localmotives #5 nettkunst - ://The Art of Being There

1. State of the art

A characteristic of Internet art is perhaps that it draws upon both classical artistic traditions and new experiences that arise from a digital world devoid of matter and tangibility.

Oncotype, Danish net art group

The state of definitions

In a recent article by Danish art zine editor Andreas Brøgger, the various definitions of net art are discussed. Brøgger defines online art as art that is only possible online, i.e. art that can or should only be experienced online. However, what he has in mind seems to be art that depends on internet connectivity (for instance by linking to various other sites), not art that depends on the connection with other people in order to be performable. Hence, in principle this "online art" could be experienced offline on a computer with cached webpages with no obvious difference to the online experience. When the presence of other users becomes an intrinsic part of the computer-mediated art experience, it can only truly be experienced online. It is this relatively undescribed multi-user or "social" net performance art, that is the topic of this article - without further ado assuming that in general we understand net art as art that is based on the internet and experienced through the computer. Net art is art that intrinsically in form or content dependant on the computer platform. Multi-user online performance art, "social art", is an unexplored art form that has not yet received much attention as such. However, I find that it embodies many of the features often attributed to net art - and furthermore, it points us in the direction of what might also be done with the internet and the computer as an artistic tool. Multi-user performances are therefore indeed worthwhile studying as net art.

Specifically, the multi-user performances I am here refering to, are those designed for and taking place in virtual world environments such as MUDs or MOOs. They are constructed as "plays" or performances for a number of users, who take on the role of designated characters by typing in or performing sentences and "actions" acccording to certain guidelines. They are performances designed prior to their enactment, in this way more or less resembleming what we off-line would call a theatre play, but if so, they are propably closer to the improvisational theatre tradition of the commedia del Arte or the modern performance theatre than the Aristotelian tradition of theatre.

So far there have been relatively few attempts to make specific theatre performances online. However, if one turns to virtual world game environments such as Ultima Online, Everquest or just any old roleplaying MUD, there are performances going on anywhere, all the time. It is time to recognise that designing successful performances in all kinds of online environments is as much an artform as is traditional performance design and scripting.

This is a screenshot taken in the graphical MOO LinguaMOO. The MOO-interface consists of 3 panels, the one to the right contains room descriptions, the top left, the "text output box", prints texts and actions of all players in the same room. The bottom left panel is the text input box - here the user can type in sentences and actions (which are "performed" by use of the emote-function - see shot for example). Though the interface may look different, there will always be a text output and a text input box in these environments.

What is special about net art?

When you look at texts discussing net art, terms which often influence them are "interactivity", "proximity" , "dynamic" and "communication". These are terms that equally describe multiuser environments. Obviously not all net art is inspired by these terms or based upon these principles, however, it appears that within net art as a genre, it is often the process of interaction with the work that is the work. Rather than monologic interpretation of an already completed piece of art, what the viewer/user experiences is a dialogue, i.e. interaction, with something that will never be one thing. In other words, one could say that the user's communicative performance of the net art piece is what makes the work. A net art work constantly changes, it is in a dynamic flux. The changes may be affected by parameters programmed into it (e.g. data may be gathered from the net each time the piece is viewed, changing the art piece). the individual choices of the individual user or recent updates by the artist. It is no wonder that fluidity, for instance of text itself, becomes an object of study in several net pieces. However, most writing on net art as well as many of the pieces I have viewed seem to center on the relation of one user to one piece of work, be it a website or a downloadable piece of software. The "viewing" - or rather the performing of the art piece - is thus conceived of as an solitary act - the user sitting at home face to face with his own computer screen. For me this displacement of the viewing site from museum or public space to the private home signifies a move from a social experience of art (at least often you go to a museum with someone) to a more solitary one. However, multiuser online art performances are intrinsically social and based on social interaction: the constant response to other users' input. Communication is here truly at the centre of the work. The flux of these works emerges from the constant scrolling by of lines of typed input from the users, i.e. the communicative process ensures a constant dynamics.

This is art from many to many. Though from an aesthetic point of view the output of these mainly verbal performances may not always be worthy of being coined "art", to me they are salient examples of an artistic exploitation of the specificity of being online. Being online is about communication, it's about being somewhere else, where interaction within the boundaries of an completely fictional world depends on an act of collaborative imagination.

Of two minds

I believe there is such a thing as a "cyberspace" in the sense that we as as online users communicating with other users may experience moments of mental displacement during which we truly feel that we are "there", on/in the virtual stages where we interact with other users - be it just a simple chat room or the elaborately fleshed out scenery of a 3D virtual world . This feeling of being there is not so much dependent on the "feel" of the place (the reality of the 3D environments for instance) as on the experience of sharing this space with others. As Beth Kolko points out in her article Building a world with words , it is exactly the act of narrative collaboration, the "making up" of the space as we speak about and act within it, that makes these spaces believable to us. However, being "there" is never so absorbing as to let us forget completely that we are also here: your body is at a remove from the screen and you continously need to type in actions on the keyboard in front of you in order to communicate. As it is, the "whole" of the action becomes apparent to you only as an appropriation of the "whole of the screen" embodied by you as an seeing eye behind the screen. In some ways, this experience resembles the experience Georges Poulet described in his article on the Phenomenology of Reading. Poulet, however, was concerned with the dual feeling of experiencing both the consciousness of the reading and the authoring mind. Online you are of two minds too: the one "there" and the one "here" - the one place where you imagine you are (as an actor) and the other place where your body is couched, watching, spectating. This two-mindedness allows for a certain degree of anonymity and distance in the online encounter, however engulfed in the online action you might be - you as a person are able to hide the body that so easily gives you away behind the screen - and behind the avatar that represents you. I think it is exactly this corporeal distance and anonymity that makes a free play of words and imaginary actions possible. This play can result in collaborative art which you for many reasons (inhibition, lack of counter-play) would never experience in RL ("real life") or on the pages of the book. It is the strange duality of the actor-spectator and the communication with other actor-spectators that defines and makes possible that unique arena of play and performance which one could call the multiuser online performance stage.

2. The art of Staging

All the MOO's a stage since alle the men and women are player objects

- Juli Burk, cybertheater director & MOO administrator

What is the art object? And who is the artist?

Which ones are the true artists? The playwright or the actors? The director or the scenographers? All are essential to the production of a theatre piece - so if a theatre performance turns out to be a piece of art, it is a result of an artistic collective, not an individual. This also applies to performances online. They are most often the result of the programming skills of the computer scientists, the dexterity and verbal cunning of the performers and not least, the vision of the designer and/or playwright. In his seminal book, Writing Space , Jay David Bolter describes the electronic text and the writer this in this way:

The elements of the text are no longer fragments of a prior whole, but instead form a space of shifting possibilities. In this shifting electronic space, writers will need a new concept of structure. In place of a closed and unitary structure, they must learn to conceive of their text as a structure of possible structures. The writer must practice a kind of second-order writing, creating coherent lines for the reader to discover without closing off the possibilities prematurely or arbitrarily.

This is exactly the art of the online performance designer: s/he must design (rather than write) a structure of possible structures, a space within which multiple experiences might be possible, yet not lose their coherence. However, it is not before this space is programmed ("fleshed out") and inhabited by the actors, i.e. performed, that it turns into a piece of art. The writer might to some extent still be a writer - however, we judge her work according to different parameters than those we apply to offline writing. It is no longer the writer's prose, but her architecture of interaction that should be our object of study.

Designing an architecture of interaction

Concretely this metastructure will often consist of designing the stage for interaction (be it one or several "rooms" in an virtual environment) and designing it so it becomes a believable space inhabited by believable objects, yet "spacious" enough it to hold the clutter of both imagined and real objects construted by the players on the fly. Also, you must allow for several modes of interaction within this space: between players and players (social interaction), players and inanimate objects (manipulative interaction) and players and communicative objects, such as bots or "speaking" items (transcommunicative interaction). For a further idea of what this concretely entails, see this example.

Finally, you need to frame the interaction on a more abstract level: perhaps providing a script for the interaction and characters, endowed with a little or a lot of motivation, background history etc (for instance: "You are in love with Y and want to court her. You are afraid of her mother. Your mother used to beat you up as a child"). In other words, you must provide the players with on the one hand "handles" on which to lean during their performance but enough freedom to allow individual improvisation and character building on the fly ; and on the other hand restraints preventing them from doing just anything or performing too much out of character.

For all this, luckily, the designer(s) have several tools not available to offline theatre playwrights. They may preprogram certain events or monologues that are triggered by the director itself or timed to happen when certain conditions are fulfilled - or use the possibility of being on stage "invisibly" (i.e. not being visible on the screens of the players/audience), doing things that make the playing more easy or difficult. They may use the virtual environment's possibilties of interfering in the performance itself by "announcing" things all over the performance space (this can be preprogrammed too) or of "spoofing" (i.e.inserting sentences into the performance without indicating who said them, or making them look like they come from a completely innoncent person - this was the technique of the cruel trickster described in Dibbells historical essay A Rape in Cyberspace). A designer may choose to strictly divide people into audience and players, but may also (as is the case of Karen Wheatley's AtheMOO play Scherazade's Daughters), choose to have the "professional" actors enlist the audience as participants - or they may choose to just provide "costumes" for participants to step into and use (like in AtheMOO's Kafka-house or in the StoryMOO murder mystery), so the performance is not as much something that is performed for someone, but rather something to be enjoyed as an act in itself.

May we leave now?

What distinguishes these performances is that the boundaries between audience and performers, director and actor is always blurred. Everything takes place on the same "stage" - a few rooms in the virtual world - and every movement and every word uttered there becomes part of the whole, the text, which we read"on the other side of the screen". There is, in principle, always room for comments or ringside conversations (don't forget that normally everything you type in is viewable by all others logged on!) - and it might be difficult to tell when the performance is actually beginning or ending. This is also thematized in the beginning of the Plaintext Players Orpheus performance:

Hades dies.

Digital.Director says, "And now, without further or future ado: Today we are telling the story of Orpheus, the musician who went to hell to get his wife back after she was bitten by a snake."

Zeus drinks another cup of coffee.

Digital.Director says, "Only the details are being changed to protect the innocent. There will be no snake today. In place of the snake..."

Orpheus says, "No snake? What do you mean, no snake?"

Digital.Director says, "What I said, no snake."

Orpheus exclaims, "Come on-- I wanted to play the snake! Why do I always have to play the dork? The complete idiot? The sucker?"

Some people have such an overwhelming, irrational fear of snakes that the phobia may restrict their lifestyles.

Digital.Director says, "Only a complete idiot would ask to play a snake."

Another distinguishing feature of this kind of dramatic art is that one might easily stage a performance as something that takes places in several rooms at the same time. Potentially, then, a possible audience can walk from room to room in the virtual environment, taking in snippets of the action here and there. This has already been tried offline in so called hyperdramas, a writer of which is playwright Charles Deemer:

In this new form of theater, multiple plot lines branch out throughout a performance environment - in this case, the upstairs Ballroom at Edgefield - so that many scenes and story-threads are happening at the same time. Second and third viewings of the play greatly enrich the experience and to encourage this, tickets are reduced to eight dollars for a second viewing and six dollars for a third viewing during the play's 9-week run.

Charles Deemer, Hyperdrama playwright

Even from a less commercial perspective, this multi-spaced performance form holds much promise, I think. Surely this kind of art form seems to encourage replayability - going on stage and in-world several timess to experience the full significance of a play - or to enjoy the unavoidable variations on words and actions each new performance brings.

3. The art of becoming a character

Online theater is actually an unique hybrid of drama, fiction, playscript, poetry, oral storytelling, and psychotherapy

Plaintext Players FAQ section

It is not just the playwright or designer who needs to come up with new methods of framing the action. The actors or performers, be they amateurs or professionals, also need to develop new skills and to apply their imagination in unforetold ways. Devoid of the body as an instrument of expression, they need to learn how to use images or icons to express their feelings or how to relate actions in words, rather than performing them with their bodies. Noone can see exactly what you are feeling, if your representation in the virtual world just consists of a name or a crudely animated figure and hence as a performer, you need to explore new ways of expressing not just action, but also thought and feeling. In the MUD-environment, a word can be an axe, both in the literal and symbolical sense - you may chop of someone's head with an imaginary axe (performing the action by the use of the words) and you yourself can be an axe "in the flesh" as well - not only playing a person, but an object. So in the role of the axe, you could for instance type: < The axe chops of the troll's head but feels disgusted by the of blood on its newly polished blade. > < You say: > 'Please do not use me for this purpose anymore'. Since in virtual worlds anything can easily be assigned the ability to communicate, an axe can be a character too and performing an object well can be a new challenge to even skilled actors. As a player, you are telling stories too. Communicating in a way that makes people believe in you, makes them stop and listen on more than one level, can be an art form in itself.

4. The art of staying in tune

Ernest takes out a tube from his back pocket...
Julie bumps into Susan
John blushes Well, I haven't gotten a guitar
Julie says, "AW!"
Ernest a tube containing a tuba...
Julie says, "Watch out what you're doing with that tube of yours!"
Ernest plays on the tuba
Julie says, "Watch out what you're doing with that tube of yours!"
Ernest plays on the tuba
Julie is still dancing merrily
John stares at Nigel - "Hey, man, you know what's wrong with these people?"
Ernest says, ""Do any of you wanna play with my instrument?"
Julie tries to pull John into dancing
Susan says, "Come on, you are dancing on my dead father!!!"

This is an example from a performance of a mystery game I set up in StoryMOO. The players, playing characters staying in a house where a murder had just taken place (the corpse could be found in the living room) were supposed to cooperate in order to discover which of them was the murderer. However, apparently being somewhat bored with the story, at one point during a performance the characters abandoned the mystery story completely and instead decided to "perform" a musical party. Only one character, Susan, tried to "tune in" to the story again.

Did anyone notice when the story left?

Online performance is an art form still very much in its adolescence. New possibilities and new technologies constantly pose new problems which need to be solved. In general, the fact that multiple players/users are involved in the process of creating the art work means that the designer cannot ensure that her perhaps tightly knitted plot will always be followed. People will always act in unpredictable ways, not necessarily paying heed to the designer's guidelines and the story is always in danger of digression or dissolution into multiple small stories pursued by small clusters of the players. Coherence and "meaning" are therefore not a guaranteed outcome and you might end up with nothing but a number of fragmented and absurd scenes that not even the most willing audience member is able to make a unified story of. Technology itself forces us to make room for randomness as an unpredictable factor in the artistic process due to phenomena such as lag or problems with the local network (e.g. disconnected characters suddenly vanish from the scene of action only to be able to reconnect a few moments later). Sometimes there is only a short step from the conceptually coherent mise-en-scene to aleatory chaos. A future challenge for online performance designers will be to not only make an architecture for interaction but an architecture which ensures a minimal degree of coherent content. Not that the designers or players should try to tell stories or perform dramas with the same kind of causal structure we know from media like the film and the print book, but they should aim towards creating experiences which are meaningful, one way or the other, to all parts involved.

Future steps

I believe that by not being afraid of using the computer's ability to monitor and cue the individual spectactor, the designers will find an useful tool for ensuring a minimal degree of coherence in a piece. Possibilities I think should be explored further are the options of letting the computer itself perform as a kind of character or audience (for instance commenting on a player's playing style and choices - "Hey, it's the 10th time you've fiddled around with this object, shouldn't you try something else?") and the possibilities of transferring pieces of the action onto preprogrammed objects and non-human characters and letting them become an integral of the social interaction (handling objects together in order to communicate with them, for instance).

Metaphorically speaking, it seems to me that what we still need to figure out is how to "stay in tune"; that is, to enable improvising ad libertum within the framework of a play but still keep the improvisation within the same tonality. Doing this requires both skill and artistic creativity. Multiuser online performances can be net art, and in the future I hope more people will come to enjoy the pleasures gained from performing and creating this art form.