The Presence Project

Lynn Hershman Leeson: A Real + Second Life Symposium

2007-11-17T15:19:19Z

Lynn Hershman Leeson: Autonomous Agents

A Real + Second Life Symposium

Saturday 24 November 2007, The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester + Second Life, 1.00pm – 5.00pm GMT

A Real + Second Life Symposium, a collaboration between The Whitworth Gallery, Manchester and The Presence Project, coincides with the major retrospective exhibition Autonomous Agents: The Art and Films of Lynn Hershman Leeson. The Guardian’s preview of the show spoke of Hershman as an artist for whom the creation of self-identity is less a vain game than a matter of profound political import’.

Working in performance, installation, video and film, new media and technology, Lynn Hershman Leeson has explored identity, politics, surveillance and artificial intelligence, operating at the vanguard of artistic innovation from the 1960s onwards.

A Real + Second Life Symposium considers the accumulation of Hershman Leeson’s practice and its habitation within live space, cinematic space, the buildings of museums and galleries and most recently, the virtual space of Second Life.

Through 20 minute long presentations, a range of academics and artists will talk about Hershman Leeson’s practice, as well as identity, politics, surveillance and artificial intelligence. Confirmed speakers include Prof Gabriella Giannachi (Centre for Intermedia, Exeter University), Prof Amelia Jones (University of Manchester), Prof Nick Kaye (Centre for Intermedia, Exeter University) Prof. Michael Shanks (Faculty Fellow, Stanford Humanities Center, California) and Prof. Jackie Stacey (University of Manchester) as well as the artist herself - Lynn Hershman Leeson.

This free symposium will take place in real life in The Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester on Saturday 24 November 2007 1.00pm – 5.00pm GMT and on the same day in Second Life at 3.30pm – 4.30pm GMT. Contact susan.fletcher@manchester.ac.uk for Second Life location.

Autonomous Agents, A Real + Second Life Symposium is in collaboration with The Performing Presence Project, a four-year partnership between University of Exeter, Stanford University and University College London funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), UK and with the support of Stanford Humanities Lab, California. Performing Presence is available at: http://presence.stanford.edu/

Booking

To book a place at this free symposium please call Sue Fletcher on 0161 275 7472 (Mon, Wed & Thurs) or email susan.fletcher@manchester.ac.uk

Documenting The Builders Association, CONTINUOUS CITY

2007-11-03T23:11:37Z

Through 2007-8 The Presence Project will be closely following the development of The Builders Association's current project, CONTINUOUS CITY.

CONTINUOUS CITY: Excerpts from a work-in-progress by The Builders Association, UC Berkeley, October 5-14, 2007

Our extensive documentation of this process will be developed on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1187

Initiated in a series of company workshops at the Krannert Centre and the National Centre for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in July 2007, CONTINUOUS CITY will be developed throughout the next year toward opening performances in Autumn 2008.

CONTINUOUS CITY: Excerpts from a work-in-progress by The Builders Association, UC Berkeley, October 5-14, 2007

Engaging with the impact of network technologies on the nature and sense of contemporary place, the company write that:

CONTINUOUS CITY is a mediation on how contemporary experiences of location and dislocation stretch us to the maximum as our "networked selves" occupy multiple locations. Globally, we are at a watershed moment where, for the first time, more people are living in cities than in rural environments. From the megacities of the developing world to the gated communities of the U.S., our new production looks at the sense of 'place' within a global context, and how electronic connection contributes to and complicates that sense of place.

CONTINUOUS CITY also explores these networked architectures through a website created as a performance space where members of the public may participate in the project by joining a chorus, entering into dialogue with characters and uploading images, all of which may be added to the theatrical production. Uploaded material may also be viewed from the site. Visit http://continuouscity.org/ to explore and participate in this part of the project.

CONTINUOUS CITY: Excerpts from a work-in-progress by The Builders Association,
UC Berkeley, October 5-14, 2007

Ranging from extracts from Marianne Weems' preparatory notebooks to interviews at key moments with company members to analyses and accounts of working processes and outcomes, this documentation will form a unique dialogue between The Presence Project and the evolution of a major theatrical work.

Lynn Hershman Leeson, Autonomous Agents in Manchester

2007-09-13T14:58:07Z

Lynn Hershman Leeson's exhibition, Autonomous Agents open at the University of Manchester's Whitworth Art Gallery on Saturday 15th September.

from Phantom Limb series (1988-)

Running through until 12th December, this is the first retrospective of Lynn's work to be presented in the UK and ranges from the creation of Roberta Brietmore in San Francisco in the 70's, through to Lynn's recent collaborations with Tilda Swinton.

DiNA (2004-)

Autonomous Agents will also present Life to the Second Power, Lynn's reanimation of her archive through Second Life in collaboration with colleagues at Stanford University as part of The Presence Project.

from Life to the Second Power (2006-)

For more details of Autonomous Agents, please follow this link to The Whitworth Art Gallery http://www.whitworth.manchester.ac.uk/exhibitions/future/autonomousagents/

Follow this link for a streamed discussion on video of Life to the Second Power between Lynn Hershaman Leeson and Michael Shanks, published in Seed Magazine, August 2007 http://www.seedmagazine.com/news/2007/08/seed_salon_lynn_hershman_leeso.php

Analysing CAVE experiment 1

2007-09-05T15:15:34Z

Following an intensive period of work at the UCL CAVE between February and July 2007 at UCL we are now beginning the process of analysing the outcomes of the first of our two experiments in VR.

During this period, Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, Mel Slater, David Swapp, Marco Gillies, with performer Annie Hudson, developed a mixed reality scenario in CAVE to test hypotheses defined in response to the our series of Performing Presence practice/research workshops in Exeter during 2006.

Using sophisticated motion capture and software, and developed as an interactive performative scenario between avatar, performer and participant, the experiment provided us with a wealth of qualitative and quantitative outcomes, including interviews, questionnaires and data recording physiological responses to the experience.

The outcomes of this process will feed into key project publications as well as shaping our developing work within CAVE. More images and details of the experiment will be available on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/645

The documentation of the workshops on which this process draws, and interviews with many of the contributing artists, including Tim Etchells, Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes, Fiona Templeton, and Phillip Zarrilli, are now available on the Presence Project Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu

Presence Interviews online

2007-08-30T15:32:00Z

The Presence Project Collaboratory now incorporates more than a dozen extensive discussions with contributing artists now available through the Collaboratory, including:

Marianne Weems http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/831

Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1120

Fiona Templeton http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1101

Phillip Zarrilli http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1143

A full directory of these discussions of presence, performance and visual art is available at our Presence research grouping, available on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/493

Our most recent posted discussion is with Tim Etchells:

I don’t know if there is such a thing as simply ‘being there,’ just being present. Being present is always a kind of construction. Perhaps we could think of presence as something that happens when one attempts to do something, and whilst attempting to do that thing you become visible; visible in not quite succeeding in doing it, visible through the cracks or the gaps. (Tim Etchells, Presence Project Interview)

Our interview with Tim is now avaliable online through the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/646

Recorded by Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye following Tim's Presence Project workshop, 'Presence and Absence Intertwined,' our discussion ranges over Forced Entertainment's live performance, digital and installation work, as well as the company's collaborations with the photographer Hugo Glendinning.

Throughout, Tim considers the constructions of performer presence that animate the company's work, as well as the work of other influential artists including The Wooster Group and Peter Handke.

courtesy Tim Etchells

Reflecting on the impact of new technologies on the construction and performance of presence, Tim notes:

One of the things we do as readers of signs and situations - and of all things - is that we respond to absences - and we fill absence. So, you know, the way the telephone makes us imagine the whole person, the way that in text chatting - instant messaging - in writing, you sort of spend time with other people but you are not in the same room as them. And because it’s purely in that sense, because it’s purely language, there is a huge role for you in mentally unpacking what’s written or, in the phone, unpacking what’s said, to create people.

As we look forward toward beginning year 3 of the project, we will be significantly extending the Collaboratory resource, incorporating video documentation, publishing a wide range of interviews and significantly developing our core investigations.

We welcome contributions and enquiries - details of contributing to the Presence Project Forum are at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/1095

Beginning CAVE: interdisciplinary exchange and experiment

2007-04-02T15:57:46Z

We have now started developing the first of our project experiments on presence within CAVE, through a process that will extend through until mid-July.

Focusing on this process are Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye, Mel Slater, David Swapp, Marco Gillies, with support from Annie Hudson, Peter Hulton, and others.

This will be an intensive period of collaboration aimed at realising a scenario that will transpose and test propositions and practices across disciplinary boundaries.

In its culmination, we aim to draw conclusions of relevance to our various disciplines and of significance across The Presence Project and beyond.

These images show an earlier and unrelated experiment in CAVE, exploring social interactions with 'responsive' avatars. Once our process is complete, we aim to post documentation on the Presence site, including still images, video, diary and analysis.

In the meantime, the basis of our work in CAVE is explored in the Collaboratory by Gabriella Giannachi at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/371

Tony Oursler, Painting + Paper: Ooze

2007-03-22T16:03:03Z

These images are from Painting + Paper: Ooze, Tony Oursler's most recent exhibition at Lehmann Maupin Gallery http://www.lehmannmaupin.com, New York, running 17 Feb - 24 March 2007.

Oursler’s work explicitly addresses an uncanny presence evoked in psychological and perceptual responses to media structures.

TONY OURSLER, Red "Love Hurts" Laboratory, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
58 x 47 x 4.5 inches
147.3 x 119.4 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

Articulated in a collision of sculpture, painting, video, and performance, at Lehmann Maupin seven such works are exhibited in a single room. Formed in aluminium, and set slightly off the gallery wall, a flat, coloured surface is opened to reveal body parts - an eye or eyes, a face, lips, fingers - morphed to reflect the abstract shape in which they are captured. Over time, in some of the works, the body parts change.

Issues of Presence are explicit - these works take up each other's time. Fixed to the wall, they assert a belonging to the animated realm of the visitor: some of them look and wait.

TONY OURSLER, Purple Ideation Exposure, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
59 x 47 x 4.5 inches
149.9 x 119.4 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

Linked to this, these pieces evade the forms they explicitly invoke. They assert painting, relocating video art into conventions of surface, paint, the hand, and abstraction. At the same time, this abstraction is loaded: these works play with play, denial, objectness, investment, fiction, science fiction, gothic, colour theory, animation.

TONY OURSLER, Invisible Green Link?, 2007
aluminium, acrylic, LCD screen, DVD player
57 x 61 x 4.5 inches
144.8 x 154.9 x 11.4 cm
COURTESY OF THE ARTIST AND LEHMANN MAUPIN GALLERY,
NEW YORK

From March 2007, we will be developing an online analysis of Tony Oursler's work, including discussion of recent exhibitions, past work and key publications.

As part of this, we will be publishing a series of interviews on presence with Tony Oursler. The first of these were recorded by Nick Kaye in New York in October and November 2006.

This ongoing engagement with Tony Oursler's work is developing at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/327, including a fully illustrated analysis of this current exhibition.

Tony Oursler's extensive website, including image and video documentation, is at http://www.tonyoursler.com/.

Cinema prosthetics and the politics of new media

2007-01-23T16:25:41Z

Strange Culture - the première of Lynn Hershman's documentary "Strange Culture" at the Sundance Film Festival 22 January 2007

Stanford Humanities Lab and the Life Squared Project (part of Presence) yesterday hosted the first online movie première for the Sundance Film Festival.

The movie was Lynn Hershman's "Strange Culture" - a documentary about bio-artist Steve Kurtz.

We are working with Lynn on part of her archive at Stanford, re-animating an installation she created in 1972 with Eleanor Coppola at the Dante Hotel in San Francisco. Gabriella (Giannachi) has introduced some aspects of "Life Squared" project, as we have called it, in this blog - [Link].

Questions we are facing include:

How is a past work of art, that knew no definitive and original material form, to be re-collected (what future for the digital art museum?).

If we are to move beyond the record of the past being identified simply with its preserved remains (boxes of stuff), what might an animated archive, built with the remains of the past, look like?

Can the past be made to live again - albeit in metamorphosis, on the basis of what remains?

And we are doing this in a machinic world that immediately questions the easy distinctions we usually make between material worlds and immaterial "virtualities": images, memories, hopes, designs, fears.

Lynn's movie is about a vital, and related, issue in contemporary art.

In 2004 bio-artist and college professor Steve Kurtz was preparing for a MASS MoCA exhibition that would let audiences test whether food has been genetically modified when, days before the opening, his wife tragically died of heart failure. Distraught, Kurtz called 911, but when medics arrived, they became suspicious of his art supplies and called the FBI. Dozens of agents in haz-mat suits sifted through his home and impounded his computers, books, cat, and even his wife's body. The government held Kurtz as a suspected bioterrorist, and, nearly three years later, the charges have not been dropped. He still faces up to 20 years in prison.

Because he is legally barred from comment, the movie uses actors as avatars to tell this story of contemporary art, science, politics and paranoia.

For the CIA and FBI, Steve was working in a dangerous border zone, familiar to us from both recent events, and also in the nightmares of modernity - our ability to design, engineer and organize whole new worlds of creatures, machines, peoples. A border zone that includes clones, robots, genetic mutants ... artists and terrorists.

And avatars. Steve's is a distressing case, an important wake-up call about what culture has become. I don't think it is trivialising his experience to say that it is entirely appropriate to have such a movie shown in the likes of a "prosthetic" world as SecondLife. The boundaries between reality and virtuality have always been indistinct and permeable, constantly re-drawn. This is why I use the term "prosthetic" - extension, augmentation.

Watching the movie yesterday in the "audience" was not a "virtual" experience. The screen and sound came through clearly as cinema or TV. But this, of course, was not cinema or TV - the mode of engagement was quite different. (A favorite argument of mine is that media are to be understood now not in a traditional way, according to their material form - as "film", "video", "TV", "print" - but as different modes of engagement - hence, again, prosthetics, not virtualities.)

And what is an audience to do with the freedoms afforded an avatar? The viewing is an invitation to co-perform, to be involved. There were mutant cats and foxes in the audience, guests in haz-mat suits looking bizarrely damaged, as well as everyday ordinary-looking folk.

Not coincidentally Red Herring magazine phoned during the showing to ask about the implications of such screening for small-scale independent cultural creation - daring to inhabit edgy matters of common contemporary concern.

Documenting Life to the Second Power (L2)

2006-12-03T20:15:32Z

The Stanford team and Gabriella Giannachi have started to document the presence research project Life to the Second Power (L2)

With colleagues at Stanford University the artist Lynn Hershman has been developing an online archive in 'Second Life,' a virtual world with over 1.6 million participants worldwide.

At http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/946, Gabriella Giannachi has now started to track the emergence of this project, which takes place in NEWare, an island in Second Life.

At 12:00pm PST (noon) on 30 November, the project was formally launched through a presentation in Second Life itself by the Stanford Humanities Lab in collaboration with artist Lynn Hershman: "Regenerative Presence: Remixing the Archives of Lynn Hershman Leeson." The invitation to the event announced that:

The L2 Project seeks to regenerate and re-imagine Hershman's work inside the 3D online world Second Life; it will re-animate Hershman's existing archive, now housed in the Special Collections Library at Stanford University. Converting the archive into a digital format of hybrid genre will allow users of the content to dynamically revisit the past while simultaneously expanding the audience for this material.

Gabriella writes that:

As NEWare is beginning to take shape the traces of Lynn Hershman's archive, itself formed of traces of a lifelong commitment to an exploration of identity and presence (though often in its absence), are increasingly recognisable.

The Life to the Second Power (L2) research project is at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/LynnHershman/261 while the project blog is available at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/LifeSquared/

Shortly, Gabriella will lead an interview of Lynn Hershman in Second Life with the collaboration of colleagues at Stanford and Exeter.

Blast Theorys Day of the Figurines in Berlin

2006-09-15T15:31:10Z

The world premiere of Blast Theory's Day of The Figurines opens on Thursday 28th September 2006.

The Board (photo: Blast Theory)

Gabriella Giannachi has been documenting the development of the work on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/627

In Berlin, Gabriella will extend this work by tracking her experience of the game at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/758 .

This documentation will continue to evolve over the following 24 days of play.

The Locarno (photo: Blast Theory)

Day Of The Figurines is the world's first MUD (Multi User Domain) for mobile phones. Blast Theory describe it as 'a mass participation artwork using mobile phones that is part board game and part secret society'. They write:

Set in a fictional English town that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay, the game unfolds over 24 days, each day representing an hour in the life of the town. Up to 1000 players place their plastic figurines onto the board. They are moved by hand in a meticulous performance throughout the duration of the exhibition

Players participate by sending text messages. They must help other players as they receive updates from the town, missions and dilemmas. They can also chat to players who are near them in the town using text messages as events unfold in the town: a gig by Scandinavian death metallists, an invasion by a Middle Eastern army, a summer fete.

Day Of The Figurines will be running from Thursday 28th September to 21st
October 2006 from 4 to 8pm at HEBBEL AM UFER HAU 2: Hallesches Ufer 32 / 10963 Berlin.

Blast Theory Day of the Figurines in Barcelona

2006-06-11T16:36:35Z

Blast Theory are presenting a 3 day public test of Day of the Figurines at the Sonar International Festival of Advance Music and Multimedia – Barcelona, Spain, on the 15th,16th,17th June 2006.

Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.

Gabriella (Giannachi) has just returned from visiting a 3 day preparatory workshop with Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj of Blast Theory, Steve Benford and team members from the Mixed Reality Lab, Nottingham University, Irma Lindt of the Fraunhofer Institute for Applied Information Technology, and Alain Becam of the Interactive Institute, Stockholm.

Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.

Day Of The Figurines has been developed as part of the European research project IPerG (Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming) in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham, Sony Net Services, University of Gotland, Interactive Institute and the Fraunhofer Institute.
.
We will be following and documenting the evolution of Day of the Figurines as part of the Presence Project over the next 18 months.

Our documentation of these processes will soon be emerging at: http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/627

Blast Theory write that:

Day of the Figurines is set in a fictional town that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay. The game unfolds over a total of 24 days, each day representing an hour in the life of the town that shifts from the mundane to the cataclysmic; the local vicar opens a summer fete, Scandinavian metallists play a gig at the Locarno that goes horribly wrong and a gunship of Middle Eastern troops appears on the High Street. How players respond to these events and to each other creates and sustains a community during the course of a single day in the town. From the Gasometer to Product Barn, the Canal to the Rat Research Institute, up to 1,000 players roam the streets, defining themselves through their interactions. The centrepiece of the game is a 3.5 x 5 meter model town – at the Centre de Cultura Comtemporània de Barcelona - created using pop up metal buildings, overlaid with computer graphics. Each of the 1,000 players is represented by a small plastic figurine which is moved by hand every hour for the duration of the game.

The full day 24 day version of Day Of The Figurines will be launched in Berlin in September, which we will be following closely.

At Sonar by Day - at the Centre de Cultura Comtemporània de Barcelona C/
Montalegre, 5 08001 Barcelona, on 15,16,17th June 12.00 – 22.00

For more details -

www.dayofthefigurines.co.uk

www.blasttheory.co.uk

www.sonar.es

www.pervasive-gaming.org

Andrea Zapps Eye 2 Eye - Networked Installation

2006-06-11T16:16:18Z

The first part of Andrea Zapp's current current work, Eye 2 Eye will open on 16 June.

Eye 2 Eye – Networked Installation is developed for the Okno Gallery in Cheljabinsk, Russia. her partners onsite are Dmitry Lathukin and Svetlana Shlyapnikova from the Okno Gallery. The gallery's website is at http://www.oknogallery.ru/en/index.html

Andrea will be showing the work locally via a LAN connection at the summer festival at the GI in Moscow on the 16th of June and then travel on to the Urals, to set up the work as a networked link between theUral State University (Ekaterinburg) [http://www.usu.ru/] and South Ural State University (Chelyabinsk)

Andrea describes the piece:

Two remote identical black wooden boxes are connected via the Internet using I Sight cameras and an I Chat video interface.
Visitors glimpse through a small peephole into the box. An invisible camera inside on the opposite wall captures their eyes and transfers it to the other box, where it is displayed underneath the camera on a small round-shaped projection screen and vice versa. Both participants exchange their views in real-time, looking into each other’s eyes.

This surveillance interface inside the box is embedded into a stage like miniature set of an earth globe below and amidst a starry sky with little colourful planets dotted around that seem to float in the space. It recalls a satellite perspective, which is underlined by the surveillance interface above; but the view onto this small universe glowing in the dark, reminiscent of toys even, implicates ironic commentaries in itself – resulting in thoughts about who controls and who observes whom in a more globally networked sense

Image courtesy Andrea Zapp.

Andrea Zapp's website is at: http://www.azapp.de/

Bella Merlin Presence Workshop 21 June

2006-06-07T10:17:11Z

On 21 June, 12.30-4.30, Bella Merlin will conduct our sixth and final Presence workshop of the series here at Exeter.

Coming from a training in the Russian School which combined Stanislavsky, Michael Chekhov and Jerzy Grotowski, Bella’s particular emphasis in the exploration of performing presence will be in many ways remarkably simple: what happens between two physical bodies in the performing space?

Her investigation will try and unravel some of the complexities arising out of that simple encounter when actors undertake - in Stanislavsky’s words - to 'get each other in each other's grasp'. This process also connects Grotowski’s via negativa and how the actor strives to eliminated inner and physical blocks between action and impulse.

Putting the notions of 'radiation' or 'communion' under the metaphorical microscope, Bella will work with actor Miles Anderson, whose extensive experience in theatre, film and television has challenged his own understanding of 'presence; in the moment of performance, whether in front of the camera or in front of a live audience.

Through a series of silent etudes, in which the actors' attendance to the minutiae of each other's facial, physical and (most importantly) energetic changes prompt impulses in the moment of performance, Merlin and Anderson will work towards an analysis of text (taking a scene from Three Sisters between Vershinin and Masha and/or a scene from Anna Karenina between Anna and Vronsky). This in turn will lead to an investigation of how the spoken word alters the actor's psycho-physical state in the moment of performance: to what extent is 'the present' nudged out of the picture by memory-testing the pre-learnt lines?

Bella Merlin trained as an actor in the UK and at the State Institute of Cinematography in Moscow. She has worked extensively with director, Max Stafford-Clark in co-productions between Joint Stock and The Royal National Theatre, including David Hare’s The Permanent Way, She Stoops to Conquer and A Laughing Matter. Bella’s many other roles have included Masha in The Seagull, The Governess in The Turn of the Screw, and Celia in As You Like It, with numerous performances on radio and television.

Bella’s wide ranging publications include: With the Rogue’s Company: Henry IV at the National Theatre, Oberon Books, 2005; Konstantin Stanislavsky, Routledge Performance Practitioners, Routledge, 2003; and Beyond Stanislavsky: The Psycho-Physical Approach to Actor-Training, Nick Hern Books, 2001.

Bella Merlin is Lecturer at the University of Exeter.

Audience places for the workshop are free. The workshop will take place in Theatre Studio 2, in Drama's new complex, The Alexander Building, Thornlea, University of Exeter. Details of how to find us are here http://www.projects.ex.ac.uk/performing-presence/How%20to%20find%20us.php

To book an audience place at the workshop please contact l.m.dowsett@exeter.ac.uk

An introduction to Bella's is available through the Presence Project Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/350

Images reproduced courtesy Bella Merlin..

Audience Interaction: Fiona Templeton Presence Workshop 24 May

2006-05-15T12:38:45Z

On 24 May, 12.30-4.30, Fiona Templeton will present the fifth of our Presence Research Workshops here at Exeter.

Fiona Templeton, YOU - The City (1988), Greg Archinega
photo: Zoe Beloff

Fiona's workshop will focus on Audience Interaction.

She writes:

Theatre that interacts with the audience must consider the audience themselves as an area of skill to be developed. This has become far more sophisticated than notions of "audience participation" which risked (or played with) the audience's discomfort. Technological "interaction" is now familiar, but live interaction functions differently to the machine. The audience's part in an interaction can not wholly be surmised, and specific research is needed if interaction is to become more refined, responsive and complex. The inclusion of audiences in the development of the work from the beginning, therefore, is, I hope, not only an "opportunity to take part" but an opportunity to shape and have ownership of arts experiences. In the Afterword to my book YOU-The City I wrote "Theatre is the art of relationship." So research into the relationship of a specific work to its audience is also for me work on a model for further relationships between the art and its public.

Fiona's work ranges widely across many disciplines. She has been awarded fellowships from the U.S. National Endowment for the Arts in both Poetry and Visual Arts (new genres); an ''Abendzeitung Muenchen Sterne des Jahres'' for theatre; and two fellowships from New York Foundation for the Arts for performance, as well as one for playwriting. She was 1996-7 Senior writer-in-residence at the English Faculty of Cambridge University, England, and 2000-2003 Arts and Humanities Research Board fellow with the Department of Theatre Studies, University of Lancaster, England. In December 2002 she received the annual Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts grant for theatre in New York.

Her award-winning and influential YOU--The City, "an intimate citywide play for an audience of one", has since been recreated in six countries and languages, including at the London International Festival of Theatre in 1989, and most recently as a key project of Rotterdam Cultural Capital of Europe 2001.

Recognition (1996).
Images: Fiona Templeton.

Long-term, she is writing a project for multiple directors, Realities, consisting of 5 interrelated plays. Her work created in collaboration with the late Michael Rotamski, Recognition, the first of these pieces, was produced at the Kitchen, New York, the ICA, London, and the Cambridge Conference on Contemporary Poetry 1996-7. The second work, Borders, was written for Gledalisce Glej, Ljubljana, Slovenia. The third , The Medead, is in progress. It is a play that retells the whole life-story of Medea, for 10 performers, to be produced by the Glasgow Tramway and the Rotterdamse Schouwburg, and has involved research into the origins of the Medea figure in what is now the Republic of Georgia.

To book an audience place at the workshop please contact l.m.dowsett@exeter.ac.uk

A fuller discussion of Fiona's work is available through the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/352

Fiona's website is at http://www.fionatempleton.org/

Images reproduced courtesy Fiona Templeton.

Future Presence workshops will be conducted by:

Bella Merlin (21 June)

Toward a Dispositional State of Possibility - with a touch of madness: Phillip Zarrilli Presence Workshop 10 May

2006-04-25T12:18:12Z

On 10 May, 12.30-4.30, Phillip Zarrilli will conduct the fourth of our Presence workshops here at Exeter.

In the workshop Phillip wil be assisted by Klaus Seewald http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/509 of Theatre Asou/Austria, the performer and researcher Jeungsook Yoo, and Exeter University students

Phillip writes:

In ''The Metaphysical Studio'' (published in The Drama Review) I reflected upon the relationship between 'presence' and 'absence' in actor-training and performance.
Absence is derived from the Latin 'absentia (...) state of being absent or missing'.

Presence is derived from the Latin 'praesentia', to be before one; 'pre + esse to be (...) at hand.

In the spatio-temporal realm of the ‘metaphysical’ studio, this workshop will further reflect upon and interrogate the relationship between presence and absence, between 'what is' as it 'comes into being' and 'what is not'.

I view this relationship as a constantly dialectical state of creative possibility. I will argue that only if the absent is constantly present (‘at-hand’) to the performer might ‘presence’ emerge as a performative disposition—a place of possibility and readiness.

The question in practice becomes how to prepare/train actors toward this dispositional 'readiness'.

To tease out this relationship between presence and absence, in addition to drawing Western phenomenology and South Asian paradigms and languages of practice and embodiment, I will elaborate a few Taoist principles that inform the inner dynamics of taiquiquan and the dynamic, dialectical relationship between yin and yang central to its practice.

After an introduction, the first part of the workshop is a work demonstration of pre-performative psychophysical exercises (yoga, [kalarippayattu], taiquiquan) guided by the set of metaphors used to train and prepare actors toward this dispositional state of readiness. As important as the exercises per se is the studio-based language I have developed to held actors toward actualizing this dispositional readiness. We will explore and interrogate this dispositional state between presence and absence in advanced martial arts practice with weapons.

Two reflections will follow: *(1) how everything must be ‘forgotten’, i.e., one must enter a kind of ‘chaos’ where form is ‘abandoned’ in heightened practice; and *(2) the ‘problem’ of the senses, sensory awareness, and perception, i.e., how an alternative language of awareness might move the actor toward a dispositional state of possibility.

The underlying principles of the training will be put into play towards acting as a few structured improvisations are ‘played’. Again, ‘abandonment’ is crucial to this process of ‘play’.

In the final part of the workshop, specific examples of the application of such principles and training to specific dramaturgies will be explored.

How is the dispositional state of the performer shaped by particular modes of being/doing appropriate to a particular dramaturgy?

What are the tasks most appropriate to helping the actor create a “dispositional score” in which presence might emerge?

Particular attention will be given to the actor’s inhabitation of performance scores in which media has played a central part in realizing the mise-en-scene, and in issues of documentation—Beckett’s ''Eh Joe'' and ''Rockaby'', Martin Crimp’s ''Attempts on Her Life'', Charles Mee’s ''Orestes''.

Time permitting, the workshop will conclude with a brief discussion of the ‘problem’ of documentation of non-mediated live performance—the ‘problem’ of ‘capturing’ an ephemeral/emergent ‘presence’ if and when it is not directed at or incorporating media as part of the mise-en-scene.

Phillip Zarrilli is a performer, director and theorist, internationally known for training actors using a psychophysical process combining yoga (especially Hatha Yoga) and the Asian martial arts ([Kalarippayattu] and Tai Chi Ch’uan). He is the first westerner to have undergone full-time, long-term training in Kalarippayattu. He also studied Yoga and t’ai chi. In 1988 he received the traditional pitham (stool representing past masters) from Govindankutty Nayar. He also trained at the Kerala Kalarippayattu Academy, Kannur, with C. Mohammed Sherif Gurukkal, and under Sreejayan Gurukkal and Raju Asan. He studied Yoga with Chandran Gurukkal in Kannur and Dhayaniddhi in Thiruvananthapuram. He specializes in northern style kalarippayattu, full-body massage (uliccil), and complimentary yoga. He trained in t'ai chi ch'uan (Wu-style) with noted theatre director and East Asian scholar, A.C.Scott.

Phillip has conducted workshops, "Making the body all eyes..." throughout the world, including Esalen Institute, Utrecht School of the Arts, Passe Partout, National School of Drama (New Delhi), Centre for Performance Research (Wales), (London) International Workshop Festival, Gardzienice Theatre (Poland), among others. For over twenty years he was Director of the Asian-Experimental Theatre Program in the U.S.A. where he taught classes daily. His numerous books include (editor) ''Acting (Re)Considered'' (2nd edition, forthcoming), ''When the Body Becomes All Eyes'' (1998), ''Kathakali Dance-Drama: Where Gods and Demons Comes to Play'' (2000), and (editor) ''Martial Arts in Actor Training'' (1993). He is currently writing a new book with accompanying interactive DVD-Rom (by Peter Hulton) on his approach to training actors and performance, ''The Psychophysical Actor at Work: acting ‘at the nerve ends’'' (London: Routledge Press, forthcoming).

Phillip is Professor of Performance Practice at Exeter University.

To book an audience place at the workshop please contact l.m.dowsett@exeter.ac.uk.

A fuller discussion of Phillip's work is available through the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/357

Phillip Zarrilli's extensive website is at http://www.phillipzarrilli.com/