Modes of Spectating

Christine White, Alison Oddey

Description

The notion of spectatorship has become of increasing interest as artists develop experimental works and manufacturers seek to produce the means for viewing such works. Modes of Spectating explores the visual landscapes which spectators encounter, and how they perceive what they view.The volume questions the effect of different mediums on the spectator and asks not only how we view, but also how what we view determines what artists create. Chapters discuss how gaming and televisual media and entertainment are used by young people, and the resulting psychological challenges of human beings in their new ‘spectated’ surroundings of virtual worlds and media. Themes explored include aesthetics, the body and mind and digital entertainment environments, looked at through the lenses of gaming art, photography, sculpture and performance, making it a useful text for scholars of all disciplines of media and art.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Développement personnel
• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Histoire du sport
• Sports
• Theater
• Sociologie, société et politique
• Theatre
• Reference
• Cultural studies
• Psychology
• Media studies
• Anthropology

Informations

• Publié par: Intellect Books Ltd
• Date de parution: 01 mars 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781841502960
• Langue: English

Extrait

Modes of Spectating
Acknowledgements
We would like to acknowledge the assistance we have received in compiling this book, and the intellectual generosity of all the contributors. We would like to thank all those who have financed or funded this research project, including The International Federation of Theatre Research, The Society for Theatre Research and The Arts and Humanities Research Council. We would like to thank all the photographers who have kindly supplied the images for this volume.
We would like to acknowledge the International Federation for Theatre Research s research group, Digital Technologies, Visualisation and New Media in Performance , whose scholarly debate testifies to this burgeoning area of study for both academics and practitioners.
Lastly, we gratefully acknowledge the advisory board of Scenography International for all their contributions and comments.
Modes of Spectating
Alison Oddey and Christine White
First published in the UK in 2009 by Intellect Books, The Mill, Parnall Road, Fishponds, Bristol, BS16 3JG, UK
First published in the USA in 2009 by Intellect Books, The University of Chicago Press, 1427 E. 60th Street, Chicago, IL 60637, USA
Copyright 2009 Intellect Ltd
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Cover designer: Holly Rose Copy-editor: Rhys Williams Typesetting: Mac Style, Beverley, E. Yorkshire
ISBN 978-1-84150-239-7 EISBN 978-1-84150-296-0
Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta.
C ONTENTS
Introduction: Visions Now: Life is a Screen
Alison Oddey and Christine White
Part One: Interactive Media and Youth Culture
Chapter 1 Altered States
Christine White
Chapter 2 A Quick Walk Through Uncanny Valley
Saint John Walker
Chapter 3 Spectatorship and Action Research Performance Models
Lizbeth Goodman, Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Vicki Munsell
Part Two: Imaginative Escape
Chapter 4 The Active Audience: The Network as a Performance Environment
Gregory Sporton
Chapter 5 The Audience in Second Life: Thoughts on the Virtual Spectator
Dan Zellner
Chapter 6 Cultural Use of Cyberspace: Paradigms of Digital Reality
Iryna Kuksa
Chapter 7 Observing the Interactive Movie Experience: The Artist s Approach to Responsive Audience Interaction Design
Chris Hales
Part Three: Identity and the Self-conscious Spectator
Chapter 8 Interior Spectating: Viewing Inner Imagery in Psychotherapy
Valerie Thomas
Chapter 9 Tuning-in to Sound and Space: Hearing, Voicing and Walking
Alison Oddey
Chapter 10 Picturing Men: Performers and Spectators
Jeremy Mulvey
Chapter 11 Haptic Visuality: The Dissective View in Performance
Gianna Bouchard
Chapter 12 Touched by Human Hands: City and Performance
Roma Patel
Part Four: The Site of Spectating
Chapter 13 Dwellings in Image-spaces
Maiju Loukola
Chapter 14 Embodiment, Ambulation and Duration
Craig G. Staff
Chapter 15 Odd Anonymized Needs: Punchdrunk s Masked Spectator
Gareth White
Chapter 16 Sites of Performance: The Wollstonecraft Live Experience!
Anna Birch
Selected Bibliography
Authors Biographies
Index
I NTRODUCTION
Alison Oddey and Christine White
Visions Now: Life is a Screen
The mode of spectating that is historical , that is the film reel of news, the sports highlights of the event, what was happening previously, has moved through the sound and narratives experience of the film to the instant replay, the immediate historicizing of the present moment. In the twenty-first century, we can take an historical event of the nineteenth century and re-market it as a children s animated series to bring both a knowledge and an awareness to a new generation of the London Brighton Veteran Car Run (LBVCR), which is more than an historical celebration, a publicised tourist attraction on the internet.
What is it that we want to spectate on the screen and is there still a need or desire to share, to communicate with others about what it is that we have seen, viewed or witnessed? Spectating enables us to journey in an experience, where we meet with the unexpected, chance upon and incur the improvisational, know and feel, and become acquainted with what is given. People spectate the LBVCR. It is free of charge, viewed from the roadside and the comfort of the experience is determined by each spectator, according to their own initiative of bringing a seat, drink or snack. The exhibition of cars displayed in the London streets requests that the spectator does more than simply view. They are asked to vote on their favourite vehicle from the display, which results in a free draw and a special prize.
Such is contemporary culture: the vote, the prize, the viewers decision. Spectators are guided on the Internet by feature viewing points , which offer the spectator opportunities to eat, drink, go to the toilet, park their car and, sometimes, view the cars at close quarters. To become a spectator-performer-protagonist , as posited by Alison Oddey, 1 the roadside spectator can participate in the participant services of an auction, a reception, a lunch, a cocktail party or a dinner and dance. 2
What is radically different about how we spectate now?
In live spectatorship, the spectator s frame of spectating focuses on their own self in relationship to what they view. On the other hand, the spectator may be the anonymous individual, the nullified being, participating as one of many at an event. Are we leading towards a mode of spectatorship, where the liveness is simply a mode of entering the live event; a means of display? The audience is watching the screens installed in the Regency Theatre, not the actors on stage; the large-scale plasma screens at the music concert, not the performers.
Is this the end of the live event? Life captured on screen? The spectator s function has to change into a role which takes and actively engages them into the action. Is it technology, and the potential of computer-enhanced television, which will change our perspective of how and what we view with pleasure? The new mode of spectating is to focus only on what I want to see; on my perception of the world as I see it.
This mode of spectating is beyond simply watching. It is about substituting a sensory, kinetic and cinematographic experience, in which Mark Leyner argues, neural-input units will become as standard a feature of your entertainment console as the remote control. A technology, which sends complex algorithmic signals into your major cortex and parietal lobe, enabling the spectator of the event to experience what it feels like inside the performer s body. Leyner suggests that gerontological research and biotechnological innovations will profoundly affect how a spectator watches sports. He argues that, cloning capabilities, discoveries in the genetics of longevity and advances in cryonics will bring about an end to discussions about how competitors from past times might have fared together as scientists will be able to revivify long-deceased athletes or extend the lives of current players. 3
In the sports analogy of spectatorship, Leyner proposes that wrestling, with its intricate and interfacing narratives, its music, pyrotechnic stagecraft and glorification of oratory is the Gesamtkunstwerk - the total artwork , of the worlds of sport and entertainment. 4 Mark Rosenthal, with reference to installation art, suggests the Gesamtkunstwerk , where, the artist has total command of a space and might use any artistic means, including architecture, music, dance and theatre, along with the visual arts, to create a synaesthetic environment, has become an everyday occurrence. 5
This notion of a total artwork recognizes a jigsaw of parts for the spectator to encounter and to gain delight at such detection. Is the tele-vising of the live art event the future, where the spectator is drawn into the liveness through their own engagement to the extent that they re-act, re-enact or act out the event within the space of their own viewing world? They are there - in real time - in the liveness of their own vision.
The perceptual experience of the spectator comes through the subjective capabilities of their own body and nervous system. This is within a recognized shift of spectatorship, which must now understand the conditions of cultural creation and reception in the twenty-first century. Therefore, artworks have re-directed themselves, reconfiguring in expanding borders, new areas of content, changing modes of cognition and experience. The interdisciplinary nature of installation artworks means that the spectator is no longer content simply to view the work. More is required. The spectator wants to engage in a more active way, to play a significant part or role in the reception of the work.
Jacques Lacan: I see myself seeing myself I see outside, that perception is not in me it is on the objects that it apprehends. Can the spectator see without being aware of being seen? Installation challenges the aesthetics of frontality, that is, the paradigm of cinematic screen and monitor. 6 When the spectator participates in the work, they become fused with it . De Oliverira argues that the challenge to spectatorship is to focus on the viewer s frozen immobility an endless mirroring, return of the gaze. 7 In Gilles Deleuze s opinion, cinema offers an opportunity to disrupt self-centred perception, by giving competing viewpoints. 8
By contrast an installation may be defined as anything the artist wants to do when given a room in which to work a spatial experience the viewer is usually in an enclosed space, swept up in a work of art much larger in expanse than an individual object can normally create. 9
The notion of spectatorship has become of increasing inte