Sally Jane Norman versión en español

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@ Original Abstract Submitted @ Short Biography of Author @ Links @ Paper

ABSTRACT:

Synthetic character designers develop behavioural animation models based on essentially realistic exchange, but the fundamental challenge posed by cyberspace is to elicit unprecedented kinds of exchange and involvement. "Interesting behaviour" in cyberspace is behaviour that recognizes the specificity of a new existential medium: transposing modes of interaction rooted in flesh-and-blood mores will not make new form yield new content. Cyberspace is no mere pixel-teasing playground, but an original realm of being to be tapped by an emerging species of Homo sentiens. Through their sheer lability, cyberspace modes of existence differ radically from other modes. Virtual space frees us from social commerce based on face value, enabling us to assume guises and disguises at will. Insofar as behaviour means "how one conducts oneself," this raises a burning question: how can "one" be defined in a situation of free floating identity, i.e. what are the minimum prerequisites for the existence of a perceptible entity, someone who "behaves"? Casting one's cyberself into the virtual ocean means creating a quantum persona recognizable not just for one's virtual counterparts, triggering and enabling cyber intercourse, but moreover recognizable for oneself as prime mover. Hanging onto a kernel of identity fixed enough to uphold exchange, while sounding the mutability favored by cyberspace, calls for a delicate balance. Many spectacular traditions derive their strength from precisely this balance, where seminal affinities with a mask or persona allow players to fully invest their roles. Synthetic behaviours form the essence of performing arts, which for millennia have devised ways to portray, personify and embody virtual interactive characters. Early commedia dell'arte actors were strolling players as much psychologically as geographically, wandering in and out of a gamut of kindred personae. By exploiting roles as exuberant facets of a latent self, rather than donning them as alien identities, they forged a unique art. Other traditions use masks to negate / disculpate the human subject enthraled by a usurpatory virtual presence. The subject does not wilfully enact or behave as the character symbolized by the artefact, but is overwhelmed by it and a slave to its whims (some animators refuse to "bear" characters they fear). During ritual noh preliminaries, the actor does not put on his mask, but asks it to accept him as conveyor of its spirit: the mask puts on the actor. When the voodoo loa or divinity descends on a mortal and annihilates his/her identity, the human "mount" is spurred on to spectacular behaviour by the omnipotent loa. Performance models propose infinite ways of modifying and switching identities to assume novel, interesting behaviours within an autarkic realm of existence. The "dead/ alive" binary is irrelevant in this realm or u-topia, where the quick and the dead are indistinguishable. Heroes and heroines die and resuscitate, spirits are manifest, animism and anthropomorphism endow the paltriest objects with radiant life. Labile, atomizable, interchangeable dramatis personae have constantly subtended live art, and ancient performance techniques may well prove vital in our quest for synthetic behavioural models for cyberspace.

BIOGRAPHY:

New Zealander/ French performing arts theorist working on theater technology links. Doctoral dissertations on non-figurative aesthetics in live performance, and staging the body in avant-garde theater (Paris III - Sorbonne Nouvelle). Texts published on subjects including shaping spectator gaze, modes of alienation or "otherness" in live performance, and immersion and theatricality; research associate with the CNRS Performing Arts Laboratory. Organizer of the 1993 Louvre International Conference on New Images and Museography, and the 1994 motion capture course for performing artists at the International Puppetry Institute. Trained in dance and martial arts.

LINKS:

@ SALLY JANE NORMAN web search

PAPER:

"DRAMATIS PERSONAE: CASTING CYBERSELVES" Cyberspace modes of existence differ radically from other modes through their sheer lability. Virtual space releases us from social commerce based on face value, enabling us to assume guises and disguises at will. Insofar as behavior means "how one conducts oneself", this raises a burning question: how can "one" be defined in a situation of free-floating identity, in other words, what are the minimum prerequisites for the existence of a perceptible entity, someone who "behaves"? Casting one's cyberself into the virtual ocean means creating a quantum persona recognizable not just for one's virtual cronies, triggering and enabling cyber intercourse, but moreover recognizable for oneself as prime mover. Hanging onto a kernel of identity strong enough to uphold exchange, while sounding the mutability favored by cyberspace, calls for a delicate balance. There is a recurrent tendency amongst those caught up in debate about this new space (its champions and detractors alike) to maintain a simplistic opposition between the supposedly tangible, circumscribable real world endowed with discrete, consistent categories of the body-object kind, and the elusive, impalpable cyberspace world where these categories are mysteriously fused and confused. Opposing the real and the virtual in this way is tantamount to ignoring or denigrating the innumerable areas of human activity that do not have this clear-cut, categorically discriminant anchorage, performing arts first and foremost. To consider that body-object relations are limpid in the real world is to overlook the vast cultural coding processes that go into our reading of objects and of bodies: in the space of a few seconds, any good actor (or any priest, for that matter), can show how readily a given object is interpreted and symbolically invested in markedly different ways. David Garrick, a great 18th century English actor, was almost lynched at a salon one evening when he tenderly cradled a cushion in his arms until everyone was thoroughly enrapt in the "infant", then walked calmly over to the window and dropped the cushion outside (several floors down to the pavement). Perhaps by becoming more aware of the wealth of practices in the "real" realm of imaginal behavior, that of theater and performance (Artaud celebrated "virtual reality of theater" back in the early thirties {1}, we will be better equipped to tackle tricky questions of cyberspace behavior. The performance arena, a u-topia (non-place), is dedicated to transgression: normally irreconcilable forces are intimately mingled, the quick and the dead are indistinguishable, spirits and ghosts assume visible form, and time need not be fatally unidirectional. Animism and anthropomorphism are powerfully operative, endowing the paltriest objects with radiant life. Basic distinctions between inanimate and live entities thus break down: breathing bodies may metamorphose into empty hulks and, conversely, symbolically-loaded objects may exude immense vitality. Tensions manifest in performance vitalize and mix the most disparate phenomena in ways that resist all rational analysis. LOOKING OUT FOR THOSE LOOKING IN In the framework of synthetic behavior research, concepts and practices related to dramatis personae may indicate directions for exploring and inhabiting cyberspace. These ancient ways of being were specifically designed to allow us to transcend banal behavioral registers ; they constitute one of the oldest forms of synthetic behavior, positing a realm where living entities can be modeled, put to the test and observed away from the bounds of ordinary social convention and physiological dictates. Performance arts propose infinite ways of relating to a behavioral model, via identification processes ranging from full credence - where one is wholly engrossed by a role in a "possession"-type situation - to the other extreme of calculated, alienated, technically expert "enacting". Assuming a persona may consist of exteriorizing and demonstrating what is felt to be one's own identity or a part of it, it may involve fashioning a novel exogenous identity, it may mean abandoning oneself as a vehicle for a pre-existing foreign identity to be "lived out" by proxy, or it may combine all three of these processes in different doses. How far the performing subject is considered as an irreducible, determinant element in spectacular behavior thus varies enormously. There are performance traditions built around a conception of the actor as a unitary person, a hard core of physical and mental idiosyncracies which prompt and ease identification with a certain family of characters. This has led to the refinement of role typologies within, for example, commedia dell'arte troupes. The principle underlying the Italian players' use of masks has been distorted by reductionist modern interpretations: rather than to rigidify and give concrete form to a character, the commedia mask's main function was to neutralize the performer's face, thus to allow untrammeled expression and uninhibited embodiment of the role {2}. This principle radically differs from that which subtends use of the mask in theater marked by religious ritual, including Japanese noh theater, where it is completely imbued with the character's psyche. During ceremonial noh preliminaries, the actor does not simply put on his mask, but salutes it and asks it to accept him as conveyor of its spirit: it would be more correct to say that it is the mask that puts on the actor. Each noh mask bears its own "level of distinction", its kurai dori, to be respected by the actor. Moreover, actors believe that it is not the person wearing the mask, but the mask itself, that is endowed with sight - in fact, masks in noh theater practically suppress the actor's vision. The Greek word for mask, pros-opon, also translates an ambivalent actor-mask relationship: opsis means vision, and pros-opon refers to the vision-granting mask as much as to the vision that is offered by the wearer of the mask {3}. The notion of adopting a mask not only to appear and be perceived differently, but moreover to see and to perceive differently, thus as an interface providing access to a foreign realm of experience, has gradually given way in western thinking to an expedient, dichotomous view of subject-mask interaction. Yet revival of this earlier more complex notion may help broaden our approaches to behavioral models for cyberspace. To what extent does my cyberclone free my acts and thoughts, catalyze my behavior, and to what extent do I feel as though I'm succumbing to an alien entity? How liberating and conducive to behavioral invention (to "interesting behavior") are cybermasks which stimulate latent facets of a wearer's personality, compared with cybermasks which impose a totally foreign identity and force a stark behavioral transformation? By donning a mask, physically assuming the traits of a persona (mask and persona being synonyms in Latin), mortals can parade as beings of another order - as larvae and specters, to use two other ancient synonyms for mask. In many dramatic traditions, the mask itself suffices to generate the performance arena: the persona who overwhelms the wearer or bearer takes over and thereby dramatically charges his or her vital space (in certain cultures, animators refuse to "bear" characters they fear). Multiple-figure masks are widely used: the Janus-faced "larva" was a standard device for Romans, and certain Baoulé (Ivory Coast) and Fang (Equatorial Guinea) masks present several faces. What is important about these prolifically enigmatic artifacts is that they undermine the crude actor-mask opposition and raise complex issues of identity, in that the switch from individual to persona is no longer hinged on a straight binary relationship, but involves investment of multiple, changing roles. Once we get beyond grossly schematic concepts of actor-object interplay, we encounter disturbingly shifty identification loops in use of masks and effigies, which convey uncanny vitality in ritual performance. Many masks provide striking examples of infringement of the dead/alive binary through their integration of body matter (Christian relics being a supposedly "civilized" answer to unholy primitive dealings with corpses). Artifacts incorporating human bones (including skulls), teeth, hair, and skin have been central to ritual performances all over the planet, and the corpse is borne to its grave as a highly animated figure in numerous cultures (vestiges of such traditions can be seen in western death masks and memento mori, or even in Lenin's embalmment and Walt Disney's cryopreservation). In Yoruba death ceremonies, a member of the tribe dons a specially sculpted wooden mask and the shroud of the deceased, and acts as his or her spirit. The mask is considered to be invested by the life of the person who has passed away, this energy being transmitted to all subsequent wearers. Similarly, in Ancient Rome, professional players called "arch-mimes" starred in funeral processions, where they were masked to resemble the mourned person, and cunningly imitated the latter's gestures and voice. By mingling with the funeral entourage, the archmime paid an eery homage to the departed, thus rendered acutely present. By dramatically bridging the gap between this and the other- or afterworld, such performers heighten the feeling that physical immediacy is not the only way of being manifestly present, thus the notion that we are living on just one of many planes of existence. Negation/disculpation of the human subject by a usurpatory virtual force does not necessarily require the mediation of a physical mask, but may occur through bare-faced possession rituals, which take place at the razor-edge between "acting" and "behaving". The possession paradigm raises hot ethical questions of responsibility for one's acts when under the grip of outside forces. The voodoo Loa, or divinity, descends on its human bearer, whose identity is annihilated by the divine "rider". Behavioral transformations are spectacular, since the human "mount" is spurred on to superhuman prowess by the omnipotent Loa's adoption of a specific gestural register ("comportement", French for behavior, which etymologically translates as "bearing with", here takes on literal significance). The "Hougan" or "Mambo", respectively the priest or priestess of the voodoo community, thoroughly versed in behaviors of the pantheon of Loas, supervises the possession ceremony and is capable of breaking the initiate's trance state by dismissing a Loa which is seen as a danger to its unwitting mount. Unlike the voodoo religion, where everyone is the predestined bearer of a celestial rider, shamanist possession (for example among the Tungusic hunters in Siberia) involves a single person as intermediary between the human and spiritual worlds. Yet here again, possession gives rise to supranormal physical feats and licences extraordinary acts. These behavioral states raise many of the questions which right now are wracking web psychosociologists and would-be web law-makers: how far can one be exonerated from normal social behavior when performing through a persona? To what extent are cut-and-dried, obdurate identities, which form the traffic of conventional social exchange, valid in a medium not bound to traditional mores or to flesh-and-blood characters? Where do Netethics start and end? Who are our Hougans and Mambos, who are our shamans, in other words, who has the spiritual power and the political authority to interrupt the ceremony, to break the trance? HYPOKRITES AS MUTAGENS Today, headed as we are towards new kinds of existence, we should no doubt be thinking in terms of afterlives as a species (artists like Stelarc are actively working along these lines). It is nothing new to say that we are in the throes of major mutations: our tissues, genes and antibodies are being prolonged and reinforced by adventitious chips and molecules and, in addition to hosting growing numbers of foreign bodies and processes, we are increasingly besieged by stray flashes of déjà-vu fired across a planetarily networked consciousness, a vast collective mind like the mnemonic ocean in Stanislas Lem's Solaris, from which we can fish virtual figments to color and people our lives. The forms of identification and interrelation fostered by cyberspace will no doubt be determinant for the future development of humankind. In this precarious evolutionary context, recourse to performance strategies to fulfill the ancient function of building alternative models of existence might prove invaluable. Dramatis personae and masks have long served to channel what might be called "distributed subjectivity" (perhaps a cumbersome way of designating myth?). As vectors for exchange in realms beyond the commonplace, they have frequently been the mainstay of ritual (the differentiation between ritual and theater, between officiating and performing, is extremely tenuous). The often sacrificial aspect of the theatrical protagonist (etymologically, proto-agonist means "first competitor") stems from this person's defiance of the passive crowd and status quo to accomplish decisive individual action. For millennia, the protagonist's challenge to the masses has been praised as sacred as often as it has been condemned as sacrilegious. The gesture of individual assertion whereby the player is born is as wrenching as any biological birth: the congregation torn asunder by the first hypokrite ("the one who replies") has been haunted by nostalgia for bygone unity ever since (Nietzsche's Birth of the Tragedy, and Freud's Totem and Taboo amply describe this trauma). But the actor's self-sacrifice is precisely what endows performing arts with their peculiar power as a heuristic medium: they provide us with living proof of other possible lives, including afterlives. There are those who proselytize that cyberspace is a realm for beatific cybercommunion with no object or subject other than auto-celebration. Collective navel-contemplating nirvana. Certainly, a massive social meltdown in the virtual ocean may well be a salutary, much needed communal experience, and new congregations of networked sensibilities will vibrate to the sheer thrill of being tuned together. Despite our often grim history of death and destruction, human survival as a species has frequently depended on solidarity and selflessness, and there is no reason for cyberspace not to accommodate and nurture such instincts, to consolidate gregariousness and the group identity. On the contrary. But this is only one of its potential functions: cyberspace can also host individual actors. The hypokrite, the protagonist who captures our attention, is likewise a vital social element. The tendency to promote joint jubilation and interactive free-for-alls by systematically stigmatizing individual undertakings has totalitarian overtones which are no novelty, and moreover, which insidiously overlook the fact that even collective, connective art has its maker, whether singular or plural. Anyone who has worked with John Cage or his acolytes on I Ching-governed works like Variations IV knows how ingeniously such masters engineered chance to their own aesthetic ends. The paradox currently posed by much group-wrought art resembles what Sergi Jorda describes as the "myth of interactivity", where guileless participants convinced that they are creators of an interactive work are usually just privileged players who have been allowed into the garden of its effective maker(s) and overlord(s). The advent of synergistic, ego-less forms of group creation does not necessarily make individual expression a heresy: the creative loner is not a dastardly antisocial plot drummed up by European Cartesians or Romantics, Wall Street or Hollywood, but is a driving spiritual force within societies throughout the world and throughout history. The hypokrite is a unique mutant and mutagen capable of breaking with accepted order and disclosing new existential models (perhaps somewhat akin to the technoparasites described by Erik Hobijn and Andreas Broeckmann, though I'd prefer to stress a mutagenic rather than a specifically "crash" function). Instead of welding the throngs through anonymous mass action drawing on readily recognizable codes (as in a sports stadium), the protagonist acts as bearer of unknown tidings, provoking the crowd to entertain strange, unforeseen visions, thus stretching the collective imagination. That is why actors, more or less legitimate offspring of priests, have so often been considered as a social threat - half-gods one day, outcasts the next, buffeted between stardom and the pillory. Live performance at its most potent, as prefiguration and generator of impossible lives, catalyzes what Jeanne Randolph keenly describes as "a yearning for deranging precedents" {4}. CYBERSTAGING If we do choose to ascribe cultural importance to the dramatis persona, as a guide to virgin terrain and "deranging precedents", then we must work out how to implement cyberspatial configurations which separate the spectator - performer, since it is by standing aloof that we are able to behold the model. We have to learn to give shape to the actor across emerging cyber-arenas, of a substantially different nature to other sites invested by communal awareness. Performing arts have always been deeply embedded in settings, whether manifestly contrived as architecture or implicitly represented through consensual symbolic codes. Regardless of how patent it is, the cleavage between observers and actors generates crucial tension on which dramatic impact depends. The performance area defined by this cleavage is sublimated and transformed with respect to its surroundings. In virtual, "liquid architectures" (Marcos Novak){5}, theoretically doomed to homogeneity by their very constitution (or dissolution) as a sort of digital primal soup, how can a spatial feature of this order be wrought and made truly instrumental? "All the world's a stage, /And all the men and women merely players : /They have their exits and their entrances..." (As you like it, Act II, scene vii). Perhaps there's a clue to be had in Shakespeare. The two-door Tudor stage facilitates exits and entrances, as do many other theater configurations - the two doors in traditional Chinese drama are respectively termed "the door of birth" (assigned to entrances) and "the door of death". This is not the place to inventory stage architectures, of which there are hundreds, but simply to point out that the protagonist's actual trajectory, emerging from and subsiding back into the milling crowd, itself instantiates the performance arena. Of course, we must beware of the danger of facile appropriation of "ready-made" models, which too readily become alibis for dilettantes: codifying performance arenas through more or less ostensible, more or less symbolic cardinal points, exits and entrances, is just one way of ensuring they come into being; they may also emanate or radiate from the actor. Thus, for example, the crucial inaugural phase of kathakali performance consists of the leading and first actor's saying a prayer behind the curtain. Although he is not yet visible, this phase nonetheless constitutes a vital, integral, sensible part of the performance. RAMPARTS OF DIFFERENCE So what trajectory can be described by the virtual hypokrite? How can we define the point at which "normal", albeit expansive behavior switches into a performance mode, and how can we set aside virtual space accordingly, to give free reign to unorthodox behaviors? How can we formalize, solemnize, and orchestrate virtual spaces for live art? What architectural strategies can we devise to ensure an effective spectator/ performer demarcation? In the absence of strong theatrical concepts apt to really explore cyberspace as a source of vital new tensions, we seriously risk being overrun by digital clichés of red plush and stucco, stages painfully reminiscent of tacky TV drama and as painfully inept to convey new art. Unless we consecrate creative arenas in cyberspace which, like other places for performance and ritual, benefit from a certain degree of social immunity and impunity - often under the falsely ingenuous cover of that state so wonderfully termed "make-believe" - there is every chance that this new realm's dramatic potential will be leveled to the ground by conventional behavioral norms with extremely narrow tolerance limits and standard deviations. If this happens, cyberspace as a spawning ground for the collective imagination will be severely, perhaps irretrievably hemmed in. Clinical psychiatry as evidenced by the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM to habitués) has shown how relative cultural interpretations of behavior can be: attitudes certain practitioners qualify as exuberant are elsewhere termed pathological, offensive, or reprehensibly exhibitionist. Conversely, "healthy outgoing", not to say "go-getting" attitudes of enterprising New Worlders - even those equipped with a Golden Rule and a Social Contract - may look like rampant aggression to others. Those who blithely underestimate the dangers of reactionary behavioral bias in our brave new embryonic cyberworld should think twice about what has recently occurred in bodily standardization of synthetic agents: today's virtual planetary corps derives almost exclusively from normalized American builds of "NASA astronaut trainees" and "Army soldiers", valiantly propagated by Jack and his buddies {6}. Africa's undersized Pygmies and oversized Tutsis have been left off the virtual map, along with Scandinavians, Laplanders and other "abnormal" physiques. Standard stock is obviously necessary for virtual task ergonomics, but these creatures have insidiously infiltrated areas supposed to be devoted to creative experimentation, where there's definitely something wrong if non-standard phenomena cannot even get through the door. If we humans are geared towards evolution as a more generic, cohesively linked and unified species, then it is surely in our interests to uphold and fight for ramparts of difference as a way of keeping ahead of excessively normative technologies, and sustaining power of the imagination to project ourselves beyond humdrum life forms. Strong performance and ritual traditions within often non-dominant cultures may constitute a precious resource in this struggle. Indeed, it is disturbing to see how much energy goes into plugging for cultural pluralism on the net on a purely linguistic basis, when cyberspace potentially offers so much more than merely a place for verbal exchange. The body politic does not limit its expression to the logos, as is amply borne out by the vastly varied proxemics at work in our societies. The seething multicultural mass that cyberspace is theoretically capable of engendering and nurturing gives us a unique opportunity for rediscovering cultural strengths and specificity withheld by geographically and/or historically distant peoples, including innumerable so-called "PONA" (people of no account). Hopefully, this realization will do more than just prompt opportunist accumulation of a kind of cultural capital comparable to the human genome bank, an umpteenth world heritage project backed by the future brokers and dealers of human antiquity. Greater insight into how different peoples design and bring alive "real" collective space, particularly in its extremely codified forms developed for the purposes of performance and ritual, will surely heighten and catalyze our awareness of the social dynamics peculiar to networked space. LONG LIVE THE LURE OF THE FLESH ! Cyberspace is preparing us for types of existence which are not mere ludic escapism with respect to prosaic terrestrial activity, but which may become "real" the day we invest as yet unfamiliar, possibly non-terrestrial spaces - hot, full-blown, multisensory nano and giga media previously apprehended as cold digits. It would be silly to pretend that physically-bound mores are nothing but a nostalgic hangover, since they continue to correspond to a large range of human activity and perhaps always will. Indeed, as long as corporeal enjoyment holds good, debates on modes of eccentric, distributed existence will be happily tainted by recalcitrant carnal lust: the call of the flesh prevails. Some of the biggest challenges to cyberspace are posed by our most solidly bodily grounded experience: proprioception, kinesthesia, haptics - not to mention smell and taste (we too often forget that "sapire", whence "sapiens", means to taste). Perhaps it is these senses that will confer on our earthly, physical world an aura of lastingness and irreplaceability. Familiar physical experience is not to be carried over per se to cyberworlds, any more than it can be brazenly transposed to any other media. New forms of investing and "owning" bodies will be devised, but for this, we need greater understanding of bodily identification processes at work in the "real" world. There are forms of physical intelligence - for example, those acquired by jugglers and puppeteers, acrobats, and dancers, which draw on an ancient heritage of corporeal wisdom - well worth studying in this respect. Kinesthetics and haptics in virtual space lend themselves to new ways of gauging and enjoying bodily presence. The sleek, careened figures bred by computers during the teething phase of cyberspace incorporate potent proprioceptive information that we must be able to recognize as such, that is, if we really do want to vary our virtual incarnations. This calls for fine analysis of the complex interworkings of our perceptive modalities (the five senses, plus what growing numbers of neurophysiologists are referring to as the sixth, muscular sense){7}, and our ingrained, visceral sensitivity to morphological and textural dynamics. As humans are increasingly so.llicited to invest realms accessible exclusively through virtual agents - clones and masks - we have to develop different notions of presence, behavior and feeling. Being able to enjoy infinite reach and dispersed existence when navigating in a world without objects (Malevich's Gegendstandslose Welt) is a colossal step in our life as a species. 700,000 years ago, when Homo erectus presapiens' literally stood up for evolution and thus modified his vital space, this move instigated dramatic changes. Our current incursion into new realms of space and time will no doubt precipitate unforeseen ways of being, perhaps a move from Homo sapiens to Homo sentiens. In order to potentiate and embrace third millenary protagonists, hypokrites capable of revealing the impossible, unprecedented visions that in turn may become tomorrow's realities, cyberspace must engender its own poetic identities, quicksilver spectra charged with new pathos. For this, we need energy, imagination, and guts, more than ever before. NOTE This is essentially the original form of my paper. Invariably, though, debate during 5CYBERCONF left its mark. As it was possible to acknowledge this exchange only partially (unreferenced quotes above were gleaned in the Madrid hive), I wish to thank all participants for their generous, stimulating, salutary influence. FOOTNOTES {1} See Antonin Artaud, "Le Théâtre alchimique" (1932), pp.73-80, Le Théâtre et son double, Paris, Gallimard, 1964. {2} See Ferdinando Taviani, "Position du masque dans la commedia dell'arte", pp.119-134 in Le Masque. Du rite au théâtre, Paris, Editions du CNRS, 1985. {3} Sandy Stone has described "the little conflicts and fights about who gets to look out of your eyes". In My Friend, Jimi Hendrix's virtual counterpart (his reflection) is the symbol of real loneliness: his gaze cannot get beyond his own mirror image ("I feel so dizzy I take a quick look in the mirror to make sure my friend's with me too"). The ache of Hendrix's pre-cyberian (swan)-song makes it clear that solitude and the introversion loops it induces are not exclusively imputable to computer civilization. {4} Jeanne Randolph used this expression during discussion which followed her keynote address, "Technology and the Meaningful Body", at the Green Mill Dance Forum, Melbourne, in 1995. See Hilary Trotter (ed.), Is Technology the Future for Dance?, The Green Mill Dance Project Papers, Braddon, Ausdance, 1996, pp.17-25. {5} See Marcos Novak, "Liquid Architectures in Cyberspace", pp.225-254 in Michael Benedikt (ed.), Cyberspace: First Steps, Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 1992 (2nd printing). {6} Reference here is to research carried out by Norman Badler et al at the University of Pennsylvania, creators of Jack, a software human animation system featuring high level task control and knowledge bases. The value of this system for utilitarian applications is unquestionable. See Norman Badler, Cary B. Phillips, Bonnie Lynn Webber, Simulating Humans, New York, Oxford University Press, 1993. {7} See Jean-Pierre Roll, "Le Sentiment d'incarnation. Arguments neurobiologiques", pp.18-31 in Du Corps au corpus technologique, Blagnac, Odyssud, 1996.

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