"explore of the legacy of post war information systems that attempt to create a systemic unity of man and machine connected together through a process of fluid and continuous feedback. The presentation will focus particularly on how performance, dramaturgy, language and repetition can be used to interrogate and split apart this pervasive ontology".
(Rod Dickinson is an artist and lecturer in Media, Culture and Practice at University of West England in Bristol. His artworks have explored the way in which our behaviour interacts with media feedback systems and social contexts. Using detailed research into moments of the past and present, he has made a series of meticulously re-enacted events and performances that explore the link between these mechanisms and our behaviour. ) (Recent exhibitions and performances include Newseum, Washington DC (2014); The Hayward Gallery, London (2012): The Showroom , London (2011), DOX Centre for Contemporary Art, Prague (2011); Longside Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2010) among many others.The lecture started with a discussion of the notion of "a volunteer's dilemma" based on work by John von Noyman (who was connected to the Manhattan project, together with the work of mathematician John Nash).
In a volunteer's dilemma,
"somebody has to take on a chore that benefits everyone else. It doesn't matter who does it, but everyone is in trouble if no one does it".-Poundstone (1992) page 201.Initially developed by the Rand Corporation, to try to predict volunteer ship or action etc, (this notion follows the Pareto rule in a way), where approximately 20% of the population will volunteer to to agree to do something, but at least 80% will not. Latterly this is been used in game theory, in that the optimum outcome is that no one volunteers.
The point of this lecture and debate is to highlight that in our current culture, these theories govern pretty much everything that we do. We encounter these systems when ever our transactions occur online or on the Internet. This led the artist to re-conduct the Stanley Milgram experiment which was reenacted in 2002. This comprised of 10 actors within a stage set, set up a little bit like a laboratory, who were conducting a "memory test", but a memory test with difference.
This artist reenacted the whole Milgram experiment to a live audience for FOUR tedious hours, using the original American transcript of the analysis. The artist allegedly got permission from the copyright lawyer in order to proceed with this, because the original material is in fact now owned by Yale university and Stanley Milgram's widow.
The artist quoted that 66% of people would increase the shock of threshold which would be sufficient to "execute" the memory candidate. The point of this exhibition was that in effect, this experiment had been mediated twice before. The audience already knew that they were actors who were part of the exhibition, even so, the audience empathises with the subject who is also an actor. The teacher who was administering the shock treatment is also an actor as is the learner (the actor who is being given an electric shock for each failed memory test).
This whole exhibition was designed to place the subject in order to create a visceral (emotional) reaction within the audience. The artist wanted to highlight the fact that this behaviour is everywhere in our digital age.
The next example given by this artist, (exhibited in "the Showroom Gallery" in London) was a performance, where he placed to "lecturers" upon two lecterns or daeus together, and these two speakers discussed "crisis or catastrophes" and rhetoric from world emergencies, but this is then delivered in a recyclable way. Material was taken from world figures and their speeches broadcast through news media, and then replayed effectively as a short poem. However, the teleprompters are also visible to the audience, and the reference of the script is also given to the audience.
Berthold Brecht in his writing, describes the relationships of audience and the actors "being in the flow" of the performance. However, by putting the reference in the performance to the audience, Brecht talks about the audience being "above" the performance.
The outcome of this overall performance seems to me to be just a collection of soundbites, with generic forms, austerity, wars etc, but here through a series of complete generalities. It suggests that most of these speeches were in fact a kind of meaningless diatribe. The news media are aligned to create crisis and catastrophe. With such analysis as the artist has done here, they become totally predictable.
I think perhaps some of this lecture either went over my head, or I struggled to comprehend its usefulness because I have in the past, done some study on Stanley Milgram's work, (which was originally designed to help understand human obedience, with respect to the Nuerenburg trials following World War II). The sensitivity of the artist was therefore put in question in my consideration. I seem to recall that the original Milgram experiments helped to place some of the work by the psychologist Erik Erikson and his student Eric Byrnes who then developed the psychology stream of transactional analysis. Transactional Analysis, I believe, is really what this artist is trying to demonstrate, but perhaps his research has been slightly deviated in order to create an artistic spectacle. Whilst this is perfectly acceptable, I think it detracts from the very important work that the psychologists of Yale and Birtley universities through the late 1950s and 1960s actually achieved. Much of their work, has been the foundation for more modern psychological studies, including cognitive behavioural therapy, Nuro-linguistic programming and psychoanalystic schema therapy.
If the artist were to explore Transactional Analysis to a deeper understanding, I think he may find a better route to his stated intentions of exploring; "a systemic unity of man and machine connected together through a process of fluid and continuous feedback". ...
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