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

3. performance
Riverside Studios looked very different from The Place Theatre. Riverside was a working space with various Digital Dancing projects happening simultaneously. In our corner the projection was high on a sloping white cyclorama meeting a white floor. Spectators sat, stood or milled about. The computers shared the performance space. All operational components were laid bare. The camera people shared the space with the dancers. The Place Theatre offered much more rigid theatrical conventions. Audience members were urged to leave the raked seating and circulate from stage to seats, pursuing as many sight lines as possible. The black stage space was stripped except for a large cinema screen that it was possible to see through, and onto which the live feed from Riverside was projected and seen from both sides. Viewers had the choice between seeing the projection with me behind the screen looking almost like a projection myself, or venturing behind the screen to see the same projection with me unveiled.

Transcending the conventional audience/performer divide in this sort of work is crucial. Everyone implicated in the experimentation (from computer operators, to performers, to audience) generate their own meaning of the piece while it happens. Reactions to the project are not simply based on judgements of beauty or virtuosity, the act of responding is implicated in creating a new poetics and physical imaginary. A new performance aesthetic cannot be imposed simply by the devisers of the piece, it arises as an engagement between all participants of the event. To use another of Merleau-Ponty's terms, response is a dynamic entwinement, a chiasm.

There was more distortion and pixellation of the image transmitted from West London to North London for Ghosts and Astronauts than between Vancouver and London for Multi-Medea: Exiles. The ironies of the internet demonstrate how a geographical understanding of distance is irrelevant: we would expect that the greater distance would introduce greater interference but this is not necessarily so. Remoteness or proximity in interaction is not a pre-set parameter but is a variable shaped by the vagaries of the internet and by how we respond to moving, pixellating and recombining images. It is not true that it is easier to respond to full clear images. Sometimes response is more powerful when a pixellated fragment is all that is offered. For example, in the section where Ruth and I work very close to the eyeball cameras our images would often split so that a piece of an eye or a mouth would be suspended in a sort of abstraction. Instead of this seeming disembodied it evoked a strong physical response. How did we hold on to a connection with each other? There were choices to be made: I could look at her image in her projected window and engage directly, or look at the projected image of my body in my window juxtaposed with her in hers -- this was inevitably different from the first option since my own image was delayed from my real time movement -- or I could ignore the projections and use a powerful imaginative sense of her based on intense concentration through the lens of the camera. There was another option for interaction and this arose through the small torches we had strapped to our wrists and collarbones. The line of light could be directed at the camera resulting in a flare, or onto other surfaces (including floors, walls or the projection screen itself) extending and throwing the shadow of hands and fingers, stretching touch.

The cameras and camera people were hybrid physical beings who danced with us and impacted enormously on the process. The camera introduces its own movement vocabulary of pulling, spiralling, abstracting, focussing, overexposing, hiding, revealing, inverting, disintegrating, leading, chasing, tracing. It can make us fly, float or fall. To begin the perfomance I was suspended in a harness with a tiny video camera taped to my right palm. There were strong movement implications. For the camera to pick up the elusive territory of spaces in between and to pursue a spiralling journey my movement needed to be pared right down. Less became more. Big movement was lost or banal. Small shifts of weight or balance became more interesting. The objective was not to carve through space with acrobatic or virtuosic feats, but to feel the viscosity of the air and let this stickiness be captured by the camera. The image bordered on high abstraction, familiar body parts (hands, faces, feet) became landmarks from which to navigate. Our (both myself and the viewers) physical bearings were continually lost then re-established, relying on visual perception but also a three-dimensional kinaesthetic sense. When the digital camera was introduced into the harness section the visual effect of bodies floating in space was eerily similar to archive film documentation of moon walks in the 1960's, or even of more recent Mir footage. We hadnÕt intended to recreate familiar images of outer space, but by working from simple movement principles through the telecommunications equipment available to us we inadvertently generated an approximation of the iconic shape of the astronaut in weightlessness.

Ending with the theme of astronauts, it is possible to return to Virilio for another instance where his concerns converge with our experimentation. For him the great menace of our technologies of telecommunication and transportations is the shrinking of the Earth.

Virilio 1996, p.44.

The experience of vertigo, of delirum, of nausea is inevitable at the beginning of a new stage of physical-philosophical knowledge, whether in gravity or microgravity. I wonder if space travel has been the greatest enchantment of the 20th Century, not due to a sense of loss of the self or of the Earth, but because of the potential for an innate physical understanding of the expansions it entails.

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Notes: 1. Digital Dancing 1997 was a two week forum for choreographers and digital artists to explore ways that digital technologies (including telematics, motion capture, Big Eye, CD-Rom authoring techniques) can be drawn into live performance. It was produced by Illuminations Interactive (Terry Braun, Suzanne Kelly, Henry Johnson), for further details see this website
The Ghosts and Astronauts team was made up of Jonny Clark (music), Ruth Gibson (performance), Guy Hilton (networking), Anne Holst (performance), Susan Kozel (performance, choreography) Dominique Rivoal (cameras), and Gretchen Schiller (digital choreography).

2. Multi-Medea: Exiles was part of the Electronic Cabaret of the Body Electric Festival (May 1997) in Vancouver Canada. A link was made between Vancouver at midnight (where I was) and London at dawn where Ruth Gibson performed at the other end of the connection.

3. V_2, an artists collective in Rotterdam (Holland), introduced the term "unstable media" to describe artistic uses of digital technologies. For more information on their artistic, programming and networking activities see their website

4. I am grateful to Kitsou Dubois for an illuminating discussion, as well as the opportunity to see video documentation both of her parabolic flights and the performance she choreographed as a result of her research. See Dubois (1996) Gravité zéro, une danseuse en apesanteur, Les actes du corps au corpus technologique. Odyssud-Blagnac.

5. See Michel Bernard (1995) Le corps. Paris: ?ditions du Seuil; and Entretien avec Hubert Godard, Le geste manquant, Etats de Corps. Revue Internationale de Psychanalyse, no 5, 1994, pp.63-75. Both are strongly influenced by Merleau-Ponty's idea of the chiasm, and are taking his thought further.

6. Page references are from Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1968)The Visible and the Invisible, translated by A. Lingus. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.

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