From telepresence to teletrust

Introduction

Communications tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring. (Shirky 2008)

This affiliated edition of the journal builds on the online symposium, From Telepresence to Teletrust,¹ organised by Bournemouth University’s experimental media centre EMERGE. It took place in July 2021, just one month after the lifting of the third and final Covid 19 lockdown in the UK. Although a shared sense of relief was palpable, there was a pervasive anxiety as we had no idea whether the virus would return.

In retrospect, the meeting can be seen as an early attempt to use experimental creative media as an instrument with which to process and find meaning in what we had been through. Our entry point was the changing nature of telepresence and how our understanding of this term had been transformed as a result of the surge in the adoption of popular cloud-based video conferencing platforms, such as Zoom and Teams, during the pandemic. Quite simply these new and accessible video conferencing platforms became a key part of the everyday infrastructure of social survival. There was a widespread sense that this was the moment that the internet finally came of age.

Even now as memories of the pandemic fade (or are repressed) the new technologies, skills and rituals we absorbed have become normalised, even boring. As Trevor Hearing puts it in his report on the symposium for this journal, ‘it seemed prescient to dig more deeply into what was rapidly becoming another daily routine in which our physical embodiment and performance in the world was being supplanted by the construction of screen identities’.

Hearing’s report already hints at the hidden psychological costs of the years of life online. Iveta Hajdakova, a cultural anthropologist, goes further, describing in 2020, how one of the accompanying symptoms of ‘zoom fatigue’ is a numbing sense of psychic entrapment in which ‘The more I try to be a real person, the more I’m getting trapped in the simulation of myself’, […] ‘I’m communicating and sharing just to remind people I exist. No, it is to remind myself that I exist … Like McLuhan’s gadget lover, like Narcissus, staring at his own image’ (Lovink 2020).

This edition of the journal starts from the recognition that although in the post-Covid era, many of the social distancing behaviours faded the near-universal adoption of telepresence platforms has become embedded, profoundly disrupting social practice and re-shaping our lives. Once again, we encounter a recurring dialectical binary; captured in Stiegler’s (2013) influential notion that our technologies are a pharmakon: continuously oscillating between being both the toxin and the remedy.

Our aim here is to draw together thematic strands from different generations of artists working in the field of live mediatised performance, an area with a rich history of resisting the lure of technocratic domination. It is our contention that lives spent navigating the intense psychic demands of these new spatial logics would benefit from drawing on the expertise of generations of experimental media artists. These artists have decades of practical experience exploring the technologies of ‘liveness’ as telematic platforms have continued to evolve. Each, in their own way, has wrestled with how the psychosocial connections between remote presence and the brute facts of embodiment impacts on our shared reality. Their insights, though grounded in the arts, have wider social implications. It is clearly the moment to push their reflections and insights closer to the centre of public discourse.

Origins and definitions

We should be wary of presupposing that telepresence is a definable entity with discrete edges. To do so would be antithetical to the dynamic nature of the field. But provisional points of origin and classifications have their uses as tools for orientation helping us navigate an era of extreme flux. This is less about saying what telepresence is and more about describing what it does, with us and to us.

This perspective is evident in Atau Tanaka’s contribution, which displaces traditional art history with a more granular media archaeological approach that picks apart the overlapping strands of art, technology, phenomenology and politics. However, both Tanaka and Paul Sermon do suggest that one of telepresence’s points of lost origin can be glimpsed as far back as 1876, with Alexander Graham Bell’s invention of the telephone, with its capacity to transmit the human voice over distance. For Tom Davis, the point of entry is 1980 when Marvin Minsky (1980) linked the term to teleoperation – the distant remote control of robotics through sensors, actuators and haptic feedback, a transactional model of ‘control at a distance’.

Of all the artists represented in this volume, it is perhaps the artist Stelarc’s performance Ping Body, described in this volume by Caroline Nevejan, that comes closest to actually inhabiting Minsky’s model of telepresence as ‘control at a distance’. It is no accident that Ping Body is a particularly challenging and disturbing work, as the artist/subject deliberately surrenders his bodily agency, allowing his wired-up body to be remotely controlled by electronic muscle stimulators, manipulated by multiple anonymous audience members in various remote locations. It is a piece that displaces many utopian narratives of ‘finding love in a telematic embrace’ with a forensically dystopian literalness.

Language of trust

Each of the authors in this special issue speaks of different ways in which telepresence relates to, alters or extends notions of embodiment. In particular, there is a common consideration of how telepresence relates to notions of ‘being here’ and its variable relationship to the concept of teletrust. Why is this notion of trust so important? For us, the notion foregrounds a movement away from the teleoperations of telerobotics, away from remote control, towards considering the personal and lived experience of people engaging in and connecting across distance. As Karen Lancel, Hermen Maat & Frances Brazier acknowledge, early studies of interaction focus on what technology can do, and less on the human experience. Oliver Gingrich, Havsteen-Franklin, Alain Renaud, Daniel Hignell-Tully & Claire Grant also highlight a historical shift from a techno-centric definition of presence to one that encompasses notions of love, intimacy and mediation between humans. Teletrust as a term is thus helpful in emphasising the challenge of avoiding the emergence of new forms of alienation by highlighting this person-centred view as it is related to notions of social connection, embodiment, intersubjectivity, empathy and witnessing.

Uncanny presence

The persistence over decades of the field of live mediatised performance is based on a paradox, the paradox of the uncanny presence. Put simply, different generations of artists have found ways to exploit the fact that our embodied sense of being-here-now can be heightened by an encounter with the disembodied presence of a distant other. The media artist Annie Abraham has described these practices as ‘being together while separated’. In 2020, Abrahams and Darren Pinheiro. D set out to explore this sensation in the project Distant Feeling(s), ‘a yearly online ritual of contemplation on our situation of being together while being separated.’

From the earliest iterations in influential works from Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz, Hole in Space to Paul Serman’s Telematic Dreaming, to the physical extremes of Stelarc’s performances, we see a shared impulse to extend and intensify our sense of embodiment through the incorporation of a performative disembodiment. This experience of the uncanny in the Freudian sense of ‘the return of the repressed’ generates, in the right hands, a vivid sensation of estrangement from our everyday lives. Rather than a search for common ground, it is a perspective that places more value on encounters across differences through the use of telematics to embrace (un)common ground.

Sermon builds on this idea in his description of the third space of interaction ‘a telepresence experience of self as other in a coexistent reflection’ in which the idea of witnessing is important. Not just witnessing others but also witnessing ourselves witnessing the other. As Sermon puts it, the encounter is ‘conjoined through the presence of self in our reflection, the presence of other in our experience, and self as other in our coexistence’. For Sermon, presence is mediated and in some ways constructed in this 3rd space of interaction. In fact, he notes that participants in Telematic Dreaming engaged for longer and seemingly preferred to observe themselves in this 3rd space by observing it on screens, rather than engaging with the projections onto the bed in the physical space. Importantly, Sermon notes that this 3rd space is not a replacement for the real physical body scheme but rather an extension of it.

Susan Kozel also revisits her time as the ‘body on the bed’ whilst performing in Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming. As articulated in her 1994 article, Spacemaking (2007) for Kozel interacting within the 3rd space, was very much an embodied experience, one in which she felt physical pain and the physical threat of violence. In this new article, she revisits the experience and her earlier writing to perform a feminist archaeology, re-examining her past phenomenological accounts and putting forward a new critical phenomenology that layers in critical perspectives around power, gender and sexuality that were perhaps missing from her previous discussion. Whilst exploring an interesting methodology for reimagining this work, the combination of critical phenomenology, feminist archaeology and media archeologies, she also dramatises the insight that ‘no body is any body’, highlighting the fact that bodies are not transparent things to be projected or projected onto, rather they bring with them their own social cultural constructions of meaning and understanding of events.

In her article, Tuning One and Other, Caroline Nevejan also writes of the importance of witnessing. Noting the pivotal role that witnessing has in the formation of social structures and the way that telematic practice provides new configurations of witnessing and bearing witness. In a rare attempt to develop an overarching theoretical matrix, her framework, YUPTA: to be with You in Unity of Time, Place and Action, offers a method of analysing a series of live online networked events spanning more than three decades of telematic practice. The YUPTA framework is put forward as a useful way of analysing human togetherness through temporal, physical and agential lenses. Nevejan draws links between levels of presence-ness and our capacities to trust, arguing that notions of trust affect the ways we ‘perform our presence’. In her article, Nevejan puts forward pivotal moments of technological advances that have challenged these ways of being – which, in themselves, provide ways of reimagining configurations of the YUPTA framework. For Nevejan, once we allow for the ‘mediation of witnessing the self’, we can build trust based on the new partial perception of the mediated sense of others’.

Haptics, Touch and Empathy

Whilst Sermon’s work perhaps privileges the visual, others such as Tanaka, Davis & Lancel et al. turn to examples of haptic interaction in trust formation in networked environments. Tanaka introduces this by discussing InTouch (Brave, Ishii, and Dahley 1998), an interactive installation by Brave where users could physically feel the movements of others through wooden rollers that simultaneously sent and received movement information from each other. Arguing that this level of reciprocal haptic interaction between distanced sites used notions of touch to help build telematic empathy. It was this kind of touching at a distance, a shared notion of physical control that informed Tanaka’s exhibit Global String (Tanaka and Bongers 2002), where once again users could physically feel the vibrations of a string, transmitted over a network and plucked in another physical location.

Touch and empathy are also themes for Lancel, Maat & Brazier. Lancel et al. describe social touch as ‘unmediated personal interaction’ where people are co-present and have a ‘reciprocal influence on each other’. They argue that this reciprocal sense of social touch can be recaptured online, through a consideration of empathy – where the empathy comes from a sense of neuro-physical entanglement between parties. They draw on psychological research that explores ‘immersive physiological connections’ such as the sense of caressing at a distance to conclude that a ‘technological mediated shared embodied experience of social touch’ must include a reciprocal influence of touching and being touched.

Similarly, Gingirch et al. champion a relationship between trust, empathy and social presence, through the immersive dimension. Importantly they relate teletrust to how we are socially available to each other at a distance. Their article attempts to measure social connectedness and relate this data to a sense of teletrust – where their work with the partially sighted highlights ways in which social presence can be explored through telematic interactions as distinct from the project's technical parameters.

For Davis too, in his piece Ambiguous Devices, physical touch is an important tool for conveyance of presence within the complex social situation of a musical performance environment. In this instance, similarly to InTouch (Brave, Ishii, and Dahley 1998), the interface of interaction is a reciprocal haptic connectivity provided by the performance interface. Ambiguous Devices though are less literal, whilst there might be a conveyance of performance gesture through space, there is not a literal transference of movement and thus there is a need for trust engendered directly by ambiguity within the interface. In this instance, related to and perhaps inspired by, Global String, the medium is the message, and the distributed nature of the network itself is harnessed to explore its idiosyncrasies and to help think through notions and issues of trusting at a distance.

Enchantment–Disenchantment–Reenchantment

There is another way in which many of the authors write about their encounters with telematics over the years. The early days of telematic art overlaps with a transitional moment between the video/art era and the imminent explosion of the mass internet. It was an era when access to teleconferencing was normally reserved for corporations or institutions. There was sci-fi-inflected magic of early experimental communications that is perhaps best captured by Hole in Space, an installation created in 1980, by artists Kit Galloway and Sherrie Rabinowitz (Galloway and Rabinowitz n.d.). The work consisted of large-scale video displays connecting a street in New York with a similar location in Los Angeles through a live satellite feed. At the time, this quite straightforward arrangement, allowing people an audio-visual connection across the continent of North America appeared miraculous. It generated huge excitement and spontaneous mass participation from passers-by. In this volume, so many years later, the piece appears as a touchstone for many authors. Even though technologically basic by modern standards, it felt like a very rich form of social interaction at a distance. In his article, Tanaka describes the work with a sentiment echoed by many authors in this issue that Hole in Space had a ‘liveness and authenticity that is somehow missing with present-day Skype and Zoom.’ Tanaka’s statement reflects the ethos of many of the works cited as important in this volume, which generally favour works that push back against the technosolutionist approaches of telecommunication companies with their video connectivity restricted to the heads and torsos characterised by Sermon as the ‘newsreader shot’.

This cycle of enchantment – mass adoption – disenchantment is a familiar narrative (even a cliche) that attends to the arrival of every significant medium and is highlighted by Hearing as the shift from avant-garde play to ‘corporate control, conformity and monetization’. But we should not forget that disenchantment, even panic, is frequently followed by a period of reenchantment as new generations of artists re-evaluate and re-engage with established platforms from new perspectives. We see this generational dynamic playing out in this volume. It is above all the multiple ways in which authors are identifying the ambiguity within the systems, the partial representation of the mediatised presence that highlights and demands the need for trust, which suggests that it is perhaps the concept of teletrust is generative of something over and above mere telepresence. Something that foregrounds the social and reflexive connections of the encounter at a distance.

Concluding thoughts – tech alone won’t fix the trust problem

We end where we began reflecting on the sentence ‘Communication tools don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring.’ With these words, Clay Shirkey, in 2008, concisely captured the essential message of his book ‘Here Comes Everybody’, about the power of web 2.0 to enable people to ‘organize without organizations’.

However, the real potency of this sentence is that it has the effect of shifting ‘attention to the right level, away from the tools and to what people do with them’. Moreover, it opens up a key dilemma, at the heart of both Shirkey’s book and this edition of the journal; ‘how to write about technology once that technology has become mundane’ (Stalder 2008). It is our contention that we must not only ask ‘what it is that makes technologies mundane’ but also whether this process of normalisation is always desirable however ‘socially interesting’ it might be.

Our editorial perspective is polemical. We argue that too much of our technological culture is founded on the assumption that tech will fix the trust problem, as though trust depends exclusively on technologies remaining seamlessly transactional. In contrast, much of the work featured in what follows resists this conclusion, by finding multiple ways to re-capture the combination of strangeness, wonder, critique and idealism that attended telepresence’s inception. This is a process that is re-visited and refreshed by every generation. Taken together, contributions to this affiliated issue readdress the idea of telepresence from a human-centred position, insisting on the foundational importance of social connectedness, and we return to Kozel’s statement that ‘no body is any body’, concluding that trust in communications platforms can never be a given but it has to be earned every day and repeatedly tested and contested in the white heat of the public domain.

Notes

1 The term teletrust is inspired by and related to a concept introduced and explored by Lancel and Maat in their artwork Tele_Trust.