I'll be Gone Again: Documenting the Virtual Body

Ruth Benschop

I’ll be gone was a project in which two groups of students from different backgrounds and theatre traditions worked together with artist Peter Missotten to create a performance at the Maastricht Theatre School. In the project they explored virtual technologies as part of a larger project called The Virtual Body. In order to research the way in which virtuality was at stake in the project, a documentation of the working process was made. The documentation aims to discuss as well as embody issues that are also at stake in performance and virtuality – such as the relationship between real/non-real and live/non-live. Moreover, the documentation tries to take seriously questions about why, how and for whom one would want to maintain what to all intents and purposes has gone: I’ll be gone.

ILLBEGONE is part of the SIA RAAK research project THEVIRTUALBODY.ORG by The Maastricht Theatre Academy

‘I was the only one outside the house. That matters for how you evaluate it, but how? I can see what is happening inside. The performance plays with that. The males can hardly see me, because a light is shining on the greenhouse. But I also only see a part. At a certain moment, I am hanging on top of the greenhouse and then I am on it and go in it. Inside you really can’t see a lot.’

‘The project was definitely not a research project by any stretch of the imagination. I felt the performance really lacked any sort of depth or intelligence. In the beginning of the project you could say we went through a research process – discussing contemporary art and watching films, however I felt there was no discussions about what we had watched and how we could explore it within the process. So for me the things we looked into were never used. That to me does not constitute a successful research period.’

All art is research, fundamental academic research in that it tries to find out something new without controlling the search. You try and make something collectively and at the same time try to find out what works. And you check with one another what “working” is. Until you have a new, working machine. It may not be useful in the short term, but definitely in the long run.’

‘If every description is an addition, omission, accentuation, and presentation, and if all these things are considered "distortion" according to the truth criteria of the recording, then it has to be said that many ethnographies suffer from a lack of distortion. After the symbiosis with the object they lack a phase of individualization - those de-contextualization processes in which a perspective is created, a vision of the field that differs starkly from the way members can see it.

Readers have a right to claim that a sociological description "make a difference." In order for that to happen, however, it is important that its constructive moment be developed, rather than kept under control. Descriptions have to make use of their liberties. But this also means that they will be judged according to their analytical achievements. I noted several times that descriptions do not hold their own against theoretical "prejudices." On the other hand, descriptions, compared with recordings, have a much higher potential for theoretical innovations: Where language becomes the central instrument for data production, concept formation becomes the center of empiricism, since from the very beginning it is in line with the whole struggle for verbalization with which description is dealing. It is from "soft" data that ethnographies obtain their theoretical impulses. If these impulses are taken up and developed further, the solution to the redundancy problem might be found in practicing ethnography, much against its traditionally naturalistic self-definition, as theoretical social research.’ (Hirschauer 2006, 438-439)

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Dear someone interested in issues around documentation and the legitimation of the documentation of I’ll be Gone,

Note: This documentation of I’ll be Gone is written in English to allow all participants of the project to read it.

I was asked to document I’ll be Gone by Peter Missotten. It had been a difficult project and he wanted an external view on why and how. He wanted his and his students’ work to be scrutinized by an outsiders gaze, even though, or maybe more correctly, just because it had been such a difficult process. Because it had been difficult, he was interested in an external examination. So already in the need for documentation, lies a reference to the non-representational, but always practical function of documentation. From the beginning it was never only going to be a true picture, but an instrument.

When starting to research I’ll be Gone, these were the kind of questions I was concerned with:

- How can I document I’ll be Gone in a way that is interesting for both the virtual body project and for the ARC project?

- If cataloguing, keeping, archiving is also doing, and performing, then what is an interesting performance of I’ll be Gone as research in the ARC?

- What do we learn about virtuality through analyzing I’ll be Gone? And what can we use of those insights for the design of the ARC?

- What notion of research is implicit in I’ll be Gone and how can I use it in documenting the project for the ARC?

- What role does the video registration of the performance of I’ll be Gone play?

- Who do I document for?

Partial perspectives and imitation

One aim of the exposition of I’ll be Gone is to provide an experience of the partiality of what can be seen. The performance was in a way about partial perspectives and about how such deliberate manipulation of partial perspectives raises questions about the reality of what is seen: are we dealing with reality or with expectations, fears, etc? More generally of course, theatre works with the tool of time, allowing this audience to see this performance at this moment in this place. This exposition of I’ll be Gone also aims in a way to imitate that reality of performance. The aim was to repeat it at the level of documentation: people’s stories about what happened during the project were also partially overlapping and once, there. Strikingly in this project, views differed quite extremely. So while in some cases there was indeed partial overlap, often there didn’t seem to be any overlap. To create this effect in the documentation, I chose to force visitors to choose a perspective (an identity) and to allow them insight only in the documentation aimed at this identity.

Research

I asked participants whether they considered I’ll be Gone a research project, and if so in what and conducted by whom. There was no agreement on this question. Some participants considered the project to have allowed them great freedom to research issues and particularly acts (in the greenhouse) that were also used in the performance. Others felt that the project was not a research project at all, either because they felt that the process did not allow them freedom to introduce their ideas or because they felt that there was no room for any substantial exploration and backing up of topics brought up throughout the project. Some felt it to have been a research project of director Peter Missotten.

Research here is conceptualized as (1) the freedom to explore and introduce these into the performance; (2) creating a foundation to legitimize and feed choices made within the project.

Distortion

In ‘Putting Things into Words: The silence of the Social’ (Human Studies 2006) Stefan Hirschauer discusses what he considers the central role of ethnographic description in a way that is relevant to the documentation of I’ll be Gone as well as to the question of virtuality and I’ll be Gone itself. He argues against the idea that the main problem of ethnography is forgetting. The researcher’s aim in doing research, making fieldnotes, making audio- and video recordings etcetera is not to hold on to the reality of a situation that is as fleeting as the researcher’s own ability to remember that reality. Ethnographic documentation, in short is not about representation. What then, does Hirschauer suggest that it is about? He argues that the central task that each ethnographer faces is to verbalize, to find or create words that do not yet exist about the situation/reality at hand. The ethnographer does not mirror what is already there, but through her background in another reality (academic ethnography, for instance) takes the position of the stranger who is forced to translate what she does not immediately or fully know or understand. Moreover, the words she finds should not be a representation of the field she has researched, but a result of both the world she comes from and the one she encounters. And this result should aim to engage with, intervene in both worlds.

I was the stranger. For me, then, to document I’ll be Gone in the way Hirschauer lays out, is thus to make a distorted image of I’ll be Gone. The distortion comes from the ways in which the world that I come from allow me to verbalize what I have encountered about I’ll be Gone. Moreover, I should aim to create a form of documentation that intervenes in the world to which I’ll be Gone belongs, as in mine – most particularly here, thus in the project of the Artistic Research Catalogue.

Some questions in no particular order:

- Why not provide students with insight in the artistic stakes of The Virtual Body project in which they were participating? Being wary of unambiguity may not have to radically exclude such knowledge all together.

- If using virtual technologies on stage is building a machine without knowing what it can do and then taming the beast so you can get an inkling of how audiences may experience that beast, then what taming building and taming skills should be taught?

- How educational is desperation? Or, how educational is safety?

- How can I tempt you to read this? Or, how can I make this documentation generous?

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