ART & TECHNOLOGY : Theater on a Chip : George Coates’ ‘Invisible Site’ mingles performers and ‘live’ computer images in a symbiotic work that redefines the state of the art

On New Year’s Day, avant-garde impresario George Coates sips red wine from a plastic glass as he holds forth in the dimly lit house of the neo-Gothic former cathedral that is his resident theater. Brocade light projections cover the cavernous interior, and leftover confetti and balloons from the previous night’s bash are scattered about, along with piles of unused blue and orange 3-D glasses.

This is the scene of an arts revolution in the making. What has gone on here the night before was more than another “ring out the old and ring in the new” party. It was a preview performance of Coates’ 11th and latest spectacle, “Invisible Site: A Virtual Sho,” which will have its official opening Jan. 22 at the McAllister Street venue after five weeks of previews.

George Coates Performance Works, purveyor of large-scale experimental music theater, is about to boldly go where no performance art company has gone before. Audience members wear 3-D polarized glasses and watch a high-tech “happening” that intermixes opera singers, actors and a martial artist with projected environments--a sort of Nintendo for the arts intelligentsia, a literati’s “Star Tours.”

“The electronics involved in (“Invisible Site”) are probably more sophisticated than anything being done in the world right now,” Coates says of the technology used in the 80-minute show, referring to a new generation of high-speed multimedia computers; a huge, specially designed perforated film screen; a high-definition projection system, and stereo-optic scenic projections. “We are the first to find new applications for this (technology).”

Although the movie “Who Framed Roger Rabbit” took the clever step of intermingling actors with cartoons, and recent pop culture products such as “Beauty and the Beast” have used computer graphics, “Invisible Site” is the first mix of live performers with computer-generated images created in what computer folks call “real time.”

These projected designs--such as a huge eyeball that follows one character around--aren’t prefabricated or “canned,” as in the films. Significantly, they are actually being computed and created at the moment, controlled by offstage engineers so the graphic can respond according to the performers’ movements.

It is not, however, just what’s onstage that’s revolutionary here. The process that brought it all together is just as innovative as the art itself.

An erudite teddy bear in a black leather jacket, Coates has seduced the best and the brightest Silicon Valley talents and their state-of-the-art know-how to his lair, offering in return new applications for emerging technologies.

The result is a unique meeting of the arts and science communities--and a prototype collaboration that could well provide financial and motivational benefits for both groups. Here, in the spacious chambers of Coates’ cutting-edge haunted house, computer nerds work side by side with bohemian performance artists.

“We’ve used emerging-technologies companies and collaborators--engineers, software and hardware design people--in our investigations before, but this particular piece involves a fundamental linkage between several of the leading companies, including Silicon Graphics Inc., Apple Computer and Kinetic Effects,” Coates says.

Silicon Graphics, which donated a substantial amount of equipment for “Invisible Site,” is the company responsible for such technical sleights of hand as the “morphing” faces in the recent Michael Jackson video “Black or White” and the spinning NBC logo. The $150,000 Silicon Graphics VGX Workstation used for “Invisible Site” is the same device that created the special effects in “Terminator 2.”

“They’re happy to see that we’re developing new applications, so the companies involved in developing the technologies that made it possible underwrote the costs to show off what their products can do,” Coates says. “We, as creative artists in multimedia, will work with new products and find ways of making theater out of it all that the initial creators of the technologies may not have anticipated.”

The Philadelphia-born and Rhode Island-raised Coates, 39, studied acting in New York, he said, “with some of the finest charlatans in the business.” He first came to California in 1969, where he lived and worked off and on for several years--a period that included a stint with an experimental ensemble near Berkeley.

“I discovered that there was a difference between acting in theater and art,” he says. “Artists were more creative, interested in pure forms for their own sake. Theater people were not so interested in the elements of the craft as the psychology of the narrative.”

That realization eventually led Coates to strike out on his own, creating a series of performance works with opera singers and mimes. He has been making multimedia shows in the Bay Area since 1977, and his first major group work--”The Way of How” (1980)--toured around the world, including a stop at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Next Wave Festival.

“The company was entering our 14th year of making original music theater from an interactive process, and we needed a home base to develop,” Coates recalls of the decision to secure his own theater. “I had built up an audience and it became apparent I wasn’t able to serve that audience by renting halls here and there.”

When Coates discovered Performance Works’ current site in 1988--a vintage 1929 Methodist-built sanctuary inside a nondescript building that also houses Hastings Law School dorms--it was just a shell.

“No one wanted it,” he says. “The (federal) government had bought it from the Methodists and put a false ceiling in and plastered over everything to make office cubicles. The building was forgotten and its cathedral just disappeared for about 40 years, and then it was rediscovered by an architect.”

Studies estimated that the structure would lose about $300,000 a year as a rental hall, but one such report concluded that the facility would be best off with an artists ensemble as tenant, and so Coates’ company moved in. The 300-seat space was baptized as its home in October, 1990, with “The Architecture of Catastrophic Change,” which ran for five months.

Today, there are still ragged holes in the 60-foot overhead arches where cables were dropped through to hold up the false ceiling, and portions of the plaster walls remain. It is far from pristine.

“I realized that the distressed look is so chic, it’s impossible to destroy anything. You could spend $6 million trying to design this kind of disrepair,” Coates says of the Beirut-esque interior decor. “It’s also a $6-million renovation if you try to turn this into a little rococo chamber hall for the refined clientele.”

Instead, Coates ties the look together with tricks of the eye, “upholstering” the walls with projected patterns of light that often change during the course of a show (although not during “Invisible Site”). By his estimate, he saves about $1.5 million this way. To date, the company has put only $650,000 into renovation--although it plans to spend another $1 million to $2 million, chiefly to complete work on the 144-seat balcony.

In 1989, Coates formalized his network of alliances and contacts in the computer field by creating SMARTS--Science Meets the Arts Society. The organization was set up to foster exactly the kind of cooperation between the nonprofit arts and the computer industry typified by “Invisible Site”--artists are given new tools with which to experiment, and the companies that provide the technologies get new uses for their products in return.

The National Endowment for the Arts has granted Coates’ company a $175,000 challenge grant to support the SMARTS work.

“Invisible Site,” the first full-scale SMARTS production, was initially produced at SIGGRAPH, the premiere computer graphics trade show, last July. Backed by 19 different companies--including major support from Silicon Graphics Inc.--the show was the only theatrical entry in the gathering’s arts component, the prestigious “Electronic Theater.”

“This is the place where people unveil their latest Frankenstein’s monsters,” Coates says. “When you see Max Headroom on television doing a commercial for Coke, that’s an example of something that was unveiled at SIGGRAPH two years before it was ever seen on television.”

Acquainted with some computer industry professionals before his company’s SIGGRAPH debut, Coates was, from that point on, wired into what seems to be most of the Silicon Valley.

“For a long time, the arts tried to appeal to Silicon Valley through their philanthropic sense and have failed miserably,” he says. “We’ve gone through the marketing research and development door, and we’ve said, ‘We can develop applications for your products that will open up new markets that you hadn’t initially thought of.’ They respond well to that.”

The premise of “Invisible Site”--which has changed numerous times over the course of the show’s development and was still in flux during previews--is fairly simple. Two main characters are participating in a “virtual reality” game--a technology in which users don goggles and gloves that enable them to see and interact with 3-D environments. What the audience sees is the experience these characters are having.

One character goes on-line to partake of a fantasy in which she’ll be Shakespeare’s Prospero. She sets out to meet another virtual reality player elsewhere on the network who will be Caliban, and, as Coates puts it, “They’ll do a master-slave thing and have an affair--electronic sex.” These best-laid plans go awry when a hacker enters the system.

The show stresses the visual and aural over narrative. That, though, is nothing new for this artist who has long been associated with spectacle performance art--often incorporating a minimalist score--that shares qualities with the ‘80s works of Robert Wilson, Robert Longo and others.

More so than some of these artists, however, Coates has acquired a broad following. His “Rare Area,” a sequel to his “How Trilogy” (“The Way of How,” “are are” and “Seehear”), broke attendance records in 1985 for experimental music theater in San Francisco, with 23,000 patrons during a three-month run.

When it played Los Angeles--first in a 1985 one-night stand at UCLA, then for a 1986 run at the James A. Doolittle Theatre--response was also positive. Times theater critic Sylvie Drake called Coates’ works “magnificent confections for the eye and ear.”

Confections, though, can have limitations. The Times’ former theater critic, Dan Sullivan, for instance, noticed in the 1986 version “a low comic who wonders what the hell is going on here” and suggested that “some of the audience may be wondering the same thing.”

Similarly, aficionados of the increasingly popular socially conscious and politically activist performance art will have little affinity for Coates’ image theater. He doesn’t mind that.

“For me as an artist, the challenge is to make the whole thing human-driven, to where you’re not at all interested in the technology,” he says.

“The whole production is a ‘What if?’ What if, at some point in the future, people could plug their nervous systems right into a multimedia data bank and experience worlds that didn’t have to conform with the laws of physics but that had a kind of quality of reality you have right now as you’re sitting here reading this article?’

The phenomenon that Coates is describing and that is depicted in “Invisible Site” has nearly arrived. The term virtual reality refers to various forms of 3-D interactive environments in which the user is “virtually” in the scene he is viewing, thanks to special goggles and bodygear. As the user turns his head, for instance, the visual field changes accordingly. If you reach out to open a door, the program shows you what’s behind the door, and so on, as if you are actually in the world, surrounded by a landscape you can affect.

“Virtual reality systems are definitely the growth technology. I’m betting my entire future income on it,” says Robert Warren, whose groundbreaking entertainment company SimSystems is building interactive virtual reality games, including ones that can be played with computers linked together via a telephone network.

“It’s going to be another three to five years before we’ll see (virtual reality) available for the home,” Warren predicts. “But there are new technologies coming out all the time that allow us to create for smaller computers--so you don’t have to own a $10,000 studio.”

As with any innovation, virtual reality also suggests a Pandora’s box of unanticipated uses. “One of the characters we suggest is addicted to the network and he’s in there all the time,” Coates says. “There could be abuse, no doubt.

“On the other hand, you might be able to open up perceptual circuits, to enliven and regenerate sensibilities that have been dormant, to jiggle your imagination into play so that it becomes as vital a muscle in your psychic persona as your wit.”

For an avant-garde arts organization in a recessed economy, Coates’ company is doing remarkably well. About 63% of its budget comes from the box office, and the grants continue to flow from public- and private-sector sources.

Mainly though, Coates has found that the key to getting ahead--in the performing arts or in the computer industry--is attracting the right talent to your enterprise.

“Some companies are a little more alert to the cultural cachet that accrues with connecting your work force into a creative experience that’s outside the product sales bottom line,” he says. “Companies compete trying to assemble the best teams. It can be very similar working for one company as opposed to another. They’re all in low-slung buildings.

“One of the things you can do is to try and link up with artists in your community that might be involved with cultural applications for your products, that could take advantage of the opportunity to work more closely with the designers of these systems.”

“You need to get artists involved in your project in order to get people into your products,” SimSystems’ Warren concurs. “There’s still a shortage of people who can write software. You have to allow them to be creative. That’s something traditional companies don’t do very well.”

Coates, however, offers a very non-traditional perk for the computer expert who finds his way to the theater on McAllister Street: “The engineer is the eighth performer. That’s exciting for somebody who spends a lot of time in a cubicle designing code--to come in here and perform with us.”

In the rush to get the best programming talent, companies have even turned to Coates’ productions as a lure. In one instance, 700 programmers were flown to San Francisco from around the country at the hiring company’s expense. “The programmers spend a week learning about the new product that’s going to be unveiled, and then (the company wants) to take them out on the town,” Coates says. “And they come over here and see a creative, cultural experience that uses that machine. This gives the company a competitive edge.”

Perhaps most important, this kind of business strategy acknowledges that there’s less distance between the psyche of the computer programmer and that of the artist than the stereotypes have long implied.

“The scientific sensibility involved in creating computers and programs is not that foreign to the creative and artistic impulses that need to be cultivated to make art,” Coates says. “Scientists are artists. They just have a different medium and a different respect for the limitations of their tools, of their paintbrushes. It’s insipidly moralistic to assume that science is outside of the purview of creative action.”