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The Shape of the Stone was Stoneshaped Between the generations of and David Rokeby lisa moren

Whereas my body, taken at a single moment, is but a conductor interposed between the objects which influence it and those on which it acts, it is nevertheless, when replaced in the flux of time, always situated at the very point where my past expires in a deed. Bergson 1991: 78–9

At first glance it may seem that a programmer clichés, through collage techniques in time and and builder of multi-media surveillance-to- space. Rokeby, although working in new media sound systems in the current São Paolo tools, consciously broke from the philosophy of Biennale has little in common with the demate- the media generation and worked distinctly as a rializations of a artist, or in the direct software artist, who romantically makes art experiential forms of the art from the scratch material of code (Manovich movement. However, the fundamental gestures page 4 ‘Generation flash’). An examination of a within interactive art of the 1990s can be found selection of work by these two artists, and their in the corporeal work of Fluxus, performance relevant contemporaries, provides a point of art, Situationism, , participatory convergence regarding the mechanical transfer- works and Happenings generated in the 1960s. ence of ideas from the body to the computer and The notion that the viewer completes a work the transformation of the subject through manifested itself literally with the emergence of empowering the spectator to participate as interactive art. This notion, idealized in litera- content provider. This empowerment questions ture and art throughout the 20th century, had the inventive role of the artist since he or she is prior origins evident in participatory art not the primary producer of content. Through produced globally in the 1960s, including the paradigms of what Higgins coined ‘blank struc- work created within , Happen- tures’ and Rokeby referred to as the exoskeleton, ings and Fluxus. the inventive roles of these artists may be Co-founder of the Fluxus movement, Dick examined. Higgins (1938–98) coined the term A utopian promise of technology is one of a in the 1960s; artist/programmer David Rokeby direct experience through a ‘calm technology’ (b. 1961) first spoke of interactivity as an art (Mark Weiser, former chief technologist at form 10 years before he pioneered the popular Xerox PARC in Horizonzero, Thinking about genre in the 1990s. Leaving behind the gener- MIT’s Tangible Bits, Tom Sherman) where the ation of the modernist artists whose romantic interface is so transparent and intuitive that it genius creates works from scratch, Higgins acts on what we think without it being apparent fueled the media artist generation which that it exists. Rokeby dispels the notion that critiqued the media, history and art world interfaces are navigational structures for

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directly experiencing or even accessing content. machines in his installations. Higgins mechan- Moren On the contrary, interfaces are the content for ized his performers in the same way that Phillip interactive works, and we will miss the point if Glass mechanized his musicians or Merce Cun- we are cognizantly unaware of them. Rokeby ningham mechanized his dancers. Bergson’s dis- explains that ‘the rush to stuff content into cussion of memory relates to how performers interactive media has drawn our attention away were used as transitory conductors of Higgins’s from the profound and subtle ways that the art system. At each moment the performers interface itself, by defining how we perceive and describe the art by acting out content of their navigate content, shapes our experience of that own invention. Change the performers and the content. If culture, in the context of interactive content is changed but the art system remains media, becomes something we “do”, it’s the the same. This approach is precisely the distinc- interface that defines how we do it and how the tion between the paradigm and syntagm that “doing” feels.’ Because the entertainment Lev Manovich describes. The paradigm is a industry is leading the field, ‘The interface database organized by ideas, concepts, literary becomes a hardened and brittle perceptual or technical figures, while a syntagm is a exoskeleton which we can’t easily question or narrative with linear grammar chronologically redefine’. If interfaces do replace our direct producing concepts. The artwork of Higgins, experience to negotiate content with people, , Alan Kaprow, Ken Dewey, information or knowledge, then that experience Robert Bozzi, and other Fluxus and is fundamentally altered by the interfaces we artists of the 1960s sometimes engage in. Interfaces, though not necessarily of allowed participation from the audience into the any skilled quality, offer information, wisdom or art paradigms. The 1960s art paradigms that an experience from one form (system, person or emerged complete with modules, loops, cueing people) to another form (system, person or systems, feedback, random chance and variable people). Therefore, by redefining the exoskelton outcomes were picked up in the form of of the interface, Rokeby has deepened the computer code materialized from these same participatory relationship between the artist conventions by 1980s and 1990s software and the viewer as well the presentation and per- artists (Manovich). With the same nervous ceptual experience of art. energy that propels today’s software artists to Redefining the interface between producer work through the night writing code that will and audience is a fundamental goal in the automatically execute all the permutations of a diverse body of work produced by the late Dick composition, Higgins worked straight through Higgins. Human characteristics, such as intelli- several days without sleep, typing, editing and gence, empathy, sensitivity and responsiveness, collating all the permutations of his composi- thinking, feeling are always used to describe tions. The overlap came to full fruition when Rokeby’s art machines. His art machines can be Higgins wrote code on a Fortran IV software threatened, they like things or can be stimu- program between 1967 and 1970, producing lated, they even have visceral poignancy and an scores of poetry, scripts and even a novel. With intangible spirituality, or they can be shamanis- James Tenney, Higgins’s partner Alison Knowles tic. The art of Dick Higgins, on the other hand, is wrote the first computerized poem ‘The House described with terms such as intermedia, of Dust’. It is no coincidence that when, from the modules, matrices, blank structures, random 1980s on, art systems were fully replaced with chance, exemplativist work and variable actual machines, the body’s obsolescence and a outcomes. These mechanical/human-like romantic notion of its loss became a fixture in descriptions are ironic in that Higgins used theories of embodiment. Precedence for this people in his early productions and Rokeby uses transference occurred between even earlier

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generations such as Experimental Art and Tech- alteration regarding the expectation of the roles nology’s (E.A.T.) 1966 performance series ‘Nine in both the artist and the viewer. Evenings: Theater and Engineering’ at Armory Rokeby also sees the world as a fully modern Hall, which included , , system of interrelationships; he sees the Merce Cunningham, Robert Rauschenberg and mechanics of these interrelationships as Frank Stella. Cage used photo cells to interpret abstract and, therefore, not subjugated by the movement of dancers, and in Rauschen- names; he sees that the computer, not dissimilar berg’s interactive piece ‘Open Score’, tennis per- to Higgins’s view of theater, is a way to create an formers used wireless rackets to trigger the alternative world where interrelationships can Stone lights off in the audience, one light at a time, be freshly defined; he believes that the experi- until the theater was dark. When the theater ence is allowed entry into that world through of was dark, infrared cameras recorded hundreds interactivity and that the mirroring effect of performers whose haunting greenish images inherent in interactivity is central in producing were projected on a screen. The transference spectator-driven content. In fact, Rokeby first Shape from body object to simulated subject was saw these relationships through an art school complete, and when the lights were turned on exercise, reminiscent of Zen studies, in which he

The the stage was as blank as Rauschenberg’s was instructed to stare out of his classroom famous white . Other pivotal artists window for two hours. who cross between the generations of media artists and software artists include Peter blank as content Weibel, Jeffrey Shaw, and Lynne Dick Higgins theorized that the exploration of Hershman. These artists and others, such as ‘blank structures’ has had a profound effect on Diana Burgoyne, moved from doing perform- artists’ approach toward subject-matter in the ance work themselves to creating interactive latter half of the 20th century, just as form and installations, exchanging their own bodies for the object had on the earlier part of the century. that of the audience’s. Naively or with foresight, The concept of the blank structure has to do Higgins’s curiosity that led to mechanizing his with the notion of systemic paradigms, which performers in the first place differs signifi- grew from Higgins’s interpretation of the work cantly from the results of the complete transfer- of his contemporaries and the work of former ence of body to machine in Rokeby’s work. avant-garde artists, such as his mentor John Higgins was inspired by a set of belief systems Cage. Blank structures are primarily shells, that he understood to be fully modern (what he forms without content, always locating them- called post-cognitive). These included a desire to selves outside the dominant paradigm. In the rethink subject-matter; to accept a logical and latter half of the century, the subject-matter was mechanicized culture through a Zen filter that wholly explored and new structures developed is both real yet irrational; to end the subjugation as an accepted conceptual practice for gener- of the text in theater; to create an art that ating both narrative and non-narrative works. brought relational experiences from both the These blank structures imply a comprehen- performers and the spectators as content. This sive ideology and result in challenging the last important objective is what Katherine assumed relationship between the artist and Hayles calls the introduction of reflexivity into art-making, confronting the viewers’ perceptual the human–machine relationship, meaning that role. Higgins describes comprehending this the audience or observers of art are part of the process as finding ‘the poem within the poem, art that they observe. Higgins used these post- the word within the word – the process as cognitive tools to produce works that exempli- process, accepting reality as a , fied his central objective, the dramatic enfolding it by the edges, so to speak without

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trying to distort it . . . The work becomes a performance in any obvious sense. It is not Moren matrix.’ His earliest examples of blank struc- instructional like a typical event score; however, tures appeared in the late 1950s with the goal to it implies that the participant act out responses. transform what he believed was the appalling An interview is both a real-life situation and an state of theater. By deferring control of the act, and once a spectator stumbles upon the content from artist, director, producer to the score, an interview will always be aware of itself performers who brought to it whatever they as a performance. Once such a paradigm is believed to be relevant, Higgins centered his offered the relationship between art and artist, attention on the construction of a paradigm to viewer and audience no longer exists in any con- embody this deferment, believing it was more ventional sense. Higgins explored the invented important than the execution of the work: ‘Why blank structure to get away from illusions and not simply give the rules if, for the moment, things that weren’t grounded in an objective that’s the point? Then let the individual reality. ‘The point – the real meaning – is not to performer work out his own performance . . .’ tell us here but to show us things actually being (p. 19, DOC). as they are (not standing for something else . . .)’ Higgins describes Lecture No. 7 (On Employ- (p. 79, DOC). This is the reason John Cage’s influ-

• Poster essay Five ment) as another example of a blank structure. ential 4Ј33Ј has been called the greatest piece of Traditions of Art History, The 23 May 1963 score read: ‘What do you have the 20th century. In this infamous piece in three by Dick Higgins (1976). Courtesy of the Estate of to say? Tell me about yourself.’ At first glance movements, Cage rests at a piano for four Dick Higgins the score seems to be neither a lecture nor a minutes and thirty-three seconds, doing nothing and playing nothing for that duration. It is significant as a work in which blank content (that is content full of unabated listening) allows blank structure (or the form itself) to illuminate. 4Ј33Ј is a work that doesn’t represent anything other than what it is. Higgins attempted such illuminations in his 1967 Scholarship score: ‘I would like to build a room where the more you put in it the emptier it becomes’; and in his more inviting 1962 piece Danger Music No. 6, which reads simply: ‘There is nothing here’.

exemplativist art In his poster essay ‘The Five Traditions of Art History’, Dick Higgins outlines five categories for interpreting art: Objective, Exemplificative (later changed to Explativist), Expressive, Pragmatic and Mimetic. Under exemplativist he describes:

Art as illustrations or example or embodiment of idea, especially abstract conception or principle (Blake’s ‘The Mental Traveller’, Christian Mor- genstern, Gertrude Stein’s ‘geographical’ and ‘calligraphic’ styles, Marcel Duchamp, concept art, modular music and poetry – Steve Reich,

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Philip Glass, etc. – structural cinema, poems population and their feeling the feeling of the reflecting Chomskian linguistics, Dick Higgins’ whole population that the American soldier Happenings and graphic cycles). (Footnote: It standing there and doing nothing impressed should be noted that in Higgins’ poster essay he them as the American soldier as no soldier could does not include most of Fluxus, many of the impress them by doing anything.’ concrete poets, most of Gertrude Stein and (Gertrude Stein, 1935, as quoted in Jefferson’s as ‘exemplativist art’, he instead Birthday by Dick Higgins, SEP, 1964) names their work in the ‘Objective Art’ category. A saint a real saint never does anything, a martyr John Cage is under ‘Mimetic Art.’) does something but a really good saint does

Stone Exemplativist work is an example of a possible nothing, and so I wanted to have Four Saints who did nothing and I wrote the Four Saints in Three outcome of an idea, form or model. For instance,

of Acts and they did nothing and that was every- a Fluxus event score that can be considered thing. exemplativist is the participatory score by (Jefferson’s Birthday by Dick Higgins, SEP, 1964) Alison Knowles SHOES OF YOUR CHOICE. Here

Shape the audience is invited to come forward and relativity and choice: manual describe his or her pair of shoes and why he or modules of a finely tuned

The she likes them. Each performed outcome is an machine exemplativist series of descriptions and At the heart of Higgins’s work is the idea that anecdotes that are both connected and uncon- the presented work serves the spectator’s nected, the diverse expressions are derived from received experience. These types of experiences a single object category — a random shoe in the are reference points for participation. He called audience. Knowles’s paradigm pointed the these relationships ‘horizons’ where the work audience to their own stored information and acts as a node for experience teetering between expressions relevant to their shoes. The the author/artist, performer/inter-actor (if there audience provides narrative content (a is one) and spectator/viewer. By inverting these syntagm), and for Higgins they also perceive the presumed roles, he demanded the constant flux underlying exemplifying structure of the work of spectators and their experiences play a key ‘not merely as an end it itself, but as a communi- role in developing meaning. In 1958–9, prior to cation of the entire range of possibilities’ (DH- his involvement with Fluxus, Dick Higgins DialecticsOC p. 157). The narrative content has wrote and produced new models for theater in been described as remarkably fascinating as to his avant-garde pieces Stack Deck (along with what one can learn about people through their composer ), Graphis 82 and shoes. The Tart. The works premiered at New York’s By creating flexible blank structures and Kaufman Auditorium, the Living Theater and multiple examples of work based on them, the Sunnyside Gardens boxing ring between 1959 resulting matrices form the underlying arrange- and 1965. These works brought together casts ment of Stein’s example in which nothing that included Alison Knowles, Meredith Monk, breaks down into meaning something. Higgins Ettie Eisenahauer, Florence Tarlow, Ay-O, Daniel offers insight to an experiment in exemplativist Spoerri, and composer Richard thinking when he quotes his work side-by-side Maxfield, who produced the first fully computer- Stein’s in his book Jefferson’s Birthday: ized music score for Stacked Deck. These ‘performance art’ pieces or ‘Happenings’ were ‘I always remember during the war being so interested in one thing in seeing the American abstract forms of collage theater with media soldiers standing, standing and doing nothing references such as Marilyn Monroe and Cecile B. standing for a long time not even talking but just De Mille. These examples show the experience standing and being watched by the whole French of art-making shifting from the subjective

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were placed in relationship to other things. . . . Moren These activities had to happen in space and I started to draw . . . very large notations on the stage so that the performers could follow the lines and share these as well as materials.’ For instance the plan for Graphis 82 was a 20 ϫ 24 foot polyethylene sheet laid on the performance stage. ‘In this it served as set, script and script (or score) for the performance’ (pp. 125–6 LE). The performers began with the word ‘lung’ and had to come up with an action related to the word, resolutions ranged from pantomimes to dictionary definitions. For instance, ‘lung’ prompted a fish pulling itself up on the land, the word ‘linen’ prompted someone to sew some giant bed linen, and the word ‘lodge’ prompted someone to sleep in it, while another described the architecture of a Scottish Abbey. Daniel Spoerri was noted for his quiet, slow walking from station to station amongst the bustle of his fellow characters (126 LE and conversation w/AK). Hence the performers brought ideas from their lives into the production. Artist , roommate of Higgins at the time these projects were written, described the endurance of his labor: ‘It would be typical for Higgins to lie awake one morning, composing over a period of an hour or so several hundred pieces. During the next few days, working straight through, he would edit and type up all the permutations, cut stencils, mimeograph same, collate same, staple same, and by the next Sunday would be mailing a book of 100 notations all over the world’ (pp. • The Score for Graphis 82 position of the artist to the relative contribution 77–81). by Dick Higgins (1959) performed 1962 at the of the performer and, to a lesser extent, the Cage taught Higgins that chance operations Living Theater NYC. audience. and indeterminacy were methods for producing Courtesy of the Estate of Dick Higgins After studying extreme experiments in nota- – without exerting oneself on the natural tional music from John Cage and Henry Cowell, process of the world – musical compositions free Higgins started producing automatic notations of ego. Higgins explains his chance process used for theater, which led to creating ready-made in Stacked Deck ‘in which any event can take notations out of things he found on the street. place at any time, as long as its cue appears’ He called these notations the Graphis Series: ‘I (Intermedia 1966). In Stacked Deck each stopped the more anarchistic Graphis where performer is cued by chance in relation to what each person performed a range of possibilities another performer is doing; chance is further so wide that only a nervous confusion prevailed, cued in relation to lighting, color, sound, phrase, and I began to give people lists of things which etc. Not only the order of the performance but

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much of the original score and the repetition beyond setting up indeterminacy and choice by • Still image from Stacked Deck by Dick within the score are subject to a complex system the performers, Higgins also introduces Higgins (1958) of cues triggered by chance. The important audience participation. ‘Since the colored lights performed, 1960 at the YMHA Kaufman introduction of choice in this relative system could be used wherever they were put and Auditorium, NYC. Courtesy of the Estate of cannot be understated. Without the insertion of audience reactions were also cueing situations, Dick Higgins an indeterminate element, the performance the performance–audience separation was would have a finite situation of possible pro- removed . . .’ (Intermedia 1966). The colored gressions and outcomes (albeit there might be lights were intensified by an especially dark thousands of them). Therefore, the concept of theater; the experience of overlapping lights the ability to ‘choose’ became Higgins’s answer intersecting on stage and on costumes such as to indeterminacy. In the opening remarks of the the brilliant reflection on a red sequin dress was 1 22 /2-minute production of Stack Deck, the per- very abstract and mesmerizing (AK-interview). formers are instructed in over half-a-dozen situ- Higgins’s following experimental play The ations where they must choose: ‘Lighting cues Tart was even more modular in its structure and given by combinations of such colors as blue was further systematized to intensify the and green are to be interpreted as giving both collage effect. Each performer was symbolized sets of cues. The performer chooses which to as the burly man, the hungry woman, etc. Thirty- follow.’ Performers are prepared to recite their six nonverbal phrases were randomly assigned lines 12 different ways and enact their actions in to each performer in the form of one sentence, five. ‘Each performer must be prepared to make one action, and one special effect: optical, split second choices’ (Stacked Deck). Going acoustic or kinetic. He wanted the relevance to

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dilemma and transcend the theater away from Moren illusions and simulations to one that was concrete and ‘realistic’ (footnote: Higgins was clearly aiming at an estrangement-effect of the Brechtian type, which would prevent the audience from empathizing with the persona. –Happenings, Darko Suvin p. 131). The perform- ers were never in dialogue with each other. They were instead engaged with what Artaud mani- fested as a theater of symbolic gestures whose ‘innumerable meanings constitute an important part of the concrete language of the theater – evocative gestures, emotive or arbitrary attitudes . . . all the impulsive gestures, all the failed attitudes, all the slips of the mind and the tongue which reveal what might be called the impotences of speech’ (Artaud). Higgins’s use of chance collage was to encourage empathy with the performers, denying any possible audience • Still image from The Tart be determined by the performance’s social empathy with their personas. ‘My hope was that by Dick Higgins (1965) at the Sunnyside Garden context, that is the people and the place in one the audiences would sympathize with the per- Ballroom and Arena moment in time (Happenings, Darko Suvin p. formers (not the characters) in their social (Boxing Ring), Quyeens NY. 131). Higgins also put forth a pragmatic Cage contexts’ (Happenings, DH p. 131). In order to photo: Peter Moore notion that psychology was an illusion and that follow the modular collage format manifested by © Estate of Peter Moore/VAGA, NYC the only meaningful qualities were tangible and Higgins designed a chance cueing system physical (foew&ombwhnw, p. 51). This coincided dominated by lights. The colored stage lights with Higgins’s desire for a post-Artaudian initiated a data storing and retrieving system, theater utilizing movements, words, harmonies while the technical insertion of choice (indeter- and rhythms as a modular formula creating a minacy) redirects any loop or finite predictabil- single expressive gesture. Artaud dreaded the ity the fixed database system might create. simulations of theater, such as binding a logical However, theoretically, choice also defied ration- costume to its character, and believed that an ality by creating the compelling notion that the objective and concrete language would substi- relevant interrelationships offered by the tute narrative illusion for a paradigm that would performer, participant, or interactor should be ‘surround the organs’ as it ‘flows into the sensi- empowered. Higgins asserts his deferring of bility’. Higgins therefore avoided the explicit content to the viewer in his Fluxus event score craft of stories and acting but one to pursue a Danger Music No. 13, which offers the ultimate theater where phrases, symbols and gestures empowerment of the viewer; it simply reads: were retrieved randomly from a manual ‘Choose’ (Dick Higgins, 13 April 1962). database triggered by a system of cues. The By allowing the performers to choose, Higgins phrases, symbols and gestures were derived placed them within the fabricated mechanism of from the media and popular culture while the his rule set, allowing an engagement of the cue system voided the performers’ ability to world as it is experienced by both performers create an improvisation of a compelling and viewers (osmith). Amongst his rules were narrative or illusion. Narrative illusion was that no one spoke to each other. Further given up in order to resolve an Artaudian estrangement developed when recited phrases,

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speeches or improvised actions were often “atmosphere” in an impressionist . The attributed to another performer on stage. By setting is free from the traditional trappings of creating a superimposition of lines and charac- theatre and the mind is free to wander among ters, objects of unusual proportions, the compo- the pillars, lights, and hot dog stands.’ This sition of the performance appeals to the senses. romantic integration of the boxing ring is in A complexity of visual richness, rhythm, stark contrast to Happening artists who asymmetry and even confusion were all desired performed that same evening but used the space outcomes of Higgins’s early work. ‘I was trying as substitute for the white cube. This distinction to set up a form that was unsemantic, even points to Higgins’s conscious validation of the Stone choreographic, in conception’ (Graphis by D. H. importance of relativity over ‘fixity’ when and Letty Eisenhauer, p. 122) putting an end to producing meaning (Iblom p. 17). Relativity in of Artaud’s deadening simulations falsely binding time and location is as significant for producing actors with phrases, costumes and character- meaning as the performer’s subjective partici- istics. He proposed a dynamic expression that pation. Shape named and categorized ‘objects, movements, It would be misrepresentative of Higgins to attitudes, gestures, but provided their meaning, portray him as an artist centered in theater.

The their physiognomy, their combinations extended The interdisciplinary Higgins, who coined and until they become signs and these signs become theorized Intermedia art, implemented the a kind of alphabet’. This ambitous system was viewers’, participants’ and readers’ relativity for Artaud ‘purely material’, a language that into his performances, books, objects, prints, ‘utilizes movements, harmonies, and rhythms, poems and paintings as well as his own but only insofar as they can converge in a kind bureaucratic systems, such as dating ordinary of central expression, without favoring any letters. A formal letter to a Hungarian curator particular art’. is dated ‘Alison’s 36th Birthday’, as if the Beyond the relative contribution of the reader, as well as Higgins, might attach some performer being part of the art, Higgins van- importance to what he was doing that day; in guarded the notion that relevant content could similar fashion, Higgins notes that The Tart also be derived from the time and location of a was performed on Easter Sunday, 1965. Via particular art object or event. Higgins may have these labeling gestures, he suggests that the derived this idea of time and space from Cage, triggering of a religious meal or a birthday for whom the audience and the auditorium were celebration is more meaningful than the more a unit that brought content to his performances. opaque forms of indexing, titling and cata- Higgins expanded the idea to integrate the loging. Rather then cataloging his works, he connotation of unconventional performance offers the audience his life; rather then spaces with his Happening ‘The Tart’ which was expressing himself, he catalogues a blank performed not in an auditorium but in a boxing index for the audience to do so. This type of ring. As Higgins described it: ‘Here people come repositioning of art and audience challenges expecting combat between two men, if we have the familiar paradigms of how art is presented developed an aesthetic expectation in theatre, and perceived based on a shared responsibility there is little of that in boxing. Style is theatre’s of creation and reception. ‘At the heart of these mark while catharsis rules prize fighting. new roles is how the viewers’ experiences can Furthermore there is something marvelous deliver the content of art . . . He calls upon us about the ring: a pedestal onto which one as participant observers to consider how we mounts, enacts a ritual act of (implied) violence, create and/or relate to art as well as what and goes away. The light, heavy with smoke, is comprises our expectations of it’ (Owen Smith, broken up by the movements of the fighters, like Lecture: Danger, Boredom and other

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Traditions: thinking about the wor(l)d of Dick environment or even a finite set of possibilities. Moren Higgins, UMBC, Oct. 14, 2003). Open content participation is where the viewer Occasionally this indexing of creativity brings his or her subjectivity as content to the backfires, and the automation of the work loops art. This work allows a broad interpretation of and creates other interesting technical problems. voices to produce outcomes not expected by the Higgins’s second 1962 Two Contributions for the artist. Theater included several performers carrying out Central to the Happening is the art of partici- short performance gestures (footnote: Nikolaj pation as it manifested to break any Church in Copenhagen, November 1962). The last active/passive hierarchy within the audience. two gestures were by Eric Andersen who chose to The mantra of Happenings was to force the spec- leave when the last performer exited the stage tators into an active position creating a circular and by who chose to leave after dialog within the work. The concept of open a certain number of audience members had left. content participation further allowed something For 50 minutes the two artists stood, one in the unexpected to happen, thereby blurring art with center and one behind a lectern, until Emmett life. However, this open participation with the had to relieve himself and left the stage, thus Happening format often confused spectators breaking the loop. (conversation with AKnowles, into believing they could participate more than email from EAndersen). A more complicated, but they were truly meant to. Sometimes partici- interesting piece is Idle Walk by Eric Andersen. pation meant the audience was physically con- Andersen organized a participatory piece on trolled, such as in ’s first manners to be held at the Royal Palace in Copen- Happening of 1958 18 Happenings in Six Parts, hagen. 165 invitees were to be well acquainted where spectators were given instructions on with at least five but not more than ten other how to interact with the environment. These invitees. Each of the invitees was permitted to spectators, who moved from room to room and bring a guest, and each participant could veto up bent in awkward positions in order to see varia- to two other participants and companions. Many tions of the work, were more physical partici- conveniences were provided and participants pants than true content providers. Another were offered many choices, among them 34 piece utilizing closed content participation is dishes, 40 drinks, 25 types of entertainment, 13 CHOICE 18 by Robert Bozzi that used mirrors to means of transportation and 15 newspapers. By show the audience to itself. In this 1966 score an extreme coincidence, the number of partici- performed by Ruckus (2001) (footnote: at UMBC pants who were vetoed equaled minus 23 Fine Arts Recital Hall), the musicians panned invitees. Therefore it was impossible for the the audience horizontally and slowly with four Copenhagen Royal Palace to host the perform- full-length vanity mirrors. The combination of ance. (EAndersen) the panning and the mirror angles left the viewers in a perpetual state of simultaneously participation: from performer to watching and being watched. This experience audience differs from a closed-circuit video in which the Early participatory art can be understood as audience members encounter the moment they physical participation, closed content partici- are watched. Such a moment was dispersed in pation and open content participation. Physical choice 18 as audience members watched friends, participation is where the physical body of the students, colleagues and strangers, each with a viewer is used as a material within the making distinct view from their neighbor’s view, while or completing of the art. Closed content partici- at the same time never being sure when their pation is where the viewer is invited to partici- own image was being watched and, if it was, by pate in the content within a controlled or limited whom. In fact an assortment of reflections of

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each audience member was seen at varying moments by other audience members, and each individual had his or her own unique panoramic perspective in which to draw content. The result was a fascinating loop of voyeurism, a self- reflecting loop without feedback, with the per- formers on stage subservient to a window to the audience whose conscientious presence perpet- ually acknowledged both watching and being Stone watched. Open content participation also occurred and of included physical and mental expectations beyond the artist’s original intent. Because of the sometimes violent nature of the Happen- Shape ings, as when a girl accidentally fell through a glass ceiling with blood spilling everywhere,

The many audience members believed the accident to be part of the performance (Hansen). Happen- ings such as Wolf Vostell’s You provided the audience with participation cards that read: ‘Consider China’, ‘Whistle five times’, ‘Say the word “banana” forty times’, or ‘Go to another closed physical participation – a tug-of-war – • Still image from Action Theater by Ken Dewey part of the room and kiss someone . . .’, etc. For that they nearly revolted against being used as (1965). the most part these closed content participa- material, calling the Happening ‘tyrannical and photo: Peter Moore © Estate of Peter tions were safely controlled within the artist’s dictatorial’. One of the participants artist Al Moore/VAGA, NYC expectations. Although You made no direct Hansen was at first disturbed by the heavy references to WWII, ‘a small Eastern European objection to the open process on the part of the man focused his remarks on what he believed to audience. However, once the spectators were be the concentration camp aspect of the piece. given the simple parameter to approach the rope Was this the content of the Happening or did he as slowly as possible, the mood changed. ‘Some project this notion onto the piece?’ (Hansen). people sat on the floor and edged toward it; Happening artists were delighted by such others crawled slowly; some wriggled on their content projections as they blurred into the stomachs; some walked on tiptoe; some walked work the subjectivity of life in that moment of three or four abreast making a huge arc towards time and location. In Higgins’s early, most the rope; it was very beautiful’ (Quote by experimental Graphis Series, open content Hansen?). When the participants were kneeling participation allowed such a wide relative range in the low lighting on either side of the rope, to be input from the performers ‘that only a they were further instructed to consider the nervous confusion prevailed’, and he began rope while raising it gently. Attendants raised a making more directed pieces. As had Knowles in large triple-folded net enclosing the partici- the earlier SHOES OF YOUR CHOICE, pants. It was described as a beautiful piece, and Happening artists soon learned the need for participants felt ‘a religious experience or a directing audience participation by balancing ritual act of religious nature. . . . Some people meaningful content with an overall performance wondered why the whole evening hadn’t been experience. Ken Dewey’s Action Theater began spent doing this – it seemed so positive, so rich with the audience being directed into such a and unique’ (56 Hansen).

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An open content participatory performance description, Artaud lyrically describes the Moren assumes that a compelling illusion or gesture outcome of his hypothetical theater that is can be improvised from the spontaneous concrete, non-illusionistic and systemically behavior of an unrehearsed participant. modular: Happening artists acknowledged these unlikely this objective and concrete language of the moments, even referring to the shepherd’s crook theater serves to corner and surround the when speaking of unwanted participants. organs. It flows into the sensibility. Abandoning Artists in the 1960s observed that participation Western uses of speech, it turns words into that was too specific led to feelings of tyranny incantations. It extends the voice. It utilizes and control on the part of the performer; and vibrations and qualitites of the voice. It wildly works that were too open led to a nervous stamps in rhythms. It pile-drives sounds. It seeks to exalt, to benumb, to charm, to arrest the sensi- confusion. In order to produce a rich partici- bility. It releases the sense of a new lyricism of patory experience, the traditional spectator needed a balance of open content participation, but with direction. Direction came via a multi- subjective imagination of a single object, an instruction or a connotation that was open enough to produce indeterminate content, but focused enough to avoid a nervous confusion.

david rokeby While many third-party artists such as Toni Dove use Very Nervous System, an interactive • Installation view of The Giver of Names by David hardware/software system that translates Rokeby (1998). motion (changes in light) into sound to produce photo: courtesy of the artist content, it was, however, David Rokeby who created and implemented the concept, in place of spectators dancing to music forms in response to a spectator’s motion, thus clearly inverting the presumed role of observer and observed. The result is a self-reflecting loop where a person’s image is mirrored repeatedly through sound. By both perceiving and respond- ing, spectators are encouraged to become more aware of their body and the space around them. In this sense, Very Nervous System is a sophisti- cated version of Bozzis’ CHOICE 18. Rokeby explained that ‘Part of the desire that drove me to produce Very Nervous System was a gesture which, by its rapidity or its spatial desire to slip out of my own self-consciousness amplitude, ultimately surpasses the lyricism of words. In short, it ends the intellectual subjuga- into direct, open experience of the world . . . The tion to language by conveying the sense of a new feedback loop of Very Nervous System effec- and more profound intellectuality which hides tively neutralizes consciousness, and can itself under the gestures and signs, elevated to occasionally lead to states that could best be the dignity of particular exorcisms. described as shamanistic. It can be intoxicating and addictive.’ Curiously similar to Rokeby’s

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Rokeby later describes the neutralizing of con- provided to direct content. A camera observes sciousness in Very Nervous System as a reflex the object or objects and the system analyzes its and an undesired state where participants color, texture, shape, scale and relationship to become true McLuhan extensions of technology. other objects on the pedestal. The analysis A preferred state is an interface that inspires includes a dictionary, knowledge of grammar, conscious reflection. Although influenced by and patterns of written behavior by Rokeby Artaud, Higgins too preferred an art where the himself. To ‘teach’ the system, Rokeby scanned spectator was aware they were part of a system scores of literature so that textual interrelation- and reflected on their newly provided roles. ships could be established. The result is a Stone system operating with technically correct direction and filters grammar: of The concept of direction was adopted by interac- tive artists to set a balance of parameters for After another quarter day, across participation. However, software can upset that from many more of the shells, a

Shape brownish-yellow bath toy, on the balance by adding filters to regain control. Thus, left side of the one lake-water green undesired participation enacted by spectators inlet, will burn down all cresson The can be redirected or filtered out completely. houses, of the fighter, who has Filters can distort or delete the participants’ taken out this blood. input, reducing content diversity rather than expanding it. Filtering is, therefore, a kind of When bubbling intellectual automated shepherd’s crook that can diminish a spirit Ernestine Daubner was on spectator’s ‘actual’ voice so that it appears his way to see The Giver of Names, closer to that of other participants and to the he ‘pondered how Cartesian dualism provided us with the means to consider • Screen shot from The intentions of the artist. To avoid a new tyranny Giver of Names by David of control, Rokeby mellows the concept of even our own body like a thing, like a neutral Rokeby (1998). photo: courtesy of the artist direction even further by calling it an encounter. object outside of oneself. With my minds-eye, I In Very Nervous System he noticed that the became aware . . . [h]ow much our cultural con- spectators approached the work with a test. structs influence the way we experience things, They reproduced a gesture multiple times with the way we conceptualize them, I wondered? To increasing confidence that the system was what extent was I still grounded in the aesthetic indeed responding to their movements. ideals of Western tradition?’ However, the increasing confidence slightly In Very Nervous System, Rokeby stripped and altered the participants’ gesture, thereby poten- rebuilt the interface. In The Giver of Names, his tially altering the reaction of the system. ambition was to strip and rebuild language Instead of filtering out these gestures for more itself. ‘It seems that we stop seeing, hearing, control, Rokeby used them to serve as infor- smelling as soon as we have positively identified mation for more relative reflection. something. At that point, we may as well replace the word for the object.’ He re-evaluates the sub- the textless experience of giving jugation of language in the hope of discovering names a fresh discourse mingling between gesture and The Giver of Names follows Rokeby’s Very thought. In this ambitious process, language Nervous System and is also a 10-year project itself becomes pure material and the manner in that Rokeby exclusively programmed. The Giver which language acts on our sensibilities is of Names is a computer system that ‘sees an fundamentally redefined. In Very Nervous object’ and names it. A spectator is invited to System, Rokeby learned that the faster any place an object on a pedestal; objects are often symbolic identification is comprehended, the

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• Installation view of n- more likely individuals will live in ‘a world of object. The shape of a stone for example already Cha(n)t by David Rokeby (2001). predigested and abstracted memories’. The effi- has a name, but Rokeby reinforces that the word photo: courtesy of the artist ciency of speed moving from thing to thing stone has been substituted for the actual stone. inhibits the consideration of the gaps which are (footnote: This is also the fundamental concept being skipped. He didn’t want to build an experi- behind Toby MacLennan’s The Shape of the ence in the world of symbols; he wanted to point Stone is Stoneshaped, who authored another to the relative gaps that the symbols represent. book published by Higgins.) Rokeby’s system For his language, he favored a relative means for offers a broad interval between word and object. sensing the environment as it existed both He asks his audience to imaginatively infuse within the system and within the daily lives of fresh meaning into the familiar object–symbol the spectator to the system. For example, after relationship. The emphasis in The Giver of The Giver of Names responded to Daubner’s Names is on what Rokeby’s system does not choice of a yellow toy Volkswagen with ‘Lemons, make explicit, and that is a perception between more eyeless than other beady sectors, would symbols, whereas the participants’ imaginative pardon no optical drops’, Daubner began to put leap is both their naïveté and illumination. In meaning together relative to his earlier- the same way that Higgins’s characters were mentioned thought process: ‘Do these words not never in dialog with each other, Rokeby’s chance deal with the very issue I had been thinking retrieval collage discourages compelling about a few minutes earlier: about being eyeless, narrative or illusion. Instead The Giver of oblivious or blind to my perception of genuine Names encourages the real life of spectators beauty?’ such as Daubner where the art exchange Rokeby exploits this ‘tight conspiracy becomes a dialog with oneself, not with the art between perception and language’ in The Giver object – the interactive objects such as the toy of Names, enabling the content of each and car. Here the database paradigm is given every viewer to bring meaning to his structure. material existence while the narrative syntagm In turn the interactors receive a fresh yet is dematerialized in Daubner’s imagination. abstract interpretation that speaks to their ‘Paradigm is privileged, syntagm is downplayed’ yearning to close the gap between word and (Manovich). Both Higgins and Rokeby reverse

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the expected illusion (or syntagm) in favor of a full of networked computers. Without further paradigm that is concrete and realistic. As input, the computers gradually find a Manovich says, the ‘paradigm is real; syntagm, common voice, their chattering subsiding virtual.’ into a sonorous, collective chant. ‘Coming across them at this moment, it is as if the THRICE SEVEN XIX – The Wind A child shouts into the wind viewer has entered a medieval cloister in And the wind which a haunting chorus of words fills the Plasters his words all over his face. space with a sacred residue.’ (Dick Higgins) n-Cha(n)t predicates its content on an Stone audience that is part of a generation that has to In Rokeby’s exploration to produce new a certain point accepted the logic of science, and of paradigms for subject matter, he created works other cultural mechanizations as generators of that organize learned ideas and literary and syn- governing truth. Through Rokeby’s subversion tactical relationships as modular retrieval these belief systems can actually be seen for

Shape categories, not dissimilar to Artaud’s manifes- what they are when left to their own prejudicial tation where objects, and movements and devices. Under these conditions, the spectator’s gestures can be categorized into symbols and The rational belief systems are delighted, shattered retrieved modularly – similar to an alphabet – and possibly haunted by the logical patterns of which in 1938 he thought of as a language that behavior. When the participant enters Rokeby’s was ‘purely material’. Artaud’s statement systems, all familiar namings of roles are foresaw the software artist utilizing the pure rewritten. If the spectators allow their raw per- material of software code in much the same way. ceptions to embrace Rokeby’s modular system of Rokeby’s code precisely distinguishes both what logic, they are subjected to a slippery subversion Artaud was trying to get away from and what he of rationality that alters their understanding of was manifesting. The Giver of Names points to the tools that are supposed to logically filter the the limitations compared with human dialog. world. Under these conditions, the spectator’s Artaud, who was so influential to Higgins, prior- rational belief systems are delighted, shattered itizes the expressive possibilities of database and possibly haunted by the logical patterns of paradigms because they are free from the deadly behavior. When a participant enters Rokeby’s illusions of narrative dialogs. Rokeby points to systems, all familiar naming of roles is human narrative while avoiding the simulation rewritten. If the spectators allow their raw per- of theater. Instead he calls upon spectators to ceptions to embrace Rokeby’s modular system of make use of his paradigm as a stand-in for logic, they are subjected to a slippery subversion observing in order to point to the rich percep- of rationality that alters their understanding of tion of human dialog in real life. the tools that are supposed to logically filter the feedback loops world. The installation n-Cha(n)t (2001) is an extended exemplative of The Giver of Names. conclusions When entering n-Cha(n)t one finds a room full Rokeby defines interactivity as a leap from the of computer monitors with images of ears context of John Cage’s systems of chance and listening to the words spoken by visiting indeterminacy: ‘The structure of interactive spectators. The participatory input is facili- artworks can be very similar to those used by tated by a microphone and by speech recog- Cage in his chance compositions. The primary nition software. If the viewer speaks, the difference is that the chance element is replaced computers begin chattering first individually, by a complex, indeterminate yet sentient then in a linguistic chorus within the room element, the spectator. Whereas Cage’s intent is

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to mirror nature’s manner of operation, the scripting, which often generated a form of non- Moren interactive artist holds up the mirror to the narrative poetry. They both subscribed to the spectator.’ Higgins’s chance compositions, such notion that art is always relative to the as the chance dialog triggered by colored lights spectator’s ideas, thoughts and expressions, and in Stacked Deck, are also similar procedurally to their works were literally incomplete without chance systems used by Cage. Through Cage, the performance of others who provided content Higgins’s chance cueing system alone, once set to their pieces. Their aim was to create carefully in motion, had the undesired predicament of directed blank structures or exoskeletons having a pre-determined outcome, like a domino within which content could be inspired. Choice effect. Also because of the ‘if cued by x, then or interactivity was the method for inviting execute y; if cued by y, then execute z’ state- content. Furthermore, they both gave direction ments written into the Stacked Deck within choice to avoid solely depending on the script/score, the chance cueing element system participation of an uninspired performer and, creates a finite number of procedural outcomes. therefore, risking clichéd content. While both Higgins doesn’t replace chance; he supplements artists freely gave or sold their work for others chance with indeterminacy in the form of choice to perform, they engaged in exemplativist offered to the performers and spectators. thinking, continuously providing examples of Higgins distinguishes himself from Cage’s their own content for their conceptual struc- mimetic approach by developing an exempla- tures. tivist approach, where the choice of first the The main distinction within this discussion is performer, then the audience is reflected in the that once Higgins’s manual, mechanical process final content. Furthermore, when Higgins holds was transformed and his performances were the mirror up to popular culture, including the replaced by the computer, intercepting the actual boxing ring that holds the art, he is unnatural stigma of having created a closed reflecting the relevant time and space as well as system was no longer necessary. What Rokeby the participation of people. saw was that once the computer became a Rokeby further distinguishes his mirror from household representation of a rational world, that of Cage. Unlike Cage’s work, Rokeby’s inter- then exposing the prejudicial flaws of what active work involves a dialogue between the culture created could be a subversive and poetic interactor and the system making up the asset. Avoiding intercepting that world with artwork. ‘A feedback system is created in which indeterminacy is what Rokeby exploits. Both the implications of an action are multiplied, artists offer a poetic exposition of how our much as people are reflected into infinity by the cultural capital promises to make us modern. two facing mirrors in a barber shop.’ In The distinction of n-Cha(n)t is that it builds on Higgins’s experiments in theater, the the compositional and experiential knowledge performer’s response is engaged and affected by of a previous generation but lives within a the actions of other performers. A feedback loop computer generation able to observe and expose was possible and easier to control in a manual the flawed product manifesting that cultural system. For instance, while Higgins worked out promise, a computerized reflection of our own feedback loops during rehearsal, loops did desire. occasionally happen as in ‘Idle Walk’ when the reference parameters of the art canceled the performance Bergson, Henry (1991) Matter and Memory, translated at the Royal Palace (email, Eandersen). by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer, New York: Zone Dick Higgins and David Rokeby brought the Books, pp. 78–9. ordinary life expressions of participants into their art. Both artists created a form of

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