hi johannes & all,
On 28/02/12 4:16 PM, Johannes Birringer wrote:
> And what would we make of the chats? the "histories" of subtextual
> chat conversations during a live stream? these resonancers? (Caroline
> raised the questions of whether chats have any resonance). I'd say,
> little if any.
caroline's question was not whether the chats themselves have any
resonance, but "if the resonance of an event is in direct proportion to
the ability to sustain a conversation by whatever means necessary or
available?"; sustaining a conversation, via a text chat or other means,
might enhance the resonance of an event by confirming co-presence &
sense of temporary community (as how you say below, the communal gossip
etc contributes to embodied cultures). as for what we might make of the
chats ...
> is the random (and sometimes crazily disconnected/disconcerting) chatting during a live networked performance worth archiving and reproducing? i would think not, although it may help to be some sort of empirical and ethnographic data if you were to analyze the apparent resonators and social factors surrounding or "flowing" into a networked event? [and see below]
for me it is worth keeping; usually not with the intention of
reproducing it, altho often there are great quotes or hilariously funny
things that happen spontaneously &/or unintentionally. but for me it's
an important trace of the live event.
> How many narratives would we get, recounting the chats that happened during ephemeral live networked events that may have happened? Who would read these accounts? how would this accrue to a new "oral culture" of or about the "experience" of live performances if they happened? (Caroline Langill mentioning "Distribution is as much about documentation as it is about dissemination" and the Chris Burden "Shoot" example and the photographs of a witnessed event.....).
i read them - myriad narratives that are conflicting & contradictory as
often as they are harmonious; there are arguments & jokes & stories &
commentary & criticism & compliments & appreciation & questions &
objections & affirmations & everything else in between. there are
snippets of the ordinary realities of the individuals gathered in that
moment - someone's kid wakes up, the phone rings somewhere, someone has
to leave to go to work, someone is hungry - yes it can be disconnected,
disconcerting, banal, stupid, etc but it is all part of the moment that
was created within that performance.
> What temporalities suit the internet? (Annie Abrahams) Annie argues: "For me the most important aspect of the "live" issue is the way it relates to control and power. Life performance always means accepting one's own vulnerability, the possibility of mistakes, errors, breaks, failure, etc. This absence of total control leads to extra excitement for the public (whether online or offline)"
>
> is this a point made on behalf of improvisation (and old point, thus, and not necessarily a historically convincing argument on behalf of breaks, glitches and failures. What is it that excites you about break downs? what is so sexy about vulnerabiltity (claimed also by body artists and then it becomes a promotional engine to highlight the so called vulnerable body, yes?). But then again, what is interesting about the claim you make? why would that lead to extra excitement in the public? what excites the users about bad YouTube clips? i have no idea. Is anyone excited about bad& boring YouTube clips, and given the innumerable flood of things getting posted to the internet every day, who cares?
the unpredictability of breakdowns interests & excites me; i'm not
interested in "bad" youtube videos because they're always going to be
the same, if it's a "failure" then it's already failed. in live
performance it is the unexpected, the unpredictable, the possibility of
complete & utter disaster as well as the possibility of complete utter
brilliance (sometimes at the exact same moment) - & the online
environment adds its own instability to live events. i've learned that
the mistakes & glitches that happen in cyberformance are really
important for the audience - they confirm the liveness of the
experience, & its riskiness; & that is exciting, for some people anyway.
> i believe the social networks and YouTubes and Livestreams and Low Lives cannot at all compete with nor supplant the more viscerally embodied and ingrained lived theatrical cultures and ritual cultures and music cultures and dance cultures and sporting cultures that sustained themselves precisely through the communal gossip or conversational and emotional and intellectual social (and class specific and ethnically inflected) direct-encounters/exchanges that inevitably happen in live ritual events - where we had gathered and where we will have gathered during our limited life times.
maybe i missed something, but i don't think anyone suggested that
networked performance/cyberformance, social networks or any other "new"
media are trying to compete with or supplant other forms of art/culture?
i'm not; rather i think that online/digital mediums have become infused
by theatre (which is the original multimedia artform after all, & one
that has always been an early-adopter of new technologies) & its
emphasis on real-time exchange, being in the moment, ephemeral rather
than recorded.
i'm curious as to what you mean by "lived" cultures - do you mean that
networked/digital cultures are somehow not "lived"? or do you mean
something else?
>
> I doubt very much that i shall look back and remember the 2000s as the era where we gathered at (our home) computer terminals typing excited and angry chat words, yearning signals and missives from our angry intimacy to the lonely collective out there, the cravers and desirers and asserters and lurkers so extraordinarily captured and deconstructed in the melancholic "music" that Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen made out of the chatrooms of the internet with their perverse search engines (in the digital installation "Listening Post") [see for example http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dD36IajCz6A)?
>
our indivdiual memories will be wonderfully diverse, i'm sure :)
h : )
--
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helen varley jamieson: creative catalyst
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http://www.creative-catalyst.com
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http://www.upstage.org.nz
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