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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.
