Final Reading/Resource List

Assignment
*Brief review for class next Tuesday. Prepare a comment or question to bring to class. If you are stuck, try considering the following: what strategies and materials are employed, what is the role of the artist’s body in their performances, what subjects do the performances explore?
*Full Reading response due on Feb. 12th. I would like you to read all of the resources I have carefully chosen and give me general feedback. You obviously shouldn't write a response to every artist. Follow the guidelines of previous readings by remarking on what you liked, didn't like or found helpful to your own practice.

The following notes have been synthesized from our class reading American Avant-Garde Theater: A History by Arnold Aronson.

A. 1960's Collectives and Ritual

1. Desire to return to nature, not just literally, but to make theater more natural “more like life”. Theater as a means of reinventing and shifting spectators' and communities' consciousness.
2. Unconventional use of language: more fragmented and metaphoric than narrative. Similar to romantic and symbolist poetry that tried to express an “inner truth”. There was a shift away from conventional narrative story-telling to an emphasis on using the vocabulary of the actors' bodies, movement and sound.
3. Belief in creating communities through theatrical ceremony and quasi-religious ritual that would help rectify the world's ills and lead to a shift in consciousness.
   
4. The model of ensemble theater eventually lost out due to practicality and social-political changes. Maintaing a troupe of actors became harder in NY, many artists wanted to return to narrative theater as a way to tell stories or convey ideas, and American “community” was splintered by racial tensions and Vietnam

Open Theater "The Serpent" Part 2


Performance Group "Dionysus in 69"

Created by Richard Schechner: “Environmental Theater”-setting actively or implicitly surrounds the spectators. Once immersed, spectators may engage with the presence of the actors. This was an attempt at making spectators believe they were equal to the performers.

Difficulty scripting the audience: Schechner structured Dionysus to allow for audience participation. However, there was tension between the actors and director. The actors weren't pleased when the audience would either refuse to participate or take over the play. It was challenging to “script” audience participation. Theater is by definition a “presentation” to an audience and actors inevitably approach the material with a longer investment and more knowledge than the audience. In real religious and social rituals, participants have knowledge of how to behave or specific “roles” and therefore know the script and how to interact.

Richard Foreman

Contemporary work: "Deep Trance Behavior in Potato Land"
Founder of the Ontological-Hysterical Theater @ St. Mark's Church-in-the-Bowery.
Calls his works “total theater”.

B. Performance Art, Action Art, Body Art

1. Hard to define and classify. Artists often had diverse ways of referring to their performance work. Many were self-created and often solo acts of performance that were rooted in the visual arts world.
2. In some senses emerged in the 70s (the “me” generation) as an expression of “looking inward” as the ideals of the 60s and the emphasis on community action began to erode. Shift in focus to the individual and absorption with self-fulfillment: introspective theater.
3. The action was the art object; art was constructed in the behavior of the artist and viewers
4. Performance Art often deals with a single or over-riding concept or idea that makes the audience question their relationship to the performer or material. It may take the form of autobiographical or semi-autobiographical monologues like Spalding Gray's which focused on blurring life and theater. Often, characters are the performer's alter-egos or drawn straight from life and the imagination. Many performance artists enact or embody conceptual ideas.

Spalding Gray

Early member of Performance Group and Co-founder of Wooster Group. Noted for autobiographical texts in performance. His writings/performances endeavored to bring life more into theater. His texts were used as found material and molded by his partner Ellen LeCompte for ensemble performances by the early Wooster Group. Both Gray and LeCompte were inspired by Meredith Monk.
*Wooster Group on TV link meant to be included with our section on them.

C. Sample Artists

1. Drag Performance by Ethyl Eichelberger
2. Penny Arcade
3. Chris Burden "Shoot" & short description
4. Vito Acconci "Undertone 1972" & "Seed Bed" at Lolvantgarde
5. Stuart Sherman performs as part of "Robert Beck is Alive and Well and Living in NYC"
6. Suzanne Lacy's directed ensemble performance “The Crystal Quilt”
7. Marina Abramovic & her "Rhytm 0"
8. Janine Antoni "Touch" & "Lick and Lather"
9. Matthew Barney "The Order from Cremaster"
10. Butoh Performance at Tokyo Gallery
11. Circus Amok
12. Coco Fusco "I Like Girls in Uniform"
13. Gilbert & George "Bend it"
14. Bruce Nauman "Clown Torture"
15. Yasumasa Morimura
16. Carolee Schneemann "Meat Joy" & "Site" with Robert Morris
    
17. Stelarc
18. Yoko Ono "Cut Piece" & "Voice Piece for Soprano"
19. anything Laurie Anderson...
    

Week 5: 1/31/11 Performance Art + Audience Awareness

A. Admin

1. Attendance
2. Wednesday Make-up
3. Final Critique 2/7/11 + performance date
4. Guest Star Ian Hatcher!

B. Resource Notes and context for exercises

1. Toward an interdisciplinary approach in new media: Renaissance culture: idea of distinct forms of art as an unified structure.20^th century avant-garde attempted to reintegrate these forms. Richard Wagner proposes GESAMTKUNSTWERK “total art work”-each unit subsumed under absolute control of one artist. Blends together. However, this could be viewed as too much of a disservice to the unique characteristics and materials of forms of art. Cage proposed: “Arts are not isolated from one another but engage in dialogue”. Avant-garde in some cases was tied to the scientific and technological progress of its day: more-so in that technology opened up new ways of thinking and perceiving.

   
   

2. Towards an aware audience?
   Performance Art is very “live” and “present” may strive for critical distance in the audience. What are some techniques pioneers used for audience awareness, critical distance?

   Bertolt Brecht-known for “epic theater” made from art composed of separate elements in constant tension and dialogue. It was necessary for a spectator to be involved for the full execution, resonance and completion of work. Also coined the “alienation effect” as a goal to promote aesthetic distance in the performance. This was achieved by “show that you are showing” and jarring the audience into consciousness.

   Gertrude Stein- Landscape theater. The audience was aware of performance as a function of space in addition to time. Theater as if viewed from a plane window, the audience could choose which part of the total space to focus on. Emphasized how sight and sound relate to emotion and time, rather than focusing on plot and action. Why? It is hard for an audience member to appreciate theater in the present moment in a context that has a linear plot that unfolds deliberately over time. It is because they are always either emotionally focused on absorbing what just happened or anticipating the future of the play.

   Antonin Artaud-influenced by eastern thought and culture, especially Balinese theater. Placed importance on the mise en scène, visual design aspects, of theater. Sought a mystical trans-like state from spectators tried to achieve this by inducing an intuitive awareness or understanding of the images that made up the performance. He also rejected all aspects of Western Theater including language and a conventional stage. He wanted to make language have the same quality as in dreams.

   John Cage-wanted spectators to re-focus their process of consciousness on the performance while it unfolded. He did this by eliminating meaningful content and creating structures that were completed by performers and spectators. Also, by employing “Chance” as a way to structure and select compositions without the total imposition of the artist. Places the intention on the spectator by stating that theater is created by the simple “framing of an action”.

   
   

3. Performance Art-usually labels performance that is theatrical conceptual art (with tradition rooted in visual art), rather than simply performance for its own sake, for entertainment purposes, or for maintaining theatrical illusion.

   Performance art could be considered more immediate and present to the audience. Much of the time, the art object is the action or results from the action. It aims to be in communication with the audience, as a result it often breaks the fourth wall: the performer behaves as if aware of the audience.

   Basic elements: Time, Space, Performer's body and Relationship between performer and audience.

   
   

4. Audience Awareness, Relationship to Performer

   Try considering your audience. Without them having any background knowledge of your piece, what are you conveying? What overall aesthetic effect are you producing? How can you create the ideal impact? Is relaying intention important, Why/Why Not? Remember that the audience is aware of itself as a group and has its own dynamics. Knowing how to listen and respond to these dynamics can be key in a good performance.

   Many different ways to approach your audience

   1. Approach advocated by Stein, Artaud, Brecht and useful when thinking about “performance art” creates critical distance, alienation, intellectual awareness or spiritual awareness. See approaches under artists above

   2. In a Western/Aristotelian sense (think traditional theater) Audience as a collaborator, “building emotion together” a circuit of empathy, pathos, connection. Immerse in the illusion of theater.

   A few approaches used in #2:

   Make the audience feel as if you care about them. Manipulate their emotions. Use subconscious fears. Stir imagination in hypothetical scenarios. Use the compressed, focused time of a play to bring about revelation. Make the revelation seem exotic through the “magic of theater”SURPRISE! Suspense. NO ONE EXPECTS THE SPANISH INQUISITION. Let them anticipate an outcome and then reverse or alter it. Connect through believable or recognizable characters.

5. The Wooster Group Inspired Workshop on Emotional “Throw” and Presence

   Founded 1975 with trilogy, Three Places in Rhode Island after Spalding Gray. Operates under Elizabeth LeCompte. Intelligent and interesting merge of “high and low” culture in performance. Blending of classical works into contemporary pop culture. The group often uses well-known plays and the accompanying text as a starting point or “prop” and then dismantles the text to extract useful characters, scenes and dialogue. For example: L.S.D. (. . . Just the High Points . . .)(1984) was a mash up of Arthur Miller's “Crucible” and Beat Culture/Writings. Miller threatened to sue them over unauthorized use of the text. Plays are always billed as “works in progress” and can't be considered closed systems. Of interest to this class because they were one of the first groups to integrate technology in a significant way that was in service to their vision. Previously, much of the technology was substitutional-like projections instead of backdrops-or relied on new gimmicks of film or video.

   film and video have their own vocabularies, and the process of reading them is significantly different from reading a stage production. Most experiments had simply tried to subjugate media to the rules of the theatre, and it is safe to say, most experiments did not succeed...-Aronson

   To begin everybody write down one short statement or question.
   
   Exercises:
   Attention to your present body: goal-tension, posture, and presence.
   Ensemble: 3min (quick warm-up)
   A. Spread-out equidistant across the room. Walk at a normal comfortable gait. Pay attention only to your own body and how it is present in the space at that given moment. Imagine a balloon tied at the center of your head lifting it up gently and allowing it to float and center above the neck. At the opposite end of your torso, a weight is pulling your butt down. Be aware of your body as you walk. Relax into this posture. Notice where you are holding tension. What parts seem tight? Breath from your diaphragm into these spaces to loosen them. If time proceed with class scales.
   B. Freeze at time. Choose a partner from someone next to you. Proceed to next exercise
   
   Meisner Training and Repetition: goal-listen & respond, stay in the moment.
   Pairs: 12min
   Each pair pick an anonymous submission from the class.
   A.Two actors face each other and "repeat" their prompts back and forth. An example of such an exchange might be: "You're smiling." "I'm smiling." "You're smiling!" "Yes, I'm smiling." Actors observe and respond to others' behavior and the subtext therein. If they can "pick up the impulse"—or work spontaneously from how their partner's behavior affects them—their own behavior will arise directly from the stimulus of the other.
   B. A new phrase will be repeated about every 3 min. The starting emotion will be triggered by a still from a youtube webcast.
   
   Wooster Group: Video Monitor as a prompt: goal comfortable with being “live” in our bodies/conveying to audience.
   Individuals: remaining time.
   A. everyone return phrases, count-off and explain exercise.
   B. Wooster workshop participants were asked to mirror the actions of bodies on monitors and use those gestures in an improv to audience, often taking cues for the tone and content of monologue from the video's audio that was relayed to them via small personal earphones. We will do a rapid-fire variation on this exercise using the phrases we have collected and various youtube body-building videos.
   C. I will call a number. The called performer will face the projection with the audience's back to screen. They must use gesture of the youtube video as a prompt by imitating it(like in the mirror game) and repeat their phrase in a way that uses it to convey an emotional intensity to the audience. The emotion should seem appropriate for the action that their body is doing to imitate the gesture.
   videos: body building, belly dance on steroids, talk to the hand, still alive, the boyz, body language
   

Week 4: Class 1/24/11 Performance

A. Admin:

-Attendance Sheet
-Email check and catch-up
-Individual Meetings
-Date and time for final hoop-la.

B. This week:
once foundation is established transition to workshop mode.

1/24/11

1. Set-up for critique & open questions.
   
2. Critique

1/25/11

1. Vizzie Introduction
2. Projection workshop

C. Open Dialogue
Is this digitally mediated performance?

1. Creepy Japanese Crawling Robot
2. Tiny Tim?
3. ASCENDERE
4. Live in Real-Time
5. Via headphones, Ant Hampton and Tim Etchells whisper to us over the silence of a library reading-room.
6. Mariano Pensotti turns four authors into literary surveillance cameras who describe scenes in a railway station as they happen. The viewers read the texts as a novel unfolding live on large screens over the heads of its real-life figures.
7. The Ligna activists choreograph their listeners in a shopping mall, turning their movements into a conspiratorial radio ballet.
   

D. Critique Play House

Week 3: Digital M. 1/18/11

A. ADMIN

Internet finds of the week:
Gorgeous and Quirky IamamIwhoamI
Immaculate Stacking: me.ow

-Attendance Sheet

-Class Make-up Day

B. Reading/Reminders/Contact (20min)

What is digital media? What is particular to art making with dm?

Lev Manovich "Eight Propositions":

1. New Media versus Cyberculture
2. New Media as Computer Technology Used as a Distribution Platform
3. New Media as Digital Data Controlled by Software
4. New Media as the Mix Between Existing Cultural Conventions and the Convention of Software.
5. New Media as the Aesthetics that Accompanies the Early Stage of Every New Modern Media and Communication Technology.
6. New Media as Faster Execution of Algorithms Previously Executed Manually or through Other Technologies.
7. New Media as the Encoding of Modernist Avant-Garde; New Media as Metamedia
8. New Media as Parallel Articulation of Similar Ideas in Post-WWII Art and Modern Computing.

C. Other concepts/artifacts to consider as fodder for art making:

1. Loop/Iteration: one cycle of a series of instructions repeatedly cycled over by a computer program until some specified condition is satisfied.
2. Modularity: covers the principle that new media is composed of modules or self-sufficient parts of the overall media object.
3. Algorithm: a set of simple instructions that combine to accomplish a task. Computer processes are algorithms. Algorithms could also be accomplished by hand (often at a much, much slower rate).
4. Transcoding: is the process of converting data from one format to another so the output will be displayed in an appropriate manner for the device. An example would be converting DV video shot from a camcorder into MPEG-2 for burning a DVD.
5. Variability: something that can exist in different potentially infinite versions like remixes. Different ways/approaches to navigate and encounter an object.
6. Interface: The point of interconnection between two entities; The point of interconnection between two systems or subsystems; The input devices (mouse keyboard) and graphics that allow for interaction between a user and a computer HCI (human computer interface); A thin layer or boundary between two different substances or two phases of a single substance.
7. Surveillance:monitoring of the behavior, activities, or other changing information, usually of people and often in a surreptitious manner.
8. Capture: get: succeed in catching or seizing. Often tied to surveillance also tied to “capturing” footage into a software program from a video camera.
9. Feedback loop: a circuit that feeds back some of the output to the input of a system
10. Non-linearity:EX: Nonlinear narrative or disrupted narrative is a narrative technique, sometimes used in literature, film, hypertext websites and other narratives, wherein events are portrayed out of chronological order and are usually dictated by user choices and set parameters within the media.
11. Signal: an electric quantity (voltage or current or field strength) whose modulation represents coded information about the source from which it comes;any incitement to action; any nonverbal action or gesture that encodes a message.
12. Interrupt: a signal that temporarily stops the execution of a program so that another procedure can be carried out.
13. Digital vs. Analog: a digital system is a data technology that uses discrete (discontinuous) values. By contrast, non-digital (or analog) systems use a continuous range of values to represent information.
14. Archive: collection of records; A file archiver is a computer program that combines a number of files together into one archive file, or a series of archive files, for easier transportation or storage.
15. Memory: data storage device is a device for recording (storing) information (data). Recording can be done using virtually any form of energy, spanning from manual muscle power in handwriting, to acoustic vibrations in phonographic recording, to electromagnetic energy modulating magnetic tape.
16. Compositing: layering; Compositing is a broad term for creating complex visual effects made up of several different types of sources like 2D, 3D and stills; Live-action shooting for compositing is variously called “blue screen,” “green screen,” “chroma key,” and other names.
17. Real-time: within the media is a method of narratology within a motion picture, television series, radio program, computer game, comic book, or comic strip wherein events being represented or portrayed exactly as it occurs.
18. Remediation: the representation of one medium in another (Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin 1999).
19. Materiality: the particular physical attributes and presence specific to a medium.
20. Metamedia: as coined in the writings of Marshall McLuhan, metamedia referred to new relationships between form and content in the development of new technologies and new media

D. Critique

Week 3. Assignment for 1/18/11

NO CLASS 1/17/11! will find an agreed upon time for a make-up session as outlined by RISD policy.

Assignment 1:

1. General Assignment–come to class with a well thought out sketch or made object of your final. Be prepared to workshop ideas. Your work should reflect about a week's worth of effort and investment. For the sake of time and numbers, I am opening-up the final to collaborative group work as an option. Groups must be small and driven by equal effort from its members.
or

2. Optional Prompts–create a virtual or physical art object/performance that responds to your research on a basic definition of one of the following class concepts (feel free to suggest another concept to me that is based in digital culture or computer processes):

Surveillance/Capture
Feedback loop
Non-linearity
Signal
Interrupt
Interface
Digital vs. Analog
Archive/Memory

Assignment 2–Reading and Resources:
This week we will be going over some digital concepts. This would have been the assignment we had addressed if we had class on Monday.

1. Read Lev Manovich's section in The New Media Reader titled “What is New Media? Eight Propositions”. I have excerpted this from a longer article and made a pdf here.
2. Review the net.art pages at the bottom of the first week's packet here (in gray).
Artists:

3. Check out Justin Katko from Name in Lights
4. Check out Jason Nelson
5. Check out Jodi and experiment with different variations of entering the URL. Also try clicking "View" "Page Source" in your browser's menu.
   
6. Tate Modern exhibition on surveillance
7. Surveillance Camera Players
   

If you were inspired by last week's links check out Ted Talks: John Crawford-Embodied Media in Performance

Week 2 Embodiment 1/11/11!

Agenda:

1. Final Avatar Critique:
   
2. Administrative: make-up class
   
3. Short small group discussion on resource assignment for 1/10/11. Send Responses before Wednesday to my risd email.



When dance-media and social media merge to form social dance-media works, the result is not simply additive. Posting a comment on a YouTube video, for example, does not constitute an example of social dance-media, since the commentary does not alter the work as such. The choreographic component of social dance-media must accommodate and reflect the use of social media strategies in composition as well as reception, which allow a creator to integrate users and audience members not just as commentators, but also as collaborators of a sort.
–from "Screendance 2.0: Social Dance-Media" at Participations by Harmony Bench



4. Workshop Projection Exercise with Pianographique

Assignment:

1. Download and try free demo of Max 5 with Vizzie. Watch tutorials to get some ideas.
2. 
   

Week 2: Embodiment/Class and Assignment for 1/11/11

quick administrative work before critique.

• pass around attendance sign-up sheet.
• reminder about assignments + attendance.

quirky internet favorite: the worst music video ever. remake 1 remake 2 remake 3

Warm-up 20-30 min.
spread out throughout the room equidistant from your neighbors.

1. Stage 1: hone your center of focus:Listen to the sounds inside the room, then sounds outside the room, then sounds next to or near you, then focus on the sounds you make or inside you. These sounds show your CIRCLE OF ATTENTION, whether it is focused or distanced.
2. Stage 2: Keep your center of focus on yourself but also extend gently outward to your neighbor. Without a leader, as a collective walk around the room with a spatial awareness slowly at first and then crescendo. Decrescendo together. Stop.
3. Stage 3: Move again. This time experience the difference of being led by different body parts. Without exaggerating this movement: imagine that the weight and pull of different body parts are directing your center of gravity, as if a invisible string was joining the to pull you forward.

Critique for performing the Avatar assignment.
pass out performance suggestions.

Assignment due 1/11/11!
Monday-Tuesday Resources.

View resources and read texts below. We will spend a bit of time in class on "inputting" the values/notions we are able to get from these materials. Bring a comment/critique/question with you to class and be prepared to engage in a short discussion. Before Wednesday, email me with the feedback you prepared for class.

Quickly view the following resources and choose two to read in-depth. Specify the articles in the email you send before Wednesday:

Edit: choose two minimum from the below section as stated above.

• Interview with Artist: Untitled 5 by Camille Utterback
  
• Interview with Curator Joachim Jäger http://www.artificial.dk/articles/jager.htm
• Can performance be "shown" on the internet? + Performa website
• Screen Dance 2.0 Social Dance Media
• Quick thought provoking article on Virtual Dance
  

Review the following artists/sources
-out of theme but essential group to know about BLAST THEORY
Could this be considered a dance performance?
Laurie Anderson's Home of the Brave
Telematic Collaborative Dance
Mortal Engine by Chunky Move
http://www.metacafe.com/watch/729789/projector_performance_art/