Desktop Theater: Keyboard Catharsis and the Masking of Roundheads

 

Desktop Theater is an ongoing series of live theatrical inventions.

Desktop Theater is made whenever intentional theater-like activity wafts through the layers of unintentional drama and surreal banality encountered in online visual chat rooms.

Street theater for the new Downtown.

In this shared cartoon arena, we are simultaneously static, and in motion; hidden, yet pictured; silent, yet speaking; alone, yet crowded into a small space.

What lures Desktop Theater back to this place again and again?

The opportunity to slip between the cracks of belief and disbelief, to pry ourselves off detachment for this short time before All-Knowingness returns with its constant companion Whatever.

--Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis

A random snapshot moment in Desktop Theater ¹ reveals a postcard-sized background image animated by a scattered assortment of stamp-sized figures. These heterogeneous figures fill a flat screen-based proscenium with fits and starts and hiccups of movement and speech. Behind some of these images, on the other side of screens attached to networked computers on desks around the globe, are members of a loose troupe of actors, writers, artists, and troublemakers conspiring to create Desktop Theater. Behind others are bored teens, multi-tasking industry professionals, long- and short-distance lovers, procrastinating college students, and no doubt a few FBI agents.

Amidst cartoon balloons containing questions about age, sex, and geographical location--and the occasional software query--"prof," "farmer," "Santaman," and the rest make a scene. In response to farmer's anguished lament on the state of his crops, an Iowan named "cowboy" sincerely offers some advice he's gleaned from farm life. The "tree" sagely whispers its simple needs while look-a-like mall-rats swap clothes, hairstyles, and even heads. As a monotonous computer voice recites fractured poetry, the log window belches out a disturbed dynamic: a counter-textual pattern of looping quips and abbreviated, acronymed in-talk layered with quirky improvisational dialogue that lurches toward momentary dramatic encounters.

Since 1997, Lisa Brenneis and I have adapted, directed, rehearsed, and performed live, in "real-time," over 25 different Desktop Theater experiments. ² This article is a first attempt to chronicle these experiments, as well as an inaugural gesture toward answering some of the many questions raised by our activities:

--What constitutes theater?

--How might drama be expressed when separated from the body, the voice, and shared space?

--Can poetic speech and changes in expression or gesture attract and sustain group attention in an arena of constant distraction?

--What new languages exist in this forum?

--How might theatrical play be used to examine the striking shift in consciousness ushered in by ubiquitous computing?

We can only hope to answer these questions in dialogue with others. And so, even though the form and practice of Desktop Theater is in its infancy, we feel compelled to share our work to date and offer it for consideration and further experimentation.

Beginning with Gaming

The idea for Desktop Theater began, innocently enough, in dialogues between Brenneis and myself as we ventured onto existing visual chat and game-centered online spaces. Like many other non-gamers, we were intrigued by the communicative potential inherent in these dynamic environments. Having first encountered the 2-D audio-visual chat rooms of the Palace <http://www.palacetools.com> back in 1994, I revisited the application with Brenneis in preparation for our UCLA class in multimedia narrative. Our shared interest in distributed narrative (Brenneis's lengthy production credits include Nintendo games and museum exhibits, while my most recently completed artwork was the CD-Rom road movie MAUVE DESERT [1997]) were further piqued by our discovery of Massively Multiplayer Online Gaming. ³

We decided to spend some time in both chat and game environments and find out what kind of fun we could have in them and what kind of meanings could be made.

Before discussing successful Desktop Theater experiments, I'd like to relate one rather less fruitful foray into...