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Topic for Discussion: Liveness
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Here are the whiteboards summarising our discussion in seminar - Liveness - concept maps
Posted at Nov 15/2005 01:43AM:
Leila Takayama: Liveness in Computing Technologies Auslander touches on "interactive computing technologies" in a footnote on page 13 and "digital technology" on page 104 onward, but primarily focuses in on television and the televisual. More contemporary digital media raise questions for me such as:
Fred Turner: Some questions on "liveness" as I read - How should we think about high-status live performances like symphonies and opera? Are they frozen relics of another era? Or not?
And where does the legitimacy ascribed to either live or mediatized performance come from? Is saying that one is the "dominant" style of an era sufficient? What social processes ascribe legitimacy to different styles of performance?
Romeo Castelucci: I've been wondering about definitions of liveness. Auslander seems to take it for granted that we know what it is, and I suppose we do. But I sat down yesterday to try to come to grips with it, and, well, I'm confused.
My first instinct was to go for some sort of spatio-temporal simultaneity. I exist in a localized point in space and time, which also happens to be the the same one as whatever performance I happen to be watching. This seems to privilege the physicality of the performers as the core of performance's ontology. And our own presence.
Am I happy with this...? I don't know. Physical presence isn't a given either. I can be here as in being here in this room. I can be here divorced from my body. I can be-in-the-world (grin). I can be here and have no memory of it (as in Freudian trauma in real time). And then of course there's issues with being in the present, which I've never quite been able to understand. The present as real-time experience is easy enough to get, but as Nietzche mentioned, we experience the present tangled with memories of the past (individual and social), with hopes and expectations for the future. We experience sensory data with (I'm convinced) a time lag between the actual perception and its cognition. The only real alternative to this is a zen-like conception of the present as simply inhabiting a spatio-temporal point.
Thinking about this might be important because of new mediatized live performances -- virtual reality being the obvious one. Although here the ontology of the environment in which we occupy a spatio-temporal location becomes crucial to its liveness. And then again, there's now the possibility of live interaction with mediatized (computerized?) entities. Is that considered live? Here I'm reminded of Blade Runner, and problematizing what it is to be human, and its repercussion for what it is to be live.
I also spent almost two hours last night trying to find out what makes Ruby tick. What does that mean?
Some somewhat stream-of-consciousness thoughts as I've been reading:
1. Would chat conversations and MMORPG gaming be considered live, enacted or performed modes of social meaning-making? Auslander's model of cultural production (discussed mostly around page 2) and discussion of audience (discussed mostly around page 56-7) would seem to be helpfully problematized by new media (which he explicitly avoids).
2. I may have been reading too much into this but Auslander's discussion of television (around page 16) made me question whether he is implicitly making a democratic argument around forms of liveness? Are live TV and theatre more 'democratic' than cinema because of their potential for audience voice?
3. Issue of power and representation are key: live events may let viewers pay attention to different things but recorded events give consumers the power to (re)consume as they see fit. We don't just need to ask how attention is controlled -- through live OR recorded events -- but how transparent the means are by which attention is controlled. The more commonplace the mechanisms of representation, the more opportunity there is for manipulation but, also, the more power and agency individuals may have to critique meaning that comes from familiarity with representation. (See discussion around page 19.)
4. The distinction between templates and interpretations (page 49) is very nice and made me think about media appropriation (e.g. mixing music, satirizing TV shows) as an interesting hybrid between templates and interpretations. To me, innovative media creation seems to happen when *templates* are *interpreted*.
5. I thought the recasting of the historical assumptions around mediatization was nice: "live is actually an effect of mediatization, not the other way around. It was the development of recording technologies that made it possible to perceive existing representations as 'live'" (page 51) and "... live performance cannot be said to have ontological or historical priority over mediatization, since liveness was made visible only by the possibility of technical reproduction." (page 54) Good to consider new media in terms of their historical situatedness -- how they borrow/appropriate/recast/reject/adopt different elements of traditional media.
6. I thought it was interesting that he rejected these 2 notions of liveness: that is appeals broadly to the senses; and that it creates community (page 55). I disagreed with these two statements: "The sense of community arises from being part of an audience, and the quality of the experience of community dreives from the specific audience situation, not from the spectacle for which that audience has gathered." (page 56) AND "Whereas mediated performance can provide the occasion for a satisfactory experience of community *within* the audience, live performance inevitably yields a sense of the failure to achieve community *between* the audience and the performer." (page 57). His senses of "community" seems grounded in a static notion of people -- e.g. would be good to distinguish among geographic community, audience community, community of artistic practice/production, and community of critique.
Oh, just to add an image, here's the #1 Google Images hit if you search on "liveness": a project at the University of Buffalo to create fake fingerprints (http://www.cubs.buffalo.edu/liveness.shtml):
Additional artefacts to chew on: tradi-moderne music: Konono 1 plays traditional Congolese trance music with a twist--they amplify their instruments with homemade microphones. http://www.crammed.be/craworld/mp3/02701.mp3
symphony: (in response to Fred) It seems like one of the responses of Western classical music is to promote a media presence. Has anyone been to see the SF Symphony lately? Michael Tilson Thomas' picture is everywhere!
generative music: Autechre is considered one of the seminal electronic music "bands" in the commercial realm. http://www.soundonsound.com/sos/apr04/articles/autechre.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gorillaz arguably the worlds first virtual band recently picked up Best Group at the MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon and then went on to play "live" http://www.devilducky.com/media/37886/
Should the view of liveness be even more granular? Could you say that a singer using a microphone sacrifices some liveness just by doing so – ie. less dynamic range added effects to the voice etc. If yes, does this basically mean that pretty much the whole history of music has been a movement away from liveness?
This is fantastic. I was watching the video today... obviously, the notion of a live animated broadcast video is a difficult one to handle, if we're so gung-ho with live versus mediatized cum live mediatized video. There's also something rather sad but funny about the MTV kids pretending to go wild over a band that's not really there. A strange live experience it must have been for them...
I am glad that Mike brought up "new media"; in addition I wanted to ask how concepts of "proximity" and "intimacy" -- which Auslander says are dervied from television -- are understood in on-line social interactions (and whether we interpret these concepts from a televisual perspective, or a "live" one in on-line communication). Similarly, if Auslander proposes, which Mike cites above, that the "live is actually an effect of mediatization" (51), where does new media stand in terms of creating representations of both the live and the televisual?
I was also thinking about the interaction of culture/economy. On page 86, in the context of live concerts becomming simulations, Auslander writes that "this change in music culture was anticipated by alterations in the structure of the music industry, and its relation to other entertainment industries, in the 1980's." In terms of television, he writes "to put it bluntly, the general response of live performance to the oppression and economic superiority of mediatized forms has to become as much like them as possible" (7). The seems to imply a certain casuality in culture's dependent relationship on the cultural economy.
Why does the word "advertising" never appear in the book?
(1) A workshop at the Marsh several years ago explored live performance as tool for social change. A representative of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo's Theatre for Identity movement spoke of some truly impromptu wandering street performances/protests which incorporated spectators as sorts of performers, in spite of Auslander's claim for the "unbridgeable distinction between audience and performance" (57). She described the streets of BA as a perpetual set for live performance. Graciela Monteagudo tells of the thousands of paper silhouettes pasted all over Buenos Aires as reminders of the disappeared. This urban set provides the space for live Boalian performances. Monteagudo explains, "(Augusto) Boal claims that his theater is complementing what Brecht started by destroying the barriers that separate spectators from actors. In his theater everybody is a protagonist, necessary in the battle for social change. While Brecht's poetics is that of an enlightened vanguard, where the spectator does not delegate power to the actor to think for him, but does delegate power to the actor to act for him, Boal attempts a poetics where the spectator does not delegate this power to the actor, but thinks and acts for himself."
(2) I've been kicking this ancient idea of a continuous and simultaneous performance, review, and critique of daily performance within the limits of a totalizing account in an effort to determine one's daily glaring inconsistencies and subtle coherence (See philolog.org). I cannot imagine how the events of one's daily, truly live performance could ever be commodified, or why someone would ever wish to do such a thing.
Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal: I find the way Auslander deals with issues of power and resistance somewhat disturbing. He criticizes the romantic view of live performance as a space that enables attitudes of resistance. However, he does not propose alternatives. Mediatized performances do not seem to be in a better position to contest power. Is resistance impossible then? The author apparently adopts a negative stance "I doubt very strongly that any cultural discourse can actually stand outside the ideologies of capital and reproduction that define a medietized culture..." (p.40). Although I find Auslander's reasoning suggestive (a little bit sophistical, though), in my opinion it is more easy to find radical critique in most forms of non-mainstream live performance than on TV (see James Collins' examples above). On the other hand, I do not think that the persistence of liveness in trials is necessarily a conservative, repressive thing. The idea of fully mediatized trials sounds like something rather uncanny and dangerous. A futuristic nigthmare.
I like the idea that making things visible, even something as ethereal as memory, makes them easier to be monitorized and controlled. This recalls Bowker and Star's argument on the dangers of completely exposing systems of classification. I think archaeologists might have something to say here. Archaeologist always work in between disclosure and obscurity. This has always been interpreted as a negative aspect of the discipline, but in fact it may provide a model for exposing things without making them completely available to surveillance and censorship. A way of resistance.
We might think of media as practices of translation/mediation and experiences of connection/engagement - throwing emphasis on the qualities of these rather than trying to define an attribute such as "liveness".
So we might look to specific (historically located) experiences to understand something like "liveness" which is clearly a discursive effect - ie liveness is inseparable from certain ways of talking, debating, managing "media" (understood in a rather ethnocentric and local way as film, TV, painting, music).
This means that liveness will change, because it is part of particular modes of engagement.
We might reflect on the relationship of liveness to the history of theater. Theater in the Greek polis was about a community of citizens manifesting structures of belonging, political rights, religious and intellectual commitment in a civic/religious setting/architecture. The act of speaking in front of others was inseparable from forensic and political representation. We might therefore think less of "reproduction" as a way of understanding a medium, and more of the connections media have with "re-presentation" - direct political representation through to the notion of someone speaking on behalf of someone else.
This throws emphasis on Auslander's discussion of witnessing, precisely an act of trustworthy representation. This has recent origins in the reevaluation of witnessing as scientific documentation with the emergence of experimental method in the 17th century (Shafer and Shapin deal with this wonderfully in their book "Leviathan and the Air Pump").
Documentation. I agree with Peggy Phelan (reported by Auslander in Chapter 4) that documentation is crucial in understanding performance and liveness. It is not some addendum to the "real" event. The particular project of documentation associated with a medium (understood as a mode of engagement) is part of that medium and shapes its character.
This, taken further, means that we should consider that all performance is "mediatized". Otherwise we will have to argue for some kind of essential distiction between real and represented - which leads us into all the twists and turns of deciding whether sitting in front a computer screen playing an online game with distant others is live or not.
