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POL - a mechatronic rabbit on diet
What you see depends on how you walk. At least if you’re a rabbit, played by Marcel-lí Antúnez Roca, that has lost all his teeth and finds himself set on a sausage-diet, put in a mechatronic exoskeleton that generates moist organic worlds of Cronenbergian dimensions in the wireless hardware space.

Well, you have to ask yourself in how far this fits together – on the one hand the old fashioned form of the fable that demands for a strict and coherent narration, and on the other hand the Performance that pretty often overthrows the rigid structures of such a genre, as if it was an itch it can scratch in order to let the purulence flow. You surely have to ask yourself. But as soon as this query is posted, the answer seems much more plausible than one might have guessed. Antúnez himself explicitly said, he decided to take the fable as the basis for this event, because fables are constructed and told with such a simplicity, containing both unexpected and magical events – reasons other performance artists would name as obstacles in this very form of art.

One of the central works of performance theory is called “The Colonized Body” – colonized by the text, the rhetorical figures and characters. The body therefore has to be freed and shall step out of its role as the victim of art, it shall go beyond the mere plot instead of obeying the rules of movement and action given to him by every text. It’s something different with POL (which is the name of this rabbit spectacle), where we are confronted with a pretty conventional story the rabbit is tumbling through, followed by the powers of evil, that seek to break his relationship to his beloved girl, Princepollu. For every obstacle he masters, he receives on of the missing teeth to restore his potential self-image. Transported to the screens by two exoskeletons and five robots, the fable can be controlled, new sequences can be found and altered by will throughout the performance. The whole thing is structured in acts, broken down into scenes, which should make every other performance artist frown, because here time isn’t questioned, time isn’t revealed and replaced. Not a single expectation seems to be fulfilled. Last but not least catharsis shall be achieved through ritual cleansing and through the power of impressions. Is this really a performance, like Antúnez claims? Or an interactive drama, as he likes to call it too?

If we consider normal performances as a form of art that seeks freedom for our physical being by breaking through the diegetic flow, POL comes to freedom by other means – which is, through the body itself. In a crumbling, organic dance of synesthesia the body undermines its underlying narrative form, clothed in wireless fragile constructions, and shows that the fable itself is a slave to conscious physical action, and not the other way round. How you walk makes the difference, not where you go. The interaction of different perception organs (movement controls sounds, sounds control the point of view, as well as the speed controls the pictures) is consciously evoked and helps the body to turn the colonization process upside down. So the text needn’t be replaced or deconstructed, but just handled the right way. It’s a drama and a performance in one.

While the main object of other performances is transporting information by terms of interaction, the main theme in POL is (almost) only the relationship of the performing and the performed – of the demonstration and the demonstrated. Art doesn’t have to be innovative by any means – often it’s indeed more revealing and more innovative if one throws “innovative conventions” overboard and finds other ways of expression, which can be full of vividness even in their mechanical motion. But of course you don’t have to tell this to one of the founders of La Fura dels Baus (he was a member until 1989). So I won’t.

Bartomeu Mali calls the work “archaic futurism” and indeed art and science/technology are taking opposing roles in this performance. The visualization of the software (which was especially developed for POL) is highly ornamental, nearly emblematic. Like a rusty Victorian wheelwork the piece of art is ticking towards the venous nodal point of decline, while technology is holding on perfection. With POL Antúnez manages a mechatronic splits between those two extremes.
This is worth an Honorary Mention in the category Interactive Art. A dental modern fairy tail with a mystical resonance that points out what Arthur C. Clarke meant when he said: A sufficiently developed technology can’t be told from magic.

September 11, 9:00 pm, Posthof
21.7.2003
Marcus Lust
© Ars Electronica Linz GmbH, info@aec.at