The following comment from Benton Bainbridge frames a question that we, the organizers have been asking since we first thought of this blog. What connects the future and past of networked performance. How has networked performance evolved? What directions has it taken? A real understanding will come from individual replies to the questions Benton has posed. We hope you will make an effort to answer them.

From Benton: “my personal interest would be connecting the dots between the future and the past of networked/collaborative performance. can we advance today’s efforts in distance collaboration through global and local digital networks by studying similar ambitions in earlier networked media?

my background is live audiovisual performance. the history of this discipline still hasn’t been written, so as a country boy i drew inspiration and guidance from other collaborative arts: live music, underground comix ‘jams’ and performance art. Laurie Anderson, “Good Morning Mr. Orwell” and Youngblood’s “Expanded Cinema” were key triggers too.

i’m curious how networked performance artists on this blog developed their art. how did you get into networked performance; what was your inspiration and how did you map the territory - firsthand R&D or study of past masters?

~benton-c”

What is Live Art?

This from the UK: “Unlike with opera, people often ask, ‘What is Live Art?’ The answer is people have been experiencing it for the last hundred years, from the earliest events at the Cabaret Voltaire where DADA was born to the happenings of the Sixties which influenced Andy Warhol, and in the 21st century this tradition continues to mutate.”
Today Live Art is witnessed at perfomances by Vanessa Beecroft or The Battle of Orgreave by Jeremy Dellar. Live Art is an interrogation of the aesthetics of presence. Live Art is about being there.

“Live Art mixes genres and diverse cultural experiences to express the complex organisation of contemporary life. It often involves work which questions commonly held assumptions. Live art is the trash-can of culture recycling and celebrating the debris of the modern world.”
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Three Performances: 2001-03: A Comment

The three location-specific performances Dialtones: A Telesymphony, Flip Flop, and Texterritory –you had to be there to experience them–introduced in the last posts were produced between 2001 and 2003 They made use of networked technologies–mobile phones, video/audio relayed by wireless broadband–to involve their audiences in the creation of the performances. Each has done this successfully in its own way, while maintaining control, in the case of Dialtones, a tight control, over the performance itself.

Dialtones: A Telesymphony

Dialtones, as described on Golan Levin?s web site, “is a large-scale concert performance whose sounds are wholly produced through the carefully choreographed dialing and ringing of the audience’s mobile phones. Because the exact location and tone of each participant’s mobile phone can be known in advance, Dialtones affords a diverse range of unprecedented sonic phenomena and musically interesting structures.”
Preparatory to the concert, members of the audience register their wireless telephone numbers at secure Web kiosks located in the performance space. In exchange for this information, they then receive seating assignment tickets for the concert venue. New “ringtones” are then automatically downloaded to their handsets. During the concert, a small group of musicians perform the phones en masse by dialing them up with a specially designed, visual-musical software instrument. “Because the audience’s positions and sounds are known to the Dialtones computer system, the performers can create spatially-distributed melodies and chords, as well as novel textural phenomena like waves of polyphony which cascade across the crowd; these musical structures, moreover, are visualized by a large projection system connected to the performers’ interfaces. Towards the end of its half-hour composition, Dialtones builds to a remarkable crescendo in which nearly two hundred mobile phones peal simultaneously.”

Flip Flop

Flip Flop comprises a group of motion poets, cyborgs, and sound, video and net-artists who collaborate on ?site-specific remote connection theater performances? that, in their words, “challenge boundaries between audience and performer, on-stage and off-stage, the venue and the street outside.”
For instance: the audience is invited to a party where, over the course of the evening, one of the partygoers (actor and motion poet Ajay Naidu) emerges as a performer, and the audience gradually realizes that it is participating in theater. As the performer shifts between private conversation and “narrative outbursts,” the event shifts in mood and form.
Simultaneously, a performer, equipped with a wearable multimedia-streaming computer roams the neighbourhood. The route is choreographed to synchronise with the performers story, and a live “point-of-view” video feed (as well as audio) from the wanderer is relayed by wireless broadband to the performance venue. Flip Flop was performed in July, 2002. Read a report on Live Streaming as Dramaturgy.

Texterritory v.2.3

Texterritory is a playground performance concept in which the audience has control over physical bodies (dancers and musicians) along with lighting, music and midi system at specific times during the performance. Their influence alters the direction of each performance. Texterritory was performed in May 2003 at the Mumford theatre in Cambridge (UK). Its plot is described as follows:
“Grace, a Legal Secretary arrives home early to prepare herself for her first real date with Jerome. She?s just bought a new pair of shoes to go with one of those outfits. At the moment she drops her keys on the kitchen table, the text arrives from J ? he has been delayed but will be there soon. From optimism to despair from knowing to kneeling in prayer, Grace’s dilemmas and insecurities unfold as she figures out what to do with this unexpected time on her hands. Together with the influence of the audience she decides exactly what to wear, who she might call if he doesn’t show up as well as trying to reassemble a photofit image of what Jerome really looks like.”
The multi-media, non-linear narrative “is told through texting/photo-messaging, dance, music, spoken word and animation.”
Texterritory makes use of a mobile gateway created by new media company Digit. Computers that tally the results of text messages sent to the audience and derives instructions for the performers from them. It thus gives the audience a certain amount of interactive control over the physical bodies, music and lighting at specific times during the performance.

Matt Adams of Blast Theory posted a comment of encouragement to the blog’s opening and I’d like to follow up with more about Blast Theory and a call out to Matt to respond to some specific questions about their work.

Blast Theory, comprised of Matt Adams, Ju Row Farr, and Nichols Tandavanitj, describe themselves as ‘an artist group whose work explores interactivity and the relationship between real and virtual space with a particular focus on the social and political aspects of technology. It confronts a media saturated world in which popular culture rules, using video, computers, performance, installation, mobile and online technologies to ask questions about the ideologies present in the information that envelops us.’
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Today’s empyre list (empyre Digest, Vol 18, Issue 14) arrived with a date 1/3/70 and therefore slipped to the bottom my email and probably that of a number of others.

But read it… After Andreas Horbelt?s remarks:

“If somebody stops writing in a textbased surrounding, he stops existing, no matter if he just takes a dramatic pause, if he is laged or if his computer is crashed… In graphical systems, you might still be there (as a visible avatar), but you also might already be gone (if you are lagged or your computer has crashed). So in the end, you’re just alive while typing, and every new sentence is a rebirth.”

Melinda Rackham, in her empyre post (which is about games) speaks of the Pause or Gap as “our portal into difference” — a positive take on a similar occurrence. An opening for the unexpected.

forwarded by Shu Lea Cheang -

TRAMJAM - VIENNA RUSHHOUR by Mumbai Streaming Attack
A multi-track-multi-driver mix hub streaming jam session of Vienna city vibe, orchestrated in sync with the city’s tram routing schedule.
TRAMJAM is a project that Shu Lea Cheang started when teaching networked performance at Zurich’s HGKZ. The work will go on to other cities where there are tramlines. The next stop- Rotterdam and the Deaf Festival ?04 Affective Turbulence: The Art of Open Systems in November.

Thanks for sharing this event Shu Lea.
Would you comment on your involvement in this project?
Can you, for instance, compare the Zurich and Vienna experiences?
Is there online documentation of the Zurich events that you can direct folks to?

Collaborative and collective process is really important to us (blog & conference organizers) and we see it as a core component of networked_performance - both within groups developing work, and with the inclusion and contribution of viewers/users/participants/ to the work. The website notes that ‘the Mumbai Streaming Attack study group expands to include local participants for each performance’. Do you mean in the respect that participants can upload sounds and contribute in that manner - or do you also connect with local artists for implementation/augmentation of prior iterations of the work? Would you talk about the technology and process involved?
Would you give us an overview of your personal practice and describe how this particular project is a continuation of that or has grown out of your former practice?
Would you comment on your specific involvement in this project?
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B.L.O.O.D.F.O.R. S.A.L.E. As James Joyce did 100 years ago, Christophe Bruno walks through Dublin, but with a Wi-Fi handheld and a digital camera. He records everything he sees, mainly company logos or brands, as if his eyes were “spammed”. Then, through the wireless network, he sends all this visual spam to a program on his server that fetches related “sponsored epiphanies” from the whole Web. These epiphanies are incorporated into the text by Joyce in real-time.

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