Parnassus Performance Laboratory
Human studies in Artificial performance
Parnassus Performance Laboratory (PPL) is a venue in Virtual Reality (VR) for
contemporary performance. It is a place for studies in/of the artificial and is itself a study
in the pursuit of a human frontier at the intersection of performance and technology.
What is actually sacrosanct or unique about the person-to-person encounter… about human beings spending time together in a real place? The question itself is vexing to performance makers, and to people generally, who strongly resist notions that technology can enhance or expand upon unmediated human encounters. Yet it also makes sense that, in a culture saturated with algorithmic and technologically mediated communication experiences, we can learn about our world only by thoughtfully and fully embracing such technologies in the study of ourselves. Thus, this question – What human utility can VR and machine intelligence offer? – is paramount in the PPL experiment.
PPL’s projects dive deeply into human-machine collaborations and/in mixed realities in order to find the expansive (or previously unimaginable) possibilities in technological mediation. We are unmoved by simple fears that human encounters are being “replaced” by technology. ​​
While it is clear that commerce alone cannot steer technological development along a humane vector, PPL is developing rigorously collaborative projects wherein artists create in concert with VR and/or AI technologies…in good faith that there is previously inconceivable (human) beauty and (humane) engagement in such collaborations. This is PPL’s exploratory mission.
Following this directive, accessibility is critical. As PPL explores modes of creativity and communication – both as features of performance and as aspects of everyday life –which are distinct from what has been known prior to AI and VR technologies, sharing of this work is inseparable from its construction. ​​​​​​​
The intra- and inter-communication between spectators and stage players (in a performance dynamic) or between people in everyday life is no less fundamental in VR (or mixed reality) than in real life. In many ways, it is more complex. Similarly, machine intelligence, as we engage it collaboratively and creatively, also requires that spectatorship and shared reception be a constant object of examination in our work.
Thus, PPL has been installed on a VR platform that permits people anywhere to access it. A virtual game platform called VRChat permits a robust, shared access to PPL, which we do not need to maintain or service technically. Also, a private platform that would allow for high resolution graphics to be shared in VR would not only be the exclusive province of a large corporation, but it would also restrict access to an invited few with a high degree of technical proficiency and expensive equipment. Prior to the advent a “web 3.0,” we are choosing to work with extant technology. Yet, PPL does not perceive to be restrictive the choice to construct environments and avatars that are radically low in their visual resolution (by necessity, due to the technical limits of the platform). Rather, we see our expanding collection of studies to be helpfully and enthusiastically aimed at imagining what is possible, rather than competing with large for-profit ventures for the flashiest or the most true-to-life spectacle. ​
When artist-players work together in VR, or when spectators encounter these artists, our work is with sensations of spatial proximity and connectivity that the technology offers, no matter how high the resolution nor how “real” something looks. Our work is not to trick people with realistic substitutes, but to activate the critical imagination by constructing dynamics that we have not yet encountered.
The point of arrival for PPL is a large lobby, lit from above through an oculus. Connected to the lobby are three theaters, two of which each host a performance piece that continually runs in its respective space. These two pieces exist as they were constructed to be experienced—only in VR. The third theater is a working laboratory for experimentation and development of new modalities and projects.
Playing in the lobby is Anti-gravity Donuts: Performance and Mixed Realities: the “place” of digital proximity, mime & mimesis, and the undetermined vector of emerging virtual technologies...in a pandemic. Anti-Gravity Donuts is a lecture demonstration created and captured in VR, and the first work completed by James Dennen as part of a year-long digital residency at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​
The period of experimentation in VR. The work was ultimately completed as a two-dimensional video document of a series of human performances in a theater in VR that Dennen co-designed and co-constructed with collaborators, and then posted for a year on the Wexner Center’s website.
The investigation was framed by Bertolt Brecht’s social theory of the critical awareness that can emerge at the moment when a particular technology become obsolete as a new technology overtakes it. The influential contemporary string quartet, ETHEL, provided an improvised score and has a visual appearance in the piece as they interpret it musically.
Playing on a loop in one of the theaters (off the lobby of PPL) is Critical Theory 1, a contemporary performance piece composed of spoken text, choreography, improvisation, and music. Work on the project began prior to the pandemic as an experimental, improvisational “game” between choreographer Molly Shanahan and James Dennen, in which they traversed unmarked boundaries among theory, theatre, and dance.
With the changes brought on by the pandemic, the project’s final venue was moved from the live stage into the virtual theater. In the game, Dennen’s avatar reads aloud a very short, dense excerpt from an extant critical theory text (which he has not seen previously), while Shanahan’s avatar develops a short movement phrase, the work on which follows Dennen’s reiterative returns to the beginning of the passage as he tries genuinely to understand the meaning of the passage that he’s reciting.
The improvisations – Shanahan’s as a choreographic accompanist to text, and Dennen’s as a reader aloud of theory in a state of slow apprehension – reach nexus halfway through the game, at which point an authorial reversal takes place, wherein Shanahan’s reiterative refinement of her movement phrase dictates Dennen’s returns to the top of the text passage.
The resulting movement and text piece thus merges the discursive subject matter of the original text with the interpretive aspect(s) of the movement developed over the course of the game. The acclaimed string quartet ETHEL later became part of the process by creating an interpretive, reiterative, improvisational
score.
In another PPL theater plays a full spatio-temporal 3D replica of the VR component of Like Leaves. Like Carrots., a mixed reality performance piece that took place in January of 2024, commissioned by the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Like Leaves. Like Carrots. was authored and performed by mixed intelligence, in response to Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The piece inverts a problematic power dynamic in Godot, which features Lucky, a leashed, indentured individual. Like Leaves. Like Carrots. features a new Lucky 2.0 in VR as the prominent figure, whose dialogue is co-authored by spoken word poet, Michael “Blakk Sun” Powell, and an AI BOT that he co-designed.
​
The vagrants featured in Waiting for Godot are radically recast as a pair of decaying, performing machines in VR, whose words and voices are provided by two life-sized marionettes – physically animated, voiced, and authored by another AI BOT. Beckett is effectively replaced, as author, by Blakk in collaboration with a set of machines.
Like Leaves. Like Carrots. was originally presented as two separate shows that took place concurrently in two different realities (actual and virtual), in two different performance spaces, for two different sets of spectators. The virtual audience consisted of people located all over the world, wearing VR headsets. The live work done by Blakk, Brianna Rhodes (whose movement and dance animated Lucky’s movement), and the string quartet ETHEL, as well as by many operators and technicians, was all done in service of the virtual performance.
​​​​​Inside the virtual theater that houses the Like Leaves. Like Carrots. 3D replica, there also plays a video of the live performance that took place in the Wexner Center where Like Leaves, Like Carrots was commissioned. The projection of this video, of the real bodies in the past in juxtaposition with the (always) presently taking place (constructed)3D version right next to it, may invite visitors into a critical conundrum regarding the way we might regard the flow from an original, missing past to a present document.
For the virtual and actual audiences, the intended subject matters, though inseparable, were distinct. While the virtual experience immersed its spectators in a constructed fiction, tightly narrativized around notions of appropriation and incarceration, the actual performances were to draw spectators toward more open questions about the place of inorganic intelligence and virtual encounters in the theatre and in everyday life.
For inquiries: dennenji@gmail.com