The scenographic turn: the pharmacology of the digitisation of scenography

Abstract

Theatre has long been acknowledged as a space that facilitates collaboration, not only between different fields of art, but also between the arts and sciences. Scenography, through its rationalisation of the performance space, is the territory where these collaborations are played out, and is therefore the leading field to employ digital technologies. Increased computing power has introduced new opportunities for digital simulation – already widely exploited in the film and gaming industries – on the live stage. This article focuses on the shift taking place in the performing arts, brought about by the migration from mechanical to digital technologies and the import of software into scenographic working processes; this is my definition of the scenographic turn. What are the repercussions of this turn aesthetically, socially and politically? As a catalyst for discussion I will analyse the Australian-based performing arts collective Chunky Move’s digitally engaged performance, Mortal Engine, which is a quintessential example exhibiting the new possibilities made available to live performance by digital technologies. In doing so, this article considers the new technohistoric specificities of the work in relation to the concept of machine as performer, thus highlighting a certain development in working processes that facilitates an increase in machines’ responsibility and intention in live performance. This logically also demands a discussion of how technology impacts on the formulation of choreography and dramaturgy, and what this means for working processes going forward. The technological philosophy of Bernard Stiegler is engaged to help unpack and reflect upon the sociohistoric, ontological and cultural implications of such technologically engaged productions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes on contributor

Néill O’Dwyer is an artist, PhD candidate and practice-based researcher at the Arts Technology Research Lab (ATRL), in the Drama Department, at Trinity College Dublin (TCD). His research is concerned with artistic possibilities emerging from processes of human-computer interaction, how one can inform the other and why this is useful in broader socio-political contexts. He is a part-time teaching assistant in the Drama Department. He is a member of the IFTR’s Scenography Working Group. He is a member of the international Digital Studies Network initiated by the Institute of Research and Innovation (IRI), at the Pompidou Centre, and he is an associate researcher of GradCAM (Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media). He is a co-editor on the forthcoming Palgrave Macmillan publication, Performing Subjectivity in the Space of Technology: Through the Virtual Towards the Real.

Notes

1. The ability, via electronic calculation, to place processes of automation within processes of automation is what ultimately allows physicists to conceive cybernetics.

2. For example, reel-to-reel film technology operates on the cyclical action of two revolving reels that pass the celluloid film from one to the other, at a rate of 25 frames per second, to reproduce the illusion of life-like movement. The kinetic components of the technology are all visible; the machine’s movement is perceptible, occurring in the same space as the body.

3. A nanosecond is a unit of time equal to one billionth of a second (10−9 or 1/1,000,000,000 s). This is the standard unit of measurement for clocking hardware such as processors and graphics cards.

4. See YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sbjOMualLVs.

5. Lucy Bullivant (2006) calls this a ‘responsive environment’.

6. I used this term at the 2014 International Federation for Theatre Research (IFTR) conference to convey the increasing need for scenographers, who are now frequently working with digital media, to be equipped with computer programming language skills. Frieder Weiss is the software engineer who worked with Chunky Move on the Mortal Engine project, and has written his own software, EyeCon, for motion-tracking bodies in live performance (available at http://eyecon.frieder-weiss.de/index.html).

7. These are terms in computer programming that describe objects that are created on the fly, or in response to a given variable.

8. The stage is, in fact, mechanically operated so that the incline can be controlled. During most of the performance it is kept at a shallow incline to help the audience’s view of the overhead projection. At some points it is also raised to a vertical state and the dancers perform movement against it in standing poses.

9. This is precisely the problem that Lyotard worries through in his book The Inhuman – Reflections on Time: ‘Work becomes a control and manipulation of information … The availability of information is becoming the only criterion of social importance. Now information is by definition a short-lived element. As soon as it is transmitted and shared, it ceases to be information, it becomes an environmental given, and ‘all is said’, we ‘know’. It is put into the machine memory. The length of time it occupies is, so to speak, instantaneous’ (Lyotard 1992, 105).

10. Grammatisation is a term coined by Sylvain Auroux to describe the technical and logical process of creating alphabets by discretising vocal utterances into individual letters and letter combinations. As a process of reductive logical thought it is the precondition, and structural archetype, for all language, and by default knowledge in general, including science. Stiegler borrows the concept and extends it beyond vocal language, into the spatial fields of gesture and movement.

11. Thresholding is the simplest method of image segmentation; that is, the process of partitioning a digital image into segments, in order to simplify and/or change its representation into something that is more meaningful and easier to analyse.

12. Walter Benjamin rightly points out that certain types of artefacts were reproducible even in ancient Greece: ‘The Greeks knew only two procedures of technically reproducing works of art: founding and stamping. Bronzes, terra cottas, and coins were the only art works which they could produce in quantity’ (Benjamin 2011, 212).

13. Benjamin opposes film to theatre. Philip Auslander furthers this notion in his book, Liveness, by pointing out that in the 1930s film actually mimicked theatre (Auslander 2008).

14. In the opening paragraphs of Symbolic Misery, Stiegler asserts his view on the inseparability of aesthetics and politics (Stiegler 2014, 1–2).

15. Heidegger coins this term to explain a quality of objects produced under the mode of production brought about by modern technologies: automation and reproduction. By this he means that they are disposable, firstly in the sense that they are easily ordered and arranged, and secondly in the sense that they are cheapened and therefore throwaway.

16. By invoking the term ‘temporal objects’, Stiegler is citing and extending a Husserlian concept. They are objects that are comprised of successive instants, which flow into one another creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts – for example a musical melody, a cinematic film or a radio broadcast.

17. Mitosis, also known as ‘Reaction Diffusion’, is a mathematical logic derived from the field of linear algebra. It is a phenomenon that takes place in countless natural, and synthetic, situations. The logic is used to simulate phenomena such as cell division (in microbiology) and chemical reactions (in engineering).

18. Gilbert Simondon’s theory of individuation, asserted in L’individuation psychique et collective (1989), shows how the ‘individual and the group co-constitute each other through the intergenerational transmission (synchrony) of the pre-individual [knowledge] fund and its individual adoption (diachrony)’ (Stiegler and Rossouw 2011, 53).

19. Stiegler’s theory of a general organology is distinctly different from Simondon’s theory of individuation because it is a three-way process that involves the psychic, the social and the technical. Simondon says that only living beings can individuate, but Stiegler argues that technologies – as inorganic organised beings – not only influence human individuation, but so too do they themselves individuate.

20. By Grand, I mean something that impacts, globally and irreversibly, on populations and their systems of knowledge, and therefore perception. Analogous innovations would be the inventions of alphabets or mechanical automation.

21. In her book Beckett, Technology and the Body, Ulrika Maude offers a comprehensive argument on how the tape recorder serves as prosthetic memory and therefore as an agent of identity.

22. Degrees of freedom and their constraint thereof is an important concept to William Ross Ashby in his setting out of the fundamentals of cybernetics (Ashby 1957, 61, 129–131).

23. Hiroshi Ishiguro is a Professor at Osaka University and group leader of ATR Intelligent Robotics and Communication Laboratories. His work is concerned with human nature and feeling, how ‘presence [can] be captured, revived, and transmitted’ (Stocker and Schöpf 2010, 218).

24. Geminoids are a type of robot, ‘originally planned to be test-beds for studying the individual nature of human beings’ (Stocker and Schöpf 2010, 218).

25. Stiegler uses the term ‘opacity’ to describe the degree to which consumer masses have become mystified by, and ultimately removed from, the production of cultural symbols, due to the pervasiveness of automation in mass culture.

26. Software such as CueLab has made this process very easy for the performance operator.

27. Bolter and Grusin (2000) argue that new visual media achieve their cultural significance by aping, rivalling, refashioning and alluding to earlier media such as film, photography, painting and so on.

28. The Pharmakon is a concept first invoked by Plato, in Phaedrus, who declared that writing – as a technique of inscription – is a pharmakon; that is, at once poison and cure. He focuses on the toxic aspects of it, dismissing its short-circuiting of real presence as an avoidance of truthful dialogue and a substitute for pure recollection. This provides the locus for Jacques Derrida’s critique of the dominance of logocentrism in the history of Western philosophy, thus breathing life into the idea of privileging written word over spoken. Stiegler, Derrida’s student, takes up the mantle by delineating the curative aspects of writing, and hence modern, cognitive technologies of inscription: tape recorders, cameras, computers and so on.

29. There were several similar research projects in progress at the turn of the twenty-first century. Some of particular note are: Klaus Obermaier’s pioneering fully resolved motion-tracking performance, Apparition (2004); Scott deLahunta and the Forsyth Company’s Synchronous Objects project (2009) in collaboration with Ohio State University (this important work was among the primary movers in establishing fundamentally new processes in devising and annotating choreography); and the Motion Bank Project (2010) initiated by the Forsyth Company, in Frankfurt am Main, which is still in progress.

30. Motion-tracking technology has been used in military applications for decades, so in this sense Chunky Move is engaged in re-invention, which according to Stiegler is the job of the contemporary cohort of avant-garde artists.

31. ‘The irreconcilable elements of culture, art and distraction, are subordinated to one end and subsumed under one false formula: the totality of the culture industry’ (Adorno and Horkheimer 1997, 144).

32. See, for example, BMW’s projection mapping presentation (2012) for the launch of the new F30 series, at the Moscow Garage (http://vimeo.com/groups/touchdesigner/videos/39586237).