Page 4 - Expanded Media & the MediaPlex

Expanded Media - and the MediaPlex 4/206
Paul Philipdor + Étienne-Gaspard Robert (aka Robertson): Phantasmagoria 1801
We start our chronofile of media-art innovations with a form of theatrical audio-visual presentation that invited the audience to immerse themselves in a suspension of disbelief less cerebral than a dramatic play or opera - much more visceral in fact - Etienne-Gaspard Robert boasted that he wanted to really frighten his audience. The Phantasmagoria perhaps had more in common with a modern theme-ride than a conventional theatrical experience. Right at the beginning of the 19th century then, we have the first modern iteration of a theme that artists will turn to again and again over the next 200 years - the idea of a multi-media, immersive art form that evoked a primitive, collaborative, participation in an experience that was quasi-religeous, exhortative, physical and transporting. In recent times we have had Artaud’s Theatre of Cruelty, the Living Theatre, the Happening, the ‘Technicolor Dream’, the Pop Festival, the Rave, - often an amalgum of media forms related to the same kind of religeous-mystical experience that was once the preserve of orthodox religion.
I have this fascination with imagining the kind of primordial campfire gathering that must have been a norm amongst our ancient nomadic hunter-gatherer ancestors. The fire-light, the coloured smoke, the star-light, the moon-light, the shamen-performer, the stories drawn from the collective memory and wisdom of the tribe - the long mnemonics - what Alfred Lord called the Singer of Tales - the infinite variety of the Song, the weaving together of a story relevant to those listening and participating - singing the chorus, the enactments of bits of the story, the miming, the jokes, mimicry, the laughter, the dancing, the acrobatics, the music, the drumming, the face-making and face-markings, the ululation, the cries of fear, of joy, the ghostly moon flitting clouds, the shooting stars, the vast milky way, the infinitude of it all, the wild, the firelit tribal family together....
Is it those 15-20 thousand years of our nomadic evolution, our portability, our family-tribal unity around the fire and the food, after the hunting/gathering - that we try to re-evoke vicariously in these multi-media performances?
Arran Gare has pointed out: “It is argued that stories play a primordial role in human self-creation, underpinning more abstract discourses such as mathematics, logic and science. To uphold the consistency of this claim, this thesis is defended by telling a story of the evolution of European culture from Ancient Greece to the present, including an account of the rise of the notion of culture and its relation to the development of history, thereby showing how stories function to justify beliefs, situate people as agents within history and orient them to create the future.”
Arran Gare: The Primordial Role of Stories (https://cosmosandhistory.org/index.php/journal/article/view/56/112)