[-empyre-] sense of place in digital space....

[Martin Kusch <mkusch@k-pluriel.org>]

Empyreans,

hello one more time, this time my e-mail should carry the right 
sender´s address
since my last e-mail had to be recovered from the spam-filter box
of the empyre list (thanks you Michael).

I would like to say  a special hello to Company in Space (Hellen and 
John are you still there?).
Unfortunately we never met (until now ),and we never had the chance to 
see your work in live!

 I know the work of Company in Space from the description by a lot of 
people,  saw some video excerpts and  worked for some weeks with one of 
CIS´s collaborators Luke Pither. He was the one who introduced me first 
to CIS´s work in 1999.
Compared to Company in Space, we are working in this field for only 4 
years.

CIS is  working already for a longer time on the creation of live 
presence/performances combined with interactive media and technology, 
therefore I am really hoping that  we will have some chance to exchange 
in the course of the next two weeks...And I am for sure interested in 
talking about tools and very much would like to know about their 
experiences how the daily practice of movement creation in combination 
with interactive media gets supported but also  constrained by the 
different disciplines.

I  saw on the recent postings that Amanda Stegell (www.liveart.org) is 
around, I respect very much the work from Motherboard in the field of 
networked performances, maybe we will hear more from here..

> One question I find compelling is, how do you work with the sense of 
> place
> in digital space....how does the viewer's (or participant's) memory 
> play a
> role in the forming, or creation of a sense of time and space in the
> interactive work?

When I read your question about sense of place,  automatically I think 
about works where
 the viewer can become activly engaged, where her /his choices are key 
factors, in
single or multi-user set-ups like for example in VR worlds we can 
"sense" place in digital space.( it is even often one of the 
constitutin factors in these works)

in our performances,  in which often  "only"  the live performers are 
in direct contact
with the interactive technology, I could say that the notion of place 
does not play
such an important role, on the other hand the memory of the viewer 
plays a huge role in
the constitution of our works. In our time-based installations schème 
and schème II
we try that digital space and "real" space merge together, digital 
space becomes physical and "present"
perceivable for the viewer, as an experience during the performance.
These performances are not taking place in remote locations, which 
means that the performers are
sharing the same physical space, and when the performers navigate or 
manipulate virtual environment - projections - it is all build and 
presented to extend the physical performance space, visually but also 
aural.
Since we work with images and sounds exclusively material coming from 
the actual performance sites we work to create an encounter of digital 
and physical space each time specific for the actual site.

In one of our recent works "entre-deux" we have the viewer in a remote 
location and the two performer s
share the same space - via video signals both spaces were interconneced 
-In this piece the viewer is activly involved into the creation of the 
work, the disposif we propose in that case is dealing with the media 
space / the video space,  a physical visceral sensational experience 
takes place on the level of perception for the viewer, but I would say 
also here the sense of  place in digital space is not a relevant factor.

hmm i would like to hear more about this, especially from those who 
work on performances where two (or more) physical spaces are used to 
perform,  ....in this cases (I assume) the sense of place is maybe a 
relevant factor - but is it for the performer and /or the viewer ? How 
does it embody?

That´s it for now
looking forward to hear more
best
martin