Drama and Technology – The Pursuit of Uncertain Benefits Kim Flintoff B.A.(Drama Studies) Murdoch Grad Dip Ed (Secondary Drama) Edith Cowan John Forrest Senior High School Perth, Western Australia Biography Kim Flintoff is the creator, moderator and maintainer of the DramaWest website and the international email discussion list. Formerly the first Technology Officer of DramaWest (The Drama Teachers Association of Western Australia) Kim teaches high school Drama in Western Australia and has an extensive background in theatre production. While currently examining the implications of technology and virtual domains in educational Drama, Kim is also interested in NLP, Brain-based and Accelerated Learning Applications in Drama. Kim worked as a clown/magician for several years, is co-founder and former chairman of Class Act Theatre (Theatre-in-Education) and founder and present chairman of SHY (Seen and Heard Youth) a newly-formed youth arts organization in WA. Kim has recently accepted the position of Director of Technology for Drama Australia. Welcome Before I start I’d like to thank the QADIE committee and Shay Ryan for inviting me to speak today. It’s an exciting development in my career and an honour to feel that the ponderings of a classroom Drama teacher are regarded as valuable. Interestingly and tellingly, my own employer has never enquired about what it is that I do when I’m running around to conferences and leading groups. I’ve never been asked to formally deliver anything relating to this work to EDWA teachers. So I thank you for this opportunity and hope that I can prompt you to consider your own position in this field. Rationale In Drama education we are faced with the challenge of relevancy. The nature of theatrical form is changing as we begin to explore the intersection of technology, culture, and nature. Cyberspace, with its apparent offerings of vicarious and disembodied experience, poses challenges to the field of Drama studies. Classroom drama traditionally presupposes the physical and the verbal, focussing heavily on role; in virtual reality these presuppositions are cast in a new light and demand that new questions be asked. We are re-creating nature: the boundaries between the virtual and real are becoming increasingly confused. The interface is becoming increasingly important in our experience – we are still dealing with artificial, clumsy computer interface and yet we strive for the unencumbered, the unconscious, fully interactive experience. The pretence of the virtual is insinuated into our lives on a daily basis- when you make telephone calls are you aware whether or not you are speaking to a person or a cleverly constructed piece of software. Is that actor in a movie a real person or a carefully compiled composite created in an advanced graphics suite? Soon, if we are to believe the techno-boffins, the "implosion" of culture and nature will allow us to redesign bodies that will not only be genetically "ideal” but will also reconfigure our conceptions of the perfect body. We will with horrifying precision be able to control what survives and what is deleted (and what constitutes life and death) in our virtual-real surroundings. <SLIDE> Artists like Stelarc have already begun these investigations with the addition of “hardware” – he asserts that our soft bodies are obsolete. There is a range of freely available “intelligent agents”; software programs that attempt to replicate human intelligence. More and more we find ourselves interacting with machines that seem to mimic human processes. I believe these interactions once again raise the questions that were addressed by the Turing Test 1 . In Drama we often seem to have a predetermined, yet unstated, concept of human intelligence. We base our activities on these presumptions; yet there is now a new player. Computer generated agents (metaphorically brought to life in the film The Matrix) lurk in all virtual arenas and defy us to identify them. Even as I wrote I this article I became cyborg 2 , a human-machine hybrid. The nexus between human and machine is pervasive, and Drama education can play a role in exploring these developments. We are already "cyborgs": and by “cyborgs” I refer to any interface that connects us with man-made technology. The artificial and the "real" are no longer divided by clear boundaries. Human/machine, nature/culture, virtual/real, object/subject, male/female: technology disrupts boundaries, and, hopefully, encourages us to see socially constructed aspects of our perceived reality. A constantly shifting morphology reigns here, but, because we can't be sure of anything anymore, so does paranoia. Hence, in terms of this speech, whenever we are engaging with technology we are pursuing uncertain benefits. The outcomes are not predictable; the possibilities are not necessarily positive if we hold our current mindset. We need to develop a new way of seeing and questioning; one that allows us to transcend our present perceptual limitations, we need to be more aware of the “big picture” and our place in it. The purpose of this paper is to propose a position of tolerance and exploration towards the introduction of Learning Technologies into the established classroom practices of educational Drama. I advocate that a variety of studies and investigations are necessary to explore the possibilities, scope and efficacy of utilizing emergent interactive technologies in classroom Drama within Australia. At the same time that the theatrical stage has welcomed the offerings of the new technologies and is exploring new notions and forms of representation, subjectivity, mediation, etc. it seems sometimes in classroom drama that we are still doing the same as we’ve done for the past 30 years. <SLIDE> There is an old adage that if you do what you always do you’ll get what you always get. I hope to relate some of my observations, perceptions and speculations not only about possible approaches to beginning to explore ways of utilizing computers in Drama education but also to consider some of the responses and attitudes that I have experienced over the past few years. I make no claims to having any deep insights, nor do I offer any particular answers, although what I can do is offer some challenges, arguments for the experimentation and further study within this area, and some necessarily speculative – possibly spurious – ideas about strategies. The title of the paper “The Pursuit of Uncertain Benefits” raises the question of what it is that we gain from the introduction of Learning Technologies. Will educational Drama be better as a result? What are the “educationally favourable” connections between Drama praxis and the “New Media”? Last year I was a joint facilitator of Special Interest Group #7 at the IDEA World Congress in Norway; working alongside Klaus Thestrup from Denmark and Liliàna Galvan from Peru. The focus of our group was Drama and New Media. An interesting side note is that until we met in Bergen, the three of us had never met or even spoken to each other. Our entire collaboration was conducted by way of the Internet. For something close to 7 months we exchanged emails and files without knowing how the other person looked or sounded. We organized all our activities and planned the structure and proceedings without any face-to-face interaction. I met Klaus the day before our group met for the first time and it was like catching up with a long time colleague. Liliana arrived shortly before we started the next day. At that time, around 35 participants, including academics, drama teachers, theatre-in-education practitioners, interactive project developers and performers, came together to consider issues relating to Drama and New Media. Not surprisingly this group of people brought a wide range of perspectives and opinions to the group. One of the most poignant pleas came from an experienced Dutch drama teacher who voiced a concern held by many others in the room, but were too afraid to utter. <SLIDE> Of Bodies in Place or In Place of Bodies http://drama-education.com/resources/QADIE_2002_Keynote.htm 1 of 5 23/07/2014 2:48 pm