Α reflection deriving from an artwork: thought based on action and practice–part 1
Dāna Papachristou, Greece
5 September 2023
This is Part 1 of a two-part essay. Read the next part here.
The project[1] was a series of digital art events on the topic of the communication between human and technology through remote data processing and manipulation. The dancers’ bodies were used as controllers for sounds produced through a computer, with the use of motion sensors attached to their hands, transferring movement data from them online and again in situ, thus resounding as they move. It was based on the idea of embodiment and embodied action, telematic improvisational creation, telepresence in the technologically territorialized and reterritorialized space of the internet. The project aimed to reflect upon the relation of human and machine as a single body. The work also incorporated audio walks with the use of geo-location in most parts of the city, including the archaeological site, the city center, the sea promenade, the railway lines and the old olive mill. The geolocation platform that was used attaches pre-composed or pre-recorded sounds onto the map of an area, available to be listened to and walked through by the visitors with the use of their mobile phones.
The city is one of the many European Capitals of Culture, as it brims with cultural heritage in its history and its surroundings. It was used as a city of pilgrimage to goddess Demeter during antiquity, where hundreds of citizens would walk to the city, by a road named until today “the sacred road”, and engage into collective worship of the goddess, following specific rituals. Those rituals were re-enacted by a group of intellectuals during the previous century, although the city had already become an industrial place with factories of soap, cement production, distillery, paint, glass, resin, steel, ceramics and varnish industries, wire and oil mills, shipyards, gas and petroleum storage, shipbreaking, and others. At the moment some industrial activity carries on, but most of the infrastructure is being transformed into cultural centers or left to their fate in this post-industrial condition. The broader state planning for the region is non-existent –or far from reality– and there are talks of selling the infrastructure to European or third countries for exploitation.
As for the specific artistic project, it does not touch on the history or the discourses around the post-industrial environment and the fate of the city. After all, without active cultural planning on a national level, the fate of the city is predetermined. The work poses its own questions, in terms of the relationship of humans-machines over artistic creation, with a pervasive mood of experimentation with new media and new possibilities. It explores ways of experimentation to explore new possibilities in the field of music composition, with a focus on human-machine connectivity and real-time live coding with data transfer. Music can be created in many ways beyond traditional instrumental performance. In this case the performers create the sound themselves through their own bodies and their own movements, hence body and sound take on a distinct dynamic as a synergy of body, inspiration, context and real-time data transfer. This experimental and highly technological mode of composition can be a new aesthetic proposition for technological creation which is worth exploring.
Deriving from this theoretical background, I will pose some questions regarding these techniques of dance and music performances with motion sensors, so as to reflect upon how the body is identified and utilized through these artistic practices. Is it used as a controller or as a puppet? Do both body and machine enter into this process on equal terms? Is there a centralized power involved, from the choices of a composer / maestro / puppeteer to data collection? Are we trying out technologies that might have started out as lines of flight, but are bound to be recaptured by power arrangements? Is the appropriate role of the artist today to be celebratory and playful with new technologies, or should we try to break them down, twist them, utilize them, evade them? And lastly, is connectivity a friend or a foe?
Having said that, the main goal of this text is not to answer those questions, as they involve a wider discourse on media theory and artistic research, aesthetics and philosophy of technology. The main theme is to reflect upon whether we can actually address them through art, and mainly if we managed to address them in our own artistic production. As artists and researchers, we are constantly caught between intention, potentialities, institutions, technologies and political agendas. Are we always able to stand ethically towards our field? And if so, how do we do this? Is technology a field of playful experimentation, where we navigate as a playful technological amusement park, or do we manage to stand critically towards our role and our potential. Is connectivity a friend or a foe? Is technology a new goddess, on whose apron we rest our inspiration?
Demeter was the goddess of fertility, harvest and agriculture.
Her daughter Persephone was abducted by Hades and
forced to reside into the underworld.
Demeter fought hard to get her daughter back,
resulting to a deal with Hades:
for the six months Persephone will be with him
while the earth will be in fall and winter,
for the other six months she will be living with her mother
while the earth will be in spring and summer.
The project was informed by innovative technologies that combine the logic of open source and the sharing of media and tools, through copyleft practices, meaning creation and distribution with rights of use that allow the use and variation of the work by others, provided that the new work also remains under the same copyright regime. At the same time, it is a work in progress, still evolving, to be presented in its final outcome later this year. It is not limited to a score: the choices of the dancers, walkers, and participants create the artistic effect in situ. To design this project, we embarked upon a journey of exploration and wonders. Technological wonders, wonders of the oldest inspirations of humans and their tools. Humans invent the tools and use them, but these tools shape them to the point that they are never the same again.
What is explored in this project is our relationship with technology, beyond the trivial view that humans invent technological tools to merely use them. Indeed, humans invent, but the claim that humans have been the masters of technology throughout history seems unfounded. Technological objects mutate humans and evolve them according to their own completely unique and autonomous agency, from the first stone or bronze tools to contemporary media. The McLuhan quote “the medium is the message” is addressing exactly this: the medium varies and redefines, it changes us to such an extent that we can perhaps say that humans and technology evolve through intertwined agencies. Beyond the neurological and mental alterations induced upon the human species by technological production and invention, our environment itself is drastically altered by it, calling us to adapt as a species to new conditions.
The city was an ancient pilgrimage for the goddess Demeter.
She was said to have passed from there searching for her daughter.
She denounced her sacred nature while in mourning.
Hundreds of people were walking from the nearest city-state
to participate in the religious ceremonies.
Centuries passed and the Greek military junta
chose this place for industry and shipyards.
The entire coast was degraded
to the ancient olive groves of Megara.
The destruction of the ancient olive trees
was one of the first documented[2], collective resistance to the junta.
Since that time the city has been left to its industrial fate,
the people alone lick their wounds and
chew over tradition and the ancient remnants
of a glorious history: a sparkling promise.
Where there is no future there is glitter.
All the glitterati were at the opening.
The cold discouraged them from taking off their coats.
But with them came a certainty of glamor, luxury, viscose, satin.
While humans invent the technological tools that eventually shape them, they also perceive themselves through their media reflection. Our technological identity is constructed as we see ourselves in the realm of media mirrors. What constitutes the sphere of the real and the virtual in the digital age? From which invention on can we then affirm that the technological tool becomes embedded in humans and thus an extension of our nature? And then, what is this element of the internet and of digital connectivity that makes this specific tool more autonomous and more invasive on a daily basis than the first stone or iron tool, forged for the purposes of the war industry or agricultural production?
You can read the next part of this essay here.
References for Part 1:
[1] The name of the project will not be stated here. It is still in progress, constantly being shifted and restructured so as to take its final form. My involvement with it is twofold: I am both an artist and a producer, mainly because of my ability to converse with an institution as an artistic legal entity –a rare circumstance in my country of origin due to the outrageous taxation and the lack of national funding for individual artists. The choice to handle my reflection on this project with secrecy mainly derives from my will to protect the people involved, who struggle to enhance their artistic practice with conceptualizations and realizations. My personal need for reflection is crucial for me throughout all artistic processes, although I understand how others –and possibly my colleagues as well- might not feel at ease with this self-critical point and might not want their names directly associated with it. Hence the anonymity in this particular text. Moreover, writing from the stance of the artist, this is not a critique of what is being done in artistic form or content. The emphasis is being placed on the relation between the artist, the tools and the institution, hence the project’s name is not crucial: it could be any artwork trying to converse with any institution asking for in situ work in any community.
[2] See documentary film “Megara, 1973”, directed by Giorgos Tsemberopoulos and Sakis Maniatis, photography, editing by Sakis Maniatis, awarded by 1974 FIPRESCI Award, Berlin Film ForumInternational of the Young Cinema, and 1974 Best Production Award, Thessaloniki Film Festival of Greek Cinema, available online at https://www.megaratv.gr/megara-1973-o-agonas-gia-ti-gi-ke-tin-eleftheria/, last accessed on July 22nd, 2023.