[-empyre-] networked_performance



Greetings Empyre:

First of all thank you for inviting us to be guests at empyre this month.
Jim, especial thanks to you for encouraging our participation.

We are proposing a return to the subject of networked performance, which
this list dealt with in  September 2003,  and a second look, this time from
the perspective of recent new and transitional work.

On July 14, 2004, we (Jo-Anne Green of turbulence.org, Michelle and Helen)
launched the networked_performance blog (http://turbulence.org/blog) to
explore the shifting paradigms in performative cultural practice. Our goal
was to take the pulse of current network-enabled performance practice, to
obtain a wide range of perspectives on current issues and interests?which we
felt were under-examined?and uncover common threads that might help shape a
symposium in 2006.

We didn¹t expect what we found.

With close to 1,000 entries in its first year, the networked_performance
blog reveals an explosion of creative experimental pursuits, as artists
investigate the possibilities opened by the migration of computing out of
the desktop PC and into the physical world, and by the continuing advances
in internet technologies, wireless telecommunications, sensor technologies
and Geographic Information Systems (GIS).

The ephemeral conceptual art practices that came into existence during the
50s and 60s ­ with Happenings, Fluxus, the Situationists  -- and that
re-emerged as participatory works on the Internet in the early ?90s, are
now, with mobile networking technologies, networked sensors and embedded
computing, proliferating as new ways of working and experiencing.

The interest in these emergent practices is keen, as the 150,000 visitors to
the blog attest.

For the purpose of this presentation to the empyre list, we¹ve defined
networked performance as any live event that is network enabled. There is
nothing clear-cut about what we are presenting ­ it¹s exploratory and
necessarily messy. But we see a great advantage in beginning to look at this
outburst of new work ­ in chronicling it, understanding its commonalities
and beginning to think about how it impacts our notions of performance.

We would therefore like to start by setting out four broad categories under
which this new work falls, suggesting works within each that are
particularly meaningful to us, namely works that occupy liminal spaces ­ the
in-between ­ and are transformative and generative. We would like to invite
the originating artists to describe their work, and then proceed by posing
questions for the empyre list, such as: ³How do we understand performance in
relation to these new activities that are between the existing and the
developing, and what can we learn from stretching our understanding of
performance in light of these perspectives²?

More in the next,

Helen & Michelle




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