Hi Victoria (and all),
Teaching "new media performance," I run into pleasantly confounding situations where it's difficult to tell whether a proposed student project is a "new media performance" or an "interactive installation," or "digital instrument construction" (like they were a digital luthier or something).
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1.
Here is a piece of mine that could be somewhere between all three:
http://lab404.com/video/francis.html
It was a series of about four performances in one evening, each about 10-20 minutes, in a black box room adjacent to a gallery. Between the performances, I left the system running, and it behaved like a kind of generative installation, remixing itself:
http://lab404.com/video/francis_documentation/flood/installation.mov
I would take off the white robe and gloves and leave them on top of the theremin between performances, and then I would walk into the room and put on the robe and gloves and start to play again for each performance.
So it was like a generative system that I could step into and modulate (inhabite? animate? haunt?), but then when I removed myself from the system, it would continue to self-modulate.
So was it an instrument that I was playing, or was it a series of performances with breaks in between, or was it an ongoing generative installation that was performing itself with occasional input from me?
At the time, I thought of it more as a performance, because I wasn't inviting audience members to "play" it between performances, and I broke it all down at the end of the evening. But between performances, people's conversation in the room was part of the input that was modulating the system.
Maybe something analagous would be Young/Zazeela's "Dream House" ( http://melafoundation.org/DHpressFY12.html ), because they do have occasional musical performances in that space with the installation drone still going. But due to the duration of the installation vs. the duration of the performances, it really feels more like an installation than a performance.
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2.
Also, this piece seemed relevant given the past discussion and returning back to language and dance.
http://dancereply1.tumblr.com/
It is recent work by a student in my "internet art" class. She is posting "dance replies" to her facebook thread. So she's not receiving coded "performative" instructions and "implementing" them (per se), but she's just dialoguing with natural language via dance (channeled through post-produced video).
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3.
Finally, here are some funny ones:
http://playdamage.org/98.html
http://playdamage.org/97.html
It's not an animated gif. It's (ugly) javascript calling in discrete image files repeatedly in a (pseudo-)random order, and with a given range of variable pause between each refresh.
So the code is instructing the "dancer" to "perform," and it is dutifully performing a non-looping, variable dance.
I don't think of it as performance. I think of it as generative animation. In this case, it's a kind of generative puppetry.
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Phunk,
Curt
On Mar 24, 2014, at 9:29 AM, Victoria Bradbury wrote:
> n the spirit of CRUMB's practical approach to research, I propose that we
> spend the final week giving examples of performativity and code within our
> own work by responding to a question of When:
>
>
>
> When, in your own art practice, does performativity occur? Is it when the
> code is written? Is it when you perform with your body or voice? When a
> participant encounters your work? At all of these points, at another time,
> or not at all? Can you give a specific example?
>
>
>
> You may choose to comment on the way you are defining performativity in
> your answer (many definitions have been offered over the course of the
> month).
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