Unstable Surfaces 01 02 03 04 05 06
sponge is an association of artists and researchers involved in a conversation concerning the domains of phenomenology, perception and desire.
This article was originally written from an interview with sponge conducted by Fabienne Regnaut and Franck Bauchard for the French publication ec/artS ,issue #2 2000.
It emerged out of conversations from a 3 year long seminar at Stanford University about how we can conceptualize and work with digital media or more generally computer-mediated interaction. The particpants in that seminar came from literature, mathematics, performance arts and computer science as well as the new media industry, each pressing against the limits of their disciplines. Part of the project was to develop over the years a new language for talking about media and interaction. This was the most important result; a publicly developed, shared language -- not just a collage or a dictionary of mutually alien expertise. sponge's works are in a sense a materialization of certain aspects of that 5 year-old conversation.
We can think of sponge, the association of artists and researchers that is forming in various countries, as a quasi-species, like a cloud of bees that at any particular moment has a well-defined shape, is bound by common attractions to certain ways of asking and materializing questions, and is constantly drifting in the world. A bit playful, a bit dangerous,perhaps.
Destabilizing the concepts of dramaturgy and theatrical performance.
The concept and position of the dramaturg and director as the main site of interpretation is being disolved in this so-called age of digital media. Until very recently, the dramaturg’s position was defined in strictly literary terms -- when we say literary we mean not only dramatic but historical, sociological, economic – all leading to the concept of interpretation, whether this be for texts or images. Once we enter into a regime where media and matter become pliant, dynamical and fluid, however, the reigning conventions of text and interpretation no longer hold much authority. We are long past the moment when we can be satisfied with a unitary or heroic interpreter, whether this is a literary interpreter (dramaturg)or a theatrical one (director). Why do we need a single presence to act as the interpretive filter when the very filters are continuously shifting and being updated? It goes without saying that the age of digital media,dramaturgy can no longer be defined in strictly literary terms. There has been a lot of talk about "post-literate dramaturgy" -- but the problem is that for all of this radical talk, the objects of this dramaturgy still remain strictly in the art realm (or, for the most part, in the epistemological black box of the theater).
sponge is interested in setting up compelling conditions which enable people to make their own meanings out of built spaces and environments (spaces being architectural, symbolic and media) and for this reason we are looking outside of the domain of art – to fields such as human-computer interaction, ethnography and information design. These sorts of enterprises use methods very different from the convention of narrative to construct a compelling or meaningful experience. In such work, we don't have the conditions where the viewers are expected to receive one or even more than one narrative from a fixed point, whether that point is an architectural or psychological one. Instead, meaning-generating interpretations and histories are constructed fluidly in the course of embodied and embedded social activity.
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