Just as water, gas, and electricity are brought into our houses from far off to satisfy our needs in response to a minimal effort, so we shall be supplied with visual- or auditory images, which will appear and disappear at a simple movement of the hand, hardly more than a sign.
- The Conquest of Ubiquity, Paul Valéry, 1928
- The Conquest of Ubiquity, Paul Valéry, 1928
During the last week at the space we’ve occupied at Triangeln this autumn we (me, Nea Landin and AZ Kelsey) invited one artist per day to make a turbo performance that was to go live on our Twitch channel at 17.00 that same day. Five days, five artists, five new works created for this time and particular combinations of physical and virtual spaces. Nea wrote a prompt that the incoming artists could relate to however they wanted:
In this digital age, our relationship with memory has evolved. We find ourselves navigating a landscape where personal recollections coexist with computer memory, blurring the lines between what is stored in our minds and what exists in the vast expanses of data. This performance series invites us to ponder how these forms of memory intersect - how the stories we carry within us merge with the digital footprints we leave behind.
She set up three stations as proposals for how to work during the few hours of ideation and production available for the artists (and, it turned out, for me and Nea as well) each day. The stations came from the work we’d done together earlier, which you can read more about here, and were (in Nea’s words):
The POV
At this station, you can stream from a pair of glasses (the Meta/Rayban collaboration) which have a camera next to the lens, so that you are able to stream the video from your own point of view.
The Proscenium
This station will have a static camera pointed at a more traditional frame. Think DIY puppet theater or TV frame. There will be a rack with costume options as well as a second, more mobile camera, to be used if you wish.
The Computer
A computer with a webcam. At this station you will be able to choose between a few pre-prepped scenes in OBS. One is a screen share option, one is a video with text on the screen (or in a speech bubble) which can be changed during the performance, and one is a reaction video setup where you will be displayed next to another video.
This mostly visual and auditory format of a Twitch stream has the potential to create an intimacy across distance. This was explored in the sound work by artist Theodor Ryan, who made a prototype of a live streamed binaural audio walk through a mall. Walking with their ears, overlaying images streamed from their eyes and the walking score created to match the image with the sound created a fleeting intimate moment of togetherness in this space. The piece made taking a stroll along the shop windows performative, or rather foregrounded the performative aspect of such a pedestrian act, inviting one to listen and move in a more contemplative manner. But also made us think about the anonymity of online viewing of art. Who am I walking with now? Who is listening in and what are they hearing? Theodor’s process involved a lot of technical questions about how to live stream binaural sound while walking. (I was searching for answers to questions like: how do I wear an open MacBook?) In choreographer and dancer Anna Näsström’s piece she danced the memories of her own childhood states of flow as well as memories shared in the Twitch chat from participants commenting. This was another kind of intimacy and sharing of memories in an anonymous way that still made room for a very personal score where stories intermingled. Anna also made use of youtube videos that triggered memories for her to create a universe where events were simultaneous and time was relative. Her piece really showed the potential of having an engaged chatroom and we talked a lot about the role of moderating and facilitating participants’ responses. What if we’d had hundreds of viewers? Or thousands? What things might be collectively prompted by an audience tuning in and what things might be curated by a moderator?
Maria Naidu danced with herself. We ripped some video documentations from performances where Maria danced in New York in the 90’s and layered those with live feeds of Maria moving in the green screen studio. Filming her from slightly different angles enabled her to react to herself in real time as she saw herself on a monitor. She was also wearing the Meta glasses and the feed from those was also sometimes layered over the other videos. There was a playful and poetic quality to the result and something that stayed with me was this way of looking that happened when Maria was trying to “meet” herself in different angles and times. A tentative positioning in relation to oneself that is a quality present in many online media today: looking at oneself as one is looking at oneself. And then trying to edge closer to oneself from another perspective. Tickling oneself.
Jeannette Ginslov responded to the theme of memory and data in a somewhat similar manner. She brought her drawing practice to the live stream table. Jeanette layered videos we shot during the day of her moving in front of a frosted glass window we found when doing an excursion to the staff bathroom that is located some twists and turns into the belly of the Triangeln beast. And another video came out of Jeanette wanting to draw on the camera lens and during lunch we found the solution to that shot when holding the lids of the take away salads we’d just eaten. Placing the see through plastic in front of the camera allowed Jeanette to draw and smudge paint at super close up. These videos were layered in the live feed with a top mounted camera of Jeanette drawing live on white paper as a response to the pre-recorded videos. Shapes were traced and movements responded to live. Jeanette also directed Nea live with voice commands. Nea was running the stream and VJ-ing in OBS, and in Jeanettes own words it was like Nea was an extension of her own drawing tools.
The last day we helped Filip Rahim Hansson to use chat roulette and similar randomized conversation platforms for orchestrating chance meetings between people. He came up with the idea of having two “roulettes” facing each other and that way we could tap into a conversation as an invisible third party. This of course was a prototype of something that in practice breached the terms of use of most of these platforms since it is an “unauthorized framing” of the service in question. But the hypothesis was a conversation starter for sure and the moral implications of this eavesdropping was a fascinating subject. When two people find each other and decide to keep talking not knowing there are others listening in on the conversation, a very fragile and intimate moment appears. Maybe because it is happening live?
All five works that came out of the lab week went through a pedal-to-the-metal version of an artistic process. I love this about making turbo work. The artists were presented with the tools available. All of them learned a thing or two about live streaming. All of them asked us questions we did not at first know the answer to. Some questions were more technical and involved extensive workflow testing and thinking. Some were more about figuring out a situation and what it communicated. Some kind of idea materialises when the artist gets their hands on the tools and some knowledge. Then this idea gets brutally pushed through the eye of the needle that is the real constraints of time, space and tools.
AZ kept asking: why live? Why is this live? Does it matter? We somehow feel that it matters. There’s something honest in the way we test things live, with an audience. There is a meeting there that happens and by inviting people to see something that’s not finished we also invite them to test not just a work of art but test a way of making a work of art. We’re foregrounding the communication. There is great value of knowing there is going to be a live audience at 17.00. It does something to the research process when it has to be faced outward and talk to someone who is not in the know. There’s something in that which is inherent to live performance and that I keep coming back to during the Stream Slam week. When we’re not sure of how this new format actually “talks”, it is a non-exhausted source of communication potentiality.
Why turbo? Why not give more time and space for ideas to grow? Well, I believe there is all the time in the world and this is one way to make space for play, for surfacing some things that might not have surfaces in a more stretched out process. This being said, it is also a mirroring of the precariousness of artistic work at the moment. There is very little time and place for exploration. Should we really be speeding things up? Should we not slow down and rest? Who profits from the one or other way of doing things? How to resist the precarity and regain agency and power over our own infrastructures? I believe we need to be imaginative in the temporal forms we work within. This is one way. Giving space, even if it is for a brief moment. Caring for the idea and supporting each other, even if that is not sustained for long. Holding this turbo space and place with a critical posture, but insisting on the playing and the testing as the principal ways of doing just that.
Me and Nea had an hour or two in the morning preparing for the artist of the day. This usually meant playfully testing our own setup to warm up and get better acquainted with it. This unsolicited making was a counter pole to the turbo process we were about to move into with a sharp deadline and expecting audience. The morning sessions churned out some hours of material, playing around with chroma, meta layers of desktop choreographies, and placing the body on top or inside of a live browser window. We explored the meatiness of close up footage in combination with casual duckduckgoing. Our warm ups sometimes trickled into the turbo process later in the day but more importantly, they will ferment in our bodies and Drive folders for future endeavors. The lab week is over, appearing and disappearing at a simple movement of the hand, but the lab is not closed for science business. Promising mold will grow. Stay tuned.
Keep swimming. Keep computing.