<x-charset iso-8859-1>Interesting question posed by Robert Walton: It seems to me that your study is intended to compare, as you say, your theatre practice with newly emerging "events" in telecommunications media and the web, artwork done for/on the internet, interactive works. You then supply a brief definition of what matters to you in live (composed) theatrical performance..: >the moment of live communication between an audience and performance: the fabrication of a revelatory, time-based, composed and responsive environment encompassing the ëeventí and its participants. >> and i am not sure how to read your notion of "responsive environment," if you are speaking of presentational theatre forms of old (on the proscenium or other-shaped separated performer-audience spaces). I also don't think you are addressing interactive artworks and installations as such (revelatory or non), and the potentially quite different parameters of composition/control and non-controlled feedback they might involve, apart from the diverse mediations in play. What I also find unclear is how you are thinking of the web as a space for "events", since you speak of "soft performances" (?) and of the websites as "composed environments" storing information, which does not entail interactivity, in my opinion, apart from the minimal mouse-click/scroll -over dreamweaved-and-fire-worked webdesigns. Now, rather than looking at the web and at websites only as a particular virtual environment, and I think they arfe obviously different from the theatre and from theatrical composition and physical/social performer-audience relations, I propose it would be more interesting and a propos for your investigation perhaps to look at today's emerging net art and webperformances in the context of telematics and videoconferencing, i.e. live performances that link distant sites and that produce a new composite event and an aesthetic or an event-collaboration that could o n l y happen in the web environment and its particular video and audio and graphic streams, links, packets, configurations and platforms involving specific softwares and applications, and also its particular user/participant interfaces and interactions. Eduardo Kac speaks of "dialogical interaction," and of creating "nomadic ephemeral networks" in his telepresence works, and with his most recent transgenic works he even addresses "interspecies, telematic, sonic remote connection or installation, or installation where I donít have any control over what happens" (quoted from a talk he gave here at OSu a few weeks ago). He doesn't speak of "compositions" in the older or classical sense, but how different telematic elements in an installation produce a particular reality, or different kinds of movement, as we might say in regard to dance. What I mean to suggest is that there is a fundamental difference between websites as a r c h i v e s - which basically do what video or text/photo portfolios of art, performance, dance have always done, namely document what had happened - and the internet as a new globalized "ecology" or environment for live telematic interaction between users in different sites (bi- or multidirectional communication), and such interaction as a performance event is probably vastly different from the "composed" and framed theatre practice you spoke of. If you are interested, there is some new literature out there on telematics and telerobotics (http://www.ieor.berkeley.edu/~goldberg/art/), or, say, the writings/artworks of Eduardo Kac (http://www.ekac.org/) or Stelarc (http://www.stelarc.va.com.au/index.html), or Company in Space, an Australian dance company that has experimented with teleperformances (www.companyinspace.com), or Corps Indice (directed by Isabelle Choiniere), or Curious.com (www.leftbank.org), among others, and you may also want to look into the recent work of Blast Theory, which has been discussed on this list previously. If you are interested, I wrote an essay on "New Environments for Dance" which addresses the changes and transitions from site specific/real place performance to interactive dimensions of internet-based performance. (please contact me directly) sincerely Johannes Birringer Environments V/AlienNation Co. http://www.aliennationcompany.com http://dance.ohio-state.edu/files/Dance_and_Technology/environ.html http://www.wexarts.org/thefold/practice/practiceframes.html </x-charset>
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