In the text score and the photomontage film documentation for "When is a Mirror not a Mirror?", the Glasgow Improvisers Orchestra Global GIOFestXVII Hybrid Piece for a ROOM orchestra and a ZOOM orchestra https://youtu.be/3y-pPHwpQkc?si=JqKU1nfRAl4f-Hqc , a dramatic attention is drawn to the uncanny distancing of digital bodies versus physical bodies (both the people and their sounds). The work opened with the theatre and room orchestra in pitch black darkness, with a bold dancerly performance from the hands of a ZOOM performer, as if he was a silent cinema star. These ZOOM hands conjured the sounds of the ROOM orchestra, while his own voice was muted:
"One ZOOM player has a camera on, is full screen (mic off)
ZOOM player moves/dances/gestures to “conduct” the ROOM orchestra
(anyone/all ROOM orchestra plays, but if conduction is markedly spatial (a digital body pointing at a specific player, respond to that)"
Eventually his voice emerged too, in syncrony with his mouth movements - I ask the audience "Does this digital body who was just seen (previously unvoiced) feel more real/present/material when they can sound?"
In the GIOFest XVI 2024 Hybrid Piece, we needed the ROOM orchestra to see the ZOOM orchestra – so we had a large television monitor facing the orchestra. Documentation shows that even the players players placed right underneath the projection screen often peered up above them, implying that the ZOOM orchestra had this looming, almost corporeal pronounced presence from the cinema screen. For When is a Mirror not a Mirror? I wanted to emphasise and enlarge that difference by having zoom players SOLO on screen, taking up the whole screen (for the first sections).
Themes and questions asked in the performances include:
“Tele-presence / tele-distance”
an image of a digital body on ZOOM is transmitting gestures that activate sounds of the physical bodies in the ROOM
(Emphasising the elevation of the projection screen ZOOM orchestra as above the ROOM orchestra - like a spectre)
All free, together.
FUSION of digital bodies, and physical bodies
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Do those physical bodies who were just heard (previously in darkness) feel more centred when they are lit?
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Do those physical bodies who were just heard (previously in darkness) feel less like an accompaniment when they are lit?
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Do these digital bodies feel more spatially simultaneous with the physical bodies when they appear together?
Influential concepts stemmed from film sound theory and from telematic performers' research into myths and archetypal role models:
“They say when the copper pheasant cries for its mate it can be consoled if one puts a mirror before it…” Constance Cooper, actor/composer/musician in GIOGlobal Session 2024, referencing The Pillow Book, written by Sei Shōnagon in the year 1002. https://dn720003.ca.archive.org/0/items/the-pillow-book/The%20Pillow%20Book.pdf
The ghosts of Silent Cinema were breathed into life, or voiced by orchestras… (see Carl Dreyer’s The Passion of Jean d’Arc (1927) / Dario Argento’s Suspiria (1977) scored by progressive rock band, Goblin)
Vivian Sobchack – the Audience is/has a Body (eyes and ears perceiving), the Film is a Body (the director’s eyes and ears perceiving) https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1057/9780230294851_12
Vivian Sobchack’s theories about Fleshing Out the Image: Phenomenology, Pedagogy and Derek Jarman’s Blue (1993) makes me think of cinema spectatorship/audience identification with stars - as the image of the boy in the prelude to Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), reaches out touching the face on the cinema screen – the audience has a Body… the film is a Body.
According to Laura Marks, the Audience is a Body, the Film is a Body, the Screen is the SKIN of the Film Body…
In Steven Wurltzer’s chapter in Sound Theory and Sound Practice (Altman, 1992) “She sang live, but the microphone was turned off: The Live, the Recorded and the Subject of Representation” he recounts how unsettling it was when the illusion of “liveness” in Whitney Houston’s Superbowl halftime show faltered – it ruptured binary notions of “live” or “lipsync”. Wurltzer established a grid of:
the Temporal Simultaneity versus Temporal Anteriority (LIVE/PRE-RECORDED)
Spatial co-presence versus Spatial Absence (SHARED SPACE/SPLIT SPACE).
