• WorkshopDay2

• Some interesting presentations and discussions to get us going in the morning. Following Steve Dixon's showing (The Chameleons, Brunel Uni), we talked about intimacy, relationship, "real contact" etc. Would be useful to have links to Steve's work and also to related subjects such as Paul Sermon's telematics work, our peers' work from the group and the recent conference about intimacy at Goldsmiths.

Here are my notes from that discussion: "Cheap interactivity" e.g. zapping the screen, talking to your screen double. (Artaud - Theatre & it's Double as point of ref)

Scale and perspective. Physical hybrids. The screen in performance can be omnipresent - in THe Chameleon's work that we see it is a parellel and constant double, often splitting further through use of split screen and mirrors. A seance with spirit-like presences that are there in real time but not in body (networked bluescreen play with audience and actors)

• "I have so much fear in this place" Quote from Chameleon's show.
• THE THIRD SPACE - the screen space where audience and (pre-recorded) performers meet and inhabit. Audience members can become absorbed by the mis-en-scene of jsut being there. Is the intimacy true or is the dissonance of having to respond and orient yourself in this new space part of what jump starts the emotions you encounter in this space?

Feedback on open interactive performance and online theatre - don't let the audience write the script (top tip) as 1) loss of narrative potential 2) issues of power and sadism - make the monkeys dance etc 3) better if accomplished writers are involved and can develop the narrative. Steve's experience of online theatre particulalry telling - the real interactivity is in the chat room and the end product of the theatre is awful reductioist improv that the actors hated doing!

• What is the next stage of interactivity?

Role of performer in blue screen env? Text or performer's speech can denote the quest / action / direction - gives pointers to the other parts of the game map - 'where would you like to go?'

Here are some of the further questions and bigger picture discussion that arose out of this and how it led to the tasks we posed ourselves today,working with avatars in Second Life.

• AIM - making performance interventions using avatars in a virtual world. CONSIDERATIONS - What ethics of intervention and relationship are we using? Who is it for? Who / what benefits? Can this be open access or limited, in terms of numbers of avatars participating? How many? Is it an obvious or subtle performance? What responses do you expect in a heavily-populated multi-player environment such as Second Life?

  we split into small working groups to work on building avatars, then devise our interventions or scenarios from this. One group (SY, SIMON, JON & STEVE) worked on a fixed performance of an extract of ENDGAME by Beckett, that would be an explicit and obvious performance. Another group were working within the constraints of dance and other gestures available to programme avatars, as tools for flashdance and collective dance experiences in Second Life. This was the start of an interesting process that would need more time to develop and publicise, in order to give time for other participants to program their avatars with the appropriate tools/gestures, and also to gather interest, ad space and word of mouth on Second Life.

• Mel

• Are games art? This seemed to be a big question, which I couldn't get very interested in. Oh no Do games promote an aesthetic response? Yes But does that make them art? No Wh Interesting to hear about games beign in their infancy; reminds me of the talk about there being a lack of dance theory. Dance theorists want to put down a marker to say "this is unlike any other art form"

Unnatural

• Be careful what you say

Play theory is well established game/theory 2

LTalking and operating simultaneously

• negotiating my body's response

  • & verbal/cognitive

• this you do a lot while playing games

lovely

• Endgame was trying to work from an existing text within the game this highlighted key differences
• Simon says they were approaching it traditionally is/isn't the game environment is theatrical
• illusory
• we inhabit it
  • throu a character

game avatar representation/ theatrical

• close in terms of playing out ourselves

Jon said

• performance in the style of Trigger happy tv
  • general public
    • in se4cond life is in a different mode they're performing

You could do it in the style of THTV

• infringe their space are people aware of cameras?
• Simon says they were approaching it traditionally is/isn't the game environment is theatrical
• illusory
• we inhabit it
  • throu a character

game avatar representation/ theatrical

• close in terms of playing out ourselves

Jon said

• performance in the style of Trigger happy tv
  • general public
    • in se4cond life is in a different mode they're performing

You could do it in the style of THTV

• infringe their space are people aware of cameras?

• End of edit conflict

• doing their own thing (performatively)

the couple in the bar

• performing
• to each other

ruining that is ethically unsound community arts ethic more acceptable

What's the difference between interrupting someone's perfomrmance and interrupting the r daytoday engaggemenst

• sitting int he park
  • everyday life as performance
• What's my response?

(Barry and Kyra)

What were we saying?

• A kind of telematic performance as much as working in Second Life - mediated conversation through text (typing/speaking) - provokes anxiety One of the main features of my interactions with these new technologies - very new to me - causes anxiety interesting

interesting to look at unreal tournament - handicapped and able differently experience (like golf) wiped out by Sy and Simon! within a limited range of activity - quite frustrating/ or not the avatar has a limited perceptual range - very restricted field of vision - no kinetic or tactile sensation, or auditory - I got completely lost in a very small virtual space

• the construction of the level - it's like an experiment for rats or gerbils - features you can't conceptually focus - literally identical (disorientating) same visual texture, nothing to distinguish any one space from another

playing as a group, I had no memory of what my avatar looked like, and I couldn't see it - a red mist...doomed!! somebody's on a killing spree

disappointment that when you killed someone, nothing changed at all - eventually they just reappeared

• You have been reading the blog comments of Kyra, Barry and Sita

• The differing approaches to making this kind of work - suspension of disbelief and immersion allied to a wow factor or critical reflexivity/distancing in the Brechtian sense...

There was discussion in the morning regarding the ways in which telematic performance acts as a short circuit or jump allowing for a more immediate sense of intimacy between users. This struck me as immensly problematic as it alludes to a normative level of intimacy in human interactions against which telematics can be judged. Indeed - many sociological studies of computer mediated communications have argued for the opposite effect of mediation - however this equally appears to be overly reductive - perhaps a more useful approach would be to ask how or in what ways do users within telematic/avatar representations afford an increased level of intimacy, and in what ways do they promote a distacing from empathic connectivity.

The 'democratisation' of animation tools... Using the character designer in Second Life it struck me that this is a free tool which allows users with no technical programming skills to create complex avatars which only a few years ago would have required expensive (and often complicated) modelling software. Equally the variety of preexisting locations within the Second Life universe affords potential directors a large number of sets which - although aesthetically contained by the constrainst of the software as a design tool - allowed us to situate our performance in an environment with minimal effort on our part. While creating this kind of work from scratch would have taken a large amount of time and technical skill the software is open ended enough to allow for creative repurposing by groups of people without large amounts of specialist knowledge. However - what became apparent as we blocked and rehearsed out piece was that the skills we collectively had as film and theatre directors/performers/technicians were highly transferable to this kind of work.

The difference between using these tools for the creation of scripted performance (closed set) vs the use of these tools for creating collaborative work involving the inhabitants of Second Life... The latter option seems more conceptually appealing to me, but actually involves a different process (probably over a longer period of time) and carries a much greater risk of 'failure' due to the impossibilty of predicting the way that other users will react to the game/performance. However I'd be interested in pursuing this kind of participatory distributed work in future.

Overall a really intersting and enjoyable couple of days with a lovely group of people

Sy.

<simon says>

• i was surprised by the outcomes of the day the piece we made based on end game underlined some of the strengths and weaknesses of wokrking in this way the experience as a virtual puppeteer was not at all simelar to that of traditional puppeteering. the procces was much more like a location shoot. we blocked out a scene and rehearsed the camera moves. the puppeteering was reduced to activating a set of pre existant behaviors and lacked the tactile interface of traditional puppetry. the results were interesting. though i no way as polished as an equivalent piece of animation produced by one of the major packages, they were impressive when considering the amount of time it took to develop them. i missed the sound part of the day so nothing to say there i think the best thing about the process here was the participants. the dialogue and debate generated were excelent the interface of games and art leaves me with a question though. with the popularisation of cross art gaming projects has come the mixing of these two communities but what attempt has been made to mediate the relationship between them? the potential knowledge exchange is exciting- no doubt. but how are these two communities going to be able to understand each others particular histories and stand point? so what now? im interested i the next stage of this process. where do we go from here? a lot of ground has been covered in these two days lots of interesting avenues ave been exposed. we now need to find a way of following some of these up i hope we do

  </simon says>