedtime story. Mendes Silva offers very specific instructions to her participant, asking them to recreate real conditions under which you would normally sleep. Creating a certain kind of space for this performance could potentially be done by replicating a nighttime or bedroom space in a normative gallery/exhibition space, akin perhaps to relational aesthetics, where participants could hear bedtime stories and fall asleep in the recreated space. The artist however is not promoting a service that could be recreated in a normative gallery space, but infiltrating particular networks and communities, whose spatialities are expansive and diverse - traversing immediate geographical separations (that would not need be overcome in a gallery).

Not only are humans, the artist and the participant, mediating the performance, internet technologies play a central role in this work, and furthermore interactions with embodied perceptual processes and human activity. The boundaries separating the virtual from the actual are progressively blurred as individuals spend an increasing amount of time inhabiting both realms simultaneously. Distinctions made between the virtual and the actual are obscured as, for example, the artist is using skype as an apparatus that enables a transmission of a live stream of sound, her voice reading the story to the pre-arranged participant. This describes the concept of "mixed reality", (Milgram & Kishino, 1994; Strauss & Fleischmann, 1999; Hansen, 2006) envisioning a fluid interpenetration of virtual and actual realms.

The actual-virtual artist-participant interaction online poses some interesting ethical questions, the artist identifies that "there is an implicit degree of mutual trust and discreetness, as you might actually fall asleep", and perhaps therefore, "the performance [is] not recorded." Interestingly the artist allows the participant to interrupt the story, they may speak to the artist at any moment. This not only protects the participant and artist from any discomfort they could experience, but also heightens the improvisatory nature and role of chance in Mendes Silva's projects. Suggesting perhaps all in the performance is improvised - except the choice of the story (the participant selects in advance), that which may not necessarily put the participant to sleep.


Links to:

A Bedtime Story Blog: http://a-bedtime-story.blogspot.com/

Artist's site: http://www.susanamendessilva.com/

Project at Rhizome: http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/27963/#50781