the dirt behind the stove ...
By Helen Varley Jamieson - 11/04/2007
after an incredible, intense & inspirational long weekend at the magdalena aotearoa gathering, i have done my washing and vacuumed the house - which really needs a good dust; the freezer could do with defrosting and it is surely time i pulled the stove out from the wall & cleaned up all that ... stuff ... that's accumulated back there. this strange obsession with housework might have something to do with the deadline for my first assignment looming hugely over me. i have the books by my bed in the hope that some of the knowledge will leak into my head while i'm sleeping ... it is no coincidence that procrastination was the first 5-syllable word i learned as a child. it's impossible to focus on an assignment when the house is dirty.
speaking of dirt, i'm pleased to report that i'm about to dirty my library record with the second book i've borrowed. it's been recalled and should be returned on the 12th, but i need it for this assignment & on consulting a librarian i learned that the penalty for not returning it is 20 points a day. when i get to 500 points, i get a warning letter. as the librarian said, my record is "clean", so a little dirt - 120 points to be precise - is surely called for. the book in question is "telepresence and bio art - networking humans, rabbits & robots" by eduardo kac. it's not just the green bunny on the cover of this book that appeals to me - it's the word "telepresence", which is the topic of the assignment i'm not writing at this very moment.
kac writes a lot about telepresence, which is great, but it was marvin minsky who first coined the term back in 1980. both kac and minsky use the term in relation to telerobotics, where as i'm specifically interested in its manifestation in cyberformance, and its relationship to the idea of presence in performance. the presence project quotes goldberg to define telepresence as "teleoperation systems used in remote object-manipulation applications" (Goldberg, 2000: 27) (that's the next book i have to read ... ). it seems to be more about have a physical effect from a distance, eg manipulating machinery, whereas i am interested in the emotional, communicative, social and performative effect of telepresence. i think.
however, i don't have time to keep chatting on about telepresence. i must fold my clean washing; make soup for dinner; call my elderly uncle; write a list of things to do; defrost the freezer; clean behind the stove ...
Comments
Wet Paint: Consciousness & Presence
Helen I want to give a considered response to your pressing telepresence essay but the paint on my wardrobe is drying fast and I need to get the rest painted and let the barking dog out, before kids arrive home and the neighbours report me to the council. Actually I should be finishing the script for the site specific at the Master Shipwrights House for next weeks rehearsals- there's still a prologue outstanding and no ending in sight. Perhaps they all drown in the Thames? So telepresence huh? Goldberg doesn't make it sound very sexy and presence is often sexy and usually produces visceral effect for witnesses. The easiest way to get an actor to project presence onstage is to have them up their concentration levels by 1000%. This works. It also suggests that its mind and/or consciousness emanating through the physical body . That's something you are not getting online unless you are imagining it, which is not to discount the effects of imagination which in this example might be akin to psychological projection or mebbe masturbation. (My first 4 syllable word). Hence you read critics who note that such-and-such an actor who had particularly short stature seemed suddenly HUGE onstage. Presence onstage is like a forcefield which whips out and around the auditorium, often flattening the other actors onstage. Instead of Goldberg and Minsky I give you Barbara Scofield: I once had lead in Victor Hugo's 'Ruy Blas', at tender age of 23, playing young queen in lovely big costume, to packed houses from French Embassy in NYC. Each night, friends would congratulate me etc and then ooh and ahh over Barbara Scofield - what stage presence, how magnificent she was! Barbara Scofield was my friggin maid and she had one line!! But the clever hussy maintained an intense concentration with the goings-on onstage in such a way that the audience came to read the show THROUGH her minute reactions to everything. Again, this doesn't happen online - or does it (I am waiting to be contradicted here helen. BTW: Barbara Scoffield is now a leading drama coach in LA and still my friend:) I think stage presence, like street charm, is a consciousness thing. Some might say hormones count, but hormones don't hit the back wall (or do they?). The only connection I see between stage presence and telepresence, is the dual consciousness trick we actors pull off: onstage we simultaneously animate a character - and run/project this characters consciousness, while simultaneously quelling our own interior monologue. Online, we do something comparable when we animate our avatars and cloak our own consciousness. Anyone who has ever had an imaginary friend knows what I am talking about. This is a very superfical account because I am conflating mind and consciousness and also suggesting there is no flow-through between an animated consciousness and our own (i.e we become our characters), but my paintbrush is stiff and I have 5 minutes to go before bedlam breaks lose again. Karlabrushing up (against) my presents
thanks very much for your present, conscious & considered response, k. all of this is taking me back to "swim" and our own experiments in remote intimacy and telemasturbation. i am spread across the kitchen table with an array of devices as i multitask - capturing & compressing video footage while researching telepresence ... distracted occasionally by food, coffee and a small black thing with a tail that i see for a second out of the corner of my eye by the rubbish bin. is this some kind of over-tired stress apparition, or could it be a mouse? boomer has only been absent a few weeks - surely the cheeky rodents aren't making their presence felt already! i'm not sure where my essay is going at the moment but i am relieved to know that barbara scofield is still your friend, & am hoping that your brush is not too stiff.Look Here
The presence of 'another' on UpStage is organised into two categories: (1) Players who have form (avatars); movement of form; speech - both written and spoken and subcategories of that ie. whispering, thoughts; and scenographic context(s). (2) Chatters have written text, period. The affect, power, extent of presence should be modified by this discrepancy in means of represenation/communication in UpStage. It is surprising then, that Chatters can sometimes insert strong imprint within a performance e.g. the Amercian artist (forget her name) who spoke of the 'Dogs of War' in DTN2 chatspace. You'd think that Players had the presence field hands down. Same thing happened in 'Familiar Features' when I was typing in chatspace and the focus (action/eye)moved there for a spell. My musings here are even more unreliable then they would be in assessing a proximal performance where as a member of the audience I'd at least be confident that, yes, every eye did turn towards Defoe's entrance in the Wooster Group's production of .....etc etc. Same holds for cinema, you get that unified field feeling. What about when you are watching telly alone? You get confirmation that Gene Hunt is blasting above and beyond the call of telly acting from critics and public feedback. (This is reference, Helen to a character in pop TV drama in UK that just finished. Insert your own example). There's some recorded feedback via the audience collective, or in print media. Online, who the hell knows where anyone is or is not looking. Or even if they are still there. Where is the gaze? Its not something we ask our audiences is it? Although we polled them earlier on during Palace days and mebbe in Swim on what moments had most impact. But whenever we had a proximal performer the feedback from proximal audience always seems to overwrite online audience views - because latter usually focuses on what they did or did not 'receive' i.e. technology often hijacks the online audience. With distributed performances the individual online audience member (or performers') opinion stands alone. What does it matter if I am the only one thinking that the American artist/chatter had great presence during DTN2 solely through her use of text. I was performing Bush at the time but her text captured my eye. I tried to improvise with it. Her text still stood out for me when I read the log afterwards. And then again, the individual performer in distributed performances might find she's been playing solely to the machine: How many times have we got up in the middle of the night, put on make-up and a bit of costume and performed from the waist up to a tiny webcam, acting our digits off, getting a definite performative buzz, only to find out much later that the image & sound didn't make it across to Belgrade, Brisbane, Timbuctoo. Does telepresence count if no one gets it?present and absent posts
i replied to your post, karla, & it has disappeared! it was present, visible, here on the blog and now it is gone. it was articulate and erudite and absolutely here - and now it is not. i can't remember what i wrote but it was something about telepresence requiring reciprocity - an observer - i created a beautiful metaphor of a charged battery with nowhere for its electricity to go until it is in a swtiched-on electrical device. damn, it was a good post! but since then i have been doing some more reading & now i am thinking about what is the difference between "immersion" and "telepresence" because a lot of these theorists are talking about telepresence has having a sense of being in a remote space (as opposed to what we do, which is coming together in cyberspace). i think immersion is about the feeling of really being in a space, while telepresence is about sensing the presence of another being. let's see if this post disappears too. does a post exist if no-one can see it?I miss your lost posting already.
Hmm. "Telepresence is.." akin to "..being lost in remote space.." and/or about "..sensing the presence of another being?" Explain it to me then. Have you had this experience, of being lost in remote space? Immersion seems self-evident. You concentrate and dive into your work, your performance, whatever, and when it works you achieve a sense of 'flow' where you get distinct impression of merging with the creative act, including the technologies at hand - its what we aspire to in our creative work: immersion and flow. Its the opposite of multi-tasking unless those task all directly relate to the process. So not the dirt behind the fridge then.