Networked performance has now got the major arts institutions seal of approval with the series of online performances initiated by the Tate titled BMW Tate Live at Tate Modern. The first of these was on the 22nd of March and seemed to go largely unnoticed in many networked / new media art circles however the second Pablo Bronstein’s Constantinople Kaleidoscope (images above and below) broadcast tonight received a lot more publicity through a variety of mailing lists.

Tonight’s performance was pretty good, well worth watching. It consisted of a clever use of several mirrors choreographed movement by performers to reveal all points of view of the space the performance was occuring within. The mirrors allowed action from different parts of the space to be composited together within the broadcast screen space, sometimes creating optical effects and sometimes simply dividing the screen into parts similar to video split screen effects. What was particularly interesting for me was how the mirrors revealed the camera capturing the event, the result being the distance audience was effectively pulled into the space of the event as we were identified as having that initial point of view. In addition what would nomally have been off stage in a performance like this, prompters providing directions for sequences of movements, were also clearly visible and audible. All three spaces of performance, support and audience colapsing together. The simplicity of the performances execution enabled the clear concept of spaces, point of view and vision to be understood in the work.

What was unclear and not revealed through the question and answer session with the artist after the performance was how the subject matter of the performance, a heavily costumed sequence of dance like movements, related to those concepts. References such as 1920′s Russian performances were briefly mentioned (such as those developed by the Constructivists) however ideas of how optics were explored in those and perhaps related to this performance was unfortunately not developed any further during the Q&A.

If you missed the live event the full performance and Q&A is already online on YouTube (embedded above). Below is Jerome Bell’s performance of Shirtology, the first performance at BMW Tate Live.

Last day in Paris and the second network related work I’ve seen here (there probably was more to see but I’ve been ill for a few days) was Pangée by the collective MU today at the Musée du Quai Branly. Normally an unlikely location as it’s the museum of ethnography there has been a week of conferences, exhibitions and events around the subject of new media and how it can be used to present the museums collection. Pangée, a sound installation in the gardin of the museum essentially serves this purpose and reuses sounds of the instruments (and their musicians) in the museums collection. The following is translated from the works text:

In the gardin of the museum, a sonic territory in movement retraces the aesthetic of musical instruments of four continents: Africa, Asia, America, Oceania based on recordings from the museums media library…During the week “Digital Museum”, visitors are invited to explore the gardin and the musical collection of the Musée du Quai Branly provided with a headset and audio captors. The movement of the visitors, their position and direction activates the sonic sources of the work.

The sound installation closes tomorrow the 22nd. More details about it at the museum here.

I’m in Paris at the moment trying to see as many exhibitions and conferences as possible. The best work I’ve seen all week is Videodrones (image above), an audio-visual installation by Céleste Boursier-Mougenot at the Collége des Bernardins.

The work uses live video feeds from five cameras placed in the street outside the gallery to generate constant drone audio within the space. The imagery is unmodfied however projections of the videos are placed out of order making it difficult to follow movement in the external space and in a sense abstracting it across all five projections. Movment / changes in light controls the audio, passers-by become unknowing participants in the work. The installation closes today the 15th of April so if you’re in Paris go see it without delay.

I wasn’t aware that I knew of this artist however Les Oiseaux de Céleste (video below) shown at the Barbican in 2010 does look very familiar.

Many thanks to Frédérique Santune for taking me to see this installation.

The following are a selection of four networked works by artist Winnie Soon from the last three years. The first two works employ mobile phones while the last three use Twitter creating some shared concerns and methods of presentation.

5-stars’ identity (image above, video below) is an interactive installation which uses mobile phones as ready made objects to create a connected work. It is the first of two works where mobiles play an important part in the work. The works purpose, research led, is to:

express the notion of transmediation, examine the properties of dynamic complex system in association with readymade object. The new aesthetic possibilities is explored by having the inter-relationship of technology, media and objects, leading to a hybridization in sensorial transformation.

The project starts with scanning the various Internet websites of news and blog, those content that is related to Chinese’s Identity will be translated into different language versions and send to the mobile device. The five mobile phones perform with different behaviors and this is subject to political and environmental events. It constructs a continuous and dynamic autonomous system.

Jsut Code (image above, video below), a collaborative work with Helen Pritchard, is an interactive installation using QR Code, mobile phones and Twitter. It is the first of three technically related work which uses live information from Twitter as its basis. The work prompts users to explore and browse online texts written by a combination of human and non-human writers.

Statements on life and death are gathered in real-time, from the social media site twitter and displayed as geometric images. Viewers encounter a continuously updating feed as the machine translates language to image and twitter message to QR code, each image “carries” a language of pattern and meaning, which is activated by the reader…We see code as a call to action, a call for execution. The playful activity of reading in ‘jsut code’ is a collaborative performance between human, machine and code. The installation explores a continuously evolving and mutating text which moves beyond and between language.

Net.Portrait (image above, video below), a collaboration with Sam Norgard also uses live information from Twitter as its basis. Net.Portrait is:

a live and network-based installation combined with fine-art painting, kinetic sculpture and collective network data. While you are watching the piece, the artwork is also dynamically watching you by having different emotive eyes painted on a collection of wall mounted cocktail umbrellas. The live happenings of happy and sad smiley faces from Twitter are being transformed from a text, static and virtual medium to a kinetic and physical sculpture. Every bit of spinning action amplifies the network behavior, resulting in a continuous and flowing net portrait.

Datascape (image above, video below) is an interactive installation / performance which is created through the latest text and emoticons from Twitter.

The last post on visual interfaces for the moment (until I find other works) is Ouroboros by Alvaro Cassinelli which was posted as a comment on the Urban Echo post. Ouroboros is:

a shared virtual space, a world-scale tunnel built by chaining video-conferencing cameras and projectors in a closed loop around the world. This virtual space comes into contact with the Earth at several entry points or “Gates” situated in different cities, each standing in a location particularly representative of the place (public squares, markets, private homes, etc). Each Gate is simply composed of a (portable?) projection screen, a video camera a little far away, and an “interstitial” public space in between. The camera captures the whole view – that is, the passersby and the standing projection screen blended in the background – and the resulting live stream is sent over the Internet to be projected onto a similar structure – in a different city, in a different country, in a different continent. The process repeats itself until the loop is completed, as the final video is projected back onto the first screen – only to restart a tour in an eternal circulation. In its (almost) instantaneous travel around the world, the video stream will gather “souvenirs” of the visited places. People from all around the world will appear on the screen as standing in the middle of a tunnel whose walls are composed by an infinite recursion of (Matryoshka-like) nested video windows; one can recognize the actual location of the shooting in each of these rectangular frames.

The work has similarities to Urban Echo and The Tunnel under the Atlantic however is, in my opinion, far more sophisticated in concept and ambitious in its goal. It employs a combination of video capture, delay and feedback to great effect. Still in concept form, the artist is currently developing this into a finished piece so hopefully there will be a post here at some point in the future with the finished work.