FIELD AS WITNESS ! ! ! ! ! a Dissertation Submitted to Auckland University of Technology in Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
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! ! ! ! ! OPEN LIMIT FIELD AS WITNESS ! ! ! ! ! A dissertation submitted to Auckland University of Technology in fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Marcia Lyons January 18, 2013 School of Art and Design ! "! AMMENDMENTS: Prologue Storyspaces and unstable territories Algo-cinematic and network fiction Open Limit – “opens” with the “limits” of a central research question: how is “field witnessing”? Exploring unstable territories in post-studio practice, essays situate the writing within broader academic theories concerning philosophies of performance. Considering the ways in which such an approach can deepen a trans-mediated event, I aim to explore creative fiction as a mode of thinking. Through five staging-operations, sound is interrogated as a signifier for field and for forces that incite participation. Introducing the concept of wild-tracking, I propose that the artist and participator project all kinds of unconscious material onto the work. Working peripherally with a concept Carl Jung called the “Participation Mystique”1, field immersion is installation-ally and performative-ly expressed. An elusive field-ing, this parallels being in any location and seeing the work through the prism of an observer's own inner experience. That being the case, audience as host becomes critical. Fluency is heightened intuitively, gravitating toward an inward sense that appears to be contagious, absorbing forces that appear to generate multiple readings. Jung goes on to say that creative fiction becomes fact in participation and the most bizarre experiences can take place within the narrative because the reader/viewer is experiencing directly. The writing in the exegesis mirrors this idea that, as in the work, the reader is 'in' the storyspace. Let me take you there with my earliest piece in this study, Emergent Submersives: Viewers enter into a long rectangular gallery space and experience a pulsating blue color field. Descending, underwater footage is compressing live via a slit-scan operation at the long end of the space. Whale calls stream in remotely from a network buoy, maintained by the Whale Trust in Maui. With each base tone the floor vibrates, re-conditioning the viewers' spacings. At the top of the gallery ceiling, representing the very limits of the ocean surface, an uncanny, headless body is wildly thrown, disappearing and reappearing, in a kind of floating orbit. With each booming blue tone, a snippet of sound is locast out to the street to passers-by cell phones via Bluetooth. Sound is remotely streaming, massaging an audience field, locally swarming, then migrates outside the anatomy of the architecture. In this sense, we can talk about how participation is opened up in the practice. Sound travels. Sound mutates, as a field, to the limits of the media-medium (air, sea, body, space, network) and becomes contagious, a sub-liminal projection (in this case, inter-species), tele-pathic condition. This de-limits the experience beyond fleshly presence into the experience of fielding on the far side of an authorial or original intention. Creating a sound field, a psycho-physical relationship, within the viewing body's inner life causes a projection, where every part is 'in' an all-around. Its a question of giving into the space and radiating from one's inner field out into a swarming potential. Beginning with an on site probing, the works shape-shift – in the midst of it all – a “methodology” of plotting plots, that cut through earthly realities to tease out aspects of live performance. Ice, deep sea, desert, each with their own psychology and momentum, were chosen for their extreme conditions. Bodily thresholds are tested, encountering breathtaking sights, meted out in a process of humanly navigating a site. Going to extremely risky, un-inhabited places was a decision to test the limits of location where sound-space immersion incite a speaking/listening in the work that tests the limits of the bodily and the local. Wild-tracking became a process as voices mysteriously began to match moving. The algo-cinematic (coined by this research) in network fictions became the concentration in multi-modal reception for the practice. Let me take you through the experience of scuba diving with 40 foot whales 60 meters below the ocean surface where my ability to move, speak and hear felt alien to the extent that my body opened up and became porous 'in' the surround- sieve. In order to be permitted on the research vessel, to collaborate with sonic scientist, Jim Darling, the Whale Trust required that I learn to dive and shoot underwater video. Diving involved adapting to a denser medium-space where human hearing and voicing were almost imperceptible. The audible became internalized but appeared to filter through the sea. The proximity and sheer scale of the whales, while ominous and overwhelming at the same time (their bodies) responded and appeared to be 'tuned' and 'sensitive' to my 'space'. Somehow, I felt they were 'aware' of my precarious position. The water itself seemed to make a 'space' for me. On ship, I was responsible for GPS tracking of individual voicing personalities, as we plotted various whale sounding points. This immersive research and data gathering directly influenced the performer decisions in all the works. Key conceptual terms began to develop in order to probe the complicated idea of “witnessing”: surround-sieve, absorbing and hallucinogenic states, polyphonic and contagious transmissions, all became fertile ground for the development of gravitating narratives. The writing of the exegesis began to mirror the practice as a polyphonic 1 Jung attributes PARTICIPATION MYSTIQUE to Lévy-Bruhl. It denotes a peculiar kind of psychological connection with objects, and consists in the fact that the subject cannot clearly distinguish himself from the object but is bound to it by a direct relationship which amounts to partial identity. (Jung, [1921] 1971: paragraph 781) My orientation to the participation mystique is through Mike Figgis' movie, Suspension of Disbelief, 2012, where the screenwriting begins to blur the lines between spectator and storyline. The main character, a screenwriter, is caught between an hallucinatory experience and actual criminal events appearing in his own writing. topographic site. In some sections 'below the surface' became the point of highest activity. These sites and exegeical truce lines seemed to become porous with a durational quality, the way a sonogram visually represents a sound and shows the distribution of energy at different frequencies. These prose-ings are complicit with the idea of participation, as are streaming harmonic spacings in nature and in our inner imaginings. Coming to a field of action translated into a theatre of encounters within a host field seemed to reflect both the cause and that which is caused. Unstable territories and storyspacings became crucial to a mystery of field witnessing and ultimately defies meaning, except the meaning the participator/observer gives it. In sharing, inter-changes mutate with each hosting body; the force, the energy, the design perfectly suited to the time, place and events, in that moment, are expressed. Like the pulsating blue line in Emergent Submersives on which the audience/participator stands, the line between the text above and below suggests a toning – that translates into an activated textuality. It is a process of rejoining the inseparable distance. This privileges the discursive field “witnessing” over the authorial position “telling” which tests a kind of compositional instinct. Each reading could follow re-combinant pathways to what happens there; closure is as obsolete as the printed page. These words need to be sounded out. Crossing the hypothetical dividing line, above or below, finally a non-separation, not merely experienced in form, concept or idea. The choices made in the exegesis are a risk that I am aware of; to challenge and extend the parameters of what constitutes the exegesis of practice, as an activated field. The message is in the lived event, the muscle for that, not just the project at hand or the story of the energy in sifting sands called desert. The two-way that is 'audience' and 'site' is open. Absorbing a surround-sieve, moving, expanding field or fiction, is about creating a space for an individual field and collective field in-sight (site made manifest). What I believe is the original contribution to this genre of transmedia practice are these strategies of polyphonic and fictional methodologies. My work sits amid key contemporary transmedia practitioners that include: • Filmmaker/performance artist – Mike Figgis' film, Time Code and Suspension of Disbelief, introducing a split- screen narrative – geometricized improvisation, where choices made by actors become the source and POV for constructing a crime drama. • Transmedia producer/writer – Nuno Bernardo, founder of Beactive and author of The producers guide to Transmedia, has crossed over into mainstream film production and content development via multi-platform engagements, winning him Emmy's in television. • Transmedia sound artists/musicians – Sun O))), a band that de-emphasizes the musician's identity in order to mediate a sound performance as pure mutating energy within the bodies of an audience field. • Geo-tagging network fiction/writer – James Bridle's, Blogging Ship, about a fictional ship lost at sea, propelled to and fro by weather data, also featured in wired magazine defining network fiction as "fictions that connect to other kinds of fiction" establishing a basis for a new kind of hypertextual storytelling for Internet and live media. http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-02/05/ship-adrift • Data Gathering/artists – Mark Hansen's and Ben Fry's piece, I Like, employed textuality to create a wall of small screen text-speaking installations, culled from chat rooms in real-time. • Softcinema/conceptual theorist – Lev Manovich who created a traveling database software cinema editor uses an algorithmic database to load his movies “randomly” in recombinant story-lines about traveling from airport to airport, documenting his lecture circuit experiences.