Intro | The Text | Reading Rilke as Music | Interaction | Reading Rilke as Performer

Reading Texts in Real Time:
The Dramatic Voice in/of Interactive Media
Katherine BERGERON, University of California, Berkeley
Joseph ROVAN, University of North Texas

Published in Proceedings, Ninth Biennial Symposium on Arts and Technology, Connecticut College, February 2003. (download) (see video excerpts)

Introduction

What is the cause, and the cost, of insight? What does it mean to see the world face to face? These were questions raised by the young Rilke in a well-known passage from his Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, a Parisian diary he kept in 1904 while serving as personal secretary to Rodin. They are also questions lying at the heart of Vis-à-vis, a multimedia work for voice, live electronics and real-time video, which takes Rilke’s words as a dramatic point of departure.

This paper begins by addressing the formal and psychological aspects of "Vis-à-vis" as a way of understanding the piece’s attitude towards, and use of, interactive technology. Performing within a dense sonic landscape whose electronic sounds are based entirely on her voice, the solo singer interacts, in effect, with a computer to convey the drama of Rilke’s unusual text. The interactive score, written in MAX/MSP, makes the computer a virtual performer, listening and responding to the changing musical events in its own terms. A level of independence—or "obstinance"—designed into the real-time environment creates an ever-changing system.

Together with the electronic score, the piece’s five scenes are illuminated by a corresponding visual score, assembled in real time by means of another custom program, written in the video-programming environment Onadime. Much of the visual material is, as in the audio score, based on different aspects of the singer’s visage. The exception is a single visual quotation, a haunting image of a woman caught unawares by the turn-of-the-century Parisian photographer Eugène Atget. The aim was to deploy the two layers of interactive media to suggest the dramatic structure itself—the shifting psychological relationship between the woman who sings (the “I” narrating the story) and the nameless woman who is ultimately the subject of Rilke’s narration. Incorporating the creative perspectives of composer and performer, this paper will approach the question of reading Rilke as both text and act. (next page)