Every image is surrounded by an atmosphere of world.
Sartre
There are as many worlds as there are images, and each visual and sound image is a passage between. It is this movement that defines the image over time and destabilizes notions of physical and institutional space. Improvisation processes are at the heart of this movement, where real-time analysis, intuition, instinct, and action combine to construct an emergent public space.
In this context we approach technology not as a tool but as a constructed environment where the participants interact. Technology is considered additive in nature rather than subtractive or competitive. The medium is not simply the conduit for discourse, but has a discrete identity of its own, a personality that offers up some resistance and echoes organic systems that behave unpredictably, that kick and scream, and will not go gently under the artist’s control. In short: an environment that is alive.
We are made of compacted water, earth, light and air.... The eye binds light, it is itself bound light.... This binding is a reproductive synthesis, a Habitus. – James Flint (by way of Gilles Deleuze)
This new synthesis, which might appropriate Pierre Bordieu’s concept of habitus, is defined and populated by a fluid world of details that hints at both the limitlessness of potential choices and the lack of possibilities in reality; the push and pull of capital within a complex social system. This concept of habitus recognizes that there are limitless options for action that an individual would never hit upon, and therefore those options do not really exist as possibilities. In common social situations, a person relies upon an established store of knowledge, scripts and patterns, which present that person with a very specific picture of the world and how to behave within it.
It is actually difficult to imagine a useful dialogic space within the context of a spectacular performance event. Spectacle can seem the opposite of dialog; defining itself according to its own methodology and subsequently monopolizing the space it inhabits, forcing the spectator into a passive, slavish posture. Even with direct input from the spectator (“Cast your vote!”) the spectacle simply reconstitutes itself, cannibalizing the input, feeding back into the system, only to spit it out as the same product repackaged.
Visual, aural, human, machine, artist, performer, spectator: it is essential that no single component dominate the space.
Performance art works generally share the same consumerism logic as more openly commercial producers such as MTV or CNN. That is, consumption (or "investigation") itself is the goal. Propaganda, information, entertainment, art: sites of a struggle for domination. A reification of the pre-existing value system that privileges appearance over essence, mediated experience over direct experience. Spectacle generally valorizes the means of production, an end unto itself, an investigation within a prearranged and preapproved social laboratory as both the methodology and the goal. The situation can easily be misrecognized as something rooted in atemporal or natural truth, value, or necessity – characteristics that are then attributed to the dominant structures of interpretation and evaluation within the institution, thus perpetuating the cycle.
To create a more interesting and meaningful public space, it is useful to break away from these behaviors as much as is possible by aiming for a less passive stance on the part of all participants – performer, audience, environment. A certain amount of unpredictability, or risk, must be programmed into the system so that improvisation is utilized, even necessary, for negotiating and maneuvering within it. This not only makes it more difficult for the dominant social hierarchy to reassert itself, but also promotes a kind of creative tension, a survival instinct, that might uncover unexpected and meaningful narratives. A question of life or death, which Deleuze describes as a distance “proportionate to the extent to which the characters know that all hangs on very small differences in behavior. Thus one moves from the ‘behavior’ to the ‘situation’ in such a way that, from the one to the other, there was the possibility of a ‘creative interpretation of reality’.”
The artist participants will contribute to this new "reality" through a custom cinematic and sonic language comprised of individual and collaborative image "statements". This vocabulary pool, or lexicon, will be made available to the collective – artist and audience participants alike. The resulting "statements" combine to construct an argument to justify (or not) the existence of the image worlds generated by the spectacle. Each performer takes responsibility for his or her contribution to this evolving argument. Consider the process, the production as a whole, as one narrative arch, a cohesive experience rather than a cellular accumulation of fractured signifiers.
There will be no recital formality, no successive presentation of independent pieces, but rather the collective sculpting of an event, the formation and building of a community. Artist collaborators will perform from within the collective space, rejecting the traditional stage/house orientation and artist as author/hero mythology. The audience is considered an active participant and must be given meaningful access to the "public" discourse – the engagement-avoidance binary alone is not a meaningful mode of interaction in this context.
–Hans Fjellestad
