Kinetic Atmospheres

Performance and Immersion

Johannes Birringer

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000476477
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Media & Performing Arts
• Thema: Theatre History & Criticism

This book offers a sustained and deeply experiential pragmatic study of performance environments, here defined at unstable, emerging, and multisensational atmospheres, open to interactions and travels in augmented virtualities. Birringer's writings challenge common assumptions about embodiment and the digital, exploring and refining artistic research into physical movement behavior, gesture, sensing perception, cognition, and trans-sensory hallucination.

If landscapes are autobiographical, and atmospheres prompt us to enter blurred lines of a "forest knowledge, " where light, shade, and darkness entangle us in foraging mediations of contaminated diversity, then such sensitization to elemental environments requires a focus on processual interaction. Provocative chapters probe various types of performance scenarios and immersive architectures of the real and the virtual. They break new ground in analyzing an extended choreographic – the building of hypersensorial scenographies that include a range of materialities as well as bodily and metabodily presences. Foregrounding his notion of kinetic atmospheres, the author intimates a technosomatic theory of dance, performance, and ritual processes, while engaging in a vivid cross-cultural dialogue with some of the leading digital and theatrical artists worldwide.

This poetic meditation will be of great interest to students and scholars in theatre, performing arts as well as media arts practitioners, composers, programmers, and designers.

1 INTRODUCTION Theatre, atmospheres, living systems

DOI: 10.4324/9781003114710-1

Act so that you will be spared the necessity of deceiving anyone.

(Gertrude Stein)

Art must start work where something is defective.

(Bertolt Brecht)

Resilient theatre

We live in a 21st century marked by waning resources and various crises in the social and natural worlds. Human-induced global climate change and the deterioration of nature now receive as much attention as the economic fallout and attending financial stresses of global capitalism or the impact of the new migrations on old notions of national sovereignty and border security. Increasingly, one senses naturecultural immunitary deficiency, with no deus ex machina in sight, and no paleocybernetic remedies. And yet it is not always apparent how environmental problems are intertwined with social and political problems, and how such intertwining inevitably affects artistic production and the creative industries. A crisis of the political imagination could have the opposite effect on the arts – indeed one might expect artistic positions to articulate diagnoses of the world or offer visions of resilient interaction and transformation: bold new visions of what could be, imaginative projections of how human beings might harmoniously relate to one another, to other species and the living earth.

Artistic positions or forms of expression reflect principles of organization, certain kinds of management of resources, and in this respect theatres, or the performing arts in the broadest sense, are quite naturally subject to economic realities, to limits of sponsorship, travel opportunities, access to work spaces and tools, various safety rules and risk protocols. Even in the countries of overdeveloped capitalism, many under- or unemployed artists, actors and dancers find themselves, like the migrant workers, belonging to the precariat laboring under conditions of everyday vulnerability in our age of austerity. Is it not inevitable, therefore, that performing and directing, writing, composing and designing as shared theatrical labor engage their practices, forms and spaces of expression in the search for fresh viewpoints? In the search for lenses able to focus on the archive and the repertoire, as well as on the new content that so-called immaterial labor might shape through the use of old and renewed vocabularies? In the search for new spaces and protocols under the impact of unforeseen lockdowns and pandemics?

About five or six years ago I began to work with a large collective of artists and arts organizations on a shared project in Europe, titled METABODY, which led my London-based ensemble to the development of a series of installations. There was no hesitation to shift from stage or film-work – the physical-digital – to other digital or software-based and networked experiments, in the spirit of immaterial labor, for example, linking distant performers telematically through the internet, creating a composite virtual stage or learning how to work with Kinect camera interfaces, sensors or virtual reality (VR) technologies. The physical-digital intertwining was a premise for working with bodies, not beyond but with and about living bodies and living environments that mattered. Takahiko Iimura’s media work on the beach: gone forward into the gallery, then back to the shore; in his email post he proposes that you choose this one or that one, whatever the media, you do select one of them at a time, the one you fit to this or to that.

The digital always retained physical materiality for me. I understood the shifts to be a part of the construction of complex built environments. In fact I had always imagined the site-specific in my work as a combination of engaging a particular place and adapting to it with all the tools and media (somatechnics) available. Sometimes one also succumbs to and receives from an environment, an off-site specific nature or urban commons, outside of theatre. A place understood as milieu, as habitat and as experiential atmosphere. The energies of bodies and our imaginations enter into material sites while drawing from the sites’ affective materiality. If you perform in a quarry, the quarry will constitute your environmental atmosphere and rocky habitat. The tools, materials and media help to modify the site or be modified with the site’s power – the site transforming into a constructed reality with a particular atmospherics or aesthetic energy. The kinetic atmospheres I explore are somatechnical, full of mutual referrals, real worlds.

Kinetic also, of course, means moving (from the Greek kinesis), motioning, moveable. In art historical terms, kinetic means “relating to motion.” Since the early 20th century, artists have incorporated movement into their art, their objects, either to explore the possibilities of movement or to introduce a temporal and architectural dimension, duration in the experience of material textures or behaviors, and also to reflect on the importance of the machinic and the light, as well as technologies and projection/rotation techniques (especially involving electric light and motors) in our modern world. These artistic kinetic experiments have also very often been related to explorations of perception, optics and the nature of vision. Movement, in regard to kinetic art, has been produced mechanically by motors (e.g. in Naum Gabo’s Standing Wave, 1919–20) or by utilizing natural movement of air within a space (e.g. Alexander Calder’s mobiles that he began to work with in the 1930s). Kinetic art became a major phenomenon of the late 1950s and 1960s; it was an international exploration, as I became aware visiting a number of museum exhibitions, for example, Lo(s) cinético(s) at Reina Sofia Madrid in 2007, or Kinesthesia: Latin American Kinetic Art, 1954–1969, first shown at the Palms Springs Art Museum in 2017.¹ In Houston I had seen many more exhibitions of art from Latin America, Japan, and Korea that involved experiments in light and colored space art, projection art, technical experiments, moving “sound” (multichannel acoustic architectures) and visual projections that drew attention of synesthetic experience. I remember the exhibition See this Sound: Versprechungen von Bild und Ton (Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz) – its catalog with a whole range of provocative essays edited by Cosima Rainer et al. in 2009. At that moment, after having been well aware of visual (sound) artists like Brain Eno, William Kentridge, Bob Wilson, Meredith Monk, Hélio Oticica, or Steina and Woody Vasulka, I began to connect ambient sound and atmospheric visual design/choreographies in my thinking much more explicitly.

Later, during my years in London, I also became aware of an annual festival called Kinetica, initiated in 2009 by Dianne Harris and Tony Langford who founded the Kinetica Museum. Open to galleries, curators and artists from around the world who “focus on universal concepts and evolutionary processes though the convergence of kinetic, electronic, robotic, sound, light, time-based and multidisciplinary new media art, science and technology,” as stated in the press release, the exhibitions are structured like an art fair, with a wild, unpredictable mix of elements in each showcase, combining futuristic fantasy sculptures, or animal-machine hybrids punning on evolutionary processes, with the latest gadgets and amusing gizmos brought there by inventors themselves. One also discovers stunning laser works or projections such as Venezuelan artist Carlos Cruz-Diez’s Chromosaturation. Participating in each year’s event between 2011 and 2015, I also noted a performance space hosting a range of digital, interactive shows and graphic projections; a key feature here was the 3D stage of Musion Academy, which offers its advanced projection system to other artists (the DAP-Lab was invited in 2013 to show “Tatlin Tower,” a wearable electroacoustic instrument) as well as displaying its own 3D animation research. Judging from the exuberant atmosphere on the opening nights I attended, almost half a century after Cybernetic Serendipity: The Computer and the Arts (ICA, 1968, curated by Jasia Reichardt), the public’s interest in inventive new contraptions and kinetic art objects has not subsided at all. This exhibit attracts up to 10,000 viewers each year.

As so much of my work since its beginnings in 1986–87 had to do with creating scenographies for dance-theatre, for movement and projected movement/light/visuals, drawing also from the synergies of the locale where I was working (while experimenting with choreographing abstractions, abstract virtualities), I assumed that scenographing an atmosphere also meant that the public would become immersed in it, move through it or be moved by it. Atmospheres in this sense are like the weather: they act, embrace us and slip into us or spread, move our sensations, vibrate in us, shape our presentiments. Except that in theatrical-architectural terms they are also engineered, constructed, actuated. They might deceive us. We become subjected to illusions. The sound of wind can be heard? Do we hear wind? Atmospheres are tricky, they are tricksters, technical actors, they are actionable and they are performed.

In this book I am about to write, weather is being linked to forest knowledge, a sensual understanding of elemental archives so to speak (if you accept nature as infrastructural, environmental media and biocycle), and thus reaching back deeply into an internal time sense, my times of growing up around forests, navigating, building models of the Umwelt, comparing, crafting and forecasting perceptions. These are also times of growing older, readapting the techniques with which I naturalize, readapting memories that have permeated my sensorimotor muscles. It is my way of sharing choreographic operations with you, which may also to an extent be resilient operations. They certainly resist commercial pressures or expectations, as well as the conventions that are associated with the traditional dramatic and text-based theatre. Choreographing atmospheres might be the simplest way of putting what I plan to do here.

Choreographing atmospheres, expanding kinesis

The prevailing atmospheres of the locales where we worked also of course affected me and my collaborators – those were not created but creating, affecting and in-forming. Atmospheres are reciprocal. In meditative terms, one could speak of communal designs, spiritual energies and chance operations (also in the sense in which John Cage’s compositional process included random events and tacit exchanges with indeterminacy, or Pauline Oliveros’s work relied on deep listening) that come together and provoke what is experienced as vibrational atmosphere, in a participatory embodied manner with affect-intensities, changing amplitudes of sensory phenomena. The climate – or the condition of the light and the temperature – where you work also has an immediate effect on how you experience the work. My two main home bases are Houston, Texas and London, UK, and their respective climate temperatures, humidities, the dryness or wetness and the biophysical transmissions of space one experiences are quite distinct from one another, thus affecting my metabodily being. My third base is the childhood forest valley where I grew up, in the Saarland (a tiny state in southwest Germany on the border with France and Luxembourg).

Languages, and lilting accents, spoken here and there, differ. Body languages differ. Round, flat, sharp edged, steep, curvy – physical contours are different, and so are the predominant colors and hues. Word machines differ too; when I travel from Texas to Europe, words, their contours and grammars, change and their phonetics require a different acoustic sensorium. But such vehicular shifts are relative, as we may be rehearsing with Chinese, Japanese, Italian and Brazilian performers, reminding our ears of very small nuances in the pronunciation of single syllables and homophones. Listening to atmospheres of the spoken is a feat of perception, and I have always considered it uplifting. During the METABODY project we traveled to work in various locations – Madrid, Amsterdam, Genova, Weimar, Paris, Dresden and back to London – and again the material world kept changing, and with it the reservoir of the imagination. I recall that the workshops in Madrid were most pleasurable as we woke early in the morning, every day, to sunshine and a walk to the nearby Retiro Park, to gather together and practice Qigong. A somatic preparation for the many hours that followed inside the Media Lab Prado. While in the park, I enjoyed listening to the slowly repeated guiding instructions for our movements, softly provided by Marcello Lussana. I also tried to take in the distant barking of dogs, the rustling of the wind in the trees, the urban noise of a city waking up outside of the perimeter of Retiro, on one side lined with many dozens of tiny wooden stalls displaying used books – the Cuesta de Moyano urban “library” dating back from 1925. Listening while moving, sensing felt presences and breathing the air above the grass under the sky – communication happening at elemental levels, transporting us.

I did not know at the time that atmospheres and immersion would gain a greater notoriety in the 21st century as terms relevant to theatre and performance. I also did not immediately think of these terms as pertinent to resilient theatre operations. And the writings that follow are not necessarily trying to do justice to n...