a time-based installation, video, and live performance commissioned to open 'Jezebel', an international season of women's performance, ICA, London (September, 1995). Push the Boat Out, explores the grand-scale consumption of American trash culture on both sides of Atlantic and questions the 'special relationship' between the US and UK.

Push the Boat Out: Site Specific to Cyberspatial in Live Art
New Theatre Quarterly, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) February, 1998.

The following is an account of how a weekend I spent on a boat on a lake in Oklahoma in 1994 became a weekend I spent on a boat in a time based installation at the ICA in 1995 became a voyage into cyberspace in 1996 - the metamorphosis from 'real' to performance to virtual. A little self-conscious of the title of this article, I confess that my work in the past has not been site specific in the sense that I have created performances for public toilets, bowling alleys or National Trust properties. My usage of the term here is perhaps inappropriate in its evocation of an oeuvre to which my work does not technically belong, so before going any further let me qualify. I use the term site specific in this article for several reasons: 1) I have never transferred a performance from one venue to another without radically altering it in relation to the institution, the season, the performance space, so in this sense my performance work has been venue and program specific. 2) I regard showing work at the ICA, to give an institutional example, to be at least as contextually complex and inherently circumscribed by cultural and critical referents as showing work in a pasture or a laundrette, and therefore regard work made for the ICA to be site specific. 3) If I go to the trouble of creating a time based installation as the setting for my performance, I should be allowed to call the performance site specific. 4) The spatial and temporal emphemerality of live work predisposes me to regard a large proportion of it as site specific - reminiscent of Walter Benjamin's definition of the traditional contextualisation of art as occurring within the 'cult' situation of a unique moment of contact between the art and the audience at a specific place and time. 5) The shifting relationship between place and 'placelessness' brought about by the rapid adoption of the Internet as a preferred form of communication leads me, at times, to regard all real space, real time events as site specific as opposed to 'cyberspatial' works, whose reception occurs in the largely intangible interface between the human mind and the computer. As my interest here is primarily in the move from 'site specific' performance and installation into 'cyberspatial' computer-formatted work, I shall spare the details of my 'real life' weekend on the boat in Oklahoma and skip straight to the yellow rubber raft in the ICA theatre.

Site specific
In Push the Boat Out I constructed an American landscape of ignorance, greed and discontent, a territory where the rich get meaner, the poor get trashier, and no one expects to keep their own teeth past the age of thirty-five. At the base of this installation was a giant map of the USA made from photocopy enlargements of (then) current tabloid newspapers: OKLAHOMA CITY BOMBER IS MAN OF MY DREAMS; THREE SEMI-AUTOMATICS FOR FUN!; O.J.'S ANGUISH - NICOLE WAS A LESBIAN.... I covered the map in a thick, rank rennet of consumables from the trashy white underbelly of America: Moonpies, Twinkies, Runts, Nerds, Bubble Brains, Beef Jerky, Licorice Super Ropes, Pocahontas Sweettarts, Power Rangers Fruit Chews etc. A film screen above the map featured American TV clips from July, 1995: the Praise the Lord Club; QVC cable shopping; Days of Our Lives; WWF Wrestling; the Psychic Hotline; confessional talk shows; O.J. Simpson's trial; and the gala 4th of July celebrations at the White House. From a yellow rubber raft positioned in the center of the map, I generated a counter discourse. Floating in the sea of trash consumables were various messages in bottles which I tape recorded and placed, in personal stereos, inside 64 oz. 'Big Gulp' drinks containers. I sent out hundreds of narrative fragments via text confetti, paper airplanes and Red, White & Blue helium balloons which acted as carrier pigeons. These texts were stories, recipes, statements and questions generated in response to trash culture. A video camera, twenty disposable cameras, tape recorders and blank postcards were littered about, with which the audience were invited to document their impressions and experiences. I defined the border between 'America' and the ICA floor (Britain) with a six inch high, six inch thick line of pure refined salt and sugar, which followed the contour of the map. Over the two day period, as patrons waded back and forth steadily consuming the map, the border blurred beyond recognition. Occasionally, anxious Brits attempted to sweep it back into place, saying, 'but you can't tell it's America anymore.' I looked around at all those empty cans and empty wrappers and thought: My point exactly.

Still in my raft by night, I gave a one hour monologue each evening to a conventionally seated theatre audience, succinctly performing some of the text which had been drifting piecemeal through the installation. The differences in reception between the spoken text and the written text were fascinating to me as a writer/performer. Both texts consisted of the same words, distributed by the same person from same boat, pitted against the same elements in the same art space, but were accorded very different status. The spoken text, which demanded no direct interaction on the part of the audience, was accorded higher rank from the outset (partly by virtue of the fact that admission to the performance cost five pounds more than admission to the installation). The printed text, language intended for consumption when I carefully folded it into paper airplanes, seemed to become 'garbage' the moment it hit the floor, an impasse only the audience could rescue it from. The spoken text, in contrast, was instantly given the audience's full, uninterrupted attention. The difficulty, from my perspective as a would-be communicator, was that during the installation audience clicked into the 'trash' discourse of TV clips and Twinkies with such ease, such relish, that most of my text seemed to be hopelessly swamped. The fear of this rather desperate dynamic is what fueled the piece in the first place, so I can't say I was surprised that the people who came to the installation seemed to ingest more of the trash than the text, that the trash is what they put into their bodies and took home with them, but I hadn't counted on the emotional impact this would have on me as the person struggling to communicate through the mire. As the hours went by and I knew that the map of America was slowly seeping through the bodies of patrons and into the sewage system of greater London, I wondered if anyone had taken a piece of my text home in their pockets.

Whereas the installation made me feel isolated and dispirited as a would-be communicator, the first evening performance brought me back into a reassuring feeling of direct contact with the audience. When I conceptualised the piece I never anticipated the personal difficulties I would have with the silent performances within the installation. Why, I wondered, was sitting amidst my installation distributing text so uncomfortable? As a writer I was accustomed to representing myself through printed texts, albeit I didn't normally have to be in the room with people while they read them. As a performer, I realised that I was used to controlling the space and the audience during performances. In previous works the audience was very specifically controlled in terms of what they could see, what they could hear, which space they occupied, how they entered, how they exited etc. In creating a highly interactive installation, I had relinquished a great deal of this control. If audience members chose to eat twelve feet of licorice super rope while watching Jan Crouch spin the globe for Jesus on the Trinity Broadcast Network and never engage with my presence, my messages in bottles, or my text, that was entirely their prerogative. I had to remind myself, however, of the perverse pleasure I had taken in amassing the 'Wurmz'N'Dirt' and Pocahontas candies; the sinful hours I spent snorting and chortling as I edited TV clips of demonically possessed soap opera characters; and my guilty obsession with Women & Guns magazine. I had to shake myself out of the feeling that my work was being ignored by an audience who actually preferred neon orange peanut butter & cheese crackers and WWF Lumberjack Wrestling to my narratives and realise that the audience, most likely, shared my horrified fascination with full-frontal trash culture. Of course a normal person was bound to engage with a giant film screen and a ton of Moonpies before they got round to unfolding paper airplanes. Their consumption, however, like my own, was not callow or uncritical. By the second day I had relaxed into my role in the installation and began to enjoy my eagle's nest view of the interaction between audience, trash, text and performance. I became much less competitive about how my own texts were faring in relation to the trash, and much more critically interested in people's patterns of consumption.

Cyberspatial
My initial interest in multimedia computer work came as a direct result of my quandary as to how best to document Push the Boat Out. The elements, of course, were all thematically interrelated, but the structure was non-linear and the form ranged from film and television to home-movies, to beer can sculpture to postcards to tape recordings to text to live performance to footprints in the detritus. Not only was I faced with the problem of documenting the trash components of the installation and my own text and performance, but also with over 200 photographs and four hours of video taken by audience members, as well as their postcard responses and the patterns with which they had consumed and redistributed trash and text. Obviously, the performance text and video came nowhere near standing as an adequate representation of the project. Around the same time, I began using the Internet and the modus operandus of jumping from a hypertext hot link to a photograph, video clip or sound bite and from one web site to another instantly appealed to me. In a book format one faces the necessity of arranging narrative in a linear fashion - no matter how experimental the form or content, the author still commits to a page 1, 2, 3... sequence. In hypertext, however, I could arrange the different pieces of 'trash', personal and audience narratives and images in a series of links unlimited in their complexity, a format much more akin to the installation itself, where sequence and interrelation were dependent on the enfranchisement of the perceiver. Of course navigating through a series of electronic links could never recreate the atmospheric qualities of the installation - moving one at a time from one screen field to another bears little relation to the experience of standing in a ton of trash reading a story plucked from a passing helium balloon while fireworks explode over the White House on the film screen above your head and someone snaps a Polaroid picture of you spitting Pepperoni Pizza flavoured Corn Nuts. For the more visceral aspects of live art, technology will always be hard pressed to eliminate the adage, 'you really had to be there'. For me, the point was not whether one could recreate, through technology, an installation environment, but simply that technology offered some very exciting new options in the notoriously difficult project of live art documentation. Formally a Push the Boat Out hypertext could never resemble the live work, but conceptually a series of text, image, sound and video links navigated by individual readers/viewers/users seemed much closer in spirit than a set text or straight video could ever be.

The primary choice, as I saw it, for the artist interested in developing computer formatted work was between web publishing and CD-ROM. As a live artist, the 'live' nature of the Internet held obvious appeal - being 'on-line' is a live situation in a way that reading a book or watching a film is not because in exploring the Internet you are downloading images and information from the source in the moment, i.e. as you navigate. The live aspect of the Internet makes it ideal for time based work, sites can be updated weekly, hourly, or every few seconds not only by the artist but by the people who visit the site. On World AIDS Day 1996, for example, the ArtAIDS web site launched Nick Crowe's 'One Day and All of the Night' an Internet performance of sunrises, sunsets and lovers over twenty-four hours around the world. On another branch of the Artaids site, Zara Waldeback, Lois Weaver and myself designed a Lost & Found department where visitors were invited, over a one-year period, to submit images and stories of things, people and feelings lost and found. In the first instance the viewer would download a specific moment of an ever changing site, in the second instance the visitor could become a co-creator of an ever growing site. Both situations are dynamic / time-based. The second major attraction of the web was that on a web site the artist could design internal links between visual and textual elements of their own work, as well as external links to other relevant sites on the web such as Anglicans Online!, the Capt James T Kirk Sing-a-Long page, Cyberstars, or the Interactive Frog Dissection site. In this way, work could branch out and interconnect in uniquely interesting, contemporary ways. The last, but certainly not least great draw of the Internet as far as I was concerned was and is its relatively inexpensive nature, which allows people such as myself who are making work from the margins to self-publish.

CD-ROM holds quite a different appeal, the most important being its superior quality and speed. As a performer, I have been accustomed to cutting and pasting freely from photography, music, video etc. a practice which is severely limited, as yet, on the Internet. A photograph or a simple animation can take several minutes to download from the net, and video and audio can take a small eternity with infuriatingly poor results. While I accept that a certain amount of download time is inevitable, as a performer I would never leave an audience sitting in boredom for five minutes at frequent intervals during a show and expect them to stick around. If the web is to be capitalised on as an alternative performance space, this must be done with the abilities and limitations of the 'venue' in mind, therefore while sophisticated networks of internal and external links and interactive time-based projects are ideal for the web, audio and video and animation work is much better left to CD-ROM. While a CD-ROM doesn't have the 'live' or time-based quality of a web site, it offers a much greater formal range to the artist as well as having the classic integrity of a 'finished' or complete piece of work. Because Push the Boat Out consisted of and generated so many photographs, video and audio clips, CD-ROM would obviously have been the more suitable format for expanding this piece into an electronic work. Sadly, the average cost of developing a CD-ROM in 1996 was around $30,000, which in live art terms is pricey. Push the Boat Out was never developed into a CD-ROM, but it did lead me to a great interest in the potentials of electronic venues, potentials which I am currently exploring and exploiting in new works designed specifically for computer technology.

As a performer, making work for the Internet or a CD-ROM will never induce the adrenaline rush of a live performance, but neither, I suspect, would it generate feelings of the isolation and alienation I described as part of my experience in a durational performance. In 1994 I found a message in a bottle on the beach on Arran island off the west coast of Scotland, it was scrawled in pencil and decorated with Jelly Babies; in 1995 I scattered tape recorded messages in bottles throughout my performance installation; in 1996 I posted my first hypertext, Deus ex Machina, onto the Internet in much the same spirit as one might cast a bottle upon the waves. One can, of course, classify these different forms of communication as 'real', 'performance' and 'virtual' or as examples of place and placelessness or site specific and cyberspatial experience, but the salient point, as far as I'm concerned, is that the common denominator of both sending and receiveing still resides in living, breathing human bodies.