Renny Gleeson is a the Global Digital Strategies Director for Wieden+Kennedy. In 2009, he presented a 3 minute lecture for Ted Talks, the video is uploaded above. Though a bit more of a stretch in terms of performance. I came across the video and was taken aback by some key terms that he touches on. I am going to try and expand on them, and more importantly- connect them to my work and the how they fit into socially engaged performance/art.
The beginning of his talk titled, Renny Gleeson on antisocial phone tricks broke down some common social strategies that people use to interact with their personal mobile devices (at the expense of realtime interaction with the physically present people sharing their space). Some of these include the discreet "lean" or "stretch" to the brazen use of devices while driving or the the midst of engaging in personal interactions such as holding hands and kissing.
Gleeson's main argument and hope is that as a society that continually develops and evolves devices to match growing consumer demand, we should ensure that the devices we create work to connect us as opposed to disengage us further.
Key terms that he discusses: culture of availability, multi-dimensional engagement, and internal/external narratives.
As far as a culture of availability goes- it is the expectation of interaction and response and response time. As devices become more intuitive and available, the expectation for response rate dramatically increases among users. This has dramatically impacted the way we communicate today. I often hear of anecdotes from colleagues and professors who observe the absurdity of being expected to respond to student emails at 2-3:00 am on a weekend, and receiving complaints when they don't get responses until Monday. Until the recent decade, theories and research on emotional intelligence (EQ) proposes that as a culture, our youth are losing the ability to empathize and connect with each other. These theories have changed to recognize that we have been conditioned to better read into text messages and brief online messages to form our relationships.
Continuing on the discussion of interaction and perceived relationships, and tying this to everyday performance- multi-dimensional engagement is the act of being connected and engaging in multiple interactions at the same time. So being present in a room and engaging with the people in front of you, while having a different dialogue with various people on your mobile device, and also posting images on Instagram, while managing relationships on Facebook would be an example of this.
And deepening that observation to thinking about how our current and real interactions can be reframed and posted online as an external narrative that we control when we are the authors of our own content, and then managing the same content when it is appropriated by others and public narratives about us are posted without our control.
In all of my recent work- mobile devices have been an integrated/integral part to the performance. My mobile device (an iPhone 4) is used to document my journey, and represents my connection to the world around me, and my communities that I prescribe to, but am removed from. My iPhone 4 also provides my music and media that underscores my experience and archives my memories in song and performances that are heard by myself and my audiences.
For Alien Soiled, Rice, Spitting Too Close my iPad and iPhone 4 were used to create sound/music/media that was incorporated into the show. As a symbol and device I did not want to separate these tools that become part of our identity. My actors used them in Spitting Too Close throughout the piece- partially because of a need to prompting for their lines, but also because they felt significant in our hands.
Through these glowing conduits we connected to the women and men in our lives, indicating the invisible but present scene partners in our stories. I think the "glow" of mobile devices also provide recognizable images to the audience of our experiences and our need to connect, and the act of disconnection when the lights go out.
During rehearsal and in discussion with my actors, the idea that we constantly checked our devices for messages from potential partners and the manifestation of these partners in the rehearsal hall changed the context in which we performed. It created an incredibly strong barrier from being completely present- so as a director and an ensemble, we had to negotiate how we can become present. Do we turn off the phones? Did we have time to practice and train ourselves not to wait with anticipation for the next call or text? Or perhaps we work within it, and with the devices. Though I asked for ringers to be turned off- we established that we wouldn't turn off the devices during performance. It provided an interesting risk and reflected how instrusive these devices are.
I want to explore and articulate this further in my work, and am interest in how I can work with these devices more. I'm still not entirely sure what these can mean or how to best use them in performance.
One question I continually ask is- just because I use personal mobile devices... does that make my work interdisciplinary or intermedia? Which is sometimes often branded and associated with work that does use these. An important question that I have yet to answer from Rice is how we actors interacted with the video or rice pouring on naked bodies on film in front of us during the performance. For me, it represented the people in our minds pouring in and out, intruding on our experience. But this did not read. A future incarnation of this will be to have the videos playing off of mobile devices and projecting them via mini projectors attached to the actors, so that the films will be screened onto other bodies and audiences and screens which I think will build a more engaging interaction and possible read more clearly.
I am not sure I am commenting on how this affects social engagement, as much as I am concerned with recognizing how these devices are in fact a part of who we are and who we build ourselves to be.
Gleeson, Renny. "Renny Gleeson on antisocial phone tricks" Ted Talks. February 2009. Last accessed: April 12, 2013. http://www.ted.com/talks/renny_gleeson_on_antisocial_phone_tricks.html
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