Participatory performance as a CAT(s+ Resident)

By Sam Mayer CATS+ Computer Club 5: OBS and Participatory Performance, CATS+ Out of the BagPublished: February 1, 2024

This is an artist page by Sam Mayer. This project was part of the 2023 CATS+ Computer Club cohort.

Introduction

I entered the CATS+ residency not knowing much about the technology I use in my art practice. My goal for the residency was to deepen my understanding of the way technology plays a role in my practice, as well as gain new skills from other creative technology practitioners, and begin to build a community of artists for myself here in Austin outside of the university. During the residency I gave a short presentation on participatory performance and presented a first draft of a new lecture-performance in response to the discussions and content of the residency.

Presentation: Participatory Performance

I gave a presentation on participatory online performance at the very beginning of the computer club. Sadly, my notes for this talk have disappeared. However, I still have the powerpoint I made and the four images will have to act as documentation. The only note I have, scrawled cryptically on the back of a sheet of paper, not in my notebook at all, is “allowing actual co-creation with an audience is dangerous.” The rest… Is lost to time.

The Sims

Image from The Seagull on The Sims 4 by Celine Song (2020)

Teri Joe

Montage of live’s hosted by Terri Joe (2022-2023)

Recruitment and propaganda

Image from Twitch stream by AOC (exact date unknown)

TikTok battles

Montage of battles on TikTok, various users (2023)

Lecture "The Collaborative Body"

For the CATS+ showcase during Fusebox I presented a short (20min.) lecture performance. This was the first time I have ever worked so directly with an audience. In a normal poolboy00 performance, my interactions with the audience are mediated through a sieve of technology. Unexpectedly, a result of my time in the CATS+ residency was a resistance towards working with technology. How could I make technology, or technological processes, live in a tech-less performance space. As my cohort mates sped towards integrating arduinos and techno-tricks in their pieces, I felt the urge to slow down and unplug. The residency, in some roundabout way, encouraged me to interrogate more deeply my relationship to technology by working with its absence.

Control & the computer

My work as poolboy has always been about control and the dulling effect of the screen on our ideas of power. As the project has begun to fuse offline/online performance, the performance of this control has had to shift. Exploring the ways a faceless, anonymous audience interacts with a faced, front-and-center performer is impossible in the physical performance space. An audience is right there. Often, you know them personally. How does this experience translate, or, what is a physical form of performance that can act in-dialogue with this online performance? After all, online can never be recreated offline. So to find some kind of physical, performative structure that could exist in conversation with the online performance structure, became the goal of the residency. The structure of my performance was two fold: tasks and prompts. Prompts were a series of pre-written texts in response to my cohorts work as well as general themes of the residency. These would be paired with a series of tasks for me to complete. Both tasks and prompts would be triggered by the audience, at any time, by raising a series of hand-written paddles. While I had a desired structure for the lecture, the audience would swerve this, rewritten the lecture, and challenging me to complete the entire set text while at the same time responding to their prompts and tasks whenever they presented them.

The audience was incredibly responsive to this structure, maybe even too responsive. They were paddle-happy, switching topics and tasks with glee, generally before I had even finished the one I was working on. The result was chaotic and frenetic. I felt unprepared to navigate such rapid shifts, I had not anticipated that the audience would be so gung-ho. As a result, I finished the residency with some new intel. As a performer, I have to create more structures to allow myself to get through the lecture. Perhaps a system to stack prompts/tasks as they come in, so that I can complete one before starting another. Perhaps some other performative discipline I have yet to discover. Either way, the lecture imprinted in me the importance of retaining control, or the feeling of control, in the lecture, even as I invited randomness and chaos. What follows is my written documentation of the performance.

Tasks

• Drink piss
• Spin
• Plank
• I’m bored
• Spit
• Shotgun a beer
• Take it off
• Cite it
• Berg, Ann Quin
• Castle Faggot, Derek McCormick
• Arguments for the Theater, Howard Barker
• On your knees
• Reward

Topics

What follows are my notes for each topic, copy-pasted as-is, from the document they were written in. My hope here is to present a totally realistic depiction of where the text stood at the exact moment the performance started. What actually transpired, what words I actually said, will be forever known only to those at the showcase.

Intro

What follows are my notes for each topic, copy-pasted as-is, from the document they were written in. My hope here is to present a totally realistic depiction of where the text stood at the exact moment the performance started. What actually transpired, what words I actually said, will be forever known only to those at the showcase.

Intro THE BODY THAT COLLABORATES do you need two bodies to collaborate can you collaborate with a computer is a computer just the sum total of the nerds who worked on it who is leading start: workshop end: falcon studios

(())(()) what is the evil thing i am saying about myself (revealing) or what is the good new thing i am saying (revealing) about myself (())(())

Hi everyone good evening thanks for coming to this short lecture, which i have tentatively titled, glance up, “the collaborative body” glance down or “the body, comma, in collaboration.” 10 weeks ago I joined the CATS+ computer club. it was an odd opportunity for me because small pause while I am an artist that works with technology, sort of, smile, i’m pretty bad at computers and don’t really have like a natural faculty with them. however, (touch nose), what i am interested in and what i do do touch nose with my work is play w control and subordination. both with other people, with machines, and with other people and machines. quick glance up then back down.

What do you need to collaborate, do you need two bodies, do those bodies need to be actively involved in an exchange? Can one body collaborate with an amorphous mass of bodies? How about one body and a computer? Is collaboration inherently about a two way exchange? What’s the name for one-sided collaboration? Is a computer just the sum total of the nerds who worked on it? Aka an amorphous mass of bodies?

so i’m going to talk about the work you see in the gallery around you, work that was made by the cohort of CATS+ residents here at MoHA. I’d like to talk a little, briefly, about what that meant, to me, to be in conversation with another group of artists. pause. I am mostly a theater artist, which is very collaborative, but during the early days of the Pandemic apologetic smile I started streaming my life live on Twitch. i would stream for hours on end, glance up, play videos, listen to music, talk to the chat that filtered in and out, get drunk. When I first started streaming it felt really good because I was so alone in my apartment and I had broken up with my ex and was feeling very bored and also hateful (towards myself). Streaming allowed me to feel like I was doing something while also not doing anything. I liked the feeling of being inside the frame of my computers camera, taking my shirt off, letting my nipples go in and out of view. I liked the feeling of talking to a sea of faceless usernames, who would never see each other, who would only sense and interact with each other, all while looking at me. i liked watched the chat develop relationships with each other , knowing that these connections had to pass through the computer first, and then pass through me, to become real. As I continued streaming for years I realized what I crave is an artistic practice in which people can not pay attention. Or pay a different, new kind of anti-theater attention. An attention in which the fractured lens of 25 tabs open all at once can become the way we watch performance.

• what you should be also focusing on while watching to this lecture:
• not watching
• listening
• smelling smoke
• drinking your beer
• looking at Serena’s thermochromatic quilt
• feeling the heat gun
• texting your friend
• texting your mom
• texting your hookup
• read my bio
• read Serena’s bio
• blocking a call
• checking Grindr
• scrolling twitter for porn
• looking at a meme
• staring past me at Itai’s monitors
• looking at the insulation, puffy
• needing to pee
• you need to pee
• your need to pee is growing stronger
• it is almost uncontrollable
• Looking at the digital archive
• looking at Jesse’s puzzles
• touching your face. touch face.
• listening to your headphones
• commanding Sara
• squinting into the projector
• doing the crossword
• eating
• anything else

So here’s how the rest of the lecture is going to work. there are a series of paddles here on the table. paddles outlined in green have on them some of themes and artworks featured in the gallery. paddles in black have actions or tasks. at any point during this lecture you should feel free to approach the table, raise either a black or green paddle, or a combination of black and green. i will fulfill your request and then return to my lecture. if you get to the table and don’t find the topic or tasks of your liking. raise the paddle and say OVERRIDE and then the topic or task. I’ll fulfill your tasks before continuing with my talk. so let’s practice: you, over come close, why don’t you pick up the paddle that says “Workshop.” Let’s practice.

Workshop

somewhere along the line i picked up a really bad habit. or actually it’s a habit that’s served me well sort of. when i read someones play or look at someones art or whatever and i’m in a situation where i have to give notes, often i’ll say something like “what i found cool…” or “what i liked…” about the thing and then say exactly what i DON’T like about it. like if i think a play is really bland I’ll give the note I’ll say something like “what I found really cool about this play was how like none of the characters have any real desire, I love how that gives the play a stilted tone.” that’s a bad habit i’ve picked up in workshop. Smile reassuringly. Look down. Look up. Look back at computer. Smile.

Great, thanks! Ok, so feel free to lift a paddle at any point. don’t be shy.

In my journal I wrote that streaming felt like, quote “an extension of the work but also not the work.” close quote. I don’t know what I meant by the work. Something to do with how I am as an artist? But that feels like such a dumb and unspecific thing to say. I think that has sort of hovered around my work the whole time: this feeling that despite calling what i do art maybe it’s just really stupid. the emperor has no clothes. and I guess the thing i try to cultivate is a kind of unknowing in my work, a willingness to just let something be unknown to me, even as I present it to an audience, even as i present it to myself. to look like an idiot, to look unprepared, or lazy, or to fail.

New Years Resolution

at the end of the last year i read two really different books: one was called The Golden Notebook and it won the nobel prize it’s about a woman writing a novel about a woman who is writing a novel and she keeps four different notebooks and the book is these notebooks but also the novel the woman is writing etc. the second book was a self pub piece of autofiction by a friend of mine. afterwards i was like did i like those books? do i like anything? what are qualities i like? this year, and i know it’s already q2, but my goal for the year is to be fully empty of the desire to create opinions in any kind of rapid timescale. it took me almost 5 months to read The Golden Notebook - why should I know how I feel about it ten minutes after I’ve finished? I could not know how I feel about it for 30 more years. This new years i’m committing to emptying my body entirely, to knowing less, to being stupider, less formed,

Maximalism

All ten weeks of the computer club we talked about maximalism about layering things on top of other things about hoarding everything. around you in the gallery are attempts at a maximalist robe, worn around experiments. i think rt is about doing very little but doing it well. Art is about doing very. Art is about the opening. The entrance. The hole. The first piece of flesh. Art is about the knick, knicking it. I am opening the door to my very first car, I am looking at my book and none of the words make sense. I want to have thoughts but instead I have no thoughts. Maximalism is about making yourself as small as possible, so that the frame fills up with everything else, but big, filling up your brain with whatever you can and then spitting that out there’s nothing in my brain. the pieces in the gallery engage with a lookit sense of attitude, a chair covered in berries streaks across the screen of our digital archive. i hoard: notes, thoughts, tweets, screenshots, screenshots of texts, every straw wrapper i’ve ever had is in my car, but still the archive is incomplete, practically empty. all around you is work that engages with maximalism. there’s a kind of lookit attitude to maximalism, a feeling like - i can, so i will. i have seen art and technology work together and gone “ok” i have seen myself do something because it is cool. i have done four hundred things all to look cool. somehow i never look cool.

Grimes' baby

Nobody wants to be an artist more than my friend Graham. I met them in grad school and we had all the same friends for a while except for I fucked all of our friends and they never did. They had a big crush on one of our friends who I was fucking at the time even though I also had a boyfriend even though were technically open but we were both just cheating on each other sort of constantly. Graham is also a writer but they work hard. they’re always posting BeReal’s at their office job but they’re actually working on a screenplay or a short story or something and they’re always getting published or selected for things. i am no longer with the boyfriend i was with when i first met graham in face i’ve been with four or five series partners since then and i haven’t had a single show.

Digital archive

I don’t notice anything. i collect everything but none of it means anything or is real. I read a book in which a character is constantly starting short stories about things that happen in her life, matter of factly, as if her life were fiction, i can’t remember anything. my journal is all just dreams. there is no archive. here are some dreams i had during cats+

• dream of trash bag split open and coffee water dripping on my y shoulder
• dream that i told julia what i wanted to discuss at the next poolboy stream and i don’t remember exactly what she said but it was not an overwhelming yes. it was a quiet no.
• this is a day late but i had a dream that ryan and i bought a beautiful modernist house to find four squatters (the sketch group simple town?) who didnt have jobs, didnt want them, and didnt want to leave. i am afraid of them. then at Outsider I feel such a blankness where there should be ideas.
• didn’t remember any dreams last night.
• dream that i was in the subway station and i couldnt find the right platform: i had gone a station too far and i needed to go back. somehow, i lost my shoes. i was walking around the city with no shoes and i felt how gross it was i was so gross and suddenly three girlies asked me what happened. i was desperate to find a shoe store but every shoe store was 54 or 56 minutes away, including a beautiful outdoor store in some ruins that google recommended
• dream that i was shaving my head, increasing the number on the clipper. the feeling of razor on my scalp, over and over, evening out, shearing more and more off, hair pooling in my clavicle, on my shoulders.
• in the dream the camera rocks back and forth in a horizontal line
• dream i ate the moldy yogurt
• dream that gazelle twin was black
• dream that i went to see bennett’s show and i sat on the stage inside their massive beautiful set i was scared but also excited and jealous to see the show.
• dream that i was in a car w bennett, pete, and a female friend who was driving we got pulled over by a cop w curly hairy like carole kane mixed w gina our landlord she was aggressive hitting on our driver plucking the cigarette from behind her ear
• dream that i sat in on david walkers show and i was so intimidated by his fame
• dream that julia and i were driving from new orleans to somewhere (austin? houston?) and we left late as the sun was going down, later than we wanted to leave. we were in a giant van, higher off the ground and bigger than anything i’d ever driven before and it was a challenge, i was struggling to keep control and pilot it and julia the whole time was not really aware of how much i was struggling or how different this was for me. she doesn’t have a license. also in the dream there was a small dildo that kept falling out of my ass
• dream that ryan is making chili and in the kitchen is a giant bag of fritos

Photogrammetry

My object is this shrimp. I got it when I was traveling around Japan by myself in 2016. the shrimp is very lifelike. it is made of plastic and resin. it is perfectly colored. the fake tempura goes all the way around almost covering the whole object, but it disappears briefly so that the shrimp can lay flat. a scan of a shrimp, as seen on the screen here, is manipulated. why? because shrimp are from god and god’s objects are not perfect but we can make them so. I make shrimp for each boyfriend. A recipe of my moms that is from my grandma that is from an Italian restaurant on the west bank of new orleans. When I was in Japan I felt very alone but that was bc I wanted to feel alone. nobody was making me feel alone. in fact, everyone was really nice and helpful to me. almost sickeningly so. on one of my last days there i noticed that one of the ads in the tokyo subway was encouraging people to be nice to foreigners. the illustrated foreigner they were helping was a redhead in a jean jacket with a beard and olive green pants, which was exactly what i wore every day for the entire month i was backpacking around.

Puzzles

I will never go on Survivor.

Thermochromatic paint

I think of performance and my performance as like a two layered thing, essentially, in which i’m like ok what am i going to talk about and then what am i going to reveal about myself. and often when i’m being dumb i sit around and think what should i reveal about myself, what is dumb and dark and true about myself that is painful and will make people go ugh he really revealed that and it never works i can never set out to think like ok let me reveal something about myself once i get under the warm hot light of performance something will shimmer through something truthful that i can actually name you can’t name any truth you can’t prepare yourself for truth truth only comes as a by product of something else something ineffable that is the result of being heated. in this room it is very hot, i am always hot, i am hot and very hairy. once i went to a large, fake mediterranean villa in houston to hook up with a guy and he insisted on shaving my back before we hooked up. he had two very large german shepherds and was living in the garage apartment of the mansion, bc the mansion was being gutted. the german shepherds barked and wouldn’t stop barking. he used a straight razor on my back and the next day i was covered in acne. there are two pieces in the gallery using thermochromatic paint. they are next to each other. it is so hot they are changing on their own. they remind that, like everything else, art needs certain conditions to thrive.

Arduinos

I don’t know what an arduino is and i stopped trying to figure it out. from the computer club meetings it just seems like it can do anything?? anytime someone would have a problem that needed a solution someone would say you can use an arduino?? so - i don’t know - it’s something you can do stuff with? it can do anything? an arduino is an opportunity, i guess, an opportunity to make something out of a nothing, like a hyper charged canvas that attracts possibility. i am too lazy to do anything. arduinos power itai’s sculpture, where if you slap it an image appears. i think a lot about slapping. my dog is afraid when i slap my bf on the ass. he cowers from fear. he was a stray for the first year of his life and sometimes he is so afraid of everything. right now he refuses to go on walks, he trembles when we take him outside, a dog is a possibility, a slap on the ass is a possibility, it conjurs up reactions that can’t be known. itai’s sculpture activates when slapped and yet there is a finite set of reactions, 100 photos. an arduino can do anything, or so i’m told. to create an infinite set of reactions an arduino, i’m guessing, would have to be programmed, there is no infinity without setting up parameters.

Dragonframe

I want to show you what I will look like in a few years. I want to show you what I will look like with my face covered in puss, in makeup, in a look for each era of Taylor’s Eras Tour. Covered in cum. I look at myself as i want to see myself. in the mirror.

Collision

I don’t want to collaborate or be a collaborative artist because I like control. I work in the theater, which doesn’t exist without collaboration. My very first play I worked with my best friend, she directed it, and afterwards i was like “i like working with you bc if something is bad i can always blame you” and we never had a falling out in fact we’re still really good friends sort of best friends but we have never worked together again.

Modernist literature

reading ann quinn berg and it makes my head spin. i have no idea what she’s saying the words spill out and pile up on the page and i just zone out. i don’t understand why this is so, why the modernist novel makes me immediately stop paying attention, i want to pay attention

Finale

As someone who is not very good at computers, but who has been in a computer club for the past ten weeks, i have often felt like a sort of profound disconnect from process. meaning, i let myself be quiet – i let myself feel disconnected.

i am printing out photos of a falcon studios model on my parents black and white computer. the model is tall and standing in front of a glass shower door, full of steam. he is naked, intense bikini tan, his pubic hair shaved into a perfect triangle of tight dark curls. the printer is loud. it is around 4pm, i am eating half an apple and a babybell. it is still light out but the sky is covered in clouds so the room is filled with a heavy white light. white light on old carpet. the printer stops whirring, i hear my brother. he is in the living room playing nintendo. i hear the joystick the plastic click of it being jammed upwards and then to side, a player forcing movement. i hold the two sheets of cheap white paper in my hand. the ink has streaked around the models torso, which is hard and chiseled like an ant. he looks at the camera and i look into his eyes. in the second photo the model has his back to the camera and he turns his head around like this [do the pose] and his ass clenches and lifts. i sent a photo to my friend in this pose once to get her opinion on how i looked and she had never encountered this pose before, which to me, is one of the most iconic poses, it is a pose i see all the time, on twitter, on sniffies, but now it’s on the family computer.

i take the two pieces of computer paper back to my bedroom and close the door. on the otherside of the hallway, my brother loses. the same music repeats over and over again, he’s gone to the bathroom. i am alone in my room. i look into the eyes of the model streaked grey and white and black. staring at me through wet ink eyes. he watches me and i watch him.

in the computer club i am alone. small pause i am not a good collaborator. i like to be with other people, see other peoples work, but i like to be alone. i don’t want to share. look up. i like to share with the computer. online i am happy, i am a canvas. the computer is a canvas, but i cannot paint on it, i cant reach it. or, i don’t want to. i don’t know anything about computers. look up. even to the computer i am not a good collaborator, i am trapped by my own limitations, but the computers magnetic arms that tell me what to do, i am ultiatemly ,happy, like this, look up, a little sub. look down, small pause. here in the gallery look at someone i have tried to let myself think of you, change person the audience, change person as the computer. look down but it was not fun. make eye contact. i did not like seeing your eyes watch me. change. i like looking into eyes, change. but only on cheap computer paper, change. in my childhood bedroom. look down.

Related links

• Sam Mayer's website