Oldal 152 [152]
OCR
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.
