TECHNOPARTICIPATION

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Scrapbooks, secrets and stories ... I’ve published a reflective account about poetry and film work about my teenage scrapbook in the latest issue of Body Space Technology journal. Read here: https://www.bstjournal.com/article/id/9882/

#digitalstorytelling #performanceart #performancepoetry #multimedia #technoparticipation

#performancepoetry #liveart #performanceart #poetryfilm #videopoetry #newmedia #spokenword #poetrycommunity

ZOOM PERFORMANCE FOR PRAGUE BIENNALE (2022) 

PROJECT BACKGROUND

Technoparticipation explores what it may mean to traverse physical and virtual, digital and technological worlds pedagogically and explore the application of critical theory from the (fine) arts to cultural narratives of the Internet; to discover new ways of seeing (pedagogically) through the Internet.

At the start of 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak, I edited my first collection, a two-part book volume on critical performance pedagogy, Leap into Action. 

One of the sections of that volume, called Technoparticipation explored, in both theory and practice,critical  digital performative pedagogy as a space that embodies polycontextuality (Elstad, 2016), the condition of being in more than one space at the same time. In terms of having multiple concurrent 'presences', Technoparticipation authors considered how disruptive (positively and negatively) polycontextuality can be for creating a 'third place’. Thinking about digital technology as a kind of disruption, I invited authors to explore ‘how can the digital teaching and learning space be imagined or reimagined as a site for creative interruption?’. Proposing that some of the by-products of a digital teaching space might be the glitches that happen in virtual/online space, authors put forward examples of where glitching can be artistically employed in a really creative way. 

No one could have ever predicted that only three months after the launch of Leap into Action at the end of 2019 at London College of Communication, with the Covid-19 pandemic outbreak and the UK being placed under lockdown in March 2020, would the questions and ideas underpinning Techoparticipation become so pertinent not just to those working in education, but to everyone who experienced varying forms of disruption to their daily lives. 

I define critical digital pedagogy as a philosophy and social movement where the digital is the framework within which critical pedagogy is practiced. As an artist, educator and interdisciplinary practitioner with pedagogical interests in the role of technology for improving access, participation and collaboration within the arts, I employ technology to rapidly multiply the spaces and opportunities for collaboration and participation — to achieve what I define as technoparticipation — using the digital learning environment as a space to not only reflect upon artistic practice, but also to produce it as well as prompt statements and responses to its limits. Technoparticipation is also the name given to a research project I first conceived in 2015 at Loughborough University thanks to the generous funding support of a Teaching Innovation Award to explore how technology becomes an additional performer/participant. In other words, how technology participates. I am particularly interested in moments of disruption, when technology interrupts what I am doing and through that disruption opens up new possibilities for thinking, practice and creativity.  Tapping into the increasing importance of digital and virtual realities in students’ lives — while helping students to engage with multiple technologies to build digital literacy, thus ensuring that teaching and learning does not displace students’ unique life experiences — Technoparticipation aims is to disrupt the digital space pedagogically and explore how the interruptive plays out in the specific context of digital pedagogy. 

The latest iteration of the project is the online Digital Pedagogies Open Studio co-set up between myself, Richard Parry and Natasha Sabatini at the University of the Arts London, an online space accessible to both staff and students where personal approaches and personal narratives shed light on key questions/ pertinent themes relating to disruptions, interventions and liminalities.

The Digital Pedagogies Open Studio encourages digital criticality and creative learning potential via student engagement in digital technology where educational formats (tutorials, workshops, seminars and so on)are viewed as ‘performative events’ (Nunes 2006: 130–1) to help students develop as autonomous self-reflective thinkers and doers in a constantly evolving digital age. The Digital Pedagogy Open Studio replicates chance happenings and interruptions online and proposes that the dynamic connection between students in a co-creative environment can still function when flow is constantly interrupted by technological imperfections. Rather than airbrushing out glitches and technological disturbances, the online studio sees valuein not just reflecting upon technological imperfections such as momentary on-screen visual freezing but actually deliberately engineering these ‘interruptions’ to happen within teaching. Thinking through how the body may be configured/compromised when we are speaking/communicating online, moments when technology freezes momentarily online during teaching sessions are embraced as they bring in the materiality of the digital. The online studio also recognizes the weirdness when parties are attempting to look at each other but are synchronized, producing a ‘technological uncanny’.

It could be said that online working may be most attractive to those whose artistic practice directly concerns the digital and technological forms of making. Therefore, one of the ambitions of the studio moving forward is to attract a wide cohort of practitioners, who are engaged in physical forms of making, to really encourage contestation, deliberation and debate about what happens when we experience, for example, a painting, a sculpture, the artist’s live physical fleshy body in performance art online. We are keen to use the studio as a locus for discussions concerning what happens when we experience those physical entities through the digital/ through virtual presence and how this mayaffect viewer engagement? Is it altered? Is it compromised? How can the digital positively disrupt our ways of thinking around presence, encounter and engagement?

Another iteration of Technoparticipation are Lee Campbell's live Zoom performances. By the end of 2020, my work took a major turn when I started using films I had made as green-screen video backdrops. Emerging as a positive of using Zoom under Covid-19 lockdown restrictions, I explore the possibilities of how Zoom can really enhance my creativity in what I am doing in terms of combining my performance and live cinema practice, and generate a way of working with Zoom which can be something that isn’t just ‘more of the same’ but as an immersive storytelling prototype. Making full usage of Zoom’s video green screen effect as a performative filmic backdrop, this involves me creating a bridge between video, poetry and performance and, in turn, proposing a new way of thinking about what the somewhat tired term ‘collage’ may be. 

Embodying what I term as technoempathy, in December 2021, I invited members of the UAL LGBTQ+ student network to attend a presentation of this performance as an iteration of DPOS. Having watched the performance, students fed back how they the performance generated a space of technoempathy to break down hierarchies between student and tutor in two ways. First, in terms of me and the students as mutual practitioners by me demonstrating, a performative embodiment of polycontentuality in terms of how I combine physical and virtual forms during the performance including the tape reocrder and cassette from the the football match I attended with my Dad in the 1989 and the photocopies of a large scrapbook I made as a teenager between 1993-1998 which I rip to pieces in a pronounced moment of emancipation. Secondly students feedback they appreciated the level of honesty that I shared with them in terms of revealing, at times, quite difficult personal subject matter but subject matter that they themselves could empathise and relate to: ‘I smuggled Gay Times too!’ said one student ‘I fancied George Michael as well ‘said another. Then we began exploring the optics at work for both audience and performer/speaker when engaging in Zoom and how these may be (re)considered in terms of potentially opening up ways of thinking about the content of these performances: queer visibility and  queer optics. We identified the virtual encounter as  a sort of crossed gaze in a way - you are looking but you are not being looked back. Online parties cannot look at each other in the eye — this kind of direct visual encounter with another human is interrupted completely in addition to the delay in reaction time. We connected how queer people see and are seen to Zoom’s optical one-way street, visual and sonic interruptions, disruptions, interferences etc.

 

There will always be a latency or lag between  what is seen on screen and what is heard when the work is performed on Zoom. However, that quality is not seen as a negative in the context of these performances where the importance and clarity of hearing and understanding is deliberately obscured/ intentionally difficult to decipher; an intentional confusion to suggest that the audience may not understand what's going on. The possibility of lagging and buffering, interferences, interruptions etc. creates a texture that has resonances with some of the difficulties that these students said they have experienced or are currently experiencing in terms of being heard/seen

One student mentioned that they could perfectly relate to how this textural quality that I achieve here underlines and reunderlines various points. They loved the repetition of the eye eye eye, the every cut every rip in my scrapbook, the double entendre of tackle, the SEE ME, the gay slang terms bears and cubs, all use repetition as such a propulsive force to emphasize significant themes and experiences that both me and the student both share. Obstacles are often deliberately put in the way for some many queer folk to come out where they are unable to express their (queer) ide ntity directly/clearly or express it in any way at all. Containing so many visual and audio clashes and dizzying sound levels for texture and difference, the layering subsides in places and towards the end and the taunts are heard more clearly, the eye eye, ete, ete, Digitisation of the moving imagery, the sounds, and my body as the performer via Zoom and couching my performance within the  Zoom landscape helps to achieve the effects of discombobulation, dizziness and confusion a student remarked. Whilst there are moments throughout the performance where I make everything super clear, then I go back out. One student commented that the discomfort weirdly enough made him feel like he was in the room with me and that the interruptions, craziness, and everything being so distorted visually made it better than it being smooth otherwise it would have felt like a just another slide show, he commented. ‘I loved the fact, he said, as a queer man, that everything in the performance is not perfectly synchronized, underlining form is content.’ 

Whilst there are moments throughout the performances where I make everything super clear, then I go back out. These are performances where the importance and clarity of hearing and understanding is deliberately obscured/intentionally difficult to decipher; an intentional confusion to suggest that the audience many not understand what's going on, but more to use the interruptions/disruptions/interferences that Zoom green screen effect may have on the viewing/listening experience to relate to the difficult that a lot of queer people experience themselves in terms of visibility. Being seen, not being seen, being heard, not being heard etc, especially when discovering their sexuality at a young age in spaces/places where being anything other than heterosexual is frowned upon/not accepted and obstacles are deliberately put in someone’s path to coming out or feeling they are unable to express their (queer) sexuality directly/clearly or express it in any way at all. The lo-resolution, the possibility of lagging and buffering create a texture within the performance that relates to the difficulties that queer people can experience to be heard/seen.

SELECTED PUBLICATIONS 

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Leap-into-Action-Performative-Pedagogies/dp/1433166402

Dominant cultural expectations of ‘the student’ are moving steadily away from receiving collective instruction in a passive manner towards being able to individually (re)cons- truct the place, pace, timing and nature of any engagement with learning. As such, digital technologies are frequently described as reconfiguring contemporary forms of education. (Selwyn, 2011: 156)

In response to Nick Selwyn above, as we accept digital technology in everyday life, so too should we accept it as a learning tool. Yet, is technology really a learning tool or is it more of a way of socialising? Or can it function as both? Critical Digital Pedagogy is a philosophy and social movement where the digital is the framework within which critical pedagogy is practised. Students develop as autonomous self-reflective thinkers and doers in a constantly evolving digital age. Paige Abe and Nickolas A. Jordan suggest, ‘using social media in the classroom creates a new pat- tern of social encounter’ (2013: 17). Digital teaching practice should be viewed less as ‘social encounters’ (ibid.) and more as ‘performative events’ (Nunes, 2006: 130– 131). Within this event the student is ‘anything but marginal’ (ibid.: 130).

Developing a diverse identity as an artist, educator and interdisciplinary practitioner, my pedagogical interests have opened out to include questions of inclu- sivity in terms of the role of technology for improving access, participation and collaboration within the arts. Drawn from these interests, Part III explores the possibilities as well as the blind spots of enacting a Critical Digital Performative Pedagogy. It challenges learning taking place purely in the real ‘physical’ world with contributions by authors who are tutors who generate technoparticipation. They tap into the increasing importance of digital and virtual realities in students’ lives by helping them to engage with multiple technologies that build digital lite- racy thus ensuring that teaching and learning does not displace students’ unique life experiences.They employ technology to rapidly multiply the spaces and oppor- tunities for collaboration and participation—to achieve technoparticipation—using the digital learning environment as a space to not only reflect upon artistic practice but also to produce it as well as prompt statements and responses from students as

introduction to its limits. Many authors in contributions prior to Part III write about role of the (physical) body and embodied experience in teaching and learning. 

A selection of contributions in Part III interrogate what digital forms of teaching and learning may mean for tutors providing possibilities for sensory engagement/immersion amongst students. Indeed, these contributions (Campbell, Childs and Childs) aim to uncover ‘the point at which the body is crucial’ (O’Gorman, 2015) in terms of achieving sensorial bodily immersion through digital/virtual means in class.

Campbell, L. 2017. ‘Technoparticipation: The use of digital realia in arts education’, Spark: UAL Creative Teaching and Learning Journal, Vol 3 / Issue 1 (2017)
https://sparkjournal.arts.ac.uk/index.php/spark/article/view/74

Campbell, L. 2017. Technoparticipation: performance art, mobile phones and audio instructions. Vocal Eyes. Available at http://vocaleyes.co.uk/technoparticipation-performance-art-mobile-phones-and-audio-instructions/

Campbell, L. 2016. ‘Cinematic Interruptions’, Viewfinder, British Universities Film and Video Council, November 
2016 http://bufvc.ac.uk/articles/cinematic-interruptions

SELECTED CONFERENCE PROCEEDINGS (where I have given research-informed teaching practice papers on

technology-enhanced learning)

2017 INVITED GUEST LECTURE 
LITE Masterclass: Technoparticipation – Digital Realia Possibilities for Practice and Pedagogy Leeds Institute of Teaching Excellence, University of Leeds

http://teachingexcellence.leeds.ac.uk/events/lite-masterclass-technoparticipation-digital-realia-possibilities-for-practice-and-pedagogy/

Watch full lecture here
https://mymedia.leeds.ac.uk/Mediasite/Play/ebd1b81a7c044ce1aaddbbc731a58c721d

 Digitally Engaged Learning, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
2017 Digitally Engaged Learning, Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London
Link to my paper: http://www.digitallyengagedlearning.net/2017/sessions/technoparticipation-the-use-of-digital/#technoparticipation-the-use-of-digital

2017 Developing Theory into Practice in Higher Education, City University, London
Link to my paper: 
http://www.city.ac.uk/lead/conference-events/learning-at-city/conference-sessions/session-3g-paper-1

2016 Performative Pedagogy (invited guest speaker), University College Cork

2015 Inspiring Research, Loughborough University

2015 eLearning 2 Conference 2015, Brunel University. Link to my paper:  
https://www.slideshare.net/secret/i2S0XmK1oqj8YF

Technoparticipation, Nottingham Trent University (June 2015) 

Technoparticipation, University College Cork, Ireland (July 2015) 

This discussion-centred session concentrated on the usage of technology to explore aspects of Performance, participation and pedagogy and consisted of presentations of practice and research firstly by Dr. Lee Campbell, who spoke about his pedagogic and performative uses of Bluetooth and Skype technology. This was followed by a presentation via Skype from Dr. Mark Childs who explained instances of his practice and research exploring concepts relating to virtual performance. This was followed by a brief Skype presentation from Annie Morrad who shared her innovative deployment of Skype in terms of making artwork and specifically how she and her collaborator Ian McArthur make positive performative usage of the reverb echo Skype can cause. Whereas most us try to engineer the reverb out, Morrad and McArthur use it as a staple in their work. Throughout the session, external audiences posted up their comments, observations and questions about what they heard via live Panopto stream using the Twitter hashtag #technoparticipation.