Week 6 : Mediatised Performance Lecture

As all students are presenting their Online Learning Journals (blogs) this week it is more appropriate to present the Week 6 Lecture on Mediatised Performance on the MECS008 blog instead of through a PowerPoint presentation.

Your student Online Learning Journals and this blog are appropriate places to keep notes, lecture discussions, links and research, as the module topic is New Media, a blog is an excellent example of New Media and a digital journal means it is possible to include the YouTube videos, E-books and website links to the New Media concepts and theories we will be discussing.

Mediatised Performance is today’s topic.

• What is mediatised space / environment?
• What is mediatiesd performance?
• Case studies of Mediatised Performance

A mediatised environment is a space that is augmented with technologies.

Mediatised performance is performance that is

• augmented with digital technologies,
• performance using new technologies or
• performances in virtual and online spaces.

Human interaction with technology is an important area of study in an age of ubiquitous digital technology

It is also referred to as e-performance and digital performance and writings on this subject come from many disciplines, including; theatre, dance, net art, sound art, installation, as well as theatre studies, media studies, cultural theory, and art history.

In media studies the key questions and concerns include:

• aesthetic questions related to 'the body',
• the observer's participatory virtual experiences, and
• virtual embodiment in new media arts.

Liveness – performance in a mediatised culture

“Mediatised performance is performance that is circulated on television, as audio or video recordings, and in other forms based in technologies of reproduction. Baudrillard’s own definition is more expansive: “What is mediatised is not what comes off the daily press, out of the tube, or on the radio: it is what is reinterpreted by the sign of form, articulated into models, and administered by the code” (Baudrillard 1981:175-6). For Baudrilard, meditisation is not simply a neutral term describing products of the media. Rather, he sees the media as instrumental in a larger, socio-political process of bringing all discourses under the dominance of a single code.”

(Auslander 1999: 4-5)

Performative Realism

“In ‘Liveness – performance in a mediatised culture’ Auslander aims to prove how the alleged opposition between live and the mediatised event cannot be maintained in the context of the media society. With reference to Walter Benjamin’s consideration of the new ways of conceiving generated by mass culture, Auslander argues that the merging of live and mediatised forms in contemporary society, on a material level illustrated the untenableness of the performance ontology. Auslander points to Benjamin’s essay: “The work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction”, in which Benjamin describes how the emergent mass culture causes an overcoming of distance, but at the same time a banishing of aura. In that connection, Benjamin refers to:

“The desire of contemporary masses to bring things “closer” spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction. Every day the urge grows stronger to get hold of an object at very close range by way of its likeness, its reproduction.” (Benjamin 1986:31-32)

Auslander’s point is that the alliance contradicted between the mass desire of proximity and reproducible objects, respectively, is directly illustrated in, for instance, the use of giant video screens at music and dance concerts and sporting events that seem to have become the norm in the event-culture of contemporary life. By virtue of the video screens, the audience gets a feeling of being closer to performers – by virtue of the reproducible object, the mediatised event, the feeling of the live event is intensified.”

(Gade and Jerslev 2005: 30 -31)

Activating Audiences

Activating Audiences is what happens in web 2.0, we the audeince are activated to participate and perform collaboratively - receiving, sharing, and producing content online and commonly performing in virtual spaces, such as social networking sites, in which we present profile pictures of ourselves and write status updates about our activities.

As new technologies and paradigms emerge, new ways of activating audiences are tested, ‘structuring radically new possibilities of feedback between spectators and the environments they could inhabit’.

(Salter 2010: 304)

In response to the common history of human-computer relationships in interactive art, Peter Salter, in his text Entangled; Technology and the Transformation of Performance, talks about interaction in physical and social space that involves a multitude of untrained performers and ultimately changes the emphasis from computer-human to inhabitant-performer-environment.

(Salter 2010: 306)

Hybrid and Convergent Space

The immersive and public space that emerges here becomes a hybrid space with new possibilities for activating audiences.

Eric Kluitenberg, a researcher in the field of the significance of new technologies for society, explains how we are living in an environment in which the public population is constantly reconfigured by a multitude of media and communication networks interwoven into the social and political functions of space to form a ‘hybrid space’.

The physical spaces that we inhabit daily - including offices, shops and cafés - are now networked, located and recorded using digital technologies. A number of our daily social routines now reside in the virtual world; from social networking websites and online chat rooms to virtual shopping malls and cafés in virtual worlds like Second Life. New mobile technologies mean we can now connect, inhabit and perform in these spaces whilst remaining on the move.

Geotagging, using Global Positioning Systems (GPS) to track and locate our physical latitude and longitude coordinates, can be uploaded continuously from our mobile devices to our networks, thus updating others on our daily activities and movements. A hybrid space, then, can be understood as “a space in motion and an interaction between perceived, conceived, lived and virtual space. This space is formed not only by materiality and social and political actions, but also by digital technology.” This space, then, creates new platforms in which artists can invite participation and engagement from a new, virtually residing public.

(Kluitenberg 2006: 8)

Performing with hybrid technologies

“A mobile experience can be characterized as an intersection point in everyday life that is mediated through a device such as a PDA or a cell phone. This intersection is where real and virtual realities collide and become an experience. We make business decisions and exchange stories with friends over cellular infrastructures. Most of us are communicating in public spaces like walking through a mall or on the street. In some cases the mediated presence (talking on the cell phone) is the stand in for our real attendance. We are becoming skilled performers at weaving together the hybridization of real and virtual realities. These new conditions are changing the way we interact as humans and the design of tangible interfaces. Incorporating elements of performance as a design tool is a start to define the theoretical framework for modelling this new world.”

Vicki Moulder

http://www.interactionart.org/doc/index.html

[Accessed 5^th March 2011]

Case Studies

We will look at a number of examples of mediatised performance and discuss these as case studies. We will be going through their websites and watching videos of their mediatised performances.

Stellarc: New Media Artist

About: http://stelarc.org/?catID=20314

Case: http://stelarc.org/video/?catID=20258&type=Performance

http://stelarc.org/video/?catID=20258&type=Performance

Troika Ranch: Dance and Theatre company

About: http://www.troikaranch.org/about.html 

Case: http://www.troikaranch.org/vid-loopDiver.html

Michelle Teran: New Media Artist

About: http://www.ubermatic.org/?page_id=2

Case: http://www.ubermatic.lftk.org/blog/?p=225