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Category: desire

Richard Foreman: The Presentation of Real Time

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MARIE: Oh, Idiot Savant— why stuff that provocative dental instrument into your mouth—impeding all possible “human speech”? (He takes it out. Pause)—Thank God, you’ve removed it.

IDIOT SAVANT: As a result, dear lady—am I no longer capable of saving us from magic words?

MARIE: But they occur very infrequently.

IDIOT SAVANT: Are we under attack, Madame?

MARIE: What makes chosen words— magic?

IDIOT SAVANT: Who among us is prepared for an explanation?

MARIE: (Pause, thinks) Me?

IDIOT SAVANT: Me?

It always pains me to miss any production by Richard Foreman. Unfortunately, this happens all too often as I am based in San Francisco, and he’s based in New York City. Whenever I plan to be in New York, one of the first things I do is check whether Foreman has something going on.

I orginally learned about Foreman’s work through the pages of a journal edited by Michael Kirby called The Drama Review. I still occasionally return to the December 1975 issue on New Performance & Manifestos which contains Foreman’s Third Manifesto for the Ontological-Hysteric Theater. It’s taken intensive reading and re-reading over many years to finally feel as though I can stand under the meaning of the manifesto.

Richard Foreman’s latest, and perhaps last, work for the theater is currently running at The Public Theater through December 20th and is called “Idiot Savant.” I’ve only experienced this work through the text of periodicals that have chosen to cover the event. This morning I finally got around to reading the New Yorker’s coverage. When the mainstream press writes about Foreman they have to budget at least half of the designated column inches to explain who Foreman is, what he does, and why it’s important and kind of entertaining. Without the establishment of a makeshift frame, a preface to the words describing the performance, the text that describes the performance would simply appear to be a recitation of a random flow of inner states and thoughts that occurred simultaneously with the performance of Foreman’s work.

Hilton Als, in his preface to his published thoughts on “Idiot Savant” quotes Foreman’s introduction to his 1989 play “Lava.”

“There are writers who despair that a gap exists between the self and the words that come, but for me that gap is the field of all creativity— it’s an ecstatic field rather than a field of despair…It’s the unfathomable from which every pours forth.”

The writer indemnifies himself with the construction of a frame within which to view and share the performance. The words of his text will need to cross a large gap, and in the end will not be a true representation of the events that unfolded on the stage on that particular night. The difficulty in trying to represent Foreman’s work is that Foreman’s performances don’t represent anything. They are the thing itself. There is no third thing about which both the performance and the writing about the performance can refer.

Foreman explains his approach in his Third Manifesto:

Most theatre, on the other hand, is dedicated to creating an “experience.” Sometimes that experience is thought of as an avenue to understanding. (For instance, an experience in a politically oriented play, which is designed to help one “understand” why workers do such and such, and the managers do such and such, etc.)

But an “experiencing” does not lead to the radical “understanding” I am concerned with. Here’s why. Experience of any sort is “recognizing.” I would not deny that anything called “art” has to end up in the thing called “spectator” as some kind of experience. But there is a difference between this last fact and the always misguided attempt to make the art experience be isomorphic with an OTHER experience-event.

We experience what we recognize—what we know. Even if the experience is the experience of “not-knowing” or “being confused” or anything else to which we can give a name. The task of art is to serve understanding… by trying to create a field which is isomorphic with what stands-under experience— which is not experience itself.

Now, what stands-under experience cannot be experienced, experience is not the mode by which we can know it.

What stands-under experience are the laws (processes) of perception and other laws-of-configuration of the universe.

My task is to make work, the structure of which is isomorphic with those laws. Then I will be standing-under experience.

Foreman’s work attempts to be present in the real-time moment. The gestures don’t refer to some other fictional reality, they are gestures that are happening right now. And to create something that can genuinely be perceived as new, the performance charts a course outside of the grooves of our comfortable, traditional, cultural narratives. Returning again to the Third Manifesto, Foreman contemplates the implications of physicist Paul Dirac’s work as it relates to the creation of performance works:

For instance: Dirac, Paul. His 1931 theory— (for me, the most useful MANTRA of our time). In which he postulates—

Space isn’t empty. It’s filled with a bottomless sea of electrons with negative mass (& negative energy). All available locations in space, filled with minus energy electrons, not interaction, no manifestation of their existence!

On occasion, a high-energy cosmic ray hits one of these “ghost” electrons and imparts its energy to it. So the ghost electron is then bumped out of the sea of non-existence and becomes a normal electron with positive energy and mass.

But that leaves a “hole” in the sea where it had been. The hole is a negation of negative mass, so is positive mass (also positive change). This hole (DIRAC predicts in ’31) would be a new kind of particle, having mass equal to and charge opposite to a normal electron (which is +mass and -charged.) An anti-electron.

But (he predicts) the anti-electron will be very short lived because a normal electron will soon be attracted to the “hole,” fall into it, and the two oppositionally charged electrons will immediately annihilate each other.

Most of the writing about Foreman’s work notes that the “subject” of the work hasn’t changed over the years, it’s always “about” the same thing. Of course, this is because it isn’t “about” anything, it “is” that thing itself— and since it isn’t a story, it’s not recognizable as one.

The pattern of creation described by Dirac describes both the activity and the subject of Foreman’s work. In Chapter 16 of Foreman’s text The Amateur Genius he writes:

The Amateur Genius was on a street where the brick surface of the wall confronting him did sparkle, desertd as the street was on the Sunday that it was; and The Amateur Genius tried to think about the brain roots that twisted into a very real antispace, spaced into the careful click that widened as idea on idea perfromed mutual erasure so that the writing The Amateur Genius did (and upon his very brain The Amateur Genius did write).

“—Write not the ideas,” spoke The Amateur Genius. “The ideas perform mutual erasure.”

“Write rather the brain-stem rush. So when that is written nothing is written. Or rather, the writing speaks so the weakened eye speaks a kind of internal stress and strain out of which pop the grapefruits of, dare I say it, a second world, a third world— (there are grapefruits that do thinking as well as other sweetness).”

Foreman toils endlessly to get to the present moment, the being of the act of creation, not a representation or a narrative about a thing, but the thing itself. The theatrical performance provides a rare opportunity to experiment with focused attention and the real-time moment. The work done by Foreman, Schechner, LeCompte, Breuer, Growtoski and others on the theory and  practice of presentational performance provides a rich ground for understanding our newly emergent networked media environment.

When Hilton Als attempts to write about a Richard Foreman performance, the difficulty of his task mirrors the difficulty traditional journalism faces with the real-time network. We’re used to media reports that represent a series of events. The quality of the report is based on the degree to which the text is isomorphic with the event. With the speed-up to real-time and the connectivity of the networked media environment, we become participants in the thing-itself as it unfolds in time. You can hear the critique of this state of affairs from the perspective of the traditional press: There’s no objectivity, the representations are not accurate, they don’t match the reported, and checked, facts.

We should have concerns about this new media environment, this new stage on which we stand, but they aren’t those of objectivity and representational accuracy. The participant can have no standing in either of those causes. The journalist who situates himself outside the event—within a field of objectivity—intends to be invisible, to withhold both his presence and influence on the event itself. He believes that only through this distance can he produce a text that is isomorphic with the event itself.  The journalist’s ethics have to do with accuracy of representation; the participant’s ethics have to do with what one chooses to do with an active or passive role in the action as it unfolds. Do you accelerate the action or oppose it? Do you ignore it or silently contemplate it. Do you route it to a private or public group? Do you produce a work in reaction to it? (Note how this is fundamentally different than the idea of the citizen journalist).

The common thread between Foreman’s performances and activity on the real-time network is that neither represents something else. They’re both the thing itself. It’s this shift from representation to presentation that opens a new world of possibilities (“dare I say it, a second world, a third world…”). Getting the hang of the new physics and economics of this space may take some time. The ethics of real-time mean that you’re a participant in an unfolding event— you aren’t invisible— and your actions (or lack of action) have consequences.

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While Interpreting The Instruction Set, I Encounter An Ambiguous Opening…

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We seem to live in an age where the algorithm serves as an extension of our desire. This picaresque ramble contemplates what it means to follow a rule, what the boundaries of a rule are meant to contain, and the morality of rewriting and overwriting a rule. In his book on the algorithm, David Berlinski provides a definition:

In the logician’s voice

an algorithm is
a finite procedure,
written in a fixed symbolic vocabulary,
governed by precise instructions,
moving in discrete steps, 1, 2, 3, …,
Whose execution requires no insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, or perspicuity,
and that sooner or later comes to an end,

Within the conceptual machine of the algorithm, we envision the creation of software agents that will encapsulate and encode our desires. These secret agents will be unleashed upon the virtual and augmented world to locate the conditions and process the data that match a predetermined map of our dreams and passions.

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But let’s hit the back button on this train of thought. The interface for this exploration appeared the other night at an art opening. Paul Madonna was introducing his new work at Electric Works. On a table in the entry way to the exhibition were a number of books. In addition to Paul’s new book, there was a book by David Byrne called Arboretum. This book contained a number of drawings that I immediately wanted to willfully misinterpret. Byrne’s drawings are mind maps that show connections/relations between things— they represent a kind of systemic history in some cases, or the dynamics/economics of a system in others. They have a strong relationship to Diderot’s organizational ideas for his encyclopedia.

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David Byrne, History of Mark-making

There was something about the visual character of Byrne’s drawings that reminded me of the music notation and compositional titles of the saxophonist Anthony Braxton. When music notation is at its most strict, it tells us precisely how a piece can be replicated. The player piano uses piano rolls to produce near identical performances. In the fake book, we might just get the chord changes and the melody— the arrangement is up to us. Braxton takes this kind of abstraction to another level in some of his notation that borders on encoding synesthesia— where color and shape are meant to guide the performers.

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Braxton’s Composition #76

Somehow by combining the notation of Braxton and the tree drawings of Byrne, I imagine conjuring up a notation system for an exploration through conversation, a kind of performance script. While, as Umberto Eco notes, the list can be a flexible tool, engendering both anarchic and organizational impulses— I find myself drawn to these maps of notation. When I engage in conversations about strategic direction, I always imagine them taking place within a terrain with specific dynamics.

By Berlinski’s definition, these musical instruction sets aren’t algorithms. Their execution requires insight, cleverness, intuition, intelligence, and perspicuity. The performer has to make decisions, exercise options, contribute variable inputs that will result in a variety of outputs. In that sense, they function more like a game.

In business, there’s an attempt to codify process to the extent that all of its aspects are substitutable. Even as parts of the machine are replaced, it’s output remains constant and consistent. This is the industrial commodity as ideal. Variances are a sign of poor management.

The script for a theatrical performance is another kind of instruction set. Notational experiments in this realm are also highly instructive. A few years back I attended a performance of the Wooster Group’s Poor Theater. The text of the performance was largely other performances, and the group’s performance itself described as a simulacra. For instance a performance piece, where the movements are the performers’ response to, and modeling of, a cowboy film projected to the side of the stage.

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Elizabeth LeCompte by Leibowitz

Elizabeth LeCompte experiments with both what counts as a performance text, and what counts as a vital interpretation. She even refuses to be limited to a single text (instruction set), with the Wooster Group’s La Didone she weaves together a performance based on Cavalli’s opera combined with Mario Brava’s 1965 science fiction film Planet of the Vampires.

Cavalli’s Didone

Brava’s Planet of the Vampires

Wooster Group’s Didone

The mashup, the remix, the blending of instruction sets to produce something entirely new is what the process of creation has always already been. The boundary between recipes loses importance if the meal is well presented and delicious— a new recipe is created.

These two relationships to rule sets define much of human experience. The one approaches the regularity of the machine, while the other can careen off into what seems to be unbounded chaos. One set must be followed to the letter (a machine is the optimal performer), the other leaves openings for a two-way interaction. But the act of writing back into the interface is fraught with danger. It stands on the border of transgression, or transumption. When we don’t follow a rule set, but instead apply a new rule set from different context, we can be perceived as willfully misreading, incompetence or breaking local laws. Edward Said, in his reading of Harold Bloom’s A Map of Misreading, describes the Oedipal resonances:

Thus Bloom writes: “To live, the poet must mis-interpret [his literary] father, by the crucial act of misprision, which is the re-writing of the father.” Consequently a poet is not a man speaking to other men, but “a man rebelling against being spoken to by a dead man (the precursor) outrageously more alive than himself.” The great poetic ambition, which only the strongest poets achieve, is to appear self-begotten not only free of the father but, as Bloom demonstrates beautifully in the case of Milton (who is Bloom’s own strong poet par excellence), the father’s father. This final “transumptive” act of poetic majesty Bloom calls metalepsis: “Milton does what Bacon hoped to do; Milton and Galileo become ancients, and Homer, Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Tasso, Spenser become belated moderns.”

The fixed symbolic vocabulary of the algorithm is one of the points where misreading wants to overwrite fixity. Meanwhile back on the Network, there’s a sense in which Phil Windley’s concept of a purpose-centric web dares to ignore the local laws and advocates simply rewriting/overwriting the fixed symbolic vocabulary to serve another purpose. There’s a sense in which we can view this as another instance of text, interpretation and performance. The revolutionary idea of the Action Card is that my rule set trumps yours.

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To return to the moment that started this train of thought, let’s look at Byrne’s Arboreum drawings as a performance text. It seems as though the fixed symbolic vocabulary becomes slippery when it moves from linear typography to a map or model. The symbolic moves from symbol to symbol. The adjectives finite, discrete, governed, fixed, and  precise all seem to lose purchase. And yet if we look at the Wooster Group’s rigorous performances, we could apply all of those adjectives along a different dimension.

These two relationships to the text stand across from each other as mirror images.  As the algorithm blends with desire and takes flight into the real time flow of the Network, our sense of logic may sometimes take on the guise of the logic of sense, and it will have to learn to keep its cool as it makes the occasional trip through the looking glass.

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The Twittering Machine: A Network of Accelerants & Silences

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In 1922, the Artist Paul Klee completed a work entitled Die Zwitscher-Maschine, which has been translated into English as The Twittering Machine. The work is part of the Museum of Modern Art’s collection. The catalog description delves beneath the surface interpretation of a machine for making pleasant bird sounds:

Upon closer inspection, however, an uneasy sensation of looming menace begins to manifest itself. Composed of a wiry, nervous line, these creatures bear a resemblance to birds only in their beaks and feathered silhouettes; they appear closer to deformations of nature. The hand crank conjures up the idea that this “machine” is a music box, where the birds function as bait to lure victims to the pit over which the machine hovers. We can imagine the fiendish cacophony made by the shrieking birds, their legs drawn thin and taut as they strain against the machine to which they are fused.

I’d like to take a moment to delve beneath the surface of the machinery that makes up the micro-messaging ecosystem. The micro-messaging service Twitter approaches a kind of frictionless channel for messaging. Everything about it seems to be built for growth and speed. After the substantial speed bump of signing up and orienting yourself in the system, both listening for, and creating messages are very simple. Select the other people (and pseudo-people) you’d like to follow, type fewer than 140 characters of hypertext into a text field and press update.

It’s been noted many times that the follow social structure – the directed social graph – allows for the rapid expansion of social linking. A participant is able to follow many others without the requirement of reciprocity. I follow you, you don’t have to follow me. And the retweet has emerged as a method of transmitting messages across multiple overlapping social graphs. Hash tags have become a conventional method of indicating a message tied to a particular event. All of these tools are dedicated to the acceleration of the growth of the Twitter network. Twitter’s trending topics and search functionality allow users to find high-velocity memes as they begin to achieve broad circulation through the social mesh.

Examples of the benefits of the speed of the Twitter network abound – news about the earthquake in China, the plane landing on the Hudson River, reports on wild fires in Southern California, etc. The news media, feeling somewhat usurped here, has also brought the negative aspects of this lack of friction in the system. Usually this kind of story is meant to point to the filtering role of their own editorial facility. The New York Times put a Twitter contretemps involving Stephen Fry in the first section of their newspaper.

…that little tweet set off a frenzy of vitriolic attacks and counterattacks on Twitter, drawing an untold number of people into an increasingly charged debate and thrusting brumplum — in reality a man from Birmingham, England, named Richard — unhappily into the public’s angry glare. It was an example once again of the extraordinary power of Twitter to distribute information and to sway the opinions of vast groups of people in tiny amounts of time.

While the frictionless micro-messaging environment can accelerate important, or amusing, messages (news, stories, jokes, musings), it can also assemble and ignite an angry mob at lightning speed. And if we look at the tool set we’re offered, everything is oriented toward accelerating people, memes and the growth of the Twitter network. In this frame, value is equated with high velocity and numbers of retweets, likes, mentions, @replies, followers and now, list memberships. We’re looking for what, or who, is going viral.

But if we examine the often banal items that achieve virality, we have to question the value = virality equation. Often the high numbers are a result of lowest-common denominator dynamics, it’s not the cream rising to the top. There are certain kinds of viral items that we’d prefer to be vaccinated against. We’d like a micro-messaging Center for Disease Control warning us about time-wasting viral memes spreading through the Network. Where are the tools to retard the spread of a meme? Where’s the don’t like, or the visible gesture of hiding something from your messaging stream. It’s as though we’ve put a poll in the field that only asks for a positive response and excludes all negative reaction. Feedback loops require both positive and negative inputs.

Feedback is a mechanism, process or signal that is looped back to control a system within itself. Such a loop is called a feedback loop. Intuitively many systems have an obvious input and output; feeding back part of the output so as to increase the input is positive feedback; feeding back part of the output in such a way as to partially oppose the input is negative feedback.

Negative feedback helps to maintain stability in a system in spite of external changes. It is related to homeostasis. For example, in a population of foxes (predators) and rabbits (prey), an increase in the number of foxes will cause a reduction in the number of rabbits; the smaller rabbit population will sustain fewer foxes, and the fox population will fall back. In an electronic amplifier feeding back a negative copy of the output to the input will tend to cancel distortion, making the output a more accurate replica of the input signal.

Positive feedback amplifies possibilities of divergences (evolution, change of goals); it is the condition to change, evolution, growth; it gives the system the ability to access new points of equilibrium.

One method of judging the relative merit of the memes circulating through the stream is to pay close attention to the silences, the negative gestures. While the wisdom of crowds may have crowned an item the real-time meme of the moment, there’s a simple way to filter for value. Using a small portfolio (lists, if you will) of people who’s opinion you respect – look to see if they remain silent on a topic. In the task of discovering value, this kind of silence is golden.

In the early stages of growth, accelerants are essential. As a Network matures, unless it develops a deeper tool set, it simply becomes a twittering machine. The value it appears to create is illusory, and so the commons begins its descent to knee-jerk reactions to the high numbers generated by the lowest common denominator. Perhaps the inevitable result is that overlapping publics contract and the social space becomes a much more private circulatory system. The crucible of dispute, debate and dialogue that produces real value may only emerge away from the public network of accelerants where the social contract allows such differences (both positive and negative feedback). One of the better statements of this kind of contract was for the Nettime mailing list:

Nettime was vector for experimenting with net critique that would confront it with the possibility of inventing new forms of discourse and dialogue in a new medium. Consensus is not the goal. There’s no governing fantasy according to which the differences within this ‘group’ will on some ever-deferred day be resolved. the differences are Nettime; they might be dialectical, implying each other, or they might be differential, making absolutely no reference whatsoever to each others’ terms. Net critique, if understood as a shared practice in and against a never pre-defined techno-local environment, contains many modes of possible participation.

In navigating the electrical storms and fires of the micro-messaging Network, we’d do well to have some tools in our kit in addition to that can of gasoline.

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The Page and the Item: The Dynamics of Context and Collection

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In thinking about building things on the web, I stopped to consider the raw materials from which we build. HTML markup retrieved from a web server and rendered by a browser, that’s where it all started. But even at that early moment, there was the implied structure of the document. The markup that existed was there to render visible the form of the academic paper. Headings, paragraphs, quotations, tabular data display– these are the formal elements of the document.

And very early on, the metaphor of the page gained purchase. We nodded our heads and spoke of the ‘web page.’ The static web page and the static book page have similar kinds of boundaries. The web page could theoretically be infinitely long, but the usability experts indicated that users didn’t scroll much beyond the length of a book’s page. And just like that, an infinity was tamed. The edge of the world was discovered.

As the content on a web page became dynamic, infinity migrated to the combinations and permutations a database could produce. As long as the data continued to grow and change, the items presented in a particular page could be of an infinite variety. The boundaries to the north, south, east and west remained consistent with the book’s page, but the objects emerging from the depths of the backend could be practically without end.

The document and the page have been structurally ingrained into the architecture of content management systems such that the smallest building block becomes a page linked to a hierarchical document tree. The elements that can be placed into a page are those for which the system has templates. And while most systems allow the manual writing and insertion of raw HTML, it’s a practice that is discouraged because it ruins the uniformity of the CMS’s output. The content management system is an industrial machine for creating hierarchically organized sets of pages.

The other major organizational structure on the web is time-sequenced content. To some extent, news media takes this approach to organization, new material is published each day to replace the material from the previous day. What’s lacking in the model is the continuity of sequence. Yesterday’s news is fish wrap, rather than the next step in a sequence. Blog posts and Tweets (micromessages) have the form of a sequenced set of texts by an author or group of authors. In this sense they are more like the output of a columnist or the writer of serial fiction. Blog posts can also be assigned categories and tags so that they can be sequenced across other conceptual frames. Tweets don’t have the extra infrastructure to house categories and tags, so the practice of adding a hashtag has been bolted on. More elegant solutions like the original track feature have failed to resurface.

Rather than referring to time-sequenced pages, here we more commonly talk about items in a feed. We’re interested in the source of the feed in order to gauge its authority, along with it’s velocity and trajectory. And unlike a hierarchical organization of pages, the items in a time-sequenced feed need have no semantic relationship to each other. The items are such that they can be organized in an arbitrary large variety of collections either within a particular feed or among a diverse set of feeds.

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The page and the item converge at the URL (Uniform Resource Locator). Because of our page-centric view of the web, here we’d like to say this is the point where the item becomes a page. And yet, the web becomes much more interesting if we resist this temptation. The item has no native context, the page wants to own its context. The item allows the user to create a collection, a playlist, a feed that suits her own needs, wants and desires. The page needs to reinforce the hierarchy of which it is a part. The key to the dynamic context of the item is that it both has a URL and can contain a URL, and it doesn’t have a single right context.

Information architecture has largely concerned itself with pages and hierarchies, and the economics of the web have centered around the page-view model. As the item begins to emerge as a basic building block, it will be very interesting to see what kind of economics and architectural patterns arise. The containers, the playlists, where we assemble items will command an interesting new role in the assignment of context. And in this landscape, the item and the context are always already social, two-way and dynamic.

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