Toni dove by ACC Art Books

O U R G H O S T S , O U R M AC H I N E S , O U R S E LV E S T H E A R T O F TO N I D O V E C H R I ST I A N E PA U L

n today’s networked landscape of social media we have become increasingly accustomed to performing and reinventing ourselves through

subgenre of science fiction fusing a post-apocalytpic future with aesthetics of nineteenth-century industrial machinery.

channels ranging from Facebook and Twitter to YouTube, Instagram, or 3D worlds. Mobile phones, tablets and Fitbits have become extensions of many people’s bodies. Activated by touch and movement, these devices connect us to communities, assist us in creating social spaces, shape our memories, and technologize our existence in the process. Amazon Echo and Google Home answer our questions and mold our explorations through their data sets. Cameras are our witnesses, and the switching and controlling of points of view has become a necessary skill for self-representation or even a political act. On the backdrop of this landscape Toni Dove’s body of work seems to be more relevant than ever. For decades her projects have explored the technologized body—the blurry boundaries between mind, machine, and embodied action—through images of doubles, cyborgs, automata and robots that traverse and connect through centuries and tell technological and cultural histories in the process. Time travel, ghosts, and supernatural possession— tropes of sci-fi and horror stories—have been part of the recurrent vocabulary of Dove’s speculative fictions. Her work has created a universe with a distinct style and language that has both influenced and defied genres. It shares central imagery with steampunk—a term first coined in 1987 by writer K. W. Jeter—yet preceded the steampunk movement of the 2000s, a “neo-Victorian”

In 1949 Oxford philosopher Gilbert Ryle coined the term “the ghost in the machine” as a metaphor for the Cartesian dualism of the mind-body relationship, and Arthur Koestler subsequently used it as the title of his 1967 book about philosophical psychology. Ryle tried to emphasize the problematic condition of Descartes’ dualism where the interaction between mental activity and physical action remains unknown or speculative. The interconnectedness of mental states and embodied action is precisely what Toni Dove’s works explore in a technological environment—digital installations activated through interaction and performance. Her signature projects Artificial Changelings (1998), Spectropia (2007), and Lucid Possession (2013) and her most recent piece The Dress That Eats Souls (2017) are speculative fictions that, in poetic ways, explore how our bodies have been colonized by the respective technologies of their time and how the understandings of selfhood, identity and culture itself have been shaped in the process. The complexity of the issues addressed in Toni Dove’s works is mirrored in the fusion of artistic practices and genres in her work. Her projects combine digital installation, live performance, robotics, and interactive cinema in a unique blend; they become cinematic instruments that are performed by the audience or the artist and her collaborators. Dove started out as a painter but her interest in narrative, which put her at odds with 13

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n today’s networked landscape of social media we have become increasingly accustomed to performing and reinventing ourselves through

subgenre of science fiction fusing a post-apocalytpic future with aesthetics of nineteenth-century industrial machinery.

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the moment in painting at the time, led her to experiment with spatialized images through the use of scrims, screens, and slideshows. She has not only been one of the pioneers in experimental digital cinema, but her work has always taken a unique approach to its narrative possibilities. The concept of the digital moving image and “digital cinema” has been shaped by several strands of media histories and practices, ranging from the ‘live action’ movie and animation to immersive environments and the spatialization of the image. In more conventional cinema, digital technologies are playing an increasingly important role as a tool for production, post-production, and screening. Even if a movie is not a special effects extravaganza, images that seem purely realistic have often been constructed through digital manipulation. However, the use of digital technologies as a tool in the production of a linear film does not fundamentally challenge the language of film and the moving image. Yet the potential of the digital medium in many ways redefines the very identity of cinema and the moving image: from the possibilities of instant copying and remixing to the seamless blending of disparate visual elements into a simulated form of reality, the medium challenges traditional notions of realism and questions qualities of representation. At the core of this potential for remix and new forms of montage lies the fact that the spatial and temporal dimension of the image can be separated and controlled independently. The digital medium transforms image sequences or the image itself into discrete units that can potentially be recombined in new constellations. Spatial montage, through cuts or split and juxtaposed frames, has become an established convention of the language of film, but digital technologies allow for choreographing space, point of view, and the temporal dimension of the image independently. The practice of assembling and reconfiguring image clips from a structured collection by means of algorithms, sometimes referred to as database cinema, has been explored by Dove and several other artists—among them Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Lev Manovich, Thomson & Craighead, or Marc Lafia. All of their projects can be understood as explorations of the possibilities of database

as a cinematic and cultural narrative, but Toni Dove’s works have been more engaged with issues of identity, the body, and narrative perspectives. Her work has been deeply engaged with interactive manipulation of image sequences through automated software processes or interaction by a viewer/user and has taken these types of interaction to new levels, creating a singular cinematic style. Interaction in film and video is not intrinsic to the digital medium and has already been employed by artists who experimented with light in their projection—for example, by incorporating the audience in the artwork through “shadow play”—or with closed-circuit television and live video captures that made the audience the “content” of the projected image and artwork. What is considered to be the world’s first interactive movie, KinoAutomat by Radúz Činčera, was first shown at the 1967 World Expo in Montreal in the Czech Pavilion. Shot in alternative versions of image sequences, the film required the audience to vote on how the plot would unfold. Artists’ explorations of the spatialization of the moving image in a physical environment were outlined by Gene Youngblood in his book Expanded Cinema (1970). Over the following decades, digital media took these earlier experiments to new levels and led to new forms of artistic exploration. Lynn Hershman’s Lorna (1979–84)—a project unfolding on the television screen and navigated by viewers via a remote control—and Roberta Friedman’s and Grahame Weinbren’s The Erl King (1983–86) and Weinbren’s Sonata (1991–93)—in which viewers experience different stories or multiple points of view by interacting with a custom-designed system—made major contributions to shaping the language of interactive narrative film. Toni Dove’s body of work—from Artificial Changelings, Spectropia, and Lucid Possession to The Dress That Eats Souls—combines and expands the vocabulary of database cinema, interactive film, expanded cinema, performance, and VJing in a unique blend that creates its own universe and distinct signature. Artificial Changelings is the story of Arathusa, a nineteenth-century kleptomaniac, and Zilith, a woman of the future who is an encryption hacker. Dove has referred to the piece as a “romance thriller about shopping,” a

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narrative conceit that allowed her to cleverly draw parallels between consumer culture and emerging technologies and conventions—the emergence of the department store could be read as a proto-’database’ of products—and the economic and mental “disorders” (kleptomania and hacking) brought on by them. The installation consists of a curved rear-projection screen, on which viewers experience the narrative, and four sensor-controlled zones on the floor in front of it. By stepping into the interactive zones, viewers/participants influence and control the narrative: in the first zone closest to the screen, viewers find themselves inside a character’s head; stepping into the second zone prompts a character to address the viewer directly; the third zone induces a trance or dream state; and the fourth area, most removed from the screen, results in a time travel that lets the viewer emerge in the respectively other century, switching from the reality of one character to the next. Within each of the zones, movements of the viewer cause changes in the behavior of video and sound. At the core of the work lies the audience’s embodied interaction with a cinematic, narrative instrument: body movement, which becomes a dance through spatial zones, is connected to and materialized in perspectives, mental states, and access to memories through time travel. To implement the piece, Dove used artist David Rokeby’s motion sensing software VNS (Very Nervous System), which preceded and conceptualized the current motion sensing input devices such as the Kinect, popular in motion dance and other games. Dove’s sci-fi hybrid Spectropia again uses mirroring stories as a narrative technique for viewer orientation. In this case time travel and supernatural possession are used to connect narratives that, respectively, take place in 2099 and in 1931, after the stock market crash. The lead character Spectropia lives in the dystopian future of 2099 with her cyborg companion The Duck, invoking Jacques de Vaucanson’s automaton Canard Digérateur, a mechanical duck built in 1739 that appeared to have the ability to eat kernels of grain and to metabolize them. Spectropia is in desperate search for her father and uses a garbage scanner, which creates virtual reality from the moment in time in which the scanned object was created, to trace him. Through a glitch in the machine she gets trapped in

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the body of Verna whose story unfolds in 1931. Spectropia has been performed by Dove and collaborator Luke DuBois as a live-mix cinema event, a “scratchable” movie in which live performers orchestrate onscreen characters by means of a system of motion sensing that serves as a playable cinematic instrument creating a narrative form that combines characteristics of feature film, video game, and VJing. Once again Dove investigates the potential of a haptic feedback loop in which body movements trigger and manipulate film clips. The system allows performers to create playlists of scenes from a database of movie clips. Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents the thoughts of each character and allows the audience to hear what they are not saying; Zone 2 triggers conversation and Zone 3 corresponds to eavesdropping, moving between two different views of the conversation seen from a distance Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

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Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

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and surrounded by the sound of the space. Performers each control one of the characters and have to engage in an improvisational “dance” to drive the action. Movement of their hands will speed and slow the characters movement and speech, and they must cooperate to move back and forth; competing movement will cause the system to only hover in the same place. Spectropia combines preprogrammed elements with improvisation and quite literally is a “possessed movie,” in which characters are controlled by performers or inhabited by another fictional character. The possibilities of live theatrical performance were further explored in Dove’s Lucid Possession, a cinematic experience mixed in real-time that involved complex layers of media. Dove has described the piece as a cinematic bunraku—the form of traditional Japanese puppet theatre, founded in Osaka in 1684, in which puppeteers, chanters, and musicians collaborate—to capture the choreography of the building blocks of voice, movement, and music. Robotic screens, sound, and video performed and activated by musicians and VJs create the story of avatar designer Bean whose mind “picks up” people like a radio receiver. Bean is plagued by ghosts and struggles with her own celebrity as her avatar goes viral on the Internet. The lead actress sings and speaks through an avatar onscreen and onstage, manifesting both the split and connectedness between virtual and embodied presence. Lucid Possession engages with the pressing theme of self-perception and media fame in virtual and physical social spaces, exploring the dualism and schizoid states resulting from the extension of embodied existence onto virtual spaces, on the one hand, and the experience and fragmentation of the body and its representation, on the other. The Dress That Eats Souls, Dove’s latest project, draws upon the themes and vocabulary of previous works and takes her art to a level that engages and incorporates the audience in new ways. The piece takes the form of an elaborate robotic dress that functions as body, a sculptural projection environment, and host of the stories it contains and displays. The dress mirrors or responds to the movements of viewers/participants, allowing them to access the stories of ten different ‘characters,’ each taking place in a different decade, from centuries ago to the

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future. The robotic dress both embodies and ‘consumes’ stories, reflecting on the ways in which technologies are expanding and colonizing our bodies. The Dress That Eats Souls more explicitly than Dove’s other works draws upon the convention of horror films and more literally manifests her idea of an “uncanny interface.” The term alludes to the phenomenon of the uncanny valley—the aesthetic hypothesis that computer-generated figures, replicas, or humanoid robots with near-identical resemblance to a human being elicit feelings of eeriness or revulsion. Dove’s uncanny interface manifests as a system of interaction in which the connection between the user’s body and image world it activates can arouse a similar sense of unease. In its combination of virtual and physical elements The Dress That Eats Souls is more of a mixed reality project than fully immersive virtual reality or augmented reality, in which virtual elements are superimposed onto physical reality. Yet it still evokes the visual registers of these different forms of simulation. One of the essential questions that The Dress and Dove’s other projects ask is, what happens when images become detached from their hosts? What happens if memories become separated from the individuals who remembered, if representations disconnect from their sources and contexts and start leading a life of their own? Artist and media theorist Hito Steyerl addresses these questions in her concept of circulationism—the act of post-producing, launching, and accelerating rather than making images—and has brought our attention to the ways in which technologies displace and seal images into their respective apparatus. Toni Dove’s art provides us with visceral experiences of the displacement and embodiment of image worlds and narratives. Her projects invite us to test boundaries of our bodies and perceptions and make us aware how they are redrawn in a mediated world. The history of communication machines has been referred to as a ghost story. From the daguerrotype and phantasmagoria to software systems, technological platforms have elicited anxieties about representations of reality. Toni Dove’s robots, apparitions, and doubles are reflections of our anxieties and desires, raising our awareness of how our media shape our existence.

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Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

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Matthew McLendon — Your work is characterized

Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

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personality, and the fragmentation of subjectivity: what’s inside, and what’s outside, and the process by which the supernatural as an external entity becomes internalized as possession and then evolves into the unconscious. That history of our writing of consciousness is really central to what I do. It’s an architecture of subjectivity that has its own narrative arc and has an interesting dialogue over time with the development of genre in fiction. MM — Your work is also deeply embedded in your thinking and experimentation around interface. I don’t believe you think about interface in the typical ways it is presented. So where then does interface meet narrative? TD — Interface, for me, is the thing I was bringing to cinema that creates dimensionality by using the physiology of the human body: the apparatus of perception, proprioception, and affect, directly in relationship to media so that as your body navigates media the narrative becomes a visceral experience. When you utilize the physiological apparatus that we use to navigate the real world to connect to media, you’re cueing into your own body in a very immediate way. It’s a fascinating layer to add to narrative experience, and that’s what interested me. MM — But to me it always seems as though the narrative is the driving force. So, in Artificial Changelings, you start out looking at the rise of the department store in the nineteenth century, the commodification of culture, and how that then becomes pathologized within the female body through the rhetoric of kleptomania. TD — Yes, but then she’s dreaming about an encryption hacker in the future.

by a deep interest in narrative structure and genre, both honoring and subverting traditions in each. At the beginning of the body of work we are exploring in the exhibition, how were you thinking about narrative? What were you toying with? Toni Dove — Early on, at the beginning of my work with immersive media, I was reading about the origins of psychology and about Freud. Mesmer: Secrets of the Human Frame is loosely based on Freud’s case history of Dora. I was interested in the idea of having a voice, of having a platform to speak from, and I gave a voice to Dora. At the time I read a lot of Freud’s case histories and his essay on the uncanny. I was interested in how Freud functions narratively in the case histories and in how the talking cure is essentially a narrative arc—by articulating your life you heal it, or fix it. Building a narrative becomes the cure. MM — He presents the id as this kind of primal, emotional entity within you, and then imposes the ego, and superego on top of it to construct the narrative, the meaning. TD — And what intrigued me was the idea that the performance or spoken articulation of the story was in itself a powerful form. That relationship between language and how the speaking or singing of it impacts meaning continues to fascinate me: embodying language. MM — And this is a decisive moment in intellectual history, as well—this notion of narrativizing the unconscious TD — Exactly. I was also reading about the history of the unconscious, looking at possession, multiple 34

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Matthew McLendon — Your work is characterized

Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

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MM — And so, where does that come in? Why is she dreaming about an encryption hacker in the future? TD — She’s dreaming a form of liberation, so she sees the character in the future as a liberation from the cloistering that she experiences, and the tight lacing, and everything that molds, shapes, and holds her in, controls her. The character in the future has an exoskeleton— underwear has turned inside out and become armor, and she’s autonomous, an independent person on a research mission. But she’s also bemused, because she sees that information has become a product. She sees that encryption is the new weaponry, but she can’t find the center of power, it’s diffuse and hard to locate. MM — How do you move, then, from Artificial Changelings into Spectropia? TD — Artificial Changelings sets up a template for using the past to understand the present by mashing up genres in a time travel format. Historically I moved from the nineteenth century to 1931 in Spectropia, so I kept that same future, but looked at a different moment in the evolution of consumer culture—the birth of credit and the Great Depression. In narrative terms, I moved from what is essentially exposition in Artificial Changelings to working through a whole narrative arc in Spectropia. MM — Artificial Changelings was made at the dawn of the internet, basically, when that was starting to become … TD — When I wrote it, the web was just starting to be an everyday reality and it already looked like an oncoming shopping mall to me. When I wrote Spectropia it was during the dot.com explosion, and I looked around me and I realized that all the young adults who had recently entered the work force and were part of this explosion of new technology had never worked in anything but a boom economy. The effect was a tabula rasa of possibilities with no apparent consequences. I started writing this piece about the Depression and a salvage culture in the future. Spectropia’s world is really the result of a runaway consumer economy. MM — Where built-in obsolescence becomes law. TD — Yes. And where the result is an ocean of garbage, detritus. It was imagined as a potential future of consumer culture. 1931, when Spectropia is set, is the experience of the Great Crash, and even the interface

reflects the sense of reaching for something that you can never quite get a grip on, that was always slipping through your fingers and getting away. Both Artificial Changelings and Spectropia use a motion sensing interface, which we also use in Lucid Possession but less so. Lucid is more about the network, about social networks as augmented reality; and the interactive structure of that piece was as much the narrative, as the narrative itself. How the piece was programmed, and how it was performed, and what the infrastructures were, what the technologies were, was what the piece was about. It’s a much simpler narrative, but in a lot of ways it’s a more complex piece, partly because it’s not as didactic. MM — Right. It’s not as didactic as Spectropia. That’s interesting. I hadn’t really thought about it in that way— so, the setting of Artificial Changelings is also a boom economy brought about, of course, by technology. TD — The Haussmanization of the boulevards in Paris. MM — A marvel of urban planning and civic discipline. TD — The arcades that were transformed into the department stores that became the “cathedrals of commerce.” MM — Exactly. The cathedrals of commerce, and just like the dot.com boom, people had a really hard time imagining that it would ever be any different than that. Once again technology had provided a bubble. Then it becomes fascinating how many times we have to learn the same lesson. TD — Tulipomania, The South Sea Bubble, so many iterations throughout history. And while the bubble is in place, it seems as if it will never end. MM — So, getting back to this notion of interface, how do you feel you approach interface differently from others working in the field? TD — Interface for me comes out of an instrumental notion of the user in an experiential flow, a feedback loop, whereas most of the first person shooter designed interfaces are more cue, or command, or control-oriented. MM — So how does that affect narrative? TD — In a first-person shooter interface, interaction through the interface breaks the narrative. In other words,

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Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

you become present in the narrative, and therefore your actions alter it. In my work the interface is an instrument you’re playing that allows you to enter and inhabit the mise en scene in multiple ways, but not to alter it. I love the complex process of unfolding a narrative and engaging the audience in that experience. It’s a very different premise. There might be a different end if you end up in a different century, but you’re not choosing the end, or choosing who gets the girl. It’s more about immersion and immediacy. You can see through more than one point of view or step out of the narrative into a physical experience MM — But only for a time, it’s not that you’re inhabiting the character, which tends to be the first person shooter. TD — You’re not altering the motivations—you

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move around in and in and out of the narrative in a very physical way. MM — Exactly. TD — You don’t have agency to alter the narrative, but you perceive it in multiple ways. It’s a different kind of agency. MM — Which seems actually much more honest in a way, that you’re being more honest as the artist, because when you are in the typical first-person shooter mode, the illusion is that you are in some way in control. But of course, you’re never in control. TD — No, you’re never really in control. Although gaming really is about a series of problem-solving events, but the experience doesn’t build suspense through story.

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Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

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MM — That you need that anchor point, right.

viewer’s body movement engages with the robotics of the dress in a mirroring process and then the viewer sees out of the eyes of those who have worn the dress over time on the overhead screen, navigating with head movement through five streams of video to create the POV. There’s something physically impossible about how the interface operates, but it works—it’s immersive in an almost dizzying way. Interaction design often evolves in a partially intuitive way for me. I’ll have no concrete idea of how or why it will work and I operate on faith. As if my body knows something my mind doesn’t get yet. MM — I think that is what is important about your work in particular because you’re working with the idiosyncratic nature of the interface. That then is as much what the work is about as the higher philosophical notions of the work, and therefore that opens you up to a freedom of porting technologies that so many other artists are hamstrung by. TD — Because I’m never working within an established platform? MM — Exactly. You allow yourself the freedom to migrate the piece to new platforms, to new interfaces as they become available instead of being straightjacketed by the “original.” TD — I cut a linear feature film version of Spectropia and I looked at it, and I thought, “Enh.” How can you throw a cherry bomb in something, and then go back and make it into that thing you threw a cherry bomb into? It made no sense at all. And then I did the serial version of it, and it made much more sense to me as a form. MM — Also, it just makes more sense in the history of your work, because ultimately, I think a lot of what you’re doing is what Dickens did, and Dostoyevsky did, that’s your narrative structure. TD — Yes. It really is. MM — It’s the segment; it’s the tune in next week. TD — And the idea of being able to create something over a very long time. MM — Over a very long time with that space in between. The reader or the visitor fills in depth in those in between moments. TD — Yes, and I’m not starting something new every fifteen minutes, so I can build something rich and complex

TD — Yes! Genre creates a kind of narrative recipe,

Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

You might drop someone in a pit and give them thirty seconds to get out to create suspense. For me the movie becomes like a building that you swim through, and you can slip into the points of view of different characters or wander into a room where no action is occurring, but you engage with an experience outside the narrative. It’s the inhabitation of a process, so it’s about immersion—it’s a spectatorship of a different kind, and there might be cul-de-sac moments where you’re dancing with Sally [in Spectropia], or you’re doing something that’s heightened as an experience for you that can be even be physically transcendent, but it’s not about you changing the story, per se. MM — And for me that seems more honest, and honest might not be the best word, but it’s that the artist is present and the viewer is more aware of that. TD — It’s more interesting to me as a way of making a narrative more vivid, and of making a successful responsive iteration of long-formed narrative, because when you’re breaking the narrative, a long form story is very difficult. It’s antithetical, or at least a different way of building an arc. I think there’s something about the way that I’m responding to embodied interface that’s

narrative. MM — Yes. I love this notion of the narrative cul-desac. It’s almost like you can have a moment of stream of consciousness, but you’re always brought back into the narrative. TD — But then, yes, you move back into the center of the narrative. And it has the potential of giving the viewer control over pacing, over time. MM — Usually a really traditional narrative structure that’s been lifted out of a traditional experience. TD — Yes. It’s traditional, or it’s not. It allows for experimentation with the narrative, for instance you can play with time. And I use genre a lot, because I think that the structure of the work is so unfamiliar for a lot of people that . . . 38

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very different from games and other forms of interactive media. I think it has to do with the haptic feedback loop, the fluidity, and the notion of it being immersive, and of containing these more highly interactive cul-de-sacs along the way that allow you to engage physically with moments outside of the

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and you can toss a cherry bomb into the middle of a genre piece and people still know where they are. It’s interesting, because Steve Dietz recently reminded me that Artificial Changelings, Spectropia, and Lucid Possession were a trilogy. I was thinking about that early on and then it slipped out of my mind. The pieces go from the origins of consumer culture in the department store to the development of credit, and then Lucid Possession is about a last frontier, the commodification of the human body itself. Ultimately, it’s a trilogy about the escalations of commodification. And then the new work, The Dress That Eats Souls, really steps back, and creates an overview of that whole process in one project. MM — And so, getting to The Dress, early on you were talking about the fact that it’s really ten characters inhabiting one character. And is that, again, drawing our attention to fragmentation, and how the fragmentation of society brought about by technology then starts to fragment the self, and we’re all these ten selves? TD — No, I don’t think I thought about it, that way exactly, but it’s true I’ve always been interested in apolyvocal subjectivity. How many people are there inside us? Are we nested, or possessed, like Russian dolls? I did a lot of reading about multiple personality disorder, and I started thinking about it as a cubistic interface model. There is a phrase from Jean-Pierre Jeunet where he says that multiple personality disorder is characterized by alternating episodes of agitation and amnesia, and I found that compelling. If you replace agitation and amnesia with conflict and ellipsis, it becomes a rhetorical narrative model. MM — So how do you then relate that to character(s) of “the dress”? TD — That the dress contains all these different people—or literally these people have worn the Dress through time. And some of them know what is going on now, and some of them are memories from the past, and who knew what part of the narrative? Do they know about each other? Which one did and which one didn’t? I thought about that as a model, and then the interactive design came out of that, not literally, but it came out of that. The

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MM — That you need that anchor point, right.

TD — Yes! Genre creates a kind of narrative recipe,

Caption TK Performers can then select zones, which correspond to the cinematic conventions of interior monologue, dialogue, and the fly on the wall. Zone 1 represents th

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Musicians, a VJ, and robotic screens combine to present the performance of a contemporary ghost story—a poetic musing on managing the mass of information ”noise.” The audience is drawn into a world in which video characters come to life: the wave of a hand moves a video body, and video characters lip synch live to a singer. The players onstage collectively perform the movie, which spills off the dynamic, dimensional screens onto the stage. Lucid Possession is a schizophrenic duet between a woman with a head like a radio receiver and her own avatar. The result is like a complex threedimensional, automated video pop-up book, and as characters are brought to life through motion, voice, and robotics, the boundaries of the real and virtual are blurred. It’s another iteration of cinematic bunraku, separating voice, movement, music, live and filmed performance—fragmented elements that only become a whole in the moment when the piece is performed. In the story, Bean, a young designer of virtual personalities, is so deeply engaged in her programming, that it has escalated her skills into the realm of the supernatural. Her mind is like a live Twitter feed without the technology, a radio station of flesh and bone: she picks up what people think. She creates an avatar, an exaggerated alter ego that goes viral on the Internet and makes her a minor celebrity. People stop her on the street: they want something, and she isn’t sure what it is. The anxiety from the experience exponentially increases her paranormal sensitivities, and a ghost from the past emerges from the noise to act as a guide. Lucid Possession attempts to break out of the screen and to represent, in its use of technology and live performance, the augmented reality of our everyday present. Three-dimensional screens animated by robotics further explode the interactive cinematic elements. Live performers and technology merge in real time to create something part improvised, part scripted. The technologies of media delivery are networked together

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LUCID POSSESSION

Musicians, a VJ, and robotic screens combine to present

something part improvised, part scripted. The technologies

the performance of a contemporary ghost story—a poetic

of media delivery are networked together to create a

musing on managing the mass of information ”noise.” The

performer-operated engine that controls sound, image,

audience is drawn into a world in which video characters

a fan, and lights that can be synched and improvised in

come to life: the wave of a hand moves a video body, and

a variety of ways. Dialogue occurs across screens and

video characters lip synch live to a singer. The players

performers, moving through different registers—from

onstage collectively perform the movie, which spills off the

virtual to real, from movie to music performance. Video

dynamic, dimensional screens onto the stage.

puppets learn a performer’s voice using a neural net-based

Lucid Possession is a schizophrenic duet between a

form of vocal analysis and become more efficient at lip-

woman with a head like a radio receiver and her own avatar.

synching with use. Video characters are animated using

The result is like a complex three-dimensional, automated

motion sensing in real time, responding to the wave of an

video pop-up book, and as characters are brought to

operator’s hand. The robotic screens move with the real

life through motion, voice, and robotics, the boundaries

time video chara cters, creating inhabited structures that

of the real and virtual are blurred. It’s another iteration

interact with the live performers onstage. The technological

of cinematic bunraku, separating voice, movement, music,

engine becomes both the form of presentation and the mise

live and filmed performance—fragmented elements that

en scene of the narrative, as it seamlessly slides from live to

only become a whole in the moment when the piece is

virtual, and from cinematic to musical, enfolding characters

performed.

as they struggle to come to terms with their landscape.

In the story, Bean, a young designer of virtual

Lucid Possession is an attempt to sketch out, as poetic

personalities, is so deeply engaged in her programming,

musing, the augmented reality of the contemporary social

that it has escalated her skills into the realm of the

landscape. It’s a meditation on the nature of life lived in

supernatural. Her mind is like a live Twitter feed without the

the networks of social media and online communities that

technology, a radio station of flesh and bone: she picks up

include email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram: a landscape

what people think. She creates an avatar, an exaggerated

that is evolving so rapidly that to identify an element of it is

alter ego that goes viral on the Internet and makes her a

to already be outdated. Underneath the story is a question

minor celebrity. People stop her on the street: they want

about how image operates when it is separated from its

something, and she isn’t sure what it is. The anxiety from

host and how that plays out in the multiple registers of

the experience exponentially increases her paranormal

the new landscapes we live in. All of this is in the context of

sensitivities, and a ghost from the past emerges from the

the filters we use or don’t use to manage the exponential

noise to act as a guide.

increase of information input; a meditation on noise

Lucid Possession attempts to break out of the

management and on the nature of performance in social

screen and to represent, in its use of technology and

media spaces. How that impacts what we think about who

live performance, the augmented reality of our everyday

we are as individuals and collectively as groups, and how it

present. Three-dimensional screens animated by robotics

touches on celebrity, privacy, history, and friendship across

further explode the interactive cinematic elements. Live

this new landscape.

performers and technology merge in real time to create 64

toni dove interior prelims 170331.indd 64-65

TO N I D OV E E M B O D I E D M AC H I N E S

LU C I D P O S S E S S I O N

3/31/17 1:35 PM

LUCID POSSESSION

Musicians, a VJ, and robotic screens combine to present

something part improvised, part scripted. The technologies

the performance of a contemporary ghost story—a poetic

of media delivery are networked together to create a

musing on managing the mass of information ”noise.” The

performer-operated engine that controls sound, image,

audience is drawn into a world in which video characters

a fan, and lights that can be synched and improvised in

come to life: the wave of a hand moves a video body, and

a variety of ways. Dialogue occurs across screens and

video characters lip synch live to a singer. The players

performers, moving through different registers—from

onstage collectively perform the movie, which spills off the

virtual to real, from movie to music performance. Video

dynamic, dimensional screens onto the stage.

puppets learn a performer’s voice using a neural net-based

Lucid Possession is a schizophrenic duet between a

form of vocal analysis and become more efficient at lip-

woman with a head like a radio receiver and her own avatar.

synching with use. Video characters are animated using

The result is like a complex three-dimensional, automated

motion sensing in real time, responding to the wave of an

video pop-up book, and as characters are brought to

operator’s hand. The robotic screens move with the real

life through motion, voice, and robotics, the boundaries

time video chara cters, creating inhabited structures that

of the real and virtual are blurred. It’s another iteration

interact with the live performers onstage. The technological

of cinematic bunraku, separating voice, movement, music,

engine becomes both the form of presentation and the mise

live and filmed performance—fragmented elements that

en scene of the narrative, as it seamlessly slides from live to

only become a whole in the moment when the piece is

virtual, and from cinematic to musical, enfolding characters

performed.

as they struggle to come to terms with their landscape.

In the story, Bean, a young designer of virtual

Lucid Possession is an attempt to sketch out, as poetic

personalities, is so deeply engaged in her programming,

musing, the augmented reality of the contemporary social

that it has escalated her skills into the realm of the

landscape. It’s a meditation on the nature of life lived in

supernatural. Her mind is like a live Twitter feed without the

the networks of social media and online communities that

technology, a radio station of flesh and bone: she picks up

include email, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram: a landscape

what people think. She creates an avatar, an exaggerated

that is evolving so rapidly that to identify an element of it is

alter ego that goes viral on the Internet and makes her a

to already be outdated. Underneath the story is a question

minor celebrity. People stop her on the street: they want

about how image operates when it is separated from its

something, and she isn’t sure what it is. The anxiety from

host and how that plays out in the multiple registers of

the experience exponentially increases her paranormal

the new landscapes we live in. All of this is in the context of

sensitivities, and a ghost from the past emerges from the

the filters we use or don’t use to manage the exponential

noise to act as a guide.

increase of information input; a meditation on noise

Lucid Possession attempts to break out of the

management and on the nature of performance in social

screen and to represent, in its use of technology and

media spaces. How that impacts what we think about who

live performance, the augmented reality of our everyday

we are as individuals and collectively as groups, and how it

present. Three-dimensional screens animated by robotics

touches on celebrity, privacy, history, and friendship across

further explode the interactive cinematic elements. Live

this new landscape.

performers and technology merge in real time to create 64

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TO N I D OV E E M B O D I E D M AC H I N E S

LU C I D P O S S E S S I O N

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TO N I D OV E â&#x20AC;&#x192; E M B O D I E D M AC H I N E S

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