[-empyre-] July on -empyre-: Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel: Networked Performance

["Jim Andrews" <jim@vispo.com>]

Thanks to last month's guests concerning blogging and to Melinda for
facilitating it.

This month we feature Helen Thorington and Michelle Riel on the topic of
networked performance.

Helen says "For the purpose of this presentation to the empyre list, we?ve
defined networked performance as any live event that is network enabled."

Along with Jo-Anne Green, Michelle and Helen have been publishing their
"Network Performance" blog at http://turbulence.org/blog since July 2004.
This blog is explorative of a wide range of networked performance.

We will also be joined by various of the artists discussed on the "Network
Performance" blog.

Network enabled performance continues to become more diverse as technology
and bandwidth increase, develop, merge with things like telephone/cell
technology, become wearable, etc. I look forward to Helen and Michelle's
observations about the sort of range they've noted.

ja

--**************************************
  BIO: HELEN THORINGTON & MICHELLE RIEL
--**************************************

Helen Thorington is the founder and co-director of  Turbulence.org
(1996-ongoing). Turbulence commissions NET ART and exhibits, archives, and
promotes net artists? work. She also founded and directed the New American
Radio series (1985-1998). NAR commissioned over 300 original works for
public radio, 140 of which are currently available at http://somewhere.org
She is also a writer, sound composer, and media artist (
http://new-radio.org ). In 1997 she initiated the Adrift project
(1997-2002), an evolving multi-location Internet performance collaboration
with Marek Walczak and Jesse Gilbert ( http://turbulence.org/adrift ).
Gilbert and Thorington also initiated a number of distributed musical
performances, which included musicians performing at various locations in
New York City and at Mills College, Oakland, CA.  It was her recollections
of Adrift and thoughts about the directions it might have taken that
prompted her interest in exploring current networked performance practice.
This, in turn, lead to her contacting Michelle Riel and with turbulence?s
co-director, Jo-Anne Green, to the development of the networked_performance
blog.

Michelle Riel is an educator, artist, and designer based in San Francisco.
She is an Assistant Professor in New Media and Chair of the Department of
Teledramatic Arts and Technology, an interdisciplinary program at California
State University Monterey Bay. In addition to collaborating on the networked
performance blog with turbulence's Helen and Jo, her current work is
creating networked environments, objects, and experiences that explore
technocultural issues using mobile technologies, networked sensing
environments, and real-time video. Her interest in performance and
space/time based arts stems from her professional training in scenic and
production design focused on the integration of media in live performance
and virtual reality sets. Her work has been seen nationally including
SIGGRAPH, the Whitney Museum of American Art's Performance on 42nd Series
and has received grants and awards including an Emmy Award for broadcast set
design and net art commissions from turbulence.org. Michelle received her
MFA in Theatre from UCSD.