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OCR
SAMUEL BECKETT’S PLAY IN DIGITAL CULTURE: TECHNOLOGIES OF INFLUENCE question of where the audience would be, and under what exact conditions they would perceive the content. We agreed from the outset that there would be anintention to harness the live-streaming capabilities of the technical setup by broadcasting to a remote site." We investigated several software options for streaming video content, and Telestream’s “Wirecast Play for YouTube” proved to be the most robust, affordable and compatible with the camera hardware. Wirecast Play is a piece of software that is especially designed to be compatible with the YouTube’s live-streaming service. In spite of the ethical challenges inherent in engaging with one of the “big five” data firms, YouTube does provide a service that allows amateurs, non-professionals, and small enterprises to broadcast cultural content without having to pay substantial broadcast license overheads, which is an improvement on the top-down broadcasting model that dominated the twentieth century. In a live production where the audience is anchored to a single perspective, part of the fascination of Play is the observation of a live actor “running the race” under “real” conditions, where the observer can feel the actors’ risk in having to respond accurately to hundreds of prompts over a period of ten minutes, and then repeat the performance. Screened versions of the play do not occasion the same sensation, since visible editing — used abstractly to some extent in Marin Karmitz’s 1966 Comédie, but much more visibly and extensively in Minghella’s more recent version — implies that the actor is not achieving their performance in one take, but rather that a director is assembling the material asynchronously. The ontology of film thus disrupts the dramaturgy — unsurprisingly, given the play’s strong link to the theatre — not only because of this added layer of authority above even the interrogator, but also because it deprives the actors of their purgatorial logic by implying rest. We were excited by the possibility that a PTZ live-stream could engage the impact of the screen without this dramaturgical trade-off, showing the audience a single, continuous take, ostensibly performed by live actors in a nearby room for their benefit. This gesture implies an ethical progression for the audience, from the theatrical/filmic situation of “witnessing” interrogation to actually becoming the interrogator. The editing choices reflected this journey by the viewer, and we took the offer made by Beckett to allow for an element of variation in the da capo by showing this progression, in the following schema: Block A (before chorus, first time): wide shot locked off, manual interrogator light Block B (after chorus, first time): pan and zoom, “signal” lights to show camera focus The remote venue for the audience was the Arts Technology Research Laboratory, about a ten-minute walk from the Samuel Beckett Centre dance studio where the PTZ camera, actors, and technicians were set up. The latency in the digital network between the two spaces was about ten seconds.
