Page 152 [152]
SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAY IN DIGITAL CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF INFLUENCE
ongoing experimental practices of artists, permitting creation of innovative
content as well as new forms, while perhaps “resurrecting” old content into
digital art. In this context, “digital art” is understood as experimental practice
that endeavours to elicit the unique specificities of digital technologies;
it is not simply a catch-all phrase to describe or categorise artworks that
employ digital technologies to do that same work that was already possible
using analogue formats, yet more efficiently. As such, it was the goal of the
Intermedial Play project to foreground the unique specificities of the digital
PTZ technology, for two reasons. First, there was the hope that the gesture
would encourage the audience to reflect on their contemporary (digital)
status in its sociopolitical and historical-material totality (especially the
aspects of surveillance, repetition, presentation of self, presence/liveness,
and the screen). Second, this practice of engaging with the technologies
of performance as such, and deeply considering how they operate on the
performing subject is a specifically Beckettian strategy, familiar from his
works such as All That Fall, Film, and Ghost Trio.
One of the technological specificities of the PTZ camera is that on seeing
it for the first time, the audience can experience something of a sublime
shock or surprise when the camera pans, pivots, or zooms with superhuman
speed and accuracy. Audiences accustomed to handheld cameras, smooth
Hollywood-style Steadicam, or the choppier snap cuts of advertising are
taken aback by a distinctive machine-like point-of-view. This break with
dominant film techniques represents a rift in tradition and knowledge,
opening a new horizon afforded by the technology in which the human is
repositioned. The more traditional techniques can be linked to the gestural
functions of the camera operator’s body more easily, meaning that the viewer
experiences a kind of embodied choreography of the image identified with
the eye looking into the camera, whereas the “surgical” speed and precision
of the PTZ intensifies the viewer’s identification with the camera itself. This
shift accelerates a distancing from nature and a growing dehumanisation
arising from the condition that “our biological, ontogenetic and sentient
selves become increasingly dissipated against the horizon of advances in the
technical [...] milieu.”!!
By directing that the actors take their cue from the interrogating spotlight,
Beckett’s stage directions expose and highlight the internal workings of the
theatre. He also sets up a game of interaction between the spotlight operator
and the actors, where the audience inhabits the role of witnesses to a sort of
Pavlovian trial. However, in the theatrical version, the audience retains its
position as indisputably separated from the process, a cold and detached jury.
1 Néill O’Dwyer: Death and Ecstasy: Reflections on a Technological Sublime, Proceedings of
the European Society of Aesthetics 8 (2016), 375.