ROBOTIC and SYNTHETIC PERFORMANCE: Steps Toward a Culture of Liberation a Manifesto of the OmniCircus
XXIV. MECHANICAL PERFORMANCE: Evolution, Implications
A critical component of any new aesthetic language is the drive to create and integrate new technologies into its arsenal. In the last several decades a revolution in the power, dissemination and democratization of music and art has taken place. Electronic music and imaging tools, such as audio and video synthesizers and computers, are utilizable for unprecedented imaginative expression. It is now possible for a band or composer to make 'orchestrally' complex music without needing the resources to hire an orchestra. Computer animation is utterly transforming accepted notions of "realistic" storytelling. Mechanical engineering technologies have the capability to bring to life real-time robotic actors with virtually limitless potential of expression. An artistic language of vastly expanded articulation is evolving.
OmniCircus Center for Robotic and Synthetic Performance is a drama laboratory that strives for the creation of a new performance language. Yet mechanical performance is almost as old as theater and mythology itself. One of the first books ever written on theater was On Pneumatics, Hydraulics and Mechanical Theater, by the ancient Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria, written in the time of Nero. Early actors were condemned criminals, forced to enact rituals of the gods on the way to their own executions. Is it any wonder that the profession of actor was, very early on, automated? Even at the time of the birth of classical Western theater the genius of humanity intuitively knew its own evolution! There has been a periodic effort since ancient days to make automatons capable of 'artistic' or theatrical effect. In his 'Book of Knowledge of Ingenious Mechanical Devices', Ibn al-Razzaz al-Jazari describes animated figures such as elephants and musicians, as well as water clocks utilizing rolling balls, striking the hours on cymbals. This work was completed in Diyar Bakir, now Turkey, in 1206 A.D. An eighteenth-century Swiss inventor, Pierre Jaquet-Droz, inventor of the pocket-watch, made amazingly intricate automata such as his LITTLE WRITER a programmable mechanical computer in the shape of a man which could produce different letters and phrases by changing cams. And Leonardo da Vinci engaged in robotic theater, building a mechanical lion described by his biographer Giorgio Vasari, and a robotic warrior no doubt intended to ease the burden on real soldiers produced by one of his other mechanical disciplines, making instruments of death for what he called 'beastly madness', the business of warfare. At the end of the 16th century the "Theater of machines" literary genre appeared. One of the first of the 'Theaters' books was produced by Jacques Besson (1540?-1573). It was called 'Theater of Instruments and Machines'. It is a fascinating compendium of early attempts at automation of labor, including descriptions and drawings of lathes, cutting and hauling machines, elevators and much else. It is clear that by this time engineering has moved from the realm of entertainment and theory to the trenches of hard labor. Surely da Vinci and Besson knew it would only be a matter of time before the OmniCircus would begin to automate the jobs which act as the sarcophagus for our collective self-loathing - hookers, beggars, junkies and prophets!
There are only two forms of economic organization that allow enough material surplus to create civilization- slavery (exploiting humans through bondage, in its chattel and wage forms); and a highly mechanized (and democratized) technology. The only one of these options that has yet been implemented is slavery, in all of its magnificent finery and masquerades. Social evolution has, until this very day, been a tragic carnival of contradictions, where the greatest achievements of imagination and daring - the Sistine Chapels and Taj Mahals, the indomitable Grand Canyons of human genius - are sponsored by wealth founded on the backs of exploited labor and the grossest and most palpable slavery. Robot theater exists today because it is now possible to imagine a civilization built on technology instead of degraded human labor. The dim outlines of a truly human culture are at hand and are discernable by the most astute and courageous among us, those that know that the end parenthesis of the slave epoch is to be seen in the silhouette of the robot. In the deepest and most primal sense, if you're opposed to technology, you're opposed to civilization or in support of slavery!
Soon it will be possible to end the primal tragedy upon which civilization is built - exploitation of slave labor in all its forms... chattel slavery, wage slavery, prostitution; and heal the primal split between physical and intellectual labor that materialized when the owning classes raised up a caste of intellectuals and endowed them into the priesthood of thought, leaving the mass to their fate as beasts of burden. The means of ending the riddle of progress, namely that progress has been based on degradation, is at hand, and that fact is symbolized by the advent of Robotic Theater.
The theatrical endeavors of the past epoch have struggled, sometimes heroically, within the limitations proscribed by individualism and naturalism, once-progressive doctrines now propped up on life-support by Hollywood and Broadway mega-bucks. Dramatic individualism presumes that stories are best told by focusing on the exterior, perceivable lives of persons who embody the psychological forces that are the presumptive motives for the drama. This form of animated 'portraiture' favors a historicity whose atomic structures are the psychological interactions of individuals.
Dramatic naturalism also inherently imposes a passive focus on the existing appearance, emotional landscape and modes of behavior of the culture that produces the work, an imposition that is almost totally at odds with the revolutionary role of drama, which is to create NEW myths, modes of behavior and codes of emotion. Another result of this focus on empirical, visible, pre-existing reality is a certain infantile over-simplification, one which downplays or sidesteps the complexities and psychological profundities of the main characters to the role of background, since they can't be shown directly through external action. Ironically these limitations tend to cancel out most of what can be shown in modern-day drama, eliminating or marginalizing the expressionistic, the surreal, the ambiguous and the poetic from the arsenal of the dramatist. Down with the "story arc"!
OmniCircus is extending the territory of theatrical exploration, to make both of the realms which are translucent under the cloak of naturalism - the micro-context of the interior of the individual, and the meta-context of the social landscape - visible in a corporeal way on the stage, screen or street. Our method is to bring these multifaceted interior and exterior dimensions of the story to life with sophisticated robotic actors and (digitally animated) synthetic characters, which we call VIRpts, for virtual puppets.
We are committed multi-disciplinarians, who traffic in meta-fusion music, theater, dance, digital visual art, and robotics. Since 1988, we've been engaged in an effort to build a Robotic Red-light District, an ensemble of mechanical beggars, hookers, junkies, street preachers and other living embodiments of our culture's economic ritualization. These robot warriors of the collective unconscious live at the San Francisco OmniCircus, at 550 Natoma St., itself a permanent installation as well as a theatrical laboratory. The OmniCircus Ensemble has been making a series of stage works that explore the labyrinth of life in these deformed, traumatic times. These works include:
HOUSE of the DEAFMAN, at the OmniCircus, upcoming in March 2002
ORGY of DOUBT, at the OmniCircus, 1999
FEEDING FRENZY, at the OmniCircus, 1999
SERMON on the MOUND, at the OmniCircus, 1998
SEASONS of the VEIL (first version), at the OmniCircus, 1997
RAPTURE of the DEEP, at the OmniCircus, 1997
DETOUR, at the OmniCircus, 1996
DAMAGED MAN and WOMAN, at the Climate Theater, 1995
One of our current projects is the perfection of a midi VIRpt (digitally animated puppet) controller, which allows the real-time performance of animated characters. This device initiates a symbiosis of the strengths of film (the epic scope), theater (the interactivity and immediacy), and animation (access to surrealistic and fantastic inner and outer worlds). Our troupe of robot and synthetic performers now includes digital actors capable of expanding the performance vocabulary of humans in the same way that music synthesizers expanded the language of sound for the electronic composer in the past three decades. Robotic researchers, artists, virtual reality artists, composers and others are coming to work at the OmniCircus to do cutting edge engineering, make robotic theater, and create projects that further new multimedia and experimental performance techniques and tools.
The struggle to join art and technology is a metaphor for the immense effort needed to create a more equalitarian society. Our newest project is an effort to apply this methodology to the world of disabled performers. We are applying our collaborative energies to the making of a robotic exo-skeletal arm based on the snake-arm or elephant trunk design, which will be combined with our already existing performance 'chariot' to allow a paraplegic dancer to literally extend their reach and the fluidity and expressivity of their movements past that of non-disabled dancers. There is no greater task and metaphor for the extension of human capabilities with technology than to build robotic devices that extend the movement and performance capabilities of disabled (partially paralyzed, wheelchair-bound, nervous system damaged, or otherwise limited in their motion) performers past that of the non-disabled performers in specific, limited but profound ways. And there is no greater goal for theater artists in our greed-besotted times than to participate in the making of new and empowering codes of emotion and behavior, going to war with the Hollywood 'entertainment' (distraction) industry for the heart, mind and mojo of the working-class audience.
We believe that the science and art of robotics, when combined with biology, nanotechnology and engineering, will allow the implementation of human consciousness on other planets many years before we can send astronauts. Robotics is the arena where the extension of the human body and human capability in all of it's dimensions into unimagined potentialities ensues. Robotics lays open the possibility of ending wage-slavery and grinding exploitation by mechanizing a much larger portion of the grind of alienated labor. Robotics will allow the implosion of the simplistic naturalism of infantile theatrical modes. Robotic art can be a holy place for the ritualized baptism of new forms of consciousness and physical empowerment. Robotic and Synthetic Theater has the potential to be the metaphor for the technologizing of human work, and the humanizing of technology. And Robotic and Synthetic Theater can be the Coliseum within which Liberation Gladiators will do battle for the right to begin social evolution anew, freed from the evils of human exploitation! To win this war, artists need to master not only the new technologies but also new languages of expression - surrealist expression.
