Intermedia || Interactive Audience

For our last study this semester, we were thinking about how the audience can participate while also folding in the first two studies and reshaping the work. We considered taking an easy approach to lighting and technology limiting down to what and why we use tech, light, sound, and movement. We chose to begin with making a dinner table set with place settings digitally. This work was inspired by Judy Chicago’s The Dinner Party (1974-79), a monumental feminist work of its time. Then, we decided to interact by having our cell phones engaged in the work. To talk through with the audience, to text other performers, and to capture video of the event. We also set up an interactive movement study to see if the audience would pick it up and – they did!

Feel free to skip through:

In reflection, this work seemed to be the easiest to complete, and we found a balance between interactions, technology, and movement that seemed to create a holistic environment. While it is important to consider what Marshall McLuhan said, “the medium is the message”… well, we are responding to the message (Dixon 2004). A couple of key questions sit on my mind: What are we saying with the technology we are in collaboration with? What are the stakes that surround this interdisciplinary landscape? The work feels open, free, and uncontained to a specific genre. In a sense Intermedia is freedom.

While maintaining a sense of freedom, I turn to Faye Driscoll’s (2014) Thank You For Coming: Attendance has been a huge influence on the work I do in considering interactivity and connection with the audience. I referenced Faye’s work in the earlier blog post. So when we talk about the community making the work and co-creating, co-authoring, and co-generating the outcome – we are interested in separating from technology for a moment to connect. This is a driving part of the work created in the final study. However, we demonstrated the interference technology has in our daily lives. The way we connect through media to interact has certainly come in full force.

Take a moment to enjoy this work and commentary:

 As the semester came to a close, Norah Zuniga-Shaw asked us what Intermedia is. I responded:

Intermedia is a radical space that allows for interactive engagement that activates the performers, technology, and audience to explore a liminality of openness. This interdisciplinary space transforms the environment to teleport all parties to a sub-dimension of the unknown. Intermedia creates a visual distortion and appetite fostering the collaboration of technological humanness.

Intermedia moves without a container and allows your imagination to run in any direction possible. I gained more insight into the importance of light/projection, how to formulate collaboration within this setting, and how to build a structure around integrating technology. While also learning the array of equipment and programs in the MOLA lab. I am leaving this course with more questions than I entered, but I feel ready to engage and continue the exploration forward. Digital self-signing off for now.

Sources:

Dixon, Steve. 2004. “The Digital Double.” New Visions in Performance: “The Impact of Digital Technologies. Ed. Gavin Carver. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger, 2004. Print.

Driscoll, Faye. 2014. Thank You For Coming: Attendance. (Film) Walker Art Center. Published 2017. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dlB3MrBr2_M

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Intermedia || Media First

Archive Date: December 14, 2017

Texture inspires movement, environment, and sound were the starting point for our next study. Our next task gave us a moment of pause to reflect on how we can enter into a work from a different starting point. We recorded and photographed various videos with movement in them to project throughout the campus. Then, we had a full day of sifting through the material and trying different captures on different placements within MOLA.

After selecting the images our next task was to see where they were going to be installed in the space. So we used the arch of mesh to create a container for the work, as well, as using the scrim and wall to project on. Next, came the movement of invention and exploration. This project was challenging since the majority of our group needed to be behind the scenes working on Isadora, MaxMsp, and the lighting. However, the goal for us was to accomplish a welcoming environment in a fluid space for the audience. To me, this was our most challenging study, but it paid off in understanding how to merge movement when media comes first.

Developing the movement to suit moving images takes awareness, quality, and timing to not overload the audience’s visual capacity. We found it helpful to juxtapose the images with more movement with stillness, and the more static images with more movement. Mimicking movement from the screen was also a good way to be informed by the media.

Overall, a more developed version of the media first study would be projection mapping. I have listed here work by Dandypunk who puts the movement in response to the media to create a narrative. This is a different direction than the space we created, but, the work is a good example of a fully realized form of media first that shows the multiplicity of choice within the Intermedia work.

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Intermedia || Merging Reflection

Archive Date: December 14, 2017

In collaboration with my colleagues, we set out to produce a digital double investigation. Our goals included examining the Double as Reflection, suggested by Steve Dixon’s “The Digital Double” (2004) essay which I reflected previously on here. From this project, we realized that we were attracted to textures, and themes, and discovered multiple ways to find a reflection at different levels of technological entanglement. Take a moment to skip through.

One challenge that we encountered was in using the video feedback loop, top-down camera, projection, and lighting to gain different perspectives of the space, it appeared that the movement we created needed to shift per examination. Incorporating The Isadora program, live sound, and lighting to bring these portraits together merged with the movement and use of the material was essential and grounding components to this project.

The digital double in the sense of reflection draws me to the consciousness that the real body maintains throughout the performance. I found it interesting that most of the time the real-life performer needs to witness the digital in reflection. Dixon notes, “This has been exacerbated by paradoxical rhetoric of disembodiment and virtual bodies, which have turned ideas of corporeal reality full circle by the claim that the digital body has equal status and (authenticity) to the biological one” (Dixon 2004, 24). During this study, the concept did cross my mind of the equality of images, and I found myself drawn to both bodies at different times. I begin to speak about this on this page with Agent Ruby and the sense of awareness of consciousness through AI that has developed.

For this project, I appreciated this viewing:

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker’s Fase (1982) is so simple from a current technological standpoint but is still so mesmerizing to watch. Here light, shadow, film, and movement create the dance – enhance the dance. One of the parts that most interests me is at 7:18 of this film. Noting that from the first half of the film space transforms and they are now performing on their shadows in a fully saturated blue space.

Glancing into the future I was struck by this digital double. While the concept is simple seems simple what transpires is exhilarating.

This is CO: LATERAL (2016) by Joao Martinho Moura

Moura’s work with the digital double here is literally electrifying itself. I appreciate how in this work the dancer is in the dark while the emphasis is put on the double.  The bold lighting against the blackened stage gives a stark contrast platform for the double to stand out.  In a sense this double take on a dominant force on stage and provides a strong presence in the work following along with Dixon’s models.

The most important experience I had from this study is the merger of technology and body with intention. Questioning why /how we implement technology into the work was at the forefront of this study to think about as a group. The question: How we collaborate with technology? Continued forward into our next studies.

Sources:

De Keersmaeker, Anne Teresa, and Michele Anne de Mey. 1982. “Fase.” (Film) Director Thierry de Mey. Music Robert Reich.

Dixon. Steve. 2004. “The Digital Double.” New Visions in Performance: The Impact of Digital Technologies. Ed. Gavin Carver. Lisse: Swets & Zeitlinger. Print

©LROD