1. Acting on the Body: Evolution into New Media TJ Perry April 13, 2010 ENG 538

2. One way to mark difference is to say that social aggregates are not the object of an ostensive definition-like mugs and cats and chairs that can be pointed at by the index finger-but only of a performative definition. -Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

3. Anteater: I take a stick and draw trails in the moist ground, and watch the ants follow my trails. Presently, a new trail starts getting formed somewhere. I greatly enjoy watching trails develop. As they are forming, I anticipate how they will continue (and more often I am wrong than right). -Douglas Hofstadter, Godel, Escher, Bach

4. To conceptualize the human is not to imperil human survival but is precisely to enhance it, for the more we understand the flexible, adaptive structures that coordinate our environments and the metaphors that we ourselves are, the better we can fashion images of ourselves that accurately reflect the complex interplays that ultimately make the entire world one system. -N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post Human

5. Theatre is a mode of discovery that explores the threads of what is implicit and buried in the world, and pulls them into a compressed and acknowledgeable pattern before us in its “world”. Theatre discovers meaning, and its peculiar detachment reveals our involvement. -Bruce Wilshire, Role Playing and Identity

6. It’s now much easier to not consider the actor as a subject endowed with some primeval interiority…Rather we should be able to observe empirically how an anonymous and generic body is made to be a person: the more intense the shower of offers of subjectivities, the more interiority you get. -Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social

7. Central to this scenario is performative language…not from J.L. Austin or Judith Butler but from computational theory. …Thus the Universial Turing Machine, which establishes a theoretical basis for computation, is concerned not with how physical changes are accomplished but with what they signify once they are accomplished. - N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post Human

8. The spectator is less than a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore to him his capacity of action in all its fullness. He too must be a subject, an actor on an equal pane with those generally accepted as actors, who must also be spectators. -Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed

9. All around the world large prisons were constructed that could hold hundreds of prisoners-movie houses. The prisoners could neither talk to one another nor move from seat to seat. While they were taken on virtual journeys, their bodies remained still in the darkness of collective cameras obscura. -Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media

10. … as the “mobility” of the gaze became more “virtual”-as techniques were developed to paint realistic images, as mobility was implied by changes in lighting-the observer became more immobile, passive, ready to receive the constructions of a virtual reality placed in front of his or her unmoving body. -Anne Friedberg- Window Shopping

11. The challenge is to write the rejoining of body and thought that Stelarc performs. This requires a willingness to revisit some of our basic notions of what a body is and does as an acting, perceiving, thinking, feeling thing. -Brian Massumi, Parables For The Virtual

12. The Method actor could be described as reproducing in performance the “lack of being” of Lacan’s theory of the subject…The essence of the Method, in this context, could be defined as an identification of the actor’s “want to be” with that of the character’s. -Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics

13. … a seeing of oneself . Specifically, a seeing of oneself as others see one . The problem with acting isn’t that it carries the actor out of himself, out of his character into another, out of his real self into a false double; it is that it doesn’t take the actor far enough outside of himself. -Brian Massumi, Parables For The Virtual

14. By creating organic links between the actor’s own personality and the character he was playing, the damaging rift between the actor as human being and as performer could be healed. -Jean Benedetti, Stanislavski: An Introduction

15. That Method acting is the proper style for rhetoric’s reconquista of logic is suggested by one of the trademarks-the use of the body to display the mental, in what has been called “affective thinking”. -Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics

16. The contradiction between acting and experience often leads the uninstructed to suppose that only one or the other can be manifest in the work of the actor…in reality it is a matter of two mutually hostile processes which fuse the actors work…his particular effectiveness comes from the tussle and tension of the two opposites, and also from their depth. -Bertoldt Brecht, A Short Organum for the Theatre

17. The Method, and the rehearsal as the search for a Psychological Gesture, is a way to bring into learning Kristeva’s association of chora with the human body, the site mediating through strong feelings the relation of subject/object with the abject . -Gregory Ulmer, Heuretics

18. All these experiments of a people’s theatre have the same objective-the liberation of the spectator, on whom the theater has imposed finished visions of the world. -Augusto Boal, Theatre of the Oppressed

19. The body figures not as an object, one substantial element among others, but as a part-object, a conversion channel, a transducer-of the substantial elements of mixture, along with the shards of already-abstracted elements they carry, into sensed potential. -Brian Massumi, Parables For The Virtual

20. But how, without symbolizing, without communicating to an audience, can a particular performance target a generality? How can a single performance raise itself to the amplitude of the objective? It can’t. -Brian Massumi, Parables For The Virtual

21. The history of the human-computer interface is that of borrowing and reformulating, or, to use new media lingo, reformatting other media, both past and present-the printed page, film, television. Along with borrowing the conventions of most other media and eclectically combining them together… -Lev Manovich, The Language of New Media