Plam. A Modest Physical Theater
for a Digital Era
Assistant
Professor
School of Art and
Design, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
email:
nicktob@umich.edu
Abstract:
What by products of
commerce and industry are there that offer a counterpoint to the 20th
century's fascination with the machine's sonics? Today's Buster Keaton and
Jacques Tati rolls, falls and folds inresponse and reaction to the sound
composed strictly
from stock software accompanying Power Point. Substituting the
moving physical body for the image, these generated and rearranged disembodied
whirrs, drumrolls, ricochets and barks are the soundtrack for a new era of
physcial performance.
Text:
A speaker stands still at a podium, clicking the
projector's button gently with an index finger. Still images fly across the
screen and screech to a halt accompanied by the sound of squealing brakes.
Charts and tables appear to thunderous applause.
Drop and drag applications, such as PowerPoint,
easily animate the inanimate. Their effortless action sets us up for canned
effect. Add a soundtrack to family vacation photos and, like magic, you have a
movie. Apply a directional wipe to a
series of bullet points and, by the same magic, a dry presentation comes alive.
While all this occurs, our bodies stand still. The
synthetic sound effects are surrogates for our own movement and for the actions
of another time -- a typewriter clack-clacking or the rising and falling tone
of a 1930's space fiction laser. The real and anticipated industrial effects
accompanying those early 20th century machines engendered physical performers,
such as Buster Keaton and Jacques Tati. They recognized that we experience the
world somatically, and that the human body is always in motion, responding to
the sources emitting these noises and affected by the corresponding forces that
surround us.
The Plam performance derives from
a 21st century awareness that while today's machines might create temporary
automatons out of sentient bodies, the rhythm of the finger clicking the mouse
is infectious. As these animated
effects affect their operator, the metaphorical movement suggested by the
woosh, the bang, the clack and the screech makes its way off the screen and
into the world.