Aanleiding
Intermedialiteit speelt een belangrijke rol in de huidige ontwikkelingen in het theater. Professionals uit alle theaterberoepen zoals acteurs, musici, performers, regisseurs, theater technici, hebben te maken met nieuwe technische mogelijkheden. Technologie kan gebruikt worden bij het bedenken, maken en tonen van een voorstelling. De inzet van technologie varieert van het gebruik van bestaande, bekende toepassingen zoals het projecteren van een decor, tot nieuwe onbekende toepassingen waarmee performers innovatieve creaties ontwikkelen of tonen. Deze intermedialiteit zorgt voor spanning in de podiumkunsten omdat professionals geconfronteerd worden met een ontwikkeling die direct ingrijpt op het uitoefenen van hun beroep. Het Toneelhuis Antwerpen, The Center of Contemporary Arts Manchester en de Toneelacademie Maastricht willen het gebruik, de effecten en de grenzen van intermedialiteit in het theater diepgaand onderzoeken.

Doelstelling
Een internationaal erkend platform creëren waar kennis, experimenten, innovaties en alle mogelijke ervaringen met intermedialiteit met elkaar samenkomen. Het platform stimuleert het gebruik van intermedialiteit en stimuleert internationale kennisuitwisseling hiervan.

Beoogde resultaten
Een internationaal projectbureau zal de continuïteit van het internationale kennisplatform waarborgen. Daarnaast zullen er in zes verschillende landen artistieke presentaties worden gegeven van uitgevoerd onderzoek. Het onderzoek vindt plaats in een laboratorium setting waar studenten, docenten en professionals uit meerdere landen met elkaar een bepaald thema binnen intermedialiteit onderzoeken.
De onderzoeksprocessen en resultaten worden vastgelegd in een vervolg op het boek Theater & Technologie en via een aantrekkelijke en internationaal laagdrempelig digitale omgeving (bijvoorbeeld Facebook en LinkedIn).

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Dear person who is interested in the SIA-RAAK project The Virtual Body,

The Virtual Body is a project artistically managed by Peter Missotten and funded by RAAK. This project consists of a series of diverse events/projects in which participants (a combination of students of the Maastricht theatre school and young professionals in the field of theatre/art/digital technology) explore digital practices and concepts to enrich the application of such technologies, primarily within the Maastricht Theatre School. The project I’ll be Gone was the first project within The Virtual Body.

The gains in virtuality can be recognized in two ways. First, by looking at what was learnt about the virtual in I’ll be Gone, and second by analyzing the performance itself. Both perspectives on virtuality in I’ll be Gone were informed, it should be noted, by interviews with participants. They talked about what they had learned and they talked about what they considered the role/importance of virtual technologies in the end performance.

     1) Learning about the virtual

I’ll be Gone was not about virtuality.  In general, Peter Missotten aims to work in such a way that his work is never unambiguously about anything. Whenever it becomes clear what a performance is about, he steers away from it. An unambiguous message that is the exact equivalent of the performance, he holds, should not be performed, because the performing of it would add nothing. Messages should be written down. In practice this means that (1) ideas about virtuality were introduced in the beginning of the project through the work of artists who themselves work with virtuality; (2) the stakes of the project in the larger SIA-RAAK project were only indicated rudimentarily to participants as one of the many aspects or themes feeding the project; and (3) virtuality was brought in very concretely by Missotten’s introduction later in the project of the use of projections on the walls of a greenhouse that was used on stage.

There seems to be a kind of radical non-intervention logic at work here: In order for students to meaningfully work on and with virtual technologies, they should not consciously think about this aim. I wonder about this. Why such radical non-interventionalism? Why not also conscious thought?

More implicitly, participants indicated ways in which the virtual body was at issue in the project:

Technical skills

It was at issue for them technically: students indicated that they – at least some of them – had gained technical skills in working with digital projections in the project. In particular they learned that in order to work in a realistic manner, that is to create en effect that manages to fool or confuse viewers about what is real (live) and what is not-real (a projected image) is hard and precise and quite non-virtual work. For instance, they had to record the material in such a way that bodies could seem to emerge out of thin air, involving the skilled use of smoke and a plane of hard-plastic and many, many takes. They had to learn how to spray the “right” amount of chalk-water on the transparent windows of the greenhouse that was used in the performance to create an opaque surface onto which the images could be projected. Whenever they failed to do so, the confusing effect on the watching audience did not come about. They had to deal with effects of creating this virtual effect, such as one of the participant’s allergy to chalk.

As a lot of research into questions on how technology works, shows, here too:

Creating virtual effects involves a lot of non-virtual, technical and human effort and skill.

Moreover, some participants felt that the skill needed to work with the projections allowed something qualitatively good to emerge. In contrast to earlier projects, in which digital technologies were explored which were, they felt, too new to students.

You have to have quite a high level of skill in order to make something good. So to innovate on themes such as virtuality, it might be better to use “older” technologies for which skills and know-how are available.

     2) Virtuality in I’ll be Gone

On the basis of interviews with participants, a number of perspectives on the performance as such emerged, which I outline here.

In the performance I’ll be Gone, the combination of projections that were made and staged to be “realistic,” yet physically impossible, can be said to have created a crisis of authenticity: it seems real, but it can’t be real. This crisis maybe intensified the other themes that can be seen to be running through I’ll be Gone.

Besides the non-virtual encounter with virtual technologies, I’ll be Gone is characterized by a juxtaposition of physicality, or brutality and the virtual. In the performance, power and sexual relations between men and women are explored and played out it a sado-masochistic or pornographic way. The one female in the piece is outside the greenhouse attached to a cable, while the males are locked into the greenhouse. Yet the males (particularly one figure) controls (physically, through a tackle that was attached to her and that was controlled by a remote control in the greenhouse) her.

The performance could only bring in ideas of virtuality in terms of other more substantive themes and topics. Moreover it may have worked not only through this combination of themes, but also through the combination of virtual and non-virtual technologies.

In this way, I’ll be Gone also came to deal with the virtual body more conceptually. In the project, Missotten introduced a greenhouse and projections for the students to work with. The greenhouse introduced a notion of in- and outside which was combined with a notion of real and unreal by the images projected on/in the greenhouse. This pulling apart of the “inside” and the “outside” of a performance is a way thematizing the role of media in the performance. Missotten argues that the stage is always a machine that creates meaning. Technologies of virtualization and other media however, necessitate in performers an extreme faith in what the audience is given to see. More so than in non-mediatized performances, as performers you have to learn together to deal with the machine and to control it, in order to get to know what the audience is given to see. In this constellation, students worked with notions such as time and reality:

- Are non-virtual bodies now, and virtual (that is projected) bodies not-now?

- What is not-now?

- Is not-now the future, or rather the past or expectations, fears, fantasies of the non-virtual bodies?

These questions were not solved in the project, but thrown up for audiences to consider. In a way, then, the audience experience replicated the exploration and inquisitiveness of the students’ working process.

The performed/staged questions about time, power and reality were explored in an apocalyptic, mythical, mediaeval, religious stage setting. In combination with the projections and the greenhouse this atmosphere could give rise to questions such as:

- How typical of our (post)modern, secular time is the virtual really?

- In what way might we think of the virtual as a current-day form of religion or mysticism?

The students performed the piece in a very precise, slow and attentive manner. This deliberate and focused manner of performing created an effect of threat and meaningfulness in a piece that was otherwise defied grasping, for instance through linear narrative. Audiences were thus appealed to, to find or create meaning in the slow world they encountered on stage.

Missotten speaks of the generosity of performance: that and what the performance gives the audience. He describes the successful use of the recordings in I’ll be Gone in the same terms and thus defines a criterion to evaluate the use of virtual techniques: ‘Is the simulacrum better than the original? That is, does it invite audiences to fantasize more? This is done here with simple means, although they have to be used effectively. You confuse the brain and that creates arousal. And arousal is always experienced by audiences as meaningful.’

To decide whether to use virtual technologies, the question is not how well these technologies simulate reality, but whether they create a more generous performance.

Generosity is at issue in a different way also: Even though nobody may have wanted to make a performance that was sadistic and pornographic, apparently this is what they ended up with, working with virtual technologies. ‘I’m a structuralist in that sense. Working with these technologies means to some extent surrendering to their logic. And here, that surrender, which is also a learning to really work with the technologies, resulted in something no one individually would have chosen to make or say. In a way it was not surprising that while we started the narrative from the Angels (the first, rather peaceful virtual bodies in European history), we ended up with a quite violent and rather sexist play. If you look at the evolution of virtual media: it started off as a load of unsold educative cd-roms on all kind of subjects, and ended up with the huge success of online porn sites and Grand Theft 3. This tells something about what narrative a virtual medium in itself transfers. The medium is the message - again.’ (Peter Missotten) The students were generous in the sense that they learned to surrender themselves craft-fully to the machine.