I am reading Jaron Lanier’s simultaneously depressing and invigorating manifesto, You are Not a Gadget and I plan to write a full review of it soon, since it touches on so much of what we are doing over at NewsWrights United, but when I ran across this section I felt compelled to rush to share an excerpt (while noting the irony that rushing and excerpting are two of then things Lanier warns we do far too much of in the digital age).
It is easy to forget that the very idea of a digital expression involves a trade-off of metaphysical overtones….
A digital image of an oil painting is forever a representation, not a real thing. A real painting is a bottomless mystery, like any other real thing. An oil painting changes with time; cracks appear on its face. It has texture, odor, and a sense of presence and history.
… You could define a … standard for representing oil paintings that includes odors, cracks, and so on, but it will always turn out that you forgot something, like the weight or the tautness of the canvas.
The definition of a digital object is based on assumptions of what aspects of it will turn out to be important.… If you didn’t specify the weight of a digital painting in the original definition, it isn't just weightless, it is less than weightless.
A physical object, on the other hand, will be fully rich and fully real whatever you do to it. It will respond to any experiment a scientist can conceive. What makes something fully real is that it is impossible to represent to completion.
A digital image, or any other kind of digital fragment, is a useful compromise. It captures a certain limited measurement of reality within a standardized system that removes any of the original source’s unique qualities. No digital image is really distinct from any other; they can be morphed and mashed up.”
Theatre by definition takes place in the real world. As I wrote in an early draft of my play The Ten Thousand Things: “Theatre has limits. Limits of distance, scale. If I can’t reach you with my own live voice, it’s not really theatre anymore.” This drawback, which we have bemoaned since the advent of microphones, turns out to actually be an asset. Theatre cannot be represented. It can only be presented.
So why are we still so stuck in representational theatre: literal living room “dramas” that represent so-called “real-life” in so called “real-time?” Would our standards as theatre artists be higher if we accepted the truth that our art form may stand squarely on the front line of the battle to keep culture human? Would we hold our feet closer to the fire of true creation and not just continue to spew out fodder for, by and about an ever dwindling Upper Upper Middle Class?
We theatre artists have to stop thinking we have been left behind in some technology backwater of the struggle for expression, and instead wade into the fray confident that our magic is more powerful than anything Silicon Valley can produce. Our magic is real. It is bottomless. The present of theatre can only be presented. It can never be re-gifted.
Hey.
Welcome to the fray.
Have you read "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" by Walter Benjamin? He doesn't take it the same direction I do, but his opening discussion on reproduction and art is practically a manifesto for why we need live performance and why it is so valuable.
Posted by: Jim Jewell | 10/09/2010 at 03:55 PM
Chills with those final words of yours. I think, for reasons you have already stated, that theatre is perhaps more important than ever, precisely because notions of human "weight" are missing from so many 21 century, mainstream, artistic products (and processes). Theatre is perhaps one of our final conduits back to that experience of being alive, together, in a wild, freezing universe that, at best, tolerates (not without limits) our attempts to command our world, the way a parent might tolerate a child who holds a coke bottle to an anthill.
Posted by: Jonathan Westerberg | 07/12/2013 at 10:59 AM
Hah! Great image. Thanks, Jonathan!
Posted by: Paul Mullin | 07/12/2013 at 11:01 AM