PPP – Pretty Public Privacy is a performance installation that sums up the
different works in progress/research/pieces we developed in the last few years.
It is, in a sense, a merging of the performance work (actors, dance, work with
text etc.) with the more media orientated work and a try out of putting both lines
of work into one complete piece.
A short summary of past work:
Zones
Essentially a site specific work where the group occupied a space for a certain
amount of hours and explored the architecture, the social implications and the
tension between the space and the performer’s bodies. (Works including a
40 hours performance in a cable factory in Vienna and a four hours performance
installation on a construction site in Marburg/Germany)
Chat Rooms
Essentially a net based work, in it we were connected live to different chat rooms
and used the text coming from the chat rooms as our “play”. The performers
repeated text that was written live by different people around the world and put
it into their own way of speaking, creating a new meaning in front of the public.
The chat room’s text was projected live on stage and function as 1. Documentation
and 2. Pretext to the action on stage. (Performances: Vienna, Berlin, New York)
Stolen Identity
A net based work, in it the performers “stole” identities from real
people in the net (actually we stole the content of their personal websites) and
created a new identity for themselves. We took text and recreated visual material
and then put on the net new homepages that resembled the one we stole. This project
did not have any manifestation on the stage, it was a pure net project and as
that created an interesting dilemma for a performance group: what constitutes
a performance?
Storytelling
A continuous work that manifests itself in different pieces. Essentially we are
trying to find new ways of storytelling using text, video and new media to tell
personal stories and blur the border between a character and the performers themselves.
The text is either personal or “borrowed” from different sources;
the video is either a documentation of the performer’s lives or scripted
short movies with the performers playing themselves in a fictional situation.
The installation
The installation form implies by its definition an engagement with the question
of space. An installation both defines and contains space, situating, if not controlling,
the viewer within it. In addition, installations that deploy such technologies
as video and computer devices delineate time; they are constructed with particular
concerns about the length of time viewers will stay with the work versus its cycle,
as well as concerns about how to get viewers to move in particular ways in the
space. Indeed, one could argue that for artists working in these media, control
of the viewer in time and space is a primary and inevitable goal. The space of
installations is inhabited not by the artist but by the viewers. Hence, as Margaret
Morse has written, it is the visitor rather than the artist who performs the piece
in an installation. The role of the artist is thus to create the rules, limitations,
and context for that “performance”, as well as to create a context
in which it can, perhaps, operate in unanticipated ways.
The meaning of the installation is thus created in the moment when a viewer is
interacting with it-walking into and through it, standing within it, watching
or even touching it. Those installation works that actually acquire the definition
of “interactive” are more conscious of the extent to which the presence
of viewers completes the work, either in supplying the raw image material for
a piece or activating it in some way. An interactive work constructs a complex
negotiation with its viewers, both anticipating their potential responses and
allowing for their agency in some way.
“A space exists when one takes into consideration vectors of direction,
velocities, and time variables. Thus space is composed of intersections of mobile
elements. It is in a sense actuated by the ensemble of movements deployed within
it. Space occurs as the effect produced by the operations that orient it, situate
it, temporalize it, and make it function in a polyvalent unity of conflictual
programs or contractual proximities. On this view, in relation to place, space
is like the word when it is spoken, that is, when it is caught in the ambiguity
of an actualization, transformed into a term dependent upon different conventions,
situated as an act of a present (or of a time), and modified by the transformations
caused by successive contexts. In contradistinction to the place, it has thus
none of the univocality or stability of a “proper.” In short, space
is a practiced place.”
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life.
The performance will take place in the Dom im Berg in Graz. We will live in this
space for 12 hours a day for four days.
The performance-space will be divided between intertwined "public" and
"private" spaces. The audience will move freely between the different
areas. Viewing will alternate between frontal and circular, standing and sitting,
intimate participation in the action to a more passive viewing.
The "private" space/ The Isolated House
Each performer will build his/her own version of their living room/ or any other
private room. The rooms will be marked by a taped floor plan that will resemble
the real measurement of their living room/other room. Each day the process will
repeat itself but the performers will have to build their living rooms in different
areas of the space and by that changing the performance space day by day.
*Each "private" area should include a TV-Set, video player, music player
(CD, Tape, etc) some pieces of furniture and some local light (home lamps etc);
an option, each performer will have his or her own computer that can network via
wireless during the show
*In addition, each performer should bring some personal material - photos/albums,
CD´s, video-tapes personal and movies, books, cooking recipes, games, dolls,
etc.
*Each performer will host members of the audience by presenting his/her own material
/private stories, dances, action, daily routines, shows or movies they like, music
etc. The material will be performed with no particular order, it can be repeated
and it will depend mainly on the interaction between the audience and the performers.
*A home movie will be made with each of the performers in their own apartment.
Each performer in the private areas will show the movie, as they choose
* A web-cam will circulate between the different private rooms. Images will go
live to the net.
Site
The functional site may or may not incorporate a physical place. It certainly
does not privilege this place. Instead, it is a process, an operation occurring
between sites, a mapping of institutional and textual filiations and the bodies
that move between them. It is as an informational site, a palimpsest of text,
photographs and video recordings, physical places, and things: an allegorical
site, to recall Craig Owens’s term, aptly coined to describe Robert Smithson’s
poly-mathic enterprise, whose vectored and discursive notion of “place”
opposes Serra’s phenomenological model. It is no longer an obdurate steel
wall, attached to the plaza for eternity. On the contrary, the functional work
refuses the intransigence of literal site specificity. It is a temporary thing,
a movement, a chain of meanings and imbricated histories: a place marked and swiftly
abandoned. The mobile site thus courts its destruction: it is willfully temporary;
its nature is not to endure but to come down.
Public spaces
The mobile site is an in-between site, a nonplace, a ruin.
The main public spaces will be the group performing areas
Dance space, chat area, video projection, screens/monitors
Guest performance-area (via video/ live/or live on the net)
In addition a bar, chill out area, Dining room, tec-area and audience chat place
will be prepared around the room
Any area can serve more then one function
*Dance-space 4 choreographed and improvised dances (dance floor/light)
*Chat-area for live chat. The area will include a permanent projection of an ongoing
chat room where the audience, the performers and guests from around the world
can interact with each other during and in between the performance time.
*Video area for presentation of video work from bilderwerfer and guests, projection
of the live performance, chat rooms, background-material. Video projections of
material that will be researched live during the performance will be used as a
text or inspiration for different activities in the room.
*Guest area for live &recorded appearances
* We will have local guests from Graz involved: youth ballet groups, amateur chorus
singers, and local activists
*'Chill out room" with sofas and armchairs, music via headsets, newspapers
etc.
*Dining table- one dinner a day for all the performers open to public, so the
dinner is a performance in itself.
* There is a possibility that we will turn the cooking of the dinner into part
of the performance
*Tec. space in the space, should be integrated in the room
The electronic Space
“The space of non-place creates neither singular identity nor relations;
only solitude, and similitude. There is no room for history unless it has been
transformed into an element of spectacle.”
Marc Auge
We tend to think of networked space as one that is characterized by distributed
power, by the absence of hierarchy. The Internet is probably the best known and
most noted. Its particular attributes have engendered the notion of distributed
power: decentralization, openness, possibility of expansion, no hierarchy, no
center, no conditions for authoritarian or monopoly control.
But we must recognize that the networks are also making possible other forms of
power. The financial markets, operating largely through electronic networks, are
a good instance of an alternative form of power. The three properties of electronic
networks: speed, simultaneity, and interconnectivity, have produced orders of
magnitude far surpassing anything we had ever seen in financial markets.
It also may be significant that although in some ways the power of these financial
electronic networks rests on a kind of distributed power, i.e. millions of investors
and their millions of decisions, it ends up as concentrated power. The trajectory
followed by what begins as a form of distributed power may assume many forms,
in this case, one radically different from that of the Internet.
It signals the possibility that networked power is not inherently distributive.
Intervening mechanisms can re-shape its organization. To keep it as a form of
distributed power requires that it be embedded in a particular kind of structure.
In the case of the Internet, besides its feature as a network of networks and
its openness-two crucial elements-it may well be the relative absence of commercialization
that has allowed it to thrive the way it has.
The net as a space of distributed power can thrive even against growing commercialization,
but it may have to reinvent its self-representation as a universal space. It may
continue to be a space for de-facto (i.e. not necessarily self conscious) democratic
practices. But it will be so partly as a form of resistance against overarching
powers of the economy and of hierarchical power, rather than the space of unlimited
freedom that is still part of its self-representation today. It seems that there
are enough changes in the last few years that the representation of the Internet
needs to be subjected to critical examination. Perhaps the images we need to bring
into this representation increasingly need to deal with contestation and resistance,
rather than simply the romance of freedom and interconnectivity or the new frontier
(though it needs to be said that the image of the frontier has been subjected
to a critical reevaluation which frees it from the romance of freedom and escape
from oppression and poverty). Further, one of the very important features of the
Internet is that civil society has been an energetic user; but this also means
that the full range of social forces will use it, from environmentalists to fundamentalist
groups such as the Christian Coalition in the U.S. It becomes a democratic space
for many opposing views and drives.
Insofar as electronic space is embedded we cannot read it as a purely technological
event and in terms of its pure technological capacities. It is inscribed by the
structures and dynamics within which it is embedded: the Internet is a different
type of space from the private networks of the financial industry; and the fire
walled corporate sites on the web are different from the public portion of the
web. Beyond this question of intentionality and use lies the question of infrastructure:
space is going to be far more present in highly industrialized countries than
in the less developed world; and far more present for middle class households
in rich countries than for poor households in those same countries.
The living room
When is the exact moment your home becomes a homepage, a site? When is the moment
the privet becomes public? Your living room is a political and social battleground.
Every thing from your physical condition, your class, your taste in furniture
gets a meaning that is behind the four walls you call your living room. And anyone
can pay you a visit, sit on your sofa and reexamine your life. Your privacy is
a public site, a location, both as in the fact of being somewhere, and as the
answer to the question of “where” that “somewhere” is.
In a system of signs, site - understood in the sense of the center of a situation
- is not necessarily a place, although a place is always a site. A site can be
a situation between and through places. A website is an address on the Internet
that always implies a relation of desire between hosts and visitors. In other
words, it doesn’t really mean anything for a place to exist (virtually)
if it is left un-visited. In this way, a site can be both real as well as potential.
A site is a place where the address is. A site is a place where the work belongs.
A situation between these two locations (where the work is and where it belongs)
is a site where the work orbits. A site is also a place where people need to wear
helmets to protect themselves from random falling bodies, traveling in eccentric
orbits.
The bodies
The body, too, is a living room. Private but open to visitors. It is a chat room,
albeit, a private one…So the body has disguised its parts, deformed its
shape and is now spread all over the web, changing names, identities, methods
of communication. The body is a virus inside the homepage (a still life of a room
with furniture); its existence disturbs the peace. What is essentially a sculpture,
a room, becomes an installation (with the body presence). The room with the body
is now an active chat room. Visitors are welcome…
Zone
The space between the sites. The hallways between the rooms. The place where the
deformed body parts meet. A zone may also be described as the overlap between
rooms at work… The residues from the displaced bodies meet in the zone,
and form a simultaneous existence of different versions of a narrative within
oral and digital cultures…the zone is the record, the sum of the everyday
activity.