October 10, 2006
A Day in the Life: Streaming performance event
Call for Participants
A Day in the Life :: Streaming performance event :: @ Upgrade! International :: November 30, 3-5pm (Oklahoma City time) :: We are developing A DAY IN THE LIFE as a platform for simultaneous global performances and as a base for international collaborations. Urban spaces in Munich, Oklahoma City, Boston and Istanbul will be connected with each other via a streaming video server for the duration of the event.
At each location, local activity in and around the space is formally framed and streamed to all other locations. Thus the audience in each location sees the activities in four international cities at one time, and the full performance is only complete when viewing all four locations simultaneously.
The simple act of framing causes the viewer to impart the activities of daily life with meaning, following Marcel Duchamp’s dictum: "It is the viewers who make the pictures.” The construction of meaning is however aided by focusing on specific themes. This is done through targeted media interventions and activities that take place at all four locations simultaneously, and that at pre-arranged times react to a common theme. Daily life becomes a performance of itself.
Local activities will be framed by the lens of the video camera, but additionally, if the interior space has a view into the exterior space, for instance through a storefront window, the physical frame of the window can also define the exterior space as a stage for the activities.
Activities will ideally dynamically engage each local interior space with its respective exterior space, whether engaging passers-by in street performances or luring them inside as participants.
The full performance, viewed over all four locations at once, becomes a synergistic confrontation of chance occurrences at each location with the prepared interventions, plus the inevitable cultural differences between the four locations that become apparent as reactions to the common theme.
A DAY IN THE LIFE locates the global in the local. The peculiarities and characteristics of the location at which a given viewer happens to be are contrasted with the typical and untypical aspects of another location, another city, another country, coalescing into a poetic fusion.
A DAY IN THE LIFE creates connections, discovering the familiar in the foreign and the foreign in the familiar. It transforms your local streetcorner into part of a Do-It-Yourself global stage.
Concept:: Horst Konietzny & Tamiko Thiel
MoreMX.com / InterLake GmbH of Munich (Germany) and Jacksonville, Florida (USA) will be providing technical support and the streaming video server.
INDIVIDUAL PERFORMANCE CONCEPTS:
Realtime subtitles
Concept: Horst Konietzny
Text: Marlena Corcoran, et. al.
An author in each location writes a literary text in realtime, commenting on the local events and activities. This running commentary appears as subtitles at the bottom of the streamed image.
NEEDED: 1 writer who can produce a running commentary in English in realtime (if there's more of you, just switch off between yourselves.)
Realworld supertitles
Concept: Aram Bartholl
In many online worlds, players are represented by avatars, computer graphic figures, whose names float as text over the avatar’s head. Following Aram Bartholl’s instructions, people construct real “supertitles” for themselves which can be made to float mysteriously over their heads as they walk around the city.
NEEDED: whoever wants to participate!
Realtime networked music performance
Concepts: Christoph Reiserer
Concept #1) Musicians in each location improvise on the basis of phrases
played by musicians in all other locations. Concept #2) Beginning with a common, well-known musical score, the streamed images of musicians in each location are linked in a chain such that movements of musician in location A modifies in realtime the score seen by the musician in location B, etc.
NEEDED: 1 or more musician(s) who can either 1) improvise freely or 2) sight read well (or both)
Realtime video processing
Concept: Wolfgang Diller
The video from each location (ideally realtime stream from the local street scene) is altered and remixed by local VJs.
NEEDED: 1 VJ with own VJing setup
Realtime trading of upgrade node shares
Concept: Burak Arikan
Participating Upgrade nodes become traded companies on the Upgrade Stock Market. Each node gains or loses fair value depending on the number of people in its local room. People can buy and sell shares from a web based interface. Speculation on the values and the dynamic fair value of the nodes together affect the total valuation. Overall market activity is projected on a large screen in each node location.
NEEDED: whoever enters the room adds to Oklahoma City's share value -
and whoever buys or sells on the website trading interface affects the
overall market activity!
Contact Tamiko Thiel: tamiko at alum.mit.edu
Posted by jo at October 10, 2006 12:45 PM
