The Extended Logic of the Interactive Performance Space

by Gregor White

LifeLines is a work I will presently discuss at the San Francisco Performative Cinema Symposium 2003. It is an experimental performance that looks to explore the conventions of theatrical and cinematic performance in the context of digital presentation and distribution. The project is a collaboration led by University of Abertay Dundee and includes expertise from The Dundee Repertory Theatre and Angus Digital Media Centre. The project is part of a series of performances that look to explore specific technological processes and environments in relation to performance and narrative forms that embrace the new logic of information based culture. The work uses video, sound and performance to create a work of drama that is compatible with Internet distribution.

LifeLines explores the question of how to deliver a meaningful performances for Internet distribution; performances that defy and exploit immediate associations with a range of stage and screen traditions and the logic of theatrical and cinematic space by generating unique, interactive performance spaces. The work recognises that performance in non-linear space brings with it new associations and meanings that will not only confuse the existing theatrical and screen conventions but fundamentally alter the way that meaning is constructed in the performance. To be able produce a performance in interactive space that is coherent and meaningful it is necessary to understand how traditional performance spaces operate and to explore how traditional conventions are used to deliver performances in theatre environments. Once the meaningful content of traditional performances has been established it becomes possible to judge whether these conditions exist in interactive space and whether or not they can be exploited to similar effect.

In 'Theatre as Suspended Space' Andrew Garton offers an insightful description of the structure of traditional theatre and how the construction of meaning is accommodated, "Traditionally, the performing arts is comprised of three components - the performer, the audience, the stage. The performer engages the attention of the audience; the audience observes and responds to the gesture and prose articulated by the performer; the stage provides a formal structure within which the relationship between performer and audience is cultivated and sustained. Separation from the creative process is perpetuated whilst the stage imposes its own criteria upon it." 1.

The hierarchical performance space described above is posited on notions of authorship, in the modern history of cinema and theatre first the writer, then the text and finally the context have all laid claim the authority of meaning. New forms of performance especially interactive forms rely on a more democratic distribution of authorship that occurs when the performance space no longer relies on the separation of author and audience but engenders an integrated space, a space shared by both the performer and the audience that disperses authority. Where Garton presents the audience as passive receptor of the space another view is offered by David Pattie in his essay 'Space, Time and the Self in Becketts Late Theatre' that supporting the argument that the audience creates the space in which the performance becomes meaningful.

The basis for the audiences claim to authorship is found in their need to reconcile the discrepancy between the time and space of the theatre experience and the time and space of the dramatic events and how events occurring simultaneously in incompatible 'timespace' can exist in a convincing world in which the dramatic events can play out. Pattie describes how the audience reconciles theatrical timespace through inferred offstage action and the preconceived logic of sequential events. "The setting of the play is to be imagined as only one of a number of simultaneously existing settings that together form the world described in the text...If described in a manner that is internally consistent allow[s] the audience to accept the subjectivity of the characters presented - because they have a coherently and sequentially described existence outside the immediate confines of the performance." 2. This description of theatrical timespace identifies how the audience creates an internal logic that appeals to their own subjectivity through individual experience of space and time and the logical sequence of events therein. In traditional theatre the ability of the audience to rationalise the space through reproduction of internal space rather than observation of external space is fundamental to generating a meaningful event. This model of meaningful space informs the approach that interactive performances will take to the role and experience of the audience. Where traditional theatre depends individual subjectivity to establish the logic of its performance the challenge of performing in non-linear and no-sequential timespace is to extend the logic of interactive space to the audience, but if the audience takes recourse to their own subjective experience of timespace to create the logic of theatrical or cinematic performance, what model do they use to assimilate new forms of performance?

Work that explores the possibilities offered by new technologies and new media must confront the question of how it communicates and what language it shares with its audience. In his essay David Pattie describes a period when Beckett produced a series of plays that audiences found particularly impenetrable, it was not the physical nature of the space that made the work seemingly incomprehensible but the lack of familiarity amongst the audience with the forms of disrupted timespace generated by the performances. The inability of the audience to reconcile the performance timespace with their internal timespace prevented them from taking authorship of the space. Without the extension of the logic of the performance into the audience meaning could not be generated. Later in his career Beckett would move into electronic media, both television and radio where the conventions of the space were more compatible with the performances. Contemporary audiences found these performances much more accessible due to the widespread familiarity with the traditions of the work and the learned conventions of radio and television, electronic and satellite telecommunications. These technologies established new forms of timespace that were not only aesthetic or experimental but useful spaces with productive, performative and experiential forms that informed audience familiarity and allowed the internalisation of a new form of spatial logic.

The success of new forms of technology-based performance depends on the ability of the individual to assimilate, internalise and objectify their everyday experiences of the technology in order to authenticate the value/meaning in the context of the performance. If the audience has experience of digital technologies this allows the objectification of remote or virtual forms in the same way as that of actual forms. In the essay 'Nonlinear Art' Pavel Ivanov describes this process of assimilation as reflexive non-linearity where external objects become products through use and reproduction. "Any activity assumes a repeated sequence of assimilation of an object by a human actor (the subject) followed by generating another object intended for being assimilated in a particular way (the product)...In the process of interiorisation, the product becomes an internal state of the subject rather than a commonly observable thing." 3. In the same way as Walter Benjamin describes the comoditization of the cinema screen in 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions' 4. and Jean Baudrillard describes the comoditization of computer screen in 'The Ecstasy of Communication' 5. Ivanov's description of the internal reproduction of the object is significant to new forms of media reproduction in the way they identify the construction of the meaning of an object in the context of its cultural function, it is only when the conventions of the technology enter the cultural vocabulary and its use enters the functional activities of the population can the audience for new forms of performance internalise and assimilate the technological timespace.

Thanks to video games, email, Internet shopping, chatrooms, home digital media production etc. the process of creating meaningful performances in an interactive environment can take recourse to a language of conventions which the audience is familiar and comfortable with, and thanks to the steady creep of western cultural hegemony through the global use of digital communications technologies the language of interactive performance is being established. Given the operational nature of digital media the defining characteristic of digital performance spaces is not its objective environment but the operational environment, to create a meaningful space the significance no longer depends on how the space is perceived as much as how it is controlled. The relationship between action, object and meaning has always been definitive of the relationship between the artist and the work of art but it is only meaningful when the work demonstrates an awareness of the conditions of its creation, when an act or object becomes significant in a specific context it enters the role of ritual and achieves a social function and supports the society it serves. In this context works of arts become meaningful through critique or support of the language or functions by which it is understood. In 'Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses' Louis Althusser describes a social context for the meaningful manifestation of the action/object in describing how the reification of ideology through action creates meaning in everyday actions. "His ideas are his material actions inserted into material practices governed by material rituals which are themselves defined by the material ideological apparatus from which derive the ideas of that subject" 6. Althussers description of ideologically motivated behaviour illustrates how individual beliefs when objectified and reproduced socially are defined by and perpetuate the belief system that supports them thus completing the link between action and object, object and meaning and action and meaning.

In interactive space the action that the audience perform in relation to the action on the screen combine to reveal the motivated choice of the user and exposes the role of the space in generating meaning and in doing so the interactive performance timespace enters the tradition of performance spaces through becoming meaningful through the exposition of the broader cultural logic of the community. Historically the role of explaining communities to themselves has been that of the storyteller who would use the conventions of the community to carry narratives. Through time this role has been institutionalised into theatre and cinema and as the cultural hegemony of the west spreads the conventions of global communication have become the language of the storyteller. The Boogieman has relocated from under the bed and now stalks our children in their chatrooms.

Footnotes:


1. Garton, A. (1997) Theatre as suspended space,http://www.nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-0008/msg00159.html

2. Pattie, D. (2000) Space, Time and the Self in Beckett's Late Theatre, Modern Drama, Volume 43 No. 3

3. Ivanov, P. (2001) Nonlinear Art, Information Approach in the Humanitarian Sciences, Taganrog, Russia.

4. Benjamin, W. (1936) The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproductions in Arendt, H. (ed) (1973) Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London

5. Baudrillard, J. (1988) The Ecstasy of Communication, Semiotext(e), New York.

6. Althusser, L. (1971) Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses, Lenin and Philosophy, London.