August 09, 2004
MYRIORAMA
responsive performance space
ambientTV.NET and kondition pluriel invite you to MYRIORAMA a locative media dance performance. In London: August 12 & 13 2004, 21:30h at Project Market, Silwex House, Quaker St., E1 6SN; in Helsinki: August 21, 2004 14:00h at Kiasma Theatre as part of ISEA2004 festival. Myriorama explores position- and motion-tracking at widely different scales: across the city, and inside the venue. The wanderer’s location in the city is reported by satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS), and fed into the venue’s local network via a cellphone network (GPRS) and the internet. Inside, the data are manipulated and transformed in real time by the dancer's gestures, using a wireless sensor system. The emergence of cellphones, GPS, and other location-aware devices seems to favour the local and contextual over the global. However, most of the communication networks that these devices operate in remain centralised and closed.
Once upon a time, in the kingdom of Myriorama, there ruled a king who knew the art of reading and bending the thoughts of his people over great distances, which rendered him famously powerful. One day, a wanderer entered the kingdom...Taking a hint from Italo Calvino's story 'A King Listens', Myriorama unfolds the world of one whose environment is all ears and all eyes; one for whom every whisper and rumour is heard distinctly, for whom every movement is watched and logged. Today, equipment designed for a paranoid king has become the plaything of the people, part of our everyday gadgetry and woven in the fabric of the city.
For this production, ambientTV.NET and kondition pluriel have repurposed location-aware mobile devices, motion sensors and audio-visual transmissions to fashion a responsive performance space that both extends beyond, and is concentrated in the venue itself. The protagonist at the centre of Myriorama tracks his subjects, agents and avatars as they move through the city. The one in the place of the king watches, commands and interprets a mediated world, a domain of data, a screen of projected subjectivities in which inside and outside are entwined.
Posted by jo at August 9, 2004 12:59 PM
