I. What is performance cinema?

Performance Cinema sits between traditional passive cinematic experience and the dynamic experience of live music. Like standard cinema, it requires a "moving picture". Like live music it requires an audience that is, through their very attendance, participating in the construction of the event as a meaningful experience. This is an essential feature of Performance Cinema that is not to be underestimated and will be dealt with in some detail later.
Calling it Performance Cinema is critically important, as it positions this range of creative practice in the Cinematic Tradition, which up to just very recently, was largely dominated by traditional film theory – a theory of passive cinema. The advent of video, performance art, and especially the recent development of digital video has, as we all know, worked to expand the boundaries of creativity. With the major theatre chains presently in the process of installing digital video projectors in their theatres, the unipolar dominance of film technology is now waning, and we are seeing the development of a multipolar system of cinema that uses both film and digital video technologies. So, too, the unipolar dominance of the passive cinema entertainment empire must also give way to a multipolar field of practises, including Performance Cinema. I humbly submit that due to the reduced costs of video vs. film, and the effect of Moore’s Law on increasing the quality of video technology, that film will largely (but not completely) disappear from common cinematic practice.
This new cinematic practice of Performance Cinema sits at the forefront because it is also about performance – as one obvious and powerful example would be the live manipulation of cinematic instruments and presentation of cinematic visual and audio visual data by performers and/or actors in front of an audience. That’s a horribly mangled syntax, so I’ll elaborate and discuss what can be some of the grosser components of performance cinema.

The cinematic components of Performance cinema are fairly obvious but should be made explicit and developed:

1. Points of cinematic editing: Montage, dialog, cuts, transitions, editing rhythm, image matching, etc. – all of the points in cinematic grammar apply in Performance Cinema as well.

2. Points of cinematic narrative: linear storytelling, cause and effect, character narratives, narrative structures, etc. Due to historic reasons, such as its heritage from experimental film and video’s visual lineage, as well as its historical relationship with music principles (both academic and popular), for Performance Cinema, both the Narrative and Narrativity are among the most problematic aspects to the distinct genre in Cinema. This will require a lot of work in terms of theoretical development, but moreover, a genuine push on the part of practitioners to really tackle issues of narrative and narrativity and take on a variety of approaches to the subject - especially issues such as simple story telling and how it can work in a performance context.

3. Points of the collaborative adventure of cinematic art. Most Performance Cinema that depends on camera made imagery is done without a "crew" – it is most often a single individual with a digital camera and a Non Linear Editing System. By this standard, even the "dogme95" system of filmmaking looks like a giant over-production. However, I think that this needn’t be the case, especially as Performance Cinema hits a point of Legitimation, and the entertainment industry invests in the genre in an attempt of co-option. At that point, the bloated weight of the "film industry" will come to visit, with its attendant production values. This needn’t be a necessarily bad thing, as such a level of investment would serve to re-focus public attitudes on performance and open up new doors for practitioners, and a variety of technologies.

4. The issue of visual or audio/visual data acquisition. This topic has a rich and complex history that is, unfortunately, now weighed down with a vast number of complex legal issues regarding the copyright of digital data. It is not the object of this symposium to solve that particular crisis – there are many other symposia and events and sources for that kind of information that are more closely aligned to that particular and timely subject. However, it is a point of understanding Performance Cinema, especially in its historical context and heritage from experimental film and video, where the use of appropriated footage, stock footage, and found footage are all aspects of how the genre engages visual or audio/visual data acquisition and thusly altered our sense of cinematic art.

5. Points of Performance Cinema that devolve on live "actors" as opposed to "performers". In Performance Cinema, as it is a live phenomenon, it is perfectly reasonable to consider the projected image as one element of a number of elements, including live actors working in a theatrical sensibility.

The issue of actors versus performers is important. Performers are a type of actor, and vice versa. The difference is in the relationship to instrumentality. Insofar as they are recipients of audience cathexis and engage the audience in a kind of emotional feedback loop they are "actors". However, many musicians work in a vein where they are "actors" who are "playing the part" of musician on stage.
However, it is also very likely that there are many performance cinema artists who are uncomfortable in the limelight and would prefer that their physicality be less an object of focus in the art of the performance, much as in a classical music performance. In this way, the performer "acts" as a conduit, a vessel or catalyst by or through which the cinematic event is made manifest. In this way, their relationship to the cathectic environment is both muted and amplified. Muted, in that they seek to be out of the spotlight of audience attention; and amplified in that, their obscured stage presence ever more sharply focuses cathexis upon them.

In this way visuality of human form becomes a main method by which cathexis is exchanged from audience to artist. In this way, artists can arrange their relationship to the audience anywhere along this continuum : from zero (where the there is no human performer of proximate cause for cathectic targeting ) to one (where the performer is the sole focus of the cinematic experience either through physical dependencies native to a specific performer, or in a conceptual sensibility projected into a mystifying cloud of a performer’s cult of personality) and any number of places in between these two values.

I believe it is this relationship, this active cathexis feedback mechanism between audience and performer, that will prove to be one of the most valuable and rewarding for the development of Performance Cinema as a category of art, as it can drive the repurposing of venues that were once large spaces purely dedicated to passive cinematic experiences (i.e. MOVIES) to multivalent spaces of active performance cinema.

6. Points of live Abstract Visualisation. Abstract Visualisation of musical audio sources has a long and rich history and is the wellspring from which performance cinema has evolved. The details of this will / have been discussed by Fred Colllopy who has come from Cleveland Ohio to lecture here and perform his work. Fred asked if I could find some musicians for him to improvise with, and so I volunteered to provide such for him later this evening. In a live context of improvised music and improvised visuals, abstract visualisation is brought to a cinematic performance where music and cinema are equal partners with the audience in the creation of an aesthetically meaningful shared experience – all essential to the performance cinema experience.

7. Points of live "multiplayer" games. This is an interesting and complex relation to Performance Cinema, and is a somewhat attenuated form. It can have all the signifiers of Performance Cinema: an active audience, a gridlike and/or layered sense of narrativity, a fictive space similar to mis en scene in traditional cinematic storytelling. It can have a loosely arranged plot based on a layering of gridded narrative units, clips, or structures. The main difference between this and the more common practise of Performance Cinema is the lack of a performer: the audience itself is the performer, and the notion of performer is thusly a distributed notion.

This does not eliminate audience cathexis: indeed, players can get completely caught up in the experience to a degree that other forms can’t. However, the cathexis is focused on a field of action and the relationships created there in, whether symbolically (between player and fictive space and/or fictive players) or actually and performatively with other players. Technically, since it all exists in a field of simulation, there is no difference between symbolic objects of cathexis and actual objects of cathexis – everything is always already in a condition of simulation. However, the human actor is still human, and a different level of cathexis is directed at human vs non-human players as non-human players fall outside the circle of empathy that is accorded living things Hence, with a tiered cathexis structure, and a consideration of the subject of performer / actor or perhaps even the absence thereof, one must then consider:

8. Reductions of this element to nil and the consequences that adhere to this. Example: projections that have no human author in its proximate causation. One can have a machine programmed with chaotic patterning systems (as opposed to random or stochastic systems) that could create powerful and evocative or simply retinal and mesmerising images. The question then becomes "who" is performing? Technically the software stands at proximate cause, and may be behaving quite outside what the programmer initially imagined. However, since it is a machine at proximate cause, the cathexis of the audience is blunted – there is no one available for emotional investment. Real? Machines? Who do we care about? Where is the locus of our compassion? With people or machines? That’s why I was excited about Shirley Shor demonstrating her software at this symposium – her relentless reduction removes so much from an experience of performance cinema, that I felt it important to have her work with us as a kind of logical and critical point to the notion of performance cinema.

9. It is important to not exclude traditional film technologies from notions of performance cinema – the qualities peculiar to that medium of motion picture projection are important and valuable, and as it becomes used less and less over time, due to the inexpensiveness and ubiquity of digital video, these very qualities will acquire an aura of their own. A situation I’m sure Walter Benjamin would find most peculiar.