interaction – F15 54-498/54-798/60-446/60-746: Expanded Theater https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015 Carnegie Mellon University, IDEATE Fri, 18 Dec 2015 22:25:24 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=4.5.31 “Kitchen (You’ve Never Had It So Good)” by Gob Squad (2007) Analysis https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/kitchen-youve-never-had-it-so-good-by-gob-squad-2007-analysis/ https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/kitchen-youve-never-had-it-so-good-by-gob-squad-2007-analysis/#respond Fri, 18 Sep 2015 04:08:57 +0000 http://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/mediadesign/f15/54-498/?p=10738 Gob Squad’s Kitchen (You’ve Never Had it So Good) is an exemplary example of expanded theatre. Kitchen premiered in 2007; it is an interpretation and to a certain extent a reenactment of and reaction to Andy Warhol’s films Kitchen, Eat, Sleep, Kiss, and Screentest. It is self-reflexive, meaning that it is aware of the mitigating influence of the context in which the piece itself is created. It is both a piece about the 1960s, counterculture, the supposed birth of the modern/cool; and it is a piece about nostalgia for a time that those experiencing this nostalgia weren’t even around to experience in the first place—a vicarious nostalgia. It asks questions like, how can we ever possibly know what it was like to be ensconced in a different time, place, cultural context? Can we get closer to historical works by attempting to embody them? How does this attempt in fact illuminate aspects of our own historical and cultural moment?

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The scenic design of Kitchen is fairly straightforward. There are adjacent three large screens on which images are projected; these are all that is visible from the audience seating. Behind these screens are sets and cameras; the stage left third contains a chair and lighting, the center third a realistic kitchen set and cameras, the stage right third a bed and camera. The audience enters the performance space by first traversing the backstage area, checking out these mechanisms for image production before moving to their assigned seats for the performance. When the live images appear on the screens, it is understood that they are being produced just feet behind the projection surfaces.

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The performers begin to reenact scenes from Warhol’s films, then interrupt themselves to talk and argue amongst themselves about their struggles to capture this specific cultural moment. Why this time? Why these films? What was it about Warhol’s work that is so emblematic of the 1960s counterculture, and why should that moment be privileged? The spoken text is explicit and discursive, as group members each attempt to refocus the piece to conform to their own sense of what made this cultural moment significant and special. We see the process by which this piece was arrived at made visible within the performance itself, a tactic common to postdramatic theatre. This tactic unfolds on multiple layers: in the expository speeches and the naked attempts, framed as such, to appropriate Warhol’s footage; in the argumentative dialogues regarding the success and failure of each of these attempts; in the mechanism of the image production, revealed so clearly by the pre-show traversal of the backstage production space.

 

Much of the text turns on a discussion of authenticity. It is this quality, members of Gob Squad claim, that distinguishes Warhol’s work and by extension the project of the counter-cultural movement just beginning to emerge in 1965, when Kitchen was originally shot. How to get more of reality, the real sense and texture of lived experience, into art? The performers’ attempts, modeled after Warhol’s cinematic tactics, center around capturing casual, unrehearsed behavior, naked emotional truth, and by all means, ‘non-acting’. These attempts become more comic and frustrated as the piece goes on, as the futility of constructing ‘casual’ moments becomes more evident. The group’s knowledge and understanding of the cultural project they are attempting to emulate begins to seem more and more shallow, the attempt more and more misguided.

 

Finally, in frustration, one of the performers leaves the frame of the soundstage and storms onstage, in front of the projection surfaces. They stalk into the audience and choose an audience member seemingly at random; to this audience member they give a headset and a push onstage while they disappear into the audience. It becomes clear that this member of Gob Squad has ‘replaced’ himself with an audience proxy, who is now receiving instructions about where to go and what to say via headset. Partly flummoxed, partly game, and with seemingly no real alternatives (the show must go on), the remaining members of Gob Squad still onstage engage with their compatriot’s proxy as though nothing has changed. Of course, this injection of unpredictable and unrehearsed behavior provides exactly the kind of ‘authenticity’ that was lamented as absent and unattainable in the first part of the piece. Another performer decides that she wants to replace herself with an audience proxy; she finds her replacement in the audience and sends them onstage equipped with a headset. From the audience now, these partly absent members of Gob Squad murmur instructions into microphones, guiding their ‘actors’ through the motions of the performance.

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The shock of seeing an audience member ‘like oneself’ not just onstage, but situated within and incorporated fully into a media landscape of such specific aesthetic and cultural connotation dislocates the performance experience into a new level of presence and complexity. In modern dress but period sets and media aesthetic, the juxtapositions both visually and textually evoke simultaneously the distance and the proximity of this 1965 cultural moment and our own. The entire theatre space is activated, as the auditorium is made volatile, a place where one might not only be seen from the stage (the inverse of a traditional performance situation) but invited up onto it and guided through a performance in which one becomes the center of attention.

 

Gob Squad manages this interaction with sensitivity and intelligence. The face that these audience participants/actor proxies are taken onto the set means that they cannot see the audience, freeing them from a certain level of performance anxiety. They are held within a safety blanket of action and certainty by the instructions delivered to them over their headphones, meaning that they are never pressured to devise content. Finally, the actions they are asked to perform are at least at surface level pedestrian and everyday—laying down on a bed with someone, sitting in a kitchen and eating, facing a camera and answering simple questions about themselves. Sometimes it is clear that they are reciting words that are being transmitted to them over their headsets; other times it seems as though they themselves are speaking spontaneously.

 

By the end of the performance, not a single member of Gob Squad remains onstage; the proxies complete the performance. Somehow it is all deeply affecting.

 

The mastery displayed by Gob Squad in this work is manifest on several planes having to do with the notion of expanded theatre: expressive and effective use of architecture and physical space, creating meaning through both the form and content of moving image media, and designing and executing sophisticated interactions with audience-participants.

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Kitchen (You’ve Never Had it So Good) is a hugely popular piece for Gob Squad; it toured as recently as 2014 (and may tour again). In 2012 it won a Drama Desk award (NYC) for Unique Theatrical Experience.

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“Link” by Kimchi and Chips (2010) https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/link-by-kimchi-and-chips-2010/ https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/link-by-kimchi-and-chips-2010/#respond Fri, 11 Sep 2015 00:38:08 +0000 http://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/mediadesign/f15/54-498/?p=10622 This is an interactive installation created with many cardboard boxes stacked to form some sort of urban landscape on which images of participants were projected. People could come up to the installation and record a video of themselves and see it mapped onto the boxes. The stories told are saved and replayed through the sculpture.

 

Vimeo / Mimi Son – via Iframely

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“Sandbox” by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer (2010) https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/sandbox-by-rafael-lozano-hemmer-2010/ https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/sandbox-by-rafael-lozano-hemmer-2010/#respond Fri, 11 Sep 2015 00:25:27 +0000 http://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/mediadesign/f15/54-498/?p=10618 This piece uses large scale projection and cameras to create interactions between people on different size scales. A camera records and aerial view of people on a beach and projects it onto a sand box (small scale) for people to play with using their hands. The hands on the sandbox are then recorded and projected back onto the beach so that the people on the beach can interact with the huge hands. This was a commissioned work for Glow Santa Monica and takes place on Santa Monica Beach.

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“Rain Room” by rAndom International (2012) https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/rain-room-by-random-international-2012/ https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/rain-room-by-random-international-2012/#respond Thu, 03 Sep 2015 11:05:48 +0000 http://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/mediadesign/f15/54-498/?p=10326 Posts

Vimeo / rAndom International – via Iframely

Rain Room is an installation art that could also be seen as a “trust game”. In the room of falling water, the 3D camera tracks visitor’s walking path and navigate the rain, so that visitor will never be drenched in the process. The idea behind the work is to “push people out of their comfort zone”, and trying to trust something that has never happened in real life. The sound of rain and moisture feeling in air help create a virtual world that people would have emotional interaction with it.

 

 

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“LIVE/WORK” by Joy Poulard https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/livework-by-joy-poulard/ https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/livework-by-joy-poulard/#respond Thu, 03 Sep 2015 06:31:59 +0000 http://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/mediadesign/f15/54-498/?p=10216 LIVE-WORK_restingLIVE-WORK_audience

LIVE/WORK is a performance installation I created in 2014 examining voyeurism and exhibitionism, domesticity and the societal role of artists. I found and renovated a blighted storefront and converted it into an artist’s live/work studio where I publicly performed for one month behind the glass and via two surveillance-style webcams. These webcams streamed live 24/7 on Justin.tv. A video installation of domestic and artistic ‘chores’ were juxtaposed on four looping television screens placed throughout the space.

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Part of the performance was the intentional act of occupying the space itself– from renovating, to decorating, and ultimately living. Audience-performer interaction was blurred by creating an unexpected public spectacle for passersby. The work addressed preconceived notions of the artist’s work, as domestic roles were mocked but also realized. The piece also asks what symbiotic relationships are generated within an artist’s surrounding neighborhood by taking up residence.

Below are selected clips from the video component within the installation.

Vimeo / Joy Leverette – via Iframely

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“The Extra People” by Ant Hampton (2015) https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/the-extra-people-by-ant-hampton-2015/ https://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/54-498/f2015/the-extra-people-by-ant-hampton-2015/#respond Thu, 03 Sep 2015 00:41:16 +0000 http://courses.ideate.cmu.edu/mediadesign/f15/54-498/?p=10150 A part of his ongoing series of performance pieces (called autoteatro) exploring interaction and “self-sufficient” performance, The Extra People is a site-specific and immersive performance for large theatres, where 15 audience members sit in the seats and watch another 15 on stage. The ‘audience’ members wear headphones; they hear the audio equivalent of optical illusions–binaural recordings made from the exact location they now occupy. What they hear seems to be movement and activity around the theater. They are instructed over their headphones to illuminate certain parts of the theater with their (provided) flashlights. The ‘on-stage’ participants are glimpsed, mysteriously. After half an hour, the ‘audience’ members find themselves replacing those on stage, only to discover that another 15 have appeared in the seats they’ve left behind. The piece cycles this way, for hours on end.

 

extrapeep

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