Contents
The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader 5 Foreword 76 Contemporary Ma ¯ or i Edited by Stella Brennan and Su Ballard Sally Jane Norman Women’s New Media Designed by Jonty Valentine Art Practice © 2008 the artists and authors. All rights reserved. Apart from fair dealing for the purposes of private study, research, criticism 11 Introduction Maree Mills or review as permitted under the New Zealand Copyright Act no part of this publication may be Stella Brennan and Su Ballard reproduced without permission. 86 Kawhia & Kete #1, 22, "Internet; Environment" copyright © Julian Priest 2007, GNU General Public License. 15 ADA: A Web of Sites 20 and 83
ISBN: 978-0-9582789-9-7 Caroline McCaw Lisa Reihana
A catalogue record for this book is available from The National Library of New Zealand 21 What is Digital? Concepts 90 Sampling Tradition: and a Chronology The Old in New Media Title: The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader Douglas Bagnall Janine Randerson Author/Contributor: Brennan, Stella (ed); Ballard, Su (ed) Publisher: Aotearoa Digital Arts and Clouds 28 Cloud Shape Classifier 97 Solar Circuit Aotearoa Douglas Bagnall New Zealand Trudy Lane and Ian Clothier 30 Local Knowledge and Aotearoa Digital Arts Trust Clouds New Media Theory 104 Composition for farmer, www.aotearoadigitalarts.org.nz PO Box 68-187, Newton, Auckland 1145 Danny Butt three dogs and 120 sheep Aotearoa New Zealand www.clouds.co.nz for four-channel video 36 Mushroom installation Brit Buckley Alex Monteith Every effort has been made to trace the copyright holders of the illustrations reproduced in this book. Unfortunately, this has not been possible in all cases. The editors and publisher would be pleased to hear 38 Open Interactions 106 Why You Should Learn to from any copyright holders whom they have been unable to contact and to print due acknowledgement in Karl D.D. Willis Love Free Documentation subsequent editions. Adam Hyde Unless otherwise noted, all images are repoduced courtesy of the artists. 48 Real Time, Virtual Space,
Editing a book takes a long time, and many people have helped along the way. Stella and Su would like firstly Live Theatre 112 Corticosteroid to thank the authors and artists who have contributed to this book, and the institutions and individuals who Helen Varley Jameison Marcus Williams and shared their image archives with us. We would also like to acknowledge the work and support of the following: Susan Jowsey Nova Paul, Leoni Schmidt, Col Fay, Khyla Russell, Justine Camp, Letitia Lam, Pam McKinlay, Geoff Noller, Sarah McMillan, Robert Leonard, Melinda Rackham, Mercedes Vincente, and Gwynneth Porter, 57 Centres and Peripheries Deborah Orum and Warren Olds from Clouds. And of course, Jonty Valentine for the hours spent in Vicki Smith and Adam Hyde 114 Interdisciplinary Moments: design. Thanks also to the ADA community, and especially to the other ADA trustees, Janine Randerson, A History in Glimpses Douglas Bagnall and Zita Joyce. 62 New Data: Curating and Andrew Clifford Thanks most of all to our families: Nathan, Moss and David. Archiving Digital1 Art in 136 The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader would not have been realised without the support of AUT University, New Zealand Little Boy and Fat Man Otago Polytechnic and Creative New Zealand. Lissa Mitchell Stella Brennan
69 The Digital Artist in 138 A Minor Cinema: Moving Residence Programme Images on the Internet Sean Cubitt and Bevin Yeatman Eu Jin Chua Real Time, Virtual Space, Live Theatre exchange of music, story and an inter-hemisphere jam session between Helen Varley Jameison musicians in Auckland and Washington DC. Reviewer Julia Stoops wrote that “the group psyche blossomed through a sense of joining and of union. There was the thrill of emotionally touching people on the other side of the world at that very second.”4 Part of what makes theatre magical for me is its liveness: what I’m seeing on stage Live performances were broadcast over the internet from New Zealand as is happening now and only now, in this precise ‘real time’ moment and in the early as 1994, when Richard Naylor webcast the Tawa Schools Music Festival presence of these specific people. It’s a shared experience that can’t be captured from the Michael Fowler Centre in Wellington; it was seen and heard in a or recorded, never to be repeated exactly the same. In today’s digitised, media- dozen countries.5 At this time the World Wide Web was in its infancy; using tised, sampled, recombinant and remixed world, the truly live is an elusive and the Internet as a broadcast medium was pioneering, and as far as I have discov- precious thing. ‘Real time’ is also elusive. Similar to the theatre concept of being ered there was only one New Zealander engaging in networked performance ‘in the moment,’ real time exists in real life but too often gets lost in our of the kind that I call cyberformance. This person is only identifiable via a .nz obsessing over what’s past or yet to come. Furthermore, real time in the virtual- email address in the programme of the first documented online performance, ity of cyberspace is both meaningless—for time itself is something quite different Hamnet, which was staged in an Internet Relay Chat (IRC) channel in 1994 in cyberspace than it is in real life—and simultaneously the only way to speak and led by American theatre academic Stuart Harris.6 The eighty-line script about time; the current moment is all there is. bore some resemblance to Shakespeare’s Hamlet, with the addition of spirited What does it mean to make live theatre in real time and virtual space? How word-play, IRC jargon and contemporary references. The cast was largely based do we do it and what is it? Is it still theatre because of its liveness—or is it not in North America, with a few international participants including the mystery theatre because of its absences? Can a physically absent performer have presence? New Zealander. Harris cast the performance half an hour before show-time, and These are some of the questions that underpin my artistic practice in what I call the debut was interrupted when a lightning storm took out a key player’s Internet ‘cyberformance.’ By cyberformance, I mean live collaborative performance that connection (apparently the second performance went more smoothly). uses Internet technologies to bring remote performers together in real time; the Online networked performance continued to evolve during the 1990s, audience can be online and remote, or in a proximal space. Cyberformance is mainly led by northern hemisphere practitioners: The Plaintext Players further a form within the wider genre of networked performance, which includes any developed the art of IRC performance, and Desktop Theatre staged theatrical live performance event that involves some form of networking. This can include interventions in the online chat environment The Palace.7 Developed as a 2D computer networks (via the internet or local networks), mobile phone networks, graphical chat environment, The Palace allowed users to create their own unique GPS devices and motion sensors, as well as feedback loops between devices visual avatars, speak aloud with Text2Speech audio, and create their own Palace where there may be no human involved.1 if they had access to a web server.8 The degree of customisation, the user-friendly Artists were creating networked events long before the Internet came into interface, and the possibility of adding your own scripting made The Palace very being—via shortwave radio, telephone, fax and satellite technologies, and even appealing to both social chatters and online performers. I discovered Desktop . 4 Julia Stoops, “Burntime: the good old postal system. Although most of what’s been documented was Theater and their work in The Palace in 1999 and thus began my adventures in Communication between the initiated in the northern hemisphere, New Zealand wasn’t entirely out of the cyberformance. I was living in Scotland at the time, and would regularly get up Hemispheres,” Art New Zealand 60 (Spring 1991): 3. loop. Our geographical remoteness, along with our ‘early adopter’ attitude to at 3 or 4am to join the group’s ‘dreaming’ improvisations, collaborating with 5. Richard Naylor, email technology, made Aotearoa attractive to international artists looking to extend players in Europe and the USA. I discovered a whole new kind of performativity communication with the author, May 2007. their performances to the furtherest reaches. In the mid-80s, American sound . 1 I exclude online gaming and in my fingertips, and became fascinated by the Internet as a site for live perform- 6. Stuart Harris, Gayle Kidder and artist and event-maker Charlie Morrow organised Radio Solstice, a series of social networks from my ance, creativity and imagination. the Hamnet Players. “The Hamnet definition of cyberformance Players: An Archive,” 1993. networked events which brought together real time participants from North because although they can be As a theatre practitioner, I was curious about the relationship between http://micro5.mscc.huji.ac.il/ America, Scandinavia, and New Zealand—where Phil Dadson led a group of described as a form of cyberformance and live theatre: I was interested in the immediacy and ‘presence’ ~msdanet/cyberpl@y/ 2 networked performance they are hamnet-index.html drummers in the Maungawhau crater in Auckland. Morrow gathered musical not primarily undertaken for an of the remote performers, and the potential it offered for recontextualisation. 7. Plaintext Players. contributions from around the globe via shortwave radio, mixed them in real audience or as an artistic I had the opportunity to experiment with this in 2001, when I collaborated with http://yin.arts.uci.edu/~players/. activity. director Jill Greenhalgh on her performance installation project Water[war]s Desktop Theater, time and re-broadcast the result from his New York studio. Although the remote 2. Phil Dadson, email communica- http://www.desktoptheater.org 9 contributors couldn’t communicate with or hear each other, their performances tion with the author, May 2007. at the Transit Festival of Women’s Performance (Odin Teatret, Denmark). 8. The Palace was developed by 3 3. Scott Westerfeld, “Charlie Communities.com from 1995 to were simultaneous and part of a single live event. Morrow Alarums and I presented a cyberformance element as part of the larger work, with 2000 as a free graphical chat Another early networked project was Burntime, an interactive exhibition Excursions,” TDR (1988 – ) 34, Adriene Jenik and Lisa Brenneis of Desktop Theater. Our audience consisted of application; although the software no3 (1990): 129 – 47. See also development has ceased, the based at Artspace in Auckland in 1991. Visiting North American artists Jerome Rothenberg, Charlie contemporary theatre practitioners who had never encountered anything like ‘Palatian’ community continues Cheryl Casteen and Charles Flickinger invited local artists and the public to join Morrow, and Richard Schechner, cyberformance before; some were amazed and intrigued, while others were to exist as a social network. “Making Waves: An Interview 9. http:/ in a five-day international art exchange during which participants’ art work was with Charlie Morrow,” TDR outraged that this could be presented as ‘theatre’. Aside from causing a small /www.themagdalenaproject.org/ transmitted and received by fax and telephone. A speaker phone facilitated the (1988) 34, no.3 (1990): 148 – 58. storm of controversy, I learned that many in the audience were captivated by my waterwars
48 49 51 fig. 1 fig. 2
: 1 Avatar Body Collision, Lagging With the Lololols, cyberformance at Virtual Minds Congress, Bremen, Germany, 2004, stills from video by Lola Castro Ruiz. 2: Avatar Body Collision, swim—an exercise in remote intimacy, cyberformance, 2007, stills from video by Suzon Fuks. h http://www.avatarbodycollision.org
10. ttp://www.abcexperiment.org (2001 – 02) and from – 02) that (2001 performed UpStage Festival the at 070707
Without ever meeting physically, collaborated have we ten on shows 10
with Vicki Smith (NZ), Karla Ptacek (UK) and Leena Saarinen
, which Avatar Body Collision I first explored thisidea in the[abc]experiment 50
52 53 3: Anaesthesia Associates (Daniel Agnihotri-Clark and Paul Bradley), The Best Air Guitar Album in the World Vol. II, 55 screen shot from cyberformance in 070707 UpStage Festival, July 2007. 4: Rebekah Wild and Vicki Smith, Baba Yaga, screen shot from cyberformance in 070707 UpStage Festival, July 2007. 5: Marcus Williams (NZ) and Martin Krusche (Austria), International Smoke-In, 2005, with participants Dagmar Eberhardt (Graz, Austria), Monochrom (Vienna), Dagmar Kase (Tallinn, Estonia) and mathieu & molicnik (St. Gallen, Switzerland), networked performance, ADA ‘Emerge’ Symposium, Otago University (http://www.van.at/howl/cyb/iso/smoke/index.htm). With its contested cultural dimensions and addictive biological effects, the act of smoking a cigarette becomes vehicle for exploring the possibilities of physiological conection and emotional resonance under highly mediated conditions.The International Smoke-In created a sensation of networked bodily connections through a synchronous cigarette break shared over the Internet fig. 4 fig. 3 fig. 5 - the old hotel were devised ttp://www.specflic.net ttp://transition.turbulence.org/ ttp://www.intimacyandinyer econd Life is a commercial www.cherrytruluck.co.uk/ S h h h P and and performed by Truluck, Fuks, Bryce and Cunningham. http:/ / online virtual world. http://www.secondlife.com. Created by London-based Furtherfield.org, The Visitors’ Studiois real-time a audio-visual collaborative platform. http://blog.visitorsstudio.org/ blog/index.html face.net
7. 1 19. 16. 18. 20.
lease Stay Alert At All Times
audience—a Agnihotri-Clark 20 The Plaintext The Players The Internet, wireless 17 19 An archive networked of 18 events. (2007). Both works can (2007). be viewed online (2006) and Belonging (2006) Both performances had proximal and online audiences, and for 16 As a cyberformance practitioner,relish I any opportunity to step into Evidence similar of growth in artists working in the fieldnetworkedof The possibilityplaying of simultaneouslyremote a to online audience Some of the 070707 performancesSome the of 070707 continue to explore these ideas. During 54 both I was in the online audience. As an online audience is it difficult member, to get a sense the of proximal audience unless they are shown web cam on or identify themselves in the text chat; the however knowledge that they are there impacts experience my on the of online performance. I may be sitting in bed my 6amat with laptop my and coffee, immersed in what playingis on out the screen in front me, of I am but conscious that there are people the on other side the of havingworld a shared experience in a physical space, and that least at some of their experience is interconnected with what I am experiencing. the audience (although role impossible it’s to me see for as it someone who is new to cyberformance), and in this respect festival the 070707 and ongoing performances are invaluable. As well as UpStage performances, I also attend performances in Second Life, the Visitors’ Studio, web cam performances and proximal events that incorporate Internet technology. and mobile telecommunications, sensor technologies, Geographic Information Systems, ubiquitous computing, online social networking platforms and multiuser environments such as Second Life offerwealth a of live performance, music, storytelling and installation events involving geographically distributed participants. performance in New Zealand is harder to find,it but is there. Dancer/choreo- grapher Becca is experimenting Wood with choreography geographically for dispersed dancers, using software such as iVisit to link dancers Newin Zealand and the United States. As part his of doctoral research, cross-media artist Dan Agnihotri-Clark has curated collaborative events that explore other (among things) the indeterminate nature networked of performance. is also using UpStage as a creative platform with Anaesthesia Associates, The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader and a proximal audience has led to me consider the intermedial potentially new form audience of existing in-between the online and the proximal, in the liminal time and spacecyberformance. of Avatar Body Collision has begun to explore an engagement with this audience in two recent works, Features Familiar as well as proximally, with interaction between performers and audience as well as between the audiences. I am interested in what points commonality of there might be the for separateaudiences; and the how online and proximal audiences might interact. Without devolving to a variant the of chat room, what kind of performances can create we in UpStage thatengage the intermedial audience? theSeptember old hotel 2007, was re-staged in London Cherry for Truluck’s Master Arts, of and Please Stay Alert All At Times was performed Manchester’s at Green Room. performance is maintained as part Networked Turbulence.org’s of Performance Blog that also links to current networked performance the (in broadest pos- sible happening sense) online and around the world. still exist and are creating now that work integrates online and proximal elements, and DesktopAdriene Theater’s Jenik is employingnetworked tech- nologies in her recent large scale Flic Spec 1: Adam Hyde, DIY radio workshop, WAVES Festival, Riga, Latvia, August 2006. 57 2: Students at South Westland Area School Harihari attend a kapa haka lesson delivered by Māori performing arts students at Northland College, Kaikohe. The SWAS students learned mihi, waiata and karakia while the Northland group achieved tutoring credits, video conferencing via the Ministry of Education NZEdNet Bridge, 1 October, 2007. are four , see the preceding essay www.avatarbodycollision. . The Colliders by Helen Varley Jameson. forming Avatar Body Collision in 2002. They are a collaborative, performance troupe who live projects using chat software that is women who met online in 2001, (mostly) in London,Helsinki, globally distributed org devise and rehearse online, cross-platform and free to download. For a discussion of http:// Aotearoa/New Zealand, Australia and cyberspace. They Avatar Body Collision and its
1 . Adam is Hyde based in Europe. 1 , an online performance troupe who devise, rehearse and In March 2005 Adam with (along Hyde Harger, Zita Honor and Joyce re:mote Auckland was the first in a seriesof conferences designed to explore tors presented from London, Newcastle, Helsinki, Rotterdam and Sydney. An artist, tactical educator, media practioner, streaming media consultant, and sometime projects curator, placed have Hyde’s him most on continents, includ- ing the Antarctic and pervade the online world. both For Vicki and Adam, their most constant address is an email one. Adam Willetts) hosted re:mote Auckland, a symposium featuring on-site, online and pre-recorded presentations analysing digital how technologies augment collaborations across geographical and cultural distance. Artists and comment a Participants from around New Zealand attended both virtually and in person to share their work. what means it to be remote in an electronic art world. Are there ‘centres’ and ‘peripheries’ within increasingly a world bridged and mapped digital by technologies? Cantechnologically mediated communication ever substitute for face-to-face dialogue? Is geographical isolation factor a in contemporary art production? Is remoteness a relative concept? The conversation documented below reflectson these questions,negotiating issuespresence,of liveness, communication and connectivity. Centresand Peripheries and Adam Hyde Vicki Smith Living mostly the on Coast West the of South Island Aotearoa of New Zealand, Vicki Smith works with two clusters schools of where technology assists in teaching, as well as in social and cultural collaboration. Vickiis a member of Avatar Body Collision perform using a variety Internet of technologies. fig. 1 fig. 2 (2006) and (070707 (070707 : A History of New (Cambridge, MA: 2, and no.1: Women (2006) and at the UpStage 070707 role rather than a subsidiary e phrase “lo-tech wizardry” to ixon defines digital drienne Jenik, “The EarlyYears ebekah Wild presented Baba Steve Dixon, Digital key performed in Indigenous performance as “all performance works where Festival; Liz Bryce performed in Festival and other perform- MIT Press, 2007). Press, MIT UpStage Festival). aesthetics or delivery forms.” ances); Gabi Schmidberger Ophelia_machine /www.heelstone.com/meridian/ Technology, http:/ 1999. Performance Performance Art and Installation Indigenous ManiacsIndigenous of Desktop the Theater,” Riding one in content, techniques, describe cyberformance was was cyberformance describe coined by Vicki Smith in 2001. computer technologies play a the old hotel UpStage (070707 Meridian Media in Theatre, Dance, Maniacs A D Th R Yaga
1. 3. 2. 4. 2 2 2 2
21 works give a Cyberformance is lo-tech 23 Having accepted that can we speak in 24 It could It be partly that the speed technological of develop- 22 Theblurring of disparate time zonesby events such attendingas premier the Steve Dixon has suggested that digital performance peaked during a ‘golden 56 ment hasment failed to keep pace with the imaginations theatre of makers; certainly the actuality immersive of technologies 3D has yet to live to up the hype. But theforget a moment for popular obsession with the latest high-tech cutting-edge rich-media prophesies, and look what at many us of in have our officesand homes—we such have technology of a lot online to play with. social Today’s networking spaces and tools are as “ripe dramatic for play” as the IRC channels and Multi-User Dungeons the of early 1990s. real time with someone the on other side the of world, seems it a small step to accept that our presence in the liminal territory cyberspace of can be ‘real’ or solid. There is always a curiosity to whereknow peoplephysically are, what time isit there and what the weather is like. Asking these questions those of connected to us gives us a shared sense being of simultaneously present, in in some way, multiple other places. example, For I can give a workshop in Romania, attend a meeting in Amsterdam andwatch a performance in Brisbane all in the same day and without leaving house my in New Zealand. a performanceof the day before happens it disrupts the certainty measured of time. may be almost It audience my but are tomorrow, still staggering through today and Somebody’s yesterday. to get got in up the middle their of night. Cyberformance exists outside the clock, in a chunk time of shared all by the participants. The shared moment realis time, venue the is a virtual space, and the result is live theatre. wizardry that uses accessible tools to playfully interrogate complex notions of time, space and presence—notions that undergone have a massive change since the very first telephone call was made. sense presence of as smoke seems to flow a from body one in distantlocation to another. such Events as Interdigitate and the symposiums ADA provide opportunities the for presentation live of digital performance, although net- worked performance cyberformance or yet have to feature greatly in their programmes. age’ in the and late this 1990s seems to be true least at quantitatively, begs it but the question, why? Marcus Williams has examined the presence the of virtualised body exploring by ‘limbic resonance’ in highly mediated environment. His Smoke-In as are other New Zealand artists including Rebekah Wild, Liz Bryce, Gabi Schmidberger, and Vicki Smith and myself from Avatar Body Collision. The Aotearoa Digital Arts Reader