Exploiting the ease of making web digital movies, You Tube has penetrated the once privileged position of film and theater in the delivery of spectacle, entertainment and information. Its sheer viewing power (over 20 million/month), potential multiplicities (link sharing), and do-it-yourself paradigm (mashups) makes the phenomenon and the technology behind it an unavoidable competitor in the arena of performative practice. With new media technologies and the emergence of the web as a performance space, the more expensive, content proprietary-ness, and labor intensive manner of traditional theater production now has to compete against a democratized performance medium. New media’s products are now freely consumed and distributed with viral intensity by anyone who has access to the Internet. In this scenario everyone is potentially a consumer and/or a learner of the new modalities of audio/video construction that Lawrence Lessig calls the “tools of speech” (see Kaufman below). It is only proper and, with some urgency, that the discipline of Drama addresses this phenomenon and incorporates it within its curricular practice, pedagogy and performance theory.
As the Academic Technology Specialist in the department, it would be remiss on my part not to convey and to provide guidance to the significance of incorporating new media (digital audio/video, web) in the department’s curricular development plans. I occupy a unique position in that I operate within multiple roles in the new media context: practitioner, stakeholder, evangelist, and teacher, to name a few. This concern is not sudden and has been fomented by my experience of the early web years, with online information retrieval systems and video editing including numerous discussions with grad students. More recently, I gave lectures in Prof. Helen Brook’s Humanities 100 class on “Hamlet on the Holodeck” and the implications of technology to theater and other performative genres (see http://tinyurl.com/5whqtg) and to humanities teaching in general. I observed that while students are familiar with the practical aspects of new media (creation and display), their understanding of the depth of its theoretical precedents in literary studies, linguistics or cultural studies was weak and wanting. It is from this intellectual context that I propose the following outline for discussion for new undergraduate curricular content. I also provide recommendation of technologies that are the core for a new curriculum program.
I. Developing new media production skills (digital video and audio, web technologies):
With the new “tools of speech”, students need to understand the underlying technologies in video and audio production and its deployment in academic and everyday discourse. This would include knowledge of industry standard editing tools, miscellaneous computing skills, and theories of video editing and visual language. Most of these are already taught in Art Studio classes offered in the Art Department. A potential problem is that future Drama majors will have to compete for scarce digital studio resources with other students. Hence, a sizable addition of equipment and media stations in Drama might be required. Right now the Drama Video Cave can only accommodate grad students and does not provide a digital video camera for use. In time however, access to these will go the way of previously expensive scanning systems that are now ubiquitous in most departments.
Final Cut Studio (Mac) and Adobe Premiere (Windows) video editing software
High Definition DV cameras (Tape-based and Hard drive)
Midi interfaces (audio analog to digital interface)
Hi-speed, high-resolution scanners
II. Exploring new media theory:
Future undergraduates from the Net generation onward will have encountered, consumed, and even practiced the new technologies engendered by digital technology. For these digital natives, such technologies have become normalized in everyday discourse. Yet even as it becomes second nature in its usage, it is important that students (as with past technologies) develop the same critical tools that encourage critical analysis, reflection and positive action. While the convergence of these technologies have enabled seamless entry into virtual and real worlds as evidenced by game environments and on-line sites such as Second Life and MySpace, they also raise serious philosophical and ethical questions on the nature of social reality and human interaction. Likewise, the democratization of new media technologies bring up questions about societal control and normative policies (public protection) regarding information and where the ubiquitousness of the Internet technology hides the underlying control protocols of standards, algorithms, network infrastructures that beg many questions regarding WWW governance. Following Peggy Phelan (1998)*, this “electronic paradigm” redefines knowledge itself and what is to be remembered. Indeed, such issues weigh heavily on creativity and performance and poses problems for the future of scholarship. Historically, theater has always confronted these issues and in the process has also produced masterpieces that serve as signposts of society’s past and future albeit in its remembered analog form. Digital technology as a communicative tool expands this power of theater and introduces new interdisciplinary possibilities in its teaching and creation. It can facilitate collaborative directing, encourage distributed (and random) improv theater, simulate or recreate new and lost worlds for theater design, sound or lighting. Courses can be developed and coordinated with interdisciplinary offerings from other departments such as Philosophy, Music, Computer Science and Math, Biology, and Architecture among others. Applications of these combinations abound in the following technologies:
Video/film aesthetics
Web video non-linear narrativity
2D and 3D Animations (Anime, Second Life)
Game interactivity and psychology
Game rhetoric and ludology
Media databases (Korsakow System, Lev Manovich’s “Soft Cinema”)
Haptic and electronic performance art (e.g., Pamela Z)
III. Incorporating digital AV media in theater production:
Digital audio and video has added tremendous changes to cinema and film production that observers claim it will herald a reorganization of the century-old movie studio industry. Already, the animation industry has shown this transformation to be profitable – witness the box-office successes of Shrek, Fish Story, Polar Express, etc. Digital video and its underlying technologies have also created a trickle down effect into the hands of amateur but creative individuals. This is manifested in sites like You Tube, VideoEgg and similar ilk. Increasingly, the malleability of digital assets (image, sound) and the easy means of acquiring these, regardless of daunting digital rights control systems, have encouraged a new genre – the remix (audio/video) and the mashup (software and web technologies), often cast in multiple languages and viewed by a global audience. As in theater, both digital image and sound elements are visceral but more importantly, they afford mobility, multiplicity, and embeddedness. Knowledge of this technologies and the practices that it generates coupled with a solid understanding of traditional theater practice, takes the department into the future, not to mention the development of employable skills that the multimedia, game and animation industries will find attractive among its graduates. The following content areas are suggested:
Digital projection technologies (multiple, surround screens, etc.)
Video deejaying (Grid, Isadora software video manipulation and display)
Theater in theater (e.g. Picture-In-Picture)
Kinesthetic and motion studies (Poser animation software for character rendering)
Electronic sensor technologies (BodySynth, MIDI, Max/MSP, audio delays, wireless and infrared signaling systems)
Digital sound and lighting control technologies
The ideas and technologies presented above can provide students with both the academic and practical scaffolding beyond their student years. While the content is not entirely new and has many analog referents, the methods have changed radically, brought on largely by new paradigms of learning and facilitated by multi-channel information technologies. They also bring on exciting possibilities for a new creativity and aesthetic and yet still provide for those who care to learn further, access to deep resources in theater scholarship that only academic institutions can provide.
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* Concept paper submitted to the department Chair of the Drama Department, Stanford University, April, 2007
References:
*Peggy Phelan, in Richard Schechner, Ed. Performance Studies: An Introduction (Routledge, N.Y., 2006)
Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Monfort, Eds. New Media Reader (The MIT Press, 2003)
Lev Manovich, Language of New Media (The MIT Press, 2001)
Peter B. Kaufman, “Video, education, and open content: Notes toward a new research and action agenda” in First Monday, vol. 12 (4) April 2, 2007 (http://www.firstmonday.org/issues/issue12_4/kaufman/index.html)
The Korsakow System (http://www.korsakow.com/syndrom/index.html)
Second Life (http://secondlife.com/whatis/)
Pamela Z (http://www.kqed.org/arts/people/spark/profile.jsp?id=4743)
