Stan Wijnans |
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Academics Masters PhD Publications |
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5 Conclusions from the performance workCollaboration While the whole project was initially focussed on the more practical sides of creative robot engineering and machine design (both in terms of software and hardware), the main challenge was the difficulty to get the needed time and recognition for the sensor- and sound composition aspect of the project. The engineers were solely focussed on the technical side of designing the machine and had no experience in leaving time and space for the artistic part of the project, many other aspects had to be faced in creating the wireless sensor system, the MAX/MSP programming and designing the sound concept and the machine - sound relationship. From a personal point of view I experienced that Stelarc and the crew had to get used to collaborating with a female technical sonic artist which, unfortunately, still is quite a rare phenomenon. It is a strange alienation of recent culture that robot machines (or human - machines ; cyborgs) are genderless but collaborations can still be determined by a rather old fashioned gender distinction. Donna Haraway, scholar and a feminist specialist in cyborg gender issues, was quoted by Marina Grzinic in the publication ‘Alternate Interfaces Stelarc’, while writing about the Exoskeleton:
Donna [Haraway] developed an u-topic way of reading the cyborg, which tries to escape the established dichotomies of the Western cultures that are based on racial, sexual and class differentation. Haraway calls for a radical politics of interpretation and agency , a cyborg politics that instead of polarization offers a radical symbiosis of the technological and the human. Cyborg politics is at the center of all Stelarc’s projects (Grzinic 2002 p20). Marina Grzinic’s last conclusion about cyborg politics leaves us with the question if Stelarc’s symbiosis of the technological and the human is really genderless in his work? Below I quote Donna Haraway who writes in her essay ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ about taking the predefined social distinctions away by creating a ‘Cyborg gender’:
But the ground of life? What about all the ignorance of women, all the exclusions and failures of knowledge and skill? What about men's access to daily competence, to knowing how to build things, to take them apart, to play? What about other embodiments? Cyborg gender is a local possibility taking a global vengeance. Race, gender, and capital require a cyborg theory of wholes and parts. There is no drive in cyborgs to produce total theory, but there is an intimate experience of boundaries, their construction and deconstruction. There is a myth system waiting to become a political language to ground one way of looking at science and technology and challenging the informatics of domination in order to act potently (Haraway 1991:181). I will discuss the issue of collaborations in art - technology projects in depth at the end of this dissertation, but to conclude this chapter, I quote a view from Stelarc about the necessity to be assisted in his projects:
I [Stelarc] think I have always been conscious of the fact that I have limited skills, I have limited physical capabilities. I think if you are doing challenging things mentally and artisticly you are always having to overcome difficult problems, to adjust, modify and compromise. So that is a process that is very humbling because you do not have unlimited resources to work on the project and you do not have unlimited expertise. Often you have to get technical assistance because you are not a computer programmer, you are not an engineer, you are not an evolutionary scientist, you are not a physicist, a medical practitioner and so on (Hall & Zylinska 2003:10). RehearsalsThere was a strict deadline because of the obligatory performances towards funding bodies and Stelarc’s contract with The Nottingham Trent University. Thus, due to the above mentioned engineering problems, there was very limited time for Stelarc, the choreographer and myself to rehearse and work with movement, the sensors and sound. Since Stelarc is neither a musician nor a sound performer, I had to design a sound concept that would respond as directly and simple as possible. I achieved this by only using basic transformations of the sounds and was helped by the fact that the movements were restricted to an ‘up and down‘ movement of the legs and arms and some limited circulation of the chassis.
Audience perspective I opted for simple interactive sound transformations since an intuitive relationship adds to the strength of an interactive relationship. Weiss & al note (2000): “while too strict a coherence is banal, clearly too subtle a correlation fails to be truly interactive, and the audience is left out of any genuine experience of interactivity”. The audience was generally enthusiastic about the interactive sounds, acknowledging that the machine, performer and sounds had become an integrated object. People were disappointed though about the limited movements of the machine and in this respect they had expected to see and hear more artistic input from choreography and sound. I hope that this goal can be accomplished in the future.
End note Having completed the final project and performance, I have become more aware of how much team effort and energy is needed to accomplish innovative art projects that involve technology and interactive sound. This has been by far the most technical project I have been involved in during my sonic arts MA research period. The performance has brought a lot of issues to the surface and on the next pages I will examine related conceptual issues regarding interactive robotics / sound performances.
Grzinic, Marina (2002) Alternate interfaces, Stelarc. Faculty of Art&Design, Monash University, Melbourne, Australia. Hall, Gary & Zylinska, Joanna(2003) Talking Heads Listening to Stelarc. Publication on the occasion of the launch of ‘The Anatomical Exoskeleton’ Nottingham Trent University, UK.Haraway, Donna (1991) A Cyborg Manifesto. New York Routledge. |
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