Maria Chatzichristodoulou [aka maria x], Goldsmiths College, University of London, UK.

When Presence-Absence Becomes Pattern-Randomness: Blast Theory's Can You See Me Now?

Keywords: British art, Blast Theory, installation, body, telepresence..

This paper looks at the work of the internationally renowned British group Blast Theory (http://www.blasttheory.co.uk). More specifically, it concentrates on Blast Theory's award-winning installation /performance /game piece Can You See Me Now? produced in 2001 but still active today (November 2006).[1] Can You See Me Now? is a chase game that takes place simultaneously online, within a virtual city in Cyberspace, and in the streets of a 'real', physical city. While exploring CYSMN? I ask questions about the notion of 'presence' as both a concept and a tangible state-of-being. In the first instance I am using the notions of presence and absence to describe the condition and experience of situating (for presence) or excluding (for absence) one's corporeal body and 'aura' within/from a specific spatio-temporal context, and a set of relationalities that include (the) 'other'(s).[2] I ask: What is the meaning of presence within a postmodern, posthuman, and 'post-media' context? What is at stake when presence becomes telematic, distributed and/or hybrid? What happens when presence and absence cease to exist as polar opposites? When presence becomes, to quote Derrida, 'impregnated with absence'? When presence and absence blend into each other, in a paradoxical state of presence-absence?

Can You See Me Now?

Since 2000, Blast Theory has collaborated with the Mixed Reality Lab (University of Nottingham) in order to explore the convergence of Internet and mobile technologies and create “new forms of performance and interactive art mixing audiences across the Internet, live performance and digital broadcasting”.[3] This practice of mixing diverse audiences, media and genres characterises CYSMN?, a piece which verges on the edge of several genres such as gaming, interactive art, and live performance, mixes physical and virtual spacetimes, and spreads its participants (runners, players, involuntary audiences) across these spacetimes and their dissimilar ontologies. In CYSMN? the players can be physically located anywhere in the world. By logging on the group's website they find themselves 're-located' within a virtual city together with other players and members of Blast Theory, called 'runners'. The presence of both the players and the 'runners' in the virtual city is avatar-mediated. At the same time, the 'runners' are located within the streets of a physical city, which they use as their game terrain /stage.[4] Each runner is equipped with a hand-held computer connected to a Global Positioning System (GPS) tracker. The hand-held computer sends the runner's location from the tracker over a wireless network to people playing online, whereas the positions of players online are passed back the other way and displayed on the screen of the runner's computer. Alongside this, online players can communicate with each other through text messaging, and runners can communicate with each other trough walkie-talkies. An audio streaming of the runners' walkie-talkies allows the online players to eavesdrop on the runners' discussions.[5]

The aim of the game is for the runners to chase and 'catch' the online players. While the runners chase the players, and the players try to escape the runners, the two cities, 'real' and virtual, meet and merge into one hybrid city built from overlapping layers of physical and digital spacetime. Each layer of spacetime is characterised by different qualities and behaviors. As Blast Theory put it “the virtual city (...) has an elastic relationship to the real city. At times the two cities seem identical (...). At other times the two cities diverge and appear very remote from one another.”[6] From this process of merging and diverging, bringing together and tearing apart of the two cities, CYSMN? produces a new space which is neither physical nor virtual. It is, instead, hybrid and relational, that is, a space that pertains and belongs to the connection between physical and virtual, as well as a space created from the players' interactions with each other and their game terrain. This hybrid city cannot exist outside the relations that occur between the different layers of spacetime and the different people that 'inhabit' these through their involvement in the game.

Blast Theory describe the conceptual background of the piece as drawing upon their fascination -with the ubiquity –in many Western countries– of handheld electronic devices such as the mobile phone, and the way this changes and 'augments' our urban environments. The mobile phone blurs the boundaries between private and public space by 'broadcasting' fragments of private information into the public arena, thus staging little private dramas. The presence of (involuntary) audiences alters the actual nature of these private instances, transforming them into public spectacles, whereas the people involved in these become performers who 'act out' their everyday lives. Through this exploration around the merging of private and public spaces, Blast Theory ask: “In what ways can we talk about intimacy in the electronic realm?”

I suggest that intertwined with issues of intimacy are ideas of presence and absence. CYSMN? uses the overlay of this emergent hybrid city to explore such ideas. The issue of presence-absence is posed from the very beginning of the game. When you log online to 'meet' the runners, you find the following information: a photo and the name of each runner, as well as a text introducing a person each one of them has not seen for a long time but still thinks about. For the 2005 presentation of CYSMN? at the Chicago Museum of Modern Art, for example, Runner 1, Matt, talks about Lucy, a girl he was friends with when she lived in Birmingham, but hasn't seen for many years.[7] Matt says that, although friends, their lives were very different and never overlapped. He doesn't know where Lucy lives any more, but he thinks of her every now and then, and misses her.[8] Runner 2, Simon, talks about Dwielio, a man he met while busking in Spain. Dwielio was a man without nationality who was illegal in every country. Simon thinks about him and he would like to speak to him again.[9]

Fig. 1. Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?, 2001 © Blast Theory

Once you log on to the virtual city of CYSMN? as a player, you are also asked to identify the name of a person who is absent from your life (someone you have not seen for a long time) but present in your mind (someone you still think about). Once this person is identified (becomes 'virtually' present), no other reference is being made about him/her (considered absent) till the end of the game, when you are caught by a runner. To signify her victory, the runner says: “Runner 1 has seen -------” speaking loud not your name, but the name of the person you have identified as someone you still think about (thus signifying a presence which contradicts an apparent absence). I ask, is this person present or absent? If present, within which layers of space, time, and memory is her presence situated? How is her presence manifested? Does the identification and sharing of her absence make her –virtually– present? Does the speaking out loud of her name –virtually– situate her within the urban landscape?

Fig. 2. Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?, 2001 © Blast Theory

This is not the only occasion where the boundaries between presence and absence blur in a CYSMN? performance-game. For example, the online players are both present (in the hybrid city) and absent (in a corporeal form, from the physical city); the runners are present (in the hybrid city) and absent (in the proximity of the players). Finally, when a player is caught the runners take photos of the exact physical location where each player was “spotted”. These photos, called 'sightings', are then uploaded on the website, functioning as an abstract, minimal but also poignant documentation for each game. What do these fragmented, empty spaces stand for? I see the sightings (both their picture-taking and their sharing) as a powerful, poetic act of interweaving the digital, virtual and abstract into the physical, tangible and real, while also augmenting the physical/tangible/real and thus limited with another layer of abstraction and relationality. While weaving the physical and digital (similarly to Benjamin's understanding of aura that weaves time and space), these sightings forever link both the (present-absent) player and the (absent-present) person in her mind to an anonymous square of a cityscape (which maybe none of them has ever physically visited). Thus the sightings interweave absence with presence as much as they interweave physicality with digitality, creating unique, hybrid loci. To my eyes, these photos are the most succinct, poetic, and beautiful visual articulation of the present-absent state a cyborgian creature finds itself in.

The player is there, in the picture (Figs. 1-3). Can you see him or her now? [10]

Fig. 3. Blast Theory, Can You See Me Now?, 2001 © Blast Theory

Presence-Absence and Pattern-Randomness

Performance theorist Peggy Phelan, in her book Unmarked, claims that in performance “the body is metonymic of self, of character, of voice, of 'presence'”.[11] I ask, what happens when it comes to –fully or partly– mediated, networked, and other forms of technologised performance, such as Blast Theory's CYSMN? As discussed, in CYSMN? the runners' corporeal bodies are situated within the urban landscape, dispersed around the city, constantly in motion –rather than being concentrated within the physical proximity of their audiences/players. Does this mean that, as far as the players are concerned, the runners are absent (as performers during the game/performance), because the runners' bodies are absent from their physical proximity? Does the absence of the runners' corporeal body in the proximity of the players entail absence of the runners themselves?

Media theorist and artist Allucquère Rosanne Stone points out that “the coupling between our bodies and our selves is a powerfully contested site”.[12] Stone shows in her book The War of Desire and Technology how this site is being claimed by everyone, from governments to technologists, from scholars to the media, everybody fighting for their own right to control “the epistemic structures by which bodies mean.”[13] Indeed, bodies mean, and that applies to all bodies, whether corporeal, virtual, synthetic, posthuman, cyborgian, or other. It is safe to argue that the relationship between body and self, in performance as much as in everyday life, is a complex and multifaceted one. If we accept this, can we also accept that the contested site between body and self be approached as a metonymic relationship of the body to the self? In short, does 'body' stand for 'self'?

When it comes to the analysis of networked performance practices such as CYSMN?, I ask, which body are we talking about? The runners' corporeal bodies embedded within the urban landscape? The runners' digital bodies manifested as avatars online? And are these distinct from each other? Or are we talking about the players' bodies? In which case, are we talking about their corporeal bodies, dispersed around the world? Or the digital avatars through which they manifest their presence online? Which of these bodies –if any– can be considered as a metonymy of the self? Which of these bodies stands for presence? And what is presence within this context? I suggest that Phelan's discourse refers to visceral performance staged in physical space, where the body is corporeal, one-and-only, unique, tangible, well-defined, and limited; where the body exists “in the plenitude of its apparent visibility and availability”.[14]

N. Katherine Hayles on the other hand discusses situations that occur in virtual reality environments, where “the avatar both is and is not present, just as the user both is and is not inside the screen.”. (Hayles employs the term ‘avatar’ to refer to the user of a Virtual Reality (VR) environment. I suggest that the same applies to augmented and other hybrid environments; in the case of CYSMN? the term 'user' could apply to both the runners and the players.) She points out that when it comes to such environments “questions about presence and absence do not yield much leverage”.[15] Hayles is not the first to observe the failure of the presence-absence dialectic to adequately apply to, describe, and/or serve to analyse situations that occur within such encounters. Theorists such as Sherry Turkle, Alluqcuère Rosanne Stone, Machiko Kusahara, Ken Goldberg, and artists such as Stelarc and Eduardo Kac, all have observed the shortcomings of the presence-absence dialectic within this context, and have tackled this in different ways through their work.

Kusahara, for example, compares telematics with photography in the way space and time are being 'copy-pasted' and reconfigured in both these practices.[16] Kusahara believes that our culture is undergoing a drastic change in terms of our physical and physiological relationship with space and bodies –our own and those of others. Within this framework, Kusahara doubts the very knowledge provided by her own senses, approaching digital technology as a 'potential trickster': “Digital technology ... has brought us the notion of disembodied presence. We can no longer simply believe what our eyes see and our ears hear.” She goes on to use telerobotics –which allow for the control of a robot over distance– as an example: via telerobotics, one can either use the robot as one's machinic avatar in a distant physical space, or simply manifest one's presence over geographical distance through directing the robot's movement. But this is not quite as simple as it seems, Kusahara points out, because: “how do others know that the robot is operated by a real person? And how do we know that the robot is representing the world accurately back to us?”

In short, the notion of presence appears to be fairly straightforward as long as the performance encounters are the visceral ones Phelan refers to. In networked, mediated, and other encounters though, as demonstrates our discussion on CYSMN?, 'presence' is not equally straightforward. When it comes to such encounters, the bodily presence, self-evident in its corporeality –the pure, 'absolute' presence-as-we-know-it from the physical world (that is, the opposite of absence)– mutates into something else. This new morphing of 'presence' is no more distinct from –let alone opposed to– the notion of absence. Within this context presence can be perceived as absence and the reverse; presence and absence become interwoven like two sides of the same coin, impossible to disengage: they become a 'presence-absence'.

This paradoxical state of presence-absence is a hybrid between relative physical absence or dislocation (the user's corporeal body is absent/dislocated in relation to a partner or a physical action, either periodically or throughout the encounter/action), and relational presence (despite her/his physical absence/dislocation the user can still relate to the partner or take part in the action via a medium).[17] I argue that this paradoxical, hybrid state-of-being calls for new approaches to the notions of presence and absence. Once the self exceeds and expands the limits of the corporeal, human body to exist as a cyborg, “a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” [18], physical proximity/distance no more constitute criteria for presence and absence. Hence presence and absence can neither be safely identified as conditions nor attributed as qualities any more. Certainties dissolve, as the presence-absence state is based on doubt: presence needs to be manifested in order to be perceived; and it needs to establish the validity of its manifestation(s) for it to be accepted as an 'authentic' condition or quality. Even so, it incorporates and coexists with (physical) absence. Absence, on the other hand, also needs to be secured, whereas it can no more be safely assumed to be pure, vacant of any presence.

Katherine Hayles, through her book How We Became Posthuman, has offered a complementary dialectic that can overcome the conceptual dead-ends presence and absence lead to when applied to networked communication and performance practices.[19] Hayles argues that information is pattern rather than presence. This does not imply that non-information is the absence of pattern, that is, randomness: scientific developments such as chaos and complexity theories have shown that information can be identified, paradoxically, with both pattern and randomness. Pattern-randomness do not form a binary opposition –the way presence-absence do– since randomness is not seen as the absence of pattern, but as the ground for pattern to emerge. For that reason, pattern-randomness do not follow the same set of oppositional strategies as presence-absence. Instead, they are bound together in a dialectic that makes them complementary to one another. Since pattern and randomness are complementary rather than oppositional, we do not need to distinguish between one or the other: a system can integrate both and so it normally does.

Hayles argues in favour of a shift of focus towards the pattern-randomness dialectic which, she claims, is more appropriate for the discussion and analysis of hybrid states-of-being. She suggests that we look at notions of pattern, as the outcome of our interactions with the system and other users, as complementary to presence; and at notions of randomness, as the outcome of the noise created by stimuli that cannot be encoded within the system, as complementary to absence. Randomness can turn into pattern when extraneous stimuli merge together, whereas pattern can gradually fade into randomness. Pattern-randomness systems, explains Hayles, evolve towards an open future marked by unpredictability, unlike presence-absence systems that evolve towards a known end. That is because, in presence-absence systems, the metaphysics of presence have front-loaded meaning into the system by assuming the existence of a stable origin.[20] Unlike that, pattern-randomness systems have not been front-loaded with meaning, as they are not based on any coherent origin. Meaning is made possible – though not inevitable – by evolution.

I want to argue that the pattern-randomness dialectic is more appropriate for the analysis of networked performance encounters, such as the one presented by Blast Theory's piece CYSMN? This is exactly because this dialectic, unlike the presence-absence one, does not assume a coherent origin and thus a pre-loaded set of meanings. Because it starts as free of meaning and oppositional strategies, the pattern-randomness dialectic is also free of any pre-loaded sets of moral judgments. This absence of pre-loaded meanings and judgments creates a vacant space, an emptiness, which allows for the unforeseen, unfamiliar, and novel to occur. I suggest that the liberating potential of this dialectic is very useful for the analysis of phenomena that are emergent and still in flux, and could thus profit from this positive 'lack' –such as posthuman bodies, hybrid spacetimes, and networked performance and performative encounters. Thus, I suggest that the CYSMN? players can be described, at any given moment throughout the game, as 'more present than absent' or the reverse. This can also be articulated as 'producing more pattern than randomness' through their connections and engagements with the system and other users.[21] Through these encounters develop patterns, which gradually fade into randomness, which again coalesces into pattern, and so on.

One might speculate that the boundaries of our bodies will continue to dissolve and that the question "Who am I?" will become less relevant in the future, replaced by "What is all that I can be?"[22]

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