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“Truly, I live in dark times!

A trusting world is folly. A smooth brow

A sign of insensitivity. The man who laughs

Has simply not heard

The terrifying news”

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From “To these born after” Bertolt Brecht

 

In their book, The Disappearance of rituals, Byung-Chul Han tells us that one of the signs of a society transfixed with work and production is the loss of the love of poetry, because poetry, in Han’s words, is a magical ceremony of language. Its use of language has no purpose in the world of production and information.  

We live in a largely capitalist based society in which production and consumption revolves around desire- as Marx foretold, the capitalist object is wrapped in the phantasmagoria of commodity fetishism. Our consumption is driven by the compulsion to have more.

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When the desire for things, readily gorged with the constant production of things, created through the economy of the working body, is met with the space of the unknown, each falls away from the other like Teflon. The machine of consumerism has no time for play, for the meaning making of ritual and for the esoterism of beliefs outside of the fundamentals of capitalism. Meaning is acquired through the ordering and calculation of facts because in the capitalist hegemony, everything must be quantifiable and everything must have a price.

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This paper seeks out the spaces where alternative ideas can gather, grow and bulge. This space can be called liminal, or, as technology theorist James Bridle describes- the grey zone- a place where knowledge and ideas shift and mingle and what is known and unknown rest together without answers.

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We live in a world of the commodified personal space. James Bridle has pointed out that the constant online life that we currently inhabit had its early start in the first hours of 9/11 in the now well-known form of scrolling news tickers that began appearing alongside news coverage of the events happening in real time in America. The news tickers stayed and flowed into the daily, hourly, minutely stream of information we have today, covering news, social media, shopping sites, communication and more as we attend to the stream of stuff on our connected phones and smart systems.

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In a commodified world of facts and information that doesn’t rest, it is no surprise that the individual self has joined the stream of online information. But one of the outcomes of living in a digital stream of information is the ungrounded nature of it all. The digital may have its start in the physical present but once online it becomes loosened from its phenomenological roots. Untethered to the physical in time, the digital also becomes uncertain. When the individual joins the digital stream and shares their life online, particularly when this is caught in hegemonies of commodification, there is a need to make the digital version of the self fully, unequivocally, real.  What arises from this mix of self, commodity and digital is what Byong Han calls,” the cult of authenticity”. A person, sharing their curated self-online, becomes a product in which they are the provider. There is a constant need to show the correct “self” and to prove the veracity of this through the sharing of the intimate and personal to produce/ promote and authenticate the real/ authentic self. Evolving from the ritualised western forms of the social spectacle of the 1900’s where the public space was one of performance of social status, the act of public performance now takes place in the promenades of the social media space where the private realm is now the space for performing the authentic self.

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Discourse and information, today, replaces the magic and the mystical- the unknown interior is emptied out in the need for transparency to authenticate the parade of the self.

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Life, with its constant connection, being on, the flooding of images and information, has no closure or end, only constant production and always in the action of process. Stories and narration, however, have a beginning, middle and end and these fixed points allow for the self and the making of meaning to take hold.  

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Our conception of space and time which is derived mainly from Einstein’s theories and differs from the earlier theories of Newton and Euclidian based conceptions, has as at the core an understanding of the principal of entropy. This principal tells us that all matter, subject to movement in time, will eventually break down into a random disorder. If we take this principal onto a macrocosmic scale, we could say that the disorder of the world we are seeing and the breaking down of the environment through global warming is a result of the process of entropy. It is unstoppable and logical. Perhaps the jump into the digital realm is an attempt to reconceptualize the self in a new spatiality where the rule of entropy may act differently.

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Elizabth Grosz writes of the nature of desire being one that produces- desire is an act of producing reality and of becoming into – self, other, joining, mingling. Desire in this sense, caught in the production of commodification, could be redirected into the grey zone of unknowing, swirling amongst the breaking down particles of entropy and dreaming into something new, a new type of reality where time is untethered from its forward pointing arrow and humans intermingle with all earth in a messy process of unlearning and reorienting into a space of love, compassion and tender care for all matter.

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A contemporary artist and performer whose recent work orientates itself in the space of desire is Amrita Hepi. Hepi is a Bundjulun/Ngapuhi woman who was commissioned by ACMI in Melbourne and the Samstag Museum in Adeliade to create the multidisciplinary work, “Scripture for a Smokescreen, episode 1: Dolphin house”. The work was based on a NASA program from the 1960’s that attempted to teach dolphins human language in preparation for extra-terrestrial communication.

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Hepi has explained that she is Interested in the gap between experience and the representation of experience and sees the Dolphin house piece as a type of mimicry between human and animal. Hepi, in creating the work, wanted the viewer to know the artifice of what they were seeing, in the form of a work created in a film set, but to also become immersed in the experience of watching the work.

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Hepi sees the body as a vessel that holds time- past present and future and in this sense acts as an archive, a physical memory of what has occurred and a projection of what is to come. For Hepi, the body is a transmitter of things and in the Dolphin House work, the body we see transmits desire, longing, and a search for interspecies connection as Hepi dances and moves on film with an inflatable dolphin. In the sense of Elizabeth Grosz’z ideas on desire, the moving body in Dolphin House produces a new becoming into being with human, animal and desire producing a different reality. In the layering and multi viewing set up of the work, we, the viewer, witness the disordering of the narration but also feel the intermingling of new connections. There is an unsettling feeling to watching the film, a tension between desire, the frustration of unfinished acts and the inability of the human to converse with the dolphin. The images are saturated in colour, and each section of the film intermingles with other images; there is no rest for processing, just as in the digital realm we rarely rest before moving to the next bit of information. The NASA experiment was deemed a failure, but Hepi is able to resurrect it in what she terms her historical fiction, presenting to us a scenario where she takes the colonialist discourse of forcing others(in the case of NASA, the dolphin) to bend to the will of the power, and creates a new reality of saturation in desire, longing and the absurd.

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Hepi’s performance interrogates how colonial ideas of language, communication and subjectivity are enacted and how in the process of transmuting language from one system to another, there is a an enaction of the grey zone that James Bridle describes.

Talking about Hepi’s work, critic and curator Kate ten Buuren explains, “We must leave room for misinterpretation and mistranslation when we are not getting information directly from the source, when the source is corrupted, and when the systems of value and knowledge come from an outside place.” [1]

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[2]

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Amrita Hepi’s performance can also be aligned theoretically with the practice of Bertolt Brecht, the influential German playwright and theorist of the last century. Brecht saw theatre and performance as a tool for social change and developed key theatre strategies that he believed would allow the audience to form an objective, rational understanding from what they were viewing. For this to happen, the audience must not be allowed to become emotionally immersed in the story of the play but instead, needed to be active participants in the meaning making of the drama they were seeing. Brecht favoured storytelling and narrative, with a series of anecdotes presented so each segment told a unique or separate story. Strategies were used to remind the viewer that they were watching theatre and to break the audience out of their complacency with the theatre experience. Tactics like breaking up segments of narration with titles, the use of song, montage and unresolved endings, all served to ensure the audience were kept present to the issues being presented.

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Brecht’s goal was to present stories and ideas that were seen as unchanging and an aspect of universal law and unmask them as simply a part of history and thus changeable. What history had solidified into an illusion of stability and substantiality could be dissolved, reconstructed, replaced, improved. Just as in Hepi’s playful presenting of historical fact, fractured, broken and reconstructed by the viewer in the act of viewing, the Brechtian methods of deconstruction and alienation allow for a playful response from the audience as they recreate knowledge and ideas. The part between the elements of the performance presentation in both Hepi’s work and in Brechtian theatre are no longer a void but an active component where meaning is produced.

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 [3]

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Earth elegy

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Bonita Ely is an Australian performance artist who is best known for her feminist performances from the 1970’s that critiqued the environmental destruction that was occurring through pollution activities such as the mining of uranium at sites like Jabiluka.

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 [4]

Ely presented work that highlighted the role of the bureaucrat or disconnected power broker in the complicity of environmental destruction. In performance pieces such as JABILUKA UO2, 1979, Ely shows us how those with power who simply follow the rules can destroy through their lack of ethical action. Ely’s performances, while originating over 40 years ago, reflect events that are still tragically happening today, such as the recent destruction by Rio Tinto of sacred land belonging to the Puutu Kunti Kurrama and Pinkura people in Western Australia. Rio Tinto at the time explained that they followed the legal requirements and submitted the correct clearances before destroying the gorge.

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In her performance, JABILUKA UO2, Ely is shown caring and tending to the earth, gently and lovingly creating mounds of earth structures before two male line marker workers walk over the mounds in the process of creating their straight line. Ely is able to use performance and the documentation of it in video form to show the cruelty and absurdity of people following instructions without taking care of the outcomes of their actions.

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David Levi Struss, in his writings on photography and belief, sees contemporary society as living in a world stripped of mythology and mysticism, where history, given to us through the medium of the image, is sitting in the present, right with us. We are not able to be objective as we are inundated with imagery, there is no mediation of the human in image gathering and processing and little space to insert myth and the mystical. While Ely showed us in understandable and relatable ways the gravity of the destruction that was happening across the Australian environment, perhaps what we need now is not just the shaking out of complacency that Brecht would advise but also the reinsertion of the mystical, the intangible and the unknowable into performance practice. Feminist theorist Donna Harraway writes of the need to entwine and entangle ourselves with the earth and other species so we may find new ways of relating to the world and perhaps new energy to help save it. By going into the grey zone of unknowing, by using desire to produce a new becoming and by embracing the magical and mystical in our reality, maybe we can find an alternative to the destructive ways humanity occupies space right now.

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[5]

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Bonita Ely’s recent work looks back to the western doctrines of ancient Greek mythology to reinsert ideas of the mythical into the image. Ely says of this work,

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“I felt I wanted to embed myself - embed us non-Indigenous Australians in the fish kill as it is our neglect, our greed, our ignorance that caused this environmental cruelty. Millais’s drowning Ophelia popped into my head. Lying back, chest heaving, body sinking, her open hands are raised in helpless resignation, grief, supplication. 

Dressed in a paisley patterned garment, the ancient Persian design appropriated by weavers in the C19th Scottish town, Paisley, the performance refers to colonialism, deep despair and environmental culpability.” [6]

 

Ely’s work echoes the work of the South American artist, Anna Meinditta, whose oeuvre was an exploration into the concept of a return to mother earth, through a spiritual connection that rested in her connection to her Cuban heritage and culture.

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[7]

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Both artists use the body, specifically the female body, as a site of mediation between the earth, culture and flesh, creating a dialogue where a longing for return, belonging, reparation and repair can interact with the human and nature.

 

Phenomenological theory sees the experience of time as being made of the triad of the perception of the present, the retention of the past, through memory and the projection of the future, with each section of the temporal triad being mediated by bodily movement through points in space and time. The feminist writer Megan Burke argues that this experience of temporality, or a lived experience of time, is in itself subjective and gendered. The instability and individuality of  subjective experience means that the experience of time is also individualised, gendered, and differing, contingent on the social and cultural structures of the setting that the body operates in. If the space that you move in is not free, if your body is not fully your own, or if you are historically denied certain rights, then the temporal triad is disrupted and the subjectivity of self to time is altered.

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Promotional flyer for the Future reader performance 2024 Emiko Artemis

 

How then, to represent the future, in my performance, “the Future reader”, in a way that allows for an anchoring of possibility in the narration of a fictional story- one that is similar to Amrita Hepi’s performance of historical fiction, where what is performed is a futuristic fiction?  For this performance, I am taking the viewpoint that time is not fixed. It is subjective and the adage of the forward pointing arrow of time is but one concept of time and temporality amongst other ways of experiencing and explaining time.

                                       

The Future Reader is an interactive performance that takes each participant into their imagined future. Based on the concept of time as a human construct, the performance asks the participant to question how time operates. What if all time was present at all times? What if all our selves, in all our potential lives, were here with us now, waiting to be known and seen? Using a series of spoken prompts and props such as a darkened booth in which the participant sits, the future reader asks each person to imagine a future where they are there, in their future, whilst also being at the same time in their present. The person engaging with the future reader becomes a witness to their imagined future and is both aware of the artifice of the activity they are a part of yet also stepping into an imagined reality which will eventually occur in some form- tomorrow and all other tomorrows will eventually be experienced as night follows day through the process of the world turning within our solar system.  

 

The interactive performance is designed to engage people in their future and in doing so, ask what this future could be. The future hasn’t happened yet, in the arrow of time that we experience, so let us together see a future that is right for us, whatever that may look like for each person.

 

If temporality occurs through the triad of past present and projected or expected future, then it would seem that the masters of time will be Artificial Intelligence. AI, particularly the complex large language models that are in operation today, have through the power of advanced computing, the ability to calculate future projections with what seems to be incredible accuracy. Yet the space that AI works in is the digital realm which is not an equal space and does not represent the global world well. AI is an assemblage of binary information, a calculating machine system  evolved from the original computing code of I and O. AI systems have a superpower feeling to them. Their god like aura can be said to originate in  western concepts of intelligence acting as a marker of moral worth and further, as computing power and the ability to understand the world scientifically as being a marker of high intelligence.

 

AI, being the super calculators that they are, disembodied from moving in space and time and thus acting in a space lacking in temporality, also risk removing power and control from the hands of humans. This is not because of a super ability of AI systems but because we will freely and willingly hand it over.

 

Digital theorist Eunsong Kim uses the phenomena of deep fake technology to illuminate the misguided cultural framework that AI is situated in. As Kim points out, every command or action taken in the digital realm needs our presence to create it and has a real-world environmental outcome.  Kim views deep fake imagery as also fully embodied, being a reflection of real-world action and thus bringing with it the same colonialist structural thinking of the real world in the creation and interpretation of deep fake imagery and its social outcomes.

 

Deep fake imagery may happen through the processes of digital technology and machine learning, but it originates in social and cultural systems of the real world and shows is the faulty structures of our society that give rise to the imagery in the first place. By only responding to deep fake imagery after the fact and focusing on the imagery technology itself rather than the social structures behind it, we risk being caught in the technology loop of problem solving through more tech. We become consumed by the machine rather than activators of  tools. 

 

Technology is presented commercially as a tool of utopian futures and an equalization of avenues of representation, information and dissemination through social platforms. Deep fake imagery makes use of the tools of the traditional gate keepers of information- the institution of the media and sits comfortably in the flattened information distribution platforms of the digital world. Yet the technology is not available to everyone and the tools and knowledge to use it are similarly unavailable to all, just as the creators of new tech such as the new AI models are not representative of our global world.

 

The learning space of AI is the digital realm yet each time a site is scraped for learning by AI, the earth is further mined for the minerals needed by big tech, more wooded areas are flattened to hold the large hangers that house data centres and the biases of the information being scraped is further strengthened into truth and fact. The digital cloud is very much an earth-based reality creating an alternative reality of simulation upon simulation and inequality reproduced and amplified in a digital space.

 

To delay action is disrupt expectations of movement and to enter the repository of what theorist Elizabeth grosz calls the virtual leap. Memory can be thought of as the moving of a particular point in the past, into the present.  Each time memory is recalled, it is selected from a mnemonic lake of memories. Pulled out like a fish on a line, it must fly through the void of synaptic space before landing in the present. This void is the space of possibility, where the tension of the past hurtles into the present. Resting on the expectation of the future, not yet formed, memory, possibility and occurrence can be stretched and activated.

 

Meagan Burke writes of the action of past present and future colliding through memory as being an important element of maintaining power and control in patriarchal systems. “Systems of power and domination elide the deep reservoir of the past in order to maintain their hold in the present, to keep intact what has been and still is. Accordingly, the virtual leap is necessary for reconfiguring present and future actualities.” [1] Delaying action subverts the usual ordering of time and the reintegration of past events into future. Delay restructures the flow of events within the patriarchal ordering of time.

 

The performance, Earth Elegy- Song, or Coronach for the World, from the series Earth Call, rests in this space of amorphous time. Each performance in the Earth Call series makes use of disrupted time and bodily movement to distort and reshape the triad of phenomenology by resting in the space of the virtual leap. Presented as elegies or laments for the world, they intervene in the expectations of space and time, offering a memorial to passing moments, a looking back to what was and a calling for what is to become. Each performance employs motion, time and the elements of wind, air and water to deify the connection we have to the earth, and each presents different acts of tending, care and symbolic action towards the earth and environment.

 

The first in the series, Earth Elegy, is a slow funeral type procession through the public space of Karrawirra Pari waterfront. This site blends rest, play, promenading and business, already holding multiple temporal possibilities. It is also the site where colonial powers sought to impose their will on the Kuarna people through the building of colonial institutions and the control of the river, now called in official discourse the River Torrens. It is a site of contested histories, multiple memories and unstable truths. In terms of colonial hegemonies and patriarchal discourse, it is a sharp point and a heavy slab.

[1] {Burke, 2019 #185}

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Earth Elegy, or Coronach for the World, Performance documentation image courtesy Elliot Image 2024

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In Earth elegy, as we process in broken, slowed movement, in a public display of mourning without a recognisable object of grief, we are also breaking down the colonial expectations of the performance of grief and the expected rules of movement- move forwards, with a clearly defined purpose and do not obstruct the forwards moving, purposeful actions of others. In our strange, stilted, hard to decode procession, we grieved for the earth while refusing the colonial, narratives of expected public behavior.  

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Grief work is a laboring and in the communal act of grief work, such as in the procession if performers gathered for Earth Elegy, there can be an undoing and remaking of spatial becoming where energies are transformed and new states of being are made. When grief work is done in community, with others, we undo and redo with each other. We are joined in loss and sadness and in our enjoinment, we embody grief. We create it and hold it and share it.

 

Earth Elegy is a performance where, through delayed processional movement, symbolic action and the performance of spectacle, there is a space where a communication with and to the earth can be made, a song for the ground, water and sky, sorrowful yet joyful in the desire to communicate. It is a production of a becoming that is outside of colonialist, extractive discourse and is based on ideas of tender and care.

 

We live in a world of climate catastrophe and devastating loss of human life. The future seems unbearable. The performances and research discussed in this paper attempt to situate the future as one which has the possibility of livability through alternative conceptions of thought and action.

 

As Noam Chomsky points out, we must continue with optimism over despair because optimism provides a place for action. Action, the use of language and all the power and influence that language has, are our tools for change, as are disruptions to expectations and creative engagements with the space of the unknown.

 

Desire is the demand for love and humans, in our desire for so much, demand love with a force so strong it destructs. We are so often beside ourselves- ejected from our inner selves to stand beside our fractured, incomplete forms. Language- the place of order, can only hold so much of our ejected, abject selves. Eventually, we must return to the unknown, the earth, or the entropic waters of the sea. This return, the jump into the void, the stilling of time and movement, can be a beginning, not an end, if we reach into time, memory and history, with radical love, care and tenderness.

 

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