Installing our work in the black box was really gratifying. The shuffling, spinning, dripping, typing, whirling, jerking and scraping of our grotesque monsters was magnified by the light, sound and video effect wizardry of the TML team. To paraphrase the words of Gregory Beck Rubin, " the projects we brought to Montreal are not the ones we see here tonight". The atmosphere of the black box changed the way we saw our own work and re-established in my mind the importance of light and sound in any environment. The monsters really began to take on a life of their own. The layers of complexity: light, sound, movement, and time created an enchanting space where exhibit-goer's could manipulate and interact with our strange creatures. Of course, the highlight of Montreal experience for me was watching Homunculus perform. The dance of these puppet creatures confirmed proof of concept for my own work with sync discs. Fundamentally, the circuit worked, the motors ran, the propellers whirled (all except one) and the strings jostled the exo-skeletons around in space almost gracefully. The story was told. The creature's subtle, smaller movements, were just as mesmerizing-- and perhaps even more uncanny than the larger continuous gestures. The system worked. Reflecting on the performance has suggested a few compelling directions in which to begin questioning the tectonic substance and architectural ramifications of my work.
Because the sync disc I used to control the motors was small in diameter (one revolution every 20 seconds) the dance of Homunculus was a simple continuous repetition over the course of the two hour exhibit. Essentially, over time the dance began to fold back in on itself, and as the motor batteries died, the pattern became less noticeable and the sporadic movements of the strings less determinate thus, unintentionally, ambiguity emerged in the performance. Hume wrote, "Repetition changes nothing in the object repeated but does change something in the mind which contemplates it." Gilles Deleuze proposed the notion that difference is introduced to a system through repetition. A discussion of his seminal work, Repetition and Difference will soon follow. Classical Greek and Roman architecture draws heavily on order and repetition. On repetition, architect, Bernard Tschumi hypothesizes that there is no architecture without repetition: "with its rows of windows, columns, bricks, steps etc. architecture inevitability is the art of repetition". More than any other art, architecture depends on the nearly endless accumulation of similar elements. "A need for commerce has created the repetition of stackable floors (skyskraper), a need for power resulting in the repetition of courtyards (Forbidden city, Beijing), a need for mass housing: repetition of units (Levittown) and the need for economic development creating the repetition of nearly identical cities world wide."
ENCHANTMENT AND THE STRUGGLE AGAINST GRAVITY:
Performance has always held an aura of enchantment. The audience, through the proscenium, witnesses the creative drama of the players and is suspended in an expression of delight. Similarly, technology-- automatons and the ghost in the machine, holds mystique. It is this thrill and surprise, by which an artefact or environment is experienced, that measures our engagement with a space and place. The technologically enabled dance of Homunculus, the light, sound and play of shadow created for and during the performance was offered as the object of enchantment, attracting exhibit-goer's to an inherently transformative performance which shifted in significance and understanding over the course of the exhibit. McCarthy, Wright, Wallace and Dearden explore the concept of enchantment as a means of creating criteria for interactive experience in Human-Computer Interaction. They postulate that, "enchantment engages with paradox and ambiguity, putting being into play in an open world. This contributes to creating depth in a system or object that allows it to contain within it the possibility for complex, layered interpretation even the kind of interpretation that surprises the person interpreting." 1 Enchantment becomes a means of describing an indeterminate and evolving state of interaction, where the meaning of the interactive object or environment remains exploratory and unpredictable. 2
Homunculus draws reference from the grotesque and approaches the conceptualizaton of space and place primarily through the motions of the marionette. Heinrich von Kliest's essay "On the Marionette Theatre" argues the relationship between dance and the movement of the puppets. His fictional character Herr C. argues of the puppet that "each movement... will have a center of gravity; it would suffice to direct this crucial point to the inside of the figure. The limbs that function as nothing more than a pendulum, swinging freely, will follow the movement in their own fashion without anyone's aid. He further stated that this movement was really quite simple; that each time the center of gravity was moved in a direct line, the limbs would start to describe a curve; and that often when simply shaken in an arbitrary manner, the whole figure assumed a kind of rhythmic movement that was identical to dance." The dance of the puppets and the loss of the proscenium is an instance of interaction which communicates the boundaries and depth of an interactive space--or an event space* to the audience.3
*The concept of event space is borrowed from the work of architect Mette Ramsgard Thomsen and choreographer Carol Brown, as defined in Sites of Flux: imagining space in the dance-architectures of The Changing Room and Sea Unsea. 2006 .
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