On collaborating with an audience



Liz Phillips and Paula Rabinowitz

© 2006



The public has the power to produce images, sounds, and ultimately meaning, perhaps beyond any originally conceived by the artist who offers the collaboration. In a way, the artist passes control even while inviting the audience to share in a dialogue, which can extend to include multiple participants acting simultaneously. This cacophony of voices, sensibilities, and movements, threatens to disintegrate the piece into anarchy or chaos, while the process holds the promise of contributing to an enactment of pure democracy and collective action as participants learn to work together with each other and with the parameters of the installation. Why would an artist open herself up to this kind of public manipulation with accidental results in the first place? Can audience, piece and artists as spontaneous formations truly collaborate?

In this essay, we briefly investigate the long history of the many forms of collaborating with an audience, examining the dimensions of audience engagement that move a work from responsive to interactive to collaborative before and since the advent of electronic interface.



Breaking the Fourth Wall: Part 1: Music



Laurie Anderson views her work as

a collaboration with the people I work with, collaborating with the actors, and finally collaborating with the audience. It's amazing how much that changes things. Like the first night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and most people were donors, and you say something that is, well, funny, and somebody was laughing in the audience, and two other people said, "Shh, be quiet!" Like it was supposed to be sacrosanct. It was odd. It's really so much more fun when people, and when the audience goes, "I'll go along with that." I see and hear life as a grand improvisation—I stay open to the world of possibilities for interplay in the quantum field with self and others—community—society— the world—the universe and beyond. (Anderson)

This concept of collaboration assumes a deep level of trust by the artist in her work and in her audience whose engagement varies from cursory surveillance to immersion in the space and time of an installation or event. The dream of immediate interactivity and the profound connection to a work opens it in precarious ways, though. Some composers and performers have suggested that an interactive, not to mention a collaborative, piece enables its audience, people untrained in music theory or performance, to improvise in a formal setting, undermining the methods of practicing musicians. Potentially, this should be seen as a plus not a danger. However, some musicians and actors are leery of live feedback altering their works’ intentions.

During the 1960s, Happenings and other spontaneous events staged art as praxis, an event calling on the live dynamics of presence. In reaction to the commodification of the art object and complicity of the art world in systems of exploitation, performance art put the artist's body into direct contact with her audience and radically shifted how art could be perceived and who might see it. These reactions against the institutions of art "galleries, museums, and concert halls" also called forth new, outsider audiences. However, even as composer John Cage deconstructed musical scores applying chance operation and working through unplanned juxtaposition, he was skeptical of full audience participation. Despite joining events with other artists and dancers, he, nevertheless, felt audiences were untrustworthy and problematic because their initial response within performance often revealed their most simplistic and egotistic social behaviors.

For many years, I think probably beginning in the fifties and in the sixties, people were always talking about audience participation and I wasn't interested. Because what interests me in a piece of music was the presence of discipline which enables us to get beyond our likes and dislikes into an experience with which we are unfamiliar and which opens doors for us. And if you ask the audience who has simply come and either paid for their tickets or gotten in free to suddenly do something, it's like asking them to fall back on their most superficial habits. However, I kept giving it thought and it finally struck me when I was at the University of California in Davis that one thing that everyone in the audience knew how to do was play records. So I thought to provide them with a situation in which there would be lots of records and lots of turntables and we could hear them all at once rather than just one at a time. (Cage)

But even as Cage ceded these multiple turntables to his audience, they all played records. Nobody then, when LPs were the predominant form of recorded music, thought to really use the materials and scratch them. Productive openness towards the audience runs counter to traditional Western musical and theater training. But it is, for instance, the foundation of African musical forms. Composer George Lewis imagines improvisation with his interactive computer programs and other musicians as

a shared communicative environment, where within that environment certain codes are recognized, transmitted and accepted. [...] For cultural and philosophical reasons, I don't go with the Cageian ideas about uniqueness and spontaneity, the 'unexpected' as a paramount value. I don't think that pure spontaneity is really that desirable or interesting. I think we need a mix of predictability and unpredictability. But also, in terms of my own music, I'm interested in will and volition and personality. "At least you want a dialogue; nobody can have a lock on the definition of spontaneity." Any kind of reflective and investigative and introspective thinking about improvised music, whether done with the computer or not, is putting us among a community of people thinking about the mind, about meaning and understanding. Since I know that improvisers have a lot to say about these things, my current campaign is to get the voice of the improviser out there more, since we've already heard from the others. (Casserley)



Breaking the Fourth Wall: Part 2: Theater

Cage's mistrust of the audience's abilities as improvisers and worthy collaborators, as those who either showboat or ham it up, on the one hand, or demure and shrink from dynamic participation, on the other, is echoed by playwrights and improvisational actors. Performers Dario Fo and Franca Rame gauge the character of the audience, watching as people move through the theatrical space, interact with each other and fit into their seats, to determine how best to work them. However, the audience itself can turn the tables redesigning the performance to suit its preconceptions.

[F]or an author, actor or director, the audience represents the litmus test, the proof, the quality control as well as the possibility of valuable assistance. Never descend to playing to the gallery, however, because often the audience will turn out to be a disaster. Not all audiences participate with delight, and in many cases they can be passive and doltish. It can happen that the audience before you is not in the slightest open to innovation, and that what you have in the stalls is a mass of reactionaries. An audience is frequently given to adulation or is blinkered in its adoration. It can often come to the theatre foolishly preconditioned or brimful of prejudice and all too often accepts bizarre styles or has it [sic] own fixed ideas which it can be difficult to dislodge with one performance. Audiences, even if made up of different individuals, often fuse into one and impose their rhythms on you. (Fo, 114)

Alternatively, the Living Theater demanded audience participation to under gird a political project that forced people out of their complacency into a new uncomfortable space. This discomfort pushed audience members to collaborate in their theatrical performance, rather than remain as spectators of it. A resistant audience member was an essential part of the show's effects because people were forced to confront their inhibitions, and display themselves openly in public. These intransigent others have, at times, suggested that interactive work borders on the "fascist," because the nature of the work might leave it open to any audience member’s whim and persistence within its space and time, and thus asserting full control of the piece. This domination might undermine the collective/ensemble intention of the artist.

We, The Living Theatre, were accused of falling into fascism because what we did was looked on as the disruption of the democratic process, as not exercising emotional constraint, as using physical violence—throwing a woman’s coat across a room, tearing it from her back! A woman! Eyeglasses! Pocketbook! Private possessions! I battered my way with sound thru the wall between us, I railed against property, I cried out my despair, despair that we could ever touch or love each other, or even adequately communicate. (Beck #89)

How does an audience become comfortable with a new form of intimate communication? And what really is its gain?



Sound Art

In a hands-on, close-up exploration of objects and place people need to feel as if they were invited to engage. The work needs to be perceived as “unfinished” as it opens out and invites in. The invitation to enter opens a space for improvisation and collectivity and democracy. These potentially dynamic changes of scale, sound and space occur when a group of minds work together sensing possibilities in themselves and others.

Collaboration asks both artist and audience to decompose a work’s parts and understand how each element is composed. This is achieved through various devices and effects: repetition; commitment; surrender; composition and timing. Sound and space "decomposing and recomposing" especially when the sounds are purely electronic, allow for processing, feedback, response.

My/Liz Phillips's pieces, such as Koi (1998), Windspun (1981), Echo-Location: Queens (2005), or TV Dinner (1971), work toward a smooth, rather than nervous, extension of the body in space, often referred to as elastic space. An electronic structure resonant with its environment, as an interactive and collaborative space, adds people to its program knowing the limitations of movement. Still, surprises occur. No one can control or predict all variables.

I originally began my work in this area because I loved multiple layers of sound—conversation, different languages simultaneously responding and reacting to events in different ways. As I carved stone I believed there was some way to get the audience closer to the experience, seeing the raw rock and the smooth figure carved inside without the hammer and chisel. I was interested in negative and positive space, the scale of the audience, their place in space, near and far to the object they were viewing as they moved around it. I hoped that multiple people listening and moving in space filled with motion sensors shifting sounds would create calls and responses far beyond what a single person could do at one time.



In the electronic dinner pieces I/Liz Phillips held, the audience would interact while engaged in the ritualized activity of eating a meal together. The familiarity of the actions and sounds gave way to new accidental sounds that caught the diners' attention. Then this close listening contributed to new sounds through new gestures. In this context, George Lewis notes, "The tradition, at least in African-American music, was really not centred [sic] round making sounds for their own sake. There is always an instrumentality connected with sounds; you make sounds for pedagogical purposes, to embody history or to tell stories, and so on. When the computer possibilities came along I tried to maintain that same sensibility, so I still think the interesting thing about computer music is focusing on the process of musical creation as done by humans" (Casserley). Electronic music environments do not need to be abstract; as responsive systems, they too rely on, even produce, concrete embodiment.



Public Art

Public art projects are of necessity concerned with cultivating audiences as participants through community development. Since 1996, the Urban Institute has studied community arts projects noting how “cultural involvement” by artists in a range of projects can lead to “community-building efforts” through “a continuum of cultural opportunities over which an individual’s participation could shift among many roles and span different levels of expertise—from creator to spectator, from critic to teacher […]some participants, such as community artists, also acted as facilitators, forging links between neighborhood-based art-making and other kinds of civic engagement,” (Jackson) including community organizing. George Lewis’s Interactive Information Kiosk for the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant (2004) proposed to “redefine the nature and function of the information kiosk” that allowed visitors to “experience” rather than “retrieve” information; “create information rather than navigate among prefabricated choices”; and “encourage direct physical contact…” (Lewis). The kiosk mediates the man-made and natural worlds using ambient sounds, smells and sights encountered by anyone approaching the sewage facility, turning an eyesore into a place for public gathering and exchange

Helene Aylon, for example, developed her reclamation project of women's identities through her collective painting events. More recently, she collaborated with women's peace groups in Israel/Palestine to "get their hands dirty" repairing the borderlands along the occupied territories and thus compelling the questions: Whose land is it? Whose hand is in it? Her pieces bring women together sharing a job of digging and pouring a new foundation for communal effort. Since 1982, her on-going Earth Ambulance and the Bridge of Knots project travels throughout the American nation to reclaim devastated nuclear test sites and other environmentally degraded locations. She connects women on the road to those residents of communities to literally heal the wounds wrought by the destructive cultures of war and capitalism.

Mierle Laderman Ukeles’s continuing projects with garbage as an unpaid artist-in-residence at New York’s Department of Sanitation uses the materials of sanitation workers—the trucks themselves, for instance, in The Social Mirror (1983) [Fig. 1]—to reestablish the essential labor that makes city life possible by working directly with sanitation truckers and others within the urban community to clean up the streets. Her focus moves from the found artifacts of trash collecting and bricolage to the social and economic actions of its removal and storage. The city streets not only provide objects that might be incorporated into a piece or performance; they are the source for the municipal landfills—like Fresh Kills, www.nyc.gov/freshkillspark—which Ukeles likens to massive, accessible, public earthworks formed by decades of city dwellers discarding the objects of their lost desires.

In all these examples the artists work with specific material that is declared waste or cevastation and needs a(nother) human to re-activate it. They all seem to be participatory projects with various degrees of collaboration applying to different stage during the process of production and reception.



Computer Interactivity: Screens, Robots, Networks

Since the advent of personal computers and videogames from Pakman on, the assumption of interactivity is that the creator/producer offers a number of limited, albeit often complex choices to the "player" who then builds new identities, new plots, new stories from the available material. Grahame Weinbren, a filmmaker, uses this technology to create installations that respond in sophisticated ways to the audience, using its knowledge of Western iconography and storytelling traditions, through screen-based interactivity. In his 1986 collaboration with Roberta Friedman, The Erl King, three strands of German romanticism—Goethe’s Erl Koenig, Shubert’s Leider and Freud’s case study “From the History of Infantile Neurosis”—intertwine as the audience reassigns segments, images, and passages from each mode of story to create an ensemble of obsessive riffing, structured around the return to the death of the father.

Sonata [1999, Figure 2] conceives a cinema that is genuinely interactive—a storytelling cinema that changes with each viewer and each viewing without ever sacrificing the stories or the sense of story-flow. Sonata consists of narratives from classical sources—the Apocrypha, Tolstoy, Freud—that run into one another as the viewer points at the screen. Furthermore, each individual story is itself structured in an interactive grammar, so that as we move through the interconnected story spaces, we seem to create the fictions we are exploring. (Weinbren)

His work anticipated the methods of websurfing and now develops from the possibilities offered by Hypertext, interactive DVDs and even websites such as Wikipedia. All of which depend on audience familiarity with instructions and protocols.

Weinbren’s screen-based work relies on human activation of the machine as a text and image generating system. In recent ongoing projects of Lynn Hershman Leeson, voice recognition and synthesis, the technology of robotics, allow entrée into the fantasy life of a female surrogate to explore the essential voyeurism of the audience, especially in its relationship to women. As Hershman Leeson describes it:

Artificial life, genetics, nanotechnology, robotics, age retardation and the growing obsolescence of death have enormous social and moral implications. My sense is that newly formed digital identities will be autonomous and unpredictable, with minds of their own, just like the best of us corporeal beings. Our task is to make friends with them. The political as well as psychic stakes of what they represent and how they relate to who we are, are urgent, compelling, and inescapable.” (di Nicolò)



Digital Interactivity as Mirror or Carrier

The proliferation of digital arts makes it impossible to track a history of the first and last web-based collaboration. All we can do is engage in a dialogue about the many ways artists filter material, set parameters, morph material, create reiterative and fractal systems. For instance, George Lewis thinks of

computer music in an animistic way. [...] The discourse of computer music is really shot through with prosthetic conceptions. I'm not dealing on a prosthetic basis. So when people talk about instruments as 'controllers', the language of mastery and power, or where a musical instrument becomes just a kind of 'user interface', I start to get a little nervous. That's not animistic enough for me; I've got to have an incarnative conception. In the case of 'Voyager' you're dealing with a kind of 'emotional transduction.' […] What people are playing carriers for another signal; the sounds we hear aren't the main thing. (Casserley)

In part, this “transduction” implies that audiences now assume that everything is supposed to be “animated” and offer endless surprises. Moreover, the consumerist expectations of an audience challenge the collaborative process back. The interactive space risks becoming simply a mirror of the player; still, looking into its reflection to find oneself can draw in the spectators to become participants. But when the audience expects instant response, asks the piece for self-affirmation or affirmation of a learned behavior, the effect closes down what the piece means to open up. Collaborative art asks for something as complex as inspired surrender and must elicit recognition, building from reflection. That moment of self-regard should then develop into more complicated correspondences. Otherwise, the piece can veer toward superficiality and rely on what we call a “supermarket door process of interactivity”: I walked up to it and it opened; I have power. Self-surveillance is the most insidious form of the many tracking devices within contemporary urban life.



Architectural Interactivity: Spaces, Bodies, Sound

For his 2002 Venice Architectural Biennale installation, Seen [Figure 3], commissioned for “Next Memory City” at the Canadian Pavilion, interactive artist David Rokeby uses surveillance cameras and his own computer programs placed in the public space of Piazza San Marco to capture the movements and gestures of passersby, including birds and the detritus of a sinking city. Then he projects these time-delayed landscapes and the trails and tracks.

The interface defines a sort of landscape, creating valleys into which users tend to gather, like rainwater falling on a watershed. Other areas are separated by forbidding mountain ranges, and are much less travel led [sic]. […] But accepting responsibility is at the heart of interactivity. Responsibility means, literally, the ability to respond. (Rokeby)

Yet some audience members are simply embarrassed by their response: Why should I participate? I just want to watch. Others enter the piece and cannot experience it, but instead MUST know how it works. What one hopes for in a collaborative installation is that some of those who enter its space intuitively grasp it, want to analyze it through their senses, and find out how its proportions work—how space and time perform together as a composition requiring presence—the body’s presence as an actor—in that time, that space.

With the advent of the personal computer, the internet, websites, blogs, telepresence, surveillance, hyperlinks, etc., potentially collaborative work can now occur from home to a global network of unimagined participants. When the audience is not visible to itself and its virtual dispersion as immense appropriations run rampant. The issue of control and responsibility is only exacerbated: who owns the materials? Who made the work, and who is its audience? Is it even a collaboration? Collaboration assumes an identity and a relationship—collaboration—at least two people working together, co-laboring. A collaborative engagement between artist and audience fluctuates as a barometer, gives feedback, and heightens a sense of one’s own aesthetics. The artist must be open to communication about what works and what doesn’t work, while maintaining a baseline of aesthetic sensibilities. These involve retrieval (of traditional ideas about ordinary movements) and extraction (of the lineaments of gesture or sound that relates to the earliest dance and song forms distilled from the physical efforts of work). Collaboration is at once familiar and strange, inviting and alienating, and must constantly balance and recalibrate these oscillating relationships; something that is often achieved through recognizable patterns that build knowledge and memory.

The history of responsive sound spaces goes back further, however, hundreds of years. Sculptor Kinji Akagawa pointed me/Phillips to the “nightingale floors” of Nijo, an imperial palace built in 1603 near Kyoto, Japan, that was designed to create bird calls when humans walked along the tuned floor planks to alert the Shogun to intruders: early surveillance as well as sound architecture—beautiful, responsive, and deadly.



Bibliography

Anderson, Laurie. http://www.miyamasaoka.com/interdisciplinary/writing/sfbg_laurie_anderson.html

Accessed December 19, 2005.

Beck, Julian. The Life of the Theatre: The Relation of the Artist to the Struggle of the

People. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972.

Cage, John. Soundings: Investigation into the Nature of Modern Music. Neuberger

Museum Catalogue. SUNY Purchase, 1981. Transcription of a recorded interview.

Casserley, Lawrence. "Person to ...person? George Lewis, an interview." Resonance

Magazine v6, n 1 (November 1997).

Dietz, Steven. “Gallery 9.” http://www.gallery9.walkerart.org/. Accessed February 12,

2006.

Fo, Dario. The Tricks of the Trade. Trans. Joe Farrell. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hauser, Arnold. The Social History of Art, v.1. Trans. Stanley Godman. New York:

Vintage, 1951.

Lewis, George. “Interactive Information Kiosk for the Point Loma Wastewater Treatment Plant.” http://crca.ucsd.edu/projects/ptloma.html. Accessed February

11, 2006.

di Nicolò, Francesca. “Notte Aphex a Roma,” Culture TV News. 2006.

http://newmediafix.net/daily?p+243. Accessed February 12, 2006.

Oliveros, Pauline. “Deep Listening™ Bridge To Collaboration.” Keynote Address.

ArtSci98>>>seeding collaboration: A public symposium. Cooper Union. New

York, April 4, 1998.

_____. “Quantum Listening,”

http://www.deeplistening.org/pauline/writings/quantum_listening.html. Accessed December 19, 2005.

Rokeby, David. “The Construction of Experience: Interface as Content.” In Digital

Illusion: Entertaining the Future with High Technology. Ed. Clark Dodsworth.

ACM Press, 1998.

Weinbren, Grahame. Sonata. Lab 7 Translocation International Media Art Exhibition. 19

March-26 April, 1999. http://csw.art.pl/new/99/7e_wein1.html. Accessed

February 16, 2006.