Articles & Essays   Book Reviews   Creative Writing

Consciousness, Literature and the Arts

Volume 9 Number 1, April 2008

___________________________________________________________________

Post Human Interactivity on the Global Stage: The Culture of Simulation

By

Jade Rosina McCutcheon

University of California Davis

It is difficult to discuss the future of theatre without discussing the future of the body as the first site for construction, national or otherwise. Before the era of cyberspace, our bodies of flesh transported and expressed our questions, investigations, thoughts and discoveries about life in our world, our city, our town.  Today we move beyond the body into multiple selves, existing in multiple windows, beyond flesh into sounds, waves, currents and programs. Leaping into this ethereal net I ask a few questions. As I move beyond my ‘flesh body’ do I move beyond the ‘body self’ as ‘local’. As I move into spaces beyond flesh, does my ‘cyber-self’ exist globally rather than locally? How many ‘selves’ am I composed of and can I separate the idea of ‘self’ from the ‘body’? Beyond skin, we soar daily into the chaotic metaphysics of cyberspace, beyond local presence into shared virtual ‘rooms’ of another consciousness. 

Kathleen Hayles[1], in her recent book, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics, makes an interesting point about the body.

“Of all the implications first-wave cybernetics conveyed, perhaps none was more disturbing and potentially revolutionary than the idea that the boundaries of the human subject are constructed rather than given.[2]”

As consciousness is altered by these extensions beyond physical self, are ideas of ‘self’ or the possibilities of ‘self’ altered also and how does this affect the act of theatre?

Philip Auslander writes, “Theorists as diverse as Stanislavsky, Brecht and Grotowski all implicitly designate the actor’s self as the logos of performance; all assume that the actor’s self precedes and grounds her performance and that it is the presence of this self in performance that provides the audience with access to human truths”.^[3] The ‘self’ today is a landscape of potential dimensions ranging from a shamanic idea of an eternal energetic self to a physical body self. This expansive possibility of ‘self’ includes ideas of a self in cyberspace as well as the many ‘selves’ connected to physical presence. It is nearly as difficult to define ‘self’ as it is to define ‘consciousness’’. I found John Locke’s 1694 definition of ‘person’ one of the deeper attempts. “a thinking intelligent being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider itself as itself, the same thinking thing in different times and places; which it does only by that consciousness which is inseparable from thinking, and, as it seems to me, essential to it.... For since consciousness always accompanies thinking, it is that which makes every one to be what he calls self,[4] “

Still a loose indicator of self but Locke invites some consideration about the ‘state’ of self as ‘the same thinking thing in different times and places’. It is the possibility of awareness in our thinking process that allows the self to be so entirely expansive.

In the theatre we are witnesses to and participants in a great act of imagination. A site of reflection, mimesis, projection, transference, shifting molecules between bodies, we attend the theatre and see ourselves, in other bodies playing out familiar scripts. The stage has shaped us; we are seeing ourselves by seeing each other. I understand myself more through an act of theatre, possibilities of ‘self’ are played out before me and I have a moment between lives to observe and consider my human state. This I understand to be very much a local self, one that is experiencing a fleshy, organic and molecular exchange between bodies; an exchange that doesn’t occur with screen mediations of body.

The global self is possibly a multitude of selves existing beyond the local flesh body in numerous constructions of dismemberment. The attraction of playing multiple selves on the global stage is considerable. In 2005 at an event celebrating The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology,. A bold statement was made: "When no one was looking.... games changed the world." In May, 2006, the Chicagoland Pops Orchestra performed  ”Play! A Video Game Symphony"to a packed house at the Rosemount theatre. Above the orchestra, three large video screens flashed scenes from games such as "Final Fantasy," "The Legend of Zelda," "Chrono Trigger" and "World of Warcraft, reminding the audience of characters they've spent many hours with.” "We're the generation who've grown up with video games," says Sven, a musician who says this has influenced his own composing. "People need to start realising that game music is going to be a big part of youth culture all over the world." [5] During the concert, audience members came up on stage and competed in the games, while the orchestra changed and adapted the music on the fly, depending on the action occurring within the game. “When virtual currency or property is sold on a website, it is exchanged for real world currency, often U.S. dollars. The amount of real world money exchanged for virtual currency and property comes as a shock to many. Last year alone, over 200 million U.S. dollars were spent on virtual items sold by players".[6] In the first half of 2007 Famitsu publisher Enterbrain has just revealed that in Japan the games industry had its biggest year yet with total industry sales of 625.79 billion yen (up 37.6 percent). For the U.S. gaming business, 2007 is projected to break $10.5 billion. As the Entertainment Software Association which includes the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles states

“Whether we like it or not, this is the medium of our moment. It is a medium that is telling our cultural story, and the fact that it is a primary tool of youth and adolescents means it will have a tremendous impact on how the next generation plays itself out.”

In a report on audience attendance trends from the University of Oregon in 2002, a national decline in theatre arts attendance was noted with an estimation of less than 3% of the population attending theatre which included popular and musical theatre.  An article in The Spectator Sep.2002 stated; “Young people today are much less likely to go to the theatre than any other age-group. According to a recent report by the Arts Council of England, only 23 per cent of 25- to 34-year-olds attended theatre in 2001. “

In fact, according to an article in USA Today, Nov.2004 ‘If you’re under 35, games are a major entertainment and apart of life.” The Entertainment Software Association in their sales demographic report for 2005 stated that 47% of Americans have purchased one or more games in 2005, 42% of these play games online. Given that nearly half the people in this country are video or computer game players, what might this mean for the kind of theatre we have been engaged in for the past hundred or so years? The kind of theatre that insists on a passive audience separated from the action – who have paid to witness a reflection of self living out a drama for a myriad of reasons.

Maybe I want to play the part, to get in there and create a character, live the multiple others and become the many heroes, super beyond real. My previous life as ’audience’ is no more as cyberspace awaits me. I enter the game and choose a character, I am a barbarian in one room playing with a Russian man and a German woman. I have no idea what age, religion or size they are, in another game I design a home life, become a mother and raise virtual children, I learn Japanese from another gamer as we all chase the never ending supply of monsters, then I learn some Spanish from a 20 yr old who insists I must learn it if I live in California, I have no idea what his ‘flesh body’ looks like, only the glowing necromancer character he is playing. He doesn’t see that I am a 54 yr old white woman, only the mysterious druid I am playing. Yet this is enough for a journey of characters through a magical landscape, discussing ‘real life’ issues while solving virtual ones at the same time. I sit in front of the screen embodied, while other selves act out my play.

Sherry Turkle,[7] founder (2001) and current director of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, writes:

I believe that the experience of cyberspace, the experience of playing selves in various cyber-contexts, perhaps even at the same time, on multiple windows, is a concretization of another way of thinking about the self, not as unitary but as multiple. Life on the screen provides a new context for this practice. One has a new context for negotiating the transitions. One has a new space to stand on for commenting on the complexities and contradictions among the selves.[8]

Characters in a play might be seen psychologically as aspects of the playwrights mind but in the playing of the story we relate to the characters as individuals, attempting to make sense of our world via the actions and interactions of these characters. How does this dynamic change when I am conscious and aware that it is myself in multiple forms acting out stories, dreams and texts beyond my flesh body?  I can no longer separate myself from my etheric projections into a myriad of spaces; my idea of self all at once becomes larger, more expansive, perhaps global, perhaps shamanic as in feeling a part of a greater consciousness?

The ability to consciously move beyond the physical body is the particular specialty of the traditional shaman.  These journeys of soul may take the shaman into the nether realms, higher levels of existence or to parallel physical worlds or other regions of this world.  Shamanism itself was defined by the late Mircea Eliade as a technique of ecstasy; ecstasy comes from the Latin root ex statis, to stand outside oneself. [9] During the state of ecstasy, often a trance condition, the shaman leaves his/her body and makes contact with the spirit world while retaining consciousness. I stand outside myself as parts of me interact in cyberspace, I am not in trance but separated, I am not in contact with spirits that I aware of, just entities separated from their flesh bodies, I seem to have left my body. Does what I do in cyberspace affect what I do in real space, I mean here – the place my body is sitting in.

One area where the effects of actions taken in cyberspace affect the real world is the transaction of cash. Virtual cash is rapidly turning into a huge economy. Virtual or synthetic economies are generated within these games that play out in real money terms as players sell virtual items for real cash or purchase virtual items for real cash. On the 15^th of December 2004 David Storey a 22 year old Australian bought a virtual island for $26,500 u.s dollars or $265 Project Entropia dollars.[10]

Project Entropia is a virtual universe with a real cash economy. It is set on the distant colony of Calypso. Participants assume the roles of colonists that strive to build a new world together under constant threat from various enemies that want to destroy the fledgling colony. The real cash economy means that the internal Project Entropia economy is linked to the real world economy, by using a currency called the Project Entropia Dollar (PED), which has a fixed exchange rate linked to the US Dollar (10 PED equals 1 USD).

As a participant, you use PEDS to acquire virtual land and equipment in Project Entropia, thereby investing in your avatar’s (Participant representation in the virtual universe) growth and abilities. A unique aspect of Project Entropia is that a player may elect to transfer PED back into real life currency, thereby enabling them to earn real money while participating in the online virtual universe. Maybe an economy can transfer with relative ease and success into cyberspace and back. Possibly consciousness can also travel through these inscribed astral spaces but what about the ‘self’ that I have known in the flesh, the one that has been moved by the boundary of a ‘fleshy organic presence’ for most of my life? Once I experience my multiple selves will my conception of ‘self’ be altered? Could theatre appear as an ancient relic depicting limited concepts of self on the stage? Will I miss my ‘molecules being altered’ by the actor’s real body presence or will I be too engaged with the process of becoming of a character in cyberspace, along with the other 30 million estimated online role-playing gamers?[11]

My future story around the fire is a dazzling one.

Storytellers are working around the clock developing virtual worlds, landscapes of play, in which characters created by players interact out of body to solve puzzles, create families, engineer theme parks and of course engage in war games.  Local, national or global; human activity has presented itself online. It’s out of this world and cyber villages, towns and cities are being built as we speak, virtually speaking our stage awaits. I willingly cast aside my post modern coat for the cyber simulator, to dance, to move, to generate time and place with formula to breathe, to transform, exhaust all possibilities and inform new worlds of my arrival. A virtual blast!

Bibliography

Altizer Roger Jnr.2006. article Postmodern Aliens Farming Videogames for Gold.

Auslander Philip,1995 article in Phillip B. Zarrilli’s  Acting (Re)Considered. Routledge

Hayles, Kathleen. , 1999, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, London.

Hayles, Katherine. 1997, Presentation, "Prosthetic Rhetoric and the Posthuman Body" Penn State Conference. http://www.english.ucla.edu/faculty/hayles/Penn.htm

Locke John 1975  An essay concerning human understanding (P. H. Nidditch, Ed.). Oxford, England: Clarendon. (Original work published 1694)

Turkle Sherry 1995 Life on the Screen: Identity in the Age of the Internet
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1995.
Walsh Roger 1990 The Way of The Shaman. Harper Collins, NY, 3rd Ed.