Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

 

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Volume 12 Number 3, December 2011

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Giannachi, Gabriella with Nick Kaye, Performing Presence: Between the Live and the Simulated, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2011. 260pp, ISBN 978-0-7190-8004-3, Hardback price £55.00 GBP.

 

Reviewed by

 

Christophe Collard

Vrije Universiteit Brussel

 

 

 

Performing Presence presents itself as the eighth instalment of the groundbreaking Theory – Practice – Performance series edited by Maria Delgado and Peter Lichtenfels, and which purports to be a proving ground for ideas developed at the interstices of creative and critical performance by practitioners and theorists alike. Indeed, a mere glance at the table of contents confirms as much with an introduction doubling as theoretical framework, in turn followed by eight practice-based instances of ‘presence performed between the live and the simulated,’ and moreover capped with what appears to be an overarching conclusion proposing to ‘recover’ the ground thus covered. A produce of the AHRC-funded Performing Presence-project involving researchers from the University of Exeter, Stanford, and University College London, as well as the very practitioners whose work furnish the individual instances of presence in the dedicated sections, this study arrives on the scene while setting it at the same time.

 

       As witnessed most notably by its conceptually challenging introduction, Performing Presence always fluctuates between extant ideas and insights, as well as daring new angles and approaches. “Presence,” so the authors state in the book’s effective opening lines, “is a fundamental yet highly contested aspect of performance” (1). As such, it remains inextricably interwoven with the relation between the live and the mediated, as with the notions of immediacy, authenticity, and originality. The book accordingly ambitions to bridge past and present conceptions of presence in performance by addressing a range of contemporary performing arts, new media, and time-based visual arts practices against a backdrop of more ‘established’ critical studies with the firm intention of offering new insights born in the reciprocal mediation between these various facets. Methodologically, too, the emphasis is on those artistic and technological practices which by means of ‘dynamic relationships’ “have interrogated and revealed the mechanisms and implications of phenomena of presence in relation to various discourses” (3). Yet, while this conception of ‘presence’ itself is clear enough, one cannot help but wonder at the documentary exhaustiveness displayed throughout a long and complex introductory chapter. For, as the processual dimension of presence and its related relevance for performing arts studies always retains centre stage, the concomitant catalogue of presence-related studies, concepts, and objects does its utmost to cloud the issue. This is somewhat regrettable, all the more so since the many excellent and straightforward working definitions found throughout the introduction accordingly seem to lose their strength and vigour the more the chapter progresses. If anything, the introduction simultaneously enlightens by means of its conceptual lucidity only then to cloud the same issues by sacrificing its structural logic. One might therefore be inclined to label the book’s opening as ‘frustratingly stimulating.’ However, in the light of its concluding quote, this may precisely have been the point as “Presence [in this book] is practiced and received in counter-intuitive and contingent ways” (25 – emphasis added).

 

       After all, Exeter Performing Arts professors Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye are both seasoned practitioners of cutting-edge thinking, and hence would be unlikely proponents of reductive reasoning. It is only with hindsight, therefore, that the introduction’s relative opacity gradually dilutes itself as our reading progresses along what soon appears to be judiciously ordered chapters. The first one, entitled ‘tracing Lynn Hershman Leeson,’ relates through the work of this American media and installation artist how presence is achieved along “processes that expose and utilize the gaps, caesura and absences inherent to acts of representation” (26). In more concrete terms, this would mean that her technology-imbued creations are designed “to amplify the unfolding of a network or ecology of positions, events and times in which the viewer is implicitly positioned as an agent of presence” (27). Blurring the boundaries ‘between the live and the simulated,’ the authors’ extensive analysis of The Dante Hotel (1972) in particular quickly succeeds in harking concept and object back together by ever so subtly playing out their effective reciprocity in this book. This is no mean feat, for this and all following case-oriented chapters moreover are models of clarity where intrinsically abstruse argumentations are imbedded within (illustrated) descriptions or flanked by pointed interviews with the artist in question.

 

       Rounding off the chapter on tracing, Giannachi and Kaye manage to establish the concept of presence as produced by the simultaneously occurring acts of anticipation and recollection (60). But rather than elaborating on this latest finding with strenuous reasoning, they instead opt to ‘suture’ this image onto the next chapter’s titular topic, emergence. This time framed by the video art of Gary Hill, the notion of presence here is addressed as both the act of ‘placing,’ as well as the act of ‘taking place’ (65). It is a perspective that comes into its own as we are introduced, first, to the 1990 video-installation Inasmuch As It Is Always Taking Place foregrounding a processual dynamic over the possibility of any final resolution, and later to Hill’s earlier work centred around the ‘performativity’ of video’s play with image production and re-production, whereby the undeniably ‘staged presence’ of the video mediation highlights the infinite deferral of unmediated ‘meaning’ in the here and now.

 

       Video’s paradoxical “simultaneous production of presence and difference” (Hill op. cit. 74) is then further developed in the following section on distance and the work of Paul Sermon with telepresence technology. This interactive media artist is renowned for his pioneering efforts in combining teleconferencing facilities (cameras, video mixers, projectors) with chroma-keying technologies “to enable remote participants to be framed within the same screen image and interact with each other” (93). A physicalized ‘Second Life’ of sorts, the result invariably promotes participants to the rank of actors and engages them in a conscious confrontation of their ontological presence in a virtual space. The authors thereby remind us of Lev Manovich’s crucial insight that not only does telepresence involve the capacity to perceive oneself at a distance and act at a distance, but also that the subject simultaneously perceives this act as occurring in ‘real time’ (97).

 

Such ‘double consciousness,’ in turn, ever so logically leads us to the central notion of simulation. Indeed, for as the book progresses and the concepts under consideration become ever more complex, the overarching argumentative structure is rendered all the more transparent. The delicacy with which Performing Presence’s various layers of meaning have been crafted has by now become truly breathtaking – witnessed most notably by the polysemic overtones of the chapter’s study object, the virtual reality environment called CAVE. It is a model for a VR ‘theatre’ in which experiments pertaining to the ‘performativity’ of presence can occur. Taking a pivotal position in this book as in presence studies alike, CAVE, like its Platonic ancestor, has the capacity to ‘stage’ – and hence to ‘simulate’ – the three instances of presence discussed so far in one and the same immersive environment. Of crucial importance for the wider relevance of this book, then, is the authors’ insight that the kind of performativity elicited from a CAVE-type of simulation ought to be considered an actual ‘ecology’ where presence is viscerally experienced as the product of active cognitive negotiation between competing/conflicting signals and impulses (129).

 

‘Conflicting’ certainly is a term that also applies to the affective quality of Tony Oursler’s pluri-medial compositions. Operating in a “nexus of spaces” (150), these works cast recordings over fixed forms, objects or sites in order to direct attention towards the liminal media spaces in which they occur and through which they are media-ted. By no means unique, Oursler’s creations however derive their typical intensity from the so-called ‘ghosting’ they bring about while presenting audiences with highly ironic media-collages that are at the same time overtly liminal, constantly transformative, and perennially contaminated by external influences. At this point, though, it becomes rather difficult not to read a latent hybridity-euphoria into what increasingly looks like an enumeration of the presence-concept’s multiple subversive virtues. And yet, just when the ‘ghost’ of postmodernist partisanship starts to appear, Giannachi and Kaye show the good sense of bringing their argument back to basics: Oursler is a relevant voice in the study of ‘presence’ because there is method in his mixing madness as he ‘sutures’ the familiar with the uncanny by showing the ‘ghost’ in full array as a simulated presence (168, 175) – or, along Freud’s general proposition, by taking on precisely “the full function and significance of what [the image] symbolizes” (op. cit. 169).

 

Granted, the previous quote may perhaps appear misleading on behalf of its absolutist overtones, and the argument it illustrates likely too naïve for its own good. Fortunately, the delicate placing of the next chapter on disjunction and work of The Builders Association once again creates the necessary hindsight to avoid reductive readings. A contemporary collective of theatre makers, these NYC-based ‘Builders’ construct large-scale multimedia productions that particularly focus on “the interface between live and electronically mediated presence” (TBA op. cit. 178). As such, they complement Oursler’s ironic ‘ghosting’ with the actual ‘performance’ of presence staged as such in theatrical enactments of media processes – e.g. by embedding a live actor’s performance into layered and responsive soundscapes, or through architectonic designs as well as mediated sets that draw our attention to the actual passages between live, mediated, and recorded channels of address. Obviously, therefore, the collective’s name itself becomes ironic, since, as Oursler himself mentioned, “Media space is a conglomerate of virtual spaces” (op. cit. 188), making every emphasis on elusive medial interconnections at the same time (cognitively) constructive and (ontologically) deconstructive – or indeed disjunctive.

And yet, going into the last case-based chapter – ironically on pervasiveness – the feeling of conceptual disjunction experienced with the introduction becomes once more, well, pervasive. The aforementioned ‘logical’ progression towards greater conceptual intricacy remains, just as the reciprocity between adjoining chapters, but further cross-references with previous chapters (as well as the other way round) remain rare. The authors must certainly be commended for dedicating a separate chapter to the now very fashionable UK-based mixed-reality collective Blast Theory, and the group’s dedicated efforts in “blurring the boundaries between spectator, participant and performer, between the performance and its social and personal contexts, and between the ‘real’ and the ‘digital’” (211) could easily be read as a meta-case connecting the different strands of this otherwise impressive work. It is precisely because the authors’ conceptual grasp of so elusive a concept as ‘presence’ has proven so solid throughout the book, and the book’s own structural conception so considerate, that both the said chapter as well as the general conclusion of Performing Presence somewhat fails to fulfil the high hopes they created. Then again, with so elusive a subject, and a processual approach to boot, the end result can only leave us off right where we started: ‘frustratingly stimulated.’

 

The concluding chapter is as short as the introductory one was long, and it is precisely through this seeming ‘disjunction’ that Gabriella Giannachi and Nick Kaye in the end play their trump card. After 200+ pages on presence and performance, it has become a foregone conclusion that the subject is destined to remain ungraspable – as attested by a series of well-chosen cases depicting these instances as “temporary ecologies” implicating viewers and/or participants “in traversals rather than entrenchments of positions and places” (236-7). Therefore, rather than rehashing the book’s chapters one last time, the authors simply chose to foreground the one element that, despite its sheer abstraction, can contain them all. Because the works and investigations under scrutiny “unfold through heterogeneous dynamics and processes” (241), taking a constructive perspective to an unobtainable pursuit, they lucidly remind us, is the one element giving meaning to the investigative act performed in the present.