Each year the Center of Performing Arts Tutke organizes Spring days, in which doctoral candidates and other artistic researchers can present their work to each other. Sometimes these events have been only for Tutke’s research community (like this one), sometimes open to the public.
I had applied to take part in the Tutke Spring Days 2020 with the same notebook I used in Draft 10. The idea was to repeat the same thing in another event 17 months later. Due to the rapid spreading of the Covid-19-epidemic and the consequent closing of the university facilities the organizing team of Tutke Spring Days (doctoral candidates Kenneth Siren, Nanni Vapaavuori, Pauliina Laukkanen and Tuire Colliander) re-situated the event to the Microsoft Teams online environment. They asked also the presenters, if they were willing or able to realize their presentation remotely. I changed my original title how to audience into how to audience from a distance and replaced the physical notebook with a digital online one (at this point my use of the verb to audience was still careless. In this commentary, its definition is more narrow and I make a distinction between audience membership and audiencing). I situated the notebook in digital space using Etherpad, an open source online text editor.
The Etherpad document started with a description of Draft 10, followed by a re-iteration of it's assignment (the whole text available in the appendix):
The participants of the Spring Days could access the document at any time during the event and take notes on audiencing from a distance. Different users would be displayed on the screen as differently coloured text. Most of the writers were commenting on the difference between being in a conference call environment instead of a room.
The properties of the technology used for the event and their consequences for the audience were highlighted by several writers. This involved a choice of having your image visible for the others and if it was visible, the design of the background: the specific spot in your home environment, the possible changes you would make in it or a digital background hiding the space behind the person. The writers also emphasised the possibility to silence your microphone and the effects of the gate function of the video call software, cutting small sounds out.
These observations reveal features of an onsite audience that have profound effects on its function and influence. The perceptibility of minor bodily functions of an audience—the breathing, coughing, rustling of clothes, squeacking of chairs, smells and other subtle, almost unnoticeable expressions—all this renders an audience present for the performer and for themselves and provides information on their affective state of attention. It is the way resonance is implicitly performed by audience bodies. When this is missing, the presenters feel alone and unaware and the audience feels the need to support them with more explicit feedback, which in turn forces them to explicitly perform their resonant body (hence reiterating subordination through the adoption of the performer position by audience members, like the writer(s) below).
In addition to the performer feeling alone, they can also really be alone, if the audience members attend other things in their domestic space while keeping the conference call open. Remote audiencing enables the audience to freely ignore the performer and do something else while keeping the performance in the periphery of their field of attention. In this case they lose their resonant relation to what is being performed and drop out of the audience body. This effectively renders the status of these events as esitys/beformances more precarious than onsite events, in which the sharing of space produces a higher level and demand of presence and complicity from all the participants.
