'Making art through technology'

by Amund Ulvestad – Multimedia Artist, Musician and Composer (NO)

“YES! Wow! I think we are finally entering the twenty-first century!” 

The troll roared, stomping her feet joyfully on the ground, each stomp producing thunderous, boulderlike sounds. It was her first time trying on the troll sound costume I had prepared for her – and the first time anyone at the Croatian National Theater had ever acted with motion sensors. It was also my first time using these sensors for theatrical sound design, but the novelty of the technology had already worn off a bit (my neighbors suffered three weeks of me stomping around in my studio like a troll). Still, seeing this anything but troll- sized actress tramp about the room, hearing her test out her new stone arms and boulderlike feet, enthusiastically growing into a completely new creature before my eyes and ears, I had to agree with her: it did seem like we were entering a new era.

Technology is, in itself, nothing new. There is a clear line of technological development from the invention of the wheel to the Mars rover – a long series of ideas gradually given physical shape through human labour. The wheel. Could its inventors have imagined its impact on society? Could they envision all the purposes the wheel would fulfill and what other inventions it would facilitate? Did they ever dream of the Mars rover? Probably not. Human societies’ development of the wheel has been a long process. In fact, the wheel is still being developed today. And so, it would be a mistake to think of the creation of the wheel as a singular turning point, a dramatic moment that forever changed human society. Rather, it was the other way around: our constantly changing society – our needs, our wants – created the wheel. And new needs, new wants continue to shape it today, all the way to Mars. Human culture and its relationship to technology is just that – a relationship. In which culture informs technology and vice versa. Today our relationship to digital technology resembles the relationship our Neolithic ancestors had to the wheel.

The digital machine is, at least to most of us, something of a mystery. Like the wheel, it promises to free us from some of our burdens, to make our lives easier and more comfortable; it seeks to inject itself into our very way of living, communicating and working. And still, like the wheel to the people of the Neolithic era, it is a device whose innate properties most of us cannot easily understand and whose future potential we cannot fully grasp. This is precisely why we should interact with it.

The novelty of a new technology – its apparently magical properties – is its least interesting feature. In fact, it is only through deep exploration of a technology – i.e. , by demystifying it and thereby negating its novelty – that we can make any sort of tool or machine that would have potential in an artis- tic context. We, as creative artists, should remember this when working with new technology: only by getting to know the technology, only by getting past its baffling newness, can we produce art with it. But how can we go about doing this?

Consider the sculpture of ancient Greece. We are used to seeing sculptures as white and clean abstractions of, for the most part, the human form. And so, their cold, ethereal white- ness became a symbol of ancient Greek culture, perhaps resonating with our notions of a classical ideal of purity. But now we know that they were all originally painted. Imagine the entire Parthenon in vivid colour: the deep blues, bright reds and shining yellows. To produce a sculpture in ancient Greece was to marry the art of chiselling stone or casting bronze with the art of painting. This begs the question: Was the underlying sculpture seen simply as a three-dimensional canvas, a shape on which the painter could produce art? Or was the sculpture seen as the true art form, the paint merely a final touch, a little decoration? Or were they perhaps considered equally important contributions to a final sculptural ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’?

Modern theatre is a similar marriage of art forms. So when an actors walk across the stage reciting a text, we must ask: Is the text their canvas, the underlying structure upon which they produce art? Or are they just a mediator? Maybe the actors themselves are a canvas, dressed as they are in a costume, surrounded by lights, smoke and scenography, and under- scored, perhaps, by dramatic music or the sound of distant crows? Or is the performance of the text itself the true art form, the surrounding technological elements merely forms of decoration?

Anyone who has worked in the theatre knows that every production contains an implicit hierarchical relationship between the different art forms that come together onstage, depending on the project and its participants. While one production might be conceived solely as the traditional acting out of a script, others are explorations of specific architectural spaces, bodies or objects; others are still dramaturgically closer to a concert or a conversation or – any imaginable thing. Each of these focuses requires a different approach and organisational structure in which the most essential artistic disciplines within the given project come to the fore and lead the way. This is especially true when exploring new and yet untested technology in an artistic context: because we do not know how it will function and what role it can play; because we cannot lean on conventions when incorporating it into our work. In short, if we really want to explore new technology, we must make it a true exploration. We must invent from scratch both a suitable work methodology and a language for communicating what we are experiencing and where we want to go. We must make theatre through technology. How can technology tell the story? How can technology itself be theatre?

Circling back to the troll at the Croatian National Theatre, I feel optimistic. Through the staging of Peer Gynt here and The King’s Fair at the Norwegian Theatre in Oslo, we have barely scratched the surface of what kinetic sound design and music can be. But the enthusiasm from the actors who are now regularly acting with the technology as well as the reactions from the audience, theatre-makers and artists from other fields bode well for a continued in-depth exploration and development of the technology. We have indeed entered the twenty-first century – and it is still young.” (Ulvestad, 2019)19

19 Amund Ulvestad, “Making Art through Technology,” European Theatre Lab, September 17, 2018, https://www.europeantheatrelab.eu/making-art-technology/.

“Can digital communication be an aesthetic empowerment of the audience?"

by Jan Linders – Head Dramaturge and Deputy General Manager, Badisches Staatstheater Karlsruhe (DE)

Peter Weibel, director of the Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe (ZKM), makes the following prediction: “Today we applaud the robots. In thirty years, the robots will applaud us.” The trinational Stage Your City project was designed to overcome this binary contrast. It is not ‘man versus machine’, but analogue performance combined with creatively implemented digital technology, which allows for instant interaction, that is being tested as a variant of the theatre of the future.

There is no doubt that we are already digitizing all areas of life: television is only digital; self- learning algorithms suggest news stories, films, songs and friends to us on social media; artificial intelligence will soon control self-driving cars. Many people touch their smartphone more often than their partner. Your device knows you better than a friend, an authority: every preference, every movement, every fingerprint is registered and evaluated. Until now the order in auditoriums and theatres has been, “Please switch off your smartphones!” But isn’t theatre – as the pure and final oasis of analogue – closed to a technical development that has long since become a social development? Where would the theatre be today if the Romans had said, “No machines on the stage!” or the people of the Baroque had said, “No backdrops!”; if the visitors of 1880 had said, “No electric lighting!” or the spectators of the 1990s had said, “No video please!” Up to now, theatre has virtuously added every technique to its range of means of expression, without neglecting the essential: the people on stage. So we must ask ourselves: How can digital processes be used artistically? How can the role of the audience be expanded digitally?

These questions were the starting point of Stage Your City – a European Theatre Lab project headed by the European Theatre Convention. ETC had submitted several funding applications to the EU to develop forms of a theatre of the future. Only applications that listed ‘digital’ as a keyword were successful. Theatre people from Nancy, Tbilisi and Karlsruhe developed the dramaturgy for a digital/analogue, multi- perspective tour of the city of the future in several OpenLabs at the Médiathèque Manufacture Nancy, the Ars Electronica Center in Linz and the ZKM Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. The texts were written by the Lasha Bugadze, Marie Dilasser, Frédéric Sonntag and Konstantin Küspert.

The audience meets in a black box and encounters four experts from 2052, each of whom represents a moral challenge for the next thirty years: love in times of total simulation, immortality through medical technology, identity without historical memory, security through total surveillance.

Guided by an app and divided into four groups of twelve people each, the audience comes to four stations in succession. On the way, the experts use audio commentary to delve even deeper into their problem; this soundtrack transforms the city and its inhabitants into a future dystopian backdrop.

At four stations (a gate, a café, a library and a doctor’s surgery) at each venue, the audience gets together with virtual and/or real actors and is encouraged to interact. They send a photo, a selfie, a personal love song and a short text via the app to the net.

Back in the black box of the theatre the audience gets to meet themselves. The pictures they sent appear in a 360-degree film accompanied by a mix of the love songs. In the end, there is a real person – a little girl – as the embodiment of the master gives the people of the future love, immortality, identity and security.

When selecting the digital techniques that the trinational team wanted to acquire artistically, it followed the advice of Gerfried Stocker, the artistic director of the Ars Electronica Center: to offer all visitors a valid experience, not just rely on one technology, take technical problems into account, and not become dependent on a solution. Many projects rely on a single technique and use it to its full potential. We preferred to experiment with many new technologies and test possible artistic applications. The focus is not on technology, but on the history of the common migration into the future of the cities.

A 360-degree film on the project page www.zigmagora.eu introduces the audience to the topic and invites them to download the app. The technical rooms of the Karlsruhe State Theatre serve as a futuristic backdrop. Many viewers experience the amazing possibilities of their smartphone for the first time: the picture follows the movement of the smart- phone up, down and in all directions.

The four experts from the future introduce themselves in an installation by media artist Chris Ziegler: eight iPads on stands are arranged in a circle and use overlay technology to suggest to the standing or moving viewer inside that someone is talking to them.

The virtual actors in the city only become visible to those who hold their smartphones on a poster with a hidden code. Using this augmented reality technique, the actors can play with themselves or colleagues who were filmed previously.

For the final picture, a programme developed by Bernd Lintermann of the ZKM puts together the pictures produced by the audience into a three-dimensional sphere inside, which can be experienced with the help of a simple cardboard attachment for the smartphone.

The audience thus experience their own city in a new way, discuss problems of technical progress and have experiences with the theatrical use of digital technologies that most of us have never experienced or used before – they can thus get involved in two senses. This too is ‘Volkstheater’ in Karlsruhe: the digital empowerment of the audience to participate.” (Linders, 2018)20

20 Jan Linders, “Can Digital Communication Be an Aesthetic Empowerment of the Audience?,” Publications | European Theatre Convention, 2018, https://www.europeantheatre.eu/publication/can-digital-communication-be-an-aesthetic-empowerment-of-the-audience