Re-presencing telematic dreaming – awakening a critical feminist phenomenology

ABSTRACT

This article enacts a re-presencing of Telematic Dreaming, the influential telepresence art installation by Paul Sermon from the 1990s. Revisiting an often-cited text I wrote in 1994 called ‘Spacemaking', which spoke from the experience of being a performer in the installation, I fill in what was missing, downplayed or unwelcome in the discourses of the time: that nobody is anybody (i.e. in technological environments bodies are never neutral or universal); and that artistic works are deeply contextual and intersectional. Taking a strongly political and contextual approach to Telematic Dreaming, I first reflect on the dual states of wonder & entitlement characterising digital experimentation of the 1990s then I consider the cultural structures and material infrastructures of the installation, assessing the scope for ontological expansiveness and gender crique they afforded. Beyond a particular instance of time-travel, this article proposes a new methodological framework for examining past performances. By turning to critical phenomenology, with contributions from feminist archaeology, media archaeology, and an unexpected appearance of Sara Ahmed’s feminist killjoy, I offer an approach that paves the way for future researchers interested in engaging reflexively and critically with historical phenomenological analyses of artistic performance and of wider lived experiences.

KEYWORDS:

• Critical phenomenology; telepresence; performance; feminist archaeology; intersectional politics

I was the body on the bed in Telematic Dreaming

Most media artists and researchers in the area of telepresence know this influential work by Paul Sermon. In 1994, at the Ik and de Ander (I and the Other) exhibition in Amsterdam, I performed in the piece, several hours per day for several weeks, and wrote an article addressing the topic of bodies in virtual reality and telematic spaces. ‘Spacemaking’ (1994) offered a phenomenological perspective on being the dancer in Sermon’s work, which, halfway between installation and performance, became an example of what we now know as durational performance art. Telematic Dreaming was remarkably shape-shifting. When set up as an open-ended telematic link between two locations for people to visit, it was media art; when inhabited briefly by members of the public, it became performance art or even participatory performance; when inhabited over long periods of time by a performer interacting with the public, it took on durational and immersive qualities. Parallel developments were captured in the ‘Spacemaking’ article, developments that I was not fully aware of at the time: an expansion of bodily discourses reflecting an embodied engagement with mediated technologies occurred simultaneously with an adaptation of phenomenological method capable of accounting for complex technologically mediated engagements. As an artwork, Telematic Dreaming existed outside the spheres of both instrumental business telecommunications and the sci-fi visions of the cyberpunk era that captivated imaginations at that time. It opened the potential for being and thinking differently (Figure 1).

Figure 1. Figures a, b, c Telematic Dreaming from ‘I and the Other’ exhibition (1994). Artist Paul Sermon, dancer Susan Kozel with an anonymous member of the public. Courtesy of the artist, from documentation: https://vimeo.com/625479778.

Twenty-nine years later, I revisit not simply neglected performative aspects of Telematic Dreaming, but I propose a new methodological framework for examining past performances, offering a reflexive and critical approach to historical phenomenological analyses. At the time, I did not fully see how I was shaping phenomenology to respond to my lived experience as a dancer in this strange new place, rather than editing my lived experience into ‘acceptable’ methodological or critical categories. I had no explicit intention of becoming an academic, so I had no qualms whatsoever about throwing caution to the wind and improvising as much with my methodology as I did with my movements. I could not import existing dance techniques or vocabularies into Telematic Dreaming – I had to improvise them at the moment – so why should I feel bound to applying a methodological formula? It took me some time, and the support of valued colleagues, to fully realise how the artistic performance and the phenomenological reflection were necessarily entwined and co-created. It helps, too, that over the past three decades, phenomenology has experienced a resurgence, frequently the work of artists and researchers motivated by queer, activist or feminist life experiences. ‘As a philosophical tradition, phenomenology has privileged wonder, ambiguity, and curiosity over the Cartesian drive towards certainty, determinacy, and indubitability,’ write Gail Weiss, Ann Murphy and Gayle Salamon in the editorial introduction to a fairly recent anthology charting the landscape of Critical Phenomenology (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020, xii). A critical phenomenology is composed of descriptions of transformations, which themselves become transformative descriptions. In other words, description is creation and phenomenology is performative (Kozel 2020). In this article, I propose to enact a similar parallel between reflecting on practice, and reflecting on the methods for reflecting on practice; I will reveal what what was under-written (hidden in plain sight) in my phenomenological narrative of Telematic Dreaming, and feed this forward into a critical stance on current mediated bodily experiences. The blindspots are simple and glaringly obvious in the light of the critical discourses of the past decades: deeper affective currents and intersectional politics were missing from my phenomenology of being the body on the bed.

Several years ago, I received a pointed critiqued by Margret Westby in her PhD thesis. She expressed the view that I did not do justice to the lived experiences of dancers and choreographers because I was ‘not feminist enough’ in my development of the phenomenological method (Westby 2017). She was absolutely right. I will address the sticky question of latent universalising tendencies in the application of phenomenology while I revisit my account of Telematic Dreaming to bring to light more clearly the body politics of the time. There is time-travel involved in sifting through memories and embodied traces of experience. It involves digging in personal archives, and re-collecting and re-activating memories of not just my individual bodily experience but the cultural and political context of the early 1990s.¹ Writing this article took me on an unexpected journey. With the intention to assess the feminist stance of what I wrote in 1994 and open it to intersectional perspectives, I turned to critical phenomenology, feminist archaeology, and media archaeology, but before I even began this work I was startled by the sudden arrival of Sara Ahmed’s ‘feminist killjoy ’ – a figure which both came to the rescue and produced considerable discomfort (as she tends to do). The feminist killjoy provided the affective impulse for this article, and paradoxically, contributed to the strange joy I experienced in writing it (Ahmed 2017).

Why undertake such a potentially risky slide across disciplinary boundaries? The slide was not arbitrary or top down, it was experience-driven. Critical phenomenology affirms that phenomenology stems not from the isolated perspective of an inwardly preoccupied body, but is open to material and social complexity (Magri and McQueen 2022; Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020). As I sift through the layers of experience and, in the process, attempt to interpret the past in the light of gender, sexuality, race, and class, I appreciate the fundamentally tactile and material qualities of investigating the past found in approaches to feminist archaeology. Chelsea Blackmore argues that feminist archaeology is both a political practice and a theoretical approach that takes into account the intersectional categories of gender, sexuality, race, age, and power, fundamentally re-evaluating how and by whom the past is interpreted (Blackmore 2015). The application of intersectionality in archaeological work aligns with the intention of this article to propose a cultural materialist perspective, according to which a phenomenology of historical lived experience is capable of opening to socio-cultural frameworks, particularly where the positionality of the dancer in a technologically mediated artwork raises specific and intersecting layers of meaning or interpretation. In a related way, media archaeology attends to media technologies and technologically mediated cultures, with a particular concern for the past. Resisting a temptation to fetishize the media objects themselves, Vivian Sobchack activates a dynamic and performative quality to media archaeology when she frames it as enquiring into the ‘re-presencing of the past’. I am indebted to her for emphasising how the current conditions under which the past can be re-presented are part of the material investigation (Sobchack 2011, 323). In calling attention to the conditions which cause the past to be re-membered or re-enacted, Sobchack’s thought guides the realisation that a reflection on past phenomenologies can become a current phenomenology.

This article is not a celebration of Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming. Or not only a celebration. Respecting the work’s enduring ability to provoke, I hope to pay it an even greater compliment: I will open up layers of critique and contention circling computer-mediated art and digital connectivity in general that can be read through the piece.

Wonder and entitlement

‘Spacemaking’ was divided into themes, reflected by the sub-headings of the text: trust, pain, sex & violence, the body electric and sexual inscription. These themes positioned my bodily encounters in the aesthetic and political discourses of the time. Are these still meaningful today, but with new content? Or do we in fact need an expanded critical landscape to reflect the complexity of contemporary presence?

Let’s begin with a wide perspective. There was a sense of wonder and a febrile excitement to being able to work with digital technologies such as telepresence as a young woman and a dancer in the early-to-mid 1990s; wonder, combined with tenuous feelings of privilege and entitlement at being admitted to the fringes of an elite club. The club was male and driven by the tech industry.

These powerful affective qualities were exemplified by a fleeting encounter with techno-cultural theorist Derek de Kerckhove in 1995 in the lift of a building on Trafalgar Square in London. Tendrils of recognition realigned once we realised we had only ever seen each other in the context of a performative, cross-Atlantic, telepresence experiment, but that we somehow knew each other nonetheless.² We were filled with wonder that we could feel as if we shared a small moment of embodied history. Of course, this comes as no surprise in the 2020s, but from a socio-political perspective, it is worth remembering that these were relatively inaccessible technologies, available only to very few artists and to almost no dancers. In fact, the lift where I met De Kerckhove was taking us to a telecommunications company that was loaning us its high-speed connections for a discussion between artists in Europe and North America. After business hours, of course. It felt like being granted fleeting access to a well-guarded citadel. Speaking as a dancer, we were accustomed to being the silent bodies animating this rapidly developing technological sphere (usually invited to support publicity, often all-too-similar to the way women’s bodies were draped over cars at trade shows). We were very low on the food chain. This is one of the reasons Sermon’s Telematic Dreaming installation was so extraordinary for me – it cut through the privilege and exclusion and was an early glimmer of accessible telepresence for all. However, I am aware that my being cast in the role of performer in this work was the result of a chance encounter with him at London’s Institute for Contemporary Arts, and for the most part very few dancers who wanted to explore the new technologies of the time were able to do so.³ An uncomfortable admission for me to make is how I clung to my small slices of access. The way Kate Winslet’s character in the film Titanic clung to that famous floating piece of debris in the desolate North Atlantic, I had achieved limited and sporadic access to the high seas of high technologies and I was not about to let it go.

The affective quality of dazzlement produced by access to technologies such as broad band telematics and motion capture, was underpinned by a layer of vulnerability knowing that this access could be withdrawn at any point. This is a point I want to make about affective politics in action: it invariably pulls in two directions. The promise is almost always doubled with scarcity, the advantage with disadvantage, optimism with cruelty, and intimacy with coldness (Berlant 2011; Collins and Bilge 2016; Illouz 2007; Massumi 2015). Telematic Dreaming produced the striking phenomenological reflections found in ‘Spacemaking’ not simply because of its technological configuration but because I was able to spend time in it: hours, days, weeks. Only by experiencing the constant transformation of the space of Telematic Dreaming over time I was able to produce any sort of meaningful phenomenology of embodied telepresence, for ‘every now changes continuously [author’s italics]’ (Olkowski 2020, 322); and phenomenological reflections have to find a way through the disorientation of perpetual change. Sometimes the strangeness of something new comes as a sudden shock, but often the uncanniness needs to build up, like sediment, over time. The advantage of being able to dwell, over time, within a new technological configuration represented a degree of access not entitled to most dancers. An intersectional lens requires the recognition that I was, after all, not just anybody on the bed: I was an educated, middle-class, culturally well-connected, young, white woman on the bed (Applewhite 2016; Collins 2000; Collins and Bilge 2016; Crenshaw 1989). Nobody is anybody, particularly in technological environments; never neutral or universal, we are all intersectionally situated.

The drastically varied impact technologies have on people depending on race, class, gender, age, sexuality, and ability has provoked an important expansion of thinking concerning what constitutes entitlement (Benjamin 2019; Chun 2021; Eubanks 2017; Noble 2018; Perez 2019). Questions of human entitlement are also extended to the non-human domain (Kimmerer 2013; Tsing 2015; Van Horn, Kimmerer, and Hausdoerffer 2021). The re-presencing of Telematic Dreaming at the centre of this article brings into focus the ever-increasing reliance on global telepresence, and how server power and the environmental cost of driving and cooling networked data systems over time come to matter – particularly if/when telepresence extends to interacting with AI generated avatars. In a balancing act between wonder and entitlement, a question arises as to whether humans are entitled to continually upgraded technological affordances for connectivity and algorithmic functionality at the expense of the non-human world? Conversely, there exists an entitlement that subjugates users of telecommunication platforms: the growing entitlement on the part of tech platforms and mobile providers over personal data (Snowden 2019). All users of networked media and mobile applications have to give up personal data, or turn a blind eye to data extraction, in order to maintain connectivity. Above and beyond the affective benefits of remotely touching those we care for, there can be an adverse affective impact to being tracked, archived and algorithmically processed without our consent. This is yet another example of affective politics pulling in two directions. Further, platforms like Zoom demand considerable monthly payments for full functionality (costs that can only really be borne by institutions) cutting off the connections of independent users after 30 min and limiting other unaffordable affordances. The issues around telepresence have always been economic and political, as well as artistic and embodied. It is just that the art world is often better able to shine a light on politics than other cultural sectors. Or, as I like to say, artistic work can act as a petri dish for the issues and provocations to grow and provide rich material for critical engagement.

Structures and infrastructures

Further context can be provided by zooming in from the wider culture to the specific cultural event. Just as the phenomenological body is never isolated or entirely abstracted, the phenomenon of Telematic Dreaming was situated in a very particular context. A combination of critical phenomenological and media archaeological perspectives reveals how structures and infrastructures entwine with bodily affect, sensations and motion.

The exhibition I + the Other. Art and the Human Condition, curated by Jeanne van Heeswijk and Ine Gevers ran from June to August 1994, and was situated in the nineteenth-century Beurs van Berlage building in central Amsterdam. Gevers and Van Heeswijk collaborated with institutions such as the Dutch Red Cross ‘to create a context in which the different positions and discourses would enter into dialogue with one another.’ Demonstrating considerable foreshadowing of concerns that were to take on greater importance in the years to come, they assembled works to address the question: ‘What is the state of human dignity and humanity in a time dominated by violence, intolerance, xenophobia, and even genetic manipulation?’ (Van Heeswijk 1994) The artists left after the opening of the exhibition and the lavish dinner at an Amsterdam restaurant. I remained on site, along with the cleaning staff, the curators, the docents and the people who worked at the café. I was part of the infrastructure, but more than this, I was a performance presence in a visual arts context, and I had rarely felt so adrift. As such, it was no surprise that I made good friends with the curators and with the artworks (Figure 2).

Figure 2. Front cover of the catalogue of the ‘Ik and de Ander’ exhibition, Beurs van Berlage, Amsterdam 1994, curated by Ine Gevers and Jeanne van Heeswijk.

The exhibition contained powerful and outspoken feminist art that made political statements through the presence of women’s bodies. I make this claim not as an art critic, but on the basis of critical phenomenology. I lived with this work daily, and some pieces are still more vivid than others. Several of Cindy Sherman’s iconic photographs were included; dressed in costumes and wigs and she gazed directly outward reminding me of the non-neutral presence of the camera in Telematic Dreaming. Adrian Piper’s video art installation Cornered (1988) was set up where, dressed in twinset and pearls, she quietly and relentlessly tells viewers that she is black. Exposing the moral and political complexities of racism, she uses herself and her own experience with racism as the raw material for her artistic work (Bowles 2006). The affective politics of the piece was enhanced by the juxtaposition of her calm image on the monitor with its placement behind a table on its side, its legs jutting out towards the public (Piper 1988). Dutch fashion photographer Inez van Lamsweerde’s large images distorted the aesthetic of her beautiful subjects so that the more you looked at them the creepier they became. The women’s hands became a focal point for me, perhaps because of the importance of hands in initiating movement with strangers on the bed in Telematic Dreaming. The hands of the women in Van Lamsweerde’s images were technologically manipulated (‘doctored’ feels like a better term) so that they seemed redder, with more pronounced veins, like subtly gruesome Barbies. They were unreal, and foreshadowing of AI (Van Lamsweerde and Matadin 2011, 2015). But the work that affected me the most, and stayed with me for years, was Labirint (Labyrinthe) by Slovenian artists Marina Grzinic and Aina Smid.⁴ This is not surprising, given that it was a deeply feminist and phenomenological work of dance-based video art addressing inner bodily trauma and external political trauma of the ex-Yugoslav territory. It juxtaposed ‘hysterical and hectic dance movements’ with media documentation of refuge camps in Ljubljana where Bosnians refuges were forced to live (Grzinic and Smid 1994). The particular images that hypnotised me were the moments where the dancer shredded layers of latex off the side of her own body, not just for a hit of horror but for the play of materials through dance improvisation. The music was spiky and dissonant; in my memories, it merges with the soundtrack from Telematic Dreaming (Figure 3).

Figure 3. Labyrinth 1993, image courtesy of the artists Marina Grzinic & Aina Smids.

A combination of critical phenomenology, media archaeology, and the intersectional awareness of feminist archaeology contributed to revealing the importance of the cultural and material context(s) of performing in Telematic Dreaming. The presence of the artwork, visually, texturally, aurally, and affectively, permeated my consciousness and formed a backdrop for my passages through the exhibition: arriving, departing, going for lunch, and simply walking around to clear my head. They bled into my specific material experiences on the bed revealing that embodiment is both deeply immanent and porous to external factors.

The absent 4th monitor (a brief note on power)

Telematic Dreaming at the exhibition venue in Amsterdam did not use dial-up or other wireless image broadcasting of the times. Rather charmingly from our current perspective, it required extremely long cables connecting the projector and camera in the public-facing side of the installation to the monitors and camera in the room on the first floor which acted as my performance studio. For some peculiar reason, there were only three television monitors available, covering just three of the four sides of the bed that was my performance space. (Bear in mind, the monitors were how I saw the bed in the public room.) When I found myself facing the blind side I had to fill in with my imagination what might be happening until I shifted again and found myself with vision. This was an actual blind spot. The political blind spot was that it never occurred to me to insist that a fourth monitor be supplied. I simply made do, not feeling I had the power or influence to request an additional monitor.

Ontological expansiveness

So much has been made of touch in digital media – and for important reasons – but it runs up against limits. Touching and being touched (evoking the famous Merleau-Pontian chiasm the touching-touched) reflects more than intimacy, it can be understood in terms of ontological expansiveness: the ability to exist as a fully-rounded somatic and agential being in a range of spaces (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 130–155). Let me explain, with further phenomenological description.

Taking into account the material configuration of Telematic Dreaming, I was not the body on the bed: I was on two beds. One bed was in the closed room where I performed, where I felt safe but isolated; the second bed was in the public room, onto which my body was projected and encounters occurred. In the public room, I was saturated by visual and sonic material: the swirling coloured imagery that was the background to my green-screened figure was effectively the surface, like water, upon which I performed, and the dance-music soundtrack with the heavy base was my constant companion. Someone jokingly associated the music with 80s porn. I recall feeling slightly mortified by his comment, but it revealed the extent to which I worked hard to dissociate myself from the cybersex era. I constantly battled the ‘woman on the bed’ connotations, as if this was just a visual metaphor when, in reality, I was a woman on the bed. Exacerbated by the costume. Oh that costume.

From the start, the costume was a contentious issue. I was given a cream-coloured cotton-lycra unitard, the colour that is supposed to pass for ‘flesh tone’ on white skin. I knew it would never work for me. Initially, I told myself it was an aesthetic decision, after all in the 90s contemporary dancers did not wear unitards (unless you danced for Merce Cunningham). I did not want to cause too much of a fuss, because I knew there were legitimate concerns about the effectiveness of the chromakey (green-screen) technique at defining the edges of my body when overlaid onto the visual background. Nonetheless, I immediately went shopping and found cream-coloured pajama bottoms to be worn with a flesh-tone leotard top provided by Paul. These worked in the installation, but I never fully acknowledged the deeper personal and cultural reasons for my initial resistance to the unitard: I felt too vulnerable, too exposed. Even embarrassed. To deploy a term applied in critical phenomenology, the costume wrangling revealed how I had to choreograph my ‘ontological expansiveness’. This term refers to the ‘unconscious habit of assuming that all spaces are rightfully available for the person to enter comfortably’ (Sullivan 2020, 249). Shannon Sullivan opens the understanding of space so that it may be architectural or geographical, but it may also be linguistic, economic, and artistic. Of course, it can be mediated. With strong resonance to my experience as a woman in Telematic Dreaming, she writes that the comfort (or not) of a space,

‘is psychological and emotional, and the movement of expanding into a space involves a person’s entire being as a psychosomatic unity – hence the adjective ontological. Whether literal or metaphorical, ontological expansiveness operates with an assumed right to enter and feel at ease in whatever space a person inhabits, and inhabiting a space on this way both shapes and is shaped by a person’s individual habits’ (Sullivan, 2020, 249).

I recall shaping my body to balance assertiveness with protective measures. My resting pose was partly on the bed, positioned on a slight diagonal so that my face could be seen but the front of my body was facing downwards and my legs were off camera (note that the cameras capturing movement in both rooms were anchored to the ceiling, providing top-down views). It was only if the movement invited it that I let the front of my body be seen, and always in motion. I never lay on my back in a static position. I recall being astonished when I saw a different performer in the installation wearing the full flesh-coloured unitard, lying on his back waiting for someone to engage with his image.⁵ It was by sensing how his maleness itself afforded protection, even in a virtual space, that I realised the extent to which I had cultivated a movement vocabulary that afforded my own protection and comfort.

My ontological expansion, or indeed contraction, was performed by drawing cultural lines as well as choreographic shapes. I held onto a clear distinction between the artistic experiment of Telematic Dreaming and the cybersex and interactive pornography that were gaining traction simultaneous to the aesthetic and corporate uses of telepresence. I can’t speak for Paul, but I now see how important it was for me to distinguish my own work from the cybersex, or even worse the ‘teledildonics,’ of the era. An intersectional perspective illuminates overlapping hierarchies evident in both cultural production and academic discourse. I can’t deny being affected by a sort of class snobbery that privileged high art over popular culture, even a mild disdain for the sexual entertainment industries. Other embedded cultural hierarchies came to play, such as that between the commercially successful visual art world and the worlds of performance art, and between what could and could not be regarded as intellectually and aesthetically valid discourse in academic spheres. Being able to make a strong argument to a wider community on the basis of all the layers of experience of being in Telematic Dreaming, to my surprise, became important to me. Just as the constant note-taking and processing of ideas and occurrences became part of the fabric of my experience of being in this compelling installation.

Absence and presence

This re-presencing of Telematic Dreaming includes not just the physical performance but the performance of writing. ‘Spacemaking’ contains only one fleeting reference to my being a woman on the bed (Kozel 2007, 96). This is a blind spot, but it is not the most striking absence. In that text, I cited not one single woman author or artist. Not one. I only engaged with the written words of white men. Structural and affective factors combined to produce this now glaring lack. When writing the article, I was outraged by the assumptions pervasive in cultural discourses around virtual reality and cyberpunk that the body was meat and the virtual space was a pure cerebral mind-space. This explicit importation of a Cartesian dualism provoked me, as did the way these discourses seemed to rule out, in advance, possible embodied experiences that did not coincide with their cyber-utopian and authoritative rhetoric. Ostensibly, I cited key American male voices in cultural discussions of VR to critique them; but in so doing I joined them on their playing field.⁶ I suffered from an absence of work written by women with which to engage. A large body of feminist political and philosophical writing existed, of course, but little of that had permeated the cultural imaginary and theoretical fields addressing bodies, computers, and developments in virtual reality the way the writing of the men managed to do.⁷

The phenomenological discussion in ‘Spacemaking’ was not scrubbed of all feminist critique, but exhibited an extremely light touch, even a sort of distanced coolness when dealing with my gendered and political body. Doing my own intersectional and media archaeologies into the conditions of my writing at the time, I see that as a (relatively) young woman dancer and a (definitely) young woman academic, I was culturally conditioned to downplay the material and political conditions of the gendered body in order to be taken seriously in the world of arts and academia. In part, I felt too vulnerable to stand fully in the gender trouble that I was experiencing (including the right of the dancer to speak for herself), but in part, I was looking in another direction. I was fighting other battles. The way I worked with Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology at the time was to test out his edgier concepts (such as vibration, flesh, reversibility, and intercorporeality) to challenge the Cartesian and body-phobic rhetoric dominating the cultural discourses of virtual reality. I had no clue how such writing would be received.⁸

‘Spacemaking’ was one of my first post-PhD academic publications. It appeared in Dance Theatre Journal, a British journal published by the Laban Centre dedicated to nurturing generations of new dance writers. I recall nervously placing a call to then editor Chris de Marigny from a pay phone at the British Library. De Marigny was a generous and visionary guide for the journal, positioning it at the forefront of experiments in dance and performance making at the time. He had no idea of technologically mediated dance but encouraged me to send a draft to him. In so doing, he demonstrated one of the key themes of the article I proposed to him: trust. (And more than a little kindness, if we are speaking affectively.) This reveals how inclusivity takes work and feels risky, both for artists and other cultural actors (Figure 4).

Figure 4. ‘Spacemaking’ in Dance Theatre Journal, Volume Eleven, No.3, Autumn 1994.

Please don’t call me seminal (hello, Killjoy Feminist)

Over the years, both Telematic Dreaming and ‘Spacemaking’ have been called seminal. I have frequently wondered why some academics writing in the area of media art and digital performance insist on praising works of art and scholarship by calling them seminal? It jars. Sometimes the term is applied to Sermon’s piece, sometimes to my writing, sometimes to my performance in it. Sometimes to a combination. Even though it is meant to be a particularly rarefied sort of compliment it produces a feeling akin to a blow, honouring my work while effacing me. When, several years ago, a friend and colleague said to me wryly ‘You know you are seminal now,’ I felt it in my gut, that visceral ‘feminist friend’ (Ahmed 2006, 255). So this is what my feminist phenomenology has achieved, I thought. I’m seminal now. This needs to be unpacked further, because the cultural materialism that this article explores includes language and discourses over time, as well as the performances of historical and contemporary bodies.

To be clear, Telematic Dreaming was a rich and wonderful work. To be even clearer, I am not saying that Paul Sermon was sexist or egotistical in any way, nor am I calling the several male academics over the years who have, each in his own way, ‘honoured’ me with this term bad people. I am, however, calling for a certain amount of self-reflexivity over the use of the language that populates the critical and theoretical writing in our field. If the highest praise for a piece of work is that it is seminal, it implies that women can only ever be associated with it by accident, or by extending the metaphor (even ironically). Instead, it is worth asking what is meant by calling something seminal? The fruit of a male artist’s creative labour? Surely not. Or the implication that a work is significant, meaningful, influential, inspiring, provocative, with lasting impact or resonance? The parallel move to calling something seminal is referring to it as ‘Canonical,’ but decades of feminism and deconstructive literary criticism have dismantled this part of the master’s house.

So my work gets called, or the work I was in almost thirty years ago gets called, seminal. One morning just as I began writing this article this happened again, in an email from a colleague saying that he and I had encountered each other in 1994 in the Telematic Dreaming installation. He said that he and others joined me on the bed, and then in the next sentence called the work seminal. I prevaricated over my possible responses. Indulge me in this micro-phenomenological narrative of possible reactions:

1. I can ignore the use of the word seminal in conjunction with my work with only a private eye-roll and a rant to my friends and kindred academic colleagues … making me feel passive, cowardly, and complicit;

2. I can point it out in a light way, as in ‘by the way, I noticed that you said the work was seminal and this is what it made me think’ … still making me feel passive, but also fearful of burning collegial relations just the same;

3. I can point out strongly my resistance to the term seminal and risk being considered an over-reacting feminist, causing the praise to be retracted and door to this club firmly shut … and with a moment of recognition and relief, I realise that this strange affective spiral is the discomfort felt, and potentially produced, by the ‘Feminist Killjoy’ (i.e. I felt discomfort at the possibility of causing discomfort by making a feminist point). In this moment of recognition I was, and am still, grateful to Sara Ahmed for her incredibly practical advice: ‘if asking questions about the terms that enable that repetition means being deemed oversensitive, we need to be oversensitive. When you are sensitive to what is not over, you are oversensitive. We are sensitive to what is not over. We are sensitive because it is not over.’ (Ahmed 2006, 262).

According to Ahmed, the figure of the killjoy ‘kills joy because of what she claims exists’ (Ahmed 2006, 252). In this case, what I perceive to exist is latent gender bias in the media arts world, or at least in the residue of anachronistic language used to describe the artwork. Yet this is more than me having a tantrum because I don’t like a particular word, it is because it is a blindspot in a field. This entire article has been about revisiting blindspots, in the interests of re-presencing an important aesthetic experience and expanding a cultural materialist basis for phenomenology. When I finally saw how in 1994 I did not write about feminist politics more directly, at least in part, because I worried that my credibility in the cultural and philosophical worlds was reliant on me presenting a more neutral stance, I revealed yet another phenomenological moment described by Ahmed: ‘to render a new order of ideas perceptible is simultaneously a disordering of ideas’ (Ahmed 2006, 252).

So I decided on a fourth option,

(iv)	Direct the affective force of these inner wranglings over how to respond towards my contribution to this special edition on telematics, because gender trouble is part of the affective politics of telepresence.

Once the killjoy arrived, causing havoc, I saw ever more clearly how there were always feminist or queer red-flags around Telematic Dreaming: from being a woman on a bed, to the costumes, to the connotations of the music, to the fact that I was there to be touched, to how closely it co-existed with overtly cyber-sexual work while maintaining its distance, etc. Going further, the shared landscape of my body and the body of the queer-presenting man who took over from me as a performer in the work potentially point to a combined performative response to the spectre of a dominant male gaze directed towards the figures on the bed.⁹ This is part of what made the work so compelling for me. So wonderfully disorienting. This article could not have been written without the affective impulse provided by the killjoy.

In conclusion

The question posed at the start of this article, of whether the phenomenological themes of trust, pain, sex & violence, the body electric and sexual inscription from ‘Spacemaking’ need to be updated, is not the right one. There will always be more categories, thematics, structures, emotions, perceptions, problems, and happenings to expose and to critique. We do not need a revamped list of themes relevant to technologised embodiment, what we need is the orientation and the courage to enquire widely and critique deeply so that what comes to matter through phenomenological enquiry may be immanent body states at the same time as technological specifics; immanent states at the same time as contextual factors. The false purity of holding these apart from one another, of keeping phenomenological enquiry separate from cultural materialism, is what needs to be questioned so that we are neither obliged to investigate human perceptual experience untainted by the specificities of intersectional politics, nor are we expected to evaluate technological advancements in culture and society untainted by embodied, subjective narratives. There is nothing pure about digital cultures. They are messy and multiple. They are tainted.

If there was a primary motivation for re-presencing Telematic Dreaming it was to reinforce that in technological systems ‘no body is any body,’ which is to say that there is not an implicit neutral or universal body underpinning either phenomenological reflection or technological configurations.

This is captured when Weiss, Murphy and Salamon emphasise how critical phenomenology acts on the potential for phenomenology to be redeployed intersectionally, so that ‘race, gender, and class and their intersection are not ancillary to phenomenology if it is to be relevant today for addressing the ongoing crises we face daily’ (Weiss, Murphy, and Salamon 2020, 3). It is what Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology supports when she shatters the static categories of philosophical thought, exploding it into directionality, (dis)orientation and the disruptive potential of objects and others (Ahmed 2006); and it is particularly important in the light of current developments in AI, continued crises around data privacy and the biopolitics of surveillance.

There is a subtle difference between applying the present to the past, and opening the past to contribute to the present. In choosing to interpret Sobchak’s emphasis that within media archaeologies the current conditions under which the past can be re-presenced are part of the material investigation, it is possible to see how a phenomenology of a past phenomenology can shed light on the present (Sobchack 2011 , 323). This article may be read simply as a particular instance of time-travel producing a somewhat engaging or somewhat annoying narrative, either is fine, but the wider goals were to outline a new methodological framework for examining past performances by stitching together (albeit unevenly) critical phenomenology, feminist archaeology, and media archeologies. This approach may support future researchers and artists interested in engaging reflexively and critically with historical phenomenological analyses but, more than this, it may contribute to current phenomenological efforts to understanding present events. The promise that I did not quite fulfill in this article is to ‘feed forward’ what was underwritten (or hidden in plain sight) in the early phenomenological narrative of Telematic Dreaming into a critical stance on current mediated bodily experiences. That is the work to occur now, and to be done collectively.

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Susan Kozel

Susan Kozel works at the point of convergence between dance, philosophy and responsive digital technologies. She is a Professor at the School of Art and Communication of Malmö University, Sweden. Her research takes the form of both scholarly writing and collaborative artistic work. Her current research focuses on phenomenology, affect, somatics, and the use of mixed reality (AR/MR) technologies for the development of Somatic Archiving (https://www.somaticarchiving.org). With a strong critical stance on the impact of technologies on bodies of all kinds, she develops critical and creative practices for enhanced bodily agency and flourishing technological engagements. She has collaborated with artists Margrét Sara Guðjónsdóttir, Gibson/Martelli, Jeannette Ginslov, and works with the Cullberg in Stockholm to develop bodily transmission techniques for the performance of memory. At Malmö University she directs the process for cultivating an enduring profile in artistic research.

Notes

1 In another article I have argued for variations of phenomenological note taking, including the activation of embodied memories in the encounter with archival material such choreographers notebooks (Kozel 2015).

2 De Kerckhove was director of the influential McLuhan Program at the University of Toronto from 1983–2008, he was a visionary, guru-like figure at the time (De Kerckehove 1995). I forget the details of the telepresence experiment where we first met, but it was most likely hosted by Terry Braun of Braun Interactive and associated with the ground-breaking Digital Dancing events he coordinated.

3 A media archaeological point is that the technology that intrigued dancers and performers at the same time as telepresence was motion capture. This equipment was even more rarefied and locked away from us than high bandwidth (or any bandwidth) telepresence. A production point is that few, if any, theatres or performance spaces had any sort of connectivity.

4 I even obtained a bootleg copy of this 1993 video so I could show it to the dance students I taught. When I told Grzinic this many years later, she laughed. The full version can be found here http://grzinic-smid.si/?p=473

5 This was the performer who took over from me for the final weeks of the exhibition in 1994. He was an actor based in Amsterdam and I regret I don’t recall his name. He brought quite a strong queer aesthetic into the work. I regret not having a chance to talk to him about this experiences and performative intentions with the piece.

6 I should point out that the term virtual reality was used quite broadly to refer to VR environments but also to telepresence and other forms of online communication.

7 Brenda Laurel’s Computers as Theatre (1991) is an exception. It was discussed at the time as a way to integrate live performance and computation, but I found its perspective on digital environments and narratives too disembodied to elucidate my own experiences. Sandy Stone’s transgender perspective was striking and very valuable, but her book had not yet been published (Stone 1996).

8 I went on to expand this phenomenological approach in Closer: Performance, Technologies, Phenomenology (2007)

9 I am grateful to one of the peer-reviewers of this article for this insightful comment.