The inescapable rush of technology is forcing us to make new choices about how we want to live. In this era of gnat-sized cameras and clothes penetrating radar, it will be more viltal than ever for us 'TO WATCH THE WATCHERS'. By ensuring accountability throug reciprocal transparency we can detect danger and expose wrong doers, we can gauge the credibility of pundits and politicians ..and maybe even preserve a little privacy. The bigger threat to our freedom is that surveillance technology will be used by too few people, not too many.
from back cover of D.Brin 'the transparent society'
Thursday 22 November 2007
Saturday 17 November 2007
two new references
Just wanted to share with you that I have found these two authors that wrote a lot about privacy and surveillance culture:
David Brin 'The transparent society'
Daniel Solove 'The digital person. Technology and privacy in the information age'
I read some chapters in the internet and they seemed incredibly interesting and helpful for what we are doing
xx
D
David Brin 'The transparent society'
Daniel Solove 'The digital person. Technology and privacy in the information age'
I read some chapters in the internet and they seemed incredibly interesting and helpful for what we are doing
xx
D
'The transparent society' by D.Brin
Hei!
I have read this article which seem to me quite related to what we are talking about. I would like you to read it as well.
xx
Dona
The Transparent Society:
Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1998, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.
This is a tale of two cities. Cities of the near future, say ten or twenty years from now.
Barring something unforeseen, you are apt to live in one of these two places. Your only choice may be which.
At first sight, this pair of municipalities look pretty much alike. Both contain dazzling technological marvels, especially in the realm of electronic media. Both suffer familiar urban quandaries of frustration and decay. If some progress is being made at solving human problems, it is happening gradually. Perhaps some kids seem better educated. The air may be marginally cleaner. People still worry about over-population, the environment, and the next international crisis.
None of these features are of interest to us right now, for we have noticed something about both of these 21st century cities that is radically different. A trait that marks them distinct from any metropolis of the late nineteen-nineties.
Street crime has nearly vanished from both towns. But that is only a symptom, a result.
The real change peers down from every lamp post, every roof-top and street sign.
Tiny cameras, panning left and right, surveying traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view.
Have we entered an Orwellian nightmare? Have the burghers of both towns banished muggings at the cost of creating a Stalinist dystopia?
Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.
Now let's skip across space and time.
At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.
Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.
A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.
Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.
In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.
Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?
# # #
Technology's Verdict
Alas, they do appear to be our only options. For the cameras are on their way, along with data networks that will send a myriad images flashing back and forth, faster than thought.
In fact, the future has already arrived. The trend began in Britain a decade ago, in the city of King's Lynn, where sixty remote controlled video cameras were installed to scan known "trouble spots," reporting directly to police headquarters. The resulting reduction in street crime exceeded all predictions; in or near zones covered by surveillance, it dropped to one seventieth of the former amount. The savings in patrol costs alone paid for the equipment in a few months. Dozens of cities and towns soon followed the example of King's Lynn. Glasgow, Scotland reported a 68% drop in citywide crime, while police in Newcastle fingered over 1500 perpetrators with taped evidence. (All but seven pleaded guilty, and those seven were later convicted.) In May 1997, a thousand Newcastle soccer fans rampaged through downtown streets. Detectives studying the video reels picked out 152 faces and published eighty photos in local newspapers. In days, all were identified.
Today over 250,000 cameras are in place throughout the United Kingdom, transmitting round-the-clock images to a hundred constabularies, all of them reporting decreases in public misconduct. Polls report that the cameras are extremely popular with citizens, though British civil libertarian John Wadham and others have bemoaned this proliferation of snoop technology, claiming that "It could be used for any other purpose, and of course it could be abused."
This trend was slower coming to North America, but it appears to be taking off. After initial experiments garnered widespread public approval, the City of Baltimore put police cameras to work scanning all 106 downtown intersections. In 1997, New York City began its own program to set up 24-hour remote surveillance in Central Park, subway stations and other public places.
No one denies the obvious and dramatic short term benefits derived from this early proliferation of surveillance technology. That is not the real issue. Over the long run, the sovereign folk of Baltimore and countless other communities will have to make the same choices as the inhabitants of our mythical cities One and Two. Who will ultimately control the cameras?
Consider a few more examples:
How many parents have wanted to be a fly on the wall, while their child was at day care? This is now possible with a new video monitoring system known as Kindercam, linked to high speed phone lines and a central Internet server. Parents can log on, type www.kindercam.com, enter their password, and access a live view of their child in day care at any time, from anywhere in the world. Kindercam will be installed in 2000 day care facilities nationwide by the end of 1998. Mothers on business trips, fathers who live out of state, as well as distant grandparents can drop in on their child daily. Drawbacks? Overprotective parents may check compulsively. And now other parents can observe your child misbehaving!
Some of the same parents are less happy about the lensed pickups that are sprouting in their own workplaces, enabling supervisors to tune in on them, the same way they use Kindercam to spy on their kids.
That is, if they notice the cameras at all. At present, engineers can squeeze the electronics for a video unit into a package smaller than a sugar cube. Complete sets half the size of a pack of cigarettes were recently offered for sale by the Spy Shop, a little store two blocks from the United Nations. Meanwhile, units with radio transmitters are being disguised in clock radios, telephones and toasters, as part of the burgeoning "nanny-cam" trend. So high is demand for these pickups, largely by parents eager to check on their babysitters, that just one firm in Orange County, California, was selling from 500 to 1,000 disguised cameras a month. By the end of 1997, prices dropped from $2,500 to $399.
Cameras aren't the only surveillance devices proliferating in our cities. Starting with Redwood City, near San Francisco, several police departments have begun lacing neighborhoods with sound pickups that transmit directly back to headquarters. Using triangulation techniques, officials can now pinpoint bursts of gunfire and send patrol units swiftly to the scene, without having to wait for vague phone reports from neighbors. In 1995 the Defense Department awarded a $1.7 million contract for SECURES, a prototype system created by Alliant Techsystems, to test more advanced pickup networks in Washington and other cities. They hope to distinguish not only types of gunfire, but also human voices crying for help.
So far, so good. But from there, engineers say it would be simple to upgrade the equipment, enabling bored monitors to eavesdrop on cries of passion, through open bedroom windows -- or even listen to family arguments. "Of course we would never go that far," one official said, reassuringly.
Consider another piece of James Bond apparatus now available to anyone with ready cash. Today, almost any electronics store will sell you night vision goggles using state-of-the-art infrared optics equal to those issued by the military, costing less than a video camera. AGEMA Systems, of Syracuse NY, has sold several police departments imaging devices that can peer at houses from the street, discriminate the heat given off by indoor marijuana cultivators, and sometimes tell if a person inside moves from one room to the next. Military and civilian enhanced-vision technologies now move in lock-step, as they have in the computer field for years.
In other words, even darkness no longer guarantees privacy.
Nor does your garden wall. In 1995, Admiral William A. Owens, then Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described a sensor system that he expected to be operational within a few years -- a pilotless drone, equipped to provide airborne surveillance for soldiers in the field. While camera robots in the $1 million range have been flying in the military for some time, the new system will be extraordinarily cheap and simple. Instead of requiring a large support crew, its controller will be one semi-skilled soldier, and will fit in the palm of a hand. Minuscule and quiet, such remote-piloted vehicles, or RPVs, may flit among trees to survey threats near a rifle platoon. When mass-produced in huge quantities, unit prices will fall.
Can civilian models be far behind? No law or regulation will keep them from our cities very long. The rich, the powerful, and figures of authority will have them, whether legally or surreptitiously. The contraptions will get smaller, cheaper and smarter with each passing year.
So much for the supposed privacy enjoyed by sunbathers in their own back yards.
Moreover, surveillance cameras are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Other entrancing and invasive innovations of the vaunted Information Age abound. Will a paper envelope protect your correspondence, sent by old-fashioned surface mail, when new-style scanners can trace the patterns of ink inside without ever breaking the seal?
Let's say you correspond with others by email, and use a computerized encryption program to ensure that your messages are only read by the intended recipient. What good will all the ciphers and codes do, if some adversary has bought a "back door" password to your encoding program? Or if a wasp-sized camera-drone flits into your room, sticks to the ceiling above your desk, inflates a bubble lens and watches every key-stroke that you type? (A number of unnerving techno-possibilities will be discussed in chapter 8.)
The same issues arise when we contemplate the proliferation of vast databases containing information about our lives, habits, tastes and personal histories. As we shall see in chapter 3, the cash register scanners in a million supermarkets, video stores, and pharmacies, already pour forth a flood of statistical data about customers and their purchases, ready to be correlated. (Are you stocking up on hemorrhoid cream? Renting a daytime motel room? The database knows.) Corporations claim this information helps them serve us more efficiently. Critics respond that it gives big companies an unfair advantage, knowing vastly more about us than we do about them. Soon, computers will hold all your financial and educational records, legal documents, and medical analyses that parse you all the way down to your genes. Any of this might be accessed by strangers without your knowledge, or even against your stated will.
As with those allegorical street-lamp cameras, the choices we make regarding future information networks -- how they will be controlled and who can access the data -- will affect our lives, those of our children, and their descendants
I have read this article which seem to me quite related to what we are talking about. I would like you to read it as well.
xx
Dona
The Transparent Society:
Will Technology Force us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin, Ph.D.
Copyright © 1998, by David Brin. All rights reserved. No duplication or resale without permission.
This is a tale of two cities. Cities of the near future, say ten or twenty years from now.
Barring something unforeseen, you are apt to live in one of these two places. Your only choice may be which.
At first sight, this pair of municipalities look pretty much alike. Both contain dazzling technological marvels, especially in the realm of electronic media. Both suffer familiar urban quandaries of frustration and decay. If some progress is being made at solving human problems, it is happening gradually. Perhaps some kids seem better educated. The air may be marginally cleaner. People still worry about over-population, the environment, and the next international crisis.
None of these features are of interest to us right now, for we have noticed something about both of these 21st century cities that is radically different. A trait that marks them distinct from any metropolis of the late nineteen-nineties.
Street crime has nearly vanished from both towns. But that is only a symptom, a result.
The real change peers down from every lamp post, every roof-top and street sign.
Tiny cameras, panning left and right, surveying traffic and pedestrians, observing everything in open view.
Have we entered an Orwellian nightmare? Have the burghers of both towns banished muggings at the cost of creating a Stalinist dystopia?
Consider City Number One. In this place, all the myriad cameras report their urban scenes straight to Police Central, where security officers use sophisticated image-processors to scan for infractions against the public order -- or perhaps against an established way of thought. Citizens walk the streets aware that any word or deed may be noted by agents of some mysterious bureau.
Now let's skip across space and time.
At first sight, things seem quite similar in City Number Two. Again, there are ubiquitous cameras, perched on every vantage point. Only here we soon find a crucial difference. These devices do not report to the secret police. Rather, each and every citizen of this metropolis can lift his or her wristwatch/TV and call up images from any camera in town.
Here a late-evening stroller checks to make sure no one lurks beyond the corner she is about to turn.
Over there a tardy young man dials to see if his dinner date still waits for him by a city fountain.
A block away, an anxious parent scans the area and finds which way her child wandered off.
Over by the mall, a teenage shoplifter is taken into custody gingerly, with minute attention to ritual and rights, because the arresting officer knows the entire process is being scrutinized by untold numbers who watch intently, lest her neutral professionalism lapse.
In City Two, such micro cameras are banned from some indoor places... but not Police Headquarters! There, any citizen may tune in on bookings, arraignments, and especially the camera control room itself, making sure that the agents on duty look out for violent crime, and only crime.
Despite their initial similarity, these are very different cities, disparate ways of life, representing completely opposite relationships between citizens and their civic guardians. The reader may find both situations somewhat chilling. Both futures may seem undesirable. But can there be any doubt which city we'd rather live in, if these two make up our only choice?
# # #
Technology's Verdict
Alas, they do appear to be our only options. For the cameras are on their way, along with data networks that will send a myriad images flashing back and forth, faster than thought.
In fact, the future has already arrived. The trend began in Britain a decade ago, in the city of King's Lynn, where sixty remote controlled video cameras were installed to scan known "trouble spots," reporting directly to police headquarters. The resulting reduction in street crime exceeded all predictions; in or near zones covered by surveillance, it dropped to one seventieth of the former amount. The savings in patrol costs alone paid for the equipment in a few months. Dozens of cities and towns soon followed the example of King's Lynn. Glasgow, Scotland reported a 68% drop in citywide crime, while police in Newcastle fingered over 1500 perpetrators with taped evidence. (All but seven pleaded guilty, and those seven were later convicted.) In May 1997, a thousand Newcastle soccer fans rampaged through downtown streets. Detectives studying the video reels picked out 152 faces and published eighty photos in local newspapers. In days, all were identified.
Today over 250,000 cameras are in place throughout the United Kingdom, transmitting round-the-clock images to a hundred constabularies, all of them reporting decreases in public misconduct. Polls report that the cameras are extremely popular with citizens, though British civil libertarian John Wadham and others have bemoaned this proliferation of snoop technology, claiming that "It could be used for any other purpose, and of course it could be abused."
This trend was slower coming to North America, but it appears to be taking off. After initial experiments garnered widespread public approval, the City of Baltimore put police cameras to work scanning all 106 downtown intersections. In 1997, New York City began its own program to set up 24-hour remote surveillance in Central Park, subway stations and other public places.
No one denies the obvious and dramatic short term benefits derived from this early proliferation of surveillance technology. That is not the real issue. Over the long run, the sovereign folk of Baltimore and countless other communities will have to make the same choices as the inhabitants of our mythical cities One and Two. Who will ultimately control the cameras?
Consider a few more examples:
How many parents have wanted to be a fly on the wall, while their child was at day care? This is now possible with a new video monitoring system known as Kindercam, linked to high speed phone lines and a central Internet server. Parents can log on, type www.kindercam.com, enter their password, and access a live view of their child in day care at any time, from anywhere in the world. Kindercam will be installed in 2000 day care facilities nationwide by the end of 1998. Mothers on business trips, fathers who live out of state, as well as distant grandparents can drop in on their child daily. Drawbacks? Overprotective parents may check compulsively. And now other parents can observe your child misbehaving!
Some of the same parents are less happy about the lensed pickups that are sprouting in their own workplaces, enabling supervisors to tune in on them, the same way they use Kindercam to spy on their kids.
That is, if they notice the cameras at all. At present, engineers can squeeze the electronics for a video unit into a package smaller than a sugar cube. Complete sets half the size of a pack of cigarettes were recently offered for sale by the Spy Shop, a little store two blocks from the United Nations. Meanwhile, units with radio transmitters are being disguised in clock radios, telephones and toasters, as part of the burgeoning "nanny-cam" trend. So high is demand for these pickups, largely by parents eager to check on their babysitters, that just one firm in Orange County, California, was selling from 500 to 1,000 disguised cameras a month. By the end of 1997, prices dropped from $2,500 to $399.
Cameras aren't the only surveillance devices proliferating in our cities. Starting with Redwood City, near San Francisco, several police departments have begun lacing neighborhoods with sound pickups that transmit directly back to headquarters. Using triangulation techniques, officials can now pinpoint bursts of gunfire and send patrol units swiftly to the scene, without having to wait for vague phone reports from neighbors. In 1995 the Defense Department awarded a $1.7 million contract for SECURES, a prototype system created by Alliant Techsystems, to test more advanced pickup networks in Washington and other cities. They hope to distinguish not only types of gunfire, but also human voices crying for help.
So far, so good. But from there, engineers say it would be simple to upgrade the equipment, enabling bored monitors to eavesdrop on cries of passion, through open bedroom windows -- or even listen to family arguments. "Of course we would never go that far," one official said, reassuringly.
Consider another piece of James Bond apparatus now available to anyone with ready cash. Today, almost any electronics store will sell you night vision goggles using state-of-the-art infrared optics equal to those issued by the military, costing less than a video camera. AGEMA Systems, of Syracuse NY, has sold several police departments imaging devices that can peer at houses from the street, discriminate the heat given off by indoor marijuana cultivators, and sometimes tell if a person inside moves from one room to the next. Military and civilian enhanced-vision technologies now move in lock-step, as they have in the computer field for years.
In other words, even darkness no longer guarantees privacy.
Nor does your garden wall. In 1995, Admiral William A. Owens, then Vice-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described a sensor system that he expected to be operational within a few years -- a pilotless drone, equipped to provide airborne surveillance for soldiers in the field. While camera robots in the $1 million range have been flying in the military for some time, the new system will be extraordinarily cheap and simple. Instead of requiring a large support crew, its controller will be one semi-skilled soldier, and will fit in the palm of a hand. Minuscule and quiet, such remote-piloted vehicles, or RPVs, may flit among trees to survey threats near a rifle platoon. When mass-produced in huge quantities, unit prices will fall.
Can civilian models be far behind? No law or regulation will keep them from our cities very long. The rich, the powerful, and figures of authority will have them, whether legally or surreptitiously. The contraptions will get smaller, cheaper and smarter with each passing year.
So much for the supposed privacy enjoyed by sunbathers in their own back yards.
Moreover, surveillance cameras are the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Other entrancing and invasive innovations of the vaunted Information Age abound. Will a paper envelope protect your correspondence, sent by old-fashioned surface mail, when new-style scanners can trace the patterns of ink inside without ever breaking the seal?
Let's say you correspond with others by email, and use a computerized encryption program to ensure that your messages are only read by the intended recipient. What good will all the ciphers and codes do, if some adversary has bought a "back door" password to your encoding program? Or if a wasp-sized camera-drone flits into your room, sticks to the ceiling above your desk, inflates a bubble lens and watches every key-stroke that you type? (A number of unnerving techno-possibilities will be discussed in chapter 8.)
The same issues arise when we contemplate the proliferation of vast databases containing information about our lives, habits, tastes and personal histories. As we shall see in chapter 3, the cash register scanners in a million supermarkets, video stores, and pharmacies, already pour forth a flood of statistical data about customers and their purchases, ready to be correlated. (Are you stocking up on hemorrhoid cream? Renting a daytime motel room? The database knows.) Corporations claim this information helps them serve us more efficiently. Critics respond that it gives big companies an unfair advantage, knowing vastly more about us than we do about them. Soon, computers will hold all your financial and educational records, legal documents, and medical analyses that parse you all the way down to your genes. Any of this might be accessed by strangers without your knowledge, or even against your stated will.
As with those allegorical street-lamp cameras, the choices we make regarding future information networks -- how they will be controlled and who can access the data -- will affect our lives, those of our children, and their descendants
Tuesday 23 October 2007
Thursday 18 October 2007
score for performer
material to be used:
a. copy audience member
b. floor sequence (keeping same proximity to marked chair, whatever happens)
c. motion sensor scan
d. movement phrase (radio)
e. hand scan and dodge
options:
relating to sound produced
movement produced by interaction to initiate set material and vice versa
relate to marks on the floor, by using them as pathways, or reconstructing audience positions
a. copy audience member
b. floor sequence (keeping same proximity to marked chair, whatever happens)
c. motion sensor scan
d. movement phrase (radio)
e. hand scan and dodge
options:
relating to sound produced
movement produced by interaction to initiate set material and vice versa
relate to marks on the floor, by using them as pathways, or reconstructing audience positions
score for audience (2 or 1)
A. Thank you for coming. Please invade my dance.
Either of us can call “END” to this dance. Please exit at the end.
B. I have been waiting for you. Please guide me to one of the chairs.
Be in charge of the sound of this dance - you can use the stereo, the furniture, yourself…
Please leave with the other person. Thank you.
A. Thank you for coming.
I have been waiting for you. I need you to help me dance.
Either of us can call “END” to this dance. Please exit at the end.
B. I have been waiting for you. Please guide me to one of the chairs.
Be in charge of the sound of this dance - you can use the radio, the tape or CD.
Please leave with the other person. Thank you.
Both, as the next audience member walks in:
Please take the tape and mark on the floor what you remember of your pathway in the room.
Then leave. Thank you.
Either of us can call “END” to this dance. Please exit at the end.
B. I have been waiting for you. Please guide me to one of the chairs.
Be in charge of the sound of this dance - you can use the stereo, the furniture, yourself…
Please leave with the other person. Thank you.
A. Thank you for coming.
I have been waiting for you. I need you to help me dance.
Either of us can call “END” to this dance. Please exit at the end.
B. I have been waiting for you. Please guide me to one of the chairs.
Be in charge of the sound of this dance - you can use the radio, the tape or CD.
Please leave with the other person. Thank you.
Both, as the next audience member walks in:
Please take the tape and mark on the floor what you remember of your pathway in the room.
Then leave. Thank you.
Monday 15 October 2007
day 3
i kept working on my little phrase today. its about 12 minutes long now. i will start writing a text for instructions tonight i think. looking at just one chair in charge of the orientation of the phrase, so that the audience member can still choose from which direction they want to watch. it would be nice to have a small radio with tape player for the audience so they can tune a soundtrack if they want, and also respond to my soundcue of "magical mystery show". if they want. if they dont it works in silence too i think. i wonder how much information on person can take before they go in. also i need to find out if any of these things work tomorrow by asking someone in. at last.
i am going out into the sunny autumn potsdam now to meet my sister and her kids. its so incredibly beautiful this october. makes up for all the stupid rainy summer.
i am going out into the sunny autumn potsdam now to meet my sister and her kids. its so incredibly beautiful this october. makes up for all the stupid rainy summer.
Sunday 14 October 2007
Hello?
anyone there?
friday was awful, I thought I'm going insane. Now i have a video camera and i can watch myself go insane. helps a bit. i had some more thoughts on elements that could build the phrase in its repetition. so that its still a loop but different events can happen maybe just in one or two of the loops. i found a piece of music by the beatles that works well (in rhythm) with a little demonstration I do in the phrase, on the theme of long wave, short wave, ultra-short wave (UKW--i dont know the english word for it). its called "the magical mystery show".
somehow i like the title very much too.
i also met a puppeteer to give me some tips on how to use my arm convincingly as a radio antenna/sensory roboter. he told me to dress it up with a long stripey sock and put a rubber band around my shoulder joint, to practise sensing it as an external body part. will try this tomorrow. greetings to london.
friday was awful, I thought I'm going insane. Now i have a video camera and i can watch myself go insane. helps a bit. i had some more thoughts on elements that could build the phrase in its repetition. so that its still a loop but different events can happen maybe just in one or two of the loops. i found a piece of music by the beatles that works well (in rhythm) with a little demonstration I do in the phrase, on the theme of long wave, short wave, ultra-short wave (UKW--i dont know the english word for it). its called "the magical mystery show".
somehow i like the title very much too.
i also met a puppeteer to give me some tips on how to use my arm convincingly as a radio antenna/sensory roboter. he told me to dress it up with a long stripey sock and put a rubber band around my shoulder joint, to practise sensing it as an external body part. will try this tomorrow. greetings to london.
Thursday 11 October 2007
day one
A few things are going through my head at the end of this day.
Can we as artists define the kind of audience we want?If we attempt to guide our audience into becoming the kind of audience we wish for, is that selfish, forced and patronizing?
Is it idealism to wish for an audience, to wish for people to think about what they are interested in. whether they can change the course of action or not...in every moment of watching and every moment of doing? If this is the main aim of the piece and the content is more or less replaceable, are they then doing us a service that they should be paid for as performers? Is this achieveable, is this interesting. well i am interested in it now, so i guess thats what i will do..?
plan of action
somehow each audience member should be able to leave something of their own in the action, somehow have the chance to alter its pathway, and be part of a recognizeable building process that develops throughout the piece. we spoke about this a bit in july and it is something i would like investigate into this and next week.
I would like to experiment with this thought on three levels -
1. directly visible
shifting chairs to change orientation and maybe other things in the phrase, asking the spectator to tape their pathway in the room onto the floor when they are finished
2. indirectly visible, altering the material of the dancer
I would like to experiment with picking up movement patterns, habits, gestures of each spectator and build them into the phrase
3. indirectly visible, altering the material for the spectator
I would like to experiment with asking each audience member to pass one question and one answer they had in this room to the next person walking in. I like that this is something that builds and can become quite central to the action but stays hidden to the performer.
I would try to take one of these things at a time next week, once I have a phrase that i am confident with to take back into improvisation.
what do you think?
Diary day one
I made a long phrase today. more like a skeleton of a phrase to be developed tomorrow. i took the idea of receiving, transmitting and search for radio waves as a starting point. somehow a lot of the work on movement states we did last December reappeared. i guess it is still in my body somehow, so I let these patterns come back and build them into the phrase.
At the moment this phrase is a loop, moving between two chairs (start and finish in the same chair). It has no orientation so far. I would be interested to see what happens to the material if it is dependent on the orientation of the chairs, and I ask the spectator to shift them around as they please.
Can we as artists define the kind of audience we want?If we attempt to guide our audience into becoming the kind of audience we wish for, is that selfish, forced and patronizing?
Is it idealism to wish for an audience, to wish for people to think about what they are interested in. whether they can change the course of action or not...in every moment of watching and every moment of doing? If this is the main aim of the piece and the content is more or less replaceable, are they then doing us a service that they should be paid for as performers? Is this achieveable, is this interesting. well i am interested in it now, so i guess thats what i will do..?
plan of action
somehow each audience member should be able to leave something of their own in the action, somehow have the chance to alter its pathway, and be part of a recognizeable building process that develops throughout the piece. we spoke about this a bit in july and it is something i would like investigate into this and next week.
I would like to experiment with this thought on three levels -
1. directly visible
shifting chairs to change orientation and maybe other things in the phrase, asking the spectator to tape their pathway in the room onto the floor when they are finished
2. indirectly visible, altering the material of the dancer
I would like to experiment with picking up movement patterns, habits, gestures of each spectator and build them into the phrase
3. indirectly visible, altering the material for the spectator
I would like to experiment with asking each audience member to pass one question and one answer they had in this room to the next person walking in. I like that this is something that builds and can become quite central to the action but stays hidden to the performer.
I would try to take one of these things at a time next week, once I have a phrase that i am confident with to take back into improvisation.
what do you think?
Diary day one
I made a long phrase today. more like a skeleton of a phrase to be developed tomorrow. i took the idea of receiving, transmitting and search for radio waves as a starting point. somehow a lot of the work on movement states we did last December reappeared. i guess it is still in my body somehow, so I let these patterns come back and build them into the phrase.
At the moment this phrase is a loop, moving between two chairs (start and finish in the same chair). It has no orientation so far. I would be interested to see what happens to the material if it is dependent on the orientation of the chairs, and I ask the spectator to shift them around as they please.
Radio Waves
Propagation is a term that describes the travel of electromagnetic waves, there being three principle main modes of propagation. The first is a straight line travel: the manner that radio waves travel through deep space (ignoring the slight deviations caused by gravity under the theory of relativity). A second way is a skip, which is bouncing between the surface of the earth and the ionosphere (high frequency). The third way is to hug the surface of the earth as it curves around. Radio waves of very low frequency most often travel this way.
`Source - Wikipedia´
Wednesday 22 August 2007
Trio aim (high)
We need to get to this (aiming high):
'Spectatorship is not passivity that has been turned into activity. It s our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamt. There is not privileged medium, as there is not privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points from which we learn something new, if we dismiss, firstly, the presupposition of the distance; secondly, the distribution of the roles; thirdly the borders between the territories. We have not to turn spectators into actors, We have to acknowledge that any spectator already is an actor of his own story and that the actor also is the spectator of the same kind of story. We have not to turn the ignorant into learned person,or, according to a mere scheme of overturn, make the student or the ignorant the master of his master'
By Jacqes Ranciere
'Spectatorship is not passivity that has been turned into activity. It s our normal situation. We learn and teach, we act and know as spectators who link what they see with what they have seen and told, done and dreamt. There is not privileged medium, as there is not privileged starting point. Everywhere there are starting points from which we learn something new, if we dismiss, firstly, the presupposition of the distance; secondly, the distribution of the roles; thirdly the borders between the territories. We have not to turn spectators into actors, We have to acknowledge that any spectator already is an actor of his own story and that the actor also is the spectator of the same kind of story. We have not to turn the ignorant into learned person,or, according to a mere scheme of overturn, make the student or the ignorant the master of his master'
By Jacqes Ranciere
artistic concept
“green room” - artistic concept
At the core of this dance piece we question the roles of spectator and performer through an exploration of the act of watching. We are interested in the border between observing and taking part, the transition between watching and doing. Taking each audience member from a collective to an individual experience this piece is a literal exploration of the notion of the audience’s responsibility to create their own performance experience, as individuals and as a group.
The movement material and content of the piece we have started to develop during the previous research phases in
Moving away from a traditionally representative performance format in a theatre setting with this piece, the “green room” is hosted in two small rooms – a performance room and a watching/waiting room. Two video cameras in the performance room connected to the watching room via a live video link. No more than two audience members at one time will be allowed in the performance space, the amount of time they wish to stay inside is up to their negotiation with the rest of the audience in the watching room.
Communicated verbally through a performing usher (dramaturge M. Hargreaves) and written instructions we will develop a set of interactive rules, a score for each spectator to enter the performance space, and tasks encouraging the audience to establish as a group in the watching room. The piece becomes alive in the interactive choices of each spectator within the rules and responsibilities we provide as a framework, a constant negotiation between the roles of performer and spectator. Therefore each performance must resolve in a unique conclusion, reflecting spectators and performers individual choices inside the performance room and the collective decisions made in the watching room. In the context of these artistic parameters, it is crucial for us to set up each research phase to involve audience members as part of a performance format and for detailed and personal feedback.
Within the performance format of “green room” there is clearly an underlying theme of modern surveillance culture and its effects on intimacy on our society. As much as these references should remain subtle and individual to each audience member’s perception, we will work with references to this theme through set design, costumes and lighting of the scenery and a general notion of inviting into a coherent and specifically manufactured world. For this we will employ historical literature on surveillance regimes and their impact on intimacy, i.e. as developed by the STASI in former
Cindy Sherman’s film stills (1975-80) will also be an important inspiration to develop a design for the piece that inherits a sense of manufactured memory and careful attention to detail on focus, point of view and the observation between spectator and performer.
Monday 13 August 2007
notes from marathon feedback 2nd Aug:
These are just a few thoughts I had noted down, hoping that they will be completed by dona and martins feedback notes and questions…
There is a notion of fake interactivity throughout all of the scenes, because we have set up the instructions too tightly. Some people felt they were doing us a service to complete the performance. This seemed to be only justified because we were engaged enough in the action to value this input. Others noted that when they had completed their tasks, they would have wanted to stay and watch or stay and play but didn’t have the chance to. Another key concern seemed entrance and exits for the spectators. This seems to stem from the fact that we drop everything we do when they enter and that most of the audience members felt we wanted them to leave at certain points. The moment just before the spectator takes of the blindfold is the most undefined and most uncomfortable place. This could be a good thing if worked with, but at the moment it just seems very unsatisfying at both ends.
Most spectators we spoke with expressed the wish to be more involved, given more freedom. This could happen through simpler, clearer instructions in an open time frame, so the spectator can choose if, when and how long they wish to be involved. This brings back logistic problems of timing and lengths of scenes but also encourages thinking again about the whole thing as one performance that people join in and drop out of rather than a series of scenes. One of the instructions that seemed to be clear and simple enough to channel the spectators awareness into detail, but also allow to give a good degree of freedom within the scene to them was the film a specific body part of a performer. This one seems to be giving and taking responsibility in a good balance.
A thought came up in the after-talks of the marathon was the idea of a third room that isn’t filmed, that gives the chance for people to disappear, things to happen unseen and hidden experiences to go back into the group. I’m not sure if or how this could be realised but would like to bring it up as an option to discuss next time we meet.
Another clear outcome of the feedback for me was the wish for a collective experience for the audience, something that brings their experiences and their questions together, some kind of conclusion or container. Including the watching/waiting room into this thought, and maybe for a second experiment the possibility to work with a closed, smaller group of spectators, I feel we have the possibility to connect their own actions and choices with those of others. I know we are far from completing a task like this, but working with a set up that allows the spectators to function as a group in the watching room (in terms of the choices they make about going in) and as individuals for both themselves and for that group in the performance room could be a next step. I think it is impossible to speak about real interactivity, intimacy and the idea of negotiating the story (dare I say it) with the audience if we don’t manage to find a way to allow, within our given framework, each performance to resolve in their own conclusion specific to the meeting of performers and audience of that specific evening.
There is a notion of fake interactivity throughout all of the scenes, because we have set up the instructions too tightly. Some people felt they were doing us a service to complete the performance. This seemed to be only justified because we were engaged enough in the action to value this input. Others noted that when they had completed their tasks, they would have wanted to stay and watch or stay and play but didn’t have the chance to. Another key concern seemed entrance and exits for the spectators. This seems to stem from the fact that we drop everything we do when they enter and that most of the audience members felt we wanted them to leave at certain points. The moment just before the spectator takes of the blindfold is the most undefined and most uncomfortable place. This could be a good thing if worked with, but at the moment it just seems very unsatisfying at both ends.
Most spectators we spoke with expressed the wish to be more involved, given more freedom. This could happen through simpler, clearer instructions in an open time frame, so the spectator can choose if, when and how long they wish to be involved. This brings back logistic problems of timing and lengths of scenes but also encourages thinking again about the whole thing as one performance that people join in and drop out of rather than a series of scenes. One of the instructions that seemed to be clear and simple enough to channel the spectators awareness into detail, but also allow to give a good degree of freedom within the scene to them was the film a specific body part of a performer. This one seems to be giving and taking responsibility in a good balance.
A thought came up in the after-talks of the marathon was the idea of a third room that isn’t filmed, that gives the chance for people to disappear, things to happen unseen and hidden experiences to go back into the group. I’m not sure if or how this could be realised but would like to bring it up as an option to discuss next time we meet.
Another clear outcome of the feedback for me was the wish for a collective experience for the audience, something that brings their experiences and their questions together, some kind of conclusion or container. Including the watching/waiting room into this thought, and maybe for a second experiment the possibility to work with a closed, smaller group of spectators, I feel we have the possibility to connect their own actions and choices with those of others. I know we are far from completing a task like this, but working with a set up that allows the spectators to function as a group in the watching room (in terms of the choices they make about going in) and as individuals for both themselves and for that group in the performance room could be a next step. I think it is impossible to speak about real interactivity, intimacy and the idea of negotiating the story (dare I say it) with the audience if we don’t manage to find a way to allow, within our given framework, each performance to resolve in their own conclusion specific to the meeting of performers and audience of that specific evening.
Friday 10 August 2007
the visibility of labour
These are mostly taken from Stephen Gill's Invisibility series which highlights how "high visibility" vests have become so ubiquitous in cities that they actually render the wearer unremarkable and invisible. I though of these because of a comment Selma made on our last night in Potsdam regarding the scene she and Oliver participated in. She spoke about how the operation of a physical task (pulling the table) in the same space as a unison energetic dance sequence focused her attention on how dance usually reveals or disguises the effort it requires in conjunction with the comparatively passive state of the spectator. She said that she couldn't see the dance sequence itself but what she could perceive was the varying visibilities of labour.
I'm still on my Trio A trip - and Rainer of course was explicitly looking at these issues within her work of the late 60s. She was investigating the difference between 'real' and 'apparent' energy - the actual physical expenditure as opposed to the technical presentation of energy - and how this opened a gap up between spectator and performer in their experience of dance. The requirement to expend some 'real' energy within the scenes we developed presents the opportunity for all concerned to revisit this gap and to refocus the eye not upon the effect of the dance sequence but on its execution, bringing back into visibility the physicality of the work.
Thursday 2 August 2007
Monday 30 July 2007
dona quotes
week 1:
" this needs to be told through movement, otherwise we fail"
week 2:
"this week i don't really know what to write into the blog, basically we're just making the piece now"
" this needs to be told through movement, otherwise we fail"
week 2:
"this week i don't really know what to write into the blog, basically we're just making the piece now"
1984 quote
'It was merely the substitute of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connection with anything in the real world, not even the kind of connection that is contained in a direct lie. Statistics were just as much a fantasy in their original version as in their rectified version. A great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head.' (George Orwell, 1984)
technological reproducability
. . .the instant the criterion of authenticity ceases to be applicable to artistic production, the total function of art is reversed. Instead of being based on ritual, it begins to be based on another practice – politics. (Walter Benjamin)
"Morimura respods to and confounds links between his art and Sherman's in To My Little Sister: Cindy Sherman (1998), a remake of her Untitled #69 (1981). In Sherman's photograph from the series "Centerfolds", which employs the horizontal aesthetic of a magazine's double-page spread, she plays a dreamy and suggestive girl without a recognisable identity. Morimura however portrays Sherman herself - depicting her as she depicts the girl - and thus enables the dual elements of person and persona, reality and fantasy, original and variation to mingle" (Nicolas Bissaker in the latest issues of Sleek Magazine)
ontological graffiti
On a wall in a toilet of a Prenzlauer Berg cafe:
To be is to do (Sartre)
To do is to be (Camus)
Do be do be do (Sinatra)
Which after a little search I find out is a misquote of Kurt Vonnegut - who had Socrates as the first quote, Sartre as the second (Ol' Blue Eyes is right however). Maybe the scrawler was unpicking the subtleties of existentialism at the time. . .anyway Vonnegut is really interesting when thinking about dystopias because although his books are generally fairly pessimistic about humanity (that's a broad generalisation) he's also clear on the failure of any system to fully describe its subjects. He's far more interested in fakery, lies and absurdity and also even the creative potential opened up by the impossible demands of bureaucracy. One writer on Vonnegut describes his worlds less as dystopian (in terms of nightmarishly realised utopias) and more akin to the multiplicity of heterotopias. A heterotopia is Foucault's idea of 'another space':
"places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society - which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there." (Foucault 1967)
The worlds/states/spaces which are enacted through the negotiation with the audience have the quality of representation or a kind of reality but the insistence on the function of the gaze, and the eye of the camera doubles the space with the mixed, joint experience that Foucault assigns to the mirror. . .
Saturday 28 July 2007
some notes day 3 to 6
Realising that although we could decide that the idea of the sensory fix should be central to develop the content of the scenes, we still have very different interests in how that can be achieved, we decided to each focus on one element of the sensory fix idea.
Dona to develop a format that sets up a sensory fix for the performer, Gabi to create situations that give a sensory fix to an audience member (see score of 26th July). Both formats involve two different levels of involvement/interactivity which the audience member decides either before they go in, or when they are inside. Initially it was three - just observing as one option – but we decided that all scenes should encompass this anyway. The scenes in which an audience member receives the fix can be observed by another audience member. How we manage to avoid this being uncomfortable for the spectator (just changing terminology for the hell of it) that is more involved seems to be dependent on the set up of the scene and the way we give them information. Central to this is also the role of the usher that lets people into the performance room.
Two other thoughts (of many) that came up in conversation with martin throughout the last two days in terms of coherence:
The way in which the performers change between watching and doing, performing and being audience. This can be looked at in every scene.
Physical obstacles/objects that are brought into the space by the audience can add up, inform and change what we do/are able to do in the scenes.
Dona to develop a format that sets up a sensory fix for the performer, Gabi to create situations that give a sensory fix to an audience member (see score of 26th July). Both formats involve two different levels of involvement/interactivity which the audience member decides either before they go in, or when they are inside. Initially it was three - just observing as one option – but we decided that all scenes should encompass this anyway. The scenes in which an audience member receives the fix can be observed by another audience member. How we manage to avoid this being uncomfortable for the spectator (just changing terminology for the hell of it) that is more involved seems to be dependent on the set up of the scene and the way we give them information. Central to this is also the role of the usher that lets people into the performance room.
Two other thoughts (of many) that came up in conversation with martin throughout the last two days in terms of coherence:
The way in which the performers change between watching and doing, performing and being audience. This can be looked at in every scene.
Physical obstacles/objects that are brought into the space by the audience can add up, inform and change what we do/are able to do in the scenes.
Lenny & Keith (text)
scene from ‘strange days’
‘I want you to know what we are talking about here. This is not like TV only better, this is life. This is a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex.
You’re there, you’re doing it. You’re seeing it, you’re hearing it. You’re feeling it.
It’s whatever you want, whoever you want to be…
It’s about the stuff you can’t have right, the forbidden fruit. Like running into a liquor store, with a 357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenalin pumping through your venes…
Yeah I can make it happen, I can get you anything anything it’s true you just have to talk to me you have to trust me you have to trust me.
I am your priest. I am your shrink. I am your main connection to the switchboard of souls. I am the magic man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious. You say it, you think it, you can have it. You want a girl? You want two girls? I mean I don’t know what your thing is, what you are curious about. Want a guy? Want to BE a girl?
Before we talk about money I want you to try it. I’ve got a deck with me right here, step into my office…
‘I want you to know what we are talking about here. This is not like TV only better, this is life. This is a piece of somebody’s life. It’s pure and uncut, straight from the cerebral cortex.
You’re there, you’re doing it. You’re seeing it, you’re hearing it. You’re feeling it.
It’s whatever you want, whoever you want to be…
It’s about the stuff you can’t have right, the forbidden fruit. Like running into a liquor store, with a 357 magnum in your hand, feeling the adrenalin pumping through your venes…
Yeah I can make it happen, I can get you anything anything it’s true you just have to talk to me you have to trust me you have to trust me.
I am your priest. I am your shrink. I am your main connection to the switchboard of souls. I am the magic man, the Santa Claus of the subconscious. You say it, you think it, you can have it. You want a girl? You want two girls? I mean I don’t know what your thing is, what you are curious about. Want a guy? Want to BE a girl?
Before we talk about money I want you to try it. I’ve got a deck with me right here, step into my office…
some thoughts on spectatorship
"You never look at me from the place from which I see you. Conversely, what I look at is never what I wish to see." (Lacan)
I've been thinking about our conversations concerning the responsibility we have towards an audience and how we me negotiate the contract established between performer and viewer. I've been meaning to read Jacques Ranciere's "The Emancipated Spectator" (a lecture he delivered in Frankfurt in 2004) for a while and now seems the perfect occasion.
In thinking through the roles of an audience he starts from two commonly held conceptions:
"The first one is that theatre in general is a bad thing, that is the stage of illusion and passivity which has to be dismissed in favour of what it forbids: knowledge and action: the action of knowing and the action led by knowledge. This conclusion has been drawn long ago by Plato: the theatre is the place where ignorant people are invited to see suffering people. What takes place on the stage is a pathos, the manifestation of a disease, the disease of desire and pain, which is nothing but the self-division of the subject caused by the lack of knowledge. The “action “of theatre is nothing but the transmission of that disease through another disease, the disease of the empirical vision which looks at shadows. Theatre is the transmission of the ignorance which makes people ill through the medium of ignorance which is optical illusion. ..The most usual conclusion runs as follows: theatre involves spectatorship and spectatorship is a bad thing. Therefore we need a new theatre, a theatre without spectatorship. We need a theatre where the optical relation- implied in the word theatron - is subjected to another relation, implied in the word drama. Drama means action. The theatre is a place where an action is actually performed by living bodies in front of living bodies. The latter may have resigned their power. But this power is resumed in the performance of the former, in the intelligence that builds it, in the energy that it conveys. The true sense of the theatre must be predicated on that acting power. Theatre has to be brought back to its true essence which is the contrary of what is usually known as theatre. What has to be pursued is a theatre without spectators, a theatre where spectators will no longer be spectators, where they will learn things instead of being captured by images and become active participants in a collective performance instead of being passive viewers."
I think that certainly the second concept has surfaced in some of our discussions. . . I'm off now to watch some of the states Donna and Gabi have been working through but will post later.
Friday 27 July 2007
Gabis score 26th July
score for scene phrase/table –
Sensory fix for one audience member
Setup with props:
One chair stage right facing front
One table stage left by the wall
Two portable headphones hung up at the back wall
Audience instruction: please enter and sit on the chair. When the door opens, you will be asked to leave again. There are two sets of headphones on the wall. One of them gives information, one gives options/instructions of interaction. If you want to, choose one of them only.
Situation: before audience walks in, the three performers are in the headlock (dead end conflict situation). This is projected into the watching room. As the door opens and the audience member interrupts, they break out of this and go to their starting positions for the scene:
Dona: against stage right wall, behind chair, waiting
Gabi: against stage right wall, in front of chair, waiting
As audience sits on the chair, light changes, performers walk slowly towards person on chair, then past to start phrase.
Focus: observing audience but not aggressive, as if they are entering our territory as a superior species, there is an atmosphere between the two performers that suggests competition and a post-conflict situation. However they remain in unison until the phrase break into slide and rest (&look).
Option 1: they pick up the headphone with information. They get the text from strange days, it develops, gets more intense and persistent.
Our phrase expands to be bigger than the room, ignoring the walls as a stopping point
Option 2: they are being asked to substitute a missing performer. They need to go to the table, and drag it to the other side of the room, through the performers. The noise it makes is the sound needed for this scene.
We find a way for this sound to influence the sequence (maybe stop and go, or cues such as a long drag means something, a few short ones mean another thing)
Sensory fix for one audience member
Setup with props:
One chair stage right facing front
One table stage left by the wall
Two portable headphones hung up at the back wall
Audience instruction: please enter and sit on the chair. When the door opens, you will be asked to leave again. There are two sets of headphones on the wall. One of them gives information, one gives options/instructions of interaction. If you want to, choose one of them only.
Situation: before audience walks in, the three performers are in the headlock (dead end conflict situation). This is projected into the watching room. As the door opens and the audience member interrupts, they break out of this and go to their starting positions for the scene:
Dona: against stage right wall, behind chair, waiting
Gabi: against stage right wall, in front of chair, waiting
As audience sits on the chair, light changes, performers walk slowly towards person on chair, then past to start phrase.
Focus: observing audience but not aggressive, as if they are entering our territory as a superior species, there is an atmosphere between the two performers that suggests competition and a post-conflict situation. However they remain in unison until the phrase break into slide and rest (&look).
Option 1: they pick up the headphone with information. They get the text from strange days, it develops, gets more intense and persistent.
Our phrase expands to be bigger than the room, ignoring the walls as a stopping point
Option 2: they are being asked to substitute a missing performer. They need to go to the table, and drag it to the other side of the room, through the performers. The noise it makes is the sound needed for this scene.
We find a way for this sound to influence the sequence (maybe stop and go, or cues such as a long drag means something, a few short ones mean another thing)
Sensory Fix
We have been speaking a lot about the notion of a sensory fix, coming out of Strange Days, and I did a quick search for essays around this idea. There's a really engaging article 'Merge Invisible Layers' by John Beckmann at www.ctheory.net/articles.aspx?id=112 - I'm going to read through it to see if it has resonance with what we've spoken about. I know that we are not literally exploring virtual reality but I like his challenge to the boundaries between the visceral/virtual and the cyborg poetics mixed with techno-control.
Tuesday 24 July 2007
day one - July Potsdam 07
cleaning up day (video material, notes,blog creation, selecting whats relevant and gathering info)
decisions we made:
rather than on the waiting room, we will use these two weeks here in Potsdam to focus on the performance room. the way the audience enters and the interaction inside. this we decided because of the time limits and the technical limits we have here. and because it is the core of the idea so it shoudl be the situation from which we build. why and how are they entering, and how are they inside, and how are we inside, with them and with each other.
we have a lot of material already, going back to the footage even more so. it can serve the format, especially the material coming from the states and status play is intimate, vulnerable, voyeristic. it is relevant. that seems reason enough to keep it in the piece for now.
things to do as a result:
find tasks, frames, context for this material from the research we do and the references we have talked about.
experiment with scores, rules for the audience and for ourselves to set up these scenes, the before during after.
decisions we made:
rather than on the waiting room, we will use these two weeks here in Potsdam to focus on the performance room. the way the audience enters and the interaction inside. this we decided because of the time limits and the technical limits we have here. and because it is the core of the idea so it shoudl be the situation from which we build. why and how are they entering, and how are they inside, and how are we inside, with them and with each other.
we have a lot of material already, going back to the footage even more so. it can serve the format, especially the material coming from the states and status play is intimate, vulnerable, voyeristic. it is relevant. that seems reason enough to keep it in the piece for now.
things to do as a result:
find tasks, frames, context for this material from the research we do and the references we have talked about.
experiment with scores, rules for the audience and for ourselves to set up these scenes, the before during after.
Notes from July 07 GDA
Dears
I think it is a good idea to share with you what I have selected from the notes I have taken at gda as main elements we should focus on.
Central idea for the piece:
Watching and being watched
From this the related themes of:
· Intimacy- at which level it can still exist if you have been watched and also the people substitution of their on intimacy with someone else s intimacy on a TV screen.
· Performance and it s limits
· When does the audience stop watching and decide to enter and take part? and why?
· The decision of the audience to enter the room and interact generates encounters.
· The negotiation between us as collaborators and a parallel negotiation with the audience.
The format
Two rooms: A performing room and A waiting room which I personally wouldn’t call waiting room anymore.
From this main aspect of the form the related thoughts of:
· Having a TV screen in the W. Room
· The W. Room is a more collective space, they can share a collective experience
· On the screen images of what is really happening in the P. Room but also fake ones.
· The P. Room is connected to the W. Room with life link.
· The P. Room is not a place for collective experience but it s a space for individual experience
· The P. Room is a place for interaction and intimacy.
· The audience can activate, through gaze, touch or action, what actually happens in the performance.
· In the P. Room there is a sort of transparency of the rules we use to interact.
I think is important to keep Martin s question in mind:
Are we mimicking a sinister surveillance culture or are we offering an antidote to it?
I personally think we are doing both.
In my notes I also found other question I think we should try to answer at different stages of this process:
What is this world?
What is it set up for?
Is it a world that has been invaded?
Is it a sensory fix world?
Ok. That’s all. I have tried to select as much as I could because we are full of notes and videos and it s very difficult to move inside this huge sea of information.
Love
Dona
I think it is a good idea to share with you what I have selected from the notes I have taken at gda as main elements we should focus on.
Central idea for the piece:
Watching and being watched
From this the related themes of:
· Intimacy- at which level it can still exist if you have been watched and also the people substitution of their on intimacy with someone else s intimacy on a TV screen.
· Performance and it s limits
· When does the audience stop watching and decide to enter and take part? and why?
· The decision of the audience to enter the room and interact generates encounters.
· The negotiation between us as collaborators and a parallel negotiation with the audience.
The format
Two rooms: A performing room and A waiting room which I personally wouldn’t call waiting room anymore.
From this main aspect of the form the related thoughts of:
· Having a TV screen in the W. Room
· The W. Room is a more collective space, they can share a collective experience
· On the screen images of what is really happening in the P. Room but also fake ones.
· The P. Room is connected to the W. Room with life link.
· The P. Room is not a place for collective experience but it s a space for individual experience
· The P. Room is a place for interaction and intimacy.
· The audience can activate, through gaze, touch or action, what actually happens in the performance.
· In the P. Room there is a sort of transparency of the rules we use to interact.
I think is important to keep Martin s question in mind:
Are we mimicking a sinister surveillance culture or are we offering an antidote to it?
I personally think we are doing both.
In my notes I also found other question I think we should try to answer at different stages of this process:
What is this world?
What is it set up for?
Is it a world that has been invaded?
Is it a sensory fix world?
Ok. That’s all. I have tried to select as much as I could because we are full of notes and videos and it s very difficult to move inside this huge sea of information.
Love
Dona
Day One July Potsdam
Day one Potsdam july 2007
We have worked on editing, selecting, distilling from the huge amount of notes and video we had. Now everything is much much clearer, I think. We have made a list of scenes to rework on and change in relation to the new stronger concept of the piece. Even though we have to also think of making clear choices about what happens in this W. Room and how it happens, we have decided to concentrate on how to develop the moments we have selected and how to connect those moments with the coming in of the audience.
We want to find different ways to get the audience involved in what it s actually happening in the scene, and ways of making them activate the actions in the scenes.
So, I think tomorrow we will start with this proposition, if you have any idea please tell us.
The list of small moments/scene we have selected is this
{taking away the trios for now}
G and D on chair manipulation
G under chair
G naked
G dream
D sunset
D happiest woman
D blind folded
D dragging table plus table dance
D floor dance
Cat state plus Cat phrase
Duet
D pushed on the floor
Whispering
We have worked on editing, selecting, distilling from the huge amount of notes and video we had. Now everything is much much clearer, I think. We have made a list of scenes to rework on and change in relation to the new stronger concept of the piece. Even though we have to also think of making clear choices about what happens in this W. Room and how it happens, we have decided to concentrate on how to develop the moments we have selected and how to connect those moments with the coming in of the audience.
We want to find different ways to get the audience involved in what it s actually happening in the scene, and ways of making them activate the actions in the scenes.
So, I think tomorrow we will start with this proposition, if you have any idea please tell us.
The list of small moments/scene we have selected is this
{taking away the trios for now}
G and D on chair manipulation
G under chair
G naked
G dream
D sunset
D happiest woman
D blind folded
D dragging table plus table dance
D floor dance
Cat state plus Cat phrase
Duet
D pushed on the floor
Whispering
Sunday 22 July 2007
feedback from the sharing & afterthoughts - Dec 06
Group feedback after showing
Forced to have a different viewing experience:
Watching spectator as another performer and in turn being watched – not comfortable like in a theatre.
The choice of how you return the gaze – Frauke said she chose to ‘watch’ so that the gaze did not become confrontational.
The suspicion created by the note-taking and also by the camera – was it switched on or not?
But clear that the audience is always invited to watch.
Assumption that everyone had seen the same scene – no one talked about it in the waiting room.
The format meant you focussed less on the content and more on the audience member as a person [would this be different if the content was more linear, more – dare I say it – of a story?]
Our after thoughts
Feedback on the scenes suggest they work well. They are intriguing and create a desire to know what happened before and after.
We talked about what might be a satisfying resolution to this. To have a through line of a piece, so we decide what happened before and after, and have a continuous flow of audience entering and exiting. So that people always enter and exit a scene in ‘motion’. So we edit the people rather than the story.
We also talked about acknowledging the editing, maybe showing the missing bits on a screen in the waiting room, on fast forward.
To bring all the audience into the small space at the end of the scenes and have the scenes unfold again.
The possibility of ‘herding’ the audience.
Play with the idea of claustrophobia [false wall or ceiling that closes the space].
Radical changes in perspective:
The room tipping on its side.
Sudden blackout. When the lights come on we have disappeared, but they can hear us talking about them, telling stories about them.
Blindfold Dona and leave her in the room dancing.
Lock the audience in a room.
Forced to have a different viewing experience:
Watching spectator as another performer and in turn being watched – not comfortable like in a theatre.
The choice of how you return the gaze – Frauke said she chose to ‘watch’ so that the gaze did not become confrontational.
The suspicion created by the note-taking and also by the camera – was it switched on or not?
But clear that the audience is always invited to watch.
Assumption that everyone had seen the same scene – no one talked about it in the waiting room.
The format meant you focussed less on the content and more on the audience member as a person [would this be different if the content was more linear, more – dare I say it – of a story?]
Our after thoughts
Feedback on the scenes suggest they work well. They are intriguing and create a desire to know what happened before and after.
We talked about what might be a satisfying resolution to this. To have a through line of a piece, so we decide what happened before and after, and have a continuous flow of audience entering and exiting. So that people always enter and exit a scene in ‘motion’. So we edit the people rather than the story.
We also talked about acknowledging the editing, maybe showing the missing bits on a screen in the waiting room, on fast forward.
To bring all the audience into the small space at the end of the scenes and have the scenes unfold again.
The possibility of ‘herding’ the audience.
Play with the idea of claustrophobia [false wall or ceiling that closes the space].
Radical changes in perspective:
The room tipping on its side.
Sudden blackout. When the lights come on we have disappeared, but they can hear us talking about them, telling stories about them.
Blindfold Dona and leave her in the room dancing.
Lock the audience in a room.
notes on the piece from december 06 - raquel
The piece
[1] The format
Two spaces: waiting room and performance for two people.
By chance one person sits in the ‘directors’ chair, one sits in the ‘audience’ chair.
It is about watching and being watched.
[2] The scenes
The people entering effect a change of energy or mood. [Originally we thought they would walk into a scene already running and it would be at the moment they sat in the chair that an abrupt change would occur. We would only notice them once they had sat in the chair, then we would drop what we were doing and start the scene. I think this would be more effective]
The three performers shift between stasis and activity. It is cyclical.
Sources / Ideas
Waiting for Godo….The Beach…..Status….
Three people wanting a leader, a choreographer, someone to take control.
‘Every social animal has a hierarchy. There is stasis until a challenge is made to the leader. Then there is conflict until hierarchy is established again’.
Keith Johnston, Improv
Take this pattern for the scenes and structure of a piece [stasis / conflict].
OR Idea that we are perpetually looking for a leader in order to maintain an equality between us. The contradiction in this is interesting.
‘…but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find…’
Martin Amis, Yellow Dog
[1] The format
Two spaces: waiting room and performance for two people.
By chance one person sits in the ‘directors’ chair, one sits in the ‘audience’ chair.
It is about watching and being watched.
[2] The scenes
The people entering effect a change of energy or mood. [Originally we thought they would walk into a scene already running and it would be at the moment they sat in the chair that an abrupt change would occur. We would only notice them once they had sat in the chair, then we would drop what we were doing and start the scene. I think this would be more effective]
The three performers shift between stasis and activity. It is cyclical.
Sources / Ideas
Waiting for Godo….The Beach…..Status….
Three people wanting a leader, a choreographer, someone to take control.
‘Every social animal has a hierarchy. There is stasis until a challenge is made to the leader. Then there is conflict until hierarchy is established again’.
Keith Johnston, Improv
Take this pattern for the scenes and structure of a piece [stasis / conflict].
OR Idea that we are perpetually looking for a leader in order to maintain an equality between us. The contradiction in this is interesting.
‘…but you are first but you are last, but he is tall but she is small, but you stay up but you go down, but we are rich but we are poor, but they find peace but they find…’
Martin Amis, Yellow Dog
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)