YOU ACTORS, ONE MORE STEP!

 

 

Mr. Marshall McLuhan was ever surprised because the mass media as for mediums  provoke few interest about themselves. The controversy turns around the contents and its beneficial or manipulative effect over the citizens. The most outstretched opinion is that a medium is not good or bad in itself, but it depends on the use only. Good cinema or bad cinema, good television or bad television... McLuhan asked himself if an apple cake can be good or bad depending on its use. He saw very clearly that —apart from contents— the irruption of a new mass medium provokes changes on our perception, so on the way of living in the world: press, train, telephone, radio, television, Internet... All kind of media have generated new paradigms.

Actor’s history is media’s history too. The actor is a human medium, and his technic has developed similar to technical media evolution. The story teller jumped up to stage, from stage to radio, from radio to big screen, and from big screen to little one. This evolution has been cumulative unlike others, and theater, movies and television coexist at present. Each medium contributes with different, irreplaceable things: the proximity to audience, the immediacy, the «short cut», the «live»... And the performance adjusts itself to each specific medium demands, sometimes until the point of specialty: some actors from theater do not manage with agility in front of the camera, and vice versa.

Always the novelty has been received with a mixture of enthusiasm and skepticism. When the cinema was invented, actors from theater showed certain reticence to work in a thoughtful minor medium. Subsequent arrival of television was appraised with same suspicion. But the time has smoothed the roughness: the television —in the begining a sort of retirement to film actors in decadence— has become the opposite: a springboard to big screen. There we have Bruce Willis, among others. To act is the important thing.

Internet: the last medium —for the moment—. One more step. Is there place in it for the actors?... In fact, a lot of movies moves along the web. But I am not talking about that. I am asking myself if the refered actor’s historic evolution ends at television, or it has an specific and differed place in Cyberspace. Somebody can says Internet is a medium of media only. Well, however also the television did it, but when the production of fiction programs began, an specific way of realization catched at once, because the channel’s traits: low resolution, 3x4 format of little screen, the inevitable advertising cuts, multi-camera planning, scant range of brightness... And the video original limitations impeded the contents edition practically, forcing the «live» broadcast. The use of film format —16 or 35 mm— in television also assimilated this quick, concise, direct, mechanic, nearly way of doing. Today it is easy to distinguish a typical TV-movie from a film feature, al least by credits size. Television made up «plateau light» and scene immediacy, and favored the short cut absolutely. And it divided direction work in mise en scène and camera planning. At theater —«italian kind» theater— actor and spectator are in two separate boxes, the one opened to the other. At other theater kinds, actor and spectator are sharing the same space, the same box. At cinema, the spectator is into the box, and the actor are involving him. At television, the spectator’s space are involving the box which is containing the actor. What kind of spatial interaction is founded by Internet?...

At Internet, each one is into his own little box, with the bottom outside and the head inside: our nose brings closer and our hand puts in. On the other hand, we move away from television set enough to must to turn remote control and to do not distinguish one pixel from the next one. If we are chatting, we put blindly our hand in and touch an stranger’s face. If we are reading a web site text, we intuit the page’s size is bigger than screen’s, so we move the arrow up and down. Text surface size surpasses the frame we can see, and it has depth too. There are more pages in back of the one we see, thousands, infinite pages. Limitless pages with infinitesimal thickness, like pages of books aligned on Borges’ Babel Library shelfs. The television set is a little theater, and what we see is inside it, it is served to us inside it, like the platter of warm food in a restaurant’s elevator; on the contrary, the monitor through we look Internet is a periscope in the Cyberspace, but using it, we become cyber-substance too, because we can be examined closely by alien periscopes.

The playing manner is determined by the kind of spatial link among actor and spectator, so it is fundamental. Do I have to scream, or are you looking for I have sleep in my eyes?... Are you coming to me, or am I going to you?... Are we meeting in same place, or do I have to teletransmit myself all the way to your home, and become smaller up to fit into your magic little box?... In regard to you —spectator—, I will —the actor— appear like a superman, strong and big, or like a three colors painted homunculus?...

If the actor is going to find his own place at the new medium, he shall know to fight for its advantages and obstacles, before or after. It is inevitable: Internet actor will rise, like as film actor and TV actor have risen —and I am not talking about the actor as individual person, but actor as the incarnate act of performing—. Interactivity, ubiquity, fragmentation... these concepts come to our minds when we put a performing handbook into a computer box and shake it. But, please, let’s no derail the news train using rusty rails. Let’s be no narrow-minded: there are infinite possibilities, these do not run out in performance à la carte, that is to say with an actor obeying twelve milions web-surfers’ requests, like as live-sex girl.

Today, our theaters spit continuously shows that hardly deserve appear on TV —nevertheless, those are intrinsically television shows— and our televisions spit programs which would be better buried under a mountain of septic tank excrements. Often we run into some television style blockbuster vomits  —an example: if you manage to hold awake, then pay attention to how is Lord of the Rings directed—. I do not want to damn the inter-multi-media now. It is not badly that sometimes different mediums intersect and frolic for a while. But if the television’s great contribution, the ultra-fragmentation, that curse, that cancer, it must to be spattering constantly, contaminating with no mercy, rotting everything it touches and doesn’t touch, then it will be good to join a puritan club until better time will come. Umberto Eco’s Opera Aperta is a very interesting book, and it is O.K. that he wrote it; Duchamp also was a handsome boy when he signed the urinal; to mix up theater with joke and cabaret, TV zapping with improvised performing, karaoke with psycho-drama... those all are chup-chup media cooking pot bubbles. But maybe it would be advisable to preserve a little protected place where the authors can survive. Where they can do their things being no afraid to be quartered by the post-posmodern jigsaw.

I think is interesting to ask this question: what does Internet offer us that other medium doesn’t offer us?... Do Internet has charm, so where is it?... Is it worthwhile to do anything with / of / for Internet? —one will ask this question to oneself after knowing that it is worthwhile to do anything in general—. And, can an actor uses Internet as a place where he can works differently as he does at other medium, doing something new and interesting for the world and the show business?... Will permorming has hyper-performing, like as text has had hyper-text?... Will be there cyber-actors?... How will be they?... Of bones and flesh, of bits, of caramel?... —watch out, actors of organic molecules: as Poltergeist kind said, virtual actors are here already, and it is better be puppetter than puppet, so go thinking of update your computer rudiments—. There is no easy answer, but there is one surely, because as well as the snails go out after the rain, if there is a new human communication field, there will be comedians in it. And because if there are not two without three, then there are not three without four. And... because si non è vero, è ben trovatto.

 

 

Carlos Atanes

Barcelona, January 2004