Edward Scheer

Robotics as New Media Dramaturgy: The Case of the Sleepy Robot

It doesn’t matter if the actor is a robot; the virtual context of art and theatre is a site where a “vibrant materialism” might offer useful insights on the status of the actor, the object, and especially the robotic object, in an expanded dramaturgy.

Between Antipodality and Relational Performance: Performance Studies in Australia

On Friday 30 August, 2002, a Performance Studies (PS) Symposium held at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) in Sydney addressed a variety of questions about the ‘current disciplinary status of and the scope of research in Performance Studies in Australia’ and whether there is such a thing as “Australian Performance Studies” and, if so, how it differs from Performance Studies in other geographical locations, and especially from the United States.’ These questions was framed by the principal organizer of the event, Dr Moe Meyer, and the discussion chaired by Dr Sharon Mazer, both Americans working in Australia and New Zealand respectively. The responses were as varied as one might expect from scholars whose disciplinary backgrounds and institutional affiliations differed considerably and whose research took them across cultural studies, popular culture studies, theatre studies, and the visual arts, just to list a few of the key areas which were identified.1

Posthuman Scenarios and Performative Media

In Scenario,(2011) a new media installation by Dennis del Favero and iCinema, spectators enter a gigantic 3-D screen space and are engaged by the humanoid inhabitants of the world they find there. These humanoids engage the spectators as witnesses and participants in an uncertain scenario. What is it? It looks like the aftermath of some horrific act, not an inadvertent or random act of nature but a deliberate tearing in the social fabric. Some kind of fairy tale gone wrong? The scenario occurs in a variety of interactive spaces and environments, in underground bunkers, empty buildings and on a frozen lake. This essay uses Scenario as a case study to explore the notion of the posthuman in performance and explores the ethical questions it raises.

Cue Black Shadow Effect: The New Media Dramaturgy Experience

We begin with the notion that what was once called new media has increasingly become a familiar part of the dramaturgy of the last quarter century. By considering the dramaturgy of new media performance events, we seek to develop a language to describe, situate, and understand how the practices of conceptualizing, designing, directing, and reading/responding to performance are now in flux in new ways. This flux is facilitated in part by developments in digital culture, and by a desire to respond to and harness these. In observing these developments, we also see a decrease in the representation of mediated society and an increase in the simulation of the agency of its technical creations. Born of the synthesis of new media and new dramaturgy, the ‘new’ in NMD is practiced and performed in the work of a range of important contemporary artists – through their work with objects, actants, atmospheres, visuality, sound, machines, and systems of various kinds. We note that the use of video, powerful data projections, new sound systems, and even technologies such as robots reflects not so much a vanishing of human bodily presence from the theatre or the arts of that period, but a more subtle repositioning of bodily presence.

The Virtual Machine: Projection in the Theatre

We begin in Chapter 2 with a discussion of data projection and the ways in which it has thoroughly transformed the notion of liveness in the last two decades. New projection technologies enabled the harnessing of data-based images to create immersive, multiple, virtual stage-spaces that became increasingly easier to reproduce in inverse proportion to the disappearance of the auratic analogic image. To this end, we discuss examples of video projection in dumb type’s seminal works S/N and OR and show how projection renders the theatre space informatic and performative rather than simply illustrative. Meanwhile, analysis of works such as Ong Keng Sen’s Desdemona and Kris Verdonck’s HUMINID foreground the experience of viewing mediated artworks and proposes a form of projection as critique. Finally, consideration of Chunky Move’s Glow shows the integration of projection with the performer to create a real-time and dramaturgically transforming expression of intermediality. Overall, this chapter shows that projection in the context of new media dramaturgy is something that has its own agenda and agency and is not simply at the service of a story or characterisation.

From Extreme Light to Total Darkness: The Dramaturgy of Organised Light

The discussion of illumination is continued and extended in Chapter 3 where we explore the development of outdoor lighting systems, large-scale projections, and light and video displays in installation works exhibited in gallery spaces. We draw on Sean Cubitt’s idea of ‘organised light’ (Coherent Light from Projectors to Fibre Optics, Open Humanities Press, London: 2015, 45) as the functional ability to focus and amplify light in parallel with developments of the technologies of luminescence in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We argue that these developments predicate a complexity of aesthetic and political relations that have bearing on histories of urban space, political economy, and ideas of community and nationhood. Our discussion touches on both the rise of spectacular lighting events at expositions, civic events and world fairs, as well as case studies by artists including Rafael Lozano-Hemmer, dumb type and Ikeda Ryoji. The chapter comes full circle in a discussion of Verdonck’s Stills, a large-scale work projected onto the sides of buildings in post-austerity Athens in 2015. The early termination of this work at the behest of the authorities created a media frenzy, and our analysis in this chapter shows how these manifestations of public lighting incorporate and extend technology to draw attention to an idea that also concretises political actions.

Animate Atmospheres: Art at the Edge of Materiality

Scheer observes an important new direction in contemporary art as an exploration of vital matter enabled through technological means; that is, the manufacture of atmospheres as entities in themselves rather than aesthetic by-products. Accordingly, cloud and fog formations produced by artists such as Axel Antas and Kris Verdonck reclaim the vaporous and film like phenomena that, in turn, echo historical ideas of atmospheric animism. With reference to writers such as Kathleen Stewart and Peter Sloterdjk, Scheer emphasizes the eco-politics at stake in these artworks that exemplify the production of ways of seeing that have real significance for how we live into the future, as life and politics become the art of the atmospherically possible.

Play/Pause, FF/Rewind. End. Machine Times, End Times: Theatre, Live Film and Video

In Chapter 8 we consider two art media that have long been threatened with extinction – film and theatre – and discuss how remediation charts their formation of a practice looking backwards and forwards, communicating histories and the future worlds of NMD. This chapter deals with questions of temporality and belatedness in NMD and considers modalities of machinic temporality through a number of examples of work that seem to betray a dramaturgical commitment to a particular form of technically enabled recursion. This chapter pursues lines of enquiry opened by Cubitt and others on the idea of time-shifting – that since the advent of the Sony Portapak in the mid 1960s, and the subsequent ubiquity of technologies like the VCR, live temporalities have been subject to varieties of shifting: rewinding and repeating, fast-forwarding, pausing, amid the presentness of ‘play’. We discuss Tacita Dean’s Event for Stage, Atom Egoyan’s Steenbeckett, and Gob Squad’s Super Night Shot, works that in different ways seem to provoke existential questions about liveness, temporality and memory. We explore how strange this quality of time can seem to be and how easily it affects us. This uncertainty is also acute in Verdonck’s End, the concluding artwork for the chapter and a pivotal work for the book as a whole. End is a performance for ‘ten figures’, five of whom are actors – the others are machines, visual effects and projections. They seem to be performing the possible final stage of a human community. The ‘starting point of END’ comes from media images of environmental catastrophe, the extinction of species, and ‘the horrors of famine and war’ (Van Kerkhoven, End, A Two Dogs Company Website d). The performance lasts one hour but has no discernable beginning or end. It is dramatically flat – there is no story, only actions, and one senses that it could easily go on into infinity.

Robots: Asleep, Awake, Alone, and in Love

In Chapter 5 we look at the use of robots in recent theatre and argue that, in some cases, robots are ideal vehicles for performance based on new media dramaturgy as they can translate between the informatic and the organic, facilitating meaningful transactions between human visitors and autonomous or semi-autonomous machine. But they also raise significant questions about aesthetic representation and audience response. The chapter considers recent work in creative robotics, which gestures towards something beyond the robotics of industrial design and performance based on efficiency (speed and productivity) and beyond the comparatively simple question of the representation of robotics in the world. This involves a rediscovery of the larger representational function of robotics in imaging the enhanced qualities of human experience rather than simply its visual manifestations. We argue, through analyses of robot and android theatre works by Hirata Oriza and Ishiguro Hiroshi, Mari Velonaki, and Kris Verdonck, that the experience and meaning generated by this work is a result of the entire system’s design and dramaturgy and that it is dramaturgically constituted as a result of the interactions between entities rather than as a feature of one or more of the constituent entities. Recent work that explores what Braidotti calls ‘a displacement of the lines of demarcation … between the organic and the inorganic’ (The Posthuman, Polity Press, Cambridge: 2013, 89) is also discussed in reference to theorising a political perspective on NMD and robotics. In short, we demonstrate that we do not need identifiably human actors as guarantors of meaning and intimacy either in robotics or in performance.

XD: Reproducing Technological Experience

Experience design (XD) and its relationship to NMD is the focus of Chapter 7: a dimension of new media design based on the entire human sensorium. XD is not only consequential to our study, but leads to an important philosophical question – how to think and design for a dynamic, complex system rather than the components of that system – and a challenge to new media artists and designers to anticipate and activate a range of sensorial encounters between media environments and users. What is required to digitally encode, store and retransmit an experience? Theatre people, actors and performers are uniquely well placed to answer this question and our discussion returns to the work of dumb type to consider this. We also explore the performer/spectator relationship in the digital media work Karen by Blast Theory. For this company, digital media offers enormous scope for varying the environments they are creating and therefore also the possible forms of user interaction with these environments.