Fold II. Digital Ecologies: Digital Dramatizations – Ecologies from the Future

Hamm: Nature has forgotten us.
Clov: There’s no more nature.
Hamm: No more nature! You exaggerate.
Clov: In the vicinity.

Samuel Beckett, Endgame (1955) [1]

In Beckett’s play Endgame, Clov periodically announces the extinction of various things listed by Hamm: there are no more bicycle wheels, pap, nature, sugarplums, tide, navigators, rugs, painkillers, coffins… At least, none remain in the vicinity. It is a haunted play and endgame, haunted by shades and echoes from the future and from the past, by the objects of which he wishes to create hallucination. Digital Dramatizations – Ecologies from the Future revolves around a mystery of objects to withdraw and the distinct obscurity of Beckett’s ecological thought. We wait for something that never arrives. It may have arrived in the no-where, but not in the now-here. And yet as we are waiting, there is an openness to the wonder in our wait that may lead to another encounter – an encounter with the Other, with something strange. We wait for things to become magically different without actually trusting the use of magic, and without realizing that we are ourselves responsible for any change we desire to happen. It is a strange stranger [2] yet to come, an aesthetic (dis)orientation of perceptions towards the future that Digital Dramatizations pursues. It awaits and speculates about the unknowable, a yearning for change and yet in our despair, the obscure object of anxiety and depression. The future is the time of the fall, when the dark becomes deeper and deeper and “the sorrow of the stranger might give us a different angle on happiness not because it teaches us what it is like or must be like to be a stranger, but because it might estrange us from the very happiness of the familiar.” [3]

Digital Dramatizations – Ecologies from the Future approaches ecology through an interspecies performance in a collaboration with non-human agents at the intersections of theater, theatricality, (un)acting and contemporary art. It concerns how ecological thought and its method of dramatization(s) can open up the potentialities of ecologies from the future, of life after life, of nature after nature, of the future after the future. It dis-plays new speculative realities caused by artistic experiment and sensibilization, which is a dramatization of data in the gap between what things are and how they are represented as data. Digital Dramatizations strives to find objects, not the raw sense of data, and dis-play them because the world of things calls for art. Ecological awareness is futurality and aesthetics from the future. And the object of art is the unknowable yet to come: “Art is (from) the future.” [4]

Ecology is neither a paradise nor an alternative to current reality. It is neither utopia nor dystopia, an anagrammatic movement like Erewhon, an anagram of utopia or inverted utopia, [5] like Sci-Fi projects are a refraction of uniform time and the present upon many futures. Ecological sensibility relates to symbioses, to things that co-exist in uneasy ways, says Morton. It calls up, in the potentialities opened up by these futures by rendering life strange, dis-embodied and incorporeal companions whose physicality takes place in humor.

The essence of art is to be accustomed to something strange that unsettles familiarity. In Shklovsky’s words, “in order to transform an object into a fact of art, it is necessary first to withdraw it from the domain of life.” [6] Digital Dramatizations experiments with withdrawing objects from the domain of everyday life to attain an aesthetic (dis)orientation of ecological thought and its flat ontology, such that they re-turn as different realities, and builds upon new forms of attachments, affinities and tenderness. Ecology includes all the ways we imagine how we live together. Let us treat everything equally in the domain of art, in a kind of multimedia opera giving rise to an aesthetic experience in the domain of ecology able to articulate a politics of futurality and an aesthetics of equality. That is, a kinship of futurality, something to do with kindness, [7] a friendship between human and non-human in solidarity with all companions from a weird future, and their sym-poietic transformation into multiple visionary prospects and posters [8] that strike us as strange and troubled. [9] Beckett says of his theatrical method of dramatization: “It’s all symbiosis.” [10] And: “It is a game, everything is a game” that cannot be handled naturalistically but “has got to be done artificially, balletically.” [11] Beckett’s symbiosis is “a game in order to survive,” [12] a strange game always in pairs between extinction and adaptation. It is game of life and death.

There is something eschatological [13] to symbiosis, a parallel evolution to that of Darwin’s individual natural selection. It is rather interspecies affectual affinities, the block of becoming between the wasp and the orchid as mutually affecting species that share symbiotic patterns from which no wasp-orchid can descend. The term symbiosis comes from Greek and means living together (with the other). In Deleuze and Guattari, “if evolution includes any veritable becomings, it is in the domain of symbioses that bring into play beings of totally different scales and kingdoms, with no possible filiation.” [14] Symbiosis is viral, is mutation(s). It is “transversal communications between heterogeneous populations.” It is invention driven by a quantitative series of intensities through which kingdoms enter new alliances and weird kindships. “Ecology, after all, is the thinking of beings on a number of different scales, none of which has priority over the other.” [15]

Ecology is not a community, but simultaneously working together, symbioses. They are Beckett’s aesthetic device, forms of unexpected symbioses of affectual belonging. Symbioses are comic events. Being ecological, i.e., symbiotically related, is solidarity, which is the “default affective environment” [16] of the biosphere with its ever changing (dis)equilibrium and no ideal state. A dark comedy of coexistence in which everything that is being said and done will turn from drama into comedy as we “act, in imagination, with those who act, and feel with those who feel; in a word, give your sympathy its widest expansion” [17] as the performative forces “pass from grave to gay.” [18] Digital Dramatizations activates a collectivity, the collective aspect of laughter, as indeed it is always a collective laughter in the plural, a multitude that brings heterogeneous elements into play. It needs an echo to make palpable a collectivity of things happening on a thousand different scales, where it is difficult to define what is on the top and what is at the bottom. And all the while, says Timothy Morton, they are not outside of history.

Dramaticule is a portmanteau invented by Samuel Beckett, composed of dramatic and ridicule, in which the play is reduced to bare essential in an extremely short time – a microplay. Dramaticules is a genre, serial “comic” pieces surrounded by darkness, unacted, are an inspirational source for Digital Dramatizations – Ecologies from the Future. Dramaticules are mechanical ballet, but digitalized and intensified by laughter, when laughter becomes ridicule, without a joke! “Of all the laughs that strictly speaking are not laughs, but modes of ululation,” Beckett mentions three, “the bitter, the hollow and the mirthless,” which correspond to “successive excoriations of our understanding, and the passage from the one to the other is the passage from the lesser to the greater, from the lower to the higher, from the outer to the inner, from the gross to the fine, from the matter to the form. […] But the mirthless laugh is that dianoetic laugh, […] the laugh of laughs, the risus purus, the laugh laughing at the laugh, the beholding, the saluting of the highest joke, in a word the laugh that laughs – silence please – at that which is unhappy.” [19] This brief laugh is a laugh of future (dis)orientation of the emotions.

That is sentimentally prolonged and re-echoed by the power of objects to displace and be displaced as they get a critical awareness of their own invention in the strange world of humor in the form of ridicule, and its weird critique in the (tragi)comedy of coexistence, where art is an affect in-itself of solidarity in coexistence (without a self that seeks representation). Dramaticules in their seriality are plays in a loop, whose dramatization is not so much driven by action but by strange repetition in every turn different to itself that opens up an irreducible gap. Digital Dramatizations is driven by these disjointed moments of fading and rupture – a process of spectralization that affects the exhibition space.

The dramaticule Come and go is an unexpressive play reduced to self-exhaustion and suspended between three times to produce an other “time out of joint” [20] by repetition in variation of the same script, the play of a ghostly trio with a distinctive feminine grace. They are “three faded flowers” [21] wearing three color coats, sitting upright side by side in the heat of stage lights surrounded by darkness, in a state of strange silence inflected by their whispering voices, barely audible to the audience. This interplay of noisy silence and perceptual openness is “an artistic entity no longer conceived as re-presentation, i.e. mimetic expression, of «extracircumferencial phenomena», but as something reflecting upon itself in motu perpetuo.” [22] In “the ghostly dimension of an indefinite impersonal” [23] the distinct-obscure philosophy of laughter revolves around a riddle and unfolds secrets in whispers of life and death, this being the whimsical way in which the future continues to un-fold, playing-displaying-unplaying-replaying the animate and inanimate, organic and non-organic, human and non-human.

Beckett’s dramatic movement of ritornello is not simply a repetition. It is a fantastic de-composition of the self to re-connect with its own virtual production, a “self-estrangement: you recognize yourself as the stranger.” [24] It is like suddenly awaking in the dark from a nightmare, which is collective, like desires. And realizing the entire violence you are exposed to. Ecological awareness requires the dramatization of the art of exhaustion. It is something in retrospect that returns, always different, without equivalent, re-echoing the distinct-obscure, “a ritornello that is essentially motor” [25] by the multiplicity and the continuous potentiality of performativity in-itself. All its resources are in the game, in exhausted language, in the muffled cracking sound, in the whispering of the silence, the “shuffling of slippers,” [26] like the sound of hallucinated rats. A sound like all the dead voices. They make a noise like wings. A noise like leaves. Like sand. Like leaves. They all speak at once. Each one to itself. Rather they whisper. They rustle. They murmur. They rustle. A noise like feathers, like ashes, like leaves and their slapstick echoes of Chinese whispers beyond recognition that make moving objects appear and disappear in the folds of the stage, though they withdraw not behind but in front of the curtain. Actually, there are no more curtains and no more masterpieces. Miraculous circus tricks. That is the strange circus theater of objects – a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object. “The tragic is the effort of reconciliation, which necessarily comes from Apollo. But in Dionysus there is always something which withdraws and repudiates, something which wants to maintain the obscurity of the distinct.” [27]

These twisted peculiar and strange loops make us get “close enough to hear the whisper,” haunted as they are by the ghostly laughter from the future. Sara Ahmed writes that “pregnancy does not, then, create the future; nor is pregnancy the cause of the future. Rather, the future is what happens through the work required to get close enough to hear the whisper, which is always a whisper that somebody else must have heard.” [28] Beckett’s dramaticule Come and Go resembles a game of Chinese whispers, which Ahmed describes as being about the pleasurable perversity of transmission: “We laugh at how the whispering words deviate, so that the words we end up with are not recognizable as the words that were sent out. Deviation is the point and pleasure of the game.” [29] And deviation and proximization are the focal points from where Digital Dramatization approaches data and turns it into a play, a drama of data, a game to draw pleasure from. It is a strange theater, a haunted play, both hallucinatory and physical like the transformation of white light refracted through a prism, a colorful dramatization, a drama of light like the interplay of multiple perspectives of a haptic kaleidoscopic eye and the Proustian telescopic device – vision consciously shifting back and forth between observer and observed. Digital Dramatization engages in a process of refraction of data by the means of art, in which the work of art makes palpable the different scales, in what is at once an ecology and archeology of the future. Time is what makes the future perverse, a time of perversion.

Digital Dramatizations speculates about life after life and nature after nature, or the future after the future. If it is an endgame like in Beckett’s play, are there symptoms that the future is over? And what would the future after the future be? Is there no more trust in the future? No more trust in a heavily futurized financial capital, in an idea of progress that held “the future” to be a temporal form of utopia in the visions of the media generation and the enthusiasm of the revolutionary Cyber culture? The 1970s punk proclamation no future becomes strikingly (un)real, as they refused to re-produce progress. Perhaps we need small doses of a pessimism about a certain kind of optimism. If we are trapped in the “infinity of the present,” how can we imagine an ecology without a future, when ecology would seem to consist in never-ending imaginations about the future? Ecology is always from the future, after the future. It is even a future in-between two other futures. Like the strange stranger, it is tautological, as when the laughter laughs and re-echoes itself. The comic infuses into time its own particular essence, [30] its comic timing, dramatic pauses. It lies in the verb to space. [31] There is always something tragi-comic in the palpable when it takes a concrete form. Ecology can be seen as a black comedy of coexistence, at a turning point when depression and trauma are inverted and welcome a stranger passing by. It is a twisted future that brings about and interrogates a “comedic sense of coexistence,” [32] which encompasses also a comedic nonsense of coexistence, as sense and non-sense, thought and non-thought are always together in a loop which acts and enacts, comes and goes, no-where and now-here, in-between, a strange knowledge of ecognosis, or “knowing in a loop.” [33]

Digital Dramatizations affirms the laughter and its forced movement(s), [34] a dramatic movement stemming from the comic power of the objects to displace and to be displaced. The dramatic work substitutes for the vague hope for change, humor and the rifting laughter. In the ecology of coexistence, laughter driven by humor unsettles the settled and familiar. It is the restless force of change in-itself. The aesthetics of existence is disembodied in the essence of the comic by a sudden leap, when we find ourselves in the blank, in a gap with the marvel-inhuman where time bends into multiple dis-orientations – to the abstract essence of the multiplicity of dimensions in the refractions and eruptions of the unstable boundaries between the familiar and the strange, between life and non-life, between the aesthetics of existence and the freedom of art to speculate about possible realities of the kind of twisted future yet to come. We are all convinced that the essence of art is not imitation. Is it like the cultural meme of endlessly copied and self-replicating information for the sake of information itself in response to selective pressure and replication? Is art information? In a way, information is the abstract physical degree of freedom in which solid matter is dissolved and over-looped between the observer and the observable. Unlike the field of study of memetics, Digital Dramatizations is not about transmitting evolutionary models and behaviorism. Ecology has nothing in common with them, is not equivalent to evolution. Unlike memetics, mimicry is not just the copying and exchange of information, is not about selection and competition, but about survival, adaptation and resistance. It is a play by the work of the laughter, always witty. Ridiculing, it affirms the power of resistance. It is enacted, embodied and comic, a travesty and disguise of the performative. It is a pretentious and hilarious dramatization, divertingly tragi-comic and amusingly theatrical.

For Evreinoff theatre “is infinitely wider than stage.” [35] He argues that everything around us is theater, that mimicry in nature is full of theatrical conventions, even as he passionately fought the naturalization of theater. Nature masquerades, uses mask-wearing for concealment: desert flowers mimic stones; a mouse pretends most dramatically and skillfully to be dead in order to escape a cat’s claws; meanwhile the cat also “plays a role” feigning absolute indifference to the mouse; birds perform complicated dances; etc. Theater is not essentially a man-made thing. For him the transformation and transfigurations of an epoch, its technology and style reflect certain theatrical conventions. Theater is not limited by them. As he adds, sand, rock and stones in the desert may turn out to be plants concealing their presence. He asks: Is nature so natural after all?

Adopting Deleuze’s assertion that “a work of art does not contain the least bit of information,” [36] the project investigates how the theater and its double get rid of old theatrical conventions and painted scenery. The double is not a copy, but a deteriorated and self-estranged mock-up that haunts our post-normal time. It is all about transformation and metamorphoses. They are the very threshold of artistic production. Art is not an imitation of reality, but has curative power to impersonate reality into multiple new realities. It is the strange stranger that “converts the particularity of things into perceptible form.” [37]

Digital Dramatizations does not aim to give equivalence between art and life, to the work of art and daily life. Aesthetic practices both can and cannot transform the work of art into daily life. It is rather concerned with how aesthetic and artistic practices transform daily life into a work of art, which is an aesthetic of existence, not existence of aesthetic, and the aesthetic of existence is in the realm of ecology, too. It approaches art as displacement devices, as devices of dramatic movement in daily life, and as a tool box of transversal disjunctions in the organic, to bring and make palpable the inorganic in the organic and in the everyday. Digital Dramatizations dis-plays a collection of such devices. It involves methods of dramatization and asks how art can transform daily life into ecology, as the aesthetics and politics of ecology is from the future.

Digital Dramatizations engages in methods of dramatization [38] or dramatic movements to discover the essence of and invent an ecological thought that defines its particular space and time. All these conditions define dramatization and correspond to humble questions like who am I?, how much?, how?, where?, when? rather than what is? and who are you? [39] They constitute a strange theater and determine the objecticity that gives account of an ecological awareness defined by potentialities as a double of the possible, their multiplicities, and openness. “It is the inessential which comprehends the essential.” [40] Digital Dramatizations is a study of dramatic movement, an invisible movement in a daily routine. It is interjective, brings out the sensual of the Oh! like the serial and temporal diagrammatic features of a dramaticule. Under this dramatization, ecological thought incarnates or differentiates itself with its own peculiar meaning-content, the eco-logic of sense and non-sense. Digital Dramatizations pursues a weird knowledge of ecological awareness arising from sensualities and allure, produced by a brief laugh, an act of lucidity of the flashing eco-logic thought. The eco-logic is not clear-distinct but distinct-obscure, differentiates itself in a loop like the uroboros, the snake that eats its tail, before becoming actualized as an awareness. Digital Dramatizations has to do not simply with thinking ecologically, with ecological thought, but rather thought as susceptibility, thinking as such as ecology – the structure of thought as nonhuman. Ecognosis. “Ecognosis is like a knowing that knows itself. Knowing in a loop; a weirdknowing.” [41]

Digital Dramatizations speculates on what could be a politics and aesthetics of ecology, a futurological project without anthropocentric wounded narcissism, visionary and non-nostalgic. Following Timothy Morton’s proposal, it asks how we can think darkness and the future without the antagonism of the darkness of the present vs. the brightness of the future. Since one side of the object remains always in obscurity, we need a new degree of intimacy to compose knowledge from the virtual by attuning to the object. “The attunement, which I call ecognosis, implies a practical yet highly nonstandard vision of what ecological politics could be. In part, ecognosis involves realizing that nonhumans are installed at profound levels of the human – not just biologically and socially but in the very structure of thought and logic.” [42] The challenge is to think future coexistence, coexistence unconstrained by present concepts.

“Each epoch has its own theatrical characteristics, its own wardrobe and scenery, its own mask.” [43] The project interrogates the theatrical characteristics of the Anthropocene, and asks with Evreinoff, who struggled to unnaturalize theater: “If our life is a theatre, why should we not make a really good theatre out of it? […] Is it possible that we should be so realistic, tame and lifeless as to accept without protest these dull and tasteless decorations of ours, these rusty and dusty rafters and skeletons? Is a radical reform of the theatrical side of life impossible?” [44]

Ecological awareness is not the answer or the final stage. It is just a getaway from the tasteless decorations, from the rusty and dusty skeletons, an exit from the naturalizing of data, from a simulation, after nature, after the future, towards a non-naturalistic theater. Evreinoff calls his notion of the Theatrarch “the aboriginal source of everlasting transformation of all things living.” [45] And non-living, too. The planetary arch of the biosphere, as a source of everlasting transformations, is not something sustainable. Ongoing continuous disturbances and motions, dissonances and resonances make it the great arc of planetary disequilibrium, rather than equilibrium – and yet somehow attuned.

A metaphor like “Love is a pebble laughing in the sun” [46] recreates love in another dimension, love “as tenable as opposed to its even immanent slippage into the mirage of some narcissistic altruism,” which is actually a wounded narcissism of the anthropocentric ego-thought. The poetic sparks are letters for the unconscious and the structure of the metaphor is a leap – “situated at the precise point at which meaning is produced in nonmeaning.” [47] The metaphor also has a (micro)physical incarnation as “quantum leaps from one state of reality into the next by generating a new relation between objects.” [48] A metaphor can only be thrown towards the rift, like a laughing pebble. It is like in dream work, which is physical work that strips elements that have a physical value of their intensity with its particular mood of thinking, in deep sleep, in which there is a disparity between dream-content and dream-thoughts. The essence of a dream is peculiar. It is the radical alterity of the unconscious. At the same time “the logic of the comic is the logic of dreams,” [49] too. And “in the logic of the laughable all the peculiarities of dream logic” [50] are found, which suggests that in any love there is something comic – love is laughable and the laugh is lovable. “Love probably doesn’t exist,” [51] writes Shklovsky in Third Factory, because “it is not a thing, but a landscape, consisting of a series of objects unconnected to each other, but seen as a whole.” [52]

Digital Dramatizations adopts a strategic anthropomorphism to imagine the group exhibition as a landscape consisting of a series of objects unconnected to each other, but seen as a whole, like a landscape consisting of a series of loving pebbles in the sun – unhuman and uncanny, “lifeless” objects in the absence of man whose essence becomes laughable, a dramatic movement of wave after wave in the gap between their appearance and what they are. Like on a panoramic screen it unfolds itself to the viewer. Love is a dramatic movement in the tautological parallelism of the laughter re-echoing itself.

We need this rift of the comic between the objects, (dis)connected by love metaphors, as an elastic ephemeral bridge with astonishing acrobatic feats. Ecology has metaphoric and meta-physical dimensions of the symbiotic real. It is the bridge that attunes our thoughts to the non-human dimensions. Literary life would not occur without rocks. Life depends on rocks, is written into stone and becomes incarnated in the pebble laughing in the sun. There is some strange pygmalionism in the pebble’s laugh. It is estrangement-at-work. It is a laugh in the gap between what we consider life and non-life, between existence and non-existence. For Henri Bergson “in all laughable objects [there is] something mechanical in something living; in fact, something comic.” [53] We could invert this as well, saying that in every mechanical object there is something laughable, which means there is something living. The comic is not a strictly human phenomenon. Beckett’s dramaticules are breathing plays. We need some sparks of laugh to break things open and break words open, to create patterns of motion, disturbances that cross over different processes of ecological and biological reality – which are not the same, but co-exist. Digital Dramatizations (dis)plays, in the mystical, ghostly appearance of the laughter that breaks and dislocates, displaces and defamiliarizes, how human and non-human interplay, and indeed how we are made of things that are not human. It is an uncanny appearance, unearthly, mysterious, spooky, freaky.

Existence is always co-existing – it is to be accustomed to something strange, a strange stranger that defamiliarizes the familiar to “make stone feel stony” [54] through charm “which feels enchanted by [its object].” [55] Digital Dramatizations is the collective disembodiment of the affective situation of a world without future that makes the future laughable like a pebble laughing in the gap between things and data, with a “compassion for the ephemeral.” [56] This extraordinary uncanny that makes stones dance and love produces sensuality and allure through a “brief laugh.” It is like knowing in a loop, a weird knowing, like a metaphor borrowed from the future. A stream of sparks, flashing visual particles that are not so real but have an effect in reality, being carried and intensified by the existence of art, evolves the dazzling tissue of metaphors, not only because they are telling things ontologically true, but because they are a virtual reality of beauty. “Beauty is the givenness of data.” [57]

Text: Dimitrina Sevova