A Meditation on Virtual Kinesthesia

 

Robert Allen and Antoinette LaFarge

 

In the following dialogue, artist and writer Antoinette LaFarge and theater director Robert Allen respond to questions we posed in our initial call for this issue, such as: How has interactivity been an embodied function in relationship to a particular type of medium and/or interpersonal interface? Does the body's reduction to the simplified movement of the hand moving a computer mouse constitute an embodied and interactive experience?

LaFarge's perspective is influenced by her work with the Plaintext Players, a group she co-founded whose improvisatory online performances have appeared at a wide variety of international venues, including documenta x, the Venice Biennale, and the European Media Arts Festival. Robert's directorial philosophy reflects his studies with director Anne Bogart as well as a heightened sensitivity to movement potential honed by a dancing career in the U.S. and in the German tanztheater company of Reinhild Hoffmann . Together, they use Robert's intuitive physicality and the Plaintext Players' innately dramatic text slamming as the basis for a growing oeuvre of performances that traverse live and virtual participation. As longtime collaborators, we felt they were uniquely suited to contemplate the question of what constitutes a kinesthetic experience in the digital age.

Antoinette: I've never thought that interactivity, in and of itself, was a very interesting or productive concept. An interactive system accepts user input, and such input helps define—or appears to help define—the output. This is how vending machines work: push a button, get a can. Interactivity only becomes worth discussion when the relationship rises above a certain level of complexity or subtlety that makes it participatory rather than simply interactive.

One sign of the shift is that interactivity may be merely physical, but the participatory always involves the imagination. The discussion of our engagement with digital realities has been dogged by a certain literalism: the idea, for instance, that the body is somehow absent, or grossly reduced in its functionality— just fingers typing or a hand moving a mouse. Our reliance on the term interactivity exacerbates this problem, since it is ultimately rooted in an idea of physical reciprocity push a button, get a can.

Given that the way we inhabit our bodies is always in part a product of how we imagine them, it should be obvious that the literalist approach to defining interactivity is severely limiting. Digital interactivity, or digital modes of participation, are profoundly involved with the idea of the self and its imagined body.

Like gamers, it is common for the Plaintext Players to experience elevated heart rates, shortness of breath, and other unmistakably physiological reactions to their digital activities. But it is equally commonplace, in the graphical role-playing worlds like EverQuest or World of Warcraft, for one to duck one's physical head when one's avatar runs under a tree branch. Game players notoriously tilt their controllers when their avatars turn in game, even though they know that their tilting has no actual effect at all.

Robert: Well, if you are going after the term ‘interactivity,' I'm taking exception to the whole notion of the ‘digital' as something new and strange. Other than supercharging how things can happen—the speed of mathematical and logical computations, not to mention the speed and precision of pictorial rendering, and the growing capacity for the exchange of data over a vast network like the Internet—there is really nothing new in terms of what we are doing, and have done for millennia. Vermeer painted in a near photo-realistic style four hundred years ago, and oral storytellers have been creating powerfully "real" virtual experiences since the dawn of human culture.

Antoinette: Yes—the 19th century British navy passed mail among its ships in an analog version of a packet-switched network, and the earliest calculation devices—abacuses and counting boards—were invented more than two millennia ago.

Robert: Digital enhancement is exactly that, a simple, albeit powerful enhancement of what we are already inclined to do as human beings.

In regard to the relationship between imagination and the kinesthetic sense, I can point to something as low-tech as puppets or to Leonardo da Vinci's studies of the motion of birds, both of which can evoke kinesthetic responses in viewers. Similarly, the single most important strategy for creating a kinesthetically provocative reality in recent history has to be the use of motion capture. Dance in particular has embraced motion capture because it is itself rooted in the vicarious experience an observer can have simply by watching someone else move. In the gaming world, where motion capture is now often used as the basis for avatar animations, the physical logic of locomotion—as well as the specific timing relative to such activities as combat and flight—are understood by the player's own body. As you pointed out, you duck your head when your avatar runs under a tree.

Antoinette: Your comment about dance reminds me that one of the most popular player activities in World of Warcraft is dancing—it doesn't get you anything in game terms, but players do it for sheer pleasure.

Robert: And this has to do with the fact that most players don't have the amazing physicality of, say, a night elf that can do a front flip, but they have so identified with their avatars that they get an experience of unbounded prowess from what is actually an entirely simulated activity.

Antoinette: Even though the front flip is a completely scripted animation—it happens when you press the spacebar—the choice of the player to make use of it at this moment instead of that makes it a spontaneous gesture. "I do it because I can." The act is mechanized but the reward—the emotional pleasure from this imaginary flip—is situational.

Robert: When I teach tumbling to actors, I don't do it mainly so that they can perform a great tumble onstage, but so that they gain a sense of ease and fearlessness in using their bodies.

Antoinette: Something similar happens with the Plaintext Players, who gain fearlessness in their textual improvisations through the very fact that they are working by proxy through their avatars. Online, they can do any number of things they can't in reality: crawl across the ceiling, transform themselves into giant cockroaches, repeatedly die and resurrect. We normally think of language as speech, and only in rare cases as action, as performative; but for the Players' avatars, language is at all times a form of enactment.

Images 1 & 2: Actor Tracey A. Leigh performing in Demotic (2004), a mixed-reality work in which the actor spontaneously responds to a rapidly evolving situation created in real time by remote (internet) collaborators improvising together in a shared virtual environment akin to a chat room. The collaborator’s text is presented to the actor through a teleprompter and simultaneously projected on the floor as a combination of set design and environmental lighting.

Robert: This is much the same way that speaking is understood by actors. An actor almost never speaks simply to express a thought; speaking is always a way to achieve an objective. In other words, when an actor speaks, it has the same effect as if she were to perform a physical action. For example, in the method of acting developed by the famous actor Michael Chekhov, bits of text are understood as concrete gestures such as pushing, pulling, lifting, tearing—what the character is really trying to accomplish by speaking in that moment. In this respect, powerful acting is of a kinesthetic nature and is directly proportional to the degree in which psychological motion is expressed as a physical sensation for the actor.

Antoinette: For the Players, it is the exercise of their imagination through language that stimulates the same relationship between psychological motion and physical sensation. We did one piece in which one of the characters had a bomb that was counting down: tick…. tick… tick. Because these "ticks" were appearing onscreen in real time, they created disproportionate anxiety in the other players, much more so than the same words on a page would have done. The explosion itself was something of an anticlimax. So the question is, what is the nature of this virtual kinesthetic response: primarily physical or primarily imaginal?

Image 3: "Apologizing for Everything," a scene from The Roman Forum Project (2003) in which Alan Goodson performs a first-century Roman actor named Quintus who, in turn, is performing as President George W. Bush. Green-screen technology allows the actor to respond dynamically to an edited video of Bush's State of the Union Address while playing with the moment-to-moment behavior of the president in order to synch his speech (which is drawn from a completely different source—namely, the president's so-called Bushisms) with Bush's own earlier performance. The actor's performance is mixed with the Bush video in real time to create a third reality in which Bush and the actor are identified with each other both visually and kinesthetically.

Robert: Kinesthetic response is traditionally defined as spontaneous response to motion that occurs outside of oneself. In practice, this motion can be very small, it can even be implied. Without it, there cannot be anything approaching a relationship between individual performers—or players—in any context. Its presence is an absolute necessity for any experience that seeks to define itself as compelling, absorbing, engaging, immersive, meaningful, satisfying, authentic, believable, entertaining, scary, addictive, and so on.

Antoinette: I like the notion of implied motion. If you're logged into a digital role-playing space, you'll see real motion on your screen, but there is also a great deal of implied motion: the graphic moving across your screen is interpreted as you, yourself, running across a field. Your definition almost suggests that avatar-based activities are kinesthetic by their very nature.

Robert: Absolutely. Even if we do not see actual discernable movement in a body that does not mean it is not taking place. Quite the opposite, a kinesthetic event may not be gross enough to register visually to an observer, but it can still be felt. What I'm referring to is a subtle movement and reaction that lives, almost imperceptibly, in the joints and muscles. Chekhov once demonstrated an aspect of his acting technique to a group of students—and to this day, those who were in attendance claim that this notably short Russian man transformed himself into a 9-foot giant before their very eyes.

In a similar vein, while I was still a graduate student of dance at UCLA, one of my classes hosted a visiting butoh artist. He taught us a piece of choreography that involved, among other things, the instruction to touch an imaginary spot floating just in front of the body. Touching the spot would cause it to expand, at which point we were instructed to step into the expanding darkness and disappear. It was only after he had seen our attempts, and then showed us what he meant, that I realized that the instruction for stepping into the void was more literal than we had imagined. If pushed I will admit that he was probably still visible to the eyes. Nevertheless, despite whatever a dispassionate recording device might have recorded, I saw him step into the void and disappear.

Antoinette: This relates directly to my earlier point: with interactive systems what matters is that I believe I have made something happen with my input, not that I have necessarily made something happen in fact. The interactive work, like theater, calls into existence an I who makes things happen. It is not so much that digital modes exclude the physical body as that they require a constant negotiation of the relationship between the real and imaginal selves. The I who types at the terminal is not the I who acts in the digital realm, under another name, in another identity, through an imagined body. The one who plays is not the player. This separation also means that the player is the primary audience for the avatar, regardless of who else might be watching. And this is a major reason that virtual worlds, including computer games, strike many people as dangerous and irresponsible—because they dispense with the convention that everything revolves around the audience. There is no longer an obligation to please anyone except oneself—and possibly the other players.

Robert: In an ideal situation, by virtue of kinesthetic relatedness, there is no difference between performer and audience: what the performer experiences, the audience experiences. One of Jerzy Grotowski's last essays postulates a theater without an audience. In this essay Grotowski abandons the otherwise universal idea that theater is about the qualitative experience of the spectator. What is left is the actor himself as the primary object of his own performance. And while this might suggest great self-indulgence on the part of the actor, Grotowski argues the opposite—this approach is if anything more rigorous because the performance is grounded in (and ultimately judged by) its kinesthetic authenticity and precision rather than its emotion. It was his contention that this was the logical development of Constantin Stanislavsky's later work on physical actions, in which Stanislavsky abandoned his well-known theories of the emotional basis of acting in favor of a sophisticated notion of kinesthetic memory.

Antoinette: To speak of kinesthesia with respect to the digital, then, is to speak of a kinesthesia of the imaginal body. But from what you're saying, this isn't so far off how kinesthesia is already understood.

Robert: In theater we are constantly evaluating a performance in terms of its believability. Let me reflect this back to you: you can't really imagine yourself to be the doer unless you have the kinesthetic experience to back this up.

When I stopped dancing, I studied directing at Columbia University under Anne Bogart, an American director who is renowned for adapting choreographer Mary Overlie's postmodern improvisational dance methodology known as the Viewpoints for theater. In Anne's revised system, there are nine Viewpoints, five of space, and four of time. One of the time-based Viewpoints is called kinesthetic response. In working with the Viewpoints, I have come to an astonishing conclusion: Compelling theater is not the result of what most practitioners imagine it to be—an audience's empathetic response to emotional states generated and experienced by the actor. Although a live event, live theater can seem dead and uninteresting. One has to ask oneself: If it is live but seems dead, what is missing? I would suggest that, despite all the emotion that is pumped out by a passionate actor, that is not what we need to have a visceral connection to a performance. There has to be a kinesthetic life that is shared by performer and audience. Admittedly, kinesthesia is implicated in emotional experience, but it is not the same thing. Without the shared kinesthetic experience, the emotion reads as totally false. Conversely, it is possible to deliver a compelling performance without the display of emotion if the experience is firmly grounded in the kinesthetic responses of the body.

In the Viewpoints, exercises are constructed with the goal of heightening and exploiting the kinesthetic sense. This sense is that somewhat mystical force that both connects and transmits impulses between two or more bodies in the same space. These bodies do not need to be near each other or engaged in an obvious relationship. This brings up the question of timed response as the factor that makes a non-obvious relationship visible. Timed response—generally glorified in performance as 'good timing'— can only happen because of the kinesthetic basis of the relationship. Another way to look at it: timing can be understood as a type of ‘call and response' that does not require a conscious decision to respond.

Antoinette: Call and response is a central mode of interaction for the Plaintext Players—and of these two words, 'response' is by far the more important. For performers working through avatars, there are at least two levels of call and response: there is the avatar who responds to other avatars in the digital realm, and there is the I at the terminal who responds both to and through the avatar. These different levels of communication are reflected in the language itself: say someone says, "I killed a troll last night but then I had to log off." The first I is the avatar, the second the player.

Image 4: A player character in the popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) World of Warcraft jumping off a mountain. The character's physical animation—body position, fluttering of robes—reflects the moment of freefall. This kind of jump characteristically produces a kinesthetic response of anxiety in the player because if the distance to the ground is too great, the character will die.

Moreover, the call and response can happen on parallel channels; in World of Warcraft, players are often listening and chiming in on multiple channels at once: trade channel, guild channel, party channel, private channels—and furthermore, these may be a mixture of text and voice channels. Similarly, the Plaintext Players are usually communicating on multiple channels: speaking aloud, whispering privately, typing anonymously, sending commands that cannot be seen by any online audience members. The Players sometimes perform multiple avatars more or less simultaneously, so they may even be speaking to themselves at times. And for both gamers and my Plaintext Players, it's common for two players who happen to be sitting in the same room to interact through the various online channels while talking back and forth across the room. The model is simultaneity rather than sequentiality: everyone talks and acts at once. Both action and communication in online worlds flow so fast that responses often happen faster than conscious thought allows. And despite the fact that this sounds like chaos to the uninitiated, this kinesthetic speed is actually a major draw for the Players. The capacity to let go of a full sense of control, to exist in the moment-to-moment of action, gives them the same kind of adrenaline rush that gamers get. Most people think that better games are about better graphics, but for gamers, more speed and more action top the list, and better graphics fall somewhere below that. These factors speak to a severe disjunction between the general prejudices about these environments, which are perceived as clumsily unreal, and what players want and get from them, which is an intensely physical sensation of the real that they don't, for the most part, get from what we term reality.

Robert: So we're back to our original question: where does the participation take place, in the body or in the imagination? In some workshop situations I will ask the class to imagine a dynamic sphere of radiant energy and light in the breast. If the group is large enough, I can count on a few of the participants to betray a spontaneous physical transformation: they will start to breathe deeper, their shoulders will drop and broaden, and they will sit or stand up straighter. Most importantly, they will give the casual observer a stronger sense that they are actively present—in other words, the observer has a vicarious kinesthetic experience as a result of the students' imaginative engagement of the image. At this point I encourage everyone to actively make subtle adjustments to their physical state with the intention of accommodating the image. This is usually enough for almost everyone else to begin to show signs of a similar kinesthetic response to the image.

The psychophysical relationship that I'm describing is a two-way street. It not only means the imagination takes shape in and through the body, but it also implies that a set of kinesthetic reactions can move in the other direction, arriving first in the body as sensory experience and then being constructed into potent images via the imagination. We assume this is a primarily psychic process, when in truth it is first of all physical. We might formulate the relationship between kinesthesia and imagination as an infinite loop: if sensory experience is rendered intelligible through the imagination—as images and emotions, for example—then these constructs are in fact both subtle biophysical responses and impulses that lead to further responses in the body.

If there is any reality in ‘virtual reality' it rests on the relationship between sensory experience and fantasy. In theater the vitality of this relationship is understood as the essential element that validates a performance, and insofar as it is orchestrated by the creative imagination, it can extend and modify what we accept as real.

Antoinette: This negotiation is a crucial process. For the people who work with avatars, the strongest experience is the sense of being immersed in the world they are creating through their interactions; being part of something larger, inside it, elsewhere. It is an experience constructed from what they think they are doing (adventuring in a game, say) rather than what they are actually doing (typing on a keyboard). But it is not really a matter of either-or: the experience is constructed from both sets of actions at once, and at least partly from the cognitive dissonance they produce.

Robert: Yeah. To the degree that the body is supporting and reacting to the imagination, life in these alternate realities can seem as real and as valid as the nondigital variety. And this points to the primary obsession of both theater and games: the fate of the body.

Antoinette: Yes, everyone talks about "life" in these alternate realities, but one of their most striking aspects is how much they are about death. I don't want to dwell on the obvious point that in many games the major activity is killing monsters—and sometimes other players—that are intent on killing you first. I'm more interested in the fact that death is understood less as an end than as a means to a radical transformation of state. Game death is a temporary setback rather than a final event. My Plaintext Players invent many improbable ways to "kill" each other during performance, and their resurrections tend to be equally baroque—but the Players strenuously resist any attempts to permanently obliterate a character. Moreover, death itself turns up as a character in many guises, from Baron.Samedi, Satan, and Hades to a beheaded army deserter and the tiny body parts from the Challenger space shuttle explosion.

Robert: I'm reminded of something the playwright Heiner Müller said: somewhere he writes that death is a sex change. I believe he is pointing to a central concern of all theater: the death of the hero. In fact, all drama is dependent on the death, or implied death, of somebody for dramatic effect. This goes all the way back to the origins of theater in ritual sacrifice of the king, and then of his human proxy, and then of an animal such as a bull; and then the event itself was simulated, as in the annual celebration of the Passion of Christ.

Antoinette: I agree that games are in part about repeatedly simulating the death of the hero, with the player as hero. However, I think that the Plaintext Players are engaging with something different: the death of the idea of the hero. The characters created by the Players are often ridiculous, absurd, inconsistent, childish—in a word, unheroic. The death they evoke, fantastic as it sounds, is the death of anyone and everyone.

Robert: You mean, they're being creative? Games and theater re-enact life; their concern with the body points to a primarily kinesthetic appreciation of what it means to be alive. The primary obsession of life is death, but what we have as a response to death that celebrates our aliveness is the fact that we are creative in our response: in the plays we make, in the games we play.

Antoinette: If we're talking about reality—which is only an idea, however attached to it we are—then the most fulfilling reality is the one that is the product of our creative imaginations.

 

Robert Allen (director) + Antoinette LaFarge (artist-writer) are an artistic team whose previous joint credits include Demotic (2004, Beall Center for Art + Technology, Irvine, CA); The Roman Forum Project (2003, Beall Center; included in a Los Angeles Times–published list of “10 best shows of the past 3 years”); Virtual Live (2002, Location One, New York); The Roman Forum (2000, Side Street Live, Los Angeles); and Still Lies Quiet Truth (New York International Fringe Festival, 1998). Works in progress include Demotic 2 (scheduled for production at The Theatre Project, Baltimore, in November 2006) and Galileo in America (staged readings, Goethe Institute and Villa Aurora, Los Angeles, fall 2004). Their solo credits are listed below.

Robert Allen is a theater movement specialist who teaches movement for actors when he is not directing. He is Assistant Professor of Theater at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. His recent projects include For a Better World by Roland Schimmelpfennig (UMBC, 2006); Dream Play by August Strindberg, adapted by Courtney Baron (Cal State Long Beach, 2003); Zwischen Fear und Sex: Fünf Proben (Hellerau, Germany, 2002); Twilight by Anna Deveare Smith (Cal State Long Beach, 2002); How I Got That Story by Amlin Gray (NY, August 2001); Dear Anton (Chekhov Now Festival, 1999); The Creditors (New York International Fringe Festival, 1999); "August in January," a festival celebrating August Strindberg's 150th birthday (Theater 22, 1999); Le Ménage (LaMama E.T.C. 1998); and The Good Night (Theatre for the New City, 1998). Robert has an M.F.A. in Theater from Columbia University, where he studied directing with Anne Bogart. His work as a director is grounded in prior experience as a choreographer and performer in German Tanztheater, working with Reinhild Hoffmann (a contemporary of Pina Bausch) and other German directors. Robert also possesses an M.F.A. in modern dance from UCLA and a B.F.A. in visual art from the San Francisco Art Institute.

Antoinette LaFarge is an artist and writer with a special interest in virtual and mixed realities and net-based improvisation. She is Associate Professor of Digital Media at the University of California, Irvine, where she co-curated two groundbreaking shows about computer games, SHIFT-CTRL (The Beall Center for Art and Technology, 2000) and ALT+CTRL (Beall Center, 2004), and also co-created the intermedia performance work Reading Frankenstein (Beall Center, 2003). Her essays and other other writings have appeared in several books, including Searching for Sebald (forthcoming 2006) and Benjamin's Blind Spot (2001), as well as in such periodicals as Wired , Leonardo , and Gnosis . Antoinette is the founding director of the Plaintext Players, a pioneering Internet performance group that uses net-based virtual worlds to stage their performances. The Plaintext Players have appeared at a wide variety of international venues, including documenta x (1997), the Venice Biennale (1997), and the European Media Arts Festival (1993). She is also the founder-director of the Museum of Forgery, a virtual institute dedicated to the aesthetics of forgery. She has an M.F.A. in Computer Art from the School of Visual Arts, New York. Her domain is forger.com.