Tag Archives: new technologies

Review of DocPerform 3: Postdigital

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

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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.

 

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

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DocPerform 2: New Technologies 6-7th Nov 2017

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Just over a year ago, I penned the first entry for this website’s blog. My aim was to detail the backstory to my idea for the DocPerform project, as we planned our first, exploratory symposium. I wrote that we hoped ‘our initial event will spark further interest to form a longer term project’. I also hoped for participants.

I am pleased then, to now write, that today, CityLIS will host our second symposium DocPerform 2: New Technologies. Our 2017 gathering will run for two days, to allow for more presentations and ideas, discussion, reflection and planning.

Since the previous event, we have thought much about the concepts of documents and the processes of documentation, and the central place of these activities within the discipline of library & information science. In respect of new/future documents, we have focused on performance, and the likely impact of immersive technologies and behaviours. Over the course of 12 months, we have seen many developments in the technologies and social-cultural behaviours which first inspired our thoughts on immersive documents, and the processes which could support their amalgamation into mainstream library and information services. All of this has enriched our curriculum here at CityLIS, not least as a result of the new colleagues we have introduced as contributors to our master’s course modules.

Further, we are delighted to have appointed Dr Joseph Dunne as part-time lecturer in Library Science, to explore further the concept of performance as a document, and the documentary processes associated with the recording and archiving of the performing arts. Joe will also bring an external perspective to LIS, encountering and commenting on our work from the perspective of theatre and performance, and considering how we can communicate our work in recording humankind’s endeavours beyond the classroom and the profession, into the wider community.

Our first symposium collected together existing documentation projects from both the LIS and the theatre and performance disciplines. In our second event, we have elected to focus on theatre and dance, looking at how new technologies have changed the way in which we understand, create and experience performance, and consequently how we record, archive and preserve it as part of our cultural heritage.

Interestingly, despite significant developments in technologies and participatory behaviour, the documentation of performance appears to be somewhat reticent to move beyond record keeping as already understood. Maybe our work within the DocPerform project can change that, as we have drawn out some exciting conceptual ideas and prototypes for innovative use of technology for our Programme.

And finally, massive thanks to the DocPerform Team for making this happen, Joe Dunne, David Bawden, Sarah Rubidge, Ramone Riedzewski, and Ludi Price (admin magician). Thank also to Tom Ash for tech support and blogging, and to artist James Hobbs for our lovely logo!