Flock is a work by digital artists KMA (Kit Monkman and Tom Wexler) and choreographer Tom Sapsford. Inspired by Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake, and specially commissioned by the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Flock premiered in Trafalgar Square in February 2007. Watch in HD.

KMA’s mission is to apply leading digital innovation to large-scale live environments in order to expand the audiences’ experience of theatrical work beyond the physical environment in which it is presented. Within the last few years KMA has become a leading and prolific innovator across stage, film and public environments, expanding expectations of how technology can interface with these fields and how audiences ultimately experience the work.

KMA’s interactive work stems from their joint areas of interest in patterns of social behavior and digital technology as a vehicle for public theatre.

KMA’s most recent large-scale interactive installation projects (Flock, Trafalgar Square, 2007; The Hive, Grand Canal Square, Dublin, 2008) have expanded the horizons for how technology can interface with theatrical activity in an emotional and playful way. These pieces are set out of doors, in large urban spaces, without prepared actors or formal participants. The scale of the work creates a vast aesthetic impact on the urban environments in which these works reside, drawing audiences to it, quite often by chance as people go about their daily lives, curiosity draws people in but it is the intelligence of the language structures which layer within these installations which holds the public attention and engages them in problem solving, play and social engagement. By arresting time and space within the public arena and blurring the distinction between performer and audience, KMA’s work is opening up new and vast environments in which art and audiences meet, equally on each other’s terms.

Match-Making Sessions: April 16, 9:00 am UK, 8:00 pm NZ - find your local time here + April 16/17, 10:00 pm (Wednesday) UK, 9:00 am (Thursday) NZ - find your local time here + April 23, 12 noon UK, 11:00 pm NZ - find your local time here. Come to the matchmaking session if you would like to find collaborators for an 080808 performance, or collaborate on someone else’s performance.

If you have an idea for a performance, please prepare a short pitch - no more than 5 minutes long. Don’t worry about visuals at the moment, but think how best to describe your idea in words, and think about what sort of collaborators you are looking for.

To join any of these sessions, email info [at] upstage.org.nz for a log-in (if you have previously used a guest log-in you must still email us, as many people use the guest log-ins and it will not work if more than one person tries to log in with the same username. We will be issuing personal log-ins once we have selected the 080808 performances).

The 080808 Upstage Festival aims to create a participatory space for collaboration, creation, and for the presentation of current cyberformance. The festival provides a platform (and shares the technical expertise) to enable artists to experiment with the new medium, and to have their work seen alongside performances by internationally renowned practitioners - in a celebration of the evolution and diversity of online performance practices.

The 080808 Upstage Festival aims to create a participatory space for collaboration, creation, and for the presentation of current cyberformance. The festival provides a platform (and shares the technical expertise) to enable artists to experiment with the new medium, and to have their work seen alongside performances by internationally renowned practitioners - in a celebration of the evolution and diversity of online performance practices.

To submit a proposal, email the following information to info [at] upstage.org.nz:

o working title of your cyberformance and 3-4 sentences about it;
o names and locations of people involved;
o brief background/bios (not more than 300 words);
o preferred time(s), in your local time, for presentation on 080808;
o contact email and postal address.

Performances can be on any theme or topic; the only rules are it must be no longer than 20.08 minutes, and must be created and performed in UpStage (information about the 070707 performances).

The festival will take place online in UpStage on 080808, with some RL (’real life’) access nodes at locations around the world. If you are interested in hosting a RL access node, please contact us for further information and technical requirements.

Participating artists will be listed and acknowledged on the UpStage web site. We will endeavour to record all the performances and provide participating artists with copies for documentation, however this is dependent on volunteer resources.

UpStage is an open source venue for web-based performance and is licensed under the Creative Commons and GPL. All copyright of artworks remains with the artists; we encourage artists to use Creative Commons (http://creativecommons.org/).

Important dates:

16 & 23 April: Match-Making Sessions (times to be announced) - Looking for collaborators? Bring your ideas to pitch, or come to join someone else’s proposal.
7 May: Tutorial for those planning to submit a proposal (time to be announced) - An opportunity for you to get to know the new features of UpStage and ask questions of experienced UpStage users about what you are planning to do in your performance.
16 May: Deadline for proposals
1 June: Selection announced
8 August: 080808 UpStage Festival

Any questions, please email info [at] upstage.org.nz. We look forward to receiving your proposals.

Helen Varley Jamieson, Vicki Smith, Karla Ptacek and Dan Agnihotri-Clark - 080808 Team

The following discussion, led by Jelena, considers the impact of the networked performance Radioballet and the ethics of collective action, not least with the absence of material and reciprocal relationships limiting expressions of solidarity. It was recorded 14/07/07 with the participants Rael Artel, Anna azar, Karol Sienkiewicz, Margus Tamm, Airi Triisberg and Andreas Trossek, in the workshop on ‘Collectives, Actions, Re-enactments’ held as part of the ‘Exercises on Adhocracy’ camp in Parnu, Estonia…” From Miraculous Mass-communication - Radioballet by LIGNA, Variant issue 31.

Radioballet gegen die Nato Sicherheitskonferenz
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OAr7_kcZE4k

The free radio group LIGNA exists since 1997. In several shows and performances they have been investigating the importance of dispersal in radio as well as of the radio. One of the main focuses is to refer to forgotten and remote possibilities of radio use in order to develop new forms of interactive practices (Mental Radio Show). Another emphasis has been placed on the development of concepts and the production of performative audio plays (Labyrinthe und Interferenzen), in order to find out how radio can intervene in public and controlled spaces, so that its public nature reappears in the form of uncontrollable situations (Radioballett: Übung in unnötigem Aufenthalt).

Radio Ballet Leipzig Main station Part 2
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rpT-wb3TPXk

The meetings will focus on conceptual discussions and project presentations and, as far as possible, on the development of prototypes and tools.

Schedule: A monthly session will be held on the following Thursdays from 4:30 to 9 pm.

Core subjects:

• Light and the city. Urbanism, media-façades, the fusion of physical and digital urban spaces.
• Augmented Reality, the use of projections on three-dimensional surfaces and physical objects, the use of light as a material.
• Set and stage design and the creation of atmospheres through the projection of light: perspective, optical illusions, etc.
• Investigation of the qualities of our visual perception and its limits.

For:

-architects and urban planners interested in the use of light in public spaces
-visual artists
-set and stage designers
-programmers (applications in real time, generative and visualization systems…)
-physicists and specialists in optics
-sociologists, anthropologists
-psychologists, neurophysiologists
-other interested persons

Participants will be chosen according to the following criteria:
-Personal interest, artistic and/or research experience in the aforementioned areas

(more sessions will be scheduled for Fall)

Context:

The sun’s shadow is the earliest type of projection known to us, and Egyptian and Greek sun dials are the origin of controlled projection. With the advent of artificial light sources, controlled projections were developed, such as shadow plays and magician’s illusionary techniques. In recent history, controlled artificial light sources and their use in photography, the cinema, and moving pictures have multiplied new projection possibilities. These include the use of light as a material to the projection of moving images on a variety of surfaces: buildings used as screens, research in physics on the qualities of light or ways of altering visual perception through controlling light.

Taboo Theater 2.0 is an Internet / Theater project that focuses on the question: How much taboo does art need? Historically it seems that theater has always embraced topics regarding the breaking or rethinking of ethical values in its society. What will a theater-production face when inviting a global society with diverse approaches towards art, culture, and societal habits, to participate in it?

In the blog section of this piece we are inviting everyone to submit images, sound files, texts, videos or comments on taboos in art, theater, literature, or on the Web, which will then be part of a week-long theater production at Theater am Neumarkt. The Internet is our global stage and we are hoping that via the blog many different points of view will be conveyed, as they will co-determine the outcome of the piece. The structure and functionality of the blog will be translated onto the theater stage, where the collected content will be further worked on.

Cathie Boyd, Artistic Director of Theatre Cryptic and Martin Naef, Research Programmer will talk about their collaborative project Living Canvas, which uses real-time projection to enable a performer to “wear virtual costumes”. These can then adapt to the body, or even provide a different face. The system enables a dynamic or even improvised performance by detecting the posture and silhouette of the performer and projecting imagery precisely to the selected parts of the body. This innovative project aims to create and explore a new expressive medium by taking projection systems to a highly interactive level and providing a powerful new tool for live video artists.

This talk is FREE, but space is limited, so to make sure of a seat please email: rsvp ‘at’ mediascot.org

Cathie Boyd founded Theatre Cryptic in 1994 and is committed to interdisciplinary productions using interactive and new technologies. Theatre Cryptic’s recent production The Paper Nautilus worked with Edinburgh based LUX Biotechnology to “transfer ‘living light’ from the laboratory to the stage and successfully integrate luminous and fluorescent proteins within the set design”. In 2001 Boyd was awarded a NESTA (National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts) Fellowship which enabled the company’s fusion of sound and visuals to ‘ravish the senses’.

Martin Naef received his Ph.D. from the Computer Graphics Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology. He was responsible for the blue-c Application Programming Interface, a software toolkit for collaborative, immersive virtual reality and telepresence. With a background in computer science and graphics, his research focuses on real-time multimedia technology such as 3D graphics, 3D video, spatialized audio, and VR.

Mimétisme is a group exhibition probing an alternative conceptual framework for “theatricality” in the visual arts. Rather than looking at formal exchanges between theatre and the arts, this exhibition brings together works that use and critically reflect the abilities to act and to become something else. In doing so, it leaves behind the dominant understanding of mimesis as realist pictorial representation in favour of what Walter Benjamin has referred to as the “mimetic faculty”: the mind’s ability to detect and appropriate similarities, to mirror others, to imitate, to immerse and to become.

Mimétisme contributes to an alternative history around the prevailing modernist narrative of overcoming the mimetic paradigm. In this history, refering to surrealism, theatre and film history, the mimetic faculty is used to explore the way we inhabit and perform imaginaries, and embody images and norms. Mimétisme thus aims at shedding new light on the performative strategies that have historically used acting and mimetic behaviour in order to critique, undermine and transform representations and societal regimes of identity from within, to counter the imposed mimesis of oppressive identification by using strategies of masking, camouflage and mimicry. In Mimétisme, these strategies are brought into a constellation that look at the acting body and mind as a medium, and explore the possibilities and pathologies of mediality.

Along the historical trajectories of Brechtian performance and feminism, Mimétisme moves from exploring societal forms of behavioural copying, empathy and becoming similar (as in immersion into milieus and cultural assimilation) to forms of excessive mimesis, sketching out different possibilities to address power relations, and to portray, once again, the relation between individual and environment, self and world, thing and context or figure and ground.

The exhibition is contextualised with an archive and a library of references and related material titled the Mimetic Cabinet, meant to offer insight into discussions on the subject surpassing the boundaries of various disciplines, such as art, biology, behavioural studies and politics.

Participating artists: Pawel Althamer & Artur Zmijewski, Elisabetta Benassi, Charif Benhelima, Lieven de Boeck, Claude Cahun, Mircea Cantor, Andrea Cooper, Neil Cummings & Marysia Lewandowska, Mauricio Dias & Walter Riedweg, Harun Farocki, Tom Holert, Sofia Hultén, Peter Ott, Ria Pacquée, Jean Painlevé, Jean Rouch, Constanze Ruhm, Tomas Schmit, Isabell Spengler, Erik Steinbrecher, Javier Téllez, Barbara Visser, among others.

Curated by Anselm Franke | Exhibition architecture: Pieter d’Haeseleer, Kris Kimpe and Bruno Poelaert | Production: Lotte De Voeght and Ari Hiroshige.

Toni Sant is exploring the 3-D online virtual environment called Second Life as a venue for performance by looking at examples of theatre groups performing online within Second Life. In addition to activities presented as theatre he is also observing broader performance activities within this online space. Additionally, this project involves an attempt to use Second Life as a pedagogical tool for generating an archive of work related to a history of performance on the Internet by relating it to previous work on other online virtual environments, such as IRC, MUDs, MOOs, and 2-D graphic chat networks like The Palace. Presently, the work revolves around a planned Second Life production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in one of three simulations of The Globe in this popular massively multiplayer online role-playing game.

Toni Sant is Lecturer in Performance and Creative Technologies at the University of Hull’s School of Arts and New Media on the Scarborough Campus. Since 1998 he has served as executive editor for the Applied and Interactive Theatre Guide. His writing has appeared in TDR: The Drama Review, Leonardo, the Encyclopedia of Politics, the Dictionary of Literary Biography, and other scholarly publications, as well as in the popular press in New York and Malta. He is currently writing a book called A History of the Future: Franklin Furnace & the Spirit of the Avant-Garde. His blog and weekly podcast are available at http://www.tonisant.com and he can be found on Second Life as Not Merlin.

This event takes place as part of cultural eXchanges, an annual event hosted by the Faculty of Humanities at De Montfort University. The week long programme includes lectures, performances, debates, presentations and readings from a diverse body of artists, academics, practioners and those working in the cultural industries. Previous guests have included Janet Street-Porter, Alastair Campbell, Andrew Davies, Corin Redgrave, Matthew Sweeney, Jenny Colgan, Sue Mcgregor, Roy Hattersley, Tony Hawks, Germaine Greer, Jackie Kay and Colin Dexter.