Electronic Disturbance Theatre - Politically Motivated "Non-Matrixed" Performing

“We abolish the stage and the auditorium and replace them by a single site, without partition or barrier of any kind, which will become the theatre of the action. A direct communion will be re-established between the spectator and the spectacle, between the actor and the spectator, placed in the middle of the action, is engulfed and physically affected by it.” - Antonin Artaud

The performative avantgarde has long had connections to a political or critical social agenda - from Dada to Situationism to Punk. Working in the gap between art and life, or perhaps in such a way as to render this gap non-existent, the nature of theatrical representation is critiqued from within a performance space. Techniques & deceptions associated with theatre are avoided, by way of creating what Micheal Kirby describes as a ‘non-matrixed performance’ – that which is folded into/inseparable from life.

In 1998, Ricardo Dominguez and a group of collaborators engaged in online civil disobedience actions, in support of rebel activity in Chiapas, Mexico - the Zapatistas, a revolutionary cell fighting against generational government oppression, and are collectively known as the Electronic Disturbance Theater (EDT). Combining artistic and political agendas, the group utilises virtual networks to promote its activities - encouraging supporters to download and run a Java applet called FloodNet.

Akin to hacker-tactics, or hacktivism, this applet continually attempts to open nonexistent Web pages at specifically targeted websites. By constructing fictional or "bad URLs" (Web addresses of pages that don't exist on the targeted server). For example, participants were asked to input the names of Zapatistas killed by the Mexican Army in military attacks on the autonomous village of Acteal, forcing targeted servers to return an error message each time one of these "bad" URLs was requested.

Aligning the project with conceptual or idea-based art, the fictated URL becomes inscribed in the server's error log as a way of virtually (symbolically) returning the dead to those responsible for their murders. Presumably if enough people run FloodNet simultaneously, the server would overload - so if a regular user tried to access the site, pages would load extremely slowly or not at all.

As Michel Kirby describes, “The materials of Happenings – performer, physical element, or mechanical effect – tend to be concrete. That is, they are taken from and related to the experiential worlds of everyday life. Within the overall context and structure, the details in Happenings relate to things and function as direct experience." EDT's virtual sit-ins operate like a happening (connect to performance/theatre), however with a more direct political resonance, analogous to sit-in demonstrations in which protesters block the entrance to a public building. Projects of EDT tactically utilise existing virtual-actual media networks and structures, Dominguez explaining their goal is to "disturb - and not destroy."

Constituting Spatiality: Wearable Computing, Cognitive Mixing

Viewer wearing HMD

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

Erika Lincoln's, work-in-progress, Free Space Loss, is comprised of a seemingly elaborate, although described as low-fi, wearable computing system. The artist has created a series of HMD's, which link the participant/viewer to a feedback mechanism where by the sensors pre-installed inside the helmet measure the temperature, light and acoustic levels of the body wearing it. Measuring or quantifying the viewer's physiological "output" or environmentally mediated bodily responses, implicates the viewer's body & bodily responses in the art work, as determining variables for the viewer's particularised spatial experience. This data is firstly transmitted to a computer software program, which creates four different 3D landscape planes that the viewer "experiences", as this landscape is transmitted back to the internal LCD monitor installed on the HMD.

Inside the artist's studio ...

(http://lablog-lincolnlab.blogspot.com/)

The syntactic arrangement of the words in the title, Free Space Loss, on first glance, seem to instantiate an oxymoron. However the accompanying image of wireless signals spreading out over time and distance, illustrates the simultaneity of freeing/opening/expanding virtual spaces at the cost of "losing", perhaps reducing or altering would be better here, the materiality of actual space, or requiring a reconsideration of our invested certainty in actual spatial realities.

Interested in the communicative potentialities of embodied experience, the actual bodily responses to specific experiences generating data that may be translated into shifting topographical planes through the mediation of a software program. Landscape image projected initially onto the monitor will be one the viewer perhaps recognises as the artist is using images collected from the actual landscape surrounding the gallery. So prior to installation the artist describes how she goes for walks gathering images, which will be transformed into emerging 3D topographical maps as the HMD and software system are sensitive to physiological changes the viewer undergoes. Consequently these changes are reflected in the landscape the viewer "sees" - presumably from visually recognisable spaces to unfamiliar imaginings or representations, to something that no longer correlates with the actual space because the viewers embodied experience has brought about radical alterations. Interestingly Lincoln has also installed an audio channel enabling a dialogue between viewers. Upon discussing what they observe on their monitors, collectively they can organise the behaviour of the landscape plane.

Image of virtual landscapes as seen from inside helmet

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

Choosing the term, Virtual Virtual Reality (VVR) over say, mixed reality, suggests the artist wants to emphasise that images are literally taken from actual life and "altered", through the embodied perceptual processes of the viewers - mediated through both the wearable computing and software systems. Heightening the separability, rather than a fluid interpenetration, of actual and virtual realms. However Lincoln does address the "mixing" evident in her work by describing the "interchange between individuals, environment & [technological/augmentative] devices as creating a mixed cognitive space." She points out that the viewer must negotiate between their knowledge of the physical world outside of the helmet and the visual topographical and aural based knowledge they gain from watching their monitor and discussions with others, within the helmet. This actual-virtual negotiation of space, that which is actual-virtual simultaneously, creates a distinct experience of space.

Close up of one of the planes

(http://lincolnlab.net/freespace.html)

The images on the monitor continually interact with the viewers' own bodily responses and discussions with others, and so are not articulated through clear-cut frontal perception (Hansen 197). In fact embodied perception produces the changing landscape planes, "tonal responses to" an ever adjusting body (Hansen 197). Embodiment is the medium through which this work is experienced, "space becomes wearable when embodied affectivity becomes the operator of spacing" (Hansen 175). Space is literally worn on the body (by way of the LCD monitor installed on the HMD), and becomes fully wearable as embodied perceptual processes coupled with the physiological bodily changes (which are inextricably linked to the affective embodied response and experience) operate and constitute the spatial experience of the art work itself (Hansen 197).

~ Works Cited ~

Hansen, Mark. Bodies in Code. New York: Routledge, 2006.

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