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Wednesday, 24 March 2010
The things that I wonder about most are not on the
internet, I promise you that.
Sam Shepard
Observer interview
21 March 2010
Perhaps because it's much longer than the 140 individual characters
that
constitute the longest length of a Twitter post, or even the 300-750 words
allotted to a theatre review or blog entry, Michiko Kakutani's essay "Texts Without Context," which appeared in this past
Sunday's New York Times, seems to have gone unremarked. Her
article is an overview of the changing perspective of art in the Internet
age — a perspective seemingly driven by "boredom" with the novel
form in the case of ex-novelist David Shields, but with broader
implications for other kinds of aesthetic experience as well. Writes
Kakutani:
Now, with the ubiquity of instant messaging and e-mail, the
growing popularity of Twitter and YouTube, and even newer services like
Google Wave, velocity and efficiency have become even more important.
Although new media can help build big TV audiences for events like the
Super Bowl, it also tends to make people treat those events as fodder for
digital chatter. More people are impatient to cut to the chase, and
they're increasingly willing to take the imperfect but immediately
available product over a more thoughtfully analyzed, carefully created
one. Instead of reading an entire news article, watching an entire
television show or listening to an entire speech, growing numbers of
people are happy to jump to the summary, the video clip, the sound bite
— never mind if context and nuance are lost in the process; never
mind if it's our emotions, more than our sense of reason, that are
engaged; never mind if statements haven't been properly vetted and
sourced.
People tweet and text one another during plays and movies,
forming judgments before seeing the arc of the entire work. Recent books
by respected authors like Malcolm Gladwell (Outliers), Susan
Faludi (The Terror Dream) and Jane Jacobs (Dark Age
Ahead) rely far more heavily on cherry-picked anecdotes —
instead of broader-based evidence and assiduous analysis — than the
books that first established their reputations. And online research
enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that might
support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks of
material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted them
to reconsider or refine their original thinking. ...
Today's technology has bestowed miracles of access and
convenience upon millions of people, and it's also proven to be a vital
new means of communication. Twitter has been used by Iranian dissidents;
text messaging and social networking Web sites have been used to help
coordinate humanitarian aid in Haiti; YouTube has been used by professors
to teach math and chemistry. But technology is also turning us into a
global water-cooler culture, with millions of people sending each other
(via e-mail, text messages, tweets, YouTube links) gossip, rumors and the
sort of amusing-entertaining-weird anecdotes and photographs they might
once have shared with pals over a coffee break. And in an effort to
collect valuable eyeballs and clicks, media outlets are increasingly
pandering to that impulse — often at the expense of hard news. "I
have the theory that news is now driven not by editors who know anything,"
the comedian and commentator Bill Maher recently observed. "I think it's
driven by people who are slacking off at work and surfing the Internet."
He added, "It's like a country run by America's Funniest Home
Videos."
Kakutani's analysis seems even-handed enough, citing the use of
Internet technologies in Iran and Haiti (reminiscent of the role that fax
machines and the early Internet played in the fall of the Soviet Union),
and I remembered it too as I read this morning's "A new stage age: why theatres should embrace digital
technology" by Lyn Gardner in the Guardian. "As Andrew Taylor
... has suggested, 'participatory technology seems foreign to many, but it
is also intriguing as it carries many of the qualities we value in the
arts. [It] is by nature disruptive, but so is artistic expression,'"
Gardner writes. "So rather than being scared of technology and seeing it
as a threat to real-world social interaction, which research increasingly
suggests it is not, why don't we embrace these new technologies, and use
them to develop new forms of theatre?"
I admire her optimism I suppose even as I can't share it, and it has
something to do with Kakutani's reservations above. As she notes, Internet
users seem to be a jumpy lot, demanding the instant gratification that is
denied by more complex art of any kind. It is a call for an increased
shallowness in some ways, and these digital and virtual connections, it
must be remembered, are digital and virtual, not particularly human. They
also threaten, Kakutani suggests, to close prematurely those presumably
open minds that cross the thresholds of theatre auditoria. "Online
research enables scholars to power-search for nuggets of information that
might support their theses, saving them the time of wading through stacks
of material that might prove marginal but that might have also prompted
them to reconsider or refine their original thinking," Kakutani writes; in
the theatre, a "bored" audience's desire to have their own prejudices
confirmed as well, cutting off imaginative alternatives before they're
barely seeded, as well as demanding immediate interpretation of what might
be a deliberately ambiguous experience, seems to me to lead to a drama
resembling a mountain stream — very clear, but very shallow.
A few years ago Richard Foreman in his program notes for The Gods
Are Pounding My Head! mentioned his idea (or was it a fear?) that we
are turning into "pancake
people":
I see within us all
(myself
included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self
— evolving under the pressure of information overload and the
technology
of the "instantly available." A new self that needs to contain less and
less of an inner repertory of dense cultural inheritance — as we all
become "pancake people" — spread wide and thin as we connect with
that
vast network of information accessed by the mere touch of a button.
Will this produce a new kind of enlightenment or
"super-consciousness"? Sometimes I am seduced by those proclaiming so
— and sometimes I shrink back in horror at a world that seems to
have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved
personality.
As even-handed as Kakutani, it seems — and while one doesn't
wish to be counted among the viewers-with-alarm, one wonders
that more thought isn't devoted to the less sanguine possibilities that
online technology may hold for theatre. "Every audience member is an
artist too" is a fine democratic sentiment — but it's more a
warm and fuzzy sentiment than a fact, and that doesn't make
it true for all art, if true at all. The form of theatre may be best
poised of all the arts to provide an alternative to virtual life
— true life — rather than a surrender to it.
Wednesday, 24 March 2010
The
Geometry, a collaboration between Irish avant-garde
composer Jennifer Walshe and the Object
Collection group headed by Travis Just and Kara Feely, is the next
offering from the unique music theatre collective, opening tomorrow,
Thursday, 25 March, at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, supported in
part by Culture Ireland and the Arts Council of Ireland. The
press material describes
The Geometry as "an experimental opera evoking the
technological sublime through video gaming rituals, soap opera death
spectacles, and a hyperactivity of sensorial information. Performed within
a compartmentalized structure of interlocking and hidden stages, the
audience's perception shifts and reconfigures along with the space. ...
[The] operatic
score intertwines live electronics and field recordings with extended
singing techniques."
Object Collection is a rarity, marrying cutting-edge new music
with cutting-edge theatrical performance practice; Richard Foreman
called their last show, Problem Radical(s), "an experimental
theatricalist opera just the way such things should be and rarely are.
Creators Kara Feely and Travis Just have created a sophisticated collision
between elegant formal considerations and the disruptive garbage of a
world going down the drain that is exciting and exhilarating. The
spectator is swept away in its delirious mix and emerges clear and
emotionally refreshed." I wrote about Problem Radical(s) in 2009, and
must highly recommend this new
advance in their work. Tickets available here;
The Geometry runs through 3 April and is well worth the easy trip
to Queens.
The March 2010 issue of The Brooklyn Rail has a feature story on Object Collection as well.
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Superfluities
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by George
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