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b y . P h i l . M o r l e
Probably my most common drunken conversation at parties goes like this: when people say "What do you do," I say, "Well, I'm sort of looking at the theatrical applications of information technology and electronic communication." And then they say (if they know what I am talking about), "Yeah, it's just another thing that will stop people from talking to each other."
The more I think about it the more I think this response, though understandable, is a distraction. Having been raised watching TV, many of us have been educated with a passive attitude toward entertainment. We are "cultured" to understand the moving mass of shapes and strange sounds of the square TV set. The language of watching and -- to a lesser extent -- listening before subsequently de-coding these signs, is a new human instinct -- the MTV generation. There can be no doubt that this human activity, as well as many others, has stopped people interacting in 'real-worldsville'.
With TV we are cultured to receive. The virtual environments of cyberspace seem to speak the same language and yet they demand interaction. As easily as on-line entertainment could kill human contact, it could also re-form it.
In my group's theatre work we have noticed a resistance to interaction with life. Some of the work we have done experiment with audience interaction. However, these pieces were often greeted by an audience which remained in predominantly TV mode -- "I watch, you do". What would happen if we attempted to apply the same principles to a cyber-theatre? To a "communitek"?Cyberspace, once the unwelcoming domain of the scientist and the academic, is opening its doors to the masses. Its immigration policy is to let everyone in, and many are accepting the invitation. Millions of new inhabitants flood into this place every year and conservative estimates show a current population of over 30 million which doubles every year [Source - The U-Do-It Internet Estimator].
The electronic frontier demonstrates a cornucopia of life. Clusters of activity rise and fall; ideas are born while others die; some people build kingdoms while others sell their wares; some form alliances while others "flame". There is a parallel universe embodied in cyberspace and it sometimes feels like people communicate better here than they do in the "real world."
Any frontier needs its cultural rituals and most have an artistic population to supply them. Until recently the art in cyberspace was generated by its predominantly non-professional-artist population. With a language based on text and codes, cyberspace was not a friendly place for the visual artist or the theatre director. In the early days of the frontier the closest one got to satisfying hungry imaginations was the Multi User Dungeon or MUD.
However, in the last two years we have seen the emergence of the World Wide Web (WWW or The Web) and with it the widening doorway into cyberspace. The Web operates by using a multi-platform protocol that can be accessed via any kind of machine from PC to Macintosh to workstation. Made up of thousands of computers across the planet, each of these machines contains multimedia Web documents creating the equivalent of a global CD-ROM of infinite size.
Interactive TV ?
The Web is an environment closer to the much coveted and talked of "interactive television" than it is television itself. TV broadcasts. It sends its product one-way with a wide spread. If you have the receiving equipment you can receive the product. The Web, on the other hand, narrow-casts or point-casts. This means that its message is not sent or transmitted anywhere until it is requested by the spectator, it simply resides in resides in cyberspace waiting to be accessed. Here, the idea of thousands of channels suddenly makes sense because the product is different. The choice is not which one of thousands of brain-dead movies, sports programs or repeats should we watch, but rather in which virtual space shall we meet, learn and experience.
The Easiest Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It.
The first mistake, which is already being made by performing artists, is to consider this new medium in the same way, with the same rules as the one we currently work in. This is where all the arguments start about the supremacy of live theatre in terms of the spectator/performer dynamic. We must start again and re-think the structures, contents and processes of this new medium.
Performing Shakespeare in cyberspace, for example, would be like trying to warm your dinner in a TV set. They are different tools for different purposes. The artistic agenda for cyberspace is uncharted and unknown. We do not know what will emerge in terms of new art forms, but we must look at the emerging technologies with a fresh eye, something which is very difficult to do. Do not get the terms "communitek" and "theatre" confused. By communitek I am not talking about grafting existing artforms onto new media but rather creating new environments for interactions, ones which are currently and continually being designed and will continue to be designed over the next ten or so years.
Rather than considering cyberspace a threat, we should welcome it as another string to our bow. Instead of worrying about the many predicted futures, we should invent our own. The World Wide Web gives us an environment to start playing in and an audience of considerable size to begin interacting with. There lies the frame on which to build.
Goin' Surfin'
There are two examples of early cyber-performance. The simplest is Ralph Rosenfield's live performance via the WWW . His Butoh inspired piece was presented to us through the live feed of stills from the performance, interlaced with information about Butoh along with Ralph's own comments on the piece. Here we saw the emergence of a body from a cocoon of white material creating, to the surprise of my MTV encoded mind, a degree of tension in the spectator. Though conceptually crude, it was a necessary toe in the water. You can still see the trace of Ralph's performance on the Web.
Lacking in this project was the consideration of the dynamic of the virtual environment available today. The WWW environment is still a square computer monitor and consideration needs to be given as to how this space is used. Also, the live feed of still images meant that some of the images were not interesting or clear. As a TV actor performs with an awareness of the camera, so too must the cyber-performer perform when using video imagery.
Mark Pesce's Cybersamhain project considers the concept of virtual space much more effectively both in his choice of media and structure. In the introduction Mark says, "The great advantage of a ritual within cyberspace is very clear; everyone who wishes can join with us, wherever they may be in the world, and participate in the ritual."
Spectators from across the planet were encouraged to be a part of the ritual. Many sent in totems, images and texts for the ceremony. These were put into the space which was created using an experimental visualisation tool for the Web called "Labyrinth", which allowed the spectator to view a space in three dimensions. Although not yet publicly available through mass distribution, Labyrinth demonstrates a very exciting mode for the future of cyberspace.
Mere mortals with standard Web browsers such as Mosaic or Netscape could also join the ritual. Although not in 3-D one could read the texts and see the images. This gave an insight into the philosophy of the ritual but did not, for me at least, communicate the "vibe". However, one could imagine a future just around the corner which gives the spectator time to understand a ritual through this kind of interface before entering the ritual itself, either live in actual space or live in virtual space.
Thinking of the page as stage, or the screen as place, has been done most effectively to date by Joseph Squier in his construction of "the place." In the past year, the Web has been flooded with "virtual galleries", which were basically hundreds of digitized versions of originals uploaded onto the Web. Joseph has tackled the ambiguity of Web document formatting,creating a space which actually has a visual track to its meaning. One is affected by his use of emptiness and fullness, colour and shape, all of which are theatrical terms. Through his creation we are able to see an early example of how the Web ca be an artistic tool capable of aesthetic communication.
Cybersamhain was an experiment within an experiment. The real project here was VRML, or Virtual Reality Markup Language, a global initiative to develop a WWW front end that allows a platform for independent virtual reality. Applications cited by the developers, one of which is Mark Pesce of Cybersamhain fame, include Virtual Presence Teleconferencing [Raggett 1994], where people could meet in virtual environments; a 3-D library which one could walk through to find and grab information; and a virtual earth on your desktop where satellite data would be wrapped around a sphere to represent areas to explore on the planet. Combined with the philosophy of the MUD, spectators, liberated of text-based constraints, could build virtual 3D planets. Compared to theatre, we build communiteks together, places where we could act, interact, and work collectively to construct forums where we could explore ourselves and our race.
Today, performance research groups such as Eugenio Barba's Odin Teatret and Peter Brook's CITC are recognising the value in cultural exchange by widening the language of the performer and smashing the clichés hammered into one's culturally limited technique. Virtual Presence Teleconferencing will, in theory, extend this possibility to other performance research groups such as my own who do not have Brook's or Barba's luxurious funding. In the future we will gather and barter our skills in virtual, computer generated, neutral territories using widely accessible facilities such as the current PC or Macintosh. Mark Pesce is quick to point out that these visions are "possible immediately in the future, not in some distant, barely imagined cyberpunk evocation."
Cyberpunk folklore discusses this kind of virtual experience as a means to be liberated of one's body and the physical world. But there are other benefits to constructing virtual world other than escapism. Augusto Boal talks of his Forum Theatre as a process of rehearsing for revolution, a way of practicing for the real world in a safe environment. Pesce talks of creating a place where democracy can happen. He quotes Joshua Quitter as saying, "The net, the very network itself, you see, is merely a means to an end. The end is to reverse-engineer government, to hack politics down to its component parts and fix it."
I suppose that a global repository of humankind with no geographic boundaries nor hierarchy (yet!) is the context through which to operate this process. Now, those of us who are interested, must begin laying the foundations of the communiteks and begin the process of exploring the future of online human interaction. Though we must begin in 2-dimensions at relatively slow speeds and low bandwidth, there is an audience and a platform in the WWW on which to begin the work.
Everything is up for grabs.