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Category: performance

Hymnody of the Network

I came across this piece of music while reading David Byrne's latest post about his new project, Contemporary Color. One of the groups in a competition he was observing performed to a song by Vienna Teng called “The Hymn of Acxiom.” A hymn is a song of praise.

Acxiom is a database company that tracks personal data on the Network. They sell that data to other corporations for a variety of purposes to be used in many contexts. When I was working in online identity, we hired Acxiom to create out-of-band questions as a second factor in user authentication. For instance, you might provide a password and then answer a question from Acxiom. For example, here are three addresses. Have you ever lived at any of them? They can create that kind of question on the fly because they know everything about just about everyone.

Traditionally a hymn is addressed to a deity. The form of this song tells us something about the attitude of the singer. The hymn is also meant to be sung by the community surrounding the deity. Stewart Brand believes that humans have supplanted the gods, and must now act like it, in the face of global warming and other planetary disasters. Certainly humans, as a species, have put a stamp on the fate of the planet and all its inhabitants. But an individual human doesn't have the power of the whole species. And as “gods” is a plural, it doesn't preclude the possibility of others. Say, Acxiom, for instance.

A Hymn of Acxiom

Somebody hears you. You know that, you know that…

Somebody hears you. You know that inside.

Someone is learning the colors of all your moods, to

(say just the right thing and) show that you’re understood.

Here you’re known.

Leave your life open. You don’t have, you don’t have…

Leave your life open. You don’t have to hide.

Someone is gathering every crumb you drop, these

(mindless decisions and) moments you long forgot.

Keep them all.

Let our formulas find your soul.

We’ll divine your artesian source (in your mind),

Marshal feed and force (our machines will)

To design you a perfect love—

Or (better still) a perfect lust.

O how glorious, glorious: a brand new need is born.

Now we possess you. You’ll own that, you’ll own that…

Now we possess you. You’ll own that in time.

Now we will build you an endlessly upward world,

(reach in your pocket) embrace you for all you’re worth.

Is that wrong?

Isn’t this what you want?

Amen.

 

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Environmental Theatrics: Top Secret Crypto

I'm not saying there is such a thing, and no one could prove otherwise. But if there were some sort of new underground forming, it would have a “Fight Club”-like motto. The first rule of the new underground is that you don't talk about the new underground. In fact, no one even calls it that because it doesn't have a name yet. It may never have a name. Forget I even mentioned it.

Of course, this particular incident was revealing, but only if you were able to tune into the hidden channel it was broadcasting on. Now that the event itself is safely behind us, I can tell you a few details. It was a series of performances by a unit called “The Collected Works” in San Francisco. Untethered to any particular performance venue, this group commandeered the Old Mint building for an environmental theater performance of Jean Genet's “The Balcony.” This information is on a need-to-know basis and should not be passed on to anyone.

The Old Mint's basement was the site of the play's opening three scenes featuring the Judge, the General and the Bishop. Underground, hidden, locked away from the revolt happening at street level, these characters obsessively repeated their fetishes in strict rituals performed in various chambers of the brothel. The audience wandered from one scene to the next feeling as though they'd walked in on the middle of some very private moment. Then, just when a sense of comfort and rhythm was beginning to take hold, an alarm bell rings. An alarm clock, a wake-up call, a harsh reminder that the time for this session is up. It's time to leave the underground cells and return to the real world upstairs.

In scenes unfolding in grand room after room, the audience witnesses the business of the brothel, the protection provided by the police, the unfolding revolution surrounding the building, private fantasies transforming into public power, and finally the birth of the Chief of Police into the canon of fetishes. Like the others, the Chief of Police is an expression of a desire that wishes to remain unfulfilled, and thus remain desire in the form of “desiring.” The Bishop, the Judge and the General are all medicines that cause the illness they are meant to cure. Preserving the capacity to repeat a ritual in the private chambers of the brothel is echoed in the public halls of government, society and power. The play attempts hold up a very large mirror.

The performance was breathtaking in the sheer size of its conception, and in the difficulty and risk of selecting Genet's text. The performers and the performance inhabited and transformed the dusty and neglected space of the Old Mint building. In environmental performance, there's a tricky moment as the audience moves from space to space to witness the next scene. There is no break in the action, no pause for the logistics of movement, the performance continues even as the audience gathers in the next space. The key rhythmical moment is when the moving audience isn't fully settled in the new location. They aren't sure where to stand or sit, they may not even be clear in what part of the room the action of the play will take place. Suddenly the performance sparks to life and the scene begins. The audience, not yet feeling itself to be an audience, is transformed and pulled into the urgency of the narrative. These performers were masterful in creating each new performance space as the play progressed.

Let us assume that you didn't witness any of the performances in this particular series. For the most part the local arts and entertainment media, to the extent such a thing still exists, was oblivious to the event. While this performance of Jean Genet's “The Balcony,” by The Collected Works was a public performance, it was hidden in plain site. It occupied two floors of a large public building in the middle of downtown, but was largely invisible. The two week run sold out every performance, with some people returning several times. For work like this to prosper, it's important that you keep quiet about it. Don't tell all your friends, don't share this blog post, and don't hope that this goes mainstream.

If we were to talk about this theater collective and it's performances, we'd have to acknowledge that plays by Gombrowicz and Genet are not mainstream. They aren't supposed to be for everybody. Any future performances are on a need-to-know basis. Attend only if you must.

Environmental, or site specific, performance creates a very rare aesthetic experience for these times. In this age of screens and couches, it's a given that a certain kind of distance and separation is required to create an aesthetic experience. The fourth wall is institutionalized in the form of a sheet of glass separating you from the “content” on your device. Interacting with a performance is limited to backchannel snark inscribed on to a real-time social network stream. Alternatively, performances like “The Balcony,” if there were such performances, are strangely intimate. A performance space is shared by the audience and the performers and divided up on the fly in brief moments of stasis before transforming and renegotiating the territory all over again. There's a give and take that demands a conscious creation and recreation of aesthetic distance from moment to moment as the play moves through the site.

I'm counting on you to keep this secret. It's not as hard as you might think. People see what they want to see. Sometimes the simplest mask will keep hidden what seems perfectly obvious and public. Remember, this is top secret crypto. Your eyes only…

 

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Virtual Reality from The Balcony

It used to be called the “new new thing.” That next piece of networked hardware or software that was going to blow open new vistas in human experience and open the wallets of people all across the land. Every once in a while the pundits decide that it’s virtual reality gear. Oculus Rift and MS Hololens are the current standard bearers of this particular dream. Virtual reality is an externalization of interior space. It’s a technology that’s meant to take things we imagine and pipe them directly into someone else’s imagination as a product you can buy.

We call it “virtual reality” because very little suspension of disbelief is required. The audience member shouldn’t have to interpret or fill in pieces of the dream. The dream itself provides all the fidelity of a “real” experience. Of course, this is a very naive view of how reality is experienced by humans.

Once the uncanny valley is traversed, the importance of the hardware will fall away. That means technology will have defeated the human sensory system’s ability to distinguish between a created reality and a given reality. It then becomes a question of what virtual reality you desire. When you escape this world and enter a predesigned world-like experience, what will you choose?

The model, Kate Upton, plays a character in a video game called “Game of War.” Celebrities can sell the specifications of their likeness, and create filmed segments, that put them inside these virtual reality experiences. It won’t be long before individual game players actually pay to have all of their personal data uploaded into the game engine so that they too can be rendered into the virtual world. There’s only one real Kate Upton, but in virtual reality everyone can participate in a story with the model (or a model of the model).

Interrogating these fantasies becomes a key not just to the potential future of the technology, but to the minds behind the effort. The San Francisco-based theater group, The Collected Works has taken on the challenge by deciding that now is the right time to produce Jean Genet’s “The Balcony.” In the play, clients in a brothel pay to play the roles of figures of authority while a rebellion unfolds in the city around them. Many meta-narratives ensue for the characters. Even the audience is implicated in the play’s layers of reality and illusion. Genet gives us virtual reality without the technical apparatus.

The character of the Chief of Police wishes nothing more than to enter the secret desires of the brothel’s customers. He hopes that a customer will choose to impersonate him in their secret virtual reality sessions. One can easily imagine the technologists of virtual reality (the nerds, the geeks) hoping that the audience will choose to enact the role of the creator of technologies It’s always the next step for the latest edition of the “masters of the universe.”

Sometimes a theatrical performance is timed to play with themes coursing through the culture. In this case, the venue couldn’t be more perfect. It’s San Francisco’s Old Mint. You know, the place where they used to print money. The Collected Works has the opportunity to open up the beating heart of the zeitgeist, raise it above their heads, and show it to us in performance.

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Annette Peacock: Solving for the Unknown Known

If you've lived long enough and you look back on the trends and history of recorded music, you sense that something's missing. In that era of the late 60's when music was undergoing so many changes and revolutions, there's a space where there should be a groundbreaking female avant-garde musician. Perhaps someone who tripped with Leary, performed as a hologram in a Salvador Dali installation and a pioneered the use of the Moog Synthesizer in treating vocals. A person who changed the politics of avant-garde jazz improvisation by creating the “free form song.”

Annette Peacock was thinking about gender and the politics of jazz improvisation while most of us were having our minds blown by what appeared to be a free jazz improvisational structure. Free jazz was so new and such a different way of making music that we didn't know how to think about it, how to critique it. We barely knew how to appreciate it. Here's Peacock on how it was:

I came back to New York at the time I started my career – if you can call it that – in the world of avant-garde jazz, everything had broken loose. Everyone was blowing, improvising together simultaneously in the lofts. It was totally free. It was an aggressively masculine texture assaulting you. I’m not male and I wasn’t involved in it so I could see it from an objective perspective. And it seemed like I had to carve space out… to slow things down. So I started writing ballads, with two notes basically, just intervals. No chords. Very minimal. Musicians had no idea what to play on it. Drummers had no idea what to play on it. I felt at the time my responsibility was to create environments that improvising musicians could perpetuate; to create an architecture basically. ECM, the record label, built a very successful label on the concept of those ballads that I wrote.

Peacock's first recording, “Revenge” wasn't released by the record label. And that's why there's a hole in the history of recorded music. “Revenge” was an incredibly influential record that never made it on to the turntable. Peacock explains the choice she was forced to make:

Oh yeah, they didn’t release it. There was a problem with going over budget. Paul (Bley) had recorded some music in Boston with his trio but they weren’t interested in releasing it. So they gave me a choice: release the record and the musicians won’t get paid or pay the musicians and the record won’t get released. So I said pay the musicians because that’s the kind of guy I am! But it was devastating. It was agony. It broke my heart.

Annette Peacock has recently released a remastered version of what she calls “the right album, in the wrong century.” The new title is “I belong to a world that's destroying itself.” The white hot radicalism of the recording is still there, but from this distance we can begin to hear it. We can connect the dots and understand the missing sound that influenced so many threads of music. More importantly, the music still challenges us. We haven't progressed as much as we'd like to think. The ecology she sang about, is the ecology we've yet to sing about. All her recordings are worth listening to, but in this first one Peacock is still out ahead of us all these years later. Still avant-garde. Still a visitor from the future.

Yeah, she's the one.

Word is that there's a new record coming soon. And the great Anil Prasad of Innerviews says he's been in contact with Ms. Peacock about an in-depth interview when her new recording is completed. Happy days are here again. You can buy some of Annette Peacock's records artist direct. You should do that.

 

 

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