the timboucher experience

A few years back, I abandoned the notion of normal linear writing. I stopped trying to make sense, and began focusing on creating a multi-sensory perceptual experience. The internet is ideally suited to this kind of experimentation as you have quick and easy access to remixable reference points which you can use and reuse to convey meanings and associations and establish a psychological “sense of place” for your audience.

Through those experiments in combining and re-broadcasting massive sets of data as an “author” (perceiving center) I came to long for software tools which would make the process easier. One thing I began envisioning was a web-browser which worked laterally across chunklets of information. You’d have your regular browser options like right now, but then have the ability to circle a section of data, zoom in on it and navigate right from that sub-component directly to contextless information culled from other sources which matches or somehow elucidates further the selected data. Associative search. And then you’d have on top of that the ability to capture and transmit story-streams out of your browsing experience. A narrative history - controlled entirely by the user, whose rights are sacrosanct - which can be exported in any number of formats: video, picture streams, audio-files automatically sorted and collected, text descriptions of media reference points splayed out like a GPX stream through physical space.

This style of browsing essentially eliminates the need to actually go and visit a web-page on this or that domain. (though original sources can still be accessed as archival artifacts complete unto themselves) All the little bits and pieces are immediately culled and available without having to “go” anywhere. You get the gist of information this way. You feel the flow. You surf the web without getting covered with seaweed.

With physical performance skills, I’ve been noticing that you simply can’t learn how to do a particular action or move unless you actually engage through the full-motion of that move. That is, you can’t go right up to the edge, the beginning of that action and stop it short. You’ll only be teaching your nervous system how to short-circuit, not how to cycle smoothly through flowing inter-connected movements. Understanding this and applying it this summer is how I finally learned how to swim after twenty-nine years on dry land. It applies too in juggling, which I spent the afternoon attending to. Just haven’t had the time lately. But sometimes when you’re practicing, it’s better to work through the proper flow of the whole arc of a series of motions and actions, as opposed to being worried about getting every little nuance and articulation. That can come after, once you’ve built up the noospherically-linked space-time engrame framework to hang these smaller cue points from.

Haptic response is a component of robotics as well. It’s the system of sensors and feedback which tells a robot hand not to squeeze a glass so hard that it shatters, but makes certain it holds on tight enough so as not to drop it. Proprioception is connected somehow to this in the human body.

During the first season of my unofficial apprenticeship in the theatre, the summerstock company I worked for performed a production of The Scarlet Pimpernel a not very good rock-ish musical re-telling of the older story of aristocratic espionage - essentially yet another excuse to dress up in costumes and get paid for it.

One of the set pieces we carpenters were tasked with the construction of by our scenic designer was that of the mythic instrument of death: the guillotine.

“Ol’ Red,” I’ll call her now, for the sake of anthropomorphizing this created object, this constructed actor in the parlance of Eileen Blumenthal’s spectacular puppetry book. For the guillotine itself was a character in the story. “Madame Guillotine” is exhorted in song by the revolutionary masses of the chorus. A spotlight illuminates her exalted presence onstage as her blade descends to sever head (Reason) from shoulders.

Ol’ Red was painted red by us after a photo found on the internet of a historically re-constructed guillotine somewhere else - in a museum I want to say. Red for obvious reasons, I should say. The blood you’d be spilling would stain your raw lumber anyway. So may as well paint it that color. In cases like this, excuse my pun, it can be best to go with the flow.

The machinery of the guillotine itself was completely functional. You could put your head into a stock made out of wood and have an angled blade rapidly descend towards your neck. Except we never had a real blade. We had a quarter-inch piece of luan with a sheet of siding cut along an angle to simulate the old theatrical French blades of the revolutionary market square. Ours couldn’t sever a head, assuredly, but it could inflict a nasty flesh wound.

So we carpenters built in fool-proof (or actor-proof, as is sometimes said in the biz) wooden stops to arrest the descent of the false blade several inches above the actor’s tender neck. It meant you did’t achieve the satisfying illusion of the blade coming all the way down for a nice chopping effect. But it’s theatre and sometimes fake ends up being more real. No one wants to have deal with an actor whose head has actually been chopped off onstage. Unless, that is, your stage is the world and you just threw down the aristocracy with mass theatrics. Then it might make sense.