paul rae : presencing


Part 5: Play

'A play', pronounces Peter Brook at the close of The Empty Space, whose opening is quoted in part 2 of this article, 'is play'(1968: 157). One might question whether, even then - 1968 being no ordinary year for homo ludens - a play was play, but these days, it is an even harder position to maintain: In 2002, why play with a play, when you can play more(.com) with Microsoft's Xbox; and why bother with an empty space when the Sony PlayStation 2's 'Third Place' is arguably the rightful heir to the Theatre and its Double? If so, where Artaud's nightmare scenario of the theatre consisted of 'an incredible fluttering of men in black suits busy arguing over receipts by the entrance to a white hot box office'(1970: 34), the Third Place dragoons Stelarc's posthuman cachet into its expansive commodification of play. "To play needs much work" wrote Brook: "But when we experience the work as play, then it is not work any more"(157). Wise words for the men in suits wondering how to market play, or at least those aspects of play to which the product can give privileged, if not exclusive, access. It is about investing the brand with the promise of infinite possibility (play), enabled by unparalleled technological capacity (work).

The difference between the two advertisements is instructive here. PlayStation deploys cyperbole: graphic and conceptual excess that promises the gamer access to realms of superhuman - or, in this case, posthuman - possibility. Once detatched from the magazine, the brochure, entitled 'Human Conversion', can be opened up, and the pages overlaid. There are several permutations to 'play' with, but, ultimately, a commodificatory logic determines one combination that allows the user to track the linear development of three modes of conversion. The graphic builds from a 'regular boy' to into ice-hockeying-fighter-flying-samurai hybrid. The interlocking texts outline the activities of two men for whom 'being human is just a phase': cyborg researcher Professor Kevin Warwick, and performance artist Stelarc, whose urls are included at the end of the text. Thirdly, the phrase 'Human Conversion' transmutes, via a pseudo-Japanese script, into the PlayStation tag-line: 'The Third Place' - hovering, appropriately enough, somewhere between the theory and the practice.

By contrast, the Xbox advertisement employs a technique that could be termed glitching: the tweaking of reality. Ostensibly appealing to the gamer's sense of imaginative possibility - 'this is what we can do; what can you do? - the strategy's strength actually lies in its suggestion of world-producing power, of sufficient RAM to create a perfect simulation of already-exisiting reality, but one into which interventions can be made at will, for example by turning a ray into a surfboard.
Given that both marketing strategies are associative, the correspondance between the spirit of the adverts and the experience delivered by the products is beside the point. More pertinent in this context is what 'cyperbole' and 'glitching' can reveal about the practice and discussion of new media performance, and in this regard, Stelarc provides an intriguing case-study. His endorsement of the gaming experience and its marketing inflects anew his own aesthetic and conceptual aspirations: in particular, it reveals what is at stake in cyperbole. Predictably, the PlayStation 2 brochure trades on the sloganeering, aspirational and novelty value of Stelarc's project: familiar features to Stelarc-watchers, as a brief visit to his website, the legend 'The Body is Obsolete' flashing insistently on the screen, reminds us (Stelarc, www). But within the broader context of the work, such features also reveal themselves to be as much strategies as conceptual articulations. Stelarc is more reflexively cyperbolic than the advertisement suggests, for this reflexivity is born of difficulty. Where photographs of some of Stelarc's early suspension work exude either a harmony or counter-balance between body, force and pain, much of his interactions with advanced technologies are characterised by cumbersomeness. Where both the Xbox and the PlayStation 2 are robust and user-friendly objects, promising hassle-free entry into the realm of the posthuman or the hyper-real, Stelarc's work operates in a perpetual state of 'R n' D'. There, cyperbole is less bold pronouncement, than a mania for the prosthetic, for a proliferation of add-ons and plug-ins that are by turns haphazardly improvised and ingeniously planned. In any research and development process, each new addition in this proliferation causes the researcher - and observers - to pull up short, and reflect. In Stelarc's work, this has consistently involved the question of how a piece of technology is to interface with his body, and at what cost. This is what gives that well-worn slogan of his an ascetic, rather than revolutionary quality. Ultimately, what is distinctive about Stelarc's on-going body of work is less about what he stands to gain, and more about what he is prepared to relinquish.

Cyperbole is rife in new media performance, and the discourses that swirl around it. To a degree, this is inevitable and necessary, for it operates through a double bind: profoundly ahistorical, all potential pay-offs from a project are invested in the future. It is the sight-unseen promise of all performance talked up to unprecedented proportions. Cyperbole is both product and engine of such bright-eyed hope in endless possibility, that not even the cynical manipulations of the market can fully extinguish it. Nonetheless, dangers remain. The self-reflexivity inherently engendered by engaging with 'the new' risks becoming mere self-regarding. Most new technologies involve some form of sensorial feedback or interaction, and this has profound implications for performance, which is traditionally predicated on a feedback loop between performer and audience. Granted, the possibilities for enhancing, supplanting and critiquing this loop are legion, but not without their pitfalls. A real danger with new media technologies in performance is that the audience is frozen out, so beguiled are the artists by their own altered images. This is not simply about distracted performers, but rather a concern that a preoccupation with other manifestations of oneself on stage is built into the creative processes of certain work, to the detriment of other, conventionally audience-focussed elements. There is only a certain amount of interest that can be sustained by an audience perceiving a performer perceive themselves: it operates at the level of novelty - conceptual or otherwise - and wears off quickly. The challenge to artists working with such technologies is to find ways of working from the outset to discover where else their conceptual conceits will take them. This is the only way to match the spatial extensions enabled by the technology with a duration that extends beyond the moment of the performer's self-discovery or -apprehension.

This is equally a trap for those extra-performative features that invariably attend 'cutting edge' work. Practical considerations mean that, more than most other performance forms, new media performance runs close by institutions. Funding applications, negotiations with bureaucrats and technicians, publicity literature, public and specialized discussions, even the conceptualisation of 'research outcomes': for many artists, these are part and parcel of realising their plans. Again, caution must be taken to resist the institutionalisation of the work at a stage where one may be taken at one's word, and thereafter beholden to a certain interpretative vocabulary. In public funding situations, this may involve an appeal to a flabby terminology of 'community', in higher education scenarios, it is the academic. There are many ways in which the academic can play a productive role in the development and public understanding of new media performance, not least in underwriting this and other online projects, both literally and figuratively *.
* See for example the Body, Space and Technology Journal, and the Digital Performance Archive
Yet a cursory trawl of the Internet reveals extravagant claims for abstruse work, where theory follows neologism in a proliferation every bit as frenzied as the cyperbole of marketing. Likewise, artists articulate their work almost entirely in the vocabulary of academic abstraction.

Glitching is one possible solution. It offers an engagement with the aesthetic and conceptual possibilities of such technologies which is at once robust and insouciant. That is why, for me, the Xbox advertisement is ultimately more successful. The concept of 'play' with which it associates its product is both more expansive, and more subtly drawn. A work or an analysis that 'glitches', is one where the technology and terminology is sufficiently embedded amongst the other concerns of the artists, that at the aesthetic and conceptual level its presence is more subtly, and so more powerfully, felt. This presence need not be physical: the biomedical glitches in Xavier le Roy's Self Unfinished are a case in point.


In this article, I have attempted to mobilise both techniques. After all, how could I coin the term 'cyperbole' without also falling under its spell? In considering the implications of new media performance and discourse on theatrical performance and how it is talked about, a variety of means are necessary. The same could be said for this special issue of the journal as a whole. Addressing the points of intersection between performance and the Internet, it was our concern to offer a range of perspectives and interventions. This included approaching writers from a variety of critically engaged practices, from academics to performance and Internet artists. Each, in their own way, is inclined towards the glitching strategy. Steve Dixon tackles the cyperbole question head-on, with a rigourous survey of current thought about new media performance, before offering a more personalised perspective, based on the pragmatics of getting a telematic performance online. The question of pragmatics dominates Ben Slater's interview with Desperate Optimists, as they discuss the implications of their move from an 'academic' live performance context, to a distinctive form of community work using online film. Matthew Goulish meditates on the subjective basis of failure as a creative strategy, and Ray Langenbach addresses the performative and ideological discourses at work in the human analogue of glitching, the stutter. Simon Jones mixes up the screen in a three-pronged elaboration of the hybrid relationship between performance and sexuality and finally, Susan Melrose takes a step back from both performance and the Internet, to critically assess their discursive locations, and consider the implications of their intersection in a global context.

There is a certain irony in calling a project such as this Presence, since the academic is almost by definition only sensitive to the here (and now) from a position that designates it the there (and then). Nonetheless, since the state of being (t)here is also the condition of the Internet, it is to be hoped that this productive correspondence will generate a dynamic online engagement between performance and scholarship. This journal project is a step towards discovering and developing the best means of electronic knowledge transmission. In designing such a site, one is obliged to question the assumptions and conventions that underscore the material the site is to host. With such a range of concerns and practices represented in these contributions, this is a challenging experience. It is precisely that range, however, and the sense of possibility that attends it, that has also made it so rewarding to piece together - and, it is my sincere hope, to read. Click!



Artaud, Antonin (1970(1964)) The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Victor Corti. London: John Calder.

Brook, Peter (1990(1968)) The Empty Space. London: Penguin Books.

Stelarc, www.stelarc.va.com.au

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Bibliography

Artaud, Antonin (1970(1964)) The Theatre and its Double. Trans. Victor Corti. London: John Calder.

Billington, Michael (2001)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/reviews/story/0,3604,609279,00.html

Brook, Peter (1990(1968)) The Empty Space. London: Penguin Books.

Friel, Brian (1996(1980)) ‘Faith Healer’ in Plays: One. London: Faber and Faber, pp.327-376.

Grotowski, Jerzy (1969) Towards A Poor Theatre. London: Methuen.

Hayles, N. Katherine (1993) ‘Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers’ in October 66, Fall 1993, pp.69-92.

Massumi, Brian (2002) Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham and London: Duke University Press.

Rayner, Alice (1999) ‘Everywhere and Nowhere: Theatre in Cyberspace’, in Kobialka, Michael (ed) (1999) Of Borders and Thresholds: Theatre History, Practice and Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp.278-302.

Schimmel, Paul (2001) ‘An Interview with Juan Muñoz’ in Benezra, Neal, Viso, Olga M., Brenson, Michael, Schimmel, Paul (2001) Juan Muñoz. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp.145-51.

Steiner, George (1989) Real Presences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Stelarc, www.stelarc.va.com.au

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