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    Photo-Performance in Cyberspace: The CD-ROMs of Hugo Glendinning and Tim Etchells with Forced Entertainment

    Andrew Kimbrough
    Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
    andrewmkimbrough@yahoo.com

    © 2002 Andrew Kimbrough.
    All rights reserved.

    Review of:
    Frozen Palaces. CD-ROM by Hugo Glendinning and Tim Etchells with Forced Entertainment. Collected on artintact 5, produced by Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie Karlsruhe (ZKM), 1999. Buchhandelsausgabe/Trade Edition;

    and

    Nightwalks. CD-ROM by Hugo Glendinning and Tim Etchells with Forced Entertainment. Sheffield, UK: Forced Entertainment, 1998.

    Both CD-ROMs are available through Forced Entertainment via their website, <http://www.forced.co.uk>.

  1. Using as a springboard Marshall McLuhan's observation that different media in the twentieth century recuperated sensory operations denied by writing, media theorist Paul Levinson postulates that the computer best provides an interactive medium wherein the faculties of hearing, speech, sight, and touch may be employed in immediate communication, hence duplicating the experience of the live. Whereas the dislocation of space and time in such media as the video and telephone interrupts the experience of direct physical presence, Levinson argues, the computer fosters a tangible immediacy through the involvement of many senses. I am attracted to Levinson's theorizing, but I think it incomplete in explaining the magnetic attraction of cyberspace. For as any online gamer knows, more than simply attempting to duplicate the live, interactive computer technology offers a heightened and very different experience, one that the live cannot provide. As theorist Matthew Causey attests, with a nod to Heidegger, something "uncanny" erupts in the performative experience of technology. Such uncanniness may be experienced in the interactive use of the CD-ROMs produced by the British theatre company known as Forced Entertainment.

  2. Since 1984, the dozen actors and designers who comprise Forced Entertainment under the artistic direction of Tim Etchells have been exploring the boundaries of theatre and performance in a manner slightly reminiscent of Elizabeth LeCompte and the Wooster Group in New York. However, rather than challenging the traditional reception of the (classical) theatre text--a practice that distinguishes LeCompte's pieces--Forced Entertainment work from improvisations and Etchells' written texts, and their experiments have taken them from their own small warehouse theatre in Sheffield, England to found spaces, live and videated gallery installations, film, and even CD-ROM. With several new works produced annually, and past shows kept in repertoire, Forced Entertainment maintains steady touring schedules in the UK and Europe, with occasional trips to the US. (I first encountered them at the Walker Arts Center in Minneapolis in March of 1999, where they performed their compelling Speak Bitterness, the text of which is included in Etchells's 1999 publication Certain Fragments.) Critics have hailed the group's work as definitively postmodern for its break with theatrical convention, its obsession with the inadequacy of language, its seemingly fragmented nature, and its penchant for the appropriation and undermining of pop sensibility. (Videos of past productions are also available through Forced Entertainment's website, < http://www.forced.co.uk>.) But with its forays into CD-ROM, Forced Entertainment also confirms the noted relationship of the postmodern with the technological. With CD-ROM, Forced Entertainment explores a new performative dimension located in the multimedia intersections of photography, the theatrical, and computer technology.

  3. Both Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces defied my previous experiences with CD-ROM. Neither unfolds in linear fashion like the digital film with alternate scenarios and endings, nor are they goal-oriented like the interactive game. Rather, the CD-ROMs seem to play upon the type of audience reception found within the art gallery. Both employ the same format, presenting Hugo Glendinning's striking color photographs of locations peopled with members of Forced Entertainment and accompanied by minimalist soundscapes scored by John Avery. Digital technology, however, allows the photographs to be viewed in a novel way: as 360-degree panoramas. On-screen, the photographs are designed to be shifted and manipulated by use of the control and shift keys in tandem with the mouse: the user may zoom in and out of the image, and scroll left or right in circular fashion. By means of a small pointer icon that appears on-screen over two or three detailed images within a photograph, the user may also access other photographs that in turn open into a seemingly limitless maze of images, visual associations, and aural meanderings. Such associations are fostered not by a story line that may be read into (or out of) the photographs, but by a disjointed continuity established by the locations and hints of "character" suggested by the static poses and expressions of the actors, who may appear in more than one photograph. For indeed a strength of Forced Entertainment lies in the unique physical presence of the performers themselves, a presence that seeps through digital reproduction and offers the user-observer some kind of connection with the human and the live/real.

    Image from Nightwalks
    Figure 1: Image from Nightwalks.
    Photograph by Hugo Glendinning.

  4. The liner notes for Nightwalks claim that Glendinning's deserted, nighttime London cityscapes resemble "a catalogue of forgotten locations for an imaginary film." The metaphor (added for marketing purposes?) is unfortunate for its simplifying reduction of the vast interpretive potential the images hold. Granted, the locations feel out of the way and untravelled, and they are well suited for the film noir genre. But by means of Glendinning's and Etchell's judicious placement of people--sometimes posed, sometimes active, in various states of undress, alone or coupled--the locations start to breathe on their own and hint at scenarios that defy the generic confines of the movies (or even the comic book). The notes correctly encourage the audience to "explore," since the design compels the user to seek out connections and follow tangents. Some locations are shot from various angles; some characters appear in more than one image; pointer icons sometimes return the user to a previously encountered image and beckon a fresh departure. Yet, the surface realism of the industrial London locations clashes with the beguiling and fantasmic intimations evoked by the presence of the performed body. Who is that naked man in the metallic corridor? Why does that woman wear angel wings? Nightwalks creates intrigue not by supplying answers but by defying them. Details offer evidence without explanation. The photographs invite the user's gaze, but deny the modernist quest for meaning.

    Image from Frozen Palaces
    Figure 1: Image from Frozen Palaces.
    Photograph by Hugo Glendinning.

  5. Frozen Palaces engages the user in similar fashion as Nightwalks, but here Glendinning and Etchells's manipulation of location provides a much denser field of exploration. The first image reveals the parlor of a house after a party, clued by the torn wrapping paper, half-eaten cake, and deflating balloons. The maze of images available, however, suggests three or four more separate interior locations, without clarifying whether they are all in the same house or not. The party imagery permeates one floor; a séance takes place on another; a man lies dead in a bathtub while a woman scrubs a bloody knife; scenes of erotic encounters shuffle within a bedroom; and a body lies on the bare earth of a cellar. Again, Glendinning and Etchells establish a familiar realism within the surroundings, but the situations and expressions of the "characters" evade explanation, and Avery's eerie repetitive tones complement the sense of disorientation evoked. More palpable connections seem to exist between the characters than in Nightwalks, but the relationships are never made clear. As the images resist clear readings, the experience of the posed actors shifts: they are no longer objects of inquiry; rather, their inscrutability returns the user-audience's gaze as if to query the incessant need to know.

  6. Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces can be seen to operate on three levels. On one, the user witnesses the artistry of the collaboration between Glendinning and Forced Entertainment. The photographs are vivid, rich in color, and dense in visual information. As the CD-ROMs mimic the gallery viewing experience, the viewer may move closer to or away from each visual display, and one can decide how much time to spend with individual images. Additionally, the 360-degree design reminds me of an inverted sculpture--since the user, not the piece, occupies the center--and I must travel around it in order to take in its totality. On another level, the compulsion to move interactively and traverse the imagery subsumes the aforementioned appreciation of artistry. Indeed, the need to explore and solve soon replaces the fascination with individual images. The sensation resembles playing an elaborate board or card game, wherein the players need to keep abreast of information as it is revealed piecemeal. If anything, a weakness of the design lies in the circuit of repetition in which one eventually finds oneself. The images by necessity must repeat themselves, and I found myself impatient to move faster through familiar territory in order to find the quickly diminishing unfamiliar. Since there is no sense of completion, given the lack of a narrative, one must at some point simply decide to stop. Given the alternating poles of experience, the first sensation of mystery gives way to a closing sensation of exhaustion and ill-ease. Precisely in this discomfiture, however, a third experience surfaces: that of the photographs betraying another ontological dimension which becomes manifest only after the user exhausts habitual modes of inquiry and understanding. As the viewer's ego is not rewarded but rather stifled and displaced, the photographs must be regarded differently, and from other, non-linguistic sensibilities.

  7. Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces succeed as unique performative experiences, but not simply because of their interactive dimension or their undoubted artistry. Through their deft and aggressive exploitation of media, they offer an encounter with both performance and photography that one cannot find in a gallery, book, or theatre. There is no pretense of duplicating an experience found elsewhere, particularly within the "live," since Glendinning, Etchells, and the members of Forced Entertainment have devised a project that, with an idiosyncratic virtuosity, negotiates the parameters and possibilities of the CD-ROM. In light of McLuhan and Levinson's theorizing, the online performances of Forced Entertainment indeed recuperate senses and faculties that the one-dimensional photograph cannot engage. With the CD-ROMs, the user looks, listens, moves, feels, remembers, and anticipates, as well as appreciates. Since Glendinning and Etchells avoid storytelling, the sense is in the experience. In this regard, their work lends support to McLuhan and Walter Ong's oft-neglected alternative definition of the postmodern, found in their recognition that technology allows us to think, feel, and communicate in unfamiliar and uncanny ways, ways we have only been able to realize in the last half of the twentieth century. The experience of Nightwalks and Frozen Palaces thereby approximates Heidegger's view of art and language as a nonrepresentational revealing of what lurks on the outskirts of consciousness. As Forced Entertainment demonstrates, performance in technology helps to push us further into those unfamiliar and uncharted spaces.

    Guangdong University of Foreign Studies
    andrewmkimbrough@yahoo.com

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    COPYRIGHT (c) 2002 BY Andrew Kimbrough. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS TEXT MAY BE USED AND SHARED IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE FAIR-USE PROVISIONS OF U.S. COPYRIGHT LAW. ANY USE OF THIS TEXT ON OTHER TERMS, IN ANY MEDIUM, REQUIRES THE CONSENT OF THE AUTHOR AND THE PUBLISHER, THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY PRESS.

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    Works Cited

    Causey, Matthew. "The Screen Test of the Double: The Uncanny Performer in the Space of Technology." Theatre Journal 51.4 (December 1999): 383-94.

    Etchells, Tim. Certain Fragments: Contemporary Performance and Forced Entertainment. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

    Levinson, Paul. Digital McLuhan: A Guide to the Information Millennium. London and New York: Routledge, 1999.

    McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. 2nd ed. New York: Signet, 1964.

    McLuhan, Marshall, and Bruce R. Powers. The Global Village: Transformations in World Life and Media in the 21st Century. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989.

    Ong, Walter J., S.J. Interfaces of the Word: Studies in the Evolution of Consciousness and Culture. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1977.

    ---. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. London: Methuen, 1982.

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