4th Wall: Fifth Walter
Created in collaboration with Miljana Peric (Serbia) and Suzon Fuks (Australia). Solicited for the 090909 UpStage Festival , a curated interactive cyberformance event for live online audiences and live real life, or proximal, audiences at venues around the world on 09/09/09.
Online audiences worldwide may access the live works through the UpStage venue using a standard internet connection and web browser. In an offline venue, the works are installed at a physical location using large scale projection and local computing stations. The real-life(proximal, or in-person)audience at the venue participates in the piece using the UpStage interface on the installed computer stations. Some offline venues will allow audiences to bring their own laptops and participate via wireless connection and their personal browser software, as well. In addition, UpStage artists often perform live in person at the offline venues (either as part of the work as seen online, or as an additional element available only to the real life audience).
The 4th Wall/Fifth Walter piece produced for the UpStage Festival is a poetic, participatory performance. Part live intermedia cyberformance exquisite corpse, part virtual poetic installation, this work explores the poetic, lyrical, polyvocal, participatory possibilities of the UpStage venue—collaging visuals, sound, text and live audience participation. Text and media contributions were collected, produced for UpStage, and added to the mashup in the live event. These elements, along with the live audience’s textual contributions via the UpStage chat window and real time, collaborative, text generation/editing (thanks to EtherPad), were as necessary as the artists’ in the creation of an ephemeral, interactive, poetic, performance installation in UpStage. While the work was presented multiple times during the festival, each instance of its existence was unique— and irreproducible. This ongoing collaboration/participatory project explores the online venue and virtual space as an art-poem space–always everywhere and nowhere–and the duration (20:09) as an ellipsis. This is a piece to collectively inhabit and create, a poetic experience, installation and/or poem, based in and on its own becoming.
As part of the 090909 festival, 4th Wall/Fifth Walter was presented live three times in a twelve-hour span for online audiences and via installation for proximal audiences at the following real-life venues: The Eclectic Tech Carnival (Istanbul, Turkey); Norsk Telemuseum (Oslo, Norway), Simon Fraser University School of Interactive Art and Technology (Surrey, BC, Canada); Syneme, University of Calgary (Canada); Cultural Centre Pančevo (Serbia); Muffatwerk in conjunction with The Upgrade! Munich (Munich, Germany); APO33 (Nantes, France); Hutt City Libraries (Wellington, New Zealand).
