Top: Recreation of Rebecca Horn's studio in West Berlin employed in the performance Scratching Both Walls at Once. Bottom left: Recreation of the space employed by Joseph Beuys at the René Block Gallery for the performance I Like America and America Likes Me. Bottom right: Recreation of the studio in Southampton, New York employed by Bruce Nauman in the performance Walking in an Exaggerated Manner around the Perimeter of a Square.
A Haunting of Haunts is a collection of media kits that allow artists to reenact or create new networked performance art based on landmark performances. It provides media in image and 3D formats that can be employed within a number of networked environments.
Each kit contains a high resolution PNG image of the scene of a performance, a Collada 3D file and the source scene Blender file.
- Image (.png): The 3D rendered images are uncompressed PNG's at 1080p (1920px x 1080px) resolution. The images can be used as video backgrounds in video conferencing applications such as Zoom, Skype or through video streaming/mixing applications such as CamTwist and OBS.
- Collada (.dae) 3D: The Collada files have been specifically optimised and exported for importing into Second Life. Once imported the models will need to be scaled to size and textures can be added as required. Textures used in the original Blender source are provided in an accompanying media folder. The Collada 3D files can also be imported into 3D environments such as Unity or various other 3D/VR/AR applications that enable models to be imported. However, if the provided Collada 3D file is not optimised or high quality enough for your target 3D environment please revert to the Blender source to export to a suitable format and quality.
- Blender (.blend) source: The source Blender files can be improved, reworked, added to or remixed in any way and exported as image, video or 3D file formats. They have not been optimised for any specific target 3D environment. If you are exporting for Second Life, for example, you will be required to reduce the number of vertices to below 65,536 and join many of the small/thin meshes to allow importing and enable scaling in Second Life.
Artist's are encouraged to freely employ provided media within their reenactments of landmark performance art or as source media for their own performances.
There are a number of ways to contribute to A Haunting of Haunts:
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The reenactment or creation of performances with media provided.
- Performances can be created through the use of the provided performance image or Collada 3D file. To have documentation of the performance included as part of this repository contact Garrett Lynch (IRL) through GitHub.
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The reworking of current performance media.
- Media provided as part of performances listed in this repository can be improved, reworked, added to or remixed in any way through its provided source and exported as image, video or 3D. Reworked media can be included in a branch repository. To request inclusion in the master branch please file a merge request.
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The creation of new performance media.
- New performance media i.e. of performances not currently included in this repository, can be created and included in branch repositorys from the master branch. To request inclusion in the master branch please file a merge request.
During the lockdowns of the Covid 19 pandemic in 2020 networked technologies that were not particularly new or innovative were rediscovered as a means to communicate during social distancing. Video conferencing in particular quickly become the standard adopted means of work, education and collaboration. In a sense old became new again, was presented as if it never was, quickly integrated as part of essential communication infrastructures and its use became a key skill.
Networked performance practices have for many years been defined by these networked technologies and their form. Consequently, the pandemic brought to the fore several questions about this type of artistic practice. If the use of networked technologies is now a key everyday skill employed widely, can networked performance truly align itself with technology art, as it often has been (Zapp 2004; Dixon 2007), or does it revert to a closer relationship with performance art of the 20th century? If the latter is the case, and for many it is highly contentious that it qualifies as having any relationship with those art forms (Phelan 1993; Salter 2010; McHugh 2011), has networked performance become isolated within art history? Is it pushed to irrelevance by the current popularisation and commonisation of its technological forms, doomed to be haunted by its artistic predecessors?
In response to these questions and the condition of performance in confinement I started, during lockdown, to model a series of scenes in 3D that recreate the locations of landmark performance art. All performances selected occurred in the interior spaces of an artist’s home, studio or residency to reflect on the confined circumstances artists were now required to create within during the pandemic. The result is a series of scenes for networked performance that consist of 3D rendered images and models created from video and photography documentation of the original performances. The artist who originally performed is absent from each scene allowing new artists to 'virtually' occupy the spaces and create new performances. Distributed through GitHub under a Creative Commons by Attribution license, the scenes are created 'after' or in the manner of the original artists. They constitute a form of instruction, guide or performance media kit that enables new artists to reenact performances or create new works inspired by the originals within the context of digital technology and networked performance. The media kits can be employed within various networked environments such as through Zoom or Skype's virtual backgrounds or as imported models in Second Life, Unity or various other 3D/VR/AR applications.
The series is intended to facilitate the exploration of what can be achieved when spatial and corporeal possibilities are on the one hand limited or simplified but the necessity of technology to view performance is on the other a way to move beyond those limitations. This is most obviously demonstrated in how artists can appear out of their actual living or studio spaces and in another. The spaces/props and the bodies/actions of the performances, however, are only 'virtually' co-present: technically in image, through bluescreening, 3D rendering, interpretation etc. and conceptually through the concept of hautology. While employed network technologies remove the limitations of an occupied space, artists have to refer to what they know, such as landmark performances, or what their current frame of reference lets them imagine, perhaps a performance in a space they know. This existing awareness of performances and spaces known in a sense haunts all new performances by artists, a condition that spans all creative practices in post-modernism and beyond.
- Dixon, S., (2007). Digital performance: a history of new media in theater, dance, performance art and installation. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- McHugh, G., (2011). Post internet. Brescia: LINK Editions.
- Phelan, P., (1993). Unmarked: the politics of performance. London: Routledge.
- Salter, C., (2010). Entangled: technology and the transformation of performance. Cambridge: MIT Press.
- Zapp, A., (2004). Networked narrative environments as imaginary spaces of being. Manchester: Cornerhouse Publications.
A Haunting of Haunts has been created with the free and open-source 3D computer graphics software Blender. In addition numerous free, Creative Commons, Open Source or fair use media has been used in the creation of each performance scene's media. Full credits for these are given within each performance scene's folder.
A Haunting of Haunts is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.