The Intimacy of Rain & Digital Collaboration

Recently I started a web collaboration with a dancer in California and a Dancer in New York, where I created materials to post on the web as a collaborative process. During a Skype conference we decided to explore the theme of intimacy.  Exploring the concept of intimacy took me down a side path, making me aware of rain as a refuge for being alone or with someone you care about, as noted in the song from The Fantasticks, “Soon It’s Gonna Rain”. This led to my creating several movies about rain, such as this one:

RAIN

The music by Gwan Ying Wu provides a lingering moment of intimacy. Her pianism and arrangements are evocative of an intimate awareness, a personal connection that leads us to a safe place.

As I explored this idea, I suddenly thought of Gene Kelly’s “Singing in the Rain,” a testament to intimate exuberance:

GENE KELLY: “Singing in the Rain” (1952)

The energy of Gene Kelly celebrates love in the rain, declaring that all is right with the world when you are in love. Despite its outward enthusiasm, this moment is a personal connection with the world, an intimate touching with an invisible witness that shares the celebration. The rain invites abandonment and we surrender to spontaneity, to the immediacy of the moment.

Kelly is happy-go-lucky and with an air of naivete, a post war enthusiasm of a century poised for new and wonderful achievements. Even Singin’ in the Rain was a technical marvel that brought movie making to new levels.

Half a century later,  the fabulous entertainer Usher treats Kelly’s film as a “score” for his own performance:

USHER: “Singing in the Rain” (2007)

Usher – Singing in the Rain – live @ Movies Rock
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Usher pays careful attention to detail, and he brings a relaxed air to the moment. It is a different energy, comfortable, hip, more into the naturalness of his personality. He is more controlled within the spontaneous, and his expansiveness is embedded in an intimate awareness of style.

Usher’s recreation is not an imitation of Gene Kelly’s work, it is the creation of a new work in the context of a new century and new technology. The set for Usher was not a movie stage, it was a theatre stage. But it is a theatre stage that has the trappings of a television studio. Usher’s set is remarkable in the way it celebrates the original but achieves its own personal identity. The orchestra is re-scored with faithful attention to the original, but with an updated sound.

As a new work, it makes a different statement from the original. Kelly’s work defies the elements and achieves virtuosity through his exuberance and physicality. Usher’s work accepts the elements, and virtuosity is simply an extension of a personality entirely comfortable and at ease with himself. Within Usher’s superb performance there lingers a wistfulness of a past gone by, a recognition of past achievement and a certain regret that we can’t go back to then. But even within that context there is a pensive optimism that all that we have suffered in the past 50 years can open to a new vision of ourselves.

It was likely inevitable that someone would place their work side by side to reveal how well the recreated work matched the original:

KELLY & USHER: Side by Side

Technically, this version uses the original sound source to coordinate the two versions. This pays homage to the original, but also lets us marvel at how faithful Usher remains to the original “score.” We look at 1952 and 2007 side-by-side and observe how the present appropriates and assimilates the past. The problem with this version is that it relegates Usher’s work to that of imitation, while in reality it is a true recreation, a creative act that asserts itself in a new century.

And finally, there emerges a master at editing who transforms the two versions into a work of art:

KELLY & USHER: Together

This version celebrates two eras in a masterful merging of the materials. Each is secure in its own style, and the distinctive qualities of 1952 and 2007 are allowed to mingle in a counterpoint of past and present. Devices of prolongation and extension provide a basis for extraction of materials from each performance and to be merged across time through the technology of film and synthesis. We have a virtual duet between the past and present celebrating an idea that transcends the moment and creates its own world.

The synthesis and integration of the two performances ushers in a new technological basis for collaboration, where through extraction and synthesis new works emerge. We are beginning to see the potential of this creative process, which enables extension of new works through the transformative, collaborative power of digital technology.

Identity and the Web

The WWW provides a new platform for discovery. It can be discovery of ourselves as artists, as citizens, as thinkers, as poets. We can be whatever we want to be. There is tremendous power in this illusion. But is it illusion? As we mirror ourselves in new identities, a transformation enters into the process as we become what we project. We are what we edit. We are what we process.

At first, the principal content defining us on the Internet was text-based, language intent on informing. Blogging moved informing into the realm of identity and discovery, in creating in the constancy of change. Then content added image, then sound, and finally video. Each of these content areas became an arena for self discovery. This extension of media invited new ways of defining self. Look at this video in which the creator is not a drummer nor a pianist:

The fantasy world created through sound and image exists only as a moment of self expression and inquiry, a discovery that takes the creator to a new place through the process of creation and through the Internet witnesses that somehow stumble upon this vivid imagination. It is not an intellectual act, but rather a visceral, intuitive exploration filled with humor, self-awareness, and a sense of spontaneity. None of this happens in real time, but is achieved through assembling stop action photography with precise timing geared to the music track.

Another sound and image inquiry through the Internet takes on the quality of a musical journal. James Blunt creates a fantasy of himself. It’s appearance on YouTube seems like a confessional and a revelation. The simple unpretentious quality of his singing, his turning around, walking toward toward the viewer (it could be me or you), and removing the hood so he can share this intimacy is a confessional to himself and anyone else who might be passing by. The metaphor is extended through his stripping down, baring himself to the world as he shares his fantasy. He faces the realization of his disappointment that he will never be with someone so beautiful.

It is a brief, poignant moment that takes on the air of sincerity. He reveals his excitement when he switches from an almost impersonal narrative and exclaims directly to his fantasy “You’re beautiful! You’re beautiful! You’re beautiful, it’s true!” We are touched by his wish to share such an intimate moment (which is of course, extremely public). The public nature of this intimacy leads to Kevin Sage’s parody below.

Sage’s parody attempts to fool us by seeming so strikingly like the original, but drawing upon cliches and gay phobia to distort the sincerity and shared intimacy of the original. We know it’s an act, even when imitating the naturalness of Blunt, and this ironic realization is reinforced by his apparent leap off of a building into the bowels of the metropolis instead of the deep blue sea of the original.

Yet another parody emerges: “Bloody Cold” from piderman. Parody is a powerful way of establishing and diverting identity. Now the character is no longer a romantic, unpretentious distant lover. Instead he is everyman, out of character and out of place, trapped in someone else’s fantasy.

Parody becomes a form of public inquiry. This becomes social inquiry and reveals the stereotypes that often populate the narratives of our fantasies. The use of all media to conduct this inquiry now insures and wider dialogue and a richer process.

One cannot leave this sequence of responses without looking at the images created to be just the fantasy without the fantisizer, the famous Angelina Jolie — You’re Beautiful.

Here the narrator is only present as a disembodied figure reflecting on a fantasy, celebrating the stereotype of the American Beauty. The repeated iterations of the song in changing contexts makes the song become a parody of itself. Even though it is the same song, the repetitions with changing context remove the innocence of the earlier “reality.” Illusion dissolves into disillusionment and parody becomes caricature. This does not lessen its importance nor its impact but illustrates how distortion adds to and changes meaning.

Such imitative work and parody requires a deep assimilation of the original far beyond the textual meaning. Gestures, expressions, and props must be assimilated and synthesized at a profound level. In the 16th Century, the “Parody Mass” generated new musical expression by borrowing materials from an earlier work. It has been noted that this term might be better translated as “imitation mass”—but even that term fails to acknowledge that a new work emerges from the ashes of the old.

In these works, artists collaborate with the Internet. The Internet becomes a mirror for reflection and discovery. As the works are published, works generate responses, an emerging collaborative process that accelerates as artists transform old materials into new manifestations. Collaboration invites works to become more public, encouraging extension of ideas and materials. Identity, once a private persona presented to the world, is now an ever-changing public presence.

Music and Internet2: Interactive Multimedia Performance as a New Artistic Medium

Of interest here is music and moving image in the new medium of Internet2, which has become a platform for sharing images and music across distances in a collaborative exchange of live and processed images, video, and sound. Internet2 productions are characterized by images, video and sound that are exchanged in real-time using broadband connections transmitting and receiving multiple channels of video and audio as a multi-site simultaneous performance. Internet2 performances exist as a new medium that has yet to be fully defined and articulated.

Internet2 collaborative performances emerged during 2000 as unique investigations of artistic expression, serving as an opportunity to explore the technical limits of this new medium, while developing aesthetic practices borrowed from features of video concerts and practices, and live television. Many of these early productions focused on music in relationship to the moving image, but were generally functioning on the assumption that the only difference in musical treatment was that these concerts were delivered through Internet2 and that the primary considerations had to do with the technical problems that had to be solved while nothing new had been introduced to challenge the aesthetic premise of such productions. However the aesthetic features of Intenet2 productions suggest that this is a new artistic medium, and the role of music in the context of interactive performances in this new medium has yet to be fully explored and researched.

The most obvious feature of Internet2 performances between distant locations is the latency that occurs because of time lag between the sites, the reception of the sound and image between sites is not instantaneous. It takes time for the signal to be transmitted and received and latency can vary during connections. For sites that intend to incorporate the sounds and images of each other as part of the performance material, ignoring latency or syncing with one site is not satisfactory. Latency is a real-time factor that should be included aesthetically as part of the performance.

Several works were created as a collaboration between University of California Irvine and New York University. including Songs of Sorrow and Songs of Hope, performed in response to the terrorist attack of 9/11 on the World Trade Center. It was during the preparation and performance of this work that Internet2 was perceived by the performers to be an emerging new medium for artistic expression.

Visual and sonic latency adds to the texture of the artistic work and several approaches to structure and performance provide a rich array of possibilities. The Internet2 collaborative process shapes a powerful new medium incorporating moving images and sound in ways that can be understood as essentially different from the inclusion or addition of sound to the moving image of film. Of further interest is to understand how the layering of images, processed and live, changes the perception of the whole and shapes the musical work, especially when the music may be a combination of scored and improvised sounds. Latency furthers the richness of the texture. How does this latency impact on the creative process visually, sonically, and kinesthetically?