Feats (and follies) of technology

CAMBRIDGE -- For artists, new technology is the goose that lays the golden egg. It can represent wild, brave opportunities for expression. And trying to use too much too soon can kill the art itself. Two exhibits at the MIT List Visual Arts Center explore the fractious wedding of performance with technology. One shows how gracefully the two can come together; the other shows what happens if you try too hard.

``Choreographic Turn," which explores new ways to film dance, is lovely and quietly innovative. ``9 Evenings Reconsidered: Art, Theatre, and Engineering, 1966" documents a 40-year-old fiasco of a performance series. The latter will appeal only to a very specific kind of geek -- one who has a taste for both detailed engineering schematics and 1960s avant-garde theater.

First, to ``Choreographic Turn." For the immersive, lyrical ``whenever on on on nohow on/ airdrawing," filmmaker Peter Welz collaborated with dancer/choreographer William Forsythe , former director of the Frankfurt Ballet and founder of the Forsythe Company. Welz videotaped Forsythe from above, beside, and in front of the dance space; he also attached small cameras to the dancer's wrists.

The five video projections play at once, two on one wall and one each on the other walls of the gallery, surrounding the viewer with the dance, which is an improvisation inspired by the cadences in the writing of Samuel Beckett. The synchrony of the three videos imbues the piece with a swift, reliable pulse, even though the images from different vantage points reveal wildly varied forms. A huddled posture seen from above is almost a compact sphere; from the front it conveys a distinct psychological state.

These videos bracket and contain the more chaotic scenes shot from Forsythe's wrists, which career from intimate close-ups of his face and body to dizzying, jolting passages through the space. These come close to joining the viewer with the dancer. Curator Bill Arning points out in wall text that until Maya Dean's ``Choreography for the Camera" in 1945, dance was filmed from a static position. Welz invites the audience not only into the performance, but very nearly into the performer's skin.

Daria Martin's film ``Soft Materials" explores a relationship between dancers and robots outfitted to respond to environmental stimuli. Martin riffs on a film Robert Morris made in 1971, ``Neo Classic," in which dancers interacted with sculptures.

A sweet film, ``Soft Materials" starts with formal similarities: a human eye or navel, followed by a soft-focus shift to a robot's rounded sensors. The two dancers improvise with a robot. It's as if they've landed on Mars and, gesticulating and imitating, are trying to communicate with the Martians.

``9 Evenings," a dry, heady show curated by Catherine Morris, examines the great flop staged by a battery of engineers collaborating with 10 artists on 10 performances over nine evenings in 1966 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City. It was the brainchild of engineer Billy Kluver , who had supported artists' projects in the past. He wanted to equalize the relationship between the artists and the techies.

The intellectual wattage was considerable. John Cage signed on. So did Robert Rauschenberg and dancer/choreographer Lucinda Childs. These were the sweethearts of the New York avant-garde elite.

In one improvisation, Cage and engineer Cecil Coker amplified and manipulated sound from such sources as frequency generators and a coffee grinder. Rauschenberg staged a tennis match: The impact of ball on racket set off light and sound, then the stage went dark and was flooded with a cast of hundreds, whose shadowy images were projected on a giant screen using infrared technology. Childs used Doppler sonar so that her improvised movement triggered sound.

It was a disaster, decried by both critics and the public, with technical malfunctions and long periods of tedium. Savvy audience members who had been attending performances and happenings by the likes of Yoko Ono and Joseph Beuys came expecting to be upended and challenged. But as often happens when artists gleefully grab onto new technologies, the bells and whistles overpowered the artistry.

Nonetheless, ``9 Evenings" was in many ways a pivotal moment, which is why Morris has put together this show. It's more history and documentation than art, including blurry videotape, photographs, diagrams, and notes. Certainly it set the stage for the kind of art and technology whiz kids we see working today, such as Brian Knep and Scott Snibbe, who know how to play their bells and whistles so well they don't get in the way of the art.