 Yes, I do. Welcome everybody in my native town. I'm Nan van Houter, secretary-general of ITM, and it's not thanks to my function that we have this meeting in Amsterdam now, because it is plotted already about 10 years ago, and one of the supporters from the beginning has been the Dutch Fund for the Performing Arts. They're also the main supporter of this meeting that you will all enjoy in the next three days. I want a warm applause for the director, the general director of the Dutch Performing Arts, Henriette Post. Good afternoon. Dear friends and colleagues, it's with great pleasure that I welcome you. In its 35 years of existence, this is the fourth plenary ITM meeting that takes place in the Netherlands, and we are proud that after 34 years, the network is back in Amsterdam. International exchange and cooperation is an essential part of the Dutch Performing Arts Fund policy. We therefore value and support a network like ITM, especially now while Europe is closing its borders, while we are confronted with progressive socioeconomic inequality and rapidly changing demographics, and while freedom of speech is high on political agendas, but not everywhere, an evident value. We all share many comparable challenges and threats that we might overcome easier if we keep up the international exchange of ideas and the international cooperation. So I wish you all a wonderful, fruitful and creative meeting and a fantastic time in Amsterdam. Thank you. Thank you, Henriette. It was three years ago that I entered my position in ITM, and it was during the plenary meeting in Dublin. The theme of that meeting was trust, and I can read some quotes from the introduction text that was written then in the booklet. Who, after all, do we trust? As societies in Europe continue to change, whether it's due to recession, austerity cuts, or the rise of fascism, how do we as citizens trust those in authority? Question mark. It is trust that creates the conditions for any change to occur. It is trust that binds communities. It is trust that allows any sense of democracy to exist. Without it, it will be impossible for us to get out of the critical state in which we find ourselves now. That was 2013. During the three years since our trust in authorities and institutions, weak by then, has even grown weaker. It collapsed to a level we haven't witnessed for decades. If we may trust the media and the polls, and the polls, we live in a continent full of fear and anger. The gap between rich and poor is still growing, as is the gap between communities. Borders are being closed, refugees deported, nationalism is successful to the extent that it puts Europe at risk. But while authorities and institutions failed to restore trust, we also witnessed a resurrection of something which may have been sedated by our more trustworthy welfare states. That is protest, solidarity, attention. Intrinsic human behavior comes to surface like helping people that risk to drown, feeding the starving, and our capacity to revolt against a system that doesn't seem to care about values like solidarity, equality, right of education, freedom of expression. What this has to do with life arts in digital times? Well, I think everything. If the digital can be the main weapon of today's terrorists, it can as well be the main weapon to protect what's dear to us. While at Place de la République in the streets of Brussels, Spain, and Greece, thousands of people convene for an alternative society, it's time to restore trust in ourselves, in our ability to support the change, in our ability to create new meaning. Our job is intrinsic political because it speaks out loud. As we will see, digital technology can be more than just a tool, and they can keep us connected to a fast developing world. If only for that, I hope this meeting will give you loads of inspiration and inspire you to make and support the arts, the messenger of the alternative. Thank you. Thank you. I want to introduce to you our keynote speaker, Sally Jane Norman. Give her a warm hand. Thank you. Hello, Kiora. Bonjour. I'd like to thank Nan Van Outer and Jeffrey Merlman from the Dutch Theatre Festival for the honour of being invited to give the introductory keynote at this prestigious event. They've placed in me a lot of trust and I hope I can be worthy of it. Live arts in digital times is a subject I've long been engaged with through theory and practice in settings that range from the academic and cultural through to more or less ad hoc experimental platforms. And I attach great importance to the diversity of these places for practicing live arts. I think this diversity is reflected in the people in this room. So it's an exciting challenge. It's also been intriguing thinking back to IETM 2000 in Prague. I was moderator of the performance and new media working group with Oslo based artists Amanda Stegel and Père Plateau and the French producer Richard Castelli from Epidemic, well known for his work with technologies. Many of the questions we discussed then still seem extraordinarily relevant, including digital literacies, audience and actor literacies, but also the digital divide, literacies across our planet, the spiralling evolution and obsolescence of technical resources and the online formation of new cultural communities, which of course hasn't ceased to develop. But there have also been very significant transformations since 2000. Performance is my heartland and it's always been for me an exciting and totally unique territory from which to explore the evolving links between art and science, between culture and technology. So this lecture will be a very subjective account of what I see as some of the key contextual issues to feed into our exchanges. And I'm glad that these exchanges will also be very well supported by the recent IETM publications by Corina Busea and Maud Bonenfant's Who's Afraid of the Digital published last autumn, and by Julie Burkheim's wonderfully informative mapping document published last month. I'm using the word sensors in the plural in my title to emphasise the fact that our ability to see constantly multiplying, diversifying phenomena as live depends on radical extensions to our own sensors through increasingly digitally enriched prostheses that make meaningful data that would otherwise be incomprehensible, imperceptible. Our extended sensors, or what Robert Innis has called our exosomatic organs, include PDAs, programmable hearing aids, visual devices like Google glasses, or Google's newly patented camera equipped smart contact lenses. In short, they're systems that allow us to apprehend and process the world differently, and they're revealing haunting realities that were previously inaccessible dark matter. This process of integrating and developing new sensors and new ways of making sense is itself part of a very long story because human technologies and activities have co-evolved ever since we first managed to stand upright, empowering ourselves to grasp and to act on our surroundings. Paleoanthropologists like Leroy Goren have taught us how independent social acts cluster to gradually form operational chains, producing the concrete artifacts and systems that make up our technologies. As a result, these technologies incorporate strata of human behaviour, their sedimented memories of activities while the practices that shaped them are revived and expanded with each fresh use. As a species drawn to making things, including forever remaking ourselves, we're consequently inextricably physically and cognitively intertwined with the technologies that scaffold the world in which we live and in which we perform. Instead of pitting the natural against the artificial or the natural against the cultural as we've done for centuries, this intertwinement demands more complex and even paradoxical approaches, perhaps best summed up by Edgar Morin's wonderfully secure declaration that humans are cultural by nature and natural by culture. Digital technologies, particularly in the ways they change our ideas of scale, we just heard about the different parts of the world where digital technologies are creating and maintaining new sorts of very active and activist communities, but this scale adds to the tangle of human liveness or live humaneness with our environment. In these digital times, marked by transformational research into fields like gravitational waves and quantum computing, we're also encoding programming languages into the live cell DNA of bacteria to serve as environmental monitors, something I think we all agree that's actually probably quite important for our planet. We're also using DNA for high density archiving. Having already stored a five megabyte book in a single picogram of DNA, that's a millionths of a millionths of a gram and it represents a 10 billion fold increase over the capacity of a CD. We're now investigating ways to record dynamic, multimodal, storage, hungry media using this same apparently miraculous yet literally very basic material. For those of us from performance, it may seem strangely recursive to be using DNA, often called the building blocks of life, to unfold originary vitality and emerging textualities and thus store information and traces of human experience. But this is just one of the countless digital come technological developments that call for us to rethink our understandings of live arts. Cultural identities and memories are built up cumulatively. In their concrete manifestations, as practical implements, they're repositories of collective actions, as mentioned earlier, as Le Roy Goran has so wonderfully explained. Or as he's also explained, they may be concretely manifest as implements for inscriptive practices. This is the case, for example, with tools we use for weaving, drawing, writing, tools that convey experience in symbolic forms, as indirect signifiers, dramatic texts. Languages, a key social medium for humans, have gradually been refined as symbolic systems and made discreet and portable thanks to their grammatical and logical structures, with mechanical reproducibility further facilitating their transmission. 20th century digitization of words, images and sounds has made them still more reproducible and open to manipulation. Their transportability and malleability is the result of unprecedented standardization, by reduction to the binary bits of computing. Because we're finding ways to digitize all kinds of objects and actions, digitally encoded phenomena are both incredibly diverse in their deployments and incredibly normalized and standardized in terms of their constituents. It's this reduction to code that makes digital creations so apparently ageless, like forests of synthetic trees with no growth rings, they seem ever new. But there's something misleading about the claimed timelessness and newness of the digital. Because the hard and software, the operating systems and programs that actually make data usable are governed by their own internal clocks and their processing capacities. Just as we need a physical pen to write and a physical frame to weave, we need these materialized temporal frameworks to tap into the potential of digital data. To paraphrase Hamlet, time in our digital times seems to be curiously out of joint. The supposed transcendence of the digital is also undermined by our all too frequent need to discard or to retire our computers as heavily polluting e-waste. Like JF Sebastian in Blade Runner, the genetic designer who's afflicted with Progeria, our digital platforms are doomed to accelerated aging and early death or obsolescence. So there's a really crucial gap between platonic visions of the digital drifting up in the eternal cloud and its material realities that contribute vigorously, horrifically, to the Anthropocene's environmental nightmare. This gap is ingeniously addressed by many live performers. One of them is the artist Jonathan Reus whose iMac music that was created here in Stein in 2012 consists of live hacking recycled G3 computer circuitry displaying the visual distortions thus obtained on screen while playing the circuits with fine-tipped sound amplifying probes to reveal acoustic signatures of the computational processes at work. Reus demands a special kind of digital literacy, encountering visual stacks and sonic triggers that used to be part of our everyday activity sometimes for years on end heightens our awareness of the technological race we're caught up in and it makes obsolescence in this case a powerful poetic resource. A key characteristic of digital times that affects our senses of liveness is the fact that growing numbers of technologies created to serve us operate well beyond our knowledge and understanding therefore our control. This is of course why we built them in the first place. Research in climatology, epidemiology, demographics or other critical areas that require synthesis of massive heterogeneous datasets demands computational power that far exceeds the capabilities of the human brain. New sites of scholarship are opening up in the so-called digital humanities through computerized integration of previously patchy, unconnectable resources. Advanced digital possibilities allow non-profit social enterprises to help underprivileged populations like Canadian NIA technologies low cost rapidly prototyped 3D orthotic and prosthetic devices for children in underdeveloped and developing countries. Exploits like these or more high-end exploits like D-Mine's AlphaGo victory over the world Go champion last month testify to our tendency to constantly defy our own limits. We're what the artist philosopher Louis Beck calls extremophiles we tend to move always towards extremes of our possibilities and he calls artists creative extremophiles we tend to go to those limits in creative ways so this tendency can be beneficial in some cases if only to minimize or mitigate the damage that we've already inflicted on the world and on each other digital times are thus times for new kinds of collective reckoning rethinking socialities and ethics and I'm very aware of the environment in which I'm saying this to quote Joana Zalinska she has a wonderful book online on ethics it's downloadable it's free ethics is a mode of human locatedness in the world which involves a recognition of the processual and unstable nature not only of any such locatedness but also of the human thus located ethics is a historically contingent human mode of becoming in the world of becoming different from the world and of narrating and taking responsibility for the nature of this difference Zalinska eloquently evokes our human responsibility to account for the modes of relationality that arise from our individual positions at a given moment we have to be answerable if live arts are characterized by the by their prerogative to creatively frame and play out different forms of liveness live beings live actions then surely this makes them the vector par excellence for creatively projecting different modes of relationality for propagating forms of what the cultural geographer Nigel thrift has called effective contagion inspiring us to think otherwise and to think about others technological developments in our digital times throw human status and values thoroughly into question we're encoding and decoding the genome we're planning cosmic excursions meanwhile jet propulsion labs mixed reality facilities in Pasadena are bringing us tours of Mars guided by ex moonwalker buzz Aldrin and by Martian rover driver erisa Heinz every day exploits like this teach us more about the vast fabric of activities that challenge what it has previously meant and what it means now and what it might mean in future to be human the robo earth project was a european union funded project that ran from 2010 to 2014 which was dedicated to building a worldwide web for robots where they can continuously and autonomously leverage their collective skills and experience it's kind of like a benign version of skynet this has taken us from the internet of things which i know people are working on in this room which was an mit concept from 1999 to the internet of things that control things what we don't know is whether humans might eventually feature amongst the things to be controlled as donald grumpsfeld infamously said we don't know what we don't know the gray area of known and unknown agency in our increasingly hybridized human machine systems is something that is sometimes enthrallingly staged by performance this was the case at a live coding event last year in leeds where shelly knots holger balveg and jonas hummel set up a competitive performance called flock based on election battleground principles the three performers attempt to win votes from an artificial population the more votes a performer wins the more prominent their audio in the mix the voting mechanism consists quite simply of feature trackers that follow the performers audio inputs and artificial intelligence agents with preferences and voting rights who regularly vote for the audio input whose features best map to their preferences it's not clear in the performance as indeed unfortunately perhaps in many real political settings whether human input is convincing the ai society to flock to their musical proposal or whether the humans are instead chasing the agents preferences to win votes because the humans can't predict how the agents will react or move within the network they can either aim for mass appeal with relatively bland neutral proposals i think we all know about those or they can try to find a radical niche which strongly differentiates them from the other performers so this is a performance that's no doubt worth restaging given given the imminent electoral stakes and surrounding chaos for example in uk's european referendum referendum or the us presidential's like jonathan reyes's theater of machine anatomy live coding demands specific kinds of engagement from its audiences but in the case of flock more than actual coding literacy it calls for an eagerness to try and follow the competition between autonomously evolving algorithms and human interventions in short it calls for a new a new sense of drama in flock simplicity of the underlying principles and of the corresponding visual display and energetic presence of the three contenders together with perceptible changes to the sonic materials all of this makes the agonistic encounter relatively easy to understand in her obsession with politics and code performer shelly knots thus whimsically uses and whimsically abuses the normative pressures of large-scale opinion monitoring machines to inspire a decidedly quirky drama unintended consequences and glitches in computational systems show just how much our digital times differ from anything we've known before or not known that we've not known the high-frequency trading algorithms behind the trillion dollar stock market crash in may 2010 are an example of runaway agents over which humans have lost control it's in contexts like these that complexity scientist samuel arbisman speaks of i quote machines interacting with each other essentially as algorithms trading among themselves with humans left on the sidelines this isn't as we know science fiction over 2.5 quintillion bytes of data is produced daily or this was a 2015 estimate 90 percent of the world's digital data last year was created in the two preceding years so who knows what's happening right now and volumes of stored data are growing more than four times faster than the world economy in attempts to turn these incomprehensible facts into something that can make sense to humans like us the french ribbon or rybn artists collective bases its immersive performance installations on real-time archaeology of data flows mining web resources that show the socio-economic and geopolitical imbalance exacerbated by proliferating and impenetrable digital data like the 2010 crash which inspired their piece anti-data mining seven flash crash in 2011 publicly available data from namex a market analysis company critical of high-frequency trading and from yahoo finance are rendered as multi-channel surround sound that conveys streams of activity corresponding to eight critical markets located immediately around the new york stock exchange the sound is intensified by high-frequency bursts and pulses base rumblings and variations in resonance the fact that it was staged in a planetarium it was actually commissioned in poitiers adds to the performance's immersive impact and to its sense of superhuman quasi-cosmic complexity but big data as we know isn't just being generated by large conglomerates like nasa or the stock exchange or cern or amazon in countries like the netherlands and like most of us most of us here are probably from it's being permanently harvested from aspects of our lives that we prefer to consider as private information scraped from all kinds of individual online identities is aggregated for consumer monitoring while two decades of quantified self-practices life logging self-tracking biometric self-surveillance are likewise more specifically feeding huge databases these may be exploited in socially beneficial ways as in population health studies for example but they're often appropriated slyly bought up and repurposed by profit-seeking corporations to lure us into unconscious consumerism i want to insist on these yawning gaps between individual profiles and anonymous aggregated agents and between human response times and those of our post-human machines because how we experience those gaps conditions our ability or inability to imaginatively tune to them or to come up with compelling creative ways to resist and block them out attempts to artistically build on and with the rhythms of computational and human dynamics with their macro and micro temporalities cannot work without taking into account a context marked by ferocious commodification of human attention this was of course already omnipresent in pre-digital mass media Jacques Attali wonderfully illustrated this back in 1977 when he noted that record collectors tragically spend all their time earning money to buy recordings of other people's time and they were not only losing their own time in the process but moreover they were losing the time they needed to enjoy the artist's time they'd purchased it sounds grotesque and it was still is in some ways but it's been made even worse or perhaps more perverse by social networks which were supposedly designed to enhance communication amongst their content makers but which in reality aim to capture maximum shares of user attention to subject them to opinion shaping consumerist trends stockpiling people's time to encourage the insidious traps of the so-called experience economy affects all of us directly or indirectly it also raises particularly tricky questions in the world of performance whose defining feature for many is its stubborn immediacy and its irreducible embodied presence thus its resistance to permanence to normativity and ultimately to actually being traceable as we try to devise means to record fragile culturally vital evidence of live art how can we adopt an ethical approach so that we're not simply stockpiling stuff for tomorrow's forensic experts or for art investors or systematically deferring a future that's just around the corner as long as we don't dare to stop and enjoy the present and when live art is itself loaded with complex technological legacies that convey sedimented strands of past practices these questions become still more complex I don't have the answers but like many of us here I consider these issues urgent and important and this place is probably one of the best places to discuss them complexity engineer Danny Hillis has suggested that the onslaught of what he calls thinking machines well he can say that he founded the thinking machines corporation he says that this means that we've built our own jungle and it has a life of its own so how can we cope with the jungle if the alien life we've engendered can't be navigated by rational scientific instrumentation and calculations then creative powers are needed more than ever to map paths through unknown terrain to come back to to nuns wonderful introduction it's a question of trust it's all we have at an early 90s edition of seagraph psychologist Ron Pickett who was analyzing sensory motor activity and virtual reality systems told us how the Prussian explorer Alexander von Humboldt had to mobilize all his senses when journeying into the uncharted depths of the Americas at the turn of the 19th century to describe flora and fauna that couldn't be conveniently stored in a collector's tin von Humboldt looked at listened to touched smelled and tasted species he encountered he was actually officially reported dead on three occasions his multisensory exploration produced compellingly live and surprisingly lasting mappings of then unimaginable territories and of their inhabitants picket suggests that we need to respond in similar ways to the demands of multimodal digital territories mobilizing our entire sensorium all of our cognitive and perceptive skills our speculative and empirical attitudes to lay the foundations for a new naturalism fit for our digital times let me indulge for just a moment in a low or rather a no tech pre-digital flashback not to von Humboldt's 19th century but to the mid 20th picture a community theater in a small village full of usually rowdy children who are hushed and absorbed by a man standing on stage arms stretched wide who orders his pet flea to jump from the left hand to the right hand the flea traces a spectacular arc and hundreds of children's heads follow it perfectly and the trainer asks us to applaud to encourage the flea and of course we do vigorously and he thanks us and he says oh good the flea is really happy I think he'll jump again now so he says now jump back the other way and the flea goes from right to left and all of our hundreds of heads follow the flea and then the trainer says faster and then he says higher and then he says higher again and like him we're craning our necks we're stuck there watching the flea and for a very long time that usually very rowdy theater full of children is incredibly silent and after a very long time the trainer shrugs his shoulders drops his arms and says I'm sorry the flea is not coming back the show is over it's a it's a naive memory but for me it's an important reminder of how freely performance can be drawing on different modes of participation and engagement using a host of different ploys we're familiar with innumerable modes of engagement from this kind of willing playful suspension of disbelief to the most austere and framdungs effect or to the explosions of contemporary post dramatic performance in all its viscerality these are things that we can be using as cultural memories along with our technologies and artifacts they are layered they're sitting there waiting to be reactivated our buried traditions can be effectively crafted and brought back to life to research and combine with these recent and emerging practices the very liveness of performance as a medium quickens these temporal and mnemonic strands weaving them to build its uniquely living patterns and rhythms so perhaps in our giddily evolving digital times it's time to look back to moments in the past when we've productively synthesized diverse often incompatible ways of knowing thinking and expressing moments when virtual protagonists have been enthralling sparring partners for very embodied human agents as with shelly's flock political piece or with the flea trainer since our digital times are generating phenomena at scales that escape reason we must in turn generate imaginative ways of dealing with them of building new relations with them including by resuscitating bygone practices as latent cultural forces if myths are simplified representations of complex unfoldings in the world then computational systems surely have their own myth making contributions to offer our creative ecosystems in synergy with older traditions they can become part of our long-standing legacy of hermeneutics of collectively creating and transmitting weird and wonderful interpretations of phenomena through what louis bet calls fabulatory epistemology alongside tales of our heroic encounters with terrestrial and oceanic monsters stories of interplanetary and interstellar voyages creatively account for our relations to the cosmos to deal with its otherwise impossible scale movements in and movements of our emerging quasi living data spaces hovering between computation and technologies that use that delve into and that trip our cells and atoms demand the invention of new poetic ecologies languages that can reconcile bodies inspectors signals and signs lifelines and codes like our toes dream of theater as this crucible of fire and real meat where by an anatomical trampling of bone limbs and syllables bodies are renewed perhaps our live art attempts to relate to our digital times not hubristically trying to resolve their complexity or iron it out but instead to stage them in all their energetically agonistically plural splendor perhaps these attempts might learn something from the tricks of scale and from trusting in the artistic tricks of scale that gave us the ancient egyptians pharaohs bark or the Polynesian suntan sun taming cunning of mawi to reinvent richly hybrid human and post human live arts for the 21st century thank you Sally Jane um actually it's one minute to five we have one minute if it does before we have to leave this nice african landscape is there anybody who is uh who has an urgent question and would like to raise that question yes with with pleasure in fact with with none we're discussing how to actually i'm i'm we're talking about the publication series for ietm so i have a much longer version um i was trying to keep it short so we have time for questions but obviously one minute wasn't very generous of me but but certainly yes and and i would like to say that i'm going to be around for the entire meeting because i i attach huge importance to this event and i'm hoping that basically these are just some of the millions of ideas that i know people here are wanting hoping to talk about so that's true indeed we are apart from we hope we will publish your text definitely online there has always also been a live recording of this of this speech so it will be both in the digital and in the textual sense published uh and disseminated apart from that we are preparing a new addition of the fresh perspective on arts and digital technology and a call will be posted soon after this meeting so wait for that and then now i think i invite you all to cross the street again and go back to the Stadtschaube where we will have our opening drink uh offered to us by the fund for the performing arts and Jeffrey Milman the director of the Netherlands Theatre Festival and our the director of our great team co-organizing local team for this meeting will have a short speech over there together with Willy White our president okay hope to see you in a few minutes and have a glass with you thank you all