The TGarden Performance Research Project

The Tgarden Dreamed

When you walk into a TGarden,¹ you choose from a set of sumptuous garments, each with a different strangeness. Some billow around you in clouds of fabric, so that you grow three times larger but no heavier. Some add an odd elasticity to your body, so you tend to flop as you walk. Some may rip as you walk, or stick to each other or the walls, so you must tear yourself free as you disambiguate your body from ambient matter.

You notice, as you enter the room, that there are a few other people – costumed, unlike yourself. It is hard to distinguish some of them from the projected visual textures sweeping over every part of the floor and the walls. As you move you notice that you leave a trail behind you. The air is filled with a hubbub of sound. Everything visual and auditory seems somehow made by living entities, but you cannot place them. The room has aquatic kinematics, but there are no identifiable creatures of the sea.

As you wave your arms you notice, perhaps immediately, perhaps after a while, that some aspect of the room's sound space varies according to your movement. But it takes a fair amount of play to begin to understand what is happening. A particular gesture does not always elicit exactly the same sound; it seems as if you are dragging your fingers and limbs across materials like wool or metal sheet or rubber. If you can learn how to move to generate some desired effect, then you can begin to write calligraphically and play as if you were "bowing" through the medium.²

Five years ago, I described this vision of TGarden to my companions in the Sponge and FoAM networks of artists and engineers³ Many popular imaginaries condensed around this dream, and it became a project into which at first four and eventually over twenty-five artists and engineers poured heart, body, and craft. As the set of creators shifted, the vision refracted according to the interests and professional biases of the creators,⁴ until the dream of the TGarden responsive play space materialized as an installation-event called TG2001, which we exhibited in ten cities over five generations of work in the three years from 2000 to 2002⁵

This essay is a Janusian exercise in retrospection and anticipation. I document the imagined TGarden to lay the groundwork for a future series of installation- events and performances. This documentation serves three purposes. My first purpose is to describe the kind of theatrical inquiry that the TGarden materializes⁶ My second purpose is to describe the conceptual and aesthetic theatrical research questions and arguments that the TGarden poses in tangible form. The TGarden was born from a conversation among members of an experimental art-research group called Sponge, founded by Laura Farabough, Chris Salter, and myself in 1997. In order to understand the TGarden project, you should keep in mind that it is a poetic response to some challenges concerning performance and responsive media technologies. Finally, my third purpose is to locate the TGarden with respect to Antonin Artaud's, Peter Brook's, and Jerzy Grotowski's notions of theatre and performance, a way to place the interface between this kind of materialized performance research and modernist traditions of theatrical inquiry.

The Tgarden Built: TG2001

The TGarden project produced a series of installation-events, beginning with prototype systems exhibited at Siggraph 2000 in New Orleans, LA, and at Medi@Terra 2000 in Athens, Greece. Following those studies, the environment was redesigned and built afresh by an expanded team of artists and engineers. ⁷ The TG2001 responsive play space was realized as a co-production between the Sponge and FoAM art-research groups and a consortium of institutions, including The Banff Centre / New Media Institute, Starlab in Brussels, the Georgia Institute of Technology, V2 Rotterdam, Ars Electronica in Linz, and the Daniel Langlois Foundation for Art, Science and Technology...