Post 6: Avant-Garde 180s (featuring GATZ)

Greetings, all--

This post covers not last week (Mardi Gras/Keyword) but the week before last (the avant-garde stuff). So much avant-garde performance sounds utterly stupid, almost a parody, when taken out of context. A woman just sits all day at a table staring at whoever sits down across from her? Get a job, loser! Or: A whole movement based on blurred images? Huh. Half the pics I take are Futurist, and I never even new it!

One of my favorite moments in undergrad classes are when I get to witness students doing a complete 180 in their opinion of a work. They hear about some experimental or avant-garde performance, mock it, and then hear (usually from me) a deep retelling/reframing/explanation of that performance. Then they're silent.

One of those moments happened yesterday in my capstone class. Students were writing about what kind of company they'd like to work for in 10 or so years. One student named Elevator Repair Service. He talked about their current big show, GATZ. GATZ, as you may have heard, consists of a live reading of The Great Gatsby. The whole thing. It is eight hours long.



The class groaned.
GATZ at The Public Theater TRAILER from ERS Theater on Vimeo.

Dr. Fletcher swoops in! Funnily enough, my friend in Scranton (the same friend who invited me up to talk last week) had just seen GATZ. He described it briefly. I groaned. Then he told what it was like to watch it. I'll rely on his retelling here:

The show starts with a guy in an office cubicle, trying to load something onto a PC. We see a projection of his screen. It crashes. He grumbles, sighs, tries again. Bluescreen of death. At this point, my friend said, it's like ten minutes into the show. You wonder if the whole eight hours will be like this. Frustrated, the man rummages around his office clutter and pulls out a book: The Great Gatsby. He starts reading.

As he goes on, office life continues behind him, people coming and going, making copies, chatting. Then, at certain points, characters in the office begin saying lines from the book as the reader comes to them. They seem accidental, natural coincidences at first. Then they become more frequent. Gradually, the life in the office seems to take on features of the novel--or vice versa. It's riveting, moving, dreamlike, exciting. Finally, forty-five pages from the end, the man puts down the novel, looks directly at the audience, and recites the entire final section from memory (apparently the actor used to do this as a party trick).

By the time I finish telling this to my capstone class, they're silent, absorbed. "So often," I tell them, "we go to a two-and-a-half-hour show that feels like it's four hours long. Imagine going to an eight-hour-show that feels like just an hour or two."

They seemed sold on that.

For this post, share a story of some kind of experimental or avant-garde performance you've seen or heard of that went (for you or for others) from That's so dumb to OMG what a great thing.

Post by Tuesday (March 3)-ish. Comment on this post about someone else's post by Friday (March 6).

Post 5: Not-Me, but . . . No, It's Really Just Not Me (Or, You Can't Prove You're Not a Bot!)

Part of the mind-bending fun of the simulation argument or Jean Baudrillard's notion of simulacra involves exposing ourselves to the fundamental leap of faith at the heart of our daily life: we don't know for sure that we're real, that our perceptions of the world are accurate--but we continue on as if they are from day to day. We're real enough.

Part of the chilling unpleasantness inspired by deepfakes and other modes of falsity online involves realizing that, sometimes, we really do want to ground ourselves in a reality against which we can check and discredit unreal images of ourselves. Thanks to the ambiguity of internet, it can be hard to establish a negative: I'm not that image. I didn't do that thing you see me doing. I didn't say/type/tweet/post that thing you read in my name. I didn't buy that stuff my credit record says I did.

Maybe we aren't real enough, at least for those who aren't physically around us 24/7.

That doesn't mean people don't try to establish a "real me" online.

For this post, find, share, and reflect on some means of performatively establishing a real identity. What performance techniques do people use to establish a trustworthy connection between real them and digital them? Alternately, how do they break or discredit links between real them and (deep)faked them?

Here's an example to get you started. There's a subreddit called "Roast Me" (r/RoastMe) in which people post pictures of themselves, sometimes with a brief description ("unemployed, live with parents, 32"), asking redditors to "roast them"--use wit or meanness to cut them down, insult them, etc.

 

It is not my cup of tea. But I do find it fascinating that those wishing to be roasted must post an image of themselves holding up a sign that explicitly says "Roast Me"--preferably with their Reddit handle there. The idea, it seems, is to prevent nonconsensual roasting. You can't just post a random picture of someone and invite the internet to mock them (well, of course you can, but just not on r/RoastMe).

Obviously, this isn't foolproof. Photoshop could easily manufacture a pic of anyone holding some sign like that. But it is an attempt, at least, to establish a link between real-space human and digital-space activity.

For what it's worth, there's another subreddit, r/ToastMe, which is the same thing, but it solicits only encouraging messages for people in need of support. Much more my speed.



(This poor guy's caption is "Girlfriend of 3 years just left me. I'm completely broken." Toast him if you'd like.)

What other means of reality-checking people can you think of? Are there artists playing with this kind of verification? Share!

John

Post 4: Presence, Attention, Performance . . . and Nigel

This week's readings all had the common theme of paying attention to people. For the most part, this attention aligned with notions of sight. We watch. We oversee (the episcop in episcopal). We observe ourselves and present (for others' eyes) selective bits of us depending on our situation.

Among our discussions this week, we wondered if and how we behave differently when we know we're being watched. Now, on one level (as discussed last week), we're always being watched thanks to surveillance capitalism. So ubiquitous and dispersed is that watching that we often cease to notice it. That pervasive attention becomes the background noise for our living in 2020.

Bogart, Goffman, Orenstein, and Kirby all in their own way suggest that something else happens when we submit ourselves to others' live attention, when we present or perform ourselves in front of other people. Suddenly all of our actions, reactions, and inactions unfold as if there were a picture frame floating around us, highlighting our bodies and faces and words and deeds with a special significance. We alter our behavior in relation to that frame (or that matrix, as Kirby would say, if we're on stage). We present a different self, suppressing some acts and accentuating others. Unless we're Manny. Manny is the same in public, on stage, at home--constant as gravity.

Something Kirby points out, though, is that this Frame of Added Significance (where we're taken as not just being but representing) doesn't necessarily happen just when we want or as we want. If I accidentally walk onto a stage during a performance, I might be taking as part of the mise-en-scene, whether or not I'm actually aware of the matrixed frame or not. Or consider a "hot mic" moment, where I'm not meaning to broadcast my words or sounds to an audience, but they get broadcast anyway. Most of us have also had one of those moments where we hit "reply all" rather than just "reply"--creating a larger performance than we had intended.

Conversely, I can think of times where I'm performing my heart out, presenting a particularly special version of me for an audience I'm sure is there--only to find that in fact no one was watching/listening. Think of the impassioned rant you just spewed out--only to find that the call had dropped three words in. Think of how many stunning YouTube masterpieces of self-expression languish with zero views.

Or think of Nigel, a gannet (a kind of bird) that fell in love with a concrete statue of a gannet. He devoted himself to this statue--wooing it, dancing for it, singing for it, forswearing all others.  And then he died, alone, having given all his heart all his life to a lover that could never respond or recognize his adoration.

 

What do we--what would Kirby, Orenstein, Bogart, or Goffman--say about Nigel? Can you think of other situations where the attentional feedback cycle between audience and performer and audience seems rich and amazing and full of mutual life but in fact turns out to be a completely one-sided affair, a fundamental misunderstanding. Does this matter? If so or if not, how?

John