Text To Screen Starts:
We have many options with discourse/texts… which,
post analysis, we choose to reject or subsume…
However, a preferable formula for their ‘creative’
use/implemantation in understanding our expanding
digital hypertextual world and immersive virtual environments,
may be to consider these chosen discourse/texts – post analysis
as vectors – valuable points of reference. That is to say
‘quantities, having direction as well as magnitude, in
determining the position of one point in space relative to another’
here, intelligent and rigourous inclusion/exlusion of certain texts,
aid our cognition/comprehension, of an overall system
Their significance and value lies – not only in supplying
meaning constructed via their validity, relevance, and binding
to other chosen vectors, when applied to the potential of virtual
systems/environments – but also as an aid in defining our
‘place and our functional practice’ within virtual systems and
environments, it’s agency, strategy and eventual operational effect…
contributing towards the perception of a developing Zeitgeist
pixel Reanimator/Andy Stringer
Introduction to Zeitgeist/On Recognition of Antonin
Virtual Theatre Performance 2010
We have a genuinely polyphonic system of information, which is theatrical; a density of signs (this in contrast to literature as monodic, leaving aside the problem of the cinema). What is the relationship between these signs, arranged in counterpoint (that is to say, dense and extended at the same time, simultaneous and successive)? They do not have the same signifiers (by definition), but do they always have the same signified?
We know that the linguistic sign is not ‘analogous’, it is formed with reference to a digital code.
All representation is an extremely dense semantic act. Interrelationship between the code and the acting (that is between langue and parole), the nature (analogous, symbolic, conventional) of the theatrical sign, signifying variations of this sign, constraints of interconnections, denotation and connotation of the message; all these fundamental problems of semiology are present in the theatre.
It might even be said that the theatre constitutes a semiotically privileged object, since its system is apparently original (polyphonic) compared to that of language (which is linear).
… the meaning of a theatrical work depends not only on a summation of intentions and ‘chance discoveries’ but on what might properly be called an intellectual system of signification.
(By signification I mean the process which produces meaning and not meaning itself).
Finally… the theatrical sign is not self-determined, that which we call naturalness in an actor or the truth of a style of acting is only one language among many (a language accomplishes its function, which is to communicate, through its validity not through its veracity), and this language is a by-product of a certain mental set – that is, of a certain history in such a way that to change the signs (and not just what they say) is to give the natural a new deal (an undertaking that precisely defines art), and to base this deal not on ‘natural’ laws but, on the contrary, to base it on the freedom that men have to make things signify.
Roland Barthes
Theatre and Signification ’63
The theatre of cruelty is not a representation.
It is life itself, in the extent to which life is un-representable.
Life is the nonrepresentable origin of representation…
The stage is theological for as long as it is dominated by speech, by a will to speech, by the layout of a primary logos, which does not belong to the theatrical site and governs it from a distance.
The stage is theological for as long as its structure, following the entirety of tradition, comports the following elements: an author-creator who, absent and from afar, is armed with a text and keeps watch over, assembles, regulates the time or meaning of representation, letting this latter represent him as concerns what is called the contents of his thoughts, his intentions, his ideas.
He lets representation represent him through representatives, directors or actors, enslaved interpreters who represent characters who, primarily through what they say, more or less directly represent the thought of the ‘creator’.
Interpretive slaves who faithfully execute the providential designs of the ‘master.’
Who moreover – and this is the ironic rule of the representative structure which organizes all these relationships – creates nothing, has only the illusion of having created, because he only transcribes and makes available for reading a text whose nature is itself necessarily representative; and this representative text maintains with what is called the ‘real’ ( the existing real, the ‘reality’ about which Artaud said, in the ‘Avertissment’ to Le moine, that it is an ‘excrement of the mind’) an imitative and reproductive relationship.
Finally, the theological stage comports a passive, seated public, a public of spectators, of consumers, of ‘enjoyers’ – as Nietzsche and Artaud both say – attending a production that lacks true volume or depth, a production that is level, offered to their voyeuristic scrutiny.
This general structure in which each agency is linked to all the others by representation, in which the irrepresentability of the living present is dissimulated or dissolved, suppressed or deported within the infinite chain of representations – this structure has never been modified.
All revolutions have maintained it intact, and most often have tended to protect or restore it.
Whatever their importance, all the pictorial, musical and even gesticular forms introduced into Western theatre can only, in the best of cases, illustrate, accompany, serve, or decorate a text, a verbal fabric, a logos which is said in the beginning.
‘If then, the author is the man who arranges the language of speech and the director is his slave, there is merely a question of words.’ (The Theatre and its Double)
To reconstitute the stage, finally to put on stage and to overthrow the tyranny of the text is thus one and the same gesture.
Released from the text and the author-god, mise en scene would be returned to its creative and founding freedom.
The director and the participants (who would no longer be actors or spectators) would cease to be the instruments and organs of representation.
Thus, the closure of classical representation, but also the reconstitution of a closed space of original representation, the archi-manifestation of force or of life. A closed space, a space produced from within itself and no longer organised from the vantage of an other absent site, an illocality, an alibi or invisible utopia.
The end of representation, but also original representation; the end of interpretation, but also an original interpretation that no master-speech, no project of mastery will have permeated and levelled in advance.
A visible representation, certainly, directed against the speech which eludes sight – and Artaud insists upon the productive images without which there would be no theatre (theaomai) – but whose visibility does not consist of a spectacle mounted by the discourse of the master. Representation, then, as the auto-presentation of pure visibility and even pure sensibility.
Jacques Derrida
Theatre of Cruelty and the Closure of Representation ’66
This, our Zeitgeist – where we can…
Transgress the ordinary limits of ‘art’ and speech
This, our Zeitgeist – where we can…
Resume our place between dreams and events
This, our Zeitgeist – where we can…
(as Artaud interpreted ‘cruelty’)… implement essentially –
strictness, diligence, implacable resolution, irreversible and absolute determination
This, our Zeitgeist – where we can…
Let the dangerous side of poetry and imagination regain
their rights within the upheaval of known psychological relationships
This, our Zeitgeist – where we can…
Seize the images that arise in us, naked, natural,
excessive and follow these images to the very end
This, our Zeitgeist – where we can…
Never afford to forget the absolute magnitude of mind
of the Poet/Artist/Visionary Antonin Artaud
This, our Zeitgeist –
The Medium that is the Theatre of Second Life…
Text To Screen Ends…
On Recognition of Antonin – was a duel reality Performance – designed to be performed by four of my own different Second Life personas – within Zeitgeist @ Odyssey in Second Life and Muro Gallery in Geneva – Sat 20th /Sun 21st November 2010
Also of interest – http://irez.me/2012/08/10/virtual-reality-of-theater/
pixelreanimator 