dear all



I read Kelani's post with some interest, and tried to imagine the festival that is described;

and to  some extent I may have failed, but that is just perhaps a good starting point.



Low Lives Festival, you report, is a networked festival -- am i right in imagining

it to then take place entirely from laptop/computer to computer?  how do i imagine

it? or are there local sites - you mention "little berlin" in Philadelphia – where

performers perform in front of a physical crowd and the performance is live-streamed to 

a website? ...



I went to look for Little Berlin (the first google entry says: >>little berlin | an undefined exhibition space >> i thought that was promising) 



>>

Low Lives 4 Philadelphia is an official Philly Tech Week Event !!

L I V E  P E R F O R M A N C E

In addition to streaming performances from international presenting partners, little berlin gallery will host a live performance on one day of the festival which will be streamed out to the network of participating spaces.

Artists:
Dunstan Matungwa (Tanzania)
Britney Leigh Hines (Philadelphia)
Marcel W. Foster (Philadelphia)>>>

>>



so i am beginning to imagine it more.  

Your first question that you echo, and then respond to:



>>

 "What happens to ideas of the 'live',

over time?" (as you note below). One of the key components of the festival

is the sense of connection the networked spaces have – and thus the

attendees in those spaces also have – specifically as the festival moves

inbetween performances.>>

>>



seems to take you to what happened in the local site, mostly.



>>

The sense of 'live' performance is most present when someone has taken the

distributed stage for their piece, but as the festival is made up of a

series of very short performances that experience soon transforms into a

real-time 'intermission' as the collective stage shifts to a new location,

artists and presenters at that space inevitably fuss with technical setup,

and the 'live' event's progression of time somewhat collapses – there is an

opening up of a common 'space' that stretches across the globe.  I

understand the most intimate moments of the festival happen in those moves

in-between performances,

>.





Thus your reference to the live in quotation marks, is it concerning the in-betweenness

of people on local site waiting for/enjoying connectedness or to-be connectedness

-  with whom?  and what kind of connection are you positing?  Are you not also thinking

of the many that might sit in front of a screen somewhere, waiting?  is the live

relating to the producing/transmitting sites, or to the receivers?  would you distinguish

between performers and receivers, or are all involved telematically performing?



I think the "live" in quotation marks is perhaps less of a problem.  (over time after?) -

was not the question implying an after after the 5 minute or (how long are they) 3 minute

performance?   Is not the problem that we don't know what happened after it had

happened, and thus there is no after?





When I go to http://www.lowlives.net/index.php?/projects/low-lives-4/



i find a question mark in the space where a video might have played. 



 I also don't associate video or YouTube with a livestream, necessarily; 



are the "festival" performances youtubed? and stored?  it seems so --

[http://www.lowlives.net/index.php?/performance/low-lives/]



Then if i can watch the videos next year, why would there be a temporal festival?

is the "festival" the producing agency?



And perhaps i write from a different place now

(as a choreographer), a place removed from the initial enthusiasm that some of us

had in 2000 and 2001,  when about six or seven dance studios around the US,

Europe and Brazil decided to "choreograph" or free-improvise together, and

we did it for about three or four, maybe five years, exploring networked performance

(we founded a collective called ADaPT: Association for Dance and Performance

Telematics) .... what an ambitious enterprise (inside research institutions),

and yet, how ephemeral.



ironically, in our low  case, the shelf life was relatively short (see my partners' 'ephemeral effort'

site: http://www.ephemeral-efforts.com/ADaPT.html) ; I soon after left OSU and had no more

base to conduct all the intricate and time consuming & maddening organizational logistics of such events;

here's a video ghost , ADAPT.mp4, from the past: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucNM0ax3Sik



I remember being very busy recording the live;

and later, even attending sessions with US delegates from some Washington think tank looking into "best practices" of how to

preserve "networked" and distributed dance /performance....... but I remember shrugging my shoulders, what was the point of recording the

streams of 7 different dance groups in seven remote sites, flowing together and being recomposited in real time right there and then by each 

contributing performances-site-group and thus you never really have an "output"  or a work as each site probably saw and experienced

something different and the audiences we began to invite to the sites, they

came to see dance and "networked choreography," so we had better be good

and that was hilarious too, since we had excellent dancers and fabulous cameras..... nothing much to worry, but

there was no clear aesthetic that had developed yet how to "compose" a joint live stream.  we tinkered,

and sometimes it looked just awful. there were four of five magical moments. 



i think we stopped in 2005 or 2006, at that point we had opened our practices

to anyone in the audience wanting to play along/perform along and thus the

"choreography" gave way to video game-like open structures.  Well, i stop here,

and would say,  there is nothing new, Kelani, about these communications and broadcast techniques, they are

actually ancient (since the 70s and 80s or so, not to mention the televisual history of broadcasting), 

and about "effectiveness,"  -- i think we'd have to argue over that one.



>>I believe there is something important about the 'newness' of streaming/technology in both of these examples 

that makes this work extremely effective at this point in time, but also feel certain this will continue to evolve as

 incorporation of this collapsing of space and time becomes more ubiquitous in the context of fine art."

>>



The current generation of collaborative social network streamer/producers surely might agree to some extent about

your optimism;  i find myself hesitating a lot to join that chorus. Especially about your claims of "collapsing space and time."



But i am sure there will be much discussion here on some of the claims, for example your notion of the collective? 



>>

this collective waiting (though alone in one's own physical space)

 embedded within a technology has the effect of creating a hyper-viewership that is at 

intimately tied to the technology which is host to the experience.>>



can you explain this further please, this angry intimacy of the lonely collective?





with regards



Johannes Birringer

director, DAP-Lab

London

http://www.brunel.ac.uk/dap