LEAKS FROM A PEDESTRIAN CYBORG by Outi Condit

As my doctoral process winds towards its (however partial and provisional) sedimentation as "commentary" I have been thinking about writing. How can I write? The Performing Arts Research Centre curriculum asserts that the commentary "must demonstrate capacities to analyse, articulate, conceptualise, contextualize, and theorise artistic research settings in ways characteristic to artistic research." In ways characteristic to artistic research. It's an invitation. The door is ajar! In Figures of Touch (2018) Harri Laakso writes that the task of artistic research is to "keep grasping towards what cannot be grasped, to encounter the unknown as unknown, where the unknown will not be revealed, but indicated." Over the past four years I have been trying to trace assemble perform provoke something of the elusive experience of being "more than one, less than many", inhabited and moulded by relations, matters, (secret) agents, machines and ghosts, yet still managing to find some space to wriggle. The research has been informed by my professional life as an actor within the apparatus of theatre that folds into my queer experience of becoming in discomfort with expectations placed on my gendered body and the joys of failure. The experiments and art works are not my data. They are ways my research manifests in the world. If I don't want to write about them, how can I write? How can I inhabit the impasse that is artistic research, not as a binary opposition, but as a field of historically situated and contingent tensions of what is legible accessible legitimate and citable and for whom? Can an artistic strategy be considered a form of writing? This mini-exposition displays a writing experiment made through the Remote Control Human machine, a speculative re-assembling of elements, bodies and politics of theatre with which I have been experimenting in different ways for some time now. For this experiment I asked two of my closest colleagues, Vincent Roumagnac and Simo Kellokumpu, to collaborate. For each I wrote a "script" or a "seed", maximum one page long. I was thinking of them when I wrote, so the "seed" already grows from the intersection of my approach and theirs. I sent the scripts about a day before each session, and invited them to edit and rewrite freely as they liked. Then I asked them to perform their version of the script in front of the camera, through the Remote Control Human machine, with myself as their remote control avatar. I also asked them to decide on the location and frame the image, in effect, to split their artistry into two: to both inhabit and perform through my body, and to control what the camera sees as well. In practice the arrangement was realised through a telephone connection in between the "driver" and the "avatar", in this case myself, and simple game mechanic consisting of signals via a dog clicker: one click for speech and two for action. In addition the "driver" could see through two screened streams from two action cameras, one on the body of the "avatar" (P.O.V.-cam), and another behind the filming camera, so that the "driver" could see both the frame of the camera and the "avatar" behind it (panopti-cam). I would like to invite you to consider this arrangement as (something that produces) writing. Where and when is the writing? Who or what is writing? And obviously very importantly, (how) does this writing become legible? I am seriously considering continuing with this arrangement, so practical suggestions as well as conceptual considerations are warmly welcomed.

This is me. (Simo Kellokumpu, performing through Outi Condit, based on her script, which I have been invited to edit and rewrite as a like)

How are performing bodies assembled?

If something is assembled it could be assembled differently. "The body" is ceases to be natural and discrete. Its boundaries are up for renegotiation.

Simo Kellokumpu's artistic research asks:

if everything moves, how do I take place?

Taking place is both temporal and spatial. I arrive. I take up place.

Now I am here.

But who is speaking when an actor is speaking?

My commitment to bodies as malleable, and capable forming and performing differently in different material-discursive arrangements, is partly based on my professional experience as an actor, shape-shifting from one composition to another. But it also grows from my lived experience of queering

of being queer

of being a queer

in the apparatus of theatre and its representational regimes.

Following Sara Ahmed's Queer Phenomenology,

my experiences of becoming are as much connected to failures to fully extend into the spaces and patterns expected from my lived body, and its formation through inabilities and gaps, as much as its abilities.

The failure to fully and believably perform the body which fits dominant regimes is the failure that has performed this body,

or at least taken part in its formation,

as it takes place now.

This is the paradoxical ambivalence of a body that tends a certain way. A non-sovereign, yet obstinate body

inhabited by outside forces, wills, and voices. A body ungrounded. A virtual body, in its thingliness, even though it's flesh. Virtually anything could happen, and its anticipation is experienced in flesh. The virtual is in the anticipation, a haunting from possible futures, which has material consequences in the now. I trust you with virtually anything.

Alien phenomenology disturbs the sovereignty of a body that is regarded as a person with inhabitation by human and non-human agents, patterns and matters. And/or/again the boundaries of the human are political, and up for renegotiation.

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The actor (actress) is present(ly) with the actor-come-theatre director (Vincent Roumagnac), performing the actor (actress) in a russian-doll act of ventriloquist writing.

In the piece we co-created together two years ago, the actress (gendered) is staged as a product of the theatre machine, in which the actorly body and the directorial gaze are mutually co-constituted.

In an often repeated truth of the rehearsal studio, the actor's body is their tool. And thus they are trained to be part of the theatre machine, its fantasies become their flesh, their patterns are patterned, they are shaped by its rhythms, haunted by its gestures, they are its recurrent dream, in the Foucauldian sense, but also in the words of philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, singular plural, or of affect scholar Lisa Blackman, more than one, less than many, but hey, aren't we all.

The actor is in-between. One takes place between text and voice, between the "ontology of presence" and sediments of repetition and technique, between narrative and lived bodies, prescribed gestures and felt, channelled, and repressed affect. On the post-postdramatic stage cuts, splits and diffractions may be in the open. At the same time psychophysical approaches like Chechov or Meisner techniques (which remain popular) prime the actor to absorb these disjunctures, aiming for "instinctive and authentic performance".

The actor simultaneously obscures and sustains the performative dichotomies of theatre. No wonder our bodies are so wrought with tension.

Since the rise of the theatre director as the ultimate theatre auteur from the late 19th century onwards, the actor has also inhabited the inbetween between the theatre director and the audience. And so the actor or acting became the ultimate problem of theatre.

As instruments, we are dubious. Uncanny shapeshifters, unreliable machines, and never quite the desired übermarionettes. Our virtuosity is never quite enough, and at the same time a bit too much.

Auteurs of stage and screen tend to hate the virtuosity of the actor (actress!) and love finding the cracks. Think of Bertolucci and the rape of Maria Schneider! Violence and manipulation is of course a way of cracking things open, but instead of light I expect it's the same old stagnant fantasies flooding in.

Following Rosa Menkman, a glitch is a reminder of the inner workings of a system, "a wonderful interruption that shifts an object away from its ordinary form and discourse, towards the ruins of a destroyed meaning". I wanted to reassemble the systems of theatre into a performing body, a techno-metabolic actor, in which a human body could perform as a stage for glitches, ghosts and transmedial affects.

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This is researcher clown Stacey Sacks speaking from behind the full body mask of Outi Condit,

(another white body, nothing to see here)

invoking the actor as hypocrite - the one speaks from underneath.

Theatre is tied to a relation of appearing, theatron literally means place for viewing. Directors tell actors: "Everything is visible". I don't know if this is supposed to be a comfort or a threat.

(Is theatre a panopticon?) (Now you see me now you don't)

A medium appears in its failure, or at least in its friction, more like a glitch than a broken hammer, a performance of the subterranean invisible on which every surface depends.

Because I'm an actress I was never medium proper, always medium flavored, not to mention fractured,

I never knew how to do woman, "believably", at least not until I discovered drag.

And desire was always problem, I mean, whose desire?

my desire

my representations of desire

my expressions of desire were largely illegible, to that gaze off-stage, on-stage, read as aggression or coldness, "Just be yourself!" "But not like that".

But as a white body I slip into neutrality quite easily, everything is possible, I am invisible, just another drop in a sea of whiteness, (see Ahmed, 2007, A phenomenology of whiteness), the construct is transparent, the medium does its job, and disappears.

How did this body become white? What is embedded in that subterranean invisible, and how can it glitch?

Stanley G: "When you shine a light on white, you see NOTHING! By focusing on this nothing you then place it in the centre, reinforcing its invisibility and the spurious ways this invisibility seeps into the cracks of privileged complicity, perpetuating dominant ideologies."

And: "The research asks NOTHING of you, except to remember what stinks in the swamp of your own soul, to examine your own biases, prejudices and blind-spots."

And he quotes James Baldwin: "As long as you think you are white, there is no hope for you. "

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