ASU Research E-Magazine: Giving Riga a High-Tech Voice

The studio layout nicely illustrates the mission of ASU’s Institute for Studies in the Arts.

One half of the space resembles mission control: a bank of monitors bounce a variety of images off the dark faces of busy technicians as they dub, lift, record, dupe, grab, load, and dump sounds and images to a background of groaning hard drives and spiraling LED read-outs.

A lone camera points to the other half of the room where a bare white space awaits the artist. In that space dancers, actors, singers, and performance artists bring their very personal skills to the table, while the talented group across the room integrates those skills with the age of the microchip.

“Its a dangerous proposition to bring film media into a play for its own sake,” says Patricia Clark, studio manager for ISA projects. “You can’t bring in media as a gimmick—‘Ooooh, it’s multimedia’—without making it an integral support system to the story. Audiences are smart. They will recognize and feel the inconsistency if the multimedia is not woven in properly.”

As the images from the ever-vigilant monitors play off her lenses, Clark discusses creating the video for Riga.

“Marshall Mason and William Hoffman brought in the raw material: VHS films, old 16 millimeter films, pictures, slides,” Clark says.

“Marshall and I went through all the material. We grabbed still images off the video, transferred them to SCI crimson. Via the Internet, we used ‘Fetch’ to bring them onto a Macintosh computer for mirror image manipulation in Photoshop,” she explains. “The chosen images were processed as the more than 200 slides that float across the periphery of the Riga.”

The play’s video installments required the ISA to take Hoffman’s myriad sources and convert them to Beta for stylistic continuity. For the sake of technical expediency, the Beta tapes were then duped backed onto VHS.

Mason’s ideas and Clark’s wizardry resulted in six separate VHS tapes, containing everything from footage of a Jewish ghetto in Latvia to gay-bashing talk show preachers to the 1992 election returns.

“We wanted the operation to be no fuss,” Clark says. “Just listen for the cue line, pop’em in the VCR, and let’em go.”

Clark enjoyed the development process, characterizing Mason as decisive in his own right but open to opinion, as well.

“We would talk about which eagle to use, or what particular group of faces might elicit what effect,” she says. “Much of my advice was technical. The set required a black screen, for instance, and you can only throw certain images against a black screen.

“But, after the first three video tapes, we had a good understanding of what he wanted, and Marshall let us develop the last three tapes ourselves,” Clark adds.

In performance, Clark’s video showed a careful subtlety—complementing the stage action instead of overwhelming it. One of the most interesting applications of multimedia is that, dramatically, it can serve the same role as the ancient Greek chorus: commenting in the margins of the play, and putting the conflict in a larger context.

“I thought the multimedia worked well,” Clark says. “It provided another layer of social background. It reinforced the parallels the play was trying to make when, for instance, you see contemporary men discussing contemporary issues on the stage, and on the screen behind them you see the same issues explored by Nazis 50 years ago. It can be chilling.”

Clark says that editing the propaganda films—without being affected by their content—was the hardest part of her job.

“I had no idea what kind of imagery to expect when Marshall brought these in,” she says. “You’re so appalled, but you can’t turn your eyes away. All this stuff about ‘the dirty Jews’ and how the Holocaust ‘didn’t happen.’ I did a lot of yelling at the screen while I was editing.”—Michael Grady