NYU and UCI: Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope

In September 2001 as performing artists and collaborative arts engineers were working on a joint performance about Cassandra between the two institutions, the World Trade Center was attacked and destroyed.

This was a devastating blow and for a few weeks the collaborators at NYU felt they were in a war zone, and collaborators at UCI had experienced the devastation through the media and our exchanges. Our first inclination was to cancel our production of Cassandra and the Internet2 experiment. However, after some exchanges and discussion, the collaborators decided to honor the victims of the attack and investigate the feelings and responses through a collaboration for a production, Songs of Sorrow, Songs of Hope.

This resulted in a production that pioneered collaborative structure and improvisation through the medium of Internet2. This production was the first large scale production of improvised and processed works with performing artists utilizing and respond to the materials of each other in real time at two locations to two different audiences, east coast and west coast.

Collaborative Process

The nature of a new medium is the absorption of previous media and their contents. At least that is what seems to be one of the tenants of Marshall McLuhan's discoveries in Understanding Media. As startling as that claim might have seemed, how could it be otherwise? It almost seems to be a confirmation of how everything evolves and in the evolving morphs into something new and different. Time is the unfailing catalyst.

Yet add to that observation, an earlier observation of Hegel of the forces that shape history. He described culture or the historical moment as the thesis. A dialectical, opposing force, the antithesis, collides with the thesis, and from the ongoing collision and forced fusion, a synthesis occurs which replaces the older thesis, a new order, if you will.

From the standpoint of the artistic process and creation, both of these ideas seem central to the collaborative process. In some ways, we are always at the point of collaboration, of sharing ideas and materials, and in our mutual struggle and shaping of the new, we bring our work to a new dimension, a new discovery born out of our collaboration with the world.

Internet2 emerges as a process as much as it is a new medium. Its essence is collaboration for it is in the process of discovery of the other, acknowledging the other, incorporating the other, that our ideas emerge newborn and changed, transformed by the collisions of old and new, of a new medium leading us to discovery of new properties. We are unique in our separate cyber space presence and meaning can only emerge as we connect. The connection is a spontaneous eruption of a new, integrated presencing.

For purposes of this Blog, I2 is merely a metaphor for Internet Connectivity, for using the Internet to explore and exchange creative ideas, creating new sensibilities and new works through artistic, creative collaboration. Hopefully, in its ideal state, it will be less dependent on huge consortiums and more responsive to creative individuals who simply seek to work together in a mutual journey of exploration and creation.

An Artist for New Media: Barbara Rose Haum

A few years ago, a colleague from Information Technology Services described an Internet2 event that was performed by New York University led by Dr. Barbara Rose Haum with a University in Israel . I immediately got in touch with her as I am always searching for collaborators to bring new perspectives and energy to I2 events.

Dr. Haum proved to be a delightful, open spirit with strongly original ideas and a zest for what we both agreed is a powerful new expressive medium for the arts.

"I absolutely agree," she remarked upon my comment that I regarded I2 as a new medium, "one-hundred percent!" This enthusiasm was typical of Barbara. When she committed to anything, it was one-hundred percent and more. She went on to speculate that her passion for I2 collaborations would now be the focus of her professional and scholarly work. For my part, I was delighted to have discovered such a gifted and congenial fellow artist, and that we could share in developing I2 in the context of our alliance with arts technology as a means for extending the creative process.

We decided that we would begin by designing and teaching interdisciplinary courses on arts collaboration and Internet2. We finished these courses quickly and began teaching them in the Fall of 2006. It was an exciting time. Barbara was an innovative, creative spirit who easily embraced new media and technology. These media gave her an opportunity to extend her work as a visual artist of images, text, and dramatic revelations of sacred text.

We worked on a collaborative project with UCI. Our theme, Voices of Thallasus, focused on music and films created with sounds and images of the sea. Barbara came to the rehearsal with a huge, thick rope, some canvas, and other items she had found on the weekend at the beach, These immediately became important artifacts for our I2 production. Barbara had an eye and ear and a sensibility that connected elements, processed them, appropriated them as artistic presence and expression. The future was filled with ideas for collaborative projects and distant partners. In Internet2, she had found the medium where her originality could flourish and soar.

We began teaching our new course in the Fall, but quite suddenly, she was torn from us, taken by leukemia that at first appeared diagnosed as treatable and curable. Barbara would overcome this calamity and be back with us by Spring. But that was not to be. We never knew that the prognosis had suddenly turned so negative, and so we were taken by surprise that this dear, disarming, ebullient artist would not return to our collaboration.

I knew Barbara for scarcely a year and a half, but her presence and energy were so incandescent that she illuminated this emerging landscape like an exploding star. Even now, her wonderful voice speaks to us through the fabulous insights she possessed about this new medium where all borders dissolve in the electronic immediacy of time and space. The lives she touched with her art, her vision, her teaching, remain inspired to celebrate her work in new collaborations.

Internet2 for Everyone

Internet2 has been a metaphor for collaborative, interactive exchange that goes beyond the traditional talking-heads technology of video conferencing. I2 has been utilized with great effect in the sciences in which laboratories exchange process and control through distance collaboration, and by the arts that have created new structures through simultaneous performances, of written and improvised materials. But for all that, the limit has been the control of an elite group that requires extensive technological support. The elite group consists of universities, research institutions, and government organizations that pay an extravagant amount each month to maintain the monopoly and insure an open (traffic-free) I2 highway.

This Internet2 was the better Internet that we couldn't use without being a part of the elite.

Now we see new applications emerging that are low cost and permit a reasonable flow of images and sound between and among sites. Most are still conceived along the lines of talking-heads video technology. Skype is being used world-wide as a simple means of connecting video and sound. Recently a choreographer in New York used Skype to choreograph and process a dancer in in Korea. The results were impressive, a good as any of the vBrick connections we have used in the first half of this decade for I2 events. Furthermore, this choreographer did not need to clear the Internet highway in order to connect in "real time." Skype permits only one to one connections, so to have multiple streams of audio and video, you would need to employ multiple laptops at each site which could feed into mixers at each location. Also multiple sites would require additional hardware and coordination. Multiplying simple configurations can sometimes be fiendishly complex.

iChat provides the possible of three sites connecting through a single computer, but the addition of a computer and Canopus (device for signal conversion) for each site can provide an opportunity for high quality sound and video at each participating location. Two experiments with New York University, University of Colorado, and Bergen Community College resulted in successful application of the iChat technology for simultaneous public performances at each location: October 15th performance Trying to Connect, and the recent March 13th performance of Stayin' in Touch.

These performances were supported by ITS (Information Technology Services) staff at Colorado and BCC, but was handled by the performers and participants at NYU, although one of the participants was an accomplished video and audio engineer, but not on the NYU ITS staff. In the past such performances had been dependent on ITS support.

These shared performances demonstrated that simultaneous artistic collaboration and performance could be successfully achieved with the technology now available to everyone. It is a matter of adding microphones, speakers, projectors, video cameras to generate the material to be exchanged. This can be improvised or prepared and pre-processed, or a combination of both.

We are starting to see more and more collaborators sharing work over great distances in planning and performance. This creative application of technology in the hands of artists promises to usher in a renaissance of artistic growth that will no doubt challenge technology to serve as an enabling agency.

Collaborative Process and Digital Technology

Ultimately collaborating is sharing.

There is a certain degree of courage that enters into the process where we surrender ourselves to the moment and others engaged in our creative work. There is an additional collaborator: Digital Technology. This new technology in is continual transfomation. For the first time we have a technology that objectifies and brings identity to collaborative process.

Digital technology has been making the virtual world an alternative to our visions of reality. We have speculated that each of us perceives our own different reality and the new technology has permitted us to construct our own virtual worlds. In addition, Internet creations are making new environments for exchange, and video games create virtual environments that often consume more time than one's conventional world.

Much of what is going is our teaching the machines how to become us. To the extent that we codify all of our actions, beliefs, dreams, and needs, such efforts create a database for the machine. That was essentially the state of reality that forms the major premise of the popular film The Matrix. Reality is reduced to conscious and unconscious perception.

Perhaps two qualities make digital technology almost irresistible: immediacy and spontaneity.Immediacy has formed an essential element for the World Wide Web. Even in the earliest days this was a medium responsive to our ideas as we published our webpages as soon as we finished, or as soon as we wanted. Often we published in spurts, and a page emerged as different versions of itself as we endlessly edited our chimerical inspirations.

As pages became interactive, we experienced a digital spontaneity that transformed images and text as we moused over the surface of the page. This spontaneous quality sent us searching for dynamic web environments. More and more, the digital environments of the WWW are changing, transforming and mutating into alternative worlds, inviting the visitor to explore the pages, images and text are clues to hidden treasures.

The illusion of parallel universes exist in this virtual context. Quantum Physics has uncovered eleven dimensions of our current reality. And even now, Physics has begun to explore the reality of parallel universes. Often human imagination anticipates new discoveries in the world of science. Perhaps our consciousness is the ever-changing reality that is revealed through our imagination. New realities lurk on the outskirts of our conscious awareness.

Marshall McLuhan & Internet2

Marshall McLuhan is sometimes described as the father and prophet of the electronic age. Certainly no one understood media as intuitively as McLuhan whose ideas literally exploded upon academia as a new field of media ecology was created in response to his work.

The Internet had not yet erupted, but McLuhan seemed to understand the implications of the electronic age that was now emerging as an age of new media. In Understanding Media (originally published by McGraw-Hill in 1964 and now by MIT Press, 1994) McLuhan observed:

If the work of the city is the remaking or translating of man into a more suitable form than his nomadic ancestors achieved, then might not our current translation of our entire lives into the spiritual form of information seem to make of the entire globe, and of the human family, a single consciousness?

Some three decades ahead of their time, McLuhan's words describe the emerging electronic consciousness, the neural network that makes up the Internet, and Internet2 takes us closer to this "spiritual form of information" which has served to fire the imagination of scientists, academicians, and artists. Indeed each advance of media and digital technology is articulated through smaller and smaller devices in which all functions continue to merge and overlap in astonishing leaps and bounds. Print media, mixed media, images, photos, radio, TV, video, and film all merge into a single device, an additional brain outside our bodies, connected through dynamic interactive networks where knowledge and process are housed in distributed servers around the world that know no boundaries. While Internet2 is guarded by the high priests of the Consortium, enterprises like Skype are transforming distances into the immediacy of communication.

Now the artist is perpetually at the point of knowledge and understanding, and creation is an interactive perpetual exchange which is never finished. The creative process starts to become synonymous with the collaborative process. Ideas and expression take precedence over authorship. Ownership surrenders to spontaneity and change. Yes, Miranda, it is indeed "a Brave New World" ...but more than brave... a bountiful world compressed into binary code, a splitting the atom of imagination and creating a new equation of the infinite expanse of conscious awareness and objects dissolving in the energy of process.

Early Internet Collaborations: The Cassandra Project

A very early experiment for Internet collaboration began with a December 15th, 1996 exchange among dancers at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University, musicians at a loft in Greenwich Village, NYC, and actors at a studio stage at New York University known as the Cassandra Project. A few remnants of the posted event still linger on servers somewhere. The link posted here may work for a while, but like all web events, websites become ephemeral phatoms that come and go and the preservation of the history of the Internet and its artifacts has been very haphanzard to say the least.

Some of the key artists were choreographer/dancer Lisa Naugle at SFU, Director Alistair Martin-Smith with actors from NYU's Educational Theatre, and musicians and composers at the loft of webartist Pierre de Karangal, led by composers Dinu Ghezzo and John Gilbert. Chianan Yen engineered the cound at the loft site and later produced a CD of the sound events.

The flavor of the times gave a special pioneering feeling to these early beginnings. Artists were experimenting on many levels. The atmosphere was that of a frontier, and engineers and artists found a new framework to explore and extend their work.

The format of this 1996 event was very simple: Using the theme of Cassandra, each group of artists posted short improvisations on the WWW. Each site viewed and listened to the work of each other and created responses which were in turn posted. A structured improvisation by the three sites later led to an exchange of video and sound-ytacks which were used in a stage production in May, 1997.

From these simple beginnings works of depth and richness have evolved, and I2 has begun to come into its own as an artistic medium. There are artists seriously at work in incorporating media and distance collaboration as the substance of their creative performances.

However, recently exploring the I2 site, I have been struck by the apparent lack of innovation. Mostly there seem to be experiments using the I2 pipeline as a distance education classroom, or a professional artist giving a lesson to a student at a distance, or the broadcast of a recital to a distant location. Telematic Dance has definitely merged technical and artistic innovations as I2 events. Unfortunately these events have not been seriously reviewed, and publication noting details of the events is often not forthcoming.

Yet there is something about the way I2 dissolves boundaries and exists in its own unqiue time space that suggests we have yet to discover the true artistic idiom of this new medium.