Proceedings from DocPerform 4 in IJPADM

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Following the successful collaboration between the DocPerform team and the DRHA conference for DocPerform 4: Curating Immersive Documents, Joseph Dunne-Howrie is teaming up with Toni Sant as co-editor of a section of an edition of the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media to be published in 2021. The section will feature selected papers from the Situating Digital Curation conference.

The papers will address themes relating to the integration of interactive technologies into live performance and performative forms of documents and documentation. Ideas concerning the uses of big data for the purposes of theatre and performance historiography will also be explored, with a particular focus on how digital technologies can produce knowledge through managed methods of socialisation amongst artists and audiences.

The potential role of archivists, curators, librarians, data analysts, documentalists and other information professionals in the production processes of live artworks will be considered, with a focus on GLAM organisations becoming sites where performances can be activated in new contexts through documentation.

Joseph’s article will look at performance practices that are emerging in the context of Covid-19. He will argue that internet theatre pieces act as documents that record the experience of living through a global crisis in the information age.

More details about papers presented at DocPerform 4: Curating Immersive Documents can be found here.

The DocPerform team are delighted to be working with Toni and IJPADM.

Review of DocPerform 4: Curating Immersive Performance

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The DocPerform team were delighted to partner with the Digital Research in the Humanities and Arts association for the fourth symposium as part of their annual conference, which in 2020 took as its title Situating Digital Curation: Locating Creative Practice and Research between Digital Humanities and the Arts. The topics of the DocPerform panels included interactive narratives, documenting performance art and live art, data mapping theatre and performance, VR and 360 film, and issues of ownership and power in museums.

Giulia Carla Rossi began the session with a paper discussing the Emerging Formats project at the British Library. Emerging formats are publications defined as stories that use technology to create multi-media web-based narratives. The project is investigating the impact of new technologies on reading and writing practices and is concerned with creating new methods of preservation for publications that are highly interactive and often adaptive to user experience. Other characteristics of emerging formats is the lack of a print version and their dependency on hardware and software to be readable. Indeed, many of the publications at the British Library require bespoke software. This dependency puts them at risk of technological obsolescence. Considered in a broader context, emerging formats signify the much larger digital shift in all parts of contemporary culture.

For LIS, the digital shift in publications represents an opportunity to create new learning environments where documents such as mobile apps and web-based interactive narratives can be accessed. The pressing questions is how to capture the interactive nature of these publications. The Emerging Formats team are beginning to consider if the record of the publication, which will include metadata produced through user experience, might be more valuable than the narrative itself. Giulia described this as ‘enhanced curation’ to highlight the emphasis on the embodied, more overtly performative nature of reading these publications.

Rachel Fensham’s paper provided background information to the Circuit: Mapping Theatre in Australia project to consider how data and analytics could model histories of place through theatre. Noting that the processes of map-making precede the white, Eurocentric practices of naming places by marking out territories according to measurable distances, Rachel argued that the mobile nature of theatre challenged conceptions of distance through the creation of networks of affiliation, collaboration and visitation. Circuit uses data to understand assemblages of Australian theatre as an actor in the country’s cultural ecosystem. This produces circuits of thinking between places and peoples over time that can be expressed through data visualisation from 1965-2020. Noting that digital maps are provisional due to changes in climate, population, and new datasets and that therefore histories of place should not be grounded on them, Rachel contended that Circuit reflects how theatre’s mobility provides a model to map the highly transient and transformative nature of place.

Hélia Marcal and Louise Lawson continued to explore performance’s relationship with history by sharing documentation projects at Tate. The Collecting the Performative project investigated how documents can retain the liveness of an event, which in this context is defined as those qualities which make it adaptable to new environments. Imbricated in this question was an interest in how curators could collect those elements of a performance that allow it to exist again in the future. The team soon realised that the performances documented at Tate were reliant on socialisation between bodies and groups. Any documentation designed to activate the performance again must therefore allow for new forms of social relations to become manifest. Out of this project came a series of tools: Performance specification (venue, artist, date of original production); an activation report, created with the intention of capturing new information each time a work is taken from a dormant state into an active one; and a map of interactions for understanding the networks in and outside of Tate produced from a performance. Tate has since commissioned artists to create new work using the dossiers. One of the most interesting innovations is the human transmitters, individuals who have played the artwork before and who are present at each activation. The human transmitters are necessary because the dossier, as a written document, is not sufficient to communicate embodied and material histories of performance practice. Maintaining difference is recognised as a fundamental aspect of preservation.  

Alison Matthews drew on her experience as the creator of a The Ballad of Isosceles to analyse the affordances of 360/VR film as a documentation medium. The Ballad of Isosceles is a performance for two people. Alison’s point of departure when devising the piece was the notion of triangular desire, where feelings of jealously and envy are always directed towards a third subject or object. Similar to Hélia and Louise’s comments on socialisation, Alison recognised that the highly intimate nature of the performance meant any documentation would have to simulate an effect of being a spectator inside a scenographically rich atmosphere. One of the interesting aspects of 360/VR film as a documentation medium is the way it troubles the binary between digital and analogue environment. The digital is always experienced through embodiment, so the audience is always partially aware of the experience of viewing an artwork and do not therefore become fully immersed into the aesthetic reality. This parallel perspective lead Alison to enquire how 360/VR video documentation can create an experience for a remote observer that simulates and expands upon the scenographic atmosphere and key themes discovered in the development of The Ballad of Isosceles. She concluded that 360/VR video documentation creates an environment that is animated beyond the control of the viewer so is in a sense redolent of the collaborative nature of one-to-one performances where the audiences create the piece with the artist. Producing documentation for one-to-one performances that seeks to expand the scopic regime of the event requires the artist to make a 360/VR film for an absent body, who only becomes present when the document is activated.

In the final paper Riad Salameh argued that the idiom of ownership in a museological context is problematic because it refers to object-based values whereas performance is created with living bodies. Riad went on to state that it is more appropriate to think of performance as a form not a medium to foreground the presence of the artist’s body in the artwork, which must never be commodified or purchased. Referring to Marina Abramovic’s Mixed Reality auction at Christy’s, he concluded that one cannot possess a body and the flesh of a person or group, only the legal rights for its documentation.

Interdisciplinary collaboration was a common theme in all of the papers. This relates to collaborations between artists and memory institutions and the need for audiences to feel as though they are playing an active role in the future history of a performance when they activate a document. These collaborations are clearly complex and multi-faceted processes requiring skills in using interactive and mobile technologies to access the information instantiated in the immersive documents, whilst also needing clear parameters and protocols for the elements of socialisation that are so vital in knowledge transfer. The importance of the environment for accessing immersive documents is also a significant factor requiring further research. The library of the future may indeed resemble a performance-like environment where readers must play roles to participate in the materialisation of histories across time, bodies and objects.

In sum, there is a need in LIS discourse to shift away from thinking about methods of recording live immersive events per se to thinking about how recording the experience of that live event might be a more effective way of making documents and documentation an active part of art-making processes.

DocPerform Webinar: Internet Theatre

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Date: February 16th 2021 18.30-20-30

Register (closed) : Internet Theatre

View Recording: Internet Theatre

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A panel of academic-practitioners will discuss theatre and performance pieces produced for the internet.

The Covid-19 pandemic has forced theatre-makers to produce work online. In distinction from streaming live and recorded shows, theatre and performance produced for the internet represents a new frontier for artists.

Shows such as Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting For All frame the grid of screens on Zoom as a collage of encounters between six connected yet distant bodies, each one inhabiting a reality that never fully converges into a communal experience, whilst Dead Centre’s To Be A Machine turns the audience into data subjects by having them present as recorded video footage and as viewers watching the performance as a live stream on Vimeo. Other examples of internet theatre include Gob Squad’s Show Me A Good Time, New Diorama and Nathan Ellis’s work_txt_home, Coney’s Telephone, and Dante Or Die’s USER NOT FOUND.

This webinar has been organised to begin developing new discourses of ‘the digital’ beyond questions of liveness and ephemerality to explore how the internet has become a performance medium in its own right. The panel will explore ideas relating to the spectator as a data subject, digital intimacy, and writing plays and devising shows for performance in cyberspace with reference to pieces produced during the lockdown.

DocPerform is an interdisciplinary project based in the Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London. DocPerform investigates new and emerging documentation technologies used in the performing arts, the performativity of digital information, and concepts of theatricality and unreality as they relate to the contemporary information environment.

Panel:

Elena Araoz

Elena Araoz is a stage director of theater and opera, as well as a writer, choreographer, and performer. She works internationally, Off-Broadway, and across the USA. She is a faculty member in the Program in Theatre at Princeton University. This summer, she will direct the live virtual CGI and motion capture opera Alice in the Pandemic (White Snake Projects) and a virtual production of Virginia Grise’s a farm for meme (Cara Mia Theatre). In this time before her currently postponed productions return to their stages, this research project is fueled by Elena’s passion for innovation in the theatre. She is particularly interested in developing systems to redistribute resources and opportunities within the field and democratize theatre making and consumption. She also hopes that this research will unlock new structures of storytelling for her. Elena holds her MFA in acting from the University of Texas at Austin. http://www.elenaaraoz.com.

Jo Scott

Jo Scott is an intermedial practitioner-researcher and senior lecturer in performance at the University of Salford. Following the completion of her practice as research PhD project at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama in 2014, Jo has developed both practical and theoretical research in the area of intermedial performance, addressing in particular the intersection of digital computational processes and live performance practices. Her first monograph, Intermedial Praxis and PaR, was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2016 and she has also contributed writing to a range of recent books and journals. Jo’s current practice as research project engages digital technologies in creative encounters with wild urban spaces, through live mixing practices, combining video, text, sound and song. See http://www.joanneemmascott.com for publications, projects and documentation.

Harry Robert Wilson

Harry graduated from Theatre Studies at the University of Glasgow in 2008 and has since completed an MPhil and PhD through creative practice at the university (co-supervised at DJCAD, University of Dundee). Harry’s practice sits between live art, contemporary performance and new media and often involves methods of devising through creative response. In his work Harry is interested in exploring the politics of affect and emotion, autobiography, memory, time and the body. Harry has shown work at a number of venues and festivals across the UK including The Arches; the Citizens Theatre, Glasgow; Forest Fringe, Edinburgh; DCA, Dundee; BAC, London; and internationally at Defibrillator Gallery, Chicago and Kilowatt Festival, Sansepolcro. Harry’s research is often practice-based and generally explores the intersections between performance, media and philosophy – from photographic performances (via Roland Barthes), to virtuality and perception in VR.Harry is an associate artist with Glass Performance and has collaborated with Untitled Projects, Cora Bissett, and Magnetic North, amongst others. Between 2018 and 2019 Harry was Digital Thinker in Residence at the National Theatre of Scotland, an AHRC funded artistic research residency supported by the University of Glasgow. Harry has taught theatre, performance and digital art at the University of Glasgow, University of the West of Scotland and the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Moderator:

Joseph Dunne-Howrie

Joseph is an academic whose research specialisms include immersive and interactive theatre, archives and performance documentation, intermediality, autobiographical theatre, the politics of audience participation, site-based performance, and the media performativity of contemporary fascism. He is a long-term collaborator with the theatre and digital arts company ZU-UK. He was awarded a PhD from the University of Lincoln in 2015 for his practice research thesis Regenerating the Live: The Archive as the Genesis of a Performance Practice. Since then he has taught drama at postgraduate and undergraduate levels at Rose Bruford College, Mountview Academy, and the University of East London. Joseph currently splits his time as the MA/MFA module year co-ordinator for Performative Writing/Vade Mecum at Rose Bruford and as artist in residence in the Library and Information Science department at City, University of London where he is one of the leaders of the DocPerform project. He has published articles in Performance Research, Desearch, Stanislavski Studies, International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media, Proceedings from the Document Academy and Drama Research. See his website for more details about his work josephdunnehowrie.com

To Be A Machine by Dead Centre (2020)

DocPerform Webinar: Internet Theatre

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Date: February 16th 2021 18.30-20.30

Register: Internet Theatre

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This post has been updated.

Lockdown has opened up a new frontier for theatre-makers who wish to experiment with expanding the communication space of performance into cyberspace. Shows such as Forced Entertainment’s End Meeting For All frame the grid of screens on Zoom as a collage of encounters between six connected yet distant bodies, each one inhabiting a reality that never fully converges into a communal experience, whilst Dead Centre’s To Be A Machine turns the audience into data subjects by having them present as recorded video footage and as viewers watching the performance as a live stream on Vimeo. Other examples to cite include Gob Squad’s Show Me A Good Time, Nathan Ellis’s work_txt_home, Coney’s Telephone, and Dante Or Die’s USER NOT FOUND.

In February 2021 Joseph Dunne-Howrie will be chairing a webinar on internet theatre. The webinar will explore issue related to those performances that have been created for the digital medium (as distinct from NT and other streaming programs).

The webinar will explore the following themes:

  • The affordances of the internet as a performance medium
  • Audience as data subject
  • Are these pieces ‘real’ theatre or something else?
  • Digital intimacy
  • Writing plays for cyberspace

Panel:

Elena Araoz, Innovations in Socially Distant Performance

Joanne Scott, University of Salford

Harry Robert Wilson, University of Glasgow

Other panelists TBA

When:

February 2021. Final details TBA

Trans-Participation in the Infosphere

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This is the full version of the paper Joseph Dunne-Howrie gave at the DocPerform 3: Postdigital Symposium on May 16th 2019

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I recently gave a paper where I criticized those immersive performances that denude participants of their critical agency by turning them into dramaturgical content to be managed. It is my intention in this paper to address another side of the immersive story by focusing on the relationship between identity and history as it relates to audience participation in the context of the infosphere. Luciano Floridi describes the infosphere as a space of pervasive connectivity where anything can be connected to anything. The binaries between the off- and online worlds collapse to produce onlife, the merging of the digital and physical realities. In this way, the infosphere is an evolution of the cyberspace imaginary in its distillation of real and virtual realities into informational entities.

‘The cyborg [is] not…only a hybrid of organic, biological and non-organic forms, but [is] a creature able to bridge the gap between the real and representation, between social reality and fiction’

(Giannachi, 2004, p.46)

The infosphere intersects with discourses of post humanism in its framing of the human as part of a bio-technological interactive system. Developments in cybernetics, AI and the mapping of the human genome may well presage the next stage of our evolution, but even as a potential of humanity, bio-technology represents an imaginary of interrelations between organic and machine entities that embody the contemporary experience of the postdigital world. Gabriella Giannachi tells us in the quote above that the figure of the cyborg has always represented a real entity and a narrative construction of humanity.

‘The infosphere will not be a virtual environment supported by a genuinely “material” world. Rather, it will be the world itself that will be increasingly understood informationally, as an expression of the infosphere.’

(Floridi, 2014, p.50)

A key point of differentiation between the infosphere and conventional understandings of virtual reality – which have been significantly influenced by works of fiction, such The Matrix as William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer – is a bio-techno form of interactivity without the presence of a technological interface. Humans in the infosphere are informational organisms – what Floridi calls ‘inforgs’ – whose identity is consciously being constituted and re-constituted through pervasive connectivity.

Medial boundaries collapse in the infosphere. Sarah Bay-Cheng believes we have reached the point where terms such as hypermedia, intermedia and mixed media no longer sufficiently express the postdigital world we live in. She argues that we need a form of performance analysis which assumes ‘all media are always already activated in every cultural object’ (Bay-Cheng 2018).

Trans- encapsulates the bio-techno experience of the postdigital in its framing of identity as a state of hyphenations across mediums. Analysing audience participation with reference to the infosphere allows me to frame immersive performance as communication networks where identities are constructed in collaboration with others.

My point of departure in using the prefix trans- to encapsulate this form of participation comes from Amelia Jones who argues it denotes an emergent state of connections that never settle into a fixed or immutable form (2016). Trans- also expresses a form of knowing that is contingent on participating within expansive communication networks. Trans- treats audience participation as a method of discursive communal thinking as the first step toward political action in the real world within a performative informational environment.

To illustrate this argument I will be discussing two pieces I saw in 2017: Operation Black Antler by Blast Theory and Hydrocracker and One Day, Maybe by dreamthinkspeak. Each piece represents different facets of trans-participation.

In One Day, Maybe, participants’ experience versions of globalised democratic freedom in South Korea from the perspective of the protestors who were killed during the Gwangju uprising in May 1980. One way we participate in the infosphere is through the creation and dissemination of documents. Documents implicate us in a distributed process of knowledge production. I am interested in exploring how the presence of real historical documents in One Day, Maybe produces fictionalised versions of South Korean democratic freedom and intersects with discourses of post-truth reality.

Operation Black Antler tackles the subjects of far right extremism, identity politics, terrorism and state surveillance. Trans-participation in Operation Black Antler has an explicit political imperative by inviting audiences to play a police officer and go undercover to infiltrate a far right group, the National Resistance. The layered identities participants construct with actors and other participants over the course of the performance merges their real selves with fictional identities. In this way, trans-participation in Operation Black Antler resonates with Hannah Arendt’s argument that the imagination has a vital political utility in that it allows us to think discursively, which is to say we make alternative versions of the real world present in the imagination in order to seed the potential of creating new futures through our actions in the present (1981, p.77).

dreamthinspeak’s artistic director Tristan Sharps was inspired to make One Day, Maybe whilst walking through the new retail complexes in Gwangju. He started to think how the ghosts of 1980 would feel about the state of democracy in South Korea if they were alive to see it now. His explicit intention was to avoid creating an historical record of the massacre by allowing the audience to reflect on our globalised world from the perspectives of the dead as a way of exploring how mass consumption constitutes an expression of democratic freedom.

The performance was staged in an anonymous office block in Hull. Upon arrival, the audience were greeted by a team of corporate figures from the Kasang Corporation. Kasang were the selling us the future, which was rendered in a virtual retail environment where we purchased products via the screens installed in the walls. The word ‘kasang’ derives from a Korean word meaning virtual or unreal. In One Day, Maybe it encapsulated the virtuality of democratic freedom and the virtual presence the ghosts of the protestors possess in South Korea’s history. The products being sold to participants were not ‘real’ in the sense we could actually eat the food we bought from the supermarket, but they were no more fictitious than the images we see on Amazon. We can see a similar process operating through the intense mediation of politics. The internet transforms national narratives into an immersive experience we sense but feel we cannot meaningfully participate in. Conversely, when framed as virtual entities, the ghosts of May 1980 attain a more tangible, even domestic, and real presence when contrasted with their commemoration in historical records. The ghosts acted as an imaginative lens for participants to explore how freedom is practiced in liberal free market societies.

The postdigital real was experienced most acutely during a game participants played in a maze. Each of us were given a tablet displaying our location in real time. The aim of the game was to complete the maze and avoid the guards who were represented by red dots on the screen. The tablet directed us to nodes in the maze where electronic documents became unlocked. These documents, the Cherokee files, were real communiques between the Korean Special Forces and the US government, who at that time had operational control over the Korean army. The files disprove the US government’s repeated claims that they did not know the military had been instructed to crush the uprising. Indeed, the Cherokee Files indicate the US gave them tacit approval.

Accessing this history within the fictional world of One Day, Maybe represented the process by which we discover and access information in the infosphere. Documents scaffold social relations within communication networks. The immersive world of One Day, Maybe incubated this process by embedding the Cherokee files in the space for us to discover and interpret, but no explicit narrative was present to make sense of the information we received. Indeed, there was little time to read them, but the bits of information we gleaned made us aware of a hidden layer of information within the mise en scène. The technology enabled participants to access a past that continues to be denied by many South Korean politicians.

The Kasang Corporation began to melt away as we progressed through the maze. The maze acted as a portal into the past by leading us to the Gwangju police station of 1980. Korean Special Forces officers lined us up in a car park and marched us into cells to perform a dance for the dead. The movements of the actors were eerily slow. They spoke in quite voices and rarely made eye contact with us. The overall effect was to render the 1980 police station a spatial echo of the real site and the Gwangju uprising. Participation became trans-ed in One Day, Maybe through the performative connections that were established between the spirit of contemporary South Korea and the events of May 1980. What emerged was a space where conflicting national narratives became presence as a network where participants experienced the ideas before they were able to intellectually articulate them.

This sensibility resonates with concerns around so-called post-truth politics. Much critical commentary focuses on the difficulty of establishing consensus perspectives of reality in the immersive information environment of the infosphere. In its broadest sense, post-truth describes an ultra-relativist political discourse where we are free to shape reality and be whoever we wish to be. Holocaust historian Deborah Lipstadt warns that when opinions are of considered equally valid than the documentary record, then ‘[n]o fact, no event, and no aspect of history has any fixed meaning or content. Any truth can be retold. Any fact can be recast. There is no ultimate historical reality’ (2016: 23). However, the importance of individual perspectives in establishing historical reality should not be disregarded out of hand. Richard J. Evans shows us in his book In Defence of History that cliometrics, a short-lived attempt to produce a purely objective historiography using raw data instead of the historian’s narrative, were a failure because the historian’s voice was absent. The historian is an agent in the formulation of national memory.

‘The language of historical documents is never transparent, and historians have long been aware they cannot simply gaze through it to the historical reality behind’

(Evans, 2018, p.104)

When we consider this quote in the context of One Day, Maybe, we can see that historical reality emerges as a series of interactions between participants, documents, actors and space. The history of the Gwangju uprising is thus trans-ed by becoming actively hyphenated to present day South Korea; not just as an event to be remembered, but as an idea of democratic freedom to be challenged.

Operation Black Antler was inspired by the increasing powers afforded to the security services through the Investigatory Powers Act, colloquially known as the snooper’s charter. Artistic director of Hydrocracker Jem Wall told me that he felt there was too much soft thinking on the left and on the right when it comes to the corrosive effect surveillance culture has on democratic freedoms.

‘Surveillance is no longer merely something external that impinges on “our lives”. It is also something that everyday citizens comply with – willingly and wittingly or not – negotiate, resist, engage with and, in novel ways, even initiate and desire. From being an institutional aspect of modernity or a technologically enhanced mode of social discipline or control, surveillance is not internalized in new ways. It informs everyday reflections on how things are, and the repertoire of everyday practices’

(Lyon, 2018, p.9)

David Lyon argues the Big Brother imaginary of surveillance is outdated in the age of pervasive information. Unlike the people of Oceania, modern surveillance is sustained by our active participation. We voluntarily produce and disseminate information online, thereby turning surveillance into a fluid form of control. The imbrication of surveillance into everyday reality allows us to monitor the activities of others whilst willingly becoming objects of surveillance. But the pervasive quality of modern communication makes it impossible to see as a phenomenon distinct from all other social activities. Operation Black Antler acted as an incubator of surveillance culture so participants could critically reflect on its consequences for political freedoms.

Participants enter Operation Black Antler when they receive a text message instructing them to go to a safe house to meet their handler. We were briefed that the security services were concerned about a new anti-Islamic group, National Resistance. Our mission was to gather intelligence on the group’s activities and decide if they warranted deep dive surveillance.  We were told this allowed the security services to access the most intimate details of their lives without a police warrant. The main action occurred in a pub where the National Resistance were having a party. Over the course of an hour I played a figure who I felt would attract far right sympathies. Unemployed, lonely, despondent, a man who felt his culture was being destroyed by immigration and was eager to meet like-minded people.

Operation Black Antler is structured like a game in that participants must navigate certain obstacles in order to meet the leaders of the group. The actors invite participants to share their political beliefs. Only by conforming to the group’s ideology will they be able to access the necessary information. Participants came together after an hour to decide if a deep dive surveillance operation should be launched.

‘By learning a new language, a person requires a new way of knowing reality and of passing that knowledge on to others…All languages complement each other in achieving the widest, most complete knowledge of what is real’.

‘The liberated spectator, as a whole person, launches into action. No matter that the action is fictional; what matters is that it is action!’

(Boal, 2000, pp.121-122)

The language of the National Resistance was easy to grasp, particularly at a time when ethno-nationalist politics are in the ascendency in Europe and North America.  These lines from Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed emphasizes his interest in theatre as a space of knowledge exchange. As nodes in a surveillance network, participants interact with the National Resistance in order to gain information. But this identity is always doubled with their real selves and resonates with the process of identity construction we undertake in the infosphere. This doubling effect is an important aspect of trans-participation because it allows the identities we perform in performance to become rehearsals of our identities outside the performance space. The political affiliations we perform online are not wholly fictional versions of our real selves. The micro-narratives of the selves that we construct online change our social selves and how we see each other.

‘You may no longer lie so easily about who you are, when hundreds of millions of people are watching. But you may certainly try your best to show them who you may reasonably be, or wish to become, and that will tell a different story about you that, in the long run, will affect who you are, both online and offline.’

(Floridi, 2014, p.64)

In Boal’s terms, trans-participation constitutes political action because it liberates the spectator from pure critical reflection into a subject who can effectuate change in the real world. But action must be informed by judgement, a faculty of mental reasoning that Hannah Arendt argues can only exist in the mind. Spectating is a vital part of judgement for Arendt. She states that the spectator is able to see the whole spectacle and judge it in its entirety, unlike the actor who is a component of the spectacle and is thus unable to determine its truth (Arendt, 1981, p.94). A crucial aspect of Arendtian judgement to grasp is that it is an action executed by an enlarged mentality. Trans-participation is a public thinking event where audiences collectively imagine experience living in postdigital reality in immersive performances.

References

Arendt, H. (1981) The Life of the Mind. London: Harcourt

Bay-Cheng, S. (2016) ‘Postmedia Performance’, Contemporary Theatre Review, [online] 26(2), https://www.contemporarytheatrereview.org/2016/postmedia-performance/, accessed 21 February 2019

Boal, A. (2000) Theater of the Oppressed. London: Pluto Press

Evans, R.J. (2018) In Defence of History. London: Granta

Floridi, L. (2014) The 4th Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Giannachi, G. (2004) Virtual Theatres: An Introduction. New York: Routledge

Jones, A. (2016) ‘Introduction’ in Performance Research: Trans-ing Performance, 21:5. 2016, pp.1-11

Lipstadt, D. (2016) Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory. London: Penguin

Lyon, D. (2018) The Culture of Surveillance: Watching as a Way of Life. Cambridge: Polity Press

 

Review of DocPerform 3: Postdigital

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Thank you to David Bawden for taking notes during the sessions!

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Temporary Poster

Over 50 participants took part in the third Documenting Performance symposium, held at City, University of London, on 16th May 2019, hosted by CityLIS, the Department of Library & Information Science. DocPerform is a part of the wider CityLIS project examining The Future of Documents.

The introductory session was opened by Sarah Rubidge, Professor Emerita at the University of Chichester, and long-standing member of the DocPerform team, who set the day into context. From the first symposium which focused mainly on conventional records of performance in libraries and archives, DocPerform has moved to deal more and more with the digital realm. This matches the changes in performance itself, which, from the 1980s onwards, has moved beyond the stage into other spaces, including the digital. In turn this leads to a number of questions;

– how do we document temporal media?
– how do we document improvised performances?
– how do we document performance systems and installations, especially immersive installations?
– how do we document processes?
– how do we document and preserve digital works, which are already disappearing as systems and software become obsolete?

Solving these problems requires research, not just applying existing archival methods.

The keynote presentation, The experience parlour, was given by Lyn Robinson from CityLIS, who reminded participants that the perspective of DocPerform is from that of library and information science, the remit of which is keeping the record of humankind. It is inspired in one way by Bruce Shuman’s vision of thirty years ago of a library as an experience parlour or experiencybrary, which would store immersive experiences which could be accessed by the library’s patrons. Virtual and augmented reality technologies, which now offer the prospect of an unreal reality, seem to offer the prospect of making Shuman’s vision a practical proposition. In order to bring this about, we will need to fully understand the nature of these new forms of documents, in order to be able to describe and use them properly. This will require extensive research, rooted in the concepts of document theory as originally outlined by Paul Otlet and Susanne Briet.

The first full session, devoted to Technologies, had four speakers.

Mark Underwood, an experienced sound designer now undertaking a PhD at the University of Surry, gave a presentation Exploring the extent to which sound design enhances temporal and somatic user experiences in mixed reality environments. This examined how intelligent sound design can help make such experiences as immersive as possible, with immersion understood as a deep mental involvement. Immersion has both psychological and sensory aspects. The former can be attained, for example by reading a book, while the latter is the aspect of immersion enhanced by sound. Mark showed, by playing a film clip with and without sound, that when sound is absent we may notice visual inputs more clearly; more sensory input is not, in itself, an advantage, it has to be carefully designed. By implication, this will influence the impact of documented experiences.

Hansjörg Schmidt and Nick Hunt described their interactive installation Traces, an aspect of their wider Library of Light project at Rose Bruford College, which is developing repository for lighting practices in various creative disciplines. Traces allows light effects to be recorded with a camera or smart phone, enabling an investigation of the relation between the ways we experience light, and the ways we can record and document it. The installation was made available in a separate room for participants to experience during the day.

https://performinglightblog.wordpress.com/schedule/traces/

The presentation by Tom Ensom and Jack McConchie, curators at the Tate galleries, Preserving virtual reality artworks, outlined the potential, and the challenges, of documenting digital installation artworks which employ virtual reality (VR), and which offer immersive and multi-sensory experiences. VR engines such as Unity, Source, Unreal Engine and CryEngine, originally developed for videogame development, can be used for this purpose. There remain considerable practical difficulties, not least cost and effort of collaborating with the VR industry. At a minimum, however, to stand the best chance of preserving such works, we can, and should:

  • start collecting now
  • create and archive a disk image of the running artwork
  • gather and create documentation that shows how to do this
  • create and archive a disk image of the production materials in a software environment in which they can be accessed
  • monitor the evolution of technologies, to identify problems and opportunities.

Joseph Dunne-Howrie, from CityLIS, gave a presentation on Trans-participation in the infosphere. Luciano Floridi’s concept of the infosphere, the contemporary digital information environment, is taken as a framework . The production and dissemination of media acts as the infrastructure of the infosphere, replicating our presence across platforms and communication networks. Audience participation in the infosphere and the condition of onlife, where the physical and virtual worlds fuse seamlessly, provides new forms of interaction and identity, as evidenced by examples from immersive theatre.

The second session, entitled Transcience, also featured four presentations.

Clarice Hilton, giving a presentation of behalf of herself and her fellow VR researcher Shivani Hassard, discussed Frictional forces in creating the effect of presence in immersive experiences. Presence in virtual reality is promoted by the effective illusions of place (creating the belief that we are somewhere we are not) and of plausibility (creating the belief that was is happening is natural and sensible). A contribution to plausibility is given by providing the sense of friction in VR experiences, making such experiences involve actual physical effort, so reinforcing the physicality of the actual body.

Piotr Woycicki from Aberystwyth University presented AR remediation/documentation of Our Lady of Shadows, an example of an augmented reality space which is at the same time enclosed but also open to the outside world. The work is an AR adaption of a radio play, giving a reimagining of Tennyson’s poem The Lady of Shalott. The discussion of this presentation led to the idea that, although we may think of audience interaction as a feature of modern and novel formats, it may be that radio drama allows audiences to be active participants [Tim Crook, Radio Drama, London: Routledge, 1999].

Harry Robert Wilson, Digital Thinker in Residence, for the National Theatre of Scotland, gave a presentation on Immersive media and the multi-modal document in PaR. This reflected on the documentation of immersive media in light of the definitions of document and documentation given by Angela Piccini and Caroline Rye [Of fevered archives and the quest for total documentation, in L. Allegue et al. (eds.) Practice-as-Research in performance and screen. London: Palgrave Macmillam, 2009), 34-39]. There are two distinctive features of VR documentation of performance. It puts the audience, in a sense, inside the document; and it integrates other forms of document, such as video, photographs, text, sound, and set design. However, it would wise not to claim uncritical and absolute “immersion” or “presence” from any currently feasible VR documents.

Sarah Rubidge presented an interactive artwork of which she was co-creator, Sensuous Geographies, a performative sound and video installation. Now that artwork itself is no longer active, would it be feasible to recreate the experience in VR? The presentation raised many questions about how to translate an experience in physical reality into virtual reality, while capturing sufficient of the essence of the experience to say that the VR version was, in some sense, the same. These questions are fundamental to the documentation of any interactive performance of artwork, and more broadly to new forms of digital document. See: Sensuous Geographies

The closing session was devoted to Structures and Interfaces.

A third CityLIS speaker, Deborah Lee, discussed Documenting interactivity and post-digital performances: exploring the application of data models and standards for augmented reality performance. This presentation examined the limitations of the standard library metadata models for describing performance documentation. The essential problem is that performance does not fit well into the bibliographic world described by standards such as the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR) and the Library Reference Model (LRM). These models assume that there is a single creator of a work, and hence cannot adequately describe interactive or participatory works. Indeed, they do not cope well with works defined in space and time; they are fine for recording the text of a play, for example, but not a single performance. Nor do they recognise AR and VR among their defined media types. These problems had been noted a while ago, before experience had been gained in the used for FRBR and its associated standards [D. Miller and P. Le Boeuf, “Such stuff as dreams are made on”: how does FRBR fit performing arts? Cataloguing and Classification Quarterly, 39(3-4), 151-178]. Discussion of this presentation suggested that these were philosophical issues, of fundamental importance in keeping records of performance documentation. In turn, documenting performance is a good test bed for examining the issues which will arise with other new forms of document.

To close the day, the True Heart theatre company presented The Genie is out of the bottle: who’s got a story to tell? Taking comments from members of the audience on their impressions and experiences of the day, they presented them as Playback Theatre – short improvised performances interpreting and representing experiences – without any of the digital or technological means discussed throughout the day.

Installations and performances were available to the participants throughout the day. Apart from Traces, already mentioned, the Itinerant Poetry Library opened, and Rebecca McCutcheon’s virtual reality performances Affective bodies in dynamic spaces: documenting site-specific theatre practice were made available for participants to experience.

Further information about the symposium is available on the website. The full papers will appear in a special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy.

 

Documenting Performance: Sensuous Geographies

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Documenting Performance: Sensuous Geographies
Collaborative, exploratory research workshop held at CityLIS on March 26th 2019

This is a brief account of our collaborative, exploratory research workshop held on March 26th 2019. For further details, please contact Dr Lyn Robinson or Dr Joseph Dunne-Howrie.

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IMG_6019CityLIS has a longstanding interest in the nature of documents, document theory and the processes of documentation. We understand a document to be something that stands as ‘evidence’, and follow a broad interpretation of those entities that may be classed as documents, including data sets, works of art and performance.

We have a current focus on novel forms of document, which are afforded by new technologies. These technologies, including multimedia, pervasive networks, multisensory transmission (taste, smell, touch), VR and AR, facilitate documents with which we can interact and participate to a greater or lesser extent, and which also promote the experience of immersion, so that a scripted unreality may be perceived as something approaching reality. In many cases, these documents have a temporal component, in that they are experienced at a particular moment in time. Additionally, at any given time, they may be experienced by multiple participants or members of the audience.

Examples include born-digital documents such as video games, interactive fictions or narrative, immersive artworks, and theatre and dance performances produced in VR.

Further, such technologies might also be used to recreate (document), and thus preserve, non-digital documents with a temporal aspect, such as performance.

Whilst the technologies used to create these new forms of document can also be used to preserve them for future access, it is important to note the difference between digitization as a process, and as a technique for preservation. Digital preservation is responsible for preserving digitization.

In order to document and preserve these novel document formats, we need to understand their nature, or documentality.

This one-day workshop brought artists and engineers together with library and information specialists, to explore how immersive, participatory, performance related works could be understood, and thus documented.

We took as our example, the immersive and interactive installation Sensuous Geographies created in 2003 by Professor Sarah Rubidge in collaboration with Professor Alistair Macdonald.

This choreosonic installation, although no longer extant, has been documented by texts, photographs, sound and video recordings. Several physical components remain, including the costumes and the materials used to create the flooring.

We would like to move beyond these forms of documentary evidence (themselves documents), to recreate a version of the original piece in VR. The original installation offers a range of multisensory aspects for documentalists to consider; not only how to recreate audio and visual aspects of the installation in VR, but how to include the elements of presence (participation) and immersion (a feeling of reality).

Our workshop, hosted by myself and Joseph Dunne-Howrie, began with a presentation from Sarah, which set out the nature of the installation, highlighting the features we would need to recreate in order to fully document this unique work, so that it could be made available to new audiences, or indeed again to those who interacted with the installation in 2003/4, in as close to the original format as possible.

We then heard brief presentations from each or our workshop members, on their areas of expertise, followed by informal group discussion around documentation of a multisensory, interactive, immersive, time-based installation.

As a starting point, we considered whether existing conceptual models for describing documentary works, including FRBR (IFLA LRM), and any metadata standards associated with artefacts or performance, offered existing work on which we could build. No model for works similar to Sensuous Geographies was known to the group, although this remains an area for further exploration.

We talked about the nature of the surrogate document, or simulacrum, and acknowledged that our recreation of the installation in VR, if successful, would be a new document, irrespective of how close to creating a work with the feeling of the original experience we came.

Working conceptually, we identified layers of the work that would need to be reproduced in our VR version of Sensuous Geographies:

  • The physical attributes of the installation, the space, the flooring, costumes and screens
  • Participation as either an audience member or a someone who entered the space
  • The soundscape: ambient sounds to give a sense of presence, then the interactive musical score reacting to participants’ movements and interaction (MacDonald ‘composed’ the underlying character of the soundscape in realtime by selecting sound strands and processing systems)
  • The rules embedded in the interactive system, governing the sounds, and the level at which participants could interact
  • The sensations experienced by the participants; sight, sound, touch, movement/direction

We then discussed in broad categories, the technological possibilities that we could employ to realize the work:

  • Static view
  • 360 video on screen
  • 360 video plus headset
  • 360 video plus headset and hand controllers
  • VR headset and empty space
  • VR headset and set pieces
  • VR headset and sensors
  • Sound: multichannel audio, or binaural audio
    (the latter would need to be connected to the participant’s head movement)

The discussions were engaging and constructive. We need now to describe in more detail each ‘layer’ of Sensuous Geographies, and to further explore the technologies available to render the work in as realistic a format as possible.

Our aim is to produce a specification for a project to render the work in VR, and we would welcome any thoughts as to how this could be achieved.

This project offers a case study of documentation, digitization, and subsequent preservation of a multisensory, interactive and immersive choreosonic installation. We believe this to be a novel undertaking, and one which will be of interest to artists and creators of such works, to library and information professionals, to archivists, scholars, engineers and those interested in cultural heritage.

Participants in our workshop included:

Astrid Breel (via Skype)
Joseph Dunne-Howrie
Matthew Freeman (via Skype)
Alistair MacDonald (via Skype)
Jorge Lopes Ramos
Lyn Robinson
Sarah Rubidge
Rebecca Stewart
Mark Underwood
Zhi Xu 

***

DocPerform 3: PostDigital
May 16th-17th 2019
City, University of London

Proceedings from DocPerform 2: New Technologies

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DocPerform Image Selected papers from our second DocPerform symposium were published as a special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy. We are pleased to site our work alongside members of the multi- and interdisciplinary community of researchers focusing on documents and documentation.

Join us for DocPerform 3: PostDigital!

Immersion: A New(ish) Way to Experience Art and the World

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This post was originally published on the CityLIS blog.

As technology becomes more interactive and digital information becomes more pervasive, theatre-makers are experimenting with new forms of audience participation. The potential technology has to distribute a performance over time and distance is collapsing medial boundaries. In this post, I explore how immersion no longer denotes just the spatial dynamics of a performance by including multiple forms of audience interactivity, which may well constitute new forms of collaboration and co-authorship. 

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Immersive theatre has become a popular term in the UK over the past decade. It encompasses quite a broad range of performance practices, but at it’s most basic immersive theatre denotes performances that occur around the audience, who unlike in conventional theatre spaces experience the piece by moving inside a fictional world. But immersion does not just denote spatial characteristics. Participation is also a common trope, where artists aim to give audiences some agency over how they experience the story they are immersed inside of.

When I was an undergraduate student studying drama in the mid-2000s, what is now called immersive theatre was more commonly referred to as promenade theatre. Moving inside a performance was closely aligned to the concept of total theatre – a theatre that activates all of the senses and emotions to take the audience on a cathartic journey through a drama, thereby leaving them spiritually transformed. Originally published in 1938, Antonin Artaud The Theatre and It’s Double contains an early description of this theatre:

We intend to do away with stage and auditorium, replacing them by a kind of single, undivided locale without any partitions of any kind and this will become the very scene of the action. Direct contact will be established between the audience and the show, between actors and audience, from the very fact that the audience is seated in the centre of the action and is encircled by it. This encirclement comes from the shape of the house itself. Abandoning the architecture of present-day theatres, we will rent some kind of barn or hangar rebuilt along lines of certain Tibetan temples (2001, p.74).

A good example of the kind of space Artaud describes was Area 10. This former steel mill in Peckham, South East London was used as an art space in the late 2000s. It had no seating or any defined performance space. In 2009, I performed in Living Structures’ devised show Biosphere. The show began with the audience sat in a circle watching performers fertilising a plant with their excrement. Then, to a burst of choral singing, a different group of performers  – which I was a part of –  emerged from a plume of smoke, wearing nothing but white underpants and reindeer masks. Once the audience were ushered from the space, a large hessian tent was erected, which they were then free to explore. The inside of the tent was designed like a maze, with a series of installations located at certain nodes. The audience were given reindeer masks and hessian robes to wear. The costume was an attempt to deepen their immersion in the drama by making them part of the aesthetic environment and so become embedded in the narrative unfolding around them.

Whilst Biosphere conforms to many of the conventions of immersive theatre in terms of environmental envelopment and physical proximity between actors and audience, it is more closely aligned with promenade theatre through it’s absence of audience participation. Save for the final third act when the audience explored the maze, much of the audience’s time was taken up with watching dramatic action unfold before and around them rather than taking part in it. This “taking part” can manifest on a number of levels, from direct and improvisational contact with characters, to making choices that determine how a performance unfolds for the individual and for the audience as a whole.

A common characteristic of much immersive theatre is the fragmentation of dramatic narrative, which enables spectators to create their own version of the story. Punchdrunk’s The Drowned Man (2014) is the most elaborate piece of immersive theatre I have seen to date, both in terms of it’s scale and sheer detail. The world of The Drowned Man was one that could have been plucked from David Lynch’s imagination. Part abandoned movie set, part Americana dreamscape, part Frankensteinian nightmare, this was a world that I could never fully grasp. Yet it was the very impossibility of experiencing the drama in it’s entirety that drove my movement through it. This impulse is noted as a key characteristic of immersion in theatre by Josephine Machon, who frames it in terms of exploration: “Rediscovery is central to the experience: of space, narrative, character, theme, and sometimes even of unknown depths, or hidden emotions and memories specific to that individual participant”​ (2013, p.28). The version of The Drowned Man I experienced was not the same as my partner’s nor, indeed, anyone else who saw it. True, we inevitably saw some of the same scenes, but the order in which we experienced them in relation to what we had seen previously informed our interpretation of the overall narrative. The relationships between the characters was experienced out of sync or, rather, experienced as pieces of a puzzle we could not hope to assemble as a cohesive whole in a few hours.

We can see, here, links between immersive theatre and the genre of open world games. Games like Skyrim (2011) and the Fallout series (1997-) allow players to explore highly elaborate worlds with far fewer limitations imposed on them than games that have a linear story structure. The lack of definite goal or quest in these games and The Drowned Man creates a far more tangible reality for the spectator or the player because they are not required to follow one path. Instead, they are given a choice of routes inside a virtual reality. Open worlds create many potential experiences for players compared with those that are available in linear game narratives. The ostensive freedom this structure affords audiences and players more closely aligns it with the experience of everyday life.

The links between theatre and gaming can be developed further to address how immersive worlds are built as a collaborative partnership between actors and audiences. ZU-UK’s executive director Jorge Ramos discusses participation in the context of the “experience economy” where audiences, or “players”, act as co-authors of art live art works (2015, p.8). This was evident in ZU-UK’s six hour, overnight epic Hotel Medea (2009-2012). During this re-telling of the Medea myth, players frequently interacted with characters improvisationally. Ramos uses the term “micro-events” to describe these interactions to proffer an approach to immersive theatre that he expresses as “the dramaturgy of participation” (ibid, p.3). The degree of participation increased over the course of the performance in a way that allowed the audience to gradually become part of the story rather than as invertentionist elements.

These micro-events can be understood as private or secret dramas known only to those who experience them.  Participation in the context of immersion includes the building of imaginary worlds through interactivity. In this way, immersive performance  “aims to provide, in everyday activities at the moment of the encounter, modest but pervasive communication, provisional social consensus and micro-utopias”​ (Harvie, 2013, p.7). Describing it in these terms might appear to exaggerate the impact immersive performance can potentially have on the real world until we remember that utopias are non-places of the imagination. The physical immersion in these fictional worlds allows audiences to temporarily inhabit societies that we may celebrate or fear.

The popularity of immersive theatre is partly a product of our contemporary media ecology, which places interaction at it’s centre. Technologically mediated communication has become a significant part of everyday experience. Social media enables these interactions to stretch over time, distance, place and device, thus making the locus of communicative exchanges highly diffuse. Patrick Longeran argues that Facebook, Twitter and the like act as stages where we perform identities to a “network of followers”. When analysed in the context of theatre, online communication produces a distributed mode of performance which “can extend a production both temporally and spatially, pushing [performances] beyond the boundaries of the stage, and beyond the performance of the action in real time” (2015, pp.2-4). Moreover, interaction is not just a feature of the event, but constitutes the event itself:“What makes social media distinctive from other forms of digital performance is the extent to which interactivity is not just a context for reception, but a core element of the overall composition” (ibid, p.21).

Blast Theory’s 2097: We Made Ourselves Over (2017) pushes the envelope of immersive theatre by spreading the immersive world in live and recorded iterations. 2097 presents a dystopian vision of Hull and the Danish city Aarhus following an ecological catastrophe. On 1st October 2017, every public telephone rang in Hull at 2pm. The audience listened to a voice from the future, Hessa, who invited them to record a message to send to her community about what they think is the most important thing to preserve from the present. The piece also consists of five short sci-fi films and one interactive film for smartphones. All of these different iterations act as portals into a fictional world that is embedded in reality through technology, and is therefore not confined to the spatial-temporal zone of live theatre.2097 is neither live or non-live (if we consider ‘live’ to denote physical proximity and ephemerality). It inhabits a temporal plane inbetween or outside of this binary.

Charlie Gere argues that technology has become so embedded into reality that the term digital culture “risks becoming a tautology” (2008, p.7). Whilst the importance of maintaining body-to-body contact in theatre continues to be debated, it is undeniable that performance-makers are embracing the affordances of online communication to find new ways of engaging with audiences. Matt Adams argues that the “most significant characteristic of the ‘digital revolution’ is an explosive new amount of interaction and participation from what has gone before”​ (Adams in Blake, 2014, p.ix). The link he makes between interaction and participation is important to understand when discussing the kinds of activity immersive experiences engender in audiences. Immersion in theatre is an expanding term that is now encompassing communication networks. No single event exists in this form of immersion because it is composed of individual experiences that occur over time and distance.

The immersive spaces of the performance are created by the participation of the audience. This idea resonates with Floridi’s notion of “onlife” – the merging of the digital and offline worlds to create the “infosphere” (2014). The immersive qualities of technology are beginning to be utilised by theatre and performance artists as a way of enriching how audiences can participate in their aesthetic experiences. Immersion in art could constitute a revolution in how theatre is not just experienced but also produced in collaboration with audiences. Moreover, it might allow us the opportunity to rehearse how we can live in a hyper-connected environment without becoming subsumed into a digital fugue of voices and images by providing temporary spaces for genuine intimacy and dialogue.

Adams, M. (2014) Foreword. In: B. Blake, Theatre & the Digital. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp.viii-xi

Artaud, A. (2001) The Theatre and Its Double. London: Calder

Floridi, L. (2014) The Fourth Revolution: How the Infosphere is Reshaping Human Reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press

Gere, C. (2008) Digital Culture. 2nd ed. London: Reaktion

Harvie, J. (2013) Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan

Longeran, P. (2015) Theatre & Social Media. London: Palgrave

Machon. J. (2013) Immersive Theatres: Intimacy and Immediacy in Contemporary Performance. London: Palgrave Macmillan

***

You can follow Joe on Twitter.

DocPerform 2: Proceedings to be Published March 2018

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DocPerform Logo 3We are delighted to announce that the proceedings from DocPerform 2: New Technologies, which took place on 6th-7th November 2017, will be published in a special issue of Proceedings from the Document Academy. The issue is due out on March 1st 2018.

All speakers who presented at the two day event are invited to submit a full paper based on their session. Please send an email to lyn@city.ac.uk to confirm your intention to submit an original paper.

Papers should reflect the content presented at DocPerform 2, and showcase original work which has not been previously published, nor which is scheduled to appear in any other forthcoming publication, print or electronic. Manuscripts should be between 2,500-5,000 words. It is usually possible to include other media formats, but authors should check with the journal editorial team. Further guidance for submission can be found on the journal website. The deadline for submission is December 31st, 2017.

The process for submission is as follows:

  1. Authors submit to the submission manager. Here is a direct link: http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/cgi/submit.cgi?context=docam. (Also reachable from the homepage of the journal, link in the sidebar.) Deadline December 31st 2017.
  2. The basic format for text submissions is: up to 5,000 words, Times 12pt, 1.5” margins, single space, no header or footer. Content should be submitted in an editable format (not PDF). Besides basic text, the submission of slideshows, audio files, videos, etc. is allowed. For some projects, the journal can allow more “play” with these formatting requirements. If people have specific needs, they can email Tim Gorichanaz (gorichanaz@drexel.edu) to discuss.
  3. Once submitted, papers will be sent to Lyn Robinson as first-round reviewer, for confirmation that the paper reflects what was presented. Depending on each case, authors may need to make some revisions at this stage.
  4. Among the editorial board (sometimes with outside help, depending on the topic and needs), the second-round review will then occur. Revisions, additional clarification or copyediting may be requested at this stage. This communication will be directly to the author, since they’ll be in the system.
  5.  For a model of what to write and how it will look, see the issue page for last year’s Docam meeting: http://ideaexchange.uakron.edu/docam/vol3/iss2/
  6. Publication date for the issue is March 1, 2018.

Please contact lyn@city.ac.uk if you have any queries about DocPerform. Please contact gorichanaz@drexel.edu if you have any queries relating to Proceedings from the Document Academy.
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Further information about the Document Academy.
Further information about CityLIS.