Emotional Machines - Composing for Unstable Media.

Thorolf Thuestad

Emotional machines – composing for unstable media. Thorolf Thuestad In partial fulfilment of PhD in artistic research The Grieg Academy, Department of Music, Faculty of Art, Music, and Design, University of Bergen, 2021 The artistic research project Emotional machines - composing for unstable media explores how non-representational kinetic objects may afford affective and emotional responses, in particular experiences of kinship and relation between an audience and animated objects. Further possibilities for artistic expression are opened through composition and dramaturgy, in works where the animated objects perform alongside human performers and other media, such as light and sound. How may such animated non-representational physical objects be developed? How does animating the physical objects change the potential for experience of kinship and relation between audience and object? How does context modulate the potential for experience of kinship and relation between audience and animated physical object? How does the potential experience of kinship with the animated object differ for the creator of the object, and audience? These questions have been investigated through the creation of a set of animated kinetic figures. These figures have performed in a series of artistic presentations such as gallery exhibitions and stage presentations. The artistic research concludes with two complementary public artistic presentations taking place in bergen in June/July 2021; a time-based stage production at Cornerteatret and a gallery exhibition at Lydgalleriet. The presentations are considered connected and have the common title For one – for many – for all. This is an exposition of the research that presents the kinetic figures, the process of developing them, the questions they have contributed to explore, resulting artistic works (with particular emphasis on the final artistic presentations taking place in June/July 2021), the additional artists contributing to these public presentations, and a series of reflections resulting from the research. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- Emotional machines – composing for unstable media Thorolf Thuestad. Denne eksposisjonen presenteres som del av gjennomføring av doktorgrad i kunstnerisk utviklingsarbeid ved Griegakademiet, Institutt for musikk, Fakultet for kunst, musikk og design, Universitetet i Bergen, 2021. Emotional machines - composing for unstable media utforsker hvordan ikke-representative kinetiske objekter kan skape affektive og emosjonelle responser hos mennesker. Spesifikt opplevelse av slektskap og relasjon mellom et publikum og animerte objekter. Det åpnes ytterligere muligheter for kunstneriske uttrykk gjennom komposisjon og dramaturgi i verk der de animerte objektene opptrer sammen med menneskelige utøvere og andre medier, som lys og lyd. Hvordan kan animerte ikke-representative fysiske objekter utvikles med dette startpunktet som inspirasjon? Hvordan endrer animasjon av de fysiske objektene potensialet for opplevelse av slektskap og relasjon mellom publikum og objekt? Hvordan modulerer konteksten de animerte objektene presenteres i potensialet for opplevelse av slektskap og relasjon? Hvordan er den potensielle opplevelsen av slektskap med det animerte objektet forskjellig for skaperen(e) av objektet, og publikum? I Emotional machines – composing for unstable media har spørsmålene har blitt undersøkt ved hjelp av en gruppe animerte kinetiske figurer. Disse figurene har opptrådt i en rekke kunstneriske sammenhenger hovedsakelig galleriutstillinger og scenepresentasjoner. Prosjektet ble avsluttet med to utfyllende offentlige kunstneriske presentasjoner som fant sted i Bergen i juni/juli 2021: En tidsbasert sceneproduksjon vist på Cornerteatret og en galleriutstilling vist på Lydgalleriet. Presentasjonene er tilknyttet hverandre og har fellestittelen For one – for many – for all. Denne eksposisjonen presenterer de kinetiske figurene, prosessen med å utvikle dem, spørsmålene de har bidratt til å utforske, resulterende kunstneriske verk (med særlig vekt på de endelige kunstneriske presentasjonene i juni/juli 2021), kunstnerne som bidro til disse offentlige presentasjonene samt en rekke refleksjonstekster drevet frem av arbeidet med prosjektet.

Underground

Underground1 is a large-scale stage production featuring 30 technicians, musicians and actors inspired by Franz Kafka's writing. It is a hybrid film/theatre production directed by Philippe Vincent, script by Philippe Vincent, Alwynne Prithcard, Thorolf Thuestad and Anne Ferret, created and produced by the French company Scènes Théâtre Cinéma and Neither Nor based in Bergen, Norway. For the production I composed the score and created the sound design/live foley together with Alwynne Pritchard as well as performing as an actor and developing control systems for motorized set pieces and matte paintings.

In the performance, the audience is divided into two groups, each experiencing events from two different perspectives. As one group in the theatre space watches the live filming of Underground as a stage piece, the second group in the cinema experiences it as a film, shot, edited and relayed live. All the technicians, actors, camera operators, foley artists and musicians are on the stage. The set design is a mixture of small-scale, modular set components, full-size rooms and environments and all the equipment needed to make a movie: travelling crane, jib, cameras, tripod, microphones, wireless systems etc.

The performance takes place twice, allowing the audience to watch in both the theatre and the cinema, experiencing the drama from both perspectives. Permeating these two worlds, the musicians interact with both the film set and theatre stage, directing, participating in, enhancing and accompanying the action as they move from stage to screen and back again. They create music, noise, sound effects and words, exciting and confounding emotions and ideas. Reality and fantasy merge to create a world reflecting the dark confusion and nihilistic humour expressed in Franz Kafka's work. The result is perplexing and disorientating.

Set in multiple enclosed, confounding or disorientating spaces, both the live and film action of Underground occurs in environments from which there is, despite brief appearances to the contrary, no escape. Clearly, beyond the protagonist's control, these interconnecting locations transport Joseph K. on a seemingly inevitable trajectory towards an increasingly diminishing inner psychological space. It is the challenge of defining and separating fantasy from reality – which is at the heart of Underground and drives the interaction between the musicians and the actors on stage and film.

However, Underground does offer deliverance, if not for Joseph K., at least for the audience. The two-dimensional dreamscape of the film is revealed through the three-dimensional mechanics of the theatre performance. No matter which the audience experiences first (film or stage play), our intention and hope are that rather than shattering the film's fiction, the stage play can be a way of revealing the human agency behind it. Like having the secret of a magic trick demonstrated, the pleasure and surprise of the experience are not created by film fiction but by the human ingenuity and action of the theatre play behind it.

Unreality

The first scene in the performance starts with what appears for the audience members in the cinema as an accurate re-creation of the opening scene of Orson Welles' film The Trial2 where two inspectors show up unannounced in the protagonist' bedroom at the break of dawn to inform him of the charges brought to bear on him. Our recreation is such that the movement, timing of the actors as well as the text, albeit slightly adjusted to fit the plot of this production, matches the scene from Welles' film. The viewers in the cinema room watch a tense exchange between the actors on screen, but for the audience in the theatre space this interaction is mostly hidden inside a large set building and for the most part out of sight. The audience in this space is instead left to view a row of technicians, foley artists and musicians at the front of the stage with the stage itself populated by a jungle of cameras, boom operators and actors, and prop handlers readying items for the coming scenes. It is quiet and seemingly undramatic. The musicians play unamplified, so you hear a faint sound of drums and some acoustic instruments, but not the electric guitar, the keyboard and the extremely close miced foley props. The narrative content is at this point, only hinted at for the audience in the theatre space. They see around twenty people labouring to create something but without seeing the product of that labour.

At this early point in the performance, the difference between what you experience in the theatre space and what you experience in the cinema is so great as to almost be perceived as unrelated. In the theatre space, you watch a group of people labouring to create an illusion that seems complete for the spectators in the cinema room in effect creating a world that when viewed as a two-dimensional moving image gives no reason to consider what lies behind the wall of the set, as it were. In the theatre space, you view a group of people working to create an illusion that neither the audience nor the labourers are privy to. One of the most curious experiences in performing this show is that you work with great precision as part of a large group to make sure that one action follows another in the right order with the right timing, at the same time as you have almost no contact with what the "final" product, in the form of the film, actually looks or sounds like. I am sure this is a common experience for people working in film. Still, for performers accustomed two audience contact and the immediacy of performer-audience communication, it is a curious experience. Like the audience in the theatre space, we the performers have minimal access to experiencing what the actions we perform are transformed into when seen as the film in the cinema room.

Cog in the machine

In development and throughout the rehearsal period, it seemed natural to consider the totality of the technology; the props, the set, the actors, the foley artists and the musicians as parts in a great machine. Each of us forms a small component without fully understanding the totality of the other parts' objectives. We created this machine to achieve artistic goals, but as the machine's working took on an unmanageable complexity, the overview was lost. The experience of being a human component in the Underground machine is of performing a series of actions that must be executed accurately and at the right time, and in synchronization with other human and machine-components, but without any real understanding of the effect of those actions. It reminds me of Karl Marx' fragment on machines in which he points out that a worker that serves the machine rather than the machine serving the worker.

But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is the machine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages.3

Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself.4

Memory

When an audience member experiences Underground, they take one of two "routes" through the performance. The audience is split into two groups where one group first sees the finished film in a cinema room, and the other group first sees the soundstage where the film shoot is performed, edited, mixed and relayed in real-time.

The film is a complete, coherent and uninterrupted narrative trail with a dramaturgical curve, the experience in the soundstage is fragmented, obfuscated and to some degree a static experience.

The audience members in the two groups are watching the same actions unfolding. One group experiences it as a coherent narrative structure employing many cinematic conventions to create an engrossing cinematic experience. The other group sees an overview but a somewhat chaotic one, they have an overview but loose coherence. They see many people working precisely together, but in the theatre space, it is about how the actions performed can lead to what is seen on screen. A fundamental premise for all filmmaking is limiting the field of vision through framing to regulate perceptions of a given thing or situation, but this process is usually hidden. It is everything that is not shown that facilitates coherence.

Interestingly, while you can see much more in the theatre space, it is next to impossible to follow the storyline. The audience depends on the limits imposed by the implicit curation of assembling two-dimensional image and soundstage seen in the cinema to follow the story.

For the group that saw the film first, there is an inevitable desire to attempt to follow the storyline as it is created in the theatre space. This depends on the memory of the film and the ability to navigate the somewhat chaotic theatrical space to recognize what forms part of the narrative, and what are auxiliary functions to facilitate the creation of that narrative. In effect, the audience is trying to recreate the curation provided by the editing process and cinematography of the two-dimensional film. There is never a side-by-side comparison between what happens on the stage and what you see in the movie. Any correlation between the action on the stage and the film has to be made with memory.

A central aspect of Underground is that the audience cannot see the film and the creation of the film simultaneously. This means that memory becomes a key player in the experience of the production as a whole. The film and the stage production can be experienced as performative artwork in their own right. Still, there is an added dimension provided by memory as the audience attempt to remember what action on the stage created which effect in the film, or conversely, what happened onstage that meant you got the result taking place on the screen in the cinema room. The experience exists in different realms. Firstly as a film, secondly as a stage production, and thirdly in how the order the audience experiences the show's two halves influence the experience. If you see the film first, you may enter the stage production and be surprised as you see it revealed how the film was created. If you see the stage production first, you may wonder what this somewhat chaotic undulating mass of people and equipment could possibly result in and be surprised at how the film appears. In both cases remembering what you saw in the first half is central to that experience. Your experience in the second half is coloured and determined by your memory of the first.

Tip

Tip

Underground

Unreality

Cog in the machine

Memory