INTIMACY
in Telematic & Proximal
Encounters and/or Relationships
in Performance & Performative Environments
By maria x [aka Maria Chatzichristodoulou]
Paper presented at the Goldsmiths Thursday Club, 16 March 2006
In this Thursday Club three people will attempt to kick off a discussion on Intimacy through presenting their own thoughts, ideas, obsessions and /or practice; we are:
Johannes Birringer: Professor and Chair in Drama and Performance Technologies at the School of Arts at Brunel University (since 2006), as well as Artistic Director of Houston-based multimedia ensemble AlienNation Co. (since 1993). In the past he has been Principal Research Fellow in Live Art and Performance at Nottingham Trent University (2004-5), and before that, Head of the Dance and Technology Program at the Ohio State University (1999-2003). He has collaborated in numerous cross-cultural, site-specific and multimedia projects, workshops and events as choreographer, director, curator, organizer, facilitator and more. It is a pleasure and an honor to have Johannes at Goldsmiths, taking part at the Thursday Club.
Rachel Zerihan: PhD candidate Performance and Live Art Unit, University of Nottingham Trent
Organiser & Chair, maria x [aka Maria Chatzichristodoulou]: PhD candidate Goldsmith's College, Digital Studios and Drama. In the past, among other activities, I co-founded (1998) and was the co-director of the Medi@terra media arts festival and Fournos cultural centre in Athens, Greece (2000-2). Recently, I have been lecturing at Goldsmiths (Drama Dpt.) and Richmond the American International University in London (Communication and Fine Arts Dpt.).
I will kick off the event and take about 20mins to talk about intimacy in the work of artists Igor Stromajer – Intima Virtual Base and Entropy8Zuper!
Rachel will take another 20mins to talk about intimate, one-to-one live art pieces, focusing on the work of performance artist Kira O’Reilly.
Johannes, who is the key speaker for tonight, will take 40mins to talk on the subject of: Underwearing Telematics: On-line Performance and Fashion, which is one of his current research interests.
At the end of Johannes’ presentation there should be about half an hour left for discussion.
I will start off by reminding to you and to ourselves the basic questions we have posed and hope to address through this event.
These are:
How is intimacy experienced in telematic, disembodied relationships?
How is intimacy experienced in proximal, physical, and increasingly mediatized environments?
What constitutes presence and absence in such relationships, and how can these concepts be revisited to fit our mediated and mediatied praxis of contemporary performance and performative encounters?
How is proximal intimacy different from telematic intimacy? How do both states of intimacy inform and redefine one another?
… and now I will go on to tell you how this event came around.
While I am talking I will play a slide show with stills from net-art and performance works. The first series of stills are from Igor Stromajer and his Intima Virtual Base, starting from some classical conceptualist net-art works, and moving on to his net-performances that interrupt the electronic medium and open it up to flesh and emotion. The second series of stills is from Entropy8Zuper!’s performance / software / net art piece Wirefire (1999-2003).
This informal event, like other things, started through a little dinner party: I invited Johannes and Rachel to come along to my place where, over food, we discussed about our work. The discussion lead us to touch on issues of intimacy.
Rachel was talking about a shift in live art towards one-to-one performances, where the performer interacts with just one audience member at a time. She was describing her own experience of such performances – and she will narrate that to you in a while – telling us how she felt this encounter to be very intimate, as it allows for a personal, one-to-one relationship to develop between the performer and each individual audience member – who is not, of course, an audience member any more, as this close relationship turns her into a participant – of the relationship if not the piece – and even a performer, in the sense that she is often asked to perform an action.
While discussing this shift towards one-to-one performance practice that creates intimate performance encounters, I thought of an artist I have met and worked with, Igor Stromajer, and his Intima Virtual Base in Ljubljana, Slovenia. Igor is a theatre person who has turned into a media and performance artist, in a quest for intimacy. I remember him telling me his story on a balcony in Sofia (Bulgaria): how he was trained as a theatre director, how he was not satisfied with directing productions for distant, passive audiences. How he made close connections between performers and audiences his main working aim, looking for a qualitatively different relationship between them. He experimented with different types of proximal encounters in performance practices: he directed performances for very small audiences, he mixed performers and audiences, and he ended up offering private performances to (not exclusive) audiences. This meant that audiences could call the group and order a performance to be delivered to their house – like a ‘take-away’, say, or a call-girl /boy, as a method of creating intimate events and relationships between performers and audiences in proximal, physical environments. These were not strictly one-to-one pieces as the ones Rachel will talk about, since Igor was working with a group, and the person ordering the performance could be alone or with company. But they were pieces visiting people in their own physical environments, within the intimacy of their houses. Igor found that audiences reacted differently when in the safety of their own environment, alone or with trusted friends, and thus protected from other people’s criticism and judgment.
Igor’s quest for intimacy, which led him and his colleagues into their audiences’ living rooms, eventually led towards a more radical shift which, he felt, allowed for even closer encounters – although some people might think of this as a paradox: Igor’s quest for intimacy, which many of us relate with the physical body, the flesh, pain, pleasure and an emotional /carnal discourse, led him to shift his practice from visceral performance to net-art and net-performance. That is, from physical, proximal and corporeal performance encounters to dispersed, distributed, dematerialised, cyborgian ones.
For Igor this shift worked – he now calls himself an ‘Intimate Mobile Communicator’, and claims that the Internet is the most intimate medium that ever existed due to its quasi-total openness that, on the one hand, reduces the public to complete intimacy, allowing for the ultimate one-to-one encounter, and, on the other hand, launches it back into the public orbit. In that sense, Igor argues that intimacy plays a specific and important role in contemporary hyper-mass-media society: within this context, intimacy becomes a form of political resistance. Through his work, Igor makes use of military strategies in order to become more intimate with his audiences, to come close to them, to touch their emotions.
The stills you are watching come from a range of works, from intimate mobile art that operates on mobile phones and telecommunication devices (e.g. Mobile Trilogy), to classical net-art projects (e.g. I want to share you – what are you doing to me), emotional net-landscapes (e.g. they learned this intimacy, however, meditating on the house) and different versions of Igor’s famous net ballet project, Ballettikka Internettikka. All the Ballettikka performances are based on the idea of choreographing and dancing HTML code. Ballettikkas take place in physical locations and are streamed live on the web; they are events created specifically for the net and are only available as digital performances. Most of the pieces are guerrilla actions: for the Bolsh.oi piece, for example, Igor and his partner Brane Zorman broke into the Bolshoi theatre in Moscow and, without any permission, danced HTML code in Bolshoi’s toilets, while a formal ballet performance was taking place in the main theatre. This illegal guerrilla action was transmitted live in March 2002, and watched by more than 400 audiences dispersed around the globe.
Is Igor’s shift from direct and proximal to mediated, telematic encounters in quest for intimacy a paradox? Maybe… Nevertheless, Igor is neither the first nor the only person to find intimacy in (semi-)mediated, telematic, performance or performative encounters. Sherry Turkle, in her book Life on the Screen – published in 1995, a year before Igor turned to net-art as an intimate communication medium – talks about the computer as an ‘intimate machine’. I quote:
We have sought out the subjective computer. Computers don’t just do things for us, they do things to us, including our ways of thinking about ourselves and other people. […]
[…] Computer screens are the new locations for our fantasies, both erotic and intellectual. We use life on computer screens to become comfortable with new ways of thinking about evolution, relationships, sexuality, politics, and identity. [1]
Whereas in 1997 – a year after Igor’s first net-art piece – Sadie Plant, in her book Zeros + Ones argues that in spite of the impersonality of the screen, or perhaps, even due to that, the digital zone facilitates spontaneity, affection, intimacy and informality, exposing the extent to which older media are subject to inhibitions, barriers, and obstacles; I quote: “Face-to-face communication […] is not at all the most direct of all possible ways to communicate.” [2]
Up to now, I talked about demateralised, dispersed environments and argued that they can function as intimate spaces. I still haven't talked about what intimacy is though… Perhaps an attempt to articulate a notion of the intimacy we are talking about, could illuminate its surroundings and point towards environments in which it can flourish.
So what is Intimacy? Intimacy is intertwined with feelings of closeness, trust and familiarity. It is linked with the idea of effective communication among partners in a relationship, who feel comfortable with each other on an emotional and/or physical level. To approach the notion of intimacy I will follow Julia Kristeva’s discourse in her book Intimate Revolt. Kristeva attempts to approach ‘the intimate’ by referring back to the Latin root of the word: intimus, which is the superlative of interior, meaning “the most interior”. Kristeva articulates the intimate as an interiority that includes the unconscious, but should not be reduced to it. She goes on to posit it as, I quote: “[…] that which is most profound and most singular in the human experience” [3]. From that she derives that, I quote again: “[…] the intimate is similar to the life of the mind, that is, the activity of the thinking ego […] in opposition to social or political action” [4]. Finally – to follow Kristeva’s discourse one step further – the intimate is linked to the imaginary as this was defined by St. Augustine, that is, as an “internal vision”, I quote: “[…] neither perception, nor thought, but image” [5].
In my view, intimacy is also linked to – other than the imaginary – presence. To be intimate with someone, this person has to be present in some way [6]. In embodied encounters the idea of presence is clear: present is someone you can perceive with your senses and intellect in proximity to yourself; someone you can look at, talk to, touch; someone who is material, corporeal, tangible in present time. In telematic encounters though, the idea of presence is not equally straightforward: media theorists such as Allucquère Rosanne Stone, Sherry Turkle and Katherine Hayles have observed that, when it comes to telematic encounters and relationships, a paradox occurs: presence ceases to exist as a self-evident quality; it actually ceases to exist as a quality altogether, as it cannot be perceived in a pure state of absolute presence. In such environments, we cannot distinguish between presence or absence; instead we can perceive presence as absence and the reverse. Presence and absence become two sides of the same coin, a molecule impossible to break down: a presence-absence.
Through this paper, I would like to question the established presence /absence dichotomy that leads us to conceptual dead-ends when trying to analyse networked performance practices – that is, distributed practices that employ the Internet as a medium and/or a space. What I propose is not that we 'ban' the presence-absence dialectic; instead, following N. Katherine Hayles discourse in How We Became Posthuman [7], I propose that, when it comes to the analysis of such hybrid environments, we employ a complementary dialectic: that of pattern and randomness. In her influential book, Hayles proposes that we look at notions of pattern, as the outcome of our interactions with the system and other users, in relation to presence; and at notions of randomness, as the outcome of the noise created by the stimuli that cannot be encoded within the system, in relation to absence. Randomness can turn into pattern when extraneous stimuli merge together, whereas pattern can gradually fade into randomness. Hayles argues that pattern-randomness systems evolve towards an open future marked by unpredictability, unlike presence-absence systems that head towards a known end. [8] In my view, the adoption of the pattern /randomness dialectic as proposed by Hayles offers a way around restrictive, old dichotomies, and facilitates a more accurate analysis of networked performance practices.
To illustrate this shift of focus from presence-absence to pattern-randomness, and to take our discussion on intimacy one step further, I would like to look at Entropy8Zuper!'s award-winning [9] performance/ software/ net art piece Wirefire. Entropy8Zuper! are Auriea Harvey (Entropy8) and Michael Samyn (Zuper!); they describe Wirefire, which lasted from 1999 to 2003, as follows: “The secret history of Wirefire is sex in a virtual world. The loss of physicality – but let me not call it a loss – because of what is gained. […] What one can gain through Wirefire is a new sense of touch, an enhanced fantasy, a glimpse of a personal utopia […]” [10]
Wirefire is a piece that grew out of necessity. Entropy8, then based in New York, and Zuper!, based in Brussels, met and fell in love online. The Internet was their only means of communicating, sharing, belonging and love-making. Wirefire was created out of the couple's need to express their love and desire telematically, in combination with their frustration with the limitations of commercial software. Technically, the project was based on image, sound and animation files as well as live streams, mixed in real time. Built-in were systems for the performers and the viewer to interact and communicate with each other. E8Z! describe the Wirefire engine as their “personal remixer of emotions and graphics” [11].
From 1999 to 2003, E8Z! invited audiences to generate random versions of visual and sonar landscapes through the Wirefire database, as well as take part in a live Wirefire love-performance-making once per week, every Thursday night at midnight (Brussels' time). Audiences – which soon became a passionate, globally dispersed 'fan-club' – could not only watch, but also take part in the performance. Originally, they could participate through text messages; later, audio and video streams were also added. All audiences' interventions were 'mixed' live by the artists and integrated into their “compelling and seductive narratives” [12] – as described by the MOMA Jury, comprised by Benjamin Weil, Machiko Kusahara and Gary Hill, among others. Every Thursday, throughout these four years, E8Z! performed the same story: being digital and being in love, experiencing desire for a pixel image, exploring what ecstasy is like in the network…
E8Z! and their audiences, in order to perform Wirefire, endlessly reproduced themselves as sound and image data and/or as the force that pushed these data into motion. Their digital entities became abstract audiovisual landscapes and their communication and interaction became rhythm, color, pattern, randomness, sound and text. They themselves became distributed and multiple: by networking their love-making they invited other entities to 'become' them, to inhabit and expand their digital 'bodyscapes', to 'hijack' their love story and turn it into a globally distributed community in 'telematic embrace' [13]. Throughout the four-year-long performance of Wirefire, E8Z! and their audiences never met in physical proximity, never encountered each other through corporeal bodies: their mutual physical absence was a sine-qua-non for the performance, and the basis on which Wirefire could be built as an (unfinishable) performance piece, but also as a (constantly in-flux) community.
I will close here with a quote from Marchal McLuhan: “touch is not skin but the interplay of the senses”.
Thank you.
Endnotes:
[1] Turkle, Sherry Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet London: Phoenix – Orion Books, 1997 (1st published: New York: Simon & Schuster, 1995), p. 26
[2] Plant, Sadie Zeros + Ones: Digital Women and the New Technoculture London: Fourt Estate, 1997, p. 144
[3] Kristeva, Julia Intimate Revolt (tr. Jeanine Herman), New York: Columbia University Press, 2002 (1st published: Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 1997), p. 45
[4] Ibid, p. 45
[5] Ibid, p. 55
[6] That is, of course, questionable and open to discussion. I suppose that one can be intimate with someone who is absent – but this happens by projecting her presence into the future. I also suppose that one can be intimate with someone who is forever absent – someone dead, for example – but there must have already been a history of intimacy between them. These intimacies, which are emotional rather than physical, are often built on 'past presences', or expectations of a 'future presence' – but as I see it, intimacy is always related to some form of presence. Unfortunately we do not have the time to discuss this further, so I will leave this point open and focus on intimacy built through a broad notion of presence that would incorporate such subtle nuances.
[7] See Hayles, N. Katherine How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1999
[8] See ibid, particularly Chapter Two: 'Virtual Bodies and Flickering Signifiers', pp. 25-49 & Chapter Eleven: 'Conclusion: What Does it Mean to be Posthuman?”, pp. 283-291
[9] SFMOMA 2000 Webby Award, among others.
[10] http://e8z.org/wirefire/SECRET.HISTORY/A_SECRET_HISTORY_OF_WIREFIRE.txt (retrieved March 2004)
[11] http://www.entropy8zuper.org/ (retrieved March 2004)
[12] http://www.sfmoma.org/press/press/press_webby.html (retrieved March 2004)
[13] I refer to Roy Ascott's seminal article “Is There Love in the Telematic Embrace?” in Art Journal 49: 3, 1990, p. 241