Oldal 153 [153]
NICHOLAS E. JOHNSON, NEILL O’DWYER, AND ENDA BATES
The result of using the camera was to bring the audience closer to the action,
taking them inside the interrogation process. By using a programmable
digital control desk — which unfortunately only had a maximum number of
four pre-sets per video channel — we were able to assign one close-up shot
to each actor and a fourth master shot that would take in the three actors
in a single frame.” The optical zoom length was also very impressive for
such a condensed piece of technology; despite the large distance from the
actor to the camera, we were easily able to achieve extreme close-ups with
a crystal-clear image, as well as the wide-angle master shot. Even though
the audience members would not have control over the robotic camera, they
could more easily align themselves with the “interrogator” by watching the
live video feed. It should be noted that we did not use editing processes or
multiple cameras in Intermedial Play; we just used the single camera, with
a continuous stream. Editing was achieved perceptually through the pans
and zooms of the camera. The pressures of performance for both actors
and technicians were almost exactly like those in the theatre, but with
added complexity due to technological layers and distance from the unseen
audience. This produced an interesting counterpoint to established film
strategies, which rely heavily on montage to supplant the fiction to a different
spatio-temporal context. This is what Walter Benjamin theorized as “desire of
contemporary masses to bring things ‘closer’ spatially and humanly, which is
just as ardent as their bent toward overcoming the uniqueness of every reality
by accepting its reproduction.”'* Benjamin was astonished, early in the life
of screen technologies, by the ease with which audiences could forgo reality
and slip into the meta-reality introduced by the filmic assemblage. However,
the result of using a continuous video feed was that it was the audience who
experienced the supplanting — not the camera or object. That is to say, it was
not the object that was brought closer to the audience, but rather the audience
who were brought into the object. This experience of telepresence is also more
typical of live video feeds in digital culture.
Besides the influence of the PTZ technology on videography and audience
perception in Intermedial Play, there were also new dissemination and
broadcasting possibilities afforded by digital networks, where even remote
and non-centralized nodes have the capability to broadcast a video signal
(i.e. a cultural symbol). The harnessing of this specificity was central to
the conceptual and dramaturgical development of the work. Apart from
substituting the spotlight with the PTZ video camera, there was also the
It would have been possible to rent a desk with a capacity for more pre-sets, but we wanted
to work to the constraints of the equipment in the school rehearsal studio. The camera itself
has the capacity to receive up to 128 pre-set commands.
13 Walter Benjamin: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, in H. Arendt
(ed.) and H. Zohn (trans.): I/Juminations, New York, Schocken, [1955] 2007, 223.