by Craig Reynolds
Although the mechanics of traditional printed materials (pages marching forward in strict succession) privileges narrative content, each page paradoxically functions as its own distinct canvas. Only propriety keeps the fragmented page silent. Narrative is a traditional method of overcoming the fragmentation inherent in print media.
When I attempt to focus on two written statements simultaneously I actually only see one, with the memory of the other superimposed. Although writing is conventionally thought to act as a pure conductor of meaning, each new page fragments the linear flow, initiating narrative self-erasure. Written texts continuously reload themselves through the imaginative re-invention of that which is absent.
1.
In a world increasingly defined by hypertextual dynamics, it has become impossible to assume the stability of modern modes of communication (from linguistic conventions to data media), or indeed, of the information passed through these channels. On the web, information uproots itself from traditional narrative constructs, problematizing what we learn and how we learn it. With one click of a hyperlink, entire chapters of human history can be voided in favor of some hipster’s ode to bad ‘80s haircuts. At the same time, the littlest thoughts––John Adams was the father of the pioneer American mullet––can multiply through various permutations before reaching enormous capacity, merging with a topic, such as Chinese Communism, that seemingly retains no causal relationship to the genesis text.
Information today exists in this pregnant, non-reversible vacuum. While it’s true that the web can be used to pinpoint specific information (that is, to narrow down a topic), web-surfing is the perfect activity for an era in which information no longer defines itself by context and meaning drifts forever toward infinite enlargement. Electronica and hip-hop styles, which tend to recontextualize old musics born from more traditional conceptions of the "reality" of information, assume a degree of incompletion. Samples are taken and incomplete tracks are released for use by DJs pursuing their own recombinations, which multiply infinitely. Information serves merely as currency for transaction, not as a hard and fast text to follow, and writing, art, music, etc. amounts to nothing more than the creative manipulation of inherently disembodied information (meaning is not to be found in the source texts but in their arrangement and juxtaposition in the here and now). In this way, the hypertextual potential of the Internet fundamentally contradicts the narrative impulse of Western Culture, thereby heralding a new era of information transfer and media understanding.
But what of traditional modes of communicating information, such as performance, writing and music? In writing, hypertextual capabilities render beginnings and ends impossible in so far as web transmissions refuse the mechanical conventions of printed books, setting them free from conventional narrative structures. Whereas books proceed forward from page 1 to page end, top to bottom, left to right, the computer sets the wandering eye free to follow the non-narrative directives of the human imagination, distinct from the literary conventions encoded in books. Interactivity characterizes the experience, thereby de-centering the locus of meaning in a written e-work. Hypertext opens itself up to participation, discontextualization, recombination, erasure and juxtaposition, emptying itself into the world of the web, thereby exploding the confines of any author’s autocratic dictates (traditionally supported by the mechanical conventions of books and the formal narrative structures they beget).
The point of ththis treatment, however, is not to celebrate the internet but to explore the new non-narrative impulse and how it relates to various modes of live performance (which traditionally depend on conventional modes of information transfer). At a conventional theatrical play, for example, the audience is wholly subordinate to the performance, and any interruption has the capacity to break the spell. It is assumed from the start that the audience will graciously play this subservient role, and never actively take part in the performance except as a passive receiver of stimulation (this is the unspoken contract through which the audience will be awarded the magic of great theater). In music as well, this relationship usually rules: even at a bar where other activity inherently exists, musicians need to be the point of orientation. If the audience is not captured by the performance then it is considered a failure. If the audience chooses something else upon which to focus their attention, then the transaction seems pointless.
Through this understanding of traditional audience/performance/performance dynamics (and being prone personally towards claustrophobia and frustration when forced to view traditional media in traditional fashion), I have attempted to program musical events the formal articulation of which is consistent with this new non-linear sensibility. Although there is clearly a great degree of work still to be done, we have explored several different techniques by which to break down the linear arguments of self-styled genius authors (and the formal structures that support their claims to exultation), one primary example being audience interactivity.
Although "interactivity" has been embraced by the likes of art gallery education departments seeking to break down the wall between art and the general public, and by theater development departments proposing post-show actor talk-backs and other behind-the-scenes looks designed to increase public interest in the art form, my mandate is not to create avenues of accessibility into artistically closed and /or formally traditional work. Rather, my hope is to create, propose and support visual, verbal, musical and performance works whose method answers the call of the new era of creative interactivity.
2.
The possibility of programming simultaneous performances in an in-common space, thereby activating collage possibilities common to 2-dimensional art, has fascinated me since the first Murder the Word, when information principles familiar to me from purely textual experiments jumped to life as completely unforeseen but wholly welcome information surprises. One of the best moments, captured on Basta! Bootleg #1: Music From and For Murder the Word, finds performers on 4 different stages negotiating an in-common transition: DJ Marcos pulls back, allowing the record to stutter and pop, slowing down and speeding up as Jason Pfaff and Ribcage tentatively work towards the beginning of their techno/rock set; in the meantime, I continue a chime text that booms out of context from elsewhere in the room (consisting of every word in the dictionary that can be spelled on a keyboard, picked and played at random in 4 movements, with the aid of a 4-track recorder) and Joe Bacon growls sudden, improvised poetry into an amplified toilet bowl (brilliantly, "why am I in parenthesis? Why am I always in parenthesis?"). Somehow, these 4 entirely unrelated submissions, hedged tentatively against the silence of no rules, manifests a freeform, accidental sonata performed by the event itself (which in effect functioned as an all-over orchestra). Information impregnation was everywhere apparent and at the best moments, enthusiastically embraced by both performers and audience members alike. Although of course some audience members were confused by this all-over method of presentation, I am always delighted by accidental juxtaposition (which, through this process of discontextualization, de-centers the assumed meaning of a piece of information, setting it free). The alchemical brushing of information against information, which creates new data on the playground of non-meaning, was the primary focus of the first Murder the Word, and possibly, its most exciting legacy.
But I am also intrigued by the more complex effects of multiplication and by extension, negation/erasure that result from simultaneity. I am absorbed by what is not there, what is buried, what is lost. Coming from Buffalo, I am intrigued by works of art that lose themselves as a condition of their existence.
In traditional visual collage, the inherent entropy of layering/fragmentation seems far less offensive. We tend to assume that the final image is in effect an assemblage of the most interesting parts of the source materials, enhanced by the artist. But with collaged writing (which collects fragments of what is more easily understood as meaningful information), this dynamic crumbles. Unlike images, which retain meaning even as they are fragmented (a cropped image of a head, centered on the lips, still conveys a semblance of itself even if it no longer communicates an image of the entire head), units of verbal meaning tend to break down if they are not delivered in completed sentence form—that is, in strict accordance with the medium’s formal contract with itself. A single word or disembodied combination of words may not necessarily convey a definite statement, nullifying the utterance altogether. Of course, it’s doubtful that the full sentence ever actually carried adequate information to convey non-entropic meaning--and you could lodge the same complaint against a less fragmented visual image (certainly every visual image is merely a fragment of a larger picture which can never be contained)—but on a non-theoretical level, nullification or nonsense marks the average person’s experience of fragmented linguistic information. In effect, the degree of entropy exhibited as a result of linguistic collage seems to effectuate the collapse of communication.
A second dynamic worth noting comes into play with linguistic collage: to fully comprehend a word, a reader’s eye must focus on the word itself, the letters. Try looking at this page without specifically focusing on one piece of information to understand how difficult it is to experience cognitively 2 different pieces of information simultaneously. Cognitively, you don’t read what you don’t focus your gaze upon, so on the page, a choice must be made, rendering the reader a participant in erasure, even if the choice seems to result in increased understandability. In this way, from the author’s standpoint, information exists and is lost simultaneously, achieving a pure, intangible presence beyond the reader. In performance, the dynamics are complex and varied and often encompass all of these aspects simultaneously. It’s certainly possible for one performance in a multi-act happening to overpower the other sonically, visually or theatrically. One performer may be so loud that the other cannot be heard, or one performance could take place in front of the other, erasing the visual stimuli. It’s possible that 2 or more things happening at once will cause the audience to choose a focus-point, initiating erasure, and it’s also possible that all stimuli will blend together in a large performative soup. In this way, simultaneity allows information to slide between multiplication, subtraction, addition and division, all of which replace clear transmission of a complete statement as the modus operundi of twenty-first century texts.
3.
Although a deliberate attempt has been made, through the non-visual programming at Big Orbit, to re-direct patterns of visual and/or aural perception, the Visual Arts Program has been surprisingly consistent with this aim, allowing for some interesting trans-media experiments. In large part, the Visual program has proved structurally challenging due to the overwhelming nature of the 2 shows occupying the gallery during the fall of 2000. First, Mehrdad Hadighi and Frank Fantauzzi, architects teaching at UB, built a large cube of warehouse pallets, out of which a giant egg was cut and placed in the courtyard behind the space, where it retained an iconic quality. The original cube, however, jammed the icehouse, forcing audiences to relate to the piece in ways that usually they do not have to. In addition to the beautiful and strange tunnel left after the voided egg, audiences could walk around the periphery of the piece, but the space was minimal, although charged by the forced redirection of perception.
Happily, we were given the opportunity to program a bill of 3 groups that perform with film or video projections: Noggin, Treelinedhighway and Hylozoa. Not only did the idea that a musical performance was going to take place require the musicians to engage the space; the added visual element allowed them to do so in a creative way. Both Noggin and Hylozoa performed inside the tunnel, backed by a scrim that covered the entrance to the egg, further complicating the audience’s motion while adding to the creative stimuli. Hilariously, this increased creativity had an adverse experience on traditional viewing methods. Although the tunnel created an amazing background for their howling jazz and noise respectively, it didn’t actually allow anybody to view the performance, as there was only about 2 feet between the entrance to the tunnel and the wall. As a result, only about a dozen people could actually see the performance. Others watched from behind the scrim, merging the live image feedback with the shadowy reality on the other side of it, or peered through the spaces in the pallets, forever fragmenting their gaze. During Noggin’s performance, scratched up film stock with scratchy noise soundtracks were projected on the walls outside the cube and in the courtyard, beside the egg, providing for flow throughout the space in defiance of the impediment being engaged.
Similarly, the next show, Kurt Von Voetsch and Patrick Robideau’s Whole Lotta Chugger Behind a Whole Lotta Pat, completely convoluted the viewer’s gaze, presenting an enigmatic narrative through inadequate portals of perception. To begin with, the piece consisted of a house that once again occupied the lion’s share of the space, out the attic window of which was projected live footage of a tattoo artist drawing the face of each Von Voetsch and Robideau on the belly of a dead pig. At the opening, the house was sealed and inside, Von Voetsch did a performance which consisted of him in a Conquistador collar sewing drawings into the belly of the pig and burying it beneath the floorboards of the house. From the outside, audiences could only peer through one of the 4 windows into the space: 1 allowed the viewer to see a lit table on which the tattooed pigs were placed, another gave visual access to the fireplace through which Von Voetsch crawled back and forth in order to get between the pig table and a 3rd room, where he tore the floorboards up and buried the pigs and drawings. 2 other windows gave access to the floorboard space: 1 framed the spotlit hole into which Von Voetsch had deposited these items; the other, just over the hole, provided a direct gaze. What interested me about this piece was the way that it controlled the viewer’s eye, frustrating it and yet pulling it into a voyeuristic marriage with the performance. Nobody stood and watched the whole performance; rather, they would dip toward a window and peek in to see what was happening. If they had chosen the wrong window, they might just see the shadowy room where something creepy and mysterious seemed to be developing. Even if they did see some activity, Von Voetsch’s movement through the space would fragment their gaze. The image was continually fleeting, like the mystery of what exactly we were seeing through our allotted portals. The elusiveness of meaning and the breakdown of the viewer’s apparatus of collecting meaning rendered the piece interesting in light of Big Orbit’s larger investigations pf the nature of information transfer at the time.
4.
2 events we had planned for Big Orbit this year were conceived in hopes of achieving new modes of audience interactivity in a performance environment. The first, DJ/Atari Symphony for Turntables and Video Games (featuring the Knowmatic Tribe), did not achieve the heights of interactivity that we had envisioned (primarily due to technical difficulties). The second performance, based on Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, has not occurred yet and may go back to the drawing board after we present a similarly-developed concept-performance, (Sub)Merge. All 3 performances consider material proposed by the audience at the moment of its actualization.
Updating a concept we debuted at Murder the Word 3, the Atari/DJ Symphony for Turntables and Video Games saw the Knowmatic Tribe spinning on 6 turntables simultaneously while mixing in digital bleeps and bit-mapped blops generated by 20 Atari games played on monitors and scrims arranged around the gallery. Although half the fun of this event was in revisiting the playthings of our youth (which also marked the first stirrings of a digital revolution), the form of the performance consisted mostly of the manipulation of found data. To begin with, there were the 6 turntables, on which the DJs negotiated continuously fluctuating interrelationships, but the video games also provided a kind of chance material that could be layered in without any foreknowledge of how the sound would develop. The final “sound mash” as DJ Marcos referred to it, was in essence a hypertextual performance realized entirely through sonic information. The music (including rhythms, sounds, musical textures) provided links to other pieces of information (a new record that could be worked consistently into the mix). Over the course of the evening’s show, the whole performance was like a long evening on the internet, as the DJs negotiated a non-narrative stream of discontextualized cultural data. In addition, because this “Soundlab” event actually followed a screening, on 6 surfaces and the 20 monitors, of Modulations, a documentary film which traces the development of electronic music from early avant-garde innovation to current manifestations of digital culture, the performance suggested a larger vision of how cultural data functions (and what our creative output could amount to) in the new, hypertextual millenium.
Although the Atari/DJ Symphony did employ certain structural elements, such as rhythm and melody, that gave it a definite form, I am particularly interested in jumping into the realm of the completely unfixed. In this regard, I have been looking forward for some time to working with Jonathan Hughes on a project he had proposed based on the oblique strategy cards of Brian Eno. Designed to inspire creativity, the cards, which featured questions and statements such as “what is the sound of red?”, would be used by Eno and the likes of David Bowie to help develop new creative avenues. Jonathan’s idea was that the audience would give the cards to various musicians arranged around the room, who would have to cater their playing to that particular oblique strategy. I was particularly excited by this proposal for 2 reasons: first, not being a musician but harboring musical ambitions I have for some time been attempting to create scores that consisted of no musical suggestions whatsoever, that could be used to generate musical or non-musical results in a creative performance environment. For this event, I thought we could develop new strategy cards that included pictures, word fragments, questions, statements, directions, etc.. Secondly, I liked the idea that the audience would be creating the final form of the piece, so I thought we could develop it in such a way that would fragment the traditional presentation of an “orchestra.” First, the musicians would be arranged around the room. When audience members came in, they would be given 1 of 250 cards, which they would then be asked to deposit on any performer’s music stand in exchange for whatever card was already there (that they could then transfer to another music stand). The musician would have to interpret the new card in some musical fashion until another audience member came along and replaced the card with a new one. The performance would require remarkable dexterity and imagination among the participating artists (who could be musical but who could also be literary, artistic, theatrical, whatever). It would be a composition whose form was determined by the audience, and whose content was realized by the musicians (unlike the Atari Symphony, which yielded audience-generated icing on the cake, the structural integrity of this work would be determined by the audience, not the performers or the composers). I wanted to debut the piece at the release party for the issue of Basta! you hold between your fingers right now . . .
That is, until I got a call from Cleveland saxophonist Josh Smith, who invited me to The Action Gallery to see a performance he had developed with NY avant-garde saxophonist Chris Jonas, which he hoped Big Orbit would host at a later date. I didn’t know what the performance consisted of until I got there, and was more than just a little surprised. We were first asked to fill out a survey asking provocative questions designed to generate creative answers. Then we handed the surveys in and were given 3 cards based on our answers. One was a bar of music, one was a color and one was the first few letters of a word that we had to finish for ourselves. When the performance began, we were ushered into a room in which 4 rice paper “structures” enclosed the musicians. When an attendee tapped us, we were to pick a room and slide one of our cards through a slot, resulting in a few bars of improvisation based on the information we had generated on our cards. The piece was an exquisite saxophone/vocals accumulation of free lines played with no overarching structure except that which was defined by the rhythm of audience members visiting the rooms.
I believe that this piece, as well as the theoretical idea Jonathan and I had discussed, represent tentative but interesting next steps toward compositions consistent with the structural elusiveness of internet consciousness. Although the composer can place certain suggestions in the non-narrative flow, the order with which they are realized (in fact, whether or not they are visited at all) depends wholly on the audience’s play of movement and imagination. And the final use of the information in transaction is defined by the musicians, not the person who conceived the piece in the first place. These works accommodate our current realization that information traditionally deceives us with regard to its ability to contain meaning. These works play the surface of meaning in a fashion happily aloof from previous century’s ploys to ground it in representation. These works circle outward from an indeterminate core of pure creativity and in form and content open up to the infinite.
To be sure, there have been some significant cultural developments—particularly in recent contemporary music—that formally challenge traditional performance dynamics. For example, raves answer the death of the author (or in the specific context of recent pop culture the abandonment of the rock star), by emphasizing the communal dance over the "performer." This essential de-centering of power signifies a generational shift away from the faux-church of ‘60s and ‘70s rock--which at its best provided a focused experience of mass transcendence but often, particularly by the ‘80s, degenerated into mass-glorification of the rock star preacher--towards a more holistic approach to music, art and life that mirrors cultural shifts away from the strict adherence to church-sanctioned religious experience. Out of this recalibration of power, other forms of performance presentation need to evolve that support a more substantial act of cultural interaction. We need hyper-informational performance works that embody the potential of new media from the inside out, making no concessions to irrelevant cultural formalities. These works would nevertheless serve art’s timeless function as a locus for cultural criticism, celebration, exploration, multiplication and/or negation but would do so in light of new perspectives generated by popular hypertextual investigation.
This fragmented essay serves as a brief history of some of my tentative first attempts (or those with which I have been associated) to provide a "hyper-experience" of performed cultural data. My hope is that this discussion will initiate further investigation beyond the methods we have explored so far.