“The Solo and its Digital Double”

(This paper was presented at iDANS Conference, 7 October 2007, Bogazici Univ. Istanbul and, with slight changes, at Tedance Conference, 22 November 2007, Culturgest, Lisbon. It is published in English and in Turkish in Solo? in Contemporary Dance, ed. Gurur Ertem, Bimeras - Istanbul, May 2009)
http://www.idans.org/
http://www.tedance.com/

Aylin Kalem

The title of this paper owes a lot to Steve Dixon’s recent book called Digital Performance.[1] In that book, there is a section called “The Theatre and its Digital Double” in which Dixon, by referring to Antonin Artaud’s book of essays called The Theatre and its Double,[2] relates his understanding of theatre and his notions of virtuality to the realm of digital performance. This gave me an inspiration for re-designing my former research papers centred on performances with new technologies, within the context of iDANS festival and its theme of solo with a question mark. So, I decided to visit the concept of solo in digital performance in relation to various methods of working on the double.

In general terms, digital performance concerns the conjunction of computer technologies with the live performance arts, as well as gallery installations. New technologies can be said to provide a new field of study for long considered ideas like virtuality. The notion of the double in performance was introduced with Antonin Artaud’s The Theatre and its Double published in 1938. And the metaphor has become concrete and actuated in the theory and practice of digital performance. Artaud’s notion of the double was centred on a primitivist and spiritualized vision of a sacred, transformational, and transcendental theatre. Artaud says: “all true effigies have a double, a shadowed self.” For Artaud, the double of theatre is its true and magical self... In his discussion of theatre as alchemy, Artaud was the first to coin the term ‘virtual body’, as a doubled reality or virtuality. Pierre Lévy, in his book called What is Virtual? explains virtualization as self-projection, which is a central question of the human existence.[3]

Similarly, according to the ethno-linguist Richard Bauman, all performance involves a consciousness of doubleness, through which the actual execution of an action is placed in mental comparison with a potential, an ideal, or a remembered model of that action.[4] The performance theorist Marvin Carlson emphasizes that performance is always performance for someone else even when that audience is the self; and what is central about the double consciousness is that it is not about the external observation.

Artaud’s ideas are being realized using the capabilities of the computer, in some works, like those of 4D Art (Anima-2002), (La Fura Dels Baus’s F@usto: Version 3.0 – 1998), and Marcel.li Antunez Roca (Afasia – 1998) In some of these performances, images of performers’ digital doubles are telematically transmitted to different locations where they dance or interact with distant partners in real time.[5] In some others, the interaction of the participant with the mechanism in an installation may create various ways of connecting one’s self to his own double.

Artists working with new technologies make research on the sensations of the body. Thecla Schiphorst, having been educated in informatics and in contemporary dance, seeks to integrate models of scientific representation to the experience of the physical body. In her article, “Bodymaps : artifacts of touch”[6] she talks of her interactive installation consisting of a sensorial surface of electro-magnetic sensors and of sensors for resistance capable of detecting touch, pressure and force exercised on the velvet surface that keeps the traces of the visitor’s hand. The spectator thus, grasps his actions through his own double, which are sent back to himself. The mechanism helps the spectator to perceive his own body, by transmitting his movements through the traces of his phantom body. The French philosopher Michel Bernard, emphasizes the double by referring to the intra-sensorial chiasm in his article “Sense and fiction, or the strange effects of the three sensorial chiasms” :

By sensing a material surface, I reveal by the act of sensing, in the passivity of my digital reaction, a contrary movement, an otherness. This otherness does not depend of the postulation of another person, but the fact that I am always double, by sensing, not as a psychological entity, but as a multiplicity of fictions, of simulacras (semblances) that surround each sensation.[7]

Michel Bernard, in his discussion about this chiasm gives the example of touching a table, and he stresses that there is a dimension, active and passive at the same time. This installation seems to reinforce this aspect of touching. It reflects back the gesture of the participant to himself, it gives him an awareness of his corporeality; it helps him to perceive himself and to perceive the world through his corporeality. This idea forms the basis of Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology. The body is neither object nor subject, but is situated between the two and comprises both. The body finds an existence through the external world, and this world exists only in relation to him. In this case, the corporeality manifests itself by the act of touching, and the reverberation of this action by audio or visual reactions situates the body between an active and a passive state. This experience introduces the participant with his own double and allows him to navigate in the space between the physical body and the phantom body. Thecla Schiphorst formulates this in an explicit way:

As the viewers place their hands closer to the surface or skin of the installation, a complex soundscape responds to their proximity, and movement. The image shudders. The viewer becomes participant through the sense of touch. There is no escape from entering the 'third space' between objective seeing and subjective feeling.[8]

This installation, then seeks to show the process of ‘simulation’ and of the fictive separation (‘dédoublement’) stimulating the sensorial system that Michel Bernard speaks of in his article “Sense and fiction”.

Moreover, another aspect is put forth in this installation which refers directly to Michel Bernard’s second chiasm. Schiphorts remarks:

This work focuses on the experience based on the proprioceptive knowledge, on the sensed of what is being perceived as a skin, and on listening by touching, visualization by hearing, all of which is integrated by the attention.[9]

In parallel to this, Michel Bernard, speaking of the second chiasm inter-sensorial mentions the listening eye.

My gaze is traversed by a mode temporarily transforming the space that I have in front of me into a space of sound. My gaze produces a simulacra (semblance), a fiction constituted by the play of the specificity of the sound material. My eye has a tendency to break from the limits of a stable geometry, from the usual spatial characteristics. In each sense, there is the redoubling of the effect of another sense. There is then a certain confirmation of all this theory of simulation, of the production of fiction within the sensorial system.[10]

Thus, one more time, Schiphorst’s installation presents itself like a manifestation of the chiasm that Bernard speaks of. It is like a laboratory in the service of dance studies, where the corporeality is examined by stimulating the senses. The fact that the interface transmits the touch into sound or into image provokes the interaction of the senses. The proof of this installation seems to be like an exercise to establish and enrich the sensorial awareness.

Another very significant example of experiencing doubleness is in Paul Sermon’s performative installation called Telematic Dreaming dating 1992. The performer of the installation Susan Kozel explains the interaction between her physical body and her virtual body in her article called “Spacemaking : Experiences of a Virtual Body” She explains the set-up in her own words:

In Telematic Dreaming Sermon created a space for interaction between a performer and members of the public using a technology called telepresence. Using video projectors and monitors people in two separate rooms were drawn together. There was a bed in each room. I was alone on a bed in a room well removed from the public visiting the exhibition. My image was projected onto the bed in the room which was open to visitors, where they had the option to join me. Then video cameras in the public room transmitted the actions of the person on the bed with my image back to me in my room upstairs. I was able to interact with the person on the bed downstairs by watching both of our images on the monitors placed around my bed. The bed became my performance space. Our movement occurred in real time, but in a space which was entirely created by technology. I was alone on my bed, moving my arms and legs in physical space as if in some sort of hypnotic ritual dance, yet in virtual space I carried on intense physical improvisation with other unknown bodies.[11]

In this installation, the physical body is no more limited to its corporeal envelop but it is extended to its virtual double. Here, the double plays an essential role. Tele-presence allows the performer to be simultaneously in the real and the virtual spaces. In fact, the perception of the performer can never be in two spaces at the same time, but rather between the two. As Merleau-Ponty indicates in his book The Eye and the Spirit, “The human body is there when it makes a sort of criss-crossings between the seer and the seen, between the toucher and the touched, between an eye and the other, between a hand and a hand”[12]. Michel Bernard defines all this as « chiasms ». One is never the touched and the toucher, the seen and the seer at the same time. But the fact that the shifting between the two is very short and that the alternation from one to the other is instantaneous, allows the body to pass from one perception to the other, and thus, from one state of being to another.

The fact of existing with her own double in this experience allows Susan Kozel to pose the question of what is it to feel one’s own flesh? This otherness created through her own double, is due to the intra-sensorial chiasm which Michel Bernard talks of:

On one occasion, while thoroughly absorbed in interaction with another body I passed my hand over someone's leg, he placed his hand on my leg, when I followed his hand I touched my own leg - and was taken aback by its bulk. For an instant I didn't know what obstacle my hand had encountered after moving so freely in visual space. With vague feelings of guilt I realised that this foreign body was in fact my own! When I momentarily experienced my own body through my sense of touch it did not coincide with my body according to my sense of sight. The disorientation made me reassess what I took to be the frontier of my own body. Could it still be called a frontier if it was no longer fixed, but highly flexible and constantly changing?[13]

The act of watching her body in interaction with another body in real-time but in a created space, disrupts the perception of the performer. In this experience, the body’s sensation is aroused through the double since it is the virtual body that enters in contact with another body. The physical body is the seer but the seen as well, and the virtual body is the touched but also the touching one through the physical body’s movement. In this way, there is a strong relation created between the physical and the virtual body. Susan Kozel says that through pain, she was able to see a link between the seemingly abstract image of herself and her flesh. She describes her experience:

My real body asserted its presence as a response to the virtual image which had come to dominate my movement while performing. [14]

Here the body exists through the virtual because the mechanism allows her to gaze at herself. In that formulation, we hear the echo of André Marchand’s citation to which Merleau-Ponty refers:

In a forest, I sensed many times that it was not me who was looking at the forest. I felt that it was the trees that were looking and talking at me… I was there, listening… I believe that the painter should be pierced by the universe and should not want to pierce it. I am waiting to be interiorly submerged, to be hidden. I paint, may be to appear.[15]

The body appears then by projecting itself, by seeing itself through its double. By opposing against the commonly held belief, based on the recognition that in much of the technology consciousness is drawn out of the body and into an electronic construct, Kozel emphasizes that the experience was one of extending her body, not losing or substituting it.[16]

Armando Menicacci, a researcher in dance and new technologies, maintains that the central question of the human existence is based on self-projection, on virtualization in Pierre Lévy’s terminology.

The actual is what is experienced here and now in the course of this constant human process of tension that is focused on the imaginary. From then on, the digital, as the producer of virtual realities would not be alienating, but essentially human, because the process of virtualization is not only inherent in human but is proper to human. [17]

What Susan Kozel talks of concerning her experiences throughout Telematic Dreaming is a manifestation of this virtualization. This is about a total integration of the body through a corporeality achieved by the stimulation of the senses with the help of technology.

The perception of the external world is achieved by the projection of the imaginary through the process of virtualisation. Dance is a field where corporeality is operated by the order of the sensible, in which sensations are at play, and from which the body extends its limits. The collaboration of digital technology and dance creates a space of experimentation and enrichment of the senses. Corporeality does not depend simply on the materiality of the body, but rather of the imaginary that stimulates the sensations, in the way that Antonin Artaud conceived the double for the realm of theatre.

[1] Steve Dixon, Digital Performance, Leonardo 2007
[2] Antonin Artaud, The Theatre and its Double, 1938
[3] Pierre Lévy, Qu’est-ce que le virtuel?
[4] Marvin Carlson, Introduction to Performance
[5] Steve Dixon, Digital Performance,
[6] Thecla Schiphorst, “Bodymaps: artifacts of touch”
[7] Michel Bernard, “Sens et fiction, ou les effets étranges de trois chiasmes sensoriels”. Nouvelles de Danse, p.62
[8] Thecla Schiphorst, “Bodymaps: artifacts of touch”
[9] Thecla Schiphorst, “Bodymaps: artifacts of touch”
[10] Michel Bernard, “Sens et fiction, ou les effets étranges de trois chiasmes sensoriels”. Nouvelles de Danse, p.63
[11] Susan Kozel, “Spacemaking : Experiences of a Virtual Body” . Dance and New Technology Zone
[12] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit. Gallimard, 1964, p.21
[13] Susan Kozel, “Spacemaking : Experiences of a Virtual Body” . Dance and New Technology Zone
[14] Ibid.

[15] Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L’œil et l’esprit. Gallimard, 1964, p.31
[16] Susan Kozel, “Spacemaking : Experiences of a Virtual Body” . Dance and New Technology Zone
[17] Armando Menicacci, « L’enseignement de la danse face au numérique ». Nouvelles de Danse 40-41, Automne-Hiver, 1999, p.58