Thursday, February 12, 2009

Distributed Audience

I watched the Mark Dresser performance video and really enjoyed the music. The issue that really struck me though was the lack of a distributed audience. We often struggle with this problem in our own performances. I feel that a telematic performance should include, in its process, the development of a distributed audience that shares in the experience. So far, many of the telematic performances that I have seen or read about focus the attention to building an audience at the host site. For example, in Mark Dresser's performance, there seemed to be audience at the main theater and none at the other two sites.

Another Language continues to work on this problem. We see it manifested in several ways. One site of collaborators are graduate students that have the drive and desire to be involved in developing this form but do not have the technical or facility support from their respective department. They must perform in a classroom because the performance spaces do not have the computing or network infrastructure to support their particpation. Other sites utilze adapted visualization labs associated with their institution's high performance computing facilities.

I really would like to see the next phase of telematic performance really focus on distributed audiences. I think this is the only way to increase the attention to this nebulous art form.
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Thanks for your comment. What you saw gave you an inaccurate idea of what was happening. The performance had three local audiences. Also there was an Ichat stream between the three locations. In addition there was the perspective you saw posted on youtube which showed the performance from one vantage point only, the San Diego, space.
We had hoped to create one equally distributed virtual space, but it was beyond our resources at the time. It is a good point, however.
Mark Dresser

1 comment:

  1. Jimmy, thanks for your post. Are you referring to this video? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLJcDoJQ2ck Mark is also involved with "Deep Tones for Peace," which is an excellent initiative: http://deeptones4peace.blogspot.com/.

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