My Virtual Self:

was, I admit, slightly vexed when I was asked to write an article on technophobia. I knew I was asked because I was considered to be a technophobe, and while I was quite ready to wear that badge proudly, I felt the label wasn't quite accurate. A phobia is, after all, an irrational dread, something to be cured, or at the very least fought against, a fear of what we do not know.

I'm not convinced it's that simple. For me, apprehension towards technology comes from what I do know: I dread what I perceive technology to be doing to our society, and my phobia is a carefully thought-out response -- a political and moral choice in the face of plastic surgery, Prozac, Exxon Valdez, television. Technology undeniably and completely alters our landscape, how we live our lives, how we understand ourselves, how we relate to others. And while some alterations I choose -- or more accurately, accept -- most are chosen for me, and the choice I might have made is rendered obsolete.

Furthermore, as an artist who works in the theatre, I hold that romantic ideal that the actual, unmediated human contact that takes place between the actor and the audience can awaken us, shock us out of the humdrum. I believe that theatre can still do this better than any other art form which is constantly mediated through the new technologies. But I came up against arguments I couldn't ignore from writers like theatre critic Ann Wilson, who suggests that this is "nostalgia for a world which doesn't exist, if indeed it ever did," and from the panelists and audience members who blessed us with their attendance at the CyberStage Forum called Shadows of Silicon: Creating Art in a Wired World, which was held on March 31st, 1995. And while my technophobe's heart still sinks when I hear of virtual reality actors, I find myself wondering if my response is one that is viable.

Ahmed Hassan, a composer and musician and panelist at the forum, threw down that gauntlet early in the discussion:

I'm curious as to who is the "we" we are talking about. Because -- well -- I know right now that it doesn't apply to most of the people on this earth. It never will. Who are we talking about?

We had all known it was coming, this question of accessibility, but we weren't quite sure how to deal with it. We couldn't debate money that doesn't exist into existence. Of course, accessibility has other facets. Hassan, for instance, recounted how upon entering University he was told that not having computer skills was to be illiterate:

I didn't want to bother with that. They have to come to us. They've come much closer, [but] they're not there yet.

Gary Shilling, a graphic designer, brought up the fact that most of the new technologies are not designed to be accessible to artists:

The source of the technology has to change. Most of the technology that we're using, most of the technology that has infiltrated our society has most likely begun with the military, and it's only now just beginning to shift from the military to the mega-entertainment companies, which again, have nothing but their own self-interests in mind. I don't know how that shifts.

Hassan:

I'll tell a story. I love to tell stories. One of the instruments I play is the birimbau, which is an ancient instrument which comes by way of Africa. It was originally a weapon, it as a hunter's bow. When slaves were taken from Africa and brought to Brazil, they were allowed to bring their musical instruments. So they brought their birimbaus. And the plantation owners would say, "What are you doing?" And they'd say, "Oh, we're singing and dancing." This was an evolution of technology from being an instrument of death to being an instrument of music.

But Hassan's original point remained. The new technologies accentuate the difference between the rich and the poor, the First World and the Third, and those who understand and have access to them will walk over the rest. Will those remaining become obsolete, obliterated like the technologies they possess?

Electronic media designer and panelist Laurie-Shawn Borzovoy brought up a point:

I know that I don't have access to the most way-on-the-cutting-edge stuff, but I still feel young as an artist, I still feel like, if I had THAT, what would I be saying? I was brought in to do this workshop. I met the students and I said, "Okay, go out and bring me the stuff you have." So we had television sets, the home camcorders, and we had computer systems that I had, which were inexpensive and outdated, and we had a lot of kids bringing in "found" objects. It took nine of them to make an image that was projected on monitors and screen projectors. And we were making art that was presented on stage for their peers, and it took nine of them crawling overtop of each other, painting, pasting, gluing, hanging, moving the camera, someone with a flashlight, jiggling this stuff, making something that expressed for them what was their choice with their voice. This cost nothing. It was just making stuff from what we had lying around. It wasn't the latest thing, and as far as I was concerned it was stunning. Their peers were moved by the fact that they had a chance to participate on stage together as a social group, and it was access, to technology.

Banuta Rubess, playwright, director and Associate Artist at Theatre Passe Muraille, panelist:

But you are necessary.You are physically necessary. Otherwise it remains inanimate.

Borzovoy:

Yes!

Borzovoy's vision, told with little-boy excitement, is filled with a curiosity and playfulness that would win over any technophobe. His story takes away the threat sensed by artists working with more traditional technologies by bringing attention to the people that bring the life to the machine, instead of the machine itself or the money that buys it. It is an emphasis that, sadly, is often missing. Shilling, for instance, told us of his first days as a visual arts student. He remembered the tedious process of grinding grains of carburite with stone, and his excitement when he discovered the computer labs with which he could create images. "Everyone can be an artist!" he exclaimed. But his comment suggested that the art comes from the technology, not from the artist.

Lisa Rothman, stage director and actor, audience member at Shadows of Silicon:

The impulse, to me, is what is important. And I have seen shows -- I saw Erwartung and Bluebeard's Castle -- where I was in awe, and I've seen other productions where video is used and I don't know why it's there, and I don't know where the impulse came from. And I think that the line between technology for technology's sake, and technology to find a way to express what it is you're trying to express is for me the issue, and I wonder, where does that impulse comes from?

My other point is about the interaction, because for me, that's the essence of theatre. I understand very well -- and I quite love -- the use of different disciplines, and the one that I have the most trouble following is the video aspect, because for me, that's such a different approach. My reaction to a screen is completely different from my reaction to you sitting right here beside me. It's such a different experience, and I don't know if the two are compatible. I don't know if they should be.

Borzovoy:

But you saw projections in Bluebeard's Castle and Erwartung. There were no screens. It's a design question. Whether it's good art or bad art.

Rubess:

-- I think that in those productions they were very much part of the set, they were integral. It was the right thing to do for the piece. I think [in other productions] the difference in watching a projection or a film and everything else is that you have to stop, and look at the film, and we are thrown back into a comatose state, a state that is less active. The art can be used masterfully by some, when it's given thought, impulse and connection, but I think that question of why we use it is necessary.

No question is more annoying to the technophile than "Why use it?" But if the answer "Why not?" is unsatisfying, it's because neither Rubess nor Rothman expects the discussion to stop dead -- they want a response, a reason. "Everyone can be an artist!" Well -- everyone can play with the technology. But why we do makes the difference between a dilettante, an artist, an engineer, an advertiser, a magician, a politician. The question "Why?" is not meant to imply that we should dispense with the technology, it only establishes that know what we want from it. Once we know the answer to that, technology becomes mesmerizing not in a dulling way, but in the most exciting, like the magic of giant puppets and figures on stilts, fireworks and shimmering fantastical costumes.

But both Rothman and Rubess hinted at a tangent -- perhaps their own answer to the question "Why not?" It was the notion that the theatrical experience goes deeper than the ones created by new media, that new media in comparison were, as Rubess said earlier at the panel, "two-dimensional," perhaps impersonal, and definitely demanding a more passive response from the audience. It was a thought I believed fervently, yet the moment I heard it drop from someone else's mouth I was uneasy.

Philip Shepherd, playwright, stage actor and director, audience member at Shadows:

The art that most excites me is the art that sucks in my imagination, awakens it, engages it. And it's only my imagination that is going to invest a thing with meaning, because I'm investing it with meaning out of my own experience. As an artist, this notion of how the technology will convey my meaning or express a concept doesn't occur to me, because either the hair on the back of my neck goes up or it doesn't. So then to me the real danger with technology is its ability to present what you want the audience to see. As soon as you present them with what you want them to see, their imagination is rendered superfluous. To me, technology has this magical ability, but it either helps awaken the imagination -- and in theatre the imagination has to focus on the person and what's happening to the person -- or it's not serving the imagination.

Claudia Moore, choreographer, dancer, panelist:

I think the possibility for enhancing the movement, for creating the movement, the environment, is very exciting. In your dreams when you try to recreate or remember that dream, there isn't a table, or a person, but rather there's a colour, or a mood, or a texture, and I think that technology can help us recreate that, which could enrich not only the performer's experience but also the audience's.

Moore's quiet enthusiasm came as a surprise. I had expected that, as a dancer and as a performer with a deep consciousness of her body and her presence, she would support Rubess' and Rothman's suggestion that the performing arts were more intimate and more immediate than those created with the interference of technology. But I was questioning that idea more every moment. Most theatre anthropologists trace theatre back to rituals involving dance and song -- theatre, then, is the product of the technology of speech. The actor's experience is mediated through words. Can we honestly place theatre in opposition to other art forms where the experience is mediated through images, be they still, moving, and even three-dimensional?

Ann Wilson, in an excellent essay on this notion of theatrical presence, suggests that our fear of technology arises precisely out of our recognition of the fact that our experiences are mediated and fragmented by technology, be it speech or any new media. "The impulse of theatre," she writes, "seems predicated on a particular conceptualization of human subjectivity which is rooted in the notion that each of us has an 'authentic' or 'true' self which ought to be coherent and unified. The forces of the modern world fragment the innate coherence." She believes this notion of human subjectivity to be "dated", and I agree, though the depths to which technology alters us are still being expressed.

Joseph Wilson, writer, stage actor and director, puppeteer, audience member at Shadows, asked:

How much awareness is there on the international level of the actual physical effects, both good and bad, of the technology on the audience? There's a lot of discussion in certain circles [for instance] about virtual reality fatigue, the difference in perception that happens once a person comes out of virtual reality, their dissatisfaction with the imperfections of the lines around them as opposed to what they're seeing in VR. There've been studies of the effect of the video pulse-rate monitor on people's brain-wave patterns, and I think the studies concluded that the screen impulse patterns trigger an impulse rate in the human brain that is just a few degrees above the experience of boredom.

Louise Dompierre, panelist and Power Plant Chief Curator, responded:

Yes, we are being conditioned [by the new technologies] in so many ways. Look at how our language is changing, there are words that are coming out of our mouths that we barely understand. What is worrying me is that we're not questioning it. What is happening? How is it happening? We are cyborgs. If you have a pacemaker, you are a cyborg. If you wear contact lenses, you are a cyborg.

Dompierre said this in a soft but emphatic voice, but Borzovoy quickly piped up.

Borzovoy:

We are machines. I think every technological creation is as much a part of nature as any creation of nature.

But why did this thought repel us? We are made up of physical and biochemical systems, pumps and electrical circuits, and we should become more like machines.

Borzovoy's response, and especially the eagerness with which he said it, startled me, and I could hear my thoughts gathering to rebel. But it is an idea I accept as truth: we create technology and then it recreates us. To encounter the full effects of technology, as we must as artists, is to encounter the very core, the construction and therefore the authenticity of ourselves. No wonder technology terrifies us. What does it mean about the technology of writing that I can reread a journal entry and remember writing the words but not the event itself? What does it mean that I remember moments as though I were standing outside of myself, seeing myself in a picture as though through someone else's eyes? To encounter technology is to encounter the shadows, the holes in our understanding of ourselves, our impermanent memories and our tenuous relationships.

But Borzovoy presents us with an alternative, a positive view of the same encounter which embraces our full complexity, piecing together the puzzle, or perhaps simply becoming aware of it, and gaining insight through our bewilderment and awe.

Franco Boni, playwright, stage director and audience member at Shadows:

As artists, our job is to take tools, and interpret those tools, and share the uses of those tools with others. I'm afraid that I can't keep up with the amount of stuff that is happening, and that it's going so fast that I'm trying, I'm trying to keep up, I'm trying to interpret these things that these companies are creating, but I can't keep up. They are interpreting it for us and it should be the artists who bring it to the people. I know that sounds weird, but in a way that's the way it's always worked, and I don't think a computer has the sensitivity to -- I think there has to be a human element. It seems to me that we've gone so far that we've lost touch with the basic thing, which is to relate to one another on a very human level. And that's what I'm afraid of, that I can't interpret these tools that are being given to me by geniuses and wizards who are creating them by the minute, every minute .As we speak, another computer is becoming obsolete.

Judy Mintz, visual artist and audience member at Shadows:

Gary Shilling said something at the beginning in regards to being a visual arts student . Well -- I did the same program you did, and I loved those grains on those stones too, and I still love them. How do we keep our feet on the ground? Because a lot of people are afraid, and the thing that we love about grinding grains of carburite on the stone is that it keeps our hands and feet rooted in something we can really understand, something that is physical.

I love Boni's impassioned outburst because it expresses so well the sense of being overwhelmed which I also share; I loved Mintz's thoughtful comment because it had a down-to-earthness that was very reassuring. Both of them address that notion of "the human element", a "rootedness" that they feel is missing from the new technologies, a pure, mystical experience which Ann Wilson calls "a nostalgia for a world which doesn't exist, if indeed it ever did." But Wilson also quotes American director and academic Herbert Blau, who wrote that in the theatre "...the living person performing there may die in front of your eyes, and is in fact doing so." Taking her cue from Blau, Wilson writes, "...theatre is the assertion of the self when faced with the haunting spectre of death which threatens to obliterate completely the self." The mediations of our experience now seem to take us further and further away from ourselves, our physical bodies, to virtual reality. The digital image, the digital voice, will not die. Meanwhile, our real selves, our senses, our voices, atrophy: a virtual death.

This is the aspect of technophobia to which can find no resolution. But I also believe that technology is no less than art an expression of our own imagination, of our search for self-understanding. To continue to create art without acknowledging the role that technology has in shaping us is to ignore our own complexity. And while I would like to hold on to the ideal of the unmediated self, I think perhaps the real quest for artists should be to find how the "human essence" manifests itself not before the mediation, but within it. "It's the artist's responsibility to say, it is, new media is, technology is, cyberspace is," says Borzovoy.

We have to take responsibility as artists to make it what's right for us, and make sure that it helps us to do the things that are important to us. Because otherwise it won't.