Abstract
A window has traditionally been a sturdy artistic metaphor, able to offer a tangible account of acts of witnessing and perception. For many theatre directors and teachers, the window of our eyes has become our primary creative and pedagogical tool, gazing within the edifice of Zoom, a technology built by the intersection of interlocking digital windows, their meaning created by the witnessing gaze of the participants.And what are the windows of Zoom revealing? In the context of shared and embodied creative practice, we gain insight into other people’s worlds: bodies on the move, negotiating shared spaces, attending to human need. Insight over Zoom is knowledge of the other without inter-subjectivity. The subtle voyeurism inherent in the technology offers often uncomfortably intimate access to the personal or domestic world of students and colleagues, but a window that does not readily lend itself to social connection or reciprocal or mutual gaze.We have seen things now that we cannot unsee. What will come of the digital heterotopia of the window when we venture back into the studio, when our performance making practices once again move about freely in the world? Have we all been rehearsing a new, interconnected futurity—a permanently alternate ordering of the actual world? Drawing from the practice of four teacher-artists (director, actor trainer, devisor, and dramaturg) this article will explore the iconography of the Zoom window, and its specific qualities at the intersection of body and technology.
Highlights
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their seminal text Metaphors We Live By (1980/2003), draw on a base of linguistic evidence to propose a distinction between a classical view of metaphor as ‘a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish’ and a theory of metaphor that recognises its pervasiveness in ‘everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’ (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: ch. 1 para. 1)
For many artists and teachers, our ability to gaze through the digital window has recently and urgently become our primary creative and pedagogical tool
Borne out of necessity, that has led the authors of this article to question whether or not digital windows can serve as heterotopia, ‘alternative spaces that are distinguished from that actual world, but that resonate with it’ (Tompkins 2014: 1)
Summary
George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their seminal text Metaphors We Live By (1980/2003), draw on a base of linguistic evidence to propose a distinction between a classical view of metaphor as ‘a device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish’ and a theory of metaphor that recognises its pervasiveness in ‘everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action’ (Lakoff & Johnson 2003: ch. 1 para. 1). In this way, a window is a sturdy metaphor with which to understand the pervasive experience of the Zoom screen. The digital window of the Zoom screen is even more specific in its embodied and activated form, because, like an actual window, it is designed to be used two-ways, for gazing and witnessing simultaneously. It requires at least two bodies in mutual gaze, and there are many spaces in which these bodies exist, they come together in the “real” place of the digital window, which controls time, perspective, and participation
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