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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
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'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
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 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.
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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
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/
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.
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
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)
Paul Sermon is creating a new, site-specific telepresence work in Taipei, Taiwan. To enable this commission, Paul will be working in the studios at Taipei Artist's Village (TAV) until 6 May.
Gabriella Giannachi has begun a dialogue with Paul, published on the Presence Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/500, following the process of making the piece.
Paul writes:
Some images attached of the locations I have visited. The Chinese housing complex I spoke about is called Treasure Hill, this was a really inspiring space and several of the houses have been purchased by the city government and turned into artist studios/galleries.
The artists are working with a lot of found objects and using the space as living/working/studio/exhibition environments, turning one of the spaces into a bar also.
But in general I don't think it is possible to use the space for a media art installation, it's just not secure enough, it's also very damp and electrical supplies are not reliable.
But anyway - very inspiring. I'm also attaching a photo from The Huashan Culture Park I visited Wednesday to give you some idea of the scale of the space.
They also have some small studio/bedroom spaces here at Taipei Artists Village which I could use to produce an installation work which could draw some of the thoughts gathered from Treasure Hill. I will talk more about the concept emerging here in my next email.
I'm intrigued by your [Gabriella's] notion absentness in the telepresent space. In my work/notion nothing is absent but rather becoming redefined - the absence of touch is embodied in the expanded sense of sight. The same could be said for blind person - the absence of sight is embodied in the expanded sense of touch or sound. Can we expand this to cultural experience?
Over the next three months we will be following and documenting Paul's process.
On 8th March Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes will conduct the second of our Presence workshops in Drama's newly opened Alexander Building at Exeter.
Pearson/Brookes/Thomas:who are you looking at?
Since 1997, Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes have created a series of
productions that proposed new strategies within the form, function and
placement of performance in work employing a variety of media, from radio broadcast to
surveillance CCTV.
In this workshop, which includes audio and video material
from several of their recent multi-site works, they examine the implications
of these strategies for notions of presence and absence, for both performers
and spectators alike. They reflect upon their working practices, new forms
of dramaturgy, the shifting role of audience, reorientations in the
technique of the performer, and questions of documentation. Pearson and
Brookes will show previously little seen material including graphic
representations of their performance scenarios, footage from projects in
Germany and west Wales, and the experimental DVD-ROM of their performance
work Carrying Lyn. The presentation will be informal, with an opportunity
for discussion.
Pearson/Brookes/Thomas:who are you looking at?
Pearson and Brookes have worked together since 1997. In 2002 they began a
long-term though irregular relationship with Welsh playwright Ed Thomas.
Their regular performer/collaborators include John Rowley, now working with
Forced Entertainment, and Richard Morgan and Paul Jeff of Good Cop Bad Cop.
Pearson/Brookes: polis
Mike Pearson is Professor of Performance Studies in the Department of
Theatre, Film and Television Studies, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. He
was a director of Cardiff Laboratory Theatre (1973-80) and Brith Gof
(1981-97). His main interests are in devised performance and site specific
work. He is the author with Michael Shanks of Theatre/Archaeology (2001,
Routledge), and of ŒIn Comes I¹: Performance, Location and Landscape
(University of Exeter Press, forthcoming)
Pearson/Brookes: polis
Mike Brookes is an artist and designer, working primarily as a painter and
performance maker. His design work has engaged both graphic and time-based
media; and his collaborations with performance companies such as Brith Gof,
The Magdalena Project, Earthfall, and Quarantine, have resulted in a wide
spread reputation for his activities as a lighting and production designer.
Audience places at the workshop are free of charge and can be reserved by contacting Linda Dowsett at l.m.dowsett@exeter.ac.uk
Further information on work by Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes is available through the Performing Presence Collaboratory here http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/Collaboratory/343 and in our earlier weblog entry at http://traumwerk.stanford.edu/presence/2005/11/pearsonbrookes_presence_worksh.html
Mike Brookes' website is at http://www.mikebrookes.com/
Images from who are you looking at? Pearson/Brookes/Thomas.
Images of polis Gerald Tyler.
Images courtesy Mike Brookes.
Future presence workshops at Exeter will be conducted by:
Vayu Naidu: 22 March
Phillip Zarrilli and Klaus Seewald: 10 May
Fiona Templeton: 24 May
Bella Merlin: 21 June
Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes will be offering the second of our Presence Workshops in Exeter on 8 March.
In a series of performances since 1999, Pearson/Brookes have explored studio-based practice as a mediation of specific sites and events.
who are you looking at? – performed in Cardiff, Wales over three nights in February 2004, formed the second part of their collaboration with writer and director Ed Thomas.
The piece proposes strategies for re-imagining the city in a revelation of personal material and experience.
Mike Brookes describes the piece:
An installation and performance presentation built on core material produced in collaboration with five young female performers - each documenting 3mins within a particular public city centre location, on the same evening: producing footage, of each location, from three simultaneous and expanding points of view.
The event was performed by Brookes, Pearson and Thomas - working around a large central table, on which was arranged all the necessary equipment and material [...] to structure the progression and juxtaposition of this material live within the room of the developing installation.
In their work, documentation acts as an axis to explore the presence/absence of objects, images and experiences transposed into performance.
Mike Pearson trained as an archaeologist. Between 1972 and 1997 Mike was involved in a series of key performance companies based in Wales and working across Europe, including RAT Theatre, Cardiff Laboratory Theatre and, from 1981, Brith Gof.
A major documentation of Brith Gof’s performances is being developed at Stanford as part of Michael (Shanks)’ Metamedia Lab at http://metamedia.stanford.edu:3455/BrithGof/Home. Michael was a company director of Brith Gof from 1997 until the company closed in 2004.
Mike Brookes is an artist and designer whose performance work focuses upon 'the production of durational objects and interventions, holistic ambients, radical structures of presentation, and context specific performance works.'
An earlier Pearson/Brookes performance, polis, realised over three consecutive evenings in September 2001, comprised twenty-five performance fragments, realised in five phases of five simultaneous acts, across the centre of the city.
Small groups of spectators produced documentary traces of these events, along with personal material.
Simultaneously, within the developing structure of an installation, Mike Pearson and Mike Brookes effected a re-presentation of these traces, producing
An installation that combined multiple projection and video monitoring; with maps of routes and locations; texts; polaroid photographs; an evolving and complex sound ambient; and the accumulation of artifacts and traces resulting from the performers' processes and activities, and the spectators encounters with them.
Pearson/Brookes explore the material and immaterial traces of action and place in the performance of events just-passed and the re-presentation of one site through another.
Their work is concerned with the mechanisms in which the presence of actions and events are mapped and re-enacted.
Mike Brookes website and documentation of Pearson/Brookes work is at http://www.mikebrookes.com
Images from who are you looking at? Pearson/Brookes/Thomas.
Images of polis Gerald Tyler.
Images courtesy Mike Brookes.
Matt Adams of Blast Theory has accepted a four year University Fellowship here at Exeter.
During our collaboration Matt will be associated with the Centre for Intermedia http://www.ex.ac.uk/drama/research/intermedia/welcome.shtml
Led by Matt, Ju Row Farr and Nick Tandavanitj, Blast Theory is renowned internationally as one of the most adventurous artists’ groups using interactive media, creating groundbreaking new forms of performance and interactive art that mixes audiences across the internet, live performance and digital broadcasting.
Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.
For the past four years Blast Theory has been exploring the convergence of online and mobile technologies in collaboration with the Mixed Reality Lab at University of Nottingham http://www.mrl.nott.ac.uk/
Day Of The Figurines is a major new project being developed with MRL alongside Sony Net Services and the Fraunhofer Institute as part of the European research project IPerG (Integrated Project on Pervasive Gaming).
The piece was piloted in July-August 2005 and will be fully developed through 2006.
Mapping players’ real-time gaming via mobile phones from any location, through figurines occupying a model of a fictional city, Day Of The Figurines explores action, identity and interaction in reversals and exchanges between real and virtual social and political spaces.
Day Of The Figurines, 2005. Copyright Blast Theory. Photo: Nicola Dove.
Blast Theory describe the premise of the piece:
Day of The Figurines is set in a model of a fictional city that is littered, dark and underpinned with steady decay. From the Gasometer to Product Barn, the Canal to Rat Research Institute, up to 100 players roam the streets, defining themselves through their interactions. A gunship of Arabic troops appears on the High Street. Scandinavian metallists play a gig at the Locarno that goes horribly wrong. How players respond to these events and to each other creates and sustains a community during the course of a single day in the city.
The company has also been commissioned to create a major, new permanent installation for THEpUBLIC in West Bromwich UK, due to open in 2006.
Using Augmented Reality, Flypad will generate avatars from a 'data body' - information submitted by visitors on their entry to the gallery and as they progress through the space.
Flypad. Permanent commission for THEpUBLIC's new building, West Bromwich, to be launched in 2006. Copyright Blast Theory.
At the installation, up to twelve players will be able to fly their avatars through the gallery’s large central atrium, while attempting holds and forming moves with other avatars.
In its appearance, Flypad draws on Peking Opera, Mexican wrestling, facemasks, and skydiving.
Matt suggests that:
The whole work springs from the architectural location [….] What we're trying to do is make sure that the virtual representation and the real space which sits around it are as seamlessly interlinked as possible, that there's a very fluid relationship between the two [...] the sense of play that you will experience as you dart between real and virtual, and experience the frisson of this difference, is a very important part of the pleasure of it.
Blast Theory's complex and immersive game-structures distribute player-presence across multiple and incongruent sites and networks.
During Matt’s Fellowship we will be developing critical frameworks through which to engage with Blast Theory’s radical work.
As part of this, we will be documenting the development of work by the company through the Presence Project Collaboratory.
Blast Theory’s website is at http://www.blasttheory.co.uk/
Early in the New Year we will begin documenting Paul Sermon’s development of a new commission for the opening of THEpUBLIC museum in West Bromwich, UK http://www.thepublic.com/.
Telematic Embrace will be a permanent installation in place from August 2006.
These images from Paul’s prospectus for the project are from Telematic Vision (1992), which inspires this new work.
Paul’s site-specific installations employ telematics to explore mutual interaction and user-determined narrative between remote participants.
Participants interact with others in physically dispersed sites by observing their own ‘human avatar’ representations in a telepresent space.
Paul describes how this is enabled:
Through the use of live chroma-keying and videoconferencing technology these divided audience participants enter a video installation and initially suppose they entering a passive space - sitting, standing or sometimes lying within it. Their presence within the space is recorded live on video camera and mapped in real-time, via a chroma-key video mixer, with an identical camera view of another participant in an identical installation space – combining two shots of live action by replacing a blue or green back drop in one image with the image of the other. The two spaces which can be any geographical distance apart are linked via a videoconference connection, making it possible to link and combine these telematic installations and their performing audiences between almost any location in the world.
These installations provoke an uncanny sense of presence in conflations between proximity and distance, intimacy and removal.
Paul argues that:
All technology is a development of language - a means of construction and interpretation of an environment. The definition of the virtual and real are all part of the same linguistic construct. Technology/language is not an apparatus or attachment of the body, but rather an extension of it.
For the user, remote participants come closer in a sense of presence divided between sites, actions and interactions.
Paul’s website is at http://www.paulsermon.org/
A context for this documentation of Paul’s work is already being developed on the Collaboratory at http://presence.stanford.edu:3455/PaulSermon/Home
Images courtesy Paul Sermon.
Rome. June 11 2005
Risonanze Oscure
Dark Resonances
We are at the Colosseum, the Flavian Amphitheatre - me (Michael Shanks), Nick (Kaye) and Gabriella (Giannachi). It is 10pm.
Across the street beneath the temple of Venus we have been looking at flickering images of what look to me like archaeological sediments projected into the foundation arches, behind the protective iron grills.
They are part of a new work by Gary Hill, the Seattle/New York based video and performance artist. It is a work of site specific theatre/archaeology. Gary is one of the artists of our new project - "Performing presence: from the live to the simulated" We will be reporting on this project here, in this blog.
Here is my archaeological "reading" of the event.
Location
A ruin - spectacular, yes, but the surface of much of the Colosseum has been stripped away over the centuries - all the seating and the floor of the arena - conspicuously revealing the skeletal sub- structure, the labyrinth of passages for managing crowds, gladiators, victims, the underside of the monument. And, of course, the Colosseum is emblem of all the underside of Rome - crowds, mass media, violence as entertainment, bread and circuses, the barbarism at the heart of imperial civilization.
We find the gate, they look for us on "the list" (there are three), and we get into the Colosseum.
Characters
Rome's media and arts crowd are here as the audience tonight.
There are performers, sounds, projected images, lights, props. Ghosts - Persephone, Pan, the witch Kirke, invoked in the event. And, of course, the audiences, performers and victims from long ago - neither present nor absent - non-absent.
Episodes
One. Interference and resonance.
Within several of the great supporting arches of the Colosseum have been sited speakers and video projectors. Intermittently, randomly (?), they sound out horns across the auditorium filled with tourists as faint images appear projected up within the brickwork. Ghostly images - we spot an "angel" walking back and forth with a great curved brass horn.
Images almost invisible. Echoes across the ruin. Horns announcing what? That the past is still going on?
Two. Surface sediment.
Outside the Colosseum at the Temple of Venus - flickering indistinct images of what look to me like excavated surfaces, with spoken commentary. Shown in arches beneath a monument that now exists only as an indication of where the columns and walls once stood - traces in the thin grass of early summer.
The indeterminacy of the trace of the past.
Our contact with the past is all about translations - mediations, like these videos of surface sediment - passages forced back and forth. Forced, because the material resists - we have to dig away and work on what is left. And it is all so indeterminate - what was and is going on?
Three. A face in the underworld.
The audience stands on the second tier looking down into the depths of the arena, actually at the passages and voids beneath. It is dark but we can make out activity in the shadows. Something is going on. On the temporary stage that replaces part of the missing floor of the arena there is a dimly lit structure. It looks like a face staring upwards.
Four. Clapping/flapping.
It begins with clapping, or is it a flapping of wings, white noise. It grows louder.
Is this an echo of crowds? Clamoring for bread and entertainment. Nourishment and numbing narcotic (pharmakon).
Five. Dreams of escape.
The first of the videos projected onto the monument - within the arena and up the sides of the auditorium. A contraption. A radio mast? It looks more like one of Leonardo's flying machines - magical inventions that never flew except in the imagination. A dream of an escape.
Video recordings replayed on these ancient walls - reflexive spaces of difference.
Six. Word magic.
Strings of vowels appear projected up above the arena. They are voiced over and over again on the sound system. More clamoring. And resonance. We can detect no message, except in the performed enunciation, like a magical incantation. Mesmerizing magic - disorienting and misdirecting.
A classical location of dark magic is Kirke's island at the edge of the known world, its name a palindrome of vowels - Aiaia. Where Odysseus's men were turned to farm beasts, where he countered the witch's magic with a drug given to him by Hermes, the god of mediation and interpretation, where he found how to travel to the underworld to speak with the seer Teiresias, to find his way home.
The palindrome comes and goes, works, reads, cuts both ways.
Seven. Goat in a field.
Another projected image. Not a lion or exotic beast. The calmness of country life and farming? Where bread comes from. But the Goat is also Pan - not a divinity but a disrupting force, of chaos, from a time even before the gods. Whose shout brings panic.
Eight. The dis-invented wheel.
A carriage crosses the arena in a transect back to the stage. It is a struggle to get it there because the wheels are triangular.
The carriage carries goddess Persephone on her way from sunshine and agricultural fertility (her mother is Demeter, goddess of harvest) to the world of the dead, in her cyclical return to the underworld and Hades.
Time and the past here are not an arrow of no return, but symmetrically cut both ways.
As Odysseus found out in his search for a nostos (homecoming), the trick is not finding Hades, but getting back - that needs magic.
Nine. A lament.
Voiced over the sound system.
A lament of what is missing - what never happened, but should have done.
Ten. Flights of fantasy.
A model aeroplane flies quietly round the auditorium in the dark, lands on the stage, takes off again. It carries little fairy lights. Then model gliders are launched from above and crash into the audience. No escape, again.
Augury - to read the future by interpreting the flight of birds. Here mechanical inventions of our intellect.
Remember , with Herakleitos, that Apollo, the god whose oracle of the future is at Delphi, neither reveals nor conceals the truth, but gives a sign.
Eleven. A ghost among us.
Persephone walks among the audience in a circuit around the auditorium, followed by a video cameraman.
Uncanny ghosts - with the uncanny as the return of the repressed, the return of what is no longer the same.
And a deparate attempt to record the unrecordable - how, on earth, is this all to be documented?
These encounters with the past are new to Gary Hill's work. And though we are in the world of son-et-lumiere, this is no post-modern pastiche, but a circuit around the awkwardness of presence - a present past, more precisely non-absent.
No attempt is made to reconstruct a past - for what would that be other than superficiality of Hollywood CGI with its stock narratives like "Gladiator", however spectacular.
There is a deep questioning here of the notion that sites like the Colosseum are somehow "sources", somehow the origin of what is made of them, font of understanding the past. Instead the site, as a collocation of fragments, acts as a frame, parergon, supplement - an exterior that defines, has effect in its non-absence.
The site resists in its materiality and instead we deal in resonances and a geneaology of echoes and Chinese whispers through time.
Theatre/archaeology
PS I wrote this on the flight back home. Here are Gabriella's outline and Charles Stein's diary of the work's creation.
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