Comments on Media Theater Workshop

Jon Brooks, Caitlin, Elizabeth, Nagisa, Tyler, Stephanie, Chrissy, Jessica, Naomi, Mark, Dekyi, Wafa, Josh, Zoe, and Brian ALL did an AMAZING job with our Media Theater Workshop production at the CITRIS Holiday Gala on Friday 12 December 2008.  Here are some reviews from folks in the class who did extra-credit write-ups and handed them in the Monday following the performance (thanks to Evan for transcribing them, and to the reviewers for coming to the show and writing about it!):

Jennifer: My favorite performance was "Missed Connections." I was amazed by how accurately it could resemble my own IM conversations with my ex-significant other. There were many times that I was in the exact same position, chatting with my ex online, mad about something that he did or, more likely, failed to do, which I would kind of insinuate. He wouldn't get it, and so I would finally blow up. Then my ex would apologize over and over, and say that I meant everything to him, and blah blah blah, all of which would eventually placate me. Towards the end of our relationship, the arguments would also devolve into him accusing me of something, just as it occurred in the Missed Connections skit. 

Seeing my own life played out on stage was both unsettling and illuminating. I could see far more clearly how IM conversations work, how they both facilitate communication and lead people to misinterpret meaning. It struck me that so much of the conversation would have been a non-issue if the conversation took place offline, or that the argument would have been resolved much faster and easier if it hadn't taken place online.

While IM makes it easier to stay in touch with people, it also takes away the benefit of seeing people's body language. Even little things like putting the wrong punctuation can change the whole meaning of the conversation, forcing users to take even more time to either clarify what they said, time that could be put to other, perhaps more constructive, activities.

Diane:  The event was entertaining with lots of food, drinks, and people that love technology, the best part of the event was watching the members of Berkeley's Media Theatre Workshop performing on stage. The three plays demonstrated how technology and computer based communication programs can cause us to perform in unpredicted ways every day of our lives. The play called "Missed Connections" was humorous and witty. I thought the story was well put together because everyone in the audience can relate to this story.

Most people who chat online can relate to this performance or have performed like the characters while using this form of communication. How ever, allowing the audience to observe the chat boxes and communications between the two characters projected on the screen made the performance more personal and felt as if we were in their private lives. By far, my favorite short play was "Best E-mails Ever," because this kind of narrative happens to us every day in our lives. The play illustrates how people performing and communicating through technology has brought them closer together. Each character demonstrates their best email they have received and I know we all have one "best e-mail ever." While each short play had something special to them, I could sense there were a lot of time, commitment, and love put into the performances. It was a moving experience to watch my talented classmates from New Media perform and engage with each other on stage as they perform with technology.

Jonathan A.: I thought that the piece "Best E-mails Ever" was one of the more successful pieces in examining the intersection between performance and technology. The images projected onto the screen behind the performers really helped to enhance the stories that the actors told. They aided in establishing a sense of community among the actors and a feeling of warmth and comfort for the audience. The projected images of Dekyi's friend who was searching for love helped to personalize the story and attaching a face to her words helped to draw the audience in. The live actors recreating the iamge provided a nice button to close the story, creating a link between the reality of the images to the world of the actors. The image of the sonogram in Josh's story also provided such an emotional link for the audience. Even though we did not see any other of the people mentioned in the other stories, such as Mark's mother, the images of the profiteroles and the animals helped to personalize the stories for the audiences.

The piece did make me think about whether there will be some important e-mails that will take their place in history. However I think that at the moment, e-mail is still considered informal and is highly personal, so it may take some time before we have some historically significant e-mails. The piece also made me think about my own life and what I would consider my best e-mails ever. 

And some random thoughts and questions from Evan:

_ Not only did this media theatre workshop pulled off a great conclusion to the semester and for the Holiday season but it provided some of its' audience members a newfound insight on their own performance with technology. 

_Maybe ?? these performances with up-to-date technology should be upgraded annually and performed so that as each generation of audience emerges from  year to year, it will allow a better understanding and grasp of New Media and the way it has clandestinely cemented itself into our lives from the moment we begin adapting ourselves to technology and its' culture.

Project Comments, Part 5: Oral Presentations

It's a misnomer to say that this post is a "Comments" post, because I already gave 1-on-1 feedback to the students who gave oral presentations as their Performance and Technology projects.  But I just want to give a shout-out to the oral presenters, all of whom did amazing and really intelligent and insightful talks - most of which, sadly, only I got to enjoy: Jennifer (on the Post Secret site), Arielle (on the history of hip-hop), Mark (who taught me about Artaud's Jet de Sang, for which I will forever be grateful), Josh (on Eagle Eye), Stacey, Jonathan A. (on Sweeney Todd, comparing the stage and screen versions), Torree (on playwright Suzan Lori-Parks), and Elizabeth (who gave one of the greatest explanations I've ever ever heard of my favorite sci-fi movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey), Kristin (on the cyberattacks in Estonia in 2007) plus Jon Brooks, who did a terrific performance for the entire class about everyday life being like a technological performance.  

Project Comments, Part 4: Sound/Video Projects

Evan Yu, Wafa Hazem, and Jennifer Lowe served as peer reviewers for these projects.

Zoe created a remix of the video game Fallout 3, which is about a post-apocalyptic U.S., and put her own soundtrack to it, with songs like "Que Sera Sera." 

Evan: It kind of reminded me of that one video game trailer from class, that used Gary Jules' song.  You get a different feel with the music that you put in.

Wafa: The music makes you concentrate on what's going on in the video.

Evan: It gave it a certain movement.  

Wafa:  You feel like your body is moving.

Evan: It went well with the character onscreen.

Jennifer: Is it Digital Worlds?

Gail: Or Electronic Warfare.

Jennifer: But in the future.

Gail: I think it has to do with how video games are often focused on the apocalypse as if it's inevitable.  As if electronic warfare will end up in a really bad spot.

Evan: I was thinking maybe Electronic Warfare could destroy us.

Wafa: It has that power.

Jennifer: Maybe you need Electronic Warfare to survive post-apocalypse.  Which is why they're using those technologies.  

Gail: I thought Que Sera Sera was really creepy.  What will be will be.  So what will be...is the end of the nation.  America in ruins.  Is the implication.

Jennifer: They had those pictures of the Lincoln Memorial torn down...

Nagisa made a montage of clips from a Japanese rom-com sci-fi movie that seemed to be about a young woman who somehow meets a cyborg guy who then lives with her.  They fall in love, have misadventures, and it ends with him leaving for some reason - giving her a microchip - maybe his own chip?  The girl at the end is crying as she closes her hands around the chip.  The clips were captioned with quotations about the Uncanny Valley.

Wafa: It's nice b/c it was different than other genres that we've watched - that I watch.  It's interesting seeing how she was trying to help the cyborg out to fit into this world and he was kind of an alien person.  The scene where he was wearing her clothes was funny.  It's about fitting in and how different the worlds are.

Jennifer: What part of the uncanny valley was he really in?  Was she repulsed by him at the end, or just sad?

Evan: I wished he used more than one film.

Wafa: I wished he made it more of a remix.  Like this might happen, or this might happen.  

Gail: I think there's something in the film about - Can robots really live among us?  If they lived among us, how different would they be, how much would they stand out?  Esp. if they look mostly human. 

Evan: What if they move like robots?

Jennifer: They look human in every aspect except...

Gail: I think that's the point of that guy cyborg.  He looks cute but clearly was different.

Jennifer: He seemed clueless.

Gail: A lot of cyborgs seem childish.

Jennifer: In the Terminator universe, too.

Gail: What was up with the music?  Super cheesy romantic ballad music. 

Jennifer: Did he add that?  Was it part of the movie?

Evan: It's almost like a trailer.  

Jennifer: He made me want to watch it.

Wafa: Hellzya.

Nancy made a sound project called "Sampling the Trapezium."  She also wrote a story that accompanies it called "The Amazing Cyber-Baby."  

Wafa: It sounded like a lot of guns shooting...

Jennifer: Tapping...

Evan: Lasers...

Jennifer: In the story, someone's presenting a baby that's been cared for by robots.  The characters question the professor or doctor, talking about the readings.

Evan: I liked the sound.  It was really creative.  I think it worked.

Wafa: Really creative.  It's not just that you're listening to it, you're thinking - there's so much going on within this simple set of sounds given to us.

Gail: I really futuristic music, so it's hard for me to say whether most people would like it.  But I really liked it.

Wafa: I don't listen to that kind of music, and I liked this.

Jennifer: Me too.

Evan: It's epic.

Wafa: It's not the typical type of music that people usually listen to.

Jennifer: It would be cool to choreograph a dance to it.

Evan: It could go with a media theater performance.

Gail: It would be interesting to do a performance based on sound rather than sound based on a performance.  

Tyler made a sound piece called "Sounds Like the Future (Through Art)."  There was an accompanying write-up that explains what each part is about.  He explains that "traditional music still has a place in the future of music."  This was an original composition and he performed the piece in the recording.

Evan: It sounds like he's trying to say that even a student can produce music, you don't really need to have a studio, you can create your own music.  In the last part, he says that the beats of that part represents the cutting that rap artists do to get a danceable sound.  The first part is just a piano, but then when you add a beat to it, it becomes a different kind of music.

Wafa: You can make music anywhere.  It doesn't have to be a huge production.

Evan: Be your own music producer.

Evan: I thought the music was catchy.  I liked the beginning more.

Gail: I liked that he composed it and played it himself.  

Evan: The beginning almost sounds like an Eminem song.

Jennifer: Eminem uses a lot of piano.

Wafa: Especially at the start of his songs.

Gail: I love it that that's what you guys all have in common: Eminem.

Evan: He uses More Brilliant Than the Sun.  He says the reading helped him plan the notes in his piece.  He doesn't go into what about the reading had to do with it.

Jennifer: He uses the Hybridity essay to.  It sounds like both essays were inspiration points.

Stephanie did a piece on the Uncanny Valley.  She wrote lyrics that include, "How do we think about the other?" "Welcome to the Uncanny Valley" "How lifelike can your toys be/before you want to run and scream?/Is there a line drawn in the sand?"  "Can a person be an 'almost person'/Can a thing be a more 'human thing'?"  Stephanie sings the song over a soundtrack that sounds like the combination of a piano and synthesizer and sound effects.  She transformed the pitch of her voice to sound like a robot-man for the refrain ("Welcome to the Uncanny Valley").  She wrote an explanation that describes her thought process as she made the song.  

Wafa: This is great.  She has a really nice voice.  She was very committed to every verse of her song.  It's very clear once you hear the song and hear the lyrics. I found it flawless.

Jennifer: It's funny b/c she talks about the things that are "almost human" as if they are citizens.  That they're actual people in our society that we think are just disgusting.  But it's weird b/c we only see them on movie screens.

Evan: I was thinking the hook lines [the robot man voice] - it sounds robotic to me.  When "he" would come in, the music got more intense, more dramatic.  It complemented the robotic-ness of that part.  

Wafa: It's so GOOD!!!!  It's so technologically rich.  I'm so proud of her!!

Evan: Very creative.

Gail: I totally love this piece.

Wafa: It's something I would listen to.

Kunze made a mix of samples (which he listed on the inside of the CD cover) and did some spoken-word (with heavy processing of his voice to reverb) over the music mix.  It's called "Mr. Electric."  His spoken-word consisted of comments/questions/quotations that came from the readings from our "Sounds Like the Future" unit.  It sounds very techno, very danceable.  Incredibly futuristic.  

Evan: I liked it.  

Wafa: I really liked it.  It wasn't just a remix, it was an extravagant kind of...

Evan: Every melody had its own beat, which was it's own song in itself.  It was really cool.

Wafa:  It was surprising...you didn't know what to expect.

Jennifer: It felt like it had multiple identities.  

Wafa: That's a good way of saying it.

Jennifer: I couldn't even count how many artists there were...

Evan: Dreamlike.  I thought it was like flying through clouds.

Jennifer: My dreams are not like that.

Evan: My dreams are intense.  

Wafa: I liked it when he asks, "Do you like music?"  Like a tease.  If you like music, here's another piece of music....

Evan: There was no description that came with it?

Jennifer: It didn't really need a description.  

Gail: It sounds awesome.  It just sounds a really, really good mix.  Technically I think it was very, very well mixed.

Evan: He must have really liked those songs.  It would take time to know what really matches. 

Jessica made a song called "Who Controls the Future?"  It consists of various voice performances by Jessica, consisting of her speaking in an unprocessed voice, her speaking in a heavily processed voice, her singing in Korean, and so on.  Some of her vocals are quotations.  Many of them sound like machines making sounds, robots or computers talking.  A lot of her effects have to do with doubling sounds, creating an echo or reverb effect.  There are sounds of her breathing, sounds of music all mixed together.  

Jennifer: Where do people get all their skills to do stuff like this?

Wafa: Wow, that's very creative.  It feels like she put a lot of time into it.  Well done.  It is confusing, but...

Jennifer: But you can follow it.  

Gail: I think it sounds great.  I loved her vocals.  I loved all her effects.

Evan: I like that she was able to use American language mixed into the Korean language.  And there was a certain continuity.

Gail: I liked all the music parts.  The lullaby was awesome.  And the technical aspects of the sound mix were amazing. 

Evan: She had a producer.

Jennifer: Where do people get these people?

Wafa: It's fabulous, I don't know what else to say.

Caitlin did a video called "Real vs. Digital?" that alternated between images from real life, images from Second Life, and quotations from Poster and Moravec.  The images were of everyday activities like dancing and attending a concert and having a work meeting, and making out and giving birth, and settings like city streets and ski chalets.  The video compared Second Life's inhabitants and environments to their real-life counterparts.  There was also a soundtrack made up of pop music clips.

Evan: I thought it was kind of creepy that you can do what you do in real life in Second Life.  I can see how people get so involved in Second Life.

Wafa: The whole pregnancy thing?

Jennifer: The ending was interesting, b/c the Second Life people all look beautiful but creepy at the same time.  Then the very end was real-life people, and they were very fat.  I wasn't grossed out by them.  They looked normal, real.  I felt better [looking at them]. 

Evan: It was like an episode of The Office where someone created a Second Life character but it was exactly who he was in real life.  Everybody was asking why he didn't make himself the President, but he made himself Assistant Regional Manager like he was in real life.  

Wafa: It was very thoughtful.  Very soothing in the beginning and end, but something different in the middle.  It blended really well.  It drew us in.

Evan: Second Life was closely resembling reality.  It was weird.

Jennifer: You can create yourself to look ugly in Second Life but nobody does.

Wafa:  Perfection.  You always want what you can't have.  People are always trying to get something they don't have.  Get a kind of bliss from it.

Jennifer: I thought the picture of the fat people at the end...was about how you can't escape your body.  

Gail: I just liked this on an aesthetic level - it looked beautiful - I usually get really bored looking at Second Life but I loved looking at the comparison to real-world images.

Evan: She was able to find the pictures that closely matched.

Gail: These were all amazingly creative and wonderful projects, and way more than I could have ever expected.  Tremendous efforts all around.  I'm so impressed.  

Project Comments, Part 3: Written Projects

Evan Yu, Wafa Hazem, and Jennifer Lowe served as peer reviewers for this project.

Wafa did a series of interviews with her friends asking them what the Internet means to them, how it plays into their everyday lives, how they think about it.  She produced a five-page (single-spaced) write-up of their responses to her interviews.  

Jennifer: It seems like they [the friends interviewed] got attached to the Internet really fast once they started using it.  They talk about how they feel like they have status b/c they have their own computers now.  

Wafa: Especially b/c they're in a college environment.  They all loved the Internet.  One of them said they've become so dependent on the Internet.

Evan: Efficiency is the key.  I think so, too.  Imagine if we had snail mail still and no email.  And contact, too.  Sometimes you don't want to talk on the phone. 

Wafa: One of them said, I think people don't know how to express themselves in real life.  Please get out of there [your room] and be more social.  Virtual reality...seems so unrealistic.

Jennifer: So that person seems more afraid of the Internet.

Wafa: That person is always on the Internet but it's always for something productive, for school  She never really chats.  She doesn't spend hours on Facebook.  Versus other people who take their laptops anywhere, everywhere and do a million things with them.

Evan: All in all, we're all dependent on the Internet, whether we like it or not.

Jennifer: My thesis advisor refuses to have a computer or an email account.  She doesn't have voice mail either.  You have to see her face-to-face.

Wafa: One person said they had a roommate who was so anti-social in real life but was in chatrooms, Facebook and MySpace all the time.  She would never talk. 

Evan: I like the idea of interviewing people to see how different people are connected or want to disconnect.

Jennifer: The interviews are good but she could have done more than transcribing it.  

Wafa: Looking back, that's so true.

Jennifer: You have so much to say explaining it to us, so it could have used analysis.

Wafa: I was afraid b/c I didn't want to write so much.

Jennifer: That way you could have used the quotations to explain the text.  

Allie wrote a piece "Dictionary/Encyclopedia of the Code of Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than Sun" in which she attempts to explain Eshun's words and terms and themes.  

Gail: I'm going to comment on this piece b/c it's clear that none of the students in this room read the Eshun or understood it [Jennifer interjects: "I read half of it.  There were only two essays I didn't read."].  I really love this piece b/c Allie is trying to do what Eshun was doing: talk about techno music, the merging of man + machine, and what new type of music is emerging with new technologies, using unusual language that is meant to defamiliarize what seems so familiar to so many people: dance music, breakbeats, rhythmic jazz, etc.  I love that Allie delves into the meanings of the words that Eshun has made up, the leaps of logic that he is making, and really tries to get at his meaning, at the story he is telling in such unusual language. 

Evan drew a diagram that explains the explains the Data Thief as a vehicle between the past, present and future, in technological music.  He explains that the Data Thief is a technology, it can even be thought of a turntable.  Eshun says that "a turntable can become a subjectivity engine where it can create its own sound through a series of manipulated objects."  There is a space between the archive [of music] and the time is this new plane where data "moves through the explosive space where technology unites us..."  This is about music as commonality, music as a common space between us.

Gail: So to me this piece is about trying to explain this shadowy figure which is the heart of the documentary we saw, The Last Angel of History.  It's about how this figure can be thought of as technology (a turntable) and this technology is a movement - a movement of music through time - and it is the movement of the music that is the interesting part, even more interesting than the music itself.  It's how sampling makes music move from the past into the present to evoke the future.  

Wafa: The movement isn't just past-present-future, you can also move future-present-past, it can go both ways, any way.

Jennifer: And the present version makes you rethink the past.

Wafa: It's like real life.  You go through things through the past, present and you think about the future.  

Gail: You're saying memory works - how we experience time - we experience all times at once.

Wafa: We don't realize that we do. 

Jennifer: But it's a specific cultural history too.

Gail: And this type of music was invented by a specific culture and constantly refers to the music from that specific culture's history and timeline. 

Jennifer: I think it was really cool.  

Waldrep wrote a short story or series of musings called "Worlds."  It's a vivid description of time playing World of Warcraft combined with his real-world experiences.  It ends with "Continue? Yes or No".

Wafa: I think it's written well.

Evan: I think you'd be confused if you didn't know what he was talking about.

Jennifer: It's an interesting way to bring to life playing one of these games.

Wafa: I really like how he started it.  Waking up somewhere.

Jennifer: Is that how WoW is?  

Evan: Yeah, when you log on, you just find yourself somewhere you were last time.  It's like he's living this life.

Wafa: When you read it, it's like you're experiencing it.  All the details really really helped. 

Brighitte wrote a script, "A Glimpse At War: Inspired by 'Generation Kill - Iraq' on YouTube."  

Jennifer, Wafa, and Evan did a read-through of the script.  

Wafa: This is so much fun.  But there should have been an introduction.

Evan: A treatment.

Jennifer: Andrew Smith talks to actual soldiers about war, and about how it's like a video game.  And then Angela Smith, a college professor, talks to college students about the same thing.  They're the same generation - the students and the soldiers. 

Evan: I like how she's creative.  She's able to turn this documentary-type clip into an actual scene.  

Wafa: I like how she had description of the scenes....

Evan: The establishing scenes...

Wafa: ...because it helps you visualize what's going on.  But she could go much further than this.  This could be really, really cool.  She should hire us as actors and we'll do it.

Gail: I guess I'm more interested in where she comes down on this issue of Generation Kill.  

Jennifer: It sort of sounds like she agrees - that soldiers are desensitized to war.

Gail: But the college students aren't desensitized to war - and aren't all soldiers desensitized to war? 

Jennifer: But they're the same.  The soldiers are getting money to go to college after they come back from war.  We're not different populations.  

Project Comments, Part 2: Handmade Artifacts

Jennifer Lowe, Wafa Hazem, and Evan Yu were peer reviewers for these projects.  

Caroline made a mobile out of a bike gear, copper wire hanging from the round gear, and paper cut-outs that she painted colorfully (and in one case colored with crayon) with quotations on the backs of the cut-outs.  The cut-outs are in the shapes of a planet, a sun, a UFO, and various extraterrestrial/sci-fi objects (one is maybe a turntable).  The quotations are from the Sounds Like the Future unit.  There are some cellophane people, too. 

Jennifer: Cool.  What's the circle [bike gear]?

Evan: I think she uses it as a turntable.  Represents a CD or vinyl.

Wafa: When I look at this compared to other objects, I think, This looks out of the blue.

Evan: What are the people [cut-outs]?

Jennifer: Are they the data thief?  Musicians?  Aliens?

Gail: Why is it a mobile?

Jennifer: It exists in space.

Gail: I like that it moves.  I like that it has the potential for movement.  And the bike gear - that's the level of technology that Sun Ra to indicate space and the future.

Jennifer: They talk about scavenging in the readings.  So maybe she was referring to that - scavenging.

Brian made a camera obscura out of thick black posterboard and hard clear plastic.  On the outer section of the camera, there are several plastic shapes (cylinder, cube) painted silver and connected by wires.   It looks like a robot.  There are two sections to the camera obscura, and so in the inside section, there are printed-out pictures, that look like the refracted image of the robot.  There are quotations pasted into the object in various places.  

Evan: It looks very clean-cut, it looks simple yet complicated.

Jennifer: It's very thoughtful, where he placed everything.   Really geometric.

Wafa: It's very organized.  Is there a mirror-ish effect?  You can see yourself looking at it.  

Jennifer: Where does he get his material from? 

Gail: This was my husband's favorite piece.  This and Caroline's.

Jennifer: It's intriguing.  

Gail: A lot of people comment on it when they see it.

Evan: It's a project within a project.  

Jennifer: What are the quotations from?

Gail: There must be something from Barthes, no?  From Camera Obscura?

Evan: Mostly from Moravec.

Jennifer: And Bryant.  Maybe it's about virtual reality.  "Transplanted human minds will often be without physical bodies but hardly ever without the illusion of having them."

Gail: So it's about illusion.  So it's about appearances.

Jennifer: It's the idea of having a mind without a body and just watching the body.  It's weird.  There's something more, I don't know what it is.  You know what, I think this [the robot] is a human with his body replaced.  Didn't Moravec say your body will slowly be replaced, with more and more machinery?  And then the Uncanny Valley - how human are they [once their body parts have been replaced]?  

Marie made a journal that is a sort of book/scrapbook essay.  It's called "Performing Me: A Look at Every Piece of the Puzzle That Makes Up Marie."  On the bottom of the front cover is the quote, "All performance involves a consciousness that involves doubleness."  She gives an Introduction of herself, her status in life, and the goal of the project.  Each of the pages has a photograph of Marie (self-taken) in various "states" and a description of that state.  The first page is "My 'Relaxed' Self," and the photograph is of Marie without makeup, fresh out of the shower.  She describes that state, and how this is how she looks when she's chilling at home, watching TV.  The next page is "My 'Checklist' Self," "My 'Dead' Self," "My 'Ehhh' Self," "My 'Fresh' Self," "My 'Semi' Self," "My 'Going Out with People I Know - Daytime Self," "My 'Make a good impression Day to Night' Self," "My 'Tyra' & 'Fierce' Self."  Each page has her description of that state and quotations about the nature/definition of performance. 

Wafa: I think that she could have been a little more specific with her pictures.  In these pictures she's acting [these states] out.

Jennifer: I have worse candid shots than any of those.  

Evan: They look so normal.

Wafa: She could have had pictures from the past, pictures her friends took.  

Evan: The fact that she's doing this is also a performance.  

Jennifer: It's a double performance.  I don't even know what that means.

Wafa: Is this about how we all have different personalities, or moods, depending on the environmental self?

Evan: She's performing for herself.

Jennifer: She's performing what she thinks she looks like in these different states.

Wafa: It's a very creative idea.  One way to improve on it would be to have more random shots.  

Gail: I have to say that this was an extra credit project and I'm incredibly impressed with the fact that she did this amount of work totally aside from anything else she had to do for the class.  

Jennifer: It's a cool concept.

Evan: Yeah, the concept is great.

Gail: This is about how "I" is a "we" and we all consist of multiple people.  She's performing all the different selves that she performs in her daily life. 

Stacey made a Christmas tree ornament that was an eyeball in the theme of Foucault's panopticon.  One side of the styrofoam ball was an eye whose pupil was a mirror, and the other side of the ball was a quote from Foucault. 

Gail: I can't show this to the peer reviewers because this is actually in my house.  This was one of only two Christmas ornaments that my husband and I had in our house during the holidays.  My husband came to my office before the holiday break and saw this ornament and said, We have to take this home with us, so we did.  I love this piece so much.  It was extra credit and I gave it like a million points.  So clever, turning the sphere of the tree ornament into the eye of the panopticon - something associated with such warm and nostalgic feelings coupled with a concept that is about fear, discipline, punishment, paranoia.  And the giant eyeball hanging over you at Christmastime - the idea that you are being surveilled even in your warmest family moments - so, so, so great.  Instills exactly that paranoia that Foucault is trying to explain. 

Michal made a very artistic book whose every page was a collage of images (including diagrams and pictures) and words related to a concept that she first explained in her first essay for the class, the idea that as technology develops, our understanding of what is developing is more limited than the development itself.  In other words, emerging technologies have their own stories which we (the people developing those technologies and watching them develop) only understand partially.  

Gail: This was totally creative and so intricate and involving.  Michal needed to take this away b/c she graduated at the end of last semester, so I don't have this in my possession, but it was remarkable in its conceptualization and execution.  I love Michal's theory, it's amazing.  I can't explain it as well as she could.  

 

Project Comments, Part 1: Posters and Large Artworks

For one of their class assignments, the students in Performance and Technology, Fall 2008, UC Berkeley, had to construct artworks of any medium that expressed ideas from one of the middle units of the class.  These projects were so rich, complex, and interesting that Gail asked some students to come in and critique the pieces with her, to give each piece the attention it deserves. 

Wafa Hazem, Evan Yu, and Jennifer Lowe all served as peer reviewers on these projects.  

Annabelle did a black-and-white illustration, poster-size, with red accents.  It's about the Electronic Warfare unit.  It's about a Sergeant J. Smith playing a video game (WW3000) at an Army camp.  And he gets a warning on his screen, "More than one individual may experience the same VR at the same time."  Then the bottom panel shows a character Jane getting *actually* shot, and she says "I can't believe it, he shot me, actually...shot me."  The bottom bubble of the poster is another "warning" screen that says, "In most cases no American ever actually saw the target at all."

Jennifer: Maybe it's about how you can have a physical, emotional reaction to online gaming.  It's in her gut - that's where she gets shot.

Wafa: Because you get drawn into it.  The artwork is fabulous.  Wow, I cannot believe she did that.

Evan: You had to take a lot of time...every line....

Wafa: The commitment.  It's perfect.  Genius.

Evan: His arm's not even an arm.  

Jennifer: It looks like a canon.

Evan: He's a machine man [about the middle panel, which is the game world].

Jennifer: The skulls on the ground reminded me of Terminator.  

Gail: The fact that it's an Army officer who's actually playing a video game is a very good tie-in to themes from unit - an Army officer playing a game that really shoots people, wounds them, harms them, kills them.  It's a metaphor for how war works today.

Diane made a collage on white posterboard that she spraypainted gold.  And on top of the gold paint is the title in cut-out letters, "The Uncanny Valley: Human Ideals of Beauty and Ugliness," and a large figure of a woman's torso with her face and hair made up of different images of women's hair and facial features.  The torso is also "constructed" - there are lines like seams at her shoulder joints and there is thread (real thread - she really sewed the image) at her lower abdomen.  There is a glitter bikini top on the woman's torso covering what look like artificially enhanced breasts - which are in the center of the piece, so they are the center of attention.  All along the bottom of the poster, attached only halfway so that they form a jagged edge on the bottom, are images of artificial creatures that range from cute to weird.  

There are several quotes written in gold bubbles on the upper right of the poster, all related to the concept of the Uncanny Valley.  There are also brief "captions" for the quotations.  "Appearance" and "Imagined Worlds" are two of the captions.  

Wafa: The breasts are the first thing you look at it.  I looked at the face way later.  I think she did that on purpose.

Evan: Actually I saw the face first, b/c it's distorted, kind of grotesque.  Because the body is pretty.

Jennifer: I think she's an Art major.

Wafa: I think Art History.  

Jennifer: From far away, I thought it was pretty.  And then I got up close.

Wafa: From far away, it looks like something one would want to see, because it catches your attention.  

Diane also did an extra credit project called "Electronic Warfare."  It's a vertically oriented white posterboard with two vertical stripes of gold that look like maybe they could be the twin towers, and between them is a plane that Diane drew by hand, and then dropping from the plane is the letters that form "ELECTRONIC WARFARE."  The letters are dropping onto a pile of computer parts - monitors and hard drives and keyobards and cords, and they appear to be on fire, with red/orange flames rising from the pile, and there are words, like "Cybernetic Studies," "Machines," "Closed World Discourses," "Human-Machine Integration," placed randomly next to the computer parts as if they are also parts, like the keyboards.  They seem to be part of the pile.  

Jennifer: You can kind of see your reflection in the gold.

Wafa: I love the idea of it.  I think it's so smart.  How she has the two twin towers and the airplane and how it's just a bunch of computers.  The first thing I imagined was that all the computers you see in everyday life are all a part of your environment, you see them everywhere, I imagined how many computers I see a day.

Jennifer: I think this is more a warfare against electronics, like a play on words.  

Evan: Like it says what the title is. 

Gail: I like that the plane is dropping words like bombs.  There's also something like the the twin towers collapsed into computers, like the rubble left behind is all electronic, our worlds are all made up of electronic parts and if you destroy them, what's left behind is these electronic bites.

Jennifer: The color is relevant.  The electronic stuff is grey (black and white sketches) but the gold towers are not, and you can see yourself in the gold, so you're not part of the grey.  You're part of the open world (green world).  

Miranda's project is entitled "Moving Away from Reality and into a Digital World...one step at a time."  It consists of blue posterboard with silver stars (she did the stars by hand) and six "planets" or digital worlds that overlap, or perhaps levels of worlds.  They might be spiraling outwards.  Evan says, "I think they get more intense."  The first (lowest?) level is images of people watching TV, working at computers, things that people do in daily life.  The second-to-the-last level is The Sims and Second Life.  The last (highest?) level is World of Warcraft and Zelda and maybe Final Fantasy.  There are quotations for every level from the class readings.  

Wafa: It's very creative how she had all these different sets of level.

Jennifer: It's very neat.

Wafa: It's very simple but also....

Jennifer: I think there's a sense that they multiply, the circles get bigger and bigger.

Evan: Yeah, b/c the entire world plays World of Warcraft.  Different intensities.

Wafa: Each level is so different that she considers them whole different planets.

Jennifer: But you go "one step at a time."  There's a sense that it's really easy to go from one world to the next, it's just one step away.

Evan: But it gets worse.  You're in a Second Life and then bam, you're in a whole other world.  First you're watching Beowulf and Polar Express and the next minute you're in another world. 

Marie did a multi-panel project that opens up, like doors opening up.  The two "doors" say "The Closed World," with a quote on the bottom right-hand side which asks about the use or value of technology.  There are two images, one of a cyborg and the other of two people working at a huge computer, maybe in a military station.   When you open up the doors to the Closed World, you see a green palm tree, and each branch of the palm tree is sprouting technology.  Pictures of airplanes, militaristic technology, graphs, the electromagnetic spectrum.  There are two flaps that open, one that (when opened) says Cylindrical Reflector Surface and Feed Array and the other one that has a graph.  There are quotes around the tree and on the black tree trunk.  On the back of the project, is a large title that says "Green World," but all of the images are still militaristic and war-related images.  The Trojan horse, people fighting on horseback, a nuclear cloud, wounded people, a cemetery and urns, people fighting in the jungle.  There are several quotes as captions for the images about the green world: "an unbounded natural setting," "open space." 

Jennifer: I think the captions are ironic.

Wafa: It's awesome how she actually had the Green World in the back of the Closed World.  

Gail: It seems like the back is the most controversial part.

Jennifer: You see lots of people in the Green World whereas the Closed World was all graphs, mathematical symbols, machines.

Gail: But the green world is still suffused with war. 

Evan: I think it's one too many pictures.  I think it's conflicting.

Wafa: Overwhelming.

Jennifer: But she might be going for that.  The humans trying to fight war in the green world are all messy, but the inside of the closed world is all clean.

Deborah made a project called "Digital World" on black posterboard and features a large earth hovering above a human hand (as if held by that hand), and there are several words and phrases, like "Freedom" and "Enslaving?"   "Senses/Communication/Technology" all intersect in a kind of crossword puzzle arrangement.  The earth is covered by binary code, and on the right side of the earth is a cell phone, and extending from the cell phone is a gold telephone cord extending from the earth to the right with a telephone handset off its hook.  

Evan: I don't understand the telephone.

Jennifer: The world is digital.  It's called "Digital World."  From a distance, you don't see the quotations and they look like lines.  I thought at first they were connecting everything.  Like they were connecting the world to the hand.  

Evan: There's a question written in the corner, "Are we okay with that?" 

Jennifer: And "Enslaving?" is a question too.  It's asking if this is enslaving or freeing.

Evan: We're a giant network.  All the codes....We're all connected.

Jennifer: I kind of like how the binary is a part of the earth.  You can blue and the green and the digital all at once.

Gail: Like the green world and the closed world are all the same.

Jennifer: Rather than them being separated, you can see them all at the same time.

Naomi did a piece on a slim piece of vertically oriented posterboard.  There are four panels: "Artifacts from the Future" which shows a futuristic sci-fi city but rendered to look realistic, in color; "Puma Mirai Prosthetics" advertising prosthetic robot-like legs on soccer players, which look like puma (the animal)'s legs; an ad for "Mirai Fashion," which shows two women wearing what look like garbage bags, one woman revealing her torso and the other very covered up (both their heads are covered); and "Google Book Search" which shows a book with an arrow to a computer screen with an arrow to pages propped against a binder.  Three of the panels have quotations from the readings: Marinetti, Vannevar Bush, Paul Edwards.  

Wafa: It's very neat once you look at it.  It's very well organized.

Evan: The colors match.  Everything flows.  

Jennifer: It's a bit bland almost.  

Evan: I like bland.

Jennifer: It's almost commonsense.  Like duh, people have implants, no big deal.  

Gail: It makes it seem like these things are all normal and real.

Jennifer: They all look like something from now.

Evan: But also from the future.

Wafa: It's cool.  

Lisa did a chart by hand on a canvas.  The canvas is gold at the top and silver for the bottom 2/3.  The chart is a genealogy of electronic music genres.  At the very top is a silver moon, of which we only see the bottom half, and it's labeled "Disco."  Right beneath the moon are the words "Post Soul."  And then the genealogy/chart is in the silver portion, framed by tin foil.  The geneology has several clusters: Electronic is the overarching "source," the other major clusters are "Dance, "Synthpop," "Futurepop," "Trance," "Breakbeat," "Techno," "House."  There are several subgenres within each genre.  There are different colors representing the genres and subgenres.  There is a yellow cloud around the genres, Synthpop and Futurepop, and colored  rhinestones mark those genres and subgenres.  On the back are quotes, and also on the top (in the gold section).  The quotes on the back are labeled, "Origins: Discotechnology" and "Synthpop Facts."

Evan: It's so generalized. 

Wafa: It's very broad in a way.  No matter how specific she seems to want it to be.

Jennifer: It's pretty. The tinfoil.  

Gail: I like genealogies.  I like seeing where genres come from and how they're related, so I like seeing the relationships traced out.  

Evan: Like a family tree.  

Gail: It looks futuristic.  It looks like something that George Clinton would make - the tinfoil.

Jennifer: It made me think a little of the Data Thief, with the yellow.

Wafa: You have to sit down and stare at it for a long time to understand it.

Evan: There is a line from New Wave to the Synthpop....

Jennifer: But it's faint.

Dekyi painted a multipaneled piece on a canvas.  Each panel is a square.  There are panels of white fluffy clouds against pale blue sky, clouds against darker purple sky, several panels of a brown monolith - maybe indicating ground - several panels of a human figure sitting in lotus position.  The piece seems to be divided into five columns, and in each column, there is a ground, a figure, and clouds, but each theme appears in a different spot (the order is different) in each column.  In two of the panels with the human figure, there are flowers growing next to the human figure.  Seven of the panels have quotations at the bottom or top of the panel (or, in the case of one panel, both the top and bottom).  The quotes are from Poster and Moravec and Artaud, and Wafa says, "they stress the idea of virtual reality."

Evan: I like it.  It's really clean.  

Wafa: It's very artistic.

Evan: I get a peaceful sense from looking at it.  Like the person in it.  I want to go take yoga classes now.

Jennifer: Outside.

Wafa: It's one of those things that you want to stare at.

Jennifer: Maybe like the quote says, "narcissistic stupor."  It could be you [the human figure].  There's no face.

Evan: I would totally hang this up in my house.

Jennifer and Wafa: Me too.

Jennifer: It's so pretty.  I want it.

Evan:  I was thinking the exact same thing.  I was going to say, "I'll return it..." (laughs)

Gail: The images are almost like icons, appearing again and again.  How do they relate to her quotes about creating another reality?

Jennifer: The virtual can be switched up.  The elements of the old reality can be different in the new realities.  Poster says we watch things over and over, and here we are looking at the same things over and over.  Mirror images.  "Virtual and real communities mirror each other in chiasmic juxtaposition."  That's from Poster.

[we all look up "chiasmic" and see that it has to do with the ordering of words in a sentence: "a rhetorical construction in which the order of the words in the second of two paired phrases is the reverse of the order of the first" ("Pleasure's a sin, and sometimes sin's a pleasure" - Byron)]

Gail: So obviously, Dekyi is playing with the order of her icons - putting them in mirror relationships, switched relationships to their previous orderings.

Evan: We need to stop looking at this.

Wafa: Yeah, we're just getting lost in this dreamworld.  

Jon Brooks did a piece in paint, markers, crayons, and some paper collage, and maybe some other media that is brightly colored, consisting of lots of small regions, all flowing together.  

Evan: Looks like a fiery scene.

Wafa: It's very dramatic.

Evan: It's kind of hellish.

Wafa: It kind of gives me a headache looking at it.  Not in a bad way.  It's just a lot to take in.  What's it about?  Did he say anything?

Evan: He totally did.  But I totally forgot what he said.  I really don't remember.

Gail: There are squares and curvy shapes...

Evan: wavy lines...

Wafa: squiggly lines...in a rushed way....

Evan: Seems kind of demonic.  Maniacal.

Wafa: Very very colorful.  It's like BAM.  

Evan: In your face.

Gail: Pinks, silvers, blacks, deep reds.

Evan: Bright colors and dark colors, hot and cold, subtle ones on the side.

Gail: So it's about contrast maybe.

Evan: I think it's someone breaking through something.  

Gail: Let's call it a suggestive piece that doesn't denote a particular object but is fascinating nonetheless.

Evan: It is very fascinating.

Wafa: That's what makes it fascinating is the fact that we can't figure it out.  

Christine (Chrissy) made a poster that is a collage of various human or humanoid-looking figures, and the title is "Unit 4: Climbing the Uncanny Valley."  In the center is a kid sitting at a keyboard and mouse but no computer screen, instead of a screen he's looking his bedroom window and the caption is "Reality: Worst. Game. Ever."  There are "people" from Polar Express, Second Life, A Scanner Darkly, a scary-looking dancing baby.  And at the top center is the instruction, "Escape from the real world, get lost in the digital world."  On the right side are faces of a real person - the faces start out normal but then get progressively stranger-looking due to CGI alterations.  There are several quotes from the reading.

Wafa: There are just a lot of pictures, so it's nice, but she could have narrowed it down to something more specific.  It's one of those things that just had you thinking, lots of characters and different things.

Evan: I like the faces, how it shows the transitions.  That was pretty cool.

Wafa: Very very thoughtful.

Evan: It looks like it was put together fast.

Jennifer: Took longer to find the pictures, though.

Gail: I like the suggestion that images that can creep us out [in terms of falling into the Uncanny Valley] surround us.  All of these images are so scary in their own way.  We don't have to look too far for the Uncanny Valley.  A lot of stuff online looks creepy.  

Evan: That's definitely true.

Gail: Maybe that'll get better with time. 

And now a brief diversion from Jennifer:

"I discovered my ground state, I think.  And everyone was scared when they saw me.  We had a long day driving, I was really really tired, so I gave up on trying to look like anything.  People asked me, 'Are you okay?  We don't want you to be sad.'  But I wasn't sad.  I was just expressionless."  

Gail told Evan to pick a couple of works to leave out, and put the rest in the closet.  Every month, he'll come in and change what's on exhibit in Gail's office.  People can also come by and pick up their artwork if they want to.  

Group Performance: Unit 9: Performing Online

This group did their entire performance online.  They asked the class to bring in laptops if they had them, and they created online personalities that had specific character traits, and they recruited class members to take on those personalities and "enact" them online in Twitter.  There was a technical difficulty, b/c Airbears (the wi-fi network) didn't function for the first 10-15 minutes of the class, but eventually the class was able to fully participate in Twitter conversations via the constructed personalities. 

Evan: I want to get into a flame war on Twitter.  I'm trying to start one but they won't pay attention to me.  

Naomi: Twitter was used in a context that's not normally how it's used.  People use it to say, I'm at Telegraph and Channing, if anyone's around to chill with me.  

Evan: Why would you want to update yourself to the world?

Wafa: Arielle said, you know how you guys update your status on Facebook.  I've seen so many people constantly change their status - they want people to know they just went to the dentist.

Evan: Some people have iPhones.  They update from wherever they are. 

Naomi: Twitter is mainly used by them - people with smart phones.  I thought Twitter was really stupid but I had to make an account b/c everyone at my work place was on Twitter.  People would say, I'm at this bar, come hang out.  If you weren't on Twitter, you weren't invited to certain things.  So I had to be on Twitter just to be invited to work stuff.

Wafa: It was a performance online. 

Evan: It was totally performance online.

Wafa: It was funny how the performers didn't speak live, they just wanted to type their performance.  

Evan: We had specific roles about who we were supposed to be but I didn't play the one that I was given.

Wafa: My computer didn't work but they had specifics like you're supposed to be a shopaholic, so act that way. 

Evan: I didn't like being told what to be.  

Naomi: They were all very bipolar personalities where you were one thing and nothing else.

Wafa: Like you're nothing else, you're just shopping, you wake up in the morning and you just shop.

Gail: Even if we act online, do we always act a specific part of our personalities online?

Evan: On Twitter, I definitely act as someone else.  I want to fool people.

Naomi: But Twitter is a "real person" thing.  People use it to connect with other real people in their lives.  People might try to be one-sided but then you end up talking about other real parts of their lives.  

Evan: If I'm in a chat room where I don't know anyone, I'll just make stuff up. 

Gail: This was a hilariously funny performance - it was the funniest by far.  I definitely wasn't laughing *at* the performance, it was just amusing at some fundamental level.  There was no other group performance that had me ROFLing the entire time, from beginning to end.  Watching people interact on Twitter exclusively, not as themselves but as people either the performing group or they invented, and watching the class interact that way *not talking* to each other (they did speak in small groups huddled around the few laptops that did manage to get a wifi connection) was just so awesome.  It was so charming - a totally different type of performance.  I was so happy that the group performances in this class evolved in this way, where the first one was very very embodied, and the last one was purely online and on screens.