Preface 'An Experiential Approach to Theory From Within Practice'
(Susan Melrose)

This text looks back on the performances ofGuest House, sometime after the event and contextualises the Guest House CD-ROM project. Much of the text written in relation to the performance event can be applied to the CD-ROM re-staging.

 

In remembering Guest House I engage in a process similar to that asked of the people Uninvited Guests interviewed during our research. The performance is remembered 'only after it has disappeared' (de Certeau 1984:87). The spaces and events of Guest House have been filtered through time and, in the occasion of remembering practices that have gone before, they are altered, selected from and condensed. These memories are affected, drawn from the 'fund' of memories of Guest House, by the present circumstance of writing (ibid.). With each recall the memories of the performance event are altered and, in each occasion of remembering, different memories are drawn from the 'treasury of [...] memory' (86) depending on the particular circumstances of the present.

As a director in the work, reflecting theoretically upon my own practice, I subject my own practices to 'a field of visibility' (Foucault 1977:202) and become the principle of my 'own subjection' (202). In writing theoretically, as a practitioner, I take up a speculative position 'which consists in being a foreigner at home'. Perhaps this leads to the production of 'only illusory interpretations' of my own practices. As Pierre Bourdieu states, the practitioner "does more than s/he knows" (Bourdieu 1977). "Knowing" here is a synoptic apprehension, above the level of consciousness, which is entwined with seeing - as opposed to a somatic knowledge drawn from the body as memory (Bourdieu 1977, Melrose 1995). This leads us to Lacan's (1970) observation that, 'I am unable to see myself from the place where the Other is looking at me' (120).

Perhaps in this light (unlike J-D Dewsbury and Kira O'Reilly) I have no place to theorise or speculate upon my own practices with Uninvited Guests. In 'the failure of self seeing' (Phelan 15) how can I believe in the reality of the acts which "go to make up" our work? As a subject I lacked any distance from the representations perceived: how then can these practices gain a status as objects of my discourse?

In turning here to discursive writing (despite questioning its discursiveness), the other practices which are its subjects are inevitably transformed. The remembering (Erinnerung) and change of state displaces practices, puts them in another place, the place of writing - no longer "live", but rather "artificially remembered" (Plato) and mediated. In this transposition, the primary sources are compressed, crumpled and folded such that the signs they bore are scrambled and new units are fabricated from work which is not unitary (Lyotard 1989:24). The work of disguising/ distorting practice into text (Entstellung) in a sense resembles a murder (Freud 1953-74:43). Gregory Ulmer (1989) notes that, transposed into text, live performance is laid out on a page (like the erotic-morbid object), preserved to be looked at, again and again. In this text, as in those of J-D Dewsbury and Kira O'Reilly, the performance event is laid out on the screen.

As de Certeau suggests, in interpretation, there is no way out of language and, in describing practices, we constantly '"run up against the limits". Refiguring Lacan, it is precisely at, or beyond these limits, that the reality of the performance event happens to be. This document might not itself qualify as a way out, but the performance events and the interactive 3D Guest House to which it responds might constitute 'other place[s] from which to interpret' (de Certeau 1984:13) practice; from within practices.

Susan Melrose (1995) suggests that the practitioner may have 'an experiential approach to theory from within practice, rather than a discursive approach outside of practice' (1). Performance making is here re-cognised as discursive, theory in practice - rather than assimilating and serving as a carrier to theories. If performance is able to theorise itself we might also propose the interactive 3D Guest House and video edit staged here as research. Your interactions with the inter-related visual and audio practices packaged alongside this text might themselves be discursive.

This text approaches performance from both positions, that of the theorist and that of the digital performance practitioner - applying both an experiential approach which admits first-hand experience and the writerly-discursive which may prefer a distance from concrete experience. But, in addition, we might consider the possibility of a relationship of mutual feedback and a shifting between these two positions which are, in the instance of this writing, becoming less and less distinct.

This text, in a sense, memorialises practices, here providing fixed monuments to performance events which have already disappeared. It is possible though that these words, prosthetic memories "laid out on the screen", might act as mnemonic triggers, causing memories of the experience of practising-spectating to punctuate the present event of your reading.

Bearing these words of warning in mind, I will begin.

 

 

Performance:
The Intersection of Multiple Sign Systems

The development ofGuest House began with documentary research: intimate interviews were recorded with people who were asked to, "describe a room" and tell us "what happened there?" The interviewees were encouraged to "zoom in" on objects, spatial details and events which carried personal resonances and traces of emotional memories. Inevitably, the real space that each interviewee remembered was not entirely covered by their description; like a 'filter or sieve' (Deleuze and Guattari 1988:313) the description was lacking and incorporated gaps and holes. All the material seen and heard in the performance was drawn from these recordings of flawed rememberings. In rehearsal the interviewees became our absent collaborators as we edited, reworked and responded to the stories they chose to tell us. The recordings and the transcriptions produced - along with mistakes and errors in the performers' retelling of them - formed the "primary database" of performance possibilities; the devisors' palette. During the process the performers/technicians drew from this database/archive of aural, visual and textual information, attempting the (impossible) task of re-staging and re-presenting the remembered rooms and events.

Guest House CD-ROM attempts to document a performance project which was, in part, about the problematics of documentation, the impossibility of returning to, or reassembling real spaces, events and processes (which will never be the same again) (Lacan 1977:49). As stated above, the performance material was generated from recorded and textual documentation of a number of events; one-to-one interviews.

The performance work evolved out of productive feedback between the different representational strategies employed; a dialogue between media, each of which offered a differing approach to the "real" rooms described. Narrative threads were traced and rubbed out (though not completely erased) to make room for new spaces, as the interviewees stories were edited and woven into the performance texture. Disparate rooms and narratives were constructed and placed together in order to yield surprising resonances (frictions and interferences as well as associations) and to uncover "real"/emotive traces which might leak through into performance.

In Guest House, the technology was not sufficient alone; its reproductions were always incomplete and failed to communicate without the mediation of the performers. Likewise, the performers' representations were insufficient and failed to communicate effectively without technological mediation and a relationship with the digital signifiers. The performance quality shifted from fragile, sparse spoken text, to spectacular and visually immersive but, in the struggle for authority, the digital media never overwhelmed the performers - at least, not completely. The performance attempted to produce a space in which a relationship of mutual feedback could occur, a complex network of inter-relations between digital and live representational systems.

In performance, the apparatus required for the presentation was foregrounded and members of the company switched betweeen technical and performance roles. The two tables supporting technical equipment framed the presentation and the performers-as-technicians watched and interacted from within this frame; they occupied a space through which the audience looked.

The performance space was reconfigured using theatre flats on wheels, which stood in for the walls and doors of the remembered rooms. These also doubled functionally as screens for digital and video projections. The projections formed a shifting 3D backdrop somewhat like a theatrical set. These images were disrupted as the flats/screens were shifted periodically by performers to alter the space.

The technical set ups or set changes between scenes were made explicit and given an equal "weight" within the performance structure as the scenes themselves. The performers represented the casting and directing of one another in scenes and corrected mistakes that had become written into the performance score. The process of developing the performance work was included in the "recursive system" of the performance product. In a sense, the "completed" performance work became a representation of a "work in progress".

The audience were addressed as though the objects described might act as mnemonic triggers for them, as though the spaces might once have been theirs: the performers glanced across the audience, looking for a flicker of recognition. As in documentary re-stagings/reconstructions, events from others' memories were made visible again such that the audience might become witnesses to their occurrence and verify their "realness".

Guest House was performed in black box theatre spaces, spaces inscribed with regularities of behaviour; with Live Art and Dance modes of practice. The paths and traces of these practices do not completely disappear but remain hidden, held partly in the audience's and practitioners' memories. Here, we intervened with other less appropriate "ways of operating" (de Certeau 1984); everyday actions, "stand-up" routines, digital installation, live vision mixing more appropriate to a T.V. studio, documentary reconstructions and quotation from film.

 

 

Remarks on Sound

Jessica Marlowe's digital soundtrack was composed solely of samples of the interviewees' speech and background noise on the recordings. Parts of this soundscore can be heard on this CD-ROM, accompanying the 3D animations and video. No sounds were synthesised but rather "real", analogue sounds were sampled, "cut up", edited and composed using Cubase VST. Musical themes were drawn from vocal intonation and the lyrical speech patterns of some interviewees. Rhythms hinting at techno/drum & bass emerged from looping phatic "ums" & "errs" and idiosyncratic whistles or clicks in the interviewees' speech, the sound quality of which (not the linguistic content) "stood out" to the composer. Short sections of words were reiterated, not yet linguistically unitary, or carrying enough specific information for communication. Shorter than phonemes, these samples of words pointed to multiple potential meanings like pre-positions (Serres 1995). Guest House set up a dialogue between pre-recorded and digitally manipulated voices (both the performers' voices & those of the people interviewed) and live speech on stage (mediated by microphones). This dialogue was recorded and is repeated on the CD-ROM.

The length of some of the vocal sections looped was gradually augmented such that the recorded text was gradually uncovered. Words became audible and unitary but were heard out of context, displaced from their "original" spoken sentences and now part of a different aestheticised/"musical" order. There was a withholding of regular meter or rhythm and a holding back from allowing the sounds to collapse into a specific musical genre. Once a beat became recognisable it was cut from the sequence, replaced by a shift in structure, or drowned out by noise rather than given the time or space to become established. 'The prickles and spikes' (Serres 1993:88) of noise were flattened momentarily into music before being raised again above the musical surface and engulfing its form.

A structure took shape in the soundscore and links became possible for the listener: the source of certain sounds became discernible as more complete/continuous sections of text were heard. In context, what had been assumed to be a drum sound became recognisable as a brief sample of someone washing-up, a bass sound as a deep voice. The tonal quality of the individual interviewee's voice became familiar to the audience, as did their remembered room and the location within the performance space which was proper to that voice. Hence the audience members might have noted the distinct vocal tracks from which elements were cut and recombined to form each sound piece and therefore the rooms which were brought into contiguity in the aural field of the soundscore. At any synchronic moment in the performance the composition could be appropriate, or inappropriate to the space being represented on-stage. Possible frictions and conjunctions were produced by bringing differing, or similar spaces into relation in the different stage systems.

The performers were fragmented, as bodies and subjects, through multiple media, which foregrounded their lack of authorship and brought into question their authenticity. Their live voices were miked-up, mediated through a mixing desk and displaced from their bodies through loudspeakers surrounding the audience. Recordings of their voices were produced from the speakers such that they engaged in dialogue with their recorded selves, or lip synched to the recordings. The performers spoke texts live, yet it became apparent that these texts did not come from them and were not produced in the present, but were quoted from the absent interviewees. Only digitised recordings of the "original" interviewees' voices were produced in the event, mediated through the same sound system as the performers voices. The interviewees voices had a similar presence, but one which lacked the corporeality of the performers'. Having no visible origin, displaced spacially and temporally from the bodies which produced them, these recorded voices signalled the interviewees absence. The interviewees voices struggled for authenticity against those of the performers', who have appropriated their subjectivities. Within the supposed hierarchy of authenticity, which prioritises the immediately spoken above the recorded, the performers' voices possess authority, yet as they quote and are set against the voices from which they quote, a new non-hierarchical relation is created. Within this mediated space, the difference between the spoken and recorded, an "authentic" and an "inauthentic", is destabilised. There is much potential for misrecognition of ownership: where and to whom do these words belong?

The performers made few attempts to take on/mimic the voices of the interviewees or perform characterisations of these real people. Instead, they appropriated words proper to other speaking subjects, speaking others' words with their own accent and intonation, as though personal to them.

 

Remarks on 3D Modelling and the Visual Field

For Breathing Space, the first (R&D) stage of the project, Thomas Keller constructed a physical, architectural model of the guest house, which brought together the remembered spaces in a single structure - a building with rooms and a number of perspex floors. A video camera and projector were used to enlarge and project images of this scale model. Throughout the performance, the mediated visual track consisted of a projection of the process of piecing together this miniature version of the memory structure. Tiny props and furniture were set in place, walls resembled the flats used in the performance space and indexical marks were made on the perspex floors. The performance culminated in a live-link camera tour of the "completed" 3-D model, the camera zooming-in through its transparent floors to reveal the rooms on lower levels. Within the mnemonic structure of the touring production, and here in the CD-ROM format, we have continued to visualise the interviewees' rooms as arranged on a number of floors in the "impossible building".

For the Fluid Commission, the second stage of the project, Thomas modelled the rooms in 3D Studio Max, a computer generated animation programme also used to design the interactive Guest House. This permitted the company to render the spaces described from memory in more continuous detail, as we imagined them to be.

The use of an animation programme (as opposed to architectural Computer Aided Design) allowed us to programme camera paths through the spaces and produce a virtual tour which interacted with and mirrored the live performers' movements in the theatre space. Within the projected and performed tour of the "impossible structure" the performers might represent stepping through a door in a flat in Berlin into a room remembered from Seattle, editing spaces and times together - at the very least bringing them into relation - through walking. In the CD-ROM, connections are made between these spaces and times by virtually "walking through" the rooms and choosing to click on the VRML anchors.

In the theatre space, the performers were filmed with surveillance cameras and their images were derealized. Blown up to many times their actual size their pixellating images were projected onto the mobile screens. Within the visual field, as within the aural field, each performer's self/image split and divided, was distributed and displaced across screens and monitors. Mediated through a vision mixer, their disembodied faces were inset in the same 2D plane as the virtual rooms and computer animations.

On the contemporary stage, if we acknowledge the audience's 'scopic drive', 'the shown and seen is identified with what is to be believed' (de Certeau 187). The video and computer projections were visually seductive, attracting the audience' gaze and distracting from the live performer's bodies and spoken texts - their physical presence became less complete, their words less convincing or believable. Despite the low-tech graphics and the grainy quality of the video, these images had a strong "reality effect" simply because they were shown to be seen.

In a heavily mediatized culture in which 'the real no longer has its own proper place' (de Certeau 186), the fictionalised, computer generated images of remembered rooms appeared real and believable - perhaps more so than the recorded voices of the interviewees. A live performer staged in front of a screen, in the corporeal space of the theatre, became part of the virtual space of the projected image. With the image scaled correctly, 1:1 with the real space, these two spatial orders, virtual 3D and the corporeal, became visually conflated. The computer modellings, projected onto two dimensional screens had the appearance of being three dimensional. Another space, a virtual 3D space, was opened up in the actual three dimensional theatre space. Within the fictional reality of the stage, a space was created in which the possibility might arise that a performer could cross the virtual wall, or surface of the screen, to inhabit the projected guest house. Again, within the mediated space of Guest House the supposed hierarchy of authenticity and the line between the digital and the live was destabilised.

Images of the performers are duplicated across this edition of 1000 CD-ROMs; distributed and displaced, within this format their individual identities are further fragmented.

 

 

Mnemonic Structure

'There was a tension [in Guest House]; the liminal one on the shifting boundary between the virtual and real' (Paul Goddard, Dartington Arts).

 

As Andrew Quick states in reference to Forced Entertainment's performance work, in the semi-fictional reality of Guest House, 'things are attempted [...] that are sometimes [only] partially achieved' (Melrose and Quick 1997, unpublished). Here, the 'attempt to complete' (ibid.) the "work" is substituted for a conventional "narrative thread". In a sense this "narrative thread" followed a line of development akin to that recommended in Aristotle's Poetics. The performers-characters in the semi-fictional world of Guest House performed a gradual recognition of the futility of their attempts to represent rooms which they have, in reality, never seen. A crisis was reached in which the performer-characters put forward their recognition of the impossibility of successful reconstruction, the impossibility of performing an event "as it really was". Also signified here was an ideological anxiety about the ethics of borrowing scenes from people's real lives and playing them out vicariously in the space of theatre, a worrying over the ethics of documentary representation.

At this point of representational crisis, the fragile, mnemonic structure in which the rooms had been stored threatened to collapse in on itself and become fluid. Objects and events could no longer be kept in place but proceeded to drift between floors and one-time separate rooms. The performance arrived at a border between the failure of representation and a place where new meanings might become possible, where new connections and links might be resolved in the audience' minds.

The piece had a cumulative effect as information and evidence about the spaces and events accrued. Spaces recurred in the structure and were approached again differently, or through different media, producing a sense of déjà vous; a form of paramnesia.

The theatre, as a representational apparatus, transforms all that is framed by it into signifiers of multiple potential signs , here the Real is absented; objects and incidents are artificialised, made readable as fictions (Matejka and Titunik 1976).

Guest House drew on the multiple systems of representation available to New Theatre practitioners. Past representational modes and the classical technique of mnemonics were drawn into a contemporary context and combined with "cutting-edge" digital methodologies. Past techniques were reapproached as "of our era" (Serres/Latour 1995), using a tactic which might amount to a Situationist détournement. Past, present and varied modes/fields of aesthetic production were integrated to construct a new contemporary milieu. This might be read here as an acknowledgement of theatre's inadequacy as a representational apparatus, of its limitations when it comes to "presenting" the Real.

The performers moved through the medium's whole repertoire of tools in an attempt to trigger the audiences' memories, or to conjure visualisations of these other spaces from the past and from elsewhere - to have some small "reality effect". Rather than operating predominantly within a single consistent representational order/mode, the performance and 3D modelling shifted and combined modes of signification. There was never a completeness, a closeness to some external "reality", or continuity of detail. The representations remained partial, fragmentary and abstracted/condensed edits. The performers presented synecdoches to stand for whole rooms and bound disparate spaces together with enacted asyndetons. There was inevitably much lacking and inadequacy in these representations and hence a sense of irretrievable loss.

We might note that, in their ongoing attempt to conjure up spaces and events from others' memories, interactive CD-ROM production opens up a new repertoire of tools and modes of representation to the company.

In the process of devising Guest House, performers familiarised themselves with the positioning of objects and walls in the imagined/visualised "memory spaces" by practising them; by walking and speaking, "enunciating" (de Certeau 1984:97) spatial tours again and again in the real performance space and by correcting each others' spatial/verbal descriptions. This constituted a 'process of appropriation' (97) of both the 'topographical system' and of spaces proper to others' memories on the part of the performers. Through this 'spatial acting-out' (98) of the imagined places projected onto/attached to the performance space, the performers gained a somatic knowledge of the spaces and began to embody their own memories of them. Through practising these absent places overlaid on the performance space, the performers attempted to actualise them; to transform them into real spaces again.

If there was a continuity of detail/reality in the performance work, it was in the representation of a tour and the process of reconstruction itself. The "reality effect" of the spaces described by the interviewees and performers was regularly broken/interrupted by a spoken/enacted description of another room or context - and by performers moving into an area of the stage which signified another remembered space. Traversing the corporeal stage space had the effect of producing a series of coups in the connected geography of signification, cutting from place to place and time to time in the "suspended symbolic order", a 'strange toponymy [...] detached from actual places' (de Certeau 105).

The moveable flats were used to organise or cut up (couper) the theatre space into linked but separate places. Each configuration of these mobile partition-walls presented the performers with a different 'ensemble[...] of possibilities' (de Certeau 1984:98) which they attempted to actualise, or bring into existence. As de Certeau states, here describing the movement of a train through a landscape, 'the partition makes noise. As it moves forward and creates two inverted silences, it taps out a rhythm, it whistles and moans' (112). In one of the reconstructions in Guest House, the sound made by moving the flats stood in for the regular passing of trams outside the window of an appartment in Berlin. The noise produced by this "rolling stock" of transcodifiable partitions marked borders, the frontiers at which two differently ordered or described spaces rubbed together (113).

In general, the movement of the flats and the reconfiguring of the performance space occured in the set up/scene change between floors. The flats, as sign vehicles, acted as shifters/metaphors for the passage from one floor in the structure (as one set of memory places) to another. With each new configuration of the performance space, a new set of 'possibilities ... and interdictions' (98) became available to the performers and audience and the spatial order/state of the previous floor was overthrown (coup). The loud noise made by the flats' wheels cut through the performance structure temporally, partitioning it rhythmically into floors - this undefined, "white noise" marked temporal borders, or frames between "acts".

With each cut (coup) from room to room, the question of loss reappeared. Once left, the room/floor actuated previously or indexed verbally, which never "really" came into appearance in the theatre space, tended again towards disappearance and inertia. It might be argued that the floor-plan, ways of practising each "room", or paths taken through each "floor" did not completely disappear when the space was reconfigured or metaphorically left by the performers. Perhaps traces remained present in the performers'/audience's memories and accumulated as the "floors" in the performance structure built up. Here, the theatre becomes a palimpsest of multiple practices and other spaces. Navigating the interactive 3D Guest House might have a similar cumulative/up-building effect as you, the user, move from room to room carrying visual traces in your memory of the virtual spaces that you have previously explored.

The construction of this memory structure was mirrored by Thomas Keller's virtual modelling within which mappings, tracings of movements and images of spaces are layered, interconnected and preserved. Finally, at the show's resolution, all the rooms of the imagined "building" become visible in the projection synchronically. This programmed tour mirrored the live-link camera tour of the architectural model in the first staging of the project and is mirrored again in the CD-ROM menu/tour.

 

Resolution: A Fluid Memorial

Invisible Cities: 'Cities & Memory 4'

Beyond six rivers and three mountain ranges rises Zora, a city that no one, having seen it, can forget ... This city which cannot be expunged from the mind is like an armature, a honeycomb in whose cells each of us can place the things he wants to remember ... Between each idea and each point of the itinerary an affinity or a contrast can be established, serving as an immediate aid to memory. ... But in vain I set out to visit the city: forced to remain motionless and always the same, in order to be more easily remembered, Zora has languished, disintegrated, disappeared (Calvino 1974:15-16).

 

The process of remembering was re-staged as the interviewees' memories were filtered and deteriorated through time and through numerous retellings in different media. The performer-technicians desire to return to, or reproduce, the places and events that the interviewees described produced only fictional distortions, imagined, virtual spaces. Through these processes of devising and mediation, the rooms of the Guest House shifted from the real rooms that the interviewees described - they were placed under erasure by the company's representations. No longer in contact with - becoming further and further from - the Real, the performance might have become an artificial 'monument to the disappeared' (Durand 1993).

Despite its mnemonic structure and allusion to the archive/database Guest House might equally remain open, as event, to "live" memory and the incorporation of new elements and structural shifts (some the associations triggered in the spectator). Hence, we might re-think the Guest House as a fluid memorial to some personal events and everyday spaces. This contrasts with the grand scale of Giulio Camillo's completist "memory palace", which attempted to represent all knowledge' (Ulmer 1989:133) and is distinct from a monument to World Events, "set in stone". In Guest House, the personal anecdotal and everyday stories were raised to the level/register of dramatic text or authorised histories.

Remembering is a punctual act, producing in a place that which does not belong to it (de Certeau 1984), likewise the performance was structured by a series of interruptions of context: each crossing from one imagined room to another produced a coup; each reconfiguring of the space with partitions/flats created a new order - whilst not completely erasing the traces of the spaces actualised before.

Fictionalised, hybrid spaces and narrative threads were created as the interviewees stories were edited and woven together within the soundscore, in the performance text, in the computer generated tour and in the paths taken by the performers walking through the performance space. Inter-(re)ferences were produced between these differently named and practised places, brought into contiguity. Each "everyday" room, described from elsewhere, struggled for a proper place in the space of the theatre.

The performance produced was composed as an assemblage, a montage where components "poached" (cf. de Certeau 1984) from heterogeneous sources (predominantly the interviewees memories) were placed in an adjacency which sought to be productive. Ulmer (1989) cites Hillis Miller to ask, 'is a citation an alien parasite within the body of its host, the main [performance] text' (142), or is it the other way around, the performance the 'parasite which surrounds and strangles the citation which is its host' (142)?

 

Interactive Guest House

The CD-ROM format provides the stage for a newGuest House project: like the performance presentations and web-site, the interactive CD-ROM intervenes in the ongoing process of remembering and archiving engaged in by the company. With this interactive version the project is opened up to multiple users/players with whom Uninvited Guests collaborate in our attempt to keep others' memories of spaces from disappearing and becoming inert.

Guest House CD-ROM is both a new digital project and an innovative approach to performance documentation. The interactive 3D Guest House might qualify as a mode of performance documentation - a mnemonic trigger for the Guest House performance - yet does not include any recordings of the live theatre event. All of the video was shot specifically for the interactive re-staging.

Uninvited Guests capitalise here on the CD-ROM's capability to combine various media (video, sound, 3D modelling, animation and text) in a single platform. As in our work for theatre, Uninvited Guests draw on the multiple systems of representation available within this form to achieve a multimedia bricolage; a rearrangement of the textual, visual and aural fragments which form the stock, repository or system of material to hand (Lévi-Strauss 1966:17, Deleuze and Guattari 1984:7, Serres 1995).

What is produced is a form of "extended critical documentation" in which the way that you, the user, navigate through the CD-ROM is part of your experiential, creative and discursive, engagement with the Guest House project. The material is presented in a way that gives the user the opportunity to participate in an experience akin to our process as performers/practitioners in the work. The structure of the CD-ROM acts as a formal analogy for the performance process, allowing the user to gain a practical understanding of the theoretical tools and devising techniques employed in developing Guest House.

This CD-ROM re-staging references both the performance and the documentary research and takes the project full circle - taking the private recollections of the interviewees, which have been represented in a public performance event, back to being a private and personal event in the hands of the user. The project, the material for which was generated through intimate one-to-one interviews, is returned to an interactive one-to-one situation between you, the user, and the CD-ROM.

In the interactive CD-ROM, Uninvited Guests imagine the interviewees rooms brought together in a virtual building, the form of which alludes both to computer gaming and an architectural 'walk-through'. Interactive VRML software (the Virtual Reality software often used for 3D environments on the internet) allows the "player" to explore the computer generated spaces, producing their own edits and cuts between rooms.

Here, the performance project is taken a step further such that the "spectator" becomes a player in the work, weaving their own narrative threads across the different spaces and times the company have visualised. In this virtual, performative space the line between spectator and practitioner becomes blurred.

Due to the connotations of the format, you might imagine yourself taking on the role of a detective, discovering evidence and clues to some unknown mystery, or crime. At other times in the interactive event you might be positioned uncomfortably as a voyeur: you trespass in the personal spaces of others' memories, fictionalising their real lives through your virtual encounters with them.

Over the duration of your tour of the "impossible building", the remembered rooms accumulate and become layered in the space of your memory. The spatial arrangement of the rooms as you recall them might differ greatly from their configuration in the programmed tour/menu structure and is likely to be dependent upon the order in which you have encountered them. As a temporal event, new occasions in the interactive tour might trigger a cross-referencing between spaces and between times.

The "walk-through" might trigger memories of the performance event for users/players who have previously spectated Guest House or, for a new user, some sense could be produced of the experience of spectating/performing in Guest House. Perhaps some sense of the real rooms themselves might leak through, or the interaction might affect the recall of past spaces from the player's own memory.

Guest House started out as an exploration of the boundary between the virtual and the corporeal, between performance presence and digital media; having staged the project in the material real space of the theatre, the project moves with this CD into the virtual realm. Within virtual space it has been possible for Uninvited Guests to further "realise" the impossible structure we imagined. Using computer generated modelling we have been able to bring our versions of the rooms described into appearance, to make them visible and hence believable. Within the CD-ROM format possibilities are less constrained and the company has been able to produce more complex visual representations than were possible in the material real space of the theatre. On the CD-ROM we have attempted to render images which have a more complete resemblance to real/possible rooms than the indexical/metonymic representations of the performance event. In the process of producing such "continuous detail" models, Uninvited Guests have further filled in the gaps in the descriptions. We have drawn again on our own imaginations and stock of memories, to furnish the missing details and hence fictionalise the interviewees spaces.

Like the performance, the interactive 3D version of Guest House is a spatial archive, a form of prosthetic memory, an artificial storage device for others' rememberances. In this VRML re-staging, their memories are transformed again, displaced from their loci in the material real performance space and "bound" to "places" in a virtual archive.

The ongoing process of the Guest House project and the digital/performance presentations which have been produced might be considered elaborate 'procedures for forgetting' (de Certeau 1984: 97). Filtered and transformed again, the rooms of the virtual Guest House drift further from the real rooms described. In this light, the VRML structure traces, not a remembering, but a forgetting; it becomes an elaborate monument to the disappeared. The 3D images, due to their very visibility, place the "real" remembered rooms under a further layer of erasure.

 

Video Documentation

The CD-ROM also includes a conventional video edit of the live performance of Guest House presented as a medium resolution Quicktime video. This exists as documentation and because it is important for us to represent the significance of the performance event within the Guest House CD-ROM project. As stated above, there was a relationship of mutual feedback between the different representational systems in the performance event. It is hoped that communication will also occur for the user between the different approaches to the Guest House project staged on this CD-ROM.

A relationship can be established between the video documentation and the new VRML version of Guest House. There are both correlations and dissimilarities to be recognised between the configuration of the virtual spaces in the 3D model and the arrangement of the spaces, signified by the performers using flats, in the theatre space.

The inclusion of video documentation enables the user to cross-reference between the realisation of the work in performance and the re-configuring of the work on the CD-ROM. It is important to acknowledge, though, that it is partly our dissatisfaction with video recorded documentation of live performance that has led us to produce a new interactive 3D version.

 

Critical Practice

Guest House engages with critical debates around collaborations across disciplines in the field of Live Art, particularly between live performance and digital media. Within this context authorship and agency circulate and become hard to pin down to individual artists. Creative decisions are made within a complex network of relationships between practitioners working in different media. In Guest House the material used was secondary, "stolen" from documentary interviews. In a sense the interviewees themselves were our collaborators in the early stages of the project, the authors of the 'tissue of quotations' (Barthes 1977:146) that was the performance text.

In the montage of the performance event, and likewise here in the multimedia CD-ROM, 'a variety of writings' (Barthes 1977:146), both spoken text and "writing of the body" (Derrida 1978), 'blend and clash' (Barthes 146). The images and writings here are "imitations that are lost" (ibid.): the 'final signified' (147), the interviewee cannot be found behind these representations of rooms and hence the performance and CD-ROM remain open to the spectator/user.

Guest House CD-ROM contributes in an innovative, experiential form to critical debates around recording and documenting live events. As noted above, live practices are disguised or distorted in text and in recordings - they are inevitably transformed. In describing practices we constantly "run up against the limits" of language (Lacan 1977). It is precisely at/beyond these limits that the reality/experience of the performance event happens to be. Hence, Uninvited Guests attempt a different approach, leaving the fixed space of writing "laid out on the page" for the spaces of an open, 3D spatial archive. This performative re-staging extends the "life" of our process-based work which we do not consider to be complete/finished. With the CD-ROM, the user is placed in the "work in progress", becoming a performer in the virtual environment.

In each event of "playing" the CD-ROM you choose your own paths through the 3D structure and "write" a personal version of the performance text. The montage produced will differ every time you open the CD-ROM and "play" and will be affected by the occasion of your playing. Each user produces a new edit/collage of elements and can enter and leave the spatial "text" at different points during each new tour. The user's virtual "walking tour" selects from and fragments the spaces traversed, making narrative connections - like a kind of spatial storytelling - between disparate rooms and events. By navigating the 3D spaces, the "player" brings new elements into relation, sets up associations and conjunctions: here the "reader" becomes the "writer" in an ongoing textual process.

The CD-ROM is not performance, but it is generative of inter-action. The user can continue to practice this performative documentation, producing new, solo events that are ephemeral and could themselves become the objects of documentation/recording. By implication, does this suggest we might read the user's practices in the virtual spaces of the 3D Guest House as performance?

Peggy Phelan (1993) theorises that the ontology of performance is defined by its ephemerality; it is "marked" by its process of disappearance. Phelan asserts that it 'cannot be documented and when it is, it turns into that document and ceases to be performance'. In order to side-step the problematics of transforming and capturing inherently ephemeral live work, the Guest House CD-ROM approaches the event through staging a new version - which is not a performance, but is another, open, interactive form.

 

Theoretical Departures: Procedures for Forgetting

Extract from Guest House script: Preface.

Thomas: Lets begin with the house.

Jessica: Its not a typical residence. There is no kitchen or bathroom. It has an entrance like a palace, two attic rooms, a small classroom, and a vast room like a hangar.

Thomas: Anything else?

Jessica: There are other spaces as well, but those are more difficult to talk about. They're fragile and they wear away.

Thomas: Have you been there for some time?

Jessica: We've spent many hours in this building, we've wandered freely between the rooms, between the floors. Something has kept bringing us back.

Thomas: What is that?

Jess: A sense that something happened here, a feeling that these rooms shouldn't disappear the moment they are left, a need to reconstruct some atmospheres.

Thomas: How did you build it.

Jessica: It was recreated from files, logs and the descriptions we gave and received.

Thomas: How can you know its true.

Jessica: We don't. We pick up on sensitive areas. So we aren't always honest. We are drawn to the lurid and the things that make our hearts beat faster.

Thomas: That isn't always the case.

Jessica: No, we also try to recover lost detail.

Thomas: What do you mean?

Jessica: I mean when the archive has been exhausted and when every wall and staircase has been marked, there will still be events that we can't quite describe.

Thomas: So something happened here?

Jessica: Yes. Many things.

Thomas: Lets begin.

Ben Slater, for Uninvited Guests.

 

Spatial Memories: Mnemotechnics

Guest House employs a technique of structuring similar to that of mnemotechnics; which Gregory Ulmer (1989) refers to as a memory prosthesis. In a sense, each medium used in the performance, the sound-score, live performance and modelling forms a different prosthetic memory. The CD-ROM forms a new memory device.

In mnemonics, memories are bound to familiar places/objects; an imaginary walk through the space triggers the stored memories (Yates, 'The Art of Memory' cited in Ulmer 1989). Francis Yates 1966 notes that the images to be remembered are placed in a locus, 'a place easily graspable by the memory, such as a house' (6). In Guest House, the memories belonged to others and the places and objects were familiar to them - although they became known to the performers themselves as they repeatedly actualised them.

In mnemonics the locus or armature is re-usable, like the wax tablet, or Freud's "Mystic Writing-Pad" a model or prosthesis for mind (see below). The images placed in the loci for remembering one set of things, fade and are effaced when no further use is made of them (when they are no longer practised) (Yates 7). The images and places were usually a privately recalled text used to remember a publicly recited argument. Guest House focused on revealing the contemporary private, emotional sites/loci where points in such an argument might be placed. Rather than a "mental walk" through familiar settings which approximate those of dreams (Ulmer 1989:134), Guest House staged a walk/tour (a physical enactment of mnemotechnics) in a material real space in which multiple imagined/remembered spaces were visualised/digitally projected. Mnemotechnics uses one's own autobiography to think and write with, Guest House appropriated others' autobiographies for its composition.

Plato condemned the memory aid of mnemonics as 'artificial memory' (cited in Ulmer 1985:69), suggesting that as people learn this method 'it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory' (68).

Derrida (1981) compares the

"substitution of the mnemonic device for live memory, of the prosthesis for the organ [with] the perversion that consists of replacing a limb with a thing ... Space as writing, is opened up in the violent movement of this surrogation" (106-7).

The topoi as 'physical surrogates or representatives for the psychic that is absent' (106) are foreign to anamnesia and 'truth in the process of presentation' (107). In this figuring, 'archives, citations ..., tales, references [are] not memory [itself] - but memorials'. Such collections of signifiers can only be monuments (hypomnemata - artificial memory) to "live" memories [mneme], which have disappeared, or are in the process of disappearing.

 

'Emotion Memory' (Stanislavski)

An associative link can be made between the process of constructing Guest House, Stanislavski's System and The Method.

Gregory Ulmer, in Heuretics (1994) recounts a version of Method Acting used by his poetry professor to encourage invention in writing and the generation of emotion from memory. He compares "Method" to a "way", or journey. There are similarities between the process of writing a poem and condensation and displacement in dream work, which "telescopes" the signifiers, compressing or censoring experience and memory (see below). As Lyotard (1989) notes, Freud cites poetry 'as an example of the work of figuration [, which functions similarly to the] ... 'distribution and selection' of signs (signifier and signified) in the dream' (30).

Ulmer's poetry teacher writes that, 'the poem is always in your hometown, but you have a better chance of finding it in another' (Ulmer 118-9). He recommends that you be a tour guide and 'take someone ... to a town you like the looks of but know little about and show your companion around the town in the poem' (119). In Guest House, the performers and Thomas Keller's animated camera moves, took the audience on a tour of objects and rooms which "they liked the look of" or which "stood out" to them from the interviewees' descriptions. Like tourists, whose home-videos misread a city, the practitioners "misread" the interviewees descriptions of spaces, 'using the bits and pieces to ... "reread" themselves (119).

As Gregory Ulmer (1994:115) points out, in order to access 'emotion memory' or 'active memory', students are encouraged to practice a form of mnemonics; to call to mind the space in which an emotional event took place. In Stanislavski's An Actor Prepares (1980) he draws an analogy between the 'archives of ... memory' (174) and a 'number of houses, with many rooms in each house' (173). In borrowing from an archive of others' spaces and "emotion memories", the performers in Guest House followed Stanislavski's recommendation that we

"use not only our own past emotions as creative material but we use feelings that we have had in sympathising with others ... We must study other people, and get as close to them emotionally as we can, until sympathy for them is transformed into feelings of our own" (190).

Stanislavski suggests that 'time is a splendid filter for our remembered feelings' (131). Stanislavski writes of this "filtering" as a productive process.

Similarly, Michel Serres' hypothesises that time percolates: he replaces the "passing" of time with passoir (to "sieve"). For Serres (1995) time 'passes and does not pass' (58). He states that we must

"bring the word pass closer to passoir - "sieve". Time does not flow; it percolates. In Latin the verb colare, the origin of the French word couler, "to flow", means precisely "to filter". In a filter one flux passes through, while another does not" (58).

 

'The Memorable is That Which Can Be Dreamed About a Place' (de Certeau 1984:109).

Through the filter of memory, the interviewees (by analogy taking up the position of the analysands) tell the interviewers (questioning, in the place of analyst) what they might dream about the places they describe. Likewise, the performers-technicians, who worked from memory in devising, filtered and selected again, showed/told the audience (in the silent position of the analyst) what they might dream about the descriptions of spaces told to them.

In line with Freud's hypothesis for 'our perceptual apparatus' (Derrida 1978: 223), the "Mystic Writing-Pad" or "Wunderblock" offers '"an ever-ready receptive surface and permanent traces of the inscriptions that have been made on it"' (223). It provides 'a writing surface that preserves and erases ['re-veils' - Durand 1993], preserves the traces it erases ... and also "takes into account the un-representable"' (Ulmer 1985:77) which we might here figure as the Real. The mystic pad functions such that

"[b]y lifting the covering-sheet (the wax paper and its celluloid cover) off the wax slab, the writing vanishes. The surface is clear, but the traces remain on the slab beneath" (77).

In Freud's analogy

"The wax slab is the Unconscious, and the covering sheets represent the "Perception-Consciousness" system ... a "memory trace" [is left] on the wax slab of the Unconscious' "(Ulmer 1985:78).

Each time the liminal 'covering-sheet' is brought down, or "cuts in" to the current context, new writings/memories appear across its surface and other memories are placed under erasure. This apparatus might provide a useful analogy for the process of remembering engaged in by both interviewee and interviewer, the raising of memories above the level of consciousness (and foregrounding in the performance/digital presentations).

In the stage fiction it might be perceived that with each shift from one room/floor to the next, the covering-sheet was raised and the surface of the mystic pad (and by analogy the theatre space) was erased. The traces of the spatial patternings and paths already taken by the performers (and virtual cameras) remained inscribed on the pad (in the body/synoptic memories of performers and audience). Each room/floor, by analogy, could be seen as a new writing on the mystic pad which retrieved new spaces from the memory/unconscious, triggered by a new context (i.e. the completion of a spatial/verbal description of a previous room/floor).

To take the analogy further we could suggest that every time a performer (or a virtual camera) left a represented room and entered another, the covering sheet was lifted. Each time a boundary was crossed, a space was entered or exited, or another performer interrupted verbally by describing a new space, a clean slate was presented - a coup occurred in the spatial order. The traces may not have been visible - they disappeared - but remained present, layered and overwritten in the theatre space as palimpsest, and in the spectators'/practitioners' memories.

Time acts as a filter on memory and in the process of making Guest House memories were doubly filtered. The interviewees could only go to a certain limit in recalling the real rooms: the performers could only go to a certain limit in recalling the real interviews (Lacan 1994). Remembering acted as a filter, distorting (linking Freud's Erinnerung with Entstellung) and fictionalising the partial objects/synecdoche which "stood out" (or were the effect of condensation - Freud 1953:74).

Memory is mobile and remembered details are not objects, not fragments, not totalities and certainly not stable, as each recall alters them (de Certeau 1984). In the act of remembering dreams - the lowering of the cover sheet onto the mystic pad - a filtering occurs and a transformation. Likewise a filtering occurred in the describing and imagining of past spaces in the devising process ofGuest House; firstly by the interviewees and then by the performers-technicians.

What was presented by the interviewees of the spaces and the performer-technicians of the interviews, as in Freud's 'dream thoughts' (1953-74:383) did not come to light/manifest as the complete material. What remained of these memories of spaces, as in the extensive condensation (Verdichtung) of dreams on waking, was 'a fragmentary remnant of the total' (383). This condensation was brought about in part by 'omission: ... the [remembered] dream [- likewise the remembered space - was] not a faithful translation or a point-by-point projection ... but a highly incomplete and fragmentary version' (386).

As explicated by Lyotard (1989) in 'The Dream-work does not think', condensation is 'a physical process by means of which one or more objects occupying a given space are reduced to a smaller volume' (23). The effect is of compressing, reworking and reconfiguring the primary source; 'crumpling it up, folding it, scrambling the signs it bears on its surface, fabricating new units' (24)

Likewise, in Erinnerung (remembering) and the transposition into the space of the theatre, Entstellung (distortion) occurred, changing the appearance/ disguising the spaces/events and displacing them. The spaces/events were crumpled and certain elements came into relief (Lyotard 27).

 

Compressing, Crumpling and Folding

In the performance space, the "walking tour", which selected from and fragmented the spaces traversed, became a method, not only of making narrative connections between disparate rooms and events but also of metaphorically folding/crumpling space and time (Serres 1995). Walking acted here like condensation, bringing signifiers of disparate signifieds into contiguity, distributing and selecting signs. As in condensation, the devisors 'play[ed] "freely" [according to desire] with the units' (Lyotard 1989: 24), both of the existing spatial order (the material theatre space) and those drawn from the palette of descriptions of spaces. To return to the space of mnemonics, Ulmer (1985) suggests, the editing of imagined mnemonic walks (and by analogy, walking itself in the performance space) has something in common with montage/collage and cuts used to relate one shot to another in film.

In 'compress[ing], crumpling [...] folding' (Lyotard 1989:24) and per-colating the primary sources (which in Guest House, were already secondary and condensed), the performers walking and verbal editing had an effect equivalent to 'synecdoche and asyndeton in language' (de Certeau 101). This is also true of the animated camera moves in the tour projected in performance and of the users' virtual "walk through" in the CD-ROM. The link with mnemonics is clear in de Certeau's statement that, 'walking ... selects and fragments the space traversed; ... it practices an ellipsis of conjunctive loci'' (101).

Noting the effects of condensation we might turn here to Serres notion of time. The relation here of time to the real can be compared with that of the map. Deleuze and Guattari describe mapping as 'experimentation in contact with the real' (1988:12), in Serres figuration, time becomes spatialised and similarly an experiment in contact with the real. In place of the map, Serres uses the analogy of a handkerchief:

If you take a handkerchief and spread it out in order to iron it, you can see in it certain fixed distances and proximities. If you sketch a circle in one area, you can mark out nearby points and measure far off distances. Then take the same handkerchief and crumple it, by putting it in your pocket. Two distant points suddenly are close, even superimposed. If, further, you tear it in certain places, two points that were close can become very distant. This science of nearness and rifts is called topology, while the science of stable and well defined distances is called metrical geometry (Serres/Latour 1995:60).

In a topological (as opposed to geometric) space, Guest House experimented with folding together disparate places and times to create a new network of spatial and temporal proxemics - a 'simplicity' (60) of form, closer perhaps to how we experience the 'percolation' (58 - noting the links through etymology with collage and to collate, as in an archive) of time and not a flat 'overly simplified' version. The structure was 'indifferent to temporal' (44) and spatial distances, bringing them 'together in the same time frame' (44) and spatial framing. The ensemble of places and times was made 'contemporary by assemblage' (44). The performer, virtual camera and user in the CD-ROM takes on the role 'of a free mediator who wanders through this folded time and thus establishes connections [by (virtual)walking and spatial storytelling]' (64). In performance, the performer and virtual camera moved instantly from a loft room in Battersea, which an elderly woman had last lived in 60 years ago, into a bedroom in Bristol, which the child interviewed still plays in today.

Here, as in the conventional practice of metaphor, juxtapositions became 'justified by their proximity in folded time' (64) - i.e. by associative links. These associative links are apparent in the VRML anchors in the interactive 3D Guest House which can transport the user immediately to a room that is spacially distant in the virtual structure. The performer made such folds by travelling from place to place in the performance space; s/he 'implicated something that his[/her] movements explicated (unpleated)'. As intermediary/messenger, the performer walked between spaces which were temporarily marked out. S/he traversed in-between spaces of interference/inter-reference, taking metaphors (metaphorai - vehicles of transportation) and following threads of story, which associatively 'traversed and organized places' (de Certeau 115) and times.

 

Spatial Storytelling the House Does Not Preexist

Uninvited Guests attempted to make themselves "at home" with Guest House in the theatre space and in the theatre spaces to which they toured. As Deleuze and Guattari (1988) write,

"home does not preexist: it was necessary to draw a circle around that uncertain and fragile centre, to organize a limited space. Many, very diverse components have a part in this ... The forces of chaos are kept outside as much as possible ... This involves an activity of selection, elimination and extraction ... to enable [the interior forces] to resist, or even to take something from chaos across the filter or sieve of the space that has been drawn. Sonorous ... components are important ... : a wall of sound" (311).

Approaching the limitation of a space from the perspective of David Carroll's (1987) reading of Derrida's 'The Parergon' (1987); 'the frame itself - even as it delineates an inside and an outside ... permits and even encourages, a complicated movement or passage across it both from inside-out and outside-in (136). The frame is constituted precisely by its openings, it is 'a point of passage from inside to out' (140). The parergon is 'an outside which is called to the inside of the inside in order to constitute it as an inside' (Derrida 1987:63).

The foreignness of memory 'produces a founding rupture or break' (de Certeau 85 - a coup). The 'punctual act' of remembering marks one space-time off from another and its inappropriateness - having no "proper place" - 'makes possible a transgression of the law of the place' (85). Guest House was structured by the (attempted) return of a series of times, each attempt overturning a momentarily established order. As paraphrased above, 'memory produces in a place that does not belong to it' (86).

Stories and memories have this quality of opening up passages: 'what the map cuts up, the story cuts across' (de Certeau 129). As 'things extra and other (details and excesses coming from elsewhere) [stories and memories] 'insert themselves into the ... framework' opening up the order of the space to something different. Stories - here stories told from memory - 'permit exits, ways of going out and coming back in, and thus habitable spaces' (106) in which we might feel at home. In the space of Guest House, the others, which the performers attempted to move towards, were Real spaces and memories. Uninvited Guests attempted to open up passages between the now, of the performance, and these absent places and past times.

 

The Real and Believable real

These passages can go only to a certain limit - that of the Real - and were doubly unmoored by their reliance on shifting memories. Grafted onto the contemporary Real of the theatre space they could not reattach themselves, or re(as)emble the "originary" Real which was no longer/had never been generative of them as simulacra.

The interviewees could only go to a certain limit in recalling the real rooms: the performers could only go to a certain limit in recalling the "real" interviews (Lacan 1994:49). In this sense, Guest House was no longer in contact with, but was drifting, unmoored from any "real" connection beyond the theatre. There is an impossibility to the Guest House project in its attempts to represent multiple, differing "reals". Hence, in part, the naming of Guest House, which "hosts" the multiple para-sites of other spaces and times (Serres 1982), as an "impossible structure".

In Lacan, the Real is that 'before which the imaginary faltered, that over which the symbolic stumbles, that which is refractory, resistant ... "The Real is the impossible"' (280) which 'lies beyond the network of signifiers' (Bowie 1991:110). In Lacan, it becomes 'an adjective to describe that which is lacking in the symbolic order' and by inference, precisely that which is lacking in Uninvited Guests' representations. 'The foreclosed element [, the Real, ... ] may be approached [from a number of angles - here through a number of media], but never grasped' (Lacan 1994:280).

The moment of Lacan's Real, defined as full Being itself, cannot be returned and hence is impossible to represent in the theatre (Phelan 1993, Rose 1986, Lacan 1991, Bowie 1991). In this theorising, the Real is hidden beneath/obscured by the visible and hence the (digital and performative) signifiers of Guest House are assured to fail. The performer-technicians desire to reproduce the real in the theatre produced only fictionalised distortions, imagined, virtual spaces. For Lacan, the Real might only be represented by accident: a sense of the Real might leak through, carried by a noise, the smallest detail or friction between spaces; the projected spaces, the spaces verbally described, or enacted.

The attempt to conjure up these other places/times, to link/graft them onto the present space of the theatre inevitably failed: the other rooms remained absent. The passages or links were unable to actually touch on these absent, "real" rooms and were only able to approach them from a number of different angles. They were approached through the Imaginary and Symbolic, which remained grafted onto the now, the Real of the performance event, and could not also graft onto the primary Real of then. It is perhaps only in the gaps in-between the representations that we might catch a glimpse, or sense something of the real rooms or events (Baudrillard 1983).

Turning from Lacan to de Certeau's theorising (1984 and Baudrillard 1983), the real is precisely the visible and is bound to belief. The question of the real has become a question of belief. De Certeau (1984:187) suggests that the hypothesis that the waters of an invisible ocean (the Real) come back to haunt the shores of the visible has been given up; the real is no longer the impossible but rather the visible.

The real in de Certeau's figuring is no longer a presence/true being, 'hidden behind' or coming before appearances but 'is what, in a given place, reference to another place makes people believe in' (188). In Guest House, this was precisely the practice in which the performer-technicians engaged. Despite the knowledge that the "fictions" told, enacted and projected in performance were 'merely "semblances"' (de Certeau 187) the spectator-observer (and in the context of the CD-ROM, the user) might assume 'these simulations are of the status of the real'.

After these re-conceptualisations, the simulacrum might be true: 'The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth - it is the truth which conceals that there is none'. (Baudrillard 1983:5). The word orders can no longer be capitalised (Imaginary, Symbolic, Real) as their "property" overflows and escapes their borders - they become shifting and "unstable sets" (Lévi-Strauss 1969). Our ability to discern the 'difference between the "true" and "false", between the "real", "imaginary"' (5) and virtual is threatened and eroded.

De Certeau states that

"in narration, it is no longer a question of approaching a "reality" [...] as closely as possible and making the text acceptable through the "real" that it exhibits" (79).

He acknowledges that on the contrary, 'narrated history creates a fictional space. It moves away from the "real"'(79).

In the light of de Certeau's theories (1984) and Baudrillard's (1983), the real is precisely the visible and is bound to belief. Here, Guest House with its documentary style and computer generated models might be perceived as believable and "real" - yet, in the light of the truth and believability of Guest House as a simulacrum, there might no longer be any real "being" to conceal. The performance process might be considered a procedure for forgetting (de Certeau 1984). By their doubling of real spaces and events, the performance and the interactive 3D Guest House become 'death mask[s], ... monuments to the disappeared' (Durand 1993).

 

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Afterword

George Perec (1997) writes, 'I would like there to exist places that are stable, unmoving, intangible, untouched and almost untouchable ... the attic of my childhood filled with intact memories...' (90). He could be writing here of Lacan's Real, 'for the real, whatever upheaval we subject it to, is always in its place' (in Mehlman, ed. 1972:55). Perec goes on to suggest that :

'such places don't exist, and it's because they don't exist that space becomes a question ... Space is a doubt: I have constantly to mark it, to designate it. It's never mine, never given to me, I have to conquer it.

My spaces are fragile: time is going to wear them away, to destroy them. Nothing will any longer resemble what was, my memories will betray me, oblivion will infiltrate my memory ...

Space melts like sand running through one's fingers. Time bears it away and leaves me only shapeless shreds"

To write: to try to retain something, to cause something to survive; to wrest a few precise scraps from the void as it grows, to leave somewhere a furrow, a trace, a mark or a few signs' (Perec 90).