Dear All,

I would like to introduce myself and talk a bit about my current work.
I have been running "Trampoline", a regular 1 night only platform event for
new media art, since 1998 and also am a co-founder of the Radiator Festival
for New Technology Art, both Trampoline and Radiator take place in
Nottingham and Berlin (on different scales).

We are currently in the stage of commissioning 5 pieces of new work for
Radiator which will take place late Nov / begin Dec this year. Last week the
panel met to look through all the proposals and a shortlist was made. I
would like to use this selection process in order to pinpoint some key
issues around our way of programming "live new media" work.

With this year's Radiator theme of live work and new media we are following
our tradition in a certain sense having worked with a lot of performance
artists over the years. But not everything at Radiator festival will be of
performative nature ­ our notion of liveness is situated around forms of
human presence, direct feedback of surrounding environment and forms of
interaction between artist and audience.

While the festival will deal with the subject in a more open and general
way, the digital cultures symposium (taking place simultaneously) will take
a focused approach leading to an exploratory analysis of the lens based,
locative and network technologies that performers and dancers are working
with.

The symposium will explore questions like:

- What interfaces are being used and developed? What new stages have been
experimented with?
- How does the increased possibility for interaction affect the outcome of
the work? 
- How does the notion of live-ness change or what multi-facetted notions of
live-ness are we dealing with here?
- What are the changes in the relationship between performer and spectator?


Coming back to the Radiator commissions selection process, I would like to
share a few thoughts and observations on
- New media technology
- The notion of liveness
- Interaction


About new media technology:

it was interesting to see that:
- some of the technically highly sophisticated projects tended to lack a
strong artistic concept and the panel members felt that putting those
projects in the context of a festival's exhibition would be too much like
demonstrating a new device.
- Q ­ is there a natural time-span that needs passing before "a" new
technology can be successfully (successful from the artistic point of view)
used in an art piece? Is new media art only attractive if it uses "new"
technology, the newer the better? When does technology become old/
mainstream / and does this make it less attractive?

- Looking at performers and live artists using new media technologies I
think it can be said that the majority of them is actually using mainstream
media like video - the usage of which some have clearly done masterfully and
innovatively as such. This might possibly change over the next few years
with the advent of locative media. But at the moment it is very hard to find
projects which manage to find a balance between the performance aspect and
the use of cutting edge technology ­ usually one compromises the other (in
my opinion).


- At the same time I believe that we are at a pivotal point where ­ let's
call it "new media performance" ­ is experiencing a growth. Having been to
several new media festivals last year you could notice that performance had
been added as a new category in the programmes. This I think has partly to
do with the development of media technology and its accessibility and also
the new possibilities which these technologies have to offer (for example
mobile / locative media are at their best in motion etc.). But I'm sure it
also has to do with the development of artistic as well as curatorial
production finding new forms of presentation and interaction.


Why are we interested in live new media work and what do we mean by it?

Given the virtual nature (or as put in the monthly theme's question
'disembodied' nature) of new media, we are specifically interested in new
media work that either has a live element to it (the most obvious one being
human presence of some degree), or interacts directly with its environment
and manifests itself in the physical world, eg. work that is situated in a
public location or situation (e.g. the streets, countyside, a public
building which isn't directly dedicated to the viewing of art)

I guess our interest in this work is partly to do with the intensity,
vitality and dynamic interaction that a human interface has to offer.
Sitting in front of  a computer screen and looking at online art (given that
this has no other offline element to it) resembles too much a work situation
(for me personally) and the main feature of the Trampoline format ­ that it
takes place 1 night only creating a situation of social interaction, a
communal experience much like going to the theatre ­ tries to stress exactly
that: to discover work as an experience in a social situation opposed to
studying it by yourself at home or in a museum or white cube style gallery.

Media technology has changed our world in terms of the connectivity of time
and space and in terms of sensory body extensions. And with the advent of
mobile technologies, the usage of these media are no longer restricted to a
few dedicated fixed locations.

If one of the definitions of performance and / or live art is that it is
live and entails human presence, then we can ask ourselves where this
definition of live ends once mediating devices are at play.  Rather than
trying to find a fixed definition of what can count as live and what cannot,
it would be interesting to examine different degrees and characteristics of
live-ness according to different set-ups of work and technologies involved.
I guess the real-time factor of the artist ­ audience interaction would also
need to be taken into account here, thinking of situations where a performer
is absent in space, but triggers some sort of event for the audience.


Interaction

These recent technological developments allow for new forms of human
presence, of connectivity, of overcoming time and space and with that come
new forms of interaction between audience and artist or between artists
themselves.

Lately in the Berlin performance world a new "old" trend can be observed
which I would spontaneously describe with "experiencial theatre". Groups
like Gob Squad (with their work Prater Saga 3 or King Kong Club), Rimini
Protokoll (with Call-Cutta) or Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller (with
Ghost Machine) or partly also the X-Wohnungen project (Wohnungen = flats)
are all putting the spectator in a situation whereby they play an active
role through which they influence directly the outcome or course of the
piece and where they come out having experienced something that goes beyond
sitting in an auditorium watching.

Comparable to this trend seems to me the question of location, taking a
performance out of the 4 walls of the venue and placing it into the streets
or other public or private 'non-theatre' locations. By no means a new topic
but one which might have more of a novelty effect in Germany where the
city-playhouse culture has dominated the performing arts scene (also in the
sense of the usually male director persona as the creator of the work
instead of group processes) and the term of live art is still an unknown to
many theatre audiences. But luckily more contemporary production structures
seem to be on the increase and with it the venues programming them.


I would be interested to hear other comments on these topics or perhaps some
of the list members have worked on one of the relating subjects.
For the Radiator Symposium we are also welcoming talks and presentations
around the live new media theme, if anybody is interested, please contact
me.


That's all for now,
Best regards,
Anette


_____________________________________________
anette schäfer
trampoline/radiator festival

www.radiator-festival.org
www.trampoline-berlin.de
www.trampoline.org.uk
++44-(0)115-840 92 72