LIVENESS. What roles, now and in the future, might there be for live performance in an increasingly digitized economy? How can live performance be harnessed to address the needs and issues of communities in relation to the digital revolution (eg accessibility, empowerment)?
STORYTELLING. What new forms of storytelling – and what kinds of new content – might be made possible by the interaction between digital technologies and live performance? How can we encourage creative experiment in this area, and what could political and cultural institutions (government, BBC, etc) do to foster and support such a creative atmosphere?
SCIART: how can science and (live) art collaborate to produce new knowledge, new forms, etc?
13 Comments
hi darren,
no i didn’t manage to log in on the day – too much else going on plus the time difference & travelling … but now i’m settled for a while so will look for any documentation from the event. i hope it went well : )
Hi Helen. We had a small but lively discussion on the day – were you able to go online during?
i agree with all of hannah’s comments; my position is that the use of the internet (& other digital technologies) in live performance consitutes a new form of theatre/performance/whatever – something that is beyond simply using the internet as a distribution channel, for example, or using clever projections as scenography in a stage play. i’ve been experimenting in this area for almost 10 years & have called what i do “cyberformance” – which is specifically the use of the internet in live performance, as a site for the performance and as a means to bring together remote performers, and sometimes also remote audiences. i’ve thought a lot about whether or not it’s “theatre” & at the end of the day what it comes down to for me is that the event is happening in real-time, with artist(s) & audience simultaneously present – whether that presence is physical or virtual. for more, look at my site, http://www.creative-catalyst.com; also UpStage which is a web-based platform for cyberformance, http://www.upstage.org.nz; & if you’re really keen, my thesis is at http://www.creative-catalyst.com/thesis.html
unfortunately i won’t be physically present at the conference, & will be in a different time zone as well with a lot of other things going on, but i’ll try to check in online & see whether i can follow &/or contribute to the discussion.
Sure Radio didn’t kill the stage, TV didn’t kill Cinema, etc. etc. VR and the next big thing won’t kill anything. but whatever it is will become a new media. How popular it becomes; is up to the audience not pundits. Just like the beatles they were “sons of the devil” playing black music until people told the pudits to bugger off.
Come on, please don’t patronise me and presume what I have or have not experienced. Of course I understand VR beyond its clunky stereotype. No matter how real and immersive it is, everything I have said still stands. Of course it’s interesting, and valuable, but so is live performance, and doubly so the spaces in between.
When I call VR outdated – I mean so in the simplified way its advocates consider it- as if it is some inevitable next step that will replace old methods of media/experience. Has film ever killed live performance? Has home cinema killed the movie theatres? No. Because these are all different languages of experience, and offer different lenses through which you can view the world. This is why I believe you cannot just say that everything will move into these online spaces. Much more interesting has to be the spaces in between worlds, and the spaces between forms, if (as I believe is its role) the arts are able to continue to comment on being/experience/society, they need to be able to stand both outside and inside of everything.
The immense possibilities of VR are great, and I hope you don’t think I’m arguing against that, what I’m calling for, rather, is for people to not lose sight of liveness and analogue experience as an equally valuable thing. There are no sides here, only widening vistas. VR does fascinate me, but so does AR, and so does TR (trad reality).
Links should be:
http://apex.projectchainsaw.com
http://furnace.projectchainsaw.com
I don’t think you have experienced web.alive and the immense possibilities; http://apex.chainsaw.com offers a one click solution for fast entry and 3D spacial audio, gestures, text, 2d presentations, etc.
Http://furnace.chainsaw.com can help understanding. [ed: removed company link]
I know VR is synonymous with silly head mounted displays still but no other term has been devised; serious games, and others don’t work either.
I think what you’re describing is advance VR… Do you not think VR is a bit of an outdated (or at least simplified) concept now? There’s a problem when digital worlds try to recreate analogue spaces/methods of communication/experience. The real world will always do that better- that’s why stuff like Second Life is such a dead end, and also why the MSM and academia hang onto it so, because they speak its language- what’s much more interesting to me is exploring the gap between real and online, and enhancing both with the other. As thus AR is much more interesting to me within a theatrical/games context, than vast online spaces that seek to imitate rather than invent. There is value in liveness, just as there is in the limitlessness of opportunity represented in an online space. When you talk about the idea that “Performances will be ad hoc and non-linear” is what you’re describing is a kind of virtually situated Live Art? I don’t think people who resist crashing online worlds with live performance fear change, I think they don’t understand why it is relevant – that’s where I think the discussion needs to lie, sure it’s possible, but is it valuable? What is valuable? What should performance do? That’s why it’s such a bloody interesting discussion to have
Real-time tele-immersiveness will provide non-linear entertainment. education, and information. Exploration of many environments with domains filled with high-resolution artefacts, 3D spacial sounds, inhabited with people and AI to converse and interact with will socially include different age groups. Performances will be ad hoc and non-linear the limitation is endless. The technology exists the fear is of change not of desire.
I don’t think live performance needs to be ‘harnessed’ but rather to continue to evolve to reflect the changing experience of people who are living between worlds, and inventing new kinds of storytelling. Live streamed performance is being picked up as a really useful device in making cultural content ubiquitous (NT:Live is the strongest example in the theatre world).
However at the same time there is a move towards using ethics of digital storytelling in a live context, which shouldn’t be dismissed for all the interesting things that can be produced with live storytelling in a digital one. A brilliant example of this is the ‘pervasive gaming’ of companies such as Hide&Seek and their collaborations with theatre companies – they replace passive audience with single or multi player, often using digital tech as interface/tool in the work. They apply an open source ethic to developing their pieces, and they are all about the player as protagonist – taking gaming to a live world. I don’t think liveness is all, but there’s no way it should be dismissed. Likewise there are different ways of using tech in delivering an event online – straight streaming is very good at amplifying content – but social media tools are also excellent for amplifying a process and an experience…
Live streaming is less interesting to me, because all you’re doing is replacing one frame, with another.
Lots more I could go on about
but I guess what I’m saying is that the question should not be only ‘what can digital tech do for performance’ but also ‘what can performance do for digital tech’.
IMO art exists to test societies’ ideas, performance needs to be at the forefront of that, exploring online identity, experience, ethics… so I’d say instead of blithely accepting that ‘live performance will go virtual’, we instead need to redefine and question virtuality and liveness.
The only problem of creating large audiences for events at say the dCollesium would be allocation of bandwidth to cover the event over that period of time. Server providers assure that this can be arranged and by optimising your connection to game mode will reduce the lag and latency in the system providing a smooth display.
Live performance will go virtual; using the VR capabilities of web.alive and the real-time capabilities will enable 1000’s to enjoy real-time events without all the travel.
I guess something to bear in mind that the audience can also go through significant changes also. Not only the notion of broadcasting through a network, but also co creating through the network is an interesting proposition. There are many examples of this. I just picked up on a perfomance happening here http://www.clickgreen.org.uk/news/national-news/12690-orchestral-performance-broadcast-over-web-to-venice-climate-conference.html
I expect many other exmaples exist?