Not Found an inter-media device for artists, scholars and citizens

A prototypesª by Teatringestazione; conceived and curated by Gesualdi | Trono; dramaturg Loretta Mesiti

(ª) We define "prototypes" as those unfinished formats still being studied, created, and transformed.

The inter-media device Not Found is configured as a dynamic ecosystem in which different functions coexist simultaneously. It is an instrument of artistic research, and therefore of investigation and creation, an installation and a scenic device for participation. Its different outcomes respond to the changing spaces in dialogue with the host structures: installation, workshop, performance, document, conference, confrontation, are just some of the forms it can take. Not Found constitutes a sort of "détournement" of the spatial arrangement of classical theatre. Where the theatre traditionally places the spectacle, the representation embodied by living bodies, in Not Found, there is a surface that is both a partition and a screen, on which the images produced by the movement of the bodies in action are projected in real-time. The insertion of this element distorts the relationship between action, observation and representation: each acting body is exposed in real-time to the contemplation of the visual trace that its movement produces and is thus induced to consider itself an instrument for writing the images that appear on the screen.

“Détournement is the opposite of quotation, of appealing to a theoretical authority that is inevitably tainted by the very fact that it has become a quotation — a fragment torn from its context and development, and ultimately from the general framework of its period and the particular option (appropriate or erroneous) that it represented within that framework. Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology. It appears in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any absolute certainty. It is a language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or supercritical reference. On the contrary, its internal coherence and practical effectiveness are what validate the previous kernels of truth it has brought back in play. Détournement has grounded its cause on nothing but its truth as present critique.” (Debord, 1967)

Not Found is an inter-media device, a generator of signs constantly reorganised by its inhabitants, performers, and spectator-participants. It gives life to an emerging language and instant choreography, whose signification is entrusted to the community that inhabits it for a certain length of time.

The device is installed in a space, arranged in separate but communicating sections. It consists of a screen on which the real-time images of a video camera, pointed at the entrance, are projected backwards. The camera is set to long exposure times; the image on the screen is mirrored. Between the screen and the door, the field of action and image capture is defined; behind the screen, a space resembling a small silent cinema is set up with headphones on the seats.

In Not Found, a dimension of disclosure and sharing is constituted in a space arranged around an element of separation/transmission/diffusion: the screen, whose presence separates and relates a series of places, defines asymmetrical ways of dealing, multiplies the thresholds between action and contemplation, offering us an opportunity to examine the conditions of our presence and its political meaning in the space of existence.

TECHNICAL RIDER

SPACE minimum mt8 x 12, indoor, with chairs

PROVIDED by the company: a hanged screen mt 6 x 3; a videocamera, a video projector; wireless headphones or silent sound system (up to 30 attendees)

NOT FOUND\Playground

At the level 0, the device is an installation open to the public, who, following the rules placed at the entrance to the room, can experience it in complete autonomy. The audience can play with it by making parts of themselves disappear from the figure projected, establishing an exclusive relationship with their double on the screen. Its title "Not Found" refers to the possibility of disappearing, of escaping the continuous overexposure to which we are subjected with the advent of digital technology. The device reflects on the gap between reality and post-truth, and how in this fracture, we undergo or practice an exercise of power. The figure on the screen represents a paradox: a defined stance emerges in the attempt to disappear, a self-representation is expressed.

The device creates a heterotopia, a place where the image finds its concreteness in the mediation of the machine that forces the user to find the position and the movement that makes the image significant. The mechanism is implemented through the subtraction of movement, as we understand it, composed of instants that mark consequential moments of action. The device fluidifies the movement by creating a trail that erases the instants, making visible only the moments in which the body is truly still. To exist, to find a definition, we must deform our way of moving or exasperate movement. In this way, the image is realised on the screen; but this deformation makes the screen a heterotopia, it robs natural movement of its sense and meaning. Therefore, we are faced with the choice of existing in one world or the other, since both are only possible in inaction, in 'posing'.

The screen is, therefore, what we might define as: "Those spaces that have the particular characteristic of being connected to all other spaces, but in such a way as to suspend, neutralise or invert the set of relationships that they designate, reflect, or mirror." (Foucalt, 1954-1988)

The device is installed in a space arranged in separate but communicating sections. It consists of a screen (preferably placed in front of an entrance door), a video camera, a video projector, chairs and headphones. Thus, the visitor enters a multidimensional space where he experiences the dislocation of his body and its perceptive functions; choosing each time to occupy different positions (A - B - C) as indicated on the map at the entrance; he assumes the role of actor, observer, the consumer.

USES AND VARIATIONS OF THE DEVICE AS A TOOL FOR INVESTIGATION AND CREATION

The device at its level 0 nourishes the processes of creation and composition of different public outcomes. It is architecture (archè and tèchne) of the formats in which the research is declined; an operation in continuous evolution, able to generate philosophical reflections, artistic productions and workshops. The device evolves, adapts and contaminates the spaces in which it is installed, involving local artists, scholars, citizens and visitors. Below are the proposals in the works, to be developed in artistic residency with a public outcome; together with some collateral activities that may complement the device in residency.

[performance - work in progress]

μονάς (monàs)

La sostanza reale delle cose

"The spectator's consciousness, imprisoned in a flattened universe, bound by the screen of the spectacle behind which his life has been deported, knows only the fictional speakers who unilaterally surround him with their commodities and the politics of their commodities. The spectacle, in its entirety, is his «mirror image.» Here the stage is set with the false exit of generalised autism." (Debord, 1967)

A hybrid scenic project that combines participatory installation, choreographic composition and live cinema: a performatic work (Mengotti, 2020), reflecting on the gap between reality and post-truth and, in this fracture, how we are subjected to or practice an exercise of power. An articulated investigation that starts from Guy-Debord passes through Leibniz and arrives at the definition of Homo Mediaticus, immersed in a fantastic world, between myths and rituals that are reproduced through the screen (Gentili, 2014).

During the residency, the performer is engaged in the production of an archive of gestures through a singular and exclusive relationship with his double in the screen, while the device remains open and accessible to visitors. On the basis of this archive, a choreographic composition is to be developed, with a process of reenactment of the collected gestures. The choreography is the material with which the performer, during the public opening, inhabits the space defined by the Not Found device: the body writes and inscribes itself in the crowd. A "provisional micro-society" (Debord, 1959) is created. The porous dance welcomes the gestures of the spectators-participants, in a mutual interference, defining itself on the screen in an "anthropic" panorama. In this landscape 'being' is a chase for superimposition and the relationship between one's own image and that of others. In this search for a meaningful relationship, there is always the impossibility of acting between the frames, one is always a moment before or after action. To exist, to find a collective definition, we must surrender to the corruption of the image reproduced on the screen. And when the game has been consumed in repetition, we will surrender to the "pose"; then, the real substance of things will appear.

In a landscape of artificial identities or copies of real identities, nature as a backdrop gives way to a space composed of millions of faces, of bodies fragmented by the focal aperture of the camera, seeking definition through a presence that does not necessarily imply a precise action but is mutilated in its impossibility of being truly realised, remaining evocation and representation, becoming the background along with the other images or detaching itself from them to act as a counterpoint. Adhering to the landscape and finding one's place means remaining until the landscape asks us to change location or position. To subtract oneself becomes a hermit's or ascetic's liberation. To remove oneself means to eliminate one's figure from the landscape, with all that that entails.

Why adhere? Why seek a definition, at what cost to find a definition in this space? This imposition is answered by the man left/launched to find a place, a social project. But the device does not admit the possibility of a real encounter because its reality, which only makes sense on the screen, is fictitious.

Visual notes follow:

[performance - work in progress]

B.A.C.O.N (provisional title)

Ideas for a project in the writing phase, starting with G. Deleuze's Logic of Sensation.

"As for Cézanne, I only like some of his works. I have to choose them very carefully. After all, I don't know his place in the history of painting. I understand that he was important, but I am not as enthusiastic about it as many are. After all, I think I only like the works from the last period of his life. I find them much more interesting than the earlier phases. It's the time when there is almost nothing left on the canvas when the subjects have almost completely disappeared, they are almost not there anymore, you have the impression that they are notes taken for a moment and are about to disappear. I love this period very much, but otherwise, I don't like Cézanne". Francis Bacon

"The illustrative form reveals immediately, through the intellect, what it represents, whereas the non-illustrative form passes first through sensation and only later, slowly, brings it back to reality". Francis Bacon

NOT FOUND \ for kids

Workshop for primary schools

Not found is a playful device that generates gestures, which in real time give life to a choreographic composition. The device has been created as a game with simple rules, to be suitable for participants of all ages, especially young and very young. No technical preparation is required from the participants. The playful power of the device allows participants to approach movement and dance by simply inhabiting the playing field. The structure of the device allows participants to watch in real-time, their own image reproduced together with that of the other players, providing useful tools to acquire a singular and collective consciousness of space.

The device consists of a screen, in front of an entrance door. On the screen are back-projected images in real-time from a video camera, pointed at the entrance. The camera is set on long exposure times that force the participant to move, taking into account that all fast movements lose definition until they become totally blurred, while slow ones remain well defined; the image on the screen is specular. The field of action is defined between the screen and the door (A = actors); two rows of chairs are arranged along the sides (B = observers); a space resembling a small cinema is set up behind the screen (C = consumers).

foto di Vicky Solli https://flic.kr/s/aHsmDTYNtE

SIDE ACTIVITIES

The following are a series of activities that can be derived from the device, which can complement the residency or its presentation/installation; they can be offered optionally according to the wishes, needs and timing of the host structures:

Not Found / sharing practice

Workshop open to local actors and dancers. A workshop on the creation of gesture and its choreography. The archive of gestures generated by inhabiting the device is shared and expanded with the participants and then put into composition. The workshop goes through all the themes generated by the device: the actor and his duty, action, representation and self-representation, real and virtual space, multiple dimensions of presence, corporeity and figuration, image-time and image-movement, identity and otherness, tragic and ridiculous, device and anti-dramaturgy.

The device questions the theatrical action that closes its own destiny in the defined formal profile of work, giving rise to an act of active research, in creation, in process, in dialogue, that frees from meaning and provokes the public to operate a new conferral of meaning to its presence. We are interested in creating a space for sharing, in which the theatrical convention of space can be questioned, starting from the bodies that inhabit it. We invite participants to experience this device by setting aside the pre-understandings and intentions from which we have generated it, and to read it only from the experience they will have of it.

Not found / dialogues

Philosophical and writing exercises, led by Loretta Mesiti, dramaturg and writer, with a background in philosophy.

The device remains open to the public for the duration of the residency so that performers in research and visitors can enter into dialogue with it. A space of investigation and creation, where process and exhibition come together. Visitors access the sources of the project, experience the device directly, discuss it and leave written traces on a vertical panel on which space is mapped.

Lecture-performance

Following a research-action methodology, we invite the audience to a lecture performance, in dialogue with the chair of a local university, elaborated in residence in collaboration with a local university researcher.

Not Found qualifies as a real ecosystem, within which it is possible to reason about the relationship between real space and space of representation, which coincides with the existence of the virtual dimension. The residency will be an opportunity to specifically explore this aspect of the device. The outcome of the residency will be a lecture-performance involving the observation and discussion of the work a scholar to be identified, with some local performers called to inhabit the device.

The virtual 'is not opposed' to the real, but to the actual, to the possible, and therefore what is virtual exists in power (Lévy). Consequently, the virtual occupies concrete spaces of our existence and the pervasiveness that characterises its manifestations contributes significantly to revolutionising not only the culture and economy of the planet but also the imagination of each individual. There is a fragmentation of the ego into an infinite range of different identities and the coexistence of multiple identities of the subject, both real and virtual. A reflection that starts from the moving bodies of the performers to arrive at considerations about the phenomenon of the new corporeality which, translated into digital, is constituted not only as man-machine but also as a mutant body.

Origin and progression of research

Origin and progression of research

2017 - third project session

In 2017, we gave birth to the research project DE_RI_VA (ongoing), based on the constitution of an informal study group, which, starting from Guy Debord's The Society of the Spectacle, investigates the possibility of transcending modes of production based on the realisation of a finished product, seeking to base collaboration on the subject investigated, on the pooling of means and knowledge, on desire and reciprocity. We are bound by a pact that is renewed at each work session, in a continuous process of redefinition both of the participants and of the traces of the path.

The materials developed and collected so far form an archive in the process of being systematised and permanently put back into action; they fall into different formats and autonomous and independent episodes, but always related to the investigation into the Society of the Performing Arts and declined by "situation".

A few of the precipitates have been welcomed into experimental residences:

2017 DiARC, Università Federico II, Napoli

2018 Casa Morra - Archivio d’Arte Contemporanea, Napoli

2019 - Le Lac, Bruxelles

2019 - Trasparenze Festival (first experiment for primary schools), Modena.

"This is what is imposed on every moment of everyday life subjected to the spectacle, which must be understood as a systematic organisation of the 'loss of the faculty of encounter', and as its replacement by a social hallucinatory fact: the false consciousness of encounter, 'the illusion of encounter'. In a society in which no one can be recognised by others, each individual becomes incapable of recognising his own reality." (Debord, 1967).

The following have joined the research group so far: Silvio Impegnoso, Daniele Balzano, Paola Galassi, Ernesto Maria Di Martino, Manola Maiani, Floriana Patti, Monica Perozzi