A performer moves towards one of the smaller side projection screens. The film sputters into revolution with a mechanical whirring. This physical ignition brushes against the pre-programmed audio-visual sequencing. All surfaces of the audio-visual topography are activated with bodies. The flat depictions reach towards new spatial dimensions through their topography and relation. Your awareness shifts towards the myriad lenses that are being constructed.[1]
The first iteration of Another Other pulls audience members into the expanded chamber. The relationship between artist and technology creates tension and the possibility of risk, unsettling familiar distinctions between the live and nonlive, the ‘real’ and the analog. Self-consciously constructing what Hellen Sky describes as an ‘interface or field of interaction between different people who make up a system.’ [2] The work forces an augmented embodied experience that is, in the words of Jennifer Deger, ‘intensely social and potentially transformative’ located ‘at the intersection of the aesthetic, ethical and ontological.’ [3] Julianna Hodkinson, speaking of Turbulence, describes technology as ‘part of the dramaturgical and compositional conception’, all ‘deeply integrated into one another.’ [4]
Through this lens, technology is positioned as persona. Agile Recorder, a new platform tool, captures moments on video, enhancing the creative process, mediating, inferring, and amplifying creative process and ideas. As yet, still distinguishable from the artist, with David Rickert reminding us that ‘all it’s doing is opening up windows for you, it is not the thing itself, it is the way that you interface and work with it.’ [5]Technology enables creative practitioners and researchers to record, exhibit and perform, and incites us to extend, remix and remediate the social phenomenon occurring in the space of co-creation activated through the forces of art.
[1] Sam McGilp, “Another Other: 0:00 and 1:24,” Agile Opera Digital, January 2018
[2] Suzanne Kersten, David Pledger, Julian Rickert, Tamara Saulwick, Hellen Sky, Gorkem Acaroglu, and Glenn D’Cruz, “Working with technology/making technology work: A round table discussion,” Australasian Drama Studies 65 (2013): 101. https://search-informit-com-au.ezproxy.lib.rmit.edu.au/documentSummary;dn=806705673792715;res=IELHSS
[3] Jennifer Deger, “Curating digital resonance,” in The Routledge Companion to Digital Ethnography edited by Larissa Hjorth, Helen Horst, Anne Galloway and Genevieve Ball, 318-328. Taylor & Francis, 2017.
[4] Julianna Hodkinson, “Turbulence and distributed opera”, Pre-recorded presentation, Agile Opera Digital, December 5, 2016.
[5] Suzanne Kersten, David Pledger, Julian Rickert, Tamara Saulwick, Hellen Sky, Gorkem Acaroglu, and Glenn D’Cruz, “Working with technology/making technology work: A round table discussion,” Australasian Drama Studies 65 (2013): 111.
Photo credit: Pier Carthew