Some screenshots of the Make-shift performance last Friday. Many thanks to Frédérique Santune for taking these.

Tomorrow there is an opportunity to see a live performance of Make-shift, “a networked performance about connectivity and consequences” by Helen Varley Jamieson and Paula Crutchlow.

The performance takes place simultaneously in two separate houses that are connected through a specially designed online interface. Paula and Helen (one in each house) stage their part of the work with the help of local audience members. Scripted and visually poetic performance is interspersed with webcam videography, avatar puppetry and audience interaction in the format of a performative salon. Everything that happens in the houses is streamed to online audiences who can also contribute text chat visible on the interface to everyone throughout the event.

Below is a screenshot of the performance interface mentioned. Unfortunately I’m not going to be able to attend the performance but hopefully I can get somebody to take a few screenshots so I’ll post again on this.

The performance takes place tomorrow 15th March 2012, 2pm UK / 7.30pm India (find your local time here). To access the interface to the performance visit the works site and click on the link ‘LIVE LINK HERE’ in the right of the page.

Originally seen on the Spectre mailing list.

Over the last few months I’ve gradually trickled out a few posts on works which are audio-visual interfaces for connecting two or more places separated in time and / or space, e.g. Hole in Space and Urban Echo. These have stuck in my head, not because of how conceptually sophisticated they are but because of how simple they are and how people can very intuitively use them to communicate. There are many works over the duration of this weblog which could be grouped into this same category (e.g. here) and part of the reason for this is that they are have a direct line back to the very first telematic works (e.g. here). The following few posts will add to this collection of works that I know of.

The Tunnel Under the Atlantic by Maurice Benayoun is a televirtual art installation which established a link between Montreal and Paris in 1995.

The Tunnel enabled hundreds of people from both sides to meet. From each side, a two-meter-diameter tube, made us think of a linear crossing of our planet, as if it were dug under the ground, shouting up in the middle of the Contemporary Art Museum in Montreal on one side, and in the lower floor of the Pompidou Centre in Paris. The route that lies between the two spots is no simulation of the ocean underground, it is a block of symbolic matter in which the geological strata leave the place to iconographic strata. They are layers of pictures taken in the history of the two cultures that everybody can reveal each time they dig. The collective exploration uncovers fragments of rare or familiar pictures, which are as may opportunities to wake up the collective memory of the participants. Helping us to loitering and talking to people, these remains transform everybody’s digging route into a unique experience, into a personal assemblage made up of sounds and pictures amidst a three dimensional space architectured through their moves. While digging, the visitors can talk with their partners across the Atlantic Ocean. The sounds of their voices are anchored in space and they enable everyone to find out the directions where to meet the other. I takes six days to built and pave the symbolic space before the de visu meeting of the two-continent diggers…The televirtual event -i.e. a remote connection of people in an interactive symbolic space- is filmed with four virtual cameras. What they get is automatically mixed and edited and that takes into account each participant speech. They can discover, in the event of a counter-shot, their own live pictures floating within the space they have just dug up. They will not be able to see each other before the two sides of the tunnel meet. The exchange, essentially made up of sounds so far, then becomes visual. When the meeting is achieved, other persons can at last take the same way or create new ones as if they were in a collective quest of a shared memory.

The text above is an edited text taken from e artists statement on his website. It’s well worth visiting the site to read the full text.

Thanks for the link to Frédérique Santune.

Quintetto by Quiet Ensemble is an installation which employs the:

casual movement of objects or living creatures used as input for the production of sounds. The basic concept is to reveal what we call “invisible concerts” of everyday life. The vertical movements of the 5 fishes in the aquarius is captured by a videocamera, that translates (through a computer software) their movements in digital sound signals.

Originally seen at Colossal.

The following are four network related works by Paweł Janicki.

EU_Tracer (image above, video below) is a performance for the Internet with musical instruments. The work scans internet traffic, analysing the connection between messages and information and translates them into visual and musical structures.

Data from assorted European Union institutions are changed into visual and musical structures, in ways that relate to the particular geographic location, the quality of the connection and the original improvisation style of the local musician invited to the performance. Internet traffic is thus transformed from institutional information into the building blocks for a work of art.

Net Eater (image above, video below) is an interactive net based installation. It uses:

data captured from communication networks (traffic) and transforms it into a variety of audiovisual forms. Net Eater is concentred on abstract, statistic interpretation of the data flow, rather than semantic correlations. In other words: dataflow are describing the structures of scanned networks. Contrary to “classic” mapping project based on geolocation process Net Eater is concentred on “electronic” qualities. Forms of data and connections between them are located in virtual space in accordance to parameters taken “direct from data” (IP addresses, etc.).

Ping Melody (image above, video here) is a net based performance employing internet pings which a musician can then improvise on.

WordNetInstrument (image above, video below) is a new work created for the Dialogue Design Festival (Minsk/Belarus). The word uses motion capture to track hand/arm movements to create audio and visuals.