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Session 1: Interpresence, Interaction and Performance
Chair: Rui Torres
The Interpresence Project
Artur Matuck
School of Communications and Arts,
University of São Paulo, Brazil
1 Research Project for teleactive human language
Interpresence
exercises the language of mediatecture to propose planetary coalescence
through cyberspace. It favours worldwide integration allowing for interactive
television and the experience of telebrations between distant cities.
‘Interpresence’ is
defined as mutually sensed human telepresence. As a project Interpresence
merges telecommunication, architecture, design, media arts, performance,
television, and programming, with implications for cultural studies,
anthropology, contemporary theory, epistemology and psychoanalysis.
Its curatorial concept purports the telepresential encounter providing
for the valorization of the Other through mutual knowledge and co-authored
aesthetic propositions.
The envisioned systems would enable local participants
to interact with remote audiences, they would see and be seen, listen
and be listened, experiencing interpresence.
2 The Interpresence Vision
Interpresence represents
an alternative global television. It introduces a political proposition,
claiming a right to communicate through technologies that only have
to be reconfigured to provide for interpresential experiences.
The long-term
social design involves the gradual creation of a worldwide network
of community or university-operated telesystems. Design and implementation
will be carried out through web-based property-free interchange triggering
continous co-evolution.
3 Mediatecture for Teleactivity
Mediatectural projects
for terminals should permit diverse modes of long distance interaction.
They were conceived for bilateral and multilateral intercommunication.
Teleperformance terminals consists of interpresential units integrating
distributed screens with video cameras.
A vertical system allows for ‘conversational’ interactions,
while an horizontal one enables ‘table’ mode interactions.
Multiple-connection terminals provide interaction with many remote
locations. Specially conceived audience spaces enable remote audioviewing
of interactions occuring at teleperformance spaces.
4 Media
design for co-evolutionary teleactivity
An intercreative process
will be gradually extended through net-collaboration. Concepts,
designs, projects, propositions will be available as released information,
as common property, providing for a worldwide collective planning,
a linux-like co-evolutionary development of the project design.
A permanent webpresence
would enable long-term quality interaction between participating
artists and institutions. Propositions for projects, programs, events
and performances will trigger long-distance interconnections.
Intervisions, teleactions
and videologues would result from community and artistic initiatives
supported by institutional agreements. Subsequent coordinated planning
and networking would entail a diversity of increasingly creative
long-distance human encounters.
Those connections will form an invisible web of creative
collaboration, and mutual responsibility providing the human structure
needed for the unfolding of quality projects and events. The network
should entail the co-creation of scripts, technology evaluation,
co-planning and finally the actualization of teleactivities.
5 Research for intercommunication
Research for interpresence will be
centered upon alternative intercommunication. Proposals for computer-supported
systems enabling understanding between speakers of different languages
will be encouraged.
Software and media design can also be articulated
to program intertranslations between different sign systems allowing,
for instance, tactile stimuli to be remotely sensed as heat formations
varying in form and intensity.
Research can also take a different direction.
Specially designed software could morph human traces indicating the
possibility of artificiality, not only of realism, in the experience
of telepresence.
In Excess of the Already Constituted: Interaction
as Performance
Nicole Ridgway
Wits School of Arts, University of Witwatersrand, South Africa
New
Media, insofar as it invests in bodily affectivity, argues Mark Hansen,
has the capacity to enlarge “the threshold of the now.” Unlike
the capacity to record and re-present the past in cinema, the digital
can bring together time, body and emotion in a transducive “now”.
That is, a present in which no term exists independently of the relation
it is in.
Whereas Brian Massumi asserts that most digital art/interaction
allows only for the realisation of a preformed order, Hansen argues
that the digital has the potential to realise, what I would term, performance.
Performance in the sense of constant emergences: dynamic and embodied
interactions that go beyond the aesthetic perception of the object.
I would like to stage a debate between Hansen and Massumi (and the
case studies they draw on; namely, Stelarc and Bill Viola) to revisit
the question of interactivity from the perspective of performance versus
preformism.
Wireless McLuhan
Stephen Wanczyk
Department of Culture, Communication,
and Technology, Georgetown University, USA
“Today, after more than a century of electric technology, we have extended our central nervous system in a global embrace, abolishing both space and time as far as our planet is concerned.” –Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964: p.3)
In the 1960s, a visionary emerged from the rather obscure field of media theory and enjoyed a moment of brilliance in the glare of popular culture. Marshall McLuhan, a professor at the University of Toronto, explored the frontiers of electronic communication and discovered truths that, at the time, seemed obscure. His initial rise and fall among mainstream critics was relatively fast, but his notions of a society defined by its technology, of interactive media, and of a globally connected village have proven remarkably prescient. Since the advent of the Internet age, similar visions have taken more concrete shape; these include rosy predictions of an inevitable convergence between online services and traditional broadcast television, and forecasts of a ubiquitously wired future. This paper will adopt a perspective inspired by Marshall McLuhan to examine the relationship between wireless vs. wire-line data services, and to explain how the evolution of new technologies (and the resulting business models) will drastically alter the way video content arrives in our living rooms.