Abstract
This paper arises out of a brief period in the early- to mid-2000s when the British
funding and research climate facilitated a relationship between the technical,
operational language of e-Science and the creative and performing arts. It concerns
the ways in which live creative practices produce media traces that are fractured
across screens and networks to produce new spatial relations between live events and
their records. The split and contradictory subjectivities produced in these highly
mediatized environments bring to the fore creative tensions between the live event
and the recorded document. That is, the discourses, technologies and practices (if we
may separate these) of e-Science not only produce new, spatial connections between
events and their archives, they enact the “liveness” of archives as they are
accessed and recombined to produce new art forms. Locating Grid Technologies:
Performativity, Place, Space, a research workshop series funded by the A&H
e-Science Initiative in its 2006 round, aimed to investigate how e-Science
technologies might inform new understandings of space and time for distributed,
creative research practices. Arts and technology researchers from the UK, US and
Japan met to generate, analyze and re-use audio-visual documents of distributed
practice-led research. Specifically, the project sought to combine and repurpose
e-Science tools in order to investigate the spatial relationships produced between
time-based, live events and their immediately mediatized traces. This paper
investigates those performative fragmentations of place and space. It suggests that
the potentialities and pitfalls of e-Science tools and technologies present fertile
material for the arts researcher, particularly within the area of practice-based
research: from the politics of surveillance to the aesthetics of video compression,
from the ethics of multidisciplinary collaboration to the theoretical implications of
mixing video time and space with the time and space of the performance event.
Introduction
I am interested in human remains: in the residues, artifacts and traces left after
the party is over, in the kinds of things that people produce when they gather
together. And I am interested in how those remains might be rearranged on some
occasion to create even more littering. I am an archaeologist of sorts, but one who
looks at the relationship between performance and documentary forms. More precisely,
I track the transformations that occur across media, bodies and space as performances
are documented and as documents are incorporated into other art practices and as
those practices are subsequently documented and so on, in myriad permutations and
combinations. That is, I am interested in where the spaces and times of events are
transformed into the spaces and times of their representations in video.
This paper arises out of a brief period in the early- to mid-2000s when the British
funding and research climate facilitated a relationship between the technical,
operational language of e-Science and the creative and performing arts. Although the
creative and performing arts have always been at the leading edges of technological
innovation, the formalization and funding of e-Science presented arts researchers
with new opportunities to engage and extend their relationships with new
technologies. However, where new media arts have emphasized the critical-creative
transformations afforded by technologies, e-Science has largely been articulated in
operational and technological terms, providing practical, secure, networked tools to
enable (science) research. Thus, the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
defined e-Science as “a specific set of advanced technologies
for Internet resource-sharing and collaboration”
[
AHRC 2006]. Certainly, as evidenced elsewhere in this volume, e-Science has presented
exciting opportunities for researchers across the arts and humanities to unlock the
potential of archives and existing data sets.
However, what are the implications for other forms of research, in particular,
practice-as-research, where questions of knowledge production are of a different
order? Specifically, how might e-Science offer new ways of complicating key issues in
the performing arts? Where might e-Science, as traditionally understood, facilitate
data access, visualization and use? Within a performing and creative arts context,
e-Science tools not only present new opportunities to develop arts practices, but
they also produce traces and artifacts that may be combined to produce new work. This
paper concerns the ways in which live creative practices produce media traces that
are fractured across screens and networks to produce new spatial relations between
live events and their records. The split and contradictory subjectivities [
Haraway 1998] produced in these highly mediatized environments bring to
the fore creative tensions between the live event and the recorded document [
Piccini & Rye]. That is, the discourses, technologies and practices (if
we may separate these) of e-Science not only produce new, spatial connections between
events and their archives, they enact the “liveness” of archives as they are
accessed and recombined to produce new art forms. Where conventional telematic
performance perhaps privileges a focus on the production of a “third space”
[
de Lahunta 2002] in which mediatized, distributed arts practice coheres as “event,” the
emphasis in e-Science on maintaining the integrity of myriad data sets refuses such
coherence. Within an e-Science context, practice-as-research is simultaneously an
event and a series of traces – from flattened dialogue maps to video data.
Performativity, Place, Space, a research workshop series
funded by the AHRC e-Science Initiative in its 2006 round, aimed to investigate how
e-Science technologies might inform new understandings of space and time for
distributed, creative research practices. Arts and technology researchers from the
UK, US and Japan met to generate, analyze and re-use audio-visual documents of
distributed practice-led research. Specifically, the project sought to combine and
repurpose e-Science tools in order to investigate the spatial relationships produced
between time-based, live events and their immediately mediatized traces. This paper
aims to address questions concerning those performative fragmentations of place and
space. To do so, it will review the current state of e-Science in the arts and
humanities, while revisiting the achievements and outcomes of the 2006 workshops in
order to assess the potential of e-Science to track, understand and visualize
transformations of performance from the live event through to its documentation,
retrieval and reuse in other live events. This paper does not, therefore, focus on
distributed performance per se, but rather on the “affordances”
[
Gibson 1979] that e-Science brings to arts research activities. Additionally, this paper,
and the others in this volume, may simply mark a brief period in the history of
funded arts research in the UK when information and communications technologies were
seen to present exciting opportunities to produce new ways of thinking research
practice. The
e-Dance project,
based at University of Bedford and representing a collaboration between Manchester,
Leeds, Open University and Bedford, is now the UK’s sole major funded e-Science
project that focuses on the performing arts. The collaborators developed the key
ideas introduced at the Bristol workshops in conjunction with their individual,
pre-existing research activities.
e-Science Background
Rather than emphasizing the provision of high performance computing to researchers —
with some notable exceptions (see
Terras
article in this issue) — the UK e-Science agenda has focused on large-scale,
distributed collaborative research enabled through the Internet. It aims to
facilitate flexible, secure and coordinated resource sharing to produce new research
and has been expressed in terms of producing a network of computing power acting as a
single, extensible computer. The investment of some
£230 million
[1] in UK e-Science was driven by an increasingly
globalized research market that sees researchers faced daily with geographically
distributed tasks that involve analysis, access to resources, interdisciplinary
collaboration and project management. The common characteristics of e-Science are
coordinated problem solving via distributed computing; networked resource sharing;
virtual organizations; and transparent, efficient pervasiveness. This vision is given
form via three principle grid architectures: computational, data and communications
grids.
Computational grids allow for distributed processing power. An example of a
computational grid might be the
Condor-G multicore
network, developed by the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It harnesses
unused processing power while people are not using their computers, similar in spirit
to the well-known SETI program, which searches for extraterrestrial intelligence via
at least three million user desktops.
[2] Computational grids automate, rationalize and democratize
procedures across national borders and institutional infrastructures. In a sense,
they comprise a globalized production network, geared towards recent changes within
an academic sector increasingly competing with private-sector interests for both
funding and posts.
Data grids are distributed file systems and federated databases organized in secure
networks. In order to manage these file systems, a dizzying array of “storage
resource managers” are in development, from the open-standards
Storage Resource Management
collaboration to the proprietary
Storage Resource Broker
(SRB), which is a logical distributed file system based on a client-server
architecture that presents the user with a single global namespace or file hierarchy.
It provides secure access, via a uniform API, to various types of data storage across
local and wide-area networks, and maintains metadata (data about the data) about each
stored object (files).
[3] Where a computational grid is, in effect, a system of
production, data grids hold out the promise of seamless, globalized procurement.
Finally, the communications grid encompasses both open source (such as
Access Grid) and
proprietary (such as the Chicago-based
IOCOM, formerly InSORS, Grid) solutions for distributed communication and
collaboration. Both Access Grid and IOCOM assemble resources including multimedia
large-format displays, presentation and interactive environments, and interfaces to
Grid middleware and to visualization environments. They are flexible, interactive
audio-visual networking environments that deliver high-quality, multiple video stream
and sound across IP networks to support group-to-group interactions across the Grid.
They differ significantly from ISDN-based video-conferencing and telematic
performance platforms in that they enable highly expandable, uni- and multicast
meetings among many locations. More than facilitating face-to-face meetings or mixing
audio-visual signals the communications grid is intended to be a computational
environment, which allows the recording and reuse of meetings. If I continue to
follow the logic of the industrial metaphor, communications grids facilitate the
delivery of produced and procured data for specific purposes. By creating a
globalized network that facilitates efficient production, storage and retrieval the
e-Science agenda has aimed to position UK research teams at the forefront of the
“knowledge economy.”
e-Science in the Screen and Performing Arts
The neo-liberal flavour of e-Science as a means to open up new research
“markets” thus differs significantly from the political utopian visions of
the electronic arts and new media communities. Where e-Science has focused on funding
infrastructure to facilitate prospective new research, the new media arts communities
are project- and problem-oriented. In other words, while e-Science has been seen as a
solution in search of a problem, new media arts may be characterized in terms of
creative problems that work towards solution. Where both communities may share tools
and technologies, the differing production contexts are important. The UK’s e-Science
Core Programme was very clearly aimed at placing UK researchers at the top of the
global research market. Making research visible and available is seen to be a “good
thing” in itself. For the arts and humanities researcher, however, production
contexts and funding infrastructures are at the heart of how we engage critically and
creatively with such questions as technicity, presence, play and so on. Technologies
are never transparent tools for producing knowledge. The material and coded
constraints of any tool are what make data and shape understanding [
Kittler 1999].
2005 saw the launch of the UK’s AHRC
e-Science research
strand. One of the early activities initiated through the AHRC was the
e-Science Scoping Study
(May-August 2006). Principle Investigator Sheila Anderson spearheaded the creation of
an
Arts and Humanities e-Science Support
Centre and organized a series of “Experts Seminars,” to which key
researchers in each subject domain were invited to discuss the opportunities and
challenges that e-Science presented in their fields of research. The aim was to
identify strategic areas for further development and funding by research councils.
Through the Scoping Study process e-Science in the arts and humanities communities
was defined as
the development and deployment of a
networked infrastructure and culture through which resources — be they
processing power, data, expertise, or person power — can be shared in a secure
environment, in which new forms of collaboration can emerge, and new and
advanced methodologies explored.
[AHDS 2006]
While it may be straightforward to measure and express the benefits of, for
example, large-scale, biomedical visualization projects, practice-led research in the
creative, performing and screen arts is not always goal-orientated in this way. The
Scoping Study’s definition was, therefore, particularly welcome in that it was
sensitive to the need for arts and humanities research to frame itself in not wholly
instrumentalist ways. In order to engage with e-Science and produce new research,
careful attention needs to be paid to the kinds of data that we want to analyze,
process, deliver and — more interestingly — create. E-Science in the performing and
screen arts is challenging precisely because creative research does not map directly
onto dominant research models in the sciences. These communities do not often face
problems that require new tools. Instead, our work operates in the other direction:
new tools and technologies inspire questions that we address through creative
research praxes. With its emphasis on infrastructure, e-Science can provide the
materials with which the screen and performing arts can generate research questions
useful in both disciplinary areas.
There are endless gazetteers and critical studies of new media arts. A comprehensive
discussion of new media arts is well beyond the scope of this paper. Moreover,
e-Science has developed quite separately from the wider arena of new media arts.
Nonetheless, the background to the arts and technologies context is useful in framing
the potential relationships that might be forged with e-Science. The investigation of
relationships among science, technology and the arts has been well established since
the late 1960s. The 1968 launch of
Leonardo
, the international journal of arts, sciences and technology, marked the much
longer history of this kind of fertile interplay, while publications by [
Dixon 2007] and [
Giannachi 2007] are merely two examples
in a string of books in this field. Arguably, early adoption of new technologies is a
defining characteristic of the creative avant-garde. From the use of photography and
film by the early modernists and ISDN lines for telematic performance in the early
1990s, to the subversion of GPS systems and mobile telephones by twenty-first century
locative and pervasive media artists, technological innovation presents
artist-scholars with new questions, rather than answers. Indeed, artist-scholars
working with computing technologies are already using the newest tools and platforms
in their practices. And with the geopositional turn in so many new media
technologies, it is hardly surprising that so much of the art in this area is
concerned with questions of space — its fractures and potentialities.
We might, therefore, conclude that there is nothing new about the application of
e-Science tools and methods to the screen and performing arts. Lev Manovich’s
discussion of the history of the “database narrative”
[
Manovich 2002] located within the constructivist film making of Dziga Vertov (1929,
Man With a Movie Camera) and Michael Century’s examination
of the imbricated practices of artists and technologists throughout the twentieth
century provide a useful historical lens through which to see the current potential
for e-Science [
Century 2005]. Whether we look at the work of
Natalie Bookchin or
Blast Theory,
Paul Sermon,
Johannes Birringer,
Andrea Zapp, the myriad works coming out of
ZKM (the German digital arts
powerhouse, based in Karlsruhe and headed by Peter Weisel) or the
Second Life
collaboration between artist Lynn Hershman Leeson and archaeologist Michael
Shanks (which explores the ways in which personal archive might be spatialized and
animated within virtual environments) computing-based technologies have been at the
heart of leading-edge arts practices.
Given that new media arts practitioner-researchers are already working successfully
in existing collaborative, multi- and inter-disciplinary teams with interoperable
tools, what contribution might e-Science make to knowledge in this area? On one
level, of course, e-Science fits Bolter and Grusin’s remediation model, in which the
modernist myth of the new is complicated in order to explore the cultural and
aesthetic impact of digital technologies [
Bolter & Grusin 2000]. Nonetheless, by
exploring the specific uses of e-Science in the context of the workshop, the
particular, potential impact on the creative arts can be described.
Locating Grid Technologies Workshops
The physical environment of the Locating Grid Technologies workshop sought to provide
an appropriate space for exploring these questions. The setting was a large,
air-conditioned room on the top floor of Bristol University’s Graduate School of
Education. Space was created for a four-piece improvisational orchestra, microphones
and a large sound-mixing desk. At the front of the room, the reader should imagine a
long stretch of plain, white wall. During the workshop, a man and a woman sit in
front of one computer and another man is at a laptop. A different man stands and
gestures towards the band and towards four web cameras, three of which are mounted at
regular intervals along the blank wall, while the fourth is mounted on the opposite
wall, at the back of the room.
Projected on to the blank, slightly textured wall are several windows, presenting
four different camera points of view of another room, somewhere else. It is clear
that in that other room are also four cameras, set up in much the same way as the
ones in the first room. Those windows frame four differently angled, full-body views
of a woman with loose clothes and bare feet. In three of those windows, we can see
that the woman is joined by several spectators, who sit in a row at the back of the
room. In a fourth window, the camera focuses on the dancer as she faces the
projection wall in her room to keep an eye on what is happening elsewhere. The
orchestra’s conductor signals to begin. A second after the first notes sound, the
dancer begins to dance. The man with the laptop busily makes adjustments that
correspond with camera movements and resizing and repositioning of viewing windows,
which can be layered but not overlaid. The man and the woman at the computer discuss
what is going on both in the flesh in the big room and via the projections from the
other space. They try to map these performances by transforming them into nodes,
lines, text and tags.
The music stops, the dancer settles and the mapping activity is saved.
It begins again, but this time the recordings of band, dancer and mapping are
replayed into the two rooms and performers and participants enter into dialogue with
the artifacts.
These workshops sought to focus on a whole cycle that involved performance, recording
and reworking by using specific e-Science tools, rather than such established
performance media software as MaxMSP, Pure Data, Isadora or Ableton Live. The
objective was to assess the suitability of such research-oriented software and
hardware platforms for creative practice.
Collaboration, Tools and Infrastructure
The research undertaken in these workshops arose specifically out of my interest in
the relationships between events and their documents and the ways in which space is
practiced and transformed across media. This is an interest in things as productive,
shifting, performative. By performative I do not mean activities that are
performance-like or artificial [
Flynn 2002, 50]. Rather, I am keen
to consider the specific material processes by which relations are enacted. Judith
Butler’s argument that the body (and here I would argue both the human and non-human
body) has no “ontological status apart from the
various acts which constitute its reality”
[
Butler 1999, 173] accords with this. I was interested in how both institutional and
computational space (and time) enact specific creative practices but also in how
different creative practices productively transform institutional and computational
space (and time).
As part of the University of Bristol research theme Performativity | Place | Space,
the “Locating Grid Technologies” workshops and symposium
specifically investigated the potential of these Grid technologies to produce new
understandings of space and time for distributed, creative research practices. Key to
the success of the workshop series was the effective interdisciplinary partnership
between the author, as principal investigator, and the Centre for e-Research at the
University of Bristol's Institute for Learning and Research Technology, the Graduate
School of Education and the Access Grid Support Centre at University of Manchester.
The project brought together mixed-mode researchers from the UK, US and Japan to
generate, analyze and re-use audio-visual documents of distributed practice-led
research. In doing so, the project explored fragmentations of space and time in
networked environments by using IOCOM as a telematic performance environment and as a
dissemination tool for other performance forms; by using a range of software
interfaces within IOCOM events to record, annotate and retrieve the meetings; and by
using a Semantic Web database to query that audio-visual archive in such a way as to
facilitate its reuse in performance, in programmed installation environments and in
virtual working environments.
The choice of platforms was based on existing e-Science tools and research
relationships at University of Bristol, which had hitherto not been investigated in
conjunction. IOCOM was already in place as the contracted communications grid
solution and is the dominant platform in the UK’s Higher Education environment. The
project used two of the University of Bristol’s nodes then in existence: a large
“lecture” type room in the Graduate School of Education and a smaller
“panel” type room in the Department of Physics. Furthermore, University of
Bristol has a user group in a project based at University of Manchester that was
developing a suite of software solutions to record, annotate and retrieve
communications grid meetings. The Virtual Research Environment (VRE)
Memetic was a Joint Information Systems
Committee (JISC) initiative that coupled the recording of meetings with the ability
to map information, ideas and arguments via
Compendium software and the replaying
and additional annotation of these documents through
Meeting Replay.
Finally, through my work in the AHRC-funded
PARIP (Practice as Research in
Performance) project (2000–06) I had collaborated with Bristol’s Institute for
Learning and Research Technology (
ILRT) to develop the
PARIP
Explorer Semantic Web tool. PARIP Explorer presents an intuitive,
FOAF-like interface to the end-user
for deep semantic visualization of the connections between people (such as
researchers and artists) and practice-led research outputs (such as performance
documentation and interview transcripts). The objective in the e-Science workshops
was to develop the tool as a proof of concept for the querying of moving image data
in such a way as to facilitate the subsequent use of these media data in performance,
in programmed installation environments and in virtual working environments. In other
words, the workshops aimed to demonstrate how through IOCOM we could devise events
that would be recorded, annotated and replayed within communications grids settings
and could be searched and played through a data grid application for future use in
new creative research practices: production, distribution and use were thus
linked.
Fragmenting and Mapping
Of key interest at this initial workshop were the transformations of living bodies
and immediate proprioception, our sense of how our bodies move in space (see
report for
more details). The fragmenting of performance with musicians in one space and dancer
in another, with audience split between the two spaces, set up a number of
interesting challenges. Both sound and image in a communications grid environment are
marked by significant time lag, making synchronization difficult. Furthermore, due to
the differences between camera view and eye view, it is difficult to establish
effective eye contact. The indexicality of the projected image draws workshop
participants and performers to the eyes of the mediatized face, rather than to the
mechanical camera lens, which in fact stands in for the human eye. A body moving in a
projected image extends an arm and another body in a different space wishes to mirror
that movement. However, as these are not mirror images, the studio-trained dancer has
to learn to move counter-intuitively. The space of the video does not operate
according to the logic of the performance space. New ways of performing have to be
developed in the moment — in the time of performance. At the same time, the various
interfaces between artefact and performance are precisely what structure the
collaboration. Fernandez’s notation is used both to guide the orchestra and to
present prompts for Norman. She does not simply “respond to” the music.
A further transformation occurs with the mapping of these activities via the
Memetic toolkit. The dialogue mapping
through Compendium enhances our understanding of multiple practices of collaboration
by adding a further layer of textual interrogation. In a conventional meeting
setting, Compendium will be used by a single participant to track rhetorical shifts
in discussion and argument. The flow of words can be stopped at any time when someone
requires “clarification.” The aim is to make decision-making more visible.
However, here in real time, we cannot stop the improvisation for such clarification.
At any rate, the clarification of the processes that Norman uses to work within her
space, with the audio and with the architecture of the room that she is in and of the
projected windows has a different set of aims and concerns to those that structure
Orchestra Cube’s improvisation. Although the orchestra refers to Norman’s movements
in relation to Fernandez’s notational prompts, their practice is not spatialized in
the same way as is hers. Norman’s movement works both with and against the forms of
projected images of herself and of the orchestra, whereas the orchestra appears to
work more with what appears within individual frames.
Simon Buckingham Shum and I, who work with Compendium, have to begin to make these
observations in the moment. We cannot predetermine where interesting themes may arise
in the performance, nor can we unproblematically record the performance to revisit
later. Achieving this end is, of course, an impossible task, but the process is still
one that is useful. The speed with which performance occurs allows us to perceive
activities. However, the time that is required to materialize those perceptions as
memory-image ([
Bergson 1912]; [
Connolly 2002, 26–30]) and to transform those into scripts in a piece of software means that the
impossibility of “capturing” liveness is clear. Yet, by looking at what we
do notate, we can begin to consider the relationships between
performance, Compendium operators and the affordances of the software. On one level,
Compendium allows spectator-participants to mark points of interest that might be
revisited for further discussion. Those points of interest are themselves situated
nodes in the process of transforming performance event into text: the spikes of
activity that they indicate do not necessarily point towards spikes of intensity in
performance. This transformation thus renders some aspects of the performance
invisible or absent, while presencing other points in the performance. In other
words, Compendium produces new performatives which can neither be separated from the
performance nor be wholly coterminous with it.
The recording, mapping and annotating of fragmented performance brings to the fore
those exact qualities of the live event that escape documentation. When used within
conventional meeting scenarios, these technologies seek to smooth out chance,
accident and intuition in favour of design, planning and a sense of teleological
progress, transforming dialogue into blueprint. When applied within the context of
creative event, the arbitrariness of decision-making and the excessiveness of the
live are enacted via the technologies.
Describing and Connecting
The first workshop generated a range of audio-visual media, from photographs to the
Memetic recordings held on Manchester University’s servers. The second workshop
focused on using these to develop ways in which media data might be linked via the
Semantic Web database application. I wanted to explore this in order to ask how other
researchers might gain access to these kinds of research practices to generate
further practice-as-research projects. While Memetic recording metadata are stored as
RDF in the Manchester databases, the information is only accessible via the Memetic
interface. But what if practitioner-researchers could use an online tool to search
for and play a wide range of practice documents, from short QuickTime movies and
still images to Memetic recordings? How might the practice-as-research communities
themselves inform the processes by which such distributed resources are described and
connected through a single interface?
The second workshop focused on presentations that introduced and described the field
of data grids for participants so that we could begin to work with the Memetic
recordings produced in the first workshop. Nikki Rogers (ILRT) demonstrated a
proof-of-concept interface between PARIP Explorer and Memetic that had been developed
by Rogers, Ale Fernandez and Damien Steer. This allowed PARIP Explorer to query the
Memetic database. When search terms such as “Kyra Norman,”
“Angela Piccini” or “University of Bristol” were entered, still images from
the first workshop’s Memetic meeting were visualized in relation to the other
information held about these people and institutions. When combined with the full
Memetic functionality, there would be the potential to drill down into specific
moments of Memetic meetings that were tagged with the relevant keywords. In effect,
were a user to search for dance, improvisation and space, she might well be faced
with a window showing text, still images, relationships and a video-playing window
that would play the video recording and Compendium mapping of that meeting from the
point that was tagged.
The resulting fracturing of performance documentation and its reconfiguration via a
two-dimensional “map” of practice-as-research further flattens practice. At the
same time, via the projected window, this map extends the practices of the first
workshop into a much broader international setting of cognate work. Where people,
institutions and practices are rendered as abstract symbols, the ability to expand
graphical relationships among actors continually points beyond the perceived lack of
the document to the absent times and spaces of the performances to which they
refer.
In order to locate materials they must be described in such a way that both the
machine and their varied human users may find them. PARIP Explorer uses RDF to
describe its contents and the simple relationships between objects. This description
is combined with an ontology based on
Web
Ontology Language (OWL) to describe the properties, characteristics and
classes of those objects and their relationships. All of this data is queried through
the
SPARQL query language
for RDF. RDF relies on a consistent ontology; that is, on a formal description of
concepts, relationships and terms within a field. While this makes sense for
developers seeking to produce real-world demonstrators of semantic web tools, users
now accustomed to Web 2.0 models of interacting with online materials want to be able
to generate their own descriptions of and comments about these online resources.
By combining a user-generated component with the semantic web tool, we create the
potential to build new relationships into these media data. Not only may a wide range
of screen grammar terms be built in, such as camera angles and movements, but
spectator memory and performers’ experiences of the space and time of the performance
may be attached as metadata to the space and time of the video. If we consider the
use-case scenarios for these materials, since PARIP Explorer does not hold media
files but rather mines them from other repositories, there is a liveness to the
experience of using the database. If we consider the potential for search and use of
media artefacts within subsequent practice-as-research contexts, there are a range of
material concerns that practitioner-researchers might wish to highlight, having to do
with the reappropriation of those documents within a performance event when these
fragments of video time are connected to be transformed once again into the logic of
the live event. In particular, the spatial and temporal logics of the live event may
be transformed into these metadata. The aim is not to suggest that in providing this
form of almost choreographic notation the artist may reproduce the time and space of
the initial performance event. Instead, attention to the spatial relationships among
data produces new spatial orientations towards the performance event and beyond.
Combining and Remediating
The promise of e-Science tools and technologies is their extensibility and
reconfigurability. The ability to sample and combine data in new contexts has been at
the heart of much art production in this field. By combining the production of
performance documents in communications grids with the generative description and
visualisation of those documents within a data grid, comes the potential for new,
remediated works that seek to layer visualized space and time to trouble the
boundaries of where and when events begin and end. These are questions of memory and
forgetting, too. If, as Paul Ricoeur says, memory is an act of telling otherwise [
Ricoeur 1999], then the memories that accrue to the media objects held
within databases in the form of tags and comments might usefully complicate any
direct associations that may be made between events and their documents.
In the third and final workshop, participants drew from the activities of the first
two to consider how these media fragments might feed in to subsequent small-scale
collaborations. A distributed improvisation using IOCOM, the Memetic recordings of
the first workshop and elements of PARIP Explorer saw Bristol meet with Jem Kelly and
a group of his University College Chichester undergraduate performance students in
Southampton’s Access Grid node; with the sound poetry collective
mmmmm
http://www.mmmmm.org.uk, who participated
from Imperial College London using voice and objects; and with the Access Grid
Support Centre in Manchester. Dancers, musicians, poets, performers, visual artists,
film makers, digital artists, sound artists, archive-based researchers and e-Science
researchers participated in a series of “call-and-response” exercises. These
were intended to explore the impact of locational context on performance. Each node
took it in turn to initiate an improvisatory practice that subsequent nodes would
then follow.
By bringing together a very large group of people who do not ordinarily work
together, we were keen to test the limits of these technologies in order to highlight
research and development potential for developers. This final workshop scenario thus
explored how people’s existing practices, developed within other institutional
contexts and via heterogeneous technologies, might be transformed through an
engagement with the e-Science agenda. Clearly, a significant barrier to the
production of sustained creative research was the workshop structure itself and also
the collaboration with independent artists already familiar with a diverse range of
computing tools and platforms. Those who had worked in distributed networks and
engaged in traditional telematic art were underwhelmed by the capabilities of
e-Science. Yet, the university setting in which these workshops took place is
unaccustomed to these multi-disciplinary practices. Despite the fact that the Drama
and Computer Science departments at the University of Bristol are among the foremost
in the UK, very little sustained collaboration between the two has taken place
outside of functional approaches to making data more easily accessible. E-Science
presented the opportunity to begin to build a culture in which transdisciplinary
laboratories could begin to be planned.
What became clear, however, is that by the end of this workshop series, in a funding
structure that supported only minimal work on either side of each workshop,
participants had learned to understand and begun to work creatively with the
affordances of the e-Science tools. Once the formality of the room architecture and
furniture had been disrupted on a number of occasions, and once the seeming
inflexibility of the corporate audio-visual configuration had been disrupted, with
web cameras removed from mountings and projectors swivelled to face in multiple
directions, it became clear that e-Science tools can provide a similar creative
impetus to existing telematic, distributed and digital performance and art platforms.
That is, throughout the workshop context, it was the analogue space of the
institutional rooms and the conferencing configuration of the hardware that
constrained potential collaboration. No artist would choose to create work in these
kinds of spaces. Nonetheless, the dialectical relationship between arts practice and
e-Science quickly indicates that migrating creative practices into institutional
spaces of the university that are designed for classes, seminars and lectures and
constraining that creative practice within the temporalities of e-Science is a highly
useful method for identifying research and development needs. This may not be
appropriate for the production of “good art.” Yet, at this moment in the UK
sector, the opportunity to play with and stretch tools and technologies and the very
modest funding structures in place for this has meant that only fairly tentative
progress can be made. Thus, it is particularly heartening that the Bedford e-Dance
project was the sole successful applicant in the 2007 AHRC e-Science research strand
as it provides the only continuity between my own workshops and fully-funded work in
this area.
Aesthetics, Space and Time
As indicated previously, defining and exploring the performative limitations of the
institutionalized spaces of e-Science is a key question. The use of IOCOM
grid-enabled lecture-room spaces placed constraints around what was achievable. Fixed
cameras, microphones, speakers and projection surfaces, air conditioning, fluorescent
lighting, carpet glue, concrete floors and chairs with built-in desks all suggest
particular sets of activities, which were not ours. At the same time, the apparent
fixity of those spaces clearly inspired workshop participants to push at their
limitations. Unlike a multimedia CAVE environment, which is set up to facilitate a
wide range of immersive events, the rooms in universities that house the kinds of
tools and technologies that artists wish to use are very often not conducive to fully
realized art works.
These spaces were mediatized via our range of e-Science tools into frames that are
themselves suggestive of a techno-corporate situation. While the proprioceptive
implications of distributed performance have been discussed at length within digital
performance contexts (e.g. [
Birringer 1999]), what are the implications
of embodied experiences of moving in a room while watching the projected image of
oneself and others where that image is framed with corporate branding and within
which further software is being manipulated? The branding of academic research
outputs places multiple filters on to the experience of event. IOCOM windows bear the
IOCOM logo and the name of the institution in the banner that runs across the top,
placing a very clear frame around the image. The fact that windows can be tiled yet
cannot be overlaid with any kind of transparency also maintains the discrete identity
of each grid node. When using the off-the-shelf IOCOM software the
practitioner-researcher cannot mix institutions to create a hybrid space, despite the
ubiquity of the third space within telematic work. Bedford’s e-Dance project has
faced similar issues and is working with its dedicated programmers who are able
reconfigure the communications grid interface to produce frames that respond
specifically to the aesthetic and conceptual concerns of individual projects.
Yet, such issues do not necessarily have to be considered within such a negative
framework. While the technical glitches, the time lag between image and sound, and
the low image quality of the H.261 video codec used in the communications grid may
suggest failure, they provide an interesting aesthetic counterpoint to the seeming
verisimilitude and heightened realism of much digital media art. They introduce an
impressionistic quality to the practice that works against the stark borders of the
frame and the precision of the software applications that appear in separate windows.
The interplay between the fully haptic experience of the event, the highly compressed
flatness of the video images and mono sound and the crisp graphical transformation of
both into the database present specific aesthetic and conceptual possibilities for
the practitioner-researcher. Specifically, a material concern with projection and
performance surfaces as architectures (see [
Imperiale 2000]; [
Leatherbarrow & Mostafavi 2002]) offers the artist a way to think about the
interpenetrations of the different media through a focus on different forms of skins
and transparencies. Despite the apparent blank solidity of the IOCOM node projection
walls, their slight texture breaks up the light and produces a micro landscape of
projected image. Moreover, the image itself seemingly erases the wall in that we no
longer act as though we see it. Instead, we react to the image, rather than to the
wall. The wall becomes both window into another world and, at the same time, the
ability to project on to its surface reproduces a certain solidity.
Similarly, the materiality of the projection surface is both reproduced through its
use and rendered invisible as it becomes another desktop on which data is
manipulated, moved and positioned within a flow of juxtapositions. Bodies, video
projections and computer visualizations can be flattened into the same conceptual
space when they are all treated as equally framed data to be resized, minimized,
maximized or redeployed at will. Where communications grid “drivers” may be
concerned to ensure that the windows are aligned and rigidly organized, this enacts a
conferencing logic at odds with a focus on the specificity of such placement as
aesthetic-conceptual choice. In the field of telematic, distributed art practice,
technicians and artists are often the same people and there is a heightened awareness
of the importance of placement and framing. The collaboration between e-Science and
the creative arts presents a useful challenge to the developers of these tools and
technologies to attend more closely to the materialities of their practices and how
these may shape research outcomes.
Arguably, the spatializing practices of PARIP Explorer and similar semantic web
databases raise more troubling questions about the political implications for
creative artists adopting e-Science tools and technologies. With its emphasis on
mapping technologies, the role of cartography within research, e-Science presents
interesting intellectual challenges to those of us who agree with Herman Melville
that “It is not down on any map; true places
never are”
[
Melville 1994, 70]. Given the ways in which e-Science is implicated within the
military-industrial discourses of U.S. cyberinfrastructure, if arts
practitioner-researchers are to engage with the agenda in an informed way then we
have to find ways in which, through these spatializing practices, we can point always
to that which exceeds the map. A clear and often-quoted example of the political
implications of this was John Poindexter’s Information Awareness Office, established
by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). Although defunded in
2003, at the time Poindexter argued,
We must become much more efficient
and more clever in the ways we find new sources of data, mine information from
the new and old, generate information, make it available for analysis, convert
it to knowledge, and create actionable options…. Tools are needed to facilitate
these collaborations, and to support these teams that work to ensure our
security…. Doug Dyer is starting a new program called Genisys, which addresses
our database needs. This project will imagine and develop ultra-large-scale,
semantically rich, easily implementable database technologies. One goal is to
develop ways of treating the world-wide, distributed, legacy data bases as if
they were one centralized data base, and another is to develop privacy
protection technologies.
[Poindexter 2002]
Artists need to remain cautious of the seemingly democratic potential of
making their work so highly visible. Such issues underlie what is commonly argued to
be the radical potential of live performance [
Phelan 1993]. Because the
event does not produce a single object to be tagged and re-circulated, to some extent
it escapes surveillance. Yet, in engaging with networked technologies artists can use
the logic of late capitalism to critique the very idea of “total information
awareness” in that the work must always exceeds its documenting or mapping
apparatuses. The challenge is to produce artwork that works with the affordances of
e-Science to question the politics behind its production. In this way, arts practices
engaging with e-Science may share concerns with some within the
Locative Media communities, who use mobile
phone, GPS and a range of mapping technologies to critique the surveillance society
through participatory arts practices [
Galloway 2008]. E-Science is both
performative of the desire to invent engines that will make visible and locatable all
knowledges across time and space and the impossibility of that desire. It is
performative of its own failure, yet in that failure lays its potential.
Both the potentialities and pitfalls of e-Science tools and technologies present
fertile material for the arts researcher, particularly within the area of
practice-based research: from the politics of surveillance to the aesthetics of video
compression, from the ethics of multidisciplinary collaboration to the theoretical
implications of mixing video time and space with the time and space of the
performance event. Of course, technologies are always-already performative of the
cultures from which they are developed. They express what we collectively deem
important and while they open up certain avenues of research they must also close
down others. Friedrich Kittler has argued that we can never “understand” media
because media themselves control the possibilities of understanding, because there is
no place outside of media from which to understand it [
Kittler 1999].
The UK’s e-Science agenda presents researchers with an exciting opportunity to
research through practice the limits of knowledge within a particular moment of
intensified academic globalization. I feel very privileged to have been a small part
of the first steps in the arts and look forward with interest to the challenges that
lie ahead.
Appendix
Locating Grid Technologies: Performativity, Place, Space: Challenging the
Institutionalized Spaces of e-Science. The eight camera views and streamed computer
screen all document the 40-minute afternoon performance within Workshop 1. Each
camera view is a direct feed through the INSORS grid system rather than being
generated by independent video cameras.
Cameras Cam1-4 show the Graduate School of Education INSORS grid node activities.
Cameras 2Cam1-4 document activities taking place in the Physics Department INSORS
Grid node. Simon Buckingham Shum, Orchestra Cube and the workshop team present and
perform in the Graduate School of Education node. Kyra Norman performs in Physics and
we also see Tobias Blanke of the Arts and Humanities e-Science Support Centre, Nick
Kaye (Exeter University), Sita Popat (University of Leeds), Michael Daw (University
of Manchester), Nigel Derrett (University of Bristol). The workshop, however, takes
place both within these specific places, across the network and across the surfaces
of the fragmented screens. Each of the camera viewpoints is projected on to the walls
of each node space and the windows are arranged and resized by users over the course
of the workshop.
Simon Buckingham Shum, Open University, and member of the Memetic VRE project,
demonstrates Compendium as a dialogue mapping tool for use in the creative and
performing arts. At the 14-minute mark, Ale Fernandez of Orchestra Cube speaks. He
introduces Orchestra Cube and his conducting exercise, which uses a range of
notational symbols streamed over the network. He discusses how dancer Kyra Norman,
who is located in the second grid location (shown by videos with the 2cam suffix),
may respond to both the streamed notation and the Orchestra's performance. Ale then
introduces a series of exercises in which performers in each grid location
participate. The documentation ends with all participants being thanked.
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