Creating Digital Performance Resources
A Guide to Good Practice

Performing Arts Data Service
Guide to Good Practice
Creating Digital Performance Resources

SECTION 3: Digital Resources in Performance Practice

3:2 Shifting Grounds: Internet-based live performance work
Sophia Lycouris

1. Introduction

Live transmission of sound and image through the Internet is increasingly used in contemporary arts not only as a means of distribution but often as an integral part of works which incorporate performance and/or live presence elements. Offering a number of exciting possibilities, this new practice also poses questions and brings new problems. On the one hand, practitioners constantly face a variety of technical problems which originate not so much in the lack of technical resources as in the vagueness of how and where appropriate technical support could be sought. At the same time, the ways, conditions, interfaces, manifestations of this type of work poses aesthetic and philosophical questions about the nature, the parameters and the meaning of such work. It is interesting to notice that the above two areas are closely related, intimately dependent on each other, intertwined in an unprecedented fashion. As technology (which has become the art medium in this case) develops and expands, the medium keeps changing; definitions, expectations and materialisations of ideas are constantly shifting. On the other hand, as practitioners work with whatever is technically available at any point new needs are unavoidably identified, further technical solutions are sought and subsequently discovered keeping the medium in constant flux.

In their account of the 'technological' Michael Menser and Stanley Aronowitz suggest that the 'technological' should be explored from three methodological points of view:

"The first is ontological: what technology is ... technology, science and culture all mix together along a continuum such that each object, to varying degrees, is the result of each of these three. The second is pragmatic: what technologies do; and the third is phenomenological: how technologies affect our experience in ways that are not bound to questions of function."
Aronowitz 1996, 15

Rutsky who believes that it is the changes in the very conception of technology (rather than the changes in technology per se) that really affect and interact with the domain of culture, does not seem to acknowledge this peculiar interdependence between technological shifts and aesthetic problems (Rutsky 1999, 1). However, he does accept that in the current postmodern moment (as opposed to the modernist area):

"the aesthetic can no longer be figured in the traditional terms of aura and wholeness, nor in the modernist terms of instrumentality and functionality. Like technology, it too comes to be seen as an unsettling, generative process, which continually breaks elements free of their previous context and recombines them in different ways."
Rutsky 1999, 8

In her discussion of the postmodern condition, Linda Hutcheon has suggested that the relationship between art practice and theory cannot be understood as a causal one but as "a complex (interaction) of shared responses to common provocations", one that manifests "overlappings of concern" (Hutcheon 1988, 14). Similarly to Hutcheon, who recognises the complexity of the relationship between practice and theory in the postmodern landscape, Rutsky is equally aware of the similarity of concerns between the aesthetic and the technological in postmodernism. Following a slightly different route, he seems to ultimately meet Menser and Aronowitz who, in their theoretical exploration of the connections amongst science, technology and culture have introduced the perspective of complexity/complication. Their theoretical position is fully equipped to accommodate the current fuzziness in the definitions of science, technology and culture as well as that of their in-between relationships. Moreover, as Menser and Aronowitz suggest, the use of such terms as technoculture or technoscience becomes a reminder of the indeterminate and hazy relationship between the technological and the human. In the context of this article, it can be described as a metaphor for the indeterminate and complicated interconnection between live presence and digital technology in contemporary arts.

It becomes evident that the key parameters for such kind of work are really dependent upon the character of the constantly evolving relationship between the aesthetic and the technological. For this reason the quality of such work is never a matter of the degree of sophistication of the use of the technology involved, rather of how deeply aware of this relationship the contributing artists are. It is easy to understand therefore that it is possible to work with what might be considered 'basic resources' in this area and produce work of high quality if there is sufficient awareness of the medium (or type of technology) involved and its complex relationship with aesthetic decisions.

To give some indication about what is implied with the expression 'basic resources', the following six elements are necessary as a minimum for the works described below:

a live performance space

a website (electronic space)

a webcaster (an Internet provider that can support live sound and movement transmission, preferably a provider with Real Server)

a telephone line

a computer (minimum specifications of hardware: Pentium II, 64 MB RAM, 4 GB HDD, sound and video card, modem 56K but preferably ISDN, software: Real Player and Real Producer)

a videocamera

The videocamera, connected to the computer, records live sound and movement. Through the use of Real Producer, this digital information travels via an open phone line to the Real Server of the webcaster. The Real Server makes this recording available on a website in the form of a Real Player files which can be watched by Internet users whose computers have Real Player. This basic process called webcast is of course used in a number of ways which have no relationship with artistic work. Yet that very process can easily become a method or even a medium to be manipulated, elaborated, expanded and challenged as part of an artistic process.
Drawing on the theoretical positions mentioned earlier in this section, discussing examples of existing performance work which integrate elements of live transmission through the Internet, and addressing the technical idiosyncrasies of such work, this section aims at introducing the intimate interactive relationship between the artwork and its technology. The discussion concentrates on examples of work in the area of dance and technology. The questions explore conditions which allow for a reconsidered understanding of choreography, one which can accommodate the mutations taking place in work based on real-time processes, where digital technology has become a crucial component. Time, space and dynamics are key parameters in choreographic practice and extremely useful in this discussion; they provide a technical vocabulary through which methods in such practice can be looked at and elaborated upon. Notions such as architecture, representation and metaphor are also directly relevant to this discussion. They offer a hybrid vocabulary to address the complexity of the interdependence between the technological and the aesthetic.

Having emphasised the ontological, pragmatic and phenomenological aspects of the technological, Menser and Aronowitz's paradigm informs the process of constructing a methodology which can allow for a close investigation of the parameters of the above mentioned complexity. In Menser and Aronowitz's discussion, the ontological perspective introduces the question 'what is technology', the pragmatic point of view looks at 'what technologies do' and the phenomenological angle explores 'how technologies affect our experience in ways that are not bound to questions of function'. In the context of the investigation undertaken in this section, this paradigm reveals the importance of breaking the process down into three smaller tasks where a modified version of Menser and Aronowitz's methodology could be instrumental. The complicated relationship between the technological and the aesthetic in work which integrates live transmission through the Internet and movement-related elements and/or processes can be explored from three perspectives which are presented in detail below.

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