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.  

Group Performance: Unit 8: Personal Cameras

This was another two-person group, and they held "interviews/auditions" for a fake reality TV show.  The first part was an interview in which members of the class were called up by number (the numbers were assigned to each person at the start of class and then some were randomly selected) and asked what they liked to do with their free time, what they liked to eat, etc.  Some people interviewed were selected to audition in front of a camera.  The cameraman tried to pinpoint the auditioners into personality types that would work best for the show.

Then the performing group "filmed" the show.  It was a reality show about a competition among actors for a specific part.  The episode acted-out was about the contestants having to act in a Coca-Cola commercial.  At one point, someone took off some of their clothes.  The contestants started acting like polar bears from the famous Coke commercial.

Finally, the performing group showed a video of a reality show being edited together, which showed how "reality" is constructed for television. 

Evan: I didn't understand the beginning.

Naomi: It's about how people try to be certain personalities once they know they're on TV.

Evan: So people can't really be themselves.

Gail: We talked a lot about the "ground state" in our discussion - whether we can ever "be ourselves," esp. given that we're always on camera.

Wafa: It got me thinking about reality TV shows and how they're not real.  It's also always very dramatic.  Almost too dramatic to believe.  

Gail: You can't believe it, but people watch these shows b/c they're "real."

Naomi: I don't know if people watch reality TV b/c it's more real - a lot of people watch different things b/c of the characters - and if you can relate more to the characters.  Reality TV just makes characters more relatable.  The central basis of all TV is the same, it's about the characters.  People get attached to certain people on Survivor.

Wafa: Last week, I watched an episode of the new Real World, it was so weird b/c it was just their first day meeting, and drama started.  I found myself really into it.  That's weird.  It does have you thinking about how it's very addicting, you just keep watching and watching, and some of the characters would relate to who you are, or you get attached to some of the characters b/c you share some of the same emotions.

Evan: I used to watch The Hills and I don't relate to Lauren, or live in The Hills.

Wafa: Or you relate to how different they are.  Or how stupid it is.

Evan: That I relate to.  How stupid it is.

Wafa: And it's all scripted, it's so stupid.

Gail: This produced a lot of "actorly" behavior in the "contestants" - the people selected for the show talked about feeling lucky to get on the show, and to have people's attention, and some of them really ramped up how performative they were being for the fake reality show.  I think this was like a social experiment in that it asked whether people are different for the camera than they are in real life, and it demonstrated that yeah, we're pretty different.  The discussion was awesome, we talked a lot about whether we have a "ground" state when we are really ourselves, and whether there is a reality. 

Group Performance: Unit 7: Surveillance Culture

The performing group told the rest of the class to sit around the perimeter of the room.  There middle of the room was empty and the performers stood there.  The performers told the class that no one could speak, no one could make any facial expressions, etc..  At first, the performers just stared at people and if they made any kind of emotional facial expression or said anything, they were "punished" with a sticky note attached to them.  Then there was a game of "telephone" in which the performers initiated the phrase and the last person in each of three groups had to repeat the initial phrase.  The last group did change the phrase, and two people were "punished."

Another part of the performance was that the previous class, the members of the performing group had covertly surveilled their class members and noted some standout behaviors, like Wafa and Dekyi eating chips in the back of class, another student going to Las Vegas, another student picking up a flyer in Sproul Hall, etc. - eavesdropping on people's conversations and noticing their behavior.  During the performance, the performing group called out individuals for specific behaviors and "sentenced" them to various punishments. 

Then another group member showed a video of some government agency "recording" the Internet, basically violating the privacy of millions of Americans.  And she discussed her own incident with a government agency because she frequently called Israel to talk to family members.

Wafa: I remember Marie looking at me once [during the class when she was surveilling me] and I caught her and waved to her.  This performance got me thinking about how people watch you sometimes - you don't know that you are being watched, but you are.  It's weird and scary.

Evan: It's kind of creepy, right?  Even if you know you're being watched, how would you watch then?

Naomi [who changed the telephone message]: Someone ratted me out.  The message was about punishing us for something that I had on - "people will get punished who have closed-toe shoes" or something, so I changed it to something else.  I felt very vulnerable after that.

Evan: I felt powerful, b/c I got to punish people.  I was in the guard tower in the panopticon.

Wafa: It was a shocking performance.  I was like, What, you watched me do that?  When you're walking on campus and someone texts you and says I saw you walking to some place, and you think, that's so weird.

Gail: This performance was all about power.  It really hierarchized the class and made people feel almost like prisoners.  It was almost like the Stanford Prison Experiment.  It was a very instructive experience in that some people were really uncomfortable and squirming under the gaze of the "guards," and other people were ready to rebel (though notably, except for Naomi, no one outright defied the instructions of the guards).  Many people said afterwards they were eager to please the guards, to do whatever they thought would make them successful, i.e., not punished.  Very creative - but also sort of frightening!

Group Performance: Unit 6: Sounds Like the Future

In this performance, the group played some videos for the class, including Sun Ra having a conversation with some audience members about his Egyptology and use of futuristic imagery.  Then the group played an original composition live (music and lyrics) - each group member brought in their own instrument - and then they played their recorded version of that same song, which sounded like a techno version of the song.  

Finally, the group beat a drum and invited the class to add in their own sounds so that the class was making its own impromptu composition.

Wafa: Very entertaining.  It was cool how they had a live performance.

Evan: The remix had a different vibe, a different feel to the original score.

Naomi: The performance itself was sort of symbolic of how the music works.  None of the instruments made sense together.

Wafa: I enjoyed when we were in the circle.  They tapped people to make a sound but they didn't call on me to do anything.  Josh was next to me and made the weirdest sound.

Evan: This unit was all about the data thief to me.  

Gail: I loved the song that this group came up with, it was all about not wanting to be human and about sound and technology.  It was so great to have the musical talent of the group performers on display.  I was very concerned that the classroom next door was going to come in at any moment and tell us we were being way too loud.  It was so much fun to make a lot of noise as part of the class.  

Group Performance: Unit 5: Electronic Warfare

This performing group was pretty small, it was just one person who performed on the actual day, and then later, the second person showed a video at the beginning of another class.  

The first part of the performance was a game about contamination, in which each member of the class was assigned a number - 1, 2, or 3 - with handshakes designated to numbers 1 and 2 (3s were only receivers of the handshakes).  The goal of the 1s and 2s was to convert members of the other two groups to "their" numbers, but the conversion only happened by chance - if you encountered someone with a different handshake, you had to play rock-paper-scissors with that person and whoever lost the rock-paper-scissors had to convert to the winner's number.  By the end, almost everyone was a 1.

Then there was a Q&A.  We had two special guests that day - one of Gail's friends, who was an officer in the Army, and one of that friend's friends.

Then several weeks later, the other performer showed a video of contemporary warfare, an Army video taken in infrared or nightvision of a scene in which enemy combatants were targeted by Army sharpshooters.  The video, even though it was real footage, looked like a video game because the moving targets were just dark figures and when they were shot, their blood spattered outward in blue clouds, not like real blood.  

Evan: The game was fun.  I don't know what I got out of it.  I got more out of the video.

Wafa: I always got confused about the term "green world."  No technology?  I think I'm green kind of.  I would have liked it if they emphasized that more - about green world vs. closed world - b/c that's what the unit was about.  It was good but it was just focused on warfare. 

Naomi: It was hard b/c the two performers didn't work together. 

Gail: It's always tough when, due to illness, a group performance has to take place on separate days.  It would definitely have been more coherent if they'd been able to go together, but each piece was very interesting by itself, too.  The discussions that followed each part of the performance were really fascinating, in which we talked about total war, whether we are "too" dependent on computers to fight our wars for us, or whether computerizing war and making it more technological will give us the dream of a "bloodless" war, a war that is so precisely fought that there are no more casualties or waste than is strictly necessary. 

Group Performance: Unit 4: Digital Worlds

This performing group brought in an extra projector and had one projection at the rear of the room and one at the front of the room.  On both screens, they projected World of Warcraft, with one performer as one character in WoW and another as a different character.  The students watched the two characters interact, dance with each other, get challenged (and killed) by other characters, and the two characters wandered around WoW.

The performers showed videos that they'd made.  One showed a video of a recent experience she'd had in Second Life, where her avatar wandered around Second Life and asked about how their online or virtual lives differ from their real life.  She found that some people wouldn't talk to her, other people talked to her avatar quite a bit about this topic.  At least one person told her that s/he was more comfortable in Second Life and another person warned her against being in Second Life too much b/c you start losing value irl when you're on Second Life too much.  

They then showed the NY Times slideshow of people irl and their online avatars, some of which were idealized versions of their real-life appearances and some of which had no relationship to their real-life appearances. 

And they played a game of "Uncanny Valley" (which they invented), where they projected various images of animated figures and robots, and the class had to move to different parts of the room to indicate where, on the spectrum of emotional affection (positive to negative), they felt about the image projected.

Evan: I thought it was really awesome.

Wafa: I thought it was really cool that they had two videos.  It was distracting at the same time.  They told people to sit on the floors but some people sat in chairs.

Naomi: I don't feel like a lot of people in our class would be doing that stuff - WoW and Second Life - so there was this underlying question, Why do people do this?  

Evan: Well it gives you freedom to be whatever you want.

Wafa: It gets you thinking about why do people do this.  I asked, What's the point of all this?

Evan: I enjoyed meeting friends online.  When I would play a game like that, I would ask someone to play with me.  I would start out with someone I knew irl.  I would talk on my mic on your headset to other people playing WoW without seeing their face.  I really enjoyed campaigns, missions, I got sucked into it.

Gail: This was a very bravura performance in terms of the technology, b/c there was immersion, we felt totally inside a big big world b/c of the dual projection.  And also there were live portions (with two different perspectives and people we didn't know interacting with "our" avatars) and recorded video, too.  And questioning the ties between people's real lives and online/virtual lives was terrific.  Most of the discussion was about whether there was a danger of addiction to the online experience and whether we could get too deeply involved in digital worlds.  If anyone remembers, someone in the Q&A section said it's not about the online world vs. the offline world division, but the notion of  "third world" that will define our future "reality."  Does anyone remember what was meant by this term "third world"?  If you do, please post about that here.  

Group Performance: Unit 3: Androids, Cyborgs and Other Machines Acting Up

The performing group started out by giving each student a sticker with a barcode on it and a serial number, and each person had to sign a release before receiving their barcode.  The release form was on some letterhead for a fictional company, Bearbotz, Inc.  

Then the performing group showed a video that addressed the class directly, it was as if a machine were teaching the class certain content.  The premise was that all education had been standardized in the world to the point that all students were being taught the same content by one machine simultaneously.  

The students were divided into three groups, supposedly according to gender though it didn't work out that way.

Then the video (the computer's instruction) was "interrupted" by two other members of the performing group who claimed that the students were being brainwashed by the teaching computer and that they (the two) were coming to liberate the class.  Then the two liberators busted into the class and told everyone they had to leave right away.  About 1/3-1/2 of the students got up and left.  One of the two liberators "escaped" with the students who got up and left, but the other liberator was held back by two students, who were actually undercover "guards."  Then, none of the other students were allowed to leave the room.

Then a Q&A followed.

Naomi: I didn't sign the release.

Evan: I did.  I conform to everything.  

Wafa: It was interesting.  It was very confusing.  It still is.  It did make me think about machines acting up.

Evan: I liked how it was put together.

Naomi:  Yeah, it was really well put together.

Wafa: We were confused, but that was the fun part about it.  We didn't know what to expect.  It was funny to see people leaving and get stuck out there.

Naomi: When I saw the presentation, I instantly thought Terminator.  I, Robot.  

Evan: A.I.

Naomi: It's such a common fear in pop culture b/c it's really easy to pick up on, this whole Singularity concept.  Even in pop culture, if you talk about the Singularity outside of pop culture, it's a joke.  

Gail: The video for this performance was astounding, it was so well-edited and I loved that the video was not supposed to be a recording.  It was supposed to be live and alive!  And then the conceit of the "interruption" of the live instruction was so awesome, with Josh and Annabelle running into the room as a huge divider between the students - it was so fascinating to see whether people stayed or left.  That was a lot of what we talked about afterwards. 

Group Performance: Unit 2: Media Theater

The performing group (five women) focused on multitasking.  Two of the performers walked to the front of the stage space (which they cleared at the front of the classroom) with laptops, cell phones, notebooks, backpacks, acting the role of "college students," sat down in classroom chairs and began working on their laptops, checking their cellphones, and then began reciting the "Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" speech from Macbeth.  They enacted a very "immersed" sensibility.  To the side of the two students' chairs, there were two performers standing with laptops, with the word "tomorrow" on the screen, and opened and closed the laptops in rapid succession, and "tomorrow" was also projected on the screen behind the performers.  

Then the performing group led an impromptu dance that brought the two "students" out of their addiction/immersion, but the two students kept returning to their seats.  All the other students in the class were brought into the dance circle and instructed (through gesture) to follow the movements of some of the performers.

Next was a group discussion of the readings.  

Naomi: I remember feeling awkward b/c I really hate holding hands.  Caroline was next to me and she was so into it and was taking huge steps, but I was like, Okay...

Wafa: Even though I was a performer: I was distracted by the fact that some people didn't get into it - I didn't know who to respond to.  It was funny.  

Naomi: It was ironic that Caroline was anti-technology, but so pro-performance.  I'm so anti-performance and pro-technology.  I'm anti-actual community.  I guess that proved the point of that performance.  

Evan: I didn't resist.  I just went along with the whole thing. 

Wafa: I think we had a very interesting discussion afterwards.  The group's schedules conflicted, and we got together at the last minute, but one person suggested what we should do and we all went with the flow.  

Gail: This performance was *amazing* theater.  I found the performance of the Macbeth poem totally engaging.  But the most interesting part was that several students in the class were really confused by what they should look at - there was a lot of potential for distraction, as there always in Media Theater, and as a result different people had totally different experiences of the performance, because everyone had focused on different elements of the performance at different times.  I do media theater - I write, direct, design, and produce it - and so this performance was soooooo useful for me!

Group Performance: Unit 1: Technology as Slavery and Escape

Naomi Lew, Wafa Hazem and Evan Yu, all students from Perf and Tech Fall 2008, are acting as peer reviewers for this summary of all student projects from our class.

We are starting with the Group Performances.  For each of the nine units that comprised the class, a small group of students took on the themes of the unit, and engaged the rest of the class using various performance techniques, and drawing on the readings for the unit. 

Unit 1: Technology as Slavery and Escape

For this unit, the class read Daphne Brooks' Bodies in Dissent - the chapter on the escape of Henry "Box" Brown from slavery using the postal office (Brown, a tall man, squeezed into quite a small box and mailed himself to an acquaintance in a northern state, thus obtaining his freedom from enslavement in the U.S.  Brown went on to re-stage his escape and the history of U.S. slavery, in panorama throughout Britain.

Each of the four students created a 3-5 minute video which they displayed on their laptops arranged around the perimeter of the class like a panorama.  They used zip ties to "cuff" the rest of the students' hands together, and then the students were "chained" together in groups using a rope.  Each group was stationed in front of one of the laptops to watch one of the videos at a time, and when the performing group announced it was time to rotate (using a foghorn), the groups moved around the room in a circle and moved on to watch the next video.

Then, the performing group put a box - the same dimensions as Box Brown's tool of escape - in the center of the room and invited the other students to attempt to fit themselves into the box.

The performing group then led a discussion of the readings for that unit, with a cleverly designed handout featuring Vin Diesel's visage (we had watched portions of The Fast and the Furious in class).

Daphne Brooks attended this group performance.

Evan: I really liked the box.  I actually got into the box and it didn't feel good to be in a tiny box.  It was terrible that he got shipped in the box, that would be terrible.

Wafa: It was very creative of the group to put us in small groups and make us watch different "episodes."  You really wanted to see what video was next.  And it was good to bring the class together in the performance.

Evan: I liked their use of technology.  One video used Daft Punk which is all about humans and machines.

Naomi (who was in this group): I liked the idea of breaking down Box Brown's panorama into something we could feasibly do.  

Wafa: I remember the discussion - we talked about how people are so dependent on technology, and the whole idea of addiction and it's something we are so dependent on nowadays, it's hard to imagine ourselves not having specific technological stuff - cell phones, computers - and it really grabbed our attention, made us think about technology at another level.  

Naomi: Since it was the first student presentation, everyone was very willing to go along with it, even though we were chained together.  Even though later, some people got more suspicious, though others got more comfortable.  It shows that with technology, we mostly just go along with the flow, we adopt is so readily, we don't realize we become addicted to it.

Wafa: Every performance, I thought, We are all performing, as a class.  "Group performance" meant oh cool, we're going to do something again.  

Gail: What I loved about this performance was that it really brought the readings to life in a very visceral way.  It engaged the class 1000% and people were INTO it.  And they literally got "into" the box.  The videos, the panorama, the suggestion of enslavement and making students experience that, was so awesome.  And Daphne Brooks came and she was a terrific audience member and participant in the Q&A!!  It also kicked off the class' group performances in a major way.  It set the standard REALLY high for everyone else.

_the beginning ...

The introduction to this blog was written by one of the students in our Performance and Technology Fall 2008 class, Evan Yu.  I really love his choice of the opening photo!

_to begin_ 

performance and technology is the fusion of a person's creative imaginations through an actual performance where others that surround him/her can be allowed to visualize the meanings behind the actions whether it can be in: every sound, every movie, every documentary, tv shows, etc... there's performance 

_ in the class_ we were given an idea of a unit that is within the coined term "media theatre" and we were to produce an "act" that would express our own ideology of that particular unit.

_ to give an example of what we did, my group had to pleasure of working on Surveillance Camera and the idea was to put those around us in a very uncomfortable position. we were trying to convey the idea of Big Brother and how it is used to infiltrate our own privacy. the performance comes from those that surround us and how they begin to act as though someone is watching them instead themselves being in their comfort zone.

_ Big Brother itself stands as the technology and our reaction to that technology

is the performance.

_ another performance is the use of music and our own reaction to the type of

music it is. whether it came from one country or another, the people there and the type

of character that person is will give off a different imagery of the what he believes his

work of music can bring to the people.

_ to give you more insight on what we are... (look at the above photo)

_ that is Stelarc and he is using attached machinery to his body as part of his performance.

- it just shows how much we are attached to the technological world that when a

a part of us is not attached, we feel naked. hence, the skin MAY represent the void

in our lives that we need to have a form of technology to become a part of us.

what do you think ?