April 08, 2006
MARSVILLE.tv
distributed lightpath performance
Michael Bussiere's project, MARSVILLE.tv is a "television channel" inhabitingCanada's Ca*net4 - the world's first national optical Internet research and education network. Marsville.tv blends video conferencing, live programming and the original television stage to propose a new form of spatially distributed, participatory performing art.
In its most ambitious conception, Marsville.tv seeks to establish a permanent home on CA*net4, a multi-media research/performance channel programmed to inform next-generation, i-TV content and production. This ongoing project investigates the creation and rendering of experimental multi-media over high-speed networks, with particular emphasis on live, interactive performing art forms. It seeks to provoke new social dynamics within a distributed performance environment, and to investigate technical prototypes and the creative possibilities of embedding cyberspace into multiple performance venues.
Marsville.tv begins from the premise that musical communication is spatial in nature and therefore offers an appropriate content source for the exploration of near-instantaneous distributed expression. The project's initial content is informed by an historical repertoire designed almost in precognition of distributed performance space as a context. It embraces the creative possibilities and the paradox of dwelling in separated spaces while sharing a common virtual space. Composer John Cage's intention, for example, to avoid the perception of sounds as finite temporal objects was linked to a solution that entailed the underscoring of sounds as spatial objects. For Cage, the spatialization of sounds offered a means of fracturing a seemingly natural tendency toward temporal organization and logic. Add to this Cage's mandate for the superimposition and simultaneous performance of different works (for the intensification of the feeling of space) and one discovers a prototype for a new broadband-based repertoire. Cage's proposal that indeterminacy transforms roles (the performer becoming the composer, the audience becoming the performance, and the composer becoming a member of the audience) anticipates a performance scenario where spatially distributed performance requires new means of audience engagement.
MARSVILLE.TV also turns to, among others, repertoire of a different sort, that of television pioneer Ernie Kovacs.
Kovacs was all over US network television between 1950 and 1962. After an early career on stage and radio, Kovacs entered the world of television with a new vision of the medium's creative idiom. Working with engineers and scientists, kovacs used broadcast video to break the confines of the stage and camera, and created a new video signal-based proscenium. What could be dubbed special effects were indeed radical insights into the unique attributes of an unconventional televised spatial physics. More remarkable perhaps is the fact that Kovacs utilized comedy and music theatre as a vehicle for reaching a newly emerging mass audience, an audience that was mesmerized by the new medium's luminosity, and its capacity for stretching the optic nerves of its inhabitants into myriad spatial realms.
Network latency is just one issue that characterizes the experience of live broadband content. It may one day be reduced to the point of inconsequence with respect to traditional performance repertoire. On the other hand, current capabilities provoke questions. Can music incorporate latency as a fundamental design challenge? Is there an historical repertoire that was written almost in precognition of latency as a context? Does this repertoire anticipate a new network-based musical idiom? What is the performance proscenium and repertoire of broadband cyberspace?
Marsville.tv seeks this new emerging repertoire.
What is the proscenium of multi-point virtual space, and what
are the musical and performance theories that emerge from it? full A href="http://marsville.tv/videos/documents/Zen,%20Cage.pdf">pdf
Posted by michelle at April 8, 2006 11:05 PM
