Participants' essays / Riikka Pelo /

Unica's performance - Autopsy of an avatar

The enigma of presence "pure and simple": as duplication, original repetition, auto-affection, and diffÈrance. The distinction between mastering of absence as speech and mastering of absence as writing. The writing within speech. Hallucination as speech and hallucination of writing. - Jaques Derrida: Writing and Difference -

In my essay I will develop some critically reflecting point of views related to dramaturgy of a digital character. Here my main considerations are the questions related to nature of the performance as a transitional event, to psychological and technological automatism and to mechanisms of uncanny, der Unheimliche, in dramaturgy of a cyberpersona - a borderline, mestiza, character between an avatar and a bot, a being between real and virtual.

In the background for these questions is an avatar-design-exercise Unica's performance in Mika Tuomola's workshop The Drama between Real and Virtual. My intention is to develop the ideas gained in that exercise further, towards creating an independent digital and dramaturgical work of art - Unica - Die Surrealistische Schreibmaschine. This however requires asking many critical questions related to the ethics, dramaturgy and technological ideology of digital and cybertextual beings to start with. Some of them are articulated in this essay.

How to dramatize and represent pathos - desire and suffering - of a female cyborg in cyberspace and in the context of a virtual community, was the question I wanted to arouse in the exercise. The arguments made by Sandy Stone in her articulation of the cyborg's agency, subjectivity and desire in her essay: Will the Real Body Please Stand Up? (1994) formed a reliable theoretical soil for my own approaches. Whereas Stone is concerned of the subject and the body in virtual e.g. in relation to masculine cyborg subjectivity, penetrative and controlling in it's nature, my intention was to create an embodiment of a female cyborg subjectivity conscious of its very constructed nature. My aim was to study a virtual and cross-media subject, who would be represented as being in constant metamorphosis and transformation, in the middle of performance and masquerade, and this way deconstructing, reworking and reconstructing her identity.

1. Unica's performance

A night of adoration, a night dedicated to her! And something new occurs: A large, empty, almost completely dark stage appears - not as hallucination but rather as a distinct image which arises within her. -Unica Z¸rn:The Man of Jasmine

During the workshop Drama Between Real and Virtual I designed an avatar character, which was based on the anonymous female protagonist of Unica Z¸rn's surrealist novel Der Mann im Jasmin (1971). As an avatar she did not represent or mirror myself as a user, but was a fictive, intertextual persona of her own and in need of dramaturgy. But still, I was playing with her as with an uncanny doll, as my double - as something mutilated, empty and frightening, that I, as a user, was responsible of . Unica-avatar was my crash test dummy for creating a digital character, more like a digital sketch tool, a digital croquis. The principle idea was to develop her as a hybridization of a bot and an avatar - a semi-automatic character played on-line by a human user in a virtual community, an avatar-world.

The novel itself is an existentialist rÈcit of surrealist automatic life and female madness - deeply uncanny, Unheimlich, in itself. Since the novel is autobiographical, although in a very complicated manner, I took a risk of calling my character Unica, by the name, actually by the pseudonyme, of the author. Later the idea of pseudonyme as an anagram and a cryptonymie, a mark of a hidden, incorporated word, buried alive, will be considered as a starting points for Unica's dramaturgy, the structure of hiding and revealing her secret(1). In the exercise, the starting point was a fragment of the novel, where the protagonist, Unica, performs to herself an animistic mime-dance in her own mind. The performance is inscribed as it were a hallucination, a hallucinated ritual suicide. Now stage was not her virtual inner stage, but the virtual outer stage. As a dramatic form, Unica's performance of animistic metamorphoses was very much inspired by the buto exercises we had had in the workshop. In the exercises the imaginary, virtual, subtext of the buto came out: in Unica's dance the imaginary subtext was inherent and explicit part of the dance, controlling the animation of the avatar.

When the virtual community became her stage, She could not have been constructed in a vacuum before hands, but all her stored depths (unconscious) were to be constituted and represented in real time interaction and dialogue with other participants of the virtual community. This is also a matter Mika Tuomola emphasizes in his essay Computer as Social Contextualizer (2000): in the networked stage "everything You do becomes a real-time dialogue that at the same time opens the depths of all that you have chosen to store and link your thought development with." Could that transformation, the performance also heal her ? Or , could she, by performing and socializing her madness, reveal the madness, the repressed past, Unheimliche, of the community - and maybe be able to heal that too.

These questions recall the two purposes which theatre is claimed to serve in John Emigh's study on Asian drama. (Emigh 1994). On the other hand, claims Emigh, the masked performances in different parts of Asia, as theatre in general, is based on very primary human need to distinguish what is me and what is other by playing, performing and creating illusions . For Unica her performance was very clearly going to be a play between her and her imaginary double narrated in her story. Her mime dance dramaturgy was also based on a metamorphosis of becoming-other, becoming others but also on representation of her self in this way. However, as being a semi-automated digital character, not a human, Unica's healing would necessarily be performative also. It led me later to ask who, actually, was the actor.

Transitionality is another primary motivation of the theatrical performance Emigh emphasizes. This he also articulates as being very communal and healing in this way in its nature - a survival strategy of a community. The transitionality can also be motivated more easily, without long philosophical inquiries, in Unica's performance and in the social context of the avatar community she was created in. The idea of Asian trance performance was not yet articulated in the exercise but later I have realized it's mode, already from the novel, to be very close to the self-destructive and demonic frenzies of Balinese theatre as well as to Antonin Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty, influenced by the very same tradition . I would not see her so much pulling the community together by maintaining it's own laws of performance as a kind of liminal, borderline figure. She would rather use her uncanny performance as a strategy for working out with the repressed forces, with the repressed otherness of a community by representing herself the other of a self-same community. Could she make the gap, open up the wound and the trauma of a community, for it to transform?

2.Redefining the Avatar-interface of the Cybertown
Unica's virtual life started as a rehearsal for a performance in one of the avatar worlds, in the Cybertown (http://www.cybertown.com).. I found Cybertown the most suitable environment for my exercise because in their avatar technology the user has a very special kind of freedom in designing and constructing the avatar. With the freedom I mean the possibility of the user to redefine the keywords in the avatar-interface related to the gestures and actions of the animated character. This of course is no real freedom of a designer or a dramaturgy, but gives a possibility of playing with the relationship and meanings of word/gesture. What used to be hi, lol, happy, etc in the keywords were changed to childhood, snake, I, You, from the Unica's own hallucinatory story. Due to these activating words she was partly automatic and partly controlled by the mechanical, textual machine, I had dramatized for her.

The uncanniest feeling that Cybertown interface introduced was the emotional undecidability that the generating of the avatar's text into sound, to computer speech created. I also had a possibility to edit Unica's voice - it came out childish and very slow and it was supposed to have been changed in the course of her metamorphoses during the performance. This transformation and a new automatic layer attached to Unica's character detached her even more of my own user identity, of my self. I, as the user wasn't producing the voice of the avatar, but it was artificial, digital voice generated by the machine from the words copy-pasted in the dialogue box..

3. Automatism - question of self and mimesis
What interested me in Cybertown's semi-automated avatars was my own association of it to the surrealism's fascination with automatism and automatic subjects and to the strange, unheimlich surrealist mimesis embedded in it. For me it arouses questions concerning the status of the self and its mimesis, and of the control and the power. Surrealism itself is, as Andre Breton defines it, pure psychic automatism, production of text freed from conscious thoughts but also of the free will of the writer.(Breton 1996). The idea of automatism was one way for the surrealists to decenter the everyday principles identity and subjectivity. For them the marvelously and mechanically possessed state of automatism meant the pure presence of the psyche in writing.(Foster 1994)

Of course, the surrealist's concept of the automatism is very different from the technological automatism - the surrealists themselves were masters in confusing them. My intention is not however to equal them. What interests me though, is to study meanings of these two automatisms in relation to each others in the dramaturgy of a digital character, which I see as an construction of at least philosophical, psychological, social, narrative, rhetorical, audiovisual and technological discourses, grammars and inscriptions. My argument is that this paradoxical study is possible certainly in the age of the cyborgs, when the categories between nature and technology have collapsed as well as the boundaries of the body as it's result, which Donna Haraway have cleverly clarified (Haraway 1991 ). And actually, the closer look at the dictionary brings the automatism of machine and of human actors not that far from each other's. On the basis of following quote from a definition(2) of the word automatism they seem to mirroring and doubling each other's meanings in an uncanny way:

AUTOMATISM; NOUN : 1. a. The state or quality of being automatic. b. Automatic mechanical action. 2. Philosophy The theory that the body is a machine whose functions are accompanied but not controlled by consciousness. 3. Physiology a. The involuntary functioning of an organ or other body structure that is not under conscious control, such as the beating of the heart or the dilation of the pupil of the eye. b. The reflexive action of a body part. 4. Psychology Mechanical, seemingly aimless behavior characteristic of various mental disorders.

Etymologically the word automatism derives from the words automaton - a self-operating machine or mechanism, especially a robot or one that behaves or responds in a mechanical way - , and automatic - acting or operating in a manner essentially independent of external influence or control, Acting or done without volition or conscious control; involuntary ; acting or done as if by machine; mechanical. However, according to this dictionary, semi-automatic, the word I used earlier for my hybrid digital character, means just an automatic pistol. Description of the history of the word automatic in the dictionary also emphasizes the human status of the word:

The words automatic pilot or automatic transmission bring to mind mechanical devices that operate with minimal human intervention. Yet the word automatic, which goes back to the Greek word automatons, "acting of one's own will, self-acting, of itself," made up of two parts, auto-, "self," and -matos, "willing," is first recorded in English in 1748 with reference to motions of the body, such as the peristaltic action of the intestines: "The Motions are called automatic from their Resemblance to the Motions of Automata, or Machines, whose Principle of Motion is within themselves." Although the writer had machines in mind, automatic could be used of living things, a use we still have. The association of automatic chiefly with machinery may represent one instance of many in which we have come to see the world in mechanical terms.

In Der Mann im Jasmin the surrealist automatic life is also represented as agency of the protagonist without her own will or control or agency. She is actually controlled by imaginary outer forces, by tele-hypnosis of The Man Of Jasmine's, her imaginary lover. The person who is controlling her doesn't exist - it is a projection of her most secret desires. This projection becomes like a visitation to her. On the more conscious level she, however, creates and controls this story, story of her own double. This play of the power and control in relationship between Unica and her imaginary hypnotist/lover is the core idea for the later interaction narration and dramaturgy of the digital work. Maybe the user as the absent Man of Jasmine is controlling and hypnotizing Unica or maybe Unica is controlling the user, The Man of Jasmine, by creating and imagining his role. Are they staging the self and the other or the self's other or the other's self?

Automatism in Unica's character refers also to the idea of automatic woman (a mad, childlike, hysterical woman, a sleepwalker, a medium) that surrealist artists praised in their work. Surrealist idea of the true poet as an automaton, dictating magical knowledge, was then based on this kind of musing of madness as the supremest expression of poetry. This was then followed by the argument that automatic writing produced in collective, non-subjective, trance-like state introduced the truest form of poetry. Idea of free and original nature of psychic automatism has however later been heavily criticized: the freeness of automatic expression was revealed as being repetitive, driven, work of mechanical compulsion - speaking of death drive inscribed in each of us (Foster 5-7).

What comes to mimesis and mime of Unica, or of the self, to mimesis as doubling of the automatic subjectivity in the mirror of technology, needs in this case for my opinion a very special kind of definition, one that Jaques Derrida introduces in one of his many his discussions of Plato. Derrida argues mimesis to be a self-duplication of repetition itself, not just imitation of nature. He sees it as a strange mirror that reflects but also displaces and distorts one mimesis to other, as though it were destined to mime or mask itself eternally. (Derrida 1980) In this strange mimesis, Unica's automatic mirror, everything is played out in the paradoxes of the supplementary double.

4. Uncanny of automatic doubles
Automaton's, mechanical devices, early robots, dolls and mannequins -outmoded mechanical commodities - also fascinated surrealists. This interest also comes out in the novel. For the surrealist a figure of a madwoman, or hysterical woman became also a figure of objectified, fetisistic automaton, like in Hans Bellmer's Die Puppe. I for myself, following semiotic and psychoanalytic definitions, want to think of hysteria and psychic automatism of Unica's as a mode of expression and disturbance and crisis in representation, which in the first place is writing of a great suffering. I was not going to study the etiology of her symptoms but in the Cybertown I was free to design her automatic agency, the semantics of her gestures. Thus the signifying practice of Unica's textual mime dance was articulated in this framework of hysteria and psychic automatism . But it was also thought in the framework of the uncanny, the concept which in my thinking brings together technological and psychic automatism as well as hysteria and surrealism, self-repetition and doubling, and beyond of all this death instinct and castration.

By following Hal Foster's psychoanalytic reading of surrealism, their fascination with the mechanical-commodified happened in terms of uncanny narrative and social processes: automatons signify the blurring the distinctions between the inside and the outside, animated and inanimated, life and death, human and non-human.(125-127) Hal Foster's ideas are based on his reading of Freud's essay Der Unheimlich (1919), where uncanny is articulated as a fear produced by the return of the something repressed, something which has first been familiar and canny. For Freud also the most uncanny objects are wax-work figures, artificial dolls and automatons, for they do not only provoke a primordial confusion about the (in)animate and the (non)human, but also recall an infantile anxiety about blindness, castration and death.(Freud ----) My argument is that neither avatars, digital characters, bot etc. digital-commodities as doubling human beings, can avoid arousing such primary fears. One task for artistic digital dramaturgy is also necessarily playing with the strange uncanny mirrors , hiding and revealing, denaturalizing these hidden, repressed fears. Main principle in the surrealist politics was to oppose to the capitalist rationalization of the objective world the capitalist (ir)rationalization of the subjective world, writes Foster. In the information age there is still a lot of use with this kind of manifestation, although, in my opinion, it also needs critical re-thinking and redefinition.

4. Post scriptum
In the beginning I referred to a question, who is the agent or rather the actor in Unica's performance. I emphasized her being not so much my own avatar, a virtual embodiment of myself but an independent character of her own. However, during the performance I came to realize that it was actually I, as the dramatist and as the user, who, in spite of her automatic nature, was responsible of Unica's social identity and behavior, of her dialogic, legible or illegible, modes of being.

In continuing a dialogue with Tuomola's thoughts towards the concept of the Ideatre, one conclusion seems unavoidable: I, my self, with my thoughts and desires, was also linked to Unica's character, to the network of the different actors that constitute her character - technological, visual, intertextual - and human. In later stage this I could also be substituted by some other humans, users, actors to go trough Unica's transitional trance. His/her function as a human actor would remain the same as that of the dramatist's: to be ethically responsible of Unica¥s improvised character and social mode of being.

(1) The term cryptonymie is based on the Nicolas Abrahams and Maria Torok's psychoanalytical studies of certain linguistic formations, names, as monuments of loss, catastrophe and conflict in the psyche. (Abraham, Torok 1986)

(2) All the following dictionary quotes are from the American HeritageÆ Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth Edition. 2000 in http:// www. bartleby.com

References:

ARTAUD, ANTONIN 1983: Kohti kriittist” teatteria. Trans. Ulla Kaarina Jokinen. Otava Helsinki.

BRETON, ANDRE 1996. Surrealismin manifesti. Ensimm”inen manifesti 1924. Suomennos V”in– Kirstin” (Helsinki, Kustannusosakeyhti– Taide)

DERRIDA, JAQUES 1980. La Carte Postale . Flammarion. Paris.

DERRIDA, JAQUES 1978. Writing and difference. Translated Alan Bass. Routledge. London

EMIGH, JOHN (XXX). Masked Performance. The Play of Self and Other in Ritual and Theatre. Philadelphia: Penn.

FOSTER, HAL 1993. Compulsive Beauty. (Cambridge, Massachusetts , London, England, MIT Press)

FREUD, SIGMUND 1963. "The Uncanny", in Studies in Parapsychology . original Der Unheimliche 1919. Philip Rieff. New York

HARAWAY, DONNA 1991. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York; Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181. http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html

STONE, ROSANNE ALLUCQUERE 1994; original 1991. Will the Real Body Please Stand Up?: Boundary Stories about Virtual Cultures. In Benedikt, Michael (ed.). Cyberspace: First Steps. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press.

TUOMOLA, MIKA 2000: Computer As Social Contextualizer & Ideatre. Interactive Institute. [http://www.interactiveinstitute.se]

ZÐRN, UNICA 1992: Der Mann Im Jasmin. Eindr¸cke aus einer Geistkrankheit. Ullstein Taschenbuch. Berlin.