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Figure 9: Scorched Happiness by Adam Nash
Julia Kristeva's “Toccata and Fugue for the Foreigner” (which is Chapter 1 of her landmark work on foreignness, Strangers To Ourselves) is an ideal work on which to base such an experiment, because it deals with the psychology of those who find themselves in a new territory (i.e., the foreigner), whilst being a highly poetical work of literature that prefaces a rigorous deconstruction of the notion of foreignness throughout history to the present. It is a beautiful, confronting work that provides an immense amount of raw emotional material, expertly articulated. Its structure (23 short 'fugues') presents an ideal framework on which to base a performance, since as an immigrant myself the text resonated strongly with me, and formally these fugues lent themselves to the kind of formal structuring that had worked so well in the previous experiments mentioned above.
Rather than fill a space with these short fugues, which had previously resulted in an unsatisfactorily linear navigation systems, each fugue was actually the geometry for an avatar, one that comes into being when a user logs into an empty 3D world and thereby fills the world with its geometry; its presence becomes the environment itself. These highly geometric, abstract, non-humanoid avatars allowed me to explore as many permutations as possible towards understanding the properties of RT3D space. As the foreigner in Kristeva's text explores wildly varied emotional geographies in an attempt to know the new place, so too does the avatar explore the cyberspace in Scorched Happiness. The foreigner is by turns ebullient, aloof, confident, melancholic, multilingual yet mute, ironic yet naive. The avatars in Scorched Happiness become huge, layered, temporally chimeric audiovisual events filling up the space then receding away as they react to one another's manifestations. I was able to continue to use the successful formal elements of the Chromacy experiments whilst giving the work a conceptual basis and direction, so the avatars of the performers took the form of the works themselves (or vice versa). The idea here was that the audience (or interactors as Jusin Clemens calls them in his 2008 BabelSwarm essay) would interact with the performers, rather than arbitrary demarcations of the space itself which was otherwise a solid, dark background. In practice, this raises the interesting question of how should one represent the virtual presence of the audience – the user need not have a visual representation in order for the system to track the user’s state and location or presence, but it is unconventional for the user not to have some form of visual representation, even if for nothing more than to function as a conventional feedback device. Scorched Happiness, in multi-user version, settled for almost completely opaque spheres, in order that the audience/users could interact without visually detracting from the performance. This was an unsatisfactory solution since it is neither enacting a visual lack of marker of a users’ presence nor enforcing a strict linear relationship between visibility and presence. In other words, if the performers are not logged in, the space is empty. This is analogous to a real world performance situation, since live performances are tied to a specific point in time, but the work itself is accessible on the internet at any time, from any timezone, and therefore not particularly suited to temporally specific performances. As a practical response and also for considerations of archiving, a single-user version of the work was also produced in order that interactors could experience something of the work outside of the times it was actively being performed.
Scorched Happiness, then, used an approach where the avatar was the performer, the performance and the performance space all at once. I came to refer to these entities as performance avatars. The primary positive result from the Scorched Happiness performance was the potential that performance avatars showed in developing the concept of live virtual performance. The formal framework functioned well in enabling the production of abstract, non-anthropocentric space and avatars. Similar to writing a piece of music, the framework was able to suggest its own structure from within the parameters of the formal system, although of course this was already highly determined by Kristeva’s text, which was literally included in the performance as performers typed phrases into the built-in chat box, from the fugue that their particular avatar was based on.
Unfortunately, the showing of Scorched Happiness still displayed a certain unsatisfactory linearity to the navigation, probably because it was based on navigating a line through space. Although the work was designed, drawing on the Memory Plains Returning performances, as an online-only experience specifically for interactors to log in to rather than attend a physical venue, the show was commissioned by Melinda Rackham as part of a major contemporary art exhibition 2004 Australian Art Now at Melbourne’s Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) and National Gallery of Victoria. I had designed Scorched Happiness to be an online-only experience, to be accessed by users from their own homes, so that familiar surroundings gave them time to interact with the show themselves. However, I went ahead with two real world mixed reality performances of the work at ACMI, and both were technically successful, but they highlighted (as per the Memory Plains Returning experience, the severe need for an audience willing to log in themselves – if only a fraction of the number who’d attended the ACMI session had logged in instead, it may have been possible to achieve the tipping point where the non-initiate could have converged the intellectual and material processes of the medium and an accelerated acculturation occurred resulting in an ‘ah-ha!’ moment, but as it was only one audience avatar logged in. This was the major negative lesson from this experiment with live performance – the severe lack of an audience willing to log in and interact. Because of the popularity of Second Life and Massively Multiplayer Online Games like World of Warcraft, such experience is now so commonplace as to be able to be thought of as a reliable element in an interactive experience, but at the time Scorched Happiness was presented, it was not. Another major negative was the increasing doubt around the continued viability of VNet as a multi-user platform, due to some legal arrangements between Microsoft and Sun Microsystems, where the so-called java virtual machine that VNet required would no longer be made available to the public. Any software requiring it would need to be updated to use the new, legally approved java virtual machine.