Assignments

Due Next Week: February 4 (The Body as Instrument)

1 – Reading

Steve Dixon, Cyborgs (pg. 303-321), Digital Performance, 2007

Be prepared to discuss the essay in class and see WordPress assignment below.

2 – Research Critique II: The Body as Instrument

You will be assigned an artwork to research for a short 250 word hyperessay about the work, the artist, and how it relates specifically to the topic of next week. Incorporate the reading (see above), as relevant, into your research post, discussing how it relates contextually to the work you are critiquing. Use next week’s Lecture Notes in The Body as Instrument page of the Syllabus to prepare your research, where you will find documentation and links about each of the works.

Here are additional instructions for the research critique:

• Create a new post on your blog incorporating relevant hyperlinks, images, video, etc
• Add a featured image
• Apply the “Research” category
• Post a comment on at least one other research post prior to the following class

Due Next Week by the end of class: February 4

3 – Micro-project III:  Disembodied

Using Max, we will explore movement, gesture, spoken text, and visual effects to create an immersive portrait of ourselves as we inhabit the media space.

• Micro-project III in Project Assignments
  

Outline

Hyperlecture Week 3: Collective Narrative

This week we are discussing the concept of the collective narrative, in which a work or performance engages the viewer in a collective manner. All of these works ask the viewer to participate or create a configuration of the space in such a way that the audience is engaged collectively as a group, rather than as individual observers, sometimes interacting, sometimes not.

We begin with Robert Whitman’s the American Moon, as an example of the early Happenings staged in New York City during the early 1960s, a seminal period in the history of performance art. These works, which were performed in galleries and alternative art venues, were based on spontaneity, the use of sculptural and unusual materials, and often unscripted, improvised action. The Happenings set the stage for the medium of performance art that is now central to contemporary art today.

Works for Review

Robert Whitman, The American Moon, 1960

Robert Whitman’s first major work, The American Moon, was performed at the Reuben Gallery in November and December, 1960. Whitman created a multi-dimensional theater environment that gave viewers differing perspectives on action taking place in a central theatrical area. The artist had spent weeks clearing and rebuilding the space, and felt that the preparation of the work was crucial to his overall artistic process. One of the outstanding moments in the American Moon, was when Whitman appeared pressed against a large inflated plastic structure, an otherworldly, floating figure within the darkened, ethereal space of the installation. This action speaks to our own interest in disembodiment in the media space, the subject of next week’s class.

Robert Whitman’s use of lighting effects and unusual materials are emblematic of his early performance works. He was interested in creating what is referred to as an “environment,” in which the performance is melded into the space around it, often adding lighting and film projections to create a transformation of the space and the performers.

Note below that in the early part of the performance of the American Moon, the audience is seated in separate sections so that they each have different perspectives on the performance, but aren’t focused on one another as a collective body, in fact sections of the audience are separated from one another.

This configuration of separating the audience sharpens the contrast when later they are all grouped together (see below). In this latter section of the performance, the audience is tightly packed in the space while the performer (artist, Lucas Samaras) is hovering overhead. How does this change the experience? How does the audience relate to one another in this context? Does the audience become part of the environment? And how is the action staged in relation to the audience in a non-traditional way?

The following is video documentation from American Moon. It doesn’t show the actual performance with the audience, but rather the process of making the piece, with a few of the performers executing actions, such as rolling on the floor, another action that breaks from conventional theater: the body as a kind of sculptural object. This is not anything like traditional theater, but rather more like a sculptural environment, with the performance integrated into the space in relation to the audience. It is not necessary to view the entire video, but rather the first few minutes just to get an idea. As Whitman said, this film is not documentation, but rather clips to aid in the reconstruction of the work.

Yoko Ono, Cut Piece (1964)

As a departure from the large scale Happenings with their complex sets and multiple performers, Yoko Ono’s early performance art is radical for its embrace of simplicity and a more personal subjectivity. Ono was among the first solo performance artists to place herself at the center of the work. This approach would become a significant influence on later performance art, such as in the work of Marina Abramović. Ono, who was associated with Fluxus during the 1960s, and was married to the Beatle John Lennon, created Cut Piece in 1964, in which the artist invites the audience to cut her clothing, piece by piece, until she is stripped. A critique of women as sexual objects, Cut Piece builds on the participatory dynamic between audience and performer. Given when this work was created, years before feminism became part of the broader culture, it was a daring work, voicing fears and concerns of women as objects of public display.

The following is video documentation from Cut Piece:

Some questions we might ask about this work is the following. Who is the performer, Yoko Ono or the audience members who cut her clothes? How does this work speak to issues of feminism, how women are perceived, and how are they treated as objects for the male (and female) gaze? Is there a violent aspect to this work? Does it critique how women might fear being observed in public? And finally, how does Cut Piece speak to the idea of collective narrative?

Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole in Space, 1980

Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, founders of the Electronic Café in Santa Monica, California, were among the first artists to begin exploring communications art through satellite technologies. Their seminal work, Hole-in-Space from1980, represented one of the earliest examples of live, networked media art. They setup two large projection screens: one at Lincoln Center in New York City, the other at Century City in Los Angeles, to connect two audiences. Conceived as a participatory event (much like the early Happenings), this unannounced project, setup for three consecutive days, enabled two groups of viewers to see the other live and in real-time across the space of the US, which literally collapsed the experience of the real and the virtual, the local and the remote.

How does this telecommunications piece build on the Happenings? How did they create their own sense of space for performance? What is the material of the work? What does it mean to create a site-specific work of art? And in this work, the idea of the performer is completely removed, leaving only the audience as participants in the work.

Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz, Electronic Café, 1984

Four years later, Galloway and Rabinowitz founded the Electronic Café in a project commissioned by the LA Museum of Contemporary Art in conjunction with the 1984 Olympics Art Festival in Los Angeles. The event joined five restaurants in LA situated in diverse neighborhoods: effectively opening up a “hole in space” between ethnic groups of geographically distant and separate communities. People at the cafés could exchange drawings, photos, poems, and messages via a dedicated network. The Electronic Café was essentially the prototypical “cyber café,” nearly ten years before the Web would become a mass medium and even before email was used by the mainstream public. The artists’ commitment to using technologies to enhance community interaction led them to establish a permanent space in Santa Monica, where the Electronic Café became internationally known as a center for events, exhibitions, and performances dedicated to communications art.

From the Website of Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz:

The Electronic Cafe Network was about integration: Integrating community, art, technology, multimedia telecommunications, and cross-cultural communications. The technical mission was to define the basic human requirements to facilitate a “creative conversation” between people even if they did not speak the same language. The technical installation used a hybrid of computer-based communications: 1) A text-based computer network with a state-of-the-art user interface allowing people to participate in, or to create their own topics of discussion; 2) A keyword searchable text and pictorial databases “Community Memory(s)”; 3) The first demonstration of a public storage and retrievable image database as a component of the keyword searchable database; 4) Videoconferencing; 5) Audioconferencing; 6) Realtime collaborative telewriting & shared-screen drawing, including the ability to collaboratively add annotations to still-video images; 7) The ability of any venue to broadcast sight and sound to any, or all, of the others venues; 8) High resolution image printers so that activities could be documented and mounted on the wall for public view.

The following is a diagram of the system design of the Electronic Café:

How did the work predate today’s use of telecommunications? How did it predict the rise of social media? Despite the fact that the technologies were primitive compared to today, what are some of the paradigms for collaboration and collective art they invented?

From the reading: “Welcome to Café International”

“A performance space with no geographical boundaries.”

Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz created composite performances beginning in 1977 uniting locations that collapsed geographical boundaries such as the performance above. The dancers above were simultaneously video broadcasted while in different locations.

“Virtual space creates social situations without rules or etiquette.”

Just as in the Happenings, they were interested in bringing the audience into a new kind of social situation, one that broke down traditional social relations between people, in which the performance brought people together in new ways. In the use of telecommunications, they were bringing people together across geographical distances in new ways.

“We’re building social networks on an international, cross-cultural, multicultural scale.”

In a period long before social media, they were uniting people electronically in the Electronic Café before Facebook and Twitter existed. They were using the electronic medium to exchange ideas, images, and video across distance in a spirit of sharing and collaboration. These long distance connections, they felt, initiated and encouraged face-to-face interaction. Little did they know how virtual social relations would come to dominate our contemporary digital culture.

They linked ethnically different communities in Los Angeles through the Electronic Café project in 1984 that allowed Koreans, African-Americans and other communities to reach out and get to know each other in completely new ways.

“Integration of technology into the social fabric”

Just as the Happenings artists were interested in the integration of performance, materials, and space into the “social fabric,” bringing audiences into unusual situations that altered their perception of reality and their relation to one another, Kit Galloway & Sherrie Rabinowitz achieved this dynamic through telecommunications.

They understood that it is the role of the artist to explore these new territories of communications technologies and how they impact our social relations and our interaction with one another. We live in a mediated world, and yet we understand so little of the implications. It is through the artist that we can grasp the meaning and significance of our increasingly technologically connected lives.

The Early Happenings

Here are some additional images from other 1960s Happenings to explore how artists were creating new social situations mediated by performance, technology, and unusual materials:

Alan Kaprow, A Spring Happening, 1961

Allan Kaprow’s A Spring Happening was performed at the Reuben Gallery in March of 1961. The artist engaged the audience as participants in the work by creating a long tubular environment that trapped the viewers in a frightening, claustrophobic space. It has been said that this experience might have been intended to simulate the entrapment of Jews while traveling in rail cars to prison camps during World War II. Mysterious sounds and disturbing light effects outside the tubular space added to the effect of terror, causing some of the viewers to flee during each performance. The photo reveals the audience after the walls had fallen way, allowing the remaining spectators to escape.

Jim Dine, Car Crash, 1960

Jim Dine’s Car Crash, performed at the Reuben Gallery in December of 1960, was a dream-like experience, performed by the artist, which was intended as a purely poetic work, with collage, words, gestures and other various actions. Typical of many of the Happenings, the audience is immersed in the space of the work, situated up close to the performers and the set. In Car Crash, the audience is subjected to honking, sirens, and other city sounds building up to a chaotic skidding out of control. Note the cry for HELP written into paper towels cascading down the set. According to the artist: “It was a way for me to be an actor. It was related to me exposing my dreams…”

Claus Oldenburg, Snapshots from the City, 1961

Claes Oldenburg emerged from the period of the Happenings as one of the leading 20^th century artists for his sculptural work influenced by everyday objects and popular culture. It was through performance that his investigation began: to find the means and materials to break down the distinction between art and life. Snapshots from the City, was performed in early 1960 at the Judson Church, located in New York’s Greenwich Village. With its gritty embrace of material, collage, and tattered clothing – Snapshots From the City represented the conditions Oldenburg experienced in the Lower East Side.

WordPress Techniques

We will discuss the WordPress settings and a few other features located in the Dashboard:

• General: Give your site a name, tagline, and set it to Singapore time.
• Permalinks: Set the links to “post name” so that your URLs including the name of the post
• Menus: OSS Header Menu, Main Menu / About page

The Collective Body Micro-Project II

We will review the results of the micro-project to discuss the idea of the collective narrative as told through a sequence of photographic images taken of our bodies in the media space.

OSS NTU Flickr Group Page

Disembodied

We are now beginning the process of entering the media space, or what we will refer to as the third space environment, a space where the body becomes untethered from the physical world and connected to others via the Internet.

The first step will be a Max tutorial, which we will begin in class tonight, and will continue as experimentation throughout the week. Next week, we will complete Micro-Project III: Disembodied, by presenting real-time manipulation of ourselves using Max 7.

Max has a long and important history as software for real-time computer music and multimedia. I have been personally using it since the late 1980s, and was at the IRCAM computer music center in Paris when it was invented at that time. Since then, the software has been adopted worldwide as one of the leading platforms for interactive multimedia and live performance. I have used it in many productions to create an interactive element between the performer/viewer and various configures of media: video, sound, installation, theatrical, etc. One of my earliest examples was a work entitled Arches, in which live performers interacted with sensors to manipulate a musical score and were themselves embedded in the media space through real-time video manipulation:

We will now introduce everyone to Max 7:

• Download Max 7 from the Cycling 74 Website, install and use with the 30 day trial.
• Go to the Micro-Project III: Disembodied page in Project Assignments and follow the instructions.

To conclude the lecture, we will review next week’s assignments and projects for research critique.