Personnel:
Dr. Ted Warburton, Coordinator
Concept:
I've worked with various apps and codecs, and I agree that sound latency can be highly problematic. However, with video, these days I am particularly interested in using off-the-shelf platforms such as iChat/Skype, ect., working with (as opposed to against) the inherent latency and digitial artifacts in consumer grade apps. For our part, I envision musicians interacting with dancers at UCSC in a kind of remote contact improv jam. Contact improv naturally raises ideas about physical and emotional boundaries, with issues of intimacy, privacy, touch, and bodily feeling in happy tension with the experience of keeping in space and time together (or not). I think that adding the "ether" aspect has the potential to add a compelling aesthetic challenge to the immediacy of the form. This isn't necessarily new, but still rich with possibilities. Following a previous Gilbert experiment, we also intend to use a roving camera onstage, exploring how a wandering eye might be immersed in the scenes; how the *contact* between dancers and musicians might become both actual and metaphorical; and ways that traditional boundaries between actors/players, dancers/musicians are blurred, with images and sounds of remote dancers and musicians riffing off one another with bodies, faces, feet, breath, natural and sounded rhythms and melodies all intertwined.
Anyway, that's the thought;-) Best, Ted
"If a group of people stand around in a circle long enough, eventually they begin to dance." - George Carlin
Initiating Institution: Scene 3: UCSC (from http://www.nyu.edu/classes/gilbert/acrossether/scenes.html)
Title of work: El Día de los Muertos
Brief Description
Sunday, November 1, 2009 is Day of the Dead (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Day_of_the_Dead), a celebration of those who have passed, an honoring of the deceased. (A very important day for many Californians.) In this scene we remember our ancestors across the ether, those who have transformed cultural development and exchange through the development of electronic and digital technologies. A monologue consisting of a mashup (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mashup) of writings from key figures (Marconi, Tesla, Edison, McLuhan) will frame a colorful physical ritual, a parade of images of masked performers, flowers, and candles.
Time of Selection: 5 minutes
Personnel and Ensemble
Director, Ted Warburton
Videographer, Shyam Sengupta
Ensemble (includes actors, dancers, designers, stage manager)
Ensemble
Amy Bobeda
Stefanie Byrd
Kaylie Caires
Bonnie Cannon-Brown
Vanessa Cerritos
Flynn Crosby
Maximi Egloff
James Zachary Gaidzik
Renee Gholikely
Evanis Hart
Paloma Henriques
Alexander Henriquez
Crystal Her
Stefanie Koch
Brian Luce
Alissa Lund
Kelvyn Mitchell
Walter Piche
Chessa Piker-Ward
Samuel Reyna
Crystal Smith
Madelyn Somers
Caroline Sownie
Cristina Vargas
Maria Voylokova
Edward (Ted) Warburton
University of California, Santa Cruz
ACROSS THE ETHER
DAY OF THE DEAD
MONOLOGUE 3.0
Our industry has invested so much money in technology that perhaps it's time to invest in talent, in people.
But what talents of the people?
In physicality?
In the mind?
Is this physical? Is technology physical? Can technology be physical?
We do this mental work with computers and electronics that may be the most
physical kind possible as our bodies sit still
Receiving and sending
Tightening and loosening.
But is this physical?
The mobility of staying impeccably still across the ether of every example
of our moving,
And moving is perhaps the most important thing of all,
Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.
But does this make us intelligent?
Intelligence in our blood?
Mechanical machines?
What about Mechanical machines?
What does that have to do with our physical being?
As the rising flood reaches more populated heights, machines will begin to
do well in areas a greater number can appreciate.
The visceral sense of a thinking presence in machinery will become increasingly
widespread. When the highest peaks are covered, there will be machines that
can interact as intelligently as any human on any subject.
The presence of minds in machines will then become self-evident.
You must keep it ever-present in your mind that you cannot endow even the
best machine with initiative;
The jolliest steam-roller will not plant flowers.
And yet The real problem is not whether machines think but whether
men do.
Instead of this
artificial intelligence, a kind of telematic organism is
what I endorse;
Dry digitalization alone is deadly.
I’m more syncretic than Socratic in my thinking.
On the global level, more interested in the connectivity of minds, than the
proximity of bodies; on the personal level, love, light and the extension
of the senses.
But what does this have to do with anything?
What of these super-intelligent machines?
What does this mean to us?
Our role is to maintain art as the agent of change and transformation.
Unlike these machines, we think ourselves into being.
‘Artist’ is the tag that confers freedom,
The right to live out of the box, to transgress orthodoxies of thought
and being.
To transgress, the mechanics that we must collaborate with,
That we are lucky enough to collaborate with.
Art always tries to go beyond itself;
And we, the artist, as supersensory self.
And, in fact, dance is the only art of which we ourselves are the stuff of
which it is made.
Concurrently, we need to stop acting as if life is a rehearsal.
Live this day as if it were your last.
And remember that art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead.
And it very well might be the Day of the Dead.
But I postpone death by living,
By suffering error,
By risking,
By loving.
If only life could be a little more tender and art a little more robust.
But the past is over and gone.
And yet, people only really think about the past when they are near death.
Like they are desperately searching for proof that they were ever alive.
One must always remember the future is not guaranteed.
For it very well might be the Day of the Dead
And the future is not a result of choices among alternative paths offered
by the present, but a place that is created—
Created first in the mind and will,
Created next in activity.
The future is not some place we are going to, but one we are creating.
And who creates this? Machines? Scientists that make those machines?
Scientists?
Artists?
Scientists, scientists, and scientific artists or scientific movers
Or movers just plain and simply moving science without the notion of science
in the brain
Just art, film…
Just whatever it is there as it happens in a process without the second thought
as to how it might be received!
The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious.
It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and
true science or the blending of the two.
He who knows it not and can no longer wonder,
No longer feel amazement,
Is as good as dead, a snuffed-out can.
We can only agree on the truth that art and science have their meeting point
in method
Technology as a replication of nature and the spirals of a nautilus,
And yet it has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded
our humanity,
We've arranged a civilization in which most crucial elements profoundly depend
on science and technology.
But who can see this as an injury?
The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people
to do what they want to do.
It lets people be creative.
It lets people be productive.
It lets people learn things they didn't think they could learn before, and
so in a sense it is all about potential.
But must it be complex to have such potential?
The technologies which have had the most profound effects on human life are
usually simple.
And what of human life? Death?
Human life without death would be something other than human;
Consciousness of mortality gives rise to our deepest longings and greatest
accomplishments.
And what of death?
You can kill a man, but you cannot kill an idea.
For it is written:
From my rotting body, flowers shall grow and I am in them and that is eternity.
Is this truth?
What is truth? The blending of art and science?
Nature shows that molecules can serve as machines because living things work
by means of such machinery.
Only because of everything around the brain and everything in nature is
it possible to see such parallels…intricate repetitious designs.
Chaotic and Complex in the most intelligent behavior seen here.
Do you see?
The further backward you look, the further forward you can see.
And truly, if I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Can you hear?
The ticking so controlled, focused,
SLOW.
Times are so slow that neuron-firing cycles lack the ability to decide on
recognizing a pattern.
A pattern also seen in the Rock.
The structure of the rock is almost useless.
The connection of the rock to the computer to technology to the motion of
signals and, once again, the pattern of movements that come together in a
random-like exactitude.
This is the plan well-devised in use
The clear images that stick into memory
And the precise choice of words, movements, expressions,
Including the subtle hints of thinking and imagination.
To create what?
Something faster than the Speed of Light.
But Man is still the most extraordinary computer of all.