{"id":1764,"date":"2020-12-07T09:26:56","date_gmt":"2020-12-07T15:26:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/digitex.org\/?p=1764"},"modified":"2023-05-08T15:53:32","modified_gmt":"2023-05-08T15:53:32","slug":"levels-of-mediated-aliveness-mozilla-hubs-and-1984-part-two","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/2020\/12\/07\/levels-of-mediated-aliveness-mozilla-hubs-and-1984-part-two\/","title":{"rendered":"Levels of Mediated Aliveness, Mozilla Hubs, and 1984 \u2013 Part Two"},"content":{"rendered":"

by Todd Ellis, Director of Teaching and Learning,\u00a0Grayson College<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

This post is the second in a two-part series and is, in part, a response to last month\u2019s post,\u00a0<\/em>\u201c<\/em>Ready Player One,\u00a0Hamilton,\u00a0and Me: \u2018Liveness,\u2019 Mediated Communication, and Building Relationships in a Virtual World\u201d<\/em><\/a><\/span>\u00a0by\u00a0DigiTex\u00a0Executive Director Judith Sebesta.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

I recently \u201cattended\u201d my first virtual play. North Central Texas College Drama and Grayson College Theatre collaborated on the play adaptation of Orwell\u2019s 1984<\/em>. Wow, what a truly heroic, timely, and exciting production that was! I saw the process firsthand because my wife Alison is the director of Grayson College Theatre, and I could hear rehearsals happening every evening from my living room, live-yet-extremely-mediated over Zoom.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"\"
Directors Thom Talbott at North Central Texas College and Alison Trapp at Grayson College won Excellence in Collaborative Education awards from the Kennedy Center American College Theatre Festival for this virtual production.<\/span><\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The question \u201cWhat is liveness?\u201d was foremost in my mind as I watched this amazing and challenging technical feat. While I certainly very much enjoyed \u201cattending\u201d this \u201clive\u201d theatre in my skull jammies and with my pup in my lap, I found myself on the paradoxical verge of tears and joy for the heroic attempts of this ancient art form to continue to stay alive and relevant. A large part of the drama for me, in addition to the mediated-yet-live drama itself, was simply the bearing of witness to the newly critical precariousness of drama itself as an art form. I wondered if my own emotional reactions were examples of the \u201csoftening of culture\u201d about which the Rutgers intellectual Naomi Klein was lately speaking?<\/span><\/p>\n

What constituted the liveness<\/em> of this virtual production of 1984<\/em>? It was certainly the shared mics and projected facial images in real and unedited time. There was some very quality live and unedited acting within the confines of a movement space of about six square feet for each actor. It turns out that so much of live acting occurs, indeed, in the face and especially the eyes. However, since there was no blocking, actors couldn\u2019t elaborate contextual clues via spatial positioning. This was something I could actually do in Mozilla Hubs, clunky though it was. I could move to the porch and mope and blink to my heart\u2019s content, for what it\u2019s worth.<\/span><\/p>\n

Did the liveness<\/em> in this virtual 1984<\/em> consist of the vulnerability of actors being unable to evade or edit mistakes? Not that there were any; the actors seemed remarkably flawless. But I was hyper aware of the possibility of a mistake happening unlike anything I experience when I\u2019m watching Netflix. Yes, there was the occasional random dog bark during one evening\u2019s production, but that\u2019s our new world and I thought the distant bark went well with the tone of menace already present in Orwell\u2019s work. Does liveness now mean random barks or the surprise appearance of puppy faces poking into our frames and licking keyboards? It apparently does in my world. My enthusiastic border collies are like reminders of healthy chaos and my ultimate inability to control much. It\u2019s certainly authentic.<\/span><\/p>\n

There is a cutting-edge reality to the possibility of error in virtual theatre; it\u2019s authentic in that sense. Actors might mess up, speak out of turn, forget a line! Alison told me of a technical issue that was only solved by having actors push the boundaries of what little authenticity they still had. There was an obvious time gap after actors spoke caused, apparently, by a delay in the speed of electricity moving over numerous power cables. Some of the actors weren\u2019t even in the same state. So the directors asked the actors to break a cardinal rule of acting by anticipating when to speak. They had to speak their lines early in order to achieve lifelike speech patterns that made up for the slowed mediation of electricity in power lines. I found myself thinking increasingly of the polarity between authentic and inauthentic and liveness vs. aliveness and about how the actors had to use moments of inauthenticity in performance in order to achieve authenticity through the mediation.<\/span><\/p>\n

Theatre is live. Virtual theatre is live as well, but not to the same extent. Virtual theatre is a more mediated liveness<\/em>. Virtual theatre is clearly more live than, say, a Netflix movie. But what does that mean for my experience of it? Other than the back-of-my mind thought that this is obviously being performed in real time, it also means, not so obviously, that it is more vulnerable, spontaneous, and unpredictable. In short, it is more alive than is film in a world now obsessed with a growing realization of an emerging nearness of potential death.<\/span><\/p>\n

At one point during the Halloween performance for 1984<\/em> an actor saw on his computer that Streamyard, the video hosting platform for the performances, was draining his battery and his computer would die in 15 minutes. He managed to message the quick-thinking and highly competent stage manager who immediately decided to access a recorded performance from a previous night, fast forward it to where the live play currently was roughly in real time, and switched from the live performance to a recording of a previous live performance. The audience only saw a brief black out. The more observant in the audience may have noticed a changed hairstyle in one of the actors. So, mediated liveness merged with recorded mediated liveness. I don\u2019t have an adequate vocabulary for this.<\/span><\/p>\n

I used to live in downtown Salt Lake City. In place of a TV set, I had a set of binoculars in my living room for guests to watch the always live human drama unfolding on the bustling streets below. This was the truest degree of liveness achievable, I think, as the unscripted spontaneity and unpredictability of a Freudian attraction, aggression, and indifference played out below in periodic bursts live before our lens-mediated eyes. It was also mediated by four floors of distance.<\/span><\/p>\n

As I get pandemic fatigued while the virus expands, I realize I may need an algorithm to help me decide how much aliveness<\/em> I\u2019ll risk in any scenario for the sake of collaborative liveness<\/em>. Live<\/em> is always a mediated form of life. In the end there is just life and everything live<\/em> is a mediated abstraction from that lived, transient, and ultimately inexplicable moment. How much un-mediation will I risk today for authenticity\u2019s sake?<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cSo get away from the screen, go outside,\u201d I tell myself every evening, even as I increasingly choose not to follow my own advice, \u201cinto the synchronous presence of life in the world now, such as it is, predictably unpredictable, my breath mediated through a mask, and just hang out with an un-mediated tree or a puppy.\u201d Tomorrow I will log in again to mediated life in order to help keep myself and others safe and alive.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Todd Ellis, Director of Teaching and Learning,\u00a0Grayson College This post is the second in a two-part series and is, in part, a response to last month\u2019s post,\u00a0\u201cReady Player One,\u00a0Hamilton,\u00a0and Me: \u2018Liveness,\u2019 Mediated Communication, and Building Relationships in a Virtual World\u201d\u00a0by\u00a0DigiTex\u00a0Executive Director Judith Sebesta. I recently \u201cattended\u201d my first virtual play. North Central Texas College […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1770,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-news-events"],"acf":{"carousel_content":null},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/64\/2020\/12\/1984-2.png?fit=280%2C326&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/peJQDx-ss","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1770"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/instruction.austincc.edu\/digitex\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}