In his essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction1, Walter Benjamin discusses the idea of ‘aura’ – summarized by the Tate Museum in London as “a quality integral to an artwork that cannot be communicated through mechanical reproduction techniques”2. In this essay, I will describe and compare the differences between the experience performing and/or witnessing the original digital, VR version of my piece I’ve Been Through the Desert on a Horse with No Name, and All I Got Was This Lousy T-Shirt, and that of a version performed physically. I will demonstrate how a digital environment provides its own type of aura which cannot be replicated through physical means, and whose absence fundamentally changes both the relationship of viewer-participant to the performer, and the meaning of the piece itself.
In the digital version of I’ve Been Through the Desert… the piece comprises of the performer, a small goblin-type creature (a stock character named Doozy, from Adobe Mixamo3) standing idly next to a campfire in a hilly terrain, which upon closer inspection is made of the same UV texture as himself; i.e. he stands in an environment made up of his own unwrapped flesh. Every time the viewer-participant triggers it, a radio (also skinned with this texture) falls from the sky at a random location around the performer and begins to play the song A Horse With No Name4 by America. Upon each radio drop, the performer reacts startled, and then commences a twist-style dance, which he continues until the next radio drop which restarts this sequence. Each radio dropped also increases the speed at which the performers movements happen – all the way up to almost faster than the device can render, with enough radios. (In a previous iteration, occasionally at this point, a glitch caused the performer to begin levitating horizontally, but this was unfortunately fixed in the process of fixing a separate glitch). A sun rotates through the sky, plunging the world from day into night and back every 30 seconds or so. During the night, the performer is illuminated by the campfire alone; his manic dancing now taking on an almost ritualistic quality.
The viewer-participant can experience this in VR or simply on a computer screen, but these separate auras provide slightly different experiences, which could confer slightly different meanings, or at least communicate them to slightly different extents. In VR, the viewer-participant is enveloped by the environment; they too are trapped in this world made of the performers skin, experiencing the artificially quick day/night cycle, and hearing the multiple instances of Horse with No Name surrounding them in spatial audio. The immersion in this environment made of the performer helps solidify the idea that this is a psychological space and gives the piece the sense of being a musing on the nature of identity – the performer is trapped in their identity (the flesh- terrain), they are attacked by their identity (the flesh-radios, which often fall on the performer, bouncing off their head – and combine to form an overwhelming cacophony), and yet despite being affected by this in having to speed up to impossible speeds, they remain content; their facial expression never changes from their resting smile and they are still dancing. Conversely, the keyboard-and-screen iteration of this piece, while retaining most of the elements of the VR version, instead provides a distance in the form of a barrier between the viewer-participant and the performer. This means that the environment no longer surrounds the viewer-participant and the idea of being trapped there is less apparent.
FluID – arena of identities5 by Mathias Fuchs and Sylvia Eckermann also uses the video game aesthetic and liminal / psychological space to explore the nature of identity. In the piece, the viewer-participant begins as a blank, generic human figure but as they travel through the space, they begin to pick up identifying characteristics from the terrain and from other players. PROXYBODY III6 by Simone C Niquille creates physical blankets printed with a UV unwrapped texture made from a collage of body scans to create “a wearable communal body providing individual privacy through shared identities”7. Both of these pieces use similar techniques to me to explore the intersection of identity with the generic – but with differing results. in FluID, the character goes from generic, and makes themselves particular by picking up parts of others identities, whereas in PROXYBODY III, the artist takes something particular (their identity, and the identity of the individuals who comprise the body scane) and makes it generic. I’ve Been Through the Desert… on the other hand, remains particular to this one generic (although the viewer-participant may not be privy to this context) character, rather than picking up new bits of identity, he has his existing one duplicated and launched at him endlessly.
In the physical version of I’ve Been Through the Desert…, the performer was portrayed by myself. Without access to a set made of my own skin or indeed a large
number of working radios, the piece was performed without this context – just me, in a rehearsal room with the audience, who just shouted the word “radio” at any point to trigger me to speed up and repeat the movement sequence. I initially found the sensation of performing the movement to be enjoyable – the slightly swaying idle state had a sort of suspended quality to it, like I was being dangled from a string, which felt particularly pleasant, and the reaction movement and dance both felt within the usual bounds of my bodily movement. However, as the audience members began to shout “radio” to get me to speed up, these movements that had previously required relatively little conscious thought now required me to pay increasingly close attention to the way I was moving, to keep my limbs in sync and remember what move came next. The dance moves in particular began to feel reminiscent of that challenge where you have to rub your stomach and pat your head at the same time. As the speed of the moves increased, I found keeping track of how I was swapping which foot was in front of the other especially challenging.
The removal of the aura that had been generated by the digital environment had several effects. Firstly, in stripping the piece down to only the performer and the audience had the effect of focusing the reading of the piece on the contract between those two parties – it became a piece about how and when and how far the audience would be willing to push me. Secondly, the physical limitations of my body as compared to the digital performer’s body introduced the idea that the audience might be able to cause harm. For the digital performer, although the actions speed up to superhuman levels, the action itself remained exactly the same size; it sped up but did not become exaggerated. I, on the other hand, found myself unintentionally exaggerating the movements as I sped up. As I reached the limit of how fast I could physically go (which was both much slower and hit much earlier than the digital performer), moves such as the lean backwards in the dance gradually became more extreme as an unconscious attempt to compensate for not being able to go quicker. This lean in particular quickly began to cause me physical discomfort, and eventually actual pain – and I found myself unable to stop myself from communicating this during the piece by inadvertently grimacing or making sharp breaths.
Cut Piece8 by Yoko Ono and Rhythm 09 by Marina Abramović are the two most obvious comparisons to this version of the piece: both similarly place the control into the hands of the audience – with the possibility of being able to harm the performer. However, the physical version of I’ve Been Through the Desert… did not result in the audience behaving in nearly as horrifying way as either of these pieces – they could have tried to force me to go so fast/exaggerated as to injure myself, and yet they were reluctant to (with one even vocally noting they were worried about my back). There are too many variables to say for certain why exactly this might be – including but not limited to: the fact they know me as a real person, the classroom environment, my gender (Rhythm 0 and Cut Piece are as much commentaries on beauty10 and the objectification of women as they are the inherent cruelty of groups of humans), but also that I, the performer, remain an active participant in the piece. I may be being instructed what to do, and thus puppeteered by the audience in a sense, but I am the one doing the movement – and they see my involuntary reactions to them as they became more challenging. (Indeed, Marina Abramović recounts11 how in Rhythm 0, when the time was up and she became an active participant again, moving towards the audience, they all ran away from her terrified of what they’d done.)
The digital version of I’ve Been Through the Desert… perhaps facilitates a relationship with the viewer-participants where they are more comfortable engaging in this sort of cruelty. Certainly, in my own experience of the piece, my instinct was to drop as many radios as I could to see how fast I could make the performer dance. The knowledge that they are a) not sentient, b) can be reset at will, c) have no existence outside of the auras of the piece, and d) have the appearance of a cartoon character, makes them much easier to objectify and be cruel to in a way that doesn’t feel like actual cruelty.
I wonder therefore about two potential changes that could explore these distinct versions of the piece and cross-pollinate the themes between them. Firstly: simply performing the digital version and the physical version together. I imagine a version of the piece wherein the speed and frequency of radios dropped by the audience in the digital version is somehow recorded and played back – or livestreamed for the physical performer in another room who reacts to them accordingly. What feelings of guilt, if any, might this engender in the audience – how would their behaviour change were they to then experience the digital half again? Would they hold back more?
Alternatively: how might swapping out the performer character in the digital version – replacing Doozy-the-Goblin with a high-fidelity 3d model of a real person, such as in Matt Romein’s Meat Puppet Arcade12 (he even provides the model of himself available to download13 and use, complete with uv texture) – change the viewer- participant’s relationship with the performer? Would they feel more uneasy dropping radios, as they did in the physical version? (I definitely experience a slight queasiness watching Meat Puppet Arcade, even though I still find it quite funny. ) Would the more realistic flesh-terrain read as more grotesque ? (I wonder if the use of actual photorealistic skin transfers the meaning from ‘being trapped in one’s identity’ to ‘being trapped in one’s skin’). Likewise, how would this read differently if it was a scan of my – the artist’s – body? In providing it for download and use, Matt Romein has made his specific body generic, much like the animations on mixamo. My body, on the other hand, remains particular – so the piece stops being a musing on the nature of identity more generally, and instead a comment on my relationship with my own identity. However, much like the original digital piece where the viewer-participant is only aware of the genericness of the performer if they are given the context that it was downloaded from mixamo, the viewer-participant may equally be unaware that a digital version of myself is myself without being told so. This context provides an aura that changes the meaning of the piece – a photorealistic body is particular, but just an archetype, until the context that it is actually a representation of the artist themselves is provided.
***
1 (Benjamin 1969)
2 (Tate n.d.)
3 (Adobe n.d.)
4 (America 1971)
5 (Eckermann and Fuchs, fluID – arena of idenDDes 2003)
6 (Niquille, PROXYBODY III 2019)
7 (Roehrs & Boetsch n.d.)
8 (Ono 1964)
9 (Abramović 1974)
10 (Nelson 2012, 52-54)
11 (Abramovic 2013)
12 (Romein, Meat Puppet Arcade 2016)
13 (Romein, Download My Body n.d.)
***
Bibliography
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—. n.d. Meat Puppet Arcade. Accessed March 8, 2023. hKps://maK-
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The Real Jim Jelly 