Howard Wise Gallery included work by pioneering computer artists such as Michael A.
Noll and Bela Julesz, and computer arts continued to develop steadily throughout the
’60s. But the catalysts for “revolutionary” developments involving analog and electronic media within theater, dance, and performance during the 1960s, particularly in the later half of the decade, were more inspired by cultural and ideological change than techno-logical leaps or the emergence of computer art. At the same time, the 1960s did see a period of technological optimism and innovation, crowned by the 1969 American moon landing. Equally, just as the impetus for artistic innovation in the 1990s relied on the accessibility of computer technologies, there was a comparable sense of accessibility and democratization of video technology following the introduction of portable camera systems, most notably the Sony Portapak in 1965. However, the proliferation of multi-media performances during the late ’60s actually relied far more on the much older tech-nology of film, and video would find its place in live performance later, during the 1970s and ’80s. This was primarily because video shooting became portable and accessible in the mid-’60s, but video-editing equipment remained expensive and in the hands of professional companies, and it was not until the 1970s that more affordable, semi-professional three-quarter-inch tape-editing systems emerged.
The late 1960s marked a period of intense political and cultural changes that con-verged from many sides. The women’s liberation and gay rights movements blossomed, and the politics of the anti-establishment left reached a peak in Europe with the Paris student revolts of May 1968 and in the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements in the United States. Around the same time, a counter cultural youth movement took up Timothy Leary’s call to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” so as to undergo profound changes of consciousness inspired by psychedelic drugs, political activism, new age spirituality, and a new politics of the body conceived through sexual revolution. Mark Dery would later reconfigure Leary’s mantra for the computer age, suggesting (following Philip Proctor) that “the ’90s are just the ’60s upside down”3and a new “cyberdelia” is emerg-ing where “turn on, boot up, jack in” becomes the chant of cyber-hippies and techno-transcendentalists.4
The performance of the sixties reflected, embodied, and arguably provided some direct impetus for these movements, leading by example. The Living Theatre combined revo-lutionary politics and Eastern mysticism to demand Paradise Now (1968), and ecstatic body rituals were conceived by Carolee Schneeman to celebrate Meat Joy (1964), and by The Performance Group to relocate Dionysus in 69 (1969). In 1968, Peter Brook’s The Empty Space and Jerzy Grotowski’s Towards a Poor Theatre set fresh and demanding the-atrical agendas concerned with communion and spirituality, making the invisible visible, and Artaudian notions of cruelty and physical rigor. Performance art blossomed as a sig-nificant and influential form, and political theatre found its radical, agitprop voice. The Fluxus group of artists, performers, and musicians began creating quasi-algorithmic work reliant on the execution of tasks based on predetermined models and instructions, and
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made audience participation a key theme. Theater loosened its ties from dramatic text and reinvented itself in happenings and myriad vibrant forms of interdisciplinary, visual, and environmental performance. At the same time, dance was breaking free from its own rule-bound roots, whether classical or modern, in the work of choreographers including Merce Cunningham, Ann Halprin, Trisha Brown, Lucinda Childs, Steve Paxton, Yvonne Rainer, and Twyla Tharp. The Judson Dance Theatre in New York became a center for experiments reevaluating the nature of dance and choreography and offering potent alternatives to dominant dance aesthetics using simple walking and everyday movement, personal gestures, chance structures, geometric patterns, ritual actions, and repetitions.
Just as the futurists in 1913 had spoken of an age of new beginnings, with “no tradi-tion, no masters, no dogma,”5many ’60s artists had a similar sense of shaking off the past and wiping cultural and artistic slates clean: an equivalent feeling of liberation from passéist tradition. Geoff Moore, director of the Welsh multimedia theater group Moving Being recalls that “at the time both inner and outer space were seemingly innocent unpol-luted frontiers. It was as if we had the privilege of starting a new journey.”6He goes on to observe that the excitement of audiences equaled that of artists, and that there was a shared unspoken agreement about mutual discoveries: “If you didn’t come out of a per-formance challenged, potentially changed, with a feeling that you had been taken further, you had been cheated.”7It is interesting to note that in 1999, at the height of the digital performance movement, Forced Entertainment director Tim Etchells echoed the senti-ments: “Ask this of each performance: will I carry this event with me tomorrow? Will it haunt me? Will it change you, change me, will it change things? If not it was a waste of time.”8
Intermedia Performance
Multimedia performances began to proliferate. In 1960, The Ray Gun Spex performances at Judson Church included a piece by Al Hansen where performers moved around the space at different speeds with handheld film projectors, directing projections of airplanes and parachutists around all the walls and ceiling.9His Requiem for W. C. Fields Who Died of Acute Alcoholism (1960) featured clips of Fields’s movies projected onto Hansen’s white shirt. In 1964, in a movie theater near the Pratt School of Art and Design in New York, one of Robert Wilson’s earliest performances combined film and live choreographed dance movements.10Jeffrey Shaw, nowadays one of digital arts’ leading innovators, experimented with projecting film onto inflatable structures, and choreographers such as Alex Hay incor-porated film in performances such as Grass Field (1966).
From 1961, Roberts Blossom developed what he called “Filmstage,” expertly combining live and filmed dance pieces, sometimes in counterpoint to one another, at others in perfect synchronisation, with film close-up details of feet and body parts moving in precise time to the live dancers’ routines. The same essential techniques are now still being applied in numerous digital dance theater performances, whether using
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prerecorded footage or networked (telematic) links to other live dancers performing in synchronization elsewhere. Blossom also utilized laboratory film processing effects, such as sudden switches to negative, or from black and white to color, which were timed to coincide with live stage transitions such as changes of costume, music, or choreographic tempo-rhythms.
While most artists and groups at that time primarily created their own media projec-tions, others used found footage, including one of the first performances to incorporate video (rather than film), Wolf Vostell’s You (1964). Three television sets on three hospi-tal beds were placed by the side of an outdoor swimming pool, each running a separate distorted image of a different basketball game. The mise-en-scène included a supine woman on a trampoline between a pair of inflatable cow lungs, and another naked woman on a table clutching a vacuum cleaner. Whereas before the 1960s film had generally been employed in live performance for its positive aesthetic impact or dramatically synthesiz-ing effects, You typifies the use of video by artists dursynthesiz-ing the 1960s and ’70s to politi-cally critique television culture as a negative and hegemonic force. Video commonly became employed to portray television and mass media as a tool of consciousness numbing, social coercion and disintegration, and political propaganda and oppression. In You, although the audience is offered a symbolic liberation through the actual destruction of the televisions, the message is deeply ironic, with a patronizing “big brother” voice issuing the instructions through loudspeakers. “Allow yourself to be tied to the beds where the TVs are playing”, the voice commands, “Free yourself. . . . Put on a gas mask when the TV burns and try to be as friendly as possible to everyone.”11
The ONCE Group’s large-scale open-air performance Unmarked Interchange (1965) had the feel of a drive-in movie, with a giant screen playing the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers movie musical Top Hat (1935). Within the screen were numerous sliding doors and panels at different levels, which opened and closed to reveal live performers engaged in various narratives and activities. These open sections of the screen ruptured the visual totality of the film projection to highlight the live actions: a candlelit meal for two; a man playing a piano; a man reading the pornographic novel The Story of O through a microphone and having custard pies thrown in his face; women putting drawings of human figures onto a moveable washline.12Found footage was also central to John Cage and Ronald Nameth’s HPSCHD (1969), a five-hour “immersive” event surrounding the audience with projections of one hundred films and eight thousand slides.13
Robert Whitman became a leading figure in the development of multimedia happen-ings in the 1960s, creating what Sally Banes describes as events with “a magical, mythic aura . . . fairy tales for Americans.”14 He was adept at conjoining the real and the pro-jected in surprising and highly theatrical ways, and in Shower (1965) he propro-jected film footage of a life-size woman taking a shower onto the water-sprayed, billowing curtain of a working shower (figure 5.1). By synchronizing the scale and action of both the film and live performance, in much the same way that the Laterna Magika and other “Black
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Light” Prague theater companies conceive performances, Whitman created memorable effects to simultaneously confound and delight audiences. In Prune Flat (1965), a double image of one of the performers was achieved by projecting a film of her onto her live figure, in exact scale. The live performer wore a long white dress and synchronized her physical movements exactly with her superimposed film projection. As her celluloid image took off her coat and other clothing, throwing them aside, the live performer mimed and mirrored the same actions precisely, but without undressing, until finally both the live and film figures stood still, her projected body naked on the live performer’s dress (figure 5.2).
This idea has been repeated in a number of recent digital performances, including the Gertrude Stein Repertory Theatre’s interpretation of Alfred Jarry’s King Ubu (2000). The company specialize in conjoining live actors with actors from different locations projected into the theater space using video-conferencing software. In King Ubu, digital figures are projected and mapped onto the bodies of live performers wearing neutral costumes to create what they call “digital puppets” or “distance puppets.” A similar technique is used to powerful effect in Tony Oursler’s video installations of the 1990s, where mini-projectors beam video faces onto the blank cloth heads of small rag dolls. Set on stands or lying in open suitcases like forgotten ventriloquist dummies, the tiny bodies of these
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Figure 5.1 Robert Whitman’s Shower (1965). Photo: Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona.
mannequins remain inert while the faces and heads are eerily animated. Bemused eyes stare out and flick nervously from side to side; one doll cries softly; another talks briefly and then is silent; another moans and erupts into a scream, and its straining face of pain appears to be trying to break itself away from its spherical head of rags and out of its nightmare.
Michael Kirby’s 1966 structuralist happening Room 706 used a triangular concept in both its setting and performance structure, repeating the same discussion by three men three times: first on audiotape, then on film, and finally as live performance. In his reflec-tions on the incorporation of film into what he called the “New Theatre” of the 1960s, Kirby emphasizes how ideas of meaning and information structures are redefined to become dependent on the relationship between elements, rather than the character of the images themselves. He makes distinctions between images and actions that work to com-municate meaning, and more conceptual and abstract forms, which are often juxtaposed within multimedia theater. Information and images pass back and forth between stage and screen and the composite effect increases the “intellectual density” of each, but there is often no attempt to form a cumulative meaning through the addition of film. Rather, it is employed to form a continuum of meaning and abstraction: “Meaning and signifi-cance are not synonymous,” he points out, before suggesting, “the limits of this new theatre are only the limits of science and the imagination.”15
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Figure 5.2 Live performers, their shadows and their filmed counterparts converge in Robert Whitman’s 1965 production Prune Flat. Photos: Babette Mangoldt.
Kirby’s article appeared with a number of other important viewpoints from theorists and practitioners including Susan Sontag, Alain Virmaux, Joseph Svoboda, and Roberts Blossom in the Fall 1966 edition of TDR: The Drama Review, which has become one of the most cited journal issues in the history of multimedia performance. It is notable how the enthusiastic optimism for film-theater conjunctions following only a relatively few years of significant activity in the US from around 1960 parallels a similar wave of crit-ical euphoria in relation to digital performance in the mid 1990s following the advanced experiments taking place from around 1990.
Nam June Paik
The year 1966 saw the emergence of a brief artistic manifesto relating cybernetics to new art processes, “Cybernated Art” by Korean-American video and performance artist Nam June Paik, which included the following:
Cybernetics, the science of pure relations, or relationship itself, has its origin in karma. Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “Media is message” was formulated by Norbert Wiener in 1948 as “The signal, where the message is sent, plays equally important role as the signal, where message is not sent”. . . . As the Happening is the fusion of various arts, so cybernetics is the exploitation of bound-ary regions between and across various existing sciences. . . .
The Buddhists also say Karma is a samsara
Relationship is metempsychosis We are in open circuits16
Paik’s prolific and remarkable work in video art and performance was influential through-out the 1960s (and well beyond), and he famously manipulated video images of McLuhan’s head in Demagnetizer (Life Ring) (1965). Displaying television footage and videotape he had shot as one of the first proud owners of the newly introduced Sony Portapak camera, Paik held a powerful magnet in the shape of an eighteen-inch diameter ring and moved it toward, away from, and against the TV screen. The electrostatic onscreen faces of McLuhan and others distorted and swirled in dramatic spiral-like (and interestingly, computer artlike) patterns in response.17He continued to rework the electronic video image throughout the
’60s, using a range of powerful magnets in conjunction with televisions whose internal cir-cuitry and controls he had adjusted, and developing other idiosyncratic imaging devices including the “Paik-Abe Video Synthesizer” (from 1964) in collaboration with Japanese engineer Shuya Abe. Paik also created a number of interactive systems to allow gallery visitors to affect screen images, such as Participation TV (1963), where visitors spoke into a microphone to visually mutate abstract electronic images on a video monitor.
Paik’s McLuhan-meets-cybernetics message became even clearer when he began to sculpt television sets that thrust out physical ganglions and extensions; and his images
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and signals bled into both artificial and natural forms. Paik’s aesthetic developed to recon-figure televisions not simply as sculptures, but as clothing, gardens, forests, buildings, and robots. As Margaret Morse puts it: “our image-surround no longer represents a world apart: it is our world. The computer processing of images, in which Paik played a pio-neering role is another indication that images were now themselves raw material, the natural world upon which we exercise our influence as subjects.”18By the 1980s Paik was constructing literally awesome creations such as The More the Better (1988), a three-channel, circular video installation tower sixty feet (18 m) high, housing 1,003 television monitors. Randall Packer and Ken Jordon suggest that Paik “presents himself as a techno-shaman, synthesizing art and technology in an effort to exorcise the demons of a mass-consumer, technology-obsessed society,” and describe his art of the period as “poignantly cynical pieces that comment on American techno-culture dominated by starry-eyed opti-mists.”19But Paik’s cynicism is extremely mischievous, highly aesthetic, and sagely Zen, as demonstrated in his essay for the catalogue of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s The Machine: As Seen at the End of the Mechanical Age exhibition in 1968:
Plato through the word, or the conceptual, expresses the deepest thing.
St. Augustine thought the sound, or the audible, expresses the deepest thing.
Spinoza through the vision, or visible, expresses the deepest thing.
TV commercials have all three.20
As John Cage had famously “composed” the ultimate minimalist piece of music without any notes (4′33′, 1952), Paik created a film without images or sound in 1964, Zen for Film, where he projected clear film leader. Just as the four and a half minutes of Cage’s silence had highlighted the ambient and random sounds in the auditorium, the audience’s attention was drawn to the chance tiny scratches and subtle changes in the
“dance” of dust particles in the projector gate on the blank white screen. The film pre-dated Owen Land’s21similar but more famous Film in Which There Appear Sprocket-Holes, Edge Lettering, Dirt particles, etc. (1965–66)—a busy film by comparison with its visual revelation of the holes and lettered edges of a clear piece of celluloid. The Zen for Film screening became a “performance” when Paik appeared and stood with his back to the screen to become part of the frame, illuminated in the projected light.
This ultra-minimalist mise-en-scène of the film-plus-performer has been remediated in the digital age by British artist Anita Ponton, whose work features in Franklin Furnace’s extensive web archive of performance art conceived for streaming video. In Seen. Unsaid (1998), wearing a peroxide blonde wig and a man’s suit, she stands in front of a Super 8 projection of clear film, which is treated with intermittent large scratches and hand-drawn marks. Closely edited lines and fragments of dialogue from old Hollywood movies (pre-dominantly from the ’30s and ’40s) provide a soundtrack to which Ponton’s mouth mimes, her head jerking anxiously from side to side as she schizophrenically “plays” the dozens
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of characters. As she puts it, her startled figure lip-syncs “as if speaking in tongues, as if unable to help herself. . . . She is a trapped, ephemeral figure, perhaps a figment of cellu-loid imagination. Yet she is also live, breathing and moving. . . . The female body is here a machine.”22 To the background sound of an insistent heartbeat, the fragmented film voices begin to dramatically argue and disagree, and the live figure, trapped in the white cinema frame, becomes increasingly frantic and agitated, like a medium who has con-tacted and is now possessed by malevolent, warring spirits.
In Dies Irae (1998), Ponton is similarly subject to technological possession, hanging in
In Dies Irae (1998), Ponton is similarly subject to technological possession, hanging in