Artistically, the results of the research have been and will be experienced both through the workshops and through public productions and so will be able to influence ideas and practices in the professional and academic fields.
The development of a technical platform for video streaming and design will enable practitioners, both independent and academic, to produce their own work in the field, as well as being open to assessment by those with technical interest in the field.
Education
Creative Economy
Culture, Heritage, Museums and Collections
Key Findings
THE INITIAL AIMS
This award funded the development in year one of the fellowship of a functioning telematic system for video-streaming and afforded the opportunity for testing in performance conditions. The context concerned the technology required for two-way video streaming in a performance environment, that is flexible, reliable, affordable and low-latency, and the emergent aesthetics and dramaturgies for a telematic theatre.
The questions asked were:
What arrangement of technologies provides a robust, accessible and portable platform for telematic performance?
o In what ways can telematics serve as a conduit for dramatic performance and exploit the nature of this new medium?
o What new understandings of space (global, virtual, cultural, personal) arise from performances made through telematic production? As the project develops, it will address the following questions:
o How may one make a coherent, global space that is recognisably 'tele- present', yet absolute to its participants and spectators? How may one occupy this space? What manipulations of it are possible?
o How may temporal and architectural innovations such as changes of scale, delay, continuity and connection challenge the nature of Euclidian space while retaining its relation to the physical bodies of the occupants/performers and audience/viewers?
o What is the nature of 'identification' (with character or persona) in telematic performance, and what are its limits?
o What could be the implications for drama when performers in different locations are seen to be equivalent and isomorphic - as if they are the same character?
o How does telematic space enable (or inhibit) representation of the absent other as a projection of personal fear or desire?
o Performatively, how might telematic theatre dramatise mis- representation and mis-understanding
THE RESEARCH
These primary aims led to the following areas of research in the technology and dramaturgy:
A) Technical: 1. An assessment of the current situation.
2. An exploration of the constraints of video-streaming, what the trade-offs are, and how they interact. How to achieve optimal real-time interaction and reciprocity, using domestic consumer connections, as well as academic institutional ones
B) Aesthetics and Dramaturgy:
1. What is meant by 'presence'. 'telepresence'?
2. The video-conferencing model: the abolition of distance, the illusion of spatial coherence.
3. The absence model: to use the characteristics of the medium and the technology to find new representations of space and time, including appearance and disappearance, remote action/control, latency, spatial manipulation - visual and aural, distance, absence.
4. Practical issues of long-distance collaboration.
A1. The current situation is that high quality video streaming remains difficult to attain when required to operate in real-time with very low latency, as is necessary where performers need to respond to each other across a two-way connection. Single-direction streaming (eg by the National Theatre, or productions such as Katie Mitchell's 'The Forbidden Zone' recently at the Barbican) employs significant latency in order to ensure good quality images.
Video conferencing systems provide the low-latency, but at the cost of limited image quality (restricted to talking heads against plain backgrounds) and constrained institutional and physical set-ups.
So what in this situation suggests itself as a useable idea for performance-making that is equally distributed across space in terms of both audience and actor, one that acknowledges (and valorises) the technological environment in which the event takes place? Furthermore, given the evident fact that virtual presence is not and perhaps artistically should not be confused with physical presence, what are the characteristics and potentials of virtuality and absence in performance and where do they lead?
Much of the most successful networked performance forgoes full video in favour of less data-heavy media to provide instant feedback and interactivity. With ever increasing bandwidth and compression techniques, how should video streaming position itself in the future of networked performance?
A2. Over the first year of the fellowship I developed with my technical director Kevin Jacobs a streaming system that is portable, flexible, focussed on the spatial and site-specific, scalable, and affordable.
The system developed was tested over extended periods in performance conditions - at RCSSD and Chichester University.
B1. This question is encountered by all who work with mediatised representations of human beings.
My practice with telematics has concentrated on finding effective structures for video-streaming distant performers, without pre-defining what those effects might be. The work focussed on the spatial, sculptural and architectural character of mediated representations, rather than their graphic, iconographic or linguistic potential. I was interested in the relation between the perceptions of the viewer or spectator as a physical person in a space and the absent performer also understood as a presence with actual location and form in the space. Each of the three primary outcomes of the research found a different solution to the problem, but all contributed to the overall aim of establishing a shared space for performance that could be understood physically and spatially, rather than purely as images on a projection screen.
Experience of these projects suggests to me that there are many kinds and graduations of 'telepresence'. The sense of someone leaving the room when you terminate a connection. The degree to which you agree to mutual dependency/co-operation - that is, the degree you share your fate with the distant person - is the effect they have on you direct or indirect, sensory or imaginative, physically causal or detached, moral or dispassionate? The degree you are aware of the physical position or action of the distant person in real time, in relation to some spatial orientation of your own body. How the distant space and the local one are related perceptually.
To what degree can 'telepresence' operate in the same way (have the same affect) as the actual physical presence?
And what about absence? Awareness of the physical absence of a person in some way is a measure of their virtual presence, in whatever way that is conceived or felt.
Primarily, there is a sense in which presence is revealed or even learnt: exposure to a telematic practice opens new perceptions to what presence feels like and can be. A door opening or closing by itself is a curiosity, until you learn that it signals the arrival or departure of an active, causal agent, or a videographic one. Or, the location of a distant object's image consistently at, or superimposed upon, the location of a local object creates a persistent, functioning relationship where none existed before. Change the objects into people and the effect is amplified.
B2. The industry aim for video-streaming has been for a low-latency, high resolution functionality, allied to efficient data-manipulation tools. The notion of the desirability of creating an audio-visual illusion that is next-best to the real thing seems unexceptionable, and has been taken on by many in the artistic community. This is a next step in the accelerated flattening of the world that is the prime feature of globalisation. However it may be maintained that as an artist it is part of one's job to re-configure available technologies away from their nominal functions when they suggest ways to achieve a purpose that is not necessarily for what they are designed for. Research into affordable video-conferencing technologies revealed systems highly focussed on small-scale, rigidly controlled environments - typically a speaker's head-and-shoulders against a plain background. Under these restrictions, it is possible to attain a seemingly good quality result - the illusion of an illusion. Such systems do not deal well with the transmission and representation of large or complex spaces, or site-specific spaces. They are also proprietary systems that are difficult to customise.
B3 The research aimed to uncover alternatives to a model of telematic space that effectively denied the existence of distance in its construction and that inevitably raised questions about the point of attempting to create an illusion of normal spatial and dramatic coherence. It aimed at ensuring that distant performers retain the integrity of their own performance, and distant spaces the integrity of their own physical location, thereby insisting on a physical presence providing the root for whatever telematics could offer. In this way, by unavoidable comparison with the local, the physical presence of the distant, in its own place, could be experienced empathetically from afar, in a form appropriate to its status as distant, via a close communication with the physically present.
In the first year of my fellowship one project was developed to address these themes. This project created a telematic spaces that is inherently different from coherent representations of material space, and attempts to seek out characteristics that bring the two locations cognitively or perceptually into accord and/or collision with each other, thereby creating understandings of presence and absence, agency and virtuality, that are cognisant of the physical facts of distance and the technical means of illusion and representation. The research used workshops and studio-based experimentation to provoke and analyse the relations of streamed video imagery to physical space in terms of appearance and disappearance, remote action/control, latency, spatial manipulation - visual and aural, distance, absence.
B4. Through practical experiments and workshops in academic and semi-public contexts, estimates were made of the relative success and failure of the working practices adopted. The nature of creation and collaboration over internet links was explored at RCSSD, linking two rehearsal rooms in the same building. This allowed participants to experience and gain comprehension of the technical set-up and artistic process, which encouraged an informed input and discussion to off-set the naturally fragmentary experience of the whole event that comes from working with other performers (and often the workshop leader) who are not in the same room.
This was extended to include workshop using an internet links between Chichester University and RCSSD . This built on a perceived problem with the practice of telematic theatre experienced by Station House Opera in the company's work 2004-2008 linking theatres in England, Brazil, Singapore, Germany and Holland, relating to the encouraging and ensuring of common artistic, cultural and economic goals between the participating groups, who through the working process were not able to directly share space or communicate face-to-face. Emphasis was laid on clearly identifying potential partners as being able to share common goals and stating what these were before commencement, developing personal and professional relationships, extending development period, and allowing regular social time using the video links as well as work time.
THE OUTPUTS
Two main outputs were achieved during the fellowship, along with subsidiaries (workshops and a symposium): a technical platform and one performance/theatre piece.
1) A technical platform for researching and producing telematic theatre.
A basic system was developed that suited the independent practitioner without access to institutional resources. It was tested as to the aim of being robust, stable, flexible, and mobile. It was based on using commercially available Axis hardware encoders coding Standard Definition video (720x560) as rtsp streams, decoded by VLC. A technical guide was been compiled.
In addition, I have led innovations the development of Motorised Camera and Projector mounts, remotely controlled and synchronised across the internet, with the technical design by Nic Sandiland.
Performance
2) Nowhere is a spatial structure for performance that in each manifestation is developed specifically for the sit and context. It was developed in collaboration with Dr. Jem Kelly of Chichester University.
It was performed in different versions at
CSSD - Chichester University (Collisions Festival 2010), and later at
Roundhouse, London - Private House (Accidental Festival 2011)
CSSD - Buckingham New University (Sept 2013)
Nowhere evolved from the interest in how to represent a distant space within a local one, both spaces being both performance and viewing spaces. Rather than presenting a distant space on a video screen which establishes no spatial relation with the physical space where it is located, and is only able to show more than a single aspect of the distant space through camera movement - transmitting the illusion of ocular movement to a static screen in the standard cinematic manner - 'Nowhere' uses a camera/projector combination which moves a projected image around 360 degrees, rather like a torch scanning a darkened room, illuminating parts of the distant environment at will. Thus an understanding of the distant space is built up incrementally and selectively, its virtual geography stable within the material geography of the local, physical space. Objects that exist in the distant location are always revealed projected upon the same part of the local space, effectively mapping them onto the local objects. In effect the distant is super-imposed upon the local , providing a one-to-one correspondence, while never negating (because always partial, directional) the materiality of the local space.
Providing correspondence (and isometry) is a second camera/projection pair relaying a video image of the local space onto the walls in the same manner. Thus in each space, distant and local, two projections (directed in opposite directions) scan the walls with live images of two locations, local and distant.
This set-up provides great flexibility for further exploration of an environmental relation between two locations, presenting continuous but moving views of two spaces which are bound together by movement, direction, isometry and spatial correspondence. The distance space is insistently described but continually left, as is the local space, the fixed relation between them asking question of control, offering opportunities for imagining and imaging a single performance space that nevertheless depicts two distinct realities that are geographically far removed.
DISSEMINATION OF FINDINGS
Progress and results of the research was disseminated via conference papers and a symposium. Workshops were held from spring onwards at RCSSD, open to the public as well as students. Numerous students and others expressed interest in the work both academically and practically.
TAKING THE FINDINGS FORWARD
The results of the research during the first year of the fellowship were taken forward into the final four years, and provided a secure base for continuing technical developments and extended workshop practice leading to further artistic outcomes.