 Again, and for the last time, to the ETSA conference, screening for moments for broken screens, new predictions in theater and media, and to our final and most joint event, the Pino speech by Zara Tan. We are really, really happy to have you here tonight. Thank you so much. So this is the third annual conference organized by the ETSA, the Doctoral Theater Students Association. And this year, it's been organized by Kiro Kim, Karthus Russell, Christine Snyder, and myself, Mara Ladevarna. And the committee, it's been a pleasure spending these months with you over a number of old-style meetings, and also universal meetings. The last two days have been please feel free to take a look around there. You can move into a less obvious spot if you would care. The last two days, we have enjoyed a signing of a sort of artist and performance, and we are very happy for the diverse from many different places, and how we still have so many connections between both the faculty and staff and the provinces. And we want to thank all of you, all the participants, everybody who has joined us during this event, and especially everyone who has made this possible, starting with Frank Heckner from the Seagull Center, who is so much for support and for providing us with this opportunity, as well as the staff at the Seagull Center, Michael Cicero, who's doing all the tech for us, Mark Edwards, and Yolanda Akin. We also want to thank our volunteers, Phoebe, Zara, Alex Gutierrez, Nick, Nesara, Corey Tundler, Rui Jaao, and Dany Use. And we want to thank you so much, thank you very much. We also thank Professor Peter Ipperson, who served as our faculty advisor in this process. We want to thank Team Franah Jones, who has provided us with a couple of awards for some of our participants who were traveling from our way. He also wanted to thank Professor Arne Carlson, for his generous, generous, many benefits provided and for building us through the conference, as well as for the survey design. We also want to thank Professor Edward Müller, for his wonderful opening remarks yesterday. Thank you so much. Thank you so much. Some other people we need to thank, Eric Bass, Ariello Akinchi, Patricia Goodman, and of course our other sponsors, the ETSA, the DSC, Natural Students Council, the USS, the United Center for Students, and the SINGOS Studies Group. If I ever get anyone, thank you as well, we really appreciate you around. So, lastly, please join us at the RTIM for a final reception after the keynote speech. The RTIM is located on the 12th and 13th streams. So, what about us? Not that way, to the right. So, without further ado, I want to welcome Farley Tan, who is chair and professor of theater and dance at Bowdoin College, where she teaches theater history and theory, dramatic literature, and digital media performance. Her research focuses on the intersections between performance and media, including histories of cinema, social media, computer technology, and contemporary performance. Recent publications include performance and media, taxonomies for its main main field, and map and inter-reality of performance. In 2015, she was a human-distance alert in the terminal community of cultural studies at Utrecht University in the Netherlands. They chat and be shared with Wonky as a co-host for the podcast On-Tab. Her current work is digital historiography and performance. This summer, she will assume a new position as dean of the School of Arts and Media Performance and Design at York University in Toronto, Canada. Please, let's welcome her. And before I kind of kick off, I just want to say a big thank you to Mara and Christine and Curtis and Kuhn and, I don't know where, oh, Kuhn, and also to Frank and Edward, and especially, you know, it's like faculty member to faculty member to a dean and a leader. Like, when graduate students have the autonomy and the freedom to create this kind of intellectual community for themselves and each other, it reflects not only well on them as individual and collaborative scholars, but really well on the mentorship and the guidance and the support for their guys in their faculty. So thank you to them, and thank you for hosting me and bringing me here. It's been a really stimulating day and a half, and I'm truly excited to be able to be with you. I also want to extend a special thank you to everyone who has presented thus far. I've learned a lot. And one of the things that, you know, those of you who are in various, you know, degree programs will realize when you get out into the world and are in academic is that it is actually, you know, it's hard to keep up with stuff. There's a lot and it comes at you really fast when you get kind of caught up in, you know, committee meetings and annual reports, and there's a whole lot of toil and drudgery that I'm like super privileged to be able to do because I've got, so don't get me the plan. But at the same moment, right, you just touch with like where a new thought is coming from and so the opportunity to sit and listen and learn and think in and with you and through the performances that have been part of the last couple of days is really going to give to me. So I'm really, I just want to say thank you to all of you and especially to the organizers who have made that decision, which is the apology and the setting of the flow. I took the slide out, been using it and kind of not been using it, but we could kind of totally do this. So I started and I've asked myself a couple of questions and Chris Bailey asked myself, I've also posted a couple of anonymous critiques through social scientists in the room, bummer. And so my apology is this, or it's committee work, et cetera. This is a lot of work that I've been playing around with manipulating and developing for the past several years and it gets to a point now where I can't remember who I said what to whom. So if I heard, you've heard any of this before, I would leave you to act surprised. Because we're theater people, I trust that you can do this so I'm convincing as if, you know, magic and to you playing along at home. I tuned in last summer at the University of Georgia. You might want to just turn me off right now. And the work that I present today and the sort of engagement that I'm going to present is that I'm going to try to connect what I've been thinking about for the past, you know, decade, 15 years or so with the ideas that have come out as a part of the conference. And I'm really not very good with names. So I will try to tag and cite reference as I can sort of visually, so I might point to you. If you have your name tag, you can flash it so I remember right who you are. But I'm going to try to kind of pull some of the ideas that have been circulating over the last day or so together in ways that are hopefully coherent and coherent. Even better, it would be interesting and if you laugh at my jokes, that would be a great gift. The other thing that I'm going to try to do again which I will probably fail so don't raise your expectations yet is that if you want to like log in and start giving me stuff on the Slido app, I am going to attempt, is it what? It's not Slido, it's Clidio. The Slido? Which one? Oh, okay, I thought I had a correction over here which would have been excellent because that would have been a mistake in which we could lower the expectations. I want to attempt to respond in real time. So if you don't want to interrupt me by like raising your hand or shouting out, that's wrong! You can go to the app and be like, that's wrong! And then I will try to agate it, yes. B-1-8-7. B-1-8-7, and what would be really amazing is if people are, is this me much? Yep. Okay, so this is live stream that you want to also play along at home, like feel free and I'll kind of figure out what I can do right into it for real. And sorry, what? You don't want to interrupt me. I will welcome your interruptions and interlocations. Do you grab your answer? Yes. Um... Okay, so we're in this live, are you looking for a chair? Okay, all right, there we go. I'm just saying to quote again because I know it's one of those. B-1-8-7. Yeah, so just go download the app or go to slid.do and just enter the code B-1-8-7. Okay, and then again, for everybody who couldn't hear Curtis, this is, the app is SLID.o. The SLI.do. Oh, I'm sorry. SLI.do. And the code to not throw a snark at somebody else who's not ready for it is B-1-8-7. I'm just checking to make sure nothing. Oh, okay, marvelous. Okay, so thumbs up. So if I'm ignoring something, go thumb something a bunch of times and I'll try to pay attention to it. So I've got that over there. I also felt like, you know, in deference to being invited as a lecturer and a scholar of these things, I should prepare some stuff. So basically what I'm gonna do is kind of give you some stuff I've been thinking about for a while. Peter is like, okay, get on with it. Good, okay, moving. This is an incredibly important quote. I've circulated it in other contexts and it's been kind of my organizing principle for easily the last eight to 10 years or so. This is Marshall McLuhan leaning over television TVs have come up in a variety of ways over the course of the last day or so. Whether those are literal televisions, whether those are metaphorical televisions and in terms of the screen. You know, it was in the title of Edward Miller's talk when he talked about slow TV. And I'm gonna take a little bit of an issue with you over here, Edward, which is that when he held up the screen, like if you turn it, it's cinematic. And to a certain extent, the aspect ratio is. But more than anything else, what we seem to be engaging with when we talk about streams and performance is we're really talking about manifestations of the television, right? And this has come up in a number of conversations about negotiations of public and private and intimate and shared and domestic spaces and public spaces. And it seems to me that long before we have social media and other kinds of performance, what you really had as TV is a kind of, right, in-between space of theater and cinema and radio, right? It becomes this kind of an amalgamation and in many ways social media is kind of like TV to go, right? And I don't have a clip of it, but if you saw the, I think it was for AT&T, the Mark Wahlberg ad a while ago where he walks around and he's like, I want a TV there, I want a TV there, I want a TV there and like the whole world is turning into TV. And if you're like me and you have occasion to sit at home with your various screen devices, you know, you kind of made like that happen, right? You now surround yourself with TVs. But it's not just that TVs are consumption. And this is where we differ, you know, our global technologies differ radically from the cinematic which is that they become not, they're not just consumption devices, they're production devices. And like television production, they're mobile and they're vertically integrated, right? So you now have the means of production, post production, pre-production and distribution in your pocket, right? On a model that is much closer to television than it is to the cinematic, right? So this is the clue and I came across this quote a number of years ago. It's from his book from Cliché to Archipelago and it's in the essay on Anesthesia. And it's where he talks about, and so he talks about Sputnik and the satellite. My iPad is like tiny so I can't really read this up. So it's Sputnik and the satellite, the planet is closed in a man-made environment that ends nature and turns the globe into a regulatory theater to be programed. In the picture when you read it, because you can sort of follow it, I think when people read these lines, you know, it's like. Okay. But there's a number of things happening in here that I think are really important to our current moment. One is this idea that a technology is globally pervasive, right? So long before we had iPhones, we had satellites that literally covered the globe. The second is this idea of nature having been something that could be ended, right? Remember, this is 1970, right? So we don't even have science bringing it, but this notion that somehow technology could be positioned in an adverse relationship to nature such that what we think of as the natural world could meet an end through human technology. And it was not presented as an apocalyptic image per se, it was simply presented as a matter of fact, right? That once the satellite and satellite technology can touch every piece of the globe, which is true and has been true for a number of decades now, there's no place where nature exists on media, not a single inch on the planet, where nature exists, right, absent technology, right? So the natural environment and the concept of nature is something that the moment points to. And then of course, for theater people, right, you know, in the midst of feeling like, oh, media's gonna kill us off any moment, you know, and this notion that they were just like perpetually dying and being reborn and dying and hanging on by a thread, you know, I mean, I feel like theater is kind of like the soap opera villain, right, of the arts, you know, it's like we are decapitated and we still come back. On culture, that was my site to, where did she go? Right, the vampire, okay, right, to get vampire to raise her hand, okay. That somehow, right, that this idea that we, it's this assertion that what we have now is really just the mode of theater. And several times over the last couple of days, people have talked about like, oh, it's like theater. Oh, look, this technology looks like theater. All of a sudden we're starting to question the authenticity of a social media persona. I'm thinking of Taylor Blacks, talking about the robot, you know, Instagram, Michaela, little Michaela. And this idea of like, oh, it's like theater. And one of the really weird things that I personally, and a number of other people have found is that as you get more and more invocated and deep within digital culture, the more it seems to approach the conditions of theater. So the further it seems you go from what we have often and have sometimes positioned as the sort of ontology of life performance, right, the further you get away from that, the more things start to look and feel and sound and act like theater. And that notion is one that is deeply connected to what McLuhan is talking about in this quote, right? And the last idea is that when we live in those conditions, right, when we live in a theatricalized world, when we live in a denaturalized world, when we live in a hyper-connected, right, remember this is also on the heels of his notions of local village, that looks and feels like theater and it means that everybody is performing. So there are deep connections here to surveillance. And what has come up in a few panels and conversations, both literally named as self-surveillance, but also alluded to, and I'm thinking about, you know, different kinds of performance documentation, right, to be, and what it is to be watched and what it is to watch oneself or hear oneself or make work and then reflect on it in and through media, right? And so the classic example here is, oh, I hate the sound of my own voice, right? That sort of thing. I will say, having done a podcast, I've learned to get over that. I just kind of listened and gripped my teeth and be like, well, I'm very low on expectations, right? So it kind of all works out in the end. Okay, I want to drill down a little bit into what, are there any questions yet? Oh, okay, all right, so first interruption, we're now in question time, but this is familiar. Oh, that's me. It is. It hasn't been absorbed by the televisual. You know, my interest in this step is always thinking about things in terms of spectrum and scale rather than ontological is and is non-liners. And I would say, for those of you who know some of my work, right, this is kind of how I talk about theater and media as being on this kind of continuum or if you read the taxonomy book, one of the ways I kind of talk about things there is this idea of a spectrum or a spectrum between absolute that don't actually exist. And I would say the same is true here, right? Which is that the cinematic and the televisual as in relation to one another become one of scale, which the cinematic scale down small enough is almost indistinguishable from the televisual and the televisual scaled up large enough is indistinguishable from the cinematic. Which is not to say that there aren't interesting characteristics and distinctions between those two forms. I do take note of the sort of technology that distinguish in the sort of visual or aesthetic characteristics of say 16 millimeter film or a media maker like Sue Friedrich who in her early work on celluloid would scratch words onto each of the frames so that when it played in real time you got this kind of scratching wonderful animations that were really kind of, you know, felt tactile and intimate and connected. And then when she could no longer afford film because film courses now become so profoundly fetishized and rare that now it's an expensive, a very expensive media, when she shifted to video she played around with the same idea trying to put animated and it just didn't have the same feel to it. Of course, then you sort of like you think, oh well that's dead and then Snapchat comes along and you're like, oh no, no, no, no. Of Snapchat and sort of commentary and annotation on top. So sometimes you just have to wait for technology to kind of catch up to certain kind of techniques as they move forward. So I think this is one of scale and speaking of scale I want to turn to one of the issues that's been touched on in a number of pieces particularly in the last panel this afternoon which I really appreciated which is the question of surveillance and self-surveillance. And for me, this all really hinges with Susan Sontag's work and on photography where she talks about and predicts a future of video, right, so she's talking about video in the 1970s and she's thinking about video as an extension of a continuation of photography and her prediction that she says, eventually as video gets more and more accessible to the average person and consumers eventually we will all turn to and this is the quote, narcissistic self-surveillance. And I love this quote almost as much as I love the moment and his, you know, surveillance or satellite proceeding to be programmed and the best example that I've ever found of Sontag's prophecy fulfill, if you can say is in the form of this idea of self-documentation. And so this is the Microsoft Research License project and this was to help people with all time, right? So it was about triggering memory when you were forgetting it but then it got turned into, this is a pretty early prototype that I donated to my Kickstarter and downloaded their video before they ever did it. So this is what was called the Momoto camera and it was a wearable camera. Well, I'll let you tell them all about it yourself. Sometimes the best moments in all of that are the same moments. The things that passes by without a single noise. The small surprises, three-day experiences. We love the simple moments, but we hate forgetting them. So we started thinking, what if we can capture those moments and create a true photographic moment? What if we can build a camera small enough to never be in a way and smart enough to capture life as we lived? This is what we ended up with. The Momoto lifelong camera, weather-protected and takes beautiful five megapixel pictures. That was a big deal then. That was really great. That's how we started taking pictures. Put it down, place it in your pocket and it stops. It's that easy and all the pictures are safely stored on the Momoto storage service. We know what you're thinking. Two photos a minute is a whole lot of photos, right? Well, to make things as easy as possible, we developed apps for our iPhone, and Android to automatically organize the photos on its own. And the rest of our life's life, easy. Thanks to Momoto's smart algorithm, GPS, and time data, we can just search, find, and share it. We'll be passionate about getting this product done as we work. We've been working for a year and developed a camera that was doing a great team on the job. But we need funding to start production of the first thousand cameras. Help us reach this goal. It'd be one of the first to wear a Momoto camera. Reserve one today. What's amazing is that the first time I showed this, it was in the context of surveillance and data valence. And this was now like six or seven years ago. And the response from everyone in the audience was utter horror, right? It was just like, ooh! Right? And in fact, you know, not absurdly. Like, in fact, I go into this and I actually have that Momoto teacher, right, that Black teacher. But I wasn't allowed to actually get the Momoto because nobody in my house would let me have it. Because nobody wanted to be documented every 30 seconds of their baking life. And nobody trusted the algorithms, right? That would make this wonderful. And so I really, and Momoto actually, it ended up changing its name to the narrative clip. It got, I believe last time that company had gotten bought by Google. And this predated the Google Blast fiasco. And I was like, okay, well this is not going anywhere, right? And then very shortly after this was played was when like fitness trackers hit the market. And then not long after that, CE2, the Consumer Electronics Show, or CEF, had like technology as you and the wearables. And now it's like, I mean, you know, I feel like you can only be a real New Yorker who got like little white things hanging out here. And out of your ears. And of course, you know, I wear an Apple Watch against my better judgment. And I'm surrounded by all these technologies that are, you know, and now we've got the digital personal assistants that are talking to us all the time. And so I thought, you know, this is, this is like, Sontag and McLuhan would be both so happy and so fortified, right? By the conditions. And this really does not seem to be going anywhere soon, right? This is just now. And every year it becomes more and more the conditions of the world in which we live in. So coming back to this idea of, what is it in the natural world that ended? And what are we replacing that nature with? I'm gonna turn to some questions. Is performance always implicated with surveillance? Yes. If you don't know the work of Elisa Morrison or James Harding, they do really great stuff on surveillance. My favorite from James is, he has this wonderful phrase which is, if surveillance, then performance, right? And so now it's like, yeah, of course, like everything is a performance. What's interesting is now everything is a measure of performance, right? The quantified life and the ways in which we are all now measuring what we do and also feeling an ever-increasing drive towards productivity, right? Like how to get the most out of your day, how to produce the most that you can, how to become a more efficient worker, a more efficient writer. I'm sure some of you are following all the like M hashtag, M writing, hashtag, acro-writing, trying to generate things. I think one of the most important, and that's all important, I'm not gonna look for Jean. I'm like, that's all for the right work. That's all for the right work. Very important. But honestly, one of the most important books that I've read in the last decade or so is Jonathan Frear is 24-7, late capitalism in the ends of sleep, right? And you realize like, oh, taking a nap can be a radical political act. I can hear my neighbor screaming at Alexa through the walls. I am sorry. That I can really, I can imagine. The deep ocean is that mediated. Okay, fair, fair, fair. You have found a piece of nature that we have not gotten to yet, but give us time. All of it? I thought we weren't all the way in the meridian. I'm going to speak to the mediated, but I don't know if I can use some rubbish. Oh, oh yeah, oh yes. Okay, so if you're playing around enough, you can hear Peter. They have found rubbish at the bottom of the deep ocean. At Bowdoin College, who's a photographer, and he's been traveling to Hawaii to photograph plastic that is now being melted into the geologic record. So because of the lava flows and the rapid and geologic activity in and around Hawaii and the volcanoes, that we are now getting geologic strata of plastic, right? So we are now fully into the advocacy and it is creating a geologic record that will certainly outlive us all. As the carnivaless ended, now that any given transgressive personal experiment can be captured and stored forever. Okay, I'm just going to like side note when I read the carnivaless, I thought you were like saying, like is this over and can you get back to the real stuff behind that? I was like, I'm so sorry. But then I read and I'm like, oh, that carnivaless, it was someone who's read about theme more recently than I have, and perhaps pronounce this name correctly. You know, I think that in many ways, something like this is that all the outsides have been colonized and corporatized and are then continually being drawn into the middle. I wonder to what extent there are, that as soon as things become in the inside, one then also feels it's compelled to create and move to an outside. And I think some of what is happening right now in a very broad sense, and I'm open to critique and contestation on this, is that I think that, and I feel like some of the political movements around trans rights in particular and youth movements against climate change and trying to hold politicians and policy makers to account. And Black Lives Matter and a number of other social movements feel like they are also speaking out in important outside areas and are kind of re-territorializing space and re-invigorating outside our culture as a way of mounting a critique. So I don't know that the carnivaless has totally ended, but certainly, again, thinking less about overdone, et cetera. I think obviously there's a kind of tension there that is always in play. And we all, every time we take out our phones to snap an Instagram pic or post a selfie or engage in some kind of activity on Twitter, we both resist and perform into it at the same time. So I think there's a kind of feedback there. But again, welcome disagreements to that idea. Oh, did you hear that? Okay, I've come a lot of fun photos here for you. This is, I'm sorry, oh, this is, thank you. This is the people who had gathered at St. Peter's to witness Cook John Paul II's body being carried into the facility for public view. Okay, so this is from the Associated Press in 2005. This is the installation of Cook Francis at St. Peter's Basilica in 2013. 2005, 2013, five, 13, oh, 13, five, these are two different photographers, but in a very similar position and with a very kind of similar relationship to the crowd that they're taking. But again, this reminds me of McLuhan in the way in which he's sort of thinking about this. And one of the other things I wanted to introduce into our conversation about screens that also goes to the television is that for me, what I'm noticing in a lot of contemporary performance, but popular as well as art performance, is the emergence of boxes. And so I have a couple of my favorite examples of this. And this one is one that I use a lot to show my students and I'm a pretty big fan. There we go. Similar kind of aesthetic, this is Beyonce's formation tour. I don't know if any of you guys have seen this live. You did, don't count me down. Other people in my family got to see it live, I don't know. But really, I'm less interested in Beyonce here than I am in the relation of media to performance and also in the design of Esgedon online of Beyonce. But what's great about this clip in particular and I just don't have time to go through with you, this on the stage is a giant spinning LED cube and it separates and it gets lit up on all sides. And what's amazing is that in the middle of this, so just to the right of our faithful phone camera person is the continuation of the stage that comes out into the middle of the audience. And there's a wonderful moment where Beyonce is, she comes out into that middle and our camera person follows along with the phone and then realizes that they can't see anything anymore. And so the phone pivots back to the giant spinning cube. And there's this moment of tension where it's like, do I keep filming? But it's like the back, I can't really see her. Oh, but that's a much better view. You know, what Phil Osslider was observing in the 99th issue, the version of blindness that he's sort of talking about, our relationship to the live and its present. I'm starting around in a short of time, so I'm gonna sort of skip ahead to some of this stuff here, but what probably thinking about this was less about Beyonce and the video part of it and more this relationship to the box and the significance of the box. And so I'm gonna make a little bit of a kind of play here, kind of argument for the centrality of boxes unless there's something really amazing that's popped up. Nope. I mean, there's nothing amazing here, I just don't see anything new. Which is this idea of a lack of separation between spaces. And this has come out in a number of the papers, the ways in which these distinctions of private, public, fixed, mobile creation, reception have kind of played out. And the other one I would point to here is this book from 2017, The Mediated Instruction of Reality by social theorist Nick Haldry and Andreas Heppner. In which they talk about the fact that there's really no face-to-face, pure face-to-face communication anymore, that every face-to-face exchange is contained within this notion of media and potential mediaization, right? So there's no sunset, there's just like the Instagram photo you haven't taken yet. There was just a thing, I think in the New York Times and The Guardian, about now is the great era of long-distance relationships. But in some ways it's like, we have a long-distance relationship, like how much time do we actually spend with anyone versus going through some kind of media even when we're sitting at the table trying to be good, like not allowed to wear my apple watch. This is part of the issue, right? You know, there's this kind of conflation that happens. This is another, and I'm just gonna kind of play this without sound here. This is, I'm kind of obsessed with this family if you're gonna notice already. I'm letting the kids get a little older before I start doing analyses on them, but they're just great. This is an ad from 2006 with Jay-Z for Hewlett-Packard, in which he talks about the Hewlett-Packard's computer tagline at this point was the computer is personal again, and the PC is personal. And so what they literally did here was to make Jay-Z, I'm totally in the way of this, I'm sorry. Now the people at home can't hear me anymore, so this will be secret conversation when you're not hearing me. But they basically have me, he's going through and talking about all the things he does with his computer, right? So he checks his stocks, he travels, building a center for the next, right? And he is the computer, right? And we did the computer as personal again. Like there's no distinction between him as a body, him as a self, him as a corporate entity, hello again, sorry. And his productivity, right? I've never seen a better clip for neoliberalism than this, right? I just play it all the time. Okay, but this is on the screen, this is another favorite work of mine, this is Namjoon Kite's TV Buddha from 1974, which I really like kind of contemplating. I like contemplating the context of self-surveillance but also self-reflection, right? And again, to see the self in the television, the sort of prototype of social media and self-reflection. And I love comparing this artwork to those meditation apps, right? Or even better, to the screen time thing that's supposed to like measure your screen time so you use less of it. I'm like, genius, right? So that may be an answer to the end of the carnival ask, right? I mean, once you kind of get into measuring your screen time to reduce it, that's because you are not mastering the tools of productivity. Can I sell you a couple of books, right? Or the toggle app, which will let you measure your time so that you could do a contemplative self-analysis on how well or how poorly you are doing it. I've worked that I've been really loving is the Temporal Distortions. My voice has an echo in it. This is a durational six-hour performance of music in a box that is entirely lined with two-way mirrors on the inside. So we see in as audience members and we can hear them if you put on headphones. Take a picture quick because I'm about to change slides. They're great. You should totally bring them. I love this piece. If you're inside, you just see yourself in a parallax view. You just see yourself in a mirror, which of course, literalizes our relationship to social media production, right? We're totally riffing on our own image, imagining that there is an audience out there for it. And maybe there are and maybe there aren't. What's amazing is in talking to Kenneth Collins who's the artistic director of Temporal Distortion and the guy behind this is also the dude with the sunglasses with the long, crazy beard, is that in almost all the performances of this, people are really well-behaved, except that one time they did this and a bunch of teenagers came in and all the teenagers did was like bang on the glass. Oh! And they really kind of freaked him out and made for a very weird show. But again, it's sort of, again, this idea of the box, right, the television, our desire to literalize the boxes, it's almost as if we can build the walls that exist and physicalize them, they will give us some comfort. The Dutch performance artist, Kavice Verluden, has done a similar kind of project. You probably may be familiar with this from 2014. Wanna Play or Love of the Time, Brinder, caused a big sensation in Berlin. We got into some trouble, I look forward to all of that right now, but I don't look it up. It's terrible, it's terrible. And problematic and kind of amazing at the same time. He basically lived in a box and solicited engagement for intimate, non-sexual acts with people using Breiner and then eventually other social media apps. But he lived in the box pretty much full-time and when he was in Peaceburg, I was talking with my friends who were there, they said about them in the public square, Peaceburg is not a huge city. And so everybody, if you're kind of doing anything in any term, but anytime gear, you will pass through this one of the essential box. And so people referred to him like a pet. They were like, you know, we check on him and they're like, it is terrarium. See what he was doing in there. His next piece also kind of plays with a similar idea of virtual intimacy and engagement. He made a piece called Guilty Landscapes. And this is again, kind of gets to this question of the ways in which like screen that work and talk back and how we literalize some of this. So these were videos, video pieces that you observed in a gallery. But in doing so, you would realize that the person in the scene, these were all scenes of trauma, ecological, political, cultural, exploited, et cetera, that the person in the space was actually responding to you in real time by imitating and mimicking your body posture and then was encouraging you to do the same. So thinking about the television as an interactive technology, this one is in home, Syria. And then the last piece that I'll say a little bit about and then we can sort of open up for virtual material questions and I'll hang around as long as anyone else is interested is this piece by Christopher Daugh, Belgian artist, if you're hanging out with Peter Effersall I'm sure you know quite a bit about Christopher. So I won't go into more detail here. For those of you again playing along at home, you'll just have to bring Peter into your space. But this one also is all about kind of performance within boxes. And so it's an array of nine boxes in which you look through 3D glasses, stereoscopic glasses at a three-dimensional image that is projected on a screen, put in the bottom of a box that is gridded so it really reinforces the three-dimensional effect. And so when you look in the top you see these would appear to be very small-scale humans but are otherwise identical. So if it creates quite enough anti-unsettling experience and then you watch them kind of go through, go through these various scenes. This one is the most significant. It's like all of them, it's taken from J.G. Ballard's writing's most prominently the atrocity exhibition. And this piece is one where he talks about two people being caught in a time loop. And the man at some point tries to hug the teller. He realizes he's caught in a time loop because the same thing keeps appearing on the television. And so he goes and he grabs the television in an attempt to hug the TV to make the time loop stop. And if you know that work, the atrocity exhibition, you will know that it is also written in these boxes. That the paragraphs are literal boxes on the page and our engagement with it is very much like the television. So again, pride of the inside, the outside, what can we affect, what can we affect? But the other wonderful thing is that as you're watching this, it occurs to you all of a sudden, like you two are hugging a teller, right? Because you're leaning over this day, you know, grabbing it. And so if I had any kind of final images, these are just more from, this one's kind of weird too, so you can see my face in it, right? So this is me taking a picture and you can sort of see my silhouette hovering over the box. This idea of the box is now for me becoming a kind of organizing principle of understanding media and particularly the relations between theater and media. On a kind of, not even one, but on multiple spectra of comparisons. And I really see a lot of this work that I learned I was thinking about from the pre-conference, which was really focused on teaching, to the main conference, sort of thinking about this, performances like the hyper-present and the system, I think, touch on this as well. But really thinking through, what is our responsibility now in terms of making theater, in terms of understanding theater, and how can we use theater, not just understanding it, because I actually feel like we get there pretty quickly. Like I don't think you, this audience needs much convincing. It's making the case for the value of theater and theatrical vocabulary in helping media makers and the larger public understand more critically than media that they are consuming and participating in. How do we understand the performances that we are generating all the time and create a kind of critical culture in response to that, that doesn't just involve us breaking all of our musical screens. So anyway, that's all I have for now. Thank you so much for inviting me. I am also open to the fake question. The foster questions and the simulated questions. And yes, so many of you are all in a white box now. Yes, the white box. Hi, sorry. I really appreciate the talk. And I'm student, I'm kind of a difficulty problem with the notion of the box. I'm kind of a student of the black box, the fly, which especially in the air clock, like we have some disaster and we're trying to locate the black box. I'm trying to know the truth to that device. Sort of, it's like it preserves all the truth. And in terms of theater, we also have a black box theater, which is kind of a metaphor for theater at the place where we preserve all of our visitors and the truth in contrast to the novel screen, which sometimes we think of as false as shallow or something like that. So I'm kind of having a hard time to understand why we use that term box, if you know a lot about that. Yeah, thank you for that. The whole notion of a box, so if I'm understanding your question correctly, and please jump in if I'm not. What you're saying is like we have these, the literal black boxes that we have on airplanes and we have the metaphorical sense although they're actual, the black boxes of theater is somehow holding on toicity versus screens that are a domain of simulacra. Right, and we can factor in the white cube of the aesthetic in terms of representational space in the art gallery and all the connotations of high art and falsity perhaps that goes along with that. It leaves a certain kind of attention to artificiality. For me, what's useful the key here for me is that is that the box in all of these scenarios becomes, is both literal and metaphorical, right? Like the black box on the airplane is an actual box of recording technology. But those truths are often contested, are rarely clear, and I would say similarly in the space of theater, right? I mean we can think about it in terms of authenticity. But it is always a kind of tension of the real and how real that is. What I think is useful is that that the box for me seems to have proliferated and I was particularly struck with the number of boxes that were showing up in contemporary performance in everything from Christopher Dogg to Beyonce. And the ways in which these boxes seem to function in a whole bunch of different ways. But at their core, and this is why for Dogg I think it's super interesting, it really became a kind of a deeper screen. And if you think about ways of, like it basically is the screen is no longer a two dimensional representational object, right? Like in some ways, if you think about the ways that screens or when they sort of do ads and projectors, right? It kind of casts this light beam that creates a kind of geometric space in which we can live. And so I've been thinking out, and there's some weirdnesses in how I'm doing this, this format is probably not my clearest. But I just think like these things are really held in tension that becomes useful for me in terms of thinking about them in relation to the box. And beyond that thinking of how artists are now also many different kinds of artists gravitating to boxes is somehow an organizing principle for making work either as a projection screen or as an immersive space or as a functional and that it pulls both again, this idea of the closer we get to the digital the more we seem to approach theater that in fact as we kind of dig into the digital in the screen we seem to get more and more theatrical boxes. In which the whole negotiation of real authenticity is always kind of, you know, in play but also fantastic. Does that kind of help how I'm thinking? I appreciate that. I've seen a lot of productions do something mostly a lot of American artists work under cardboard boxes. Okay. So there actually is this kind of recycling and almost an artisanal product that I find that exists in some kind of tension with the examples that you provided when they asked me about that. And then the other is because I really work on text. I was really interested in how text and about the power of it to like also the text on the thing and it's kind of good box. Is there, give one of your thoughts to the audience on how text functions in these projects? So I think you probably know better than I do that I would not say that the artisanal box or the cardboard box is less at play here as well. It's because it plays into the same notion of container and the other part of the Verdun work in particular that he has talked about with ESOS is the idea of it relating to the ISO which is the governing body that sets the ship container sizes so that they are accessible in every port everywhere in the world. And that every ship can carry the exact same stuff regardless of where it comes from or where it's going. That is also the governing body that organizes internet protocols to allow for information transmission to be seamless globally regardless of what's faces. So there is also an implication and I believe it's Shane Boyle who's done work on this on container theater and the re-purposing of those kind of shipping containers, those standardized shipping containers. So I think there is also a way in which capitalism and commerce and circulation whether it be the standardization of objects in a way like your IKEA couch can all, I think it can fit into a set number of boxes for maximum global capital efficiency is not so different than and is closely related to also the internet protocols that allow for transmission of goods and services and information along toward the same purpose in terms of the global capital. I think that hand-made boxes of which temporary distortion have been making these since the 90s and Big Art Group is another one that often builds and destroys their own boxes and does a lot of stuff with technology that there is a kind of materiality again that literalizes the metaphor boxes that I think we feel ourselves in, right? And I think the screens look less and less to us like windows in the way that they were perhaps they were initially conceived and less and less like desktops and more and more like cubicles and boxes that we live in. And so I think this is sort of part of the thesis is that artists are basically, and especially those who are working at and close to different kinds of media technology are literalizing their own confining so that at least it's something we can see and agree on because, and this goes to questions that come up earlier about power and the conopticon, that it's the invisible power structures that are the most threatening. And I think what we're under surveillance by ourselves and our loved ones, quite intentionally that there is a kind of anxiety there and so there's something about the literalizing of boxes and then to create resisted boxes. So broken boxes, cardboard boxes, disposable boxes. I think participates in the same kind of intellectual creative project from a different lens. In terms of text, gosh, I have a ton of notes from this weekend. One of the things that I kept writing down in a number of panels was, and you know, my early work I was like, I was like, it's moving, it's moving, it's moving again, right? And this idea of repetition and I was thinking of your piece earlier today in the live writing. And so I was thinking of her and automatic writing and the surrealists, right? This idea that somehow trying to get to something authentic and felt that lives in it in between, that articulates ideas in motion and bodies in motion and sort of in between that I find. So I feel like text is kind of sitting in the same way too. I'm also fascinated by it. I don't have anything more instinctive to say than I am fascinated by the ways in which text, like theater seems to be the thing that will not die, right? And so it's like Instagram, it seems like we're gonna completely get rid of text and then it's like, no, everybody wants to put text on top of their photos and then it's like, oh, we're all gonna turn into emojis and then people make their little bit emojis, right? Which are like the little emojis that look like them and then they put text with them, you know? So it's just like this idea of the sort of durability of language and again, I think maybe as a resistance strategy, you know, is text the cardboard box of, you know, of digital culture or not for, yeah, Danit, I mean, do we have time? I don't want to pull people hostage. We do not have time for more questions but please continue the conversation with us at Exara at the archive. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you.