Exiles, Ghosts and Astronauts
physical interventions in the critique of virtual culture
Aura: Film Studies Journal. Volume IV, Issue1/1998.
Susan Kozel

Ghosts and Astronauts was a performance experiment occurring simultaneously between Riverside Studios and The Place Theatre in London (England). The videoconference link was made by Macintosh computers and basic internet videoconferencing software (CU-SeeMe). Performers in each location were projected into the other for a physical exploration of intimacy, weightlessness and altered materiality. It was part of Digital Dancing 1997, the London Dance Umbrella platform for dance and technology collaboration.1

As physical exploration is undertaken, with telepresence and other forms of digital intervention in performance , the physical and philosophical vocabularies that emerge are mutually shaped and critical of one another. This article charts a course through philosophical debate and performance practice. Many voices and perspectives unfold across three sections: dialogue with Paul Virilio, devising process, and performance.

1. dialogue with Paul Virilio
Paul Virilio 1996 Cybermonde, la politique du pire, p.44-5 (all translations are my own, my emphasis in bold)

What does it mean for dance to be in a position of maximal resistance, to be heralded as the site of maximal resistance to the space of virtual reality? This can be interpreted two ways: one is the disturbing and dualistic assertion that dancing bodies are the meat, the flesh in a base, organic and natural sense, opposed to the immaterial or phantasmic bodies of virtual reality. The other is the more subtle interpretation that the embodied arts are an electric location, an entwinement between the material and the immaterial, the organic, mythic and even machinic, and that this very hybridity makes dance a fertile ground for the critique and development of our technologically obsessed culture. Paul Virilio is a respected interlocutor in the critical debate around this cultural obsession with technology. His intuition that dance resists the disembodied hype of much cyber-politics and virtual-rhetoric is sound, yet his translation of telepresence into the realm of the immaterial wherein the other is lost does not hold up in the face of performance experiments using telematics.

Telematics is a term used to cover a range of systems that link remote locations: from fast, wide-bandwidth ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) transmission technology which can carry several streams of data simultaneously and produce slick and clear images and sounds; to slower videoconference systems, for example by ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network), which may deliver sound undelayed but which instil a jerkiness of movement; to CU-SeeMe, the grainiest, most delayed and pixellated option. CU-SeeMe can be downloaded for free from the internet and operated with a domestic modem, telephone line, and small, monochrome, golf-ball shaped digital camera. This last option was used for Ghosts and Astronauts, and, before it, for a performance link between Vancouver (Canada) and London (England) called Multi-Medea: Exiles.2 The grainy, abstracted images and movement interruptions generate a very particular movement quality as well as a tenuous feel to the interaction which I find desirable for exploring the themes of exile, presence and absence.

Virilio offsets the delocalisation of the body intrinsic to telepresence with the physical and located presence of the dancing body -- yet he does not consider the implications of dance and telepresence combined. He seeks to defend the spatial "here" against the rushing current of the temporal "now," implying that the now dominates any technological context. In my experience, there is an undeniable 'here' in telematic dance performance. It has qualities of the familiar 'here' combined with a 'here' we have not encountered before. Isn't the essence of the 'here and now,' of living and performing in the moment (with or without the intervention of computers), the potential for inherent strangeness, unanticipated on the basis of prior knowledge? The merging of two remote locations as occurs through telepresence does not annul the 'here,' but it does render obsolete certain static spatial co-ordinates such as the Cartesian xyz axes that structure our understanding of depth. Instead of rectilinear dimensionality, depth becomes a factor of movement and the layering of bodies. The experience is further complicated since the depth felt and moved by the performers does not necessarily correspond to the depth seen and created by the lens of the camera. The 'here' of telepresence is characterised by the confrontation between projection surface and interactive depth. An in-betweenness is integral to the experience: the space of the 'here' is in-between two-dimensional projections and multi-dimensional imaginary and physical interaction. When I perform via videoconference link I do not think of the other performers and myself as occupying endpoints, instead I have a strong sense that we can slide into the grainy, two-dimensional image, down an imaginary tunnel that links the remote locations. The engagement occurs as a pulling between locations that does not annul the 'here,' it is twisted into a new and constantly transforming shape.

What is the motivation for using telepresence in a performative context? It is not the desire to jettison our real bodies. There is no, as Virilio suggests, immoderate love of the virtual body at stake in choreographic exploration with telematics, although moderation is inherent to any process of movement that allows itself to be shaped and interrupted by digital data transmission. Moderation in the context of computers and remote geographical links becomes modulation, as in the modulation and demodulation performed by a modem. There is a constant process of deciphering involved, a constant need to interpret the code of the movement received and to respond to the disintegrating and recombining physicality that is generated. We need merely the vestiges of a human form to identify a face or a limb, we need only the suggestion of the line of a torso or a trajectory of movement to register the possibility for physical response. It is possible to respond even when not directly looking at the two dimensional projection, as if by innate understanding of the flow of electrical currents from plugs and leads to equipment we register the lines and flow of interaction through cameras, computers, modems, screens, light, eyes, limbs and imaginations. When the media is unstable, and flowing it can be seen as a metaphor for bodies.3 Unlike the tendency to impose a corporeal metaphor upon other practices (such as reading and writing) here the bodily metaphor does not come second: our physical, moving bodies make up the basis for understanding our interaction with computers. As such, the virtual body is not desired (and desirable) territory into which we escape, it is a modulation/demodulation of our moving, fleshly bodies. Physicality is the basis for understanding and negotiating digital abstractions, both virtual and otherwise, and technologically mediated experimentation allows us to expand upon the phenomenon of embodiment.

Virilio. 1996. p.40.

Trajectory, as understood by Virilio, is linked to proximity and community. When the truly dynamic quality of a trajectory is understood we see its relevance to a moving art form such as dance. With constant movement -- which need not be equated solely with speed for we can follow a trajectory even through stillness -- we have a constant interaction between bodies and the creation of space. Work through CU-SeeMe videoconference link calls attention to the never ceasing flow of interaction between bodies, spaces and equipment by means of consistent interruption. There is a shifting, juddering unpredictability to the movement of the image, and to the regular crashes or adjustments required for maintaining a link. Nothing is inert. The fragility of interaction across distances echoes the vulnerability of proximity. (One of the most frequently received comments was the unexpected vulnerability conveyed through the images and the interactive set up of Ghosts and Astronauts.) Proximity is not stable: it is not the easy and material alternative to telematics. As with any dualistic opposition, it is dangerous to simply equate physical proximity with intimacy and to set it off against distance, alienation and telepresence. All interaction can be seen in terms of the negotiation of flow, the creation and rending of intimacy, the incredible capability of our bodies to read, respond to and inscribe traces of physical engagement. Once the play of trajectories is identified in telematics the menace of losing the other (one of Virilio's great worries) is less pronounced.

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