Collective – Adrian Tan

ART OF THE NETWORKED PRACTICE SOCIAL BROADCASTING: AN UNFINISHED COMMUNICATIONS REVOLUTION

This essay takes Matt Adam’s keynote titled “The Here, the Now, the Audience and the Spectator” as an entry point to analysing and critiquing the online third space experience of igaies (intimate glitches across internet error) a live networked performance directed by Jon Cates who performed with his collaborators.

Screenshot of Matt Adam’s Keynote Address

1. The Internet as a starting point

A revolution that was not to be, the internet. Matt Adams had lamented in his keynote narrative that the internet was compelling and gripping for him (when he first encountered it) during its early emergence in the 1990s. Matt Adams and his collective Blast Theory then went on to leave an indelible mark on art of the networked practice with the controversial work Kidnap in the late 1990s. In Kidnap, spectators paid to enter a lottery to be kidnapped, where they will indeterminably give up control and suffer the (possible) trauma of losing control over their lives to artists who will (1) interface with their real lives, (2) attempt new action and (3) create new articulations of what will/can go on in their lives. From Matt Adam’s articulation of how “the internet failed him”, the impact that the internet has made on society, culture and interpersonal relationships is startling but in the words of Adam:

have not been able to match up to utopian believers’ hope that new social relationships can be made possible by the new interface- internet.

Will the symposium be able to tap into the internet as a virtual/online environment to bring about a communication revolution?

2. The Symposium as a construct- was the network connection real or fictional?

His words will resonate throughout the symposium as ideas of the artists/performers played out in the respective physical spaces, juxtaposed with the online happenings as conversations, opinions, and sharing of references/readings and theoretical conditions are played out. Sequentially, the process of art-making is poetically mapped in the foreground of the continuous theoretical discourses by the audience. Using Blast Theory’s Kidnap as an example of an interdisciplinary artwork that poetically played out exactly what the internet was made for, the symposium seeks to re-enact the devices of allowing/enabling intimacy and closeness to permeate through the experience of the work. The symposium can then be like Kidnap in establishing new forms of articulations of real-life activities where the actions of others feel like its close and intimate. The experience of the work, where real-time footage of the activities of the kidnapped persons was beamed over the internet was a new articulation of what went on in other people’s lives, persons who relinquished control over their lives and let the other (the artist in this case) take control. This was felt in some parts in the symposium but often times the experience of the performances were similarly theatrical and distant in its one-way mode of communication, where the remote viewer is a passive spectator viewing the process from a distant locale.

3. Who controls our imagination? Who speaks, who performs and who pays attention?[1]

The roles of the artists, the audience, and the spectator were melted in an unfinished communication revolution that was the symposium- where interdisciplinary was the constant- where media, art form and roles were mixed and mashed into a 1072 x 768 screen. The night (Day Three of the Symposium- 10:00 am in Chicago and 11:00 pm in Singapore) entered its moment of sound checking, equipment verification and upside down imagery/framing of the performative space. “Art of the Networked Practice Social Broadcasting: An Unfinished Communications Revolution”, an unerring follow-up to the 2015 event of the same name minus the “unfinished communications revolution” disclaimer.

4. Symposium Objective

The symposium is a collaboration between the School of Art, Design & Media at Nanyang Technological University (Singapore); LASALLE College of the Arts (Singapore) and The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Department of Performance (USA) and is framed as an international gathering that unites local and remote speakers, artists and audiences through the use of Adobe Connect. Such an endeavour aims to create a dynamic peer-to-peer form of academic and artistic investigation through creative art-making and two-way dialogue. The instrumental aspect of the symposium is that it is an interdisciplinary event that mixes geography, media, art forms and human expression in the articulation of a new experience. The symposium was this online third space environment that constructed an “alternative social world” for live performative arts, presentations and a creative dialogue (global roundtable discussion) all rolled into one!

5. igaies – intimate glitches across internet error

The glitches at the beginning of the Live Network Performances at Chicago highlighted the realism/real-time nature of such an occurrence, where loose cables and sound checks were visible and audible to the expectant audience- but it is precisely this glitching that added to the intimacy, authenticity and spirit of dynamism/chance. The spectatorship of such a scene differed from an experience of a performance art piece in a museum or a theater piece in its system of openness and leaving things to spectatorial behavioural responses and dynamism of the performers. The three performances had varying content, Jon Cates directed the performances but seemingly left the interpretation open to the performers and spectators. Akin to what the visionary artist, pedagogue, and writer Roy Ascott had written in his 1967 manifesto “Behaviourables and Futuribles”:

“When art is a form of behaviour, software predominates over hardware in the creative sphere. The process replaces the product in importance, just as system supersedes structure. The act of changing becomes a vital part of the total aesthetic experience of the participant.”

This quote poetically describes the night’s performances, where the Live Network Performances were seemingly loosely scripted and allowed for a high margin of free play by the artists. For example, XXXtraPrincess began the night’s interdisciplinary experiences with a textual display of bodily performance layered with their engagement in hashtagging on social media streams. As their mobile phones cover half their faces, their phone screens display images of selfies, memes and live-tweet postings that are an embodiment of their hybridised existence, mediated by their online selves and their real-time selves. The here– as portrayed by the two “young girls” remixing the materials that represent them produces a hypnotic performance for the audience and spectator as fiction is overlaid with the real in a beautiful embrace of technology. This layering continued almost seamlessly as Roberto Sifuentes occupied another side of the open space, where audiences mingled and freely moved between performer and spaces.

Screenshot of XXXtraPrincess’s Performance at Chicago, Day 3 of the Symposium

6. The Here, the Now, the Audience and the Spectator

Screenshot of Roberto Sifuente’s Performance, Day 2 of the Symposium

Together with his collaborators who assisted in the somewhat ritualistic process of placing leeches on the body of Sifuentes, there was a continuous flow of activity, abide slow but mesmerising in a process akin to mourning- where leeches were applied to the body like an act of cleansing. Gradually blood trickled down his body, onto his white singlet but the performance #exsanguination continued unabated and enabled audiences in the physical space to be part of the making of the work. This is a profound experience for the spectator, where the once passive consumer of artwork is now present in the art- whose behaviour makes up the work. Without the audience, the performer is but a figure of ‘potential’ or self-mutilation. But with the omnipresence of the audience, they enter the space occupied by the body of the performer, fill up space(s) on and around the body and serendipitously makes the remote viewer (on the 1024×768 screen in a different topology) a voyeur of this spectacle.

Screenshot of Roberto Sifuente’s Performance, Day 2 of the Symposium

The voyeur is locked in viewership with amazement, freely responding with words in the online chatter, involving themselves in the layer of theoretical discourses surrounding the process of art making currently on-going. Recalling Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz’s essay, “Welcome to Electronic Café International”, this is an example of a performance set within a collaborative networked performance space with no geographical boundaries, almost. What could have elevated or pushed the work to a higher level of transcendence would be a possible interaction by the remote viewer, how then could that be elicited? Will that remove the theoretical discourses that are also such valuable inputs in the possible impending written discourses about these artistic acts?

7. Behavioural Context & Feedback Loop

The collaborative performance space was separate from the remote online chatter space- different but similar at the same time. Taking reference from the iconic new media collective Ant Farm in the writing of their iconic artwork ‘Media Burn’:

. . . The artist, the artifact, and the spectator are all involved in a more behavioural context. . . . [T]hese factors . . . draw the spectator into active participation in the act of creation; to extend him, via the artifact, the opportunity to become involved in creative behaviour on all levels of experience—physical, emotional, and conceptual. A feedback loop is established so that the evolution of the artwork/experience is governed by the intimate involvement of the spectator.

In this regard, I posit that the feedback loop is established by having the second layering of spectators, where the remote viewer is able to dissect, discuss and hold conversations about the works as the processes evolve and experiences change. The spectator, because of this community of discursive nature is intimately involved in the work, but in a more cerebral manner. As observed by Paul Hertz in the post-performance round-table discussing, what we have witnessed- be it in the physical space or remotely is a complex topology of many delayed elements from bacteria to leeches and technological interventions. The value of such multi-sensorial, multi-layered strata of work is that it makes the viewer highly aware of their own senses, their own presence. Hertz comments that everything that makes one aware is a good performance and I cannot agree more, as I felt seduced into this totalised interconnected space where beings floated around in the spaces and the experience was multi-dimensional.

8. An Unfinished Communication Revolution is All We Need

Therefore, in analysing what was discussed in the roundtable discussion that wrapped up the three-day symposium- I posit that the audience in the real space or in virtual space is in no way compromised. The beauty and sublimity of such a multi-layered presentation and reception is in its diverse reception of the process of artmaking. The lens of the live viewer as compared with the lens of the juxtaposed viewer with online commentary and privy to the vibrant, continuous and free flow conversation is different and varies. The mediated experience is a unique experience as compared to the spectator up close and both experiences are valuable. Referring to Matt Adam’s keynote “The Here, the Now, the Audience and the Spectator”, the symposium is fruitful and admittedly an unfinished communication revolution but it is precisely this incomplete comprehension of such an open pedagogue, application of technology that makes it compelling as an artistic event and experience for viewers, performers and theorists alike. This unfinished communication is all we need, going forward.

[1] We are in a post-Marxist period where the notions of “we-the-people” have absolute control over our lives, our intake of knowledge, our levels of consumption and even our imagination.

Ant Farm
(An Interview with Chip Lord, from the NMC Media Lounge at the College Art Association conference, February 23, 2018).)

In approaching and researching into the artistic oeuvre of Ant Farm (1968 – 1978), one stumbles upon numerous documents and retrospective shows about/from the visionary collective. The body of works all stack up as being ‘sublimely relevant more than three decades later’ as quoted by Constance M. Lewallaen in her essay Still Subversive After All These Years, a testament to how Chip Lord, Doug Michel later joined by Curtis Schreier have left behind a body of not just artworks but research that is not just relevant but still considered radical and groundbreaking. As described in Michael Sorkin’s essay Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Cars, Dolphins, and Architecture:

Looking back at the amazingly fertile oeuvre of the Ants—produced in a ten-year sprint that would have left lesser artists burned out for life— one is overwhelmed by their vision and their generosity, their interventions in the range of practices and issues that set the contemporary agenda for architecture. Performance, video, public sculpture, architecture, and polemic were all wielded with huge skill and massive aplomb.

Ant Farm was established within the counter-cultural milieu of 1968 San Francisco by architects who dealt with the intersection of architecture (the built form), design and media arts (the projected form) and produced works in numerous formats ranging from agitprop events to videos, live-action performances, and installations. Referencing Michael Sorkin’s essay again, he continues that:

The times, after all, were not purely about rupture but also about rupture, about submitting the cultural and physical landscape to the revaluing of altered vision. That vision was diverse.’

Ant Farm was an art collective like no other as they produced a diverse body of artworks that cuts across visual arts, architecture, graphic design, new media art and socially engaged art. Such a diverse vision was achieved by Ant Farm as they existed as an ‘autonomous reality community’, a term by respected scholar and theorist of media arts and politics, Gene Youngblood (and referenced by Randall Packer as an ideal description of Ant Farm, in a recent interview with Chip Lord from the NMC Media Lounge at the College Art Association conference, February 23, 2018).

Autonomous, in how they developed their practice outside of the privileged institutional context of universities and were able to produce art that is still relevant today in debates about the impact of mass media on our lives, discussions on sustainable architecture and issues surrounding building technologies, public art and essentially questioning the ‘realities’ of architecture. The group crafted artworks that were altered visions like “Media Burn” that was always somewhat utopian, but also ironic and tongue-in-cheek in the appropriation of elements from popular culture. As a collaborative entity, their work was a result of the creative energies swilling around at the conceptual activities of the late sixties and seventies, a seminal period of creative gestation for art.

In “Media Burn”, it is a multimedia artwork on many levels. As a live event, the artists have created an opening ‘mockumentary’ where the artists have appropriated documentary-style staging to create a simulacrum of an actual event. Doug Hall plays John F. Kennedy, appropriating the iconic president whose live television shooting shocked a generation of Americans and their experience of mass media, as an artist-president. This tongue-in-cheek gesture by Ant Farm is exacerbated by the speech that he delivers where the artist-president regally pronounces “Who can deny that we are a nation addicted to television and the constant flow of media? Haven’t you ever wanted to put your foot through your television?”

With this radical gesture, the reconstructed Cadillac that has been crudely modified (as Ant Farm were greatly influenced by the Do-It-Yourself culture at that time) to resemble an idealised/dream vehicular object, plows into a wall of televisions. The video brings forth a performative gesture that sets up an explosive collision between two of North America’s biggest and most potent cultural symbols of the 1970s: the vehicle (a car that has come to symbolise the ability to traverse land, a dream of many Americans) and the television (a mass media device that has shaped the way people in America live and perceive one another and how they have come to envision the outside world). The invited media representatives that formed the spectators made the spectacle into a ‘media circus’ and footage of the event, which were shot from the video camera mounted inside the car, were further juxtaposed with news coverage from television stations. Such was the complexity of the work that in surveying the work, we categorise it as a media event, a series of site structures (installation), performance (also in real-time) and video-art (closed-circuit cameras and pre-edited ‘mockumentary’.

The event itself manages to merge all these into an artwork that is humorous with cultural and political critique, where they critiqued North American’s ideals of technological superiority and questioned the role of mass media and consumerism on the North American culture. The invited guests who were members of the national media, a gesture that up to this day is very much spoken about. Ant Farm had:

engaged the most powerful aspect of the joke: the possibility of splicing things that in conventional atmospheres would be considered impossible to join.

Ant Farm, Media Burn, 1975-2003.  San Francisco. Videotape. 16 mins. Color.

With “Media Burn”, Ant Farm has produced one of the most exquisite artworks of the 20^th century that is still relevant and spoken about up until today. In fact, the work has definitely become more ‘sublimely relevant more than three decades later’ due to the increased intertwining of mass media and one’s social and physical reality. The altered vision set up by Ant Farm still resonate, as our experience of the every day becomes blurred by imagery displayed on the television, internet and social media.