Warm Not Cold

Reflections on Warm Not Cold performance of April 11th.

Comments by members of the Death, Data, & Desire class, formulated by Trebor Scholz. Photos by Camille.pb and Tom Leonhardt.

The unreliable fleeting nature of the Internet conditions the art created for it. The fact that things did not work out made up the strength of the piece. Failure as window of possibility. The screen exerts its power. We are so used to screen-based worlds and it is a relieve to see this embodied focal point pulling participants away from the screen. The performance becomes a dialogue between the computational surface and the person.

Questions:
How would it change the performance if parts of the web interaction would be prerecorded as screen video? How can the drama of the Internet, with its possible, incalculable shutdowns be heightened? What did the social game focus on? Where did it lead people? The emotional, spontaneous interaction with the interface of the audiovisual blog is highlighted.

The performer, unlike the powerpoint lecturer, disrupts the peace of the pacified armchair passenger, one-to-one with the screen. Here, the performer is happening, intermingling screen realities with hot bodies. He creates an uncomfortable closeness in the black box space. He makes the participants aware how they interact with media.

Performance props: A small bag of things that you are choosing to take on a trip. The slow motion of the performer as opposed to the nervous, rapid flickering speeding mouse on screen. Should remote performers, distributed, controlling the performer from afar become part of the piece?

The performer loosens up the people in the room: “Cakes and jam!,” animations, sms from your cell phone to the screen. The tension between documentation of the performance and the performance itself blurs the borderline between the artwork on the screen and the embodied artist. The performer breaks open the audience grid to activate open social behavior. Blogs move “users” in very predesigned paths.

“One day I broke the CSS of the blog and all elements of the blog were mashed up. I thought- yeah, that’s it. I’d like to play with these formats.” Blogs merely allow us to inflict styles. It takes the technically informed user to randomize these preset patterns.

Class Suggestion:
Use of ultra small projectors. Projecting onto bodies. Cellphones project (http://wiredblogs.tripod.com/gadgets/index.blog?entry_id=1460989) a keyboard, letting you type. Project your cellphone.

Art and research. Understanding your process and outcomes through process documents. Reflect on your process. “Art practice qualifies as research when its purpose is to broaden our knowledge and understanding through an original investigation.” What does it mean to do research?

Theory and production/practice don’t marry like bread and jam. Their convergence is a process that needs to be learned. Once established the artist becomes a participant-observer. He reads and works. His production experience informs the way he grasps the texts. Snippets from essays may inform and inspire production. The act of making becomes the process of taking part in a conversation: discourse.

As Ryan Bishop and John Phillips write, the integrative history of military technology — a history of prosthetic extension, especially that of sight — has been paralleled by the rise of mass media and its manipulation of vision to create illusions of simultaneity, movement, and depth. Each has produced instruments designed to collapse distance and time, aiming to close the gap between the perceiving subject and the visible world. The “problem” proposed by the gap of perception is solved by a return to a mythologized time of unproblematic perception. But the fundamental problem remains.

These histories are intertwined with that of automation, but they connect to a still larger migration of cognition. By the 1960s, for example, television was already on its way to becoming, as it has today, a machine for the automation of thinking. Reflecting the viewer’s own thought process, it develops its own conventions of simulated deliberation, absolving the viewer of the labor of decision-making — as when a laugh track allows one to maintain a relaxed composure while the machine assumes the labor of chuckling. At the extreme end is the figure of the “couch potato”, whose body is hollowed out by the apparatus as the televisual “smart image” assumes control.

Consider a recent news broadcast. A pilot is flying an aircraft during a combat situation in Iraq. It is flown jointly, by an operator in the cockpit as well as by operators on the ground. We are watching the scene as if through the cockpit window. Computer calculations are arrayed on the image-field. We see through the pilot’s eye, but we also see through the viewpoint of the larger command network in which the pilot is embedded. The pilot is one actor within a distributed agency that combines humans and machines. Our viewpoint is momentary converged with that of the piloting agency. The clip ends, and a zoom out frames the image within a newsroom stage. A news anchor appears. She meets our gaze and addresses us in terms of a collective “we.” We are placed in position, momentarily aligned with this combinatory operator, sharing its perspective, hailed as subjects within its operational world.

For both the military and the civilian observer, there is no “time” for reflection. In the military realm, reflection adds time and space in which the target might slip away. It expands, not lessens, the gap between detecting and intervening, sensing and shooting. In the popular realm, slowness — the stuff of reflection and deliberation — is to be avoided, instantaneity prized. American media culture is one of impatience and immediacy. Reflection is distributed and automated — or as some would say, evacuated. We are however talking about a symbiotic relationship: both subject and object are mutually intertwined within the combinatory human-machinic realm.