"Profound changes are impending
in the Ancient Craft
of the Beautiful..."
--Paul Valery

Performance tec hnology is far from a new thing. Technology surrounds us; as Bill Viola says, glasses were high-tech when people realized you could put water into them. Technology is always changing, and there's always a new "killer app." You buy a N64, and you wish you had a dreamcast; you get a CD boombox and you see somebody else with a minidisc player and you think "Cool!"

The arts are no different, except that there is a tendency to stick with what you know and look down on all that "newfangled stuff". People who started by using film look down on the people who first used portable video cameras, and they love to dis people like me, who use digital video. But it's really all the same: the first people in the Renaissance who used oils to paint were probably teased by the traditional egg-white painters...

It's all about ART, though. And what is art? It's communication, it's connection, it's people talking to each other and sharing an idea.

performance is communication

My favorite definition of art is that it is the communication of emotion. A dancer may astonish you (or bore you); a rapper may infuriate you; an actor can make you laugh so hard you pee in your pants. This is EMOTION. But you have to have a way for that emotion to get from point A (the artist) to point B (the audience).

In fact, that's one of the first things ever taught to theatre majors: there are three parts to a performance:

1. The Audience
2. The Performer
3. The Space where #'s 1 and 2 come together.

Now there's this big new space, called the web, which is turning the theatre world on its head (more on this later). But the real change is that the same technology--DIGITIZATION--can be used to communicate in so many different ways. Digital books. Digital sound. Digital video. Didja ever wonder why so much is digital? Keep wondering; we aren't getting to that today.

signal to noise

Before you can communicate, you've got to have something to say. Sometimes the ease of digital media is a trap; it's so easy to create things, you aren't careful with what you make, or what you communicate. Is any of this making sense to you? I'm typing it off of some scribbled notes late at night after a long day. Maybe tomorrow morning I'll wake up and find out it doesn't make sense. No biggie. I'll just delete it, start over, and it's like it never happened.

Do you think I'd feel that way if I had to write this all by hand? For each of you? Or what if I had to chisel it in stone? I'd probably take a lot more care with what I was writing, with the way I was saying things. I might try to say things with fewer words, or make the words count more.

In any signal (be it an electrical signal, a smoke signal, or an email) there is a given amount of noise (energy or information that is useless, and sometimes detrimental, to the purpose of the signal). Our task, as performance technologists, is to make that noise as small as possible--so that our ideas are communicated in exactly the way we want.

This is why there's this "boom" in music and voice on the web. Text is a very accurate way to convey information, but if it starts to get harder to see, there isn't much we can do about it; it's already written.

"...Voice is a terribly redundant channel of information, compared with printed text...you can warp and permute voice in the most fiendish ways imaginable and it will still be perfectly intelligible to the listener....Our ears know how to find the familiar patterns."

--Neal Stephenson, CRYPTONOMICON

On the other hand, you can always say "what?" or rewind, or guess what was said from context...the ear is more flexible than the eye and the brain combined.

When you read, do you hear a voice in your head? Are you hearing me talk to you right now? That's funny; I've never said these words, ever, out loud. But as I write this, there is a voice in my head imagining that I'm talking to you. So the signal travels this way:

my thoughts go to
my brain voice which turn into
this text you are reading into
your brain voice which turn into
your thoughts

Kind of a complicated path. And if we're hearing voices anyway, why not just use voice and get rid of one of the steps in the path? Here's an important law of Performance Technology:

SIMPLIFY THE PATH, IMPROVE THE SIGNAL.

intuition and interface

As long as we're talking about Laws of Performance Tech, let's have another one, which is very useful when you're trying to figure out why your computer lost that file, or why your VCR won't program, or even why that new CD has that piece of tape on it that seems absolutely impossible to get off:

SOMEBODY, AT SOME POINT,
THOUGHT THIS WAS INTUITIVE.

That's right. Someone thought that tape was a good idea, and more importantly, they designed it in a way that it could be gotten off! If you can put yourself in their shoes, you can figure out how things work much more easily. Then you can make fun of them. "What were they thinking!?!"

What does this have to do with Art? If you have an idea, then when you present it, make it intuitive--or try to. What will you audience actually SEE? You, the artist, know exactly what your idea is, what it is you need to communicate (or, at least, you should). But they don't have that advantage. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to make your audience both understand and care about your message.

(there is a genre of artist who pride themselves on making art that is totally opaque, only understandable (supposedly) to themselves. That's fine. I've got no problem with that. But it's a DIFFERENT CLASS. So we're going to try to communicate here).