Hide to Show: Michael Beil's 'Memefying' Live Music and Hyperreality
Hide to Show: 'Memefying' Live Music
Pascal Gielen and Thomas R. Moore
Playing lonely together
There is a degree of irony in the fact that, due to ongoing health restrictions related to the Coronavirus pandemic, Michael Beil's scenic composition has only been performed a limited number of times. The work seems tailor-made for the surreal moment in which we find ourselves. Performed by the Nadar Ensemble, for whom the piece was specially composed, it offers something of a parody of pandemic-era society. Nearly everyone today can relate to the recurring lyrics: "Algorithms, ones and zeroes – You will never own – I will always be a network – You are all alone." These lines reappear constantly throughout the performance.
Over the past two years, people have become accustomed to spending entire days, weeks, and months seated before their computers. Meetings, lectures, concerts, cocktails, and even formal dinners have all been reorganised so that we experience them from behind screens (De Munck & Gielen 2020). Without this mediating technology, communication seemed — and sometimes became — impossible. In many cases, it was even forbidden by law. Yet even without such restrictions, many people now prefer to communicate while physically alone. In The Lonely Century, Noreena Hertz (2020) describes how communication technology and social media paradoxically lie at the root of contemporary loneliness. Even when people are together in a cafe, restaurant, or playground, how often do we still see individuals of all ages absorbed in their devices?
This resembles a new form of digital art: being alone together. One communicates with the entire world, but not with the loved ones sitting across the table. Covid-19 has only intensified this phenomenon. With hindsight, Beil seems to have prefigured this social condition, since his composition — though premiered after the pandemic began — was already finished by early 2020.
Through Hide to Show, the composer investigates the possibilities and limitations of digital communication in music. He places eight musicians on stage in six aligned but separate booths — a kind of display case into which the audience can occasionally and collectively peek, while the players themselves remain isolated. On the side facing the public, each musician controls a blind (of the kind found in ordinary homes), sometimes turning the slats to offer a glimpse into the booth, sometimes opening them fully to reveal the complete scene. This dramaturgical setup raises questions. What becomes of artistic practice and teamwork when performers cannot see one another? What does communication mean when musicians can only hear each other through headphones and are physically isolated?
Beil conducts a parallel experiment with the audience. What happens when digital images mediate a live performance and technological fixing techniques correct — or even exaggerate — apparent flaws? What remains hidden, and what becomes visible? The music's live 'sound' and especially its 'feel' grow increasingly ambiguous and unpredictable once reality is simulated. Drawing on Jean Baudrillard (1983), the German composer offers us a taste of hyperreality. The French philosopher coined this postmodern semiotic concept in his book Simulacra and Simulation (1983). The term refers to the inability to consciously distinguish reality from a simulation of reality, especially in technologically advanced societies. Hyperreality describes a condition in which what is real and what is fiction blend together so thoroughly that no clear boundary exists between them. It allows the mixing of physical reality with virtual reality and human intelligence with artificial intelligence (Baudrillard 1983).
Beil does not stop at exploring the boundaries of digital communication and hyperreality. The performance also engages with formats that flourish in Internet culture. Hide to Show is largely constructed as a sequence of short, repetitive, GIF-like fragments — in other words, memes: brief iconic images that circulate, multiply, and mutate endlessly online. As with genuine memes, the origin of Beil's scenes is not easy to identify. Baudrillard would likely view them as simulacra: copies without an original. Memes are catchy and attract attention, but they also flash past our eyes at breakneck speed. Beil plays with this aesthetic of immediacy. The audience confronts a rapid accumulation of scenes that initially appear to carry little deeper meaning. The experience, at first, feels similar to the associative scrolling we all find ourselves doing online at some point.
A more analytical look at these features suggests that the scenography of Hide to Show rests on at least three principles of contemporary Internet culture: communication in isolation, immediacy, and hyperreality. We shall explore what these principles demand from both performers and spectators. We begin with the Internet aesthetics employed by Beil. According to Alexander Baumgarten, aesthetics derives from aisthēsis (Baumgarten 2007). This contrasts with the more detached scientific approach to the world, instead describing one's ability to grasp surrounding reality in an affective way using all available senses. Baumgarten's conception relates to the ancient Greek notion of aisthēsis, meaning sensation and affective perception, as opposed to intellectual or rational knowledge. For Baumgarten, scientific truth exists outside the possibility of 'aesthetic truth' (veritas aesthetica), which depends on the involvement of human affects in processes of communication and interpretation. The same analytical concepts and words can differ in meaning because they are uttered differently by different affects. One must therefore perceive the author's or artist's affects when expressing words, music, or visuals in order to grasp their correct meaning (McQuillan 2021; Grote 2021). In our view, aesthetics is a way in which reality can touch us and with which a performer can touch the audience (Carroll 2006; Gielen 2022). But what does this mean in a hyperreality where our perception of the world is determined by technological mediation and simulacra? Through analysis of Hide to Show, we will posit an answer to that question.
We will also consider how Beil's scenic composition relates to reality itself. Is Hide to Show merely a mimesis of current Internet culture, or is it an artistic reflection of lived and experienced social (media) reality? In other words: the performance shows hyperreality, but is it itself hyperreal? To answer this, we compare the concept of hyperreality with another theoretical notion that illuminates our perception of reality, namely the psychoanalytic concept of the Real as set forth by Jacques Lacan (1991) and further elaborated in cultural and political terms by Slavoj Žižek (2002). It falls beyond the scope of this article to fully detail both thinkers' theories (both of which rest firmly on Sigmund Freud's writings on psychoanalysis). In summary, Lacan's most important addition to Freud's theory is the understanding that the subconscious is structured according to language and was thus heavily influenced by semiotics. Lacanian concepts can also be approached as a process of subject formation. From that perspective, three interlocking notions are relevant: the pre-linguistic Imaginary, the cultural and linguistic Symbolic, and the Real.
The Imaginary is structured by needs and image-identifications. The Symbolic is structured by language and law. The Real, finally, is that which can neither be pictured nor articulated through language. The Real occupies a central place in Žižek's theory and builds on Lacan's analytic frame. However, Žižek combines Lacan's Real with insights from cultural studies and critical theory. Crucial for this article is that, for both theorists, the Real determines our reality and everyday actions. In that sense, it is constitutive and forms a 'hard kernel' at the heart of existence. The concept does not denote reality itself, but truth itself, and is therefore the opposite of fiction, fantasy, or dreams. Yet while the Real is indeed real, Žižek argues we cannot verbalise it. We can only experience it through enjoyment, alienation, trauma, transcendence, sublimation, and similar channels. For the purposes of this article, we approach it more poetically as 'the truth of life itself', which necessarily includes death and transience in its definition. Seen this way, the Real cannot dissolve into a hyperreal simulacrum; it remains hidden from our culture. It is not susceptible to codes, concepts, or images, and never has been. Paraphrasing Lacan: the Real precedes the symbolic order. We can only experience or feel it directly, not through signs (or words). This framing lets us ask whether what remains hidden in Hide to Show could ever become visible. In other words: does the scenic composition 'show' the Real by suggesting that what is hidden cannot actually be shown? Phrased less abstractly: does the live performance convey something akin to life itself without putting it into words? Even though Beil uses extensive technology and infrastructure that erects a digital and factual barrier between the players themselves, and between the players and the audience, during the performance one can arguably sense real life lurking just behind the facade. In this way, Hide to Show differs markedly from our everyday Internet experience. The precise details of how Beil achieves this will be argued below.
Embodied disembodiment
Throughout much of Hide to Show, the players not only cannot see each other while performing — their visual focus is also kept from the audience. When the blinds open on each little booth, the musicians are instructed to direct their gaze toward the private room or to a space just two metres in front of the set. For the audience, it appears as though any eye contact has been strictly forbidded. The bodies are physically present on stage, yet they are dreamily absent. Like zombies, they inhabit an atmosphere of apathy and detachment that reveals no involvement whatsoever with the other players or the audience. Even so, the musicians play together flawlessly, and the unbroken fourth wall still holds the viewer firmly under its spell. This bespeaks rigorous stage direction — or, better, meticulous composition combined with hours of rehearsal.
Our experience suggests that when bodies cannot physically interact and resonate with each other, every movement, sound, and image must be precisely set in advance. Because of the combination of highly detailed compositional instructions, the inherent isolation within the piece, and the period in which it was created, the performers needed a specialised rehearsal strategy. Furthermore, Hide to Show must be played from memory. Although memorisation is not new, this piece is 75 minutes long and includes not only written notes but detailed choreography and play-acting as well, all of which demands a high level of commitment from the musicians.
Initial rehearsals took place in separate, smaller groupings, partly because of the pandemic and simply because the players would eventually be isolated on stage. The eight musicians first rehearsed in fixed duos and recorded the 32 scenes individually. Afterward, as a whole group with Beil and Nadar's sound engineer — who had layered the videos into a single combined montage — the ensemble watched the recorded rehearsals together and offered collective feedback. Full company rehearsals in the hall resembled theatre or dance rehearsals: the composer, like a stage director or choreographer, led the proceedings, deciding where to start and giving feedback. However, unlike typical dance or theatre productions, the performers were entirely reliant on Beil's critical feedback for matters of physical acting and timing. There was no way to fix synchronisation issues through typical collective, embodied ensemble playing. The separateness created by the set and composition further generated a rehearsal energy unique to each performer (or at least more exaggerated than usual). Much like real-life lockdown virtual meetings, emotional experiences such as frustration, exhaustion, excitement, and satisfaction were often felt individually and rarely shared across cabin walls, making the ensemble rehearsals even more disconnected and isolated.
A third factor affecting ensemble rehearsals was Beil's complex live video and audio electronics, built and operated by Warped Type of Düsseldorf. Nearly everything the musicians do in their booths is recorded live, cut, and manipulated by software written by Beil and Warped Type specifically for this performance. The 'new' videos are then projected back onto the blinds at the front of each booth, onto the performer within, or a combination of the two. The players execute the recorded actions live based on detailed instructions in the score. However, critical feedback from both the composer and his computer-science colleagues was necessary to achieve the expected level of perfection for the piece. The technicians' participation was therefore not a secondary factor in Beil's composition; it was an active choice to include them in the compositional process and in the manifest rehearsal practice. For the players, the technicians became an essential link to their peers in neighbouring booths — fellow musicians often only 'seen' through reproduced, after-the-fact videos displayed on closed blinds. Moreover, the musicians could only hear each other through in-ear monitoring, making something as simple as the exact location of another player a further unknown. Together, these factors made Hide to Show, from the perspective of the ensemble's interactions, a disembodied performance.
This disembodiment is intensified by the occasional use of technological fixing techniques, in which live music and vocals are processed in real time. On occasion, slips such as wrong notes were corrected immediately. Just as we hide mistakes, stutters, or stumbles on social media today to present an ideal image or profile (De Munck & Gielen 2022), Beil deployed technology to create error-free scenes. At these key points, perfectionism itself becomes a simulation. The act of failing on stage becomes suddenly very difficult. Each player's unique accents and authentic interpretations — those that derive from the performer's individual body — were kept under rigorous control. Combined with the strict staging, these occasional technical fixes limited the appropriation of the music. Put simply, during these specific moments, the performers were discouraged from inserting their own personalities from 'owning' the music. But does this make Hide to Show a simulacrum? The technological disembodiment suggests otherwise.
The rawness of the human voice can erase any sense of authenticity or singularity. Correcting wrong pitches and crooked melodies can drain the life from a live performance. Playing live always involves risk for musicians. It demands that weaknesses and vulnerabilities be openly acknowledged. Without this, the arc of tension needed for an audience to understand and accept a performance as such would simply collapse (Huizinga 1949). This captures the ambivalence central to any live experience. Tension builds partly because viewers know the performer can always stumble or falter. The aliveness of a live performance paradoxically rests on that very possibility of failure. Borrowing from Edgard Varèse, music is the art of organizing raw sounds, random noises, or noise itself into a sounding composition (Varèse 1917). That is why music is always artificial: created art and created life, so never truly real. The tension of a live performance stems, among other things, from the fact that noise can still break through the orchestration at an uncontrolled moment. A potential hiccup, a cracking voice, a wrong note, tone, or rhythm, as well as a sweating body or an uncontrolled movement, creates the chance that real life might temporarily break through the artifice.
Subverting Beil’s title: presenting art and making music audible is only possible by concealing the chaotic, untamed life of sounds and noises — or, like John Cage, by enclosing them within an artificial framework (Cage 1960). In this sense, we could interpret Beil’s title literally. Life in the wild must at least be tamed before one can speak of art. But if the audience knows in advance that life can no longer break through (thanks to technological fixes), all tension might disappear. Nothing would be left of a live performance. One might as well listen to or watch a recording at home. After all, cutting out the risk of failure and vulnerability also means cutting out life, rendering live music sterile, soulless, and lifeless. This might be one reason so many recordings made during the Covid lockdown felt wearisome.
Beil is clearly well aware of this danger of sterility. He both aims for perfection and works hard to achieve it by tactically using auto-tune and a click-track to synchronize this time-coded piece — yet he also cherishes the inevitable small mistakes from sections recorded without computer correction. These minor blemishes, repeated endlessly thanks to Beil’s idiosyncratic and repetitious employment of video feedback loops, let the audience know that what they are watching is genuinely live — real and not pre-recorded. Additionally, he knows how to generate tension, and therefore life, in a fresh way. Real live bodies still occupy the stage, and even a lay spectator must acknowledge that the performers are achieving a remarkable feat by connecting all 32 scenes without a hitch. In other words, though Beil applies hyperreal principles of technological media mediation, the public remains aware of a reality — a reality of sweat, blood, and tears, the hard work the players must invest to keep the virtual wall straight, intact, and unbroken. It is this embodied disembodiment that makes Hide to Show a fundamentally different experience than simply scrolling online. That sensation of real life is further enhanced by the physical presence of the audience: bodies that collectively breathe, laugh, remain silent, cough, and clap, bodies in resonance with each other and with the performers, turning Hide to Show into a visceral experience that brackets hyperreality, at least for a moment. In short, Beil has not entirely disembodied his scenic composition. Consequently, the spectator continues to taste the Real nestled within the virtual.
Memefying culture, cut up reality
In Hide to Show, memes that circulated on the internet are duplicated and placed live on stage. Etymologically, “meme” derives from the Greek word ‘mimētḗs’, meaning both ‘imitator’ and ‘feigner’ — a term that can hardly be absent from a performance that deliberately explores hyperreality. Just as memes behave online, the memefied moments in Hide to Show appear to be ‘pasted’ one after another without substantive links. Aside from the fact that all are found on the internet (and are highly entertaining), Beil’s scenes, at least on the surface, seem to have little in common. For example, what does the Beach Boys song “In My Room” have to do with the Leek Girl “Levan Polka” dance? Like online material, they appear here offline at first glance without context. Their presence in the performance seems almost arbitrary. The scenes in Hide to Show, like their network counterparts, seem to drift both bottomlessly and detached from time, despite their tangibility on a physical stage.
A meme’s success rests squarely on universal recognizability. That means memes must be easily understandable or “legible” without historical or geographical context. This condition requires shared cultural codes and demands as little effort at deciphering “on the spot” as possible. However, the result is that memes feel like fragments of displaced culture, creating an alienating effect. By exploiting this medium, Hide to Show presents a fragmented, carved, and perhaps even dismembered reality. Much like on the internet, the memefied scenes are highly entertaining — but also disorienting. Where do they come from? When were they made? And why are they shown here? Intrinsic to this “context collapse” (Marwick & Boyd 2011), the viewer is denied any key or legend that would help decode the memes or scenes presented. The only resource the audience has is their memory of memes seen online previously. The result is an immediate, bite-sized, and manageable composition. Without temporal or geographic anchors, culture must rely solely on immediacy. Images command attention instantly. Hyperreality also means hyperactivity. Following the logic of an attention economy, the viewer must be re-stimulated continuously. And so Hide to Show never slows down or stops. There is always something to see or listen to — often multiple miniature scenes competing simultaneously for the spectator’s focus. Beil’s composition masterfully weaves catchy “Acid” samples with his own upbeat vocaloid-style jingles in a captivating counterpoint at a blistering tempo. The acted-out images, both live and reproduced, are alluring thanks to quick costume changes and the layered reality created by video feedback. In one scene, Beil goes so far as to map players’ legs onto the torsos of others, playing further with the interchangeability of components found in a modern meme. By applying this principle, Hide to Show generates a certain charm. Scenes seem to continually compete, constantly shoving each other out of the way, and never quite settling before the next has already entered.
Beil also varies and copies his memes as they clamor for attention, appearing and vanishing at breakneck speed. Yet Hide to Show itself does not fully follow this online logic. For instance, the scenic composition not only grapples with but also contradicts the principle of immediacy simply by keeping the audience seated for over an hour. The viewer cannot swipe associatively like a typical internet consumer without making any commitment. In our case, Beil decides what the audience sees and hears, as well as how long it lasts. Moreover, Hide to Show does not float above history but is embedded in a musical and performing arts tradition — namely, the concert. The audience remains seated with no buttons to press or screens to swipe to control the performance. Sovereign power rests entirely with the composer and the players, to whom viewers willingly submit (Schwartz & Godfrey 1993) for over an hour. Furthermore, the performance has depth. The concert hall itself is physically and materially grounded in a geopolitical space with its own cultural policies, educational systems, and traditions. With Hide to Show, Beil first and foremost places the work inside an artistic tradition that critically observes and comments on everyday social phenomena. Although the scenography is highly entertaining, the viewer cannot escape a sharp and bitter undercurrent that contrasts sharply with the seemingly random online supply of memes. On further reflection, Beil’s selection is not random at all. Some memefied scenes demonstrate it implicitly, but others sing loud and clear: loneliness! Does not all social media, all our craving for communication and connection, mask a growing loneliness? Like memes, today we seem to float as cybernauts, bottomless and rudderless in a historical vacuum. We cling to fleeting images, easy tunes, and messages. We network endlessly in a vain hope to find grounding and anchoring. Etymologically, “meme” also refers to “mimeme”, ancient Greek for “root”. In Hide to Show, a melancholic atmosphere surrounds precisely that desire for roots and the ability to take root, something that becomes ever more present and palpable.
Hyperreality vs. the Real
Disneyland is perhaps Baudrillard’s best-known example of what he called hyperreality in the recreational life of the contemporary Westerner. There, children and adults go to literally live a fantasy. “Disneyland is a perfect model of all the entangled orders of simulacra.” It aspires to be fake so that everything else “can be seen as real” (Baudrillard 1983, 10). While the park itself is harmless, Baudrillard’s message is much more all-encompassing. For him, daily life, because of ubiquitous technology, takes on a constant veneer of simulation — an ever-present hint at the absence of anything real. In Hide to Show, Beil clearly draws inspiration from Baudrillard’s ideas — for example, in the Leek-Dance meme and thread that appears early and morphs into the work’s grand finale. The origins of the Hatsune Miku version of “Levan Polka” are murky, but it is undoubtedly an internet sensation (with over 16 million views). Early in Hide to Show, Beil re-examines, parses, and then reconfigures (arguably) the ‘original’ leek-dancing farm girl video. At first, only the highly catchy tune plays back with equally recognizable electronic instrumentation. Yet just three scenes later, Beil treats the audience to the first live, flesh-and-blood account of the meme. The dance remains confined to one of the booths, and — as if to drive the point home mercilessly — Beil projects Miku’s simulated and “mapped” version of the dance onto the blinds of the adjacent room where the live dancer performs.
Miku is a complete fantasy from head to toe. Her body is a cartoon, animated, and while based on humanoid design, is clearly an “idealised” figure. Her official image was first drawn by manga artist Kei (Sabo 2019). Her voice, the basis for vocaloid technology, is a computer-enhanced recreation of several voices, each merely recording basic phonemes. One can “let” Hatsune Miku sing simply by playing a keyboard programmed with her sample bank. By composing a piece in which players dance her moves live, Beil stretches the concept of sampling, programming the players with Miku’s physical movement routine and later putting her voice literally into the musicians’ mouths.
That brings us to a second example of hyperreal-inspired scenes. Toward the latter half of the piece, five players gather around a table outside the fixed décor to reenact the famous Beach Boys video for their hit “In My Room”. Although the musicians’ movements are clearly stylized to the 1960s-era clip, the music is Beil’s, and the audible voices were created using vocaloid software. In other words, the players lip-sync this scene, simulating reality on at least two levels: first, simply by “acting” as if the audible voices were their own, and second, by recreating a visible genre that predates the audio. Beil instructed the musicians during rehearsals to act like the Beach Boys, “the perfect sons-in-law”. This image — for him a total fantasy that the players were to enact in real life — matches seamlessly with the phantasmagorically created voice, which has little or no basis in reality beyond a recognizable language and vocabulary. A few scenes later, those same players are jammed into one room for the same number, only this time they sing it live — with heavy auto-tune correction. A polished presentation ensured through technological intervention. Just as genetic engineering hopes for the perfect life, perhaps even eternal life, technical corrections here generate the illusion of an ideal live performance, the possibility of artistic perfectionism without fault.
That hope for technology, however, rests on the assumption that humans will eventually fully and rationally decode real life and the live experience, and that this decoding will generate life itself. It is fundamentally the belief that we could play god — or that mere virtuosity suffices to deliver a catchy performance. Yet it is delusional to think that, like the “perfect sons-in-law”, there is a definitively calculable formula for liveliness and life, or that one could develop an algorithm for subjectivity, spontaneity, and authenticity. Returning to Lacan and Žižek, that would imply we could actually capture the Real within the symbolic order after all. By that logic, we could also, for instance, develop a chemical formula for love or compose something that induces love — much like Patrick Süskind, in Perfume (1985), whose protagonist creates a fragrance that spontaneously stirs lust and blind desire. This vain hope, however, conveniently overlooks how every attempt to mould the Real into codes, symbols, and formulas immediately suppresses any life. Consider analyzing sex verbally during intercourse: that act itself can instantly undermine any desire to continue — or to match deed to word.
Just as the word cannot replace the deed, the signifier cannot replace the signified. Today, hyperreality creates the illusion that money can buy true love or that high quality can be fully compensated by quantity. A common, deceitful commercial suggests one can instantly purchase a good feeling or even a happy life with the advertised product.
Hyperreality maintains this illusion by simulating the impression that the Real can coincide with a symbolic order. In semiotic terms, that means a signified — whether a person or an object — coincides with its signifier (the word “man” or “object”, respectively). In hyperreality, therefore, reality dissolves into signs, just as in the monetised economy the real economy is determined by the mass psychology and hysteria of virtual markets. The value of a product then stems not from its quality, functionality, or use value, but from its speculative worth. According to Baudrillard, commodities in this state no longer possess “use value” (as defined by Karl Marx) but operate as signs (in Ferdinand de Saussure’s sense). Baudrillard believes hyperreality goes further than merely confusing or blending the Real with the symbol representing it. Hyperreality involves creating a symbol or set of signifiers that represent something that does not actually exist — like Santa Claus (Baudrillard 1983, 130–135). In a hyperreal environment, we experience reality as if there is a one-to-one relationship between signifier and signified, leaving no room for interpretation or imagination between them. Reality is consequently confused with a sign that literally distorts our experience of it.
These days we are surrounded nearly twenty-four hours a day by the worldwide web. While it could be considered a simulacrum, its operation (as we know it) depends entirely on this one-to-one relationship. Our experiences of life and their meaning are heavily conditioned by it. As intelligent as ubiquitous digital media may be, a major limitation remains: machines still lack the ability to interpret or imagine — to fill the gaps between signifier and signified. This explains, for instance, why algorithms struggle to distinguish between nudity and pornography. According to London police, it can even be difficult to differentiate child pornography from a desert landscape (Du Sautoy 2019, 81). Artificial intelligence (still) possesses no imagination in any meaningful human sense, so it must take any observed reality literally — or, in Baudrillard’s terms, the sign equals the signified. Digital technologies can only capture sounds, images, and movements logically, encoded in a connection of ones and zeros. Sounds and pictures can be reproduced vividly — but only through logical links of previously stored data. As mathematician Marcus Du Sautoy notes in his book on artificial intelligence, “A digital camera can take a picture so detailed that it far exceeds the storage capacity of the human brain, but that doesn’t mean it can turn those millions of pixels into one coherent story. We are a long way from understanding how the brain can process data and integrate it into a story” (2019, 80).
In contrast to humans, computers have an immense capacity to remember anything they record. It is this “giga” memory — along with their connection speed — that gives the veneer of intelligence. In contrast, people constantly forget and must therefore rely on interpretation and imagination — for example, to link events historically.
Computers must first register everything encyclopedically to make the "correct" logical connections and then reproduce a reality—a voice, a sound. Anything outside this digi-logic, any ambiguity that slips in, escapes the virtual eye or simply blocks the system. This suggests that, despite all current algorithms and meta-algorithms, we now have artificial intelligence but still no artificial intellectual. Human intelligence exists precisely by the grace of imagination, that ability to glue together illogical and paradoxical events or a contradictory reality. Interpretation for thinking beings rests on that peculiar mixture of factual knowledge (or alleged facts) and imagination: facts and fiction. For us and this article, the Real, the truth of life itself is only "attainable" through imagination. We can only grasp it without really grasping it (in codes, language, symbols). We can only "read" and feel life—including life in a live performance—between the lines and binary codes and in-between the signifier and the signified.
Beil seems to understand these mechanisms all too well.
The piece owes its live-ness not primarily to technological ingenuity and digital mediation, but to the public's imagination. The scenography puts the viewer to work. They are pushed to create a personal whole from sometimes incoherent fragments. Moreover, Beil keeps life in the show by ignoring the distinction between real and artificial, body and the image of the body, between life and virtuality. The viewer and listener are sometimes left literally guessing, and that is precisely what activates our imagination. What is real and what is not? The public knows that a game is being played and must rely continually on interpretation and imagination to guess what is real and what is not real, to fill in the undecided space between signifier and signified, and the ambiguity between "ones and zeros." In that imagination we can see, hear, feel, and taste the hidden life itself, the Real, without being able to literally see, hear, feel, and taste it. Was art not precisely the expression of "that about which one cannot speak"? (Wittgenstein 1970) The life of the live performance can only be tasted between the lines, shining through the cracks and fissures in the symbolic order. No logic, codes, or words can comprehend it. Experiencing the Real means an experience that transcends all understanding. True life can only be shown by not showing it. To hold life in a live performance, one hides to show.
Grand Finale
We can conclude that the composition makes use of hyperreal "techniques," but extends beyond the hyperreal itself. Beil subscribes to a (modern) artistic tradition that reflects on our contemporary condition through a game of signs. The scenography suggests how we use codes in our digital culture to signify the world and ourselves. Summarizing Niklas Luhmann, we could say that the composer establishes a second-order observation by showing us how we look at the world today (Luhmann 2000). The work sets our own looking "to watch" and our own listening "to listen." Our first-order observations are nowadays greatly determined by digital lenses and within an Internet culture that has its own aesthetic. As we clarified above, the latter is characterized by a twofold collapse. First, as with memes, we are cut off from time and space in a so-called "context collapse," and, secondly, the space of interpretation and imagination collapses between signifier and signified. Moreover, the digital screen culture surrounding us is two-dimensional, not only literally, but also in its sensory capacity. Audio-visual media merely appeals to two senses. Touch and smell are often neglected in the digital sensory palette, leaving us with a disembodied experience of the world. The same applies to relationships we have on social media today. They are also disembodied, and Internet connectivity often leaves us with a feeling of loneliness. Beil offers us this message both implicitly and explicitly throughout his composition. Loneliness is not only literally sung of during the performance, the above-described distant focus of the performers, the separated booths, and the technological fixes also displace human presence and coexistence. In summary, a hyperreal Internet culture leads to social and aesthetic deprivation that clamps down on our imagination. As a result, we find it difficult to touch life and the world anymore, and the world cannot seem to touch us either. That appears to be the message of the piece.
Still, Beil is not a moral "preacher," and he is certainly no technophobe. On the contrary, the scenic composition demonstrates how Internet culture and digital technology can enhance our creativity. Beil is certainly inspired by it and quite adept at playing with it as well. This makes the work funny, spectacular, and highly entertaining from start to finish. The gloomy message is more inconspicuous. The proverbial hangover only comes after the performance. Here is where we reach the limits of digital technology. It can function as an extension of human creation, but as yet cannot replace it. After all, Beil only achieves this "under the skin" feeling by reopening our digitized aesthetic horizon. He does this, among other ways, by stretching the space between the signifier and the signified on the one hand, and by putting real bodies to work on stage on the other. That approach becomes most apparent during the grand finale. Perhaps not coincidentally, Beil lowers the digital veil just before the metaphorical curtain falls on the performance. The last leek-dance is anything but a pre-programmed copy. Moreover, unlike the voice or instrument, one cannot easily "fix" this dance. In the finale, perfectionism is no longer guaranteed. Every performer has their own body-idiom with their own possibilities and limitations. It is impossible to fully synchronize this scene. That certainly applies to the musicians on stage here who do not have trained dancers' bodies. At any time, any one of them could fall out of this meme's mold. A leek could slip out of a hand, and the musicians-come-dancers can and do fall out of step. However firmly Beil maintains the harmony and synchrony, the viewer cannot fail to notice how exposed the players have become. The dance could fall apart at any moment. It is precisely this fragility that makes the grand finale touchingly beautiful. We are using the slightly sentimental "touching" here deliberately. With the Leek-Dance, affection breaks the pre-programmed codes. Human emotions suddenly shimmer through the meme and the tight choreography. With this vulnerability, Beil shows exactly where life is in live performance. It is the momentum and force that pushes the composition to touch the Real. This performance gains a soul. The audience immediately comes to grips with a reality that every perfectionism conceals failure, that behind our hyper-visual culture an endless void is hiding, and that behind music there is nothing more than eternal silence.
List of References
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